MODERNISM AND SUBJECTIVITY

MODERNISM AND
SUBJECTIVITY

How Modernist Fiction Invented the

Postmodern Subject

ADAM MEEHAN

Louisiana State University Press Baton Rouge

Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2020 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved

DESIGNER: Mandy McDonald Scallan

TYPEFACE: Whitman

Portions of chapter 1 were first published, in somewhat different form, in “Specters of

Ideology in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo,” Studies in the Novel 50, no. 3 (2018): 359–77, and
are reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

Portions of chapter 3 were first published, in somewhat different form, in “Repetition,

Race, and Desire in The Great Gatsby,” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 2 (2014): 76–91,
and are reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Meehan, Adam, author.
Title: Modernism and subjectivity : how modernist fiction invented the postmodern subject
/ Adam Meehan.
Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2020] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019040538 (print) | LCCN 2019040539 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-8071-
7218-6 (cloth) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7358-9 (pdf) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7359-6 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | Subjectivity in
literature. | Modernism (Literature)—English-speaking countries. | Postmodernism
(Literature)—English-speaking countries.
Classification: LCC PR830.S82 M44 2020 (print) | LCC PR830.S82 (ebook) | DDC
823/.91209353—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040538
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040539

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library
Resources.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1
THE INTERPELLATED SUBJECT
Specters of Ideology in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo
Chapter 2
THE VOID OF SUBJECTIVITY
Sublimation and the Artistic Process in Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf
Chapter 3
THE SUBJECT IN PROCESS
Repetition, Race, and Desire in The Great Gatsby
Chapter 4
SPATIALIZED SUBJECTIVITY
Los Angeles and the Post/Modern Subject in Fitzgerald, West, and
Huxley
Chapter 5
THE NEGATION OF SUBJECTIVITY
Méconnaissance and the Other in Beckett’s Murphy

CODA

NOTES

WORKS CITED

INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like any significant project, this book would not have been possible without the help of
many people along the way. I would especially like to thank my advisers and colleagues
who read early drafts of the book in its various forms, including Carlos Gallego, Jerry
Hogle, Suresh Raval, Ed Dryden, Brent Gowen, Pete Figler, Ryan Winet, and Jerry Won
Lee. Special thanks goes to Stephen Ross for an enlightening conversation at the 2015 MLA
convention in Vancouver that helped shape the book’s main argument and for his
subsequent support and guidance as I developed the proposal. I would also like to thank
my colleagues at SUNY Westchester Community College. Although I was only with you
briefly, I learned a great deal from you and look back fondly at our time together. My
colleagues at Palomar College are also owed a great debt of gratitude for their unwavering
support and for being wonderful people. I am profoundly grateful to be a part of such a
wonderful community.
I would especially like to thank James Long at LSU Press for his continuing interest in
and support of this project. One could not ask for a friendlier, more responsive, or more
encouraging editor. His guidance has helped me produce a better book. I would also like to
thank the editorial board at LSU Press; the anonymous reader who provided very helpful
feedback on the first draft; Catherine Kadair, managing editor at LSU Press; and copyeditor
Joanne Allen.
None of my achievements would be possible without the support of my parents, who
always made sure that I had what I needed and who gave me the freedom to make my own
decisions even when they may have seemed bizarre or illogical. Most of all, infinite
rewards are owed to my wife, Nicole, who has made so many sacrifices to support my
career and our relationship, and to my daughter, Hadley, for reminding me that work can
wait.
MODERNISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
INTRODUCTION

The central argument of this book is that conceptions of subjectivity

commonly attributed to postmodern theory had already been
articulated in modernist fiction before 1945. This contention raises a
number of questions, such as, Which conceptions of subjectivity are
being considered? How does one define postmodern theory? And why
include only fiction, and not poetry, drama, or other artistic forms?
These and other questions will be addressed below, but I would like
to begin by confronting a perhaps more pressing concern: why
publish a book about modernism and subjectivity now? After all,
according to some critics, subjectivity has been outstripped as a
categorical descriptor. As far back as 1991, an essay collection
coedited by Jean-Luc Nancy asked the question “Who Comes After
the Subject?” Nancy asked readers to consider whether “the critique
or deconstruction of interiority, of self presence, of consciousness, of
mastery, of the individual or collective property of an essence” had
“simply obliterated its object [subjectivity]” (4). He pointed out that
“the inaugurating decisions of contemporary thought—whether they
took place under the sign of a break with metaphysics and its poorly
pitched questions, under the sign of a ‘deconstruction’ of this
metaphysics, under that of a transference of the thinking of Being to
the thinking of life, or of the Other, or of language, etc.—have all
involved putting subjectivity on trial” (5).1 Indeed, since the turn of
this century the emergence of new, reimagined, and/or
reinvigorated disciplines like queer theory, disability studies, affect
studies, cognitive studies, and environmental studies has meant a
further pivot away from the broad-based theories of subjectivity that
dominated the latter half of the twentieth century toward more
individualized and politically inflected understandings of personal
identity.
And yet we might point to a spring 2017 special issue of Cultural
Critique entitled “What Comes After the Subject?” (a direct response
to the collection mentioned above) as an indication that for all the
effort to overthrow the subject, its specter still lingers. The editors
write in their introduction that “the renaissance of theories of
subjectivity—as exemplified by the work of Alain Badiou, Jacques
Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek—suggests that at the very least the
declaration of the subject’s death was premature” (Haines and
Grattan 16). The persistence of subjectivity can be seen across
disciplines, including philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology,
and psychology—or, if one prefers, in what we have come to call
critical theory, which incorporates elements of these and other
disciplines. There is also an enduring interest among literary
scholars in exploring representations of subjectivity, as seen in the
recent work of Renée Dickinson, Susan Harrow, Josephine Park,
Nancy Ruttenburg, Tamar Katz, and others. Although it is true that
many scholars across the humanities have jettisoned subjectivity in
favor of newer formulations, I contend that the time is ripe for a
revisionary look at how notions of the subject evolved in twentieth-
century literature and theory—and this is the task I undertake in
this book.
After all, regardless of how we feel about the concept now, one
can make a strong case that subjectivity was the defining intellectual
preoccupation of the twentieth century. Consider that one of the
major intellectual events to take place at the onset of the twentieth
century was the publication of Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking The
Interpretation of Dreams (1899), which brought the study of the
unconscious mind into mainstream society. Shortly thereafter, in the
sciences, Albert Einstein published “On the Electrodynamics of
Moving Bodies” (1905), which outlined his special theory of
relativity and showed that all observations are relative to one’s
frame of reference. In the arts, modernist literature was gaining
momentum across Europe and postimpressionism was leading
Virginia Woolf to famously write that “on or about December 1910
[the month of the first postimpressionist exhibition] human
character changed” (“Character in Fiction” 421). In philosophy, the
seminal nineteenth-century work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
evolved into a fully articulated existentialism that peaked during
and shortly after World War II. And this all in just the first half of
the century. The second half saw the rise of postmodernism, which
was driven by a prevailing skepticism toward grand narratives and
claims of certainty or objectivity that even included for some a
distrust of so-called scientific facts. In short, across the intellectual
landscape of the twentieth century one finds a disparate but
prevailing fixation upon the singularity of individual experience and
the difficulty, if not impossibility, of ever transcending one’s own
subjective perception of the world. This preoccupation undoubtedly
reaches its apex in the age of postmodernism.
As for the designation postmodern theory, I admit that it is not
wholly satisfactory, but one struggles to find a more apposite way to
encapsulate the outpouring of theoretical work across the
humanities in the second half of the twentieth century—that time
now generally referred to as postmodern, though that descriptor
itself brings along its own contentious history. In using the
designation postmodern theory, I follow Steven Best and Douglas
Kellner, who in their 1991 book of that name use the term to
encompass not only theories of postmodernism as such, like those
advanced by Jean-Francois Lyotard, David Harvey, or Fredric
Jameson, but also the work of intellectuals across many disciplines
that has been influential in forming the postmodern zeitgeist. These
would include scholars of postcolonialism, gender studies, queer
theory, poststructuralism, post- and neo-Marxism, psychoanalysis,
and other adjacent fields. In short, postmodern theory is an inclusive,
perhaps even vague term, but one that will nonetheless have a
familiar ring for most anyone in the humanities. It is also useful for
our context, in fact, because it is problematic, as the artificial
barriers that have been erected between modernism and
postmodernism are the essential targets of our critique.
We run into similar problems when we try to explain subjectivity.
Most readers will know that subjectivity describes the state of being
uniquely experienced by every individual, or subject. But like
postmodernism, subjectivity is a fraught term with a complex history
and scads of iterations. Peter Zima gives us a good sense of this
problem in his book Subjectivity and Identity: Between Modernity and
Postmodernity (2015): “The greater the number of commentators
who express their opinion on a given term, the greater the danger
that the term will ultimately defy all attempts at definition. Subject
is one such term whose vague, shifting character stems primarily
from the academic division of labour, which endows this ambiguous
signifier with a different meaning in each discipline: grammatical
subject, legal subject, literary protagonist, or even the subject of
history. It is immediately apparent that there are a number of
different levels at play here (language, law, literature, history as
world affairs) which are far from homogeneous” (1).
Indeed, conceptions of subjectivity have been and continue to be
heterogeneous, and so in using the term one assumes the inherent
risk of lapsing into meaningless generality. Jonathan Rée playfully
acknowledges this fact when he writes that “twentieth-century
approaches to subjectivity are dominated by the anxiety not to be
Descartes” (206). This characterization certainly rings true as we
consider how understandings of subjectivity evolved from a stable
(Cartesian) self in the Victorian era, to a conflicted ego in the work
of Freud, to a fragmented personality after World War II, to a
linguistic construct in the latter decades of the twentieth century.
This is, of course, only the broadest of outlines, and one that
obviously ignores the nuances and complexities of how ideas about
the subject cut across various contexts and disciplines, but it
captures the basic “structure of feeling,” to borrow a phrase from
Raymond Williams. However, as our argument must rest on
something more solid than a structure of feeling, I would like to
take a moment to explain why this book reduces this timeline even
further by employing the terms modernism and postmodernism before
describing its particular framing of subjectivity and explaining why
it suits this project.

Closing the Postmodern Divide

Modernism and postmodernism are the defining literary periods of
the first and second half of the twentieth century. This is a reductive
view, to be sure, given the sheer number of the century’s innovative
movements—imagism, futurism, magical realism, expressionism,
and so on. But these and other isms are generally categorized as
ancillary movements within the binary schematic of modernism and
postmodernism. This binary is inherently problematic, for reasons
we will go on to explore, but it has nonetheless persisted. I thus use
it because it is problematic, and not in spite of it. Although this
project is not concerned with periodization per se, I am interested in
the more particular ways in which postmodernism’s dominant
influence on academic thought in the latter part of the twentieth
century (re)shaped our appreciation of modernism.
In order to understand how and why postmodernism affected
ideas about modernism, let us first consider how much the field we
now call modernist studies has evolved in the recent past, beginning
with Michael Levenson’s seminal book A Genealogy of Modernism
(1984). Levenson describes the term modernism as “at once vague
and unavoidable.” “Anything more precise would exclude too much
too soon,” he maintains, “anything more general would be folly. As
with any blunt instrument, the best that can be done is to use it for
the rough tasks and to reserve the finer work for finer tools. As a
rough way of locating our attention, ‘modernism’ will do” (vii). But
modernism has not done, and the subtitle of Levenson’s book, A
Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922, suggests one of the
major reasons why: until quite recently the canonical studies of
modernism were published by predominantly Anglo-European
critics and tended to focus on an exclusive set of Anglo-European
writers. This led many critics, both within and outside the field, to
view it as “a sort of monolithic ideological formation” (Nicholls vii).
Many began to see the seemingly capacious term modernism as a
smokescreen for the so-called high modernism of Joyce, Eliot,
Pound, and a small subset of Anglo-European writers. Although
there was a general understanding that modernism encompassed
several decades and a vast corpus of cultural production, it seemed
as though a handful of names consistently dominated the field’s
scholarly production. And so while modernist criticism flourished
throughout the latter part of the twentieth century and into the
twenty-first, it also accrued a stigma that critics have only recently
begun to shed.
Damage was also done to the modernist brand when it was
overshadowed by the expansive influence of the postmodern age.
“By this point in the early twenty-first century,” John T. Matthews
remarked in 2013, “students of culture rarely encounter terms like
‘modern,’ ‘modernist,’ and ‘modernity’ without a familiar prefix:
‘postmodern,’ ‘postmodernist,’ ‘postmodernity’” (282). Consequently,
students today are probably likely to describe postmodernism more
accurately than modernism. This might be a result of historical
proximity (postmodernism feels less remote because it is more
recent), but it also has to do at least in part with the fact that in the
heyday of postmodernism’s popularity critics often attacked
modernism as a misguided conservative enterprise that
postmodernism had rightfully overthrown. Regardless of the
particulars, the fact remains that the specter of post now inevitably
haunts modernism, which has left the latter to battle for legitimacy.
One of the primary ways it has done so is by becoming more
inclusive and moving away from its conventionally singular and
“monolithic” moniker. In his landmark book, Modernisms: A Literary
Guide (1995), Peter Nicholls explains his attempt to address these
challenges: “When I began work on this book, postmodernism was
in its heyday. The plural form of my title—Modernisms—thus had
something of a polemical intent, since so much of the debate about
the ‘post’ hinged upon what Marjorie Perloff has called a ‘straw-man
modernism,’ one characterized primarily by its commitment to
reactionary ‘grand narratives’ of social and psychic order” (vii). This
“straw-man modernism” has had the dual effect of legitimizing
postmodernism as a descriptive aesthetic category while
simultaneously minimizing modernism’s heterogeneity and
intellectual sophistication. I would like to expand upon Perloff’s
appellation here in order to help frame my own reading of
modernist fiction in relation to the so-called postmodern divide, a
concept that minimizes the many revolutionary achievements of
modernism—and modernist fiction, in particular.
Although the bourgeoning field of modernist studies has certainly
chipped away at the problem of straw-man modernism, there
remains a prevailing notion that while modernism’s experiments
with stream of consciousness, the subjectivity of individual
experience, and the notion of fragmented identity were important,
they were ultimately limited by writers’ desire to restore some
notion of a lost order (the archetypal illustration of this being T. S.
Eliot’s epic 1922 poem The Waste Land). Postmodernism, on the
other hand, is commonly thought to revel in and celebrate
ambiguity and fragmentation. One of the best examples of this
characterization is Ihab Hassan’s diagram of modernism and
postmodernism in his 1987 book The Postmodern Turn (91–92).
Hassan’s diagram epitomizes the efforts of theorists to magnify
postmodern stylistic and narratological experimentation by
manufacturing binaries that vastly oversimplify the variety and
nuance of modernist expression or, perhaps worse, simply categorize
as “postmodern” traits that appear in many modernist works. The
right-hand column is replete with choice terminology from late
twentieth-century theory and criticism; the left-hand column, by
contrast, reads like an archetype of Perloff’s straw-man modernism.
While one may certainly find such characteristics in various
modernist texts, the left-hand column looks undeniably reductive
next to the other, whose terms (arguably all of them) could just as
well be applicable to any number of modernist texts. To be fair,
Hassan acknowledges the problematics of his own formulization,
confessing openly that “the dichotomies this table represents remain
insecure, equivocal. For differences shift, defer, even collapse;
concepts in any one vertical column are not all equivalent; and
inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism,
abound” (92). But while he does make this concession, he goes on to
insist that “still, I would submit that rubrics in the right column
point to the postmodern tendency, the tendency of indetermanence
[a Hassanian term that combines indeterminacy and immanence], and
so may bring us closer to its historical and theoretical definition”
(92).The frequent reference to Hassan’s table in discussions of
post/modernism testifies to the fact that such dichotomies, however
tentative, tend to ossify and become reinscribed as critical doxa. The
fact that it remains relevant in discussions concerning the uncertain
relationship between modernism and postmodernism reflects not so
much its validity as its convenience, and I would caution that
drawing such rigid distinctions, even tentatively, creates obstacles
that keep us from meaningfully engaging important continuities and
evolutions between the two movements.

Modernism Postmodernism
Romanticism/Symbolism “Pataphysics”/Dadaism
Form (conjunctive, closed) Antiform (disjunctive, open)
Purpose Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Mastery/Logos Exhaustion/Silence
Art Object/Finished Work Process/Performance/Happening
Distance Participation
Creation/Totalization/Synthesis Decreation/Deconstruction/Antithesis
Presence Absence
Centering Dispersal
Genre/Boundary Text/Intertext
Semantics Rhetoric
Paradigm Syntagm
Hypotaxis Parataxis
Metaphor Metonymy
Selection Combination
Root/Depth Rhizome/Surface
Interpretation/Reading Against Interpretation/Misreading
Signified Signifier
Lisible Scriptible
Narrative/Grand Histoire Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire
Master Code Idiolect
Type Mutant
Genital/Phallic Polymorphous/Androgynous
 Paranoia Schizophrenia
God the Father The Holy Ghost
Metaphysics Irony
Determinacy Indeterminacy
Transcendence Immanence
Reproduced from The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture,
by Ihab Hassan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 91–92, by
permission of Ohio State University Press.

In arguing against such distinctions as artistic categories in the

chapters that follow, especially in relation to the “postmodern”
views of subjectivity that I sketch above, I will pay particular
attention to several of Hassan’s post/modern juxtapositions. His
association of centering with modernism and dispersal with
postmodernism is particularly problematic, as it does not hold
weight against the many depictions of decentered subjectivity that
will be explored below and that can be found across many
modernist texts. I will also challenge his framing of metaphor and
metonymy, particularly in chapter 3, where I focus on the important
role of metonymy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925),
both in a narratological and a psychological context. Using a
Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, I show how Gatsby conceives
subjectivity as radically decentered and fragmentary. Nick’s
suggestion early in the novel that perhaps we ought to view
“personality” as “an unbroken series of successful gestures” (6)
implies an identity that is not singular but dispersed among a series
of individual actions. I will also challenge Hassan’s distinction
between signifier and signified by highlighting modernism’s
preoccupation with the imprecise and problematic nature of
language. This extends as well to Hassan’s distinction between
determinacy and indeterminacy, which underappreciates the extent
to which many modernist writers and texts resist teleological
thinking and instead openly embrace uncertainty.
A similar critique can be leveled against another notable
postmodern critic, Brian McHale, who draws comparable
distinctions between modernism and postmodernism. One of his
most notable postulations is that “the dominant of modernist fiction
is epistemological,” while “the dominant of postmodernist fiction is
ontological” (Postmodernist Fiction 9–10). As I will go on to
demonstrate, however, each of the novels that I analyze as part of
this project foregrounds primarily ontological concerns—and one
could find numerous examples of other modernist texts that do the
same. Like Hassan, McHale offers his own set of qualifications, and
he in fact begins his book Postmodernist Fiction (1987) by
questioning the accuracy of the term postmodernism itself:
“‘Postmodernist?’ Nothing about this term is unproblematic, nothing
about it is entirely satisfactory. It is not even clear who deserves the
credit—or the blame—for coining it in the first place: Arnold
Toynbee? Charles Olson? Randall Jarrell? There are plenty of
candidates. But whoever is responsible, he or she has a lot to answer
for” (3). He goes on to speak of the many “constructions of
postmodernism,” perhaps implying the possibility of postmodernisms,
in the vein of Nicholls’s modernisms. The very fact that both terms
most often appear in singular form reinforces their problematic
nature and the difficulty of drawing distinctions between them. But
despite his reservations McHale, like Hassan, implicitly perpetuates
the sense of break or rupture that has had such a lasting impact on
the collective view surrounding modernism and postmodernism.
Hassan and McHale have long been recognized as two of the
foremost historians of postmodernism, which lends an inherent
legitimacy to the many distinctions they draw.
In pointing out these problematics, I want to be careful not to
engage in a straw-man argument myself against postmodern
criticism. Theories of the postmodern are of course numerous and
widely varied. McHale, for example, quips: “There is John Barth’s
postmodernism, the literature of replenishment; Charles Newman’s
postmodernism, the literature of an inflationary economy; Jean-
François Lyotard’s postmodernism, a general condition of
knowledge in the contemporary informational regime; Ihab Hassan’s
postmodernism, a stage on the road to spiritual unification of
humankind; and so on. There is even Frank Kermode’s construction
of postmodernism, which in effect constructs it right out of
existence” (4). The Hassan and McHale examples are, accordingly,
not meant as cherry-picking, but are used because they
meaningfully represent a prevailing trend among postmodern critics
to construct a diminutive conception of modernism that puts the
innovation of postmodernism into greater relief. Because
postmodernism relies on modernism as its very raison d’être, it
seems that critics have felt compelled to view it not merely as a
successor but as a sort of conqueror that has boldly gone where
modernists were too afraid to go, or were incapable of going.
But if we accept this view, then modernism inevitably begins to
look like merely a nascent form of postmodernism that has not yet
reached its full potential. If we instead allow modernism to speak
for itself, then we realize that it in fact already speaks the language
of postmodernism (both its literature and its theory). This fact
undermines the construction of a postmodern divide and suggests
that the distinctions made by Hassan and others function at best as
arguments by degree. Sure, we might find more instances of
metonymy, more widespread preoccupation with the role of the
signifier, or a willingness to accept or even produce incoherence to a
larger degree in artistic creation after World War II, but the fact that
one sees these same tendencies operating in significant ways in pre–
World War II fiction implies hereditary lines of continuity between
modernism and postmodernism (again in the realm of both
literature and theory) rather than any radical break. Fortunately, as
a result of Nicholls’s and more recent efforts, the landscape of
modernist studies has considerably diversified and is more
expansive in our present moment than it was a quarter century or
even fifteen years ago.2 In fact, the term modernist studies itself only
recently gained widespread recognition with the establishment in
1999 of the Modernist Studies Association, now the flagship
organization in the field. While modernist studies has had to battle
for relevance in the past several decades, its rebranding has been
essential to its resurgence, and Nicholls’s pluralization of the long-
standing term modernism encapsulates the essence of this
rebranding.3 The shift to a broader conception of modernisms,
modernist studies, and, most recently, new modernist studies and
global modernisms suggests a field that has become far more
inclusive, diverse, and robust.
Nonetheless, some critics suggest that this new inclusivity has
had its limits. Ironically, given its importance in shaping
postmodernism, according to Stephen Ross, “theory has been
marginalized in the new modernist studies” (Modernism and Theory
1). Ross, whose 2009 collection Modernism and Theory seeks to act
as a corrective to this problem, explains that theory “is seen as an
outdated instrument whose usefulness has been superseded by a
return to the archive and historicism” (1). This is not to say that
theory-based work is not being done in modernist studies, but the
underlying current in the field has been broadly New Historical in
character for several decades now. While archival work, in
particular, has been instrumental in helping us reassess modernism’s
scope and context, Ross makes a convincing case that the character
of modernist writing itself calls for a deeply theoretical approach:

Phenomenology, existentialism, third-wave feminism, queer

studies, postcolonial theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis,
structuralist Marxism and neo- or post-Marxism, structuralism
and post-structuralism do not merely parallel the development of
modernism, but partake of it. Theory continues modernism’s
concerns, aesthetics, and critical energies. The same cannot be
said of any other literary movement: the affinities between
modernism and theory are wide, deep, and pervasive—and they
demand exploration. There is a massive amount of work to be
done here, extending the boundaries of modernism even further,
and enhancing our understanding of the unique affinity between
modernism and theory. If we are truly to understand either of
them, modernism and theory simply must be thought together.
(2)

This, in essence, is what the present volume intends to do. It takes

up Ross’s call to arms and, I hope, will play some small part in
mapping out a new direction for the role of theory in the new
modernist studies.4 In doing so, I have been careful to avoid the
shopworn practice of merely applying theory to literature and
instead I try to uncover the theoretical registers of the literature
itself. I try to avoid, in other words, simply “reintegrating theory
into modernist studies in a purely instrumental fashion” (Modernism
and Theory 15)—an approach that Ross rejects—but rather show
how theoretically informed close readings of modernist texts may
provide us with new ways of framing modernism’s prescient
representations of subjectivity. In particular, I am committed to
showing how “modernist writing thinks theoretically and theory
writes modernistically” because, as Ross explains, “they are not
simply interestingly coincidental phenomena, but mutually
sustaining aspects of the same project” (2). In other words, if we are
to truly appreciate the intellectual contributions of modernist
literature, we must recognize this fact. What the readings in this
book reveal is that the considerations of subjectivity found in
modernist fiction and postmodern theory are one and the same,
merely two facets of the same project.
In order to give a brief sense of what this modernism/theory
nexus looks like in practice, let us name a few illustrative examples.
For instance, Susan Stanford Friedman’s introduction to Joyce: The
Return of the Repressed (1993) comes to mind. In introducing this
collection of essays that approach the work of James Joyce by way
of poststructuralism, Friedman writes that “at their best, readings of
Joyce as the prototypical poststructuralist engage theory in a mutual
dialogue with literature that avoids what Shoshana Felman calls the
‘subordination’ of the literary text to the higher authority of theory
and fosters new insights into both theory and text produced by their
juxtaposition and interpenetration. At their weakest, such readings
remain caught in a hermeneutic circle: Joyce becomes the ideal
terrain upon which to prove the theories that his texts themselves
anticipate” (3).5 With this counsel in mind, I aim to “consider
literary narrative as a place where theory takes place” (135), as
Judith Butler remarks in Bodies That Matter (1993). Indeed, my
methodology is modeled after Butler’s, particularly her chapter
“Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge,” which
reads Larsen’s Passing (1929) as “a theorization of desire,
displacement and jealous rage that has significant implications for
rewriting psychoanalytic theory in ways that explicitly come to
terms with race” (135). What makes Butler’s treatment of Passing
especially unique is that she does not simply analyze the novel
through a particular theoretical lens, as most theoretically informed
literary criticism does. Rather, she describes her task as illuminating
a meaning—namely, a particular view of subjectivity—that is
already contained within the literary text that she is interpreting. In
other words, Butler is not creating new theory so much as she is
shining a light on what Larsen has already done in literary form.
While the more common approach is to use preexisting theory to
frame a reading of a literary text, Butler acts more as a vessel that
channels and gives new voice to the theorizing that Larsen has
performed. In the readings of individual modernist texts that follow,
I use a similar approach in showing how the theoretical work
purportedly done by postmodern critics has already been done by
the modernist authors we will consider.

Permutations of the Post/Modern Subject

These perambulations naturally bring us to the question, What,
precisely, is the “postmodern subject” named in the subtitle of this
book? Although postmodern theory and, in turn, postmodern
conceptions of subjectivity are certainly informed by
postcolonialism, gender studies, queer theory, and other disciples
that prevailed in the last quarter of the twentieth century and up to
the present, this book takes the view that the postmodern subject
was fundamentally shaped by three intersecting theoretical strains:
Marxism (for the sake of clarity I prefer to use the term Marxism
throughout, though it should be assumed in reference to postmodern
theory that this would include strains of neo-, post-, and other
Marxisms as well), psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. Taken
together, these intellectual traditions and their offshoots have been
seminal in unifying the psychological, political/economic, and
linguistic dimensions of subjectivity. This delineation is not meant
to minimize the contributions of feminism, postcolonial and ethnic
studies, disability studies, queer theory, or other fields in advancing
postmodern theories of subjectivity, but each of these fields
intersects to varying and sometimes substantial degrees with the
more broad-based formulations of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and
poststructuralism. Other important fields of thought will accordingly
factor into the chapters that follow, but we will maintain an
underlying focus on this theoretical triad as generative of the
“postmodern subject” of the book’s title.
As I have alluded to above, my goal in utilizing both primary
theoretical sources from the realm of postmodern theory and those
critics who approach works of literature from a postmodern
perspective is not to use postmodern theory to analyze works of
modernist fiction, but rather to call attention to the ways in which
we can observe the critical practices of postmodern theory as
already operative in the modernist novel. I argue that the
representation of subjectivity in what we might call “deconstructive
fictions,” or modernist novels that articulate a “subject-in-process,”6
prefigures the intersection of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and
poststructuralism that prevails in so much postmodern theory. I
follow Astradur Eysteinsson in his suggestion that if we approach
modernism from this perspective, “it would be possible. . . . to see
modernism in its totality as a deconstructive practice in the
Derridean sense. Thus, we could read texts such as Ulysses (not to
mention Finnegans Wake), The Waves, The Sound and the Fury, and
Das Schloß with an emphasis on how they undermine the human
desire for stable centers of representation by constantly displacing
signifiers, frustrating immediate ‘presence’ of meaning, decentering
the subject or whatever constitutes a production of convention-
bound reference, and dispersing it in the linguistic field” (48). The
present book sets out to show, among other things, that
deconstructive practices (both in the Derridean sense and in the
sense of deconstructing prior notions of subjectivity) are in fact
pervasive in modernist fiction. The novels covered in the chapters
that follow, which offer just a small selection of examples from the
modernist canon that could very well be supplemented by the texts
that Eysteinsson names and many more, deliberately undermine
traditional concepts of subjective stability. Like many of the
postmodern fiction writers who are often recognized as more radical
than their modernist predecessors in this respect—Borges, Pynchon,
Calvino, or any number of others—the authors discussed here do
not yearn to recover some lost sense of order, as is often said of
modernist writers, but rather revel in the disorder of subjective
experience.
This parallel between conceptions of subjectivity produced by
modernist fiction and those produced by postmodern theory is not
surprising, given that the theoretical triad of Marxism,
psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism also corresponds to the three
central preoccupations of modernist art: modernization,
industrialization, and the broadening hegemony of global
capitalism; the birth of psychoanalysis and new explorations of the
human mind in psychology and related fields; and the questioning
of conventional assumptions about language and narrative. The
seminal intellectual figures in each of these realms—Karl Marx,
Sigmund Freud, and Ferdinand de Saussure—were active shortly
before and during the modernist period, and the influence of their
work and that of their successors on modernist writers has been well
documented. These figures, along with their intellectual companions
and descendants, inspired modernist writers to explore
unprecedented new ways of representing the human experience.
This is not an unknown fact, of course, and yet we have nonetheless
failed to appreciate the scope of modernism’s prescience in
anticipating the confluence of these fields in the realm of
postmodern theory.
Broadly speaking, there are a number of ways in which these
three intellectual strains overlapped throughout the course of the
twentieth century, but their most substantial points of contact occur
in theories of the subject. And while twentieth-century theories of
the subject themselves have been varied, this book takes the
perspective that in one way or another they orbit around the work
of Jacques Lacan. Lacan was, first of all, an intellectual descendent
of Hegel, one of the most important philosophers of the previous
century. Although Lacan was medically trained as a psychoanalyst,
his work—particularly his “Mirror Stage” essay, which was first
presented in 1936 and remains his most widely recognized
contribution to psychoanalysis—was influenced by his attending
Alexandre Kojève’s seminars on The Phenomenology of Spirit. He was
a fierce defender of Freud when many had begun to abandon his
work, although his take on Freud may be considered revisionary. In
the 1950s and 1960s Lacan’s own work took on a decidedly
structuralist character, as the incorporation of Saussurian linguistic
concepts into his work led him to famously remark that the
unconscious is structured like a language. His famous seminars,
which ran from the 1950s through the mid-1970s, were attended by
the likes of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Jean
Hyppolite, and Julia Kristeva. He also formed a close alliance with
Louis Althusser, who managed a faculty position for him at the
École Normale Supérieure, “an amazing feat given the hostility to
psychoanalysis of the French Communist Party and much of the
French academic world at that time” (Kirshner 219). It is not an
understatement to say that Lacan’s work sent shock waves through
the French intellectual scene, which in the second half of the
twentieth century was ground zero for producing novel theories of
subjectivity that were then widely adopted throughout Europe and
eventually North America. While Freud was the founding father of
psychoanalysis, it was Lacan who most profoundly (re)shaped the
field as it moved toward the new millennium.
To all this we can add the additional influence of Dadaism and
surrealism, which were major components of the modernist
movement in Europe. Lacan maintained close relationships with a
number of major modernist figures early in his life, a fact that
surprisingly is rarely mentioned in historical accounts of the
modernist period. This is a striking omission given that, as Thomas
Brockelman has put it, “of the fact that Lacan was a modernist it
would seem that there can be no doubt” (208). Although Lacan did
not begin making notable contributions to the field of
psychoanalysis until the late 1930s, at the tail end of modernism’s
heyday, biographical sources show that he was in fact engaged with
modernist art and artists as early as the mid- to late 1910s. His
definitive biographer, Élisabeth Roudinesco,7 and other sources
suggest that Lacan’s connection to modernism was not merely
biographical, but that his formative years were steeped in modernist
art and thought in ways that undoubtedly influenced the character
and direction of his work. As John Rajchman remarks in “Lacan and
the Ethics of Modernity, “In la modernité, one’s ‘duty’ is rather to
create oneself as work of art, or as singular artifice. It is within this
culture of singularities, his culture of exceptions, that Lacan will
formulate the ethical question of the savoir-faire with the
unconscious. His theory of the subject supplies a vocabulary with
which we can describe how modernist art and writing replaced
morality in our culture and established a kind of ethical and
amorous bond among us” (53).
Lacan and his work are an embodiment of an intellectual and
artistic lineage that stretches back to Hegel, runs through Freud and
modernism, and then branches out into the work of Michel
Foucault, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek,
Luce Irigaray, Éric Laurent, Renata Salecl, Jacques Derrida, Alain
Badiou, and others. Even those who have refuted his work have
nevertheless had to address it. All of this book’s central concerns—
modernism, postmodernism, Marxism, psychoanalysis,
poststructuralism, subjectivity—have been touched by Lacan in one
way or another. And despite critical theory’s waning influence since
the turn of the century, the popularity of the work of Slavoj Žižek
and others who have not only carried on the Lacanian tradition but
also tapped into elements of the Marxist and poststructuralist
intellectual histories testifies to the continuing relevance of the
issues taken up here. Two recent works, Samo Tomšič’s The
Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (2015) and Todd McGowan’s
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), are
notable testaments that suggest there is still much to be said on this
topic.
With that being said, the present volume is meant to be
suggestive rather than exhaustive. Several of the important
postmodern figures mentioned above are not mentioned again in the
pages that follow. Nor do I cover the many authors whose novels
also anticipate postmodern conceptions of subjectivity, like Jean
Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Marcel Proust, Nella Larsen, or William
Faulkner. For that matter, readers may wonder why only fiction is
considered and not poetry, drama, or even film and the visual arts.
Certainly one can find many examples in other arenas that would be
appropriate in this study as well. Briefly, there are a few reasons for
this: First, I have chosen depth over breadth. Of course, many
modernist authors and artists were interested in issues of
subjectivity, and many more than are represented here write about
or otherwise represent subjectivity in ways that also anticipate
postmodern theory, but I am more interested in exploring how
particular authors write about subjectivity than in creating a catalog
of all the authors who do. Second, I have sought to construct a
narrative that takes us from the turn of the twentieth century
through the beginning of World War II and gives a sense for how
thoughts on subjectivity evolve within the modernist period as well.
The process of selecting authors and works to include has been an
organic rather than a prescriptive one. And the third reason, to
which I will return in chapter 1, is that the novel genre is uniquely
positioned to capture the varieties of human experience in a way
that other forms are not and thus has a singular ability to actually
produce theoretical ideas.
I begin by showing in chapter 1 how modernist fiction
understands the subject as ideologically situated, arguing that
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) enacts a self-reflexive mode of
ideology critique that overhauls the contemporaneous Marxist
notion of ideology as false consciousness and the prevailing
Jamesian portrait of human psychology, thereby anticipating late
twentieth-century conceptions of ideology critique that emerge from
the Althusserian tradition, most notably that advanced by Slavoj
Žižek in his influential essay “The Spectre of Ideology” (1994). With
reference to Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses” (1970) and Judith Butler’s reconsideration of his essay
in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), I first show how the characters
in Nostromo are ideologically constituted as subjects through
processes of interpellation that reproduce their submission to
existing power structures. I then show how Conrad’s spectral
narrativity (which I bring into focus through Jacques Derrida’s
Specters of Marx) and imagery—which operate at a textual level but
also penetrate the world of the novel—subtly reveal that the
Costaguanan people participate in their own subjugation through
the perpetuation of imperialist ideology thinly veiled as religious
parable. I maintain that the novel lays bare (à la Žižek) the ways in
which ideological processes themselves contain the keys to their
own critique. As Conrad’s fiction embodies the transition from
Victorian to modernist—signaling, among other things, a major
cultural shift in attitudes toward identity—it offers an ideal starting
point for our narrative history of subjectivity in modernist fiction.
The principles of ideology critique explored in the first chapter also
lay the groundwork for the theoretical praxis of later chapters,
which sift through the tautological propositions of late twentieth-
century theorists and critics that have obscured our understanding
of modernist subjectivity.
Chapter 2 builds upon the notion of modernist subjectivity as
ideologically situated and engages Conrad with two of modernism’s
most formidable figures, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. This
chapter conceptualizes Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf as writers who
analogously depict human subjectivity as a self-driven ideological
illusion that masks an essential void of subjectivity. I explore in the
life and writings of Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf the intersectionality of
three fundamental intellectual disciplines: science, religion, and art.
As all three authors are religious skeptics living in an age of rapid
scientific advancement, their fiction oscillates between scientific and
religious worldviews, each making claims to totalizing knowledge
that either denies the void (in the case of science, which involves
processes of psychological foreclosure) or fills the void with God (in
the case of religion, which psychologically displaces the void). I go
on to show that the movement from the religious belief that each
author (as well as many of each author’s main characters) is born
into entails a residual guilt that must be expiated in some way by
that which displaces the religious belief. In light of these authors’
hesitancy to fully embrace the totalizing claims of science, I
conclude by arguing that each ultimately locates redemption in the
process of artistic creation, which organizes itself around the void
and offers the most satisfying and psychologically beneficial way of
confronting the void of subjectivity and accepting oneself as
fundamentally unstable and incoherent. Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf
are held up as exemplars of the modernist fiction writer in that they
see themselves not as organizers of chaos but as representationalists
(in the psycho-philosophical sense) who render the incoherence of
subjective experience in the modern world.
While the first two chapters establish that subjectivity in the
modernist novel is conceptualized not as an ontological fixity but as
an ideological (and thus linguistic) construction, which suggests the
notion of subjectivity as “in process,” chapter 3 shows how this
process operates in relation to the psychoanalytic dimension of
(racial) identity in The Great Gatsby, one of the most widely read
novels in American universities and yet one whose treatment of
subjectivity has been largely neglected by critics. Gatsby’s
articulation of subjectivity shatters the understanding of the
Freudian ego that was popular in its time and reveals an unexplored
angle that intersects with later psychoanalytic ideas centered around
Lacan’s “fundamental fantasy.” I argue that Gatsby’s object of desire
(objet a), Daisy, is the maternal figure in a (self-)destructive adult
repetition of an Oedipal drama that is complicated by her
metaphorical associations with the American landscape and her
husband Tom’s patriarchal and nativist views. I claim that the
novel’s symbolic structure is haunted by a latent desire to
reconstitute Gatsby’s ambiguous socially projected racial makeup as
only figuratively white. In doing so, I show how the novel is ahead
of its time in its treatment of the subjective dimensions of race.
With a particular focus on three modernist novels set in Los
Angeles—Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Aldous
Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), and F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941)—chapter 4 argues
that while Los Angeles has been widely viewed as a quintessentially
postmodern city (by Baudrillard, Soja, Jameson, and others), it
ought to serve as a major critical fault line in (re)conceptualizing
the postmodern divide. Los Angeles in each of these novels
comprises a pastiche of architectural styles stacked one on top of
another in a fashion at once decentered/decentering and
alienated/alienating. This visual incoherence, in turn, penetrates its
psychologically unstable inhabitants. Upon closer examination, we
find that West, Huxley, and Fitzgerald pivot away from the more
popular psychological advances of the time, like B. F. Skinner’s
behaviorist theories, and anticipate the intersection of subjectivity
and space in the “spatial turn” of the late twentieth century that
centers around the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, David
Harvey, and others. Los Angeles has long held powerful symbolic
value as the western endpoint where the frontier is finally pushed
up against the Pacific Ocean. The city, and to an extent the state of
California as a whole, has been viewed as the “end of the road,” and
accordingly each novel in this chapter shows it as producing
profound anxiety and disillusionment; its subjects are pushed to the
psychic edge toward irreparable rupture. As in later postmodern
novels like Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), these
largely overlooked modernist exemplars demonstrate the deep
understanding of prewar novelists surrounding the complex
relationship between place and identity. In this chapter I show not
only that these writers already recognized changing physical
landscapes emerging out of the time-space compression of rapidly
expanding global capitalism (à la Harvey, Soja, etc.) but that their
acute perception in connecting this phenomenon to the looming
crisis of subjectivity ought to encourage us to reconsider the
conventional notion that such observations did not emerge until the
late twentieth century.
Chapter 5 focuses on Samuel Beckett’s first published novel,
Murphy (1938). Although it is chronologically out of step with the
otherwise linear progression of the book, Murphy pushes the
boundaries of modernist subjectivity to their absolute limit.
Furthermore, Beckett, whose literary career stretched from the
interwar period to the 1980s and whose radical experimentation
profoundly (re)shaped the face of modern literature, embodies the
persistence of modernism’s critical energy into the latter half of the
twentieth century. Like Lacan, Murphy affirms the notion that
language inevitably casts us into the process of desire. Beckett and
Lacan both maintain that it is impossible to conceive of subjectivity
outside the context of desire; and because we are always already
implicated in the social realm, we are therefore implicated in the
desire of others. Unlike Conrad’s Martin Decoud, who desperately
gropes for his sense of self in the absence of others, the titular
Murphy attempts to extricate himself from all human contact,
renounce his bodily desires, and thereby deliberately negate his own
subjectivity. But with a brilliantly crafted dramatic irony, this
chapter argues, Beckett continually undermines Murphy’s endeavor
and reaffirms Althusser’s assertion that we are all implicated as
subjects, willingly or not. Chapter 5’s reading of Murphy thus brings
our project full circle, from the Conradian lamentation that ideology
ensnares us as subjects to Beckett’s revelry in the ironic
Hegelian/Lacanian notion that our conception of self is inextricably
bound to our desire for the other’s desire.
I conclude by juxtaposing Conrad’s famous description of history
as a knitting machine to Thomas Pynchon’s troping of Remedios
Varo’s painting Bordando el Manto Terrestre in his postmodern classic
The Crying of Lot 49. I use these examples as a springboard for
showing how Pynchon’s treatment of ontology, which is widely seen
as prototypically postmodern, is in fact anticipated in Conrad and
the other authors treated in this work. I use this example to
illustrate my broader rejection of the common notion of postmodern
art and theory as more evolved forms of a primitive modernism,
insisting that we legitimately recognize the role of modernism in
constructing and defining subjectivity in the twentieth century.
The trajectory of this project as it moves from early to late
modernism—1904 to 1941, based upon the publication dates of the
novels it takes up—traces the development of modernist attitudes
toward subjectivity. The subject is considered in relation to
ideology, art, race, and spatiality, until finally Samuel Beckett
begins to imagine a subjectivity that transcends corporeality
altogether, only to undermine this possibility by reminding us that
through language we have always already been interpellated as
subjects and are left with no other option but to confront our
ontological limitations head on. Taken together, the novels that
make up this study reflect the complexity and multiformity of
modernist fiction’s concern with subjectivity while at the same time
employing common narrative modalities that ultimately deconstruct
it. What we finally end up with is a version of modernist fiction that
looks much different than the one described by Hassan, McHale, and
many other postmodern critics. The authors covered in the pages
that follow make no attempt to envision new coherent versions of
subjectivity or recover a challenged or lost transcendental ego. They
not only depict and confront the fragmented self but maintain an
intentional open-endedness that explicitly rejects any sense of
closure. In doing so, they produce theorizations of subjectivity that
profoundly shaped the intellectual trajectory of the twentieth
century to an extent that, for all their acclaim, still has not been
fully appreciated.
CHAPTER 1
THE INTERPELLATED SUBJECT
Specters of Ideology in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo

Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.

—JACQUES DERRIDA, Specters of Marx

There are two central reasons why Joseph Conrad’s sprawling novel
Nostromo (1904) is an ideal starting point for our exploration of
modernism and subjectivity. The first is chronological. While there
is widespread debate about when modernism begins, there is
general consensus that the technological, cultural, and artistic
changes occurring around the turn of the twentieth century mark a
decisive shift in the zeitgeist that justifies the drawing of an epochal
distinction. As Conrad’s first serious attempts at writing began in the
early 1890s, his writing career coincides with the dawn of
modernism. Although his first two novels—Almayer’s Folly (1895)
and An Outcast of the Islands (1896)—were largely reflective of his
footing in Victorian realism and the adventure fiction of Haggard,
Kipling, and Stevenson, by the time his writing began to fully
mature in the subsequent Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), Heart of
Darkness (1899), and Lord Jim (1900) it was prototypically
modernist in its form, style, and themes. On account of this dual
footing in the old and the new, Conrad is widely viewed as a
transitional figure who exemplifies that period when modernist
innovation eclipsed the more conservative literary traditions of the
nineteenth century. His modern(ist) sensibility becomes especially
evident in the penetrating depth of psychological exploration that
we find in the novels of his so-called major phase, which spanned
the years 1897–1911. His writing during this phase unmistakably
shows that modernism’s revolutionary insights with respect to
subjectivity were present from its nascency. The second reason is
that while Conrad’s other major-phase novels contain many of the
same themes—the tension between the individual and society; the
baseness of colonialism and imperial capitalism; the struggle to
locate “truth,” or objectively narrate history; the instability of
identity—it is in Nostromo that he most effectively incorporates all
of these themes and unveils the ideological dimensions of
subjectivity in a way that presciently anticipates theories of the
subject coming out of the late twentieth-century (neo- and post-)
Marxist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist theoretical traditions
with which this book is concerned.
The key to understanding how the ideological dimensions of
subjectivity operate in the novel can be found in its opening pages,
which unfold like a panning shot across Sulaco, a coastal town in
the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana that is
insulated from the sea by a vast and tranquil gulf (the Golfo
Plácido). The short first chapter is devoted almost exclusively to
describing the geography of the town and its key topographical
features, with one notable exception: the recounting of a local
parable about “two wandering sailors—Americanos, perhaps, but
gringos of some sort for certain” (6)—who disappear along with a
servant and a stolen donkey while searching for a fabled gold
treasure on the craggy peninsula of Azuera, which overlooks the
Golfo Plácido. The mythopoeic implications of the parable are
evident in the enduring legend that “the two gringos, spectral and
alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks,
under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls cannot tear
themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the
discovered treasure. They are now rich and hungry and thirsty—a
strange theory of tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in their starved
and parched flesh of defiant heretics, where a Christian would have
renounced and been released” (6). Many critics have remarked upon
the parable’s symbolic overtones—the critical reaction is perhaps
best illustrated by Eloise Hay Knapp’s observation that “the
superstition provides an allegorical framework for the obsession
with the silver that gradually takes possession of the novel’s two
central gringos, Gould and Nostromo” (84)—but I insist that there is
something more at work here, a more far-reaching set of reasons
why this parable anticipates and then continually haunts the
remainder of the novel.1
These reasons are connected to the spectral imagery that appears
in the Azuera parable and features prominently throughout Conrad’s
fiction.2 But while other critics have focused predominantly on the
aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of Conrad’s spectral imagery,3 his
spectral engagement runs much deeper than has been previously
acknowledged. In Nostromo, spectrality functions synchronously
across symbolic, narrativistic, and ideological registers. These
spectral engagements produce a self-contained form of ideology
critique that operates simultaneously within and outside the world
of the novel, thereby outstripping contemporary notions of ideology
as “false consciousness” (à la Marx) and anticipating the later
formulations of Louis Althusser and post-Marxist theorists like
Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek. Nostromo
exemplifies modernist fiction’s capacity to anticipate theoretical
insight and, furthermore, reinforces the indispensable value of
ideology critique at a time when the rise of authoritarian populism
across the globe has made it all the more imperative that we explore
new modes of thinking about how oppressive power dynamics are
legitimized through processes of ideological mystification. The
eminent critic J. Hillis Miller has proclaimed that “somewhat
paradoxically, one of the best ways to understand what is happening
now in our time of globalization is to read this old novel by Conrad”
(173). I would agree with his assessment and contend that Nostromo
epitomizes the singular ability of the novel form to open up a space
for a meaningful critique of how ideology functions across both
theoretical and psychological registers.

