Author: staceymeeker

The most profound irony of postmodernity is the paradox inherent in the historical movement beyond the new. But the experiential realization of such paradoxes is precisely what we have called the esthetic. The postmodern transcendence of modern panestheticism is the estheticization of our very experience of time.
Eric Gans (1993, 206).

I would like to consider Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, in light of the 2014 GASC’s themes of deferral, discipline, and knowledge. I think it will be interesting to explore waiting as a mode of deferral which involves particular forms of discipline. As a guiding framework for this discussion, I am going to revisit Eric Gans’ paper, “Beckett and the Problem of Modern Culture.” There, Gans considers (among many other things) Beckett’s “esthetics of failure.” He makes it clear in the paper that Beckett’s esthetics was not only pertinent to the post-war epoch, but also continued to be so in 1981. In revisiting Gans’s analysis, I would like to re-examine the play and its esthetics (considered as a form of knowledge) in order to begin to re-situate the discussion within a contemporary cultural, historical, and of course theoretical context.

The classic point of departure for discussions of the play is the title, “En attendant Godot,” or Waiting for Godot. Like most attentive and literate hermeneuts, Gans brings us back to the French title, emphasizing that “En attendant Godot” is “not so much ‘waiting for Godot’ as ‘while waiting for Godot.’ The ‘action’, such as it is, [Gans points out here], takes place in an interval of waiting for something else. The primary dramatic action is thus the waiting itself.” (1982, 4).

I would like to pause here and consider a few things. Gans has begun to lay out the unusual situation presented by the play. There are a few more elements for us to attend to, but I would first like to note that either one of the twin titles constitutes a remarkable announcement that, already, before the play, sets up a particular form of dramatic irony that we might call postmodern. There is a hint of this in the fact that the audience can know, before the play begins, that its primary action will be the waiting itself. This dramatic irony is something for us to get back to.

I also think that the twin titles themselves bear a little further reflection. Furthermore, I would say that reading this play seriously, especially in the context of this discussion, will require us to take both the French and the English texts carefully into account. That said, I do agree with Gans that the French text has a certain priority, and this is not just chronological. The intercultural and intertextual dynamics of the two plays, with their slight permutations and subtle nuances of tone, are especially interesting given the post-nationalist angle of Beckett’s early form of postmodern drama.

Gans takes his initial framework for approaching the play from a theoretical justification for Beckett’s “lucidly paradoxical refusal of greatness.” (1982, 3) I say “a theoretical justification” because the conclusion of Gans’ article makes it clear that Beckett’s play represents a step further beyond the paradox; this implies that the esthetics of the play cannot be fully accounted for by the conceptualization that may have guided Beckett as a point of departure. At the outset, Gans argues that “we must take seriously [Beckett’s] description of Bram Van Velde as an exemplary modern artist: ‘Van Velde . . . is the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping’” (1982, 3). Failure thus constitutes “a new criterion of authenticity,” even (paradoxically) a “new form of success.” For the serious artist, this new status of failure is not just an option: “the artist’s failure to express, as an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility” is also an obligation (1982, 3).

Given both the paradox and its obligation, Gans discerns a two-level structure in the play. On the one hand, he notes, “we should avoid approaching this play in the first place as a success in doing what it does . . . what should interest us is what does not happen, what fails to happen . . . because the author . . . fails to make it happen” (1982, 4). This is the level on which Beckett “fails to express.” This is the problem that the artist cannot solve, in part because he must also take on the “’meta-problem’ that he solves as a result of failing on the first level—the meta-problem, that is, of expressing his failure to express” (1982, 4).

In the play, the first level is the primary action of the waiting itself. Gans argues that this waiting “fails to express itself in the concrete action of the play.” In other words, what the characters actually do “is not waiting but something else” (1982, 4). Gans sums up this situation: “the very choice of ‘waiting’ as dramatic action condemns the author to failure” at the first level. However, it also sets up the solution to the meta-problem: “this is a failure that can be perfectly well expressed in its own right, since everything that happens, or can possibly happen, expresses it” (1982, 4).

Gans will already have indicated at this point in the paper that, if level one is announced in the title by its [present participle] of “waiting,” level two is also already opened up by the name of Godot. The dramatic irony, in other words, also involves the level of the meta-problem. Before the play, the audience knows that Godot will not arrive since, as Gans puts it: “his absence is the sine qua non of successful waiting” (1982, 4). As Gans unpacks the structure that will enable this success, he also makes it clear that the audience can not only be aware of the waiting and of Godot’s role before the play, but they can also anticipate this particular form of success (the author’s expressing his failure to express)—unlike the characters in the play, but like the author (and the actors). This postmodern dramatic irony plays out in contrast to models of popular culture, which succeed at a different, and less significant level. As Gans puts it: “in these works, of course, Godot always arrives” (1982, 4).

Instead, in this play, the absent Godot “plays a transcendent role with respect to the scene” (1982, 6). Gans asserts that “this is precisely the role of the sacred in Judaeo-Christian society: God never makes himself present, but belief in his presence offstage allows for worldly activity to go on while waiting for his return” (1982, 6). I do not agree that the roles are precisely the same, but before explaining why, I would first like to lay out Gans’s analysis of Godot’s place within the dramatic structure of the play.

Gans compares this structure to the structure found in tragedies or comedies where the author presents us with characters on stage who effectively imitate actions. These characters are the presumed or potential masters of their situation; “whether kings or commoners,” Gans writes, “they seek to dominate their universe”—and, I would add, they seek to do this by acting. Their failure, in the case of tragedy, Gans explains, “is the sign of a higher mastery of their world from without, a mastery with which the hidden author is identified” (1982, 5). Gans makes the interesting observation that the spectators’ primary identification is with the author (and not the hero), and it is the dual identification with both the hero and the author that actually enables catharsis in the Aristotelian sense. He spells this out in the paper: “The spectators are said to identify with the hero in his tragic or comic fall, but their primary identification is with the author, who, like them, witnesses and judges the hero’s actions from offstage. The identification with the hero is what is, in Aristotle’s term, ‘purged’; but this is only possible because the spectators identify not only with the hero but with the author as agent of purgation. It is in Sophocles’, not Oedipus’, hands that we place ourselves in our search for esthetic catharsis” (1982, 5).

Here I would like to point out the importance of dramatic irony, both in the tragic situation described by Gans, as well as in the very different, if somewhat analogous situation we find in Waiting for Godot. On the one hand, as Gans points out, “The end . . . is only a matter of time.” In both cases, this is something “the spectator well knows, whose evening in the theater is sandwiched between other worldly activities like eating dinner and undressing for bed. Whatever the nature of the action on stage, its ultimate effect is to take up the time required to bring about a conclusion determined in advance by the dramatist” (1982, 5). The situation in Beckett’s play shows, Gans writes, that “this extra-dramatic conclusion is in effect always of a higher level of necessity than any dramatic activity,” that “the dramatist’s apparently superior understanding . . . really only reflects an a priori structural necessity” (1982, 5).

