Olsson, Ulf. Silence and Subject in Modern Literature

Silence and Subject in Modern Literature
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Silence and Subject in
Modern Literature
Spoken Violence
Ulf Olsson
© Ulf Olsson 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-35098-5
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For Bruno
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Cordelia’s Silence, or Spoken Violence 1

1 The Exemplary Becomes Problematic, or Gendered
Silence: Austen’s Mansfield Park 35
2 The Secrets of Silence: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter,
Musil’s ‘Tonka’ 58
3 Refusal, or The Mute Provocateurs: Melville’s Bartleby
Meets Gombrowicz’s Ivona 82
4 The Other of Monologue: Strindberg, Camus, Beckett 103
5 Interrogation, or Forced to Silence: Rankin, Harris,
Pinter, Duras 125
6 Literature as Coerced Speech: Handke’s Kaspar 149
7 Epilogue: The Silence of the Sirens 163
Notes 175
Bibliography 202
Index 212
vii
Acknowledgements
This is a study in the darker sides of language: speech as an act of

violence, producing pain. But there is also a brighter side to language,
a dialogic productivity that is the foundation for any intellectual effort.
And sometimes, when the going gets tough, you are lucky enough to
have friends and colleagues to pull you along, who push you further –
and without whose dialogic help and support, generosity and expertise,
no book would have been written.
In Stockholm, those friends were Magnus Florin and Håkan Rehnberg,
as well as my colleagues Thomas Götselius and Maria Andersson at the
Department of Literature and History of Ideas, Stockholm University.
I am also grateful to Claudia Lindén for the opportunity to present some
of my thoughts from this book at Södertörn University.
I enjoyed a semester as a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008, and benefited from the
support of Mara Wade of the Department of Germanic Languages
and Literatures, as well as from discussions with her colleagues
Anna Stenport and Cori Crane: there, this book started to become
possible.
Northern California has these last years become my home away
from home, due to the unfailing support of colleagues and friends
at the University of California, Berkeley: at the Department of
Scandinavian, Linda Haverty Rugg, Karin Sanders and Mark Sandberg;
as well as Victoria Kahn and Eric Naiman at the Department of
Comparative Literature. Much needed support was generously given
me by Moriah van Vleet. At the University of California, Berkeley I
also now and then met with the Frankfurt School Reading Group, in
which various members, but Sookyoung Lee in special, have contrib-
uted to my work.
I have benefited from generous funding from Magnus Bergvall’s
Foundation and Åke Wiberg’s Foundation. My employer, the Department
of Literature and History of Ideas at Stockholm University, has provided
both understanding and financial means.
An anonymous reader for Palgrave Macmillan pointed to holes that
needed to be filled.
The Grateful Dead supplied the music that kept me working.
viii
Acknowledgements ix
Writing in a foreign language makes special demands on you – and

on your readers. This book would never have materialized without the
support, hard work, intellectual energy and loving enthusiasm shown it
by my wife, Linda Haverty Rugg. She devoted both time and knowledge
to this book, and her support made all the difference.
This book is dedicated to my son, Bruno.
Introduction: Cordelia’s Silence,
or Spoken Violence
Cordelia, of Shakespeare’s King Lear, may stand as the embodiment of

a specific literary type: the silent or taciturn figure. The situation (act 1,
scene 1) is well known: Cordelia’s father, the King, is about to divide up his
kingdom into three parts, determined by how each daughter will express
her love for him. His oldest daughter, Goneril, starts her declaration with
the phrase ‘I do love you more than word can wield the matter’, referring
to an emotion too powerful to put into words – but a power that can only
be expressed in words: these words. His second daughter, Regan, agrees
with her sister Goneril, at the same time as she raises the bid: ‘I am made
of that self mettle as my sister, And prize me at her worth. In my true heart
I find she names my very deed of love: Only she comes too short.’ While
the elder sisters are making their declarations, we hear Cordelia speaking
to herself: ‘What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.’
Be silent: Goneril and Regan are linguistically excessive in their desire
to gain whatever they can get from their father – but Cordelia, when
asked by her father what she can say to show how much she loves him,
just states: ‘Nothing, my Lord.’ And she repeats it: ‘Nothing.’ While
Goneril and Regan add words in order to say that they cannot express
themselves fully in words, Cordelia instead reduces her statement
almost to silence. But only almost.
Reduction, then, is Cordelia’s response to the excess of her sisters. But
it seems impossible for her to keep to her promise to herself: she cannot
remain silent. Her resistance to language must be formulated in words
for it to materialize, become real. Lear does not accept her answer, and
through questions, he forces Cordelia to speak out. While she does not
follow her sisters’ example, she still has to enter the dialogue that is
forced upon her. And the situation as such seems to demand speech:
land shall be divided and distributed, power is negotiated.
1
2 Silence and Subject in Modern Literature
In making Cordelia speak, Lear uses first her own word: he returns
her answer ‘Nothing’ to her, adding only a question mark to it. He shows
himself upset – ‘How, how, Cordelia?’ – and puts before her a question
aimed at scrutinizing and controlling her sincerity – ‘But goes thy
heart with this?’ – before he finally forces his own image of her upon
her, but still in the form of a question: ‘So young, and so untender?’
Cordelia, in her last line of this dialogue, refutes his definition of her,
and this time it is she who repeats parts of his words: ‘So young, my
lord, and true.’
The dialogic exchange between Lear and Cordelia includes
questions of power and identity, but also of language. The figure that
Shakespeare constructs here is one that earlier literature knew, and
that later literature will elaborate upon: excessive or rhetorical speech
is untrue and false – while a minimum of speech or even silence is, at
least seemingly, true and sincere. Silence is, of course, golden: there are
many situations in which silence is not only accepted or respected, but
even looked upon as a token of the silent person’s sincerity, austerity
and, in general, high moral standards; or institutionalized situations,
such as practices performed within monasteries or prisons, schools
and hospitals, where silence is required or desired. Still, there are
many situations where silence, on the contrary, is not accepted,
where it seems to threaten an order based upon the circulation of
speech. Literature itself has to ‘speak’,1 it cannot remain silent if it
wants to be literature, and in this process of exploring the implica-
tions of silence, literature also shows us how the subject is recognized
only if speaking. The one that remains silent will interrupt the dis-
tribution or circulation of speech, which is a fundamental aspect of
subject formation, or subjectification, and must therefore be brought
to speech, enticed or forced to speak its mind. In representing the
silent figure, literature must represent and perhaps itself even per-
form a linguistic violence directed at that same figure in order to
make it speak.
This, then, is the basic hypothesis from which this work emanates:
literature performs an act of violence in creating, as well as killing,
its characters, and in the illusion that those characters actually
have some kind of existence. Literature writes its characters only
in order to kill them – and to kill itself. What we are reading is not
only representations of linguistic violence; we are as readers always
involved in, engaged in, spoken violence. A second hypothesis is
that this violent dimension of literature, with modernity and the
autonomy of literature, becomes even more crucial: autonomy
Introduction: Cordelia’s Silence, Spoken Violence 3
produces literature as a margin where it sees itself, reflects upon

itself – an act of linguistic violence performed upon itself. A third
hypothesis is that linguistic violence has to do with the formation
of a subject: language is forced upon the individual so the s/he must
confess her/himself as a subject, and that it is precisely this subjecti-
fication that makes spoken violence deadly. It is, then, with the tran-
sition from sovereign power to disciplinary power, which demands
that every subject expresses her or his submission to and inclusion in
disciplinary relations of power, that silence becomes an acute social
problem, in its refusal to express obedience, as well as a possibility
of resistance for literature. Literature also functions as an historical
archive, in which silence is actually written down and documented:
therefore, literature, as a textual or written medium, can generate a
silence that, perhaps paradoxically, speaks.
If we return to the scene with Cordelia in King Lear, we might notice
that it takes Shakespeare only a few more lines to transform her into
someone that almost looks and talks like an orator – her defence of her
refusal to speak becomes elaborated, it becomes – precisely – a speech:
I yet beseech your majesty,

If for I want that glib and oily art
To speak and purpose not – since what I well intend,
I’ll do’t before I speak – that you make known
It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness,
No unchaste action or dishonoured step,
That hath deprived me of your grace and favour,
But even for want of that for which I am richer –
A still soliciting eye and such a tongue
That I am glad I have not – though not to have it
Hath lost me in your liking.2
Glad not to be able to invest in the excessive rhetoric of her sisters,

Cordelia still has to say it out loud: she cannot be allowed to keep
silent – if she did, Shakespeare would have no play. But she quickly
learns to speak, by the violence that is exercised on her when Lear forces
his definition of her upon her, and when riches and power are discussed
by those interested in taking whatever power there is. The ‘glib and oily
art’ of spoken language is in reality the medium through which the
acting persons, as well as human beings, become what can be called
subjects, that is, through which they conquer and simultaneously are
given the agency that is a prerequisite of power.
Aspects of Silence and Violence
Shakespeare’s depiction of Cordelia’s silence shows us silence as an

intentional act of refusal or even protest: the silent figure is one that
does not want to be part of or take part in the circulation of speech.
But it also represents the necessity to make that person speak, so that
dialogue and the linguistic circulation of symbolic value is maintained,
as well as the strategy, employed by Lear, that makes or forces Cordelia
to speak. But there is a limit in Shakespeare that modern literature will
not respect: Cordelia’s silence and speech is related to an instrumental
goal, the access to power. In modern literature, the problem of the silent
character seems to have a much wider significance, involving the whole
of that person and their place within a social hierarchy. With the
establishment and hegemony of bourgeois culture in the eighteenth
century, the relation between the individual and subject status will be
enacted and performed constantly, and not only at dramatic, crucial
moments. Modern literature (which in this book starts with Jane Austen
and the early nineteenth century) will constantly return to this complex
of problems surrounding the individual and language, creating silences
much more radical than Cordelia’s and showing, in much more detail,
how the silent figure is forced to speak, and under which conditions
that violence is part of the formation of a subject, at once powerful and
subordinate.
The present volume is thus a study in subjectification, the everlasting
process of forcing human beings into the process of becoming subjects.
John Cage may certainly be right in that a ‘sound has no legs to stand
on’, but on the other hand, sounds always seem to be searching for
bodies to occupy.3 My rather wide ambition will, I hope, materialize
as my study becomes focused upon the struggle between speech and
silence, a struggle that cannot be described as a simple dichotomy: in
literature, silence, as well as speech, is always already written. And one
could here also refer to Foucault’s basic statement on ‘what precedes
all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous streaming of
language’.4 There is even in literature no absolute silence; silence is
not the absolute opposite of writing nor of represented speech: it is an
effect as well as part of them both. Or, as John Cage put it in a lecture:
‘What we re-quire is / silence; but what silence requires / is that I go
on talking … and the / words make help make the / silences.’5 But the
relationship between speech and silence is seldom a peaceful or harmo-
nious one. Only rarely is silence wished for, and ‘rewarded only when
signifying obedience or proper subordination’.6 Silence can, outside
of certain situations, become a threat against the hegemonic rule of

speech, and it must therefore be controlled. In forcing the silent person
to speak, language becomes violent: it torments the one forced to speak.
It might be said that language as such is, per definition, violent. And
there might be some truth to such a position: through language, we give
form to ourselves and to others, we define and name the surrounding
world. In these acts, language takes on an irresistible character; not that
we have to agree, but in that we have to share language as the way,
and the only way, through which we relate to ourselves and others.7
But we are caught in language, spoken or of other symbolic forms.
Normally, language helps through life, but sometimes it dawns on us
that we are actually caught in, produced and designed by language.
Slavoj Žižek sees the violent dimension of language in its naming of the
world, but he also goes further, when stating that language ‘simplifies
the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the
thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as
autonomous’.8 What Žižek writes – and his imagery of dismemberment
and unity suggests that he is talking not only of things but also of
human bodies – is actually nothing other than a repetition of the
biblical myth of the Fall: before the Fall, everything was one happy
‘organic unity’ – but with the introduction of language into this Eden
of unity, everything fell into ‘autonomous parts’. But one could also
say that language, instead of simplifying, complicates ‘the thing’ – and
that designated thing might then be also a human being – and makes
it possible for us to observe it from different perspectives, include it in
different discourses, discuss it, negotiate it, as a whole as well as in its
parts. Language thus makes transportation of meaning possible. Or,
as Michael Toolan puts it, ‘language is essentially a flexible practice,
shaped by profound interacting principles of self-awareness, normativ-
ity, other orientedness, and rational risk taking’.9 Still, it is true – and
it is a position that this book tries to work from – that language has a
violent feature in its potential for giving form to both its referent and
its addressee, as well as (and then not the least) to its speaker. Literature
is one of the media through which linguistic forming of the subject not
only materializes, but also becomes possible to study in detail: literature
is one of the archives in which documentation of subjectification is
stored.
Violence in this context designates an act of giving form to or forcing
form upon an object.10 This definition is also analogous to the most
basic definition of ‘power’ that I have found in Michel Foucault’s oeuvre:
the exercise of power is ‘a way in which some act on others’.11 But this
is not an intrinsic feature of language, rather an effect of the circulation

of language, its actual use in everyday life: linguistic violence, as well as
physical violence, is situated within power relations. A philosopher who
has emphasized this is, of course, Nietzsche: ‘The seigneurial privilege of
giving names even allows us to conceive of the origin of language itself
as a manifestation of the power of the rulers: they say “this is so and
so”, they set their seal on everything and every occurrence with a sound
and thereby take possession of it, as it were.’12 Not only does Nietzsche
situate the power of language as an aspect or ‘manifestation’ of political
power, but he also sees how ‘sound’ (‘Laute’) is used in appropriating
an object: sound defines that object and silences alternative ways
of looking at or handling the object. And in uttering the sounds, in
forming the words, man has appropriated the ‘Herrenrecht’, the Lord’s
privilege of giving name, form and identity to all the animals.
The silent figure withdraws from, or resists, form; becomes an
Unknown, which, if the circulation of language and therefore of
power is to remain, must be made to speak. Judith Butler emphasizes
the decisive function of address in the process of subjectification – it
is only by being addressed by others that we give accounts of ourselves
by answering the questions directed at us – but she then also sees the
significance of silence as an answer to address: ‘Silence in these instances
either calls into question the legitimacy of the authority invoked by the
question and the questioner or attempts to circumscribe a domain of
autonomy that cannot or should not be intruded upon by the ques-
tioner.’13 Butler’s observation is important, and the silence she sees must
also be related to the consequences it has to face. In its withdrawal from
form, the silent figure provokes a linguistic violence that is practised in
general, but which, in confronting silence, is enhanced and concen-
trated, and cannot be reduced to Butler’s ‘address’. But maintaining
that it cannot be reduced solely to violence and force, language also
offers possibilities of resistance. And silence, being an essential part of
language, and not something exterior or even alien to it, might be one
pocket of resistance to linguistic rationalization. It is this dialectic of
speech, silence and violence, materialized in different linguistic prac-
tices, that I want to study as they take form (!) in literary texts and how
these forms relate to subjectification. These texts are chosen to serve as
both illustrations and transgressions of the theoretical perspective that
I will be outlining first. The privileging of literature is not principal.
Originally I intended to include discussions of films (Ingmar Bergman’s
The Silence and Persona), art (Luc Tuyman’s painting Silence) and music
(by different composers and artists). But in order to keep the discussion
together and win in concentration, I ended up with these literary texts.

However, the problem of subjectification, speech and silence in no way
is limited only to the arts – but the arts, and literature, are not only
essential parts of social practices, they also serve as documentation of
those practices.
Confessing Oneself
The problem that the silent figure offers a linguistic community is by

no means only an effect of modernity or early modernity. Western
history, at least according to some sources, starts with a traumatic
experience: God withdraws in silence, leaving mankind to its own.
Instead, he will sometimes use human secretaries, like Moses, to get
his words distributed among the people. And some others succeed in
making him speak: foremost among them is perhaps Job. His complaint
over and his accusations against his God are framed within a specific
setting: his speech among his peers has silenced others (Job 11:3), and
he even boasts about this (Job 29:9–16). The men surrounding him also
criticize him not only for silencing others, but also for speaking in vain
(Job 35:16). But Job is not really concerned about his interlocutors on
earth: he is addressing God, trying to make him speak: ‘I cry out to You
for help, but You do not answer me’ (Job 30:20). There is a dialectic
at work in Job’s book, where he engages in an indirect dialogue with
his interlocutors, but only to entice or force God to answer him. And
when God finally, probably exasperated with Job’s nagging, answers Job
from out of the storm, the roles are shifted and God is the one trying
to provoke an answer out of Job: ’Will the faultfinder contend with
the Almighty? Let him who reproves God answer it’ (Job 40:1). Already
from the start, silence was a problem: God’s reticence puts a halt both to
the discovery of the meaning of existence, as well as to the distribution
of earthly goods. Job succeeded in making God answer him, but it was
only a momentary triumph for the speaker: not much has been heard
from the Lord since then, at least not his voice. And this basic silence
in Western culture is climaxed on the cross, when Christ asks his God
and Father: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matt.
27:46). In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Christ returns to
earth, and to mankind, and he walks ‘silently’ among the people, ‘with
a quiet smile of infinite compassion’.14 But Christ descends to earth
during the Inquisition, and he has to face the Grand Inquisitor, who
tells him to remain silent. Instead, the Grand Inquisitor speaks, turning
this encounter into a monologue in which Christ is the accused. To
this, Christ replies by gently kissing the Grand Inquisitor ‘on his
bloodless, ninety-year-old lips’. Thereby, Christ does answer without
speaking, and his answer is a critique of earthly power and its use of
anacrisis. Dostoevsky also uses this episode to say something about the
literary work of art: ‘back then it was customary in poetic works to bring
higher powers down to earth’ – but when Dostoevsky does precisely
that, he has that higher power remain silent, forcing the reader to enter
the agon between speech and silence, earth and heaven.
Situated at the origin of Western culture, the problem of silence
incessantly haunts the Western imagination, and, made into the
opposites of each other, the categories of silence and sound/speech
become useful and profitable in the installation of Western power. Silence
and speech (sound), I said, belong together: they negotiate each other,
relate to and influence each other. But they are also put into circulation
as a decisive difference, in which they take on a binary character: silence
and sound as mutually exclusive. The ultimate value of this binary oppo-
sition is, I would think, its usefulness in separating human from the non-
human, or animal. But this general, dividing aspect of silence and sound
is always historically determined and enacted. A crucial moment in its
history is no doubt the advent of humanism, when the individual – every
individual – is enticed to come out as a speaking and articulating sub-
ject, in direct contrast to the animals and their sounds. The instigation
of a decisive difference between human and animal beings is later also a
constitutive feature of colonial practices.15
But of course ancient Greek philosophy also treats the silent figure
and the problem of meaning in silence, most prominently in Plato.
Where Christianity would build a hierarchy, with man calling his
absent God de profundis, the Greeks situated the problem of silence
among themselves. In the early Platonic dialogue Laches, Socrates has
four interlocutors in his conversation, two of them statesmen, the other
two important military figures, gathered to discuss the problem of cour-
age: is courage a virtue? And what is courage in itself? As R. E. Allen,
among others, has pointed out, the choice of topic is not accidental:
Laches was at the time surrounded by the rumour of having loaned
from or even embezzled money belonging to the military forces, Nicias
was a political friend of Laches, and the elder statesmen are considering
sending their sons to war.16
What matters here is how Socrates speaks to these men, and listens to
them, argues with them. This dialogue is in many ways representative of
important traits in the Socratic dialogue, but it adds to them an original
conclusion, drawn not by Socrates but by Nicias.
Socrates opens up the conversation by saying that he first will just

listen to the others, his preferred silence a sign of respect for his inter-
locutors: ‘But if I should have something to add to what they say, then
will be the time for me to teach and persuade both you and the others’17
(181d). So in the second part of the dialogue, Nicias and Laches give
their respective accounts of how they look at the problem, and it is not
until they have stated their respective standpoints that Socrates
engages in the dialogue in order to add to their reflections. It happens
a couple of times during the dialogue that Socrates gives room for the
others’ accounts, before he steps in again and puts their opinions to
test. The additions to the dialogue performed by Socrates fuel the
conversation and keep it going, but they are also examples of a fun-
damental characteristic of language: it is a consuming machinery that
feeds off an ever-increasing amount of words, sentences, statements,
discourses … . ‘Consuming’, since it can correct words only by adding
other words to those already spoken.
This Socratic testing has several features. One, for instance, is that
Socrates tries to summarize his interlocutor’s view on a certain problem:
‘What’s that, Lysimachus? Do you intend to cast your vote for whatever
position is approved by the majority of us?’(184d). By using this and
other conversational techniques, Socrates will keep his interlocutor talk-
ing – he forces him, more or less gently, into speaking, here by stating to
him what his intentions are (‘You intend …’), forcing him to enter the
linguistic circulation, in order to correct or agree with Socrates. But in
this process, the interlocutor will be speaking not only about the given
topic for the dialogue – that topic will, as Nicias remarks in the middle
of the conversation, start to expand considerably:
You don’t appear to me to know that whoever comes into close

contact with Socrates and associates with him in conversation must
necessarily, even if he began by conversing about something quite
different in the first place, keep on being led about by the man’s
arguments until he submits to answering questions about himself
concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived
hitherto. (187e–188a)
If Nicias is correct in his observation, one of the fundamental basics

of Western dialogue and conversation aims at, or has the function of,
making the other say more than he or she intended to. He or she will
in conversation not only discuss and look at a given topic, he or she
will and must, in different ways and by different means, confess him- or
herself. It seems to me important to suggest here an historical aspect:

under sovereign power, the individual confesses his obedience, and
hence his subject status, to the tyrant in the form of oaths of loyalty,
and to the Lord in the form of oaths of faith. Thoroughly ritualized,
these public confessions are recurrent and repeated. But in bourgeois
society, with its disciplinary power, the individual confesses his or her
subject status constantly, and in forms that seem more individualized
than ritualized: everyday conversation is one such form. Therefore,
linguistic practices become more important, and symbolic gestures lose
some (but not all) of their impact, allowing for individualized forms of
confession. What we have at hand, then, is a capacity inherent in lan-
guage that might be called ‘anthropological’, and which separates the
speaker from non-speaking entities such as animals. But this separation
always takes place in discourse, in language as practised under different
historical conditions.
What Laches teaches us is that language never comes alone: when
speaking, we not only enter language and share it with our interlocu-
tors, we also, intentionally or not, give ‘an account’ of ourselves. This
aspect of speech has been emphasized by Michel Foucault:
in producing the event of the utterance the subject modifies, or

affirms, or anyway determines and clarifies his mode of being insofar
as he speaks – that characterizes a type of facts of discourse … . The
analysis of these facts of discourse, which show how the very event
of the enunciation may affect the enunciator’s being, is what we
could call – removing all pathos from the word – the ‘dramatics’ of
discourse.18
In speaking, we state ourselves – and Socrates questions the one

hesitant to speak since language must be used to declare ourselves as
subjects. Phrasing ourselves as grammatical subjects of the sentence –
‘I will’, ‘I shall’, ‘I intend’ – we also subordinate ourselves not only
to the rules of language, but also to the rules of the speech situation.
And the one unwilling to speak his mind must be persuaded to speak
up, otherwise he or she will have a chance of escaping the linguis-
tic or spoken violence that forms the subject. Socrates speaks of his
ambition to ‘teach and persuade’, and persuasion, as enacted in the
Socratic dialogues, is a form of spoken violence: the one persuading
intrudes upon the other, does not accept his or her stand, but uses his
linguistic skills to turn his interlocutor ‘round and round’, as Nicias
described Socrates’ method. This turning around of the interlocutor
is the forcing of new form upon that material that is the silent or more
withdrawn and taciturn person.
That method seems at first glance to be restricted to language and
dialogue. But dialogue not only includes violent aspects of language,
such as threats or contempt, but also invites physical violence as a possible
route for a dialogue to take. Aristotle writes: ‘Let rhetoric be [defined as] an
ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion.’19
Rhetoric, then, is not persuasion as such, but a way to ‘see the available
means of persuasion in each case’, as Aristotle also writes.20 In order, then,
to read and comprehend what is at stake in literary representations of this
silent figure, we must look to the particular case, to the specific situation
in which that person is addressed, and we must observe not only the
words used, but also those means of persuasion that this situation, this
‘total speech situation’, opens up to. J. L. Austin’s statement that we
‘must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued – the
total speech-act’, may originally be a way of distinguishing and under-
standing how statements may go wrong, but will here be used also as a
more general dictum for the analysis of literary texts, where the total-
ity of the situation is at once both simpler and more complex than in
everyday conversation.21
Anacrisis
In its intention of making the other speak, the Socratic persuasion is

not only a linguistically formed argument, but it is also directed towards
the interlocutor as a person. It is not only his ideas, false or true, that
Socratic dialogue aims at disclosing; it is also its relation to the person
that holds this idea, his self-image and his thinking about himself, his
forming of himself.22 Socrates practices elenchus – refutation or cross-
examination – in order to entice his interlocutor to contradict himself,
thereby demonstrating to him the necessity of choosing a more ‘just and
temperate life’.23 This dialogic technique, practised by Socrates, can also
be called anacrisis, a concept that Mikhail Bakhtin defines as ‘a means for
eliciting and provoking the words of one’s interlocutor, forcing him to
express his opinion and express it thoroughly’ and as ‘the provocation
of the word by the word’. Bakhtin then distinguishes between anacrisis
and syncrisis, the latter meaning ‘the juxtaposition of various points of
view on a specific object’, which together ‘dialogize thought’. Bakhtin
also emphasizes what he calls ‘plot situations’, situations that are being
defined by the type of intrigue or story in a text, and he exemplifies
this with the trial in Plato’s Apology. Plot situations may be situations
such as confession, therapy, interrogation; situations founded on and

presupposing the exchange or circulation of speech.24 This means also
that what I here call ‘circulation of speech’ is not necessarily ‘dialogic’
if by that we mean voluntary: speech circulates in many different forms
and under diverse conditions. It is not only plot situations like those
mentioned above that are basically non-dialogic; at the other end of
the spectrum we find word games, and language as nonsensical, that
involve two or more interlocutors engaged in exchanging words and
sounds – but their exchange is of a different kind than Bakhtin’s ideal
dialogue where different voices or perspectives generate meaning, at the
same time diverse and shared, that is, polyphonic.
There are at least two exemplary practitioners of anacrisis as defined
by Bakhtin: Socrates and Jesus. Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue, lures Gorgias
into confessing that rhetoric, or oratory, is a ‘producer of persuasion’
(453a), which is based on the listener ‘being convinced, and not the
persuasion that comes from teaching, concerning what is just and unjust’
(455a), and that it gains its force through encompassing and subordinat-
ing ‘to itself just about everything that can be accomplished’ (456a).25
Rhetoric, Socrates through his use of anacrisis makes Gorgias confess, is
a form of subordination, that is, to power. The concept of anacrisis has
had a primarily theological importance, but then with a both wider
and stronger significance, namely as inquiry and investigation. Jesus
made his disciples openly confess their faith in him, but he also threw
the question about his authority, put to him by the high priests, back
on them; and he answered Pilate’s question if he was the Messiah with,
‘You have said so’ (Mark 15:2; Luke 23:3). Other examples of anacrisis
can be found in Acts, as when Peter defends himself before the rulers of
Jerusalem (Acts 4:5–12), and the conclusion that Peter and John draw
from the hearing is: ‘For we cannot help speaking about what we have
seen and heard’ (Acts 4:20). These biblical examples suggest a problem
concerning the definition of anacrisis, since they show that the practice
of anacrisis often involves moments of force, struggle and even violence,
and that it might be situated differently than the Socratic elenchus:
translating elenchus as ‘cross-examination’ directs our attention to the
juridical proceedings of which anacrisis was a central part. Anacrisis was
a way of negotiating the truth of a matter, but with the assistance of
anacrisis, and also within the practice itself, a struggle for power was
taking place.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) can be described as a novel that
thoroughly engages in subjectification. In it, anacrisis plays an important
part, as Jane also acknowledges when she concludes one of the key
scenes in the novel, a dialogue with Mr Rochester: ‘In short, I believe

you have been trying to draw me out – or in; you have been talking
nonsense to make me talk nonsense.’26 The scene that Jane summarizes
displays several of the aspects of silence and speech that are of interest
to me here. First, Brontë carefully prepares it: she reminds the reader
of the humble status of Jane (‘in my ignorance I did not understand the
term’, ‘he allowed me to return quietly to my usual seat’), that is, her
position within a power structure. Brontë then introduces a colonial, or
orientalist, moment in the scene, by having Rochester masquerade as
‘an Eastern emir’, together with Miss Ingram, dressed in ‘oriental fash-
ion’. Orientalism, or exoticism, sets the stage for ‘a gipsy vagabond’, a
‘shockingly ugly old creature’ that will ‘tell the gentry their fortunes’.27
Behind the veil of exoticism lurks Mr Rochester, master of Thornfield
Hall, who has arranged the scene so that he can ‘draw out’ Jane: before
a sibyl, everyone has to speak. The dialogue between Jane and the as
yet not unmasked Rochester (ch. 19) starts out as a quick agon, an
exchange of lines that is summarized by Rochester describing Jane: ‘You
are cold, because … You are sick; because … You are silly, because …’
He then starts digging into her thoughts, but Jane turns out to be diffi-
cult to entice to speak freely; she resists the ‘witch’s skill’, as she calls it.
Instead, the Gypsy woman once again, but now more at large, describes
Jane, defines her – but then Rochester also discloses his true identity.
His last words as a Gypsy woman almost take on the form of a dubbing
of Jane into a subject: ‘Rise, Miss Eyre: leave me, “the play is played
out”.’28 But only almost: it is a play within a play, a Gypsy woman has
no power even over a governess, and Rochester is as yet not ready to
make Jane his wife, and consequently a subject of another type. The
significance of this scene lies also in its prophetic character; it will be
repeated, but then openly and not disguised, and, in the repetition, it
is Rochester that will call Jane a ‘witch’, since she reads him so well.29
This transformation has to do with how the situation is defined: there
is no Gypsy woman, no charades. Therefore the scene, as repeated, takes
on more of the character of an interrogation, with Rochester putting the
questions, Jane answering, or giving him her ‘confidence’. And in her
answers, she describes her master, but also defines him as ‘phantom-
like’ and ‘a mere dream’.30 A second repetition will later, towards the
end of the story, take place, and, once again, it includes a transforma-
tion: Rochester, having become blind, has to ask his visitor: ‘You are
altogether a human being, Jane? You are certain of that?’ Negotiated in
these three variations of the same scene is the reality status of the inter-
locutors, but the question of their witch-like or dream-like qualities is
really a question about their subject status. The novel transports Jane to
a subject status, at the same time as it desubjectifies Rochester, reduces
him to blind dependence on Jane’s agency: in this last scene (ch. 37),
Jane asks him for his comb, so that she can ‘comb-out this shaggy black
mane’ of his – that is, she can now liberate him from his animalistic
existence.31 And of course, this anacritical dialogue comes to a given
conclusion that benefits both of them: they marry. But the idyllic ending
should not make us forget how violent this novel is. The dialogues
between Jane and Rochester include a strong formative violence in their
mutual practice of defining each other, and, as Brontë slowly discloses,
this interaction is also performed upon the silencing of another woman,
Rochester’s wife Bertha, against whom physical violence is also directed.
Brontë’s novel includes, and almost demonstratively reports, several of
the aspects of dialogue and linguistic exchange that will be the focus
of my discussion, most of all how subjectification is performed in
dialogue. These scenes form into regulations of identity and positions,
and, as Jane said, their violent character consists in the ‘drawing out’
of Jane, the process of making her speak and take on a subject position
which consists not only in the serving of her master, but, ultimately,
the mastering of the household. Or, differently put, the subject is
constituted in a master–slave dialectic that it embodies.
In order to understand how a linguistic practice – in rhetoric seen
as part of a dialogic situation – also can lead to and include physical
violence, we must remember the juridical origin of anacrisis: it designated
a preliminary hearing within the Greek court in the fifth and fourth cen-
turies BCE, and its function was to decide ‘the admissibility of a case, not
to reveal evidence’.32 But in order to decide this, testimonies were used.
And testimonies, then, included those given by slaves, which were valid
only when ‘extorted by instrument of torture, to which either one party
might offer to expose a slave, or the other might demand the torture of
a slave’.33 This use of torture as a normal part of juridical proceedings
was discussed and criticized by Aristotle in his rhetorical manual, partly
because slaves ‘do not lie any less when under compulsion, neither
[those who] harden themselves not to tell the truth nor [those who] lie
easily to stop the pain more quickly’.34
Bakhtin tends, it seems, to idealize the practice of anacrisis when he
makes it an exclusively dialogic practice of language. American Conrad
scholar Aaron Fogel has also directed a rather sharp critique at Bakhtin’s
definition of anacrisis as much too restricted to only verbal practices.
In Fogel’s view, anacrisis includes investigation and interrogation
using ‘extreme physical torture’ and, in his discussion, he points to
the definition in Webster’s Third.35 There, anacrisis is defined as ‘an

investigation of truth in a civil law case in which the interrogation and
inquiry are often accompanied by torture’.36 Fogel gives a line of examples
from the writings of Joseph Conrad where the border between language
and psychic and physical violence is transgressed, and he appoints
the scene in Conrad’s Nostromo, where Hirsch is being interrogated
and tortured, and eventually killed, as the ‘primal scene of inquiry’.37
Without necessarily agreeing with this kind of ahistorical appointment
of a ‘primal scene’ for what is a practice with historically different
features and conditions, I think Fogel makes an important point: vio-
lence is inherent in linguistic exchange, in polite conversation as well
as police interrogation. It may not always be realized, but it lurks within
speech as a possibility; as linguistic and psychic violence or, even, physi-
cal torture.
In this stronger meaning, anacrisis is not only about ways of speaking,
or about rhetorical skills, but also about more or less formal situations
where someone is standing accused: one cannot separate anacrisis from
its prerequisite in the plot situation, the coercion to speak that is pro-
duced by a specific situation. Both as an art of speaking and as a social
practice, anacrisis includes violence. Rhetoric, Gorgias finds himself
compelled to admit, produces a power that rules over utterances. That
power is not based on argument, but on linguistic violence, linguistic
techniques forcing the interlocutors to obey certain rules – and it is
opposed by a counter-violence, as when Socrates unmasks Gorgias by
using his dialectical art of speaking.
What is at stake here is, ultimately, the ‘power’ of rhetoric, a power
that includes rhetorical persuasion as well as physical torture. But what
is that power about? Socrates, in luring his interlocutors to speak up,
practised elenchus. But this is not only a matter of rhetorical skills or
technique: Socrates tells us that he is investigating not ideas, or not
only ideas, but persons – who they are, how they look upon themselves,
their way of life. Mikhail Bakhtin states that Socrates’ ‘heroes’ are
‘ideologists’. Bakhtin, though, seems to diminish his own observation
when he says that the Socratic dialogue is ‘the purely ideological event
of seeking and testing truth’. But ‘ideology’ in Bakhtin means not a
system of beliefs about or positions on the political order of the world,
but more something like an attitude towards the world, through which
the individual orients himself, evaluates, and also understands himself.
In contemporary jargon, Socrates tells us that he uses elenchus in order
to form the other, to give him form, to make a proper subject out of
him. An obvious example is Socrates’ treatment of Alcibiades: the young
man is, by Socrates’ superior elenchus, forced to admit that he ‘must be

in some absolutely bizarre condition! When you ask me questions, first
I think one thing, and then I think something else’ (116e). Delving
further into this confession of Alcibiades, Socrates then asks if Alcibiades
intends ‘to remain in your present condition, or practise some self-
cultivation?’ (119a).38 Anacrisis, then, is all about subjectification: in
the act of giving or enforcing form upon an other, or making that other
actively form himself, there is no absolute border separating spoken
violence from physical violence. Instead, anacritical violence includes
physical violence; it authorizes violence but, in that, it also points to
an intrinsic feature of dialogue as such. In being argumentative and
persuasive, dialogue also risks transformation into non-dialogic, physi-
cal violence.
This blending of speech and physical violence that is allowed or even
generated by anacrisis might also point to a peculiar aspect of literature.
Jennifer Wise writes that the ‘“complaints” that formed the preliminary
hearings of a court case were submitted to the anakrisis in the form of
writing, graphé’, suggesting a structural analogue with the playwright
forming his play into a complaint directed against the gods and the
authorities, which was then handed to the jury that was designated to
choose which plays to be performed during the Dionysus festival – that
is, for decision ‘whether the case would receive a public hearing or not’.
At the roots of literature we find, if Wise is correct, ‘poetical anacrisis’ as
a practice through which the individual is forced to relate to power.39
Language and Subjugation
Anacrisis, then, is a complex practice that generates dialogic speech and

examinations as well as physical torture. But is that not putting too much
emphasis on violence? One can counter that, at heart, anacrisis must be
regarded as a form of linguistic violence. In his modern rhetorical manual,
Heinrich Lausberg includes anacrisis, together with the more established
categories of provoking speech (or the word), anaclasis and antanaclasis,
under the common Latin heading of reflexio, which is a distinctio in the
form of a dialogue: a word used by the first interlocutor is received by
the second in a changed sense which emphasizes the speaker’s point of
view. Provoking the word here means influencing the word, changing it,
forming it – a crucial difference is introduced into language. Distinctio is
‘the heightening semantic distinction between the (customary) meaning
of the first use of a word and the emphatic/exhaustive meaning of the
second usage of the same word.’40
Anacrisis, then, is an historically and culturally situated practice that

exploits and rationalizes a violence that is inherent in language as such.
Mikhail Bakhtin states that every utterance is already ‘inhabited’: it is
already spoken by someone else, and already marked by its circulation in
a social setting. In consequence, every linguistic feature – grammatical,
syntactical, lexical – embodies social relations.41 But language also pro-
duces these social relations: there is no subject before or outside language,
or, as Roland Barthes writes with reference to Benveniste: ‘The subject is
not anterior to language; he becomes a subject insofar as he speaks; in
short, there is no “subject” (and consequently no “subjectivity”), there
are only locutors; moreover – and this is Benveniste’s incessant reminder –
there are only interlocutors.’42 Judith Butler agrees, at least to some degree
basing her argument on Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation, and
states that the subject is produced through address, with the implication
that we cannot think the subject outside language. Language, then,
is not only a means for the expression of subjectivity, it is rather the
condition of possibility for the subject as such.43 Or, as Barthes writes:
‘We never encounter a state where man is separated from language,
which he then elaborates in order to “express” what is happening
within him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not
the contrary.’44 Inscribed within social relations, producing the subject,
language must be seen as part of historically situated power relations.
Roland Barthes says it with a brutal directness: language is fascist. This is,
of course, a quite provocative statement, but what Barthes points to
is that language is fascist in that it orders us to speak: ‘To speak, and
more so to lecture, is not, which is so often suggested, a question of com-
munication. It is subjugation: language as a whole is a regime.’ And that
regime, Barthes concludes, forces speech.45
If language is decisive in forming human beings into subjects, and
that is the basic aspect of my concept of ‘spoken violence’, this violent
character of the forming is the second: speech forces speech, as questions
force answers.
One implication of Barthes’ view is that we speak not because we
choose to, but because we are forced, by speech directed to us, to answer.
With Barthes, the question as such is a form of power exercise, since it
necessarily generates an answer; if not, the question is only rhetoric, an
empty demonstration of power. Barthes points to the ‘terrorism’ of the
question, since ‘a power is implied in every question’.46
In answering, we are accepting and acknowledging a power structure –
according to Barthes, answers and replies constitute ‘a discursive form …
mortgages to an “ideology”, submits the subject to social conformities,
and thus to anticonformisms’.47 The problem is not that we have to answer

in just one way, or that we are to submit ourselves to one standpoint or
one ideology; the problem is rather that we answer at all: our protest,
our negation, our ‘anti-conformism’ is a confirmation of the power of
language. Language as subjection refers to the basic classificatory function
of language: all speech is classificatory, Barthes writes, but we forget it, we
do not see that power.48 When we classify an object as ‘the table’, Barthes
exemplifies, we immediately ‘affirm its referent’. Speaking is an affirma-
tive act. We accept the rules of language, we subordinate ourselves to
them: ‘the yes (the affirmation) is implicitly inscribed in all of language’.
We could of course deny the classification, but the only way to do that,
Barthes maintains, is by adding to language, that is, by upholding its
power over the speaker: ‘No, that is not a table, it is a chair.’ Addition
here implies that ‘the no requires a special mark at each occurrence’.49
This is what Barthes calls the ‘fatality’ of language: we can never make
anything unsaid; we can not subtract from language, but only continue
and add to it.50 Similarly, Benjamin Lee Whorf calls language ‘autocratic’:
‘the obligatory phenomena within the apparently free flow of talk are so
completely autocratic that speaker and listener are bound unconsciously
as though in the grip of a law of nature’.51 Language does not obey
our intentions but has a life of its own, independent of the identity of
the speaker. Language is not only a mass of norms: it forms, according
to Whorf, a system, that rules over our perception and thinking. Every
language incorporates a perspective on the world.
Speaking, then, means finding oneself being spoken. It is an elementary
observation of how language works: we intend to express something
personal, and we consequently think that we are speaking ourselves.
But we are always speaking with already used words. Language forces
us, but this force is, I would say, not a fixed or stable fascist dictatorship,
but rather a force regenerated every time we start saying something.
And under special circumstances, one of them sometimes called ‘litera-
ture’, we actually test and try to resist this force. One of Barthes’ sources
for his discussion was Roman Jakobson’s linguistics, whose view seems
more nuanced than Barthes’:
In the combination of distinctive features into phonemes, the

freedom of the speaker is zero; the code has already established
all the possibilities which may be utilized in the given language.
Freedom to combine phonemes into words is circumscribed, it is
limited to the marginal situation of word-coinage. In the form-
ing of sentences out of words the speaker is less constrained. And
finally, in the combination of sentences into utterances, the action

of compulsory syntactical rules ceases and the freedom of any
individual speaker to create novel contexts increases substantially,
although again the numerous stereotyped utterances are not to be
overlooked.52
So, at the most fundamental level there is no freedom at all. One could
argue that, for instance, nonsensical poetry combines ‘phonemes to
words’. But these new words do not live outside the text or the perform-
ance, they are not being included in language; they live their lives, as
Jakobson suggests, in the margin. But there is in Jakobson an interesting
reservation: do not forget the great number of stereotypical utterances.
And one can ask if there is any basis for Jakobson’s optimism: to every
elicitation to speak, there seem to be only a limited number of possible
answers – they are already determined by the form that the elicitation
has. And in everyday conversations, the interlocutors tend to rush to
the use of ‘repairs’, so that a conversation can continue with reference
to the rules under which it is performed.53
Literature as Possibility, or, ‘Unauthorized

Alterations of Wording’
Moving from the metalinguistics of Jakobson and into actual use of

language – into linguistic practice, or speech as practised – one might
wonder if there is not, after all, some truth to Barthes’ statement about
the fascist nature of language. But at the same time: no, Barthes is
wrong, I protest, I am not living under fascism.54 And my protest is made
possible by language itself, not by an oppositional or revolutionary
ideology: the freedom inhabiting language is the flexibility of language,
which invites us to and enjoys our play with words – how we try to
squeeze meaning out of words, how we become ironical, joking, or how
we do things with words.55 We become barbarians in putting language to
use this way: as Quintilian said in his manual on rhetoric, barbarism is
when we extend the formal rules of grammar, when we intentionally or
not put words to wrong use, when we utter sentences that are ungram-
matical.56 One of the definitions of ‘violence’ in the Oxford English
Dictionary is also related to language and to texts: ‘Improper treatment
or use of a word; wresting or perversion of meaning or application;
unauthorized alteration of wording.’57 Displacement might be the best
way to summarize these ways of using language against its own power
to force us. It is a misuse, a failed use of language – and language seems
unable to defend itself against this. And as Barthes said (see above),
entering discourse’s play between question and answers submits us
not only to ‘social conformities’ but also to ‘anticonformisms’ – even if
of only a linguistic character.
Literature is, according to Barthes, the site of a ‘permanent linguistic
revolution’. This revolution does not take on the form of a line or canon
of individual works; it is rather ‘la pratique d’écrire’, the practice of writ-
ing. Literature is another way of making language speak; literature is not
directly or at all communicative, literature does not solely use language
only to find itself used and regulated by language. Literature is, with
Barthes, displacement. And that is why literature can make visible the
order of discourse: literature, Barthes says, allows us to read language
‘outside of power’.
Or ‘inside of power’? Literature moves in and out, out and in, and it
is the double character of at once being a representation and a critique
that gives literature at least the potential for both representing power as
it is exercised in reality, and criticizing it by demonstrating the incon-
sistency with which language performs power. It is this fundamentally
double character that gives literature its flexibility, a both linguistic and
social position outside of power, at the same time allowing it to relate
to power as inscribed in language and linguistic exchange.
But literature also exists under the law of language that says that
language exists only as practised. And practice is concrete: language is
always practised in situations that include at least two speakers (even
if they are both inhabiting a lonely speaker’s head), thereby forming it
into a social situation that includes different aspects of social reality.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s above-mentioned emphasis on language as inhabited
means that every utterance, spoken or written, is always marked by the
reality (or the ‘total speech situation’) in which it is uttered: profes-
sional, generic, social, and so on.58 In order to understand or interpret
what is happening in a literary narrative, the ‘plot situation’ must be
included in the analysis: the situation in which utterances are made and
dialogue takes shape. But also, literature as such, as discourse in itself,
must be included in the analysis: analysing a ‘plot situation’ necessarily
implies that it has been given form so that it has become, precisely, a
plot situation.
In everyday life, the situation is not emplotted, but it is still a situ-
ation. ‘Speaking generally,’ J. L. Austin writes, ‘it is always necessary
that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in
some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly necessary
that either the speaker himself or other persons should also perform
certain other actions, whether “physical” or “mental” actions or even

acts of uttering further words.’59 Laying the foundation to speech act
theory, Austin here goes on to discern how the utterance itself can be
an action. In doing that, he makes a difference that relates to intention:
an utterance can be described as the saying of certain words, where the
words spoken have a sort of life on their own. The spoken words can-
not be reduced to ‘merely the outward and audible sign’ of an ‘inward
and spiritual’ action.60 Instead, the utterance, or the words forming the
utterance, take on a life of their own in that they perform an action,
and – which I would like to emphasize – an action independent of the
speaker’s intentions. Austin’s own examples are all of an intentional
character, most famously the marrying of a couple: ‘I now pronounce
you husband and wife’. He therefore talks of a ‘procedure’, which must
include the correct words, spoken by the right persons under specific
circumstances: ‘The procedure must be executed by all participants both
correctly and completely.’61 But the importance of ‘procedure’ cannot
be reduced to a question of intentionality: all linguistic exchange has
an obvious or hidden procedural character.
And this includes literature. Austin repeatedly excludes literature,
or poetry, from his discussion, stating that literature is a ‘false’ use of
language, and thereby implying that the analysis of literature is another
matter. But that other matter is that literature, due to its double charac-
ter, adds a second procedure to the one that it represents: the procedural
act of writing and reading.62 The general critique that pragmatism has
directed against speech act theory emphasizes that all speech is situated
speech: not only are very specific acts like marrying a couple or nam-
ing a ship situated and procedural – the situation in which language is
spoken is always decisive.63 ‘Procedure’ implies that certain rules dictate
how an action, also a linguistic action, must or should be performed.
We are then moving from a more general description of the speaker’s
freedom, or lack of freedom, in forming his or her utterance, to the
(social) situation that generates a sort of manuscript that the speakers
involved in an exchange are performing. This script defines the situa-
tion, but does it through also including the individual speakers, their
respective backgrounds, linguistic competence, habits, and so on.64 We
are back to Bakhtin’s remark about the inhabited utterance, already
marked by its social conditions.
But there is in dialogue no simple or given identity between words
uttered and acts performed. Every situation follows a script, at the same
time as those speaking are more or less failing at following that
script – or intentionally trying to break away from it. The same goes
for literature: the speech situations represented follow a script, which is

not only the product of the writer’s intentions, but rather of a
‘total speech situation’ or discourse. But literature differs from the
everyday speech situation in that it introduces a secondary speech
situation, added to the ones that it represents: that of its own utterance
as a text. If genre is a crucial part of literature’s ‘manuscript’, every
individual work – or ‘utterance’ – deviates from the script in trying to
stretch its rules. And it can do so only by introducing difference in its
every detail: displacement. Autonomy, that is, exclusion from ordinary
speech situations as well as social order, generates speech disturbances:
literature as such becomes a disturbance to the linguistic order, in that
it displaces the different parts of language – its sentences, words, and
even phonemes – and in doing that, literature displaces its own script, it
attacks the rules for its own existence as literature, as if trying to force its
way out of its self-imprisonment, literature’s imprisonment in literature.
Modern literature, Gérard Genette writes, ‘tends to turn itself into a
monument of reticence and ambiguity’, thereby refusing subjugation
under predefined meaning, under convention, and becoming a ‘rhetoric
of silence’.65
If linguistic acts such as addressing, naming and questioning must
be seen as violent acts in that they define and give form to – or force
form upon – an other, literature, too, is fuelled by violence: a direct
violence towards language, and an indirect violence in relation to
its reader. Its persuasive dimension, directed to the reader, is related
to a position, and not an individual; its violence consists in its
directing the reader to a certain position in relation to the text, and
thereby forcing an identity upon the reader. But the main aspect of
literary violence is the difference opened up by displacement: that
is, displacement opens up language so that it differs from itself,
and the rules producing language and speech can become visible.
Literature is like a body, where traces of spoken violence are visible
as scars.
The Apparatus of Subjectification
Entering a dialogue with Socrates and letting oneself become the object of
his elenchus is not only entering a personal relationship with a master: it
is also entering a machine, or an apparatus. And this apparatus is there to
produce subjects. ‘The manufacture of subjects’, was stated as his ‘general
theme’ by Foucault in one of his lectures at the Collège de France. At its most
basic level, this manufacturing apparatus is language itself. The ‘elements
of the apparatus’, according to Foucault, can be seen as a ‘thoroughly

heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions,
architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative meas-
ures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic
propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. … The apparatus
itself is the system of relations that can be established between these
elements … .’66 These heterogeneous elements are of both a material and
immaterial character, but the apparatus, in producing effects, makes its
object material, marks it, and forms it. Language exemplifies this, in
its capacity not only to influence and inspire us, but to form us: in the
subject, language is materialized as actions. But language does not work
on us directly or immediately: it demands media through which it is
channelled towards its objects. In his discussion of Foucault’s concept of
the ‘dispositif’ (apparatus), Giorgio Agamben adds language to a more con-
ventional list of apparatuses, including prisons, madhouses, schools and
others, since language is ‘perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses – one
in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently
let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that
he was about to face’.67 Foucault never really elaborated his concept of
the apparatus; instead, that job has to some degree been performed by
Agamben. Agamben states that Foucault’s basic problem centres on ‘the
relation between individuals as living beings and the historical element’.
That ‘element’ is the conditions under which the living being is trans-
formed into a subject. In order to understand Foucault’s choice of the
rather odd word ‘dispositif’, or ‘apparatus’, Agamben traces the word’s
history back to its theological use, and the etymological chain of the Greek
‘oikonomia’, the Roman translation of it into the Latin ‘dispositio’, and then
the French ‘dispositif ’. The concept of economy, meaning how to rule the
household, entered early Christian theologian discourse, and was useful in
the separation of, on the one hand, God as pure Being, and on the other,
God who ‘administers and governs the created world’, an activity, Agamben
says, that is ‘devoid of any foundation in being’. This last point is decisive:
consequently, these apparatuses, working without or independently of
God, then must, as Agamben concludes, ‘produce their subject’.68
Agamben is then ready to give his definition of the Foucauldian con-
cept, as ‘a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions
that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient … the behaviors, gestures,
and thoughts of human beings’.69 The apparatus, then, works at a minute
level; it works on every aspect not only of our ways of thinking about
ourselves or the world, but also on our bodies, on how we move through
what is our world.
The apparatus seeks, according to Agamben, to ‘govern and guide’

living beings ‘toward the good’. In that process, which may turn out well
or not, the apparatus transforms the living being into a third class, that
of the subject: Agamben defines the subject as ‘that which results from
the relation and … from the relentless fight between living beings
and apparatuses’. Since apparatuses come in the plural, subjects are also
plural, or ‘the place of multiple processes of subjectification’.70 The appa-
ratus is directly related to, inscribed within power relations: the apparatus
transforms, gives form, and forces, through different practices, discourses
and processes, form on the living being. It is important here, I think, to
remember that these processes produce a subject that voluntarily and
happily accepts the apparatus’s work on him – without this acceptance,
the apparatus would, as Agamben says, simply turn into an ‘exercise of
violence’.
The apparatus is historically situated; it works differently and in many
different ways, related to time and place. Agamben’s hypothesis is that
today, in the Western world, the apparatus works most of all as desub-
jectification. Every process in which a living being becomes a subject
involves a moment of desubjectification, of erasing earlier or competing
forms of subjectivity. But today, then, the Western subject is caught in
a constant process of desubjectification: he who lets himself, Agamben
writes, ‘be captured by the “cellular telephone” apparatus … cannot
acquire a new subjectivity, but only a number through which he can,
eventually, be controlled’.71
This could be summarized as the theoretical anatomy of the apparatus –
but what is it then in the empirical world? How does it look? How does
the apparatus work? Agamben exemplifies with the classic Foucauldian
practice of the confession, followed by a penance:
the formation of Western subjectivity that both splits and, nonetheless,

masters and secures the self, is inseparable from this centuries-old
activity of the apparatus of penance – an apparatus in which a new I is
constituted through the negation and, at the same time, the assump-
tion of the old I. The split of the subject performed by the apparatus
of penance resulted, therefore, in the production of a new subject,
which found its real truth in the nontruth of the already repudiated
sinning I.’72
The act of entering the Socratic dialogue, then, must be seen in this
perspective: the individual might see in Socrates a person, another indi-
vidual, a teacher or a master. But when elenchus starts working, Socrates
is transformed into a discursive medium, through which the linguistic

apparatus becomes present and noticeable in its effect on the object of
the process. In his lectures on the ‘hermeneutics of the subject’, Foucault
notices that the role of the ‘person being guided’ by Socrates, is ‘basi-
cally … silence’. It might seem like a surprising characteristic, since
the dialogues consist in at least two persons speaking. But according
to Foucault, this person’s speech has no autonomy, nor ‘function of its
own’. Instead, the silent partner is there only to form material on which
power will work: ‘And the kinds of speech dragged, extorted or extracted
from him, or provoked in him through the dialogue or the diatribe, are
basically ways of showing that the truth exists wholly and solely in the
master’s discourse.’73 What Foucault here points to is also that the object
of elenchus is formed into a subject in a process which is at the same time
a desubjectification: that person is enticed or forced to speak – that is, to
become a subject – only to find that his speech is dictated by someone
else – that is, the same subject finds himself ruled over or governed, and
he is therefore not a subject, or, at least, not a sovereign subject.74 His
status is not his own choice: he is referred to a position within a discursive
order – but he will gain that position only by speaking out.
Subjectification is always, according to Foucault, inscribed within
a power relation. When he reads Plato’s Alcibiades, the lesson is that
the young man, according to Socrates, must learn to govern himself
in order to govern the state. In order to do that, he must learn how to
take care of himself. Socrates’ standpoint is that Alcibiades must subject
himself to the rules in order to be the ruler; it is a double movement of
both governing and being governed, of ruling and being ruled over.75
Subjectification always includes subjugation, also in different forms of
self-fashioning such as care for oneself.76 Even so, becoming a subject is
not only a question of conforming to convention, to rule. Judith Butler,
in her effort at trying to elaborate on Foucault, states that the ‘norm’,
which here we can understand as the apparatus,
does not produce the subject as its necessary effect, nor is the subject
fully free to disregard the norm that inaugurates its reflexivity: one
invariably struggles with conditions of one’s own life that one could
not have chosen. … This ethical agency is neither fully determined
nor radically free. Its struggle or primary dilemma is to be produced by
a world, even as one must produce oneself in some way.77
This conflictual aspect of subjectification is important, and, as we will

see, it is also a feature of its literary representations.
But if the Socratic dialogue allowed us to study the procedures of

subjectification in classical Greece, we could today, and with Agamben,
make a very different list of apparatuses assigned to the task of making
us into subjects. Already with early Christianity, something changes in
the ways subjectification is performed: from the taking care of oneself,
we move, according to Foucault, into the knowing of ourselves. But this
knowledge must always be made public in order to be real or significant.
Power, Foucault states in The History of Sexuality, encourages speech, and
a central aspect of public speech is the confession, initiated within the
Christian tradition and secularized under modernity.78 Or, as Foucault
writes:
Everyone, every Christian, has the duty to know who he is, what is
happening in him. He has to know the faults he may have commit-
ted: he has to know the temptations to which he is exposed. And,
moreover, everyone in Christianity is obliged to tell these things to
other people, to tell these things to other people, and hence, to bear
witness against himself.79
Today, Foucault famously says, we ‘have become a singularly confessing