Spectrality, Ideological Engagements, and Mystification

Spectral imagery has been prevalent in critiques of capitalism and
ideology, dating back to the memorable opening line of Marx and
Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848): “A spectre is haunting Europe
—the spectre of communism” (78). In the Manifesto, Capital (1867–
94), and elsewhere, Marx frequently refers to ghosts, hauntings, and
other mystical images in order to explain the often elusive and
shadowy ways in which everyday objects become fetishized and to
evocatively describe the figurative bloodletting effected by capitalist
forces. The specter also proves to be a fitting image for the workings
of ideology, which can often seem so mysterious and haunting;
demonic possession serves as an apt metaphor for the ways in which
our actions can be manipulated by ideological mechanisms that we
may not even recognize. Of course, Marx actually saw religion as a
possession of sorts, famously writing that “religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul
of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” (Marx,
“Contribution to the Critique” 54). Indeed, Marx proclaims that “the
criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism” (53), which
makes the significance of religion in his worldview quite clear. His
critique of religion also plays a central role in Jacques Derrida’s only
major engagement with Marxist thought, Specters of Marx (1994), in
which he remarks upon “the absolute privilege that Marx always
grants to religion, to ideology as religion, mysticism, or theology, in
his analysis of ideology in general” (185). As Derrida says
elsewhere, “Religion . . . was never one ideology among others for
Marx” (51); in other words, all ideology functions as religion.
This concept will be particularly important in this chapter for two
reasons. First, Conrad’s well-documented religious skepticism
suggests that he too sensed a fundamental connection between
religion and ideology. Second, this religion/ideology nexus informs
other important theoretical formulations that will help us
understand what Conrad is up to in Nostromo, particularly Judith
Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (1997). In her chapter on
Althusser, she wonders why “the mention of conscience in
Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ has received
little critical attention, even though the term, taken together with
the example of religious authority to illustrate the force of ideology,
suggests that the theory of ideology is supported by a complicated
set of theological metaphors” (109). She goes on to argue that
“although Althusser explicitly introduces ‘the Church’ merely as an
example of ideological interpellation, it appears that ideology in his
terms cannot be thought except through the metaphorics of religious
authority” (109). As we will see, the function of ideology in
Nostromo also intersects with religion, in both direct and indirect
ways. As in Marx, we find a confluence of both theological and
mystical imagery, particularly in relation to the characters’ various
ideological commitments.
More specifically, Butler’s remarks help us appreciate how
Conrad also uses “religious authority to illustrate the force of
ideology” via the Azuera parable, which maligns the gringos as
“heretics” who would have been spared their spectral slavery had
they (like Christians) renounced their earthly treasure. The effect is
that the poor (who would seem to be most of Costaguana’s
population) associate “by an obscure instinct of consolation the
ideas of evil and wealth” (5), which serves to reinforce the
hegemony of the ruling class by virtue of the fact that the poor’s
perception of wealth as “evil” arrests their desire to pursue it
themselves. By linking the aspiration to accrue wealth with sin, the
parable serves as a haunting reminder for the lower classes of the
dangers inherent in attempting (or even desiring) to transcend their
social class. The Azuera parable propagates what Stephen Ross calls
a “slave morality,” which “keeps the people of Sulaco satisfied in
their poverty while the material interests get rich” (Conrad and
Empire 132). The Azuera parable is instrumental in showing how
what Althusser calls the “Ideological State Apparatus” works in
service of the ruling class by covertly warning the lower classes not
to challenge the social order lest they fall victim—as do the
treasure-hunting gringos—to “the fatal spell of their success” (6). It
is essential that we recognize, then, that while religious ideology in
the novel might initially appear at odds with the “material interests”
with which the characters of the ruling class are primarily
concerned, the two are in fact continuous. As Althusser reminds us,
“What unifies their [i.e., the various Institutional State Apparatuses:
religious, educational, private, political, cultural, etc.] diversity is
precisely this functioning, insofar as the ideology by which they
function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its
contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of
‘the ruling class’” (146). In one way or another, all the characters in
Nostromo find themselves serving the material interests of the ruling
class, either consciously or unconsciously.
As the title character, Nostromo is the lynchpin not only of the
plot but of the novel’s exploration of how ideology intersects with
subject formation. The title of the novel, according to Benita Parry,
“functions as a metonym for an ethos that, by consecrating the
private ownership of property, legitimises the concept of the person
as possession” (102–3). This is certainly true, and Nostromo (“our
man”) turns out to be the greatest possession of all. It is thus via
Nostromo that this warning against challenging the social order
comes full circle when he “appears in his full dimensions as a vision
of the Imperial subject who becomes aware of the arbitrariness of
ideological/value systems, yet is unable to break free from them and
is emphatically punished for attempting to transgress them” (Ross,
Conrad and Empire 149). Nostromo explicitly acknowledges his
symbolic kinship with the Azuera specters on several occasions,
most notably when the new lighthouse is built 150 yards from the
silver he has buried: “He could never shake off the treasure. His
audacity, greater than that of other men, had welded that vein of
silver into his life. And the feeling of fearful and ardent subjection,
the feeling of his slavery—so irremediable and profound that often,
in his thoughts, he compared himself to the legendary Gringos,
neither dead nor alive, bound down to their conquest of unlawful
wealth on Azuera—weighed heavily on the independent Captain
Fidanza” (377). One of the things that makes Nostromo’s actions in
the novel particularly compelling is his awareness, which proves
limited but is nonetheless notable, of the ideological mechanisms
that are influencing his actions. In the above passage, he imagines
himself as “bound down,” a metaphor for the way in which the
“material interests” of the ruling class have ensnared him.
Nostromo’s movement among competing ideological registers
brings us into contact with recent conceptions of ideology, like those
advanced by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, beginning with
his first major work, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). In
particular, Nostromo’s (limited) awareness of how his actions are
influenced by competing ideological commitments intersects with
Žižek’s account of Peter Sloterdijk’s thesis that “ideology’s dominant
mode of functioning is cynical, which renders impossible—or, more
precisely, vain—the classic critical-ideological procedure.” “The
cynical subject,” Žižek goes on to explain, “is quite aware of the
distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he
none the less still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed
by Sloterdijk, would then be: ‘they know very well what they are
doing, but still, they are doing it’” (29). In other words, while it may
seem paradoxical that Nostromo recognizes his kinship with the
Azuera specters and yet proceeds with his theft of the silver anyway,
Žižek (via Sloterdijk) reminds us that this is in fact one of the key
ways that ideology functions. Viewed in this context, Nostromo
reads as a prototype of the cynical subject and an exemplar of
Conrad’s provident depiction of ideology.
But we might bring into relief yet another layer of Conrad’s use of
the parable as a framing device by turning to another of Žižek’s
works, published the year after Specters of Marx:4 his essay “The
Spectre of Ideology,”5 which introduces his edited collection
Mapping Ideology (1994). In that essay, Žižek responds to the
popular contention that if there is no way to step “outside” ideology
—as many postmodern critics have maintained—then perhaps the
very notion of ideology has outlived its usefulness within the
discourse of political resistance. In response to such criticism, Žižek
insists that “we must none the less maintain the tension that keeps
the critique of ideology alive” by presupposing that “it is possible to
assume a place that enables us to maintain a distance from it” (17).
Anyone familiar with the discourse surrounding ideology will know
that this is a problematic proposition, for if we are to achieve this
goal, we must first recognize and overcome the paradoxical fact that
“the stepping out of (what we experience as) ideology is the very form of
our enslavement to it” (6, emphasis in original). There is an always
present danger, in other words, that our response to what we
perceive to be ideological mystifications will be equally informed
(and therefore problematized) by other forms or manifestations of
ideology. This, Žižek maintains, is the central challenge to the
relevance of ideology critique.
We can get a sense for how this challenge is framed in Nostromo
by turning to an example that Žižek draws from Renata Salecl’s The
Spoils of Freedom (1994). In order to show how ideological
mystification is perpetuated in times of political conflict, Salecl
juxtaposes media coverage of the Bosnian War with that of the Gulf
War: “Instead of providing information on social, political or
religious trends and antagonisms in Iraq, the media ultimately
reduced the conflict to a quarrel with Saddam Hussein, Evil
Personified, the outlaw who excluded himself from the civilized
international community. Even more than the destruction of Iraq’s
military forces, the true aim was presented as psychological, as the
humiliation of Saddam who had to ‘lose face’” (13). This represents
what we might call the reductive approach, which occupies one end
of the spectrum of ideological mystification. In this example, rather
than exploring the complexity of historical, social, and political
circumstances surrounding a particular conflict, the media
metonymically reduces it to a representative constitutive element in
order for it to be more easily criticized or vilified. The ideological
seductiveness of this scenario is all the more evident considering
that we now realize that this depiction of Saddam (who was
ubiquitously and tellingly referred to by first name alone) as “Evil
Personified” maintained profound symbolic force at least until his
eventual capture and execution in 2006. Salecl goes on to explain
that

in the case of the Bosnian war, however, notwithstanding

isolated cases demonizing the Serbian president Milosevic, the
predominant attitude reflects that of the quasi-anthropological
observer. The media outdo one another in giving us lessons on
the ethnic and religious background of the conflict; traumas
hundreds of years old are being replayed and acted out, as if, in
order to understand the roots of the conflict, one has to know
not only the history of Yugoslavia but the entire history of the
 Balkans from medieval times. Or as a journalist says: “The
history of all the southern Slavs in the Balkans is a tangled
tragedy of mass rape and barbaric slaughter, the product of the
kind of ethnic hatred that perhaps only people who are closely
related to each other could nurture so well for so long.” In the
Bosnian conflict, it is therefore not possible simply to take sides,
to name evil, to assign blame, because we are dealing with
“irreconcilable warring tribes.” One can only patiently try to
grasp the background of this savage spectacle, so alien to our
civilized system of values . . .
Such an approach involves an ideological mystification even
more cunning than the demonization of Saddam Hussein. (13,
ellipsis in original)

In this instance, rather than the conflict being personified through a

representative and symbolically overdetermined figure, the
complexities of the circumstances are used as an excuse to become
disengaged altogether for fear that commitment to any particular
position will fail to take into account some other important
factor(s). We can use Salecl’s example, which serves as a useful
outline of how ideology affects the analysis of social and political
antagonism, to show how the tendency to gravitate toward one or
another of these extremes problematizes the attempt to critique
ideology in Nostromo, both for its characters and for its readers.
On the one hand, the novel’s semi-omniscient narrator6 gives
readers some sense of the complexity of Costaguanan history. We
might describe the narrator, following Salecl, as “a quasi-
anthropological observer” whose continual digressions add
increasingly intricate layers of context to the more particular story
with which he or she is primarily concerned, namely the Revolution
and the efforts of the Gould Concession to save the silver of the San
Tomé mine. But many of the novel’s pivotal events are not actually
described, leaving gaps that are, in the words of Fredric Jameson,
“present/absent in the most classic Derridean fashion” (Political
Unconscious 270).7 Conrad resists master narratives, instead
exploring the actions of conflicted individual characters in the face
of overwhelming social, political, economic, and other obstacles.
The narrative organization of the novel reflects the complexity of
Costaguana’s history and politics, ultimately suggesting that any
attempt to objectively record history or establish historical causality
is a fool’s errand. For those within the world of the novel and
without, then, there is a problem akin to the one Salecl describes
above in attempting to make any coherent sense out of
circumstances with such long and puzzling histories. Instead, the
novel’s many narrative gaps leave our understanding of
Costaguanan history and politics inevitably incomplete.
On the other hand, in keeping with Salecl’s example we find the
opposite tendency at work within the world of the novel by way of
the local journalists, who make no apparent attempt to inform the
public about the political tensions at hand or investigate their
context, but rather engage in exaggerated and highly personal
attacks against the political opponents of the parties they represent.
Martin Decoud, for instance, is enlisted by the Blancos to combat
what the narrator describes as “the lies disseminated by the press,”
specifically “the atrocious calumnies, the appeals to the people
calling upon them to rise with their knives in their hands and put an
end once for all to the Blancos, to these Gothic remnants, to these
sinister mummies, these impotent paralíticos, who plotted with
foreigners for the surrender of the lands and the slavery of the
people” (116). Although he views politics as a farce, Decoud
publishes personal attacks on Montero for the Blanco-backed
Porvenir and, in doing so, implicitly condones character attacks over
meaningful political engagement. Paradoxically, then, while readers
struggle to comprehend the abundant historical and political context
given by a narrator who fails to portray the central events around
which that context has emerged, the opposite form of ideological
mystification is perpetuated within the world of the novel by the
Costaguanan media, with the result that the view of political
conflict in the country as an unending and unstoppable farce ossifies
in the collective social consciousness. The media thus constitutes yet
another layer of ideological mystification.
 But the work of ideological mystification operates on another
level as well, one that again recalls the specters of the Azuera
parable, as the Costaguanan people’s views of their political leaders
are transmogrified into religious myths that reinforce prescribed
moral guidelines. This is evident in the propaganda of the regime:
the Blancos are depicted not simply as political opponents but as
spectral remnants of an antiquated and sinister imperial ideology.
And this same type of demonization occurs on the other end of the
political spectrum as well. The central mythologized figure in liberal
Costaguanan history is Guzmán Bento: “It was the same Guzmán
Bento who, becoming later on Perpetual President, famed for his
ruthless and cruel tyranny, reached his apotheosis in the popular
legend of a sanguinary land-haunting spectre whose body had been
carried off by the devil in person from the brick mausoleum in the
nave of the Church of Assumption in Sta. Marta” (37). Ironically,
the perpetuation of these myths, particularly by the lower classes,
actually reinforces political paralysis, as the lower-class citizens of
Costaguana—those who are least insulated from the adverse effects
of its political instability and ongoing violence—tend to extricate
themselves from their country’s social and political complexities.
Ultimately, such fanciful denigrations of Bento and other political
figures facilitate their integration into the preexisting
religious/ideological structure that underlies the world of the novel.
Furthermore, in keeping with Žižek’s adage “they know very well
what they are doing, but still, they are doing it,” even those
characters who are seemingly aware of these ideological constructs
and their damaging effects are nonetheless complicit in their
propagation, often for self-serving reasons. We have already seen
how Nostromo displays at least some awareness of ideology’s hold
over him. But his level of awareness is eclipsed by that of Emilia
Gould, who is especially attentive to the workings of such
ideologies: “In all these households she could hear stories of
political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined, imprisoned, killed in the
battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously executed in ferocious
proscriptions, as though the government of the country had been a
struggle of lust between bands of absurd devils let loose upon the
land with sabres and uniforms and grandiloquent phrases. And on
all the lips she found a weary desire for peace, the dread of
officialdom with its nightmareish [sic] parody of administration
without law, without security, and without justice” (66). Given that
the Gould Concession is an inextricable part of Costaguana’s
political landscape, Mrs. Gould must know that her husband plays at
least some role in the suffering of which she has heard. And she is
similarly troubled later by how Sulaco’s inhabitants accept brutal
violence as an inevitability: “That it should be accepted with no
indignant comment by people of intelligence, refinement, and
character as something inherent in the nature of things was one of
the symptoms of degradation that had the power to exasperate her
almost to the verge of despair” (82). The spectral imagery (“bands
of absurd devils,” etc.) used to describe her sentiments suggests that
it is, in part at least, the prevailing local religious ideology that has
instilled the notion that the country’s class distinctions are “inherent
in the nature of things.”
Ironically, though, given that Emilia is so attuned to this attitude
among the Costaguanan people, their resulting “weary desire for
peace” sets the stage for the Gould Concession and its singular
concern with “material interests” to install a dictator in Ribiera
whose loyalty to Western economic and political influence trumps
his concern for the well-being of his people. As the matriarch of the
Gould Concession, Emilia is complicit in the ideological structure
that ensures the capitulation of the lower classes to the ruling
ideology, however seemingly disturbed she may be by their plight.
The Gould Concession, which is concerned purely with profit,
provides the country with a sense of peace and stability that masks
the struggle and conflict that actually constitute its social reality. It
is not until the Gould Concession has indelibly entrenched itself that
people begin to realize “that the Ribierist reforms meant simply the
taking away of the land from the people” (141). By this time, there
is little recourse from the stranglehold of the Ribierist regime and
the Gould Concession other than submission to a new “band of
absurd devils.”
 The muddling and masking of class struggle by the juxtaposed
chaos of warring political factions and stability of the Gould
Concession once again anticipates Žižek, whose equation of class
struggle with the Lacanian real frames his main argument in “The
Spectre of Ideology.” In order to show how Conrad anticipates
Žižek, let us first review what Lacan means by the real. The real, for
Lacan, is distinct from what we generally call “reality.” It is one
register of his triadic structure of the psyche, alongside the
imaginary and the symbolic. Our entrance into the symbolic realm
of language, Lacan explains, irreversibly severs us from the real,
which we might describe as the realm of pure materiality. As Lacan
continually reminds us, though his descriptions of the three registers
evolve throughout his career, it is impossible for us to access the
real. We are able to come close only in rare moments, namely,
traumatic ones, when our essential materiality is most evident to us
—in the flight from death, for example. In order to understand
Lacan’s structure of the psyche, it is essential to distinguish between
the real and what we experience as “reality” because Lacan tells us
that this experiential interface with the world around us in fact
belongs to the realm of the imaginary. Because our interaction with
the world is mediated through language (which, according to Lacan,
forms the structure of our unconscious mind), we are only ever able
to access a subjective reality that is sealed off from the real.
Žižek’s conceptualization of the “spectre of ideology” hinges upon
his unique reading of the Lacanian real not as something that lies
behind the imaginary like a palimpsest but as something that is
woven into its very fabric. “To put it simply,” he explains, “reality is
never directly ‘itself,’ it presents itself only via its incomplete-failed
symbolization, and spectral apparitions emerge in this very gap that
forever separates reality from the real, and on account of which
reality has the character of a (symbolic) fiction: the spectre gives
body to that which escapes (the symbolically structured) reality”
(21). In other words, we might think of the specter, as Žižek
describes it, as a fleeting ghostly apparition of the inaccessible real.
If what we know or experience as “reality” is to become apparent to
us (since the real itself cannot), “something has to be foreclosed
from it” (21). Thus, “what the spectre conceals is not reality but its
‘primordially repressed,’ the irrepresentable X on whose ‘repression’
reality itself is founded” (21, emphasis in original). As we can see,
unlike in earlier (neo-)Marxist formulations, for Žižek ideology is
not simply “illusion”; rather, it is continuous with the realm of the
symbolic and an indelible facet of our lived experience.
Because the Lacanian process of signification (in which meaning
is structured around a central absence) is so important for Žižek’s
conception of ideology, it will be useful here to outline two seminal
readings of ideology in Nostromo that traffic in a similar language,
although neither would be considered Lacanian. The first comes
from Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (1976). Eagleton claims
that the plot, or action, of each of Conrad’s novels revolves around a
central absence. “It is precisely in these absent centres,” he argues,
“which ‘hollow’ rather than scatter and fragment the organic forms
of Conrad’s fiction, that the relations of that fiction to its ideological
context is [sic] laid bare” (138–39). The result, for Eagleton, is that
Conrad’s narrative forms do not “express” an ideology, but rather
produce ideological contradictions. This production, as he explains
it, is ironically deconstructive in character: “The tale or yarn
‘foregrounds’ action as solid and unproblematic; it assumes the
unimpeachable realities of history, character, the objective world.
Yet these assumptions are simultaneously thrown into radical doubt
by the penumbra of spectral meanings which surround the
narrative, crossing and blurring its contours. If the narrative is
reduced to a yarn, those crucial meanings dissolve; if the meanings
are directly probed, it is the narrative which evaporates” (139).
What adds to the complexity of Conrad’s narrativity, as many
critics have pointed out, is his appropriation of the adventure story,
which is generally formulaic. But one hallmark of Conrad’s fiction is
his tendency to subvert the classic adventure story with a thematic
complexity that belies its formulaic simplicity. In the face of the
contradictions produced, for Eagleton Conrad’s fiction insists that
“faith, work and duty must not be allowed to yield to scepticism if
the supreme fiction of social order is to be sustained. It is for this
reason that Conrad the pessimist insists that the artist’s task is not to
convey moral nihilism, but to cherish undying hope. Yet that hope
can never be anything other than ambiguous” (139). This last
sentence is emblematic of Eagleton’s critique of Conrad, whom he
sees as unwilling or unable to resolve the ideological contradictions
that his fiction produces. Eagleton himself has been criticized, and
rightly so in my estimation—he perhaps takes too literally a letter
he cites from Conrad to Edward Garnett in which he writes “that my
fate is to be descriptive, and descriptive only” (qtd. in Eagleton 139)
—for undervaluing the sophistication of Conrad’s depiction of
ideology. Eagleton believes that Conrad’s failure to narrate the
central events of his novels produces a “corrosive negation” (139)
that is never resolved and is flawed as a result.
Like Eagleton, Jameson is interested in the novel’s decenteredness
but instead focuses on the displacement of “actual” history by so-
called strategies of containment. Jameson reads Nostromo as “a
dialectical intensification and transformation of the narrative
apparatus of Lord Jim” (Political Unconscious 269) and views it as “a
demonstration of structural transformations, and the way in which
analogous materials are utterly metamorphosed when they are
wrenched from the realm and categories of the individual subject to
the new perspective of those of collective destiny” (269). Jameson
hones in on what he calls “ideological interference,” which he
describes as “threefold and layered,” involving Conrad’s adoption of
the “classic ‘Anglo’ picture of a Latin ‘race,’ lazy, shiftless, and the
like, to which political order and economic progress must be
‘brought’ from the outside” (270); his own political attitudes, which
are presupposed by readers and “rhetorically reinforced by ethical
and melodramatic markers (the Blancos are good, the Monteristas
evil)” (270); and the text’s relegation of ressentiment toward the
central event in the novel—the revolution—to “the frame or border
of the text proper” (271). This picture of ideology in the novel lays
the groundwork for his observation, mentioned above, that “this
central event is therefore present/absent in the most classic
Derridean fashion, present only in its initial absence, absent when it
is supposed to be most intensely present” (270). For Jameson, in
other words, the “real” historical events of the novel are effaced,
and the corresponding blank space is filled by narrative. He builds
upon Edward Said’s contention in Beginnings that “instead of
mimetically authoring a new world, Nostromo turns back to its
beginning as a novel, to the fictional, illusory assumption of reality:
in thus overturning the confident edifice that novels normally
construct Nostromo reveals itself to be no more than a record of
novelistic self-reflection” (137). In short, what Eagleton takes to be
a flaw, Jameson takes to be one of Conrad’s great accomplishments.
His “high evaluation of Nostromo,” according to Terry Collits, “links
the grandeur of the novel’s narrative design with its author’s
authoritative knowledge” (6). And so “Jameson sees the novel’s
refusal of closure as key to its method” (6).
I argue that the spectral meanings in Nostromo do not “surround
the narrative,” as Eagleton maintains, but fill the “absent centres”
and gaps that he and Jameson describe. We might view such absent
centers and gaps, then—namely, the revolution—as symptoms of the
gaps between the real and reality. The ideological mystifications
explored above conceal the deeper class struggle out of which the
perpetual political revolutions of Costaguana have arisen. This
phenomenon is in keeping with Žižek’s assertion that it is precisely
the real of class struggle that must be repressed in order for
experiential reality to emerge: “The consequent thinking-out of this
concept compels us to admit that there is no class struggle ‘in
reality’: ‘class struggle’ designates the very antagonism that prevents
the objective (social) reality from constituting itself as a self-
enclosed whole. . . . The ultimate paradox of the notion of ‘class
struggle’ is that society is ‘held together’ by the very antagonism,
splitting, that forever prevents its closure in a harmonious,
transparent, rational Whole—by the very impediment that
undermines every rational totalization” (“Spectre of Ideology” 21–
22). This paradox raises a number of ironies, namely, the fact that
“peace” actually emerges out of struggle, in the sense that a state of
peace signals the winning out of one particular side of an
oppositional faction; the apparent condition of peace hides the
actual antagonism that closes the social reality. Consequently, if the
citizens of Costaguana were to have their “weary desire for peace”
fulfilled, that “peace” would exist not in the absence of struggle but
as a consequence of it.8
The implication of Žižek’s reading of class struggle, finally, “is
that the very constitution of social reality involves the ‘primordial
repression’ of an antagonism, so that the ultimate support of the
critique of ideology—the extra-ideological point of reference that
authorizes us to denounce the content of our immediate experience
as ‘ideological’—is not ‘reality’ but the ‘repressed’ real of
antagonism” (25). And it is in the Azuera parable that we find the
“‘repressed’ real of antagonism” in Nostromo. The parable ultimately
effaces the underlying struggle that creates the social reality of the
country; it functions as a “symbolic fiction” that exemplifies “the
primordial repression” of the antagonism of class struggle. To take
the point further, there is a form of doubling whereby the specter as
thematic device emerges in this symbolically overdetermined
parable, which in turn itself functions as the very Žižekian “specter
of ideology” that offers a glimpse of how “reality” emerges within
the world of the novel. The first chapter of the novel sets the stage
for later moments that show the parable’s ideological resonance, as
the complexities of political conflict and class struggle are
continually effaced. When, for example, a churchgoer asks Father
Román in what direction Europe is situated, he cautions that
“ignorant sinners like you of the San Tomé mine should think
earnestly of everlasting punishment instead of inquiring into the
magnitude of the earth, with its countries and populations
altogether beyond your understanding” (78). Harking back to the
legend of Azuera, the religious dogma perpetuated by the likes of
Father Román teaches followers to accept their position in the social
hierarchy and make no attempt to involve themselves in thinking
beyond their own faith—a faith that keeps them ensnared within the
ideological trap of imperialist interests.
But Conrad’s critique is not aimed merely at religious dogma; as
discussed above, all ideology functions like religion. Accordingly,
the members of the Costaguanan ruling class, who are not as overt
as the lower classes in their religious devotion, instead worship
what is referred to throughout the novel as “material interests.” The
Azuera parable is emblematic of the wider spectral phenomena that
haunt all the novel’s characters, as the importance of “action”
among the capitalist class functions as the foil to faith. The driving
force of material interests in the novel is the San Tomé mine, which
itself carries a haunted/haunting history: “Mr. Gould, senior, did not
desire the perpetual possession of that desolate locality; in fact, the
mere vision of it arising before his mind in the still watches of the
night had the power to exasperate him into hours of hot and
agitated insomnia. . . . He also began to dream of vampires” (42–
43). Wise enough to understand that the mine will become the
battleground for Costaguana’s perpetual and inevitable political
quarrels, Gould writes to his son “with words of horror at the
apparently eternal character of that curse. For the Concession had
been granted to him and his descendants forever” (44). It would
seem that Gould senior, with his Hamlet-esque spectral hold over
his son, understands the ideological mechanisms of Costaguana
quite well, but the son’s desire to overcome his father’s failings
leave him blind to the “reality” of his situation. As he grows older,
he comes to believe that “with advancing wisdom, he [has]
managed to clear the plain truth of the business from the fantastic
intrusions of the Old Man of the Sea, vampires, and ghouls, which
had lent to his father’s correspondence the flavour of a gruesome
Arabian Night’s tale” (44–45). In fact, however, “by the time he was
twenty Charles Gould had, in his turn, fallen under the spell of the
San Tomé mine. But it was another form of enchantment, more
suitable to his youth, into whose magic formula there entered hope,
vigour, and self-confidence, instead of weary indignation and
despair” (45). Charles does not overcome his father’s obsession but
merely displaces it with his own, as his inability to adequately
appreciate the mine’s corrupting influence leads him to believe that
he can succeed where his father failed.
What Charles fails to recognize is that the “absurd moral disaster”
(50) the mine becomes is not a chance occurrence but an inevitable
consequence of the absurdity that is the modus operandi of
Costaguanan politics. Naively thinking that proper management of
the mine will establish peace in the province, he hopes to atone for
his father’s failure. According to his twisted Ayn Randian brand of
ideology, he believes that his own financial gain will bring peace to
the people of Sulaco, when in fact, as Žižek has shown, peace is a
symptom of, not an antidote to, class struggle. Charles’s
misrecognition is brought into further relief by the novel’s narrator,
who deconstructs his ideological commitments and shows how the
mediation of our interaction with the world through the realm of
the symbolic ultimately constitutes a “flattering illusion”:

It hurt Charles Gould to feel that never more, by no effort of

will, would he be able to think of his father in the same way he
used to think of him when the poor man was alive. His breathing
image was no longer in his power. This consideration, closely
affecting his own identity, filled his breast with a mournful and
angry desire for action. In this his instinct was unerring. Action
is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of
flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find
the sense of mastery over the fates. (50)

Although Charles may feel a “sense of mastery over the fates,” it

becomes clear to readers that there is nothing supernatural or
fatalistic about the success of the San Tomé mine, which is assured
by the powerful influence of global capitalist interests and the
ideological myths that perpetuate the passivity of those who would
oppose it. As we zoom out and survey the various ideological
commitments in the novel, we see that while the religious devotees
are rendered passive by the deceptive comfort of faith, those
representing the imperial enterprise are driven by an equally
mystifying ideology of action. The novel shows how the ruling-class
ideology maintains the status quo and touches everyone within its
reach; ideology functions as a hegemonic force that ensures that all
dissent is in one way or another subsumed into the service of
maintaining the existing power dynamics.
The most tragic dissenter is Martin Decoud, who takes a critical
and even ironic view of Costaguana’s ideological landscape but is
nonetheless complicit in its function. Unlike the many characters in
the novel who appear unaware of the extent to which their actions
are driven by their ideological commitments, Decoud is strikingly
conscious of his own personal illusions. In this sense he comes much
closer to an actual realization of how ideology acts upon him and
others than Nostromo, who is less introspective. But Decoud’s death
ultimately becomes another cautionary tale against buying into the
“sustaining illusion” of “action” that deceives us into believing that
we are our own free agents: “After three days of waiting for the
sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a
doubt of his own individuality. It had merged into the world of
cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In our
activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent
existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a
helpless part. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past
and to come” (357). Decoud is undoubtedly far less a materialist
than Charles Gould, and yet “action” similarly comes to constitute
his subjective reality. The “desire for action” that we find in Charles
collapses inward on Decoud, so that action itself becomes a proxy
for desire. And if we approach this scene from the perspective of
“the ‘repressed’ real of antagonism” that Žižek describes, we may
also read action as a code word for “material interests” and, in turn,
for the antagonism of class struggle itself. We might say that only in
our relationship to material interests, or within the world of class
struggle, do we find “the sustaining illusion of an independent
existence.” In the absence of action/desire, Decoud is irreversibly
traumatized by his glimpse of the real and can no longer endure his
existential suffering.
Ultimately both Decoud and Nostromo become ensnared in the
ideological interests of those they serve. In the case of Nostromo,
the false “revelation” that his own interests do not reflect those of
the people to whom he has been enslaved shows merely the
reinforcement of his own sustaining illusion when viewed within the
novel’s broader ideological landscape. Conrad brilliantly
demonstrates how various forms of either “faith” or “action” serve
to fill the gap of the real for each individual subject. It is in these
moments of false revelation that Conrad most skillfully deconstructs
Marxist notions of ideology as false consciousness and highlights the
interpenetration of ideology and subjectivity, ultimately exposing
the ways in which political and class conflict act upon the individual
psyche.
Fully teasing out this inextricable link between the personal and
the political is especially important because, as Stephen Ross
explains, there has been “a tendency among politically concerned
critics like Said, Watt, Albert J. Guerard, Claire Rosenfield, and Alan
Friedman to minimize the importance of reading Nostromo as a
subject in order to arrive at an adequate understanding of the
novel’s political critique” (Conrad and Empire 115).9 On the contrary,
I would contend that one must explore the intricacies of the novel’s
individual subjects in order to fully appreciate its political critique.
Ross’s contention “that the key to reading Nostromo lies in
recognizing that, for all that the majesty of its scale seems to
diminish the importance of individual experience, it remains a
focused vision of the human experience of modernity” (115) is thus
an important reminder that Nostromo does much more than explore
large-scale issues like history and politics. It does that too, but
alongside the granular level of individual experience. Ross later
argues that “Nostromo’s wild oscillations from sweeping panorama
to focused interiority . . . show the fundamental continuity between
the subjective and the ideological in a highly compressed yet widely
relevant critique of Empire’s emergent order” (148), highlighting
the ways in which political affairs of global consequence are always
cut through with the day-to-day proceedings of individual subjects.
Unlike most earlier Conrad critics, Ross is attuned to the fact that it
is precisely Conrad’s amalgamation of the psychodramas of
individual subjects and the inevitable march of imperial capitalism
that make Nostromo so inscrutable yet so compelling. As we have
seen, in order to truly appreciate the novel’s interpretive potential,
one must view these seemingly antipodal elements as inextricably
linked.
While we find this intersection in a number of characters
throughout the novel, it is seen most powerfully in Nostromo. His
“slave morality” in the early part of the novel is particularly
striking, as his loyal service to the O.S.N. Company interpellates him
as an imperial subject. And so the “construction and performance of
‘Nostromo’ [a corruption of the Italian nostro uomo, or “our man”]
as his persona indicates a radical displacement of identity that
replays on an exaggerated scale the drama of fissuring and loss that
Lacan says characterizes the infant’s first situation in the symbolic
order. In his public manifestation, ‘Nostromo’ becomes little more
than a nodal point in that biopolitical order, a signifier that signifies
other signifiers—that is, he is a function of the operation of
signification in its ideological configuration” (134). Because
Nostromo’s ego is entirely constructed around the persona he has
created in service of others (that is, he believes that he is “really”
their man), once the competing ideologies of those who “possess”
him are stripped away, we find, as with Decoud, a yawning void (or
an absent center) at his core.

Misrecognition and the Displaced Subject

The (self-)destructions of Nostromo and Decoud underscore the
importance of intersubjectivity in self-formation. Nidesh Lawtoo’s
work on this topic in Conrad has been especially valuable, as he
offers a novel way of examining what he calls “the phantom of the
ego.” “Above all,” Lawtoo writes, “the modernist unconscious is not
located in a solipsistic model of the psyche interrogated in isolation,
but emerges from intersubjective forms of lived, affective
communications experienced in daily social situations” (15). Lawtoo
maintains that in Conrad and other modernist writers “the ego is
formed by the other, through the other, in a relation of unconscious
communication with the other” (18) and that as a result what we
find in place of the ego is, in fact, a phantom of the ego that exists
only in an intersubjective mimetic relationship to an other.
According to Lawtoo, Conrad “relegates the modern moral subject to
the sphere of crowd psychology and the mimetic unconscious it
entails. For Conrad, as for Nietzsche before him, we live in the
Jahrhundert der Mass: the phantom has taken possession of the ego
and, as he severely adds, ‘few men realize it’” (93).
 This is certainly an apt way of describing Decoud, who does not
appear to fully appreciate his reliance on an other until he is faced
with prolonged solitude. And it is an apt way of describing
Nostromo as well. Consider the scene in which he washes up and
awakens exhausted on the mainland after successfully concealing
the silver that all others believe to be missing: “With the lost air of a
man just born into the world . . . he threw back his head, flung his
arms open, and stretched himself with a slow twist of the waist and
a leisurely growling yawn of white teeth, as natural and free from
evil in the moment of waking as a magnificent and unconscious
beast” (295). Initially, Nostromo would seem to experience a sort of
epiphany here, and it might seem that his subsequent decision to
renounce those who have possessed him as “our man” and instead
serve only his own needs would constitute his finally stepping
outside ideology.10 But as we have seen, such a notion of ideology
lapses back into what Žižek calls the “representationalist
problematic,” an outdated Marxist conception of ideology as an
“illusion” that displaces “actual” reality. Instead, we are compelled
to view Nostromo’s “revelation” as a false one that leads him not
“outside” ideology but back into it. As Stephen Ross explains, when
“he determines to replace the fantasy structure of ‘Nostromo’ with
the materialist fantasy structure of Empire,” Conrad “lays bare the
interdependence of subjective méconnaissance and ideological
misrecognition, exposing the workings of ideology as an imaginary
construction whose only defining feature is its own reproduction in
further imaginary constructions” (Conrad and Empire 142). What is
finally laid bare in Nostromo, in the words of Lawtoo, is the
“phantom of the ego” that is exposed when the competing
ideological layers that constitute his subject position are peeled
away and reveal not an essential self but a void.
And it is precisely this “psychic dispossession” (Lawtoo’s term)
that renders the Conradian subject innately vulnerable to the “spell”
of ideology. From the “fatal spell” that besets the gringo ghosts of
Azuera to Teresa Viola, who “was under the spell of that reputation
the Capataz de Cargadores had made for himself” (16), to Charles
Gould “under the spell of the San Tomé mine” (45), to Nostromo
falling under “the accursed spell of the treasure” (387) in his tragic
repetition of the Azuera parable, Conrad’s spectral engagements
suggest the inevitability of our psychic subjugation to power. Let us
then turn again to Butler, who confronts the problem that “the story
by which subjection is told is, inevitably, circular, presupposing the
very subject for which it seeks to give an account” (11). This
circularity is explained by Butler’s insistence that “if, following
Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as
providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its
desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a
strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we
harbor and preserve in the beings that we are” (2). In other words,
our psychic subjugation to power is not only inevitable but
fundamental to our subject formation. “In this view,” Butler goes on
to explain, “neither submission nor mastery is performed by a subject;
the lived simultaneity of submission as mastery, and mastery as
submission, is the condition of possibility for the emergence of the
subject” (117). Conrad clearly anticipates Butler on this point, as
Nostromo’s conception of self is ironically predicated upon his
submission to the power structure that sustains him.
As we look back, we can understand how it first appears that
because none of the characters in Nostromo escape the corrupting
influence of imperial ideology (whether political, emotional,
spiritual, etc.), the novel may seem not only deeply pessimistic but
in line with the very idea of ideology that Žižek criticizes. In fact,
however, a closer reading shows how the novel’s spectral
engagement with ideology maintains the possibility of meaningful
critique—and such critique is vital to our understanding of the
intersectionality of the political and the individual in Conrad, but
also in modernism more generally. If one of the tasks of ideology
critique must be “to designate the elements within an existing social
order which—in the guise of ‘fiction,’ that is, of ‘Utopian’ narratives
of possible but failed alternative histories—point towards the
system’s antagonistic character, and thus ‘estrange’ us to the self-
evidence of its established identity” (Žižek, “Spectre of Ideology” 7),
then Nostromo is essential to our critique of ideology because his
life itself is held up as the defining “utopian narrative” for the
people of Costaguana.
Widely considered to be “incorruptible,” politically indifferent,
and absolutely loyal, Nostromo represents an alternative history
within the world of the novel, the possibility of an infinitely
trustworthy and nonpartisan heroic figure who would bring peace
and stability to the country. This enduring false narrative makes it
all the more important that his “epiphany” is a false one, because,
rather than escaping the spell of ideology that has been cast upon
him by those who have used him to perpetuate their own material
interests, he simply adopts a clichéd ideology of “rebellion” that
further expedites his downfall and eventually leads to his death.
And we cannot overstate the importance of the fact that the novel
does not end with Nostromo’s death, but rather folds it back into the
utopian myth that is perpetuated by Captain Mitchell and others:
“Dr. Monygham, pulling round in the police-galley, heard the name
pass over his head. It was another of Nostromo’s successes, the
greatest, the most enviable, the most sinister of all. In that true cry
of love and grief that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to
Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a
big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of the
magnificent Capataz de Cargadores dominated the dark Gulf
containing his conquests of treasure and love” (405). The novel’s
final paragraph suggests that Nostromo’s legacy, the utopian
narrative that has been built up around him, will live beyond him
and, by implication, continue to estrange its adherents from the
social antagonism that it has obscured. If, as Benita Parry maintains,
“in the end Nostromo survives his abject capitulation to live on in
the minds and hearts of Costaguana’s poor as exemplar of their
aspirations” (127), then the parable of the gringo specters is brought
back around full circle to Nostromo in the novel’s final pages, and
the (fictive) parable of his life that fails to account for his theft of
the silver will continue to ensure the capitulation of all inhabitants
of Costaguana to the ruling ideology that haunts them.11
However, while Nostromo’s legacy is a utopian misrecognition of
his actual life, and thus reads as tragedy, it importantly “point[s]
toward the system’s antagonistic character” in the way that Žižek
describes. Which begs the question, How can ideology be critiqued
here if only the utopian version of Nostromo survives and the real
story is lost? In response, we must not forget that the narrator’s
occasional (though rare) use of first-person pronouns indicates that
he or she exists within the world of the novel, indicating that, in
fact, the real history of Nostromo endures after all. That we can
continually return to the legend of the gringos on Punta Mala in the
opening chapter for the first foreshadowing of Nostromo’s later
actions demonstrates Conrad’s strategy of placing his readers
“above” the action through the perspective of the semi-omniscient
narrator, which allows us a privileged view of Costaguana’s
ideological landscape, while still remaining “inside” it via a narrator
who exists within the world of the novel—and thus avoiding the
postmodern problem that Žižek seeks to overcome.12 While
Nostromo appears incorruptible in the eyes of those who rely upon
his help and loyalty, from the beginning of the novel he in fact
“estranges” those who come into contact with him from the reality
of “the system’s antagonistic character.” Nostromo straddles the
fault line of social antagonism in the novel; in him we find
embodied the tensions that underlie every social and political
interaction.
It is easy to see, then, why so many critics have read the novel as
deeply pessimistic. On the contrary, however, the Azuera parable
not only authorizes readers of Nostromo to engage in a meaningful
critique of ideology but suggests that the characters within the
world of the novel could potentially do the same, by creating “a
place that enables [them] to maintain a distance from [ideology]”
(Žižek, “Spectre of Ideology” 17), even if it is not possible to
actually step outside it. Conrad not only shows us the ideological
dimensions of subject formation in remarkably prescient ways that
anticipate theoretical formulations that come about decades later
but also provides a model of how the ideological mechanisms that
interpellate us as subjects can be meaningfully critiqued.
These achievements belong to Conrad, but they also belong to the
novel form, which, as I have said, is uniquely positioned to capture
such elaborate systems of political and individual thought. In his
essay on Dickens and Conrad, Robert Caserio makes the claim that
both authors share “a pride of art that employs the novel form to
criticize other intellectual endeavors—indeed to put most modes of
nonnovelistic reflection to shame” (339). Conrad’s pride of art
comes from his ability to so deftly exploit the novel form by
amalgamating strains of thought from historical, sociological,
anthropological, philosophical, theological, artistic, and other
perspectives. No other artistic form can accommodate such an
undertaking. Caserio goes on to write that “the novel as Conrad
practices the form challenges the authority of history, sociology,
philosophy, and science. This kind of novel in effect claims its
authority to be superior to theirs and its portrayal of life to be more
precise than direct observation and documentary evidence, more
acute than logical analysis or philosophical speculation” (339).
While this is true of Conrad’s fiction generally, the novel that most
embodies this ability is Nostromo, and it is thus the quintessential
early modernist novel that sets the stage for the readings that
follow.
CHAPTER 2
THE VOID OF SUBJECTIVITY
Sublimation and the Artistic Process in Conrad, Joyce, and
Woolf

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are
directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence
and leading the individual toward freedom.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN, Out of My Later Years

Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf may not, upon first
glance, appear to have much in common. Aside from each playing a
major role in shaping the novel form—and particularly the
modernist novel—they are otherwise quite different writers. Born of
Polish radical, working-class Irish, and upper-class English parents,
respectively, they also have few biographical similarities.1
Stylistically speaking, Joyce and Woolf were pioneers of stream of
consciousness and free indirect discourse, while Conrad’s prose was
far less experimental and grounded in more conventional Victorian
narrative modes, including the classic adventure novel, about which
much has been written.2 There are, however, two interrelated
aspects of their lives and writings that are quite significant: their
skepticism toward the prevailing institutions of their time and their
unwavering belief in the superior abilities of art and the artist in
shaping culture and society. Taken at face value, these perhaps do
not appear to be especially unique characteristics among great
artists, but what makes them notable are the analogous ways these
writers use their artistic craft as a means of resolving personal
tensions that developed out of their skepticism toward science and
religion, two of the prevailing institutions of the early twentieth
century. This chapter shows how both their personal and fictive
responses to these doubts anticipate Lacan’s account of the three
dominant forms of sublimation—religion, scientific discourse, and
art—which represent competing ways of approaching what he called
the void at the heart of subjectivity.
Lacan’s conception of the void is intimately tied to language. As
the biological fact of human existence precedes language, the
acquisition of language thus introduces the possibility of
constitutive absence, which Lacan called the “void.” In the most
elemental sense, the void is the absent center around which
subjectivity is constructed, the unbridgeable gap that separates our
desire from the sense of completeness for which we are always
longing. As such, the void cannot be filled, although we nonetheless
spend our lives attempting to fill it and restore a sense of lost
psychic unity—a psychic unity that existed only as a fantasy.
Because religion and science represent the prevailing belief systems
that individuals and societies have used to explain human existence,
in order to make any sense of that existence one tends to put faith in
one or the other. But for those who find both suspect, the existential
implications can be terrifying.
In order to give some sense of how doubt intersects the void, we
might consider Jean-Michel Rabaté’s assertion that “doubt offers a
key not only to obsessional neuroses, and its usual connection with
religion, as Freud repeatedly stated in The Future of an Illusion, but,
because of the great ‘suspension’ it affords, to the essence of Life”
(xxv). Rabaté, whose Joyce upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt
(1991) is especially useful in framing this chapter’s argument, points
out that “life is founded upon the void in Stephen’s post-Freudian
view of ‘mystical paternity,’ just as the world is founded upon the
void in Bloom’s post-Einsteinian universe” (xxv). In what follows,
we will expand upon Rabaté’s characterization of Joyce and show
how doubt and the void intersect in similar ways in Conrad and
Woolf as well.
Before we delve into the religion-science-art nexus that informs
this chapter, it will be useful to review how Lacan relates it to the
void.3 This involves, first of all, establishing what Lacan means by
sublimation, as his use of the term differs from Freud’s. For Freud,
sublimation is a defense mechanism that channels unhealthy,
threatening, or potentially painful desire into an activity that is
socially acceptable. This is how we have typically come to use the
term sublimation in popular discourse. For Lacan, however,
sublimation is related to the unbearable symbolic loss of the mother,
a loss that produces “the Thing,” or the void around which our
drives revolve. Lacan alternately calls the Thing das Ding and la
chose throughout his seminar of 1959–60. He uses the concept,
which he adapts from Freud, to describe an imagined lost object
(i.e., an object that can never be represented)4 that would fill the
void, but forever eludes the subject (later in his life, Lacan revises
his focus—as he so often did—from das Ding more toward objet a, a
physical object, person, or attribute that stands in for a psychic loss
associated with the void). Lacan describes the thing as “the beyond-
of-the-signified” (Ethics of Psychoanalysis 54), an unknowable x in
the vein of Kant’s “thing-in-itself” that resides in the realm of the
real. He explains elsewhere in the same seminar that “this thing will
always be represented by emptiness, precisely because it cannot be
represented by anything else—or more exactly, because it can only
be represented by something else. But in every form of sublimation,
emptiness is determinative. . . . All art is characterized by a certain
mode of organization around this emptiness” (129–30). This is
precisely why he turns to the example of the vase, a nod to the jug
in Heidegger’s essay “Das Ding,” to allegorize the process of artistic
creation. Lacan maintains that the process of sublimation involves
the process through which objects of desire are situated in relation
to this loss, and thus in the process of sublimation “the object is
elevated to the dignity of the Thing” (112). Lacan in turn sees, as
processes of sublimation, religion as an attempt to fill the void,
science as an attempt to reject the void, and art as an attempt to
create something around the void. The image of the vase is
significant because it is organized around an emptiness that
represents the Thing. Paradoxically, though, Lacan also points out
that the vase creates the emptiness, showing how “the fashioning of
the signifier and the introduction of a gap or a hole in the real is
identical” (121).
Because “the fashioning of the signifier” involves our entry into
the realm of the symbolic, we must also understand Lacan’s
symbolic order, which comprises the symbolic, the imaginary, and
the real. According to Lacan, we are always already implicated in
the realm of the symbolic from the moment of birth. The symbolic,
which is the realm of language and signification, precedes us and
has already made determinations for us—our name, our gender, and
so on—prior to our arrival. Our existence in the symbolic inevitably
detaches us from the real, which is located beyond the symbolic and
resists signification. Jacques-Alain Miller describes the real as “the
ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element,
which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of
the symbolic” (280). In other words, because our very conception of
self is a symbolic construction, we can never transcend the world of
signification into the realm of the real. We are thus prisoners, in a
sense, to what Lacan calls the imaginary, our relationship to
“reality” (meaning reality as we conventionally know it, which is
distinct from the real) as it is mediated through the realm of the
symbolic. We might recall here Louis Althusser’s description of
ideology as “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of existence” (162) in illustrating
how the Lacanian real is made perpetually elusive by our inability
to transcend the realm of the symbolic. Thus, while for Freud the
ego is the essential force that holds the subject together in a
coherent whole, for Lacan the subject is radically decentered and
exists only in symbolic opposition to the void. The void is closely
aligned with the real precisely because the real is unknowable.
Desire, which for Lacan is the driving force of subjectivity, is a
perpetual attempt to fill this void, which opens when we enter the
realm of the symbolic.
Because this desire to fill the void risks becoming pathological,
Lacan identifies the three primary forms of sublimation named
above, through which subjects engage the void: religion, which he
aligns with neurosis; science, which he aligns with paranoia; and
art, which he aligns with hysteria. In her book Theology after
Postmodernity (2013), which offers an especially fitting example
because it recalls Stephen Daedalus’s exploration of Aquinas in
Portrait, Tina Beattie gives a description of Lacan’s secular
theoretical paradigm that is particularly apt in this context:
“Thomas builds the edifice of the human around the goodness and
mystery of God at the heart of creation, but Lacan asks what
happens to the human when there is no God and when creation
itself is a product of language encircled around a void (the Lacanian
real)” (15–16). I emphasize the intersection of God and void in
Lacan because religious skepticism is essential to the argument that
I wish to make about Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf, whom I
characterize as writers who adopt comparable ways of depicting
human subjectivity as a self-perpetuated ideological illusion that
masks an essential void of subjectivity.
Below I will outline the skeptical attitudes to be found in the
biographies and fiction of each writer and then explore three
particularly illustrative and complementary examples of the void in
the work of each: the scene of Decoud’s existential terror alone on
the Great Isobel Island, which was discussed briefly in the previous
chapter; the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, in which Stephen wanders
alone along Sandymount Beach; and the “Time Passes” section of To
the Lighthouse, when the world of the novel is plunged into darkness
in the absence of human presence and definition. I conclude my
discussion of each author by addressing the role of art and
redemption, showing finally how each elevates the role of art as the
ideal response to the void.

