ENCOUNTER WITH ALTERITY:

EMMANUEL LEVINAS’S ETHICS AND THE NOVELS OF OSCAR WILDE,

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND DJUNA BARNES

by

Tzu-Yu Lin
December 20, 2011

A dissertation submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate School of
the University at Buffalo, State University of New York
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English
 UMI Number: 3495425

All rights reserved

INFORMATION TO ALL USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent on the quality of the copy submitted.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI 3495425
Copyright 2012 by ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346
   ii  

Copyright by

Tzu-Yu Lin

2012

(ii)
   iii  

Acknowledgments

Among the various perspectives, positions, and descriptions that Emmanuel

Levinas employs to approach the ethical relation with the other person, a simple word—

“work”—from “The Trace of the Other” caught my attention early on in the preparatory

stage of my dissertation, and throughout my writing process its significance has

continued to intensify for me. An ethical relation requires that we not only have the

Platonic goodness in mind as a guiding principle for metaphysical transcendence, but we

must also actually work for the other even though—and this is Levinas’s point—there is

no controlling the outcome of such work, no guaranteeing gratitude, and no assuring

reciprocation. Work, in the Levinasian sense, is a generous gift, a radical departure from

the self unto the future of the other. I have always imagined that with the word Levinas is

secretly referring to the experience of being a mentor, for it aptly describes what my

adviser, Dr. Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, has done for me. It was with such overflowing

generosity that Dr. Ziarek helped me bring into being a dissertation that began as, and

remained for a long time, a vague idea. She read my drafts with care, provided extensive

and insightful suggestions, pointed me to useful references, and along the process

allowed me ample opportunity to experiment with the shape this dissertation was to take.

I owe Dr. Ziarek my most sincere gratitude for being there every step of the way, and for

setting up a high standard of scholarship and mentorship that I can only hope to emulate.

I have also benefited from the generosity of the other two readers of my

dissertation, Dr. Henry Sussman and Dr. Damien Keane, both of whom went out of their

way to accommodate my project among their academic obligations in multiple locations.

   iv  

I am deeply thankful to Dr. Sussman for his sense of humor, warm encouragement, and

invaluable advice on how my dissertation may be further developed in the future. I have

always felt that my work is too much of my own, in a limited way; Dr. Sussman’s

extensive yet intimate knowledge in philosophy, literature and other genres of art kept me

aware of my limitations and will continue to press me to open up to broader perspectives.

My heartfelt thanks go to Dr. Keane for reading my drafts meticulously, suggesting

resources, and providing incisive comments on both ideas and writing strategies. My

dissertation in its present form does not do justice to his challenges, but they, too, will be

well heeded as I consider further development of the project.

Bits and pieces throughout my dissertation can be traced back to my discussion

with Dr. Michael Sayeau, with whom I took supervised reading a few years ago. I would

like to thank Dr. Sayeau for those conversations as well as for advice and support that he

enthusiastically imparted.

I am indebted to several friends as well. Thanks to Mikyung Park, on whom I can

always count for a supply of optimism; to Moriah Hampton, who alerted me to several

important resources and inspired me with her talent in various fields; to Chih Hung Chien,

for encouragement and company along the way.

Finally, much love and gratitude to Chihyuan Liao and my parents, Yueju Liao

and Shengfang Lin: without your unconditioned support, this dissertation would have

never been possible.

   v  

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement iii

Table of Contents v

Abstract vi

Chapter I 1
From Morality to Ethics:
Paradigm Shift in Literary Modernism and Emmanuel Levinas

Chapter II 24
“The Perfect Use of an Imperfect Medium”:
The There Is, Narrative Temporality,
and The Picture of Dorian Gray

Chapter III 71
Virginia Woolf’s Ethical Aesthetics:
Mourning, Temporality, Relation and To the Lighthouse

Chapter IV 121
Odd Faces of Love and Ethics:
Nightwood’s Contestation of Oedipal Narrative
and Animalistic Femininity

Endnotes 173

Bibliography 188
   vi  

Abstract

This dissertation proposes to conceive a new relation between literary modernism and

ethics by addressing three novels from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas: Oscar

Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927),

and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). Critiquing Western culture as “an insurmountable

allergy” to alterity, Emmanuel Levinas defines ethics as the decentering of the subject

that takes place in the encounter with the other. This definition allows us to distinguish

between morality as a social code and ethics as a constant putting into question of the self.

Thus, in contrast to the conventional correlation between the demand of literary

modernism for innovation and the refusal of moral concerns, this dissertation addresses

on the one hand how Levinas’s ethical encounter with alterity can be employed to

account for literary innovation—despite the philosopher’s own reservation about

literature and art in general—and, on the other hand, how the novels in question each

perform the work of Levinasian ethics as they seek to renovate the genre. The Picture of

Dorian Gray resonates with the Levinasian self critique by performing an aesthetic

experience in its central yellow book chapter, which paralyzes the narrative as an

individual’s temporal existence with the impersonal existence that Levinas names the

there is. By staging the artistic process in the context of mourning, To the Lighthouse

theorizes an ethical aesthetics that anticipates Levinas’s formulation of the signifying

subject as response rather than initiative. Finally, with its strange narrative structure and

imagery, Nightwood can be read as a Levinasian critique of Levinas himself, exposing the

philosopher’s writing as a gendered narrative of a male protagonist that obliterates the

   vii  

alterity of the woman and the animal. While the novelists addressed either ostensibly

repudiate the moral function of literature or deliberately maintain a distance from

morality as social mores, re-reading these novels suggests that ethics, understood in the

Levinasian sense, is in fact profoundly intertwined with literary innovation.

 
 
 
   1

Chapter I

From Morality to Ethics:

The Paradigm Shift in Literary Modernism and Emmanuel Levinas

A calling into question of the same—which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of

the same—is brought about by the other. We name this calling into question of my

spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics.

—Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43

I.

The spirit of Anglo-American literary modernism is effectively captured by Ezra

Pound’s memorable slogan: “Make it new!” If the long tradition of Western art has been

in general “a history of innovation” as Derek Attridge observes, literary modernism

nonetheless stands out in the history with the unrivaled explicitness of its demand for the

new as an artistic criterion (Singularity 2). The literary demand for innovation can be

traced back to Oscar Wilde, who claimed that “the work of art is beautiful by being what

Art has never been” (“Soul” 259). The demand also finds resonance in Virginia Woolf’s

argument in “Character in Fiction” that “on or about December 1910, human character

changed” and thus so must its mode of literary expression (421).1 Djuna Barnes did not

care for producing manifestos of literary precepts as much as her predecessors did, but

she declared her challenge of novelistic conventions through one of her characters: “I

have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it” (Nightwood 82). Although modernist

writers sought newness in different forms and for different reasons, their diverse interests
   2

in stylistic innovation converged on a primacy of aesthetic autonomy that disputes the

long-standing realist belief in language as a transparent medium of Truth. The modernist

demand for the new, then, questions the truth and authority of the external world by

foregrounding the constituting power of language: language does not merely reflect a

reality; it constructs reality. Often described as a postmodern view, the argument for the

constitutive function of language is already prefigured in Wilde’s assertion that “life

imitates art more than art imitates life” (“Decay” 933); it is evidenced, as well, in Stephen

Dedalus’s poetic aspiration to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience

of my race” (Joyce 196). The belief in the constitutive power of language to bring into

being what is not yet, inevitably, was bound up with a contestation of social conformity

and moral codes. The modernist demand for the new challenged the conventional sense

of propriety by articulating experiences that had not been admitted expression in

literature—consider, for instance, Wilde’s love that dares not speak its name, the various

corporeal functions described in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Barnes’s anguished female

protagonist who almost injures her infant son in her boiling resentment of the maternal

role.

With its insistence that aesthetic autonomy should not be compromised by social

conventions, the modernist demand for the new imprinted its mark of amorality in the

following decades of literary criticism that chose to leave in oblivion the moral

perspectives of the Arnoldian-Leavisite discourse that treated literature as means through

which proper cultural tastes and moral standards were cultivated. If the modernist

primacy on innovation was an intrinsic condition for the oblivion of the moral in literary

studies, the oblivion was compounded by extrinsic factors such as “the demise of modern
   3

humanism, its failure in the face of two world wars, the proliferation of nuclear weapons,

the horror of genocide and holocaust, and the oppression of peoples whose narratives

somehow fell outside the bounds of an Anglo- or Eurocentric point of view” (Davis and

Womack ix). The prevailing conception of deconstruction—before it took its ethical turn

around the 1990’s—as “nihilistic textual free play that suspends all questions of value”

further aggravated the exclusion of ethical concerns from literary studies (Critchley 3).

Thus, as Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack observe, “many critics during the

poststructuralist era have doggedly and determinedly sought to place distance between

themselves and any mention of an ethical or moral perspective in their work” (ix).

If we are to be faithful to the modernist demand for the new, how should we

approach the works that intended to “make it new” but are no longer new after the elapse

of a century or so? While the demand for newness historically precipitated the obscurity

of moral concerns in literary studies, it is imperative that we resume the question of the

ethical in order to approach again innovation as a criterion of art. I suggest that in

modernist literature we can uncover a paradigm shift from morality to ethics—a

paradigm shift that, as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter and through the rest of the

study, prefigures Emmanuel Levinas’s peculiar reformulation of ethics that enormously

complicates our understanding of subjectivity, otherness, relation, language, and time. At

the risk of simplification, suffice it to say for now that in this distinction morality is

associated with value judgment, social mores and conduct code, whereas ethics pertains

to an originary, pre-ontological encounter with otherness that enacts the critiquing,

altering, and refashioning of the structure of the self. What is “ethical” in the encounter

lies in the absolute otherness of the other—which Levinas calls “alterity” and
   4

“exteriority”—that resists totalization by the subject’s acts of cognition, identification,

comprehension, and representation. Always in excess to the subject’s consciousness, the

meaning of the absolute alterity of the other is inexhaustible. The inexhaustibility of

alterity calls into question the subject as the source and authority of meaning; more

importantly, the alterity of the other demands infinite response form the self. Such a

conception of ethics allows us to think of the “new” in modernist literature not as a fixed

historical moment, or as an inherent quality in the experimental works of modernists.

Instead, Levinas’s notion of ethics as an encounter with alterity allows us—indeed,

demands us—to renew our response to a literary work each time we attend to its

inexhaustible otherness.

It is my argument, then, that we can discern a new intertwinement between ethics

and innovation in the modernists’ overt refusal of morality. With this argument, my study

participates in the on-going revival of ethical literary studies that began in late 1980’s. In

1999, PMLA featured a special issue on “Ethics and Literary Study” that opened with the

introductory remark from Lawrence Buell: “Ethics has gained new resonance in literary

studies during the past dozen years, even if it has not—at least yet—become the

paradigm-defining concept that textuality was for the 1970s and historicism for the 1980s”

(8). A decade later now, Buell’s observation still rings true. The revived interest in ethics

has persisted as a central concern in literary studies without, importantly, producing a

unanimous definition of ethics or a unitary approach. One might even say that the

absence of consensus signals the inexhaustibility of ethics, an inexhaustibility that makes

the ethical possible precisely in the Levinasian sense. Yet, among the various influences

and methodologies that have comprised the ethical turn of literary studies, Levinas’s
   5

thinking of the self and the other person is perhaps the most helpful source for reassessing

the modernist demand for the new.2 One of Levinas’s dominant concerns is how a subject

may break away from subjectivity as a closed structure of identification that converts

everything and everyone encountered into the sphere of the same.3 Levinas inquires, then,

whether it is possible to relate to the other person in a non-incorporating relation that will

respect and preserve the otherness of the other. One such possibility is an ethical relation

that Levinas names the “face-to-face”: face-to-face with the other person who signifies

alterity, the subject’s spontaneous structure of identification is interrupted and put into

question. The face-to-face is therefore an originary moment, in the sense that upon each

encounter the subject is altered and created anew.

Drawing from Levinas’s ethical face-to-face relation, Derek Attridge’s brilliant

account of literary invention is formulated in the form of “virtual interpersonality” (Buell

13). For Attridge, literary creation is neither creation ex nihilo nor merely an expression

of the writer’s psychological or intellectual activity. Rather, for a literary work to be

inventive, creation will have to be a process in which an “entity or an idea unthinkable or

unimaginable within existing frameworks of understanding and feeling come[s] into

being as part of our understood and felt world” (Singularity 3). Parallel to Levinas’s

ethical relation in which the subject responds to the other as other, Attridge describes

literary creation as a response to what is exterior to the creating subject:

In a curious way, the ideas I have not yet been able to formulate seem to

be “out there” rather than simply nonexistent, although I know this is not

literally the case. My experience has an element of passivity, of attempting

to heighten responsiveness to hints of relationships, to incipient arguments,

   6

to images swimming on the edges of consciousness, an element of “letting

them come” as much as seeking them out. (Singularity 22-23)

He then goes on to define literary invention as “both an act and an event, both something

that is done intentionally by an effort of the will and something that happens without

warning to a passive, though alert, consciousness” (Singularity 27). Echoing Levinas’s

view that the origin of signification lies not in the subject but in the face of the other,4

Attridge’s view of literary invention as an event happening to the writer raises the

possibility of placing the source of meaning outside the subject, thus downplaying, even

problematizing, the authority of the subject. While the literary work cannot be produced

without the intentional act of the subject, the inventiveness of the work is to be registered

in the resultant difference that separates the literary work from the existing framework of

understanding and interpretation. Moreover, for Attridge, to acknowledge the necessity of

the subject’s intentional act is not to reaffirm the primacy of subjectivity; rather, to do so

is to clarify the relation between responsiveness and responsibility to the other:

“responsiveness to the other must involve something like responsibility because the other

cannot come into existence unless it is affirmed, welcomed, trusted, nurtured”

(Singularity 125). Thus, in the act-event of literary creation, “We find ourselves already

responsible for the other—and this fact constitutes the artistic sphere as much as it does

the ethical” (Singularity 127). It should be added that Attridge endows reading with as

much ethical and inventive significance as he does with writing. Reading is a

“responsible response . . . to the other as other,” which registers the singularity of a work,

its “resistance and irreducibility” to conventions of cultural and literary structures

(Singularity 124-25).
   7

Attridge’s alignment with Levinas sets him apart from an important critical

genealogy in the ethical turn of literary studies: the reinstatement of the Leavisite

tradition in the more recent works by Wayne C. Booth and Martha C. Nussbaum. Both

Booth and Nussbaum follow F. R. Leavis’s practice of moral interpretation by looking to

novels as pedagogy of proper values and conducts. In Nussbaum’s point of view, the

novel is crucial to moral education because it stages nuanced, complex, and particularized

situations that complement the abstraction and generalization of moral philosophy.5 As

much as her attentiveness to the particularity of literature—as opposed to the universality

of philosophy—may come close to Attridge’s emphasis on singularity in a responsible

response, Nussbaum’s (and also Leavis’s and Booth’s) moral criticism is in the final

analysis a literary instrumentalism, seeing the dramatic situations presented in the novel

as occasions where the reader learns to evaluate moral decisions. 6 Whereas Attridge is

guided by Levinas’s concern of how the self may be put into question on an originary

level, Nussbaum is guided by the Aristotelian inquiry of “How should one live?” on a

secondary level (Love’s Knowledge 173). The difference in theoretical orientation

between Attridge and the other tradition is also clear in the dominant trope of the novel as

a friend throughout Booth’s The Company We Keep, while Attridge follows Levinas in

referring to the other (virtual) person as a stranger “over whom I have no power”

(Levinas, TI 39; Attridge, Singularity 124).

Admittedly, it is undesirable and even impossible to maintain in actual practice a

strict, uncontaminated demarcation between the Levinasian-Attridgean mode of ethical

inquiry and the genealogy of moral interpretation that goes from Leavis to Booth and

Nussbaum. But a significant double movement emerges when we contrast Attridge’s

   8

Levinasian-inflected approach to the other tradition: on the one hand, the contrast

cautions against the potential lapse of moral criticism into reaffirmation of certain pre-

established socio-political values; on the other hand, with its emphasis on responsible

response to unformed or half-formed ideas that seem to be “out there,” the Levinasian-

Attridgean approach pushes the subject outside the boundary of existing cultural and

literary structures and thus underscores a non-prescribed, singularized, and inventive

dimension of ethics. The double movement sheds light on the paradigm shift from

morality to ethics already underway in the modernist demand of innovation as a criterion

of art. For instance, although Wilde’s aestheticism is known for its amoral aphorisms

such as “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or

badly written. That’s all” (DG 3), the refusal of conventional morality consists only part

of Wilde’s larger ethical vision. In his claim that “the morality of art consists in the

perfect use of an imperfect medium” (DG 3), for instance, we can discern an attempt to

redefine “morality” in relation to artistic innovation and the alterity of the artist’s medium.

This will be explored in greater detail in Chapter II of the study.

In addition to the outward movement of art conceived by Wilde, modernists also

already began to configure literary creation in terms of virtual interpersonality. I will

discuss two examples here: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. In “Tradition and the

Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot conceptualizes literary creation as the poet’s response to

tradition, and he understands “tradition” as the “dead poets” that have come before (48).7

He emphasizes that the “historical sense” is a necessary component in literary creation:

the writer must write “not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling

that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the
   9

literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and compose a simultaneous

order” (“Tradition” 49). Literature therefore enacts a complex dynamic between

innovation and response to the dead, the personal and the intertextual aspect of literary

history. As Eliot sees it, the “best” and the “most individual parts” of a literary work are

paradoxically “those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most

vigorously” (“Tradition” 48). Poetry is not a pure expression of an individual’s talent but

a response to alterity, where the others from the past can speak again. Eliot thus

complicates the prevalent understanding that modernism upholds the romantic notion of

the writer as “the lone genius who follows his (or occasionally her) own inspiration”

(Lewis 7).

In Eliot’s formulation of poetry as response to the dead poets, we descry an

incipient argument that displaces the signifying subject as the origin of meaning. Yet,

politically conservative and culturally elitist, Eliot eventually misses the opportunity to

develop more fully the radical implications that the encounter with alterity might have for

literature. That will be the task taken up by Virginia Woolf, who similarly conceives

literature as response to alterity but goes decisively further than Eliot in her pursuit of

otherness. Like Wilde, who demands the artist should surpass the imperfect medium of

art, Woolf urges novelists to write about life in its otherness, an alterity ever elusive to

the reified convention of the genre. In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf proclaims that life is the

preeminent subject matter for the novel, but acknowledges that life is difficult to define

because of its alterity: “this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit” cannot be

contained in the conventional demands of the genre to “provide a plot, to provide comedy,

tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable” (898,
   10

899). To articulate in the novel what is beyond its scope necessarily requires that literary

language question and exceed its own conventions by responding to singularity.

In “Character in Fiction,” which I will explore in more detain in Chapter III of the

study, Woolf formulates the novel as an encounter with the other person, thus prefiguring

both Attridge’s model of literature and Levinas’s ethical face-to-face relation. Narrating

her chance encounter in the train with a woman she names Mrs. Brown, Woolf argues

that the driving force of literary creation is a desire to respond to the singularity of the

other. As is suggested in Woolf’s description of the encounter as “a character imposing

itself upon another person,” the writer is not so much an autonomous creator who

presides over her own linguistic cosmos, as she is a respondent, obligated to answer the

forceful call of a character (425). The sense of obligated response to Mrs. Brown—

Woolf’s shorthand for both the other person demanding response and “the spirit we live

by, life itself” (436)—is of tremendous significance. This response represents a writer’s

non-utilitarian concern for human “character,” which for Woolf is the foundation of the

novelist’s enterprise. Moreover, for the response to be a responsible one and not merely a

reinscription of conventions, Woolf beseeches her fellow novelists to let Mrs. Brown

come alive in words, unfettered by conventions: “You should insist that she is an old lady

of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any

dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what” (436). The idiosyncratic personage

“[lures] the novelist to her rescue by the most fascinating if fleeting glimpse of her

charms,” and the novelist can do so only by “smashing and crashing” conventions (433).

I would like to list three aspects in which Woolf’s conception of the novel as an

encounter with the other may be said to offer a more radical vision of literature than does
   11

Eliot’s formulation of response to the dead poets. To begin with, although they both posit

response—rather than initiative—as the overarching modality of literary practice, their

response-provoking “others” are different. Woolf’s “other” is a seemingly unremarkable

old woman politically marginalized and historically excluded from the proper domain of

art; if the novelist fails to respond in time by addressing her singularity, she will soon

disappear into the undifferentiated metropolitan masses. In contrast, Eliot’s “others” in

the particular essay in question are the great minds of Europe, the staying “monuments”

of culture that signify elitist values.

In the second aspect, Woolf evinces a disposition for an aesthetics of

fragmentation, whereas Eliot’s vision of culture and tradition privileges a totalizing

whole. Woolf’s aesthetics of fragmentation underlies her narrative technique that presents

moment-to-moment sensations; she highlights the fragmentary nature of representation,

too, when she warns fellow novelists of the unlikelihood to capture their own Mrs. Brown:

“most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair” (CIF 421). As I

will argue in Chapter III, Woolf’s aesthetic inclination for fragmentation can be

associated with an ethical impossibility to totalize the other in a complete, stable form—

in other words, an ethical acknowledgement of alterity that exceeds the writing subject’s

power to represent. In contrast to Woolf’s suspicion of totalizing form, Eliot asserts that

literary innovation finally strives for reintegration of the old and the new in a harmonious

whole:

The existing monuments [of great poets] form an ideal order among

themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really

new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the
   12

new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the

whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the

relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are

readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (“Tradition”

50)

Literary creation as response, in Eliot’s formulation, retains an inclination for totalization

of meaning and form. He wants to open up the tradition only to close it again, after the

tradition has been expanded and modified with the addition of a new work of art. While

Eliot does emphasize that the double movement necessarily entails reappraisal of both the

old and new “monuments,” he nonetheless neglects the potential political implications

that can be drawn from the changing relations among literary works. As is suggested by

his words—‘monuments,” “whole,” “proportion,” “conformity”—Eliot’s agenda falls

short of foregrounding the other as other. Whatever the magnitude and nature of changes

introduced into the tradition, the monuments will persist and cultural authority will be

entrenched.

Finally, the contrast between Woolf and Eliot points to the question of the

temporality of literature, a question I will address below and throughout the study. In

their figures of the other(s), Eliot refers to the dead poets whereas Woolf superimposes a

spectral image—“will-o’-the wisp” and “phantom,” for instance (CIF 420, 421)—upon

the concrete persona of Mrs. Brown. Although in poetry the dead speak again, Eliot

compresses the time of alterity—the dead, the past, and the tradition—into the present of

“a simultaneous existence and . . . a simultaneous order” (“Tradition” 49). Woolf,

   13

however, radicalizes the temporality of literature by seeking to foreground the diachrony

between the writing subject and the represented other.

If modernists shunned morality because the ideology-laden word straightjacketed

literary creativity, we can nonetheless also see in modernists an attempt to reconfigure

morality in order to contest the oversimplified opposition between the moral and the

aesthetic. Despite their different degrees of radicality, both Eliot and Woolf are important

points of reference in literary history that prefigure the Levinasian-Attridgean notions of

subjectivity, meaning, ethics, and literary innovation based on an ethical relation with the

other person. For Attridge, reading and writing as response to otherness is inherently

associated with innovation and ethics: in the act-event of literature, we respond to the

otherness of the other, not to comprehend the other through existing modes of thinking

and signification, but precisely to question and alter the existing modes so we can

responsibly account for the other as other. In his survey of the ethical turn of literary

studies, Buell praises the model of “virtual interpersonality” for its “antiauthoritarian

valorization of alterity” and the conceptualization of literature as both an act and an event”

(13). The model of literature as an encounter with the other, Buell comments, may be

“one of the most significant innovations of the literature-ethics movement” (13).

Nevertheless, Buell also cautions that such a model risks the “temptation to reify the

metaphor” (Buell 13). This is a just warning. For his ethical discourse, Levinas prefers to

adopt a vocabulary of ordinary words endowed with specific, unordinary meanings that

can be neglected in abuse and overuse. To avoid the pitfalls of reification, I will discuss

in the following some of Levinas’s most important terms underlying the conjunction of

literature and ethics that my study proposes to uncover.

   14

II.

As I hope to make clear in this study, Levinas’s ethics both provides insights into

literary innovation and poses challenges to the study of literature. There is no convenient,

ready transference of Levinasian ethics into literary or critical precepts, partly because he

holds a Platonic mistrust of poetry as loss of control, and because he understands rhetoric

in the classical sense of persuasion, ruse, and deception. Levinas’s suspicion—even

hostility at times—of art is particularly evident in his earlier essays and the first of his

mature works on ethics, Totality and Infinity. Jill Robbins’s groundbreaking work,

Altered Reading, successfully demonstrates the contradictions between Levinas’s

classical definition of rhetoric and his inadvertent enactment of rhetoric in the de Manian,

cognitive sense (16-19, 39-54). Altered Reading makes it possible for us to read

Levinas’s writings as a textual practice of figures and tropes—that is, to read Levinas

against his own warning against the equivocation of literary language. Chapter II of my

study will address Levinas’s ambivalence towards art and literature by similarly

deploying Levinas against himself, but with a different focus on temporality. While he

describes the temporality of aesthetic experience as one of horror in an early essay on art

titled “Reality and Its Shadow,” I argue that the Levinasian temporality of art instantiates

the impersonal existence that both threatens subjectivity and, paradoxically, figures the

radical passivity at the core of the ethical.

Despite Levinas’s ambivalence towards art and literature, his interest in ethical

language—in language as an ethical relation with alterity—is directly intertwined with

the modernist demand that literature should press for the new, beyond its limitation.
   15

Throughout his writings, Levinas conceives language as the means of ethical relationality,

although he approaches ethical language in two distinct idioms in Totality and Infinity

and the last of his major works, Otherwise than Being.8 I suggest that each approach

poses a distinct challenge for the novel that seeks to renovate the generic conventions by

self-reflexivity on narrative.

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues that the self consists of a structure of

identification: “The I is not a being that always remains the same, but is the being whose

existing consists in identifying itself, in recovering its identity throughout all that happens

to it” (TI 36). This operation of identification is a habitual tendency of the I; through

labor and acts of consciousness such as representation and comprehension, the I converts

objects and the other persons it encounters into parts of its identity, or the same as

Levinas calls it. This operation of identification is an ontological violence that eliminates

the alterity of the other. One of the important tasks of ethics, thus suggests Levinas, is to

salvage the otherness of the other from the violent identification of the self-same subject.

The other person is a stranger beyond the power of the subject, the absolutely other who

does not form a totality with the I.9 In its attempt to identify the other to itself, the I would

be forming an illusory totality and thus committing a violent disrespect for the other’s

alterity. Levinas proposes that an ethical relation should depart from the I’s operation of

identification. Such a relation, according to Levinas, “rests on language: a relation in

which the terms absolve themselves from the relation, remain absolute within the relation”

(TI 64).

What would the ethical language be like? The term Levinas offers in Totality and

Infinity is the primordial signifyingness that originates in the “face” of the other: “The
   16

way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here

name face” (TI 50). The face signifies by itself, without mediation and “independent of

my initiative and my power”(TI 50). It is an originary signifyingness that enables

subsequent secondary level of language as transmission of information. The closest the

face comes to our ordinary conception of language is as “the interpellation, the vocative”:

it calls upon the interlocutor and demands response, without “touch[ing] the other, even

tangentially” (TI 69, 62). The ethical relation that emerges from the primordial

signifyingness of the face is what Levinas calls the face-to-face. In this relation, the self

and the other do not comprise a totality, nor does the I incorporate the other into his

structure of identification. Rather, in the face-to-face, the I goes out of its habitual

trajectory towards the other, thus “delineating a distance in depth—that of conversation,

of goodness, of Desire—irreducible to the distance the synthetic activity of the

understanding establishes between the diverse terms, other with respect to one another,

that lend themselves to its synoptic operation” (TI 39).

Attridge’s account of innovative literature as response is informed by Levinas’s

face-to-face in the sense that literary creation, as well as responsible reading, assumes the

form of an encounter with the other that provokes an “obligation . . . to refashion what I

think and what I am in order to take the fullest possible account of, to respect, safeguard,

and learn from, the otherness and singularity of the other” (Singularity 125). When

Attridge adds that literature conceived in this way takes place “without any certainty

about the consequences of my act” (Singularity 125), he further reverberates with

Levinas’s emphasis that the ethical face-to-face leads to unpredictable outcomes. For

Levinas, the face-to-face does not guarantee acts of benevolence or conformity to moral
   17

codes because it precedes ontological categorization. What the face-to-face concerns is,

instead, the originary metaphysical distance between the self and the other that

preconditions moral judgment:

The other is maintained and confirmed in his heterogeneity as soon as one

calls upon him, be it only to say to him that one cannot speak to him, to

classify him as sick, to announce to him his death sentence; at the same

time as grasped, wounded, outraged, he is ‘respected.’ The invoked is not

what I comprehend: he is not under a category. (TI 69)

As Robbins explains, the face to face relation is for Levinas “so fundamental, so primary,

that any invocation—even of a violent sort, in the mode of refusal or domination—is

preferable, is less violent and more ‘respecting’ of the alterity of the other than the

seemingly benign . . . modes of relating to the other” such as comprehension,

representation, and identification (10).

In the face-to-face, then, the other “is the one to whom I speak,” the one whose

call I answer—but not the one about whom I speak (TI 69). If the face to face is a

conversation initiated by the signifyingness of the face,10 in the strictly ethical sense it is

nonetheless a conversation devoid of content, a conversation comprised of interpellation.

Can we conduct a discourse like this, whether in conversation or in writing? Levinas’s

refusal of content is a refusal to thematize the other: that is, a refusal to violate the alterity

of the other by putting him into a narrative, a representation—which the other can longer

undo because, being spoken of, the other has been transformed from a signifying face

with a “living presence” into a dead plastic form (TI 66). While his notion of ethical

language draws attention to the intrinsic violence of comprehension, identification and

   18

representation, Levinas’s demarcation of language into the ethical vocative and the

unethical content highlights the impossibility for the novel to perform ethical work. A

novel, certainly in its traditional realist form, cannot do without representation and

narrative. It would be unthinkable even for an experimental novel to do so.11 In fact, in

the phase of Totality and Infinity, Levinas’s characterization of the face as “living

presence” reinscribes the traditional Western hierarchy of logophonocentrism that

privileges presence over absence, speech over writing. In this light, a literary work would

be inevitably deprived of ethical primacy.

It is significant, therefore, that in a later essay titled “The Trace of the Other”

Levinas recasts the signifying force of the face with the temporality of diachrony. Here

the other is no longer conceived as a living presence, but situated in a radical past that

cannot be recuperated into the present of the subject by acts of consciousness such as

recollection and narrative. The other now signifies in an aporetic double modality. It

signifies as a sign, which discloses the other to the subject in the thematic dimension. But

it also signifies the alterity of the other as a trace from a radical, immemorial past, which

resists assimilation and appropriation by the subject. In Chapter III of my study, which in

part explores the textual mourning in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Levinas’s reformulated

notion of ethical signifyingness as the trace of the other is crucial to my argument for

mourning as an ethical aesthetics.

In his last major work, Otherwise than Being, Levinas undergoes what Critchley

refers to as a “deconstructive turn” and further removes his notion of ethical

signifyingness from the tradition of logophonocentrism (18). Levinas here distinguishes

between two dimensions of language: the ontological said and the ethical saying that
   19

signals an exteriority to ontology—as Levinas would call it, an otherwise than being that

is neither not being nor being otherwise. On the one hand, the ontological said produces

identity, content, and classification by identifying “this as that” (OB 35). Insofar as

ontology discloses entities and enables comprehension in the light of Being, the

“statement, assertion, or proposition (of the form S is P) . . . the content of my words,

their identifiable meaning” belong to the ontological said (Critchley 7). On the other hand,

the ethical saying signifies not the content of spoken words, but the very fact that speech

is produced as a relation with the other: someone has spoken the words to an interlocutor.

The notion of the saying allows Levinas to radically reformulate ethical subjectivity in a

series of interrelated terms: the subject as corporeal exposure to the other, as proximity,

as substitution, as responsibility for the other (OB 46). In this reformulation, Levinas

raises two important points. First, subjectivity, as well as signification, originates in

sensible life. Second, responsibility is not a duty or a moral attitude that the subject

assumes; responsibility—as a relation to the other in terms of proximity, exposure, and

substitution—is in itself “humanity, or subjectivity, or the self” (OB 46).

We can discern in discourse a self-deconstructive “spiralling movement” between

the ontological said and the ethical saying (Critchley 8). The saying says the said and is

immediately absorbed in the said. While the ethical task is to unsay the said and thus to

expose the saying, the task cannot be done once and fore all; once foregrounded, the

saying is absorbed in the said again and requires another unsaying. There is no end to the

struggling between the saying and the said. To illustrate the discourse as an

interweavement of the heterogeneous significations of the saying and the said, Levinas

remarks: “The interruptions of the discourse found again and recounted in the immanence
   20

of the said are conserved like knots in a thread tied again, the trace of a diachrony that

does not enter into the present, that refuses simultaneity” (OB 170). Conceived in the

terms of the saying and the said, then, discourse “claims to weave in thematizing and

enveloping all things” and yet it also “belies the very claim to totalize” (OB 170).

Levinas’s previous formulation of ethical language as the interpellation of the face

makes it almost impossible to imagine a novel, or even any sustained discourse, that

performs the ethical. To represent, identify, and describe at all is already intrinsically

violent. Levinas’s later formulation, however, allows us to see the ethical emerging from

the interwoven aporia of the saying and said. In particular, the struggle between the

saying and the said underscores temporality as a crucial entry point into the discussion of

innovative literature, especially the novels. As Levinas’s image of the discursive thread

with knots suggests, the saying and the said is a struggle between the temporality of

interruption and the temporality of totalization. The temporal struggle can also be

understood as one between narrative as a homogenizing simultaneity and the irreducible

diachrony of sensible life. Subjectivity, qualities of things, and the language with which

to express or identify them—for Levinas, these all have their roots in sensuous life and

thus all are temporal. The self, as a structure of identification, is “out of phase with itself

in the act of identification” (OB 28). The “sensible qualities” of things—“sounds, colors,

hardness, softness”—are attributes of things “lived in time in the form of a psychic life,

stretching out or dividing in the succession of temporal phases” (OB 31). Similarly, in the

temporal registers of language we can recover its bearing of “sensible life” (OB 35). An

entity appears identical because it is gathered in the already said and thus given an

identity; but, if we can unsay the said, we can expose the saying as “the impossibility of
   21

the dispersion of time to assemble itself in the present,” or, put differently, “the

insurmountable diachrony of time, a beyond the said” (OB 38).

A response to the novel that foregrounds its temporal incongruity, then, would be

a critical strategy that attends to the ethical in the primordial sense: the non-appropriating,

non-subordinating encounter with the alterity manifest in the other person, in sensible life

before converted into cognitive terms, in the temporality that resists the homogenizing

present of narrative. In the three chapters that follow, I examine three experimental

novels by attending to temporality in various ways: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian

Gray (1891), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

(1936). Chapter II serves a dual purpose: it traces the paradigm shift from morality to

ethics in Wilde’s aesthetic precepts on the one hand, and on the other hand it examines

the ethical possibility of Levinas’s notion of the “there is”—an impersonal, timeless

existence—that I argue is enacted in the lapse of narrative time in the central chapter in

Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Chapter III argues that Woolf’s essays and To the

Lighthouse give shape to an ethical aesthetics of mourning, which posits acts of

signifyingness as mournful response and which struggles to break up the temporal unity

of narrative. In this aspect, I see Woolf as prefiguring both Levinas’s sense of diachrony

and Derrida’s aporia of mourning. Finally, Chapter IV deploys Barnes’s Nightwood as a

contestation of Levinas’s ethics of fecundity and the anthropocentrism inherent in his

description of the woman and eros. Levinas’s ethics of fecundity privileges paternity to

the exclusion of the mother and the daughter; it therefore also privileges a time of

patrilineage among the various moments of the (male) subject’s exposure to alterity. I

suggest that in this way Levinas’s ethics comes to resemble the oedipal narrative enacted
   22

in so many traditional realist novels that claims universality but in facts limits female

characters to subordinating, domestic terms. Nightwood, I argue, thus offers a critique of

Levinas with its strange narrative structure that gradually reduces configurations of

human desire: the novel first exposes and interrupts the masculine desire for patrilineage,

endeavors to narrate lesbian desire but subsequently abandons it, and ultimately ends in

animalistic, timeless configurations of desire, as if the character’s desire, in all its

singularity, cannot remain limited in human terms.

