James Olney-CARDS OF IDENTITY - AND THE SATIRIC MODE

"CARDS OF IDENTITY" AND THE SATIRIC MODE
Author(s): JAMES OLNEY

Source: Studies in the Novel, Vol. 3, No. 4, TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL (winter
1971), pp. 374-389
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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CARDS OF IDENTITY
AND THE SATIRIC MODE
JAMES OLNEY
At the climax of a virtuoso performance in hysteria, designed to un?

settle the mind of Dr. Towzer and so push him over the precipice into
ego-chaos, Mrs. Mallet, the only female member of the Identity Club
in Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity, screams out a jumble of words that
are deliberately meaningless in their context but that on the other hand
define rather deftly the tone and mode of the fiction in progress: "Only
rend," she shrieks at the by now pathetically confused creature before
her, "Only rend, tear, compress, slaughter, dismember, and yet hammer
eternally compact."1 Besides having the desired effect on the victim ("Dr.
Towzer, whose eyes had been glistening for some time, gave a loud shriek
and fell with a crash against the back of the chair"), Mrs. Mallet's care?
fully considered hysteric expression describes quite nicely the manner
of satire in Dennis's book. "Only rend, tear . . . , slaughter, dismember,"
relentlessly and at large, the book seems to advise the satirist of modern
manners; batten on all the various but related follies of the age; pursue
the quarry with neither mercy nor let, flushing him from every corner
and crevice he may think to have found for hiding. But control the emo?
tion and motive of pursuit with as great an intensity as the chase itself
demands: "compress" your fury at home before spending it on fools
abroad; and, in the pictured madness of your satire, "hammer eternally
compact." In Dennis's hands and as a traditional mode, satire thus be?
gins in artistic self-discipline and ends?if generically pure?in entire
negation.
When it first appeared in 1955, Cards of Identity was greeted by a
little flutter of critical applause and admiring comment; then?and this,
I think, is odd and unfortunate, given the real humor of the book and
the expertise with which Dennis manages his satire?Cards of Identity
very largely disappeared from view, receiving virtually no critical atten?
tion and very little praise in the fifteen years since publication. One reason
[374j
CARDS OF IDENTITY / 375
for this may be that it is rather difficult to know how and where to take
hold of the book. Reviewers invoked, among others, the names of Aldous
Huxley, Kafka, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, and Lewis Carroll in at?
tempts at saying what Cards of Identity is like, but Dennis himself pro?
vided, I think, the most relevant clue when, in 1964, he published a little
book called Jonathan Swift: A Short Character. "In this way," Dennis
remarks in that book, apropos of a certain kind of squeamish and mis?
guided reaction to the vehemence of Swift's art, "we . . . deny the writer
of fiction his need to push satire as far as it will go. . . ."2 Satire, it would
appear in Dennis's phrasing?and this is assuredly true of its operation
in Cards of Identity?logically refuses all half measures and disregards
every counsel of pity, pushing on always to the extreme where exceptions
to the rule do not exist, nor do excuses, where every largest and smallest
detail in view is finally levelled by the fury of the satirist, and where the
cold and scornful light of analytical reason replaces in him every squishy,
muddleheaded emotion of confraternity. The object of Dennis's satire, it
may be, is not the same as the object of Swift's (I use the word intention?
ally, for satire always proceeds "objectively": that is, it dissects an "ob?
ject" rather than evoking a "subject")?different times, after all, produce
different fools, different victims; but pushing satire as far as it will go is
as much Dennis's temperamental and artistic intention as it is Swift's,
and while the object of satire might change, its essential method does not.
What that method is, more specifically than rending, tearing, and ham?
mering eternally compact, or what the special tools of satire are, we may
see after first examining the follies and vices against which Dennis directs
his animated attack.
The story of Cards of Identity, leaving aside the fantastic complex?
ity of its multicircular presentation of identities (one within another with?
in another . . ., as if they were so many Chinese boxes), is extraordinarily
simple: three people, calling themselves Captain Mallet, Mrs. Mallet,
and Beaufort Mallet, take wrongful possession of a country estate
(Hyde's Mortimer), transform the identities of various locals so that they
may be used as house staff, host a convention of the Identity Club, and
then abruptly clear out, with all members except the President, who has
been done in by the Club and replaced by Captain Mallet, when the po?
lice arrive. Psychiatry, and more particularly the history of the psychoan?
alytic movement, with all its internal disagreements and defections, pro?
vides the focus of Dennis's satire. All the Club members of Dennis's fic?
tion (and for "Club members," the author implies, we can read "psychia?
trists") subscribe to the Great Theory that a trained manipulator
can forge a new identity for anyone, substituting for the victim's instincts
the manipulator's intentions; and each Club member is further devoted,
376 / OLNEY
beyond the Great Theory, to his own particular explanation of how per?
sonality and identity can be broken down, reshaped, and reconstructed.
Though every member (except the unfortunate Dr. Harcourt, representa?
tive of the common man in the Identity Club: "Like all Club members, he
