Euphemism and Other Dodges Evasion in Literature and Film Since 1900

Euphemism and Other Dodges: Evasion in Literature and Film since 1900 2022 ________________________ ii Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... v Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 Limits of Language, Silence, and Society in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando ...................... 12 Sincerity? Katherine Mansfield’s “Marriage à la Mode” .............................................. 47 The Location of Desire, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.............................................................................................................. 75 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 106 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 117 iii Abstract Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Katherine Mansfield’s “Marriage à la Mode,” Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings engage and elucidate evasive language. This thesis examines each text for how it uses dialogue, narration, and form to display euphemisms and other strategies that delay, manipulate, veil, or soften a recognition of troublesome truths. For my discussion’s theoretical framework, I employ Michel Foucault’s concept of parrhesia as a counter to euphemistic language, while I draw on insights from Keith Allan and Kate Burridge’s Euphemism and Dysphemism, Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, and George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” to guide how I categorize and qualify evasive language and the conditions that perpetuate it. iv Acknowledgements v Second, Professor Christopher Leise served as my second reader and deserves a booming thanks for his role. And finally, a “thank you” that I hope reverberates off the borders of every page, though I cannot seem to find words loud enough to express what Professor Gaurav Majumdar has given this thesis. So Gaurav, I offer you simple, quiet thanks for week after week of thesis meetings, of thesis reading, of thesis editing. Thank you for your patience with my syntax, mistakes, and frustratingly prolific passive voice, for your time in reading each chapter and returning feedback promptly, for the persistence and attention you gave my ideas and language both this semester and throughout my years at Whitman. I trust you to register this thank you at the volume it deserves. vi Introduction Jack Lint: Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the right man. The wrong man was delivered to me as the right man. I accepted him, upon a good faith, as the right man. Was I wrong? Sam Lowry: You killed Buttle? Jack: Sam, there are very rigid parameters laid down to prevent such things happening. It wasn’t my fault that Buttle’s heart condition didn’t appear on Tuttle’s file. -Brazil, Terry Gilliam In 1989, a New York court convicted five teenagers, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, and Yusef Salaam for the rape and murder of a woman in Central Park. In 2002, the true perpetrator stepped forward and the charges were vacated, though four of the men had already served their full sentence. The fifth, the only one tried as an adult, was released in August of 2002, following the reversed conviction. At the time of the initial trial in 1989, Donald Trump purchased fullpage ads in several newspapers that called for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York in response to the crime. In 2019 he was confronted about the ads and responded, “You have people on both sides of that, they admitted their guilt…If you look at Linda Fairstein and if you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case –– so we’ll leave it at that” (Ransom). The case of the Central Park Five is an egregious example of wrongful conviction. Donald Trump’s defense of his own public advocacy for their conviction and punishment exemplifies how speech circumvents blame and responsibility. Political language, as George Orwell puts it in “Politics and the English Language,” is the “defense of the indefensible.…Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness” (363). Donald Trump’s 1989 advertisement did not directly call for the death of the five teenage men, but it implied such a call by placing the demand “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY” above a description of what it called New York’s “permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman and then…be returned to the streets to rape and maim and kill once again” (Ransom). Trump defended his advertisement during his presidential term, making his language a priori “political language.” He used political language to defend, not just his advertisement, but the outcome of the trial (“they admitted their guilt”). Like Jack Lint in the absurd bureaucratic murder at the heart of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, Trump defended the punishment of the wrong men. He defends what was clearly indefensible. The press initially asked Trump if he would apologize to the Central Park Five for his 1989 advertisements. He both failed to directly answer this yes-or-no question in his response and displayed several qualities of political language in the process. He first attempted to neutralize the accusation, claiming opinions fall on “both sides of that.” This presents Trump in a position of supposed objectivity, considering “both sides,” while leaving “that” to dangle as an ambiguous referent. Trump then defers responsibility to others, both onto the victims of the wrongful conviction, saying “they admitted their guilt,” and to the city which “never should have settled that case.” He further displaces the opinion that the city holds blame onto Linda Fairstein, the prosecutor on the case. Not only is the city responsible for closing the case, but Fairstein is responsible for blaming the city, and Trump is responsible for neither error nor opinion. Finally he refuses further questioning with the statement “We’ll leave it at that,” despite never answering the initial question. Neither does Jack Lint, in his exchange with Sam Lowry that forms this 2 introduction’s epigraph, ever answer the question “You killed Buttle?”. Jack conveniently interprets Sam’s question as one of intent, instead of simple fact: Did he mean to kill Buttle? Jack can now respond in the negative to the reformulated question by noting that he was ignorant to Buttle’s heart condition. Trump was not personally responsible for the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five, and so when asked whether or not he would apologize for his ad––an ad called into question about a month before Trump’s comments when Yusef Salaam said, “They put a bounty on our heads by taking out these full-page ads calling for our deaths”––he answered instead a question about the blame for the actual conviction (“When They See Us”). He chose to claim innocence in relation to the actual conviction instead of addressing the lesser offense, but the greater personal responsibility, of the public pressure his ads generated around the case. This thesis looks at techniques of speech that defer, delay, or displace responsibility for the distasteful. Politics offers particularly fertile ground for euphemistic language, language that attempts to evade the unpleasant, to fester. Everything from the most banal private exchange to the most public declaration, however, may utilize evasive speech. Literature, too, gives rich ground for evasive and deceptive language. On the other hand, literature can also dissect and ridicule deceptive language, making its deception visible. I will investigate here the use and display of euphemism in four texts, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Katherine Mansfield’s “Marriage à la Mode,” Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings. These texts show the use of language to distract from or overwrite unpalatable concepts, as euphemism, with etymological roots in the Greek word for “fair speech,” replaces an unpleasant phrase with something more pleasing, more fair. The four main texts I examine likewise adopt 3 euphemistic modes, though their deployment of euphemism often differs from euphemisms in their most commonly-recognized forms. Considering the exchange, circulation, demand, and supply of anesthetic statements, I wanted to address the following questions: How does talking in pleasantries mold or obscure our perception of the unpleasant? When and how do banalities begin to function euphemistically? When did a word meaning “fair speech” begin to imply deceptively fair speech? My first two chapters on Orlando and “Marriage à la Mode” engage these questions as both Woolf and Mansfield craft social satires with all the charged banalities such satire requires. In these initial chapters, however, and in the closing discussion of Gilliam’s Brazil and James’ A Brief History, I diverge from my prompting curiosity around formal pleasantries and the banal towards a consideration of desire and euphemistic speech. Each chapter, and my final chapter in particular, looks at how language either crafts desire or else crafts a desired perception of the world. In Fearless Speech, Michel Foucault theorizes a truthful perception of the world through the concept of parrhesia, the Greek term for a specific kind of truth-telling. Foucault identifies several qualities of parrhesia (frankness, truth, danger, criticism, and duty) that make parrhesia nearly the antithesis of euphemistic speech. In the classical Greek system, there is no gap between truth and knowledge, or knowledge and speech, “the parrhesiastes says what it true because he knows that it is true; and he knows that it is true because it is really true. The parrhesiastes is not only sincere and says what is his opinion, but his opinion is also the truth” (14). Parrhesia communicates absolute truth, then, because what the speaker says, what he knows to be true, and what is true, all correspond precisely. In two ways, the parrhesiastes (or parrhesiast––the speaker of 4 truth or truth-teller) offers a useful opposition to the euphemistic speaker: first, the sincerity of parrhesia counters the deception of euphemism, and second, the absolute truth of what the parrhesiastes says counters the modernist distrust of absolute truth that blurs and broadens the category of euphemism. I return later to the modernists’ skeptical approach to truth, asserting in the chapter on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, that direct language, absolutely “true” speech, is impossible. The reader can choose whether to adopt the classical Greek or the skeptical modernist’s perspective on truth, but whether or not adopted in full, the Greek insistence on absolute truth establishes a clear point of reference from which to measure euphemism, making a discussion of euphemism relevant. If direct, fearless language, parrhesia, is unattainable, then all language must be deceptive and engage the euphemistic mode, making a discussion of particular euphemisms or deceptive techniques of language almost trivial. One requires the possibility of parrhesia, even if one claims that truth is fundamentally slippery, because to consider euphemism in any useful way, language still must be oriented towards truth. For speech to hold ethical seriousness, the speaker must believe, at some level, in truth, must strive towards truth, towards parrhesia, rather than assume an actual arrival at or ownership of absolute truth. Otherwise, all speech can be dismissed as garble extraneous to thought or reality. Foucault ends his introductory remarks on parrhesia in Fearless Speech with an apparent paradox. He first describes danger as a fundamental aspect of parrhesia, the parrhesiastes must risk something (social status, an authority’s anger, even life) to truly speak parrhesia, and then claims that “Philosophical parrhesia is…associated with the theme of the care of oneself” (24). The parrhesiastes cares for the self by using, and thus 5 creating space for, parrhesia, reducing the risk of future truth-telling by setting a precedent of fearless language. The parrhesiastes refuses to censor the self, whatever risk that involves, and so pushes society, too, away from censorship; he expands the breadth of speech spoken, and thus allowed to be spoken, on the assembly floor. The care the parrhesiastes takes for himself has the form of a principled life, what he establishes as a true principle he likewise adapts to his own life, thus performing his principles to the scrutiny of the public. Gaurav Majumdar clarifies this process, writing “The parrhesiast’s candid utterances, therefore, tend toward a world where self-expression and selfprotection are symbiotic. To encourage the production of conditions for the better protection of the self, the parrhesiast risks endangering the self” (18). Since parrhesia works antithetically to euphemism, euphemism endangers the self. The dangers of euphemism are commonly understood to reside with whatever conditions of violence, whoever’s pain, continues without address or redress due to euphemistic evasion. In our previous examples, the danger of Trump’s comments on the Central Park Five or Jack Lint’s justification of Buttle’s death is that they both dismiss the violence committed against wrongfully convicted men and so allow that violence to continue. Such a dismissal seemingly protects the euphemistic speaker (Trump or Lint) from responsibility, and indeed one who speaks euphemistically pursues the safety and comfort of innocence. In an immediate world, euphemism may provide the speaker with a sense of safety, but, in a consequent future, euphemism endangers the speaker, too. Addressing the dangers of a world that accepts such a future, Salman Rushdie responds to George Orwell’s essay “Inside the Whale.” Rushdie rejects the logic of “Inside the Whale” as a quietist call to enter the safety of a metaphorical whale and ignore the world 6 outside, with the statement, “The truth is that there is no whale. We live in a world without hiding places; the missiles have made sure of that….Either we agree to delude ourselves, to lose ourselves in the fantasy of the great fish…or we can do what all human beings do instinctively when they realize that the womb has been lost for ever: we can make the very devil of a racket” (Rushdie). Rushdie suggests that in a world without hiding places, the safety or comfort sought in euphemistic speech is a delusion. Both the speaker and the listener must accept a euphemism for it to function, a dynamic that enforces the cooperation in Rushdie’s first option, “we agree to delude ourselves.” If either speaker or listener pushes against illusion (the womb, the whale), the safety of that hiding place shatters. Caring for oneself, speaking parrhesia, is simply a specific way of making “the very devil of a racket.” The speaker who seeks solace in euphemism, on the other hand, endangers the self by hiding where they are vulnerable; they legislate society to censor and control their speech by first censoring it themselves and so create conditions that exacerbate personal risk when, eventually, the imagined hiding place is targeted and found to really hide nothing at all. Characters speak in varying euphemistic modes in the four main texts this thesis discusses, leading to varying degrees of danger. In particular, the bureaucratic jargon in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and the street jargon of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings induct certain individuals, Sam Lowry in Brazil and several young gang members in A Brief History, to a vocabulary and trust in authority (whether the authority of the Ministry of Information or of the gang don Josey Wales) that promises safety and reward. The Ministry later tortures Sam and Josey Wales executes or else orders the 7 death of the gang members who shoot up the Singer (Bob Marley)’s house after the assassination fails. The promise of safety breaks. While Foucault’s theorization of parrhesia and the parrhesiastes care of the self shapes every chapter as a counter to euphemistic speech, here I am indebted to several other theorists and scholars whose ideas inform each of the proceeding chapters to diverse degree. My first chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the limit of the “acceptable” in British and British colonial society spanning over three centuries, a portion of Orlando’s long life. Kate Burridge and Keith Allan’s book Euphemism and Dysphemism provides a starting framework for the forms through which euphemism operates. They initially define euphemism in terms of substitution and later list several sub-groupings of euphemisms that function through figurative or metaphorical expressions, through circumlocutions, acronyms, or “general-for-specific” or “part-forwhole” replacements, through hyperbole (substituting a notion with something grand, overwrought, inflated) and omission (substituting a notion with nothing). Woolf utilizes these last two to particular effect in Orlando, where both Orlando, a poet, and the biographer who narrates Orlando’s life embellish their language with long descriptions or small flourishes of pretty language that obscure the communicated content. Likewise, the biographer occasionally omits knowledge (such as his sources) from the tale. Woolf presents such omissions in a way that marks their absence and makes the omission visible. Her own attentions to the deceptions of speech do not exclude Woolf from employing euphemistic tendencies herself, but often her play with language elucidates the deceptive nature of words. Orlando often suggests several ways to read a passage simultaneously, exhibiting the limits of a single register of reading and the deception that 8 takes place when a text preferences a single effect. For example, in an episode where Orlando travels as an ambassador to Constantinople, the tedium of diplomacy registers alongside a mocking absurdity towards diplomatic ceremonies and an anger at the unacknowledged politics of a city on the brink of revolution. In discussing Orlando’s position as ambassador, I will draw on Saikat Majumdar’s discussion of a banality towards stasis in colonial contexts in Prose of the World. Orlando’s principal concern, however, is not coloniality but gender. The reflexivity of language parallels the reflexivity of gender in Orlando and questions whether gender, like truth, can ever be known, or if truth, like gender, can ever be fixed. Tension between content and presentation, which pervades the display of gender and truth in Orlando, also enters my second chapter on Katherine Mansfield’s “Marriage à la Mode.” Mansfield grapples with sincerity, the alignment between thought and speech, what is contained and what is expressed. George Orwell sets sincerity against the fog of euphemistic speech, saying “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity” (Orwell, 15). Likewise, Foucault highlights that sincerity is necessary for parrhesia. But Mansfield writes a tale that on the outset sets a hopelessly sincere husband in tension with his vilely insincere wife and her friends, and on subsequent readings switches sympathies to leave no character with a clear claim to sincerity. In On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt posits that the self is indeed the hardest thing to know and so aligning what the self expresses with what the self truly thinks or knows is unfeasible, and “insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit” (67). Mansfield adopts a similarly skeptical approach to sincerity and implicates the sincerity of her own relations by describing the friends of Isabel as all poets and self-congratulatory aesthetes in a pointed echo of the 9 Bloomsbury group. I will particularly focus on Mansfield’s use of time as it catalyzes or threatens sincerity and insincerity. “Marriage à la Mode” deals with the fashionable and contemporary, even one of the central characters is described as the “new” Isabel, and a look at the new and the old forces a consideration of memory and forgetting and how language molds the perception of both. The text engages delay towards forgetting, a delay without true intention to ever complete what is postponed, and this delay puts time to euphemistic ends, allowing the promise of action to replace action itself. Finally, in chapter Three, I look at Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil and Marlon James’ novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. In reading the two in conjunction, their similarities blur the distinction between absurd fantasy and absurd reality. Both texts engage jargon, whether the bureaucratic jargon of various departments in Brazil’s Ministry of Information or else the jargon of the Jamaican ghetto or the CIA in A Brief History. I look at how euphemism functions within jargon, or speech that has a clear “inside” and “outside” audience. Both texts display how language manipulates desire, particularly for those “inside” a certain rhetoric. A film absurdly hedged by automation and bureaucracy, Gilliam visualizes euphemism by manipulating camera perspective so the utopic world of Brazil in which the the film’s characters live is visible alongside the world this constructed utopia hides. A Brief History, too, uses form to display multiple layers of desire by switching between a host of narrative voices. I conclude with a more detailed look at how distortion interacts with the form of language through Roland Barthes’ use of semiotics in myth. Barthes invokes a resistance in a statement’s strict meaning in language to its concept in myth. I attempt to piece through how this resistance operates in euphemistic speech and how euphemism, with its 10 explicit intent to deceive or distort, interacts with the deception and deformation Barthes already locates in the general relation between signifier and signified. While the following chapters address the deception and distortion of language, they are only able to do so because language also makes the deception visible, resisting its own mode. 11 Limits of Language, Silence, and Society in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Preferencing the Phatic, Euphemistic Substitution When we identify euphemism, we imply that an alternative expression is possible. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando employs euphemism strategically to signal that more direct speech exists. As Kate Burridge and Keith Allan define euphemism in their book Euphemism and Dysphemism, “A euphemism is used as an alternative to a dispreferred expression” (11). Alternatives and replacement haunt euphemistic speech. Thus, when Orlando indicates euphemism, it is always accompanied by the question: What is not said? In this study, I will avoid any set vocabulary to describe non- or less-euphemistic language but will rely on context to establish a sense of the merits and obscurities of alternative expressions. I leave the idea of direct language, or language that signifies things exactly as they are, to the realm of the impossible; direct language is always elusive, as language eludes direct meaning. The orientation of this chase matters; one may search for direct language and yet the limits of language elude the speaker’s intention or else one may use language to elude direct signification. In both cases a gap persists between signified and signifier. Yet whether one seeks or runs from direct language characterizes each gap distinctly, and euphemism primarily engages the latter gap. Despite a precise alignment between speech and meaning collapsing in practice, the idea of direct language will linger beneath the rest of this discussion. 12 The titular character of Woolf’s novel, Orlando, chases direct language as he1 struggles to name things as they are. In a moment of poetic disillusion, he grows disgusted with his habitual florid writing: He tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. “The sky is blue,” he said, “the grass is green.” Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. “Upon my word,” he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), “I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.” And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection. (66) If it were possible to neutrally describe the sky’s physical appearance, perhaps “the sky is blue” would be that bland and neutral phrase. Yet Orlando knows that this bland expression does not describe the sky adequately at all. Both a description of the sky as blue and a description of the sky as the fallen veils of virgins are accurate in some part. Or else, as Orlando laments, both are false. One can avoid Orlando’s deep dejection by choosing the former formulation, which allows for accuracy in grass that is both green and a flight of girls. This is not to dismiss Orlando’s pessimism. In always asking “What is not said?”, any discussion of euphemism and banality indeed adopts Orlando’s focus 1 I use the masculine pronoun here as Orlando is gendered male in the quoted moment in the text. Orlando, however, wakes up a woman halfway through the novel. So the pronouns I use will switch throughout this discussion, attempting to follow the same pronouns the “biographer,” who narrates the novel, uses in different parts of the text. 13 on what words lack, the chasm between truth and language that language is forever trying to bridge while truth waits indifferent to its striving. What lacks in a statement of the sky’s color? To Orlando, it may miss the veils of a thousand Madonnas, which is to say the triad of the sky’s veiling obscurity, its immensity (“a thousand” being too large for human comprehension), and its purity. To another, “the sky is blue” may more generally lack imagination, it repeats a statement that’s already been stated time and again. It may lack dimension, color being only one attribute of many. And it may lack enduring truth, the sky turns gray, white, purple with stunning frequency. What lacks in the sky as the fallen veils of a thousand Madonnas? The mechanics of the atmosphere and an understanding that the sky is separate from theology. It is no virgin immensity and is routinely penetrated by greenhouse gasses, airplane trails, and the light from the sun and stars. For the most part, I will leave the “natural” world to the ravages of language, but will draw on its dangers again when the consequences of romanticized euphemistic language for scenery and its human inhabitants overlap. The biographer whom Woolf employs in her novel’s premise to record the life of Orlando undermines the struggle for accuracy in Orlando’s romantic writings through humor. Early in the novel, the biographer semi-consciously lampoons the poetic habits of writers: [Orlando] was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green more precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no 14 more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. (9) Orlando’s “audacity” here includes a scathing critique of young poets more generally for describing color without observation. Poets sense color through their imagination, not their eyes and process that imagined green into words. Orlando, meanwhile, looks at the literal color and is unable to translate it to the page at all. When the literal and imaginative come into contact, when Orlando, who is engaged in the imaginative work of writing, looks out his window at the literal green of a laurel bush, writing cannot continue; the green of nature and the green of the imagination cannot be reconciled onto a single page. When Orlando later says the green “grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods,” his words express an imaginative excess. The grass contains girls and satyrs and whole forests in the imaginative realm, but the literal realm contests the physical presence of such an enchanted world. Imaginative language exceeds the limits of the literal and the excess may, on some level, appear as bullshit, words produced (en masse) with only passing reference to a literal instance of green. Yet the imagined excess is a persuasive and compelling description, nonetheless. Harry Frankfurt in On Bullshit notes that “although [bullshit] is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong” (47-48). Young poets are thus granted the possibility of their description of green aligning with, or even enriching, the color’s obvious or literal appearance, despite most failing to glance out a window. 