The Great Void and Conrad’s Search for Truth

Conrad’s skepticism has been the topic of a great deal of scholarly
work.5 This is not surprising given that he made no secret of his
skeptical disposition and could even be said to have used it as a
bludgeon at times. Consider the following illustrative example from
a letter to John Galsworthy: “You want more scepticism at the very
foundation of your work. Scepticism, the tonic of the minds, the
tonic of life, the agent of truth,—the way of art and salvation”
(2:359). For Conrad, skepticism was not an exclusively negative
mental state, although it did at times manifest itself in what some
critics have called a solipsistic or even nihilistic worldview.6
Without a doubt such views appear frequently in Conrad’s fiction.
To name just one example that we saw in the previous chapter,
certainly “it is Decoud’s skepticism that destroys him; he has
nothing to sustain him because he believes in nothing” (Peters 124).
But skepticism at times carries a markedly positive value for Conrad
too, as suggested in his letter to John Galsworthy. If we take Conrad
at his word, the implication is that it is skepticism, rather than
certainty, that leads us to the truth. Consider the case of Charles
Gould, whose absolute certainty that he can avoid the fate of his
father and transform the nation of Costaguana is in fact his greatest
vulnerability, or the deeply skeptical tone of Marlow in Lord Jim:
“They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if
facts could explain anything!” (22). Ultimately, according to John
Peters, “Conrad must walk a thin line” between skepticism and
truth: “On the one hand, skepticism can lead to some knowledge of
the truth, but on the other, it can also lead to the abyss of despair.
Conrad’s balancing act between the two is the ability to recognize
the nature of human existence but at the same time possess a means
to shelter one’s self from such potentially withering knowledge”
(125). An excellent example of this tension is to be found
throughout Lord Jim, as Marlow despairingly searches for some
notion of truth, both the truth of what happened to Jim and the true
nature of Jim’s character. Marlow says at one point: “I cannot say I
had ever seen him distinctly—not even to this day, after I had my
last view of him; but it seemed to me that the less I understood the
more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt which is the
inseparable part of our knowledge. I did not know so much more
about myself” (134). In Conrad’s formulation, doubt is not
something that is overcome on the way to knowledge but an
“inseparable part” of knowledge itself.
With that in mind, let us further explore how Conrad’s
conceptions of knowledge and truth intersect with his views on art.
A 1913 letter to Warrington Dawson is particularly illuminating on
this topic and is thus worth quoting at some length:

As to the Eternity of Art—I don’t suppose it is more or less

eternal than the earth itself. I can’t believe in the eternity of art
any more than in the eternity of pain or eternity of love (subjects
of art, those) whose emotions art (and of all arts music) brings
home to our breasts. Art for me is an end in itself. Conclusions
are not for it. And it is superior to science, in so far that it calls
in us with authority to behold! to feel! whereas science at best
can only tell us—it seems so! And thats [sic] all it can do. It talks
to us of the Laws of Nature. But thats [sic] only one of its little
jokes. It has never discovered anything of the sort. It has made
out with much worry and blundering certain sequences of facts
beginning in the dark and leading god knows where. And it has
built various theories to fit the form of activity it has perceived.
But even the theory of evolution has got a great big hole in it,
right at the very root. And it is amusing to see the scientists walk
round it with circumspection for the last sixty years, while
pretending all the time that it isn’t there.
You don’t suppose that I am fool enough to deny the fact of
evolution. All I say is that the “truth of life” is not in it wherever
else it might lay; and that “truth of life” is too vague an
expression to link art’s achievement to. For me the artists [sic]
salvation is in fidelity, in remorseless fidelity to the truth of his
own sensations. Hors de là, point de salut. (Collected Letters
5:237–38, emphases in the original)

This letter contains just one example of Conrad’s very particular

notion of truth: he is skeptical of the type of absolute truth claimed
by science and instead prefers the truth of one’s own sensations. In
other words, truth for Conrad is something that is fleeting and
momentary, not absolute or permanent. His skepticism toward the
power of science is one of the many ways in which Conrad departs
from many of his fellow Victorians, whose faith in science to cure
the ills of society had reached new highs toward the end of the
nineteenth century. Truth, for Conrad, is more like an impression,
hence the impressionistic style that he adopts in his fiction. His
ambivalence toward religion is more subtle here, and will be made
more explicit below, but we can nonetheless point to some
suggestive linguistic and metaphorical choices in this example that
give some sense of how Conrad situates the role of art in relation to
religion as well. For instance, he questions the eternity not only of
art but also of pain and love. But the Bible tells us that God’s love is
eternal, that Christ’s pain is eternal. And in the context of Victorian
religiosity, even the very notion of a “remorseless fidelity to the
truth of [one’s] own sensations” betrays the classical devotion to
serving God above all things. Unlike the true religious believer,
Conrad does not believe in the idea of transcendental truth.
But for Conrad’s most important exposition on art in relation to
science and religion we must turn to his often cited preface to The
Nigger of the “Narcissus,” which is generally considered to be the
most emblematic representation of his artistic credo.7 Like the letter
to Warrington, it is worth quoting at length:

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art

should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be
defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of
justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth,
manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to
find in its forms, in its colors, in its light, in its shadows, in the
aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is
fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one
illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their
existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks
the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the
world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts—
whence, presently, emerging they make their appeal to those
qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise
of living. They speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to
our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest;
not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to
 our egoism—but always to our credulity. And their words are
heard with reverence, for their concern is with weighty matters:
with the cultivation of our minds and the proper care of our
bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions, with the perfection
of the means and the glorification of our precious aims.
It is otherwise with the artist. (11–12)

Conrad’s definition of art as “a single-minded attempt to render the

highest kind of justice to the visible universe” is telling in itself of
how much esteem he grants to the artist. He also juxtaposes the role
of the artist to that of the scientist, or thinker (one can infer
philosopher here). His distinction suggests that perhaps we trust the
latter too much, that in fact thinkers often appeal to our egoism and
our prejudices. Although Conrad sees the artist, the scientist, and
the thinker as essentially pursuing the same ends, he suggests that
the artist is most successful in achieving what he regards as truth.
And while the religious overtones are again somewhat subtle, we
can fairly extrapolate that to seek “the very truth” of the existence
of the facts of life is a pursuit in the vein of that undertaken by the
religious believer. The notions of art as “render[ing] the highest
kind of justice to the visible universe” and “bringing light to the
truth” carry very strong religious overtones as well. The latter
connection between truth and light is steeped in the kind of
language that we find throughout the Judeo-Christian Bible, as in
Ephesians 5:13–14, “everything exposed by the light becomes
visible; for everything that becomes visible is light,” or when Christ
says in John 8:31–32, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my
disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you
free” (New Oxford Annotated Bible). Biblical dogma holds that the
truth can only become manifest through light and that only the
truth can lead to redemption. These connections between light and
truth are especially compelling in relation to Conrad’s fiction, which
often employs light/dark imagery. Marlow’s reflection upon his
pursuit of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness offers just one notable
example: “It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on
everything about me—and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough,
too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear
either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of
light” (107). Taken together, these various example suggest that in
Conrad’s formulation the artist, like Christ, carries the light, and the
light brings the truth. But while Christ’s truth is eternal, Conrad’s is
the momentary truth of a sensual impression rendered by the artist.
Thus while religious imagery is quite common in Conrad’s work,
as John Lester shows in his 1988 study Conrad and Religion, in fact
its importance is more symbolic than practical. “Conrad’s use of a
religious lexis in his writings indicates the spiritual nature of
society’s malaise,” Lester explains. “The inadequacies of established
beliefs had left a gap in man’s existence which he endeavored to fill
with his own concerns” (168). Interestingly, Lester’s description
evokes precisely the Lacanian framework used in this chapter. He
seems to describe, albeit unintentionally, the void of subjectivity,
which must be sublimated via religion, science, art, or other means.
Lester documents a number of Conrad’s deprecatory statements
about religion, including two letters to his editor and friend Edward
Garnett. In the first Conrad writes, “It’s strange how I always, from
the age of fourteen, disliked the Christian religion, its doctrines,
ceremonies and festivals” (Letters from Conrad 188), and in the
second, “Christianity—is distasteful to me. I am not blind to its
services but the absurd oriental fable from which it starts irritates
me. Great, improving, softening, compassionate it may be but it has
lent itself with amazing facility to cruel distortion and is the only
religion which, with its impossible standards, has brought an
infinity of anguish to innumerable souls—on this earth” (265).
Indeed, while Conrad utilizes religious imagery quite frequently in
his work, ultimately his use of it would seem to be related not so
much to any actual religious belief but to his reverence for the
artistic process. In yet another letter to Edward Garnett, before we
lay the subject to rest, Conrad wryly referred to the art of literature
as a “persecuted faith” (194), perhaps best illustrating how he
favored religious imagery in spite of his own ambivalence.8
We thus find in his conflicted relationship with religion one
example of how Conrad often felt as though there was something
queer about him that did not quite suit the European society in
which he found himself. It is not surprising, then, that one of the
major themes across his fiction is the tension between the individual
and his or her social conditions. In countless situations throughout
Conrad’s novels, this tension produces moments of crisis in the
individual subject. We see this even in his early work, for example,
in the sailors from The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” who are conflicted
between their humanitarian impulses and their professional duties,
and in Kurtz of Heart of Darkness, whose identity is hollowed out
when detached from the traditional British values around which his
sense of self has cohered. We could certainly look to the latter
example as an instance of the void, as the imagery of darkness, the
novel’s “Hollow Men” epigraph, and Kurtz’s unquenched search for
some undefined something that ends in “The horror! The horror!”
are evocative in themselves. But we will focus on the passage from
Nostromo that anticipates Decoud’s suicide:

After three days of waiting for the sight of some human face,
Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own
individuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water,
of natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we
find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as
against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless
part. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past and to
come. . . . The solitude appeared like a great void, and the
silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung
suspended by both hands, without fear, without surprise,
without any sort of emotion whatever. Only towards the
evening, in the comparative relief of coolness, he began to wish
that this cord would snap. He imagined it snapping with a report
as of a pistol—a sharp, full crack. And that would be the end of
him. (357)

That Conrad uses the word void is obviously coincidental;

nonetheless, it shows just how closely his conception of subjectivity
mirrors Lacan’s. To take the comparison a step further, we might
think of the “thin cord” by which Decoud hangs as the umbilical
cord described by Miller above, which maintains the connection
between the symbolic and the real. The image of the cord then
returns in the scene of Decoud’s suicide, after he has shot himself in
the chest and rolls over the side of his small raft: “The stiffness of
the fingers relaxed, and the lover of Antonia Avellanos rolled
overboard without having heard the cord of silence snap aloud in
the solitude of the placid gulf, whose glittering surface remained
untroubled by the fall of his body” (359). It is fitting that Decoud’s
body eventually falls into the water, which then goes on as if
nothing had happened, emphasizing just how insignificant our
individual subjective existences are despite the conceptions we hold
of our own place in the world.
In the previous chapter I examined this passage in the context of
“action” as a “sustaining illusion” around which one’s sense of self is
built. What Decoud confronts in this moment is the “great void” that
lies at the heart of the sustaining illusion that constitutes his
subjective self. Aside from Conrad’s prescient use of the word void,
what makes this episode such a striking anticipation of Lacan is how
Decoud’s realization that his personality is a fantasy occurs when he
is confronted with the absence of those sustaining illusions that
appear in the form of objects and people who act as tethers to our
internal selves.9 To take the implications a step further, we might
think about the natural world that Conrad describes as the Lacanian
real, or that which escapes representation. It is fitting that Conrad’s
language mentions Decoud’s loss of “all belief in the reality of his
action,” because for Lacan the distinction between the real and what
we call reality is essential, in that reality is essentially an illusion.
This passage functions as a primary example of Conrad’s
metaphysics, which recall Jonathan Rée’s statement above that
“twentieth-century approaches to subjectivity are dominated by the
anxiety not to be Descartes.” Conrad veers away from “cogito, ergo
sum” toward a conception of self that arrives via Marx and Hegel in
a decidedly Lacanian territory. What makes this scene further
compelling is Decoud’s rationalist Enlightenment thinking: he recalls
Lacan’s description of science as denying the existence of the void,
which leaves him ill-equipped to manage the existential drama that
faces him. The only option for Decoud, unable to cope with the void
that confronts him, is suicide.
The description of Decoud’s suicide is exceedingly bleak, and
Conrad’s fiction is generally seen as quite gloomy. But as I
attempted to show in the previous chapter, I believe there is
something surprisingly hopeful in Conrad as well. As we turn to the
idea of redemption, I would like to look once more at the preface to
The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and again call attention to Conrad’s
notion of truth:

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the
work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of
distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of
form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause
for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and
evanescent, and reserved only for a very small few to achieve.
But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that
task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished—behold!—all
the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile—
and the return to an eternal rest. (16)

For all that Conrad himself has said about the artistic process, there
are not many artists in his fiction who might serve as living
examples of his credo. He did not give us a Stephen Daedalus or a
Lily Briscoe. But if we suppose that for Conrad truth lies in a
moment of artistic purity, one in which even “a moment of vision, a
sigh, a smile” can take on outsized proportions in the work of art,
then I suggest that we take Charles Marlow as Conrad’s prototypical
artist. After all, as a storyteller Marlow traffics in the art of crafting
narratives and interpreting the events and people with whom he
becomes involved. The following passage from Heart of Darkness
gives a sense of Conrad’s characterization of Marlow: “The yarns of
seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies
within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his
propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an
episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the
likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible
by the spectral illumination of moonshine” (105). There are
undeniable similarities between this description and Conrad’s
preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” in terms of both imagery and
intent. And of course there is the fact that critics have long viewed
Marlow as a proxy for Conrad, a vessel through which Conrad can
insert many of his own thoughts and reflections. And Marlow, like
Conrad, frequently turns, as in the passage above, to the imagery of
light and darkness. He does this, as well, in another passage from
Heart of Darkness, one that brings us back to the problem of “truth”
and raises the difficulty of ever escaping our own subjective
experience:

He [Kurtz] was just a word to me. I did not see the man in the
name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the
story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell
you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a
dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of
absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling
revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is
of the very essence of dreams. . . .
He was silent for a while.
. . . No, it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given
epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its
meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We
live, as we dream—alone. . . . (129–30, ellipses in original)

Marlow struggles with describing Jim as well, saying of him that “he
was like a figure set up on a pedestal, to represent in his persistent
youth the power, and perhaps the virtues, of races that never grow
old, that have emerged from the gloom. I don’t know why he should
always have appeared to me symbolic. Perhaps this is the real cause
of my interest in his fate” (159). In both Heart of Darkness and Lord
Jim, Marlow appears to understand that absolute truth is in fact an
illusion and does his best to give readers a glimpse of some fleeting
moment of truth.
The paradigmatic example of Marlow’s struggle occurs at the end
of Heart of Darkness, when he lies to Kurtz’s intended, telling her
that Kurtz’s last word had been her name, when in fact he had
uttered “The horror! The horror!” This brings us back, again, to the
notion of “truth” and what it means to be “truthful.” Marlow’s lie is,
paradoxically, an act of artistic creation and an act of redemption.
Marlow feels a sense of guilt for his participation in the
imperializing force whose brutality has allowed Kurtz to emerge.
His lie is, then, an act of redemption both for himself and for Kurtz.
While Kurtz perhaps confronts the void in the end, in his final
words, as the teller of the tale, the artist, Marlow transforms what
Kurtz had become in order that he might continue to fulfill the
symbolic function necessary for his widow’s psychic well-being. His
lie is obviously not a religious act, and in skewing the “truth” it is
not a scientific one. But if one accepts the idea that the best we can
do is create fleeting moments of truth, then the “truth” that Marlow
crafts for Kurtz’s intended can in fact be seen not simply as a
dishonest act but as an act of compassion that sustains a glimmer of
hope in the face of so much darkness.

Joyce’s Portrait of Doubt and the Resurrection of the Artist

Like Conrad, Joyce also renounced the Catholic Church, but he
nonetheless frequently turned to religious themes and imagery in his
fiction. The extent and timing of Joyce’s split with the Catholic
Church continues to be a topic of debate among critics, but at the
very least his ambivalence toward the church, and toward organized
religion more generally, is undeniable. Many critics, however, are
willing to go much further. Geert Lernout, for instance, argues
unequivocally that “James Joyce was an unbeliever from the start of
his life as a writer, that he never returned to the faith of his fathers
and that his work can only be read properly if that important fact is
taken into account” (Help My Unbelief 2). Such an attitude is borne
out in a 1904 letter from Joyce to his wife, Nora, about his
abandonment of the Catholic Church: “Six years ago I left the
Catholic Church, hating it most fervently. I found it impossible for
me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature. I made
secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the
positions it offered me. By doing this I made myself a beggar but I
retained my pride. Now I make open war upon it by what I write
and say and do” (Letters 2:48). But despite Joyce’s own bold
proclamation, other critics like Roy Gottfried are more tempered in
their assessment. In Joyce’s Misbelief (2008), Gottfried depicts Joyce
not as a disbeliever but as a misbeliever, who maintained an
intellectual connection with the church but transformed its imagery
and ideology for his own ends.10 This characterization is
substantiated by Joyce’s definitive biographer, Richard Ellmann,
who writes of Joyce’s time at Belvedere College in the early 1980s
and of how body and mind clashed amid the influence of his
readings and experiences:

As he said in A Portrait, his soul threw off the cerements that

covered it and spurned the grave of boyhood. His graveclothes
included, by one of those curious transvaluations of Christian
images that Joyce was to delight in, his allegiance to the Church;
and his resurrection, for which Christ’s was so useful a
descriptive metaphor, was as an artist rather than as a risen god.
His sins became serious, and his sense of sin, “that sense of
separation and loss,” brought him to consciousness, from which
vantage point he sloughed off all but the vestiges of Christian
guilt. (42)

With this brief background in mind, my goal is not to make any

definitive argument about Joyce’s religious belief other than to
emphasize above all his undeniable skepticism. More to the point,
though, I suggest that we use Ellmann as a springboard for
identifying Joyce’s rejection of the notion of religious redemption in
favor of artistic redemption. These respective notions of redemption
are important in Joyce, as the language of the latter is often
couched in the language of the former. Although his split with the
Catholic Church is well known and he often expressed an aversion
toward religion, we nonetheless should not view his animosity in
purely negative terms. As was the case with Conrad, despite his
ambivalence toward religion itself, religious imagery plays an
important role in Joyce’s fiction. This stems from the fact that
doubt, not only about religion but as a more general approach to
life, was elemental for Joyce. Jean-Michel Rabaté explains that
“doubt always retained a functional value for Joyce (who was as
thrifty for his fiction as he was spendthrift in real life), and
eventually provided him with his major faith: has faith in himself,
which alone could underpin his faith in the real world” (xii). This
faith in himself that Rabaté identifies equates (particularly in his
fiction) to faith in the artistic pursuit. Like Conrad, Joyce was an
absolute believer in the transformative power of art. We should also
add that Joyce’s early philosophical influences likely played a vital
role in his skepticism as well. In particular, he was influenced by
Berkeley and Hume as a young man, both of whom, according to
Rabaté, “can be said to work in the right descent from the radical
phenomenalism of the early Greek sceptics, even if they start from
Locke’s theory of perception. What Joyce took from them confirmed
his sense that language was the key to any approach to reality” (xv).
It is not surprising, then, that Joyce anticipates Lacan’s insights
about the relationship between subjectivity and language.
Joyce’s thoughts about science, on the other hand, were markedly
more positive, particularly in the latter part of his career. As Jeffrey
Drouin has shown in James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print
Culture (2015), which uses documentary evidence to show how
Joyce was engaged with and inspired by the popular science
periodicals of his day, Joyce in fact utilized many scientific
references in his fiction, especially to Albert Einstein, whose theory
of relativity was widely known and inspirational to many modernist
writers.11 The subtitle of Drouin’s book, “The Einstein of English
Fiction,” references a quote by the then head of the BBC, Harold
Nicolson, who described Joyce in those words in a broadcast
pamphlet urging readers to abandon light popular reading in favor
of authors like Joyce, who were more meaningfully engaging the
spirit of the day. Although Nicolson’s moniker likely has as much to
do with the fact that Joyce, like Einstein, sought to understand the
intersection of space, time, and consciousness, it nonetheless
provides a useful way to think about Joyce, particularly as Ulysses
and, to a greater degree, Finnegans Wake are rife with scientific
references. Biographical evidence suggests that by the end of his life
Joyce had certainly become quite interested in the topic of science.
This apparent interest is complicated, however, by other
biographical evidence. Avrom Fleishman, for instance, points out
that the pursuit of scientific meaning “has been discouraged by
Joyce’s own passing barbs at science and scientists [he cites as an
example Joyce’s critical reference to Frederick Soddy in Finnegans
Wake], by his apparent adherence to the anti-scientific maxims of
Tolstoy and other anti-rationalists, and by the scanty evidence of his
studies of the subject after his early distaste for the classical ‘natural
philosophy’ offered by his Jesuit schoolmasters” (378). Ultimately,
the biographical and fictive evidence does not lead to any definitive
determination about Joyce’s feelings toward science, but I do think
it is notable that Joyce’s interest in science peaked later in his life
and centered on principles that seemed to cast uncertainty upon
what previously had been thought to be scientific truths. Indeed,
uncertainty is a driving force for Joyce, and his depiction of
knowledge was often ironic, as Allen Thiher points out:

The joyous celebration of knowledge means that parody is

Joyce’s natural rhetorical mode. This parody is highly
ambivalent. Parody is often affirmative, but Joyce indulges in
such parodic exuberance that one finally wonders if the
knowledge of everything really has much importance. . . . In
Joyce, everything can be the object of knowledge, and there is
no more reason, it seems, to grant greater importance to the
principle of the conservation of energy than, say, to the
somewhat shabby contents of Bloom’s memory—though Bloom’s
memory may well call forth the principle of the conservation of
energy, and that principle may in turn explain some aspects of
his memory. (172–73)
Thiher thus concludes that “after surveying much of the criticism on
Joyce and science, one may be tempted to agree with Grace Eckley
that the central parable about space and time in Finnegans Wake is
about the failure of science; or at least it queries if whatever science
cannot explain might not be better turned into art” (198). I would
agree with Thiher and, in fact, apply this perspective to Joyce’s
more general attitude toward science, stressing above all that while
Joyce certainly cultivated an interest in scientific concepts and
included them in his work, he nonetheless remained skeptical of the
notion that the institution of science, like the institution of religion,
could help us adequately understand the human experience—for
that, art remained paramount in Joyce’s estimation.
Stephen Daedalus is equipped with the mind of the artist. He
accepts or even embraces the void, and he confronts the void with
artistic creation that builds around it. “Proteus” offers an apt
illustration of Joyce’s universe—and an invitation for thinking about
how that universe resembles Conrad’s. Let us begin by observing the
first paragraph of the episode:

Ineluctable modality of the visible. At least that if no more,

thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to
read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.
Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the
diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them
bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce
against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire,
maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in?
Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it,
it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. (37)

The passage is Stephen’s stream-of-consciousness reflection upon

Aristotle’s essay “On Sense and Sensible Objects,” which describes
seeing as “the superior sense.” Significantly for Stephen, sight does
not allow him to see the true nature of the objects he observes, but
rather “signatures of all things I am here to read.” As in Conrad,
there is an intimate connection between truth and sensory
experience. The essential question is, How is thought translated
from the sensory experience of sight to the neural experience of
cognition? Because the process of sight is so complex and because
elements of the seeing process like light and color (both Aristotle
and Berkeley foreground the importance of color in the process of
seeing) can be experienced so differently by different viewers,
Stephen wonders how accurate sight is in constructing a truthful
sense of reality. Berkeley, evoking Plato’s famous allegory of the
cave, contends that sense perception is inherently unreliable
because we can never ultimately distinguish between external
reality and the internal “reality” that is constructed by our thoughts.
Thus, as in Conrad, there is a recognition in the vein of Lacan that
the objects we see are processed through language and thus
inaccessible as objects in themselves. “Reality,” in other words, must
be read. Thus, as we observed above, we remain forever trapped in
the realm of the symbolic. What Stephen encounters on his walk, in
other words, is not so much truthful perceptions of Sandymount
Strand and its surroundings but momentary impressions of what his
senses are processing.
The final sentence of the paragraph, which although representing
Stephen’s thoughts could also be read as a directive to the reader,
suggests a questioning of whether the external world exists, since
that world effectively vanishes at the closing of one’s eyes. The
answer is given later on the same page: “See now. There all the time
without you: and ever shall be” (37). This shows a particular aspect
of Joyce’s attitude that is very important to understanding his
perspective. Like Einstein, Joyce is interested in the relationship
between time and space, which is reflected in the movement of
Stephen’s feet as he walks: The nacheinander (one in front of the
other) is associated with the audible and linear, and thus the
passage of time; the nebeneinander (side by side) is associated with
the visual, and thus the spatial relationship of objects to one
another. Thomas Jackson Rice, in making his case for viewing Joyce
as a “realist,” maintains that Joyce “accept[ed] the existence of a
concrete, aboriginal real that exists independently of the subjective
individual’s act of observation” (7). In addition to resembling
Einstein here, Joyce actually also resembles Lacan and his ultimate
rejection of relativism as it relates to the real—that is, that which
lies outside of human subjectivity.
Of course, one might argue that there is little comfort in the
notion that the world exists outside of us, particularly if we are not
present to sense it. Ultimately, one is invited to consider that the
senses tether us to the external world. Without them, we would exist
in a void. And it is thus the senses alone that obscure the void at the
center of our being. As Lacan shows us, this void is present from
birth. And thus Stephen reflects upon his own birth: “One of her
sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing”
(37). The act of creation, whether in the form of birth or of art,
emerges not from the divine but from the void. This is also
important because for Lacan the void is linked with the mother, and
thus with the other. The mother is a lost object for which the subject
attempts to compensate by seeking out other little objects (objets a)
that act as substitutes; this accounts for the subject’s desire and his
or her identification with the other. Accordingly, Stephen is attuned
to the other, as exemplified in his consideration for the man who
has recently drowned near Maiden’s Rock: “I want his life still to be
his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to
me out of horror of his death” (46). We see here Stephen conflicted
by his own subjectivity. He recognizes the man as “other” and yet
still feels the urge to identify with him. This recalls Decoud’s
inability to conceptualize his own subjectivity in the absence of an
“other.” We recognize our separation from others, in other words,
but still rely upon their mirroring recognition. Throughout “Proteus”
we find in Stephen’s ruminations on both others and himself a
fixation upon and curiosity about the importance of absence, which
thus brings us back to the importance of sight as a functional
reminder of our subjective reality.
I would thus like to conclude this discussion of Joyce by
returning to Conrad and his preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,”
which elevates sight above the other senses: “My task which I am
trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you
hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and
no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there
according to your desserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm
—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for
which you have forgotten to ask” (14). This brings us back around,
first of all, to Conrad’s notion of truth—and here it is sight that best
offers the truth (Conrad’s notion of sight is obviously
overdetermined here beyond the literal sense). It also aligns Conrad
with Joyce’s “ineluctable modality of the visible,” which recalls
Aristotle’s suggestion that sight, unlike sound, cannot be modified
by its corresponding sensory organ. In Joyce, furthermore, Don
Gifford and Robert Seidman give us the reference for “coloured
signs” as “the Irish educator, philosopher, and Church of Ireland
bishop of Cloyne George Berkeley (1685–1753), [who] argued in An
Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709) that we do not
‘see’ objects as such; rather, we see only colored signs and then take
these to be objects” (44–45). And this brings us back, also, to the
opening of “Proteus,” which we looked at above, particularly the
line “Shut your eyes and see.” Both Stephen and Conrad are punning
on what it means to actually “see.” That is, each explores the
operation of literal sight in relation to the other senses, but each is
also concerned with a “sight” that is possible with eyes shut, a sight
that must be aligned with meaning and subjectivity on some deeper,
darker level that functions in opposition to the void. And to bring
the meaning full circle with Joyce’s secular use of transformative
religious imagery, we might recall John 9:25, in which a blind man
who has been cured by Jesus remarks, “One thing I do know, that
though I was blind, now I see” (New Oxford Annotated Bible).
Both Joyce and Stephen turn away from their Catholic faith, but
neither fully escapes the guilt that lingers after his departure, and it
thus inevitably factors into their artistic pursuits, although it is
manifested symbolically rather than literally. This is certainly
evident, to name one last example, in the famous penultimate
paragraph of Portrait: “26 April: Mother is putting my new
secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may
learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the
heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to
encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to
forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”
(275–76). Stephen’s “Amen” indicates his achievement of
psychological closure, as he has finally reconciled his lack of
religious faith with his faith in his ability as an artist to redeem not
only himself but his entire race (the Irish). Out of the void, even in
the absence of God, the artist may be redeemed.

Time, Vision, and the Artist in Virginia Woolf

Like Conrad and Joyce, Woolf harbored persistent doubts about
some of the prevailing institutions and ideas of her day. She was an
avowed atheist, for example, and spoke of carrying an “anti-
religious bias” (Knight 28).12 Biographical materials do show,
however, that her thoughts about religion and spirituality evolved
throughout her life. She became especially interested in mysticism,
particularly in the latter stages of her life. She was averse to it at
first, having notably criticized E. M. Forster in 1922 as “mystic,
silly” (Letters 2:204). According to Julie Kane, however, by at least
1928 Woolf had begun to harbor more favorable views of
mysticism. Kane argues that Woolf was influenced by the
Theosophical Movement, which she describes as “filling the spiritual
void left in the wake of Darwinism with non-Christian, non-deistic,
humanistic, yet ‘religious’ teachings” (329). If we take the years
1922–28 as representative of a general timeline of Woolf’s spiritual
evolution, then To the Lighthouse (1927) is published at a pivotal
moment.
Although Woolf maintained an interest in science throughout her
life, as with religion we find in Woolf an underlying skepticism
about its power to help us comprehend the true depths of human
experience. That said, we do know quite a bit about Woolf’s interest
in science, thanks to some incisive scholarship on the subject.13
There are suggestions that Woolf, like Joyce, was interested in the
work of Albert Einstein, as were many after his theory of relativity
turned him into an international celebrity, but it is unclear whether
Einstein or any other scientific principles influenced her work
directly. Certainly the notion of time being relative can be found
throughout Woolf’s work, including in To the Lighthouse, as Woolf
adopts the Proustian method of drawing out certain descriptions
(like time passing slowly at the Ramsays’ cottage), while giving
others only momentary mentions (as when Mrs. Ramsay is killed
within the space of a bracket). But several critics have pointed out
that such examples are not particularly accurate representations of
Einstein’s theories, suggesting that Woolf did not necessarily engage
with his work in a deep way but was more interested in what it had
evoked in the popular imagination.
We should add that while Woolf’s interest in the sciences is
undeniable, her life and writing also indicate that she did not view
science as a singular explanation of life and its mysteries. Paul
Tolliver Brown notes that while “Woolf’s exploration of the fuzzy
boundaries between subjects and objects coincides with the
quantum physical understanding of a holistic universe,” she “also
seems fascinated with the notion of group consciousness” (42–43),
which is not in line with mainstream scientific thought but more
closely aligns with her interest in mysticism. In short, what we find
in Woolf, as in Conrad and Joyce, is an undeniable connection with
religion and science, but one that plays an ambivalent role in her
life and work and that is overshadowed by her unquestionable belief
in the transcendent possibility of art, which for Woolf was in itself
mystical in character. Although there are episodes in To the
Lighthouse that approach mystical transcendence, the most
significant instances are interwoven with the artistic process.
But before we attend to the mystical quality of artistic creation in
Woolf, we must first locate the void that art is meant to fill. The
void in Woolf, as in Joyce, is connected to absence and presence as
they intersect with subjectivity. Consider the following passage near
the beginning of To the Lighthouse, in which Lily Briscoe reflects
upon Mr. Ramsay’s philosophical work: “Whenever she ‘thought of
his work’ she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It
was Andrew’s doing. She asked him what his father’s books were
about. ‘Subject and object and the nature of reality,’ Andrew had
said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that
meant. ‘Think of a kitchen table then,’ he told her, ‘when you’re not
there’” (23). Like Stephen, Mr. Ramsay reflects upon notions of
presence and absence in relation to subjective perception. The idea,
however, is more obscure for Lily than for Stephen, as her
sensibilities are more purely artistic. In both cases, though, the
character is symbolically aligned with the idea of absence that
implies the void, and each author suggests artistic creation as the
exemplary response to that void. There has been much discussion of
Woolf’s treatment of the subject’s connection to the external world,
with some critics seeing Woolf deliberately engaging in her own
brand of philosophical inquiry and others arguing that she sought to
reject philosophical inquiry altogether.14 As with Joyce’s
relationship to religion (and Woolf’s, for that matter), what is clear
above all is her ambivalence. Her treatment of Mr. Ramsay is, if not
censorious, certainly caricatural. Like Conrad she appears, in To the
Lighthouse at least, to be skeptical about philosophy’s attempt to
truly capture the complexities of human subjectivity. Like Conrad,
the Woolf of To the Lighthouse suggests that this is a task best suited
to art.
I mentioned above that for Woolf artistic creation is connected to
her developing interest in mysticism. In particular, critics have
seized on Woolf’s statements about and depictions of ecstasy. James
Naremore writes of Woolf’s desire to explore new modes of
representing subjectivity and stream of consciousness in ways
distinct from those employed by Joyce and Dorothy Richardson.
According to Naremore, she was skeptical of their particular brand
of stream of consciousness, which was “‘centered in a self.’ It is a
claustrophobic technique which, for better or worse, imprisons the
reader inside a character. It is egotistic, just as all the villains in
Mrs. Woolf’s fiction are egotists; it never ‘embraces or creates what
is outside itself and beyond’” (123). Instead, Naremore argues, “it is
likely that Virginia Woolf regarded the aesthetic act, whether in the
form of a party or a painting, as a means of apprehending an ever-
present order which is concealed from us by our everyday lives.
Thus her characters ‘create’ so that they might ‘embrace’” (123).
Such a characterization would be equally suitable for Stephen
Daedalus. But we should take a moment to further examine
Naremore’s portrait of Woolf’s fiction, as it offers some more useful
insight into Woolf’s treatment of subjectivity, particularly as it
relates to her attempt to connect the interior life of her characters
with the external world. The model for this mode, according to
Naremore, is Proust, but he argues that Woolf takes the method
further:

The Proustian novel shows the personality being liberated from

time and space, but Mrs. Woolf takes us to the point where the
personality itself becomes dissolved in communion with what is
“outside . . . and beyond.” In these moods, the character often
has a sense of contact with “reality.” But “reality” here is
something apart from the social order of experience, removed
from the dialectic of active personal relationships, and perhaps
even inaccessible by means of language. Such intimations of
“reality” are not solipsistic; the characters often say that what
they feel is no different from what everyone could feel, and they
are shown experiencing these moments in concert. But the
experience is always brief, and it is inevitably followed by some
sharp and unpleasant intrusion from what Rachel [Rachel
Vinrace, the heroine in Woolf’s 1915 novel The Voyage Out] calls
the “superficial” world—like an auto backfire or a doorbell—or
by a vast and peaceful darkness. (131)

Naremore does not mention Lacan—he quotes the likes of R. D.

Laing’s The Divided Self (1955) instead—but his characterization of
“reality” in Woolf invites a comparison to Lacan’s concept of the
real. If we adopt Lacanian terminology, it is actually the real that
Naremore is describing as “something apart from the social order of
experience, removed from the dialectic of active personal
relationships, and perhaps even inaccessible by means of language.”
It is in line with this reading, also, that the characters’ moments of
contact are brief and fleeting. But while these moments of contact
with the real are terrifying in Conrad (recall Decoud), for Woolf’s
characters they are moments of ecstasy, as the characters sense a
connection with something elemental and primal beyond (or
perhaps behind) the realm of the symbolic—this being the real, or
the void.
The tension between the ecstasy of order and the terror of the
void builds in the early part of the novel, as the Ramsay family and
their companions come together for a dinner gathering. As the
evening approaches, Mrs. Ramsay is at first distraught by the failure
of Paul and Minta, along with her children Andrew and Nancy, to
return from their walk, which has left her feeling “alone in the
presence of her old antagonist, life” (79). Mrs. Ramsay is worried
about the return of her children and their companions not only
because she is concerned for their well-being but because she, like
Clarissa Dalloway, thinks of herself as someone who brings people
together. Thus, even after the party has returned and everyone has
been seated for dinner, she laments that “nothing seemed to have
merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of
merging and flowing and creating rested on her” (83). The
subsequent dinner scene is predominated by various characters’
reflections upon order and unity.
At first Mrs. Ramsay’s desire for unity goes unfulfilled: the dinner
feels chaotic and contentious. Particularly disconnected and
disenchanted is Mr. Bankes, who reflects that the dinner “was not
worth it for him. Looking at his hand he thought that if he had been
alone dinner would have been almost over now; he would have
been free to work. Yes, he thought, it is a terrible waste of time”
(88). He goes on to complain about “how trifling it all is, how
boring it all is . . . compared with the other thing—work” (89), and
we are eventually told that “the truth was that he did not enjoy
family life. It was in this sort of state that one asked oneself, What
does one live for? Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these
pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we
attractive as a species? Not so very, he thought” (89). As we saw in
the earlier exchange between Mr. Bankes and Lily, his mind is
focused entirely on science, leaving him with a blind spot for
appreciating the feelings of connection experienced in human
relationships. Unlike Lily and Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Bankes is unable to
locate any sense of order or meaning within the space of social
interaction. And we see the same happen with Charles Tansley, for
whom “nothing had shaped itself at all. It was all in scraps and
fragments” (90). Like Mr. Bankes, Tansley is led by his sterile
intellectual perspective on life to turn inward: “He felt extremely,
even physically, uncomfortable. He wanted somebody to give him a
chance of asserting himself” (90).
Eventually, though, a feeling of unity does begin to form. Mrs.
Ramsay first begins to feel a sense of connection with Augustus
Carmichael when both fixate on the plate of fruit at the center of the
table. Although “that was his way of looking, different from hers,”
nonetheless “looking together united them” (97). But the deeper
sense of connection forms as the narrator reflects upon the contrast
between the interior of the Ramsays’ house and the world outside:
“Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the
table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they
had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night
was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any
accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here,
inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a
reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily” (97).
The unification of the various characters during the dinner scene is
aestheticized and juxtaposed to the wildness of the natural world
outside. It is in the next paragraph that we are told of how “some
change at once went through them all, as if this had really
happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in
a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity
out there” (97). Although it is clear from the description that no
particular character actually observes this aesthetic effect, let alone
reflects or comments upon its symbolism, the narrative blending of
the image with the scene taking place adds to the ethereal quality
that pervades the novel. It also serves to remind us of Lily’s
painting, which is always in the back of her mind and is accordingly
always looming just under the surface of the text. On several
occasions throughout the night Lily thinks of how “she would move
the tree rather more to the middle” (102) when she next has the
opportunity to work on her painting.
 The dinner scene is thus crucial in that it brings together Lily’s
painting and the novel’s broader aesthetic and connects them with
both Mrs. Ramsay’s and Lily’s desire for unity. As the partygoers
establish a rhythm in their interactions Mrs. Ramsay finally
experiences her own moment of rapture:

Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all

round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to
a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about
something different once before that afternoon; there is a
coherence of things, a stability; something, she meant, is
immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the
window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the
flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again
tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of
peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made
that endures. (105)

The operative words in the passage—eternity, coherence, stability—

suggest the transcendental nature of human connection, along with
human thought and emotion. “The thing . . . that endures,” one
presumes, is memory, which lives inside the human mind. But we
might also imagine that “thing” to be Lily’s painting, which captures
a moment as a memory but endures (or has the capability of
enduring) beyond the lives of the individual characters. Indeed, the
section ends along with the party, which leaves Mrs. Ramsay feeling
somber: “With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment
longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then,
as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left the room, it changed, it
shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last
look at it over her shoulder, already the past” (111). While Mrs.
Ramsay, like Clarissa Dalloway, is ultimately successful in bringing
people together, that moment of unity is inevitably fleeting.
And like Clarissa Dalloway, although she is often dismissed by
the other characters, Mrs. Ramsay is in fact a deep thinker who on
several occasions ponders the nature of existence. And given her
rosy demeanor, she is surprisingly cynical in her thoughts, although
she ultimately tries to persuade herself to remain positive. After she
puts her youngest child to bed in the opening scene of the novel, she
laments that “they were happier now than they would ever be
again” (59) and reflects that “oddly enough, she must admit that she
felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to
pounce on you if you gave it a chance” (59–60). But just as she
reaches this thought she veers back: “And then she said to herself,
brandishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be perfectly
happy” (60). In the next section she remarks on the relief she feels
when her children have gone to bed because “now she need not
think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself” (62).
Although she cherishes this feeling of solitude, these moments when
she is not in the process of giving herself to others, she nonetheless
recognizes that “beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is
unfathomably deep” (62). After she acknowledges, finally, that “this
core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it” (62), her
reverie is finally broken by the stroke of the Lighthouse.
Woolf’s characters in To the Lighthouse walk perilously along the
edge of the void. Each character’s sense of self is continually met
with the threat of annihilation, which is embodied by the middle
(“Time Passes”) section of the novel. Consider the following passage
near the beginning of the section, in which the world (synecdochally
represented by the Ramsays’ summer house) is plunged into an
unsettling darkness in the absence of any human figure that would
give it shape or definition:

So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain
drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness
began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion
of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole
round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a
jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the
sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was
furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body
or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.”
 Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward
off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed
aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness. (125–26)

Just as Decoud melds into the natural environment in the absence of

any human companion, the absence of human figures in “Time
Passes” leaves no one, or no(thing), to make meaning of the
material world. It is as though a void opens up and swallows all
light, all sound, and all humanity—and, by extension, all language
that would give definition to these objects that now exist purely in
the realm of the real. According to James Mellard, “In ‘Time Passes’
Woolf, indeed, insists on that nether, dark, hidden side of the
subject, the veiled origin of subjectivity, of consciousness” (Using
Lacan, Reading Fiction 161). The humanity of the first part of the
novel is swallowed in the second, only to reemerge in the third in
the figure of the Lighthouse, the object of desire around which the
subjectivity of each character revolves.
The Lighthouse, with its clear phallic symbolism, lies at the
center of an Oedipal drama that pervades the novel. The opening
scene sets this drama in motion when Mrs. Ramsay’s suggestion that
James might accompany the family on a trip to the Lighthouse “if
it’s fine tomorrow” (3) is rejected by Mr. Ramsay’s insistence that “it
won’t be fine” (4). Woolf is explicit about James’s Oedipal rage, as
his response to Mr. Ramsay’s symbolic “no” demonstrates: “Had
there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have
gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then,
James would have seized it” (4). This opening scene is particularly
noteworthy if we pass through Freud’s account of the Oedipus
complex to Lacan’s concept of the Name-of-the-Father. In the
original French, Lacan puns on le nom du père, which is also the
father’s “no” (le “non” du père). Read in this context, the scene takes
on the double meaning of illustrating the way in which Mr. Ramsay
intercepts James’s desire for his mother’s love (this is true of all of
his children, in fact, as the narrator goes on to explain that “such
were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his
children’s breasts by his mere presence” [4]) and also showing how
Mr. Ramsay fulfills the broader role of the “symbolic father,” who is
identified with the figure of the law. This figure is crucial, according
to Lacan, because it situates the subject within the realm of the
symbolic and is thus integral to the subject’s identity formation. The
Lighthouse functions as an object of desire for James (what Lacan
calls objet a); in other words, it is important not for what it
embodies in itself but because James views going to the Lighthouse
as a rite of passage. Mr. Ramsay’s intervention is critical not only in
relation to James’s Oedipal desire for his mother’s love but for the
deeper desire that constitutes his subjectivity.
Mr. Ramsay also contrasts with James—and with Mrs. Ramsay
and Lily Briscoe as well—because he expresses no discernible
outwardly projected desire; he is pure ego. Consider the twofold
source of his authority: it is physically manifested in his paternity
and psychologically manifested in his imperious intellect. And he is
not merely an authority but an authoritarian, as his belief in his
own infallibility leaves no room for dissent:

What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of

untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable
word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being;
least of all from his own children, who, sprung from his loins,
should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts
uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our
brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in
darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and
narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs,
above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure. (4)

Woolf’s masterful use of free indirect discourse is especially

suggestive in passages like this one, in which the use of third-person
pronouns implies an objective point of view, but the perspective is
clearly Mr. Ramsay’s. It is only in the context of Mr. Ramsay’s
unbridled narcissism that he is “incapable of untruth.” Although the
novel is told almost entirely from the perspective of its characters,
there is an underlying and persistent challenge to the impartial
authority of “truth” and “facts.” In this sense, Woolf’s skepticism
lines up with Conrad’s; each of the novel’s characters pursues some
version of “truth,” but those versions are distinct and are judged
differently by the novel’s overriding point of view.
Woolf also mirrors Conrad in supplanting scientific notions of
“truth” with more abstract forms of knowledge and wisdom that
resonate with emotional and artistic sensibilities rather than purely
intellectual ones. While the former in Woolf’s fiction tend to
collapse upon themselves into gratuitous self-involvement, the latter
involve engaging with the human community. Thus what disturbs
Mrs. Ramsay most about her husband is his failure to look beyond
his own ego: “To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of
consideration for other people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of
civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an
outrage of human decency” (32). Mrs. Ramsay does not emerge as
the ultimate heroine of the novel, but her compassion for others is
in large part what makes her “ten thousand times better in every
way than he [Mr. Ramsay] was” (4). Although this observation is
addended by the parenthetical “(James thought),” it is obvious that
the assessment extends beyond James to the authorial/ethereal
voice of the novel as well.
As Makiko Minow-Pinkney explains in Virginia Woolf and the
Problem of the Subject (1987), Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay act not only as
oppositional forces within the world of the novel but as symbolic
oppositions representing the literary against the philosophical: “Mrs.
Ramsay outdoes her spouse in both directions, and this is
appropriate, since she represents fictionality or literature against his
philosophy. Literature is more material than philosophical
discourse, because it offers a sensuous ‘body’ while the latter aspires
to the grey universality of the concept. Yet it outdoes philosophy on
the latter ground too. The very concentration of the literary text
allows it to concentrate a wealth and play of ideal meaning far
above philosophy’s stricter joining of single signifieds to
unambiguous signifiers” (96). Although Mr. Ramsay is a philosopher
and not a scientist, we can justly broaden the opposition to the
intellectual versus the imaginative. This is not to say that there is no
imaginative capacity in intellectual pursuits and no intellectual
capacity in imaginative pursuits; rather, Woolf’s skepticism
encompasses all systems of thought (whether philosophical,
scientific, or theological) that claim ownership of “truth.”
Ultimately, Woolf’s critique is not leveled at philosophers or
scientists per se, but at those who (mis)use “facts” and “truth” as
cudgels in service of their own self-interest. But while the
compassionate and deferential Mrs. Ramsay thus outshines her
husband in this respect, her willing submission to men as the
dominant force in society prevents her from escaping the novel’s
judgment: “Indeed, she has the whole of the other sex under her
protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and
valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India,
controlled finance; finally for an attitude toward herself which no
woman could fail to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike,
reverential” (6). Even allowing for the generally more conservative
views of Mrs. Ramsay’s time regarding gender, one is disturbed that
she seems to admire the very worst in men: their paternalistic,
infantilizing treatment of women; their stranglehold on political
power; their subjugation of colonized people.
Mrs. Ramsay’s inability, or unwillingness, to move out from
under her husband’s shadow opens the door for Lily Briscoe to
emerge as the true heroine of the novel and the one who most
successfully embodies the imaginative values that distinguish her
from the novel’s other characters. From her first introduction, Lily
stands in striking contrast not only to Mr. Ramsay but to Mrs.
Ramsay as well, who “could not take her painting very seriously”
(17): “The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She
would not have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet
and the staring white, since she saw them like that, fashionable
though it was, since Mr. Paunceforte’s visit, to see everything pale,
elegant, semitransparent. Then beneath the colour there was the
shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she
looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing
changed” (18–19). Unlike Mr. Ramsay, Lily is committed to the
authenticity of her own senses rather than a fixed notion of
objective truth. And Woolf uses a very telling word in describing
Lily’s relationship with her senses: honesty. Like Conrad, Woolf (via
Lily) suggests that fidelity to one’s own senses—and hence one’s
individual notion of “truth”—is more powerful and more genuine
than fidelity to so-called objective truth. Thus it is fitting that, as
Julia Briggs explains in Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, “the early pages
of the novel locate Lily firmly outside the more traditional schools
of painting, in particular the high Victorians (painters who made
their own colours, according to Mrs Ramsay), and the English
impressionists typified by Mr Paunceforte, who worked in ‘green
and grey,’ with lemon-coloured sailing boats, and pink women on
the beach’” (180–81). In other words, the suggestion is that Lily is a
postimpressionist, obviously inspired by Woolf and her husband’s
involvement with postimpressionist art and artists. Mrs. Ramsay
does not appear to be in tune with the new trends in painting, as is
evident in her walk with Tansley when she catches a glimpse of the
Lighthouse: “That was the view, she said, stopping, growing greyer-
eyed, that her husband loved” (13). And then: “She paused a
moment. But now, she said, artists had come here” (13). She
appears bothered here on two levels: first, that the artists crowd
one’s view of the Lighthouse; second, that their (impressionist)
representations of the Lighthouse somehow diminish it. “Since Mr.
Paunceforte had been there, three years before,” the passage goes
on, “all the pictures were like that, she said, green and grey, with
lemon-coloured sailing-boats, and pink women on the beach” (13).
Although Mrs. Ramsay is more progressive than her husband, she is
certainly not as progressive as Lily in her artistic sensibilities or in
her appreciation for the artistic pursuit. Lily is deathly serious about
her painting, even in the face of tremendous struggle to translate
her vision onto the page: “Such she often felt herself—struggling
against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: ‘But this is
what I see; this is what I see,’ and so to clasp some miserable
remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did
their best to pluck for her” (19). We are thus given a glimpse even
very early on in the novel of how uniquely independent Lily is in
relation to the novel’s other characters.
 The juxtaposition of science and art in the novel is especially
evident when Mr. Bankes and Lily first discuss her painting. He is
fascinated by Lily’s decision to represent James sitting in Mrs.
Ramsay’s lap with a “triangular purple shape” (52): “Mother and
child then—objects of universal veneration, and in this case the
mother was famous for her beauty—might be reduced, he pondered,
to a purple shadow without irreverence” (52). Like many people
during this time, Mr. Bankes is trying to comprehend a
postimpressionist form of art that is radically different from the
more conventional forms of representation with which he would
have been familiar, like the painting of cherry blossoms that hangs
in his drawing room. But Mr. Bankes’s aesthetic habit is not the only
reason that he has difficulty comprehending Lily’s method, for we
are also told that “he took it [Lily’s painting] scientifically in
complete good faith” and that he undertakes a “scientific
examination of her canvas” (53). Despite his open mind, Mr.
Bankes’s ability to fully appreciate what Lily is after is limited by his
assumption that art can be understood from a scientific perspective.
This prospect is undermined by the narrator’s remark that “she
could not show him what she wished to make of it, could not see it
even herself without a brush in her hand” (53). In other words (for
Lily, at least), there is nothing resembling the scientific method
involved in her artistic process; in fact, she does not know herself
what she is trying to achieve until she performs the act of painting
itself.
Interestingly, though, the subject of Lily’s painting does propel
Mr. Bankes into “a rapture—for by what other name could one call
it?” (47):