Gans further emphasizes the contrast between the dramatic action in a tragedy or a comedy and Waiting for Godot: “even if the dramatic hero may be said to ‘await’ his fate, surely there is a difference between his awaiting something that will of necessity take place and Beckett’s heroes’ awaiting a character who never arrives. Precisely. The ‘fate’ of the hero within the play is in reality decided outside the play by the dramatist. . . . Godot personifies this process” (1982, 6).

This phrase, “Godot personifies this process” merits some unpacking. Unlike, for example, the god Apollo, the presumption of whose presence offstage would effectively guarantee and determine the action onstage, and provide a transcendental grounding for the author’s mastery of the significance of the drama, Godot personifies a process in which Beckett’s more humble yet realistic characters cannot act, but must be content to wait—and, as Gans puts it, “they ensure in effect that Godot will never come.” From this perspective there is a certain felicity built into the English title, “Waiting for Godot.” In a manner somewhat analogous to the ambiguity of subjective and objective genitives, the preposition “for” articulates two slightly different situations. Primarily, one understands “Waiting for Godot” to be a matter of remaining in the place designated by Godot until such time as he arrives. However, there is also a slight hint, as Gans has just indicated, that this can also be understood to mean waiting in Godot’s place, to do his waiting for him. Unlike a transcendental signifier that enables a structure of presence, intentionality, and action, Godot is a spectral signifier personifying a process where he not only does not fully serve as a transcendental ground for presence, but whose very absence is not a simply independent function. Furthermore, all of this is already implied for the spectators in the dramatic irony announced by the title before the play.

Gans follows Beckett’s cue in establishing the literary context for the play in terms of an anti-modernist response to high modernism as exemplified by the works of Joyce, Proust, and Mallarmé. “Beckett has qualified [the] enterprise of [high culture], with especial reference to James Joyce, as that of ‘mastery.’ Joyce was a master, he has said; I no longer claim to be one” (1982, 5). Later in the paper, Gans identifies some historical justifications for criticizing a modernist culture of mastery. Looking at the recent past, Gans writes: “modernity exhibits the most arrogantly determined efforts at mastery of man’s material and social, not to say psychological limitations” (1982, 9). Turning to an apocalyptic perspective on the future, Gans adds: “Only in a ‘hyper-modern’ era—defined by the possibility of human self-annihilation that seems to be figured in the later plays “Endgame” and “Happy Days”—is a resolutely anti-modern culture possible” (1982, 10). In between these two glimpses of the historical context, Gans will have concluded: “What Beckett’s esthetic denounces in the past is in fact nothing but its ‘modernity,’ its faith in historical solutions” (1982, 10).

This is an important distinction. Where, as someone like Hannah Arendt might point out, the movement of modern art is generally motivated by the rebellion of the artist against society (and its philistine culture), Beckett is taking this a step further, contesting the culture of mastery itself at a more fundamental level. In other words, Beckett’s artistic revolt is more along the lines of what Camus would call a “metaphysical revolt.” It will be important to bear in mind that there may be distinctions to be made between Beckett’s dogmatic formulation of an esthetics of failure and the esthetics we actually find operating in Waiting for Godot. Nevertheless, since artistic mastery or literary mastery is, at least according to Gans, “the supreme value of ‘culture,’ we have now come face to face with the central problem of modern culture” (1982, 10). This problem, and its wider context, is developed to a remarkable extent by the interactions of the characters on stage in Waiting for Godot. Before turning to Gans’ analysis of what occurs in the play, however, I would like, for a moment, to re-consider the literary context from a theatrical perspective.

In other words, rather than contrast Beckett’s projects with those of a novelist like Joyce, let us situate the play with respect to the more or less contemporary dramatic works of authors like Anouilh, Sartre, and Ionesco. Here, too, we have artists staging critical perspectives on their society. Considering these works in an admittedly cursory fashion, they appear to fall into two groups. On the one hand, plays like “No Exit” by Sartre or “Antigone” by Anouilh appear to be modernist works characterized by an esthetics of artistic mastery, albeit ironic. Anouilh’s “Antigone,” although it is reshaped by the author’s adaptation of the play, as well as the social context of its original performance, nevertheless offers clear parallels to Greek tragedies and strong contrasts to the structure which would preclude tragic action in Waiting for Godot as we have analyzed it. The action in “No Exit” may be relatively trivial and perhaps inconclusive; it nevertheless proceeds according to a structure which is still determined, again even if ironically, by the mechanisms of the author’s culture of dramatic mastery.

On the other hand, if the structure of Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” could also be described in similar terms, “The Bald Soprano” seems to follow, rather neatly, Beckett’s esthetics of failure, and at both levels. The absurd circularity of insignificant dialogue and inconsequential activities corresponds to a failure to express. The author’s expression of failure in this play operates less at the level of the framework for the impossibility of action and more at the level of the framework for the language itself. One might argue, in fact, that “The Bald Soprano” could be taken as a purer manifestation of Beckett’s esthetics of failure, if more ironic, less paradoxical, and also without the touch of pathos to be found in Waiting for Godot. Unlike the spectral signifier, Godot, the transcendental signifier that would enable Ionesco to generate the dialogue of the play and motivate the minimal significations of its absurdity seems utterly indifferent. Ionesco’s purer implementation of an aesthetics of failure involves a more radical failure to communicate, and a more ironic expression of this failure.

This contrast not only helps, I think, to highlight Beckett’s distinctive aesthetics of failure, but also points beyond the perhaps sterile dialectic of this esthetics to something we might call a distinctive theatre of resistance.

Gans contrasts the social models represented by the two couples in the play, Vladimir and Estragon, who are waiting, and Pozzo and Lucky, who are effectively non-participants. Vladimir and Estragon rarely leave the stage during the play; Pozzo and Lucky are also often on stage (over 47% of the total play, and a full 58% of the first act, based on Gans’ page count). Where Vladimir and Estragon represent an “essentially egalitarian society united in their orientation to other-worldly values” (e.g., waiting for Godot), Pozzo and Lucky represent—”rather pointedly, [Gans notes, and I think we can agree]—Hegel’s master and slave” (1982, 8). Gans adds that Pozzo and Lucky’s Hegelian master-slave relationship “incarnates a trivialized model of society as history.” They thus comprise interesting characters, both for Vladimir and Estragon as well as the audience, because they “‘express’ the fundamental worldly desire of domination,” (1982, 8) and the postures and interactions that go along with that desire. Pozzo claims to be the proprietor of the land, and he waits for no one; “his movement across the stage is self-initiated and his sojourn there is only an interlude” (1982, 8). The episodes of Pozzo and Lucky are, Gans shows us, “a play within a play” which represents the society which “created the theatre of mastery as a mirror of itself” (1982, 9). Pozzo and Lucky arouse ‘pity and terror’ (both in Vladimir and Estragon as well as the audience) “because we all desire to be like Pozzo and fear to be like Lucky” (1982, 11).