once pursued a particular aspect of the great theory of identity, but at
some time or other he found the pace too hot, the competition too in?
tense" [p. 112]) claims an absolute, objective validity for his own private
theory, the truth, as Dennis's drama demonstrates it, is that each theory
is completely determined by subjective circumstances. Because Dr. Shu
bunkin, for example, is sex-obsessed, he holds a theory of sexual determi?
nation of character; and so with all the other theories that center around
mysticism or will to power or classical restraint or traditional ritual: each
is founded deep in its expounder's identity?which, like all identities in
the book, is shown to be a more or less artificial and sham product. The
"case-histories" read by various Club members to the gathering at
Hyde's Mortimer reflect nothing at all but the private neuroses and pub?
lic identities of their readers, especially as Club policy now forbids having
anything to do with the nuisance of patients (except for a few "to bring us
in a small income and solve the servant-problem"). Theirs is an essential?
ly artistic pursuit, a shamanistic occupation that provides haven for every
sort of charlatan, and Club members get on better with it now since rid?
ding themselves of patients, who could never produce the appropriate
dreams anyhow and who were difficult to dispose of after being used. As
the President points out to the group, "We write our case-histories with a
purity of invention and ingenuity impossible in the days when someone
was always coming into the room" (p. 141). So much, in Dennis's drama,
for case-histories and their psychological objectivity.
There is, however, considerable practical analysis carried out on
more or less living patients (the locals transformed into house staff) in
the course of the book. The "psychoanalysis" performed on Miss Para?
dise, changing her from a prim, genteel, properly-proud spinster to the
widowed housekeeper of Hyde's Mortimer, may be taken as typical: the
technique, in largest outline, is to destroy the real past and replace it
with a new one, and thus will be created?must be created, since the pres?
ent grows out of the past?a new present. Captain Mallet (so the chief
identity-changer is called, though what his "real" name or identity might
be is never revealed) proceeds with Miss Paradise by first attacking at the
most vulnerable point of memory which, exceedingly frail and often de?
luded as it is, is still the only thing that connects past and present con?
sciousness and so "insures" continuity of being; he then insinuates a new
past through new memories of his own choosing and from his own re?
quirements which, however, are so ingeniously introduced that they seem
to Miss Paradise her own: she feels, triumphantly, that she found this in
her subconscious, and that she dredged it up out of that murky realm and
out of the past to be cast into the light of consciousness and of the present.
"What a lot of nostalgic memories she is going to have!" Beaufort ex?
claims (p. 43) of the dead husband given to Mrs. (recently Miss Paradise)
during "analysis." And after a particularly wild and improbable detail is
fabricated for her past and suggested to Miss/Mrs. Paradise, she?
"seizing the brilliant memory and tucking it away" (p. 59)?performs in
the sheeplike manner that Dennis claims is characteristic of dupes and
gulls everywhere of this fraudulent "psychoanalytic" treatment: she re?
constitutes her past and present selves in the image of her manipulator/
maker. The analysands of Cards of Identity are, in Dennis's view, hap?
pily worthy of their analysts and vice versa; they deserve one another and
at Hyde's Mortimer they get one another.
The nature of these "memories" depends, of course?since he is their
pure creator?entirely upon the psychological twist of the analyst. Den?
nis implies that Freud, for example (Cards of Identity being, in one of its
aspects, a roman a clef), could uncover, i.e., insinuate, sexual obsessions
and Jung archetypal images in the dreams of their patients not because
they were there in all personal histories but because they were there in the
private psychologies, and therefore in the psychological theories, of Freud
and Jung. Dennis's "psychiatrists" naturally deny this fact of subjective
determination, though Captain Mallet, after thrusting one victim into a
new past and whipping her around various turns and bushes in that past,
slips momentarily when he says, "Well, we have gone a long way in this
short chat?or rather, you have gone a long way: I have merely followed
where you led" (p. 74). The Captain's ingenious reversal of the roles of
follower and followed does not, however, obscure for the reader the true
nature of the relation obtaining between the Identity Clubbers and the lo?
cals: Dennis's satire holds up for our scorn the picture of a neurotic lead?
ing the neurotics, the ridiculous drama of a supreme egotist guiding and
misguiding his group of ego-deprived victims, for whom he supplies, from
his own rich store, appropriate egos. "What does it matter to you, after
all," Captain Mallet asks the nurse whom he is about to transform into
Miss Blanche Tray, gardener's assistant, "whether you are diagnosed on
a principle of ancestry, heredity, environment, instinct, the lavatory, or
genetics? Nothing you can say is going to make the slightest difference to
the outcome" (p. 77). His condescending tone clearly indicates the scorn
in which Captain Mallet holds his patient and, as he confidently predicts,
nothing the nurse says does, in fact, affect in the least the new and fore?
ordained identity created for her by the Captain/"psychiatrist" out of
new memories supplied by him and a new past pieced together from those
shards of memories.
378 / OLNEY
If memory is thus incapable of making us one thing through all the