Covering a range of nearly fifty years, these novels sample respectively proto-

modernist, high modernist, and late modernist experimentations that prefigured (in

Wilde’s case) and answered the modernist demand for the new. The newness demanded

in these and other modernist works cannot be understood as a particular point in time in

history. However, as Attridge would argue, the newness can be appreciated differently

each time we responsibly respond to the works. Or, in the idiom of Otherwise than Being,

in each of our response we engage in the spiraling, inexhaustible movement of unsaying

the said of the works. Towards the end of Otherwise than Being, Levinas emphasizes

again the movement in which the saying exceeds the said: “Language would exceed the

limits of what is thought, by suggesting, letting be understood without ever making

understandable, implication of a meaning distinct form that which comes to signs from

the simultaneity of systems or the logical definition of concepts” (OB 169-70). To this

description, Levinas add a statement that presages an ethics of inexhaustibility in literary

studies: “This possibility is laid bare in the poetic said, and the interpretation it calls for

ad infinitum” (OB 170, emphasis added). The following chapters, then, are my attempt to
   23

uncover the encounter with alterity enacted in the novels in question, and thus to renew

their infinite spiraling dynamics.

   24

Chapter II

“The Perfect Use of an Imperfect Medium”:

The There Is, Narrative Temporality, and

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I.

After The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in the July 1890 number of

Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Oscar Wilde came under such vehement attack for the

moral corruption of his poisonous novel that, in preparation for its republication in book

form, he was compelled to preface his story with a manifesto of aestheticism in order to

defend his creed of aesthetic autonomy. To stave off detractors who accused his novel of

moral degradation, in the newly added preface he sweepingly proclaimed, with much

pride, the dissociation of art from morality and any other social functions: “There is no

such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That

is all” (DG 3).1

So the myth goes that seals the image of Wilde as the aesthete par excellence and

Dorian Gray as the novel representative of English l’art pour l’art aestheticism, the myth

of artistic autonomy that entrenches the opposition between aesthetics and ethics. The

anecdote is a myth, not because it contains false facts: Wilde did receive plenty of

accusations from contemporary reviewers of Dorian Gray as morally detrimental, he did

add the preface specifically for its publication as a book, and he certainly did inculcate

the idea of amoral art in the preface as well as elsewhere. It is a myth, however, because

like all great myths it covers over a good many loose discursive threads which could have
   25

been woven into quite different stories, and which, accordingly, could have challenged

how we may understand the relation between literature and ethics in Wilde and the

transition from Victorian to modernist literature. One of such straying threads tucked

away under the myth of Wildean aesthetic autonomy tells the story of the epistolary battle

between Wilde and The St. James’s Gazette, in which Wilde, not his opponents, seemed

to purposely shove the discussion of his novel toward the heated terrain of morality. Four

days after Dorian Gray’s appearance in Lippincott’s, the Gazette published a review

titled “A Study in Puppydom” attacking the novel as “clumsy,” “stupid” and “tedious”:

“a very lame story it is, and very lamely it is told” (qtd. in Mason 32). In reply, Wilde

wrote to the editor of the Gazette: “I am quite incapable of understanding how any work

of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics

are absolutely distinct and separate” (qtd. in Mason 35). Although the assertion of a

morally indifferent aesthetics is in itself typical of Wilde, in this case it is strangely out of

context. Nothing in “A Study in Puppydom” merits that defense: in fact, the review had

cleverly anticipated the logic of Wildean aesthetics and refrained from any pronounced

moral judgment of the novel. As a result, the Gazette was able to respond to Wilde with a

wry remark: “We were quite aware that ethics and aesthetics are different matters, and

that is why the greater part of our criticism was devoted not so much to the nastiness of

‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ but to its dullness and stupidity” (qtd. in Mason 37-38).2

The same pattern repeated throughout the following rounds of their

correspondence, with the Gazette insisting on the purely stylistic basis of its criticism,

and Wilde, as if making a preprogrammed move, ignoring that claim and accusing the

newspaper of accusing his story of immorality. Reading these documented

   26

correspondences in retrospect, one cannot help but find Wilde’s persistence oddly

uncalled for. Did he actually see through the Gazette’s alleged neutrality and detect some

moral judgment coated in the judgment of style? If he did, he did not bother to build an

argument for it. Was his strange persistence a rhetorical oversight or a strategic blunder,

then? In any case, what emerges from Wilde’s self-staged dismissal of moral criticism is

not an absolute separation of aesthetics from morality, but rather a troubled recognition,

and an even more troubled expression, of the engagement between the two spheres. In his

second letter to the Gazette, Wilde wrote:

The poor public, hearing from an authority so high as your own, that this

is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory

Government, will, no doubt, rush to it and read it. But, alas! They will find

that it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as

all renunciation, brings its own punishment. (qtd. in Mason 43)

As it promptly clarified in its reply, the Gazette neither called Dorian Gray “a wicked

book” nor recommended censorship over it. What takes place in the quoted passage, then,

is that Wilde staged a fictional charge of immorality against Dorian Gray and

subsequently countered that charge by introducing the moral of the novel, which he next

supplemented with an explanation of how Basil Hallward the painter, Dorian Gray, and

Lord Henry Wotton each in his own way commit the sin of excess.3 Thus, the interpretive

energy was inadvertently led to the issue of morality despite Wilde’s persistent claim to

affirm artistic autonomy in his protest to the Gazette. It is as if the prior refusal of moral

evaluation were set up only to create an occasion for the revelation of the moral. It is as if,

so to speak, Wilde acknowledged the moral aspect of his text but, unsure how aesthetics
   27

might accommodate ethics, could not articulate it unless in some oblique or roundabout

fashion. After describing the sin of excess embodied by each of the three characters, he

immediately closed the letter with what seems a suppression of the flicker of the desire

for the moral: “Yes; there is a terrible moral in ‘Dorian Gray’. . . . Is this an artistic error?

I fear it is. It is the only error in the book” (qtd. in Mason 44). Wilde’s engagement with

the Gazette may be considered a classic example of Freudian negation in that it illustrates

how a repressed desire surfaces to verbal representation only in a negative form.

To unveil the mythic mask of aesthetic autonomy, to expose the rigid dichotomy

between morality and art as a much more complex relation, this chapter will investigate

the possible conjunction and disjunction between literature and ethics in Dorian Gray as

well as in Wilde’s writings on aesthetics. As his defense of his novel suggests, that to

which Wilde opposed may not be so much ethics itself as the existing notion of morality

that predominated his society and culture. If he seemed uncharacteristically tongue-tied in

articulating matters pertaining to literature and morality, it is because, I suggest, Wilde

had departed from the received notion of morality but remained restrained by its old

vocabulary in his endeavor to gesture toward a new, idiosyncratic notion of ethics that

was not yet in existence. It is my argument that Wilde’s texts reconfigure ethics as the

unsettling of the self by aesthetic experience, as is instanced in Dorian Gray’s subjection

to manifold novel sensations. Significantly, the reconfiguration of ethics in Wilde’s texts

illuminates a paradigm shift from the autonomous subject’s capacity to abide by a

socially-imposed moral system to a personal experience that deranges the self, which

anticipates Emmanuel Levinas’s deconstructive ethics that respects alterity and puts the

subject in question. Furthermore, as I hope to demonstrate, the new perspective on ethics

   28

emanating from Wilde’s texts is a crucial correlate to the literary innovations in Dorian

Gray. As it describes Dorian’s indulgence in aesthetic experience, the narrative interrupts

itself, exposes the constructedness of the temporality of realist fiction, and thus highlights

an impersonal temporality that exceeds the subject’s habitual mode of rationalization.

Our most commonsensical, and perhaps most deeply-ingrained, notion of morality

as telling right from wrong based on moral judgment is a socio-historical construction. “If

‘moral’ came to be set apart as the aspect of human thought, feeling, and action that

pertains to the distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’” sociologist Zygmunt Bauman

says of the moral legacy of the Enlightenment, “this was by and large the

accomplishment of the modern age” (4). While our moral life probably can never do

away with moral judgment, the Enlightenment construction of morality is not without its

problems. To begin with, in the moral discourse of the Enlightenment, the subject’s

capacity for making value judgments and moral decisions stems from the subject’s status

as a free, rational being. As Bauman points out, however, the freedom that the

Enlightenment posits for the subject is only a specious autonomy, an effect created by the

joint force of Enlightenment politics and philosophy to establish “the belief in the

possibility of  a non-ambivalent, non-aporetic ethical code” upon the illusion of

“universality and foundation” (9, 8). The subject may be free to make value judgments

and moral decisions, but only within the confine of a socio-historically predetermined

moral system that dissimulates its constructedness by assuming the semblance of the

timeless and universal.

Nonetheless, as is evident in numerous critical interpretations of Dorian Gray,

the problematic and restrictive notion of morality as value judgment still undergirds our
   29

notion of morality. A good many of the interpretations of Wilde’s novel follow the same

trajectory: first, they identify each major character with a particular perspective or

philosophy, and then trace what happens to the character in the story as an indication

whether the philosophy thus embodied is morally feasible, usable, or desirable. For

instance, in his analysis of the characters in Dorian Gray, Sheldon Dorian. Liebman

argues: “[M]Dorian main point is not merely that Wilde’s characters stand for opposing

values, but that the belief systems they embody are complex as well as internally logical

and consistent; that the story in which these characters act on their values is a test of their

viability and applicability to real life” (297). Since Wilde lets his characters end in ways

that would be generally deemed dismal or tragic in real life, judgment is then made that

the values they personify are morally flawed in one aspect or another. Michael Patrick

Gillespie makes a similar critique when he argues that the novel offers new hedonism as

an alternative moral program that the reader will have to measure and interpret against his

or her “immediate hermeneutic system” (154). Although he successfully shows that

Wilde’s novel advocates moral indecisiveness, the task of value judgment remains, only

displaced onto the reader from the author or the text. If part of a literary critic’s job is to

offer a metanarrative on a literary narrative, the operation of value judgment has

undoubtedly served as the masterplot that governs these metanarratives on Dorian Gray.

While the content of the value system used to measure the worth of a character or a

perspective may change over time, the plot of value judgment is still the skeleton that

supports our praxis of morality. These fairly recent critical works tacitly accept the

unquestioned premise of morality as value judgment as well as the understanding of the

subject as an autonomous moral agent, and they thus reveal that ethically we are not as
   30

distant as we would like to think from the Victorians, whom Wilde frequently took to

task for their rigid adherence to social norms.

Wilde’s writings indicate that he has departed from the paradigm of moral

subjectivity and the practice of moral judgment. The transition can be detected in the

preface to Dorian Gray, where Wilde proclaims: “The moral life of man forms part of the

subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an

imperfect medium” (DG 3). The conjunction but in Wilde’s aphorism marks a significant

fault line between two asymmetrical, disconnected levels of conceptualizing morality, art,

and the relation between them: morality as a theme of realist art on the one hand, and

ethics as an act, style, or performance of experimental art on the other hand. Implicated in

the first clause of the sentence—“The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter

of the artist”—is Wilde’s criticism of the profound interpenetration of artistic realism and

the conventional notion of morality. In the Enlightenment sense of the term, morality

points eventually to a universal truth accessible through a universal moral code, and it

follows that art, if it is to serve any moral purpose, should devote itself to an account of

moral life as truthful as possible so that the reader may be encouraged to emulate the

proper deeds. A response to this realist penchant for morality, the first clause of Wilde’s

aphorism admits moral life into art’s thematic repertoire, and in doing so it assigns moral

life to that limited role in matters pertaining to art: in effect, it repudiates the conventional

use of morality in art for other purposes, such as the employment of morality as the

critical yardstick of an artwork, or the social expectation of an artwork to serve

pedagogical purposes.
   31

By contrast, having discarded the conventional notion of an externally imposed

morality and its direct bond to representative art, the second clause of the aphorism—“but

the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium”—leaps onto an

altogether different plane of envisioning morality and art. The “morality of art” that

Wilde has in mind is conceptually asymmetrical to the conventional one, for it is neither

just yet another moral program that prescribes more or better social codes of

appropriateness, nor is it a simple negation or reversal of the existing moral system.

Rather, it divulges an aesthetics that attends to the internal dynamics of the artistic

medium, and it proclaims that ethical significance is to come forth from artistic practice.

Admittedly, Wilde is vague about just what the “morality of art” may be, but there are

good reasons for his vagueness. A rejection of programmatic and dogmatic social

conventions, Wilde’s ethical aesthetics, or aesthetic ethics, situates its ethicity precisely

in the very act of making the “perfect use of an imperfect medium,” an act that pushes an

artistic medium beyond its comfort zone and that, therefore, opens up a space where the

aesthetic and ethical interact in ways that cannot be prescribed or even predicted. Such

morality of art, and the experience it produces, cannot be adequately formulated or

described by the conventional language that already exists, but is to be traced only in the

innovation achieved by the artwork itself.

Wilde’s “morality of art” goes beyond the sphere of art and amounts to a

rearrangement of the subject’s relation with the artwork and, by extension, what is other

or external to the self. “All art is quite useless,” so claims Wilde at the end of the preface

to his novel (DG 4). This is often taken to be a gesture of aestheticism, and no doubt it is.

But it is also a gesture of respect for art, a gesture that restrains one from violating the
   32

artwork by utilizing or exploiting it for one’s own purpose. In “The Decay of Lying,”

Wilde elaborates on his non-utilitarian view of art:

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do

not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or for pleasure, or appeals

strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which

we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s subject-matter we

should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate have no

preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind. (“Decay” 561)

Art, for Wilde, is useless for us because it is recalcitrant to any human intentions. It does

not serve to instruct and to delight, nor does it does aim to advocate a certain moral

program through persuasion with the aid of sympathy, as is in the case of many

nineteenth-century popular realist novels. Art, furthermore, resides outside “the

environment in which we live” and refuses the role of functionality that links objects in

the world to the center inhabited by the human subject. To Wilde, the only appropriate

action to take with regard to an artwork is to appreciate it as nothing other than itself:

“The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely” (DG 4). To

recast Wilde’s aesthetics in Levinas’s terminology, art is an “absolute alterity” which

refuses to serve any human purpose, and which evades assimilation into subjective

intention; and to appreciate art as nothing but art is “a relation without relation,” a non-

appropriative relation that preserves the alterity of the other (TI 80).4 When pressed to the

extreme as Wilde does, aesthetic autonomy is transformed into an ethics that respects art

as alterity, an ethics in which the subject refrains from subsuming the otherness of art for

his or her own gratification. What seems to be Wilde’s gesture to privilege aesthetics to
   33

the exclusion of morality, then, turns out to collapse the boundary between the two. Art is

ethics.

The ethical relation without relation calls for nothing less than a revision of our

fundamental mode of relating to whatever is external to the self, and it questions the

longstanding notion of the subject as an I saying “I can.” Such a relation is hard to

envision, and even harder to put into practice. Wilde recognizes the difficulty when he

declares in the preface: “They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty”

(DG 3). Only a select few succeed in forging such a relation, because it demands a

particular aptitude that Wilde identifies as “the temperament of receptivity” in “The Soul

of Man Under Socialism” (“Soul” 259). The aptitude for receptivity—not for

assertiveness, initiative, or judgment—is essential to the true connoisseur of art, of whom

Wilde describes: “He is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to

contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation all the

egotism that mars him—the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of his information”

(“Soul” 259). Wilde next proceeds to explain:

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority

over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot

receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to

dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master

is to play. (“Soul” 259)

Face-to-face with art in its alterity, the subject is to submit, receive, and let art work over

him. The subject responds to art, but the response comes not so much from his own
   34

authority as from the experience brought upon him by the artwork, just as the violin

cannot make music by itself. Exercise of judgment (“if the work be fine”) comes only

later and secondary to the experience. The encounter with art, as Wilde envisions it, is

ethical because it preserves art as it is, demands the subject to experience art in its

peculiarity, and warns against the egoistic habit to take control of it.

To enable such a relation, according to Wilde, we must renounce our authority,

knowledge, value and egotism, so that the work of art will signify in its own right rather

than filtered through one’s preconceptions. For all his notoriety for flamboyance,

extravagance and narcissism, then, Wilde’s aesthetic ethics/ ethical aesthetics

paradoxically amounts to an impoverishment of the self, a renouncement of the

epistemological, socio-cultural, and affective matrix that coheres around the centering

subject. It is only in self-renouncement that we receive art ethically. Wilde cannot

emphasize enough the importance of the receptive and impoverished subject: “And the

more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own

absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand

and appreciate the work of art in question” (“Soul” 259).

The ethical relation to art, of which only an impoverished subject is capable,

drives Wilde’s artistic taste toward the experimental and innovative. The passage just

quoted above continues:

For an educated person’s ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art

has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has

never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it

   35

by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends. (“Soul”

259, emphasis added)

What deserves attention in this passage is the privilege Wilde accords to the new: his

notion of the “real perfection” of an artwork considers the new as an intrinsic condition

of the beautiful. Beauty, the sole purpose that art is to achieve, is to be sought not in yet

another implementation of an existing artistic mode, but in the innovativeness created or

perceived only when the impoverished subject relates to the artwork ethically. A link

between ethics and artistic innovation is thus forged.

Espousing the quality of newness in art, Wilde casts the distinction between old

and new artistic modes as that between “Realism” and “Romanticism,” or between

representational and non-representational art. This is indicated in the famous aphorism in

the preface to Dorian Gray: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of

Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is

the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass” (DG 3). Realism, the dominant

mode of art and especially of fiction in the nineteenth century, is Wilde’s major target of

criticism. As discussed earlier, Wilde takes issue with the moralist inclination of realism

to represent what is allegedly true and exemplary. At stake in his repudiation of realism,

in a broader sense, is the function of art in relation to the nature of reality. Not only does

he see realism as an enslavement of imagination to the imitation of a reality that is often

vulgar (“the rage of Caliban seeing his own face”), but he questions the common belief in

the primacy and stability of a representable reality. Instead, Wilde argues for the creative

power of art. We see through the perceptual matrix that an artistic mode imposes on us,
   36

and what we believe to be reality is an artistic effect. Here is an example Wilde offers to

illustrate this point in “The Decay of Lying”:

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown

fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and

changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them

and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our

river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying

barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of

London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of

Art. . . . Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we

see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. (“Decay” 576-77)

It is not art that holds a mirror to nature and life, but the other way round. Wilde therefore

calls for an art that incessantly searches for new modes of expression, an art that imagines

and creates a new reality rather than aims to represent faithfully what is already in

existence. To this art, in which Caliban will not see his own face, Wilde gives the name

“Romanticism”: “Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of

Life” (“Decay” 587). The imagery he provides for such Romanticism in full bloom is a

world teemed with fantastic, surreal creatures, including “the Blue Bird singing of

beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things

that are not and that should be” (“Decay” 585).

But what does it all mean for the craft of fiction? How does the ethical relation to

art as alterity come into play within Wilde’s own novel, as well as between his novel and

reader? In what ways does innovation take place in Dorian Gray and correlate to the
   37

ethical? With his repeated emphasis on an innovative artwork as “what Art has never

been,” as well as his frequent mockery of the stale and conventional, it may sound as if

Wilde posited a magical moment of creation ex nihilo and advocated for a total

elimination of the old in order to make place for the new. However, Wilde knows that no

rabbit is ever conjured out of thin air, and he acknowledges a much convoluted and

enmeshed relation between the new work of art and the existing tradition and convention.

This is suggested in the aphorism examined earlier: “but the morality of art consists in the

perfect use of an imperfect medium” (DG 3). Wilde recognizes that artistic perfection,

which for him signifies the new and the beautiful, is created through engagement with the

existing artistic means, imperfect as it is with the limitations of its conventions. In

making the new out of the old, and the perfect out of the imperfect, the artist presses the

artistic medium beyond what it is, and toward what it is not yet. In the specific case of the

novel, Wilde’s urge for innovation entails a constant pressure on language to do more

than what it is normally expected to do: representation. Arguing against the slavish

representational function of language in favor of its power to create reality, Wilde

foregrounds language as action in the sense that it generates effects and creates

experiences. Independent of the content it conveys, the language itself signifies to the

reader.

One instantiation of the performative, experience-generating dimension of Dorian

Gray is indicated by the contrast between the plotline of the novel and the moral

indignation it provoked among its immediate readers, in which we see a discontinuity

between what the novel actually says and how it makes some readers feel. If the

unfavorable review of Dorian Gray from the St. James Gazette made Wilde’s defense of
   38

his novel’s moral quality seem gratuitous by shrewdly choosing artistry as its primary

target of attack, it is nonetheless true that complaints about the lack of morality in the

novel were arising elsewhere. The Daily Chronicle, for instance, called Dorian Gray “a

tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents” and contributed greatly

to establishing the longstanding disreputation of Wilde’s novel as morally detrimental

(qtd. in Mason 66). If we try to summarize Dorian Gray as succinctly as possible,

however, many of us will be amazed to find its plotline thoroughly moral, even to the

point of banally didactic: a man conducts himself in socially devious ways and brings

fatal punishment upon himself in the end. The plot is fit, we would imagine, for a

cautionary tale, a morally conservative narrative that aims to discipline and hammer a

subject into a model citizen. But this is not how the majority of Wilde’s contemporaneous

readers have received it. Stuart Mason, whose documentation of the general public’s

reception of Dorian Gray was published in 1907, lived closely enough to that era to offer

the account: “The Puritans and the Philistines, who scented veiled improprieties in its

paradoxes, were shocked; but it delighted the connoisseur and the artist, wearied as they

were with the humdrum accounts of afternoon tea-parties and the love affairs of the

curate” (15). It seems that among the first readers of this novel, despite its moralist

plotline, those who would have welcomed the story were annoyed, and those who would

have been chastised by it were pleased.5 To be sure, a literary text generates effects and

imposes upon the reader an experience: this general assertion is perhaps true of every text,

to varying degrees and in different ways. But only a few texts—like Dorian Gray—

foreground their performative dimension to such a dramatic extent by putting the reader

through an experience that goes directly against their constative message.

   39

Having established an ethical aesthetics/ aesthetic ethics in Wilde’s texts that

replaces the conventional paradigm of morality, in what follows I want to attend to the

aesthetic-ethical deployment of a different sort of experience also evoked by Dorian

Gray: aesthetic experience in terms of temporality. In Wilde’s novel, aesthetic experience

is both an important theme and a pronounced function of the narrative. I will demonstrate

that Dorian Gray complicates the operation of narrative in such ways that the narrative is

no longer a pure and simple telling of a story; rather, it questions the novelistic

convention and enacts an aesthetic-ethical experience, both within the narrative for

Dorian and outside the text for the reader. To delve into the aesthetic experience

described in and generated by Dorian Gray, however, I will take a detour and turn to a

discussion of “Reality and Its Shadow,” an early essay of Levinas’s that provides a

critical description of aesthetic experience. So far I have attempted to show the

transmutation of Wildean aesthetics into a Levinasian ethics: Wilde’s l’art-pour-l’art

aestheticism accords to art the status of absolute alterity and a relation without relation to

that between the subject and the artwork. Yet, curiously, Levinas’s own discourse on art

denies it such ethical significance. Art inhabits the position of absolute alterity in

Levinas’s writing just as in Wilde’s, but Levinas falls short of naming it as such.

Moreover, although his description of aesthetic experience is akin to that brought about

by Dorian Gray, Levinas finds art bordering on the verge of evil. These complications

need to be addressed because, despite his unfavorable view of the aesthetic, Levinas

nonetheless provides a useful vocabulary to articulate the aesthetic and ethical experience

in Wilde’s novel.
   40

II.

Curiously, even though Wilde’s aesthetics can be recast into a Levinasian ethics

as just demonstrated above, Levinas’s own views on aesthetics in relation to ethics are

often less than flattering. Despite the abundance of allusions to literature and art in his

writings, Levinas never writes systematically about aesthetics, and he cannot be said to

hold a unified view in the few places where he does broach the question of art in relation

to ethics. In fact, his attitude toward art ranges from ambivalence to downright rejection,

never straightforwardly positive and oftentimes—if only seemingly—in conflict with the

larger framework of his ethical thought. To ask the question whether the work of art

performs the work of ethics in the Levinasian sense, then, we have to read Levinas

against the grain. It is not only a question that we try to answer by teasing out what

Levinas has to say about it in his texts; it is, as Jill Robbins observes, “also a question that

we put to Levinas and his work” (75). In the pages that follow, I propose to reconstruct a

Levinasian view of the conjunction and disjunction between art and ethic by extracting

some important discussions on art and ontology from several of Levinas’s early texts. I

will begin with “Reality and Its Shadow,” which, published in 1948, is Levians’s most

sustained discussion on the subject matter and also the occasion where he articulates most

clearly his discontent with art, “an outright dismissal” as Robbins describes it (82).

However, by placing “Reality and Its Shadow” in the context of Levinas’s own

discussion of subject formation and his notion of impersonal existence that he names the

there is, I will show that art eventually can still be seen as ethically significant by his own

definition of the ethical.

   41

In “Reality and Its Shadow,” Levinas sees the artwork as an autonomous entity

dissociated from historical time and refractory to human intentions. In this respect, he is

akin to Wilde, who proclaims that “All art is useless,” except that the uselessness of art is

a positive value for Wilde and a negative one for Levinas. Levinas acknowledges that

completion—“that supreme moment when the last brush stroke is done, when there is not

another word to add to or to strike from the text”—defines the formal structure of an

artwork, and that upon completion the artwork is necessarily disengaged temporally and

socially from the context in which it comes into being (RIS 131). He proceeds to point

out that completion, although a defining attribute of the artwork, does not warrant “the

academic aesthetics of art for art’s sake”: “The formula is false inasmuch as it situates art

above reality and recognizes no master for it, and it is immoral inasmuch as it liberates

the artist form his duties as a man and assures him of a pretentious and facile nobility”

(RIS 131). Thus, Levinas locks art in an ethical conundrum: by definition the artwork is

disengaged (“But a work of art would not belong to art if it did not have this formal

structure of completion,” RIS 131), and by necessity that disengagement breaches the

ethical, because it transports the subject from “a world of initiative and responsibility”

into “a dimension of evasion” (RIS 141). Art inspires no action but provides paralyzing

aesthetic pleasure, which, for Levinas, smacks of immorality: “There is something

wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be

ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague” (RIS 142).

Readers familiar with Levinas’s mature works published decades later, especially

Otherwise than Being, will be quick to point out that his notion of ethics in this early

essay seems to oppose how it is formulated in his later texts, for which Levinas is much
   42

better known. While the later texts emphasize the central role of passivity in ethical

subjectivity and characterize one’s relation with the other as response, in “Reality and Its

Shadow” Levinas repeatedly privileges the subject’s initiative and responsibility.

Nonetheless, although initiative and activity are frequently evoked in Levinas’s early

texts, they are always already encumbered with a sense of burden, exhaustion, and

hesitation, and it is based on this sense that Levinas is to develop the notion of passivity

years later. Moreover, while it is true that Levinas’s later texts delegate action to a level

secondary to the originality of passive subjectivity, they never completely dismiss the

importance of taking ethical action. Of immediate concern here, then, is not Levinas’s

characterization of ethics as initiative and responsibility, but how he derives the resolute

conclusion that the artwork preempts the subject’s agency. Levinas’s accusation of art as

evasion of responsibility and action is not exactly fresh, to be sure: it converges with the

conventional escapist view that enthrallment by aesthetic pleasure makes one oblivious of

what is important and serious in the real world. But far from repeating a stale piece of

didacticism, Levinas supports his view with a highly original ontological analysis of the

artwork. In order to better understand why he sees the disjunction between ethics and art

as inevitable and irreparable, and to ask if there is indeed no way, as Levinas insists, out

of the ethical conundrum he sets up for art, we need to explore his descriptions of the

ontological structure of art and aesthetic experience.

In “Reality and Its Shadow,” Levinas says that “[t]he most elementary procedure

of art consists in substituting for the object its image” (RIS 132). The dichotomy Levinas

sets up between the real object and the artwork, which Levinas calls an image, rests upon

temporality. Time is mobile with the real object, but the artwork is timeless. As time is
   43

not directly observable, Levinas describes the different temporalities of the object and of

the artwork in terms of the modalities in which the subject relates to them: “Already by

action we maintain a living relationship with a real object; we grasp it, we conceive it,”

whereas “[t]he image neutralizes this real relationship, this primary conceiving through

action” (RIS 132). What Levinas means by a “living relationship” is a relationship in

which the subject makes use of the object and thus opens up the subsequent possibility of

becoming and dialectic. This relationship is called “living” because, firstly and most

obviously, it triggers the process of becoming for the object, as in the case of an acorn

growing into an oak and then made a chair, which constitutes part of the subject’s world.

Furthermore, if we consider Alphonso Lingis’s remark in his Translator’s Introduction to

Existence and Existents that “Time is the inner structure of subjectivity, that is, of the

movement of existing,” then we will see that the subject’s active relationship with objects

is called “living” in another interpenetrated twofold sense (EE xxii). On the one hand, the

subject assumes existence when acting on the object: after all, without action, one can

hardly be considered alive in a meaningful way. From act to act, and from instant to

instant, the subject’s temporal existence is assumed, extended, and renewed. On the other

hand, only when the subject acts and assumes existence does time itself simultaneously

come into being and unfold. It is a personal time meaningful for the subject and distinct

from the clock time by which everyone abides.

Conscious living, therefore, is never a given. It is through engaging in an active

relationship with the object that we acquire personal existence and unfold private time in

the world. This is corroborated in Existence and Existents and Time and the Other, two

texts that belong to the same phase of Levinas’s career as does “Reality and Its Shadow.”
   44

In these two early texts, Levinas characterizes subject formation as a process of

separation: with effort and labor, one surges from timeless and anonymous existence in

order to become a separate existent who inhabits a personal existence and temporality.

Existence and Existents, in particular, foregrounds the subject as the organizing center of

the personal existence acquired through acting on objects. Employing the Husserlian

vocabulary of intentionality but adding to its purely scientific sense an implication of the

subject’s desire that is absent in Husserl, Levinas explains that the living relationship

involves the I exercising my freedom—even if only “an illusion of freedom”—to direct

my intention to go out into the world, grasp the concept of the object, and then return to

the inwardness of my consciousness so as to make the object meaningful or useful

according to me: “Consequently, existence in the world always has a center; it is never

anonymous. . . . The world is what is given to us”; “[o]bjects are destined for me; they are

for me” (EE 44, 29, 30). By acting on the objects, whether objects of knowledge or

objects of utility, the subject marks the world as his or her own. While positing the

subject at the center of meaning is one among numberless manifestations of the

philosophy of the subject that Levinas devotes his career to critiquing, Levinas

nonetheless finds in it a “positive ontological function: the possibility of extracting

oneself from anonymous being” (EE 37).

In stark contrast to the living relation we have with an object, our encounter with

an artwork is, according to Levinas, a sterile engagement that halts right with the artwork

and progresses no further. This is manifest empirically in Levinas’s observation of the

general attitude taken towards the aesthetic. Whereas Wilde urges us to approach art with

nothing but an intense admiration, Levinas comments: “To make or to appreciate a novel
   45

and a picture is to no longer have to conceive, is to renounce the effort of science,

philosophy, and action. Do not speak, do not reflect, admire in silence and in peace—

such are the counsels of wisdom satisfied before the beautiful” (RIS 141). Absorbed by

the beauty of the artwork, I do not—cannot, in fact, according to Levinas—take action

with it, put it to use, generate ideas or reveal knowledge through it, unless by the force of

criticism, which Levinas proposes as a remedy to the ethical paralysis of art, but then it

will already be action on an extra-aesthetic level.

In the strictly aesthetic experience, I cannot make use of the artwork as I would of

an object because the artwork frustrates the work of intentionality. The artwork comes to

us in its nakedness as sensation rather than as conception or perception, as raw

materiality in and for itself rather than as an object already bound in an intelligible form.6

Sensation, “the aesthetic element” as Levinas calls it, entraps one’s intentionality and

resists the living relation one needs in order to constitute a world (RIS 146):

The movement of art consists in leaving the level of perception so as to

reinstate sensation, in detaching the quality from this object reference.

Instead of arriving at the object, the intention gets lost in the sensation

itself, and it is this wandering about in sensation, in aesthesis, that

produces the esthetic effect. Sensation is not the way that leads to an

object but the obstacle that keeps one from it, but it is not of the subjective

order either: it is not the material of perception. In art, sensation figures as

a new element. Or better, it returns to the impersonality of elements. (EE

47)
   46

Distinct from perception and conception, which are already processed by human

consciousness, sensation is the quintessential alterity. It is impersonal because it hinders

the subject’s intentional consciousness that would reach out to grasp an object and then

integrate it as part of the world that the subject calls “mine.” The encounter with art as

such entails, instead, “the nontransmutation of our exteriority into inwardness”: in

Levinas’s description, it is as if the subject’s consciousness is overwhelmed, mesmerized,

even paralyzed, by the sensation of the artwork in such a way that the subject sinks into

temporal and conceptual lapse (EE 46). Paradoxically, even though Levinas’s proposition

of the artwork as an image of a real object can be linked to the perspective of art as

mimesis, his stress on the raw materiality of art leads him to argue that no art is

representational. One can use Levinas’s anti-representational view of art to theorize a

modernist aesthetics, as critic Gerald L. Bruns does, but Levinas explains that it is just as

valid with artworks that are mimetic in method:

That is why classical art which is attached to objects—all those paintings,

all those statues representing something, all those poems which recognize

syntax and punctuation—conforms no less to the true essence of art than

the modern works which claim to be pure music, pure painting, pure

poetry, because they drive objects out of the world of sounds, colours and

words into which those works introduce us—because they break up

representation. A represented object, by the simple fact of becoming an

image, is converted into a non-object. (RIS 134)

Thus, from Levinas’s perspective, whether it be an avant-garde anti-representational

sculpture or a conventional realist novel, the distinction between art and the real object
   47

applies equally: while relating to an object is to extract oneself from anonymous

existence and to gain a life, engaging with an artwork on the strictly aesthetic level is to

return one to that anonymous and timeless existence, and to make a lifeless life.

Levinas’s view of art, as presented in “Reality and Its Shadow,” is profoundly pessimistic.

In identifying sensation as the aesthetic element, Levinas recognizes the artwork as an

alterity to the subject, just as Wilde does; but whereas Wilde’s non-utilitarian view of art

can be said to lead to an ethics that respects art as alterity, Levinas finds the subsequent

sterility in concept, knowledge, utility and time ethically objectionable and disturbing: on

the practical level, it suggests that art results in evasion of responsibility in real life; on

the ontological and more fundamental level, it means that engagement with art generates

no personal existence or personal time, but returns us to the anonymous and timeless state.