society’ – confession is everywhere, and Christian ritual is no longer
necessary for us to confess.80 Confession is its own ritual, ‘a ritual of
discourse’ that takes place within a ‘power relationship’.81 Of the two
types of Christian rituals for confession, exagouresis and exomologesis,
it is the latter that has become hegemonic in contemporary, Western
society, meaning a ‘technology of the self oriented toward the permanent
verbalization and discovery of the most imperceptible movements of
our self’.82 But the exterior force, enticing or forcing language out
of us, be it Socrates or Christ (or their representatives), has become
an internalized power, making it absolutely natural for us to confess
ourselves, no matter where or when.
The absolute hegemony of the speaking subject is challenged by the
figure of the person who prefers, for one or other reason, to keep quiet.
He or she interrupts linguistic circulation, puts the words before a test:
can they stand the challenge of silence? And it is the silent figure that
in ways quite obvious entices or provokes speech, directed at him- or
herself: with the silent figure as the focal point, we should be able to read
the linguistic strategies of subjectification, of forcing someone to speak.
Literature is also included in Agamben’s list of apparatuses. If an appa-
ratus in Agamben’s words is to be defined as ‘anything that has in some
way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control,
or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living

beings’,83 then literature must be looked upon as an apparatus that
produces subjectivity and subjects – or, better, takes part in the produc-
tion of subjects. And it does so in a double meaning: in reading a work
of literature, we are being persuaded, or forced, to enter into a specific
position in relation to what we read, and the world that reading opens
up to us, at the same time as the literary work represents the manufac-
ture of subjects. Or resists it? Due to its specific position within society,
and due to its linguistic peculiarities, literature not only represents sub-
jectification: it might also resist it, as well as practise it.
Our reading of the silent figure in literature must therefore be of a
critical kind: it must criticize, that is, divide and split – it must, perhaps,
perform a violent dismembering in order to make the literary text speak
about its silences. It must be a double reading, that interrogates the
representation of the silent figure, but also how literature itself – to use
Foucault’s words – drags, extorts, extracts or provokes the word out of
the figure that it stipulates is a silent figure: the reader.
Disciplinary Power
There is, I think, a historical problem involved here: silence, outside of

certain approved situations as well as institutionalized forms of silence,
becomes a growing problem to Western modernity. Schematically, the
transition from a society under sovereign power to one under disciplinary
power drastically changes how power is legitimized. Michel Foucault
suggests that sovereignty is characterized by being reactualized in
‘ceremonies and rituals, by narratives also, and by gestures, distinguishing
signs, required forms of greeting, marks of respect, insignia, coats of
arms, and suchlike’.84 In these rituals, an ‘act of submission’ is repeat-
edly performed, and the subject that is constructed is an individual
only in these rituals: ‘The pinning of the subject-function to a defi-
nite body can only take place at times in a discontinuous, incidental
fashion’ – that is, in these ceremonial acts. Foucault’s point is that
only at the top is individualization actually happening, while at ‘the
lower extremity of the relationship [between sovereign and the one
subjected], you never find a perfect fit between sovereignty and cor-
poreal singularities’.85 The modern, disciplinary society, though, has
a different structure, according to Foucault. Disciplinary power works
through an ‘exhaustive capture of the individual’s body, actions, time,
and behavior. It is a seizure of the body, and not of the product; it is a
seizure of time in its totality, and not of the time of service.’86 This means
that the rituals and ceremonies of sovereignty become irrelevant,

reduced to anachronistic spectacles, and instead the individual must
continuously legitimize power. Speech has a decisive function within
the relation between power and individual: it is not by ritually cele-
brating power that the individual gains the subject-function, but by
participating in the circulation of speech. This circulation does not
have just one medium, but rather many: it is the direct interaction
between individuals in everyday conversation as well as televised reality
shows; it is therapy sessions as well as the collective hate speech of
soccer fans attending a game. To these different forms of circulation,
silence becomes a problem, since the silent person interrupts or even
disrupts this continuity, brings it to a halt, and the individual eludes
or escapes the subject-function. Silence can form itself into a black
hole of language, an emptiness that drains language of energy, and
that might even, potentially, form pockets of resistance to the process
of subjectification. But a society that understands itself in terms of
democracy, freedom of speech, equality, tolerance and so on will not
accept physical force being used as a regular measure on the silent
person. Instead, the approval of submission has to be interiorized within
every individual as normality, and exteriorized as circulation of speech.
An apparatus of supervision and surveillance is constantly at work,
watching over that speech, and with it our approval of submission
is constantly circulated. In disciplinary societies, institutions like
family, school, media, but also the public sphere, practise or partake in
supervision: these institutions teach the child how to speak, and how
to speak correctly, and they produce and circulate adult speech. The
democratic society distributes at least forms or aspects of the subject-
function to (almost) all its citizens, but also checks on them through
examination, interrogation and public confession.
Foucault touches upon the problem of the silent one when discussing
how disciplinary power produces individuals who for different reasons
take up problematic positions within power relations. The illiterate is
one such: ‘The individual who cannot be reached by school discipline
can only exist in relation to this discipline; someone who does not
learn to read and write can only appear as a problem, as a limit when
the school adopts the disciplinary schema.’87 The same is true for the
silent individual: he or she can exist only in relation to the circulation
of speech, and therefore must take up a position as deviant. As such,
the individual might serve as an illustrative example of the invisible but
strict limits under which subjectivity is practised, or as a problem that
must be addressed and corrected.
Within disciplinary power, the family has a central function. In his

lectures, Foucault views the modern family as a ‘sort of cell within
which the power exercised is not, as one usually says, disciplinary,
but rather of the same type as the power of sovereignty’.88 Foucault
then goes on to exemplify how individualization within the family is
granted in a ‘more intense’ way to the father than to the mother or
the children. But one must, I think, question this view of the family
as a tyranny, and instead look at it as an apparatus that distributes
speech and emotions, behaviour and conformity, among its members.
Foucault maintains that ceremonies related to occurrences like marriage
and birth, and which are of the same kind as the ceremonies performed
under sovereignty, are what give the family ‘solidity’; and therefore
then, supervision is not crucial within the family.89 But I do think
that one could have it the other way round: family is reproduced
as a power relation not through ceremonial acts, but through the
constant, day-to-day practice of linguistic exchange, which serves as
the supervising apparatus. It is through speaking, and the practices that
this speech relates to and generates, like confession, that the individual
gains a subject-position within the family, and it is also speech prac-
tices that will produce the connection between child and school,
and, consequently, society. And it is by speaking that the individual
offers him- or herself up for supervision, makes himself available for
subjectification.
This means also that the ‘disciplinarized’ family is not only the
foremost producer of normality, but also, a point which Foucault
emphasizes, ‘the agency of the abnormalization of individuals’.90 In
circulating speech, the family involves each of its members, integrates
them within this circulation, and each one at the same time has to
adjust to the linguistic circulation. In this adjustment, normalization
happens – but also abnormalization. In Foucault’s theory of power,
disciplinary power ‘has this double property of being “anomizing”, that
is to say, always discarding certain individuals, bringing anomie, the
irreducible, to light, and of always being normalizing, that is to say,
inventing ever new recovery systems, always reestablishing the rule.
What characterizes disciplinary systems is the never-ending work of
the norm in the anomic.’91 This double process never happens in the
abstract general; it is always concrete and material. It is always happen-
ing, but only through mediation by certain institutions and practices,
and family here has a key role. It is through family procedures that
normalization takes place as the earliest forming of the individual into
a subject, procedures that later will be taken over or be substituted for
others by school and work. If normalization fails, disciplinary systems

will produce punishment, but at its basic level, this punishment will
also be of a linguistic nature: speech will be the medium through which
punishment is transformed into material pain, and installed as a physi-
cal experience in the deviant’s body. And if that is not enough in order
to adjust and normalize the individual, spoken violence will make room
for physical violence.
Speech is not the only medium for normalization and subjectifi-
cation, but it is a central one, and remains of decisive importance
throughout the life of the individual. Speech should here be understood
not only as vocalization, but as an exchange system that also includes
forms such as writing, signs, images, as well as other symbolic forms of
communication: the crucial thing is that in disciplinary systems too,
submission must be announced in public.
Perhaps one should add here that a disciplinary system does not
automatically produce more obedient individuals. Foucault is careful to
emphasize this:
What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe

since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals
who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that all
societies become like barracks, schools, or prisons; rather, it is that
an increasingly controlled, more rational, and economic process of
adjustment has been sought between productive activities, commu-
nications networks, and the play of power relations.92
The relationship between the individual and this process of adjustment

can also be understood in terms derived from the Habermasian tradi-
tion: the one that keeps silent seems to privatize what belongs to the
public sphere. If speaking, in its different symbolic forms, includes
the individual’s ambiguous acceptance of the subject status, it must be
performed in speech acts that are public. But in several of my chosen
texts, a renegotiation of public and private seems to be going on. One
example is Hester Prynne of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, who not
only has to wear her sign, branding her as an adulteress, in public, but
does it proudly; she has even decorated the ‘A’ that is the brand with
embroidery. Another example is Bartleby, of Herman Melville’s story,
who moves into the office where he is supposed to be only working, and
establishes a private life in what is a public space.
Family is, according to Jürgen Habermas’s pioneering work on the pub-
lic sphere in European modernity, the space that allows the individual
to look at himself as ‘purely human’.93 The bourgeois family could – by

its members – be seen as based on ‘voluntariness, community of love,
and cultivation’.94 But to be a subject, the bourgeois individual had
to step out of the intimacy of family life, and in different ways enact
his citizenship and subject status. However, family as breeding ground
supplied also the subject, in his identity as property owner, with the
self-image of the individual as ‘purely human’. This transmission of
family values into the public sphere produces the split individual that
psychoanalysis and the psycho-sciences would explore. But literature
would also here, in the traffic between private and public, find a space
where it could find both a confirmatory function and critically inter-
vene, and in its renegotiation of public and private actually widen the
gap between the self-image of the purely human and the political status
of the subject.
Of the literary texts that I have chosen for analysis here, several relate
directly to the family. Their plot is either situated within different types
of family structures, or they refer to family matters as problems. The
works here by Austen, Hawthorne, Musil, Strindberg, Gombrowicz and
Beckett all are related to the family – but in different ways. A few texts
differ, or better, the parts I have chosen for my discussion do not really
comment upon family life, although family might be the backdrop
against which the actual plot takes form: the interrogation scenes in
the crime novels by Harris and Rankin, and the same type of scenes
in Pinter and Duras, all refer to a specific situation, in which silence is
either produced or broken. Also the work by Camus relates to a situation,
but one that is of a more general nature: the Holocaust and post-war
Europe, and the question of individual responsibility and mechanisms
of normalization. Melville focuses on work and the workplace. And
in Handke, lastly, the problems of speech and language, which all the
others also engage with, become the central focus of attention.
The Chapters
Based on readings of mostly canonized works, which have attracted

an immense scholarly commentary, my book cannot aspire to new or
original findings in interpretation of the texts themselves, other than,
perhaps, in details. Instead, what I hope for is that the constellation of
texts, and the instalment of them under the perspective outlined above,
will direct the reader’s attention to the significance of spoken violence
in these texts, and, further, to the relevance of my theoretical approach.
But even if the works chosen for reading in this book all point to a
common centre, I have chosen them also because they resist total sub-
mission to this centre: they all, in varying ways and degrees, add aspects
and nuances to the question of spoken violence. Even though my cen-
tral concern is scenes that relate subjectification to linguistic practices, in
writing this book I have tried to respect the individuality of the works.
However, I cannot declare myself innocent of directing an analytical vio-
lence against them; also analytic and interpretative practices are forms of
violence, forcing certain readings on their objects.
So what I hope to offer here are readings of different aspects of my
central problem, trying to produce a constellation of readings that could
serve as an outline of spoken violence in modern literature. It is tempt-
ing to try and find a historical trajectory in these texts, and I am sure
that there is one (or more) to be found. But this is such an exclusive
selection of texts that they do not suffice for the writing of a history.
And even though I think that my study does suggest a general (and
rather trivial) historical progression, where literature slowly becomes
more and more turned towards silence, invaded by it, and trying to
exploit it in ways impossible before, my constellation of exclusive texts
is construed to illuminate the central problem of silence and violence,
and to relate it to social powers of subjectification and normalization.
But ‘illuminate’ also implies that other parts will remain in shadow, no
doubt.95
The first reading is meant to give a foundation for the rest of the
book. It is Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which I here try to give a kind
of model status: in it, Austen writes a not very dramatic story of how
we become subjects through speaking and engaging, through language,
within the community surrounding us. But this community can also be
understood as a speech economy, which is destabilized by the silence of
the protagonist, Fanny Price. She is therefore, and in an exemplary way
for my study, the object of different forms of persuasion, among them
anacrisis, as a way of making her speak. I called it ‘non-dramatic’, and it
is, but only in comparison to a few of the other texts I will be reading:
evaluated in relation to the normativity that the novel presupposes and
distributes, the events in Mansfield Park are also of an intensely dramatic
character in that they are truly life-forming, demonstrating that even
though subjectification might look idyllic, set within rural family life, it
includes torture, pain and agony.
Family life, as depicted by Austen, serves also as the portal to social
life. And the silent character may become a problem not only to their
immediate surrounding, their circle of family and friends (in which he
or she might even be talking), but to the social structure in which their
silence has effect. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, as well

as in Robert Musil’s Tonka, speech and dialogue once again form an
economy. But this time around, the circulation of speech is obstructed
not only by reticent individuals, but also by the malfunctioning of
moral apparatuses: these novels are detailed studies of a social situation,
in which the individual, with disastrous results, opposes conventional
morality. Silence here provokes a violence that is promoted or silently
approved by society, since individual silence here might turn into a
social example of resistance that must be dealt with before it material-
izes as such.
Disciplinary power may be said to be the hegemonic form of power
today, but even so, pockets of tyranny remain also in these social
structures. Agents of discipline may suddenly, when confronting the
silent and unwilling individual, turn into tyrannical sovereigns. If
Mansfield Park has a ‘happy’ ending, in that Fanny does speak out and
does become a subject, the third chapter of this volume engages with
a couple of texts that, on the contrary, have very tragic endings: both
Herman Melville’s Bartleby and Witold Gombrowicz’s Yvonne depict the
systematic violence directed at the person who hinders speech from
circulating, and in their negation of or resistance to the subject status,
Bartleby and Ivona both face death. And they must, since they both
provoke a sovereign execution of force. And ‘execution’ is here not
accidental: in both these stories there is a logic of execution at work, an
unstoppable machinery that necessarily produces death.
Both Bartleby and Ivona say very little, almost nothing. Their oppo-
sites are those who speak freely and fluently, without bothering to have
anyone to speak with. Or do they really? My fourth chapter engages with
three different monologues in dramatic or novelistic form, by, respec-
tively, August Strindberg, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett. These three
monologues share a basic characteristic in that they address a silent
interlocutor, present or absent from the scene of speech. In these dia-
logues with another inside monologue, the speaker is defining the silent
other, also using silence as an opportunity for commanding himself,
forming and defining himself, as well as the interlocutor. Monologue,
at least in these examples, shows itself to be forced by someone absent
in its silence, whom the speaker has to make present. Monologue is here
not at all a freely chosen form, nor an obsession of a troubled mind, but
a systematic exploitation of language’s readiness to lend itself to power
struggles – or rather, to take form itself as a struggle for power.
The works mentioned above all describe the necessity of the individ-
ual to speak, and thereby to come forward and confess her- or himself.
But we all know that there are situations where the opposite seems to be
the goal. In reading interrogations scenes in novels by Ian Rankin and
Thomas Harris, in a couple of plays by Harold Pinter, and in the wartime
notebooks of Marguerite Duras, I try to see how a situation, designed to
bring speech out of a person, can be turned into its opposite: language
as a way of silencing or desubjectifying a human being. These scenes
form the negative of linguistic subjectification, and in varying degrees
of intensity, demonstrate a deadly logic in which earlier forms of subjec-
tivity must be destroyed in order for some form of confessional subject
to step forward.
My last reading is devoted to Peter Handke’s play, Kaspar; last, since
it seems to be saying everything that I can aspire to say in my book:
Handke’s play traces a precise subjectification process as it is discussed
in this book as well as in my sources. And he adds to it a dimension of
surveillance: in his play, the education of Kaspar takes place on a stage
watched over by an eye, that may be regarded as also being literature …
or the reader.
As a way of concluding, the final chapter consists of a discussion of
literature as itself a violent linguistic act. I focus on a theme that I have
been hinting at throughout the book, but that I have not been able,
really, to include in my discussion, since it is in itself already an enor-
mous field: I am thinking specifically of the relation between animal
and human, which seems to be one issue repeatedly at stake in these
literary productions of spoken violence. This also means that I try to
take a step to the side and look at the problem of spoken violence from
a slightly different angle, hoping, thereby, to complicate, rather than
summarize, matters.
1
The Exemplary Becomes
Problematic, or Gendered Silence:
Austen’s Mansfield Park
‘No, indeed I cannot act.’ Spoken by Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s

Mansfield Park, the simple constative also has a certain air of refusal
(‘indeed’), and, as such, her statement will be voiced again, by other
characters, in slightly different words, throughout my book. Fanny’s
utterance is ambiguous: it not only describes a position, taken by
Fanny; it is also the performance of an act – when saying that action
is not possible. Fanny’s words are inscribed in a world of ‘delicate bal-
ance’,1 in a conversation culture, where a refusal to speak is absolutely
unacceptable. And the action that Fanny talks about is most of all lin-
guistic: she cannot speak with another’s tongue, she must be sincere,
and not disguised; at the same time, her social and moral standing
makes conversation difficult for her, especially since conversation does
not promote sincerity, but rather politeness.2 Fanny speaks only to
voice her silence.
The Economy of Language
One can read the novels of Jane Austen as speech economies or, to par-
aphrase Michel Foucault, as economies of ‘discursive constellations’.3
By this I wish to suggest that the lines uttered in a conversation not
only form a balance between interlocutors, but that this balance is
a form of monetary economics, in which a line can be exchanged
for the answers of one’s conversational partner – which is not to
suggest that it is a free, voluntary and equal exchange. It is, rather,
the opposite: this exchange is marked by power relations.4 The idea
of a spoken ‘economy’ is of course not mine: among others, Nancy
Armstrong states that ‘[p]olite speech is not simply a psychological
function … but a medium of exchange, a form of currency that alone
35
ensures a stable community.’5 This thought was already circulating

in the eighteenth century: ‘Conversation is a sort of Bank, in which
all who compose it have their respective shares.’6 We can, of course,
also find this economic discourse much later, and more frequently,
in modern literature. The ‘economy’ of language is a recurrent figure
of thought, and in Austen’s novels we read how the general rules of
linguistic exchange and balance materialize locally. It is not accidental
that Mansfield Park starts out with the emphasis put on the economy,
or the oikonomia: a ‘handsome house and large income’. On the very
first page, the relations between people are interpreted as financial
relations: while some have big mansions, others have ‘scarcely any
private fortune’ – and who, then, is the most attractive on the marriage
market? And we see how, as in a literary fantasy, with the formation of
a market economy the lowest-priced object, Fanny, might transform
into the most valued good, Fanny Price. Or, as Austen’s ironic view of
these things is formulated: ‘there certainly are not so many men
of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve
them’. A phrase like ‘the circles in which they moved’ (2) says
something not only of the class-based and carefully delimited patterns
of social interaction in this world, but hints also at its financial charac-
ter: capital has to be circulated in order to grow. And financial capital
cannot grow only within the restrained circles of the English coun-
tryside. Austen is quick to hint at Sir Thomas’s – after Edward Said’s
analysis quite well known – ‘concerns of his West Indian property’
(3).7 But this source of income here lies outside the reach of literary
representation: a slave plantation is the condition of possibility for the
English rural world, but it is not at hand for Austen to denominate.
In Austen’s smaller world, capital circulates also, and perhaps fore-
most, in the form of, and as an effect of, linguistic circulation. Economy
is the portal through which we enter her world, but well inside it, we
find that economy is materialized not as exchange of money, nor as
trade of goods, but as conversation.8 Austen not only offers a fascinat-
ing view of a conversational culture; she also shows what is at stake in
this balancing act, namely subjectification. Also, at its most playful,
conversation is a process of a mutual defining and acknowledgement of
the interlocutors, a trying out of subject positions, a negotiation on the
rule of the speech economy and its investors.
Austen’s novels depict why this linguistic economy has to be kept
in balance, and which means the interlocutors can employ in order
to contribute to this balance, but they also disclose the means and
ways through which this economy to a large degree is upheld through
The Exemplary Becomes Problematic: Austen 37
linguistic violence. It soon becomes clear that the threats directed

against the distribution of polite speech proliferate in Austen’s novels:
one is the much too abundant, wanton speech that really promotes
an inflation of speech; another, though, is the opposite of the first,
a reticence that supports a deflation of speech; a third one is a coun-
terfeit and dissimulating speech. And identifying these types of threat
directed at good conversation, we also notice that speech in Austen is
an ‘economic’ aspect of a general political system, regulating the prob-
lem of individual and citizenship, or the relation between individual
and society.
But the problem of the ‘total speech situation’ must be kept in mind:
linguistic exchange in Austen can never be separated from other forms
of exchange, be they financial or different symbolic forms. Looking at
Austen’s world as a minutely organized communicative system, as a lin-
guistic economy, we must observe that this economy includes also the
body, with its language in the form of manners and gestures, as well as
the space that the body moves through: speech economy here means
a symbolic economy, including financial as well as linguistic and other
symbolic transactions. But Austen’s novels also put before us the difficult
task of trying to define the ‘total speech situation’: trying to understand
the mechanisms of conversation and dialogue in Austen does not mean
a reading of the novels as a totality. Such a reading might easily lead
the reader to give Austen’s characters specific identities: for instance, is
Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, a Christian or a feminist heroine? And,
as an extension of this question of identity, is Austen a conservative or
a liberal writer? Instead of looking at these novels as forming a stable,
finished world, whose inhabitants, as well as the novels themselves, can
be identified and classified, I will try to follow what John Searle would
have called ‘the performance of the speech act’,9 which I will read as a
process of subjectification, leading not to other or alternative definitive
identities for the characters, but – hopefully – to an understanding of
how Austen’s characters accept subject positions that in fact are forced
upon them.
Power relations in Austen are to a high degree mediated through
conversation and dialogue, through polite socializing in the salons.
Remembering J. L. Austin’s dictum of the ‘total speech situation’, but at
the same time rejecting a totalizing reading, conversation and dialogue
must be understood as both an apparatus in themselves, generating
their own rules, but also as part of a literary representation, which is
another apparatus. This two-sided perspective is my answer to Austin’s
emphasis on the total speech situation.
Normalization and Decorum
In one of his entries in Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno laments

the disappearing sense of ‘tact’. In his short analysis, tact has its ‘precise
historical hour. It was the hour when the bourgeois individual rid
himself of absolutist compulsion.’10 Austen’s novels are probably situated
precisely at Adorno’s historical moment: in her world, individuals
can still socialize while observing convention. But social life is slowly
becoming more and more empty, gallantry a gesture, its only legitimacy
the upholding of male power – and in social life, a new individual, the
middle-class individual, becomes more and more obvious and influential:
this individual is still being polite but he is also a representative of a
practical reason, of agency and not only empty speech. But Adorno’s
observation might also be transposed into another register: Austen
writes at a historical moment when the categories of the example, and
the exemplary, have become increasingly problematic, challenged by
liberal individualism. Another way to understand this historical shift is
offered by Michel Foucault, who in his study on prison talks about ‘the
transition from historico-ritual mechanisms for the formation of individ-
uality to the scientifico-disciplinary mechanisms, when the normal took
over from the ancestral, and measurement from status, thus substituting
for the individuality of the memorable man that of the calculable man …
and a new political anatomy of the body were implemented.’11 Austen
does actually give a glimpse of this process: normalization is a central
practice in her works, while ritual forms of social life are still, at the same
time, being practised. And through her work, one could study the process
in which normalization becomes measurable: her last novel, Persuasion,
marks the triumphal advent of a new political subject.
It is in conversation that the individual makes him- or herself obvious in
Austen. Her novels are superficial in a deeply penetrating way. Charlotte
Brontë suspected the importance of superficiality, but when comment-
ing upon Austen in a frequently quoted letter, she commended her study
of ‘what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly’, but criticized her for
ignoring ‘what throbs fast and full, though hidden’.12 Austen herself
probably was aware of this – in Emma, she has one of the characters say
exactly that: ‘Compare their manner of carrying themselves; of walk-
ing; of speaking; of being silent.’13 The observation that Brontë makes is
the affirmation of Austen as an eighteenth-century writer, while Brontë
for her own part will follow another, more interiorized – or, rather,
psychological – path for novelistic art. But Austen, too, is interested
in the interior of her characters, though this interest focuses on them
precisely as characters and not as psyches. And it is character that is at

stake in that system of gestures that Austen studies in the way people
walk, talk and, not least, how they keep silent. The rituals of social
behaviour, though, will not be enough for Austen; her persons will have
to leave their exemplary lives behind in speaking out, thereby individu-
alizing themselves at the same time as they subjugate themselves to a
different order than that of ritualized bodily gestures.14
The power and influence of convention in the world of Austen is rig-
orous, and I will from now on call it decorum.15 That concept includes
how people behave, how they ‘walk, talk, keep silent’, to paraphrase the
quote from Emma above, and how they relate to each other in social life,
as well as the mores that are being produced in social life. Decorum is,
in different varieties, a recurrent word in Austen’s world and related to
a couple of other, likewise recurring keywords: ‘proportion’, ‘propriety’.
These keywords are all related to each other, they are all a matter of
balance. Decorum determines how these figures of Austen inhabit
their lives. Originally, decorum was an architectural term, and Bharat
Tandon, in his study of the role of conversation in Austen, quotes an
English seventeenth-century definition: ‘Decor is the keeping of a due
Respect between the Inhabitant, and the Habitation.’16 But as a concept,
décor is even older than that, and also has a more complex significance
than just the decency that is suggested in the British transmission of
its meaning as ‘due respect’. We find décor in De architectura, written
by Vitruvius more than two thousand years ago: ‘Décor demands the
faultless ensemble of a work composed, in accordance with precedent,
of approved details. It obeys convention …, or custom or nature.’17 The
perfection of the building, then, will be the effect of the builder hav-
ing followed the rules and conventions that apply to building, or that
he has adapted, or accommodated, the building to the site where it is
erected (for instance, one builds hospitals where there is fresh water).
In Mansfield Park, architectural décor comes to the foreground in two
episodes in particular where conversation is directed towards buildings
and parks; one concerns Sotherton (ch. I:VI), the other Thornton Lacey
(ch. II:VII). A typical discussion on these matters is formed when Henry
Crawford speaks about what must be done to Thornton Lacey, and
then emphasizes quite a few ‘musts’; while Edmund Bertram states that
it should instead be ‘given the air of a gentleman’s residence without
any very heavy expense, and that must suffice me; and I hope may
suffice all who care about me’ (219). Bertram, then, does not approve
of Crawford’s desire for luxury, he prefers ‘rather less ornament and
beauty’ – and in this discussion he also spends far fewer words on the
topic than the excessive Crawford. Any ‘heavy expense’, whether finan-
cial or linguistic, upsets the delicate balance. Decorum, then, forms part
of the economy of social life: it regulates the relation between the indi-
vidual and the material surroundings, such as parks and buildings – that
is, it balances the body of the individual to the body of social structure.
Decorum often appears as a concept in Austen’s novels, but then
it refers not primarily to architecture, but to the demands of social
life: decorum here implies that the due respect, or balance, has been
expanded, from the relation between the building and its inhabitant,
and into the field of social life, as a demand that the right proportions
must be observed between interlocutors and among those taking part in
social life. Conversation must also be adjusted to the situation; it is to be
practised in accordance with the rank and identity of your conversation
partner.18 Thinking is one thing – ‘I do not censure her opinions’ – but
making the same opinions public is an ‘indecorous’ and ‘improper’ act
(57). Exaggerated gestures or too quick or abrupt bodily movements will
disturb the relation between individual and space, put it out of balance.
Such movements are therefore very rare in Austen’s novels, and, when
they do appear, are often defined as states of sickness. Lapses in deco-
rum have disastrous effect, and they eventually lead to the elopement
of two lovers. In this oeuvre, the good-mannered and the well-behaved
rule, so that the spontaneous can be kept at bay; and this rule is also
transmitted in the form of the good example: ‘In all points of decorum,
your conduct must be law to the rest of the party’ (126).
The Balance of Conversation
Literature too must answer to decorum, or to rules, explicit or not, on

what can be said, and how. Writing not only represents or reproduces
situations where the rules for speech are obeyed or disregarded, but
literature as such is part of, inscribed within, subordinated social con-
ventions. How is it possible for writing to claim legitimacy in critically
scrutinizing these conventions?
This central problematic is allegorized in Austen’s oeuvre. There is in
her work an abundance of textual sites where interpretation and under-
standing are put to the test. The proposal scenes in Pride and Prejudice
immediately come to mind: why, for instance, are we as readers not
allowed to learn what Darcy actually said when proposing the second
time to Elizabeth? And are not these novels based on eavesdropping,
and the transformation of gossip, heard at a distance, into writing?
Bharat Tandon suggests that Emma is a ‘reticent’ novel, and there is
actually much to be said for such a characterization, even though these

novels seem to be filled to the brim with spoken words.19 But in the
reticent novel, words are also exchanged for gestures: significant mean-
ing is produced not only in lines spoken, but in the gestures performed
and described. The symbolic economy is still at work.
In Mansfield Park, the performance of a dramatic piece offers the
involved persons the possibility to say aloud that which is normally
not allowed to be expressed: the company, as Edmund puts it, is a ‘set
of gentlemen and ladies, who have all the disadvantages of education
and decorum to struggle through’ (112). But his brother Tom replies:
‘and I can conceive no greater harm or danger to any of us in convers-
ing in the elegant written language of some respectable author than in
chattering in words of our own’ (113). At one level, the performance
serves only to reinforce the characters in the novel. But this episode also
says something else about the ‘bewitching’ (109) character of theatre.
Fanny comprehends the whole of the performance as utterly improper,
but even so, she tries to be helpful in trying to teach Mr Rushworth his
lines; she ‘was at great pains to teach him how to learn, giving him all
the helps and directions in her power, trying to make an artificial mem-
ory for him, and learning every word of his part herself’ (149). Theatre
does away with conventions; Fanny becomes the teacher for a man,
Edmund loses his judgement, Fanny learns another’s part. One can read
Mansfield Park as a story of how the connection between language and
person must be recognized and respected, how the balance between
empty babble and decorum must be upheld: speech economy must be
carefully regulated. Theatre, being the art of dissimulation, tends to cut
that connection, and, in violating the rules of conversation, break the
balance. Or, as Henry Crawford says, ‘I feel as if I could be any thing or
every thing, as if I could rant and storm, or sigh, or cut capers in any
tragedy or comedy in the English language’ (111). But what happens
here is really a question of displacement: the novel we are reading uses
a theatre performance as a disguise for the disruption of order that the
novel itself produces: here, literature takes a decisive step in the direc-
tion of autonomy, but at the same time, it is necessary for it to keep to
decorum.
The principal means for observing the right proportion within
human relations is speech as dialogue and conversation. In conversa-
tion, you represent or perform or negotiate your self and who you
are – what kind of person, traits of your character – and in doing so
you also indirectly formulate the order that is to be established between
speaking partners. One historically important form of dialogue, pointed
to by Michel Foucault, was the parrhesia: the parrhesiastic game was

the free and open speech, truthful in its essence, and with the special
meaning that parrhesia was practised with the speaker’s life at stake: it
was the speaking of truth before Power.20 But parrhesia was not only
political truthfulness as such, but a specific way, Foucault states, of
telling the truth, and thus intimately linked to the self-fashioning of the
subject. As such, it is opposed to rhetoric, which is ‘a way, an art, or a
technique of arranging the elements of discourse in such a way as to
persuade’.21 And in Christian spirituality, Foucault writes, parrhesia took
on a ‘sense of indiscretion, in the form of chattering about everything
concerning oneself’.22 In conversation, people are assessed, weighted
and consequently given their correct position within the order of the
room. If someone, like Fanny Price, does not take part in conversation,
persuasion becomes necessary: she must be persuaded into different
actions, including different speech acts. That is how rhetoric becomes
significant – and the opposite of parrhesia. And literature also includes
a rhetorical dimension, which Judith Butler points to: address is not
an aspect solely of the narrative, but also, or rather, ‘an interruption of
narrative. The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes
a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function.’23
And so, literature, too, has an addressee; it may be a fictive addressee,
inside the narrative or next to it, but literature always addresses and
tries to persuade its reader.
Dialogue works like rhetoric in that persuasion is at work within it:
we do not simply state the condition of things in conversation, we
try to influence our interlocutor, and the lines traded in conversation
have an illocutionary force: they produce an effect.24 If a speech has its
rules, and its figures, conversation also has its rules and conventions,
its figures and topics. Modern pragmatism has directed our attention to
conversation as based on ‘the practitioners’, the local people’s rules’.25
What Austen, from this perspective, makes clear, is that conversation
forms an economy that has to be balanced; its different parts must be
working within a common framework, and conversation must make sure
that the given framework is stabilized. Certainly one can read Austen
as engaging solely in the question whether the lovers will ultimately
have each other. But one can at the same time also relate the romantic
question to questions of why, and how, obstacles for marriage are raised
and overcome, how different persons relate to each other, defining
themselves, producing and representing themselves. The ‘choreogra-
phy’ of Austen points to both tradition and her own age. One might
characterize Austen as a Christian writer, in some sense, even though
she still repeatedly satirizes conceited priests, and even though there
is no God to be found in her world, for she does engage in questions
about virtues and vices, on how one can become a conscious, control-
led and virtuous person.26 Yet these classically Christian problems gain
further weight in an England that has been the neighbour of and witness
to the French Revolution, and that finds itself confronting large social
upheavals – in that context, questions of virtue and the right way to
behave become questions of citizenship, of individual agency, Mündigkeit
and authority. This is what Austen’s concern in crafting conversation
that stabilizes the framework, the ‘total speech situation’, is about.
As is well-known, the question of ‘manners’ was a great concern for
writers and thinkers at that time, such as Edmund Burke, defending tra-
ditional conventions and gallantry in Reflections on the French Revolution,
or Mary Wollstonecraft, who criticized gallantry as a barrier against
individualism in A Vindication of the Rights for Women – to both, the
question of good manners was, as Jenny Davidson writes, related to and
expressing ‘a larger system of power’.27 Rhetoric, at that time compre-
hended as ornamented speech, and ‘acknowledged as the responsible
site of civilized power’, was of central concern, Lynn Rigberg writes.28
Ways of talking were used to mark which class one belonged to, the edu-
cation one had had, and one could also express a political position by
the way one talked. But at this time, this type of rhetoric, according to
Rigberg, was being challenged, not least by the Scottish Enlightenment
philosophers, who made speech into a psychological problem, and
related it more to individual, rather than conventional or communal,
traits or qualities, which also meant that the individual, rather than the
situation as such, became the object of regulation.
If the age of Austen often found female speech exaggerated, abundant
and confused,29 that was a problem that a gentleman could deal with. In
Austen, elder women may babble constantly, expressing a female subor-
dination and dependence, but they are not to be taken seriously. Male
babbling, expressing inherited superiority, is perhaps a bigger problem
in these novels, since women are obliged to listen to it. And even worse,
there is silence, and the ones who don’t speak much or don’t speak at
all. Remaining silent is also a way of acting, which distributes unrest:
what does silence mean, what is the significance of the refusal to speak?
The lack of verbal expression might be the consequence of having been
overwhelmed, so that one does not find words – and during Austen’s
time, this becomes a topos in Romantic poetry.30 Even female silence
seems to function as an interruption or break in the speech economy:
it renders conversational exchanges and movements more difficult, it
leads to misunderstandings, and thereby it makes social control over

the production of subjects more difficult. Silence is, under certain con-
ditions, a social scandal.
Therefore, the silent figure in Austen’s world must be enticed or
forced to speak. The figures and choreographies of persuasion and
negotiation form a continuous theme throughout the works of Austen,
suggesting that spoken language in her novels must also take bodily
language and gestures into account. In a world so absolutely dominated
by its conventions, actions are most often the consequence of persua-
sion: one person has to be persuaded to follow her or his desire against
the commands of convention, or, the other way round, another person
must be persuaded about the good effects that, for instance, a conven-
tional marriage would necessarily produce.
Proposal scenes also illustrate Austin’s thesis about the illocution-
ary act as being ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’: in some, the performative fails,
while in others, it succeeds.31 Proposals have a choreography of their
own. They are highly ritualized speech acts, with the male as the active
subject, the female as the desired and adored object – which of course
is not necessarily a representation of the true nature of the relationship
between the two parties. But in the world of Austen, proposal is a both
deceptive and decisive turning point, since it will make the female
object into a subject: by accepting the proposal, the young woman will
enter marriage, with the consequence that she is given the status of
subject in leaving her former identity as unmarried daughter behind her
and instead becoming the wife, with control over the household and,
to some degree, the education of the children. The simple locution ‘I
now pronounce you man and wife’ (in all its varieties) has enormous
consequences in the world of Austen: it calls the woman into a subject
position, it confirms and strengthens, or completes, the subject position
of the man – it gives form, by adding the attribute ‘being married’ to
both the two individuals as well as to the pair of them. And it subjugates
the two to the laws and conventions of the state of ‘being married’.
But for that to happen, even the proposal must be forwarded under
observation of certain rules, and also, of course, be answered in the
positive. When Henry Crawford proposes to Fanny, we recognize
certain features of his speech from other proposals in other Austen
novels. Crawford’s speech is, first, excessive – Austen marks this by
having Crawford, in the middle of a stream of words, state that he ‘will
not attempt to describe’ how strongly he feels about Fanny’s brother’s
promotion to officer. Secondly, the intensity of Crawford’s feelings for
Fanny is marked by Austen ironically using italics to underline it (272).
Thirdly, as if the reader had not caught on to it yet, Austen has Fanny
think to herself that Crawford’s proposal is ‘mere trifling and gallantry’
(272). And lastly, he actually silences Fanny with his speech – when
she tries to stop him, he keeps ‘talking on, describing his affection,
soliciting a return, and, finally, in words so plain as to bear but one
meaning even to her, offering himself, hand, fortune, every thing to her
acceptance’ (273).
Fanny’s refusal, and her difficulties in explaining her refusal, that is,
her silence, generate attempts at persuasion: not only Henry Crawford,
but also his sister Mary, as well as Sir Thomas and Edmund, all try to per-
suade Fanny to accept Crawford’s proposal. Fanny is surrounded by words,
by persuasion, by rhetoric – and in the middle of this storm of words, she
sits silently.
The Silent Disease
There is in Mansfield Park a suppressed story, which, rather than the

romantic and marital plot, might be the real issue of the novel: why
is the heroine, Fanny Price, so quiet? And how can she be cured of
this disease of silence, or, differently put, how can this silence be
encapsulated, isolated, and cured or reformed, before it spreads?
These questions do have a paradoxical twist. There were, of course,
during Austen’s lifetime, strict rules for how to behave, especially for
young women and girls. During the eighteenth century, a literature
of ‘conduct books’ grows, and as Mary Poovey has pointed out,
these manuals became models also for literature. Novels by many female
writers could, according to Poovey, almost word for word be traced
back to these conduct books in their emphasis on self-control and self-
effacement.32 And Fanny Price is, at least superficially, everything that a
‘textbook Proper Lady’ should be.33
But is that really all there is to Fanny? She is, in my view, much too quiet,
and her silence becomes, I would say, a threat to decorum, propriety and
correct manners.34 One could perhaps see precisely this, her passivity, as
a precondition for her becoming a subject, or, in Judith Butler’s words, a
passivity that instates ‘an ego as object, acted on by others, prior to any
possibility of its own acting’.35 Butler, in her discussion not of Austen
but of Levinas, warns us against a too hasty use of this hypothesis:
Levinas’s ‘passivity’ must be understood, she writes, ‘not as the opposite
of activity but as the precondition for the active–passive distinction as
it arises in grammar and everyday descriptions of interactions within
the established field of ontology’.36 And Fanny’s silence and passivity
is not an ontological passivity, but, rather, a historical one. No doubt,

women during Austen’s lifetime were expected to take an active part in
conversations and social life. To observe silence meant, for both women
and men, a sabotaging of the social exchange. From the beginning, this
is what Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice; his silence is the effect of his
pride and his arrogance, which, in a Christian setting, must be made to
fall, and that even might cause his fall, if he does not learn to change.
But Fanny’s silence – which seems more profound, almost morbid, or
abnormal, in that it is so intimately locked up in Fanny’s personality –
results in, or provokes, problems and social unrest or instability: it might
turn into an infection. Therefore, Mansfield Park aims at forcing Fanny
Price to speak up, and to make her, through her own speech, confess to
social order: subordinate herself to the discursive order – and thereby
become a subject. The education of woman was of course also a common
feature of literature, and the female writer could win legitimacy by
making women the object of education in their works.37 But education
must be distributed under forms that in themselves observe decorum:
decorum was in reality a condition for literature. Decorum functions
as a measure that the novel, and literature, must adapt to, but also put
to the test. It is also in the resistance to decorum – that is, to rules of
social exchange and behaviour that are too superficial – that the novel,
both Austen’s and in general, wins legitimacy: the individual must, in
order to become a full-blown subject, not give in too easily to all social
conventions, but resist them, and that way form a moral foundation for
his or her subject status.38
The silence of Fanny originates from her ambiguous social standing:
she is adopted by her aunt, who is married to Sir Thomas Bertram,
lord of Mansfield Park. The adoption means that Fanny leaves behind
her own family, as well as her inferior social and – as the novel
eventually will show – linguistic circumstances. She moves into a social
setting that offers new rules for behaviour, and these rules make her
unsure and silence her. Her social background also makes Fanny into
something of a hybrid: she is a lower-class person, expected to function
within an upper-class setting, and her transport into this new setting
hybridizes her, until she finally leaves her background behind her. But
her silence marks the whole novel, also when she has grown several
years older. Fanny, Austen writes, was ‘speaking only when she could
not help it’ (277).
Taciturnity, as Tony Tanner observes, is a signal that Fanny does not
belong to the world in which she has been installed.39 But her discom-
fort must also be qualified as subordination: Fanny is being subordinated
to new behavioural rules and new linguistic rules. Her subordination

includes a linguistic failure, which has its recurrent formulation in the
novel: Fanny is unable to put her feelings and reactions into words.
She marks a contrast with Mrs Norris, who really belongs in this world,
and who, like a hermeneutical monster, begins almost all her lines with
turns like ‘I perfectly comprehend you’ (4) or ‘I thoroughly understand
you’ (5) or ‘I knew what was coming. I knew what you were going to
say’ (228): she swallows others’ speech with her understanding, thereby,
and in spite of all her empathy, making dialogue impossible. The whole-
hearted empathy of Mrs Norris means that she interrupts the circulation
of words and conversation. Elementary features of conversation, such
as ‘next speaker selection’, become problematic, since the hermeneutic
monster appropriates words, steals them out of their circulation and
context, and swallows them. Such linguistic consumption means the
end of dialogue.
The silence of Fanny also forces the people surrounding her to won-
der about decorum. Austen makes the question of correct manners into
the object of a discussion engaging Mary Crawford and the two Bertram
brothers, in which Fanny serves as the example. Miss Crawford pretends
not to understand Fanny, and wonders if she has made her début yet:
‘She dined at the parsonage, with the rest of you, which seemed like
being out; and yet she says so little, that I can hardly suppose she is’
(43). Edmund states, in answering Miss Crawford, that Fanny is grown
up: ‘She has the age and sense of a woman, but the out and not outs
are beyond me’ (43). It is, ultimately, after having ‘come out’ that the
young woman is allowed to speak, and the company expresses a com-
mon dislike for those young women who do not observe this rule. Rules
for female conduct, then, are decisive: ‘Those who are showing the
world what female manners should be,’ said Mr. Bertram, gallantly, ‘are
doing a great deal to set them right’ (44). One could say that there is,
underneath the social interaction in Austen’s novels, a ‘script’ unknown
to some of the participants, who therefore make elementary mistakes
(like Emma in Emma), or who, sensing this hidden script, hesitate to
enter conversation. The question of decorum is, then, fundamental, and
this discussion witnesses to the unrest of this social world. It consists
more exactly in the instability of discourse, since the social function of
decorum is to uphold communicative circulation and subjectification.
Fanny’s silence produces a rupture in consensus; it stops or, at least,
makes more difficult the stream of conversation: silence becomes a mys-
tery or a problem that must be overcome, if social rules shall continue
to exist, if the economy of speech shall continue to work.
One consequence of this problematic silence is that at least one

person, Edmund Bertram, tries to entice his cousin Fanny into
speaking, perhaps also because Fanny, when she actually does speak,
becomes ‘pretty’ (9), which is another aspect of decorum: the young
woman as decoration. Edmund takes a crying Fanny by surprise,
and starts questioning her: ‘For a long while no answer could be
obtained beyond a “no, no – not at all – no, thank you”; but he still
persevered, and no sooner had he begun to revert to her own home,
than her increased sobs explained to him where the grievance lay’ (12).
In identifying the weak spot in Fanny – her longing for Mother and
home – Edmund entices her to speak: he is practising anacrisis.
And Fanny confirms this when, confiding in Edmund, she tells him
that she is thinking of ‘the kind pains you took to reason and per-
suade me out of my fears, and convince me that I should like it after a
little while, and feel how right you proved to be’ (23f.) – the success of
the demonic conversation partner, Edmund, is, then, not only that he
makes Fanny speak, but that he also makes her enjoy and find pleas-
ure in being forced to speak. The violence of conversations like this
resides not only in force, but also in her interlocutors’ way of forc-
ing a definition of her upon her. Disapproving of Fanny’s negative
answer to Crawford’s proposal, Sir Thomas defines her as ‘very, very
different from any thing that I had imagined’; she is, according to
him, ‘willful and perverse’, she thinks only of herself, she has acted
in ‘a wild fit of folly’ and with ‘ingratitude’ (288f.). While Sir Thomas’s
lines aim at persuading Fanny to change her mind, Edmund instead
tries to make her speak, and in this way persuades her: ‘You must
talk to me. I know you have something on your mind. I know what
you are thinking of. You cannot suppose me uninformed. Am I to
hear it from every body but Fanny herself?’ (314). But having Fanny
speak only means that Edmund compares her present action and
thinking with her true self, ‘yourself, your rational self’ (315), which
he defines in terms of moral and literary tastes, in ‘warm hearts and
benevolent feelings’ (316).
Anacrisis and Pain
The violence of anacrisis is, within the peaceful life lived at Mansfield
Park, one of the interior strategies for the maintenance of order. The
practice, in different forms, of anacrisis is so frequent that Fanny con-
stantly has to confront it: ‘And yet, why should I be glad? For am I not
certain of seeing or hearing something there to pain me?’ (197). All the
while that Fanny is educated, slowly learning how to become a subject,

she starts trying to fend off this violence that torments her. When
Henry Crawford proposes to her, Fanny’s reaction is forceful:
‘No, no, no,’ she cried, hiding her face. ‘This is all nonsense. Do not
distress me. I can hear no more of this. Your kindness to William
makes me more obliged to you than words can express; but I do not
want, I cannot bear, I must not listen to such – No, no, don’t think
of me. But you are not thinking of me. I know it is all nothing.’
(273)
Crawford’s courtship has been tormenting Fanny , and his proposal now
seems to her a physical attack on her body and being. This is perhaps the
single place in the story where Fanny is the most expressive – at the same
time that she states that she cannot express her gratitude. The only way
left for her to escape what seems like torture is not to listen to Crawford –
which is impossible. Decorum demands of her that she answers, that
his proposal is seriously considered before answering, and that Fanny
then speaks. But, in spite of her rejecting him, Crawford continues his
courtship, and ‘poor Fanny’ cannot escape speech, since the words, like
those spoken to her by Mary Crawford, are ‘all over her, in all her pulses,
and all her nerves’ (324). In entering the body, language takes on a bla-
tantly physiological character.
Repeatedly, speech in Mansfield Park, whether it is the speech you
are obliged to utter or the speech you are forced to listen to, is related
to pain. That is another of the most important keywords of the novel,
and it has different meanings: physical and psychic agony or torment,
but also trouble and toil. With ‘pain’ as the mediator, speech is related
to body; moral response is depicted in physical terms: anacrisis is in
Austen also a physical violence, in the last instance directed towards
the female body that is being tortured by a speech that produces pain
and suffering. Speech directed to Fanny seems to have a direct, physi-
cal effect on her. The basis for this effect is of course that sound strikes
the eardrum: our perception of sounds, including speech, is physical
and not just mental. But, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle emphasizes, this
physical effect is intensified by speech ‘being articulated, by becoming
language’, and this effect, in its turn, might be intensified when lan-
guage loses meaning, and only becomes a repetitive conglomeration of
phrases.40 The gallant speech, in all its eloquence, is in Austen nothing
more than a linguistic noise. But directed to Fanny, in private, gallant
speech undercuts her own linguistic control; and her thinking about the
episode, in the form of free indirect discourse, transforms Austen’s unaf-

fected style into an agitated style that borders on parataxis:
She was feeling, thinking, trembling about every thing; – agitated,

happy, miserable, infinitely obliged, absolutely angry. It was all
beyond belief! He was inexcusable, incomprehensible! – But such
were his habits, that he could do nothing without a mixture of
evil. He had previously made her the happiest of human beings, and
now he had insulted – she knew not what to say – how to class or
how to regard it. (273–4)
The pain that Fanny experiences cuts up the calmness of narration

and turns the style into an embodiment of that pain. Scenes like this,
where the represented violence or turbulence seem also to infect its rep-
resentation, are rare in Austen: stylistically, she tends to cling to elegance
and fluency. But there is a penetrating irony in Austen, an indifference
towards the fluctuations of faith that she writes. Lionel Trilling has
emphasized that this irony is not only, or even mostly, stylistic, but rather
a way or method of understanding the world in its ‘contradictions, para-
doxes, and anomalies’.41 But this consciousness or this attitude can be
reported only by stylistic means. D. A. Miller maintains that Austen’s style
is characterized by a deep melancholy, which is an effect of her ‘refusal to
give [her] Style a human face’.42 Austen’s style, Miller writes, is ‘at once
utterly exempt from the social necessities that govern the narrated world,
and intimately acquainted with them down to the most subtle psychic
effects on character’.43 It is, in my opinion, as if the indifference of style
coincides with the indifferent face of the world represented. There is no
liberation – and the confinement of style to this indifference confirms it.
Examination
That language takes on a physical nature, but now more typically with-
out representation being destabilized, is made obvious in a scene with
the master of the estate, Sir Thomas. He is the (mostly) absent patriarch,
obliged to see to his duties at Parliament in London and to watch over
his plantation in Antigua. He was – perhaps because of his absence – a
frightening figure to Fanny as a child, and he remains frightening to
Fanny as an adult:
– a heavy step, an unusual step in that part of the house; it was

her uncle’s; she knew it as well as his voice; she had trembled at it
as often, and began to tremble again, at the idea of his coming up

to speak to her, whatever might be the subject. – It was indeed Sir
Thomas, who opened the door, and asked if she were there, and if he
might come in. The terror of his former occasional visits to that room
seemed all renewed, and she felt as if he were going to examine her
again in French and English. (282)
And now, being forced to speak before this imposing figure, an image
of the power structure that Fanny’s silence is at once both part of,
and a threat against, slowly comes to us. Her silence is a threat to the
power structure because she cannot explain to Sir Thomas why she
is rejecting Crawford, whose proposal, should she have accepted it,
would have been highly advantageous for all their economies, except
for Fanny’s private, emotional economy. And her silence plays a role
in the power structure because it is the price that she pays for her
social journey: she is paying for her welfare with subordination, and
that subordination makes her into an attractive trophy on the mar-
riage market: a prize.44
Examination and grading are both central aspects of power, and Sir
Thomas has apparently upheld authority through examination.45 The
attention that Fanny receives at Mansfield Park, and in society, takes
the form of a constant examination, by which she is being evaluated –
in the last instance so that her value on the marriage market can
be determined. Coming to a dance, Fanny is ‘approved’ – because of the
‘propriety’ of her dress (246f.). Examination is a constant feature of life
at Mansfield Park, and Fanny’s capacity for withstanding examination,
and to hold on to her moral principles, becomes of decisive importance
in this unruly world, where decorum no longer guarantees order: it will
help her in becoming a subject. Social life in the form of conversation
is an ‘examining apparatus’, constantly at work, in the same way as the
more institutional apparatuses of schools and hospitals, both examples
that Foucault uses to illustrate his general definition of examination:
‘The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy
and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveil-
lance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish.’46 Social
life in Austen means that the individual is under constant surveillance,
or, as Foucault has it: ‘It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being
able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his
subjection.’47 But examination as an aspect of social life and conversa-
tion is possible only if the one examined agrees to the process and takes
part in it as a speaker.
The successful normalization of Fanny Price is represented not only

in her slowly becoming more engaged in social life, taking part in and
enjoying dances and sometimes even conversation, but also by way of
contrast. For a while, Fanny goes back to Portsmouth, to her childhood
home, and – as has been pointed out by Tony Tanner (foremost among
others) – Austen’s prose in the description of this childhood home turns
into the ‘most violent’ she ever wrote.48 Her account of Fanny’s home
seems to be formulated on a class-based bias, and Austen forces her
heroine not only to meet her father, but also to sneak ‘back to her seat,
with feelings sadly pained by his language and his smell of spirits’ (346).
Fanny is sent to Portsmouth, and to her own family, as a sort of agent
of normalization, but one that is also to be tried, tempted and tested:
can her newly won normality stand the pressures of an inferior social
setting? Language is at the centre of the Portsmouth episode: the oaths
and curses used by her father and brothers, as well as their inability to
speak a more nuanced language. The Portsmouth episode must be read
as highly politicized: Marilyn Butler has pointed out that the account
of Fanny’s family resembles the image of revolutionaries produced in
the anti-Jacobin novel, but without any talk of the revolution: ‘Instead
he [the father] illustrates non-ideal human nature as it commonly
is, by an ugly way of life led without interest in others, without any
sense of order because he does not even perceive the existence of such
an ideal.’49 One could also say that ‘Portsmouth’ is Fanny’s colonial
project: it parallels Sir Thomas’s visits to Antigua.50 Like him, Fanny has
to see to it that normality rules, but it is also from a somewhat estranged
position that Fanny confronts her own past as colony – she has become
another colonizer. Or is that comparison too far-fetched? Fanny does
not exploit the work of her family, but she does regard her family as
savages in need of civilization, and she does single out her sister as the
good savage, the one possible to save through education.
Installed with her old family, Fanny observes the household with a
normalized gaze. Her arrival at the house is described from her perspec-
tive, and her experience of coming home is marked by the word ‘noise’:
her two younger brothers ‘run about and make a noise’; ‘she had not yet
heard all the noise’ (347); it was ‘noise rising upon noise, bustle upon
bustle’ (350); and she summarizes the experience as ‘noise, disorder, and
impropriety’ (354). To this we can add a few examples of how her family
is described: the boys are ‘ragged and dirty’ (347); the father is ‘dirty and
gross’ (354); and the mother is ‘a dawdle, a slattern’ (355). In contrast to
this animalistic horde, the normalized subject of Fanny shines forth –
even though she has to endure a bad headache, caused by all the noise
(347, 348). The difference between the civilized subject, characterized

by her good manners, and the rest is emphasized by the characterization
of the boys as ‘untameable’ (356): control stands against spontaneity.
In describing the Portsmouth family, Austen’s style is also changed. Its
rhythm and melody is different; the discourse harsher, the judgements
more condemning: ‘He did not want abilities; but he had no curiosity,
and no information beyond his profession; he read only the newspa-
per and the navy-list; he talked only of the dock-yard, the harbour,
Spithead, and the Motherbank; he swore and he drank, he was dirty
and gross’ (354). It is as if Austen’s perfection and control of expression
is disturbed by an irresistible disgust before these people. It takes on the
form of speed, making each statement both sharper and shorter than
the one preceding it. In this heightening of its tempo, the style mirrors
another distinctive difference between Mansfield Park and Portsmouth:
while life at Mansfield is led with ‘no sounds of contention, no raised
voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence was ever heard’ (357), life
inside the Portsmouth family is marked by precisely the imbalanced,
‘sudden bursts’ from Fanny’s father (348) or from the boys entering the
room (349).
The Rise of a Subject
Fanny endures this linguistic hell, along with the normalizing one
at Mansfield Park; she endures its linguistic violence, its noise – and
therefore is rewarded with becoming a subject. Her return to her child-
hood home is marked by her new, and superior, social stature, and when
she learns how to use this superiority, the process of subject formation
comes to a happy end.51 As she herself has been taught and educated
by Edmund, she now starts teaching her younger sister, Susan, who
thereby is singled out to become individualized as the next object of
normalization; she is to succeed her sister in the apparatus’s production
of subjects. It is through the conquest of this powerful position, which
includes the right to hold examinations, and by going to the lending
library to get books for this teaching, that Fanny finds herself ‘amazed
at being any thing in propria persona’ (363) – she now exercises the
authority that her position within the social hierarchy grants her.
By resisting the temptations being offered by the Crawfords and the
elegant world, and instead responsibly defending tradition by teaching
Susan, and making sure that she follows in her footsteps, she observes
decorum: she finds herself in propria persona, she observes every possible
‘propriety’ there is, she becomes a ‘proper lady’ – and her female writer,
in her turn, observes decorum by playing with, and exploiting, the

resemblance of ‘propria’ and ‘propriety’. Fanny is now, in a way, herself;
she is moving into the mould of decency and, designed, she can now,
in the guise of wife, become the ‘property’ of someone else. Linguistic
violence makes her into an object, and therefore into a commodity:
evaluated propriety is transformed into valuable property.52 And the
lower-class woman, transformed by her journey through the social hier-
archies, becomes an other to her own life’s experience, but herself, her
‘true self’, as a normalized member of the upper classes, and acknowl-
edged as such by those at the top of the social scale.
At this point, the novel faces a problem: how to protest against the
objectification and commodification of Fanny without departing from
decorum? Austen ties several solutions to this problem: Fanny is the
one who upholds the moral standard that should guide this world, but
it is the others, rather than Fanny herself, that comment upon it. And
Austen has Fanny write letters, which gives her an opportunity to make
Fanny speak in writing, and not orally, and consequently more freely
than decorum would otherwise allow. And Austen uses free indirect
speech and inner monologue. It is in Fanny’s silent reflections that her
voice is being formulated and heard; it is within this silence that
woman can speak. This also explains why the library becomes such a
strategically important place in the making of Fanny into a subject – it
is only in (literary) fiction that someone like Fanny Price is allowed to
become a subject. Outside of literature, she would still, I fear, be only
subordinate.
The novels of Austen negotiate historically new connections between
two aspects of the subject: on one hand, the acting, commanding and
responsible individual; on the other, the subordinate, the one that has
to obey. One can, using another type of lens and concept, look at these
connections as routes for ideology, for the hegemonic ideology, the
one that holds a society together, to work – that is, not to confuse it
with ‘political ideologies’, even though this form of ideology also has
decisive political implications. Both the novel as a medium, and the
world of family that it represents, may be described as ‘ideological state
apparatuses’: the novel represents how such an apparatus performs its
reproductive work in the guise of family and the parlour, at the same
time as the novel itself operates as such an apparatus. Louis Althusser
seeks to define the ideological state apparatuses, in contrast to the
repressive state apparatus as such, as ‘multiple, distinct, “relatively
autonomous”’.53 The repressive state apparatus is one and public, while
ideological state apparatuses, in this perspective, are many and private.
Reproduction is ideological: no matter what persons or family

members, family, as a set of structurally based practices, is reproduced
when ideology defines this set of practices as ‘family’. Education,
formal or not, is to a large extent instrumental in this reproduc-
tion. The ideological state apparatus works through distributing and
inculcating models and rules for how things are to be performed,
thereby ‘the relations of production in a capitalist social formation …
are largely reproduced’. But it is also in this ‘know-how’ that ideology
takes on ‘material existence’ and a life of its own. What Althusser is
discussing, then, is no simple or reductionist submission, forced by
repression, but rather a mutual process that regulates ‘the relations of
exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited’.54 In the Marxist
discourse of Althusser, power is part of the conditions of production,
but in Austen, it is power relations, and the self-understanding pro-
duced by power, rather than the conditions of production as such, that
are being reproduced: the apparatus is one of speech, not of labour or
production. That marriages are being made – and therefore the design
of personal circumstances, of one’s ‘society’, is changing – does not
implicate any significant transformations: ideology inhabits the way
that society is practised, that is, how social norms and normality are
materialized in daily life. It is the practices generated by family life,
not the opinions held or standpoints taken by individuals, which are
reproductive and that are being reproduced. Illegitimate relations or
love affairs become a threat to ideological hegemony, since they disturb
not only the marital institution as such, but the legitimate form for
individuality: illegitimate relations depend on an excessive desire that
the normal economy of speech and sexuality can not accommodate.
That is the logic that explains why the runaway in Austen always has to
be found and rescued, or captured, so that the reproduction of ideology
is guaranteed.
In Austen, family life and the parlour, in which family life becomes
public, are the two principal arenas where ideology takes on material
form and binds the whole of society. In these arenas, any individual
included within the family circle and its company may step forward,
rehearse and perform the gestures and choreography required for sub-
ject formation. The position of the subject, firmly gendered, is already
in place and expects every individual entering this space to fill out
the form. Family restricts the female subject position, but makes the
male position complete: men can become subjects sans famille, but
it is as head of the family that male subjectification is complete and
perfected.
We can observe this process of subject formation at work in Mansfield

