ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: SURVIVING ROMANTICISM: DISASTER AND SURVIVAL IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURE Konstantinos Pozoukidis, Doctor of Philosophy, 2022 Dissertation directed by: Professor Orrin N. C. Wang, Department of English ?Surviving Romanticism? argues that fictional and historical representations of disaster and survival in the Romantic period bear the potential to establish radically new ways of social and political organization that do not reproduce or replicate the pre-catastrophic world. I locate my project at the intersection of studies on disaster in Romanticism, on the one hand, and queer theories of non-reproductivity, on the other. Extending but also complicating recent Romanticist scholarship by Jacques Khalip, Anahid Nerssessian, Sara Guyer and others, ?Surviving Romanticism? asserts that queer survival, a form of surviving based on an existential discontinuity that does not reproduce materially or ideologically the pre-catastrophic world, constitutes the only possibility for radical worldmaking. ?Surviving Romanticism? asserts that disaster is omnipresent in the writings of the Romantic period affecting both the content of these texts as well as their structure, with disaster materializing formally as fragmentation, repetition and the lack of narrative climax and conclusion. ?Surviving Romanticism? points out that in the texts this project studies survival fiercely opposes recuperation. This opposition forces us to think that for fundamental change to happen we need to move away from repairing the damaged world of the past and envision instead new ideologies and social relations that do not focus on usefulness, exchangeability and marketability. The four main chapters of ?Surviving Romanticism? bring together a variety of prose, poetry and non-fiction where both real and fictional disaster takes place: Mary Shelley?s The Last Man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge?s ?The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere? and William Wordsworth?s ?Simon Lee? and ?The Last of the Flock,? all three poems from the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, Jane Austen?s Emma and the freedom narrative of Mary Prince. Even though most of these texts have been discussed in the critical tradition, ?Surviving Romanticism? interrogates the ideology of previous critical approaches that have read texts like The Last Man as cautionary tales that force us to improve our present. Instead, in ?Surviving Romanticism? I suggest that survival and worldmaking take place when fictional characters, such as Lionel Verney, and historical actors, such as Mary Prince, decide to stop reproducing the world around them one that has forced them to dwell in disaster. Instead, they start to behave as if they are inhabiting a world beyond productivity, usefulness, marketability, exchangeability, racial subjection and racial capitalism that our current world practices, with these concepts constituting some of the key ideas this project discusses. SURVIVING ROMANTICISM: DISASTER AND SURVIVAL IN LATE EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURE By Konstantinos Pozoukidis Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2022 Advisory Committee: Professor Orrin N. C. Wang, Chair Professor Tita Chico Professor David L. Clark Professor John E. Drabinski Assistant Professor Mauro Resmini ?Copyright by Konstantinos Pozoukidis 2022 Dedication To Deniz, for her unconditional support. ii Acknowledgements This project became possible through the support of several people, advisors, colleagues and friends, in the span of the last seven years. In my graduate school application process, Orrin Wang replied to my initial email of interest, encouraging me to apply to Maryland. He has been my major source of support in every intellectual and professional endeavor during my time at UMD, writing dozens of letters of reference for scholarships, fellowships, and job applications. He has always provided ample and generous feedback at a very fast pace at every stage of the dissertation. Orrin pushed my thought unremittingly, which forced me to think more fiercely. Readings, such as my critical argument that Derrida misreads the concept of death in Blanchot?s ?The Instant of my Death,? would not have happened if I have not worked with Orrin. Tita Chico has supported me in a similar manner, with comments on my work and several letters of reference, being kind and generous. I thank David Clark from the bottom of my heart for agreeing to become part of this project. His kindness can only be compared to the numerous and profound critical insights he makes in his work. Mauro Resmini?s course on cinema taught me so much about form that it forced me to start thinking formally, which has influenced both this dissertation and my intellectual development considerably. Kellie Robertson, and the group of colleagues who participated in the publication workshop Kellie organized, provided insightful comments for the publication of the first chapter of this dissertation. Christina Walter also provided helpful comments for the development of the third chapter of this project during the Critical Theory Certificate. Besides a series of mentors, I had the chance at UMD to meet a series of wonderful colleagues. I am grateful to Will Thompson and John MacIntosh for their friendship and for providing very useful comments and corrections to some prepublication iii manuscripts that originated in this dissertation. With Jonathan Williams, we discussed countless hours on the topics of this dissertation, usually over alcohol and cigarettes. Jonathan was the person that I workshopped the ideas of my first and second chapter before I put them on the page. People like Daniel Kason, Tyler Talbott, Ivan Ruiz, Dominika Szybisty, Nicole Pair and Liam Daley have supported me with their friendship in numerous ways. Heather Dias and Robert Burgard have generously provided their administrative help whenever it was needed. Michele Drummond, Assistant Director of Scheduling at the English Department, provided accommodations to my ninety-two-mile commute, improving my quality of life, and allowing me to focus on my work. This little bar called Homegrown in Newark, Delaware, hosted me innumerous nights when I stopped working late and going to sleep was not an option. There I met several people that have certainly made my life more interesting. Dr Maria Schoina and Dr. Epameinondas Tsigkas created the possibilities for this project to develop in the first place, in their respective manner, with their generous, multifaceted support. Above all, I thank Deniz, my little co-traveler, fellow scholar, fellow foodie, sous-chef and current Amazon Science Team member and CrossFit athlete, who has always been encouraging and supporting my work. With Deniz we did things that back in 2014 sounded impossible, unimaginable, when we pirate- downloaded the ?House of Cards? and hoped we could end up somewhere around DC for our Ph.Ds. For this, and for many more, this work is dedicated to her. iv Table of Contents Dedication .................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................v Introduction. ...............................................................................................................................1 I. Romanticism and Disaster. ...................................................................................................1 II. Critical Vocabulary. ............................................................................................................7 Disaster. ..............................................................................................................................7 Survival. ............................................................................................................................ 12 Worldmaking. ................................................................................................................... 15 III. Chapter Outline. .............................................................................................................. 19 Chapter 1: The Survival of Non-productive Labor in Mary Shelley?s The Last Man. ................. 24 I. The Commitment to Productive Labor. .............................................................................. 27 II. The Survival of Useless Labor .......................................................................................... 45 III. Humanities and The Last Man: Lasting, Lastness, Afterness. ........................................... 52 Chapter 2: Romantic Survival: Disaster beyond Repair in the Lyrical Ballads. .......................... 55 I. The Dominance of Reparative Criticism. ............................................................................ 58 II. Survival as Absolute Disaster in ?Simon Lee.? ................................................................. 62 III. The Unending Disaster in ?The Last of the Flock.? .......................................................... 68 IV. The Resistance of Active Passivity in Samuel Taylor Coleridge?s ?The Rime.? ............... 73 Chapter 3: Surviving Emma: Living, Reading and Writing in the Return. .................................. 81 I. ?Unnoticed, because Unsuspected:? The Wasted Lives of Miss Bates and Mr. Woodhouse. .............................................................................................................................................. 85 Miss Bates and the Defeated of History. ............................................................................ 85 Reading Miss Bates: Historical Progress and the Eternal Return. ....................................... 95 Mr. Woodhouse does his ?Little Rounds.? ....................................................................... 104 v II. Living in the Whole-Time. .............................................................................................. 119 Eventfulness and the Meantime. ...................................................................................... 119 Eventlessness as the Wholetime....................................................................................... 122 Emma Surviving Emma. .................................................................................................. 124 Emma and the Eternal Return of History. ......................................................................... 128 III. Reading and Writing In the Return. ............................................................................... 135 Reading: (Im)patience. .................................................................................................... 135 Writing: (Im)patience. ..................................................................................................... 138 Chapter 4: Disabling Linearity, Enabling Freedom: The Two Histories of Mary Prince. .......... 145 I. The Liberating and Confining Linear History of Mary Prince. .......................................... 148 II. Linearity Interrupted: Black, Crip, Queer Repetition. ...................................................... 157 Coda: Our Romantic Catastrophe: Disaster and Survival in the Twenty-First Century. ............ 180 References .............................................................................................................................. 186 vi Introduction. I. Romanticism and Disaster. In 1816 George Gordon, Lord Byron publishes his poem, ?Darkness,? a short post- apocalyptic narrative, only eighty-two lines long, that portrays the complete annihilation of human civilization after ?the bright sun? and ?the stars? are ?extinguish?d? (l. 3). In Byron?s work, during the aftermath of a disaster that alters the relation that earth has with the sun, its lifegiving star, death is neither sudden nor absolute. Human civilization slowly fades the moment that one catastrophe is followed by others when ?[t]he palaces of crowned kings? and entire ?cities? are ?consumed,? and war later prevails (Byron l. 11, l. 13). All these events force earth, a place which once constituted a world full of life, to transform figuratively into an immaterial substance, a ?thought,? which takes the form of ?death? (Byron, l. 42). The poem concludes with the absolute annihilation of every single animate and inanimate being on earth, including ?[t]he waves,? ?[t]he winds,? and ?[t]he clouds? that transform into void, with ?Darkness? its only ruler (l. 78, l. 80, l. 81). This newly established absence, where, according to the poem, the ?world? has become ?void,? acquires universal proportions, by establishing a universe of its own (l. 69). The literary use of such figures as darkness, void, and consuming fire does not make its first appearance in British Literature in Byron?s poem. ?Darkness? draws heavily from John Milton?s Paradise Lost, and more specifically from Book I, where Satan and his group of fallen angels are banished in ?utter darkness? that resembles a flaming furnace, one that contains ?ever- burning sulfur unconsumed? (1.72, 1. 69). Byron draws, to an extent, from Milton?s religious epic, and more specifically from a textual moment in that epic which precedes the creation of 1 Earth. What is of interest in Byron?s poem is that he uses Milton?s work to fantasize?Byron informs us that what he discusses in his poem is a dream?about Earth?s destruction (l. 1). If Milton?s epic allegorizes the creation of hell, situating its formation at the beginning of time and at a place that is distinctively unearthly, Byron introduces a human catastrophe that brings the end of times but does not originate in any form of hubris against the Christian God. Catastrophe in Byron?s poem does not appear to have any historical, philosophical, religious or moral justification. Byron?s ?Darkness? initiates at the time of its publication a wider literary engagement with the topic of disaster, with several other works to follow. These include Thomas Campbell?s poem ?The Last Man,? published in 1823, Mary Shelley?s novel The Last Man (1826), and John Martin?s painting on the same topic, with its first version appearing in 1826. The presence of this body of work in the first quarter of the nineteenth century raises questions concerning the appearance of disaster in literary discourse as well as the role of what it might mean to survive such disaster. Thus, while Byron?s poem concludes with the absolute destruction of earth, other works such as Shelley?s The Last Man allow the non-human world and a sole human survivor to outlast disaster. This depiction invites a nuanced and complex interpretation of disaster that incorporates several modes of surviving. All these textual elements have inspired this dissertation to ask a series of questions concerning the presence of disaster and survival in Romantic texts: Why does disaster become a literary trope that writers engage in their work? How does disaster appear in the texts that deal explicitly with disaster? Does disaster take a different form in other texts that do not immediately appear to be about disaster and what forms does disaster and survival take there? Does disaster always have a clear cause, historical or 2 otherwise, and what does it mean when disaster appears to have no known cause as well as no cure, as in the case of Shelley?s novel? The study of disaster, survival and its various articulations in the Romantic period speak to the complex historical changes that took place during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. A series of profound social, political, and economic changes take place, with lasting effects in the United Kingdom and beyond. In the words of Marilyn Butler, the whole of Europe felt ?the shock-wave? of ?the Fall of the Bastille? and the ?execution of Louis XIV in 1793? (4). In addition, Butler claims that the ?expansion of trade and industry? is ?as important as political change,? since it establishes profound social changes that have to do with the manner people labor and the geographical location of their labor, with people moving towards urban industrial centers, such as London and Manchester (M. Butler, 4). This process of industrialization goes hand in hand with the expansion of agrarian capitalism that, among other things, takes the form of enclosures and engrossments, as the small farmers lose their land, and they are either forced to enter the war machine or to abandon the countryside and become part of the newly forming proletariat. The advent of industrialization in the United Kingdom is inextricably attached to the expansion of the market economy, which, in turn, leads to a continuous search for new markets that creates the need for the increase of colonial presence in the Indian subcontinent, in the Caribbean and in Africa, as Mary Favret argues (9). Moreover, ?[t]he age of Revolutions? as Eric Hobsbawn, after Thomas Paine, calls this time, leads to a state of perpetual war, some aspects of which were Britain?s military expeditions against Revolutionary France and then against Napoleon Bonaparte in a series of battles that expanded from the Continent to North Africa (215; Favret 9). War expenses force the British government to introduce an income tax between 1799 3 and 1816 to support its military expeditions that, as Hobsbawm indicates, has devastating social consequences for the lower classes (95). The end of the war is followed by the famine of 1816- 1817 that creates social turbulence and the fear of social revolution (Hobsbawm 103). In their Introduction to William Blake: Modernity and Disaster Tilottama Rajan and Joel Faflak elaborate the relation between Blake?s oeuvre and catastrophe by reiterating all these sociohistorical elements and connecting them to the development of theories concerning population growth and financial development. David L. Clark studies the representation of worldlessness and the role of witnessing in the same historical period through his analysis of Francisco Goya?s Disasters of War. Clark attempts to uncover the form that disaster takes in these representations of war atrocities, as well as to theorize how wordlessness inhabits this Romantic period artwork. Jacques Khalip and David Collings, in their Introduction to Romanticism and Disaster attempt to trace the forms that ruination takes in Wordsworth?s poetry. Following this line of research, Khalip elaborates more extensively on the concept of lastness in his latest monograph, Last Things where he studies examples of disaster and ruination from The Prelude, ?The Pedlar? and ?Old Man Traveling,? from the Romantic period. In what follows I expand the scope of such previous scholarship by interpreting texts, such as Jane Austen?s Emma (1815) and William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge?s Lyrical Ballads (1798) through the concepts of disaster and survival that previous scholars have not included in their analysis. The current project also reinterprets The Last Man, which has been studied more elaborately in the last decades by various scholars, but not through the framework of disaster and survival that scholars such as Clark, Khalip and Collings have more recently established. Moreover, following a series of scholars on Transatlantic Studies and Critical Race Theory, such 4 as Paul Gilroy, this dissertation considers indispensable the study of saltwater slavery to this project?s attempt to understand disaster and survival in the Romantic Period. As John E. Drabinski points out in his reading of ?douard Glissant, the Middle Passage is simultaneously a profound catastrophe, so profound that language fails to convey it in its fullness, and the epitome of survival since it becomes ?the beginning of being, becoming, knowing, and thinking? for those who survived and for the cultures and identities they created during their survival (x). To investigate the experiences of disaster and survival in what Gilroy calls ?the black Atlantic,? this project concludes its study with the genre of the freedom narrative, specifically Mary Princes? The History of Mary Prince (1831). Through its exploration of its chosen texts, this dissertation studies both fictional and nonfictional representations of disaster in the Romantic Period in a variety of genres, those of lyric poetry, the novel, and the freedom narrative. The dissertation studies how these texts discuss disaster as a theme in their respective narratives. At the same time, this dissertation examines how disaster affects the narrative structure of these works. This dissertation draws from the thought of Anne-Lise Fran?ois and more specifically from her analysis of narrative waste where ?event x? in the narrative is not ?a cause for subsequent event y? (21). The project argues that in certain cases catastrophe disarticulates the structure of texts, eliminating, for example, narrative causality, in the sense that narratives fail to explain how one event in the story leads to another because they are affected by the disaster they represent. Moreover, disaster may impede narrative development, by not allowing stories to achieve progress and to reach a conclusion. In the genre of poetry, disaster breaks the poem in several smaller parts that do not connect with each other to form a coherent story with a beginning, middle and an end. In the genre of the novel, a coherent plot, where events are linked to each other to lead to the climactic 5 story?s conclusion is absent in Shelley?s The Last Man. In Austen?s Emma, a novel that scholars such as Franco Moretti, approach through the genre of the Bildungsroman, catastrophe takes away from the novel any form of character development, whether we assume that to be moral, the emotional or the sexual. In the aftermath of the disastrous events that this dissertation studies, survival appears as the ineradicable remainder that catastrophe both thematically and formally fails to annihilate. In the context of this project, survival becomes strongly attached to non-productivity and non- generativity, in the sense that what follows disaster is either unable or unwilling to restore the pre-catastrophic world, both materially and ideologically. For the forms of survival this project focuses on, catastrophe introduces a forceful discontinuity with the past that raises serious questions concerning the ideological dominance of notions of cultural and social evolution, temporal progress and repair in our post-Enlightenment, capitalist culture. Discontinuity prepares the ground for literary characters, historical actors and the readers of the works under question to imagine radically new socio-political structures beyond the Enlightenment commitment to progress and the market economy?s mandate to labor and consume. While the works this project studies do not explicitly elaborate on the parameters that a new world would need to establish, they do indicate that for worldmaking to become possible in the first place it must not replicate, or restage in an improved version, the socio-historical formations that existed before the catastrophe these texts record. This dissertation does not limit its examination of disaster and survival in the literary works it studies or in the literary period under examination. It attempts to examine the manner that the academy responds to the current, ongoing disaster, one that also expands to our humanistic disciplines. Drawing from its study of survival in The Last Man, the poems from the 6 Ballads and Emma, this dissertation unsettles the role of scholarship and the role of the Humanities in contemporary institutions by fully highlighting the complex dynamic subtending the worldmaking possibilities of these disciplines, what they have until now by and large continue to ignore. In doing so, this dissertation points to how our own present is inextricably associated with our Romantic past. Romanticism, in this context, does not simply constitute our historical precursor; rather, Romantic writing, as this dissertation argues, embodies the kernel of our modern historical experience, one that is still in progress. Our present, multifaceted relationship with catastrophe, then, invites humanistic studies and Romantic studies to reimagine their place in both academic and public discourse in our current historical moment that should be viewed as Romantic. In this attempt, as this dissertation argues, humanistic studies should view disaster, and the wordlessness it brings, as an opportunity to employ their critical imaginary in envisioning fundamentally different sociohistorical formations, instead of simply repairing, healing, or restoring our current ones. II. Critical Vocabulary. Disaster. My study understands disaster not as a single catastrophic occurrence but as a multiple, mundane undoing that takes the form of a slow bleeding, similar to Wordsworth?s ?a vein that never stopp?d? in ?The Last of the Flock? (l. 63). In the freedom narrative of Mary Prince, disaster appears so frequently that her recounting of saltwater slavery exposes the banality of evil. While this text belongs to a different genre than Wordworth?s poem, disaster in The History of Mary Prince constitutes, in a similar manner, not a single catastrophic event, but a slow hemorrhage, the daily repetition of innumerable aspects of the disaster of slavery. 7 Blanchot?s thought is pivotal in the manner that this project understands disaster. In his seminal The Writing of Disaster Blanchot discusses disaster?s relation to memory, knowledge, thought, action, repetition and experience, among many others.1 For Blanchot, disaster is not synonymous to absolute destruction. In contrast to the ?ruinous purity? of destruction, namely to destruction as a forceful, violent act that is pure because it has a definable beginning and end, disaster is not limited in terms of duration or in terms of its expansiveness, namely of what it affects (The Writing 2). This elaboration allows us to understand how disaster affects memory because it prohibits the very experience of disaster to register in the first place. This is what Blanchot calls ?the immemorial,? not what has been remembered and forgotten, but that which has never been remembered, escaping memory completely, while giving the impression that memory has been operating (The Writing 3). Another element that contributes to this project?s understanding of disaster is Blanchot?s concept that disaster becomes a ?stress upon minutiae? (The Writing 3). This aspect reinforces the idea that disaster does not appear in a spectacular manner; instead, it affects the countless details of everyday life, taking away from the acting subject any ability to act, placing its emphasis on the accidental (The Writing 3). Blanchot informs us that while one might dwell on disaster, death comes always too late, failing to offer 1 In terms of other scholarly work on disaster beyond and within Romantic studies, the writings of both Gerald Passanante and Timothy Morton were important references for this dissertation. Even though this project does not engage directly with Passanante?s discussion of catastrophic materialism, it acknowledges that Passanante?s ideas have been influential in this dissertation?s understanding of catastrophe as mode of thinking and perceiving the external world (452). Timothy Morton?s reading the of The Last Man as novel that portrays the phantasy of a world without humans has also pushed this project to contemplate if the novel allows us possibly to envision the formation of a different world (72). For other works on disaster, see Anahid Nersessian?s Calamity Form, where the author discusses the effect that Industrialization in the eighteenth century, that takes the form of disaster, has on the formal aspects of thought and narrative. In Dancing with Disaster Kate Rigby provides a reading of catastrophe though environmental humanities. Rob Nixon in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor highlights the manner that international capitalism affects disproportionally communities in the global south, causing unspectacular forms of disaster that develop in the span of several decades. Naomi Klein in her Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism exposes how neoliberalism, in the aftermath of natural disasters, expands its hold, privatizing aspects of the economy. Anna Kornbluh employs Klein?s approach to interpret the COVID response of institutions of higher education in relation to their employees. 8 any form of consolation. This formulation suggests that death is not the clearest or purest articulation of disaster. In Shelley?s work, an unknown and lethal virus that exterminates the human race appears as a mundane, slow whimper that always outlasts any spectacular events in the narrative. For Lionel Verney, the last man, death comes too late. What appears disastrous in his case is that all his loved ones and the entire human race are eliminated while he remains alive to experience it. Similarly, in ?Simon Lee? from the Lyrical Ballads, the hunter outlives the annihilation of his world, the feudal order of Iron Hall, surviving in a decrepit state. The disaster in his case is that he has remain alive without the ability to belong socially and to support himself financially, becoming a ruin. Disaster appears to affect the minutiae of the narrative structure of ?Simon Lee,? interrupting its narrative climax and interfering with narrative development. In ?The Last of the Flock? disaster takes the form of a slow bleeding of the anonymous shepherd who loses his flock one by one, without any coherent explanation. In this case, disaster appears unspectacular but also unbounded, without a clear beginning or end. Coleridge?s ?The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts? touches on the relation of catastrophe to actions that attempt to ameliorate it when the causes of disaster are completely unknown. Disaster, in this case, penetrates thought, even the thought of the reader of these poems, who might intuitively believe, as critical responses to these works also assume, that to recover the silent historical context of these texts is the only response one can have to address disaster. Rethinking disaster in the Romantic Period and in Romantic texts in the ways that I attempt to do is not a new endeavor. Over the past fifteen years, scholars such as David Clark, Jacques Khalip and Tilottama Rajan have studied disaster in Romantic literature in an elaborate manner. In ?Wordlessness and the Worst in Goya?s Disasters of War,? Clark discusses the 9 concepts of disaster, torture and death and their relation to mourning and knowledge, among others. He points out that in Goya?s work disaster appears to have deprived the creator of these images even from the possibility of mourning, creating a situation where ?even loss appears to be lost? (par. 4). Moreover, Clark understands disaster not as a single, catastrophic event, but rather as a process without end, where ?worsening and the worst are doomed to occur without end and in the absence of any organizing narrative or clarifying perspective? (par. 9). Disaster, according to Clark, neither evolves nor devolves in a structured manner. If disaster had a structure, that structure could have been traced and disaster could be stopped, at some point. Wordlessness constitutes another generative idea in Clark?s thought-provoking essay. Wordlessness for Clark constitutes a void where loss cannot provide either emotional consolation or any knowledge resource that can lead to the reconstruction of the world. This dissertation employs Clark?s concepts to texts that have not been applied before. While scholarship on The Last Man has been trying to identify how the disaster in the novel can lead to various forms of improvement, inside and outside of the novel, the concept of ?wordlessness? allows this project to think of disaster in The Last Man beyond improvement, and to conceptualize the novel itself as a work that offers no resource for knowledge. Clark?s understanding of disaster, as a never-ending process that initiates a loss so profound that deprives one even from the feeling of loss, has been instrumental in this dissertation?s interpretation of the narrative tone of Lionel Verney. Lionel appears mournful in the first stages of disaster but then acquires a radically more indeterminate tone that disconnects mourning from the affective force of his narrative. Jacques Khalip and David Collings?s ?The Present Time of Live Ashes? establishes another critical source that this project draws from and elaborates. The opening paragraph of that 10 essay, which discusses Dorothy Wordsworth?s response to the William?s poem ?The Pedlar? also influences how this dissertation approaches disaster in texts, inspiring this project to search for a more recessive, less spectacular representation of calamity in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Following the methodology that Khalip and Collings?s suggest, I approach ?Simon Lee? and ?The Last of the Flock? as disaster narratives, bringing together their understanding of disaster with Clark?s formulation on wordlessness. In these Wordsworth?s poems from the Ballads both the hunter of Ivor Hall and the anonymous shepherd experience the total loss of their sociohistoric order, being completely unable to use their disaster as a source of knowledge that can improve their current condition. When they discuss ?The Pedlar? Khalip and Collins also argue that disaster can be transmitted through narrative. This concept underlies how I discuss poems in the Ballads that contain multiple first-person narrativizations of disaster. If disaster is boundless and can spill out of the text, then the readers of a work can also experience some aspects of disaster, without being aware of them. Following this understanding of disaster, I view a variety of literary critical approaches, such as New Criticism, New Historicism and Post-Critical reading, as examples of disastrous thinking, forms of disaster that change the reader?s reaction to the text they read. In this project, this term refers to a scholarly-critical disposition that overemphasizes the role of immediate action in cases where the causes and the effects of disaster are not known and remain unknowable. Disastrous thinking, an aspect of disaster that does not limit itself to those who experience it, tries always and at all costs to ameliorate every form of disaster, refusing to tarry with catastrophe to experience it fully. This project is critical of disastrous thinking, arguing that in its attempt to ameliorate disaster, disastrous thinking simply allows catastrophe to operate in a different manner. 11 Clark?s concept of the im/possibility of witnessing, as an indispensable element of disaster, in his essay ?What Remains to be Seen: Animal, Atrocity, Witness? is one more concept that my analysis draws from. In his essay Clark discusses the Liep?ja footage, which depicts the mass shooting of the Jewish population in Latvia by the Nazi regime during World War II. Clark discusses the impossibility of this event to leave any witnesses behind, since the victims of this tragedy are unable to convey their experience. This footage includes, nonetheless, the presence of a dog, a non-human witness of shorts. As Clark underscores, ?the animal [?] looks upon us, returning a complicated gaze across the gulf of time at the moment when the human gazes of the victims are obliterated? (Clark, ?What Remains? 157). Clark?s complex understanding of non- human witnessing, along with the dog?s presence on the camera reel, influences my project?s attempt to trace elements of disaster that remain unnarratable to their human interlocutors and in textual contexts where genocide or mass murder is not taking place. The presence of a dog, a nonhuman being that outlasts disaster leads us to the next major concept this dissertation explores, that of survival. Survival. The second critical term that this project examines extensively is the concept of survival. In the context of the dissertation, disaster and survival are mutually constituted, to the extent that the very moment that disaster happens, survival has already happened. Clark and Khalip?s theorization of the ?irreducible remainder,? as it appears in their Introduction to the Romantic Circles Praxis volume on Minimal Romanticism is of primary importance in this project?s understanding of disaster and survival. Clark and Khalip consider the irreducible remainder as ?that which is left over from processes of subtraction or division, and which cannot itself be further subtracted or divided: the remainder without remainder? (par. 4). This project employs 12 the concept of the irreducible remainder for its understanding of survival since survival, for the purposes of this project cannot be eliminated by any catastrophic process. This suggests, on the one hand, that survival always has some textual presence in the materials this project studies, and it is the responsibility of the reader to trace the manner survival appears. At the same time, this project expands on Clark and Khalip?s understanding of survival?s resilience. This dissertation develops survival as resistance into an operative term for its theoretical elaborations, transforming into a source to empower other revolutionary practices that involve, for example, the resistance of the Humanities against the neoliberal neutering of contemporary institutions of higher education. Sara Guyer?s understanding of survival in her Romanticism after Auschwitz constitutes another critical source that this dissertation draws from and builds on. Guyer indicates that survival can be traced in Romanticism where it signifies ?a failure of ends,? namely the failure of representation or accounting? and ?above all the failure to represent death accurately or adequately, but equally, the failure to represent life and living? (13). Guyer?s theorization points towards a form of surviving that lives on in an after-life, where life as existed before catastrophe has ended, but death does not arrive and does not bring any closure. This dissertation traces several lyric figures, such as Simon Lee but also, and more notably, the Ancient Mariner, that inhabit this form of living on in a life without life and without death. In the genre of the novel, this project traces such instances of survival in Jane Austen?s Emma in the characters of Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates. Building on Guyer?s formulation, this project reads these examples of survival as forms of resistance against disaster. At the same time, survival?s refusal to move on with life, in other words, to reinhabit a paradigm of living that resembles the one that existed before disaster, underscores survival?s unwillingness to reproduce the pre-catastrophic world. 13 This dissertation argues, in addition, that certain forms of survival, as the example of the Mariner portrays, refuse to be ameliorated. In their unwillingness to achieve determinable ends, these characters remain as textual witnesses to the disaster that took place. At the same time, these literary manifestations inhabit, willingly, a ruined ontology that dramatizes how not everyone wants to be restored, ?cured,? or ?fixed.? This dissertation enunciates that by stopping the wedding guest from attending the wedding ceremony the Mariner claims his right to exist unrepaired, an act that has profound political ramifications, especially when terms such as ?damaged? and ?ruined? are inextricably related to notions of productivity, utility and marketability. Survival?s resistance to post-catastrophic futurities, those that, through repair, inescapably reproduce several aspects of the pre-catastrophic past, brings to the forefront survival?s queer ontology. In its understanding of queer survival, this project builds on Lee Edelman?s conceptualization of futurity in his seminal work No Future. There Edelman elaborates on his understanding of ?reproductive futurism,? the cultural practice where, fantasizing about our collective future, we tend to reproduce the present, even if this results in an improved version of the present (No Future 13). Since survival, as this project approaches it, constitutes a failure of ends that refuses to move forward, it establishes a resistance to futurity, while, at the same time it stops the reproduction of the present, which underscores survival?s queer practices. For this project, then, survival embodies a form of life with no future, that expends itself in the present, refusing to reproduce the pre-catastrophic world materially, ideologically and culturally. Edelman in his work, building on the theory of Jacques Lacan, calls this practice ?useless jouissance? (?The Pathology? 40). This dissertation attempts to underscore the 14 connection that this practice has not only with non-generative sexual pleasure, that might possibly portray the clearest articulation of any non-(re)productive practice, but with other cultural practices that involve forms of nongenerative labor. Some examples of survival in this project remain determinably laborious but in a manner that is not useful or productive for the market economy. Such is the example of the nameless narrator in the Introduction of The Last Man. Similarly, this dissertation traces the practice of laboring in a manner that does not produce any determinable outcomes on the character of Mr. Woodhouse and on that of Miss Bates. For the development of the idea of useless labor this project draws from the thought of Georges Bataille and his understanding of ?absolute expenditure? in his Visions of Excess, but most importantly in The Accursed Share. In The Accursed Share Bataille elaborates more on the concept of expenditure as the necessary parameter of cultural and political life. He mentions that expending without a purpose leads, in turn, to instances of growth, arguing even that in real- world politics and according to the rules of general economy ?a transfer of American wealth to India without reciprocation? needs to take place (The Accursed 39). Bringing the concepts of absolute expenditure, non-productivity and non-reproductivity together as forms of survival?s resistance, this dissertation also briefly touches on one more aspect that it considers indispensable to the study of disaster and survival. This is the process of worldmaking. Worldmaking. Worldmaking is a process that this project brings to the forefront, without discussing what form worldmaking takes in the works under question or how future worlds can be structured. Instead, this project considers that worldmaking can only become a possibility if the world we, the readers, as well as the literary characters and the historical actors of the works this dissertation discusses, comes to an effective and determinate end. The end of the world does not 15 indicate the absolute annihilation of every human and nonhuman being. It suggests, instead a radical restructuring of the way we produce and consume materially, culturally and ideologically and of the way that we structure our societies, which is inextricably associated with the manner that capital operates in our current social formations. This project considers the manner capital operates as indispensable to its understanding of historical and social change, along with their relation to disaster, survival and worldmaking, drawing from the thought of such thinkers as Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Louis Althusser. In its approach to Austen?s Emma this dissertation examines the ascendancy to power of the bourgeoisie, the moment that part of the landed gentry of that period deteriorates due to the expansion of the market economy. Even more importantly, the study of capital constitutes a major part of this project?s approach to the freedom narrative of Mary Prince. Exposing the function of the market economy is indispensable to the proper understanding of the Black Atlantic, where white enslavers capture, transfer and sell Black individuals, transforming them to commodities. The manner that enslavers force their human chattel to labor in the Caribbean and in England to maximize their profits, the moment that they do not take into consideration the human cost of their practices, underscores that slavery does not constitute the exemption to capitalism?s labor paradigm; instead, slavery exemplifies the relation between labor under capitalism, on the one hand, and subjection on the other, which takes its cruelest form when it materializes as racial subjection. To better understand the association between capital accumulation and racial subjection this project draws from recent works galvanizing Black Studies. Saidiya V. Hartman?s Scenes of Subjection and her ?Venus in two Acts? have been critical in this project?s attempt to explore the multiple forms that racial subjection takes, including is textual presence or absence. In her work, 16 S. Hartman employs the term ?fungible commodity? to describe the manner that white enslavers treat Black subjects, a critical formulation that emphasizes the indispensable role of the market economy in the slave trade (Scenes 24). Moreover, Frank B. Wilderson?s radical elaboration on racial subjection forces this project to realize that white supremacy is ingrained in every aspect of our current culture, to the extent that merely improving some aspects of our sociopolitical structures will not liberate the Black subject. Wilderson?s thought pushed me in this project to contemplate that the termination of the world of subjection becomes the necessary step for any form of true liberation. Building on Wilderson?s work, this project attempts to locate such instances in Prince?s freedom narrative, where Prince, with her refusal to labor, interrupts the accumulation of capital and puts a stop, to the extent that she can, to the material and ideological reproduction of the world of slavery. In this dissertation disability theory also elucidates the relation between labor, capital accumulation and usefulness, becoming a necessary part of this project?s understanding of worldmaking. Scholars such as Dea H. Boster emphasize that while bodily impairment relates to bodily injury, disability is a discursive formation associated with the ability to labor and produce. At the same time, impairment forces the body stop producing, creating the potential for a form of resistance that attempts to stop the accumulation of capital. In the study of Prince?s freedom narrative, this project expands on Boster?s arguments that instances of disability in the enslaved population allow for forms of resistance, and, in certain cases, lead to the partial negotiation of the conditions of enslavement (4). While this project does attempt a materially dialectical understanding of history, as the study of capital accumulation suggests, this dissertation also follows the methodological suggestion of Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia to read history at once dialectically and 17 undialectically (151). An undialectical reading of history argues that even though material production determines the parameters of historical change, there still are historical elements that escape the dialectic. In other words, Adorno?s argument explains that while historical materialism should be our primary methodological tool, it should not be the only one. Drawing from Adorno, this dissertation attempts an undialectical reading of the poems in Ballads, explaining that the disaster ?Simon Lee,? ?The Last of the Flock? and ?The Rime? portray cannot be interpreted fully in a historical manner. In is study of Emma, this project focuses on the appearance of the landed gentry as, in fact, cultural waste, waste that as Adorno might say exists or survives outside the dialectical progress of history. Based both on dialectic and undialectic approaches to texts and contexts, this dissertation traces examples where the necessary pre-condition for worldmaking becomes possible. It argues that in Shelley?s The Last Man the arduous nongenerative labor of the anonymous narrator establishes a new world, that of Lionel Verney. The anonymous narrator labors simply for the pleasure of laboring, without any predetermined end in sight. Her labor has no purpose; it constitutes an absolute expenditure of labor-power, which is enough to bring a world, even if it is a literary one, to light. Most importantly, in the case of Mary Prince, a world beyond bondage becomes possible only when the world of the plantation comes effectively to an end. As this project discusses, Prince?s refusal to reproduce the world of the plantation, by not having any descendants, a practice that points towards unique forms of female resistance, along with her refusal to produce for her enslavers, all contribute to the upending of the world of slavery. Drawing from this historical example, the final chapter bridges Edelman?s concept of ?no future? with the possibility of a futurity for a new world beyond bondage. In this way, the final chapter of this project considers Edelman?s theoretical pessimism?who discusses the figure of the 18 Child, a trope in contemporary political and cultural discourses on futurity, and not actual children, as his critics assume?as the necessary condition for any true historical optimism to take place. No future means, in the manner that this project employs Edelman thought, no future for our current sociohistorical formation, a statement that could possibly allow the possibility of some other future beyond our current condition, that could escape our critical imaginary at this moment.2 This project then attempts to conceptualize the possibility of a future that is radically other, and otherworldly, in the sense that it belongs in a different sociohistorical formation that our modern condition has failed yet to envision or put in place. The idea of a true historical optimism, that is only possible if our current sociohistorical formation comes to an end, addresses Laura Berlant?s theorization of a cruel optimism, where the very structure of neoliberalism impedes the subject from achieving upward mobility that the subject fantasizes as the ?good life.? III. Chapter Outline. The story this project narrates is structured around four chapters. The first two chapters address forms of disaster and survival that are not grounded in historical change and are irrelevant to the manner that industrialization and the market economy reshaped the world in the end of the eighteenth century. The purpose of these two first chapters is to expose that disaster sometimes deprives us of the historical grounding a more socio-historic analysis necessitates. In this vein, we need to develop additional methodologies for the study of literature that do not 2 Edelman points out that ?queer negativity? does not justify its presence by portraying itself as ?some positive social value? (No Future 4). Edelman argues that the ?value? of queer negativity ?instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social? (No Future 4). This is a clear expression that queer negativity, as Edelman portrays it, cannot be used to establish any form of current or future society. Queerness?s radical formulation appears in not allowing the social to achieve a permanent closure, forcing it to restructure itself. This project admits to reintroduce the concept of futurity, one, nonetheless, that becomes possibly if any current fantasy of the future is terminated, and one that becomes possible if the way we construct meaning changes. 