The full scope of Levinas’s pessimism towards art will be made clearer if we

place it in the context of his discussion of the anonymous and timeless existence. To the

anonymous existence, as opposed to the personal existence, Levinas gives the name there

is, a term that is central to both Existence and Existents (1947) and Time and the Other

(1948) but curiously absent from “Reality and Its Shadow,” although the three texts were

published in the same phase of Levinas’s career. Despite its disappearance, the term there

is, which Levinas characterizes as horror throughout his work, simmers right below every

description of the ontological structure of art and aesthetic experience in the essay. It is

only with recourse to the notion of the there is, I suggest, that we can fully understand the

fear and anxiety that rustle in Levinas’s description of art and aesthetic experience in

“Reality and Its Shadow.”

   48

The there is is Levinas’s hypothesis for what being is without one’s assumption

of personal time and existence: an anonymous, impersonal, and timeless state of pure

existence from which one must surge in order to become an existent. As we are always

already in the world—that is, as thinking and speaking subjects we are always already

existents extracted from the there is and inhabiting interwoven webs of relations and

experiences organized around our distinct consciousness—we cannot know of the state of

the there is directly. Levinas therefore invites his readers to approach the there is through

an exercise of imagination:

Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness.

One cannot put this return to nothingness outside of all events. But what of

this nothingness itself? Something would happen, if only night and the

silence of nothingness. This indeterminateness of this “something is

happening” is not the indeterminateness of a subject and does not refer to

a substantive. Like the third person pronoun in the impersonal form of a

verb, it designates not the uncertainly known author of the action, but the

characteristic of this action itself which somehow has no author. This

impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable “consummation” of being,

which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by

the term there is. The there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is

“being in general.” (EE 51-52)

Were we able to eliminate all experiences, relations, objects and persons in the world,

what would emerge is not pure nothingness, but the work of existing that still persists in

the void. Here Levinas seems to conceive the there is as a primordial state before
   49

personal existence and personal time begins. But the there is does not simply go away

after the subject assumes personal existence; it reinstates itself in various experiences and

disturbs the subject’s work of existing with the senses of anonymity and irremissibility.

As the two major characteristics of the there is, anonymity and irremissibility are sources

of ontological fear and anxiety for different but related reasons. As will be demonstrated

below, Levinas abhors the aesthetic experience precisely because it is reflective of the

state of the there is, and evocative of its concomitant horror and anxiety.

In the long quotation above, Levinas compares the there is to the impersonal

verbal structure, such as “it is raining,” which suggests an act that takes place regardless

of a subject’s intention or consciousness. In Time and the Other, Levinas again broaches

the anonymity and impersonality of the there is, figuring it as “the impersonal ‘field of

forces’ of existing” (“TO” 46). The experience of the there is, which intervenes in the

subject’s conscious life often unexpectedly, exposes the subject to anonymous existence

and threatens to reduce the subject to just that. It arouses fear because it is “a subjective

experience of the loss of subjectivity,” to borrow C. Fred Alford’s words, if one can still

speak of subjectivity in that limit experience (Alford 57). The fear of being reduced to

anonymous existence is apparent in Levinas’s disparaging of the semi-conscious state in

which one is placed by the aesthetic experience. Impersonal sensation, forestalled

intentionality, and temporal stasis all correlate in the phenomenon of the artwork and

ramify into several of Levinas’s most intriguing yet confusing statements on how art

affects us in “Reality and Its Shadow.” For instance, the correlation allows Levinas to say

that “An image marks a hold over us rather than our initiative, a fundamental passivity,”

as well as that in participation of the aesthetic activity “the subject is caught up and
   50

carried away” by the inner rhythm, i.e., the formless materiality, of the artwork (RIS132).

These statements in turn account for Levinas’s ultimate accusation that art divests the

subject of ethical agency. Moreover, in contrast to the work of intention that marks

existence as mine, the frustrated intention in the artwork causes the subject to lose its

particular subjectivity: “in rhythm there is no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage

from oneself to anonymity” (RIS 133). Further, because the artwork as materiality

forecloses the return of intentionality back into the inwardness of the subject, we have as

a result “an exteriority of the inward,” with the subject becoming “among things as a

thing, as part of the spectacle. It is exterior to itself” (RIS 133). In sum, the artwork as an

image, as pure materiality, is an absolute alterity that not only refuses to be usable for the

human consciousness, but also threatens to take away the subject’s mastery of self.

The anonymity of the there is also insinuates irremissibility, which is at the root

of Levinas’s existential horror. The impersonal existence of the there is, in which the

subject no longer masters his or her existence, will go on despite the subject’s will or

consciousness. Interruption of or escape from the there is is out of the question, for it is

precisely what returns after every negation, after each of our imaginary attempt to remove

everyone and everything from the world. The subject subsumed by the there is, then, will

be stripped of its possibility for meaningful life while condemned to the burden of being

with no hope of terminating the state. This leads Levinas to comment: “Horror is nowise

an anxiety about death…. It is, if we may say so, the impossibility of death, the

universality of existence even in its annihilation” (EE 56). We will want to ask, of course,

where or under what circumstances the irremissibility of the there is may manifest itself

and clash with our consciousness. It seems that the most apt instantiation of the there is
   51

takes place in Levinas’s description of the artwork in “Reality and Its Shadow,” even

though the term is missing altogether from the essay.

Despite G. E. Lessing’s famous distinction between spatial arts and temporal arts

that has become a critical convention since the eighteenth century, Levinas characterizes

all arts as timeless in “Reality and Its Shadow.” Several examples throughout the essay

illustrate this point. Visual arts, no doubt, fit into the description: the statue of Laocoon

will undoubtedly forever remain in the agony of the serpents’ grip, as will the Mona Lisa

always remain in her famous half smile (RIS 138). It must be noted that in the

timelessness of artworks Levinas sees not the glory of the eternity of beauty or

transcendental truth as cultural conventions would have it, but the horror and anxiety of a

congealed present that is unable to pass, unable to relinquish its place to a future that

awaits to materialize as the next present: “Eternally the future announced in the strained

muscles of Laocoon will be unable to become present. Eternally, the smile of the Mona

Lisa about to broaden will not broaden” (RIS 138). Unable to die, this interminably

prolonged instant of the artwork is the there is materialized. There is a despair in

Levinas’s description of Laocoon and the Mona Lisa forever stuck in the unending

moment and powerless to escape from it. The same rings true with the supposedly

temporal arts, where Levinas also finds timelesness as well as its concomitant horror and

anxiety. In the novel, for instance, Levinas claims that time is only “apparently

introduced into images,” for “[t]he characters of a novel are beings that are shut up,

prisoners. Their history is never finished, it still goes on, but makes no headway” (RIS

138, 139, emphasis added). As with other arts traditionally classified as temporal,

although the novel does take time to take place—the narrative time inside textual
   52

development and the clock time that passes when one reads—from Levinas’s perspective

it cannot be considered real, living time but rather an instant infinitely stretched, because

the characters, as well as the readers, are condemned to “the infinite repetition of the

same acts and the same thoughts” (RIS 139). There is perhaps no clearer indication of the

cruelty of the irremissible there is than the characters of a novel, who are fated to the

futility of action that nonetheless “makes no headway.” Thus, for Levinas, each artwork

is “an image” of the object it replaces, and all art is in the final analysis “a plastic art”;

rather than a living instant that will dissipate and then, in its death, be relieved by a new

instant, time in the artwork is at best a frozen time condemned to the there is that knows

no end (RIS 132).

The artwork, therefore, not only contrasts with the real object that constitutes the

subject’s world in living time, but it also contrasts with the Western cultural

commonplace that aligns art with transcendence and absolute truth. Levinas asks

rhetorically:

Is to disengage oneself from the world always to go beyond, toward the

region of Platonic ideas and toward the eternal which towers above the

world? Can one not speak of a disengagement on the hither side—of an

interruption of time by a movement going on on the hither side of time, in

its “interstices”? (RIS 131)

The timelessness of the there is differs from the timelessness of transcendental truth. The

interstice of time to which Levinas refers in his question is precisely the frozen instant of

the artwork, a strange duration in which movement, if there is any, repeats itself infinitely

without progress or change of any sorts, a strange duration that stretches without end and
   53

without hope of future. Human consciousness participating in the strange temporalization

of art will not gain access to truth or knowledge. In fact, if art is capable of expressing

anything, Levinas says that it is “the very obscurity of the real” that art directly imposes

upon the subject (RIS 131). Thus, in the correlating in art of materiality, timelessness,

frustrated intentionality, and the blending of consciousness and the unconscious, Levinas

identifies an aesthetic event that “is the very event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an

invasion of shadow” (RIS 132).

Because of its timelessness, Levinas figures the artwork in harsh and derogatory

terms such as a “caricature” that “manifests itself in its stupidness as an idol,” “a lifeless

life,” “a derisory life which is not master of itself,” “a caricature of life,” an infinite

duration that is “something in human and monstrous,” and so on (RIS 137, 138, 141). To

stress the loss of subjectivity and the confusion of consciousness in the encounter with art,

he also compares the experience variously to “playing,” “a waking dream,” as well as

“the captivation or incantation” imposed on the subject by magic and music (RIS 133).

What is the ontological significance of art, then, that makes it a worthy subject for

Levinas to investigate, even though he feels compelled to attach to it those trivializing

and even loathsome names? Within the scope of his essay, Levinas belittles art as a

“limited problem” embedded in the larger concern of ontology, and the only reason why

the question of art interests him is that art serves as “an allegory of being” (RIS 135, 140).

Along the way of his discussion, Levinas already generates an interrelated series of

dichotomies: reality and art, object and image, form and materiality, cognition and

sensation, knowledge and obscurity, the illumination of light and the darkening of the

night. The first term in each set of dichotomy never takes place without the second, and
   54

one may say that the first term is itself and at the same times something other than itself.

The splitting into “two contemporary possibilities of being,” as Levinas sees it, is

characteristic of being in general: “A being is that which is, that which reveals itself in its

truth, and, at the same time, it resembles itself, is its own image” (RIS 136 135).

Ultimately, the discussion of art in “Reality and Its Shadow” is meant to lead to the

general thesis: “Being is not only itself, it escapes itself” (RIS 135).7 Insofar as the

description of art as the shadow of reality is meant to be a specific instance of an general

ontological claim, it is possible to consider the description as neutral. Yet Levinas’s

emotionally-charged criticism unequivocally speaks against the ethical incapacity of art.

Levinas’s strong, negatively-valenced phrasings about art does not really do

justice to its ethical possibility. Consider the ontological thesis that Levinas’s discussion

of art is meant to instantiate: “Being is not only itself; it escapes itself.” The two

“contemporary possibilities of being” comprise the dialectic of being that preoccupies

Levinas’s early work. One wishes to establish oneself as a subject inhabiting private

existence and personal time, and yet in experiences such as art, one also feels as if one

cannot assume the mastery of one’s own existence. Levinas’s early texts oscillate

between these two moments, seeing both the significance and danger of each, but it is

always in the second moment that Levinas seeks the possibility of relating to alterity.

Without the first moment, the subject cannot launch itself as such; but with the first

moment only, the subject risks what John Llewelyn refers to as “ontological

claustrophobia,” confined in the materiality of being. In Existence and Existents, Levinas

characterizes the subject that has successfully surged from the there is by solitude, a

being closed off onto itself, even if the subject lives in society among others. He explains:
   55

“But I am not the other. I am all alone. It is thus the being in me, the fact that I exist, my

existing, that constitutes the absolute intransitive element, something without

intentionality or relationship. Inasmuch as I am, I am a monad” (EE 42). If, for Levinas,

solitude is “the indissoluble unity between the existent and its work of existing” (EE 43),

might not an experience of the there is, an imagination of what it may be like before that

indissoluble unity is contracted, before the subject well establishes itself as a separate

entity, contribute to the loosening of the bond between the subject and its private

existence? That is, might not the experience of the there is provide a glimpse beyond the

ontological claustrophobia?

This is not at all to suggest that it is an ethical move for a well-established subject

to plunge right into the impersonal and timeless existence of the there is and to forfeit

altogether a life of consciousness and action. A life subsumed by the there is would be no

life at all, and it would still lie within the iron grasp of the irremissible being, of which

the there is is a modality. What is suggested, instead, is this: in the friction between

personal life and the impersonal there is, the ethical may take place. Each time we

encounter and survive the horror of the there is, we are reminded of that originary

moment when we have to take up existence, through labor and effort, to become who we

are. Levinas’s allusion to “the indissoluble unity between the existent and its work of

existing” explains why we tend to take existence to be naturally our own and forget that,

from the start, existence is other to us. Whereas some modalities of existence can be

absorbed into the economy of the subject, the there is is the dimension that most

resolutely resists the absorption and most decisively marks the sense of alterity when it

breaks into our consciousness. While Levinas places emphasis exclusively on the
   56

horrifying aspects of the artwork, he neglects that through negating subjecthood the

artwork may perform the ethical work of putting the subject into question.

Yet it is another path that Levinas pursues to approach alterity. To seek escape

from the claustrophobic confinement of existence, Levinas proposes in Time and the

Other that we should look to the time of the other, a time that comes at us rather than

projects from us, a time—analogous to the time of death—that is beyond the mastery of

the subject. During the early stage of his career, the there is is thoroughly devoid of

ethical significance. We have to wait until three decades later, in Levinas’s last major

work, Otherwise than Being, to see that Levinas returns to the notion of the there is with

a more positive take on it. The most radical of Levinas’s texts, Otherwise than Being

characterizes ethical subjectivity as infinite passivity and describes the responsible

subject as substituting him- or herself for the other, even if the other is an enemy. Here

Levinas deploys the there is as the basis of that passivity:

The incessant murmur of the there is strikes with absurdity the active

transcendental ego, beginning and present.

But the absurdity of the there is, as a modality of the-one-for-the-

other, signifies. The insignificance of its objective insistence,

recommencing behind every negation, overwhelms me like the fate of a

subjection to all the other to which I am subject, is the surplus of nonsense

over sense, through which for the self expiation is possible, an expiation

which the oneself indeed signifies. The there is is all the weight that

alterity weighs supported by a subjectivity that does not found it. . . .

   57

Behind the anonymous rustling of the there is subjectivity reaches

passivity without any assumption. (OB 164)

Here Levinas analogizes the relation between the existent and the there is and the relation

between the subject and the other. The there is, an infinite existential burden on the

existent, can only be responded to with infinite patience and in infinite passivity, and it is

this relationship, which fully recognizes the existential horror of the there is, that enables

Levinas to propose ethical subjectivity as passivity to the other person. And yet, Levinas

remains tacit about whether he has also changed his opinion of art, which is closely

related to the there is. It is, ultimately, the textual performance of Dorian Gray that

carries out the ethical task of the artwork.

III.

Often hailed as a proto-modernist work for its self-reflexive language, The Picture

of Dorian Gray has captured critical attentions regarding its linguistic play. And yet, a

major textual idiosyncrasy has remained largely unaddressed: what is the use of the so-

called yellow book chapter, the strange central chapter that devotes its entire twenty-eight

pages to cataloguing Dorian’s ever-expanding artistic collections and exorbitant

experiments with the senses, inspired by the mysterious decadent French novel wrapped

in a yellow cover? Consider narratologist Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of narrative,

which places primacy on action: “[Description of a state of affairs] does not suffice for

narrative . . . as narrative requires the unfolding of an action, change, difference"

(Todorov 28). Each change is a temporally discontinuous unit, Todorov goes on to

observe, and a narrative may be seen as “the chronological and sometimes causal linkage”
   58

of these discontinuous units (28). Description, by contrast, inhabits “an on-going,

continuous time frame” and serves only as the backdrop against which events take place:

although it may be part of narrative, “[d]escription alone is not enough to constitute a

narrative” (28). Todorov’s structuralist remarks are intended for a universal narrative

model, but it is obvious that they cannot account for the yellow book chapter, which

appears to be an extended description devoid of any full-fledged action. Indeed, by

Todorov’s measure, the narrative of the yellow book chapter cannot be called narrative at

all. The chapter describes Dorian’s total immersion in the hedonistic enjoyment of the

aesthetic, but as far as narrative goes—from Todorov’s point of view as well as from the

commonsensical perspective—it is quite a “useless” chapter: it delineates a psychological

state that lasts for eighteen years without advancing the plot, and its surplus of material

details accentuate hedonistic theories already expounded by Lord Henry in previous

chapters. The yellow book chapter therefore begs the question: what is the use of the

useless?

If we provisionally accept Todorov’s definition of narrative, we must ask for what

purpose Wilde expands the description of Dorian’s aesthetic experiences to a whole

chapter, and what effect is achieved by such excess. If we reject Todorov and accept the

language of the yellow book chapter as narrative, we must ask what light it sheds on our

usual notion of narrative that cannot accommodate it. In either case, to inquire about the

purpose, function, and effect of a stylistic quirk is to acknowledge that literary form in

itself also signifies.8 Because of its potential for textual performance, I focus on the

yellow book chapter as an aesthetic narrative—as opposed to the novel’s dominant realist

narrative—with an eye to the difference between the act of interruption and the actions
   59

concocted into narrative development, a difference that may be registered as between the

useless and the useful. Importantly, the interruptive encounter of the two narratives

provides us an entry point into the inquiry about how Wildean ethical aesthetics/ aesthetic

ethics plays out in Dorian Gray. For Wilde, the work of ethics and the work of

innovation are inseparable, simultaneous, and even synonymous. In what follows, then, I

will demonstrate how the ethical takes place in Dorian Gray as Wilde interrogates the

conventions of realism. More specifically, I will argue that Dorian Gray deploys

contrastively realist narrative and aesthetic narrative so as to perform the temporality of

realist narrative and the aesthetic temporality of the there is. It is in the friction between

the useful realist narrative and the useless aesthetic narrative, between the developmental

temporality of the worldly subject and the timeless, non-developmental temporality of the

aesthetic there is, that one experiences the possibility of dissolving the “indissoluble

unity” between the existent and existence (EE 43).

Dorian Gray resonates with Levinas at several points. The title of the story, to

begin with, refers not only to the magical picture that propels the development of the

narrative, but also to the novel itself as a whole: “The full portrait . . . is Wilde’s book

because it alone captures the chiaroscuro of Dorian’s life” (Manganiello 31). The

compression of the entire narrative into a portrait reflects the Levinasian view of the

novel as an image, or as an infinitely stretched instant in which characters are destined for

repetition of the same acts and “make no headway” (RIS 139). Moreover, Dorian’s

encounter with the artwork is described in terms similar to those Levinas uses to describe

the effect of the aesthetic  upon the subject. Upon seeing his beautiful portrait for the first
   60

time, Dorian is immediately “caught up and carried away” by the artwork, as Levinas

says of aesthetic experience (RIS 132):

When he saw [the picture] he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a

moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had

recognized himself for the first time. He stood there motionless and in

wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking to him, but not

catching the meaning of his words. (DG 27)

Held spellbound by the portrait, Dorian wants to become that beautiful image that,

despite their resemblance, is already other than him. The desire to participate in the

aesthetic, which is to eliminate the distance between himself as a separate subject and the

aesthetic there is, would no doubt signal to Levinas a warning sign that Dorian is

beginning to lose his firm footing in his worldly existence. Having just heard Lord

Henry’s theory about youth and beauty a little while ago, Dorian cannot help but utter the

famous wish:

How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. [The picture]

will never be older than this particular day of June…. If it were only the

other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that

was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there

is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for

that! (DG 27-8)

Dorian’s unlikely wish, of course, comes true. The fantastic narrative device involved

here is often described as role exchange, in which, as Dominic Manganiello says, “Dorian

exchanges his ‘original self’ or soul for the reflection he grows increasingly enamoured
   61

of” (30). From the Levinasian perspective, however, it may be more accurate to say that

the fulfilled wish transforms Dorian into an instantiation of what Levinas calls the “two

contemporary possibilities of being”: “A being is that which is, that which reveals itself

in its truth, and, at the same time, it resembles itself, is its own image” (RIS 136, 135).

Dorian is both the person and the picture, with their usual associated qualities switched:

the person bears the timeless trait of art that confronts him with the experience of the

there is, while the picture registers the passing living time and his living relation with

others in the world. In the character of Dorian, therefore, coexist the temporality of the

worldly subject and the anonymous, aesthetic time of the there is.

The aesthetic, anonymous temporality in Dorian becomes a dominant feature in

the language of the central chapter about the mysterious yellow book, which dictates the

form of Dorian’s aesthetic experience. Inside the protracted instant that Dorian Gray is,

the two temporalities that coexist in the character of Dorian—the developmental

temporality of the worldly subject and the timeless temporality of the aesthetic there is—

ramify respectively into realist narrative and aesthetic narrative. By the term “realist

narrative,” I am specifically drawing attention to the conflict-climax-resolution structure

common to realist novels, and the semblance of the worldly subject’s living time thus

effected by such developmental structure. By the term “aesthetic narrative,” I refer

specifically to the narrative of the yellow book chapter as well as that of other sporadic

passages in the text that share the same characteristics: in terms of content, they describe

or reflect on aesthetic experience; in terms of style, they effect a stoppage of the plotline;

and, accordingly, in terms of temporality, they enact the timelessness of the aesthetic

there is.
   62

In Dorian Gray, time progresses at a steady pace from Chapters I to X, where the

realist narrative introduces and develops the conflict by representing events that occur in

a matter of several weeks; the same can be said of Chapters XII to XX, in which action

falls and moves toward the resolution. The narrative of Dorian Gray would have been

unremarkably realist in the way it proceeds, were it not for the interruption of Chapter XI,

the central chapter that divides the text into symmetrical halves and that puts the

development of the plotline on hold by miring it in excessive details. In this chapter, time

slows down and tarries, as if unsure where or how to proceed. The interpolation of the

aesthetic narrative in the center of a by and large realist narrative is explicitly presented

in the text as a literary question about the form of the novel, but, as we shall see, the

literary question at once entails both moral and ethical concerns.

The interpolation of the aesthetic in the realist narrative of the novel begins near

the end of Chapter X. Soon after Dorian’s lover, Sybil Vane, commits suicide, Lord

Henry sends the young man the yellow book in hopes that Dorian will find in the reading

diversion from the ugly scandal. The yellow book contrasts sharply with the realist novel:

It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed,

simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his

life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes

of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up,

as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit

had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that

men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that

wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious
   63

jeweled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and archaisms, of

technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the

work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes.

There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in

colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical

philosophy. (DG 121)

By introducing the yellow book as a psychological study without a plot, Wilde toys with

the notion of a radically non-realist novel that rids itself of a developmental structure.

Wilde’s fictional yellow book inherits from the decadents the fascination with sensations,

and it also prefigures the profound interest of high modernism in psychic activities rather

than external actions. And yet, even the decadent and modernist novels most famous for

going deep into human psychology still operate within the framework of plot. Joris Karl

Huysmans’s A Rebours is a case in point.9 Although Huysmans’s decadent novel has

been identified by Wilde himself as a major model for the yellow book and similarly

features a young Parisian’s experiments on aesthetic and sexual self-fashioning, the

crucial distinction remains that A Rebours retains a realist sense of plot: Huysmans’s

protagonist sets out with the ambition to put decadent ideals into practice, but he ends up

sickened by his experiments. 10 By contrast, the fictional yellow book radically renounces

a developmental structure, or “the unfolding of an action, change, difference” that

Todorov sees as the defining characteristic of a narrative. Instead the yellow book gives

primacy to sensations derived both from objects and from elaborate, strange use of

language: the richness and exquisiteness of the jeweled style, the stimulating

defamiliarization of both archaic words and scientific jargon, the unruliness of metaphors
   64

that do not refer to a meaning but bring to mind the appearance and scent of an exotic

flower. As soon as the yellow book is introduced, the language of Dorian Gray takes on

its characteristics and begins to resemble it. Just as the yellow book concerns itself

primarily with passions, moods, and sensations, so is Dorian’s initial response to it

described in the same terms:

After a few minutes [of reading the yellow book] he became absorbed. It

was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite

raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were

passing in dumb show before him. . . .

It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to

cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the

sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex

refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the

lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of

dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping

shadows. (DG 120-21)

Wilde’s fictional non-developmental aesthetic novel is a concretization of Levinas’s

notion of the artwork in its purest aesthetic sense. For Levinas, as mentioned earlier, the

artwork is outside the world and without a form: it is sensations that exceed the

organizing power of human intentionality. Plotting of narrative fiction may be seen as the

human mind at work placing words, often at the expense of their sensuous materiality,

into a directional succession that moves along the developmental pattern, from the

exposition of a crisis to its resolution. A novel without a plot would therefore be an

   65

extreme case in which sensations overcome the work of human intentionality, and in

which, consequently, the living time of the subject is flattened into one prolonged instant.

In the absence of plot, put briefly, the reading subject is brought down to the there is,

enthralled by the sensations of words rather than imposing a meaning on them.

The literary question about novelistic form also evokes questions of the moral,

which is judged according to social conventions. Narrative and morality as such are

interpenetrated. Narrative discourse is not only a carrier of a moral independent of its

medium; rather, as Adam Zachary Newton remarks, morality “often depends on narrative

structures” (8).11 The form of narrative is intrinsically bound up with our moral concepts,

judgments, and practice. Recall Todorov’s assertion that narrative is “the chronological

and sometimes causal linkage” of discontinuous actions. To decide that an earlier

incident is responsible for the occurrence of a later incident is already to impose a moral

meaning as we make sense of random occurrences through narrative. The same capacity

to link contingent happenings chronologically and causally that enables us to summarize

Dorian Gray—Dorian falls in love with his own image in a portrait, becomes just such an

ageless and beautiful image after he makes a magical wish, and in consequence is given

license to live a hedonist life of excessive sensational experiences for years, and so on—

also allows us to make moral judgment: because Dorian has done so many wrongs, his

death at the end must be understood as a punishment.

By proposing a radically plotless novel, Wilde demands us to think the possibility

of an aesthetic narrative beyond the tight knot of morality and narrative. “Experience was

of no ethical value,” Lord Henry says, unless we narrate ours mistakes as a cautionary

tale of sorts:
   66

Moralists had, as a rule, regarded [experience] as a mode of warning, had

claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had

praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what

to avoid. (DG 57-58)

By contrast, an aesthetic novel—if one is ever possible—acknowledges “no motive

power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself” (DG 58). On

the level of textual operation, experience is articulated for the enjoyment it generates; it is

not a textual unit to be joined causally or temporally with other units to form a

developmental narrative: “All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the

same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do

many times, and with joy” (DG 58). Lacking textual changes and development, aesthetic

narrative is indifferent to changes of human conduct. The possibility of an aesthetic

narrative as such, accordingly, leads us to rethink the validity of both Todorov’s

definition of narrative and the realist developmental narrative. Todorov’s structuralist

view of narrative poses itself as a universal model, but it cannot accommodate the

example of the yellow book and Lord Henry’s view of experience. Todorov’s view in

fact fits most closely with realist narrative, which also presents its constructedness as an

objective representation of truth. The logic of temporal sequence and causality that they

both presuppose is particular to the worldly subject only. Although the subject as a

separate existent, well-established in a living relation to objects in the world is the

dominant mode of how we conventionally think of ourselves, it is nonetheless only a

specific mode of the existent’s being. The fictional model of an aesthetic novel raises the

possibility of seeing narrative and morality differently.

   67

In order to test out the plausibility of the possibility of a plotless novel, Wilde

allows the style of the yellow book to blow into full scale in Chapter XI. The chapter of

the prolonged aesthetic narrative not only gives us s sample of what a plotless novel

would be like if one ever existed, but also imposes on us a distinct experience of stagnant

time. When the chapter opens, we are told that Dorian’s fascination with the yellow book

has led him to identify with the young Parisian almost entirely. His participation in the

aesthetic, which threatens his separate existence as a conscious subject, is so intensified

that the young Parisian “became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And,

indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before

he had lived it” (DG 123). As Dorian moves closer and closer to the there is through his

myriad aesthetic experiences, so the temporality of the chapter begins to slow down.

Chapter XI starts by indicating the temporal prolongation of Dorian’s fascination with the

yellow book and his subsequent indulgence in aesthetic pleasures: “For years, Dorian

Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book” (DG 123). Dorian’s

enthrallment by aesthetic objects endures through the chapter, forming a sharp contrast

between the timelessness that his unchanging state of mind has fallen into and the

external time that speeds up as it becomes irrelevant. Thus the opening statement of the

next chapter marks a twenty-year lapse: “It was on the ninth of November, the eve of his

own thirty-eight birthday, as he often remembered afterwards” (DG 123, 141). The

abrupt leap in years is striking because, in chapters both before and after the yellow book

chapter, time has been kept by distinctive temporal units such as hours, days, and weeks

as the text narrates the development of the actions of characters, at a steady pace. By

contrast, as there is no action or change that furthers the development of the plot in the
   68

yellow book chapter, the time flanked between the two opening sentences also falls

inactive: even though we know according to the opening sentence of Chapter XII that

twenty years of calendar time have since elapsed, what Dorian experiences is only an

infinitely stretched instant in which his actions never amount to a developmental

narrative.

In the yellow book chapter, Dorian is not the only one subjected to the aesthetic

there is. The organizing capacity of narrative is also severely frustrated as the chapter

catalogues Dorian’s collections of artistic objects and aesthetic experiences that range

from perfumes, jewels, music, embroideries, tapestries, to a plethora of religious

sensations and personalities that he tries on without accepting, and so on and so forth.

Here is a sample passage on Dorian’s collection of jewels:

On one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a costume

ball as Anne de Joyeause, Admiral of France, in a dress covered with five

hundred and sixty pearls. This taste enthralled him for years, and, indeed,

may be said never to have left him. He would often spend a whole day

settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had collected,

such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight, the

cymophane with its wire-like line of silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot,

rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with

tremulous four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet

spinels, and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. He

loved the red gold of the sunstone, and the moonstone’s pearly whiteness,

and the broken rainbow of the milky opal. He procured from Amsterdam
   69

three emeralds of extraordinary size and richness of colour, and had a

turquoise de la vielle roche that was the envy of all the connoisseurs. (DG

130)

The entire chapter is composed of passages like this, passages that catalogue excessive

details without moving the plot forward. None of these details assist in propelling the plot

development; they create a vivid impression of what it is like to be a hedonist, to be sure,

but to achieve this purpose a mere fraction of these abundant details would suffice. The

aesthetic surplus arrests the narrative and paralyzes the semblance of personal time; as

such, Chapter XI becoems a barely readable text.

What is the use of the uselessness, then? On the one hand, the fact that the

overarching structure of Dorian Gray follows the pattern of the realist developmental

narrative, perhaps, affirms its necessity not only in the craft of fiction but also in any of

our attempt to make sense. On the other hand, by interrupting the developmental

narrative with the uselessness of the aesthetic, Dorian Gray directs our attention to the

“shadow” of reality and the realist semblance of narrative conventions. If, inside the

narrative horizon of the novel, Dorian is eventually subsumed by the aesthetic there is,

the narrative of the novel nonetheless enables a distance from the there is by resuming

the developmental narrative after Chapter XI. The close encounter with the there is,

however, makes visible the conventions that have constituted what we take to be reality.

For instance, it is the sudden leap in years that opens the yellow book chapter and the

chapter’s lack of temporal marks that lead us to cast a second glance at the temporal pace

of other chapters. And it is the lack of development of the aesthetic narrative that compels

us to rethink the relation between narrative and morality, as well as the necessity of
   70

developmental narrative. The useless of the aesthetic is useful, finally, because it puts the

absolute truthfulness, authority, and validity of the useful into question. Staging the

aesthetic experience that questions the realist conventions, the stylistic quirk of the

yellow book chapter of Dorian Gray performs the work of both the innovative and the

ethical in the sense that it foregrounds an otherness in narrative temporality.

In this chapter, I have juxtaposed Levinas’s discussion of the artwork and Wilde’s

manifesto of art. For different reasons, both of them appear to insist on the separation of

the ethical from the aesthetic. Levinas alleges that the artwork is useless, ethically

suspicious at best and ontologically fearful at worst; his description of aesthetic

experience resonates with the ontological horror of impersonal existence, the there is. Yet

if we accept that the paralyzing, useless temporality of the there is alerts us to an

excessiveness of existence that cannot be converted into one’s own, but an alterity that

demands patience and response, then the aesthetic there is does enact the ethical in an

oblique way. A similar oblique approach to the ethical and aesthetic can be found in

Wilde. His insistence on the disjunction of morality and art turns out to be an ethics that

applies “the perfect use of an imperfect medium.” Dorian Gray puts the axiom into

practice by interrupting the realist temporality with a prolonged aesthetic timelessness. If

the yellow book chapter frustrates the movement and interpretation of the narrative, it

also brings forth an alterity occluded by the semblance of realist language. Both Levinas

and Wilde, then, evince possibilities for the conjunction of art and ethics.
   71

 
Chapter III

Virginia Woolf’s Ethical Aesthetics:

Mourning, Temporality, Relation and To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf’s classic novel To the Lighthouse (1927) tells a story about a

woman painting another woman—twice. The first attempt is thwarted, even though Mrs.

Ramsay, the sitter, dutifully models for Lily Briscoe, the aspiring but struggling artist.1

When Lily attempts the same picture again ten years later, Mrs. Ramsay is long deceased

and Lily has recourse only to memory. Yet, it is the second time, in the absence of Mrs.

Ramsay, that Lily completes the painting and proclaims: “I have had my vision” (209).

The painting fails when Mrs. Ramsay is present; it succeeds when she is absent. Seen in

this light, the myriad thoughts and miscellaneous activities laid out in the opening and

middle sections of the novel all converge in Lily’s act of painting in the final section,

serving both as raw material for Lily’s recollection and as the backdrop against which her

painting finally takes place. While critical truism sees the transformation of life into art as

one of the dominating concerns throughout Lighthouse, it has, however, rarely been

addressed why the novel specifically situates the transformation of life into art in the

context of mourning. In this chapter, I propose that Woolf stages in Lighthouse and

several essays a model of artistic creation as an elegiac missed encounter, an aesthetic

model that participates in Levinas’s sense of the ethical. Like the Levinasian ethical

relation, mourning is characterized by a temporal structure of diachrony: for Levinas, the

absolute alterity of the other manifests itself from an immemorial past discontinuous from

the present of the present; similarly, in mourning, the departed is irretrievably lost and,
   72

try as the grieving subject might, cannot be fully recuperated even by the act of

recollection. Furthermore, mourning and Levinasian ethics both evince a tension between

the infiniteness of the other and the finitude of expression. If we take mourning to be an

extreme yet concrete instantiation of what Levinas might mean by the diachronous

temporality between the self and the other, the textual deployment in Lighthouse of

mourning as the framing device for Lily’s development as an artist—and, in parallel, for

the novel itself—points us to the artwork as the site where aesthetic creation and ethical

relation are similarly figured in temporalities of diachrony, disruption, and finitude.2

The posthumous publications of Woolf’s personal writings since the 1970’s have

established mourning as a familiar theme in the scholarship on Woolf’s oeuvre as a whole,

and on To the Lighthouse in particular, following a largely biographical methodology in

reading Lighthouse as textual mourning in light of Woolf’s private life. Lighthouse,

undeniably, has a highly autobiographical dimension. Like the Ramsays in the novel,

Woolf’s family used to enjoy their summers in a vacation home on the Isle of Skye in the

Hebrides. The premature deaths of Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen, half sister Stella

Duckworth, and brother Toby Stephen were mapped onto the narrative as the abrupt

deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prune in childbirth, and Andrew on the battlefield. Lily’s

conflicting feelings for Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay resonate with Woolf’s own difficulty in

coming to terms with her parents’ deaths. In several entries of her diaries, Woolf clearly

intends the writing of this novel as a coping device for her unresolved grief. One year

after its publication, Woolf wrote of Lighthouse in her diary: “I used to think of him &

mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind . . . . I believe this to be

true—that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; &writing of them was a necessary
   73

act” (Diary 208). More than a decade later, Woolf reiterated the same sentiment in her

memoir, “A Sketch of the Past”: “I suppose I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for

their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing

it I explained it and then laid it to rest” (94).