changes of time and place, what is there left? Perhaps, some characters in
Cards of Identity fondly imagine, a name can do it: surely, they suppose,
one name goes with one identity, and if the name remains firm the identi?
ty should not slip away or be transformed or fade into nothing. On this
assumption, Captain Mallet tells the woman who is the easiest touch he
has, governments everywhere insist on names in capital letters?not to re?
mind them but to keep each of us to his nominal promise and obligation:
"It is their hope that by continually reading and re-reading your name,
you will be able to keep your hold on a past that no longer exists, and thus
bring an illusion of self into the present" (p. 94). In the hands of the Iden?
tity Club, who thus obliterate even the tenuous trace of continuity implied
by a name, Miss Paradise becomes the widowed Mrs. Paradise, "Florrie"
to the enthusiastic and sentimental Beaufort and Mrs. Mallet (who is not
"really" Mrs. Mallet, Beaufort's mother, but instead his lover, her pre
Mallet existence being given no name), but "Florence" to Captain Mal?
let; her brother, Henry Paradise, becomes Henry Jellicoe, the butler with
a past, whose name gives a hint, to him as well as to others, of what he has
been made by his analysts ("a bellicose, echoing, challenging suggestion
discreetly balanced by an opening syllable indicative of a nature con?
gealed and wobbly. In short, though he is for ever partly something pink,
shaking guiltily on a plate, he has, in whole, the stuff of leadership"?
pp. 40-41); Dr. Towzer is daringly left with his name but stripped of his
title and his profession (to become a lover of roses, the gardener at Hyde's
Mortimer); and the woman who is reborn as a flighty maid is prey almost
too simple for the identity artists, for she is uncertain in the beginning
whether her proper name is Mrs. Chirk or Mrs. Finch, shows no prefer?
ence for either name or identity, and wobbles uncertainly between the two
(and a few others suggested by the Identity Club) throughout the book.
Oddly enough, since his satiric attack is presumably directed in?
differently against all schools of psychiatry, i.e. (as Dennis sees it),
against all who presume, on the basis of their own theory, to meddle with
the identities of others, Dennis's dissection of the activities and motives
of the Identity Club would seem to have its theoretical foundation in the
teaching of one psychoanalytic splinter group, viz., Alfred Adler's. In the
last analysis, after we push beyond Shubunkin's sex theories and Bitter
ling's symbolism and ritual and Father Orfe's drunken mysticism, what
we discover is that each is proclaiming his own theory as the uniquely
right one and asserting his own superior psychology with the intention of
coming out on top in an internal battle of egos. The real reality for each
of them is not sex or symbolism or mysticism?only halfway houses and
means to an end?but power?the true goal and every heart's desire.
Every one of the "psychiatrists" is engaged in compensating for a feeling

of inferiority by assertion of superiority: thus Dennis analyzes the Identi?
ty Club and the psychoanalytic movement, precisely in Adler's terms, as
exercises in Adlerian will to power. The President of the Identity Club too
sees all the bitter infighting of Club members as manifestation of the pow?
er instinct; and, as dissident members of the original psychoanalytic cir?
cle claimed to be Freud's tactic (and Dennis obviously agrees with their
view), the President assumes a self-justifying martyrdom under all the
complex attacks and multivarious conspiracies of his onetime adherents.
". . . it is all a plot" he tells Captain Mallet pathetically. "They are try?
ing to force me out" (p. 194). And, of course, he is right. The President,
who at the end is literally crushed by the defectors from his authority, has
the same sort of dissension and difficulty to deal with from his Club mem?
bers as Freud, according to Dennis, had with his psychoanalytic group in
Vienna, and he can no more keep Dr. Shubunkin, Dr. Must, Dr. Bitter
ling, Father Orfe, and all the others in line than Freud could control Carl
Jung and Otto Rank and Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler; but it is only,
I think, the last of these?Adler?who would agree with Dennis's reading
of the motives behind all the bickering and treachery of the Identity Club
members.3
While the psychoanalytic movement provides the focus of Dennis's
satire, however, it is by no means the circumference of his target, nor is
it imagined as an isolated folly of our century. Dennis directs his satiric
animus (as one can see from his preface to Two Plays: "Cards of Identi?
ty" and "The Making of Moo") against every variety of what he chooses
to call "religion": that is, the attempt by some one supremely egotistic
man (Plato, St. Augustine, Pythagoras, Freud, Jung?whoever) to re?
define the identities of all men according to his necessities and his own?
in Dennis's view, deformed?personality. In his preface to Two Plays
Dennis mentions, as examples of Identity Clubs, the Pythagoras Club,
the Augustine and Jerome Club, the Marx Club: that the Clubs have been
around a long time then is obvious; that they are not always recognized
by us as essentially the same "panegoistic" (as Dennis delights in calling
it) attempt to redraw our identities according to their own necessities is
that they continually change their name to be called after their founder:
Christianity, Marxism, Freudianism, Mooism (in the play), etc. In our
day religion, at least in its most potent and dangerous and dogmatic form,
calls itself, according to Cards of Identity, psychoanalysis, and not only
does it offer to change our identities for us, substituting the analyst's bias
for what might be our own, but it proudly advances a Great Theory by
which all changes of identity can be explained, justified, and controlled.
Though in one sense it is a technique, psychoanalysis, as Dennis presents
380 / OLNEY
it, is not simply a blind method: it is, more importantly and more evilly,
according to the author, like any other power-seeking religion, an in?
tentional and vicious, inclusive theory.
Religion, Dennis argues, whether it calls itself psychoanalysis or
Christianity, Marxism or antismoking campaign,4 proposes to answer for
everyone the question "Who am I?"
The nonentity, or human inquirier [sic], is placed in the