19 situate and interpret literary texts solely in relation to historical contexts, as these historical contexts are determined by a dialectical understanding of history. In contrast, chapters three and chapter four then focus on capital accumulation and the development of the market economy as disastrous in their operations. These final chapters perform a historically grounded reading of disaster. This dissertation concludes with a short coda on the relevance of this project in our current moment. The first chapter of this project underscores that the major theme of Shelley?s? work is that of survival, situating the novel amid theoretical discourses that relate to disaster and its remainder. The chapter emphasizes that the manner that both disaster and survival appear in The Last Man does not transform the novel into a resource of knowledge on how to avoid or recuperate disaster, an approach that resonates with Blanchot?s understanding of disaster as well as with elaborations on disaster that Clark and Khalip offer. The chapter, instead, places its focus on the topic of useless labor that scholarship does not often address in its approach to this novel. This first chapter then places its emphasis on two critical instances of nonproductive labor that frame the entire narrative of The Last Man. The first instance appears in the novel?s Introduction, and it relates to the arduous, imaginative labor of the nameless narrator to put together the fragments she locates in the cave of the Sibyl and to construct a coherent story. The second instance, one that has been unacknowledged in scholarship, relates to Lionel?s final resolution to abandon any form of useful labor, even the labor of memorializing the pre-catastrophic world, and to expend his days ?ploughing seedless ocean [sic]? (Shelley 469). The chapter concludes by interpreting the labor of the nameless narrator in the novel?s Introduction as an allegory for academic work in the Humanities in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The chapter argues, in its closing pages, that amid their institutional demise, the Humanities need to stop 20 thinking on how to be more useful, in their research and teaching, for that same system that is responsible for their downfall. Instead, the Humanities must claim their right to labor in a nonproductive manner, which sets free the worldmaking potentiality that results from this manner of laboring, The second chapter of this dissertation studies the interrelation of disaster and survival in three poems from the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, Colleridge?s ?The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts? and Wordsworth?s ?Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman, with an Incident in Which He was Concerned? and ?The Last of the Flock.? This second chapter locates disaster in the themes that these poems develop, in the formal structure that these poems inhabit and in the response of the scholarship to these poems, making the claim that disaster spills out of the text and inhabits, in certain cases, the mind of the reader, conditioning the responses she generates. The chapter then locates poems in the Lyrical Ballads where disaster eliminates its causes, making it impossible to determine what has caused disaster and how this disaster can be properly addressed. The very structure of these poems that occludes that disaster?s causes. The first poem this chapter studies is ?Simon Lee?; the second poem is ?The Last of the Flock,? a relatively less-studied work in the collection, that also eliminates the causes of the disaster it portrays as the poem bears no indication of the sociohistorical events that caused its nameless shepherd to suffer the demise of his flock. Chapter two, then, discusses how Coleridge?s ?The Rime? incorporates the survival narrative, moving one step forward to suggesting that to exist unrepaired, in a wounded state, is an appropriate ethical proposition. The concluding lines of ?The Rime,? where the Mariner convinces the wedding guest not to attend the wedding ceremony, a ritual of communal renewal and healing, exposes the poems support for an ontology that respects the concept of ruination for its nonfunctional, dissonant manner. 21 The third chapter of this dissertation reads Jane Austen?s Emma through the scope of disaster that has its origin in historical change. Building on the scholarship on the novel that considers Emma to represent the slow ascendancy of the bourgeoisie to power, this chapter?s main contribution is to expose how a small part of the landed gentry, that does not form an alliance with the bourgeoisie, manages to survive occupying the category of historical waste. While scholarship has approached Emma dialectically, placing the bourgeoisie in the place of the victors of the historical dialectic, little attention has been given to that which escapes this dialectic, what Theodor W. Adorno describes as historical waste in his work. The chapter places its focus on two characters from the novel, Miss Bates and Mr. Woodhouse, that scholarship considers unimportant and derisory, paying little attention to them. The chapter employs, then, Blanchot?s concept of the eternal return, explaining that the cultural survival of these characters becomes possible through their ability to remain constantly unproductive, always turning away from achieving determinable results. The chapter argues that the presence in the pages of Emma of the dialectic?s waste, along with the novel?s eventlessness, one that is interrupted irregularly by some events that move the plot forward, construct a new understanding of historical time where what we have been accustomed to understanding as historical progress is simply the circular motion and eventual repositioning of the novel?s historical actors. The final chapter of this dissertation expands to include the freedom narrative of Mary Prince that was published in the volume The History of Mary Prince, accompanied by a series of other documents that introduce and discuss Prince?s story. The chapter highlights the existence of two narratives in Prince?s narrative. The first narrative has all the characteristics of a linear narrative, starting with Prince?s birth in enslavement, portraying Prince?s intellectual and social maturity concerning her enslaved status, and climaxing with Prince?s initiative to abandon her 22 enslavers in London, since she becomes aware that this was legally possible because of the Somerset ruling. The second narrative emphasizes the existence of scenes of bodily impairment and disability in Prince?s story. In her relatively short narrative, Prince portrays multiple instances where slavery inflicts profound and irreparable harm to the bodies of enslaved individuals, which were then considered to underproduce. Even though Prince?s narrative elucidates how the disabled bodies of certain enslaved individuals such as Sarah and Old Daniel are brutally assassinated, Prince uses her rheumatism to survive by not overworking herself, to negotiate the conditions of her enslavement, and when that becomes impossible, to seek her freedom which guarantees her survival as a free individual. This last chapter points out that both in her consensual sexual encounters and in those that she was raped while she was enslaved, instances that the published text of Prince?s story remains mostly silent about, Prince does not have any descendants. Based on previous scholarship on this matter, there is a strong indication that Prince?s resistance to her enslaved condition includes a secret history of contraception and abortion. This final chapter understands Prince as a historical actor who actively resists by attempting to bring the world of slavery to an end, by refusing to reproduce it materially, culturally and ideologically. The dissertation concludes with a coda that elaborates on the multiple manifestations of disaster in our current historical moment. The coda connects disastrous encounters in the Romantic era with our contemporary experiences, arguing that Romantic texts exemplify the manner that disaster and survival operate in the present. The relevance of Romantic disaster signifies that our times are inextricably tied to our Romantic past, which suggests that the study of Romantic disaster can inform our understanding of catastrophe. Most importantly, by portraying the end of current sociohistorical formations, Romantic texts force us to explore, 23 through our critical imagination, the possibility of establishing radically different sociohistorical formations in our future. Chapter 1: The Survival of Non-productive Labor in Mary Shelley?s The Last Man. Following its resurrection in the 1990s, Mary Shelley?s The Last Man has recently become again the centre of academic interest. The novel has two parts, Lionel Verney?s story of a plague that annihilates the human world, and a short Introduction that precedes it, written by a nameless narrator who, with her companion, find Lionel?s narrative in pieces inside an underground cave and put it together. Scholars revisit Shelley?s work to determine its historical, political and philosophical usefulness for a post-millennium cultural milieu that experiences the end of the world as a constant threat, trying to find its possible causes and cures. Survival is the dominant theme of Shelley?s novel, from the Introduction to the finale of Lionel?s narrative. The narrator of Shelley?s main story is the only human survivor of the eight- year trajectory of the plague, composing a narrative in his attempt to facilitate the survival of the ante-pestilential human world, at the same time that the nonhuman world remains untouched by the disease. In the Introduction, the nameless narrator describes how the piles of fragments they discover with her companion in the Cave of the Sibyl in Italy have survived for centuries hidden from the human eye. Her imaginative labor reanimates these fragments by transforming them into a coherent story that helps her survive her world, that has ?averted its once benignant face? from her, by entering the world of Lionel Verney (Shelley 7). Survival in The Last Man bears no explicit promise for biological, cultural or political regeneration, neither of Lionel?s world, nor of the world of the nameless narrator. The reader of 24 The Last Man wonders what purpose Mary Shelley?s narrative serves when it depicts a single human being surviving disaster without being able to ameliorate its effects or start anew, a question the novel?s Introduction does not address in a determinate manner. In the later twentieth and early twenty-first century scholars have tried to respond to this question, attempting to uncover the purpose survival performs in The Last Man, approaching it as a cautionary tale for sexism, colonialism, global capitalism, biopolitics and climate change, among others. Criticism assumes that since Shelley expends her creative labor on a novel about the end of humanity, she must provide either a glimmer of hope for humanity?s regeneration, or, at least, propose some form of political and social restoration that can help us prevent future catastrophes. Scholars presume that either the labor the nameless narrator expends to piece the scattered fragments in the cave, or the work Lionel puts to compose his narrative must create something useful for human society. The scholarship on Shelley?s post-apocalyptic novel has rarely, if ever, explored whether The Last Man questions the relation that useful labor and social value form with human survival. This chapter investigates the relation labor establishes with survival in The Last Man. It argues that Shelley?s work portrays the radical potential useless labor bears both for human survival and for worldmaking. In the main narrative of the novel, the plague eliminates all other human beings except from Lionel who decides to reside in Rome believing that encountering other human survivors is more probable there. After he discovers a half-finished manuscript that contains a dedication to posterity, Lionel decides to write his story, one emblematic of the demise of the ante-pestilential human world, monumentalizing his world?s socio-historic achievements for the generations to come. The phantasy that motivates Lionel?s arduous labor is that depopulate earth will ?be re-peopled? and his narrative will become useful to the future 25 human race (Shelley 466). During the time of writing Lionel does not meet a single human being in Rome. He resolves, thus, to abandon his residence and to spend his remaining days exploring the Mediterranean and expending himself in voluntary tasks that will only satisfy each day?s fulfillment without attempting to produce something useful, for himself or for future generations. After he survives the disaster of humanity Lionel finally abandons any attempt to restore, repair or preserve the ante-pestilential world, deciding on the contrary to labor without purpose till the time of his death. In the short Introduction to Lionel?s story, the nameless narrator puts together the dismembered pieces of the tale she finds in the Cave of the Sibyl, admitting that she has no specific purpose in mind for this re-composition besides her intellectual pleasure. While laboring to reconstruct the pieces, her work takes her ?out of a world? of sadness, situating her instead into ?one glowing with imagination and power? that provides her with ?the excitement of mind? (Shelley 7). The nonproductive expending of her labor is conducive to intellectual gratification only the moment of laboring and not when she uses the product of her labor, i.e., when she reads the story she composed. Her purposeless action sets in place a new world that she can access only at the time of laboring. The world the nameless narrator discovers while translating and reconstructing the Sibylline leaves is intellectually exciting without improving, reinvigorating or recreating the world she permanently resides. The non-reparative nature of Lionel?s story reinforces the premise that the work of the nameless narrator creates only intellectual pleasure without producing personal or social usefulness, for her or for others. The Last Man reveals the potential of non-productive labor to survival, with the Introduction supporting more emphatically the worldmaking possibilities of labor for intellectual fulfilment. Even though Shelley?s novel does not discuss explicitly the survival of literary 26 criticism, it mirrors, through our own scholarly approaches to it, our ideological commitment to producing usefulness and social values through our scholarship. Our practices portray our belief that our labor results in social change at the same time it contributes to our institutional and social survival at a sociohistoric moment when the function of the humanities is constantly under question by students and administration alike. This chapter begins with an analysis of Lionel?s narrative, revealing the primary role productive labor performs in it before, during and after the plague. In this vein, it discusses Raymond?s visions for the perfection of humanity in the pre-plague years and then it elaborates on Adrian?s attempts to ameliorate the effects of the disease during these years. When Lionel becomes the last human survivor, he labors in a similar manner to monumentalize the pre-plague world in a last effort to preserve its usefulness, repurposing it for the future. Lionel expresses a commitment to useful labor that scholarship on The Last Man reproduces, attempting to discover some kernel of value scholarship can use for social and political change. Instead, this chapter argues, Shelley?s novel concludes placing its emphasis on non-productive labor, an expenditure that holds only a marginal place in our critical tradition. Turning to the novel?s Introduction, this chapter then traces there once again the theme of non-productive labor, examining its relation to worldmaking. The chapter concludes with a short discussion on how the representation of useless labor in The Last Man can inform our institutional practices that focus exclusively on the social value of criticism, measured by its ability to effect social change. I. The Commitment to Productive Labor. Shelley organizes The Last Man in two parts, starting with the short Introduction of the nameless narrator and then moving to the considerably longer story of Lionel Verney who writes his autobiography while residing in Rome and after becoming the only human survivor. Lionel 27 composes almost his entire tale in the past tense and from the vantage point of the mature narrator who revisits the events that took place in his earlier life, recounts them in chronological order and, occasionally, comments on the importance of these events or on his feelings while writing them. Lionel structures his autobiography mostly in two major parts, one that depicts the ante-pestilential world of the plague, along with the role that he and his close circle of friends perform in it, and one that portrays the slow progress of the disease until he becomes the only human alive. In the first part of his narrative, Lionel presents himself dwelling in a state of being where he remains outside of? and antagonistic to?human society, usurping and consuming other people?s commodities. Looking back at his younger years Lionel calls himself a ?savage? whose only law was ?that of the strongest? (Shelley 14). Young Lionel was living a life ?like that of an animal,? stealing game and sheep from nearby estates, following uncritically the demands of ?brute nature? while waging ?war against civilization? (Shelley 18, 19). The condition Lionel inhabits at the time alludes to what Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan refers as ?the natural condition of mankind? (82). In this condition, when two ?men? desire the same thing they ?endeavour to destroy or subdue one another? to acquire it, coming ?prepared with forces united, to dispossess, and deprive [their fellow human being], not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or liberty? (83). For Hobbes, who associates in one phrase property with liberty and human life, confrontation leads ?man? ?in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man? (84). Lionel?s ?war against civilization,? where only the law of the strongest applies, threatens to revert society, one that has established laws for the protection of property that results from productive labor, into a state of perpetual war where the production and accumulation of commodities is under constant attack. The beginning of Lionel?s 28 narrative associates one aspect of nonproductive consumption, i.e., consuming unlawfully the commodities that belong to others, with an animal condition of existence. Lionel expresses his anxiety over nonproductive expenditure in his critique of his father whose financial, social and physical demise results from the mindless consumption of commodities. An aristocrat, Lionel?s father subdues himself to ?short-lived pleasure? that performs the role of ?the deceitful and cruel arbiter of his destiny,? with his gambling being exemplary of nonproductive expenditure that takes the form of consumption unwilling to contribute toward production (Shelley 11, 10). Wasting his fortune on various forms of entertainment, Lionel?s father ends up in huge debt that threatens his status. When the King of England offers Lionel?s father a large sum of money to repay those debts and to restitute himself in society, Lionel?s ancestor decides to waste it again on the gambling table. Whereas repaying his debts would constitute a productive expenditure for the reason that it could elevate his social status, gambling stands as useless expenditure leading Lionel?s father to leave London and to lose his social position. In Georges Bataille?s thought, gambling is indicative of the unconditional expenditure that characterizes those human practices that demand the purposeless consumption of energy or of considerable sums of money, as this chapter examines below (Visions 119). In the case of Lionel?s father, gambling condemns the survival of his future family to a life of poverty and misery that Lionel experiences as ?catastrophe,? which then leads Lionel, self-professedly, to spend his youth in an animal state characterized by the wasteful expenditure of other people?s commodities (Shelley 12). Once Lionel meets Adrian, the son of the last king of England helps the narrator acquire an education and enter human society, one characterized from the useful employment of labor. Lionel?s initial animosity towards Adrian, who believes that Adrian?s father is responsible for the 29 demise of his own family, quickly turns into a loving relationship of mutual respect. Adrian helps Lionel ?to beg[in] to be human,? progressing from his animal condition towards developing a love for intellectual pleasures, such as ?[p]oetry and its creations, philosophy and its researches and classifications? (Shelley 29, 31). This passage portrays that Lionel?s consumption of intellectual artifacts is a facet of productive labor. Besides poetry, Lionel enjoys philosophy and its ?classifications,? a term that alludes to the natural philosophy of the 18th century, and more specifically to the classificatory systems of Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Peter J. Kitson reveals that Linnaeus and Buffon based their theories on the Aristotelian concept of the Great Chain of Being, creating classificatory systems for the natural world at the same time they racialized the human species, situating the European, white man at the top of the chain, above all other human beings and the nonhuman world (16, 22). Kitson mentions that these classificatory systems were fueled by the evidence that ?the three great voyages of Captain James Cook (1769?75)? brought to the forefront (14). At the same time, the classification of humans and nonhumans alike created the ideological justification for white Europeans to subordinate and exploit the rest of the world, refueling maritime exploration, along with its vicious circle of conquest and exploitation. When Lionel indicates that the consumption of poetry and philosophy made him feel ?as the sailor who from the topmast first discovered the shore of America,? at one level he refers to his exploration of the sea of knowledge that his intellectual interests afford him (Shelley 31). On a different level though, the trope of naval discovery incorporates discursive traces that relate to the construction and dissemination of systems of knowledge, such as natural philosophy, that made imperialism, colonialism, the slave trade and global capitalism possible in the first place. In this fashion, the intellectual pleasure of consuming philosophy is a productive expenditure, and in that sense a 30 form of productive intellectual labor, where one spends time and energy only to gain more wealth in return. Moreover, the parataxis that connects philosophy to poetry in Lionel?s sentence denotes their close relationship in the education Lionel receives from Adrian. While philosophy establishes the discourse that naturalizes the production of wealth through maritime expansion and subordination of humans and nonhumans, poetry naturalizes and reproduces this ideological practice. In his narrative of the ante-pestilential world Lionel associates productive intellectual labor with applicable ideas, namely with ideas that can be put to use and reshape the material world, as his juxtaposition of Adrian with Raymond portrays. Lionel admires Adrian, his first tutor, and describes him as a person who is ?all mind,? implying that his philosophical concepts are not useful in real life (Shelley 27) This is a point that Adrian explicitly makes for himself when he refuses to claim the position of Lord Protector, by asserting that ?the visions of [his] boyhood have long since faded into reality? (Shelley 95). Adrian?s ?plans for the improvement of mankind,? and more specifically his aspiration ?to diminish the power of the aristocracy, to effect a greater equalization of wealth and privilege, and to introduce a perfect system of republican government into England? lead him to a mental breakdown because he is incapable of making all these ideas work (Shelley 43, 44). Lord Raymond, on the other hand, the Byronic figure that Lionel initially considers ?a despot? dedicated only to ?worldly idols,? holds in contempt Adrian?s idealism (Shelley 48, 49). Raymond marries Lionel?s sister Perdita, becomes a member of Lionel?s ?happy circle? along with Adrian and Idris, and then advances to the position of the ruler of England with the support of his friends occupying himself in ?a thousand beneficial schemes? to implement his ideas for the improvement of mankind (Shelley 90, 106). He launches numerous projects that start from the construction of infrastructure, such as 31 ?[c]anals, aqueducts, bridges,? and ?stately buildings? and expand to plans for social reformation where ?poverty [is] to be abolished,? attempting even to improve the ?physical state of man,? banishing disease from the human frame (Shelley 106). Raymond?s plans are reminiscent of William Godwin?s understanding of infinite and unstoppable human progress, as he expresses it in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Godwin underscores there that ?man is perfectible? in the sense that ?he? is not ?capable of being brought to perfection? but rather ?he? is capable of ?being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement? (144, 145). Godwin?s progress is a continuous, never-ending forward movement that Raymond?s endeavors recall, especially when he is ?continually surrounded by projectors and projects? (Shelley 106). To achieve his goals, Raymond establishes in society a systematic mode of operating that can satisfy all human needs. Drawing from the function of ?machines? that can, in his view supply, ?every want of the population,? Raymond believes that if he puts ?the mechanism of society? to work in a proper manner the result will be infinite progress. He attempts to ?systematize? society, i.e., to make it incorporate a system of ?faultless rules? and to operate following this system (Shelley 106). This passage establishes a strong link between systematization, production, and progress. Drawing from the example of non-human machines that work ceaselessly, producing huge quantities and satisfying, in theory, every human need, Raymond believes that he can adjust society, which possesses its own ?mechanism? that makes it similar to a machine, to produce unremittingly, fulfilling every human necessity in England, achieving continuous progress. Humans, in return, must not create obstacles to themselves ?swerv[ing] into disorder,? a phrase that functions as a synonym for humans not reaching their productive potential by spending their labor in nonproductive pursuits (Shelley 106). Despite Raymond?s final fate, who decides to follow his dream of ?being enregistered in the annals of 32 nations as a successful warrior? dying in Istanbul, Lionel?s narrative monumentalization of the pre-plague world favors Raymond?s ideas over Adrian?s for their ability to be put to use and to produce tangible outcomes (Shelley 108-109). Shelley?s passage enunciates the 18th century belief that systems are the means that put ideas to work, maximizing the productivity of material and intellectual labor, a frame of thinking that Lionel inherits from Newtonian Enlightenment. Clifford Siskin, discussing how systems became the primary medium for the acquisition of knowledge during the Enlightenment, argues that Newtonian thought brings to the forefront ?the mathematical structure of physical nature? by combining the concept of the calculus, a whole comprised by many equal parts, with the notion of the system, where numerous parts form a whole (94). The outcome, as Siskin mentions, is a worldview where the external world can both be calculated and systematized (94). Nevertheless, this fashion of Enlightenment positivity ends up acknowledging only what can be calculable, which, in turn, is always already related to labor which produces demonstrable results, as Lionel?s narrative shows. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno indicate that calculability ?recognizes no function other than that of working on the object as mere sense material in order to make it the material of subjugation? (65). ?Calculating reason,? namely reasoning that has been dominated by calculability, is inherently associated with useful labor since it recognizes work as work if it subjugates some primary material to human will, producing value (Horkeimer and Adorno 25). Lionel?s ideological commitment to the functional knowledge Raymond personifies goes hand in hand with his fantasy of futurity. In the aftermath of the plague?s appearance, Lionel, observing an interaction between the Countess of Windsor?Adrian?s mother?and her daughter? Lionel?s wife? mentions that it is ?our nature? as human beings ?to wish to continue our systems 33 and thoughts to posterity through our own offspring? (Shelley 331). Lionel believes that it is a natural phenomenon to desire to preserve and reproduce the way we function as society, i.e., the manner we produce commodities and ideas. Lionel?s language though suggests that our ability to envision our future is limited by our present condition. When we think of a future where our children repeat our knowledge systems and practices, even in an improved manner, this suggests that we are unable to imagine our future to be radically different from our present. Lee Edelman strongly critiques this practice, one that he terms ?reproductive futurism,? namely the replication of our present sociohistorical relations through the abstract concept of the Child, a phantasy through which we visualize our collective future (No Future 14). Exemplary of Lionel?s reproductive futurism, which perpetuates his fixation on productive labor, is his depiction of ante-pestilential Eton college full of its young pupils. Lionel describes the time his son Alfred first went to school at Eton as transitional for their family life, which progresses from ?an animal?s love of his offspring? towards ?the true affection of the human parent? (Shelley 226). The distinction Lionel constructs in this passage, one between the animal and the human, stands in place of a distinction between biological tendencies and the cultural functions that lead to the formation of human societies. Up to a certain point of a child?s growth, Lionel argues, the love the child receives from its family originates in the animal function humans possess, that of protecting their offspring for the survival of the species (Shelley 226). When Alfred goes to school his family sees in him the ?future man,? in other words the potential the child bears for cultural growth that relates, according to Lionel, to his ?intellectual faculties? and ?moral propensities? (Shelley 227). Upon joining Eton, Adrian becomes a member of a ?youthful congregation? where all its participants carry the promise of becoming leaders in the future of England (Shelley 227). Observing these children with ?double interest,? now that 34 his son has joined their ranks, Lionel sees ?the future governors of England? who are destined to ?carry on? with their projects ?the vast machine of society? (Shelley 227). Lionel?s phrase denotes that the Etonians are expected to continue and develop the world they are given, but they are not expected to build a different world. By achieving ?uninterrupted and secure? progress, the young Etonians perpetuate Raymond?s legacy, confirming Edelman?s position that the fantasy of reproductive futurism promises that ?the social world in which we take our place? will ?still survive? through our children ?when we do not? (Shelley 228; No Future 34). Unsurprisingly, heteronormativity performs a pivotal role in Lionel?s futurism intertwined with an ideology of material production and consumption. Lionel describes the Etonians as the future ?lovers, husbands, fathers? but also as the future ?landlord,? ?politician,? and ?soldier? (Shelley 227). Lionel initially observes that these young kids will become future ?lovers,? a noun indicative of emotional and sexual intimacy independent of gender and sexual orientation (Shelley 227). Lionel?s description, nonetheless, immediately transforms ?lovers? into ?husbands? and ?fathers,? indicating that in his eyes futurity is the child of heteronormative reproductive relations (Shelley 227). These three nouns, ?lovers, husbands, fathers,? are followed then by a semicolon which creates a parataxis with three more nouns, namely ?the landlord, the politician, the soldier? (Shelley 227). Parataxis underscores a signifying chain where a metonymic sliding and substitution of signifiers takes place: ?lovers? transform to ?husbands? and then to ?fathers,? nouns that refer to sexual, emotional and familial relations, which then convert into ?the landlord, the politician, the soldier,? a second set of nouns characteristic of socioeconomic relations and more specifically of property relations, political and military relations (Shelley 227). This transformation becomes possible because of Eton, an educational institution that performs the role of an Ideological State Apparatus, in Louis Althusser?s parole, 35 reproducing the interrelation heteronormativity holds with bourgeois ideology, but also with the ideological fixation on useful labor that leads to productivity. Lionel maintains his strong emphasis on the importance of productive labor in the second part of his story where he describes the progress of the plague. Following the death of Raymond, Ryland, Raymond?s pre-plague political adversary, becomes the ruler of England only to dessert his position as Lord Protector. The fear of political instability and the need for disaster management demands Adrian to take over the task of governing the country his father ruled as its last king. The narrator describes Adrian springing up ?from listlessness and unproductive thought, to the highest pitch of virtuous action,? re-articulating his belief for Adrian?s previous unproductive intellectual labors (Shelley 248). Adrian systematizes the resistance to the plague, which, although it fails to stop the disease, it prevents ?other evils, vice and folly? from dominating society, with Adrian becoming detrimental, in Lionel?s eyes, to the survival of the English population (Shelley 270). During the winter that follows Adrian?s appointment to the position of Lord Protector the plague recedes, providing an opportunity for ?the wise, the good and the prudent? to occupy themselves with ?the labours of benevolence,? which in this context means to engage themselves laboring for the reconstruction of their communities, spending their time usefully (Shelley 273). ?[T]he young, the thoughtless and the vicious,? on the contrary, expend themselves ?in search of amusement,? populating the theaters, frequenting ?dance[s] and midnight festival[s]? abandoning ?modesty, the reserve of pride,? and ?the decorum of prudery? (Shelley 273). Facing death, one part of society rushes to enjoy themselves through the consumption of spectacles and through sexual pleasure. Lionel indicates, hence, that Adrian?s government maintains order by preserving in English society the primary role of useful labor, not allowing England to waste itself in orgiastic consumption. 36 Despite Adrian?s attempts, the plague progresses relentlessly transforming the entire globe into what Lionel terms a ?waste world,? one characterized as such by the inability of humans to put it to work (Shelley 293). Lionel uses ?waste? multiple times as a trope for unproductivity even before the plague appears. At the time of Adrian?s mental breakdown, for example, Lionel?s narrative depicts Adrian to have become ?wasted to a shadow? unable to articulate any form of coherent meaning (Shelley 70). In another occasion, when the text represents Raymond?s life of earthly pleasures before the Byronic figure focuses on his projects for the perfection of the human species, Lionel observes ?the worthless fellows on whom [Raymond?s] time was wasted? (Shelley 151). Lionel?s tale first associates the plague with waste when Raymond advances towards Istanbul to fight the Turks with his troops becoming aware of ?fearful histories of whole regions which had been laid waste during the present year by pestilence? (Shelley 195). The disease then starts devouring the human population, to the extent that whole countries, such as Mexico, America and the ?fertile plains of Hindostan,? are ?laid waste? (Shelley 233). Since the appearance of the plague, the narrative clearly indicates that the lack of productive human labor leads to the proliferation of waste. Starting from the early stages of its expansion, pestilence forces ?[b]ankers, merchants, and manufacturers, whose trade depended on exports and interchange of wealth? to bankruptcy, leading an entire nation to suffer ?frequent and extensive losses? since it is incapable to apply itself to productive activities. According to Lionel, pestilence transforms ?[h]uman labour? to waste the same moment ?human life [is] set at nought? (Shelley 316). This is in fact the primary catastrophe the plague brings for Lionel: the extermination of humanity makes productive work impossible since, for Lionel, labor 37 means that, humans expend their energy to change the world around them. If all humans are dead, labor is impossible.3 Lionel?s use of the term ?waste? informs the new relationship humans establish with the nonhuman world, with waste underscoring the human inability to labor productively. Describing the waste of post-plague London, Lionel mentions that ?every thing was desert; but nothing was in ruin? (Shelley 332). ?[U]ndamaged buildings,? ?luxurious accommodation,? ?troops of dogs, deserted of their masters,? along with ?unbridled and unsaddled? horses and an ?unwieldy? ox, 3 The conceptualization of labor as humanity?s ability to shape the nonhuman world along with labor?s relation to human survival makes a seminal appearance in Marx?s analysis of the commodity form in the first volume of Capital. In his attempt to reveal how capitalism, a system that Lionel?s England experiences as well basing its economy on manufacture, trade and banking, generates wealth, Marx famously begins from the commodity form explaining the relation between commodity, value and labor. Marx declares that a commodity is ?an external object,? namely a material ?thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind,? meaning both the physical need for nourishment as well as the intellectual need for entertainment that a painting fulfils, for example (125). For a material thing to become a commodity it must be the product of human labor, Marx claims (128). Moreover, it must satisfy a human need for some other person than the person who produced it (Marx 128). This is the point in Capital where Marx differentiates between use and exchange value. If I labor to create something useful for me only that no one else wants then this product is a useful thing ?and a product of human labour, without being a commodity? (131). To produce a commodity, I must create ?use-values for others? that Marx terms ?social use-values? (131). Marx argues that the utility of what we produce determines after the fact the quality of labor we have spent to produce it. He underscores that if the thing we produced is useless, ?so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value? (131). Marx terms the labor that produces utility as ?useful labour,? namely the ?productive activity of a definite kind, carried on with a definite aim? (132-133). Useful labor, Marx claims, does not belong exclusively to a capitalist mode of production. It is rather ?a condition of human existence,? a ?natural necessity? independent of sociohistoric formations that makes the survival of the human species possible. Furthermore, Marx points out that ?useful labour? is ?the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself? (133). The term ?metabolism? [Stoffwechsel] naturalizes productive work even further transforming it into a natural process detrimental for the biological preservation of human life. In Marx?s analysis, the term ?labor? signifies only useful labor, while the term ?useless labor? never appears in his text as such, being mostly implied as the unnamed opposite of useful labor. Marx employs the term ?expenditure? to discuss the energy humans spend while laboring, pointing out that ?[i]f we leave aside the determinate quality of productive activity, and therefore the useful character of labour, what remains is its quality of being an expenditure of human labour-power? (134). In Marx?s hypothesis the separation of labor from usefulness, that allows us to notice the expenditure of human energy, can only happen in the abstract for the reason that these two qualities, i.e., expenditure and usefulness, are in reality always already interrelated. Marx emphasizes that ?all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim,? suggesting that the term labor cannot be used for the pure expenditure of human energy that produces no utility (137). Since, in his view, useful labor is a natural human condition, what this chapter calls useless labor, an expenditure of human energy that does not produce any utility, is unconceivable in Marx?s system of thought and, therefore, it does not have a name and a place in his analysis. On top of that, Marx indicates that labor is not value itself, but has the ability to produce value, which materializes in the product labor creates (142). Value must acquire for Marx a material form, which means it must be tangible, which, in turn, makes it calculable. Recalling Horkheimer and Adorno?s position on calculating reason, Marx?s understanding of labor and value appears to be an aspect of calculability. 38 all these comprise the wasted urban environment of England?s capital (Shelley 332). What Lionel calls a ?wasted, depopulate land? exposes his anthropocentric view that the nonhuman world exists for humans to shape it according to their will, and when they cannot shape it, it remains useless. In this post-pestilential ?new state of things? human bodies are transformed to waste by the plague the same time that human energy is expended qua wasted when it is unable to change the nonhuman world or to restitute humanity in its former condition (Shelley 232). In Lionel?s view, the waste world is the result of wasted, non-productive human labor. Humanity?s inability to mold the world to its will does not affect Nature, in a positive or negative manner. Attempting to understand the causes of this disease that persists ?irremediable,? Lionel anthropomorphizes nature believing initially that nature, humanity?s ?mother? and ?friend? has ?turned on [humans] a brow of menace? (Shelley 243, 232). He soon realizes that Nature does not benefit from humanity?s inability to work, remaining ?the same, as when she was the kind mother of the human race,? a point that Melissa Bailes enunciates as well when she argues that ?[t]he earth, all of nature, continues on, unaffected by humankind?s extinction? (Shelley 329; 671). Lionel?s depiction of post-plague London, that includes the roaming dogs, horses and oxen, emphasizes, unwillingly, that these nonhuman materialities oppose, in Jane Bennett?s words, ?our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption? by exemplifying a resistance to functionality (ix). Nevertheless, neither London?s empty buildings nor its wandering animals are portrayed to possess the ability ?to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle? that Bennet calls ?thing-power? (6). The demise of the human species leaves nature absolutely indifferent4, neither decaying nor regenerating. Post- 4 Lionel?s narrative strongly challenges any ecocritical approach that claims, in Kate Rigby?s words, that the disease is related to ?[a]nthropogenic climate change? caused by ?fossil-fueled process of industrialization,?, or even that The Last Man exemplifies an ?environmental apocalypse? that ?the age-old masculine quest for world domination generates,? as James C. McKusick postulates (81, 82; 109). In their attempt to situate Shelley?s work as part of a 39 plague London refuses to provide any consolation for the repair of human civilization, either in the form of reconstituting the old world or promising earth?s repopulation. London resonates with Jacques Khalip?s understanding of ?lastness,? a ?state of things? that enunciates ?the repeatability or recoil of an end that is neither negative nor a new beginning,? in the sense that lastness signifies neither absolute annihilation nor the regeneration of a condition that existed before it (7). Associating lastness with afterness, ?the last?s cousin,? Khalip suggests the possibility of a world currently unimaginable, one that appears after the end (7). Lionel?s experience of deserted Rome reignites, for the last time, his commitment to purposeful work. In the aftermath of the loss of Adrian and Clara, Lionel?s daughter, both drowned during a sea storm while sailing, the narrator reaches Rome where he decides to reside hoping to meet other survivors. Lionel enters Italy?s capital through ?the Porta del Popolo,? visits the Colonna Palace and the Monte Cavallo, and, admiring the statues of Castor and Pollux, realizes that Rome?s marvelous structures, in their ?cold durability,? constitute the only surviving point of reference for humans through the centuries (Shelley 460). Rome, for Lionel, is the ?eternal survivor of millions of generations of extinct men? (Shelley 461). Contrasting the fleeting nature of the human body with the persistency of Rome?s marble wonders, Lionel realizes that Italy?s capital bridges the past with the future, constructing a linear temporality that glues the world together by making the concepts of heritage and legacy possible in the first place. Material permanency is the ?medicine? Lionel discovers for his ?many and vital wounds,? one that is indispensable from the calculable outcomes of productive labor. Rome, the monument of western human civilization, is the result of people expending their energy productively with progressive environmentalist discourse, this scholarly analysis infuses Nature with agency while obfuscating the contingency of the plague, substituting it with a cause-and-effect relationship where man destroys nature only for nature to then destroy man. 40 the intend to shape the world around them. The city persists beyond the individuals who produced it, and as the narrative shows, beyond humanity itself. Productive human labor then appears to Lionel to be a human necessity for the survival and reproduction of the social, a human need as important as the biological survival of the species. Rome?s power, as the primary example of productive human labor, to outlast humanity encourages Lionel to write his story. Following the plague?s transformation of the earth?in Lionel?s eyes?into a ?vacant space, an empty stage,? the narrator considers that ?[t]o read [has become] futile? and ?to write, vanity indeed? (Shelley 308). The experience of Rome re- institutes his commitment to useful labor, which is triggered, moreover, by his discovery of a manuscript with ?an unfinished dedication to posterity? (Shelley 466). This is the moment the narrator decides to write a book himself, recording ?with sacred zeal the virtues of [his] companions,? as well as how pre-plague humans ?so wondrous in their achievements, with imaginations infinite, and powers godlike? have been annihilated (Shelley 466). Dedicating his work to ?TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD,? Lionel calls them to ?ARISE? and read their fall inscribed in ?THE HISTORY OF THE LAST MAN? (Shelley 466). In the writing of his work, Lionel exploits a formal structure that subsumes the negativity the plague manifests in the second part of his story to the positivity of the pre-plague world, that envisions to perfect humanity and to augment the glory of England. Lionel mentions that at the beginning of writing his book he ?thought only to speak of plague, of death, and last, of desertion,? narrating the disaster pestilence brought (Shelley 466). He then remembers his ?happy circle? along with their achievements from the pre-plague years, deciding to devote nearly half of his narrative on these incidents (Shelley 466). His story is organized in coherent narrative blocks, the pre-plague world is portrayed full of life, the post-plague world is replete 41 with death. This contradiction of the ante- with the post-pestilential earth ultimately constructs a dialectical formation where Lionel opposes life to death. In his critique of Hegel?s dialectic, Jacques Derrida underlines that Hegel?s thought disregards the negativity of death, using it to establish ?an essential life? that strives unremittingly to maintain productivity. Derrida discusses that in the lord-servant section, ?[t]he servant is the man who does not put his life at stake? the moment that ?[t]he lord is the man who has had the strength to endure the anguish of death? (321). For the lord to become a lord, to claim the privilege he gained by confronting death, he ?must stay alive,? in the sense that if he dies, he cannot occupy the position of lordship (Derrida 322). The master, through the dialectic, transforms the negativity of death into positivity that manifests itself in ?lordship? as a social position, in other words, he uses death to create social structure. For this reason, Derrida calls the dialectic an ?economy of life? since through the preservation of the biological life of the lord, the dialectic creates social meaning, that, in turn, generates language and discourse (322). For Derrida, discourse is a system that employs negative terms, such as ?destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice,? in a meaningful way maintaining its coherency. Death, for example, is the limit of meaning for human beings. It is incomprehensible before we experience it and takes away our ability to comprehend it when it occurs. The word ?death? is a placeholder for this impossibility of understanding. The use of the word ?death? in a sentence, instead of disrupting the meaning of the sentence, maintains the sentence?s integrity. In this way language and discourse transform negativity into the side-kick of positivity (327) This manner of reasoning though, Derrida continues, ?restricts itself to conservation, to circulation and self-reproduction? every time meaning is (re)produced in discourse, and more importantly in historical and philosophical discourses (323). Lionel?s opposition of the pre- to the post-plague world puts this 42 structure of the dialectic to use to establish a meaningful historical resource that the children of ?a saved pair of lovers? will find and read in the future (Shelley 466). His intellectual labor is invested to create utility out of the disaster the plague brings, giving meaning to this unknowable and irreparable catastrophe, an act that exemplifies his commitment to useful expenditure. Criticism on the novel has tried to discover the social and political value of Shelley?s work, forming, inadvertently, an ideological alliance with Lionel?s fixation on useful labor. Anne K. Mellor, for example, points out that ?Shelley is showing us the universal human destruction that could occur if?but only if?all political leaders are male, all narrators are male, all females are oppressed,? highlighting the social value of Shelley?s work for the equality of the sexes (144). Alan Bewell argues that the novel?s episode where Lionel contracts the disease from a Black man and then becomes immune to the plague portrays the fear Europeans share towards the colonial other (313). In a similar vein, Audrey A. Fisch asserts that despite Lionel?s catastrophic narrative the novel?s Introduction brings to the forefront ?a new kind of agent and a new kind of subject? that enhance ?progressive politics? despite the totalizing disaster of the plague (279). More recently, Fuson Wang claims that The Last Man ?gives shape to a politics of possibility that recovers the novel from charges of nihilism,? while Andrea Haslanger asserts, in a less triumphalist manner, that the novel proposes, through Cynic cosmopolitanism, a non- teleological form of political organization (236). Echoing Lionel?s fixation on labor, scholars attempt to monumentalize the dead world of Shelley?s work. Scholars expend their energy productively to uncover the utility of The Last Man for the amelioration of humanity?s social, political and cultural present and future, focusing their critical energy to create more utility themselves. Scholarly labor constitutes what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call ?immaterial labor? that produces, among others, ?communication, social relations, and cooperation? (113). 43 Similar to Marx?s analysis where physical labor changes the material world, immaterial labor, that often blends with aspects of material labor, shapes, according to Hardt and Negri, ?social life itself,? a phrase that exemplifies the goals academic labor sets for itself (146). Lionel?s narrative, however, concludes by abandoning productive labor once and for all, endorsing useless labor as the only ineradicable remainder of disaster, while Shelley?s Introduction expands on the worldmaking possibilities of useless labor. The novel?s non-utility has been seldomly recognized in the scholarship of The Last Man. At the time of its publication, the Monthly Review described The Last Man as ?the offspring of a deceased imagination, and of a most polluted taste,? with the reviewer expressing her disgust over a tale that embraces human disaster without attempting to ameliorate it (qtd. in Snyder, 435). According to Robert Lance Snyder, besides the Review, ?