15 What may seem “obvious” about grass, that it is green, partially appears obvious because it is cliché. Louis Althusser theorizes the obvious in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” saying “Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word ‘name a thing’ or ‘have a meaning’ (therefore including the obviousness of the ‘transparency’ of language), the ‘obviousness’ that you and I are subjects—and that that does not cause any problems—is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect” (172). What is obvious is what is ideologically true, which is not the same as what is “true” true, nor poetically true. Neither the “obviousness” of “the grass is green,” nor the poetic truth of Orlando’s imagined girls and satyrs capture the absolute truth. Like Orlando’s imaginative excess, the obvious or literal description of green grass may fit a loose definition of bullshit in its distance from truth, but now it is the ideological collective “faking things,” instead of the individual. The introduction to this thesis presented Foucault’s idea of parrhesia in Fearless Speech as a counter-touchstone to deceptive language. Foucault’s parrhesia is not the same as the Greek’s parrhesia, and yet Foucault adopts the Greek term and all of its assumptions, including the assumption that absolute truth exists and that “the parrhesiastes says what it true because he knows that it is true; and he knows that it is true because it is really true” (14). Foucault preferences this aspect of parrhesia in context of decades of theory, literature, and experience that are skeptical towards absolute truth. His stance does not blindly assume truth exists, but it recognizes truth as a necessary, something the parrhesiastes and anyone attempting fearless speech must believe in and orient themselves towards as a prerequisite to speech. While the ideological and poetic truths Orlando spouts as he tries to describe grass and sky retain a distance from truth that may appear as bullshit, pulled 16 straight from the imagination or from cliché with little reference to nature itself, Orlando maintains a “concern with the truth” that contests Frankfurt’s criteria for bullshit. Orlando’s concern with the truth, his very act of trying, then failing, then trying again to match words to nature, both establishes Orlando as a character striving towards truth and a potential form of literary (as opposed to political) parrhesia, and disrupts Althusser’s concept of the obvious. Althusser first mentions the obviousness of the “transparency” of language, and this is the obviousness that Orlando disrupts as he struggles to reconcile the imaginative and the literal shades of nature. He realizes that “the grass is green” is not so obvious after all, a phrase that still fails to match what his eyes perceive, undermining the ideological truth of a cliché cemented into the English language. The text, which also questions the obvious “transparency” of language through passages both exterior and interior to Orlando’s musings, deals primarily with Althusser’s second obviousness, the obviousness of the subject. Gender is a principal aspect of an ideological subject. In the historical timeline that echoes the novel’s timeline, the late sixteenth century to 1928, an individual is obviously man or obviously woman. Orlando questions the obviousness of gender and, through gender, the obviousness of the subject. Judith Butler, in an interview about her book Gender Trouble, says, I would suggest that there are two dimensions of gender performativity from the start: one is the unchosen or unwilled situation of gender assignment, one that we can come to deliberate about and change in time; the other is performative action that takes up the terms by which we have been addressed (and so a retaking, a taking over, or a refusal), the categories through which we have been formed, in order to begin the process of self-formation within and against its terms. (Butler) 17 Orlando enters the novel a young man and the first thirty years of his life he formulates the self “within and against” the masculine pronoun, the masculine “-o” ending of his name, and the expectations for the men in his family line (the opening scene of the novel shows Orlando in patriarchal lineage, slashing at heads his “father, or perhaps his grandfather, struck from the shoulders of a vast Pagan” [7]). At the age of thirty, however, Orlando awakens a woman, a fact the biographer quickly moves past, “let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can” (91). The biographer brushes past Orlando’s sex change and suggests that Butler’s first dimension of gender performance, “the unchosen or unwilled situation of gender assignment,” is hardly worth remarking upon; Orlando did not choose to be a man at the start of the novel and neither did he choose to awaken a woman halfway through, his or her gender assignment must simply be accepted and debating it is a futile bore to the biographer. Oriana Palusci who, in the essay “Modernist Sex-Change on Paper: Gender Markers in Joyce’s ‘Circe’ and Woolf’s Orlando,” particularly analyzes Woolf’s choice to cross out the feminine form “Orlanda” in an initial draft of the novel, focuses on what stays the same after Orlando switches gender: “the new masculine Orlando keeps his name, his frame of mind, and his former self when he becomes a woman” (162). The consistent presence of Orlando’s name and identity, regardless of gender, in the novel, leads Palusci to conclude that “Orlando the novel can be read as an androgynous performance, in which Orlando the man and Orlando the woman share each the other’s half of the book” (164). Orlando the man and Orlando the woman are simultaneously separate entities in the book while also sharing the book, and themselves, with one another. As a “shared” subject, then, Orlando contradicts a unified, “obvious,” subject. Althusser follows his 18 passage on the obviousness of the subject with an example, an example that engages gendered terms: “we all have friends who, when they knock on our door and we ask, through the door, the question ‘Who’s there?’, answer (since ‘it’s obvious’) ‘It’s me’. And we recognize that ‘it is him’, or ‘her’. We open the door, and ‘it’s true, it really was she who was there’” (172). Orlando answers any ontological call throughout the book with “it’s me,’ but an ambiguity persists for the reader who is never quite sure if it is “him” or if it is “her,” which of Orlando's multiple identities answers the address? Butler sets up the formation of the self as happening after gender assignation. First gender is assigned, and then, within the space created through gendered address, the individual defines the self within or against the limits of such an address. But Orlando has formed the self before he is assigned the sex of woman, and reforming the self against new terms does not obliterate the preceding self of a male Orlando. No longer is the response of the subject obvious, “it’s me,” but instead surprising: we recognize “it is him” and then open the door and instead, “it really was she who was there.” When Woolf opens the door to the feminine pronoun in Orlando, while maintaining the masculine name, Palusci argues that Woolf “stage[s] an effective linguistic game-play and thus insist[s] on the rift between grammatical gender and sexual gender” (164). Intertwining the feminine and masculine in Orlando likewise intertwines gender and the presentation of gender; the text not only insists on the rift between grammatical and sexual gender, but it also insists on the entanglement of the two. The reflexivity of language, or self-presentation more generally, saturates Orlando through its concern with gendered language and expression. When he first awakens a woman, the biographer tells us “Orlando had become a woman––there is no denying it. But in every 19 other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change…did nothing whatever to alter their identity” (90), but soon “Her modesty as to her writings, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her safety all seem to hint that what was said a short time ago about there being no change in Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to be altogether true” (122). If being a woman influences how Orlando is presented and presents herself, then presentation can also influence her “womanhood.” Expressing a femininity towards and for others begins to change Orlando’s femininity on an ontological level. The subject, then, as the basis for ontology, is destabilized in the re“self-formation” that Orlando undertakes “within and against” the new feminine terms that address him. Moreover, Woolf uses the plural possessive “their” in claiming Orlando’s sex change did not “alter their identity.” While the gender-neutral “their” is now commonly used in the first person singular, Woolf uses “their” as a singular possessive when it was non-standard practice, and the plurality of the term registers more in this context. She thus hints at Orlando being a plural subject, which is far from “obvious” in “the subject” as a singular noun. Disrupting the obvious in any form acts against euphemism. Euphemistic modes do not require intention to operate; they are often a mode adopted automatically and unintentionally, using configurations of speech so often rehearsed that using them again appears “obvious.” Idioms and clichés such as “he passed” for “he died” or “her time of the month” for “menstruation” can be used so often that they do not register as euphemisms but instead as “transparent” language, obviousnesses too commonly understood to register as deceptive. Gender operates similarly; replacing a name for a pronoun is often automatic and the substitution barely registers. In her chapter on 20 “Criticizing the Social System: Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s Dark Comedy of Manners,” Lisa Colletta adopts a statement from Patrick O’Neill that the main attribute of modernism is “the loss of certainty in all systems traditionally seen as giving meaning to the world” (49). Modernity then also attempts to disturb the “obvious” structures of the world, including gender. Colletta sees Woolf addressing the modernist loss of certainty through humor, she “simultaneously values those manners for their ability to impose order on chaotic or even purposeless existence and subverts them by exposing them for their lack of any real meaning” (43). As Orlando discovers her femininity and the social mores surrounding her new gender, she subverts the gender system as ridiculous. She laughs delightfully as she realizes a few inches of exposed ankle can make a sailor lose his balance, or the refusal and then acceptance of a thin slice of meat can control the mood of a ship captain. The gender system gives order to the novel and structure to the eras of Orlando’s life, yet gender is simultaneously exposed as an arbitrary, and often absurd, distinction. Orlando is aware of her gender and holds a privileged position where “she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each….The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied her” (103). Yet despite such a privileged awareness of how gender operates, she still behaves, even thinks, with increasing femininity, eventually crying passionately, “‘Praise God that I’m a woman!’” (104). Likewise, while Orlando suffers periods of disenchantment with his or her writing, he or she always returns to writing; an awareness of the process of description and the gap between reality and words does not keep Orlando from still attempting description. Thus self-awareness changes nothing behaviorally…yet something has changed. A 21 lingering skepticism places truth in the periphery of Orlando’s writing even as he or she continues to oscillate between writing with false flourishes of detail and the false bluntness of “the sky is blue.” A lingering masculinity haunts Orlando’s increasingly feminine behavior as she cross dresses and juggles litigations as the father of three sons. She finds herself musing, “‘I am losing some illusions, … perhaps to acquire others” (113). Whether illusions of gender or language, it is the very naming of mirage that lets that mirage diminish. Orlando’s illusions must maintain some conventional distance from truth, indeed writing and womanhood seem at times too delicious for her to reject their illusional world, and yet even from within illusion she orients towards truth because she perceives that distance. Returning to Frankfurt’s thoughts on bullshit, which shares some overlap with illusion, I turn to a generalization about the conditions that produce bullshit and immediately afterwards to the conditions of Orlando’s royal appointments across Woolf’s novel. Frankfurt writes, “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about” (63). The queen gives Orlando his first position of power, as the queen’s Treasurer and Steward, on the sole accreditation of his shapely legs and the top of his head, which he presents to the queen the first time he kneels at her feet (13-15). King Charles later appoints Orlando to be the “Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople,” after Orlando asks for the position as a means to escape a vulturous love pursuing him in England –– though perhaps the comment of Nell Gwyn, the King’s mistress, that “’Twas a thousand pities…that such a pair of legs should leave the country” helped the King agree to Orlando’s request to depart (77). In both cases, then, Orlando begins his diplomatic positions with the sole 22 qualification of shapely calves. Stewards and ambassadors are both public political figures, and yet no one asks Orlando to demonstrate any knowledge of politics before accepting either position. As soon becomes clear, however, diplomats are not only expected to stand on their legs but also to talk, and write, putting Orlando exactly in the position where, Frankfurt claims, “bullshit is unavoidable.” The biographer begins the chapter on Orlando’s diplomacy with an acknowledgement that little is known about this period of his life, blaming “the revolution which broke out during his period of office, and the fire which followed [and] so damaged or destroyed all those papers from which any trustworthy record could be drawn” (78). In the same paragraph, however, the biographer asserts that “We know that [Orlando] discharged his duties to admiration” (78). How can this knowledge be stated so surely when the records to back it up are burnt? Is there evidence of poorly discharged duties in the statement that revolution and fire marked Orlando’s time in office? One English diplomat may not be responsible for the unrest of a city, yet the biographer risks contradicting himself by admitting the city’s turmoil and simultaneously praising Orlando’s work with the very sultan against whom the populace revolts. But on what level does this ironic contradiction function? In Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature 1900-1940, Gaurav Majumdar differentiates between Orlando’s reactions to Constantinople and the text’s descriptions of the same. He suggests that Woolf, and several other modernist authors, “are uneasy with contemporary practices of empire…However, they also sustain the cultural impulses within the machinery of empire” (44). Woolf may thus both ridicule Orlando’s reverence for the smell of the city that “seemed the very breath of the strident and multicoloured 23 and barbaric population” (79) and enter her own rut of orientalist reverence in the same passage, where description can never fully be pinned to the eyes of Orlando nor of the biographer. Floating between the explicit perspectives of Orlando and the biographer leaves open, too, the possibility that the gaze reflects the implicit perspective of the author. Irony includes an inherent uncertainty that allows for multiple effects, as Majumdar writes, “Irony, then, offsets and sustains several moments in the text that are overtly xenophobic” (44). A description of Orlando’s diplomatic days and his banal exchanges exhibit some of the dual registers in irony: After luncheon, lackeys announced that his coach and six was at the door and he went, preceded by purple Janissaries running on foot and waving great ostrich feather fans above their heads, to call upon the other ambassadors and dignitaries of state….In the first room, it was permissible only to mention the weather. Having said that it was fine or wet, hot or cold, the Ambassador then passed on to the next chamber, where again two figures rose to greet him. Here it was permissible to compare Constantinople as a place of residence with London; and the Ambassador naturally said that he preferred Constantinople, and his hosts naturally said, though they had not seen it, that they preferred London. In the next chamber, King Charles’s and the Sultan’s healths had to be discussed at some length. In the next were discussed the Ambassador’s health and that of the host’s wife, but more briefly. In the next the Ambassador complimented his host upon his furniture, and the host complimented the Ambassador upon his dress. In the next, sweet meats were offered, the host deploring their badness, the 24 Ambassador extolling their goodness. The ceremony ended at length with the smoking of a hookah and the drinking of a glass of coffee; but though the motions of smoking and drinking were gone through punctiliously there was neither tobacco in the pipe nor coffee in the glass, as, had either smoke or drink been real, the human frame would have sunk beneath the surfeit. For no sooner had the Ambassador dispatched one such visit, than another had to be undertaken. (81) The text offers this drawn-out ceremony, described in a paragraph almost as exhausting as the formalities it repeats, with a healthy dose of irony. The described exchanges (the weather, health, trivial compliments) are so common, so clichéd, that they could fade into the background noise of the novel altogether if not formally displayed in rapid overt succession. It is the form of the passage and the formal structure with which such banalities are laid out that make the conversations seem pointless, laughable, offset from their ubiquitous and unexceptional functions in daily usage by engaging them with absurd ubiquity. Nothing, seemingly, happens in this political exchange, no decisions are made, no policy discussed, no coffee is even drunk. The exchange seems a surfeit of empty gestures, easily done without, and yet the performance of each gesture works as a place-holder, and a relations-holder, for international politics. The passage’s ending comments on coffee provoke a particularly ironic guffaw. Just as soon as coffee and tobacco are established as integral parts of the daily diplomatic exchange, the biographer reveals they are not there at all. Colletta calls Woolf’s brand of social humor subversive and indeed here she subverts the coffee cup upside down to expose it as empty, no liquid spills out. Coffee and tobacco are crucial to the ceremony 25 only, and specifically, in their absence. This absence can be extended to other absences throughout the visit. In each conversation, each room, what is not said? Asking this question begins to suggest how banal exchange may limit to euphemistic exchange. Prescribed conversations about the weather, health, and places of residence are not overtly euphemistic. No glaring substitution, no “dispreferred expression” or more direct term, lurks under Orlando’s formulaic exchanges; yet such conversations still fulfill a substitution role. The whole diplomatic ceremony is phatic, it fulfills a social function with the actual content communicated having no importance or even specificity. This, in part, is because what is expressed is expected. The visit follows a structure, a formula, where who should say what is predetermined, only requiring the participants in the exchange to follow the script. A temporal substitution then operates in the Ambassador’s exchanges. A pre-formulated rulebook replaces any speech that would emerges from the time, people, and situation of the meeting. The ambassador and his hosts rely on a set structure that lets them avoid any conversation involving the immediacy and specifics of Turkey’s politics. In How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Žižek explains the value of phatic dynamics through the example of two friends applying for the same job promotion. If the first receives the job, Žižek argues, the proper thing to do is for him to offer the promotion to his friend and for the friend to promptly reject it, insisting that the friend originally promoted keep the promotion. Žižek writes, “What we have here is symbolic exchange at its purest: a gesture made only to be rejected. The magic of symbolic exchange is that, although at the end we are where we were at the beginning, there is a distinct gain for both parties in their pact of solidarity” (13). This dynamic underlies Orlando’s diplomatic 26 visit. Describing the weather does not change the weather, discussing each other’s health does not modify that health, stating a preference for certain cities (particularly when unseen) does not affect where one lives, and pretending to smoke a hookah leaves the lungs and mind in just the same state as if the smokeless smoking were forgone all together. Indeed, the passage ends by commencing a twin ceremony as soon as the last ceremony ends, leaving the Ambassador about to embark on a visit, exactly where he began. Though the pleasantries the Ambassador and his hosts’ exchange are vacuous, Žižek suggests both parties still gain something from the interaction. Žižek illustrates the “pact of solidarity” in symbolic exchange by pointing towards what happens if the pact is broken, “Of course, the problem is: what if the person to whom the offer to be rejected is made should actually accept it?” (13). The content of a symbolic exchange suddenly matters when the expectation for the exchange is broken. The unexpected causes offense. For the Ambassador to claim he prefers London over Constantinople would be perceived as rude, his statement turning from an empty expression to an distasteful moment of selfcongratulation (even if his true preference). Maintaining script maintains the solidarity between two parties, while breaking script would break that pact and force a change in relations; the Ambassador’s routine and inoffensive visits, then, create static relations. Stagnant international relations provide a sense of reassurance to both participating powers and keep political unrest covered by perpetual political pleasantries. When diplomats use standard, phatic language, generated by a repeatable script instead of by a response to current conditions, political change falters. The Ambassador’s daily brand of diplomatic duties not only creates stasis in his own iterative relations, but pre-formulated 27 conversations stagnate too the larger international relation which the Ambassador represents. Moments of unrest flit into Orlando, though they never receive the same prominence on the page as the meticulous duties of the Ambassador. The Constantinople chapter opens by noting the fire and destruction responsible for the scant records found on Orlando’s time there, but it mentions the revolutionary uprisings that led to the fires only in brief passing. After several pages focusing on diplomatic pleasantries instead of the politics of the city, the biographer details the grand celebration of Orlando’s coronation as a Duke and inserts a short, incomplete, note from the diary of John Fenner Brigge that reads “‘there was considerable uneasiness among us lest the native population…’” (83). Later in the celebrations, “The natives pressed into the banqueting rooms” (85) but the biographer states that order was quickly regained and moves on to the scandalous rumors of a washer woman who witnessed the Ambassador (now Duke) bringing a woman up through his window. These passing remarks address the political situation of the city’s populace only from the perspective of the uneasy elite and do not linger on the causes or potential consequences of a popular uprising. The revolution itself is given only a sparse paragraph in the midst of a description of Orlando’s great sleep before she