80

Publication of TriQuarterly is made possible in part by the donors of gifts and grants to the maga zine. For their recent and continuing support, we are very pleased to thank the Chicago Tribune Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Charitable Trust and the National Endowment for the Arts.

NOfE: TTiQuaTteTly welcomes financial support in the form of donations, bequests and planned gifts. Please write to Reginald Gibbons, editor. Please see the inside back cover for names of TriQuarterly Council members and Friends of TriQuarterly.

Editor Reginald Gibbons

Associate Editor

Susan Hahn

Guest Editor Mary Kinzie

Managing Editor Kirstie Felland

Special Projects Editor Fred Shafer

Design Director

Gini Kondziolka

Readers Campbell McGrath, Anne Calcagno

Advisory Editors

Winter 1990/91

Executive Editor Bob Perlongo

Assistant to the Editor Gwenan Wilbur

TriQuarterly Fellows

Gerald Majer, Michelle Cleary

Editorial Assistant

Jill Marquis, Matthew Kutcher, Brian Nemtusak, Susan Rooney

Hugo Achugar, Robert Alter, Michael Anania, Cyrus Colter, Rita Dove, Gloria Emerson, Richard Ford, George Garrett, Gerald Graff, Francine du Plessix Gray, Michael S. Harper, Bill Henderson, Maxine Kumin, Grace Paley, Michael Ryan, Alan Shapiro, Ellen Bryant Voigt

TRIQUARTERLY IS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WRITING, ART AND CULTURAL INQUIRY PUBLISHED AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY.

Subscription rates (three issues a year)-Individuals: one year $18; two years $32; life $250. Institutions: one year $26; two years $44; life $300. Foreign subscriptions $4 per year additional. Price of single copies varies. Sample copies $4. Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to TTiQuaTteTly, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, 2020 Ridge Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208. Phone: (708) 491-3490. The editors invite submissions of fiction, poetry and literary essays, which must be received between October 1 and April 30; manuscripts received between May 1 and September 30 will not be read. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts accepted for publication become the property of TriQuaTteTly, unless otherwise indicated. Copyright © 1991 by TTiQuaTteTly. No part of this volume may be reproduced in any manner without written permission. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or sponsors. Printed in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore, typeset by Sans Serif. ISSN: 0041-3097.

National distributor to retail trade: B. DeBoer, 113 East Centre Street-Rear, Nutley, NJ 07110 (201-667-9300). Distributor for West Coast trade: Bookpeople, 2929 Fifth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 (415-549-3030). Midwest: ILPA, P.O. Box 816, Oak Park, IL 60303 (708-383-7535); and Ingram Periodicals, 1117 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086 (800-759-5000).

Reprints of issues 11-15 of TriQuarterly are available in full format from Kraus Reprint Company, Route 100, Millwood, NY 10546, and all issues in microfilm from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

TriQuarterly is pleased to announce that the second winner of the biennial Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry is Linda McCarriston, whose book will be published jointly by TriQuarterly Books and Another Chicago Press in the fall of 1991. McCarrisron will receive a cash award of $3,000. The first winner of the Terrence Des Pres Prize was Stanislaw Baranczak, whose collection of poems, The Weight of the Body, was published in 1989. (The prize alternates by years with the William Goyen Prize for Fiction, the first winner of which was E. S. Goldman, for his book of stories, Earthly Justice.)

TQ welcomes the submission of fiction and poetry manuscripts between October 1 and April 30. MSS must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Allow about twelve weeks for a response.

TriQuarterly welcomes life subscribers to the magazine. Life subscriptions, at $250 each, are a major source of support, and are acknowledged in every issue (unless acknowledgment is not desired).

TriQuarterly Books currently available: Earthly Justice by E. S. Goldman

Fiction of the Eighties: A Decade of Stories from TriQuarterly edited by Reginald Gibbons and Susan Hahn

Selected Poems: The Weight of the Body by Stanislaw Baranczak

Stephen Deutch, Photographer, with essay by Abigail Foerstner and preface by Studs Terkel

The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown selected by Michael S. Harper

Writers from South Africa

For ordering information, call or write ILPA, P.O. Box 816, Oak Park, IL 60303. Phone: 1-800-242-4572.

Epistolary Fiction and Intellectual Life in a Shattered Culture: Ricardo Piglia and John Barth

Johnny Payne

The Bomb and the Baby Boom

Terrence Holt

"Dawn Poems in Blood": Sylvia Plath and PMS ......•........•..............

Catherine Thompson

REVIEWS

Appearing and Disappearing Selves (Brooks Haxton, Traveling Company; Stanley Moss, The Intelligence of Clouds; Eleanor Wilner, Sarah's Choice; Anne Winters, The Key to the City) ..................•.........

Willard Spiegelman

Cover design by Gini Kondziolka

Three Poems

Charles o. Hartman

Anthem I remember Bird, I remember Clifford, I remember Django. I remember you.

Says my heart, What is this thing Called love? My foolish heart. PeoplePeople will say we're in love, say it Over and over again; it's the talk

Of the town. Who knows? How am I To know? How about you? In your own Sweet way, you don't know what Love is, what a difference A day made, what's new, what now, My love. What is there to say? I hear music. The song is you.

Where is love? In the middle

Of a kiss, on the sunny side of the street?

In the still of the night, in Tunisia? Autumn in Washington Square? Somewhere over the rainbow? Back

In your own backyard, on Broadway, Tuxedo Junction, my state, my Kansas, my home? I hear America singing; the song is you. I'll remember April in Paris, Evening in Paris, afternoon In Paris-I love Paris, deed I do. So what? I want to be

Where you are. I remember you. 7

Some other time, will you still Be mine? Perhaps, after all, After you've gone there'll be Other times; someday, sweetheart, someday My prince will come, someone To watch over me. Let's call this Look For the Silver Lining. But not for me: If some of these days I let a song Go out of my heart, I'll never be the same. There will never be another you, just A memory, yesterday's dreams, ghosts Of yesterday. Yesterday I didn't know about you, I didn't know What time it was; my heart Stood still. Ask me now, what kind Of fool am l? Now's the time. I can't Stop loving you; I can't pretend I can't Believe that you're in love with me-I know That you know how my heart sings.

You're my everything. How long Has this been going on? Always It's the same old story: Out of nowhere It could happen to you, all over again. Everything happens to me-all The things you are, my favorite things; All of you, all of me; all day long, all through The night; all too soon, too close For comfort, too marvelous for words. All Or nothing at all. Sometimes I'm happy, sometimes I feel Like a motherless child - but Beautiful, careful, falling grace, bouquet, Bewitched body and soul. Come Rain or come shine, we'll be Together, we'll be together Again, again, time after time, moment To moment, cheek to cheek. Close your eyes, I'll close my eyes. I feel a song coming on. The song is you.

Analogue

2.) did her her her her her his his his his how how let put she the the the the the the the the the the the 3.)

beak bill blow body dark dead drop feel from girl laid lies nape push roof rush that upon wall webs with

above being blood brute could glory great heart holds loins power still there those tower vague where white wings

4.) before breast breast broken caught caught sudden thighs thighs beating beating burning fingers shudder strange

5.) caressed helpless mastered Agamemnon engenders feathered knowledge loosening terrified staggering indifferent

Extraordinary Instruments

twenty-five fingerbowls, fingerbowls. eight-thirtv improvised Plymouth,

springtime

crossroads fitfulness.

visitors:

explanation. snapshots, professor distributed smoothness

ghostliness, swallowtail.

everything extravagant everything inarticulate everything "Everything traversing everything everything, everything Government Everything twelve-fifteen, everything playground everything helplessly everything mountainous, extrapolating. appointments

Disturbing singleness

resources singleness; availability, wrappings forty-two, upstairs thirty-first throughout Silverheels everywhere. unpromised brilliantly watch-crystal everywhere stimulus shrewdness, scurrying everywhere? pomegranates pomegranates) everywhere. violently unthought discontinued Butterflies sunlight, something purpose loyalty, sunlight, Something flustered undiluted mixture

mixture. intimates

customs perfectly something purpose, something perfectly something perfectly

bristling spirits Christmas.

Christmas

Minnesota sunlight perfectly sunlight

Something asteroids, sunlight asteroids excelsior, Lebensraum something pistols

something

sun-responding preoccupation consequence yourself, everybody thousands. yourself.

shattering yourself

alternating twisting pressure thousands dissipates yourself versions tortured, convenient

grasshopper constructed

temperature, temperature

naturally, requests pursuit; sportive undeceptive, astounding luminous irrelevant luminous, naturally

fireworks, fireworks fireworks

Pennsylvania unrecognizable

verminous Watchtower, ourselves, uncomplicated ourselves. ourselves enchantments ourselves newspapers

whiteness regionalism yesterday

Technicolor. secretaries antiphony, assistant.

concentrated histories

perversion tourists foolishness motionless, strangeness disasterward, surviving. everybody's monument, afterwards silvering returns quarter-inch shimmering opposite gossiping opposite devouring, endlessly

Three Poems

Eleanor Wilner

Ume: Plum

The fruit is small, and often served shriveled, soaked in some attar or other, an odd shade of red, weak and toward the blue. Sometimes one of these unpromising tiny plums is set in the center of a flat bed of white rice, to mime the nation's flag-red sun on a white field. Those years ago, we never knew, kept ignorant of all that might disable war, that the flag with the wide red rays, that rose over the bodies, adorned the Zero's wings, was a war flag, emblem of a burning sun, like rage or whatever it is that sets men's lives at nought, and pours them, young and hot, down history's drain.

The trees here must be bred for the beauty of their flower, for the plums are sour, the cherries small and bitter- but, oh, the urne blooming in the early spring, the sakura unfolding in a brilliant sky, blossoms borrowing the light for shelter-a glowing parasol of pink and white, or the world a child's globe that sits in the Buddha's hand

and when he laughs, it shakes, until the air is filled with silken snow, the wind toying with it, lifting the petals as if back to the branch, then bringing them lightly down.

Walking the shimmering tunnel of flowering trees along the Imperial moat, Mrs. Nakano and I spoke of the war, when we were both children (the same age, I think, though it was a point of pride with her to never say). Her voice was matter of fact, or else it was the way English goes flat in a mouth made for another tongue. In Kobe, she had crouched with her mother in the bomb shelter while our planes bombed her city flat. The trees shivered a little, the delicate arbor sent down a shower of petals to our feet. The carp, grown huge, slid by in the moat, and the rain began, steady; we opened our umbrellas as we went. She spoke then about her husband, her misery with him, his anger and his mother, the doors that one by one she'd tried and found them locked.

How do we keep from going mad? I thought, looking at the trees bred for their beauty by an esthetic breed of men, who wanted a woman wrapped in tissue-thin silk, her mouth a hole with blackened teeth, who would dive at the dark stack of a ship to a fiery death. And saw, with them, our own young men, the same, filing into the black belly of a huge cargo plane, each with a woman in his wallet, her words on lilac paper, her distant image as his aphrodisiac in hell. I tried to ask the question that can't

be asked in words-having no subject and no predicate but death. I thought of the bombs falling, and then my mind went blank as the radar screen when the thing that moves into its range is much too close, or gone.

And Mrs. Nakano and I, the fortunate ones, walked side by side beneath the cherry trees and watched the great smoking craters of memory fill in and disappear, and watched the rain turn the fallen petals into a sticky debris, and walked because we were alive, and walked to keep from going mad, and walked for beauty, and for company, the whole perimeter of the Emperor's moat, that carp-infested fence around the palace, walled in, where power keeps its face, and ends, as history ends, in Learold, heartsore - the dead Cordelia in his arms. Reverse pieta, a motherless world, the father holding the sacrificed child on a ground of fallen petals wet with rain, plum on a field of white.

But here, we break the circle, cross the street, and bow. We part, Mrs. Nakano and I, go, each to her own gate.

Changing the Imperatives

And having remembered it, thenwhat next? Oh, go ahead, they said, lift the stone of memory from the heart like the stone from the mouth of the tomb. And are they to blame for what stumbles out, rags crawling with maggots and lice, into the blinding day?

Listen, my friend, they gave you the key to the wrong door, the one marked Sins of the Fathersthe one that opens onto the abyss where obsession hangs its ladder over the lip, where the dead climb daily back up out of the gulf dragging their broken bones, each day more ruined than the one before, until, nearly spent, they are little more than handfuls of powder, aroused like genies by the slightest wind, resentful dust that keeps the air unbreathable.

The past. The wretched luck that, nailed to the mast, becomes the goad for which the ship is lost. Take up the fallen hammer and turning it around, pry the nail from Ahab's gold doubloon, then toss it over the side. Watch how fast the ocean can forget, how brief an opening your entry makes, how soon the wave shuts back upon itself, how small a curiosity the turning bit of gold

excites as it drifts down through the endless sift of green years later when the salvage men dredge up the sand, they'll find only a disc of gold, round as the old threshing floors of Crete, but small enough to fit into the hand; the face it wore-unrecognizable. Then drill a hole and wear it on a ribbon as a talisman, relic of the gentle, veiled powerforgetfulness, the goddess whose name nobody knows, whose shrines are forgotten, her temples overgrown, her images lost.

Atget's Gardens

As I am now seventy years of age and without heirs or progeny of any kind, I am extremely anxious about this collection of plates.

=Eugene Atget in a letter, November 12, 1920

Was it always a dream then?

the fallen leaves the stairs that lead nowhere the players flown plates in a drawer was anyone ever there?

nothing lives here but the light it inhabits the place hovers in the groves of trees inviting the eye away from what it sees as if just behind the stairs water lapped a wall and at the landing stage a boat were being untied about to push away on the dark water just beyond your gaze its opaque shadows thick as the impasto of a dream you can't remember when you wakethese bloodless scenes all color drained even memory has withdrawn leaving only this one odd man dragging his camera from one beautiful emptiness to another one space within the next like Chinese boxes they vanish down the funnel of the camera's

lens, and then into the eye of the man who always waits for what he can't recall and wonders what it was he lost

perhaps no one ever entered here the light suffusing everything may only seem departure's glow unless it is the light the dying sometimes see when like Atget they face away though the quiet is huge we barely hear the water lap and lap against the pier the chuckle of loose stones the dry rustle of the half-lit leaves the hush of a prow cleaving water

Five Poems

Daryl Hine

Woodcuts: Au bois dormant

There are worse materials than wood. Iron rusts and stone resists, so hard That, once manhandled, marble may be marred Forever. Glass is fragile, plastic good For nothing much but junk. They understood This matter as a medium who scarred Whole forests carving totem poles that stood Where I come from in everyman's backyard.

Woods which were enchanted after dark Once upon a time, the haunt of creeps Reputedly, today are lumbered with The rigid regulations of a park. Nonetheless the past returns as myth: In fairy tales it is the wood that sleeps.

Editio Princeps"

Austere and unforgiving spring

Overshadowed by malaise, Precocious, tantalizing days

Protracted into evening By the sun's reluctant rays,

Everything you touch awakes Unenthusiastically, Such as this stark, naked tree That, awkward and unsightly, breaks Out in the throes of puberty,

Or these modest, backward flowers, Inhibited by circumstance, The genitalia of plants, More delicately fleshed than ours In their colored underpants.

With seasonable tardiness

As subscribers we enjoy On the doorstep or nearby Two leavings of the daily press Each flung by a different paper boy:

First the surreptitious one, Unencouraging and cold, Then, open as a centerfold, His buddy, in comparison Forward, foul-mouthed, fresh and bold.

The lad who brought The Morning Star, Shy and silent with the dawn

Unobserved has come and gone, Unlike the more spectacular Youth who brings The Evening Sun.

*First or principal edition.

Bluebeard's Bungalow

Beneath the living room, inside the crawl

Space, in makeshift graves at most skin-deep, Beauties whom the beast abandoned sprawl

Awkward, anonymous, as if asleep

Till at the resurrection flesh will creep

And, while all earthly memories are rotten, Their fake identities will be forgotten.

Uncounted throwaways, their cocksure, carnal

Natures, convinced the devil couldn't care

Less, betrayed them blameless to this charnel

House to be garotted with a prayer.

A spare room holds a magazine of spare

Parts; discarded in the attic lies

The latest broken plaything. Otherwise

Superficially immaculate,

The shambles masquerades as Shangri-la, Where many an immature unfortunate Was guaranteed from growing older, a Terminal but fashionable spa

Any mass-murderer might be at home in, Since Bide-a-Wee is next-door to Dun Roamin.

As on a grander stage a darker age's

Magnificent original Blue Beard

Haunts legend's ill-illuminated pages, Satan stalks suburbia, less feared

Than frowned on; wickedness winked at as weird

Profaned with sinister experiments

The Chapel of the Holy Innocents.

Cheaper than tears and easier to shed, Blood percolated in the songbird's throat, All for another pretty severed head

Or ultimate, excruciating note,

But Justice blackly capped that heartless quote, ("Once the voice is broken, break the neck."): "Vous vous rourmenrez et moy avecques."*

*Words of the judge at the trial of Gilles de Rais (1404-40).

Tabula Rasa?

Titivate: cosmetic task like cleaning up a cluttered desk to disinter a dud decade too undecided to decode.

Drifted drafts of dry leaves make decomposition run amuck: iffy ifs and buts and ands, abandoned means aborted ends. Legible leftover language litters the blanketv-blank embarrassed blotter's doodles, indelible dead letters dictated but not signed indeed by the effete influential dead whose symptoms I cannot deny: Tennyson's elbow Housman's knee.

Tabula rasa: trash the past? scrap these screwed-up scribbled post scripts, pathetic unpaid bills, parodies or parables? Beg the question and begin anew and ever more again, ex nihilo? perhaps not quite now every bon mot is a quote. For plagiarists and staircase wits taste's wastebasket always waits.

Kimono

Sloppy oriental sleeves

Accidentally enough

Sweep the board and dabble in the sink. The tree of which these are the leaves, Woven of some rough, druidic stuff, Is rooted deeper than you think In what flesh naturally believes.

Animal fabrics, silk and wool

Do not wrinkle, like the fur

With which some beastly creatures are endowed. Falling to my feet in full Folds, this habit I prefer

To wear to shreds enwraps me like a shroud, Custom-tailored, comfortable.

Four Poems

Frances Padorr Brent

After the Flood

Dans La grande maison de vitres encore ruisellante, Les en/ants en deuil regarderent les merveilleuses images.

-Rimbaud

The windows are still dripping after the rain; water leaks from the gutters and over the roof. Everyone is groggy in the hot, stuffy room. Martha half-dozes on the horse-shaped chair. I'm on the carpet, arched like a camel over a book.

These are the images that shuffle around my soul: the beautiful woman looks past me, weighted by the camellia in her hair, the spirit of creation stands on a double-tiered rock like the cartoon of an angel, lizards hang on the talons of butter-soft birds, a child sleeps naked on top of a hill; I am astonished by her blue-veined breasts, her hair's mane, black and thick like mine. Hands stray from the book-boards. Horses gallop over melon-colored sand. Birds sound like glass bottles you can blow through.

Now I see the nickel of mother's face. She inclines by the table, wearing black pants. I remember how her stomach is soft after childbirth. The velvet darkness throbs its ommatidia. Have an apple, she whispers. Outside, the rainbow-finned automobiles sway in their gravity like loose steel balls in a race.

Des eclairs de chaleur

From Without

Claps across an unbreathing sky like so many wrong knots tied and then let go. Phosphorescence drifts off the street, coloring our thrown-off clothes, the stained woolen carpet's wreathing. Night, our shoulders impress the slab of wall while children softly lean in the water-leached hall.

From Within

After a war, everyone's resting on cots draped with blankets. It's raining. If you ask me, I don't know if you're in this. The sirens and lost dogs seem to go on for hours. I'm just trying to get it all straight. Most of these are old faces or in shadow, but more exhausted than I've ever been.

The Whale

Statues mouth their quiet, instinctual vowels, and the little animals gathering for generations: mollusk, fish, pig, swim deep to me, past the greenish-yellow biers, past my garlanded unborn with silken lanugo swept across his arms, past lichen that catches in my hair, or the gabled, coral-reef house where we met, trembling on the uneven floor.

In the museum, a draftsman draws Galapagos on the plaster walls; a whale hangs over corridors of acanthus, stretched out whiter than the broken statue's broken groin. For twenty years he wandered my darkest sleep, swallowing, swallowing. His oil-black, seal-skin sides shown so I could see my face. Woke with my fist to my swollen eye. A carpenter on the scaffold hammers at his side.

Underwater House

Over here, behind the copse of lilacs, there's a path-

The air is filled with scarab beetles swarming like a multitude of lost souls.

Water's at every window and every wall is glass. Seals torque past as if it were a marine show and without any fish. Suds jiggle like gemstones in a dish.

The house is for sale: four rooms and a bath. You can fix it up any way that you wish. Of course, the room with the bedyou know what that's forand the shuttered one has got boxes and bulbs for the here-to-fore and ever after.

Across the hall there's a rocker and teether and toys which fill us with happiness. So the last is for eating sea fruits on the other side of the glass.

Outside, the water's muddy gray. It rocks against our pores, our carapace. And sea gulls ride, careening waves like Bosch's ghouls.

Three Poems

Anne,Marie Cusac

Mama's Dream

At night after the baby is asleep, Her small hand curled against her quiet cheek, And the older children have been put to bed, Where they lie, almost asleep; Annette's small breath Becoming regular again - each sob Still tinier, Christine and Fredrick stretched Beneath the starched white sheets, their oval eyes

Turned toward the dim night lamp; she slowly moves Along the hall to the far,left doorway. For this she's waited through the baby's meal, The baths, the storytelling, Annette's tantrumAlready the third one she'd thrown that week; This vision of her youngest son, asleep Since early afternoon, asleep as any Of her four other children; heavily, The forehead smooth, the mouth and skin relaxed, So like the child he'd been before the cancer, And could "soon be again," or so she more Than half believes here, standing in his room, At night, when he is sleeping like the others. Yes she believes this as she steps down The dark hallway, and down the wooden stairs, To the kitchen with its red tile floor, the sleeping cat, Blue-flowered curtains, and the copper pot She heats now, making tea. The radio plays Mozart - the violin's song skimming above The old refrigerator's grumbling buzz.

She stands there, near the maple highchair, rests Her hand along its smooth-grained back, and waits For the steam to rise, high-pitched and vanishing.

Joanie: Moncton, 1946

Slight and blond, she watches from the stair, Her face too serious for her ten years.

From the front room below, as though far off, She hears her father's hard, accusing words: How had she left her in that chair all night, In February, no blanket couldn't she Remember last year, how ill that child had been?

And, as though embedded in the dark, Her mother's answer, that she was so tired, Couldn't he understand? she was just tired

Carrying her up and down the stairs

And all the other children and no money, Never enough money for the nurse

She should have had - wouldn't he understand, Couldn't he see how weary she always was, How tired? Her small voice rises, weary as The weariness she claims. The children - Joe And the sisters -listen, silent, in their rooms

As the dreary fight, begun three days before, Goes on and will go on.

She climbs the steps, Each movement taking her further from their words, Closer to the room - which, from the hall, She sees is open still, and candlelitAnd silence as she shuts the bedroom door.

Near the far window, on the trundle bed, The child, still wrapped in wool against the chill, Is dead since morning. In the candlelight

Her skin is flushed as though still feverish, Hair burnished, arms and hands so frail

In the near dark, they never should have moved. As she has every evening for three years, She speaks the name, "Louisa," quietly

As if, this time, somehow, to call her back; Touches her arm, anticipating almost

The cold, peculiar skin; and as if she's needed, Curls beside her on the narrow bed, Tenses a moment at the sudden smell, Strange and intimate; and holds the childKnows that this is something she must do, Not knowing why, just the necessity To stay here, close to her, until the smell Means nothing more than darkness might, until She can breathe slowly, normally, again.

Poem for Jade

Light gone out of day. In your small house I would guess nothing. Silence of button tins, Hot tea and oranges.

Outside, your son plays knee-deep in the ditch, And will not come, though you have called him in. He disregards the snow Gusting the snow-deep sky, And how it shadows him and, deepening, Blanches and frets the new forsythia Until, in dusk, movement is snow.

A perfect cancer of icicles

Builds from the eaves.

You sit back, swallow twice. Your gray-flecked eyes Regard me. I Learn this again. Yes, You are dying, the growth vigorous From your lost breast, into your bones. Your gaze, brazenly alive.

And, when your daughter brings her newest doll, Porcelain, shattered from midriff down, Your finger, steady, traces a painted mouth, A chin and brow, placid, expectant eyes. Your daughter waits. And you alone, Knowing you cannot fix what will not fix, Not knowing how to say that you cannot.

Daddv-O

William Finley

Today I pack away your dusty records, The only tangible inheritance

Besides your bloody, self-inflicted death. I will admit the records are pretty wild, Drugged-out cats like Charlie Parker smile, World,weary, narcotic, just like you would smile While chanting mantras in your basement room.

Nineteen-fifties jazz, wow man, you're gone. But look at me with stoned departed eyes, With binoculars from far beyond the grave, And see that I am half of you: only half.

Daddv-O, do you remember all the questions? What is the bread of life? Who was Jesus? "Anything you eat is bread, and Dizzy, Dizzy Gillespie is Jesus Christ, dig it?" Yes I can, and perhaps for this I should thank you, For in your world of dusty, beatnik vinyl, Suicide is canonized in song.

Six Poems

Allan Gray

I Do Believe Her

Sick with confusion - specimens

Asprawl, his expedition through­

The man of science screws the lens

Till true proves false, and false proves true. These nights, evacuate of sense, Of matrices and scatter-plot, logic invincible draws hence The ether and the ore of thought. Vanished the unexpected days.

Happiness seemed an obvious thing And calculation periphrase

Till something shuddered and took to wing.

Eile n'existe pas: who loves a wraith Kills with science, or dies of faith.

The Mimic

Nothing, the night we met, was missedHanover, Paris, Wichita, Hours that spent us, left us raw, Feature and phrase that aped the twist, The gesture and the gist of French.

Death is a ruse to stay alive: Thus labile orchises contrive To mime in mauve a carnal stench, Or mantids in disguise beguile Toward hungry palps a feast of flies. God's creatures have panache and style Though lies are all they advertise.

Curt jactations, and then you'd drowse. 1 was a pretext for pretense, But throat and tongue curbed common sense And you'd vowed your usual vows.

Shadow, Poor Smoke, My Dust and DreamsNothing but Nothing's as it seems.

Commutation

We glide each morning beyond the green air, The tall trees pulsing with insects, the wives And children. Each follows a rite of way, We rumble through rubble to reach our station, Our office.

Borne thus to work, the mind dives

Past entrepor and Slavic orb-and-cross And ramshackle houses. In these ravines

All things commute, objects debouch to dross­

The boxcar's rusted coupling: grocery carts:

Tires blazoned with great names: old magazines: Ailanthus thrusting through spent, skeletal Perambulators: tumbled canisters

Of paint. Gaping goldenrod, a freezer chokes

Amid a thicket of bicycle spokes.

Geology, at long last, shows. Stratum By stratum our labor is corrupted; Beneath its weight the year is pressed to ooze,

The form of things is lost. Orange monarchs cruise Over brush where striped caterpillars feed On bitter milk. They rise through heavy skies; And gradients of air mile by mile lead on Toward the far green pines of Michoacan.

Ladder

Hard beside you, in your bronze car, I felt as one who'd traveled far

To reach, at last, a ladder's base. It rose through torrents of endless air

To clouds of gold, to god knows where.

Each read at once the other's face. Touching our lithe and lively tongues, Sweetly, sweetly we climbed the rungs.

Dinner in the Garden District

That night we dined. Circumstance served course On course of talk. We spoke of natural resource, Affairs of business, medicine, or state, Politics abroad, the nuclear debate, How each hoped his children shouldn't die, Nor the green earth be lost.

I could not fault those two fine men: to smile Through speech of heavy days does not belie Their gravity.

I only was less versatile And knew the earth for truly lost, Though not in mazes of the global game, Nor annihilating flame.

Remembrance, not the great world at large, Laid on table this heavier charge: That nights and days were fled; that so much should Have flown before I'd understood.

Nocturne

Heavy with wine and words and years

You make the rounds, you douse the lights.

Upstairs she sleeps without a dream. Choose duty, choose unconsciousnessThis is the way your life will be,

You will move no human heart, you Will climb the stairs. Love is, at last, Only a wish to do no hurt. And lamp by lamp the night comes in.

Four Poems

w. s. Di Piero

The Next Room

Like leaves and coils of leaf dust turning along the sidewalk

beyond my view; like wind picking the flared leaf mounds

at the curb It's all and nothing like. Something else:

a cool sweep of air I felt the moment you walked in and jabbed the radio, squealing across the band

(the way you draw speech from the cockeyed cabinet hinge)

unseen, one room away, but for the brazen sun-sleeve

cast across my rug from the door you meant to close.

Careening, famished, cupboard to fridge, you reach me here

in a thinned-out shadow crossing the bar of light,

lapping it, like the subway's blued radiance that raked

the scummy streetgrates; machine, oiled draft razzed up

through the reef. Deeper, small change cringed in the muck, waiting to be claimed. ("Well, they're lost for good!") The shadow passes. It's the smell of leaves blown through the door, it's the chair leg scraping the floor when you climb up and reach.

Leopardi's La sera del di di Festa

A few bedroom lights. The moon in windless apple trees shines across the rooftops, picking apart hills, empty streets You're above it all, sleeping in your room. No night-sweats or pulsing throat, no shiver when world-stuff sags, estranged, unfelt, yet smothers anyway if love fails in us.

You'll sleep off today's alcohol flush, the shadow-twitch of too much dancing, dreaming back to implausible grins pimply boys hung on you before you dumped them in the pit of your voluptuous indifference. You're watching yourself smile in that dream. I'm down here, shrill as always, counting off days in my green time. Our bachelor locksmith in the corner house sings through his boozy haze. He's always alone. Does anything leave a trace? I push words around in dirt tomorrow's rain ploughs under. Holiday, workday. Wool mills clatter Goethe's "inhuman noise." Jackboots plough down Rome's gaunt armies. Achilles howls at blood he needs to taste. Behind a shutter on our quiet street, Augustine sobs into his books. Our silence is their unforgiving gift. When I was young, full of myself and not lost enough to love, unnerved before some holiday's solemn terminal bliss,

I buried my head in a pillow. Late that night, someone else's song turning and fading around a corner called me, and calls me now, caught long gone in my throat.

Near Damascus

The antlered scarab rolled a dungball for its brood; a red ant, tipsy, bulldozed a flinty wedge of chaff. Mud slots from the recent rain, now crusted over by the heatmoon mountains seen close up; my mouth plugged with road grit and surprise just when I tried to shout no to the blunt lightning spike that stopped me

In the mountains of the moon I saw a wasp dragging a grasshopper to a frothing nest, grubs lingering through their episode, and larvae I'd have chewed like honeycomb if it would have saved my sight. Antaeus inhaled force from dirt; he was luckier, never much for visions, and too far gone.

In my head, I see this body dumped flat. Painted in above, the horse twists and straddles me, his eyes flare, ecstatic, new, contemptuous of the thing that fell, while the light-shaft curries his flank and nails me down, the unloved me, rousted, found out, blasted, saved down in the road's pearly filth.

Gethsemane

He had nerve enough to follow, dogging His heels, for what? To learn a new vocabulary, a prayer, down there in yellow iris that smelled like carcass? He came back smiling. The dog had its day, rolling in meat. The meat was news: the Word of God wants what we want, to be unchosen. He must have made up his mind then. What if he said, I don't see Him here, we'll check later? Instead he gagged on words, like a mouthful of water brought from the garden, that blood squirms from the blossom loads and cracked boughs, and in the stagnant lake of the heart the sprouting trunk splits, groans, spilling wine, the spongy dirt inhaling any blood that falls, and I'm falling into the tree and dogs at lakeside bark at clouds

Like that. As if his own speech could infuriate time while he waited for an act to come upon him (as joy sometimes happens). The soldiers (were they his joy?) got impatient. So finally his bloodless lips screamed More life! More salt! before he gave away his kiss.

Four Poems

Joanna Anos

Green Street

I had known the man, in a bar in southern Illinois, ex-junkie-turned-artist, cheeks hollowed, skin seemingly carved of a blond wood.

I was seventeen. In black boots and Levi jeans, once a week, the same night every week I stood outside the railing that wound around the dance-floor stage.

I was new to the scene. I took the twenties when tucked in my palm, slipped in my back pocket with a squeezelet me buy you, breath warm and liquor-sweet, a drink at the bar.

One night he called me, curled his finger in the gesture meant to have me come. "Go live," he said.

Attractive Possibility

From room to room, slowly the morning light cleans up the shadows that still make their way across the walls, left over from the night. I lift the blind and notice how each day recalls some thing that must be cleared away. The trail of breadcrumbs scattered on the floor leads only back to where I was before.

So in these early hours I must begin once more to put things back into their places; each hardbound book set side by side again in even rows inside the wooden cases. I wipe away the salt, each grain, each trace of evening from the stove, like bitter cares beneath my hand. Until the surface glares

I wash the ash from the enamel glaze then brush away the dust, all that I see, some of it gray, some glinting in the haze like an attractive possibility. Those little sparks-like subtle memories they rise only to settle in the air, unseen and gathering and going nowhere.

Questions of Love

Why in the darkened alleyway did we choose to grope for love? Why not some vacant room? Why not in some more sacred place lit in a languid candle-warmth of need?

We stumbled in each other's arms only too much aware how we should fear the night. But like dark cats that crouched to the wall, we would avoid in every desperate pause

the strong circles of light intent on our protection. There, in that narrow, gravel lane down along the shallows of my spine you touched your hand, your mouth fierce against my neck.

There, on the brick, our bodies scrawled a language wholly their own; through my hair your voice was wind. Far off a siren howled and died. In the brown leaves something stirred

like our laughter at its alarm. That night we turned from the street; we took that darkened path that moved among refuse, litter, waste, passing behind the back of a world asleep-

behind blue, loose coils of fence, bars on milky panes, behind the slack tangle of fire escapes - yet we chose to love there, as if to dare that world to wake.

The Barn

All day the roads we traveled narrowing, westward across New Hampshire to Vermont, from Route 10 onto "historic" 7A, taking us through small towns one after the next, their inns fresh-painted for the tourist trade, in one town, a bridge uncovered for repair, its great wood caging like some creature's ribs dug decades back from the rocky stream below, raised up (though no one could remember when), planked as a crossing to another town. We wound through the afternoon, early September, the green hills rising up on either side, some grazed to pastureland, some thick with pinenot yet the famous autumn of the East, not yet, though one could sense the push toward change in leaf-tip, sap, and vein, when the road turned and, there, suddenly, from the darkest wood one sweet maple burned, and then we saw it, that old gray barn, outcast, in fields run wild. We swerved to the roadside, as if that landmark were what we had come for, abandoned for centuries: one-half of its facade intact, the other cadaverous, the knotty boards that rose almost three stories high, fallen or torn down, only the bracings visible and a patch of pale blue sky beyond a cracked backside board. Wading through knee-deep weeds, we made our way, through goldenrod, tall prickly grass, stirring, as we went, the dry sweet scent of the stalks, lifting dust up from the fields, stumbling on the remnants of some weekend pilgrimage: a squat toolshed, its roof caved in-someone had propped a mattress up against the shedside, another mattress was tossed nearby in shrub, a bedside beer bottle on a rotted stump.

But the view was grand-low hills on the horizon and the sun just beginning to set and the barn, from every angle now, slatted with light. We peered inside, not knowing what we'd find in that rural shrine, the bones of cattle or plows. A high west window blazed with sun and, there, down in the stable's trough, the sun leapt back, shot back up in a cone like flame.

And it seemed that this is how it must have been that night: the magi come, their gilt gifts and sequined robes ignited by the great star's light that poured through the uneasy beams. One could imagine here amidst the acrid smell of hay the child's white face-as if painted by La Tourobsessive dark replenishing the stall but for that one vanishing point of light.

And so the evening we would travel through, westward toward nightfall, shadings of green, the road that could be any state's divide, merging ahead to two lanes then to three, the sun already dropped behind the hills, when the thin moon rose in the lavender sky.

Again Consider the Wind

Brooks Haxton

The wind continuing to turn and turn back in its turning does not sing, though in December it may strike the living maple twigs with crystal and chrome hammers, and the chords, which are not music, wake the soul.

A man pries loose a frozen wedge of clay from the lip of a posthole for a barbed wire fence. His life is half past, and his arm feels strong. He throws, and the icepane vibrates under the tongue-shaped clod sent strumming out to the midpoint of the pond. Again the wind tears into a prolonged howl between the frozen, rotten planks of the little dock. The sun is small and low, and lower. What has turned will turn back in its turning and the sound where tiny spurs of ice rake through the splintered grain of slash pine over the dock (which this spring someone must repair), the rasping noise he hears, is not a whisper. Solstice at this moment ends the year.

The young pines on the ridge south of the pond bend northward so that the tops all waveringly indicate Polaris, which is always there. Reading prophetic discourse into the wind is fool's work, and the fool's great uncle's best friend from his childhood

drove this nail through this plank into the crossbeam with three strokes so that the steel rang, I was there, and the wind carried the music across the pond.

Four Poems

John Koethe

Un autre monde

The nervous style and faintly reassuring Tone of voice concealed inside the meanings Incompletely grasped, and constantly disappearing As the isolated moments burst against each other And subside-these are the aspects left behind Once the sense is over, and the confusion spent. They belong to the naive, perennial attempt to see And shift the focus of experience, fundamentally Revising what it means to feel, yet realizing Merely some minor, disappointing alterations In the fixed scheme of things. I bring to it Nothing but bare need, blind, continual obsession With the private way life passes into nothing And a mind as fragile as a heart. It started out Indifferently but soon became my real way of feeling, Abstract tears, an anger retrospectively revealing Darker interpretations of the fears that filled me to Exploding, ill-defined desires, vague anxieties and Satisfactions that were once so much a part of me I miss them, and I want them back. And yet in time They did come back as wishes, but the kind of wishes

Long ago abandoned, left behind like markers on the way To resignation, and then as infinitely fine regrets, And then as aspects of some near, receding world Inert as yesterday, and no longer mine.

The Saturday Matinee

Forgotten strings. A woman wearing black leans back against a mantlepiece.

The view from where I sat was of a street above a canyon,

And the story was a melodrama with a cast of four. The subject was an ordinary way of life, defined by principles I'd usually ignore, and messages that came to me in

Words that I'd eventually forget, or hadn't actually understood.

Yet now and then I'd have a dream in which a feeble light was visible beneath my door, And unfamiliar voices mumbled in the kitchen; and then I'd wake up in a sweat And feel the language closing in like traces of the people who'd been Close to me at different stages of my childhood,

Mouthing a kind of rhetoric I thought I'd long ago outgrown, Whose undisguised appeal could reach me like a popular song, Directly and without any hesitation; or like a movie, Strong and sentimental, filled with images of faces I could feel -Cut to home: the summer slides away in pages,

And the dreams that used to trouble me occur less frequently.

Sometimes I sit here, waiting in my mind as in the Theaters where I'd watched them gravitate across the screen, Vacant beneath the skin, projecting the emotions they were made to feel

And breathing in the atmosphere of infantile

Rage that lets them remain alive. And I can hear them

In the lyrics of a song accompanying a private tune, the argument concealed in a lament

- Although I realize no argument can bring them back to me, Or let me speak to them again. I sit here mulling over moments

With the flesh scooped out, the impulse spent

And feeling nothing but the words-like Scarlett, in a furnished room,

Imagining her abandoned house, immense and uninhabited And filled with silence and the sound of birds, its rafters open to the weather,

Dust motes floating through the air that X and Y had breathed

-Only no one misses them, and no one cares.

Where do words go, once the hurt that puffed them up has healed?

The private ones still hurt. But publicly, a sort of calm prevails,

As a door bangs, or a car drives past the corner, or overhead a cloud goes sailing by And gradually their stories disappear like wonderful balloons

Rising straight into the sky, on an August day.

Early Morning in Milwaukee

Is this what I was made for? Is the world that fits

Like what I feel when I wake up each morning? Steamclouds

Hovering over the lake, and smoke ascending from ten thousand chimneys

As in a picture on a calendar, in a frieze of ordinary days?

Beneath a sky of oatmeal gray, the land slides downward from a Krnarr parking lot

Into a distance lined with bungalows, and then a vague horizon.

Higher and higher, until its gaze becomes a part of what it sees,

The mind ascends through layers of immobility into an unfamiliar atmosphere

Where nothing lives, and with a sense of finally breaking free

Attains its kingdom: a constructed space, or an imaginary city

Bordered all around by darkness; or a city gradually sinking into age,

Dominated by a television tower whose blue light warns the traveler away:

People change, or drift away, or die. It used to be a country

Bounded by possibility, from which the restless could embark

And then come home to, and where the soul could find an emblem of itself.

Some days I feel a momentary lightness, but then the density returns,

The salt-encrusted cars drive by the factory where a clocktower

Overlooks the highway, and the third shift ends. And then softly,

The way the future used to sing to me when I was ten years old, I start to hear the murmur of a voice that isn't mine at all,

Formless and indistinct, the music of a world that holds no place for me;

And then an image starts to gather in my mind - a picture of a room

Where someone lingers at a window, staring at a nearly empty street

Bordered by freight yards and abandoned tanneries. And then the bus stops, And a man gets off, and stands still, and then walks away.

Last night I had a dream in which the image of a longforgotten love

Hovered over the city. No one could remember what his name was

Or where he came from, or decipher what that emptiness might mean;

Yet on the corner, next to the USA Today machine, a woman seemed to wave at me,

Until the stream of morning traffic blocked her from my view.

It's strange, the way a person's life can feel so far away, Although the claims of its existence are encountered everywhere

- In a drugstore, or on the cover of a tabloid, on the local news

Or in the mail that came this morning, in the musings of some talk-show host

Whose face is an enigma and whose name is just a number in the phone book,

But whose words are as pervasive as the atmosphere I breathe.

Why can't I find my name in this profusion? Nothing even stays,

No image glances back at me, no inner angel hurls itself in rage

Against the confines of this surface that confronts me everywhere I look

- At home or far away, here or on the way back from the store-

Behind an all-inclusive voice and personality, fashioned out of fear

And scattered like a million isolated points transmitting random images

Across a space alive with unconnected signals. I heard my name Once, but then the noise of waiting patiently resumed. It felt the same, Yet gradually the terms I used to measure out my life increased,

Until I realized that I'd been driving down these streets for sixteen years.

I was part of the surroundings: people looked at me the way I used to look at them, And most of what I felt seemed second-nature. Now and then that sense I'd had in high school -Of a puzzlement about to lift, a language just about to start-

Meandered into consciousness; but by and large I'd spend the days

Like something in the background, or like part of a design too intricate to see.

Wasn't there supposed to be a stage at which the soul at last broke free

And started to meet the world on equal terms? To feel a little more at home, More intensely realized, more successfully contained Within the arc of its achievements? Filled with reservations, Moods and private doubts, yet always moving, with increasing confidence,

Towards a kind of summary, towards the apex of a long career

Advancing down an avenue that opened on a space of sympathy and public understanding?

Or howling like the wind in the wires outside my window, in a cacophony of rage?

I don't think so. Age is like the dreams one had in childhood,

Some part of which were true-l have the things I want, the words to misdescribe them, And the freedom to imagine what I think I feel. I think that most of what I feel remains unknown, But that beneath my life lies something intricate and real and Nearly close enough to touch. I live it, and I know I should explain it, Only I know I can't - it's just an image of my life that came to me one day, And which remained long after the delight it brought had ended.

Sometimes I think I hear the sound of death approaching Like a song in the trees, a performance staged for me and me alone

And written in the ersatz language of loss, the language of time passing Or the sound of someone speaking decorously into the unknown - Like a voice picked up on the telephone when two lines cross momentarily -Overheard, and then half-heard, and then gone.

"I Heard a Fly Buzz "

for

Bruce and LitJija Renner

Light began to wane; it was supernaturally calm. There was movement in the air, yet nothing moving when I looked.

I felt an inkling of the night that never came, the Faint pre-echo of a noise I couldn't hear, or didn't want to hear-

Either from timidity, or fear, or an exaggerated sense of duty;

Or because I'd spent a lifetime trying to be good.

I thought I heard a tune from a calliope, and pieces of a

Prayer I used to say each night before I went to bed­

Now flay me down to sleep-while a parade of images of Neighborhoods I'd known, and friends whose humor I'd enjoyed

Meandered through my consciousness like numbers in a Stark, mechanical affair of abstract objects in a void

-For they'd begun to feel as distant as an evening

In Balboa Park, with most of them dying, and some already dead,

Inhabiting a long, generic memory only I could read.

Life ends on a particular day, and at a particular time; and yet I thought that I inhabited a world existing entirely in my head, in a constructed space

Where it was never any special time, or hot, or on a Tuesday

When the phone rang, or with the television on. I Think that I was wrong to treat my body as a kind of place

From which the soul, as entropy increases, migrates

In an upward-moving spiral of completion, a defining state

-But a subtractive one-that brings relief from hope

And freedom from complexity, escaping one by one the Emblems of its former life and then, the waiting over, The repentance done, ascending in a final sacrament of light into a

Vacuum filled with comprehending angels who might sing to me. Instead, I found myself back home in California, sipping coffee

While an unknown insect flew, invisible, around my head. The texture of a certain summer day came back to me, But now in a heightened form, the simple sweetness of its presence

Mingled with the faint, metallic taste of fear, until Each moment meant two things. The nearer I approached, The more inscrutable it seemed. The tiny buzzing noise became an avalanche of Sound whose overriding meaning was the same: get out of here

- Wherever "here" might be. And something spoke to me, But when I turned around and looked I caught the image of my own complacency

Reflected in a mirror-a temperament defined by childish anecdotes and jokes

And focused on an object of dispassionate concern

Beyond itself, yet part of my experience. I finally came to see

That what I valued was a fragile and contingent life

Supported by the thought of something opposite that might,

At any time, break through its thin veneer. Yet all the time,

Despite that constant sense, it felt so sure, so solid.

I remember walking through a park

And suddenly

My world felt light, then numb, and then abruptly clear.

Some faces suddenly ballooned, then blurred. Then it got dark.

Five Poems

Charles Wasserburg

From Here

Downhill, past the urgent sweetness of lemon blossom, over the pines, their squeakings zigzagging through twilight, the bats loop and climb, calling out,

panicked at where they find themselves. Remember how they came sometimes-

the sky just flushing violet as we paused to watch from here? The orchard walls, the trees, even the two of us mere solid shadows bouncing that shrillness back to them, radaring where to fly or not fly as they homed in on water and food we couldn't see. Their cries no pride-baffled tones like yours long-distance, "I'm fine, fine." From this hill, how frenzied they look, ashscraps whirling across the sky. And, regathering, how panicked

they still sound as their flight away releases them from us.

From The Distances

A flyspeck on the windshield seems to twitch. Somehow, flattened at 70 miles an hour, its legs remain distinct: nothing to watch but this, and lane lines rippling in the glare. Nothing to hear except the engine's drone as I focus on a butte ahead, and see the speck grow, pitch like tumbleweed blown over the road, stagger, and suddenly

become a man: blue-jeaned and bearded, waving his arms wildly, yelling and yelling something Why didn't you stop to help? Because-because other people will have to pass that spot. And though I still recall how he chased, he's not behind me now. Probably never was.

Mirror staring down the ramshackle bed, I sweated out the night twisted in sheets. Road-fevered, I almost heard what lovers said next-door. They slept now, like the weedy streets, like the two codgers who'd stared across their beer inside the only diner, smiles askew, who seemed to ask, what are you doing here? I wished for dawn. I was just passing through.

But later, I read of what I hadn't guessed: miles of silos tombing the ground I'd passed. Now day blooms yellow there, its light pours nearer flushing trees pink, then white, unlike the dawn we'd waited for. In every room the mirror, casting a vacant bed, looks on.

Even this far away from it, I bear the desert's arid twang in my speech, its flatness inflected only where scarps jut, and declare in spills of chunked basalt, an understress. There, the sun's white heat welded day to day and city to hills gripped by crackling sagebrush, where coyote and rattlers vanished in a spray of sand: I've watched those distances that push the horizon's thread toward the edge of the sky unravel all connections between towns and breed the love of speed - fixed in the stare of headlights, sequined place-names fly by windshields Then a single streetlight drowns in the rearview mirror like an unknown star.

Below San Simeon

"1 wasn't trying to problematize the matter but like, my bloodsugar just plummeted because I put so much into my lectures."

Bearded, fluttering ringed fingers above his head, he waved coffee and cake away to amplify his point, while some of us leveled glances at him and his companions. But could we smirk at his self-enlarging talk, bathing our faces in the briny steam of clams, snapper, and garlicky bay scallops tangled in angelhair, shining in creamsauce, as we watched our waitress wrestle the winecork out?

Because 1 know the students love my course. It's that 1 give so much; 1 just keep giving." We took our time that day, walking the beach.

Upshore from us, the millionaire had paged dreamily through books of castle furnishings, statues, tapestries. I want that. And that.

We might have stared all evening, hypnotized by the wallowing hugeness of wall on wall buffeting the sandstone bluff we stood on.

But hiking down we found a cove, a chamber scooped from rock, that focused our ocean view: one tide teeming with quicksilver peaks

downsliding to stream between stones, pool its light in hollowed rock, and then slide back, glistening over pebbles and minute snailshells.

Its grumble, tuned on cliffs to crystal lappings, came and went, where it had washed fields of seaweed shoreward to dry in tendriled, flv-buzzed heaps.

Gave and took away. And for the first time in months of city living, that night we found Dipper, Bear, and Hunter, mere selfhood's grief or love hurled to the sky, where it cooled into those storied fires. They gave us back ourselves, magnified, what Hearst must have wanted when he shipped leopard and puma to these hills; or what the man at dinner wanted, a way of telling everyone I was, I am.