Over the years, the scholarship on Lighthouse as textual mourning has expanded

from the biographical interest into a multidimensional approach with emphases variously

placed on the social and aesthetic. Yet the critical conversation leaves much room for

further discussion on the aesthetic and sociocultural effects that mourning may produce,

and the ethical implications those effects may carry.3 The complete opposition, for

instance, between Karen Smythe and Tammy Clewell in their interpretations of the

cultural work of mourning is telling of how the theoretical conception of mourning, and

of memory by extension, may impact our view of the function and form of a text. Smythe

suggests that the prevailing element of elegy in Woolf’s fictions “both renders public and

private (or cultural and personal) grief, and offers a sense of consolation in aesthetic and

historical continuity” (75-76). In the specific case of Lighthouse, Smythe sees Lily as a

cultural continuation of Mrs. Ramsay: in “developing an aesthetic of fixity, of

memorization” exemplified by Mrs. Ramsay, Lily thus sutures the historical and narrative

disruption of the central section in the novel (74). In stark contrast, Tammy Clewell

argues that Woolf emphasizes the irremediable disruption wrought by the war on the

humanity and “grounds a practice of anticonsolatory mourning on the very failure of her

artist to derive recompense from the work of art” (210).4 Their opposite stances on

whether or not mourning consoles and compensates the loss, and whether it sutures

historical and narrative trauma or disrupts continuity in history and narrative, stem from
   74

the different accounts of mourning that they rely on respectively. Smythe follows the

classical Freudian conception of mourning emerging from “Mourning and Melancholia”

and supplemented by “The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego Ideal)”; Clewell references

Derrida’s “By Force of Mourning,” which revises the Freudian discourse by addressing

an aporia of mourning that “would have to fail in order to succeed” (Derrida, “Force” 173;

qtd. in Clewell 207).

As Clewell notes, Derrida’s concern with mourning is a critique of “the

philosophy of the subject” perpetuated by Freud’s account, which reduces “the lost other

to an object for the mourner” (207). Reading Lighthouse in light of Derrida, Clewell thus

diagnoses “a fundamental decentering of self” in the novel’s refusal to grant Lily and the

reader “the consoling and recuperative function” of art (207, 210). Her fine analysis falls

in line with my exploration of the ethical dimension of mourning, yet her inquiry also

remains limited without taking into account the fact that Lily does accomplish a painting,

and the fact that the narrative does affirm that accomplishment which, in itself, affirms

not the narcissistic self but the alterity of the other. As Levinas remarks, “The putting into

question of the self is precisely the welcome of the absolutely other” (“Trace,” 353): the

rejection of the consolatory, narcissism-fortifying function of mourning in Lighthouse

must be examined in relation to the creation of the artwork, which emerges out of the

tension between finite representation and infinite alterity. As I will demonstrate below,

when read in light of Levinas’s notions of diachrony, the immemorial past and the trace

of the other, Derrida’s aporia of mourning reorients grief work as an ethical relation that

gives rise to fiction; in this respect, he offers a starting point for the exploration of

Woolf’s ethical aesthetics predicated on mourning.

   75

I.

Smythe’s assumption that elegiac writing provides psychological consolation and

cultural continuation is predicated on Freud’s imperative for successful completion of the

work of mourning. Introducing the distinction between pathological melancholia and

normative mourning in his now classic “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud explains that

the work of mourning is completed when the libido detaches itself from the lost object of

love. The process involves the cathexis of “memory traces” related to the lost object; the

ego then compares against reality the resuscitation of the lost object in memory

(“Mourning” 166). In the case of a successfully completed mourning, the loss is

ascertained and accepted; otherwise, the mourner will lapse into debilitating melancholia

that hampers the functioning of everyday life. In a later essay, “The Ego and the Super-

Ego (Ego Ideal),” Freud’s emphasis on normative mourning persists, but he complicates

the work of mourning with a paradox: the acceptance of loss, so crucial to normative

mourning, depends precisely on the preservation of the object within the psyche. The

resuscitation of the object in memory provides a “substitution,” an identification with the

lost love, so as to offer a psychic compensation that will alleviate the pain of loss and

eventually bring the grief work to completion (Freud, “Ego”18). The psychic

compensation promised by the preservation is, Freud says, “the sole condition under

which the id can give up its objects” (“Ego” 19).

These operative terms in Freudian mourning—preservation, memory, identity,

and compensation—are visibly at work in Smythe’s and other similar critical

interpretations, which see in Lily the resumption of Mrs. Ramsay’s values after the ten-
   76

year interlude in the narrative, and thus the consolatory suture of the hiatus in history.

These operative terms refer us to the question of how to narrate the lost other. It is

perhaps no coincidence that critics who hold this view often reference a moment that

occurs in Lily’s intertwined process of mourning and painting, a moment at which Lily

recalls an afternoon spent on the beach with the Ramsays and their other guests.5 Lily’s

very first coherent recollection/ articulation of the now deceased Mrs. Ramsay since the

characters’ return to the seaside house, this moment has been interpreted as a revelation

of truth that will eventually enables Lily to paint:

That woman [Mrs. Ramsay] sitting there writing under the rock resolved

everything into simplicity; . . . she brought together this and that and then

this, and so made out of the miserable silliness and spite . . . something—

this scene on the beach for example, this moment of friendship and

liking—which survived, after all these years complete . . . and there it

stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art” (160).

The representation of Lily’s recollection is framed as a picture that has Mrs. Ramsay as

its center of emotional and compositional structure. To Lily’s mind, the preserved

memory of the beach scene seems to be saying, through the figure of Mrs. Ramsay, that

“Life stand still here,” and Lily acknowledges that “She owed it all to her” (161). Similar

to Smythe’s reading of this moment as Lily’s succession of Mrs. Ramsay by “developing

an aesthetic of fixity, of memorization” (74), Susan Dick remarks: “By providing her

with evidence in life of the order and value she would express in art, the memory of these

‘moments of being’ plays a central role in her effort to complete her painting” (193). 6
   77

On this reading, which affirms yet simplifies the working of mournful memory,

the knowledge Lily acquires by recollecting past incidents informs and guides how Lily

should be working on her present painting. Memory—“which survived, after all these

years complete”—is taken as a depository, in which we store the knowledge of a certain

incident, or of another person, and from which we can withdraw that knowledge years

later if need be. To borrow Derrida’s words, this view echoes the Socratic view of

memory as “the wax in which all that we wish to guard in our memory is engraved in

relief so that it may leave a mark, like that of rings, bands, or seals. We preserve our

memory and our knowledge of them; we can then speak of them, and do them justice, as

long as their image (eidolon) remains legible” (“Mnemosyne” 3). Memory is understood

here as a realist impression of truth, and the question that follows from this view would

concern the faithfulness of our representation of the truth recalled. 7

The consolatory interpretation of Lighthouse holds only insofar as it considers the

recollection of the beach scene as the culminating moment of Lily’s mourning, the

moment at which mourning is completed, and the lost other recuperated in representation

as truth. It is crucial to note, however, that the beach scene memory is no such point of

culmination, but merely one instant among others in Lily’s continual oscillation between

affirmative and ambivalent recollections of Mrs. Ramsay, and between self-confidence

and self-repudiation about her own art. After remembering the beach scene, Lily

continues to experience unresolved conflict with Mrs. Ramsay, as well as frustration of

her painting; thus the novel puts into question the view of memory as faithful and usable

preservation of the other. The question underlying the Lighthouse is not, therefore,

whether Lily can remember Mrs. Ramsay well enough or whether she can represent that
   78

memory faithfully enough. Rather, Lily’s simultaneous difficulty with mourning and

painting asks the questions raised by Derrida in “Mnemosyne,” a lecture on possible and

impossible mourning: “But what happens when the lover of Mnemosyne has not received

the gift of narration? When he doesn’t know how to tell a story? When it is precisely

because he keeps the memory that he loses the narrative?” (3)

While the classical view considers the loss of signifying power as a sign for failed

mourning, Derrida’s questions stage the dilemma of memory and narrative in terms of

possible and impossible mourning. On the one hand, the dead other “lives only in us”

through possible mourning that “would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of

the other” (“Mnemosyne” 6). On the other hand, the dead friend resists such

interiorization and demands respect for his or her “infinite remove” (“Mnemosyne” 6).

Impossible mourning would therefore be a grief work in which the subject “either refuses

to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of

some narcissism” (“Mnemosyne” 6). The ethical dimension of mourning, then, emerges

in the form of an aporia. If we adhere to our fidelity to a departed friend by representing

our remembrance, we do so at the risk of assimilating the alterity of the other with our

attempt at an “exhaustive narrative or the total absorption of a memory” (“Mnemosyne”

11). If, out of respect for the other’s alterity, we fail to memorialize or resuscitate the

memory of the other, we do so at the risk of betraying the friendship. Derrida does not

present the aporia to us as an either/ or choice between to mourn and not to mourn; rather,

he urges us to live this aporia, “where success fails . . . and the failure succeeds”

(“Mnemosyne” 35). To live this aporia is to occupy an impossible position—much like

Lily’s constant oscillation between affirmation and non-affirmation—but Derrida insists

   79

that “this impossible affirmation must be possible: this singular affirmative affirmation

must affirm the impossible, without which it is only a report, a technics, a recording”

(“Mnemosyne” 32).

Derrida’s aporia of mourning, as Ewa Plonowska Ziarek insightfully argues,

“echoes and restages Levinas’s dilemma of how the absolutely other can be inscribed in

consciousness without being assimilated or constituted by the subject” (“Mourning” 144-

45). If we accept the conjunction between Levinas and Derrida in the rethinking of

“finitude of memory” vis-à-vis “finite alterity” (Ziarek, “Mourning” 145), Levinas’s

attentiveness to the temporalities of the other will conversely recast Derrida’s aporia as

the impossible contemporaneity between the self and the other. In the essay “The Trace

of the Other,” Levinas characterizes the ethical relation between the self and the other

with a temporality of diachrony, which maintains the necessary separation that prevents

the other from being absorbed into the subject’s economy of the same. The other signifies

to the subject from exteriority, which Levinas emphatically refers to as a past “utterly

bygone,” “immemorial,” and “irretrievable,” in order to underscore the fact that the other

exceeds the subject’s consciousness and cannot be made present even through the

subject’s acts of remembering and representing (Levinas, “Trace” 355). For Levinas, then,

an aporia also rises in the double signifyingness of the other. On the one hand, the other

manifests himself as a sign, which represents the other as a content, situated in and

illuminated by “a cultural whole” (Levinas, “Trace” 351, 356-57). On the other hand, the

other also manifests himself as the trace, which signifies the other’s infinite alterity by

interrupting the subject’s consciousness with a sense of absence that alerts to the very fact

that “[s]omeone has already passed” (Levinas, “Trace” 359). The trace is a signification
   80

from the immemorial past, manifesting itself to the subject as a disturbance and

withdrawing before capture by the subject’s consciousness. The trace qua trace is

therefore the mode of signifyingness proper to the absolute alterity of the other, always

exterior to comprehension, representation, and memorialization. Having set up the

distinction between the sign and the trace of the other, Levinas nonetheless adds that

“every trace also plays the role of a sign,” and that “every sign is a trace” (356, 357). As

an aporia, the double modality of the other’s signifyingness is characterized by the

other’s simultaneous manifestation and effacement; or, to put it differently, by the other’s

breaking into and withdrawal from the subject’s consciousness that is always experienced

as the present. The impossibility for the other to remain contemporaneous to the self

explains why Derrida’s possible mourning may—indeed, must—transform into

impossible mourning.

Importantly, the impossible contemporaneity reveals that mourning is fictional by

nature. Derrida recognizes in Freud’s normative mourning a work of interiorization, “a

movement in which an interiorizing idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and

voice of the other, the other’s visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring

them” (“Mnemosyne,” 34). But in contrast to the traditional view that sees the

interiorization as faithful recuperation—which would suggest a violent totalization of the

other’s incommensurable past within the subject’s present—Derrida argues that

mourning gives rise to fiction: “This mimetic interiorization is not fictive; it is the origin

of fiction, of apocryphal figuration” (“Mnemosyne,” 34). With terms such as “fiction”

and “apocryphal figuration,” Derrida does not mean to accuse interiorization of

falsification so much as he suggests that we should always carefully discern the temporal
   81

diachrony at work in mourning and, while we do so, welcome the alterity that breaks out

of the subsuming form. The interiorization preserves the other, for Derrida, “in the form

of those hypomnemata, memoranda, signs or symbols, images or mnesic representations

which are only lacunary fragments, detached and dispersed”: these fragmentary parts of

the other cannot be recollected into a coherent representation of the other, because they

are also “the trace of the other” in the Levinasian sense, which signifies “the other’s

irreducible precedence” “(“Mnemosyne” 37, 29). Unable to stay contemporaneous to the

subject, the double signifyingness of the trace not only threatens to break up the totaling

form of memory, but it also always signifies in surplus to what the subject can register.

Consequently, while the traces become “parts of us, included ‘in us’ in a memory,”

memory is also inherently open to the alterity of the other. Cast in this light, memory thus

suddenly seems greater and older than us, ‘greater,’ beyond any quantitative

comparisons: sublimely greater than this other that the memory harbors and

guards within it, but also greater with this other, greater than itself, inadequate to

itself, pregnant with this other. (“Mnemosyne” 37)

By attending to the traces of the other from the immemorial past, the aporia of mourning

therefore brings forth a new life, as the phrase “pregnant with this other” suggests. The

new life is not a replicate or an extension of the other: greater than the other, it is already

fiction; greater than the subject, it is also a creation, paradoxically beyond the mastery of

the subject. The fiction thus brought into being by the aporia of mourning is even “greater

than itself,” because it is “greater with the other”: it is only thanks to the alterity of the

other that it can come about.

   82

Levinas’s attentiveness to the temporalities of the other—diachrony, the

immemorial past, the trace—has allowed us to foreground two interrelated dimensions in

Derrida’s aporia of mourning: the other’s impossible contemporaneity with the self, and

thus the fictional nature of mourning. If mourning is fiction by nature, it also participates

in the ethical as fiction, as creation. Critics of Woolf’s Lighthouse have interpreted Lily’s

memory of the beach scene both as the culmination of her mourning and, by extension, as

the quintessence of the truth for her art. Contra this prevailing view, I have suggested that

the memory of the beach scene does not impose a decisive ending to Lily’s grief work,

and that mourning in Lighthouse does not simply convey truth from the deposit of

memory to the canvas. What Lily undergoes is an aporia of mourning, where the desire

for the preservation of Mrs. Ramsay’s memory conflicts with the desire for the

preservation of her alterity. Her difficulty with completing the picture, then, evinces an

ethical incapability to reduce the other’s infinite memory into a usable object, and

diachrony into the present. By framing Lily’s creative activity with the work of mourning,

Lighthouse raises the question of the nature of memory, and the answer from Derrida and

Levinas has shown that mourning is fictional by nature. Below, before returning to the

exploration of Lily’s mourning and painting in more detail, I will detour to several of

Woolf’s essays and argue that, for Woolf, literature is inherently mournful.

II.

Inspired by Levinasian ethics, Derek Attridge predicates the process of literary

invention on the subject’s ethical relation with otherness, arguing that genuine literary

invention is an act of response before it is an enactment of the subject’s will. In literary

   83

creation, according to Attridge, there is “an element of passivity, of attempting to

heighten responsiveness to hints of relationships, to incipient arguments, to images

swimming on the edges of consciousness, an element of ‘letting them come’ as much as

seeking them out” (Singularity 22-23).  It is with much clarity and persuasiveness that

Attridge articulates the import of Levinasian ethics for innovative literature, but he is not

the first to have conceived literary creation as an ethical encounter with alterity. Indeed,

not only does Woolf’s discussion of her craft bear a striking resemblance to Attridge’s

formulation, but the illustrative image she provides for the discussion vividly evokes

Levinas’s face-to-face relation. In the famous cluster of essays eventually published as

“Character in Fiction,” Woolf makes a case for the conception of the novel as an

encounter with a character.8 As Woolf sees it, the impetus behind the writing of fiction

originates in the novelist’s encounter with a character, and the novel develops as the

writer, intrigued by the character, urgently seeks to know the character in his or her

singularity.

Typical of Woolf, rather than “analyzing and abstracting,” she tells an anecdote of

her encounter with Mrs. Brown to illustrate how a novelist approaches a character (CIF

422). Hopping on a train from Richmond to Waterloo one day, the novelist finds herself

intruding a railway carriage where sit a man and an elderly woman whom she

provisionally names Mrs. Brown. When she eavesdrops on the two’s conversation and

secretly observes Mrs. Brown’s demeanor, so fascinated is Woolf by the impressions the

elder lady imparts that the novelist’s mind is immediately, almost involuntarily, set off to

work: in silence, observations are made, questions asked, and speculations advanced. In a

few strokes, the novelist weaves imagination with impression into a fictional—but
   84

probable—sketch of Mrs. Brown’s character. The novelist conjectures the cause of the

apparent tension between Mrs. Brown and the man, infers from her shabby appearance

and uneasy comportment a miserable predicament she might possibly be in, and invents a

plausible personal history that has led her into the current circumstances. Mrs. Brown’s

untimely disembarkation from the train thwarts Woolf’s imaginative sketch, but from the

encounter already emerges an insipient story, a novel in its embryonic stage. 9 As Woolf

writes, “What I want you to see in [the anecdote] is this. Here is a character imposing

itself upon another person. Here is Mrs. Brown making someone begin almost

automatically to write a novel about her. I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in

the corner opposite” (CIF 425). The concrete, singular scenario in the carriage, where the

novelist and the character sit opposite each other, instantiates Levinas’s abstract notion of

the face-to-face relation. Just as Levinas’s ethical subject is infinitely obligated to

respond to the other, even to the extent of being held hostage by the other, so does the

Woolfian novelist experience an intense obsession with the character that compels her to

respond with the act of writing.

To see the novel as an encounter with a character, then, orients writing not as the

signifying subject’s initiative but, rather, as the ethical subject’s response to the other

person. In “Character in Fiction,” the ethical reorientation of novel writing as response

entails Woolf’s cogent critiques of earlier novelists’ conventional practices in character

making. Although Woolf shares with her predecessors a common belief in the centrality

of character to the novel, the reorientation of the novel as response has decisively set her

apart from those earlier novelists. If a novel is a response to a character, as the encounter

with Mrs. Brown suggests, it follows that the primary goal of the novel will be to present
   85

the character’s singularity, which Attridge defines as the presentation of a cultural object

“in its difference from all other such objects, not simply as a particular manifestation of

general rules but as a peculiar nexus within the culture that is perceived as resisting or

exceeding all pre-existing general determinations” (Singularity 63). In Woolf’s

estimation, this is a task her predecessors have failed miserably: Charles Dickens reduces

the singularity of a character to a repetition of a peculiar key phrase; H. G. Wells flattens

characters into speaking vessels for political propaganda; and Arnold Bennett, at whom

Woolf launches her most vehement attack, is too preoccupied with describing material

details to actually communicate what a character is like (MBMB 386). Underneath the

various literary devices these novelists have adopted is their common lack of reflection

on their relation to their character. Unquestioningly, they assume the role of god-creator

in their respective fictional universe, where the character is but an extension of the

authorial will. In contrast, Woolf acknowledges that the singularity of the character

exceeds the novelist’s immediate purpose, design, and comprehension, and she argues

that it is a disinterested interest in the character that fuels the novelist’s fascination with

the character. We all must learn to read character in order to get by in real life, Woolf

says, but it is the novelists who extend the study of character beyond “practical purposes”

in order to look for “something permanently interesting in character in itself” (CIF 422).

The presentation of the character therefore involves not so much the assertion of authorial

will as attentiveness and receptiveness to the singularity of the character. Even though

Woolf rarely openly addresses the issue of ethics or morality, the novelists’ craft as she

sees it is already inseparable from an ethical relation with the other. Indeed, by positing
   86

character as the portal to literary creation from real life, Woolf provides the link between

ethics and literature that is missing in Levinas’s own work.

If a novel originates in an encounter with a specific person in a carriage, can we

then accuse Woolf of replicating the metaphysics of presence, which has historically

constituted for Western culture a hierarchy privileging presence over absence, speech

over writing, the present over the past? Does a novel produced as a response to the other,

to borrow Levinas’s words, “revert . . . to this egological significance of intentionality,

the egology of synthesis, the gathering of all alterity into presence, and the synchrony of

representation?” (“Diachrony” 99-100) Very importantly, the answer suggested by

Woolf’s texts is a clear no. In her description of the novel as an encounter with an old

woman, Woolf problematizes the apparent contemporaneity between the subject and the

other by infusing a subtle but undeniable ghostly overtone to the person in question.10 For

instance, toward the beginning of “Character in Fiction,” Woolf opines: “And when I

asked myself…what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom [of the

difficult task of writing a novel], a little figure rose before me—the figure of a man, or of

a woman, who said, ‘My name is Brown. Catch me if you can’” (CIF 420, emphasis

added). The challenge imposed by the character becomes an obsession, and Woolf

observes: “Most novelists…are haunted in precisely the same way” (CIF Lecture 502,

emphasis added). The process of writing a novel, then, is recast as a ghost chase: “And so,

led on by this will-o’-the wisp, [great writers] flounder through volume after volume,

spending the best years of their lives in the pursuit” (CIF 420, emphasis added). At the

end of the day, Woolf laments, “Few catch the phantom; most have to be content with a

scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair” (CIF 421, emphasis ended). A rhetorical mark
   87

indelibly and unquestionably Woolf’s, the metaphor of the spectral other first and

foremost characterizes the novelist’s encounter with the character as a temporality of

diachrony. The phantom-like Mrs. Brown is not fully present for Woolf even when she

sits right across the novelist in the same carriage, for a ghost is by definition a temporal

disturbance, a past that intrudes into the present of the subject and threatens to vanish any

time. With its ghostly overtone, the anecdote of the encounter illustrates what it may

mean for us to say each person inhabits a different temporality, and no one’s temporality

is completely compatible with that of another person. The temporality of the novel,

conceived as a response to the ghostly other, is therefore a temporality of diachrony. The

key ideas about fiction writing that Woolf seeks to accentuate with the deployment of the

ghostly rhetoric—such as the obsession with the character that motivates response

through writing, and the otherness of the character as fleeting and protean as a spectral

mystery—are secondary effects derived from the diachrony on which the novel is

predicated.

The temporality of diachrony that Woolf envisions with her ghostly Mrs. Brown

is not merely a rhetorical ornament or a theme about which she writes. It is also a textual

structure that resonates with the sense of diachrony that prevails in Levinas’s ethics and

underlies Derrida’s aporia of mourning. Although Woolf ends her essay hoping for a day

when novelists of the new generation will succeed in the pursuit of the ghostly Mrs.

Brown, the temporality of diachrony entails that the pursuit will inevitably fall short of

completion, ending not with a totalizing grasp of Mrs. Brown but rather with “a scrap of

her dress or a wisp of her hair” (CIF 421). As Lily contemplates to herself, language

always misses its mark: “Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low”
   88

(178). Insofar as the diachrony between the subject and the other is an unbridgeable gap

that no activity of consciousness can convert into an adequate representation in the

present, the other cannot be recuperated by the subject in whole but must filter through

the subject’s perception in fragmented forms. The novel as an encounter with the ghostly

other may appear to end in a failure, but it is a failure that succeeds in the ethical.

Cast in light of the temporality of diachrony, the apparent focus on the novelist’s

craft in Woolf’s quarrels with her Edwardian predecessors is from the start thoroughly

interwoven with the ethical. Woolf’s critique of her predecessors clearly repudiates

conventions that purport to present a character vividly but that, in fact, only make the

character a masterful continuation of the present of the authorial intention. It is equally

clear, however, that the novel cannot be entirely free from the author’s intention,

judgment, selection, and organization. In a manner similar to Derrida’s aporia of

mourning, Woolf’s conception of the novel as encounter with the ghostly other must

struggle with the tension between the finitude of representation and authorial intention on

the one hand and, on the other, the infinity of the other beyond representation. How does

the temporality of diachrony, then, translate into the terms of the novelist? In her

recommendation to fellow novelists, Woolf again resorts to the ghostly rhetoric, in order

to propose a representational strategy that deflects its own totalizing power:

In the first place, her solidarity disappears; her features crumble; the house

in which she has lived so long (and a very substantial house it was) topples

to the ground. She becomes a will-o’-the-wisp, a dancing light, an

illumination gliding up the wall and out of the window, lighting now in
   89

freakish malice upon the nose of an archbishop, now in sudden splendor

upon the mahogany of the wardrobe. (MBMB 387)

The house that the essay claims must come into ruin is a mocking allusion to Bennett, the

quintessential Edwardian novelist whom Woolf faults for not going directly to the

essence of life but hovering over external, material details of a house. What Woolf offers

here as a counterstrike to Bennett and his like is a spectralization of representation, which

effects a loosened grip of authorial intension on what is represented. For Woolf, it is only

in the ruin of representational conventions that a new conception of character can be born.

The descriptive directions in this mission statement, apparently intended for her fellow

novelists, are to be executed later in Lighthouse one by one. From the onset of the novel,

far before any death takes place or any house crumbles in the narrative, we can already

see that Mrs. Ramsay is characterized by a spectral vagueness. Although the novel

repeatedly mentions her great beauty, no exact depiction of her outer appearance is given.

Hers is thus a vague face, not in the sense that she is of no consequence in the novel, but

in the sense that Woolf refuses to simplify the character’s singularities into one unified

identity. In the central section of the novel, after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, the seaside house

is left to ruin, with the air—if not exactly the ghost fire—going freely in and out of it.

Throughout the final section of Lighthouse, the late Mrs. Ramsay haunts the

consciousness of other characters, and towards the end the narrative even insinuates that

the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay has briefly returned. Moreover, Lily’s effort to attempt the

same painting again while she mourns for Mrs. Ramsay reminds us of Woolf’s

formulation of novel writing as a ghost chase. The life, death (not incidentally,

accompanied by the decay of the house), and the apparition of Mrs. Ramsay in
   90

Lighthouse renews Woolf’s attempt of her disrupted sketch of Mrs. Brown on the train.

With its mournful overtone suggestive of the spectral, the representational strategy

highlights the tension at issue in representation and seeks to foreground the singularity of

the character through the tension.

Simmering right below the surface of Woolf’s formulation of the novel as an

encounter with the ghostly other, the notion of diachrony is instrumental to establishing

an aesthetics of mourning for Woolf’s textual practice. The aesthetics of mourning

functions in Woolf’s writings in several senses: as a reformulation of the novel as an

encounter with the ghostly other, as a theme, as the overarching narrative structure of

Lighthouse, and as a spectral rhetoric that undermines the all-too-ready totalizing power

of representation. More importantly, the temporality of diachrony between the writer and

what she writes allows us to read Woolf’s representational act in a mournful sense, even

when the subject matter is not ostensibly concerned with death or grief. Woolf calls upon

novelists to cast aside realist conventions and stay truthful to their own vision in “Modern

Fiction,” and another version of the same essay, “Modern Novel.” On both occasions, she

articulates her own famous impressionist vision:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind

receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved

with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower

of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the

life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old. . . .

(MF 160)
   91

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which

they fall; let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in

appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.

(MN 33-34)

If the novel in its finished shape inevitably imposes a form on impressions—at least in

the sense that Lily must put a final stroke to her painting—Woolf nonetheless

problematizes formal totalization by foregrounding the temporal movement in which

dispersed traces of perception enter linguistic representation. Her repeated rhetorical

structure of “as they shape themselves” and “as they fall upon the mind” places an

emphasis on a time that cannot be reduced into the present of the narrating consciousness,

and thus cannot be made invisible in the narrative. The insistence on the irreducible time

of dispersed traces can be seen in Lighthouse, too. In a passage in the opening section of

the novel, Lily observes the Ramsays with great interest and contemplates to herself:

“And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, . . . how life, from being made up of

little separate incidents which one loved one by one, became curled and whole like a

wave which bore one up with it and throw one down with it, there, with a dash on the

beach” (47, emphasis added). The wave, as a trope for life and narrative that consists of

the subject’s experience of fragmentary traces, is “curled and whole” for only a transient

moment. The diachronous fragments of sense perceptions, thus, participate in the making

of the form and at the same time disperse the form.

I argue that Woolf’s impressionistic aesthetics is mournful by nature for two

reasons. First of all, Woolf’s use of dispersed, fragmentary traces for the narrative evokes

Derrida’s aporia of mourning. There is a similarity between the finitude of memory and
   92

the infinity of the other staged by Derrida and the tension emerging from Woolf between

formal totalization of narrative and its interruption, or the finite means of representation

and the infinite alterity of the represented. There is also an analogy in Woolf’s privileging

of the traces of perceptions and Derrida’s primacy of the trace of the other.11 Secondly

and more importantly, Woolf resonates with Levinas in the sense that the irreducible

diachrony of the trace, manifest in the interruption of representation, points to the other as

the source of signification. If, for Levinas, the signifying act of the subject is already

signification in retrospect, already response to someone who has irreparably retreated to

an immemorial past, it is possible to infer, then, to signify is already to mourn.

One may question the relevance of such an assertion when stretched to such a

comprehensive extent. Yet, it is precisely by never losing sight of death hovering over

quotidian and philosophical activities that modern philosophy has irrevocably

repositioned its thinking on our relations in and with life, and the mournfulness in

Woolf’s writings may be considered a participation in, even an anticipation of, such

reorientation in philosophy. As Levinas says, “The philosopher’s mortality marks his

thought as it marks his existence. A finite existence. A finite human thought, though it be

philosophical. A philosophical thought because of this finitude” (“Philosopher” 122).12

Death is not only one among many other themes of the philosopher’s thought; it

structures the trajectory of the philosopher’s thinking. For Levinas, it is an attentiveness

to the other’s death that enables the ethical relation with the other person. The face of the

other obligates me for infinite responsibility precisely because it signifies the other’s

mortality, “an exposure unto death: nudity, destitution, passivity, and pure vulnerability”

(Levinas, “Diachrony” 107). The face of the other, which is the source of signification for
   93

Levinas, is inseparable from the death of the other: “I sometimes ask myself whether the

idea of the straight line—the shortest distance between two points—is not originally the

line according to which the face that I encounter is exposed to death” (“Philosopher” 127).

What needs to be noted here is that the death of the other is intertwined with the ethical

relation before the death actually takes place. For Levinas, the resonances of death are

heard not only “in every death to which one attends,” but also “in each approach of

someone who is mortal” (“Philosopher”126). Similarly, Derrida emphasizes that

mortality—the one thing we can be sure of before its actual occurrence—preconditions

friendship. He asserts in “Mnemosyne” that “there is no friendship without this

knowledge of finitude” (29). Already underway before the actual occurrence of death,

mourning is in fact a modality of our relation with the others: “And everything we

inscribe in the living present of our relation to others already carries, always, the

signature of memoirs-from-beyond-the-grave” (“Mnemosyne” 29).13

Derrida proclaims that death preconditions relation and mourning underlies our

signifying acts, and Levinas argues that the intertwinement between the other’s death and

ethical relation begins before the death takes place. If we accept their perspectives on life

oriented by death, then the conception of Woolf’s aesthetics as predicated on mourning

brings out the ethical dimension of her attempts to renovate the genre of the novel. The

conception of the novel as an encounter with the ghostly other, the spectral rhetoric, and

the tension between traces and totalizing form all attest to Woolf’s refusal to subdue

heterogeneity into a contemporaneity of the signifying consciousness. Her textual

mourning, which thus extends to her writings that do not explicitly pertain to death,
   94

enacts the aporia of mourning in order to preserve alterity. As I demonstrate below,

Lighthouse enacts Woolf’s ethical aesthetics predicated on mourning.

III.

In Part I of Lighthouse, Lily despairs over her painting that features Mrs. Ramsay

reading to her son in the setting of the seaside house. Lily’s difficulty does not lie in lack

of vision, for she sees “The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring with white . . . .

She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked” (L 18-19). Nor does it

lie in lack of method; from the start she resolutely embraces the post-impressionistic

arrangement of abstract masses of strong colors, renouncing realistic mimesis of outer

appearance and heeding no “fashionable” trend of impressionistic diffuseness that renders

the world in soft pastels (L 18). What is the obstruction that frustrates Lily’s painting,

then? The narrative deploys a parallel between Lily’s contemplation on Mrs. Ramsay and

her rumination on pictorial composition of her picture, thus implying the central

difficulty to be an issue of how to relate: how Lily may relate to Mrs. Ramsay in life, and

how one mass of color may relate to another on the canvas. Martha C. Nussbaum’s

famous reading formulates the problem of relationality in Lighthouse as an

epistemological “problem of other minds” (732). She diagnoses Lily’s thwarted painting

as symptomatic of the failure of her epistemological project. For Nussbaum, Lily’s

prospect for a successful painting hinges upon her ability to produce an adequate

knowledge by reading Mrs. Ramsay as a text; because Lily has not learned to decipher

the signs of Mrs. Ramsay—as the Ramsays are able to with each other—she is unable to

convey the truth of Mrs. Ramsay in the picture.

   95

However, although Nussbaum insightfully describes the “problem of other minds”

as one that “is not simply an epistemological problem . . . but above all, an ethical

problem,” the ethical for her is in the final analysis subordinated to the epistemological

and depends on the subject’s success to know (732). If knowledge has been the

predominating mode that characterizes our act of relating to another person, it is by no

means the only mode, and its implication of the subject’s epistemological totalization of

the other provokes ethical concerns. From the perspective of Levinasian ethics, it is

precisely the alterity of the other that can be approached, but not known, that

characterizes the ethical relation. Indeed, Lily’s challenge is precisely to invent new

modes of relating when knowledge is impossible. In Part I of Lighthouse, prior to the

actual occurrence of several characters’ deaths, Lily’s painting is already a retrospective,

mournful response to the other whose diachrony cannot be eliminated by the finitude of

representation. To the contrary of Nussbaum’s indictment that Lily fails her

epistemological project, then, I argue that Lily’s quest for a relation with Mrs. Ramsay in

Part I (a work of mourning in the broadest sense) starts as an epistemological question

but ends with an ethical suspension of knowledge, which prepares for the orchestrated

acts of mourning, ethical relating, and artistic creation in Part III.

Nonetheless, Nussbaum’s epistemological reading usefully alerts us to the gender

dichotomy that frames the Ramsay community, and to Lily’s struggle to navigate her way

between the gender poles.14 Mrs. Ramsay is depicted as an exemplary specimen of

Victorian womanhood, the “angel in the house” immortalized in popular imagination by

Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem of the same title. Emblematic of the British middle class

on the eve of drastic social change, the Ramsay’s small community operates on the
   96

principal of gender division, which labels man as the “conquering hero” and woman the

“angel in the house (Bowlby 64). On the one hand, men have their “work” to do: they go

out there in the world to accomplish what they can in philosophy (Mr. Ramsay), science

(Mr. Bankes), painting (Mr. Paunceforte), and poetry (Mr. Carmichael), and by extension

in politics, imperialism, and commerce, as is implied by the military shopping catalogues

that young James plays with. Women, on the other hand, are not to do work of their own

but to encourage men onward by nurturing them with feminine beauty, sympathy, and

affection. In playing her multiple role as hospitable hostess, nurturing wife and mother,

enthusiastic matchmaker, and community caregiver, Mrs. Ramsay herself not only fulfills

the conventional role for a middle-class Victorian woman, but she is the very staying

force that supports and propels the gender division.15

As the androgynous New Woman hailing from London, Lily wants to break away

from the stifling gender division and thus finds her relation with Mrs. Ramsay full of

ambivalence. She loves the older woman for her feminine power to nurture and to sustain

human connectedness, and yet she also longs for entrance into the supposedly masculine

world of achievement and ambition, which is denied to her by none other than Mrs.