awakens a woman; “The Turks rose against the Sultan, set fire to the town, and put every foreigner they could find, either to the sword or the bastinado” (87). Orlando survives the attack only because her trance of sleep marks her as already dead. With these plot details neatly summed up, the novel moves onwards. The discontent glimpsed in the “natives” that mob the banquet halls contrasts the static quality of Orlando’s diplomacy. Saikat Majumdar explores this stifling sense of 28 stasis in the context of modernist authors writing from the British colonies in Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. Majumdar’s exploration partially arises from his own experiences with the remnants of British colonialism in India where, he writes, “What was much more real for me was not the spectacle of power but the banality of it. Underlying such power was not brutality but apathy, what Michael Herzfeld has aptly called ‘indifference,’ whose ‘real danger’ is ‘not that it grows out of the barrel of a gun, but that it too easily becomes habitual’” (178). While Turkey was not a British colony and Britain’s diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire are distinct from the colonial relations Majumdar analyzes, the same habitual indifference distinguishes the stagnant formalities of the diplomatic elite in Orlando. The biographer, the Duke (once Ambassador), and his coronation guests, are indifferent to the “natives” so long as they are kept under control and at bay. Majumdar argues in Prose of the World that the modernist writer is, at least partially, aware of this bureaucratic and colonial indifference. He writes that “Banality and boredom make up evaluative and effective names for an introspective aesthetic whose apparent isolation from the tremors of public history is more symptomatic than conclusive” (6). The emphasis here is on the apparent, the appearance of isolation, and not a conclusive isolation. The modernist writer engages banality and boredom with the possibility, then, that the “introspective aesthetic” they use is still connected to public history and internal only in veneer. While her biographer may remain oblivious, Woolf herself seems to purposefully give the revolution only the slightest slivers of space in the story and to match that censoring elsewhere in the novel. The biography spans nearly 400 years of English history and yet omits, or only mentions in the briefest fashion, the 29 political stirrings of England as well as Constantinople. The biography appears removed from history (and from the working or peasant classes) while avoiding a “conclusive” removal. The apparent removal of history is arguably accompanied by a subtle anger that pushes any “conclusion” to remain firmly tied up with history. Gaurav Majumdar perceives such an anger in how Woolf addresses death throughout the text. In looking at a moment during the “Great Frost” in England, which dominates the first chapter of Orlando, Majumdar notes how Woolf moves casually from an image of an “old bumboat woman,” who is frozen while carrying her fruit to market, to the festivities of the alive and warmly-dressed king who brings his courtiers to gaze upon this frozen statue. Majumdar claims that moving from an image of death to the “oblivious festivities of the elite” works as a social critique of “neglect and forgetting;” he writes “The flitting, veiled qualities of grief in the passage intensify its mourning and anger by promiscuous means” (49). The veiling or covering of grief turns grief from an emotion of sorrow to one of anger. No one grieves the “old bumboat woman,” she neither receives space in the festivities nor on the page to be properly mourned, and so a sense of injustice accompanies any existing anger that surrounds death. Likewise, rapid transitions intensify the anger surrounding condition for revolt in Constantinople; each mention of unrest is quickly replaced by a description of ceremony or celebration. The text repeats the dismissal of the Turkish populace’s political demands in its dismissive mentions, and layered dismissal thickens the anger simmering in the situation. Recalling Majumdar’s claim that Woolf critiques social “forgetting” through the passage with the bumboat woman, we can understand any slivers of anger in the text as an anger towards remembering and an anger against euphemism. Euphemism is 30 intimately tied to forgetting. One attempts to forget the meaning of a phrase by substituting one expression for another, one brand of language for another. Euphemisms often surround tabooed subjects: death, sex, the functions of the body, and by using expressions (“she passed,” “they slept together,” or “he went no. 2”) that avoid directly naming what happened, one almost forgets the tabooed subject, allowing language to indicate the taboo without invoking an image or precise action. In Orlando, we see an incomplete substitution take place. Descriptions of Orlando’s diplomatic visits, the biographer’s ramblings on Orlando’s lavish coronation party, and flourishes of gossip that follow Orlando’s shapely calves, all replace potential elaboration on the politics of the city, the context for the eventual uprising, or any description of the revolting “natives.” Yet the latter are not completely forgotten either. The text moves to forget them by focusing on the elaborate interactions of the elite, and yet still includes them in slim sentences; an inclusion which points to attempted, but not conclusive, substitution. Moments of (purposefully) botched substitution hold subversive potential in Orlando and keep the novel from being one solely of frivolity. Though that frivolity remains, the text attempts to also remember the death and unrest that frivolity skates around. In remembering, the text enacts anger, a rage against the almost-complete substitution that took place. Damp in the Inkpots: Hyperbolic Euphemism Orlando engages physical flourishes as ambassador. The biographer focuses on these physical ornaments to writing, instead of the content of Orlando’s diplomatic language, when he laments that the written record of Orlando’s diplomacy was lost in the 31 fire. The biographer admits, “Of their contents then, we cannot speak, but can only testify that Orlando was kept busy, what with his wax and seals, his various coloured ribbons which had to be diversely attached, his engrossing of titles and making of flourishes round capital letters” (80). The biographer names only the decoration of speech and asks the reader to accept on ornamental authority that Orlando “kept busy.” Wax and ribbons and fancy capital letters suggest that the words decorated with such care must be important. Ornamentation speaks for the words themselves and physical, florid excess delivers a message louder than any burnt fragments of actual content, content which the biographer does not even try to piece together. Orlando’s competence with wax and ribbons comes as no surprise in the context of his other elaborations of language. The biographer first introduces Orlando’s affair with writing when he cover ten pages with poetry in one sitting. Several pages later, Orlando catches the disease of reading which spreads, promptly, to writing. We learn that “Thus had been written, before he was turned twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems; some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic, and all long” (49). A sheer volume of words distinguishes Orlando as a writer from the outset. This excess takes precedence over any of the content of Orlando’s oeuvre. Below this excess there then seems to lurk not an impulse to say anything in particular, but a simple impulse to write, regardless of subject. Writing for the sake of writing seems innocuous enough of a habit, and yet Orlando’s compulsion to use language eventually threatens her life. After Orlando awakens a woman in Constantinople, she realizes that the revolt took place while she slept and her diplomatic duties are no longer required nor wanted. She leaves the city and joins a community of 32 gypsies. After several weeks of living in the community, Orlando, elated to have “no documents to seal, or sign, no flourishes to make, no calls to pay” (92), turns her extravagances of language away from formal correspondence and back to her long enduring victim of description, the blue sky and the green grass. Orlando stares at a sunset sandwiched between the darkening sky and the grass of the Thessalian hills, and cries out “‘How good to eat!’” (93). The biographer explains this exclamation with a parenthetical note about the limits of the gypsy language, which has no word for “beautiful.” Orlando’s outburst at first sounds silly, and indeed it provokes laughter from the children around her, but it also provokes anger. The elders in the group, “began to suspect that she had other beliefs than their own and the elder men and women thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and cruelest among all the Gods, which is Nature” (93). Orlando witnesses their suspicion and anger, even understands that her own relation to Nature is not shared by the gypsies, and yet she cannot prevent herself from verbalizing the beauty she sees around her. She takes to walking alone through the hills and valleys and each time she returns to where the gypsies are camped, she could not help bursting out again, How good to eat! How good to eat! (For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication that they can only say ‘good to eat’ when they mean ‘beautiful’ and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves). (94) 33 Here even the biographer cannot understand Orlando’s outbursts, stating it simply as a “curious fact.” A curious and inexplicable compulsion drives her to unwelcome speech; speech that marks her in the community as both ridiculous and different. Does Orlando’s “How good to eat!” function euphemistically? Here euphemism is slippery, for to the gypsy elders her words indeed serve the same covering and obscuring work that hyperbolic euphemism, as the elaborate additives of language that distract from and cover the content of speech, serves. The man who first brought Orlando from Constantinople into the gypsy community, Rustum el Sadi, blames Nature for the fingers he lost to frost and his damaged foot crushed by a rock (95); Orlando’s praise of Nature overwrites the dangerous and cruel Nature he knows. Rustum perceives the way Orlando pins a silly phrase to the landscape, that itself only tangentially names the beauty Orlando sees, as an act of avoidance, an inability to take Nature and her threat seriously. In this sense, Orlando’s “How good to eat!” euphemistically runs from a direct reckoning with the land and its hazards. Yet Orlando is equally frustrated with the gypsies’ inability to share the beauty she sees around them: “‘Oh! if only I could write!’ she cried (for she had the odd conceit of those who write that words written are shared)” (95). She feels not just compelled to name Nature as beautiful, but also to speak what is “true” to her, despite consequences. This, in a way, is the type of fearless speech that Foucault describes as parrhesia. Parrhesia works against euphemism in its very etymological roots of “to say everything.” This etymology leads Foucault in Fearless Speech to state, “The one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything” (12). Euphemism, in all our previous formulations, is language which covers, 34 obfuscates, substitutes, or avoids — language that “hides.” Parrhesia works against such a hiding. Foucault claims later on the page that “The word parrhesia then, refers to a type of relationship between the speaker and what he says.” He describes this relationship through five concepts: frankness, truth, danger, criticism, and duty. The relationship between Orlando herself and her outbursts in praise of Nature display several of these characteristics. First, her words are frank in their compulsion, they are not mediated by past reactions of ridicule or fear but are spoken sincerely with an alignment between affect, her elation coming back from a walk in the mountains, and articulation, “How good to eat!” (while precise language fails her here, she still attempts to name her thoughts as accurately as possible). Next, there is a slippery truth in her speech. No exact coincidence between “truth” and Orlando’s God, Nature, exists, as any “truth” given of beautiful Nature comes along with a counter “truth” of a cruel and terrible Nature, as evidenced by Rustum’s injured body. The novel gives preference to neither truth. Yet while Rustum’s cruel Nature prevents Orlando’s opinion from coinciding with any absolute truth, as classical parrhesia would require, the text still allows for some truth in Orlando’s statements. Despite describing Orlando’s belief in Nature as an English “disease” (93), the text also describes the landscape, independent of Orlando’s gaze, through images such as “the sunset blazing over the Thessalian hills” (93). The verb “blazing” suggests a reverence for the scene that is not Orlando’s alone, but corroborated by the biographer, perhaps by Woolf herself. A shared perception of beauty, if one adopts a Kantian aesthetics, then gives at least a hint of universal truth to the region’s natural beauty, suggesting an alignment, if not a parrahesiastes’ “exact coincidence,” between Orlando’s belief and the truth (Foucault 14). 35 Danger and criticism, as regard parrhesia, I will address together. Foucault describes a risk necessary to parrhesia. Even if truth and belief harmonize; the truth teller only speaks parrhesia if they risk personal danger by voicing what they believe is true. This risk is in relation to an interlocutor, who is always in a position of power above the parrhesiastes, and thus involves an element of criticism. Either the parrhesiastes criticizes the interlocutor and risks offending him, or else criticizes the self and risks being reprimanded for whatever fault he names. Moreover, to be in a position to criticize, the parrhesiastes must be able to speak and be listened to, which for the classical Greeks meant being a male citizen with an elevated status to address the assembly. While Orlando is an outsider to the gypsy community, the biographer notes that “The gipsies…seem to have looked upon her as one of themselves” (93), a detail that allows her both to be listened to in the group, and to risk her inclusion within the group through her insistent use of “How good to eat!”. Orlando implicitly critiques the elders’ view of a cruel Nature through her outbursts; in so doing, she risks the opinion of her superiors in the community and eventually her life. When she decides to leave the group, it is in the nick of time, “Already the young men had plotted her death. Honour, they said, demanded it, for she did not think as they did” (99). Orlando’s silly outbursts in this context become life-threatening, and, almost inadvertently, assume the courage of parrhesia. Finally, Foucault talks about a sense of “duty” in parrhesia, “The orator…is free to keep silent. No one forces him to speak, but he feels that it is his duty to do so” (19). No one forces Orlando to comment on Nature, most would perhaps prefer her to remain silent. Yet even knowing she will be met with ridicule and annoyance, Orlando still 36 speaks. She expresses an internal need, a duty or responsibility to her own affect, that prompts her to speak and in this sense, “How good to eat!” is not euphemistic at all but again utilizes the qualities of parrhesia, euphemism’s opposite if such can exist. The above analysis points to how a single phrase can involve elements of both euphemism and parrhesia, complicating any label we give language. Societal context further complicates the functions of speech. No element of danger or risk would be present, for example, if Orlando were to extoll Nature in her own English countryside; her exclamations would lose any connection to parrhesia if directed to like-minded poets in the comfort of a drawing room. Evaluating speech, and particularly any euphemistic tendencies, requires one to address not just what is said, but who is saying it, where, and to whom it is said. The contrast between English society and the gypsies is stark, but within England too the context in which Orlando speaks changes. The novel spans from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, and both England and Orlando change as they age. For Orlando, his or her aging includes a sudden gender shift, with the accompanying amendments to how Orlando uses language and her language is perceived. For England, the most direct description of how language mutates over the centuries comes at the start of the Victorian era. On the boat returning to England, after Orlando bid goodbye to the gypsies, the ship’s captain gives special attention to Orlando, offering to cut her a thin slice of meat at dinner. Their brief exchange reveals to Orlando the new discursive position she occupies as a woman and she muses: Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s? And are they not perhaps the same? No, she thought, this is the most delicious (thanking the 37 Captain but refusing) to refuse, and see him frown. Well, she would, if he wished it, have the very thinnest, smallest shiver in the world. This was the most delicious, to yield and see him smile. (101) Orlando’s power to refuse and yield to a man’s offers, which she revels in here, is also an expectation to refuse and then yield. The unwritten English contract for societal exchange stipulates that a woman must not show direct, carnal wants––she must refuse meat when offered––but she may want things to please others (provided it is only the “thinnest smallest shiver”). She may only express her desires in circumlocution, which, as Orlando muses, can be a rather fun game. The text emphasizes the indirect and almost playful discourse between the sexes more directly when the Victorian era begins amidst a pervasive damp: “In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practices on both sides” (149). As with Orlando’s roundabout way of accepting a sliver of meat, a profusion of language navigates around the era’s expectation for “no open conversation.” Orlando finds joy in the nimble language game she plays with the captain, and there is comfort too in the above passage, the subterfuges are “warm” and the fine phrases are “swaddling.” The hyperboles, subterfuges, fine phrases, evasions, and general ornamentation of speech offers a protective solace through sheer volume. Allan and Burridge, in their introduction to Euphemism and Dysphemism, discuss the ubiquitous use of euphemism in response to taboo. In the preceding passage, fine phrases swaddle the often-tabooed topics of “love, birth, and death.” Allan and Burridge 38 describe a speaker turning to euphemism in order to safe face and avoid offense, “Generally speaking, the greater the oncoming face-affront, the greater is the politeness shown, and the greater the degree of euphemism required” (7). Euphemism thus pads the distasteful and provides a sense of safety, perhaps comfort, to the speaker and their position in society. This safety contrasts with the dangers of euphemism that George Orwell identifies in “Politics and the English Language.” He writes: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. (363) Orlando nods almost imperceptibly to euphemism’s use in the political arena when the biographer continues to describe the profusion of damp that begins the nineteenth century 39 and writes, “Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus––for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork––sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics becomes epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes” (149-50). The passage vaguely explains “damp” as the origins of the British Empire, and then moves on. If Orwell names the rule of Britain in India in the twentieth century as indefensible, then surely the imperial height of British rule there and around the globe in the nineteenth century is equally indefensible, and chalking this British colonial presence up to “damp” defends the indefensible in a euphemistically evasive way. The text immediately follows this brief mention of the British Empire with a description of swollen writing that enforces the connection between politics and language. While the correlation is not explicitly stated, the multiplying of adjectives and breeding of pages perhaps serves a justifying role in relation to the swelling borders of Britain — the damp that inflates politics must also enter the inkpots in order for bulging and bloated empire to persist. An essay a column long could, perhaps, give a biting critique of empire in a way a twenty-volume encyclopedia may not. When concise thought is expressed in lengthy, dancing sentences it becomes diluted. As Orwell earlier claims in the essay, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought” (364). Like the ink itself that dilutes with damp, the force of opinion and critique that is possible in writing dilutes with a euphemistic excess of words. Omission as Euphemism 40 No euphemistic defenses, such as Orwell uses to exhibit political language, accompany the statement, “Thus the British Empire came into existence.” The same conditions of violence and occupation which underlie Orwell’s examples, however, must surely underlie many of the concrete events facilitating the British Empire’s beginnings. Even while surrounded by a description of nineteenth century wordiness, the statement itself fills scarcely half a line; rather than relying on an obscuring profusion of euphemistic language, it relies on simple omission. Omission underlies all euphemisms in the question “What is not said?” and in several moments, Orlando makes this omission visible through form. Ellipses, dashes, statements of missing material, or simple space on the page, indicate omitted content throughout the novel. In The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition, Patricia Lawrence investigates Woolf’s use of omission more broadly, “The spaces in her novels for the reader are the silences of the writer whose conception of writing is to allow the reader’s emotions and responses a place to grow in the generous spaces of ellipses, dashes, and a lexicon and scenes of silence. When reading a Woolf novel, ‘we are in a world where nothing is concluded’” (91). The text concludes nothing but leaves the task of any conclusion(s) to the reader. While this space for “the reader’s emotions and responses” is rich, it also requires an engaged reader to fill them. Earlier in the chapter, Lawrence introduces the concept of reading silence with a caution that “The paradox of reading silence…requires a faculty and attention perhaps dormant in this age of speech and noise” (87). The spacious silences Woolf creates then always risk that the reader will fail to fill or examine them. When silence persists without reader response, omission 41 preferences the suffocating qualities of euphemism, instead of an open questioning without conclusion. If the reader does not pause at the brief statement about the British Empire’s beginnings, then the effect is one of silencing, the statement stifles elaboration on how, why, where, when, and who is implicated in the catalyzing of empire. However if the statement’s omission is read as silence, and thus forces a pause in the reader, curiosity sneaks in and silence lets one question context, reflecting on omission. At times, Woolf engages a “lexicon of silence” that encourages easier access to the reflective and questioning space of silence. Within the opening pages of the novel, Orlando makes love to a girl, Sukey, in the docked ship of the Earl of Cumberland. When the Earl himself boards the ship and sees the two sleeping figures he interprets them as phantoms and superstitiously takes them as a threat and warning that he must mend his ways. He promptly does so by building a row of alms houses nearby. The biographer begins to interpret this scene, writing, “so that illicit love in a treasure ship–– but we omit the moral” (18). The dash, the direct statement of omission… these devices adhere to what Lawrence calls a “punctuation of suspension” (91). Suspended, the reader may hold several morals afloat in the ship: that illicit love can lead to charity, that the illicit indeed sanctions the licit, even the ethical, that a confusion of lovers and ghosts may prompt generosity. The biographer himself quickly decides to “omit the moral,” pointing almost to something immoral in the suggested moral; any moral conclusion from the tale might support Orlando’s scandalous actions. The omission concedes to propriety. 