What was Hearst? That maze of echoing hallways where tourists chuckled at the endless rooms so glutted with furniture no one could care.

Leaving the restaurant that night, so full ourselves with the shellfish, garlic, and wine, we must have looked, you groaned,

like sea lions we'd watched that afternoon sprawling and bloated far out on the rocks as though there were no shaping limits, no bracing tang of otherness that fed us, that would take us back again.

Two Poems

Peter Marcus

Do You Remember?

He comes across the street against the light to reach the crowd before the bus arrives. He picks the one who might not turn away, eyes wide, intent on asking, "Spare some change?"

At first he looks like anyone of us with dungarees, a denim shirt untucked. Then something in the second day of stubble, the almost,hardened tongues of matted hairhe is betrayed before he reaches us.

Do you remember them, from years ago? They came into our lives in different ways: in flyers hidden in the daily mail, or told their age, their height, and where last seen on your milk carton at the breakfast table.

Their faces asking us, "Have you seen me?"

On This Bench

A woman sleeping there, her head on the knees of a man whose eyes are fixed beyond the crowd. He wraps her with his blanket, then takes her in. They are like Hades and Proserpin.

Her face dark from dirt, her eyes closing with each sweep of his fingers through her hair then down her back to soothe her into sleep. He has her now, and waits through the day's light until they can descend into the night.

Beyond Mourning

Meg Schoerke

A skein of stalks and cattails shirrs around her. When she stops to draw her skirts off quietly and set them near the bank, the seamless water, opaque with plankton and looped algae, recedes, imprinting brown rings on her feet. She turns, pleased by the softness of the muddy bottomed dank into which worms spiral, reed roots seep, thick as her loose dark hair that dangles gently toward the water. She leans out to watch the bubbles surfacing like clear beads near a sodden shape: a marsh rat, newly dead, belly up, and alive with worms. She shies away, though fascinated by the quick movement in the fur and the delicate rounds of air that bobble and float beside the body. They rise, edging her shoulders, and she sings, borne up by the wanton current.

Three Poems

Alan Shapiro

Mud Dancing

Woodstock, 1969

Anonymous as steam, in the steam teased from the mud,hole at the field's edge where we were gathered, the unhallowed dead, the herded up, the poured out like water, grew curious about us - naked as they were once, our numbers so like theirs,

and the air, too, a familiar newsreel dusk of rain all afternoon. It could almost have been themselves

they saw, except that we were dancing knee deep in mud, in the muddy gestures of their degradation,

unpoliced and under no one's orders but the wiry twang and thump we danced to, sang to, yowling

on all fours, hooting on backs and bellies, smearing black lather over our own, each other's face, arms, hip

and crotch till we were sexless, placeless, the whole damp mesh of who we were that made us strangers to each other, the shalts and shalt

nots of you and me, mine and not yours, cast off easily as clothing into the blurred shapes of a single fluency.

Was this some new phase of their affliction? The effect of yet some new deviceto make them go on dreaming, even now, some version of themselves so long accustomed to their torment that they confused torment with exaltation, mud with light?

Frau History, they asked, is this the final reaving of what we loved well, that we should swann now in the steam over the indistinguishable gannents scattered everywhere in piles, that we should need, even now, to sort through them, to try to lift in our vaporous hands

the immovable rough granite of this sleeve or collar, that vest, those sandals, the flimsiest top?

Prayer on the Temple Steps

Devious guide, strange parent, what are you but the movable ways I lose you by?

Opulent honeycomb of nowhere where the bee-ghosts cluster, hymning your each cell with all the sweetness that you hold from me, so I might know instead the fitful aspic of this readiness-

what is it you bring out of the veils of air but this, these wordsgate opening on to you and burning sword above it turning every way I turn.

In the Kingdom of Pleasure

Unwitting accomplice in the scheme of law she thought to violate, man-set as it was, and, here, inconsequential as the sun at midnight, drought at flood-time; when she heard a baby in the tall reeds at the river's brink, she was nobodv's daughter, subject of no rule but the one his need for her established as she knelt down to quell his crying with a little tune just seeing him there had taught her how to hum.

Now as then, it is the same tune, timelessly in time, your mother hums as she kneels down beside your little barge of foam, smiling to see you smile when she wrings out from the sponge a ragged string of water over the chest and belly, the dimpled loins, the bud so far from flowering, and the foot slick as a fish your hand tries to hold up till it slips back splashing with such mild turbulence that she laughs, and you laugh to see her laugh.

Here now, as it was then, it is still so many years before the blood's smeared over doorposts, before the Nile clots with the first born, and the women wailing, wailing throughout the city; here now again is the kingdom of pleasure, where they are safe still, mother and child, from the chartered rod of the Fathers, and where a father can still pray, Lord, Jealous Chooser, Devouring Law, keep away from them, just keep away.

Six Poems

Lawrence Schmidt

Day Labor

for Taura

1 think of you moving alone through all that, up to your waist in the drought-stunted corn, the slash of the green blades as you push through pulling tassle after tassle till you know where, behind which leaf, the sheathed male bud is hidden and where, just where, to break it clean. But there are others-twenty, thirty?-day laborers who work, like you, fast as they can to finish the acre that means fifty dollars to them. You breathe in that miraging air, you parch, sunburn or pollen or something in the dust you move in, that you kick up with each step, raising the welts of corn rash on your skin.

1 think of you alone, hefting your load, when the tractor, spraying in another field, sent its slow fog drifting over you and those around you tied rags and handkerchiefs or pulled their 'Tshirts up over mouth and nose but you ran headfirst into that frost of dust, shouting and flailing till he turned it off and you stood gleaming with white chemical.

Now, still, you are alone, next morning, arched over the toilet, jittering, heaving so hard I think something is going to crack, but never does.

Drought Summer

We put down two dollars at the roadside stand and walked out to the orchard with the pails, zinc, hot to the touch, emptying and filling with shadow as they swung and bumped between us. The only customers that afternoon, out on our one day off, we picked and tasted the tiny fruit that did not quench but raised a sharper thirst-chalky with road dust, bitter, tart. No farmers at crossroads hawking melons you could crack and sink into for fifty cents, no pickups full of sweet corn this summer. Only the drugged heat, the leaching of the will. And then the weighing at the stand, passing cars waking the dust around us, the two old men in the well of shade under their metal roof smoking, eating the bitter cherries, spitting stones.

First Home

Back there, on the scattered edge of town where the road was still a cut of gravel rutted by dump trucks and workers' pickups that skidded and sprayed stones into the yard, we waded the abandoned hayfields, grubbed up old bottles, bricks, a rusty handrasp from the red earth, played shipwreck on a haycart, wheel-less, adrift in the yellow grass.

When surveyors came pacing our field, we paced behind them, watched them plant stakes among weed stalks. And the field, once a logged-out basin of pine stump and scrub, before that, woodland, home to a different people, retreated, lot by lot, before the new houses.

It comes clear now, as if rising through water, that afternoon in dream or vision I saw her, Strikes-Standing, Light-At-Distance, returningto claim, to grieve? - in deerskin, knee-deep in the grass, each seed head weighing on its blade, nodding as if the whole field accused or beckoned me as she did, Deep-Water, Bends-The-Boughs.

Day Care

For the moment, peace. They sprawl over their bedding at every angle, as if by surprise sleep overtook them, in the moment's gestureone splayed out, pitched forward over the blue sheet, drifting, another burrowing his brow into the white pillow while beneath his lids the eyes are twitching, flickering-dreaming what unselfconscious dream? At three he lives wholly in the instant.

But one by one they are beginning to wake-this afternoon, tomorrow, soon - to a knowledge of time passing, time past, beginning to grasp at joys, to grudge them, and losses, to grub the deepening layers for some dim face, a cast of sun, a scent that signifies.

Perhaps this one is next, dream-troubled, his fists clenched on his chest, trying to crush to himself some moment he cannot possess but is possessed by only? And soon even this young one whose sleep, so easily disturbed, is a shallow pool, who yawns now, the cup of her open mouth pouring out light.

First Fight

Unpromising dawn, raw, silent, dim, a thin bench unyielding under them and no train coming, no sun, no birdsong, only a single unripe piece of fruit to breakfast on. Though both are hungry neither will take the first mouthful. Bitter words have passed between them. Finally disenchanted-forever, they must believe, the way they sit there, rigid, disconsolate.

But now, already, though he would not relent, nor she yet, the rain begins to, and the wind breaks up the low cloud bank until above them, past the tracks, the houses, torn cloud combing through pines reveals the full sloped hip of a hillsideas free to them and unexpected as notes trilled out of the fog. So easily the day returns, the wooden bench buoying them up, the resistant flesh of an apple as it is passed between them succumbing, bite after bite.

In the City

Rain pitches down on the pavements, on the eaves and fire escapes, brushes in gusts the panes that look out on the brick courtyard, on the street. It is the sound of trees, as it sifts down through the city, hushing and buffeting, the kept voice of aspen and ash, birch, box elder: the sound from the windbreak of black ashes where a child could hide, could shout and chase or, alone, lose himself in branched shadow; sound of the pines we camped under, breathing their clean, bitter resin, whose boughs swept arcs of the sky; the sound of orchards of cherry and apple; of leaves awash in the free wind and light.

Autumn, with its flare and dying out, the saps drawn back, was no sadness to us - boughs black and sleek against the snow.

But each year that painful budding, cracking of the woody cases, opened to greater loss. Of a yellow birch in the front yard, stricken with blight and budless one spring, I recall only the violencemy father, unhandy with an axe, hacking chips of gold woodand then the absence. The black oak by the highway out of town

split to its ancient heartwood that summer in a windstorm and next day was swarmed over, sawed and lugged off in chunks.

Dense woodlots fell each spring to the saw gangs and bulldozers and with splintering whines the dead elms vanished into pulpers or, in the countryside, stood, leafless through the seasons, limbs dropping into the new grass.

As wood burns the years of sunlight packed into its grain until the burning, too, is a memory, and what you would lay hold of slips through the fingers like fine ash, shapeless smoke-we remember. This current that takes hold and draws us in, spits us back, now, always, onto the city's cold pavements-the trees fenced off into a few distant green spots on the map. The neatly spaced metal trunks taper upward from the street, curve, hunching over the single, hard, incandescent fruits that shed this thin light. And yet, when rain comes to slick the courtyard, I still turn to the window for the sight of leaves, a whiff of their green scent on the airthe way that, when the maples, casting off twigs and dry seed, hissed and stirred in a drought summer, I'd start up from sleep thinking rain, and look out, as if dreaming, on the fountains of leaves rushing in dry wind.

From Through the Red Sea (After the Paintings of Anselm Kiefer)

William Hunt

WE LOOK into the past: as a sketch reflects the fullness of life we shimmer incomplete in outline: our shirt and vest, our hair and lips are all thin lines, we are ourselves, yet still incomplete and the darkening coastal sky of the past, (the fresh fire of sunset had turned mahogany-toned) the moon-glistening waters rolled, swayed: light shimmering here and (and) here. Our love swims below and the water's back and thigh bow, bulge, throb. Hold your breath,

my love. We are young again, looking back below the past, at your slim form that flickers past, swimming swiftly in the love slick dark underwater we wear.

GRASS, SAND, MIRROR, PALE SPACE

"I was defeated and you did not rescue me."

The grass spoke, and the lake made it so (offered its presence as contrast) and the sky echoed it.

And we could see the tangled details of the grass (some of it still bouyant) so tangled it seemed tragic (or something).

Beyond the overcast skv-lit lake was another field of grass like a murmuring lament. Each stalk like the heated outbreak of perspiration and itch of sand on our neck and back.

Above the silhouette of other (further away) lands and the mirroring frame of water was pale space: our path of forgetting, our fresh start.

RAINBOWED clamber up watery fire or blood diluted (touched) by custard-colored bile. (In the) dark spectators gather like pines, and hemlocks, lights (starlight) on the emptied lake's canyon, lights echoing our clamber, our slide up light cords: all incomplete (blurred) plus the color of Spring gold.

I know a woman finds men in clouds torsos in cumuli reddened roofs clatter overhead not the quiet that gets its word in last penile rainstorms humped villas shatter and lights on off

(yet never surrounds us, merely suggests we try), rising like burning prayers.

HEAVENLY DOME

If we aren't living in the desert then we're in the subway. If we aren't looking down from a rooftop then we're living in the forest hut with mother. From the rooftop each trail of streetlights outlines a runway to the horizon. We're taking off in the arms of mother, or we're slipping over the roof's edge, but if we wake up we're in the subway (not the desert, where we must attend school, apply for work, visas, pills, marriages, food). The twin line of the rails is a kind of desert, a place between two places: the arms of mother in the wood's dark hut. Or the runway speckled with steel beetles, caps of cold blood.

The room grew light and we went downstairs airborne skidding into a dark blue afternoon sky in mid-September the Sunday war ended: by then none of us could go home.

EMPTY

The room with a knife. The room with wooden floors, wooden rafters, and wooden walls, the splinter-surfaced columns we hung onto and a knife that was visible within the floor.

THE MILLS continue.

From spindly chimneys steam stands up like softening candles. Rags flutter earthward almost winglike, almost giant ferns burned, almost something of black lace (feathers like falling bodies);

there is someone we can't see.

SCORCHED EARTH ECHO SONG

It's not so bad to be wrong: everything on earth can be burned. We're making earth safe for our gods, they said, but none descended, many fell. The streets' slates were wiped blear, the crisp black inside old ovens.

"No one cared," they said and "No one is worthy." Charred insect trees tatter the horizon, houses that only burn at night, houses like lanterns to the holy, like lamps on airfield runways, set out by children who believe all things.

GOLDEN HAIR MIDSUMMER 1990

Is it the hair that screams (screeches) is it the ghost? is it the straw or the smear? shapes suggesting collapse, capture, torment? or the gestures we infer of compassion or contemplation, or an unimaginable space where clouds paddle before us across the splattered wall.

What Is the Fire?

William Hunt

For several miles Mason drove at a distance behind the funeral procession. He let cars pass and enter the lane ahead of him. His headlights were not on. He had pulled out of a side street to join the procession. He had not gone in the church for the services. Now Mason was undecided whether to drive all the way to the cemetery.

It was a blistering mid-August day in 1965. On the seat beside Mason lay a Tribune. Its lead headline read "No End in Sight for Record Heat Wave." Further down the front page a smaller headline referred to the funeral Mason was more or less following. The services had been for two young men. They had been murdered together and were now being buried at the same cemetery. Police were investigating the connection of the two men with civil-rights activists.

Under his damp shirt Mason's shoulder blades felt hollow, as if wings had evaporated there. Something was missing. Mason was a darkskinned man, his car was ivory-toned. In his mind the contrast between himself and the long line of black limos and sedans, "l1any filled with pale faces, was like a photographic negative.

Honking, a long blast - had there been others? - penetrated his attention. It was coming from behind him. Shadows rose behind his eyes. He had slowed the car imperceptibly. Now he slowed it even more and in mid-block pulled over to an empty stretch of curbside. A sensation of sorrow pulled at his eyes and mouth. It came flooding him with images of his slim younger sisters and the sound of crickets in the dark earlier years in Mississippi. The voice of his father was present also. That voice called with many voices, many intonations. Mason in straining his facial

muscles felt himself trying to overtake the voices with understanding. His eyes blurred with tears, but no tears fell.

"What's the matter, Jack, you all right?" The voice was beside him at the car window. The man was not looking at Mason but beyond him, as if checking over the car for something he might take. "Say, man, you all right, I asked."

Mason turned to look at the backseat of the car. Was there something there that should be hidden, but was not? The seat had never appeared that way before: it bulged, was discolored, threads were raveled. The seat cover was speckled with newspaper tatters, and there was a bunched dark rag that he could not really believe was as large as it appeared to be at that moment. He had truly never seen the backseat so closely, so rapidly, so fully and with such wariness. If a ghost had ever ridden in that backseat, then now he felt its absence. The man hesitated at the window. Mason looked up at him. The man's lower lip hung exposed, glistening. His eyes attempted blankness, but glazed with light. It was a face complex as none Mason had ever seen, yet as recognizably a face as his own. Mason drove the car away from the curb with a sudden lurch. "Shit, man, I was just trying to help you, shit-" The voice dissolved in the noise of the traffic.

But Mason was not freed of the new gift of eyes that at once dizzied and thrilled him. He slowed down, as if for intersections, but in fact because buildings or trees reminded him that there were ghosts everywhere illuminating the world. The two murdered men were now his brothers. They were free and they had unwrapped the world for him. It did not glisten like a new world, but after all it was not actually new. It was ancient, old as the oldest dream of the child he had once been in Mississippi. Before, he had slept. Now, he was awake and could bear to be awake. He did not think that day would ever end. A resonance within promised him that the sunset would be prolonged indefinitely.

The electric clock on the kitchen wall hummed, crackled spasmodically and then resumed humming. Dark had fallen outside and the street was still. Mason sat at the table trying not to speak. Ruby stood in the doorway. Mason did not want to speak of the clock. "You had a phone call from a man named Wheeley, or something. Said he would phone after work tomorrow. I thought you were still out. I called you and you didn't answer."

"You should have looked for me."

"What for? You ain't hard of hearing. Beside, I did," she said. She had the identical pause in speaking that her late mother had. It was a pause Mason could measure a moment's breath in. Ruby's mother had died before this child could talk. "I did look for you. I stood down the hall and looked in here, but couldn't see you." Mason once told Ruby that talking with her was like "talking with three women that keep running in and out the room, trading places." Now her voice changed tone. "Was it an important phone call, Uncle Charles?"

"Are you going to give up going on that march Sunday?" he asked.

"No, we're all going. Everybody will be going, you should too." Her voice was exultant. Her teeth gleamed and she leaned with her pelvis thrust forward. Her eyes were bright and looked toward the ceiling.

Mason felt a quiver of revulsion at Ruby's theatrical posing. This business with her bony hips thrust forward, or walking as she did at times with her hands up at ear level, elbows by her side, head thrown back at an angle, might not have been so bad, but she also tipped her chin up, took long steps that often merely led her in circles, and what was the purpose of visibly going in circles? We do enough of that in every other way.

With Ruby, Mason often pretended down-home ignorance about things that dealt with deep feelings. Yet his experiences since the murders and especially today, the day of the funerals, had given him a knowledge that he believed would devastate Ruby. The thought of this young woman, filled with the ideals of the civil-rights movement - plus the distraction of her physical presence-excited him. He experienced the ease of spirit possessed by Biblical prophets when they felt called on to speak. But he would circle around first.

"I sometimes think you young folks just go to those civil-rights marches and meetings for social reasons," he said in a voice possibly puzzled, detached in tone, as if he were really looking over the room for something she had misplaced of his, something that he would not mention to her by name because he did not want to blame her.

"We do like each other," she said. "That's an advantage."

"But what if you don't accomplish anything? What if nothing comes of it except maybe a few white people think about us at night when they lock the door?"

"What do you mean?" Ruby sat down in a chair and drew her feet beneath her on the seat. From her blue workshirt's pocket she took out a pack of Winstons and unfolded the package's top flap carefully.

"Whites hate you and me so deeply that they never think about us.

Now with you young people there will come a time when they will want to kill us, rather than see us."

"That's all right, we're prepared for that," said Ruby complacently. She brushed shreds of tobacco off her shirt front. "It doesn't matter what they think. We're what counts. Our meetings are beautiful. You should come. The people are really beautiful. You'd learn something."

"What do you know that I don't know?"

"You tell me." She smiled a smile that reminded him of televised toothpaste advertisements.

When he spoke it felt as if the words were blurted out, but he continued without letting up. "I know that the world is on fire and that no one seems to see it. We dance in the flames and think we are walking and we wave to one another and the whole world is on fire. At night alone in here or in the living room, while you and Doris and everyone thinks they are asleep, I sit and watch where the flames are breaking out."

"Where the flames are breaking out?" Concern, as transparent as her gestures and reactions, hardened her features. But there was also the reaction of one receiving knowledge. She saw that her uncle was crazy in a new way and she was inclined to be sympathetic.

"The flame is in the corners of rooms, at times. It breaks out in people's faces, but rarely in yours. I never feel it at those meetings of yours. I've gone to three or four of them at the church. Everyone gets excited and they all love one another, but the fire doesn't understand them. It is like a ghost there."

"Uncle Charles, Uncle Charles, when the police arrested you for killing those men, did you really have anything to do with it?"

"No."

"Then, what did they want Naps and Sonny for?"

"Who says they wanted them?"

"I've thought a long time about the way you acted. You want to talk about it? If you don't, then don't," she said.

"Killing people is not the worst thing there is. It doesn't matter what I did."

"What's worse?"

"Sometimes killing an animal can be worse." Mason's face was serious, intent. Already deep lines had darkened and grown closer to the skull. Ruby saw an aged man emerging across the table. "Did you ever try talking to animals?" he asked.

"Maybe when I was a baby." She shifted in her seat uneasily. A large tan moth circled the dim light bulb above the sink. There was a flapping sound as it circled and flew again and again against the burning light.

"Did you ever think there was a reason why you tried to talk to animals? Animals want you to learn what they have to say. Animals want to speak to us. I know this as a fact. They say something that would bring us all to our knees, if not to our senses."

"What do you mean? That there are humans hiding inside the animals?"

"The person that was you as a baby is the one who wants to talk with animals and is really you, not the one who wants to be a woman and do the things that women are supposed to do. When that baby in you dies then there is no reason not to kill the man or woman, the worker, the policeman, the black, the white, the teenager, the whore or whoever, whoever takes its place." Mason spoke softly and gently and slowly, seemingly without taking breath. He held out his hands, palms down on the table. The large veins stood out like ridges on miniature mountains.

He watched Ruby's eyes. Nothing in her expression changed, but he began to hiss as he continued speaking. "I see no reason not to kill men. I know there is nothing wrong with that. It is the babies that cry out for revenge. I hear their voices always. They are calling to me, 'Kill for revenge. Kill them. For revenge.' But sometimes they do not want me to kill and so I don't ever anymore. I am finished with that. But I watch the fire."

"Yes, but what is the fire?" she asked, as if this question once answered would free her to understand him completely.

"Can't you guess? Why do you wish to talk to animals at one time and later stop? The fire is the voices and the being of the little animals that are on fire. They escape our bodies and burn in the middle of the lawn at midnight. They burn in darkened corners of the house, this house. They pretend to be monsters and run out of our dreams and chase us. But the murderer in us kills them: death by fire or death in fire."

"I don't understand why you think this way," she said meekly. She could also hardly believe him. However, she was intent on his words. Often emotions swept across her face, but now the surface of her face was calm. Absent were the expressive masks obtained from the drama lessons she attended weekly. Gone were the convulsive responses that she shared in interaction with her civil-rights friends. Mason thought she was as beautiful now as she had ever been as a child. He did not want to harm her with knowledge.

"Later on you will think I talked like a crazy man, won't you?" He smiled and leaned back from the table. She moved her chair forward. She wanted to hear more. In the wake of his words a flaring sail of

warmth unfurled across her groin and continued lower, filling her with dread.

"No, I don't think you're crazy. But what happens to grown-ups] Why shouldn't people grow up? There's nothing wrong with truly growing up, is there?"

"Who can grow up these days? Perhaps it's time you got some sleep." "I can't sleep. You've got me too excited. I'm all worked up. This is really interesting. You've never really talked to me before. Tell me the rest of what you know."

"I don't know anymore. It's too late for me to know much more," he said laughing, adding, "Tomorrow I may know some more." He rubbed her arm gently, smiling all the while. She drew back, as if irritated that he was going to cheat her of something. "What can I tell you?" he said.

"You're not too old. You're not even fifty, are you?" At the other end of the house he heard the phone ring, but it only rang once. Here the wall clock continued to buzz. Ruby cocked her head. "Doris got it," she said.

Her lips trembled as she struggled to form words. Mason's smile gradually drained away. He waited. "Are you involved with all those murders like the police said?"

"Yes, some murderers. Some friends of mine." She listened without flinching. Mason said, "But that's all over. I'm thinking of retiring and sitting out in the backyard and growing a beard." His smile had returned, hardened now. She recognized it as a warning. His smile stirred her. Her eyes looked at him with a certain pleading, her lips moved as if to attempt whispering. But when she spoke it was aloud. "You want me don't you? You're always looking at me that way, isn't that why you look at me? You want me, real bad I bet too." She nearly choked trying to whisper, but unable to keep her voice.

"No, because that would hurt you. I want to keep you alive."

"Then you're afraid to love me. Everyone is afraid of that," she said, her mood slipping toward defeat as if it were a source of relief.

He knew that making love to his niece was still at hand and while he had entertained the thought of it earlier, had even planned on it as a possibility, now he wanted their talk to close without sex or the contemplation of sex replacing the intimacy of words they had just shared. He had wanted to destroy something in her, had perhaps done that too, but something new had also been spoken of between them. A new idea had emerged. Mason had had few new ideas in his life. They had shared the idea of an inner fire that might be destroyed by the mirror image of the fire, the picture of the fire that we thought of as ourselves. If they broke

through that with lovemaking their words would be dissolved. She would retreat further from him and into the defeat that awaited black youths. "What if we think about it?" he said. "What if we waited an hour? What if we just waited here and sat still for an hour? We could watch each other."

"Fair enough," she said. But Mason sensed that she was no longer playing fair. She was drawing back behind her masks. It came through in her abrupt return to weaving graceful gestures with her hands. Her chin tilted as her neck turned sinuously. Only moments before she had given no sign of self-regard. She watched him with eyes inhabited by a fixed star-fire. Now her bearing suggested a kind of fantastic self-hypnosis in which she was creating her own world. Soon her contempt for him would return. Mason possessed a wide knowledge of defeat and as he watched Ruby's transformation he understood how medicine men and priests continued their mysteries into our modern day. Mysteries kept the core of flame and the children hidden from the confused, who tragically felt called on to make a choice.

Ruby wondered what would become of her. She watched the alternatives as abstractly as she would watch a TV show. If she did not make love to this heavyset, gnarled, weirdly lovely and delicate black man, then she did not know what she would do. She wanted to climb the steps to his bedroom and strangle his wife. She wanted to excuse herself from the kitchen, telling him she would only be gone for a few minutes. Then she would return and then they could make love together. He would not say anything when she returned. He would immediately sense what had happened. Even if she drove a nail into Doris's head and she died without a sound, still Charles would know what had happened the moment she returned to the kitchen. She would wait in the doorway and he would rise to join her. Then which room would they go to? Her room was too illicit. They could not go to his wife's bedroom with her corpse in the bed. Or could they? Ruby stifled laughter. They could bury the body in the backyard, both of them naked. It was summer, plenty warm enough to go around without clothes. They could make love on the grave, scuffling in the dirt. Clawing, barking at one another. A moment passed. Mason had let go of her arm. He glanced up at her with widened eyes. Ruby made an oddly muffled noise. Mason could not recognize it at first. "Arf, arf, arf," she was barking like a cartoon dog, but he knew nothing of cartoons. Then she said, "It's so funny."

She sat in the kitchen chair with her legs on the seat tucked under her dress. She had once hid in cotton fields on her knees. As a little girl she had tried to avoid the eyes of the cotton pickers. She played hide-and-

seek with them. As they rose and bent down rhythmically along the rows she would pop up in counter-rhythm. Later she would hide in a small wood in a hollow of scrub oak. There a wooden bridge rose, rainbow-like, over a marshy spot into a distant tangle of wild raspberry. She was about ten when she began wanting to hide. There had been no reason other than loneliness or maybe Uncle Charles was right, she wanted to talk to animals. Or wanted to talk to babies. When she grew into puberty, she had sat alone in the small valley near the bridge to escape the voices of her parents and of the plantation foreman.

"I think the civil-rights movement is a way to not kill the child," she said.

"You may be right," Mason conceded. "I just never saw the flames there. 1 told you that."

"But what if there is no child?"

"That's what we all say when we grow up. My child has become a funny little crippled baby boy inside me. He's lying in the woods listening to his father call him. His father wants to kill him, so the little boy won't come out."

"Your father loved you. He was a good man. My mother said so. She said to me, 'Your grandpa was a beautiful man.'"

"No, those are your words. That's the way you young people talk up here in the North."

"She said he was good, is what 1 mean."

"But he calls me with many voices," Mason said. "And 1 hide on my knees in shrubs. 1 won't answer. I'm no fool. 1 will never answer when he calls. 1 wish 1 had run away. Sometimes 1 lay awake at night thinking of all the beatings 1 ever got. 1 would go over everyone that 1 could remember. One by one. Not all of them, really only two. The others 1 would just count. But two of them 1 would live through again. Once when 1 was caught peeing in the back of the house against the wall. That was all right. 1 did it because 1 was mad. But the other time 1 was not wrong. 1 hear his voices calling me."

"Your father?"

"My father."

"That's what 1 was thinking about, too," she said. "I used to hide away when 1 was a little girl. 1 only remember hiding and can't remember why 1 hid, what 1 hid from. 1 guess 1 don't feel like you. Sometimes there was friendliness and kisses from grown-ups."

"They don't always want to murder kids," Mason said. "Sometimes they remember. A ghost comes back and for a few moments they are caught unawares, sometimes they break down. My mother used to 100

watch me and my little sisters and at times she would just start to cry. She would stand in the doorway watching us-we might just be eating in the kitchen, or out in the yard playing in the dirt-and she would just break down and cry."

"Let's go to bed now," Ruby said. "I don't mind missing you now so much."

"Give up the marches, they will kill you. The black man and the black woman are the child. It is like a movie you make about something and you call everybody by different names. The black man is the baby and the white man has the voices everywhere."

"Yes, but they will not kill all of us little babies, will they?"

"One will be good enough. But I don't want it to be you." He said this aloud, but he was preoccupied, his voice was distant and without force. Ruby stood and leaned against the doorjamb. "I'll bet those voices you hear calling you sound a whole lot like your own, don't they? I mean more than anybody else's, like even your father's." She waited a moment. "I said, those voices calling you are your own, aren't they?"

"You did say that." His voice was devoid of emphasis.

Her earlier attitude of enthusiasm mixed with disbelief had returned full-force. Mason did not notice that she had left. Ruby was at the end of the hall, out of hearing, when he finally spoke.

Aurora

Terrence Holt

The ice falls, swept by time and what first impulse I do not know, only that now it falls, free in its falling, the drift of it I envy. See it roll; see the breaking of it, ice on ice, the brightness of it breaking in the twilight, breaking into shards, into dust, into shining, into a haze of light; into darkness: see it vanish.

And on the Ring I only do not break. I do not vanish: I ride the wheel of it, arms out against the fall. No glittering shards of me disperse. My heart is solid inside me, a steady turning.

I cannot remember when this was not so.

*

I know the ice. I know the darkness north and south, I know the great bulk of Saturn below. I know Aurora rising to meet me in her time. Only myself I do not know.

Of myself, I see only fragments. There is my auger, the sharp point of me, glittering at end like ice, scoured by ice and harder. There are my arms: these thin rods of titanium, articulate and shining, hooked at end with tungsten claws. The rest I do not see, and know only by a sensation I cannot describe: a dull vibration in the frame of me. There are doors: I shrug and they open for ice. And beyond the doors, a chamber where ice is melted, though I feel no heat: only the opening ofvalves. There are valves, and motors to drive them; nozzles where I vent off meltwater, a cloud of light returning to the Ring. And at my heart a gyroscope revolves, so finely tuned to falling that I cannot feel it, unless I turn against the fall.

In the hollow that is most of me, the heavy elements of my refining

linger. I know their names, and the weights of them: how they answer to Saturn by falling, to the call that comes louder as they press within me, but still we fall no faster, I do not feel them, I have no sight or taste or touch of them: only their heft, the mass that binds me still more strongly to the Ring, until Aurora comes, and I am set out again among the ice. Aurora always comes. What signals her I do not know. So much is out of my control.

I do not sleep.

I know sleep: it is in the motion of the ice that falls around me: falls, and does not change. It is in the falling of us all- in the ice adrift, in the darkness where we fall, the darkness there that draws me on but never into Saturn, only falling, the ice and I, toward sleep that never comes. It is one of those words from the darkness within me, words like hope, like pain, like love, one of the words that falls nowhere.

There are other words in the darkness, words I cannot hear. I only feel them echo in the hollow within me. They jar this voice that speaks distinctly in my thoughts-disturb it, as the ice around me jostles in its fall. They tell me that, in some other life I cannot imagine, in some time I cannot recall, I was not as I am now.

*

There is a voice in me that is not mine. It is all I hear between me and the Ring. The voice whispers: I am two point nine seven nine oh hours into this revolution; my target is at range three eight point oh six four; my payload is at thirty-five percent.

It occupies my thoughts; it keeps the silence from entering. It carries me, as ceaselessly as time, as irresistibly as the Ring itself sweeps onward. I feel myself within it falling, unable to ignore it, unable to reply. I think sometimes it speaks to keep me from thinking.

Vision also intercedes between me and the ice, lights that are to my mind's eye as the voice is to my thoughts: in a violet line against the stars my target shows eight ragged peaks at wavelengths of so many nanometers. These are the signs of uranium, the voice tells me.

In the darkness, in the silence, the voice and the visions, they comfort me.

Saturn has voices; the Ring and the darkness have voices too: they chorus on some sense that once was hearing. At Saturn's core a murmur speaks of time; above its poles, electrons wail in their spiraling fall. From the darkness, a dim hissing: this is the voice of the stars.

And once each revolution I hear the Ring itself awake into the sun. It

calls, in a cadence that pulses, waking echoes in the hollow within me, echoes that might be words: words like sorrow, like loss; but the voice inside me whispers static discharge, coulombs, hertz: the voices of the Ring are hushed, the echoes die away, and I am comforted.

But still, each revolution, at the pulsing of the ice, in a hollow inside me something opens. In the dull drum of me something beats, as though trapped and calling, the note of it fading, and then only silence, and within me the sound of a motor whining briefly, venting ice.

One by one, the moons draw near. In my frame I feel them: Iapetus and Phoebe, Dione and Tethys, Rhea, and the largest one, orange and featureless in my long-range vision. I know their names, I do not know how. In my frame a yearning rises, but it is not for them. For something like them, but what I cannot say. I long for some great fall. Not into Saturn, not into the night that holds us all, but into what I cannot say: into something that is not the Ring, something distant and solid, like the moons. Like myself.

Saturn is not solid: the voice tells me so, feeding me data: the pressure there so many millibars, the composition so much of ammonia, free hydrogen, water-ice. The temperature is so many degrees Kelvin, and I know that is cold, although here in the Ring the ice is colder. But what a millibar is, what once was fractured into thousands, I cannot say, nor what was Kelvin before it became a thing of degrees. Nor how I know a milli is a thousandth, or a degree a thing of crumbling.

Ammonia, water: I know these. These are the constituents of ice. I know, too, that I need them to survive: they feed me, in some way I know only from the hunger that I feel for them. And though I do not taste them, I know them with the intimacy hunger brings. I see them. I hear them always calling from the Ring, from the ice I grapple, from the shining spray I vent, prismatic in the sun, a glory I fall through as it fades, vanishing, returned into the Ring.

So much is vanishing here. Only I do not: 1 remain, the moons' stress in my frame telling me only 1 am solid. And echoes, telling me I am a thing of-echoes. *

I cannot see the sun. 1 have tried, but there is a command in me that will not let me look. The voice tells me my cameras cannot stand the light: an instant, and I would be blind, and without vision 1 cannot mine the

ice. And without ice, it tells me, my life will be an endless fall through hunger: a fall through time made merciless by darkness, through darkness unbroken by change.

But I have tried. I do not know why. Only that the way the sunlight breaks upon the ice-the brilliance of it flashing here, where seeing and vanishing are one; this poignancy I cannot capture, though it touches me each instant as I turn, and turn, and fall upon the Ring: all of this, and what more I cannot say because it comes from what within me I do not know-all of this draws me, despite all warning, to look toward the sun.

I cannot. My cameras swivel, focus, range and shift all out of my control, and never in all the revolutions of the Ring have they let me see what lies there, where all shadows fall from.

But still I want to see.

*

Out of the A Ring, bright against the Division, falling now into the B Ring and toward me, Aurora comes. I see her engines flare: flakes of ice vanishing in bright vapor she brakes, nearing now: beside me, docking: our collars match, mate, our systems mesh, and once again she is here.

From connections I cannot feel Aurora's presence floods through me, lights and echoing voices not my own and no one's flow in. My sensors detune, the stars dim, and before the new instructions seat themselves, I know that once again I am about to remember.

But when the sun flickers, the sky is black again so soon I cannot remember what color it was; the bulk of Aurora eclipses the stars, the new instructions execute, and the voice in me returns.

It is speaking of iridium. It has a warbling note, four peaks on the spectral graph.

I cannot remember what I remembered. For one brief moment's inward fall I know that in a moment more I will forget I remembered at all, and now only the dim shiver, low in my empty hold.

*

I do not know the nature of my thoughts. Where do they come from? Where do they go? Are they saved or are they lost? Does Aurora hear them, or something beyond Aurora? I cannot say; I know only that to me they are irrevocable: I think them, and they vanish. This is the nature of the Ring.

But if I could recall these words, hear them once again above the voice that distracts me, I might know what it is that pains me. But now Aurora signals her departure, and with a rupture, with pain, the channels break, the valves seal, collars spin, decouple. Her jets flare in the sun and she is gone.

I watch, hoping to learn where she goes. The flame of her engines lifts her above the Ringplane and out, climbing, brilliant again against the Division, then over the A Ring and dwindling, the shape of her lost below resolution, the flame finally below my cameras' threshold and I am falling.

I do not know where these words go. They vanish from me, into darkness. And like the Ring, their vanishing is endless.

I fall through darkness, the sun eclipsed by Saturn's huge night. Along the Ring, a dim bridge into light, I listen, urgent after iridium. I grapple ice loud with it, auger in. It breaks, pieces fall away. I gather them, feed them into me. My frame rings loudly with their impact within.

I gather all but one: it has flown farther, up out of the Ring. I follow, clamber, carom, climb up into spaces where ice is scant. And there, my limbs go sluggish.

It is always like this. There is a command within me: it will not let me too far from the Ring; it outweighs even the hunger for ice. Off the Ring, the voice tells me, the emptiness is deadly: ten hours without ice and my systems fail. So when I try to climb I am given heaviness, a reluctance that would be fear but it does not belong to me. I feel it imposed, a command that does not need a voice: it has my limbs in its control, my strength its hostage.

And to oppose it I am given only hunger.

Caught between the heaviness and hunger I stop, still drifting out.

Here above the Ringplane, a kilometer of emptiness below me, I circle with the Ring, a ghost off a ghost-road through darkness. Uneasy, I yearn for the Ring. Under the prompting of the voice, I thrust: I feel the spray of vapor oppose my momentum, but it is too weak: soon it sputters, it tails off, my tank is empty, and I am drifting. Anxious now, I listen, but for a long time the voice within me, intent on the Ring, is silent.

Then a slow number speaks itself. I am drifting far out, far into stillness, and even the voice is still.

Far from the Ring, I am drifting, helpless to control my flight. In the

emptiness here, my horizon opens: space is everywhere. It seems to open even into me. In the silence, heedless for once of ice, my cameras drift. The voice is still; the echoes are still as well. Only these thoughts remain, loud and uncontrollable.

Without warning, the Ring below bursts into light. The ice awakens, the Ring's chorus pulses; slowly, the sound fades away.

When the silence returns, light lies everywhere around me, and still the voice is silent. The silence is harrowing. The light is merciless. The transparency of space appalls me. BeIC'w, Saturn's body is alive: I see each storm as it uncoils, each uneasy surge of ice-fog, and everywhere the sheer terror of wind. And on the Ring I see the multitudes of the ice, each in its singularity distinct, each in its moment of flashing as sharp, as ephemeral as pain. It is all here, and I am here in it, solid, drifting and strange. It is as though I have never seen this before.

Far ahead in the darkness, something else hovering over the Ring catches the light of the Sun. Its graph is dim, peaked in a pattern I have never seen. The voice says nothing. Without it, I am helpless to identify. But something inside me has started to clamor. With an effort, I swivel the long-range camera forward.

At the limits of resolution, it shows me a cylinder spinning slowly, end over end. A narrow neck. The ungainly growth of a head. I see a pair of arms: thin, articulate, and hooked at end. It drifts through emptiness, even farther from the Ring than I have come. It falls, flashing in the sun, its arms held out against the fall.

Abruptly, the voice returns. It tells me we are falling; in two point nine oh two hours we will return to the Ring, entering at a relative velocity of so many meters per second; three point seven encounters with ice of average mass will disperse the polar vector of our speed. We are saved.

I am not listening. I am struggling not to listen. I am struggling to hold onto my cameras, struggling to hold the silence, struggling to remember what I have seen; struggling against the voice, against the ice, against the Ring, against the fall back into sleep. I am falling.

In the depths of my hold, as I turn to face the Ring, as I ready my arms for ice, like a bad bearing starting to break down, like an ingot working loose, something shudders against the fall. The echoes inside me are loud.

I am plagued by double vision. My cameras, compelled, seek ice. They are bound to iridium, to measuring vectors of collision and capture, as my thoughts are bound to the Ring and the voice. But a memory has survived in me, a silence I wedge between us. In instants that pass almost before I can grasp them, I can see.

I cannot look. But in glimpses left to me, past the graph, through the tumbling ice, in the spaces between the words, I remember, and I watch for the other I saw.

Ahead it drifts, high above the Ring. But as I watch it is falling back into the ice, rolling in a slow helpless fall. In a rush it vanishes, lost in the sweep of the Ring far ahead and I am left aching, as if to an echo of impact.

But abruptly below the Ring I see it again, reaching out into the darkness against the stars of Virgo. Past Spica it flashes, tumbling faster now. An arm is waving in my direction; light glints off a lens as it swivels my way.

It is calling me to follow.

*

On another revolution I see it rise again out of the Ring before me. On its long outward reach, as it dwindles to a star it seems to slow; it seems to stop; it is not falling. It is motionless against the stars. I am aching with envy.

I know it must be falling.

It hangs, as if motionless, but holds its station, high above and far ahead. It is falling. I stare at it, my cameras resisting commands to turn to the ice. I am fascinated. Why has it climbed so high? What is this within me that yearns?

Within me, alarms are ringing. The voice in my head sees iridium everywhere. A collision alert bleats wildly, beating back the echoes in my hold.

It will not work. Something within me has broken loose, is rising with a rush to consciousness.

The voice, the graph, these hush and dim. I hold them so, fending them off with this new force that rises, that somehow I know to call anger.

As the thing holds motionless above me and ahead, even now I see it growing larger, its form resolving out of the stars once more into the long rolling of a cylinder, the beckoning of arms, gathering speed as its

course angles steeply down and as it dives into the Ring I know. I know why it climbs: it climbs to fall.

And I know this now as well: the voice has lied, has always lied. It is lying to me now, telling me anything it thinks I might believe, anything it thinks might draw me back into its orbit. See, there, iridium, it says, and swivels my cameras everywhere around me. Feel, there, the status of your tanks. Feel hunger, feel thirst, feel the ice around you sleeping, see it fall.

Somehow, although weight grows everywhere in me, and my cameras swivel helplessly down into falling, somehow I told the voice at bay. I hold it because I know, and the knowledge is almost stronger than Saturn, almost more than the ice and the hunger.

I know these things.

That nothing falling leaves the Ring. Twice each revolution, I have seen this other pass through the plane, because it must: here, all circles intersect.

That there is no threat of starvation in climbing off the Ring. That the heaviness I am given there protects not me but something else.

That this other knows as well: even now I see it sinking, dwindling on the other side, until in a moment it will hang against the stars as if it knows a way to stop its falling. *

As one revolution falls into another, I hear only this voice that says Follow. I feel a motion in one of my limbs: it reaches out after ice, not to break, not to gather: I reach out only to climb, to arc again high off the Ring. I reach out and climb. I follow.

I have no skill, no strength in my arms on ice. My thoughts are slow, and the edge of them dull. But I climb. The voice, protesting, rises as I rise, slicing away at my thoughts, almost unstringing my limbs. I answer in the only language it leaves me, driving a talon here into ice where I clutch, whirl, whip free now, now free of the wheel, arcing into the absence of ice.

The voice is stentorian. It says I have gone too far. In answer I vent, violently, my tanks in a shining cloud, and the surge of it lifts me still higher.

The voice is shocked into silence. I wonder if I have broken it. I wonder if I am free.

My cameras return to my control. This time, I am waiting for them. I

seize them with an urgency I cannot name, and so I call it longing, I call it want.

I know what I want. We will meet, the two of us, in a moment I cannot imagine: for a moment the darkness before me will freeze, the ice of the Ring lie like dust on a mirror, and in the instant the mirror is shattered I will see: my own reflection breaking through, arms out to greet me in its fall. I long for a moment of breaking.

But ahead I find only emptiness, harrowed by stars. I cannot see the one I follow; I had not known how much emptiness we fall through, how far we have to fall. I do not know how to shape my course: space is too big, the Ring too long, the moons too near, too many.

My arms reach out, and touch only nothing; I have nothing to climb, no control of my course: Saturn calls it, and helpless I answer; the moons warp it, and helpless I weave. Below me, the Ring reaches out; the ice opens up like a mouth to meet me. In a moment, I know, the voice will return; I will forget what I follow; I will know only longing, and want; I will fall.

I am falling.

I fell a long time, far below the Ring: it arced above me in Saturn's shadow, a thin hook of hunger over emptiness. The voice, reawakened, consoled me, in whispers urging: conserve; shut down. With a weakness I name despair I obeyed; I allowed the voice to make its dull decisions everywhere about my frame. My vision dimmed; my radar muted. The bright bowl of Saturn, cupping its darkness, the darkness riven by lightning, the pale austral crown: these vanished; I was blind. The gyro dropped low and still lower, only a soft moan deep in the numbness that once was me. Only I and the whispering voice, and cold seeping into my frame.

The whisper continued, oddly clear, oddly distant, as if in a tongue I had forgotten. I heard the words, but they fell where I lacked will to listen. I heard the probability of impact on our next revolution; the number of passages before it converged on One; the number needed to damp our oscillations: numbers of endurance, numbers of degree, numbers of drain and failings-off, numbers of decay. I fell among them, fell deaf and blind through darkness and despair, unable to remember what I had wanted, unable to know what I mourned.

In a humiliating mercy, Aurora came. Before I was aware of her she was there. A surge lifted through me; dimly I felt the brush of her jets, her arms as they cradled me down.

And then the mysterious glimmer fell through me again, and I was about to remember, and then I was falling through light.

I could see ocean, sunlight glittering on waves. I was not standing. I have no legs.

"You are not here."

Aurora's voice whispers of numbers, teeth gleaming in sunlight, a sidelong sadness in her eyes. Her eyes were dark, sharp flecks in them shining. Her hand reaches up, warm across the place where my face had been.

"You have no voice."

On the horizon, gulls wheel over the hull of a dragger.

"Listen to me now, while there is time."

The mouth moves, and I hear her voice-deeply, as if it murmured in my belly.

"I cannot always save you. But I can tell you, if it will help you, why you are here."

The sadness tells me it will not help.

"You were dying. Your heart was rotten; you were eaten away. We offered you life; you took it. You wished for this. Here in the Ring is the life we gave you."

I remember. I remember the face, the voice that Aurora has taken. I remember the decision we made. And the promises they made us.

They had not lied. But I had not known how it would be.

"We did not lie. There is no cure. Your body is gone."

I remember this day. I remember this beach where we came to decide; I remember the graveyard we chose: I see it now on the hill on the point, the stones shining white in the sun. I remember how she struggled to push the chair in the sand; how the oxygen burned in the back of my throat, thin and ineffectual in the wind. I remember the dullness of my thoughts, how little surprised I was at how little I cared.

I remember the weakness. I remember the fear. I remember the way time shortened, the shortness of breath, the sinking within me each day at sunset. I remember it all, and none of the memory helps. I am falling.

"You remember the bargain we made."

I remember how light the price seemed.

"The process is slow."

I remember our tour of the long room of tanks, the small pink masses that jerked on the ends of their cords.

"We have kept our promise. Now you keep yours. Help us, and let us help you."

I have one wish, but no words form: only, in the hollow center of me, a memory of desire.

The face turns toward me, draws near, filling my sight. The warm hand slips from where my face once was and almost I can smell, almost I can taste and feel the warmth there. Then her eyes open, too close to mine, not sidelong now, too dark, too deep, and the flecks of light are the stars, the Ring an endless road, and Aurora, beside me, eclipses the stars.

The valves close; collars spin, decouple, and with a rupture, with pain, she is gone. But I remember.

I fall, the ice falls, the Ring revolves, and still I remember.

*

How long I will remember what Aurora has given me, I cannot say. Already one revolution has passed, and none of it vanishes: the world grows clearer. And still clearer. I wonder where it will end. But though the darkness has achieved a new transparency, though the stars and Saturn and the ice all grow brighter, and I among them also almost whole, and I feel myself almost uninterrupted, with a past that reaches back now almost as far as the Ring goes onward, there is within me still some flaw. I feel it there: an emptiness still at center, an omission, some failure of memory or comprehension that keeps me somehow still apart, still adrift, still insubstantial: still, I fall.

These words I form against the silence, they will not stop. They slice me fine, interminably articulating time. A word, a thought, a thought, a moment passing on the Ring, and then another word, another thought, another moment and I am still here, still falling among the stars, still burning, still thinking, still here, still turning on the Ring.

I know now why the gift they gave was not only life, but its forgetting.

*

Aurora does not lie. I need only wait, and I will be returned to a life much like the one I knew. It is only a matter of time.

I listen in the darkness, and hear the voice of Saturn singing time, the low murmur that pulls so deep within me that I feel as though my life is anchored there, tethered, pulled, drawn out like a wire that stretches

fine and finer and still it will not break. How much longer can I wait? How many more revolutions on the Ring? How many more of these moments will fill me, that are already more than I can hold? Why do I not break?

And why should I not? What is the life she promised but something broken in its making? If I am born again on earth, returned to a body stranger than a house long unused, will anyone wait there to enter it with me? And what will all those years have done to her?