Ramsay, the otherwise loving cultural mother. Lily’s love for Mrs. Ramsay and the

community she builds is therefore an impossible love: “I’m in love with this all,” she says

to herself, then “waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children. It was absurd,

it was impossible” (L 19). Because of this ambivalence, Mrs. Ramsay perhaps poses a

greater obstacle between Lily and her artistic aspiration than do the patriarchal male

intellectuals. It is relatively easy for the New Woman from London to respond to the

misogynists’ rustling whispers that “Women can’t write, women can’t paint,” for any
   97

response of indignation, dismissal, or sarcasm would be politically justifiable (L 86). But

the ambivalence of simultaneous love and deprivation makes the relation with the cultural

mother much more difficult to navigate: the feminist stake at issue in Lighthouse is not so

much how a woman liberates herself from the shackles of patriarchy as how a woman,

already resolute in her feminist belief, relates to her cultural mother, who replicates the

idea of patriarchy. For Lily, Mrs. Ramsay’s capacity for love and emotional sustenance

makes total denouncement impossible, although equally out of the question is total

identification with the cultural mother. Caught in the ambivalence, Lily finds herself

constantly engaged in a tug of war, resisting a love that she also wants to enjoy. “And it

was then too,” the narrative tells us,

in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced

themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance,

keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road, and much ado to

control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted

so far) at Mrs. Ramsay’s knee” (L 19).

At frustrating moments like this one, Lily is tempted to discard her artistic ambition and

to abandon herself to Mrs. Ramsay. But she refrains from submitting to the impulse, for

she knows that submission to Mrs. Ramsay will reinforce these external restraints that

have eaten into her self-confidence and further weakened her ability to execute her

artistic vision. To persist with her artistic ambition, then, suggests that Lily must

deliberately maintain a distance from her cultural mother, an endurance of emotive

deprivation that a decade later, in Part III, will erupt into a sense of abandonment that

fuels her mourning for the then deceased Mrs. Ramsay.

   98

The socio-historical construction of Mrs. Ramsay as an angel in the house thus

leaves Lily stranded in the conundrum of how a woman may relate to her cultural mother.

In a later essay titled “Professions for Women,” Woolf proposes symbolic matricide as a

viable solution to the ambivalence between different generations of women: “Killing the

Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer” (60). Given the

author’s resort to violence, it is all the more impressive that Lily responds to Mrs.

Ramsay with neither open protest nor overt hostility, neither complete indifference nor

downright denial of her knowledge and experience. Instead, placing herself above the

dichotomous choice of either violence or submission, Lily wants to see past the social

conventions that have shaped Mrs. Ramsay’s identity in order to discover her singularity,

and to invent accordingly ways of relating to her beyond the restrictive option of

opposition or identification. Dwelling upon the kind of knowledge she would like to

pursue, Lily inquires:

How did she [Mrs. Ramsay] differ? What was the spirit in her, the

essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of

a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?

(L 49)

Lily’s questions reorient the pursuit of knowledge as a pursuit of singularity. Like Woolf,

who argues that the novelist should renounce the tyranny of generic conventions so as to

express the spirit of a character, and thus life itself, Lily wants to bypass the knowledge

produced from social conventions in order to get at the spirit, “the essential thing,” or the

singularity of Mrs. Ramsay. This inevitably raises the concern as to whether such a

pursuit of singularity, an attempt to attend to the otherness of the other, may not revert to
   99

the epistemological subject’s reinscription of the other person as essentialized knowledge.

With the image of the deserted glove that evokes Levinas’s trace of the other, Lily

suggests that non-essentialized knowledge is indeed possible, if the possibility is not

immediately apparent. An ordinary object which nonetheless bears a unique imprint of

the absent other, the glove acutely expresses the tension between the essential and the

trace: the mediation of the deserted glove, while yielding certain knowledge

“indisputably” of its absent owner, does not give us access to a totalizing knowledge, for

the trace of the other is not a spatial figure of synecdoche, a part that refers to the whole;

rather, it is a trace left across the unbridgeable diachrony that suggests the impossible

temporal coincidence of the subject and the other, hence the impossibility of totalizing

epistemic mastery.

The image of the twisted finger of the deserted glove suggests that it is possible to

know the other in a way that does not commit epistemic violence, for we have no direct

access to the essence but only the mediation of the trace. Yet, such ethical knowing

implied in her own image is not immediately clear to Lily. The next set of images she

conjures up intimates a modality of relating to the other characterized by wholeness and

immersion, a modality that reveals Lily’s fantasy of erotic reunion with the lost, beloved

mother. Admitting her longing for “unity” and “intimacy,”

she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman

who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the

tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could

spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be

offered openly, never made public. (L 51)

   100

In this image, the maternal other is figured as a space that Lily wants to find ways to

enter, and the knowledge of the other, though a secret hidden inside, is laid out on the

tablets for one to read if one “[can press] through into those secret chambers” (L 51).

Relating imagined as such amounts to immersion with the other. To some extent, Lily’s

fantasy of “love . . . mak[ing] her and Mrs. Ramsay become one” is a desire, to borrow

Julia Kristeva’s term, for regression into the mother-child symbiosis before the symbolic

order intervenes (L 51).16 The wish for reunion with the lost mother, at the expense of

self/ other distinction, is made clear as Lily’s imagination of the mother as a room

morphs into a water jar: “What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar,

inextricably the same, one with the object one adored?” (L 51) From the Kristevan

perspective, however, the wished-for regression is not a viable arrangement of Lily’s

relation with Mrs. Ramsay, for it announces precisely the possibility of melancholia—

caused by the woman’s inability to firmly establish her subject position through symbolic

matricide—and thus the female subject’s own symbolic death. While Lily’s figuration of

the lost mother as an enclosed space evokes the womb, the first container of life, it also

suggests an anticipation of death when Lily compares Mrs. Ramsay to a mausoleum-like

place. The death is Mrs. Ramsay’s insofar as Lily conceives her in a fixed, essentialized

form, “the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions” (L 51). The

death is also Lily’s own, insofar as she conceives the pursuit of knowledge of the other as

a seamless fusion that dissolves the differentiation between the self and the other.

The implausibility of fusion with the other is brought to the fore by the contrast

between Lily and Mrs. Ramsay’s physical intimacy and the lack of common ground for

their thoughts. While “[s]itting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay’s knees,
   101

close as she could get,” Lily cannot escape the sense that the marriage-urging Mrs.

Ramsay “would never know the reason of that pressure,” and that the older woman is

“presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand”

(L 50-51). Lily imagines erotic unity as a means to redress such alienation, but to no avail.

Even as she lays her head upon Mrs. Ramsay’s knee, she realizes that “Nothing happened.

Nothing! Nothing!” (L 51)

Lily then summons up a second image to create a different formulation of how to

“know” the other. Here she acknowledges the impossibility of total immersion with the

other, and proposes instead a fleeting but frequent contact with the other person:

How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing

about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some

sweetness of sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted

the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of

the world alone, and then murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which

were people. (L 51)

In this image, the other is no longer a space that one may enter after some searching. The

other is now compared to a closed beehive that the subject, like a bee, can only come to

haunt after a long and lonely trip across the world. For Nussbaum, this image indicates

the very failure of Lily’s epistemological project: “The hives are sealed. Their sweetness

or sharpness lures us—and then all we can do is to hover round the outside, haunting the

hive . . .” (732-33). Undoubtedly, the relation between the subject and the other figured in

this image is characterized by the concession that the other cannot be known. But if the

alterity of the beehive-like other presses us to the limitation of epistemology, it also

   102

brings us to the forefront of ethics. Acknowledging the impossibility of obtaining

complete knowledge of the other, Lily’s formulation of the other as a beehive does not

conclude that we should renounce our efforts to relate to the other person altogether.

Rather, it is the epistemological approach and erotic unity with the other that is

renounced; in substitution, the beehive theory formulates the labor of relating to the other

person as a constant contact and speculation, a labor that must go on despite the fact that

it will not receive the reward of confirmed knowledge. Thus, the questions that Lily asks

about Mrs. Ramsay, to which she will receive no ascertained answers, must continue to

be asked time and again. It is therefore with great significance that in her painting Lily

employs a non-mimetic “purple triangular shape” to represent Mrs. Ramsay (L 48). There

is no sure prospect to her attempt to know Mrs. Ramsay; perhaps she will never really

know Mrs. Ramsay. But despite the epistemological doubt, Lily affirms Mrs. Ramsay in

her otherness by putting in her place on the canvas “an august shape; the shape of a dome”

that evokes the beehive (L 51).

In Part I of Lighthouse, while Lily endeavors to come to terms with the infinite

otherness of the other person, Mrs. Ramsay is engaged with her own struggle between the

finitude of the self and the infinite alterity of impersonal existence. This is a struggle that

echoes the Levinasian terms discussed in my chapter on Wilde—personal existence and

anonymous, timeless existence that Levinas calls the there is. The subject becomes a

subject as such through surging from the impersonal there is, but the there is can erupt

the coherence of subjectivity at unexpected moments to remind us of its unstable

construction. In her privacy, Mrs. Ramsay reveals a dark side incompatible with her

external role as angel in the house. Despite her ostensibly cheerful “work” of brining
   103

people together, Mrs. Ramsay is profoundly drawn to the allure of the impersonal there is

that tempts her to forgo action and meaning that consist of the personal. In an image that

reverberates with Lily’s beehive, she visualizes the barest form of being as “a wedge-

shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. . . . And this self having shed its

attachments was free for the strangest adventures” (L 62). But whereas Lily’s beehive

safeguards the singularity of the other person—the peculiar and deeply personal crooked

finger of the other’s glove—Mrs. Ramsay’s wedge is an unlimited expansion “all dark,”

“all spreading,” “unfathomably deep” (L 62-63). It is in this state of bare being—

detachment from ego—that Mrs. Ramsay identifies herself as becoming one with the

beam from the lighthouse as well as with other inanimate objects:

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate

things; trees, streams, flowers, felt they expressed one; felt they became

one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness

thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for one. (L 63-64)

Mrs. Ramsay’s penchant for impersonal existence, expressed in the pronoun “one,”

complicates her character. On the outside, it seems to others, the bits and ends that she

does—to love and to serve others, to help with charity and to urge to marry—places her

in the stereotypical position of Victorian womanhood. On the inside, these acts suggest

not simply conformity to social conventions, but, more importantly, a persistent effort to

resist the seduction of impersonal existence.

Mrs. Ramsay’s domestic drudgery, in this sense, transforms the impersonal

existence into supportive relation with others. Yet Woolf’s narrative cautiously refrains

from expanding Mrs. Ramsay’s capacity for relationality into a narcissistic fantasy of
   104

omnipotence that would keep under control the horror of the impersonal there is. Rather,

the finitude of life permeates Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts. Despite her cheerful appearance of

the hospitable hostess, Mrs. Ramsay casts a cold view on human finitude:

How could any Lord have made this world? She asked. With her mind she

had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but

suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to

commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that. (64)

While men of distinction like Mr. Ramsay worry about whether their work will be

celebrated forever, and while Lily agonizes over the oblivion that already seems destined

for her painting, Mrs. Ramsay knows for certain that “No happiness lasted.” Importantly,

for Mrs. Ramsay, the acknowledgement of finitude is enabling rather than paralyzing. In

the passages on the famous dinner scene, for instance, it has often been noted that Mrs.

Ramsay accomplishes her own work of art by uniting people in a “common cause against

that fluidity out there” (L 97). What has less been noted is that Mrs. Ramsay prepares for

the success of the dinner—not just a meal but an artful composition of human relating—

with a vigilant anticipation of the inevitable moment when the success will come to an

end. As hostess, Mrs. Ramsay has to watch out for the right timing to end the dinner:

It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on

the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing

even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left

the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew,

giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. (L 111,

emphasis added)
   105

The sense of finitude underlies Mrs. Ramsay’s art form, which is life. Just as Lily’s

beehive insinuates persistent encounters despite the unknownability of the other, Mrs.

Ramsay performs the domestic art despite its transitoriness: the sense of finitude must be

acknowledged and transcended, though not eliminated.

Yet, regardless of her own insight, it is only after a decade-long hiatus that Lily

will register the finitude in the artwork. Towards the end of the novel, Lily finally

finishes her painting and reconciles herself with the prospect that her labor will be lost to

time: “It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did

that matter?” (L 208) The change in Lily between Part I and Part III of the novel is caused

by her response to what takes place in Part II: in the middle section of the novel, it seems

that the death of Mrs. Ramsay unleashes the alluring force of the impersonal there is to

overwhelm human activities. The narrative in Part II presents a world where, without

human consciousness, temporal changes lapse into undifferentiated repetition: “But the

stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night”

(L 135). It is a world without subjects, but “with the trees standing there, and the flowers

standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so

terrible” (L 135). After “all these years without a soul in it,” the Ramsays’ seaside house

“was gone to rack and ruin. Only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment,

sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter” (L 135, 138). When Part

III resumes human activities, it will be through the intertwined process of painting and

mourning for Mrs. Ramsay that Lily renews her insight into the diachrony and finitude of

art, memory, and relationality.

   106

IV.

In Part III of Lighthouse, Lily returns to the Ramsays’ seaside house with other

guests after a ten-year interlude that has seen the deaths of Andrew, Prue, and, in

particular, Mrs. Ramsay. When Lily wakes up on her first morning in the house in ten

years, she feels a radical unrelatedness from the environs: “She had no attachment here,

she felt, no relations with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen . . . was a

question, as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they floated

up here, down there, off, anyhow” (L 146). The lack of relation causes the breakdown of

meaning, prompting Lily to ask: “What does it mean then, what can it all mean?” (L 145)

Lily’s sense that things are floating all over without a meaningful structure resonates with

Levinas’s impersonal there is, which he illustrates with a description of the traveler’s

experience: “Like the unreal, inverted city we find after an exhausting trip, things and

beings strike us as though they no longer composed a world, and were swimming in the

chaos of their existence” (EE 54). In Lighthouse, the impersonal there is that Lily

experiences upon her return to the seaside house is directly attributed to the absence of

Mrs. Ramsay. Now the hostess who has been the congealing force that brings people

together is gone, coming all the way up to the Hebrides seems to have lost its raison

d’être and everything is put into question.

Painting is Lily’s way to resist the lack of relation and meaning of the there is,

and she decides to resume the painting that features Mrs. Ramsay as a purple triangle,

which she abandons ten years ago. Lily’s original intent is to reproduce that same

painting. Sitting at the table, she remembers the solution that she has come up with a

decade ago while looking at the pattern on the table cloth: “The question was of some
   107

relation between those masses. . . . It seemed as if the solution had come to her: she

knew now what she wanted to do” (L 147-48). Standing at the same spot, looking at the

same view, with a clear solution in mind, Lily seems to be equipped with the recipes for

success this time. Yet, the renewed effort of painting involves more than the conveyance

of an existing inner vision to a canvas on the outside. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes

clear that the process of painting demands Lily to reinvent her relatedness with Mrs.

Ramsay again, through the process of mourning.

The trajectory of Lily’s mourning for Mrs. Ramsay is a long and complicated one.

When Lily ponders on the lack of relationality and meaning at the beginning of Part III,

she denies that the deaths that the Ramsays have suffered have any influence on her:

“Mrs. Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too—repeat it as she might, it roused no

feeling in her” (L 146). Much later in the narrative, however, we are informed of Lily’s

strong reaction immediately after Mrs. Ramsay’s death ten years ago: her pain is so acute

that only a hallucinatory vision of Mrs. Ramsay could alleviate it (L 181). Lily’s

unsentimental statement at the beginning of Part III thus turns out to be a disavowal of a

loss that she has not sufficiently mourned. Her repressed feelings are now forced open by

Mr. Ramsay, who angers Lily by interrupting her painting to solicit emotional sustenance.

Mr. Ramsay’s solicitation transports Lily right back to the familiar scenario in Part I of

the novel, where she has witnessed Mr. Ramsay’s insatiable demand on Mrs. Ramsay for

praise and pity:

That man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave; that man took.

She, on the other hand, would be forced to give. Mrs. Ramsay had given.

Giving, giving, giving, she had died—and had left all this. Really, she was
   108

angry with Mrs. Ramsay. . . . It was all Mrs. Ramsay's doing. She was

dead. (L 149)

Lily's anger at Mr. Ramsay is revealed to be an indignation at Mrs. Ramsay. Through the

way she loves, Mrs. Ramsay has condoned her husband’s exactingness and thus

perpetuates the gender division between man as the “conquering hero” and woman as the

“angel in the house” (Bowlby 64). The socially constructed gender role is a legacy that

Lily does not want to inherit from her cultural mother, yet the conventionally feminine

task of providing consolation inevitably falls upon Lily. Lily therefore blames Mrs.

Ramsay for abandoning her in a gender position she wishes to refuse: “Here was Lily, at

forty-four, wasting her time unable to do a thing, standing there, playing at painting,

playing at the one thing one did not play at, and it was all Mrs. Ramsay's fault. She was

dead. The step where she used to sit was empty. She was dead” (L 149-50).

In the incident with Mr. Ramsay, nevertheless, the bitter anger that bites into

Lily’s heart is transformed into a sense of generosity when she inadvertently gains a

fleeting glimpse of the man’s singularity. At first, Lily wants to get done with Mr.

Ramsay by giving him the sympathy he solicits. During her awkward attempt to imitate

what she thinks other women would say under such circumstances, she suddenly gets

distracted by the sight of his boots:

Remarkable boots they were too, Lily thought, looking down at them:

sculptured; colossal; like everything that Mr. Ramsay wore, from his

frayed tie to his half-buttoned waistcoat, his own indisputably. She could

see them walking to his room of their own accord, expressive in his

absence of pathos, surliness, ill-tempter, charm. (L 153)

   109

Mr. Ramsay’s boots are reminiscent of a previous image created by Lily for Mrs. Ramsay

ten years ago: the “twisted finger” of an empty glove by which “you would have known

[it is] hers indisputably” (L 49). Insofar as the glove finger is a trace of an absent other,

the image transforms Lily’s epistemological quest of Mrs. Ramsay into a quest of her

non-essentialized singularity. Mr. Ramsay’s boots, which are “his own indisputably”

even when they walk by themselves without the owner in Lily’s imagination, acquire the

same status of the trace that gives access to his singularity. The boots allow Lily to see

beyond the typical Mr. Ramsay as an emotional tyrant: “He tied knots. He bought boots.

There was no helping Mr. Ramsay on the journey he was going” (L 154). She is further

moved to find that her inappropriate exclamation—“What beautiful boots!”—does not

entail “his sudden roars of ill-temper, complete annihilation,” as she anticipates, but

instead meets with spontaneous cordial responses from Mr. Ramsay (L 153). With an

unexpected disregard for propriety, Mr. Ramsay conducts a pleasant chat about the boots

and teaches Lily his special method of tying shoe laces (L 154). It is at this moment,

when singularity replaces social conventions, that unforced sympathy for Mr. Ramsay

wells up in Lily's heart for the first time.

Diachrony figures prominently in the episode that describes Lily’s transition from

anger to generosity in relation to Mr. Ramsay. On the level of the narrative, the image of

the glove is completely absent in the language of the passage, despite its thematic

relevance and the similar phrasings of “hers indisputably” and “his own indisputably.” It

is as if the glove image, as a trace of memory, has been lost to time and consciousness,

but metamorphosed into the new image of the boots. On the level of Lily’s relation with

Mr. Ramsay, a temporal disjunction takes place in Lily’s attempted work of sympathy.
   110

She is now ready to offer him consolation, but before she does so Mr. Ramsay leaves for

the trip to the lighthouse. As she remarks later on her habit of withholding words, “The

urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the

object inches too low” (L 178). Lily’s words of sympathy are not articulated in time, but

Woolf seems to suggest a diachronous mode of relationality in the absence of empirical

action. Lily’s subsequent process of mourning and painting is frequently punctuated by a

concern with Mr. Ramsay, and eventually Lily feels “[w]hatever she had wanted to give

him, when he left her that morning, she had given him at last” (L 208).

Since her interaction with Mr. Ramsay that reveals the untimely aspect of human

relation, Lily begins to register a sense of finitude and diachrony that will inform her

painting and mourning for Mrs. Ramsay. As she tries to focus on the painting, the “white

and uncompromising” presence of the empty canvas confronts her as a concrete image of

the meaningless and timeless there is, “this other thing, this truth, this reality, which

suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded

her attention” (L 156, 157). The painting she attempts to execute on the white space is

therefore likened to the individual’s struggle to surge from the impersonal there is, and

artistic creation conceived as such is understood by Lily as a “perpetual combat,” “a fight

in which one was bound to be worsted” (158). This insight harkens back to Mrs.

Ramsay’s dedicated deployment of finite domestic art against the impersonal there is.

Moreover, as Lily resumes the picture that features Mrs. Ramsay, she must struggle

between the finitude of her artistic medium and the diachrony in which the infinite

alterity of Mrs. Ramsay persists. The narrative describes Lily’s trance-like state of mind

when she paints and digs into memory: “her mind kept throwing up from its depths,
   111

scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over

that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modeled it with greens and blues”

(L 159). Like Woolf’s modern novelist who records the traces of perception, Lily’s task

as a painter is to compose these memory traces into an artistic form. As her subsequent

recollection and meditation about Mrs. Ramsay will make clear to her, artistic form, like

mourning, is an ethical aporia. Representation entails a violent reduction of the other’s

diachrony into contemporaneity with the subject; to do justice to the alterity of Mrs.

Ramsay, Lily must find a way to open up her artistic form at the same time she creates it.

Lily’s recollection of the beach scene is often taken by critics to denote a faithful

memory that culminates her process of mourning and thus provides the source of her

artistic revelation. I have suggested earlier that this is not the case. The recollection of the

beach scene is significant for Lily, in fact, precisely because it oscillates between two

moments. In the first moment, Lily formulates her affirmation of Mrs. Ramsay clearly

and thus comes close to what Freud would consider successful completion of mourning.

In her recollection of the beach scene, Mrs. Ramsay’s presence is seen as a wordless

pleading for human connectedness that silently urges Lily to be friendly with Charles

Tansley, whom she has always found offensive.

When she thought of herself and Charles throwing ducks and drakes and

of the whole scene on the beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs.

Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee, writing letters. . . .

But what a power was in the human soul! She thought. That woman sitting

there writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity; made

these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and
   112

that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite . . .

something—this scene on the beach for example, this moment of

friendship and liking—which survived, after all these years complete, so

that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there it stayed

in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art. (L 160)

Mrs. Ramsay has the power to make Lily willing to briefly renounce her prejudice

against Tansley at the moment when they are right on the beach; the memory of her, as

well, has the power in retrospect to make Lily willing to “re-fashion her memory” of him.

Lily thus derives a comparison between artistic composition and Mrs. Ramsay’s ability of

forging human connectedness out of the spitefulness and squabbling of quotidian life.

The memory leads her to see that

[i]n the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing

(she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into

stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs.

Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed it all to her. (L 161)

Mrs. Ramsay’s power to distill form from conflicting emotions resonates with Woolf’s

own argument throughout A Room of One’s Own that anger, however justified, should be

refrained from art.17 But despite her own endorsement of the value Mrs. Ramsay

represents to Lily, Woolf relentlessly puts into question mourning as recuperation of the

other in memory. In Freud’s sense, as Clewell points out, “mourning allows the lost other

to be recovered in the language of the symbolic so that the subject can refuse to admit

that something of the self has been lost with the other’s departure” (207). In other words,

successful completion of mourning reduces the other to an object for the subject. The
   113

recuperation of Mrs. Ramsay through affirmative memory resolves Lily’s earlier

indignation at her, and the revelation that Lily draws from Mrs. Ramsay functions as a

symbolic substitution that almost facilitates the completion of mourning.

Nevertheless, Lily subsequently registers the vulnerable status of the dead. She

becomes aware that she has subjected Mrs. Ramsay’s memory to her own

representational power; if she can reduce her to an object for affirmation, she can

likewise reduce her to an object for ridicule and rejection.

But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some obstacle in her design

which made her pause and ponder, stepping back a foot or so, of the dead!

She murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a

little contempt for them. They are at our mercy. Mrs. Ramsay has faded

and gone, she thought. We can over-ride her wishes, improve away her

limited, old-fashioned ideas. (L 174)

Lily’s claim that “We can over-ride her wishes, improve away her limited, old-fashioned

ideas” is a sarcastic acknowledgement of the violence of what Derrida calls possible

mourning: in possible mourning, which “would interiorize within us the image, idol, or

ideal of the other,” the dead other “lives only in us” and loses his or her alterity

(“Mnemosyne” 6). For Derrida, possible mourning must fail in order for impossible

mourning to succeed. In contrast to the claim of possible mourning to faithful

preservation of memory—hence totaling mastery of the other—Derrida’s impossible

mourning acknowledges the diachronic, incoherent and fictional nature of memory that

both preserves the alterity of the other and gives access to creation. Thus it may be said

that Lily’s beach scene memory oscillates from the first moment of possible mourning to
   114

the second moment of impossible mourning, which undermines the first moment by

foregrounding the dimension of fictionality and uncertainty in memory.

In the second moment of Lily’s recollection of the beach scene, Lily continues to

paint while she “seemed to be sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay on the beach” (L 171). At this

point, her memory work is no longer a realist re-presentation of the event, but a mixture

of recollection and imagination.

And Lily, painting steadily, felt as if a door had opened, and one went in

and stood gazing silently about in a high cathedral-like place, very dark,

very solemn. Shouts came from a world far away. Steamers vanished in

stalks of smoke on the horizon. Charles threw stones and sent them

skipping. (L 171)

The entrance into the cathedral-like space, again, echoes with one of the images Lily

creates in Part I when she tries to “know” Mrs. Ramsay. Back then, Lily fantasies a total

immersion with Mrs. Ramsay by gaining entrance to the mausoleum-like “chambers of

the mind and heart of the woman” (L 51). Lily has imagined that, if only she could make

her way into the mausoleum of Mrs. Ramsay’s interiority, then she would discover

“tablets bearing sacred inscriptions” there “like the treasures in the tombs of kings” (L

51). Lily has also felt that she could learn “everything” as long as she learns to decipher

the inscriptions (L 51). But in the second moment of her memory of the beach scene here

in Part III, although Lily similarly evokes a cathedral-like space, the possibility of

epistemological and representational mastery of the other is no longer her central concern.

Instead, Lily discards both the desire for fusion with the other and the urgency of the

epistemological quest by asking,

   115

Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment

of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then, Mrs. Ramsay

may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her

side) by saying them? Aren’t we more expressive thus? (L 171-72)

The second moment of Lily’s recollection of the beach scene undermines the first

moment. In the first moment, Lily is able to articulate with clarity the meaning of Mrs.

Ramsay, and thus she creates a paradoxically limiting symbolic substitution for the dead.

In the second moment, Lily renounces the meaning she has just formulates for Mrs.

Ramsay and returns her to the “very dark, very solemn” space of alterity. The refusal to

formulate the other as knowledge, or as a fixed memory, activates an impossible

mourning, which deprives Lily of symbolic consolation but allows the alterity of the

other to persist. Thus, Lily intuits that silence renders us “more expressive,” and the

moment “extraordinarily fertile” (L 172).

The impossible mourning of the second moment allows Lily to maintain a

respectful, non-incorporating relation with the memory of Mrs. Ramsay. At the same

time, the abandonment of symbolic substitution in impossible mourning also confronts

Lily with a twofold challenge: she must face the pain of loss again, and she must

accordingly reformulate the guiding principle for her painting. Having given up the

symbolic substitution of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily feels that her desire for the older woman has

never been satisfied:

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a

hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want

and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
   116

Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! She called out silently . . . as if to abuse her for

having gone, and then having gone, come back again. It had

seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing

you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night,

she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and

wrung the heart thus. (L 178-79)

The heightened intensity of pain induces for Lily a hallucinatory presence of Mrs.

Ramsay that provides an “antidote, a relief that was balm in itself” (L 181). Lily feels Mrs.

Ramsay “staying lightly by her side and then (for this was Mrs. Ramsay in all her beauty)

raising to her forehead a wreath of white flowers with which she went” (L 181). Although

it asserts a “power to console” as does the first moment of the beach scene memory, the

hallucinatory vision differs from the almost successful completion of mourning because

the image does not lay claim to the exhaustive structuring power of memory,

representation, and meaning (L 181). Instead, the vision is in itself fragmentary,

incomplete, and constantly disrupted by some disturbance from outside, “so that the

vision must be perpetually remade” (L 181). Contra Freud’s insistence on the successful

completion of normative mourning, then, Lily’s incomplete, non-totalizing vision of Mrs.

Ramsay here suggests a mourning that sustains grief rather than terminates it. In this

modality of grief, although recollection may relieve pain, the loss of the other will

continue to signify in excess of the totalizing attempts of the mourner’s consciousness.

This explains the significance of Lily’s revelation that this hallucinatory vision is not

entirely new to her: “For days after she had heard of her death she had seen her thus” (L
   117

181). The vision, a fragmentary form in itself, recurs because there is no completion to

mourning.

Having renounced the symbolic substitution of possible mourning, Lily also needs

to reevaluate its aesthetic correlative, the artistic revelation that she has associated with

Mrs. Ramsay. Previously, in the first moment of the beach scene memory, Lily has

affirmed the sense of beauty represented by Mrs. Ramsay: unity, balance, shape out of

chaos and life in standstill. But now she questions such value of art:

But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty—it came too

readily, came too completely. It stilled life—froze it. One forgot the little

agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or

shadow, which made the face unrecognizable for a moment and yet added

a quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under

the cover of beauty. (L 177)

Oscillating from affirmation to rejection of the value of art that Mrs. Ramsay embodies,

Lily finds that the sense of beauty as compositional unity and balance conceals the

singularity of the other person—the boots or the glove finger moment that tilts our sense

of appropriateness and strikes us off balance. It is the singular alterity of the other, not the

formal beauty, that Lily wants to express in her art: “what was the look [Mrs. Ramsay]

had, Lily wondered, when she clapped her deerstalker’s hat on her head, or ran across the

grass, or scolded Kenney, the gardener? Who could tell her? Who could help her?” (L

177-78)

As Lily examines her painting with dissatisfaction, the finitude of mournful

memory and the finitude of art converge: “She must try to get hold of something that
   118

evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now when she

thought of her picture” (L 193). As means of signification, both the painting and memory

are finite vis-à-vis the absolute alterity of the other that evades representation. Put in

temporal terms, the painting and memory are finite vis-à-vis the diachrony that they can

only struggle to register by disrupting themselves, for he temporality of representation is

a present inherently incongruous to the diachrony from which the other signifies. Ethical

mourning is impossible for Derrida, thus, because it seeks to foreground the diachrony in

the present of finite memory and must be enacted only through the aporia of successful

and failed completion of grief work. A similar aporia between finitude and diachrony

emerges when Lily reformulates alterity as the impossible aim of her painting. She

suggests the link between the alterity of the other and the temporality of diachrony when

she contemplates: “Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases.

But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before

it has been made anything” (L 193, emphasis added). By positing to alterity a time before

representation, Lily conceives the work of art as a representational oxymoron that must

open up its own homogenous present in response to the irreducible past of the other.

The final resolution of Lily’s difficulty with her painting is prefigured in a

passage that appears to suggest a resignation with art, rather than an inspiring revelation.

Unable to decide what has gone wrong with her painting, Lily thinks to herself: “But one

gets nothing by soliciting urgently. One got only a glare in the eye from looking at the

line of the wall, or from thinking—she wore a grey hat. She was astonishingly beautiful.

Let it come, she thought, if it will come. For there are moments when one can neither

think nor feel” (L 193). The self-deflecting attitude towards art in the passage contrasts
   119

sharply with the climatic, euphoric tone found in the first moment of Lily’s recollection

of the beach scene. Yet, whereas the affirmation of artistic coherence, balance and

stillness derived from the beach scene later comes undone in Lily’s continuing process of

mourning and painting, it is the let-it-come attitude in the present passage that allows for

alterity to signify despite the finitude of art. The “glare of the eye” signifies the alterity of

the other in much the same way as Levinas’s trace of the other does: it denotes not a

content, but an interruption of the subject by “the thing itself before it has been made

anything.” Lily’s painting must be formally disruptive, therefore, in order to signal the

diachrony of the other in spatial terms. The final passage of Lighthouse describes that

Lily finishes her painting by putting down the final stroke on the canvas:

She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was

blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she

drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she

thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

(L 208-09)

The final stroke down in the middle of the picture is equivocal. On the one hand, it relates

the various masses of colors on the canvas and imposes a structure on the painting. On

the other hand, the final stroke also functions as a space holder for the diachrony of

alterity; it interrupts compositional unity and thus prevents the various masses in the

painting from collapsing into a homogeneous temporal surface. Much in the same way

that Derrida emphasizes that the aporia of mourning is not an either-or choice but a

contradiction that must coexist, the equivocal double sense of the final stroke must be

simultaneously registered.
   120

By drawing attention to the disruption and resumption of Lily’s painting

occasioned by her various responses to Mrs. Ramsay and her legacy, this chapter has

investigated the possibility of seeing mourning as a model for artistic creation and,

consequently, the ethical implications of such an aesthetics of mourning. Informed by

Derrida’s aporia of mourning and Levinas’s diachrony of the other, I have argued that

ethical mourning is fictional and inventive by nature. I have also suggested that literature

is inherently mournful by exploring Woolf’s formulation of the novel as an encounter

with the ghostly other, as well as her description of modernist mimesis as a simultaneous

formation and dispersion of sense perceptions. In its enactment of mourning as an ethical

aesthetics, Lighthouse dramatizes a non-appropriative, non-incorporating relation with

the irrecuperable other by tracing Lily’s intertwined process of mourning and painting. In

so doing, the novel demonstrates that the temporality of the artwork is a temporality of

diachrony, finitude, and disruption. Reading Woolf’s novel in terms of mourning for the

other, then, allows us to see that the modernist aesthetics of fragmentation, incoherence,

and interruption are profoundly associated with the ethical.

   121

Chapter IV

Odd Faces of Love and Ethics:

Nightwood’s Contestation of Oedipal Narrative and Animalistic Femininity

What is it that W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915) and Djuna

Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) have in common and yet sets them apart? Despite their

resolutely different use of language, one realist and the other highly aestheticized and

non-progressive for the most part, the two novels both open with a scene of a mother

dying of birth complications and leaving a young son orphaned. The arrangement of an

orphaned protagonist is in itself a common practice in the novel, but it is interesting to

observe how, from the same starting point, the narratives of the two novels project into

very different trajectories. The rest of Of Human Bondage narrates the itinerary from

childhood to adulthood of its orphaned protagonist, who seeks his individuality, social

advancement and marriage. With his expressed wish to start a family of his own, the

narrative comes full circle, returning the protagonist’s forward-moving itinerary to his

lost origin, the father who has died before his birth. In contrast, although the opening of

Nightwood seems to promise a similar trajectory for its orphaned child, Felix Volkbein,

who also struggles for social advancement and continuation of patrilineage, his story—a

story heteronormative in nature—is soon interrupted by the lesbian story of his wife,

Robin Vote. Robin’s story of two major lesbian relations subsequently fall apart, too, and

the narrative of Nightwood ends in a shocking scene that depicts Robin down on all fours,

chasing a dog and howling along with it. If Of Human Bondage traces a course of

narrative driven forward by a masculine oedipal desire only in order to repeat its origin,
   122

then Nightwood projects a narrative trajectory that proceeds further and further towards

the realm of alterity: from the heteronormative desire, through lesbian desire, to a desire

that cannot be conceptualized within the human framework of domestic relations.