42 The biographer states his omission again when he describes Orlando’s relations to Nell, a sex worker in London. The biographer begins to describe what women desire when in company with each other, but then interrupts himself: All they desire is––but hist again––is that not a man’s step on the stair? All they desire, we were about to say when the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths. Women have no desires, says this gentleman, coming into Nell’s parlour; only affectations. Without desires … their conversation cannot be of the slightest interest to anyone. “It is well known,” says Mr. S. W., “that when they lack the stimulus of the other sex, women can find nothing to say to each other. When they are alone, they do not talk; they scratch.” And since they cannot talk together and scratching cannot continue without interruption and it is well known (Mr. T. R. has proved it) “that women are incapable of any feeling of affection for their own sex and hold each other in the greatest aversion,” what can we suppose that women do when they seek out each other’s society? As that is not a question that can engage the attention of a sensible man, let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians from any sex whatever, pass it over, and merely state that Orlando professed a great enjoyment in the society of her own sex, and leave it to the gentlemen to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is impossible. (143-44) The gentleman interrupts a statement of women’s desires, silencing it and forcing the biographer to suspends naming their desires through punctuation. The interruption and the dashes lets those desires escape any confinement to naming. The subsequent assertion that “women have no desires” does not complete the interrupted statement, as it is 43 expressed only through the mysterious Mr. S.W.’s authority, an authority that the biographer promptly questions by deciding to “pass it over” and still assert that Orlando greatly enjoyed the company of Nell and her female companions. The claim that woman have no desires is thus neither proved nor disproved but again suspended in a silent space where the biographer refuses to speak on the possibility or impossibility of women desiring. The move to “pass it over” and leave the question unengaged in the world “where nothing is concluded” lets the reader insert their own conclusions, whether one chooses to attempt to prove women lack desire or else to conclude that the gentleman Mr. S. W. should scratch his own convictions. Simple page space at times also creates silence and suspends conclusions. Perhaps even more so than other punctuating features of silence (ellipses, dashes, or brackets), page space nurtures ambiguous silences that do not invite an immediate completion of the sentence or phrase. Too much is left out and so the reader must work to imagine what fills the silence, instead of participating in a guessing game of implication or fill-in-theblank. At one point in the novel, the biographer quotes Mr. Pope’s most witty sayings at Lady R’s party: (132). He footnote’s the witty outburst with the recognition that “These sayings are too well known to require repetition, and besides, they are all to be found in his published works” (132). The biographer simultaneously expects that the reader knows exactly what fills the space and gives no hint as to what that might be, only assuring the reader that Pope has just exhibited the pinnacle of wit. Later in the text, the novel’s most poetic conversation takes place: 44 (165). Again, the void is acknowledged: “the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion” (165). This is a very different sort of space than Mr. Pope’s exclamations. The prefacing remark annuls our obligation to fill the space, for it is already replete, overflowing, there is no space in the empty page for the reader left. We do not need to address the space on the page with our own words but instead to absorb the excess of its silence as a sort of wordless emotion. A poetic shiver that can’t be written down pulses from the potential of a blank page. These two silences, one which waits to be filled and presupposes the reader’s knowledge of the omission, and one which pushes itself onto the reader in a surfeit of silence, demonstrate the dual function of omission: to invite and to tranquilize. One silence invites the reader to operate upon it and the other operates upon the reader. The second silence particularly informs how omission, whether a euphemistic omission or a candid loss of words to capture a feeling, is not just perceived but also received. In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell writes that “[language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” In conjunction with Orlando’s recognition that silence implicates both a reader’s reception and creation of (even wordless) language, Orwell’s formulation establishes a firm correlation between how thought appears in the mind and on a page and the ability of each to modify the other. How Orlando as a text and how we as participants in the text address the words said or unsaid on the page is 45 ultimately tied to how those same words address us; what we read into the page and what the page reads into us become nearly indistinguishable. 46 Sincerity? Katherine Mansfield’s “Marriage à la Mode” Why should a foolish marriage vow Which long ago was made, Oblige us to each other now When passion is decayed? We loved and we loved, as long as we could, Till our love was loved out in us both: But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled: ’Twas pleasure first made it an oath. -Act 1, Scene 1 Marriage à la Mode by John Dryden Fashion, Stasis, and Private/Public Consensus of Feeling The 1672 play Marriage à la Mode, by John Dryden, provides a reference for Katherine Mansfield’s short story of the same title. Dryden’s play weaves two plot lines, one melancholy and one comic. Mansfield’s plot utilizes both modes, with the short story ending in a moment of hysterical laughter infused with aching regret––a laughter in itself tragic. The humor in both Dryden and Mansfield’s brands of comedy takes modern, fashionable marriage as their target. Wit too, and the ways the comic itself can become static and banal, come under the critique of Mansfield’s humor. In Mansfield’s story, a certain performance of wit is fashionable to the small gaggle of friends who induct the “new Isabel,” the wife in the titular marriage of the story, into their circle. But before any of the characters display wit, by introducing one of the main actors as the “new Isabel,” Mansfield gives us a taste of the story’s own humor. Already the narrator has distanced herself from Isabel in this implicitly criticized 47 newness, here is a character repackaged, one introduced through her difference to her hastily shed former self. And yet, in Mansfieldian fashion, the story leaves us unaware of where this narratorial judgement comes from: does Mansfield focus on Isabel’s newness? Or does the text reflect the judgement of William, Isabel’s husband, who moments before expressed an overwhelmed aversion to the “new” in his kids’ new, foreign-made, toys? The performances of wit that follow in the text come with this wary, ironic “new” attached; Isabel and her friends are almost on trial in their newness. As with anything new, the verdict is still out, and whether we should be laughing with or at these “new” individuals remains ambiguous. The putatively new sets Isabel and her friends apart from reality: they eat, they bathe, they reference art, they sleep, and they remain oblivious to the resources their social existence requires. William provides the financial and material support for their lifestyle, allowing their daily lives to continue under an illusion of aesthetic value (Isabel’s friends are painters and writers, general aesthetes) that ignores the material value they consume. The socialite Moira Morrison seems to admit unconsciously that their social circle rests on illusion when she describes Isabel as “an exquisite little Titania,” the reference to the illusory aspects of A Midsummer Night’s Dream forcing the reader to question whether Isabel really likes her new friends, or if her admiring relation to them is pure enchantment, pure illusion (306). Within the story, certain moments of cruel humor, particularly when Isabel’s friends laugh at her husband William’s love letter to her, hint at a conflict between reality and Moira’s crafted social illusion. Such moments of almost too-real, derisory laughter, however, merely threaten Isabel’s social sphere and do not shatter it. It is only to the reader that “real” humor breaks through parts 48 of the story’s social façade. Outside this narrated world, Mansfield’s own wit contrasts with her characters’ performed wit in a way that shatters illusion and leaves the reader in an critically external position to Moira, Isabel, and the rest of their circle. When the husband in the short story, William, arrives on the train, Isabel’s friends immediately begin to exhibit their wit à la mode as they meet him on the platform. William carries a parcel of a pineapple and a melon to give his children, and their conspicuous shape sparks the taxi driver’s curiosity. When the driver asks what William is carrying, Isabel’s friend Bill Hunt jumps in, answering “De-cap-it-ated heads!” (308). In the next line the package is discovered to be fruit and Isabel seizes the pineapple, thanking William and refusing his protests that it is for the children. As she clings fiercely to the fruit, Moira reaches for it too and Dennis Greene interjects saying, “A Lady in Love with a Pineapple” (308). Dennis’ joke is repeated twice more in the text. When Isabel, William, Bill, Dennis, Moira, and Bobby Kane go in for dinner, Moira grabs a box of sardines and Dennis comments, “A Lady with a Box of Sardines” (310). Several days later, after William has returned to his job in the city, Isabel receives a letter from him and as she begins to read it, Dennis once more states, “A Lady reading a Letter” (312). There is an obvious attempt at wit in both Bill and Dennis’ statements, and yet the quality of their jokes is difficult to understand. In the introduction to The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud says “Writers have long been fond of defining wit as the knack of discovering similarities between dissimilars” (3). Bill’s joke has precisely this quality. Not only are severed heads and melons dissimilar, though brought together by their shared round shape, but the horror of taking a taxi ride with decapitated heads contrasts with the silly, syllable-splicing way Bill tells the joke and the 49 predictable, homely figure of William who seems unlikely to severe anyone’s head. No one laughs at either Bill or Dennis’ jokes, however, and they seem to meld into the conversation effortlessly, unacknowledged. Freud notes “that odd feature jokes have of being able to manifest their full effect on the listener only when they are new to him, and come to him as a surprise” (147). All of Dennis’ jokes follow the same form, by the second and third repetitions the joke is no longer new to the reader and feels stale. Within the narrative, Dennis is almost defined by this joke, a Dennis-ism, implying that the joke is not new to any of the characters, even upon first repetition in the text. His jokes then meld into the noise of the text without surprising either the reader or his friends, which keeps the joke from having comic effect, shocking his listener into reaction or laughter. While Bill’s joke is not repeated in the text, it comes within a stream of dialogue as the friends talk over each other in the taxi. The conditions of its reception are in sharp contrast to Freud’s assertion that a successful joke requires “that the attention should be distracted” (147). Both Bill and Dennis’ jokes fall flat, then, because they are told within a milieu of distraction where any shock or distraction prompted by a witticism blends into the groups pervasive distracted mode; throughout the text the four friends turn from one exclamation to the next, one activity to the next, turning distraction into a technique of the quotidian, instead of the comic. While Bill and Dennis’ jokes fail to prompt laughter, the jokes preform socialwork if not “joke-work” (Freud’s phrase). Dennis’ jokes name scenes in the style paintings may be titled, briefly holding a banal moment of the day steady in mental brushstrokes. In a similar moment, Isabel interrupts a fairly mundane dinner saying, “I do wish, Bill, you’d paint it.” 50 “Paint what?” said Bill loudly, stuffing his mouth with bread. “Us,” said Isabel, “round the table. It would be so fascinating in twenty years’ time.” Bill screwed up his eyes and chewed. “Light’s wrong,” he said rudely, “far too much yellow”; and went on eating. And that seemed to charm Isabel too. (310) Isabel wants to preserve a mealtime moment that seems equally silly to paint as a woman holding a pineapple or a box of sardines. Both Dennis and Isabel, by stating such small moments as paintings or else wishing them to be painted, try to elevate the mundane, and themselves, to the realm of art. They express narcissism in their respective whims, implying that their passing social interactions are worth preserving, moments that will still be relevant and “fascinating” in twenty years. Thus while Dennis may fail to make his friends laugh, he succeeds in cementing their friendship as something with social value, comparable to fine and long-lasting art. Dennis’ wit not only tries to stabilize and preserve mundane moments, but it becomes static itself in repetition. The repetition here is one of habit and, while there are admittedly rich possibilities in repetition, these statements engage the repetitive mode weakly, in a way that enforces stereotype instead of consolidating meanings and memory. Walter Pater in his conclusion to The Renaissance writes, “In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike” (60). The “A Lady [conjoining phrase] [Object]” formulation which Dennis habitually enacts, by its third repetition, feels exhausted and stereotypes his behavior. His habit of speech further aids to stereotype this narrated world, lumping 51 Isabel and Moira and their respective actions into a generic pool of female fodder for the artistic eye. Dennis’ iterative wit always targets “A Lady,” a pattern that ties to what Saikat Majumdar labels a “gendered tedium [which] pervades Mansfield’s colonial and British/European stories alike” (84). Women and their subjectivity to the boredom and repetition of daily life is put on ridiculous display here where women are subject to bland iterations of male humor. Mansfield particularly satirizes how Dennis’ speech ties to painting, to “high” art. Majumdar writes, “Mansfield, in these stories, is a fierce parodist of the pretensions of transcendence that art is capable of making over the banality of labor….Her aesthetic vision remains firmly rooted in this labor, and it is the banality of this labor that provides narrative energy to her fiction. Often this entropy is generated through the scathing edge of satire” (87). Through Dennis, Mansfield satirically elevates a trivial scene of a woman with sardines to the artistic realm of portraiture. The text implies that Dennis’ words attempt to cover over the dull pulse of his companions lives but cannot actually succeed in fooling the reader that their banal lives transcend to the realm of art. The portrait-of-a-Lady comments constitute about half of Dennis’ dialogue in the text, and the other half are equally flippant (“We shall have to anoint ourselves with the butter” [308],“Heaven will be one long Monday” [311], etc.). Thus the repetition of the portrait phrases takes place within an even more ubiquitous repetition of tone. Sianne Ngai attempts to tackle the slippery concept of tone in her book Ugly Feelings, where she claims that “there is a crucial similarity between the affective-aesthetic idea of tone, which is reducible neither to the emotional response a text solicits from its reader nor to representations of feelings within the world of its story, and the slippery zone between 52 fake and real feelings, or free-floating and subjectively anchored feelings” (41). As Ngai suggests, neither Dennis and his friends own self-affirming pleasure nor the readers’ exasperation fully defines the tone of the story’s dialogue. Dennis’ tone enters the slippery zone Ngai establishes at the end of her sentence; its consistency points to some sort of anchored feeling, even as the remarks themselves are free-floating, unattached to an identifiable emotion and engaging indifferently with the conversation. His comment relate to the prevailing conversation and action of the group, but solicit, and expect, no response, making his speech simultaneously included and distanced from the story. His habitual tone fails to experiment with the form that he addresses the world and defaults to his own brand of cliché, which, as with any cliché, involves a loss of newness. This loss is crucial to the irony with which Mansfield addresses the modern and fashionable, the new, in “Marriage à la mode.” By showing supposedly fashionable characters trading in clichés, repetitive dialogue, and repetitive action, Mansfield points to the very lack of novelty in the “new” Isabel and her friends. Moira’s newest hobby evidences such a lack: “Sleeping was her latest discovery. ‘It’s so wonderful. One simply shuts one’s eyes, that’s all. It’s so delicious’” (311). Here is not just the redundant statement of “so wonderful” and “so delicious,” but also the lack of originality in discovery sleep, an activity practiced both by millions every day and surely practiced by Moira herself long before her “latest discovery.” Moira presenting sleep as newly discovered presents Moira as living in her own modern dream world (a dream world she brings Isabel into through comparison to Titania); she both ignores the enduring history of sleep in humanity and in her own life and takes false credit for the discovery of such a delicious (in)activity. Sleeping, Moira commits her time to an activity that revels in its 53 distance from conscious thought. Already, her and her friends’ lives are marked by constant distraction and trivial activity, a mode of life that avoids sustained conscious thought. Moira pushes the superficial and unconscious ways she fills time to a new frontier when she begins to sleep in excess. The iterative bathing, feasting, and chatter that fill the rest of Moira’s time display a similarly illusory freshness that the text undercuts through repetition. Repetition and lines such as “Sleeping was her latest discovery” leave a stale aftertaste in the reader’s mouth; the reader is aware that all one is really reading is a staging of mundanity that the actors label art. The stale taste of supposedly-fashionable wit and activity in the story reflects a muddled understanding of fashion. Inherent in the idea of trends, the contemporary, anything “à la mode,” is an emphasis on change; nothing stays in fashion indefinitely and acting or living à la mode implies adaptability, a constant awareness of what the mode of the times is and when it shifts. The defining fickleness of fashion escapes Isabel and her friends. In the opening of the story, William debates what presents to bring his children and recalls a conversation with the “new” Isabel, “‘It is so important,’ the new Isabel had explained, ‘that [the children] should like the right things from the very beginning. It saves so much time later on’” (303). Isabel’s concern for the children’s likes and dislikes assumes that the “right” things will remain just as right, just as “in style” as the children age. She assumes that the preferences of the time will persist indefinitely, an assumption that counteracts the very trending-ness (as something eventually trended away from) of trends. Mansfield does not ridicule the new wholesale, but through “Marriage à la Mode” she presents a stagnant fashion that is distinct from an adaptable fashion that she admires, even attempts to practice herself, in other contexts. Alex Moffat in an essay on 54 Mansfield’s relation to the “temperature” of the times, quotes a letter she wrote to her husband near the end of World War I, “‘[W]e have to take [the war] into account and find new expressions, new moulds for our new thoughts and feelings’” (61). The “We” here refers specifically to Virginia Woolf and Mansfield herself, but implicates modernist writers more generally. Moffat calls her statement “a perfect expression of the modernist desire to experiment with literary forms more appropriate for an age of fracture” and so aligns “modernist desire” with being “appropriate,” or responsive to the times (61). Like her characters, then, Mansfield strives for the new. She, however, does not see newness as a static condition that, once socially achieved, must be be socially maintained; instead she desires a dynamic fashion, one which changes and adapts with and through time. What “Marriage à la Mode” offers, then, is not four friends at the forefront of fashion, but four friends leading dully iterative, unchanging, and thus un-trending, lives– –lives marked only by a feeling fashionable. This feeling reflects Ngai’s insight on the complexity of tone and the feeling that pervades a story never being fully pinned to the world of the story or else the world of the audience. If one temporarily pins a feelingfashionable to Isabel and her companions, then their speech helps cultivate this feeling. Euphemism uses language to circumnavigate feeling. In substituting one phrase for another, omitting or exaggerating description, euphemism is a tool towards tone, it attempts to soften the distasteful and obscure the vulgar in a way that enforces some feelings and avoids others (particularly avoiding feelings of anger, offense, shock, etc.). When Moira discovers sleep, she marvels at the “so wonderful” and “so delicious” qualities of sleep, using language to navigate around the necessity and ubiquity of sleep and the realization that she has nothing better to occupy her time than the closing and 55 opening of her eyes. Likewise, we see feelings navigated in Isabel’s request for Bill to paint the group round the dinner table and Bill’s dismissive response that the “light’s wrong.” Relying on light as an excuse to refuse Isabel’s request avoids offense––it indirectly communicates that no, Bill would not like to paint the group eating sardines without him having to directly say it. Yet his response is still quite rude. The narrator acknowledges, however, that this too “seemed to charm Isabel.” Every euphemism, indeed every spoken exchange, includes not just a speaker but a listener or interlocutor. For banal or euphemistic language to succeed in creating a certain feeling, or in avoiding feeling, the interlocutor too must accept the words as they are presented and ignore the content they skirt around. A charmed Isabel chooses not to take offense at Bill’s fairly blatant refusal and to maintain the polite excuse of his words instead of challenging his analysis of the light having “far too much yellow.” The collaboration between two (or more) interlocutors in the dual voicing and accepting of euphemism establishes consensus. In “consensus,” the prefix “con-“ implies “with” or “together” and the ending “-sensus” implies “feeling.” Thus consensus may be understood as a type of communal feeling, a feeling with or together. Looking at this chapter’s opening lines from Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode, consensus applies to marriage vows which may fall apart, the play implies, when a consensus of feeling (the shared feeling of pleasure) dissipates: “But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled: / ’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.” The feeling, the pleasure, first creates the bond of marriage, and it is feeling that is capable of breaking it. For William and Isabel, a consensus of feeling between the two is replaced by a more public consensus, their marriage vows are incorporated into an ideal of fashionable, “modern” marriage; a 56 marriage à la mode that values large houses with servants and consuming time and meals with witty friends. A marriage à la mode is thus never an agreement or vow between two people, but a vow dictating how those two people shall behave in relation to broader society, how their marriage will adhere to the “mode” of the times, a mode which is always defined by more than just two. Public consensus and public marriage vows pervade the end of the story after Isabel receives a letter from William who has returned to London. One of Isabel’s friends––for Mansfield removes attribution from most of the dialogue in the ending scene, turning the four friends’ voices into an anonymous, and overwhelming, cacophony of voices––comments “He’s sending you back your marriage lines as a gentle reminder” (311). Another anonymous joking voice immediately interjects, “Does everybody have marriage lines? I thought they were only for servants” (312). One can read the suggestion that William has returned their marriage lines to Isabel as either William surrendering those vows to the public sphere, returning them to Isabel and her friends to dispose of as they will, or else as this “gentle reminder,” an attempt to hang onto a private contract that is threatened by Isabel’s new social, and public, sphere. The very existence of those marriage lines is questioned immediately afterwards, enforcing the idea that such a private exchange has no place in the fashionable lives of married socialites; marriage vows are relegated to the realm of servants, who exist outside of fashion for Mansfield’s class-infected cast of characters. Though the letter does not actually contain marriage vows, its contents are addressed to Isabel alone, beginning with “My darling, precious Isabel” (312). The public quickly commandeers the letter’s contents, however, when Isabel is begged to read 57 the letter aloud. She does so, allowing the private words to be consumed in public reaction: “Go on, Isabel, it’s perfect.” “It’s the most marvellous find.” “Oh, do go on, Isabel!” God forbid, my darling, that I should be a drag on your happiness. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” “Sh! Sh! Sh!” And Isabel went on. When she reached the end they were hysterical: Bobby rolled on the turf and almost sobbed. “You must let me have it just as it is, entire, for my new book,” said Dennis firmly. “I shall give it a whole chapter.” […] “Let me hold it. Let me read it, mine own self,” said Bobby Kane. (312) The gaggle of friends layers its own speech over the contents of the actual letter. Mansfield gives us only two lines of the letter and the rest may be imagined only through the friends’ reactions to it. Their speech operates euphemistically, not just in covering over the letter’s actual contents, but in performing what Ngai might label “fake feeling”– –mockery and scorn for William and his sentimentality are hidden by outwardly positive, complimentary phrases: “it’s perfect,” “most marvelous,” and the almost erotic pleasure of “Oh! Oh! Oh!” and “Sh! Sh! Sh!.” In the ending sentences of the passage, Dennis and Bobby both demand a more complete ownership over Williams words; Dennis wants to submit the letter to the even broader public through publication and Bobby feels a need to 58 touch the paper and read the words “mine own self.” For Dennis and Bobby to transfer the letter from Isabel’s possession into their own, and then the public’s hands, would appropriate language and private communication. Dennis can construct how the letter is perceived through publication, euphemistically substituting the sincere, private feeling of the letter for a mocking public feeling. While euphemism as previously described tends to require collaboration between speaker and listener to succeed, in this passage euphemism is enacted on the part of the listener(s) without consent of the speaker (William). They read Williams’ words not as they were intended (can an unintended audience ever read words aligned with the author’s intention?) but instead as a joke, a parody of romance and outdated, sentimental marriage. As such, his words are allowed into the public realm of publication (Dennis’ book) and social chatter only in altered form, his sincere words substituted for grossly sincere words, a private sentiment inflated to public dimension. “Later. Not now.” Delay and Forgetting Forgetting is a privilege of euphemistic language. The move from a private to public marriage contract discussed above includes a forgetting of Isabel and Williams’ past relationship as it is replaced with their current marriage, mediated through the public/social sieve of Isabel’s friends. Forgetting does not just affect Isabel, but infects Williams’ mind too, even as he maintains a certain sentimentality and nostalgia that remembers the past. Reflecting on their “old” marriage, William marvels: But the imbecile thing, the absolutely extraordinary thing was that he hadn’t the slightest idea that Isabel wasn’t as happy as he. God, what blindness! He hadn’t the remotest notion in those days that she really hated that inconvenient little 59 house, that she thought the fat Nanny was ruining the babies, that she was desperately lonely, pining for new people and new music and pictures and so on. If they hadn’t gone to that studio party at Moira Morrison’s––if Moira hadn’t said as they were leaving, “I’m going to rescue your wife, selfish man. She’s like an exquisite little Titania”––if Isabel hadn’t gone with Moira to Paris––if––if… (306) Hindsight here recognizes the past William as blind, blind to how his wife truly felt about their home, their marriage, the rearing of their children. There is no clear “forgetting” of the past in this passage, but William re-visions the past through his current knowledge of Isabel’s disdain for their old life, implying a possible forgetting. In saying William “hadn’t the remotest notion in those days,” the narrator offers the possibility that indeed there was no reason for him to have had such a notion in “those days,” perhaps Isabel was happy and perhaps the house was plenty spacious and perhaps the Nanny was appreciated by both parents; perhaps it is the “new” Isabel who is blind towards any happiness in the past, instead of a past William who was blind to her discontent. In this possibility lies a forgetting where the feelings of the past are overwritten by Isabel’s feelings towards the past. William gestures towards this possible forgetting when he names a serious of “if”s and leaves his thoughts trailing on an inconclusive “––if––if…” Outwardly, these if’s express the concern that William could have never cured his blindness if Moira hadn’t saved the day with her grand rescue of Isabel. Read as such, they are grateful if”s; William is grateful for what happened in place of the alternative negated events. Yet William reminisces in these trailing if’s as well, signaling an “if only;” if only they had never gone to the party and Moira had let his wife be, if only William still obliviously 60 believed his and Isabel’s marriage to be mutually happy in a spacious home with a caring Nanny. The “if only” of continued ignorance does not appear entirely distasteful, but instead holds longing. The trailing “—if—if…” maintains a nostalgia for the past that yearns against the conditions of the present. By maintaining such a nostalgia, William performs forgetting while also evoking certain memories of their old marriage. He “forgets” any past happiness almost unwillingly when he lampoons his own blindness, yet in forgetting he still consents to the conditions of the present, creating a euphemistic collaboration between all of the characters in the story that fosters a continuing appreciation, no matter how forced, for the present. The story ends on a note of continuation. After having read William’s letter aloud to her friends, Isabel crumbles it up and refuses to let Bobby read it for himself, questioning how she could be so cruel to William in the first place to have read it aloud. She commits herself to write back to him and yet just as she sits down to begin, Moira calls her to join them for a swim. Isabel hesitates and then decides, “No, it was too difficult. ‘I’ll–– I’ll go with them and write to William later. Some other time. Later. Not now. But I shall certainly write,’ thought Isabel hurriedly” (313). Despite this stated resolve, the reader is left convinced that Isabel will certainly not write. Todd Martin supports this conclusion by pointing to the poem “The Forsaken Mermaid,” by Matthew Arnold, which Moira quotes as she calls for Isabel to come swim just before the story ends, saying “Call her once before you go, call once yet!” (313). Martin draws a parallel between the ending of “Marriage à la Mode” and the ending of the poem: As Arnold’s poem unfolds, it becomes clear that the merman willingly allows his wife to return to shore, but before she leaves he pleads for her to return to them 61 once again. Likewise, William has tried his best to accommodate Isabel’s new lifestyle, and his letter is a plea to rekindle the life they had together. At the conclusion of the Arnold poem, however, it is clear that the parting is forever. (Martin 161) Isabel and William’s emotional parting too seems to be “forever,” she will continue to intend to write and yet delay the actual writing with one more swim or meal or social commitment. She will never write “now,” only “some other” time, a time that is forever in the future and not the present. Her vague promises can be endlessly invoked to delay action, and eventually the process of delay postpones the action until it becomes irrelevant or forgotten. In Euphemism and Dysphemism, Allan and Burridge discuss the delay between a word’s connotation and its use. They describe the “contamination” of euphemisms by the topics euphemisms avoid naming. The French term baiser, for example, originally meant “to kiss” and then was adopted as a euphemism for “to fuck.” The euphemistic baiser, however, replaced other direct terms for “to fuck” so frequently that now baiser is itself considered obscene language (18). In this instance, an innocuous word gains strength through its use in euphemism, by a similar, but reversed, process dysphemisms (substituted words that are strong, exaggerated, or obscene in relation to what they signify) may lose their aggression in use. William invokes two such instances when he offhandedly calls people “hysterical” and “filthy.” On the train home from London at the beginning of the story, he looks up from the documents of bland and bureaucratic language he reads for work and glances out the window: “a red-faced girl raced along by the carriages, there was something strained and almost desperate in the way she waved 62 and called. “Hysterical!” thought William dully. Then a greasy, black-faced workman at the end of the platform grinned at the passing train. And William thought, “A filthy life!” and went back to his papers” (305). Out the train window, William glimpses lives otherwise excluded from a tale dripping with class privilege. While William registers both of these lives, they exact none of his sympathy and receive only the briefest of responses. The label “hysterical” dismisses the pain of the running girl––the word rejects rationality and thus any explanation for the girl’s pain, though two seconds more of thought may offer several reasonable explanations for her desperation. The dull tone William uses when proclaiming the girl “hysterical” makes her displayed pain not just irrational, but also uninteresting, dull, almost not worth William’s notice at all. The train is moving, and the girl soon gone from the window, so William can quickly dismiss the scene from his attention and return to his reading; he forgets the woman’s pain partially because he moves quickly past it, onto the next thing. He may likewise dismiss the workman as “filthy,” refusing the clean joy that accompanies even a greasy grin because the workman disappears so quickly from the window. Moreover, the “filthy” man presumably works for the railroad, partially responsible for the functioning, moving train, and thus for the enclosed and speeding comfort that enables William to easily dismiss the worker’s presence. In Speed and Politics, the theorist Paul Virilio talks about acceleration as a modern phenomenon. He focuses on how speed applies to war, writing, “Contraction in time…leads to a situation in which the notions of "before" and "after" designate only the future and the past in a form of war that causes the "present" to disappear in the instantaneousness of decision” (156-57). This “contraction in time” can be applied to a 63 modern world more broadly where inventions (such as the train) diminish the present and, if not the space for decision, at least the space for response or reaction. A single phrase, “Hysterical!” or “A filthy life!”, perhaps three seconds of speech and judgement, constitutes William’s entire response to a desperate woman and a working man. The “before,” William reading his bureaucratic documents, and the “after,” William returning to reading, hedge this brief moment of judgement into an instant that never reemerges in the story. The people on the platform almost disappear from the story itself with the speed of the train. Speed and movement mark “Marriage à la Mode” as a staging of modern life that, even in its banal mundanity, does not slow or stop. Throughout William’s visit, Isabel and her friends bounce from activity to activity, going to the water to the pub to the dining room and by the end of William’s visit Isabel tells him, “I hardly seem to have seen you this time …It’s so short, isn’t it? I feel you’ve only just come. Next time––” (311). A similar succession of one activity after another ends the story, when Isabel joins her friends bathing instead of pausing to respond to William’s letter. Isabel uses “Next time” or “Later” to delay responding to William, whether in personal interaction or on paper, and such deferment plays leap frog with the present. The moment of deferral, where Isabel considers that she should spend more time with William or should write back and instead says “Next time––” or “Not now,” becomes the instantaneous decision that Virilio invokes. The “after” (a sense of regret that William’s visit was so short or a mourning for cruelly reading aloud his letter) immediately becomes a “before” (an anticipation for the “Next time” or the “Later” when Isabel will make good on her regret). And yet as soon as she states this indefinite future time of action, the waiting for it to happen already reeks of another “after,” the next chance for 64 William to see the kids or for Isabel to write will inevitably also be passed over, delayed, and this current state of “before” or waiting will once again take on the “after”-taste of regret. Isabel’s particular phrases have a notorious history in postponement. We do not read Isabel’s promises of “Next time––” or “Later” as her words alone. Such phrases may have a direct meaning of deferral, postponement, but they also have an established synonym in “never.” Such phrases euphemistically soften direct refusals, direct acts of forgetting or admitting that something will not happen; they soften the guilt of laziness or inaction by replacing the definitive idea of “never” with endless delay. Though the result is the same, “Not now” maintains an illusion of future action that legislates current inaction in a way the direct choice “now or never” does not. As a euphemistic replacement for “never,” the word “later” articulates the meaning of both words; it preforms postponement and implies a more complete abandonment. “Later,” however, does not always imply “never,” and the speaker may eventually complete the action they postpone. Two strains of connotation overlap when euphemism is used with a surface meaning that encases another implied meaning, yet the literal meaning persists and allows for doubt: might Isabel truly write? As with any encased language, confusion is possible: Is “later” really a euphemism or might it be sincerely meant? Isabel does not know how to answer this question herself. Between reading William’s love letter aloud and running off to bathe with her friends, she crumples the letter and reflects: “How vile, odious, abominable, vulgar,” muttered Isabel. She pressed her eyes with her knuckles and rocked to and fro. And again she saw them, but not four, more like forty, laughing, sneering, jeering, stretching out their hands while she 65 read them William’s letter. Oh, what a loathsome thing to have done. How could she have done it!…she felt that even the grave bedroom knew her for what she was, shallow, tinkling, vain…. (313) This moment expresses a rush, profusion, and confusion of feeling, that precedes the story’s ending delay. It appears a moment of true regret, and while the intensity of feeling dissipates when she to go bathe, the regret lingers and confuses the final promise of “Later. Not now. But I will certainly write”––it remains possible that this is not an empty promise and that Isabel is still capable of sincere feeling (and thus a sincere response) towards William. Within this confusion, the small doubt around whether “later” will or will not come provides a sense of comfort. Euphemism gives comfort in the very possibility for confusion, the possibility for misunderstanding and thus to choose one’s desired understanding. A euphemism which unambiguously indicates the language it avoids––take the earlier example of the French baiser, whose original meaning “to kiss” indicated so directly its euphemistic meaning “to fuck” that the word simply became a synonym for the latter––no longer serves the softening purposes of euphemism. Only when a euphemistic expression maintains its original meaning, allowing the user to preference this meaning over the implied meaning, does the dual interpretations of euphemism provide comfort. The comforting confusion present in euphemism translates to bureaucratic language, language that is replete with formulaic additives which distract from direct meaning. On the train, William takes out his papers and immediately the bureaucracy of the text begins to lull him, “‘Our client moreover is positive…. We are inclined to reconsider…in the event of––’ Ah, that was better. William pressed back his flattened 66 hair and stretched his legs across the carriage floor. The familiar dull gnawing in his breast quietened down. With regards to our decision––’ He took out a blue pencil and scored a paragraph slowly” (304). William may breathe, stretch, sooth the gnaw of his heart with dull language. The expressions he reads are simply long strings of verbiage that, five or six words into a sentence, have yet to say anything at all. George Orwell diagnosis such expressions in “Politics and the English Language,” saying they function as a crutch: “modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy” (362). Orwell attributes the ease of prefabricated expressions, ubiquitous in the type of bureaucratic speech William seems to be reading, to the writer. Already-invented phrases are easy to write because they already exist and already hold a certain rhythm that has been tried and tested, snippets of language so often used that they are engaged by the pen or keyboard for reuse almost without thought. Yet to William, such language gives ease and comfort to the reader. Like for the writer, established bits of verbiage may be heard so frequently by the reader that they can be read without thinking just as they may be written without thinking, the brain absorbs them through habit instead of through comprehension. In the midst of such easy thoughtlessness, William looks out the window and judges a girl “hysterical” and a worker “filthy” with almost as much thoughtlessness; he makes these rather harsh judgements “dully” with none of the force that the words themselves suggest and the tone of his mundane reading permeates his glance out the window with an equal mundanity. 67 The comfort of banal, bureaucratic language thus proliferates, extends and stages one of the ways that banal and euphemistic language perpetuates itself. A dull mode of reading leads to a dull mode of looking which lets William return dully back to his dull reading and he is never shocked out of his mundanity. A disconnect occurs between William’s consistent banal mode of thought and the aggressive and charged judgements he articulates toward the girl and workman out the window. If the chasm between his sharp words and his dull reaction is a symptom of the vague language he reads and absorbs, then it is perhaps possible to reverse Orwell’s claim that “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” To William, murky language almost legislates insincere reactions. His insincerity on the train contrasts other moments in the text where he seems compulsively sincere. Afloat in the gentle waves of formulaic speech, a gap between intent and articulation may grow without detection, allowing judgmental outbursts of another’s hysteria with no emotional or reflective evidence that William truly registers or is bothered by this hysteria. Sincerity? William performs a slippery sincerity throughout “Marriage à la Mode.” He is introduced as a sentimentalist, the first line of the story notes William’s “fresh pang of disappointment that he was taking nothing down to the kiddies” (303). From the beginning he feels forcefully, in pangs. This feeling appears genuine and he acts upon his guilt, putting thought into what sort of gift would make the children happy, eventually 68 settling on a nice melon and pineapple. He displays sincerity by acting upon his feelings, his pang of disappointment, and thus demonstrating a correlation between sentiment and action; how he feels and how he behaves align. Yet quickly his behavior deviates from his thoughts, he remains a sentimental character but not a sincere one, he feels strongly and yet fails to act in kind. On the train, William is distracted from his papers by imagining “the exquisite freshness of Isabel” and letting his thoughts wander nostalgically to their old home and the vacations they used to take, and he “couldn’t help a grim smile as he thought of Isabel’s horror if she knew the true extent of his sentimentality” (307). This grim smile hints to a self-recognized emotional excess, he understands himself to be sentimental and yet keeps the extent of those feelings to himself. He does not defend his strength of feeling but instead hides it, putting the opinion of others over his own. He similarly conceals his feelings in the taxi ride from the station. Isabel takes the pineapple he so carefully chose for the children and he tries to rescue the fruit, “‘No, wait a bit,’ said William, smiling. But he really was anxious. ‘I brought them down for the kiddies’” (308). He smiles and protests weakly but his thoughts are anxious, inwardly protesting with vehemence against the greed of Isabel and her friends. He dilutes his feelings in expression and so his behavior becomes insincere, a gap opens between thought and speech. The gap characterizing his insincerity seems to disappear again when he is alone on the train back to London, expressing himself to Isabel alone, “He folded his arms against the dull, persistent gnawing, and began in his mind to write a letter to Isabel” (311). The reader only hears a few lines from the letter he drafts, “My darling, precious 69 Isabel” and “God forbid, my darling, that I should be a drag on your happiness” (312). Yet from from these brief gushes of affection and the guilt Isabel later expresses after having read the love letter aloud, it seems that the letter expresses William’s thoughts sincerely. The sentimental letter aligns with the loving images that enter William’s mind in imagining “the exquisite freshness of Isabel!” and the regret Isabel feels indicates her read-aloud betrayed the letter’s sincere address to her and her alone. Yet these indicators of the letter’s sincerity are prefaced by William folding his arms against a dull ache as he mentally constructs the letter. He suppresses another mode of feeling, this gnaw in his chest, even as he allows himself to finally articulate his sentimentality. William complicates any claim to sincerity by still censoring feeling from the letter, physically barring certain thoughts with crossed arms. While he may still express honest feeling in the letter, a gap between his feeling and expression persists with the persistent gnawing in his breast never acknowledged. Full sincerity, a full alignment between feeling and expression alludes him. Harry Frankfurt ends his discussion in On Bullshit with the provocation that there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgement that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial––notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit. (66-67). Frankfurt’s ending claim unwinds any lingering sincerity in William’s character; if the dull gnaw in his chest is not expressed, and William does not seem to know how to 70 express it to himself either, never describing its cause or nature, then how well does William really know the sentiments he does express, does he know himself at all? If human sentiments are truly as insubstantial as Frankfurt purports, sincerely representing or expressing the self is an impossible task and any attempt becomes bullshit. Returning to William’s moment of self-declared blindness, “the imbecile thing,” we can piece out several formulations of sincere bullshit. First, William seems to sincerely want Isabel to be happy, he expresses sincere love in blaming himself for not recognizing her past discontent and appreciating her friends for bringing his wife happiness even when their companionship replaces his own. Yet this sincerity is undercut by the longing “if––if…” that ends the paragraph and the milieu of nostalgia that surrounds his reflection on his blindness, suggesting a part of him would still prefer the old Isabel, the old house, and the old ignorance to her discontent. The two emotional impulses towards gratitude and nostalgia conflict in William’s exclamation of blindness, he cannot sincerely express himself since any expression will omit a conflicting half of his feelings. As Frankfurt phrases it, the slippery self resists “skeptical dissolution,” and so even in this moment of apparently clear hindsight, everything William professes in his disillusion from the past retains a whiff of bullshit. As previously discussed, forgetfulness forces William’s clear hindsight into even more doubt; Isabel may not, indeed, have found the house inconvenient and the fat nanny ruin-ness. She judges the past, perhaps, only in revision to her and William’s memory, forgetting any past happiness. Moira describes Isabel as an “exquisite little Titania” whom she shall rescue from William’s captivity, but what kind of queen is this Titania? Has she left a possessive and selfish king? or is she befuddled and tricked such that she can no longer distinguish who is the 71 ass? The definitive truths in the passage that she “really hated that inconvenient house,” etc. are also potential lies—so muddled by Moira’s meddling and a certain angle of yellow midsummer light over sardines that neither she nor the audience knows quite how she feels. Finally the simple question of if Isabel was or was not happy in the past raises the question of Isabel’s current happiness. William’s dual sentiments of gratitude and nostalgia establish an either-or: either the old Isabel was discontent and now the new Isabel is content with her large house, host of servants, and fashionable companionship or else the old Isabel was content playing with the children in the drawing-room of their old house and pick-a-backing them up the stairs to their caring nanny and the new Isabel, like William, must partially ache for this old life. Mansfield, perhaps, calls bullshit on this dichotomy. Saikat Majumdar discusses Mansfield’s personal biography in relation to the female characters she writes. These characters, Majumdar claims, consistently possess a longing which simmers within the banal everyday and which echoes Mansfield’s own boredom growing up within the colonial margin of the British empire, in New Zealand. He discusses banality as an intrinsic characteristic of colonial settings and the edges of the metropole (“Marriage à la Mode” is set just a short train ride from London) and a tool engaged in the colonies to maintain a static, mundane, and habituated mode to everyday life that helps British control persist. Majumdar writes, Even the calm texture of quotidian domesticity that makes up a significant part of her fictional world is molded by the replication of metropolitan social values and norms in the colony. The colonial writer who had so eagerly desired and gained entry into Bloomsbury but was simultaneously derided for her colonial origins 72 offers telling stories of futility, restlessness, and emptiness, of a world where such desires are teased but never satisfactorily fulfilled….Mansfield’s fiction is pervaded by this aesthetic unfulfillment, which casts a shadow even on the stories that do not have a recognizably colonial setting. (75) Isabel displays precisely such a futile, restless, vacuity that she herself names when, after reading aloud William’s love letter, she laments herself to be “shallow, tinkling, vain…” (313). This aching emptiness does not disappear and echoes in the final tragic laugh that ends the chapter as she abandons her letter writing and “laughing in the new way” goes to join her friends (313). The story contains a yearning not just within the narrative but which extends beyond the narrative; Isabel both yearns to escape her simple domestic life before the story starts and continues to yearn to escape her “shallow, tinkling” life beyond the story’s ending. Mansfield and her characters, though her stories foundationally engage banality, are never fulfilled by the iterative quotidian setting where they reside. Refusing to be satiated by the mundane refuses any soothing euphemistic comfort. Yet Isabel never acts on the story’s pulsing discontent but capitulates once more to her friends’ daily routine at the end of the story. Even after Mansfield leaves colonial New Zealand, Majumdar describes her lingering discontent in Bloomsbury. Alex Moffat claims Mansfield’s own discontent indeed comes to the surface in “Marriage a la Mode,” which he labels a “Bloomsbury satire” (202). He says the story “conspicuously mocks Bloomsbury values in its depiction of Isabel’s new friends, a set of poets and artists who…are largely characterized by their excessive and gratuitous demonstrations of knowingness, a desire to demonstrate to others their own store of witty references” (204). Mansfield rages against the superficial and self-congratulatory social scene of 73 Bloomsbury through staging stories whose characters parody her own situation and discontent. Yet neither Mansfield nor Isabel is quite capable of escaping their social spheres and their discontent persists. Without direct confrontation, and only the subtle rage of recognition, the euphemistic, the insincere, and the daily routines of society maintain control and lingering authority in Mansfield’s story. 