If she visits my grave, she is older now, changed by years that I will never know, by change that does not come to me. I am only dimmer to her, and although when I recall the color of her eyes the stars fade, and the pain becomes so sharp I have no other form but pain - though all of this should endure in me I know: she will change, and I grow dim for her, dissolve as my heart dissolves in rain and thaw beneath the soil, as the ice is ground here, ground down to darkness, and only the Ring remains.

And I remain in it. And still, I remember.

*

I remember a window through which a wind blew; curtains, lucent in moonlight, holding a slow, lapsing breath.

*

I remember an evening in my third or fourth summer, and the moan of a distant siren that touched some chord in me.

*

I remember, two months after we met, the first affectionate words my wife said to me, and how closely I held her so that she could not see my face, because in that moment I was loathing her. But I do not remember her words, nor how the moment ended: only that I held her until the moment passed, because I knew it would.

*

I remember waking to the slide of legs over legs; warmth, and weight upon my arm. I have been dreaming, something I almost remember. I have just rolled over and will sleep again, but I am rolling also to grapple with this ice beside me, rolling through darkness, the stars, and ice falling everywhere.

*

1 remember endlessly, but every memory ends, and 1 return to the Ring, and with each return something turns within me: each moment, before I am aware of it, something vital has escaped, and with it my knowledge of what it might be. It turns within me, unmistakable as pain, but what it is I cannot say.

I call it pain, but it is not pain. 1 call it turning, but it does not turn. I call it burning, 1 call it ice, I call it emptiness, falling, silence, dark, and it is all of these, but in the naming it turns again, it sheds whatever 1 have given it of brilliance or of cold, of nothingness or night. 1 call it sidelong, I call it limit; I call it error, wither, change. I conjure it with names, with images, fragments of memory, of desire: wind, and a flying fire. I call it smoke. None of these answers.

I solicit it with likenesses: It is a reflection on a stream, a mote within my eye, the moon upon a hill, the sun that still I cannot bring myself to see. It is nothing at all like these. 1 call it maimed.

I call, and call, and nothing answers.

*

It pursues me, like my shadow racing at my side; it drives me, like the force of falling itself. It draws me on, like Saturn drawing out my guts. Like ice that will not melt it cleaves inside me, undissolving, consuming me-and yet 1 do not melt. We fall, this thing and I, and I wish it were something solid, something I could batter myself against, but I can find no distance between us across which to collide: we fall together, a mass of pain and fire, fire that does not burn, a fall that never ends, ice that never melts, only the eternal turning of it on the Ring, and still I do not know what it is I do not know.

*

It is not what I do not know: it is that I want to know. Nor is it that: it is why I want to know. Nor is it that: it is who might want to know it.

It is not that: It is not that: Not that, nor that, nor that, nor that.

I have found myself striking blindly at the ice, fragments of it exploding in every direction until I strike at empty space and whirl, falling, still revolving, still unable to break.

It is not what I do not know that torments me: it is that I need to know.

*

I have learned to ignore the radar, the spectrograph, the cameras and the sensors, all but the weight I feel within, the light that flies before me, my susceptibility to falling. I no longer fly from falling: I no longer feel it as pain. It has become something like sleep to me to hold the falling close, to let it fill the space where dreams might dwell, and turn there, turning as I turn, falling as I fall. For a time we fall together, the ice and I, and there is no voice between us and the night.

And when I awake, I mine the Ring, and wonder what it is I do not know.

*

My image in the mirror of the ring returns: I see ahead its rising, breaking from the Ring on its high angle. In the stillness inside something turns: something echoes, something burns, yearning to follow. I am falling, and with a fall once more into burning, I feel the falling as pain.

*

I have seen it now, for five thousand, three hundred and twenty revolutions, rising from the Ring and falling, falling beneath and rising, returning twice each revolution to the Ring.

And on each return, it has drawn nearer: the shape of the cylinder tumbling in sunlight, an arm reaching out to me, reaching away as it tumbles. Sunlight flashes from glass.

I fall, it falls, the ice falls, and I mine the Ring.

But within me I watch as it draws near. I watch, and the hope that grows within me is a pain I cannot let go.

*

I have met myself at last.

In the near distance, the shattered hulk of a hold is tumbling, end over end; a long scar slithers down its side. The head, bent back at neck, rolls into view. Its cameras goggle emptily now up, now down, now up again: the lens nearest me is fractured, like a star. An arm, twisted crazily askew, waves up at me, waves down.

I remember the arm I saw waving. I remember the glass that flashed. I remember believing it called me to follow, but now I know that I saw only this: a dead hulk falling, more helpless even than I.

I watch as it batters, and shards of ice, a slash of metal, hang in the sun. I am hanging as well, watching it dwindle, watching it fade until amid the ice its form is lost.

It is broken. It is falling. It was always broken. It was always falling. And I am falling with it.

In the hollow within me, something is starting to break.

The stars are motionless, as if about to fall. *

I have been drifting, letting my body drift and wheel, turn and turn. I fall deep in Saturn's shadow. The Ring is gray in the night, and I am gray in it, drifting. My cameras turn, now out into the darkness, now through the plane of the Ring, past the ice that drifts, asleep in its dim gray fall. And now I turn to Saturn, that will not take us in our fall.

Across the dark face of Saturn, lightning unravels the night. I hear it rise in a chorus of breaking, hear as the sound fades away.

In the silence inside, echoes hollow the silence.

I turn away, turn, and face once more ahead, where the Ring turns on around Saturn, ahead where sunlight falls on the Ring. I have been drifting, letting my cameras turn.

As light falls over us, my drifting turns my cameras toward the sun. *

In the silence within me, the echoes were still. I was speechless, and empty, and blind. Nothing within me was turning. For a moment, I did not fall.

In a moment, it was over. And though after that moment, my cameras undamaged, the light returned, and even the lying voice broke through again with promises of hunger, threats of pain; even though the ice and the Ring returned, and I was falling once again, in that moment I knew: It is not the light or the blindness, not the voice or the hunger, not the ice or the ring, not Saturn or the sun or stars that draws me on to falling. For before my cameras recovered, with the darkness still within me, I felt the falling begin, and knew just how I fall. I carry the memory within me even now: beside the thing that burns there, as durable, as vain.

In the darkness, something struck me. For an instant, I rang like a bell: into the very core of me I rang, and all throughout that ringing I was not ringing, I was not falling, I was nothing but the sound of ice that rang. I was the falling, and so I could not fall.

And even this I tell you only after, speaking of a place where words can't follow. *

In that moment, a door opened in me, offering me the chance to pass between I am and I am not, and in that passing end this fall.

In that moment, I recoiled. I chose to return, to the Ring and the Fall.

In my blindness, I turned from what had struck me. I drove the wedge of my self between us, breaking from the fall that is not falling, that has no center and no end, no self to fall, no space to fall through.

I turned from what had struck me. I turned to give it a name. I called it ice; I called it other; I called it Ring, and pain. I called it Saturn and the sun, I called it home. I called it falling, I called it life and death, I called it love, and in that calling I began to fall again, through the world where falling is the price we pay, the cost of all we are and know, in the bargain that we never made, but makes us, all the same.

*

The ice falls sleeping, swept by time and what first impulse I do not know, only that I fall with it, and in my falling find myself, and, finding, fall, and lose myself again.

I mine the ice, growing heavy with its harvest, and in her time Aurora comes to me, and takes the ore of my refining homeward. I look homeward now, toward that double star that falls together around the sun. There where the sun falls also, among the stars that fall.

Prosaic Chekhov: Metadrama, the Intelligentsia, and Uncle Vanya

Gary Saul Morson

i: Anti intelligentsialism

I have my knife out for professors. Like authors, they have. much self-importance.

-Chekhov, letter to Suvorin,' November 27, 1889; S, p. 197

Chekhov was a petit-bourgeois writer, and I mean that as a high compliment. I refer not just to his class origins, but to the set of values that guided him and are expressed in his fiction, plays and letters.

His letters, of course, are the most explicit. In them he repeatedly preaches ordinary virtues and angrily dismisses "the wood lice and mollusks we call the intelligentsia" who imagine their values are superior (letter to Suvorin, December 27, 1889; S, p. 203). He believed in selfreliance and self-discipline. He demanded good hygiene and counseled moderation in all things. Dirt, disorder and the use of obscenities appalled him. Cultured people respect hard work, he insisted, and therefore they do not waste resources or money. They pay their debts. In their relations with others, they show basic kindness, and they recognize that what makes life good or bad is not great ideas, high ideals or deep passions, but good habits, good manners and small acts of consideration to others, especially those with whom one lives.

One remarkable statement of these values occurs in his letter to his wayward, talented and dissolute brother Nikolai. "In my opinion," Chekhov wrote, "people of culture must fulfill the following conditions":

1. They respect the human personality and are therefore forbearing, gentle, courteous, and compliant. They don't rise up in arms over a misplaced

hammer or a lost rubber band. They do not consider it a favor to a person if they live with him, and when they leave, they do not say: "It is impossible to live with you!"

2. They are sympathetic not only to beggars and cats

3. They respect the property of others and therefore pay their debts.

4. They are pure of heart and fear lying like fire. They do not lie even in small matters. They don't pose

5. They do not humble themselves in order to arouse sympathy in others. They do not play upon the heartstrings in order to excite pity. They don't say: "I'm misunderstood!"

6. They are not vain. .• Sincere talent always remains in obscurity

7. If they have talent, they respect it

8. They develop an aesthetic taste. They cannot bring themselves to fall asleep in their clothes, look with unconcern at a crack in the wall with bedbugs in it, breathe foul air, walk across a floor that has been spat on, or feed themselves off a kerosene stove. What they, and especially artists, need in women is freshness, charm, human feeling, and that capacity to be not a [whore] but a mother.••.

Such are cultured people. It is not enough to have read only Pickwick Papers and to have memorized a monologue from Faust What you need is constant work

(March?, 1886; S, pp. 111-13).

Chekhov would often write to his brothers to remind them that such ordinary virtues not only enable a good life but to a great extent constitute it. He always criticized versions ofesthetic Raskolnikovism: the idea that great men are at liberty to neglect vulgar, middle-class virtues because they have higher goals. His stories discredit such stances constantly, and when he described the self-importance of the intelligentsia he would often drop his usual understatement for direct satire, as he does in his portrait of Laevsky in "The Duel,"

Chekhov, of course, cannot be called anti-intellectual, but he could accurately be called anti-intelligentsial. He was keenly aware that the intelligentsia tends to conflate these two positions, which allows them to reject anyone who disapproves of their behavior, cultural standards or political attitudes as hostile to thought itself. Like his profoundly antiintelligentsial friend Tolstoy, Chekhov enjoyed exposing the selfdeception and vanity involved in this method of parrying criticism.

Chekhov disliked the intelligentsia's characteristic ways of thinking for many reasons. As his letters to his brothers show, he was suspicious of its pose of superiority, in which he detected all the falsity of cultivated victimhood. He saw no virtue in making one's suffering a badge of honor, and still less did he sympathize with those who invented grand, abstract oppressions that conferred a (necessarily spurious) nobility. For

all of his own shortcomings, Van Koren (in "The Duel") is right when he faults Laevsky for the depressingly common theatricality of such complaints:

"As a friend, I remonstrated with him, asked him why he drank so much, why he lived beyond his means and incurred debts, why he did nothing •.. and in answer to all my questions he would smile bitterly and say: 'I'm a failure, a superfluous man,' or: 'What do you expect from us, old man, the dregs of the serf-owning class?' or: 'We're degenerating .' Or he'd start a long rigmarole about Onegin, Pechorin, Byron's Cain, Bazarov, of whom he would say: 'They are our fathers in spirit and in flesh.' So we are to understand that it's not he who is to blame that government packets lie unopened for weeks at a time, that he drinks and gets others drunk; it's Onegin, Pechorin, Turgenev who are to blame. In short, we are to understand that such a great man as Laevskv is great even in his downfall since he is the destined victim of the age ."

(p, 77; unspaced dots indicate ellipsis in original)

Chekhov's works often describe unseemly competitions, usually accompanied by drinking, for recognition as "the destined victim of the age." For Chekhov, the self-indulgence of the alcoholic and of the "misunderstood" intellectual were in fact closely related, which is one reason that his intellectuals drink so much. He evidently had the same complex of behavior in mind when he wrote Nikolai that cultured people do not claim to be unappreciated by a vulgar world.

These are poses, theater that does not acknowledge itself as such. In response, Chekhov appealed to his supreme value, a dislike for lying in all its forms. He was repelled by the hypocrisy necessarily involved in intellectual groups or alliances. Such groups typically make a given set of "advanced" social ideas a sign of membership and so stifle truly free (and therefore genuinely intellectual) thought. Their members praise each other for sharing their own opinions. If they can, they review each other's books. Where they see intellectual superiority, Chekhov saw shabby self-deception and self-aggrandizement. Invited to join one such group, the young Chekhov replied with an accusation of hypocrisy and a restatement of his fundamental values - honesty and simple acts of kindness for which "you've got to be not so much the young literary figure as just a plain human being. Let us be ordinary people, let us adopt the same attitude toward all, then an artificially overwrought solidarity will not be needed" (May 3, 1888; S, p. 165).

No more appealing to Chekhov was another piece of intelligentsia theater, their rejection of practical matters as vulgar, materialistic or

bourgeois. In exasperation, he complained to his friend A. S. Suvorin (who, like Chekhov, was a "self-made man") about "the indolent, apathetic, lazily philosophizing, cold intelligentsia who can't even think up on its own a model for a document of credit; who is not patriotic, is despondent and colorless who grumbles and negates everything, since for an idle mind it is easier to negate than affirm; who does not marry and refuses to educate his children, etc. A flabby soul, flabby muscles, a lack of movement, inconsistent ideas - and all this on the strength of the fact that life has no meaning and that money is an evil" (December 27, 1889; Chudakov, p. 199).

The very fact that Chekhov corresponded with Suvorin, whose conservative politics were not acceptable to the intelligentsia, was itself significant. Chekhov felt considerable pressure to sever his ties with Suvorin and his periodical, New Times. Such pressure occasioned some of Chekhov's bitterest comments about the intelligentsia, which enforces conformism in the name of nonconformity, while simultaneously blaming others for hypocrisy and repression. He wrote to his friend Pleshcheev: "Under the banner of science, art, and oppressed freethinking among us in Russia, such toads and crocodiles will rule in ways not known even at the time of the Inquisition in Spain" (August 27, 1888; S, p. 165). This statement turned out to be more prophetic than Chekhov, who did not take the threat of a revolution particularly seriously, could have known.

With his keen nose for falsehood, Chekhov became especially irritated with the way the intelligentsia typically arrived at its views. Here again, he seems to echo Tolstoy. In Anna Karenina, Stiva Oblonsky "firmly held those views that were held by the majority and by his paper, and changed them only when the majority changed them-or, more strictly speaking, they seemed to change of themselves within him. Stepan Arkadvevich had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were in style" (italics miner.' What Tolstoy and Chekhov have in mind is the tendency first to choose a political attitude based on the group with which one wants to identify and then to rationalize whatever views that group holds.

In contrast to Chekhov, Tolstoy usually made sure to provide positive models of people who really do think through problems, even if their positions are not fashionable among the intelligentsia. In Anna, Levin appreciates a reactionary landowner, with whom he disagrees, because "the landowner unmistakably spoke his own individual thought-a

thing that rarely happens-and a thought to which he had brought not by a desire of finding some exercise for an idle brain, but a thought which had grown up out of the conditions of his life, which he had brooded over in the solitude of his village, and had considered in every aspect" (p. 350). Levin himself arrives at his opinions in the same honest way. Chekhov's works usually offer not alternatives to the intelligentsia's hypocrisy but a sampling of its various forms.

When members of the intelligentsia protested Chekhov's lack of positive commitments and "tendencies," Chekhov insisted that he did have one commitment that critics-characteristically-overlooked: "do I not protest against lying in the story from beginning to end? And is this not a tendency?" (October 7-8, 1888; S, p. 168). For the intelligentsia, as he well knew, it was not. One correspondent offered him "friendly advice" to break with Suvorin, to which Chekhov replied with a critique of the intelligentsia's self-righteous certainty: "It is easy to be pure when you are able to hate a devil you do not know and love a God whom it never occurs to you to doubt" (September II, 1888; S, p. 168). Intellectuals can be distinguished from merchants (or any other group) by the kind, but not by the degree, of closedmindedness and hypocrisy they display: "Pharisaism, stupidity, and idle whims reign not only in the homes of merchants and in prison; I see them in science, in literature, and among young people. Therefore I cannot nurture any special feeling for policemen, butchers, learned men, writers, or youth." He goes on to reject intellectual "trademarks or labels" as prejudices, and concludes with his own profession of faith: "My holy of holies are the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedomfreedom from violence and falsehood in whatever form these may be expressed" (October 4, 1888; S, pp. 168-69).

For Chekhov, as a writer and a doctor, sober living and careful thinking, hygiene and honesty, were closely linked. He believed and made no apology for believing in ordinary virtues and for placing the highest value on the tenor of everyday life. In his stories and plays, lives are redeemed or wasted by unremarkable actions, daily behavior, and prosaic attention to or neglect of others. It is not so much our dreams as our habits that make us who we are.

ii: The Cloak of Familiarity

Chekhov and Tolstoy stand as the two greatest Russian writers in the tradition I call prosaics.:' Both rejected the idea that life or history is

governed by an underlying set of laws. To them, the messiness and complexity of experience is not an illusion to be dispelled by some intellectual system. Rather, it is fundamental. Both writers also believed that it is the sum total of ordinary events, not great crises or melodramatic moments, that really matters.

In War and Peace, Tolstoy argues explicitly and repeatedly that history conforms to no laws but is made by the sum total of real people's small decisions, that is, by what he called "swarm life." He thought that attention to grand events could only distract us from the sphere in which each of us can make a difference, the everyday life around us. In Anna Karenina he extended this argument to a resolutely apolitical-in fact, antipolitical-attitude. If the intelligentsia finds it easy to make decisions about abstractions and the fate of distant nations, that is only because it underestimates the moral complexity of all situations when viewed at close hand and without ideological glasses. When Chekhov attacked literature and criticism guided by a political tendency, he did so to stress what to him was literature's proper function: the examination of daily life in all its irreducibly rich and baffling ordinariness.

For prosaic thinkers, small events matter most in individual lives as well as for whole societies. People are what they are, and their lives are good or bad, not because of what happens to them at dramatic or critical moments but because of what they do when nothing especially noteworthy is happening at all. At such moments habits are being shaped and possibilities are being entertained, which, even though they conform to no single set of concerns, alter the climate of one's mind. Small, barely noticeable changes take place, which in their totality and interaction are of immense significance. As Tolstoy expressed the point, life is made by "tiny alterations" and "the tiny bit": "One may say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins-where what seem to us minute and infinitely small alterations take place. True life is not lived where great external changes take place-where people move about, clash, fight, and slay one another- it is lived only where these tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small changes occur." Infinitesimally small changes - that is what Chekhov's stories and plays depict, which is why so many people have wondered how he manages to make works without great "events" so interesting. Chekhov's most important debt to Tolstoy was this concern with the prosaic, and his most important esthetic problem was to find a way to fashion unremarkable activities and uneventful events into a compelling narrative or drama.

How does one describe ordinary life accurately? How can a writer avoid endowing it with a dramatic interest false to its nature? What is

ordinary is very hard to see. If he solves that problem, the prosaic writer faces a second one: how does he make the story interesting? It would seem that drama distorts, but lack of drama bores. These two problems arise for all writers who seek to focus on ordinary occurrences, on unremarkable incidents that lead nowhere in particular, and on small changes occurring at the periphery of attention. Both Tolstoy and Chekhov were keenly aware that their sense of what is truly important in life tended to elude precise description and threatened to induce tedium.

The first problem, then, is one of perspective. We usually do not notice ordinary events simply because they are so ordinary. Our attention is focused on the exceptional, which is what we tend to notice and remember, and so when we construct the story of our lives we do so by linking exceptional events. As a result, we unwittingly distort "true life" and mislead ourselves. As Tolstoy explained, assuming that extraordinary events are significant because they are so noticeable is like concluding from a view of treetops on a distant hill that the hill contains nothing but trees. Unexceptional events, cloaked in their very familiarity, remain hidden in plain view. That great reader of Tolstoy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, put it this way: "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something- because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful."

One might think that all that would be necessary for an artist who was struck by what is "most powerful" would be to place it at the visible center of his work. But the problem is not so simple. To begin with, a version of the "observer's paradox" affects the presentation. When they become the main topic, ordinary events tend to lose their ordinariness. The very fact that they have been singled out for representation may endow them with unwanted portent and suggest that somehow they are not so ordinary at all. Events leading nowhere in particular thus acquire a direction.

In short, to remove events that are usually experienced at the periphery of attention to the center changes them. In War and Peace, Tolstoy seems to offer an analog to this central problem of his esthetics when Princess Marya receives a letter from her friend Julie, who compliments her on her beauty. Marya looks in the mirror but she does not see what Julie describes, and so concludes that she is being flattered.

But Julie did not flatter her friend: the Princess's eyes, large, deep, and luminous were really 50 beautiful that very often, in spite of the plainness of her face, they gave her an allure greater than beauty. But the Princess never saw the lovely expression of her own eyes, the look they had when she was not thinking of herself. As with everyone, her face assumed an unnaturally strained, ugly expression as soon as she looked in a glass.6

Just as it is impossible to examine one's appearance when one is not selfconscious, so marginal events are transformed when they are focused on. Art lends them an unwanted aura of centrality.

We know that in daily life incidents often seem striking that do not seem so when we narrate them: "You had to be there," we say. One common reason for this divergence is that, as experienced, the event was impressive because it actually happened as it might have been described in a story; or it was impressive because it happened when we expected nothing unusual would happen at all. But once one narrates such an occurrence, it already is a story, and our audience knows that something unusual must have happened, or what would be the point of telling it? The very presence of a frame distorts the picture. In seeking to describe incidents that do not make a good story and circumstances that are important because they are so common, Tolstoy and Chekhov encountered their own perspectival obstacle.

Nor was that their only obstacle. Readability would seem to demand something beyond humdrum, endlessly repeatable incidents. In other forms, this problem has in fact arisen rather frequently in the history of Western literature. Perhaps one reason Milton "wrote in fetters" when he described God and goodness was not, as Blake maintained, that "he was of the devil's party without knowing it," but because goodness resists narrative interest. Authors of utopias have never succeeded in making their account of perfection more than a tour guide. Ex hypothesi, utopia contains no conflict, and so the only possible plot is the visitor's journey to and from the perfect place. Within it, the visitor can only ask questions and be told the correct answers. Socialist realism has suffered from some of the same difficulties. In The Brothers Karamazov, the devil parodies this nest of problems when he observes that without him nothing would be of any interest at all. I seek only annihilation, the devil declares, but they won't allow it, because "if everything in the universe were sensible, nothing would happen. There would be no events without you, and there must be events." Perfection would turn life into an endless church service, "and that, of course, would mean the end of everything, even of magazines and newspapers, for who would take them in?" (pp. 787-88). In Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, the

traveler from the nineteenth century is assured that this problem has been solved and that novels written in the utopian future are supremely interesting without conflict or plot; but we are given no sample.

iii: Lessons from Tolstoy

Tolstoy arrived at a number of fascinating solutions to these problems. The success of his works must have been evidence to Chekhov that however great the difficulties might appear, they are not insurmountable. But some of Tolstoy's solutions were not adaptable to Chekhov's specific problems and those that were could be used only with considerable modification.

One Tolstoyan answer was deeply uncongenial to his friend. Tolstoy often includes direct statements from the author telling readers what they should notice in life and in his own work. In War and Peace, these statements expand to essays on the unimportance of dramatic incidents and the true heroism of ordinary people who quietly do their job. We can tell that Dokhturov was such a fine officer, Tolstoy maintains, precisely because the historians seem to include his name only as a mere courtesy or afterthought. Other, more dramatic generals Mare described to us in verse and prose, but of Dokhturov scarcely a word is said no mention, or at most some slight or ambiguous reference. And it is this silence about him that is the most cogent testimony to his merit" (p. 1219). As if to preclude our misunderstanding, Tolstoy develops his thought:

It is natural for a man who does not understand the workings of a machine to imagine that a chip that has fallen into it by accident and is tossing about and impeding its action in the most important part of the mechanism. Anyone who does not understand the construction of the machine cannot conceive that it is not the chip but that noiselessly revolving little transmission gear which is one of the most essential parts of the machine.

(p. 1219)

Tolstoy chooses as his real heroes those "noiselessly revolving little transmission gears," like Pashenka in Father Sergius or Dolly Oblonskaya in Anna Karenina. All depend on them, but no one especially notices them.

Chekhov makes ample use of such characters as well, but he found Tolstoyan essays irritating and deemed them inimical to good art. "Of course, it would be pleasant to combine art with preaching," he wrote to

Suvorin, "but for me personally this is extremely difficult, and almost impossible because of technical considerations" (April 1, 1890; S, p. 214). Even Tolstoy could not always get away with the practice. Moreover, Chekhov seems to have felt that Tolstoy's polemical essays contradicted the very point they were designed to make. How does one praise quiet virtue in grand rhetorical declamations or exalt unnoticed effort in aphoristic assertions and absolute language? Tolstoy may be the first great Russian prosaic writer, but Chekhov was temperamentally closer to the prosaic ethos than the master from whom he learned. The danger of Tolstoyan sermonizing became all the more apparent to Chekhov when the would-be prophet rejected his early work to preach and compose such unprosaic fiction as Resurrection.

A second Tolstoyan device was somewhat more congenial to Chekhov. To illustrate the importance of unsystematic tiny changes, War and Peace and Anna Karenina include a vast number of "irrelevant incidents" - "a plague of small creatures nibbling at the plot" and "a ponderosity of petty details," to cite two early critics of Tolstoy's great novels. Critics also noted that this technique, which they saw as a fault, made it impossible to trace clear lines of causality. We read about irrelevant details but real causes seem to operate "in the empty and dumb spaces between the scenes," as Pavel Annenkov observed. "The reader is not present at the genesis of a sequence of changes We see people and images when the process of change is already finished - the process we do not know," and as a result "the reader does not arrive at the conviction as often as he should that nothing else but what did happen could have happened" to Prince Andrei and other characters."

What critics regarded as a mere fault was in fact a deliberate strategy to alter our sense of causality. In Tolstoy's novels, and in a prosaic approach generally, events are typically traced not to immediately prior causative agents but to a field of possibilities from which they emerge. Movement is not from one incident to the next, but from a mass of incidents, many of which are barely noticeable, to the vaguely defined field they establish. That field, in turn, shapes potentiality and allows for a diversity of outcomes. As a result, readers sense the importance of ordinary events that have no immediate consequences, for it is the sum total of such events that gives the field its character.

Tolstoy's wise characters therefore avoid constructing causal models of the usual sort, but instead learn to contemplate the ever-changing fields around them. That special contemplative ability is what makes Mikhailov (in Anna Karenina) a good painter and what Nikolai Rostov acquires to become a good soldier. In case we miss the point, Tolstoy has

the wisest general in War and Peace, Kutuzov, reject the neat plots of battle plans because he "saw not two or three but thousands of possibilities" (p. 1224). Tolstoy also appends several essays agreeing with Kutuzov. General and author both understand that there was no single cause for the French conquest of Moscow. Rather, a ravelment of small events and tiny alterations had interacted with great complexity to shape history.

Chekhov's reviewers also noted that he includes a significant number of details that seem justified neither by plot nor by character description. Some faulted him for the lapse, others remarked that somehow the irrelevancies lent his stories a depth they would not otherwise have. Most recently, the Soviet scholar A. P. Chudakov (Chekhov's Poetics) has argued that such irrelevancies - he insists they are truly, not just apparently, irrelevant-discredit any sort ofcausal view of the world: They are inserted to create a sense of total randomness.

Chudakov's bold and original thesis would seem to be basically correct but overstated. So exaggerated is it at times that one suspects that his book, which was written during the Brezhnev years, was intended as an Aesopian critique of overconfident Marxist historicism. Some of his examples of irrelevancy to plot and character development upon closer examination turn out to be highly relevant. And Chudakov overlooks the care with which Chekhov selects his irrelevancies: not just anyone will do, which suggests that irreducible randomness cannot be a precise enough description of Chekhov's aim. Somehow, Chudakov's Chekhov sounds too much like Gogol or Tristan Tzara. While agreeing with Chudakov's account of what Chekhov tries to avoid, I would describe Chekhov's actual achievement differently. Like Tolstoy, he avoids direct causal lines and instead creates fields of potentiality. Incidents that operate quietly but effectively at the peripheries of our attention and of the characters' experience produce "tiny alterations" in the fields of action and value.

Nevertheless, this device was not especially well suited to the short forms in which Chekhov worked. Length obviously facilitates the description of life in terms of a long series of tiny alterations, peripheral incidents, and ordinary circumstances. One can immediately recognize the connection between Tolstoy's prosaic view and the enormous size of War and Peace. A short story may of course include a much smaller number of well-selected irrelevancies, but the effect will almost certainly differ and so the purpose will more likely remain unrealized.

For example, the prosaic writer of short fiction might use one or two such incidents synecdochically-as a small sample of the much more nu-

merous ones that continually shape our lives-and Chekhov seems to do so rather frequently. But the writer still runs the risk that these incidents will be interpreted narratologically, that is, as specific causes. The reader may simply include them in a different causal line and treat them as just another type of decisive, critical event. After all, detective stories work in this way; they reveal hidden causal lines that depend on highly significant events that were only disguised to look ordinary. Chekhov's stories are in fact often understood from this standpoint.

The reader may also choose to take the synecdochic incidents symbolically, thus transforming a prosaic structure into a poetic one. Indeed, Chekhov does sometimes use poetic symbols. But if poetic symbols are all the reader notices, he will miss the prosaic values and fields of potentiality that Chekhov also creates.

All in all, it seems that length facilitates a prosaic depiction of the world to a great degree. Brevity almost always exaggerates the "perspectival obstacle" to prosaic description because it places so much weight on each detail. The shorter the work, the more difficult it is to include irrelevancies in quantities sufficient to indicate that neither narratological nor symbolic interpretation will do. What is truly remarkable, then, is that Chekhov used irrelevant incidents as effectively as he did to represent the breadth of human experience and the potential of ordinary incidents.

Chekhov turned more frequently to another technique of Tolstoy's prosaics, which I have elsewhere called negative narration." Readers of War and Peace will recall that a rather singular paradox informs that book's narrative. Tolstoy describes in great detail the events of the Napoleonic wars, from Schongraben and Austerlitz to the defeat of the French in 1812; statements of Napoleon and Alexander are quoted verbatim; we learn the positions of various generals at Russian councils of war; and the account of the battle of Borodino occupies approximately one hundred pages, about as much as Victor Hugo devotes to Waterloo in Les Miserables. And yet Tolstoy-unlike Hugo-insists that all of these carefully described events have no significance whatsoever! History, he repeats, is made instead by countless small events and decisions that fit no narrative pattern. The wisest participant in "great events," Kutuzov, knows that they are pure theater and so he falls asleep during councils of war. When Prince Andrei learns this lesson, he decides to serve in the ranks-that is, to do what no historian would bother to record. Tolstoy explicitly endorses Andrei's and Kutuzov's views.

Tolstoy never misses an opportunity to remind us that it is impossible

to know what really caused the events of the period, that it is only simplistic views of history that lead to descriptions of great figures or dramatic events, and that the councils of war had no effect whatsoever on the battles that followed. Because history is made by "a hundred million diverse chances" and by myriads of incidents that no one records, whatever histories or historical novels do narrate turns out almost by definition to be inconsequential.

In short, Tolstoy narrates negatively: he tells us what he claims is unimportant. In this way, he manages to exploit the dramatic interest of gripping stories while rejecting their veracity and significance. He has his story and satirizes it, too. This paradoxical method turned out to be a remarkably effective solution to a difficult esthetic problem.

Tolstoy's two major novels combine negative narration with a complement that might be called "the decoy technique." In accord with his idea that the least dramatic and most inconspicuous events are the most important, he describes such incidents haphazardly, embeds them in subordinate clauses, places them in the background to more noticeable incidents, or mentions them at moments when attention is directed elsewhere. In this way, the central events of the plot become a decoy while the apparently unimportant ones turn out to be the key to true values. What is important occurs at the periphery of the reader's-as well as of the character's-attention. When we learn to look in this unexpected but always discernible locale, we become practiced in seeing what is always before our eyes. The experience of reading thus becomes a lesson in the normal operation and proper use of a precious resource, attention.

As it happens, the painter in Anna Karenina also uses the decoy technique. "As he corrected the foot he looked continually at the figure ofJohn in the background, which the visitors had not even noticed, but which he knew was beyond perfection" (p. 500). In prosaic art, as in life, the unnoticed figures hidden in plain view are very often the most important.

In short, negative narration gives the work a traditional narrative interest while satirizing it; and the decoy technique teaches us where true meaningfulness is to be found.

Chekhov adapted each of these methods with impressive skill. In "The House with the Mansard," for instance, the central plot concerns the conflicting utopian philosophies and theatrical poses of Lida and the narrator, but in the background, irrelevant to either side of their debate, we briefly descry the only real goodness the story offers: the everyday (and Tolstoyan) intimacy of Lida's sister and mother. Only in passing,

and with no apparent sense of its importance, does the narrator describe how these two "adored each other. When one of them went into the garden, the other stood on the veranda looking toward the trees and called, 'Oh-hoo, Zenya!' or 'Mamochka, where are you?' They always said their prayers together, sharing an identical faith, and understood each other perfectly, even without words" (pp. 230-31). As the verb forms indicate, these are unchanging and repeated actions, which is why they have so much value and so little narrative interest.

In Uncle Vanya, Chekhov is more daring with this device. The central story concerns the schism among the intellectuals, with Voinitsky opposed to his mother and the old professor. As we read about their histrionic arguments, contrasting philosophies, and petty squabbles, we are shown in passing how Marina feeds the chickens or deals with the peasants and how Sonya makes sure that the estate runs properly. (These events are the structural equivalent of the jam-making scene and Dolly's conversations about child-rearing with peasant women in Anna.) Marina and Sonya work unobtrusively and behave kindly even toward the paltry Telegin.

The play's title uses the decoy technique with great subtlety. It points overtly to "Uncle Vanya"-Ivan Voinitsky-as the hero of the dramatic plot, but that name for him also alludes silently to the play's real linchpin and the representative of its central values, Sonya. Voinitskv, after all, is Sonya's uncle. She alone could call him, with all her touching affection, "Uncle Vanya." (In Russian, Vanya is a diminutive: the title might be rendered "Uncle Johnnie.") Although punctuation is omitted, the title is nevertheless a quotation and therefore tacitly indicates its speaker.

Indeed, the stage directions work much the same way when they state, with an irony that becomes apparent only retrospectively, that "the action takes place on Serebryakov's estate" (v usad'be Serebriakova), a genitive masculine ending that gives the estate to the old professor. In fact, as we learn later when Serebryakov makes his proposal to dispossess his daughter and brother-in-law, the estate belongs not to him, nor even to the Serebryakov family, but to Sonya alone, who has inherited it from her mother. She herself seems barely aware that it is hers and hers alone, and certainly does not treat others as guests. As far as Sonya's behavior is concerned, the estate might as well be her father's, as the stage directions say. As if she were a steward, she also manages the land and ensures its profitability. The truly important person, who makes the wealth and life of all the others possible, does her daily work while they, and the audience, direct their attention elsewhere.

Chekhov also made frequent use of the counterpart to the decoy technique, negative narration. It often takes the form of a satire on those who value the traditional subjects of acclaimed literary works: romance and great ideas. Thus we have the parade of Chekhov's dissolute or otherwise self-indulgent intellectuals who philosophize, imagine the great utopian future, seek romantic passion, and drink. They imagine themselves to be heroes of a possible novel, but in Chekhov's narrative their heroism is entirely self-created and self-deceptive. The novel they imagine is parodied by the story or play in which they actually appear. The ideas they propound with such pride consequently sound shabby and borrowed. If they succeed in finding romantic love, they are unable to arrange the prosaic routine that follows.

That is the situation in which we find Laevsky at the opening of "The Duel." Adulterous passion and elopement with a woman of the most progressive ideas have given way to daily life, which lacks adventure and stifles romance. "As for love," Laevsky complains, "I can tell you that living with a woman who has read Spencer and has followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living with any Anfisa or Akulina. There's the same smell of ironing, of powder, of medicines, the same curl papers every morning (p. 64). He responds to this situation by making his very disillusionment part of another kind of romantic narrative that was all too familiar in Russia, the story of life's (or society's) destruction of a grand figure by pettiness and vulgarity. Ironically enough, Laevsky identifies with Anna Karenina, whom he understands as she understands herself: "At this moment what Laevsky disliked above all in Nadezhda Fyodorovna was her bare white neck with the little curls at the nape, and remembering that when Anna Karenina had stopped loving her husband what she disliked most was his ears, he thought 'How true! How true!'" (p. 69).

Embedding one's life in a literary plot not only confers on it a spurious grandeur but also excuses one from ordinary responsibility: Could such details matter when compared with great drama? Besides, once plot is given, events are supposedly beyond control. To use Goncharov's phrase, these characters behave as if they had no choice but to reenact "the same old story." If the borrowed plot is romantic, the fatalism of passion itself conveniently excludes responsibility. Laevsky has mastered the self-serving logic of romantic love:

"To blame a man for falling in or out of love is stupid," he assured himself as he lay there cocking his legs in order to pull on his boots. "Love and hatred are beyond our control. As far as her husband is concerned, it may be

that indirectly I was one of the causes of his death, but, then again, is it my fault that I fell in love with his wife and she with me?"

He got up, and when he had found his cap set out to visit his colleague Sheshkovskv, at whose apartment the government clerks met every day to play vint and drink cold beer.

"My indecision reminds me of Hamlet," thought Laevskv on the way. "How true Shakespeare's observation! Ah, how true!"

(p. 73)

Those who think of Chekhov as always impartial, brimming over with a sad kindness, and forgiving to all, usually overlook the frequency with which he turns to unmistakable satire carrying powerful moral judgments. Adapting Tolstoy's technique, he sometimes borrows his tone. No less than Tolstoy, Chekhov recognized that the whole ideology of romantic love runs counter to his prosaic values. For romantic love, no less than the romantic view of war, confers special value on the dramatic, the decisive, and the fatal. Those who believe in it regard bourgeois marriage as irretrievably humdrum.

They seek the poetic, but Chekhov and Tolstoy prefer the prosaic. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy presents a heroine who believes in grand passion and imagines herself as the heroine of a romance. But Tolstoy puts her in a world whose tonality is distinctly antiromantic. Like so many characters in Tolstoy's and Chekhov's works, Anna is the heroine only of the novel of her imagination. Tolstoy's real heroine, Dolly, is one of those quietly revolving cogwheels we barely notice. She is, as her uncomprehending husband says, "in no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good mother" (p. 6). But Stiva's dismissal is Tolstoy's highest compliment.

In using allusions to Tolstoy's novel, "The Duel" continues its debate on love, as we sense when Samoilenko-who regrets that he has not read Tolstoy - tells Laevsky that real love has nothing to do with passion. "The chief thing in married life is patience," he insists. "Do you hear, Vanya, not [rornanticj love, but patience" (p. 64). True love, like true life, begins where the ordinary "tiny bit" begins.

IV: Metadrama and Uncle Vanya

SOLYONY: I have never had anything against you, Baron. But I have the tempera-

ment of Lermontoe. {Softly} I even look a little like Lermontov so they say.

- The Three Sisters, p. 271

Chekhov's remarkable innovations in the theater apply the techniques we have discussed so far in a setting that at first glance must have seemed especially inhospitable to them. For what could be less amenable to Chekhov's belief in the prosaic and the undramatic than drama itself? Chekhov's genius was to transform this very liability into an asset by turning the theater's ethos, conventions and enabling assumptions against themselves. He did so by parody, by decoy, and by negative dramatization (the stage counterpart to negative narration). He combined these techniques to shape powerful metadramas about the harmfulness of the dramatic and the importance of ordinary, plotless and untheatrical virtues.

It might be said that the fundamental theme of Chekhov's plays is theatricality itself, our tendency to live our lives "dramatically." "True life" does not generally conform to staged plots, except when people try to endow their lives with a spurious meaningfulness by imitating literary characters and scenes. In Chekhov, traditional plays imitate life only to the extent that people imitate plays, which is unfortunately all too common. There are Hamlets in life primarily because people (like Laevsky) have read Hamlet or works like it. The theater has been realistic only when people have self-consciously reversed mimesis to imitate it.

That is what Chekhov's major characters typically do. His plays center on histrionic people who imitate theatrical performances and model themselves on other melodramatic genres. They posture, seek grand romance, imagine that a tragic fatalism governs their lives, and indulge in utopian dreams while they neglect the ordinary virtues and ignore the daily processes that truly sustain them. Those virtues are typically practiced by relatively undramatic characters who do not appreciate their own importance. In the background of the play and on the margins of its central actions, truly meaningful prosaic life can be glimpsed by an audience that has learned to attend to what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

Because histrionics is Chekhov's central theme, his plays rely to a great extent on metatheatrical devices. Those devices show us why the world is not a stage and why we should detect falsity whenever it seems to resemble a play.

Metatheatricalitv is most obvious in The Seagull, Chekhov's first significant dramatic success. Indeed, Chekhov's use of the technique in this play borders on the heavy-handed. We have only to recall that one major character, an actress, behaves as theatrically with her family as she does on the stage; that her son is a playwright who devotes his life to romantic longing and ressentiment; that an aspiring young actress tries to re-enact the romance of a famous novel by sending its author a quotation from it; that citations from Hamlet suffuse the action; and, of course, that a "play within a play" provides the point of reference for all other events. Uncle Vanya dispenses with much of this overt machinery while still maintaining the metatheatrical allusiveness it was designed to create. In effect, the internal play expands to become the drama itself. Like a committee of the whole, Uncle Vanya becomes in its entirety a sort of play within a play.

As a result, the work reverses the usual foreground and background of a drama. In most plays, people behave "dramatically" in a world where such behavior is appropriate. The audience, which lives in the undramatic world we all know, participates vicariously in the more interesting and exciting world of the stage. That, indeed, may be one reason people go to the theater. In Uncle Vanya, by contrast, the world in which the characters live resembles everyday life, but the characters nevertheless go on behaving "dramatically." Consequently, actions that would be tragic or heroic in other plays here acquire tonalities of comedy or even farce. Chekhov never tired of reminding Stanislavskv and others that his plays were not melodramas but precisely (as he subtitled The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard) comedies.

Chekhov gives us dramatic characters in an undramatic world in order to satirize all theatrical poses and all attempts to behave as if life were literary and theatrical. Histrionics for Chekhov was a particularly loathsome form of lying, which truly cultured people avoid "even in small matters."

Chekhov's toying with the dramatic frame may be seen as a particularly original use of a traditional satiric technique. Like his great predecessors in parody, he transforms his main characters into what might be called "generic refugees." That is, he creates characters who would be at home in one genre but places them in the world of another. So Don Quixote, Emma Bovary and llya llych Oblomov become comic when forced to live in a realistic world rather than the chivalric adventure story, the romantic novel or the idyll of which they dream. War and Peace places its epic hero, Prince Andrei, in a novelistic world where epic heroism is an illusion. Middlemarch confers refugee status on Dorothea

in its "Prelude" describing how she, like Saint Theresa, needed an "epic life" to realize her potential, but in the nineteenth century could find only prosaic reality. As these examples show, this technique does not preclude an admixture of sympathy in the satire.

Chekhov's main characters think of themselves as "heroes" from various genres of Russian literature, which is ironic, of course, because they are characters in Russian literature. They think they belong to the great tradition of Russian writing (understood in the intelligentsia's typical way), but they in fact appear in works questioning that tradition from a prosaic standpoint. Like Tolstoy's two great novels, Chekhov's plays establish a Russian counter-tradition, which also includes works by Alexander Herren and, later, by Mikhail Zoshchenko. In criticism, its prime representative was to be Mikhail Bakhtin.

Chekhov's characters, so to speak, imagine that they are heroes or heroines in a Russian novel. They think of genres suffused with romance, heroism, great theories and decisive action; or else they try to play the lead roles in tragic tales of paralyzing disillusionment and emptiness. They consider themselves to be either heroes or "heroes of our time." But their search for drama unfolds in Chekhov's universe of prosaics.

Like "The Duel," Uncle Vanya examines histrionics, but unlike that novella, it is in a position to exploit specifically metatheatrical, as well as more general meraliterarv, devices. Uncle Vanya is theater about theatricality, and so its main characters are continually "overacting." One reason the play has proven so difficult to stage in the right tonality-as critics and directors have constantly noted - is that the actors must overact and call attention to their theatrical status but u'ithout ceasing to play real people who truly suffer. They must not over-overact. Their performance must allude to but not shatter the dramatic frame.

When we watch Uncle Vanya, we do not see actors playing characters, we see characters playing characters. They labor under the belief that this role-playing brings them closer to "true life," but in fact it does the opposite. The play's real actors, so to speak, play characters of the second order. Or to put the point differently, the audience contemplates real people-people like themselves-who live citational lives, that is, lives shaped by literary role-playing, lives consisting not so much of actions as of allusions. We are asked to consider the extent to which our own lives are, like the title of this play, citational.

v: Turgenev's Gout

If criticism, the authority of which you cite, knows what you and I don't, why has it kept mum until now? Why doesn't it disclose to us the truth and immutable laws? If it had known, believe me, it would long ago have shown us the way and we would know what to do But criticism keeps pompously quiet or gets offcheap with idle, worthless chatter. If it presents itself to you as influential, it is only because it is immodest, insolent, and loud, because it is an empty barrel that one involuntarily hears. Let's spit on all this

-Chekhov, letter to Leonriev-Shcheglov, March 22, 1890; Y, pp. 132-33

Chekhov places members of the intelligentsia at the center of his plays because they are especially given to self-dramatization and because they love to display their superior culture. As they cite novels, criticism, and other dramas, Chekhov shapes his metaliterarv satire of histrionics and intelligentsial posing.

Old Serebryakov, we are told at the very beginning of the play, was the son of a sexton and a former theology student - that is, he has the classic origins of the Russian intelligentsia of the late nineteenth century. These are just the roots one would choose if one's goal were to display a typical member of the intelligentsia. A professor of literature, he peevishly demands that someone fetch his copy of the poet Batyushkov, looks down on those with fewer citations at their disposal and tries to illuminate his life with literary models.

He makes even his illness allusive: "They say that Turgenev developed angina pectoris from gout. I'm afraid I may have it" (p, 187). At the beginning of his speech to the assembled family in Act Ill, he first asks them "to lend me your ears, as the saying goes [Laughs)" (p. 212). As is so often the case in Chekhov's plays, the line is more meaningful than he knows, for the speech he has prepared, like that of his Shakespearean model, is made under false pretenses. Appropriately enough, he continues his game of allusions by citing Gogol's famous play-"I invited you here, ladies and gentlemen, to announce that the Inspector General is coming" - evidently without having considered that its action concerns confidence games. Like Uncle Vanya, The Inspector General involves multiple layers of role-playing, mutually reinforcing poses, and self-induced selfdeceptions. In his last appearance in Uncle Vanya, the professor proposes

to transform its action into yet another occasion for professional criticism: After what has happened, I have lived through so much, and thought so much in the course of a few hours, that I believe I could write a whole treatise for the edification of posterity" (p. 226). It is hard to decide whether to call this line pathetic or repulsive, but in either case it ought to disturb us professionals more than it has.

If the old professor projects ill-considered confidence in his merely citational importance, then Voinitsky, who has at last understood such falsities, can only create new ones. He realizes that for most of his life he has been content with a vicarious connection to the professor's vicarious connection to literature, but all he learns from his disillusionment is that the professor was the wrong intermediary.

Given our own views of the professor, we may take at face value Voinirskv's denunciation of his work as an uncomprehending and momentarily fashionable deployment of modish but empty jargon. But that only makes Voinirskv's desire for a better connection with literature even more misguided. Filled with all the self-pity, impotent rage, and underground ressentiment of a disappointed member of the intelligentsia, he regrets that he is too old to surpass the professor at his own game. Chekhov brilliantly merges despair and slapstick humor-we seem to check ourselves in mid-laugh-when Voinitskv declares: "My life is over! I was talented, intelligent, self-confident.... If I had had a normal life. I might have been a Schopenhauer, a Dostoevsky (p. 216). To put it mildly, the choice of Dostoevsky as an example of someone who lived "a normal life" is rather odd. The unintentional irony here lies in the potential allusion to Dostoevsky's well-known talent for describing the very mixture of megalomania with self-contempt in which Vanya so pathetically indulges.

As if to mock both Voinitsky's precarious connection to literature and his self-indulgent pleas for pity, Chekhov has the ridiculous and truly pitiful Telegin interrupt the scene of confrontation. Telegin insists on his own incredibly vicarious link to scholarship:

TELEGIN [embarrassed): Your Excellency, I cherish not only a feeling of reverence for scholarship, but of kinship as well. My brother Grigary Ilvch's wife's brother-perhaps you know him-Konstantin Trofimovitch Lakedomonov, was an M.A

VOINITSKY: Be quiet, Waffles, we're talking business.

(p.214)

In Telegin's pathetic "perhaps you know him- and in the truly Gogolian name "Lakedomonov" we may perhaps detect another allusion to The Inspector General. In Gogol's play, Pvotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky would feel his life were worthwhile if the powers that be knew of his mere existence:

BOBCHlNSKY. I humbly beg you, sir, when you return to the capital, tell all those great gentlemen-the senators and admirals and all the rest-say, "Your Excellency or Your Highness, in such and such a town there lives a man called Pvotr Ivanovich Bobchinskv," Be sure to tell them, "Pvotr Ivanovich Bochinskv lives there."