[m]ost of the magazines which took notice of it at all wasted little time and even less thought in summarily denouncing the work? (435). Snyder suggests that magazines contemporary to The Last Man thought of the novel as meaningless, considering it unable to provide answers to the issues it brings to the forefront. They then decided not to spend their labor unproductively on a work that offers no utility, which forces Shelley?s novel to survive out-of-print for more than a century, revealing the close relation utility has with marketability. Echoing those initial reader reactions, Mellor?s first interpretation of the novel acknowledges the irrecuperable negativity of the work?s ?anti-political and anti-ideological? aspect, arguing that it foreshadows ?twentieth-century existentialism and nihilism? (165). Unwilling to accept Shelley?s labor expenditure in the long run, and in need for a reparative narrative that justifies critical labor, Mellor recoils from her initial approach, arguing several years later for the novel?s usefulness. 44 II. The Survival of Useless Labor The end of Lionel?s story, written in the past tense, does not coincide with the conclusion of his narrative which terminates with a brief epilogue composed in the future tense. The narrator declares that after one year of writing and residing in Rome, his ?medicine,? the monumentalization of the pre-plague world, ?will not do? anymore (Shelley 467). Embracing his incurable solitude by admitting to himself that no human being ?will ever come,? Lionel realizes that his hopes for the repopulation of the earth are but a ?delusion? (Shelley 467). He now plans to abandon Rome to spend his life looking for a survivor to pass his time with. The narrator is expecting that ?hardship, inclement weather, and dangerous tempests? will often accompany him in his trip (Shelley 468). The energy he will expend though is not an investment for the amelioration of his current life since finding a fellow human being is not his goal. He starts his trip forming ?no expectation of alteration for the better,? hoping only to change his ?monotonous present? that, as this chapter argues, has been characterized by his ideological commitment on the powers of productive labor (Shelley 469, 470). In his future trip Lionel plans to spend his time unproductively. He narrates that he will ?unfurl his sail, and clasp the tiller?and, still obeying the breezes of heaven, for ever round another and another promontory, anchoring in another and another bay, still ploughing seedless ocean [sic]? (Shelley 469). The trope of naval exploration appears multiple times in the novel, always associated with productive labor, as this chapter has already discussed. Lionel opens his long autobiography with a paragraph where he is reminiscent of England, portraying it to resemble a ?well-manned ship, which mastered the winds and rode proudly over the waves,? another reference to England?s engagement with imperialism and trade in a global scale (Shelley 9). Conversely, the image of Lionel ?ploughing seedless ocean [sic],? which concludes his story, 45 emphasizes his final decision to expend the rest of his days laboring uselessly (Shelley 469). The act of ploughing without using any seeds, on top of ploughing the ocean that cannot make any seeds grow, emphasizes that ploughing, as an act, is not a means to an end. Lionel plans to exercise ploughing for ploughing?s sake, for the reason that ploughing will change the repetitive nature of his life, without him caring to transform the labor of ploughing into the utility the plant which would grow from his seed can bring. ?Ploughing seedless ocean [sic]? is a conscious expenditure of human energy in the sense that Lionel decides in advance to expend his energy not producing any value. Marx deems labor useless after it has not produced any utility, suggesting that non-productive labor can happen only as an accident, unintentionally. Lionel?s pre-meditated decision highlights that he makes a choice about his future life, prioritizing useless labor above useful labor. Lionel further elaborates on his future condition, claiming that he longs ?to grapple with danger, to be excited by fear, to have some task, however slight or voluntary, for each day?s fulfilment? (Shelley 470). In contrast to Raymond?s goals that take the form of innumerable projects and schemes, from the building of infrastructure to the conquering of Istanbul, Lionel sets tasks that remain ?slight or voluntary,? not aiming to mold the nonhuman world to his will but planning to allow him to pass his time till the moment of his death (Shelley 470). Lionel?s new aims resonate with Maurice Blanchot?s idea of ?patience? that ?tells another time, another sort of task whose end one doesn?t see, which assigns us no goal we can steadfastly pursue? (127). Non-productive labor restructures Lionel?s temporality into one that has no long- term future tasks, no goals for the future amelioration of society, no plans for the future accumulation of wealth through labor expended in the present, and, in general, no future that, 46 one way or another, replicates the pre-plague world. The Last Man concludes portraying useless labor as the only thing that survives the disaster of the human population. 5 5 In Lionel?s story, useless labor develops into such a radical expenditure that signifies a negativity more profound than what Georges Bataille discusses in his work. Bataille recognizes two kinds of expending, one devoted to ?the conservation of life and the continuation of individuals? productive activity,? what I have called in this chapter useful expenditure, and another, that includes ?luxury, mourning, war,? ?arts,? and ?perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital,? among others, that he names ?unproductive expenditures? which ?have no end beyond themselves? (Visions 118). Bataille claims that in contrast to aristocratic ruling classes before it, the bourgeoisie aims only to acquire more, acknowledging nothing other than the existence of productive expenditure, considering anything that does not have ?material utility,? such as ?violent pleasure,? to be pathological, (Visions 116). He believes that contrary to Marx who considers productive labor as the natural necessity which makes human survival possible, absolute expenditure is the true natural necessity, the only reason humans employ labor usefully in the first place, so they can expend unproductively at a later stage. For Bataille, ?[m]en assure their own subsistence or avoid suffering [?] to accede to the insubordinate function of free expenditure? (Visions 129). To support this view, Bataille discusses the practice of potlatch, performed by various indigenous populations around the world, which is characterized by the solemn giving of considerable riches, offered by a chief to his rival for the purpose of humiliating, challenging and obligating him? (The Accursed 67). To save one?s honor, the receiver of the gift of potlach must return it ?by means of a new potlatch, more generous than the first? (The Accursed 68). The potlach, Bataille stresses, exemplifies ?consumption for others? [emphasis in the original] that ?is not reducible to its utility? (The Accursed 69). He concludes that if ?the ultimate problem,? the primary focus of humans, ?concerned the acquisition and not the dissipation of useful wealth? ?[t]here would be no potlatch? (The Accursed 68). The drawback of Bataille?s theory concerns his belief that orgiastic consumption comes after useful labor, impeding him from fully exploring the possibility of the more profound expenditure of useless labor. He indicates that ?[s]ociety can grow,? in which case ?the excess? it produces ?is deliberately reserved for growth? (The Accursed 45). Bataille asserts, however, that production ?is by nature a transitory state? that ?cannot continue indefinitely? but has to be followed by absolute expenditure, which he believes materializes in potlach (The Accursed 45). Bataille draws his understanding of potlach from Marcel Mauss. In his work The Gift, Mauss points out that ?the purely sumptuary destruction of wealth? that takes place in potlach is nevertheless, ?a struggle between nobles to establish a hierarchy amongst themselves from which their clan will benefit at a later date? (8). Mauss clearly mentions that potlatch establishes social hierarchy, another name for social value, which limits, this chapter believes, the unproductive character of expenditure. Bataille associates the ?[g]lory? that results from this form of gift exchange aka potlach with the ?movement of senseless frenzy, of measureless expenditure of energy? (The Accursed 71). He implicitly recognizes that potlach does not reach the absolute limit of expending, revealing that ?the ideal would be that a potlatch could not be repaid? (The Accursed 70). The true gift for Bataille is one that no one has asked for, no one awaits, and one that cannot be repaid, similar to the gift the sun gives. Bataille elaborates on how ?[s]olar energy is the source of life?s exuberant development? since the sun ?dispenses energy?wealth?without any return,? meaning that ?[t]he sun gives without ever receiving? (The Accursed 28). In this formation, Bataille articulates that the sun labors producing solar energy, which materializes as the outcome of his labor. Yet, solar energy is another name for the sun laboring itself to death, not the calculable result of the sun?s labor. Solar energy is the material trace of the process, and not the product, of laboring without having any goal in mind, becoming a gift that unwillingly, and unknowingly, makes life on earth possible, creating, in this manner, an entire world. In this example, purposeless labor, one that leads its subject to death, is conducive of worldmaking. Bataille suspects the radical nature of this expenditure, declaring The Accursed Share as ?[a] book that no one awaits, that answers no formulated question? (11). Unable to find any other material example of expenditure in human societies, Bataille resorts to potlach, the unproductive consumption of material things, which suggests that, even in his radical conceptualizations, expenditure must follow the dictates of calculability. If expenditure cannot be counted in terms of quantity to assure its extremity, it does not count as expenditure. 47 In the frame narrative of the novel?s Introduction, a nameless narrator and her companion discover and recompose Lionel?s tale. When they reach the real cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, they find ?piles of leaves, fragments of bark, and a white filmy substance, resembling the inner part of the green hood which shelters the grain of the unripe Indian corn? (Shelley 5). These surviving remnants are writings in various languages from ?ancient Chaldee? and ?Egyptian hieroglyphs? to modern ?English and Italian? in poetic form (Shelley 5). They decipher, adopt and translate these ?obscure and chaotic? fragments to resurrect the dead body of Lionel?s narrative into a coherent story with ?form and substance? (Shelley 5, 6, 7). The Introduction of The Last Man highlights the importance of non-productive labor associating it with worldmaking. The narrator points out that her ?labour have cheered long hours of solitude, and taken [her] out of a world, which has averted its once benignant face from [her], to one glowing with imagination and power? (Shelley 7). She claims that she recomposed Lionel?s fragmented narrative because such is ?human nature, that the excitement of mind? was dear to her, and that the imagination softened her ?real sorrows and endless regrets? (Shelley 7). The narrator of the Introduction states clearly that the only reason for putting Lionel?s story together was the ?excitement of mind,? a phrase that underlines that she decided to expend her labor for her intellectual pleasure alone (Shelley 7). She never argues that her work aimed at discovering utility for the preservation or amelioration of her world, which ?has averted its once benignant face? from her, leading her to misery (Shelley 7). She emphasizes, on the contrary, that it is her long hours of laboring, without ever mentioning the result of her labor, that took her out of her world and placed her into one glowing with imagination. What initially appears as escapism?the narrator labors to forget her sorrows?quickly turns into putting in place a new world. The narrator indicates that her intellectual laboring establishes a world, one ?glowing with 48 imagination,? radically different from her own (Shelley 7). This new world has not been imagined in advance, and, in this manner, the narrator?s labor does not constitute the means to achieve her goal. The world of Lionel Verney, the last man, that offers, unapologetically, no hope for the regeneration of humanity, endorsing at its conclusion non-productive labor, becomes possible merely when the narrator labors for her intellectual pleasure, without an end- goal in sight. The employment of imagination in this context does not constitute another example of Romantic ideology. Rather, it points towards the possibilities useless labor opens for a radically different world that can come into being through the breach useless expenditure creates in our critical imagination. The narrator?s emphasis on laboring for her pleasure alone without any other goal or end opens the Introduction to a queer reading via Edelman?s notion of ?useless jouissance? that he associates with the ?sinthomosexuals? (?The Pathology? 40). For Edelman the sinthomosexual stands against reproductive futurism being unwilling, through his queer sexual practice, ?to contribute to the communal realization of futurity? (No Future 44-45). The sinthomosexual has access to ?negative jouissance,? a pleasure beyond the limits of pleasure that has no other goal besides pleasure itself that Edelman describes as ?the continuous satisfaction? characterized ?by its pulsions and not by its end? (No Future 45, 86). Edelman asserts that through its relation to jouissance, the sinthomosexual identifies with the death drive?s undoing of ?meaning, progress, sociality or futurity,? standing for ?whatever is wasteful, meaningless, conducive of death? (?The Pathology? 40). Since for Marx useful labor is a natural necessity for human survival, the threat non-productive labor poses towards the survival of the human race exemplifies a wastefulness so profound that can lead to death, or, at least to the death of a certain form of social existence. 49 A queer reading of the Introduction leads, inevitably, to the queer reading of the Cave. When the narrator and her companion make it to the cave of the Sibyl, it is not the first cave that they enter, but the second, which they discover by following a small opening in the wall. This second opening constitutes for Peter Melville an ?in-hospitable? space where the piles of leaves coexist with the remains of a goat that has fallen accidentally in the cave through an opening in its roof and died (153). For the narrator, the goat?s bones become ?[t]he only sign that life had been there? (Shelley 5). Since life?s ?only sign? is the ?snow-white skeleton? of a dead animal, the material manifestation of death, the narrator portrays the cave as a space where life is impossible. This place is the anus where the expenditure of human energy for sexual pleasure becomes unwilling to contribute to species reproduction and to the fantasy that comes with it, namely reproductive futurism. Moreover, the existence in the cave of ?piles of leaves, fragments of bark, and a white filmy substance? that resembles ?the green hood? of the ?unripe Indian corn? allude to the presence of human excrement, that are known to frequent the anal cavity (Shelley 5). The allusion becomes clearer when one considers that these fragments are ?obscure and chaotic,? i.e., incomprehensible, and thus, useless for any reader before the narrator expends her labor on them (Shelley 6). In other words, these piles are piles of useless matter qua waste. Furthermore, upon entering the second cave, the passage for the narrator and her companion appears impenetrable, scarcely admitting them (Shelley 4). Managing to make it through because of their perseverance, the passage then grows ?narrower and lower,? with the torch the narrator and her companion carry to become ?extinguished by a current of air? (Shelley 4). Later, when they discover the piles of leaves, they consider them a hidden ?treasure,? a phrase that resonates with the Freudian understanding of excrement, providing more evidence towards the scatological imagery of the cave (Shelley 6). Surviving in the form of waste in the inhospitable and almost 50 impenetrable second cave, these green piles, along with the current of air that kills their torch, reinforce a queer reading of the cave as the anus, that contains excrement and emits gasses, and which William A. Cohen describes as ?shit-smeared and sex-focused,? gesturing that human excrement and useless human sexual energy co-exist in the anus at the same time6 (21). Through the figure of the cave and the pleasurable actions that take place in it, the Introduction portrays a deliberate disengagement of ?sexual and aesthetic pleasure from purpose? that, as Richard C. Sha reveals, it was consciously practiced by Romantic writers in their attempt to reimagine human relations in general (2). The sexual and scatological imagery of the Introduction links sexual with aesthetic disinterestedness, where the aesthetic act that takes place in the cave, evocative of the anus, is simply pleasurable, constructing a narrative that has no utility and exemplifying the absolute expenditure of unproductive labor. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously consider the cave as ?womb-shaped,? believing it constitutes ?the place of female power? that holds ?the mysteries of transformation? (95). In their reading of the cave as an allegory of the womb where Mary Shelley descends to find ?[t]he body of her precursor?s art, and thus the body of her own art,? Gilbert and Gubar maintain the fantasy of reproductive futurism, since the womb, in their reading, can provide a new beginning for a better future for women. They disregard, in this manner, any references to useless labor, both in the Introduction and in Lionel?s story, along with any scatological allusions in the Introduction (98). 6 Richard Sha traces the discourse on the non-productive sexual pleasure of the anus in Erasmus Darwin?s Zoonomia where, according to Sha, Darwin ?emphasizes the sympathy between the anus and the penis, thus explaining how sodomy can be a form of pleasurable sex? (39). The polluted bodily cavity of non-productivity is not limited to the male anus. Leo Bersani indicates that descriptions of the anus in male homosexuals resemble those of ?female prostitutes in the nineteenth century? where the vagina was considered a contaminated vessel that was spreading venereal diseases and it was not productive at all (211). Both the prostitute?s vagina and the homosexual?s anus stand for a jouissance, ?the fantasmatic mystery of an insatiable, unstoppable? sexuality in Bersani?s words that leads straight to death (222). To this we need add ?women?s anal eroticism,? another aspect of unproductive pleasure, in relation to which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out that ?there has been no important and sustained Western discourse? (204). 51 III. Humanities and The Last Man: Lasting, Lastness, Afterness. Even though Shelley?s work does not discuss openly the function of literary criticism, the manner the nameless narrator labors resonates with scholarly work. The ?long hours of solitude,? the balance she tries to keep between deciphering, adopting, translating and faithfully transcribing the fragments in the cave is reminiscent of the work of the literary critic. On top of that, the novel?s resistance to usefulness reveals criticism?s ideological fixation on productive labor, implying that the novel could help us reconceptualize the relation our critical and institutional practices in the Humanities hold with utility. Academics, such as Michael S. Roth, have voiced in the past the demand for the restructuring of the Humanities, that are currently, to his view, ?entirely negative,? ?seriously unsatisfying,? and ?ultimately counterproductive,? towards a model of ?practical exploration,? especially if the field is to survive in the institutions of the 21st century (?Beyond Critical Thinking?). Roth?s opinion exemplifies a long-held ideological fixation on utility that reaches back to the postwar era. Even since the end of World War II the Humanities have been trying constantly to improve the world, following a reparative rhetoric that has been attempting to make scholarship as valuable as possible, for society in general and for groups that have been facing racial, sexual and gender oppression in particular. This chapter recognizes and admires the work that generations of scholars have put. It acknowledges nonetheless that by focusing on repairing a broken world, scholarship has been, unwillingly, naturalizing and reproducing many problematic aspects of the very world it has been placing itself against. Working unremittingly to restore what is broken, and focusing on producing values towards that goal, criticism has been limiting its imagination drastically, becoming incapable of envisioning a radically different manner of being. Striving to produce what can be immediately 52 recognized as useful, scholarship has silently accepted and endorsed calculating reason as the only acceptable manner of thinking and writing. Moreover, criticism?s obsession with utility has silently consented to what Achille Mbembe calls the ?scission of humanity into ?useful? and ?useless,?? a division that implicitly argues that only the useful has the right to exist (12). Critiquing our current approaches for the acquisition of knowledge, Mbembe believes that our overreliance on useful knowledge, along with our dependence on its marketability, lead to ?epistemic obsolescence? that escort our societies towards ?a relentless impoverishment of the real? (109). Limiting our critical, social and political imagination, our overdependence on utility deprives us from the real possibilities that texts and theories provide, and which could lead to the radical material transformation of our world, one that will come after this one end, as an afterward in the form of an after-world. Even if it appears initially as escapism?the nameless narrator of Shelley?s novel puts together the Sibylline leaves to avoid the pain her world causes?her useless, wasteful labor exposes the possibility that our critical imagination can lead to a world where working for intellectual pleasure without intending to produce concrete results exists as a right that individuals and social groups should be able to practice unapologetically. Laboring without purpose, i.e., without the imperative to produce something of value, establishes a profound resistance against our current socioeconomic mode of being by refusing to improve upon it, restore it or reproduce it in any sense. Laboring for labor?s sake constitutes a political act that highlights the importance of unremitting action, enunciating the moment of acting as the locus of infinite possibility that our fixation on achieving specific goals and producing social values limits greatly. Useless labor, hence, opposes political quietism, escapism or resignation from praxis by emphasizing unremitting action, one that includes, but is not limited to, intellectual 53 labor. Valuing action for action?s sake without using it as a means to an end replenishes the potential action has for future change, one that is currently unthinkable and unknowable. While laboring with purpose focuses our intellectual and physical energy on achieving specific goals, laboring without purpose brings to the surface intellectual and material possibilities that were not thought in advance. 54 Chapter 2: Romantic Survival: Disaster beyond Repair in the Lyrical Ballads. The recent years have testified to the rising popularity of post-critical readings. One of the many reasons of post-criticism?s intellectual allure originates in its conscious attempt to redefine the role of criticism, responding, among other things, to concerns about the function of the humanities in the educational institutions of the 21st century. Drawing from Actor-Network theory, Rita Felski defines ?post-critical reading? as the set of practices that emphasize the agency of the work of art and its role as a co-actor in an ever-changing network of innumerable other co-actors (3, 12). This form of scholarship, Felski claims, reestablishes the usefulness qua survival of literature and the humanities in our current sociohistorical moment (Felski 143). In her view, the critical tradition that she calls ?suspicious reading,? which draws from Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and Kant, and which has been strengthened by critique?s linguistic turn, has been focusing on revealing a hidden meaning, creating in this manner a fundamental division in our relationship with the world (31). For Felski, post-critique holds the power both to suture the gap that suspicious reading has instigated as well as to reestablish the practical role of the humanities in this newly re-unified universe that post-critique can institute, allegedly. This chapter opposes the ideological dominance of repair in our critical methodologies and our social and cultural practices typified most recently and most emphatically by post- criticism. It suggests instead that Romantic poetry demonstrates why repair is not always possible or desirable and why existing beyond repair is an ethical choice that we need to consider in our cultural, political and institutional practices. The chapter first asserts that, despite Felski?s belief that her proposed methodology achieves a radical break with the critical tendencies of the past, post-criticism follows a long line of interpretive methodologies which, ever since New 55 Criticism, have championed repair. These practices have constantly reproduced the ideology that catastrophe can always be ameliorated, even in cases where restoration is unattainable, an ideological practice which I call disastrous thinking. This chapter then indicates that specific poems from the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, namely ?Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman, with an Incident in Which He was Concerned? and ?The Last of the Flock,? propose, by employing the survival narrative formally and thematically, that in certain cases reparation is impossible and that any attempt towards repair can prove even more catastrophic. Through fragmentation, repetition and stagnation, the survival narrative in these poems portrays that disaster can eliminate the causes that bring it to existence and make it historically and philosophically comprehensible. This chapter turns next to Samuel Taylor Coleridge?s ?The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts,? with the poem proposing, after it has employed the survival narrative, what I call the active passivity of thought, a form of thinking that respects the right of ruins to have their own political existence. The term ?political? in this context does not carry the meaning it has in liberal democracies, where it is associated with ?citizenship, elections, the particular forms of political representation and the various ideological families? (Stavrakakis 71). It rather refers to ways of being-in-the-world as a member of the polis, of an organized community. This manner of existing might be able to change our scholarly practices, liberating our critical imaginary from always attempting to fix the texts we read along with the contexts that situate our readings. The focus of this chapter is on the 1798 edition of the Ballads. This edition opens with Coleridge?s version of ?The Rime? underscoring the importance of the survival narrative in this volume, even if relatively few of its poems incorporate it in their structure. Starting with ?The Rime,? an emblematic portrayal of the mariner?s survival in a lifeless and deathless state, the 56 1798 edition establishes new critical avenues to the readings of ?Simon Lee? and ?The Last of the Flock.? The reason is that ?The Rime? functions as a nodal point that defines the meaning of the other survival narrative poems that follow it. I choose to focus on these poems in the Ballads because they most explicitly manifest survival as a nonrecoverable disaster by putting the survival narrative to use. Refusing to represent the aspects of catastrophe they articulate, these poems become disorienting for their readers by lacking progress and conclusion. Even though this chapter does not claim that either resistance to repair or active passivity, a mode of existing beyond repair, make their first appearance in Romantic poetry, it argues that the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 provide, probably for the first time, a clear articulation of these modes of being. The modernization at the end of the 18th century materializes as polymorphous disaster, one that Wordsworth alludes to in his famous Preface. Industrialization, urbanization, the dissolution of rural communities through enclosures, the creation of an urban proletariat of factory workers and of an lumpenproletariat, that Wordsworth portrays in his Book VII of the 1805 Prelude; the French Revolution, the rise in power of Napoleon Bonaparte, the fear of a French invasion and the experience of perpetual war; along with imperialism and fights for the abolition of the slave trade, all these construct a deeply fragmented social reality, that led to the radical disarticulation of familiar modes of economic, social and cultural experience. These multivalent ruins then evoke more articulate reactions on the topic of disaster, survival and repair, with the Lyrical Ballads incorporating, thematically and formally, an indicative example of such a reaction. The Ballads contemplate and complicate these concepts by thinking with and beyond the historical associations that disaster establishes between texts and contexts. This chapter advances a conceptualization of ?survival? that originates in Geoffrey Hartman?s notion of ?intellectual witness? to discuss forms of catastrophe beyond the context of 57 the Shoah, of genocide and of mass murder. The poems from the Lyrical Ballads this chapter studies provide, to appropriate Hartman?s parole, ?a witness for the witness? in the sense that they make their readers bear witness to the catastrophe they portray (G. Hartman 48). In this manner, the poems reflect ?the darkness of the event? without attempting to make it comprehensible since ?intelligibility is not the aim of witnessing,? as Hartman suggests (G. Hartman 48). Survival in this chapter differs from Sara Guyer?s formulation as she develops it in Romanticism after Auschwitz. Guyer focuses on survival as an allegory of figure, reading the function of prosopopoeia to expose, among other things, that the rhetoric of ?flesh and blood? in Wordsworth?s ?Preface? of 1800 and of 1802 creates a poetry where non-human life survives concurrently as human and non-human (66). Borrowing from Guyer the idea of survival as a failure of ends that she employs in rhetorical figures, my analysis instead investigates how the poetic narratives of Coleridge and Wordsworth allegorize without ameliorating the negativity of survival and suggests how this concept can inform our current critical and cultural practices (13). I. The Dominance of Reparative Criticism. The appearance of post-critical thinking enunciates retroactively a long tradition of reparative thought. Post-critical reading, in its attempt to bridge the dichotomies between subject and object as well as surface and depth that suspicious reading has, among others, supposedly created, employs the rhetoric of repair, ultimately arguing for the restoration of the usefulness of criticism in the humanities. Felski claims that suspicious reading underlines the dualism of a subject that critiques and of an object of criticism while post-critical reading, by contrast, does away with notions of surface and depth implicit in this model, and instead equivocates the reader and the work of art as ?co-actors? in a network. Networks portray modes of existence where being ?entangled, mediated, connected, interdependent, intertwined? means that the categories of 58 subject and object, self and other, signifier and signified, reason and passion, are re-paired into one vibrant whole (Felski 146, 187). Extending her rhetoric to embrace the role of utility in humanistic thought, Felski suggests that post-critique can stand against political dissent by enunciating the network of friends, allies, disciples, attachments and receptive hosts to which the artwork belongs (166). Post-criticism, Felski argues, highlights the ?re? prefix and ?its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception,? abandoning critique?s focus on the ?de? prefix and its ?power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize? (17). In this manner, post-critique can justify the ?larger political payoff of critique,? making critique useful at a time when the value of the humanities is under constant attack (Felski 143). The function of post-critique then is reparative, aspiring to recuperate the political, aesthetic and market value of critical thought shifting it towards a positivist vision for the humanities that reconfigures ?the uses of literature in everyday life? and portrays publicly persuasive rationales ?why literature, and the study of literature, matter? today (Felski 191). The purpose of post-critical reading is not to ?add fresh ruins to fields of ruins,? to appropriate the words of Bruno Latour, but to underscore what Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski call the ?creative, innovative, world-making aspects of literature and criticism? (225; 20). Post-critique wants to rebuild from the ruins of old, suspicious, and useless forms of critical thinking a new world where the worth of texts, of humanistic thought, and of critique itself is revalued. Post-critique?s stand on repair is a continuation rather than a radical break from previous reading practices. Despite their profound methodological differences, most dominant critical methodologies since the 1950s propose some form of restoration and re-pair that tries to ameliorate?but also to bring together and unite as if in a pair?different elements of a shattered 59 social reality. Restorative thought does not always aspire to recreate a lost unity but can perhaps attempt to realize it for the first time. M. H. Abrams?s old humanist argument indicates, for example, that the Romantic poets in their work, and Wordsworth, the most emblematic of all, in his, try to repair the divided world around them. Romantic poetry for Abrams brings together a social reality that was split because of the ?unbounded promise? and failure of the French Revolution along with ?the turbulent emergence of the modern political, social, and industrial world? (12). Jerome J. McGann?s historical turn in Romantic Ideology invites the scholar to become an ?Enlightened mind like Diderot?s or Godwin?s or Crabbe?s,? and to recover the historical absence in Wordsworth?s poetry.7 While it opposes New Criticism, historical approaches like McGann?s, which bring together a Marxist cultural analysis with historical excavation, become, eventually, another form of repair, re-placing the violence of history, that has remained masked, obfuscated or oblique inside the literary text by putting it in the forefront of critical discourses. This is, in Thomas Pfau?s words, also a re-pairing of ?meaning as reference?viz. as strictly restating or referring to antecedent (putatively hidden) meaning? (977). When the scholar re-states the absent meaning of history, setting in place what Marjorie Levinson calls ?a theory of negative allegory,? the scholar brings together in a pair the signified of history with the ?absented signifier? that ideology has obfuscated or omitted all together (8, 9). This rhetoric of repair replicates, while arguing against, Abrams?s bourgeois humanism. David Simpson, in his more recent Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern, 7 While McGann argues that Wordsworth?s poetry in poems like The Ruined Cottage is a displacement of both history and Enlightenment thought, Marilyn Butler asserts in Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries that the poems in the Ballads are ?[t]rue to the humanist sympathy of classicism? (59). Despite their ?spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,? Butler calls attention to Wordsworth?s emphasis in the 1802 Preface that in order to produce those poems the poet ?had also thought long and deeply? (Wordsworth, ?Preface? 98). She concludes that the use of ?intellect and moral sense? and ?rational thought? in the Ballads makes Wordsworth a true son of the Enlightenment (60). 60 effectively refutes romantic ideology as the term that must apply unequivocally to all of Wordsworth?s work, indicating on the other hand that Wordsworth ?had a profound poetic understanding of the condition of England around 1800, specifically of its evolution into a culture governed by industrial time, machine-driven labor and commodity form? (4). Despite Simpson?s far-reaching implications, his analysis does not successfully counter the methodological hegemony of historically reparative positivism that McGann and Levinson demonstrate.8 Simpson retains the notion of history as an hors-texte, a transcendental signifier that restores the meaning in Wordsworth?s work, with restoration resulting in the revaluation of this body of literature by resituating it in the historical context of modernity. Simpson approaches the annihilated figures of the Ballads and of the Prelude as an example of ?bare life? or ?death-in-life? that is ?historically generated? by modern times (3). Reparative approaches to reading do not end with restituting texts and contexts. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, uncovering systemic violence through historical and theoretical investigation does not absolutely preclude that the scholar does something about it. Critiquing an interpretative practice that, in her view, monopolizes the academy, Sedgwick argues that criticism manifests a ?terrible alertness? to the ?dangers? of ?systemic oppression,? which does not ?intrinsically or necessarily enjoin? those who practice it ?to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences? (Touching Feeling 128, 127). She dubs this form of interpretation ?paranoid reading,? calling then for establishing scholarly methodologies that read not simply with the aim to uncover violence but most importantly with the intent to repair. Her work argues for putting the knowledge of oppression to use?a shift from contemplation to action?through a reading that assembles what 8 Jacques Khalip critiques this hegemony of historically reparative positivism by pointing out that ?[f]or McGann, each poem is the record of a person?that has been left behind as a result of the onslaught of the romantic ideology? (10). He argues that historicism tries to recuperate the ?perpetual disavowal and irresistible loss? that allegedly results from the romantic ideology through ?a holistic union of text with history (12). 61 is shattered, broken, or in pieces ?into something like a whole? (Touching Feeling 124, 128). It seems that what this wide variety of scholarly practices have in common is the implicit or explicit goal to repair. In this sense, post-critique, despite its attempt to establish a radical break from old forms of criticism, reproduces the same reparative ideology that has dominated our interpretative practices for more than half a century. To the contrary, Wordsworth and Coleridge?s poetry indicates that in certain cases repair can be more catastrophic than disaster. II. Survival as Absolute Disaster in ?Simon Lee.? ?Simon Lee,? a story about an old, infirm hunter who hardly survives by farming small scraps of land, is paradigmatic in both form and content of the survival narrative?s resistance to restoration in the Lyrical Ballads. The fate of Simon Lee is an absolute catastrophe that stays unexplained throughout the poem, pointing towards its accidental nature which leads disaster to remain unknown, to be unknowable and thus irreparable.9 The narrative first highlights the demise of the master of Ivor and then the desertion of the hall of Ivor. Contrasting Simon Lee to the surrounding calamity, the narrator points out in the third stanza that ?[m]en, dogs, and horses,? all part of the social reality of Ivor Hall, are ?dead? and ?[h]e is the sole survivor,? neglecting at this point to mention his wife Ruth (?Simon ll. 23-24). Appearing initially to contrast Simon Lee?s life with the dead sociohistorical formation to which he belonged (Ivor Hall), upon closer inspection the last two lines of the third stanza emphasize that Simon Lee?s survival is disaster?s most clear articulation. The hunter remains entrapped in a deceased world unable to move forward to new beginnings or backwards toward death. In the poem the 9 Even though the poem mentions the social reality of the enclosures, Simon Lee does not belong to the propertyless poor that resulted from the Enclosure Acts of the 18th century, since, according to the narrator, the hunter has managed to enclose a ?scrap of land? when ?he was stronger? but he is physically unable to work on it which leads to his endless suffering (?Simon? l. 62, l. 61). 62 catastrophe is that everyone and everything around the hunter has been destroyed and yet he somehow endures unwillingly, in this decrepit physical state, ?lean? and ?sick? (?Simon? l. 33). Simon Lee has ?swoln and thick? ?ancles? and a ?half awry? little body that make it possible for him to work but impossible to work his way out of his extreme poverty (?Simon? l. 35, l. 34). In this context, the hunter?s declaration that Simon Lee has ?in store? only ?[f]ew months of life? sounds more like wishful thinking, revealing his hope that his suffering might end soon (?Simon l. 65). Simon Lee, however, is trapped in a life where, while working in the fields and growing crops, he is producing just enough to keep himself and his wife from dying. Further indicative of his irrecuperable disaster is his effort to sever a ?stump of rotten wood? late in the poem (l. 84). Simon Lee tries to cut an old tree but the ?mattock? totters in his hand and his endeavor becomes so vain that he ?might have worked forever? (?Simon? l. 85). The trembling inside of the hunter?s hand does not actualize into a progressive movement and cannot become the harbinger of change. It signifies a limited back-and-forth, that cancels itself out, trapping him in an endless cutting. This incident may very well point towards the hunter?s desire to cut himself off from the realm of suffering and loss he inhabits. Pfau asserts that ?Simon Lee resembles the ?stump of rotten wood? and ?tangled root? (ll. 84, 94) whose pointless tenacity in the landscape the narrator addresses? (Wordsworth?s Profession 217). Following this line of analysis, Simon Lee tries to cut the old root because he wants to uproot himself from the world of the living. At this juncture in the poem the narrator intervenes, taking Simon?s tool and with ?a single blow? severing ?the tangled root.? This brings tears to the hunter?s eyes which, the narrator assumes, are tears of gratitude (?Simon? l. 93, l. 94). ?Thanks and praises seemed to run? out of Simon Lee?s heart, apparently to thank him for his help (?Simon? l. 97). If, as we have seen, the hunter is trying, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to sever himself from his unending 63 survival, I am arguing that his tears come not from gratitude towards his ?helper,? but rather from his understanding that no one can help him end his terrible fate. Simon Lee?s disastrous survival materializes formally and thematically in the survival narrative, mediated by the narrator who, in recounting the hunter?s story, becomes an ?intellectual witness? in Hartman?s parole, incorporating Simon Lee?s catastrophe in the structure of his poem. ?Simon Lee? introduces the protagonist and then contrasts his sorrowful present with his glorious past, creating the impression of change and evolution. The first eight stanzas put in place a structure of ?then? and ?now?: Simon Lee ?once was tall,? ?could outrun? all the country to the point that he ?[c]ould leave both man and horse behind,? and did not have to work in the fields because he was a huntsman and not a farmer (?Simon? l. 4, ll. 41-42, ll. 37- 38). Now, the years upon his back have shrunk him; ?[h]is legs are thin and dry,? he is ?the weakest in the village? and ?the poorest of the poor? (?Simon? l.40, l. 60). Even if at times his heart momentarily rejoices from hearing his hounds bark, this fleeting joy is more the result of nostalgia for the glorious times of Ivor Hall than a reparative moment that re-establishes a long- lost bliss. The contrast of past and present creates the expectation that when the ?incident? mentioned in the title happens, it will bring change to the characters. Placed at the end of the story, this ?incident? promises to achieve a climax, indicating a peripeteia of sorts that will conclude with anagnorisis, a moment of critical discovery. Anagnorisis, the poem?s structure insinuates, will alter profoundly both the story?s characters and readers. In ?Simon Lee? no critical discovery ever appears. The poem at first sheds light on the hunter?s past condition and then moves into a mystification of his current situation, since neither Simon Lee nor the narrator know the cause of the annihilation of the hunter?s world. The ?incident? at the end of the poem does not lead to a climax either. The narrator, after putting in 64 place a ?then? and ?now? structure, addresses the reader in the tenth stanza, diminishing the expectations she has concerning the ?incident? in the poem. In the tenth stanza, the narrator indicates that his story is ?no tale? and only the reader can transform it into one, ?[p]erhaps? (?Simon? l. 79, l. 80). When the narrator tells us that his story is ?no tale,? he points out that it lacks the development and closure that the first nine stanzas have been pointing towards. The incident that follows, the narrator seems to say, does not relate to the first part of the poem and this lack of climax does not transform the poem into a tale. The narrator then describes the incident where Simon Lee seems unable to cut the old root and the narrator helps him to sever it with one single blow. The hunter seems to express his ?thanks and praises? and then the narrator concludes with four lines that are separated with a dash from the rest of the poem. These contemplate the nature of gratitude, indicating that gratitude has more often than not caused the narrator to mourn (?Simon? l. 98). The survival narrative in ?Simon Lee? makes its appearance as the interruption that takes place when the narrator addresses the reader directly, breaking the poem in half. The apostrophe shatters the coherence of the story the moment it declares that the poem is inconsequent with various of its parts not relating causally to each other. At first, the apostrophe resembles a short parenthesis that suspends the building up of the plot. Then, the narrator abandons the contrast of ?then? and ?now,? focusing instead on the incident that the title of the poem foreshadows. The incident brings ?no tale,? that is, no climax, peripeteia, conclusion or end, resisting an Aristotelian definition of plot and emptying the first nine stanzas from narrative development (?Simon? l. 80; 133). These stanzas then linger in the poem as the ruin of what Simon once was, without providing any knowledge about his current situation and without portraying any causal 65 relation between his past and his catastrophic present. Being cut off from the rest of the poem, these stanzas shatter the narrative into several pieces that do not relate to one another. Disintegration also appears in the poem?s form, between the ?balladlike first part,? that precedes the apostrophe, and the ?lyriclike second part,? that follows and describes the incident (McGrath 78). The de-structuring of the poem in three distinct parts, the ?balladlike part,? the apostrophe to the reader, and the ?lyriclike part,? is an element of the survival narrative that manifests itself as lyric inconsequence, i.e., as the inconsequence of the lyric genre. Dissonance transforms the poem?s dismembered parts into what Fran?ois calls ?narrative waste,? narratives where ?event x? is not ?a cause for subsequent event y? (21). The lack of coherence comes into view once again in the lyric-like section of the poem. This section comprises two parts, the narration of the incident and the four final lines of the poem that appear to be the narrator?s contemplation on what he has just described. When he severs the old root to help Simon Lee, the hunter starts crying, murmuring at the same time something that the narrator interprets as ?thanks and praises? (?Simon? 97). The narrator thinks that this is Simon Lee?s expression of gratitude, which leads him to conclude that it is ?the gratitude of men? that has ?oftner left [him] mourning? (?Simon? ll. 103-104). The narrator mourns for the excess of gratitude, the ?thanks and praises? of the hunter that ?never would have done,? not for its lack, indicating that mourning does not originate from loss and problematizing in this way the semantic relation the last four lines have with the incident (?Simon? l. 98, l. 100). Some readers assume that there is a connection between the poem and its conclusion because in the last four lines the narrator discusses the notion of gratitude due to Simon Lee?s ?thanks and praises? (?Simon? l. 98). This reading suggests that there is a causal relation between the incident and the poem?s ending by confirming, rejecting or 66 simply questioning ?the ability of the poet-narrator to respond appropriately to one in need? (McGrath 78). However, this approach disregards the warning the poem incorporates, namely that silent thought can perhaps transform this poem into a tale by reading the last lines as a conclusion. Wordsworth?s narrator does not encourage us to read his poem as a tale; he simply informs us that if we manage to read ?Simon Lee? as a coherent narrative that concludes with a moral or with a call to action, this is something of our own making as readers, not an element his story incorporates, remaining skeptical if such a reading is even possible in the first place, as his use of ?perhaps? attests. The dash that separates the finale from the rest of the incident contributes to the dissonance of the lyric-like part, indicating that these last four lines may well be recollections or contemplations in tranquility, and not a closure that transforms the poem into a tale. Contributing to the narrative dissonance of the poem, the dash is an element of disaster that appears, in Blanchot?s parole, as a ?stress upon the minutiae? which ?escapes the very possibility of experience,? justifying why scholars have disregarded its disruptive function and have tried instead to argue for the poem?s narrative unity (The Writing 3, 7). The fragments that linger in the poem become, in Blanchot?s parlance, ?incommensurate with pleasure? and ?with joy? because ?Simon Lee? creates, to appropriate Alexander Freer?s reading of Wordsworth?s poems, especially those that appear in the Ballads, ?narrative difficulty, frustration, and disappointment,? breaking the expectations the structure of ?Simon Lee? has already set forward (The Writing 42; Freer 1134). The dissatisfaction that the poem causes results from the radically disjointed narrative structure that creates a story out of multiple, unconnected pieces, a narrative that also appears in a less-studied Wordsworth poem from the same collection, ?The Last of the Flock.? 