Park. Sir Thomas is the paterfamilias, lord of Mansfield Park, the owner
of a sugar plantation on Antigua, and a Member of Parliament. As
such, he is part of the public power apparatus, the state, in which only
a few are included: a limited number of well-off men. This apparatus
produces power in the form of decrees, laws, regulations and so on. It
also has the right to command repression inside its own nation, and to
declare war against foreign nations. Sir Thomas, in order to be part of
this apparatus, has to leave family and estate and go to London. This
regularly conducted journey marks the difference: within the ideologi-
cal state apparatus of the family, where one does not exercise power but
is constantly formed by it, everyone is included; in the political appara-
tus, only a few. The difference becomes obvious also if we compare Sir
Thomas and his two sons: his sons have not yet married, they are not
members of any parliament, they have limited, or severely limited,
financial resources. Even so, his two sons are subjects, but not in the
completed form their father is. When Edmund marries Fanny, he takes
a decisive step in the direction of a complete status as subject. At that
point, they have both been taught the forms of correct manners.
But there is a strange ambiguity marking the position of the subject.
Does transformation into subjecthood mean only a new captivity?
Not only subjection, but also becoming the one that must keep others
subordinate? Fanny Price marries; she is about to become the next lady
of the estate. But, as Nina Auerbach acidly observes, she is, en route to
marriage, also transformed from prisoner to jailer at Mansfield Park;
‘she rises alone from being the prisoner of Mansfield to the status of its
principal jailer’.55 Althusser offers a way to understand this strange game
surrounding and penetrating the position of the subject in Austen. One
might observe forceful motions going through social life in these nov-
els: there is a peculiar attraction towards a centre, which on one level is
marriage, towards which both the marital partners and their company
is ultimately drawn. But on another level, this centre is exactly the
subject: all these motions are directed inwards, towards the interior of
the subject, or subjectivity, the position to be Somebody to oneself, and
to be able to say ‘I’. But in no example does that include an individual
saying no, who denies the conditions, who breaks away from the soci-
etal norms, out of convention and the rules of social life: at this level,
there is no liberation. Althusser formulates an analogous problem in
a theoretical discourse: ‘all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals
as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of subject’.56 Even
so, Althusser asks whether individuals are ‘abstract’ – which he can do
since ideology can address individuals exactly because they are already
subjects. Becoming a subject, then, is not becoming one’s true self, nor
to liberate oneself, but to repeatedly and endlessly enter an already
defined function. And what happens in ‘interpellation’ is also that not
only the addressee, but also the sender, is being defined and redefined,
put into place and position: the interpellation is always emitted from
an already ideologically fixed position.57
The culture of conversation that Austen constantly exploits had as
its ultimate criterion that conversation must please. Included within
‘conversation’ was not only the exchange of words, but also inter-
course in a wider sense: the conversational rules were part of the rules
for social life in general.58 Conversation was not an end in itself, but
the medium through which both men and women were allowed and
encouraged to practise ‘the art of pleasing’, as a contemporary conduct
book formulated this overall aim.59 In conversation, subjectification
found a medium for the forcing of human beings into subjects. One
reason, according to Sir Thomas, why Fanny should not reject Henry
Crawford’s proposal is that the young man has a ‘more than common
agreeableness, with address and conversation pleasing to every body’
(285). But Jane Austen also writes the violence inherent in the pleasures
of becoming a subject: the ‘cheerful orderliness’ of Mansfield Park might
include ‘some pains’, while Portsmouth ‘could have no pleasures’ (357).
2
The Secrets of Silence: Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter, Musil’s ‘Tonka’
‘Speak, woman!’ Why does Hester not speak out and confess, why
does she instead simply say ‘I will not speak!’? Why does Tonka not
say anything, why is she almost mute? The reasons for keeping quiet
and not saying anything are many: they might be of an ethical nature,
or – on the contrary – only opportunist; there might be a linguistic
problem, a language barrier, or a speech disturbance of some kind; it
might be shyness or other personal traits that keep one from speaking,
or the situation might, for some reason, be overwhelming. One obvi-
ous reason for remaining silent is, of course, to keep a secret. And also,
many literary texts want to keep their secrets to themselves, be it, say,
Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson or Marguerite Duras’s Le Ravissement
du Lol V. Stein, both novels that refuse, but in totally different ways, to
give away any explanations. Novelistic silence is of as many different
types as everyday silence, but we shall now have a look at two novels
that investigate a kind of silence and secrecy with apparent social
relevance.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Robert Musil’s
‘Tonka’ (1924) both tell the story of a young woman who becomes
pregnant under circumstances that don’t allow for pregnancy. Hester
Prynne, of The Scarlet Letter, and Tonka of Musil’s story, both refuse
to name the fathers of their children, since both are married but their
respective legal husbands are not the fathers. And, adding to this prob-
lem, Hester lives in a small Puritan town, Boston, and Tonka seems
to have aquired a ‘horrible, dangerous, insidious disease’, which her
husband has not. Hester simply refuses to reveal the father, and while
everything points to the simple fact of Tonka having been ‘unfaithful’
to her husband, she still stubbornly denies it, even if she cannot give
any alternative explanation for her pregnancy.
58
The Secrets of Silence: Hawthorne, Musil 59
Speech and Writing: The Scarlet Letter
Hester Prynne is a talkative person. It is only when asked about the

father of her child that she refuses to speak. But this silence on her part is
enough to provoke specific reactions among the persons and the society
surrounding her, and enough to engage Hawthorne and his readers
in a hermeneutical problematic: The Scarlet Letter forms into a story of
language, and of interpretation as a social practice, a story that is both
enacted on and generated by an opposition between writing and speech.
The story of Hester Prynne takes place in the Puritan community of Boston
in mid-seventeenth century,1 with its peculiar mixture of sovereign and
disciplinary power, but it is framed also in another way: Hawthorne intro-
duces a narrator, and his finding of a manuscript, to make this story write-
able as well as legitimate. This narrator, who is going to give us a detailed
account of Hester and her problems, opens his story by stating that he
is ‘disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs’, and he adds
that it is ‘scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak
impersonally’.2 Furthermore, he introduces these thoughts as part of an
autobiographical project, but the resulting story never forms into any-
thing like an autobiography at all. Instead, these introductory remarks,
which expand into a long – very long – introduction to the story, serve
as a marker for the hermeneutical issues at stake here: what is it to ‘speak
all’, and who is it that could eventually ‘speak all’? What is the relation
between speech and person, between letter and meaning? And what is the
relation between private and public? All these questions have a common
concern, namely the regulation of speech and communication. And that
regulation has its central point in the embroidered ‘A’ on Hester Prynne’s
breast, marking her as an adulteress. This letter could also be said to be
the protagonist of the story, since it almost takes on a life of its own, and
it is constantly at the centre of attention, transcending its own identity as
merely a letter of the alphabet, as Nina Baym points out:
Constantly, people in the novel are reading it, looking for its symbolic
import; yet, the letter evades all attempts to fix its meaning and, through
such evasion, establishes itself as an entity that is beyond meaning. …
The question of what that letter ‘means’ is exactly what the story is all
about, and the ‘source’ of that story is the physical object, the letter
itself, the physical object capable of being read in any number of ways.3
The ‘A’ is embroidered on the clothes veiling Hester, at the same time
as the letter makes her crime public knowledge. But if the narrator cannot
undress Hester, he can open up the manuscript, making the disclosure

of Hester’s secret into someone else’s act, which is only being reported
upon by Hawthorne. The truth-content of the story is therefore open
to discussion: the narrator/Hawthorne tells us, in the introduction, of
his ‘desire’ to put himself in ‘a personal relation with the public’. With
a rhetorical gesture, Hawthorne tries to undo the dichotomy of public
and private, thereby reaching some kind of truth, that of a speaker ‘in
some true relation with his audience’ (4). But is the writer writing really
a speaker speaking? Can the mass distribution of the written story among
anonymous consumers be called a ‘true relation’? The rhetoric of the
personal – also called ‘autobiography’ – must then substitute for the pres-
ence of the speaker: if the story as such has nothing whatsoever to do
with autobiography, at least the finding of the manuscript is legitimate
as a product of true, autobiographical writing.
The problem of truth and its media – writing, speech – remains close
to the surface of the story, now and then turning visible in the form
of a specific traffic from speech to writing. Based on the manuscript,
unsigned and anonymous, Hawthorne tells the story of Hester. But how
can he offer any ‘proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein con-
tained’ (4)? He cannot – which is why The Scarlet Letter throughout takes
on a specific, questioning form, one which generates no answers, as
Stephen Railston has pointed out, at the same time as it ‘organizes the
whole novel’.4 Combined with this form of questions-with-no-answers
is another rhetorical gesture, which Hawthorne uses to emphasize the
preliminary character of the story: ‘it may be’, ‘it might be’, ‘perchance’,
‘perhaps’, ‘it seemed’, ‘according to some’, ‘it was reported’.5 What
Hawthorne introduces with this form of writing – a well-known literary
topos – is the notion that the story originally has been overheard or
even intercepted, then written down in the found manuscript, which
in its turn is now inscribed in Hawthorne’s autobiographical project.
The relationship between overhearing and writing, between speech
and text, must be regulated in some way if truth is to be disclosed,
‘without violating either the reader’s rights or his own’ (4). It is the law
that sees to it that everything is kept within its limits, and throughout
the story, law is hinted at, alluded to. Starting with the shelved law
books in the Custom-House (7), via Chillingworth thinking of himself
as a ‘judge, desirous only of truth’ (129), but in reality more of a ‘thief’,
ready to ‘steal’ (130), we move into the Puritan community, where we
will oscillate between the public, in the form both of the marketplace
and the offices of power, and the private, in the form of both domes-
tic interiors and inner thoughts. Puritan society is in this novel still
under formation, its inhabitants – ‘amongst whom religion and law

were almost identical’ (50) – still at work drawing up its boundaries,
among those also the act of balancing public and private, inner and
outer. The story starts with a gathering in the marketplace, where we are
to witness Hester Prynne being sentenced, and, towards the end, we
once more gather in the marketplace, and when we see the happy faces
of the people there, we learn that it is because ‘a new man is beginning
to rule over them’ (229). The story of Hester being sentenced for adul-
tery, and forced to wear the letter ‘A’ as a sign of her guilt, is carefully
inscribed within the problems of the forming of a society and its law,
within a juridical discourse, signalled by the recurrent presence of words
like ‘crime’, ‘guilt’, and so on.6
Still, when we reach the end of the story, in the final chapter called
‘Conclusion’, as if the story leading up to it has been an (juridical)
argument, the question of truth remains central – but it has now lost its
close connection to the law. ‘Be true! Be true! Be true!’, is the slogan –
but truth is now defined as an act performed by the individual: ‘Show
freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst
may be inferred!’ (260). The law remains a central regulatory function in
the novel, but is has to be combined with the regulation of the self.
In order for the transformation of the self to be trustworthy, the indi-
vidual must ‘publish’ his or her confession: showing one’s faults ‘freely
to the world’ is an act of publicatio sui.7 Hester is throughout the story
constantly visible, and therefore an object of supervision, while her lover
Dimmesdale on the contrary hides his true nature; he stays invisible
until he, finally, ‘publishes’ himself when dying on the scaffold. Truth
is also a moral matter, and, as such, it can only be the result of living
truthfully, transforming the question of truth into one of the production
of true subjects.
This breaking of the law, then, is the first aspect of the novel, suggest-
ing that the story it tells has social implications having to do with society
and its borders, as defined by the law – any transgression of these borders
threatens the social structure that they support. But the original trans-
gression is supplemented by another crime: Hester’s refusal to confess the
name of the father. ‘Speak, woman’ (68) – but neither Woman nor Hester
does speak, at least not about the problem of fatherhood. Or do they?8
The Double Function of ‘A’
The ‘A’ on Hester’s breast has a curious, double function in the novel:
it both brands and silences Hester, as well as delivers her story; it is at
once both silencing and speaking.9 Hester’s embroidering of the ‘A’ on

her breast, making it so beautiful that it even serves as an advertisement
for ‘her delicate and imaginative skill’ as a seamstress (81), underlines
the double function of the letter: due to Hester’s personality and way of
life, the ‘A’, for some of the surrounding people, takes on the meaning
of ‘Able’ (161). More importantly, the ‘A’ on the cloth found wrapped
around the manuscript also conveys of Hester’s story, her adultery and
its consequences. But the ‘A’ is also a physical branding of its bearer,
as when Roger Chillingworth – Hester’s husband, long missing but
now back – puts ‘his long forefinger on the scarlet letter, which forth-
with seemed to scorch into Hester’s breast, as if it had been red-hot’
(73). The ‘A’ brands like a branding iron, normally used on cattle, and
Chillingworth makes it obvious to Hester that he looks upon her as his
property: ‘Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me’ (76).10 The
presence of the ‘A’ on Hester makes her situation totally different from
that of the hidden father to her child, as well as to that father, and to
Chillingworth: ‘He bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment,
as thou dost; but I shall read it on his heart’ (75).
The absent father will be the object of hermeneutics, one could say;
he is a text to be identified and read (in the face of Pearl), while Hester
is already identified and fixated by the ‘A’. Hester’s brand installs her
within a power structure, placing her in the lower regions of society:
she serves as an example to learn from. Her sentence makes her a con-
stant object of observation, of surveillance, of commentary: her posi-
tion makes her the object of a repeated violence. The embroidered ‘A’
is described in terms of ‘torture’ to Hester (102, 256): it is as if the ‘A’ is
actually inscribed on her skin and body. And Chillingworth’s talk about
finding the male culprit is to Hester like ‘terror’ (76): violence is a spoken
violence. Also her crime, her adultery, is related to violence, since it was
committed as an act of passion, of passionate love, and passion is in The
Scarlet Letter closely tied to violence: Dimmesdale’s personality includes
the ‘violence of passion’ (194), and Pearl has apparently inherited this
streak; she ‘burst into a fit of passion, gesticulating violently’ (210).
Passion is violent since it does not respect borders or limitations; passion
transgresses, and in that transgression, it is violent.
Violence is also directed against Pearl, the living ‘A’, the proof of the
adultery. Mother and daughter are both interrogated, Hester in public
(67–9), Pearl in more of a semi-public setting at the Governor’s office
(109–17). One aspect of these interrogations is that they are efforts at
producing definite definitions of Hester and Pearl, by making them
speak, or confess, whom the father of the child is. The application
of law has a direct consequence for the identity of its objects, and
Hawthorne carefully describes the effects on Hester, not of the ‘A’ as
such, but of the instalment of Hester within a power structure. The
formerly beautiful Hester has lost most of the ‘light and graceful foliage
of her character … leaving a bare and harsh outline’, and her transfor-
mation means that she has lost the attributes ‘the permanence of which
had been essential to keep her a woman’. But still, Woman who once
has lost her womanhood might regain it by a ‘magic touch’ – which
of course is that performed by Man. And Hawthorne tells his read-
ers that we will see ‘whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so
touched, and so transfigured’ (164). The application of the law means
that the form called Hester undergoes a gradual but inevitable change,
which might be hindered only by a magic touch. But the magician’s
touch, Chillingworth’s touching of her ‘A’, only makes the branding of
her more obvious – it is when she once again meets her former lover
Dimmesdale in the forest that magic works, if only for a short episode.
The embroidered ‘A’ speaks, through giving form to Hester – and
it keeps silent. Another way in which it speaks is that it functions as
an allusion to another piece of handicraft, which is to be found in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. That story also relates the fate of a woman to
the forming of a social structure: the king’s daughter, Philomela, visits
her sister Procne, who is also married to a king, Tereus, who, ignited
by Philomela’s beauty, rapes her. But in order that she should not tell
on him to her father, the more powerful king, he cuts out Philomela’s
tongue so that she cannot tell of the rape. But Philomela, being rel-
egated to the traditional female chores, weaves a tapestry, and into it
she weaves purple letters, telling the story of what has happened to
her. She then sends the tapestry to her sister, and the two of them take
a bloody revenge on Procne’s husband. The decisive metamorphosis
then takes place: the two sisters are transformed into beautiful birds.
In Hester Prynne’s story, too, Philomela still speaks about the violence
directed against women, still speaks about how states trade women, as
the two kings in the story of Philomela do, in order to secure the lawful
forming of society.11
This speaking, or telling, and therefore public, side of the ‘A’ is made
even more significant when Hester’s daughter Pearl is made into a living
counterpart to the embroidered letter: ‘Behold, verily, there is the woman
of the scarlet letter; and, of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the
scarlet letter running along by her side!’ (102). Does the embroidered ‘A’
signify ‘Adulteress’ or ‘Able’? And what does the living ‘A’, in the form of
Pearl, signify? She is the ‘living hieroglyphic’ (207), and consequently,
hermeneutic efforts of interpretation are directed against her, foremost

by Chillingworth, the legal father of this dysfunctional family, and her
biological father, Minister Dimmesdale, who both, but for different
reasons, wish to detect, in Pearl’s face, proof of fatherhood. And Hester
too searches her daughter’s face for signs of ‘the guiltiness to which
she owed her being’ (90). Being the outcome of an illegitimate affair,
Pearl turns into a nondescript entity, impossible to fixate, and she must
therefore be made to speak. The recurrent question of what her ‘being’
is (96, 97) can only be answered by herself.
The problem is that Pearl does not really speak, and that she can-
not unmask her father, whose identity she does not know. Also, she is
the result of a metamorphosis, her identity as a ‘living A’ transforms
her into ‘a bird of bright plumage’ (244). Ovid’s birds will sing of the
sad destiny of Philomela through history, finding their way into both
literature and art. But how does Pearl, ‘the scarlet letter endowed with
life’ (102), sing? She is a ‘strange child’, as Chillingworth states (116),
and she is, much more than the embroidered letter, the interpretative
enigma of the story, since she, although said to be a living analogue to
the letter, refuses meaning – her birdlike movements seem to transport
her out of signification. Her enigmatic character as a living hieroglyph
demands an interpreter who is ‘a prophet or magician skilled to read the
character of the flame!’ (207). This magician is nowhere to be found,
not even in Chillingworth, though he is repeatedly referred to as invest-
ing in alchemy.
The ‘A’, then, whether in its identity as a letter on a woman’s breast,
or as a living child, offers severe difficulties for reading. The isolated
letter cannot be read; reading demands sentences, syntax, meaning-
ful utterances, a context wherein the individual letter is included and
embedded in a row of letters. Hester refuses to tell of the father, the
child does not know who her father is, at least her earthly father. And
even so, had Pearl been able to tell her father’s name, there remains the
problem of her speech. Her birdlike features correspond to a specific
quality of her speech: ‘She broke continually into shouts of a wild,
inarticulate, and sometimes piercing music’ (228); ‘Pearl mumbled
something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human language, but
was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves
with … it was in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman …’ (156).
Pearl, as a child, is not included within discourse; she stands outside,
even though speaking. But her childhood relates her to nature; the
bird is like the brook ‘telling its unintelligible secret’ (187). Innocent,
Pearl exists before language, which of course makes her a problematic
and paradoxical feature of the forming of a society: in her self, she is

innocent, at the same time as she bears witness to the transgression of
the law that society can not allow or afford. In her closeness to or even
identity with nature, Pearl is represented much like Native Americans
were represented in American literature12 – her speechlessness and
her playfulness tie her to nature. But her status as child offers her as
an object of normalization, which ultimately separates her from the
Indians silently watching the proceedings of the Puritan community.
The Public Sphere
Hawthorne frames this story of interpretation, reading and speech by

situating his protagonists in the public sphere, here represented by the
marketplace, the streets, and by the church. The problem how to inter-
pret, and understand, Hester and Pearl, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth,
is not only the reader’s, but also the interpretive community’s, that of
the surrounding society: as Stephen Railston points out, the audience
‘precedes the text’.13 This community, made up of the inhabitants of
Puritan Boston, but also of more temporary visitors to the city, serve both
as interpreters of the ‘A’, and as signs themselves, signs that represent
the borders of the social structure under formation. When we first are
to meet Hester, we are waiting for her together with a group of people,
‘founders of a new colony’ – but their ‘Utopia’ (47) is already in a state of
decay, it is fallen, since the founders have found it necessary to introduce
a prison and the law into their community.14 Hawthorne thus ensures, by
having people waiting in order to learn how the law has decided to treat
a transgression of its order, that his story will be related to the building
of society. Also, the law is present, as personified by ‘the Governor, and
several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the
town’ (56). Into this seemingly cohesive community, Hawthorne also
introduces a stranger. He does it in a peculiar way, in that he hints at
the stranger being an Indian, ‘in his native garb’, but, he states, ‘red men
were not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements’; however, next
to the red man stands the true stranger, ‘a white man, clad in a strange
disarray of civilized and savage costume’ (60).
One would have thought that a white man should have been less
of a stranger than his Indian companion. But strangeness here – as in
the example of Pearl – means something difficult to define: the Indian
is outside of the social borders, and therefore no problem for a defin-
ing practice, while the white man (who turns out to be Chillingworth)
becomes, in his uncertain blend of civilized and savage, a problem
for classification, just as Pearl, the result of an illegitimate affair, is an

uncertain or doubtful entity. Both are hybrid forms, combining dif-
ferent or even opposite characteristics, and therefore questioning the
strict demarcations that regulatory classification demands. Hawthorne
systematically adds elements that combine to make Chillingworth this
problem: ‘Chillingworth’ is not his real name; he is a medical doctor, but
he is seen picking herbs in the forest; apparently he is a diligent reader,
but not of the same and only book, the Bible, that the Puritans read.
This multi-layered character is the hermeneutic interpreter, engaged in
reading people – Dimmesdale, Hester, Pearl – but, being of this double
nature, Chillingworth also serves as the mediator between the Bostonian
Puritans and another interpretive community, consisting of those who
are outside, or at least closer to the outside, of the law. Towards the end
of the novel, we are once more at the marketplace, this time waiting
for the new governor. Once again we find Indians on the scene, but,
as before, they are not the most problematic group – that position is
reserved for a group of sailors from a Spanish ship, and Hawthorne’s
description of them ends with a statement on their ‘animal ferocity’ and
a description on how they transgress ‘the rules of behaviour’ (232). And,
of course, we also this time find Chillingworth there in the marketplace,
in the company of ‘the commander of the questionable vessel’ (233).
This status is ascribed to the sailors according to the logic that the novel
produces: they are a mix of civilized (and white), on the one hand,
and the savage, on the other, and therefore they are given a position as
‘questionable’.
The problem that Hawthorne explores and negotiates in The Scarlet
Letter is the hybrid beings, those that are on the borders of the law,
whose garb is civilized but whose behaviour is, in one way or another,
savage. They are problematic, since they question, with their being, pre-
cisely the borders that define society. Put in a different way, one could
say that the problem is how the law can embrace not those outside it,
but those who are between law and lawlessness; or, how civil law, that
of society, can triumph over natural law, and in consequence how civi-
lization can triumph over savage barbarism.15
On this view, Hester is not really a problem: the branding of her
identifies her securely as someone who is included within the commu-
nity, if only as a personification of its borders. Hester lives inside the
social structure, but she is from this inside singled out as an example:
the embroidered ‘A’ had ‘the effect of a spell, taking her out of the
ordinary relations with humanity’ (54); Hester is ‘not merely estranged,
but outlawed, from society’ (199); she lives in a ‘moral solitude’ (234).
But, in a way, her situation has a curious double character, in that

she, although fully alive, ‘was actually dead, in respect to any claim
of sympathy, and had departed out of the world with which she still
seemed to mingle’ (226). The branding of her with the ‘A’ functions as
an isolation of her, depriving her of voice and agency, while at the same
time it makes her, somewhat paradoxically, into a public woman; her
function as bearer of the ‘A’ is to bear witness, constantly and publically,
to the relevance of the law and of her own sinfulness, her fall. And
when she finally does speak, in meeting with Dimmesdale, her words
are immediately used against her by Dimmesdale: ‘Woman, woman,
thou art accountable for this!’ Silence means that the ‘A’ brands Hester
with guilt, but speaking out has the same effect. The position of woman
in this power structure is a trap: no matter how or what she does,
whether she speaks or remains silent, she is accountable.
The Practice of Reading
In contrast to Hester, Chillingworth never becomes an example to expose

to the Puritan community. His strangeness is specified: he is a ‘learned
stranger’ (120). Identified with books and reading, Chillingworth also
practises his art of reading on human beings. As a physician, he wishes
to ‘look into’ his patients, and also into Dimmesdale’s bosom. But
Chillingworth never opens any bodies, never performs any surgery;
instead, he reads people: his eyes, Hester recalls, have ‘a penetrating
power’, used to ‘read the human soul’ (58). Reading here means that
Chillingworth digs into the heart of, especially, Dimmesdale, a digging
that is an interpretive practice of searching after a hidden meaning;
like ‘a miner searching for gold’ (129), he goes ‘deep into his patient’s
bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his recollections,
and probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in
a dark cavern’ (124). This digging should then result in the disclosure
of the secret, the stone that the miner digs for, the Pearl that the diver
fishes for in the deep dark. Chillingworth is demonized as ‘evidence
of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil’ (170), and his
being must be described as only partly human, in his capacity to enter
other people’s interiors and find out their secrets. This demonization
of Chillingworth relates him to Pearl, who is repeatedly described as
the ‘demon-offspring’, and it also qualifies him as a ‘hermeneutical
monster’. It is as if the silent figures, be it Fanny Price or Hester Prynne,
need their opposites, the monstrosities of Mrs Norris or Chillingworth
(who is a kind of demonic counterpart to Mrs Norris). His monstrosity
means that he is without stable identity, but also that he is physically

deformed, a characteristic that at first is only hinted at (60), but which
grows with the story, turning him into ‘a deformed old figure, with
a face that haunted men’s memories longer than they liked’ (175).
And his hermeneutics, as well, have a demonic aspect to them, in his
own words: ‘I shall seek this man, as I have sought truth in books; as I
have sought gold in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me
conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder,
suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!’ (75).
Reading here leads to the appropriation of the Other, it is a process that
will make the object into the reader’s property – as Hester already is the
property of her husband.
But interpretation never does fulfil its promises. Instead Chillingworth
finds out the truth about Pearl’s father, when Dimmesdale demonstrates
his guilt, together with Hester and Pearl, on the scaffold. Guilt must
be made exterior and visible. Interpretation will not suffice to shed
light on the darkness of the interior, Hawthorne seems to suggest;
understanding of the letter must be produced by the one wearing – or
writing – it: the person forms an initial context for the letter. Therefore,
Chillingworth can call Hester a ‘living sermon’ (63), while Pearl remains
enigmatic.
Dimmesdale, the unfaithful minister, is portrayed as an erudite
man, and since he is a priest he is of course actively engaged in speaking
and writing. But he also engages in silence: if Hester refuses to tell the
name of her lover, but still wears the outline of her story openly on her
breast for everyone to see, Dimmesdale is the one who practises silence
in order to protect himself. Even so, Dimmesdale writes a sermon, and
he performs it, and, according to the people listening, ‘never had man
spoken in so wise, so high, and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day;
nor had inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more evidently
than it did through his’ (248), and he has also written this sermon
‘with earnest haste and ecstasy’ (225). Apparently a powerful speech,
that moved spirits – but what was it that Dimmesdale actually said?
We are not allowed to know anything about the content of his sermon;
instead, we follow Hester’s appreciation of the speech: ‘Hester Prynne
listened with such intentness, and sympathized so intimately, that the
sermon had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its indis-
tinguishable words’ (243). Not hearing the words, Hester instead hears a
‘vocal organ’, and the music, the ‘tone and cadence’ that it generates, its
undertones, its combinations of ‘solemn grandeur’ and ‘plaintiveness’,
is a voice of ‘expression’: ‘if the auditor listened intently, and for the
purpose, he could detect the same cry of pain’ (243). Hester, it seems,
is listening to the materiality of the voice, rather than to the message it
conveys – or, rather, she translates that materiality, the sounds the voice
makes, into meaning.
The voice, at least to the intent listener, makes public what cannot be
said; it exteriorizes what is hidden deep inside – the voice, but not the
words it is uttering, is analogous with the letter ‘A’. This publication of
guilt that the voice produces will be repeated, when Dimmesdale, dying,
on the scaffold confesses his guilt when speaking to Hester in front of
the multitude – here, a transport takes place, in that Dimmesdale loses
his voice, but the multitude instead gains a voice: ‘the multitude, silent
till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder, which
could not as yet find utterance, save in this murmur that rolled so heav-
ily after the departed spirit’ (257). This voice is never described in more
detail, it never utters any words – but set in the framing that Hawthorne
has applied to his story, it can only be the voice of the community, of
society, confessing its fallen status and its subjection to the law.
The Scarlet Letter can be seen as an effort at regulating a transfer from
the interior to the exterior. The problem with Hester’s decisive silence
about the child’s father is not only that she hides the truth; it is also
that she resists or even opposes the law in hindering this traffic from
the interior to the exterior. She has made her own guilt wholly visible,
even decorated it, but she still remains silent on this crucial matter.
And the transport as such is not without its risks, which is illustrated
by Dimmesdale’s transformation. When he starts on the road to con-
fession, which will make his inner secrets public, he also feels a strong
temptation to utter ‘blasphemous suggestions’ (218), and, encounter-
ing some of his parishioners, he is also tempted to ‘teach some very
wicked words’ (220). In order to avoid these risks, confession must take
place under specific, ritual circumstances. Being blasphemous towards
those under the minister in a social hierarchy would produce only
confusion. Instead, Dimmesdale’s true confession takes place coram
populi, before all people, in the marketplace, and it has a marked, ritual
character, inscribing it within an established order. His appearance on
the scaffold here has also been rehearsed earlier, when in the middle of
night, Dimmesdale stood on the scaffold and gave out, not words, not
language, but a shriek, an ‘outcry’ (148). Standing on the scaffold, and
confessing a second time, Dimmesdale now addresses power, turning ‘to
the dignified and venerable rulers; to the holy ministers, who were his
brethren; to the people’ (254) – that is, he is addressing the totality of
the social structure he has been both part of and outside. In confessing,
in transporting his guilt from his interior and out into the open, he
re-enters society, tearing off ‘the ministerial band’ under which he has
hid his sins (255). He now stands as revealed as Hester did when she
met the crowd of people outside the jail – and the chapter also bears the
heading ‘Revelation of the Scarlet Letter’.
Through this sacrifice, order is re-established. The most obvious
aspect of this reconstruction of a social order is the transformation of
Pearl from ‘demon offspring’ to ‘the richest heiress of her day’ (261):
she becomes her name, an identity has been revealed, and her inherit-
ance is the acknowledgement of this identity – and the practices of
observation and interpretation, which proved ineffectual when applied
to her face, have been made superfluous by the public confession. The
transport of truth, from the inner darkness to the disclosing light of
exteriority, also means that the voice itself is transformed. After the
ceremonies in church, when the procession moves through the streets
to install the new ruler, a strange shout is heard, apparently emanat-
ing from the crowd. It is described as the ‘irrepressible outburst of the
enthusiasm’ the crowd felt for the sermon, and even though a unique
shout, never before heard in New England (250), it has to give way to
the voice of Dimmesdale; and now, when he performs his confession
on the scaffold, his words are actually heard and quoted. The confess-
ing voice produces not eloquence nor music, but truth. Through this
act, Dimmesdale contradicts his own denial, in conversation with
Chillingworth, of the exemplary function of confession, stating then
that he only commits himself to ‘the one Physician of the soul!’ (137).
What Dimmesdale learns is that he must do that in public, if confession
is to have any effect.
And it is proved that only in public, as performed before the embod-
ied agents of power – that is, within power relations – will confession
have a meaningful effect. Acknowledging before each other their sins to
each other does not change anything for either one of the three main
characters of The Scarlet Letter. And had Hester broken her silence, and
confessed the name of her child’s father, it would not have changed
much for her: she would still have been a woman without voice, she
would still have had to ask a man to be her voice – ‘Speak thou for me!’
(113). Hester’s confession of guilt, made public through the letter, does
not have any of the social consequences that Dimmesdale’s confession
produces: he is a man, and therefore his confession produces drastic
changes within the social structure. As Brook Thomas emphasizes,
Hester, in being a woman, ‘could not fit definitions of good citizen-
ship in either the economic or the political sphere’.16 Her entering the
scaffold does not have any decisive effects, since the scaffold is raised
on the marketplace for ‘the promotion of good citizenship’ (55) – and
woman is not a citizen, nor a ruler, only one that is being ruled over.
But Minister Dimmesdale’s entering of the scaffold has other, decisive
effects, since he, as a citizen – meaning someone who is both ruled over
and a ruler17 – has another, and exemplary, position within the power
structure. The silent woman has no voice and is only subject to the law,
while the speaking man is subject to the law but also a subject’s voice
distributed in public.
It is actually literature that here proves its social worth in transport-
ing Dimmesdale’s truth from his interior out into the open. Hawthorne
opens the novel with a reflection not only on autobiographical speech,
but also on storytelling, quoting a general view on storytelling’s impact
as that of fiddling (10). But Hawthorne proves otherwise: it is his story
that penetrates the ‘flat, unvaried surface’ of Boston, as well as that of its
inhabitants; it is his forcing of Hester and Dimmesdale to tell the truth
that gives literature its social worth as a medium for public confession.
And in this regulation of speech that The Scarlet Letter turns out to be,
literature concedes that the law cannot be broken – while it does what
it can to subvert that law.
The Framing of Tonka
European society of 1900 is one of rapid transformation. Suddenly, it

seems more possible than ever before to move between social classes,
to rise above one’s conditions. Women come out both as workforce
and as sexual subjects, transgressing their lock-in as objects. Already
these two aspects of a transformative age point to new encounters, new
mixtures, to new forms of social hybridity. Add to them also migratory
movements, where large sections of different populations were forced
to move to new countries, and the hybrid forms of language thereby
produced. This hybridity is embodied by the female protagonist of
Robert Musil’s ‘Tonka’ – but in this story we also become aware of the
forces that stood up against social and linguistic mobility, that tried
to control and fence in class-based struggle in what was to become a
revolutionary era.
It is tempting to read Robert Musil’s ‘Tonka’ as just another of the
well-known stories about moral hypocrisy and the oppression of
women, as well as of sexuality, in Western Europe around 1900. And
‘Tonka’, one of Musil’s Drei Frauen (Three Women), is precisely such
a story, but at the same time also something else and more. In short,
the narrator of the story, who also is an aspiring scientist, meets and is
attracted by the young working-class woman Tonka, even though they
are from different social classes. But when Tonka gets pregnant, the
young man realizes that he could not be the father of the child. Tonka,
in her turn, refuses to tell who the father might be; she does not confess
to any infidelity, and the young man reaches in vain for a rational
solution to the mystery. Eventually, Tonka dies, without giving birth,
without her mysterious pregnancy having been explained. There is
something intriguing about this story, with its narrative complexity
that has something of the form of a chiasm: the story turns around half-
way, and seems to return back, ironically mirroring the first half of the
story.18 This narrative complexity also resides in its weaving of different
layers into what I suggest can be read as a tightly knit, and very detailed,
analysis of the circulation of different kinds of values and goods.19 That
this story could be written at all is due to the Habsburg empire, and
the different cultures and languages that it subsumed under its power:
‘Tonka’ is also a representation of an encounter between centre and
periphery, between ruler and ruled.20
Musil frames his story of Tonka’s pregnancy in different ways. There
is a literary tradition to which the story might be said to belong; and this
tradition of the German novella, from Goethe and onwards, as well as
questions of literature’s capacity for depicting reality and its legitimacy,
Musil installs in his story.21 The nameless male protagonist is a scientist
who, although he hates poetry, reads Novalis, and his mother is close,
perhaps too close, to the writer Onkel Hyazinth. The writer here is a
gentleman, one of the ‘respectable people’ (88); his function in the story
is that of watching over decorum, assisting in trying to erase ‘the blot
on the family honour’ (99) that Tonka becomes.22 There also runs
through this story another specific symbolic discourse: inside the young
man’s head, but not wrapped around it, there is a ‘tangle of thorns’
(72), and this interiorized ‘crown of thorns’ will eventually move to
the outside, ‘all transformed into a tangle of thorns’ (95).23 There is an
obvious Christian discourse at work here: the young man will also find
himself ridiculed in public, he will feel in himself strong pain when
witnessing Tonka’s sickness, his tears will fall, and blindness will finally
give way to new vision – almost: ‘All that he had never understood was
there before him in this instant, the bandage that had blindfolded him
seemed to have dropped from his eyes – yet only for an instant, and the
next instant it was merely as though something had flashed through
his mind’ (122).24 Starting with reminiscence, ending with a return
to reminiscence, Tonka is only a literary fantasy – like her pregnancy
might be only a young man’s fantasy – the effect of a specific, historical

imagination.
Tonka’s story is, in other words, framed. Musil includes a detailed
description of Tonka’s social status, her position within the class struc-
ture, and within the economic system of what can only be viewed
as capitalist exploitation. Tonka is carefully kept within the social
boundaries of her lower-class status, and Musil employs convention
and decorum as active agents in keeping the hierarchical social structure
intact. These features should add up to a strong framework, and even
though ‘Tonka’ can be said to be a carefully supervised and controlled
story, it is also unstable, undermined by irony and by the problem of
the unspoken or unsaid. The framework seems to be used to keep Tonka
imprisoned, but what is caught inside the story is not so much a person
as it is language itself: the centre around which Musil forms his story is
language, and issues related to linguistic exchange. Tonka’s silence is the
blank centre of Musil’s story. This blankness also suggests that the persons
inhabiting this story can not be interpreted as psychological portraits;
they are rather clichés, ironically used as vehicles for the transportation of
linguistic and social issues.
Tonka’s silence is a problem also, since it seems to be intimately related
to the young man’s obsession about her: her silence triggers his speech.
Silence challenges convention in its refusal to enter the exchange econ-
omy of conversation. Time and again, the young man asks Tonka if she
understands, only to get the answer that she does understand – but
she says nothing to prove it: her understanding does not make her enter
the exchange economy.
Language as Capital
Exchange: if Tonka says only a few words, and never the decisive ones,
in the story that has her name, there are others who seem much more
at home in language. They, relatives of her husband, speak freely and
with ease, generously spreading their words:
His relatives were all talking eagerly, all talking at once, and he
noticed how skilfully each of them turned the situation to his or her
own advantage. They expressed themselves, if not clearly, at least to
some purpose and with the courage of their convictions. In the end
each of them got what he or she wanted. For them the ability to talk
was not a medium of thought, but a sort of capital, something they
wore like jewellery to impress others. (83–4)25
‘A sort of capital’: words, through talking, invested in an economy of

language? The relatives are talking, and their instrumental aim is to get
hold of as much as possible of their dead relative’s fortunes. But the exer-
cise of speech, of trading words, also has other implications: words can be
used to define and control an object. Language in ‘Tonka’ has the status
of monetary capital; words can be used to gain (or lose) value, but also
to mark oneself and others each with their respective social position and
identity. Tonka’s silence withdraws her from the exchange of value, but the
exchange economy, no matter what value it consists of, is a totalizing proc-
ess: her silence forces the young man to ‘provide’ for her (84). This provi-
sion is in reality an attempt at incorporating her in the speech economy.
Repeatedly in this story, the circulation (or non-circulation) of speech
is tied directly to the circulation of monetary value. And mediating
between these different economies, and tying them to each other, is the
female body: Tonka’s body. We find in ‘Tonka’ three obvious economies,
that is, systems for the circulation of value: the economic, the linguistic
and the sexual. And we can also sense the presence of other systems of
circulation, such as the religious and the scientific.
Sexuality as an exchange economy is demonstrated by a scene in
which the young couple finally have intercourse. There is no seduction
involved, but rather a negotiation, as if the two are about to enter a busi-
ness relationship: they talk about ‘entirely belonging to each other’ (92),26
employing a lovers’ linguistic cliché that still echoes sexual relations as a
historically situated form of ownership. And that discourse is not present
here by accident. What is enacted here is also a power relation: ‘She
acted in silence, as though she were subdued by the authority of “the
master”’ (94). Still, she finds a way to handle the situation: she ‘stole into
his being … in order to take possession of all she admired in him’ (95).27
The vampire-like character of Tonka might be his way of explaining his
captivity, but her stealing from him is rather the act of someone being
suppressed and therefore forced to steal. The conclusion of the chapter
relates this economic discourse to the overall mechanism of the exchange
economy: ‘it was only necessary in order to belong to him entirely and
then she would be part of it all’ (95).28 Entering the exchange means
handing over yourself, turning the self into a commodity, or an object,
that can be traded in exchange for something else, which here is inclu-
sion within the system. The commodity character is also emphasized
when the young man and his mother negotiate about Tonka: she is the
object, and nothing else (100f.).
Already from the outset, Tonka is inscribed precisely at the intersection
of these economies: as a young girl, she grows up next to a brothel, run by
a neighbour. This brothel is ‘concealed’ behind curtains, and it was ‘tacitly

ignored’ by her family, apparently trying to hold on to decorum (71): the
place where women’s bodies were sold and bought, where the monetary
and the sexual economies intersect, is not allowed to enter the circula-
tion of language – except, of course, in the indirect form of the story we
are reading. And here, Musil also makes us aware that these ‘back streets’
where Tonka grows up are characterized by a ‘queer mixture’ of languages,
of German and Czech, that is inscribed directly in her name: ‘she had
been given the German name Antonie, and Tonka was the abbreviated
form of the Czech diminutive Toninka’ (71).29 One can see these as exam-
ples of how borders are upheld in Tonka’s world, but at the same time
also as examples of blending, of hybridity: in Tonka’s childhood, moral
conventions and Sittlichkeit are mixed with prostitution, German with
Czech. Tonka herself seems to be the meeting place for different discourses
and practices, and consequently her speech is characterized as not ‘the
ordinary language that other people used, but some language of the total-
ity of things’ (78).30 There is to Tonka an important trait of immediacy;
she relates to the world in a simple, direct manner, without mediation: she
is part of an immediate whole. The ‘language of the totality’ here is not a
national language, not German or Czech, but rather song. Tonka and the
young man together start singing like children (88), and it is the medium
of song performed together, in harmony, that brings them into mutual
understanding – up to this point, the young man has struggled to make
her ‘understand’, a seemingly hopeless task (77). Central hermeneutic
categories are put to play in the linguistic struggle between the young
lovers. She, finally realizing that he is a man, starts to ‘read’ him, and the
‘ugly’ details in her reading still add up to a ‘whole thing’ of ‘happiness’
(80). Reading, then, transforms details into parts forming a whole. Still
the young man asks Tonka if she ‘really’ understands him, and the slow
progress in their learning to know each other shows that understanding
must, according to the young man, be the result of putting one in the
other’s place: the young man, in singing, accepts the life-world of Tonka,
and steps inside it, sharing it: ‘and even if the whole thing was foolishness,
the dusk itself was at one with their feelings’ (78).31
Economic Crisis
At the same time, the linguistic economy of Tonka’s world is disturbed –

as well as that of the two others, the monetary and the sexual: ‘Tonka’
is about the introduction of speech as a financial transaction in Tonka’s
world, about the intertwining of these economies of value and speech,
but also about their common crisis, materialized in the pregnant but
speechless body, about the problems that the circulation of values here
encounters. It is signalled in the relatives’ eager speech. They speak too
much; theirs is a linguistic inflation, it seems, and they speak instrumen-
tally, in order to access monetary value but without being interested in
communication. They don’t step into any other’s life-world, they would
rather appropriate it. Their capital is a sort of excess capital, which does
not produce anything: it is non-productive. They wear their riches vis-
ibly, only to expose their power and glory.
Tonka does not. And her pregnancy is what causes a crisis within these
inflationary economies. The paradisiac unity of speech and referent, of sig-
nifier and signified, breaks with this pregnancy: the sign is there, material
and unavoidable, but the referent is missing, or rather, a central referent –
the father (or the phallus) – is unknown, which makes it impossible to
connect the different parts to each other: Babylonian confusion will
reign when the father is absent or unknown. Tonka’s fall from decorum
introduces the linguistic snake into the Eden of speech: her refusal to
partake in the linguistic exchange economy forces those surrounding
her, in particular her husband, to engage in that suspicious practice
called interpretation. When Tonka refuses to divulge who is the father
of her child, the young man starts to suspect each and every man he
meets on the streets. His simple world, shared as ‘one’ with Tonka,
is transformed into a shadow world, where nothing is given, where
stability of identity is at risk, where everything that used to be certain
has become enigmatic: ‘They were always such ludicrously marginal
figures; they were like dirty parcels thrown into his memory, tied up
with string, each parcel containing the truth – but at the first attempt
to undo it, the package would disintegrate, leaving him with nothing
but an agonising sense of helplessness and a heap of dust’ (107).32 This
is the world of signs, and the young man’s interpretation of the signs is
never confirmed – there is always another sign waiting to be observed
and interpreted. The world is thoroughly destabilized, its contours
become vague: ‘Her silence was now a blanket over everything’ (107).33
Confusion rules, the confusion of tongues, and Tonka turns into some-
one ‘mildly dazzling as a fairy-tale’ (108).34 The unison of their singing
has been transformed into difference again, but the harmony will not
really become polyphony – since she remains silent.
Throughout the story, the young man tries to make Tonka speak. And
even though she answers, he finds himself repeatedly facing ‘the same
opacity in her mind’ (75).35 Apparently, she does not invest the right
words into the circulation of speech, which forces him to employ
anacrisis in his dialogues with her. He tries to entice her speech by defin-
ing her through his questions to her, but is met by counter-questions
and smiles. At this point, then, he enters her singing and partakes in it.
But her pregnancy will generate a new, anacritical energy; his project,
defined as masculine, is to ‘wring a confession out of Tonka’ (97).36 But
his efforts at trying to ‘extract a confession from her’ is met only with
her denial (99). He also tries tricks, putting ‘what seemed to be a per-
fectly harmless question, hoping that the smooth sound of the words
would take her off her guard’ (106).37 There is of course a touch of
violence in this anacritical process, and the young man also wishes her
dead (121). But he never uses direct physical violence, realizing that not
‘even on the rack’ would she confess (99). Even so, she will eventually be
placed on that rack, being ‘strapped … to the table’ at the hospital (119).
But even though the anacritical torture is directed against her, it is his
pain that is emphasized: he is ‘tormented’ by the scenes in the hospital.
But why is Tonka like a ‘fairy tale’? One answer could be that she is
the result of an intertextual relation: ‘Tonka’ shares attributes with H. C.
Andersen’s tale ‘The Snow Queen’.38 Andersen’s tale is about two small
children who love each other almost as siblings. Living next door to each
other, the children share a garden but also a song: ‘Roses bloom and cease
to be / But we shall the Christ-child see’. But the young boy, Kaj, one
day senses that there is something in his eye, and that his heart has been
struck by something. His perception of the world now starts to change;
when hooked up to the Snow Queen’s sledge, he wants to say a prayer,
but he ‘could remember nothing but the multiplication table’, and he says
to her that he can do ‘mental arithmetic’. The young girl, Gerda, must go
searching for Kaj, and eventually she finds him; she calls him back into
life, melting his cold heart by singing the song about the Christ-child
again. The paradisiac life in the garden is reinstated, they once again sing
the song together, and they both ‘all at once understood the words of the
old song’. Andersen’s tale concerns language and understanding, emo-
tions and reason. The scientific reason of Kaj keeps him imprisoned, and it
is only the bravery of Gerda’s emotional quest that can break through the
ice armour of reason and unite the two in mutual understanding.
It is not the regressive utopia of Andersen that Musil picks up, but
rather the conflict between reason and emotion. The young man of
‘Tonka’ is Kaj, the mathematician and logician, transplanted to another
mode of writing, and the focus is shifted from Gerda’s quest to the
young man’s suspicious interpretations and testing of his Tonka. Both
Kaj and the narrator of ‘Tonka’ look at their respective women as
problems to be solved. In both stories, innocence is a central category.
In Andersen, innocence seems to be possible to restore – that is his

regressive utopia – but in ‘Tonka’, innocence is only an illusion that
the young man can cultivate, but not the young girl. That innocence
already has been lost is a condition of Tonka’s life.
Tonka has a line in this story that might remind its reader of Bartleby’s
‘I prefer not to’, but with perhaps an almost opposite meaning: ‘You
see, I have to earn my living’ (77).39 This line takes on the character of
a general explanation; with it, Tonka defines her position within the
social hierarchy, and, listening to the line, the young man is relieved,
‘Ah, how simple it all was!’ The enigmatic Tonka might then, if only
for a short moment, be explained by her working-class identity. Earning
one’s living is necessary outside of Eden: the losing of innocence is
the beginning of a lifetime of work. Tonka returns to this problem of
making a living when she has to leave the house where she has been
working as a maid. Talking with the young man, her future husband,
she says that she must find a new job, and he asks her to stay, promising
that he will see to it that she gets another job. And she unpacks her bags
again, thinking: ‘So this was love’ (85).40 The intrinsic definition of love
is that of an economic transaction: love is traded for financial security.
The young, nameless man, through whom this story mostly seems
focalized, buys her: he will provide her with a job, and, in the intertwin-
ing of different economies, this is also ‘love’. Financial security equals
emotional affection. Tonka’s emotional reaction seems to limit itself to
a simple statement, a constative with perhaps a light touch of inquiry in
it: ‘So this was love.’ Most of all she is ‘simply realizing’ this – so roman-
ticism in any more profound meaning is here directed to the presence of
a book with poems by Novalis, and perhaps to the writer that belongs to
the young man’s family circle, Onkel Hyazinth. If Tonka’s take on ‘love’
seems very distanced, and she never expresses any romantic disposition
in her story, Hyazinth is another representative of the intermingling of
different economies: he is both a ‘senior civil servant’, specializing in
financial questions, and a poet. In his person, two economies come
together, but only to reveal that ‘the fluency of his talk and his narrative
gift derived from his own lack of such integrity’ (87).41
Back to Nature, or Desubjectification
Ultimately, the circulation of value is related to the identity of the inves-

tor. Entering this circulation, it will have definite consequences on the
individual doing it. Musil points to a relation between personal value
and different symbolic values. Tonka is not investing; she does not sup-
port the system of circulation by engaging in it. Instead, she is the one
being circulated; and therefore, she also is the one that remains silent, she
is the object that is transferred between different owners – the narrator,
her employer, ‘the officers and the gentlemen … the students and young
business men’ (72) who stand watching the young women parading as
goods to be bought. And being almost mute, not participating in this all-
encompassing symbolic capitalist economy, she remains steadfast: she has
to make a living, but she does not, apparently, have to confess. Others,
like Hyazinth, invest – and they find themselves ruined as personalities.
This lack or absence of true personality, of integrity, is also what
characterizes the young man from the start of this story: he is doing his
military service when meeting Tonka, and ‘there is no other time of life
when a man is so deprived of himself and his own works, and an alien
force strips everything from his bones’ (69). This is a condition for this
story: already from the outset, the young man is besides his self, not
at home in his self, but rather experiencing the effect of the different
social relations he finds himself in.42 These relations are all marked by
exchange and linguistic difficulties.
We have then in this story a curious constellation: those that speak
fluently, like the young man or Onkel Hyazinth, are both lacking in
personal integrity, while the one not speaking seems utterly steadfast
and does not give in; hers is an absolute integrity.43 To the young man,
his fiancée is a mystery, and he tries to identify and classify her. In doing
this, he adapts a discourse with apparent Romantic connotations: Tonka
is to him an instinctual being:
There was something nobly natural in her helplessness, her inability