How does the non-normative desire figure within Levinasian ethics? To answer

the question, I undertake a critique of Levinas’s notions of eros, feminine alterity and

fecundity, as well as his juxtaposition of animality and the woman. In the last two

chapters, Levinas’s thinking of the ethical has been a crucial resource for the illumination

of The Picture of Dorian Gray and To the Lighthouse: in the former, the impersonal time

that Levinas names the there is provides a possible entry point into the interpretation of

the non-progressive temporality that characterizes the protagonist’s absorption in

aesthetic experience; in the latter, the diachrony between the self and the other, which for

Levinas maintains the separation necessary for an ethical relation, makes it possible to

argue for the inventive and ethical nature of mourning, and conversely for mourning as

an ethical aesthetic paradigm. In the present chapter, however, Barnes’s Nightwood is

represented as a counter narrative contesting Levinas’s ethics of fecundity and the

anthropocentrism inherent in his description of the woman and eros. In the last section of

Totality and Infinity, Levinas develops a phenomenology of eros between man and

woman in order to pursue an ethics of fecundity that highlights the generational

transmission between father and son, in which the father finds transcendence. Feminist

critiques have pointed out that Levinas’s ethics of fecundity, with its emphasis on

paternity, is accomplished at the expense of the feminine other and undoes his larger

ethical project. Thus, of Levinas’s ethics Luce Irigaray laments: “Although temporarily
   123

useful and worthy of respect up to a certain point, this ethics no longer knows its faults”

(Irigaray, “Questions” 114).

In this chapter, by revisiting Levinas’s discussion on the feminine other, eros, and

fecundity, I recast his arguments as a narrative that enacts a masculine desire for the son

that complements the oedipal desire for the father. Narrative theorists have identified

oedipal desire as the driving force which governs how patriarchal cultures are

comprehended and generationally transmitted, and which also motivates, organizes, and

develops the plot of traditional novels such as Of Human Bondage. While the desire for

the son in Levinas’s ethics of fecundity and the oedipal desire for the paternal origin in

traditional novels seem to be oriented towards opposite directions—one towards the

future and the other towards the past—both of them similarly depend on the

subordination of feminine alterity, and their narratives share the theme of the

transformation of a masculine subject. The alignment with the narrative of the novel

allows us to see the constructed nature of Levinas’s phenomenology. Consequently, the

subordination of the feminine alterity in both of oedipal and Levinas’s narratives

becomes the entry point where the deviant narrative of Nightwood offers a critical

intervention into Levinas’s ethics. Aberrant from generic conventions on every level

possible, Barnes’s strange novel is often questioned for its status as a novel.1 If narrative

is driven by desire, as narrative theories since Roland Barthes, Teresa de Lauretis, and

others have argued, then the singular shape of Nightwood’s narrative—tracing a

trajectory from the heteronormative through the lesbian to the animalistic—instantiates

how the feminine alterity may be articulated within the genre that has historically

preoccupied itself with the masculine subject’s adventure of transformation.

   124

I.

Throughout Levinas’s oeuvre, the figure of the woman traces a vicissitude that

attests to an increasing attenuation of the alterity of the feminine in service to the male

subject. In his early texts such as Time and the Other and From Existence to Existents,

which explore various forms of otherness in order to find ways to break away from the

unity of being, Levinas begins to conceive the father-son relation—when Levinas speaks

of paternity, it is always a son, not a daughter, that he has in mind—as a means to open

up the enclosed time of the subject to the time of the future, of otherness.2 At this stage

the woman is already assigned to an auxiliary role that facilitates paternity, but at the

same time Levinas also remarks on her alterity with great emphasis: “I think the

absolutely contrary contrary, whose contrariety is in no way affected by the relationship

that can be established between it and its correlative, the contrariety that permits its terms

to remain absolutely other, is the feminine” (“TO” 85).3 However, by the time he writes

Totality and Infinity, the first of Levinas’s mature works that officially articulates

otherness in relation to ethics, the alterity of eros and the woman is repeatedly reduced to

“equivocation.” Eros is “the equivocal par excellence” because it oscillates between

metaphysical desire, which prompts a movement unto the other, and satiable need, which

demands satisfaction and thus returns the subject back to the self (TI 255). In eros, the

woman appears in the “equivocation” of the “simultaneity of the clandestine and the

exposed,” for her exposed nudity is, unlike “the frankness of the face,” incapable of

expression and signification (TI 257). The equivocation sometimes leads to descriptions

that seem to promise an ethics of sexual difference or of erotic sensuality, but the woman
   125

in Totality and Infinity always falls short of realizing such an ethical potential. Rather, in

their equivocation, the woman and eros are never other enough in their otherness to

evoke an ethical movement towards the infinite, the transcendental. Levinas develops the

phenomenology of eros, and the woman as eros, only in preparation for locating an ethics

of fecundity in the father-son relationship: for Levinas, the erotic relation with a woman

may lack ethical implications in itself, “But the encounter with the Other as feminine is

required in order that the future of the child come to pass from beyond the possible,

beyond projects” (TI 267). And in Levinas’s last major work, Otherwise than Being, the

woman is no longer discussed as eros or as an alterity. Rather, she appears qua maternity,

figuring the ethical subject who “bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the

persecutor” (OB 75). The affirmation of the mother notwithstanding, the complete

effacement of the woman as eros or in her other roles from the text suggests that, for

Levinas in this later stage, maternity “is apparently the only acceptable face of the

feminine” (Chanter 208).

Levinas’s ethics of fecundity yields apparent questions: Why always a son? Why

not a daughter? And where is the transcendence of the feminine other? If we read

Levinas’s ethics of fecundity alone, provisionally suspending our knowledge that the

ethics of fecundity rises at the expense of a preempted ethics of sexual difference, and

leaving aside the apparent questions for a moment, it becomes clear why the father-son

relationship, in itself, should occupy a preeminent place in Levinas’s ethics of alterity. As

has been discussed in previous chapters, the overarching trajectory of Levinas’s thinking

is to find ways to break free from the unremitting hold of unified being. But when he

seeks the break in liminal experiences which subdue the individual’s being—insomnia,
   126

boredom, absorption in art, for instance—being only reappears in its impersonal form,

and thus reaffirms its relentless grasp on the subject. Death may be the place where such

an evasion of being becomes possible, but in death the subject will altogether cease to be.

Paternity, then, stands out as a unique and singular experience for Levinas because in

paternity the male subject leaves the confinement of his subjecthood without, importantly,

being shattered by alterity. As Levinas claims: “I do not have my child; I am my child.

Paternity is a relation with a stranger who while being Other . . . is me, a relation of the I

with a self which yet is not me. In this ‘I am’ being is no longer Eleatic unity” (TI 277).

The child simultaneously is and is not the father, and vice versa; in relating to the son

both as the same and as the other, the father is enabled to see himself not just as himself

but also an other to himself. Unlike the exposure to impersonal existence, which

paralyzes the subject without bringing forth a genuine exit from being, paternity doubles

the father’s self identification and thus opens up his enclosure within the self. And unlike

death, the ultimate inaccessible and unknowable alterity that shatters the subject,

fecundity as paternity is a livable experience while allowing the subject to embark on an

itinerary toward the other person.

Paternity, as Levinas describes it, is a life-giving experience on several levels. In

addition to the birth of the son, paternity also refers to the rebirth of the male subject as a

father responsible for the son. In paternity there is not only “the continuation of the

substance of the father in the son,” but also “a form of transubstantiation of subjectivity

itself,” which suggests the transformation of the subject qua initiative into a subject qua

response, “a subject beholden to, and responsible for, the other” (Oliver 229). Levinas

further proposes that paternity is fecund because it engenders time: “[t]he relation with
   127

the child . . . establishes relationship with the absolute future, or infinite time” (TI 268).

The future that the father finds in the son is not a projection, repetition, or extension of

the father’s own time; rather, it is a radical future that exceeds his mastery, actualized in

the other person. From father to son, the temporality thus constituted by paternity is a

generational transmission that is at once discontinuity and continuity. As I will suggest

later, temporality of paternity intimates a conception of narrative, both for the novel and

for history. Depending on its ambiguous oscillation between continuity and discontinuity,

the conception of narrative may be said to reproduce patrilineage as an organizing

principle of meaning, or, on the contrary, to create a logic of language akin to

deconstruction. Finally, for Levinas, paternity is at the heart of social life. The father’s

love makes each son unique; thus all sons are, paradoxically, “at the same time unique

and non-unique” to the father (TI 279). The subject as son is simultaneously a subject in

fraternity, and fraternity makes possible an individual’s subsequent face-to-face relation

with the other, which in turn will transform into a relation with a plurality of others, a

society of “the We” (TI 280).4 While this is not the appropriate place to expound in detail

Levinas’s thinking on the complex transformation from the ethical to the social and

political, it should be noted that Levinas conceives society as a ramification of paternity,

a view that encourages a comparison with other masculine accounts of society and

civilization, such as Lacan’s the name of the father and Freud’s Oedipus complex.5

Levinas’s notion of fecundity in paternity, in itself, does seem to promise a unique

experience of alterity that cannot be lightly dismissed. However, once we return

Levinas’s fecundity to its textual context, the fact remains that the ethics of fecundity is

accomplished at the expense of the woman and eros, and that it effects a marginalization
   128

of women in the formation of history and society. 6 A sexual polarization is at work in his

phenomenology. While the enjoyment of eros—which Levinas characterizes with non-

seriousness and laughter—blurs the distinction between the man and the woman, Levinas

makes it clear that the male lover and female beloved part their ways after the transient

passions. The man, as the active lover, will soon detach himself from the physical

enjoyment and, through the fecundity in the son, assume the serious role of an ethical

subject; the passive beloved woman, on the other hand, remains on the side of animality,

materiality, frivolous play and laughter. As Irigaray summarizes it, “The beloved woman

would be cast down to the depths so that the male lover could be raised to the heights”

(Ethics 198). It is only paradoxical that Levinas, a strong advocate of an ethics of alterity,

should consistently subordinate the woman to the ancillary role in a male subject’s ethical

experience.

Why does Levinas, meticulously attentive to alterity in various forms, choose to

neglect the potential of an ethics of sexual difference, and to see eros as ethically

pertinent only insofar as it issues in a father-son relation? Why, in short, does he repress

the otherness of the woman and deny her own adventure for an ethical itinerary? As a

philosopher who tries to think outside the conceptual grids that govern what can or

cannot be thought, Levinas is perhaps still not immune from the cultural subtexts that

make certain assumptions about sexuality and the woman. His insistence on binding up

eros and procreation, for instance, shows an affinity with the nineteenth-century sexology

proposed by Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, which ostracizes all sexual

behaviors as perverse, except heterosexual intercourse that results in the production of

offspring.7 Levinas’s less than radical view of sexuality and the feminine other evinces a
   129

restraint imposed by his time and Western cultural heritage. But to response to the

question about Levinas’s subordination of the feminine, it is not sufficient to simply

identify it as an unfortunate failure to go beyond sociocultural limitations. A more

productive way to respond to the question, I suggest, is to open up such limits by reading

Levinas’s texts as a narrative structure of ethics in the context of feminist studies of

narrative. In this way, we can discern what is the desire, the unconscious motive, that

operates in Levinas’s narrative, interrogate its claim to universalism, and speculate the

possibility of an alternative desire—for which Barnes’s Nightwood will serve as a

compelling example later in the chapter.

Denouncing early formalist and structuralist studies of narratology that construe a

narrative strictly as a combination of various semiotic units, post-structuralist studies of

narrativity have highlighted desire as the force that propels the development of narrative.

The most prominent proponent of such desire-oriented analysis of narrative is Roland

Barthes, himself a key figure pushing the transition from the structuralist to post-

structuralist view of narrative. In The Pleasure of the Text, he identifies the pleasure of

the text as an oedipal pleasure “to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end,”

assuming “that every narrative (every unveiling of the truth) is a staging of the (absent,

hidden, or hypostatized) father” (10; qtd. in de Lauretis, “Desire” 107-08). According to

Barthes’s view, it is no mere contingency that the oedipal desire for the origin—that is,

for the father—is a prevailing theme in narratives, for the oedipal desire is the very

dynamic force that initiates and structures the narrative qua epistemological project.8

Nonetheless, while Barthes’s influential turn to desire sheds light on how our psychic and

emotional life bears on textual production, it is important to ask whose desire it is that is
   130

in operation in Barthes’s oedipal account. The oedipal desire, obviously, is a masculine

desire that has passed as universal and thus effectively renders the feminine desire

obsolete, invisible, nonexistent. As Teresa de Lauretis has cogently demonstrated, if the

Oedipus story proper is “in fact paradigmatic of all narratives” for the narrative theories

she has analyzed, narrative can be said to do the work of mapping sexual difference.

“[T]he hero must be male,” whereas the female character functions as the obstacle in his

adventure: “the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female and

indeed, simply, the womb” (“Desire” 112, 119). The narrative, as a way in which we

create and organize meaning, therefore takes on the form of a “movement of a passage, a

crossing, an actively experienced transformation of the human being into—man” (de

Lauretis, “Desire” 121).

De Lauretis’s critique of the oedipal logic of narrative lays bare the sexual

differentiation at work in narrative, which allots man the agency that undergoes

transformation, and woman the passive role as an obstacle to be overcome, a boundary to

be crossed, or a destination to be finally reached. The female character in a narrative

undertakes no transformation of her own, but acts as the locus, or the matter, necessary

for the man’s development. At this point, the oedipal logic of narrative begins to sound

familiar: it is the same logic that underlies Levinas’s discourse on eros and fecundity, in

which the erotic relation with the feminine other is needed in order for an ethical relation

with the son to become possible for the male subject, whereas neither the woman herself

is given any prospect of ethical transcendence, nor does eros per se carry an ethical

implication. Indeed, to borrow de Lauretis’s phrasing, Levinas’s philosophical texts may

be read as a narrative that traces the transformation of a human being into—ethical man.
   131

From his early texts, Time and the Other and Existence and Existents, to the later Totality

and Infinity, the narrative structure of Levinas’s works presupposes a male protagonist

for an itinerary that traces the movement from interiority to exteriority, from the

establishment of the self to the exposure towards the other. If the neutral tone adopted for

the most part of his writings makes it possible for a reader bearing sexual difference in

mind to entertain the hope that these phenomenological descriptions are meant to be

equally applicable for man and woman, Levinas exposes himself to be speaking

exclusively about a man’s ethical itinerary when he subordinate eros and the feminine

other to procreation.

Once we recognize that Levinas’s narrative of the transformation of an ethical

(male) subject and traditional novels share a similar desire that evolves around paternity,

what comes to the fore is their common emphasis on generational transmission. Proposed

in the wake of Barthes’s oedipal narrative logic, Peter Brooks’s notion of “Freud’s

masterplot” provides an account of novelistic narrative that is especially illuminative of

the aspect of generational transmission in oedipal desire. Brooks’s notion of Freud’s

masterplot is borrowed from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud examines the

repetitive workings of death and life instincts within the life process that, inevitably, has

death as its telos. In this sense, we all live in order to die. But the activities of life and

death instincts are not to be dismissed, because in their compulsive, repetitive staging of

desire-arousal and discharge they comprise an intermediary span that will allow us to

“die in the proper manner, to die the right death” (Brooks 107). For Brooks, Freud’s

masterplot governs the novelistic narrative as it does life: Freud’s masterplot “gives an

image of how the nonnarratable existence is stimulated into the condition of narratability,
   132

to enter a state of deviance and detour (ambition, quest, the pose of a mask) in which it is

maintained for a certain time, through an at least minimally complex extravagance,

before returning to the quiescence of the nonnarratable” (108). In the overarching

trajectory from beginning to end in the narrative, as in life, Brooks sees a constant

movement of returning to the origin, a movement governed by the desire “to reach an

assertion of origin through ending, to find the same in the different, the time before in the

time after” (110). The play of Freud’s masterplot between sameness and difference,

between ending and origin, “transmits a kind of wisdom that itself concerns with

transmission: how we pass on what we know about how life goes forward” (9). While

Brooks’s argument is not explicitly predicated on Freud’s oedipal account of paternity,

the origin that he claims textual development desires and strives for is often figured as the

father in instances of his literary analysis. In his readings of Le Rouge et le noir and

Great Expectations, for instance, while each narrative features a male protagonist’s

“striving forward and upward” in society, Brooks discerns in the progress of the

protagonist’s social self-fashioning an “attempted homecoming,” a troubling engagement

with the authority or mystery of the father (110). Narrative is therefore seen primarily as

transmission of “paternal authority”(300), of “knowledge and wisdom,” of “genealogy. . .

and history” (291). Of Human Bondage can be considered a textbook example of the

same structuring motif, though not included in Brooks’s scrutiny. The unstated but

inherent connection of Brooks’s Freud’s masterplot to the oedipal logic is perhaps what

leads Joseph Allen Boone to risk a bold, but in the end rightful, conceptual leap by

spelling out the theme of paternity hidden in Brooks’s view of narrative: the “Freudian
   133

masterplot is driven by the desire for an ending that returns us to and explains our origins,

thereby repeating the agonized oedipal relation of child to parent” (Boone 241).

Brooks’s Freudian masterplot contrasts Levinas’s account of paternity in that the

former evinces a desire for the father and the past, while the latter privileges a desire for

the son and the future. But generational transmission is as central to Levinas’s narrative

of the subject’s ethical transformation as it is to Brooks’s Freud’s masterplot, although

in—at least seemingly—different ways. Because of its uniqueness for Levinas as an

ethical experience, paternity may be read as the predominant theme of his narrative of the

subject’s “adventure” towards the ethical (TI 268). Just as a classical novel requires a

subplot, which not only offers the necessary digression that prevents the main plot from a

premature ending but also illustrates alternative solutions to the problem involved in the

main plot (Brooks 104), Levinas’s narrative of the subject’s adventure consists of the

main plot of paternity (a man looks to his son for the hope of ethical transcendence) in

addition to several subplots (his other attempts at reaching otherness either fall short or

threaten to shatter him). Levinas’s discussion of the temporality of paternity delineates a

trajectory of narrative, which, at first sight, seems to suggest a narrative structure more

radical than that found in Brooks’s Freud’s masterplot. Levinas places fecundity in the

issuance of the son because, he explains, “[t]he relation with the child . . . establishes

relationship with the absolute future, or infinite time” (TI 268). The son, who both is and

is not the father, opens up the father’s time to a future, a future that is absolute and

infinite because it exceeds the father’s power and mastery, a future that thus both is and is

not the father’s. Fecundity, propelled by the male subject’s desire for the son, therefore
   134

gives rise to a generational transmission that is oddly both a continuity and a

discontinuity:

Fecundity encloses a duality of the Identical. It does not denote all that I

can grasp—my possibilities; it denotes my future, which is not a future of

the same—not a new avatar: not a history and events that can occur to a

residue of identity, an identity holding on by a thread, an I that would

ensure the continuity of the avatars. And yet it is my adventure still, and

consequently my future in a very new sense, despite the discontinuity. (TI

268, italics added)

Paternity, or generational transmission, constitutes a strange temporal movement forward

towards the infinite. The movement forward is, in a sense, the extension of the father, but

it is an extension punctuated and irremediably altered by the otherness of the son. As

Levinas later goes on to add, “Infinite time does not bring an eternal life to an aging

subject; it is better across the discontinuity of generations, punctuated by the

inexhaustible youths of the child” (TI 268).

If reading Levinas’s phenomenology of the ethical subject’s transformation as a

narrative allows us to see its proximity with the traditional novel, what implication may

the peculiar temporality of paternity have for the structuring of the novel, or, in a more

general sense, for textuality? The “adventure” of paternity is a continuity of the father

paradoxically made possible by the discontinuity that it already encloses. If we are to ask

how to narrate the “adventure” of paternity following Levinas’s reasoning, a possible

answer evokes a vivid image Simon Critchley offers when he discusses the debt of

Derrida’s notion of textuality to Levinas’s complex formulation of the saying and the said:
   135

“One imagines a series of knots connected by a continuous thread, upon or within each of

which is a nodal point of supplementarity. This image of the text as a play of binding and

unbinding, where the mended interruption of essence is itself interrupted by a moment of

irreducible ethical priority, is the way in which Levinas’s work works” (128).

Brooks’s Freudian masterplot, operating in the trajectory of the son’s desire for

the father, allows the end to determine the meaning of the origin. Brooks thus has been

criticized for reinscribing “narrative’s impulse to totalization” (Clayton 37). Given

Levinas’s reverse trajectory propelled towards an absolute future by the desire for the son,

is it possible to say that Levinas’s temporality of paternity offers a nontotalizing model of

textuality that takes place ethically? Once again, the father-son relation in itself, as

Levinas describes it, seems to promise a new, and ethical, mode of narrative. But one of

the obvious questions about Levinas’s account of fecundity inevitably returns to disrupt

the promise: Why does it have to be a son, not a daughter, for Levinas’s paternity? In his

account of paternity, Kelly Oliver observes, “Levinas emphasizes that it is the otherness

of the son that pulls the father out of himself toward infinity. Yet it is the sameness of the

son that allows the movement without shattering the father’s subjectivity altogether”

(238). According to Oliver’s reading, Levinas’s paternity is fundamentally hinged upon

sameness, rather than otherness. If alterity were indeed to be foregrounded in paternity as

Levinas would have us believe, as Oliver asks, “Wouldn’t a daughter be a stranger child?”

(238). Thus, while Levinas stresses the transcendental aspect of the father-son relation,

she suspects that there is a good chance that paternity may return the father to himself

through the son, therefore reduced to a relation of need rather than ethical desire. Since

Levinas excludes the daughter from his discussion of paternity, Oliver concludes: “the
   136

future that paternity engenders is masculine. Insofar as it is masculine, it is limited.

Insofar as it is limited, it is not open to radical alterity. And, insofar as it is not open to

radical alterity, the future is finite and must come to an end” (239). Levinas seems to be

acting in bad faith when he simultaneously emphasizes alterity and insists on the son over

the daughter. If the sameness between father and son protects the father from being

shattered in the relation with alterity, the sameness also threatens to undermine paternity

as an ethical structure. By the same token, it can be suspected that the narrative structure

based on the temporality of father-son relation may fall short of stepping outside the

oedipal logic of narrative. Although Levinas stresses the discontinuity of generational

transmission, the exclusive insistence on paternity as a father-son relation always

threatens to collapse discontinuity into continuity: that is, erasing the generational

discontinuity and conflating the trajectory towards the future as a patrilineage, as an

extension of the father.

II.

Barthes’s oedipal logic, Brooks’s Freud’s masterplot that desires the origin, and

Levinas’s paternal desire for the son: all these are variations of a masculine desire that

transforms a subject’s relating to alterity into a quest—sexual, social, linguistic,

epistemological, ethical—and the quest into paternity, patrilineage, and history, while

deploying the feminine other as the locus or the materiality that facilitates such

transformation. If this is the hegemonic paradigm for narrative, how are the feminine

alterity and the woman’s own desire to be articulated? To simply replace the hero with a

heroine in a novel will not guarantee a subversion of the hegemonic masculine script. As
   137

de Lauretis suggests, the girl’s journey is from the start “guided by a compass pointing . . .

to the fulfillment of the promise made to ‘the little man” [going through the Oedipus

complex]” rather than to the fulfillment of her own desire (“Desire” 133). The heroine’s

seeming agency is deceitful because what appears to be an active journey in fact only

restores her to her rightful place, “the place where the boy will find her, like Sleeping

Beauty, awaiting him, Prince Charming” (de Lauretis, “Desire” 133). It is in this respect

that Nightwood presents itself as a strong critical intervention into the dominating,

androcentric logic of narrative. To begin with, rather than reiterating the sexual division

of the man as the one who crosses borders and boundaries, and the woman as the

landscape or terrain to be treaded upon and claimed, Nightwood gives us Robin Vote, a

woman who “took to going out; wandering the countryside; to train travel, to other cities,

alone and engrossed,” without wishing to claim or even stay in any territory, much less to

be claimed or recruited to help constitute a history in which she is to remain invisible

(Barnes 42).

By exploring the possibility of a narrative structure that deviates from the oedipal

domination, Nightwood questions Levinas’s narrative of the transformation of a male

ethical subject. Thematically, Nightwood is explicitly resistant to Levinas’s concern with

paternity, patrilineage, and hence history. While Levinas locates fecundity of eros in the

son, Nightwood situates fecundity between the lovers, as Irigaray suggests, and further

complicates the notion of fecundity by placing it in the context of failed lesbian relations.

Moreover, while in Levinas’s narrative maternity seems to be the only acceptable face for

the woman, and procreation the only legitimate telos of erotic desire, Nightwood attempts

to show the “odd faces” of love, various expressions of desire incongruous to the
   138

normalizing framework of the oedipal logic.9 These critiques staged in the fictional

narrative of Nightwood are carried out, first and foremost, by the novel’s structure. As

described above, the first chapter begins with the birth of Felix Volkbein as well as his

mother’s death, and the omniscient narrator dwells long enough on the story of Felix’s

parents to incite a reasonable expectation for the subsequent unfolding of Felix’s own

social and romantic adventures structured according to the oedipal logic. Had the

narrative continued with Felix’s oedipal narrative, the novel would have become a

reiteration of Of Human Bondage, or a fictional rendition of Levinas’s narrative of the

subject’s ethical transformation. Instead, after the narrative in the first chapter fast-

forwards to Felix’s adulthood, the narrative of Nightwood shifts its focus abruptly. The

second chapter condenses into about sixteen pages Felix’s encounter with Robin, their

marriage, the birth of their son Guido, and Robin’s desertion of the family for a lesbian

relation with Nora Flood. The next two chapters focus respectively on Robin’s relations

with Nora and with Jenny Petherbridge. Up to this point, the time of the narrative has

been progressing chronologically, but for the next three chapters the forward movement

of time stops, as Felix and Nora take turns talking to Dr. Matthew O’Connor, a Tiresian

figure in the world of the “night” where these characters inhabit, about the trauma that

Robin has inflicted on them. In the final and enigmatic chapter, the narrative ends when

Robin and Nora meet again, with Nora shocked and shattered upon witnessing Robin

chasing and howling along with Nora’s dog.

The notoriety of Nightwood as a difficult text stems for a large part from the

strange structure of the narrative, and yet its narrative structure is also the stylistic

innovation that has perhaps solicited the least critical attention. On the surface, the plot
   139

itself is simple enough, devoid of the intricate “plottings” that characterize traditional

novels, such as the ones Brooks analyzes (Brooks 260). The plot is simple to a point of

bordering on bareness, so some critics disregard the bare plot while they examine other

aspects of Barnes’s style. For instance, in her reading of Nightwood as an exemplary case

of “woman’s writing,” Carolyn Allen treats the plot as a mere backdrop for Barnes’s

other stylistic innovations: “Traditional plot development is of scant interest to Barnes,

and in Nightwood it operates as pretext rather than context” (Allen, “Dressing” 106, 108).

However, the apparent scarcity of plot poses a difficulty for understanding and

interpreting Nightwood, because it is not entirely clear what logic is at work to string

together the events—or episodes, rather—into a meaningful sequence. Emily Coleman,

Barnes’s friend and editor whose comments helped to shape the form in which

Nightwood was first published, complained during the editing process that Barnes had

shifted the “center of emotion from Felix—to start with—to Dr. O’Connor —to Robin—

to Nora—to Felix (Guido)—to Dr. O’Connor —to Nora” (qtd. in Plumb xvi). For her,

“the story of Felix and Robin distracted from the tragedy of Robin and Nora” (Plumb

xvii), and when she forwarded the text to T. S. Eliot, she even suggested removal of the

first six chapters in order to impose a sense of unity to the story (Plumb xvii). Coleman’s

sense that Nightwood lacks one single emotional center that imposes textual unity is

precisely symptomatic of Barnes’s deliberate defiance of the conventional oedipal logic,

which has governed the intelligibility and anticipation of meaning. While evidence

suggests that Barnes accepted many other editorial suggestions from Coleman, she

declined the advice to refocus the narrative exclusively on the lesbian story. For Barnes’s

critique of the oedipal plot consists of more than a mere replacement of a heterosexual
   140

story by a lesbian story. Her episodic narrative opens up the closure of the oedipal

inscription of patrilineage, projects to the alterity of the desires between women, and

further presses into the terrain of alterity that cannot be adequately conceptualized in

anthropomorphic terms. Just like Levinas’s texts that repeatedly and progressively push

on with his search for alterity, Nightwood ventures further and further into the realm of

alterity, but in the dimension of eros and feminine desire, which Levinas ignores.

The first tactic in Nightwood’s critique of the oedipal logic is parody.

The first chapter of Nightwood, titled “Bow Down,” enacts the oedipal logic by setting up

an anticipation for Felix’s story and then deflects that anticipation when it allows what

promises to be Felix’s oedipal story to be usurped in subsequent chapters by the story of

Robin’s lesbian relations. Before that usurpation takes place, the narrative makes explicit

use of generic conventions to show the oedipal desire as the primary force propelling the

narrative. The chapter’s opening describes the simultaneous birth and orphaning of Felix,

and in so doing it announces the problem of the origin that will be the telos of his

narrative and his life’s quest. The sense of Felix’s story as an inscription of the Freudian

masterplot is accentuated when the narrator next endows Felix’s existence with historical

import by relating the racial and family history that his deceased father has wished him to

inherit and pass on. Yet, every step of the elaborate setup of the anticipation for an

oedipal story is at once undermined by a flamboyant flourish in language and an

inordinate supply of details that unsettle what is conventionally meant to be a transparent

operation of desire in narrative.

The opening of the chapter depicts Felix’s birth in one single long sentence that

comprises an entire paragraph, and then with a second sentence, the narrative concludes
   141

the death of the mother. The language at work here, described by Elizabeth Pochoda as

an “impressive verbal cascade” (181), creates dazzling but also confounding linguistic

whirlpools that disrupts linear reading:

Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of

perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the

disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein, a Viennese woman of great

strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed, of a rich

spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the

House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin on which, in

massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms, —gave birth,

at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her

physician predicted that she would be taken.

Turning upon this field, which shook to the clatter of morning

horses in the street beyond, with the gross splendor of a general saluting

the flag, she named him Felix, thrusting him from her, and died. (Barnes 3)

While the sentences manage to impose an appearance of grammatical coherence over the

rampant syntactic elements such as participle phrases, prepositional phrases, appositions,

and so on, they are adorned with excessive details, inflated with elaborate conceits, and

punctuated with historical, religious, racial and political allusions. These excessive

overdeterminations complicate the linear trajectory of the sentences by threatening to

digress into an endless number of coveting claims. Felix’s birth is, therefore, at once

implicated in multiple layers of contexts, such as conflicts between the Jews and Aryans,

between Judaism and Christianity; between the violence of aristocratic lineage and the
   142

Jewish struggle for survival; between birth as a personal, intimate experience and the

fascist view of childbirth as a woman’s duty to the nation equivalent to a man’s duty of

war; between the woman’s labor and God’s creation of the world in seven days, and so

on.10 Apparently, there are infinite possibilities of meaning that can be read into the

beginning of an individual’s life, even though some may seem more appropriate, amusing

or absurd than others. But just as grammar imposes a structure that contains the coveting,

excessive phrases in a readable sentence, the oedipal logic regulates the multiplying

meanings associated with Felix’s birth by setting up the narrative for a distinct trajectory:

the protagonist’s itinerary in life.

The parody of oedipal narrative continues as Barnes accentuates the Volkbeins

clinging to a fictional patrilineage as a racialized subjectivity’s defense mechanism

against anti-Semitism. Having announced the birth of Felix, the narrative turns to Guido,

Felix’s Jewish Italian father who has deceased six months earlier. The omniscient

narrator introduces first the Roman persecution of the Jews as “racial memories” that

have burdened Guido, and then his strategies for surviving anti-Semitism in the late

nineteenth-century Europe (3). Not only does he marry a gentile woman and try to pass as

Austrian gentile himself, but he goes to extra lengths to fabricate an elaborate family

history and identity, including a fake title to a Barony: “He had adopted the sign of the

cross; he had said that he was an Austrian of an old, almost extinct line, producing, to

uphold his story, the most amazing and inaccurate proofs: a coat of arms that he had no

right to and a list of progenitors (including their Christian names) who had never existed”

(5). Later the narrator describes to us the “life-sized portraits of Guido’s claim to father

and mother,” which he had found “in some forgotten and dusty corner and had
   143

purchased . . . when he had been sure that he would need an alibi for the blood” (7-8).

Like the opening sentences that announce Felix’s birth and branch into endless

ramifications, the portraits evoke indeterminate meanings, especially the portrait of

Guido’s supposed father: the man sitting “precariously on a charger” seems “not so much

to have mounted the animal, as to be about to descend upon him”; his dress is “a baffling

mixture of the Romantic and the Religious”; and the “whole conception might have been

a Mardi Gras whim” (7). And just as the opening sentences of the novel channel the ever-

proliferating contexts into an oedipal narrative, Guido imposes on the people depicted in

the paintings the identity of his parents, although the pictorial details suggest equivocal

signification.

Ironically, the Volkbeins internalize the strategy of ethnic passing to such an

extent that the fabricated patrilineage, crowned by a false claim to aristocracy, becomes

the treasured object of generational transmission between Guido and Felix: “Childless at

fifty-nine, Guido had prepared out of his own heart for his coming child a heart,

fashioned on his own preoccupation, the remorseless homage to nobility” (4). Although

the family line, title, and history are fictional, they are deemed important tokens of the

father-son relation, signs of their mutual desiring across the rupture of death. Preservation

and continuation of the patrilineage, false or not, is therefore a task of utmost importance

for Felix in his adult life, even though his father’s legacy is an ethnic mimicry that turns

his whole life into a hoax. After his first encounter with Robin, Felix—who now refers to

himself and is addressed as the Baron—indicates to Dr. O’Connor that “he wished a son

who would feel as he felt about the ‘great past’” (37). By exposing the fictionality of the

family history, the narrative makes palpable the working of patrilineage in fiction by
   144

denaturalizing it. Inasmuch as the construction of patrilineage is employed as a defense

mechanism as racism, the parody of oedipal narrative suggests the violence of

patrilineage as a means of organizing meanings for social and personal lives, a means that

naturalizes its violent differentiation of some as aristocratic and racially legitimate, and

others as racialized objects of persecution.

When Felix says, “To pay homage to our past is the only gesture that also

includes the future” (38), he is arguably paraphrasing Brooks’s Freudian masterplot that

moves forward in order to return to the origin. If a basic guideline for realist novels is to

show and not to tell, Nightwood both shows how the oedipal logic unfolds the narrative

and tells, even spells out, what that logic is. Persistent with its parody, the narrative has

Felix return to the same topic much later in the novel to emphasize again his oedipal view

of desire, eros, and paternity—in case the reader still fails to notice the oedipal desire that

shapes Felix’s story. Long after his marriage has broken up, he confesses to Dr.

O’Connor :

My family is preserved because I have it only from the memory of one

woman, my aunt; therefore it is single, clear and unalterable. In this I am

fortunate, through this I have a sense of immortality. Our basic idea of

eternity is a condition that cannot vary. It is the motivation of marriage.

No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible;—

it is a form of immortality. (94)

Felix acknowledges that the purpose of marriage for him is to perpetuate the patrilineage

through which a sense of immortality can be maintained. Felix further explains that he

has chosen to marry Robin because she seems to possess “[t]his quality of one sole
   145

condition” which will help him “to achieve immortality” (94). Although Levinas would

not recommend deference for the “great past,” Felix shares with him an instrumental

view of eros that places fecundity in the son. Felix’s quest for immortality through

patrilineage even reverberates with Irigaray’s critique that Levinas’s ethics of fecundity

aims for “transcendence of death” (Irigaray, Ethics 186). Ironically, Robin and Felix do

have a son together, but the son is described as without a future: “Mentally deficient, and

emotionally excessive, an addict to death; at ten, barely as tall as a child of six, wearing

spectacles, stumbling when he tried to run, with cold hands and anxious face” (90).