67 III. The Unending Disaster in ?The Last of the Flock.? The presence of the survival narrative in ?The Last of the Flock,? a poem about a shepherd losing all but one of his sheep, stands as evidence that this story also incorporates a disaster that cannot be ameliorated. In this poem the survival narrative takes the form of the interminable repetition of irrecuperable loss whose causes are unknown, portraying another facet of this formation in the Ballads. The narrator of ?The Last of the Flock,? discusses in the first sixteen lines how he meets a shepherd, at one point asking him what ails him. The shepherd tells his story in his own voice, which in the poem appears in quotation marks, portraying how in his youth he decided to acquire one ewe which gave birth to more sheep, leading to a flock of fifty. This acquisition highlights a moment of change in the shepherd?s life that creates a ?before? and an ?after? in his narrative. The acquisition of the ewe transitions the shepherd from a state characterized by his ?youthful follies? to one of maturity that he associates with plenitude and happiness in relation to his flock and family (?The Last? l.22). The shepherd mentions that when he decided to buy his ewe ?little [was] given to care and thought,? indicating that the change that resulted and led to his bliss happened accidentally, out of pure chance. The transition in the shepherd?s recount of his story between a state where he is sheep- less and child-less to one where he has a flock and a family obfuscates that, in his case, both states are equally disastrous. The shepherd implies in his version of the events that before disaster hit him, he had achieved a pre-catastrophic state of wholesome bliss undergoing a peripeteia that made him ?rich? as much as he ?could wish to be? (?The Last? ll. 28-29). His plenitude, however, results from a series of choices that are arbitrary and start with the thoughtless purchase of the ewe and culminate in the shepherd?s marriage and his ten children. The surplus of wealth sets in place the conditions for the shepherd?s unending demise, since the 68 more he accumulates, the more he will lose, experiencing it melting slowly away while he dwells in disaster. In contrast to Simon Lee, the shepherd is rich enough and healthy enough to go through the unstoppable hemorrhaging of blood-drops dripping from his heart in a disaster that has no end, with the rhythmic repetition of ?[f]or me it was a woeful day? promising that the shepherd?s story does not conclude with the obliteration of his flock, as the printed version in the Ballads does. Instead, the structure of the poem creates the impression that the annihilation of his flock seems as if it is going to be followed by that of his children, each vanishing like ?blood- drops? from a vein that never stops. The survival narrative in ?The Last of the Flock? appears as the interminable repetition of a disaster that fails to conclude, making the shepherd unable to move forward or backward, similar to Simon Lee. Paralysis penetrates the shepherd?s story spreading its ceaseless recurrence and leading the poem to a lack of development that is enunciated by the motion and stillness of the phrase ?[a]nother still! and still another!? (?The Last? l.60, 61). The pronoun ?another? figuratively establishes the successive loss of his sheep, with its repetition foregrounding a form of motion that the appearance of ?still? arrests. The narrative creates the impression that despite the passing of many days the same ?woeful? day appears as if the shepherd is reliving it in perpetuity (?The Last? l.60). This irreparable woe underscores the unstoppable return of disaster creating a ?lateral rather than linear progress? in the narrative, an ?undifferentiated continuum,? in Fran?ois?s words, that makes the failure of narrative incompletion definitive (160, 158). In a similar manner to the shepherd?s survival, the survival narrative in ?The Last of the Flock? remains unable to move forward or backward, portraying ?a failure of ends? in its inability to bring closure to disaster (Guyer 13). 69 The accidental acquisition of wealth on the part of the shepherd along with his demise deprives the reader of any elements that could lead to a historical or philosophical understanding of his situation. The narrator at first mentions that he has been in ?distant countries,? which may gesture towards ?the great national events which [were] daily taking place? during Wordsworth?s time and had to do with the backlash of the French Revolution, the Age of Terror, and the fear of a French invasion (?The Last? l. 1, ?Preface?). This reference though is resistant to any historical grounding. The fact that the narrator has travelled in faraway lands does not necessarily indicate that he has visited Revolutionary France, which is not that distant from England after all, or even that the poem takes place at the end of the eighteenth century. A comparison of the shepherd?s sorrow with the loss that a traveler would have experienced in France with its ?lamentable crimes? and its ?ephemeral monsters? that ?could only show themselves and die,? as Book X of the 1805 Prelude indicates, ultimately falls short (l. 31, ll. 36-37). The disaster in the ?The Last of the Flock? cannot be interpreted through a historical reading, old or new. A philosophical reading of the poem that approaches the shepherd?s annihilation through causality and reason, or tries, through the dialectic, to create some valuable meaning out of his demise, also leads to a dead end. The shepherd?s disaster does not provide the reader with a cause and does not allow itself to be interpreted as an effect, resisting in this manner any attempt to repair it, in contrast to other poems in the Ballads of 1798 and 1800, such as ?Michael,? ?The Female Vagrant,? ?Old Man Travelling,? and ?The Old Cumberland Beggar.? Pfau, for example, points out that ?Michael: A Pastoral Poem,? which appears in the 1800 edition of the Ballads and addresses the demise of another shepherd, is ?affiliated with the intricate and hazardous urban world of manufacture, trade, and credit-based speculation,? despite the inclusion of such pre-historical sites, as its hidden valley and its archetypical streams (Romantic Moods 196). In Wordsworth?s 70 ?Michael,? Luke gives himself to the ?dissolute city,? which echoes ?the encreasing accumulation of men in cities? that Wordsworth mentions in his 1802 Preface to the Ballads (?Michael? l. 454, ?Preface? 99). This, among other historical indications, suggests, according to Pfau, that ?some kind of [historical] awakening is imminent? in ?Michael? (Romantic Moods 193). In a similar manner, ?The Female Vagrant? situates the sorrowful survival of its narrator along the historical context of Britain?s imperial warfare, portraying the slow violence of industrialization that manifests itself in the poem through the ?polluted air? that causes fever, while the story?s material scarcity results from the unending war of the time that leads to hunger (?The Female Vagrant? l. 104). Moreover, in the 1798 version of ?Old Man Travelling,? the old man?s son is described as a mariner injured in a ?sea-fight,? making visible the historical origins of the catastrophe it portrays. To bring in yet another example from the Ballads, in the story of ?The Old Cumberland Beggar? from the 1800 edition, the protagonist does not experience an endless catastrophe per se, but he is described as an indispensable element of a natural, rural community threated by modern times that will inevitably cause him and other members of his class to perish, as the tone of the poem suggests (?Old Cumberland Beggar? 19). This poem intimates a historical disaster-to-come. The survival narrative, as it appears in ?Simon Lee? and ?The Last of the Flock,? exceeds the limits of repair through its discord, fragmentation, recurrence and stagnation, depriving the reader of the ability to understand it as a historical, philosophical or moral resource. The knowledge of disaster in these poems is not an absent element that one can recover, a story, or a history, that one can reconstruct, but a radical loss that can never be recuperated. The thought of acting on behalf of Simon Lee or the shepherd is an attempt to fix something that is ultimately unknown and for this reason irrecoverable and irreparable. 71 The idea of improving upon catastrophe when recovery and restoration are utterly impossible is what I call disastrous thinking. ?Simon Lee? and ?The Last of the Flock? portray that catastrophe spreads from the survivor to the poems? narrator, spilling then into the poem. Disaster makes an outward motion from the hunter and the shepherd to the person who considers helping them, making her think that she can recuperate catastrophe. It appears that when disastrous thinking encounters catastrophe, it shies away by turning itself towards future reparative action and attempting to improve what is ruined, following what Fran?ois calls ?the Enlightenment imperative that we act in light of what we know? (135). In this context, repair is action that re-covers disaster with silence, becoming a more profound calamity than what it tried to fix, speaking through us ?by [our] forgetfulness? of catastrophe (Blanchot, The Writing 4). It displaces violence from memory by shifting our focus to recuperation, refusing to tarry with catastrophe interminably to acknowledge it in its fullness. In this manner, the ideological dominance repair instigates comprises another form of Lauren Berlant?s cruel optimism. Even though repair, to appropriate Berlant, is not ?inherently cruel,? the belief that every form of disaster is reparable and amenable depicts an optimism that ?actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially,? which in this case translates into remembering catastrophe and avoiding it in the future (1). The ideological practice of disastrous thinking leads to what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno call a state of ?ever deeper blindness,? where, to appropriate Horkheimer and Adorno?s jargon, only the ?calculability and utility? of what has been ameliorated has value and where the theoretical imagination that can allow us to think beyond repair is slowly suffocating (The Dialectic of Enlightenment xvii). Opening the 1798 edition of the Ballads, Coleridge?s ?The Rime? provides a paradigm of existing beyond 72 restoration, foregrounding and complementing our understanding of catastrophe in Wordsworth?s poems. IV. The Resistance of Active Passivity in Samuel Taylor Coleridge?s ?The Rime.? ?The Rime? of 1798 moves the discord of the survival narrative one step further, proposing the ?active passivity? of non-repair as an ethical manner of existing. Anne Dufourmantelle uses the term ?active passivity? to characterize the life-altering power of gentleness that she associates, among others, with the transformation an embryo undergoes to become a baby (6). In this chapter active passivity indicates the forcefulness of being static, standing against the concept of transformation that in many cases goes hand in hand with transvaluation and repair, while at the same time witnessing, acknowledging and recording disaster. In Coleridge?s poem, the active passivity of the survival narrative is placed in the forefront. The poem?s foreword includes a short ?Argument? that describes the sequence of events in the story but does not employ any causal or temporal linkers in its syntactical structure, such as ?since,? ?when,? etc. The ?Argument? describes ?How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by Storms to the Cold country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country? (?The Rime;? emphasis added). The stress in the ?Argument? is not placed on why the ship was driven by the storms or when she made its course to the tropical latitude, with ?thence? and ?back? denoting a spatial rather than a temporal change presenting a parataxis of events that bear no relation to each other. The ?Argument? establishes ?a lateral rather than a linear progress,? shattering any sense of causality and refusing even to substitute it with a linear temporal structure (Fran?ois 160). Preceding the poem, the ?Argument? suggests that ?The Rime? is a shattered story that expands 73 as a set of unrelated incidents, what Orrin N. C. Wang calls ?a code without a message? (?Technomagism? 303).10 The Mariner?s narrative mirrors the structure of the ?Argument,?11 with extreme weather conditions appearing before the killing of the albatross, indicating that the albatross does not determine the poem?s plot, despite the mariner?s belief.12 As soon as ?[t]he Ship was cheer?d? and ?the Harbour clear?d,? ?Storm and Wind,? ?Tempest,? ?Mist and Snow? seize the Mariner?s ship, with devastating results (?The Rime? l. 25, l.45, l. 46, l. 49). The ?Ice? is as high as the ship?s mast, acquiring an emerald green color and creating a scene of arctic waste all around it, where ?[n]e shapes of men? or beasts are visible and where the never-ending white of the ice becomes omnipotent (?The Rime? ll. 51-52, ll. 55-56). The arrival and subsequent killing of the bird is an arbitrary event that does not shatter a pre-catastrophic unified whole and does not relate philosophically, morally, or even metaphysically to the misfortune that the ship?s crew has 10 In his essay ?Technomagism, Coleridge?s Mariner, and the Sentence Image,? Wang employs Ranci?re?s notion of symbolic montage to read the poem?s shattered narrative. Wang focuses on the 1817 version of the poem that includes the addition of the gloss. He indicates that the meaning in Mariner comes through the parataxis of ?disparate semes? that ?are juxtaposed together? but through their sequence on the page, they create meaning (296). ?Technomagism? is the name that Wang gives to this process that makes something out of ?nothing at all? (292). The gloss, Wang asserts, which repeats and underscores the poem?s discontinuity, is a medium through which we come face to face with the ?nonhuman, inhuman, nonhome? of the world around us. 11 Robert Southey first critiqued the poem?s plot as ?absurd or unintelligible? in his review of the Ballads in October 1798 (53). 12 This reading opposes that of several scholars who also enunciate the poem?s erratic elements, but nevertheless argue that the albatross is pivotal for the development of the story. Raimonda Modiano, for example, asserts that while the Mariner?s experience is ?formless, incomprehensible, and unbearable,? language helps him create a ?structured narrative with a beginning, climax, ending-and a moral lesson as well? (43). The killing of the albatross is important for Modiano since this is the moment that the Mariner loses his ability to speak (43). More recently, Pfau maintains that while the appearance of the dash in the structure of the stanza ?forecloses any causal explanation,? it is the killing of the albatross that signifies the poem?s preoccupation with an experimental modernity that can lead, in Pfau?s interpretation of Coleridge?s poem, in an ?unhinged, radically contingent cosmos? (?The Philosophy? 987). For Pfau, ?the killing of the albatross launches the ship of modernity on its journey into what the likewise seafaring young Wordsworth recalls as ?unknown modes of being?? (?The Philosophy? 983). My analysis is more in agreement with William Empson?s reading which came as a response to Robert Penn Warren?s ?A Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment in Reading.? There Empson argues that there is no moral causality in the poem since what follows the killing of the albatross are mere ?accidents? and not ?punishments calculated by God? (159). 74 been experiencing ?[f]or days and weeks? before the bird emerged (?The Rime? l. 47). While there may be a cause for the ship?s fate, the text makes it unavailable. In ?The Rime? the killing of the albatross is not immediately followed by a series of calamitous events, signaling that these are not related to the appearance or disappearance of the bird. When the Mariner slays the albatross, ?the good south wind? still blows behind the ship and benevolent weather continues uninterrupted until it suddenly stops (?The Rime? l. 85). The weather shift takes place between the sixth and the seventh stanza of the second part of the Mariner?s narrative, drawing attention to the poem?s fragmentation. In the sixth stanza, the breezes blow and the white foam flows behind the ship, while in the seventh stanza both the breeze and the sails drop down without the reader or the narrator knowing why (?The Rime? l. 99, l. 103). What causes this radical weather change is irrevocably lost in the white empty space that separates the two stanzas on the printed page, indicating that the misadventure of the ship is yet another catastrophe with unknown and unknowable origins. Desistance pollutes the Mariner?s story despite his attempt to retrofit the killing of the albatross with a clear, grounded meaning. He believes that he has done a ?hellish thing? when he killed ?the Bird/ [t]hat brought the fog and mist? and his comrades think so as well when, instead of the cross, around his neck they hung the albatross? (?The Rime? l. 89, ll. 95-96, l. 138). The advent of the ghost-ship that carries the two devilish figures, Death and Life-in-Death, who play dice for the crew?s fate, shatters once and for all any causality the Mariner has tried to instigate. Refuting any attempt to read the poem through its religious imagery, the game of dice confirms that the fate of the crew is also a catastrophic accident characterized by an ?arbitrary discontinuity? rather than a ?causal connection between events? (Wang, ?Technomagism? 300). 75 While the survival narrative in ?The Rime? resembles that of ?Simon Lee,? Coleridge?s work distinguishes itself from Wordsworth?s by proposing active passivity as resistance to unity and repair. The Mariner, after his survival, feels compelled to spread infrequently, ?at an uncertain hour,? with his ?strange power of speech,? his tale of ?ghastly aventure? (?The Rime? l. 615, l. 620, l. 618). He finds people, just like the wedding guest, whom he, somehow, knows must hear him. The Mariner?s ?hypnotic power? stops the wedding guest from experiencing the wedding communion, which is a re-pairing of sorts, the bringing together of a pair of individuals that renews the social world through the restitution of a lost unity (Wang, ?Technomagism? 294). Kathryn Walls argues that the Mariner drives ?a wedge between church attendance (and thus, implicitly, communion) and the wedding feast which (on the authority of Christ) was a figure of the eternal communion of the redeemed? (57). Following Walls?s suggestion to read the wedding ceremony figuratively, the Mariner?s story initiates a passivity that actively opposes notions of communion, community and restoration which the wedding ceremony carries. Active passivity in ?The Rime? also takes the form of nonproductive stillness that both characters and readers of the poem experience. The Mariner physically grabs and does not let go of the wedding guest who ?cannot chuse but hear? what his assailant has to say (?The Rime? l. 22). Stillness appears through the repetition of ?hold? and ?still? in the first lines of stanza three to stanza five, re-emerging once more when the Mariner is rescued by the Pilot and the Hermit. After the Mariner boards the Pilot?s boat and the survivor?s ship disappears in a whirl, the Mariner?s presence seems to impose stillness on everything else around him (l. 591). Also, after Mariner, Pilot and Hermit reach the land, the Hermit appears the first human paralyzed by the Mariner?s presence, being scarcely able to stand (?The Rime? l. 604, l. 606). Thus, even before the Mariner starts the unremitting repetition of his tale, which the Hermit hears first, the 76 Mariner?s appearance foreshadows the arresting effect his narrative will have to his audience. When the wedding guest hears the Mariner?s story, its immobility changes the guest?s attitude towards repair since the latter ?[t]urned from the bridegroom?s door,? actively deciding not to attend the ceremony (?The Rime? l. 654). After the tale concludes, the wedding guest does not think of restoring the Mariner who, as with the other figures in this study, wanders around compulsively, unable to move forward or backward. The Mariner?s story stupefies the wedding guest, bringing a slumber of thought that puts repair to sleep, making the guest ?a sadder and a wiser man,? sadder because he realizes that recovery is not an appropriate response in this case, and wiser, because the guest now knows that it is more suitable sometimes to leave ruins ruined and remains to remain (?The Rime? l. 657). Wordsworth?s disagreement with the language and style of ?The Rime? of 1798 asserts that Coleridge?s survival narrative manages to shatter the coherency of the Ballads, creating a collection of poems that is characterized by discord. McGann in The Beauty of Inflections quotes Wordsworth who calls Coleridge?s poem ?an injury to the volume,? claiming that ?the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on? with the rest of the poems (qtd. in McGann 136).13 Wordsworth expresses an anxiety over the market success of the Ballads of 1798, one that Coleridge?s poem jeopardizes. The undefined ?strangeness? that Wordsworth 13 As the 1800 and 1802 editions of the Ballads show us, the poem was not replaced but had its title and vocabulary altered along with its ?Argument.? The ?Argument? of 1800 changes from one that emphasizes incoherency and lack of causality to one that tries to justify morally the course of events that follow the killing of the albatross. The narrative voice of the unknown editor that composes the ?Argument? of the 1800 version of ?The Rime? asserts that ?the Ancient Mariner cruelly, and in contempt of the laws of hospitality, killed a Sea-bird? and that ?he was followed by many and strange Judgements? (?The Ancient Mariner. A Poet?s Reverie? 9). As J. C. C. Mays points out, the original argument ?is replaced by a moral story that tells of crime, punishment, and partial redemption,? one that, I argue, tries to repair the poem?s fragmented meaning as well as to re-pair the poem with the rest of the Ballads (124). At the same time though, the editorial changes in the 1800 version of the poem initiate a reparative form of editing that culminates with the addition of the gloss in the 1817 version of the poem that was included in Coleridge?s Sibylline Leaves. While the 1817 gloss makes an attempt to create a narrative spine for the Mariner?s story, it finally portrays even more emphatically than before the poem?s narrative desistance. The gloss?s coherence opposes that the poem?s fragmentation, making the latter more visible than it was before. 77 quotes, which is separate from Coleridge?s archaic vocabulary choices, can very well be pointing at the narrative structure of the poem, supporting my argument that ?The Rime? is a prime example of both the survival narrative and the resistance against repair that follows in this narrative?s wake. Wordsworth fears that opening the collection with Coleridge?s piece forces the reader to reach an unproductive stillness failing to proceed to the other poems in the volume. This is the stillness the survival narrative inflicts on thought, that ?The Rime? turns into a paradigmatic form of thinking and being. The narrative inconsistency of the Ballads of 1798 is another example of active passivity where the entire poem holds the reader still not letting her go and eventually forcing her to avoid reading the collection. Opening the Ballads of 1798 with ?The Rime? signals the reader to embrace nonproductive stillness and to accept the ruined ontology of the collection, putting the disastrous thought of repair to sleep. The fragmented narrative of ?The Rime? and the poem?s shattering of narrative coherency in the volume allows other dismembered narratives in this collection to come to light. After experiencing the desistance in Coleridge?s poem, the reader discerns ?Simon Lee?s? disjointed story, the ?The Last of the Flock?s? interminable repetition of suffering, or even the survival narrative of the little girl in ?We are Seven,? who does not understand that disaster has fallen upon her family and deprived her of loss. Opening with ?The Rime,? the 1798 edition of the Ballads re-shapes our understanding of the collection by forcefully enunciating a non- expansive but critical constellation of ruined narratives. Standing opposed to recuperation, Coleridge?s ?The Rime? supports the right of the ruin and of the ruined to exist damaged and in fragments, allowing other aspects of the theoretical imagination to thrive that do not follow the Enlightenment imperative to know and act accordingly, or the religious imperative for repentance and atonement, in a manner that produces 78 tangible, calculable results. The Mariner?s tale underlines an actively passive manner of being one that respects what is dissonant, discordant, and inconsequent, and accepts the right of humans, nonhuman beings, and things to remain still and to resist dominant discourses on progress and growth. Active passivity, then, is neither the political practice of what William Keach calls ?transvaluation,? the preservation of ruins for the reason that they constitute ?objects of positive aesthetic and ideological value,? nor of monumentalization, with its adjacent notions of nostalgia and ideological mystification, which UNESCO?s cultural heritage projects point us towards (?The Ruins of Empire;? Stoler 14). Being actively passive, as the case of the Mariner portrays, means staying indifferent to recuperation even when the latter takes the form of innovation and epistemic advantage that bridges ?past and future in distinctive and sometimes surprising ways? in a world that, according to Steven J. Jackson, ?is always breaking? and it is ?in its nature to break? (223). A radical, emphatic idleness that resides outside the dialectic between activity and passivity, active passivity is characterized by what Blanchot calls ?patience? in The Space of Literature, a way of operating ?which assign[s] us no goal we can steadfastly pursue? (The Space, 127). Patience requires an immense effort on our part that differs from the ?purposeful activity that makes us possessors and producers, concerned with results and avid for objects? without failing to witness disaster (Blanchot, The Space 135). Active passivity is not political quietism or an absolute resignation from political thought or action but a forceful, paralyzing immobility that prioritizes thought over thoughtless action. It stands against the imperative to repair with its emphasis on functionality, productivity, and marketability, at least in the manner they appear under capitalism. The resistance of active passivity takes the form of a ?stationary blast,? to use Wordsworth?s phrase, an immovable and unspectacular resistance to Enlightenment forms of thinking and being (The 1805 Prelude, VI. 79 558). In this manner, following Fran?ois, active passivity avoids putting in place a ?public performance? while also evades acting in ?the economic sense of materialization or productivity? (xv). The poems this chapter studies, however, indicate that active passivity is not ?inconsequential,? and it does not appear as ?accommodation to a world that promises one no return,? as Fran?ois believes (Fran?ois 3, xix). Instead, in ?Simon Lee,? ?The Last of the Flock,? and ?The Rime? active passivity appears as a paralyzing force that the current system of material and intellectual production refuses to recognize as active for the reason that it is not always concrete, quantifiable, and thus marketable. In our current sociohistorical moment, active passivity remains imperceptible not because it barely makes anything happen but for the reason that it constitutes a radically different paradigm of action that the market economy, and our institutional practices that are largely immersed in it, fail to recognize. This is how active passivity forms its resistance, by eschewing promising a better future for our children or a past that we can access and understand fully. It promises instead a non-reproducible present, that, to borrow from Edelman?s thought, stands against the fantasy of reproductive futurism and has no future, delivering a life for everyone and everything that is dismantled and non-functioning. Contrary to Felski?s call for repair and utility, the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge supports a radically more inclusive mode of being, one that we need to consider seriously as a viable option the next time we feel that repair is the only response we can provide after disaster hits. 80 Chapter 3: Surviving Emma: Living, Reading and Writing in the Return. Arguing with Frank Churchill over the location of an upcoming dance party, the ?valetudinarian? Mr. Woodhouse emphasizes that during the dance no one should open the windows to let in ?cold air upon heated bodies,? which is what ?does the mischief,? and why people get sick (Austen 234). Frank replies that he has ?often known it done [him]self? by a ?thoughtless young person,? with his use of passive voice exposing, the very moment it is concealing, that he has stepped ?behind a window-curtain? and thrown up ?a sash? in similar occasions in the past and that he might do it again ?without its been suspected? by Emma?s father (Austen 234). Amazed by the possibility of such an imprudence, and without fully understanding Frank?s intended mischief, Mr. Woodhouse declares that he lives ?out of the world? and is ?often astonished? at what he hears, moving on to other matters that pertain to the party (Austen 234). William Galperin?s work reveals the connection between realistic representations in art, and worldmaking, one that can help us understand better the multiple worlds Emma incorporates into its narrative. In his discussion of the ?period-bound phenomenology? of the panorama, Galperin informs us that, as Frederick Birnie?s etching of Barker?s 1791 London panorama shows, these singular works are comprised of multiple panels (The History 6, 8). Each panel, Galperin suggests, if taken out of the panoramic loop and studied individually, exposes ?a largely parallel world? that has been hiding in plain sight (The History 9). Applying the model of the panorama to Emma, if we read Mr. Woodhouse?s statement as only part of its panoramic loop, it strengthens our belief in the novel?s realistic representation of his frail composure, affirming James Thompson?s view that Emma?s father, self-exiled in his Hartfield manor, ?emblematizes a resistance to motion worthy of the paralytically agoraphobic? (Jane Austen 62). However, when 81 we think of Mr. Woodhouse?s statement, that he lives ?out of the world,? as a panel that we need to single out of the panoramic loop making it the center of our critical focus, we begin to inquire about the novel?s world: more specifically what are its spacio-temporal parameters, who comprises its inhabitants, who exists outside of this world, and what does living in this outside mean in Emma. This chapter focuses on cultural survival in Emma, discussing how a part of the landed gentry that has been cast off by historical movement survives in the form of human waste, residing beyond a world of progress. These wasted lives enact an interminably eventless and unproductive temporality that is always in motion, refusing persistently to be either progressive or static. During the second half of the 18th century the landed gentry, as Terry Eagleton shows in his classic treatment of Wuthering Heights in Myths of Power, forms a political and economic alliance with the up and coming industrial and commercial classes that dominate the 19th century financially, socially and culturally. Not all members of the gentry participate in this progressive movement though, resulting in the formation of what Theodor Adorno calls in Minima Moralia ?the waste products? of the historical dynamic that ?have escaped the dialectic,? meaning that they have been discarded from the forward movement of history as socially and culturally useless, residing defeated in history?s outside (151). In Austen?s novel, I argue, it is Miss Bates and Mr. Woodhouse but also Emma and Mr. Knightley that epitomize the landed aristocracy that is left out of a world undergoing a profound sociohistorical transformation. Being history?s inassimilable matter, these characters survive enjoying only minimal material and emotional fulfillment because they produce nothing. While Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse, Emma and Mr. Knightley share the same space in Highbury with Frank, Jane, the Knightleys, Robert Martin, Harriet, the Eltons and the Coles, the first group inhabits an unproductive ?residual temporality,? 82 to borrow a term from Fran?ois, surviving by continuously turning away from achieving measurable outcomes that can take the form of financial and moral improvement and sexual maturity (38). Similarly, the novel embodies a corresponding nongenerative narrative structure by continuously detouring from development and lacking resolution, rejecting any pertinent analysis of its ending. The chapter opens with an analysis of Miss Bates whom scholarship has viewed as useless and derisory. Failing to establish a coalition with the industrial and commercial classes, Miss Bates is placed outside of dialectical progress taking the place of what Adorno calls history?s ?defeated,? the class that unproductively resides outside of historical movement. Miss Bates?s chatter enacts a temporality that evokes Blanchot?s reconceptualization of Friedrich Nietzsche?s notion of the eternal return. In The Gay Science Nietzsche introduces the eternal recurrence as a temporal repetition where the same events appear in the exact same order in perpetuity. Even though his thought has been read as a cosmological hypothesis where the material world around us repeats itself as if in a loop, Blanchot interprets it as a continuous detouring from meaning and work that institutes worklessness. The chapter then moves to Mr. Woodhouse, whose unproductive motion highlights yet another aspect of the temporal squandering of the eternal return, asserting that the entire narrative of Emma, including the wedding of Miss Woodhouse with Mr. Knightley, embodies this nongenerative negativity. Developing Adorno?s thesis that historical waste resides outside of the space of the dialectic, this chapter examines how the concomitance of waste with the dialectic?s victors in the pages of Emma manifests a spatiotemporal formation similar to that of the Moebius-strip. This pure mathematical concept, that Jacques Lacan has also employed for psychoanalysis, suggests that in certain cases binary distinctions result from visual and conceptual illusions with the strip 83 exposing that what at points appears as a two-sided surface is in fact one-sided. Emma, by presenting historical movement as a Moebius-like structure, indicates that the concept of history?s progress is a fantasy since both waste and the dialectic move in a way that is recursive, not progressive. During what Emily Rohrbach calls ?the time of reading,? the novel transmits its profound unworking of narrative and history to the reader, forcing us to recognize that the only way to survive both socially and culturally is to enter the category of waste where the measurable outcomes of the dialectic fail to operate (19). This chapter, besides helping us rethink the temporalities that reside in Austen?s novels, that in turn enrich our understanding of time structures in Romanticism, informs the survival of the humanities. It maintains that writing in a manner where worklessness directs an incessant production of work, one that is not produced with a specific goal in sight and cannot to be put immediately to use, namely, one that is not created as a product that is then marketed to satisfy a specific need, our research can survive and transform through time without embracing an all-or- nothing manner of existing. In this neoliberal model one either fully participates in the discourse of progress and growth or ends up static and dead. While stasis may appear, in certain occasions, as a heroic resistance to progress, Emma portrays that stasis sometimes reaffirms progress by opposing it in a dialectic formation. Being both useless and stagnant, intellectually and methodologically, may provide one more argument to the opponents of the humanities against their survival, who can easily argue for the merits of being in motion compared to being immovable. The unremitting motion of the useless survival of the humanities can be a viable alternative to the dialectic that progress forms with stasis. Taking the form of an incessant scholarly deepening, breadthening and intellectual hybridizing, the worklessness of the 84 humanities can oppose the limited activity of neoliberalism who puts things in motion only if they bring a monetary return. I. ?Unnoticed, because Unsuspected:? The Wasted Lives of Miss Bates and Mr. Woodhouse. Miss Bates and the Defeated of History. When Harriet discloses to Emma the extraordinary possibility, according to Harriet?s understanding, of Mr. Knightley being in love with her, Miss Woodhouse is caught by surprise. Emma finds merit in the ?proof? Miss Smith presents, but she is shocked for the reason that she did not foresee this development (Austen 384). The occurrences that Harriet describes remained ?unnoticed, because unsuspected? by Emma, making one wonder what else have readers and scholars overlooked, who, guided by an unreliable narrator, as Galperin stresses, have not considered the possibility, even if in this case it remains unactualized, of a union between Mr. Knightley and Miss Smith (Austen 384).14 Miss Bates is one of the novel?s characters that from the work?s publication to more recent readings has been consistently underappreciated in criticism because of her meaningless chatter and off-putting mannerisms. The essence of Walter Scott?s frequently cited review of 1815, which calls Miss Bates ?a good-natured, vulgar, and foolish old maid,? has been reverberating through the centuries, revealing that the critical views on this Austen character have remained stagnant (69). Henry Crabb Robinson?s 1822 comment on her ?silly chattering? has become, for most scholars after Lionel Trilling, Miss Bates?s signature character trait, adopted even by feminist critic Claudia L. Johnson who mentions the character?s ?prattle,? i.e., 14 Galperin asserts that the omniscience of the narrator ?breaks down throughout the novel,? mostly because of her failure to acknowledge the Frank Churchill-Jane Fairfax marriage subplot (The Historical 180). 85 her ?excessive, undisciplined, diffuse? and ?frivolous? speech (96; 56; Equivocal Beings 200, 193). Other critics, like Adena Rosmarin, have called her monologues ?amusing,? emphasizing the innocuous aspect of what Christopher R. Miller calls ?Miss Bates?s comic loquacity? (330; 250). The term ?comic? functions as a euphemism for what Galperin identifies as her ?pathological responsiveness,? revealing that in a long interpretative tradition, readers have been laughing at, and not with, Miss Bates, mocking her through their condemnation or sympathy (The Historical 191). Approaching Miss Bates in a comic manner points at the uneasiness the critic experiences when she cannot unveil the function this character performs narratively, in the novel?s story, or historically, as the embodiment of an abstract social force. Confronted with Miss Bates?s nonsense, the critic refuses to tarry with her negativity, deciding instead to interpret it as entertainment that has nothing more to offer besides cheap laughs. These readings share, to use Susan J. Wolfson?s diction, a ?cognitive alliance? either with Emma?s response to Miss Bates at Box Hill, one of harsh contempt, or with Mr. Knightley?s, who castigates Miss Woodhouse for her ill-considered reaction, emphasizing Miss Bates?s ?harmless absurdity? (Austen 351). Miss Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley agree that Miss Bates combines in her personality ?what is good and what is ridiculous? in the most unfortunate manner, meaning that they both recognize that her nonsense chattering prevails over her kindness (Austen 351). George though believes that Miss Bates?s ?character, age, and situation? should invoke sympathy, a feeling that readers who find her ?comic? share with him, while Emma cannot stand her frivolous prattle, a view that scholars who criticize Miss Bates?s rabbling seem to adopt (Austen 351). From the characters in the novel to the readers of Emma, Miss Bates has been largely regarded as socially useless, meaningless and derisory, a form of social waste, with scholars 86 considering her exemplary of the destiny of unmarried women at Austen?s time. In the passage that introduces the character, the narrator describes her as the ?single daughter? of Mrs. Bates, ?the widow of a former vicar,? who after her husband?s death has been living under ?untoward circumstances? (Austen 22). Mr. Knightley later reminds Emma that Miss Bates ?is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and if she live to old age, must probably sunk more? (Austen 351). When the interpretative weight in these passages falls on Miss Bates being ?single,? these are directed to enunciate the theme of female survival that Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have identified as integral to Austen?s oeuvre (154). Under this light, Miss Bates underscores, maybe more evidently than any other character in the novel, the gloomy prospects of unmarried women in Austen?s time. Following an approach that strongly considers the depressing fate of women in Emma, Galperin has more recently elaborated on the barely surviving Miss Bates, indicating that the social world she inhabits is one that ?routinely claims people? like her, namely women who have been enjoying some form of social and financial security in their youth and have then remain unmarried, ?as victims,? putting them ?continually at risk? (The Historical, 183). I do not aim to contend these approaches as much as to advance them, suggesting that Miss Bates has been turned into waste because she is a woman who is at the same time one of the unseen victims of the historical change that the bourgeoisie?s ascension to power had generated, with the intersection of gender and class making her position even more vulnerable. Austen?s novels in general, and Emma in particular, depict the beginning of a social restructuring that crystallizes in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, through what Eagleton calls the transformation ?on a considerable scale? of ?traditional aristocrats? to an ?industrial bourgeoisie? (Myths, 6). Highbury demonstrates this transition through the significant presence 87 in the novel of individuals and families that belong to the industrial and commercial classes, from Mr. Weston, who makes his fortune in trade, with his brothers? help, and then acquires Randalls, to the obnoxious Miss Hawkins of Bristol, with its connotations to slave trade, who enters the village?s society as Mrs. Elton, coming from ?no name, no blood, no alliance? and showing off her barouche-landau (Austen 172). To these we need add Mr. Perry, the apothecary, Mr. Cox, ?the lawyer of Highbury? and Mr. and Mrs. Cole, a family of merchants who have been living in the village for a while but have only lately seen ?a considerable increase of means? that encouraged them to do improvements to their house (Austen 200, 194). The bourgeoisie soon takes the place as the new ruling class, that, in convergence with fragments of the old which, according to E. P. Thompson, ends up losing its cultural hegemony, establishes its ideology and, by the early 1830s, champions over the yeomanry (Eagleton Myths, 116; 165). In this process the part of the landed gentry that acquires the role of class waste results from an exclusion in history and narrative that demands further critical attention because of the radical prospects it encompasses. Eagleton?s analysis, for example, argues that change happened ?on a considerable scale,? implying that not every member of the landed aristocracy participated in the sociopolitical transformation he discusses (Myths, 6). His study does not include those few cases that did not participate in this social modification because he deems them insignificant, leading him to explain what happened predominantly, ?on a considerable scale,? as if it has occurred in an absolute manner which confirms James Marin Harding?s view that ?dialectics has never derived its universals from the entirety of the particulars? (Eagleton, Myths, 6; 61). The members of the gentry that have been excluded from the historical event are omitted from its representation, coming to be unseen, unheard and unthought. In Adorno?s critique, these ?waste products,? which during history?s progress, ?fell by the wayside,? i.e., they are temporally left 88 behind the very moment they are spatially placed, in his jargon, outside of the dialectic, share with the ?victor? the ability to transcend the historical conditions that generated them (151). Adorno?s analysis of dialectical progress and waste creates three different categories of historical existence, the victors, the vanquished, and waste that he names the ?defeated.? Adorno builds on Walter Benjamin?s thesis that ?[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,? an approach that divides history into two social groups, the victors and the vanquished. Adorno adds one more historical class that he calls the ?defeated,? which in its ?impotence? stands as ?irrelevant, eccentric? and ?derisory? (256; 151). Although the terms ?vanquished? and ?defeated? are synonymous, in Adorno?s thought they are conceptually distinct. The vanquished is the dialectic?s loser that resides inside historical movement. This social category is productive, meaning it is working for the dialectic?s victor, i.e., the ruling class, who then obliterates the social, cultural and economic contribution of the vanquished from historical narrative. According to the OED the definition of the transitive verb ?to vanquish? is ?[t]o overcome or defeat (an opponent or enemy) in conflict or battle? and ?to reduce to subjection or submission by superior force.? The individuals who belong in the social category of the vanquished have been forcefully subjugated by the victors via specific socioeconomic structures to work and produce for them. Nonetheless, a more obsolete use of the verb ?to vanquish? means ?[t]o expel or banish from a place? (OED). The vanquished have lost their chance to control the flow of history, are working for the victors and are at the same time displaced from the historical archive, which, following Benjamin, transforms into ?a tool of the ruling classes? (255). Benjamin uncovers the existence of the vanquished on the material artifacts that surround us comprising our civilization, our ?the cultural treasures,? contemplating on who produced them and under what circumstances (256). Any civilization, Benjamin asserts, 89 has been built on the backs of innumerable unnamed laborers whose ?anonymous toil? has drastically contributed to the advancement of the culture they belong to (256). A historical example of the vanquished from the 18th and the early 19th centuries can be found on the small farmers who, after the passing of the Enclosure Acts between 1760 and 1820, that E. P. Thompson calls ?the years of wholesale enclosure,? were compelled to move to the cities comprising the new proletariat that erected England?s industry and who William Wordsworth mentions in his 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (198). The vanquished are living under limited material conditions that are constantly declining for the reason that they are forced to overwork and overproduce while they are underpaid in order to maximize the profits of the victors. The ?defeated? do not participate in historical movement and for this reason they are unproductive, with the vocabulary Adorno employs to describe them, namely that they are ?impotent? and ?irrelevant,? exposing these properties of this group (151). To be impotent, to quote from the OED, signifies one ?incapable of reproduction.? Whereas the vanquished are the functioning clogs in the machine of capitalist production that reproduces both commodities and ideological practices, the defeated are those broken parts that do not fit in the machine anymore and are thus considered unable to contribute in a profitable manner, considered ?irrelevant? because they do not relate to production which stands as the fundamental goal of this system. Their nongenerativity is the feature that clearly distinguishes them from the vanquished. Even though both categories are omitted from historical narrative, the absence of the defeated from the historical archive happens for a different reason than that of the vanquished. The victors intentionally remove the vanquished from historical discourse to 90 conceal the violence the vanquished have suffered. Historical waste however, in Adorno?s vocabulary, is left out of the course of history because it is useless. Producing nothing materially or culturally, waste is abandoned to the point that it disappears from our thought as a conceptual category. Since the losers of the dialectic are worn out from incessant overproducing, led in this manner to their social death, and since the dialectical progress transforms today?s winners into tomorrow?s losers, history?s defeated transforms into the only undefeated element of history. The defeated can persist and resist in extremely limited material conditions without being worked to death because they have nothing productive to offer, incorporating modes of existence that have outwitted the historical dynamic, demanding our consideration in our theoretical imaginary.15 Emma focuses on the life of the defeated, namely Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse, Mr. Knightley and Emma, and to a lesser extent on the lives of the victors, such as Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, the Westons, the Eltons and even Robert Martin and Harriet Smith. The fate of the vanquished, which is looming in part over the novel?s second volume and haunts the first part of its third volume, appears as the future that Jane Fairfax would have had if she had not married Frank Churchill, namely that of becoming a governess. When the intrusive Mrs. Elton offers repeatedly to find a place for Jane to work as a governess, Miss Fairfax bitterly states that when the time comes, she will visit those offices in town that specialize in the sale ?not quite of human 15 Zygmunt Bauman in his discussion of historical waste in Wasted Lives fails to grasp this fundamental tripartite distinction in Adorno?s analysis of the components of historical progress. While Adorno is never mentioned in this work, Bauman is clearly drawing from Minima Moralia when he asserts that ?[o]nly the useless, the off-putting, the repellent, the poisonous and the frightening is tough enough to be still there as the time passes? (3). Claiming very accurately that the ?spectre? that ?hovers over the denizens of the liquid modern world and all their labours and creations? is ?the spectre of redundancy,? Bauman combines in his work aspects of Adorno?s thesis with approaches to the consumer society to interpret how the latter uses and wastes people in the same manner that it does to commodities (97, 123). This leads him to the conceptual fallacy of confusing Adorno?s ?vanquished? with the ?defeated.? Bauman points out that redundancy, which makes one social and historical waste, leads to social death, without explaining how waste can be both ?tough enough? to survive socially the very moment that it is considered redundant and it is socially dead (13). 