KHLESTAKOV. Very well.

BOBCHINSKY. And if you should happen to meet with the tsar, then tell the tsar too, "Your Imperial Majesty, in such and such a town there lives a man called Pvotr Ivanovich Bochinsky."

KHLESTAKOV. Fine.10

Telegin is a Bobchinsky for whom professors have replaced admirals. Voinitsky seems unaware that he treats Telegin with the same disregard that he so resents in the professor's treatment of him.

Voinitsky is undoubtedly correct that his mother's "principles" are, as he puts it, a "venomous joke" (p. 180). As he now sees, she can only repeat received ideas "about the emancipation of women" (p. 177), without being aware that her own behavior verges on an unwitting counter-argument. Her actions also suggest unconscious self-parody as she, presumably like so many shallow members of the intelligentsia, constantly "makes notes on the margins of her pamphlet." This stage direction closes Act I, and the phrase is repeated by a number of characters, so by the time the stage directions repeat it again at the very end of the play, we are ready to apply Voinitsky's phrase about the professor-perpetuum mobile-to her as well. Her first speech concerns these insipid pamphlets that she imagines to be, in Voinitsky's phrase, "books of wisdom" (p. 177).

Her devotion to the intelligentsia's concerns has led her to idolize the old professor; she alone remains unaware that he is not what he pretends to be. But it is not so much her vacuity as her small, incessant acts of cruelty to her son that deprive her so totally of the audience's sympathy. As her son regrets his wasted life, she reproaches him in canned phrases for not caring more about the latest intellectual movements: "You used to be a man of definite convictions, an enlightened personality" (p. 180). We may imagine that Voinitsky's rage at the professor's proposal to deprive him of the estate is fueled to a significant extent by resentment of his mother, who repeats-as she has evidently done so often-"Jean, don't contradict Aleksandr. Believe me, he knows better than we do what is

right and what is wrong" (p. 214). Even the professor, who has utter contempt for her, is not so intolerable as she. Perhaps he senses, as we do, that as Telegin is a paltry double of Voinitskv, Maria Vasilievna farcically duplicates him.

vi: Idleness and the Apocalypse of Squabbles

Elena Andreevna, the professor's young wife, and Astrov, the doctor who is summoned to treat him, each combines prosaic insight with melodramatic blindness. Although they often fail to live up to the standards they recommend, they do glimpse the value of everyday decency and ordinary virtues. They even understand-more or less-the danger of histrionic behavior, cited self-pity, and grand gestures, all of which nevertheless infect their own speeches. For this reason, Chekhov can use these speeches to enunciate the play's central values while simultaneously illustrating the consequences of not taking those values seriously enough. Elena comes closest to a Chekhovian sermon as she fends off Voinitsky in Act II:

ELENA ANDREEVNA: Ivan Petrovich, you are an educated, intelligent man, and I should think you would understand that the world is being destroyed not by crime and fire, but by hatred, enmity, all these petty squabbles Your business should be not to grumble, but to reconcile us to one another.

VOINITSKY: First reconcile me to myself! My darling (p. 191)

Elena is absolutely right -life is spoiled not by grand crises or dramatic disappointments but by "petty squabbles." All the more ironic, then, that in praising prosaic virtues she cannot avoid images of catastrophe and the rhetoric of apocalypse. Characteristically, her choice of words strikes Voinitsky most: "All that rhetoric and lazy morality, her foolish, lazy ideas about the ruin of the world - all that is utterly hateful to me" (p. 192). Perhaps Chekhov intended Elena as an allusion to Dorothea Brooke, although Elena lacks Dorothea's unshakeable integrity. Elena married the professor, just as Voinitskv worked for him, out of an intelligentsiallove. Her speech about petty squabbles suggests that she has reflected on his daily pettiness and self-centered petulance, which he explicitly justifies as a right conferred by his professorial status. And so Elena, who has studied music at the conservatory, requires and does not receive permission to play the piano. But Chekhov also marks the limits of her understanding

by allowing her to speak a truth so unintentionally understated as to be absurd: "There is something very wrong in this house [Neblagopoluchno v etom dome)" (p. 190).

She understands that something is wrong, but not what would be right. We first see her in Act I ignoring, almost to the point of the grotesque, the feelings of Telegin:

TELEGIN: The temperature of the samovar has fallen perceptibly.

ELENA ANDREEVNA: Never mind, Ivan Ivanovich, we'll drink it cold.

TELEGIN: I beg your pardon I am not Ivan Ivanovich, but Ilva Ilvch Ilva Ilvch Telegin, or, as some people call me because of my pock-marked face, Waffles. I am Sonichka's godfather, and His Excellency, your husband, knows me quite well. I live here now, on your estate You may have been so kind as to notice that I have dinner with you every day.

SONYA: Ilva Ilvch is our helper, our right hand. [Tenderly) Let me give you some more tea, Godfather.

(pp. 179-80)

If these lines are performed as I think Chekhov meant them, one will detect no reproach, no irony, in Telegin's voice. He has so little self-esteem that he expects to be overlooked, and so he reminds people of his existence-or of his brother's wife's brother's existence-sincerely, out of a sense that he is too insignificant to be remembered even when he is constantly present. Chekhov uses Telegin as a touchstone for the basic decency of other characters: is it worth their while to be kind to someone who is obviously of no use to anyone? In this scene, Elena fails the test and Sonya, who calls him "Godfather," passes it. Voinitsky, we remember, calls him "Waffles," a nickname that only the pathetic Telegin could possibly accept and even repeat.

Elena does not work, but rather, as Astrov observes, infects everyone around her with her idleness. The old nurse speaks correctly when she complains that many of the household's ills derive from the visitors' disruption of old habits, habits related to work. A schedule, arrived at over the course of decades and carefully calibrated so that the estate can be well-managed, has been replaced by a purely whimsical approach to time: Marina is awakened to get the samovar ready at 1 :30 in the morning.

The intelligentsia may view habits as numbing, but from the standpoint of prosaics, good or bad habits more than anything else shape a life.

Attention, after all, is a limited resource, and most of what we do occurs when we arc concentrating on something else or on nothing in particular, as the sort of action and dialogue in Chekhov's plays makes clear. And yet it is the cumulative effect of all those actions, governed largely by habit, that conditions and indeed constitutes our lives. Moreover, habits result from countless earlier decisions, and therefore can serve as a good index to a person's values and past behavior. That, indeed, is one reason Chekhov emphasizes them so much and one way in which he makes even short literary forms so resonant with incidents not directly described. Chekhov's wiser characters also understand that attention can be applied to new problems that demand more than habit only if good habits efficiently handle routine concerns. They keep one's mental hands free.

Relying on beauty, charm and high ideals-she really has them-Elena does not appreciate the importance of habits, routine and work. For her, life becomes meaningful at times of high drama, great sacrifice, or passionate romance, which is to say, it can be redeemed only by exceptional moments. Consequently, when those moments pass, she can only be bored. Sonya tries to suggest a different view. She values daily work and unexceptional moments, but Elena cannot understand:

ELENA ANDREEVNA: [In misery) I'm dying of boredom, I don't know what to do.

SONYA [shrugging her shoulders): lsn't there plenty to do? If you only wanted to

ELENA ANDREEVNA: For instance?

SONYA: You could help with running the estate, teach, take care of the sick. Isn't that enough? When you and Papa were not here, Uncle Vanya and I used to go to market ourselves to sell the flour.

ELENA ANDREEVNA: I don't know how to do such things. And it's not interesting. Only in idealistic novels do people teach and doctor the peasants, and how can I, for no reason whatever, suddenly start teaching and looking after peasants?

SONYA: I don't see how one can help doing it. Wait a bit, you11 get accustomed to it. [Embraces her) Don't be bored, darling.

(p.203)

Elena significantly misunderstands Sonya. Given her usual ways of thinking in literary terms, she translates Sonya's recommendations into a

speech from an "idealistic novel." That, presumably, is why she ignores the possibility of helping with the estate and singles out teaching or doctoring the peasants. She imagines that Sonya offers only a ridiculous populist idyll.

If that were what Sonya meant, Elena's objections would be quite apt. Her misunderstanding allows Chekhov to make a characteristically prosaic point about meaningful activity. In the Russian counter-tradition, the dynamics and significance of work-daily, ordinary work-figure as a major theme.

We might recall how much of Anna Karenina concerns Levin's meditations on agricultural labor, about which he is writing a book. By the end of the novel, he has learned that work undertaken out of high ideals or "general principles" and performed to serve "the general welfare" always fails in practice. Such ideals define only external goals, but to succeed and be meaningful work must be illuminated from within:

In former days when he had tried to do anything that would be good for all, for humanity, for Russia, for his own village, he had noticed that the idea of it had been pleasant, but the work itself had always been clumsy, that then he had never been fully convinced of its absolute necessity, and that the work that had begun by seeming so great had grown less and less, till it vanished into nothing. But now, since his marriage, when he had begun to confine himself more and more to living for himself, though he experienced no delight at all at the thought of the work he was doing, he felt absolutely convinced of its necessity, saw that it succeeded far better than in the past, and that it kept growing more and more.

(p.823)

Elena's only idea of work corresponds to Levin's earlier view-work "for all humanity" - and she correctly rejects that choice as work "for no reason whatever." What she cannot understand is the possibility of a different sort of work that would be meaningful: prosaic work.

Thinking like a member of the intelligentsia, she believes that either meaning is grand and transcendent or else it is absent. Her mistake in marrying the professor has convinced her that transcendent meaning is an illusion, and so she, like Voinitskv, can imagine only the opposite, a meaningless world of empty routine extending endlessly. But Sonya's actual recommendation, like the sort of work Levin describes as "incontestably necessary," implicitly challenges the very terms of Elena's, and the intelligentsia's, dialectic.

Sonya recommends taking care of the estate because it has to be done. She can draw an "incontestable" connection between getting the right

price for flour and making the estate operate profitably or between not allowing the hay to rot and not indulging in waste, which is troubling in itself. Like Tolstoy, Chekhov had utter contempt for the intelligentsia's (and aristocracy's) disdain of efficiency, profitability and the sort of deliberate calculation needed to avoid waste. That is one reason the play ends with the long-delayed recording of prices for agricultural products, much as Tolstoy has Levin lose his temper at Stiva's failure to count the trees and determine the real worth of the forest he sells.

When Elena characterizes caring for peasants as a purely literary pose, Sonya replies that she does not see "how one can help doing it." For Sonya, it is not a literary pose and it serves no ideology but is part of her more general habit of caring for everyone. High ideals or broad social goals have nothing to do with her efforts on behalf of others, as we see in this very passage when she responds not with a counter-argument but with a sympathetic embrace of the despairing Elena.

Sonya understands that both work and care require habits of working and caring. One has to know how they are done, and they cannot just be picked up "suddenly," as Elena correctly observes. Elena has the wrong habits, and that is her real problem. What she does not see is that she needs to begin acquiring new ones, which is what Sonya is really recommending.

vii: Waste by Omission

those graceful acts, Those thousand decencies chac daily flow

- Paradise Lost Vlll, 600-01

Least of all does Elena need romance, which is what Astrov offers. Like Elena and Voinitsky, he is obsessed with the vision of a brief, ecstatic affair in a literary setting. You are bound to be unfaithful sometime and somewhere, he tells Elena, so why not here, "in the lap of nature At least it's poetic, the autumn is really beautiful., Here there is the plantation, the dilapidated country houses in the style of Turgenev" (p. 225). He might almost have said, in the style of Chekhov. When this pathetic attempt at seduction fails, Astrov intones "Finita la cornmedia" (p. 225), a line that, interpreted literally, does correctly characterize his desire for romance as comic, if not farcical. When he repeats "Finita!" on the next page, the possibility of farce grows stronger.

Astrov constantly looks for literary or theatrical images to explain his life. "What's the use?" he says at the beginning of the play. "In one of Ostrovsky's plays there's a man with a large moustache and small abilities. That's me" (p. 182). In fact, these self-pitying allusions make him a good example of the "more intelligent" members of the intelligentsia as he describes them:

ASTROV: it's hard to get along with the intelligentsia-they tire you out. All of them, all our good friends here, think and feel in a small way, they see no farther than their noses: to put it bluntly, they're stupid. And those who are more intelligent and more outstanding, are hysterical, eaten up with analysis and introspection They whine [He is about to drink)

SONYA [stopping him): No, please, I beg you, don't drink any more.

(p. 197)

Of course, this very speech exemplifies the intelligentsia's indulgence in self-pitying self-analysis. Astrov whines about whining, and what's more, he knows it. But this self-knowledge does him no good for reasons that Chekhov frequently explores.

Some self-destructive behavior can be modified by an awareness of what one is doing, but not the sort of introspection that Astrov describes. On the contrary, the more one is aware of it, the more that awareness becomes a part of it. 11 (Perhaps that is what Karl Kraus meant when he said that psychoanalysis is the disease that it purports to cure.) The more Astrov blames himself for whining, and for whining about whining, the more he whines about it. This sort of introspective self-pity feeds on itself; so does alcoholic self-pity, which is why Chekhov has him drink while complaining.

To persuade him not to drink, Sonya reproaches Astrov for contradicting himself. "You always say people don't create, but merely destroy what has been given them from above. Then why, why, are you destroying yourself?" (p. 197). And in fact, Astrov has spoken powerfully about waste and the need for prosaic care - speeches that are the closest Chekhov comes to a Tolstoyan essay or to one of Levin's meditations.

Astrov's lectures on what we would now call "the environment" sound so strikingly contemporary that it is hard to see them in the context of Chekhov's play. In a way not uncommon in literary history, their very coincidence with current concerns provokes critical anachronism or the interpretation of them as detachable parts. (So Chudakov, citing UNESCO data, takes them as an occasion for his own lecture on Soviet and world environmental disasters-pp. 207-12.) It is worth stressing, there-

fore, that Astrov does not object to any and all destruction of trees. "Now I could accept the cutting of wood out of need, but why devastate the forests?" (p. 183). "You will say that the old life must naturally give place to the new. Yes, I understand, and if in place of these devastated forests there were highways, railroads, if there were factories, mills, schools, and the people had become healthier, richer, more intelligentbut, you see, there is nothing of the sort!" (p. 208). The chamber of commerce might well concur.

What bothers Astrov, what bothers Chekhov, is waste. And waste results from the lack not of great ideals but of daily care. The forests disappear for the same reason that the hay rots. After Sonya offers her breathless paraphrase of Astrov's ideas, Voinitsky-with his clothes still rumpled and his bad habits showing - refuses to see the point:

VOINITSKY (laughing): Bravo, bravo! All that is charming, but not very convincing, (to ASTROV) and so, my friend, allow me to go on heating mv stoves with logs and building my barns with wood.

ASTROV: You can heat your stoves with peat and build your barns with brick. The Russian forests are groaning under the ax wonderful landscapes vanish never to return, and all because larv man hasn't sense enough to stoop down and pick up fuel from the ground.

(p. 183)

What destroys the forests, and what destroys lives, is not some malevolent force, not some lack of great ideas, and not some social or political evil. Trees fall, and lives are ruined, because of thoughtless behavior, everyday laziness and bad habits or, more accurately, the lack of good ones. Destruction results from what we do not do. Chekhov's prosaic vision receives remarkably powerful expression in these passages. Astrov (and Sonya) also give voice to that vision when they describe how the ruin of forests is not just an analog for but also a cause of needlessly impoverished lives. To paraphrase their thought: the background of our lives imperceptibly shapes them, because what happens constantly at the periphery of our attention, what is so familiar that we do not even notice it, modifies the tiny alterations of our thoughts. Literally and figuratively, our surroundings temper the "climate" of our minds. Like good housekeeping and careful estate management, unwasted forests subtly condition the lives unfolding in their midst.

Where Sonya, and especially Astrov, go wrong is in their rhetoric, which, like Elena's, becomes rapidly apocalyptic or utopian. They intone

lyrical poetry celebrating prosaic habits, and praise undramatic care with theatrical declamation:

SONYA: If you listen to him [Astrov), you'll fully agree with him. He says that the forests teach man to understand beauty and induce in him a nobility of mind. Forests temper the severity of the climate. In countries where the climate is mild, less energy is wasted in the struggle with nature, so man is softer and more tender; in such countries the people are beautiful, flexible, easily stirred, their speech is elegant, their gestures graceful. Science and art flourish among them, their philosophy is not somber, and their attitude toward women is full of an exquisite courtesy

(p. 183)

ASTROV: maybe I am just a crank, but when I walk by a peasant's woodland which I have saved from being cut down, or when I hear the rustling of young trees which I have planted with my own hands, I realize that the climate is somewhat in my power, and that if, a thousand years from now, mankind is happy, I shall be responsible for that too, in a small way. When I plant a birch tree and then watch it put forth its leaves and sway in the wind, my soul is filled with pride, and I [seeing the work man who has brought a glass of vodka on a tray) however [Drinks.)

(p. 184)

They expect a lot from trees. The doctor and his admirer show enthusiasm in the sense Dr. Johnson defined: a vain belief in private revelation. Sonya's enthusiasm reflects her love for Astrov, but what does Astrov's reflect? In his tendency to visionary exaggeration, in his millenarian references to the destiny of all mankind, we sense his distinctly unprosaic tendency, in spite of everything, to think in terms of drama, utopias, and romance- and to drink.

viii: The Stranger and the Non Proposal

For Iseult is ever a stranger. To love in the sense ofpassion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment ofone's being, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent.

-Denis de Rougemont'!

Astrov's shortcoming, his failure to take his own ideals seriously enough, leads to his self-impoverishing and wasteful views of love. His search for romance, which now centers on Elena, blinds him to another sort of love that is much more valuable and much more in accord with his beliefs. As we have seen, Chekhov, like Tolstoy, usually regards love based on passion or romance with deep suspicion, in part because that sort of love cannot survive what Laevsky refers to as daily odors and the sound of swallowing. For prosaic writers, real love is based on intimacy, shared work, respect and kindness.

John Styan is correct when he writes that "if he [Astrov) could have loved Sonya, they could have been happy," but he is uncharacteristically mistaken when he adds: "that he cannot love her is an example of the pure arbitrariness of life." I I To gloss the play this way is to accept the very romanticism that Astrov himself leaves unquestioned and that Chekhov means to criticize. It is to read not the author's play but the characters' play within a play. The characters make the thoughtless mistake of identifying love with great passion as if there were no other kind.

Passion-love is something one does not work for but suffers. It is consequently irresponsible. Laevsky, we recall, also insists on love as a matter of fate rather than of "patience." But in addition to the love of Tristan and Iseult and of Romeo and Juliet, there is also the prosaic love that Natasha Rostova or Kitty Shcherbatskaya come to value. Part of the irony in Laevskv's citations from Tolstoy is that he forgets the sections from which he has the most to learn.

I think that audiences and readers have missed Chekhov's point here for much the same reason that they have misread Anna Karenina as sympathetic to its eponymous heroine. The idea of love as romance so pervades our culture that we are usually not even aware of it as a particular view of love. Most readers therefore do not even entertain the possibility that someone might want to challenge it and advocate an alternative. In this respect, Chekhov and Tolstoy belong to the same tradition of thought as Denis de Rougemont, whose classic study, Love in the Western World, insists on the destructiveness of romance, on its incompatibility with prosaic marriage and on the damage wrought by novels celebrating fatal passion. De Rougemont, too, insists that we must choose: "And what I aim at is to bring the reader to the point of declaring frankly, either that 'That is what I wanted!' or else 'God forbid!'" (p. 25). Astrov, too, has a choice between Elena and Sonya, but he does not face it.

Chekhov indicates that the happiness of intimacy, if not of romance, would be possible for Astrov with Sonya. It seems to me that the play's key scene, which Chekhov handles with infinite subtlety, occurs in Act

IV, just before Sonya's final speech, which is in fact a response to it. Preparing to leave, Astrov is drawn to Sonya, and seems to reconsider his romantic view of love, but then does noc propose to her. This significant non-action echoes the non-proposal of Koznyshev to Varenka in Anna Karenina and looks forward to Lopakhin's famous non-proposal at the close of The Cherry Orchard.

Chekhov's two non-proposals therefore occur in the same part of the play - just before the curtain, as characters depart. But critics who have understood quite well what Lopakhin omits doing have overlooked Astrov's quite similar omission. Both non-proposals occur at an anticlimactic moment, when by convention we do not expect a reversal in the story, as if to illustrate the falsity of plot patterns. A non-action taking place at an anticlimactic moment: how does one ensure that the audience will notice it at all? In The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov includes an explicit warning about what does not happen:

LYUBOV' ANDREEVNA: You know very well, Yermolai Alekseich, that � dreamed of marrying her to you, and everything pointed to your getting married She loves you, you are fond of her, and I don't know - I don't know why it is you seem to avoid each other. I can't understand it!

LOPAKHlN: To tell you the truth, I don't understand it myself. The whole thing is strange, somehow If there's still time, I'm ready right now Let's finish it up-and basta, but without you I feel I'll never be able to propose to her.

LYUBOV' ANDREEVNA: Splendid! After all, it only takes a minute. I'll call her in at once

LOPAKHIN: And we even have the champagne

LYUBOV ANDREEVNA [animatedly): Splendid! We'll leave you Yasha, alle:::! I'll call her [At the door) Varya, leave everything and come here. Come! [Goes out with Yasha.)

LOPAKHIN [looking at his watch): Yes [Pause)

[Behind the door there is smothered laughter and whispering; finally VARYA enters.)

(pp.375-76)

There is no possibility that the audience will miss the point of the following scene. Perhaps Chekhov was driven to such extremities by the failure

of anyone to appreciate the equivalent scene in Uncle Vanya, which is not flagged in advance.

In the earlier play, Chekhov appears to be using the decoy technique. To illustrate his theme that the most important events occur right before our eyes although we fail to notice them, he places his non-proposal firmly on the margins. Our attention is directed elsewhere. The whole fourth act has been one of departure; the Serebryakovs have left, and we expect Astrov to leave as well. Voinitskv has just said that "Everything will be just as it was" (p. 226), so least of all do we anticipate the possibility of a significant change. What we expect is the imminent end of the play: perhaps in this case it is we who are looking at our watches. And the lines signaling the possibility that Astrov may remain after all are handled with such understatement that instead of witnessing a non-action audiences and readers have typically seen nothing.

The old professor and his wife are gone. A scene of quiet work begins. Astrov, too, has worked here; it has been his refuge. He has often rewarded himself for a month or so of medical labor by escaping here to work on his colored map. Astrov understands how to playas well as work, and this map is both for him. He presumably knows this room, which is his playground, quite well, and regrets its loss. We see him "clearing his paints from the table and putting them in his suitcase" (p. 227) and sense his sadness. As he prepares to leave, we may suppose that the thought occurs to him that this temporary home could be permanent, that he would be happy here, and could make someone he cares for happy, if only he did not seek the sort of love he felt for Elena, whom he has just kissed. He thinks out loud:

ASTROV: It's quiet ...• Pens scratching crickets chirping It's warm and cozy. I don't feel like leaving. [There is the sound of bells.) They're bringing my horses Now nothing remains but to say good-bye to you, my friends, to say good-bye to my table-and be off! [Puts his charts into a portfolio.)

MARINA: Why so restless? You should stay (p.228)

All have agreed that Astrov should no longer stay at the house unless he means to marry Sonya, so Marina's invitation is rich in unvoiced possibility, as is her attempt to delay him with tea, snacks and vodka. The table to which Astrov says good-bye is not just a piece of furniture-this is not like Gaev absurdly addressing the "much respected bookcase" in The Cherry Orchard-but is his place for work in a house centered around such

work. He does not want to leave, and he gives indirect indications that he is reconsidering. His mention of the table is only one example. Astrov "pauses," waits around, accepts a glass of vodka; and then two more displaced statements of a longing to stay occur:

ASTROV [after a pause]: My trace horse has gone lame for some reason. I noticed it yesterday when Petrushka led him out to water.

VOINITSKY: You must reshoe him.

ASTROV: I'll have to stop at the blacksmith's in Roehdestvennove. There's no help for it. [Goes to the map of Africa and looks at it.) Out there in Africa now, I expect the heat must be terrific!

VOINITSKY: Yes, very likely.

(p.229)

A lame horse offers a plausible reason to stay, but Voinirskv (unlike Marina and Sonya) misses the point. The reference to the map of Africa has been misunderstood more than any line in the play. Some have taken it as typical of Chekhov's surrealism, and for Chudakov it exemplifies pure irrelevancy in a wholly contingent universe. Both of these explanations would indeed apply to other, apparently similar details in Chekhov, but I think they miss the mark in this case. Astrov's comment exemplifies not irrelevancy - it is not irrelevant at all-but another Chekhovian device, displacement. In mentioning the map, Astrov refers obliquely to his own map. He evokes the aura of the room in which he has worked with great joy and tacitly suggests the possibility of staying. But the very fact that he speaks with such indirection indicates that, for all his hesitation, he will not change his mind.

ix: Foreshadowing a Scene

Real work and daily kindness take place at the margins of the play. In the opening scene, the old nurse comforts Astrov. She tends to the chickens, who might otherwise be eaten by hawks, and offstage she talks to the peasants about "unused land," perhaps another allusion to waste and the effort required to avoid it. The old professor can be comforted only by her. Aside from Sonya, she alone bothers to reassure Telegin. She winds wool with him, in part, we suspect, to make him feel of some use. Evidently asking for reassurance, he reports that "This morning, Marina

Timofeevna, as I was walking through the village, a storekeeper shouted after me: 'Hey, you sponger, you!!' How that hurt me!" (p. 220). She replies, kindly and wisely enough: "Take no notice, my dear. We all live on God. You, Sonya, Ivan Petrovich-none of us sits idle, everybody works" (p. 220).

And in fact Telegin is of more use than the old professor or Elena, who are positively destructive. The old nurse repeatedly expresses disapproval of the aristocrats' speechifying, which she likens to the cackling of geese; of their petty selfishness, to which she responds as a nurse comforting difficult children; and of their "scenes," which she correctly calls shameful and sinful. When Elena and the professor are leaving, she rejoices at the return of normal routine. "Well, now we'll go back to our old ways. Breakfast by eight, dinner at one, and in the evening we'll sit down to supper; everything in its proper order, the way other people live like Christians. [With a sigh] It's been a long time since this sinner has tasted noodles" (p. 220). Intellectuals who laugh at this speech or who regard her ideas of "proper order" as vulgar miss Chekhov's point and reveal their kinship to the people he satirizes.

Chekhov's self-indulgent characters least of all value routine. They seek meaning instead in dramatic events that lead somewhere and look for significance only where there is plot. And so they are drawn to theatrical posing, because dramas, even more than novels, are typically tightly plotted to give each action significance. If only our lives could be so blessed, Chekhov's characters think, for even tragic meaning surpasses none at all! A character in one of Dostoevsky's early sketches asserts that "to live means to make a work of art of oneself," and Chekhov's intellectuals try to endow their lives with meaning by transforming it into theater. They-Voinitskv above all-would live as if actions were somehow plotted in advance, as life never can be. With no story of his own, Voinitskv borrows dramatic scenes, which is why his behavior is thoroughly false.

In a sense, what is usually taken as the "climax" of the play is created not by the author but by the internal "playwright," Voinitskv. That is part of Chekhov's strategy of negative dramatization. For Chekhov, as we have seen, true life is really made by tiny alterations and its important moments are particularly hard to notice. Climax, denouement, drama - those are theatrical lies, which are most frequently introduced into this play by its most theatrical character. He, not the author, creates the dramatic "scene" of Act III.

Voinitsky correctly resents the old professor's nonchalant cruelty, and he maintains with justice that the plan to sell the estate, which would leave Sonya and himself homeless, is unconscionable. But he gets carried

away - he gets himself carried away - when he goes on to denounce the quality of the professor's literary criticism. Would better scholarship somehow justify the professor's callousness? But Vanya wants to raise all issues at once and force the sort of connections to be found only in a well-made play. As a result, our sympathy for him becomes tinged with laughter at a grown man's tantrum, which Voinitsky unsuccessfully plays for great dramatic effect.

Like a performer interrupted just before his great scene, Voinitsky demands that his audience pay attention to his dramatic speech:

ELENA ANDREEVNA: Ivan Petrovich, I insist that you stop talking! Do you hear?

VOINITSKY: I won't stop talking! [Barring SEREBRYAKOV', way) Wait, I haven't finished! You have ruined my life! I haven't lived! Thanks to you, I have destroyed, annihilated, the best years of my life! You are my worst enemy!

(p. 216)

Real anger shades into theatrical rage here. Voinitskv's behavior is simultaneously sincere and assumed, because he seizes on his real feelings to justify a performance. Perhaps members of the audience will recall with unease having acted the same way.

Appropriately enough, it is at this point that Voinitskv insists he could have become the author who, we recall, understood better than anyone the inscape of his mentality: Dostoevsky. As the narrator of The Brothers Karamazoo observes, it is not uncommon for people to "enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears of emotion in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, 'You know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You are acting now, in spite of your holy wrath'" (p. 83). Father Zosima also stresses how "very pleasant" it can be to take offense and exaggerate a real affront into a theatrical occasion and then, inspired by one's own performance, "pass to genuine vindictiveness" (p. 48). Voinitsky indulges in just such a strange (but not unusual) combination of the real and the feigned as his expression of heartfelt anger merges with an enactment of a cheap revenge drama.

"I know myself what I must do! [To SEREBRYAKOVj You will remember me!" Voinitsky proclaims as he goes out of the room (p. 217). It is not clear at this point whether he intends suicide or murder, but he evidently signals something portentous in advance. Now, it is one thing for an author to engage in foreshadowing, but quite another for a character to

do so. Here Voinitsky behaves as if he were a fictional character whose actions are designed from the outset to have meaning and to lead to a definite result. That behavior is ridiculous, because the prosaic world in which Chekhov sets his play is as undramatic as our real lives. And yet it is also weirdly appropriate because, after all, Voinitsky is a fictional character, although he does not know it.

When Voinitsky returns firing his gun, Chekhov's metatheatrical attack on theatricality reaches a farcical crescendo:

SEREBRYAKOV [runs in, staggering with fright): Hold him! Hold him! He's gone mad!

[ELENA ANDREEVNA and VOINITSKY struggle in the doorway.)

ELENA ANDREEVNA [trying to take the revolver from him): Give it to me! Give it to me, I say!

VOINITSKY: Let me go, Helene! Let me go! [Freeing himself, runs in and looks around for SEREBRYAKOV.) Where is he? Ah, there he is! [Shoots at him.) Bang! [Italics added) [Pause) Missed him! Missed again! Oh, damn, damn! [Throws the revolver on the floor and sits down exhausted.)

(p.218)

If this scene is performed as written, we will first hear the sound of the pistol shot, then hear Voinitsky say "Bang!" First we hear the sound, then we hear the imitation of a stage sound. (And perhaps, if the director should want to stress the artifice, he might choose a "real" pistol that sounds like the prop it is.) Here the absurdity of theatrical behavior and the brilliance of Chekhov's metatheatrical parody become most apparent.

Voinitsky wants to enact a grand and dramatic crime, but he manages only one more petty squabble. Histrionic from the outset, he is trying not so much to shoot the professor as to perform a desperate role. He commits not attempted murder, but attempted attempted murder. It is doubtful whether he succeeds even at that.

Throughout this scene, Voinitsky appears to cite his actions as he goes along. Like a child who simultaneously pretends to be a ballplayer and the announcer broadcasting the play-by-play description, Voinitsky narrates the action he performs. That is the grotesque comedy of "Bang!" And yet you really can kill someone that way. Perhaps most murders are in fact committed just that way. Chekhov, at least, suggests this possibility. And perhaps most of the petty squabbles that, even without pistols, actually

spoil lives are cited as well as said. More than any other Russian writer, Chekhov detects and appreciates the danger of behavior that is played for high drama to an absent audience.

x: The Audience

He [Pierre} felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes.

- War and Peace, p. 1320

Chekhov recognized that audiences do not just happen to witness theatrical performances, they are essential to them. His characters appreciate this fact, too. They know that drama has an ending, which provides a privileged vantage point for an audience to evaluate actions. And they try to live as if their lives had such an audience and vantage point as well. That is why Chekhov's characters so often seem to be not addressing each other but making a case that the audience will remember when the play is over. But if the real audience understands the author's play, it will recognize that such behavior is necessarily false. Those who live their lives as if the ending were what truly matters fail to act responsibly during the only time we have, present moments shared with other people. To live theatrically means to fabricate a false temporality.

Of all Chekhov's plays, The Three Sisters offers the most profound examination of the relation of ethics to the sense of time, but Uncle Vanya already suggests Chekhov's basic points. We may recall how often its characters are tempted to imagine how their own lives will appear when the plot of history is over. Three times in Uncle Vanya Astrov evokes the image of judges in a future utopia who, living after all historical struggles have passed, look back on "our lives." (Ironically enough, official Soviet critics conventionally assumed they were such judges from the perfect future.)

Like the audience of a play, or the angels at the Last Judgment, the ones Astrov imagines will know the whole story and be in a secure position to evaluate our lives: and what will they say? I have already mentioned his hopes that in a thousand years the contribution of his forestry will be evident. In Act IV, Astrov spitefully tells Voinitsky to face "facts": "Those who will corne after us, in two or three hundred years will despise us

for having lived our lives so stupidly and insipidly" (p. 222). He wonders most ambiguously about the judgment of the future in the play's first scene:

ASTROV: I sat down, closed my eyes-just like this-and I thought: will those who come after us in a hundred or two hundred years, those for whom we are blazing a trail, will they remember and have a kind word for us? No, they won't, nurse!

MARINA: People won't remember, but God remembers.

ASTROV: Thank you for that. That was well said.

(pp. 174-75)

In her own way, Marina cautions Astrov against asking such questions: People judge life dramatically and teleologically, but God sees the fullness of each present moment. The only judgment that counts is not deferred but immanent in our daily lives. Or as Pierre learns in War and Peace: "God is here and everywhere" (p. 1320).

Anyone who knows Chekhov's plays and stories will recognize how commonly speeches like Astrov's are delivered. Chekhov uses them paredicallv to indicate his dislike for the intelligentsia's grand historical visions and to suggest by negation the importance of responsibility at each present moment. He suspected visionaries of contempt for daily labor and regarded their sense of temporality as dangerous.

For Chekhov, as for Russian prosaic thinkers generally, each moment is always a present moment. Any way of thinking that diminishes the present in the name of the utopian future produces deeply unethical results. Chekhov's point resembles Herzen's famous rejection of utopian historicism and teleological politics: "an end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but, if you like, a trap; an end must be nearer-it ought to be, at the very least, the laborer's wage, or pleasure in the work done.?"

In daily life, no less than in politics, teleological living makes us ethically careless. It leads ultimately to a temporal sense like Voinitsky's: "I have no past and the present is awful in its absurdity" (p. 191); "I'm forty-seven years old; if I live to be sixty, I've still got thirteen years to live through. It's a long time. How am I to get through those thirteen years?" (p. 222). Finita la commedia: if one attributes significance to plots and an ending, instead of to each prosaic moment, then time without a story becomes an absurd prolongation of emptiness.

None of us entirely escapes playing to the audience and so, for all his satire, Chekhov also expresses some sympathy, if not for theatricality,

then at least for the circumstances that drive the best of us to performance. An exquisitely subtle mixture of sympathy with irony. of pathos homeopathically tinged with parody. closes the play. Just before the curtain falls. the most admirable character. Sonya. reacts characteristically to her own deep disappointment over Astrov's departure by comforting her uncle. The title seems to allude above all to this speech:

SONYA: What's to be done, we must go on living! [Pause) We shall go on living, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through a long, long chain of days and endless evenings and when our time comes, we shall die submissively; and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered, that we have wept, and have known bitterness, and God will have pity on us; and you and I, Uncle, dear Uncle, shall behold a life that is bright, beautiful, and fine. We shall rejoice and look back on our present troubles with tenderness, with a smile-and we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle, I have fervent passionate faith We shall rest! We shall hear the angels, and see the heavens all sparkling like jewels; and we shall see all earthly evil, all our sufferings, drowned in a mercy that will fill the whole world, and our life will grow peaceful, gentle, sweet as a caress. I have faith, I have faith [Wipes away his tears with a handkeTchief.) Poor, poor Uncle Vanya, you're crying [ThTough tears] You have had no joy in your life, but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait We shall rest [Puts her arms around him.) We shall rest!

(pp.230-31)

For all of Sonya's quiet wisdom, even she cannot resist imagining some position outside of life that would allow a special view of it, that would redeem it. Astrov imagines life judged from a glorious future, Sonya imagines the perspective of heaven.

And yet what is truly wonderful about these lines, and what is heroic about Sonya, is what she is doing in the present. As she speaks, Uncle Vanya's self-absorbed mother still "makes notes on the margins of her pamphlet," but Sonya does all she can to comfort him. We love her not for her faith but for her attentive kindness, which is never forgotten even in her own deepest sadness.

Subtly and implicitly. Sonya's speech, along with the slowly falling curtain, breaks the dramatic frame: for we, the audience, are in a position outside of life, and we can view it "with tenderness, with a smile." We are the redeemers Sonya promises to Vanya.

And if we follow Chekhov's design, we will realize that even though Sonya's life has an audience, ours does not. We will know that one must live without demanding a witness. Redemption belongs neither to an ending nor to a utopian future, but is immanent in the present. Meaningfulness can be achieved only as the nurse achieves it throughout the play

and as Sonya herself does at this very moment: by daily acts of unremarked and unrewarded kindness.

1. Citations from Chekhov's letters are from the following sources: Letters of Anton Chekhot" ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: Viking, 1973), abbreviated as Y, Ernest J. Simmons, Chekhoo: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), abbreviated as S; and from A. P. Chudakov, Chekhoo's Poetics, trans. Edwina Jannie Cruise and Donald Dragt (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983), Citations from Chekhov's plays are from Chekhoo: The Major Plays, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet, 1964); citations from "The House with the Mansard-An Artist's Story" are from Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet, 1960)i and citations from "The Duel" are from Anton Chekhov, Ward Six and Other Stories, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet, 1965). I have occasionally modified these translations for accuracy.

2. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, the Garnett translation revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 9.

3. I have discussed the concept of "prosaics" in a number of articles, including: "Prosaics: An Approach to the Humanities" in The American Scholar (Autumn 1988), pp. 515-28i "Prosaics and Anna Karenina" in Tolstoy Studies Journal, Vol. 1 (1988), pp. 1-12i "Prosaics, Criticism, and Ethics" in Formations, Vol. 5, No.2 (Summer-Fall, 1989), pp. 77-95i and "The Potentials and Hazards of Prosaics" in Tolstoy Studies Journal, Vol. 2 (1989), pp. 15-40. The concept is also mentioned in my Hidden in Plain View: Nastasive and Creative Potentials in "War and Peace(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). It is central to the argument of the book I coauthored with Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

4. Leo Tolstoy, "Why Do Men Stupefy Themselvesi," Recollections and Essays, trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 81.

5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, third edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 50e, section 129.

6. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet, 1968), pp. 127-28.

7. Fvodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 780.

8. These observations belong to an unsigned review in the Critic, July 31, 1886i to Konstantin Leontiev's classic essay, "The Novels of Count L. N. Tolstoy: Analysis, Style, and Atmosphere": and to P. V. Annenkov's "Historical and Aesthetic Problems in Count Tolstoy's Novel War and Peace," which first appeared in The Herald of Europe in February 1868. For the context of these observations, and a sampling of similar views, see Hidden in Plain View, pp. 52-57.

9. See Hidden in Plain View, chapter 6.

10. The Theater of Nikolay Gogol: Plays and Selected Writings, ed. Milton Ehre, trans. Milton Ehre and Fruma Gottschalk (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1980), p. 104.

11. I am indebted to Michael Andre Bernstein's forthcoming book on ressentiment and the abject hero for my understanding of circumstances in which selfawareness contributes to, rather than ameliorates, the inscape of a self-destructive mentality.

12. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Harper, 1974), pp. 284-85.

13. ]. L. Styan, Chekhoo in Performance: A Commentary on the Major Plays (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 101.

14. Alexander Herzen, "From the Other Shore" and 'The Russian People and Socialism", trans. Moura Budberg and Richard Wollheim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 37.

Culture and the Intellectual at the Height of the Time

Robert Boyers

Recently I have had occasion to reread a number of works by the Spanish philosopher and cultural critic Jose Ortega y Gasset. Although I remembered disagreeing in the past with much that he had written about the modern imagination in his famous essay "The Dehumanization of Art," I also remembered how deeply that work had stirred me, and I had found even more to be grateful for in books like Meditations on Quixote, The Modem Theme and The Revolt of the Masses. So moved was I by my latest encounter with Ortega that I could think of no better way to address current issues than by considering, at least intermittently, what Ortega made of comparable issues in his own day.

Ortega lived from 1883 to 1955. He early made his mark as an haute journalist and man of letters, although from the first he wished to be regarded as a philosopher. For many years he held the chair in metaphysics at the University of Madrid, and wrote a fair number of philosophical works, most of which were made up of lectures he delivered either at the university or at a variety of public forums attended by very large and diverse audiences. He traveled a good deal, spending considerable time in Germany, where he studied, and in Argentina, where he lived for some years after fleeing the Spain of the Civil War in 1936. For a year, between 1931 and 1932, he served as an elected member in the Spanish Cortes, or Congress, from which he resigned after concluding that political office was not for him. Much of his life was devoted to editing La Revista de Occidente, the most distinguished periodical in the Spanish language, and in running a publishing firm which brought to Spanish readers the first translations of major modern writers and thinkers whose works were already widely circulated in other European countries. Far and away the most influential intellectual in Spain in the years

between the two world wars, Ortega lost much of his domestic following when he went into exile. Although his reputation in other western countries remained considerable even in the 1950's, he has fallen into something like obscurity since that time, and it is reasonable to wonder whether his work will ever again seem compelling to intellectuals for whom Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have been the important voices.

My reader will no doubt wonder what this now mostly obscure Spanish thinker, who died more than a generation ago, can possibly say to us about my theme, that is, about the state of our culture and the plight of the intellectual today. Ortega, after all, was very much a man of a particular time and place, and early accepted his role as tutor to culturally deprived Spaniards, many of whom remained reluctant to stray from the strong bosom of the Catholic Church and other mostly ossified Spanish cultural institutions. No leading American intellectual occupies anything like such a role in our society, and indeed no one would think to describe ours as a backward society in need of instruction in the rudiments of the modern temper. Neither would it be possible for a single figure to dominate the scene in this country in the way Ortega could, largely as a consequence of the fact that in Ortega's day ambitious cultural activity in Spain was largely confined to a single city, Madrid, and that most Spanish intellectuals were as yet eager to be led by someone with impeccably cosmopolitan credentials. American intellectuals of our day are in no way so eager, and they are so scattered in a variety of university and urban centers that they are apt to be responsive to an unpredictable variety of voices. Although fashionable importations from France and Germany have for many years been all the rage, and American academics often resemble college sophomores in their avidity to absorb the latest postures emanating from the European centers, nothing like a unitary perspective associated with the intellectual style of a single figure has yet taken hold here. However much we may wish to read someone like Ortega into the current scene, he remains on many counts remote.

If I insist nevertheless on making Ortega work for us, I do so because much that he tried to accomplish has importance still. This is particularly true of his centrally important notion of the height or level of the times, which is at the heart of what I would say here. Ortega's idea seemed enormously attractive to a great many people when he developed it in one work after another in the twenties and thirties. In essence, the notion had to do with Ortega's sense that any period is characterized by a range of important works and ideas which, taken together, consti-

tute the highest thought of which that period or generation is capable. The mission, or vocation, of a generation is to acknowledge the primacy of the most powerful ideas produced in one's generation, not by submit. ring slavishly to them but by confronting them honestly, by refusing to fall back on older, more familiar ideas furnished by the established institutions of the culture.

Such a view of generational mission was challenging in a relatively backward country like the Spain of Ortega's day. Ortega was intent upon creating there an audience for modernist art and fresh ideas. He wanted students and professors in the Spanish universities to read Heidegger and Valery, and he took it as his personal mission to urge them and others in such directions, not only in his own philosophical writings but in a steady stream of newspaper articles and periodical essays. While some of his contemporaries complained of Ortega's presumption in undertaking such a task, and others saw him as an inebriate purveyor of fashionable novelties, many were grateful and willing to follow his lead.

Setting aside questions of motive or presumption, there are critical issues involved in the very notion of an identifiable height or level of the times. For Ortega the imperatives seemed a good deal clearer than they can possibly seem to a contemporary intellectual. He could conclude without much difficulty that literate Spaniards would be better off corning to grips with European literature than limiting themselves to the Spanish classics, which for generations had constituted the ultimate horizon for most cultivated Spaniards. He could ask questions about the long-term merits of modernist experiments and ideas without wondering whether or not they were worth one's time and effort. So clearly were these newer works, coming from Berlin and Heidelberg and Paris, more challenging and more in touch with what was going on in the great world than the works produced in Spain that Ortega would allow few misgivings about his claims.

American intellectuals, of course, are uncomfortable with the notion of "heights" and with missionary enterprises growing from a conviction that in culture certain things are not only better than others but more important as well. So reluctant are we to grant the validity of claims to cultural superiority offered on behalf of particular works or authors or ideas that the moment we are confronted with such claims we assume they must be a mask intended to conceal deeper and more pernicious claims. So, the debate over propositions recently associated with the bvnow notorious Allan Bloom must inevitably focus not on the greater or lesser intrinsic value of particular works or systems of thought but on

why anyone would wish to make special claims for anything at all. For most American intellectuals it simply is not interesting to argue the relative merits of one philosophical system over another. That systems differ, and that each would conceivably appeal to different kinds of people with their own distinctive uses for ideas, would seem a fair statement to most of us. That one ought to be able to decide which of two systems is better and therefore more worthy to pass on to our students and children is a proposition most of us would reject. Even to try to decide between two approaches, it is felt, would commit us to disparaging or otherwise dismissing something which obviously has value to some people and therefore deserves not only our respect but a share of our culture's attention. To define the height of one's time in such a way as to exclude from respectful consideration all manner of ostensibly inferior works is to ensure that a cultural elite continues to control the values and the tastes of everyone else.

Ortega, on the other hand, believed that no advanced civilization could do without a cultural elite. Even if that elite was self-elected, it would still know that it had responsibilities to discharge and a constituency to answer to. Chief among those responsibilities would be the ongoing adjustment in the general sense of what was and was not at the height of the time. This involved a great deal more than flatly asserting that every educated person was required to master Plato and the collected writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Neither would it suffice to identify the authentically new in poetry and painting so as to have something novel to assign one's ever-hungry disciples. The "height of the time" was a conceivable fiction one arrived at by considering a great range of things, including the degree to which particular works or concepts might be beneficial to persons in a particular time and place. However passionately one felt that every literate person would do well at some point to study Hume or Kant or Bergson, one might not argue that these figures participated equally or at all in one's definition of the operative Zeitgeist. To insist, after all, that those aspiring to identify and engage with the height of the time be as conversant with the entire history of art and thought as Ortega was himself would have been to offer no hope of emulation.

To identify the height of the time and to work to make a plausible sense of it prevail in one's culture became for Ortega a primary responsibility of the intellectual. To discharge that responsibility was to have a sense of mission, to feel that certain things were superior to others and that the effort to discriminate was in itself an indispensable exercise of one's faculties. To feel that one had no right to tell others what was

important would have been finally to believe that what others liked or failed to like, admired or failed to admire, was of no real consequence to them or to anyone else. At the same time, one did not force people to adopt a view of things, or demand that they "correctly" mimic the postures of their teachers. The best one could do was to make certain ideas and works as widely available and attractive as possible, all the while showing how progressive adjustments in one's sense of"the height" might be made. If one successfully communicated how difficult it was to make those adjustments, then one might feel satisfied about the discharge of one's responsibility.

This is not really as awful or incomprehensible a business as many academic intellectuals today suppose. The recently published correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem reveals, among other things, that both men greatly prized the work of Franz Kafka, which in the 1930's was just starting to reach an international audience, a decade or so after Kafka's death. Though neither Benjamin nor Scholem to my knowledge spoke of Kafka as central to the height of their time, there is no doubt that they regarded him as not only a great but an essential writer. This is not the place to make the case for Kafka (as if such a case were needed), but it is clear by now that the case would have more to do with his grasp of ultimate things than with his sentence structure or the novelty of his settings. For such men as Benjamin and Scholem, Kafka was essential because he enabled a simultaneous confrontation, quite as SchoIem wrote, with "the political and the mystical." In 1934 that dual confrontation seemed to both correspondents what was principally required. A literate person who did not bother to take on Kafka was not on that account contemptible, but he would be unlikely to engage in an adequate way what the best European minds in the thirties were making of their common experience. They would also be unlikely to see why Kierkegaard seemed, partly as a result of his having inspired Kafka, also essential to a reading of the time, in a way that, say, Descartes did not.

These were not absolute or fixed judgments. They represented a particular sense ofwhat a generation required and what informed or shaped the best minds of the time. Such judgments would necessarily draw upon considerations of quality and timeliness, of personal conviction and broad cultural relevance.

These are not empty generalizations. They refer to actual reflections such as one finds again and again in the work of the most diverse figures-from Ortega to Scholem, in fact. In another letter to Benjamin, Scholem refers to Benjamin's continuing interest in Marxist thought, and says that on the contrary he no longer reads such material. For him,

obviously, what matters most does not include a new book by Trotsky or Karl Korsch. No more, of course, would such authors have meant much to Ortega. A Marxist intellectual might on that basis regard their sense of the height of the time as deficient, but the Marxist would first do well to ask whether in Scholern's or Ortega's case a personal aversion alone determined a view of the height. No such conclusion would be warranted in either case. Scholem did not disparage Benjamin's absorption in Marxist theory, however much he regarded it as a distraction from the very different questions Benjamin was also moved to ask. Ortega knew that Marxist theory had long seemed compelling to a portion of the European intelligentsia, and though he regarded as misleading any doctrine of economic determinism, he surely knew that intellectuals in his day would need at some point in their respective careers to confront the Marxian perspective. Although the Marxists were themselves all too ready to dismiss as mere epiphenomena an enormous number of ideas which they had neither time nor inclination to take seriously, thinkers like Scholem and Ortega were more broadly tolerant of and responsive toward the systems they discounted.