to reject whatever was vulgar and worthless, even while with an
obscure sense of rightness she did not adopt it as her own. It was
astonishing with what sureness she rejected everything crude, coarse,
and uncivilised in whatever guise it came her way, although she
could not have explained why she rejected it. And yet she lacked any
urge to rise beyond her own orbit into a higher sphere. She remained
pure and unspoilt, like Nature herself. (91)44
Tonka, growing up with a brothel next door and often helping the pris-
oners of a nearby prison to return there after obligatory work – is she
really supposed to be Nature, rejecting what is crude and coarse? ‘She was
nature adjusting itself to Mind, not wanting to become Mind, but loving
it and inscrutably attaching itself to it’ (92).45
‘Mind’ – that is of course our young man, the scientist, and Tonka is
an animal who seeks the company of man. Tonka exemplifies, within
the hybridity of the social structure that Musil explores, the true status
of woman as Nature: she is Mother. Friedrich Kittler has defined the cen-
tral position of woman in the discourse network of 1800 as Nature – and
in Musil’s story, we can understand Tonka as a more modern woman
who is forced into this symbolic position. And this force used upon her
silences her on precisely the central aspect of her symbolic status, that
of her motherhood: that silence forces men to speak, which is Kittler’s
point: woman’s ‘function consists in getting people – that is, men – to
speak’.46 The novel starts with Tonka only slowly being singled out, but
not separated, from the surrounding nature:
At a hedge. A bird was singing. And then the sun was somewhere
down behind the bushes. The bird stopped singing. It was evening,
and the peasant girls were coming across the fields, singing. What lit-
tle things! Is it petty if such little things cling to a person? Like burrs?
That was Tonka. Infinity sometimes flows in drips and drops. (69)47
And the novel ends by returning Tonka to her identity as ‘nature’, that
is, she is desubjectified: her goodness, the young man thinks, was that of
a dog, and he sees in an inner image a ‘man walking all alone with a dog
in the mountains of the stars’ (120)48 – that is, he and Tonka. And dogs
don’t speak, outside of literature – meaning, of course, that speech as well
as writing is left to men.49
But this is only the young man’s view of her; throughout this story we
are reading his construction of this enigmatic Tonka, the working girl
who does not give in, who refuses to confess. And he tries to compensate
for his lack of integrity with speaking and writing, with the inflationary
distribution of words upon words – while she remains silent. Her silence
means, of course, that he gets no answers, but it also implies that she
does not serve as his mirror, with fatal consequences for his identity and
self-image. The circulation of speech is an exchange economy, which
works as long as everyone present takes part in it, invests their own
speech in it, thereby confirming the investments made by the other
participants in conversation. But if anyone should refuse to invest his
or her words, the circulation will come to a halt, with a severe crisis as
a result. The crisis has to do with identity, since the linguistic circulation
rests on the mutual approval of the invested identity of the speakers.
In spite of all the young man’s words, in spite of both his scientific and
romantic or aesthetic discourses classifying her and trying to force her into
the position of mirroring him, since she is below him in the social hierar-
chy, Tonka refuses to perform her part as expected of her – that is, perform
confession and guilt and shame. But her refusal must generate a crisis as
its result. This crisis can be solved only within the intermingling of the dif-
ferent economies at work in the story. The final, very short chapter starts
with one last transaction: Tonka has died, the young man has given her
nurse some money and, in exchange, he apparently has received the last
words from Tonka reported to him. The fundamental presence of the
exchange economy is once again emphasized, and the consequence of it
is that Tonka now becomes possible for the young man to appropriate and
exploit for his own benefit: ‘He felt her, from the ground under his feet to
the crown of his head, and the whole of her life’ (122).50 With Tonka dead,
and with a last exchange providing him with her last words, he can get a
hold on the ‘whole of her life’ – but it is only in his own fantasy, and at the
end of this story, that this grip on her as dead ‘made him a little better than
other people’, inspiring him to good deeds in his ‘brilliant life’. Yes, his life
has taken on a ‘brilliant’ form, and she has finally become part of a ‘jewel-
lery to impress others’ – as the description of the spoken ‘capital’ of his rela-
tives went. She has not become pure Nature – but dead, she is nothing but
language, circulated within the speech economy that he controls: ‘Tonka’.
Once again, a woman has been killed and resurrected to new life:
Pygmalion has done it again. But the new life that Tonka reaches is
the literary life: she will be forever an enigmatic sign, written into the
body of literature. And she will remain there as a sign, only because she
keeps quiet: ‘And what was Tonka? Spirit of his spirit? No – perhaps a
symbol, some cryptic correspondence to himself, an alien creature who
had attached herself to him, with her secret locked within her’ (103).51
***
These are two stories of silent women. Or rather: silenced women. They
are both situated within power relations that include traits of both sov-
ereign and disciplinary power: their respective communities are both
authoritarian and moralistic. But while Hester’s community can be
looked upon as a counter-form of the public sphere, with the Puritans
aiming to form a social structure different from the sovereign power
they have left behind, Tonka lives in a world in which the Habsburg
monarchy is facing its decline, but its sovereign power will eventu-
ally be replaced by a tyranny that legitimizes its rule with reference
to precisely the multi-ethnicity that Tonka is an example of. And that
is both Hester’s and Tonka’s destiny: they are reduced to signs and, as
such, silenced; are used to reinforce existing power relations. And they
are used by their creator-writers, respectively, as signs within a chain of
signifieds, from which they are not allowed to break away.
3
Refusal, or The Mute Provocateurs:
Melville’s Bartleby Meets
Gombrowicz’s Ivona
Kafka once wondered when it could be considered appropriate to speak

in a conversation, made up of eight people, if one did not wish to
be considered silent.1 Silence is sometimes a breaking of rules – rules
of decorum, but sometimes also of the circulation of words as such.
In those cases, silence works as the ultimate provocation, forcing the
other to speak and even to command speech. ‘Nothing so aggravates
an earnest person as a passive resistance’, as the narrator, a Wall Street
lawyer, says in Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853). Bartleby,
the newly hired scribbler, is polite in his resistance, repeatedly saying,
‘I would prefer not to’, rather than any absolute ‘no’, when asked to
perform his duties. In Witold Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona (1935), Ivona
keeps even more silent than Bartleby, and her function is to ‘irritate’,
thereby enticing – or rather, provoking – speech. And the Prince does
understand this function: ‘I recognize that for everyone there is, some-
where, somebody capable of firing them to a white heat; you do that
to me, you must be mine, you shall be mine.’2 In both these examples,
Bartleby and Ivona not only break with decorum, they not only inter-
rupt linguistic circulation, but they also disrupt the exercise of power, be
it the disciplinary power of the lawyer’s office or the absolute power of
the King’s court, and they both interrupt the workings of a system, of a
machine. And it is the passivity of Bartleby and Ivona that is important
to emphasize: they are no revolutionaries, even though their function
within their respective circumstances may include a momentary spark of
revolutionary energy. Gilles Deleuze characterizes Bartleby as an ‘exclu’,
but not a rebel, and the same goes for Ivona; she is an excluded, but she
is not in any way a bearer of any revolutionary energy.3 Both of them
are eventually excluded from social circulation and relevance in their
respective stories, in that they interrupt, rather than contribute: they
82
Refusal: Melville, Gombrowicz 83
do not really add anything even to language. Both Ivona and Bartleby
can be understood as being offered subject positions, but these are
of a kind that seems unacceptable to them: subjectification here has
its emphasis on subjugation, and means really that one is to accept a
specific position within a power structure – and both of them refuses
their respective invitations to subject status. Bartleby may be a diligent
worker when he chooses to be, but he still does not take part in those
social activities that hold the surrounding community together. What
interests me here, then, is not what the motives might be for Bartleby’s
or Ivona’s resistance or denial, but, rather, the reactions that they actu-
ally provoke, what force they have to face when they challenge the rule
and circulation of speech. Or, put differently: when the rhetoric of per-
suasion in both these cases finds itself bereft of power, when the central
personification of power, be it a prince or a lawyer, finds itself without
persuasive force, the situation can only lead to the violent death of
those resisting power.
Both Bartleby and Ivona are inserted within a framework based on
the mechanics of a system or an apparatus. Bartleby exists within the
lawyer’s office, and he is subject to the rules generated within that
system that governs his work, writing and listening, but also how to
speak, how to respond and behave. The office is an apparatus fuelled
by rhetoric in the setting up of legal documents, but an apparatus also
as a specific space organized according to the demands of work and the
organization of work – here too, decorum has a function. And work
itself functions as an apparatus in its regularity and its monotony.
The same goes to some degree for Ivona, but in her case the system is
that of a royal court, which of course presupposes an absolute social
hierarchy, sovereignty; within it, an apparatus of behaviour, of mores,
is working, rather than labour as such. The court is an apparatus that
feeds on the chivalrous; it produces obedience through speech and
bodily gestures and positions, that is, through precisely what Foucault
saw as characteristic of sovereign power.4 Both Bartleby and Ivona are
like stones thrown into an industrial machine: they block, disturb, they
must be taken care of, one way or another. Their respective refusal to
take part, to let themselves be integrated and normalized, their refusal
of form, will have severe consequences.
Public and Private: The Office of Bartleby
‘To not be concerned with politics, with affairs, is also to remain

silent’, Foucault writes.5 That may be so, under certain conditions – but
silence can also be the only legitimate or relevant retort to a political

situation. Foucault goes on to quote Euripides’ tragedy The Phoenician
Women, where Jocasta states that it is like ‘being a slave to silence
one’s thought’.6 But both Bartleby and Ivona add another dimen-
sion to the politics of silence, which has nothing, or very little, to do
with passivity. Irritation, aggravation – the provocative function of
the silent, or passive, or excluded, person – is well known. One aspect
of it is religious: it is quite possible to read Bartleby as an allegorical
representation of the testing of faith, along lines familiar to church
history, with Bartleby in the role of the Holy Fool, testing the faith
and belief of the congregation – and the lawyer actually almost hints
at this: ‘Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose
of an all-wise Providence’ (37). Here the congregation consists of
Bartleby’s fellow scriveners, and the lawyer/narrator, who, in recalling
this story, several times alludes to different biblical passages, and once
quotes John (13:34): ‘A new commandment give I unto you, that ye
love one another’ (36).7 The lawyer claims to have been ‘saved’ by this
‘divine injunction’, which kept him from killing Bartleby. But even so,
the lawyer too is swept away by an apocalyptic storm: ‘a great change
was wrought in me. I resolved to gather all my faculties together and
for ever rid me of this intolerable incubus’ (38). So the lawyer will
repeatedly deny his saviour, and Bartleby will eventually be imprisoned,
in a prison that is like an ‘Egyptian monastery’. Read as a Christian test
of faith, the lawyer fails miserably: he repeatedly emphasizes his own
humility, righteousness and faith – but he does not fully understand
that Bartleby might be there to test precisely how these words are
translated into praxis by the lawyer.
Yet this variety of a Christian reading of the story is far from the only
one possible, nor is it necessarily the most persuasive. Citing the full title,
‘Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’, brings capitalism to the
fore.8 Read within such a framework, Bartleby transforms into a story of
exploitation, starvation and resistance. Already at the time of writing in
the mid-1850s, Wall Street was turning into a widely recognized symbol
of capitalist expansion and greed. Set in the lawyer’s office, the story sheds
light on the situation for the lowest in a hierarchy. The scriveners are,
as a group, constantly exploited: facing poverty, they live on cakes and
nuts, and the individual scriveners come to represent different positions
in respect to the owner of capital, the lawyer. While his colleagues
subordinate themselves fully to the power structure, Bartleby refuses,
and is therefore fired. And without any job or place to live, Bartleby
is imprisoned, and dies in prison.
This very general story of (capitalist) exploitation can be given

a much more detailed focus when the emphasis is put on the
juridical aspects of the story too.9 Another possibility offered by
the general framing of capitalist expansion is that of ‘Wall Street’ as
architectural space, materialized as the office: ‘a specific spatial site
with the power to organize and structure personal and social relation-
ships’.10 The office organizes and exploits a work crew, puts it under
surveillance, generates different types of relations between the workers –
and it encloses Bartleby, who apparently is willing to be imprisoned.
The office becomes a claustrophobic space, with Bartleby surrounded
by brick walls when looking out his window, and by a glass wall when
turning to look inside the office. The spatial logic transforms the office
into a ‘hermitage’, the prison into an ‘Egyptian monastery’ – and, in an
act of capitalist reification, it petrifies persons, those working or dwelling
there, into pillars supporting social hierarchies.
Transforming the office, and his own workplace in it, to his home,
Bartleby also provokes a redistribution of the categories of public and
private. Decorum as the relation between building and inhabitant is at
work here. The lawyer puts up a folding screen, ‘which might entirely
isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice’.
The voice is also the transportation means, in this story, that can trans-
gress borders, and, as the lawyer puts it, this arrangement means that
‘privacy and society were conjoined’ (19). The voice travels through the
room, unbinds its ties to the body, and entices the lawyer to become an
‘echo’ of Bartleby’s voice (20). This traffic of voices and bodies inside
the office is based on Bartleby’s displacement of home and workplace,
private and public, and it forms an important aspect of Bartleby’s domi-
nation of the lawyer.11 In his echoing of Bartleby, the lawyer displays a
fundamental insecurity about what kind of arena the office has turned
into, and this insecurity makes him the more sensitive to the suggestive
power that Bartleby’s silence and passive resistance radiates.
Whatever strategy of interpretation the reader chooses, a power struc-
ture within the text becomes visible. Every reading of Bartleby involves
a confrontation with power, whether social, religious, economic or
linguistic. Even if the different forms of power represented in the story
impregnate and penetrate each other, the linguistic power – since this
is a literary text – lays the foundation for any other power structure
in the story. And this power becomes visible and readable, since it is
provoked by Bartleby’s silent resistance. Bartleby’s silence interrupts a
specific literary machinery, that of interpretation, or rather, his silence
triggers this machine, makes it work frenetically in order to solve the
enigmas of the text – but the problem is that when interpretation tries
to ‘understand’ Bartleby, instead of only accepting his silence, the
interpretative machinery risks running on empty.12
Purely Human: the Lawyer
The story of Bartleby starts out with the narrator construing himself as
an epitome of a peaceful man, satisfied with what life has given him:
‘I seldom lose my temper; much more seldom indulge in dangerous
indignation at wrongs and outrages’ (14). The peaceful quality of our
narrator is emphasized by the way he represents himself: his simple
way of stating that ‘it is fit I make some mention of myself’ or ‘I do not
speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact …’ demonstrates that it is a
very modest narrator who is speaking here. His modesty, or normality, is
further enhanced by his description of his ‘law-copyists, or scriveners’ –
they are, in contrast to the normality he sees himself embodying, a
‘somewhat singular set of men’, and he adds that it is ‘an irreparable
loss to literature’ that so little is known of Bartleby’s biography (13).
The lawyer here performs himself as ‘purely human’, to quote again
Habermas’s depiction of the bourgeois self-image, and it is related here
to literature: it is in literary representation that this self-image is circu-
lated. But it is also in literary representation – that is, in ‘Bartleby the
Scrivener’ – that the rupture between this self-image and disciplinary
power is disclosed: as long as the lawyer sticks to his self-image of pure
humanity he cannot do anything about Bartleby, but as soon as he
discloses himself as property-owner, he can get rid of the nuisance.
The lawyer’s remark on the ‘loss to literature’ is interesting: one
could think that the story we are reading is a retraction of the nar-
rator’s statement. Or does he by ‘literature’ refer to something much
larger than fiction, to literature as writing in general, or to juridical
writing? That is, is it a loss to the law that so little is known about the
legal case of Bartleby? With Bartleby being the most eccentric of them
all, we search this story in vain for an explanation of his personality –
and therefore, he is both eccentric, that is, peripheral, to the law, and
excluded from it as juridical precedent. The lawyer who tells us
about his employee has a hermeneutical ambition, comparable to the
‘hermeneutical monster’ in Austen, he wants to reach the ‘adequate
understanding of the chief character about to be presented’ (13) – but
Bartleby refuses to be understood.
The whole introduction of the story and its protagonists, the narrating
lawyer and his scrivener, is carefully balanced, as a perfectly textualized
representation of the carefully controlled character of the narrator. But

the rhetorical logic is also immediately destabilized, when the lawyer,
declaring his mild-tempered nature, asks permission to be ‘rash here’
and attacks the ‘new Constitution’ as a ‘sudden and violent abrogation
of the Master in Chancery’ (14), an attack that does not harmonize
with the self-image that the lawyer produces. This digression functions
as an early warning to the reader that the narrator perhaps should not
be absolutely relied upon, since his well-tempered balance sometimes
slips out of control. Still, in his telling of Bartleby’s story, a discourse on
the ‘gentleman’ is at work. To the lawyer, his office workers should not
only be ‘useful’ and efficient, they should also be representative. Of the
other two scriveners here, Nippers ‘wrote in a neat, swift hand; and …
was not deficient in a gentlemanly sort of deportment’ (17). The second
scrivener, Turkey, poses more of a problem to the lawyer, who tries
to make him appear more like a ‘gentleman’. And, finally, the third,
Bartleby, is totally a gentleman in his manners with his ‘cadaverously
gentlemanly nonchalance’ (27), or, as Dan McCall describes him, ‘he
talks and behaves like an impoverished aristocrat’.13 Apparently, the
category of ‘gentleman’ has lost every, or almost, relation to its origin
in the ruling over land and owning of property, since it can be applied
to those who do not own anything besides the ability to work, and
has here become only a criterion for social behaviour and manners.
Bartleby’s ‘nonchalance’, which consists in a ‘wonderful mildness’,
expressed throughout the story in the form of his voice, ‘not only
disarmed me but unmanned me’, confesses the lawyer (27). The dis-
placement of private and public, the persuasive sensuality of Bartleby’s
voice, ‘unmans’ the lawyer – that is, he loses agency, he loses the
potency of firm action.14
What is a gentleman? The relation between individual, truth and
speech was already central in antiquity. The citizen, with his right to
speak in public, was by definition a free man, and one can, in many
texts from both Greek and Roman antiquity – in Plato, Cicero and
many others – see how citizenship is defined, how an ideal individual is
construed and the truth effects that it generates: who is the citizen, when
and where and how is he allowed to speak, and is he obliged to speak
only truthfully? Citizenship is, from this perspective, about how discur-
sive practices regulate the question of the subject.
Early modern culture also upholds the discussion about the individual
and truth in relation to social order. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century England, the category of the gentleman evolves, and it is, as
Steven Shapin has pointed out, established with reference to a concept
of truth. Society was divided into ‘gentry’ and the rest, a fundamental
division that was surpassed only by the one separating Christian from
heathen. ‘Gentry’ referred not, in opposition to contemporary usage
of the word, to an upper middle class or something like it, but rather
the king, the aristocracy and the gentlemen. The last category made up
only 1 to 5 per cent of the population during the seventeenth century;
thus the term refers to a very small and exclusive group of people. A
combination of ownership of land, fortune and the profits from others’
labour endowed this group with recognition and authority, what Steven
Shapin calls ‘the political rights of spokesmanship’.15 Based on a set of
criteria, a person was recognized with the right of speech, as well as the
privilege of being believed: the gentleman stood by his word; he could
be trusted to tell the truth. But there raged also a lively discussion on
the question of who should be counted as a gentleman: were social
criteria really sufficient and satisfactory? Many maintained that the
gentleman was based on ‘lineage’, while others, on the contrary, related
him to ‘virtue’: did one inherit the identity of the gentleman, or was it
something earned through the practice of gentlemanly virtues? There
was a humanist ideal of the gentleman, which related him to erudi-
tion, and he was looked upon as, in Shapin’s words, ‘magnanimous,
humble and self-controlled’.
Steven Shapin sums up the evolution in three fields, or ‘overlapping
repertories’, for gentlemanly behaviour. The first is a secular, knightly
code, in which blood lines, individual honour and renown were central
categories. The second is a secular humanist culture, which tried to
‘define and defend gentry’ by emphasizing the importance of inherited
codes for social behaviour. And the third was a Christian code, based
on virtue, which encouraged to a certain degree the same kind of ideals
as the humanist code, but demanded a ‘systematic self-interrogation of
the state of the soul’.16
A gentleman, then, had to be truthful and trustworthy; his reliability was
a personal quality, which was made public through the deeds performed
by the gentleman. The question of truth was a question of practices,
embodied in the gentleman’s way of being. In a democracy under
formation, the gentleman loses some of his privileges, and one can no
longer as easily legitimize these privileges with reference to the material
basis, that is, his property. But some of the ideas about the gentleman of
course gain wider circulation, and have radical consequences also among
the lower classes. In Jane Austen’s novels, the gentleman is still a reality,
but the scriveners in ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ also find the category
of gentleman used in relation to them. And Bartleby does behave
as a gentleman in some respects: he works hard, he is trustworthy. But

he does not seem interested in conquering ‘spokesmanship’, and persists
instead with his polite ‘I prefer not to’ – he is a gentleman who has with-
drawn from the privileges of the original gentleman and its social class.
He is indeed gentle, but shows no signs of aiming for spokesmanship:
his preference is to remain private. But understanding gentlemanship
as based on property, it is the lawyer who is the real ‘gentleman’ of the
story; he is the one that owns capital, that exploits labour, and that can
expel his workers from their work space. But in order to have maximum
work done, he must treat his workers from a standpoint of the ‘purely
human’, that is, the power relations in the office are characterized by
disciplinary power, trying to make the scriveners take responsibility for
their own work, to perform their duties. But Bartleby, in a way, moves
too far in this process, transforming his work space to his life world.
Bartleby’s transformation of the office into a private space is empha-
sized by the presence of public events there. A lawyer’s office as such is a
public space, if only in a limited sense: it is open to visitors, clients and
colleagues, and in it a process is formed through which the law will find
its public application. ‘Come forth and do your duty’, the lawyer says to
Bartleby, thereby inscribing this dialectic of the private and public into
the story: to do one’s work at the law office, one has to step forward,
become public. Bartleby is constantly interpellated in this way, and
constantly refuses interpellation: he may withdraw behind his screen
and write, ‘mechanically’, but he will not take part in public work, like
the proofreading that is being ritually performed in the office by all
employees, collectively listening to the lawyer reading and correcting
their writing. Bartleby apparently accepts his position as a subordinate,
property-less office worker but he refuses to be turned into a public
spectacle. Public spectacles also surround office life: the lawyer goes to
listen to a ‘celebrated preacher’, and one day it is ‘election day’. Religion
and politics are, respectively, established forms of public discourse, and
of rhetoric, and the third classical form for rhetoric is law itself: Bartleby,
then, is all about the triangle formed by speech, rhetoric and the
person – as symbolized by the presence of a bust of Cicero in the office.
Agon and Anacrisis
Trying to stay in control of both his office and his workers (apparently
no easy task), and working to control his speech as well, the lawyer
slowly finds that Bartleby is the one really governing or even manipu-
lating his – the lawyer’s – speech. Having divided the world into the
categories of the ‘singular’ and eccentric, on one hand, and the neat and
gentlemanly, on the other, the lawyer has to face Bartleby’s disruption
of this simple binary logic. The lawyer is repeatedly met with the phrase
‘with submission, sir’ by Nippers and Turkey: they may not always do
what the lawyer wants them to, but they observe decorum. And his own
telling of the story is done in a neat and perhaps gentlemanly way –
but one can also characterize it as circular, slow, anxiously observing
unspoken rules of what to say and how to say them. It is a discourse that
in every moment signals its desire to be controlled, its submission to a
discursive order. But this linguistic control and authority is constantly
challenged by Bartleby, uttering nothing but his singular phrase
‘I would prefer not to’. Bartleby writes efficiently, ‘an extraordinary
quantity of writing’ (19), but he steadfastly refuses to do anything
besides this basic copying. One day the lawyer ‘abruptly’ demands the
services of this scrivener – only to be met again with the shocking line
of ‘I would prefer not to’ (20). This is the start of a classic agon, in which
every linguistic and social rule is put to the test. The lawyer ‘hurriedly’
commands his employee, who ‘mildly’ refuses. The lawyer begins to
‘reason’ with the employee – but this reason consists in more direct
ordering: ‘Is it not so? Will you not speak? Answer!’ (22). But Bartleby
persists, and his repeated answer, no matter what the specific situation
is, denies that speech is always concrete, that every utterance has to fill
a function in a specific situation: Bartleby sabotages a basic element of
all linguistic circulation.
The lawyer depicts himself as sensitive to Bartleby, claiming that he
would have ‘flown outright into a dreadful passion’ with any other
man. But this is at the same time a step in an increasingly passion-
ate speech, with the lawyer asking his other employees for assistance,
and ultimately having them threaten Bartleby with physical violence.
This agon has now become an anacrisis, turning into both a threat of
direct violence and a juridical argument about the duties of someone
employed: ‘What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any
rent? Do you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?’ (35). And the
lawyer argues with himself, relates his problems to himself, and forgives
Bartleby. But Bartleby’s superior linguistic power, based on his constant
and monotonous repetition of his single phrase, always uttered in the
most polite way, theatricalizes the situation, and turns the lawyer into
a co-actor in his drama. The lawyer notes an ‘evil impulse’ in himself,
and ‘the following little scene ensued’ (24), namely a repetition of
an earlier scene, with Bartleby refusing to take part in proofreading.
Repetition also generates inflation, an increase in vocal force: the lawyer
starts out by ‘saying’, then speaks ‘in a louder tone’, and finally roars
at his employee – before returning back to a ‘self-possessed tone,
intimating the unalterable purpose of some terrible retribution very
close at hand’ (25). The threat of physical violence is materialized as
linguistic violence: shouts and roars, a threatening tone – which also
signals that the lawyer has lost his linguistic control, and realizes it. He
can no longer, he admits, avoid ‘falling into sudden spasmodic passions’
(26), and melancholy starts to seize him (28, 29). He decides to put
‘certain calm questions’ to Bartleby, meaning that he tries to entice
a confession from Bartleby about himself – where he was born, ‘any
thing about yourself?’ (30) – but Bartleby still prefers not to, provoking
the lawyer into pleading with Bartleby to be ‘reasonable’, which he of
course refuses. What the lawyer asks Bartleby to do is confess himself, or
identify himself, give him the fixed and stable and recognizable identity
that the lawyer is unable to put onto him, but that would give even the
irrational silence of the scrivener a dimension of intentionality, and
meaningfulness, within the rationally working apparatus of the law
office – but also within the equally rational apparatus of literature: we
remember how Bartleby’s refusal to confess himself is a ‘loss’ to litera-
ture. Here, the lawyer, facing these constant linguistic and disciplinary
defeats, turns to his other employees for advice. The scene is made
into a linguistic discussion, with the interlocutors testifying to having
themselves started to use Bartleby’s word: ‘prefer’. Bartleby’s choice of
words is contagious; he distributes a linguistic virus within this closed
space of the office.17 This is also the virus of homosociality: the office is
a male community, which produces a desire to be like Bartleby; he is the
desirable model. The linguistic bonding has a parallel male bonding, a
community that the lawyer wants to be part of but is refused.
Bartleby’s words start to ‘involuntarily’ roll from the tongues of
the others (31), forcing the lawyer to renew his attacks on Bartleby,
demanding ‘in a sudden passion’ straight answers from him, but he
is met only by mild answers and silence (35). And it comes to a cre-
scendo, with the lawyer ‘fairly flying into a passion’, that is, into the
opposite of what he has depicted himself as: ‘If you do not go away from
these premises before night, I shall feel bound – indeed, I am bound –
to – to – to quit the premises myself!’ (41); here, the lawyer ‘loses his
temper’, and indulges in ‘dangerous indignation’. This transgression
of his normal self is represented in the form of hesitancy and even a
stuttering, signalled by the dashes. His reasoning, or argumentative,
way of speaking gives in to an abrupt, or passionate, way of speaking.
The lawyer corrects himself, he makes what he admits is an ‘absurd’
conclusion. The virus that Bartleby spreads interrupts the regular lin-
guistic circulation, and forces the speaker into stuttering – and the only
way of saving oneself from this sickness is to distance oneself from it.
And this is precisely what the lawyer does, physically as well: ‘effectu-
ally dodging everyone by the suddenness and rapidity of my flight,
rushed from the building, ran up Wall Street towards Broadway, and,
jumping into the first omnibus, was soon removed from pursuit’ (41f.).
His reward is immediate tranquillity, and he now learns that Bartleby
has been sent to the Tombs as a vagrant. The story slowly calms down,
comes to an end, and ebbs out – but not entirely. Repetition once again
works its way into the scene, with Bartleby preferring not to, even
though the lawyer instructs the grub-man to be very polite and he,
in his turn, addresses Bartleby with a ‘Your sarvant, sir, your sarvant’
(44). This is the aftermath of the linguistic agon, with the underclass
now speaking bad English, as signalled by the dialect spelling, as well as
the slang of the grub-man’s lines.
If the reader at this moment has become totally absorbed by the story,
its last words function as a wake-up call: ‘Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!’
Grand rhetoric returns to put an end to this story, which has featured
Cicero in a modest but symbolic role as an observing bust: rhetoric has
been present all along, but it ultimately seems to lose the fight. It is
helpless in the face of passive resistance – at the same time as passive
resistance apparently suffocates the one resisting. Even though Bartleby
actually utters something more than only ‘I would prefer not to’, and
even though he copiously writes, he finally dies of starvation. Eating,
nutrition and digestion is another theme of the story, pointing to the
fact that one has to be part also of linguistic circulation, as well as of
the nutrition chain, in order to survive. The diet kept by the scriveners
is witness not only to their relative poverty, but also to a certain animal-
istic dimension of their being: they really are what they eat.
Bartleby must die. Having worked in the Dead Letters Office, he has
become contaminated by death, and already early on in the story, he is,
in being ‘cadaverous’, marked by his approaching death; he is moving
down a one-way street (20, 25). It seems that already, within himself,
he is turning into a cadaver, a dead body – and too few letters leave
his body and mouth: circulation, be it of nutrition or blood, does not
seem to work inside him. Even though Bartleby says not only that he
would prefer not, he refuses to become the subject of speech, he refuses
agency. At one moment, the lawyer gives him a choice: ‘Now one of two
things must take place. Either you must do something, or something
must be done to you’ (41). It is a decisive choice, but Bartleby persists
in his preference not to. Forming into what comes close to a dialogue,
with two active interlocutors, the conclusion that Bartleby himself draws
from his persistence in preferring not to, is that ‘I am not particular’ (41).
The lawyer started out his whole story by emphasizing the particular-
ity of the scriveners, and especially that of Bartleby – but Bartleby now
denies that description of himself. The master rhetorician, that is the
lawyer, has been lying all the time, and in that act, he kills: by making
Bartleby into someone ‘particular’, he gives him a form which Bartleby
himself refuses to adjust to. And literature, whose loss the lawyer began
by referring Bartleby’s life story to, will never know who Bartleby was: he
never confesses either to the lawyer, or to us, the readers.
The Theatre of Silence
Bartleby turns into a performance: the story is theatricalized, and also

ritualized – since it builds a recurrent repetition of lines and situations.
The lawyer and his interlocutor, Bartleby, turn into actors in their own
play, which, in the case of Bartleby, is his own tragedy. Reading Witold
Gombrowicz’s drama Ivona, Princess of Burgundia (1935), theatre not only
has become the genre of the text, but the theatricality of the proceedings
is striking, as is the nonchalance and arrogance by which the play is to be
performed by at least some of its participating actors. But in emphasizing
this theatricality, one must also be aware of the risk of adding a falsely
voluntary dimension to the text: this is not a game, you cannot choose
to participate or not, you are already included. ‘Duty calls!,’ Cyprian says,
‘Action! Action!’ (3).18 We are, all of us, already contained within an order;
our duty is to observe and follow that order, bend to it. But what if we
prefer not to participate, if we don’t want to play our part in it, not fulfil
the function reserved for us? Perhaps I would prefer, like Ivona, to remain
silent?
Keep silent – but silence speaks, it seems. Silence speaks too. But
in a different way, without me. In his The History of Sexuality, Michel
Foucault writes:
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and

what one does not say; we must try and determine the different ways
of saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot
speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized,
or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not
one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies
that underlie and permeate discourses.19
Foucault writes about the order of discourse, not about individual

speech. That silence speaks, and sometimes even screams aloud, is well
known. But still you can allow yourself to be inspired by the thought
of silence as part of speech and as sharing the conditions of speech –
Foucault also specifies these conditions as a discursive silence. Silence,
then, is not, once again, the opposite of speech: silence and speech pre-
suppose each other, produce each other, intermingle with and depend
on each other: they belong with each other, they speak in harmony or in
rivalry, they form an ongoing dialogue. And Ivona’s silence can perhaps
be called ‘eloquent’: there is a richness of significance to it.20
In Gombrowicz’s Ivona, by far the most common stage instruction is
this: ‘Ivona is silent’, the phrase a couple of times varied with ‘Ivona
does nothing’. It is repeated perhaps 25 times, and almost all of them in
the first two acts of the play. Why does Ivona remain silent? The answer
cannot, I think, be of a psychological type; it is rather of a structural
character. Her function in the play is to get the line of actions started:
she triggers the actions that make up the play, she is only a part of
the theatrical machinery. But when ‘woman’ had an analogous func-
tion within classical tragedy, like a Medea or an Elektra, she spoke. On
certain conditions and under certain circumstances – but she spoke.
When Ivona, on the contrary, remains silent, or almost silent, the story
cannot become anything else but absurd: Ivona, like Bartleby, stops the
regulated traffic or circulation in that economy of speech, which is a
fundamental part of every order, including that of theatre; and perhaps
even more so in an apparatus, like courtly life, that feeds on rhetoric.
That silence here is female, and as such the dark obverse of the male,
homosocial order of Bartleby, adds a structural element that any reading
of the play must incorporate in its reflections. And there is also another
dimension to Ivona’s silence: she refuses theatre, she resists aesthetic
form, and is a touchstone also for the play itself.
So, why does Ivona keep silent? Or, as the Prince has it: ‘Silence,
silence, why are you like this?’ (21).
Sovereign Power
Gombrowicz called himself an apolitical writer. But even the apolitical

writer sometimes formulates a politics, a social doctrine. Ivona care-
fully depicts how order is based on subjection: you are Someone only
within a regulating system. One could describe the play as putting an
individual, Ivona, who really seems to belong to a disciplinary system,
inside a social system based on sovereignty. The play, in this perspective,
becomes absurd since it represents a confrontation between two oppo-

site systems, which can not really coexist since they are mutually exclu-
sive. But in this confrontation, it is sovereignty that has to compromise,
that has to adjust to the individual of the other system, even though she
is totally without any power. And the royal court, which here represents
sovereign power, is already from the outset invaded by an anachronistic
modernity, with the Prince reading the horoscope in a daily paper. But
even so, sovereignty will, throughout the play, recurrently rely on its
absolute power, and when Ivona resists by keeping quiet, she will have
to be sacrificed. And reading Ivona within a literary landscape, a tradi-
tion (slightly different than that of the ordinary reading of his work)
where violence, speech and silence have been central aspects of his
circle of motifs, the realms of a power relationship will appear.21
It is not only, and simply, because Ivona is forced into direct contact
with the ultimate power, as represented by the Prince and the court,
but because the exercise of power seems absolutely arbitrary, that the
play becomes absurd. While reading the horoscope from a newspaper
he picks up from the ground, the Prince’s gaze happens to fall on Ivona,
and she is chosen as a target for the amusement of the Prince and his
friends. But what from one perspective looks like randomness, has,
looked at from another angle, its own logic: power here acts in order
to be recognized. When first meeting Ivona, the Prince not only intro-
duces himself with his royal title, but he adds that he is the ‘heir to the
throne’ (7). The cynical Cyprian talks of what he calls a ‘proper division
of labor’: ‘Let us be young men and give work to the clergy so that they
can be clergy’ (3). Or, as the Queen says after having met Ivona: ‘The
way she bears misfortune has appealed to our best, most refined feelings’
(15). The Prince himself realizes this mechanism of power: ‘Apparently,
it is necessary to find someone completely inferior to appreciate one’s
own excellence. To be a Prince in name is nothing. To be a Prince in
essence – it’s heaven, it’s pure joy’ (20). There is a mirroring relation
between superior and inferior, at least according to those in power, and
it is only within this mimetic relationship that the ‘essence’ of power
is disclosed; only when the inferior recognize the superiority of those
in power can the latter enjoy their being. But Ivona refuses to mirror
power, refuses to recognize it, and thereby she poses a threatening ques-
tion about its legitimacy.
There is also another way of looking at why Ivona remains silent: she
keeps quiet because several silent women in the history of literature
precede her. Ivona is inscribed not only within the hierarchical order of
the royal court, but also within an intertextual web. One of her most
important intertextual predecessors is perhaps, in this perspective,

the Cordelia that this book started out with, who, in the first scene of
Shakespeare’s King Lear, says ‘What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be
silent.’ Her sisters are flattering their father with a declared unlimited
love and devotion – Cordelia prefers to remain silent about the love
rather than feign. When her father still forces her to speak, her first
word is ‘Nothing’. In spite of the repeated instruction ‘Ivona keeps
silent’, Ivona is actually speaking. She has nine lines. Perhaps those
answer to Cordelia’s ‘Nothing’, although Ivona has no love to offer:
‘It is a wheel, it goes round and round in circles’ (22). Or: ‘Get out,
go!’ (34). But Ivona, then, is not a play about opportunities or choices:
much as Cordelia has a function that she is supposed to fulfil, so Ivona
is expected to and should fulfil a given function. We are forced to play
our parts, to fulfil our functions. This is not a question of convention, of
decorum, in any simple sense – even though the Queen maintains that
Ivona must be treated with ‘tact’ (17). It is a question of power: Ivona is
a play about power, and both silence and speech are subjected to force.
In the Tradition
This becomes even more obvious if Ivona, captured in the intertextual

web, is also compared with Philomela. Let us therefore return to her
myth (see above, Chapter 2), as captured by Ovid in his Metamorphoses,
and to the scene in which Tereus forces Philomela to silence: ‘But he
seized her tongue with pincers, as it protested against the outrage,
calling ever on the name of her father and struggling to speak, and
cut it off with his merciless blade. The mangled root quivers, while
the severed tongue lies palpitating on the dark earth, faintly murmur-
ing.’22 What Tereus does not think about is that the culture of writing
had already started to triumph over oral culture: Philomela weaves
‘purple signs’ into a fabric that is to be sent to the sister, Procne. The
reading of the writing in the fabric overwhelms and silences Procne
too, who can speak again only after having lured Tereus into eating
his own son.
If one compares Ivona to Philomela, it becomes even more obvious
that female silence is the result of male violence: of power. The play
does not represent any rape as such, but still it is within this chore-
ography – the history and tradition of outrage – that Ivona must be
interpreted.
The story of rape is about a threat against the state: Philomela accuses
Tereus of having ‘confused all natural relations’ (VI:537). The accusation
is based on the fact that the father of Philomela, King Pandion, urges
Tereus to protect his daughter just like a father would. And how is the
act of rape to be read in relation to that appeal? The two women are
the objects of a trade between the two kings. And the victim is the sister-
in-law to the perpetrator, meaning that rape affects, changes or doubles
family relations. These relations are not only the close relations between
parents and children; rather, they include the right to speak, the right to
one’s own body – family relations are related to the border between self
and society, and to that female virtue that seems to be a foundation for
society. The myth touches on fundamental social conditions, and what
the myth says can be understood as an inquiry into ‘how the political
hierarchy built upon male sexual dominance requires the violent appro-
priation of the woman’s power to speak’.23
Even more obvious is the relation between rape and political power in
another founding story, that of Lucrece. The story as told by Livy in his
chronicle of the history of Rome demonstrates that the rape of Lucrece
and her consequent suicide is about male power over women: the one
most virtuous, Lucrece sitting at her loom, is the one that is chosen as
object of violence by the son of the king. Before killing herself, Lucrece
demands of her close ones that they avenge her, and Brutus swears to
this, overthrowing the royal family and initiating the republic. The
triumphant Brutus is then to become one of the Roman republic’s first
consuls.
This political dimension of Gombrowicz’s play appears clearly if one
writes Ivona into a situation of anacrisis: the play centres on how to
force Ivona into speaking, since speech is the medium through which
she can be subjected to the order of power. And that means that its
popular and traditional story, with a girl of the people and a boy of
noble descent, must be understood as a political intrigue.
The play of roles that we are enticed to take part in in this drama is an
order of power where the subject has to confess her subjection: ‘Doesn’t
it give Your Highness a glorious sense of achievement to hear some
sweet lips say “yes”, even if it means hearing the same old thing over
and over again?’ (3). Ivona will refuse to fulfil that function of pleasing
those in power, causing the disturbance, or imbalance, that the play
represents in all its absurdity. But being a prince, you can feel yourself
as standing above that kind of system: ‘I am free’ (13). Ultimately, the
freedom of the Prince shows itself to be only self-delusion. Even he is,
like the King and the Queen, subjected to the mechanisms of power:
power is, with Gombrowicz, an order, not a possession. And no one is
allowed to escape the order.
Ivona’s mission, then, is to place herself outside of this role play,

outside order’s cage: she remains silent. Her silence falls out against
the babble that is practised by the Prince and the court: the action also
starts with the Prince reading his horoscope in a paper. This silence
of Ivona’s has the function of evoking the speech of the others: her
presence results in a tension that silences the babble; her mission is to
‘get on everybody’s nerves’ (9); she becomes a constant nuisance. And
her silence still remains a way of speaking – if only as a form of say-
ing ‘no’. Or as Simon has it when he describes the silence of Ivona: ‘It
is a negative silence’ (32). Her aunts says that she makes fun of them,
the King and Queen involuntarily bow to her, instead of the other way
around – which could have been expected – and the reaction of the
Prince is rather that of attraction: ‘I recognize that for everyone there is,
somewhere, somebody capable of firing them to a white heat; you do
that to me, you must be mine, you shall be mine’ (9).
The aim of the play can now be identified as an investigation of
how, and under which circumstances, this threat against order can be
brought under control and pacified, and it forms the play as a whole
into an agon, a ritualized struggle between opposing parties: one silent,
the other therefore absolutely talkative. Ivona is, like Bartleby, no par-
rhesiastes in the Foucauldian sense: she, like Bartleby, does not question
power, she just ignores it – and this lack of rationality, of motivation
and opposition, seems to turn out even more provocative.
Mechanisms of Power
The play produces, with the Prince as its leading character, different
strategies aimed at making Ivona speak. The Prince may for instance put
seemingly emphatic questions to her: ‘Why are you afraid? Because you
are shy. But why are you shy? Because you are afraid, a little’ (23). But
not even his way of answering in her place can entice her into speaking.
Neither do statements, or constatives, like ‘There must be something in
you – something positive as it were, a spark’ (23), drag her into the
circulation of speech. However, the questioning quickly escalates, with
him putting his own words into her mouth:
Wait. This is important. Suppose someone comes up to you and tells

you that you are a horror, an abomination, and a curse. Striking,
wounding, killing words. What would you reply? Would you say:
‘Yes, I am all this, it’s true, but …’ But what? What would you say?
IVONA is silent. (24)
This intimation of violence, based on anacrisis, evolves into a discus-

sion between the Prince and Cyril about proper ways of treating Ivona.
The Prince rejects Cyril’s suggestions, and his irritation grows rapidly:
‘Give me a knife. I will cut her throat with pleasure’ (27). In that
way, the Prince transforms Ivona into a Philomela for the twentieth
century – with the (crucial) difference that Ivona does not weave her
story in purple letters. But it is like a Philomela that she is going to
die: ‘There you stand – a living reproach – but it means nothing to me.
Stand as much as you like’, the Prince tells her (54). Such a reminder
about the significance of force and violence to power is not allowed to
exist. Ivona is lured into eating perch and, swallowing a fishbone, she
suffocates to death, thereby definitively kept from speaking. And it is,
once again, the throat and the organ for speaking that this deadly attack
is directed against.
Ivona, Princess of Burgundia is almost unbearable in its slow determina-
tion of Ivona as the victim of power. That is also why a transformation
or exchange occurs: the Prince looks at himself as the victim of Ivona,
he sees himself as locked up inside her: ‘She has enmeshed me. … She
is the trap and I am captured’ (34). The point is not the psychology of
power as such, but that the Prince is also part of the order, captured
within it; his way of thinking and feeling is also an effect of this order.
Power as an apparatus is constantly working, grinding, moulding.
The silence of the subject is also a form of normality. Do we resist – or
do we keep silent? Remaining silent is also, as in the example of Ivona, a
way of marrying power. This passivity, or acquiescence, is also part of why
Ivona is such a provocative character. In her uncompromising attitude,
she entices her surroundings into dictatorialness, and thereby lets it
unveil itself. But in doing that, she also lets herself become the object for
someone else’s actions. The Prince describes her: ‘Anyone can touch her.
Believe me, you can do absolutely anything you like with her. She is made
for it – for anything. She is too shy to protest, too disagreeable. One can
do anything. One can be stupid, idiotic, cynical, horrid’ (51). She is only
a pawn in their game: it is an economy of rape that Gombrowicz gives
us an image of.
But Ivona also represents a gaze that is returned to power – and power
does not approve of the representation of itself it hereby has to face.
What from the start triggers the action is that Ivona ‘annoys’ those in
power, and her refusal to enter and to accept a position within the
discursive order remains a threat to the self-image of power all through
the play. She becomes the bad conscience of power, much like Bartleby
is to the lawyer. The Prince calls her his ‘dragon to be slain’ (19), before
changing it to a ‘worm’ that one prods with a stick. But even a worm
can slowly consume the earth surrounding it, and to Simon, Ivona is
‘eating up’ his Prince (26). By not adjusting herself to the demands
put on her, Ivona turns into a destabilizing factor, impossible for the
agents of power to handle. But even though Ivona is the object of
constant humiliation, in spite of her having become an object that one
can do ‘anything’ with, to Prince Philip she can still remain a threat,
‘she has still got us’ (55). Looked upon as an agon, and even though
the opposing parties are very unequally equipped, power cannot really
win – simply because Ivona does not adjust to or accept the rules of the
game. Only brute force, and not verbal power, can break the spell her
negativity radiates over power. One could summarize Gombrowicz’s
play as situated within the process where a power apparatus loses its
persuasive force, and therefore transforms, even though no conventional
physical force is used on Ivona, into what Giorgio Agamben calls an
‘exercise of violence’.24
A perhaps stupid – but, even so, necessary – question remains: why
does Ivona not run away? Or, why does Gombrowicz not allow an
escape for Ivona? The simple answer is that there would not be any play
if she were allowed to run out of the text and escape from the theatre
stage – and she cannot do that since her existence is theatricalized
from the start. Another answer can be found in Gombrowicz’s novel
Ferdydurke, 1937:
And I now understood why no one could run from the school – it
was their faces, their whole being in fact, that killed their ability
to run, everyone was a prisoner of his own ghastly face, and even
though they should have run they couldn’t, because they no longer
were what they should have been.25
The logic of subjection is imperative, and such that we cannot escape

since we then will escape identity. The motivation for Ivona’s silence is
also not psychological: it is literary. But, like Bartleby, she refuses inter-
pretation. It is not by understanding her character as producing her
silence that Ivona can be understood, but rather, I want to suggest, by
understanding her through the process of subjectification. The Prince
wants to call forth a subject in Ivona, someone that speaks and in that
way subjects herself to order, who bows when entering the dwellings of
power, and who thereby is transformed from No one to Someone.
But Ivona does actually protest, and her protest is a form of negativity: she
refrains – but from what? Birgit Harress writes, in line with Gombrowicz’s
understanding of himself, that Ivona refrains from assuming a form,

‘refuses the categorical imperative of form’.26 Cyprian calls Ivona a ‘jel-
lyfish’, suggesting her lack of form. But the design of form always also
belongs to someone else; giving form can be a disciplinary practice, as
when the Prince tries to command a true Ivona to step forward, and it is
this ‘interpellation’ of the subject that Ivona resists and denies: to take
on form is for the person to accept, acknowledge and subjugate under
the designing act of the other. Ivona’s first line is therefore a refusal of
how the Prince and Cyril try to define her: ‘Please, leave me alone. I am
not offended’ (21). If silence is resistance, it is resistance as a way of
refusing identification.
The necessity of forcing Ivona into the discursive order, to make her
speak, is emphasized by the Prince in what is perhaps the most crucial
line in the whole play: ‘I am myself but how can I be myself, how can
I get back to norm if she stays outside it?’ (75). A norm only remains a
norm for as long as it is recognized and acknowledged by those it calls
on. In turning her back on the norm, in her refusal to speak and her
apathetic response to any questions, she also refuses to become a sub-
ject. She does not ‘curtsy’, that is, she does not subordinate herself to
an arbitrary order, but neither does she speak out for herself, she denies
herself agency – and thereby she interrupts the circulation both of
speech and power. ‘Smile’, power exhorts Ivona – as if it is not enough
to recognize power, you must also enjoy or find pleasure in doing it;
at least ‘[i]t won’t hurt’ (23). ‘Speak’, power tells you, ‘Speak, Madame,
speak’ – but speech here is exemplified as the writing of poetry, and the
belief ‘that Christ Our Lord died on the cross for you’ (24). Speaking out
always implies that the one speaking enters a speech economy, an order
of speech, that includes poetry and Christianity, or, that forms part of a
discursive order. It is only by entering established discourses that Ivona
can become a subject.
In her muteness and silence, Ivona becomes like her distant literary
cousin, Bartleby, he who also resists every attempt of others to give
him form, or force form upon him. Cordelia and Philomela do not
remain silent, after all: Cordelia tries to speak truthfully, while Philomela
weaves a text. But the modern figures, Bartleby and Ivona, persist in
remaining (almost completely) silent, in refraining from taking part
in the circulation of words: they cannot be persuaded to speak out.
Being part of the modern world, where the air is filled with babble and
nonsense, their refusal to speak becomes, precisely, a way of speaking:
discourse incorporates non-discourse too into its circulation, and forces
it to speak. And as Bartleby persists in not answering with any other
words, so Ivona also prefers not to: the high point of the play might be
the scene when Ivona bends down to pick up a hair, and the Prince says:
‘Don’t curtsy to me!’ (55). Ivona’s answer is very simple, and it shows
that her stand is not passivity, but rather negativity: an active no, a
refraining from. She says: ‘I am not curtsying.’
Both Bartleby and Ivona refuses to take an active part in the social
hierarchies that surround them. They do not take part, they will not
share; they prefer to keep silent. Denying themselves agency, they also
refuse subjection. But one cannot, at least not in these two texts, live
outside the law of discourse: both find themselves interrogated and
questioned, examined and defined, abused and punished. They put
their lives at risk, and they are, both of them, eventually killed: both
stories end with their physical death, but also with both stories forcing
their respective protagonists into silence, back into silence.
4
The Other of Monologue:
Strindberg, Camus, Beckett
Monologue is a strange form of linguistic practice: the name seems

to refer to a practice that does not exist. Language is always shared,
not in the abstract, but as practised. The voluntary speech of a singu-
lar individual always has an address – and perhaps that addressee is
the agent of the force that is necessary for the production of speech?
Monologue is dialogue – while what sometimes seems like a dialogue,
in truth, is a monologue reducing its addressees to an audience, rather
than interlocutors. And monologue, however random it may seem,
is motivated. The reduction of speech to only one sounding voice
results in a concentration of the violence inherent in every linguistic
exchange: written monologue puts on display the power of dialogue,
exploiting it in order to produce its own Other.
Silence as Struggle: Strindberg’s The Stronger
A café, only for ladies. Tables and chairs, a bottle of ale on a table.
Illustrated magazines scattered around. It could be a place to relax and
enjoy the company of others, to sit down and browse through maga-
zines, while having a cup of tea or a glass of wine. But a strange scene
takes place here: two women are shown; one enters while the other is
already seated at one of the tables, drinking that bottle of ale. Apparently,
they are both actresses, and their names are almost the same – but at the
same time decisively different: Mrs X and Miss Y, the latter unmarried,
while the other is married. They mirror each other: their names are just
letters, but letters that come next to each other in the alphabet, so that
the two women are connected to each other whether they like it or
not. But one could ask if the order of the letters in the alphabet means
that X comes before Y, or if Y comes after X: who comes first, Mrs X or
103
Miss Y?1 Such is the setting for August Strindberg’s The Stronger, written
in 1888–9.2
Included among Strindberg’s one-act plays, The Stronger is a short piece
for just three actors, of which only one actually speaks. The one speak-
ing, though, does to some degree formulate the second woman’s voice
as well, while the third part, the waitress, remains absolutely silent. The
Stronger is therefore a mix of play and mime, and the silence of the two
silent women might be saying more than the words of the one actu-
ally speaking. Or not. Which of the two actresses really is the strongest
remains up to the viewer or the reader to decide, if it is at all important
or even interesting.3 But it is also fundamental that what Mrs X is saying
is actually something that should not be expressed in public – she is
suggesting that her husband has been having an affair with Miss Y. The
tension and struggle between openness and secrecy, between speaking
out and remaining quiet, is fuelled by the social and moral conventions
that the play, at least indirectly, challenges by saying what was not really
allowed to be said.
But there is a struggle going on here, between the women X and Y.
It is as if they have both chosen their weapons, decided upon which
tactic to use, and they are ready for combat, for a verbal war. As Jean-
Jacques Lecercle writes, the best way to fight this kind of war is not
always by using speech: ‘Talking is not as good a tactic as silence.
It is often a position of weakness and ignoring your opponent’s implicit
demand is usually a better choice.’ What could look like a given hier-
archy is not given at all, and it is of course precisely this instability or
undecidedness of the monologic situation that Strindberg explores.
Lecercle explains this instability with the war already having been
fought: ‘But this supposes that the battle has already been won. He who
talks recognizes the other’s position, i.e. becomes his slave. In the first
stages, one must talk, in order not to inform, but to assert. Take care of
your place, and meaning will take care of itself.’4 In a way, this seems to
hold true also for Strindberg’s play: the talking Mrs X constantly refers
back to a history that she shares with Miss Y. But the war at that time
may have been fought only indirectly, with the two combatants never
confronting each other. It is now, when they meet, that the results of
the battle will show, and the stipulated conditions of the peace treaty
negotiated – here, war returns to politics. But also here, the garrulous
Mrs X constantly runs the risk of becoming the slave of the silent Miss Y,
since as she speaks she seems to recognize the influence of the younger
woman on her own life. And the mute Miss Y seems to be taking care
of her ‘place’, or her position as untouchable in respect to Mrs X, and
Monologue: Strindberg, Camus, Beckett 105
letting her silence point to the true significance of what has taken place.
Silence here functions as anacrisis. Even though confrontational, there
is at the same time in the play a dialogic traffic going on between the
two women. One could also add that The Stronger relates to a recurrent
theme in Strindberg’s oeuvre: that we are always as narrated by others.5
Mrs X enters and starts the conversation by using Miss Y’s first name:
‘Amelie, dear’.6 Already from the first line, then, a discursive apparatus is
working, producing, through the mouth of Mrs X, clichés and formulaic
addresses. The apparatus produces intimacy only as cliché; ‘name’ +
‘dear’, a formula constantly under repetition wherever language is
circulated. And the address seems necessary: it is the stamp of approval
that the apparatus marks the utterance with – without address, speech
will be nonsensical or meaningless. And Mrs X uses a typical conversa-
tional strategy for drawing Miss Y into the conversation: if Miss Y will
refuse to speak for herself, Mrs X surely knows how to speak on her
behalf: The Stronger can be read as a detailed study in hermeneutical mon-
strosity. Mrs X’s first line ends with her comparing Miss Y with a ‘bach-
elor’: intimacy opens up for a kind of playfulness, one which contains
the sexual and erotic problematic at the heart of the play. And Strindberg
has already prepared for this gender traffic by placing Miss Y in a ‘male’
coded position: in front of a bottle of ale. Mrs X uses the question format,
but answers these questions herself: ‘you’re thinking’ – that is, Mrs X has
already answered the question. Or: ‘You remember last Christmas, how
happy you were …?’ (311), where happiness is already taken for granted
in the question.
But although Mrs X in her way of posing her questions already tries
at defining the answers to be given by Miss Y, as well as defining her,
the latter also has a way of speaking – but silently, as regulated by the
stage directions: Miss Y ‘gives her a contemptuous look’ or ‘makes a gesture
of horror’. And she laughs at what Mrs X is saying, the volume of her
laughter slowly increasing: ‘laughs aloud’, and again, ‘roars with laughter’.
This repeated laughter provokes Mrs X to sharpen her tone: ‘What are
you laughing at? What! What! … What are you grinning at?’ (313).
A dialogue between two is apparently taking place, even though only
one voice is actually being heard. But Strindberg is also close to creating
in The Stronger a monologue that seems to produce its interlocutor, that
is, that hallucinates the other – language is an apparatus that produces
hallucinations; language seems to be making us see, when in reality we
are only speaking or listening to words, producing sound, not vision.
The Stronger is totally possible without Miss Y on the stage, since she, in
a way, exists only as hallucinated in Mrs X’s lines.
The silence of one of the interlocutors brings forth and emphasizes

the speaking one’s speech. Her silence allows or even forces Mrs X to
elaborate, to keep on speaking. At one point, Mrs X observes this and
responds to the unequal distribution of speech: ‘Why are you silent?
You haven’t said a word the whole time –’ (314). And when Miss Y then,
pantomimically, ‘makes a move to speak’, Mrs X stops her before she has
had the chance to say anything: ‘Quiet! You don’t have to say any-
thing …!’ (315).
What happens in this conversation is that Mrs X recalls the history
that the two women share. And it is she alone who does it: Miss Y does
not present her view on what has happened, if she really has had an
affair with the husband of Mrs X. And this lack of opposition to Mrs X
may of course be interpreted in several different ways: as a silent giving
in, as negligence, as contempt … or as Mrs X’s hallucination. And for
a while it looks as if it is the silent Miss Y that really has defined their
relationship and continues to do so – Mrs X attacks her exactly on this
point:
Everything, everything came from you to me, including your pas-