74 The Location of Desire, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil Two stories of botched assassination, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings and Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, ridicule American bureaucracy. While neither is specifically set in the United States (with the exception of the ending of A Brief History which takes place in New York), America enters the novel through a CIA agent and American journalist who narrate several sections of the novel and America provides a touchstone for the absurd fantasy world in Brazil. In “The Location of Brazil,” Salman Rushdie points to the film’s ties to America through its American director (though Gilliam had moved to Britain by the time he directed the film) before quoting Gilliam’s views on the United States: “‘America bombards you with dreams and deprives you of your own,’ he says, and Brazil is about that, too: the struggle between private, personal dreams (flying, love) and the great mass-produced fantasies, eternal youth, material wealth, power” (125). In both texts, Brazil and A Brief History, the location of desire, and particularly whether this desire emanates from the individual or from the state becomes more important than either of their physical locations. The following chapter will map how language locates and displaces desire in both the film and the novel. Vague Language, Jargon, and Threat Brazil opens in a setting that is simultaneously precise and ambiguous: The opening credits tell us that the time is 8:49 pm, but do not specify the year, as the viewer is immediately thrown into a world of screens, ducts, and gadgets that invoke both the past and the future. In “The Location of Brazil” Rushdie says “The TV sets look oddly 75 quaint…In other ways, though, the film looks marvellously futuristic” (119-20). Within this milieu, that gives details before context, the camera zooms into a machine printing pages that all say “Archibald Tuttle,” when suddenly a fly falls into the machine and “Tuttle” is mistyped as “Buttle.” This small detail forms the premise for the rest of the film when Mr. Buttle, an unexceptional shoe repairman, registers as the heating-system terrorist “Tuttle.” In the world of Brazil, Central Services performs all maintenance work and the rogue heating services that Tuttle provides make him, and therefore the misidentified Buttle, a threat to the state. After a team of suited and masked security troops cut a hole through the Buttle family’s ceiling, enter their apartment in a clatter of plaster and noise, buckle Mr. Buttle into a ridiculous and constricting sack-suit, collect several signatures from Mrs. Buttle, give her a receipt for her husband, and take Mr. Buttle away, Buttle’s file ends up on the desk of Mr. Kurtzman (Ian Holm) in the Records branch of the Ministry of Information. Mr. Kurtzman feels immediately overwhelmed and calls in the film’s endearingly ordinary hero, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce). Sam is the first to note the mistake that has confused Tuttle and Buttle, noting particularly that Buttle’s file registers a charge for £ 31.06 of electrical procedures, it should have been on Tuttle’s account. While Mr. Kurtzman is flustered by the mistake, and Ministry officials throughout the film feel similarly threatened by the Buttle/Tuttle mistake, Sam calmly and quickly relieves Mr. Kurtzman’s agitation, affirming there was a mistake but saying “Well, at least it’s not ours” (00:15:55). No one wants to claim responsibility for the Buttle mistake and characters continually use evasive language to dodge the blame. A few days later, however, correcting the mistake does become the partial responsibility of Sam and Mr. Kurtzman when a check arrives for Mr. Buttle on Mr. Kurtzman’s desk. 76 Wanting to deliver the check and get it off his conscience, Mr. Kurtzman begins to frantically read the type attached to everything in Buttle’s file, searching for his address. He tells Sam: “Population Census have got him down as dormanted, the Central Collective Storehouse computer has got him down as deleted, Information Retrieval have got him down as inoperative…Security has him down as excised, Administration have him down as completed…” (00:36:01). Sam Lowry interrupts after his own quick search on the computer: “He’s dead” (00:36:19). Not only does every branch of the Ministry compulsively avoid the term “dead,” but each of the five departments listed also uses a separate term, specifying its own individual jargon for death. In Euphemism and Dysphemism, Burridge and Allan note that jargon necessarily dictates an inside and an outside, a group initiated to the jargon’s particularities and a remainder to whom the jargon is unintelligible. So, “while jargons aim to facilitate communication on the one hand, they also erect communication barriers on the other” (196). In Brazil, those working in “Population Census” or “Central Collective Storehouse” perhaps comprehend the specific euphemisms (“dormanted,” “deleted”) chosen to replace the more universally intelligible “dead” or “deceased,” and the euphemism simply blunts the force of a more obviously morbid term. To Mr. Kurtzman, whose position in the Records department does not privilege him to the jargon of Information Retrieval, Security, or Administration, the euphemisms each department uses (“inoperative,” “excised,” “completed”) generate genuine miscomprehension. Kurtzman expresses true surprise when Sam says of Buttle (whom state records have confused for another man named Tuttle), “He’s dead,” translating the various jargons into a word Kurtzman understands. Kurtzman reacts, “Dead? Well that’s awful…We’ll never get rid of the damn thing now” 77 (00:36:21). His reaction focuses on the “damn” check and fails to show true sympathy for Mr. Buttle or his family, but at the very least his surprise and shock register Buttle’s death. Before Sam interrupts, the five euphemisms for “dead” engaged by various Ministry departments prohibit Mr. Kurtzman from even recognizing that Buttle died. Euphemistic jargon produces a distinct lack of communication across departments: if Kurtzman in Records can’t understand that five different departments are telling him Buttle is dead, then how is information ever going to be shared across departments or to the public? Jargon works in the Ministry of Information as a sort of shield, keeping information compartmentalized and inaccessible to those outside of a department, a buffer that keeps departments themselves outside of scrutiny that could detect mistakes, violence, or dysfunction. Later in the film, Sam almost unwittingly adopts the jargon of Information Retrieval, where he’s been promoted, as he tries to get information out of his friend Jack Lint on Jill Layton (Kim Geist), the girl of his dreams who has also entered his waking life. Jack sees the picture print-out of Jill that Sam has brought and immediately assumes trouble, since Jill has been nosing around for information on the Buttle/Tuttle mistake to help her neighbor Mrs. Buttle. Though Sam only answers Jack’s questions honestly and seems to fumble his way through the conversation, Jack begins to darken the scenario, reading prior knowledge into Sam’s every short reply. When Jack asks, “How much do you know about this?”, Sam hesitatingly answers, “Not much,” which, though the truth, Jack takes to mean that Sam knows quite a bit (1:18:44). Almost by mistake, Sam speaks the jargon of knowledge-denial that Jack’s career seems based upon. Sam’s ignorance may be real, but Jack hears his answers as a display of “pretend ignorance,” allowing 78 Jack to share information without breaking confidentiality, since he assumes the information is already known. Once Sam realizes the assumptions Jack makes about his knowledge, he switches from simply displaying his ignorance to pretending to pretend ignorance, gaining the confidence to ask more questions under the act that they both already know the answers. Eventually, Sam asks what Jack plans to do about Jill and he answers “Well I’ve put her on the detention list” (01:20:11). To this Sam responds with jargon of his own, “Why don’t you let me try to get to her for you? I’ll um…I’ll deactivate her” (1:20:20). What “removal from circulation,” “detention,” and “deactivation” precisely mean in regards to a person is unclear (though all have the potential to be euphemisms for death). Even to those who use these terms, the ambiguous euphemism Sam selects is met by confusion; Jack asks, “What does that mean, Sam? I…I don’t want to get involved in anything unsavory” (1:20:28). The word “deactivate” is thus thrown into the conversation with a euphemistic function, Sam hopes it will signal something to Jack while Jack clearly thinks the term must mean something to Sam, without either party knowing what, precisely, the term signals. And yet Jack capitulates and accepts the term for whatever it means, letting Sam do what he will with Jill’s file. Jargon takes on another kind of obscurity when numbers replace words. Sam indicates the importance of numbers to the functioning of the Ministry when he notes the Tuttle/Buttle mistake by their mismatched numbers, B58/732 instead of T47/215, and when he tracks information using the check’s number, but the substitution of numbers for words gains a different level of absurdity when Sam joins his mother for lunch at a fancy restaurant. The waiter, Spiro, begins taking orders, Sam’s mother orders a “number eight”, her friend Mrs. Terrain a “number two”, and Mrs. Terrain’s daughter Shirley a 79 “number one,” while Sam orders “A steak. Rare” (00:20:25). Spiro is flustered, and, in frustration, tries to force Sam to order with a number instead of a word. Insisting that “you have to say the number,” he eventually says the number for Sam: “Number three” (00:20:39). Just as letters tend to generalize the numeric world, once algebra introduces the concept of the variable and 1, 2, 3 becomes x, y, z, so too do numbers generalize a world based on language where “3” becomes “steak.” Apparently, generalizing the word also generalizes the concept. When the meal arrives, the “number three” turns out to be like the numbers “one,” “two,” and “eight,” a neat pile of green mush with a little flash card bearing a picture of a more traditional, and more appetizing, steak. The possible appearances of an ambiguous “number three” are far broader than those of “steak.” The euphemistic substitution of numbers on the menu disturbs usual relations of particularity and difference. Instead of a particular meal corresponding to a particular term, the same meal corresponds to different numbers and different little pictures. Precise, numeric euphemisms obscure the resemblance between what each signifies. The restaurant indeed operates on a the gap between signifier and signified––for in this gap one can insert illusion, the photographs of nice meals that come with each plate of mush, the occasional French word that indicate the establishment is at the peak of haute-couture––and so Spiro will not leave Sam’s side until he has collected Sam’s order in the form of a number, maintaining the illusion-fertile gap the restaurant depends upon. Like with jargon, certain numbers are specific to departments or technical professions and hold meaning and/or threat primarily for those within the department. Like when Sam infiltrates the language of Information Retrieval, promising to “delete” Jill, he likewise attempts to numerically infiltrate the jargon of Central Services. He 80 submits an emergency repair request to Central Services for his apartment which has begun to overheat, but he cannot get past an automated phone message and instead accepts the help of the heating services renegade Archibald “Harry” Tuttle (Robert De Niro). Tuttle, who avoided capture through the confusion with Archibald Buttle, runs a repair business outside of the authority of Central Services and so constantly looks over his shoulder and moves spy-like through the apartment, wary of getting caught. Sensing Tuttle’s unease, Sam asks him why he does not simply do heating repair for Central Services itself. Tuttle’s response initiates Sam to the Central Services’ numeric jargon: “The paperwork, couldn’t stand the paperwork…listen, this old system of yours could be on fire and I couldn’t even turn on the kitchen tap without filling in a 27B/6…. Bloody paperwork” (00:29:20). When two real Central Services repairmen show up at the door with Tuttle still in the apartment, Sam adopts the jargon Tuttle used, brandishing it threateningly at the repairmen to keep them from discovering that Tuttle is inside. He asks “Have you got a 27B/6?” (00:31:25). The repairmen stop their chatter, everything goes quiet, and one of the men begins to shake and tremble on the edges of an anxiety attack before his companion hits him over the head with a wrench…Sam has issued the ultimate threat in Central Services dialect, the threat of more paperwork. But his threat backfires. Sam later walks into his apartment to find the heating system hanging in disarray from the ceiling and walls. One of the repairmen aggressively hands him a piece of paper him to sign, “What is it?” Sam asks, and the repair man replies “27B/6, what did you think it is?” (00:52:26). A string of three digits, a letter, and a stroke have the power to both kick men out of Sam’s apartment and legislate them to do absolutely anything to his heating system. Never is it clarified what Sam signs onto, but the vague numbers and 81 the authority with which it is brandished give this ambiguous bit of paperwork almost unlimited licensing power. The form 27B/6 threatens almost precisely because it is ambiguous, the Central Service men could do anything to his apartment and Sam would never whether he had “agreed” to it or not. Numbers apply not just to paperwork but also to people. Sam eventually accepts a promotion to Information Retrieval as he seeks information on the woman of his dreams, Jill Layton. His boss, Mr. Warren, welcomes him briskly to the department. He leads Sam to a line of identical doors and stops outside of one emblazoned with “DZ-015,” Mr. Warren says “Your very own number... on your very own door... and behind that door... your very own office. Congratulations, DZ/015, welcome to the team” (01:09:17). Amidst identical doors marked with nearly identical numbers, Sam is welcomed to the team by being homogenized to the team. He is expected to behave like everyone else on the floor and his number becomes a symbol of conformity. While Mr. Warren says “DZ/015” cheerfully, with none of the aggression with which Spiro utters “number three” or the electrical repair man utters “27B/6,” Sam’s personal number is still uttered with an implied threat. The number “DZ/015” on his door and the office behind it seem to belong to the department, one in a set of similar doors and offices, instead of being his “very own.” The term “very own” implies that Sam has a certain ownership over the office, and yet from when his first enters and takes up the battle with his neighbor Mr. Lime for equal table rights (the shared desk can slide under the wall and be pulled to varying extents into one office over the other) it seems the office and Sam’s new promotion take ownership over himself instead; even the furniture has more agency to move about in the cramped office than Sam himself. With his newly assigned number, Sam comes under 82 threat to operate uniformly, to operate in the mold of an Information Retrieval employee. The department seems to take control, ownership, over his time and behavior — no longer is Sam the one suggesting what to do to Mr. Kurtzman, but his new boss, Mr. Warren, is telling him directly what to do, even what style of suit to wear, with no space for questions. Expected to assimilate seamlessly into the office pattern from day one, the threat to conform becomes more explicit when Sam fails to do so, letting his inbox fill while he searches for Jill. Mr. Warren eventually confronts him with genuine anger, demanding that Sam tackle his paperwork and telling him “this is a black eye for the department, Lowry…I don’t know what’s going on here Lowry, but don’t think you can intimidate us with your friends and relatives in high places! Now shape up!” (01:43:35). He then continues on to the next demand on his time, leaving no chance for Sam to respond. There is still no “or else,” no direct threat, uttered here, but the anger in Mr. Warren’s tone implies that something will happen if Sam fails to perform his job the way everyone else performs it. Warren’s aggressive “Now shape up!” includes an ambiguous, unnamed threat; a threat which does not have to be clarified because, at least to Warren’s mind, there is no question that the injunction will be obeyed. The threat to conform may apply to employees inside the Ministry of Information, but to the public and those outside the Ministry, language issues an equally subtle and gentle threat to prevent penetration and navigation of Ministry systems. Neither the inside nor the outside, then, may interrupt the Ministry’s quotidian functioning. Jill Layton enters the Ministry to report a wrongful arrest on behalf of Mrs. Buttle. She is sent on a circular quest for the appropriate paperwork, going to one department after the next and always being told something similar to what one porter says, “You want Information 83 Adjustments. Different Department” (00:14:54). Jill argues, but eventually leaves in frustration. The porter’s dull tone, and his almost-patronizing patience as he inevitably directs Jill away from his desk, suggest, like Mr. Warren’s more energetic but equally confident authority, that what the porter says will not be questioned. He seems to know from the beginning that the Ministry’s circular and exhausting systems can outlast any individual and Jill’s report will never get through. The porter need not explicitly tell Jill to stop meddling, the threat is contained in the porters very surety, his confident, bored deflection of her requests. Whether it is a number or procedural gobbledygook that prohibits comprehension and communication within and across departments in the Ministry, vague language (including direct euphemisms, jargon, or just mundane explanations of paperwork) produce conformity through subtle threat. Brazil-ian society’s use of numbers, jargon, and bureaucracy, however, loses some threat to the film’s absurd humor. In his book Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud describes how humor can replace or be favored over other emotions. Freud describes a joke where a man walking to the gallows asks for a scarf for his neck to ward off the cold: The situation that is supposed to drive the delinquent to despair could rouse intense pity in us; but this pity is inhibited, because we understand that the one who is affected most closely makes nothing of the situation. On account of this understanding, the expenditure on pity that was already mobilized in us becomes unusable –– and we laugh it away. The rogue’s own indifference –– though we note it has cost his psyche great expense –– has, as it were, infected us. (222) 84 Characters in Brazil seem indifferent to much of the death and violence around them, as well as to the threats contained in bureaucratic discourse. When Mr. Kurtzman finally comprehends that Mr. Buttle is dead, his shocked “Oh no!” does not mourn Mr. Buttle himself but instead the complication of delivering a check to someone deceased. Likewise, in the restaurant, Sam and his mother and mother’s friends fail to react or help when a series of explosions maim other diners and employees behind them (00:21:59). Mrs. Lowry, calmly chewing her green mush, is annoyed at the loud background noise of the explosions, but seems indifferent to the dozens of people actively wounded or dying behind her. While the viewer perhaps has an initial reaction of concern, shock, or horror when the explosion maims dozens, the indifference of the other diners, of Spiro (who sets up a screen to shield the explosions from the view of Mrs. Lowry and her companions), and of the band (which continues to play) destabilizes the viewer’s initial reaction, prompting, as Freud suggests, laughter. The violence and the indifference towards violence simultaneously displayed in the frame lets the audience laugh even at death, the most gruesome moments of the film are also the most absurd and ridiculous. Yet how much of this ridiculous farce is truly farce? The apathy of Brazil’s overblown bureaucracy contains enough grains of reality to make our laughter at the film uncomfortable and uncertain. Marlon James’ story of an also bungled assassination, that of Bob Marley, in A Brief History of Seven Killings, makes no such direct substitution of humor for pity or other affect. While fiction, A Brief History is both based on true events and uses a serious, through still playful, narration far removed from the absurdity of Gilliam’s film. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting System, James himself says that, “I still 85 reserve the right to be fanciful wherever I want to. But some of these stories didn't need help. They didn't need me as a fiction writer” (Jones). The jargon engaged in the novel does not always feel that far from the hyperbolized and ridiculous jargon of Brazil, nor are the background deaths in the novel, which number far more than seven, addressed with much more sympathy than Mrs. Lowry and her companions spare for the diningroom dying. Read against each other, the reader of both novel and film can take no solace in a single affect or response to bureaucratic language, jargon, or gratuitous death; neither humor nor disgust suffices alone. In A Brief History, Barry DiFlorio is a CIA agent working in Jamaica in the mid 1970s. He names the connection between vague language and threat quite directly when he begins to analyze his wife and her complaints that they are still living in Jamaica. Immediately after she tells him not to overestimate how many choices he has, Barry thinks, “She’s not being specific because if she were, it would reduce the threat” (98). Precisely because an “or else” is not named, Barry considers his wife’s language more threatening; until she establishes an “or else,” the threat relies on a consequence that could be anything at all, allowing Barry to imagine the worst and almost construct the threat for himself. The lack of specificity in Claire DiFlorio’s threat pervades their relationship more generally. In particular, Barry maintains a vague secrecy around his job and why their family is in Jamaica at all. Never does Barry reveal his actual assignment in Jamaica and it is only upon Claire’s request that he shares why the “Company,” as Barry consistently refers to the CIA, sent him on his last placement in Ecuador. Knowing it will annoy his wife, he quotes the memo at length: 86 Priority A: Collect and report intelligence on strength and intentions of communist and other hostile political organizations, including international support, influence in Ecuadoran government. Priority B: Collect and report intelligence on stability of Ecuador on government, strength and intentions of dissident political groups. Maintain high-level agents in government, security, ruling political and opposition political parties, especially opposition military leaders…Priority C: Propaganda and psychological warfare: disseminate information to counteract anti-U.S. propaganda, neutralize communist influence in mass organizations, establish alternative organizations. Support democratic leaders. (177) The language of this memo represents much of the language of the “Company.” In just a paragraph, specific patterns already form that begin to constitute a bureaucratic jargon. Key words and phrases (“priority,” “collect and report intelligence,” and “influence”) repeat in the memo and point to a standardized vocabulary. The verbs used in the directive (“collect,” “report,” “maintain,” “disseminate,” “neutralize,” “support”) engage the insider-outsider dynamic of jargon; they are vague enough to not communicate any explicit action to the outsider, there are dozens of ways to “collect and report intelligence” and the ethics of doing so relies heavily on the method, and yet to perhaps imply more specificity to the agent initiated to such language and trained in the Company. To Barry, this memo surely means something different than to Claire who is quickly disgusted with the language, interrupting with “I’ve really heard enough, Barry” (177). Besides the country, Ecuador, nothing in the memo refers to specific places, people, political parties, or organizations. Barry recognizes this, telling his wife, “The 87 Company only has one rule book, dear. One size fits all” (177). Such an allencompassing rule book standardizes how American international presence is shown in the novel. If the Company sends agents abroad with identical memos, identical political responses to various countries and contexts, it threatens a conformity that almost resembles the absurd template for work presented in Brazil. Are numbered employees in identical offices in Information Retrieval really so absurd if the CIA assigns an Ivy league-educated agent to each identical country south of the U.S. border with an identical rule book for how to organize their “office,” what information to collect and report to a superior and what anti-communist posters to disseminate on the walls? A Brief History is indeed fiction, but before the novel even starts, James prefaces the story’s fiction with two epigraphs: a lyric from the song “Tangled and Dark” which goes “Gonna tell the truth about it, / Honey, that’s the hardest part,” and the Jamaican proverb “If it no go so, it go near so.” If A Brief History does not, cannot, represent an accurate reality of American presence abroad, it at least goes “near” reality. Comparing Brazil and A Brief History then muddles what is absurd fantasy and what is absurd reality. Since both texts engage overblown bureaucratic jargon, they together disrupt what sort of language belongs to imagination and what to reality, what to art and what to politics. Rushdie writes in “The Location of Brazil” that “the opposition of imagination to reality, which is also of course the opposition of art to politics––is of great importance, because it reminds us that we are not helpless; that to dream is to have power” (122). The similarities between the two texts’ bureaucracies disturb any such clear opposition and throw the dreamer’s power into question. 