Moreover, Robin rejects the maternal role that both Levinas and Felix would like her to

accept. In a scene soon after the birth of her son, Felix spots her standing in a room alone,

“holding the child high in her hand as if she were about to dash” (44). Among the very

few direct speeches that we hear from Robin, several are vehement curses she utters

about being a mother: “Go to hell!” “Oh for Christ’s sake, for Christ’s sake!” “I didn’t

want him [the son]!” (44, 45). It is clear that Robin has a desire of her own, other than

that of being an auxiliary in the perpetuating of a man’s patrilineage, regardless of the

historical, emotional, or ethical significance the lineage may carry for the man. Finally,

Robin “took to wandering again, to intermittent travel,” and thus she wanders out of

Felix’s oedipal story (45).

Starting from Robin’s rejection of her instrumental role in eros and patrilineage at

the end of the second chapter, the narrative of Nightwood shifts its focus from Felix’s

elaborately wrought oedipal plot to the story of Robin’s lesbian relations, first with Nora

and then with Jenny. The fact that both of Robin’s lesbian relations end in failure, not

because of some socially-imposed barrier but largely because of Robin’s own

   146

predisposition for promiscuity, has rendered Nightwood politically unusable for lesbian

activism. As Carolyn Allen points out, “Nightwood has been described by some

historians of lesbian fiction and culture as a depressing story of all-consuming obsession,

a work that portrays lesbian life negatively and fails to celebrate lesbian heroes” (Allen,

“Erotics” 180). The description of lesbian desires in Nightwood offers such a bleak,

unflattering outlook on lesbianism that the novel can even be interpreted by some as “a

homophobic portrayal of a failed lesbian relationship” (Martins 109). However, in

reading Nightwood as a narrative that seeks to articulate feminine alterity, it is crucial that

the novel refuses to unquestioningly affirm female homosexuality as a utopian alternative

to the patriarchal and heteronormative culture that subsumes the woman. It is precisely by

portraying “failed” lesbian relations that Nightwood compels us to ask how we define

failure in a relation, what logic of desire lurks behind that definition, and how the

definition shapes our expectation of narrative. Robin’s relations with Nora and Jenny

both fail in the sense that neither stalls her desire to wander again. Robin wanders away

from Nora and Jenny, just as she has done from Felix, and leaves the lovers to suffer

anguish, sadness, and perplexity. But to repudiate Nightwood for representing “failed”

lesbian relations is to reinscribe the narrative closure shaped by the oedipal logic of desire.

In the oedipal logic, as discussed above, the male protagonist undergoes the journey of

transformation, and the female character functions as an obstacle to be overcome, or a

destination to be reached. The oedipal logic thus sets up not only sexual differentiation

but also a teleology for erotic relation and narrative, resulting in an anticipation for an

end, a telos, in the very ending of a relation or narrative. If we regard Robin’s relations

with Nora and Jenny as failure, we are in fact faulting Robin’s female lovers for failing to
   147

maintain Robin in a lasting monogamous relation, that is, for failing to duplicate the

woman’s function within the oedipal narrative as a destination, and therefore for failing

to give us a satisfactory sense of ending. The true tragedy of Nightwood’s lesbian story

does not lie in the supposed failure of the romances, but in the different positions Robin

and her lovers occupy in relation to the oedipal desire: Robin is exterior to it, while her

lovers, especially Nora, remain caught within the oedipal logic.

In Nightwood, Robin commands the attention and desire of other characters by

remaining in her elusive and taciturn existence. An “enigma” Felix calls her, and the

narrative refers to her as la somnambule, a sleepwalker who treads the nighttown of Paris,

as well as other parts of Europe and the US, as if guided by some inexplicable force or

instinct, often out of the bounds of her lovers’ watch and even out of the bounds of the

narrative (41, 30). More fittingly so than most other fictional characters, Robin embodies

the other person’s absolute alterity in the Levinasian sense: she incites desire and

response with no guarantee of reciprocation, and at the same time she remains impervious

to attempts of understanding and controlling. Her random promiscuity that shatters her

lovers, and possibly alienates the readers, in fact signals her alterity that will always

remain exterior to any relation. She feels “innocent” about her actions that may be

perceived as moral degradation because, as Dr. O’Connor explains, “Every bed she

leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her ‘escape’

again. That’s why she can’t ‘put herself in another’s place,’ she herself is the only

‘position’” (121-22). “[Holding] no volition for refusal” (40), Robin lets her lovers

impose on her different configurations of eros—just as she has allowed Felix to project

his oedipal desire onto her—but always only until she feels the configurations begin to
   148

threaten the alterity that she harbors, “the only ‘position’” that she is, and then she must

move on.

Since procreation is dissociated from eros in lesbianism, Nora and Robin’s

relation evinces a certain degree of fluidity in the configurations of feminine desire.

Nonetheless, Barnes simultaneously maintains a critical distance to the configurations,

which she shows to be still limited by domestic terms. Nora and Robin are often figured

as protective mother and protected child, as Dr. O’Connor appeals to Nora in a

conversation: “You, who should have a thousand children and Robin, who should have

been all of them” (85). Nora takes Robin out of the circus when Robin is startled by a

lioness bowing down right in front of her. When Robin resumes her life of the “night”—

the novel’s primary metaphor for all the morally impermissible forms of desire—and

starts to cheat on Nora, Nora takes the mission upon herself to save Robin from impurity.

In retrospect, Nora comes to realize that she has lost Robin partially by overdoing the

mother-child configuration. As Dr. O’Connor explains to her, “You almost caught hold

of her, but she put you cleverly away by making you the Madonna” (122). Another

configuration of Nora and Robin’s relation enacts the mimicry of a heterosexual couple,

and they alternate between the masculine and feminine roles. In some instances, Nora

performs conventionally masculine acts, such as providing a house to satisfy feminine

Robin’s “wish for a home” (50); in others, she reiterates the conventional feminine role

of the anxious wife, waiting jealously at home for the pleasure-seeking Robin to return.

Their mimicry of a heterosexual couple is completed with a doll that Robin has given

Nora to be their child. The simulacrum of a heterosexual family, in the end, proves

unbearable for Robin, too. Nora confesses to Dr. O’Connor that sometimes she would
   149

find Robin “standing in the middle of the room, in boy’s clothes, rocking from foot to

foot, holding the doll she had given us—‘our child’—high above her head, as if she

would cast it down, a look of fury on her face” (122). One time, in a fit of temper, Robin

does hurl the doll to the floor and stamp on it. Nora’s justification for Robin’s fury is that

when Robin comes home late that particular night, “she was angry because for once I had

not been there all the time, waiting” (122). But we know otherwise, because we have seen

Robin once almost doing the same thing to her own son.

Jenny, who steals Robin from Nora, is the “squatter,” “a dealer in second-hand

and therefore incalculable emotions,” who appropriates as her own thoughts, feelings and

experiences of others (60). The antagonist in Robin and Nora’s story, her interest in

Robin is not initiated by an attraction to Robin in herself, but kindled by the mediation of

“the most passionate love that she knew, Nora’s for Robin” (60). Although Jenny is

consistently presented in such an unflattering light, a tableau that depicts her relation with

Robin nonetheless catches the gist of a formally non-developmental desire:

Jenny leaning far over the table, Robin far back, her legs thrust under her,

to balance the whole backward incline of the body, and Jenny so far

forward that she had to catch her small legs in the back rung of the chair,

ankle out and toe in, not to pitch forward on the table,—thus they

presented the two halves of a movement that had, as in sculpture, the

beauty and the absurdity of a desire that is in flower but that can have no

burgeoning, unable to execute its destiny; a movement that can divulge

neither caution nor daring, for the fundamental condition for completion

was in neither of them. (61)

   150

The tableau is a stylistic device heavily employed in the narrative of Nightwood. It

presents the characters not in a “visual freeze-frame,” an arrested moment taken from the

flow of actions (Allen, “Dressing” 110). The grotesque tableau at the dinner table shows

Robin and Jenny in a state much like the bride and groom who will never finish their kiss

on Keats’s Grecian urn, lacking “the fundamental condition for completion” of action—

although what that means remains highly ambiguous. It is possible to interpret Robin and

Jenny’s relation in negative ways. The frozen moment of Robin leaning back and Jenny

leaning forward, especially, seems to resonate with Jenny’s lack of authentic feelings and

Robin’s natural inclination to avoid fixture in any relation. However, if we take the

“fundamental condition for completion” to mean the oedipal desire that drives a relation

and narrative towards an ending in order to return to the origin, then the lack of

completion can be seen as a modality of desire otherwise than the oedipal configuration,

rather than as a flaw particular to the relation of Robin and Jenny. Seen in this light, the

story of Robin and Jenny illustrates this other desire—between women, non-procreative,

non-teleological, and thus forever incomplete—more clearly than does the story of Nora,

because Nora is too blinded and too desperate in her fervent search for completion.

As reflected in Robin’s random promiscuity, desire is enacted episodically and

strives toward no end. For a lesbianism unbound by the oedipal imperative, incompletion

is the normal state of affairs. Completion, on the contrary, is an exception, and it is

accomplished by violence. Nightwood illustrates this point when it describes a scene of

violence as the precipitator of Robin and Jenny’s affair. In a carriage ride to town, Jenny

grows jealous when she sees Robin flirting with two other female acquaintances, one an
   151

English woman and the other a young girl. Jenny starts quarrelling with Robin, and all of

a sudden she begins to assault her:

Then Jenny struck Robin, scratching and tearing in hysteria, striking,

clutching and crying. Slowly the blood began to run down Robin’s cheeks,

and as Jenny struck repeatedly Robin began to go forward as if brought to

the movement by the very blows themselves, as if she had no will, sinking

down in the small carriage, her knees on the floor, her head forward as her

arm moved upward in a gesture of defense; and as she sank, Jenny also, as

if compelled to conclude the movement of the first blow, almost as

something seen in retarded action, leaned forward and over, so that when

the whole of the gesture was completed, Robin’s hands were covered by

Jenny’s slight and bending breast, caught in between the bosom and the

knees. (66)

The narrator concludes the scene with an abrupt statement: “It was not long after this that

Nora and Robin separated; a little later Jenny and Robin sailed for America” (67). Yet

another example of the tableau, the action in the carriage scene decelerates until it stops

in the final freeze-frame, where Jenny’s body is seen to overlap with Robin’s. The

carriage scene invites comparison and contrast with the imagery at the dinner table.

While at the diner table an irreducible distance between Robin and Jenny is maintained

by the incomplete nature of their desire, here inside the carriage they are brought into

close proximity in an eruption of violence. Paradoxically, the physical assault is the very

cataclysm that precipitates Robin and Jenny’s relation. Violence turns into intimate
   152

contact, eliminating the distance. Or, to put it again, the desire for the completion itself is

violent.

The non-procreative and non-teleological desire of lesbian incompletion finds in

its appropriate form of articulation in the tableau, whereas the oedipal desire has

traditionally manifested itself in the progression of the plot. The distinction between the

two forms of desire, and their corresponding manifestations in the narrative, hinges upon

their different temporalities: the oedipal, masculine desire correlates with a view of time

“as history, . . .project, teleology, . . . departure, progression, and arrival,” hence its

association with the forward movement of narrative; whereas the feminine desire is

manifest in a cyclical temporality, reverberating with the recurring rhythm of nature,

hence the tableau (Kristeva 35, qtd. in Lee, n. 6, 396). The tableau itself is a still image, a

spatialization of the temporal narrative. When used abundantly as Barnes does in

Nightwood, the tableau creates a sense of discontinuity in the narrative, because they do

not constitute themselves into a sequence moving forward towards an intelligible end.

But this is not to say that the tableau and, by extension, the feminine temporality and the

desire between women do not generate meanings. As Alan Singer has powerfully

demonstrated in his study of the metaphor in Nightwood, “The significance of the image

is in the new connections it fosters” (81). To generate meaning out of the tableau, itself a

medium for the non-procreative desire, thus requires reading the text back and forth,

violating the linearity of narrative. The circular movement is reflected in the structure of

the novel, too. Once the narrator finishes telling the story of Jenny and Robin, the

progressing narrative rearranges itself into a cyclic form, having Nora, Felix, and again
   153

Nora revisit with Dr. O’Connor their relations with Robin, their speeches irresistibly

circling back to events that have taken place by the end of the fourth chapter.

Structurally and thematically, then, Nightwood parodies and disrupts the oedipal

logic as well as its correlative views of procreative sex, patrilineage, and history that

stand behind not only the traditional novel, but also Levinas’s narrative of the

transformation of a male subject that locates fecundity in the son. With its story of lesbian

relations, Nightwood offers instead a configuration of non-procreative and non-

progressive desire, narrative structure, and temporality. Yet, the bleak outlook Barnes’s

novel offer on lesbian love still makes us wonder if eros has a chance for fecundity. On

one level, the answer is already an obvious yes: the rich, inextricably-woven text of

Nightwood itself is born out of the wish to give form to the desire of the feminine other,

in defiance of the oedipal desire. On another level—within Nora and Robin’s story—I

would like to suggest the answer is affirmative, too, but in a much oblique way. To

conclude this section, in the following I will examine the possibility of fecundity in non-

procreative desire, as opposed to the fecundity in the son that Levinas promulgates.

The most influential contestation of Levinas’s notion of fecundity comes from

Irigaray, who untethers eros from procreation in order to restore fecundity to what she

deems its rightful place: not in the son, but in the mutual fecundation between lovers. In

eros, the lovers engender each other again as loving beings, and together they create “[a]

future coming” measured “by the call to birth of the self and the other” (186). Eros

reconceived with fecundity is thus recast as an important originary ethical relation, one

comparable with Levinas’s face-to-face relation. To some extent, Irigaray’s reformulation

of eros and fecundity informs our understanding of eros in Nora and Robin’s story in
   154

relation to Levinas’s oedipal narrative. While Levinas’s fecundity in the son necessitates

a heterosexual and procreation-oriented view of eros, Irigaray’s mutual fecundity

between lovers is open to other forms of sexuality, including lesbianism. Furthermore,

while Levinas’s eros enlists the help of the feminine other but simultaneously renders her

passive and incapable of ethical significance, Irigaray emphasizes eros as a “locus of all

responsibility,” an “ethical site,” and each lover as an ethically responsible subject (199).

None of the women in Nightwood is willing to be restricted to an entirely passive

maternal role, and each of them is a lover in the relation, not a beloved.

Yet, it is only to a very limited extent that Irigaray’s reformulation of fecundity

can be useful for a reading of Nora’s story. Irigaray describes eros and fecundity with a

utopian undertone, demanding lovers to take the ethical responsibility for mutual

fecundation but also simultaneously promising the felicity of regeneration as loving

beings. However, in Barnes’s night world, love is inseparable from pain and anguish, and

it offers fecundity of a darker kind. Lesbian love, as construed by the novel, can be

masochistic, violent, and brutal. Dr. O’Connor cries out loud when he witnesses Jenny

striking Robin in the carriage: “Love of woman for woman, what insane passion for

unmitigated anguish and motherhood brought that into mind?” (66) Commenting on

Nora’s obsessive-compulsive dwelling on her broken relation with Robin, Dr. O’Connor

says: “You are . . . experiencing the inbreeding of pain. Most of us do not dare it. We wed

a stranger, and so ‘solve’ our problem. But when you inbreed with suffering (which is

merely to say that you have caught every disease and so pardoned your flesh), you are

destroyed back to your structure” (109). In her obsession with Robin, Nora is described

as “bloodthirsty with love” (123), and the blood she seeks to spill is her own: “In Nora’s
   155

heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran

Nora’s blood. Thus the body of Robin could never be unloved, corrupt or put away.

Robin was now beyond timely changes, except in the blood that animated her” (50-51).

In Nora’s formulation, lesbian love seems to call forth death and destruction, rather than

rebirth. Thus Dr. O’Connor predicts that Nora, Robin, and Jenny will “all be locked

together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way,

their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other they never wanted, having had to

contemplate each other, head on and eye to eye, until death” (85).

In the dark world of Nightwood, fecundity is not to be found in the plenitude of

eros, but in the willingness to recognize the violence at work in the completion of desire,

and ultimately to accept the incompletion. In the penultimate chapter, Dr. O’Connor finds

Nora writing yet another letter to Robin, heedless of his advice to let Robin be and to

move on with her own life. Out of desperation, Dr. O’Connor says:

Of for God’s sake, couldn’t you stand not learning your lesson? Because

the lesson we learn is always by giving death and a sword to our lover . . . .

So I, Dr. O’Connor, say, creep by, softly, softly, and don’t learn anything,

because it’s always learned of another person’s body; take action in your

heart and be careful whom you love—for a lover who dies, no matter how

forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave. Be humble like the dust,

as God intended, and crawl, and finally you’ll crawl to the end of the

gutter and not be missed and not much remembered. (122)

What Dr. O’Connor means by the “lesson” that can only be learned by “giving death” to

the lover is the lesbian variation of the oedipal quest that poses the feminine other as an
   156

obstacle to be overcome and then subjugated to the subject’s adventure. It is particularly

apt that Levinas’s narrative of the subject’s transformation should come to mind here, for

Levinas’s male subject, on his way to transcendence, precisely learns his lesson “of

another person’s body.” Refusing to accept the eternally incomplete state of Robin’s

desire, Nora’s lesbian love is no less violent in her wish to possess Robin in death. Dr.

O’Connor’s injunction is to not learn the lesson, whether Nora’s or Levinas’s, because

the lesson is always learned at the expense of the other, “by giving death and a sword to

our lover,” eliminating her alterity and stripping her of personhood. This injunction

reverberates with Nora’s own earlier epiphany that she can only possess Robin by killing

her: sometimes, she confesses to Dr. O’Connor, she wishes to say to Robin, “die now,

then you will be mine forever (What right has anyone to that?)” (120). Dr. O’Connor’s

advice to not learn the lesson is, therefore, a reminder that renouncing the pursuit of love

is also a way to love. We can forego the completion of the pursuit, even if that means no

end to our own anguish. That is the dark fecundity of the night world: bear the unbearable

pain, and let the lover live. If there is felicity in Nora’s story, it is also a dark felicity. At

one rare moment of resignation to the fact that she will not always be able to monopolize

Robin, Nora feels “an awful happiness” about the thought that “Robin, like something

dormant, was protected, moved out of death’s way by the successive arms of women”

(57). It is awful, because she has to see Robin in the arms of others; it is nevertheless

happiness, because Robin lives.

III.
   157

The lesbian story of Nightwood does not offer an adequate representation of

Robin, the other par excellence in the novel. Although the lesbian story supplants Felix’s

oedipal story in the narrative, Barnes shows us that lesbian erotics can still be vulnerable

to the recapitulation of the oedipal logic, both by its domestic configurations of relation

and by its imperative for a closure of narrative. To articulate Robin and her desire,

Nightwood takes a radical break away from the still anthropomorphic configurations of

lesbian desire and juxtaposes her with traits and images of animality. In addition to

several tableaux where she is presented with elaborately-wrought animalistic images,

Robin is explicitly described as “beast turning human” and “a wild thing caught in a

woman’s skin” (36, 121). Her acquaintance with Nora, moreover, is flanked by two

actual encounters with animals, one with a lioness and the other with Nora’s dog. In

Nightwood’s narrative, it is only in the aberrant mixture of the woman and the beast,

embodied in Robin, that the feminine other’s alterity and desire finally approximates an

adequate expression beyond the regulatory, normalizing (hu)man terms. In this respect, I

suggest that Nightwood offers a further rejoinder to Levinas. In his phenomenology of

eros, Levinas also provides a juxtaposition of the woman and the animal, but he does so

in order to suppress the signifying power of feminine alterity, and thus to justify his

denial of ethics and humanity to the woman. In closing this chapter, I hope to show that

Nightwood uses the figure of the animal as a means to articulate the feminine—which is

extended to encompass the human in Barnes’s night world.

As discussed earlier in this chapter, Levinas’s phenomenology of eros deploys a

sexual differentiation, allowing the man to surge from eros to his hope for transcendence

in the fecundity of the son, while withholding the woman in the material, bodily
   158

dimension of the experience. The man’s transcendence depends on the abolishment of the

woman’s alterity and, ultimately, on the interdiction of her transcendence. Still, even in

this context, it is alarming that Levinas goes so far as to strip the woman in eros of

personhood by relegating her to the realm of animality:

The beloved, returned to the stage of infancy without responsibility—this

coquettish head, this youth, this pure life ‘a bit silly’—has quit her status

as a person. The face fades, and in its impersonal and inexpressive

neutrality is prolonged, in ambiguity, into animality. The relations with the

Other are enacted in play; one plays with the Other as with a young animal.

(TI 263)

Levinas’s resort to the figure of the animal deserves attention. Here, upon a presupposed

distinction between the human and the animal, he builds a second layer of distinction,

which, according to Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, is “a difference within humanity itself, the

difference between those who are properly human and those . . . gendered others who are

said to be inferior and who do not measure up to human essence” (Ziarek, “Otherwise”).

Irigaray’s critical response to Levinas’s ethics of eros can thus be seen as an operation on

the secondary level of differentiation that philosophy employs the figure of the animal to

create. By substituting mutual fecundation for fecundity in the son, and accordingly

restoring ethical responsibilities back to both lovers, Irigaray’s critique brings the woman

out of the company of the animal and returns humanity to her. The anxiety in her

objection to Levinas’s juxtaposition of the woman and the animal is audible when she

asks: “Is she some more or less domesticated child or animal that clothes itself in or takes

on a semblance of humanity? . . . . But what of her own call to the divine?” (Ethics 196)11
   159

Irigaray’s agenda, however, does not in any significant way alter the primary distinction

between humanity and animality. In fact, with her urgent call to salvage femininity from

animality, she participates in the anthropocentrism inherent in Levinas’s philosophical

thinking that relegates the animal to a secondary, lower level of being neatly separate

from that of the man.

The figure of the animal rarely appears in Levinas’s writings, but, when it does, it

brings along a long philosophical tradition that defines the human being by contrasting it

with animality. Drawing examples from several specific moments in Western philosophy,

Andrew Benjamin argues that “the propriety of human being can only arise in its

differentiation from the animal,” and yet philosophers have employed complex

conceptual moves to institute a radical separation between the human and the animal, so

that both seem to be self-contained, unrelated entities (23). Thus, while Levinas

formulates his ethics as a search for alterity—whether alterity in the transformation of the

ethical subject that takes up much of the discussion in this chapter, or alterity in the

relation with the other person—in a way that does not seem to concern the animal, he is

able to do so only because his work already presupposes the radical break. Indeed, it is

Levinas that Benjamin has in mind when he remarks that in the history of philosophy the

“question of the other” seems to have been formulated as “a uniquely human concern,”

an investigation “with an assumed if often implicit anthropocentrism”: “Alterity figures

therefore within a context that is delimited from the start by an assumption about the

being of being human, or at least the approach to human being usually begins with the

posited centrality of human-to-human relations” (95).

   160

For Levinas, what constitutes the unspoken yet decisive break between the human

and the animal is the capacity for language, which further determines the human’s

capacity for the ethical and the animal’s lack thereof. Only the speaking being’s face can

compel us to face it, and to respond to its call. The animal, presumably without language,

does not have the signifying power necessary to make the ethical demand. This inherent

distinction between the human and the animal predicated on language is not original to

Levinas, nor does he find the presupposition in need of explication, commentary, or

interrogation. Levinas’s reservation of the face-to-face exclusively for human beings,

nonetheless, can be discerned when he recalls in a short anecdote a stray dog that lingered

around the ground of the Nazi camp where he was detained as prisoner of war during

World War II.12 While Levinas and other prisoners were treated inhumanly by the Nazi

officers, the stray dog’s look, as he wagged his tail to the prisoners on their way to work

and back, made Levinas feel human again. Yet, in retrospect, Levinas still hesitates to

grant the dog an ethical face, an agency to summon a man to assume ethical

responsibility. As John Llewelyn remarks, the dog “is without logos and that is why he is

without ethics” (“Bobby” 236). In Levinas’s reservation about the animal, Llewelyn finds

an alignment between Levinas’s and Kant’s ethics despite their differences in other

aspects, and he thus explains Levinas’s denial of ethics to the animal in Kant’s

terminology: “If I think that I have duties to animals it is because I am failing to

distinguish direct duties to or toward (gegen) from indirect duties regarding (in

Ansehung)” (“Bobby” 236). That is, in responding to the dog, a man is really being

responsible to himself regarding this dog. The denial of ethics to the animal does not, of

course, amount to sanction of violence to the animal; but as he clarifies this point in an
   161

interview, Levinas also insists on the human paradigm for ethical relation: “It is clear that,

without considering animals as human beings, the ethical extends to all living beings. We

do not want to make an animal suffer needlessly and so on. But the prototype of this is

human ethics” (Levinas, “Paradox” 172; qtd. in Clark 66).

Within the framework of Levinas’s thought, the lack of signifyingness, hence the

incapacity for an ethical relation, is the unspoken point of convergence where the woman

joins the animal. In the phenomenological world constructed by Levinas in Totality and

Infinity, the equivocal face of the female beloved is described as beyond face, and eros as

beyond the face to face. The beyond is not to be understood as denoting a superiority; on

the contrary, it suggests an impossibility: the ethical significance of the face is impossible

in the face of the woman, and the ethical relation of the face to face between self and

other is impossible in carnal intimacy between the lovers, despite their formal similarity.

According to Levinas, the distinction lies in the woman’s incapacity for signifyingness

proper to the ethical. In the ethical face-to-face relation, the face expresses itself in its

“frankness,” “straightforwardness,” and “uprightness” (Robbins 18). Such undisguised

revelation of the other—the “nudity,” among other names he attributes to it—is the

originary discourse that summons one into the subject position to respond to the other’s

call. In stark contrast, the face of the woman, as well as her “erotic nudity,” is

“signifyingness inverted” and thus improper for the ethical function: “The beloved is

opposed to me . . . as an irresponsible animality which does not speak true words” (TI

263, emphasis added). Instead of self revelation in a frank, straightforward and upright

manner, the signifyingness of the feminine other in eros “discovers the hidden as hidden”

(TI 260). In “the clandestinity of love,” language “loses its frankness and meaning and
   162

turns into laughter or cooing” (TI 213). Here, Levinas’s description of what the feminine

face has to say reminds us of de Lauretis’s remark that the oedipal desire treats femininity

as an obstacle to be overcome, a riddle to be answered. With her tendency to convert “a

clarity . . . into ardor and night,” the wayward words of the woman are not so easily

tamed to offer an unequivocal answer to the riddle of femininity (TI 263). At this point,

where feminist thinkers and writers would undoubtedly see an opportunity emerging for a

signifyingness based on sexual difference, an écriture féminine, Levinas cannot be

quicker in his attempt to erase the sexual difference in signifyingness by silencing the

feminine other’s words: “Thus erotic nudity is as it were . . . an expression that ceases to

express itself, that expresses its renunciation of expression and speech, that sinks into the

equivocation of silence, a word that bespeaks not a meaning but exhibition” (TI 263).

For Levinas, both woman and animal are opposed to man because they are

without signifyingness, and hence without face and without ethics. While Irigaray’s

intervention into this formulation reinstates the woman’s separation from the animal and

leaves intact the definition of humanity by its differentiation from animality, Nightwood

takes a different approach. Barnes’s novel compels us to redefine the human by

imagining the dissolution of the demarcation between the animal and the human, a

demarcation that is in itself already an invention of anthropocentrism. The animal has

long been used as a trope for human desire, the obscene, the carnal, the feminine—the

darker aspects of humanity either to be tamed by or expulsed from culture. It is clear that

Barnes wants to reassess prevailing negative connotations of the animal. As a letter from

Barnes to Coleman reveals, Barnes preferred “Night Beast” to “La somnambule” as the

title to the second chapter, “[e]xcept for the debased meaning now put on that nice word
   163

beast” (Nightwood 218, n. 30.1, emphasis added). Barnes did not change the title, but in

the narrative world of Nightwood, characters are commonly depicted in animalistic terms.

Hedvig has a “goose-step of a stride,” which her husband loves to imitate (5); Felix is

said to love the circus “with something of the love of the lion for its tamer” (11); Dr.

O’Connor always carries his hands “like a dog who is walking on his hind legs” (33);

Jenny has “partridge blood” that “set[s] out to beat up trouble” (82). Nora, who represents

the clean, desire-repressing American puritanism and is thus not directly given an bestial

attribute, remains within the proximity of a dog: in the first detailed visual description of

her, she is seen in her salon, listening to people talk while “her hand on her hound” (46).

The figure of the animal saturates the world of Nightwood to the extent that animality

becomes the universal condition for the humans, laid bare on the surface of the narrative.

In the context of universal bestialization, the narrative’s particular representation

of Robin as a composite of reticent woman and languageless animal stands out as a

complex, othering expression of feminine alterity. To characterize Robin with silence and

animality may at first sight appear to be following Levinas’s terms for the ethically

impotent feminine other, but Nightwood repeats the terms only to complicate them from

within. To begin with, Robin’s reticence warrants suspicion. It is true that Robin has few

directly quoted words in the novel, forming a sharp contrast to the garrulous Doctor who

never seems in short supply of anecdotes and advice, or to Nora’s torrential outpour of

agony over their lost love. This has led critics to equate Robin with silence, and thus to

interpret her return to the narrative near the end as a sign of Barnes’s mistrust of her own

language. However, if Robin is not one of abundant words, it is not entirely accurate to

call her silent, either. Rather, her actual words somehow fail to filter through the narrative
   164

even when the narrative reports that Robins speaks. For instance, as we are told, Nora

becomes aware of Robin’s promiscuity because Robin comes home singing songs or

using “a peculiar turn of phrase not habitual to her” (52). In the last chapter, we see

Robin ambling in the American woodland and “speaking in a low voice to the animals”

(136). Additionally, Jenny is perturbed “because in [Robin’s] speech and in her gestures

there was a desperate anonymity” (138). We see Robin going through the motion of

speaking but we do not hear, let alone comprehend, Robin’s words. Robin’s words are

denied entrance into the narrative, so she is mistaken as silent—much like the woman in

Levinas’s narrative, whose wayward words cannot filter through the discourse of the

male lover and are thus comprehended by the male philosopher as frivolous laughter,

infantile cooing, and silence.

Furthermore, Nightwood appears to reverberate with Levinas’s relegation of the

woman to the ethically impotent realm of the animal, when the narrator depicts Robin’s

eyes as having “the long unqualified range in the iris of wild beasts who have not tamed

the focus down to meet the human eye” (36). A “beast turning human,” not fully man and

not fully human, the feminine other as embodied by Robin is without face in Levinas’s

sense (36). Yet the narrative troubles Levinas’s formulation once more by staging a face-

to-face encounter between Robin and a lioness, precisely the two beings denied language

and ethics by Levinas. On the first day of Nora and Robin’s acquaintance, they sit by

chance next to each other in the audience of a circus, watching circus animals entering

the ring in procession.

Then as one powerful lioness came to the turn of the bars, exactly opposite

the girl [Robin], she turned her furious great head with its yellow eyes
   165

afire and went down, her paws thrust through the bars and, as she regarded

the girl, as if a river were falling behind impassable heat, her eyes flowed

in tears that never reached the surface. At that the girl rose straight up. (49)

Taking the narrative literally, it can be argued that the encounter between Robin and the

lioness demands an extension of the ethical face-to-face to the woman and the animal,

since the narrative explicitly endows the lioness’s look with a response-provoking

signification of anguish. Admittedly, this argument easily leads back to the cul-de-sac

question of whether animals possess means of communication that qualify as language. A

more productive way to interpret this woman-beast encounter, without necessarily

dismissing its potential to expand Levinas’s formulation of the ethical, then, is to suggest

that the animal functions as a figure that signifies the woman in her alterity while

circumventing the pitfalls of (hu)man configurations. That is, the woman is signified

indirectly, through the animal, so as to prevent her otherness from reabsorption into the

oedipal narrative. If we accept the figure of the animal as the feminine other’s mode of

expression in the narrative of Nightwood, then we can begin to argue for the feminine

other’s capacity for the ethical, if still not quite for that of the animal per se.

The encounter of the lioness and Robin alerts us, first, to the analogous condition

of the circus animal and the woman. The lioness’s furious great head, fiery eyes, and

invisible tears speak of a desire to escape the cruelty of the circus, where discipline and

imprisonment by humans reduce bestiality to docility. It is perhaps no coincidence that

the encounter takes place in the narrative not long after Robin escapes the wifely/

maternal position designated by Felix’s desire for patrilineage, and just before she is to

begin a lesbian relation in which Nora will similarly seek to domesticate her. Moreover, it
   166

is by the description of the lioness’s emotions that the narrative directs us to a more

careful distinction between Robin’s reticence and her alleged silence. The narrative

opposes the supposed nonsignifyingness of the animal with the lioness’s “tears that never

reached the surface,” an expression of emotions that do exist and yet cannot come forth

through the readily available linguistic system (49). The lioness’s barred signifyingness,

like “a river . . . falling behind impassable heat,” is at once also a telling image for

Robin’s words that fail to filter through the narrative, her supposed silence (49).

Nightwood’s strategy of speaking the feminine alterity through the bestial image

finds resonation in the writings of Monique Wittig, who powerfully calls for an

inscription of the lesbian body beyond conventional conceptions of the human by

discarding preconceived gender and sexual codes.13 Her struggle with language for

lesbian representation demands alternative ways of seeing the body, as de Lauretis

remarks, “perhaps as monstrous, or grotesque, or mortal, or violent, and certainly also

sexual” (“Sexual Indifference,” 167). Similarly, the animalistic images that articulate

Robin in Nightwood are often outlandish and inordinate to the masculine economy of

signification. For instance, when the narrator observes that Robin is associated with the

tableau—“a ‘picture’ forever arranged”—rather than with a conventional oedipal

narrative that progresses through time, the narrator reinforces this claim by providing a

set of striking animalistic similes (36):

Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a

person’s every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten

experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as

insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an

   167

aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof

raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will

become myth; as the unicorn in is neither man nor beast deprived, but

human hunger pressing its breast to its prey. (36)

The quoted passage takes place on Robin and Felix’s first encounter: Robin has lost her

consciousness in a hotel room, while Felix comes to the scene accompanying Dr.

O’Connor, who is solicited for medical assistance. Robin’s picture-like quality, to an

undiscerned eye like Felix’s, evokes “an eternal wedding cast on racial memory,” and

immediately sets at work his oedipal desire for the perpetuation of his family history. But

what Robin evokes is merely a “mirage.” Her alignment with the tableau already makes

clear her incompatibility with the temporal trajectory of the patrilineage such “an eternal

wedding” in Felix’s mind will entail. The narrative does not supply the conventional

realist details about Robin and Felix’s subsequent courtship and their marriage, yet how

Robin may feel at the early stage of their relation seems to be summed up in the prophecy

of the condensed, grotesque image of the frightful eland in the bridal veil. Additionally,

the unicorn, described as the “prey” to (hu)man hunger, brings into our attention the male

characters’ predation on Robin: while Robin lies unconscious, Dr. O’Connor steals her

money, and Felix, as we know, starts planning on making use of Robin in the

perpetuation of his patrilineage. The animalistic similes, in themselves, are

incomprehensible unless returned to their context in the narrative, and even so no

interpretation can exhaust the surplus of ornate and often incongruent details. But while

they frustrate a comprehension of Robin, they articulate her grotesque affinity with the

animal, and her differentiation from the conventional female role within oedipal desire.
   168

Many of the animalistic figures in Nightwood, like the eland in bridal veil and the

unicorn, are surrealist images, highly aestheticized in style and obscure in meaning.