centre of an imagined area and surrounded by a magic circle of
invisible points which, following Hesiod and Homer, have been
given arbitrary names such as God, Satan, Ghost, Mary. When
the fancied identities of these fixed points have been explained
to the human being, he is invited, trained, or forced to adopt
a certain attitude towards them, to stand in a certain relation to
them. He thus obtains a sense of self, based upon his position in
a scheme. In the earthly circle, he is "Agnes's little brother,"
"Tommy's father" and "Willy's Uncle," "from Moreton-in
the-Marsh." In the transcendent circle, he is "Dung-heap in the
Sight of God," "Pleader to Mary," "the Redeemable through
Christ," "from Fallen Adam," etc., etc. By thus knowing ex?
actly "where he stands," he knows who he is.. . .5
If, hedged about by all these identifying points, one is even yet not satis?
fied by the answer to the question "Who am I?" then, Dennis imagines, it
is still no great matter; one has only to wait a bit and another savior will
soon be along to give his name to a new religion and to offer us, for suf?
ficient identity, a share in his own bountifully neurotic personality.
Besides priests of identity, religion requires, of course, worhipp*ers to
the shrine: such are the non-Club members in Cards of Identity, the other,
necessary half of Dennis's satiric object, all yearning, with as much in?
tensity as their wateriness of character allows to them, for some strong
willed savior to come and resituate, relocate, redefine, and reidentify
them. These figures of clay need their spiritual masters as much as those
charlatans need them?indeed, the victims' need, if they are to have any
identity at all, is the greater of the two, for the Club members have proved
themselves quite capable, in their presented case-histories, of creating
patientless identities in the human void. In the exquisite bathos of the
description of Captain Mallet's first appearance to Miss Paradise, we see
this desperate yearning, born of abysmal weakness, for some savior to
tell her who she is?she being the other side from Captain Mallet to Den?
nis's satiric coin. "What an entry, what a man!?a full-length portrait
stepping slowly out of an Edwardian picture book, so beautifully dressed
and blending so many time-honored characteristics: the carriage of a
duke, the perspicuity of a great surgeon, the courtesy of a sultan, the
steel of an imperial governor. And what a sheen on his fine, mature fea?
tures and on his good boots?real boots, not shoes: the sight of it
all struck Miss Paradise as forcefully as if an undertaker had come in"

(p. 23). If this is not the luminous image of some modern demigod, come
to lay away her empty past and to transform and reorder her existence, it
will do for Miss Paradise until a better comes along. One might compare,
for similarity of phrasing, the compliment that the President of the
Identity Club gives Captain Mallet on his success in reestablishing iden?
tities: "When Jellicoe has left the room, the President bows his head re?
spectfully and says: 'What a finish you give to your people, Mallet! That
man is like an old inlay' " (p. 115). Mallet's identity, of course, no matter
what Miss Paradise may think?and this is the point of the comparison?
is no more final or original, no more assured and continuous than Para?
dise/Jellicoe's: it, too, is a fabrication, a reconstruction, an unreality;
for, as we learn in the course of the novel, the name of Mallet and the
profession of Captain have both been chosen so that the Identity Club
may occupy the premises of Hyde's Mortimer (Mallet being the family
that had previously owned the estate) for their annual ego-building skir?
mish with one another and with reality. Though Captain Mallet is ob?
viously strong compared to the Paradise pair, yet even he confesses to
fatigue after the effort of asserting and imposing new identities. "His
character was not strong," he tells his "son" and "wife," referring to
Henry Paradise, "but he had been using it for a long time. It was quite
rusted on to him. Why he wanted this identity so much, I cannot imagine"
(pp. 39-40). To which Mrs. Mallet responds, "I hope you have supplied
him with a rich, full past," and the answer, of course, is that that much, at
least, the professional worker has been able to do.
In the other two book-length fictions that he has published, Dennis
shows us, as an apparently central fact of modern existence, "fear in a
handful of dust" and, at least in the one case, suggests that this is the al?
most universal human emotion when faced with the necessity of living.
This pervasive terror at the thought of having to cope is the counterpart,
I imagine, among the victims, to the egotistic greed displayed on the op?
posite side by their masters, the psychic shape-changers. Of Jimmy Mor?
gan, the central figure in Boys and Girls Come Out to Play, a young man
who suffers occasional epileptic seizures but who has thrown away the
drug that, by doping him, is supposed to prevent the attacks, Dennis says:
"For, the last two weeks had introduced him into a new world of the most
disillusioning kind. Where he had once heedlessly dozed far into the
morning, he now awoke, like any normal grown-up man, with a violent
palpitation of the heart and a sharp sense of horror at the prospect of
another day."6 If this is the way the "normal grown-up man" returns to
living reality, then it is little wonder that he seeks a savior and an exter?
nally imposed self-transformation. A House in Order (1966)?apparently
intended on one level as a Kafka-like allegory?is a study of fear in depth:
382 / OLNEY
the story of a man frightened to be alone and frightened to be among oth?