In contrast, Vladimir and Estragon, in their essentially egalitarian relationship, comprise what Gans calls an anthropological culture, as opposed to an historical one. He also characterizes this anthropological culture as a modern culture, as opposed to a traditional one. Here, I would make a distinction between what one might call “modern anthropology” and “postmodern anthropology.” The development of anthropology, following the development of the science of biology with Darwin’s theory of evolution, is clearly a modern phenomenon, and is based on premises which are fundamentally different from traditional views with respect to many elements of culture, and in particular with respect to traditional conceptions of language. However, anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and critics of orientalism and colonialism such as Edward Said have shown that the science of anthropology has long been denatured, and sometimes manipulated, co-opted, and corrupted by the modern culture of mastery within which it emerged. The critics’ case has often been overstated; I think it is important to recognize that the tension between the science of anthropology and the modern culture of mastery was there from its inception and that this was felt to some extent (and resisted) even by some of its earliest pioneers. Nevertheless, especially since World War II, in a post-colonial context, a more intercultural approach to anthropology has since worked to transform the science and further detach it from the culture of mastery. I think, within the context of Beckett’s play, that this perspective would be more accurately termed “postmodern anthropology.”

Getting back to Gans and the play within the play, if we consider the society represented by Pozzo and Lucky, and we also keep in mind that this society “created the theatre of mastery as a mirror of itself,” (1982, 9), then it is interesting to observe with Gans that “inserted into the broader ‘anthropological’ context of Beckett’s play, this theatre appears as inauthentic posturing, a self-contradictory effort to demonstrate to the spectator that it exists independently of his presence” (1982, 9).

Vladimir and Estragon establish a (postmodern) “anthropological” context by forming a model of a minimal human society. Gans suggests that the audience relates to them differently, without identifying with them as heroes. “We are neither to imitate them nor to avoid imitating them” (1982, 7). They do not represent anyone, but “they have solved . . . the problem of living in society” (1982, 7). Their dialogues maintain an ongoing and “delicate equilibrium . . . [they] are just different enough from each other not to be mirror images, but not different enough to allow for the development of asymmetric relations of any kind. Vladimir knows Godot, and Estragon doesn’t, but Estragon trusts his friend enough to make leaving unthinkable” (1982, 8).(1)

Although Gans contrasts the anthropological boredom of Vladimir and Estragon (where nothing really happens) with the historical fascination of Pozzo and Lucky, he also reminds us that the anthropological perspective is fundamental, and asserts that the “theatrical test of these propositions comes in the second act” (1982, 9). Gans reminds us that when Pozzo and Lucky again cross the stage, Pozzo is blind and Lucky is mute. Gans notes that “Pozzo’s blindness is a caricature of Oedipus’; he is the master humbled, the victim of hubris” (1982, 9). Unlike Oedipus, we might add, Pozzo is childless. Gans argues that the “dramatic function of the division of the play into two acts” (otherwise a somewhat enigmatic structure, given the lack of action) “is to mark the different effect of time on the two couples.” (1982, 9) Gans calls our attention to the fact that, although Vladimir and Estragon recall their previous meeting, Pozzo has lost all memory of the past; “the blind as he says, have no notion of time” (1982, 9). Gans notes the difference here between Pozzo and Oedipus, and explains that Pozzo’s amnesia stems from the fact that “the world of the stage is no longer a locus of significant experience” (1982, 9). Gans further explains that, although “Pozzo has been humbled by fate, [he] cannot understand the past because his fate has not been determined in time but by time” (1982, 9). Gans takes this a step further when he asserts that Pozzo’s illusion of mastery “has not been shattered by the ironies of experience, but by the essential disequilibrium of historical existence” (1982, 9). Here I think Gans may have gone just a bit too far. I would have to agree with him, if we were talking about characters in “The Bald Soprano.” In this play, however, Vladimir and Estragon remember, and I think that fact is very important.

It would appear, if we follow Gans’ analysis all the way here, that Beckett’s rejection of the modern culture of mastery is also a complete rejection of all history. I think that Beckett’s stance is more nuanced. Earlier, I noted that Beckett approached this early form of postmodern drama from a post-nationalist perspective. As Gans reminds us in his analysis, the modern culture of mastery is based on a conception of history. In the modern context, then, this is a history based on nationalist narratives. In rejecting the modern culture of mastery, in particular as he does this from a post-nationalist perspective, Beckett is, indeed, also rejecting the nationalist conceptions of history. That does not necessarily imply that his postmodern perspective is completely ahistorical. In any confrontation with a different culture, there are three possible outcomes: rejection, assimilation, or a cosmopolitan acceptance. As an Irish writer choosing to write this masterpiece first in French, and, furthermore, choosing to translate it brilliantly into an English masterpiece, Beckett has succeeded in adapting a cosmopolitan perspective. We will return to these choices, and to the historical significance of Beckett’s stance, a little later.

Meanwhile, let us consider the significance of Vladimir and Estragon’s memory. This brings us back to Godot. We noted earlier, following Gans, that there is no waiting for Godot unless he remains absent. There is also no waiting for Godot if Vladimir and Estragon completely forget about him! At the same time, given Godot’s role as a spectral signifier, he cannot guarantee memory the way a transcendental signifier presumably would. With this in mind, let us consider the odd role of the messengers in the play.

Although they do serve as a reminder that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot, the messenger(s) in this play barely seem capable of remembering their messages, much less the past. This stands in stark contrast to the messengers in Oedipus the King, for example, who connect the action on stage to its grounding in the past (and future) as determined by gods like Apollo. In short, history is not grounded in this play the way it would be in a play produced by a culture of mastery, yet Vladimir and Estragon nevertheless remember most things faithfully.

Some of their memories may also connect the play to what, at the time of its early performances, was then recent history, at least for the French spectators. Hugh Kenner was one of the first to point out that the play “resembles France occupied by the Germans” and that Vladimir and Estragon’s situation resembles situations faced by members of the resistance like Beckett himself. Kenner suggested that presenting the structure of this situation may even have been “the playwright’s most remarkable feat.” Kenner explains: “There existed, throughout a whole country for five years, a literal situation that corresponded point by point with the situation in the play . . . that millions of lives were saturated in its desperate reagents” (2005, 10).

Marjorie Perloff notes that, in the French version of the play, Estragon alludes specifically to l’Ariège in the Pyrenees, a point along what was known as the “‘Chemin de la Liberté’—the chief World War II escape route from France to Spain” (2005, 2). She recounts Beckett’s clandestine stay in Roussillon, a village about 40 kilometers from Avignon, where he worked for a farmer named Aude and picked grapes for another farmer named Bonnelly, “who is mentioned by name in ‘En attendant Godot’:

VLADIMIR : Pourtant nous avons été ensemble dans la Vaucluse, j’en mettrais ma main au feu. Nous avons fait les vendanges, tiens, chez un nommé Bonelly, à Roussillon (2005, 7).