91 flesh? but ?of human intellect? (Austen 279). For Jane, the slave-trade and the ?governess-trade? are ?widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on,? but when it comes to how miserable their victims are, she claims that she is not sure what is worst (Austen 280). The conditions of paid work that Jane would have undergone as a governess differ considerably from those of unpaid labor the slaves were forced to provide. Nevertheless, Jane?s reaction to Mrs. Elton characterizes the position of the vanquished as one of violent subjugation that especially women in her position experience as another form of slavery. Another aspect of the vanquished that the novel depicts only fleetingly is the laboring poor that Emma and Harriet visit in the first volume of the novel. The novel?s 10th chapter opens with Miss Woodhouse and Miss Smith visiting in a charitable manner ?a poor, sick, family, who lived a little way out of Highbury? (Austen 81). Even though this narrative moment serves as an introduction to the chapter?s main theme which is Emma?s and Harriet?s visit to the vicarage by placing the two friends in the vicinity of Mr. Elton?s estate, the visit to the poor family enunciates the frequent 18th-century cultural practice of charity. In her reading of Pride and Prejudice Mona Scheuermann mentions that the moral code of the time signified that ?the rich have duties toward the less privileged,? meaning that they had to provide work and, ?when necessary, support for the poor who are dependent? upon them (103). The fact that the poor are in need of work, i.e. they are still productive, designates them as the dialectic?s vanquished, without necessarily placing Emma and Harriet as ?the rich,? another word for history?s victors. Emma?s material scarcity, an aspect of her unremitting detouring, makes her act even more charitable, providing to the disenfranchised out of her limited means. The fate of both Mrs. and Miss Bates indicates that they belong to history?s defeated and that Miss Bates?s impoverishment relates to her gender but also has a lot to do with her family 92 not establishing an alliance with the new classes, which led the Bates to remain unproductive. In the second chapter of the first volume of Emma the narrator presents a group of male characters that comprise Mr. Woodhouse?s close friends, followed by ?a second set? where the Bateses belong along with Mrs. Goddard (Austen 21). Presenting these female characters, the narrator discusses Mrs. Bates, stressing her unfortunate situation in life, mentioning in a single period that she lives ?in a very small way? and that she suffers from ?untoward circumstances? (Austen 22). Moving then to her daughter without providing any other explanation for Miss Bates? poverty, the narrator seems to suggest that she is poor because of her family?s background, with financial difficulties probably appearing during Mr. Bates?s lifetime and mounting after his death. After all, being Highbury?s vicar carries a promise for socioeconomic advancement that is not always materialized. While the clergy was part of the landed gentry?s symbolic order, their cultural capital had to be carefully invested to be combined with the financial capital of the landed gentry, and later with that of the bourgeoisie, creating the prospect of financial development but not always being able to actualize this prospect. For example, Mr. Elton?s vicarage shows ?no advantage of situation,? being only ?smartened up? and not improved16 by the current owner and placed in a neighborhood among ?inferior dwellings,? reflecting ?the decline of the clerisy? (Austen 81; Todd 98). Mr. Elton?s attempt to improve his situation through marriage portrays his struggle to enter historical progress and to invest his symbolic capital, which becomes fruitful only when he marries Miss Hawkins, establishing an alliance with the commercial class. In this light, it can very well be the case then that Miss Bates is unmarried, despite her previous ?attachment? to Mr. 16 Raymond Williams in The Country and the City exposes the rise of ?the ideology of improvement? in the eighteenth century which views land not as a stable income but as a financial investment that through the improving of ?arable land? and the dramatic expansion of cultivated land it increase its returns (60-61). The fact that Mr. Elton does not do improvements on his property means that he is lacking the means to invest financially on his land. 93 Knightley that Galperin unearths, for the reason that her family had been declining financially during her marriage age, gesturing that she has not only become destitute because she has remained single (The Historical 193). When George reprimands Emma for her rudeness towards Miss Bates, he simply underscores that the latter ?is poor? and that ?she has sunk from the comforts she was born to? (Austen 351). Her sinking points at a profound decline in her social and financial situation, without specifying how or why this decline has happened and if in her case it relies specifically on her remaining single or if it preceded what at the time would be considered her proper marriage age, which could have made it more difficult for her family to form a class alliance through her marriage. Miss Bates, it seems, was unable to marry Mr. Knightley because she could not compete with pre-pubescent Emma, as Galperin points out (The Historical, 195). In addition, lacking ?intellectual superiority,? ?beauty,? ?cleverness,? and, last but not least, a fortune to compensate for the absence of all these female qualities that the narrator considers they can disrupt a marriage system that mostly operates as a financial investment, Miss Bates was incapable to attract other potential suitors, underscoring that her financial situation worsened her marital prospects (Austen 22). Emma portrays that only a timely marriage coalition with the bourgeoisie during its ascent to power can place one firmly in the dialectic, suggesting that not simply any marriage is beneficial. In the prehistory of the novel Miss Churchill was married to Mr. Weston, then Captain Weston, which led to her be cut off from her family, to miss ?the luxuries of her former home,? and to die after ?a three years? marriage? (Austen 17). Even though the narrator does not associate directly her unhappy marriage to her early death, the narrative hints at such a connection. Only when Captain Weston achieves ?[a] complete change in life? by quitting the militia and engaging in trade with his brothers, joining the commercial class and becoming Mr. 94 Weston, he is able to remarry Mrs. Weston?and former Miss Taylor?and provide for her both emotionally and financially, guaranteeing her place in historical progress (Austen 17). Concerning the value of marriage in Austen?s novels, Frances Ferguson argues that it ?performs the job of transformation and transvaluation,? increasing a person?s social value (173). It remains uncertain though that if Miss Bates was simply married to somebody, regardless of his fortune, she would be in a better financial situation than her unmarried counterpart, since, to recall Emma?s advice to Harriet on the subject, being a ?poor old maid? is more the result of ?a very narrow income? than of ?celibacy? (Austen 85). With her family?s financials declining and because she failed to establish through her marriage a coalition with the new ruling classes, Miss Bates occupies the nonproductive category of the defeated. Reading Miss Bates: Historical Progress and the Eternal Return. Reading Dialectically. Standing for the ?social formation? of class waste, history?s defeated, Miss Bates inhabits a nongenerative mode of existence that force us to consider history at once dialectically and undialectically (Galperin, The Historical 190; Adorno 151). In Emma the progressive movement of the dialectic is, among others, reflected in the monologues that make Miss Bates infamous, when, as James Thompson notes, she lists the new players?the dialectic?s victors?of Highbury?s emerging bourgeois modernity for us, ?the Coles, the Coxes, the Perrys, the Otways, the Hughes, the Churchills, the Dixons, the Campbells, the Gilberts? (Jane Austen 58). Dr. Hugh belongs to the medical profession, the Churchills? and Campbells? residence in London implies an affiliation with commerce, and, even if there is not enough information on the Oatways and the Gilberts, it is easy to assume that since they all join in Highbury?s dancing event, they probably reside at those ?good-looking houses? that belong to the rising classes and whose ?particulars? and ?families? are not discussed in the novel in a sufficient manner (Austen 186). By exposing 95 the part of the village that is modernizing, Miss Bate?s monologues compel us to think dialectically and to inquire further how the new classes have triumphed over the structures of late feudalism that made the bourgeoisie possible in the first place. In other words, when Miss Bates makes visible through her talk the proliferating bourgeois families of Highbury that we now know they have become the victors of the dialectic, she compels us to research how and why this historical progress was actualized and what specific formations of 18th-century feudalism created the necessary socioeconomic space for the bourgeoisie to strengthen and expand to the point that it conquered the social space by prevailing over the landed gentry. Reading Austen dialectically, critiquing that she obfuscates the violent historical progress at the end of the 18th century or arguing how her work informs this event, has been the dominant interpretative approach to her oeuvre. Williams, for example, in The Country and the City famously claims that during the time that in Britain ?an acquisitive high bourgeois society? exists ?at the point of its most evident interlocking with an agrarian capitalism,? Austen achieves in her work ?a unity of tone? and a ?settled and remarkably confident way of seeing and judging? that covers the commotion of social change which constitutes the motor of historical progress (115).1718 Affirming Devoney Looser?s take, that the major shift to the interpretation of Austen ?allows us to see her writings imbued in, rather than divorced from, history,? recent approaches 17 For this reason, in Georg Luk?cs?s work on realism Walter Scott plays a prominent role whereas Austen is not even mentioned. In his renowned essay ?Narrate or Describe?? Luk?cs celebrates Scott as the novelist whose work ?introduces the factions and protagonists of a great historical drama,? while Austen?s work does not comprise any part of his analysis (114). Following this critical vein on Scott?s work, Moretti has recently argued that his narrative voice is transparent allowing history to tell ?its own story? (The Bourgeois 91). In his older work Between Self and World James Thomson brings together Luk?cs, the ?most powerful theorist? of ?the Hegelian wing of Marxism,? and Austen, claiming that such an analytical approach can bring ?to the study of Austen a totalizing explanation,? adding himself to the group of scholars who read Austen dialectically (17, 16). 18 Even though it is reaching a different conclusion, William?s reading agrees with Alistair M. Duckworth?s, that Austen describes Highbury as ?a landscape of peace and stability,? an ?ordered world? (163, 167). Contrary to Williams who thinks of nostalgia as an ideological tool, Nicholas Dames professes that what he calls Austen?s ?nostalgics? operate in a recuperative manner that accomplishes the ?[f]orgetfulness of former traumas? and the ?closings of former fissures? (118, 121) 96 to Emma read Highbury as ?both declining and modernizing,? according to Janet Todd, as ?a world in decline? that will soon be as ?dead as its name,? in Marshall Brown?s reading or as a static and ?irretrievably moribund,? place that is ?removed from both the present and near future,? in Galperin?s interpretation (217; 96; 9, 11; Historical 213, 180). These takes on the novel associate Highbury?s decline that Emma portrays with the advance of the new classes, restoring Austen?s awareness of historical change. Dialectical readings of Emma have not been limited to the novel?s historical representations with scholars employing a vocabulary of progress to highlight Emma?s development in the novel. R. H. Hughe?s article ?The Education of Emma Woodhouse? from 1961 uses the Hegelian dialectic to interpret Emma?s Bildung, maintaining that even the novel?s structure can be described as Hegelian, with Alistair M. Duckworth asserting ten years later that ?the recurring pattern of Jane Austen?s plots? is ?the movement from a condition of initial security to a period of isolation, and then to a final reinstatement,? which echoes the structure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis (73; 10). By the mid-1980s, according to Rosmarin, approaches that emphasized the heroine?s moral, sexual or perceptual growth had become common topos, with Franco Moretti arguing in The Way of the World that the Bildungsroman as a genre originates from Goethe and Austen (316; 12). In response to narratives of advancement, other readers have introduced the concept of stasis to discuss the novel?s protagonist. In those cases, her Bildung is either what has not been achieved by the novel?s closure, to recall the readings of Eugene Goodhart, and more recently, Brown, or what needs not be accomplished because the heroine, as Johnson?s interpretation of the novel shows, is a strong, independent woman that needs to learn nothing.19 19 Goodhart questions if there is an abundance of evidence to indicate that Emma ?will not be up to her old ways after the marriage,? while Brown points out that ?it remains a dispute whether [characters] have grown even one 97 In Emma stasis becomes synonymous with regression, necessarily standing in a dialectical relationship with, and against, narratives of improvement. To return to the Box Hill encounter that Mr. Knightley has with Emma, the former believes that Miss Bates ?has sunk? from her comforts and that ?she must probably sink more? (Austen 351). The process of sinking underlines a violent regressive movement that concludes only with disaster and death. When Mr. Knightley points out that Miss Bates ?has sunk,? he implies that she is not sinking at that moment but that she currently remains stationary. George though considers her unmoving, viewing her stasis as an uneventful but equally violent condition, with her current situation being gloomy enough to ?secure? Emma?s ?compassion? (Austen 351). Mr. Knightley?s narrative of Miss Bates creates what Kevin Bruyneel names as a temporal boundary that separates a ?static people? from ?an advancing people,? displacing the former as a static class in Emma ?out of time? (2). Belonging with regress to the temporal counterworld of progress, stillness, as Dames mentions, can register mobility (135). In a world where everything advances exponentially, people and things that are static stay always further and further behind, embodying a motionless deterioration conducive of death. Reading Miss Bates Undialectically through the Eternal Return. There is another approach to understanding the characters of Emma, however, which means studying the novel undialectically. To do so in a manner that escapes the dialectical thinking that has directed the novel?s scholarship means unearthing and embracing the temporal possibilities of social waste. This attempt involves avoiding viewing characters in the novel merely ?as representing social forces;? it also entails thinking beyond what Jacques Khalip year wiser? (23). For Johnson, Emma ?is a woman who possesses and enjoys power, [?] not only over her own destiny, but, what is harder to tolerate, power over the destinies of others,? while the novel is lacking ?the clarity of emphasis and the conclusory arguments that mark didactic fiction (Jane Austen 125, 127). 98 names ?a life of progress? and ?development? (Eagleton, The English Novel 104; ?Triumph?). In addition, it requires establishing methodologies that read beyond stasis as the only resistance to progress, which, in this work, forms its dialectical opposite, unavoidably reasserting it by contradicting it. To approach Emma undialectically involves understanding that history?s defeated incorporate an unremittingly unproductive motion that defies concurrently both progress, with its emphasis on production, expansion, and growth, and stasis, that characterizes the vanquished who are structurally trapped into working for the victors without any chances for upward mobility. Considered unimportant by most scholars who read the novel to examine history?s violent progress in the late 18th and early 19th century, Miss Bates exposes through her monologues the nonpropagative motion of the defeated. Discussing Miss Bates, an unsigned review from 1852 in the New Monthly Magazine, describes her gossip as ?eternal,? commenting that her contributions make the reader of the novel believe she will never stop talking (154). A monologue that the narrator calls ?incessant? develops during the episode of Highbury?s dance, following Miss Bates and Miss Fairfax?s entrance in the ballroom: So very obliging of you!?No rain at all. Nothing to signify. I do not care for myself. Quite thick shoes. And Jane declares?Well!?(as soon as she was within the door) Well! This is brilliant indeed!?This is admirable!?Excellently contrived, upon my word. Nothing wanting. Could not have imagined it.?So well lighted up!?Jane, Jane, look!? did you ever see any thing? Oh! Mr. Weston, you must really have had Aladdin's lamp. Good Mrs. Stokes would not know her own room again. I saw her as I came in; she was standing in the entrance. 'Oh! Mrs. Stokes,' said I?but I had not time for more.? She was 99 now met by Mrs. Weston.??Very well, I thank you, ma'am. I hope you are quite well. Very happy to hear it.? (Austen, Emma 302) The narrative announces Miss Bate?s babble in a dry manner, simply mentioning that when ?the door opened, she was heard? (Austen 302). Her talk heralds her physical appearance in the room, with the phrases that the ballroom crowd discerns, ?[s]o very obliging of you!?No rain at all. Nothing to signify,? coming as a response to an unheard question, a narrative motif this passage repeats frequently revealing that Miss Bates?s speech muffles its environs (Austen 302). Her short sentences flood the ballroom with the unstoppable?but also unnoticed?power of a wave that forces its way in, silencing everyone as if by putting them under water. Her monologue has no point of origin and no beginning, as it is uncertain what, if anything, initiated it while it remains unknown at what moment in time it started since its audience notices it in media res getting then carried away by its ?incessant flow? (Austen 302). Miss Bates?s ?prattle? embodies an amorphous amalgam of syntactical semi-structures that are always in the verge of falling apart, being almost unconnected to each other, unable to form a coherent narrative but also being more uncompromising than ?a comparable freedom from syntactic order,? as William Deresiewicz claims (48). Always too short to convey enough information about whom they are addressing or what exactly they deliberate on, and at the same time not short enough to carry the puncturing aesthetics of the staccato, a form of expression that makes every unit of meaning count, either sound or word, these elliptical sentences appear directionless and purposeless, creating the feeling of a never-ending, ?eternal? gable (?Mid-Century View? 154). The fragmentation of Miss Bates?s speech results from an incessant turning away from meaning the moment before it is achieved, resonating with Blanchot?s understanding of the eternal return as constant unworking. In philosophy, the concept surfaces initially in Aphorism 100 341 of Friedrich Nietzsche?s The Gay Science, which elaborates a revelation that he experienced in the summer of 1881 at Sils-Maria, almost a year before the publication of this work. The aphorism begins intending to introduce ?[t]he heaviest weight? that thought has to bear describing a scenario where a ?demon? invades in the reader?s most private thought to plant the possibility of having to live one?s life ?once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return? (194; emphasis in the original). Nietzsche argues that the recurrence becomes possible through the unremitting revolving of the ?eternal hourglass of existence? that transforms human life into ?a speck of dust? (194). As Alexander Nehamas mentions, this concept has most commonly been interpreted as a ?cosmological hypothesis? where ?there is only one cycle,? a two-dimensional loop, ?repeated over and over again in infinity? (322). In this understanding of the eternal occurrence ?[t]here can be no variations, and hence no interactions, between such repetition,? transforming everything that has happened, is happening and will happen into a ceaseless reiteration of ?exactly the same events? in ?exactly the same order? (Nehamas, 322). Pierre Klossowski, whose reading of Nietzsche invited Blanchot?s response, conceptualizes the eternal recurrence as a cyclical motion that is paradoxically also ?a necessity that must be willed,? breaking subjectivity apart and leading the subject to deactualize her ?present self in order to will [her]self in all the other selves whose entire series must be passed through? (57). The circle that breaks the ?I? into pieces also liquidates both ?[m]eaning and goal,? since the subject is not coherent, and as such cannot focus on a single purpose, and it cannot acquire a subject position to interpret meaning in a unified manner (70). Drawing from Klossowski?s approach, Blanchot understands the eternal recurrence as the repetition of the ?nonidentity of the same,? since the ?I? that repeats itself has abolished 101 any form of stable identity (The Infinite 159). He emphasizes though that ?the return does not permit assigning to the figure a center, even less an infinity of centers,? diverging from the belief that the return follows a cyclical motion (The Infinite 275). For Blanchot, the return resembles a ?detour,? namely an incessant turning away from work, meaning and value that institutes, in turn, worklessness, meaninglessness, and valuelessness (The Infinite 159). To circle back to Nietzsche?s aphorism, the eternal recurrence, depicted through the incessant turning of the ?eternal hourglass of existence,? obliterates the concepts of beginning and ending, annihilating any possibility that meaning, work or value could turn into achievable outcomes (194). The hourglass is continuously turned up-side down just after the last grain of sand has passed through its neck, but before it is added to the pile in the lower bulb. Even if one observes its turning, it becomes impossible to establish if this is the first turning or to predict if it is going to be the last. Without the prospect of a beginning or an ending, neither meaning nor work can be achieved, since, to remember Slavoj ?i?ek, meaning is always constructed after the fact through a ?retroactive movement,? while the work and the value it produces, as Marx has informed us, exists only in relation to labor-time, which comprises an identifiable time-frame (The Sublime 16). During the continuous rotation of the hourglass the individual loses, along with her subjectivity, any other element that differentiates her from her surroundings. Even though Nietzsche mentions that in the eternal recurrence ?life must return? in ?the same succession and sequence?even this spider and this moonlight between the trees,? this process transforms one into a ?speck of dust? (194). Nehamas believes that in Nietzsche?s thought there is ?no thing? left over ?beyond the sum-total of its characteristics and effects,? which extends to the view that ?if any object [in the world] were different, every object would be different? (344). When the 102 subject in the eternal recurrence turns into one speck of dust in the hourglass, every aspect of the human and the nonhuman world transforms, in an analogous manner, into sand particles that comprise a pile of sand. This pile occupies the inside of a glass bulb constituting a desert that is only confined by an extreme version of itself, since glass results from sand that has been heated excessively. The ?spider,? the ?moonlight? and the ?trees? that Nietzsche refers to take the form of grains of sand, i.e., interchangeable elements that comprise the sand pile of this device. Having this shape, they continuously reappear, same but not absolutely identical, converting what Blanchot calls ?the eternal return of the same? and ?the perpetual detour of difference? into two sides of the same coin (The Infinite 277). This dynamic is exactly what Miss Bates?s discourse and actions formally stage for us. Her monologues resurface irregularly in the novel diverting the reader for the linear narrative development of the scene they appear in as they set in place a temporality of unremitting change that is neither progressive nor static. The entrance of Miss Bates and Miss Fairfax at the Highbury dance prepares the educated reader for an advance in the Frank-Jane subplot, especially if one has in mind the lengths that Frank has gone to put this event in place. Before the appearance of Miss Bates, the narrator has already mentioned that Frank is standing next to Emma in an unsteady manner, having been overcome by a ?restlessness? that forces him to walk up and down the hall, keeping a distance from his socially assigned partner, as if waiting for another guest to arrive (Austen 300). When Miss Bates enters the room with Jane, her talk interrupts any development that could move forward the novel?s shadow plot, with the narrator mentioning immediately after the end of Miss Bates?s monologue that Frank returned ?to his station by Emma,? implying that he has missed the opportunity to have a t?te-?-t?te with Jane (Austen 303). Furthermore, since her chatter keeps Frank away from Jane, it establishes a 103 temporality that meddles, briefly but successfully, with the linearity of what Madhavi Menon calls ?compulsory heterotemporality? which, reproducing through sexual difference the structure of thesis and antithesis, implies that heteronormativity is the only way that time and plot move forward (1). Creating a cognitive dissonance to the reader, Miss Bates diverts one?s attention from the scene?s main action reiterating an incessant narrative insignificance that Blanchot describes in his work as ?the return returns (as neutral)? (The Infinite 275). Her elliptical sentences are combined with the repetition of a language that, emptied out of coherent meaning, comprises a semantic detour, a turning away from, or even, an overturning of, sense, that leads to the neutering of narrative development. Miss Bates?s meaningless monologues, both in terms of content and form, deviate from making a clear, coherent meaning possible. Enacting the temporality of the eternal recurrence, that for Blanchot is a never-ending worklessness that destroys both value and meaning, these monologues underscore that Miss Bates belongs to the defeated and not the vanquished. Mr. Woodhouse does his ?Little Rounds.? Wasting Time, Slowly. Mr. Woodhouse is the character that mostly shares with Miss Bates the same textual space in the novel and in its criticism. In the pages of Emma Miss Bates belongs to his ?little circle,? the close group of friends that Mr. Woodhouse enjoys having at Hartfield, his manor (Austen 21). Despite their allegedly different situation in life, where, as the narrator informs us, Mr. Woodhouse is in Highbury ?first in consequence? whereas Miss Bates stands ?in the very worst predicament in the world,? both appear useless, off-putting and targets of derision (Austen 9, 22). This has resulted in Mr. Woodhouse having an almost identical history of scholarly reception to that of his friend, to the extent that Duckworth critiques him for his ?old- maidishness,? a term that echoes Scott?s analysis of Miss Bates the moment it is synonymous to 104 ?spinster? that Rosmarin has used for her (5; 326). These textual and critical analogies prompt one to ponder that they both belong to the category of social waste, with Mr. Woodhouse?s poor financials also remaining ?unnoticed, because unsuspected? due to our ideological identification in our reading practices with the novel?s unreliable narrator who considers him very rich (Austen, Emma 384). The narrator, who introduces Emma?s father right after the protagonist, justifies Mr. Woodhouse?s eccentricity and unproductivity on his valetudinarianism. According to the information she provides, he lacks any ?activity of mind or body? which causes Mr. Woodhouse to hate ?change of every kind,? and above all matrimony as ?the origin of change? (Austen 9). For this reason, the narrator claims, Mr. Woodhouse thinks that Miss Taylor ?had done as a sad thing for herself as for them [him and Emma], and would have been a great deal happier if she had spent all the rest of her life at Hartfield,? a phrase also applicable to Isabella who married and left Hartfield before Emma?s governess (Austen 9). Johnson, forming a cognitive alliance with the narrator on this matter, calls Mr. Woodhouse ?anile? in an attempt to explain his behavior, with Marvin Mudrick, who most likely focuses on the character?s alleged lack of mental and bodily activity, views him as ?an idiot . . . quite incapable of thought or judgment (Equivocal Beings 197; 150). For James Thompson, Mr. Woodhouse is an invalid and a hypochondriac and for Nina Auerbach a parasite, with all these adjectives portraying different aspects of what Galperin has more recently called the character?s repressive ?pathological responsiveness? (Jane Austen 59,72; 9; The Historical 191). The approaches to Hartfield?s landlord that focus on his physical and intellectual inactivity are inattentive to the minimal motion he performs, one that takes imperceptibly small steps, making him appear as if he is static. Mr. Woodhouse lacks much corporeal activity, but he 105 is vigorous enough to invite the Westons, Mr. Knightley, Mrs. Bates and Miss Bates, Mrs. Goddard and Mr. Elton for dinner,20 being also convinced to leave his seclusion and dine at Randalls on the 24th of December (Austen 21, 103). Later, he is once again persuaded to venture to Box Hill, taking even ?his little round in the highest part of the gardens? when he is there (Austen 399). His engagement in charades with Emma and Harriet denotes some intellectual activity, to the point that he comes to be ?almost as much interested in the business as the girls,? trying to contribute to their collection by remembering some riddles from his youth (Austen, Emma 68). Even if one agrees with the narrator that Mr. Woodhouse lacks ?activity of body and mind,? this does not indicate that he is static. Emma?s father exemplifies rather a minimally gestural activity that refuses to develop into determinate action the very moment he evades remaining totally still. The motion of Mr. Woodhouse is best illustrated in his insignificant ?little rounds,? a nonemphatic movement that wastes its time existing unaccounted for?it occurs in a liminal manner, being barely, if ever, noticed?and uncounted?it is so insignificant that cannot be measured, to recall Fran?ois (13). Moreover, his activity is barely noticeable because it makes nothing happen narrative-wise, embodying the temporal wastefulness of the return which manifests itself as a profound unworking of the novel?s story. Mr. Woodhouse?s temporal and narrative wasting places him in the social category of the defeated, history?s waste. The time Mr. Woodhouse spends at Mr. Knightley?s collection comprises an inconspicuous aspect of the Donwell Abbey visit that depicts the former?s unproductive and uneventful activity. To make Mr. Woodhouse more comfortable after his walk at his gardens, 20 Deidre Shauna Lynch in Loving Literature: A Cultural History labels this practice of Mr. Woodhouse as ?scheduled sociability,? a ?queer arithmetic in which augmenting the number of repetitions of an action makes its performance less burdensome? (184). Lynch in this passage deprives queerness from its unsettling element, arguing that the unregenerative repetition that frequently appears in Emma is a routine indicative of ?stasis, the ?stationary movement? that is the everyday? (184). 106 Mr. Knightley invites him in his manor and presents him with ?[b]ooks of engravings, drawers of medals, cameos, corals, shells, and every other family collection within his cabinets? that leave Emma?s father ?exceedingly well amused? (Austen 339). Mr. Woodhouse persists in a ?slow, constant, and methodical? manner in his dealings with these artifacts, intending to ?show them all to Emma? (Austen 339). George has designed this event with the purpose ?to while away the morning? of Mr. Woodhouse, who tours sluggishly through these objects spending his time wastefully. Benjamin discusses in Illuminations the nonfunctional relationship a person establishes with the artifacts of his collection. In the essay ?Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,? Benjamin mentions that the collector creates ?a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value?that is, their usefulness? (60). For the collector these artifacts are the placeholders of memories attached to their acquisition and their unfolding in front of one?s eyes diffuses the past into the present (60). Benjamin argues that the collector?s thought expresses a dialectical tension between ?the poles of disorder and order,? in other words, between the ordering of these memories that results in a meaningful sequencing of the past, and their unordered chaotic presence which does not conclude in any form of coherent meaning (60). In Benjamin the dialectic that inhabits the mind of the collector always threatens to subdue the uselessness of the collection, turning it into a productive arrangement since, as he emphasizes, the collection is ?a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? (60). Mr. Woodhouse is not a collector himself but a visitor to someone else?s collection. These objects bear no memories for him, and he is not compelled to make order of their chaos, meaning that he is not torn by the dialectical tendency to organize these artifacts and to make meaning out of them. He only enjoys the pure squandering of his morning that unhurriedly moves in ?little rounds,? from his walk ?in the highest part of the 107 garden,? to his little journey round Mr. Knightley?s collection and then to his desire to cycle through it once again to present all his findings to Emma (Austen 339). Mr. Woodhouse performs a slothful movement that is ?constant? and ?methodical? for the reason that it is interminable, without ever acquiring a systematicity that can make it meaningful or productive. Miss Fairfax?s appearance at the end of the paragraph that begins with Mr. Woodhouse?s nonproductive endeavor in Knightley?s collection erases any narrative trace that the temporal expenditure of Hartfield?s owner could have left. The paragraph that starts with Mr. Woodhouse wasting his time concludes with Jane frantically searching for Emma to announce that she is leaving the party. Jane?s appearance contributes to the development of the novel?s plot, concealing Mr. Woodhouse?s nongenerativity. In this manner she forces his nonemphatic movement to remain determinately undetected by the reader who forgets Mr. Woodhouse?s insignificance attempting to explore the meaning that Miss Fairfax?s sudden departure has. In Rei Terrada?s jargon, Mr. Woodhouse is the very embodiment of ?forgettable living;? his motion is ?forgettable and incessantly forgotten? because he is culturally insignificant the very moment he stands against species-reproduction, leaving no trace of himself in the narrative of Emma, with his family name disappearing after Emma?s marriage to Mr. Knightley (95).21 Irrelevant to Reproduction or Desire. The narrator?s satirical comment that Mr. Woodhouse stands opposed to ?change of every kind,? and more specifically to matrimony, ?the origin of change,? could be extended to 21 Terrada investigation of the idea of ?forgettable living? results from her reading of Hannah Arendt?s concepts of work, labor and action as they appear in The Human Condition. Arendt differentiates between labor, which only guarantees the life of the individual and the species, from work whose ?product? is ?the human artifact? and which in turn confers a ?permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life? (8). In addition to these two concepts, Arednt adds that of ?action? which relates to the ability humans have to constitute and maintain ?political bodies? (8-9). Terrada argues that Arendt refuses to acknowledge everything that is neither ?species-reproductive? or ?culturally significant? calling this unacknowledged existence ?forgettable living? (95). In Arednt?s vocabulary Mr. Woodhouse is lacking work, labor and action but, as this paper asserts, still manages to survive. 108 include how the character?s microcircular temporality resists being disturbed by biological regeneration (Austen 9). The narrator believes that for Mr. Woodhouse matrimony is the paradigm of change. The satire the narrative aims at originates from the implication that Emma?s father is so eccentric that even motherhood, the most natural event in a woman?s life, can unsettle him profoundly. Matrimony though unsettles the unemphatic existence of Mr. Woodhouse the instant it sets in place a ?repro-time,? which is the temporality that sexual reproduction constructs and which embraces and promotes the rectilinear progress of the dialectic (Halberstam, In a Queer Time 5). To call Mr. Woodhouse?s reaction pathological, as Galperin does, namely, to read it as the result of his valetudinarianism, derives from what Elizabeth Freeman terms ?chrononormativity,? the ideology that compels us to naturalize and normalize culturally hegemonic temporal formations, such as the reproductive temporality that motherhood instigates, forcing us to think that they are only ?ordinary bodily tempos and routines? (3). It is our reaction to Mr. Woodhouse?s views on matrimony that is ideological when we consider eccentric and laughable his mode of existing because it does not encourage and promote species-reproduction. Because chrononormativity forces us to program our body to complete concrete tasks which portrays as natural, such as creating a family and having children, we consider abnormal every other way of being, such as that of Mr. Woodhouse, that does not conform to our ideological practices. Besides resisting matrimony which, through the institution of family and through practices such as inheritance, establishes heterotemporality, Mr. Woodhouse exemplifies a profound disinterestedness in any form of determinate action that can move the plot of the novel forward. This is another indication that he belongs to historical waste since the class of the defeated in useless and cannot make history advance. During the dinner-at-Randalls episode on 109 the 24th of December, Mr. Knightley, after becoming aware of the snowstorm outside, informs Mr. Woodhouse of the weather condition. George does not forget to mention that the current situation signifies the beginning of Mr. Woodhouse?s winter engagements, referring to his and Emma?s future visits at Randalls to see Mrs. Weston, that will unquestionably force his ?coachman and horses? to make their way through ?a storm of snow? (Austen 119). The narrator describes how on this topic ?every body else had something to say; every body was either surprized or not surprized, and had some question to ask, or some comfort to offer? (Austen 120). In a matter that concerns him most Mr. Woodhouse is the only one who abstains from expressing any opinion, without remaining absolutely silent either. He constantly repeats ?[w]hat is to be done, my dear Emma?? refusing to take the initiative to act to resolve this issue it in a determinate manner by making a decision, signifying through his verbal reiteration a minimal circular motion that remains unproductive (Austen 120). The question through its numerous repetitions turns into a rhetorical one whose presumed response is ?nothing;? there is nothing to be done because Mr. Woodhouse is in fact indifferent in doing anything that can somehow affect his environs. Even before this issue pops up, his intent in this scene has been to return to Hartfield right after tea has been served, which is another indication of his worklessness. Mr. Woodhouse?s desire has been to leave Randalls so early as if he was never there, constituting a turning away from the dinner scene that leaves his companions unaffected by his presence (Austen 120). Emma?s father manifests the property of nongenerativity that historical waste possesses, namely that of remaining unregistered in historical narrative. This attribute entails that the defeated do not contribute in the advancement of the story of history, explaining why Mr. Woodhouse does not impact the narrative progress of Emma. 110 The minimal motion of Mr. Woodhouse gestures at an indefinitely prolongable survival that follows from avoiding both life and death as assessable end-goals. Unwilling to participate in any form of definite action, as the Randalls episode displays, Mr. Woodhouse embodies a ?neutrality? in which ?nothing is accomplished,? not even death (Blanchot, The Space 112). In Blanchot?s parlance, the neutral designates a profound unworking that results from the return, which, when re-turns, either by turning away from itself or by repeating itself, it brings worklessness (The Infinite 275). In contrast to Wordsworth and Coleridge?s poetry in the Ballads, where, as this dissertation has argued, survival is the ultimate disaster, cultural survival in Emma becomes the site of the possibility of a persisting existence deprived of life and of death, one that results from what Sara Guyer terms ?a failure of ends? (13). Blanchot?s name for this condition in The Space of Literature is ?death? that takes the shape of ?empty omnipotence? that ?consumes itself eternally,? failing to make death happen and leading thus to survival (The Space 112). Desire does not escape the interminable expenditure of the return. According to Blanchot, the return makes one desire that which turns one ?away from every desired? transforming desire into ?a detour from all desire, as from all that is desirable? (The Infinite 279). For Blanchot then the return directs one?s desire to desire only the return and to stop desiring anything else. Since the return is a profound unworking, it stays away from making desire possible, by fulfilling it or by fueling it, forcing desire to turn away from itself. In other words, surviving in the return, one?s only desire is to continue to survive in the return, staying away from desiring anything else. Rendering death and desire unachievable, the recurrence sets in place a ?movement of disappearance? that deviates from its own purpose, failing to make humans disappear, causing in turn the disappearance of death and human survival (Blanchot, The Space 114). The return takes the form of a ?disinterested energy,? to employ Georges Poulet?s 111 parole, an energy without goal or end that transforms Mr. Woodhouse?s unnoticeable motion into a ?joyless satisfaction,? a gratification that becomes possible through survival which is the absence of any gratification (55). Assuming both the character?s opposition to marriage and matrimony and his desirelessness, Mr. Woodhouse personifies a queerness that is reminiscent of, but also divergent from, that of the synthomosexual. Edelman calls ?sinthomosexuality,? the repetitive meaninglessness associated with an ?unregenerate? and ?unregenerating? queer sexual practice that shows a ?singular insistence on jouissance? (No Future 47-48). Sharing with the synthomosexual the resistance to the culture of reproduction and futurity that motherhood most explicitly represents, Mr. Woodhouse denies himself any pleasure that is more than minimal, appearing desexualized to the point that Jill Heydt-Stevenson calls him ?asexual.?22 This character?s queer temporality adds another chapter to what Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon call ?homohistory,? namely a history that suspends the ?determinate sexual and chronological differences while expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero? (1609). Edelman?s term runs the risk of naming another ?identity category? of queer sexuality that causes what Judith Butler refers to as ?a certain radical concealment,? hiding the uncontrollable multiplicity of nonregenerative queerness under the umbrella of synthomosexuality (308, 309; emphasis in the original). The desirelessness of Mr. Woodhouse introduces a nonproductive negativity that makes survival possible while challenging ?the strictures of knowability? which Edelman?s theory, connecting negativity exclusively with jouissance, introduces through the back door (Goldberg and Menon 1609). 22 Heydt-Stevenson argues that Austen?s portrayal Mr. Woodhouse might indicate his sexually promiscuous past that has left him with ?tertiary syphilis? (163). For her reading of Emma through a series of sexual innuendos that point to venereal diseases, see Austen?s Unbecoming Conjunctions, Chapter 5. 112 Adjusting Extremely. Similar to Miss Bates, the other ?foolish old maid? in the novel, the nongenerative temporality of Mr. Woodhouse suggests that he participates in the category of historical waste with his plain dietary preferences underscoring the material aspect of his minimal survival (Scott 69). Emma starts with an exaltation of its main character and her place in the society of Highbury, without neglecting to mention that she is rich, ?the heiress of thirty thousand pounds? as we will soon learn, and with a ?comfortable home,? all reflecting Mr. Woodhouse?s considerable fortune (Austen 128, 7). However, in retrospect the unreliability of the novel?s narrator makes the reader question whether the Woodhouses are really that financially secure. In her description, Mr. Woodhouse?s love for gruel, ?thin, but not too thin,? who offers it even to his daughter Isabella when she comes from London to visit Hartfield with her five children, is another comic element that strengthens her view of the owner of Hartfield as a valetudinarian (Austen 100). Gruel at the time of the novel?s composition was ?the sustenance of the poor during the food riots of the eighteenth century and the near-starvation years of the nineteenth century? something that readers contemporary to the novel would know and recognize (Hyman 41). In a period when, to quote Gwen Hyman, what a person eats ?is precisely what marks one as gentleman? the consumption of gruel by Isabella?s father raises strong suspicions that just like Mrs. and Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse might also be living under ?untoward circumstances? (41). The extreme dietary simplicity of Mr. Woodhouse does not limit itself in his fondness of gruel, expanding on the nourishment he offers to his guests. Having over for dinner Mrs. Godard, Harriet Smith, Mrs. and Miss Bates, he offers to the latter only a little of everything, a soft-boiled egg that is not unwholesome because it is ?very small,? ?a little bit of tart?a very little bit,? ?[a] small half-glass? of wine, and that watered down, while he advises her to avoid the custard 113 completely (Austen 25). It appears as if Mr. Woodhouse tries not to spend his provisions on his guests for the reason that he does not have enough for himself and his daughter. Hartfield?s proprietor, even though he summons his acquaintances to dine with him, offers them almost nothing. The narrator lets us know that despite her father?s behavior, Emma, like the good hostess she is, supplies ?her visitors in a much more satisfactory style,? to keep them happy (Austen 25). This sentence, which does not necessarily denote that the dinner that was eventually served was in accordance with the affluent meals the gentry was expected to have, is too vague to suppress once and for all the suspicions surrounding Mr. Woodhouse?s material insufficiency. Whereas both the vanquished, history?s losers, and the defeated suffer from limited material means, in the case of historical waste material insufficiency relates to its unproductivity, signaling that whenever survival, useleness and material scarcity conflate, they point to what has survived independently of the dialectic, the bare means and little to no ends of Mr. Woodhouse?s material sustenance. The emotional and sexual disinterestedness of Mr. Woodhouse, when combined with his dietary preferences, which encode the material scarcity of his existence, signify that his survival is characterized by a radically extreme form of what Nerssessian has called ?adjustment.? She defines the notion of adjustment ?as a formal as well as an ethical operation that allows human beings to accommodate themselves to the world by minimizing the demands they place upon it? (3). Adjustment does relate to the concept of survival, in the fashion that this chapter discusses it, to the extent that survival in Emma embodies a way of being in the world that moves away ?from the conceptual regime of the all-or-nothing, the wholly privileged impossible or the wholly degraded probable? (7). In a novel, where, to follow Galperin, ?an horizon of change? and ?a basis for hope? are receding rapidly ?ever more noticeably into the past,? upward mobility has 114 been considered by scholarship the ?wholly privileged impossible,? especially for middle-class women, while social stasis which turns one into history?s vanquished, ?the wholly degraded probable,? as the story of Jane Fairfax almost working as a governess for Mrs. Smallridge demonstrates (The Historical 196; Nersessian 7). However, even though I draw my concept of extreme adjustment from Nersessian?s notion of adjustment, which leads in her scholarship to a vision of a ?limited utopia,? I eschew any form of utopian hope that her analysis entails (21). Extreme adjustment borrows from Nersessian?s analysis the idea that adjustment moves conceptually beyond the binary structure of all-or-nothing, enunciating survival as one of the ?new ways of living the damaged and damaging life of industrial modernity whose rise in the mid-eighteenth century coincides with the emergence of Romanticism as a cultural movement? (Nersessian 16). In the case of Emma though, adjustment is radicalized in the sense that it does not stand for ?a simple pursuit in limitation? that can structure utopia, developing instead as an aspect of the eternal return which always maintains an unremitting unworking. The neutering the return brings, as Mr. Woodhouse?s disinterestedness and Miss Bates?s meaninglessness divulge, is not a simple ?divestment from regimes of absolute, comprehensive gratification? but the very destitution of the concept of intellectual and material fulfillment that makes utopia impossible once and for all (Nersessian 13). The historical refuse that resides in Emma has adjusted to an extreme extent to a condition where survival cannot form a utopia because it cannot be considered ?as an ontologically positive entity integral to the material makeup of the world? for the simple reason that it is an unworking so profound that becomes a ?dewordling? that does not concern itself with any aspect of material or conceptual re/making of this or any other possible world (Nersessian 7; 115 Hugill 1). Extreme adjustment is suspended between ?low adjustment,? the ?vision of a better world neither cleaved off nor materially distinct from our own? that for Nersessian takes the form of limited utopia, and ?high adjustment,? the philosophical impulse [?] to dissociate from, transcend, or break and remake the world? (21). In extreme adjustment?s material and emotional insufficiency, the term ?utempia? that Toby Thomson introduces, the ?nowhen? of the perfect temporality, is not applicable (207). Neither is the term ?heterotempia,? a real time, that, to appropriate Michel Foucault, is an ?effectively enacted [utempia] in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted? (24). Besides, Stephen Guy-Bray informs us that ?heteros means the other when there are only two, as opposed to allos, which means a potentially infinite number of other people and of other differences? (115). Mr. Woodhouse?s extreme adjustment emerges as an allotempia, a time queerly other from the time of progress, but also other than the temporality of stasis and regress. It is a condition that breaks open the ?narrowness of our system? of experiencing time through what has or has not be achieved, i.e., through concrete, measurable outcomes that make our temporality countable. In contrast, extreme adjustment, that is an aspect of the return, is radically uncountable (Guy-Bray 115).23 23 Blanchot elucidates the condition of extreme adjustment in The Instant of my Death where his character survives his shooting by inhabiting emotional scarcity. Being led to his execution during the Nazi occupation of Paris only to be dismissed by a lieutenant of the Vlassov army moments before he is shot, Blanchot?s character realizes during the anticipation of his death that the meaning of war is ?life for some, for others, the cruelty of assassination? (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 7). Waiting for his killing, he undergoes a ?lightness? that he does not know how to articulate (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 7). After many attempts, he wonders if it can be described as a freedom from life, only to rephrase it as the ?infinite opening up? (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 7). Faced with what he has designated as the only two possible outcomes of war, either life or death, the character in Blanchot?s text breaks away from both when, ?freed from life,? life for him becomes neutered, neutering death that same moment. His ?infinite opening up? then places him in an existence beyond war?s achievable ends (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 7). His survival undertakes a disinterestedness where ?