sions! Your soul crept into mine like a maggot in an apple, ate and
ate, dug and dug, until it was nothing but a shell on a bit of black
meal! I wanted to flee from you, but I couldn’t. You bewitched me
like a serpent with your black eyes – (315)
Your ‘soul’, Mrs X says, but she could have been more sincere and
instead used the word ‘speech’. In imagining her opponent, or competi-
tor, Mrs X is really saying that language took on the form of Miss Y and
invaded her: she is the ‘serpent’ that caused the Babylonian confusion.
And language’s invasion of the person is always marked by Strindberg
as a violent act, one that consumes the person, transforms her or him,
turns her or him into a talking machine – as in The Stronger. But then
Mrs X backs down, and instead sees herself as victorious. She has what
Miss Y lacks: a husband, children: ‘Thanks for teaching my husband
how to love! – Now I am going home to love him’ (317). The conversa-
tional struggle then ends with this return to normality: the family. And
these are the very final lines to the play.
But what is it that we have been witnessing? Mrs X, just before get-
ting up to end both conversation and play, says: ‘And why do you
stay silent – always and forever silent, silent? Well, I thought it was
strength – but maybe it was only that you had nothing to say! Because
you couldn’t think of anything!’ (316).
Silence as made up only of absence of thinking: Barthes states that

silence as such is no sign, that silence does not signify, it does not refer
to a signified; silence ‘baffles the binary structure of the paradigm’.7 But
silence is also a condition for the binary logic: in music, it is the rela-
tionship between silence and sound that forms the foundation of any
composition or performance; in talking, silence is a fundamental part
of the dialectic between talking and not talking, between activity and
passivity, that forms the basis for the speech economy: without silence
there is no rhythm. And, as Barthes writes, silence is transformed into a
sign when it is forced to speak, to signify – which is what happens in The
Stronger. What Mrs X finally reaches is perhaps, but without knowing it,
a disclosure of what lies at the heart of every conversation: at least one
differing voice is always silenced, since conversation aims at agreement,
at a reciprocal recognition. Two voices still embody a moment of con-
flict, which the practice of conversation must overcome. Conversation
is the engaging of the self in a mimicry: the two speakers imitate each
other, they feed off each other, charm and bewitch each other, entice
and force each other, so that conversation becomes collaborative
monologue: the force of inclusive normalization is the true victor in
Strindberg’s play, and he demonstrates, with a grin on his face, how
the verbal war is an agreement of two speakers, becoming one in that
recognition of each other.
Mikhail Bakhtin does not define dialogue and monologue only for-
mally; instead, he sees the dialogic as the inclusion of the other’s words
in one’s own; and the monologic as the opposite. The dialogic is
‘double-voiced’, while the monologic is only ‘single-voiced’. As Bakhtin
writes, dialogic relationships have many different dimensions: they
can ‘permeate inside the utterance, even inside the individual word,
as long as two voices collide within it dialogically’, and also inside
‘one’s own utterance’, as a sort of distancing ourselves from our
words.8 In ‘novelizing’ monologue, a double-voicedness seems to reign
also in monologue: there cannot be any monologue without an other
being addressed.9 Mrs X, of The Stronger, seems intent on speaking in
one voice in that she treats her opponent, Miss Y, as an object, which
Bakhtin sees as the defining characteristic of single-voiced speech. But
Mrs X fails, in that she is forced to include Miss Y in her own words. She
comes close to turning dialogue into monologue, but she also provokes
answers, or rather reactions, from Miss Y, whose silence is interrupted
through gestures and facial expressions. One general consequence
of Bakhtin’s argument is that not every monologue appears as solely
single-voiced any longer. Jacques Derrida hints at this when he warns
us that Molly Bloom’s famous interior monologue in Joyce’s Ulysses

is ‘too lightly referred to as her monologue’.10 Derrida points to the
fact that her words are framed by the word ‘Yes’; she is responding
to someone or something, her lines are situated in between an open-
ing ‘Yes’, that is of another quality than the ‘Yes’ that ends her lines.11
Monologue is, it seems, impossible without address: the monologic utter-
ance is always directed towards someone or something, present but
silenced, or absent but speaking: silent in his or her presence, speaking
in his or her absence. The linguistic apparatus is constantly performing
a ‘dividing practice’ of a Foucauldian type, practices through which a
subject ‘is either divided inside himself or divided from others’.12 In The
Stronger, the linguistic apparatus works minutely, on a trivial level, on
the speaker, dividing her from herself, as well as from Miss Y, making
her into an object for language: it operates not only through her but
also on her – in trying to define her interlocutor, Mrs X is confessing
herself.
Persuasion as Normalization: Camus’s The Fall
The problem with language, Roland Barthes states, is ‘not to make

oneself understood but to make oneself recognized’.13 Many literary
works exploit precisely this ambiguity: they might contain a perfectly
intelligible protagonist – but the problem is to recognize and acknowl-
edge what turns out to be an objectionable character. Although formally
a monologue, Albert Camus’s novel La Chute (The Fall, 1956) opens
with a scene that includes three people: one speaking, another listen-
ing, a third being spoken about. The one speaking introduces himself
to the one listening by offering his assistance in making the third
person, a bartender, observe him. On the face of it, this is a totally trivial
scene, but still of strategic importance in that it draws up a dividing
line – between them and us – that Camus will put to use throughout
his novel. In speaking, the speaker distances himself and his listener
from the bartender, calling him a ‘worthy gorilla’ (‘estimable gorille’).
And although sometimes mimicking human behaviour, gorillas do
not speak the same type of language as humans. Furthermore, the
speaker defines the bartender as a ‘homme de Cro-Magnon’, that is, a
human type that indeed had started to use utensils and tools, and that
could paint the insides of his cave: perhaps we are at a place where
civilization’s future will be negotiated? While performing this act of
separation and definition, the speaker at the same time includes the
listener in his community of speakers. An absolute divide is produced,
one separating those of linguistic competence from those without it: we

must speak in order to be subjects. But this apparently also implies that
to be speakers, we must subject ourselves to others’ speech. The silence
of the bartender ‘de Cro-Magnon’ is ‘deafening’ (‘assourdissant’) – and
the reader, if remaining quiet, will risk the same description, if he or she
does not, at least when reading the novel, start speaking up.
The speaker in this scene, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, is one more exam-
ple of the species that I here call the ‘hermeneutical monster’. He intro-
duces himself in a mannerly way – ‘But allow me to introduce myself;
Jean-Baptiste Clamence, at your service. Pleased to know you’ (8)14 – but
soon defines himself as utterly talkative. And you cannot guard yourself
against him; he is pushy, he embraces you with words and takes you
with him – until finally you find yourself thinking like him, speak-
ing like him: you are his double.15 Or his prisoner? The conclusion of
this novel is scary, at least if the reader accepts that she or he is being
addressed by Clamence, when on the last page of the novel he says:
‘You yourself utter the words that for years have never ceased echoing
through my nights and that I shall at last say through your mouth …’
(147).16 This is a summary but probably accurate description of how
many readers respond to the hero of La Chute. The novel is frequently
described in terms of a ‘web’ or a ‘trap’ in which the reader ultimately
will find her- or himself entrapped.
La Chute is most often read as a political novel, in the form of a
diagnosis of post-war Europe: a place where individuals, people, as well
as nations, stood by and watched, or even assisted, in the Holocaust.
And it seems to say that there is a debt which is shared by everyone.
Camus himself once said that he intended the novel to have the title
‘A Hero of Our Time’, thereby pointing to the situatedness of the novel
in its own time.17 But the effect of the novel cannot be described in
exclusively political or ethical terms; its effect on the reader is not a
matter only of his or her identification with, or at least approval of, the
ideas that Clamence distributes in his monologue.
Instead, the monologue, working like a slowly grinding machine –
and the duration of the grinding, the only slowly developing scheme of
things – might be the secret behind the novel’s seductive power. And this
monologue is based on silence. Although Clamence is obviously talking
to someone, that someone is never heard, aside from Clamence’s quotes
of or allusions to this absent speech. And since these are quite frequent,
La Chute must be defined as a dialogized monologue, a monologue that
has taken up and integrated within it apparently dialogic elements.
Or, as Dominick LaCapra has put it, ‘Clamence’s narrative is a split
monologue or an invidiously skewed and manipulative non- or pseudo-

dialogue, a shifting and shifty “conversation” with a depersonalized,
silent other who is also within the self.’18 La Chute forms into a ‘hidden
polemic’. It is an ironical reproduction of the discourse of normality,
but inside that irony it is a polemic that, in Bakhtin’s words, can be seen
as ‘directed toward its own referential object, as is any other discourse,
but at the same time every statement about that object is constructed
in such a way that, apart from its referential meaning, a polemical blow
is struck at the other’s discourse on the same theme, at the other’s state-
ment about the same object’.19 And especially if considering the kind
of speech that Clamence delivers throughout the novel, we can identify
aspects of Clamence’s strategy in having the other’s silence actually
speak, and we can give this strange monologue a more specific name:
it is a diatribe.
In everyday usage, but also in more regulated usage, ‘diatribe’ has come
to mean something like an aggressive verbal or written attack on some-
one.20 But the term has a more complicated history, and Mikhail Bakhtin
defines ‘diatribe’ as ‘an internally dialogized genre, usually structured
in the form of a conversation with an absent interlocutor – and result-
ing in a dialogization of the very process of speech and thought’.21
As Suzanne Sharland points out, ‘genre’ in Bakhtin here must be
understood as non-formalist, and she suggests that ‘diatribe’ should
rather be looked upon as a mode of writing. This mode of the diatribe
then generates dialogic features: ‘Typically the speaker will exploit the
rhetorical device of the imaginary interlocutor (adversarius fictivus),
often appearing to be addressing someone else in the midst of his talk,
and often firing a series of questions, interspersed with rebukes, at
this fictive addressee.’22 The interlocutor of Clamence is never named,
never asked to step forward and identify himself (it is a he), and he
is never quoted as saying anything outside of Clamence’s speech:
he has no textual space of his own. He must therefore be looked
upon as absent. But he, or rather the function of an interlocutor, is
present in Clamence’s speech, referred to, addressed and argued with,
acknowledged as well as rebuked. Or, as Sharland defines the typical
features of the diatribe, understood within a Bakhtinian perspective:
‘Although formally monologic, the “diatribe” demonstrates aspects
which are normally indicative of dialogue. There is a strong distinction
between “I” and “you”. The whole structure of the discourse is aimed
at giving an impression of direct address, and the orientation of the
discourse is also toward the here and now.’23 It is precisely this ‘giving an
impression of direct address’ that Camus brilliantly exploits: Clamence’s
speech produces an Other, even though there is no other present but

the reader – in his or her here and now. With Bakhtin we can speak of a
discourse with a ‘referential meaning’, namely Clamence’s own life, but
within this discourse, ‘an intentional orientation toward someone else’s
words’ makes itself undeniably palpable.24
In dialogizing Clamence’s monologue, Camus uses several basic strat-
egies, and it is in their interaction with each other, that the metaphor
of the novel as a web or net, in which the reader finds him- or herself
captured, becomes reasonable. These strategies all interact with each
other, which of course is the point of dialogization. Still, it is possible
to single out a few as of fundamental importance in the knitting of the
textual net.
The first of these strategies has to do with address, or apostrophe:
how is this silent addressee invoked? La Chute starts with a formal
gesture, signalling politeness and humility: ‘May I, Monsieur, offer my
services without running the risk of intruding?’25 For a brief moment,
it is the reader that is being addressed in this way, but already the
second line suggests that no, it is not me, in the function of reader,
but someone else that is being addressed. But this hesitancy, already
established with the first line of the novel, will grow stronger during the
act of reading. One factor behind this is precisely the formal character
of this first address. Clamence addresses the other as ‘you’ in the French
second person of the plural (‘vous’) – thus an apparent distance between
the interlocutors is there from the start. This formal address then serves
as the starting point of a slow change in address, a movement through-
out the text which has the function of hauling in the reader. The ‘vous’
and ‘Monsieur’ will slowly be exchanged for ‘mon cher compatriote’
(728; the translator has chosen to keep the French also in the English
translation), which in its turn is transformed into a repeated ‘Cher ami’
(‘Dear friend’).
Closely related to this shift in address is a second strategy, that of
intimization, which is carried out not only through addressing the
absentee. It is signalled also at the start of Clamence’s monologue –
‘I confess’ (5), and the French original says that I confess to you: ‘Je
vous l’avouerai’ – and used throughout the novel. Another instance of
it is Clamence’s plea for sincerity, ‘Tell me frankly …’ (86),26 which also
incorporates the other: sincerity is a question of exchange. Intimacy
here also means a change of room; the conversation moves from the
semi-public sphere of the bar, ‘Mexico-City’, and apparently into
Clamence’s private rooms: ‘I’m embarrassed to be in bed when you
come’ (119).27
Intimization here also points to the closeness of diatribe to confession:

Clamence engages in an apparent confessional rhetoric, that intimacy
allows for but also presupposes. But confession is of course also the
making public of intimacy, and this transport into the open of what
has been hidden depends, as Michel Foucault has pointed out, on two
characteristic features of confession: it always takes place within a
power relation, and it is always of a ritual character.28 Clamence repeat-
edly refers to himself as a ‘juge-penitent’, to his discourse as a sort of
juridical statement, thereby inscribing his monologue within a power
structure. And the same discourse is also given obvious Christian
implications – his name is after all ‘Jean-Baptiste’ (John the Bapist) –
and his meeting with his voiceless interlocutor takes place during sev-
eral days: it is not one, but a series or repetitions of meetings and
conversations.
The third of these dialogic strategies can be called anacritical, but is
really a summary of several related linguistic manipulations.29 Their
common denominator is their function of enticing the other to speak,
or to step forward – even though he never seems to do that except in
Clamence’s lines. The first of these manipulations is the use of a negation
in addressing the other, a negation that is not only the formula of French
politesse, but that also forces the other to correct the speaker: ‘Haven’t
you noticed that …’ (7, 73); ‘You don’t understand what I mean?’ (73).30
A second manipulation that Clamence puts to use is the anticipation
of what the other is about to or should say: ‘Have you never suddenly
needed understanding, help, friendship? Yes, of course’ (30); ‘You must
look on that as childish’ (93); ‘I can see from your manner that I am skip-
ping rather fast, in your opinion, over these details which have a certain
significance’ (123).31 This anticipation should generate a correction from
the interlocutor. A third manipulation can be said to consist in Clamence’s
assent with his interlocutor: ‘as you can see’ (4); ‘You are right, cher ami’
(73); ’The amazement I generally encountered in my listeners, their rather
reticent embarrassment, somewhat like what you are showing – no, don’t
protest – did not calm me at all. You see, it is not enough to accuse yourself
in order to clear yourself: otherwise, I’d be as innocent as a lamb’ (95).32
This is combined with an obvious dimension of flattery in Clamence’s
way of performing this conversation, a servile and mannered flattery that
exceeds and even corrupts the gestures of ordinary courtesy. In manipulat-
ing his interlocutor into agreeing with him, with his resentment and his
hatred, Clamence flatters the other for not being like the ones he talks
about – including himself. This manipulation could engender a protest
from the other, even if only dictated by politeness. Closely related to it,
as well as to the intimizing strategy, is Clamence’s use of comfort: ‘don’t

get upset!’ (146).33
Also, one should notice the recurrent use of an elementary question/
answer form throughout the novel. The questions seem to be put to
no one in particular, but are always answered by Clamence, one way
or another: ‘Are you staying long in Amsterdam? A beautiful city, isn’t
it? Fascinating? There’s an adjective I haven’t heard in some time’ (6);
‘What is a judge-penitent ? Ah, I intrigued you with that business’ (17);
‘But here we are; here’s my house, my shelter! Tomorrow? Yes, if you
wish’ (70–1).34
In this way, Camus uses silence, and the silent character, to
stylize the speech of Clamence, and to force the reader into the posi-
tion, and the function, of the addressee: several, if taken separately, trivial
rhetorical tricks are engaged in an anacritical manoeuvre, directed against
the reader’s silence and triggering his or her preparedness to answer.35
Clamence then shows himself to be not only a morally and politically
ambiguous figure, but also a linguistic machine that consumes language,
a hermeneutical monster, producing ‘understanding’ of the other only
to keep his own speech going – although not ridiculous in the manner
of Austen’s Mrs Norris – who only too well knows and understands
his interlocutor, and swallows the other’s words, digests them, and
in appropriating them pronounces them according to his own inten-
tions. ‘Monstrosity’ here should be understood as something without
a fixed form and identity: Clamence is a speech apparatus, which is
constantly adjusting and adapting to the other whom he is addressing,
thereby producing the other, as well as himself. And as an apparatus, it
keeps going, grinding language and speech. This automatic character of
linguistic performance is attested to by different maintenance practices
that Clamence sometimes has to use: ‘Where was I? Oh yes, honour!’
(54); ‘What? Forgive me, I was thinking of something else’ (40); ‘What ?
I’m getting to it, never fear; besides, I have never left it’ (36).36 This
maintenance of his discourse is basically a use of ‘repairs’, aiming at
keeping the speech going without losing the listener’s attention nor the
logic of the speech itself. The last example also hints at the fact that in
everyday dialogue, repairs are used by both parties of a dialogue, and
not only by the one having the initiative in or dominating the conver-
sation. But here it is Clamence who uses repairs on his own speech, and
he also takes the other’s repairs and appropriates them.
The dialogic form of the monologic diatribe shows itself, on a basic
level, to be only a simulacrum: dialogue in La Chute is revealed as mono-
logic manipulation (in Strindberg, the opposite is more true: monologue
is dialogized in The Stronger). La Chute forces, through these (and prob-

ably other) linguistic manoeuvres, a constant moral Unbehag upon the
reader, forcing him or her to enter into and engage in a different kind
of dialogue, a dialogue at another level of the text, that of ethics and
responsibility, of action and passivity. And breathing the big air of deep
thoughts and moral responsibilities, the reader might feel a little dizzy,
when he or she notices the simple means that Camus used to put the
reader into Clamence’s language …
But can the reader, then, remain silent? Throughout the novel,
Clamence is systematically defining his listener/reader. The first scene
includes his talking on behalf of his interlocutor – ‘Unless you authorize
me to plead your case, he will not guess that you want gin’ (3)37 – and
this appropriation of the other’s speech works through the whole of the
novel. This means also that he can use a specific pronoun when talking
about the bartender, or about any other person or object: he employs
a first person plural pronoun, ‘notre taciturne ami’. The bartender has,
ironically, become ‘our’ friend through this linguistic move, and an
elementary likeness between speaker and listener has been reached.
Speaker and listener form a common front against the animal-like
bartender, whose sounds are those of someone grunting (‘grogner’). But
this common front is really dictated by Clamence, in forcing his ‘nous’
upon his passive interlocutor.38
The second step in this defining practice of Clamence’s is a more direct
description of his interlocutor. And identifying himself in this game as a
sort of detective, Clamence might allow us to call his definition of the
other a ‘profile’. A profile, in this sense, is not that individualized, but
rather hints at a type:
Now, allow me to play the detective. You are my age in a way,

with the sophisticated eye of the man in his forties who has seen
everything, in a way; you are well dressed in a way, that is as people
are in our country; and your hands are smooth. Hence a bourgeois,
in a way! But a cultured bourgeois! (8f.)39
‘As people are’ – ‘Comme on l’est chez nous’ – the interlocutor is now
within the same cultural and social community as the speaker, and all
the while the speaker continues to flatter his interlocutor: ‘raffiné’. The
profile seems to indicate an ordinary man, a man of normality (‘Comme
on l’est’), but with at least an edge of the extraordinary added to him.
And a couple of pages later, the profile is confirmed: ‘You are like eve-
rybody else’ (13) (‘Vous êtes comme tous le monde’, 702). And through
this identification of the interlocutor as the man of ‘normality’, and as

someone like himself, Clamence can speak for both of them: ‘Ah, this
dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of
what we are capable’ (45).40 And it does not even stop there: ‘Isn’t it
good likewise to live like the rest of the world, and for that doesn’t the
rest of the world have to be like me?’ (136).41 Society, it seems, is
the same as Clamence: he is, in his cynicism and his hatred, speak-
ing out about what society is, how it functions; he is the discourse
of social power. We are not surprised to find that Clamence has no
friends, only accomplices: the world is nothing but a criminal act. And
the final recognition of that identification of the reader as like himself,
and therefore as one more of his accomplices, is the mirror effect that
the novel ends with, when the speaker finds out that his interlocu-
tor is a lawyer, precisely like himself: ‘In Paris you practise the noble
profession of lawyer! I sensed that we were of the same species. Are
we not all alike, constantly talking and to no one, forever up against
the same questions although we know the answers in advance?’
(147).42 Does this imply then that the reader also is a lawyer? Yes, it
does: Clamence is actually giving a defence speech (‘I’m on the point
of making a speech to the court’, 115)43 and the nightmare of the
post-war situation is that everyone is accused, everyone has to make a
defence speech on his or her own behalf: ‘When we are all guilty, that
will be democracy’ (136).44
Confession is an accusation directed at the self – and no one illus-
trates this better than Clamence: he knows it. And he knows that this
means that the one accusing himself is also the legitimate prosecutor of
others. Clamence discloses his rhetorical strategy:
No, I navigate skillfully, multiplying distinctions and digressions, too –

in short I adapt my words to my listener and lead him to go me one
better. I mingle what concerns me and what concerns others. I choose
the features we have in common, the experiences we have endured
together, the failings we share – good form, in other words, the man
of the hour, in fact, as he is rife in me and in others. With all that
I construct a portrait which is the image of all and of no one. (139)45
One way to understand Clamence’s theory of discourse, then, is to see

how it provokes silence to speak up: by including the other’s silence in
his own speech, Clamence makes the silence of the other into a sign.
Silence in La Chute is not silent at all; Clamence forces silence into
a sign, representing normality and its politics of passivity: he makes
silence speak. And this silence is not innocent; it may not be conscious
of it but it makes a stand, an ideological statement that allowed the
Holocaust to happen.46 By appropriating this silence, Clamence discloses
this politics inside silence.47 And in speaking, Clamence also discloses ‘the
linguistic system of an ideology’: the mixture of accusation and confes-
sion, of cynicism and sentimentality, of the violent appropriation of the
other’s word, that forms the ‘ideosphere’ that La Chute investigates.48
No, the reader cannot remain silent. But in order to break the
overwhelming silence, in order to speak, the reader must transgress his
or her imprisonment in Clamence’s speech.
The Monologic Machine: Beckett’s Embers
‘On.’
Why is Henry in Samuel Beckett’s ‘play for radio’ Embers (1959),
talking? The first word he utters is ‘On.’49 Could we read that as meaning
or implying that someone is turning him ‘on’, as if he is a radio or
a gramophone or a tape recorder? Is Henry plugged into a ‘random
generator’ of speech, as Friedrich Kittler names the discourse producer
that was the effect of the combination of psychophysics and new media
‘circa 1900’?50 And he is actually ‘on’, as if stored inside this discourse
generator: this is a radio play, the moment we hear him we are actu-
ally listening to a radio, an apparatus that not only transmits but also
produces sound. And how could he not speak when on the radio, when
we already have pushed the button marked ‘On’? Silent on radio?
Silent radio? He is on the radio, and only there. Therefore this speech
ends with his last words being: ‘Not a sound’, it being time to turn
the radio off – and since the last word of the play is a stage direction
stating ‘Sea’, the last thing we hear is probably just noise, the noise of
the radio medium, blending with the murmur of language.51 In a way,
Beckett parodies discourses of radio broadcasting – in another way, he
utilizes or exploits radio, by letting Henry’s words pass through the
radio, the ever-grinding transmitting machine.52 And the importance of
the technological medium of the radio should not be underestimated,
even though it is installed inside a written and printed text, that is, in
another technological medium called literature – and Embers is fully
realized only as heard on the radio.53 And it might also be that Henry is
actually talking not to real or imagined interlocutors, nor to the listener
(or reader) of the play – but to the radio, or to the technicians produc-
ing his voice, or, as Jonathan Kalb puts it: ‘Henry, the man, is wrestling
with his imagination – a spectacle we witness in the form of sound-effect
commands barked out as if to obedient radio technicians: “Hooves!

[Sound of hooves walking on hard road. They die rapidly away. Pause.]
Again! [Hooves as before.]”.’54
Machines like radio microphones, tape recorders and telephones not
only give us an offer: please, say something. They also coerce us into
speaking. They form parts of larger networks devoted to the production,
distribution and circulation of speech and other sounds. And they coerce
us into being silent – or to reduce the volume.55 And they also might be
seen as performing precisely the type of dividing practices mentioned
above: they disembody speech, they make what was once a sure sign of
either religious obsession or madness, by making voices sound where
there is no body, with the exception of different types of resonance boxes,
into an everyday experience of normality. This ‘remote technology’, as
Derrida emphasizes, is not ‘an external element of the context; it affects
the inside of meaning in the most elementary sense, even so far as the
statement or inscription of practically the shortest word …’.56 Embers is
repeatedly punctuated by the simple stage instruction ‘Pause’: the word
is stated more than two hundred times in this rather short piece.57 Two
hundred times Henry is forced to keep silent, two hundred times some-
one turns him off: two hundred times someone – a writer, an actor, a
director, a reader, a listener – pushes the knob on Henry that says ‘Pause’.
And apparently, that someone also as many times turns him back ‘on’.58
Henry is, then, a talking machine: a talking head commenting upon
it/himself. And this status of the only speaker in the play points to the
ambiguity of the play, which Beckett himself points to: ‘le personnage
a-t-il une hallucination ou est-il en présence de la réalité?’59
The simple answer is that he is both: a voice in the radio, but also,
and at the same time, a person walking by the sea, talking to himself – a
hallucination is also real. But he isn’t only talking to himself; next to
him walks his father. Embers actually starts with Henry calling his inter-
locutor, his father, ‘back from the dead’ so that he can walk beside him.
The father doesn’t say anything, he is already dead, drowned in this sea –
but he is there for Henry to address: ‘No, he doesn’t answer me (Pause.)
Just be with me’ (93). Contrary to the literary strategy of calling the dead
back to life, Henry seems intent on keeping his father among the dead so
that he can’t object to what Henry says, or how Henry defines his father
when addressing him. The father’s hallucinated or imagined presence
answers to the more general need that Henry talks about:
Stories, stories, years and years of stories, till the need came on me,
for someone, to be with me, anyone, a stranger, to talk to, imagine
he hears me, years of that, and then, now, for someone who … knew
me, in the old days, anyone, to be with me, imagine he hears me,
what I am, now. (95)
It is only in the presence of the other that the self exists, only by being
acknowledged by another can Henry state what he is ‘now’. And when
that specific other is dead, Henry has no choice but to imagine father,
hallucinate presence, so that he himself can talk, that is, confess him-
self. When the daughter, Addie, once asked her mother why ‘Daddy
keep[s] on talking all the time’, even when in the lavatory, Henry
remembers that he told his wife to tell the child ‘I was praying (Pause)
Roaring prayers at God and his saints’ (100). If no one else is present,
one could always direct one’s conversation to God, ever-present in his
absence.
From one perspective Henry is as real as anything: he is talking. And
as he says to himself, ‘But I’d be talking now no matter where I was, I
once went to Switzerland to get away from the cursed thing and never
stopped all the time I was there. (Pause.) (94). And perhaps never since:
endless talk – ‘everything always went on for ever’. A machine for talk:
turn on the tape recorder, wherever you are, and you can hear him talk-
ing at any time – until you push the knob marked Pause. (Pause.) And
then you notice that the voice you have been listening so intensely to is
a written voice; you can’t hear him any other way (if you don’t have a
radio at hand, or a tape recorder, or …) than as transmitted inside your
head, like Henry sees his father only inside his head. So why is this writ-
ten figure always talking? Why does the writing of him go on and on,
passing through more than two hundred pauses?
I usen’t to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one
about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished
any of them, I never finish anything, everything always went on for
ever. (Pause.) (94)
So there we have him: a writing machine, a never-ending production

of stories, a – writer. And like all writers he is talking to himself, unable
to break out of himself, his own story. And at the point where he states
that he never finishes anything, he of course starts (re-)telling the
confused story of Bolton and Holloway. But it ends, ‘sound of dying,
dying glow’, the embers are dying: ‘Listen to it!’ Why not rather look
at it? Because it is a ‘white world’, and if everything is white, what
could you look at?60 That is what we are listening to: the absence of
sound. So there he is, in this white world, where perhaps the sound
is just a white noise, since what we hear through the radio is the
sound of the sea, but according to Henry, it is ‘so strange, so unlike
the sound of the sea, that if you didn’t see what it was you wouldn’t
know what it was. (Pause).’ See the sea? But it is on the radio. Or in
a book. And we release the ‘pause’ knob again, making the machine
repeat and resume its talking:
Father! (Pause. Agitated) Stories, stories, years and years of stories,

till the need came on me, for someone, to be with me, anyone, a
stranger, to talk to, imagine he hears me, years of that, and then,
now, for someone who … knew me, in the old days, anyone, to be
with me, imagine he hears me, what I am, now. (Pause.) (95)
So what is he now, then? Something imagined by someone else? Is

turning him ‘on’ a way of producing hallucinations? Is Henry hal-
lucinating, or are we, the listeners to and readers of Embers? Radio is
a machine that produces auditory hallucinations, and Embers, and
the other radio plays, as Ruby Cohn has suggested, ‘refer vividly to the
visual’, and Embers might even be Beckett’s ‘first step into a candidly
unreal landscape’.61 And turning someone ‘on’ is of course also to trans-
port, with some kind of drug as the vehicle, that person to a landscape
of hallucinations.
Media produces hallucinations, but also forces upon us the desire
to be seen and heard by others that constitute us as talking machines.
But being seen by the same and only by the same gets boring: ‘Father!
(Pause.) Tired of talking to you. (Pause)’ (96). So Henry then calls for
Ada, and, answering his call, as if commanded forth by him, this Ada
wonders, ‘Why do you stop, don’t mind me. (Pause.)’ (97). But he has
stopped, someone must have pushed the ‘pause’ knob again; Henry
has stopped telling his story about Bolton and Holloway and instead
engages in a dialogue with Ada, even though he has just said (to him-
self?) that ‘conversation with her, that was something, that’s what hell
will be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days
when we wished we were dead. (Pause.) Price of margarine fifty years
ago. (Pause.)’ (96). Beckett pushes Bakhtin’s notion of the monologue
as double-voiced further, giving both voices their own space, breaking
up monologue in two voices, at the same time that it actually remains
a monologue.
Is this dialogue with Ada real? It is as real as both a hallucination and

a repetition is real: they have been talking to each other for 50 years,
and part of their dialogue now is, according to the stage directions,
taking place ‘twenty years earlier’ (100). Henry calls on Ada, makes her
present, but that also means that he will be repeating something. And
before Henry does it, someone else was performing this dialogue: in
Strindberg’s trilogy of plays To Damascus (1898–1904), or his The Dance
of Death (1900), hell is simply being alive, forced to engage in a daily
small talking, perhaps discussing the price of margarine.62 Dialogue is
repetition, endless repetition. And so is monologue: release the ‘pause’
knob, and it will resume again. And is it for real, this time? Throughout
Embers we hear the sound of horses running on the shore: ‘Hooves!’ Or
do we? We read them, and on a radio broadcast we probably hear two
woodblocks being rhythmically hit against each other. It is a sound that
makes Henry come alive again, but it is also a sound that Henry is hal-
lucinating: there are no horses, they are just a sound effect, called forth
by Henry from his interior. The sound of hooves releases and sends a
signal through him, and here Embers becomes truly hallucinated: Ada
is speaking. Addie is speaking. Addie is playing the piano, reminiscent
of us playing with the ‘on’ and ‘pause’ knobs. And there is a ‘MUSIC
MASTER’, speaking ‘violently’, forcing Addie to play. Again. To keep on
playing – but correctly. All the time: ‘Hooves walking.’ And with them
comes a ‘RIDING MASTER’. Two masters, mastering Addie, who starts
wailing. There should be a ‘RADIO MASTER’ in this play, but there isn’t.
Or is there? There is – not in the form a person controlling the radio, but
in the form of the radio as such: the medium is the master.
In this nostalgic story, the remembrance of things past generates
the presence of the Riding Master, who taught Addie to ride, and the
Music Master, who taught her to play the piano. But the function of
these Masters is not only that of illustrating nostalgia and memory;
they are there not only to teach but to use force: they exercise violence.
It starts with the Music Master, with an Italian accent, ordering ‘Santa
Cecilia’, and beating two bars of waltz time, and beating time with a
ruler while Addie is playing. She makes a mistake, stops playing, and the
Music Master is immediately there, ‘violently’ saying ‘Fa!’, and increas-
ingly violent saying ‘Eff! Eff!’, and ‘frenziedly’ saying ‘Eff! Eff!’, and
hammering the notes. The scene is a torture scene, with Addie starting
to ‘wail’, and with that wail ‘amplified to paroxysm, then suddenly cut off ’.
Here, the technical medium of the radio is hinted at: amplification and
cutting are both parts of radio production. The same technical proce-
dure is repeated through the Riding Master’s violence, when teaching
Addie how to sit on the horse. She ‘begins to wail’, the wail is ‘amplified
to paroxysm, then suddenly cut off ’ – according to the stage instructions
(98f.). The scene is filled with repetitions: the Music Master repeats him-
self, Addie makes the same mistakes, the Riding Master repeatedly says
‘Now Miss! Now Miss!’ The Master yells ‘violently’ several times, Addie
answers ‘tearfully’ every time – and the repeated transformation of the
wail into a paroxysm, as if it takes control of the whole body. The Music
Master is an extremely violent figure, beating with his ruler, and reduc-
ing his speech into singular phonemes, that seem to be cutting right
through the conversation, and right through memory: the scars on the
body are still vivid reminders, whether it is Henry remembering, or
Addie experiencing. By cutting up the monologue into different voices,
and amplifying them, Beckett makes violence present in his play, and
the scene allegorizes the conditions for all human speech: it must be
learnt, and it must be continually produced. It must be forced: you can
have neither a subject nor a radio without someone talking.63
In remembering/repeating/hallucinating the scene with Addie play-
ing the piano, and corrected by the Music Master, Henry hears how
the Master ‘hammers note’ while yelling ‘Eff!’, and the word ‘hammer’
shows up not only in the musical torture, but also in Henry’s and Ada’s
reminiscing of their life together: ‘Years we kept hammering away at it’
(101). Also ‘it’, that is, trying to become pregnant, is a repeated practice:
they had to sexually hammer each other in order to have a daughter,
and in this way a dimension of torture enters their life together.64
The mastering of Addie transforms into a mastering of Henry. Ada
tells Henry ‘don’t’: ‘Don’t stand there thinking about it.’ ‘Don’t stand
there staring.’ ‘Don’t wet your good boots.’ When Henry repeats or
mimics the repeated ‘Don’t’ that Ada hurls at him, by saying ‘Don’t,
don’t …’, Ada sharpens her voice: ‘Don’t! Don’t!’ Henry tries to senti-
mentalize the dialogue, adding a ‘Darling!’ to Ada: Ada, Addie, adding.
Addition – like ‘Daddy’ and ‘Addie’ echo each other. And then, tech-
nology: ‘Cry and sea amplified, cut off. End of evocation. Pause’ (100). So
Ada tells Henry not to sit there ‘gaping’, asking if he’s ‘afraid we might
touch? (Pause)’. And when Henry obliges, Ada, now having almost
succeeded in stopping Henry from speaking – his speech is reduced to
one word at a time; ‘Darling!’, ‘Yes’, without anyone pulling the ‘pause’
knob – finally comes to the core of it: ‘You should see a doctor about
your talking, it’s worse, what must it be like for Addie?’ (100). But there
is no doctor present, and the only one that really could do anything
about that talking is not doing anything; this listener is not turning off
the radio.
Without anyone putting a stop to it, dialogue, as the negotiation

of the self with itself, must linger on. And having heard Ada say twice
that ‘there must be something wrong with your brain’ (100), Henry goes
wild: ‘Thuds! I want thuds! Like this’, and he picks up a couple of stones
from the shore, the stage instructions tell us, and he dashes them against
each other: ‘Stone! (Clash.) Stone! (Clash. “Stone!” and clash amplified, cut
off. Pause. He throws one stone away. Sound of its fall.) That’s life! (He throws
the other stone away. Sound of its fall.) Not this … (Pause.) … sucking!’
(100f.). Once again, action is dictated by the medium in the form of
amplification and cutting (or editing). The technological practices have
now definitely entered Henry, taken control over him, and Henry’s
speech is now reduced to one word: stone. Matter. Does it matter?
Henry, his speech reduced, now seems to have become an existential
philosopher, illustrating the thesis of the Ausgeworfenheit of man, and
nonchalantly accepting the conditions he is living under: ‘that’s life’.
Henry then resumes his talking. And he talks Ada talking; they talk,
indulging in memories. And they even remember having added a new
member to their family, Addie. And to do that, they had to repeat, adding
year to year, beat to beat: ‘Years we kept hammering away at it.’ Here, at
this point, Henry sighs. And he suddenly changes the direction of the con-
versation, he now seems to comment upon the sea, the sound of the sea:
‘Listen to it! (Pause.) It’s not so bad when you get out on it. (Pause.)’ And
Ada answers: ‘It’s only on the surface, you know. Underneath all is as quiet
as the grave. Not a sound. All day, all night, not a sound. (Pause.)’ (101).
Finally, in our listening (to ourselves reading … hallucinating) we have
now reached the point where Henry is about to reveal the truth about
himself. After a Pause, one more of the more than two hundred instances
of ‘Pause’ in the play, he says: ‘Now I walk about with the gramophone.’
Wasn’t that what we now have suspected almost from the beginning:
Henry is the name of a machine (re)producing sounds. Turn the ‘pause’
knob and he will be silenced. It’s a relief to know this by now. But then,
with his next line, Henry negates this solution, saying that he ‘forgot
it today’. And as Ada says, there is really no sense in a walking gramo-
phone. It may sound strange talking about a mobile gramophone in a
play from the 1950s, but travel gramophones – they were mechanical,
and not electrical – were actually introduced much earlier, and seem to
have become popular already in the 1920s, as well as mobile radios. In
the 1950s, new types of mobile or travel gramophones were introduced,
and rapidly grew in popularity.65 But if Henry has forgotten his gramo-
phone, his repetitive talking might be not the effect of sound technology
but of writing technology: literature is a repetitive machine. And maybe
Henry is saying that he forgot about the gramophone, meaning that it is

still ‘on’, and the needle is moving in the same track, never moving for-
ward on the record. Or is he saying that we, human beings, are machines
for the reproduction of sounds, as when we learn how to talk? Speech
has been engraved within us, and it only takes another person to func-
tion as a needle and that speech will start sounding, producing ourselves
as hallucinations: the self as an effect of language, always divided into a
talking self, and another, talked about.
And returning to the question of his father, Henry says that his father
has stopped answering his questions. Ada – ah, beautiful cynic! – only
says, ‘I suppose you have worn him out.’ First the live father, then the
dead father: worn out. But do you wear people out, or isn’t it rather
gramophone records that become worn out? But this record, produced
by Ada, is still being played, no matter how worn out it has become:
The time comes when one cannot speak to you any more. (Pause.) The
time will come when no one will speak to you at all, not even com-
plete strangers, (Pause.) You will be quite alone with your voice, there
will be no other voice in the world but yours. (Pause.) Do you hear
me? (102)
As if to keep that moment ahead of them, at a distance, they resume

conversation – but that time of a lonely voice has already come, if we
look at the voices of Ada and Addie, the Music Master and the Riding
Master, respectively, as imagined or hallucinated. Listening to Ada’s
voice, we are actually hearing Henry’s version of her. But Henry is not
there to listen to others, he is there to have others listen to him: his
father, Ada, Addie. And when Ada says that she should get back, Henry
senses the risk that no one will listen to him any longer, saying: ‘Not
yet! You needn’t speak. Just listen. Not even. Be with me. (Pause.) Ada!
(Pause. Louder.) Ada! (Pause.) Christ! (Pause.) Hooves! (Pause. Louder.)
Hooves! (Pause.) Christ! (Long pause.)’ (103).
‘Hooves!’ is the keyword. As soon as Henry now utters the word, he
resumes his monologue, the words clattering like galloping hooves.
So he once again returns to repeating his old story about Bolton and
Holloway. And who cares to listen to that? And the end of the story is
not about Bolton and Holloway, it is about Henry, who, having finished
his backward-looking story, instead looks forward to the eternal same:
This evening … (Pause.) Nothing this evening. (Pause.) Tomorrow …

tomorrow … plumber at nine, then nothing. (Pause. Puzzled.) Plumber
at nine? (Pause.) Ah yes, the waste. (Pause.) Words. (Pause.) Saturday …

nothing. Sunday … Sunday … nothing all day. (Pause.) Nothing, all
day nothing. (Pause.) All day all night nothing. (Pause.) Not a sound.
(121)
There, we got it. We, or Henry, at least, keep on talking just to keep
alive. It is a question of survival as in the One Thousand and One Nights.
Henry is a Scheherazade: he just keeps on talking, repeating himself,
pausing himself, and then again repeating himself, so that he can face
and even fill the nothingness that lies ahead of him and that threatens
him with silence and death. The self is possible only as a linguistic sign,
as spoken, as defined in speech. The nothingness is a white world, there
is not a sound to be heard in it, no difference – but this text is inscrib-
ing itself in that whiteness, a black difference, a needle in the linguis-
tic track. Or one has to talk, speak, murmur in order for there to be a
sound. The plumber is coming: it is trivial, it is the noise of life that just
continues; it is life as hell. Words are ‘waste’ – and that talk, this speech,
is nothing but the murmur of everyone’s speech, added to the already
spoken: Addie is an addition to the circulation of speech, she will keep it
working. The voice is a gramophone, turned on and paused, constantly
paused. Its sounds are transmitted via the radio – that is turned off.
Then there is not a sound, but only the blindness of ‘sea’: we cannot
see the sea on radio. Or, like Embers ends, we return to the noise that is
constantly there, the constant streaming of language, the white noise of
talk, the murmur of discourse, the enormous waste of words, the point
where Embers also started:
Sea.
5
Interrogation, or Forced to Silence:
Rankin, Harris, Pinter, Duras
‘Noirs jumeaux’, Michel Foucault calls them in Histoire de la sexualité:

confession and torture are ‘dark twins’. Since the Middle Ages, Foucault
writes, torture has accompanied confession as a ‘shadow’, pushing it
out of and further from its hiding places in the soul or in the body.1
However, torture generates not only confession, but also, and paradoxi-
cally, its opposite, silence, the refusal to confess – and to speak. Or, as
Elaine Scarry writes: ‘Physical pain does not simply resist language but
actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate recession to a state
anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes
before language is learned.’2
Torture is a way of producing a speaking subject, but it always does
that through desubjectification: by ‘unmaking’ the subject. Torture
is furthermore applied in cases where the one tortured perhaps has
nothing to confess, a situation that turns interrogation into a theatri-
cal performance. Torture deforms confession, but more than that, it
deforms language when performing its violence on the speaking body,
making language itself violent and, frequently, only violent. If Scarry
suggests that torture transports its victim to a pre-linguistic state, I
would rather suggest that, at least in literature, torture does not produce
memories of earlier stages of evolution, but transports its victim outside
him- or herself, transforming the human being into a sounding animal.
The most obvious mediator between confession and torture is that
of interrogation. This, perhaps perversely dialogic, practice connects
the opening up of the innermost parts of the soul, with the violence
directed at the body, the container of that soul. In this mediation,
interrogation also forms into a negotiation of silence and speech,
relating them to each other, but also producing them, forcing them
125
together and sometimes even forcing a likeness upon them – that of

non-significance, non-meaning.
Torture is the consequence and effect of power – but, being a horrify-
ing, amoral practice, it sometimes also turns on the torturer, or runs
out of control, takes on a life of its own, exceeding the instrumental
intentions of the torturer, that of trying to gain information. In Joseph
Conrad’s Nostromo, Colonel Sotillo has imprisoned Señor Hirsch, and
he wants to know where the hidden silver is: ‘Speak, thou Jewish child
of the devil!’3 Humiliation, as well as definition, of the prisoner, is a
structural feature of the situation where torture is applied. Hirsch has
his arms tied behind his back, he is ‘bundled violently’, he is kicked and
beaten, he becomes passive, ‘sunk in hebetude’. But then Sotillo is alone
with his victim: ‘[s]everal times he had entered the torture-chamber
where his sword, horsewhip, revolver and field-glass were lying on the
table’. He tells Hirsch that he is waiting for him to speak out. But Hirsch
does not, he refuses to speak: he screams, and his scream fills the whole
neighbourhood. That is the first product of torture here: a scream, with-
out linguistic significance, but even so, intensely truthful, and the only
truth that the situation here generates. The second effect of torture here
is that Sotillo himself cannot stand the psychological war that torture
generates: he spits in his prisoner’s face, he whips him, and suddenly
takes up his revolver and kills Hirsch. And it comes over Sotillo: ‘What
had he done, Sangre de Dios!’ Torture exploits the arbitrary character of
a power relation that is absolutely one-sided, the absolute power over
another’s body, but that arbitrariness also generates a loss of rule and
control. Overwhelmed by his own power, Sotillo makes truth impossi-
ble: ‘Behold a man who will never speak again’, a voice is heard saying.4
Sotillo’s actions cannot be fully understood solely as the actions of
an amoral lunatic: it is the situation itself that makes possible the chain
of action. Torture, whether performed secretly and illegally, supported
by authoritarian tyrannies, or with ‘democratic’ government approval
at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, is a miniature, or condensed, version
of a state of emergency, where law and legality no longer rule; and as a
result, moral laws have lost their relevance.
Forcing Speech, Forcing Silence: Ian Rankin’s

Black and Blue
Two situations in which interrogation, and therefore also anacrisis, is

practised exemplify this state of emergency as an everyday happening –
but, mirroring each other, they are also the other side of each other:
Interrogation: Rankin, Harris, Pinter, Duras 127
parodying, but also pointing to a frightening implication of anacrisis,

the randomly applied violence. The two situations, which are ‘plot
situations’ in the Bakhtinian sense, that is, they demand speech of
those present (see Introduction, above, and the section ‘Anacrisis’),
are to be found in the first chapters of Ian Rankin’s police procedural
(‘An Inspector Rebus Novel’) Black and Blue (1997), a novel that slowly
twines together the different lines of action that the two scenes suggest.5
The first of these situations we enter in medias res: ‘Tell me again why
you killed them.’ This request needs no explanation; the well-trained
reader of police procedurals immediately understands that we are
present at a police interrogation. A man named Shand has confessed to
several murders, and his explanation is ‘this urge’ to kill that he expe-
rienced. But the interrogating officer immediately corrects him: ‘The
word you used was “compulsion”.’ And this small difference is the start-
ing point for this application of anacrisis and the testing of the alleged
murderer: is he telling the truth?
The interrogation is now represented as a straightforward dialogue:
question-and-answer. But at one point it is stopped by a ‘three-
beat pause’, with no commentary added about the implications of
the pause – but one implication is that of an aposiopesis, the rhetorical
figure, as exemplified by three punctuation marks (…), that signals
that what should be said is something that is really unspeakable, too
large or too bewildering to be put into words. Here, the aposiopesis also
signals that there is something unspoken that governs and regulates
the situation. And in the middle of the interrogation, Inspector Rebus
turns to another police officer in the room, silently leaning against the
wall: ‘Rebus walked towards the wall and stared at him. Maclay nodded
briefly. Rebus turned back to the table’ (4). No further commentary.
Slowly the situation comes to include an unspoken but growing
threat. Silently, the policemen are saying that they don’t believe the
suspect’s confession: ‘Pause: two beats’; ‘Four beats’. And finally a mild
form of violence erupts in the room: ‘Rebus reached out a hand until
it touched the man’s forehead, faith-healer style. Then he pushed, not
very hard. But there was no resistance. Shand and the chair toppled
backwards on to the floor’ (5). And this is the end of the interrogation:
the policemen agree with each other that the suspect is telling only
lies; the interrogation has made clear that he has only a general knowl-
edge of the murders, of the kind that any newspaper reader could have.
Forming a part of the state apparatus, and having a certain right to
exercise violence delegated to it, the police organization has to observe
a balance between its sovereign authority and its function within a
disciplinary system. In everyday routines, such as interrogation of

suspects and witnesses, the police negotiate sovereign and disciplinary
power: interrogation is a situation in which the use of physical vio-
lence is not approved; at the same time, an obvious power relation is
enacted. As a consequence, the border separating interrogation from
violence and torture risks becoming blurred – and in crime novels, the
transgression of this border has become routine. But if the confronta-
tion in Gombrowicz of two opposite power systems – sovereign and
disciplinary power – becomes absurd, in the crime novel it becomes
necessarily deadly.
The second example from Rankin of how sovereign power is exercised
through the practice of anacrisis starts with a backward glance, explain-
ing the identity of the main character: Allan Mitchison, on leave from
work on an oil platform in the North Sea. In a bar, Mitchison meets
two other men and they start talking and drinking together. Jokes are
traded, glasses filled again and again. Finally, the two unknown men
buy a lot of booze at the bar, in order for the three of them to continue
the party at their place. A very drunk Mitchison is invited, and escorted
into a cab, and all three of them end up in a broken-down building,
apparently deserted and vandalized. And Mitchison? ‘He was sobering
up fast, but not fast enough’ (15).
In a grotesque reflection of our first scene, the two men place
Mitchison in a chair, as if to start interrogating him. But instead they
tie him to the chair and fasten tape over his mouth; it will be totally
impossible for Mitchison to say a single word, even less to cry for help
(sobering up, but not fast enough). During the whole episode, no words
are uttered. The two men practise a well-known medical, psychiatric
and psychoanalytic strategy, in which the ‘doctor’ keeps totally silent
in order to provoke the ‘patient’ by making him uncertain, insecure,
forcing him to start talking himself – but here, in Rankin’s story, this
nervous, confessional speech is made impossible and unnecessary. One
of the men silently picks out what he has in his Adidas bag: ‘Pliers,
claw-hammer, staple gun, electric screwdriver, and a saw.’ The sense of a
deadly threat is overwhelming: ‘He knew what was happening, but still
didn’t believe. The two men weren’t saying anything. They were laying
a sheet of heavy-duty polythene out on the floor. Then they carried him
and the chair on to the sheet’ (15).
Still no words uttered – the only thing that happens is that Mitchison
escapes the situation by getting up on his feet, and, still tied to the
chair, throwing himself out of the window, only to be killed when land-
ing on the ground. And the two killers-to-be just gather together their
tools: still no word is uttered. Silence. But the scene verifies the accuracy
of Elias Canetti’s remark that the ‘final purpose of questioning is to dis-
sect’,6 also with the help of sharp instruments.
The second scene is the demonic opposite of the first: its double, but
in a twisted, dark way. The settings are very much the same: two men
against a third; an empty room; a chair. On the surface, the first inter-
rogation aims at making the third man speak, the other at keeping him
silent. They might seem like opposites – but the violence of the second
scene is already included in the first, when Rebus in slow motion makes
his suspect fall over backwards. And the silence of the second has its
representative in Rebus’s colleague Maclay, who silently watches the
proceeding. Rebus has no tools at his disposal – except perhaps for one.
A couple of times, Rankin’s story focuses on the cigarette and the ash
Rebus flicks from it, the stub he throws at Shand when the interrogation
has come to an end.
And are the two scenes not identical also in their most essential
aspect? The first aims at making the suspect speak; the second is con-
ditioned by the need to keep the victim silent. But essentially, the first
scene also aims at keeping the suspect silent: his confession to the
murders is not to be taken seriously, and the man himself smells bad,
groans, sweats: he can not be allowed to speak. The interrogation aims
at silencing his false confession, in order to clear the way for a resumed
search for the true murderer.
But that is part of the nature of anacrisis: it encourages you to speak –
only to silence you. And the practising of anacrisis always opens up to
violence: within it lurks physical violence, ready to jump forward and
assist in making the subject step forward – or force it to return to its
dark dungeons.
In both scenes, the situation itself is decisive. These are not scenes
where subjects freely enter into dialogue with each other. Instead, these
scenes are ritualistic. Repetition seems to act in both. The police inter-
rogation starts with Rebus asking the suspect to speak up ‘again’, and
at one point he also repeats the suspect’s words. And the serial reader
of the Rankin ‘Rebus novels’ is of course quite familiar with the scene:
it is recurrent in Rankin’s representation of an aging, alcoholic police
officer. Repetition seems to be the basis also for the second scene: the
two presumptive torturers act in silence; apparently they both know
what they are supposed to do and need not engage in any conversation
about it. Also, the journey to the house where the scene takes place has
a ritualistic and allegorical touch to it; it is a descent into hell. Dialogue,
in the form of anacrisis, then, when having no life in itself, is pregnant
with violence as an effect of repetition. And repetition is, of course, also

a form of textual violence.
The detective novel, or, better, the police procedural novel, is one
genre of literature that rationalizes and systematizes specific aspects
of conversation, including such aspects as identification and guilt,
but also observation and objectivity. Conversation within this type
of novel is also a quotidian conversation among peers: policemen on
or off duty. But conversation is also featured in a more elaborate and
situated form here: conversation and dialogue turns into examination,
into interrogation. At its best, the crime novel of this type discloses the
violence which is present, but hidden, in everyday conversation as well
as in literary dialogue: dialogue has always the potential of turning into
a form of interrogation and surveillance. And it has always the potential
of harming the other, of symbolically ‘killing’ the other in an act of
desubjectifcation through the denial of the other’s integrity.
The situation is well known to every reader of crime fiction, or, for
that matter, any viewer of crime series on television or thrillers in the
cinema. We are inside the interrogation room; a suspect is asked or
ordered to have a seat. The atmosphere is often strained, on the verge
of transforming into physical violence. The interrogation is then con-
ducted by a police officer, or, as is often the case, by a pair of police
officers. The suspect is therefore already outnumbered from the start,
and the police officers exploit this power relation by putting on differ-
ent strategies of interrogation. One strategy is the familiar ‘good cop,
bad cop act’; another one we witnessed in Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue:
Inspector Rebus is active in the questioning of the suspect, while in
the background, leaning against a wall, stands his colleague silently
waiting, embodying a more or less explicit threat. These repeated
patterns, a situation that returns time after time, underscores the ritu-
alistic character of interrogation, of its game of speech and silence: it
is performed repeatedly, giving it a theatrical dimension, sometimes
underscored by the presence of an audience behind a one-way screen
used for observation of the interrogations.
Although a form of dialogue, interrogation is never based on recipro-
cal or equal premises. It is never, or at least almost never, performed
in passing – and, put inside a crime story, it always has some kind of
significance. It is generated from a certain basis of knowledge: the police
know something, and the questioning then takes on its forms accord-
ing to the relevance of that knowledge. Often the one questioned is a
suspect – and directing their questions at this suspect, the police officers
have already a basic knowledge about him: where he lives, his job, his
family, other significant circumstances of his life, and, most impor-

tantly of all, whether he has a criminal record. This prerequisite, based
on knowledge, is the same that was employed by psychiatry in the late
nineteenth century, as demonstrated by Foucault, and it forms the basis
of the choreography that interrogation takes on, with the suspect seated
opposite the active police officer, while in the background, a second
police officer waits his turn.7
The interrogation systematizes conversation. There is a script that the
police officer follows; sometimes the suspect also is aware of that script.
Interrogation is ‘business as usual’, a routine that police officers carry
out more or less every day at work. And the script defines the purpose of
the interrogation as the finding out of facts concerning not the person
being interrogated, but actions that this person may have committed
or not, or been a witness to. A conversation normally has two parties,
sharing an interest in the conversation, giving and taking. But in the
police variety of conversation, interrogation, the interests of the parties
may vary and even be opposing. One tries to hide what the other one
tries to disclose – or, in a darker version, one tries to pin down what the
other tries to resist.
Both the two presumptive torturers, as well as the interrogating police
officers, in Rankin’s novel, may be looked upon as rhetoricians – if we
remember Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as ‘the faculty of observing
in any given case the available means of persuasion’.8 The torturer and
the policemen both explore what the situation allows them to do, how
far they can go in order to achieve their goals: they are investigating and
trying out ‘the available means of persuasion’. But persuasion here has
exceeded its verbal identity and transformed into a theatrical physical
violence. It is not, of course, accidental: torture has historically always
been part of interrogation. In Aristotle’s time, torture (which he saw as
‘non-technical’ or non-artistic) was also a precondition if the testimony
given by a slave should have any value. Such a testimony was consid-
ered worthless without the accompaniment of torture.9 In the crime
novel, torture, whether performed by the police or by the criminals, has
become a routinely performed practice, randomly directed at anyone.
Thus these novels also demonstrate how discourse is based on a con-
tinuous, and violent, questioning that forces answers.
Roland Barthes defines the answer as ‘a form of discourse that is com-
manded by the form “question”’, and he adds ‘terrorism’ to his descrip-
tion of the question. Barthes emphasizes how the question forces the
answer to take on a certain shape or form: hesitancy and indeterminacy;
not knowing, or uncertainty, are impossible responses before a question
that pretends to be precise. But Barthes also points out that the ques-
tion is a ‘highly cultural’ and in no way a natural ‘mode of discourse’,
and the form that is produced by questioning is always historical: ‘Every
question transforms me into a trapped rat: test, police, affective choices,
doctrinal choices, etc.’10 What we read in Rankin’s two interrogation
scenes is a form of questioning that has stopped being productive. It
seeks negativity: silence, death. And the pleasure that this kind of tor-
ture hints at is uncertain, and never realized: Rankin depicts power as at
the same time haphazard and empty. Interrogation, as a routine made
up by ritual violence, is an apparatus that runs on empty, fuelled only
by confirmation of its own absolute power.
Identification and Intertextuality: Harris’s