Beckett’s experience of World War II was different from that of many of his contemporaries, including Anouilh, Ionesco, and Sartre. He and his wife both played active roles in the French resistance, even risking their lives. Given his Irish identity (he apparently spoke French with a recognizable accent), his experiences of risk and solidarity were inevitably infused with cosmopolitan nuances. Our perspective on the significance of this experience can be further informed by comparing the English version with the French version. Instead of what might be an obscure reference to l’Ariège for an English-speaking audience, Estragon instead suggests that “we’ll go to the Pyrenees” (2005, 1). Perloff also notes that “the specific references to the Vaucluse and Bonnelly have been excised [by Beckett from the English version], Vladimir’s lines reading”:

VLADIMIR : But we were there, together, I could swear to it! Picking grapes for a man called… (he snaps his fingers)… can’t think of the name of the man, at a place called… (snaps his fingers)… can’t think of the place, do you not remember (2005, 7)?

In the English version, Vladimir’s memories are becoming as uncertain as some of Estragon’s, making it more difficult for him to remind his partner of the event. This is not total amnesia, however; although it is a function of a different kind of history, it is not a sign of the absence or utter insignificance of history. Perloff cites the narrator of one of Beckett’s short stories, who says: “Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little” (2005, 2). If we consider both versions of the play and the scenes which they set up for the audiences, there are clearly a number of challenges for the playwright. Foremost among them, I think, if we consider this particular scene of trying to remember together things which combine trivial, everyday matters of a personal relationship and a broad, even global context, there is the challenge of both remembering and resisting the culture of mastery.

Perloff makes it clear that Beckett’s experience of the resistance profoundly informed his postwar outlook, and I would argue that it played a key role in the formation of his distinctive postmodern stance. This is hinted at in the combination of esthetics and ethics in his formulation of the esthetics of failure. This positive thrust of his cosmopolitan experience of resistance is more fully articulated in the play, in both the French and the English versions. In short, I think that the waiting in Godot, shared by the audience of the play just as it was by so many people, and not just French people, in occupied France (and elsewhere during the war), is less an expression of failure than it is of resistance. Beckett takes a firm anti-modernist position in creating Waiting for Godot, but there is a humanist impulse that needs to be further attended to.

With this in mind, let us now turn to Gans’ wider analysis of the problem of culture in the article. Gans opens this wider analysis by re-examining the notion of mastery: “the very word ‘culture’ suggests a more culturally relevant definition of mastery. Agriculture, from which this originally metaphoric term derives, exemplifies man’s domination of nature” (1982, 11). When the word culture is applied to people (originally to children), it involves “the conquest of the natural—and socially unacceptable—‘disorder’ within man himself” (1982, 11). The real meaning of this cultural mastery “is thus mastery over human emotions” (1982, 11). From this perspective, in the context of a culture of mastery, “literature may be seen to consist of subject-matter related to domination or ‘mastery’ and capable of arousing our desire and fear of same” (1982, 11). Gans has already called our attention to this in the case of Pozzo and Lucky. He explains that “this desire and fear . . . may be identified with the desire that Nietzsche called ressentiment” (1982, 11).

Gans contrasts this situation with one found in primitive egalitarian societies, where significant ressentiment is not generated because they do not involve significant social differences. He cites Vladimir and Estragon as a model of such a society. He notes, however, that “this lack of social difference does not mean automatic harmony; on the contrary, it is in such societies that the force of the sacred is greatest. The harmony of these societies is founded on the incarnation of social values in external gods or ‘ancestors’ like Godot” (1982, 12). I have already mentioned that I would not quite agree with this characterization of Godot. Let us continue with Gans’s analysis for a moment, however.

Gans turns at this point to the Greeks as an early example of a society in which secular culture has reached a high level. Comparing Sophocles’ Athens to Racine’s Paris, he explains that “both are characterized by a strong degree of hierarchization limited by certain ‘countervailing powers’ expressed in law and custom, and above all, permitting considerable room for personal initiative in the upper-middle strata. These are the strata that support ‘culture’ and whose ressentiment culture both expresses and subjects to the control of catharsis” (1982, 12). I think Gans’ comparison may be generally valid; however, there is something else going on in Greek culture that is also pertinent to our discussion. Greek culture cannot be fully comprehended, in my opinion, in terms of an agricultural civilization. Instead, I think it is important to consider its relatively unique status as a commercial civilization. There have been other commercial civilizations, of course, and the Greeks were aware of examples such as the Phoenicians. The Greeks were fortunate not only to be able to trade and learn from the Egyptians and the Persians but also to enjoy a geographical position which enabled both trade and relatively long-standing independence. Hence the elaborate development of their civilization and its culture. In contrast to those whose experience was shaped only by a single agricultural civilization, the Greeks could be both familiar with and able to view other cultures from a unique critical perspective.

Gans characterizes modern society as one in which well-defined social hierarchies are broken down and opportunities for social advancement are expanded. In such a context, ressentiment operates quite differently. “Ressentiment against necessary and insuperable domination—mastery—is one thing; ressentiment against the contingent, and often temporary, superiority of others is another” (1982, 12). I would argue that the social context of “necessary and insuperable domination” corresponds much better to an agricultural civilization than it does to a commercial one. More important for the context of this discussion, I think, would be the modern examples of totalitarian societies that were such a prominent feature of the mid-20th century. Fortunately, the figures of Vladimir and Estragon may point, not so much to a golden age of primitive egalitarianism, but, perhaps too modestly, to a situation where ressentiment continues to operate, but in a context of contingent, and often temporary, superiority of others—and in a context of resistance to the threats posed by cultures of mastery. Vladimir and Estragon’s situation, in other words, is not one in which ressentiment is absent; instead it may be transformative.

Madelaine Hron has described the transformative possibilities of ressentiment:

“As Gans cautions, however, the value of ressentiment does not merely lie in its consciousness-raising potential, but, rather, it rests in its transformative possibilities—in its creative attempts to transcend the victim status. To be a ‘real instrument of culture,’ a creative act of ressentiment entails a continuous process of transformation, and of overcoming, those elements within the social order that are deemed non-significant. Such transformation can only be achieved if the subject is no longer dependent on the Other for definition, or operating in response to the Other, to take up Nietzsche’s main criticism of ressentiment as a reaction” (2009, 56).

The relationship of Vladimir and Estragon to the figure of Godot differs in subtle, but important ways from the situation captured by Nietzsche’s criticism of ressentiment as a reaction. They depend on Godot, but not precisely for definition, and he can also be said to depend on them. They wait in response to Godot, but their response is based on an obligation that depends on some sort of reciprocity and maintains an open quality. It maintains an open relationship, both with each other and with respect to the figure of Godot.