[n]either happiness, nor unhappiness? are applicable or desirable anymore, indicating that it is an experience of extreme adjustment (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 7-9). The unworking of survival in ?The Instant of my Death? challenges the Hegelian concept of historical progress. The Ch?teau that is located in the vicinity of the impending assassination bears the inscription ?of the date 1807,? ?the famous year of Jena, when Napoleon, on his small gray horse, passed under the windows of Hegel, who recognized in him the ?spirit of the world?? (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 7). Blanchot?s alter ego sees the Ch?teau, where Hegel 116 Miss Bates? and Mr. Woodhouse?s eternally recurring but nonrecuperative temporality that makes historical waste visible is central to the redefinition of Austen?s relation to history. According to Jane Rendall, the historical writings of the late 18th century by prominent historians such as ?Adam Smith, William Robertson, John Millar and Lord Kames,? were based on the waited to herald the angel of progress, Napoleon, as a synecdoche of the Hegelian understanding of historical movement that actualizes through the violence of life and death. The Ch?teau at the time of Blanchot?s narrative suffers the Nazi occupation of France, that, standing metonymically in place for Napoleon?s military expedition to conquer Europe, could appear, if examined through Hegel?s view, as one more facet of historical progress, an argument that is not too farfetched if one recalls Benjamin?s assertion that Fascism had a chance to succeed because ?in the name of progress? even ?its opponents treat[ed] it as a historical norm? (257). Blanchot?s text forces Hegelian thought to question if Hegel was somehow alive during WWII, would he also have heralded the Nazi army in the same manner he welcomed Napoleon, and ?distinguish[ed] the empirical? from ?the essential,? the burnings of the farms and the killings of the farmers, from the forward movement of history (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 7)? During intellectual and material desertion, where the Third Reich takes Napoleon?s place as the spirit of the age situating the massive extinction of Jews, Romanies and members of the LGBTQ+ as its fundamental measurable outcome, Blanchot?s literary self is the only human being that ?[t]here remained,? undergoing survival?s extreme adjustment by dwelling in the beyond of the end-goals the Reich had set (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 7). Jacques Derrida argues that while waiting for death to encounter itself Blanchot?s character becomes ?[i]nvincible because totally vanquished, totally exposed, totally lost.? This reading, however, misconstrues Blanchot?s understanding of survival (?Demeure? 65, 67). Derrida focuses on the textual instance when death is about to arrive, originating from the barrel of the gun that is going to shoot Blanchot?s character. The experience of this moment forces Blanchot to wonder if he can call it ?[t]he encounter of death with death? (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 5). Contemplating this phrase, Derrida calls death an ?imminence,? an event that is always about to happen from the very moment it has announced itself as coming (64-65). Derrida has biological death in mind, which is an inherent characteristic of every human being, transforming life into ?only ever a suspension, an anticipation? of its actual arrival (64). This is the death that ?[a]ll living beings? share, whose experience becomes impossible because the moment a being is about to undergo death it has already died and has moved beyond the realm of experience (Derrida 65). For Derrida the arrival of the moment when ?[d]eath encounters itself? makes Blanchot?s character invincible, because being already ?totally lost? he has nothing else to lose and thus he cannot be defeated (Derrida 65). Moreover, dying nulls death as a possibility?biologically it cannot happen more than once?making Blanchot?s character immortal. What remains, Derrida argues, is the character?s ?orgiastic jouissance,? a phrase that reinterprets Blanchot?s characterization of his character?s experiences as ?[p]erhaps ecstasy? (Derrida 68; Blanchot, ?The Instant? 5). In Blanchot?s text, though, ecstasy quickly melts into ?the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity,? turning then into ?the happiness of not being immortal or eternal,? finally ending up through a series of transformations to the ?infinite opening up? of ?[n]either happiness, nor unhappiness? (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 5,7, 7-9). This is the final description of the character?s survival in the text, one that is not undermined by a ?perhaps? that precedes it or by a question mark that follows it, as Blanchot?s previous attempts to describe it have been. For Derrida ?death? in The Instant of my Death is a physical condition, a measurable outcome, a definite and determinable biological end. For Blanchot in the same text death is the neutering he discusses in The Space of Literature, a cancelling of death as a biological event the instant that one death encounters the other. For this reason, Blanchot does not say that death encounters itself, this is a phrase that Derrida uses; Blanchot only mentions that death encounters death, meaning that one kind of death, death as neutering, comes face to face with another kind of death, biological death. In this manner Blanchot places his survivor in an existence beyond the binaries of life and death that are the achievable ends of historical progress. The character?s survival undertakes a disinterestedness where ?[n]either happiness, nor unhappiness? are relevant or desirable anymore, indicating the effacement of life as progress and of death as stasis while exposing the experience of extreme adjustment, which, similar to Emma, is an aspect of survival (Blanchot, ?The Instant? 7-9). 117 notions of individual and social development that can result, they believed, in material growth and knowledge expansion (156). Contrary to the English, who associated infinite progress with God?s ?providential design,? these Scottish historians, Rendall informs us, composed narratives that discussed the progress of politics, economies, societies and manners, using the ?four stages of progress? as a ?common pattern of evolution? (157). Austen, Emily Rohrbach reports, is aware of these works, having Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey24 tutoring Catherine Morland on this model of historical understanding when he calls her attention to the progress modern England has achieved over the medieval times that Catherine?s gothic imagination assumes still exists (35). The temporality of Miss Bates?s jabber and Mr. Woodhouse?s minimal motion revolutionizes Austen?s ?historiographical aesthetic? beyond what Rohrbach calls ??little? narrative histories full of feeling? transforming it into one that enunciates the radical temporal plane of human waste where survival is made possible through an unremitting detour from meaning and work (Rohrbach 61, 57). Reading Emma, for Galperin ?a synecdoche of Austen?s oeuvre,? historically but beyond the heteronormativity of the dialectic reveals that Austen?s temporality is un-historically queer (Galperin, The Historical 180). Through its emphasis on ?unidirectional history? dialectical thinking replicates ?the heteronormative demand for proper sexual sequencing? (Rohy, 130). The temporal return breaks down the dominant ideology of ?reproductive temporality? with its emphasis on ?family, inheritance, and child rearing? queering Emma beyond the never- actualized Harriet-Emma relationship that scholars from Mudrick to Johnson and more recently 24 Narelle Shaw highlights that Northanger Abbey was composed between 1798-99, 1803 and 1809, while it was revised in 1816, after the publication of Emma, with its revisions remaining unspecified (591). This shows that notions of the literary representations of temporality have been in Austen?s mind probably during the composition of Emma that took place from 1814 to 1815. 118 to Galperin have called attention to25 (Halberstam, In a Queer Time 4, 2). Through the marriage plot, the novel enunciates a heteronormative narrative only to undermine it, showing that the dialectic places queer negativity out of its field of vision to forget its uncanny intimacy. II. Living in the Whole-Time. Eventfulness and the Meantime. After Mr. Elton?s marriage and his subsequent return to Highbury, Emma, out of propriety, throws a dinner-party for the newlyweds, inviting, among others, Miss Jane Fairfax. Talking to Mr. John Knightley who happens to visit Hartfield with his children the day of the party, Jane discloses that, when she encountered him early in the morning, she ?went only to the post-office,? an activity that constitutes her ?daily errand? before breakfast (Austen 272). Miss Fairfax, as she soon informs Mrs. Elton, considers that ?[t]he post-office is a wonderful establishment!,? admiring its ?regularity and dispatch? (Austen 275). Jane organizes her daily life at Highbury around her programmed post-office visits that designate the highlight of her day. The educated reader is aware that Miss Fairfax ventures there to receive Frank Churchill?s letters which comprise her only means during the time she remains in Highbury to acquire any news he might have relating to the future of their secret engagement (Austen 280). The walk to the post office sets in place a daily routine that is formed around the possible eventfulness of Frank?s letters that transforms the rest of her day into an eventless waiting for her next mail correspondence. In her case, the post-office is, among others, ?an 25 Mudrick claims that Emma is in love with Harriet, with Johnson adding that she ?is highly autonomous and autoerotic; and, finally, displaying shockingly little reverence for dramas of heterosexual love? (203; Equivocal Beings 195). In ??Describing what Never Happened?? Galperin reveals one other such possible homoerotic relationship between Harriet and Mrs. Martin, which collapses before it even begins, denoting a missed opportunity that the past made possible (361). 119 establishment? because it puts in place?it establishes?a circular temporality of eventfulness and eventlessness. In her discussion of wartime in William Cowper?s The Task, Mary Favret calls ?meantime? the eventless time interval between the daily visits of the post-boy who brings the news from war, a term that also describes Jane?s stay in Highbury. Besides the time of clocks, Favret argues that the post-boy and the newspaper he carries structure a predictable, circular temporality that shifts between eventfulness, one that the newspaper mediates through the act of reading, and the ?meantime? that is a ?pause in eventfulness? and which turns into the ?waiting for news of events which happened at a distance both geographical and temporal? (War 59-60, 64, 70, 73). Concealed behind the military concepts of victory and defeat, Favret?s eventfulness is structured around the biological categories of life and death: the newspapers inform their audience daily of how many soldiers died and when. Frank?s letters arrive from London, which is geographically detached from Highburry by sixteen miles the same time that it is temporally remote from the city?s industry and commerce, reshaping Jane?s time26 at Highbury into a meantime that she suffers ?with held breath? and forcing her to experience ?anticipation and dread? for the outcome of her love affair (Favret, War 81, 74). In a corresponding manner to the eventfulness of war, the news that Frank mails concerning their relationship are a matter of life and death for Jane. Unlike Miss Bates who has been surviving wastefully and in an unproductive manner, Miss Fairfax does not belong to the category of social waste but to that of the vanquished, being subdued to the ruling class by having to face the fate of being a governess that she considers intellectual slavery, as this chapter has already discussed (Austen 279). 26 In her analysis of Emma through the notion of time periods, Favret discusses Jane?s experience of time as ?the complex temporality of the mail (reading in the present what was written in the past; writing now what will not be read until later and elsewhere), avoiding calling Jane?s waiting a ?meantime,? in an attempt, it seems, to save the term only for her discussion of wartime (?Jane Austen?s Periods? 421). 120 The construction of a meantime equally through wartime and through the Frank-Jane marriage sub-plot highlights that in both cases, being placed in the dialectic means ?life for some, for others, the cruelty of [economic, social, and intellectual] assassination? (Blanchot, The Instant 7) As Blanchot?s The Instant discusses, for Hegel progress is exemplified in the change that the Napoleonic wars bring, which translates into life for the victors and death for the vanquished, a condition of existence that the eventlessness of survival radically defies. This understanding of the dialectic?s temporality exposes that death?biological in the case of war, but also economic, social and cultural?is imminent in the dialectic, ?only ever a suspension, an anticipation,? as Derrida might say (64). Even when one is placed in the social side of the winners, such as Jane Fairfax is after her marriage to Frank, one has only postponed death, not evaded it. The rise of the yeomanry for example, that in Emma is reflected in the description of Robert Martin?s Abbey Mill farm, did not last beyond the 1830s when it was ?often forced to sell [its] land either to a large landowner, or to a local tradesman who would put a tenant in,? turning eventually into a ?historically superannuated force? that was defeated by the dialectic (Eagleton, Myths 116, 119). In this fashion, Mr. Woodhouse?s exclamations in the form of ?[p]oor Miss Taylor? and ?poor Isabella,? that the narrator quotes in a comic manner only to emphasize his eccentric character, indicate that his could possibly sorrow originate from his realization that for his daughter and for Mrs. Weston death has become a certainty because both form through their marriage an alliance with the new classes, one that places them firmly in the dialectic (Austen 10, 11). In contrast to Mr. Woodhouse?s survival that happens because he resides beyond the dialectic, Mrs. Weston and Isabella, who in the novel?s narrative belong with the dialectic?s winners, might very easily become tomorrow?S losers, i.e., the vanquished, who are forced to overproduce for the class that has replaced them as the new champion of historical advancement. 121 Eventlessness as the Wholetime. Zooming out of Jane?s structured temporality to acquire a wider view of Emma we observe that the novel is the literary embodiment of an all-encompassing eventlessness. Emma opens in the aftermath of Miss Taylor?s marriage which turns into an unrelenting whiling away of Emma?s time that Harriet?s acquaintance intensifies instead of interrupting. The entire first volume of the novel is spent on its protagonist unsuccessfully plotting Harriet?s marriage, with the second volume turning Emma into a marionette played, in Duckworth?s words, by Frank in his ?subtle show? (163). The third volume concludes the Jane-Fairfax subplot with the couple?s marriage while Emma?s wedding to Mr. Knightley forces the novel?s readership to struggle after the fact to trace a series of events that could have led to this abrupt narrative turn. Taking into consideration Emma?s lack of Bildung, that Galperin, among others, has mentioned, the novel portrays a narrative motion that lacks narrative development. In this way, the narrative of Emma is unproductive, but it is not static (The Historical 189-90). Emma, mostly through its protagonist?s match-making that always goes awry, circles around everyday minutiae and detours from closure, overturning, as the Frank-Harriet-Emma incident underscores, any narrative significance it has been trying to establish. At the same time, Emma?s ability to be an ?imaginist?27 turns into a facet of ?plotting? in Peter Brooks? terms, ?the activity of shaping, with the dynamic aspect of narrative?that which makes a plot ?move forward,? and makes us read forward? (xiii). Emma practices a marriage plotting that becomes the shell that shelters the novel?s plotlessness, restoring the possibility of transmission of eventlessness without achieving 27 Drawing from Emma?s ability to be an ?imaginist,? Sonia Hofkosh calls Austen an ?illusionist? whose realistic prose unearths ?unexpected channels? in the run of ordinary life that can in turn escape the aesthetic realm of art, creating ?real consequences? (104). Hofkosh builds on Galperin?s argument in The Historical Austen where the latter argues that Austen ?is ever alert to possibilities that animate an ostensibly predictable and patriarchal society? resisting against a developing realistic depiction where ?regulation and representation? are becoming ?coterminal? (93, 181). My understanding is that Miss Woodhouse being an ?imaginist? in Emma operates in a purely formal manner, framing, and placing in the spotlight, the fundamental emptiness of the novel?s plot, which deprives Austen the title of the illusionist for this novel at least. 122 any kind of narrative transformation that Brooks believes it takes place in ?every case of narrative? (27). The novel in this manner resembles a vase, an object in Lacan?s parlance, ?made to represent the existence of the emptiness? by circumscribing, through Emma?s marriage scheming, the radical temporal negativity of the unworking of the return (The Ethics 121). Letters in Emma portray that Favret?s meantime is so pervasive in this novel that it turns into a whole-time. Despite mail arriving in Highbury ?with some frequency,? it fails to regulate the novel?s temporality in a predictable manner (Brown, 8). The first letter shows up in the novel?s second chapter and it is Frank?s to Mrs. Weston, with the second being Mr. Martin?s proposal to Harriet, while the next letter is that of Jane Fairfax, with most of the other letters that arrive in Highbury to be related to the Frank-Jane subplot. Together with Mr. Elton?s marriage that he communicates by letter to Mr. Cole, all this mail relates to marriages of upward mobility, indicative of an economic and social progress that only briefly interrupts an otherwise nongenerative narrative whose formal structure enacts that of the return. The appearance of mail creates an infrequent and short-lasting eventfulness that underscores in turn the novel?s overarching unproductive narrative motion. If the meantime is in Favret?s thought a temporary postponement of eventfulness, in Emma it transforms into an all-embracing experience, a whole- time, which, lacking narrative progress and character development is exposed as a hole-time, a temporality that resembles a black hole in the sense that it is a temporal void were every aspect that could have contributed to the novel?s advancement has disappeared. The recurrent temporality of Miss Bates and Mr. Woodhouse stand out to direct the reader?s attention towards the unworking that Emma engulfs, revealing that to find a form to accommodate the wasteful temporality of human survival is the primary operation of this novel. 123 Emma Surviving Emma. The title of Austen?s work stands as a clear and direct pronouncement of the survival of its protagonist, which, among others, sets the parameters on her material survival, namely as one of extreme adjustment. With Miss Woodhouse?s wedding to Mr. Knightley following those of Isabela, Miss Taylor, Jane Fairfax and Harriet Smith, the narrative sets in place an interpretative pattern where marriage becomes synonymous to upward mobility, placing one inside the dialectic.28 This is not the case with Emma. We know that Mr. Knightley is a gentleman farmer, coming from ?a family of such true gentility, untainted in blood and understanding? (Austen 336). Whereas his relationship to Mr. Martin, along with his interest in agriculture, could deem him ?[a] figure of patriotism and chivalry? that ?effects change within historical continuity, adapting tradition to evolving economic forces,? the narrator also provides clues that paradoxically indicate his financial troubles (Merrett 712). These signs indicate a narrative that counters George?s willingness to participate in history?s movement, to work with Martin and travel to London on business. Within this account he fails to become productive in a manner that is profitable, and since he is not forced to work for the ruling classes, he is expelled into the class of defeated. The day the dinner at Coles takes place, Emma?s carriage is following another, both heading at their host?s estate, when, upon arrival, she realizes that this is Mr. Knightley?s. The narrator then mentions that George is ?keeping no horses? and that he has ?little spare money,? which leads him ?to get about as he could? and ?not use his carriage so often? (Austen 199). The 28 Frequently read as a settlement because of her failure to marry Mr. Elton or Mr. Knightley, the marriage of Harriet Smith to Robert Martin is undeniably a moment of financial and social mobility. Thinking of ?nothing but profit and loss,? Mr. Martin, according to Emma, is ?a thriving man? that is ?full of the market to think of any thing else? (Austen, Emma 35). More importantly, Emma is certain he is bound to have a fruitful life because she does not doubt that ?he will thrive? and ?be a very rich man in time? (Austen, Emma 35). While for the protagonist of Austen?s work all these are reasons for Harriet to refuse his proposition, the end of the novel, when Harriet accepts Robert?s second offer, reveals that her happiness goes along with her social and financial progress, since, as the narrator mentions, her wedding establishes both ?stability? and ?improvement,? (Austen, Emma 435). Harriet?s wedding positions her inside history?s movement, exorcizing the ghost of a social death that drifts ominously over her head throughout the novel due to her gender and her unknown origin. 124 protagonist believes this is attributed to a ?great deal of health, activity, and independence? on his part, but the reader knows better than simply to trust her understanding (Austen 199). After Mr. Knightley sends to the Bateses another ?large basket of apples? that amounted to ?a bushel at least,? Miss Bates hears from Patty, her servant, who learns it from Larkins, that this was the last batch of apples of that kind that Mr. Knightley had (Austen 222). William does not seem to be concerned about his master?s lack of apples because he thinks the rest have been sold, but as Brown also points out, ?the supply is limited? (13). Knightley?s lack of spare cash though, along with Mrs. Hodges irritation because her master will have no apple tart for the rest of spring, meaning that he will not buy any more apples, might point towards a financial demise that Donwell?s housekeeper is aware of, but Larkins is not (Austen 222). The Donwell visit in the novel stages a comparison between Mr. Knigthley?s abode and Robert Martin?s Abbey Mill, where that latter is described as a happy place that is more prosperous, financially and socially, than the former, replacing it culturally and displacing it out of historical movement. ?[F]avorably placed and sheltered? in a bank ?of considerable abruptness and grandeur? the Mill creates ?a sweet view [?] to the eye and the mind? representative, for the narrator, of ?English verdure, English culture, English comfort,? and exemplary of the ?prosperity and beauty? of the place (Austen 337, 338). The Mill?s blossomed orchard, when regarded together with its ?rich pastures? and ?spreading flocks,? gestures at the rise of the yeomanry, that, according to Todd, ?most agitates Emma?s social vision, the encroaching of lower classes? (109). In contrast, Donwell Abbey is ?low and sheltered? in a claustrophobic manner, having almost no view of the ?ample gardens? and ?meadows? that surround it (Austen 335). The manor is larger than Hartfield, appearing to Emma ?rambling and irregular,? which for Heydt-Stevenson highlights its picturesque aesthetic (Austen 336; 180). 125 The house is nothing more than ?what it ought to be,? a monument of ?true gentility [?] untainted in blood and understanding? (Austen 336). This sentence reminds the reader that the Knightleys have never formed a coalition with any other class besides their own, a compliment to their high rank in society. ?Untainted in blood and understanding? though can also stand as an indication of social and cultural inbreeding.29 Besides, Donwell is a place of ?coolness and solitude? according to the narrator, and when compared to the warmth of Abbey Mill, whose orchards are fully-blossomed even in midsummer, Donwell?s ?rambling? signifies an excess and an eccentricity reminiscent of the meaninglessness that those who have been placed out of history bear, which might explain, since the narrator does not discuss it, why Mr. Knightley ?keeps turning to his accounts? (Austen 329; Brown 9-10). The marriage of Emma and Mr. Knightley then does not signify a coalition with the new classes. Rather it involves a narrative detour that places the couple outside the productive space of the dialectic, situating them instead in the space of history?s defeated, with their nongenerative existence underscoring their wasteful survival. Miss Woodhouse?s wedding to George bears elements of what in my analysis of Mr. Woodhouse I described as Nerssessian?s notion of extreme adjustment, lacking ?finery or parade? and having ?[v]ery little white satin? and ?very few lace veils? (Austen 453). The couple?s residence at Hartfield also shows that they are both turning away from inhabiting a discourse of development and growth. Visiting the Abbey Mill after her first rejection of Robert Martin?s proposal, Harriet spends fourteen minutes with Mrs. 29 Envious of Frank because he attracts Emma?s interest, Mr. Knightley treats him offensively, calling him at one point a ?trifling, silly fellow? (Austen 193). What appears as excessive confidence on Mr. Knightley?s part though is in fact a demonstration of social weakness that results from cultural hemophilia, the outcome of sociocultural inbreeding. George, who becomes profoundly disturbed by Frank?s letters, downgrading them even for their handwriting style because it resembles ?woman?s writing? in his eyes, is afraid of an actual comparison with the young Mr. Churchill whose tainted blood and understanding has made him financially, socially and culturally adoptable (Austen 276). On the contrary, in George?s case, a sack of apples or a letter from London might almost bleed him out by destroying his financial and emotional stability. 126 Martin who mentions the ?pencilled marks and memorandums on the wainscot by the window? that she used to measure Miss Smith?s growth when latter stayed at the Mill (Austen 176). Recalling this incident, Harriet remembers ?the day, the hour, the party, the occasion? that brings also in mind the ?consciousness? she had at the time (Austen 176). Consciousness in this passage is the result of physical growth and stands as the other name of an ideology of homogenous, empty time, calculated in hours and days. This is interrupted when Harriet enters Hartfield?s nonproductive temporality not finding a husband either in Mr. Elton or in Mr. Knightley, with her marriage to Robert re-instituting her once more in historical movement. Leaving the unhospitable Donwell Abbey to enter Hartfield, ?[t]he happy ending [of Emma] fails to satisfy? because, I argue, the novel?s narrative turns away from closure, the point where narrative culminates and concludes (318). Emma?s union with George is neither a happy moment in the text nor an unhappy one; it is what Blanchot calls the ?infinite opening up? of narrative where the novel can perpetuate its disinterestedness in advancing its plot and its characters ad infinitum, continuing in the aftermath of this marriage by describing the whiling away of both George?s and Miss Woodhouse?s mornings at Hartfield in the company of Mr. Woodhouse. This turning away from narrative closure that avoids achieving any ending, let alone a happy one, points once more at the eventless survival of the couple as historical waste. The novel?s conclusion, moreover, that heralds the ?perfect happiness of the union? reminds us of Mr. Weston?s understanding of perfection which comprises another example of extreme adjustment (Austen 453). In Mr. Weston?s self-admittedly not very clever conundrum during the Box Hill episode, the letters ?M? and ?A? of the alphabet ?express perfection? (Austen 348). ?M? and ?A? though is the adjusted version of ?Emma,? which recalls ?Rcsm,? a shorthand for Romanticism that appears in Nersessian?s discussion of low adjustment. ?Rcsm? in 127 Nersessian?s analysis highlights the ?body of literature interested in reclaiming the value of less? the moment this literature exposes that the growth industrialization brought was translated in ?economic inequality in Europe and America,? imperialism, deforestation, enclosures and the ?extinction of innumerable species? (22). Similarly, ?M? and ?A,? a scarce riddle, namely a riddle that is scarcely a riddle because it is deprived of cleverness, but also a riddle that formally embodies scarcity, indicates that perfection in Emma is an aspect of the extreme adjustment that informs the ?perfect happiness? of the couple, portraying the limited character of their survival not as any moment of the utopian, as Nersessian might insist, but as the group affect of the defeated, a sociable waste that exists beyond happiness or unhappiness (Austen 453). Emma and the Eternal Return of History. The unworking of interminable recurrence in Emma occupies the center of the novel?s narrative, complicating Adorno?s figurative description of the spatial location of historical waste that falls outside of the dialectic. Adorno indicates, as I have already mentioned, that waste has fallen ?by the wayside? of progress (151). His diction constructs two spatiotemporal planes, one where the dialectic operates, which occupies the vast majority of space-time, and one where it does not, where history?s unassimilable materials dwell. Adorno point outs that what has been left aside was ?not embraced? by the historical dynamic (151). The verb ?to embrace? creates a circumscribed area where the dialectic takes place and where reside the things and beings that have been embraced by it. Simultaneous to this inclusion, a space of exclusion is constructed in the outside of the dialectic?s enclosed space; this outside for Adorno is the space of waste where progress is inoperable and where the things that exist there ?have escaped? the dialectic?s grip. Nevertheless, in one of her wasteful chatters Miss Bates claims that she sees what is before her, referring to the progressive historical and narrative developments that her talk records, including the life of members of the bourgeoisie and the development of the Frank-Jane subplot (Austen, 128 Emma 165). By being able to observe the historical and narrative dialectical progress of Emma Miss Bates seems to share the same space with the dialectic, because if she was occupying a different spatial plane she would be banished from any such observation. As a matter of fact, the term ?blind spot? that Adorno uses to refer to historical leftovers agrees with such a reading of the spatial parameters of Miss Bates?s existence. Adorno asserts that historical waste comprises the ?blind spots that have escaped the dialectic? (151). In anatomy, the blind spot is part of the eye?s retina that has no photoreceptors. Placed centrally rather than in the periphery, the blind spot creates a gap in our field of vision that our brain fills with ?the colour and texture of the area surrounding it? (?Experiment Module: The Blind Spot?). Similarly, lacking conceptual receptors, readers cannot observe Miss Bates sharing the same space with the dialectic, because she is camouflaged by the ?colour and texture? of progressive history (?Experiment Module: The Blind Spot?). This omission from the historical discourse does not resemble the exclusion of the vanquished, the dialectic?s losers, whom the winners have intentionally excluded through the naturalization of their ideology, concealing the immense financial and cultural contribution of the vanquished along with the violence they suffered to overproduce for the ruling class. The eccentric structure of the Moebius strip provides a model for understanding how waste and development reside on the same spatiotemporal plane, forcing us to realize that the concept of dialectical progress of history is a fantasy. This simultaneity makes Emma, Knightley, Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse and other members of Highbury?s defeated that much more formally interesting than those figures of historical waste already relegated to the novel?s periphery, such as the gypsies that send Harriet into a panic. Retroactively placed along with the nonpropagative homosexuals and the Jews in concentration camps and exterminated massively, the gypsies have been considered by the Third Reich as historical waste par excellence, a 129 historical element that necessarily informs any contemporary reading of Emma. Their unremitting futile existence makes the gypsies perhaps the most obvious example of the defeated in the novel. Even though Nancy Armstrong has read them to represent anxieties concerning the propertyless migrant workers of the time, transforming them into a ?specter? of the vanquished, the non-productive nomadic existence of the gypsies points towards a mode of being that is governed by the detour of the return (246). Unlike these explicitly marginalized figures, the defeated that this chapter focuses on engross because they model how waste and development coexist in the blind spot that is Highbury, the central spaciotemporal plane of the novel?s staging of its non-dialectical non-productivity. Lacan introduces to psychoanalysis the pure mathematical matter of the moebius loop in his 1972 text ?L? Etourdit,? reflecting his interest in the topology of the Moebius strip whose physical representation30 shows that what initially appears as two separate surfaces, an ?inside? and an ?outside,? is only an optical illusion. To visualize it through M. C. Escher?s famous woodcut from 1963, an ant that walks around the Moebius loop shows up, at different moments, on what would be traditionally thought as both sides of the strip, while the strip only has one side (Fig. 1). The novel?s eventless narrative, which on the same page blends the disinterestedness of everyday minutiae with sporadic events, reveals a Moebius-strip configuration where progress and waste comprise, to borrow the vocabulary Joan Copjec employs to interpret sexual difference through the strip, ?two species of the same genus? (217). Miss Bates?s testimony also points towards that end; when she sees what is in front of her she shares the same space with the dialectic which indicates that waste and the dialectic sit on a Moebius-like surface that has only 30 As Gideon E. Schwarz mentions, to create a physical model of the strip you need ?a paper rectangle that is sufficiently long and narrow is bent and twisted so that its two shorter edges can be glued together in the required manner? (890) 130 one side, creating at points the conceptual illusion that there are two sides to it. Whereas in Adorno?s model progress moves forward while historical waste stays motionless, the novel?s narrative detouring shows that both waste and the dialectic are mobile, moving on the surface of a Moebius-strip structure. Furthermore, as David Gunderman and Richard Gunderman explain, the strip is non-orientable, which means that if one places on its surface three dots that, listed off clockwise, are black, blue and red, and then moves them around the loop, the colors of the dots, when they reach the point of their departure, will be listed off as red, blue and black, indicating that when going around the Moebius strip the objects change positions as if reflected in a mirror (?The Weird World of One-Sided Objects;? Figure 2). Both the dialectic and historical refuge are conceptual categories that in our material world translate into an infinite number of beings and things. If we imagine all these moving recurrently around a non-orientable surface that is similar to that of the Moebius strip, they would shift positions multiple times without ever repeating ?exactly the same events? in ?exactly the same order,? precisely what a cosmological understanding of the return would argue and describe (Nehamas, 322). The strip, moreover, is a space-time structure whose temporality, Tim Maudlin stresses, is also non-orientable with ?the [temporal] direction originally called ?future?? to change when a dot moves on the strip, and to point ?into the opposite lobe,? namely the past (156). In the case of waste and the dialectic moving constantly on the surface of the Moebius strip this means that the progress that is heading towards the future at some point changes direction and becomes regress that points towards the past while at the same time it shifts places with refuge. In other words, what initially appears as progress, when it continues progressing on the one-sided non-orientable space of the loop, becomes regressive. Progress and regress constitute the fate of both the victors and the vanquished. To situate winners, losers and waste on Gunderman and Gunderman?s model, the 131 elements that belong to the dialectic are the black and red dots. Starting at point A moving clockwise and supposing that the black dot is the ruling classes and the red dot the vanquished, when these dots reach point A after making a full turn on the surface of the Moebius strip they reappear as red and back, indicating that the progress of the winners became at some point regressing while the regress of the vanquished progressive. At the same time the blue dot most closely resembles history?s defeated since it is placed centrally in historical movement, between the winners and the vanquished, it performs a full turn remaining spatially undisturbed, i.e., without taking the place of progress or regress, while it does not affect the movement of the other dots, contributing in any manner to the dialectic?s workings. The structure of the Moebius strip points out that what we call historical progress, the paradigmatic change we can observe after the fact in our spatiotemporal plane is in fact the change of position of things and beings that the recurrence cause combined with the restructuring of their relations. To recall the figure Nietzsche employs for the eternal return, the turning of the hourglass resets the position of the grains of sand in its bulbs, but it results, once more, in another pile of sand, an extremely adjusted form of desertwaste, which, in its material scarcity, limits even itself. What is mostly considered an event is the observation that a new pile of sand has appeared and that the grains inside the bulb have changed positions. Nonetheless, even if one adheres to Alain Badiou?s definition of the event?namely that an ?event of the site X? is ?a multiple such that it is composed of on the one hand, elements of the site, and on the other hand, itself??when this definition is re-approached through the structure of the Moebius strip, it reinforces the argument that the event is only a switching of places on the space-time of the Moebius loop (179; emphasis in the original). The observable transformations that take place on the surface of this loop result, on the one hand, from the reorganization of the infinite amount of 132 objects that belong to the conceptual categories of rubbish and progress, what Badious calls the ?elements of the site,? and on the other from the properties of this site itself, i.e., that the loop is non-orientable both spatially and temporally. On these grounds it becomes evident that waste does not merely exist at ?the core of the dialectic? gnawing it from the inside, meaning that waste is not a subset of the dialectic (Khalip, ?Triumph?). Neither are there two separate movements, the progressive and productive movement of the dialectic, that is linear, and the recursive unproductive movement of waste. Since Emma portrays that what appears in Adorno?s thought to reside outside the dialectic, the defeated of history, and what appears to occupy the inside of the dialectic, the winners and the vanquished, cohabit the same space, history emerges as the structure of the Moebius strip, a recursive loop. Since history resembles a Moebius-strip structure the movement of history is eternally recursive, with the dialectic and waste being aspects of a return that takes place at a higher level. If Emma discloses history as pure unworking, namely as the eternal return, the dialectic, through the work it produces, obstructs history?s unworking, becoming in turn the unworking?postponement?of history?s unworking. The relationship of work?s unworking and history?s unworking does not form a dialectic relationship at a higher level but rather appears as falling ?into an irremediable idleness,? with falling being the operative term (Gurciullo 54). Whatever the dialectic produces the eternal recurrence dismantles. With the dialectic continuously generating (progress, value, meaning) and the recurrence incessantly tearing all to pieces, their relationship resembles a never-ending collapse, an incessant falling into absolute passivity that never concludes because this passivity never takes place, since if it did, a form of progress would have been achieved. History?s worklessness then has the power to transform 133 even the meaningful work of the dialectic that incorporates as one of its aspecrs into unworkable negativity. Admittedly, Emma depicts the spatio-temporal coexistence of historical waste, history?s defeated, and the ruling class, the dialectic?s victors in its narrative structure, as well as more locally in the monologues of Miss Bates, without providing clear and elaborate representations of the dialectic?s vanquished. Since we have been trained to think only dialectically, our thought has been accustomed to a conceptual illusion, leaving waste unseen and unthought. When we read the novel, we initially tend to confuse the defeated, that the novel focuses on, with the vanquished, of which Emma provides only a glimpse. To use the Gunderman and Gunderman representation of the Moebius strip, because Emma mostly incorporates in its narrative two out of three dots, the black and the blue, we confuse the blue dot with the red one. At this point we would do well to remember our earlier reelections on Jane?s fate as a governess, what remains unactualized in Emma, as staging the novel?s representation of the fate of the vanquished. Even more pointedly has been this chapter?s focus on the uselessness of Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse, Emma and Mr. Knightley, as what emphatically places them on the side of the defeated. Additionally, the novel does not fully parse out the mirror substitution of the victors with the vanquished that takes place on the surface of the Moebius strip. Our current historical understanding informs us though that the rise of the yeomanry, which in Emma appears as historical progress, eventually led this class to become regressive and to be defeated by the coalition of the landed gentry with the industrial and commercial classes, pointing at the switching of places between the black and red dots on the Gunderman and Gunderman model of the Moebius strip. Nevertheless, the nongenerative marriage of Emma with Mr. Knightley underlines how the worklessness of the strip transforms 134 marriage, that as Emma portrays in the case of Isabella, Jane, Mrs. Weston and Harriet, is financially, culturally and temporally reproductive, into an unworkable negativity that produces nothing, turning marriage?s work into one more function of the return?s unworking. To appropriate Lacan?s take on the properties of the strip, history, once ?imagined? as a Moebius loop, ?puts within hands? reach for everyone what is unimaginable,? namely history?s unremitting worklessness (Lacan, ?Second Turn? 13). Figure 1: Moebius Strip II (Red Ants). February 1963, Woodcut, Printed from 3 blocks. mcescher.com, 12 October 2019, ?Recognition and Success:1955-1972.? Figure 2: The GIF of the Moebius strip with the three dots created by David Gunderman. Double-click on the image to run it. III. Reading and Writing In the Return. Reading: (Im)patience. The eventlessness of Austen?s novels had been detected by her contemporaries. Discussing Austen?s early readers, Galperin mentions that Scott, in his review of Emma, ?can barely conceal the anxiety [Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates] produce? with the author of Waverley arguing that these characters derail with their minutiae the novel?s aim, which is to make its content comprehensible (The Historical 3). Galperin stresses Scott?s observation ?that the regulatory function of the novel will be compromised? by the unimportant elements of the everyday which, failing to hold the attention of the reader, cause ?boredom,? with Maria Edgeworth?s famous take on Emma, that the novel has ?no story? besides Emma?s father?s liking of ?smooth thin water gruel,? to corroborate this argument (The Historical 3-4; qtd. in Galperin, The Historical 9). Contrary to Scott, Galperin asserts that the details of the everyday achieve a ?[t]urning, or better still returning? of ?what is familiar and probable in social life to a potential and demonstrable otherness,? challenging the view that ?boredom can be as threatening or as deleterious as Scott contends? (The Historical 4, 3). In other words, Galperin?s argument is that 135 the minute details Austen overwhelmingly incorporates in her novels, when revisited, open new avenues in our understanding of the possibilities everyday life presents, becoming ?deleterious? because they comprise a form of action that makes future progress possible. Even though Galperin points out that the possibilities Austen?s novel portrays have already been foreclosed, he shares his belief that what has been ?sufficiently lost to time? can be ?recoverable as a prelude to becoming present,? recognizing that future change is possible (The History 23) In the work of Georges Bataille, the word ?deleterious? labels the nongenerative temporality the eternal return creates. In his essay ?The Obelisk? published in Visions of Excess, Bataille uses this adjective to describe the ?destructive and creative? movement of the recurrence of time, whose harmfulness does not originate from action, which in Galperin?s analysis of Austen is associated with change mostly synonymous with upward mobility, but from ?the feeling of an endless fall? that the return initiates (216; 220). This falling is ?FINAL? in the manner that is it never-ending, drawing attention for Gurciullo to the shattering of a ?progressive-linear? understanding of history and substituting it with ??the vertiginous fall? into the ?void?? that characterizes the return?s unworking (56). To circle back to Galperin?s reading of Emma, the injury the novel inflicts on Scott and Edgeworth comes from its worklessness that Scott?s ?boredom? quite accurately addresses. Emma is subversive because it portrays that no form of development of any kind is possible in its characters, in its story, or in history. Austen?s novel is the placeholder of a negativity that migrates to the reader through what Rohrbach calls the ?time of reading? (19). The term designates ?the way a reader at least potentially experiences the meanings (and revisions of meaning) of a text across the period of time it takes to read it? (Rohrbach 19). In Emma the reader encounters a meaninglessness so profoundly disturbing that it might stop one, as did Edgeworth, from reading. 136 Through the ?re-enactment of the absent events? in the narrative, the time of reading of Emma enacts on its reader the infinite falling into the void of the return that readers such as Rosmarin have been struggling to recuperate by rereading Austen?s work in an effort to ?reach ever deeper towards an underlying reality? which can comprise an ?inherently interesting and valuable? process that leads to the development of the reader (Hill, 149; 336, 320).31 Rosmarin in her time of reading practices patience to unearth the hidden usefulness of Emma while Edgeworth?s time is one of pure impatience that leads to stasis, with both together enacting a two-sided reading temporality that replicates the dialectical readings of the novel that this chapter has already discussed. A time of reading that experiences Emma undialectically engages with patience and impatience in a manner where both are welcomed as elements of the novel?s profound unworklessness. As referenced in this dissertation?s second chapter, Blanchot argues in The Space of Literature that patience ?tells another time, another sort of task whose end one doesn?t see, which assigns us no goal we can steadfastly pursue? disengaging us ?from all forms of daily activity? without making us ?inactive? (The Space, 126). Blanchot in fact distinguishes between two kinds of patience, with the second one ?seek[ing] to master? the absence of time, by ?making of it another time? that appears as presence, can be ?measured? and mastered (The Space 173). Rosmarin?s approach embodies both ?exactitude? and ?cold mastery,? which Blanchot associates with this second kind of productive patience, preventing ?the limitless? of the return from ever being imagined, let alone achieved (The Space 81). This patience is opposed 31 More recently scholars have reinforced this argument with George Levine pointing out that in Emma ?[e]verything means something other or more than what is said, either for the reader or for the characters engaged in conversation? (par. 2). Likewise, Mary Poovey has asserted that Austen?s work during its rereading creates the sense of Bildung on the part of the reader whose ?first impression? is that she ?is seeing everything? with the ?second impression? to make her realize ?that something has been missed? the first time but has been eventually recovered (360). The Frank-Jane subplot that is fully acknowledged by the reader through the novel?s re-reading, this approach reads as if it is specifically relates to Emma. 137 to ?impatience? which for Blanchot is the withdrawal from the insufferable ?absence of time? in an effort to hurry this experience to a concrete, calculable end (The Space 173). In a similar manner to what I term ?productive patience? trying to differentiate the different kinds of patience in Blanchot?s work, impatience is another shot towards mastery. Edgeworth?s impatience that manifests itself in the reading time of Emma exemplifies her effort to escape, and in this manner to control, the nauseating recurrence that Austen?s novel creates before it leads the uncontrollable ?infinite opening up? of the return (Blanchot, The Instant 7). What Blanchot names ?