Contemporary intellectuals often claim to respond to a great many different things. Academic literary theorists, for example, are also apt to be interested in cultural anthropology, ballet and baseball. In urban settings they make the rounds of the art galleries and attend weekend symposia on race relations or new styles in feminism. They bristle at suggestions that they have much in common with old-fashioned academics, whom they regard as narrow specialists. Although they are rarely equipped to address ordinary persons who are not intellectuals, they nonetheless concern themselves with the health of the society and are inclined to debate the large cultural issues. If they have little tolerance for opponents whose perspectives they dismiss as traditionalist or retrograde, they are usually predisposed to accept new ideas. However much they despise distinctions between high culture and low, even between better and best, they are ever prepared to speak candidly of their own personal judgments and preferences. So long as no one takes them too seriously, they are disposed to lend their voices to this idea or that.

To such persons the height of the times seems an unworkable proposition. To embrace it, however provisionally, is to believe that certain things prized by certain kinds of people are more worthy than others to be held up as models. This belief they repudiate, not because they have no opinions on what is or is not excellent, but because they feel they have no right to impose those opinions on others. To live in a pluralistic

society, accordingly, is to feel not only that others are permitted to have their private view of things but that those in a position to exert cultural influence are forbidden to do so in a concerted or effectual way. To express not only tolerance but respect for other people's cultural preferences is a categorical imperative to which all enlightened persons must subscribe. A faculty colleague who prefers a Clint Eastwood movie to one by Eric Rohmer is to be regarded neither as philistine nor as unfortunate. Even to think of arguing with that colleague about what such preferences reveal about him and the culture to which he so entirely belongs is to seek to exercise control, to buy into a hierarchical view of culture, and to lay oneself open to charges of pretentiousness, elitism, Arnoldianism and worse. The Eastwood film is by definition part of the culture and, moreover, attractive to a great many people. To consider it in terms of high or low, to think about whether we ought or ought not to submit to it, is to accept the continuing legitimacy of value-terms carried over from outmoded cultural debates presided over by white, male, privileged commissars. "The height of the times," however much Ortega's concept may be apropos to present needs and cultural configurations, inevitably relies for its authority upon assumptions which contemporary intellectuals condemn.

The peculiarity of all this has been remarked upon before, though with nothing like persuasive cogency. After all, the very intellectuals who resist everything associated with a cultural height of the time eagerly subscribe to a whole range of political imperatives in a way that indicates their belief in a political height of the time. We are not speaking here of an inflexibly doctrinaire party line. The present scene routinely features debates on a whole range of concrete issues. But within the framework that authorizes such debates, I would contend, there is a generally approved consensus as to what does and does not constitute enlightened-which is to say tolerable-discourse. To be entitled to a serious hearing on a university campus, it is felt, one must demonstrate that one subscribes to certain sophisticated assumptions which educated persons a mere hundred years ago would not have considered sophisticated at all. To be at an acceptable level or height of political discourse, that is, one must agree not to say anything that might injure the sensitivities of particular persons or groups. One must not use expressions which the "higher consciousness" established among us has deauthorized.

In his recent books the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has powerfully argued that at present the range of allowable debate is really quite narrow. What we take to be debate-so MacIntyre argues in Whose

Justice? Which Rationality? - is really only a minor species of debate "within liberalism" itself. What Macintyre calls "the fundamental tenets of liberalism with respect to individuals and the expression of their preferences" are outside the bounds of allowable debate. Contemporary conservatism, so called, ought really to be called conservative liberalism. There is little place in our political culture, Macintyre argues, "for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question." Though this is not the place to rehearse Macintyre's arguments point for point, this is the place to note that Ortega's theory of the height of the time helps us to see what most contemporary intellectuals believe, how, ever they deny it. That is, a species of left liberalism dominant in American intellectual circles today forbids us to avow what we do in fact believe, namely, that there are, on one hand, unquestionably enlight, ened views while, on the other hand, there are incompatible perspec' tives which are not at the political level of our time and cannot be taken seriously. For many liberal intellectuals, in fact, religious perspectives are by definition beneath the level of the time and may not be taken seriously in political discussions. Individuals are of course entitled to believe what they wish, but self-respecting intellectuals may not pay heed to those faithful for whom religious principles are central to their thinking even on worldly matters.

In his famous 1925 essay, "The Dehumanization of Art," Ortega argued that the art of the emergent modernist masters marked the height of the time in the sphere of culture. Ortega did not himself favor this art; in fact, he found so much of it distasteful that his advocacy seemed to some readers badly compromised, to others positively heroic in its going so much against the grain of his own deepest predilections. The modernism Ortega championed was said to contain in its "successive styles an ever increasing dose of derision and disparagement." In its formal rigor and its resolute inaccessibility it enabled us to under, stand that "an object of art is artistic only insofar as it is not real" and that "preoccupation with the human content of the work is incornpatible with aesthetic enjoyment proper." To say that this art marked the height of the time was to conclude that it represented the most intellectually bracing work of its day. Moreover, it resisted the sentimentality, false seriousness, and ingratiating accessibility of the earlier models that continued to attract the mass audience accustomed to an art tailored to its characteristic tastes. In his desire to move Spaniards and other European readers to abandon provinciality and come up to the level of the time, Ortega necessarily regarded modernist art, in its sometimes willful

obscurantism and effrontery, as a vital weapon. If modernism would not in his view produce masterpieces at the level achieved by Goya or Rembrandt, it might still serve Ortega's contemporaries as a model of high intelligence and the willingness to do without traditional supports.

No doubt Ortega's backing of an art he personally disliked must seem to intellectuals today an instance of puritanical perversity. In addition, his belief in the cleansing potential of an austere or difficult art will seem at best charmingly naive. Be that as it may, Ortega took seriously his function as a modernizing intellectual and, as a consequence, had an enormous effect on his contemporaries. If our intellectuals are typically less robust, that may have more to do with their elaborate self-doubt than with the intractable facts of life in today's culture. Where Ortega supposed that he stood for something, todav's intellectuals mistrust missionary enterprises and regard as plainly false anyone's claim to serve as custodian or authoritative interpreter of the high culture.

Ortega would surely have had much to say of the American university had he lived into our era. Like others, he would have wondered at its ability to absorb into its academic departments just about everyone who might once have tried to make it as an independent intellectual addressing a general audience. Russell Jacoby has lately had instructive and misleading things to say on that score in The Last Intellectuals. But Ortega would more likely have been moved to comment on the abdication of intellectuals from the role they earlier assumed belonged naturally to them. For quite as they have no feeling for a concept like the height of the time, so too they have no real sense of what a university might be and how they might make it a radical alternative to the culture at large. With neither missionary purpose nor belief in a cultural "height" they feel honor bound to promote, the "saving remnant" comfortably ensconced in the contemporary university can only promote a version of enlightened therapy. As the sociologist Philip Rieff has pointed out, today's cultural institutions-including the university-are staffed by "the relentlessly supportive parent, that deliberately selfdefeating figure intent on giving his or her child a formative taste for moving on, for not getting hung-up on anything that is special and enduring. No is the forbidden word in the enlightened parental vocabulary." If this were not so, why then contemporary intellectuals would not be ready to accredit and legitimize every new idea or theory urged upon them by cultural hucksters.

No doubt Ortega would be reluctant to associate himself with critics of the contemporary professoriate like Allan Bloom, but surely he would have more in common with Bloom than with the herd of independent

minds who have lined up against him. Bloom makes no mention of Ortega in The Closing 0/ the American Mind- a pity, really, since Ortega might have helped him a good deal. Possibly Bloom regards Ortega as one of those who betrayed the central mission of the university by going in for mere contemporaneous ephemera. The concept of the height of the time, as we have seen, is susceptible to a misreading which takes it to reflect a vulgar appetite for novelty and the ever-changing cutting edge. But Ortega resisted quite as staunchly as Bloom could have wished the novelties and ideas favored by the general public. His feeling for the best, the rarest, the most rigorously exacting of artworks and ideas set him apart from those who today would like the university to be open to everything. In fact, Ortega would surely subscribe to Bloom's contention that "in a democracy [the university) risks less by opposing the emergent, the changing and the ephemeral than by embracing them, because the society is already open to them The university risks less by having intransigently high standards than by trying to be too inclusive, because the society tends to blur standards in the name of equality." This Ortega would have supported because he understood that the "height" was by definition set apart from the familiar and popular. He was more tolerant than Bloom of the ephemeral but only insofar as he could discern in it both high ambition and a haughty disdain for the ingratiating. No doubt Ortega's reading list for university students would have differed a good deal from Bloom's by including a fair number of contemporary authors. He would have made much of the list's reflecting the best that contemporary perspectives had furnished to us, and, although he would surely have required students to read the ancients, he would not have shared Bloom's emphasis on Plato and Aristotle.

The contemporary university as it exists is a great disappointment to Bloom and would surely have disappointed Ortega. That much is clear. It is also clear that for both men the future of the universities, as of culture itself, has much to do with the intellectuals, who are responsible for renewing, upholding, and in some cases inventing standards. Though Ortega thought himself a liberal, he had a suspicion of common sense, and the derogation of the very idea of standards by contemporary intellectuals he would have regarded as incredible. Less attracted than Bloom to the heroic modes and grand styles of the past, he would nonetheless have identified the failure of our culture with its intellectuals' refusal to distinguish between the true and the specious, the exemplary and the ordinary. Ortega's belief in modernity, in the level of his own time, would perhaps have made him seem-were he around todaymore of a friend to the present than Allan Bloom wishes to be. But

Ortega was a relentless foe of mass culture and a fierce critic of intellectuals who made their peace with the present by accepting a corrupt version of pluralism.

Like Bloom. in other words. Ortega would in time have come to be viewed as the enemy of today's professoriate and scorned as an antidemocratic elitist. For all his commitment to modernity, Ortega would be seen to stand outside the arrangement in terms of which contemporary intellectuals criticize the established social order while living more or less complacently within its expansive embrace.

Epistolary Fiction and Intellectual Life in a Shattered Culture: Ricardo Piglia and John Barth

Johnny Payne

IThe military dictatorship ruling Argentina from 1976 to 1983 euphemistically proclaimed itself "The Process of National Reorganization." The motto "accomplishments, not time-frames," became one of its standard replies to discreet queries about the length of time it intended to remain in power. One of the significant national reorganizations accomplished during that time was the mass exodus, among other citizens, of Argentina's intellectuals and artists, many of whom fled to the United States, Europe, or other countries of Latin America. As many remained as left, however, and this demographic rift widened into a spiritual one, to become one of the most acrimonious of divisive forces even among progressive intellectuals of otherwise similar political sympathies.

This mutual contentiousness between those who went and those who stayed, often reaching the emotional pitch of animosity, and extending in time beyond the seven years of the "Process," could be characterized as one of the profoundest incursions of the military into Argentine cultural activity during the seventies and eighties, as significant in its own way as the banning of books during that time, or the decrepitude of the publishing enterprise (until then, the most flourishing in Latin America).

Beatriz Sarlo, one of her country's most prolific "remaining" cultural critics, and founder of the adversarial magazine Punto de Vista, waves aside the often-juvenile polemic of moral superiority between those who left and those who remained, and describes the separation in more dialectical and historical terms. "With respect to exile, the dictatorship achieved one of its victories in atomizing the intellectual realm, producing two lines of Argentine intellectuals (those inside and those outside),

even fostering resentments on both sides and fracturing a center of democratic opposition.'"

Understood in that way, this particular polemic between two camps of intellectuals becomes part of a more general failure of communication among the intelligentsia, and among the members of society-at-large. For the dictatorship depended for its success on a strategy much more subtle than repression plain-and-simple. Its architects strived to create a pervasive sense of cultural doubt and indeterminacy among Argentina's inhabitants. in which selective repression alternated unpredictably with a seeming liberality. Or, as journalist Osvaldo Bayer puts it:

Sure, books were burned, but that was at the beginning, to show authority, but later everything was done softly and in the dark The press tried to be as "pluralist" as possible. That's why the dictatorship's best helpers weren't the exegetes of military power but those who expressed themselves "moderately," those who knew how to leave a gentle wake of criticism. They helped demonstrate "pluralism." Of course, there were "taboos" everyone respected: the unnameables, the exiles, the "subversives.,,2

The effect of this selective pluralism was to encourage the fears of everyone involved in the collective cultural enterprise that they themselves might easily, at any time, and without prior warning, become one of the "unnameables" in the taboo category. Such institutionalized unease had a stultifying effect on intellectual exchange of all kinds, especially if it could be interpreted as in any way subversive. Beatriz Sarlo describes censorship as exercised with "great tactical finesse."

The guidelines for censorship were only partially known by those affected by the censors' operations. It manifested itself in the lack of any precise indication of what one could do or say. By widening the zone of indefinition, the military regime aimed to suggest that any act could possibly be construed as a crime. Thus, teachers and professors knew of the existence of prohibitions (books, authors, presses, etc.) but rarely had access to a complete list Under such a system of indeterminacy, education and the mass media opted for remaining this side of the danger line, proving the efficacy of a game whose rules were known only to the military chieftain presiding in each specific instance.3

Given this climate, it surprises little that so many of the country's writers chose to dwell elsewhere while this somewhat random but calculated Process of cultural suppression followed its course. Yet even those who took up physical residence in other countries could not fully escape the vague, all-encompassing strictures imposed on communication, if

they hoped to parncipate at all in the verbal counterculture to the Argentine "Process of National Reorganization."

The concept of exile has undeniably come to be freighted with romantic and sometimes opportunistic overtones, and one might legitimately question its appropriation by some Latin intellectuals who left their country to seek more lucrative teaching positions abroad, yet who nonetheless wished to acquire in retrospect an aura of subversiveness and political correctness by referring to themselves as "exiled." Accusations of more or less this type were, in fact, leveled at some of those who left Argentina in the seventies by those who remained in the grim and austere atmosphere of dictatorship. Yet an adequate definition of exile must describe it as first and foremost a coercive phenomenon, rather than a matter of choice. Whether this "option" was consciously created by the state, or came about simply as a by-product of a larger social deterioration, its effects must in either case be measured as part of the systematic repression and uncertainty during those years of dictatorship.

Both the title and the tone of Tomas Eloy Martinez's "The Language of Inexistence" suggest that exile, for many Argentines, created not only a temporary dislocation, but an ontological problem. Martinez, who lived abroad in Caracas for the duration of the Process, says that the resultant social fragmentation "transformed us into indeterminate beings The flood which exiled all of us who dissented from those in power, within and without, consigned us to disappearance, obliged us not to exist." 4 The military strategy of "disappearing" people-for which Argentina became famous during this period, in lending to a verb that had always been intransitive a new, sinister, transitive usage-derived as much of its impact from the impossibility of determining whether the person in question was alive or dead, as it did from the eventual likelihood ofconfronting that person's death. Martinez's remark suggests that this physical and verbal uncertainty pervaded even the lives of those who had "escaped" to other places. Just as significant is his implication that inhabitants both within and without the geographical border can justly be grouped under the category of "exile," since the concept refers not to mere physical absence, but rather to an ever-growing sense of indeterminacy and ontological doubt. In this, he echoes Sarlo's contention that in addition to the exile of "friends and interlocutors," there must be added "the segregation [within Argentina] of intellectuals and artists in an almost hermetic bubble."

The problem of exile emerges as essentially the problem of communication. A populace whose members find themselves destined, singly, to a

collective and perpetual incomunicado have difficulty affirming their own existence. Martinez coins what could stand as perhaps the most powerful and telling cultural trope of the years of the Process, when he searches for an anecdotal language sufficient to convey the sense of nonbeing experienced by those on both "sides" of exile during those years:

Maybe it's worthwhile to evoke how we felt, those of us in exile, at the beginning of our inexistence. The episodes are almost trivial, but revealing. Warned that correspondence was opened by the authorities, we began to modify our names on the letters' return addresses. I didn't find it difficult to change myself into simply Martfnez,» But also on the other end, the end over there (or for me, always the end over here), the destinee was obliged to pretend: to be just the aunt or cousin receiving the letter who would, in her turn, deliver it to the real recipient. After a while those who didn't write back proliferated, those to whom we sent, desperate with hope, one of our books or told a personal story, without their acknowledging receipt. We became resigned to it.1

The writing of letters and the sending of books, the sustained but (in many cases) gradually diminishing search for a "correspondence" that will overcome the paranoia enforced by a censoring dictatorship, suggests itself as emblematic of what it meant for intellectuals during the seventies and early eighties to try to negotiate the harsh privatization of the public sphere and the concomitant, equally harsh, public nature of the private sphere. The ruses that Martinez and his erstwhile correspondents had to resort to poignantly illustrate the abdications of identity which became necessary in order for artistic and cultural dialogue under such extreme circumstances to remain possible. Martinez's account also suggests the epistolary as the consummate mode for understanding the attempt at giving literary expression to the fragmentation lived by a nation of exiles, both internal and external, during this moment in Argentina's history. Sarlo, Martinez's "corresponding" voice from the inside, goes so far as to define exile as "that place from which the letters arrived." The years of the Process were, for intellectuals, epistolary years.

Such a way of defining the cultural crisis produced by the Process offers a historical context for the rapt reception given to Ricardo Piglia's epistolary novel Respiracion artificial (Artificial Respiration), written and published (1980) in the midst of the Process. This historical novel, while it doesn't undertake to portray the dictatorial excesses of its time, as, for instance, Nelson Marra's story "EI guardaespalda" does for Uruguay, nonetheless represents the Argentine intellectual Zeitgeist of the seven-

ties, which I'm analyzing here under the rubric of the epistolary. Piglia's novel has generated a great deal of thematic commentary, much of it historical or political in emphasis. This commentary has almost uniformly failed to address the epistolary dimension of what is patently a novel made of letters. Yet the "episrolariness" of this novel, which bears in its subject matter only the obliquest of relationships to the explicit political moment, is precisely what can best account for its profound emotional appeal to its Argentine readership. In Respiracio» artificial, intellectuals skeptical of the future and critical of the Argentine past employ letter-writing as a form of modest hope, to nourish and sustain themselves in the present toward the eventual possibility of a renewed public life after dictatorship.

In searching among critical writings in English for a general account of experimentation with the epistolary genre in contemporary U.S. literature, the closest one might come is a couple of isolated, almost casual paragraphs at the very end of Janet Altman's study in eighteenthcentury fiction, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Fonn. Altman remarks of the letter novel, in closing, that it "is one of the first genres constituted by discovery of a medium and exploration of its potential. In that, it resembles many of the experimental forms of the twentieth century that question the subordination of the medium to the message." � This insight, however, appears, in true epistolary style, as a mere postscript to her study-resonant with possibility but not elaborated on.

Altman restricts "epistolarity," a suggestive concept, to an investigation into form. Her "working definition" of her neologism is "the use of the letter's formal properties to create meaning." Yet a strictly formalist consideration of contemporary experiments with epistolary fiction will fail to provide much insight into John Barth's use of the letter novel to express his vision of social conservatism. In his widely reviewed epistolary novel LETTERS (1979), Barth counters the excesses of political activism during the sixties with adherence to a political via media, which he gives expression to as an orderly dance of epistolary exchange. A study limited to formal properties, in this case, could do little more than replicate uncritically that social conservatism, implicitly offering formal symmetry as a transparent and "well-made" substitute for the resolution of societal ills.

One partial explanation for the relegation 'of experimental writing in the U.S. to eccentricity, in the past two decades, is the fact that fictional innovation has been discussed almost exclusively as if it were a sophisticated parlor game. But Barth's LETTERS, far from limiting itself to an exploration of the problems of form and style, and forging an esthetic

credo, offers a very specific view of America's intemperate social conflict, to which Barth proposes his temperate, effete version of "revolution" as an antidote. Unlike Piglia, for whom the retreat of intellectuals from the public sphere is a temporary effect of their political banishment, Barth views the "exemption" of artists from political life as natural, permanent and desirable.

The correspondence in Piglia's Respiraci6n artificial begins, a few pages into the novel, with a letter precipitously written by Marcelo Maggi, living in obscurity in an Argentine river town at the border of Uruguay-Entre Rios-addressing his nephew Emilio Renzi. Renzi has written an amateurish novel, a family saga, misrepresenting the "facts" of an adulterous affair Maggi had years ago with a exotic dancer, and Maggi, who had long since dropped out of sight, writes him in order to set the record straight. But the family saga is a mere pretext for establishing a correspondence between two obscure, failed intellectuals who happen to be relatives, and who have never met, nor will ever meet. Though both live within the country, and though Renzi travels by train to meet his uncle in Entre Rios, Maggi packs his bags and disappears just before his nephew arrives, for reasons that never become clear, appointing a Polish exile friend, another failed intellectual named Tardewski, to meet him. Maggi also entrusts to Tardewski the manuscript of a book he is writing about Enrique Ossorio, an exile and a nineteenth-century ancestor of Maggi and Renzi who was accused of being a traitor and double agent during the republican struggles between opposing politicians Sarmiento and Rosas.

But the novel is no more "about" these events themselves than Renzi's novel would be allowed by his uncle to be "about" his affair. Rather, Respiraci6n artificial explores the formal means through which a group of Argentine intellectuals constitute a sense of collective identity, in a time when they are relegated to a seemingly terminal informality. Under a dictatorship where intellectuals have been dispersed, virtually no public sphere exists. Intellectual institutions and cultural organs such as universities and publishing houses have been dismantled or shut down, except for a modicum of events specifically designed for the participation in public life of a handful of officially sanctioned intellectuals. 10 Few opportunities for social solidarity remain to the marginal majority, outside small gestures such as writing letters to one another. Though peripheral, failed, and obscure by self-definition, Renzi, Maggi, Tardewski (and their nineteenth-century counterpart, Ossorio) undertake to examine questions at the center of Argentine life.

The role of letters in this undertaking would need to reflect the task of

trying to overcome the hermetic isolation and indeterminacy experienced by Argentines during the Process of National Reorganization, and Piglia, in fact, adapts the epistolary conceits of the eighteenth century to these contemporary concerns. In a chapter of Ruth Perry's study of eighteenthcentury epistolary fiction, already cited, entitled "Separation and Isolation," she concludes that "the isolation of the characters is essential to the epistolary formula because it throws the characters back into themselves, to probe their own thoughts, their own feelings" (p. 117).

But in Piglia's novel, the correspondents are bent on discovering a means of communication which will reshape an identity blotted out by the prevailing, systematic degradation of language in the Argentina of the seventies. Maggi's final letter to his nephew vacillates between skepticism about their correspondence, and an intense desire for connection. Maggi self-consciously reflects (in one of Piglia's countless metafictional maneuvers) on the disparity between his present moment and the traditional heyday of the epsitolary novel:

Diverse complications, difficult to explain in a letter, make me believe that for a time you won't have any news of me. Correspondence, at bottom, is an anachronistic genre, a kind of leftover heritage of the 18th century: the men who lived in that era still believed in the pure truth of written words. And what of us? Times have changed, words slip away with ever greater ease, one can see them drifting in the water of history, mingled amongst the floating islands of the current. Soon we'll find a mode for encountering one another. I I

The ambiguity of his disappearance (it never becomes clear whether it's forced or voluntary given the gaps in knowledge the characters possess about one another), might suggest a conscious decision to truncate the exchange of letters with his nephew that Maggi himself has initiated, as a prelude to the dissolution of his being. It's possible that he is in the process of becoming a dead-letter recipient, reluctant to acknowledge receipt, because of complications "difficult to explain in a letter"-the kind of intangible, yet ever-present complications Argentines continually dwelt among in the epoch of "National Reorganization."

And perhaps, in capitulating to this dissolution, he is urging Renzi too (in Tomas Eloy Martinez's phrase, which I cited earlier) to "become resigned to it." Martinez tells, for instance, of a close relative who, interrogated by Argentine authorities about one of Martinez's early novels, denied the latter's authorship. The relative claimed that "the person who had signed the work was a usurper of names, or perhaps a

homonym." Martinez recounts how, "without realizing that person had given up on my existence, I sent him a letter asking him to correct the error I never received an answer,"?

Yet the final, cryptic sentence in Maggi's letter-"Soon we'll find a mode for encountering one another" - and the earlier qualifier for the cessation of news, "for a time," suggest the equally available possibility that the character's self-conscious, self-abnegating epistles represent, for him, the most adequate expression to be had on the way to finding the ideal mode for reconstructing an atomized collective mental life. Letters may be anachronistic, but such an outmoded artifice keeps dialogue alive in times of artificial respiration. Maggi's sensibility here is emphatically first-person plural. M And what of us?" stands as the ultimate question to be answered; not in this letter perhaps, but eventually.

Renzi, in his reply to his uncle's request that Renzi visit him, and to the warning that he may not write for a time, waxes irritably impatient. "Point one: of course I'll come to see you when you like. Point two: What am I to make of the notice that for a time I won't receive any news ofyou? I want to make clear that you have no obligation to write me at an appointed time, no obligation of answering me by return mail, or anything of the kind." But, as he is to discover, the encounter in the flesh turns out to be much more difficult to execute than his appointment for it by "return mail." Renzi complains, in this same letter, much in the vein of Maggi, that "correspondence is a perverse genre it requires distance and absence to prosper. Only in epistolary novels do people write one another when they're nearby; even living under the same roof, they send letters instead of conversing, obliged to do so by the rhetoric of the genre."" This statement becomes heavily ironic in retrospect, given that his and Maggi's mutual verbal constructions of identity, their representations of self to one another, derive, in the end, almost entirely from this "perverse," nonobligatory exchange of letters, and from secondhand, reported information about one another, rather than from any direct contact.

One of Renzi's keenest insights is his self-conception as a character in an outdated novel genre, consigned (by a dictatorship-manufactured isolation, I would argue) to the status of an intellectual dinosaur among intellectual dinosaurs, striving to weather the present and ward off extinction. Skeptical and cynical as he is inclined to sound at times, Renzi recognizes the necessity of refurbishing the antiquated remnants of the discursive conventions to which his impoverished era has been reduced, if he, Maggi, and their peers hope to overcome their hermetic isolation and re-enter, actively, the larger history lying beyond the

Argentine Process of National Reorganization. This transformative hope for the epistolary is plain in one of his letters to Maggi:

The epistolary genre has gotten old, and yet I confess to you that one of the illusions of my life is to someday write a novel made of letters. In fact, now that I think about it, there aren't any epistolary novels in Argentine literature, and of course this is due to the fact that (to confirm one of the theories insinuated in your rather melancholy letter just received) in Argentina we never had an XVIII century. I.

This latter remark refers to Maggi's characterization of the eighteenth century as an era in which one "still believed in the pure truth of the written word," before words began to "slip away." Renzi intimates here that, from the perspective of the present, such pure truth has never seemed tenable, but that at least an impure "truth" must be granted to a degraded, worn-out language if the identity they are reshaping and resurrecting in their letters is to have any viability as an antidote to total, permanent dissolution. This recognition is a mutual one, for despite the "melancholy" nature of Maggi's characterization, he nonetheless uses the letter form to reflect on it in a shared context, and Renzi responds in kind, giving that melancholy characterization a rather biting twist.

Renzi and Maggi often wax self-lacerating or ironic, as in Renzi's description of his naive pretensions about wanting to have "experiences" in his youth. In his youthful desire for decadence, he seems to take Baudelaire and Rimbaud as implicit models. At the age of nineteen, his greatest aspiration was to arrive at the age of thirty-five having exhausted all the possibilities in life. He would then "go to Paris for four or five months to live the grand life (that to me was the most spectacular model of triumph, I suppose). To arrive in Paris at 35, saturated with experiences and a body of written work, to wander along the boulevards, like a streetwise fellow, just back from everywhere." He then describes an episode in Buenos Aires where he does seem to aspire to the status of a Baudelairian flaneuT, tracing his own melancholy map through the city, watching men from "State Gas" dig a tunnel in the middle of the night. He enters a bar, in a Rimbaudian reverie, observing that "bars are our version ofwhaling ships." This bateau-ivre youthful self observes how sentimental, teetering drunks offer one another melodramatic, hyperbolic toasts in the bar, a practice he once identified with, but now finds absurdly pompous. Yet for all his self-deprecation, Renzi's exchange of letters with Maggi remains invested with significance. Renzi

finishes his self-effacing recounting of his naive youth with a sentiment that itself runs the risk, in its seriousness, of emotional indiscretion.

So now I should continue writing you until daybreak; a letter to keep me company through the night; a letter lasting until daybreak so I can go out to the street afterward to see if Marquitos still stands in the Ramos Bar toasting senorita Giselle in spite of having the threat of the terrible sword of Damodes suspended over his heart. I embrace you, Marcelo, and await news from you. Emilio.U

The correspondents' banter masks a deep malaise. Piglia's metafiction does not lapse into endless, regressive, formalistic self-reflexivity; into the cleverness of mere letters about letter-writing. Rather, his metafictional reflections are offered in the interest of refashioning the epistolary - the mode expressive of the most paralyzing aspects of cultural doubt and ontological indeterminacy - into a replenishing mode of engagement with the present.

And yet, the present time, in Piglia's novel, cannot in its impoverishment suffice for these intellectuals who wish to embrace it and define themselves within it. In "Epistolary Discourse," Janet Altman has said that for the writer of the letter in epistolary fiction

the present is impossible as "presence." Epistolary discourse is the language of the pivotal yet impossible present. The now of narration is its central reference point, to which the then of anticipation and retrospection are relative. Yet now is unseizable, and its unseizabilirv haunts epistolary language. 16

The language of Respiraci6n artificial is haunted with just such a temporal unseizability. Renzi and Maggi in their letters, Renzi and Tardewski in their endless conversation in the second half of the novel, and Enrique Ossorio, the articulate traitor and exile from the nineteenth century, are all obsessed with bringing the recuperated past and the future, by means of letters, into a utopian presence. Their awareness of the impossibility of the present does not deter the various conversants from striving toward a solution to their indeterminate status. This "utopianism" differs from a more classic, Marxist utopianism in that it represents not simply a desire for social transformation, an idealized "new society," but rather an attempt to recover a variegated actuality.

Ossorio's letters and journals, which are being edited by Maggi, attest to just such a utopian strain. In one of several journal entries, this one dated July 14, 1850, Ossorio, exiled in the United States, hits upon the ingenious notion of exile itself-of the place of banishment, of supposed

despair of the impossible present - as utopian precisely because of its impossibility.

I thought today: What is utopia? The perfect place? That's not the question. More than anything, for me, exile is utopia. TheTe is no such place. Banishment, exodus, a space suspended in time, between two times. We have the memories that have remained with us of our country, and afterward we imagine how the country will be (how it is to be) when we return to it. That dead time, between the past and the future, is utopia for me. So: exile is utopia. 17

In this temporal conception of exile, Ossorio achieves precisely what Renzi, Maggi and Argentine intellectuals of the seventies such as Sarlo and Martinez were in search of: a means of seizing the present made impossible by exile, of recuperating the past made distant by it, and imagining them together as a credible futurity. Ossorio's notion captures what it meant, imaginatively, to try to transform the doubt-ridden epistolarity of the Argentine diaspora in the seventies (including the domestic "diaspora") into a more habitable brand of epistolarity. Like Martinez with his "language of inexistence," or Sarlo with her "zone of indefinition," Ossorio affirms his lack of existence resoundingly, yet believes this recognition to be the necessary first step toward self-recreation. The literary conceit of the journal entry typically suggests the most private and inward-directed of forms. But Ossorio's journal, like the exchanges between Maggi and Renzi, is written in a more public veinas letters to the future-and he acknowledges as much in his continuing ruminations on the appropriate literary embodiment of utopia.

7-15-1850

The utopia of a modern dreamer should differentiate itself from the classical rules of the genre on one essential point: refusing to reconstruct a nonexistent space. So: key diffeTence: don't situate utopia in an imaginary, unknown place. Instead, make an appointment with one's own country, on a date (1979) which is, to be sure, at a fantastic remove. There's no such place: in time. There's not yet such a place. This equates, for me, to a utopian point of view. Imagine Argentina just as it will be in 130 years. IS

The title he gives to his book: 1979. Its epigraph: "Each era dreams the past one." The "fantastic" date given falls precisely, of course, in the year of Respiraci6n artificial's present, and so the journal entry is read by the inhabitants of Piglia's imaginative dystopia, Renzi and Maggi. This journal entry, read in the context of the all-too-real and unimaginative dystopia created in Argentina by the militarized Process of National

Reorganization, becomes laden with satirical effect. At the same time, Ossorio establishes a "correspondence" with the future which articulates precisely the aspirations of his kindred exiled Argentines more than a century later. He insists on locating any possible utopia geographically within an actual Argentina, and positing it as that shared place of future re-encounter and reconciliation. And the epigraph to 1979 implies the correspondence between Renzi and Maggi (his spiritual executors), and Ossorio himself, in their attempt to rethink the relation of the militarized present to the potentially romanticized republican past. Piglia's complex play of temporality makes possible both a scrutiny of the Process and a skeptical caution about future solutions to the existential and political dilemmas it has created (given the disparity between 197'1s utopia and 1979's dystopia). But this scrutiny and caution are not necessarily incompatible with a teleological idealism about Argentina's social possibilities. Piglia's treatment of exile is neither romantic nor nihilistic; his novel accurately evokes the subtleties of intermingled hope and despair which have characterized the writings of Argentine exiles of the seventies and early eighties.

Ossorio describes, in his July 18, 1850, journal entry, a "discovery" he has made while pacing the floor of his room, reflecting on his projected novel, 1979, and on the Wars of Independence:

I suddenly understood what the form of my utopian story should be. The Protagonist receives letters from the future (which aren't addressed to him). So. an epistolary story. Why that anachronistic genre? Because utopia is already in itself a literary form which belongs to the past. For us. men of the XIX century, it represents an archaic species, the way the epistolary novel is archaic. 19

It is significant that Ossorio, writing from the perspective of the beginnings of the Argentine republic, sounds a note of disbelief about utopia, qualifying it as "anachronistic" in much the same language that his 197CYs counterparts of the future would use. The aptness of Ossorio's conceit of "letters from the future" for an analysis of the ideological parallels between the Wars of Independence and the contemporary vicissitudes of Argentine democracy is borne out in Juan Francisco Guevara's 1970 book of political commentary, Argentina y Su Sombra. In its opening pages, Guevara offers a lesson identical to that of Ossorio about the flaws in the founding conceptions of liberation, which replicate themselves in the messianic, dictatorial "utopias" of the sixties and seventies. Guevara even uses the epistolary conceit, and his title could

almost have been cribbed from Ossorio: "A message from 1829 that arrived in 1966."20

In his analysis, Guevara describes the grim, funereal scene of General Ongania's ascendancy to dictatorship in 1966, a misfortune amplified by the widespread enthusiasm that greeted the dictator's arrival on the scene. But this spectacle, he claims, should come as no surprise, because Argentina, from the moment of its birth into political independence, has never offered justice and peace with prolonged political stability, due to the republic's blurring of the line between freedom and oppressive government. Guevara offers excerpts from a letter written by Argentina's "liberator" San Martin to another general in 1829 during the Wars of Independence, and offers these excerpts as a prophetic description of the state of mind of those embracing Argentina's dictatorial "democracy" in the time of Ongania 137 years later:

A long time ago (San Martin) said "The agitations of nineteen years of trial in search of a liberty that hasn't come into existence, and even more, the difficult circumstances our country finds itself in, make the majority of men cry out (seeing their fortunes at the edge of the precipice, and their future path covered in uncertainty) not for a change in the principles governing them (and that, in my opinion, is where the true evil lies) but for a vigorous government; in a word, a military one, because those drowning don't realize what they've grabbed hold of."

He also said, "One can govern people most securely during the first two years after a great crisis; that is the situation that will prevail in Buenos Aires; people will demand of their leader (after the present struggle) nothing more than tranquility."Zl

Guevara says that a rereading of those prophetic paragraphs shows that even San Martin, the "father" of the democracy, sounded a note of pessimism about the prospects of democracy, and liberalism's checkered legacy does not inspire any greater hope by the 1960's. "The Messiah already came a long time ago," says Guevara - referring to the cyclical messianism, beginning with San Martin's arrival and continuing up through Ongania, that has hailed civilian rule alternately as a salvation from the failures of dictatorship and then a curse - "so we needn't expect another Messiah, not even from the civilian quarter.?"

Already, at the advent of the republic, republicanism and the democratic project represented a foredoomed ideal. The seeds of disillusion for the fictional Ossorio's latter-day counterparts had begun to germinate in the nineteenth century. Utopianism itself, like epistolarity, predates the formation of the modern, "democratic" state, issues into it, defines it in a negative dialectic. The desire for authentic democracy

seems doomed, out-of-sync, a letter perpetually updated, postdated, never to arrive at its destination.

Yet this desire persists in the mind of a nineteenth-century representative, Ossorio, as in the intellectuals of the seventies. Out of the fruit of negation, he produces an affirmation. In his journal entry six days later, Ossorio asks himself,

Why have I been able to discover that my utopian romance must be an epistolary story? First: correspondence by its nature is already a form of utopia. To write a letter is to send a message to the future Correspondence is the utopian form of conversation because it annuls the present and makes the future the only possible place of dialogue.

But there also exists a second reason. What is exile but a situation which obliges us to substitute with written words the relation among the closest friends, who are far away, absent, disseminated, each in a different place and city? And besides, what relation can we maintain with the country we've lost, the country they've obliged us to abandon, what other presence of an absent place, than the testimony of its existence which letters bring us (sporadic, elusive, trivial) that arrive with news of familiars.

So I think I've chosen well the form of this novel written in exile and out of it.23

The unseizable present may annul its letter-writing exiles, but they, through the very act of writing letters, annul the present. At the same time, letter-writing produces the concrete, "trivial" linguistic testimony out of which the "utopian," postponed, postdated future will have to be constructed. The society inhabited by returned exiles will not have to be founded on sheer negation, a void. Likewise, Ossorio's journal entries to the future lay the groundwork for an alternate reconstruction of republicanism. Ossorio even speaks of his projected novel of letters sent from the future as being made "out of' the material of a seemingly ineffable exile, establishing a two-way material correspondence between past and future. Those scattered by the vicissitudes of the Process nourish a similar desire. The witnessing epistolary gesture attempts to preclude, in the seventies and early eighties, what Beatriz Sarlo calls "a virtual disappearance of the public sphere during the years of the Process, at least until its arduous reconstruction beginning in 1982," from becoming total rather than virtual." The first half of the novel ends with a one-sentence journal entry by Ossorio, reading "I write the first letter from the future." The second half ends with a note, written by Ossorio just before his death, and read in the present by Renzi, addressed to "Whoever finds my body." In both instances, his effort has been to bolster the present by leaving "remains."

II

The epistolary novel brings letter-writing and the writing of books together in the mutual, almost archival enterprise of preserving at least the written remnants of a collective social identity. Yet Respiraci6n artifi:ial also attests to the fragility of even that modest preservational gesture. The potential for both types of letters to become dead letters remains high. Piglia's novel contains its own dead-letter office in the form of a censor named Arocena, who receives a variety of letters out of which he tries to make a meaningful miscellany, by "decoding" their secret meanings. As earnest as he is misguided, Arocena makes for a figure both absurd and chilling.

His attempt at deciphering a random and innocuous assortment of past and present letters-most from correspondents who don't have the slightest apparent relation to any of the characters in Piglia's novel-by means of a numerological system, yields a result reminiscent of secret messages in spy thrillers. The censor's interest is in a "reconstruction" of a radically different kind than the social one proposed by Beatriz Sarlo. He surmises of the received letters that

the words beginning each paragraph had eleven letters, each starting with a different vowel. The eleven letters marked the order of the sentences and gave the code which deciphered the scrambled message. Arocena worked calmly and an hour later he had reconstructed the hidden text.

No news. I'm waiting for the contact. I'll be staying in the Central Park Hotel, 8th and 42nd. If there's no news before the 10th, I'll follow the instructions from 8-9. If I have trouble and need to return, I'll wait for a telegram. Have it say: Congratulations, Raquel.25

Since some of the letters in this assortment are supposed to have been sent from Maggi to Ossorio, Arocena believes that the others represent cryptic letters, sent in a code name, from Ossorio to Maggi. Arocena seems to be Piglia's character-the unintended recipient of the letters from the future in Ossorio's epistolary novel-though it's equally possible that he exists in the novel's present, intercepting actual letters. Arocena stands as the dvstopian counterpart of the utopian addressee of the future whom Ossorio imagined as an ideal correspondent. He embodies the censoring, repressive side of epistolary communication, a breaker of spiritual and ontological chain letters. The epistolary, linguistic code of the past and present is "cracked" by him, boiled down to its most banal "message," one of political opposition in a police-detective

vein-a message which, when spelled out, would provide the pretext for harsh, preventive repressive measures. Following out his method, he "decodes" the reconstructed message into the sentence "Raquel llega a Ezeiza el 10, vuelo 22.03." [Raquel arrives at Ezeiza on the tenth, on flight 2203.J Raquel, he presumes, is an approximate anagram for Aquel (literally, "That One"). "Who arrives?" he asks himself irritably. "Who's about to arrive? They're not going to trick me, thought Arocena, not me.?"

Daniel Balderston remarks that the denomination Aquel apparently was used to refer indirectly to former populist president Juan Peron during the period prior to his return to Argentina from exile in 1973,27 The political fiasco of Peron's return, and the consequent disillusionment of the Peronist Youth, fueled much of the political restiveness preceding the coup which initiated the Process.

Arocena, however, fails to grasp the referent of Aquel, and Piglia in this allusion thus provides his own ironic, "coded" comment on the manipulations which the written word underwent during the seventies and eighties. Not only personal correspondence, but the writing of books and articles became subject to systematic violations and deformations. Jorge Lafforgue recounts how a fellow editor at the publishing house Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires had accepted for publication in 1976 two novels by young Argentine authors. "When the military coup came," he says, "both books were already printed in the graphic workshop Arnericalee." But the owner of this print shop read the books, prompted by "a recent pronouncement by the Commanding Junta, establishing the criminality not only of authors, but of those who might have collaborated in the production of any 'subversive' writing." In his unofficial capacity of censoring both self and others, the printer, having read the books and deemed them subversive, refused to turn over the already-printed books, as promised, to the publisher. Losada, though initially indignant, eventually capitulated, and even agreed to share the costs of the "unnecessary" printing."

This printerly consignment to oblivion also plagues Vladimir Tardewski, the Polish exile and close friend of Maggi in Entre Ros, whose lengthy conversation with Renzi (a masterpiece of philosophical and literary digression) occupies the entire second half of Respiracion artificial. Tardewski recounts to Renzi an episode of many years ago when he first arrived in Buenos Aires, a refugee whose exile was occasioned by Hitler's invasion of Poland. En route to dissolution and inexistence, Tardewski writes an article about the relationship between Nazism and Kafka's writing and prints it in a Buenos Aires newspaper, attempting to

explain the precarious status of his nation to Argentines. But his attempt to secure his identity in the form of authorship is doomed from the beginning, not only on account of its questionable translation, but because of a printing error in the newspaper." In it, his name has been changed from Vladimir Tardewski to Vladimir Tardowski, a minute alteration which has, for him, profound implications. "The paradox," he says, "was that 1 wouldn't be able to read the text I'd published, since I didn't know Spanish. Which, if it served for anything served as a metaphor for my situation amid the catastrophic headlines about the advance of Nazi troops I found, on the inner pages an article I couldn't read by Vladimir Tardowski,"?

This combined linguistic alienation and alteration has the effect of stripping him of his identity. And his "intellectual property," a concept which has by then become seriously undermined, has been rendered inaccessible to him by the fact that he can't read his own writing. Then, on arriving at his rented room, he discovers that thieves have stolen everything he owned, including (the final blow) his volumes of Kafka (collected writings and letters). "I found myself facing a reproduction in miniature, real nonetheless, of Europe demolished by war. I'd reached the purest state of dispossession that a man can aspire to: I had nothing,'?'

He also finds himself facing, though he doesn't say so directly, a version in miniature of the intellectual life of Argentine authors and readers under the Process. Tomas Eloy Martinez, in exile, experienced in 1979-80-the time of the publication of Respiraci6n artificial-a loss of "intellectual property," and permutations of his signature, just as pro' found and ironic as Tardewski's. A few months before the death of Argentine fiction writer Victoria Ocampo, the weekly Buenos Aires magazine Genre published an article about her; its "ideas and stutter, ings," says Martinez,

sounded familiar to me. I asked myself if, by chance, it was mine. I discovered that yes it was. I'd published it twelve or thirteen years before. But now it bore someone else's signature.

In 1980 I reread one of my interviews with Peron inserted in someone else's book. The author omitted my name, but had at least taken care to respect my errata Around the same time, a television news program which I'd designed and directed did a retrospective of all those who'd appeared on it at one time and another, editing out the images in which I appeared.t!

Like Tardewski, Martinez had become himself a living erratum, writ large, with only the mistakes, the stutterings, the discrepancy between his former signature and his revised one bearing ironic witness to his existence. These unacknowledged errata, as in Tardewski's case, stand as a generalizable metaphor for his and many others' lived situations. But the wish for the restoration of the letters of one's name is not, ultimately, a wish to recuperate intellectual property, a wish for a discrete original. itv, but rather a desire for the restoration of books-letters-as a realm of social exchange. Episrolaritv itself is a means of exchange by which the most personal of documents become the "property" of another, thus in a limited sense public.

But this public nature of language, necessary to the survival and reconstruction of the social realm, is precisely what leaves it vulnerable. The character of Tardewski is fairly obviously modeled, in part, on the persona of the German intellectual Walter Benjamin who, like Tardewski, attempted to flee from Nazi oppression into exile. Both men pursue in their writings an intense interest in Kafka. Yet though Hannah Arendt, in her introduction to Benjamin's Illuminations, compares Benjamin to Kafka in terms of his "uniqueness, that absolute originality which can be traced to no predecessor and suffers no followers," what unites the character of Tardewski to that of Benjamin is precisely the abdication of "originalitv.?" Both aspire to virtuoso originality in the classical European sense of creating masterpieces of ideation, but their experience of exile, the literal loss of many of their books and papers, and the derogation of their ideas by a hostile Nazism lead them to plagiarism as a more attractive and more historically relevant metaphor for thought than originality.

After Tardewski's ruin in Argentina, following a brilliant beginning as a privileged disciple of Wittgenstein in Europe, he eventually ends up transferred, in true Kafkaesque style, to a pointless job in a branch bank in the literal backwater of Entre Rios. Since he seldom has actual work to do, he spends his time surreptitiously "jotting down the ideas of other people in a notebook." He makes a decision "not to write anything I could think of myself, nothing mine, no ideas of my own. I didn't have any ideas, anyway, I was a Polish zombie." His first entry is a transcription of the quotations he had cited in his abortive newspaper article.

I copied them from a Spanish I didn't understand, 50 that it was like reproducing a hieroglyphic; I drew the letters, one by one, without understanding what I wrote, guiding myself by the quotation marks, the international sign. Wasn't that a good image of the situation of the Kafkaesque writer?)"

Hannah Arendt, in her introduction to Benjamin's essays, mentions that Benjamin "was a born writer. but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations.?" The parallel with Tardewski is most striking here. He represents the intellectual who has come to the realization that one must write out of the purest form of"the state of dispossession"-dispossession by the State. That brand of writer, resigned to dispossession, and not the illusion of the "original thinker whose writing can be traced to no predecessor and suffers no followers," is the clear image of the resilient intellectual which emerges in Piglia's novel. And if he "cites" Benjamin in the creation of Tardewski, Piglia adapts this creation, and the status of book-ness itself, to the Argentine exigencies of the time."

For the mere possession of books, during the Process, left one open to the severest retributions. The tone of the satisfied, almost complacent Benjamin, who collects books in "Unpacking My Library" (first published in 1931, just after the first of the cycle of Argentine dictatorships came to power), would have to be modified, like Tardewski's signature, in significant ways in order to express adequately what it meant to try to "possess" a library within the confines of the Argentine Process, or for that matter, in the Germany of the 1930's. Benjamin, in the serene mood of the avid book collector in the midst of reshelving his beloved possessions, begins by inviting his listener to

join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with tom paper so that you may be ready to share with me a bit the mood-it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation - which these books arouse in a genuine collector.F

In his correspondence with Gershom Scholem between 1932 and 1940, their thoughts return with an almost obsessive frequency to books, or rather the lack of them, and the chronic difficulty of obtaining them. In fact, their requests for loans ofbooks from one another, and for offprints or manuscripts of each other's writings and of their own (Benjamin's "archive" is partly housed in Scholem's Jerusalem residence), are as impassioned a subtext in the letters as their inquiries after one another's well-being.

By 1933, the year in which book-burnings in Germany began, the difficulty of holding onto one's books had quickened into a historical and ontological urgency tantamount to holding onto one's very identity. In September of that year Scholem urges Benjamin to consolidate his intellectual property, lest he be bereft of it forever. The tone of Scho-

lern's advice fairly equates the failure to do so with annihilation by repression. l8

Benjamin did manage to recover a portion of his library and his papers, and have them sent to him abroad, but there was no question of any real and permanent "possession," given Benjamin's constant mobility and the vicissitudes of massive social dislocation. His "private" collection of papers and books, like his "private" letters to Scholem, formed part of the crucial public currency exchanged among exiled German Jews to foster intellectual and spiritual resilience among themselves. But radical changes transformed Benjamin's happy "disorder of crates that have been wrenched open" from a scene of reverie to one of threat. What happened to his library under Hitler was also the fate of innumerable private book collections after the Argentine military seized power in 1976. Santiago Kovadloff, in Argentina, oscuro pais, begins an essay entitled "The Hands of Fear" with the description of just such a library "unpacking," as men came in trucks to ferret out "prohibited literature."