It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas,

distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its
object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their
symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the
world and become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The
world by all means should have shared it, could Mr. Bankes have
said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her
 reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same
effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that he rested in
contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved
something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that
barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued. (47)

Mr. Bankes’s rapture is described in essentially the same artistic

language that is used to describe Lily’s relationship to her painting,
but unlike Lily, Mr. Bankes is not able to comprehend his experience
on an aesthetic level, nor does he have the ability to transpose it
into an artistic endeavor that would “spread [it] over the world.”
Instead, he is only able to compare his experience to “the solution of
a scientific problem.” Thus, although late in the novel Lily does
remark that “thanks to his scientific mind he understood [her
philosophy toward painting]—a proof of disinterested intelligence
which had pleased her and comforted her enormously” (176), Woolf
nonetheless insists that Mr. Bankes can never truly comprehend the
significance of Lily’s vision.
This juxtaposition of the ways Lily and Mr. Bankes react to the
same scene is a perfect illustration of why the artist eclipses the
scientist in capturing the depth and profundity of the human
condition. Unlike the scientist, who seeks to classify, the artist (Lily)
undertakes her painting with only some general notion of what she
wants to achieve: “It was a question, she remembered, how to
connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left. She might
do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the
vacancy in the foreground by an object (James perhaps) so. But the
danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be
broken” (53). For Lily, the ultimate goal is “unity,” and all other
concerns—aesthetic and otherwise—are subsumed into this singular
pursuit. In that sense, the scientist and the artist do share a similar
desire for creating order out of chaos, but they go about it in much
different ways. This is sharply illustrated in the final sentence of the
novel: “I have had my vision” (209). Lily’s concluding remark
embodies the elusiveness and ambiguity of the artistic process,
which is much different than the scientific approach that Mr. Bankes
takes toward understanding her painting. And it is different than
what Mrs. Ramsay possesses as well, in spite of her thoughtfulness
and depth of emotion. Lily imagines Mrs. Ramsay’s intuitiveness
about others as “tablets bearing sacred inscriptions” (51) that are
locked away within her. But Lily does not aspire to be like Mrs.
Ramsay, because “it was not knowledge but unity that she desired,
not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any
language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge”
(51). It is for this reason that the knowledge possessed by Mr.
Ramsay, Mr. Bankes, and Charles Tansley can never reach the level
of Lily’s art.
In Charles Tansley’s case, we find not a scientific mind but an
atheistic one. In fact, he is first introduced as “the atheist Tansley”
(5), which suggests that his atheism is his defining feature in the
eyes of the novel’s other characters. And we are quickly told, as
well, that the children in particular do not much like him: “It was
not his face; it was not his manners. It was his point of view. When
they talked about something interesting, people, music, history,
anything, even said it was a fine evening so why not sit out of doors,
then what they complained of about Charles Tansley was that until
he had turned the whole thing round and made it somehow reflect
himself and disparage themselves he was not satisfied” (8). The
novel implies a connection between Tansley’s atheism and his
egotism, as though the lack of belief in God leaves one susceptible
to an oppositional tendency to obsess over oneself. Although the
novel does not advocate for religious belief, it suggests that
everyone believes in something and that what one believes is
grounded in one’s belief, or disbelief, in God. Indeed, even when
Tansley realizes that he harbors an attraction to Mrs. Ramsay, his
emotions are again couched in the language of self-involvement, as
it is twice repeated that “for the first time in his life Charles Tansley
felt an extraordinary pride” (14). Unlike Lily, however, Tansley has
no object (other than Mrs. Ramsay) on which to project his desire.
Confronted with the void, Tansley can only retreat into narcissism
and bitterness.
 Lily alone successfully navigates the existential challenges that
the novel raises and goes on to “forge. . . . the uncreated conscience
of [her] race” (Portrait 276). There is, of course, no referent in
Woolf comparable to Joyce’s concern with Irish independence, but
there is nonetheless more to Woolf’s depiction of the artistic process
than a mere argument about art. There is, first of all, a
transcendentally humanist conception of art. But there is also a
deeply involved critique of traditional gender roles.15 Lily is
therefore concerned not only with her art but with the advancement
of the female sex. Her art stands as a testament both to the power of
women and to the power of art to confront the void of subjectivity
via artistic, humanistic, and political awareness. It is, after all, the
artistic act that produces the novel’s greatest insight and awakening.
It is thus on a number of fronts that Woolf anticipates the
psychoanalytic insights of the late twentieth century.
We can see, finally, that the artistic act for Lily is many things,
and above all mystical. To get a sense of the breadth of Lily’s
journey, let us consider the following juxtaposition of the first
paragraph of the final section of the novel, “The Lighthouse,” with
the final paragraph of that section and of the novel:

What does it mean then, what can it all mean? Lily Briscoe asked
herself, wondering whether, since she had been left alone, it
behooved her to go to the kitchen to fetch another cup of coffee
or wait here. What does it mean?—a catchword that was, caught
up from some book, fitting her thought loosely, for she could
not, this first morning with the Ramsays, contract her feelings,
could only make a phrase resound to cover the blankness of her
mind until these vapours had shrunk. For really, what did she
feel, come back after all these years and Mrs. Ramsay dead?
Nothing, nothing—nothing that she could express at all. (145)

Taken by itself, this opening paragraph does not suggest the

potential for a profound insight or awakening. On the contrary, Lily
seems as far as can be from any epiphany on either an artistic or a
personal level. But, in fact, it is precisely Lily’s initial failure as an
artist that helps illuminate the looming of the void in the novel. In
her failure, Lily recognizes that any notion of wholeness or
completeness is fleeting, rather than a given state of subjective
stability.16 This also emphasizes why the mystical moment of ecstasy
is so important for Woolf. That is, she recognizes that because of the
void, one will never achieve a permanent state of subjective
wholeness but can only manage fleeting moments of ecstasy that
bring one into contact with such a state—and for Woolf, like Conrad
and Joyce, the act of artistic creation is the best means to achieve
such moments. Thus, To the Lighthouse fittingly ends not with Lily
achieving a permanent state of transformative psychic well-being
but rather with a moment of ecstasy when she finally realizes her
artistic vision:

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she

turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its
greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at
something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would
be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking
up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty;
she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden
intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line
there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she
thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had
my vision. (208–9)

The moment of revelation begins with the adverb quickly, which

emphasizes that Lily’s epiphany is ephemeral and risks evading her
if she does not act upon it immediately. It is also striking how she
recognizes that the picture is not likely to have a significant life
beyond her. It will “be hung in the attics,” or even “destroyed.” But
her recognition that the permanence of the painting is immaterial
intersects with her recognition that the revelatory power of artistic
creation lies not in the lasting impact of the creation but in the
mystical moment when the artistic vison is realized. This final
paragraph is thus particularly striking for how Lily openly
recognizes and accepts the transitory nature of her “vision”; that is,
her moment of revelatory artistic creation is significant in and of
itself. It also shows, in the vein of Conrad and Joyce, the
interrelationship between artistic creation and subjective well-being.
The ecstatic consciousness of the artist grows out of the moment of
creation itself, rather than the reaction of an audience, and thus
achieves a sublime personal relevance that exceeds that offered by
either science or religion.
CHAPTER 3
THE SUBJECT IN PROCESS
Repetition, Race, and Desire in The Great Gatsby

Although his fiction might not suggest many similarities at first

glance, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a great admirer of both Conrad and
Joyce. In a short entry entitled “10 Best Books I Have Read,” in the
April 24, 1923, edition of the Jersey City Evening Journal, he listed A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, writing, “Because James Joyce
is to be the most profound literary influence in the next fifty years,”
and Nostromo, “The great novel of the past fifty years, as Ulysses is
the great novel of the future” (86). He later wrote, in a public letter
to the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 19, 1923, “I’d rather have
written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel” (“Confessions” 87).
He spoke of his admiration for Conrad on a number of occasions,
once remarking to John Galsworthy, for example, “You are one of
the three living writers that I admire most in the world: you and
Joseph Conrad and Anatole France!” (Mizener 132). He even
attempted a sort of bizarre tribute, as related in Arthur Mizener’s
The Far Side of Paradise (1951), which describes how Fitzgerald and
his friend Ring Lardner devised “a typical Fitzgerald scheme” in
order to meet Conrad during his much-publicized visit to America in
1923. “They would go to the Doubledays [where Conrad was
staying] and perform a dance on the lawn,” Mizener explains. “Their
notion was that this dance would make Conrad see he was dealing
with men who knew how to turn an amusing, yet delicate and
sincere, compliment and that from there everything would be clear
sailing. But before Conrad could be properly charmed they found
themselves thrown off the Doubleday estate for creating a drunken
disturbance” (158). Alas, despite Fitzgerald’s best efforts, the two
writers would never meet.
Fitzgerald did, however, meet Joyce. Sylvia Beach, owner of the
famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore on the Left Bank in
Paris, relates the following anecdote: “Scott worshiped James Joyce,
but was afraid to approach him, so Adrienne [Monnier] cooked a
nice dinner and invited the Joyces, the Fitzgeralds, and André
Chamson and his wife, Lucie. Scott drew a picture in my copy of The
Great Gatsby of the guests—with Joyce seated at the table wearing a
halo, Scott kneeling beside him” (116). In another of his eccentric,
intoxicated moments (like his performance on the lawn outside
Conrad’s room) Fitzgerald apparently threatened to jump out of a
fourth-floor window, allegedly leading Joyce to remark, “That
young man must be mad” (116). And Herbert Gorman claims that at
another of Beach’s dinner parties Fitzgerald asked Joyce, “How does
it feel to be a great genius, Sir?” and remarked, “I am so excited at
seeing you, Sir, that I could weep” (116). The interaction, which
apparently followed the threatened self-defenestration incident,
made Joyce quite uncomfortable. Ironically, Fitzgerald also
criticized what he called the “Joyce cult,” a phrase he used to
describe authors who he felt were derivative. To be fair, we
certainly could not call Fitzgerald’s writing derivative of Joyce’s—
although there is some evidence that he may have found inspiration
for This Side of Paradise (1920) from A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man.1
When it comes to Conrad, on the other hand, Fitzgerald’s
borrowing is far more obvious. We see this most clearly in the fact
that The Great Gatsby is essentially a retelling of Heart of Darkness,
set in urban New York City rather than the wilderness of Africa.2
Both narratives are recounted retrospectively by narrators who are
personally involved in the stories being told; both narrators journey
to an unfamiliar setting and become fixated on a mysterious and
charismatic figure; both have their illusions shattered but
nonetheless come to paint their subjects in an undeservedly positive
light; and each book ends with the narrator sustaining the illusions
of the subject’s loved ones in order to shield them from their moral
failings. Thematically speaking, both novels also explore obsessive
desire and psychological disintegration. And at least two critics have
suggested that “the title The Great Gatsby is a deliberate allusion to a
passage in . . . Lord Jim (1899) in which a businessman with a thick
Swiss German accent tells the narrator Charles Marlow that Jim is
‘of great gabasidy’ [capacity]” (Martell and Vernon 57).
But Conrad’s influence goes well beyond these examples. In his
book Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (2010), Peter
Lancelot Mallios suggests that we might go so far as to “reconsider
the ‘lost generation’ in terms of the ‘Conrad generation’” (222).
Mallios is particularly interested in how American expatriate writers
turned to Conrad as a model for envisioning new understandings of
nationhood and national identity. He argues that “what Fitzgerald
ultimately discovered [from Conrad] was a means of ‘undiscovering’
his country: of approaching nationhood as not an objective fact but
an imaginative social construct, and anatomizing the various
imaginative techniques and material interferences through which
U.S. nationalist imaginings advanced and receded in the 1920s”
(235). Mallios shows how Fitzgerald’s understanding of nationhood
plays out in his fiction, particularly in how Nostromo and Gatsby
suggest ethnic otherness and blur national boundaries. But whereas
Conrad explores individual subjectivities within a fictional nation as
it succumbs to the influence of Anglo-American capitalism, in Gatsby
the capitalist dream has been fully realized and the social
antagonism has been almost entirely effaced by the rampant
ideology of both personal and national “success.” Certainly we
would view Gatsby much differently had it been published after the
stock market crash of 1929, but much of what makes Gatsby great is
its prescient understanding of the antagonisms that lurk beneath the
prevailing ideology and its deeply Conradian rendering of the
individual subjects who are torn asunder by them. And we should
add that Fitzgerald’s interest in the intersectionality of national and
personal identity is reminiscent not just of Conrad but of Joyce as
well. In this respect we can begin to see how the three hold similar
views about how the individual is shaped by his or her notions of
nationality.
 Race was the elephant in the room in Fitzgerald studies for
decades, but since around the mid-1990s it has been a hot-button
issue. A smattering of critics as early as the late sixties and early
seventies began exploring Fitzgerald’s personal racial politics, but it
was the likes of Richard Lehan’s “The Great Gatsby”: The Limits of
Wonder (1990), Jeffrey Louis Decker’s “Gatsby’s Pristine Dream: The
Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties” (1994),
and Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and
Pluralism (1995) that set the stage for a thriving discourse on race in
Fitzgerald’s fiction, and especially The Great Gatsby. A major catalyst
for these seminal readings was the rise of New Historicism, which
led to a reexamination of the nativist ideology that proliferated
following World War I. “The social climate of the early 1920’s,” says
Decker, “specifically as it is expressed in increasingly racialized
forms of nativism, creates the conditions under which Fitzgerald’s
narrator imagines Gatsby as a figure for America” (56). In
sharpening our perception of the social, cultural, and historical
conditions that Gatsby grows out of, New Historical influence sowed
the seed for the recent outcrop of critical attention to the novel’s
treatment of race. This new cycle of criticism, with noteworthy
contributions including Meredith Goldsmith’s “White Skin, White
Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby” (2003),
Benjamin Schreier’s “Desire’s Second Act: ‘Race’ and The Great
Gatsby’s Cynical Americanism” (2007), and Greg Forter’s chapter on
Gatsby in Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism (2011),
has situated the novel’s racial politics in relation to prevailing
contemporary critical approaches, including performance studies,
queer studies, and narratology, helping to establish what is now a
well-defined body of scholarship.
This chapter follows the lineage outlined above by considering
race as a highly contested and politically charged term, with a
particular focus on its role in the process of psychoanalytic
development. A slew of critical studies over the past twenty or so
years drawing inspiration from Frantz Fanon’s engagement with
Lacanian psychoanalysis have added a compelling and valuable
dimension to the study of race and have considerably expanded the
influence and visibility of the field.3 Although Gatsby is well suited
to psychoanalytic interpretations, surprisingly few critics have
treated it meaningfully from this perspective. Of those who have,
which would include A. B. Paulson, John Hilgart, Barbara Will,
Richard Godden, and James Mellard, none have considered such
interpretations alongside the issue of race.
The broad goal of this chapter is to show how The Great Gatsby
anticipates both Lacanian understandings of subject formation and
the psychoanalytic dimensions of racial identity. As a foundational
principle, I adopt Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’s assertion that “Lacan’s
theory of subject constitution provides us with cognitive landmarks
or positions by which to bring the subject of race into
representation” (2). With that in mind, we might argue that a
psychoanalytic reading of race in Gatsby involves identifying the
major “cognitive landmarks” in the life of the title character. These
are primarily manifested in adult repetitions of childhood—and
teenage—fixations. In order to make sense of these landmarks, we
should begin by contextualizing Gatsby’s desire in relation to
Lacan’s “fundamental fantasy.” A reading of the novel that places
Gatsby as the barred subject—the void of subjectivity—and situates
him in relation to Daisy as l’objet petit a allows us to see Daisy not
just as mere commodity fetish but rather as an object manifestation
of Gatsby’s primal lack, the signifying phallus. While commodity
fetish is one facet of Daisy’s symbolic overdetermination, the novel,
through Nick, tells us quite clearly what Gatsby is really after: “He
talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover
something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving
Daisy” (117, emphasis mine). Although Nick’s suggestion is
frequently cited, critics tend to revert to the standard interpretation
of Daisy as just another item in Gatsby’s list of “things.” But we
ought to take Nick’s proposition more seriously and pay closer
attention to the construction and function of Gatsby’s desire in the
text.
Benjamin Schreier has made the valuable observation that Gatsby
“enacts a deeply problematical drama of identification whereby the
representational capacity of identity—ultimately American identity
—is an object alternatively of desire and skepticism” and that the
novel “ultimately lacks faith in the symbolic orders on which stable
conceptions of identity rely” (155). Yet a more concentrated
(re)contextualization of Lacan’s symbolic order relative to race helps
us bring the novel’s psychodynamics into sharper focus. If we look
beyond—or, perhaps more accurately, through—Daisy as
commodity fetish, she may be viewed as an object manifestation of
Gatsby’s desire to return to the realm of the pre-symbolic, prior to
the figurative castration of the Oedipal drama. Her maternal role,
which is crystallized through the association of the green light at the
end of her dock with the “fresh, green breast of the new world” on
the final page of the novel, suggests her metaphorical role in the
text as America itself. And as “Gatsby is ‘borne back ceaselessly’ into
a Nordic past as recollected within the climate of the Tribal
Twenties, when conceptions of whiteness both narrow and become a
sign not of skin color but of national identity” (Decker 53), we
might argue that she ultimately represents Gatsby’s desire to
reconstitute his ambiguous—suggestively Jewish—racial identity in
line with a fantasized Nordic American past. Adopting Walter Benn
Michaels’s broader claim about Jewish identity helps us further
contextualize this process: “The point, then, of identifying as a Jew
the ‘stranger’ who wants to marry into your family is to identify as
American the family he wants to marry into, which is to say, to
transform American identity from the sort of thing that could be
acquired (through naturalization) into the sort of thing that had to
be inherited (from one’s parents). Insofar as the family becomes the
site of national identity, nationality becomes an effect of racial
identity” (8). Put in this broader context, we can read Gatsby’s
renouncing of his biological family as a denial of his racially
adulterated lineage and his desire to marry Daisy as an attempt to
create a family that would regenerate his socially projected ancestry
as figuratively white. This reading offers us a unique way of
reconciling the symbolic duality of Gatsby’s autopoietic process and
America’s fantasized (and racially whitewashed) mythopoeic past.

Situating Gatsby’s Desire

Just after the midway point in the novel, Nick recounts what must
inevitably be considered an unverifiable account of Gatsby’s
adolescence: “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm
people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his
parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long
Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son
of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and
he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar
and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby
that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this
conception he was faithful to the end” (104). Outside of the general
unreliability of both our title character and narrator, Nick’s
admission that “he told it to me at a time of confusion, when I had
reached the point of believing everything and nothing about him”
(107) leads us to further question the story’s veracity. But what is
particularly interesting about Gatsby’s account is that it holds equal
interpretive value whether it is true or not. Either his parents
actually were “shiftless and unsuccessful farm people” whom he
never really accepted or else he fabricated the account and, in doing
so, refuses to accept whoever they really were. Nevertheless, the
suggestion that his parents either were or may have been farm
people has substantial though multiple and perhaps competing
implications. On the one hand, this lineage may symbolically tie
Gatsby to America’s earliest settlers, implying a hereditary stake in
the nation’s history and emphasizing his essential “Americanness.”
On the other, an association with itinerant immigrant farmers may
imply a family lineage that could potentially be perceived as
nonwhite. Gatsby’s account reflects the ambiguity into which he is
continually cast (and casts himself) throughout the novel, and
ultimately we do not come to understand his history with any more
certainty. Instead, we are confronted with the essential polysemy of
the novel, which, as critics have observed, arises out of the many
narrative and textual contradictions that cleave fissures in the
meaning of the text.4 But however we characterize or interpret
Gatsby’s family history, what matters is that he renounces it and in
doing so symbolically extricates himself from the Oedipal drama
and sets the stage for “an adult repetition of a childhood
phenomenon”—a phrase that James Mellard uses in his essay
“Oedipus against Narcissus” (55) to describe Fitzgerald’s 1922 short
story “Winter Dreams.”
In his reading of “Winter Dreams,” part of what has come to be
called the “Gatsby cluster” of short stories that prefigure the novel,
Mellard argues that this tale of ill-fated romance “illustrates how we
may read the dialectic of desire not only in the context of oedipal
authority—the Lacanian Law of the Symbolic Father—but also in
that of the abjected mother residing in the semiotic chora Julia
Kristeva posits as prior to the patriarchal order ultimately repressing
it” (51). In the story, a young boy named Dexter Green, who aspires
to transcend his humble upbringing and join the ranks of the upper
class, falls in love with a wealthy girl named Judy Jones. Much like
Gatsby, he covets her as a symbol of the wealth and status that he
hopes to acquire. The narrator tells us at one point that “he wanted
not association with glittering things and glittering people—he
wanted the glittering things themselves” (220–21). Like Gatsby, the
story speaks through the language of commodities, as material
possessions are tantamount to social stature. Matthew J. Bruccoli
describes the story as “the strongest of the Gatsby-cluster stories,”
explaining that “like the novel, it examines a boy whose ambitions
become identified with a selfish rich girl. Indeed, Fitzgerald
removed Dexter Green’s response to Judy Jones’s home from the
magazine text and wrote it into the novel as Jay Gatsby’s response
to Daisy Fay’s home” (introduction to “Winter Dreams” 217). By
reading Dexter’s desire through Lacan’s account of the Oedipal plot,
Mellard chronicles the eventuation of Dexter’s Oedipal resolution.
Like Daisy, “from the beginning Judy wears a halo of desirability
because of her metonymic association with a place—and eventually,
a subject—of wealth and power” (Mellard, “Oedipus against
Narcissus” 58). Through the metonymy of Dexter’s desire, Judy
ultimately represents the symbolic phallus that Dexter lacks on
account of the figurative castration of the Oedipal drama. “As a
symbol of the phallus,” Mellard says of Judy, “she represents
something beyond desire” (66), and “as the symbol of that which
the subject wants but cannot have, she invokes castration in the
prohibitions of the law of the father” (67).
The Oedipal drama unfolds almost identically in Gatsby. The
crucial difference is that while at the story’s end “Dexter has truly
become the postoedipal subject, has resigned himself to loss, loss
not of grief or of Judy but of that which every oedipalized subject
loses—the phallus” (74), Gatsby instead charges on toward the
painful jouissance5 that resides in possession of Daisy and is
eventually punished for his transgression of the law of the Name-of-
the-Father. Like Dexter’s, Gatsby’s desired object (Daisy) is merely
one manifestation in a deeper signifying chain. And as Mellard
explains, “Since the object is never attainable, both Gatsby and
Dexter approach it (as do most subjects) from the side, for, in the
beginning, they focus not on the woman as such, but on the
accouterments of wealth with which they associate the woman and
in which they display their right to her, the one who symbolizes
their fantasies” (54–55).
For Gatsby, this association is formed the first time he visits
Daisy’s house, which Nick tells us “had amazed him—he had never
been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of
breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there—it was as casual a
thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe
mystery about it” (155). Gatsby realizes, however, that as “a
penniless young man without a past” (156) he will not be able to
marry Daisy. As Walter Benn Michaels argues, “The real problem is
that he is ‘without a past’ and to get Daisy he must get a past. Thus
Jimmy Gatz’s efforts to improve himself, which begin in the
Franklin-like scheduling of his present intended to produce the
perfected Gatsby of his future (‘study electricity, etc.’), must
themselves be transformed into efforts to reconstruct his past” (26).
Put another way, “Gatsby does not want to be praised for what he
is, but for what he is not” (Berman, “The Great Gatsby and the
Twenties” 87). While Gatsby certainly wants to “reconstruct” his
past, as Michaels has said, he also wants to repeat the past once he
has revised its premises and live out the fantasy that his socially and
racially muddled pedigree has prevented. Gatsby’s symbolic
transformation from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby has already set his
desire in motion before he meets Daisy; she simply becomes its
objective manifestation, or objet a.6
Lacan describes objet a as “something from which the subject, in
order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This
serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as
such, but in so far as it is lacking. It must, therefore, be an object
that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the
lack” (Four Fundamental Concepts 103). Prior to the mirror stage, the
object of the child’s desire is the mother; the child—who has not yet
imagined him- or herself as subject(ed)—sees the mother as a
physical extension of its own body. The “moment at which the
mirror stage comes to an end,” however, “decisively tips the whole
of human knowledge [savoir] into being mediated by the other’s
desire, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence due to
competition from other people, and turns the I into an apparatus to
which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger, even if it
corresponds to a natural maturation process. The very normalization
of this maturation is henceforth dependent in man on cultural
intervention, as is exemplified by the fact that sexual object choice
is dependent upon the Oedipus complex” (Lacan, Écrits 79).
Following the mirror stage, the initial desire for the mother (Other)
becomes a repressed unconscious desire for which the subject seeks
substitutes, now symbolized in objects, or the “little things”—objets
petit a—that represent the mother/Other that has been lost (Mellard,
Using Lacan 147). While the process of subject formation is initiated
in childhood, it is ongoing throughout adult life.
In adopting this Lacanian terminology, we must make a crucial
differentiation between Autre (“Big” Other) and autre (“little” other).
According to Lacan, the status of the Other is interminable. The
subject’s desire for the Other is an unending and impossible attempt
to fill the void left by the loss of the mother; it is this interminability
that causes the subject to seek substitutes in objects that can take
virtually any form:7 “Objet a can take on many different guises. It
may be a certain kind of look someone gives you, the timber of
someone’s voice [i.e., ‘full of money’], the whiteness, feel, or smell
of someone’s skin, the color of someone’s eyes, the attitude someone
manifests when he or she speaks—the list goes on and on. Whatever
an individual’s characteristic cause may be, it is highly specific and
nothing is easily put in its place. Desire is fixated on this cause and
this cause alone” (Fink, Clinical Introduction 52). Objet a produces an
elusive/illusory duality since its value is not inherent but is rather a
product of the metonymic process of desire, “indicating that it is the
signifier-to-signifier connection that allows for the elision by which
the signifier instates lack of being [le manque de l’être] in the object-
relation, using signification’s referral [renvoi] value to invest it with
the desire aiming at the lack that it supports” (Lacan, Écrits 428). As
Lacan famously says, desire is ultimately “caught in the rails of
metonymy, eternally extending toward the desire for something else”
(428, emphasis in original).
In order to understand Gatsby’s fundamental desire to rewrite his
ethnological history, we must further unpack the metonymic chain
of Gatsby’s desire and the process through which Daisy becomes the
essential link. The key moment in this process is their first kiss: “His
heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his
own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his
unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never
romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a
moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.
Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a
flower and the incarnation was complete” (117). The ineffability of
the dream—“his unutterable visions”—collides here with a very
specific “object”: “her perishable breath,” culminating in an aptly
described “incarnation” that transforms the various components of
Gatsby’s desire (which are joined through metonymy) into a
Borromean knot that entwines each fiber of Daisy’s symbolic
overdetermination. Hilgart has made a similar observation: “His
portrait shows Gatsby’s consciousness to be so completely reified
that desire’s substitutional, symbolic process has become a loop,
repeatedly attempting to exceed itself yet ever diverted back to the
signifiers of the commodity” (99). In highlighting the process of
reification, Hilgart perceptively demonstrates the way in which
commodities in the novel act as signifiers of deeper desires rather
than ends in themselves. Ronald Berman recognizes this distinction
as well, noting that “the central irony developed by the novel is that
our largest feelings, love and faith, can only be directed at objects
unable to contain them” (“The Great Gatsby” and Modern Times 50).
In turn, when Gatsby says to Nick that “‘her voice is full of money’”
(127), he employs not a simile but a direct metaphor; her voice is
not like money, it is money.8 According to Richard Godden, “Daisy’s
quality has a tendency to become a quantity: how many bedrooms,
how many men, what make of car? Even as the object of Gatsby’s
desire is translated into ‘commodity,’ so Gatsby’s desire is
commodified” (Fictions of Capital 83).
While commodification plays an integral role in the process of
Gatsby’s desire, it is crucial that we recognize the role of objects in
the novel—and here I include Daisy—as mere placeholders (objets a)
for Gatsby’s deeper desire. After all, love of objects, or even people,
always entails loss. Many objects are lost, for example, and all
people eventually die. But there is also ironically a loss at the
moment of obtaining one’s desire; for as soon as one obtains what
he or she has been desiring, the visceral power of the initial desire
can never be replicated. This is why there is such a tragic tinge to
the passage above, in the fact that Gatsby’s “mind would never
romp again like the mind of God.” As Marcel Proust tells us, the
most powerful love is unrequited love.

Desire and Repetition

The first kiss not only marks the moment when Daisy as commodity
fetish and as object manifestation of Gatsby’s preexisting desire
intersect but also closely precedes the moment when Gatsby
symbolically reinitiates the Oedipal drama. Just before describing
the first kiss, Nick recounts the following: “Out of the corner of his
eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a
ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could
climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the
pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder” (117). In
his Freudian reading, A. B. Paulson glosses this passage by arguing
that “Gatsby must ‘climb’ alone because Fitzgerald’s metaphor—
despite its conventionality—is true to the psychic realities of nursing
infants and mothers’ breasts; at some deep level Gatsby pursues a
source of nourishment in which the self and the world merge, fuse,
and expand to colossal proportions” (313). Bruce Fink can help us
take this analysis one step further: he explains that “when Freud
says in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that ‘[t]he finding
of an object is in fact a refinding of it,’ he is referring to the fact that
object-choice after the latency period repeats the child’s first object-
choice: the breast. Here too, an initially encountered object is found
anew at some later point in time” (Lacanian Subject 94).
Read in the context of Freud’s insights on repetition, Gatsby’s
encounters with Daisy emerge as repetitions of his childhood
relationship with his mother. The maternal language that appears
throughout the novel—of which more will be said later—suggests
Daisy as a substitute for the biological mother whom Gatsby has
forsaken, and who is conspicuously absent from the text. When, in
the final lines of the novel, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock
is symbolically linked to the “fresh, green breast of the new world”
(189), the incarnation that becomes “complete” with the first kiss is
now wholly consummated in the novel’s broader symbolic
configuration. The final page of the novel thus underscores
repetition as its textual, thematic, and symbolic axis. Gatsby’s
attempt to repeat his past with Daisy is finally equated with a
collective cultural desire to relive a fantasized American past when
“man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent,
compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood
nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something
commensurate to his capacity for wonder” (189). While not
understood or desired at the time—when the future had not been
foreseen—it is the nostalgia to recover the (imagined) vanished
moment that underlies the compulsion to repeat.
In order to make sense of this compulsion, it will be useful here
to review Freud’s identification of four types of repetitive behavior
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The first involves “dreams occurring
in traumatic neuroses [that] have the characteristic of repeatedly
bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a
situation from which he wakes up in another fright” (11). The
second is the fort/da (gone/there) game played by children, in
which the child throws a toy from its crib, reels it back in, and then
repeats the process: “The interpretation of the game was related to
the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation
(that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had
made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He
compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the
disappearance and return of the objects within his reach” (14). The
third type of behavior occurs when an analysand is exploring his or
her repressed past and “is obliged to repeat the repressed material as
a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer
to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (19). The
fourth is a more generalized “compulsion of destiny,” in which the
subject possesses “an essential character-trait which always remains
the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition
of the same experiences” (23–24). Freud concludes that “if we take
into account observations such as these . . . we shall find courage to
assume that there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to
repeat which overrides the pleasure principle” (24). Because the
repetition compulsion acts counter to the pleasure principle, Freud
goes on to explain, it must therefore represent something “more
primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure
principle which it over-rides” (25). This compulsion to act against
the pleasure principle underlies Derrida’s proclamation in Writing
and Difference (1967) that “what is tragic is not the impossibility but
the necessity of repetition” (248). In other words—as we see in the
novel—repetition acts through language as it does through desire.
Gatsby’s tragedy, in both a classical and a psychological sense, is
encapsulated in his “incredulous” response to Nick’s suggestion that
one cannot repeat the past: “Can’t repeat the past? . . . Why of
course you can!’” (116). Gatsby epitomizes the repetition
compulsion; he attempts to relive his affair with Daisy “as a
contemporary experience instead of . . . remembering it as something
belonging to the past.” And as we have seen, Daisy is only an object
manifestation of Gatsby’s deeper desire; because it is not Daisy, but
a reconstituted version of himself that he seeks, Gatsby’s dream
inevitably “fails” shortly after he and Daisy reunite: “He had passed
visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his
embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with
wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long,
dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to
speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction,
he was running down like an overwound clock” (97). The image of
the overwound clock aptly describes the inevitable failure of the
dream to live up to the reality and brings us back to the crucial role
of repetition—both psychological and temporal—in the novel, back
to the “orgastic future” that has always already eluded us. As we
saw above, Gatsby’s vision of Daisy cannot possibly live up to the
image of her that he has constructed. “In invoking the Oedipus
complex,” Mellard says of “Winter Dreams,” “when Judy situates
Dexter within the dialectic of desire, she places him between the
polarities of desire and jouissance, alienation and separation,
Oedipus and Narcissus” (“Oedipus against Narcissus” 62). The same
could be said of Gatsby, whose reunion with Daisy sends him
symbolically “beyond the pleasure principle” into the realm of
jouissance, which functions as a surplus desire not unlike Marx’s
surplus value and is experienced as a form of pain.
The Lacanian concept of jouissance offers us a particularly
illuminating way of interpreting Gatsby’s desire. One especially
useful way of thinking about jouissance comes from Slavoj Žižek’s
The Sublime Object of Ideology, in which he describes the Titanic as “a
Thing in the Lacanian sense: the material leftover, the
materialization of the terrifying, impossible jouissance. By looking at
the wreck we gain an insight into the forbidden domain, into a
space that should be left unseen: visible fragments are a kind of
coagulated remnant of the liquid flux of jouissance, a kind of
petrified forest of enjoyment” (71). If we appropriate Žižek’s
metaphor in respect to Gatsby’s desire, we might read Daisy in place
of the Titanic. Because she cannot possibly live up to her symbolic
overdetermination, she comes to represent not Gatsby’s dream—
which requires the whitewashing of his racial past—but the
impossibility of its realization. Lacan tells us that we can never
actually “obtain” the object of desire; we can only circle around it in
a never-ending repetition. What is perhaps most tragic in the novel
—if we lend some credence to Nick’s insight—is that Gatsby appears
to realize this fact. Just after the reunion with Daisy, Nick makes the
following observation: “Possibly it had occurred to him that the
colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.
Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it
had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It seemed as
close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a
dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one” (98).
The light at the end of the dock serves as a perfect metaphor here,
bringing Daisy closer to Gatsby in a process of optical magnification;
because the light is physically close but also “as close as a star to the
moon,” the description fittingly analogizes Gatsby’s relationship to
his dream: in one sense it feels as close as an object across a bay, but
from another perspective the distance is unfathomable. In
(re)obtaining Daisy, Gatsby appears to ironically recognize what he
has lost. This is why psychoanalysis often tells us that we do not
actually want to obtain that which we desire; our most profound
enjoyment comes from desire itself. The great tragedy of Gatsby’s
achievement is that even as he attempts to relive his past with
Daisy, he realizes that his compulsion to repeat has already taken
him beyond the pleasure principle and into the realm of pain and
Oedipal punishment.
We should add that Žižek’s Titanic metaphor proves useful in
relation to other aspects of the novel as well, and thus the lesson
about the proximity of pain to desire is not confined to Gatsby but is
in fact wide reaching. Consider, as another example, Nick’s
description of the valley of ashes: “About half way between West
Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs
beside it for a quarter of a mile so as to shrink away from a certain
desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm
where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque
gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and
rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who
move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” (27).
Nick’s Bosch-like imagery recalls Žižek’s description of the Titanic’s
wreckage. The valley rests in a liminal zone between the novel’s two
geographical poles, Manhattan and Long Island, and serves as a
repository for the excreta of society’s unconscious, “the material
leftover” that Žižek describes above. The imagery of “a fantastic
farm” suggests an inversion of America’s idealized pastoral past. It
also calls to mind Žižek’s (re)formulation of the Thing (das Ding), a
concept used by Freud and later Lacan, as “the Space (the
sacred/forbidden zone) in which the gap between the Symbolic and
the Real is closed, i.e. in which, to put it somewhat bluntly, our
desires are directly materialized (or, to put it in the precise terms of
Kant’s transcendental idealism, the Zone in which our intuition
becomes directly productive—a state of things which, according to
Kant, characterizes only infinite divine Reason)” (“Thing from Inner
Space” 221). For Žižek, the Thing is an “Id-Machine,” “a mechanism
that directly materializes our unacknowledged fantasies” (221). This
characterization lays the groundwork for a Lacanian analysis of the
valley of ashes. The Thing, like Marx’s surplus-value and Lacan’s
jouissance, represents a surplus-desire, a desire that has gone
“beyond the pleasure principle and into the realm of pain,” as does
Gatsby’s desire for Daisy.
While Žižek’s Titanic serves “as a condensed, metaphorical
representation of the approaching catastrophe of European
civilization itself” (Sublime Object of Ideology 70), Fitzgerald’s valley
of ashes can be said to serve the same function in relation to
American civilization as manifested in the views of Tom and other
nativists of the time. “‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’” Tom says in
the first chapter of the novel, before referencing “The Rise of the
Coloured Empires.” The valley of ashes thus becomes a symbolic
reservoir for society’s abject, a fact that is compounded by the eyes
of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which “look out of no face but, instead,
from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a
nonexistent nose” and “brood on over the solemn dumping ground”
(27–28). Spectral and uncanny, the eyes surveil and judge those
living beneath. Moreover, it is overlooking the valley where the
novel’s most notable confrontation with race occurs as Nick and
Gatsby cross over the Queensboro Bridge:

As we crossed Blackwells Island a limousine passed us, in

which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed
aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty
rivalry.
“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I
thought; “anything at all. . . .” Even Gatsby could happen,
without any particular wonder. (73)

Greg Forter observes that “the sight of racial inversion gives rise to
the thought that ‘Anything can happen now’; that thought then
produces the reflection that ‘Even Gatsby could happen.’ Such a
sequence gives an explicitly racial cast to the social fluidity and
sense of possibility that Gatsby exploits in his self-making” (47). As
in his descriptions of Meyer Wolfsheim, which exploit anti-Semitic
stereotypes of wealth, physiognomy, and crime, Nick is an active
participant in constructing the racial caricatures that the novel
perpetuates. Broadly speaking, the valley is figuratively racialized
through Nick’s account, as crossing through it comes to suggest the
prospect (and fear) of miscegenation. This fear, particularly on
Tom’s part, erupts when the characters again make the crossing in
chapter 7, where the novel’s final tragic events are set in motion and
where the violent scene in the hotel room takes us back once again
to the Oedipal conflict.

Resolution of the Oedipal Conflict

Purposively reading Gatsby’s desire through Lacan’s fundamental
fantasy means that we must account for the moment in the novel
when Gatsby’s symbolic castration first takes place. This occurs
when his initial affair with Daisy is interrupted by his deployment
and he is subsequently usurped by Tom, who marries Daisy in his
absence. Nick’s first description of Tom supports a reading of his
role in the novel as a symbolic father: “Two shining, arrogant eyes
had established dominance over his face and gave him the
appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the
effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous
power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he
strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle
shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body
capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body” (11). Whereas
Gatsby’s foppish ways of dressing and speaking are meant to suggest
effeminacy, Tom’s muscular body shatters “the effeminate swank of
his riding clothes” and highlights both a body and a demeaner that
are driven by aggressivity and cruelty. In the subsequent paragraph,
Nick observes in his voice “a touch of paternal contempt” (11). As a
symbolic father figure, Tom stands in the way not only of Gatsby’s
desire for Daisy but of her desire for—or recognition of—Gatsby,
which is crucial to his achieving his dream. Tom’s nativist views put
him squarely in opposition to Gatsby, whom he addresses repeatedly
in racially charged terms. “For Tom, as for Stoddard,” Michaels
explains, “Gatsby (né Gatz, with his Wolfsheim ‘gonnegtion’) isn’t
quite white, and Tom’s identification of him as in some sense black
suggests the power of the expanded notion of the alien. Gatsby’s
love for Daisy seems to Tom the expression of something like the
impulse to miscegenation” (25). As the novel’s figurative paternal
figure, Tom assumes the role of guardian against the threat that
white, female innocence will be defiled by the ethnic other.
In that sense, both Gatsby and Tom rely on Daisy as a talisman in
relation to which their sense of (ethnic) self is constructed. The
conflict between the men thus takes on a broader significance as a
Hegelian battle for recognition in which each man seeks to not only
possess Daisy but annihilate the other. The conflict between the men
reaches its climax in the hotel-room altercation in which Gatsby
insists that Daisy never loved Tom: “Your wife doesn’t love you. . . .
She’s never loved you. She loves me. . . . She only married you
because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a
terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone but me!”
(137). In their battle for recognition, Gatsby wishes to symbolically
kill Tom—the father figure—so that he can decisively possess Daisy;
it is not until he has eliminated the symbolic influence of the father
figure that Daisy’s desire for him will be pure and uncorrupted. And
it is by proximity to and ownership of Daisy that Gatsby can become
fully white. Instead, the humiliating rejection that he suffers when
Daisy refuses to declare that she never loved Tom—“‘Oh, you want
too much!’ she cried to Gatsby. ‘I love you now—isn’t that
enough?’” (140)—amounts to another symbolic castration and a
further splintering of Gatsby’s dream, as she ironically exclaims that
she “can’t help what’s past” (140). It is not enough for Gatsby that
Daisy loves him now; until the castration is undone and Gatsby’s
sense of (white) manhood is restored his dream will remain
incomplete. It is thus a crucial but too often overlooked fact of the
novel that if winning back Daisy’s love is truly Gatsby’s goal, then
he achieves victory when Daisy first tells Tom that she loves Gatsby
and plans to leave her marriage. If Gatsby were to simply leave with
Daisy at this moment, then she would be his; it is only when she
realizes that he “want[s] too much” that Gatsby’s plan—and with it
his persona—begins to shatter (“Jay Gatsby had broken up like glass
against Tom’s hard malice” [148]).
The deeper symbolic and psychological consequences of Gatsby’s
Oedipal desire then begin to unfold when Daisy kills Myrtle Wilson
with Gatsby’s car. Paulson’s analysis of Freudian splitting in the
novel has been valuable here in drawing the symbolic connection
between Daisy and Myrtle that fits her into the Oedipal reading as
well. “Here,” Paulson explains, “the novel’s contrary movement—
toward synthesis—appears as a function of androgeny [sic]; that is,
the mythical dream of the hermaphroditic being. . . . The image of
the ‘fresh green breast’ makes a good beginning because I see both
androgeny [sic] and splitting as grounded in a special relationship to
the mother” (312). My sense is that the importance of the mother
figure in the text is twofold. First, as Paulson argues, “mothers are
conspicuous by their very absence” (312). Daisy is the only mother
in the novel, but she can be described at best as disinterested. Aside
from the opening scene of the novel, in which she briefly parades
her daughter in front of Nick before shuffling her away, the child
does not appear again, and one otherwise would not even notice
that Daisy has a child at all. At the same time, it is arguably all the
more significant that Daisy is the only mother in the novel, for it
seems a natural extension to symbolically tie her to Myrtle’s
physical violation, with her breast “swinging loose like a flap”
(145). Together with the breast imagery of the “incomparable milk
of wonder” that Gatsby imagines consuming when he first kisses
Daisy and the “fresh, green breast of the new world” that Nick
contemplates at the end of the novel, Myrtle’s mutilated breast
symbolizes the death of Gatsby’s dream. And by extension, if we
accept the symbolic tie that links Daisy and Myrtle, the mutilated
breast also symbolizes the corruption of the promise once carried by
the American landscape as it has been embodied in our collective
cultural fantasies. Once again recalling Žižek’s Titanic, Myrtle’s
disfigured body may also serve as “the material leftover, the
materialization of the terrifying, impossible jouissance” that has been
Gatsby’s relationship with Daisy. Like the Titanic, Myrtle’s body
becomes a spectacle, first lying mutilated in the street and then
splayed out on a table in Wilson’s garage. The novel’s climactic
scene invests the valley of ashes with its full significance, as “a
condensed, metaphorical representation of the approaching
catastrophe of [American] civilization,” and sets in motion the
events that lead to Gatsby’s ultimate punishment, inflicted by
Wilson but precipitated by Tom.

“It eluded us then . . .”