er men; frightened to have guards but more frightened without them;
afraid of losing his liberty but more afraid of having it; frightened at the
danger of winter but terrified with the coming of spring: a man who fears
death infinitely and who fears life at least as much. Some religious fa?
natic, possessed of a will to power, seems certain one day to take over this
terror-impelled void that is the "normal grown-up man," and the normal
in Dennis's satire must be taken to include not only such obvious figures
in Cards of Identity as Miss Paradise and Henry, Dr. Towzer and his
nurse, Lolly Paradise and Mrs. Chirk/Finch, but also the Club members
themselves who, fearing loss of identity, cling to what they are supposed
to be by wearing a hat, by smoking pipes, cigars, and cigarettes, and by
clutching loose money in their pockets. Everyone needs a savior, includ?
ing the saviors themselves, who are revealed in the book to be little more
than power-hungry shams and self-seeking mountebanks.
Reviewers of Cards of Identity hesitated whether to call it a novel or
a satire, those calling it a satire being generally better satisfied with its
merits than those who chose to consider it a novel. "As a novel," one of
the latter said, "it is conspicuously lacking in narrative progression and
dramatic coherence. . . ."7 And another, in somewhat the same vein, de?
clared that "What is less satisfactory [than the style] is the novel's struc?
ture, tending to fall, towards the end, into a series of fine fragments. . . ."8
There might, without doubt, be such a thing as a "satiric novel" (though
even in so calling it we remove it from pure satire), but to see how Dennis
works in Cards of Identity one ought best to stand back and distinguish
between the two genres of novel and satire: in so doing one will, I think,
obviate much of the criticism that has to do with the formless, structure?
less quality of Cards of Identity. Here again Dennis's book on Swift gives
us the clue: "But once we realize that even the pettiest error of behaviour
is seen by Swift as a symptom of one huge degenerative disease, and that
the little symptom puts him in mind instantly of the great evil that has
occasioned it, we understand again that we are dealing with one who can
think only in terms of unities" (p. 35). Does this not explain much about
the unified vision and the structureless technique of Cards of Identity1.
Every weakness of character, every stupidity, every sin, every error and
evil of modern life, in Dennis's argument, is related to the central, single
folly and vice of what Dennis likes to imagine as psychoanalysis: i.e.,
modern religion in any one of its covert secular and scientific forms as
well as in its overt religious garb. Each of the scenes in the book, likewise,
is a variation on, a petty instance of, or a dramatization around this one
encompassing fact. Working in this way, the satirist can be, in narrative
progression, as episodic, as disconnected and rambling as he likes (con?
sider Book III of Gulliver's Travels, for example), without weakening his
effect thereby, if and because, in the thematic relevance of scenes, he is

equally and oppositely consistent, unified, controlled. Dennis's unity
(cf. his remark on Swift), or any satirist's, is more thematic than struc?
tural, more repetitive-with-variations than regularly progressive.
Cards of Identity thus gaily thumbs its nose at plot and scorns, more?
over, to do what Virginia Woolf, among others, claims the novel-form
exists to do: to create character. Structurally it is a shambles, with event
inside story inside anecdote inside occurrence, all turned regularly back?
side around until the reader cannot tell the chronologically later from the
earlier, the logical cause from its effect, the end from the means, or the
psychologically real from the spurious. It exhibits nothing resembling an
Aristotelian action with beginning, middle, and end, for the "beginning,"
logically, chronologically, and psychologically, is as likely to succeed the
middle and end as it is to precede them, and so on. Dennis begins his book
in medias res (and then some), and never bothers really to go back to ex?
plain from a fundamental beginning so that the reader has no place
where he can take hold of this intricate tale of manipulated and created
and imposed identities to say with assurance, "Here is a starting point
and here a final, incontrovertible identity." Always beyond the present
image and the current assertion lie other, earlier but equally artificial,
images and assertions. "Never apologize," Edmund Wilson once said was
the technique of Evelyn Waugh's fiction, "never explain"; the satire of
Cards of Identity proceeds according to precisely the same scheme.
Having dropped all pretense to a coherent, logical, progressive plot,
Dennis is free to dramatize his meaning in a variety of scenes that are
hopelessly diverse as structural elements but that are hammered eternally
compact as thematic statements around the central question of imposed
identities. The case-histories, for example, are no more than thinly dis?
guised means for creating new variations on the one theme, and, within
the case-history of the "Badgeries," the auction scene is a situation set up
within a situation set up within a situation that achieves the same mean?
ing as the whole case-history and the entire book. The whole thematic
intention of the book is compacted, more or less, into every scene how?
ever minor in itself, however short (Dr. Towzer's transformation, for
example) or long (the performance of The Prince of Antioch, for
example) it may be. A corollary of this thematic-scene organization is
that, with some notion of Dennis's techniques, we can enter the book at
virtually any point?we can pick it up and reread only the Badgeries
history, if that pleases us, or only the death-march in that history?and
we miss very little, for the meaning is not achieved by a flow between
foregoing and following but is all in any one scene. The "Shakespearian"
play (The Prince of Antioch) performed by the house staff of Hyde's
384 / OLNEY
Mortimer and inserted without cuts as an integral part of the text of