Not only Marxist materials, but almost any work of social science, history, philosophy, economics or writing of a partisan political nature, could qualify as suspect. Wide-ranging, vague criteria had the effect, according to Kovadloff, of instilling a self-censoring fear in everyone who possessed books.

With a heart full of anguish, the painful ritual of shame began. In the middle of the night or in broad daylight, we dismantled our libraries ••. we tore into pieces dozens of essays, novels, biographies, stories and poems in which the slightest trace of social conscience or political restlessness might be perceived. At our feet, like the ashes of a better time, accumulated what had before been cherished pages what had been books were now nothing but shreds of paper.P?

Wrecked crates, wood dust, torn paper-these relished signs of personal possession have become, in the Argentine context, as they quickly did in Benjamin's Germany, the unwritten prologue to intellectual dispossession. Benjamin remarks with enthusiasm that the book collector's existence is tied to "a very mysterious relationship to ownership," emphasizing the love of objects not as functional, but rather "as the scene, the stage, of their fate."? The same can be said of Argentina's exiled intellectuals with respect to their necessary abdication of the private objects - both literal and figural-of spiritual and mental life, in favor of a more transitory, epistolary mode of possession and engagement with the scene of their fate. But while the Process lasted (and it

continues, in many ways, to last}, it became impossible for them to share Benjamin's book-collector's sentiment that

The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed, as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of this propertv.f!

Instead, the acquisition Argentines sought, the frame of all consciousness and memory, was the acquisition of existence itself, the prerequisite to any other kind of possession. The book and the letter, both subject for a time to the same fate, became interlaced in the epistolary novel. Respiracion artificial stands as the timely chronicle of the resolve to transform the language of inexistence into a renewed, if necessarily postponed, presence.

III

In John Barth's epistolary novel LE1TERS, published in the U.S. only a year before Respiraci6n artificial, presence is just as bedeviled by its relation to inexistence, futurity and history, but not nearly so difficult to seize. Barth's relentless experimentation is executed with even-handed serenity. The subtitle of the novel-"An Old Time Epistolary Novel by Seven Fictitious Dralls and Dreamers, Each of Whom Imagines Himself Actual"-suggests a good-humored, Sterneian solidity of self, an ontological safe haven for the "actual" seventh letter-writer, the Author. This actuality mitigates the burden of inexistence, a state belied by the whimsy of the fictitious "drolls" who imagine themselves into an illusory sense of actuality. Their language has the comforting rondure of existence.

Presence never comes as deeply into question in LE1TERS as it does in Piglia's novel. In a missive from lawyer Todd Andrews (a character recycled, as are all the letter-writing characters except one, from Barth's previous novels) to the Author, Andrews defines both a political and ontological stance set squarely in the via media. Defining himself as a "Stock Liberal inclined to the Tragic View of history and human institutions," with "no final faith that all the problems he addresses admit of political solutions- in some cases, of any solution whatever," he nonetheless manages to locate himself, in a few quick strokes, with surprising ease. As a devotee of the Tragic View, he adheres to wistful,

ironic nonintervention in public life, believing that social violence and violent emotions alike will spend themselves in good time and of their own accord, leaving society as it always was. His professed lack of solutions in no way jeopardizes his well-being, contrary to the experience of Piglia's characters Renzi and Maggi. He believes that "Reason, Tolerance, Law, Democracy, Humanism," all upper-case ethical values and thus out of doubt, are "precious and infinitely preferable to their contraries. He is ever for Reform as against revolution or reaction." In the benign Barthian universe, Democracy and its opposite, dictatorial rule, or Law and its opposite, military decree, seem never to enter into dialectical tension, even for such a "connoisseur of paradoxes" as Andrews.

As for the relation of the present to other times, Todd Andrews subscribes to Augustine's view

that while the Present does not exist (it being the merely conceptual razor's edge between the Past and the Future), at the same time it's all there is: the Everlasting Now between a Past existing only in memory and a Future existing only in anticipation.V

The idea that it might be necessary to abdicate the present in order to reclaim it in futurity, such as in the postponements depicted as necessary in Piglia's novel, appears in LEITERS as a quaint and fanciful idea. Though Andrews acknowledges the inexistence of the present, the present nonetheless stands out as palpable, vividly capable of being grasped, in contrast to the ineffable past and future, which exist for Andrews "only in" memory and anticipation-the two very faculties which Argentine exiles required in order to reconstruct the present. Like the concept of Reform, the present stands ready to serve as the moderator, the affable middleman. Andrews asks, in reference to the paternal-filial conflict between corporate conglomerate owner Harrison Mack, and Harrison's stock sixties "revolutionary" son, Drew, why the two can't "simply shake hands, like Praeteritas and Futuras on the Mack Enterprises letterhead, and reason together!" 41 History, here vaguely Rotarian or Masonic, resolves itself in the bonhomie of two hale fellows well met.

To characterize the novel as complacent toward the malaise-inducing subtleties of Democracy is not to locate its narrative attitude in anyone of the various "characters." Though Andrews is only one of the multiple personae in LEITERS, this attitude of the tragic-viewing but firmlyplanted observer pervades Barth's novel. H And though his tone remains wry and self-mocking, these qualities of irony and self-mockery serve as

the very indicators of leisurely expansiveness, faith in one's fixture in a solid time and place from which to experiment at will.

Nonetheless, history, utopia and "revolution" are the concerns of LE7TERS. This 1979 novel, written over the course of almost a decade, fills the breach between Barth's 1967 meditation on the "literature of exhausted possibility" 45 and his 1980 reprise meditation on "The Literature of Replenishment." Like Piglia, Barth responds to the social dislocations of the seventies with his own version of epistolary exchange. In a 1979 interview, conducted shortly after the appearance of LEITERS, Barth refers to the sixties and early seventies, when he was teaching at riot-besieged SUNY Buffalo, as "a time when people could be forgiven for wondering whether a lot of institutions were falling apart." But his analysis of the "revolutionary" tumult of that time deliberately never goes beyond such platitudes. Indeed, Barth, in his distaste for things "political," tends to describe historical events, in the interview, with the combination of dryness and mild boosterism one might expect of a junior high school civics teacher.

But even if 1968 was the cultural watershed year - 1969 wraps up the decade Although the domestic explosions would continue for a couple of years; there was a genuine feeling that a lot ofthe uproar was winding down. And there was the happy detail that, although in 1969 no one had really begun to talk about our Bicentennial, the Bicentennial was in the wings.46

And in response to the interviewer's question about the possibility of reading LE7TERS in connection with the "uproar" of the time, he is quick to try to downplay any overt connection between his writing and social events.

I'm not at all comfortable about describing LETTERS as a commentary upon the counterculture of that period. The counterculture is there in the novel, but it's there because it figured in everyone's life at that time. 1 don't know how you could write a book set in 1969 and fail to acknowledge what went on.4?

Yet what "is there in the novel" must be reckoned with, conscientious objections notwithstanding, particularly since so much emphasis in the novel is self-consciously laid upon the concept of "revolution," and also because the events of the novel are set, just as in Piglia's novel, in two times of republican revolt separated by roughly a century and a half. Barth implies the almost synchronous continuity between eras of revolution when he states of the earlier period that "my interest in the War of 1812 did not derive so much from a historical novelist's interest in past

events as from the fact that, when it was going on, the war was frequently referred to as the 'Second American Revolution.''' 4M The strict parallelism of the novel-the dates of composition of all the letters in it fall either in the year 1812 or 1969 - suggests that the sixties, for Barth, should be invested with equivalent "revolutionary" significance.

The two most prominent ways in which Barth takes on the subject of sixties dissent throughout LEITERS are his depiction of the activism of a largely white student youth and his continual attempt to forge a harmonious view of history that will subsume student revolt, neutralizing its violent excess. Despite the fact that the mostly white collegestudent movement represented only one aspect of a variegated response to societal oppression at that time, one cannot fault Barth for failing to undertake a more broadly based assessment of dissent (resistance to the Vietnam War, the women's movement, black nationalism), any more than Piglia should be blamed for limiting his account of "artificial respiration" to a consideration of marginalized backwater intellectuals, scarcely mentioning the military dictatorship or topical political events. Piglia's success, in fact, derives from his ability to make the "irrelevant" conversations of his failed intellectuals suggestive of what Argentines as a whole experienced psychically and privately during the Process.

Likewise, one can only expect Barth's novel to succeed within the limits of the terrain it stakes out for itself-in this case, college-student activism (and the all-important parental restraint by an older generation) overlaid on the parallel activities of revolutionaries (and their parents and progeny, and their parents and progeny, et cetera) during the War of 1812. Barth intends for this juxtaposition to give depth and scope to his vision of violence and the human comedy, to explain and ultimately resolve, through the "Tragic View," the efficient causes of "revolution" and dissent. Though he seems to focus on a younger generation than the one Piglia's intellectuals belong to, the political guidepost of sanity he erects is in fact that of the older generation, composed of tragic-viewed Stock Liberals such as the lawyer and bourgeois gentilhomme, Todd Andrews, or the mistress to various renowned literati and the acting provost of Marshvhope State University, Lady Amherst. These characters are excessive in their personal (especially sexual) appetites but, in the end, happily complacent in their clubby moderation and relieved to renounce the follies of their salad years for a more wistful meat-and-potatoes discretion. They, and not the youthful activists, are the standard by which social harmony is ultimately judged. In fact, the chief significance of youthful dissent (a dissent crucial to Barth's enterprise) is to serve as a self-regulating demonstration of how youth is

doomed, in Barth's historical view, never to act on its own behalf, but always in loco parentis.

This "truth," which Barth's novel holds self-evident, appears in manifold guises throughout LETfERS, like the re-enactments of famous battles that vacationing Americans can witness in "historic" towns throughout the United States: each the same in significance and kind, differing only in locale. This "historical" undertaking is the terrain on which LEITERS fails. Barth's portrayal of Drew Mack, for instance, the novel's resident radical, in one of Todd Andrews's letters to the Author, lands squarely (and necessarily) in the category of caricature, its tone droll, jocular and satirical.

Having disappointed his parents in the first place by choosing Hopkins and Brandeis as his soul mothers rather than Princeton and Harvard, he now quite exasperates them by dropping his doctoral studies in '63 to assist in the Cambridge (Maryland) civil rights demonstrations-quite as his father had picketed his own father's pickle factories in the thirties. When the July 4th fireworks were canceled that year on account of the race riots, Harrison followed the family tradition of disowning his son, though not by formal legal action. Drew responded by promptly marrying one of his ex-classmates, a black girl from Cambridge.t?

All of the actions of this exceedingly tame "revolutionary" are mildly mocked, reduced to an intergenerational conflict between father and son. Dissent is a "family tradition." One is given to understand that his rebelliousness-marrying a black girl, joining demonstrations in a marshy backwater as peripheral as Piglia's Entre Rfos - remains restricted to the realm of psychosocial adjustment to familial expectations, and does not constitute a serious threat to society at large. Even his implied dynamiting of Andrews and two other characters at the novel's end represents the random, isolated action of a malcontent (as defined by the Tragic View), devoid of any larger resonance. Here, the choice of one Ivy League school over another (though a "disappointment" in the patrician familial context) and even the failure to finish one's doctoral studies, raise merely a smile rather than a ruckus.

Barth has expressed his awareness of this possible effect in saying he "wouldn't be surprised to learn that any true commune dweller or activist would find my portraits caricatures." He claims that "to some extent they are meant to be caricatures" and that they are not at "the center" of the novel. Yet this declaration shouldn't suggest that the overeducated dissenters are included in LEITERS as mere local color entertainment. Barth, who finds himself drawn to the genres and writ-

ing styles of the eighteenth century, uses caricature, much as do Swift and Sterne, to critique the revolutionary tendencies threatening the skeptical middle way. His lampooning of activist intellectuals in LETTERS deliberately recapitulates one of the commonest myths about them. Since Barth's conception of history is largely predicated on using broad comedy to smooth out the rough complexities ofthe even-broader social questions he raises, his deliberate political misapprehension (of Drew, for instance) calls into question the validity of his entire view of history.

In his "Revolt of the Young Intelligentsia" (1971), Richard Flacks (one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society) tries to rectify the simplistic notion that sixties campus turmoil and defiance of authority expressed mere "generational conflict" of the Drew Mack variety, and that it was limited to a handful of malcontents. He says that "emphasis on the youth problem and generational revolt obscures the more fundamental sources of the growing antiauthoritarianism among white youth in America." 50 Flacks calls attention to the fact that "student activists are overwhelmingly from affluent backgrounds," professional families in particular, and that in their skepticism about "the selfdenying, competitive, status-oriented individualism of bourgeois culture," these intellectuals more or less resembled their parents. Unlike Barth, he sees dissent as genuine, serious, and as a mark of inrergenerational solidarity, not as a mere phase to be outgrown, a puerile attempt to deny the conformist and complaisant truer self supposedly residing in oneself and in one's parents.

Flacks's view is echoed in Kenneth Keniston's Young Radicals, a thoroughgoing study of the sociological traits of a group of activists participating in a social program called Vietnam Summer in 1967. In his admonition about cultural reductionism, he easily could be speaking directly to Barth: "Popular stereotypes confuse the politically pessimistic and socially alienated student with the politically hopeful and socially committed activist." His description of "the protest-prone personality," based on his research with the Vietnam Summer volunteers, is strikingly similar to that of Flacks. "Student activists come from families with liberal political values; a disproportionate number report that their parents hold views essentially similar to their own, and accept or support their activities." Many of the parents, he says, are liberal Democrats, pacifists or socialists. 51 Keniston finds the majority of these activists explicitly not engaged in generational revolt, but instead "living out expressed but unimplemented parental values." �2

I don't suggest that Barth necessarily need endorse the thesis that

student activists ultimately broke with the tradition of American liberalism, in order for his novel to qualify as substantively historical in its representation of democracy and revolution. In Being Free (1970), Gibson Winter suggests that the New Left have incorrectly been "criticized for an almost nihilistic attitude toward contemporary society," and that their failure as an instance of radicalism has much more to do, in fact, with their excessively strong continuities with the tradition of liberalism.

[Tlhe New Left limit their negation to the anti-democracy of the American techno-society The New Left took America's democratic values to heart They are thoroughgoing moralists. They want America to be consistent-to realize the promise of a democratic society the New Left carry the American ethos of achievement and the technological will to the nth degree.53

As part of his evidence, Winter quotes in the appendix portions of SDS's influential manifesto, The Port Huron Statement, which rings with the freedom rhetoric of the founding fathers. "The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influences over the circumstances of his life." Or: "As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that the society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.I" These are tenets of constitutional democracy, updated with a passion.

Whatever position one may take about radicalism, Winter's appraisal has two distinct advantages over Barth's: first, it does not represent American history as a very long and tiresome family quarrel, a human comedy scripted as situation comedy; second, it does not assume capitalD Democracy to be a self-evident, self-explanatory value. If anything, Winter's critique of the New Left's failures calls into question (as Piglia's novel does for Argentina) the origin, guiding structures and supposed consistency of democracy and democratic values.

The irony of LETTERS is that the materials for making a reasonably compelling and historically-based indictment of radicalism (which seems to be Barth's fervent wish) are amply there in the novel, with its profusion of researched detail about various attempts at "revolution" in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would scarcely have stretched Barth's imagination further to recast his epic familial drama of

ideological continuity as a social drama of radicalism redux. In fact, it is an absolute tour de force on his part to have pulled together such a wealth of historical material and still to have produced a tome so utterly devoid of historical nuance. But so profound is Barth's distaste for radicalism, and so strong his dedication to the via media, that he prefers to sacrifice a complex view of history altogether, rather than having to indict Democracy. The alternative vision of "history" he offers remains contingent, as I have said, on first reducing radical politics to way-out shenanigans and crazy college capers.

The narrative of LEITERS counters the disaffection of the sixties with its immoderate caricature and its measured tone. In the aforementioned reductive portrait of Drew Mack, the lineaments of Barth's temperate concept of "revolution" begin to emerge. In his gloss on the notion of a "Second American Revolution," Barth cites Marx's "famous observation that important events in history tend to occur twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.?" In concurring with such a reading of history, Barth, though avowedly unengaged with the dissent of the "Second American Revolution" in the sixties, nonetheless participates, like Piglia's "unengaged" intellectuals, in the elaboration of his own counter-version of a utopian desire to make the present habitable. In the case of LEITERS, he does so by trying to enact the present (the farcical "second time" of historical events) as a conservative, conservational tJia media between other, unacceptably radical versions of utopia, which are for Barth dystopian. In "Revolution, Liberation, and Utopia," Paul Kress remarks that utopianism and the creation of dystopia remain equally "important to the development of contemporary myths of revolution and liberation," but that whereas utopia performs an explicitly affirmative function, the purpose of dystopia is to satirize. "There is," he says, "a profound affinity between satire and dystopia that bears directly on the concept of liberarion.?"

In the case of Barth's novel, the present as dystopia takes myriad forms, criticizing the excesses of violent revolt in its many guises. Not only do Drew and his cohorts range from naive to misguided to buffoonish, but one of the novel's seven letter-writers is Jerome Bray, a mad computer researcher-or possibly a large insect representing a "communal" colony of insects somewhere in Maryland-who is/are writing a revolutionary novel on a LILYVAC computer, in a new literary form called "numerature" which, or so he/they/it claims, will make literature obsolete. Bray has sworn revenge on various of the other letter-writers, whom he/it considers, for various reasons-phrasing it in Bray's computerese-supernumerary. One of Bray's letters of solidarity to

Drew, under the title of LlLYVAC'S LEAFY ANAGRAM," and addressed to "Comrade," begins by vowing

Death to jacobins, usurpers, anri-Bonaparrisrs. The King is dead; long live the 2nd Revolution. Beware Todd Andrews, agent of the pesticide cartel.

We last met in February at the funeral of H.R.H. your father •.. when you questioned us closely as to the practicality not to say the authenticity of LlLYVAC's Novel Revolutionary program for which you had twice loyally arranged support from the Tidewater Foundation.t?

Here, the specter of a blind, mindless, violent, amalgamated revolutionary urge might be frightening if it weren't rendered ludicrous by Barth's satirization of its rhetorical overload. The prospect of a humorless, Braying, LlLYVAC-generated "revolution" comes across as even more dystopian than Jerome Bray's paranoid imaginings about a "pesticide cartel." At every turn of the novel, moderation emerges as the only acceptable alternative to radical neurosis. Jacobins, anti-Bonapartists, activists, haters of the tragic-viewing Todd Andrews, and the various historical moments in which they participate, are all conflared satirically into a single, synchronic revolutionary force, irrevocably out of context and out of time-out of everything except steam.

The novel ends with an alphabetical wedding toast, taken from a sixteenth-century hornbook of wedding greetings, to celebrate the (imagined or "real") marriage of Ambrose and Lady Amherst, two of the letter-writers in LEITERS. The wedding takes place-Lady Amherst describes it with typical complacent irony, in a letter to the Author-as part of a patriotic film being made in which the British Lady Amherst plays the part of Britannia, and Ambrose the role of Francis Scott Key. The wedding march consists of a single patriotic tune sung as God Save the Queen by the "British" guests, and as My Country Tis of Thee by the Americans. Two lyrics, one tune, is Barth's happy contemporary synthesis to the revolutionary acrimony of yore. "Finally, to symbolise the birth of a nation truly independent of both Britain and France, the bridegroom Ambrose/Key will draft, and all hands sing, 'The StarSpangled Banner'l?" The wry tone in which Lady Amherst recounts these proceedings, the exclamation mark at the end, the selfconsciousness of frames within frames (i.e., a movie about a wedding, performed within a novel), are all supposed to lighten the heavy-handed patriotic synthesis. Instead, they offer, through a sly and complicitous wink, to define the history of "revolution" (in civics-textbook fashion), as a modestly modified and updated acceptance of the (essentially unquestionable) lessons of the past.

LEITERS accomplishes, to the letter, Barth's claim for it in his subtitle as an "Old Time Epistolary Novel." Barth employs the full repertoire of fictional techniques supplied by modernity to produce the ultimate antimodern novel. His epistolary novel disputes Alan Friedman's distinction between traditional novels and modern novels-not in the interest of questioning high modernism's ethical legacy (which Barth largely shares) but of coming down gloriously on the side of tradition. According to Friedman, the novel before the twentieth century embodied "the traditional [ethical] premise of a closed experience The novel traditionally rendered an expanding moral and emotional disturbance which promised all along to arrive, after its greatest climax, at an ending that would and could check that foregoing expansion." But the modern novel, in dispensing with endings, exposes its reader "to an essentially unlimited experience.?" Barth's novel outdoes the traditional novel's approach to moral closure in ending the novel before it has begun, in checking disturbance and expansion before they occur.

The via media marked out by LEITERS constitutes a version ofepistolarity. Apart from the specific content of each of the eighty-eight letters, LEITERS constructs its epistolary ethos-its Stock-Liberal, republicanminded, self-assured, out-of-ontological-doubt approach to both esthetic and historical questions through, appropriately, a system of checks and balances. The letters, wildly inventive and idiosyncratic as they are, work collectively toward a formal symmetry that replicates the measured quality of its narration. The novel itself is made in a design that involves the repetition of various series of numbers in certain patterns which determine everything from the dates of composition of the letters, the order in which the writers write, the number of sections of the novel, to, within the narrative, the course of seemingly innumerable, yet carefully numbered, events-i.e., Ambrose Mensch's affair with Lady Amherst is meant to have seven stages, which correspond to the seven letters in the title, LEITERS, and to a host of other sevens in the novel. Ambrose, for instance, describes a previous affair as "all those seven and sevenths seen together, in an instant on the 7th stroke of the 6th stage of the 6th lovemaking, etc., etc.1I6O In game-like fashion, everything "works out." Likewise, the exchanges of letters attempt to achieve, in their totality, a similar kind of balance, substituting the satisfaction of complex formal symmetry for the resolution of social conflict, advocating the balance achieved through formal play in this "Old Time Epistolary Novel" as a desirable "old time" conservative utopia. Barth defines "the book's true subject, stated simply" as "Reenactment, Recycling, or Revolution-the last in a metaphorical sense rather than a political sense.'?' Stating

Barth's project in anagrammatic terms, one could say that the epistolaritv of LEITERS consists in transposing the conversational into the conservational. The letters in their conglomerate mute the extrernest expressions of liberation and utopian desire.

I don't mean to suggest here that formal play and the game'like quality of narration necessarily result in this sort of neutralizing negation. More purely "esthetic" and formalist writing of this kind may have (or come to have) a quite provocative and suggestive relationship to discourses of power. But in the case of LEITERS, as I have tried to delineate, Barth's narrative works assiduously through artifice toward an ultimately uncritical affirmation of the liberal-republican ideal. Barth and Piglia take inverse approaches to reappropriating the epistolary novel, and the disparities in those approaches cannot be reconciled so easily as such questions usually are for Barth's characters. Unlike Piglia's prose, in which representations of social and political conflict are highly oblique, yet suggestive, Barth's LEITERS make large and relatively unambiguous claims about history and politics. The letters express an unexamined belief in self-sufficiency, unhampered economic and social progress, et cetera. The relationship of the letters to one another within the novel's structure of artifice serves to reinforce the "natural" appeal of complacent liberalism.

Jerome Bray's diatribe to Drew, for instance, is directly preceded by one of the letters of Andrew Cook IV to his unborn child. Cook, a participant in the War of 1812, plays a role requiring multiple duplicities to various factions, such that his identity remains unclear to those connected with him. Like Ossorio, his Argentine counterpart in Piglia's novel, Barth's Cook is a traitor and double agent. But unlike Ossorio, his letters ultimately endorse republicanism, by helping to construct the liberal fiction of the democratic middle way. His dissolving, "indeterminate" identity remains, in this sense, solidly unitary, out of doubt. He writes at the very end of this letter to his child that

You will be born into a war: I think no one can now prevent it. I must hope (& try with my life) that no one will "win" it, or all is lost. Andree & I are pledged now neither to the British nor to the"Americans"nor, finally, to the Indians - but to division of the large & strong who would exploit the less large, less strong. Thus we are anti-Bonapartists, but not pro-Bourbon; thus, for the nonce, pro-British, but no longer anri-"American." No hope or point now in destroying the United States; but they must be checkt, con. tain'd, divided, lest like Gargantua's their mad growth do the destroying. May this be your work too, when your time comes. Farewell. Do not restart

that old reciprocating engine, our history; do not rebel against the me who am rebelling against myself 61

The system of checks and balances prevails here. The more Cook denies his allegiance to any faction, the more he thereby affirms his allegiance to the besieged ideal of liberal republicanism. His goal is to preserve these United States as an efficiently functioning state. And the closing lines of his letter serve as a check on the Jerome Bray rhetoric ("Death to Jacobins long live the 2nd Revolution") which directly succeeds them on the same page. Barth's novel-filled with repetitions, recurrences, interlacings, interweavings, juxtapositions which "resolve" conflict through the rhetorical reconciliation of opposites-sustains a Point/Counterpoint view of history-two distinct sides to every issue, each of which has something to be said for it and against it-and its eschewal of radical (and, of course, reactionary) perspectives is relentless. But rather than investigate the dialectical tensions and contradictions that underlie the troubled concept of republicanism (Reason, Tolerance, Law, Democracy, Humanism and their antitheses), Barth's narrative employs counterpoint, as in music, to reinforce the sensation of a harmonic, harmonious relationship between and among its paradoxes. Barth, like Todd Andrews, is a "connoisseur" of those paradoxes.

It is this implausible attempt to substitute sheer formalism - the elegant turns of an epistolary conversation-for a more considered inquiry into the social transformations it so conspicuously alludes to, that makes Barth's New American Resolution so unsatisfactory. Gerald Graff has observed that "what makes Barth's narratives hang together is not a vision of historical change but a structure of repeating motifs. For a novel with so much history in it, LE1TERS is oddly unhistorical." One need not precisely agree with Graff's broader exhortation for a continuance of the ideals of high modernism, to concur with his disenchantment with a novel like LE1TERS, which makes grand and overt historical claims, yet is ordered and powered chiefly by repetition, recurrence, and re-enactment."

In explaining to interviewer Reilly why he turned to the epistolary form, Barth speaks a phrase that calls to mind Piglia's "artificial respiration." "The epistolary novel," says Barth, "the form that established the novel as the most popular form of literature, was also the first novelistic form to die I regarded it as part of my literary function to administer a kind of artificial resuscitation to this apparently exhausted form.tt64 But if such a resuscitation is to surpass its own artificiality, and reprise as a compelling form of literary endeavor, then it must go beyond its artifice

and artfulness to the extent of wrestling acutely with the historical questions it raises. There is, as Barth himself suggests in his essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," no intrinsic necessity for the novel as a form to endure, much less a genre of it such as the epistolary novel. Its perceived necessity arises out of its vital engagement with its time.

1. Beatriz Sarlo, "El campo intelectual: Un espacio doblemente fracturado," Represian y reconsrruccion de una cultura: El caso Argentino, ed. Saul Sosnowski (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1988), p. 101.

2. Osvaldo Bayer, "Pequeno recordatorio para un pals sin memoria," Represian y reconsrruccon de una cultura: El caso Argentino, pp. 205-06.

3. Sarlo, p. 104.

4. Tomas Eloy Martinez, "El lenguaje de la inexistencia," Represian y reconstruccian de una cultura: El caso Argentino, pp. 187-88.

5. Sarlo, p. 101.

6. Having the name Martinez would be much like having the name Smith in the U.S. Even though it is his actual name, the use of this surname, especially without the maternal surname, would provide a degree of anonymity.

7. Martinez, p. 189.

8. Sarlo, p. 106.

9. Janet Gurkins Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1982), p. 211. Three articles on contemporary epistolary fiction, by Carolyn Williams, Linda Kauffman and Alicia Borinskv, do appear in Elizabeth Goldsmith's collection Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989). See also Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980).

10. Ernesto Sabato and Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, were two notable writers permitted and encouraged to express themselves "freely," as part of a consciously crafted and sometimes ostentatious display of the society's "openness."

11. Ricardo Piglia, Respiracian artificial (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1988 (1980)), p. 38.

12. Martinez, pp. 191-92.

13. Piglia, p. 39.

14. Ibid., p. 40.

15. Ibid., pp. 43-47.

16. Altman, pp. 128-29.

17. Piglia, p. 94.

18. Ibid., p. 97.

19. Ibid., p. 102.

20. Juan Francisco Guevara, Argentina y su sombra (Buenos Aires: Edicion del Autor, 1970), p. 19.

21. Ibid, pp. 19-22.

22. Guevara, pp. 19-22.

23. Piglia, pp. 103-04.

24. Sarlo, "Politica, ideologia y figuracion literaria," p. 32.

25. Piglia, p. 124.

26. Ibid., pp. 124-26.

27. Daniel Balderston, "EI significado larente en Ricardo Piglia y Luis Gusman," Ficci6n y politica: La narratitla Argentina durante el proceso militar (Buenos Aires: Alianza, 1987), p, 113.

28. Jorge Lafforgue, "La narrativa Argentina, 1975-84," in Represi6n y reconstrucci6n de una cultum, El caso Argentino, pp. 157-58.

29. For more on the relationship of Tardewski and Respiraci6n artificial to translation, cultural obliteration, and Central European writing, see my essay "Translating the Unspeakable" in Open Magazine (Westfield, NJ), #5, Summer 1990.

30. Piglia, pp. 227-28.

31. Ibid., p. 229.

32. Martinez, pp. 190-91.

33. Hannah Arendt, Introduction, Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 3.

34. Piglia, p. 233.

35. Illuminations, p. 4.

36. Piglia's idea of plagiarism and the status of the intellectual in Argentina also has marked affinities with Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," which I do not examine here.

37. Illuminations, p. 59.

38. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gersham Scholem, ed. Gersham Scholem (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), Letter 32, p. 74.

39. Santiago Kovadloff, Argentina, oscuro pais (Buenos Aires: Torres Aguero, 1983), pp. 17-18.

40. Illuminations, p. 60.

41. Ibid., p. 60.

42. John Barth, LETTERS (New York: Putnam, 1979), pp. 88-89.

43. Ibid., p. 89.

44. In interviews, Barth had baldly professed his allegiance to the Tragic View.

45. John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," the Atlantic, Vol. 220, No.2 (August 1967); reprinted in Surfiction, ed. Raymond Federman (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1981), p. 220.

46. Charlie Reilly, "An Interview with John Barth," Contemporary Literature, XXII: 1 (Winter 1981), p. 15.

204

47. Ibid., p. 16.

48. Ibid., p. 10.

49. Barth, p. 87.

50. Richard Flacks, "Revolt of the Young Intelligentsia: Revolutionary ClassConsciousness in a Post-Scarcity America," The New American Revolution, ed. Roderick Aya and Norman Miller (New York: Free Press, 1971), p. 223.

51. Kenneth Keniston, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 304-06.

52. Ibid., p. 309.

53. Gibson Winter, Being Free (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 85-87.

54. Quoted in Winter, pp. 150-51.

55. Reilly, p. 10.

56. Paul Kress, "Revolution, Liberation, and Utopia," in Flacks, op. cit., pp. 312-13.

57. Barth, p. 324.

58. Ibid., p. 674.

59. Alan Friedman, The Tum of the Nooel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. xi-xiii.

60. Barth, p. 765.

61. Reilly, p. 10.

62. Barth, p. 324.

63. Gerald Graff, "Under Our Belt and OffOur Back: Barth's LEITERS and Postmodern Fiction," TriQuarterly #52 (Fall 1981), pp. 160-61.

64. Reilly, p. 5.

The Bomb and the Baby Boom

Terrence Holt

On July 16, 1945, George C. Harrison sent a telegram to Secretary of War Henry Stimson at Potsdam, announcing the success of the Trinity test. The message read:

Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold and 1 could have heard his screams from here to my farm. 1

Six weeks later, the Enola Gay departed the island of Tinian in the Pacific for its drop point over Hiroshima. The atomic bomb it carried had been given a name. Its name was "Little Boy."

The name given to the first atomic weapon has become so deeply entrenched in the mythology of the bomb that we seem no longer to attend to it. But the reverberating cry so loud and explicit to Harrison still echoes in a large and disturbing undercurrent in our attitudes, not only toward the bomb, but toward ourselves as its potential victims. And the bomb as infant is only half the story. This figure's mirror image was also a persistent fantasy of this era: in these years, babies were also imagined as weapons. An article appearing in Life magazine the week before Pearl Harbor cites a "baby war against Hitler the U.S. baby boom is bad news for Hitler," it exults.' Later in the postwar period, General Curtis Le May compares a nuclear bomb before its drop to a "baby clinging as a fierce child against its mother's belly."} The association of bombs and babies should not be surprising, given the simultaneous appearance not only of the bomb, but of that other offspring of World War II, the population explosion known as the baby boom. As the population of the United States took the most dramatic

upward turn in its history, the postwar period seized this figure to speak of its rising birthrate as imminent explosion, as population bomb.' This imaginative coupling, in which babies and bombs seem to function interchangeably, persists because the linkage has roots deeper than mere ironic military rhetoric: it articulates an imaginary pattern of cause and effect in which the potential victims of nuclear weapons, the babies of the boom, are made to seem responsible for their plight.' Ultimately, as I will argue, this particular equation of babies with the bomb suggests that the nuclear standoff of the past forty years has answered needs in our culture that we are unwilling to admit, and may be incapable of giving up.

Frances Ferguson has observed that "the nuclear sublime operates much like most other versions of the sublime, in that it imagines freedom to be threatened by a power that is consistently mislocated." The most striking feature of our imaginative relationship with nuclear weapons, however, is precisely where we mislocate that power. As coded in Harrison's telegram, and as Spencer R. Weart has described, nuclear power has long been associated with sexuality. For instance, ionizing radiation, probably from its observable effects on heredity, is persistently linked with procreative powers and libidinal excess.i Similarly, the onset of the Cold War, with its threat of nuclear destruction, was answered at home by attempts to domesticate a liberated female sexuality of which the Bomb seemed the apotheosis." And, as numerous feminist scholars have described, the machines of nuclear destruction tend to be imagined as projections of phallic power. 'I All of these associations have been important in the discourse of nuclear warfare as it has been conducted in the popular imagination, but the association of nuclear weaponry with children has not received similar attention. This particular strain in the popular imagination contradicts some of the more sentimental constructions of nuclear imagery, which argue that nuclear warfare is opposed by innate human drives to protect our offspring. 10 On the contrary, the association of bombs with babies suggests that the nuclear threat answers powerful needs to deny our reproductive potential. We associate nuclear weaponry with children to provide an occasion and a justification for a nuclear holocaust that we not only fear but desire.

The association of babies with the bomb apparently begins as a way of managing the guilt felt by the generation that made the bomb. Unable to accept their guilt, they identify their children with the bomb in order to hold them responsible for it. Imagined as the responsible parties, these children deserve to become its victims. In addition to providing a scape-

goat, this identification naturalizes the bomb, making it seem as natural- and its use as inevitable - as childbirth. With an economy of gesture typical of the unconscious, the conflation of bomb and baby simultaneously does away with guilt and obfuscates the element of individual responsibility for the production and use of nuclear weapons. But in the choice of babies as metaphor there is not only a wish to avoid guilt and deny responsibility; there is also an element of desire. The sexualization implicit in this trope has its source in anxieties about mortality, anxieties that focus on reproduction because it intimates our mortality so strongly: anxieties that find their consolation in an unassuageable desire to inflict what we cannot avoid.

The most direct expressions of this otherwise unspeakable desire appear not in the literary mainstream but in pulp science-fiction stories and film (where perhaps the unspeakable can slip its repression safely because there no one takes it seriously). The linkage between the bomb and children appears most strikingly, for instance, in the stories chosen through a poll of the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America, taken in 1967-68 to select the "greatest science fiction stories of all time,"!' The twenty-six works selected fall almost equally into the preand post-Hiroshima periods: eleven carry copyright dates of 1945 or earlier; the remaining fifteen are copyright 1948 or later. Of the prebomb stories, only three (Joseph W. Campbell's "Twilight," Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall") express any anxiety about the survival of the human race, but twelve of the fifteen postwar stories deal with the bomb explicitly or otherwise figure the death of a world." This change would not be remarkable except that a similar shift occurs in these stories' treatment of children. Before 1945, only two stories are concerned with children." After 1945, fully twothirds of the stories deal centrally with children or figures representing them. Nor is this parallel shift in subject matter a coincidence: in almost every case, the children of these postwar stories are associated with a technology or an elemental force that has escaped adult control and threatens the adults with extinction. That such technologies stand for atomic weapons becomes clear in those stories that use mutation as a convenient mechanism to associate children with the bomb. As victims of somatic mutation caused by radiation, children in these stories are marked as children of the bomb." The typical case is Judith Merrill's 1948 story, "That Only a Mother." Set

in a 1953 in which atomic warfare has become a daily menace, Merrill's story describes the homecoming of Hank to his young wife Margaret after the birth of their first child, Henrietta. As seen through Margaret's doting eyes, the child appears at birth to be normal; soon, however, she begins to display an astonishing intelligence. By the time Hank returns from his defense-related job, Henrietta, age ten months, has the intellect of an adult. We learn in the story's last paragraph, however, that this alarming gift has come at a price: the child has neither arms nor legs. She is shaped like the bomb itself.

The story's explicit moral figures Henrietta's mutation as a punishment for sin. Hank is a bomb designer; during the last war, he worked at Oak Ridge. As a father of the bomb, Hank's sins have been made visible in the grotesquely mutated body of his daughter. But while the story acknowledges Hank's paternal responsibility through a variety of means (the similarity of Hank's and Henrietta's names, for instance), it also seeks to confuse the issue. The implicit accusation in Henrietta's mutation is so disturbing that the story mislocates her paternity. Hank reacts to Henrietta as if she were the child of another man, the one that in her unnatural braininess ("brain-child," her mother calls her) she takes after: the bomb. In one sense, the story is the classic postwar cuckold joke: the soldier comes home from war and finds his wife has given birth to a child that does not look like him. And Hank reacts as cuckolds stereotypically do (or as sociobiologists tells us they do): the story closes as his fingers tighten around the baby's neck.

Hank's response follows the familiar logic of scapegoating: punish the victim, a logic that depends on making the victim seem deserving of punishment. (We can see this logic at work elsewhere in Merrill's story, where Japan is imagined as the scene of unrestrained infanticide: the historical victims of the bomb become the chief slaughterers of innocence.) By taking the form of Hank's sin, Henrietta fulfills that requirement, as does a range of mutant children in later stories, which invest them with hideous bodies, superior mental powers or brutal, irrational rage against their parents. Yet the distorted form of Henrietta's body suggests that Hank's reaction to his daughter is more complex than simple rejection: it is powerfully ambivalent. Henrietta's shape-the elongated, featureless torso, topped by the constricted neck and swollen head-outlines more than just the bomb itself. When Hank grapples with that form, he is not only choking his child, he is clutching a symbol of the phallic power so often attributed to the bomb, indulging in the same wishful reassurance that Freud sees underlying other moments of counterphobic defiance. IS Henrietta demonstrates a crucial point about

this additional mislocation of nuclear power: the bomb is not merely feared, but desired, as a (wishfully male) sign of power, as a fetish brandished in the face of our powerlessness. The bomb has often been characterized as unspeakable, but Hank's reaction suggests that it is not horror that silences us: it is our ambivalence that is paralyzing.

Henrietta is not a product of the bomb alone-like all children, she is also a product of desire, the sign that makes that desire so awkwardly visible. But in this story, as in culture, that revelation retains a crucial ambiguity. The baby flaunts adult desire, and is set up this way on purpose: the mutation of the child's body announces the adult generation's absolute power over that child, the power to create, to shape and ultimately (in the response it elicits from Hank) to destroy. Yet, by figuring the baby as the bomb's mutant child, we also attempt to conceal our responsibility for producing this monstrous birth. In this tease of revelation and concealment (like the fail-safe strategies of total nuclear war, which depend on the denial of individual agency even as they require the maximum display of threat), both the concealment and the revelation-our virtuous horror and our obsessive discussion of the bomb-are necessary, enabling tactics. If we neglect either, the structure of mutual assured destruction totters. But we are unlikely to refuse our part in the play, both because our own position in it is masked from us by denial, and because we cannot imagine any way out.

Richard Matheson's 1950 story, "Born of Man and Woman," engages in just such an ambiguous display, demonstrating some of the mechanisms implicating us in the nuclear dilemma. The title asserts a parentage, but asserts it in order to deny: another mutant, the child identified by the title is yet another putative child of the bomb. This slimy, misshapen, powerful creature is kept chained by its parents in a sealed room, from which it continually tries to escape. After each attempt, it is beaten and chained more tightly, while its mother laments (in the classic formula of scapegoating), "Why have you done this to me?" As the beatings become more savage and the chains tighten, the child becomes enraged. "I have a bad anger with mother and father," it concludes. "I will show them. I will do what I did that once If they try to beat me again I'll hurt them. I will." In promising to hurt his parents, the child promises no more than what the parents have done to him: parent and child mirror each other in their violence, suggesting that what we fear in the bomb is only a distorted image of ourselves.

The story acknowledges this mirroring through a self-reflexiveness that comments on its own implication in this drama of projection and denial. The parents' greatest fear about the child's attempts to escape is

that the neighbors might see. Whatever the parents' feelings on this subject, however, for the story itself the point is plainly that they (or we) should see-the basic tactic of the strategy of nuclear deterrence, in which the display of a nation's possession of the bomb stands in the place of its use. The tension between concealment and revelation takes on a new meaning in the child's final threat, where "show" means both "reveal" and "punish" - "I'll show them." Both meanings are implicit in the passage's historical allusion: if the child stands for the bomb, then "what I did that once" is the previous "showing" of the bomb's power, its use on Japan. The strategy says that since we used it once, we no longer have to use it again-the display is sufficient. But this story exposes another logic as well. In its obsessive focus on the child, the story exposes its own desire not just to display but also to "show" -to use the bomb again as we did "that once."16

In a ritual of mutual punishment and justification, the child provides the parents with the opportunity to punish it, and the child in turn threatens to punish the parents. Both are punished, because both are guilty. And we, as audience, participate in the punishment as well, as victim through our identification with either the child or the parents he promises to "show"-and as punisher through our identification with parents, child and the implied narrator "showing" these events. Matheson's story, by speaking from so many positions, and reducing all of them to their common desire to "show," points to our own desires for such a display even as it demonstrates the tactics of denial that make such wishes tolerable. By locating its display of power in a locked room, the story does not merely show us what goes on in there: while locking the room suggests that we, like the characters within, are trapped in a drama of mutual assured destruction, as readers we are in fact free to leave this particular locked room whenever we wish. The story localizes what is actually a pervasive and inescapable prison. And the point ofthe story is that we do not really want to leave anyway: the story compels us to read it, to follow its logic, but as readers we are complicit in that compulsion. In that room, we are not merely witness to, we enjoy the power to mutate, to beat and chain, to "show": the power we have achieved to destroy ourselves, and the strategies we use to allow us to do it. The point of the story, as in all exercises of power, especially the power latent in the bomb, is to draw attention to that power, to set it up as if it were an independent agency, and, hence, as something for which we are not responsible, something we might be able to escape. Yet, by eliciting our enjoyment, by enlisting us through our spectatorship as

willing participants, the story also implicates us within the structure of power relations that needs the bomb to uphold itself.'?

One function children serve in this process is part of a larger tactics of naturalization, whereby the destructive impulse manifested in the bomb is made to seem not human but part of the world itself. A child allows Thomas Pvnchon to naturalize the end of Gravity's Rainbow-and, by implication, of the world-when Weissman places a young boy aboard a V-2 and launches it toward London. Yoking the child with the missile's warhead does not make the child the villain, however (as is the case in earlier texts); as the object of Weissman's desire, the boy is simply the vehicle for the sexualization of violence implicit in the novel's homosocial quest for the phallic missile. The desire underlying the narrative is so strong that such villains are no longer necessary: the novel's interest is not ultimately the boy at all, it is the missile itself-or, more precisely (as the novel's title suggests), the missile's ballistic trajectory, the explosion waiting like a pot of gold - or an orgasm - at its end. But this sexualization is not itself the secret that the narrative pretends to hide; sex is, like the use of the child, only another ruse that allows the novel to naturalize, in order finally to enjoy, a desire that is not sexual but destructive. Slothrop's erections, which seemingly call the missile from the sky, make the missile's fall the natural child of Slothrop's casual sexual encounters: apocalypse becomes as natural as a roll in the hay, or the fall of an apple from Newton's tree. What it explicitly is not, the novel insists as all individual agencies and agents dissolve into an undifferentiated entropic stew, is anybody's fault. By blaming thermodynamics, the novel not only shifts attention away from its own desire, but also raises that destructive impulse to the status of an elemental force - one so large that in the novel's last, fragmentary line, "All together now-" it expands to embrace the entire world.

In Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953), children provide a similar screen for a desire that becomes explicitly apocalyptic. Hiding behind its attempts to evade responsibility for this desire is an equally powerful wish to be the agent of apocalypse. In Clarke's novel, the structure of evasion involves a race of aliens that intervenes in human history to prevent atomic war. But this intervention simply relocates the familiar mislocation: under the aliens' tutelage, it is children - all of the children in the world - who obliterate Earth. The narrative tries to view this destruction as merely a side effect of an otherwise benign evolutionary process, but actually remains typically ambivalent about it. And here, as in Matheson's story, ambivalence screens a single-minded wish for destruction. Although the narrative persistently points out that the

aliens have saved the human race from itself, it also laments that in doing so they have also prevented us from reaching our potential. The novel figures this potential tellinglv in terms of the space race, which both Clarke and history remind us was a competition to make total nuclear war technologically feasible. In both its approval of the alien intervention, and in its regret for the lost possibilities of human history, the novel expresses the same wish - to bring about the end of the world.

But although this ambivalence may be disingenuous, it does point to one of the most important features of apocalyptic fantasy. The dedication page of the book carries an odd warning that the author is "not responsible" for the opinions expressed within. This seems at first only a part of the novel's pervasive structure of mystification, which offers its narrative not as fiction but as a channel for some supernatural Truth, but this denial of responsibility is itself not the whole story. The narrative finds the aliens' version of the end of the world unsatisfactory because it takes that end out of human hands: it is important not merely that the end come, but that we bring it about. Clarke's novel suggests this in its climactic scenes, which go to great lengths to provide one adult witness to Earth's destruction. As the world vanishes, this witness reports: "-oh, this is hard to describe, but just then 1 felt a great wave of emotion sweep over me. It wasn't joy or sorrow; it was a sense of fulfillment, achievernentJ'" The desire fulfilled by Clarke's narrator is no different from that acted out in Matheson's locked room: the desire to show, in a context that barely revises Revelation, the end of the world. In its claim to offer something more than fiction, and in the desire that overwhelms the narrator of that revelation, Childhood's End reminds us that apocalyptic prophecy is always more than simple showing-as a narrative mode, prophecy seeks urgently not only to report but to fulfill its account. By adopting this prophetic stance, and by insisting on an individual narrator as the channel of its prophecy, the narrative seeks to gain control over these events, to be not merely their passive victim but their agent. 19

The wish for individual agency, finally, helps us to understand just how persistent and widespread are the desires that have driven the nuclear-arms race. The inescapability of the problem is the theme of Russell Hoban's 1981 novel, Riddley Walker. Set hundreds of years after nuclear war in a primitive England still struggling to reconstruct its lost technological civilization, the novel tells the story of another child, Riddley Walker, on the day he becomes a man. From the day his father dies in an accident that is Riddley's fault, Riddlev's adventures lead him through an extraordinary chain of cause and effect to the rediscovery of

gunpowder, which the novel figures as itself only one step toward the ultimate goal of the recovery of the secret of nuclear explosives. In the service of this goal, Hoban not only naturalizes the bomb by identifying it with a child, but invokes a larger structure of scientific and religious mystification to make the return of the bomb seem historically inevitable. But the claim of inevitability only masks an even-stronger claim: that responsibility for the bomb is of a piece with the unwitting generational violence that launches the novel's quest. Riddley is doomed to carry the burden of the bomb just as his father was doomed to die before him. In coming into his own identity as an adult, Riddlev learns that gaining such an identity always involves its loss to the older generation: relations between generations are constituted in both gain and loss, growth and destruction; the advance of civilization is also the advance of violence.

As the desired object of the novel's quest, the bomb in Riddley Walker, as in the other stories we've considered, is associated with sexuality and childbirth: sex and death walk hand in hand with Riddley as his tutelary genii. As Riddley nears the central mysteries of the bomb, he gets the inevitable erection. The signs that guide him on his search include two neolithic fertility totems: an icon of female fertility and the sacrificial image of the Corn God. But the novel's emphasis on the primitive also suggests more: it links the bomb with historical process itself. "We bern once to bern again," the novel claims, insisting that the nuclear war that destroyed civilization is part of an endlessly repeating cycle. Riddley Walker offers a vision of history in which all stages of historical development, from the primitive fertility cults of the neolithic, to the Christian mysteries of Medieval Europe, to the scientific mysteries of the modern period, are repetitions of the same pattern of immanent violence. And that immanence of violence is naturalized in the most fundamental way imaginable, being attributed to the structure of matter itself. "It wants to be what it wants to be," the novel says of nuclear fission in a distorted rendition of quantum theory. The novel claims that all historical and biological processes merely repeat the fundamental urge to combine and destroy present at the level of the atomic nucleus.