The final lines of The Great Gatsby unify its themes with an
overwrought precision rivaled by few short passages in fiction.
Although they have accordingly been the subject of much
discussion, they contain a striking temporal irregularity that has
gone unmentioned in previous criticism of the novel: “Gatsby
believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year
recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—” (189). If
we are to assume that the referent of the pronoun It that begins the
second sentence is “the orgastic future that year by year recedes
before us,” then we are encountering a temporal disjunction in the
text—what Thomas Pendleton has called a “chronological
incoherence” (12). The text is telling us that “It” (“the orgastic
future”) “eluded us then,” and the context in which then is used
suggests that the elusion occurred in the past. But how can “the
orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”—in a continual,
ongoing action—have eluded us then, in the completed past? This
paradox produces the polysemous doubling elusion/illusion
mentioned above. The orgastic future eludes us precisely because it
is illusory. And just as the orgastic future eludes us, so too does the
certainty of meaning.
We can view this temporal disjunction as what Derrida calls an
aporia, a paradox or contradiction that threatens to unravel the
meaning of the text. And yet this contradiction also produces
meaning in the final lines of the novel. It is through this temporal
paradox that the meaning of the text is disseminated; or, perhaps
more acutely stated, the literal meaning is dislocated, allowing the
symbolic to finally emerge. The final sentence of the book, “So we
beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past” (189), offers an inviting analogy to the concept of the floating
signifier developed by Lévi-Strauss and later adopted by Lacan. Each
individual word in a sentence acts as a floating signifier because its
meaning cannot be fully known or comprehended until the sentence
is completed and the broader meaning crystallizes.
This brings us back to the connection between subjectivity,
language, and temporality that pervades the novel. I suggest that we
approach the temporal disjunction and linguistic uncertainty of the
final lines through Lacan’s notion of the future anterior: “I identify
myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object.
What is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what
was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in
what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given
what I am in the process of becoming” (Écrits 247). Lacan suggests
that the subject must continually reinvent itself by anticipating what
it will become in a future moment of psychological harmony. But
this unified conception of self can only be recognized
retrospectively, which sends the subject into a repetitive rummaging
of the past. It is this compulsion to repeat, or more deeply to
reconstitute his past and rewrite his questionable lineage as racial
outsider, that plunges Gatsby back into the Oedipal drama that
ultimately punishes him for transgressing not only the law of the
Name-of-the-Father but the racial boundaries that have been erected
against him.
CHAPTER 4
SPATIALIZED SUBJECTIVITY
Los Angeles and the Post/Modern Subject in Fitzgerald,
West, and Huxley

Scattered among these masquerades were people of a different type. Their clothing was
somber and badly cut, bought from mail order houses. While the others moved rapidly,
darting into stores and cocktail bars, they loitered on the corners or stood with their backs
to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. When their stare was returned,
their eyes filled with hatred. At this time Tod knew very little about them except that they
had come to California to die.
—NATHANAEL WEST, The Day of the Locust

All of them had come to California as to a promised land; and California had already
reduced them to a condition of wandering peonage and was fast transforming them into
Untouchables.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

I seem to be a little mixed up. This doesn’t seem to be quite the girl who came out to
California for a new life.
—KATHLEEN MOORE, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon

After The Great Gatsby received a lukewarm response from readers

and critics following its publication in April 1925, Fitzgerald did not
publish another novel until Tender Is the Night in 1934. He was
deeply depressed that Gatsby did not catapult his career as he had
hoped, and the ensuing years were some of the worst of his life.
Although he began writing his new novel immediately after Gatsby’s
publication, he struggled continually. While he wrote several
chapters in 1925 and 1926 that would eventually be revised and
incorporated into Tender, he was unable to complete the book at the
time. In 1927, after he returned with his family from Europe,
Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and had his first stint as a writer for
motion pictures. His time there provided him with further ideas for
Tender, particularly the inspiration for Rosemary Hoyt in actress
Lois Moran. “Fitzgerald was fascinated by Moran,” writes Arthur
Mizener, “and she by him” (204). The Fitzgeralds’ short stay in
Hollywood would be defined more, however, by “a whirl of parties,
night clubs, and practical jokes” (204) than by Scott’s rejected script
for Lipstick. The Fitzgeralds left Hollywood as soon as the script was
finished, but Scott would return several times and eventually spend
most of the last four years of his life there. But Hollywood never
quite seemed a natural fit for Fitzgerald. One friend, the filmmaker
Billy Wilder, once said that “he made me think of a great sculptor
who is hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect
the fucking pipes so the water would flow” (qtd. in Zolotow 72).
His final trip came about as a result of serious financial hardship
in the early and mid-1930s. Mizener writes that “ever since he had
got into financial straits, Fitzgerald had thought of trying to get to
Hollywood again. During 1936 he had worked to find a job there. . .
. His income reached a new low in 1936 ($10,180) and would have
fallen to half of that in 1937 had he not gone to Hollywood” (270).
This was in addition to his massive debts, which “amounted,
according to his own estimate, to something like $40,000 at the
time” (272). Fortunately, those final years in Hollywood would
prove more successful, and his income increased considerably. Much
of the money came from his prolific short-story writing, but he
enjoyed more success as a screenwriter as well. Along with this
financial success, according to Mizener, “he was in love with
someone in Hollywood, really in love for the first time since his
feeling for Zelda had, with separation and time [Zelda was
institutionalized in North Carolina], become a memory rather than a
fact. The best evidence there will ever be of how he felt is the story
of Stahr and Kathleen in The Last Tycoon” (275). Indeed, The Love of
the Last Tycoon—which critics now agree was Fitzgerald’s preferred
title—had the potential to equal the best writing he had done in his
career, but a lifetime of alcoholism and generally self-destructive
behavior caught up to him and he died before he could complete the
novel.
Fitzgerald was one of many celebrated American novelists who
tried their hand as screenwriters in Hollywood in the first half of the
twentieth century. William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, John
Steinbeck, Dalton Trumbo, and Nathanael West all wrote for the
movies, mostly because it paid better than writing fiction. A fair
share of European and British writers made the move to Hollywood
as well, including Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Aldous Huxley,
who arrived in 1937, around the time when Fitzgerald made his
final return. As it happens, while the birthplaces of Fitzgerald, West,
and Huxley were geographically and culturally distinct from one
another—St. Paul, Minnesota, New York City, and Surrey, England,
respectively—they all died in California: Fitzgerald in Hollywood on
December 21, 1940, of a heart attack, West the very next day with
his wife in an automobile accident outside El Centro while returning
from a hunting trip in Mexico, and Huxley in Los Angeles in 1963.1 I
call attention to this fact not because it is particularly significant in
itself but because it illustrates a long-standing propensity for
assigning California, and Hollywood in particular, a symbolic weight
as American’s final frontier. We might think about the epigraph
from West above, particularly the remark about people who “had
come to California to die,” as a representative illustration for the
many writers who came to California in the first half of the
twentieth century as a last resort and for those who came in search
of new opportunities but instead became disenchanted.
But I do not simply wish to make a point about California.
Rather, in focusing on these three modernist writers,2 I would like to
redirect what has been a common focus in literary and cultural
studies on California—and Los Angeles in particular—as an
archetypal postmodern locale and ask instead what it might tell us
about the symbolic “death” of modernism, particularly as it relates
to notions of subjectivity. Each of the three novels that make up this
chapter—The Day of the Locust (1939), After Many a Summer Dies the
Swan (1939), and The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941)3—were
published in the waning years of the modernist period as it is
commonly conceived. Locating an “endpoint” to modernism is, as I
have shown, a highly contentious task. For the sake of convenience,
perhaps, the most commonly accepted year is 1945, when World
War II comes to an end. There is also some literary justification for
choosing the year 1939, as it saw the publication of James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake, after which for many modernism as such could no
longer exist. Such specific lines of demarcation have contributed to
the notion of a postmodern “divide.” Andreas Huyssen, one of the
most notable critics to take up this notion, adopts mass culture as a
central concern:

Mass culture indeed seems to be the repressed other of

modernism, the family ghost rumbling in the cellar. Modernism,
on the other hand, often chided by the left as the elitist, arrogant
and mystifying mater-code of bourgeois culture while demonized
by the right as the Agent Orange of natural social cohesion, is
the straw man desperately needed by the system to provide an
aura of popular legitimation for the blessings of the culture
industry. Or, to put it differently, as modernism hides its envy
for the broad appeal of mass culture behind a screen of
condescension and contempt, mass culture, saddled as it is with
pangs of guilt, yearns for the dignity of serious culture which
forever eludes it. (16–17)

But like Hassan’s and McHale’s, Huyssen’s attempt to draw a

dividing line between modernism and postmodernism is problematic
on account of the flawed assumptions he makes about modernism.
While modernism surely had its share of elitists, more recent studies
have shown that modernist writers and artists engaged with popular
and mass culture far more, and to a more significant degree, than
has been previously recognized.4 That these three novels are set in
and around Hollywood places them at the hub of mass culture in
America, or perhaps even worldwide, in the late 1930s. West’s and
Fitzgerald’s novels, in particular, are steeped in popular and mass
culture in ways that were in fact far more common to modernist
writers than critics like Huyssen have allowed.
 Much of the popular- and mass-culture mood in these novels
comes through their depiction of Hollywood in the 1930s and the
political climate of the film industry. In his book Hollywood
Modernism (2001), Saverio Giovacchini insists upon “the necessity of
recasting the history of the Hollywood community and its cinema
from the 1930s to the end of World War II within the cultural
context of an increasingly politicized modernism. A modernism that
was concerned with the necessity to open up its message to the
masses insofar as it was increasingly aware that the work of the
previous generation of modernists had been hampered by the
narrowness, elitism, and overall fragmentation of its audience” (5).
In other words, the appeal of each of these three novels to mass
culture represents a gesture that has typically been associated with
the postmodern and does not do justice to the extent to which these
late modernist writers sought to contextualize their fiction alongside
contemporary popular culture.
It is for reasons like these that critics have increasingly come to
view modernism and postmodernism less as divided, more as
continuous with one another. Given that Los Angeles has long been
associated with so many different elements of postmodernism, it has
conventionally been seen as a fault line that runs through the
postmodern divide. This may be a useful metaphor, but it is not very
accurate. Instead, we ought to view the city as a place where
modernism and postmodernism come together and intermix. The
novels taken up in this chapter challenge the classic view of Los
Angeles as postmodern city by showing how many of the elements
that critics have used in justifying that moniker, like the city’s
geographical, architectural, and cultural peculiarities, are in fact
pre–World War II phenomena. These novels cross Huyssen’s great
divide and transcend Hassan’s columns, showing how pre–World
War II Los Angeles produces new ways of thinking about
subjectivity that have been so commonly and casually associated
with postmodernism.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the population of Los
Angeles was 102,479, which was itself a stretch on the city’s
resources at the time and made it the thirty-sixth most populous city
in the United States. By 1910 it was the nation’s seventeenth most
populous city, with 319,198 residents. In 1920 it became the tenth
largest city, with a total population of 576,673, and by 1930 that
number had ballooned to 1,238,048 and Los Angeles was suddenly
the fifth most populous city in the country (United States Census
Bureau). While urban metropolises like New York were short on
space and had to be built up vertically, Los Angeles sprawled out
ever further from the Pacific Ocean and did not, like other major
cities, maintain a discernible “center.” This chapter argues that the
city’s geographical decenteredness intersects with the individual
subjectivities that inhabit it in the novels of West, Fitzgerald, and
Huxley. Consequently, in each of the three novels discussed in this
chapter, Los Angeles is represented as “the end of the road,” an
ideological wasteland whose inhabitants tragically and endlessly
attempt to remake themselves in the image of their collective
cultural fantasies.5 The subject in each of these novels is pushed to
both a geographical edge, where the American frontier is driven up
against the Pacific Ocean, and to the psychological edge of sanity,
where the self violently fractures. These novels collectively invite a
critical reevaluation of the post/modern subject and offer a
potentially fruitful new avenue of investigation in the study of
modernist fiction.

Los Angeles: Post/Modern City

Many postmodern theorists have turned to Los Angeles as a
paradigmatic example of the postmodern city. Jean Baudrillard
writes that “there is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by
night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity
stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in
the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch’s hell can match this inferno
effect” (America 51). Edward Soja, in the words of Casey Shoop,
“effects what is perhaps the ultimate consolidation of the many
postmodern encounters with Los Angeles when he characterizes the
city in Borgesian terms as the ‘Aleph’: Los Angeles becomes the
space that contains all spaces” (206). Rachel Adams even suggests
that we look beyond the postmodern, asking, “If Los Angeles is the
city that taught us how to be postmodern, might it also be the place
where we begin to imagine what comes after?” (248). And the title
alone of Norman M. Klein’s quintessential The History of Forgetting:
Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997) reflects the continually
adapted and persistent notion that Los Angeles is a city “without a
past.” These and other examples reinforce Fredric Jameson’s
alignment of postmodernism with the “weakening of historicity,
both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of
our private temporality” (Postmodernism 6). This view of Los Angeles
as postmodern seems fitting for a number of reasons, one of the
most apparent being its patchwork of disparate architectural styles.
Jameson observes that “it is in the realm of architecture . . . that
modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible,
and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised
and articulated” (2), and, as he goes on to explain, his own
conception of postmodernism grows largely out of architectural
debates. These “modifications in aesthetic production” are related to
the evolving demands of industrial capitalism and the evolution of
humanity’s connection to space, which in turn develops alongside
the changing aesthetics of the post–World War II cultural landscape.
One prominent feature of greater Los Angeles that has been
commonly remarked upon is its endless variety of building styles.
These various styles did not, as one might suspect, emerge after
World War II, when postmodern architectural styles first became
popular, but much earlier. A 2008 draft of the La Fayette Square
Preservation Plan developed by the City of Los Angeles Planning
Department characterizes the architecture of the city between the
world wars (not post–World War II) as follows:

The period between the World Wars was one of intense building
activity in Los Angeles, and a wide range of revival styles were
built in the area during this period. The Eclectic Revival styles
popular in Los Angeles between the First and Second World
Wars include the Colonial Revival, Dutch Colonial Revival,
Spanish Colonial Revival, Mission Revival, French Eclectic,
Chateauesque, English and Tudor Revival, Italian Renaissance
 Revival, Mediterranean Revival, Neoclassical Revival, Egyptian
Revival, Monterey and Hispano-Moresque styles. The Craftsman
and Craftsman Bungalow styles continued to develop as popular
styles through this period. Many of these styles were popular
both as residential and commercial styles, with a few,
particularly the Egyptian Revival and Chateauesque styles, being
particularly popular for use in small and large scale apartment
buildings. (18)

This litany of architectural styles anticipates the ironic relationship

to history described by Jameson and suggests the rejection of the
“new” in favor of a replicative mining of past styles in an almost
parodic fashion. And while one might insist that such heterogeneous
building is a reflection of high modernism, which according to
Jameson is “credited with the destruction of the fabric of the
traditional city and its older neighborhood culture” (2), we should
also observe that the architecture of Los Angeles was in fact reviled
by many architects of high modernism themselves. In a piece
entitled “Architect Wright Doesn’t Like This City and Bluntly Says
So,” on the front page of the Saturday morning edition of the Los
Angeles Times on January 20, 1940, Frank Lloyd Wright famously
remarked of Los Angeles that “it is as if you tipped the United States
up so all the commonplace people slid down here into Southern
California” (qtd. in Turner 1). The author of the piece, Timothy G.
Turner, says of Wright that “he looks over its architecture and
laments. One notable example of business building, modern in
architecture, he calls ‘a dish of tripe.’” These sentiments are picked
up by cultural critics as well. One notable example is Edmund
Wilson, who expresses a number of strong reactions to Los Angeles
—and California in general—in his 1932 book The American Jitters:
A Year of the Slump: “Now we motor agreeably and speedily along
the beautiful residential boulevards. The residential people of Los
Angeles are cultivated enervated people, lovers of mixturesque
beauty—and they like to express their emotivation in homes that
symphonize their favorite historical films, their best-beloved movie
actresses, their luckiest numerological combinations or their
previous incarnations in old Greece, romantic Egypt, quant Sussex
or among the priestesses of love of old India” (226). Although
Wilson was writing well before critics began thinking about
postmodernism, he was attuned to many of the concerns that later
critics like Jameson would take up. He suggests, for example, that
Angelinos are more interested in surface than depth, which is an
essential distinction for Jameson between postmodernism and
modernism, respectively. Angelinos, Wilson maintains, style
themselves and their lives after such trivialities as their favorite
films, movie stars, or astrological/mystical symbols. Wilson picks up
on the mishmash of revival architecture around Los Angeles—
referring to it as “mixturesque”—and, anticipating Jameson, draws
the connection to a shallow appropriation and lack of appreciation
for actual history. We find anticipated in Wilson the “weakening of
historicity” that forms an essential part of Jameson’s definition of
postmodernism.
Wilson’s observations are also notably similar to those in the
opening chapters of both The Day of the Locust and After Many a
Summer; the passages are so similar, in fact, that one wonders
whether West and Huxley may have actually read and been
influenced by Wilson’s account.6 After Many a Summer begins with a
comparable automobile ride following Jeremy Pordage’s arrival in
Los Angeles: “Through trees, Jeremy saw the facades of houses, all
new, almost all in good taste—elegant and witty pastiches of
Lutyens manor houses, of Little Trianons, of Monticellos; light-
hearted parodies of Le Corbusier’s solemn machines-for-living-in;
fantastic adaptations of Mexican haciendas and New England farms”
(11–12). Huxley’s references to pastiche and parody in relation to
the architecture of Los Angeles anticipate Jameson, who points to
the two as important characteristics of the postmodern. The parody
of modernist architecture here, however, comes from a modernist
source itself. As Michael Snyder explains, “A parody of modernism
has, by definition questioned the sensibilities of the International
Style: geometric purity, clean lines, austerity, and lack of
ornamentation.” As such, he goes on, “parody constitutes a proto-
postmodern design which is informed by modernism, but injects
humor and irony, as called for later by postmodern architectural
theorists like Robert Venturi, Jencks, and Moore” (175).
Stoyte’s castle, in particular, evokes the type of play and
excessiveness with which postmodernism is often aligned: “The
thing was Gothic, mediaeval, baronial—doubly baronial, Gothic
with a Gothicity raised, so to speak, to a higher power, more
mediaeval than any building of the thirteenth century. For this . . .
this object, Jeremy was reduced to calling it, was mediaeval, not out
of vulgar necessity, like Coucy, say, or Alnwick, but out of pure fun
and wantonness, platonically, one might say. It was mediaeval as
only a witty and irresponsible modern architect would wish to be
mediaeval, as only the most competent modern engineers are
technically equipped to be” (Huxley, After Many a Summer 18). It is,
in other words, even more Gothic than an authentic Gothic
cathedral, like some sort of gaudy modern-day Las Vegas hotel—the
New York, New York or the Paris—that is actually more like the
actual place (because it so blatantly accentuates its stereotypical
features) than the place itself, thus entering into the realm of the
hyperreal. Kevin Starr adeptly encapsulates Huxley’s vision of Los
Angeles in his classic study The Dream Endures (1997), where he
describes it as “the most sweeping, comprehensive, and . . .
successful description of Los Angeles as idiosyncratic cityscape. . . .
Huxley’s evocation announced to the English-speaking world the
palpable presence of a new metropolis on the planet, in which
distinctions between fantasy and reality, eccentricity and the norm,
dissolved in the tense complexity of a new and vital genre of urban
theatre” (158). It would seem that Huxley’s novel, which is not
often taught or written about, has slipped under the radar, given
that it anticipates in so many striking ways the aesthetics of
postmodern architecture described by Jameson. And as we will later
see, Huxley’s concern is not mere aesthetics but rather the
intersection of these aesthetics with the philosophical questions that
the novel pursues.
Although it is a very different novel than After Many a Summer by
a very different kind of writer, Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last
Tycoon is similar in how it blurs the lines between façade and
fantasy. Consider the following description of a major Hollywood
studio’s film lot: “Under the moon the back lot was thirty acres of
fairyland—not because the locations really looked like African
jungles and French chateaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway
by night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of
childhood, like fragments of stories dancing in an open fire” (25).
Like Wilson and Huxley, Fitzgerald looks beyond the mere aesthetic
dimensions of the setting and into the realm of identity; there is a
continuity, in other words, between the aesthetic and the subjective.
And Nathanael West, finally, uses essentially the same strategy as
Huxley in establishing the narrative setting in The Day of the Locust,
though in this case the trip is ambulatory and follows Tod Hackett
on his walk from the movie studio where he works to his apartment
building: “But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses.
Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch
houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese
temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible
combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon”
(262). Across these descriptions from each of the three novelists we
find a tone of contempt that lines up with Edmund Wilson’s
observations. These real and fictional accounts of Los Angeles
throughout the 1930s and 1940s suggest that observers were acutely
aware of the air of artificiality, unreality, and fantasy surrounding
the city.
We might best describe the architecture of Los Angeles since the
turn of the twentieth century as pastiche, which is another hallmark
of Jameson’s characterization of postmodernism and one that ties
into the broader connections with history and space that he relates
back to Baudrillard and Guy Debord. He writes that the “new spatial
logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous
effect on what used to be historical time. The past is thereby itself
modified. . . . Guy Debord’s powerful slogan is now even more apt
for the ‘prehistory’ of a society bereft of all historicity, one whose
own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles” (18).
We see this “society bereft of all historicity” in each of the three
literary passages above. In turn, we might say that twentieth-
century Los Angeles represents “the New spatial logic of the
simulacrum.” One of the primary characteristics of this new spatial
logic, as the above postmodern critics attest, is that it is decentered.
This reflects the spatial organization of Los Angeles, but it also more
broadly reflects one of postmodernism’s most recognizable
characteristics, and one that branches out into a number of realms.
Snyder, for example, points out that “the decentering of
postmodernity affects subjects, interpretations, disciplines, and even
cities. During the 1930s in Los Angeles, the downtown city center
lost supremacy over other outlying areas, and by the end of the
thirties Los Angeles was literally an idiosyncratically decentered
city” (169). In fact, however, the notion of decentering is critical in
studies of modernism as well (recall Yeats’s “the centre cannot
hold”). Edmund Wilson picks up on this notion as well, writing that
“everyone who has ever been to Los Angeles knows how the mere
aspect of things is likely to paralyze the aesthetic faculty by
providing no point d’appui from which to exercise its discrimination,
if it does not actually stun the sensory apparatus itself, so that
accurate reporting becomes impossible” (Classics and Commercials
53). Again in Wilson’s description we find suggestions of the
intersection between the aesthetic and the subjective, as the images
of paralysis and distortion suggest an endless play of subjectivity.
Altogether, this collection of evidence suggests that Los Angeles and
its decenteredness is not a distinctly postmodern phenomenon but
rather one that has firm origins in the pre–World War II history of
the city.
What further deepens this connection is the presence within Los
Angeles of the district of Hollywood, which was formally absorbed
as part of the city in 1910. Much of the tenor of Los Angeles since at
least World War I has been set by Hollywood, which was home to
more than 80 percent of the world’s film industry by 1921 (Buntin).
The decentering of Los Angeles has to do not just with its
geographical layout but with its role in the birth and development
of the film industry, particularly in the interwar years. More than
any artistic medium before it, film produced new and complex
relationships to time and space, and set the stage for the
phenomenon that would later come to be known as simulacrum. In
1946, long before Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), the
great historian of Southern California Carey McWilliams wrote that
Hollywood “exists only as a state of mind, not as a geographical
entity. . . . The concentration of the motion-picture industry in Los
Angeles is what gives Hollywood its real identity. As Jerome Beatty
once said, Hollywood exists as ‘a kingless kingdom without a
kingdom,’ an island within an island” (330). McWilliams’s portrayal
is strikingly Baudrillardian, particularly evoking the Borges fable
“On Exactitude in Science,” which Baudrillard draws upon in
describing his notion of simulacrum. “Today abstraction is no longer
that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept,” Baudrillard
writes. “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential
being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real
without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). McWilliams’s description
of Hollywood suggests such an environment in which the idea,
model, or “state of mind” precedes the thing itself, the
“geographical entity,” testifying to Hollywood’s symbolic value as a
liminal space between reality and unreality.7
While it may seem surprising to find premonitions of Baudrillard
in Fitzgerald, in fact we find examples of the simulacrum in Tycoon,
again with specific ties to geography. Geography in Tycoon functions
in much the same way as it does in The Great Gatsby, only the poles
have been reversed and the focus is the West Coast rather than the
East. While Nick makes continual reference to the “Middle-West” as
a point of contrast to New York City, Tycoon begins with our
narrator, Cecilia, outside Hollywood—which serves to contextualize
its unreality. The opening sequence of the novel, which takes place
on a transcontinental commercial airline flight and in Nashville,
Tennessee, where it is diverted due to a storm, is essential in
establishing the contrast between Hollywood and the rest of
America. This is particularly apparent when Cecilia, Wylie White,
and Mannie Schwartze take a long middle-of-the-night taxi ride to
visit the Hermitage: “I could feel even in the darkness that the trees
of the woodland were green—that it was all different from the dusty
olive-tint of California. Somewhere we passed a Negro driving three
cows ahead of him, and they mooed as he scatted them to the side
of the road. They were real cows, with warm fresh, silky flanks and
the Negro grew gradually real out of the darkness with his big
brown eyes staring at us close to the car, as Wylie gave him a
quarter” (9). Having been conditioned by Hollywood’s unreality,
where everything consists of mere façade without depth, she is
struck by how “real” things appear in Middle America. Perhaps
someone with her familial connection to Hollywood might see “real”
cows there, but they would likely be on a film set, where even in
their materiality they would become merely a set piece. This feeling
of unreality is one that is pervasive across the literature of Los
Angeles, especially for those who, like Fitzgerald, came from the
East. According to Edmund Wilson, “All visitors from the East know
the strange spell of unreality which seems to make human
experience on the Coast as hollow as the life of a troll-nest where
everything is out in the open instead of being underground”
(Classics and Commercials 45–46). In a sense, we might take Wilson’s
observation literally: the West Coast of the time did not have
developed subway systems like those of the East, particularly New
York City. But there is also a suggestion, which again anticipates the
postmodern, that the West Coast (and Wilson is certainly thinking
especially of Los Angeles here) is all façade and no depth. And this
could be applied to the people as much as to the architecture.
The opening scene of Tycoon also brings us back to Jameson’s
notion of a “weakening of historicity.” Upon landing in Nashville,
Cecilia observes that “airports lead you back in history like oases,
like the stops on the great trade routes” (7–8). Symbolically
speaking, it is as though Cecilia and the others have been taken
back in time to a period when America was dominated by large
swaths of rural landscape. The pastoral scene that Cecilia observes
would not have been at all unusual at this time, but she belongs to a
new, urbanized generation for whom this type of quaint scene has
become a novel slice of America’s past. Cecilia, for her part, seems
acutely aware of this. “In the big transcontinental planes we were
the coastal rich,” she remarks, “who casually alighted from our
cloud in mid-America” (8). As she goes on to explain, however, she
herself—along with her coastal compatriots—is not necessarily what
she seems: “High adventure might be among us, disguised as a
movie star. But mostly it wasn’t. And I wished fervently that we
looked more interesting than we did—just as I often have at
premiers, when the fans look at you with scornful reproach because
you’re not a star” (8). The early pages of the novel suggest a
narrator in Cecilia who is acutely aware of the complex relationship
between surface and depth that informs the film industry with
which she is involved. And one of the things that makes her such a
fitting narrator for Fitzgerald’s novel is that she is, as Nick Carraway
says in Gatsby, “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and
repelled by the inexhaustible varieties of life” (40)—particularly
those found in the Hollywood film industry.
These and other accounts testify to the fact that Los Angeles, back
to nearly its earliest beginnings, has carried more symbolic than real
value. This fact was becoming especially evident in the 1930s, when
Hollywood was on its upward rise to power. In their book Los
Angeles in the Thirties, David Gebhard and Harriette Von Breton
explain that during the Depression Los Angeles, and Hollywood in
particular, was the only place that “seemed to retain and even to
continue the optimism of former decades. . . . The Los Angeles
scene, as portrayed in films, weekly radio broadcasts, and the press,
seemed to mirror just what most Americans throughout the country
felt their world should be like” (5). In other words, in a time when
so many Americans were suffering in their day-to-day lives, Los
Angeles was becoming a profound ideological force in the collective
cultural unconscious, more significant for what it represented in the
public imagination than for what it actually offered in reality. It
makes sense, as Cecilia observes, that those attending movie
premiers would be disappointed upon seeing “ordinary” people like
her who are not stars; after all, they are chasing the glorified image
of Hollywood, not those individuals behind the scenes who actually
turn the wheels. One of the things that both Fitzgerald and West
capture so well is the long-held notion that the West might offer a
new and glamorous life, a notion that both writers juxtapose
without mercy to the common sense of disillusionment experienced
by those who chase the dream. Edmund Wilson is especially caustic
in this regard:

Here these people, so long told to “go West” to escape from

poverty, ill-health, maladjustment, industrialism and oppression,
discover that, having come West, their problems and diseases
still remain and that there is no further to go. Among the sand-
colored power plants and hotels, the naval outfitters and
waterside cafés, the old spread-roofed California houses with
their fine close grain of gray or yellow clapboards—they come to
the end of their resources in the empty California sun. Brokers
and bankers, architects and citrus ranchers, farmers, housewives,
building contractors, salesmen of groceries and real estate,
proprietors of poolrooms, music stores and hotels, marines and
supply-corps lieutenants, molders, machinists, oil-well drillers,
auto mechanics, carpenters, tailors, soft-drink merchants, cooks
and barbers, teamsters, stage drivers, longshoremen, laborers—
mostly Anglo-Saxon whites, though with a certain number of
Danes, Swedes and Germans and a sprinkling of Chinese,
Japanese, Mexicans, Negroes, Indians and Filipinos—ill, retired
or down on their luck—they stuff up the cracks of their doors in
the little boarding-houses that take in invalids, and turn on the
gas; they go into their back sheds or back kitchens and swallow
Lysol or eat ant-paste; they drive their cars into dark alleys and
shoot themselves in the back seat; they hang themselves in hotel
bedrooms, take overdoses of sulphonal or barbital, stab
themselves with carving-knives on the municipal golf-course; or
they throw themselves into the placid blue bay, where the gray
battleships and cruisers of the government guard the limits of
their enormous nation—already reaching out in the eighties for
the sugar plantations of Honolulu. (American Jitters 259–60)

Against the glamour of Hollywood and American life as it was

portrayed on the big screen, Wilson’s stark description of the West’s
brutal reality is all the more powerful. He identifies suicide as a
major problem in the West, particularly in San Diego, which had the
highest suicide rate in the nation at one time.8 Although one would
not know it from the depiction of American life in popular films,
many saw California not as an untapped land of opportunity but as
the end of the road for the tragically desperate and hopelessly
deluded.
This storyline forms the backbone of The Day of the Locust, which
features a cast of disenchanted and dejected characters. West
captures their general state of being as follows: “All their lives they
had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and
counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving
their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when
they had enough” (411). Los Angeles thus becomes for them a
means of escape, an opportunity to overcome their lives of banal
enslavement to industrial capitalism. But eventually they become
bored and “realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with
resentment” (411). The newspapers and movies that they turn to for
entertainment instead feed them on “lynchings, murder, sex crimes,
explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. . . .”
“They have been cheated and betrayed,” the novel laments. “They
have slaved and saved for nothing” (412). While early Hollywood
suggests a glamorous land of opportunity in Los Angeles, the reality
simply does not live up to the filmic depictions. The Day of the
Locust emphasizes this fact in its opening pages, when Tod Hackett
first steps off the streetcar at Vine Street, near his apartment:

A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not
really sports clothes. Their sweaters, knickers, slacks, blue
flannel jackets with brass buttons were fancy dress. The fat lady
in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in
the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a
mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and
sneaks with a bandana around her head had just left a
switchboard, not a tennis court.
Scattered among these masquerades were people of a different
type. Their clothing was somber and badly cut, bought from
mail-order houses. While the others moved rapidly, darting into
 stores and cocktail bars, they loitered on the corners or stood
with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone
who passed. When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with
hatred. At this time Tod knew very little about them except that
they had come to California to die. (261)

In West’s novel many of the people, like the architecture, are mere
façade, dressing as though they are preparing to engage in exclusive
recreational activities practiced by the wealthy, when in fact such a
lifestyle is beyond their means. But West also shows the underside
of the façade, which is illustrated in the striking juxtaposition
between the two paragraphs quoted above. Alongside the
“masquerades” are a subsection of the population who are so
disillusioned that their bitterness and hatred are plainly evident in
their dress and physiognomy. West depicts openly what Fitzgerald
only hints at. Compare the above description to the more moderate
one from Tycoon: “There was lassitude in plenty—California was
filling up with weary desperadoes. And there were tense young men
and women who lived back East in spirit while they carried on a
losing battle against the climate” (80). Fitzgerald’s description,
while more moderate, similarly captures the feeling of
disenchantment felt by so many who moved to California from the
East in the first half of the twentieth century. In all three novels
explored in this chapter, we find a stark contrast between the
expectations of what California will offer and what the actual
experience of living there is like. While the plots of their three
novels move in very different directions,9 West’s, Huxley’s, and
Fitzgerald’s characters all undergo psychological crises that lead us
to consider what we call “identity” as merely a projection of our
own desire. Consequently, their divergent plots inevitably venture
into the realms of tragedy, violence, and the grotesque.

The Lost Tycoon

In one of his oft-quoted descriptions, Nick says of Gatsby that “if
personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there
was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to
the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate
machines that registers earthquakes ten thousand miles away” (6).
Indeed, as we have seen above, Gatsby’s “identity” is in fact a
meticulously constructed façade that he employs in an attempt to
hide the true chaos at work in his subconscious mind. Although
there are distinctions to be made between their various depictions of
personality, ultimately our three novels take a similar view of
identity as multifarious and elusive rather than singular.
Tycoon, like Gatsby, is narrated from the periphery. While Cecilia
is involved in the action at times, she acts mostly as an observer
rather than a direct influence.10 Like Nick Carraway, she interacts
with the central characters and colors the narrative with her own
subjective point of view, but her essential purpose in the novel is to
tell the story of Monroe Stahr and his relationship with Kathleen
Moore. In keeping with this narrative framing, Cecilia tells us from
the outset that she’s unable to get fully inside the world of
Hollywood herself and instead will take us there through her
proximity to Monroe Stahr. “You can take Hollywood for granted
like I did,” she says, “or you can dismiss it with the contempt we
reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but
only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able
to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads. And perhaps
the closest a woman can come to the set-up is to try and understand
one of those men” (3). Cecilia is essentially a marginalized figure,
not only in her role as peripheral narrator but in her inability to get
Stahr to see her in the way that she wishes he would. As she
remarks in the scene on the plane, she wishes that she looked more
interesting and captivated more of Stahr’s attention. But like Nick
Carraway, she is overshadowed by the colossal stature of the man
about whom she writes.
Monroe Stahr resembles Gatsby in a number of ways; both are
wealthy, self-made, and charismatic young men seeking to recover a
lost love. As Bruccoli points out, however, Stahr achieves greater
“success” than Gatsby: “Monroe Stahr is an archetypal American
hero,” Bruccoli explains, “the embodiment of the American Dream:
a Jay Gatsby with genius” (vii). Stahr, for one thing, amasses his
fortune legally. And while he is not universally liked, unlike Gatsby
he is universally feared, and his power is virtually unquestioned. We
find in Stahr’s character an apt example of the “cult of personality”
typically associated with political dictators. Note Cecilia’s
description of him when a crowd spots him on the studio lot:

He spoke and waved back as the people streamed by in the

darkness, looking I suppose a little like the Emperor and the Old
Guard. There is no world so but it has its heroes and Stahr was
the hero. Most of these men had been here a long time—through
the beginnings and the great upset when sound came and the
three years of Depression he had seen that no harm came to
them. The old loyalties were trembling now—there were clay
feet everywhere—but still he was their man, the last of the
princes. And their greeting was a sort of low cheer as they went
by. (27)

Crowds obviously flock to Gatsby as well, but we find that Stahr is

more deeply implicated in the actual lives of those around him. He
is treated and thought of as royalty and as a hero who is carrying on
a historical legacy of sorts; he is seen as a man of mythic
proportions. Whereas the mythology surrounding Gatsby leads to
cynical speculation about a nefarious past, Stahr evokes all the
glamour and glory of an idealized Hollywood film industry. Without
Stahr, the novel implies, the system itself would implode: “Stahr
must be right always, not most of the time, but always—or the
structure would melt down like gradual butter” (56). There is
certainly a hint of paternal arrogance in Stahr (evoking more Tom
Buchanan than Gatsby in that respect). As another example, when
asked what makes the “unity” of his studio system, Stahr, whose
“face was grim except that his eyes twinkled” (58), replies, “I’m the
unity” (58). Even Stahr’s name is suggestive, as he is a star in the
many different senses of the word. He is not only the star of the
novel and a star in the sense of celebrity but also, like a celestial
star, a collection of matter held together by his own gravity. We
might even add another meaning of star from the Oxford English
Dictionary: “a crack or fissure in the skin.” Ironically, then, star
implies both centripetal and centrifugal force. It is thus a fitting
metaphor for personality, which implies cohesion but is always in
danger of fracturing. Like Gatsby, Stahr is struggling with his own
sense of identity and attempting to reconstruct it by repeating his
past with a proxy for his deceased wife, Minna Davis.
Early in the novel, Stahr appears as a strikingly confident figure
who is entirely in control of his thoughts and actions; but when he
first sees Kathleen and notices her uncanny resemblance to Minna,
his personality begins to fracture. This begins, in the first instance,
with his fragmented vision of Kathleen, as seen here during their
first consequential meeting in the novel: “When she came close his
several visions of her blurred; she was momentarily unreal. Usually
a girl’s skull made her real but not this time—Stahr continued to be
dazzled as they danced out along the floor—to the last edge, where
they stepped through a mirror into another dance with new dancers
whose faces were familiar but nothing more. In this new region he
talked, fast and urgently” (73). Kathleen appears to Stahr as
“unreal” (like Hollywood itself), and he is unable to process his
experience with her as he does other things in his life. His “several
visions of her” also suggest that like Daisy, she is symbolically
overdetermined. And like the reunion between Daisy and Gatsby,
Stahr’s moment of ecstasy is fleeting, which becomes apparent to
him the next day: “Last night was gone, the girl he had danced with
was gone” (78). Like Gatsby, Stahr is fixated on irretrievable
moments from the past, and as is the case elsewhere in Fitzgerald,
personality is depicted as something that is fleeting and changeable
from one moment to the next. The major difference between Gatsby
and Stahr is that while Gatsby is true to his illusion until the end,
Stahr gains a level of self-awareness and self-consciously desires to
break the pattern of his life (a notion that recalls Nick’s notion of
personality as “a series of successful gestures”):

“Don’t be a mother,” he [Stahr] said.

“All right. What shall I be?”
 Be a trollop, he thought. He wanted the pattern of his life
broken. If he was going to die soon, like the two doctors said, he
wanted to stop being Stahr for a while and hunt for love like
men who had no gifts to give, like young nameless men who
looked along the streets in the dark. (90–91)

Stahr’s response evokes Freud’s Madonna-whore complex, which

identifies men who can only see women as either virginally pure or
as sexually debased. This distinction is in keeping with Stahr’s
tendency to view people not as individuals but as either objects with
something to offer or obstacles that must be overcome on the path
to success. But it also suggests that like Gatsby, Stahr ultimately
desires a mother figure, although he eventually wants to break that
pattern of desire. The implication is that Stahr seeks to break the
cycle of his desire for a mother figure because he wants to become
someone other than who he has been. While Kathleen helps him
experience this, the experience is fleeting and temporary: “Now they
were different people as they started back. Four times they had
driven along the shore road today, each time a different pair.
Curiosity, sadness and desire were behind them now; this was a true
returning—to themselves and all their past and future and the
encroaching presence of tomorrow” (94–95). Once again Fitzgerald
reminds us that these instances of figuratively stepping outside
oneself are only temporary and situational, limited to the specific
moments in which they occur. It is for this reason that both Gatsby
and Stahr seek to repeat their past, but under the guise of a new
sense of self.
What makes it so difficult for Stahr to “escape himself” is that his
sense of his own identity is so firmly entrenched in his work in the
film industry, which ensnares him in a world of illusion and
deception. Even when he experiences one of his most emotional
moments, it is mediated through the language of film:

Winding down the hill he listened inside himself as if something,

by an unknown composer, powerful and strange and strong, was
about to be played for the first time. The theme would be stated
 presently but because the composer was always new, he would
not recognize it as the theme right away. It would come in some
such guise as the auto-horns from the technicolor boulevards
below or be barely audible, a tattoo on the muffled drum of the
moon. He strained to hear it, knowing only that music was the
beginning, new music that he liked and did not understand. It
was hard to react to what one could entirely compass—this was
new and confusing, nothing one could shut off in the middle and
supply the rest from an old score. (95–96)

This experience with Kathleen is so entirely new to Stahr that he

finds himself unable to neatly fit it into any paradigm that he
already knows. This lack of control becomes frightening for him,
and when he finds the letter that Kathleen accidentally dropped in
his car he cannot resist opening it: “He was proud of resisting his
first impulse to open the letter. It seemed to prove that he was not
‘losing his head.’ . . . ‘Falling for dames’ had never been an
obsession—his brother had gone to pieces over a dame, or rather
over dame after dame after dame” (97). Although Stahr desires to
break the pattern of his life and become someone new, he is,
paradoxically, afraid of losing his head or “going to pieces,” which
he associates with a lack of self-control. Nonetheless, this is
precisely what happens when he meets Kathleen. The raw reality of
the emotions he experiences for the first time (that we know of)
challenges his sense of identity as Monroe Stahr, and he realizes
how difficult, even impossible, it is to escape the public identity that
he has created for himself and that he has allowed to entirely
consume his own personal thoughts. And while he begins to
inevitably recognize the incoherence of his own identity, he finds
himself deconstructing Kathleen’s in order to justify opening her
letter: “Kathleen was really far away now with the waning night—
the different aspects of her telescoped into the memory of a single
thrilling stranger bound to him only by a few slender hours. It
seemed perfectly all right to open the letter” (98). While Stahr
allows himself to be seduced by the notion that Kathleen can act as
a replacement for Minna, ultimately he realizes that she is merely a
projection of his own desire, just as he has been a projection of
Cecilia’s: “I’ll always think of that moment, when I felt Miss Doolan
behind me with her pad, as the end of childhood, the end of the
time when you cut out pictures. What I was looking at wasn’t Stahr
but a picture of him I cut out over and over. . . . He was my picture,
as sure as if he was pasted on the inside of my locker in school”
(71). Cecilia’s realization illustrates the central difference between
her and Stahr: she realizes and accepts that her “picture” of Stahr is
only a simulacrum, while he acknowledges that Kathleen is only a
simulacrum of his dead wife but is never able to reconcile this fact
with his obsessive desire. What we find in the relationships
throughout the novel is a great deal of blurring between the various
conceptions that the characters have of one another and of
themselves. By continually calling attention to this confusion,
Fitzgerald creates an ironic characterization of identity in which
each character projects his or her desire on an other in an endless
cycle, which creates a feeling of radical decenteredness in relation
to the novel’s subjects.
This brings us back full circle to the geography of Los Angeles.
There is a popular conception that Hollywood is the lifeblood of the
city, when in fact it is merely a vacuum filled by the illusions and
fantasies of its inhabitants. When we speak of Los Angeles as
“decentered,” we mean literally, as a result of its endless sprawl, but
also figuratively. Monroe Stahr, the center of Hollywood in the
novel, functions in the same way. While he is decentered himself,
ironically the other characters depend upon him for their own
senses of identity. A perfect example of this is Mannie Schwartze,
who, although he appears in the novel only briefly, is a crucial
figure in establishing both Stahr’s profound power over the other
characters and some of the deeper themes that the novel develops in
relation to American ideology.
When we first meet him, Schwartze is on the tail end of a
downfall from a powerful position in Hollywood as a studio head.
His suicide, while not actually described, is imagined by Cecilia
after she and Wylie leave him at the Hermitage in a scene that
establishes a number of deep symbolic connections to American
history: “Mannie Schwartze and Andrew Jackson—it was hard to
say them in the same sentence. It was doubtful if he knew who
Andrew Jackson was as he wandered around, but perhaps he figured
that if people had preserved his house Andrew Jackson must have
been someone who was large and merciful, able to understand. At
both ends of life man needed nourishment—a breast—a shrine.
Something to lay himself beside when no one wanted him further,
and shoot a bullet into his head” (13). The passage recalls the
maternal imagery from Gatsby, which uses both the breast and the
idea of nourishment, particularly in the description of the scene just
before Gatsby and Daisy share their first kiss: “Out of the corner of
his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a
ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could
climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the
pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder” (117). And
just as Daisy and the maternal imagery of Gatsby establish a
connection between Gatsby and the American landscape and its
history, a similar connection is made here between the Jewish
Schwartze and Andrew Jackson, one of America’s most enduring
historical figures, although one who was not particularly merciful or
understanding. But as we have continually been reminded, the
object does not matter in itself but only insofar as it provides a
center around which we can orbit.
For several characters in the novel, including Schwartze, Stahr
occupies the central role. This is demonstrated in the case of
Schwartze’s suicide letter, which reads, “Dear Monro, You are the
best of them all I have always admired your mentality so when you
turn against me I know it’s no use! I must be no good and am not
going to continue the journey let me warn you once again look out!
I know” (16). Stahr, also not particularly merciful or understanding,
at least professionally, is godlike in the power that he exercises over
the other characters in the novel. Cecilia tells us early on that “some
of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures—‘42nd
Street,’ for example, had a great influence on me. It’s more than
possible that some of the pictures which Stahr himself conceived
had shaped me into what I was” (18). We see, in short, a troubling
sense of dependency among those characters who satellite around
Stahr and depend on him for their own senses of identity. We might
say that Stahr himself functions as a shrine—certainly for Cecilia. In
addition to forming their identities in relation to notions of
Hollywood success, the characters actually construct their own ideas
of personal identity in relation to Stahr. This is ironic, of course,
given that Stahr himself orbits around Kathleen, who satisfies both
his desire for a mother figure and his desire to reconstruct his own
identity. These relationships show how identity in Tycoon, as in
Conrad, is intersubjective in nature.
Throughout Tycoon, Fitzgerald shows a keen awareness of the
ways in which Hollywood problematizes notions of personal
identity. This is true of Cecilia, as we have already seen, but we find
similar anxieties in every other notable character as well. Wylie
White, for example, tells Cecilia wearily that Hollywood is “a good
place for toughies but I went there from Savannah, Georgia. I went
to a garden party the first day. My host shook hands and left me. It
was all there—that swimming pool, green moss at two dollars an
inch, beautiful felines having drinks and fun—” (11). His first
impression is just what one expects from Hollywood; the appearance
is just as one would imagine it. He goes on, however: “—And
nobody spoke to me. Not a soul. I spoke to half a dozen people but
they didn’t answer. That continued for an hour, two hours—then I
got up from where I was sitting and ran out at a dog trot like a crazy
man. I didn’t feel I had any rightful identity until I got back to the
hotel and the clerk handed me a letter addressed to me in my name”
(11). While Cecilia tells us that she has never had this experience
herself, she is not surprised by it. “We don’t go for strangers in
Hollywood unless they wear a sign saying that their axe has been
thoroughly ground elsewhere,” she explains, “and that in any case
it’s not going to fall on our necks—in other words unless they’re a
celebrity. And they’d better look it even then” (11). Hollywood, of
course, is made up largely of actors and writers, and Cecilia makes a
notable distinction between the two when she first finds out that
Wylie White is a writer: “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re
any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying hard to be one person.
It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who
lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting
chandeliers” (12). While writers are many people trying to be one,
in other words, actors are one trying to be many. Fitzgerald’s
broader point is that in Hollywood everyone is driven to be
something other than who or what they are. And regardless how
they manage to present themselves, others will form their own
opinions based on the endless gossip that is passed around. In the
case of one minor character named Rose Meloney, for example, we
are told that she is “a dried up little blonde of fifty about whom one
could hear the fifty assorted opinions of Hollywood—‘a sentimental
dope,’ ‘ the best writer on construction in Hollywood,’ ‘ a veteran,’ ‘
that old hack,’ ‘the smartest woman on the lot,’ ‘the cleverest
plagiarist in the biz,’ and of course in addition a nymphomaniac, a
virgin, a pushover, a lesbian and a faithful wife” (36). In Fitzgerald’s
Hollywood, everyone contains multiple personalities. Ultimately,
Fitzgerald paints a picture of a Hollywood that maintains a stark
contrast between what is above and beneath the surface, where
people are seldom recognized for who they are and are often unsure
of their own selves. Although his depiction may not be as appalling
as West’s, he similarly captures “the emptiness of Hollywood.”