The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris’s bestselling thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1988), is a

story about reading: Dr Hannibal Lecter, a convicted serial killer, does
what his name says: he reads.11 And no reader misses the importance
of his reading practice: he reads people, and is then, as many readers
have also noticed, a psychoanalytical agent installed within the Gothic
novel.12 But as important is that he reads also in another sense: he is an
enthusiastic reader of literature. Listening to Glenn Gould performing
Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’, he reads Dumas. And the reading habit
of Lecter is shared by the novel itself: the killer that is being searched
after in the novel has been nicknamed ‘Buffalo Bill’ after e.e. cummings’
poem of that title, and which ends in the lines, quoted in the novel,
‘how do you like your blueeyed boy/Mister Death’. One could add
several examples like these, but fundamentally, the novel is itself con-
strued as a reading of Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The
Man without Qualities) (1933–43), which includes the story of the serial
killer Moosbrügger and a woman named Clarissa –who has given her
name to Harris’s heroine Clarice Starling. One could here speak of an
intertextual violence, performed by The Silence of the Lambs on The Man
without Qualities, and which takes on a character of appropriation and
fragmentation: Harris chooses one aspect, one line of action, in Musil’s
novel, and skilfully exploits it by elaborating on it, without any side
glances at the rather more complex setting of the story of serial killings
in Musil’s work. The crime novel here rationalizes, while at the same
time it adds a complex intertextual dimension to its own genre habits.13
But the theme of reading is not restricted to this kind of literary
allusion, ultimately proving not much more than that the author is
well read.14 What Harris, as a writer, does is the same as what Lecter, as
interlocutor, does: he redefines the other text, appropriates it, steals it –
intertextuality is then the violent reading, interpretation or even appro-
priation of another text. But the significance of reading as practice is
larger, or wider, than only literary: reading is in Harris’s novel a practice
with many aspects. The search of a victim’s apartment is a reading of a
place, the autopsy of a dead body is a reading of that bodily text, and
police work consists to a large degree in reading reports and summaries
of reports, while Lecter keeps himself informed by reading psychiatric
and psychological magazines. But the decisive importance of reading
practices is that you must let your self up to be read in order to gain
legitimacy, that is, in order to be recognized as a subject – which is the
story of Clarice Starling.
She is the young novice, still in training to become an FBI agent. And
her mentor Jack Crawford picks her for a special assignment: she shall
interview Dr Lecter and get him to fill out a questionnaire on serial
killers. Lecter has refused any such efforts by the authorities; he has
remained silent on this crucial point, never giving in to any efforts at
making him speak. By sending in this young woman, Crawford hopes
that the sight of her might loosen Lecter’s steadfastness. But to Lecter,
the young woman is most of all a text to read, in the way a psychiatrist
‘reads’ his patient, and to rewrite, the way a writer rewrites an intertext.
The conversations between the imprisoned psychiatrist and the
police agent have two sides: one is Clarice’s efforts to make Lecter
tell what he knows about a serial killer outside the prison, the other
is Lecter’s reading of her. That reading includes elements of free play:
Lecter plays with and teases his interrogator, gives her riddles to solve,
hints at solutions to the crimes being committed. But he sees these con-
versations also as a sort of economy, where you have to pay for infor-
mation. And the payment is that you must tell about yourself, in order
to get something in exchange. Another way of looking at it is that the
art of anacrisis is being practised, but the skills at doing it are unequally
distributed among the practitioners: Lecter easily disarms Clarice, and
turns the weapons of anacrisis on her. Clarice accepts Lecter’s demands,
thinking that she will receive a reward – but waiting for that reward, she
ultimately finds herself being redefined and really construed by Lecter’s
way of performing conversation. The interrogating agent turns into an
interrogated object.15
The first meeting between the two starts with Lecter correcting Clarice
on how their conversation should proceed: ‘No. No, that’s stupid
and wrong. Never use wit in a segue. Listen, understanding a witticism
and replying to it makes your subject perform a fast, detached scan

that is inimical to mood’ (17). Apparently there is a correct way of
conducting this kind of conversation, and Clarice acknowledges the
expertise of Dr Lecter on these matters. But the interrogation then
takes an unexpected turn with Lecter defining Clarice, and as always
with definition, the defining practice includes a certain verbal violence,
expressed as Lecter’s contempt for the simple country girl: ‘Is it the West
Virginia Starlings or the Okie Starlings, Officer?’ (20), suggesting that
she is nothing but white trash. However, when Clarice doesn’t give in
but resists him, she becomes more interesting to him, and their meet-
ing ends with him giving her a clue on an earlier crime. This correcting
of Clarice is continued by Lecter when meeting her again. Lecter has
received a message from a fellow prisoner, written in crayon on a piece
of paper: ‘I WAN TOO GO TO JESA / I WAN TOO GO WIV CRIEZ / I
CAN GO WIV JESA / EF I AC RELL NIZE’ (133). Lecter asks Clarice to
read these lines aloud, and she obliges. But her ‘translation’ of the note
into a correct English is not the right way to read the lines, according
to Lecter – he demands a more intense and fervent way of reading.
Pronouncing the words more like the prisoner has spelled them, Lecter
performs the message, ‘he was bouncing, clapping time, his voice ring-
ing like sonar’. What Lecter demonstrates is the power of the correct
pronunciation: his way of reading the message makes its original writer
in his turn raise his voice. It is not enough to have a correct understand-
ing; conversation becomes powerful if you know how to speak, and not
only what to say. Lecter makes language materialize by not only forming
words by airwaves, but also by performing the words, using the dialogic
situation as a sort of stage or theatre.
At stake here is identity: what and who is Clarice? A novice, with no
authority? A student? The novel repeatedly returns to the question of
Clarice’s authority, and how she has to prove it, which includes produc-
ing her ID. The novel could be looked upon as a kind of Bildungsroman,
in which the young woman will become an authoritative police
agent. In order for that to happen, she must show who she is, she must
confess her self: she must, with her name being that of a songbird, sing.
Her mentor Crawford opens their cooperation with defining her: her
merits, her status. Such things are factual, and also of a juridical nature.
But Lecter wants to know not what Clarice is, but who she is. Crawford
represents the superficial knowledge of the exterior, which is polar-
ized against Lecter’s penetrating knowledge of the interior. This will to
know is expressed in the trained psychiatrist’s questions to his patient:
‘What’s your worst memory from your childhood?’ (137). When Clarice
hesitates, Lecter presses her: the conversation is aimed at the truth about
Clarice, not towards what she may think about herself, nor her self-
image, or to what Clarice might choose to present as her true self. And
slowly Lecter forces Clarice to look deeper into her self and to report on
her childhood and youth. He is actively putting questions to her, until
he suddenly changes subject. But there is no doubt that he is in charge
of the situation: he is the superior reader, meaning also that he, as a
good psychotherapist, tells her to think through something for their
next meeting: ‘How do you manage your rage?’ (155). And, ultimately,
that he makes her not only talk about herself, but perform herself: she
acts, and linguistic self-identification materializes in her actions. These
conversations end with Clarice telling Lecter that yes, she confesses a
traumatic childhood memory to Lecter. Clarice is not a silent figure as
such, but confessing here means that she has adjusted her speech, that
Lecter has forced her, through his superior verbal art, to move from
distant questioning into a realm of intimate, personal confession.
Two opposite systems of identification are active here. The one
represented by Crawford relates to identity only in an instrumental
fashion – Starling’s status is shown by an ID card, by a letter of recom-
mendation, by the approval given by a mentor, or an institution like
the FBI, as a result of training and examination. Within this system,
identity is all about competence: identity allows certain sets of practices,
it gives access to certain kinds of information and places. The other
system of identification is represented by Dr Lecter’s way of perform-
ing therapy. Here, identity has at least one decisive point, where it is
based on incompetence: on a childhood trauma not yet overcome. The
psychiatric system of identification seeks the whole personality, and not
only a specific aspect of it, suitable to transform into competence. But
Lecter is of course the demonic night side of psychiatry, a manipula-
tor only using people for his own satisfaction. As a consequence, the
instrumental identification system of the FBI generates agency – while
the psychiatric system generates paralysed narcissism.
So the convicted serial killer, the psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter,
discloses the childhood trauma of the investigating officer. And his
patient, Clarice Starling, is really giving witness to the truth of Nicias’
commentary, commented upon above (see ‘Confessing Oneself’ in the
Introduction). Here we can return to Socrates and his art of conversa-
tion (and Lecter has been practising a sort of majeutic on Clarice),
remembering that the one who engages in conversation with Socrates
‘must necessarily, even if he began by conversing about something
quite different in the first place, keep on being led about by the man’s
arguments until he submits to answering questions about himself

concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived
hitherto’.16 Conversation, as practised by Lecter, is a platonic pharma-
kon: a cure, a drug, a poison.
But standing the test that anacrisis produces, Clarice is richly rewarded.
She is given clues that ultimately lead her to the killer. More important,
these clues ultimately result in her being authorized. Formally she has
to continue her studies at the FBI training school, but her efforts bring
her a congratulatory letter from her escaped serial killer cum psychia-
trist. And she gets a kiss on her forehead from her mentor and superior,
Crawford. And Crawford also says to Clarice: ‘Starling, your father sees
you.’ The father’s gaze of approval, as mediated both by the serial killer
and the investigating police officer, is what finally gives Clarice an iden-
tity. She steps into the line, she succeeds him: she gains recognition. But
it is in conversation, by speaking, that Clarice confronts her childhood
memories and comes to terms with them, thereby authorizing her self,
which at the same time means that Clarice lets herself up to the reading
practice of Lecter – and the reader of the novel.17
What Harris does in The Silence of the Lambs can be seen as an alle-
gorization of what the author does: Lecter is not only a reader, but
also a writer. He reads Clarice, but at the same time he also writes her:
he affects her, influences her, defines her, designs her – it is Lecter’s
anacritical practice that bestows form to her. And Harris has him do it
via literature – I have mentioned a few literary allusions here, but there
are plenty more to be found in the novel. And in Lecter’s Gestalt, the
writer takes form as a serial killer, robbing lives out of literary works, and
installing them as talking heads in his own works. Lecter is obviously
a monstrous character, but not only in the sense that he is a bestial
killer and a cannibal. He is a monster in the sense that he lacks form
in himself, and his way of conquering form, and thereby transgressing
his bestiality, is through other people: he lives through others, fore-
most of them Clarice Starling. As a cannibal, Lecter only performs, or
mirrors, what Harris’s text itself does: his eating of parts of his victims
parallels the excessive intertextuality through which Harris’s text is
constructed upon appropriated parts of other texts – reading as an act
of cannibalism.
Random Power: Pinter’s Mountain Language
In Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language (1988), power works at random.18

Its arbitrariness has absurdist consequences, but at the same time,
power remains absolute. The setting is a prison, with a line of women

waiting to come in to see their male relatives. Among the women,
a young woman seems to support an older one, while an Officer
and a sergeant enter the room. This, then, is a confrontation between
the personification of absolute power and those totally without power.
And as so often is the case, the first thing power, in order to ensure the
power hierarchy, wants and needs to know is the identity of those sub-
ordinated: three times the sergeant demands the young woman’s name,
without getting it.19
And immediately the line of action takes an unexpected turn: the
Officer steps in and orders the sergeant to ‘[s]top this shit’ (13), and
he turns to the woman and asks if she has any complaints about how
she has been treated. And that she has: waiting in line, the elderly
woman has had her hand bitten by a guard dog. Once again, the ser-
geant tries to find out the young woman’s name, but the Officer tells
him to ‘[s]hut up’ and instead takes a look at the hand. He now wants
to know how this could have happened, and learning about the dog, he
demands to know the name of the dog:
Every dog has a name! They answer to their name. They are given
a name by their parents and that is their name, that is their name!
Before they bite, they state their name. It’s a formal procedure. They
state their name and then they bite. What was his name? If you tell
me one of our dogs bit this woman without giving his name I will
have that dog shot! (17)
If the young woman would not tell her name, she of course could not
give the name of the dog. But the importance of the name, which most
of all is emphasized by the officer’s violent repetition of ‘their name’,
lies in its capacity for stabilizing identity and producing order. Through
equalizing animal and human, Pinter points to the absurd reliance on
the classificatory aspect of language that we practise, and that power
relations exploits. But she does complain about how the women waiting
have been treated, with the prison guards frightening the women with
Doberman Pinschers – and then, the sergeant once again interrupts,
first asking ‘With permission sir?’, and then saying: ‘Your husbands,
your sons, your fathers, these men you have been waiting to see, are
shithouses. They are enemies of the State. They are shithouses’ (21).
So far, Mountain Language seems to be a fairly simple allegory of
authoritarian power, its vulgarity and randomness. But it has already
taken a sharp turn: its narrative logic is weak, its causal logic even
weaker. Varun Begley’s view that Mountain Language is built on

‘alienating details and episodes … uncomfortably fused with what
seems to be a didactic realist critique of authoritarian power’ demands
elaboration.20 Nor is Martin Esslin’s21 privileging of a meaning that is
‘clear, unidimensional and never in the slightest doubt’ enough: sure,
everyone understands that torture and unjust domination are bad –
but do we really need Pinter to tell us that? One should perhaps, as
Jeanne Colleran suggests, rather describe the play in terms of ‘montage
or bricolage as the structuring principle’.22 But her characterization of
Mountain Language as ‘metonymic fragmentation’ might perhaps be
turned around: it is a metonymically grounded whole.
But the question of name, and of who has a name, also points to a
more fundamental problematic. This enclosed space, where names are
repeatedly asked for, may also comprise a larger, linguistic problem,
concerning names, naming, and how to gain knowledge of the names.
Once again, Pinter combines ‘small scale and large scope’.23 He does it
so that the question of names clearly turns into a question of power.24
The words uttered in Mountain Language become a synecdoche for lan-
guage as a whole, for the way language dominates and produces effects.
The play is a study on the functioning of power, and on the language
which distributes and produces that power, which translates it from
a structure of domination into concrete traces on both language and
human bodies: language materializes in its production of identity. And
what immediately comes through is the arbitrary nature of spoken vio-
lence, as soon as the power situation has been firmly established. Here
Pinter differs radically from most police novels: in those, interrogation
is regulated, even if the interrogating officers stretch the rules as far as
they can. But in Pinter, no such regulatory framework seems to be at
hand. The situation is rather that of the state of emergency: the presence
of the soldiers but also their way of addressing the prisoners, their treat-
ment of them, the cruel way in which they play with their victims, all
this suggests a situation where law no longer rules, and no regulations
keep the behaviour of the soldiers under any kind of control.
At the point in the play where the sergeant has uttered his contempt
for the men in prison, the Officer takes action. The stage instruction
says that ‘The OFFICER steps towards the women’ – a threatening gesture,
performed in a different code than speech. And now the Officer dictates
to the women:
Now hear this. You are mountain people. You hear me? Your language
is dead. It is forbidden. It is not permitted to speak your mountain
language in this place. You cannot speak your language to your men.
It is not permitted. Do you understand? You may not speak it. It is
outlawed. You may only speak the language of the capital. That is the
only language permitted in this place. You will be badly punished if
you attempt to speak your mountain language in this place. This is
a military decree. It is the law. Your language is forbidden. It is dead.
No one is allowed to speak your language. Your language no longer
exists. Any questions? (21)
From the Officer’s lines, we can try and more exactly outline the situ-
ation in which the play takes place. But not by trying to identify this
as, for instance, a play about the Turkish oppression of the Kurdish
people.25 That type of concretion has no immediate basis in the play.
But the opposite reading is, I think, too wide, as when one wants to see
this as simultaneously a political and an ontological situation.26 Two
sentences in the Officer’s speech show a more precise definition of the
situation: ‘This is a military decree. It is the law.’ Military decrees are
issued only under this specific form of power, the state of exception, or
emergency, and they then substitute what has formerly been the law –
and that is also the explanation to why power in Mountain Language
is executed so haphazardly. There are no laws proclaiming guidelines
for the ruling of society, no laws and no moral principles to guide the
concrete exercise of power – at least not in Mountain Language. And
whether there is any such law in our contemporary Western societies is
the decisive question that Pinter, by making his play very British in the
names used, puts before his audience.27
In his speech, the Officer also uses his power to define the young
woman and her family, placing her under obligation to his definition:
‘You are mountain people. You hear me?’ The consequence of that defini-
tion is that the young woman is not allowed to speak her native moun-
tain language: it is forbidden. It is also, the Officer maintains, a dead
language, which apparently is not true since he forbids the speaking of
it. But the young woman does not acknowledge this definition, saying
that she does not speak the mountain language. The threatening physical
gesture is now repeated: ‘Silence. The OFFICER and SERGEANT slowly circle
her. The SERGEANT puts his hand on her bottom’ (23). This time, a border
is transgressed with the sergeant molesting the woman physically. And
the silent threat is getting slowly stronger, as when the woman states
her name in this play in the English language as ‘Sara Johnson’. The
sergeant’s contempt is now verbally aimed directly at her, even though
the line addresses the Officer: ‘She looks like a fucking intellectual to
me’ (25). That is what the interrogation, as it now must be called, results
in: a redefinition of the young woman and of her husband – neither of
them come from the mountains. Pinter here puts the performative aspect
of language to use: definitions spoken by the agents of power will have
the force to alter or transform their object.28 But it is also important to
notice here what Marc Silverstein says about the officer of the play: he is
‘spoken through rather than speaking, subjected to as well as subject of
power with which he can never coincide’.29 Power, then, in Pinter forms
a net or web, which, through language, imprisons both the oppressed
and their oppressors. Power materializes not only as soldiers and prison
camps, but also in a language that produces, forms and de-forms identity.
The identification process includes a relating of language to body.
Putting his hand on her bottom, the sergeant asks the woman, ‘What
language do you speak with your arse?’ The question relates to the
same sergeant’s definition of the men in prison as ‘shithouses’, and to
the dead language they supposedly speak: in the eyes of the agents of
power, these people, and their language, are nothing but waste or bod-
ily excrement; they materialize as that bodily object which the body
refuses.
In the second scene, in the ‘Visitors’ Room’, the threat against visitors
and prisoners materializes as assault, although in a ‘mild’ form. Hearing
the elderly woman and the prisoner talk with each other in ‘a strong
rural accent’, the guard begins jabbing the woman with his stick:
‘Forbidden. Language forbidden’ (27). The woman does not understand
what the guard is saying, but it is also as if the guard is the one that
really is speaking a foreign language, with his incomplete sentences
pointing towards some kind of linguistic disturbance or problem,
making it all the more clear that power is not in the agency of the
individual soldiers or prison guards; power works through them. Here,
then, a kind of superficial resemblance between prisoners and guards
appears, which the prisoner tries to put some emphasis on. But that
resemblance is a sort of transgression. The guard suddenly says that he’s
got ‘a wife and three kids’ (260), the prisoner commenting that he also
has that. This parallel or likeness – where power sees itself mirrored in
its victim – provokes the guard, makes him telephone his superior, and
then the lights go down to half, and the lines are now spoken in ‘voice-
over’. The lights return, the sergeant comes in and, then, the lights go
completely out. From this point on, the realist drama with an absurd
edge becomes in the third act, ‘Voice in the Darkness’, more of a surreal
drama: lights go up and down, part of the play is in voice-over: Pinter
demonstrates how language joins power in controlling us.
First we hear the sergeant asking, ‘Who’s that fucking woman?’, then
the lights go up again, and we see the sergeant and a guard holding up
a ‘HOODED MAN’. The young woman is watching them, making the
sergeant become parodically polite, addressing her as ‘Lady Duck Muck’
and asking what he can do for her. But the lights go halfway down, and
we hear the voices of the man and the young woman talking sweetly
to each other. Lights up again: the hooded man collapses and is being
dragged away. The sergeant tells the young woman that she has come
‘through the wrong door’ (264), probably a computer mistake, and
that she must talk to the man in charge. And her response, once again,
relates language to body, saying, ‘Can I fuck him? If I fuck him, will
everything be all right?’ She is not offering to be a prostitute, but rather
still trying to protect her husband.30 Then: ‘Blackout’.
The fourth and last act brings us back to the Visitors’ Room, but now
something is definitely changed: ‘The PRISONER has blood on his face.
He sits trembling’ (43). The only conclusion to draw is that he has been
tortured, that he was the ‘hooded man’ who was being tortured. But
we don’t know how that torture was performed: did linguistic violence
change into a systematic physical torture, or is linguistic violence in
itself enough to produce these traces on the prisoner’s face? But some-
thing else is also changed: the question of language. The guard now says
that ‘they’ve changed the rules. She can speak. She can speak in her own
language’. No explanation whatsoever is given, but the prisoner starts
talking to his mother, saying that they can speak in their own language.
But she does not respond, just remains still: ‘The PRISONER’S trembling
grows. He falls from the chair on to his knees, begins to gasp and shake vio-
lently.’ He speaks no more: language is substituted for an involuntary
bodily movement, and the sergeant comes into the room to deliver the
play’s cynical last line, watching the trembling prisoner: ‘You go out of
your way to give them a helping hand and they fuck it up’ (47).
That you cannot trust the sergeant is obvious: he has not tried to
help any prisoner. But can you trust the prisoner, or the visiting family?
Having denied that they speak the mountain language, they now, in the
final scene, are allowed to speak their ‘own’ language: does that imply
that, after all, they are of the ‘mountain people’? Or only that they can
speak to each other in their ‘strong rural accent’? The fundamental
instability in Pinter’s play has to do with the absurdity of power, its irra-
tionality, as represented or, rather, enacted, and with its fear of facing
itself in its victims: the execution of absolute power becomes a random
practice, invaded by a linguistic irrationality, in its effort at avoiding
having to confront itself.31
‘Pig’: Duras’s Wartime Writings
In Marguerite Duras’s wartime notebooks, published in 2006 as Cahiers

de la guerre et autres textes (in English translation as Wartime Writings
1943–1949),32 there is a dense, concentrated scene, in which resistance
fighters and activists are trying to make a Gestapo informer speak. In
other words: it is the ‘good’ side that is trying to persuade, with all
available means, the ‘bad’ to confess. It is an informative scene, since it
contains fundamental aspects of interrogation. One is the systematic de-
identification, or desubjectification, of the accused. It is enacted with the
accused being forced to take off all his clothes, transforming him from a
possible identity as a public servant into a body: ‘He’s completely naked:
he has an old penis, shrunken testicles, no waist, he’s fat, he’s dirty. He’s
fat’ (63).33 The repetition of the fact that the man is fat is significant. The
informer – ‘le donneur’ – is in Duras repeatedly addressed with degrad-
ing or insulting words, which are repeated or put into series of words:
‘Traitor. Bastard. Pig’ or ‘Traitor, pig, sonofabitch, bastard, scum’ (64).34
The word ‘salaud’ (traitor) in particular is repeated several times in this
short scene, as if Duras wants the text to share the repetitive violence that
the interrogating woman, Théodora, and her two assistants are directing
at their captive; all the while people surrounding them also call the
accused by these dirty names. Duras adds an important piece of informa-
tion: the two young male assistants have both been under Nazi torture
themselves, have had their nails drawn out and been assaulted – but they
had not informed on their fellow resistance fighters. Their torturing of
the accused is then a turning upside down of the power structure, but
also, at the same time, a repetition. But, interestingly, these two young
men, in contrast to Théodora and the crowd, had not been insulted the
prisoner, ‘not even once’, as Théodora remembers.
Repetition here systematically deforms the accused, and transforms
him into something that has no intrinsic value: ‘You can kill him’
(67).35 But the identification of him as worthless also means that the
interrogation of him really has no direction. Or rather, Théodora seems
slowly to become indifferent, while the surrounding crowd wants blood,
and her two assistants perhaps revenge. The interrogation seems to take
on a life on its own, with Théodora only assisting at this performance
of linguistic logic.
Here, linguistic logic means that words take on a physical, or bodily
character. The men beating the accused are not only cruel, they ‘stick
their faces right up to his’ and hurl questions at the prisoner, ques-
tions that are repeated, ‘For the last time, what …’ ‘Answer!’ ‘Answer!
You’re going to answer!’ (65) – their words hurled at the suspect become
physical threats to him. But those words are not directed at any reason-
able cause. Since everyone involved already knows, or thinks that s/he
knows, the facts, torture and interrogation become ritual, a repetition
that has lost any immediate significance it might have had outside of
ritual. This happens also because the accused cooperates in this gradual
process, with himself as the victim. He does not give in; he repeatedly
instead wonders what this is all about, maintaining that he is inno-
cent, pretending to understand nothing. He speaks – but at the same
time withholds speech, since what he says does not confirm the inter-
rogators’ view. And silence, Canetti points out, is an ‘extreme’ form of
defence, and in a situation like this, it might not interrupt the violence,
but rather trigger it: ‘Persistent silence leads to cross-examination and to
torture.’36 Silence provokes speech – and more speech; denial provokes
persuasion – and further persuasion.
What Duras points to in this short story, published only posthu-
mously, is the dead end that interrogation and torture can result in: a
silence at precisely the point when the accused is supposed to speak:
The informer doesn’t know which way to turn. He’s going to talk. He
attempts to raise his head, like a drowning man tries to breathe. He’s
going to talk. This is it. He’d like to say something. The blows are
what’s keeping him from speaking. But if the blows stop, he won’t
talk. Everyone waits in suspense for his birth, this deliverance. But
he still doesn’t talk. (69)37
Duras catches interrogation at it its paradoxical climax – and absolute

failure. And she also points to desubjectification as dehumanizing:
torture here transforms the accused into something reminiscent of an
animal: naked, groaning, bereft of language; he is also, repeatedly, called
‘porc’ (pig). It is, Duras says, the blows that make the informer talk or
confess – but the blows will keep him from talking if they are too violent.
Desubjectification works, but not subjectification: the new life, the new
being, able to speak up and confess, cannot come out of an interrogation
that is too violent. Interrogation here produces only pre-linguistic pain.
Desubjectification as (no) nonsense: Pinter’s

The Birthday Party
In Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1957), celebration turns into

torture, and, as in Duras, there is an erotic touch, a sadistic pleasure,
to the spectacle. And a spectacle it is: torture is here transformed into a

language game, full of what might seem like nonsense. Stanley Webber
tells Goldberg and McCann, who have rented a room for the night in
the boarding-house where Stanley is a long-time guest, to leave the
house: ‘To me, you’re nothing but a dirty joke.’38 After a few moments
of confused power struggle, Stanley sits down, with Goldberg and
McCann starting to ask him questions, lots of questions. The first one
echoes police interrogations: ‘Webber, what were you doing yesterday?’
(47), and Stanley defends himself against this and the following ques-
tions by asking counter-questions: ‘Yesterday?’, ‘What do you mean?’,
‘Me?’39 Goldberg immediately comments upon this, asking Stanley
why he is ‘wasting everybody’s time’, and the intensity and rhythm
of the interrogation heightens, at the same time that the line of ques-
tions becomes more and more random: ‘Why do you force the old
man out to play chess?’, ‘What would your old mum say, Webber?’,
‘Where do you keep your suits?’ In their interrogation, Goldberg and
McCann are, as Jeanette Malkin points out in her analysis of the play,
‘mediums for socially prescribed speech, vessels for the manipulative
power of language’.40 The tension that Pinter still manages to fill his
play with has to do with the fact that the forces of normalization,
Goldberg and McCann, themselves are not very ‘normal’: instead, they
are personifications of linguistic stereotypes, or rather, themselves the
results of discursive rejection of them as stereotyped ‘gangsters’. The two
interrogators also start referring to each other, answering or empha-
sizing the other’s questions as a way of intensifying the process of
desubjectification: ‘GOLDBERG: Who does he think he is? MCCANN:
Who do you think you are?’ For a few questions, Stanley delivers an
answer, but the interrogators interrupt him: for them, it seems enough
that Stanley answers, but what he says is of less interest. The questions
generate answers, but those are of no consequence, they have no
relevance: it is the answer as form that must be produced, and the
importance of that lies not in any significance of what might be said
in the answer, but in the answer as a recognition of the power of the
question: answer as subordination. Question here is a form, emptied of
significance, and ritualized, performed only for the effect it produces in
the addressee. The questions can therefore interrupt the answers, and
thereby generate a process of stammering in Stanley.
GOLDBERG Speak up, Webber. Why did the chicken cross the road?
STANLEY He wanted to–he wanted to–he wanted to….
MCCANN He doesn’t know!
GOLDBERG Why did the chicken cross the road?

STANLEY He wanted to–he wanted to….
GOLDBERG Why did the chicken cross the road?
STANLEY He wanted…. (51)
Interrogation here combines questions that echo the rhetoric of

police interrogation, and others that suggest that the interrogators
and Stanley are all members of the same criminal gang; a third cat-
egory are nonsensical questions, that point nowhere in particular
but to the functioning of language – but they all are directed to
Stanley as if to confuse him, make him insecure and therefore vulner-
able.41 Forcing their questions upon Stanley, Goldberg and McCann
finally provoke Stanley to express himself outside language: ‘Stanley
screams.’
Making Stanley more and more speechless and defenceless, the
interrogators tend to leave questioning behind in favour of a direct
description and definition of Stanley, which ends with the ultimate
denomination: ‘You’re dead.’ The scene here reaches a crescendo in
desubjectification, with the two interrogators circling around Stanley;
and once again they force him away from language, thereby making
him approve of their definition of him as dead:
GOLDBERG Steady, McCann.

STANLEY (circling) Uuuuuhhhhh!
MCCANN Right, Judas.
GOLDBERG (rising) Steady, McCann.
MCCANN Come on!
STANLEY Uuuuuuuhhhhh!
MCCANN He’s sweating.
STANLEY Uuuuuhhhhh! (52)
At this point in the play, Meg enters, soon to be followed by Lulu, and
the torture scene is turned into a party, with Stanley present but not
very active. It is a comedy without any trace of humour, which ends
with Stanley trying to strangle Meg (64), and, apparently, with Goldberg
spending the night with the other woman, Lulu. The next day, when
the parties re-enter the stage and their performance, the nonsensical
dimension of interrogation is elaborated upon, or rather the frequency
with which different types of discourses is actualized, with Goldberg
and McCann once again defining Stanley, and including in their defini-
tions, threats against him:
GOLDBERG You need a long convalescence.

MCCANN A change of air.
GOLDBERG Somewhere over the rainbow.
MCCANN Where angels fear to tread.
GOLDBERG Exactly.
MCCANN You’re in a rut.
GOLDBERG You look anaemic.
MCCANN Rheumatic.
GOLDBERG Myopic.
MCCANN Epileptic.
GOLDBERG You’re on the verge. (82)
The interrogation generates both a cultural discourse, with references

to songs and novels (or to films), as well as a distinctively diagnostic
discourse, with medical terms. It is as if language when used this way
becomes a random generator. This goes on for some time, with the
interrogators adding more and more lines with no interrogative logic
to them. All the while, Stanley, according to the stage instructions,
‘shows no reaction. He remains, with no movement, where he sits’. Goldberg,
finally, wants to know what Stanley thinks about all this, and wants
him to say something:
STANLEY’S head lifts very slowly and turns in Goldberg’s direction.

GOLDBERG. What do you think? Eh, boy?
STANLEY begins to clench and unclench his eyes.
MCCANN. What’s your opinion, sir? Of this prospect, sir?
GOLDBERG. Prospect. Sure. Sure it’s a prospect.
STANLEY’S hands clutching his glasses begin to tremble.
What’s your opinion of such a prospect? Eh, Stanley?
STANLEY concentrates, his mouth opens, he attempts to speak, fails
and emits sounds from his throat.
STANLEY Uh- gug…uh- gug…eeehhh- gag… (On the breath)
Caahh…caahh… (84)
The interrogators use three different forms of address here: Stanley’s

name, but also the contemptuous ‘boy’ and the falsely polite ‘sir’. And
while the questioning goes on, the stage directions focus on different
parts of the body, fragmenting it as if performing torture itself: ‘head’,
‘eyes’, ‘hands’ ‘mouth’, ‘throat’ – before it returns back to the ‘body’
as a whole, which is now only a container for a ‘shudder’. Life is leav-
ing this body, it seems, and this is the ultimate result of torture: the
destruction of language and speech, the stuttering of the violated body,

a mouth that can produce only sounds – but no meaning, no language:
‘Caaahhh… caaahhh…’ What the interrogators meant by stating that
Stanley was ‘on the verge’ is precisely this loss of language which
turn him into something non-human: he is on the verge of becoming
animal.
It is possible, as Malkin does, to understand Stanley’s transformation
into this speechless body as his becoming a ‘giggling idiot’.42 But iden-
tifying him with idiocy makes it more difficult to account for his return
to the stage all dressed in a black suit, just like Goldberg and McCann.
Another way of understanding this metamorphosis is to see desubjec-
tification here as a bodily process, which turns Stanley into an animal,
emitting animal sounds. And it is as an animal, but a trained animal,
that he appears again. The accelerating speed with which the pair of
Goldberg and McCann interrogates Stanley, the sheer intensity of the
questioning, opens up his body, and displayed there is only ‘Caaahhh…
caaahhh…’
***
All these examples of what can be called interrogative techniques point

to the paradoxical effect of language producing its opposite: roles are
reversed, moral standards confused, speech is reduced to silence, or
even death. And in all these examples, the paradoxical effect does
not stop at the production of silence through speech, but extends to
how sound and speech are turned into inscription and writing: the
repetition of certain words, like ‘pig’, will ultimately turn the accused
into something like a pig, through inscribing those letters on his or
her body, and transforming the accused into one who can no longer
speak, but only groan: the human turns into an animal. But if Harris
cross-examines literature in order to produce literature, Pinter seems
to cross-examine interrogation, in order to reduce literature to mere
letters – ‘Caaahhh… caaahhh…’ It is, as S. I. Salamensky suggests, as if
‘cross-examination may be seen as the effort to squeeze the trace out of
talk’43 – having reduced speech to those punctuation marks, Pinter can
allow his text to, once again, be literary in its play with allusions and
play on words. Viktor Shklovsky pointed to ‘distorted speech’ as the
defining characteristic of poetry. Prose, on the other hand, is accord-
ing to Shklovsky, based on a rhythmic automatization, and becomes
‘artistic’ only if that rhythm is ‘distorted’.44 That is one function of this
figure of forced stuttering that we find in Austen as well as in Duras or
Pinter: instances of disrupted rhythm force the reader to wake up. But
the ‘word which is forced into service’, to borrow Roman Jakobson’s
description of what we do when we wish to ‘revitalize an object’,45 also
demonstrates how literature itself is a form of, as well as formed within,
power relations.
6
Literature as Coerced Speech:
Handke’s Kaspar
‘Casper Hauser!’
Herman Melville, The Confidence Man
Literature already knows everything I have tried to state in this book –

and this fact is never more obvious than in Peter Handke’s play Kaspar
(1967). The play was loosely based on the well-known story of how a
young man, who came to be called Kaspar Hauser, appeared in a German
city in 1828, apparently not able to speak much more than a single
sentence, ‘A söchener Reiter möcht I wärn, wie mei Voter aner gween
is’ – ‘I want to become a horseman like my father once was.’1 This story
of the education of Kaspar Hauser, which has been retold in several
versions, most famously perhaps by Werner Herzog in his movie Jeder
für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974), was summarized by Handke as ‘the
model of a kind of linguistic mythos’.2 It is a story, then, of language,
and of the learning of language – and Handke’s use of the word ‘model’
also suggests that his Kaspar is not an individual, not a psychological
entity, but rather an example. And as such, Kaspar here is an ambiguous
figure, or, as Handke himself determines the significance of his play: ‘It
shows what is POSSIBLE with someone. It shows how someone can be
made to speak through speaking.’3
‘Mythos’ in Kaspar is an apparatus into which Kaspar is installed,
and we follow in detail how the apparatus works on him, only slowly
realizing that we, as readers or viewers, are ourselves part of that appa-
ratus. ‘Apparatus’ here can be specified in at least two ways: language
and theatre. As discussed above (see the Introduction and the section
‘The Apparatus of Subjectification’), the general linguistic apparatus
works on us through more specialized media. Theatre is one such media-
ting structure, and it is obvious that Kaspar includes theatre within the
149
apparatus that it describes: ‘The audience does not see the stage as a
representation of a room that exists somewhere, not as a representa-
tion of a stage. The stage represents the stage’ (60).4 In pointing to the
facticity of the stage, Handke points not only to the ‘here’ of the place,
but to the present moment as well: what is being enacted on that stage
is happening now, and not at another time, and it therefore includes
within its course of events everyone in the room. This play does not
re-present: it is happening at the present moment.
The Theatre of Torture
Theatre here shares many of the characteristics that Foucault designates

to the ‘educational institution’, thereby also making his thought of the
apparatus more concrete:
the disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations that govern its
internal life, the different activities that are organized there, the
diverse persons who live there or meet one another, each with his
own function, his well-defined character – all these things constitute
a block of capacity-communication-power. Activity to ensure learning
and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior works via a
whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and
answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differential
marks of the ‘value’ of each person and of the levels of knowledge)
and by means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveil-
lance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy).5
Kaspar Hauser was an almost silent figure in history – and Handke’s Kaspar,
as well, is an almost silent literary figure. He knows his one sentence,
but will find it taken away from him, and substituted with other, model
sentences. He will find himself to be speaking, forced to willingly
speak, and thereby also finding himself defined by discourse. But the
education of Kaspar does not start from an originary state of innocence,
even though Kaspar says that he is ‘heruntergekommen’, or fallen from
innocence. In saying that, Kaspar is actually quoting the most canoni-
cal of German writers, Goethe, and his ‘Schäfer’s Klageliede’.6 This also
implies, of course, that Kaspar is both inscribed within and produced
by another apparatus, the one we know as literature: the play is, as
many critics have pointed to, to a large degree made up of fragments
and quotes or paraphrases of other works, ranging from Anselm von
Feuerbach’s Kaspar Hauser – Verbrechen am Seelenleben des Menschen,
Literature as Coerced Speech: Handke 151
on which the opening of Handke’s play is based, to Shakespeare’s

Othello, quoted in Kaspar’s final words: ‘Ziegen und Affen’ (‘Goats and
Monkeys’).7 Here the network that makes up the apparatus is also of an
intertextual character.
In contrast to at least some of the other versions of the same story,
Kaspar is not about the person with that name: it is about language,
and about the workings of the apparatus. Handke almost demonstrates
how subjectification is at constant work in language, but also how
disciplinary power appropriates the whole of the individual, body and
soul, and makes him produce the subjectification of himself. We do not,
when reading or watching this play, follow the education of a specific
individual, a young man suddenly appearing out of nowhere. Instead,
what we have is a model example of language at work. Several critics
see Kaspar as an abstraction, but this view can hold some relevance
only in a psychological perspective – which the play does not really
allow.8 A model is not an abstraction, but rather a rationalization:
some aspects of what the model represents have been cut away, so that
other aspects can be focused upon.9 Already, then, in its instigation,
Kaspar is the result of an act of linguistic violence: a historical figure
has been intertextually appropriated, but at the same time seemingly
lifted out of his historical frame. Language not only allows and approves
of such violent rationalization – it knows of no more peaceful way to
refer to and represent objects. Language itself here is material, and it
can therefore also be ‘speech torture’: its material character makes itself
obvious not only in the mouth and throat struggling to learn pronun-
ciation; rather, it involves the whole body which is subordinated to
language: language is the prison of the body …
In his introduction to the play, Handke himself calls its ‘mythos’
speech torture, ‘Sprachfolterung’. And this is not an only metaphysical
violence performed on a model; the whole of the play, Handke empha-
sizes, takes place underneath a specific gaze: ‘a kind of magic eye …
above the ramp’(59).10 Another way of putting it is to say that the action
on stage takes place under surveillance: the big eye is watching, but also
signalling the pressure, or tension, to which both Kaspar and the audi-
ence is exposed. And Handke also makes another important point in his
introductory stage instructions: ‘the voices addressing the protagonist …
should be that of voices which in reality have a technical medium
interposed between themselves and the listeners’ (59). These technical
media include telephones, radio, television, and answering machines,
and in addition we also listen to the kind of functional voices that
take up positions of power: interviewers, gym teachers, policemen and
so on.11 Kaspar is lifted out of Kaspar Hauser’s historical setting, to be

installed in another historical situation, in other conditions for speech.
Handke here joins a line of writers who have ventured into the relation
between medium and voice, as exemplified for instance by Strindberg,
whose novella The Roofing Feast (1906) explores the graphophone as
trigging the voicing of the unconscious, while a lamp functions as the
eye of surveillance; or Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), which
exploits the tape recorder as (non-)dialogic partner; or Paul Auster’s
New York Trilogy, in which the first novel, City of Glass (1985), starts
with a telephone call: a wrong number that generates the whole story.
But in Handke, the media put to use are more anonymized, at the
same time as their presence becomes almost physical, even though a
microphone, according to the stage instructions, is the only visible trace
of these media. What Kaspar demonstrates here is the necessary and
inevitable presence of media: there is no natural voice in the sense of
‘originary’. Therefore, Kaspar himself is not the clown figure that his name
suggests, but rather, Handke writes, Frankenstein’s monster or King
Kong. This monstrous quality in Kaspar points to his being a sort of
montage: a hybrid. Having no form of his own, he is put together from
what the mediated voices make him into being, and at the same time
he is a displaced, prehistoric animal. Towards the end of the play, Kaspar
says that ‘a sentence is a monster’ (139)12 – but this monster, having
no physical form in itself, always imposes form upon its object. And
as Kaspar also says: ‘I am in someone’s hand’: he is at the mercy of his
writer, Peter Handke, of his reader, holding the text in his hand, but also
at the mercy of language.
The point here is not that Handke has moved his Kaspar out of his
German nineteenth-century village and into a technological future, but
rather what Handke says about language: it is always mediated, it does
not exist as such, only as uttered, as mediated by different functions of
speech. Language is uttered only within power relations, but in Kaspar
it also takes on something of a Cyborgian nature: learning to speak
is to become a machine for speech. Handke’s foreword systematically
emphasizes that we are entering an apparatus, where the mediated
voices are without bodies, without the form of physical presence that
otherwise could have offered a way of holding these voices responsible
for their words. But language is not personal when fulfilling its social,
and not only communicative, functions like teaching, ordering, train-
ing and so on. Having the voices speak through technical media, and
not through bodily presence, Handke also suggests the disciplinary
character of exercised language, or, as Peter Bekes formulates it: ‘Die
Sprache ist eine Ordnungsmacht.’13 But we must not make the mistake
of looking at language only as censoring or forbidding. A hindrance
that the subject must overcome, it is rather, as the prompter says, by
forming sentences that something ‘has become impossible: something
else has become possible’ (73).14 Kaspar seems to be formulating the
‘conditions de possibilité’ of the subject: it is possible to be a subject
only within discourse. Subjectivity is made possible by discourse, but it
does not only mean that something is forced upon Kaspar and installed
inside him: ‘The language-learning process in the play is a language
conditioning in which the trainee is not only taught something but
also has something forced out of him.’15 The prompter carefully states
what Kaspar can do with his one sentence, and among those possibili-
ties is to declare ‘every disorder an order’ (69):16 language turns black
into white, and white into black. And it is through discourse that the
subject can work on himself, as the prompter says: ‘You are the lucky
owner of a sentence which will make every impossible order possible
for you and make every possible and real disorder impossible for you:
which will exorcise every disorder from you.’ Linguistic exorcism:
anacrisis.
As many critics have observed, Kaspar hints at an allegorical mode of
representation with its use of the example and the exemplary (Kaspar
as Everyman), its demonstrative character, and its didacticism. Handke’s
name for his early plays, ‘Sprechstücke’, of course alludes to Brecht’s
‘Lehrstücke’.17 But the play is still dominated by that specific form of
dialogue that I here have called anacrisis: the prompters, as Handke
states, ‘make Kaspar speak by speaking’ (66).18 The frontal character of
the play underlines its demonstrative character, and it is also in this
demonstrative approach to Kaspar, as well as to the audience, that the
play itself takes on anacrisis as its own mode of speech: there is nothing
hidden here, everything is out in the open and visible except for the
prompter – which makes the machinery of power only the more visible
in its functions. Kaspar fills the function of the one being forced to
answer, and in answering, he is formulating himself, willingly or not.
It is not a true or originary self, but he construes a self, according to
the rules for self-construction that are set by the prompter. And the
one he has to answer, and answer to, is the prompter’s voice, a voice
without body, a voice that is only speech. There is in Kaspar nothing
of the setting within a culture of conversation, as in Austen, noth-
ing of the nostalgically imagined dialogue of Beckett. We are, with
Kaspar, down to the basics of learning to speak: of linguistic violence
as one, but fundamental, form that subjectification takes on in a
disciplinary power structure. The language exercised in Kaspar forms

and at the same time forces a subject, through its authoritarian repeti-
tions of normativity.
Traditionally, allegory implies the separation of meaning and utter-
ance: what is meant is totally and systematically different from what
is being said, but that other meaning is always possible to identify. But
modern allegories, as exemplified by Kaspar, even though they also
separate and divide, do not function solely according to that tradition:
in Kaspar, allegory produces not only a generalized Everyman, but also
a multiplied Kaspar that materializes in different bodies as Kaspar 1,
Kaspar 2, Kaspar 3 and so on. Allegory installs a kind of schizophrenic
moment in language, distributes one body in several discourses, making
Kaspar’s statement that ‘I am the one I am’ ambiguous: one Kaspar is
several different Kaspars.
This ‘schizophrenic’ or split distribution of the subject is present in
Kaspar from the start. He knows one sentence; Kaspar Hauser’s original
sentence (“A söchener Reiter möcht I warn …”) has been transformed
into a more general statement: ‘I want to be a person like somebody
else was once’ (65).19 Already this first, original sentence, is based on
mimetism: the subject can be formed only in a mould already given or
proposed by somebody else. When Kaspar later in the play emphasizes
that he is ‘the one I am’, it means that Kaspar will be precisely that: he
has no identity outside the one given him by language; he exists only
as his own stating of himself. He is, therefore, constantly produced and
reproduced in the play: Kaspar, Kaspar 1, Kaspar 2, Kaspar 3 et cetera.
But even though Kaspar is multiplied, he remains, in a specific way,
absent. We could look at Kaspar as the subject resulting from Foucault’s
‘dividing practices’: it is only as divided ‘inside himself or divided from
others’ that the subject is objectivized. But here, objectivization does
not mean a ‘true identity’ of any kind, but rather the status as, precisely,
object. Language works on Kaspar without acknowledging him as an
individual – and the objectifying process means that Kaspar loses not
his individuality or ‘Persönlichkeit’ so much (we do not know anything
about any anterior ‘personality’) as his sensuous relationship to the
world: immediacy is lost in mediation. Dividing practices produce dif-
ferences between rich and poor, mad and sane, et cetera, and they are
interiorized through subjugation: ‘The form of power that applies itself
to immediate everyday life categorizes the individual, marks him by
his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law
of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize
in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects.’20 Looking
at Kaspar from this perspective, the play is about his death as an indi-
vidual body, starting with the destruction of his original sentence, and
slowly becoming his resurrection as a function within the text, as no
more, almost, than a sign produced by the prompter’s pronunciation
and writing of him.
Normalization
We could give the name ‘linguistic schizophrenia’ to this multi-

plied production of Kaspar – but we could also, and better, call it
‘normalization’. Language does not produce one stable body, but
rather a constantly shifting answer to the questions put to the
individual by and through language. Kaspar depicts how Kaspar’s
original sentence, used by him in different modes as a defence against
linguistically superior powers, is broken down, and transformed into
a part of discourse. The technologically mediated voices, which in the
play take on the function of a prompter, suggest and state different
ways of applying or using a sentence: to make your self noticeable,
comfortable, sensible, to name your self, to become crazy, remember
your self, own, resist (67–73). These ways are all a matter of relating
the self to discourse, of positing your self within discourse – the
same discourse that, precisely, produces the ‘self’. There is no way in
which the subject can separate himself from language: subjectivity
is linguistically produced. And if Kaspar is a writer, by the name of
Handke or by any other name, normalization also includes him: the
play transforms, slowly but increasingly, into a recognizable piece of
literature, most obviously in the use of poetic discourse in scenes 61
to 64 – a process which is crowned by Kaspar’s statement that he ‘no
longer understand anything literally’ (139).21 The normalization of
Kaspar equals the normalization of Kaspar.
Handke, then, in his foreword, calls this process ‘speech torture’,
which implies that it produces a physical and/or psychological pain,
or, as Jeanette Malkin puts it, ‘physical torture is described as the logi-
cal extension of verbal order’.22 And pain is an obvious part of Kaspar:
the deconstruction of Kaspar and the redistribution of him into several
Kaspars, numbered 1, 2, 3 and so on, implies a painful dissolution
and quantification of both body and speech. The learning process, in
which Kaspar is ‘being taught to speak’, is marked by pain from the
start (71), which is emphasized by language here being produced not
only as speech, but also as bodily movements. The prompter starts by
giving simple and direct orders: ‘Sit. Lie. Order …’ (74), and Kaspar,
finding his original sentence non-functional, answers by producing

different sounds, with his mouth but also with bodily movements.
Lacking language, Kaspar’s body seems curiously formless; he moves
around the different objects on stage, tries them, fumbles with them,
but does not use them as intended. This, which can be seen as an
open-ended or unfinished exploration of the world of objects, is
accompanied by the prompter speaking about what language makes
possible, and what is impossible without it: ‘Without the sentence,
you cannot put one foot in front of the other’ (70).23 In this extended
scene, Kaspar is ‘gradually needled into speaking through the use of
speech material’ (75),24 the linguistic needle (or ‘Stachel’) penetrating
his language, tearing it apart, and forcing him to adapt to the demands
of discourse: he starts uttering whole words, non-complete sentences,
and finally he utters ‘a normal sentence’ (77).25 Trying out different
ways of uttering sentences, Kaspar recognizes the hurt and pain in
language, that he feels ‘ashamed of falling’, and he repeats to himself
the same sentence, again and again: ‘Do remember that and don’t
forget it!’ (79).26 This is a decisive moment in the education of Kaspar:
the prompter immediately takes care of this linguistic normality,
which is a self-disciplining that Kaspar orders himself to observe; he
appropriates it, comparing this sentence to others, making it into a
model: it is an ‘orderly sentence’, and as such it should, to Kaspar,
be ‘a picture of a possible sentence’ (82). All the while the prompter
states the rules of utterances, Kaspar moves around the stage,
organizing both it and his clothes. The ‘normal’ sentences are linked
to each other, forming the speaking subject into a narrative, that, by
definition, as a repeated linguistic performance, is never different from
other narratives of other speakers: narrative is the story of normality.
And normality forms the subject into one: Kaspar’s words are ‘timed to’
his bodily movements; he moves in rhythm, or out of rhythm, with
the words uttered by the prompter. The pain that Kaspar feels and
will feel is dictated by the prompter, saying ‘The shoelace hurts you’
or ‘The coat hurts you’ or ‘The table hurts you’: ‘The words that you
hear and the words that you speak hurt you’ (72).27 This prediction is
then confirmed by Kaspar: ‘Ever since I can speak I can stand up in
a normal fashion; but falling only hurts ever since I can speak’ (79) –
language not only expresses pain, but seems also to generate it. And
the speaking Kaspar will engage in a violent discourse, split and there-
fore threatening: ‘The dog barks. The commander barks’ (95), or ‘The
fearful girl trembles. The slap in the face smacks. The body smacks.
The tongue licks. The flame licks. The saw screeches. The torture
victim screeches’ (96).28 The process of becoming one with discourse

means also that violence can be identified, talked about and resisted.
But this oneness is really an ambiguous captivity within language:
‘you can’t say anything except what you are also thinking’ (100).29 This
is one of the conclusions, if we can call it that, that is produced by the
most dialogic part of Kaspar: uttered by the prompter, the sentence
is part of a dialogic exchange, where prompter and Kaspar perform a
linguistic dance with each other, intermingling, exchanging lines – but
the essence of this dialogue is, as is stated when the dialogue starts,
that Kaspar here is being ‘taught the model sentences with which an
orderly person struggles through life’ (90). This is what language does
to its speaker, it – once again! – transforms him into an ‘orderly person’.
It is therefore not so much a question of a historically specific person,
but of how language works; how it, in accordance with its own gram-
matical and syntactical organization, functions. And order is the effect
of linguistic violence. The most violent form of language in Kaspar is
probably the use of repetition, as when the prompter states the word
‘you’ 25 times, so that Kaspar, even though he is speaking words that do
not relate to the prompter’s repeated ‘you’, finally has to recognize the
implications of ‘you’: his last line in this dance is ‘recognized me’ (98),30
as if the insisted utterance of ‘you’ forces Kaspar to confess his ‘self’.
A Dividing Practice at Work
Language acquisition and learning to speak are ‘dividing practices’:

in organizing the world, language divides it into different objects.
The crucial division in Kaspar might be the one that is installed
between Kaspar and himself, the reflexivity which allows and forces
Kaspar to reflect upon himself. As the prompter says: ‘You can hear
yourself. You become aware. You become aware of yourself with the
sentence. You become aware of yourself’ (70).31 This dividing practice
goes on throughout the play, and its triumph is acknowledged by
Kaspar towards the end. He lists all things that he could not do before
entering discourse, and central is here his inability to separate anything:
‘I could keep nothing apart’ (123). His ‘fall’, he says, that is, his enter-
ing discourse, has driven ‘a wedge / between me / and the objects / and
finally extirpate / my babbling’ (125). This whole process of separating
things from one another results in the rise of the subject: ‘everyone
must tell everyone / his name’ (128).32
The orderly character of language and the utterance mirrors that of
the world. Peter Bekes points to how Kaspar is being systematically
trained in grammar and syntax, and that he is also being taught cer-
tain linguistic clichés. Among these are words like ‘Everyone’ and ‘No
one’, which do not accept any opposition, phrases that generate words
like ‘Naturally’ – sentences based on this type of cliché are not pos-
sible, or are at least problematic, to argue against.33 Closely related to
these mechanisms of language are the regulation and the furnishing
of the world: ‘You need homely sentences: sentences as furnishings:
sentences which you could actually save yourself: sentences which are
a luxury. All objects about which there are still questions to be asked
are disorderly, unpretty and uncomfortable.’ This logic of language that
the prompter dictates is then passed on to the world of objects: ‘Every
object must be the picture of an object: every proper table is the picture
of a table.’ This logic is valid also for language: every sentence turns into
a ‘picture of a sentence’ (82).34
One could say that the prompter’s words are those of ‘klischierten
bürgerlichen Moral- und Wertmaßstäben’,35 or at least traces of such
an expression of an ideology – but more important is that they not
so much express a view on the world as form part of the training and
disciplining of Kaspar. Kaspar will, towards the end of his education,
mechanically state clichés with an apparent ideological and disciplinary
character: ‘The salt shaker stands on the left. The spoon is lying on the
outside to the right of the knife, The spoon lies bottom up.’ But these
constatives on the laying of the table are surrounded by sentences that
suggest another order: ‘To the right of the towel is the first-aid kit. …
The stab comes from the right’ (116).36 The order of the world is a vio-
lent order: the training of the subject in organizing his world is also the
adjusting to and acceptance of violence, and its inhabiting of not only
the physical world but also linguistic exchange: ‘every bum in jail: / kill
every paradox’ (130).
The prompter’s part of the dialogue is reduced into a repetition of
just one word: ‘you’. Insistently repeating the word, the prompter forces
Kaspar to reformulate it into ‘I’: only if being addressed as a ‘you’, can
he start saying ‘I’. It is an interpellation, a calling upon, that is enacted
here, but like every interpellation of the subject, it is an ambiguous
call.37 Interpellation acknowledges or recognizes the other as a subject,
a ‘you’, but it also means that the other is defined by that you: having
recognized the force of the ‘you’, Kaspar performs a series of grammati-
cal variations on ‘I am’ (101f.), ending with ‘I am the one I am’ (‘Ich bin,
der ich bin’). Kaspar quotes none less than God (Exodus 3:14) himself in
this identification of himself as ‘He who is’. And the stage here suddenly
becomes black, when Kaspar adds a question that is out of line with the
grammatical and syntactical logic of the dialogue: ‘Why are there so

many black worms flying about?’ (102).38
This strange sentence has no immediate place within the discourse
that Kaspar learns to perform. It is instead possible to see it as another
discourse, another language, which has not yet been subjugated under
the logic of language learning. Kaspar’s statement is metaphorical, its
meaning and relevance consists not in its place within discourse, but
rather in its differing from or opposition to discourse – at the same time
that, as a grammatical and syntactical entity, it presupposes discourse.
And it is also a rather typical example of how Handke installs a poetical
language in his play: the line is taken from Ödön von Horvath’s Glaube
Liebe Hoffnung (1936), in which it is uttered by one of the characters,
Elizabeth, as she dies.39
Installed within discourse, Kaspar can reflect upon himself: language
acquisition is all about learning to subjugate your self under the
reflexivity of language. From the outset, the prompter emphasizes that
the exercise of language is closely connected to the self: ‘You begin,
with yourself, you, are a, sentence you, could form, of yourself’ (72).40
The odd punctuation underlines the situation as one of dictation,
directed to the listening Kaspar, but it also says precisely what this
play is about, namely how language forces form onto the individual
being. Kaspar slowly starts talking about himself, finally naming
himself: ‘I am the one I am’ – but which is that one? ‘I am prepared
to be interrogated’, Kaspar states, giving himself up to the workings
of language. Here the other Kaspars appear, marking the multitude of
subjectivity, produced by language: anyone can call him- or herself ‘I’.
This schizophrenia is the most obvious effect of linguistic agency:
‘I speak of my own accord, but now I can wait to speak until I am
asked’, Kaspar says (111).41 But language does not ask, it forces us to
speak. And Kaspar’s voice now tends to sound more and more like the
prompter’s, while his other selves, Kaspar 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, start making
sounds of different kinds. And the official voice of the prompter states
the rules: ‘No one may …’; ‘Everyone must …’. The rules are not only
negative, not only what is forbidden, but also positive: what every-
one must do. And the prompters have already declared why the rules
and models are necessary: ‘if you see the object differently from the
way you speak of it, you must be mistaken: you must say to yourself
that you are mistaken and you will see the object: if you don’t want
to say that to yourself, then it is obvious that you want to be forced,
and thus do want to say it in the end’ (102).42 The apparatus is sure
to produce an effect on the individual, no matter what the individual
thinks or wishes. Or, as the prompter more cynically states: ‘‘You’ve

been cracked open’ (103).43
This openness, which is that of a nut cracked into halves, generates
confession: Kaspar will confess himself. Reflexivity implies that the
subject will comment upon himself, and confession is the most
important mode socially for this linguistic capacity, here formulated
within the typical temporal tension between then and now:
Once plagued by sentences