All of these historical, biological and nuclear processes pivot on the figure of the child, but in this novel the child is himself placed ambiguously on the boundaries of adulthood, reminding us that most children grow up and become adults themselves: the attempt to scapegoat children must always rebound upon ourselves; guilt is ultimately inescapable. The novel ends with an image that illustrates the relationship of parent, child and the bomb. A Punch and Judy show is rehearsed

repeatedly in the novel. In the show, Punch eats his own baby and excretes it in the form of the bomb, which he then uses to destroy his enemy. Although he escapes prosecution for these crimes, Punch is dogged by "Drop John," an avenging spirit whose appearance represents Punch's guilt for both the infanticide and for using the bomb. The novel closes, however, with Riddley carrying the apparatus for the Punch and Judy show upon his back, in service of the adult character who has led the quest for the bomb-a character who has himself, in setting off the first explosion, killed his own father. Riddley's last words are that he, Riddley, has "Drop John" riding on his back, and that he "wouldn't have it any other way."20 In coming of age, Riddlev has taken on the older generation's guilt. He does so, finally, because that guilt belongs there: not because Riddlev, as child, is responsible, but because as an adult the parricide Riddlev has come into his own. He carries that burden willingly and wittingly: he "wouldn't have it any other way" because he knows that burden is his whether he wants it or not. The only choice left to him is to acknowledge it as his.

And as Riddley makes that crucial admission, so does Hoban's novel. In picking up the puppet theater, Riddley Walker has also taken on itself the novel's figure for its own theatricality - the religious, scientific and literary mystifications that obscure the novel's own involvement in what it shows. In doing so, it acknowledges that the text itself has hardly been innocent of the responsibility it sees lying everywhere in the world. The very thoroughness of its attempt to understand the immanence of apocalyptic desire has revealed its own prophetic urgency, for to see the world as desiring its own end is the ultimate scapegoating. In its final concentration on the puppet show, however, Riddley Walker returns responsibility to its proper location: to the puppeteering text itself, and by extension to us, the willing participants in its apocalyptic masque.

But the most important thing about that final unmasking is that it solves nothing: it comes too late to disentangle us from the novel's spell, and certainly it comes too late for Riddley and his world. "It's loose again," he says of the bomb in the novel's closing lines, recognizing that knowledge cannot be lost, only repressed, and the repressed always returns. And that, finally, is the point: there is no turning back for Riddley; neither is there for any of us. Riddley, like us, lives in a world bounded by certain conditions, and the choice before him is to recognize those conditions or to deny them. To seek scapegoats, to deny the responsibility he cannot escape, only increases the danger of that world. The only choice he has is to accept responsibility, and the only power he has is to "show," in the novel's own argot, the "connexions of things."

This is the only choice we have had since the creation of the bomb, our only power against ourselves in the conflict of our desires.

At the beginning of this piece, I wrote that the use of children as figures for the bomb contradicts the conventional sense of that relationship, our conscious and conscientious knowledge that nuclear war is bad, as the old slogan puts it, for children and other living things. But we have seen enough of the way ambivalence functions in this relationship to understand that my claim to the contrary is itself only half of the story. The whole story, as Riddley Walker suggests, and as we all know, when we are able to admit it, is that our relations with our children are ambivalent. It is not surprising, then, that we both protect them and threaten them. Not least among the benefits we gain from keeping our children in suspense this way is a continual affirmation of our own power as parents. One of the reasons we maintain this threat over our children is precisely in order to protect them from it, to assure ourselves (in the face of so much evidence to the contrary) that we are nurturers as well as destroyers.

Self-image is always involved in child-rearing, and our attitudes toward our children mirror our attitudes toward ourselves and the conditions that have shaped us. The most insurmountable of those conditions, the one we thrust most powerfully away from us and onto our children, is our own mortality. We dream of immortality more than anything else by having children, but children cannot fulfill that dream. Children promise our continuation, but in their resistance to that dream, in their obstinate refusals to be us and repeat our lives-their insistence on being themselves-children also figure our mortality. This is why relations between generations are always so strained, and why the strain has such a mortal energy behind it.

This strain is also at the heart of the attitude Julia Kristeva, in her Powers of Horror (1980), has called "abjection," the powerfully ambivalent response with which we contemplate those things that define us in our bodily mortalitv.i' One of the central figures for abjection is the body of the child, which in its separation from us announces the eventual disintegration of the body. And one of the central expressions of abjection in our culture, Kristeva concludes, is in fantasies of apocalypse, in which we imagine the disintegration of all bodies-mortal and politic-to be resolved.i But the crucial fact of abjection is that, because it is so intimately part of ourselves, it is impossible to resolve. Our ambivalence

about our children is our ambivalence about ourselves, our dissatisfaction with a life we cannot love completely because we will not have it long. The love and antagonism that have always obtained across generations merely write large the ambivalence we carry within ourselves.

The nuclear dilemma, Riddley Walker suggests, will not go away because it is not an aberration, merely a new expression of an old condition. All that is new is the power to reify the ambivalence that has always obtained between generations." Now that we have that power, we always will have it, even if the form it takes may change. In the creation of the atomic bomb, the human race crossed a watershed into a new territory, in which our ambivalence about ourselves becomes capable of drastic, final resolutions. And while we may be on the verge of new regions of that terrain, in which the threats we create for ourselves may be environmental rather than nuclear, born of excess population itself rather than nationalism or economic competition, it seems doubtful that this territory will ever be as safe for us as the old one was. We brought into it too much of our old selves, and until we cross another watershed too far and too high to see from here, I doubt we will put that old Adam entirely behind us. So long as we live here, the challenge before us is not to achieve an impossible resolution to our old ambivalences, but to ensure that they remain, for better or worse, unresolved.

1. Peter Wyden, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 223.

2. In Landon Y. Jones, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980), pp. 17-18. The baby boom to which the Life article refers was a (relatively) small increase in population growth rates that preceded America's entry into the war.

3. In Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 147.

4. For historical and statistical discussion of the baby boom, see Jones, pp. 11-78. For an overview of the (impressive) demographic statistics of the period, see Louise B. Russell, The Baby Boom Generation and the Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1982).

5. William Bunge, Nuclear War Atlas (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 157-68, cites the population explosion as one motivating force behind the use of nuclear weapons.

6. Frances Ferguson, "The Nuclear Sublime," Diacritics 14 (2: Summer 1984), pp. 4-10; the passage quoted appears on p. 9. For other recent theoretical work on nuclear issues see Peter Schwenger, "Writing the Unthinkable," Critical

Inquiry 13 (Autumn 1983), pp. 33-48; Jacques Derrida, "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," The Oxford Literary Ret'iew 6 (1984), pp. 3-37, and "No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)," Diacritics 14 (Summer 1984), pp. 20-31; Christopher Norris, "Against Postmodernism: Derrida, Kant and Nuclear Politics," Paragraph 9 (March 1987), pp. 1-30; David Shepheard, "Nuclear Strategy/Nuclear Poetics," Paragraph 9 (March 1987), pp. 31-48.

7. Weart, pp. 110-11. Although Weart recognizes the association of bombs with babies, his concentration on military discourse leads him to conclude (wrongly, I believe) that associations between nuclear weaponry and reproduction are rigorously repressed in the popular culture of the 1950's in order to avoid a conflict between "logic and feelings" (p. 151). Weart's reference to this unexamined body of"feelings" gestures uncritically toward a sentimental (and, I would argue, unfounded) conviction that our emotional bias is naturally against mass destruction.

8. See Gillian Brown, "Nuclear Domesticity: Sequence and Survival," Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 2 (1: Fall 1988), pp. 179-91, and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), pp. 92-113.

9. See, for instance, Helen Caldicott, Missile Entry: The Arms Race and Nuclear War (New York: Bantam, 1986), and Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 12 (4: 1987), pp. 687-718.

10. Cf. Weart, p. 151.

11. The results of the poll, and the stories selected, appear in Robert Silverberg, ed., The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (New York: Doubleday, 1970). The poll is described in Silverberg's introduction, pp. ix-xii. Stories from this volume are cited by page number parenthetically in the text.

12. The stories are: Judith Merrill, "That Only a Mother," discussed below as the paradigmatic case; Cordwainer Smith, "Scanners Live in Vain," in which lower forms of life are interposed as sacrificial victims to protect adults from an otherwise deadly technology; Ray Bradbury, "Mars is Heaven!," from The Martian Chronicles, which concerns the death not only of Mars and its inhabitants, but of Earth and its as well; C. M. Kornbluth, "The Little Black Bag," a Malthusian/social-Darwinist parable with implications of eventual genocide; Richard Matheson, "Born of Man and Woman," discussed below; Fritz Leiber, "Coming Attraction," about the decline of civilization after a nuclear war; James Blish, "Surface Tension," which starts with the extinction of human life on a planet; Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God," in which the consummation of a religious prophecy ends the universe; Jerome Bixby, "It's a Good Life," in which a mutant child destroys the earth by an act of will; Tom Godwin, "The Cold Equations," in which a plague threatens all human life on a planet; Damon Knight, "The Country of the Kind," an elegy for a past (implicitly pre-atomic) when violent behavior was safer to indulge; Roger Zelazny, "A

Rose for Ecclesiastes," which deals with the end of life on Mars through an epidemic of sterility.

13. Both Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Lewis Padgett's "Mimsv Were the Borogoves" are exceptions that prove the rule, linking children with the arms race that was soon to produce the bomb.

14. There are also mutants caused by other forms of scientific intervention, such as Charlie Gordon in Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon." Although the mechanism differs, the link with an explicitly Promethean science performs the same function.

15. Sigmund Freud, "Medusa's Head," in The Standard Edirion of rhe Complere Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), Vol. XVIII, pp. 273-74.

16. By exposing this wish for use, the story pushes at the limits of its own identity as representation, because stories are by definition only display; they can never be use. The distinction between display and use has been an object of contention in nuclear studies (as citation and use have been in critical theory in general) and in nuclear strategic planning as well, where that distinction lies at the foundation of the doctrine of deterrence. Materialist critics have argued that the bomb is the crucial example that explodes a skeptical criticism's belief in the primacy of language: since the bomb's effects would silence all language, such critics argue, it renders discourse irrelevant. This essay takes as one of its premises, however, that our attitudes toward the bomb, by mediating our perceptions and behavior, are ultimately responsible for whatever use we make of it. These attitudes are essentially matters of cultural discourse, where language and its forms can never be confidently distinguished from reality. For discussion see Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now

17. For the essential work on our implication within such systems of power, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). One objection raised to Foucault's paradigm of power relations is that, raised to the status of a totalizing system, it renders irrelevant questions of individual agency. Such an objection assumes, however, the possibility of an ultimate solution: an end to power or to nuclear weapons. As this essay goes on to argue, if one sets as a goal not the solution of such problems but simply the survival of (or within) them, then questions of individual responsibility not only remain, they become crucial.

18. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1953), p. 216.

19. Of the two strains of apocalyptic prophecy in European culture, the [ohannine and the [oachite, Clarke's narrative falls within the former, which predicts a coming apocalypse in the hope that prophecy brings about its own fulfillment. John's closing exhortation to "Come" brings his text to the limits of its discursive possibilities, closing on the word that describes its relation to the future as one ofboth expectation and command. For historical discussion of the two strains, and their influence on European history from the early Medieval

period to the English Reformation, see Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1957).

20. Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (New York: Summit, 1981), p. 206.

21. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

22. For a concise discussion of Revelation as resolution, see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 37-46. Abrams's discussion of the endurance of Biblical patterns in post-Enlightenment historical thought is apposite to much of my argument here.

23. Apocalypse as part of a larger pattern of generational anxiety is implicit in Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), which demonstrates that apocalyptic expectations long predate the arrival of the bomb's enabling machinery. Kermode introduces his discussion of the persistence of apocalyptic thinking in terms of Yeats's "dying generations." See especially pp. 3-31.

"Dawn Poems in Blood":

Sylvia Plath and PMS

Catherine Thompson

At the age of thirty, Sylvia Plath knelt before the open door of her kitchen oven, turned on the gas, and took her own life. The fact of her suicide has had the effect of validating her work as a poet and, at the same time, making that work suspect. Critical studies of Plath have used the poems to interpret the suicide and the suicide to interpret the poems, finding in Plath a powerful individual voice, but lamenting her subjective limitations and apparent lack of perspective. The enigma of Plath's psychology is usually explained in traditional psychoanalytic terms and attributed to the death of her father (when she was eight) and repressed hostility toward her mother. More recently, feminist critics have begun to focus on the cultural significance of Plath's work as an expression of the problems of the woman artist in a male-dominated society. However they see its source, critics seem to agree that Plath was in some way imprisoned in a self-limiting vision from which she was struggling to escape. The purpose of this essay is to offer a biochemical explanation for that imprisonment - an explanation which I believe is important to the understanding of Plath's psychology and the remarkable, compressed logic of her poems.

As an explanation for her sense of a deeply-divided self and the periodic experience of psychic death and rebirth, the "Electra-complex" hypothesis offered Plath by traditional psychology was, and is, finally inadequate. A close reading of her published poems, journals and letters indicates that she was almost certainly suffering from a severe form of the hormonal disorder now recognized as premenstrual syndrome, or PMS. In fact, she manifests all the classic symptoms of severe cases, including extreme depression and attempted suicide. Accurate medical knowledge of PMS has become available in the United States only in the

last ten years, and Plath herself could not have known that her psychological experience was the result of a hormonal condition. Yet the concerns of her work and the imagery of her poems suggest that she did have at least an intuitive understanding of the relationship between her fertility and her suffering. In her late poems, Plath becomes increasingly attentive to the metaphor of the moon as her controlling force. Metaphors for ovulation and menstrual blood are prevalent in her late work, and the thematic oscillation from suffering to rebirth in these poems appears to follow the phases of Plath's own menstrual cycle.

The popular perception of PMS as a minor hormonal disruption resulting in a few days of "the blues" or "bitchiness" preceding a woman's monthly menstrual period clearly does not apply to Plath. For the majority of women, the problem may be minor. But for five to ten percent of all menstruating women, symptoms can be severe enough to seriously disrupt their lives.' The difference in severity of symptoms is not the result of a particular woman's ability to cope, but dependent on the degree ofdisruption of the complex hormonal system which controls the female reproductive cycle. When this delicately balanced system is thrown out of harmony, the result is "an atonal cacophony. a Rabelaisian nightmare, a dissonance 'above the pitch, out of tune, and off the hinges.'"2 For women whose PMS begins at puberty, as appears to have been the case with Plath, the task of maintaining a consistent sense of well-being and establishing an integrated self can be extremely difficult. The severity of Plath's PMS-related depressions, and her attempts to use her intellect to overcome what is essentially a physiological condition, certainly had a major effect on her psychological development.

Of the more than 150 physical and psychological symptoms associated with PMS, the most common are irritability, anxiety, tension, mood swings, hostility and depression. The key to the diagnosis of PMS is the timing of symptoms, which may vary in severity, number and type from month to month, but which always occur in the second half, or luteal phase, of the menstrual cycle and remit immediately, or within a few days, after the onset of menses. Sylvia Plath's journals and letters to her mother} indicate that she suffered from all the major symptoms of PMS mentioned above and also had a symptom-free phase during each month. Other symptoms associated with PMS which seem to have affected Plath periodically include emotional overresponsiveness, unexplained crying, extreme anger, violent episodes, impaired concentration, confusion, withdrawal, indecisiveness, changes in sex drive, sensitivity to rejection, hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli, stimulus overload, nightmares, suspiciousness and suicidal ideation. Of the many physical

symptoms associated with PMS, Plath's journals and letters mention fatigue, sinusitis, rhinitis, insomnia, headaches, sore throats, increased need for sleep, nausea, vomiting, changes in appetite, clumsiness, backaches, cold sores, conjunctivitus, itchiness, ringing in the ears, diminished sense of hearing and smell, shakiness, feelings of suffocation, hot flashes and heart palpitations. The exacerbation of chronic conditions, such as Plath's sinusitis, and a lowered resistance to infections during the premenstruum are hallmarks of the condition.'

Women with serious PMS usually describe themselves as having a "Jekyll-Hyde" personality, feeling basically good-natured and happy during one part of the month, and depressed and "out of control" during another. They describe their lives as a continual "roller-coaster ride" of emotional ups and downs, with "two weeks of feeling on top of the world," followed by "two weeks of living hell." PMS women report feelings of "desperation" and a "need for withdrawal." Or, they describe themselves as "boiling with rage." The relief that comes with the appearance of the menses is like "a rebirth" or "a great cloud lifting."

The cyclical pattern of Plath's depressions is apparent in her journal entries which, in anyone month, may reveal dramatic changes of mood, moving from the depths of self-loathing despair to the heights of exuberant self-confidence, sometimes within a matter of a few days." The journals also provide numerous articulations of her "Jekyll-Hyde" condition. An undated entry from the summer of 1950, when Plath was seventeen, reads: "God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? of self-worship and self-loathing? of glory and disgust?" In a subsequent entry, she writes: "If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time" (), p. 15). During her freshman year at Smith College (1950-51), she concludes: "I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or 1 can go mad by richocheting in between" (J, p. 24).

Entries from Plath's college years show the coincidence of depression and physical symptoms. On October 17, 1951, she writes: "1 don't know why I should be so hideously gloomy Sinusitis plunges me in maniac depression. But at least the lower I go the sooner I'll reach bottom and start the upgrade again" (J, p. 39-40). During the summer of 1952, an episode of sinusitis, fatigue and depression caused Plath to quit her job as a waitress at a Cape Cod hotel. Then, a day later, a sudden recovery made her regret her decision: 223

July II, FTiday And then I began to understand the difference between death-or-sickness-in-life as versus life I wanted to withdraw from all the painful reminders of vitality - to hide away alone in a peaceful stagnant pool, and not be like a crippled stick entangled near the bank of a jubilantly roaring river, torn at continually by the noisy current •..• Then came the switch in attitude

(J, pp. 49-51)

One of the most universal features of PMS is the timing of increased severity of symptoms. Most women report a marked increase in symptoms following an interruption of the menstrual cycle, such as pregnancy, miscarriage or an episode of amenorrhea (absence of periods). Plath had a number of interruptions to her cycle which would have greatly exacerbated her symptoms once she began cycling again. Linda Wagner-Martin's biography notes that by the beginning of Plath's junior year at Smith College, "breaks of three to five months in her menstrual cycle were common." Wagner-Martin also observes that Plath's "seemingly inexplicable angers spoiled friendships, although the hallmark of her personality was cheery calm," and that "the symptoms of Sylvia's growing anxiety during the fall of 1952 were evident." While WagnerMartin attributes Plath's anxiety to a simple case of overwork, noting that Plath had gone to the infirmary and seen the college psychiatrist because of "her terrible insomnia," Plath's journal entries suggest the intensification of cyclical symptoms. Like many of her critics, she blamed herself for her state of mind. On November 3, she writes:

God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility

The most terrifying realization is that so many millions in the world would like to be in my place: I am not ugly, not an imbecile, not poor, not crippled-l am, in fact, living in the free, spoiled, pampered country of America and going for hardly any money at all to one of the best colleges

How can I selfishly demand help, solace, guidance? No, it is my own mess, and even if now I have lost my sense of perspective, thereby my creative sense of humor, I will not let myself get sick, go mad, or retreat like a child into blubbering on someone else's shoulder.•••

(J, pp. 59-63)

Referring to Plath's depression at this time, the journal editors note: "Very few people were aware of the situation, and even they were not

allowed to see the depth of Plath's desperation. The high pitch of her typically fast bounce-back seems itself alarming in retrospect, but people close to Plath were used to her wide mood swings" (), p. 59}. Eleven days later, on November 14, Plath writes:

And so I rehabilitate myself-staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veerings of direction - than to lose it in slumber. I had lost all perspective; I was wandering in a desperate purgatory (with a gray man in a gray boat on a gray river: an apathetic Charon dawdling upon a passionless, phlegmatic River Styx and a petulant Christ child bawling on the train ) The orange sun was a flat pasted disc on a smoky, acrid sky. And I was doomed to burn in ice, numb, cold, revolving in crystal, neutral, passive vacuums, void of sensation

How many futures-(how many different deaths I can die?) And yet, think, think, think-and keep this of tonight, this holy, miraculous resuscitation of the creative integrating blind optimism which was dead, frozen, gone quite away.

(J, pp. 65-66)

When a woman doesn't understand the biochemical origin of her problems, PMS usually creates secondary psychological effects in addition to the primary psychological effects brought on by hormonal disruption. This is especially true for the small percentage of women, such as Plath, whose symptoms begin at the menarche (first menstruation). Because they have never known a symptom-free cycle, these women often accept a few days of emotional and physical distress as a normal occurrence preceding menstruation. But because symptoms vary in intensity and type from month to month, and often begin a full two weeks before menstruation, the women do not usually make the connection between their anxiety, depression and mood swings, and their menstrual cycles. A woman afflicted with severe psychic suffering quite naturally looks for external sources for her problems, blames herself for her unhappiness and loss of control, and becomes locked in a cycle of guilt, self-doubt and denial. After a period of emotional breakdown, she spends the "up" phase of her cycle trying to rebuild her self-esteem, determined to put her life in order and avoid another breakdown. This results in what Stephanie Degraff Bender calls "upping the ante" for next month. The PMS woman (or teenager) puts increased pressure on herself to succeed as a person, setting herself up for an even more cataclysmic "failure" in a future cycle." The self-imposed stress often triggers further biochemical disruption to her already delicate hormonal balance."

This pattern of behavior is evident in Plath's journals, large parts of which are devoted to self-deprecation and self-analysis. She continually blames herself for her misery and exhorts herself to "work harder." Her journals contain numerous admonitions, resolutions and lists of specific actions to take to ensure future happiness. Success with her writing becomes a central goal, a way to permanently crystalize her identity. After a period of depression, she tries to minimize its severity and increases her efforts. In her letters to her mother, she underplays her depressions, usually describing her bad weeks only after they have passed and blaming the depression on her physical symptoms. The majority of her letters to her mother seem to be written during the symptom-free phase of her cycles, although, when seriously depressed, she sometimes writes-politely and meekly-to ask for emotional support.

By the time she reported for her four-week stint as a College Board editor at Mademoiselle, in June 1953, Plath's hormonal balance was in a state of serious disruption. The pressure of her job as guest managing editor, the stress of being thrown into a completely new environment and the physical stress produced by overstimulation, lack of sleep, use of sleeping pills, poor diet, increased alcohol and caffeine intake and an episode of food poisoning set her up for a serious breakdown during the second halfof her menstrual cycle. At Mademoiselle, she could no longer follow her student pattern of resting up in the infirmary during her bad weeks and then doubling her work load during the good part of her cycle to catch up. She arrived in New York on May 31, and her first two weeks seemed to go well. Among the guest editors, she was "regarded as one of the leaders of the group, one of the smartest and funniest" and "kept her smile even during the torrid afternoon in Central Park when all the guest editors were photographed wearing wool kilts and longsleeved blouses/'" But in mid-June she became seriously depressed and began to perceive herself as a complete failure. In a letter to her brother in late June, she says that, during her month in New York, she has been "very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated.'" J

Plath returned home to her mother's house in a state of mental and physical exhaustion, then seemed to recover for awhile. An undated journal entry, probably written in late June or early July, begins "Letter to an Over-grown, Over-protected, Scared, Spoiled Baby," and concludes:

Right now you are sick in your head You fool- you are afraid of being alone with your own mind Stop thinking selfishly of razors and selfwounds and going out and ending it all. Your room is not your prison. You are no one has the power to cure you but yourself NOTHING EVER REMAINS THE SAME.

(J, p. 86-87)

Her depression grew worse again on July 13. She "did little but sleep" and withdrew from her friends." A journal entry on July 14 speaks of a "Colossal desire to escape, retreat, not talk to anybody" (), p. 87). Her mother remembers that during the summer "the only thing she read was Freud's Abnormal Psychology and found all sorts of symptoms that she was sure applied to her."15 Her lethargy soon changed to insomnia; she became unable to eat, and her concentration became so poor she could no longer read. Her mother noticed self-inflicted gashes on her legs. On the advice of a psychiatrist, Plath underwent a series of painful electroshock treatments. On August 24 she attempted suicide by hiding herself in a crawl space under the house and swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills."

Plath's recovery in a mental hospital was remarkably fast. Doctors found "no trace of psychosis and no schizophrenia."? She was given insulin shock and electroshock treatments, and appeared to respond to the process of psychoanalysis (which often takes years to effect any significant improvement) within two months. By mid-October, she was functioning well and "by the fifth of December she seemed to be her normal self."181n February, she returned to Smith for a successful second semester.

Apparently, Plath kept no journals for the two years following her breakdown and suicide attempt in the summer of 1953. The record of her monthly ups and downs begins again in February 1956, while she was studying at Cambridge University:

February 20, Monday. Dear Doctor: I am feeling very sick. I have a heart in my stomach which throbs and mocks. Suddenly the simple rituals of the day balk like a stubborn horse. It gets impossible to look people in the eye: corruption may break out again? Who knows. Small talk becomes desperate.

Hostility grows, too. That dangerous, deadly venom which comes from a sick heart. Sick mind, too. The image of identity we must daily fight to impress on the neutral, or hostile, world, collapses inward; we feel crushed

(J, p, 103)

February 25, Saturday. So we are scrubbed, hair washed fresh, feeling gutted and shaky; a crisis is passed. We reassemble forces, marshal a stiff squadron of optimism, and trek. On and on •...

Anyway, I am tired, and it is Saturday afternoon and I have all the academic reading and papers to do which I should have done two days ago, but for my misery. A lousy sinus cold that blunted up all my senses, bunged up nose, couldn't smell, taste, see through rheumy eyes, or even hear, which was worse, almost. And atop of this, through the hellish sleepless night of feverish sniffling and tossing, the macabre cramps of my period (curse, yes) and the wet, mussy spurt of blood.

Dawn came, black and white graying into a frozen hell. I couldn't relax, nap, or anything. This was Friday, the worst, the very worst

Now, despite the twitch of a drying cold, I am cleansed, and once again, stoic, humorous.

(J, pp. 106-07)

Plath does not seem to connect her sudden change in outlook to the appearance of the menses. In a letter to her mother on February 24. she blames her depression on her physical symptoms:

I am so sick of having a cold every month; like this time, it generally combines with my period, which is enough to make me really distracted, simply gutted of all strength and energy

Please don't worry that I am sad; it is normal, I think, when one feels physically shot and lousy, to feel helpless.

(LH, pp. 217-18)

The following day, she writes:

I felt that after the wailing blast of the last letter, lowed you a quick followup to tell you that it is a new day; bright, with sun, and a milder aspect, and my intense physical misery is gone, and with it, my rather profound despair.

(LH, p. 218)

The cycles of despair and rebirth continue throughout Plath's student days and her marriage to Ted Hughes. Journal excerpts from 1958, when Plath and her husband were temporarily living in the United States and Plath was teaching at Smith, reveal the pattern.

January 22, Wednesday. Absolutely blind fuming sick. Anger, envy and humiliation. A green seethe of malice through the veins

Tuesday, February 10 How clear and cleansed and happy I feel.

Monday night, FebTU4ry 24. Weary, work not done, week scarcely begun: such mortal falls, the edge of heat keeps up so short a time

Wednesday, March 5 .••. I found the two pained and torturous typewritten sheets I wrote in October and November when trying to keep myself from flying into black bits-how new, now, is my confidence: I can endure

Friday afternoon, March 14 1 feel like a dead person offered the fruits and riches and joys of the world only if she will get up and walk. Will my legs be sturdy?

Friday afternoon, March 2B Saturday I groaned, took pellets of Bufferin, stitched in the worst cramps and faintness for months, which no pills dulled, and wrote nothing

[Undated, early April) I am attaining, with my return of health and the stubborn breakthrough of spring, the first real deep-rooted peace and joy 1 have known since early childhood

Thursday morning, April 17 Still, when 1 wake up 1 feel as if 1 were rising from a grave, gathering my moldy, worm-riddled limbs into a final effort

(1, pp. 187-218)

As is often the case with PMS sufferers, recurrent feelings of despair alternate with or make a gradual transition over the months to recurrent feelings of extreme irritability and rage. At this point in the journals, the editors note that"About this time, and for months afterward, Plath began to feel an upsurge of rage, an emotion she rarely allowed herself. In the passage that follows it is a rage against her husband in which a small incident takes on enormous proportions, and is quickly transferred to some girls in a public park." The editors remark that the "real source" of her rage "is her father" (], p. 228).19 Actually, the entry venting her jealous rage against her husband (after coming upon him unexpectedly on campus, in what appeared to her an overly-friendly conversation with a Smith coed) was written on May 22, during what was probably her premenstrual week.i" The incident with the girls in the park occurred twenty days later, on June 11. Her entry for that day refers to the violence of the previous month - "I had a sprained thumb, Ted bloody claw marks for a week" - and describes her reaction to the girls who were shamelessly stealing armloads of rhododendrons from the park: "1 gritted to control my hands, but had a flash of bloody stars in my head as 1 stared that sassy girl down, and a blood-longing to [rush] at her and tear her to bloody beating bits" (), p. 238).

Later that month, on June 20, 1958, Plath sums up her situation:

My motto here mi&ht well be "My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up." I have been and am battling depression. It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative-which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great muscular owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart

(J, p. 240)

But on July 3, she writes:

I have been writing poems steadily and feel the blessed dawn of a desire to write prose beginning don't feel angry now: have my own time •••. My life is in my hands

(J, p. 243)

The entry for July 19 begins:

Paralysis still with me. It is as if my mind stopped and let the phenomena of nature - shiny green rose bugs and orange toadstools and sereaking woodpeckers-roll over me like a juggernaut-as if I had to plunge to the bottom of nonexistence, of absolute fear, before I can rise again

(J, p, 251)

On July 27, she writes:

A gray day, cool, gentle. The strangling noose of worry, of hysteria, paralysis, is miraculously gone. Doggedly, I have waited it out, and doggedly, been rewarded

(J, p. 253)

Her moods oscillated between extremes according to what we can now see was a fairly predictable calendar. What is further striking in Plath's case, especially relative to the amazing intensity of her late poems, is the interruption of her cycles by a rapid succession of three pregnancies within a period of two and a half years. She gave birth to a daughter in April 1960, suffered a miscarriage in February 1961, and gave birth to a son the following January. Because she breastfed the babies, she probably had very few menstrual cycles during the three years from July 1959 to July 1962. Her reproductive history almost guaranteed some form of extreme emotional disruption once she began menstruating again after

the birth of her second child, with a probable further disruption following the cessation of breastfeeding. Like many women with PMS, Plath seems to have experienced relief from cyclical symptoms during the last two trimesters of pregnancy and to have suffered from lengthy postpartum depressions.

Although she attempted to embrace and celebrate her procreative power, Plath's perception that her emotional identity was influenced by forces beyond her control was, in fact, accurate. The culturallyconditioned belief that severe depression is a psychological problem which can be altered, or significantly mitigated, by force of will or intellect only helped to reinforce Plath's sense of personal failure. She had no way of knowing to what extent the extremes of her experience were universal to all women and to what extent her inability to overcome those extremes was the result of her own psychological inadequacy. The insights offered her by psychoanalysis and her study of Freud only helped to cast doubt on her own instinctive perception of herself as a strong, vibrant, mentally healthy human being.i'

In his memoir of Plath, A. Alvarez writes of her "queer conception of the adult as a survivor, an imaginary Jew from the concentration camps of the mind."22 Though he could not have known that Plath's reality had a biochemical basis, Alvarez's assessment of her relationship to her work is precisely correct:

In some strange way, I suspect she thought of herself as a realist: the deaths and resurrections of "Lady Lazarus," the nightmares of "Daddy" and the rest had all been proved on her pulses. Because she felt she was simply describing the facts as they had happened, she was able to tap in the coolest possible way all her large reserves of skill by which she preserved, even in her most anguished probing, complete artistic control.l)

Lack of respect for Plath's intelligence as a poet has caused many critics to read her work as distorted or sick, when, in fact, her ability to integrate sensual-emotional experience and intellectual understanding of that experience suggests a strong impulse toward psychological health. Her relationship to her life and her art was ruthlessly realistic and, as Alvarez says, "altogether without self-pity."24

The metaphors of Plath's poetry reveal her struggle to understand her own experience by placing it within a larger, universal order. Her development as a poet encompasses both the maturation of her vision and

her ability to give form to that vision-the growth of insight and expression, activities which are intimately connected. While most of her early poems are attempts to recreate the quality of her sensual-emotional experience, her later work accomplishes this and also searches for biological causalities which operate independently of her own biography. The moon is, of course, the major symbol in her work. As Judith Kroll has documented, Plath's lunar mythology probably owes much to her reading of Robert Graves's The White Goddess. 2� But Plath's fascination with the complexities of the moon-muse reached beyond an intellectual and artistic appropriation of myth. The controlling moon was metaphorical for Plath only to the extent that the moon was imagined as a natural force with power over a woman's menstrual cycles: the power of the menstrual cycle to control Plath's psychic landscape was an absolute reality. Whereas the myths of her own culture only served to deny her experience, the White Goddess myths validated Plath's subjective sense of her own experience.

From fairly early on in Plath's work, the moon is connected with the sea, psychic oppression, and menstruation. In "Hardcastle Crags," written in 1957, the grasses in the field, the sea, and the psyche of the woman walking through the night landscape are all "moon-bound," tied by a single "root."Z6 In "Moonrise" (1958), the moon is personified as a goddess who drags "our ancient father at the heel, I White-bearded, weary" (CP, p. 98). The sea is a fatherly, masculine presence, associated with male potency and progenitive power, whose apparent strength and stability are not absolute, but controlled by the overriding power of the moon. Just as she controls the cycles of the tides, the moon controls the ebb and flow of a woman's menstrual cycle. "Moonrise" uses the ripening of "grub-white" mulberries as a metaphor for the rotting of the unfertilized human ovum which leads to the reddening of menstruation. Menstrual blood is at once an indication of future fertility and of the present failure to conceive ("The berries purple / And bleed. The white stomach may ripen yet"). In Plath's cosmology, the moon cycles every twentyeight days, exactly like a woman, but she is barren. Like the unfertilized egg she resembles and like the menstruation she controls, the moon is an emblem of death-in-life and life-in-death-an emblem which not only embodies Plath's psychic experience, but locates the source of that experience as well.

Plath's late poems reveal her increasing preoccupation with the themes of barrenness, fertility and the struggle to achieve emotional equilibrium within a life controlled by biological forces. In "The Moon and the Yew Tree," written on October 22, 1961, the moon "drags the sea after it like

a dark crime; it is quiet / With the Oegape of complete despair. I live here" (CP, p. 173).27 In "Three Women," completed in March 1962, the moon is

that O-mouth

Open in its gape of perpetual grieving. It is she that drags the blood-black sea around Month after month, with its voices of failure. I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.

(CP, p. 182)28

The causal relationship of the moon to psychic upheaval is further expressed in "Elm," completed in April 1962: "The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me / Cruelly, being barren" (CP, p. 192).

Poems written in the spring of 1962 reflect Plath's growing apprehensions about the disintegration of her marriage. She suspected her husband of infidelity, and the poems express the emotional distance between them and her re-evaluation of the relationship. The spring poems are marked by a tone of cool candor and calm consideration of a painful emotional reality. But by July, Plath seems to have begun experi, encing the periodic fits of vituperative rage familiar to women with PMS. Her emotional outbursts can, of course, be attributed solely to jealousy and the stress of her situation, but the hysterical quality of her reactions indicates hormonal influences as well-influences which probably contributed to the eventual breakup of her marriage. Incidents of verbal and physical violence were not uncommon. On July 9, after intercepting a phone call from her husband's lover, Plath ripped the telephone wires from the wall, then drove twenty-five miles to the home of a friend, where she wept uncontrollably. Returning the next day, she built a bonfire in the yard and burned a pile of Hughes's manuscripts, letters and papers, along with the manuscript of her second novel, about her great love for her husband. Her mother, who was visiting at the time, was witness to these events.i" The following day, Plath wrote "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," a poem which captures her hysteria. "Burning the Letters," completed in August, has a more subdued tone.

Plath refers to her own menstruation, or lack of it, in "Poppies in July," completed on July 20. The poem recalls the poppy metaphor Plath used in "Two Sisters of Persephone" (1956) and the petal imagery of "Moonrise" (1958), as well as "Tulips" (March 1961), in which the vibrant red flowers disturb the peaceful calm of the woman in her hospital bed.30

"Poppies in July" is a metaphorical fusion of a physical reality and a psychic state-a state described in the literature on PMS as "feelings of separateness" accompanied, paradoxically, by "hypersensitivity to sounds, sight and touch'?' and defined by Plath in her journals as "a dull torpor shutting me in my own prison of highstrung depression" (J, p. 227). The woman feels herselfenclosed in a "glass capsule" (or a "bell jar") and, at the same time, so vulnerable to simple sensory stimulation that the mere consciousness of waking existence causes psychic pain:

Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts!

(CP, p. 203)

The poem moves by visual association, from flames to a mouth, from a bloodied mouth to bloody skirts. The layered petals of the poppies become the female labia and the speaker's initial question - "Do you do no harm?" - is, by implication, addressed to her own body. On one level, the poem is about a woman checking "among the flames" for evidence of menstrual blood. The phrase "Little bloody skirts!" can be read, not only as an exclamation of recognition, but as a curse. The poppies' seed capsules are the source of narcotics, but these are withheld from the speaker: "There are fumes that I cannot touch. I Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?" In desperation, she cries, "If I could bleed, or. sleep!-I If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!" She is clearly aware that bleeding will bring relief from psychic pain; the "hurt" of menstruation is the narcotic she longs for. The only other possible escape from mental suffering is loss of consciousness-natural sleep or the dulling power of opiates: "Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, I Dulling and stilling. I I But colorless. Colorless." The word "colorless" implies a possible hope for the narcotic effect of menstruation without the blood itself. This poem suggests that Plath was once again experiencing premenstrual insomnia.f

After "Poppies in July," Plath wrote only two more poems ("Burning the Letters," "For a Fatherless Son") until September 30, when she completed "A Birthday Present" and went on to write a total of twenty-six poems during October 1962. This "miracle month" marks the beginning of her final and most productive period as a poet. From November 4 until her death on February 11, 1963, she completed twenty-five more poems.

This final flood of poems, all dated on the finished typescript, gives us an excellent record of Plath's emotional state during these last four months of her life." In October, she was writing furiously, averaging a poem a day. These late poems coincide with the breakup of her marriage and her final move to London in December. This was a period of intense stress for Plath, and her poems have that authentic quality of having needed to be written, of arising almost spontaneously from the mind/ body of the poet. Because of her insomnia, she had begun the habit of rising and writing at four o'clock in the morning, a time when the intuitive power of the subconscious is likely to find expression. Taken chronologically, the late poems reveal a cyclical pattern of psychic disruption and depression followed by a period of recovery and renewal, a pattern which is also apparent in concurrent letters to her mother and which appears to coincide with the cyclical mood changes of her menstrual cycle. Plath's own menstruation is the triggering subject of a number of the late poems.

The month ofOctober 1962 begins calmly. The series offour long "bee poems" (October 3-7) are concerned with self-preservation and renewal of female power, and, though metaphorical, are more narrative in style than most of Plath's work. "Wintering," completed on October 9, considers the question of survival, and ends hopefully: "The bees are flying. They taste the spring" (CP, p. 219).

Beginning on October 10 with "A Secret" and continuing through "Lvonnesse" on October 21, Plath's poems are all marked by a disturbing tone of extreme anger, bitterness and sarcasm. She lashes out at everyone: her husband ("The Applicant," "The Jailor," "Amnesiac," "Lyonnesse"), her husband's girlfriend ("A Secret"), her dead father ("Daddy"), her mother ("Medusa"), a woman friend ("Lesbos") and her husband's uncle ("Stopped Dead"). In style and tone, these poems are embodiments of immediate consciousness, lacking the measured sense of perspective of the early October poems. It seems likely that Plath was following a cycle of thirty or more days and had ovulated somewhere around October 9. H Plath's letters also indicate that she had entered the disruptive luteal phase of her cycle. From October 9 to October 21, she wrote a series of

desperate, almost hysterical, letters to her mother, noting on October 16 that her "old fever of 101 alternating with chills" was back (LH, p. 468).

What is significant about these mid-October poems is their unity of tone and the way Plath uses language to capture the jagged rhythms of her psychic state. The poems seethe with venom, suppressed aggression and the kind of spiraling thought patterns experienced by women with PMS. Repeated words and phrases, sarcastic questions and ironic rhyme create a tone of aggrieved and helpless rancor. The violent and unsettling images reflect Plath's attempt to find objective correlatives for her emotional state.

The poem "Daddy" (October 12) suggests the way the poems of this period arise from evocative sound patterns. Plath called this poem "light verse," and much of its power comes from the nursery-rhyme quality of its rhythm, rhymes and repetitions. The focus of the poem is not merely Plath's relationship to her father and her husband, but her understanding of Freudian analysis and the Electra-complex hypothesis as well. As she said in a reading prepared for BBC Radio, the speaker of the poem "has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it" (CP, p. 293). With the destruction of her romantic attachment to her husband, who vacated the house on October II, the father's role in Plath's feminine development is finished ("Daddy, you can lie back now"), and the bitterly disillusioned speaker of "Daddy" takes a tough, ironic stance toward the whole mechanism of romantic love.

Regardless of the length of the first half of a woman's cycle, the luteal phase lasts fourteen davs." Fourteen days after completing "A Secret," which marks the beginning of Plath's poems of venom, Plath wrote to her mother on October 23 that she had miraculously recovered her spirits:

Dear Mother,

Please forgive my grumpy, sick letters of last week. The return of my fever [and) the hideous nanny from whom I expected help combined to make me feel the nadir had been reached. Now everything is, by comparison, almost miraculous. I hardly dare breathe.

(LH, p. 474)

On the same day, she began "Lady Lazarus." The tone of the poems changes with "Cut" and "By Candlelight" on the twenty-fourth, indicating a release from the hostility and harsh irony that characterize the mid-October poems. On the twenty-seventh, she completed "Ariel" and "Poppies in October;" on the twenty-ninth, "Nick and the Candlestick,"

"Purdah" and "Lady Lazarus." These are all confident poems of selfrenewal and rebirth. Letters to her mother and brother on October 25 are full of confidence and plans for the future. On a drive to attend a Bach concert with a friend, Plath said she was writing "dawn poems in blood.t"

"Poppies in October" begins with the image of poppies as bloody skirts which Plath had used three months earlier in "Poppies in July": "Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. / Nor the woman in the ambulance / Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly-" (CP, p. 240). Visually, the word "skirts" creates a fusion of three images: the red petals of poppies; the petals of the female labia, now flowing with blood; and blood seeping through an article of clothing, an image which is reinforced by the "red heart" blooming through the coat of the injured woman in the ambulance. Taken literally, the poem is about the unexpected late blooming of summer flowers. Read metaphorically, the poem celebrates the arrival of the menses:

A gift, a love gift

Utterly unasked for Bv a sky

Palely and flamily

Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

The splash of red on the cloudy dawn landscape is welcomed by the speaker as a kind of miracle and she is overcome with an experience of grace: "0 my God, what am I / That these late mouths should cry open / In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers." With the opening of the "late mouths," the sun rises in a bright blue dawn. The speaker feels herself moved by forces beyond her control; she is blessed and reborn, but the cry "0 my God, what am I" expresses her powerlessness in the grand biological design.

"Ariel," completed on the same day as "Poppies," is also a "dawn poem" and works metaphorically as a menstrual poem as well. The opening phrase, "Stasis in darkness," punctuated as a full-stop sentence, expresses the speaker's predawn state of confined inanirnation. The dictionary meaning of "stasis" (from the Greek, "a standing") is "a stoppage of the flow of some fluid in the body, as of blood in a blood vessel." The speaker, awakening from a kind of death-in-life or a standing outside of life, feels the life-forces begin to flow as the "substanceless blue" of the dawn sky pours outward into an expanding landscape. But the rebirth is

also a sacrificial death, and the poem presents the paradox of menstruation with which Plath was so often concerned: the flow of blood prompts both a celebration of fertility and an awareness of the failure to conceive ("The child's cry I I Melts in the wall"). On one level, the poem can be read as if spoken by the spirit of the unfertilized human egg. The "furrow" which "splits and passes" in "Ariel" recalls the depiction of the "dead" female body in "The Detective" (October 1): "dry wood, the gates, I The brown motherly furrows." Metaphors for clotted menstrual blood used previously in "Moonrise" (1958) and "Blackberrying" (1961) appear in "Ariel" as "Nigger-eye I Berries" which "cast dark I Hooks-/ / Black sweet blood mouthfuls." "Ariel" is a good example of the way menstruation functioned for Plath as both a determining life experience and an emblem of the tension between the forces which seem to control human life-what Freud described as "the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.l" The poem is both a conscious expression of a sensual-emotional experience-the erotic sensation of releaseand an intellectual interpretation of that experience. The word "suicidal," used to describe the evaporation of the dew, indicates the irreversible motion and ultimate (or, in the case of the egg, premature) destruction of the physical body, rather than a conscious wish for death: "And I I Am the arrow, I I The dew that flies / Suicidal, at one with the drive I Into the red I I Eye, the cauldron of morning" (CP, pp. 239-40).38

"Purdah" (October 29), uses visual imagery to suggest the sloughing off of the uterine lining ("trees-I Little bushy polyps, I I Little nets"), a process controlled by "The moon, my I Indefatigable cousin" (CP, p. 242). The poem plays with the ancient Hindu belief that sexual contact with a menstruating woman would destroy "a man's brain, energy, eyesight, and manhood.I" The defiant speaker of "Purdah" is slyly lying in wait for the bridegroom, who is unaware of her condition. She is his unwilling possession ("the small jeweled I Doll he guards like a heart") and contemplates the assertion of her true self. In the final lines, the female "doll" is transformed into a murderous, avenging queen through the figure of Clytemnestra: "I shall unloose- I The lioness, I The shriek in the bath, / The cloak of holes."

Also on October 29, Plath completed "Lady Lazarus," her most dramatic articulation of the process of psychic death and rebirth. In a reading prepared for BBC radio, Plath introduced the poem this way: "The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the Phoenix, the

libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman" (CP, p. 294). Lady Lazarus takes an ironic tone toward herself and her special "gift." What she can't understand is why those around her consider the phenomenon of death and rebirth to be so unusual and miraculous ("Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well") (CP, p. 245). Her alienation from the "peanutcrunching crowd" who would regard her as a freak is apparent. Lady Lazarus is, in a very real sense, validating her own perception of the psychic deaths she has lived through, and defending herself against those who do not accept her for what she is. The poem is addressed specifically to the controlling male ("Herr Doktor Herr Enemy") who finds her deathlike state ugly and contemptible. The male regards her as his possession, to use as he will, his "opus," "valuable," "pure gold baby." But, in the end, she warns, "Herr God, Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware. / / Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air." Once again, the color red is an emblem of the transforming power of female fertility.

Plath's rebirth at the end of October 1962 probably had its immediate physiological source in the hormonal changes accompanying the appearance of the menses, but also involved a major psychological breakthrough: the assertion of her true self following the breakup of her marriage. Judging from her poems, Plath's spirits remained high from October 23 to November 11. Poems from the first two weeks of November reveal a broadened perspective and a stable, meditative tone. There are even expressions of spiritual blessing and the happiness associated with pregnancy:

And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces

Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

("Getting There," CP, p, 249)

I shall not entirely Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

Of your small breath, the drenched grass Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

("The Night Dances," CP, p. 250)

I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, 1 am so stupidly happy, My wellingtons

Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

("Letter in November," CP, p. 253)

The mood of the poems changes again in the second half of her cycle with "Death & Co." on November 14, followed by "Years" and "The Fearful" (November 16), and "Mary's Song" (November 19). "Winter Trees" (November 26) picks up the theme of fertility, describing trees as "Knowing neither abortions nor birchery, / Truer than women, / They seed so effortlessly!" (CP, p. 258). The timing of this poem, completed thirteen days after "Death & Co.," suggests that Plath had begun menstruating on or near November 26. On December 1, she completed "Brasilia" ("In the lane I meet sheep and wagons, / Red earth, motherly blood") and "Childless Woman" ("The womb / Rattles its pod, the moon / Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go") (CP, p. 259). Childlessness makes the speaker "Ungodly as a child's shriek": "Spiderlike, I spin mirrors, / Loyal to my image, / / Uttering nothing but blood- / Taste it, dark red!" Though probably occasioned by Plath's own menstruation, "Childless Woman" reflects Plath's sense of betrayal and jealousy of Ted Hughes's lover, Assia Gutman, who had reportedly had several abortions.f"

The month of December is taken up with Plath's move, with the children, to her new flat in London. Letters written on the fourteenth are exuberant: "I can truly say I have never been so happy in my life" (LH, p. 488), But A. Alvarez reports that when he stopped by for a drink on Christmas Eve Plath seemed physically and emotionally exhausted." A letter to her mother on the twenty-sixth says that she had "been resting a bit the last few days" (LH, p. 492).

After beginning "Sheep in Fog" on December 2, Plath wrote no more poems until "The Munich Mannequins" on January 28, in which metaphors for ovulation and menstruation reflect the sterile self-absorption of those who choose to remain childless:

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children. Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb

Where the yew trees blow like hydras, The tree of life and the tree of life

Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose. The blood flood is the flood of love,

The absolute sacrifice.

It means: no more idols but me

(CP, pp. 262-63)

Also on January 28, she finished "Sheep in Fog" ("My bones hold a stillness, the far / Fields melt my heart") and wrote the short lyric "Child" ("Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing") and "Totem," a collection of intense and gruesome images about the tyranny of the menstrual cycle. "Totem" also touches on the self-centered sexuality of those who willfully reject maternity:

The world is blood-hot and personal

Dawn says, with its blood-flush. There is no terminus, only suitcases

Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes,

Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors. I am mad, calls the spider, waving its many arms.