Cards of Identity?jammed in with no regard for structural logic one
would have to say if the book were being taken for a novel?has only the
most tenuous relevance to any developing plot; on the other hand, how?
ever, in its confusion of appearance with reality to such a degree of com?
plexity that identity exists, if at all, only at an impossible remove, the
drama is seen to be intensely relevant to thematic concerns. Consider,
for example, Captain Jack, one of the dramatis personae: Mr. Henry
Paradise, as we know, has been transformed into Henry Jellicoe and pro?
vided with a disreputable seaman's background; now reformed, he plays
the part of butler to the household and, in the play, a sea-captain; but in
the plot of the drama he disguises himself as a Duke, with a whole new
history and background, and then, over the Duke-disguise, dresses as a
witch so that he may be taken for the Prince of Antioch who has been
going around disguised as a witch; in addition, since there are fewer staff
members at Hyde's Mortimer than there are dramatis personae, he also
appears in the role of Prime Minister to the King of Artois. So we have
Henry Paradise transformed into a servant and ex-mariner, transformed
into a sea-captain, transformed into a Duke, transformed into a witch, in
order to appear to be the Prince of Antioch transformed into a witch, and,
incidentally and simultaneously, transformed into the Prime Minister
of Artois. The other staff members, likewise, have their many parts to
play, and when Captain Jack (Henry Jellicoe ne Paradise) comes upon
the noble trio disguised as ghosts disguised as witches?the Prince of
Antioch (played by Herbert, formerly Dr. Towzer), the Duke of Brit?
tany (played by Miss Blanche Tray, onetime nurse to the former Dr.
Towzer), and the Count of Baalbeck (the maid who has sometimes gone
under the name of Chirk, other times Finch)?he says, in effect, what is
said elsewhere a hundred times in the book in action and in speech, in
character and in theme:
Oh, helpless, awful combination!

Under the horrid witch, more horrid ghost
Of dungeon dead! Identity
Hard heaped upon identity! 'Neath each, another.
Remorseless spirit, spurn that ghastly smile
And let me flee! (p. 344).
"Who am I?" Psychiatry/religion, according to the Dennisonian satire,

offers to solve the riddle of identity for each of us, but the answer, as given
in The Prince of Antioch and Cards of Identity, while undoubtedly in?
genious, is perhaps more complex than Everyman can easily bear. Well
might one of the characters in the drama exclaim, "Welcome, good hag,
if good and hag thou art,/ If merely hag, get hence" (p. 346).
To understand a story told by a character in a novel, one has ordi?

narily to have some sense of the narrator's psychology, the circumstances
of the delivery, and the effect intended on the listeners; one has, that is,
to "correct" for all the peculiarities of presentation before one can be
at all sure of touching on any real events. When Dr. Bitterling reads his
paper ("The Case of the Co-Warden of the Badgeries") to the assembled
Club, we should, in novelistic principle, in order to comprehend the auc?
tion scene, have to have some understanding of the Identity Club enter?
prise and theory, the character of Dr. Bitterling himself, the significance
of the Badgeries story, the character of the narrator of that story, and the
details of the narrative; we should, in other words, have to correct for all
the psychological twists that occur between the event and our reception
of it. But the truth is that in the theme/scene, satiric organization of
Cards of Identity (as opposed to a plot/character, novelistic structure),
the multiple-masks device is the meaning, and all we need say is that it
all concerns vagueness of identity and the chaotic jumble of identities
imposed upon the weakly-willing individual by greedy, devouring re?
ligionists. "If the comic devices are applied to a single object or group
of related objects," David Worcester says, in distinguishing the pointedly
satiric from the humorous or the merely comic, "if a sense of unity is
produced by the common bearing of diverse illustrations, we are on the
side of satire."9 No matter what his ostensible subject?auctions, or doc?
tors and nurses, or the national health system, or sex, or religion, or na?
tional tradition, or police, or psychiatrists, or Communism, or Shake?
speare, or whatever?Dennis, exemplifying in his presentation that unity
in-diversity that is peculiar to satire, is always hammering away at the
one inclusive theme of identity. He never relaxes the intensity of his scorn
and ridicule, never ceases poking a finger in his victim's one eye, and?
this especially?never lets himself be caught hinting at a real and possible
positive; for one of the satirist's cardinal rules is: "Always keep it nega?
tive."
Not only does the satirist shy away from the danger of offering posi?
tives, but in fact he seldom speaks directly in his own voice about any?
thing. Dennis characteristically makes objective presentations entirely
from outside character and action (Cards of Identity) or, as in A House
in Order, creates a persona that is not, in any essential way, to be identi?
fied with himself. "To play this game properly," Dennis advises in his
book on Swift, "the true author must never interrupt the pretended one;
the T that is Jonathan Swift must never make a sudden personal ap?
pearance in territory that has been given over to one of his pseudonyms"
(p. 32). Perhaps a better example than A House in Order of this persona
device is offered by an article, "Of Unhappiness and War," that Dennis
386 / OLNEY
published as coeditor of Encounter. An exercise in Swiftian irony of the