[t]rue patience,? however, is another name for an impatience ?endured endlessly,? meaning that the need to break from the vertiginous experience of a recurring story or history is sustained unrelentingly, bearing no other aim or desire than the unremitting continuity of itself (The Space 173). In this formulation patience and impatience avoid forming a dialectic, exemplifying what Leslie Hill calls ?the fundamental dissymmetry between work and worklessness? in which it is ?always the latter that prevails? (120). Writing: (Im)patience. In a recent article bearing the title ?Why the Humanities Can?t Be Saved? and published in Unherd on the 27th of August 2019, the philosopher John Gray believes that the death of the humanities results from the uselessness of critical thinking. Gray argues that majoring today in English, History or Philosophy students learn only an ?intra-academic argot?intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like?that has zero utility,? at a time when if ?Marx may be worth re- reading? due to capitalism ?entering another of its recurrent crises,? Heidegger, Derrida and Lacan certainly do not (?Why the Humanities Can?t Be Saved?). Even when he comes in contact with critical thinking that bears the promise of activist potential, that the terms intersectionality and hetero-normativity represent, Gray finds some utility only in readings that directly engage with the market economy, to the point that Marx may be worth the student?s time. He traces ?the 138 ideology of deconstruction,? that in his view dominates critical thinking, back to Socrates?s maieutic, asserting that while the latter was used by Plato?s teacher to ascertain a secular truth beyond metaphysics, critical thinking has transformed into a movement that deprives our ?western civilization? from the secularized thought of Socrates, leaning towards ?progress that is devoid of meaning? (?Why the Humanities Can?t Be Saved?). He thus advises ?young people? to get educated in the humanities by themselves without spending ?tens of thousands of pounds? since it is cheaper to ?buy a copy of Montaigne?s essays, Emily Dickinson?s poems, Joseph Conrad?s Lord Jim or Proust?s In Search of Lost Time? than to enroll at a Bachelor?s degree (Gray, ?Why the Humanities Can?t Be Saved?). Gray is impatient. He wants to dispense with the nonproductivity of critical thinking once and for all, being done with the meaninglessness of ?intra-academic argot? and the nauseating valuelessness it causes. Just like Edgeworth, Gray?s impatience tries to master the negativity of critical thinking by putting its motion at a halt. Gray?s article is reminiscent of an opinion piece from 2010 entitled ?Beyond Critical Thinking? and written by Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, also concerning the future of the humanities in relation to the unproductivity of critical thinking. Published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Roth postulates that the ?antipractical reputation? our profession has fallen under ?the rubric of critical thinking,? whose ability to ?undermine statements made by (or beliefs held by) others? without ?finding or making meaning? is ?entirely negative,? ?seriously unsatisfying;? and ?ultimately counterproductive? (?Beyond Critical Thinking?). Roth does not propose the ousting of the humanities from the University; he does suggest nonetheless that we, students and scholars of the humanities, need to ?transition from critical thinking to practical exploration? (?Beyond Critical Thinking?). Roth practices a productive patience similar to that of Rosmarin?s reading of Emma that endeavors to place the negativity of critical thinking 139 under specific goals it can steadfastly pursue which can reinstitute the value of humanistic thought. Roth and Gray, by targeting the uselessness of critical thinking, recognize its subversive nature; they are both attempting to master its uncontrollable unworking that is ?seriously unsatisfying,? inhabiting a place beyond happiness or unhappiness, to recall Blanchot. A response to such attacks appears in a recent volume of the MLA Newsletter from Spring 2019. In the ?President?s Column,? Brian Croxall discusses how the MLA 2019 convention has exposed that the digital humanities are firmly grounded in the academy. Attending multiple panels on the Digital Humanities (DH), Croxall describes his astonishment by the research possibilities this subfield of the humanities offers, discussing for example how Sabrina Lee went through the 104,000 volumes of the HathiTrust collection finding evidence that women writers have been declining over the last 150 years or that Kenton Rambsy collected data from 101 anthologies of short fiction, finding that anthology editors have managed to shape the canon of African American literature by incorporating only 30 stories by seven different authors (?The ?Next Big Thing? Ten Years Later: Digital Humanities at MLA 2019,? 3-4). This masked paean displays a future of humanistic scholarship that transcends ?the hitherto predictable, natural space of time and experience? to do research on thousands of volumes or of hundreds of years of publications in a traditional manner is physically untenable for the human intellect, an impossible experience, which in Reinhart Koselleck scholarship is exactly the discourse of historical progress as it appears in eighteenth-century thought (22). Interestingly, this article follows another opinion piece by Croxall in the same column that describes the closing down of the humanities departments under ?the constant questioning of the role of the humanistic education? (?The Right to the Humanities,? 2). Even though Croxall argues that the ?[d]igital humanities is just one method among many? that we can use to understand ?the products and 140 producers of modern languages,? the clear and measurable outcomes of a methodology that examines 104,000 volumes before it makes an argument provides a concrete response to those critics who believe that humanistic thought is dominated by the uselessness of critical thinking (?The ?Next Big Thing? Ten Years Later: Digital Humanities at MLA 2019,? 3-4). There are other ways to scholarship besides critical thinking, Croxall seems to say, where contemplation is directly related to action and where theory is not divorced from praxis, with DH proudly manifesting one of them. Croxall?s article is a symptom of a wider paradigmatic shift that the humanities have been experiencing for more than a decade, where critical thinking that goes hand in hand with close reading is deemed antiquated and ineffectual in the complexity of today?s world. It is not surprising then that graduate students have embraced DH to such an extent. Confronted with the possibility of what Jane Fairfax calls the sale of ?human intellect,? namely working on yearly contracts with a teaching load of 4-4 that deprives them of the time to pursue their own research, graduate students in the humanities are rushing to integrate aspects of DH in their research methodologies to prove their value in ?a dismal job market? that ?may have not hit bottom yet? (Austen, Emma 279; Croxall, ?The Right to the Humanities,? 2). Nevertheless, the marriage of the digital world to humanistic thought does not differ much from the marriage coalitions that Emma portrays, where superannuated historical forces, in our case those of critical thinking, form a union with the new forces of history, namely digital technology, to re-place themselves within a necessary narrative of dialectical progression. The death of Eagleton?s yeomanry in the 1830s though provides a very concrete historical example that opposes these arguments that the progress DH instigates will be beneficial for the field in general. Depicted in Emma in 1815 to be at its zenith, the social annihilation of the yeomen asserts that the dialectic is the space where today?s victor is tomorrow?s vanquished. 141 The uselessness of critical thinking reflects the disinterestedness Emma manifests, enunciating it as the paradigm we need to follow to institute in a determinate manner the survival of the humanities as that of the defeated. Instead of trying to convert critical thinking?s nonproductivity into an action that has tangible goals and observable outcomes, we need to develop even further modes of writing (im)patiently. To write (im)patience as a scholarly endeavor compels us to change our focus and methodology, when needed, to address the change that happens around us. This does not preclude that our methodologies have to ?progress? to match society?s ?advancement.? To read, write, inquire and respond anachronistically for example is one of the various ways of writing (im)patience. Anachronism, as Jerome Christensen has revealed, is the place ?where the excluded and extinct can make common cause? and which acquires an ?insistently ethical and potentially political import? (Lord Byron?s Strength 324; Romanticism at the End 11). To allow our texts to encircle and highlight the negativity of queerness, one that is not only manifested through sexual practices but expands to include everything that dismantles the determinate closure of the social, is another way to write (im)patience. The return, as my analysis of Mr. Woodhouse?s microcircular temporality has demonstrated, is an unremitting motion that is more powerful and more dangerous because it stays uncounted and unaccounted for. To write (im)patiently in manner that attunes with the return is sneaky process; it demands scholarship and critical thinking to move in ?little rounds? remaining unnoticed till the very last minute, appearing when least expected and when no one has prepared against them. Writing (im)patience then renounces any affiliation with forms of political quietism that can appear in the form of what Julius B. Fleming Jr. has recently named ?black patience,? whose caution on enslaved African American?s ?to ?go slow? in the pursuit of 142 full citizenship? became ?pivotal to transatlantic slavery and colonialism? (?Transforming Geographies? 589). On the contrary, writing (im)patience denotes a profound neutering of every form of productivity that manages to shake the very foundations of slavery and colonialism. To write (im)patiently requires one to exist in the midst of action which, because it sets no determinate goals, having no purpose and no specific use, it never stops from being at work. This is what Alison Hugill, in her discussion of Blanchot?s understanding of the artwork, calls its ?paradoxical strength of an inexhaustible impotence? (9). The profound unemployability of (im)patient writing creates an unremitting production of thought and action that because it is constantly undermined by worklessness it becomes a gift that never stops giving, forcing us to reconceptualize evenentlessness. If eventlessness describes a sociohistorical sameness that the ?eventual occurrence? interrupts in an explosive manner, to follow Badiou, then writing (im)patiently can create a form of sameness that is characterized by the uninterrupted action that worklessness creates, and which becomes unstoppable (74). Writing (im)patiently takes the form of an intellectual and social vigilance without a cause that abstains from the inactivity of lack patience as well as from any other inactivity that takes the form of absolute passivity. Similarly, it refrains from promoting that the only appropriate and effective response to ?the nation?s shattering praxis? which includes the ?shattering of black flesh? as well as the intellectual, spiritual and corporal devastation of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, women and the LGBTQ+ by both ideological and repressive apparatuses is that of immediate action, which is deemed effective for the reason that it is immediate (Flemming, ?The Shattering? 831, 833). Refusing to become part of the neoliberal discourse of deadlines, development, and growth, writing (im)patiently recognizes that the concept of historical progress that fantasizes the absolute closure of the social is the highest form of cruel optimism. Instead, writing (im)patiently 143 adheres to the ethical imperative the return instigates according to Blanchot, namely to have the will to shape the life around you in such a manner that ?you can accept having already desired it and having always to desire it again without beginning or end, even if it be as you yourself, without identity and without reality? (The Infinite 279-280). The fundamental worklessness of the return of History makes writing (im)patiently a never-ending process. This chapter argued that Emma circumscribes the temporality of social waste that historical progress has created and which takes the form of an eternal detouring from meaning, purpose and work. Starting from an analysis of Miss Bates?s chatter and Mr. Woodhouse?s minimal activity and moving then to the novel?s structure, the current chapter asserted that Emma is characterized by a profound eventlessness that it passes on to the reader. Taking into consideration the frequent denunciation of the humanities, the novel concludes by supporting the radicalization of the nongenerativity of our fields through what it terms (im)patient writing, explaining how this concept correlates to social and political activity, denouncing any allegations of political quietism. To appropriate the effect that Miss Bates?s monologue had on its environs during Higbury?s dance, (im)patient writing can become the mode par excellence of incessant political action that does not comprise a response to a specific question?its function is not to satisfy a particular need. Carrying the undetected and uneventful force of a wave that puts everything under water, subsuming all aspects of life under its transformative power, (im)patient writing can become the center of our cultural and intellectual practices 144 Chapter 4: Disabling Linearity, Enabling Freedom: The Two Histories of Mary Prince. This dissertation has examined the relation of disaster, survival and worldmaking in the literary and historical discourses of the Romantic period. In the aftermath of disastrous events, survival becomes strongly attached to non-productivity and non-generativity which both effectively bring to an end the capitalist production of goods along with familiar modes of social and political organization. The forceful discontinuity that catastrophe brings raises questions concerning the ideological dominance of cultural and social evolution, temporal progress, and the role of repair in our post-Enlightenment, capitalist culture. Discontinuity prepares the ground for literary characters, historical actors, and the readers of the works under question to imagine radically new socio-political structures beyond the Enlightenment imperative to progress and the market economy?s mandate to labor and consume. These radical re-imaginings refuse to replicate, or restage in an improved version, the socio-historical formations that existed in the pre-catastrophic world. Starting with Shelley?s The Last Man the first chapter explored forms of non-productive survival, drawing from the work of Blanchot and his understanding of absolute expenditure. In Shelley?s novel, the last human survivor decides to labor without reproducing materially or ideologically the pre-plague world and without a predetermined goal in mind, which, as Shelley?s Introduction suggests, constitutes the necessary prerequisite for any attempt at worldmaking. In its reading of The Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the second chapter turned to the study of unknowable forms of human disaster, criticizing the ideological fixation on repair that critical methodologies from New Criticism to post-criticism share. Building on the thought of Anne-Lise Fran?ois and her critique of the Enlightenment imperative to act based on our 145 knowledge, the chapter suggested that unknowable and irreparable disaster forces our thought and actions to move beyond trying to fix our damaged world and to start thinking of how to institute other worlds. The third chapter underscored the relation between survival, unproductive temporality, and the advent of capitalism in Austen?s Emma, highlighting how certain characters in the novel achieve cultural and material survival by residing outside the historical and economic progress that the transition to a market economy imposes. This non-progressive and non-static temporality stays in motion by shying away from achieving tangible outcomes and recalls Blanchot?s notion of the eternal return. It also suggests that survival can reside in temporal modes of being that avoid the historical dialectic of progress and the disaster it brings, complicating at the same time our understanding of historical movement. This fourth chapter examines the forms that disaster and survival take in The History of Mary Prince,32 the first freedom narrative recorded by a woman. It argues that Prince?s mediated narrative employs two registers to convey her survival33: a linear, triumphalist recounting of the events of Prince?s life and another that inscribes survival in the freedom narrative through repetition. The first register portrays Prince?s survival and freedom as the result of her gradual moral and intellectual development that climaxes with her final, direct confrontation with the Woods in London. This triumphalist register underscores Prince?s fight to survive the 32 This chapter refers to The History of Mary Prince, in italics, indicating the entire printed volume which includes Pringle?s ?Preface,? ?Supplement,? and all the other paratexts. When ?The History of Mary Prince?, in quotations marks, appears in this chapter it refers to Prince?s narrative only. 33 The authorship of the 1831 printed volume, that bears the title The History of Mary Prince, constitutes a complex socio-historical artifact that includes?but it is not limited to?the mediated recounting of Mary?s life. The volume involves the labor of an amanuensis, Susanna Strickland, and that of an editor, Thomas Pringle. Besides a short Preface, The History of Mary Prince incorporates a lengthy Supplement that comes after Prince?s story, followed by an Appendix that contains a letter testifying to Prince?s scarred body that results from the ferocity of her various enslavers. After the Appendix comes the short story of a young boy, Louis Asa Asa, who was captured in Africa by a rival tribe to be sold to slavery. These documents provide additional evidence that support the veracity of Prince?s autobiography. The same moment they complicate the reception of Prince?s text by a white, middle-class, abolitionist audience by presenting Prince, as Merinda K. Simmons points out, as ?a speaking subject and a speaker subjected? (81) 146 interminable disaster of slavery, to reach London and to reclaim her freedom from her enslavers by using the Somerset ruling. At the same time, this first register also serves Pringle?s abolitionist goals, who, according to Simmons, needs to portray Prince to his white, abolitionist audience as ?a woman worth emancipating? (84). The mediated progressive narrative shows Prince to realize her freedom by transforming herself from an enslaved subject into a wage laborer. The second register in the narrative of Prince marks the relation between freedom and survival to repetition. Pringle ?pruned? Prince?s linguistic choices, namely her use of West Indian Creole, retaining her ?expressions and peculiar phraseology? as much as it was ?practicable? (3). Other forms of repetition, nonetheless, escaped his editorial intervention. Prince frequently returns to representations of impaired enslaved bodies, concluding her narrative with her own impairment. Prince?s narrative recounts the stories of Sarah and Old Daniel, whose impaired bodies suffer in the hands of their enslavers because they cannot labor faster and in a more productive manner. Prince then focuses on her rheumatism, which limits, at first, and then prevents her body from laboring. At the same time, repetition in Prince?s mediated narrative makes visible that Prince?s impairment materializes as failure to produce for her captors, which arrests the system of racial capitalism, if only for a short period of time and to a limited extent. Prince?s Black, female body, moreover, fails to have descendants despite her various sexual encounters,34 those forced on her by her enslavers or those she chose to have, 34 Jenny Sharpe points out that ?[b]ecause of the structures of slavery that sanctioned their sexual appropriation by white men, slave women had extremely limited options? when it came to refusing a sexual partner (xvii). On the topic of enslaved women and their inability to choose their sexual partners, Katherine McKittrick notes that ?[t]he classification of [B]lack femininity was therefore also a process of placing her within the broader system of servitude?as an inhuman racial-sexual worker, as an objectified body, as a site through which sex, violence, and reproduction can be imagined and enacted, and as a captive human (xvii). Similarly, Barbara Bush-Slimani points out that ?[p]ower over the black woman's body in its productive capacity as an asexual labour unit thus combined with sexual power in an attempt to control both production and reproduction on slave plantations? connecting sexual labor with the reproduction of the plantation (84). Concerning the documentation of instances of sexual abuse, 147 which implies a shadow history of contraception and abortion, suggesting that Prince refuses to contribute to the future of the plantation and to reproduce, in this manner, the world of slavery. Prince?s multiple partners signal modes of queer desiring, as Jos? Esteban Mu?oz conceptualizes the practice, with Prince desiring other bodies beyond the constraints placed on her Black body. Her non-procreativity signifies a female, queer resistance that focuses on the non-reproductivity of the enslaved population and establishes the world of the plantation as one that has no future. In these passive, non-triumphalist forms of resistance that contribute to the unbecoming of the world of the enslaved by impeding its material and ideological reproduction, Prince?s crip resistance intersects with Black, female and queer modes of opposition that all utilize failure?the failure to work, to produce and to reproduce?and manifest themselves through repetition. Through the recurrence of failing on multiple fronts, Prince gestures towards a more absolute form of freedom that is radically discontinuous from the material conditions of her enslavement, and moves beyond the racial and ideological constraints of capitalist production. This movement constitutes the fertile ground for radical worldmaking, namely for thinking Black subjectivity and the Black body in a fundamentally new social structure that does not include any aspect of Black subjection. I. The Liberating and Confining Linear History of Mary Prince. ?The History,? as one of the earlier examples of freedom narratives, exemplifies most of the conventions of the genre, starting with the phrase ?I was born? (Prince 7). Nineteenth-century Marry Jeanne Larrabee points out that ?The History? omits all explicit references to Mary?s sexual abuse by her owners (468). However, the silences that both editor and amanuensis create in relation to Mary?s sexual abuse prescribe the gender performance of Black bodies. ?The History? implies that, for Pringle and Strickland, if bondspeople want to be considered ?worth emancipating? by the British public, to borrow a phrase Simmons uses, they need to control their, supposedly, ?unruly? sexuality, adhering to the moral standards of the period that forbid sexual encounters before marriage (84). This view opposes Clare Midgley?s interpretation that Strickland brings to the forefront ?instances of Prince?s sexual victimization? suppressing at the same time ?instances of her attempts to exercise control over her intimate life? (89). 148 novels, such as Charles Dicken?s Great Expectations, begin in a similar manner in their attempt to establish a realistic representation of society the same moment they initiate a process of bildung for their protagonists, underscoring their moral and intellectual growth in a process that at the time characterized?and was exclusive to?white subjectivity. In freedom narratives ?I was born? performatively asserts, as James Olney points out, the historical existence of the narrator, which grounds the truthfulness of the story?s occurrences and guards against anti-abolitionist accusations of fabrication (52). The phrase exemplifies what Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. describe as the ?correlation of language-use and presence? in the freedom narrative, the document that represents ?the attempts of [B]lacks to write themselves into being? (xxiii). In this vein, Olney emphasizes that ?I was born? constitutes an ?existential claim,? if one reads it as the first sentence the former chattel inscribes in the archive (52). This phrase constitutes the declaration of the existence of the captive subject as an inviolate kind of human subject, after she has been considered her entire life, to evoke Saidiya V. Hartman, either a fungible commodity to be bought, hired, beaten, raped, sold or killed, or a kind of a lesser subject who is ?legally recognized as human only to the degree that [s]he is criminally culpable? (Scenes 24). ?I was born? constitutes the inaugural formal element of Prince?s narrative: it commences the linear recounting of her corporeal survival, establishes her historical survival in the archive, and introduces a gradual process of character maturity?a Bildung for the Black subject, that initiates, in turn, Prince?s attempt towards social change. ?I was born,? a phrase that the enslaved expresses after she has freed herself, declares ?I have experienced the disaster of slavery, I was physically and mentally abused in ways that I cannot fully describe, but, nonetheless, I survived. I now inhabit a world where my body is my own.? Through the phrase ?I was born,? Prince marks both the starting point of her story, her birth, and the concluding point of her narrative, her 149 emancipation that allows her to narrate her story. By revealing how her story begins and ends, Prince?s mediated text establishes reader expectations for a progressive story development that connects these two points in her life. ?I was born,? moreover, signifies Prince?s emergence from archival absence, another aspect of the disaster of slavery.35 The physical annihilation of enslaved bodies, that during the Middle Passage were thrown over the ship to sink and vanish in its wake, was often accompanied by their historical annihilation. Enslavers in their records deprive the enslaved individuals from any form of agency and subjectivity, representing them only as objects to be owned, transported, acted upon, violated and killed. By inscribing her story, in a mediated manner, in the archive of narratives concerning the enslaved population and its experiences, Prince?s physical survival contributes to her achieving historical survival for herself and for the individuals and the events she witnesses in her narrative. Given that for Olney freedom narratives have one goal, the emancipation of all who are enslaved, ?I was born? also underscores Prince?s intention to change the world around her. The social and intellectual maturity that allows Prince to gain her freedom is paired with a gradual process of social change that she, among others, advances through the machinations of her narrative labor. Prince?s story brings together, in a linear manner, the past, when Prince was enslaved, with the present, where Prince, through her Bildung, achieves her freedom. Prince?s testimony continues with the particulars of her life, establishing her social and intellectual progress. This growth begins with her consciousness that she is chattel at the age of twelve when her first captor, Mrs. Williams, hires her out to Mrs. Pruden. Prince has fond 35 Hartman highlights how the archive erases historical events by turning into ?a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property? (?Venus 2). Bringing the example of a merchant?s account concerning the death of his human cargo Hartman states that the merchant initially reports the causes of death of his chattel as ?[m]elancholy? and ?dysentery? proceeding immediately afterwards in the use of ?ditto, ditto? (?Venus? 5). For Hartman, ?the ledger introduces another death through this shorthand? that exemplifies the manner the archive operates (?Venus 5). 150 memories of her earlier years in the Williams?s household, growing with Mrs. William?s daughter, Miss Betsey, who treats her more as a little pet than as a human being36. Her departure to Mrs. Pruden?s forces Prince to realize that, under colonial rule, her body does not belong to her. Prince exclaims that she ?cried bitterly? parting with her ?dear mistress and Miss Betsey? as well as her ?mother and brothers and sisters? ?[b]ut there was no help, [she] was forced to go? (Prince 8). She describes this event as ?a sore trial? followed by more painful experiences that, as the story shows, lead to the auction block. Prince?s relocation to another household captures one instance of her gradual apprehension of her condition, which sustains the forward momentum of her narrative. Prince develops from being unaware of the social structure she inhabits to becoming painfully conscious of her place in society through an experience of trauma whose narrativization, in this case, becomes synonymous with the progressive recounting of her character?s growth. The linear structure of Prince?s freedom narrative embodies the attempt of the former chattel to recuperate her structural exclusion by repositioning herself as a speaking and acting subject. ?The History? portrays how Prince resists aspects of her enslaved status and takes active measures to protect herself and others from the maliciousness of her captors. In this manner Prince displays, to borrow from the work of Henry Louis Gates Jr., her membership in the ?human community? by participating in historical, social and political processes (129). Indicative of her resistance is the incident when, in her attempt to protect herself, Prince temporarily escapes from the extremely abusive Captain I?. When her father returns her to her enslaver, Prince steps up to emphasize that ?[she] could stand the floggings no longer? and ?that [she] was weary of [her] life? (Prince 18). This encounter portrays that Prince takes steps into 36 Keith Thomas uses the term ?sinister benignity? to describe the relation that white Europeans developed with Black children, treating them as pets (403-404). 151 becoming more enlightened about her socio-historical condition and, as Fran?ois might say, Prince acts in light of what she knows by protecting her life and her body (30). Later, when Prince works for Mr. D?, she intervenes to save Mr. D??s daughter from her father?s wrath. Mr. D? would first get drunk and then abuse his child ?till she was not fit to be seen,? while Prince?s intervention leads him to abuse his slave instead (24). The event comments on Prince?s courageousness, sacrificing herself to protect an innocent child. It underlines, moreover, Prince?s understanding of patriarchy as a structure that, even though it intersects with and supports racial subjection, does not exclude violence against white females. In ?The History? the Black, speaking subject gradually becomes ?sympathetically engaged with an oppressed slave majority in the region of her birth,? empowers women through her autobiography, as Sandra Pouchet Paquet argues, and, as the incident with Mr. D? shows, acts on behalf of women to protect their bodies from male violence (132). The high point of Prince?s intellectual development, one which includes her understanding of how racial subjection operates, and the moment of the narrative?s climax, occurs when she frees herself from the Woods, following their relocation to London. As soon as she is sold to the Woods, Prince acquires ?the rheumatism? under their service, while their trip to England follows (25). There, her last enslavers force her to wash clothes, although they know that washing torments Prince?s body considerably. When Prince complains about her difficulty to perform these duties, the Woods open the door and order her out (32). Through the rehearsal of this threat the Woods maintain in England, for as long as they can, the social relations of Black subjection they have established in Antigua. To this end, and during their residence in London, Mrs. Wood reminds Prince that even if she thinks of herself ?a free woman,? she is not, pointing towards the imbalance of power between them that goes beyond Prince?s legal status in 152 England (33). Prince?s decision to ?take [the Woods] at their word? and to leave their residence is an intense act of courage since she is unaware about her ability to secure housing or employment when she moves away from them (33). Prince escapes being recaptured when she returns to the Wood?s London residence to gather her personal belongings, evading her former enslavers? sly attempts to enslave her once more. The Woods, at this instant, use an Englishwoman, Mrs. Pell, to prevent Prince from remaining free. Mrs. Pell encourages Prince to follow her ?into the country? and work in her household (34). Prince?s character development gains momentum when she stands her ground against this last concealed attack, managing to retain her freedom. ?The History? depicts Prince?s process to apprehend her condition as chattel, to take a series of actions to protect her body and others from abuse, and then finally, when given the chance, to reach out to grab her freedom. Read in this manner, ?The History? acknowledges ?a process of growth and development? for Prince, the narrative subject, as Paquet mentions, but also, as this chapter argues, for the narrative itself (138). In addition, Prince manifests for the audience of ?The History? her ?desire for freedom and equality? that originates in her, not in Pringle or Strickland (Jenny Sharpe 81). In ?The History? the abolitionist demand of emancipation appears as freedom earned by the enslaved, who claims this privilege in word and deed, not as freedom given by the abolitionist. On this level of linear recounting, the narrative and character development in ?The History? underscore the emergence of Prince?s corporeal and historical survival out of the disaster of slavery. It is a progressive process that begins with Prince?s birth in enslavement and concludes a little after she emancipates herself in London, where she is immediately employed as a wage laborer. ?The History? highlights that the violence Prince has suffered by a series of enslavers forces her to gain knowledge concerning her enslaved condition and to mature 153 intellectually and culturally and to try to free herself. Then, when she finds the chance, Prince protects herself from future violence by leaving her enslavers, achieving her corporeal survival. In turn, Prince?s oral recounting of her story to Strickland, and its publication by Pringle, contributes towards Prince?s historical survival, since her personal experience of enslavement enters the Anglophone, print archive, achieving three editions and becoming the reported subject of numerous public debates. This progressive narrative structure of ?The History,? however, belongs to a linear historical discourse that modernity utilizes to control available versions of the future. As J?rgen Habermas observes, ?[w]herever progress becomes a historical norm,? the ?quality of novelty? is eliminated and the future closes off ?as a source of disruption? (12). Elaborating Habermas, Emily Rohrbach remarks that ?a commitment to this idea of progress is everywhere in eighteenth-century British histories,? where progress appears unwilling to ?accommodate the possibility of paradigm-shifting surprise? (66). Habermas stresses that modernity limits ?the quality of novelty? while Rohrbach emphasizes the impossibility of radical change through narratives of development. If narratives of progress, such as ?The History,? bring social change, they also function as control mechanisms. They regulate the extent change can reach in a given social structure, foreclosing any possibilities for radical breaks from the past. In Prince?s case, her freedom from enslavement, which constitutes a very significant aspect of social change, transforms the enslaved individual into a wage laborer without disarticulating other aspects of the structure of racial capitalism, such as white supremacy, or anti-Blackness.37 Using narrative progress to convey social progress, Prince?s freedom signifies an improvement from, but not a 37 As Mathew Shum points out ?even as a ?free? person Prince is not an equal but a servant,? which in Mary?s case exposes the intersection of race and class and their relation to the English social hierarchy (318). 154 radical break with, her chattel condition, limiting the ability of the audience of ?The History? to imagine to what extent change needs to happen for Black subjects to be treated as equal. By employing a linear temporality ?The History? also cannot portray the complexity of Prince?s traumatic experience of the Black Atlantic, an experience inseparable from a fuller understanding of her multifaceted survival, namely the corporeal survival of Prince as human being and the historical survival of Prince, as a liberated individual, in the print archive of slavery. ?The History? shows the multiple dislocations of Prince who is bought, hired and sold around the Caribbean by a series of white enslavers. This experience is characterized by constant spatial and temporal repositionings that shatter any form of spatial or temporal coherence, breaking into pieces any attempt towards a coherent subjectivity. Every time Prince changes enslavers and locations in the Caribbean, she starts adjusting to her new environment from the beginning, learning from the start what situations to avoid in order to survive. This is an aspect of slavery?s disaster which John E. Drabinski, in his reading of Edouard Glissant, terms as ?the recurrence of beginning? (48). There is an impulse in the freedom narrative to narrativize these events in a continuous and coherent manner, in line with the linear temporality of the story. The progressive recounting of ?The History? covers over, even while it reveals, this series of interruptions, disasters and survivals Prince is forced to undergo, since the experience of a coherent narrative that the story conveys to the reader opposes the fractured traumatic experience that Prince underwent. This forces the Black subject to suffer, at least on a narrative level, what Glissant terms an historical ?implosion,? another name for the temporal disaster that underlies the attempt of the West to impose its singular and unidimensional time/line upon the diverse histories of the Caribbean (66).38 38 For Glissant, any form of progressive recounting of Caribbean subjectivity that inscribes subjects, such as Mary Prince, within ?a chronology of natural events,? leads to cultural and ontological alienation (63). Glissant fiercely 155 Embedded in Prince?s linear recounting exists a narrative structure that uses repetition to convey, in a non-triumphalist manner, the intricacies of Prince?s experience as an enslaved Black, female body transported as a commodity around the Black Atlantic. Against the triumphalism and the unitemporality of Prince?s linear recounting, this recursive narrative formally embodies Prince?s traumatic experiences. At the same time, this repetitive narrative suggests that both Prince?s freedom and survival are not so much the result of her character development as much as the outcome of her failure, a non-triumphalist form of resistance, on multiple fronts. Failure becomes the operative term for resistance, signaling the inability to exist according to the demands that a socio-economic system imposes on the enslaved Black subject. Prince?s failure to produce according to the dictations of her enslavers along with the failure of her Black, female body to reproduce the plantation world by having offspring, which points also to queer forms of resistance, all contribute to her failure to reproduce ideologically the world of racial capitalism that incorporates white supremacy and Black subjection. By putting a stop on the workings of this system of production that violates the Black, female and disabled body, Prince?s failure allows her and the readers of her story to think beyond improving the current system and towards thinking of establishing a radically different world that does not incorporate any aspect of Black subjection. This does not indicate that Prince?s mediated narrative articulates refutes the existence of a singular, linear and hierarchical historical time, with a unique, forward course that the West calls ?History,? and that Mary?s published narrative employs (64). Providing the example of Martinique, Glissant highlights that ?the apparent continuity? of time ?is the periodization of French history? that, through its historians, and with the help of the ?written sign,? a form of expression that opposes the orality of the Caribbean cultures, obfuscates the ?real discontinuity of the Caribbean experience? (76, 91). Being subjected to the unitemporality of History, Glissant argues, one is dominated by ?the hegemony of Europe? who uses both History and the institution of ?Literature? to totalize and dominate the world by concealing other temporal understandings (248, 76). The lived history of the Caribbean, on the other hand, ?is not saturated with a single History but effervescent with intermingled histories, spread around, rushing to fuse without destroying or reducing each other? (154). Glissant describes a cultural cross-fertilization that continuously puts in motion a never-ending process of coming together and becoming, fusing pasts and futures. Taking into consideration that History is considered by the West ?the first and most basic dimension of human Experience,? according to Glissant, any subject who does not partake in this process is banished from humanity (84). 156 the parameters of how a radically new world can exist. Instead, by breaking the continuity of her progressive narrative, one where the past dictates the forms that the future can take, Prince?s recounting frees the imaginary of her audience concerning the limits of social change. II. Linearity Interrupted: Black, Crip, Queer Repetition. In his Preface, Thomas Pringle, the editor of ?The History,? inadvertently signals the overarching, organizing presence of repetition in Prince?s story. Pringle explains that, before his editorial intervention, repetition in ?The History? was excessive. He decided to maintain only some of those moments that contribute to character and narrative development. Other instances he admits to pruning to ?exclude redundancies and gross grammatical errors, so as to render [Prince?s story] clearly intelligible? (Preface 3). These supposed ungrammaticalities that, for Pringle, obscure the narrative, are in fact elements of Prince?s West Indian creole, as Paquet, and Allen more recently, have noted (137; 510). Instead of elucidating Prince?s narrative, Pringle?s intervention, which changes the language and style of the oral recounting, attempts to assert ?authorial control? over Prince, as Jessica L Allen points out (518).39 Aside from a sign of linguistic complexity, trauma theory constitutes another approach that scholars such as Rachel Banner40 have used to explain the presence of repetition in ?The History.? Trauma appears in the narrative the moment Prince realizes her non-human status as an interchangeable, commodified thing. In the aftermath of the death of Mrs. Williams, Prince 39 Scholars view Pringle?s editorial labor rather critically. A. M. Rauwerda acknowledges, for example, Pringle?s ?well-intentioned abolitionist impulse,? recognizing at the same time that that his editorial interventions, both in the text and the paratexts, have occluded Prince?s voice (398). Matthew Shum refers to ?The History? as a ?highly mediated autobiographical narrative? whereas Allen underlines that ?Pringle?s paratexts overwhelm Prince?s story,? as ?his preface and supplementary materials? engulf ?her brief narrative? (312; 511). Simmons best depicts the complexity of The History stating that ?religious and abolitionist goals? and Prince?s voice ?mutually and simultaneously construct and complicate each other to such a degree that would not allow either to be discussed in isolation? (78). 40 Even though Banner connects slavery with trauma and repetition, her analysis of trauma is rather short and it only refers to the repetition of themes, without elaborating how trauma affects Mary?s narrative formally. 157 returns from Mrs. Pruden?s estate, where she was hired, to be sold by Mr. Williams who wants to gather capital to fund his new wedding. Prince rearticulates her inability to process the reason of being torn apart from her immediate family by her enslavers. She declares that ?[t]he idea of being sold away from my mother and Miss Betsey was so frightful, that I dared not trust myself to think about it,? only to mention a paragraph later that she ?cannot bear to think of that day,?it is too much? (9, 10). Even before the experience of the auction block takes place, Prince?s realization of her exchangeability resembles, to the extent that this is possible, what Christopher Bollas terms ?the unthought known.? In Bollas?s work, which does not deal with enslaved individuals, this experience partakes in the ?ontogenetic process? of the ego, signifying something known but ?never cognitively apprehended? (5). In its interaction with its social world, at that point its mother and father, the infant, according to Bollas, through countless instances of ?intense conflict,? negotiates its needs and wishes with a parental system; in this process ?a compromise emerges? (30). The knowledge of the fundamental laws that occur from these negotiations is, Bollas argues, ?part of the unthought known? (30). Prince?s enslaved subjectivity is constructed in a dis/similar manner through the interaction with the social structure of racial capitalism that considers her body a commodity. The radical imbalance of power between Prince and her enslavers limits the act of negotiating to a minimum, even if any such negotiation is possible. The development of the ?unthought known? on the part of the enslaved individual constitutes another aspect of disaster of saltwater slavery, where the enslaved individual has to shape their ego development in order to achieve corporeal survival. Through a series of early disastrous encounters with the enslaver Mr. Williams, which indicate that he believes he must sell Prince, she realizes that the only compromise that can keep her alive at this point is to keep on suffering, temporarily, as an enslaved individual. Through the textual 158 moments where Prince cannot process cognitively the prospect of being sold at the market by her enslavers, ?The History? portrays Prince?s ego in her early years as structured around the catastrophic moment of the recognition of herself as a fungible commodity, which constitutes the enslaved individual?s version of the unthought known.41 The manifestation of Prince?s traumatic moment of realizing her status as a commodity disarticulates the narrative coherence of ?The History.? In the early moments of the story, after Mrs. Williams?s death, the narrative reiterates in the span of four paragraphs the sorrow of Prince, her family, of other enslaved individuals and of Miss Betsy, impeding, briefly, the plot from moving forward. At this point, the narrative repeats the trauma Prince undergoes, along with the mourning her family experiences, resulting in the constant interruption of the progressive flow of Prince?s testimony. Other instances of repetition, as Banner discusses, concern Prince?s ?brutal beatings, unending labor, family separations, illnesses, and other traumas? (305). Prince, for example, goes to considerable lengths to explain the various ways Captain and Mrs. I? abuse her. After spending a paragraph elaborating on her constant beatings with various instruments of torture, such as ?the smart of the rope,? ?the cart-whip, and the cow- skin,? Prince turns to discuss the abuse of Hetty, only to return to another instance of her own abuse by the same enslavers. ?The History? switches from one instance of trauma to the next, re-turning around the theme of violence against enslaved individuals. The omnipresence of abuse in the freedom narrative formally materializes in Prince?s account as narrative interruption. It impedes, at 41 Bollas uses the phrase ?ego grammar? or ?the grammar of the ego? to refer to the structural formation of the unthought known (36). In Prince?s case, fungibility is the unthought known which underscores predominantly the catastrophe of slavery. Wilderson?s the ?grammar of suffering? exemplifies Prince?s ego formation with his term echoing Bollas?s while building upon it to highlight how fungibility establishes a structure of racial subjection (6). 159 various moments, the story?s linear recounting from reaching its cathartic climax?Prince?s emancipation of herself in London. The presence of repetition in Prince?s memoir is intimately tied to her account of bodily disablement that she and other enslaved Black Caribbeans experienced. Prince?s testimony retells again and again the trauma by which slavery leaves the human body permanently impaired, which offers readers another way to understand the meaning of her survival in and beyond slavery. In the first part of ?The History? and before Prince is sold to the Woods by her previous enslavers, the enslaved individual Hetty is beaten by her enslaver so severely while she is pregnant that she gives birth to a dead child. Prince testifies that even though Hetty was recovering ?her former strength never returned to her,? underlining how saltwater slavery damages the Black body beyond repair (16). The younger bondspeople Cyrus and Jack are beaten gratuitously by Mrs. I?, which leaves ?their flesh ragged and raw with licks? (15). Later, enslaved by Mr. D?, Prince becomes witness to the torture and death of Old Daniel, an older captive whose disability, a lame hip that has probably been acquired during his enslavement, does not allow him to be as productive as his captor wants. The enslaved Black woman Sarah has an even worse fate. Old, physically and mentally disabled, and unable to work a lot, she is tortured and then killed. To add to these experiences, in Turks Island, Prince meets her mother again after several years, who ?she had gone from her senses,? a phrase that points towards some form of mental disability. Prince?s mother suffers a partial loss of her cognitive functions during the time she was transported like cargo ?under the vessel?s bottom? (23). ?[O]vertaken by a violent storm at sea,? Prince?s mother undergoes a profound trauma that affects her ability to process the world around her, never managing to recover fully (23). ?The History? reveals multiple cases where bodily and psychic impairment is directly inflicted by saltwater slavery. 160 Following her enslavement by the Woods, the narrative places its emphasis on Prince?s personal experience, establishing a strong and clear connection between the working and living conditions of slavery and its relation to physical impairment and disability. Prince explains in her testimony that her duties at the Woods household were ?to attend the chambers,? ?nurse the child, and go down to the pond and wash clothes? (25). Her rheumatism, she mentions, results from ?catching a cold at the pond side, from washing in the fresh water,? connecting her sickness directly to her duties as a bondswoman, since the story makes it clear that it is the work Prince performs that injures her body permanently (25). As Dea H. Boster points out, ?