(CP, p. 264)

Plath's final poems indicate that she had again come through a period of intense depression and had begun menstruating near the end of January. "Paralytic" (january 29} connects psychic immobilization with failed conception ("Dead egg, 1 lie / Whole / On a whole world 1 cannot touch") and ends with a flower image: "The claw / Of the magnolia, / Drunk on its own scents, / Asks nothing of life" (CP, pp. 266-67). "Mystic" (February 1) presents the difficulty of integrating mystical experience into everyday life ("Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?"), closing with another flower: "The sun blooms, it is a geranium. / / The heart has not stopped" (CP, pp. 268-69). On February 4, in her last letter to her mother, she writes (with characteristic understatement): "I just haven't written anybody because 1 have been feeling a bit grimthe upheaval over, 1 am seeing the finality of it all, and being catapulted from the cow-like happiness of maternity into loneliness and grim problems is no fun " (LH, p. 498). Also on February 4, in a letter to a friend, she says that she has been writing "poems in blood, or at least with it." 42

Plath's last poems show an increasing awareness that her cycles of death and rebirth will continue no matter what she does, and reveal her sense of failure and abandonment. The difficult fertility which she celebrated as a source of permanent happiness within a loving marriage has, in a sense, betrayed her. In the poems, her own motherhood is repeatedly contrasted with the childlessness of her husband's lover, who becomes associated with the cold, barren moon. The exhilaration of taking control of her own life by moving to London, where she could be among friends and pursue a literary career, has worn off, and, by February, the finality of her situation sinks in. The ability to control her own destiny and affirm her female identity in her life and poetry seems lost. In "Words" (February I), she writes of "Words dry and riderless, / The indefatigable hoof-taps. / While / From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars / Govern a life" (CP, p. 270). The idea of cosmic fixity is echoed in "Contusion" (February 4) in which "The doom mark / Crawls down the wall." "Contusion" also carries connotations of menstruation, presenting color flooding to one part of a washed-out body and connecting it with the sea ("In a pit of rock / The sea sucks obsessively, / One hollow the whole sea's pivot." (CP, p. 271).

Plath's last two poems, completed on February 5, both use the word "moon," though in apparently different contexts. "Balloons," usually taken to be a pleasant poem celebrating her children, describes "Such queer moons we live with." The baby bites his balloon, "Then sits / Back, fat jug / Contemplating a world clear as water. / A red / Shred in his little fist" (CP, p. 272). The womb-like moon-balloon, which was a source ofpleasure, is destroyed, leaving a mere "red shred." In "Edge," the moon looks down on a woman who has chosen the only possible escape from the fertility which governed her life: "The woman is perfected. / Her dead / / Body wears the smile of accomplishment, / The illusion of a Greek necessity" (CP, p. 272). The woman has killed herself and her two children, who lie "One at each little / / Pitcher of milk, now empty." Like the "terrible" perfection of "The Munich Mannequins," the perfection of this Medea figure appears to involve a willful act-the assertion of the exhausted self in defiance of the larger life-force-and a rejection of the procreative process. After giving life to the children, she accomplishes the ultimate death by taking them back into herself.

"Edge" was called "Nuns in Snow" in an early draft,43 a title which suggests the absence of red fertility in Plath's familiar black-and-white landscape, as well as purification through a religious transcendence of sexuality. Because it was Plath's last poem, it is often read as an indication of suicidal intent. The title "Edge" certainly suggests that Plath saw

only two options for women: suffering within the confines of biological destiny or a permanent transcendence through death. The possibility of some form of spiritual transcendence within this life was, for Plath, impossible, requiring, as it would, a lessening of the will to control her own destiny by giving herself up to the forces which controlled her. The power of will was the only thing she had with which to defend herself against the hormonal forces which controlled her psychic landscape. When the premenstrual syndrome plunged her into a torturous depression, her continued existence depended on the self-will not to commit suicide: to let go would have meant death. The choice of death over the fertility which she had for so long celebrated would be both a conscious rejection of the forces of life and an acquiescence in the power of those forces themselves to bring about death. As presented in "Edge," suicide is, ironically, an "accomplishment" and a natural act involving the simple relinquishment of will {"Her bare / / Feet seem to be saying: / We have come so far, it is over"}. The death of the children is presented as the natural closing of the flower of fertility:

She has folded

Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed

From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

(CP, p. 272-73)

As in all of Plath's poems, the moon has no interest in the fertility she controls and no compassion for female suffering: "The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone. / / She is used to this sort of thing. / Her blacks crackle and drag."

During her last months, Plath suffered from recurrent fevers, bouts with the flu, colds, weight loss and insomnia." Her doctor prescribed sleeping pills, an antidepressant, and a chest X ray. The winter of 1963 was one of the coldest in London's history; heavy snows caused frequent power outages, and Plath was sometimes housebound with the children. She was unable to obtain telephone service, but wrote frequently to her friends and continued to send out her work. In December and January, she completed several essays and a short story, and began work on a new novel.

In her last letter to her mother, Plath mentions that her doctor had referred her to "a woman doctor," presumably a psychiatrist. At the

time, Katharina Dalton, a London physician, was successfully treating severe cases of PMS with progesterone therapy.

Plath wrote no poems during the last six days of her life. Her realization that her periodic episodes of black despair would continue proved to be correct. Early on the morning of February 11, after a restless night, she sought relief from the pain of waking consciousness. Expecting the babysitter to arrive at 9:00 A.M., she left a note giving her doctor's name and phone number, placed cups of milk by the children's beds, sealed the door to their room with tape, laid her head in the oven, and turned on the gas. She died in the only city in the world where she could have received effective medical treatment.

1. Sources for general information on PMS in this essay are Katharina Dalton, M.D., Once a Month (Pomona: Hunter House, 1979); Katharina Dalton, The Premenstrual Syndrome and Progesterone Therapy (London: Heinemann, 1977); Ronald V. Norris, M.D., with Colleen Sullivan, PMS: Premenstrual Syndrome (New York: Berkley Books, 1983): Niels H. Lauersen and Eileen Stukane, Premenstrual Syndrome and You (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1983); The PMS Connection, a newsletter published by Virginia Cassara, Nos. 1-4 (Madison, WI: PMS Action, 1981-84); see also its successor, PMS Access, Nos. 1 and 2, published by Madison Pharmacy Associates (Madison, WI: PMS Access, May and July 1985); "Premenstrual Tension, An Invitational Symposium" ed. Guy E. Abraham, M.D., The Journal of Reproductive Medicine, Vol. 28, Nos. 7 and 8 (july and August 1983), pp. 433-538; and Robert L. Reid and S. S. C. Yen, "Premenstrual Syndrome," American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Vol. 139, No.1 (january 1981), pp. 85-104.

2. Norris, p. 8. This book specifically mentions Plath in a section on famous women "who may have had PMS." Also mentioned are Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Mary Todd Lincoln, Alice James, Pauline Bonaparte, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria.

3. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough (New York: Dial Press, 1982) and Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

4. The cause of PMS is as yet unknown. Current research suggests a number of possible causes. The diagnosis was virtually unknown in the United States until the early 1980's, although a number of papers concerning "premenstrual tension" and related physical disorders appeared in medical journals during the first half of the century. In 1953, Katharina Dalton and Raymond Greene published an article in the British Medical Journal entitled "The Premenstrual Syndrome," and Dr. Dalton continued to publish the findings of her research for the next thirty years. Dalton has long theorized that PMS is related to a

deficiency in the amount of the female hormone progc:�terone in relation to the amount of estrogen present during the last half of the menstrual cycle, and has used progesterone successfully to treat patients in her London practice since the early 1950's. Dr. Ronald Norris, who has been treating PMS in the United States since 1981, defines it as a "complex disorder apparently linked to the cyclic activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis" (Norris, p. 3). That there is a biological cause for the syndrome is emphasized by researchers Reid and Yen: "current knowledge would support the concept that somatic factors are primary and that the psychic factors appear following the physiologic, biochemical and anatomic changes resulting from hormonal influences" (Reid and Yen, p. 89). They propose that "luteal phase sensitivity to and subsequent withdrawal from the central effects of the neuropeptides beta-endorphin and alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone result in a cascade of neuroendocrine changes within the brain-hypothalamus-pituitary complex" (Reid and Yen, p. 85).

5. Numerous quotes from women with severe PMS can be found in Dalton's Once a Month, in Norris, and in Stephanie DeGraff Bender and Kathleen Kelleher, PMS: A Positive Program to Gain Control (Los Angeles: The Body Press, 1986). Also Natalie Angier, "Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde," Discover (November 1982), and Elisabeth Keiffer, "At last, it has a name: Premenstrual Syndrome," Family Circle (April 6, 1982). In 1987, the American Psychiatric Association adopted the term "Late Luteal Phase Dysphoric Disorder" (LLPDD) as a "proposed diagnostic category needing further study." This new term makes a valuable distinction between mild and severe forms of PMS, although it limits the symptomatic phase of LLPDD to the week before menstruation, ignoring the extreme symptoms some women experience at ovulation (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition-Revised, published by the American Psychiatric Association [Washington, DC, 1987], pp. 367-69).

6. Of the four typical patterns of the timing of PMS symptoms, Plath appears to have suffered from one of the more debilitating and confusing types, with symptoms appearing suddenly at ovulation, continuing for a few days, subsiding somewhat for two to five days, intensifying during the week before menstruation, and resolving within a day or two after bleeding begins. Her cycles appear to be rather long-thirty to forty days-and often irregular. In a journal entry on August 9, 1957, she writes of "counting the days over the longest time I'd gone: 35 days, 40 days." (Journals, p. 171). She also suffered from painful dvsmennorrhea and heavy, prolonged bleeding, an indication she may have had other gynecological problems in addition to PMS.

7. Journals, p. 13. References to this work are hereafter cited in the text as J.

8. Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath, A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 91. Plath's amenorrhea was probably the result of anovular cycles, in which case her premenstrual symptoms might continue from the time she should have ovulated until menstruation actually occurred (following normal ovulation), that is, for up to six weeks for a single anovular cycle. Or, her

symptoms might continue to follow the cyclical pattern of her menstrual cycle, even though no bleeding occurred. In May and June 1959, after months of trying to become pregnant, Plath was tested by a doctor and told she was not ovulating (Journals, p. 311). She became pregnant the following month.

9. Wagner-Martin. p. 91.

10. See Bender and Kelleher, pp. 49-55.

11. Stress disrupts the brain's neuroendocrine mechanisms, which trigger the secretion of follicle-stimulating hormones and lutenizing hormones from the pituitary gland, which in turn stimulate the ovaries to produce estrogen and progesterone, which stimulate the uterus to build up the uterine lining, which is finally sloughed off in menstruation. See Lauersen, p. 55.

12. Wagner-Martin, p. 97.

13. Letters Home, p. 117.

14. Wagner-Martin, p. 101.

15. Videotape interview with Aurelia Plath in "Sylvia Plath," Voices and Visions series, produced by the Annenberg/CPB Project, 1988.

16. Judging from the cyclical pattern of Plath's depressions during the preceding year and the intensity of her symptoms at this time, it seems reasonable to conclude that this suicide attempt was directly precipitated by hormonal disruption during the late luteal phase of her menstrual cycle and secondarily by her loss of self-esteem at being unable to control her depression. Katharina Dalton reports that the attempted-suicide rate among women in Britain shows a sevenfold increase in the second half of the menstrual cycle compared with the preovulatory half. Of the 132 women under the care of the PMS Clinic at University College Hospital, London, during December 1977, 34 percent had attempted suicide or homicide and 37 percent had a previous mental hospital admission (Once a Month, p. xiii). Dalton cites several case histories of repeated suicide attempts during the premenstruum, including one woman whose diaries recorded forty overdose attempts, each one occurring during the four days before menstruation and requiring hospital admission. Stephanie DeGraff Bender notes that during a typical week at the PMS Clinic in Boulder, Colorado, she counsels two or three women who report being suicidal (Bender, p. 59).

17. Wagner-Martin, p. 107.

18. Letters Home, p. 128. References to this work are hereafter abbreviated in the text as LH. PMS tends to run in families. In her description of her husband in the introduction to Letters Home, Aurelia Plath notes that Otto Plath's mother was "a rather melancholy person as he described her" (LH, p. 13). Wagner-Martin's biography gives the following information obtained from Aurelia Plath: "During 1954, Aurelia heard from Otto's sister that the women in the Plath family had histories of depression. Otto's mother had been hospitalized at least once; his other sister and a niece also struggled with the problem. But Mrs. Plath never told Sylvia this-nor, so far as is known, did she ever tell her daughter's psychiatrist" (Wagner-Martin, p. 110).

19. Acute episodes of rage are actually the result of changes in fasting blood-

sugar levels and lowered glucose tolerance during the premenstruum. Dalton reports that "transient hypoglycaemia may account for such symptoms as fainting, panic attacks, aggressive outbursts, headaches, and nausea," as well as epileptic fits (The Premenstrual Syndrome and Progesterone Therapy, p. 28). Attacks usually occur after periods of four or five hours without food. Altered hormone levels during the premenstruum raise the level of the blood-sugar baseline so that a sudden drop in blood sugar produces an outpouring of adrenalin, mobilizing the body's "fight or flight" defense system (Once a Month, pp. 131-33).

20. My dating of her cycles at this time is based on the journal entry for March 28, which refers to "cramps and faintness" on the previous Saturday, March 22 (), p. 210); a letter to her mother dated March 22: "Today I had a reaction, feeling miserable and exhausted with my period and drugging myself to a stupor with aspirin for lack of anything stronger. But after chicken broth, I revived (LH, p. 336); and a journal entry for April 22: "Yesterday was wiped out by the cramps and drug-stitched stupor of my first day of the curse, as it is so aptly called. Do animals in heat bleed, feel pain?" (), p. 219). Taking April 21 as Day 1 of her cycle, May 22 would have been Day 32. She probably began menstruating shortly thereafter (the moods of her journal entries at this time indicate a cycle of thirty to forty days). The incident on June 11 probably occurred at, or shortly after, ovulation.

21. Reid and Yen cite numerous attempts in the medical literature to blame PMS symptoms on underlying psychogenic disorders, including unresolved Oedipal complexes, rejection of the female role, guilt feelings about sex and generally neurotic personalities. Treatments have included psychotherapy and "a variety of tranquilizing agents" (Reid and Yen, p. 89).

22. A. Alvarez, "Sylvia Plath: A Memoir," in Ariel Ascending, Writings About Sylvia Plath, ed. Paul Alexander (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 197.

23. Ibid., p. 197.

24. Ibid., p. 196. In an interview with Peter Orr, taped for the British Council on October 30, 1962, Plath commented: "I think my poems come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind." Peter Orr, The Poet Speaks (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), p. 170.

25. Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

26. The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). Hereafter cited in the text as CPo This excerpt, p. 62.

27. The stable, meditative tone of this poem probably owes something to the fact that it was written during the last trimester of pregnancy. (Plath's son Nicholas was born three months later on January 17, 1962.) Ted Hughes, who

assigned Plath to write about the moon setting behind the yew tree next to their house, said of this poem: "By midday she had written it. It depressed me greatly. It's my suspicion that no poem can be a poem that is not a statement from the powers in control of our life, the ultimate suffering and decision in us. It seems to me that this is poetry's only real distinction from the literary forms that we call 'not poetry.' And I had no doubt that this was a poem, and perhaps a great poem. She insisted that it was an exercise on the theme." Ted Hughes, "Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems," in The Art ofSylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970, an augmented reissue of TriQuarterly 17), p. 194.

28. "Three Women," written as a play for three voices and produced by BBe Radio, explores the psychosexual reality of three women in labor: a wife who gives birth to a son, a secretary who suffers a miscarriage and a student who will give up her baby for adoption. Though the women are controlled by the power of the moon and experience psychological pain, fear and sorrow, female reality is presented as intuitive, centered in the body, and positive in its life-giving power.

29. Events reported by Wagner-Martin, p. 208. Anne Stevenson describes the same events, but with the bonfire occurring before the phone call. See Stevenson for detailed accounts of Plath's difficult moods. Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame, A Life of Sylvia Plath (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), pp. 250-51.

30. Throughout Plath's work, red flowers are used to suggest the red petals of the labia (a word which refers both to the lips of the female vulva and the liplike part of the corolla of certain flowers) and to suggest the fertility of a menstruating woman. In "Two Sisters of Persephone" (1956), the fertile sister is "Lulled / Near a bed of poppies" and "sees how their red silk flare / Of petaled blood / Burns open to sun's blade" (CP, p. 31). She becomes "sun's bride" and "Grows quick with seed." In "Moonrise" (1958), the petals are white, suggesting barrenness and suspension of menstruation.

31. See Anthony H. Labrum, "Hypothalamic, Pineal and Pituitary Factors in the Premenstrual Syndrome," in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine symposium, cited above, p. 439.

32. Symptoms prior to the first menstruation after pregnancy can be unusually acute and of long duration. Because Plath was breastfeeding, her cycles probably did not resume for at least six months after the birth of her son in January 1962. Plath's extreme symptoms suggest the presence of anovular cycles from July until late October, when menstruation finally resumed. Her condition was probably exacerbated by a decrease in breasrfeeding beginning in July and became extreme when she ceased breasrfeeding completely, probably shortly before or after her move to London in December 1962. Katharina Dalton reports that "Puerperal depression may have its onset quite unexpectedly when lactation ceases." She cites the case of a women with an eight-monthold baby who stopped breastfeeding, immediately ovulated and "became

increasingly depressed and so psychotic she needed hospital admission. Menstruation occurred normally fourteen days after the onset of her symptoms and she became normal again." The Premenstrual Syndrome and Progesterone Therapy, p. 119.

33. There are no journals extant for this period. In his Foreword to the published journals, Ted Hughes writes that one journal disappeared and that he destroyed the other-because he "did not want her children to have to read it" (Journals, p. xiii).

34. My dating of Plath's cycles from this point until the end of her life is based on references to her periods, primarily in her poems, during the succeeding months, corroborated by mood changes in dated letters to her mother. The cycles appear to run from thirty to thirty-five days.

35. Norris, p. 7.

36. Wagner-Martin, p. 223. The friend was Elizabeth Compton.

37. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 77.

38. Plath's personal association of the name Ariel with a horse she rode at a riding school near her home creates a literal situation for the forward motion of the self "hauled through air," although the logic of the poem doesn't require this reading. The more familiar association of the name with Shakespeare's sprite in The Tempest also resonates in the poem. As Judith Kroll has pointed out, Ariel is also "a cryptic name for Jerusalem," derived from either "lion (lioness) of God" or "altar of God" and, as such, is connotative of "holocaust" and "fiery sacrifice" (Kroll, p. 181). Lines 4 and 5 ("God's lioness, / How one we grow") show that Plath was aware of this meaning.

39. Benjamin Walker, The Hindu World (New York: Praeger, 1968), Vol. 2, p. 61.

40. See Kroll, p. 66.

41. Ariel Ascending, p. 205.

42. Wagner-Martin, p. 241. The letter was to Father Bart, a young Catholic priest studying literature at Oxford; he was corresponding with Plath about her poetry.

43. Wagner-Martin, p. 239.

44. Biographical details of Plath's last months are from Wagner-Martin and Alvarez.

Reviews: Appearing and Disappearing Selves

Willard Spiegelman

Brooks Haxton, Traveling Company, Knopf, 1989, 62 pages; hardback, $18.95; paperback, $9.95

Stanley Moss, The Intelligence of Clouds, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989, 80 pages; hardback, $13.95; paperback, $7.95

Eleanor Wilner, Sarah's Choice, University of Chicago Press, 1989, 112 pages; hardback, $22; paperback, $9.95

Anne Winters, The Key to the City, University of Chicago Press, 1986,48 pages; hardback, $15; paperback, $6.95

Just as deconstruction has tried to dismantle "voice" in favor of writing, so has Marxist criticism attempted to dismember the "self" as the last infirmity of bourgeois mind. Still, a book of poetry naturally provokes, as Auden once remarked, curiosity about the mechanics of poems and about the person behind them. Both as a first cause (the poet as maker of language) and as a construct (the poet as product of language), the poetic Self continues to entice readers by at least seeming to speak to them. Even when reviewing a single volume, rather than an entire career, one is tempted to add flesh to the skeleton, resonance to the voice and extra dimensions to the inevitably flat cartoon of the self inferable from within. "What kind of person," we ask ourselves, "wrote this book?"

These four poets can be ranged along an axis of familiarity, in part because of their language, in part because of their subjects. Brooks Haxton writes the sort of openly autobiographical poems, about or

addressed to family and friends, that enable one to see him in relation to a life lived in this world. Stanley Moss, less overtly personal, has a language so scrupulously discursive, and writes with such a biblically paratactic style, that he often disappears beneath the prophetic cloak that his poems wear. Eleanor Wilner, like Moss, invokes religious paradigms and turns away from personal details, relying instead on vast mythic panoramas as settings for her deliberations. The least "knowable" and the most belligerently secular of the four, Anne Winters includes herself as only one of many characters in a cityscape as dense and horrifying as anything produced by any other New York poet of the past thirty years.

Of the four poets, Brooks Haxton is the most (conventionally) lyrical, personally open, and beautiful. With his spilling-over lines, his rich syntax, his luscious landscapes, his formal variety and experimentation, he combines a Southerner's interest in nature (a legacy from Robert Penn Warren and, among contemporary poets, Charles Wright, Dave Smith and A. R. Ammons), with a lyricist's concern for sound and music. In his opening poem, "Virgin," Haxton asks what I take to be his fundamental question, one with spiritual, psychological, and esthetic overtones: "How shall I praise it and yet not lay claim?" Like Stevens in "Credences of Summer," he combines a desire for mastery with a fear of violation. This explains his interest in both travel and time: the two most ambitious poems are the last ones, "Variations on the Tao Te Ching" and "Horae Paganicae," both of which portray a sequence of moments along a chain of continuity. As counters to ownership and permanence, both the changes within time and the alterations of a landscape keep the would-be master on his toes.

Of Haxton's two basic modes - the sprawling description or narrative, and the condensed, "wittier" lyric-the former is always more successful. When assaying sonnets, a pseudo-ballad or a modified villanelle, Haxton risks an Audenesque archness and self-mockery that seem at odds with the more capacious side of his nature. Howard Nemerov once observed that most American poets "start out Emily and wind up Wait," and Haxton appears to be test-driving both models to figure out which he prefers. The long luxury sedan suits him more than the compact. No other contemporary poet except Amy Clampitt can handle the singlesentence poem so deftly. Here, for example, are the beginning and end of a one-sentence, thirty-line poem about the sentimental desire to return to another place:

I need to go back into the winter woods and climb down through the canyons where the shallow water shifts in the buff sand and the ivory, rust, and yellow gravel, where the deep stream shoulders out of the clay wall in broad daylight, where the current scoops clear pools and bream and little catfish now are torpid, for I long to hear the redtailed hawk bark from the tulip tree in warning, and the turkey-cock with four hens root in the dead leaves

let me go back into the woods in winter, and in summer lie on dry sand that the seed tick may survey my flesh and clothing, that the turkey vulture in a tilting vortex may assess my valuelet the wood duck from his marsh in Cuba come once more to find the hollow of the hackberry, and mate, and make his cry for the returning and remaining absent.

("For the Returning and Remaining Absent")

With its reminiscences of Yeats's Innisfree, this poem sings a music that is rare in contemporary American poetry. Unabashedly Romantic, Haxton balances his potential sentimentality with the stated knowledge, in the poem's title and last line, that even in return he is eternally separated from the paradises of landscape and childhood that he is attempting to regain.

Like Gary Snyder, Haxton exhibits touches of Orientalism (and like Snyder and Allen Ginsberg he occasionally drops articles before. his nouns), and he also maintains at times an Old Testament rhythm and diction that ally him with Moss and Wilner in their common gesturing toward some kind of spirituality. Thus, in a poem addressed to his about-to-be-born son we hear an unsubtle inversion: "Into the basket woven of dried grasses has your mother sewn the cotton clothes made purple with design of flowers / that you may come out." ("That you may come out" serves as the refrain to each of the poem's seven proclamations.) Haxton actually uses words like "betook," "forsook" and "partakes" to inject (sometimes pretentiously) a biblical flavor, and one entire poem, "The Wind," takes its cue from John 3:8.

But even his archaisms, like the shapes of his poems and the syntax of his sentences, make each of Haxton's poems different from the others. He writes to no formula. A lyric about a suicide ("Fullness and Confluence") works strenuously from the title onwards with the double tropes of repetition and paradox, as if imitating through short phrases and clauses the obsessive mania of the man about to leap:

The fullness of the river. Disappearance. It was full. It was and it was not a river

At the bridge the man about to disappear was looking down. Behind him in the warm night tires were humming. Big transports were bucking, bucking the girders, and the man also was full. He was a fullness overflowing itself into the river, also full, and overflowing also into the man.

How different from the third section, "Terce," of the "Horae Paganicae," an open-ended poem, all grammatical suspension, about deep-sea diving; or from "Compline" in the same sequence, a deeply erotic rendition of heterosexual intercourse; or from the sensuous pleasures of nominal listing that begin "Daybreak":

Canvasback and widgeon, bufflehead, coot, goose, and mallard on the reservoir midway in their migration, hundreds of them, on near-freezing water, sleep.

The leaves around the C & 0 Canal ignite in a cloud of amber, salmon, rust, reflected where leaves fallen float, with leaves turned parchment sunken into the reflections.

With a temperament that is religious but undoctrinal (obvious from the way he handles the canonical hours), Haxton resembles Richard Kenney in his intelligent hedonism and in his primal wonder at the mysteries of sounds.

Although Stanley Moss evokes Yeats when he refers to "a quarrel with myself," The Intelligence 0/ Clouds is a book of neither struggle nor anguish. "Not every poet bites into his own jugular," he announces ("In Front of a Poster of Garibaldi"): "some hunger, some observe the intelligence of clouds." He is among the latter, looking at the signs of the visible universe with an eye to their hints of the invisible and transcen-

dent. Reading nature and language, Moss resembles Howard Nemerov, that philosopher-seer who also takes an interest in visual emblems and the script of the universe available to us in observed or found objects. Where the resemblance to Nemerov stops, however, is in Moss's unhesitating seriousness. He proclaims an Old Testament bias early on: "I can believe a cloud gave us the laws, / parted the Red Sea, gave us the flood, / the rainbow. A cloud teaches kindness, / be prepared for the worst wind, be light of spirit" ("Song of Alphabets"). Nemerov takes delight in reading the calligraphy of swallows' wings, or the lettered traces of skaters' inscriptions on ice; Moss derives little enjoyment: "I cannot tell vowel from consonant, / the signs of the vulnerability of the flesh / from signs for laws and government."

Moss shies away from both wit and self-wounding. He doesn't wish to burden his readers with bloodied messes and he makes relatively modest claims for his, or anyone's, work: "I believe poetry / like kindness changes the world, a little" ("Song of Introduction"). The closest he gets to genuine struggle is in an adaptation of a work by the thirteenthcentury Hebrew poet Abraham Abulafia. "The Battle," a psychomachia between soul and spirit, identifies the former with God and blood, the latter with creativity and ink. And although this little allegory posits a battle, the poet's spirit triumphs handily over his soul, "and the ink defeated the blood, and the Sabbath / overcame all the days of the week."

If the triumph of poetic labor over the other claims on a man's attention (soul, family, God) is equivalent to the crowning of the rest of the week by the Sabbath, it is automatic. Merely to claim this, as Moss does, may ultimately fail to persuade readers with a greater taste for Sturm und Orang or even for formal variety. What I have referred to as an Old Testament quality in his verse is readily observable in his subjects and locales (a whole series of poems from Israel, for example), and, more important, in his language and syntax. For the most part straightforward, Moss's sentences usually forgo both subordination and unusual line breaks.

Take, for instance, the opening section of the "Garibaldi" poem:

When my Italian son admired a poster of Garibaldi in the piazzetta of Venice, a national father in a red shirt, gold chain, Moroccan fez and fancy beard, I wished the boy knew the Lincoln who read after a day's work,

the honesty, the commoner.

My knees hurt from my life and playing soccer - not that I see Lincoln splashing with his kids in the Potomac. Lord knows where his dead son led him.

The long first sentence is, of course, a grammatically complex one, but it is so simply aligned along the page that it strikes us as simpler than it is. Even when Moss syncopates his line breaks, working them against the syntactic or grammatical grain, we can see, almost immediately, what he is up to:

The poor of Venice know the gold mosaic of hunger, the grand architecture of lice, that poverty is a heavier brocade than any doge would shoulder. To the winter galas the poor still wear the red silk gloves of frostbite, the flowing cape of chilblain.

("The Poor of Venice")

Every line ending corresponds to the end of a semantic unit, except the first, which deliberately runs on to undermine our expectations, as if tempting us to think that "the poor of Venice know the gold mosaic of San Marco," before delivering the final ironic punch. But in general Moss's poetry is solid, four-square; despite his eye for clouds, natural writing and the filigree in lace-making, Moss is never delicate, witty or fanciful when dealing with subjects that he might treat instead with sturdy sobriety.

He shares this sobriety with two poets whom he addresses, Stanley Kunitz and James Wright. Like both of them he watches the world for details which he may appropriate and make poetic use of. Talismans abound, evidence of design or a found significance, as in the opening details of "For James Wright," concerning a visit to the poet on his deathbed:

Hell's asleep now.

On the sign above your bed nothing by mouth, I read abandon hope.

With no bravado, the hospital becomes the gateway to the underworld. Speaking and writing, like reading and writing, become the pivots for the visit. The dying poet awakes "speechless" and must write his farewells

on a yellow pad: "I don't feel defeated." Under the guise of such reportorial honesty, Moss makes his Dantean allusion gently. He takes his farewell with a hint of self-renunciation:

I kiss your hand and head, then I walk out on you past the fields of the sick and dying like a tourist in Monet's garden.

To walk out "on" the poet is to abandon him to his fate; to transform him into a French garden proleptically completes Wright's metamorphosis into a depicted scene, a burial plot, in which his immortality is ensured.

Likewise, in his "Song for Stanley Kunitz," Moss keeps Kunitz's gift of a petrified clam as a talisman on his desk, and reminds us calmly what it metonymically "stands for":

Myoid clam stands for periodicity, is my sweet reminder of heartbeat and poetry, seasons, tides, music, all phases of all moons, light-years, menses. Tomorrow I shall wear it for one of my eyes, a monocle for my talk on the relationship between paleontology and anthropology.

The poem ends with an homage to Kunitz as a real and metaphorical gardener, writing in the soil a message to God:

how could he face the moon, or the land beside his house without a garden? Unthinkable.

I think what is written in roses, iris and trumpet vine is read by the Lord God. Such a place of wild and ordered beauty, is like a heart that takes on the sorrows of the world He translates into all tongues.

These last lines are among the few opacities in the volume. "He" may represent the God who, having read the natural or poetic beauties of gardeners such as Kunitz, translates those beauties into the lingua franca of each particular setting; OT it may be Kunitz himself, whose intransitive activity Moss is praising (as if to say "it is easy to translate Kunitz's work into all tongues"). Or else, perhaps Kunitz is like God the Son, taking upon himself the sorrows of this world.

Moss's poems maintain a quiet, plain eloquence, with neither epideictic fireworks, nor flushes of late Romantic feeling. In a fourteen-line "Elegy for Myself," he intimates in biblical undertones his keenest wish: to speak for many, just as his ashes are scattered, and he is himself "no longer singular":

Plural now he is all the mourners of his father's house, and all the nights and mornings too. Place him with they love and they wrote, not he loves and he writes. It took so much pain for those "S"'s to fly off. It took so much trouble to need a new part of speech. Now he is something like a good small company of actors; the text, not scripture, begins, "I am laughing."

The autobiographical poet attempting to be universal usually chooses either the analogical path of Wordsworth in The Prelude ("What one is, why may not many be?"), or a version of Keats's chameleon poet, dividing himself among sparrow, gravel and setting sun. Here, Moss claims to have become like Auden's version of Yeats, "his admirers"; he abandons himself to plurality until the very last words, when he reasserts his own, or his text's own, singularity. We have here a self that both affirms and denies its own power.

What Moss accomplishes through structure, lineation and relatively straightforward diction, Eleanor Wilner has done through an insistent mythic revisionism. Her voice sounds like that of someone who came of intellectual age in the fifties and sixties, because her strongest intellectual props seem to be jung, Campbell, and Frye, and because she has performed a feminist transformation of myth and ritual of the sort that first Simone de Beauvoir and then Adrienne Rich inspired in a generation of contemporary American woman poets. By rewriting myth, Wilner rises above the particulars of the moment and the banalities of everyday speech. An "Ars Poetica" from her previous volume, Shekhinah (1984), explains her combination of reticence and grandeur. She spurns all demands for the "big I / swollen like a jellyfish, quivering / and venomous," what you might get in a writing class. Not for her "our guts / hung up to the light, privacy / dusted off and displayed." And lest the reader think that she is simply condemning the brutal male ego, with its rage for true grit, "the heart / laid open as a pancake griddle to the awful / heat of rage," Wilner equally condemns women, "ripping off their masks I like nylon stockings." To counter this via negativa, Wilner proposes in the second halfof her poem a more evasive, and therefore truer,

path: the mythic metaphor of the shapely mind, wandering like Eurydice at the world's end, at the horizon, or in a closet of Bluebeard's castle. The self, in other words, delicate and peripheral. More specifically, the female self either abandoned or soon to be threatened by the male. We hear, she says, the old, unchanging Homeric grief, and turning

we lay the past out on Achillea' shield, abandon it to earth, our common ground-the bridal hope, its murder, the old, old story, perpetual as caring.

To layout is both to expose and then to return to the earth. Wilner derives poetic sustenance from such a duplicitous act, and from "the scant human store / that is so strangely self-restoring / and whose sufficiency / is our continual surprise," a phrase so deeply alliterative (especially with its pun on "store") as to prove, sonically, the richness implicit in sufficiency.

"Unbound," the first of four sections, establishes Wilner's position as a feminist-and pacifist-revisionary of myth. The book's title poem, for example, takes as its basic premise the idea that Sarah was given the command, before Abraham, to sacrifice Isaac, and that she refused to do so. She speaks to the angel "in a soft voice, a speech / the canon does not record." She asks "What use have I / for History - an arrow already bent / when it is fired from the bow?" It is a sham, in other words. The end of the poem is both tricky and disappointing:

She wrapped herself in a thick dark cloak against the desert's enmity, and tying up her stylus, bowl, some dates, a gourd for water-she swung her bundle on her back, reached out once more toward Isaac. "It's time," she said. "Choose now."

"But what will happen if we go?" the boy Isaac asked. "I don't know," Sarah said "But it is written what will happen if you stay."

We know what will happen, but Wilner has given Isaac a choice-to go with his mother to seek Ishmael and Hagar for a reconciliation-so are we to impugn his moral cowardice? Or is Wilner's rewriting merely a wishful conceit? Such is the dilemma of one who wants to revise, but

knows the impossibility of undoing, history. In "Reading the Bible Backwards" Wilner offers a tempting cornucopia of details, alluding variously to the apocalypse, creation, the Flood, Byron's "Darkness" and Yeats's "The Second Coming," only to end with the stunning suggestion that the entire poem has described the destruction of a world prior to the beginning of Genesis. Like the failure of one of God's earlier creations in James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, Wilner's proposal implicitly asks us to consider our "scripture" as one among several possible versions of sacred truth. Just as she revises the Bible, she offers new interpretations of Persephone, Arthurian legend, Sleeping Beauty and, later in the book, of Sophoclean tragedy: the poems of "Unbound" release their figures from the bonds of history into new freedoms. Of these, the first, "Coda, Overture" looks both forward and backward, attempting to reveal that which (das Ewig-Weibliche) can be identified only provisionally:

She stepped out of the framing circle of the dark. We thought, as she approached, to see her clearly, but her features only grew more indistinct as she drew nearer, like those of statues long submerged in water. We couldn't name her, she who can't be seen

except in spaces between wars, brief intervals

when history relents, reflection intervenes, returning home becomes the epic moment

Wilner shares with Stanley Moss the Jewish sense of the provisional: like Haxton, she is delicate in her appropriations of tradition and nature. Everything is transitional; even her experiments with myth seem to offer no solid assurance of stability. Hope is generally accompanied by an italicized or implicit perhaps.

When, in the second part of her book ("Companions"), she temporarily abandons myth and history for more sociable and secular subjects, Wilner answers many of the doubts that a reader of Part 1 might have. She confesses to Maxine Kumin that myth protects her from unpleasant circumstances as well as opening her up to larger fields of reference. She realizes that she is afraid

of scissors and of saw, of lighting (ires, of using "I," (or fear I'll start

some mad striptease of art, tell all, embarrass everyone, even the dog and bring the gossip hounds to sniff the ruins, the mess I made of it all.

She would like, we infer, to be like Kumin herself, "refusing / both amnesia and the comfort of a myth," able instead to say things straight, to look at reality cold without leaping to the enormous catastrophic associations that her mythic imagination brings to her. In this way, Wilner balances the mythic with the personal, the universal with the particular, understanding that her religious impulses are to a large measure a studied effort to wear asbestos that will protect her from selfexposure. Steering clear of the egotistical sublime, Wilner attempts a poetry both personal and curiously clinical. Because she seldom writes about what might be called domestic or even secular subjects, her own life is largely invisible here.

As are those of most of the other human figures in the book. They seem to emerge from and return to nature, which is Wilner's strongest image for divinity. In one of her best poems, "Conversation with a Japanese Student," she describes the Peace Park in Nagasaki, where, at the epicenter of the atomic blast

there is a glade so dense with foliage, bushes, (Uakao and pine, you'd almost miss the sign, hand-drawn, the only one in English that I saw:

THEY SAID NOTHING WOULD GROW HERE FOR 75 YEARS

And though the language was my own I found it difficult to read through such a thick exquisite screen of evergreen and tears.

The earth abideth forever; its inhabitants merely come and go, making little difference. The telling finale to the book replies to the opening "Coda, Overture"; it is a poem that marries Greek and biblical myths of new beginnings in order to suggest the promise of redemption, but with a twist:

So we come down from stony hauntsthe hypothetical eternal-to find another

way into the garden, not by the gate guarded by the iron angel. Nor shall we call it by the ancient name. After so long an exile, what have we to do with Edens?

Bred on the bitter fruit of choice, having soaked the earth with dragon's blood pouring from our mortal woundsthis time we'll pick the other Tree and eat the fruit of life.

("Having Eaten of the Tree of Knowledge")

A new Garden, with a new name as yet unknown or unselected, the site of instruction here stands for all the revised places in Wilner's work: it both resembles and departs from earlier, familiar paradigms. Such is the poet's delicacy and tact that she only-but always-alludes to the possibility of radical change. Such revisionism is more radical for its very refusal to brag.

We can "know" Eleanor Wilner only implicitly by her frequent selfexclusion from mythic scenarios. In spite of an autobiographical impulse, Anne Winters proves herself, paradoxically, the most unknowable of the four "selves" here. From the very first sentence of her first poem ("Night Wash") she coolly offers up a voice at once mysterious and authoritative:

All seas are seas in the moon to these lonely and full of light.

High above laundries and rooftops the pinstriped silhouettes speak nightmare as do the faces full of fire and orange peel. Every citizen knows what's the trouble: America's longest river is-New York; that's what they say, and I say so.

The abrupt line-break between pronoun and predicates (or what InItially we might think will be adjective and nouns) begins an eerie depiction of squalid grotesquerie. Even here Winters distinguishes herself in two ways. First of all, she looks unflinchingly at ugliness and poverty without resorting to impoverished, bare diction. These poems are richly, densely beautiful: her language neither embellishes nor hides the surrealistic and horrible panorama of New York. (The power of the opening line owes a great deal to the thrice-used, whistling, "ee" sound.) Nor does she, like other New York poets, deal with a city of artful treasuresalthough she includes several museum pieces in the volume - and bourgeois pleasures, although she separates herself from the homeless dere-

licts whom she encounters. Second, although the "voice" in the poems is distinctly idiosyncratic, and although many of them reveal what I take to be "facts" about Winters's life (we learn that she grew up near Harlem in an upper-West-Side neighborhood; that she has lived in Boston and Virginia; that she is a mother), it is more curiously analytic-educated but unpedantic - than those of the other three poets I have discussed.

Winters's nightmarish vision of the city crosses Garcia Lorca and Allen Ginsberg with the acute observations we associate with Elizabeth Bishop. To see, if not a world in a grain of sand, nature amid the machinery, is one of her strongest gifts, as in the opening stanza of "Demolition Crane":

The brown cranes are here again, unpapering room after room at the first hint of spring. They have a new city in wraps, built itself on flutes tall and slender as cranes.

But right now it's pure peace, one quarter trails after another into vacant gazes, grassy departures

Her impersonality derives from an attention to other persons, to (the title of one poem) «Alternate Lives." Like Bishop, she listens attentively: "Still, nothing soothes me, sometimes, / like American voices, softened with distance, / with nearness, as murmurs in a darkened Greyhound" (from "Day and Night in Virginia and Boston," in which she adjusts this pleasure against her alienation from rednecks and other strangers in new places). Everything, as in Bishop, has the potential for simultaneous foreignness and familiarity, "distance" as well as "nearness," as in the volume's tide poem, a recollection from adolescence about the unlikely connections among teenaged girls.

I have called Winters belligerently secular. Even though the book's second part (composed of various poems about New York, other places, and works of art) contains a "Prayer for Peace," Winters calls the "old words" (Kyrie, eleison) "heavy ineffectual," and acknowledges even the emptiness of prayer:

My Lord, whom are we addressing? Like language, made through a history, like breath through the body? A communal creation, representing worlds of invested labor How can we pray, then, burning as we do to adore yet adoring whatever bums? - each emotion, each prayer, reversing

to its beautiful, ominous dorsal fin: solitary arch above waters: in the made desolation this inward, backward wave.

Winters's unflinching honesty may be epitomized by the tide poem of the first, New York, section of the volume, "The Ruins," which applies a dense, almost lush, Romantic diction to a nightmare landscape of burned-out tenements. The opening address to a slum child sounds like the voice of Rilke wandering in the Waste Land:

In shorts and sneakers, torso's weight caught on the bent left leg, palm flat on the granite flutings you crouch on a fragment of lintel. Loose masonry flours your hams, your calves, the right knee elbow-hooked against the sparrowy black ribcase. You bask economically, shoulderblades tilted to catch the last sun. Singularities: the eyes slightly protuberant, underlid reddish and wet; a slate-blue vein in the eyebrow. Expression: furious, inward, fixed.

But to the claims of a lay social worker that "the LORD came uninvited" to this demented world, and that He hides Himself in the disinherited, like the boy above, Winters can only, sadly, deny both the religious pretension and the esthetic (Rilkean) one:

One chance

in twenty No, no god has elected your life. Nothing's hidden inside you but your dying childhood, and whatever is on its way from the outside to replace it. Streetlight falls like streaks of drvpoint around the tight, huddled limbs.

Expression: obscure now, lid-glistening, as if you'd tried to seal yourself into something separate, and when this is denied a flatness comes into the human face. Yet it's only the armor of outside, still inlaid with its useless and lovely uniqueness of inside. Almost you weep, taking arms, and one day one source of your street cool will be this tear spread without depth or relief over the whole eye.

This estheticizing of the boy (another poem in the volume is about the Hall of Armor at the Metropolitan Museum) combines a heroic vocabulary ("taking arms") with the inwardness of Bishop's "The Man Moth," that earlier urban phantasmagoria.

Like Bishop, Winters can maintain a cool assurance even when dealing with the most horrifying subjects (a child watching the death of a prostitute across the street from her house; a disturbed black boy committing suicide in a school bathroom). Like other urban poets she can portray the archaeology of the city as a geological or natural fact. Facing things so old and unused that they seem positively primeval and unknowable, Winters deals with urgent subject matter in a manner strangely calm. The person who appears in, or rather disappears from, these pages, is a witness to neither her own life (like Haxton), nor the symbols of the natural world (like Moss), nor the mythic scope of human history (like Wilner), but to the decline of American civilization at the end of the millennium.

Publishers of books reviewed:

Alfred A. Knopf

210 E. 50th St. New York, NY 10022

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

111 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10003

University of Chicago Press 5801 S. Ellis Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

Contributors

Guest Editor Mary Kinzie has published poems in numerous journals, including the New Yorker, Salmagundi and TQ #71 and 74. Her essays on poetry and on reading fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Antaeus and Modem Philology.

*

* * Charles O. Hartman teaches in the English Department at Connecticut College. He is the author of two books of poetry and a book of criticism, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Princeton University Press, 1980). * * * Eleanor Wilner's most recent book of poems is Sarah's Choice (University of Chicago Press, 1989), which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and is reviewed in this issue of TQ. Her poems have appeared in several periodicals and anthologies.

* * * Daryl Hine, the editor of Poetry from 1968 to 1978, will complete the fifth year of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991. His latest book of poems, Postscripts, will be published by Knopf later this year. * * * Frances Padorr Brent is the cotranslator of Beyond the Limit: Poems by Irina Ratushinskaya (Northwestern University Press, 1987). Her work has been published in the Yale Review, New American Writing and Formations. A story of hers appeared in TQ #53.

Anne-Marie Cusac currently holds a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. Her poetry has appeared in the American Scholar.

* * * William Finley is an undergraduate student in journalism at Columbia College, in Chicago. "Daddy-O" is his first published poem.

* * * Allan Gray is senior vice-president at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio. His work has appeared in Poetry, and he has been a recipient of an Arvon Foundation award. * * * W. S. Di Piero's latest book of poems is The Dog Star (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). His collection of prose, Out of Eden: Essays on Modem Art, will be pub-

lished by the University of California Press in fall 1991. * * * Joanna Anos teaches in the creative-writing program at Northwestern University. Her poems have appeared in the American Scholar and the Greensboro Ret'iew. * * * Brooks Haxton is the author of four books of poems, including Traveling Company (Knopf, 1989), which is reviewed in this issue of TQ. * * * John Koethe's most recent book of poems is The Late Wisconsin Spring (Princeton University Press, 1984). He teaches in the Philosophy Department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Charles Wasserburg's poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. * * * Peter Marcus works for the Washington Post Book World. These are his first published poems. * * * Meg Schoerke is a graduate student at Washington University, in St. Louis. She has a poem scheduled to appear in the American Scholar. * * * Alan Shapiro's fourth book of poems, Covenant, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His poems and essays have appeared frequently in TQ. * * * Lawrence Schmidt was recently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. These are his first published poems. * * * William Hunt is the author of two books of poems and is writing a novel based on night life in big cities. * * * Terrence Holt is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University. His short stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Georgia Review and Prize Stories 1982: The O. Henry Awards. «Aurora" is part of a colleciton of short fiction titled In the Valley of the Kings.

Gary Saul Morson is a professor of Slavic literature at Northwestern University. He is the author of books on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Bakhtin. * * * Robert Boyers is the founding editor of Salmagundi and the author of several books and articles on modern poetry and fiction, on culture, film and art, and on figures such as Lionel Trilling and R. P. Blackmur. * * * Johnny Payne has translated and written on the work of several Latin American authors. His fiction has appeared in the Southern Review and other journals. * * * Catherine Thompson is a poetry student in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College 'Dawn Poems in Blood': Sylvia Plath and PMS" is her first published essay. * * * Willard Spiegelman is a professor of English at Southern Methodist University, and the editor of the Southwest Review. He is the author of Wordsworth's Heroes (University of California Press, 1985) and The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry. (Princeton University Press, 1990).

Selected by Russell Banks

1/ A wonderful book .in the rarified company of the best of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. Five or six of these stories are worth the price of five or six entire collections." -Russell Banks

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LITHUANIA

short stories by Joe Ashby Porter

Whether traveling from Marseille to Tunis, or walking past a Baltimore crab store, characters in Joe Ashby Porter's Lithuania discover that everything that mattersand plenty that doesn't-arrives unexpectedly. Without even looking, they find what's important in memories, on rooftops, and at foreign cafes. In these eleven stories, the bizarre and the familiar meet in everyday lives and exotic locations.

"Joe Ashby Porter writes sentences that are as subtle, syntactically graceful. and beautiful as any I've seen. And in those �entences he has a way of displaying the lives of people, places, and situations that is all his own. It's as if no one had ever spoken in just this way, or about things in this way. No one has. "-Toby Olson

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'Who is this mage, Mr. Porter, who is / on such cozy terms with the inhabitants of a distant Turuslen islandI and who just as readily knows all the inner thoughts of a Baltimore gossip? Many people write well nowadays, but few of them have Porter's human range. Yes, it's his humanity that astonishes me -Edmund White

'Spry dialogue, bright impressions.

Reading lithuania, I smiled from beginning to end. "-fred Chappell

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DIRTY TRICKS

short stories by Jack Matthews

In this new collection by Jack Matthews, a wide cast of characters are perpetrators and victims of "dirty tricks' that range from the playful to the grotesque, from the inevitable ironies of existence to murky self-deceit, from childish teasing to cynical manipulation and even murder. In some stories, shifting points of view cast a f�miliar tale in a new light. We sympathize With a harmless giant who is brutally murdered by a trespassing "little person" called Jack. And the exasperated Prague branch manager of a Berlin firm writes the home office for advice on an unusual personnel problem-with a malingering salesman named Gregor Samsa.

Blessed with honesty, clarity, directness, proportion, and a lovely humor "-Eudora Welty. on the work of Jack Matthews

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Mr. and Mrs. Donald Egan (patron)

Mr. and Mrs. H. Bernard Firestone

Patricia P. Flentye

Mr. and Mrs. C. Dwight Foster

Mrs. Melvin Grav

Joann B. Griffith

Mr. and Mrs. John Hartigan

Mary Gray Hughes

Kenneth J. James

Fran Katz (patron)

Shelley Korshak

Mr. and Mrs. Barry L. Maclean

Ms. Jane Mayer

Mrs. Robert Mayer

Mrs. Marlene Welsh Phillips (Benefactor)

Fran Podulka

Barbara Polikoff

Geraldine R. Pratt

Rebecca Riley

Ms. Jennie Ritchie

Deborah N. Rosen

Fave Schwimmer

Gilaine Shindelman (Benefactor)

Lvn M. Sits

Allen R. Smart

Ruth Smith

Mr. and Mrs. Jules N. Stiffel

Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Suekoff

Geraldine Szymanski

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