"Modest Proposal" variety, the article is based on the premise that
American liberals are happy only when miserably unhappy, specifically
when they are revolted by governmental policy (thus they were in their
days of glory under Coolidge and Hoover); their greatest happiness-cum
revulsion/unhappiness is with the war in Viet Nam, and Johnson (this
was published in February 1968), a great leader of the liberals, has sacri?
ficed billions of dollars and thousands of lives in a commendable effort
to keep his liberals happy, i.e., unhappy. The question that the writer pon?
ders in conclusion is whether Johnson will be willing to make the liberals
really unhappy/happy by turning over Southeast Asia to the Commu?
nists in an entirely ignominious and degrading capitulation. Dennis ap?
pears throughout this essay not as himself but as a good-hearted and
helpful observer, inclined to the liberal side in his political sentiments,
who modestly seeks to serve the best interests of everyone involved, and
especially of the liberals; and, as will be obvious, he manages to have it
both ways, eating his cake and keeping it too, by hazarding nothing posi?
tive.
One might suppose that in Cards of Identity, if the central question
really is "Who am I?" Dennis might want to pursue from within the ef?
forts of the individual to establish and realize his identity. This is what
Joyce does in the impressionistic record of A Portrait of the Artist or in
the interior monologue of Ulysses, where there is little else but the sub?
jective; this is what Virginia Woolf does also and a hundred other novel?
ists intent on sketching an answer to the question of identity. Dennis's
treatment, however, is unfailingly exterior. Indeed, another thing, as I
have already implied, that distinguishes the satirist's art from the novel?
ist's, is the small regard shown by the former for characterization, which
is perhaps achieved in any fullness only through the inner view. One rea?
son that Cards of Identity so completely eschews the inside is that it is
not really concerned with answering the question "Who am I?"; rather it
pursues those who do offer to answer this question at large and those
who require an answer from someone else: the book is dedicated not to
the internal but the external, to the objective rather than the subjective.
No living person, taken from his own point of view, is entirely?or per?
haps at all?despicable, and this is good reason for the satirist to refuse
to identify with any interior point of view and, going a step further, to
avoid creating full and living characters. "Dogmatically," Wyndham
Lewis says, speaking as a satirist, "I am for the Great Without, for the
method of external approach. . . ."10 Never, in Cards of Identity, does
Dennis try to evoke the Within; never do we penetrate a character's mind
and his thoughts so as to make them our thoughts; never do we have a
sense of any character's individuality or his essential being (which is

anyhow in question: is there such a thing?) It would be to destroy his
very intention if Dennis went within a character, or within characters
generally, to analyze their inmost, private motives and personalities.
"Tout comprendre," according to the French proverb, "c'est tout par
donner." When we begin to understand the characters, we begin to ex?
cuse and to forgive them, and that is not at all to Dennis's purpose, for he
has no desire to pardon anybody. Seeing them from without, the reader
lacks totally in sympathy for the rogues and ninnies of Cards of Identity.
As the characters are not made a part of his empathic field, the reader can
laugh and ridicule (along with the author, who is in his book only in its
consistent tone of mockery and ridicule, irony and sarcasm) and can con?
demn the sin without worrying about the sinner. The satirist, unlike the
"true, compleat" novelist, is not interested in his characters for their
humanness. He is not drawn to create character because he loves to create
life, to feel a character come alive under his hand. He is almost always
more interested in ideas than in people, and his characters are to be used
rather than simply to be. Putting the distinction in gross terms, one might
call the great novelist a creative genius, the great satirist a critical genius.
Another name for the satiric target of Cards of Identity is the mod?
ern ideal (though Dennis also argues that it is to be found throughout
history in all religions) of self-consciousness. "Self-consciousness is, in?
deed, the hallmark of the new identity," he maintains, speaking in par?
ticular of the effects of psychoanalysis: "changed out of all self-recog?
nition from childhood on, it sees its past, present and future, its whole
world, simply as a series of mirrors in which its defects are precisely re?
flected" (preface to Two Plays, p. 48). And on the next page he continues:
"It would seem that the aim of all the doctrines that have been discussed
here is one and the same: to deny the existence of the external world by
making self-consciousness the keystone of life. If we live turned inwards,
watching our engines move and our sins writhe, we soon achieve to the
peak of panegoism: whatever takes place outside us becomes merely an
extension of ourselves." Hence the externality of treatment in Cards of
Identity can be seen as both a satiric technique and an instance of person?
al morality: at one and the same time, it prevents our sympathizing with
the sinner to the extent of forgiving the sin, and it demonstrates Dennis's
revulsion against all who would penetrate the depths to re-form identity.
It demonstrates his feeling, on all counts, against "panegoism."
With its technical exuberance, scenic diversity, and thematic pro?
liferation, Cards of Identity answers very nicely to what the dictionary
says is the original meaning of the word satire: "a dish of mixed fruits."
While the fruits themselves are mixed, however, Dennis's vision is not,
388 / OLNEY
and he succeeds, by the single-minded intensity of his attack, in bringing