88 A Currency of Desire: The Dream of the State and the Dream of the Individual Perhaps the model American, Barry DiFlorio shows an almost perfect coincidence between his nation’s desires and his own. In a phone call with an ex-colleague, William Adler, DiFlorio displays his allegiance to the Company as the figure head of American anti-communist sentiment to the mockery of Adler: ––I just don’t get how you guys think. Socialism is not fucking communism. ––it’s an ism though, that’s for sure. Your problem, and it has always been your problem, Bill, is that you think you’re hired to think. Or that anybody gives a shit what you think. … ––Really? You think I’m to be blamed for Welch? I overestimated you, Barry. I thought the company trusted you with more info than you’ve clearly got. I must be talking to the wrong man. (95) Bill and Barry’s exchange jumps quickly between jabs, each a little unclear what the other knows and both performing that they know precisely how the other operates. Barry ridicules Bill for his conscience, for leaving the company and publishing a book with confidential information, a book Barry blames for the death of a couple named Welch. His critiques of Bill illustrate a, perhaps self-aware, but pungent American conviction: a generalizing condemnation of “ism”s, a trust that the company can and should replace individual thought, possessing a logic greater than individual thought, and a disgust at Bill for abandoning his country. Meanwhile, Bill condemns Barry for his uncritical trust of the company, for adopting their fear of all isms, and for what Bill sees as delusional ignorance, believing in a company that doesn’t trust him back. In a later phone call 89 together, Bill tells Barry “You’re the worst of the lot. It’s one thing if you approved of what your government is doing, but you don’t even care. Just punch the clock and cash the check” (326). In this biting summation of Barry’s approach to life, Bill perhaps articulates the ideal American citizen, one who believes in their government not through principals but through habit, because belief in the state is easy and lucrative. In the Jamaican ghetto, individual desire also gets capitulated to the desire of a few. The main plot of A Brief History follows the planning, execution, and aftermath from the attempted assassination of Bob Marley right before his “Smile Jamaica” concert in December 1976. Josey Wales, don of the section of Kingston called Copenhagen City and the leader of the drug syndicate “Storm Posse,” collaborates with Doctor Love, a CIA consultant also involved with the Colombian Medellín drug cartel, to organize a group of, primarily young, gang members to shoot up Bob Marley, or “the Singer”’s, house. None of the members involved in the assassination share the desire or motivation of Josey Wales or Doctor Love, several indeed listen to and admire the Singer’s music. The 15year-old gang member Bam-Bam is particularly invested in music, he even narrates the shooting of the Singer’s house in his own style of rapped rhyme (a form that both gives a strange beauty to the event and communicates its intensity in short, chaotic lines), and later ends up at the Smile Jamaica concert, where he narrates the concert as though talking with the Singer, saying “You doing it. You telling them to close in and stomp down Babylon. Now me jumping to you singing to them ‘bout me” (258). His words express admiration for the Singer and hint at a deep regret, not just because the botchedshooting has turned him into a dead man, running from Josey Wales who is on the hunt to silence every gang member involved, but because he holds respect for the man he 90 attempted to kill. Yet despite the shooters not directly desiring to kill the Singer, it becomes their desire through the persuasion of Josey Wales and the drug labyrinth behind him. In the moment of the shooting, the gang members participate voluntarily with cocaine already in their veins and the promise of more if they do as directed. Bam-Bam begins his rap on the shooting itself with the line “Josey Wales said no more line for you, work to do” (236) and the craving for cocaine continues to repeat in Bam-Bam’s narration of the event, becoming a pulsing desire, “I want another hit / I want another hit / I want another hit” (238). The desire of Josey Wales and Doctor Love, and the massive drug organization behind them, absorbs the desire of the individual shooters to their own through the organization’s own economics, a currency of drugs. The novel introduces Bam-Bam, however, before he is introduced to drugs and guns and we briefly see that he has personal desires too, desires over written and replaced by the constructed desire of Josey Wales, Doctor Love, and their affiliated organizations. Most notably, Bam-Bam wants to survive. The first section of the novel that Bam-Bam narrates describes both his parents being shot in their house as he himself hides and desires desperately to run. Running eventually brings him to Copenhagen City and the protection of Josey Wales, where Wales is able to buy even Bam-Bam’s dream to live (trying to assassinate an internationally acclaimed singer is inherently risky) through the trust Bam-Bam establishes for him and the promise of drugs and new guns. It is only after the shooting that the base desire for survival returns and Bam-Bam runs. In his fear he says, “I want my daddy to come back and my mother to not be a whore and Josey Wales to not try to find me” (255). He wants, in short, the safety of his family and his life. But Josey Wales does find him and buries him alive. As the dirt begins to fill his mouth, the last words that 91 Bam-Bam narrates in the novel express those small lost desires of simple and innocent life, reminding the reader once more that they are reading the death of a teenager, a child: “I want a kiosk pop and and lollipop and a tootsie pop and all kinda pop and a purple crayon and red too pink no pink is for girls pink is for girls HubbaBubba chewing gum don’t stick even when you blow a big big bubble biggest and bubblest ring around the rosie pocket full of posie aw shucks aw shucks we—” (268). And as he suffocates and his words devolve he expresses desires that have clearly been instilled in him, “pink is for girls” and a focus on brands like “Hubba Bubba,” but also that base desire once more for life in the final image of chewing gum: a bubble too is a pocket of air. After this final image he begins to sing his own funeral dirge, a rendition of a morbid children’s song about dying from the plague, “we––” all fall down. Though most of the gang members involved in the attempted assassination are eventually killed by Josey, his gang enforcer Weeper survives and at the end of the novel Weeper is in charge of running a smooth distribution of cocaine in New York City. He starts to neglect his job, however, for other desires, sex and the beginnings of a relationship with another man. Any kind of personal connection or relationship is an insular want, a dream restricted to two and not controllable on large scales of production. When Weeper, distracted by other things, doesn’t notice when his dealers start using and slowly lets the management of the operation slip, Josey Wales flies to New York and, in two of the most brutal scenes of the novel, Wales calmly massacres every living body in the crack house where the New York operation was run and Weeper, knowing that he has botched the operation in New York enough that he doesn’t have long to live, asks JohnJohn K, a hitman hired by a rival drug syndicate, to give him one more hit of cocaine in 92 then neck. But the cocaine isn’t cut and Weeper dies by a choice, but gruesome, overdose. The desire of a drug operation is not its product, indeed in the chapters set in New York, several characters reiterate that problems occur when one starts both dealing and using. But the operation produces and distributes cocaine as the tool, the produced desire, to allow its own organizational desire for money and power to thrive. In New York, Weeper’s personal desires as he begins to more fully explore his sexuality, the desires of the drug operation (control, wealth) and the desires produced by the operation (addiction) start to tangle, dealers use and Weeper’s sex life begins to take precedence over his work life. These tangled individual wants jeopardize the organizational want of the operation and Wales comes in to take the private desires back out of the equation, pap, pap, pap. Let us return to Rushdie’s claim at the beginning of the chapter, that Brazil deals with “the struggle between private, personal dreams (flying, love) and the great massproduced fantasies, eternal youth, material wealth, power” (124). For the economy of Brazil to operate in this currency of fantasy, it needs its citizens to buy in, the personal dreams must surrender to mass-produced, and Ministry-produced, dreams. This massproduced dream is not the same as the Ministry’s dream (which seems to be simply for totalitarian control), but it is produced by the Ministry to align personal desires with the Ministry’s desire; citizens who accept the Ministry-produced economy of youth, automation, material and social wealth also accept the continued power of those producing and controlling such currency. Sam’s heroism in the film results partially from his persistent fidelity to his private dreams, though he still deals in many of the currencies of the Ministry. Sam’s mother, on the other hand, buys fully into the state-produced 93 fantasies. Mrs. Lowry is first introduced with clips drawing back her face and a plastic surgeon tightly saran-wrapping her head (00:17:30). The surgeon, Dr. Jaffe, claims he’ll make her look 20 years younger and Mrs. Lowry, like the other woman in her social circle, jumps on this promise of eternal youth, which is turned into material currency through “medical tokens,” a way to gift and trade surgeries. Mrs. Lowry is equally invested in a wealth of other material goods and social connections. Her apartment is filled with artwork, ornate pillows, and trifles of every expense and her social credit is displayed through her almost-royal treatment by Spiro at the restaurant, the host of important individuals who attend her party in the middle of the film, and the strings she continually pulls to get Sam a promotion, despite Sam protesting that he wants no such thing. The film is set at Christmas time, exacerbating the already prolific consumption on screen and showing how the mass-produced desires of the film’s world are inculcated from a young age: “my own credit card” (01:37:39) a kid answers when Santa asks what he wants for Christmas. And there is another Santa in the film. Mr. Helpman, top-dog of the Ministry of Information, dons a Santa suit near the end of the film, showing his bureaucratic position to be both the patriarch of information and the father of fantasy (02:02:35). Sam and Jill are among the few characters on screen whose desires do not conform to the masses. Though Sam participates in the mass economy as a bureaucrat working for the Ministry (and Jill indeed asks him “Doesn’t it bother you the sort of things you do in Information Retrieval?” [01:34:24]) he denies wanting the markers of wealth his mother so values. Sam tries to leave the restaurant early after eating with his mother and Mrs. Terrain when his mother interrupts: 94 “Sam…you haven’t had your dessert.” “I’m sorry. I don’t want dessert. I don’t want a promotion. I don’t want anything.” “Don’t be childish, Samuel. Of course you want something. You must have hopes, wishes, dreams.” “No! Nothing!” (00:23:34) Though Sam lies in his last shouted response to his mother, for the next scene indeed cuts to Sam dreaming, he still expresses something at least close to the truth; his hopes, wishes, and dreams barely register as such for they are outside the currency of the mass desires of the film. Sam’s private, sleeping dream, where he flies on silver wings and heroically rescues an idealized Jill, echoes throughout the film. In “The Subversion of Happy Endings in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil,” Jeffrey Melton and Eric Sterling analyze Sam’s own, perhaps delusional, understanding of his dreams: “He clearly sees his flight fancies as separate from the drudgery of ‘Brazilian life’; he is wrong, for they serve as part of the mechanism that keeps him passive and submissive….they appease his psyche’s need for such escape while doing nothing to challenge the complacency of his waking self” (68). Melton and Sterling imply then that Sam’s dreams are not so different from his mother’s dream for youth, wealth, and powerful friends, both dreams keep both individuals obedient and passive to the state. Indeed, his first flying dream is followed minutes later by an image of a giant winged statue in the Ministry entry hall (00:12:28). The statue reflects Sam’s winged fantasies, suggesting even his unconscious dream is influenced by his place of work. Slowly, however, Sam becomes less complacent to the Ministry as Jill Layton exposes him to a life with desires that counteract the state. Jill has 95 selfless desires (to help her neighbors, the Buttles, to aid the background wounded caught in the random and violent explosions that pervade the film) that threaten the anesthetized sensory world the Ministry demands its citizens dream within. She registers and protests the deaths of Buttle and countless background victims that most of the characters in the film barley register, desensitized to state violence. Euphemistic dialogue in Brazil is accompanied by a euphemistic visual language. The Ministry, in helping construct its citizens’ desires, also composes what they do and do not see, encouraging a euphemistic mode of sight and thought. From Spiro physically setting up a screen between Mrs. Lowry, Sam, their lunch guests, and the exploded victims in the other half of the restaurant, to broadcasting interviews that attribute all of the random attacks to terrorists and “bad sportsmanship” (00:02:02), to lining its roadway with giant advertising billboards that hide a blackened, resource-depleted landscape, Brazil-ian society wants its citizens to ignore the violence and the ugliness around them. This involves hiding the violence, but also numbing citizens to the violence, preventing them from responding in any ethical way. Citizens like Jack Lint’s secretary may transcribe every scream and protest of a tortured victim without batting an eye or pausing her fingers’ efficiency (01:16:53). Jill, however, turns towards victims of violence and questions the state’s explanations for violence, “How many terrorists have you met, Sam? Actual terrorists?” (01:34:37). As Sam begins to help Jill, it at first feels like pure adrenaline, he embodies the heroism and escape that he had before only dreamed about when he and Jill drive away from the ministry in Jill’s giant armored truck. The cars chasing them, however, crash and Sam suddenly sobers as, whooping for joy, he turns to watch them and realizes that he is celebrating the death of a security officer in the 96 burning debris of the crash (01:37:18). From this moment, Sam begins to perceive the random explosions as violence instead of annoyance. Through Jill, Sam is able to resensitize himself to the daily ugliness that the state has taught him to ignore and when a shopping center explodes, he aids Jill in trying to help the wounded (01:40:47). The dreaming Sam at the very end of the movie, who dreams to escape the torture chamber where his body physically resides, is no longer a passive participant to Brazil’s bureaucracy. Melton and Sterling write, Lowry’s triumphant dream – in contrast to the ones born of flight and escapism – is a vision of life on the ground, a life in its pastoral ideal that would be tied wholly to the earth, never flying above it in egomaniacal fantasies or hidden behind the cold metal and plastic of technology, a life that would prove difficult but always shared. When the landscape/still-life image concluding the dream sequence is torn asunder by the reappearance of Lint and Helpmann, we are shocked back into the reality of Brazil’s totalitarian world. However, Lowry is not; he is with Jill Layton – his Eve – in a new world of their making. Lint notes: ‘He’s gotten away from us.’ This is true, and that is a happy ending. (77) “Happy” is perhaps an overly generous term for a movie that ends with the female protagonist dead and the main protagonist trapped in a body inside a torture chamber, even if his mind escapes. Desire is still taut in the ending scene—the struggle between Sam’s personal desire and Brazil’s mass-produced desires continues. The Ministry may have submitted Sam’s body to their own dream, but his mind maintains the private desires for love and simple life, in this way he has indeed “gotten away” from the Ministry and their consuming dream. 97 Melton and Sterling frame their discussion of Brazil’s “happy” ending within the bureaucracy of the film’s release. They describe how Hollywood first rejected the film for its ending and how Universal Studios proposed several alternate endings to try and end the film on a light-hearted affirmation of the transcending powers of love. Melton and Sterling use this context around the film’s release as a path into the movie’s own politics of controlled narrative. Backtracking, a discussion of private and public desire(s) in the film can lead us to the politics of audience desire. The next section focuses on the desires of both the individual viewer and the cinematic market that received Brazil, and how the form of the film structures the audience perspective with the potential to satiate or disrupt desire. Offended Viewer: Form, Frame, and Narration Both Brazil and A Brief History have received critical and popular acclaim. Published in 2014, A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker prize in 2015 and Marlon James received several other honors for the book. Terry Gilliam released Brazil in 1985 to success in Europe and controversy in America, but since its release it has gained a strong foothold in the canon of English cinema, with a cult following and high ratings from both critics and audience. The texts’ acclaim, however, does not mean that either text conforms precisely to audience desire. As Melton and Sterling discuss, Brazil was originally released by Universal Studios in what is now referred to as the “Love Conquers All” cut of the film, a cut which declared Hollywood’s desire for simply happy endings and presumed American audiences wanted the same. The revised ending to Brazil performs a euphemistic substitution that turns away from what is unpleasurable 98 (the film’s “reality”) and lingers on what is pleasurable (Sam’s dream). This ending did not gain much credibility and it is the original cut that survives. Though the film may not deliver a simple happy ending, even in its final scene the film satisfies some sort of audience desire for a privileged gaze. Two distinct perspectives coincide in Brazil, in one, the viewer adopts Sam’s perspective, his dreams and gloss on the world. In the other, the viewer’s vision is broader, both Sam’s perspective and what is beyond his periphery appear on screen. In the ending to the original cut of the film, the audience has the pleasure of double vision. We see first Sam’s dreamed happiness and then his body trapped within the cavernous walls of a torture chamber. While Sam’s trapped body demands pity, we also, perhaps, take pleasure from the superior perspective the film grants us: we see both Sam’s limp figure and empty eyes, that Mr. Helpman and Jack Lint see too, and his peaceful and happy life with Jill to which only Sam and the audience are privy. The ending is different to the viewer than to any of the characters within the scene, giving a multiplied view that fulfills a voyeuristic desire for a gaze that is superior, more comprehensive, than another’s. This is almost the perverse pleasure of detecting euphemism, feeling that one is incapable of being duped. Brazil repeatedly delivers the satisfaction of seeing others duped while one remains outside the deception oneself. When Sam and Jill drive away from the Ministry in Jill’s truck, the camera zooms out and we see the truck traveling through a tunnel of billboards that block an arid and bleak landscape (01:33:40). The restricted perspective of the characters, seeing only the bright advertisements on the billboards, and the wide perspective of the camera gives the viewer a privileged position, those inside the film are fooled and we are not, we know 99 what is beyond their gaze. At other times, the camera replicates the obstructed views of certain characters, letting the audience more fully enter the disorienting world of Brazil. Sam enters his apartment after the Central Services repairmen have torn all the ducts and heating tubes from the ceiling and the hanging bits of heating system block the view of both the audience and Sam himself. Into this setting a woman dances, singing a telegram invite to Mrs. Lowry’s party and the camera stays at a lower-angle shot that allows the woman’s dancing body to frequently fill the frame and block the rest of the room, replicating parts of Sam’s own confused and overwhelmed perspective, where his private space (the apartment) and the viewer’s gaze both feel invaded (00:57:33). When Sam first arrives in the department for Information Retrieval, the viewer at first is given an omnipotent, and ominous, gaze as the camera takes a bird’s-eye view. From above, we watch the doors of the Ministry open at the bottom of the screen, slowly letting in the outside light until the doors form obtuse angles with the doorway and the light extends in a narrowing rectangle across the Ministry floor: the exact shape of a coffin (1:05:44). Into this grave Sam steps, leaving the viewer with foreboding as the camera switches back to an eye-level perspective. Moments later, both Sam and the viewer’s gaze is blocked by large white pillars that section the office floor of Information Retrieval into vertical slivers. Every direction he turns, the pillars block his view, replicating the sense that Sam is a caged man with a caged future from a more immersive perspective (01:08:31). The two camera angles in this sequence allow the viewer to carry over the text’s ominous foreshadowing to Sam’s perspective, almost allowing the audience to share their privileged gaze with the film’s hero, engendering sympathy. The camera also produces sympathy in Sam’s previous office, the department of Records, where the viewer shares a 100 perspective with the workers on the floor. The camera frames employees moving efficiently through the space in almost choreographed fashion, but as soon as Mr. Kurtzman, who has been watching their progress from the balcony of his office, goes inside his office and closes the door every worker drops their piles of paperwork and turns to watch small TV screens (00:08:29). When Mr. Kurtzman opens his door again everyone is immediately back at work and Mr. Kurtzman becomes the butt of his employees’ joke, a joke the viewer is also let in on. The viewer, however, may laugh at the employees too, every one of whom is addicted to tiny screens; the full screen, both employees and boss in the department of Records, are targets for the audience’s ridicule. The camera draws on other movie genres familiar to the audience in catering to a double perspective. Whenever Robert Di Nero, as the rogue heating engineer Harry Tuttle, comes on screen the scene is framed like a spy movie with a soundtrack of suspense to match. Sam and Tuttle clearly take delight in Tuttle’s clandestine operation, exchanging gleeful glances as they use a spy glass to watch the suits of the Central Service repair men, who have just sabotaged Sam’s heating system once again, fill with fecal waste after Tuttle switched two of the pumps on their suits (01:48:55). While their joy and pleasure in the scene is one of novel rule breaking, the audience’s pleasure is in recognition. The music that only the audience hears, the dramatically angled framing of Tuttle’s exits and entrances to the scene (high angle shots consistently frame Tuttle as he speeds on a zipline down from Sam’s apartment), and the spy glass and elaborate electrical gadgets in Tuttle’s toolbox echo every good, old-fashioned spy movie and the viewer comes to the scenes of Tuttle’s heroism with this context. The viewer can appreciate Sam’s fresh joy in this sort of action scene, even as the scene echoes a 101 nostalgic genre, and the tone becomes simultaneously new and familiar. Though the film offers perspective after perspective of characters ridiculously and absurdly cocooned in the state’s fantasies, promises, rules, and inefficient efficiencies, or else reveling in their small acts of illegality, the viewer maintains a vision outside of the deception; we too adopt some of Sam and Tuttle’s glee in voyeurism, we too can recognize the absurdity of the absurd. One sequence, however, refuses the viewer any distanced