I now can’t have enough of sentences.
Once haunted by words
I now play with every single letter (110)44
The final point in this process of adjusting to the power of language is

Kaspar’s promise to be ‘vernünftig’: ‘I will be rational.’ Reflexivity here
means self-control: through interiorization of the mechanisms of the
apparatus, Kaspar learns to be his own master – no exterior power is
necessary. It is a ‘subsumption’ under a rationalistic discourse, as Peter
Bekes writes, and language in this appearance has taken on the character
of a ‘second nature’.45 Kaspar learns not only that resistance to language
is impossible, but step by step, he learns to love his subsumption:
‘everything that is orderly is beautiful: everything that is beautiful
is good for my eyes: everything that is good for my eyes is good for
me’ (89).46 Kaspar here speaks inside a linguistic logic, based on the
repetition of a word from the first sentence in the second, and so on, a
logic whose mechanical character is emphasized by the colons. But even
if this process of subsumption – or subjugation – is an almost linear
process in Kaspar, it is not without its ambiguities. Kaspar also learns to
‘play with every single letter’, which might suggest also the possibility
of a not particularly rationalistic discourse. And even if he interiorizes
the rules of discourse, he still hesitates and stutters, and there are these
flashes of another discourse in his utterance, the black worms.
Kaspar finally reaches a crescendo in the form of a sounding inferno:
Kaspar tries to speak while his other Kaspars ‘begin to emit peculiar
noises’ (127).47 The audience will hear ‘rustling, leaves slapping against
each other, ululations, roaring, laughter, humming, purring, warbling,
and a single sharp scream’ (127).48 It is an ambiguous sound mass,
a linguistic mumble, cut through only by the single scream, which
resounds, like the other sounds, from nowhere and everywhere, without
being attributed to any specific individual. And what is it that Kaspar
is saying? ‘I can appear because I know where my place is’ (138).49 That
place is inside language, subjugated to the normality produced by lan-

guage: only from a position within discourse can we appear. There is
a price to be paid for this instalment of the subject inside discourse, a
price that directs our attention, once more, to the allegorical character
of the play: Kaspar says that ‘I no longer understand anything literally’
(138). Being educated, and given linguistic agency, means a necessary
loss of language – it loses its materiality, its literality, and becomes sig-
nification. Subjugation to discourse is subjugation to a symbolic order.
Or is it an expansion?
The subject is multiplied: ‘I am the one I am’ means that the one is
the one uttered at this specific moment, as defined by a specific situ-
ation, a ‘total speech situation’ – and another one at the next specific
moment, in the next specific situation. But all these subjects, or subjec-
tivities, are already defined in language: uttering only sounds, Kaspar
is ‘POSSIBLE’, as Handke states (59). He is still only a possibility; but
subjugated to discourse, he has become an impossibility, distributed in
several schizophrenic selves. The crucial moment, then, occurs when
language to Kaspar appears as reflexive: it deserts its own materiality,
only to reproduce Kaspar as, increasingly, literature. And literature, of
course, is the technological medium that Kaspar is produced through.
The symbolic eye that Handke wants to have installed over the ramp
is the ‘already there’ of literature: the production of Kaspar takes place
under the surveillance of literature. And learning to speak, for Kaspar,
means learning to lose the innocence of materiality, and to enter the
fall of signification. Literature is that event: it opens up signification as
a possibility, a productivity, that produces an endless signified, an end-
less chain of interpretation, or schizophrenia. This paradox is produced
by the simple fact that you can correct language only by adding to it, as
Barthes pointed out: only by subjugating ourselves to discourse can we
formulate our critique of discourse.
By the end of his play, Kaspar has learned to speak the language of
literature: ‘I can hear the logs comfortably crackling in the fire, with
which I want to say that I do not hear the bones crackling comfortably.
The chair stands here, the table there, with which I mean to say that
I am telling a story’ (139).50 Language has become double: something
is said, but something else is intended or meant by the said. It is the
divided subject that speaks: ‘my hair has gotten into the table as into a
machine and I am scalped: literally: with each new sentence I become
nauseous: figuratively: I have been turned topsy-turvy’ (139).51 And
now, once again, division and linguistic ‘schizophrenia’ is materialized
textually as two columns, after having been only one column, signalling
the normality of Kaspar. While Kaspar is talking, the other Kaspars

are producing ‘an infernal noise’; Kaspar himself also partakes in the
noise, and while he five times states his last words, ‘Ziegen und Affen’
(‘Goats and Monkeys’), the curtain moves with ‘the shrillest sound
possible’. Language here becomes a sound that pains and torments, a
torture. And while the whole play has an unmistakable demonstrative
character, the end leaves us in confusion and ambivalence: his words
seem to have some relation to the noise that is simultaneously being
produced, since that noise does not form into any kind of language, but
rather is the kind of noise produced by animals. But the words them-
selves are not those of animals, but the opposite: once again, Handke is
quoting, and this time not the only the most canonical German writer,
but perhaps the most canonical ever – Shakespeare, and his Othello.
This is the divided, therefore tormented, subject: speaking and
screaming at the same time. If I could, I would say to Kaspar: ‘You have
the right to remain silent.’ But I can’t, it is impossible. It would be untrue.
And Kaspar already knows this (137): ‘Already with my first sentence
I was trapped.’52
7
Epilogue: The Silence of the Sirens
‘Speech torture’ is what Peter Handke suggests that his play Kaspar could
be called: ‘Sprachfolterung’. Speech torture is also what this book has
been about: the linguistic violence directed against the one that cannot
or does not want to take part in the circulation of speech, whether con-
versation or interrogation, whether silenced by an ongoing monologue
or by a wish to protect a secret. Silence can also be a weapon against
linguistic corruption: when words are produced within an economy
of inflation, silence might serve as resistance. But language does take
on a violent character; it becomes torture, even resulting in physical
effects on its victim. Austen’s Fanny Price experiences pain most of all
when those surrounding her try to make her speak. Melville’s Bartleby
slowly diminishes and finally dies, pursued by words, and unable to
utter any words himself (except for just a few). Gombrowicz’s Ivona
suffocates to death, refusing to defend herself against the speech
directed against her. The different interrogation scenes illustrate how a
socially legitimate, spoken violence can serve both to silence someone,
and to force form upon the other, humiliate the other – interrogation
is a form of desubjectification. My different examples of monologue
show how monologue depends on the silent answers of another, and
how monologue is triggered by that silence. Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne
wears her embroidered letter ‘A’ on her breast, even though it feels as if
it’s burning there, it is ‘torture’ to her, while Musil’s Tonka is exposed
to an anacritical violence that ends only when she is tied on a rack:
dead. And Handke’s Kaspar is needled into speaking, but whether he is
something more than just a talking head by the end of the play is a still
an open question. In none of these examples can spoken violence be
reduced to mere ‘hate speech’, to insults or direct attacks, even though
there is a residue of hate speech in Camus’s La Chute, as well as in
163
Pinter’s Mountain Language. Instead, language is here mostly circulated

as conversation, as everyday talk – even the interrogation scenes can be
called routine. Repetition is, then, a featured weapon in this violence:
spoken violence is a constant pounding on the other, a repeated beating
on the eardrums of the other.
The goal is subjectification: Kaspar is pushed into language and
correct speaking; he is not allowed any of his early animal-like
sounds. But this process, so linear in Handke’s play, is also shadowed
by the other Kaspars and the sounds they produce, these ‘peculiar
noises’ that ultimately make the objects they address ‘utterly ridiculous’
and ‘COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE’ (139).1 Looked upon as a process of
normalization, subjectification happens close to its opposite, to an
irrational, impulsive desire to make other sounds than speech, to turn
the world upside down; it is closely followed by a subversive desire that
must be kept at bay. And it is a strange, speaking silence that provokes
spoken violence.
There is of course not only one silence, with only one specific
meaning. Within Western culture, silence is accepted in many forms,
admired in some: as concentration, or meditation, as a sign of deep
thinking, or mourning. Intentional silence can, among other things,
imply serious-mindedness, carefulness – or absentmindedness. Silence
is also commanded in certain institutions, like monasteries, churches,
libraries, hospitals, prisons, schools, theatres and concert halls.2 The
options are many, and at least to some degree, the evaluation of silence,
its significance, depends upon the situation in which it occurs, or in
which it sounds: silence in an intimate dialogue does not emit the same
signal as silence does in a police interrogation. Forced silence is not to
be mistaken for intentional silence, and neither is speech: forced speech
is not the same as voluntary speech. Silence always speaks, otherwise we
would not notice it. Silent, the subject might be engaged in precisely
those activities that characterize the Western subject as such: thinking,
reflection. Or, as Adorno and Horkheimer define the ‘self’: ‘the identi-
cal, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings’.3 But the
silent subject may also, simply, be silently listening to himself.
What is it then that the subject hears in silence?
John Cage wanted to explore silence, understand and get to know it,
a desire that resulted in, among other things, his perhaps most famous
(and scandalous) piece of music, 4'33", the ‘silent piece’, meaning that
no musician is playing anything during its four minutes and thirty-
three seconds – and that audience and musicians are engaged in a joint
listening to the space they are inside. One of the experiences that seem
Epilogue: The Silence of the Sirens 165
to have been important for Cage in his orientation to silence was that
of being in a totally silent room. At one time, Cage entered an anechoic
chamber at Harvard University, in order to listen to silence. But he could
not hear any silence: he heard, he writes, ‘two sounds, one high and one
low’, and he asked the engineer for an explanation: ‘he informed me
that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my
blood in circulation’.4 As Kyle Gann points out, this story is perhaps
not to be taken for granted: one cannot hear the electrical impulses in
one’s own brain or nervous system. But for Cage, however, this experi-
ence meant, as Gann writes, that he abandoned the view of ‘silence
and sound as opposites; he now understood them as merely aspects
of the same continuum’.5 No dichotomy then, only different modes of
language. And the other, important aspect of Cage’s story here is that
what the Western subject hears, then, when he organizes silence, is the
sound of his own body. Apparently, to Cage, that was not a very pleas-
ant sound.
In turning Homer’s story of the Sirens upside down, Franz Kafka in
his ‘Das Schweigen der Sirenen’ (‘The Silence of the Sirens’, 1917) points
to an analogous experience: his Sirens possess a ‘noch schrecklichere
Waffe’, ‘a still more fatal weapon than their song’.6 That weapon is
their silence. Why? No one has ever, Kafka writes, escaped from their
silence. And when Odysseus tries to do precisely that, he is fooling no
one but himself. Having plugged his ears with wax, he thinks that he
is the only one that does not hear the Sirens’ singing. But this time,
the Sirens, when Odysseus comes by, choose not to sing: Odysseus
consequently did not hear their silence, he was totally emerged in
listening to himself, to his own cleverness and triumph – and with his
gaze fixed not at the beautiful Sirens, but to the future, he looks ahead,
fixing ‘his gaze on the distance’. At that moment, he also, paradoxi-
cally, seems to lose his humanity; he takes on an animal characteristic,
he is ‘such a fox’, whose guile is beyond ‘Menschenverstand’, beyond
‘human understanding’ and reason.
Silence, in Kafka, perhaps offers a way out of the only too human –
or at least, his version of the story of the Sirens negotiates in new ways
the relation between human and animal, between language and silence.
He does it with the support of Homer: we might note that Odysseus
in the Homeric version has just survived a year of partying with the
goddess Circe, ‘the divinity of regression to animal form’, as Adorno
and Horkheimer define her.7
The scene featuring the Sirens’ song, as found in Homer’s The Odyssey,
is one of the constitutive scenes of Western literature, and as such the
object of many qualified and even famous analyses and readings. The
Sirens might be understood as the muses of art and literature, and
listening to them is then listening to a pure, poetic discourse: we
listen not to what is being said, but rather to how it is said, to the
song but not to its lyrics. And this discourse, based on melody and
intonation, puts the subject at risk: a heap of corpses next to the Sirens
testifies to this. In Homer, if we are to believe Adorno and Horkheimer
in what is perhaps the most influential of the different readings of
the scene, the point is the civilizing aspects of Odysseus’s journeys.
Reading the episode of the Sirens as ‘a prescient allegory of the dialectic
of enlightenment’, Adorno and Horkheimer understand the Sirens as
Western art: the Sirens know all about the past, at the same time as they
send out a promise of future pleasures and delights. But the bourgeois
morality of Odysseus forces him to deny himself these delights offered
him by the work of art: he torments himself by listening to the song but
is, tied as he is to his mast, totally unable to indulge in the pleasures the
Sirens seem to promise. And he forces his crew, his labourers, to keep on
rowing so that they will not be able to take out the wax from their ears
and listen to the temptations of the Sirens. Already here, manual labour
becomes mechanized, automatic, and therefore dehumanizing.8 A per-
tinent comment on Adorno and Horkheimer’s profile of the bourgeois
subject was formulated by Steely Dan, in their four-minute, outermost
rationalized version of the scene, in which a modern-day Odysseus
sings that his home is the mast he is tied to.9
No one knows what the Sirens actually sounded like. Homer does not
describe the actual sound of their song in any detail; theirs is a ‘high,
thrilling song’ that they perform with ‘ravishing voices’ – Adorno and
Horkheimer call that which the ‘fettered man listens to a concert’.10 But
no recording of that concert exists. And in Kafka, we read about their
silence. But we find the ‘original’ Sirens not only in Homer but also as a
motif on Greek vases, where the Sirens are depicted as a mix of woman
and bird, a hybrid of human and animal. The allure of the Sirens is cer-
tainly that of the female, and, as Adorno and Horkheimer pointed out,
as such it is a threat to patriarchal order.11 And in Homer, the Sirens are
surrounded by ‘heaps of corpses / rotting away, rags of skin shriveling
on their bones’. Are these then the victims of female lust and seductive
power – or are they the remnants of a beastly feast celebrated by birds or
raptors, in the disguise of Sirens? The different interpretations suggested
by these questions are hardly mutually exclusive: in the Sirens, woman
and animal are combined in the singing of a beautifully deadly song.12
That song is deadly since it is not based on language: we don’t hear the
words they are singing, only the undifferentiated sounds. And sounds
were made before language.
In Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading, the Sirens represent what must
be kept at bay in order for power and social organization to function,
and this allure is ‘that of losing oneself in the past’.13 But if Odysseus
ties himself to the mast in refusal or denial of the temptation, Western
civilization, starting with Homer, has learnt that a better way for the
implementation of obedience than that kind of violent disciplinary
action is the internalizing of norms: the Sirens’ song is, according to
Adorno and Horkheimer, neutralized as only a piece of art to be con-
templated, and therefore of no significant consequence for reality.14
Circe warns Odysseus of the Sirens, saying that their meadow is filled
with ‘heaps of corpses’, but when Odysseus explains to his crew how
they are going to pass the Sirens, he tells them of their ‘meadow starred
with flowers’.15 The Sirens, then, can, as has often been done, be read
as the muses of poetical language: they transform heaps of corpses into
flowers, they offer pleasure and not toil. But that offering might also
mean that the reader loses him- or herself, surrendering selfhood in
limitless pleasure.
If the Sirens tempt us with the loss of ourselves, combining sexual
and aesthetic delights in their singing, they do it by not speaking, by
not using language. Kafka’s recasting of the story points to this aspect
of the Sirens’ song: his Sirens neither speak nor sing; they remain silent.
But in Homer, they do use language, but language as a form of self-
reflexivity: their ‘ravishing voices’ exhort Odysseus to ‘come closer’ so
that he can hear their song. But, as Homer emphasizes, whoever listens
too closely to the song will never return home. Home in Homer is the
physical home; it is the island of Ithaca where Penelope faithfully awaits
Odysseus, a place that belongs to Odysseus, the landowner. But in
Kafka, that promise of happiness no longer exists, and in his appropria-
tion of the story, civilization seems very problematic. But we can also
understand ‘home’ as ‘home in oneself’: in the Subject.
Literature is born as such, and to itself, in the same measure that the
subject starts speaking. The Sirens sing about their own song and its
power, ‘like a bard that never stops singing’, as Tzvetan Todorov puts
it.16 The two versions of the Sirens, Homer’s and Kafka’s, offer two dif-
ferent but interrelated threats to the subject: that of aesthetic and erotic
delight, and that of a loss of language in its turning into song. In his
understanding of The Odyssey as, likewise, a document of a civilizing
process, Todorov points to Telemachus’s ‘passage from adolescence to
manhood’ as ‘marked exclusively by the fact that he begins to speak’.17
In this perspective, silence is a threat that must be controlled and, pref-

erably, be made harmless, through making it speak. But beginning to
speak, which is the entering into the circulation of speech, always and
necessarily includes the regulation of speech, one’s own but also that of
others. Telemachus illustrates precisely this. In his first appearance in
Homer, he not only speaks in public to his mother, but also rebukes her
for speaking about things, in this case the qualities of the bard’s song,
that women must keep silent about:
So, mother,
go back to your quarters. Tend to your own tasks,
the distaff and the loom, and keep the women
working hard as well. As for giving orders,
men will see to that, but I most of all:
I hold the reins of power in this house.18
By speaking, Telemachus takes on the form and function of the subject,

the one who ‘holds the reins of power’ in his hands. But this act also
includes his silencing of a woman, even of his own mother, who is at
first astonished but then obeys, and even happily ‘takes to heart / the
clear good sense in what her son had said’.19 Penelope stops listening to
the lure of the Siren, which in her case is the Poet qua Bard, and instead
sees to it that the household labour keeps working, keeps on producing.
But Telemachus is still too young to actually exercise the power in his
house; he will have to wait for his father to return home. Being a sub-
ject is a question also of being acknowledged as such, approved of, and
installed within the functions of the subject – that is, installed within
the power relations of a given social structure: ‘The awakening of the
subject is bought with the recognition of power as the principle of all
relationships.’20
What then, once again, is the Sirens’ song? What does it mean?
Pleasure, delight, the loss of self, or, as Albrecht Wellmer in a critical
reading of Adorno and Horkheimer puts it, ‘a desire beyond all meas-
ures, a desire for total fulfillment, for the abolition of difference’.21 But it
also says something about language as a fundamental part of becoming
a subject. Maurice Blanchot, in his reading of the Homer story, seems
to continue the Kafkaesque game or appropriation of the Homeric text
when maintaining that Homer and Odysseus are the same person, and
that he, Homer/Odysseus, ‘goes toward that place where the ability
to speak and narrate seems promised to him, just as long as he disap-
pears into it?’22 And Michel Foucault, in reading Blanchot, specifies
this song of the Sirens that makes the listener disappear, as the ‘being
of language’, which implicates the ‘visible effacement of the one who
speaks’.23 Language, then, once again, kills.
In Cage, the ‘effacement’ of the ego and the self becomes a desirable
goal in his growing interest in Zen Buddhism. But in Foucault, this
effacement of the individual seems more problematic, and not as attrac-
tive: silence is in Foucault ‘not the intimacy of a secret but a pure out-
side where words endlessly unravel’.24 Language becomes in Foucault
the apparatus that constantly produces the subject, which can exist
only as subjugated under a discursive regime. The song of the Sirens is
the opposite of language: it is, as Wellmer emphasizes, not difference
(the basic characteristic of language is that it works only as difference)
but rather a borderless pleasure.
In writing his version of the Sirens’ story, Kafka seems to acknowledge
a need not only to keep the Sirens under some kind of supervision, but
to exercise a kind of control that he gains by telling their story. He is
appropriating Homer’s story, which could be seen as a very doubtful and
ambiguous act in a culture that heralds originality and property. Kafka,
therefore, has the first word of his remake to be ‘Beweis’, ‘proof’, and the
last paragraph of this very short story starts with the sentence ‘Es wird
übrigens noch ein Anhang hierzu überliefert’, or, as the English transla-
tion has it, ‘A codicil to the foregoing has also been handed down.’25
With the choice of ‘codicil’, the translators obviously have chosen to
interpret Kafka and emphasize the juridical aspect of the story. ‘Anhang’
can have this meaning, but could perhaps also have been translated
as ‘addendum’: it is something added to the main text. Kafka draws a
circle around his story, installing it within a juridical discourse, but also
specifying his own text as something added to Homer’s, a comment
on it.26 His Odysseus, thinking that he hears what is outside himself, is
only listening to himself; he is transfixed not by the Sirens (which Circe
in Homer prophesies that he will be, should he listen to their song) but
by himself; and he, since he is telling the story of the Sirens himself
in Homer, is that bard that never stops singing: he is an apparatus. Or
he is literature: the history of Western literature is shadowed by the
problem of silence, how to handle it, make it speak, make it possible to
write, and, thereby, to include within the circulation of speech – and
at the same time, and perhaps in an increasing degree, how to respect
silence, express it, without forcing it into language and signification.
The basic division at work in subjectification is that between human
and animal. This goes also for the works discussed in this book: Austen’s
Fanny Price turns into a subject only in contrast to her animal-like father;
the individuals in The Scarlet Letter, that is, Hester and Dimmesdale, are
contrasted against the animal sounds of the multitude; the three scrib-
blers in Bartleby are all animal-like in their diet; the tortured informer
in Duras’s wartime notebooks is reduced to a screaming pig. At work in
several of these texts is also what I have called a ‘hermeneutical mon-
ster’, the one swallowing language, eating words; and in this gluttony,
the eating of language takes on an animalistic character, if in Austen,
Strindberg, Camus or Harris. And so on: perhaps not in all, but in sev-
eral of my chosen works, one can observe this division between human
and animal played out.
In his discussion of the man/animal division, Giorgio Agamben
maintains that we ‘should investigate not the metaphysical mystery of
conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separa-
tion’. Several of these works do precisely that, which means also that
they put their reader before the question that Agamben sees as the
crucial one: ‘What is man, if he is always the place – and, at the same
time, the result of ceaseless divisions and caesurae?’27 One conclusion
to draw from Agamben’s argument is that this question can only be
answered provisionally and in the form of an analysis of those dividing
practices that produce man as the ‘human’. In a reading of the works of
Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), Agamben comes to this conclusion: ‘Homo
sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species, nor a substance; it
is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the
human.’28 The ‘human’, then, is an apparatus, constantly at work at
defining itself by producing and repeating a division between itself and
the ‘other animal’. The ‘other animal’ is the expression used by – among
others – Mark Payne in order to both separate and conjoin two types
of animals.29 Payne, of course, creates his division as a way to escape
an otherwise imperative dichotomy, that between human and animal,
or human and non-human. Payne builds his argument upon a crucial
experience, that of having met the gaze of the other animal directed at
him, and which he uses in a critique of Levinas’s exclusive emphasis on
the human face as the beginning of language.30 Agamben also seeks to
overcome the dichotomy ‘man/animal, human/inhuman’, but his way
of trying is different from Payne’s in that he studies how the dividing
machine ‘necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is
also always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always
already an exclusion)’. And the machine, or the apparatus, can divide
because ‘the human is presupposed every time’.31
One consequence of this is that the ‘animal’ is not really a problem
for the apparatus: defined as the opposite of ‘human’, its place within a
power structure is given. Separating humans from animals is, for instance,
an obvious aspect of colonial practices and discourses. In James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), the English are sepa-
rated from the Indians, but a more decisive difference is also installed
among the Indians themselves, and it is based on silence and sound.
The Mohicans, cooperating with the English, are characterized by their
dignified, noble silence, which is broken often only by the austere utter-
ance of an ‘Hugh!’ But the Mohicans do also speak in Cooper’s novel,
as when the Indian chief, Chingachgook, addresses his adult son ‘in the
soft and playful tones of affection’. Their dialogue is then depicted in
musical terms:
It is impossible to describe the music of their language, while thus

engaged in laughter and endearments, in such a way as to render it
intelligible to those whose ears have never listened to its melody.
The compass of their voices, particularly that of the youth, was
wonderful, – extending from the deepest bass to tones that were even
feminine in softness.32
While the Mohicans’ speech is not translated, it is also not possible to

represent it within the English language. There is a moment of linguis-
tic utopianism in Cooper, with the Mohican language representing a
communication, which does not need the meaning of words and even
refuses semantics. But this language of music is situated right between
the reason of English speakers, and the absolute unreason of the Wild
Savages. While the impossibility of representing the beauty of words
spoken in Mohican is emphasized, no such rhetorical figure is used in
describing Huron speech. The Hurons simply utter animalistic sounds,
‘horrible cries and screams’.33 And when an Englishman performs a
song, in the background sits ‘the shaggy monster [a Huron Indian]
seated on end in a shadow of the cavern, where, while his restless body
swung in the uneasy manner of the animal, it repeated, in a sort of low
growl, sound, if not words, which bore some slight resemblance to the
melody of the singer’.34
The separation between human and animal is a recurrent, and central,
aspect of several, if not all, of my chosen texts, although sometimes more
implicit than in Cooper. Cooper’s casting of the Huron Indians as animals
is itself a clear example of how literature engages in linguistic violence,
and both this violent act as such, as well as Cooper’s representation of the
ideological evaluation of different speech strategies, tells us something in
general about the mechanisms of power and subjectification.35
What several of the works discussed here demonstrate, and that

Cooper actually touches upon, is that hybridization and hybrid forms,
forms that in different ways seem to combine aspects of both ends of
the man/animal-dichotomy, are the real problem. One can exemplify
with Chillingworth in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, or with Musil’s
Tonka: Chillingworth is a mixture of Indian and Western culture, not
by blood, but in his education.36 And Tonka is a linguistic hybrid,
which her name, in its combination of German and Czech, bears
witness to, and also a social hybrid, in combining different social
classes in her life, and therefore also different moral traditions. One
could say that Tonka, and other figures, are being worked on by the
literary apparatus; they are objects of normalizing and disciplinary
practices. But the literary apparatus is also the one that produces these
hybrid forms, that makes them possible and writable. Looked at as an
apparatus, literature has its machine-like features, but also something
else: literature is an apparatus that not only reproduces itself, repeats
itself; it also produces a redundance, forming a margin of autonomy
where the machinery and the workings of the apparatus are put under
discussion.
What happens to Handke’s Kaspar? Handke’s play can be used to illus-
trate Agamben’s thesis about subjectification as ‘the relentless fight between
living beings and apparatuses’.37 Of course, one could say that Kaspar does
not put up much of a fight: he is an easy target for that dividing practice,
called language, that he is the object of. But he does resist, to my mind;
he puts up a heroic fight against the prompter, and we cannot only look
at the actual action on stage if we are to understand Kaspar’s subjuga-
tion under normality. If normalization in, say, Camus’s The Fall to a large
degree is enacted through small figures, through which Clamence engages
his anonymous interlocutor in his diatribe, through the rhetorical tricks
generated to produce the interlocutor’s assent, in Kaspar subjectification
is situated also, firstly, in the learning of language and how to speak, and
secondly, in literature as an apparatus.
Perhaps one of the most famous of literary machines is the ‘eigentüm-
licher Apparat’ – the ‘strange machine’ – in Kafka’s ‘In der Strafkolonie’.
This is the machine that slowly kills its victims by writing their verdict
on their bodies: a typewriter. Isn’t this what literature also does? It both
writes its characters – and kills them. Language, as demonstrated by
the song of the Sirens, is deadly: poetic language is seductive, luring its
reader and listener into losing himself or herself. In the penal colony,
even the Officer overlooking the executions and the machine enters it,
if only to be killed by it, and the reader follows a detailed description
of his death: death is now actual, physical and brutal, and not only an
enticing song. And what finally kills the Officer is a specific detail in the
machine; through his forehead, an iron needle is forced: ‘the point of
the large iron spike had passed through the forehead’.38 This spike, or
iron needle, shows up also in Handke’s play: Kaspar is ‘gradually needled
into speaking through the use of speech material’.39 In the original
German, Handke uses the same substantive: ‘Stachel’, meaning ‘stinger’
or ‘thorn’; and in the English edition of Kafka’s story it is translated into
‘needle’. Kaspar is needled into speaking because he is inscribed within
an apparatus producing language and speech, and that is, somewhat
ironically, materialized as Kafka’s story of the strange machine.40
But here is a crucial difference also to be observed: Kaspar is not killed
by the machine. Or is he? We may think of Kaspar’s subjugation under
language, and his consequent adjustment to ‘accepted morality, self-
restraint, and toil’ as normality is defined in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret
Agent,41 as death, or living death – but the difference is decisive. Kaspar
ends with Kaspar still speaking, against a shrill sound:
Ich:
bin:
nur:
Ziegen und Affen:
Ziegen und Affen:
[‘I: am: only: Goats and Monkeys: Goats and Monkeys:’]42
Even though Kaspar actually has learned to speak, has become able
to form not only syllables or words, but also sentences and lines of
sentences, he still seems to confirm an animal status that learning
to speak was supposed to liberate him from. But at the same time,
Kaspar is with those last words confirming the ultimate triumph of the
‘eigentümlicher Apparat’ called ‘literature’: in stating his own identity,
he is quoting Shakespeare’s Othello. But life as quotation, as intertextual-
ity, is also a death: one is always another.
And the apparatus is constantly at work – the literary apparatus,
forcing us, as Barthes says, to conformism, as well as to anti-conformism.
The silencing of others is a constitutive part of becoming a subject,
but the silence of others is a threat to that same subjectification. It
is precisely this ambivalence that literature processes – and produces.
This strange ambiguity, which is a central aspect of modern literature,
means that literature has generated what Gérard Genette calls a ‘rhetoric
of silence’ (see above, Introduction). In order for it to be at all, literature
must force its silence to speak, and that speech even becomes a rhetoric,
organized around the central figure of silence as a way of speaking out
loud. Speech is the ultimate proof that one is still alive, that one is still
able to silence others with one’s speech. No one knows this – that words
are the only things we have in order to speak ourselves – better than
Samuel Beckett:
dream, dream again, dream of a silence, a dream silence, full of mur-

murs, I don’t know, that’s all words, never wake, all words, there’s
nothing else, you must go on, that’s all I know, they’re going to
stop, I know that well, I can feel it, they’re going to abandon me, it
will be the silence, for a moment, a good few moments, or it will be
mine, the lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts, it will be I, you
must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say
words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me,
strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already,
perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to
the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story,
that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence,
where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t
know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.43
Notes
Introduction: Cordelia’s Silence, Spoken Violence

1. Ah, yes, I am quite aware that literature really does not speak: it writes. But
for the sake of convenience, I will here use the speech metaphor as a way
of describing what literature does. And not only for convenience’s sake: the
speech metaphor nicely relates representation to what is represented, that is,
here to linguistic practices. But I would like to emphasize that ‘speech’ here
metaphorically, and at least potentially, includes any kind of symbolic inter-
action, even though language has a privileged position in our hierarchies of
symbolic systems. However, I am also aware that power, to some degree, rests
on the fact that not everyone has access to all sign systems through which
power is executed. But a study of other sign systems in literary representations
falls outside the scope of this book.
2. All quotations from King Lear, act 1, scene 1, are from The Arden Shakespeare
Complete Works (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1998).
3. John Cage, ‘Four Statements on the Dance’, in Silence (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1973 [1961]), p. 96.
4. Michel Foucault, ‘The Thought of the Outside’, tr. Brian Massumi, in
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–
1984, vol. 2 (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 166.
5. John Cage, ‘Lecture on Nothing’, in Silence, p. 109.
6. Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2004), p. 5.
7. The best introduction to the analysis of language and/as violence – although
with no emphasis on silence – is the German anthology Philosophien sprach-
licher Gewalt: 21 Grundpositionen von Platon bis Butler, ed. Hannes Kunch
and Stefan K. Herrmann, (Göttingen: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2010), which
devotes instructive chapters to individual thinkers in the field. Also a couple
of other German anthologies have served as both introductions and over-
views: Ursula Erzgräber and Alfred Hirsch (eds), Sprache und Gewalt, Studien
des Frankreich-Zentrums der Universität Freiburg Bd 6, (Berlin: Berlin Verlag
Arno Spitz, 2001); and Sibylle Krämer and Elke Koch (eds), Gewalt in der
Sprache: Rhetoriken verletzenden Sprechens (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010).
These two later studies include not only philosophy and linguistics, but also
literary analyses. The different contributions in S. I. Salamensky’s anthol-
ogy Talk, Talk, Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation (New York
and London: Routledge, 2001) give a fascinating and thought-provoking
overview of many different aspects of speech, even though it does not really
confront the question of violence in language.
8. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008),
p. 61. Žižek’s discussion is far from unique. An important predecessor is
Walter Benjamin, who, in ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of
175
176 Notes
Man’, uses the Fall to elaborate his mystical linguistic theory. See Benjamin,
Selected Writings I, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1993), pp. 62–74.
9. Michael Toolan, Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 13.
10. In the anthology Gewalt in der Sprache, Elke Koch, in her ‘Einleitung’, defines
‘violence’ as ‘Jemand tut jemandem ein Leid an’ (p. 11; ‘Someone hurts
someone else’). But this definition, in all its simplicity, is not precise enough
here. And my definition of violence as ‘giving or forcing form’ includes pain
as an effect of the giving of form.
11. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Power: Essential Works of Michel
Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, tr. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press,
2000), p. 340.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, tr. Carol Diethe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 12; Zur Genealogie der Moral, Sämtliche
Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag
and de Gruyter, 1999), p. 260: ‘Das Herrenrecht, Namen zu geben, geht
so weit, dass man sich erlauben sollte, den Ursprung der Sprache selbst als
Machtäusserung der Herrschenden zu fassen: sie sagen “das ist das und das”,
sie siegeln jegliches Ding und Geschehen mit einem Laute ab und nehmen
es dadurch gleichsam in Besitz.’
13. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005), p. 12.
14. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue,
tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1990), p. 249. The chapter ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is on pp. 246–264.
15. On humanism and its emphasis on the speaking being, see Thomas
Götselius, Själens medium: skrift och subjekt i Nordeuropa omkring 1500,
Göteborg: Glänta, 2010.
16. R. E. Allen, ‘Comment’, in The Dialogues of Plato. Vol. 3: Ion, Hippias
Minor, Laches, Protagoras, tr. R. E. Allen (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press 1996), pp. 49–50.
17. Plato, ‘Laches’, in Collected Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1997). I will be using this edition of Plato, and references will be
given in brackets in the text.
18. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de
France 1982–1983, tr. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
2010), p. 68.
19. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, tr. and ed. George A.
Kennedy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1355a.
20. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 1355a.
21. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 52.
22. James P. Zappen, The Rebirth of Dialogue: Bakhtin, Socrates, and the Rhetorical
Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 34–5.
23. Zappen, Rebirth of Dialogue, pp. 34, 78.
24. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson, Theory
and History of Literature, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984), p. 110–11.
Notes 177
25. Numbers refer to Plato, Gorgias, tr. Donald J. Zeyl, in Complete Works, ed.
John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997).
26. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. and intr. Stevie Davis (London: Penguin,
2006), p. 234.
27. Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 223.
32. Alfred P. Dorjahn, ‘On the Athenian Anakrisis’, Classical Philology 36.2
(1941), 185.
33. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, ed. William Smith, 1870, www.
ancientlibrary.com/smith-dgra/0100.html (accessed 13 March 2013).
34. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, I.15.26.
35. Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 29.
36. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged
(Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam, 1963).
37. Fogel, Coercion to Speak, p. 30.
38. On Alcibiades, see also Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject:
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, tr. Graham Burchell (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
39. Jennifer Wise, Dionysus Writes: The Invention of Theatre in Ancient Greece
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 132.
40. Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, tr. Matthew T. Bliss (Leiden:
Brill, 1998), §660.
41. Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 21.
42. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1986), p. 166.
43. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York:
Routledge, 1997), pp. 28–30.
44. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p. 13.
45. Roland Barthes, Leçon, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, 1974–1980 (Paris: Seuil, 1995),
p. 803, my translation. ‘Parler, et à plus forte raison discourir, ce n’est pas com-
muniquer, comme on le répète trop souvent, c’est assujettir; toute la langue est
une rection généralisée.’ And ‘le fascisme, ce n’est pas d’empêcher de dire, c’est
d’obliger à dire’. In ‘Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France’, in A Barthes Reader, ed.
Susan Sontag (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 460, the translation is: ‘To speak, and,
with even greater reason, to utter a discourse is not, as is too often repeated, to
communicate; it is to subjugate: the whole of language is a generalized rection.’
46. Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–
1978), tr. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005), p. 107. Elias Canetti has also, discussed questioning
as an exercise of power: ‘All questioning is a forcible intrusion.’ See his Crowds
and Power, tr. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking Press, 1962 [1955]), p. 284.
47. Barthes, The Neutral, p. 107.
48. Barthes, ‘Inaugural Lecture,’ p. 460.
178 Notes
50. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p 76.

51. Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings (New
York and London: Technology Press of MIT, John Wiley & Sons, Chapman &
Hall, 1956), p. 221. On Whorf’s relevance here, see also Jeanette R. Malkin,
Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to Shepherd (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 23.
52. Roman Jakobson, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic
Disturbances’, in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of
Language, Janua Linguarum no. 1 (’s-Gravenhage: Mouton de Gruyter, 1956),
p. 60. See also Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London and
New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 29f., for a similar view. One source for this
view on language is Fernand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale, 1916,
and Saussure’s discussion there of the arbitrary character of the sign – the
sign is motivated or non-motivated, and it is up to the speakers to introduce
‘order and regularity’ in the mass of signs, that is, linguistic communication
will be possible only if language appears as a motivated form of order.
53. See for instance Susan Mandala, Twentieth-Century Drama Dialogue as Ordinary
Talk: Speaking Between the Lines (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 10, 14f.
54. At another linguistic level, Michel Foucault suggests, in ‘The Subject and
Power’, that we must ‘distinguish power relations from relationships of com-
munication that transmit information by means of a language, a system of
signs, or any other symbolic medium. No doubt, communicating is always
a certain way of acting upon another person or persons. But the production
and circulation of elements of meaning can have as their objective or as their
consequence certain results in the realm of power; the latter are not simply
an aspect of the former’ (p. 337).
55. On this more ‘liberatory’ aspect of language, see for example S. I. Salamensky,
‘Dangerous Talk: Phenomenology, Performativity, Cultural Crisis’, and
Stanley Cavell, ‘Nothing Goes without Saying: The Marx Brothers’ Immigrant
Talk’, both in Talk, Talk, Talk, pp. 15–35 and 95–104, respectively.
56. Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, tr. H. E. Butler, The Loeb
Classical Library (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1986), I.v.8–10. See also Aristotle, who in his Poetics (1458a), sees ‘the use of
strange words’ as leading to ‘barbarism’.
57. See the Oxford English Dictionary online: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/
223638?rskey=GAKOR1&result=1&isAdvanced=false-eid (accessed 13 March
2013).
58. Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 19.
59. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, p. 8.
62. Michael Toolan, Total Speech, p. 231, sees Austin’s exclusion of literature
and other ‘non-serious’ uses of language as ‘simply mistakes’, of which too
much should not be made: ‘For all we know, they are misrepresentations
that Austin might have quite readily withdrawn – and even shown to be
mistaken, in view of the theoretical position he has reached by the close of
How To Do Things With Words (1962).’
63. Jacob L. Mey, Pragmatics: An Introduction (Oxford and Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell, 1993), pp. 137–8.
Notes 179
64. Mey, Pragmatics, p. 162.

65. Gérard Genette, ‘The Obverse of Signs’, Figures of Literary Discourse, tr. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 41.
66. Foucault in a ‘conversation’, translated as ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin
Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 194.
67. Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is an Apparatus?’, in What Is an Apparatus? And
Other Essays, tr. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009), p. 14. I have here, for the sake of simplicity, chosen to
keep to ‘apparatus’ as an accurate (and established) translation of ‘dispositif’.
But for a discussion of the consequences of a choice between ‘apparatus’ and
‘dispositif’, see Jeffrey Bussolini, ‘What Is a Dispositive?’, in Foucault Studies
10 (November 2010), 85–107. http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/
article/view/3120/3294 (13 March 2013).
68. Agamben, ‘What Is an Apparatus?’, p. 11. One could here also add the defini-
tions of ‘apparatus’ offered by Webster’s Third: among those are ‘the complex of
instrumentalities and processes by means of which an organization functions
or a systematized activity is carried out’, or ‘the machinery of government’.
69. Agamben, ‘What Is an Apparatus?’, p. 12.
73. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 366.
74. See Agamben, ‘What Is an Apparatus?’, pp. 19–20.
75. See Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, especially pp. 38–9.
76. Commenting upon the Greek and Roman practices for self-fashioning that
Foucault discusses, Edward F. McGushin writes that these practices ‘did not
interpret the self, they fashioned the self; they did not approach the self as a
text to be read but as a material to be formed’; see his Foucault’s Askesis: An
Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 2007), p. 97.
77. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 19.
78. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), especially pp. 58–64.
79. Michel Foucault, ‘Christianity and Confession’, in The Politics of Truth (New
York: Semiotext(e), 1997), p. 202.
80. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 59.
81. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 61. Foucault here sees confession as still
taking place before ‘the authority who requires the confession’, but today,
25 years after his writing, confession seems to have lost its need for an
authority, but instead has increased its desire for general admission to it:
the authority of confession is today modern media, but they function as
generators or engines, not as external, authoritative forces.
82. Foucault, ‘Christianity and Confession’, pp. 228–9.
84. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–74,
tr. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 43.
85. Foucault, Psychiatric Power, p. 45.
180 Notes

92. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, p. 339.
93. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, tr. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991), p. 48.
94. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 47.
95. Here, I would also like to foreground two works, already mentioned above,
which have been more important for my own work than might be clear from
my text. The first one is Aaron Fogel’s work on Joseph Conrad, Coercion to
Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue (1985), which demonstrated for me the
possibilities of the Bakhtinian concept of anacrisis, as well as its possible
shortcomings. The other work, which I came upon in the midst of writing,
is Jeanette R. Malkin’s Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to
Shepherd (1992). I share with her both parts of the theoretical perspective as
well as some literary works that we both discuss: finding her inspiring work
was important, and I will be referring to her analyses when discussing the
plays of Harold Pinter and Peter Handke.
1 The Exemplary Becomes Problematic: Austen

1. Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
2. Fanny’s line is discussed by Anne-Lise François in her Open Secrets: The
Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2008), pp. 223–4.
3. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 66.
4. S. I. Salamensky hints at this in ‘Dangerous Talk’, in his (ed.) Talk, Talk, Talk:
The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation (New York and London: Routledge,
2001), p. 28.
5. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 155.
6. J. Forrester, The Polite Philosopher, 1734, cited in Peter Burke, The Art of
Conversation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 111.
7. I am quoting Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. J. Lucas (London: Oxford
University Press, 1970). This edition follows the critical edition of the novel,
ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1923), but the commentaries on the text have
been revised. Page references are given in parenthesis directly in my text.
On Edward Said’s analysis, see his Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf,
1993), ch. ‘Jane Austen and Empire’.
8. As we will see, the economy is materialized also in other forms, such as archi-
tecture, but conversation is its most important medium.
9. John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 163.
Notes 181
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, tr. E. F.
N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 36.
11. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 193.
12. Brontë, quoted in Bharat Tandon, Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation
(London: Anthem, 2003), p. 41.
13. Jane Austen, Emma (Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen), ed.
R. Cronin and D. McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
p. 33.
14. Body language or postures of course continue to be of importance also in
bourgeois or middle-class social life, but then of a less ritualized or cho-
reographed character than in aristocratic settings. On the general relation
between human postures and power, see Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, tr.
Carol Stewart (New York: Viking Press, 1962), pp. 387–94.
15. As the reader will see, decorum is, directly or indirectly, a feature in almost all
of my chosen texts: both silence and speech are related to social conventions.
16. Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture, 1624, cited in Tandon, Jane
Austen and the Morality of Conversation, p. 176.
17. Vitruvius, On Architecture, vol. I, tr. Frank Granger, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), pp. 27–8.
18. Peter Burke suggests, in The Art of Conversation, p. 110, that the ‘traditional
theory of “accommodation” was reiterated’ – that is, conversation demands
accommodation to the company within which it is performed.
19. Tandon, Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation, p. 173.
20. Foucault discusses political parrhesia in Fearless Speech (Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext(e) 2001); and in a wider perspective in The Hermeneutics of the
Subject. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, tr. Graham Burchell (New
York: Palgrave, 2005), The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège
de France 1982–1983, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), as well as in The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II)
Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, tr. Graham Burchell (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
21. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, p. 53.
23. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005), p. 63.
24. See John Searle: ‘Making a statement is as much performing an illocutionary
act as making a promise, a bet, a warning, or what have you. Any utterance
will consist in performing one or more illocutionary acts.’ Cited in Jacob L.
Mey, Pragmatics: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 123.
25. Mey, Pragmatics: An Introduction, pp. 137–8.
26. Sarah Emsley, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (New York and
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), discusses how Austen engages with
both classical (as for example courage) and Christian (as for instance Mercy)
virtues in her writing. But one could perhaps also suggest another category
of virtues, namely those of contemporary convention (tact, for example).
27. Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals
from Locke to Austen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004), p. 76. Michael Kramp, in his Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern
182 Notes
Man (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), elaborates on this theme,
and suggests (p. 116) that Knightley in Emma represents a mixture of Burke’s
gallantry and Wollstonecraft’s individuality. Claudia L. Johnson, in Equivocal
Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790’s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe,
Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995, p. 201), points
out that Knightley’s character traits of ‘energy, vigor, and decision’ were not
valued by sentimental culture. Knightley therefore can be seen as having one
foot in both cultures: with his name, he refers back to a rhetoric of knight-
hood, but his character as such is much more valued in the modern, secular
or bourgeois culture we see more of in Persuasion.
28. Lynn Rigberg, Jane Austen’s Discourse with New Rhetoric, Studies in Nineteenth-
Century British Literature 14 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), p. 1.
29. On the opposition between male and female speech, and on female speech
in the theatre, see Patricia Howell Michaelson, Speaking Volumes: Women,
Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2002), especially pp. 98–113. See also Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of
Politeness, pp. 157–8, on ‘female modesty as a kind of speaking silence’.
30. James Thompson discusses this in his article ‘Jane Austen and the Limits of
Language’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85 (1986), 510–31. But
to my mind, as for many other commentators, silence has more strategic
significance in Austen than that of being only a literary topos.
31. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 14.
32. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the
Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press 1984), p. 38.
33. Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, p. 212.
34. See John Wiltshire, ‘Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion’: ‘Fanny’s moral atti-
tudes in general are overdetermined … and so it is a great simplification to see
her as modeling a “conduct book”, a Christian, or evangelical heroine. Does
she refuse to act in Lover’s Vows out of fear of acting, or out of disapproval of
the play? She certainly offers her timidity as her excuse, thereby displaying that
timidity rather than moral righteousness.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Jane
Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 60–1.
37. See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975), p. 217; and Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, p. 38.
38. François, Open Secrets, p. 257, talks about ‘the recessive “plot” of accommoda-
tion’, but emphasizes how Austen ‘comes close to representing naturalization’s
obverse; the permanent alienness of time’.
39. Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan,
1986), p. 156.
40. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of language (London and New York:
Routledge, 1990), p. 233. Lecercle is talking here about how language to
a patient suffering from schizophrenia takes on a ‘rhizomatic’ character
(Deleuze), slipping out of the speaker’s control, and spreading. But his basic
description of speech as violent holds true also for Fanny Price.
Notes 183
41. Lionel Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park’, The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism
(New York: Viking, 1955), p. 181.
42. D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
43. Miller, Jane Austen, p. 32.
44. Subordination is not the only feature of Fanny’s attraction: Margaret
Kirkham has pointed to ‘her beauty of face and figure’ (as Austen writes).
See her ‘Feminist Irony and the Priceless Heroine’, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield
Park, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), p. 118.
45. For a modern reader, the entrance that Sir Thomas makes into Fanny’s
room may be compared to that made by another Sir – that is, Sir Stephen in
Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O (1954) – into a woman’s room, and, after an eco-
nomic transaction with her lover, demands her sexual services. Sir Thomas
in Austen does not use any physical force – he doesn’t need to – and he
does not demand any sexual services, which would have been, of course, a
severe crime against gentlemanly decorum. Meanwhile, one should perhaps
remember that it is his own son, her future husband, who has raised or
transformed Fanny into an attractive and desirable erotic object, the prize.
46. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 184.
47. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 187.
48. Tanner, Jane Austen, p. 146.
49. Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, p. 244.
50. Edward Said points, in Culture and Imperialism, pp. 92–3, to the parallel
between Fanny’s expansion and that of capitalism: ‘right up to the last
sentence, Austen affirms and repeats the geographical process of expansion
involving trade, production, and consumption that predates, underlies, and
guarantees the morality’.
51. We could agree with François, Open Secrets, p. 239, that ‘[m]aking do with
less’ is ‘a strategy of survival for the arriviste from whom too little is expected
rather than too much’. But Fanny’s return to her childhood circumstances is
also a last glance backwards, at what she has left: she arrives not there, but
at Mansfield Park, gaining everything.
52. See Tanner, Jane Austen, p. 19, also p. 168.
53. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward
an Investigation)’, On Ideology, tr. Ben Brewster, Radical Thinkers, 26 (new
edn) (London and New York: Verso, 2008), p. 23.
54. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, p. 30.
55. Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 20.
56. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, p. 47.
57. Lecercle, The Violence of Language, p. 248, refers to F. Falhaut and his critique
of Jakobson: ‘Illocutionary force acts not only on the addressee but also on
the sender, and that its function in both cases is to ascribe a place within a
social system of places.’ See also Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 53:
‘But if I can address you, I must first have been addressed, brought into the
structure of address as a possibility of language before I was able to find my
own way to make use of it.’
58. See Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, p. 49.
59. Cited in Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness, p. 157.
184 Notes
2 The Secrets of Silence: Hawthorne, Musil

1. For a discussion of the Puritans, American history and historiography, see
Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet Letter (Baltimore and London:
The Johns Hopkins Press, 1991), especially chapter 2, ‘The Ironies of
A-History’. For a political interpretation of Hawthorne, see Magnus Ullén, The
Half-Vanished Structure: Hawthorne’s Allegorical Dialectics, Uppsala University,
2001.
2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Centenary Edition of the Works of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 1 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962), p. 4.
3. Nina Baym, The Scarlet Letter: A Reading, Twayne’s Masterwork Studies no. 1,
(Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1986), p. 86.
4. Stephen Railston, ‘The Address of The Scarlet Letter’, in The Scarlet Letter: Case
Studies in Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn, ed. Ross C Murfin (Boston and
New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), p. 359.
5. All examples are Railston’s, p. 360.
6. Brook Thomas talks about the ‘nascent formation of a relatively independ-
ent civil society’ in his ‘Love and Politics, Sympathy and Justice in The Scarlet
Letter’, in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Richard H.
Millington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 177.
7. Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), p. 202.
8. There is some truth to the understanding that ‘[t]he demands for utterance
that punctuate The Scarlet Letter … are unanswerable theoretically as well
as practically’, as Charles Feidelson, Jr., writes in his ‘The Scarlet Letter’, in
Hawthorne Centenary Essays, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1964), p. 35 – but this does not mean that the characters of
the novel do not try to answer them, in more or less direct ways.
9. Joanne Feit Diehl understands this double function of the embroidered
letter within a psychoanalytical perspective, describing the ‘A’ as a fetish,
which generates a ‘tension between disclosure and concealment [that] is the
narrative corollary to the fetish’s function: to mask desire while naming it’.
‘Re-Reading The Letter: Hawthorne, the Fetish, and the (Family) Romance’,
in The Scarlet Letter, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn, ed.
Ross C. Murfin (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), p. 320. Feit Diehl
also points to the letter as a representation of ‘what cannot be spoken’, iden-
tifying that as ‘the longing for the mother’ (p. 323) – my own analysis here
moves in a very different direction.
10. In his George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), Neil
Hertz discusses how language turns into ‘a burning or biting or branding
of its message – or perhaps only of its force – into the consciousness of the
listener’ (p. 123).
11. On Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, see the discussion of Gombrowicz’s
Ivona below in Chapter 3.
12. See here the discussion of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans
in Chapter 7, ‘Epilogue’, below.
13. Railston, ‘The Address of The Scarlet Letter’, p. 351.
14. See Baym, The Scarlet Letter: A Reading, p. 90f., on how Hawthorne construes
an originary and uniform social structure that is divided by the introduction
of the law. Thomas, ‘Love and Politics’, p. 179, emphasizes the structural
Notes 185
function of ‘the new beginning’, on different levels of the novel, that is

always denied us by Hawthorne: the novel is ‘anything but utopian’. See also
his ‘Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic Myth’, in The Scarlet Letter, Case
Studies in Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn, ed. Ross C. Murfin (Boston,
MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), pp. 439–40.
15. On social, or civil, and natural law in The Scarlet Letter, see Baym, The Scarlet
Letter: A Reading, p. 90. Thomas too hints at the presence of this dichotomy
when discussing the role of citizenship in the novel; see his ‘Citizen Hester’.
16. Thomas, ‘Citizen Hester’, p. 435.
17. That ‘citizen’ implies ‘the capacity to rule as well as to be ruled’ is a point
made by Thomas, ‘Citizen Hester’, p. 442.
18. Todd Kontje hints at this in his reading of the story: ‘The story thus falls
neatly into two halves, the first demonstrating the young man’s social,
intellectual, financial, and sexual dominance over Tonka, the second invert-
ing this pattern through the unresolved mystery of Tonka’s pregnancy.’
‘Motivating Silence; The Recreation of the “Eternal Feminine” in Robert
Musil’s “Tonka”’, Monatshefte 79.2 (1987), 165.
19. Nathalie Amstutz points to this in the form of an opposition between, on
the one hand, ‘Offenheit und Komplexität’ (openness and complexity), and
on the other, the ‘Fabel einer einfachen, jungen Frau’ (fable of a simple
young woman). But she also emphasizes that this ‘Einfachkeit’ (simplicity)
here is an ‘ästhetische Kategorie’ (aesthetic category); Autorschaftsfiguren.
Inszenierung und Reflexion von Autorschaft bei Musil, Bachmann und Mayröcker
(Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2004), p. 46.
20. I will be quoting ‘Tonka’, in Five Women, tr. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst
Kaiser (New York: Delacorte Press, 1966), pp. 69–122, in comparison with
‘Tonka’, in Gesammelte Werke II Prosa und Stücke. Kleine Prosa, Aphorismen,
Autobiographisches, Essays und Reden, Kritik, ed. Adolf Frisé (Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1978), pp. 270–306.
21. Kontje, ‘Motivating Silence’, p. 163, points to the tradition, emanating
from Goethe’s Faust, in which ‘a cultivated man of high social status has a
brief affair with what is conceived of as a simple, natural girl of the lower
classes’. Amstutz both enlarges the tradition and gives the motif a name:
‘Pygmalion’. See her Autorschaftsfiguren, p. 64.
22. ‘verläßliche Menschen’; ‘eines Familienmakels’ (291).
23. ‘Dornengerank in seinem Kopf’ (272); ’[es] war alles in ein Dornengerank
verwandelt worden’ (288).
24. ‘Alles, was er niemals gewußt hatte, stand in diesem Augenblick vor ihm,
die Binde der Blindheit schien von seinen Augen gesunken zu sein; einen
Augenblick lang, denn im nächsten schien ihm bloß schnell etwas einge-
fallen zu sein’ (306).
25. ‘Seine Verwandten sprachen lebhaft durcheinander und er bemerkte, wie
gut sie damit ihren Nutzen wahrten. Sie sprachen nicht schön, aber flink,
hatten Mut zu ihrem Schwall, und es bekam schließlich jeder, was er wollte.
Redenkönnen war nicht ein Mittel der Gedanken, sondern ein Kapital, ein
imponierender Schmuck’ (280).
26. ‘sich ganz anzugehören’ (286).
27. ‘wie kindlich tapfer sie sich in ihn stahl … um auch alles zu besitzen, was sie
an ihm bewunderte’ (287).
186 Notes
28. ‘man braucht bloß ganz ihm zu gehören und dann gehört man dazu’ (287).
29. ‘Übrigens hieß sie nicht ganz mit Recht Tonka, sondern war deutsch getauft
auf den Namen Antonie, während Tonka die Abkürzung der tschechischen
Koseform Toninka bildet; man sprach in diesen Gassen ein seltsames
Gemisch zweier Sprachen’ (272).
30. ‘weil sie die gewöhnliche Sprache nicht sprach, sondern irgend eine Sprache
des Ganzen’ (276).
31. ‘und wenn das alles auch dumm war, war der Abend eins mit ihren
Empfindungen’ (277).
32. ‘Stets waren es solche lächerlich ferne Gestalten, die wie ein verschnürtes
schmutziges Paket in die Erinnerung geworfen wurden, das die Wahrheit
enthielt und beim ersten Versuch es aufzuschnüren nichts als den
Staubhaufen quälender Ohnmacht hinterließ’ (295–6).
33. ‘Ihr schweigen war jetzt über alles gebreitet’ (296).
34. ‘blendend wie ein Märchen’ (296).
35. ‘der gleichen Undurchsichtigkeit in ihrem Geiste’ (274).
36. ‘das Geständnis zu entreißen’ (289).
37. ‘einer geheuchelt arglosen Frage, auf deren glattem Klang ihre Vorsicht aus-
gleiten sollte’ (295).
38. That ‘Tonka’ could be read together with Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ was
first suggested to me by Linda Haverty Rugg.
39. ‘Ich mußte mir doch etwas verdienen’ (275).
40. ‘das war jetzt der Liebe’ (281). That it is really Tonka who thinks that ‘this
was love’ is not absolutely certain. But the paragraph, written in free indirect
discourse, ends with this sentence as a summary conclusion of her reactions.
41. ‘die Flüßigkeit seiner Rede und Erzählergabe gerade davon kam, daß sie
seinem Geist fehlte’ (283).
42. See Kathleen O’Connor, Robert Musil and the Tradition of the German Novelle
(Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1992), p. 126: ‘The “identity” the narrator
attains is a construct of language, born of discourse. As such it lacks the
permanent substantiality of the psychological “individual” or “self”.’
43. On women’s silence as a prerequisite for men’s speech, see Friedrich A.
Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, tr. Michael Meteer, with Chris Cullens
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
44. ‘es lag eine edle Natürlichkeit darin, wie hilflos sie in der Abwehr des
Wertlosen war, aber ahnend es sich nicht zu eigen machte. Diese Sicherheit,
mit der sie alles Rohe, Ungeistige und Unvornehme auch in Verkleidungen
ablehnte, ohne sagen zu können warum, war staunenswert, aber ebensosehr
fehlte ihr jedes Streben, aus ihrem Kreis in einen höheren zu gelangen: sie
blieb wie die Natur rein und unbehauen’ (285).
45. ‘Sie war Natur, die sich zum Geist ordnet; nicht Geist werden will, aber ihn
liebt und unergründlich sich ihm anschloß’ (285).
46. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, p. 25.
47. ‘An einem Zaun. Ein Vogel sang. Die Sonne war dann schon irgendwo hinter
den Büschen. Der Vogel schwieg. Es war Abend. Die Bauernmädchen kamen
singend über die Felder. Welche Einzelheiten! Ist es Kleinlichkeit, wenn
solche Einzelheiten sich an einen Menschen heften? Wie Kletten!? Das war
Tonka. Die Unendlichkeit fließt manchmal in Tropfen’ (270).
48. ‘ein Mensch geht mit einem Hund ganz allein im Sternengebirge’ (305).
Notes 187
49. Once dead, Tonka becomes the ironic confirmation of Kittler’s hypoth-
esis: ‘The Mother did not write, she made men speak’; Discourse Networks
1800/1900, p. 63.
50. ‘Er fühlte sie von der Erde bis zum Kopf und ihr ganzes Leben’ (306).
51. ‘Und wer war Tonka? Geist von seinem Geiste? Nein, in zeichenhafter
Übereinstimmung war sie ein fremdes Geschöpf mit seinem verhohlenen
Geheimnis, das sich ihm zugestellt hatte!’ (293).
3 Refusal: Melville, Gombrowicz

1. Here quoted after Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, tr. Susan
Hanson, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 82 (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
2. Witold Gombrowicz, Ivona, Princess of Burgundia, tr. Krystyna Griffith-Jones
and Catherine Robins (New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 9. My discussion
of Ivona is based on this translation, but in comparison with both German
and Swedish translations: Yvonne, die Burgunderprinzessin, tr. Heinrich
Kunstmann, in Theaterstücke. Gesammelte Werke Bd 5 (Munich: Carl Hansen,
1997), pp. 5–77; and Yvonne, prinsessa av Burgund, tr. Mira Teeman, in Yvonne,
prinsessa av Burgund; Vigseln; Operett: tre pjäser (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1968).
3. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, tr. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 73.
4. See the section ‘Disciplinary Power’ in the Introduction above.
5. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, tr. Graham Burchell
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 101.
7. Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wall Street’, The Writings
of Herman Melville. The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, Vol. 9: The Piazza Tales
and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860 (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern
University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987); page numbers are given
in brackets after the quote.
8. Dan McCall discusses the status of the subtitle in his The Silence of Bartleby
(Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), starting from a
simple opposition: ‘Some critics think “A Story of Wall-street” is too limit-
ing, that it insists too much on the local setting of a work that has universal
implications. Other readers argue the opposite: “Bartleby, The Scrivener” is a
story about Wall Street, about economic pressures and class relationships; to
remove the subtitle is to remove a cultural dimension from the story which
was essential to its imaginative conception’ (pp. xi–xii).
9. This has been suggested by, among others, Brook Thomas, Cross-Examinations
of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 164–82.
10. Graham Thompson, Male Sexuality under Surveillance: The Office in American
Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), p. 5.
11. Graham Thompson has observed this dialectic in Bartleby in Male Sexuality
under Surveillance, p. 14.
12. See also McCall, The Silence of Bartleby, p. 58, on the impenetrable character
of Bartleby.
188 Notes
13. McCall, The Silence of Bartleby, p. 62.