Thwarting a transparent and stable signifier-signified relation, such animalistic figures

highlight their own status as discursive production. The unicorn is a product of human

imagination, not biology, after all. It is important that Nightwood foregrounds the

animalistic figures as discursive formation because, in doing so, the animalistic figures

articulate feminine alterity without subsuming it under the category of nature, where the

woman would be deprived of her language again. Although the example of the lioness

suggests that Barnes does not mean to consistently or systematically erase the presence of

the real animal in her narrative, the animal in Nightwood is always first and foremost a

figure of the animal employed to articulate alterity, as are the eland and the unicorn, or to

indicate a subversion of dominant values. Thus, when Dr. O’Connor urges Nora “to be an

animal, born at the opening of the eye, going only forward, and at the end of day, shutting

out memory with the dropping of the lid” (113), his figure of the animal stands not so

much for the empirical animal as for a conceptual opposition to the oedipal mode of

narrative, a fragmentary temporality in which lived experiences cannot be incorporated

into a coherent history by the masculine logic of narrative.

As discursive formation, the animal in Nightwood is then deployed as the means

of the indirect articulation of feminine alterity, which the novel also extends to the

universal level to include the alterity in all humans. Such use of the figure of the animal

culminates in the final chapter, “The Possessed.” The three-page long, coda-like chapter

reactivates temporal progression and narrates what happens after the last meeting

between Nora and Dr. O’Connor. Nora disregards the doctor’s advice and returns to
   169

America in hope of finding Robin, knowing that is where Robin and Jenny have gone.

Meanwhile, in America Robin resumes her habitual solitary travels, going further and

further into the woods, until she reaches “Nora’s part of the country” (138). They are,

finally, brought together by answering to the calls of Nora’s dog. Sleeping in a deserted

chapel in the thick of the night, Robin “woke up to the barking, far off, of Nora’s dog”

(138); whereas with its “barking and whining,” the dog leads Nora to locate Robin (138).

Nora follows the dog, “cursing and crying,” and “blindly, without warning, plunged into

the jamb of the chapel door” (138). The description that Nora “struck wood” marks a

choice she must make: whether she will come to terms with the world of the woods of the

night, where she has always already been, but which she has disavowed (139).

For what Nora is about to see expresses Robin’s desire through the animal. The

shocking scene confronts her, as well as the reader, with the animalistic configuration

that Robin assumes once liberated from the domesticating (hu)man terms of the oedipal

logic:

Robin began going down, down, her hair swinging, her arms out. The dog

stood rearing back, his forelegs slanting, his paws trembling under the

trembling of his rump, his hackle standing, his mouth open, the tongue

slung sideways over his sharp bright teeth, whining and waiting. And

down she went, until her head swung against his, on all fours now,

dragging her knees. The veins stood out in her neck, under her ears,

swelled in her arms, and wide and throbbing, rose up on her hands as she

moved forward.
   170

Robin, who earlier has been described as “beast turning human,” now reverses the

direction of her transformation. A human turning beast, she forces the dog into the corner

and strikes “against his side” (139). Dodging Robin’s attack, the dog “let loose one howl

of misery and bit at her, dashing about her, barking, and as he sprang on either side of her

he always kept his head toward her”:

Then she began to bark also, crawling after him—barking in a fit of

laughter, obscene and touching. Crouching, the dog began to run with her,

head-on with her head, as if to circumvent her; soft and slow his feet went

padding. He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she

grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving

head to head, until she gave up, laying out, her hands beside her, her face

turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes

bloodshot, his head flat along her knees. (139)

De Lauretis suggest that the very last tableau of Nightwood simulates “a sexual act from

frenzied crescendo to (failed) orgasmic release” (de Lauretis, “Nightwood” 121). Her

description of the simulated orgasmic release as failed, put in brackets, alerts us to the

equivocation of the desire configured in the animalistic term. The semblance of the fight

between animals recalls the carriage scene, where Jenny comes across the irreducible

distance between them only by physical assaults. If the carriage scene suggests that the

oedipal desire for completion in sexual act, and resolution in narrative, is a form for

violence, the final scene highlights the desire of a different sort. Lying on the floor with

the dog and weeping, Robin’s passions do not lead to sexual consummation or reach the
   171

telos of the narrative. As a tableau that arrests the temporal flow of narrative, the final

scene rather reminds us of the episodic nature of Robin’s desire.

The enigmatic scene of Robin and the dog embodies the “inverted” signifyingness

of the feminine other in the quintessential sense intended by Levinas: it “discovers the

hidden as the hidden” (TI 260). There are no words to justify or rationalize the action in

the final chapter; there are only laughter, howling, and crying. Yet, importantly, in

Nightwood the inverted signifyingness of the non(hu)man laughter, howling and crying is

not absence of signification, but signification otherwise: they express the “obscene and

touching,” affects and emotions that are not attributed to specific contents but point

towards Robin’s desire beyond the oedipal economy of representation. This point is

corroborated by de Lauretis, who insightfully reads the dog as a figure for “the excess of

affect or unbound psychic energy that racks Robin’s body and makes her run and laugh

and cry and bark and weep” (de Lauretis, “Nightwood” 121). The dog thus functions as

the figure through which Robin’s desire finds a form of articulation that presses through

the limits of representation; in the animalistic figure, we approximate the alterity of

Robin’s desire.

Thus, while Levinas refuses to extend the ethical face to the feminine other and

the animal based on the premise that they are without language, Nightwood suggests the

feminine and animalistic howling and crying signify precisely an alterity beyond (hu)man

terms. While Levinas expulses the feminine other from the (hu)man realm into the

derogatory terrain of animality, Nightwood extends the association between woman and

animal to a universal condition for humanity in its world. The world in Nightwood is one

in which the feminine other, as embodied by Robin, persists as in otherness and refutes
   172

the subordination of the woman in oedipal narrative as well as in Levinas’s ethics of

fecundity. Nightwood comes into conjunction with Levinas at several points—feminine

signifyingness, eros, procreation, patrilineage, animality—but the novel relentlessly

subverts the values and meanings that Levinas attributes to these terms. What Barnes’s

novel presents, then, are the odd faces of love and ethics, which put Levinas into question.

 
   173

 
Endnotes

Notes to Chapter I
1
Woolf’s essay, “Character in Fiction,” will be abbreviated as CIF below when

cited parenthetically. The abbreviation will continue to be in use in Chapter III.

2
Literary studies have since become more hospitable to Levinas’s ethics, though

still insufficiently so and thus leaving much room for theoretical speculation on the

implication of Levinas’s thoughts for literature, and for application of Levinas to specific

literary works. Some examples of such effort include Robert Hughes, Ethics, Aesthetics,

and the Beyond of Language; Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel:

From Leavis to Levinas; Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas;

Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics.

3
Levinas speaks of the I as a structure of identification: “The I is identification in

the strong sense; it is the origin of the very phenomenon of identity. The identity of the I

is not the permanence of an unalterable quality; I am myself not because of some

character trait which I first identify, and then find in myself to be the same. It is because I

am from the first the same—me ipse, an ipseity—that I can identify every object, every

character trait, and every being” (“Trace” 345).

4
For Levinas, signification originates in the face of the other, which signifies its

otherness in a distinctive mode; what we commonly refer to as meaning—information,

content, signs, the constative dimension of language—is secondary and derivative of the

signifyingness of alterity. In Totality and Infinity he writes:

   174

 
The first instance of signification is produced in the face. Not that the face

would receive a signification by relation to something. The face signifies

by itself; its signification precedes Sinngebung. A meaningful behavior

arises already in its light; it spreads the light in which light is seen. One

does not have to explain it, for every explanation begins with it. (261)

Later, in “The Trace of the Other,” Levinas will continue to elaborate on the other

person’s double signifyingness as sign and as trace. Chapter III of my study, on To the

Lighthouse, will explore the ethical dimension of the Levinasian conception that the

subject’s signifying act is always already a response to an anterior expression of the other.
5
Contrasting the language of the novel with that of philosophy and ordinary

language, Nussbaum asserts in Love’s Knowledge that “certain truths about human life

can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the

narrative artist” (Knowledge 5).

6
Nussbaum’s conception of the novel as a moral education of value judgment is

represented by one of her quotations from Henry James’s preface to The Golden Bowl:

“Art is nothing if not exemplary, care nothing if not active” (qtd. in Nussbaum, “Exactly”

59). Another strong advocate of the ethical turn of literary studies, J. Hillis Miller also

relies heavily on James’s works to construct his own speech act theory-based discourse

on ethics and the novel. Despite their different approaches, Miller similarly “understands

ethics in its traditional determination as a region of philosophical inquiry” (Critchley 47;

also qtd. in Gibson 12); and, much as Nussbaum does, Miller focuses on the novel as “a

literary example” of “ethical situations in real life . . . in the sense that we may learn from
   175

 
it how much on our own we are when we are in a shrewd situation and must make an

ethical decision” (271).

7
  Grover Smith discerns “a certain moral seriousness” which runs though Eliot’s

works as early as his poems written in the early 1920’s, and which culminates in his later

essays such as “The Social Function of Poetry,” written in 1945 (17). In this context,

Smith argues, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) deserves critical attention

because the appearance of its exclusively aesthetic concern with the poetic process can be

demonstrated to be profoundly moral. I depart from Smith in that the morality he

uncovers in the essay is one affiliated with “characteristically American” and “Christian”

values and principles, such as self reliance, entrepreneurship, democracy and individual

liberty (22), whereas I hope to show that the enactment of intertextuality itself is ethically

significant, even despite Eliot’s own authorial intention.

8
“The relation between the same and the other . . . is language” (TI 39).
9
Of the absolutely other, Levinas says: “He and I do not form a number. The

collectivity in which I say ‘you’ or ‘we’ is not a plural of the ‘I.” I, you—these are not

individuals of a common concept. Neither possession nor the unity of number nor the

unity of concepts like me to the Stranger . . . who disturbs the being at home with

oneself . . .Over him I have no power. He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension,

even if I have him at my disposal. He is not wholly in my site” (TI 39)

10
“The relation between the same and the other, metaphysics, is primordially

enacted as conversation” in which the I “leaves itself” (TI 39).

11
Levinas does not speak of the novel in his discussion of the face in Totality and

Infinity, but in a very different idiom he does condemn the novel as unethical—as an
   176

 
aesthetic experience and as a mode of signifyingness—in “The Reality and Its Shadow”

(138-39). In Totality and Infinity, nevertheless, Levinas does offer historical narrative as

an example, which is instructive to my subsequent discussion of the novels as narrative:

“The historical is not defined by the past; both the historical and the past are defined as

themes of which one can speak. They are thematized precisely because they no longer

speak. The historical is forever absent from tis very presence” (65).

Notes to Chapter II
1
The Picture of Dorian Gray will be abbreviated as DG in in-text citations. Other

texts by Wilde will be referred to in citations by the first or primary word in each title.
2
For the immediate responses Dorian Gray received upon its first publication, see

Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality: A Record of the Discussion which

Followed the Publication of “Dorian Gray.”

3
“The painter, Basil Hallward, worshipping physical beauty far too much, as

most painters do, does by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and

absurd vanity. Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill

conscience, and at that moment kills himself. Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the

spectator of life. He finds that those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded than

those who take part in it” (Wilde, qtd. in Mason 43-44).

4
Parenthetical documentation of Levinas’s texts will follow the abbreviations

below: Existence and Existents, EE; Otherwise than Being, OB; “Reality and Its Shadow,”

RIS; “Time and the Other,” TO; Totality and Infinity, TI.
   177

 
5
Accordingly, scholars and critics such as John G. Peters have located “a

disparity between the ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray and the novel itself”

(Peters 1). Richard Ellmann, whom Peters quotes, remarks that “Wilde the preface-writer

and Wilde the novelist deconstruct each other” (qtd. in Peters 1). But to cast the disparity

as Wilde’s inner contradiction, or to account for it as Wilde’s failure to make good his

own treatise, does not help us further explore its significance.

6
Here I follow Edith Wyschogrod’s explanation of Levinas’s usage of the word

“form”: “Although it may seem paradoxical to sever art from form, Levinas explains that

form always arises in a context. In cognition and relations of utility we experience objects

in a network of relations, whereas art lifts entities out of the world to create a field not of

forms but of pure sensations” (137-38).

7
I will quote in entirety here the paragraph in which Levinas’s thesis is presented:

Being is not only itself, it escapes itself. Here is a person who is what he is;

but he does not make us forget, does not absorb, cover over entirely the

objects he holds and the way he holds them, his gestures, limbs, gazes,

thought, skin, which escape from under the identity of his substance,

which like a torn sack is unable to contain them. Thus a person bears on

his face, alongside of its being with which he coincides, its own caricature,

its picturesqueness. The picturesque is always to some extent a caricature.

Here is a familiar everyday thing, perfectly adapted to the hand which is

accustomed to it, but its qualities, colour, form, and position at the same

time remain as it were behind its being, like the “old garments” of a soul

which had withdrawn from that thing, like a “still life.” And yet all this is
   178

 
the person and is the thing. There is a duality in this person, this thing, a

duality in its being. It is what it is and it is a stranger to itself, and there is

a relationship between these two moments. We will say the thing is itself

and is its image. And that this relationship between the thing and its image

is resemblance. (RIS 135)

8
It seems that if moral readings of Dorian Gray tend to neglect the question of

style and form, readings of Dorian Gray from the stylistic end of the critical and

interpretive spectrum also tend to neglect the question of content. For instance, John G.

Peters argues:

In the end, the novel’s aesthetic style dominates the morality and plot, so

that the moral ideas and the plot become mere mirrors and props to reflect

the book’s style; thus the style itself—not the moral overtones or gothic

and melodramatic plot—becomes the book’s most important aspect and

becomes, in a sense, the novel’s content. (4)

Hans Eichner offers a remark not unlike Peters’: Wilde “wrote a book in which the form

consumes the substance. By the time we have finished the novel and put it away for a few

weeks, what we remember is not the horrible end, but its beauty, the brilliance of the talk

and the brilliance of the writing” (201). Common to both is a strict demarcation between

form and content—the gothic and the melodramatic surely mark both content and style,

not just content as Peters suggests in the quoted passage—which inhibits further thinking

on the signifyingness of the performative aspect of a text.

9
Huysmans, incidentally, is one of the novelists Levinas refers to in a passage

that describes the sense of the there is emerging from aesthetic experience:
   179

 
The misunderstood art of certain realistic and naturalist novelists, their

prefaces and professions of faith notwithstanding, produces the same

effect: beings and things that collapse into their “materiality,” are

terrifyingly present in their destiny, weight and shape. Certain passages of

Huysmans or Zola, the calm and smiling horror of de Maupassant’s tales

do not only give, as is sometimes thought, a representation “faithful to” or

exceeding reality, but penetrate behind the form which light reveals into

that materiality which, far from corresponding to the philosophical

materialism of the authors, constitutes the dark background of existence. It

makes things appear to us in a night, like the monotonous presence that

bears down on us in insomnia. (EE 54-55)

10
Wilde wrote in a letter that the yellow book was “partly suggested by

Huysmans’s À Rebours. . . . It is a fantastic variation on Huysmans’s over-realistic study

of the artistic temperament in our inartistic age” (Letters 116; qtd. in DG 244 n.7).
11
Newton’s choice of diction is ethics. I change it into morality in keeping with

the loose distinction between morality as proper conduct based on judgment and ethics in

the Levinasian sense of putting the self into question.

Notes to Chapter III

1
To the Lighthouse will be abbreviated as L in parenthetical citations hereafter.
2
In Lighthouse, Woolf clearly intends an analogy between the visual art and the

art of the novel. The loosely organized but influential Bloomsbury group, of which Woolf

was an active participant, counted as its core members painters Duncan Grant and
   180

 
Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s sister), as well as art critics Clive Bell (Vanessa’s husband) and

Roger Fry. The latter two were the primary proponents of the aesthetic doctrines of

formalism and post-impressionist paintings in England. For the effects of formalism on

Woolf, see David Dowling, Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf.

For Woolf’s feminist revision of formalism, see Christopher Reed, “Through Formalism:

Feminism and Virginia Woolf’s Relation to Bloomsbury Aesthetics.”

3
For a succinct but useful survey of the development of this scholarship, see the

introductory section of Tammy Clewell, 197-99. Mark Spilka’s study is representative of

the biographical approach that reads Woolf’s texts as symptomatic of her unresolved

mourning; John Mepham, on the other hand, is instrumental in swerving the focus of the

discussion from personal significance to the correlation between literary form, mourning,

and the socio-cultural crisis of Woolf’s time. In addition to Clewell and Smythe, whom I

quote, Susan Bennett Smith attends to Woolf’s attempt to offer a “defeminized and

demedicalized model of grief practices” distinctive from the norm of Victorian grief work

(323).
4
Smythe coins the term “fiction-elegy” for what she sees as Woolf’s innovated

form of the novel that responds to the need for consolation and psychological expression,

a task for which Victorian social and literary conventions are no longer competent (65).

The correlation of literary form and expression of grief is supported by Woolf’s own

suggestive diary entry: “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to

supplant “novel.” A new---- by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” (Diary vol. 3 34).
   181

 
5
In addition to Smythe (74) and Susan Dick (193), whom I quote, see also

Michael Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic

Form from Conrad to Woolf (210).

6
Although I take to task critics such as Dick for conflating memory and artistic

creation, Dick’s study offers a useful survey of memory as theme and structuring device

in Woolf’s texts, from early short stories up to Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. For

a comparison of how memory representation functions differently for Lily, Cam and

James in Lighthouse, see Dick (193-95).

7
The conflation of memory and artistic creation, in turn, may contribute to the

assessment of Lighthouse as contrived formalism. Indeed, having remarked on Lily’s

simultaneous preoccupation “with both her painting and the past,” Dick herself raises two

potential objections despite her own conflation of memory and artistic creation:

The reader may feel that Woolf is straining her fiction here somewhat, that

she is so interested in exploring the process by which life is transformed

into art that she becomes more discursive than dramatic and that the “bolts

of iron” come rather too close to the surface. One may also feel that Woolf

faces a difficulty she doesn’t completely overcome in relating Lily’s

memories of scenes from the past to her creation of an abstract painting.

(192)
8
Like many of Woolf’s other essays, “Character in Fiction” went through several

avatars in its history of publication. It began as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” published

in 1923, which Woolf revised in 1924 into a lecture that she delivered before Cambridge

Heretics Society, under the title “Character in Fiction.” The lecture was then again
   182

 
substantially revised into the final version of “Character in Fiction,” published in 1924.

“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” the lecture of “Character in Fiction,” and the final

version of “Character in Fiction” are hereafter cited in parentheses, abbreviated

respectively as MBMB, CIF lecture, and CIF.

9
Woolf’s essay is a feminist argument in narrative form, staging suggestive

details to raise “questions of representation, history and sexual difference” (Bowlby 3-4).

As Rachel Bowlby remarks, the “unfinished third-class railway journey” from Richmond

to Waterloo is a trip “from the periphery to the center of London,” a metaphor for

Woolf’s call for the primacy of women’s literature (Bowlby 4). The detail that Mrs.

Brown alights before the novelist has a chance to complete her sketch, moreover,

foregrounds the urgency for the timely salvage of characters such as the pauperized,

senile Mrs. Brown, traditionally underrepresented and ill-treated by the violent, largely

masculine, literary convention (Bowlby 10).

10
Although Levinas would probably have reservations about an analogy between

the ethical encounter with the other person and literature as encounter described by

Woolf, it is worth noting that Levinas also describes the face with a ghostly quality: “the

phenomenon which is the apparition of the other is also a face” (“Trace” 351).
11
Although Freud’s normative mourning is often critiqued for its totalizing

tendency, one of his descriptions of the resuscitation of the lost other in memory presents

a potential for an argument against himself: “The task is now carried through bit by

bit . . . . Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object

is brought up and hyper-cathected” (“Mourning” 166, emphasis added). Suggestive of

this potential deconstruction of his mourning discourse, Freud’s phrase “bit by bit”
   183

 
resonates with Lily’s “one by one” (L 47). For a critique of Freud’s discourse of

mourning, see Kathleen Woodward, “Freud and Barthes: Theorizing Mourning,

Sustaining Grief,” which, as the title suggests, draws resources from Roland Barthes

rather than Derrida.

12
This is Levinas’s description of Heidegger, his former teacher, in an interview

titled “The Philosopher and Death.” In the interview, Levinas remarks that Heidegger

“referred philosophical thought to death most extensively;” that he “deduces all thinkable

signification from the attitude of man in regard to his own death” (“Philosopher”122,

126). Death occupies a prominent position in both Levinas’s and Heidegger’s thoughts,

but Levinas’s turn towards the other, which distinguishes him from Heidegger in general,

also sets them apart regarding the matter of death. While Heidegger attends to death as

the subject’s ownmost reality, Levinas finds in the death of the other the source of ethics:

“Is there no thinking that goes beyond my own death, toward the death of the other man,

and does the human not consist precisely in thinking beyond its own death? . . . . But in

every death to which one attends, and in each approach of someone who is mortal, the

resonances of this extraordinary unknown are heard. An event the significance of which

is infinite, and the emotion of which is thoroughly ethical” (“Philosopher” 126)

13
In his earlier writings on textuality, Derrida already begins to consider the

significance of death: “the possibility of the sign is this relationship with death” (Speech

and Phenomena 54, qtd. in Attridge, Reading 97). What he stresses, as Attridge explains,

is “the structural implication of death in any textual entity whose operation depends on its

inbuilt ability to survive beyond the moral existence of its producer or addressee”

(Reading 97).
   184

 
14
For other examples of criticisms that read Lighthouse as a contestation between

the feminine principle represented by Mrs. Ramsay and the masculine principle

represented by Mr. Ramsay, see Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on

Virginia Woolf; Jean Alexander, The Venture of Form in the Novels of Virginia Woolf;

and Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject.
15
The complicity of traditional womanhood in a patriarchy that ramifies into

militarism and fascism is, of course, the central concern of Woolf’s Three Guineas. For a

thorough examination of Woolf’s discussion of maternity and fascism, see Erin G.

Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (136-86).

16
The pre-oedipal mother-child symbiosis is an important theme that Julia

Kristeva starts to develop in her early Revolution in Poetic Language through her trilogy

in the 1980’s: The Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, and Black Sun. In Black Sun,

melancholia is diagnosed as the inability to establish a symbolic separation from the

mother.
17
Woolf says in A Room of One’s Own that “the mind of an artist, in order to

achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be

incandescent. . . . There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed” (56).

She takes Shakespeare as an quintessential example: “All desire to protest, to preach, to

proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or

grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free

and unimpeded” (56-57).

Notes to Chapter IV
   185

 
1
T. S. Eliot, who edited Nightwood and saw through its publication, is among the

first to point out the novel’s ambivalence in relation to generic classification. In his

introduction to the first edition of Nightwood published in England, he opines that

Nightwood would “appeal primarily to readers of poetry” because “it is so good a novel

that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it” (“Introduction” xi, xii).
2
Levinas: “Instead of obtaining this remission [from being] through the

impossible dissolution of hypostasis, one accomplishes it through the son. It is thus not

according to the category of cause, but according to the category of the father that

freedom comes about and time is accomplished” (TO 91).

3
In From Existence to the Existents, Levinas similarly states: “The plane of eros

allows us to see that the other par excellence is the feminine” (EE 85).
4
Levinas: “The human I is posited in fraternity: that all men are brothers is not

added to man as a moral conquest, but constitutes his ipseity. Because my position as an I

is effectuated already in fraternity the face can present itself to me as a face. The relation

with the face in fraternity, where in his turn the Other appears in solidarity with all the

others, constitutes the social order, the reference of every dialogue to the third party by

which the We—or the parti—encompasses the face to face opposition, opens the erotic

upon a social life, all signifyingness and decency, which encompasses the structure of the

family itself” (TI 279-80).

5
The comparison of the accounts of fatherhood by Freud, Lacan, and Levinas is

suggested by Kelly Oliver, “Paternal Election and the Absent Father” (224-25).
6
Levinas defines fecundity with the following statement: “Both my own and non-

mine, a possibility of myself but also a possibility of the other, of the Beloved, my future
   186

 
does not enter into the logical essence of the possible. The relation with such a future,

irreducible to the power over possibles, we shall call fecundity” (TI 267). Note that here

he does acknowledge the child as “a possibility . . . of the Beloved,” but he never

discusses the mother-child relation with the same elaboration and intensity of his

discussion of paternity.
7
For Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, homosexuality was not only a perversion, but also a

sign of racial degeneration. For a discussion of Nightwood in the context of the

degeneration theory prevailing in the nineteenth century, especially in relation to Ellis

and Krafft-Ebing, see Dana Seitler, “Down on All Fours: Atavistic Perversions and the

Science of Desire from Frank Norris to Djuna Barnes.”

8
Another example of desire-oriented narrative study is Robert Scholes, who

compares the development of narrative to an “orgastic rhythm of tumescence and

detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and

consummation” (qtd. in de Lauretis, “Desire” 108).

9
The phrase that forms part of the title to the present chapter, “odd faces of love,”

is taken from a letter Barnes wrote to friend and editor, Emily Coleman. It has been

widely accepted that the lesbian story in Nightwood is highly autobiographical: Barnes

herself is the character Nora Flood, who loses her lover Robin Vote (Thelma Wood in

real life) to Jenny Petherbridge (Henriette Metcalf in real life). In the letter to Coleman,

Barnes spoke of her use of the novel as a means of retaliation on Metcalf: “for her I did

not write of with love or one or other of its odd faces” (qtd. in n. 58.2, Barnes 221).

Whereas it is antagonism that concerned Barnes in the letter, I borrow the phrase to, first,

suggest the anomaly and polymorphism of the expressions of desire; and to, second,
   187

 
evoke both Levinas’s use of the face and his denial of the face to the feminine other and

the animal, which will be the major concern in the next section.
10
For a study of Nightwood in relation to fascist ideology and aesthetics, see Erin

G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (42-85).

11
Irigaray’s protest against Levinas’s assignment of the woman to the realm of

the animal recurs in several passages in the same essay, including: “When the lover

relegates her to the realm of infancy, animality, or maternity, one aspect of this mystery,

the relation to the cosmos, is not brought to light” (Ethics 195); “Is she like a child or an

animal in his eyes? Irresponsible, so that he can regain his freedom” (Ethics 197); and,

“When the beloved woman presents herself or appears to the male lover as a paradise to

be referred back to infancy and animality, then the act of love leads not only to profaning,

but also to a destruction, a fall” (Ethics 198).

12
Levinas recounts the anecdote of the dog in a brief article, “The Name of a Dog,

or Natural Rights” (151-53).

13
In her collection of essays, The Straight Mind: And other Essays, Wittig

famously proclaims that “Lesbians are not women,” in order to advocate “a change of

perspective” from the “heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic

systems” (36).
   188

 
Bibliography

Alexander, Jean. The Venture of Form in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Port Washington,

NY: Kennikat, 1974.

Alford, C. Fred. Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis. Middletown, CT:

Weslyan University, 2002.

Allen, Carolyn. “‘Dressing the Unknowable in the Garments of the Known’: The Style of

Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood.” Women’s Language and Style. Ed. Douglas Butturft

and Edmund E. Epstein. Akron: L & S Books, 1978. 106-17.

---. “The Erotics of Nora’s Narrative in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.” Signs 19 (1993):

177-200.

Attridge, Derek. Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh UP, 2010.

---. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts. 1936. Ed. Cheryl J.

Plumb. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 2007.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and

Wang, 1975.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,

1993.

Benjamin, Andrew. Of Jews and Animals. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.

Boone, Joseph Allen. Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

   189

 
Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California

P, 1988.

Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1984.

Bruns, Gerald L. On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly. New

York: Fordham UP, 2006.

Buell, Lawrence. “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA 114 (1999): 7-19.

Carlston, Erin G. Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity.

Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.

Chanter, Tina. Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers. New York:

Routledge, 1995.

Clark, David. “On Being ‘the Last Kantian in Nazi Germany’: Dwelling with Animals

after Levinas.” Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject. Ed. Barbara Gabriel and

Susan Ilcan. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004. 41-74.

Clayton, Jay. “Narrative and Theories of Desire.” Critical Inquiry 16 (1989): 33-53.

Clewell, Tammy. “Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, the Great War, and Modernist

Mourning.” Modern Fiction Studies 50 (2004): 197-223.

Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford, UK:

Blackwell, 1992.

Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack. “Preface: Reading Literature and the Ethics of

Criticism.” Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary
   190

 
Theory. Ed. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia.

ix-xiv.

De Lauretis, Teresa. “Desire in Narrative.” Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. 103-57.

---. “Nightwood and the ‘Terror of Uncertain Signs.’” Critical Inquiry 34 (2008): 117-29.

---. “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation.” Theater Journal 40 (1988): 155-

77.

Derrida, Jacques. “By Force of Mourning.” The Work of Mourning. Trans. Pascale-Anne

Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. 139-64.

---. “Mnemosyne.” Memoires for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay. New York:

Columbia UP, 1986. 1-44.

---. Speech and Phenomenon and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans.

David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1973.

Dick, Susan. “The Tunnelling Process: Some Aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Use of

Memory and the Past.” Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays. Ed. Patricia Clements

and Isobel Grundy. London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1983.

176-99.

Dowling, David. Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf. London:

Macmillan, 1985.

Eaglestone, Robert. Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,

1997.
   191

 
Eichner, Hans. “Against the Grain: Huysmans’ À Rebours, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and

Hofmannsthal’s Der Tor Und Der Tod.” Narrative Ironies. Ed. Raymond A. Prier

and Gerald Gillespie. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 191-206.

Eliot, T. S. Introduction. Nightwood. New York: New Directions, 1937. xi-xvi.

---. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and

Criticism. 1919. London: Methuen, 1950. 47-59.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego Ideal).” The Ego and the Id. New

York: W. W. Norton, 1960. 18-29.

---. “Mourning and Melancholia.” General Psychological Theory: Papers on

Metaphychology. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. 164-79.

Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics, and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London:

Routledge, 1999.

Gillespie, Michael Patrick. “Ethics and Aesthetics in The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Ed. C. George Sandulescu. Gerrards Cross, UK:

Rowman and Littlefield, 1994. 137-55.

Hughes, Robert. Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language. Albany: SUNY P, 2010.

Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill.

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.

---. “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love.” Trans. Margaret

Whitford. Re-Reading Levinas. Ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. 109-18.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1917. Ware, UK: Wordsworth,

1992.
   192

 
Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Mitchell

Guberman. New York: Columbia UP. 201-24.

Lee, Judith. “Nightwood: ‘The Sweetest Lie.’” Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of

Djuna Barnes. Ed. Mary Lynn Broe. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP. 207-18.

Leibman, Sheldon W. “Character Design in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Studies in the

Novel 31 (1999): 296-316.

Levenson, Michael. Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic

Form from Conrad to Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Levinas, Emmanuel. “Diachrony and Representation.” Time and the Other and

Additional Essays. 1947. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987.

97-120.

---. Existence and Existents. 1947. Trans. Alphoneso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP,

1988.

---. “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights.” Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.151-53.

---. Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence. 1974. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:

Duquesne UP, 1998.

---. “The Paradox of Morality.” The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. Trans.

Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright. Ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood.

London and New York: Routledge. 168-80.

---. “The Philosopher and Death.” Is it Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel

Levinas. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.121-

39.
   193

 
---. “The Reality and Its Shadow.” The Levinas Reader. Ed. Sean Hand. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1989. 129-43.

---. “Time and the Other.” Time and the Other and Additional Essays. 1948. Trans.

Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987. 39-94.

---. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. 1961. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.

Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.

---. “The Trace of the Other.” Deconstruction in Context. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Ed.

Mark Taylor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 345-59.

Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

2007.

Llewelyn, John. “Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal).” Re-

Reading Levinas. Ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. Bloomington and

Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991. 234-45.

---. Emmanuel Levinas: A Genealogy of Ethics. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Manganiello, Dominic. “Ethics and Aesthetics in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The

Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 9 (1983): 25-33.

Martins, Susana S. “Gender Trouble and Lesbian Desire in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.”

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 20 (1999): 108-26.

Mason, Stuart. Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality: A Record of the Discussion Which

Followed the Publication of Dorian Gray. 1907. New York: Haskell House, 1971.

Maugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage. 1915. New York: Doubleday, 1936.

   194

 
Mepham, John. “Mourning and Modernism.” Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays. Ed.

Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy. London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes

& Noble, 1983. 137-56.

Miller, J. Hillis. “How to Be ‘In Tune with the Right’ in The Golden Bowl.” Mapping the

Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Eds. Todd F. Davis

and Kenneth Womack. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia. 271-85.

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Briton, UK:

Harvester, 1987.

Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,

1995.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism.”

Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Ed.

Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia. 59-79.

---. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.

---. “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

New Literary History 26 (1995): 731-53.

Oliver, Kelly. “Paternal Election and the Absent Father.” Feminist Interpretations of

Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Tina Chanter. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP,

2001. 224-40.

Peters, John G. “Style and Art in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: Form as Content.”

Victorian Review 25 (1999): 1-13.

   195

 
Plumb, Cheryl J. Introduction. Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts.

1936. Djuna Barnes. Ed. Cheryl J. Plumb. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.

2007. vii-xxvi.

Pochoda, Elizabeth. “Style’s Hoax: A Reading of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.” Twentieth

Century Literature 22 (1976): 179-91.

Reed, Christopher. “Through Formalism: Feminism and Virginia Woolf’s Relation to

Bloomsbury Aesthetics.” Twentieth Century Literature 38 (1992): 20-43.

Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Seitler, Dana. “Down on All Fours: Atavistic Perversions and the Science of Desire from

Frank Norris to Djuna Barnes.” American Literature 73 (2001): 525-62.

Spilka, Mark. Virginia Woolf’s Quarrel with Grieving. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1980.

Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot and the Use of Memory. London: Associated UP, 1996.

Smith, Susan Bennett. “Reinventing Grief Work: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist

Representations of Mourning in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth-

Century Literature 41 (1995): 310-27.

Smythe, Karen. “Virginia Woolf’s Elegiac Enterprise.” A Forum on the Fiction 26 (1992):

64-79.

Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Two Principles of Narrative.” Genres in Discourse. Trans.

Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 27-38.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” Collected Works of Oscar Wilde. Hertfordshire:

Wordsworth, 1997. 919-44.

---. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. London and New York: Penguin, 2003.

---. Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1979.
   196

 
---. “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Other

Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. 227-71.

Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind: And Other Essays. New York and London:

Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

Woodward, Kathleen. “Freud and Barthes: Theorizing Mourning, Sustaining Grief.”

Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 13

(1991): 93-110.

Woolf, Virginia. “Character in Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919-1924.

Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1991. 420-38.

---. “Character in Fiction.” Lecture delivered to the Cambridge Heretics Society. The

Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London:

Hogarth, 1991. 502-17.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

---. To the Lighthouse. 1927. San Diego: Harcourt, 1981.

---.“Modern Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1925-1928. Ed. Andrew

McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1991.157-64.

---. “Modern Novel.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew

McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1991. 30-37.

---. “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919-1924. Ed.

Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1991. 384-89.

---. “Profession for Women.” Women and Writing. Orlando: Harcourt, 1980. 57-63.

---. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, 1989.

   197

 
---. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. 64-137.

Wyschogrod, Edith. “The Art in Ethics: Aesthetics, Objectivity, and Alterity in the

Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.” Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of

Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Ed. Adriaan T.

Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 137-48.

Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. “Encounters Possible and Impossible: Derrida and Butler on

Mourning.” Philosophy Today 50 (2006). 144-56.

---. “Otherwise than Universal: On Andrew Benjamin’s Of Jews and Animals.”

Postmodern Culture 20 (2010): n. pag. Web. 1 Nov. 2011.