The Burning of Los Angeles

Tod’s model for “making it” in the early part of The Day of the Locust
is the “successful screenwriter” Claude Estee (271). Estee’s house,
like Gatsby’s, is a gaudy imitation—akin to the personality of its
owner. It is a “a big house,” we are told, “that was an exact
reproduction of the old Dupuy mansion near Biloxi, Mississippi.
When Tod came up the walk between the boxwood hedges, he
greeted him from the enormous, two-story porch by doing the
impersonation that went with the Southern colonial architecture. He
teetered back and forth on his heels like a Civil War colonel and
made believe he had a large belly” (271). Aside from the disturbing
racial implications of Estee’s slave fantasy, one can understand why
the glamour and wealth of the motion-picture industry would lead
someone like him to develop such an inflated sense of self. Estee’s
party is just the kind that Fitzgerald’s Wylie White might have
attended. As contrasted with White, or perhaps a figure like George
Boxley, the novelist turned screenwriter in Tycoon, Estee
demonstrates what success in Hollywood can get you. And like Joe
Stoyte, Estee is able to in some sense “repeat the past” by replicating
it architecturally—and of course playing the part of a plantation
owner. The successful characters in all three novels have a knack for
transcending history in ways that are not accessible to the middle-
class and poor characters.
While the successful characters in each novel act out in forms of
masquerade that are often depicted as more playful than sinister,
the middle-class and poor characters are seen as grotesque. A
description of Tod Hackett early in the novel tells us that “despite
his appearance [he is previously described as appearing “without
talent, almost doltish”], he was really a very complicated young
man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a
nest of Chinese boxes” (260). One side of Hackett that we encounter
quite early is a proclivity for violent thoughts. Looking at a
photograph of Faye Greener, he muses: “Her invitation wasn’t to
pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to
love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing
yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a
scream” (271). He reflects bitterly that Faye would never have him,
that she is not sentimental and sees Hackett as a “good-hearted
man” (270), meaning that he would only be suitable as a friend.
Sexual rejection is an important facet of Hackett’s inclination
toward violence. As he becomes increasingly disillusioned by
Hollywood, his sexual fantasies about Faye intensify, and eventually
he dreams of violently raping her. Of course, his fantasies are based
in misplaced illusions about what Hollywood has to offer its
inhabitants—a fact that unites Hackett with “the people who come
to California to die.”
Throughout the novel, we see a number of these different
personalities emerge at various moment, causing Hackett to appear
as one (type of) person at one moment, and a completely different
one at another. West’s descriptions are much like Fitzgerald’s, whose
characters are described as different people at different points in
time: “Now they [Stahr and Kathleen] were different people as they
started back. Four times they had driven along the shore road today,
each time a different pair. Curiosity, sadness and desire were behind
them now; this was a true returning—to themselves and all their
past and future and the encroaching presence of tomorrow” (94–
95). But while Hackett is described as someone who is more
complex than he appears, Kathleen insists that Stahr’s personalities
are out in the open: “You’re three or four different men but each of
them out in the open. Like all Americans” (116). The difference in
each case is simply one of appearance; on a deeper level, each novel
recognizes that the subject exists as an apparently singular entity
only at specific moments in time. The subject, according to this
conception, has little coherence but rather adapts to situational
particularities.
This notion of multiple personalities is not limited to Hackett but
spills over into other characters as well. In fact, early descriptions of
Homer Simpson demonstrate a lack of stable personality and self-
control. Shortly after we first meet him, he is described getting out
of bed “in sections, like a poorly made automaton” who, as though
not fully in control of his body, “carried his hands into the
bathroom” (289). Once there, “he ran hot water into the tub and
began to undress, fumbling with the buttons of his clothing as
though he were undressing a stranger” (289). This lack of agency
becomes more sinister later, when we are told of a former encounter
with a drunk and crying Romola Martin: “He caught her in his arms
and hugged her. His suddenness frightened her and she tried to pull
away, but he held on and began awkwardly to caress her. He was
completely unconscious of what he was doing” (293). Strangely
enough, when she later lies on her bed and offers herself to him, he
suddenly runs out of the room, unable to act upon his obvious
sexual impulses. When we are brought back into the present, we are
given some indication of his underlying issues: “He got out of the
tub, dried himself hurriedly with a rough towel, then went into the
bedroom to dress. He felt even more stupid and washed out than
usual. It was always like that. His emotions surged up in an
enormous wave, curving and rearing, higher and higher, until it
seemed as though the wave must carry everything before it. But the
crash never came. Something always happened at the very top of
the crest and the wave collapsed to run back like water down a
drain, leaving, at the most, only the refuse of feeling” (294). These
disturbing descriptions of Simpson suggest a deeply crippling
emotional impotence that, while it precedes his move to California,
eventually reaches a head there and returns in the form of powerful
violent acts that culminate in the mob-scene finale.
One of the strangest and most poignant examples of troubled
personality in Locust is Harry Greener, who epitomizes the tragic
downfall of the Hollywood performer. When Greener, a former
vaudeville clown who has been reduced to selling silver polish door
to door, tries to close a sale with Simpson, we see him shift into
“acting” mode: “He jumped to his feet and began doing Harry
Greener, poor Harry, honest Harry, well-meaning, humble,
deserving, a good husband, a model father, a faithful Christian, a
loyal friend” (300). The irony, of course, is that Greener’s “acting” is
just another version of himself. Like many of the characters in
Tycoon and Locust, Greener has been reduced to a caricature of
himself. Once again the masquerade is not playful but tragic, which
is emphasized a moment later: “Suddenly, like a mechanical toy that
had been overwound, something snapped inside of him and he
began to spin through his entire repertoire. The effort was purely
muscular, like the dance of the paralytic. He jigged, juggled his hat,
made believe he had been kicked, tripped, and shook hands with
himself. He went through it all in one dizzy spasm, then reeled to
the couch and collapsed” (301). These types of depictions are not
unique in modernism, as Martin Rogers explains: “Modernism’s
ambivalence toward technology often took shape in the critique of
the dehumanization of mechanized industry, prophetically so in Karl
Capec’s play R.U.R. (first performed in 1921) as well as Chaplin’s
Modern Times (1936) and [Fritz Lang’s] Metropolis” (373). West’s
point, however, stretches beyond a mere critique of mechanized
society. Homer’s daughter Faye, for example, suffers from a similar
obsession with show business that reaches frightening limits. She
tells Simpson, “I’m going to be a star some day. . . . It’s my life. It’s
the only thing in the whole world that I want. . . . If I’m not, I’ll
commit suicide” (309). Faye represents exactly the kind of all-or-
nothing attitude that West finds so disturbing among the Hollywood
crowd. For West’s characters there is no contentment to be found in
leading “ordinary” lives; their entire existence is premised around
“making it” and living out their fantasies of what show business
ought to be. His characters, like many of Fitzgerald’s, are so
obsessed with their projected images of themselves that they
become mere simulations.
What makes Faye’s artificiality all the more disturbing is that
Hackett actually becomes attracted to it: “Had any other girl been so
affected, he would have thought her as intolerable. Faye’s
affectations, however, were so completely artificial that he found
them charming” (316). Faye’s artificiality is so consuming and
transparent that it is almost as if any sense of “reality” has melted
away. “Being with her,” the narrator says of Hackett’s attraction,
“was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play.
From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situation would have
made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the
perspiring stage-hands and the wires that held up the tawdry
summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted
everything and was anxious for it to succeed. . . . She didn’t know
how to be simpler or more honest” (316). Despite his “attraction” to
her, Hackett’s desire is deeply conflicted and, like Simpson’s, is also
tinged with a desire for violence. These violent tendencies are a
result of Hackett’s conflicted emotional state, and he is
simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by Faye’s fakeness: “If he
only had the courage to throw himself on her. Nothing less violent
than rape would do. The sensation he felt was like that he got when
holding an egg in his hand. Not that she was fragile or even seemed
fragile. It wasn’t that. It was her completeness, her egglike self-
sufficiency, that made him want to crush her” (320). What seems to
enrage him so much about Faye is that she thinks of herself as self-
assured and level-headed, while he sees through her façade and
recognizes that she is the exact opposite. Amid the crowded throngs
of people Hackett observes around Los Angeles, it is actually Faye’s
ignorance of her inconsistency that he finds so infuriating. The very
fact that Faye is so content with herself inspires the violent rage that
Hackett channels into his art:

In “The Burning of Los Angeles” Faye is the naked girl in the left
foreground being chased by a group of men and women who
have separated from the main body of the mob. One of the
women is about to hurl a rock at her to bring her down. She is
running with her eyes closed and a strange half-smile on her
lips. Despite the dreamy repose of her face, her body is straining
to hurl her along at top speed. The only explanation for this
contrast is that she is enjoying the release that wild flight gives
in much the same way that a game bird must when, after hiding
for several tense minutes, it bursts from cover in complete,
unthinking panic. (321)

The painting, which is disturbing enough in its mere depiction of

the naked Faye being chased by an angry mob, is made even more
so by its suggestion that she is actually enjoying her torment. As
with Simpson, it seems inevitable from early on in the novel that
Hackett’s repressed desire will eventually be realized in the form of
real violence.
Hackett is able to see through the various characters he meets
and recognize that they, like Hollywood, are pure artifice. When one
looks closely enough, it becomes apparent that people fit into
various reproduced categories of personality based upon the models
presented to them by the popular culture of the time and Hackett
cannot help but take notice of these phenomena:

He thought of Janvier’s ‘Sargasso Sea.’ Just as that imaginary

body of water was a history of civilization in the form of a
marine junkyard, the studio lot was one in the form of a dream
dump. A Sargasso of the imagination! And the dump grew
continually, for there wasn’t a dream afloat somewhere which
wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made
 photographic by plaster, canvas, lath and paint. Many boats sink
and never reach the Sargasso, but no dream ever entirely
disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unfortunate person and
some day, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it
will be reproduced on the lot. (353)

Andrew Lyndon Knighton points out that “the novel is replete with
similar inventories. It is set in a Hollywood where such fetish
objects abound, both on the studio lots and beyond. And it makes
the argument that, torn from their homelands and their historical
contexts, such objects share their alienation with those refugees who
have flocked to Los Angeles to pursue dreams of celebrity, wealth,
or freedom” (145–46). This description applies directly to Faye, who
has built herself up entirely around the notion of achieving celebrity
and fame. Her beliefs about Hollywood are culled together from
various things she has read and heard: “She went on and on, telling
him how careers are made in the movies and how she intended to
make hers. It was all nonsense. She mixed bits of badly understood
advice from the trade papers with other bits out of the fan
magazines and compared these with the legends that surround the
activities of screen stars and executives. Without any noticeable
transition, possibilities became probabilities and wound up as
inevitabilities” (386). Just as we arrive at a stable sense of identity
by transforming our thoughts and experiences into coherent
narratives, Faye creates a coherent narrative of future success out of
what is, in fact, a patchwork of anecdotes and half-truths. What
become for her “inevitabilities” are actually no more than fantasies.
As in Tycoon, one potential reaction to this phenomenon is the
symbolic return to the maternal. But just as this step represents the
end for Mannie Schwartze in his suicide, for Simpson it turns into a
devolution toward violence. Unable to bear the stress any longer,
near the end of the novel Simpson enters into what Hackett calls a
“Uterine Flight,” a term that he gleaned from a caption under a
picture of a woman in a similar position from a book of abnormal
psychology: “But he wasn’t relaxed. Some inner force of nerve and
muscle was straining to make the ball tighter and still tighter. He
was like a steel spring which has been freed of its function in a
machine and allowed to use all its strength centripetally. While part
of a machine the pull of the spring had been used against other and
stronger forces, but now, free at last, it was striving to attain the
shape of its original coil” (403). Once again we see the pervasive
imagery of machinery; even in his attempt to symbolically return to
the safety of the womb, Simpson is unable to escape the influence of
the mechanized world around him. Hackett, for his part, sees the
tragedy in this, imagining the womb as an idealized space: “What a
perfect escape the return to the womb was. Better by far than
Religion or Art or the South Sea Islands. It was so snug and warm
there, and the feeding was automatic. Everything perfect in that
hotel. No wonder the memory of those accommodations lingered in
the blood and nerves of everyone. It was dark, yes, but what a
warm, rich darkness. The grave wasn’t in it. No wonder one fought
so desperately against being evicted when the nine months lease
was up” (403–4). But clearly one can never find an actual
replacement for this state. As in the case of Mannie Schwartze, the
closest one can get to this return is death. In lieu of that, the
inevitable turn is to violence.
Harking back to West’s broader focus on mass culture, what is
particularly frightening about the violence in the final pages of the
novel is the way that it erupts as a result of a spontaneous crowd
gathering. West describes the scene in meticulous and horrifying
detail, suggesting that the erupting violence wells up from a site of
repressed rage:

New groups, whole families, kept arriving. He could see a

change come over them as soon as they had become part of the
crowd. Until they reached the line, they looked difficult, almost
furtive, but the moment they became part of it, they turned
arrogant and pugnacious. It was a mistake to think them
harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter,
especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so
by boredom and disappointment.
 All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy
labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious
machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the
leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. . . . If only a
plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the
passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the
newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize
that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day
of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies.
Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions,
wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. . . . Nothing
can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and
bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved
and saved for nothing. (411–12)

The mob feel “cheated and betrayed” when their actual experience
in Los Angeles does not live up to the ideological fantasies that they
have been fed. But the final riot scene of the novel is not without
wry irony and humor. What makes it so bizarre is that some
participants do not even realize that they are part of a riot to begin
with and simply gather because they believe Gary Cooper has been
sighted. This absurdity makes West’s insight into the violence of
crowd mentality all the more disturbing, as does the fact that most
of the participants do not enter with any violent intent but rather
are swept up in the fervor of the moment. Human beings, West
suggests, are tragically susceptible to social influence and mob
mentality.11
Recent critics and historians have drawn major connections
between modernism and fascism. The historian Roger Griffin’s
Modernism and Fascism (2010), for example, convincingly argues
that modernism—in areas from aesthetics to politics—was integral
in setting the stage for the spread of fascism in Europe. Ultimately,
West’s violent vision anticipates the violence of World War II and
the destructive potential of the masses as seen most tragically in the
Nazi concentration camps. His vision serves as a warning about the
destructive potential of modernity’s effects on the individual psyche.
Pushed to the edge, the human animal, like any other, will
inevitably turn violent.

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and the Escape from
Personality
Given the subject matter of The Love of the Last Tycoon and The Day
of the Locust, Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan is
somewhat of an outlier here. It is not a Hollywood novel, strictly
speaking, although it does tell the story of a Hollywood millionaire.
And although it is less dystopian and less steeped in the conventions
of science fiction than Huxley’s earlier novel Brave New World
(1932), After Many a Summer is nonetheless a novel that it is
difficult to imagine Fitzgerald or West ever attempting, at least
successfully. Then there is the obvious fact that Huxley is British,
which makes him an “outsider” alongside these two quintessentially
American writers. But this fact actually makes Huxley’s inclusion
here all the more intriguing, as he offers a sardonic outsider’s
perspective on the ideology of American exceptionalism, which
fascinated Fitzgerald and West. Huxley’s Joe Stoyte is an obvious
caricature of William Randolph Hearst, who does not appear in
either Fitzgerald or West but whose colossal presence in Los Angeles
inevitably informs their respective novels, particularly their
depictions of the gaudy opulence of Southern California’s
aristocracy.12 Unlike Fitzgerald and West, who came to Los Angeles
at the end of their careers, Huxley would spend more than twenty
years in Southern California, mostly in and around Los Angeles
(including Hollywood). While Hollywood and the film industry do
not play a direct role in the novel, their influence on Huxley is clear.
Like those in West’s The Day of the Locust, Huxley’s characters are
often described as artificial, or as actors who are meant to play a
specific role. The chauffeur, for example, who takes Pordage to
Stoyte’s mansion at the beginning of the novel, seems entirely aware
of the part that he is being asked to play in Stoyte’s charade: “Once
more the old-fashioned retainer, the chauffeur, taking off his cap,
did a final impersonation of himself welcoming the young master
home to the plantation, then set to work to unload the luggage”
(26). The chauffer is conscious of his own role, understanding that
Stoyte is interested not only in his practical employment but in his
keeping up the appearance of classical grandeur that feeds Stoyte’s
narcissism. The reference to Stoyte’s mansion as a “plantation,”
which echoes Claude Estee, reflects Stoyte’s desire to possess not
only lavish commodities that serve as testament to his vast wealth
but people themselves.
Huxley builds upon this notion of acting in his description of
Stoyte’s face when he and Pordage first meet: “The face wore that
shut, unsmiling mask which American workmen tend to put on in
their dealings with strangers—in order to prove, by not making the
ingratiating grimaces of courtesy, that theirs is a free country and
you’re not going to come it over them” (28). We see echoes here of
Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr; it is not enough that each man possesses
wealth and power, but he must play the part of a wealthy and
powerful man down to the minutiae of each facial expression. Stoyte
maintains a similar countenance throughout the novel, fitting of the
archetypal American business tycoon after whom he styles himself.
Underneath, however, like Monroe Stahr, Stoyte suffers from an
emotional vulnerability, not unlike the less wealthy and powerful
characters around him. While the other characters are utterly fooled
by Stoyte’s act, Pordage comes to recognize Stoyte’s façade for what
it is: an attempt to mask his deep insecurities. Pordage, in fact, sees
beneath the surface of all the other characters in ways that no one
else is able to do. Perhaps, we might surmise, this is because
Pordage is the novel’s only outsider (a proxy for Huxley), an
Englishman who has not been so thoroughly corrupted by the
intellectually enervating forces of American popular culture. While
the other characters in the novel appear to fully buy into the “acts”
they perform, Pordage sees them for what they are. In the opening
pages of the novel, he observes a number of women walking down
the city streets: “Most of the girls, as they walked along, seemed to
be absorbed in silent prayer; but he supposed, on second thought, it
was only gum that they were thus incessantly ruminating. Gum, not
God” (5). Like those in Locust, Huxley’s characters appear to be
doing something meaningful, but upon deeper examination there is
in fact nothing behind the façade; the façade itself produces the
illusion of meaning. In this case, the juxtaposition is particularly
ironic on account of its religious connection; where God appears to
exist, there is in fact only meaningless, mechanical action.
Religion is a major theme in the novel, and it straddles the
underling paradoxes between mind and body and between faith and
science that compose its essential symbolic structure. In the vein of
Eliot and Joyce, the novel takes up the classic modernist notion that
society’s old (namely, religious) value systems have crumbled.
Huxley suggests that society is at a critical moral and philosophical
juncture, and it is unclear whether salvation will come in the form
of faith or of science. While in the cemetery that Stoyte owns,
Pordage reads religious messages that accompany the sculptures
scattered throughout and reflects upon their meaning in their new
modern context. One in particular sets off his interest: “‘Death is
swallowed up in victory’—the victory no longer of the spirit but of
the body—the well-fed body, for ever youthful, immortally athletic,
indefatigably sexy. The Moslem paradise had had copulations six
centuries long. In this new Christian heaven, progress, no doubt,
would have stepped up the period to a millennium and added the
joy of everlasting tennis, eternal golf and swimming” (16). Jeremy
envisions a materialist heaven rather than a spiritual one, a heaven
that resembles the lives led by the rich inhabitants of Los Angeles.
Like the girls chewing gum who appear to be ruminating upon God,
the cemetery shows all the outward signs of faith, but those buried
there have worshiped and coveted their earthly goods rather than
the God who is evoked at their gravesites. While Fitzgerald and
West do not take up the issue of religion in quite the same way,
each novel uses the setting of Los Angeles to symbolize the broader
and ever-growing trend of American consumer culture. While Stoyte
offers an extreme (and satirical) example, After Many a Summer
suggests that Americans have become obsessed by the notion that
immortality is available for purchase.
For Pordage, the man of history and science, the academic, the
idea of faith in a “higher power” runs counter to his distinctly
practical character. While “faith” is continually undermined
throughout the novel, in Pordage Huxley privileges the importance
not only of experience but of recognizing “meaning” as a construct
rather than an a priori phenomenon: “For Jeremy, direct,
unmediated experience was always hard to take in, always more or
less disquieting. Life became safe, things assumed meaning, only
when they had been translated into words and confined between the
covers of a book” (27). Unlike the novel’s other characters, Pordage
recognizes the importance of language in structuring “reality.” His
reference to Stoyte’s castle upon first seeing it as “this Object” (19)
suggests Lacanian undertones, as though the thing itself cannot be
encompassed by the inadequate descriptions of language. This is
further emphasized by the word’s capitalization, which accentuates
its domineering nature. As he comes upon the castle for the first
time, he makes the following observation: “The Object impended,
insolently enormous. Nobody had dealt poetically with that. Not
Childe Roland, not the King of Thule, not Marmion, not the Lady of
Shalott, not Sir Leoline. Sir Leoline, he repeated to himself with a
connoisseur’s appreciation of romantic absurdity, Sir Leoline, the
baron rich, had—what? A toothless mastiff bitch. But Mr. Stoyte had
baboons and a sacred grotto, Mr. Stoyte had a chromium portcullis
and the Hauberk Papers, Mr. Stoyte had a cemetery like an
amusement park and a donjon like . . .” (27, ellipsis in original). In
some sense, for Pordage at least, what Stoyte has created transcends
words and history, which makes it especially difficult for him to fit
it into the practical paradigm in which he couches his existence. It
also, in that sense, stands as a contrast to religion and symbolically
sets up Stoyte as a Kubla Khanian figure whose vast material
possessions make him a sort of god on earth; though in spite of his
godlike stature, we are led to anticipate the erosion of this heretical
power.
Running directly counter to the religious theme in the novel, and
once again evoking the false belief in a timeless earthly paradise, is
Stoyte’s obsession with developing a scientific cure for aging. The
irony of his wish is that when one turns so entirely from faith to
science one must starkly face the realities of the human animal for
exactly what it is: abject. Our first glimpse of these implications
comes in the form of a description of the gorillas that are housed at
Stoyte’s residence: “Just opposite the point at which they were
standing, on a shelf of artificial rock, sat a baboon mother, holding
in her arms the withered and disintegrating corpse of the baby she
would not abandon even though it had been dead for a fortnight.
Every now and then, with an intense, automatic affection, she
would lick the cadaver. Tufts of greenish fur and even pieces of skin
detached themselves under the vigorous action of her tongue.
Delicately, with black fingers, she would pick the hairs out of her
mouth, then begin again” (91–92). This grotesque scene is, first of
all, a reminder of human mortality that contextualizes Stoyte’s futile
pursuit in a far more disturbing light than Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”
While Stoyte makes an effort to avoid meaningful emotional
attachment, it is also a reminder of the inevitable (“automatic
affection”) connection that even nonhuman animals feel toward one
another. It also suggests the difficulty of understanding and coping
with death. We cannot help but see shades of Stoyte in the baboon
mother, unable to accept the reality of death and decay. Just earlier,
Huxley equates the rich with gorillas, another reminder of the
connection between human beings and our primate ancestors.
Further, the baby symbolically recalls Virginia (whose name is
certainly an ironic joke), who is earlier described as Stoyte’s baby,
“not only figuratively and colloquially, but also in the literal sense
of the word” (50). As two gorillas begin copulating she remarks,
“Aren’t they cute! . . . Aren’t they human!” (93). What is so
disturbing about the scene is precisely that the gorillas are so human
and that their actions, although we would not like to think so, are
not so far removed from our own.
While the gorillas anticipate the final grotesque scene of the
novel, in which we find that the Fifth Earl has devolved into, as
Obispo calls him, a “foetal ape” (353), making a horrifying ironic
joke of Stoyte’s dream, the most truly revealing aspect of the novel
comes in the form of Propter’s ruminations on personality. By way
of contrast, the narrator first explains Propter’s notion that “Peter
Claver’s conception of the world had the defect of being erroneous,
but the merit of being simple and dramatic” (108–9). This
conception consists of a personal and forgiving God, “heaven and
hell and the absolute reality of human personalities” (109), and
other qualities that one would typically associate with a Christian
worldview. Propter, however, poses the following: “For, if
individuality is not absolute, if personalities are illusory figments of
a self-will disastrously blind to the reality of a more-than-personal
consciousness, of which it is the limitation and denial, then all of
every human being’s efforts must be directed, in the last resort, to
the actualization of that more-than-personal consciousness” (109). It
is in this gesture toward something somehow “more-than-personal”
that Huxley most closely reaches a postmodern and Lacanian
psychoanalytic conception of “identity.”
This is supported by other echoes of Lacanian theory elsewhere in
the novel, for example, in Dr. Obispo’s comments during his first
conversation with Pordage, in which he draws a connection between
the novel’s problematic view of religion and what resembles parts of
Lacan’s theory of object choice: “Why, you can’t even love a woman
as she is in herself; and after all, there is some sort of objective
physical basis for the phenomenon we call a female. A pretty nice
basis in some cases. Whereas poor old Dios is only a spirit—in other
words, pure imagination” (61). Like Lacan, Obispo suggests that we
do not actually desire objects themselves but rather the meanings
that we project upon them. Our desires are primarily narcissistic,
and ultimately our only desire is to fill the void opened up by our
entry into the realm of the symbolic.
Propter’s philosophy is not so different from what we find in
Fitzgerald and West, but it is more acutely stated. “To conceive of
that all-important ego of his [referring to Stoyte’s worker from
Kansas] as a fiction,” he ruminates, “a kind of nightmare, a
frantically agitated nothingness capable, when once its frenzy had
been quieted, of being filled with God, with a God conceived and
experienced as a more than personal consciousness, as a free power,
a pure working, a being withdrawn” (111). There are echoes here of
our previous focus on Lacan’s three primary modes of sublimation,
and of course the novel as a whole travels on the border between
science and religion. This is the vision of ideal human identity that
Propter lays out, and it is essentially Lacanian in nature. I would
like to view Propter’s vision, ultimately, as a culmination of the
fragmented view of personality collectively laid out by Fitzgerald,
West, and Huxley. Together, these novels create a post/modern Los
Angeles that imagines not simply an alternative view of subjectivity
—as do many modernist novels—but a profound problematization
of the conception of personality altogether.
I have tried to suggest that the Los Angeles of the 1930s provided
a perfect site for these writers to take up the notion of identity as a
construct, rather than an ontological fixity. As for the city’s broader
symbolic value, there is a great deal of nuance to their view. For
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan also suggests, as Russell Berman
points out, that it is problematic to simply view Los Angeles as a
place disconnected from any but its own ephemeral history:

Stoyte’s own obsessive pursuit of youth, which Pordage

incorporates into his condemnation of the American West, turns
out to draw on a tradition—so we learn from the documents—
that leads back to England, and this unsettles Pordage’s too
comfortable contrast between Old World and New: California
youth culture draws on very Old World traditions. Far from
endorsing the denunciation of Los Angeles as barbarian, Huxley
—not unlike the German exile philosophers Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno—uncovers a dialectic in the Enlightenment
which finds its starkest expression in his new home. (50–51)

Huxley’s Los Angeles, in particular, gives us the paradox of the city’s

vapidity and artificiality—a weakening of historicity—but at the
same time a reminder that even as it seems so completely detached
from what has come before, it is in fact built upon the values of its
nation and its nation’s progenitors. Taken together, Fitzgerald, West,
and Huxley seem keenly aware that Los Angeles represents a new
phenomenon in American life, a fragmentation of old value systems
and of classic notions about identity. But they also maintain a sense
of continuity with the past. This chapter is meant to show that what
we call postmodernism is not so far removed from its predecessor.
In fact, these novelists of the 1930s were already exploring the
major themes that postmodern writers would take up following
World War II. If we thus make a more concerted effort to trace the
lineage of Los Angeles’s representation in modernist fiction, we
might reclaim it from the realm of postmodernism and instead paint
a more accurate picture of its importance to the age of modernism.
CHAPTER 5
THE NEGATION OF SUBJECTIVITY
Méconnaissance and the Other in Beckett’s Murphy

The first four chapters of this project have proceeded for the most
part chronologically, through the work of Joseph Conrad, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, and
Aldous Huxley. I have attempted a sense of continuity in order to
suggest a trajectory from early modernist attempts to situate the
subject within capitalist ideological structures to later novels that
increasingly adopt stylistic and thematic traits typically associated
with postmodernism and poststructuralism. Samuel Beckett’s
Murphy (1938) is thus, in a sense, out of sequence here, as its
publication precedes that of the three novels from the previous
chapter. But like Huxley, who also lived well into the age of
postmodernism, Beckett did the bulk of his writing after 1945. His
work continues to challenge critics, who have called him the last
modernist or the first postmodernist or used countless other
monikers in an attempt to classify his elusive writing. Duncan
McColl Chesney encapsulates the problem of classifying Beckett,
describing him as a “crucial test case” in evaluating the usefulness
and validity of postmodernism as a category, style, or, borrowing a
term from Jameson, “cultural dominant” (637):

He follows perhaps the most exemplary of prose modernists,

James Joyce, and produces a body of work which is very much
unlike that of his famous predecessor and compatriot/co-exile,
as well as that of the subject of his youthful scholarly interest
(another quintessential prose modernist), Marcel Proust. Beckett
clearly, and not just temporally, comes after these modernists
 and their moment. His defining war is the Second, not the First.
His childhood was not that of the fin-de-siècle; his abandoned
homeland was the Republic of Ireland; his exile was so famously
marked by the change of language in order to achieve what he
called “the right weakening effect” in a clear attempt to escape
the style of Joyce in the language of Proust, and thus attain a
style all his own. If post simply means after, then Beckett is
perhaps the first great postmodernist. But we all know it is not
so simple. (637–38)

Indeed, critics have noted that Beckett has often been cited as an
exemplar in justifying just the type of post/modern “break” outlined
above.1 Steven Connor, for instances, writes that “for a while during
the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed to make more sense for critics to use
Beckett’s works to make the case for some kind of break within
modernism, moving beyond the forms of order and authority
represented by high and classic modernism into a world of
unlimited contingency” (2). This is ironic, in some sense, given that,
as Chesney points out, Beckett’s great influences were modernists.
And yet his writing, even as early as Murphy, does not feel quite
right in company with Joyce, Proust, and his other compatriots
(with the exception, perhaps, of Joyce’s 1939 novel Finnegans Wake,
which has itself been used as an emblem to mark the end of
modernism). In addition to being influenced by many modernist
novelists and poets, Beckett was also profoundly influenced by his
radically diverse readings in philosophy, psychology, and other
subjects. These disparate influences generate in Beckett a style that
is intensely literary, deeply philosophical, and packed with
penetrating psychological insight. It is surely in part Beckett’s
footing in so many different disciplines that gives his prose such a
distinctive and unclassifiable character. He is one of those few
writers who truly resist comparison.
Murphy was Beckett’s second novel, although his first, Dream of
Fair to Middling Women, which was allegedly written in a matter of
weeks in 1932, was rejected by publishers and not actually released
until 1992, three years after Beckett’s death. While the mid-1930s
saw the publication of the short story collection More Pricks Than
Kicks (1934) and the collection of poems Echo’s Bones and Other
Precipitates (1935),2 Murphy was Beckett’s first mature effort. The
major event that defined the 1930s for Beckett was the death of his
father in 1933, which was extraordinarily traumatic for him.
Following his father’s death, he began psychoanalytic treatment
with Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic in London. During his
treatment Beckett developed an interest in psychology and began
his own course of study on the subject. Chris Ackerley explains that
“Freud was a major force, Beckett’s interest centering upon
narcissism, neuroses and the psychopathology of daily life rather
than the familiar dreams of totems and taboos. He found in these
studies . . . confirmation of his own intrauterine attraction and
psychosomatic problems, and insights into the fraught relationship
with his mother . . . but he retained a skepticism about their
potential” (17). James Knowlson, one of Beckett’s biographers,
describes some particular influences, writing that “in the course of
his therapy, Beckett read widely on the subject of psychology and
psychoanalysis. R. S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of
Psychology provided him with the general framework he needed. His
detailed notes on this book still exist. In it, he read about
behaviorism, gestalt psychology, Freud, Jung, Adler, and William
McDougall” (171). These readings, coupled with his own
experience, became the inspiration for the Magdalen Mental
Mercyseat, where Murphy eventually takes employment. Given this
context, it is not surprising that Murphy was a deeply personal novel
for Beckett. “Above all,” according to Knowlson, “Murphy expresses
in a radical and sharply focused way that impulse toward self-
immersion, solitude, and inner peace the consequences of which
Beckett was attempting to resolve in his personal life through
psychoanalysis” (203). Together with his philosophical readings of
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and others, Beckett’s readings in
psychology inform Murphy’s unique discourse on human
subjectivity.
While previous critics have observed the novel’s underlying
irony, I will focus specifically on what I find to be a central ironic
tension out of which the novel’s deconstructive critique emerges,
which is the juxtaposition of Murphy’s belief in a Cartesian dualism
to the novel’s narrative posture, which suggests a Lacanian view of
subjectivity as a symptom of desire. In order to reach his utopian
vision of existential transcendence, Murphy attempts to extricate
himself from the torment of the subject-object relationship; in other
words, he desires the negation of desire. The omnipotent narrative
voice, on the other hand, recognizes that desire itself generates
subjectivity, and thus Murphy (like Gatsby) finds himself trapped in
an endless repetition, which in his case is symbolically represented
by his rocking chair. While the rocking of the chair creates physical
movement, in a deeper sense Murphy does not go anywhere at all.
His vision is further sabotaged by the other characters in the novel,
whose ceaseless pursuit of him mocks his attempt to escape the
social dimension of subjectivity (we might imagine Lacan’s symbolic
realm here). As Lacan, Althusser, and others have demonstrated, we
are always already subjected through the signifying practice of
language and our existence in a physical space populated by other
human beings, through whom our desire is mediated. Accordingly,
the driving force of Beckett’s novel is méconnaissance, the persistent
misrecognition that sustains the subject’s sense of unity and
coherence. This leads Murphy continually into the painful realm of
jouissance, culminating in his encounter with Mr. Endon and his
eventual death. While Murphy longs to escape into the realm of the
real, the novel reminds us that our entrance into the symbolic
forever severs us from this realm.

Head/Space
Just as the novels taken up in the previous chapter emphasize the
importance of spatial surroundings in creating a geographical
context for the subject’s existence, Murphy establishes spatiality as a
major theme through its meticulous attention to particular spatial
details. John Pilling argues that Murphy “could be called ‘a novel of
London’ in much the same way as T. S. Eliot’s The waste land [sic]
can be seen as a ‘poem of London,’ and there is perhaps no other
single work of Beckett’s that fosters, though very much as an
incidental by-product, the possibility of a ‘literary pilgrimage’ to the
places mentioned in it” (33). Indeed, Murphy is filled with references
to particular streets, neighborhoods, and landmarks. As John Pilling
goes on to observe, “Without such representational, solid points of
reference—quite as important in their way as the ‘points’ which
both the characters and the narrator insist we take note of . . .
Murphy’s desire to elude definition would itself lack definition”
(33). Particularly interesting in Pilling’s characterization of the
novel is his claim that geography represents an “incidental by-
product” in its own right, along with his insistence that it is in fact
thematically crucial in that it allows a point of juxtaposition against
which Beckett can examine issues of psychology and philosophy.
The paradoxical tension underlying Pilling’s characterization of
geographical specificity in the novel mirrors the ironic tensions that
underlie the novel itself, those between virtual and actual, mental
and physical, subject and object, presence and absence, and
ultimately life and death.
Neary says to Murphy in the opening pages of the novel that “all
life is figure and ground” (2), to which Murphy responds, “But a
wandering to find home” (3). Taking a cue from Joyce, the novel is
pervaded by this desire to “find home,” but Murphy explores a
notion of “home” that is entirely psychological. In these opening
pages, as it will do so often throughout, the novel asks us to
consider the function of a concept that is generally associated with
physicality (wandering) in a less familiar psychological context. In
other words, the novel constantly forces us into an uncanny position
as readers: whenever we try to establish a footing in physical
reality, we are pulled back through the subjective filter of Murphy’s
consciousness. The notion of wandering is also contrasted with
Murphy’s obsession with bondage, which is introduced on the
opening page of the novel, beginning with a meticulous description
of the room in which Murphy feels his deepest pleasure by
distancing himself from the outside world: “The sun shone, having
no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though
he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have
been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on
and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect
commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-
eastern aspect” (1). The novel gives us in this first paragraph not
only the general location of West Brompton but also the
directionality of the apartment itself. In mock epic fashion it even
begins with a description of celestial positioning, foreshadowing the
premonition that Murphy receives from Suk, which he takes as
gospel and obsessively follows in his future actions throughout the
novel. The irony here is that aside from the fact that he prefers
spaces that provide him solitude, physical location is practically
meaningless to Murphy, who desires only withdrawal into his own
mind. As with the juxtaposition between Murphy’s belief in a
mind/body dualism and the novel’s constant undermining of such a
view of subjectivity, one gets the sense that the novel’s meticulous
spatial details subtly mock Murphy’s insistence that place is of no
importance to his project of psychological liberation. Of course, this
is not entirely true for Murphy, as in fact particular places, like the
Cockpit in Hyde Park and, of course, his apartment, become crucial
sites of escape for Murphy. It is significant, going along with this
fact, that the passage refers to Murphy’s state “as though he were
free,” again highlighting the irony that while Murphy may feel a
sense of freedom, we as readers are continually being told that this
freedom is illusory. This is emphasized as well in the reference to
his apartment as a “cage,” suggesting that what Murphy sees as
liberating is in fact a form of confinement—in a physical sense but
perhaps in a psychological or emotional one as well.
Murphy’s fixation on the solitude of his apartment is introduced
in stark terms in the following paragraph, which tells us just how
unusual his obsession is: “He sat naked in his rocking-chair of
undressed teak, guaranteed not to crack, warp, shrink, corrode, or
creak at night. It was his own, it never left him” (1). Murphy’s
nakedness recalls the safety of the womb and his desire to escape
the realm of the symbolic. We also learn that Murphy is not only
mentally but also physically constrained by the scarves that he has
used to fasten himself to his chair: “Seven scarves held him in
position. Two fastened his shins to the rockers, one his thighs to the
seat, two his breast and belly to the back, one his wrists to the strut
behind. Only the most local movements were possible” (1). The fetal
metaphor is extended here as the scarves that hold Murphy to his
chair suggest an umbilical connection, the security of physical
confinement. Later the narrator tells us that “he sat in his chair this
way because it gave him pleasure! First it gave his body pleasure, it
appeased his body. Then it set him free in his mind. For it was not
until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind, as
described in section six. And life in his mind gave him pleasure,
such pleasure that pleasure was not the word” (2). In this initial
description of Murphy’s occupation, we can already begin to see the
novel’s underlying irony emerge: while Murphy insists upon the
absolute separation of mind and body, he nonetheless must rely
upon physical appeasement in order to achieve the psychological
pleasure that prepossesses him.

Murphy’s Mind
The famous sixth chapter of the novel fully lays bare the
philosophical and psychological assumptions according to which
Murphy operates. In doing so, it also calls attention to the
multiplicity of viewpoints regarding subjectivity that the novel
contains. “It is most unfortunate,” the narrator explains, “but the
point of this story has been reached where a justification of the
expression ‘Murphy’s mind’ has to be attempted. Happily we need
not concern ourselves with this apparatus as it really was—that
would be an extravagance and an impertinence—but solely with
what it felt and pictured itself to be” (65). We might interpret “as it
really was” here as a scientific or biological description, the
implication being that such a description would serve no purpose in
this venue. That we are given a description of Murphy’s mind
according to “what it felt and pictured itself to be” suggests the
problem of subjectivity, with which the novel is concerned. There is,
first off, an ontological conundrum here: if we accept that
“Murphy’s mind” carries this conception of itself, are we to assume
that we are speaking here of Murphy? In other words, do we assume
that Murphy’s mind is speaking for him? This once again raises the
issue, which the subsequent paragraphs develop, of the Cartesian
mind/body dualism:

Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere,

hermetically closed to the universe without. This was not an
impoverishment, for it excluded nothing that it did not itself
contain. Nothing had ever been, was or would be in the universe
outside it but was already present as virtual, or actual, or virtual
rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universe
inside it.
This did not involve Murphy in the idealist tar. There was the
mental fact and there was the physical fact, equally real if not
equally pleasant. He distinguished between the actual and the
virtual of his mind, not as between form and the formless
yearning for form, but as between that of which he had both
mental and physical experience and that of which he had mental
experience only. Thus the form of kick was actual, that of caress
virtual. (65)

The description is solipsistic in its insistence on absolute

subjectivity. Although the “mental fact” and the “physical fact” are
said to be “equally real,” all physical experiences are filtered
through processes of mental activity. At the same time, it is only
through mental processes connected with the brain that physical
stimuli can be felt. The two are, then, equally real in the sense that
both mental and physical sensations are registered through the
activity of sensory perception as it is received by the brain. But the
virtual, unlike the real, entails that which cannot be seen or felt by
the real. The foot that kicks has a physical presence in time and
space and is therefore plainly visible; the caress, in the common
sense, is physical as well. The hand that caresses us exists in time
and space and makes physical contact with the sensing body. But
the caress transcends the real in the intangible emotion that it
evokes, the immaterial thought, feeling, or desire that has no
materiality. The novel plainly recognizes the fundamental
subjectivity of human existence. Our experiences, whether mental or
physical, are always filtered through our biological selves and our
psyches.
The Cartesian dualism is more fully developed and muddled by
the narrator’s description of Murphy’s conception of and
relationship toward his body and mind, which is rendered
problematic by an essential lack of understanding: “Thus Murphy
felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse
apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had
anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did
not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected
nor how the two experiences came to overlap” (66). While Murphy
sees the body and mind as equal—if we may extrapolate this from
the previous passage—he also experiences a fundamental disconnect
between the two. Interestingly, despite this philosophical notion of
separation, Murphy does admit to some sort of fundamental
continuity between his body and mind, but he simply chooses to
believe that it is enshrouded in metaphysical mystery: “However
that might be, Murphy was content to accept this partial congruence
of the world of his mind with the world of his body as due to some
such process of supernatural determination” (66). We see here
Murphy succumbing to ideology in the Žižekian sense of choosing to
believe even while the evidence in front of him challenges his belief:
“The problem [of reconciling the disconnect between his body and
mind] was of little interest. Any solution would do that did not clash
with the feeling growing stronger as Murphy grew older, that his
mind was a closed system, subject to no principle of change but its
own, self-sufficient and impermeable to the vicissitudes of the body.
Of infinitely more interest than how this came to be so was the
manner in which it might be exploited” (66). In other words,
Murphy continues to believe, even though he realizes that he is
deceiving himself in doing so. “Any solution would do,” as long as
he does not have to confront reality as such. In a passage from The
Sublime Object of Ideology referenced above, Žižek posits “a new way
to read the Marxian formula ‘they do not know it, but they are
doing it’” (32), which encapsulates the classic Marxist view of
ideology. “The illusion is not on the side of knowledge,” Žižek
explains, “it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the
people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality
itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic
inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the
reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real
social activity” (32). This brings us back to Nostromo, where the
citizens of Sulaco allow themselves to be victimized by bourgeois
ideology and continue to act in ways that obviously run counter to
their own interests (supporting successive political dictators, and so
on).
While the nature of Murphy’s misrecognition is somewhat
different, the effect is nevertheless the same: he is unable to
recognize his role in social activity through his relationship to
others. Despite the obvious and inevitable connections that build
between him and the people around him, he persists in the belief
that he may simply sever these connections at any time and retreat
back into the virtual world of his mind, essentially shutting off the
“actual” world. Let us recall that Žižek concludes the above point by
reformulating Marx’s famous statement: “They know very well how
things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know.
The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the
illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to
reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be
called the ideological fantasy” (32–33). While Murphy believes in the
liberating potential of freeing his mind from the tethers of his body,
the novel makes it clear that his pursuit simply constitutes a
fundamental ideological fantasy.
The essence of Murphy’s fantasy is the belief that if he extricates
himself from the realm of the physical, the realm of bodily
sensation, he can then extricate himself from the realm of desire.
This is where we, as readers, encounter the disconnect between
Murphy’s Cartesian view of subjectivity and that of the novel, which
recognizes that Murphy has already been inevitably cast into the
drama of desire from which his subjectivity has emerged. The
notion of subjectivity that the novel suggests resembles that posited
by Lacan, who maintains that physical objects are only fleeting
material manifestations of our desire, which in fact resides entirely
in the psychological realm, or the realm of the mind, as Murphy
would have it. Murphy’s mistake, in other words, is to think that he
can escape the constriction of corporeality by shielding his body, so
to speak, from the physical world—thus his tying himself to his
chair. The underlying irony in the novel, which functions
simultaneously as comedy and tragedy, arises out of the
juxtaposition of Murphy’s view to the novel’s rejection of
Cartesianism and its insistence that one cannot escape desire, as it is
desire itself that distinguishes us as human. The situational irony in
Murphy’s case is that his very attempt to escape the realm of desire
through physical bondage is actually a symptom of his desire (put in
Lacanian terms) to return to the prespecular and prelinguistic
subjective fantasy prior to the mirror stage, or, as we have seen, a
symbolic return to the safety of the womb. While Murphy becomes
increasingly convinced throughout the novel that he can escape the
external world, which he loathes, and achieve what might be
described as a form of psychological enlightenment, the novel’s
narrative voice simultaneously deconstructs his attempts.
Daniel Katz explores this issue as well, explaining that “a
deconstructive analysis of the ‘voice’ in Beckett inevitably leads to
the broader questions of consciousness, self-presence, and
subjectivity. As Beckett’s prose closes down the space of
phenomenal identification based on the representation of a coherent
subjectivity, it likewise eliminates the possibility of psychologizing
interpretations” (17). Without question, one of the most difficult
characteristics of Beckett’s prose for critics is its inherent resistance
to interpretation. “It is difficult indeed,” Katz writes, “to state the
sum of the achievements of an author who so consistently strove for
erasure, to constantly say in order to have finally said nothing”
(181). This notion of “say[ing] in order to have finally said nothing”
encapsulates Beckett’s deconstructive discourse throughout the
novel. While Murphy is continually denied the negation of desire
that he strives for, the novel ironically ends in erasure when his
ashes are unceremoniously scattered across a soiled barroom floor.3
It is as though Murphy is gradually erased throughout the novel
until he is done away with entirely—and of course Beckett further
develops this irony by continuing the novel for several chapters
after his death.
As we have established, one of the central tensions in the novel is
between Murphy’s attempt to escape the ensnaring net of desire and
the novel’s continually recasting him back into it. Murphy’s essential
problem is that he believes in the uniqueness of his own subjective
experience; as the narrator tells us, “Murphy believed there was no
dark quite like his own dark” (95). Murphy says to Celia during one
exchange early in the novel, “I can’t talk against space” and then
asks her, “What have I now? . . . I distinguish. You, my body and my
mind. . . . In the mercantile Gehenna . . . to which your words invite
me, one of these will go, or two, or all. If you, then you only; if my
body, then you also; if my mind, then all” (25). Murphy’s Cartesian
dualism has animated many critical responses to the novel.
Ackerley, for example, contends that “the structure of the novel as a
whole arises from a distrust of Cartesian rationalism, and its
controlling irony from the incommensurability of Murphy’s declared
goal and its realization in a universe which is unclear and indistinct
—in a word, absurd” (18).4 Thomas J. Cousineau also recognizes
this underlying tension in his account of the novel’s central ironic
structure: “In effect, Beckett uses irony to place in question that very
promotion of mental experience at the expense of the physical
which is the essence of Murphy’s system. The abuse to which he
subjects Murphy serves as a vehicle through which he registers his
suspicion that, as attractive an option as Murphy’s retreat into his
mental world may be, it represents in some way a misconception of
reality” (225). What I find particularly interesting about Cousineau’s
account is the way that he characterizes Beckett as subjecting
Murphy to the abuse he suffers throughout the novel. One cannot
help but feel as though we, as readers, are in on a joke that the
novel is perpetrating against Murphy, that the novel is subtly
mocking him in his attempts at escape. It is as though, in effect, he
is entrapped by the novel—and thus language—itself. While the
novels taken up in previous chapters recognize the importance of
language in structuring subjectivity, Murphy is more assertive in
plainly suggesting that subjectivity is language. This is why a
Lacanian framework is so essential to making sense of the novel’s
complex project.
Not surprisingly, there is precedent for reading Murphy through a
Lacanian lens. Cousineau himself, for instance, addresses the novel’s
treatment of subjectivity as follows:

For both Beckett and Lacan a central concern is the process

through which the primordial subject moves out of its original
undifferentiated experience into the world of customs, cultural
norms, and socially sanctioned rationality. The process itself is
paradoxical. Positively, it confers upon the subject an identity,
through which he perceives himself as an organized unity, and a
language, through which he presents himself to the world and
forms relations with other language-uttering subjects.
Negatively, it substitutes an artificial, socially conditioned self
for the original, authentic, pre-cultural subject. Both Beckett’s
fiction and the psychoanalytical process as envisaged by Lacan
are motivated by the desire, ultimately futile though it may be,
to reverse this process of alienation and to restore original
subjectivity. (225)

Cousineau’s account is rooted in Lacan’s famous account of the

mirror stage, in which the subject first recognizes itself as an
autonomous and coherent whole apart from the mother. As Lacan
explains, however, this apparent “recognition” is in fact a
méconnaissance, or “misrecognition.” Because this autonomy and
coherence are illusory, the subject finds itself forever longing for the
lost unity that the mirror stage deceptively suggests. In some sense,
then, Murphy’s struggle actually brings us back around to Gatsby,
who similarly yearns for a symbolic return to the safety of the
mother’s womb. The primary difference in the two cases is that
Gatsby appears to be entirely unaware of his subconscious desire
and is so thoroughly immersed in ideological and desiring processes
that he believes himself to be striving toward an obtainable goal or
idea, while Murphy’s attempt is premeditated. Gatsby desires the
fulfillment of desire, while Murphy desires its negation.
In outlining the novel’s symbolic structure, Cousineau identifies
Lacan’s symbolic order in the “three zones” that Murphy delineates
in his mind, the “light,” “half light,” and “dark.” respectively. “In
the first,” the novel explains, “were the forms with parallel, a
radiant abstract of the dog’s life, the elements of physical experience
available for a new arrangement. . . . Here the kick that the physical
Murphy received, the mental Murphy gave” (67). This first zone
corresponds with the realm of the symbolic, where experience is
given form and arrangement. “In the second were the forms without
parallel. Here the pleasure was contemplation. This system had no
other mode in which to be out of joint and therefore did not need to
be put right in this. Here was the Belacqua bliss and others scarcely
less precise. . . . The third, the dark [suggesting the Lacanian real],
was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder
of forms. . . . Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure
forms of commotion. Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of
absolute freedom. He did not move, he was a point in the ceaseless
unconditioned generation and passing away of line” (67–68). It is
well known that in discussing the issue of philosophy in Murphy
Beckett pointed to two particular quotations, the first by Arnold
Geulincx: “Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis” (Where you are worth
nothing, there you should want nothing); and the second by
Malraux: “Il est difficile à celui qui vit hors du monde de ne pas
rechercher les siens” (It is hard for someone who lives outside
society not to seek out his own).5 The first is particularly relevant to
Murphy’s desire for negation, which I would argue—going along
with the above description of the three zones—represents for
Murphy an entrance into the realm of the real. But despite his best
efforts at a psychological transcendence that would allow him to
enter the realm of the real, Murphy remains trapped in the
imaginary.
While the mirror stage as described by Cousineau is obviously
important in a Lacanian reading of Murphy, I would suggest that we
might view it as a foundation for what might actually be a deeper
Lacanian reading of the novel. In “The Subversion of the Subject
and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Lacan
maintains that “man’s desire is the Other’s desire [le désir de l’homme
est le désir de l’Autre] in which the de provides what grammarians
call a ‘subjective determination’—namely, that it is qua Other that
man desires (this is what provides the true scope of human
passion)” (Écrits 690). Although there are essentially two
implications that stem from this oft-repeated insistence from Lacan
that “man’s desire is the Other’s desire”—the first that the essence of
desire is the desire of recognition from the other and the second that
desire is directed toward the thing that the other desires—the
fundamental lesson remains the same: that desire is always in some
way mediated by the other and in that sense is always social in
nature. In elaborating this point, Lacan goes on to explain:

It should be noted that a clue may be found in the clear

alienation that leaves it up to the subject to butt up against the
question of his essence, in that he may not misrecognize that
what he desires presents itself to him as what he does not want
—a form assumed by negation in which misrecognition is
inserted in a very odd way, the misrecognition, of which he
himself is unaware, by which he transfers the permanence of his
desire to an ego that is nevertheless obviously intermittent, and,
inversely, protects himself from his desire by attributing to it
these very intermittences. (690–91)

The misrecognition, or méconnaissance, described above grows out

of but extends beyond the mirror stage. It is apparent that Murphy
“transfers the permanence of his desire” to what he believes is a
stable and permanent “self” or ego, an ego that resides within the
realm of the “virtual” and exists in distinction from his physical
body—although, as he admits, the two are mysteriously connected
in some ungraspable way. Murphy’s strapping himself to his rocking
chair is a symptom of this misrecognition, as he fails to realize that
it is the process of desire itself that produces the very ego into
which he longs to retreat. We might extrapolate this further and say
that Murphy’s broader dichotomizing of the “virtual” and “actual”
itself represents a misrecognition that leads to Murphy’s confusion
of psychological and physical space.
In order to bring our Lacanian reading into broader focus, we
might turn to David Watson’s insightful Paradox and Desire in Samuel
Beckett’s Fiction (1991). While Watson searches for a symbolic
landscape that covers the whole of Beckett’s fiction, at this point we
can clearly see how his delineations apply to Murphy: “We thus now
have the elements of a model containing all three of Lacan’s orders:
the symbolic, which for Beckett is the space of words, of the
alienating je; the real, which lies beyond the text in silence; and the
imaginary, instituted at the point occupied by the mirror, where the
self in the other sees an image of the self in silence, the point which
is in some way the locus of an interaction between the zones of
speech and silence” (48). The other for Murphy is Celia, whose
relationship with him is one of the central problems in the novel,
challenging his attempt at mind/body separation. “The part of him
that he hated craved for Celia,” the narrator explains, “the part that
he loved shrivelled up at the thought of her” (5). Despite Murphy’s
psychological protestations, he is unable to keep himself from
desiring Celia on some “bodily” level. This reflects the paradox
described above, as Murphy’s fatal flaw is his inability to
comprehend that these two parts of him are in fact one in the same.
Katz maintains that “Celia represents not an alternative to Murphy’s
narcissistic scrutiny of the skies—narcissistic in that his interest in
them lies in his viewing them as a text of his own life, of himself—
but its continuation” (38). Beckett wryly subverts in Celia the classic
love interest in a way that once again brings us back to the novel’s
underlying conception of desire, which holds that desire is in fact
desire for the desire of the other, or ultimately recognition by the
other of one’s self. While Murphy seeks to perpetually escape the
realm of the other, ironically he must rely upon the other for his
own conception of self. “In Murphy’s dialectic,” Katz continues,
“Celia is one stop on the path that begins with the firmament and
ends with Mr. Endon, in which all acts of scrutiny are investments
in self-scrutiny, and where all objects derive their interest from
narcissistic projection” (38). As we have seen, despite his own
obsessive investment in self-scrutiny, Murphy is nonetheless always
already implicated in desire as a socially mediated phenomenon;
even his narcissism, in the end, is socially mediated.
We might finally say that the part of himself that Murphy hates is
the desiring subject that we all inevitably are, while the part that he
loves is the solipsistic self that exists outside of the subject/object
relationship; thus the central conflict in the relationship between the
two. Lacan says that desire is “caught in the rails of metonymy”
(Écrits 431). If Murphy were able escape the rails of metonymy, he
could then extricate himself from the prescribed path that desire
inevitably leads us down. The narrator’s observation that “soon his
body would be quiet, soon he would be free” (6)—which is repeated
near the end of the novel—reflects the notion that it is in fact the
primal nature of desire that negates any notion of a freedom that we
believe ourselves to be in possession of, a freedom that is inevitably
tied to the corporeal body. In an insightful psychoanalytic reading
of Murphy, Wendy Foster suggests that

for Murphy, social meaning, as with socialized desire, has been

domesticated to a state of patterned regularity, to a kind of
dogmatic fixity that is crystallized, textually, in Suk’s oracle and
spatially in Neary’s futile cycle of bar stools around which “he
sat all day, moving slowly from one stool to another until he had
completed the circuit of the counters, when he would start all
over again in the reverse direction” (56). Neary’s “circuit,” as
the physical exposition of Murphy’s inability to provide a verbal
context for meaning, articulates that fundamental paradox of
mobile immobility that is life within the boundaries of the “big
world.”