In her essay on the crisis of culture, Hannah Arendt mentions that “it is of some importance that the last individual left in mass society seems to be the artist” (2006, 161). This individuality enables the artist to continue to be the authentic producer of cultural objects. Arendt defined these objects as things that have “the faculty of arresting our attention and moving us” (2006, 163). Like Arendt, Beckett also considered the role of the artist to be important and was particularly concerned about its authenticity. Thanks to Eric Gans’ analysis of Beckett’s aesthetics, I think we can better understand the role of the artist in shaping postmodern culture.

When I first read this article back in the early 1980s, I was struck by the remarkable complicity that occurs in the play between the spectators, the actors, and at least two of the characters. When Waiting for Godotis performed, thanks to the masterpiece constructed by the author, they all participate in this waiting. I have now come to recognize the element of transformative solidarity implicit in this shared experience.

To wrap things up, I would like to recall Gans’ explication of culture in the context of agriculture, and its relevance to raising and educating children. Perhaps I have spent too much time in high school French classrooms, but this also reminds me of the scene in The Little Prince where the fox teaches the little prince in a playful and imaginative way about deferral and discipline, about culture and waiting. Saint-Exupéry, writing during World War II, frames this discussion in terms of apprivoisement or domestication, and explains that it is fundamentally a process of building relationships (créer des liens).

Although Beckett took a stance against modernism, there is a humanist impulse at work in Waiting for Godot. As they wait, Vladimir and Estragon also show us how to finesse ressentiment in the play of relationships, something, I think, that is at the heart of growing as an individual in society and yet continuing to resist mastery.

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Ben Barber is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, where he holds a Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Scholarship for his research on the influence of Shakespeare’s representations of mimetic desire upon the poetic vision of Lord Byron. In 2012 he received an MA in English from the University of Victoria, where his research focused on honor and mimetic rivalry in early modern drama.

Ian Dennis is a Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is Secretary-Treasurer of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference, and was Chief Organiser of its 2009 conference in Ottawa and Co-Chief Organiser in Los Angeles in 2013. He is the author of four novels, the Girardian study Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997) and Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Delaware 2009), a work of literary criticism making substantial use of both Mimetic Theory and Generative Anthropology.

Sandor Goodhart is a Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Purdue University, and author of The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical (Michigan State UP, 2014), Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution (Notre Dame UP, 2011; co-edited with Ann Astell), For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and Truth (Michigan State UP, 2009; co-edited with James G. Williams, Thomas Ryba, and Jørgen Jørgensen), Reading Stephen Sondheim (Garland, 2000), and Sacrificing Commentary: Reading the End of Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). He directed Purdue’s Jewish Studies Program (1997-2002), the Philosophy and Literature Program (2005), and the Classical Studies Program (2007-2011). He served as guest editor for a special issue of Religion, An International Journal 37.1 (March 2007) on René Girard, and as President of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion from 2004 to 2007.

Marina Ludwigs teaches English Literature at Stockholm University. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine and has worked with, and presented papers on, both Girardian theory and Generative Anthropology. Her current interest is bringing into dialogue narratology and Generative Anthropology.

Ken Mayers teaches at the Bergen County Academies, a public magnet high school in Hackensack, New Jersey. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA. He is actively involved in human rights work as the Chair of the North Africa Coordination Group for Amnesty International USA. His current research interests include, from a broader perspective, humanism and postmodernism, and, more specifically, the argument between Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas about relationships; Generative Anthropology offers important insights into these questions.

Andrew J. McKenna, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, is professor of French at Loyola University Chicago and a member of the Anthropoetics editorial board. He is the author of Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction (U of Illinois P, 1992), as well as of numerous articles on Molière, Pascal, Racine, Montesquieu, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Fellini, and critical theory. From 1996 through 2006, he was editor in chief of Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. He is a board member of Raven Foundation and of Imitatio, foundations devoted to research and education in mimetic anthropology.

Virginia Woolf’s 1927 To the Lighthouse ends on a strange note. Its moment of narrative closure is both satisfactory and unsatisfactory. On the one hand, it is perfect, almost too perfect in the way two narrative strands come together and reinforce each other in their mutual culmination. There is the story of going to the lighthouse: James Ramsay expresses his wish to go to the lighthouse in Part One; his wish is finally fulfilled at the end of Part Three, ten years later. What heightens the ending of this quest-like plot is the ending of another subplot: Lily Briscoe’s search for the artistic means of finishing her paining (and, in a larger sense, her role as a female artist). As Lily watches the boat touch land, she experiences an epiphanic moment—a sudden inspiration about how to complete her painting (with “a line . . . in the centre” (TTL 226)). Thus the boat is arriving and Lily is putting the finishing touches on her painting at the same time: both subplots have been resolved. On the other hand, there is something about this congruity that feels artificial, contrived, empty even. It is presented as the moment of closure, but it does not feel like closure because the natural rhythm of the rising and falling action is compromised. Due to the unusually long deferral of the ending, the emotional charge that is supposed to fuel the coda has already dissipated by the time the event finally occurs, making the ending sound a hollow, anticlimactic note. Is this done deliberately? Is the artificial resolution without a sense of closure of a piece with other formal experiments of modernist fiction or is there more to it? I think, that the answers are: “yes,” “yes,” and “yes.” Something other than/in addition to a familiar unraveling of literary form is taking place here. The novel’s peremptory, self-consciously imposed performance of narrative closure does more than deconstruct the novelistic structure by undermining the idea of closure. It creates, as I will show, a metanarrative awareness of the originary structure of narrative, organized around the aesthetic moment of literary epiphany, which itself lays bare what Eric Gans calls “the becoming-portable of the sign” (SI 84).

In addition to being emotionally unsatisfactory, the plot of Virginia Woolf’s novel is almost parodic in the way it implements the narrative pattern of the quest. The story, which is loosely based on the lives of Virginia Woolf’s parents, features the Ramsays (Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their eight children), who host several guests in their summer house on the Isle of Skye. The first part, “The Window,” spans one summer day, which happens some time before World War I. It starts with little James’s request to go to the Lighthouse and ends late in the evening, after a dinner party, with the trip postponed. The second, impressionistically-written, part, “Time Passes,” spans ten years, which include the war. Unusually enough, it centers on the setting of the summer house itself, which is abandoned by the family, and follows the changes and decay that are taking place. In the third part, “The Lighthouse,” Mr. Ramsay and two of the children, including James, return (sans Mrs. Ramsay, who is now dead) but together with some of the previous guests. At the end of the novel, Mr. Ramsay and the two grown children go to the lighthouse, observed by two guests: Augustus Carmichael, a poet, and Lily Briscoe, an amateur painter and one of the novel’s main focalizers.