14. Graham Thompson notes this, and sees it as a ‘feminization’ of the office, cre-
ating a certain ambiguity in the lawyer: both an erotic attraction and the need
to distance himself from this displacing force. See Thompson, Male Sexuality
under Surveillance, pp. 14–16.
15. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century
England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 46.
16. Shapin, A Social History of Truth, p. 64.
17. And within literature: he has provoked an overwhelming amount of literary
analysis – according to Matthew Guillen, in 2007 more than two hundred
articles, dozens of chapters in books, and several whole books; see his Reading
America: Text as a Cultural Force (Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, 2007),
p. 172, note 5. But there have also been literary re-representations, ranging
from T-shirt slogans to Georges Perec’s ‘Bartlebooth’ in La Vie – Mode d’emploi
(1978), or Irazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea (2001), as well as Enrique Vila-
Matas, Bartleby & Co (2004). Dan McCall, in his The Silence of Bartleby, repeat-
edly calls the scholarly writing on Bartleby the ‘Bartleby Industry’.
18. The German translation here has ‘Also tun wir, was wir tun müssen! …
Funktionieren! Funktionieren!’ (8).
19. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 27.
20. Allen Kuharski maintains that Ivona’s – as well as Molly’s (from The
Marriage) – ‘eloquent silences embody Nietzsche and Foucault’s diagnosis of
history’; see his ‘Witold, Witold, and Witold: Performing Gombrowicz’, in
Gombrowicz’s Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality, ed. Ewa Plonowska
Ziarek (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 284.
21. In his Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form (West
Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2010), Michael Goddard considers
Princess Ivona a ‘virulent attack on the upper-middle-class familial and social
milieu of the manor that Gombrowicz came from’ (p. 74). While there might
be some truth to this as an explanation for the genesis of the play, I am more
reluctant to identify the resulting play with its sources.
22. Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), Book VI, ll. 555–9.
23. Patricia Klindienst Joplin, ‘The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours’, in Rape
and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 41.
24. Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is an Apparatus?’, in What Is an Apparatus? And
Other Essays, tr. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford
25. Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, tr. Danuta Borchardt (New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press, 2000 [1937]), pp. 46–7.
26. Birgit Harress, Die Dialektik der Form: das mimetische Prinzip Witold
Gombrowiczs (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), s. 267: ‘Verweigerung
ist der Grundzug in Iwonas Verhalten, Verweigerung gegenüber dem kate-
gorischen Imperativ der Form.’ See Goddard, Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism,
and the Subversion of Form, p. 75: ‘The whole of the drama is therefore not
so much concerned with particular individuals but their relations to the
“formalism” of social habits in which they can be incorporated.’
Notes 189
4 Monologue: Strindberg, Camus, Beckett

1. Strindberg also uses the letters X and Y as the names for the two men
speaking in his next one-act play, Pariah (1889), and to the same effect:
the speakers are parasitic on each other.
2. As Peter Szondi remarks in his Theory of the Modern Drama: A Critical
Edition, ed. and tr. Michael Hays (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 25, we
can find in The Stronger ‘something akin to the core of the three- or four-
act play by Ibsen’. Szondi adds that the ‘hidden and the repressed appear
with incomparably greater power in the density and purity of Strindberg’s
monologue than in Ibsen’s dialogue. And their revelation does not require
that “unparalleled act of violence” which Rilke saw in Ibsen’s work.’ It is in
a passage of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, where the addressee
is generally considered to be Ibsen, that Malte talks about ‘the unparalleled
violence of your work’; see Rainer Marie Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge, tr. Burton Pike (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2008), p. 61. But the
presence and importance of violence in The Stronger too seems obvious to me.
The strategic position of The Stronger within the history of drama should also
be underscored: as Barry Jacobs notices, for instance, it is ‘the direct ancestor
of modern monodramas like O’Neill’s Before Breakfast and Krapp’s Last Tape by
Beckett’; ‘Introduction’, Strindberg’s One-Act Plays, tr. Arvid Paulson (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1969), p. xxvi.
3. Egil Törnqvist focuses on this question in his discussion of the play,
and his conclusion is that of a ‘delicate balance’ between the two women.
See his Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structures, Stockholm and Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Almqvist & Wiksell International/Humanities Press, 1982),
pp. 64–70.
4. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London and New York:
Routledge, 1990), pp. 256f.
5. See for instance the concluding scene of The Father, where the Captain’s
childhood is narrated by the Nurse, thereby luring him into the straitjacket.
6. There are several translations of The Stronger in circulation. I am using here
Joe Martin’s translation in Strindberg – Other Sides: Seven Plays, tr. Joe Martin
(New York: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 309–18.
University Press, 2005), pp. 24 and p. 6.
8. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson, Theory
and History of Literature, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984), p. 184.
9. See for instance Everett C. Frost, who, with Beckett as his example, states
that ‘the monologist needs an audience, no matter how remotely present
or dimly felt’; ‘Mediatating On: Beckett, Embers, and Radio Theory’, in
Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print media, ed. Lois
Oppenheimer (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), p. 318.
10. Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, in Derrida,
Acts of literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge,
1992), p. 256.
11. Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p. 299.
190 Notes
12. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Essential Works of Michel
Foucault III Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000),
p. 326.
14. The English translation – The Fall, tr. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1961) – will be quoted with references in brackets after quotes. The
references to the original French of La Chute are put in the notes and are
from Œuvres completes, III 1949–1956, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris:
Gallimard, 2008), here p. 699: ‘Mais permettez-moi de me présenter: Jean-
Baptiste Clamence, pour vous servir. Heureux de vous connaître.’
15. Debarati Sanyal repeatedly formulates the ambiguous character of Clamence
as a ‘contradictory position as simultaneously critic, apologist and symptom
of history’s ongoing violence’. See his The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire,
Irony, and the Politics of Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2006), p. 196.
16. ‘Prononcez vous-même les mots qui, depuis des années, n’ont cessé de
retentir dans mes nuits, et que je dirai enfin par votre bouche’ (765).
17. The phrase ‘A Hero of Our Time’ was also part of an intended motto, taken
from Lermontov; see Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz
(Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 179. That quote
is used on the title page of the English translation by Justin O’Brien, but not
in the version of the text as printed in the Pléiade edition.
18. LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz, p. 83.
19. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 195.
20. Compare also Suzanne Sharland’s discussion of this changed meaning of
‘diatribe’ in her Horace in Dialogue: Bakhtinian Readings in the Satires (Oxford:
Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 20–2.
21. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 120. Bakhtin also, p. 154, defines
an obvious intertext to La Chute, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, as
‘constructed as a diatribe (a conversation with an absent interlocutor), satu-
rated with overt and hidden polemic, and contains important elements of
the confession’. Peter Dunwoodie has analysed the intertextual relationship
between La Chute and two of Dostoevsky’s novels, Crime and Punishment and
Notes from Underground; see his Une Histoire ambivalente: Le Dialogue Camus-
Dostoevsky (Paris: Librairie Nizer, 1996), pp. 115–55.
22. Sharland, Horace in Dialogue, pp. 22–3.
23. Sharland, Horace in Dialogue, p. 32.
24. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 196.
25. Camus (Fr. orig.) ‘Puis-je, monsieur, vous proposer mes services, sans risquer
d’être importun?’ (697).
26. ‘Franchement’ (736).
27. ‘Je suis confus de vous recevoir couché’ (751).
28. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 61–2.
29. Peter Dunwoodie, Une Histoire ambivalente, p. 154, has also seen the anacriti-
cal aspect of La Chute: ‘Les renversements et faux-fuyants sur lesquels joue le
récit camusien, à l’instar de l’intertexte dostoïevskien, créent une anacrèse plus
directe que le Sous-sol [Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground], parce que (appara-
ment) moins mediatisée par l’écriture.’
Notes 191
30. ‘N’avez-vous pas remarqué que …?’ (699, 729); ‘Vous ne comprenez pas ce
que je veux dire?’ (730).
31. ‘N’avez vous jamais eu subitement besoin de sympathie, de secours, d’amitié?
Oui, bien sur’ (710); ‘Vous devez trouver cela puéril’ (739); ‘Je vois à votre air
que je passe bien vite, selon vous, sur ces détails qui ont du sens’ (753).
32. ‘comme vous le voyez’ (698); ‘vous ne trouvez pas?’ (731); ‘L’étonnement
que je rencontrais généralement chez mes auditeurs, leur gêne un peu réti-
cente, assez semblable à celle que vous montrez – non, ne protestez pas – ne
m’apportèrent aucun apaisement. Voyez-vous, il ne suffit pas de s’accuser
pour s’innocenter, ou sinon je serais un pur agneau’ (740).
33. ‘ne vous inquiétez pas’ (764).
34. ‘Ferez-vous un long séjour à Amsterdam? Belle ville, n’est-ce pas? Fascinante?
Voilà un adjectif que je n’ai pas entendu depuis longtemps’ (698); ‘Qu’est-ce
qu’un juge-pénitent? Ah! je vous ai intrigué avec cette histoire’ (703); ‘Mais
nous sommes arrivés, voici ma maison, mon abri! Demain? Oui, comme
vous voudrez’ (729).
35. On the reader as Clamence’s interlocutor, see LaCapra, History and Memory
After Auschwitz, p. 87.
36. ‘Où en étais-je? Ah! oui, l’honneur!’ (721); ‘Comment? Pardonnez-moi, je
pensais à autre chose’ (714); ‘Comment? J’y viens, ne craignez rien, j’y suis
encore, du reste’ (712).
37. ‘À moins que vous ne m’autorisiez à plaider votre cause, il ne devinera pas
que vous désirez de genièvre’ (697).
38. See Sanyal, The Violence of Modernity, p. 185: ‘His sly confession moves from
a “Je” who has fallen to the “nous” of a community that is equally fallen but
unaware of it.’
39. ‘Voyons, permettez-moi de jouer au détective. Vous avez à peu près mon
âge, l’œil renseigné des quadragénaires qui ont à peu près fait le tour des
choses, vous êtes à peu près bien habillé, c’est-à-dire comme on l’est chez
nous, et vous avez les mains lisses. Donc, un bourgeois, à peu près! Mais un
bourgeois raffiné!’ (700).
40. ‘Ah! Chère planète! Tout y est clair maintenant. Nous nous connaissons,
nous savons ce dont nous sommes capables’ (717).
41. ‘N’est-il pas bon aussi bien de vivre à la ressemblance de la société et pour
cela ne faut-il pas que la société me ressemble?’ (760).
42. ‘Vous exercez à Paris la belle profession d’avocat! Je savais bien que nous étions
de la même race. Ne sommes-nous pas tous semblables, parlant sans trêve et
à personne, confrontés toujours aux mêmes questions bien que nous connais-
sions d’avance les réponses?’ (765).
43. ‘Allons, voilà que ça me reprend, je vais plaider’ (750).
44. ‘Quand nous serons tous coupables, ce sera la démocratie’ (760). See René
Girard, ‘Camus’s Stranger Retried’, in ‘To Double Business Bound’: Essays on
Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 33: ‘La Chute … is directed against the
lawyers in a world where only lawyers are left.’
45. ’Non, je navigue souplement, je multiplie les nuances, les digressions aussi,
j’adapte enfin mon discours à l’auditeur, j’amène ce dernier à renchérir. Je
mêle ce qui me concerne et ce qui regarde les autres. Je prends les traits com-
muns, les expériences que nous avons ensemble souffertes, les faiblesses que
192 Notes
nous partageons, le bon ton, l’homme du jour enfin, tel qu’il sévit en moi et
chez les autres. Avec cela, je fabrique un portrait qui est celui de tous et de
personne’ (761).
46. In a convincing polemic against Shoshana Felman’s reading of La Chute,
LaCapra describes the novel ‘as a critique of the position of the bystander’,
p. 76. Shoshana Felman’s problematic reading, in which she equates La Chute
with Paul de Man’s silence on his personal wartime history, can be found in
her and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,
and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 165–203.
47. See Barthes, The Neutral, p. 26, where Barthes notes how silence is one of
the signs often ‘produced so as not to be a sign’ but one that is ‘very quickly
recuperated as a sign’.
49. Samuel Beckett, Embers: A Piece for Radio (1959), in Collected Shorter Plays
(London: Faber and Faber 1984), p. 93. Hugh Kenner calls Embers ‘Beckett’s
most difficult work’ in his Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (New York: Grove
Press, 1961), p. 174, a view that is echoed by Rosemary Pountney in her
Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956–1976 From All That Fall to
Footfalls with Commentaries on the Latest Plays (Gerrard Cross: Colin Smythe,
1998), p. 113: ‘Beckett’s most impenetrable play’.
50. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, tr. Michael Meteer, with
Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 229.
51. In other editions, Embers ends with Henry’s last words, ‘Not a sound’ – see for
instance The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 264.
The first – as far as I know – printed edition of Embers has ‘Sea’ as the ultimately
last word: Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 39.
52. Marjorie Perloff reads Embers as a parody of radio: ‘But in Embers, there are
no findings, no announcement, no “late bulletin.” Indeed, it is these features
of radio discourse that Beckett parodies: the radio audience’s demand for fact
is consistently undercut by verbal and phrasal repetition, by elaborate rheto-
ric and sonic excess.’ See her ‘The Silence That Is Not Silence: Acoustic Art in
Samuel Beckett’s Embers’, in Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: Music, Visual
Arts, and Non-Print Media, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York: Garland , 1999),
p. 264. For an early discussion of how Embers was actually broadcast, espe-
cially in the original BBC broadcast, see Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting:
A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett For and In Radio and Television, Acta
Academiae Aboensis, Series A, 51.2 (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1976), pp. 93–9.
53. Embers was originally broadcast by the BBC on 29 June 1959.
54. Jonathan Kalb, ‘The Mediated Quixote: The Radio and Television Plays, and
Film’, in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 124–44. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett:
A Critical Study, p. 174, hints at this: Henry ‘is the director as well as the
principal actor; the sound-effects men await his cues’. But Kenner also means
that Henry is ‘taking command of the medium’, although in my view it is
rather the other way round: the medium taking command of Henry.
55. In Swedish playwright Lars Norén’s Blood, tr. Maja Zade (London: Methuen,
2003), the frequent uses of media technologies is combined with Sophocles’
Oedipus, that is, a literary apparatus works intertextually on Blood, and is
transmitted via cameras, door phones, CDs, records, etc.
Notes 193
56. Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p. 269. Derrida is here referring to the ‘gra-
mophony of yes’ in Joyce’s text.
57. The counting of more than two hundred instances of ‘pause’ is not mine,
but that of Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, p. 89. One can here add that
Strindberg’s The Stronger, even shorter than Embers, includes something like
80 stage directions saying ‘Pause’, if we among these include, as does Swedish
scholar Hanif Sabzevari, interruptions in the spoken lines marked only with
a ‘–’. See his Varför tiger du? Expositionen i sju enaktare av August Strindberg,
Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 43, 2008, p. 60.
58. Marjorie Perloff’s view that radio, with ‘its sounding of disembodied voices
makes it the perfect vehicle for the dance of death that is its subject’
(‘The Silence That Is Not Silence’, p. 264), points to the central role of the
Strindbergian theme of the dance of death, that is, of a (hellish) logic that
takes control over the subjects.
59. Beckett to Paul-Louis Mignons, cited in Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 245.
60. Zilliacus points to the centrality of ‘the opposites of light and darkness’
(Beckett and Broadcasting, p. 87) in Embers, but to me the significance of
‘white’ here is not the absence of colours, nor the opposite of black, but its –
so to say – ‘audible’ character in the play.
61. Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), pp. 6 and p. 24.
62. Or, as Walter Benjamin writes: ‘The concept of progress must be grounded
in the idea of catastrophe. That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe.
It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. Thus
Strindberg (in To Damascus?): hell is not something that awaits us, but
this life here and now.’ The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1999), N 9 a, 1.
63. The literary allegorization of technology forcing us to speak is at least as old as
the invention of sound reproduction: Strindberg’s The Roofing Feast (1906) is an
interesting example, in which the ‘graphophone’, a predecessor to the gramo-
phone, is used as a violent, irresistible trigger of speech. Strindberg’s story also
has a hallucinatory aspect: these machines produce phantasmatic speech …
64. The symmetry in Embers, with ‘hammering’ as the keyword, that connects
sex to piano playing and horse riding, has been emphasized by James Jesson,
‘“White World. Not a Sound”: Beckett’s Radioactive Text in Embers’, Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 51.1 (Spring 2009), 53–4.
65. On the history of the gramophone, see Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous
Phonograph, 1877–1977 (New York: Macmillan, 1977).
5 Interrogation: Rankin, Harris, Pinter, Duras

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 59; Histoire de la sexualité 1: La
Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 79.
2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 4.
194 Notes
3. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, ed. Véronique Pauly

(London: Penguin, 2007), p. 354. This is, then, the torture scene that Aaron
Fogel calls ‘primal’ – see the section ‘Anacrisis’ in the Introduction, above –
and Fogel analyses it on pp. 25–9 in his Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of
Dialogue (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1985). See
also pp. 121 and 138.
4. Conrad, Nostromo, p. 356.
5. Ian Rankin, Black and Blue (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997).
6. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, tr. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking Press,
1962), p. 285.
7. For Foucault on psychiatric questioning, see his Psychiatric Power: Lectures
at the Collège de France, 1973–74, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), pp. 184–5.
8. Aristotle, Rhetoric, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford
Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Bollingen Series LXXI – 2 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 1355b1.
9. On the ‘non-technical’ nature of torture, see Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1356a1. See
also Jennifer R. Ballengee, The Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of Torture
(New York: New York State University Press, 2009), pp. 1–2. On torture of
slaves, see for instance George A. Kennedy, in Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory
of Civic Discourse, tr. George A. Kennedy (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), p. 115, n.265: ‘the official assumption being that
slaves could not be counted on to tell the truth otherwise’.
University Press, 2005), pp. 107–8.
11. Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1988).
Lecter’s last name, with its roots in the Latin legere, ‘to read’, is discussed by –
for example – John Goodrich, ‘Hannibal at the Lectern: A Textual Analysis
of Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s Character and Motivations in Thomas Harris’s Red
Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs’, in Dissecting Hannibal Lecter: Essays
on the Novels of Thomas Harris, ed. Benjamin Szumskyj (Jefferson, NC and
London: McFarland, 2008), p. 38. In his essay, Goodrich also discusses
Lecter’s readings of people.
12. See for instance Peter Messent, ‘American Gothic: Liminality and the Gothic
in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter Novels’, in Dissecting Hannibal Lecter,
pp. 13–36.
13. One could also look at Lecter as a variation upon Musil’s Ulrich, who is the
man without qualities: Lecter lacks identity or characteristics, and instead
repeatedly takes on different, temporary identities, also those of his victims.
14. Lecter’s first name, Hannibal, is also the name of the city where Mark Twain
was born: is there any significance to this? Well, he also reads Alexandre
Dumas, which Twain did enthusiastically. And does not Lecter wear the equiv-
alent of the iron mask that Dumas writes about in Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou
Dix ans plus tard (1847), its last part known in English as The Man in the Iron
Mask? The historical Hannibal was of North African origin, and Dumas had
African ancestry. Thomas Harris’s novels are full of these types of intertextual
games, or allusions, but the individual significance of them is, I’m afraid, not
always clear to me.
Notes 195
15. Elana Gomel, Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2003), p. 58, suggests that Lecter has ‘the most traditional
identity of all, the ahistorical incorporeal identity of a moral monad’. This
lack of ‘story’, of a ‘past’, turns Lecter into a sort of conversational machine,
totally directed, through anacrisis, towards his interlocutor.
16. Plato, Laches, tr. Donald J. Zeyl, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 187e–188a.
17. There are more novels by Harris featuring Starling and Lecter, but I leave
their later whereabouts outside my discussion. For those interested in these
novels, see the essays in Dissecting Hannibal Lecter.
18. Harold Pinter, Mountain Language (London: Faber and Faber, 1988).
19. Names and the act of naming have a special significance in Pinter’s works.
See for instance Ronald Knowles, ‘Names and Naming in the Plays of Harold
Pinter’, in Harold Pinter: You Never Heard Such Silence, ed. Alan Bold (London:
Vision, 1985), pp. 113–30. See also Stephen Watt, ‘Things, Voices, Events:
Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language as Testamental Text’, in Modern Drama
52.1 (Spring 2009), 47: ‘In Mountain Language, Pinter specifically exploits
the defining linkage between linguistic capability and species identity, as
women and dogs alike are required to give their names on command; ….’
20. Varun Begley, Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism (Toronto: Toronto
21. Martin Esslin, Pinter: The Playwright (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 209.
22. Jeanne Colleran, ‘Disjuncture as Theatrical and Postmodern Practice in
Griselda Gambaro’s The Camp and Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language’,
in Pinter at Sixty, ed. Katherine H. Burkam and John L. Kundert-Gibbs
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 58.
23. Austin Quigley, ‘Pinter, Politics and Postmodernism’, in The Cambridge
Companion to Harold Pinter, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 21, sees that combination as characteristic for the ‘late’
Pinter.
24. See for instance Watt, ‘Things, Voices, Events’, p. 39: ‘Central to the por-
trayal of the economy of domination in Harold Pinter’s writing are language
and, perhaps oddly, naming.’ But it is not at all an ‘odd’ status that Pinter
ascribes to naming.
25. Esslin, Pinter: The Playwright, p. 210, puts some emphasis on an unprob-
lematic referential: Mountain Language ‘does in fact refer to Turkey’ and the
oppression directed at the Kurdish people.
26. Colleran, ‘Disjuncture as Theatrical and Postmodern Practice’, p. 58.
27. On the concept of the ‘state of emergency/exception’, and its consequences,
see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception tr. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2005).
28. Colleran, ‘Disjuncture as Theatrical and Postmodern Practice’, pp. 61–2,
notes, but without using the term, this performative speech in the play.
29. Marc Silverstein, Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power (Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell University Press, 1993), p. 147.
30. That the young woman becomes a prostitute has been suggested by, for
instance, Colleran, ‘Disjuncture as Theatrical and Postmodern Practice’, p. 61.
31. Silverstein, Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power, p. 148, notes how
power in Pinter tends to see a ‘reflected version of itself’ in the other.
196 Notes
32. Page references in brackets after quotes are from Marguerite Duras, Wartime
Writings 1943–1949, tr. Linda Coverdale (New York: The New Press, 2008);
page references in the notes are to the French original, Cahiers de la guerre et
autres textes (Paris: P.O.L./Imec, 2006).
33. ‘Il est tout nu, il a une veille verge et des testicules flétris, il n’a pas de taille,
il est gras, il est sale. Il est gras’ (115).
34. ‘Salaud. Enfant de pute. Porc’ or ‘Salaud, cochon, putain, ordure, fumier’ (120).
35. ‘On peut le tuer’ (124).
36. Canetti, Crowds and Power, p. 286.
37. ‘Ce sont les coups qui l’empêchent de parler. Mais si les coups s’arrêtent, il
ne parlera pas’ (128).
38. Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party (London: Methuen, 1980 (1960]), p. 45.
39. Jeanette R. Malkin, Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to
Shepherd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 57, also main-
tains that Pinter uses ‘stereotyped police interrogation’.
40. Malkin, Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama, p. 61.
41. Malkin, Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama, p. 59, emphasizes that the
seemingly nonsensical questions that Goldberg and McCann put to Stanley are
not at all random and nonsensical, but rather are ‘verbal stereotypes’, belong-
ing to the ‘moral and intellectual clichés’ that Stanley has turned his back on.
43. S. I. Salamensky, ‘Dangerous Talk: Phenomenology, Performativity, Cultural
Crisis’, in S. I. Salamensky (ed.), Talk, Talk, Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday
Conversation (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p. 26.
44. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, in Theory of Prose, tr. Benjamin Sher
(Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), pp. 13–14.
45. Roman Jakobson, ‘On Realism in Art’, in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna
Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 22.
6 Literature as Coerced Speech: Handke

1. Cited in June Schlueter, The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke (Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), p. 41. For different versions of the Kaspar
Hauser story, including his own, see Ulrich Struve (ed.), Der Findling:
Kaspar Hauser in der Literatur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992).
2. Handke, interviewed by Arthur Joseph in 1969, cited in Schlueter, The Plays
and Novels of Peter Handke, p. 41.
3. Peter Handke, Kaspar, in Kaspar and Other Plays, tr. Michael Roloff (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), p. 59; further references are given
within brackets after quotes. German original in Stücke 1 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1972), here p. 103: ‘Es zeigt, was MÖGLICH IST mit jemandem.’
Further references to the German original are given in the notes.
4. ‘Die Zuschauer sehen das Bühnenbild nicht als Bild eines woanders gelegenen
Raumes, sondern als Bild von der Bühne’ (104).
5. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Power: Essential Works of Foucault
1954–1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000),
pp. 338–9.
Notes 197
6. See M. Read, ‘Peter Handke’s Kaspar and the Power of Negative Thinking’,
Forum for Modern Language Studies 29.2 (1993), 130.
7. On Feuerbach, see Peter Bekes, Peter Handke, Kaspar: Sprache als Folter:
Entstehung, Struktur, Rezeption, Didaktik (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh,
1984), p. 43; on Othello, see Read, ‘Peter Handke’s Kaspar and the Power of
Negative Thinking’, p. 139. Also David Barnett points to intertextuality in
Kaspar as a web of power relations – see his ‘Dramaturgies of “Sprachkritik”:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Blut am Hals der Katze” and Peter Handke’s
“Kaspar”’, The Modern Language Review 95.4 (2000), 1060.
8. Kaspar as abstract: see for example Richard Arthur Firda, Peter Handke, Twayne’s
World Authors Series 828 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), p. 22. Kaspar
is here an ‘abstracted and theatricalized figure’. On the impossibility of
psychological interpretation, see Fritz Wefelmeyer, ‘Handke’s Theater’,
in David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp (eds), The Works of Peter Handke:
International Perspectives, Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture and Thought
(Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press 2005), p. 212.
9. One of the meanings of ‘model’ is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
this: ‘A simplified or idealized description or conception of a particular system,
situation, or process, often in mathematical terms, that is put forward as a basis
for theoretical or empirical understanding, or for calculations, predictions,
etc.; a conceptual or mental representation of something.’ http://www.oed.
com/view/Entry/120577?rskey=1cDfaW&result=1 - eid (accessed 13 March
2013).
10. ‘Zur Formalisierung dieser Folterung wird dem aufführenden Theater
vorgeschlagen, für jeden Zuschauer sichtbar, zum Beispiel über die
Rampe, eine Art von magischem Auge aufzubauen, das, ohne freilich
die Zuschauer von dem Geschehen auf der Bühne aufzulenken, durch
sein Zusammenzucken jeweils die Sprechstärke anzeigt, mit der auf den
HELDEN eingeredet wird’ (103).
11. Jeanette Malkin, Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to
Shepherd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 1, maintains that
‘language is on trial’ in Kaspar. And there is of course some truth to this – but
at the same time, this ‘trial’ implies that we can use language against lan-
guage, a thought which I am not so sure that Handke’s play really supports.
12. ‘ein Satz [ist] ein Ungeheuer’ (196).
13. Peter Bekes, Peter Handke, Kaspar, p. 60. Bekes offers a detailed analysis of
how ‘order’ works in Handke’s play.
14. ‘Etwas ist unmöglich geworden: etwas anderes ist möglich geworden’ (119).
15. Wefelmeyer, ‘Handke’s Theater’, p. 212.
16. ‘jede Unordnung zur Ordnung erklären’ (115).
17. On Handke and Brecht, see for example Rainer Nägele, ‘Peter Handke: The
Staging of Language’, Modern Drama 23.4 (January 1981), 327–9.
18. ‘Kaspar durch Sprechen zum Sprechen bringen’ (111).
19. ‘Ich möchte ein solcher werden wie einmal ein andrer gewesen ist’ (116).
This change is discussed by David Barnett, ‘Dramaturgies of “Sprachkritik”’,
pp. 1060–1. Barnett emphasizes that the ‘other’ in Handke’s version is no
original, but rather an allusion to Shakespeare.
20. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, p. 331, my italics.
21. ‘Ich nehme nichts mehr wörtlich’ (195).
198 Notes

23. ‘Du kannst ohne den Satz keinen Fuß mehr vor den andern setzen’ (115).
24. ‘Er wird mit Sprechmaterial zum Sprechen allmählich angestachelt’ (121).
25. ‘einen ordentlichen Satz’ (125).
26. ‘Das merken und nicht vergessen!’ (127).
27. ‘Die Worte, die du hörst, und die Worte, die du sprichst, tun dir weh’
(119).
28. ‘Der Ängstliche zittert. Die Ohrfeige klatscht. Der Körper klatscht. Die Zunge
leckt. Die Flamme leckt. Die Säge kreischt. Der Gefolterte kreischt’ (147).
29. ‘Du kannst nichts sagen, was du nicht auch denkst’ (150).
30. ‘erkannte mich’ (150).
31. ‘Du wirst mit dem Satz auf dich aufmerksam’ (116).
32. ‘jeder muß jedem seinen Namen / nennen’ (183). Pinter’s scene in Mountain
Language, with the dogs that must have names which they listen to, has
echoes of this line in Handke. And there are other likenesses between the
two writers: Malkin, Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama, p. 66, points to
Goldberg’s and McCann’s function in The Birthday Party as analogous to that
of the prompters in Kaspar.
33. Bekes, Peter Handke, Kaspar, p. 70.
34. ‘Jeder Gegenstand muß ein Bild von einem Gegenstand sein: jeder rechte
Tisch ist ein Bild von einem Tisch … ein / Bild von einem Satz’ (129–30).
35. Astrid von Klotze, ‘Zur Struktur von Peter Handke’s “Kaspar”’, in Peter Handke,
ed. Raimund Fellinger (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004 [1985]), p. 80.
36. ’Rechts vom Handtuch liegt ein Verbandkasten … Der Stich kommt von
rechts’ (170).
37. Althusser emphasizes that in interpellation, it is always ‘ideology’ that per-
forms the actual calling forth. But in Handke, although present, ideology
in the Althusserian meaning is not emphasized, but rather the mechanisms
of language that ideology also relies upon as well as produces. Or as Read,
‘Handke’s Kaspar and the Power of Negative Thinking’, p. 133, puts it: ‘These
voices epitomize the world of rational discourse, and the purely functional
use of language, which Handke is portraying as the dominant mode of
rationalized Western thought.’
38. ‘Warum fliegen da lauter so schwarze Würmer herum?’ (152).
39. It is Jeanette Malkin who identifies the line in Handke with the one in von
Horvath: see Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama, p. 231, n.42.
40. ‘Du fängst, bei dir, an du, bist ein, Satz du, könntest von, dir unzählige, Sätze
bilden’ (118).
41. ‘so rede ich jetzt von selber, aber jetzt kann ich mit dem Reden warten, bis
ich gefragt werde’ (165).
42. ‘wenn du den Gegenstand anders siehst als du von ihm sprichst, mußt du dich
irren: du mußt dir sagen, daß du dich irrst, und du wirst den Gegenstand
richtig sehen: willst du es dir nicht gleich sagen, so ist es klar, daß du gezwun-
gen werden willst, es also schließlich doch sagen willst’ (153).
43. ‘Du bist aufgeknackt’ (154).
44. ‘Früher mit Sätzen geplagt / kann ich jetzt von Sätzen nicht genug haben /
früher von den Wörtern gejagt / spiele ich jetzt mit jedem einzelnen
Buchstaben’ (165).
45. Bekes, Peter Handke, Kaspar, pp. 66–7.
Notes 199
46. ‘alles, was schön ist, tut meinen Augen gut,: alles, was meinen Augen gut tut,
begütigt mir’ (138).
47. ‘seltsame Laute zu erzeugen’ (181).
48. ‘Raunen, Krächzen, nachgeamte Käuzchengeräusche, Jammern, Singen mit
Kopfstimme.’ (181).
49. ‘Ich kann auftreten, weil ich weiß, wo mein Plats ist’ (195).
50. ‘Ich höre die Scheite im Feuer gemütlich knacken, womit ich ausdrücken
will, daß ich die Knochen nicht gemütlich knacken höre. Der Stuhl steht
hier, der Tisch steht dort, womit ich ausdrücken will, daß ich eine Geschichte
erzähle’ (196).
51. ‘daß mir die Haare in den Tisch geraten sind wie in eine Maschine und daß
ich skalpiert bin: wörtlich: bei jedem neuen Satz wird mir übel: bildlich; ich
bin durcheinandergebracht’ (196).
52. ‘Schon mit meinem ersten Satz bin ich in die Falle gegangen.’ (194).
7 Epilogue: The Silence of the Sirens

1. ‘Lächerlichkeit’; ‘UNMÖGLICH MACHEN’ (196).
2. On silence as socially and culturally approved, see Peter Burke, The Art of
Conversation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
3. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philo-
sophical Fragments, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2002), p. 26.
4. Cage, ‘Experimental Music’, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1973 [1961]), p. 8.
5. Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4'33" (New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 163.
6. Franz Kafka, ‘Das Schweigen der Sirenen’, in Beim Bau der Chinesesichen
Mauer und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Taschenbuch, 2004), p. 169; and ‘The Silence of the Sirens’, tr. Willa and
Edward Muir, in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York:
Schocken Books, 1971), p. 431.
7. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 26.
8. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 25–7.
9. Steely Dan, ‘Home at Last’, on the album Aja, 1977.
11. The fundamental importance of gender and sexuality in Homer’s story (and
in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of it) has been emphasized by Rebecca
Comay, ‘Adornos’s Siren Song’, New German Critique 81 (Autumn 2000), 21–48.
12. Comay, ‘Adornos’s Siren Song’, p. 26, refers to Jean-Pierre Vernant’s analysis
of the Greek word for ‘meadow’, which is where the rotting corpses are lying,
as being the same as the one meaning ‘female genitals’.
13. For a critique of Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading, see Musik und Mathematik.
Band 1: Hellas, Teil 1: Aphrodite (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), p. 55, n.2,
where Kittler points to Adorno basing his analysis on a ‘katastrophalen
Verdeutschung’. But Kittler’s reading of the Sirens in Homer is most of all
another type of reading, and he makes a fascinating point: ‘Mit der Musik, die
sie aus Laut und Sinn erstehen lassen, fängt alles Senden in Europa an’ (p. 56).
200 Notes

15. Homer, The Odyssey, tr. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1996), 12:51 and
12:173.
16. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
17. Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, p. 57.
18. Homer, The Odyssey, I:409–14.
19. Homer, The Odyssey, I:416–17.
21. Albrecht Wellmer, ‘The Death of the Sirens and the Origin of the Work of
Art’, New German Critique 81 (Autumn 2000), 15–16.
22. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, tr. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 7.
23. Michel Foucault, ‘The Thought of the Outside’, tr. Brian Massumi, in
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–
1984, vol. 2 (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 166.
24. Foucault, ‘Thought of the Outside’, p. 152.
25. Kafka, ‘Das Schweigen’, p. 169; ‘The Silence’, p. 432.
26. The German ‘Anhang’ has several meanings; one is ‘Nachtrag’ (or ‘codicil’),
that is, a text added to, for example, a treaty or a contract. See Duden: Das
große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 2. Aufl. (Mannheim, 1993), catch-word
‘Anhang’. ‘Codicil’ has a somewhat stronger juridical reference; it is, accord-
ing to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘supplement to a will, added by the
testator for the purpose of explanation, alteration, or revocation of the origi-
nal contents’ – see http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/35598?redirectedFrom=
codicil - eid (accessed 13 March 2013).
27. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, tr. Kevin Attell (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 16. For a critique of Agamben, see
Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca,
NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2009), chapter 6.
28. Agamben, The Open, p. 26.
29. See his The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination
(Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
30. Payne, The Animal Part, p. 11.
31. Agamben, The Open, p. 37.
32. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757
(London: Routledge, 1901), p. 236.
33. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, p. 93.
34. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, p. 303.
35. This is not the place to engage in a more extended discussion of Cooper’s
novels. A defence of Cooper, and a critique of him being identified too easily
with ‘savageism’, can be found in Sandra M. Gustafson, ‘Cooper and the Idea
of the Indian’, in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, ed. Leonardo
Cassuto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 103–16.
36. The young girl, Pearl, can also be seen as a hybrid form; she is often lik-
ened to a bird. But, since a small child, her closeness to animals and nature
is conventional, and totally socially acceptable, the normality of which is
emphasized also by her growing up to become ‘the richest heiress of her
Notes 201
day’. Her hybridity is of the kind that is installed only so that it can be
erased, by her education and her learning to speak.
37. See the section ‘The Apparatus of Subjectification’ in the Introduction above.
38. The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, tr. Joachim
Neugroschel (New York: Scribner’s, 2000), p. 226; ‘durch die Stirn ging die
Spitze des großen eisernen Stachels’, ‘In der Strafkolonie’, Schriften Tagebücher
Briefe Kritische Ausgabe: Drucke zur Lebzeiten, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch
and Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996), p. 246.
39. See above, Chapter 6, and the section ‘Normalization’.
40. In being, as Joseph Vogl points out, a murderous typewriter, Kafka’s machine
is a linguistic machine, producing a ‘rhetoric of description’ that is also dis-
solved into ‘metaphorization’. See Vogl, Ort der Gewalt: Kafka’s literarische
Ethik, Münchner Germanistische Beiträge Bd 38 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
1990), pp. 41–2.
41. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 42.
42. Handke, Stücke 1, pp. 197f. The English edition does not translate the phrase
‘Ich: bin: nur:’; instead, it repeats ‘Goats and Monkeys’ four times, not two,
as in the German original – the translation follows Handke’s later revision
of the play; see Kaspar in Die Theaterstücke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1992), pp. 189–90.
43. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 179.
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Index
Note: ‘n’ after a page reference denotes a note number on that page.
address, 6, 17, 42, 103, 105, 108, Canetti, Elias, 129, 143, 177n46,
110–13, 183n57 181n14
Adorno, Theodor W., 38, 164–8 Christ, 7–8, 12
Agamben, Giorgio, 23–4, 26, 100, Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 87, 89, 92
170, 172 citizenship, 31, 37, 43, 70–1, 87
agon, 8, 13, 90, 98, 100 Cohn, Ruby, 191
allegory, 40, 84, 121, 129, 136, 137, Colleran, Jeanne, 138,
153, 154, 166, 193n63 confession, 10, 12, 16, 24, 26, 28,
Allen, R. E., 8 61, 69–71, 112, 115, 116, 125, 160,
Althusser, Louis, 17, 54––6 179n81, 190n 21
anacrisis, 11–12, 14–17, 48–9, 90, 126–9 Conrad, Joseph, 15, 126, 173, 194n3
Andersen, Hans Christian, 77–8 conversation, 8–11, 15, 19, 28, 35–43,
animal, 8, 10, 125, 137, 143, 147, 46, 47, 48, 51–2, 57, 73, 80, 105,
165–6, 169–73 107, 110, 130–1, 133–6, 181n18,
apparatus, 22–9, 37, 51, 54–6, 83, 91, 190n21
105, 108, 149–51, 169, 170, 172–3, Cooper, James Fenimore, 171–2
179n67 crime novel, 126–136
Aristotle, 11, 14, 131
Armstrong, Nancy, 35 Davidson, Jenny, 43
Auerbach, Nina, 56 decorum, 38–41, 45, 46, 47–9, 51,
Austen, Jane, 32, 35–57, 88, 163, 169 53–4, 72, 73, 75, 82, 83, 85, 90, 96,
Auster, Paul, 152 181n15, 183n45
Austin, J. L., 11, 20–1, 37, 44 Deleuze, Gilles, 82
Derrida, Jacques, 107–8, 117
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11–12, 14–15, 17, desubjectification, 14, 24–5, 34,
20, 107, 110–1, 127 78–81, 125, 142–3, 143–5, 147,
Barthes, Roland, 17–20, 107, 108, 163
131–2, 161, 173 dialogue, 8–12, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 25,
Baym, Nina, 59 37, 41, 42, 47, 103, 105, 107, 110,
Beckett, Samuel, 33, 116–24, 152, 174 113–14, 129–30, 153, 164
Begley, Varun, 138 diatribe, 25, 110, 112, 113, 172,
Bekes, Peter, 152, 157, 160 190n21
Bible, The, 7, 66, 158 Diehl, Joanne Feit, 184n9
Blanchot, Maurice, 168 discipline, 3, 10, 27–31, 38, 51, 59,
Brontë, Charlotte, 12–14, 38 81, 82, 86, 89, 94, 101, 128, 151,
Burke, Edmund, 43 154, 158
Butler, Judith, 6, 17, 25, 42, 45, 183n57 dispositif, 23, 179n67
Butler, Marilyn, 52 dividing practice, 108, 117, 154,
157–62, 170, 172
Cage, John, 4, 164–5, 169 Dunwoodie, Peter, 190n 21, 190n29
Camus, Albert, 31, 108–16, 163, 172 Duras, Marguerite, 31, 58, 142–3, 170
212
Index 213
elenchus, 11, 12, 15–16, 22, 24, 25 identity, 14, 18, 37 44, 64–5, 68, 70,
Emsley, Sarah, 181n26 76, 78, 80, 100, 113, 134–6, 137–8,
Esslin, Martin, 138, 195n25 140, 154
ideological state apparatus, 54–6
family, 28, 29, 30–1, 54–5, 97, 106 ideosphere, 116
Feidelson Jr., Charles, 184n8 interpellation, 17, 57, 89, 101, 158,
Felman, Shoshana, 192n46 198n37
Feuerbach, Anselm von, 150 interrogation, 12, 13, 14–15, 28, 62,
Fogel, Aaron, 14–15, 180n95, 88, 125–48, 163–4
194n3 intertextuality, 77, 95–6, 132–3, 136,
form, 5, 6, 15–16, 17, 22, 23, 55, 66, 151, 173, 194n14
83, 94, 101, 131–2, 136, 144, 152,
172 Jacobs, Barry, 189n2
Foucault, Michel, 4, 5, 10, 22–3, 25–7, Jakobson, Roman, 18–19, 148, 183n57
27–30, 38, 42, 83–4, 93–4, 112, 125, Jesson, James, 193n64
131, 150, 154, 168–9 Johnson, Claudia L., 182n27
François, Anne-Lise, 182n38,
183n51 Kafka, Franz, 82, 165–7, 169, 201n40
Frost, Everett C., 189n9 Kalb, Jonathan, 116
Kenner, Hugh, 192n49, 192n54
Gann, Kyle, 165 Kirkham, Margaret, 183n44
Genette, Gérard, 22, 173 Kittler, Friedrich, 80, 116, 187n49,
gentleman, 43, 72, 87–9 199n13
Girard, René, 191n44 Kontje, Todd, 185n18, 185n21
Glenn, Cheryl, 132 Kramp, Michael, 181n27
Goddard, Michael, 188n21, 188n26 Kuharski, Allen, 188n20
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 72,
150, 185n21 LaCapra, Dominick, 109, 190n17,
Gombrowicz, Witold, 33, 93–102, 192n46
128, 163, 188n21 Lausberg, Heinrich, 16
Gomel, Elana, 195n15 law, 15, 56, 60–1, 65–7, 71, 86, 89,
Goodrich, John, 194n11 115, 126, 138–9
Götselius, Thomas, 176n15 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 49, 104, 182n40
Guillen, Matthew, 188n17 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 45, 170
Gustafson, Sandra M., 200n35 Linnæus (Linné, Carl von), 170
Livy (Livius Patavinus, Titus), 97
Habermas, Jürgen, 30, 86
Handke, Peter, 149–62, 163, 164, Malkin, Jeanette R., 144, 147, 155,
172–3 180n95, 196n39, 197n11, 198n32,
Harress, Birgit, 100 198n39
Harris, Thomas, 132–6, 147, 170, McGushin, Edward F., 179n76
194n11, 194n14 medium, 3, 25, 28, 30, 54, 57, 71, 75,
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 30, 31, 33, 97, 116, 120, 122, 144, 151–2, 161
58–71, 163, 172 Melville, Herman, 30, 31, 33, 82–93,
Hertz, Neil, 184n10 163
Homer, 165–9 Miller, D. A., 50
Horkheimer, Max, 164–8 monologue, 7, 33, 54, 103–124, 163
hybridity, 46, 66, 71, 75, 152, 166, monster, 47, 67, 86, 109, 113, 136,
172, 200n36 152, 170–1
214 Index
montage, 138, 152 Sanyal, Debarati, 190n15, 191n38

Musil, Robert, 33, 58, 71–81, 132, Scarry Elaine, 125
163, 172, 194n13 Searle, John, 37, 181n24
Shakespeare, William, 1–4, 96, 151,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6 162, 173
Norén, Lars, 192n55 Shapin, Stephen, 87–8
normativity, 5, 18, 25, 28–31, 32, Sharland, Susan, 110, 190n20
38–45, 46, 51–4, 55, 65, 83, 86, 99, silence, 2–3, 4, 6,8, 22, 26, 27–8, 33,
101, 106, 107, 108–16, 144, 154, 43–4, 107
155–7, 161, 164, 167, 172, 173 Silverstein, Marc, 140, 195n31
Novalis, 72, 78 Socrates, 8–11, 12, 15–16, 22, 24–6,
135
O’Connor, Kathleen, 186n42 sound, 4, 6, 8, 49, 69, 105, 107,
One Thousand and One Nights, 124 116–17, 119, 120, 122–3, 125, 147,
Ovid (Ovidius Naso, Publius), 63, 64, 160, 162, 164–6, 171, 193n63
96 sovereignty, 3, 10, 25, 27–9, 33, 59,
81, 83, 94–6, 127–8
parrhesia, 42, 98 space, 30, 37, 40, 55, 83, 85, 89
Payne, Mark, 170 state of emergency, 126, 138, 139
Perloff, Marjorie, 192n52, 193n58 state of exception, 139
pharmakon, 136 Steely Dan, 166
Pinter, Harold, 31, 34, 136–41, 143–8 Strindberg, August, 31, 33, 103–8,
Plato, 8, 11, 12, 25, 87, 136 113, 120, 152, 170, 189n1,
Poovey, Mary, 45 189n2, 193n57, 193n58, 193n62,
power, 3, 5–6, 8, 10, 12, 15–16, 17–18, 193n63
19–20, 24, 25–6, 27–31, 37, 39, 42, subjectification, 2, 4, 5, 6–7, 14, 16,
43, 51, 55–6, 70–1, 74, 81, 83, 85, 22–7, 28, 30, 47, 55, 57, 83, 100,
89, 94–6, 97, 98–103, 112, 115, 126, 151, 164, 169, 172, 173
128, 132, 136–41, 144, 151, 160, subjection, 18, 51, 56, 94, 100, 102
168 see also discipline, sovereignty subjectivity, 17, 24, 27, 28, 56, 153,
private sphere, 30–1, 54, 59–61, 85–9 155, 159
public sphere, 10, 26, 28, 30–1, 40, syncrisis, 11
54, 55–6, 59–61, 62–3, 65–7, 69–71, Szondi, Peter, 189n2
81, 83–86, 87, 88, 89, 112
Tandon, Bharat, 39, 40
Quintilian (Quintilianus, Marcus Tanner, Tony, 46, 52
Fabius), 19 Thomas, Brook, 70, 184n6, 184n14,
185n15, 185n17
radio, 116–24, 151, 192n52, 193n58 Thompson, Graham, 188n14
Railston, Stephen, 60, 65 Thompson, James, 182n30
Rankin, Ian, 126–32 Todorov, Tzvetan, 167
rape, 63, 96–7, 99 Toolan, Michael, 5, 178n62
repairs, 19, 113 Törnqvist, Egil, 189n3
Rigberg, Lynn, 43 torture, 14–16, 49, 62, 77, 120, 121,
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 189n2 125–6, 128, 131–2, 141, 142–3,
143–6, 150–1, 155–6, 162, 163
Sabzevari, Hanif, 193n57 Trilling, Lionel, 50
Said, Edward O., 36, 183n50 Twain, Mark, 58, 194n14
Index 215
Ullén, Magnus, 184n1 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 18

Wiltshire, John, 182n34
Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus, 39 Wise, Jennifer, 16
Vogl, Joseph, 201/40 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 43, 182n27
Watt, Stephen, 195n24 Zilliacus, Clas, 193n57, 193n60

Wellmer, Albrecht, 168–9 Žižek, Slavoj, 5, 175n8

Olsson, Ulf. Silence and Subject in Modern Literature

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Introduction: Cordelia’s Silence, or Spoken Violence 1

This is a study in the darker sides of language: speech as an act of

Writing in a foreign language makes special demands on you – and

Cordelia, of Shakespeare’s King Lear, may stand as the embodiment of

produces literature as a margin where it sees itself, reflects upon

I yet beseech your majesty,

Glad not to be able to invest in the excessive rhetoric of her sisters,

Aspects of Silence and Violence

Shakespeare’s depiction of Cordelia’s silence shows us silence as an

of certain situations, become a threat against the hegemonic rule of

is not an intrinsic feature of language, rather an effect of the circulation

together and win in concentration, I ended up with these literary texts.

The problem that the silent figure offers a linguistic community is by

Socrates opens up the conversation by saying that he first will just

You don’t appear to me to know that whoever comes into close

If Nicias is correct in his observation, one of the fundamental basics

herself. It seems to me important to suggest here an historical aspect:

in producing the event of the utterance the subject modifies, or

In speaking, we state ourselves – and Socrates questions the one

In its intention of making the other speak, the Socratic persuasion is

such as confession, therapy, interrogation; situations founded on and

scenes in the novel, a dialogue with Mr Rochester: ‘In short, I believe

the definition in Webster’s Third.35 There, anacrisis is defined as ‘an

man is, by Socrates’ superior elenchus, forced to admit that he ‘must be

Language and Subjugation

Anacrisis, then, is a complex practice that generates dialogic speech and

Anacrisis, then, is an historically and culturally situated practice that

and thus to anticonformisms’.47 The problem is not that we have to answer

In the combination of distinctive features into phonemes, the

finally, in the combination of sentences into utterances, the action

Literature as Possibility, or, ‘Unauthorized

Moving from the metalinguistics of Jakobson and into actual use of

certain other actions, whether “physical” or “mental” actions or even

for literature: the speech situations represented follow a script, which is

The Apparatus of Subjectification

of the apparatus’, according to Foucault, can be seen as a ‘thoroughly

The apparatus seeks, according to Agamben, to ‘govern and guide’

the formation of Western subjectivity that both splits and, nonetheless,

is transformed into a discursive medium, through which the linguistic

This conflictual aspect of subjectification is important, and, as we will

But if the Socratic dialogue allowed us to study the procedures of

Today, Foucault famously says, we ‘have become a singularly confessing

or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living

There is, I think, a historical problem involved here: silence, outside of

that the rituals and ceremonies of sovereignty become irrelevant,

Within disciplinary power, the family has a central function. In his

others by school and work. If normalization fails, disciplinary systems

What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe

The relationship between the individual and this process of adjustment

to look at himself as ‘purely human’.93 The bourgeois family could – by

Based on readings of mostly canonized works, which have attracted

silence has effect. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, as well

‘No, indeed I cannot act.’ Spoken by Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s

The Economy of Language

ensures a stable community.’5 This thought was already circulating

linguistic violence. It soon becomes clear that the threats directed

Normalization and Decorum

In one of his entries in Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno laments

precisely as characters and not as psyches. And it is character that is at

The Balance of Conversation

Literature too must answer to decorum, or to rules, explicit or not, on