[t]he conditions of slave labor, including overwork and repetitive motions,? lead to ?a number of different health problems that resulted in disability,? with rheumatism appearing ?frequently in descriptions of slave health problems? often incapacitating its victims (39).42 The living conditions of bondspeople are strongly related to disability as well. At the same time Prince acquires the rheumatism, she gets infected with ?the St. Anthony?s fire? that leaves her left leg ?quite a cripple? (25). Also known as ergotism, St. Anthony?s fire is a disease caused by the consumption of rye that has been spoiled by a fungus. John S. Holier, Jr. explains that the disease was most widely spread in the Middle Ages ?particularly among the poor who, during famine, consumed bread made from spoiled rye? (718). There seems to be no direct connection between rye bread and saltwater slavery in the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. The association of rye with poverty and extreme living conditions, nonetheless, at least in France, continues well into the eighteenth century, according to Steven Laurence Kaplan (44- 45). Taking into consideration Prince?s adverse life conditions, along with the silences the historical archive imposes on the life of bondspeople, it would not be too far-fetched to associate 42 In the nineteenth century, rheumatism indicates, according to Boster, ?a more expansive disease category [?] that could arise from infections or arthritis? (39). 161 diseases like ergotism with the bondsperson?s limited access to nourishment. Even in the case that St. Anthony?s fire is irrelevant to slavery, Prince?s recovery from the disease, while abandoned in ?a little old out-house, that was swarming with bugs and other vermin,? poorly fed and attended to, is exemplary of slavery life (Prince 25). Working and living as chattel hurt the Black body irreparably, since as Boster observes in his study on the American South, ?corporeal punishment and abuse? and ?the circumstances of slave life? were disabling for bondspeople (34).43 Enslavers view Prince?s impaired body as disabled due to her inability to produce as much as her enslavers require, which underscores that while impairment is a physical attribute, disability is a socially constructed category based on economic and cultural forces external to the human body. After Prince acquires the rheumatism, the Woods move from a town house to a country house where Prince is expected to continue with her house duties. On a weekly basis Prince must ?wash two large bundles of clothes, as much as a boy could help [her] to lift? (26). Mrs. Wood, however, is not satisfied with Prince?s productivity, constantly ?abusing and fretting after? Prince to work more (26). Before she departs for London with the Woods, Prince records two more instances where her rheumatism interferes with her work, which result in her enslavers getting extremely frustrated with her decreased productivity. In the first instance, Mrs. Wood becomes irritated with Prince, informing Prince that she needs to find another enslaver.44 The text validates David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder?s argument that just like gender, sexuality and race, disability is ?a constructed category of discursive investment? (2). The impaired Black 43 Boster distinguishes physical impairment from disability, considering disability ?a significant labor deficit? that relates to impairment but does not originate in physical or mental injuries (41) 44 When Mr. Burchell shows up to purchase her, however, Mr. Wood refuses to sell Prince, demonstrating that the Woods use her disability as an excuse to practice diverse forms of psychological torture against her. In this instance, Mr. Wood is torturing Prince by pretending to provide her some form of agency, namely to choose her next enslaver and to escape Mr. Wood?s treatment. When Prince manages to find her next enslaver, Mr. Wood suddenly refuses the agency he provided to Prince, making her painfully aware that being enslaved deprives the subject of agency. 162 body becomes disabled in the context of forced labor the moment it is not producing as much as one?s enslaver expects, a predicament which exposes that disability is not simply or essentially a bodily attribute. ?The History? renders visible the intricate relation between disability, enslavement, and disaster by exposing their connection to one another and to the chattel?s working conditions. Michael Oliver memorably associates disability with the body?s inability to conform to the labor demands of its historical period, connecting disability most emphatically to the machinations of capitalism, a position that Snyder and Mitchell hold as well (27; Cultural Locations 15).45 While impairment relates to the manner that subjects experience their bodies, disability is constructed through the demands that the capitalist system of production imposes on the human body, i.e., that it must produce a certain amount of goods or services at a specific time-period. In his discussion of capitalism, Oliver does not relate disability to the ravages of slavery, a connection that has become clearer with recent scholarship stressing slavery as one of the most violent modes of capitalist expansion. For Sibylle Fischer ?slavery in the Caribbean was one of the first and most brutal appearances of modernity,? entailing ?a radical rationalization of labor processes, an utter disregard for traditions, and a degree of instrumentalization of human life that had never been seen in the metropolis? (12). All these explicitly indicate slavery?s ?capitalist form? according to Susan Buck-Morss, who connects the exhaustion of ?both land and labor? to ?an insatiable consumer demand created by the addictive products themselves (tobacco, sugar, coffee, rum),? highlighting how production under slavery both establishes and maintains entire 45 Oliver argues that whereas ?agriculture or small-scale industry, did not preclude the great majority of disabled people from participating in the production process? further capitalist development put in place a ?process of exclusion from the workforce? that involves ?all kinds of disabled people? (27). 163 sections of an international capitalist market economy (87).46 Prince?s experience from the salt ponds in the Turk?s Island confirms these views, since as Michele Speitz points out, salt, ?a survival commodity,? has an international market history whose significance is comparable to sugar and tobacco (Par 5). Many instances in the ?The History? encourage its readers to connect bodily impairment with how the enslaver?s production demands define disability. In Turk?s Island, for example, Prince is required to work at least twelve hours a day, six days a week, with several hours of work taking place on Sundays as well (19). The development of the salt boils in her leg, a manifestation of impairment, forces her to move slowly, only for Mr. D? to rebuke her for decreased efficiency, which points towards establishing disability, with Prince?s body recovering from this impairment. Under slavery the Black body can never stop producing, which leads it to become injured beyond repair, forcing it then to be perceived, by enslavers and other enslaved individuals, as disabled the instance it does not meet the labor criteria imposed on it. Like her working conditions, Prince?s living conditions repetitively stage violence against the Black body that is both gratuitous and structural, and leads once more to acquired disabilities, the corporeal manifestations of the disaster of slavery. Frank B. Wilderson III asserts that slavery establishes an ontological condition for the Black body that simultaneously excludes it from being a member of society, constantly abusing it without a reason. Gratuitous violence, for Wilderson, is ?not contingent on transgressions;? it exists simply ?without cause,? being ?uncalled for? (55, 56). Wilderson points out that white-dominated society, starting from slavery and continuing in its wake, institutes gratuitous violence for the Black body in a ?structural? 46 In ?Capitalism, Slavery and Caribbean Modernity? Hilary McDonald Beckles associates directly the Caribbean and the slave trade with the process of capitalist globalization. She argues that [c]ommercial capitalism signaled the beginning of the integration of the continents of the world into one economic system,? with ?[h]istorians on both sides of the Atlantic? documenting ?very carefully the impact of the slave trade and slavery upon world trades? (785). Achille Mbembe, in a more theoretical formulation, asserts that capitalism through ?the constant manufacturing of races, or species (as it happens, Negroes)? that it then consumes as human ?biostock,? is driven forward ever since its origins (177, 165). 164 manner (55). Violence against Black individuals and communities reappears incessantly and remains inescapable. For this reason, it is ?absolute.? (Wilderson 76). Prince?s testimony supports this argument when she mentions that slaves were ?never secure one moment from a blow? spending their lives in ?continual fear,? such as the fate of the enslaved woman Hetty portrays or of the enslaved children Cyrus and Jack who are constantly beaten by Mrs. I? for no reason, which leaves ?their flesh ragged and raw with licks? (Prince 15).47 Working and living as chattel establishes a temporality that accelerates and exacerbates the natural decline of the Black body. Overworked, brutalized and malnourished, bondspeople become disabled sooner rather than later. The cases of Daniel, Sarah, and Prince show that disability prolongs, to use Christina Sharpe?s diction, the ?quotidian catastrophic events? against bondspeople (In the Wake 20). Exemplary is the story of Old Daniel whose inability to work effectively leads his enslaver to torment him unremittingly. Due to his limited mobility caused by his ?lame hip,? Old Daniel ?could not keep up with the rest of the slaves,? suffering additional assaults by Mr. D?who beats him with a ?rough briar? and then throws salt in his wounds, which are then festered with maggots and never heal (Prince 21). Prince narrates that Daniel?s ?wretched case? showed to the other slaves what will happen to them if they live to be old (21). The case of the bondswoman named Sarah, moreover, resembles that of Daniel, with the exception that in her occasion violence leads to her assassination. Old and subject ?to several bodily infirmities? suffering from mental impairment as well, according to Prince, Sarah does 47 Wilderson maintains that slavery establishes a world where the Black body is unable to acquire any form of subjectivity. Instead it is excluded from all socio-political discourses that negotiate the present and future of the social formations Black bodies inhabit. This exclusion transforms the Black body into what Wilderson calls the ?anti-Human,? an existence that does not manifest the opposite of humanity through a dialectical formation (11). The ?anti-Human? stands as the negativity that is prohibited from acquiring any meaning through synthesis. Wilderson reaches the conclusion that in this new world that slavery constitutes, Blackness transforms into the experience of social death, which equals worldlessness because for Wilderson, ?the violence that produces the Slave,? ?makes it impossible to think ?Slave? and ?world? together? (52). 165 not ?wheel the barrow fast enough? to please ?Master Dickey,? the son of Mr. D?, who throws her ?among the prickly-pear bushes, which are all covered with sharp, venomous prickles? (22). The cases of Sarah and old Daniel confirm Robert McRuer?s point that ?[s]ooner or later, if we live long enough [?] we will all become disabled? (214). Prince explains that Sarah ?was nearly past work,? which can easily justify her disposal in the eyes of her captor (22). Deemed unable to produce, Sarah?s enslaver discards her as useless. ?The History? exemplifies how enslavers consider bondspeople commodities that through use and abuse break down and lose their value, becoming waste for the enslaver. The temporality of slavery imposes on the body of the chattel a compressed time that wears it out rapidly, which in turn disables it, transforming it, in the eyes of the enslaver, into a useless commodity. Through the textual depictions of Old Daniel and Sarah, the intersection of slavery and disability strongly supports Elizabeth Deloughrey?s view that waste is ?a constitutive process and product of the violence of Atlantic modernity? (711). Apart from enslavers, the manner that ?The History? represents bondspeople, in ?The History? maintain strong beliefs about able-bodiedness. Boster discusses how certain freedom narratives portrayed disability as a wretched condition, emphasizing the need for physical strength on the part of the bondsperson. Frederick Douglass, for example, famously becomes the master of his own fate after a two-hour long physical battle with the villainous overseer Mr. Covey. Douglass grabs Covey by the throat, pushes back Hughes, another enslaved individual who came to help Covey, by kicking him ?under the ribs,? reclaiming his subjectivity through physical strength (77). Next, Boster draws attention to Harriet Jacobs?s narrative where she implies that her bodily strength allowed her to escape her captor (30). In such freedom narratives from the American South, Boster concludes that many ?African American bondspeople assumed that those with physical impairments were weak and burdensome,? a liability to other enslaved 166 people trying to free themselves (31). This view also speaks to Prince?s story, underwriting how it can be understood through the theme of disability. During the period of Prince?s suffering her first rheumatism attack and recovering from ergotism, the Woods hire ?a mulatto woman? named Martha Wilcox (Prince 26). When Prince gets ?well enough to work in the house,? a phrase that suggests that she has not reached full recovery, Martha, tries to bully her. (26). Such episodes from ?The History? and other freedom narratives discuss how slavery can be understood as what Snyder and Mitchell term a ?cultural location of disability? (x). Enslavers and bondspeople, to different extents, abuse and disenfranchise the disabled enslaved individual who is either viewed as a weak link in the production chain or as an obstacle for other enslaved individuals who try to strive for freedom. Yet ?The History? also implicitly associates Prince?s struggle with her disability with the prospect of future emancipation, with this struggle constituting the necessary step towards her corporeal and historical survival. Around the time of Prince?s third attack from rheumatism, the Woods announce that they will be going to England ?to put their son to school, and bring their daughters home,? and they are willing to take Prince with them as household slave (Prince 31). Before the trip starts, Prince declares her eagerness to travel to London, relating this opportunity with the possibility of her pain decreasing in magnitude, since she believed at the time that ?by going there [she] should probably get cured of [her] rheumatism? (31). Besides rehabilitation, the passage associates London with the promise of freedom. Prince states that her husband informs her that in London her enslaver will set her free (Prince 31). London occupies the textual space in which Prince?s disability and emancipation coexist, even if there is no direct link between them. The textual proximity of disability to freedom foreshadows that disability both causes additional violence on the body and can also become the harbinger of liberty. 167 After Prince relocates to London, disability becomes a central motif of ?The History,? with Prince first attempting to use her impairment to renegotiate her labor conditions. Prince reports that as soon as she and the Woods approached England, ?the rheumatism seized all of [her] limbs worse than ever, and [her] body was dreadfully swelled? (31). Presenting those symptoms to her mistress as evidence of her worsening condition, Prince tries to convince her enslavers to be more lenient about the chores they want her to perform. Prince notifies Mrs. Wood that if she pursues working in the tub, especially putting her hands first in cold water and then in hot as is the English custom, her condition will worsen, which means Prince will be able to produce even less. As Boster would say, Prince puts to use a common tactic for ?slaves with disabilities? who ?recognized opportunities to use their defective bodies and minds to negotiate the terms of their bondage? and sometimes even established ?a measure of self-control? (4). The Woods refuse to lift any of Prince?s work requirements contributing to the deterioration of Prince?s health, with Prince ending up being barely able to keep with the task of washing. Prince expresses her bodily pain to Mrs. Wood who does not acknowledge any aspects of Prince?s experience. Prince then repeats to her enslaver how her impairment affects her productivity, with Mrs. Wood still does not ?release[ing] [her] from the tub? (32). These labor requirements force Prince ?not [to] stand to wash? at all (32). Mrs. Wood does not provide any accommodations to her chattel, a gesture that could alleviate some of the tension between them. The absence of any resolution to this conflict between the enslaver and the enslaved in this lengthy paragraph creates the impression that Prince is narrating the same incident multiple times. In fact, the paragraph reports three separate occasions where Prince attempts to ?negotiate??a term that Boster uses?her work conditions with the Woods. By narrativizing all three incidents without constructing any narrative progress through climax or resolution, the 168 paragraph expands the reading time of Prince?s conflict with the Woods, exposing a lack of narrative development that the repetition of these almost identical events creates. These negotiations concerning the disability of enslaved individuals impede both Prince?s material production and the plot development of ?The History? from moving forward, and they establish both material and narrative unproductivity, in relation to the linear narrative of Prince, in the sense of not permitting the progressive narrative to develop and reach its resolution quicker. Repetition continues in the next two paragraphs, establishing a non-linear narrative pattern that Prince breaks with her emancipation. Moving with the Woods to Leigh Street, their permanent residence in London, Prince is expected to wash those clothes her enslavers wore during their trip from Antigua--?five bags,? a large amount for someone who cannot hardly wash clothes at all (32). Prince once again informs her enslavers that washing is painful to her body because of her rheumatism, encouraging them to hire a woman instead (32). For their part, they threaten to oust Prince from their household if she continues to fail to work, a threat they rearticulate in their next confrontation with their chattel over ?one of [their] great washings? (32). As a depiction of the parties? ongoing conflict, this account divorces itself from narrative progress, such as one that would result in better working conditions for Prince. Instead, ?The History? highlights another repetitive pattern?the Woods?s threat to oust Prince from their household. The narrative at this moment of ?The History? is what Elizabeth Freeman calls a ?stuttering kind of time rather than progress toward the future,? a temporality that shies away from achieving tangible results, either for the Woods, who want Prince to produce for them, or for Prince who attempts to improve her labor conditions (34). The Woods, by threatening Prince, try to reestablish their social dominance over her body through the rehearsal of the Black subjection they have instituted in Antigua. For the first three 169 times, the repetition of the threat in ?The History? focuses on Prince?s reaction, who insists on not abandoning her enslavers. The Woods believe that Prince?s repeated refusal to leave them informs her future behavior, reading her past behavior as a strong indication of her future attitudes and establishing, in this manner, a continuity between past and present. As a result, they think that their threat is an efficient mechanism for subjection. The final time they reiterate it, however, Prince decides ?to take them at their word? (33). Prince, the last time she is ordered out, opens the door and leaves, refusing the continuity that the Woods imagined was in place. This unanticipated behavior appears as fundamentally different from Prince?s previous responses, evoking how Glissant links repetition to obscurity and resistance. Glissant points out that repetition does not always clarify expression, for the reason that it can just as easily lead to obscurity (4). Recurrence establishes patterns of behaving that create expectations?social, cultural, economic and even narrative. Glissant calls these patterns ?stubborn shadows? in the sense that every new articulation of an act is expected to follow those that preceded it (Caribbean 4). Believing that repetition establishes behaviors to exclude anything improbable leads to what Glissant calls ?perpetual concealment,? the ontological hiding of the numerous improbable occurrences the future can bring (4). Her repetitive response obscures her unprecedented decision to break that pattern to abandon the Woods? household. Repetition in Prince?s case does not function as a simple ploy, where she puts in place a pattern of submission with an intent to break it and to set herself free. Nowhere in the text does Prince?s appear to be planning to leave the Woods household or to try to trick them by executing strategic actions that lead to her liberty. Not at all signaled in any way by the repetitive pattern of conflict coming before it, improbable leap into freedom breaks up once and for all the narrative of gradual, progressive development. Prince?s repetitive acts of submission to her enslavers conceal not 170 psychologically but ontologically an entire horizon of improbable, but not impossible, actions, ones that ?The History? does not have Prince conceptualize in advance. For this reason, Prince?s decision to leave her enslavers institutes a radical break between her existence before leaving the Woods and her life after leaving them. The text shows that this behavior is both unprecedented and unthought of, both from the Woods and from Prince herself, creating another instance where the narrative does not progress towards resolution in a linear manner. Instead, it institutes a break in Prince?s life, and in the narrative of ?The History,? that signifies a narrative discontinuity, since the plot lacks a continuous narrative flow. ?The History? establishes a narrative temporality through recurrence where disability and the experience of the Black Atlantic intersect, pointing towards a non-progressive manner of history writing that registers Black survival through discontinuity and breaks. The sheer amount of repetition in Prince?s story, along with Pringle?s note that even more existed before he edited other episodes of repetition out, point towards how ?The History? uses repetition to defy the progressive Western narrative time that its audience expects, and its editor extolls. Escaping, in some cases, through the fissures of the linear narrative, while in others using the linear narrative as a vehicle, repetition allows Prince to de-scribe herself from an imposed linearity only to inscribe her own non-continuous affective experience that more effectively conveys both her Caribbeanness and her disability. These elements in ?The History? recall M. NourbeSe Philip?s assertion that ?the Western way of narrative?in terms of a beginning, a middle, and end? cannot adequately represent Black experience, which includes both the disaster of Black lives and the survival of the Black subject, one that a linear narrative can seldom portray accurately (Saunders 72). Philip endorses non-continuous modes of historicization that harness the potentially disruptive force of repetition, one ?made manifest in our continued need to go over the same 171 material time and time again, trying to find answers, trying to come up with different understandings of what this experience? of slavery was and how survival was achieved (Saunders 76). Her approach echoes Glissant?s on the ?art of repetition? as a manner of writing Caribbean history that opposes the universality of the linear, progressive temporality of the West (85). Read together, these non-linear understandings of Black life under slavery draw attention, after the fact, to past narrative instances, like those in ?The History.? Along with representing the complexity of the disaster of Black bodies under slavery, non-progressive forms of narrative portray the multiple iterations that Black survival acquires during the centuries that are more accurate and more complex than linear historicizations of the same events. The recurrence of disability also emphasizes that Prince?s freedom and survival do not result from her triumphal resistance but from a negativity that takes the form of endless failings on multiple fronts. Prince avoids an organized, physical confrontation against the Woods, that both Stella Dadzie and Marisa J. Fuentes associate historically with masculinity, and which Frederick Douglass?s narrative best exemplifies in his two-hour fight against Covey (21; 9). Instead, Prince?s failure48 to alter her work conditions in England, which forces her to repeat her requests to the Woods and, eventually, to become unproductive, evokes what Jack Halberstam describes as manifestations of ?refusal, passivity, unbecoming,? and ?unbeing? (129). These denote the intersection of both feminine resistance and queer modes of opposition that focus on un-doing. In ?The History? Prince slowly resigns from her role as a washer, epitomizing what in relation to Coleridge?s ?The Rime? I called ?active passivity,? a forceful inactivity that is not easily traceable and for that reason can remain unconfronted, and thus more successful in its 48 Failure is not simply an antithesis to productivity. Failure signifies the subject?s unwillingness and/or inability to conform to a specific social, historical and economic system. In this light, failure becomes a primary site of resistance, refusing to produce for and reproduce, materially and ideologically, any aspect of the system that generates it in the first place. 172 unmaking of racial capitalism. The negative power of unproductivity forces the labor of the enslaved to a violent stop, revealing the revolutionary potential of what Kate?ina Kol??ov? names as ?crip failure? that, under certain circumstances, leads to liberation from bondage (271). The term underscores the ways that disability reinvigorates all those aspects of queer failure and female forms of opposition that Halberstam mentions, with Kol??ov? pointing out more emphatically the associations between crip failure and survival as well as failure?s ability ?to foster and sustain life? (271).49 What the enslavers view as failure, on the one hand, signifies the racialized, gendered or disabled body?s inability to conform, perform and produce according to the demands of the social structure it inhabits. Instead of forcing the body to adjust and damage itself in this process, which can lead to trauma, injury or even death, failure, an unfinished act of sorts, protects the body, allowing it to remain alive, to survive, and to recover to continue its resistance. By employing repetition in ?The History,? crip failure establishes a recursive temporality that impedes Prince?s pace of work, permitting her to regain some of her strength and to imagine her future liberation. Disability generates failure concerning the production and reproduction of commodities, bodies and ideological practices. Failure manifests itself through narrative repetition, which dissociates the present from the past. Prince?s impairment materializes as a negative ontological rupture between her life as chattel and her life as free person, one that sustains her body and allows her to acquire her freedom. Repetition creates a temporal and narrative break which prohibits Prince?s subjection to determine the parameters of her liberation. In the linear narrative, 49 Through the representation of Prince?s failures, ?The History? avoids what McRuer calls ?inspiration porn or crispiration? where the disabled subject has to overcome her disability in order to live a life worth living (Crip Times 68). Prince, instead, embraces her disability to set herself free. The repetitive narrative of ?The History? establishes a historical archive that incorporates ways of living with disabilities that move beyond crispiration, resisting against the ?austerity of representation? that modern media adapt when they discuss disability (McRuer, Crip Times 68) 173 emancipation is relative to the subjection that existed before, with any current improvement for the better to be considered progress. Dissociating the present from the past allows Prince to reconceptualize the relative meaning of emancipation and to envision her freedom beyond the dictates of her bondage. In this way Prince shutters what Freeman calls ?[t]he logic of time-as- productive? where ?the past seems useless unless it predicts and becomes material for a future? (5). Prince?s break in time, that she achieves through repetition, brakes the flow of time enunciating that a recursive, unproductive temporality, both in Prince?s daily practice and in her narrativization of that practice, can establish the possibility of a new world that the past cannot bind, deeming the past useless to determine the fate of Black bodies in the future. Thus, the temporal disarticulation between past and future creates the opportunity for re-worlding, namely for the chance to imagine a world beyond the one that the subject currently inhabits. This temporal break does not put, by itself, a new world in place; instead, it allows historical actors to imagine other worlds without using any past social formations as a point of reference that determines how different the future should be. Temporal break, as the necessary prerequisite for worldmaking, becomes possible for Prince through the intersection of Black, feminist and queer forms of failure. Halberstam believes that the failure to be and the failure to act in the manner a social structure expects you to?which, he argues, emanates from queerness?allows one to imagine other possibilities for life and for being, beyond that very structure (88). Besides crip failure, worldmaking becomes possible in Prince?s story through her childlessness.50 From the texts in The History as well as from the information that surfaces through the libel trials after the 1831 publication of the 50 Baumgartner discusses in her paper that ?Prince's failure to bear children and the absence of any articulation of desire to do so strongly suggest another sign of her refusal to support the system of slavery whenever possible? (260). Building on her analysis, I attempt to enunciate how this feminist form of resistance is indispensably related to failure through Blackness and queerness. 174 volume, the mediated text of ?The History? informs us that Prince had sexual encounters, presenting them as consensual, without any of her relationships resulting in descendants. Prince never addresses this topic in her narrative, but if one employs Hartman?s concept of ?critical fabulation,? reading ?The History? next to available historical evidence on Black, female and queer forms of opposition, one might wonder if Prince?s childlessness was willed rather than accidental.51 The historical archive shows that in the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, as Kenneth Morgan mentions, ?the fecundity of slave women became central to the viability of plantation slavery in the British Caribbean? (231). That is to say that the world of slavery can only survive if enslaved women continue to give birth. Dadzie asserts that despite the bad living and working conditions of bondswomen, which affected their ability to reproduce, ?there is a weight of evidence to suggest that women slaves may have been exercising a conscious choice to control the extent of their own fertility? (27). Additionally, Bush-Slimani indicates that among maltreatment, exhausting work and malnourishment, slave women must have had ?knowledge of abortion and contraception? that they have brought with them to the Caribbean (90). All this evidence suggests that Prince could have willed her lack of descendants, especially if one takes into consideration the multiple forms of passive resistance registered in the repetitive, episodic structure of her narrative. At the very least, her narrative invites a reading where such willed lack is an overdetermined feature of her story. Non-reproductivity is a form of Black and queer resistance against slavery unique to the female body, bringing forward ?a feminism grounded in negation, refusal,? and ?passivity? that 51 Hartman proposes the practice of ?critical fabulation? which allows one to explore the possible scenarios that texts and historical contexts point towards (?Venus? 11). In Hartman?s thought this practice includes ?playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story,? ?re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view,? with the intent ?to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done? (?Venus? 11). 175 makes other worlds possible (Halberstam 124). Bush-Slimani notes that bondwomen were aware that giving birth would only force their child to experience the atrocities of servitude they have been going through (91). In their case, biological reproduction entails the socio-cultural regeneration of the system of slavery, to the extent that a world beyond bondage can only happen if the current world that enslaved women inhabit comes to an end. Dadzie affirms that this form of opposition was, in fact, successful since the decreased fertility of Black women in the Caribbean ?became increasingly linked to the economic survival of the planter?s class? (27). The practice of birth control of the enslaved emerges as Black, female and queer failure that ?touches the dark heart of the negativity? through the silent and unhurried disarticulation of the world of slavery (Halberstam 23). This affirms Fred Moten?s argument that ?[B]lackness bears or is the potential to end the world,? with the addition that in ?The History,? non-generativity materializes through the intersection of Blackness with other synchronous modes of being (739). Moten?s thought connects Blackness to a negativity that is both a degenerative and a regenerative power (742). If Blackness takes the form of this radical nothingness that can bring the current world down, which constantly subjects the Black body, then the absolute annihilation of the world of subjection is the necessary precondition for building a new world beyond subjection. Historically, the death of the world of the plantation is the sine qua non of worldmaking, which dramatizes how, sometimes, the prospect of no future is not the ?bleak alternative? that Halberstam wants to believe it is (120). Prince Prince?s un/willed childlessness, which alludes to the female and queer practices, under the scope of non-reproductivity, of birth control and abortion that bondswomen were practicing in the Caribbean, signifies that, despite Mu?oz?s critique that Lee Edelman?s work portrays an ?active disavowal of a crisis in Afro-futurism,? the theorization of no futurity in fact advocates that no radical future can ever arrive if the present is 176 not terminated permanently (94). The practices of enslaved women, along with Prince?s resistance, indicate that this is nowhere truer than in slavery. Through this shadow reference to a uniquely Black, female and queer mode of resistance ?The History? invites a reading of slavery that asserts that true optimism about Black survival and Black futures can only take shape within the wake of the plantation, when pessimism is radically embraced by the historical actors themselves. Crip failure converges with Black, female and queer failure, facilitating a temporal break with the past, the necessary precondition before any worldmaking can begin, on multiple fronts. If birth control and abortion prevent a new generation of bondspeople from coming into being, disability resistance stops those currently enslaved from producing for their masters, bringing the system to a hold. This disarticulation of production allows Prince to imagine a life in England beyond bondage. If one views Prince?s petition to return as a free woman back to Antigua along with the possibilities for freedom that repetition generates, Prince envisions a world where Black subjects can travel the Black Atlantic without the fear of bondage or subjection. The resistance that disability establishes combines with Prince?s Black, female and queer opposition, generating a poly-synchronous non-compliance the very moment that Black time coincides with queer time and crip time to set in place a multi-synchronous temporality.52 Prince?s testimony broadens what Alison Kafer terms a synchrony that allows ?two cycles of time? to ?[run] simultaneously? and to create ?circular moments of coincidence rather than straight (in both senses of the word) lines of forward movement? (36). Prince adds Black time to Kafer?s feminist, queer and crip 52 Non-compliance originates in McRuer?s discussion in ?Submissive and Non-Compliant: The Paradox of Gary Fisher.? McRuer traces Fisher?s resistance in his disidentification with normative identity politics that emphasize the value of Black, queer and crip identity, and which lead to generic sameness (105). In a similar manner Prince does not celebrate her identity in positive terms, as being a strong woman or a person proud of her disability; she rather uses the negativity of her Black, queer, crip identity to take apart the system of oppression around her. 177 temporalities, with all of these modalities realized through repetition. Repetition, as the singular symptom of multiple levels of non-compliance, that all take the form of failure, shatters through the stillness of the world of slavery and subjection. In this fashion it makes survival possible by nurturing life and living and by undoing the present once and for all, making possible the possibility of Black futures possible. Prince?s non-linear history shows how Black-crip-queer failure can function as a ?technology? for worldmaking, by preparing the ground for worldmaking to happen. The theorization of race as a technology famously belongs to Beth Coleman who believes that race is not a natural characteristic with any inherent value; instead, it is a medium that can be put to use to achieve both liberation or further subjection (180). Coleman suggests that we can use the power that race has acquired through the current system of signification, and which so far has led to abjection, to turn the tables against that very system, establishing further ?agency, will, and movement? for racialized subjects along with ?the ability to move freely as being? (177-178). To conceptualize it as a technology, Coleman establishes race as prosthesis, as a socially added attribute to the human body. Drawing from the thought of Gregory Bateson, who thinks that a blind man?s stick is indispensable to his body because it is ?his? pathway to navigate the world, Coleman, referring to race, argues that prosthesis ?may not be ancillary, discrete, or even separable from its agent? (Bateson 324;199). ?The History? forces us to think of both race and disability at the same time, as two separate but interconnected technologies Prince uses to navigate to the end of her world till she sees the beginning of another where the Black body is free to develop all its human attributes, to travel freely and to construct her own future according to her intellectual, emotional and sexual desires.53 53 In Cultural Locations of Disability Snyder and Mitchell highlight that both race and disability were constituted at the same historical period and through similar discursive practices that labeled bodies as biologically incapable and 178 Prince?s queerness, intersecting with her Blackness and disability, is one more technology that she uses to explore her world and to imagine another. Her multiple amorous partners, namely Captain Abbot, Oyskman and then her husband Daniel James, those that the mediated narrative of ?The History? presents as consensual sexual relationships, along with a fabulist approach that allows for the strong possibility that she was able to control her fertility, point towards her queerness as ?a formation based on an economy of desire and desiring? (Mu?oz 26). Prince?s mode of desiring and acting on that desire addresses the possibilities for pleasure Black, female, disabled bodies can acquire in a future world where slavery, Black subjection, heteropatriarchy and ableism do not have any hold. Through the pleasure she gains from her desire, one being uncelebrated, fleeting, precarious, and many times dangerous for her well-being, Prince?s constant attempt to own her body portrays that her desire ?is always directed at that thing that is not yet here,? which for Mu?oz defines queerness. For Prince, queerness is a third pathway that allows her to experience both the world around her and to think beyond it. In ?The History? Black, disabled, and queer synchronize together, providing attributes to Prince?s body that allows her more agency, even if failure is the prerequisite for any form of agency to emerge. Black, female, queer and crip modes of being become technologies for worldmaking in Prince?s case, helping her to escape the world of bondage and then to imagine and to start putting in place a world beyond slavery and Black subjection. defective (111). They use the term Eugenic Atlantic, building on Paul Gilroy?s the Black Atlantic, to emphasize that ?disability and race? both belong ?into a mutual project of human exclusion based upon scientific management systems successively developed within modernity? (101). 179 Coda: Our Romantic Catastrophe: Disaster and Survival in the Twenty- First Century. This project started from the analysis of the fictional disaster that appears in Shelley?s The Last Man and concluded with the study of the historical disaster of saltwater slavery. In this dissertation, disaster does not come only in one manner. Instead, it occupies a spectrum, with multiple manifestations that vary both in form and magnitude. This means that this project does not simply equate the disaster of saltwater slavery, and Mary Prince?s experience of her enslavement, with the historical annihilation of the landed gentry in England. These historical events share similar characteristics in the manner that disaster operates, but they also constitute radically heterogenous historical experiences and processes. As this study has explored, the Romantic period evinces a profound sociohistorical restructuring that leads to the manifestation of disaster on multiple fronts. Europe at the times experiences a state of constant war, in the Continent and abroad. Wordsworth, among others, portray in the Ballads and the Prelude wounded soldiers, as well as mourning family members, as in the Old Man Travelling and widows and orphans, as in the Female Vagrant. The recent invasion of Ukraine reminds us that Wordsworth?s world is the world we also inhabit. Photos of injured or dead soldiers, from both sides, populate the press. The stories of Russian mothers, whose dead sons are buried in mass graves the moment they are not even acknowledged officially as war casualties, forces us to approach their experience through Clark?s concept of wordlessness, as a disaster so profound that takes away the ability to mourn. The disaster of war, in this case, is strongly connected with new forms of authoritarianism that deprive certain parts of the population the experience of war itself. If Favret discusses the creation of war-time at a distance in the Romantic period, part of Russia?s population is unable to experience even that, 180 since all news outlets are controlled by the Russian state that strongly refuses that a war is taking place. Disaster in this case, becomes immemorable by not even registering in the collective memory. Even though the war in Ukraine is the most recent articulation of a profound disaster, others came before it in the span of the last two decades. The civil war in Syria led millions of people to look for shelter and safety in Europe, with thousands being drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on their way to Italy and Greece. If, among other things, Coleridge tells a story about survival at sea, where one?s fate is determined in a game of dice, this experience partly resonates with that of the Syrian refugee population but also of thousands of other immigrants that faced such extreme adversities at home that they decided to risk swimming or sinking in the Aegean Sea. Those who survived were, in turn, deposited in the refugee camps in the Greek islands?a dark aspect of Greece?s history?often with limited access to water, heat or electricity. Several years ago, and when thousands of refugees reached the Greek islands, and eventually the mainland, I experienced in my hometown families trying to find shelter at the entrance of apartment buildings. Does not this instant resemble those Wordsworthian moments where the poet/narrator meets with a person who experiences disaster and listens and records their story (even though, in my case, I remained, unfortunately, distant and silent)? This is a disaster incomprehensible in magnitude, with those who survived only partly able to tell the story of those who drowned. In its own way this dissertation participates in the discussion on how human and non-human witnessing could possibly contribute towards the study of this disaster. As this project?s discussion of Simon Lee shows, a dash in the structure of a poem can perform the role of the witness to a catastrophe. 181 The manner that capital operates in the modern times and its relation to disaster, which has influenced the study of this project, has multiple equivalents in our contemporary moment. Part of my interest in the understanding of disaster originates in the events that took place in Greece in the aftermath of its financial decline, but the topic of this project has become, unfortunately, even more relevant ever since this dissertation started being written. Greece, among other countries of the European south, has experienced an unspectacular disaster. From extremely high unemployment rates, to salaries that are unlivable, to the rise of the poverty level to one third of the population, disaster in Greece takes the form of a slow bleeding in the manner that Nixon conceptualizes it, as a slow violence that ?occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all? (2). This disastrous violence affects every single individual in the country, leading to huge immigration waves abroad and breaking my family, and countless others, apart. While this is situation was unexpected in the context of the European Union, Greece?s story resembles that of other countries in the global South, such as Argentina. The manner that capital is accumulated by individuals and institutions continues to alter in a profound manner, and in a global scale, our familiar modes of existing socially and culturally. At the same time that capital affects the movement of entire populations globally, the adherence of our society to the demands of the market economy changes the manner that our communities function locally. In our sociocultural environment only what is marketable and immediately profitable survives and flourishes. The slow demise of the humanities, both in the popular consciousness, in popular discourse and inside the institutions of higher education signifies a cultural turn from humanistic thought. This shift becomes more violent when critical thinking does not materialize in bourgeois humanism. The demise of the humanities then 182 portrays a catastrophe that is historical in nature and characteristic of our modern condition that blindly follows market demands. Nonetheless, I believe that disaster may point towards radical change. Similar to the useless labor that the nameless narrator performs in the Introduction to Shelley?s The Last Man, the critical thinker who labors unproductively bears the potential to establish a radically new world that does not adhere to what our current system values. The coronavirus pandemic, a disease that has many similarities with the one that Shelley presents in her novel, is another manifestation of disaster that has affected the world in recent years, and connects our world with the Romantic Period. When it made its first appearance, the coronavirus almost stopped the world for two whole months, which profoundly threatened the movement of capital. Even though the world responded by attempting to repair itself to its pre- pandemic condition, the forceful immobility that the world had experienced exposed that the end of the market economy is neither impossible nor unimaginable. The pandemic presented a unique opportunity for worldbuilding, if our social and historical consciousness, as historical actors, had matured enough to move beyond our current sociopolitical paradigm. The concept of active passivity, that this project discusses in relation to Coleridge?s poem, is present, more than ever, in our recent historical experience. Moreover, post-pandemic materializations of repair restored neoliberalism to its former status, which limited even more the access to shelter and nourishment, with the high inflation in rent and food prices. Repair for repair?s sake resulted in inflicting more damage. The shattering of Black flesh, as Julius B. Fleming Jr. accurately calls it, continues to connect us with our Romantic past through the manifestation in our cultural practices of white supremacy and Black subjection. While in our historical moment Black subjection does not formally materialize in enslavement, white supremacy has infiltrated such diverse institutions as 183 healthcare and the justice system. The brutal killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery painfully remind us that Black subjection is ingrained in the manner that our society operates. While repairing the injustice these individuals suffered is surely a measure we need to take, our critical imaginary should focus on the more ambitious and as necessary task of radically altering those social structures that enable and incite state-sanctioned violence against people of color in and beyond the United States. Disaster, then, is one more element that connects us with our Romantic past, if it does not force us to examine the present as inherently and unavoidably Romantic. The study of texts from the Romantic period that this project examines invite us to think that catastrophe is indispensable to our modern condition. Romanticism informs us that some manifestations of disaster often have a clear and identifiable historical cause. Black subjection?s relation to the market economy and to capital accumulation is indicative of this specific historical understanding of calamity. Similarly, there is the slow environmental disaster that results from the Anthropocene due to the profound causes that human activity causes to the biosphere and to geological time, a process of planetary devastation induced by mass industrialization that, as Anahid Nerssesian has recently argued in Calamity Form, was by and large initiated during the Romantic period. The reading of the Ballads in the first quarter of the twenty-first century encourages us, contemporary readers and scholars of the field, to question what other forms of disaster capitalism has caused and to look for their manifestations in the present. Forms of survival can lead to uncover the operation of disasters that we have not contemplated so far?and can make ourselves aware of how exclusive or circumscribed that inquiring ?we? might be. To these catastrophes that are historical in origin, Romantic texts suggest that a change is possible if our entire sociohistorical structure changes by envisioning a future beyond capitalism. This future can only become possible if we 184 establish a new labor paradigm that frees our work from the concepts of usability, exchangeability and marketability that our current system champions. Romanticism, in this case, can become a resource for radical world change. At the same time, Romantic texts point towards a radical negativity that exists in historical time, but it is not generated in or used or made intelligible by historical processes. This negativity makes its appearance in The Last Man and in this project?s study of the Ballads. 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