On the face of it, the novel has the shape of a quest (in, at least, two or three senses, depending on how loosely we define “the quest”). On the plot-driven level, it tells a story of a wish fulfillment or the story of a boy who wants to go to the lighthouse and does, eventually, go to the lighthouse, albeit ten years later. But the novel can also be interpreted as a quest in a metaphorical sense, as we focus on the character-driven aspect of the story. Read as a family drama, the plot of To the Lighthouse develops along the narrative arc of redemption in a story of a distant father who eventually reconciles with his son. The narrative opens with Mr. Ramsay’s contradicting his wife’s promise to go to the lighthouse by saying that the weather will certainly be bad. At this, young James, disappointed by Mr. Ramsay’s habitual lack of empathy, “would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him”: “Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence” (TTL 8). As for Mrs. Ramsay, she is not oblivious to James’s reaction, thinking that this disappointment will imprint itself permanently on her son’s memory: “he will remember that all his life,” for “children never forget” (TTL 68-69). James’s resentment is finally addressed (and redressed) at the very end, when James, Cam, and the father go to the lighthouse. We view this moment from the point of view of each of the three participants. First, the father is oblivious to the two teenage children as they are watching their father and brooding over their childhood grudges. As James tries his hand at steering the boat, he is praised for his effort by Macalister, a fisherman who is accompanying the family to the lighthouse. “But his father never praised him, James thought grimly” (TTL 221). However, just before they arrive, the normally overcritical father says “Well done,” at which, the sister, Cam, thinks to herself: “You’ve got it at last. For she knew that this was what James had been wanting, and she knew that now he had got it he was so pleased . . . that he was not going to let anybody take away a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him” (TTL 223). This marks the point of the fulfilment of James’s psychological quest, the moment of reconciliation with his father.

Lastly, the ending resolves another narrative thread, the story of a painting, or rather the story of Lily Briscoe’s process of creating and completing a painting. As an amateur woman painter (“one could not take her painting very seriously” (TTL 21)), Lily struggles with self-doubt throughout the novel. As she tries to paint, knowing that, in the end, her paintings “would be hung in the attics” or “rolled up and flung under a sofa” (TTL 193), she is distracted by Charles Tansley’s, Mr. Ramsay’s assistant’s, voice in her head: “women can’t paint, women can’t write” (TTL 54). Despite this, Lily, who is quite ambitious and au courant with the formal experiments of her time, has her own compelling artistic “vision” (TTL 60), which she finds difficult to explain to the uninitiated, such as William Bankes, Mr. Ramsay’s colleague. Mr. Bankes’s dated ideas about art cannot, for example, accommodate the motivation behind abstracting a mother-and-child image (Mrs. Ramsay’s reading to James) into a purple triangle. Such hollowing out of referential content clashes with his understanding that “mother and child” are “objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother [is] famous for her beauty” (TTL 59). When Lily tries to explain to him that she is interested in “relations of masses, of light and shadows,” he finds this thought novel and plans to subject it to “scientific examination” (TTL 59). We follow Lily as she tries to solve the problem of her painting by figuring out “how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left” without breaking the unity of the painting (TTL 60). During the protracted dinner scene, central to “The Window,” Lily tunes out the surrounding conversation to return to her painting and rethink the composition: “She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower in the pattern in the table-cloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree” (TTL 92-3).

Even though the painting remains unfinished during the visit described in part one, its idea is taken up again in part three, when Lily returns. She remembers that “there had been a problem about a foreground of a picture. . . . It had been knocking about in her mind all these years” (TTL 161). But now “it seemed as if the solution had come to her: she knew now what she wanted to do” (TTL 161). Prompted by inspiration, she is able to overcome doubt and start painting, settling into a rhythm where everything falls into place, only to be later arrested and distressed by a thought that “she could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay [on the boat, approaching the lighthouse] and the picture” (TTL 209). It seems that her solution has deceived her, and for a moment, Lily feels despondent, frustrated with “the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment” (TTL 209-10). She resolves to wait for the return of her inspiration, and, in the end, it is there for her. As the boat touches the shore, she is struck by a revelation, a sudden knowledge of what is missing and how she should complete her painting:

There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision (TTL 226).

Of the two subplots, the surface one, about Mr. Ramsay and James (both as a story of arrival and father-son reconciliation), lacks satisfactory closure, in my opinion. Such things are subjective, to some degree, but I would suggest that many other readers would share my impression that the sense of narrative anticipation and release is violated due to “improper” narrative dynamics. The resolving incident is too far removed from the inciting incident, both in terms of the fabula and of sujet (story and plot), compromising the emotional logic of the story.

By speaking of “emotional logic,” I am alluding to various reader-response friendly narratological accounts that pay attention to the temporal unfolding of the plot. According to Meir Sternberg, for example, the reading experience is structured by navigating “a dynamic system of gaps” (EM 50). The reader is compelled to revise his understanding of the plot in response to a surprising event that sheds new light on his previous construction of the fictional world. This revision is an ongoing process, being continually stimulated by the narrative interests of curiosity and suspense. The former aims to close the gaps of knowledge, addressing itself to the questions of “what happened?” and “why?” The latter is oriented toward the future, as a clash of hope and fear. Curiosity and suspense are dynamic and temporal properties that are balanced with each other via the structure of retardation (such as reversals, digressions, etc.) in order to heighten tension and increase the impact of the ending. As Sternberg puts it: “retardatory structure relates directly to the temporal nature of narrative . . . The fact that the text is communicated and apprehended along a continuum makes possible (and to some extent entails) a gradual and controlled unfurling of information, and hence a lively play of expectations throughout” (EM 161-163). Heta Pyrhönen, in his entry on retardatory devices in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative theory, also stresses the affective temporality of perception by saying that these devices “contribute to our sense of narrative dynamics” and, “by suggesting that there is a goal to reach, but one that will not be attained through the fastest route, they retard our perception of the narrated whole” (NT 499).

Similarly, David Velleman, who argues for the emotional logic of narratives, says that emotions are “essentially diachronic— . . . their nature consists in how they unfold over time” (NE 13). In his view, our understanding of plots is indissoluble from our emotional understanding: “a description of events qualifies as a story in virtue of its power to initiate and resolve an emotional cadence in the audience. . . . A story . . . enables its audience to assimilate events, not to familiar patterns of how things happen, but rather to familiar patterns of how things feel. . . . Thus, the audience of a story understands the narrated events, first, because it knows how they feel, in the sense that it experiences them as leading it through a natural emotional sequence; and second, because it knows how it feels about them” (NE 18-19). Borrowing Frank Kermode’s analogy of a ticking clock, Velleman suggests that stories are made sense of “by deploying some episodes to set off an emotional tick to which subsequent episodes can provide the answering tock” (NE 20). But it is important to realize that the tick and the tock are not just to points on a graph, that is to say they should not be understood in structural terms; on the contrary, they are dynamic variables in the way they are embedded in the experiential temporality of emotion. Emotions have to run their course for the story to feel complete: “the story begins with the circumstances that initiate some affect, or sequence of affects, and it ends when that emotional sequence is in some way brought to a close” (NE 14). Thus, “having passed through the emotional ups and downs of the story, as one event succeeded another, the audience comes to rest in a stable attitude about the series of events in their entirety” (NE 19).