them all under a single head, so that, though many and mixed, they are all
unquestionably fruit: though his object is large and bears a variety of
names?psychoanalysis, psychiatry, self-consciousness, religion, panego
ism?in the end the folly and the evil, as Dennis delights to imagine them,
are seen to be manifestations, symptoms, and excrescences of a single
principle, a single disease. And by whatever name Dennis chooses to call
his object, there is no doubt that he pursues it in Cards of Identity re?
lentlessly, in the best tradition of the satirist, rending and tearing, slaugh?
tering and dismembering, yet compressing and hammering eternally com?
pact.
NORTH CAROLINA CENTRAL UNIVERSITY
NOTES
1 Cards of Identity (New York: Vanguard Press, 1955), p. 67. Subsequent references to
the book will be given in the text.
2 Jonathan Swift: A Short Character (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 45.
3 Elsewhere Dennis maintains that it is a mistake to discuss St. Augustine in terms of

sexuality, as has become fashionable in recent criticism; one should perceive, he says,
that Augustine's real drive, beyond anything one might say about his relations with his
mistress or his mother, is to satisfy a power instinct in the Adlerian manner (Two Plays
and a Preface [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958 j, p. 20). One reviewer of Cards
of Identity (Anthony Bailey in Commonweal, 60 [28 Oct. 1955 J, 95) says that Dennis,
prior to Cards of Identity, had translated Adler, but I have never been able to find any
published translation.
4 In an article in Life Dennis describes, with satiric eye, a weekend organized by anti
smoking campaigners in which he partly participated and that he saw as essentially re?
ligious in orientation: it attempted to redraw the identities of its victims according to
the needs of its founders who were, significantly in light of Cards of Identity, a medical
doctor, a psychiatrist, and a Baptist minister (Life, 65 [17 Nov. 1958], 69-70). In an?
other Life article Dennis implicitly praises eccentrics because they have formed their
own identities?as one can tell because they are like none other: "A Treasury of English
Eccentrics," Life, 43 [2 Dec. 1957J, lOlff.
5 Two Plays and a Preface, p. 29.
6 Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951), p. 301. I
assume, from the coincidence of publication dates (both first published in 1949) and
from the relevance of the title to the action of Boys and Girls, that this is the same book
as A Sea Change (listed in various places as one of Dennis's novels), but I have never
seen a copy under the latter title.
7 C. J. Rolo, Atlantic, 196 (Dec. 1955), 94.
8 Bailey, Commonweal, p. 95.
9 David Worcester, The Art of Satire (New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), p. 37.
10 Quoted by Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1960), p. 225.

James Olney-CARDS OF IDENTITY - AND THE SATIRIC MODE

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James Olney-CARDS OF IDENTITY - AND THE SATIRIC MODE

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"CARDS OF IDENTITY" AND THE SATIRIC MODE

Author(s): JAMES OLNEY

At the climax of a virtuoso performance in hysteria, designed to un?

If memory is thus incapable of making us one thing through all the

Every one of the "psychiatrists" is engaged in compensating for a feeling

The nonentity, or human inquirier [sic], is placed in the

all struck Miss Paradise as forcefully as if an undertaker had come in"

the story of a man frightened to be alone and frightened to be among oth?

effect thereby, if and because, in the thematic relevance of scenes, he is

Mortimer and inserted without cuts as an integral part of the text of

Oh, helpless, awful combination!

"Who am I?" Psychiatry/religion, according to the Dennisonian satire,

To understand a story told by a character in a novel, one has ordi?

published as coeditor of Encounter. An exercise in Swiftian irony of the

sense of any character's individuality or his essential being (which is

and he succeeds, by the single-minded intensity of his attack, in bringing

NORTH CAROLINA CENTRAL UNIVERSITY

2 Jonathan Swift: A Short Character (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 45.

3 Elsewhere Dennis maintains that it is a mistake to discuss St. Augustine in terms of

5 Two Plays and a Preface, p. 29.

7 C. J. Rolo, Atlantic, 196 (Dec. 1955), 94.

8 Bailey, Commonweal, p. 95.

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