I would add that Murphy’s fear of “domestication” extends to his

troubled relationship with Celia as well and her attempts to
persuade him to seek out employment. Entering the workforce
would mean for Murphy capitulation to a socially constructed
notion of the willing subject of the state, a position that Murphy
longs to avoid. Employment would mean, ultimately, a capitulation
to a socially constructed notion of subjectivity that fundamentally
clashes with his ideal philosophy of being. It is this resistance to
social expectation, in part, that causes Murphy to gravitate toward
—and eventually obsessively embrace—the mental patients at the
Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. As Phil Baker observes in Beckett and
the Mythology of Psychoanalysis, “The hermetic sphere of Murphy’s
mind finds its contented correlative in the padded cell; a windowless
upholstered monad which takes on the qualities of both skull and
womb” (71). In the asylum, the circle of life and death is closed, the
metonymic chain of desire is collapsed, and language itself breaks
down.

Deconstructing the Self

In a relatively innocuous-seeming moment in the middle of the
novel, Murphy experiences the following train of thought: “The
Chaos and Waters Facility Act. The chaos. Light and Coke Co. Hell.
Heaven. Helen. Cecilia” (106). At work in this passage is the
metonymic structure of language; Murphy’s mind creates a chain of
signifiers beginning with the Chaos and Waters Facility Act and
ending with Celia. As Foster argues, “Within the space of the ‘big
world’ Murphy is deprived of any kind of agency. He is acted on and
spoken through his capture within objectification—Celia’s
ultimatum, Suk’s prophecy, the ‘goal’ of Miss Counihan, et al. The
language and needs of the ‘big world’ are not his own, but forces to
which Murphy is passively subjected.” Beckett clearly recognizes the
ultimate futility of attempting to transcend our physically grounded
subjectivity in any meaningful way. In a final postmortem request,
Murphy asks that his cremains be unceremoniously flushed down a
toilet; however, his final desire is ultimately thwarted when a bar
fight causes them to be scattered across the barroom floor, part of
the “sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the
vomit” (165), the remains of his physical body disseminated in
space in ironic contrast to his living attempts at immobilization.
Katz emphasizes “how scrupulous Beckett is in refusing to allow
traditional philosophical, literary, historical, and psychoanalytic
notions of subjectivity, consciousness, or intention to be turned into
bulwarks of meaning to orient, control, and finally recuperate the
oscillations of erasure.” “If the metaphysical subject remains a
crucial issue for Beckett,” he argues, “it is largely because its
deconstruction is necessary for the textual movements to be freed
from an ideal tether that would prohibit their flux” (181–82). I
would extrapolate from this that deconstruction is “necessary” in
Murphy and in the other novels analyzed in this project in order to
challenge the conventional notions of subjectivity that modernist
fiction reacted against. I would argue that Beckett’s Murphy is the
ultimate deconstructionist modernist novel. Beckett deconstructs
desire in its role as the fundamental element in structuring language
and ends not by envisioning some new conception of subjectivity
but by reaffirming an essential truth: That language inevitably casts
us into the process of desire. It is impossible to conceive of oneself
outside desire, as desire itself is inherent in the act of conceiving.
There is no “conscious” escape from this, as Murphy would hope;
the only escape is death, or eternal negation.
While the other writers in this project distinguish themselves
from their predecessors by deconstructing conventional notions of
subjectivity rather than looking to supplant them, Beckett pushes
the boundaries of this kind of dialectical deconstructive thinking to
its breaking point. I follow here the path laid out by Richard Begam,
who explains his interest “in reading Beckett through the discourse
of poststructuralism but also in reading the discourse of
poststructuralism through Beckett.” “Such an approach reveals,” he
goes on to claim, “that as early as the 1930s and 1940s Beckett had
already anticipated, often in strikingly prescient ways, many of the
defining ideas of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida.” “Indeed,” he
argues, “we might begin to understand Beckett as a kind of buried
subtext or marginalium in French poststructuralism, the writer who
spoke most resonantly to those thinkers in France who came after
Sartre and reacted against him” (4). In other words, we might think
of Beckett as a sort of full-fledged proto-poststructuralist and,
further, I would argue, proto-Lacanian. While this becomes more
evident in his later work, Murphy functions as a fascinating test case
that nonetheless distinguishes itself from other novels of its time.
Murphy, as Ackerley describes it, “represents the fullest achievement
of the first decade of Beckett’s writing (1926–36)” and “is a
culmination of one stage in Beckett’s career, but equally the
beginning of another, the matrix in which many later works were
formed” (10). In other words, while it is firmly grounded in the
modernist tradition and the influence of Joyce6 and others, it also
represents Beckett’s ultimate trajectory toward the unmistakably
postmodernism. Ackerley also points out, however, that Murphy has
never quite escaped the shadow of Beckett’s later work,7 and in that
sense, I would argue, it still has much to offer us, particularly as we
try to better understand the post/modern divide and its
problematics, as this project has sought to do.
CODA

In Language and Materialism (1977), Rosalind Coward and John Ellis

write that “because all the practices that make up a social totality
take place in language . . . man can be seen as language, as the
intersection of the social, historical and individual” (1). While
Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, Fitzgerald, West, and Huxley undoubtedly
demonstrate an awareness of language and ideology as integral
components of subjectivity, in Beckett we find a more radical
awareness of the notion that, as Daniel Katz remarks in an echo of
Coward and Ellis, “the subject is language” (182). Beginning with
Murphy and expanding into his subsequent fictional and theatrical
explorations, Beckett pushes this notion to its extreme. But while in
this sense he brings us closer to ideas commonly associated with
postmodernism, particularly as his writing career extended into the
1980s, he also brings us back around to Conrad. Both Martin
Decoud and Murphy die in solitude, haunted by the inextricability
of consciousness and action. Just as Conrad and Beckett can be
taken to represent the beginning and the end of the modernist
period, we might consider Decoud and Murphy as occupying
opposing ends of the same spectrum. While Decoud experiences an
existential crisis when his sense of self vanishes into the dark
solitude of the void, Murphy, paradoxically, longs to inhabit this
precise condition. What Decoud finds unbearable, Murphy finds
liberating. Broadly speaking, this instance in Conrad shows the
desire to recapture a lost sense of order, which many critics have
seen as a hallmark of modernism, while Beckett revels in the chaos
in classic postmodernist fashion.
But this seeming difference is belied by the underlying irony of
each novel’s narrative voice. Just as Beckett produces ironic tension
in Murphy by juxtaposing the desires of the characters within the
novel to the distanced narrator, in Nostromo Conrad devises a
narrator who exists within the world of the novel and yet presents it
in a near-omniscient fashion that produces a similar tension
between the characters and their ideological circumstances. As
critics like Fredric Jameson have observed, Conrad’s movement
beyond the embedded narrator of Lord Jim to a more complex and
nearly omniscient narrator in Nostromo grants him a narrative
posture that lays bare the psychological dramas of his characters
while simultaneously maintaining a narrative distance that more
panoramically frames those dramas for readers. Read this way, the
intersection of Beckett’s narrativity with his treatment of
subjectivity is not in itself new; it is, rather, an outgrowth of a
method that Conrad was already developing at the turn of the
century. While Beckett thus brings us closer historically and
stylistically to the moment of postmodernism, his modernist lineage
is essential to an understanding of the role of modernism in shaping
the ways of depicting subjectivity in fiction and of actually
theorizing subjectivity as a phenomenon.
In closing, I would like to make one last gesture toward the
historically oriented post/modern debate through which I have
framed the more particular issue of subjectivity. In a December 20,
1897, letter to R. B. Cunningham Graham, Conrad advances a
definition of history that encapsulates both the turn-of-the-
twentieth-century zeitgeist and modernism as historical and artistic
phenomena:

There is—let us say—a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely

scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—it knits. I
am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it
ought to embroider—but it goes on knitting. You come and say:
“this is all right: it’s only a question of the right kind of oil. Let
us use this—for instance—celestial oil and the machine shall
embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold.” Will it?
Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery
with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that
the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought,
 without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without
heart. It is a tragic accident—and it has happened. You can’t
interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion
that you can’t even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and
immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into
existence it is what it is—and it is indestructible! (Selected Letters
82)

As we have seen in our analysis of Nostromo, Conrad’s world is a

frighteningly indifferent one absent of a priori determinants or
values.1 Human existence, according to such a viewpoint, is
distinctly messy; despite our best efforts to construct historical
events into a narrative that fits them into whatever value systems
we have adopted, the situation on the ground, so to speak,
ultimately resists meaningful representative signification. While
Conrad does not directly address the issue of subjectivity here, we
see that by implication it is interpenetrated by the processes of
history. We might say, in keeping with his metaphor, that human
consciousness is woven into the fabric of history’s knitting; it is not
distinctly visible in its individuality from a panoramic view, but it is
nonetheless integral. After all, what is history without human
consciousness to experience and record it? This interrelationship
between the unfolding of history and the individuals caught up in its
unfolding encapsulates Conrad’s narrative project and, as we have
seen, Nostromo’s exploration of both personal and historical dramas.
As I have shown in chapters 1 and 2, Conrad’s approach forecasts
that of other modernist writers, who similarly deconstruct
conventional notions of subjectivity and show that while humans
are actively engaged in the process of “making” history in the form
of narrative, our own (self-)identities are simultaneously implicated
in these same processes.
I would like to close by juxtaposing Conrad’s knitting machine
metaphor to one of the most important passages from Thomas
Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), widely viewed as a seminal
postmodern novel, and one that led Brian McHale to “favor 1966 as
year zero of postmodernism” (“What Was Postmodernism?”). In it,
the narrator describes a trip taken by the heroine, Oedipa Maas, and
her now deceased ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, to Mexico City:
“They somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the
beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a
triptych, titled ‘Bordando el Manto Terrestre,’ were a number of frail
girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in
the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry
which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking
hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures,
all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this
tapestry, and the tapestry was the world” (20–21). The work
described, known in English as Embroidering Earth’s Mantle, was
painted late in Varo’s career, in 1961, just two years before her
death. The obvious primary influence of the work is surrealism, a
movement that coincided with modernism in the 1920s but
remained popular beyond World War II and into the 1960s. The
painting becomes a centerpiece in the novel, much like Tod’s The
Burning of Los Angeles in West’s The Day of the Locust. What is
initially striking about the painting in a most general sense is that
Varo’s choice of metaphor closely resembles Conrad’s. But whereas
Conrad is embroiled in a historical moment marked by the growth
of modernity and thus imagines a “machine,” Varo imagines a
tapestry that is human made. And while Conrad’s machine can only
knit—suggesting that history unfolds chaotically rather than neatly
—Varo’s women embroider a remarkable tapestry that billows from
their tower and comprises the landscape around them. McHale
explains that the painting “produces a visual equivalent of the kind
of ontological paradoxes that one finds in postmodernist novels—
paradoxes based on the running-together, in a logically impossible
way, of different levels of reality. . . . Pynchon calls our attention to
this paradox in Varo’s painting, and builds it into his heroine’s
experiences of entrapment in a world of strange loops.” Although
Varo’s painting and its use by Pynchon depart metaphorically from
Conrad’s image in various ways, Conrad’s fiction similarly
represents the “paradoxes based on the running-together, in a
logically impossible way, of different levels of reality.” He does this
in Nostromo, for example, by taking us into the psyches of various
characters and showing how their unique circumstances affect their
consciousness and perception of the “real” events that occur in the
novel. He does this earlier in Lord Jim as well, where fragments of
the narrative are slowly pieced together as they are recalled by
various characters. And like Joyce and Woolf, he also engages the
void, as we have seen.
Looked at another way, Varo’s painting might be seen as a
metaphor for the way in which the void of each individual’s
subjectivity is populated by the world of the symbolic. As Lacan tells
us, that which we experience as “reality” is in fact only our illusory
relationship to the real as it is mediated through the realm of the
symbolic. As she stands in front of the painting, Oedipa begins to
weep as she experiences a moment of epiphany, realizing that the
painting symbolizes her own condition of existence:

She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a
painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a
couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by
accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away
from nothing, there’d be no escape. What did she so desire to
escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to
think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture,
are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her
where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her
from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus
except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless
magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field
strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on
superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go
mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the
knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else? (21–
22)

Oedipa’s name, which is of course derived from Oedipus, suggests

the inescapability of fate. The “anonymous and malignant” magic
that is “visited on her from outside and for no reason at all” evokes
the indifference of time in Conrad’s knitting-machine metaphor. The
glibness of the choices afforded her—“fall back on superstition, or
take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk
jockey”—testify to the absurdity of living in a world without
inherent meaning, one in which the ego is “only incidental” and the
tower in which one is imprisoned is one’s own creation. While
Oedipa is unable to escape her own subjectivity, history marches on
indifferent to her plight.
While McHale and others view The Crying of Lot 49 as a
prototypical postmodern text, I wonder if Pynchon’s treatment of
ontology is really so different from Beckett’s, or even Conrad’s? On
the contrary, I would argue that the primary difference between
Pynchon’s exploration of ontological questions in The Crying of Lot
49 and Conrad’s in Nostromo and elsewhere is more than anything
merely stylistic. As is typical in the postmodern novel, Pynchon
pulls readers into the drama that his characters are experiencing in
a way that Conrad does not. Conrad maintains an ironic distance in
his narrative posture the likes of which Pynchon has rejected
entirely. But despite certain undeniable stylistic differences, I have
tried to show that as far back as Conrad we see writers working
through the notion that our “reality” is in fact a construction of our
own subjective consciousness. The examples from Conrad and
Pynchon above do reflect changes in both historical perspective and
stylistic conventions, but they are in essence promoting the same
ontological worldview.
I would thus reiterate that rigid distinctions like McHale’s—
especially given his explicit use of Pynchon—rely too heavily upon
an oversimplified view of the modernist project. Certainly historical
evolutions and major historical events—namely, World War II—
have produced scientific, technological, social, economic, and other
changes that justify the practice of demarcating epochal changes. So
my goal is not the rejection of postmodernism as a historical,
artistic, or theoretical category. Such distinctions as those between
modernism and postmodernism can be both useful and necessary in
helping us understand historical progression and social evolution.
But as the eminent modernist scholar Robert Scholes remarks in his
conclusion to Paradoxy of Modernism (2006), “the Modernists were
grappling with the same modernity which we inhabit, though ours is
a more extreme case of it, to be sure” (276). Just as Scholes breaks
down the critical tendency to draw distinctions within the modernist
period between “high” and “low,” “old” and “new,” and ultimately
“good” and “bad,” we must resist the impulse to view
postmodernism as an overcoming of modernism’s limitations.
Rather, we ought to view postmodernism, particularly on the pivotal
subject of ontology, as carrying on the project of the modernist
writers who were already speaking the language of postmodern
theory. Doing so will allow for a more robust appreciation of
modernism’s contribution in shaping one of the central
philosophical and artistic preoccupations of the twentieth century,
and one that despite our best efforts we still have not quite moved
beyond.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. It is worth noting that Nancy ultimately defends subjectivity, offering the following
explanation: “That which obliterates is nihilism—itself an implicit form of the metaphysics
of the subject (self-presence of that which knows itself as the dissolution of its own
difference). There is nothing nihilistic in recognizing that the subject—the property of the
self—is the thought that reabsorbs or exhausts all possibility of being in the world (all
possibility of existence, all existence as being delivered to the possible), and that this same
thought, never simple, never closed upon itself without remainder, designates and delivers
an entirely different thought: that of the one and that of the some one, of the singular
existent that the subject announces, promises, and at the same time conceals” (4).
2. In a follow-up to their 2006 book Bad Modernisms, Douglas Mao and Rebecca
Walkowitz remark that “were one seeking a single word to sum up transformations in
modernist literary scholarship over the past decade or two, one could do worse than light
on expansion” (“New Modernist Studies” 737). In tracing this expansion, they address the
insular focus of twentieth-century modernist criticism:

Meanwhile, interrogations of the politics, historical validity, and aesthetic value of

exclusive focus on the literatures of Europe and North America have spurred the study
(in the North American academy) of texts produced in other quarters of the world or
by hitherto little-recognized enclaves in the privileged areas. In addition to these
temporal and spatial expansions, there has been what we are calling here a vertical
one, in which once quite sharp boundaries between high art and popular forms of
culture have been reconsidered; in which canons have been critiqued and reconfigured;
in which works by members of marginalized social groups have been encountered with
fresh eyes and ears; and in which scholarly inquiry has increasingly extended to
matters of production, dissemination, and reception. (737–38)

The article quoted here, “The New Modernist Studies,” provides an excellent survey of the
ever-changing landscape of modernist studies in the early twenty-first century.
3. Although it should be mentioned that the general notion of modernisms in varying
contexts dates back at least to Frank Kermode’s use of the term in The Sense of an Ending.
 4. Ross closes by arguing that “our task now is to explore the occulted relationship
between modernism and theory as aspects of the twentieth century’s massive cultural
upheavals. We must approach the problematic of modernism/theory from a range of
perspectives, including the institutional, historical, and discursive constructions of them as
distinct fields. Additionally, we must push beyond disciplinary squabbles to ask not just
what modernism can tell us about theory and what theory can tell us about modernism,
but also what the nexus modernism/theory can tell us about the twentieth century’s
preoccupations, tendencies, triumphs, and failures” (Modernism and Theory 15). As
subjectivity was certainly one of the preoccupations, if not the central one, of twentieth-
century intellectual and artistic culture, it is imperative that we shed a new light on this
nexus.
5. Friedman’s explanation of why Joyce’s work lends itself particularly well to
poststructuralist readings is also useful: “First, as Sigmund Freud frequently stated, poets
often ‘discover’ what philosophers and others come to theorize many years later.
Poststructuralist theory is, in the eyes of many, an extension into philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and linguistics of what writers such as Gertrude Stein and Joyce forged in
literary discourse” (3). The present volume operates on the same premise, arguing that
postmodern theories of subjectivity are extensions of ideas forged in modernist fiction.
6. I borrow here from Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “subject-in-process”: “It is poetic
language that awakens our attention to this undecidable character of any so-called natural
language, a feature that univocal, rational, scientific discourses tend to hide—and this
implies considerable consequences for its subject. The support of this signifying economy
could not be the transcendental ego alone. If it is true that there would unavoidably be a
speaking subject since the signifying set exists, it is nonetheless evident that this subject, in
order to tally with its heterogeneity, must be, let us say, a questionable subject-in-process”
(135).
7. According to Roudinesco,

During the First World War, as a pupil at the Collège Stanislas, Lacan thought of
embarking on a political career, happily regarding himself as a twentieth-century
Rastignac. He was interested in everything: new literature, the work of James Joyce,
Maurras’ style, Léon Bloy’s desperate imprecations, libertinism, extreme experiences,
the philosophy of Nietzsche. And he had a horror of his family origins: a bigoted
mother, a father who was a sales rep crushed by the omnipotence of his own father,
and ancestors who were vinegar merchants. In a sense, he rejected the chauvinistic
France profonde from which he hailed. Hence his attraction to Parisian intellectual
elites, avant-garde movements (Dadaism and surrealism), sartorial eccentricity,
 unusual food, the centres of European culture (London and Rome), and, finally, women
who did not resemble his mother, who were not “maternal.” (11–12)

Chapter 1
THE INTERPELLATED SUBJECT
1. By my count, Nostromo himself references the parable four times, and there are two
additional descriptions of Nostromo’s thoughts in which he compares himself to the
enslaved specters. There are, additionally, many other implicit references and connections
to the parable throughout the novel that do not name it explicitly.
2. For an exemplary account of how spiritualism and the occult influenced such
imagery in late nineteenth-century writers, and Conrad in particular, see Stephen Ross’s
“The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Modernist Haunting.”
3. Robert Caserio’s 1981 essay “Joseph Conrad, Dickensian Novelist of the Nineteenth
Century” is a notable exception. Caserio argues that Conrad’s fiction can be characterized
as “a reflective medium . . . whose objects and forms are likened best to spectral
emanations” (340). Conrad’s particular type of novel, which Caserio calls “a spectral
mirror,” uniquely captures “what is—like a ghost—visible and invisible, substantial and
shadowy, natural in origin and preternatural in manifestation or effect” (340) and, in doing
so, “challenges the authority of history, sociology, philosophy, and science” (339).
Caserio’s essay offers a workable foundation for considering the nature and importance of
Conrad’s spectral narrativity, but like many Conrad critics, he stops short of what might be
a more fruitful engagement with the intersection of the personal and political that informs
so much of Conrad’s fiction.
4. Derrida’s book was originally published in 1993 as Spectres de Marx but was first
published in English in 1994 by Routledge.
5. “The Spectre of Ideology” was subsequently reworked and appeared in Interrogating
the Real (2006) as “Between Symbolic Fiction and Fantasmic Spectre: Towards a Lacanian
Theory of Ideology.” My references throughout will be to the former.
6. Cedric Watts gives a useful account of the novel’s “narratorial mobility,” relating it
specifically to the narrator’s “spectral mobility of fictional ‘omnisciences’” (77).
7. Jameson says of the role of the Monterist Revolution in the novel: “The hold of
conventional notions of presence, both physical and narrative, leads us to assume that it is
only at this second point in the novel that the event in question ‘really’ happens at last. Yet
it would surely be more adequate to suggest that in that sense it never really happens at
all, for the initial discursive reference to it—not as scene but as fact or background—
dispenses Conrad from having to ‘render’ it in all its lived presence later on. This central
event is therefore present/absent in the most classic Derridean fashion, present only in its
initial absence, absent when it is supposed to be most intensely present” (Political
Unconscious 270). This absent presence illustrates just one of the many ways in which
Conrad’s narrative style anticipates a poststructuralist understanding of language,
narrative, and interpretation.
8. Žižek’s point recalls Blanchot’s concept of “permanent revolution,” which for Derrida
“supposes the rupture of that which links permanence to substantial presence, and more
generally to all onto-logy” (Specters of Marx 39).
9. Benita Parry, for example, argues that because “the central figures are represented as
individual products and victims of historical circumstances, pressing against the frontiers of
their given situation and destroyed by their presumption, ‘history’ as the collective project
of human agents is itself the principal protagonist in Nostromo and the destiny of an entire
social order its subject” (101–2). Guerard, who for his part is more attuned to the
importance of focusing on the psyche of the individual in the novel (but still undervalues
the complexity of its psychodynamics), argues that it “recognizes unconscious motives and
self-deceptions (Charles Gould’s especially) but its treatment of them—its psychology, in a
word—is classical rather than Freudian. Reason and folly play a larger part than
unconscious or half-conscious compulsion; reasoning on political affairs occupies more
pages than solitary introspection” (177). And Ian Watt is similarly out of step in Conrad in
the Nineteenth Century (1979), remarking that “Conrad did not continue to develop the
subjective aspect of the disjunction between the individual consciousness and everything
outside it; or at least it was in the phase of intense experimentation which began in 1896
and ended in 1900 that Conrad was most deeply involved in presenting the obdurate
incompatibility of the self and the world in which it exists” (357). Cedric Watts is a notable
exception in this regard. He maintains that “Nostromo is a powerfully psycho-political
novel. By ‘psycho-political’ I mean that Conrad conceives human psychology largely in
terms of political history, and political history largely in terms of human psychology” (85).
10. In addressing such a suggestive misreading of this scene, Stephen Ross fittingly
turns to the language of “gaps” that we have encountered across the works of Eagleton,
Jameson, and Žižek: “Seeing both the world around him and his own existence as
permeated with gaps, perplexing spaces of nothing, Nostromo becomes a fully modern,
proto-Imperial subject. With this reconfiguration, Nostromo steps out of the spurious social
role he has occupied (as merely a structural feature of the emergent Imperial order) and
determines to take charge of his destiny, supplementing his earlier ethic of action with the
calculation of ideological consciousness in a concerted effort to ‘gain a sense of mastery
over the fates’” (Conrad and Empire 138).
 11. Jameson makes a similar observation regarding the disconnect between Nostromo’s
actions and the mythology that is spawned from the people’s misunderstanding of them:

The central act, the heroic expedition of Decoud and Nostromo, which ought to have
grounded their status as heroes, as ultimate legendary forms of the individual subject,
is appropriated by collective history, in which it also exists, but in a very different
way, as the founding of institutions. In classical Sartrean language, we can say that the
historical act of Decoud and Nostromo has been alienated and stolen from them even
before they achieve it; or in a more Hegelian terminology, their action can be
characterized as that of structural ephemeral mediation. They stand indeed in the
Weberian place of the “vanishing mediator,” of the prophetic or charismatic individual
term whose historical but transindividual function, according to the “ruse of history,”
is merely to enable the coming into being after him of a new type of collectivity.
Decoud’s and Nostromo’s is the moment of the action of the individual subject, but
one which is at once reabsorbed by the very stability and transindividuality of the
institutions it is necessary to found. (Political Unconscious 278–79)

That such an “action of the individual subject” should be so cynically co-opted by the very
forces that have set the annihilation of Nostromo and Decoud in motion shows the
inextricability of the ideological and subjective registers in the novel.
12. Cedric Watts makes a similar point, writing that “Conrad’s oblique method [of time
shifts as a narrative strategy] could almost have been designed to induce in the reader the
very flexibility that most of the main figures in the novel lack, and suffer from lacking.
Thus, while demonstrating the political infancy of men, the novel embodies its own
political maturity in techniques which entail for the reader an education in that maturity.
By delaying the decoding of events, Conrad forces us to share the myopia of his characters;
but, by provoking the decoding, he provides a therapy which helps us to share his own
keen vision” (82). I view this “decoding” as another way of describing the ideology critique
in which the novel’s narrative voice engages. I would only add my belief that despite the
characters’ undeniable myopia, this decoding is available within the world of the novel to
anyone who would truly attempt to understand the layers of ideological mystification at
work.

Chapter 2
THE VOID OF SUBJECTIVITY
1. For a compelling comparative study of Conrad and Joyce, see Szczeszak-Brewer.
Citing Adolf Nowaczyński, who “called the Irish the Poles ‘of the Western world’” (9),
Szczeszak-Brewer examines the two writers as like-minded exiles who developed a
skepticism toward the religious authority and colonial past of their respective homelands
and points to the ways in which Conrad and Joyce used their fiction to critique traditional
power structures and ideologies in favor of a more individualized form of self-
determination.
2. The most well known example comes from Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious,
which examines the influence of popular- and mass-culture genres like romance and
adventure tales on Conrad’s fiction: “This emergence is most dramatically registered by
what most readers have felt as a tangible ‘break’ in the narrative of Lord Jim, a qualitative
shift and diminution of narrative intensity as we pass from the story of the Patna and the
intricate and prototextual search for the ‘truth’ of the scandal of the abandoned ship, to
that more linear account of Jim’s later career in Patusan, which, a virtual paradigm of
romance as such, comes before us as the prototype of the various ‘degraded’ subgenres into
which mass culture will be articulated (adventure story, gothic, science fiction, bestseller,
detective story, and the like)” (206–7).
3. The commentary of Mary Ann Doane is also very instructive in this regard:

In Lacan’s account of the concept, sublimation is the result of a crisis concerning the
object; it is motivated by the void which signals the relation between the real and the
signifier—“In all forms of sublimation the void will be determinant.” Art is perhaps
the pre-eminent form of sublimation and the most primordial artistic activity may
very well be that of the potter who produces the vase which, for the archaeologist, is
the irrefutable sign of a human presence. For Lacan, the vase creates the void in its
very form and through this fact suggests the perspective of fullness—“if the vase can
be full, it is insofar as, in its very essence, it is empty.” Given the fundamental lack or
emptiness Lacan associates with the signifier, the vase deserves its archaeological
prominence because it incarnates the signifying emptiness or void. Art is characterized
by a certain mode of organization around the void; religion is constituted by all the
means of avoiding the void (or, perhaps, as Lacan later amends it, “respecting” the
void); and the discourse of science simply rejects the void in favor of a realistic
discourse which is adequate to the object. (256)

4. Lacan says of das Ding that because it is in fact located at the level of the
unconscious Vorstellungen (mental image), “the Thing only presents itself to the extent that
it becomes word” (Ethics of Psychoanalysis 55), or only as a function of external
signification.
5. For an excellent account of scholarship on Conrad’s skepticism, see Peters, chap. 5.
6. J. Hillis Miller, for example, maintains that “the special place of Joseph Conrad in
English Literature lies in the fact that in him the nihilism covertly dominant in modern
culture is brought to the surface and shown for what it is” (5). John Peters points to
William W. Bonney and Roy Roussel as critics with similar views of Conrad’s nihilism.
7. It is important to properly contextualize Conrad’s preface, and indeed all of the
commentary that appears outside Conrad’s fiction, as he was often susceptible to emotional
reaction, hyperbole, and otherwise provocative statements that cannot always be said to
represent his actual sentiments with full accuracy. Apropos of his preface to The Nigger of
the “Narcissus,” Ian Watt tells us in a 1974 essay that “doubts about the Preface actually
began very early; indeed, with Conrad himself” (“Conrad’s Preface” 101). Indeed, in a
letter to Edward Garnett Conrad seemed unusually reticent about the preface, and his
editor, Sidney Pawling, rejected it for the initial publication of the novel. After appearing
alongside the serialized version in the New Review, it was not included with the novel
again until the 1914 Doubleday Page edition. Although the preface was criticized by some
both in Conrad’s time and after, Watt maintains that while such criticisms “are largely
justified if we try to read it as an analytic exposition of a theory of fiction,” in fact, “in any
rigorous sense of the word, Conrad had no such theory, and did not want to have.” “But
since as Conrad wrote no other inward account of his creative aspiration,” he goes on to
explain, “the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ remains by default the most reliable,
and the most voluntary, single statement of Conrad’s general approach to writing” (103).
8. Of course, we must also recognize that as on so many occasions, Conrad offers
contradictions on the point of his religious beliefs. In Zdzisław Najder’s seminal biography,
for example, Conrad is quoted as saying that “I was born a R.C. [Roman Catholic] and
though dogma sits lightly on me I have never renounced that form of Christian religion.
The booklet of rules is so, I may say, theological that it would be like renouncing the faith
of my fathers” (535).
9. We might also take the opportunity here to recall Hassan and McHale’s insistence on
epistemology, rather than ontology, as the defining mode of modernism. This is just one
instance from the modernist canon of the overriding importance of ontological concerns.
Paul Armstrong is also attuned to this fact in this particular scene:

The world is social to such a radical degree that “reality” exists only through the
intersubjective recognition of objects. Things themselves become ephemeral to a single
consciousness. Decoud’s sense of his own identity slips as well because who we are for
Conrad depends on the way others see us. . . . Decoud finds that the self loses
substance when the gaze of others no longer objectifies it. Decoud’s longing for
another’s “face” and “sight” emphasizes that one’s identity is constituted by the regard
of others and threatened by its absence. Deprived of a field of interpersonal
differences against and within which to define himself, Decoud feels pulled into
 amorphous oneness with the natural world—a terrible rather than rejuvenating
experience because this loss of self is pure destruction and not a reabsorption into a
higher unity. (165–66)

Although he does not explicitly mention Lacan, certainly Armstrong’s use of quotation
marks around the word reality and his reference to concepts of intersubjectivity and the
gaze invite a more overt comparison.
10. For another recent treatment of the issue of religion in Joyce, see Van Mierlo.
11. Although the final form of the theory appeared in 1916, it would take several years
before Einstein gained general notoriety.
12. For some representative treatments of Woolf’s relationship with religion, see Knight;
Graham and Lewis; Griesinger; and Gay.
13. A few recent examples include Henry; Alt; and Crossland.
14. For a useful overview of competing critical positions, see Mackin.
15. Toril Moi is especially astute on this point:

To the Lighthouse illustrates the destructive nature of a metaphysical belief in strong,

immutably fixed gender identities—as represented by Mr and Mrs Ramsay—whereas
Lily Briscoe (an artist) represents the subject who deconstructs this opposition,
perceives its pernicious influence and tries as far as is possible in a still rigidly
patriarchal order to live as her own woman, without regard for the crippling
definitions of sexual identity to which society would have her conform. It is in this
context that we must situate Woolf’s crucial concept of androgyny. This is not, as
Showalter argues, a flight from fixed gender identities, but a recognition of their
falsifying metaphysical nature. Far from fleeing such gender identities because she
fears them, Woolf rejects them because she has seen them for what they are. She has
understood that the goal of the feminist struggle must precisely be to deconstruct the
death-dealing binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity. (13–14)

16. This is a view shared by James Martel: “One could say that, as a failed artist, Lily is
also able to access her failure as a subject; she has a sense that parts do not always cohere,
that beauty and dazzle are not the same as truth, and that there is no inherent destiny of
telos that demands that, in the end, we all will be complete and whole subjects (or at least
those of us who rate such a happy ending)” (188).

Chapter 3
THE SUBJECT IN PROCESS
1. For an excellent overview of Joyce’s influence on Fitzgerald, see Thomas.
2. Robert Emmet Long was the first to meaningfully explore the Conrad-Fitzgerald
connection in his essay “The Great Gatsby and the Tradition of Joseph Conrad.” Long’s
study is broad in scope and traces Gatsby’s influence through a number of Conrad’s novels.
His was also the first sustained analysis of the similarities between Heart of Darkness and
The Great Gatsby.
3. These include, to name a few, the influential collection Female Subjects in Black and
White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1997), edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian,
and Helene Moglen; Claudia Tate’s Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the
Protocols of Race (1998); Barbara Johnson’s The Feminist Difference: Literature,
Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (1998); Christopher Lane’s collection The Psychoanalysis
of Race (1998); Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’s Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race
(2000); Mikko Tuhkanen’s The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and
Richard Wright (2009); and various contributions from Slavoj Žižek, Homi Bhabha, Joan
Copjec, Judith Butler, and others.
4. For an excellent interpretation of the novel’s internal contradictions, see John
Hilgart’s essay, which “resist[s] the conclusion that contradiction in the novel defines
Nick’s limitations, arguing on the contrary that contradiction is very much Nick’s overt
technique, serving not only to undercut his critique of commodity culture but to mount it”
(88).
5. “The French word [jouissance], given its indissoluble relationship to all the rest of
Lacan’s teaching, including his mathemes or his logical and topological formulae, is
difficult to translate into English. Lacan himself was aware of the problem and favored a
combination of ‘enjoyment’ and ‘lust’; however, all translators have noted the conceptual
loss that is sustained in the use of these terms, and therefore the great majority prefer to
keep the French word, without italics, as a word already recognized by the OED and as a
psychoanalytic contribution to the English language” (Braunstein 103).
6. “Objet ‘a’ designates the lost object as an abject remnant and uncanny revenant of
the Real. Its lower-case ‘a’ stands for autre or little other in order to distinguish it from the
Big Other of the general language system. In French objet a was pronounced by Lacan as
objet petit a, ‘object small a,’ both in order to preserve its quasi-algebraic character as an
abstract symbol for the absence of the lost object and also to sound like objet petit tas, ‘a
little pile of shit’” (Levine 67). Lacan maintained that the term should remain untranslated,
wishing it to resemble an algebraic sign. As a result, it is represented by English translators
as objet petit a, objet a, and at times simply objet. It is also—against Lacan’s wishes—often
translated as “object a,” “little object a,” and so on. For this reason, the reader may assume
that the various terms are used interchangeably in this essay and refer to the same concept.
7. For some of the most lucid explications of Lacan’s work, see Fink’s The Lacanian
Subject (1995), A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1997), Lacan to the
Letter (2004), and Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique (2007).
8. See Godden, “A Diamond Bigger than the Ritz,” for more on Daisy’s voice.
Chapter 4
SPATIALIZED SUBJECTIVITY
1. The geographical and temporal proximity of West’s and Fitzgerald’s deaths reflects a
number of parallels between their career trajectories. Edmund Wilson points out that “both
men had been living on the West Coast; both had spent several years in the studios; both,
at the time of their deaths, had been occupied with novels about Hollywood” (Classics and
Commercials 51–52).
2. While Fitzgerald and West died in 1940, well before critics began debating
postmodernism, Huxley lived until 1963 and went on to write novels like Island (1962),
which could arguably be classified as postmodern. Because the bulk of Huxley’s writing
occurred before World War II—and in fact stretched back as far as 1916—most of his
writing can be classified as modernist.
3. The Love of the Last Tycoon was originally published in 1941 under the title The Last
Tycoon and edited by Edmund Wilson, but Matthew Bruccoli’s 1993 edition, which uses
Fitzgerald’s preferred title, The Love of the Last Tycoon, and more faithfully maintains the
portion of the novel that Fitzgerald had actually completed, has become the preferred
version.
4. Notable works include Thomas Strychacz’s Modernism, Mass Culture and
Professionalism (1993), Susan Hegeman’s Patterns for America Modernism and the Concept
of Culture (1999), Allison Pease’s Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity
(2000), David Seed’s Cinematic Fictions (2009), and Scott Ortolano’s Popular Modernism
and Its Legacies (2017).
5. Matthew J. Bruccoli writes of Fitzgerald’s Last Tycoon: “Fitzgerald was writing a
western—a novel about the last American pioneers, immigrants, and sons of immigrants
who pursued and defined the American dream in the last western frontier” (introduction to
Tycoon v). The same could be said of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, a novel that
is clearly informed by both the immigrant and the frontier experience. Born Nathan
Weinstein, West was himself born of an immigrant Jewish family and initially came to
California chasing the dream of seeing his novel Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) adapted to the
big screen, this only after the publisher of his book declared bankruptcy and America sank
deeper into the Depression. Thus both Fitzgerald and West were acutely aware of the
power of the American Dream (although it was only with the publication of James Truslow
Adams’s 1931 book The Epic of America that the term entered the lexicon, the idea was
pervasive avant la lettre) not only as a positive projection of possibility but as an idea
frantically clung to by the desperate.
 6. Wilson, incidentally, did not care for Huxley’s After Many a Summer. He wrote in a
1944 New Yorker review of Huxley’s next novel, Time Must Have a Stop (1944), that
“Huxley’s peculiar version of the life of contemplation and revelation was expounded in
After Many a Summer by a boring non-satirical character who read homilies to the other
characters with an insufferable air of quiet authority and who constantly made the reader
feel that it would have been better if he, too, had been satirically treated as a typical
California crank” (Classics and Commercials 209–10). He did give Huxley some credit,
however, conceding that “the one thing that was imagined with intensity in Aldous
Huxley’s novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, was the eighteenth-century exploiter
of the slave-trade degenerating into a fetal anthropoid” (43).
7. Wilson wrote favorably of West’s depiction of this fact, saying that “Mr. West has
caught the emptiness of Hollywood; and he is, as far as I know, the first writer to make this
emptiness horrible” (Classics and Commercials 54).
8. Wilson wrote in 1932 that “Americans still tend to move westward and many drift
southward towards the sun. San Diego is the extreme southwest town of the Unites States;
and since our real westward expansion has come to a standstill, it has become a veritable
jumping-off place. On the West coast to-day the suicide rate is twice that of the Middle
Atlantic coast, and since 1911 the suicide rate of San Diego has been the highest in the
United States” (American Jitters 257). He does not cite a source for his claim, but later
writes that “in 1926 there were fifty-seven suicides in San Diego. During nine months of
1930, there were seventy-one, and between the beginning of the January and the end of
the July of 1931 there have already been thirty-six. Three of these latter are set down in
the coroner’s record as due to ‘no work or money’; two to ‘no work’; one to ‘ill health,
family troubles and no work’; two to ‘despondency over financial worries’; one to ‘financial
worry and illness’; one to ‘health and failure to collect’; and one to ‘rent due him from
tenants.’ The doctors say that some of the old people who have been sent out here by their
relations but whose source of income has recently been cut off, kill themselves from pride
rather than go to the poorhouse” (259).
9. In Fitzgerald’s case we have only his working notes. There are suggestions about how
he had planned to end the novel, including outlines that he had created and an account by
Sheilah Graham, with whom Fitzgerald was romantically involved at the time of his death.
It appears that Fitzgerald had intended for Stahr to be killed in a plane crash and for the
novel to end with the scene of his funeral, which according to Graham’s account would
have included “all the Hollywood hypocrites” (qtd. in Bruccoli, introduction to Tycoon xix).
Bruccoli stresses, however, that “Graham’s account does not necessarily provide
Fitzgerald’s final plot.” “It is unlikely that he had decided how the novel would continue,”
he explains, for “as late as 2 November 1940—less than two months before his death—he
wrote to his wife, Zelda, that the novel ‘is still in the early character-planning stage’” (xix).
We can only speculate about how Fitzgerald would have actually ended the novel, which
leaves us with the incomplete draft that Bruccoli assembled for Scribner as the most
coherent and accurate version of the novel.
10. Regarding Tycoon’s narrative perspective, Fitzgerald once again acknowledges his
debt to Conrad. He writes the following in a 29 September 1939 prospectus to Collier’s
editor Kenneth Littauer: “This love affair is the meat of the book—though I am going to
treat it, remember, as it comes through to Cecilia. That is to say by making Cecilia at the
moment of her telling the story, an intelligent and observant woman, I shall grant myself
the privilege, as Conrad did, of letting her imagine the actions of the characters. Thus, I
hope to get the verisimilitude of a first person narrative, combined with a Godlike
knowledge of all the events that happen to my characters” (qtd. in Bruccoli, introduction to
Tycoon ix).
11. Wilson’s insight into this final scene is worth mentioning as well: “The America of
the murders and rapes which fill the Los Angeles papers is only the obverse side of the
America of the inanities of the movies. Such people—Mr. West seems to say—dissatisfied,
yet with no ideas, no objectives and no interest in anything vital, may in the mass be
capable of anything. The daydreams purveyed by Hollywood, the romances that in movie
stories can be counted on to have whisked around all obstacles and adroitly knocked out
all ‘menaces’ by the time they have run off their reels, romances which their fascinated
audiences have never been able to live themselves—only cheat them and embitter their
frustration. Of such mobs are the followers of fascism made” (Classics and Commercials 54).
12. Tycoon mentions Hearst in passing, as Stoyte and Kathleen are stopped at a red
light and a newsboy nearby yells, “Mickey Mouse Murdered! Randolph Hearst declares war
on China!” (79).

Chapter 5
THE NEGATION OF SUBJECTIVITY
1. For two exemplary accounts of how Beckett has been classified in relation to
modernism and postmodern, see Connor; and Beloborodova, Van Hulle, and Verhulst.
2. Critics have noted here the similarity to Joyce, who published a book of poetry and a
book of short stories prior to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
3. As an alternative to erasure, which I find preferable, others commonly focus instead
on the notion of silence in Beckett’s work. Anthony Cronin, for example, writes the
following:
 Beckett was a perfectionist. Most artists are; and indeed perfectionism, à la Eliot and
Joyce, was a feature of modernism, which rejected both the journeyman’s code of
“needs must” and the slapdash, hit-and-miss methods of the great Victorians. But he
was a perfectionist to a degree which was unusual and obsessive even among the
modernist masters. He yearned for silence, the blank white page, the most perfect
thing of all. As an artist he had had more false starts and false beginnings than most.
The principal failing of his earlier work, so knowing but also so self-revealing in all the
wrong ways, is the failure to achieve a form and a tone of voice which would allow
him to express his particular truths. Perhaps this repeated failure made him feel more
acutely than most the torment of marred utterance, of false utterance, of would-be
significant utterance; and to feel also more intensely than others that the object of the
true, achieved and necessary utterance is silence—in some sense or other, a permission
to be silent, whether granted by one’s daemon or by one’s creator. (376)

4. Andrew Gibson, in a similar vein, writes that “Murphy commits himself to an extreme
version of apagogic reason whose ironical futility is clear from the start: that is, he
conducts himself ‘as though he were free’ in a world to which he ‘fondly hope[s]’ he does
not belong” (144).
5. Lawrence Harvey relates a statement from Beckett that ‘if he were a critic setting out
to write on the works of Beckett (and he thanked heaven he was not), he would start with
two quotations, one by Geulincx: ‘Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis,’ and one by Democritus:
‘Nothing is more real than nothing’” (267–68).
6. Ackerley explains that “Beckett had written for his own delectation as much as
anybody’s, but the example of Ulysses could hardly be ignored. He probably believed that
his novel should do for London (the dear indelible world of the 16th, 18th, and 20th
centuries) what Ulysses had done for Dublin. It was not to be” (19).
7. “Samuel Beckett’s Murphy is a vast, rollicking jeu d’esprit in the tradition that runs
from Cervantes and Rabelais through Burton and Fielding to Ulysses,” writes Ackerley,
“and it maintains itself proudly in the company. Yet it has never received the attention it
deserves. For all its mere 282 pages (158 in the Calder edition), it has an intricacy which
justifies its place among these giants of philosophical comedy, and cries out for the kind of
close scrutiny that has not yet been made of it” (10).