Patrik Colm Hogan offers a somewhat more complex framework of the affective logic of narratives, but the idea at its core is compatible with the insights of both Velleman and Sternberg. It shares with Velleman the belief that narrative shapes are affected by emotions, and emotions unfold and play out dynamically, and with Sternberg the interest in the continual sampling and reevaluation of emotional states and situations. Hogan presents two theories of emotions, one based on appraisal, another on perception. This appraisal theory attempts to chart the dynamics of human emotions in connection to desire and goal-oriented thinking. “Appraisal is [the] process of evaluating the ways in which a particular, interpreted situation affects one’s ability to achieve one’s goals. Broadly speaking, we may say that positive emotions reflect situations that make goal achievement more likely while negative emotions reflect situations that make goal achievement less likely. Particular positive and negative emotions reflect particular configurations of goals and facilitations or inhibitions of the achievement of those goals. For example, jealousy arises when attachment goals are threatened by a rival.” (AN 44). This model of emotions presupposes our utter sensitivity to the passage of time. We subdivide time into chunks, which form hierarchically ordered units (from smaller to larger) of incidents, events, episodes, and stories. Each occurrence marks a deviation from normalcy, thus prompting the reader to yearn for a return to normalcy, the fulfilment of which would complete an emotional cadence. Again, as in Velleman, the emotional profile of deviating from and returning to normalcy is not static but dynamic and experiential. He writes that “One important aspect of emotional response is that our experience of emotion does not operate on an absolute scale. It is part of a function of the gradient of change from one moment to the next. To some extent, this is a matter of our prior mood” (AN 33).

In contrast to the appraisal theory, the perceptual theory is based on the observation that “we respond to certain perceptual experiences very quickly,” (AN 45) such as noticing that something is scary, unexpected, or arousing, before we would have had time to appraise its effects on our long-term goals. It is a theory based on reaction and it is not, as Hogan writes, immediately obvious how the two dovetail. Perhaps both of them are right, and both types of emotional response are evoked under different circumstances. What I find interesting is that there seem to be correspondences between the appraisal and perception theory of human emotions and Meir Sternberg’s identification of several narrative interests. Thus, the element of surprise correlates with the perceptual view, and the act of balancing between curiosity and suspense with the appraisal model of emotions. First, we react to an event, which is then followed by our trying to incorporate it into our picture of reality and adjust our expectations.

By giving this brief overview of theories of narrative emotions, I have been preparing to justify my contention that the ending of the story of James and Mr. Ramsay does not work properly. Even though the story does contain the tick and tock of the initiating and resolving incidents, James’s desire to go to the lighthouse and James’s resentment of his father, coupled with the scene of arrival at the lighthouse and the moment of reconciliation with the father, the emotional landscape that would allow the reader to get from point A to point B is missing. There are no reversals, no ups and downs that connect these events, no detectable retardatory structure. The tick and the tock are nothing but formal markers without any meaningful phenomenological content. This feature does not easily fit in with the character of the rest of the writing. On the contrary, Woolf’s novel is everywhere else extremely finely attuned to the ebb and flow of human emotion. In fact, the masterful way in which the writing captures the recurrent rhythms of emotions and perceptions is one of its stylistic innovations, together with the technique of the floating focus, whereby one focalizing consciousness seamlessly shifts into another. Both of these contribute to making this book a heady and sometimes disorienting reading experience.

The two important psychological observations that the narrative makes is, firstly, that our feelings about things constantly change: a momentary snapshot of our feelings does not reflect our overall attitude about a subject, and, secondly, that timing is crucial to making a meaningful connection with another human being. We can see this, for example, in the dinner scene in the first part of the novel. William Bankes, who has an old crush on Mrs. Ramsay, is turned off by her trivial conversation during dinner and feels a sudden distaste for her. “Yes, he thought, it is terrible waste of time. . . . Yet, he thought, she is one of my oldest friends. . . . Yet now at this moment her presence meant absolutely nothing to him” (TTL 97). However, a little bit later, when a perfectly cooked boeuf en daube is served, Mr. Bankes declares it a triumph. “How did she manage these things in the depth of the country? He asked her. She was a wonderful woman. All his love, all his reverence had returned”(TTL 109). In another scene in part three, Mr. Ramsay approaches Lily Briscoe as she is trying to paint. “Look at him, he seemed to be saying, look at me; and indeed, all the time he was feeling, Think of me, think of me” (TTL 166). Lily understands that he wants sympathy but bristles at the thought that it is expected of her, as a woman, to provide men with a shoulder to cry on. “His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet” (TTL 167). When the feeling of sympathy does spontaneously come unbidden, it does so at a “completely inappropriate moment . . . her feeling had come too late; there it was ready; but he no longer needed it” (TTL 168-9).

These episodes, together with others, reflect a recurring conflict that the novel explores—one between sensitivity to feeling and responsiveness, on the one hand, and a somewhat insensitive (or “barren,” as it is labeled in the novel) tendency toward scientific, rational thinking, on the other. The scientific mind is often associated with the male characters, such as Mr. Ramsay and Charles Tansley, his student, especially the latter’s “acid way of peeling the flesh and blood off everything” (TTL 12). They both say disagreeable things in the name of truth, such as the wind “blowing from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse” (TTL 9). James, who wants to go to the lighthouse, hates his father not only for saying that the weather will not be fine in response to Mrs. Ramsay’s assurance that it will be fine, but for the way he says it, “grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife . . . but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment” (TTL 8). In his turn, Mr. Ramsay hates his wife for saying that it might be fine tomorrow. “The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. . . . Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west” (TTL 37).

Scientific thinking with its long-term goal-making thematizes explicitly the foregrounded contrast between the linear temporality of the male, quest-like and abstract, and the convoluted temporality of the woman, attuned to the natural rhythms and flow of human emotion and grounded in concrete situations. Mr. Ramsay has his own metaphoric lighthouse that shines ahead but cannot be reached. Excusing himself, because he has to feed eight children, he is nonetheless dissatisfied with his life’s achievement because “he had not done the thing he might have done” (TTL 51). Even though he had a “splendid mind,” yet “if thought” was “like alphabet . . . arranged in twenty-six letters all in order . . . he reached Q . . . Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still if he could reach R it would be something” (TTL 39). His friend and colleague, William Bankes, says that “Ramsay is one of those men who do their best work before they are forty” (TTL 28), while Mr. Ramsay himself imagines that people consider him a failure and “that R was beyond him” (TTL 39). His wife, in her turn, wonders what she has done with her life. But her achievements cannot be arranged in an alphabet: they lie in the sphere of human interactions. She has a special talent of making people feel special and has mastered the art of bringing them together in a harmonious way on social occasions. Thus as she enters the dining room, she sees that “nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and creating rested on her” (TTL 91). Similarly, in an earlier scene, she builds up her husband’s ego by her carefully-chosen, soothing words, and while he, “filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied” feels “restored” and “renewed,” she is sucked dry of energy and is described as “fold[ing] herself together [in exhaustion], one petal closed in another” (TTL 44).