perspective and puts us behind Sam’s own eyes while he is being briefed by legal consultant after legal consultant following his arrest (02:01:18). The camera both moves and restricts the frame to a blurred rectangle, presumably echoing Sam’s distorted gaze through a rectangular eye flap. Sam’s vision feels dazed and vulnerable as the camera blurs the periphery and moves in a side-to-side swoon, all while voices overlay the sequence in increasing cacophony. But the distorted vision also reflects the confusion of the audience in suddenly adopting another’s gaze. Sam awakens in a daze completely removed from his old relations to the world of Brazil, once employee of the Ministry, he is now its enemy– –the daze the camera creates likewise embodies our own displacement of relations, once looking in on Sam’s life, we now look out on his life from his own eyes. This one moment of the film is the mode of Marlon James’ A Brief History. The novel switches narration between the first-person perspectives of over a dozen characters, creating a “fisheye lens” effect as the text transitions from the pompous language of a Rolling Stone reporter, to the slang and partial sentences of a teenage gang member, to the anger of a woman who wants desperately to leave Jamaica. The first narrator, and arguably the framing narrator of the novel, is a dead politician, extending the perspectives the novel 102 offers even beyond death (and perhaps framing the living perspectives, too, through death; a strange echo of the transition in Brazil from the coffin-shaped shadow on the Ministry floor to Sam’s point of view in Information Retrieval). The reader must constantly reorient oneself. Not just the perspective on events changes, but the style of writing, the vocabulary, syntax, and tone. Even the name of a single narrator changes over the course of the novel, Nina Burgess becomes Kim Clarke becomes Dorcas Palmer, forcing the reader, already reoriented towards a new perspective, to disorient again as the perspective is revealed to indeed be familiar. Like Gilliam, who protested against giving his audience a happy ending, James does not necessarily aim to please his readers either. Frequently the narrated chapters of A Brief History are themselves jarring, not just the transition between them. Following the shooting at the Singer’s house, the gang member Demus takes up narration, and immediately narrates five pages of solid text, no paragraph breaks nor punctuation, no moments for the reader to pause. An excerpt near the start goes: …we going roast in hellfire them goin’ fuck we up them going put we under heavy manners they going eradicate we he start to cry and Weeper stop the car and come out and what the bloodcloth you a do Josey say but Weeper pull out him revolver and pull open the back door on the left get out of the bloodcloth car, you batty boy he say to Heckle but Heckle say him nah go nowhere Weeper fire a gunshot in the air me thinking Jesus Christ people goin’ come now but Weeper put the gun right near Heckle head and say to me Brethren, you betta shift ‘cause brains going splash over you and Heckle start bawl… (246) 103 Demus’ narrative continues in the same continuous thought stream page after page. James is not writing here to please a reader, Demus’ narration is indeed difficult to read, ignoring the conventions of syntax, spelling, and punctuation. Several words are unfamiliar slang to probably most readers, “bloodcloth” and “batty,” and the language includes swearwords and direct graphic image, it is both convoluted and harsh to work through and its length offers no easy place to pause. No single desire or dream exists for the reader, for no such representative reader exists and the desire to read is not always explainable, yet difficulty is seldom desired and Demus’ narration is indeed difficult to read. As such, it disrupts the reader’s desire, whatever that may be. Desire within the text of A Brief History often relies on a continual process of satiation, particularly with addiction, a desire is briefly satiated but then replaced with a craving for one more hit. The control Josey Wales wields over the seven men hired to shoot up the Singer’s house comes with the manipulation of this satiation. Yet it is in the disruption of desire, when it finds no easy satiation, that the process of control is displayed and questioned: when the seven shooters sober up and realize their danger is when they run, expressing regret and different wants, personal wants. For the audience too, James often refuses to satiate any desire for comprehension or clarity, he includes passages like Demus’, he renames Nina Burgess three times as she remakes her identity, repeatedly tricking the reader, he does not define slang terms and includes too many characters and names to be easily tracked across the novel. When such desire is disrupted the reader is able to gain some awareness of their own expectations for language and how those expectations control one’s reading. The narrator Tristan Phillips references V.S. Naipaul’s Middle Passage saying, 104 …the man say West Kingston is a place so fucking bad that you can’t even take a picture of it, because the beauty of the photographic process lies to you as to just how it really is…Trust me, even him have it wrong. The beauty of how him write that sentence still lie to you as to how ugly it is. It is so ugly it shouldn’t produce no pretty sentence, ever. (452) Is an ugly form necessary to communicate ugly content? Phillips suggests yes and the text too gives examples of sentences, and strings of words not even constructed into sentences, that possess “ugly” form. A beautiful sentence like Naipaul’s is absorbed easily by the eyes and brain while a passage you have to go back and read to distinguish what is dialogue from what is exposition and who each pronoun belong to does not go down so easy. Perhaps the later communicates the location of James’ writing, West Kingston, more directly. But still content will be manipulated by form, neither picture nor writing Phillips suggests can capture the true affect of a place. James too must ultimately fail in the attempt to communicate West Kingston in writing, yet there is success too in the attempt; to reiterate the novel’s epigraph, “if it no go so, it go near so.” Though the “ugly” form of parts of the novel cannot fully echo an ugly place, event, or even seven (plus) ugly killings, it still disrupts a desire for beauty and makes one realize once again how language, any language, deceives. 105 Conclusion In Mythologies, Roland Barthes replicates the traditional semiotic system, the triad of signifier, signified, and sign as developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, on the level of myth. He introduces three new terms to distinguish this second triad of relations from those used in the linguistic system, though the systems are not distinct and the second builds upon the first. The signifier in the linguistic system becomes the first term in the mythical system, what Barthes relabels the “form” and which retains the accumulation of sign(s) from the linguistic system. The form now signifies the “concept” and the relation between form and concept he labels the “signification.” In this mythical system, Barthes claims “myth has in fact a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us” (115). He illustrates this dynamic with two examples, that of the sentence “quia ego nominor leo,” or “because my name is lion” found in a Latin grammar textbook, and that of a photograph on the cover of Paris Match of a Black soldier in French uniform, saluting. Both forms, the sentence and the picture, still carry the signs that associate the words or image to a meaning, but each further signifies a new concept in the context of myth; one signifies a grammatical example and the other signifies military power and loyalty across the French empire. Barthes locates the power to distort in the mythical system: The relation which unites the concept of the myth to its meaning is essentially a relation of deformation…this distortion is possible only because the form of the myth is already constituted by a linguistic meaning. In a simple system like that of language, the signified cannot distort anything at all because the signifier, being 106 empty, arbitrary, offers no resistance to it. But here, everything is different: the signifier has, so to speak, two aspects: one full, which is the meaning (the history of the lion, of the Negro soldier), one empty, which is the form (for my name is lion; Negro-French-soldier-saluting-the-tricolour). What the concept distorts is of course what is full, the meaning; the lion and the Negro are deprived of their history, changed into gestures. What Latin exemplarity distorts is the naming of the lion, in all its contingency; and what French imperiality obscures is also a primary language, a factual discourse which was telling me about the salute of a Negro in uniform. But this distortion is not an obliteration; the lion and the Negro remain here, the concept needs them, they are half-amputated, they are deprived of memory, not of existence: they are at once stubborn, silently rooted there, and garrulous, a speech wholly at the service of the concept. The concept, literally, deforms, but does not abolish the meaning; a word can perfectly render this contradiction: it alienates it. (121) The preceding chapters have discussed euphemism and euphemistic modes primarily for the deceptions they enact in the discussed texts. Speech that delays, differs, replaces, obscures, manipulates may indeed be present in all of the considered texts, but neither can speech claim complete control over what it describes or names. A Barthesian dual signification accompanies any euphemistic mode, an explicit and the implicit meaning are both communicated in euphemistic speech, though euphemism attempts to amputate the implicit, but perhaps more frank, meaning. While each text illustrates language that deforms, for such deformation to be identified the deformed meaning cannot be abolished, only alienated. As Barthes argues, deformation is not obliteration. Yet 107 focusing on the processes of deformation and deception in texts risks forgetting the resistance that meaning practices against deformation. Each of the four texts in this thesis were indeed chosen for the way their content resists euphemism. To some extent, the form(s) in each text encourage such a resistance although it is form too which initiates deformation. In Brazil, Sam Lowry delivers a refund check to Mrs. Buttle. She asks “My husband’s dead, isn’t he?” to which Sam responds “Er…I assure you Mrs. Buttle, the Ministry is always very scrupulous about following up and eradicating error. If you have any complaints which you’d like to make, I’d be more than happy to send you the appropriate forms” (00:42:55). The presentation of Sam’s response includes two aspects. The first aspect is the form it is presented which is the individual words and their strict meaning, the statement of the Ministry’s abstract values and the offer to provide Mrs. Buttle with paperwork. The other aspect is the sentiments Sam communicates to Mrs. Buttle without saying them which are indicated by the form but not directly stated through it: an affirmative answer that yes, Mr. Buttle is dead, a plea for innocence both for himself, by pushing responsibility to the Ministry, and for the Ministry and its procedures, and a request for her to stop asking questions by not answering the first. The second aspect, what is communicated but not formally present, is what Barthes describes as distorting the first meaning, and indeed Sam’s literal words, though generic statements about the function and navigation of the bureaucratic system, are twisted by death in this example. Yet unlike Barthes’ examples of the Latin grammar textbook and Paris Match cover, the balance of meaning tilts toward the first meaning over the second; instead of a grammatical example or French military might assuming the brunt of the signification, the discourse around Mr. Buttle’s death is only reluctantly 108 signified in Sam’s response. Since the concept behind euphemism is signified almost unwillingly, the distortion that Barthes claims characterizes the relation between the concept and the meaning in myth is bidirectional. The concept does not simply deform the meaning but the literal form of the words and their meaning aim to distract from and deform the concept. And if the deformative process is bidirectional in Sam’s euphemistic response, then resistance, too, is practiced by both the concept and the meaning, for neither is obliterated in deformation. Up to this point, our discussion of euphemistic modes has focused on the distortion of concept by form and how the concept resists this distortion. In moments such as the biographer’s brief and dismissive mentions of public unrest in Constantinople in Orlando, or or the composition of both fine dining and random bombings in the same frame in Brazil, the discussed texts resist the deceptive language or else the deceived perspectives of their own characters or narrators and force a recognition of the discontent or violence on the edges of the narrative world. I introduce Barthes and semiotics here in order to consider the reverse resistance: the resistance of the actual words used in euphemistic speech. The primary meaning, or the “factual discourse” as Barthes describes it, of the lion and the Black soldier saluting are stubborn in their existence. He characterizes their obstinate existence, however, as almost ahistorical, saying they are “deprived of their history, changed into gestures.” Barthes implies that the “naming of the lion, in all its contingency” loses much of its contingency, its memory, when distorted by its use as grammatical example, even though the name lion necessarily persists in the form of the example. “Marriage à la Mode” makes a similar argument about social gestures as it satirizes the Bloomsbury group. Isabel’s friends consistently reference bits 109 of art and literature only for social credit (Moira, for example, alludes to Shakespeare when she calls Isabel “Titania,” name-drops the operetta The Maid of the Mountains, and references Robert Arnold’s “The Foresaken Mermaid” in the ending scene). Such gestures designate Moira as “cultured,” while failing to engage the “cultured” texts themselves, allowing the references to lose the contingency of their parent texts. Likewise, the contingency of the Ministry of Information and its paperwork is lost in Sam’s words to Mrs. Buttle; he invokes the Ministry in a gesture away from death and the history or past of the Ministry hardly matters, the Ministry functions solely to divert from confronting the grief, anger, and blame of Mrs. Buttle’s question. Yet if Sam’s actual words resist being reduced to mere diversion, and Barthes suggests every signifier on the mythic level must put up such a resistance, then the contingency of the Ministry too must survive. As soon as one dwells on the persistence of the lion or the image of the soldier or the Ministry and not simply on what they gesture towards, some of this contingency must be revived, memory cannot be fully severed. Todd Martin returns the contingency of Robert Arnold’s “The Forsaken Mermaid” to the quotation Moira cherrypicks from the poem when he applies the plot of the poem to the ending of “Marriage à la Mode.” While Moira and her friends carve quotes from context as they turn snippets of art and literature to social means, the text and the secondary literature revive some of the references’ contingency. Brazil, too, instigates such a revival. In the initial scene of Mr. Buttle’s arrest, Mrs. Buttle is given form after form to sign and finally a receipt for her husband. Later, Jill Layton attempts to lodge a complaint with the Ministry for the wrongful arrest of Mr. Buttle through the proper paperwork channels, but these channels are circular and lead her no where. Since Sam uses an offer for paperwork as the form of 110 his gesture away from addressing Mr. Buttle’s death, the memory of Mrs. Buttle’s past trauma with paperwork is echoed in the script. Sam’s response is not an empty gesture but a gesture full with the contingency of its presentation, a contingency established in every previous scene of the paperwork-obsessed, error-eradicating Ministry. It is then through memory, and how form references memory (repetition), that Brazil aids semiotic resistance. While the motif of paperwork preserves contingency through sheer repetition over the course of the film, Orlando returns contingency to the form of a passage when the biographer condenses repetition. In a moment of such bland iteration that the form needs to be addressed for its needless opacity, the biographer writes with a dull rhythm, “It was now November. After November, comes December. Then January, February, March, and April. After April comes May. June, July, August follow. Next is September. Then October, and so, behold, here we are back at November again, with a whole year accomplished” (174). The words of this passage seem to accomplish rather little, a complaint the biographer acknowledges but justifies soon after, saying Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore––since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now––there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar…until she has done. (174-75) The listing of the months then gestures to the impropriety of including Orlando’s thoughts in a biography. The concept the words carry is just to fill space, to pass the time 111 while the principal subject of the biography dawdles her time at pursuits too dull, too devoid of the action of life, to be printed. This moment repeats again the technique of euphemistic omission (analyzed more fully in this thesis’ chapter on Orlando). Here, the omission of Orlando’s thoughts is marked by the biographer’s own wandering mind, which uses the rhythmic progression of the year to indicate where Orlando’s thoughts might have been. The biographer explains that the calendar merely fills space, he means only to replace the (surely unimportant) content of Orlando’s thoughts with any content whatsoever. Yet before we receive this explanation, before the concept of space-filling distorts the meaning of the passage, we have simply read a list of months. The months too must resist their deformation into an arbitrary replacement for thought. The passage stubbornly persists as a list, taking up semiotic resistance and in so doing reviving the history of the months, their contingency to time and particularly the novel’s time. Orlando begins at the close of the sixteenth century and ends on the 11th of October in the year 1928, the date Woolf first published the novel. Over these 300 plus years the biography neither covers Orlando’s birth nor death, but simply the 20 or so years between his adolescence and her middle age. Decades of history are glossed over in a sentence or two or else no mention at all and years of Orlando’s life are lost to prolonged bouts of sleep. Time, in short, is goofed in the novel. Within the context of Orlando’s slow aging (or else the ages’ rapid passing) the passage listing the months, one by one, in proper order, represents time in a wildly ordinary and familiar form. The list uses the royal “we,” implicating the reader in the passing of the months and aligning the reader’s timeline with Orlando’s and the biographer’s time. December follows November for ordinary reader and extraordinary heroine alike and the grouping of the months, some clumped in a short 112 list, others occupying a sentence of their own, reflects a varied and ordinary rhythm to the turning year. Although the biographer includes the months from November to November as a replacement for Orlando’s thoughts, indicating they would not be worth including at all if Orlando did something more interesting than sit and think, their inclusion cannot be dismissed wholesale. Woolf mocks her biographer at times, making him reveal his own pomposity. She distances herself from the biographer’s opinions and gives further evidence in other writings, such as “The Mark on the Wall,” that she supports an Orlandoian practice of sitting still and thinking. Woolf, then, revives the possibility that Orlando’s thoughts may be worth their space in print after all. If Orlando’s excluded thoughts have worth, then either the recitation of the calendar is a misguided replacement or else the biographer is correct that the months deserve more space on the page than any of Orlando’s pondering, and the months must have some value in their own right to justify inclusion. Naming the calendar generalizes the year. The narrator of Woolf’s essay “The Mark on the Wall,” who also sits still and ponders for the duration of the text, condemns generalizations for the “military sound of the word.” The months indeed follow a strict regiment and an order of precedence. Time marches forward in military form and the year is generalized such that it cannot be differentiated from any other year following the institution of the Gregorian calendar. Repetitive and generalized time seemingly has no place in a novel. In “On Repetition,” Edward Said says, “To be novel is to be an original, that is, a figure not repeating what most men perforce repeat––the course of human life, father to son, generation after generation. Thus the novelistic character is conceived as a challenge to repetition, a rupture in the duty imposed on all 113 men to breed and multiply, to create and recreate oneself unremittingly and repeatedly” (117). Orlando certainly challenges repetition. Though he/she sires four children over the course of the novel, she exists outside of generational time and her switch from male to female in the middle of the novel resists a standard understanding of repetitive filial relations. The narrator from “The Mark on the Wall” continues her protest against the standardized and generalized passage of time saying, Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits–like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. (86) The oldest connotation of “illegitimate” in English and the second definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is to be born outside of wedlock, to exist outside of legally and religiously sanctioned relation (“illegitimate” adj. 2a.). For Orlando to challenge repetition and filial relation challenges the legitimate. Indeed when she returns to England as a woman, the legal system cannot accommodate her and starts a series of ontological law suits leaving her “in a highly ambiguous condition, uncertain whether she 114 was alive or dead, man or woman, Duke or nonentity” (110). She is herself outside of legal sanction and thus illegitimate. Her apparent disregard for the passing months and the biographer’s need for her to get on with a life of action and not thought, likewise puts Orlando in the position of the disbeliever, making phantoms of generalized time. The second half of the above passage focuses on material things, the luncheons and walks and tablecloths that all lose reality, but in the first sentence the narrator includes “ways of speaking” within the milieu of a general London Sunday. If one reads such speech as implicated in the rest of the passage as well, then the polite and euphemized ways that the dead, clothes, and habits may be discussed at a Sunday luncheon also become half phantom, capable of disbelief with only the delicious consequence of “a sense of illegitimate freedom.” When Barthes describes signification as being born from the relation of signified and signifier in the mythical semiotic system, he gives examples of legitimate, sanctioned birth. The writer of the Latin textbook or the editor of Paris Match authorizes and encourages the signification that results from relating the name of the lion to grammar or the image of a saluting soldier to French military fidelity. No such sanction accompanies euphemistic relation. The biographer would really prefer Orlando to get on with the business of action instead of thinking, annulling any need to relate the recited calendar to Orlando’s life. Sam would really prefer to speak about the Ministry’s values and paperwork without any relation to Mr. Buttle’s death. Since euphemistic modes link form to content only reluctantly, without fully endorsing that the uttered words truly signal whatever unpleasant concept is spoken around, the signification born from the relation between signifier (the euphemism) and signified, is illegitimate. As with any bastard child, one’s impulse is to dismiss the 115 illegitimate and here lurks the violence of euphemism. But if one registers the gap between real things and their reality, whether tablecloths or “ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits,” then Sunday afternoons and banal, euphemistic speech are products too of an illegitimate relation between the real and the unreal. Woolf describes illegitimate freedom resulting from when we laugh the “real things,” the standardized things, the “legitimate” things, “into the dustbin where the phantoms go” (86). When the sanctioned “ways of speaking” on a Sunday afternoon are too laughed into the dustbin, then speech may reclaim its illegitimate signification and shake off the censor of standardized society in favor of new relations of form and content. There may never be a direct alignment of speech and concept, but when the distortion of concept in presentation and of presentation by concept can be played with and displayed, instead of generally accepted when first offered in euphemistic encasement, then perhaps one can taste Woolf’s sense of illegitimate freedom. Two days following the assassination attempt on Bob Marley, he played “Jah Live” during the Smile Jamaica concert. Marley sings in the song, “The truth is an offense but not a sin / Is he who laugh last, children, is he who win” (Marley). Euphemism avoids what is offensive, which may mean it avoids what is true. Marley, with bullets in his chest and arm, sings these lyrics and aligns himself both with truth and victory in laughing challenge to his shooters. Woolf’s laughter that would banish the stilted euphemistic ways of speaking on a London Sunday to the dustbin has too the sense of a last laugh. 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