CODA
1. For an illustrative reading of Conrad’s letter, see Schwarz: “Conrad uses this elaborate
ironic trope to speak to the late Victorian belief that the industrial revolution is part of an
upwardly evolving teleology; this belief is really a kind of social Darwinism. According to
Conrad, humanity would like to believe in a providentially ordered world vertically
descending from a benevolent God; that is, to believe in an embroidered world. But,
Conrad believed, we actually inhabit a temporally defined horizontal dimension within an
amoral, indifferent universe” (52–53).
WORKS CITED
Abel, Elizabeth, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, eds. Female Subjects in Black and
White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.
Ackerley, Chris. Demented Particulars: The Annotated “Murphy.” Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
2010.
Adams, James Truslow. Epic of America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1931.
Adams, Rachel. “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism.” Twentieth-Century
Literature 53.3 (2007): 248–72.
Alt, Christina Marie. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2010.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. 127–86. First
published in 1968 by Francois Maspero as Lénine et la philosophie.
Aristotle. “On Sense and Sensible Objects.” Aristotle: On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On
Breath. Trans. Walter Stanley Hett. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1957. 207–86.
Armstrong, Paul. The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in
James, Conrad, and Ford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.
Baker, Phil. Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.
Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 1998. First published in 1986 by Bernard
Grasset as Amérique.
———. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. First published in
1981 by Éditions Galilée as Simulacres et simulation.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. 1956. Reprint, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991.
Beattie, Tina. Theology after Postmodernity: Divining the Void—A Lacanian Reading of
Thomas Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.
Beckett, Samuel. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. 1992. Reprint, New York: Arcade,
2012.
———. Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates. Paris: Europa, 1935.
———. More Pricks than Kicks. 1934. Reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1970.
———. Murphy. 1938. Reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1957.
Begam, Richard. Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.
Beloborodova, Olga, Dirk Van Hulle, and Pim Verhulst, eds. Beckett and Modernism. Cham:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Berman, Ronald. “The Great Gatsby” and Modern Times. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994.
———. “The Great Gatsby and the Twenties.” The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Ed. Ruth Prigozy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 79–94.
Berman, Russell A. “British Expatriates and German Exiles in 1930s–1940s Los Angeles.”
The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles. Ed. Kevin R. McNamara.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 49–58.
Best, Stephen, and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory. New York: Guilford, 1991.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “On Exactitude in Science.” Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley.
New York: Penguin, 1998. 325.
Braunstein, Néstor A. “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan.” The Cambridge
Companion to Lacan. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.
Brockelman, Thomas. “Lacan and Modernism: Representation and its Vicissitudes.”
Disseminating Lacan. Ed. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul. Albany: State U of New
York P, 1996.
Brown, Paul Tolliver. “Relativity, Quantum Physics, and Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse.” Journal of Modern Literature 32.3 (2009): 39–62.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. Introduction. The Love of the Last Tycoon. New York: Scribner, 1994.
v–xxi.
———. Introduction. “Winter Dreams.” The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. By F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner, 2003. 217.
Buntin, John. L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City. New
York: Broadway Books, 2010.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge,
1993.
———. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
Caserio, Robert L. “Joseph Conrad, Dickensian Novelist of the Nineteenth Century: A
Dissent from Ian Watt.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 36.3 (1981): 337–47.
Chesney, Duncan McColl. “Beckett, Minimalism, and the Question of Postmodernism.”
Modernism/Modernity 19.4 (2012): 637–55.
City of Los Angeles Planning Department. “La Fayette Square Preservation Plan.” Office of
Historic Resources. Los Angeles Department of City Planning, 25 Sept. 2008. Web.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Kubla Khan.” Selected Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 101–2.
Collits, Terry. “Anti-Heroics and Epic Failures: The Case of Nostromo.” Conradian 29.2
(2004): 1–13.
Connor, Steven. Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2014.
Conrad, Joseph. Almayer’s Folly. 1895. Reprint, New York: Penguin 1991.
———. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies.
9 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983–2007.
———. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
———. Letters from Conrad 1895 to 1924. Ed. Edward Garnett. London: Nonesuch, 1928.
———. Lord Jim. 1900. New York: Norton, 1996.
———. The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Other Stories. London: Penguin Classics, 2007.
———. Nostromo. 1904. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
———. An Outcast of the Islands. 1896. Reprint, New York: Penguin 1990.
———. The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Ed. Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2015.
Cousineau, Thomas J. “Descartes, Lacan, and Murphy.” College Literature 11.3 (1984): 223–
32.
Coward, Rosalind, and John Ellis. Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and
the Theory of the Subject. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977.
Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. 1997. Reprint, New York: Da Capo,
1999.
Crossland, Rachel. Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of
Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018.
Decker, Jeffrey Louis. “Gatsby’s Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in
the Tribal Twenties.” Novel 28.1 (1994): 52–71.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Originally published in
1993 by Éditions Galilée as Spectres de Marx.
———. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2002. First published
in 1967 by Éditions du Seuil as L’écriture et la difference.
Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Drouin, Jeffrey S. James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture: “The Einstein of
English Fiction.” New York: Routledge, 2015.
Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. 1976. Reprint,
London: Verso, 1978.
Einstein, Albert. “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” Annalen der Physik 17
(1905): 891–921.
———. Out of My Later Years. 1950. Reprint, New York: Citadel, 1956.
Eliot. T. S. The Waste Land. 1922. Reprint, Ed. Michael North. New York: Norton, 2000.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 1959. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.
Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1997.
———. Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners.
New York: Norton, 2011.
———. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1995.
———. Lacan to the Letter: Reading “Écrits” Closely. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Confessions.” F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship. Ed. Matthew J.
Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996.
———. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
———. The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. First
published in 1941 by Scriber as The Last Tycoon.
———. “10 Best Books I Have Read.” F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship. Ed. Matthew J.
Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996.
———. Tender Is the Night. 1934. Reprint, New York: Scribner, 1962.
———. This Side of Paradise. 1920. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 2009.
———. “Winter Dreams.” The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli.
New York: Scribner, 2003.
Fleishman, Avrom. “Science in Ithaca.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8.3
(1967): 377–91.
Forter, Greg. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2011.
Foster, Wendy. “Murphy’s Aporia: An Examination of the Spaces of Desire as Structured
Absences in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.” The Modern World, n.d. Web.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York:
Norton, 1961. First published in 1920 as Jenseits des Lustprinzips.
———. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1955.
First published in 1899 by Franz Deuticke, Leipzig & Vienna as Die Traumdeutung.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. Introduction. Joyce: The Return of the Repressed. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1993.
Gay, Jane de. Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018.
Gebhard, David, and Harriette Von Breton. Los Angeles in the Thirties: 1931–1941. Los
Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1989.
Gibson, Andrew. Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. “Ulysses” Annotated. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California
P, 2008.
Giovacchini, Saverio. Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal.
Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2001.
Godden, Richard. “A Diamond Bigger than the Ritz: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Gold
Standard.” ELH 77.3 (2010): 589–613.
———. Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1990.
Goldsmith, Meredith. “White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The
Great Gatsby.” Modern Fiction Studies 49.3 (2003): 443–68.
Gorman, Herbert. “Glimpses of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual 5 (1973):
113–18.
Gottfried, Roy. Joyce’s Misbelief. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008.
Graham, Elyse, and Pericles Lewis. “Private Religion, Public Mourning, and Mrs.
Dalloway.” Modern Philology 111.1 (2013): 88–106.
Griesinger, Emily. “Religious Belief in a Secular Age: Literary Modernism and Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” Christianity & Literature 64.4 (2015): 438–64.
Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler.
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Guerard, Albert J. Conrad: The Novelist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958.
Haines, Christian P., and Sean Grattan. “Life after the Subject.” Introduction. “What Comes
After the Subject?,” special issue of Cultural Critique 96 (2017): 1–36.
Harvey, Lawrence. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970.
Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Columbus:
Ohio State UP, 1987.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. First
published in 1807 by Goebhardt as Die Phänomenologie des Geistes.
Hegeman, Susan. Patterns for America Modernism and the Concept of Culture. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1999.
Henry, Holly. Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
Hilgart, John. “The Great Gatsby’s Aesthetics of Non-Identity.” Arizona Quarterly 59.1
(2003): 87–116.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
Huxley, Aldous. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993. First
published in 1939 by Chatto & Windus as After Many a Summer.
———. Brave New World. 1932. Reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
———. Island. 1962. Reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.
———. Time Must Have a Stop. 1944. Reprint, Chicago: Dalkey Archive, 2001.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1982.
———. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 1991. Reprint, Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 2005.
Johnson, Barbara. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. 1939. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1999.
———. The Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann. 3 vols. New
York: Viking, 1966.
———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1993.
———. Ulysses. 1922. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Kane, Julie. “Varieties of Mystical Experience in the Writings of Virginia Woolf.” Twentieth
Century Literature 41. 4 (1995): 328–49.
Katz, Daniel. Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel
Beckett. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1999.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. 1967. Reprint,
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Kirshner, Lewis A. “The Man Who Didn’t Exist: The Case of Louis Althusser.” American
Imago 60.2 (2003): 211–39.
Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory.
London: Verso, 1997.
Knapp, Eloise Hay. “Nostromo.” The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J. H.
Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 81–99.
Knight, Christopher J. “‘The God of Love Is Full of Tricks’: Virginia Woolf’s Vexed Relation
to the Tradition of Christianity.” Religion & Literature 39.1 (2007): 27–46.
Knighton, Andrew Lyndon. “Hollywood Panoramics: Nathanael West’s Baroque
Modernity.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 21.3 (2010): 145–62.
Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 1996.
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York:
Columbia UP, 1980.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.
———. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Trans.
Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1997. First published in 1986 by Éditions du Seuil as
L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959–1960.
———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book XI. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1998. First published in 1973 by
Éditions du Seuil as Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XI. Les quatre concepts
fondamentaux de la psychanalyse.
Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. 1955. Reprint,
New York: Penguin, 1990.
Lane, Christopher, ed. The Psychoanalysis of Race. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.
Larsen, Nella. Passing. 1929. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 2003.
Lawtoo, Nidesh. The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East
Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2013.
Lehan, Richard Daniel. “The Great Gatsby”: The Limits of Wonder. Boston: Twayne, 1990.
Lernout, Geert. Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion. London: Continuum, 2010.
Lester, John. Conrad and Religion. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine,
1908–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Levine, Stephen Z. Lacan Reframed. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008.
Long, Robert Emmet. “The Great Gatsby and the Tradition of Joseph Conrad.” Texas Studies
in Literature and Language 8.2 (1966): 257–76.
Mackin, Timothy. “Public Minds: Woolf, Russell, and Photographic Vision.” Journal of
Modern Literature 33.3 (2010): 112–30.
Mallios, Peter Lancelot. Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2010.
Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds. Bad Modernisms. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006.
———. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737–48.
Martel, James R. The Misinterpellated Subject. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017.
Martell, Jessica, and Zackary Vernon. “‘Of Great Gabasidy’: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” Journal of Modern Literature 38.3 (2015): 56–70.
Marx, Karl. Capital. 3 vols. New York: Penguin, 1992–93. First published in 1867 by Verlag
von Otto Meisner as Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie.
———. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.” The
Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1978.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin Classics, 1985.
First published in pamphlet form in 1848 as Manifest Der Kommunistischen Partei.
Matthews, John T. “What was High about Modernism? The American Novel and
Modernity.” A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–1950. Ed. John T.
Matthews. West Sussex: Blackwell, 2013. 282–305.
McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. New York:
Columbia UP, 2016.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1987.
———. “What Was Postmodernism?” Electronic Book Review, 17 Sept. 2012. Web.
McWilliams, Carey. Southern California: An Island of the Land. New York: Duell, Sloan &
Pearce, 1946.
Mellard, James M. “Oedipus against Narcissus: Father, Mother, and the Dialectic of Desire
in Fitzgerald’s ‘Winter Dreams.’” Arizona Quarterly 58.4 (2002): 51–79.
———. Using Lacan, Reading Fiction. Urbana : U of Illinois P, 1991.
Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 1995.
Miller, J. Hillis. “‘Material Interests’: Conrad’s Nostromo as a Critique of Global
Capitalism.” Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre. Ed. Jakob Lothe, Jeremy
Hawthorn, and James Phelan. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008. 160–77.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. Translator’s note. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis:
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. By Jacques Lacan. New York: Norton, 1998.
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in
the Major Novels. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011.
Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1951.
Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. 2nd ed. London: Routledge,
2002.
Najder, Zdzisław. Joseph Conrad: A Life. Trans. Halina Najder. 2nd ed. Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2007. First published in 1983 by Rutgers University Press as Joseph
Conrad: A Chronicle.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Introduction. Who Comes after the Subject? Ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter
Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Naremore, James. “A World without Self: The Novels of Virginia Woolf.” NOVEL: A Forum
on Fiction 5.2 (1972): 122–34.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Ed. Michael D. Coogan. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995.
Ortolano, Scott. Popular Modernism and Its Legacies: From Pop Literature to Video Games.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism. London: Macmillan, 1983.
Paulson, A. B. “The Great Gatsby: Oral Aggression and Splitting.” American Imago 35
(1978): 311–30.
Pease, Allison. Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2000.
Pendleton, Thomas A. I’m Sorry about the Clock: Chronology, Composition, and Narrative
Technique in “The Great Gatsby.” Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna UP, 1993.
Peters, John. Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Pilling, John. “Beckett’s English Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Ed. John
Pilling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 17–42.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. Reprint, New York: Perennial, 1990.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Joyce upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1991.
Rajchman, John. “Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity.” Representations 15 (Summer 1986):
42–56.
Rée, Jonathan. “Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century.” New Literary History 26.1 (1995):
205–17.
Rice, Thomas Jackson. Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997.
Rogers, Martin. “Monstrous Modernism and The Day of the Locust.” Journal of Popular
Culture 44.2 (2011): 367–84.
Ross, Stephen. Conrad and Empire. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2004.
———, ed. Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate. New York: Routledge, 2009.
———. “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Modernist Haunting.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
44.2 (2011): 268–91.
Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Lacan: In Spite of Everything. London: Verso, 2014.
Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. 1975. Reprint, New York: Columbia UP,
1985.
Salecl, Renata. The Spoils of Freedom. London: Routledge, 1994.
Scholes, Robert. Paradoxy of Modernism. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.
Schreier, Benjamin. “Desire’s Second Act: ‘Race’ and The Great Gatsby’s Cynical
Americanism.” Twentieth-Century Literature 53.2 (2007): 153–81.
Schwarz, Daniel R. Rereading Conrad. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001.
Seed, David. Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel Up to
World War II. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2009.
Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Shoop, Casey. “Corpse and Accomplice: Frederic Jameson, Raymond Chandler, and the
Representation of History in California.” Cultural Critique 77 (2011): 205–38.
Snyder, Michael. “Premonitions of the Postmodern: Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer
Dies the Swan and Los Angeles in the Thirties.” Aldous Huxley Annual 5 (2005): 167–92.
Starr, Kevin. The Dream Endures: California Enters the Forties. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
Strychacz, Thomas. Modernism, Mass Culture and Professionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1993.
Szczeszak-Brewer, Agata. Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce. Gainesville: Florida
UP, 2011.
Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York:
Oxford UP, 1998.
Thiher, Allen. Fiction Refracts Science: Modernist Writers from Proust to Borges. Columbia: U
of Missouri P, 2005.
Thomas, J. D. “F. Scott Fitzgerald: James Joyce’s ‘Most Devoted’ Admirer.” F. Scott
Fitzgerald Review 5 (2006): 65–85.
Tomšič, Samo. The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan. London: Verso, 2015.
Tuhkanen, Mikko. The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard
Wright. Albany: State U of New York P, 2009.
Turner, Timothy G. “Architect Wright Doesn’t Like This City and Bluntly Says So.” Los
Angeles Times 20 Jan. 1940: 1.
United States Census Bureau. Population Division. “Population of the 100 Largest Cities
and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 1990.” Washington, DC: US Census
Bureau, June 1998. Web.
Van Mierlo, Chrissie. James Joyce and Catholicism: The Apostate’s Wake. London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Watson, David. Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s,
1991.
Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. 1979. Reprint, Berkeley: U of California P,
1981.
———. “Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 7.2
(1974): 101–15.
Watts, Cedric. Joseph Conrad: “Nostromo.” London: Penguin, 1990.
West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust. 1939. The Complete Works of Nathanael West.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957.
———. Miss Lonelyhearts. 1933. The Complete Works of Nathanael West. New York: Farrar,
Straus & Cudahy, 1957.
Wilson, Edmund. The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump. 1932. Reprint, Freeport, NY:
Books for Libraries, 1968.
———. Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. New York: Farrar,
Straus, 1950.
Woolf, Virginia. “Character in Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1919–
1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1988.
———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman. 6 vols. New
York: Harcourt, 1975.
———. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Reprint, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York:
Scribner, 1996.
Zima, Peter. Subjectivity and Identity: Between Modernity and Postmodernity. London:
Bloomsbury, 2015.
Žižek, Slavoj. Interrogating the Real. Ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London:
Continuum, 2010.
———. “The Spectre of Ideology.” Introduction. Mapping Ideology. Ed. Slavoj Žižek.
London: Verso, 1994. 1–33.
———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
———. “The Thing from Inner Space.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 4.3
(1999): 221–30.
Zolotow, Maurice. Billy Wilder in Hollywood. 1977. Reprint, New York: Limelight Editions,
1996.
INDEX
Ackerley, Chris, 147, 155, 162, 180n6, 180n7
acting, 133, 139
action, 58
adiaphane, 65
Adler, Alfred, 147
Adorno, Theodor, 144
adventure fiction, 23, 35, 48, 173n2
aesthetics, 6, 11, 25, 70, 73, 80–81, 96, 111–12, 115–16, 138, 169n2
affect, 42
affect studies, 1
Africa, 86, 115
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (Huxley), 20, 106, 108, 113–115, 138–144, 178n6
alienation, 20, 98, 135, 156, 158, 172n11
Almayer’s Folly (Conrad), 23
Althusser, Louis, 15–16, 18, 21, 25–27, 51, 148
American landscape, 19, 103, 128
American Dream, 123, 177n5
American exceptionalism, 138
aporia, 104. See also Derrida
architecture, 20, 100, 111–15, 118, 121, 124, 131
Aristotle, 65, 67
art, 18, 21, 46, 48–57, 59, 62, 64, 66, 69–70, 79–80, 82–83, 117, 134, 136, 169, 174n3;
categories of, 8, 168; creation of, 10, 19, 50, 61, 64, 69–70, 83–84; forms of, 1, 48;
process of, 48 57, 59, 69, 80–82; and vision, 84
artificiality, 16, 115, 133–35, 139, 144, 156
artist, the 48, 55–56, 61–62, 64, 68, 81, 83–84, 175n15, 176n16, 179n3
arts, the, 2, 48; visual, 17
atheism, 68, 82
authoritarianism, 25, 76
autopoiesis, 90

Badiou, Alain, 2, 16
Barnes, Djuna, 17
Barth, John, 10
Barthes, Roland, 162
Baudrillard, Jean, 20, 111, 116–17
Beach, Sylvia, 86
Beckett, Samuel, 20–21, 145–48, 154–64, 167, 179nn1–3, 180nn5–7; Dream of Fair to
Middling Women, 146; Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates, 146; More Pricks Than Kicks,
146; Murphy, 20–21, 145–163, 180n4, 180n7
Berkeley, George, 63, 65, 67
Berman, Ronald, 93, 95
Berman, Russell, 144
Bible, 54–56, 67
Bion, Wilfred, 147
Borges, Jorge Luis, 14, 111, 117
Bosch, Hieronymus, 111
Brave New World (Huxley), 138
Brecht, Bertolt, 108
Bruccoli, Matthew J., 91, 123, 177n3, 177n5, 178n9, 179n10
Butler, Judith, 12–13, 16, 18, 25–26, 44, 176n3

California, 20, 106, 108, 113, 118, 120–22, 131, 133, 144, 177n5, 178n6. See also
Southern California
Calvino, Italo, 14
Capec, Karl, 133
capitalism, 15, 20, 24–25, 38, 40, 42, 87, 112, 121, 145
Cartesian dualism, 4, 58, 147, 151–52, 154–55
Caserio, Robert, 46–47, 171n3
castration, figurative, 89, 92, 101–102
Catholic Church, 61–62; faith of, 67, 175
celebrity, 69, 124, 129, 135
chaos, 19, 34, 81, 122, 160–61, 163–64
Chamson, André, 86
Chamson, Lucie, 86
Chandler, Raymond, 108
Chaplin, Charlie, 133
chora, 91. See also Kristeva, Julia
Christ (Jesus), 54–56, 62, 67
Christianity, 24, 26, 55–56, 62, 133, 140, 142, 175n8
civilization, 30, 77, 100, 103, 135
class: ruling, 27–28, 38, 40; social, 27
class struggle, 34, 37–41
Claver, Peter, 142
cognition, 65, 88–89
cognitive studies, 1
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 142
collective unconscious, 99, 119
colonialism, 24, 173n; and colonization, 78
commodity, 91, 95, 139, 176n4; and fetishism, 89, 95
communism, 16, 25
Conrad, Joseph, 18–19, 21, 23, 25–26, 28, 31, 34–36, 38, 41–44, 46–49, 51–62, 64–65,
67–71, 77, 79, 83–87, 129, 145, 163–68, 171nn2–3, 171n7, 172n9, 173n12, 173nn1–2,
174nn5–7, 174n8, 175n9, 176n2, 179n10, 180n1; Almayer’s Folly, 23; Heart of Darkness,
23, 56–57, 59–60, 86, 176n2; Lord Jim, 23, 36, 52–53, 60, 86, 164, 166, 173n2; The
Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 23, 54, 57, 59–60, 67, 171n2, 174n7; Nostromo, 18, 23–47, 57,
85, 87, 153, 163–67, 171n1, 172–73nn9–11; An Outcast of the Islands, 23
consciousness, 1, 18, 27, 62–63, 75, 84, 94, 143, 149, 154, 161, 163, 165–66, 168,
172nn9–10, 175n9; group, 69; self-, 125; social, 32. See also ideology: as false
consciousness; stream of consciousness; subconscious; unconscious
Cooper, Gary, 138
corporeality, 21, 154, 160
Coward, Rosalind, 163; Language and Materialism, 163
critical theory, 2, 6, 10–13, 17, 25, 170n4. See also postmodernism: theory of; queer theory
Criticism and Ideology (Eagleton), 35–36
Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 20–21, 165–68
cult of personality, 123–24
cynical subject, 28

Dadaism, 7, 16, 170–71n7

Darwinism, 68; social, 180n1. See also evolution, theory of
Dawson, Warrington, 53
Day of the Locust, The (West), 20, 106, 108, 113, 115, 120–21, 130–40, 166, 177n5
death, 34, 40, 45, 66, 136, 140, 142, 146, 148–49, 155, 160–61, 166, 177n1, 178n9; of the
subject, 2; symbol of, 103; symbolic, 108
Debord, Guy, 116
decentering, 20, 36, 116, 127; and geography, 110, 116–17, 127; and spatiality, 116; and
subjectivity, 8, 14, 51, 127.
Decker, Jeffrey Louis, 87–89
deconstruction, 1, 7, 14, 22, 35, 39, 41, 127, 147, 154, 160–62, 165, 175–76n15
defense mechanism, 49
dehumanization, 133
Deleuze, Gilles, 15
Derrida, Jacques, 14, 16, 18, 23, 26, 29, 31, 36, 97, 104, 162, 171n4, 171n7, 172n8;
Specters of Marx, 18, 23, 26, 29, 172n8; Writing and Difference, 97
Descartes, René, 4, 58, 147
desire, 6, 12, 14, 19, 21, 27, 33, 37–41, 44, 49–51, 55, 66, 70, 72–73, 75–76, 81–82, 85–
86, 89–102, 122, 125–27, 129, 132, 134–35, 139, 143, 147–50, 152–61, 163, 167;
collective, 96; dialectic of, 91, 98, 157; negation of, 147, 154, 156–57; object of, 19, 75–
76, 92, 98 (see also objet a); object manifestation of, 95; Oedipal, 76, 102; of the other,
93, 157–59; repressed, 135; subconscious, 156; surplus, 98, 100
dialectic, 36, 71, 91, 98, 159, 162
diaphane, 65
Dickens, Charles, 46
disability studies, 1, 13
discourse, 29, 48–49, 78, 87, 147, 154, 162, 170n5, 173–74n3; philosophical, 78;
scientific, 48, 170n6
disillusionment, 20, 119, 122, 131
displacement, 14, 19, 36, 39, 42–43; psychological, 12
Divided Self, The (Laing), 71
doubt, 35, 40, 48–49, 53, 57, 61–62, 68. See also skepticism
Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett), 146
dystopia, 138

Eagleton, Terry, 35–37, 172n10; Criticism and Ideology, 35–36

Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (Beckett), 146
economics, 10, 13, 31, 33, 36, 168
ecstasy, 70–71, 83–84, 125
ego, 4, 19, 22, 42–44, 51, 76–77, 143, 158, 167, 170n6. See also Freud
egoism, 55
egotism, 70, 82
Einstein, Albert, 2, 48–49, 63, 66, 69, 175n11
Eliot, T.S., 5–6, 140, 148, 179n3; The Waste Land, 6, 148
Ellis, John, 163; Language and Materialism, 163
Ellmann, Richard, 62
empire, 41, 43
Enlightenment, the, 58, 144
enslavement, 26–29, 31, 41–42, 121, 130, 171n1, 178n6
environmental studies, 1
epiphany, 43, 45, 83–84, 166
epistemology, 9, 175n9
ephemerality, 84, 144, 172n11, 175n9
epoch, 23, 60, 168
ethereality, 73, 77
ethnicity, 30, 87, 102
ethnic studies, 13
ethnology, 94
evolution, theory of, 53
existentialism, 2, 11
expressionism, 4
Eysteinsson, Astradur, 14

façade, 114–15, 118, 121–122, 134, 139–40

Fanon, Frantz, 88
fantasy, 19, 43, 49, 58, 90, 92–93, 96, 100, 115, 127, 130–31, 133, 136–37, 153–54;
collective, 103, 111; sexual, 131. See also fundamental fantasy
fascism, 138, 179n11
fatherhood, 39, 52, 61, 69, 76, 91–92, 101–2, 105, 133, 146, 170n7, 174–75n8. See also
paternity
Faulkner, William, 17, 108; The Sound and the Fury, 14
Felman, Shoshana, 12
feminism, 11, 13, 175–76n15, 176n3
fetish, 25, 135, 153. See also under commodity
film, 17, 107, 113, 117, 119–21, 126
film industry, 109, 115–19, 124, 126, 138
Fink, Bruce, 94, 96, 177n7
Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 14, 63–64, 108, 146
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 8, 20, 85–88, 91, 95, 100, 106–10, 115, 117–19, 122, 125–27, 129–31,
133, 138–40, 143–45, 163, 176nn1–2, 177–78nn1–5, 178n9, 179n10; The Great Gatsby,
8, 19, 85–106, 117, 119, 122–26, 128, 130, 147, 156, 176n2; Lipstick, 107; The Love of
the Last Tycoon, 20, 106–8, 115, 117–18, 122–131, 133, 136, 138, 177n3, 177n5, 178–
79nn9–10, 179n12; Tender Is the Night, 106–7; This Side of Paradise, 86; “Winter
Dreams,” 91–92, 98
Fitzgerald, Zelda, 107, 178n9
Fleishman, Avrom, 63
floating signifier, 104
Forster, E. M., 68
Forter, Greg, 88, 100
Foster, Wendy, 160–61
Foucault, Michel, 15–16, 20, 44, 162
fragmentation: See under identity
France, Anatole, 85
Franklin, Benjamin, 92
free indirect discourse, 48, 77
French Communist Party, 16
Freud, Sigmund, 2, 4, 15–16, 19, 49–51, 76, 95–97, 99, 102, 125, 147, 157, 170n5, 172n9;
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 96; The Future of an Illusion, 49; Interpretation of Dreams,
2; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 96
Friedman, Susan Stanford, 12, 170n5
fundamental fantasy, 19, 89, 101
Future of an Illusion, The (Freud), 49
future anterior, 104
futurism, 4

Galsworthy, John, 52, 85

Garnett, Edward, 36, 56–57, 174n7
gender, 50, 78, 83; and identities, 175n15; and roles, 83
gender studies, 3, 13
Genealogy of Modernism, A (Levenson), 5
geography, 24, 110, 117, 148
Geulincx, Arnold, 157, 180n5
Gifford, Don, 67
globalization, 25
God, 7, 19, 51, 54, 62, 68, 82, 90, 94–95, 140, 142–43, 180n1
Godden, Richard, 88, 95, 177n8
gothic, 31, 114, 173n2
Graham, R. B. Cunningham, 164
Great Depression, 119, 177–78n5
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 8, 19, 85–106, 117, 119, 122–26, 128, 130, 147, 156,
176n2
Greek skeptics, 63
grotesque, 99, 122, 131, 134, 142
Guerard, Albert J., 41, 172n9
guilt, 19, 61–62, 68, 109

Haggard, Rider, 23
Harrow, Susan, 2
Harvey, David, 3, 20
Hassan, Ihab, 6–10, 22, 109–10, 175n9
Hearst, William Randolph, 138, 179n12
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 23, 56–57, 59–60, 86, 176n2
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 15–16, 21, 58, 102, 172n11
hegemony, 15, 23, 27, 40
Heidegger, Martin, 50
Hilgart, John, 88, 94–95, 176n4
historicity, 111, 113, 116, 118, 144
history: as academic discipline, 2, 4, 24, 27, 82, 140, 171n3; as narrative process, 18, 21,
31, 36, 45–46, 94, 104, 109–12, 164–166, 172n9, 172n11, 173n11
Hollywood, 107–9, 115–21, 123–25, 127–31, 133, 135, 138, 177n1, 178n7, 178n9,
179n11
Horkheimer, Max, 144
Hume, David, 63
Huxley, Aldous, 20, 106, 108, 110, 113–15, 122, 138–45, 163, 177n2, 178n6; After Many
a Summer Dies the Swan, 20, 106, 108, 113–115, 138–144, 178n6; Brave New World,
138; Island, 177n2; Time Must Have a Stop, 178n6
Huyssen, Andreas, 109–10
hyperreal, 114, 117
hysteria, 51

identity, 1, 6, 9, 18–20, 24, 39, 42, 44, 57, 76, 87, 89, 115, 117, 122, 124, 126–27, 129,
136, 143–44, 156, 175n9; American, 89–90; fragmented, 4, 6, 8, 22, 126, 143; Jewish,
90; national, 87, 89–90; and place, 20; racial, 19, 88, 90; sexual, 175n15. See also
personality; subjectivity
ideological state apparatus, 27
ideology, 18–19, 21, 23–30, 32–46, 51, 62, 87–88, 128, 138, 152–53, 163; American, 128,
138; bourgeois, 153; and capitalism, 25; critique of, 18, 25, 29–30, 37, 44–46, 173n12; as
false consciousness, 18, 25, 41; and fantasy, 138, 153 (see also fantasy); and imperialism,
18, 32, 44; and mystification, 25, 29–30, 32, 37; nativist, 88 (see also nativism); and
religion, 26–27, 33, 38, 62; of ruling class, 27, 33, 40, 45 (see also class: ruling); and
spectrality, 23, 25, 34, 38, 44; and subjectivity, 18, 24, 27, 41, 145
imagism, 4
imperialism, 18, 24, 27, 32, 38, 40, 42, 44, 61, 172n10
imperial subject, 27, 42, 172n10
impressionism: as movement, 79; as style, 54
indeterminacy, 7–9
industrialism, 15, 112, 119, 121, 180n1; and capitalism, 112, 121
industrial revolution, 180n1
interpellation, 18, 22–23, 26, 42, 46
Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 2
Interrogating the Real (Žižek), 171n5
Irigaray, Luce, 15–16
Irish independence, 82
Island (Huxley), 177n2
Jackson, Andrew, 128
James, William, 18
Jameson, Fredric, 3, 20, 25, 31, 36–37, 111–15, 118, 145, 164, 171n7, 172nn10–11,
173n2; The Political Unconscious, 31, 36, 171n7, 171–72n11, 173n2; Postmodernism, 111–
12
jouissance, 92, 98, 100, 103, 148, 176n5
Joyce, James, 5, 12, 18–19, 48–49, 51, 61–64, 66–70, 82–87, 108, 140, 145–146, 149,
162–63, 166, 170n5, 170n7, 173n1, 175n10, 176n1, 179nn2–3; Finnegans Wake, 14, 63–
64, 108, 146; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 51, 62, 68, 82, 85–86, 179n2;
Ulysses, 14, 52, 63–68, 85, 180nn6–7
Joyce, Nora, 61
Judaism, 90, 128, 177n5; and anti-Semitism, 90, 100–1
Jung, Carl, 147

Kant, Immanuel, 50, 99–100

Kermode, Frank, 10, 170n3
Kierkegaard, Søren, 2
Kipling, Rudyard, 23
Kojève, Alexandre, 15
Kristeva, Julia, 15–16, 91, 170n6

Lacan, Jacques, 8, 11, 15–17, 19, 21, 34–35, 42, 48–51, 56, 58, 63, 65–66, 71, 76, 88–89,
91, 94, 98–101, 104, 141, 143, 147–48, 154–59, 162, 166, 170n7, 173–74nn3–4, 175n9,
176–77nn5–7; and fundamental fantasy, 19, 89; and future anterior, 104; and the
imaginary, 34, 50–51, 157–58; and Law of the Symbolic Father, 76, 91; and the mirror
stage, 15, 93, 154, 156–58; and Name-of-the-Father concept, 76, 92, 105; and objet a, 19,
50, 66, 76, 89, 93–95, 176–77n6; and the real, 34–35, 37, 41, 50–51, 58, 66, 71, 75, 99,
148, 157–58, 166, 174n3, 176n6; and symbolic order, 42, 50, 89, 156, 158; and the
symbolic, 34–35, 39, 50–51, 58, 65, 71, 76, 99, 104, 143, 148, 150, 157–58, 166; and the
Thing (das Ding, la chose), 49–50, 99–100, 174n4; and the void, 18–19, 42–43, 49–52,
56–59, 61, 64, 66–71, 75, 82–83, 89, 94, 143, 163, 165–66, 174–75n3
Laing, R. D., 71; The Divided Self, 71
Lang, Fritz, 133; Metropolis, 133
language, 1, 4, 9, 15, 21–22, 34, 49, 50–51, 63, 65, 71, 75, 97, 104, 141, 148, 155–56,
160–61, 163, 171n7, 176n6; and subjectivity, 1, 15, 21–22, 34, 49–51, 63, 65, 75, 97,
104, 155–56, 161, 163, 170n6. See also linguistics
Language and Materialism (Coward and Ellis), 163
Larsen, Nella, 12–13, 17
Lawtoo, Nidesh, 42–43
Le Corbusier, 114
Lefebvre, Henri, 20
Lehan, Richard, 87
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 147
Lester, John, 56
Levenson, Michael, 5; A Genealogy of Modernism, 5
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 104
linguistics, 4, 13–15, 19, 54, 104, 154, 170n5. See also language
Lipstick (Fitzgerald), 107
Locke, John, 63
London, United Kingdom, 147–48, 170–71n7, 180n6
Long Island, New York, 90, 99
Lord Jim (Conrad), 23, 36, 52–53, 60, 86, 164, 166, 173n2
Los Angeles, 20, 106, 108, 110–19, 121, 127, 134–35, 137–38, 140, 143–44, 179n11
lost generation, 87
lost object. See under psychoanalysis
Love of the Last Tycoon, The (Fitzgerald), 20, 106–8, 115, 117–18, 122–131, 133, 136, 138,
177n3, 177n5, 178–79nn9–10, 179n12
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 3, 10

Madonna-whore complex, 125

magical realism, 4
Mallios, Peter Lancelot, 87
Malraux, André, 157
Mann, Thomas, 108
Mao, Douglas, 169n2
Mapping Ideology (Žižek), 29
Marx, Karl, 15, 25–26, 58, 98, 100, 153
Marxism, 3, 11, 13–14, 17–18, 24, 26, 35, 41, 43, 153; neo-, 3, 11, 13, 24, 35; post-, 3, 11,
13, 24, 25; structuralist, 11
masquerade, 106, 121–22, 131, 133
mass culture, 109–10, 137, 173n2. See also popular culture
maternity, 19, 49, 89, 96, 103, 128, 136, 170–71n7. See also motherhood
Matthews, John T., 5
McHale, Brian, 9–10, 22, 109, 165–68, 175n9
McWilliams, Carey, 117
mechanization, 133
méconnaissance, 43, 145, 148, 156, 158
Mellard, James, 75, 88, 91–93, 98
metaphysics, 1, 7, 58, 152, 161, 169n1, 175n15
metonymic chain, 94, 160
metonymy, 7–8, 10, 27, 29, 92, 94, 159–61
metropolis, 110, 115
Metropolis (Lang), 133
Michaels, Walter Benn, 87, 90, 92–93, 101; Our America, 87, 90, 92, 101
Miller, J. Hillis, 25, 174n6
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 51
mimesis, 36, 42–43
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko, 77–78
mirror stage, 15, 93, 154, 156–58
miscegenation, 101–102
misrecognition, 39, 42–43, 45, 148, 153, 156, 158
Miss Lonelyhearts (West), 177n5
Mizener, Arthur, 85, 107
modernism, 1, 3–17, 20–21, 23, 42, 44, 63, 108–10, 112–14, 116, 133, 138, 140, 143–46,
161–66, 168, 169n2, 170nn4–5, 175n9, 177n2, 177n4, 179n1, 179n3; and architecture,
114; straw-man, 6, 8; and theory, 11–12, 170n4
modernisms, 6, 9, 11, 15–16, 18
modernist fiction, 1, 6, 9, 12, 14, 17–19, 22, 25, 111, 144, 161, 170n5
modernist literature, 2, 12
modernist novel, 14, 17, 19–20, 47–48, 143, 161. See also novel, the
modernist studies, 5–6, 10–12, 169n2; new, 11–12, 169n2
Modernist Studies Association, 10
modernist subjectivity, 18, 20, 111
modernity, 5, 41, 138, 166, 168
modernization, 15
Moran, Lois, 107
More Pricks Than Kicks (Beckett), 146
motherhood, 49, 66, 76, 80, 91, 93–94, 96–97, 103, 125, 129, 142, 147, 156, 170–71n7.
See also maternity
Murphy (Beckett), 20–21, 145–163, 180n4, 180n7
mysticism, 25–26, 49, 68–70, 83–84, 113
myth, 24, 32, 40, 45, 103, 124, 172n11
mythopoesis, 24, 90

nacheinander, 66
Najder, Zdzisław, 175n8
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1
narcissism, 77, 82, 139, 143, 147, 159
Naremore, James, 70–71
narrativity, 18, 25, 35, 164, 171n3
narratology, 6, 8, 88
nativism, 19, 87–88, 100–1
nebeneinander, 65
negation, 21, 36, 145, 147, 154, 156–59, 161
neurosis, 49, 51, 96, 147
New Historicism, 11, 88
New York City, 86, 99, 108, 110, 114, 117–18
Nicholls, Peter, 5–6, 9–11
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 43, 170n7
Nigger of the “Narcissus,” The (Conrad), 23, 54, 57, 59–60, 67, 171n2, 174n7
nihilism, 35, 52, 169n1, 174n6
Nordic, 89–90
Nostromo (Conrad), 18, 23–47, 57, 85, 87, 153, 163–67, 171n1, 172–73nn9–11
novel, the: as genre and form, 14 17, 19, 25, 36, 46–48, 143. See also modernist novel

objet a, 19, 50, 66, 76, 89, 93–95, 176–77n6.

Oedipus complex, 19, 76, 89, 91–93, 95, 98–99, 101–3, 105
Olson, Charles, 9
omniscient narrator, 163–164
ontology, 9, 19, 21–22, 144, 151, 166–68, 175
other, the, 1, 21, 42–43, 66–67, 87, 93, 102, 109, 145, 157–59, 176
Our America (Michaels), 87, 90, 92, 101
Outcast of the Islands, An (Conrad), 23
overdetermination, 30, 38, 67, 89, 94, 98, 125

paranoia, 7, 51
Paris, France, 86, 114, 170n7
Park, Josephine, 2
parody, 64, 112, 114
Parry, Benita, 27, 172n9
pastiche, 20, 114–15
paternity, 49, 76, 78, 101–2, 124. See also fatherhood
patriarchy, 19, 91, 175n15
Paulson, A. B., 88, 95, 102–3
perception, 3, 63, 65, 70, 152, 166
performance studies, 88
Perloff, Marjorie, 6, 8
personality, 8, 58, 71, 122, 124–25, 130, 132–33, 135, 138, 142–43; cult of, 123; as
fragmented, 4, 126, 143; multiple, 130–132
Peters, John, 52, 174nn5–6
phallus, 7, 75, 89, 92, 93
phenomenalism, 63
phenomenology, 11
philosophy, 2, 46–47, 63, 70, 78, 146, 148, 157, 170n5, 171n3
Plato, 65, 90
pleasure principle, 97–100
Political Unconscious, The (Jameson), 31, 36, 171n7, 171–72n11, 173n2
political antagonism, 30
political beliefs, 36, 45
political climate, 109
political conflict, 29, 32, 38, 41
political critique, 41
political factions, 34
political influence, 33
political instability, 32
political order, 36
political power, 78
political resistance, 29
political revolution, 37
politicization, 109
politics, 13, 27, 29, 31–33, 39, 41, 44, 46, 88, 123, 138, 153, 169n2, 170n7, 171n3,
172n9, 173n12; bio-, 42; and dictatorship, 33, 123, 153; and identity, 1; awareness of,
83; and psychology, 172n9; and race, 87–88
polysemy, 91, 104
popular culture, 110, 135, 139. See also mass culture
populism, 25
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 51, 62, 68, 82, 85–86, 179n2
postcolonialism, 3, 11, 13
postimpressionism, 2, 79–80
postmodern divide, 6, 10, 20, 109–10
postmodernism, 2–11, 13–14, 17, 20–21, 46, 109–16, 118, 144–46, 162–65, 168, 177n2,
179n1; and architecture, 112, 114–15; and art, 21; and criticism, 9–10, 13, 22, 29, 116;
and geography, 100, 108, 111; and literature, 9–10, 14, 20, 144, 166–67; and
subjectivity, 8, 13–14, 17, 111, 143, 170n5; theory of, 1, 3, 10, 12–15, 17, 21, 168
Postmodernism (Jameson), 111–12
postmodernisms, 9
postmodernity, 5, 116
poststructuralism, 3, 11–15, 17, 24, 145, 162, 170n5, 171n7; French, 162
Pound, Ezra, 5
Proust, Marcel, 17, 69, 71, 95, 145–46
psyche, 20, 34, 41–42, 138, 152, 166, 172n9
psychic dispossession, 43
psychic loss, 50
psychic order, 6
psychic subjugation to power, 44
psychic unity, 49
psychic well-being, 61, 84
psychoanalysis, 3, 8, 11–17, 19, 24, 83, 88, 99, 143, 147, 156, 160–161, 170n5, 176n3,
176n5, 177n7; and lost object, 50, 66, 176–77n6. See also psychology
psychological repetition, 19, 44, 89, 91, 93–94, 96–99, 105, 124, 126, 131, 147
psychology, 2, 8, 13, 15, 18–20, 23, 25, 29, 42–43, 68, 76, 86, 97–98, 102, 105, 111, 146–
50, 154, 157, 159, 164, 172n9; abnormal, 136; and crisis, 122; crowd, 43; gestalt, 147;
and space, 158. See also psychoanalysis
Pynchon, Thomas, 14, 20–21, 165–68; The Crying of Lot 49, 20–21, 165–68

queer studies, 11
queer theory, 1, 3, 13, 88

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 49, 62–63

race, 13, 19, 21, 36, 68, 87–99, 100–1, 105, 120, 130, 176n3; and identity, 19, 88, 90
racial politics, 87–88
realism: as style, 66; Victorian, 23
recognition of the other, 67, 101–2, 156–57, 159
redemption: concept of, 19, 52, 56, 59, 61–62; artistic, 62, 68; religious, 62. See also
salvation
reification, 94–95
relativity, special theory of, 2, 63, 69
religion, 18–19, 26–27, 29–30, 32, 38, 40, 48–51, 54–57, 61–62, 64, 68–70, 82, 84, 136,
140–41, 143, 173–74n3, 174–75n8, 175n10, 175n12; and authority, 26, 173n1; and
dogma, 38; and faith, 68; and ideology, 26–27, 33; and imagery, 56–57, 61–62, 67; and
myth, 32; and redemption, 65
repression, 34, 37, 40, 91, 93, 97, 109, 135, 137
Rhys, Jean, 17
Romanticism, 7
Ross, Stephen, 11–12, 27–28, 41–43, 170n4, 171n2, 172n10

Said, Edward, 36, 41

Salecl, Renata, 16, 29–31
salvation, 52, 54, 140. See also redemption
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 15
Scholes, Robert, 168
Schreier, Benjamin, 88–89
science, 2, 3, 18–19, 47–51, 53–56, 58, 61, 63–64, 68–69, 72, 77–78, 80, 81–82, 84, 140–
41, 143, 151, 164, 168, 171n3; and discourse, 48, 170n6, 173–74n3
science fiction, 138, 173n2
scientific method, 80
scientific truth, 64
sensory experience, 54, 65–67, 79, 116, 152–154
signification, 35, 42, 50–51, 165, 174n4. See also metonymy
signified, 7, 9, 50, 78
signifier, 3, 7, 9–10, 14, 42, 50, 78, 94–95, 104, 161, 173–74n3
signifying chain, 92
simulacrum, 116–17, 127
skepticism, 2, 18, 26, 35, 48, 51–52, 54, 62–64, 68, 70, 77–78, 89, 147, 173n1, 174n5. See
also doubt
Skinner, B. F., 20
Sloterdijk, Peter, 28
social antagonism, 45–46, 87
social order, 27, 35, 44, 71, 172n9
social reality, 28, 33, 37, 153
sociology, 2, 47, 171n3
Soja, Edward, 20, 111
solipsism, 42, 52, 71, 151, 159
solitude, 43, 57–58, 74, 147, 149–150, 163
Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 14
Southern California, 113, 117, 138
spatiality, 20–21, 23, 63–64, 66, 71, 106, 111–12, 116–17, 148–49, 152, 155, 158, 160–61,
169n2
spatial turn, 20
Specters of Marx (Derrida), 18, 23, 26, 29, 172n8
spectral imagery, 24–25, 33–34, 38, 44, 60, 74, 100, 171n3
spectrality: ghost-like, 24–26, 28, 32, 38, 45, 100, 171n1; and ideology, 23, 25, 34, 38, 44;
as narrative device, 18, 25, 35, 37–38, 44, 171n3, 171n6
Spinoza, Baruch, 147
Stein, Gertrude, 170n5
Steinbeck, John, 108
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 23
stream of consciousness, 6, 48, 65, 70
structuralism, 11, 15
subconscious, 122, 156
subject formation, 27, 44–46, 76, 88, 93
subject-in-process, 14, 19, 170n6
subjection, 28, 44
subjectivity, 1–4, 6, 8, 12–24, 27–28, 36, 40–46, 49–51, 57–58, 60, 63, 66–70, 75–76, 83–
84, 86–89, 92–94, 97, 104–5, 108, 110–11, 115–16, 127, 132, 143, 145, 147–49, 151–
52, 154–55, 157–62, 164–68, 169n1, 170n4, 170n6 172n9, 172–73n11, 175n15, 176n16;
as decentered, 8, 14, 51, 127; and desire, 93, 147, 159; as fragmented, 22; and ideology,
18, 24, 27, 41, 145; as interpellated, 22–23; inter-, 42, 129, 175n9; and language, 1, 15,
21–22, 34, 49–51, 63, 65, 75, 97, 104, 155–56, 161, 163, 170n6; and perception, 3;
postmodern, 8, 13–14, 17, 111, 143, 170n5; and race, 19, 88; and space, 20; and
temporality, 104–5; void of, 18–19, 56, 83, 89
subjugation, 18, 44, 78
sublimation, 48–51, 56, 143, 173–74n3
Sublime Object of Ideology, The (Žižek), 28, 98, 100, 153
surrealism, 16, 166, 170–1n7
symbolic order, 42, 50, 89, 156, 158

temporality, 63, 98, 104, 111, 169n2, 177n1, 180n1

Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald), 106–7
terror, 52, 71
Theosophical Movement, 68
This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), 86
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud), 96
Time Must Have a Stop (Huxley) 178n6
Titanic, RMS, 98–100, 103
Tolstoy, Leo, 63
To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 52, 68–84, 175n15
tragedy, 40, 44–45, 97–99, 101, 111, 122, 133, 136, 138, 154, 164
transcendence, 7, 21–22, 54, 69, 74, 82, 99, 147, 152, 157
trauma, 30, 34, 41, 96, 146
Trumbo, Dalton, 108

Ulysses (Joyce), 14, 52, 63–68, 85, 180nn6–7

unconscious, 2, 15–16, 27, 34, 42–43, 93, 153, 172n9, 174n4
utopia, 44–45, 147

Varo, Remedios, 21, 165

Venturi, Robert, 114
Victorian era, 4, 18, 54, 79, 179n3, 180n1
Victorian literature, 23
Victorian religiosity, 54
Victorian style, 48
violence, 32–33, 101, 111, 122, 131, 133–38
void, 18‒19, 42–43, 49–52, 56–59, 61, 64, 66–71, 75, 82–83, 89, 94, 118–19, 143, 163,
165–66, 174–75n3
Voyage Out, The (Woolf), 71

Waste Land, The (Eliot), 6, 148

Waves, The (Woolf), 14
wealth, 27–28, 78, 91–92, 100, 130, 135, 139
West, Nathanael, 20, 106; The Day of the Locust, 20, 106, 108, 113, 115, 120–21, 130–40,
166, 177n5; Miss Lonelyhearts, 177n5
West Coast, 117–18, 177n1, 178n8
whiteness, 19, 89–90, 101–2
Wilder, Billy, 107
Williams, Raymond, 4
Wilson, Edmund, 113, 115–16, 118–19, 177n1, 177n3, 178nn6–8
“Winter Dreams” (Fitzgerald), 91–92, 98
womb, 136, 150, 154, 156, 160
Woolf, Virginia, 2, 18, 19, 48; To the Lighthouse, 52, 68–84, 175n15; The Voyage Out, 71;
The Waves, 14
World War I, 88, 116, 145
World War II, 2, 4, 10, 17, 108–110, 112, 116, 138, 144–45, 166, 168, 177n2
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 113
Writing and Difference (Derrida), 97

Yeats, W. B, 116

Žižek, Slavoj, 2, 16–18, 25, 28–29, 32, 34–35, 37–40, 43–46, 98–100, 103, 152–53, 172n8,
172n10, 176n3; Interrogating the Real, 171n5; Mapping Ideology, 29; The Sublime Object
of Ideology, 28, 98, 100, 153