Yet there is the story of Lily, pursuing her own quest, which is fulfilled, I would like to argue, in an act of real, not sham closure. Lily’s subplot has “content,” as it were: there is continuity, gradual development, and retardation, which together amount to a sense of fullness, as opposed to the emptiness of the father-and-son plot. Her moments of doubt and dejection are interspersed with her moments of inspiration; thinking and planning are succeeded by the episodes of painting and experimentation. There is an inexorable progression in her feeling her way toward a perfect composition, from a lilac triangle, containing James and Mrs. Ramsay, which would balance light, shadows, and masses, to her doubts about foreground and background, to her decision where to put the trees, and, finally, to her epiphany about drawing the finishing line. Emotionally, Lily’s journey has high and low points, building up to the climactic and moving scene of her being swept up by the compelling force of painting, “this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention” (TTL 172-173). But she has not won yet: her pursuit of completing the painting encounters a major reversal, when she loses her earlier feeling of certainty about her compositional arrangement and begins to feel desperation instead. It is only when she makes herself calm down and allows herself to inhabit the mood of quiet expectancy that the moment of inspiration and fulfillment comes to her.

The novel’s sensitivity and adherence to the affective rhythms of emplotment, which the story of Lily’s painting convincingly demonstrates, lead me to believe that the narrative of the lighthouse subplot is not meant to elicit an empathetic response. What then? I suggest that instead of subverting or questioning the very possibility of closure, as is common in modern and postmodern literature, the text makes the closure conspicuously unnatural by imposing it externally and by fiat. I propose to read the deferral of closure through Raoul Eshelman’s theory of performatism. Eshelman bases his concept of performatism on GA’s theory of the sign. He uses his analysis to explain new and salient characteristics of post-postmodern literature and art. But I believe it is applicable to works created in other periods as well, especially those that feature central moments of epiphany that shape meaning. What makes a work performatist is, among other things, a forced closure, which is imposed by the device of the double frame. “Performatist works are set up in such a way that the reader or viewer at first has no choice but to opt for a single, compulsory solution raised within the work at hand” (P 2). “On the one hand, you’re practically forced to identify with something implausible within the frame—to believe in spite of yourself—but on the other, you still feel the coercive force causing this identification to take place”(P 3). Coercion, which we nonetheless recognize, is created when the outer frame locks the inner frame. The inner frame could, for example, be at the level of the story, and the outer frame at the level of the narrator, but they could also be at different story levels.

In this case, the inner frame is drawn around Mr. Ramsay and his children, who are arriving at the lighthouse. The outer frame is that of Lily Briscoe and her story of struggling to finish her painting. Precisely at the moment the Ramsays reach the other side of the bay, Lily Briscoe experiences a flash of intuition, which tells her how to complete her painting. Her epiphanic vision is what imposes the closure on the story, with the frame around her painting becoming the literal outer frame of the journey to the lighthouse. Lily’s realization that the painting is finished completes, in a peremptory fashion, the story within the inner frame. Eshelman’s model validates our intuition about the artificiality of this narrative closure but it also illuminates the meaning and function of epiphany from the perspective of GA’s originary scene, as I will proceed to demonstrate.

The term epiphany in its secular, aesthetic sense was introduced into the critical discourse by Joyce in his earlier version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Hero. Joyce carries over the discussion of epiphany from Stephen Hero to his Portrait, but does not use the term itself in the later novel. The idea, however, does not undergo significant transformations. I will therefore use both texts interchangeably. The protagonist of Stephen Hero says that “by epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation” of a certain truth (DOE). While in the original religious epiphany, the wise men perceive the truth of Jesus’s divinity, Joyce is, instead, interested in the truth of beauty, which, when perceived and appreciated, has a special effect, according to him: it arrests the mind, producing the experience of stasis. Unlike “desire [, which] urges us to possess,” inciting in the audience “kinesthetic” emotions, the aesthetic moment, in agreement with Kant’s postulate, is disinterested, and the emotions it arouses are static (PA 204-205). The moment of beauty, as the moment of the revelation of truth, is punctual. It arrests movement and condenses fleeting reality into a freeze-frame.

It seems to me that Woolf understands moments of revelation very similarly to the way Joyce conceptualizes epiphanies. As Lily resumes her painting, she experiences the stasis of beauty through having “exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting” (TTL 173). Significantly, Lily’s moment of clarity about her painting echoes another, earlier moment of epiphany, which she recalls as an episode that happened ten years ago to herself, Mrs. Ramsay, and Charles Tansley. The trio was spending time on the beach, with Mrs. Ramsay’s writing letters and, at the same time, observing Lily and Charles throwing stones into the water. Suddenly, this recollected scene finds resonance in Lily’s thoughts as she reflects on the way a single moment can arrest the flow of time, stabilizing the experience of life, which is otherwise ineffable and impossible to capture. “What is the meaning of life? . . . The great revelation had never come. . . . Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations. . . . Herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent” (TTL 175-6). Lily clearly sees that this memory owes its existence to Mrs. Ramsay. After all these years, Lily is now in the position to appreciate the latter’s special talent and mission in life: bringing people together, “merging and flowing and creating,” (TTL 91) and finally making something permanent, palpable, and meaningful of the fleeting moments in time. This seizing of the ephemeral instances of now and bringing out their essence is what is at the heart of the painterly nature of epiphanies. This is what the painter experiences in her moment of vision—the feeling that she can see time standing still. In a similarly charged episode, Lily and William Bankes are observing Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay observing their children. “So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball. . . . And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all . . . descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them . . . the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline . . . sank down again, and they became . . . Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching the children throwing catches” (TTL 80).

Whenever these significant, time-arresting episodes happen in the novel, they are shared by several participants in various configurations of joint attention. Vera Tobin in her article on To the Lighthouse considers moments of joint attention to be a central feature of the novel. In continuing the modernist project, according to Tobin, Virginia Woolf questions the nature of consciousness and representation. “What happens when authors are no longer certain that perceptions can truly be communicated or shared” (JA 45)? The answer that the novel provides is ambiguous. On the one hand, joint attention can engineer moments of connection between characters who do not always see eye to eye. Thus Mrs. Ramsay, who is convinced that Mr. Carmichael dislikes and avoids her, shares an aesthetic moment with him inadvertently when they both glance at the same fruit dish: “she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel here, and returned, after feasting, to his hive. That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them” (TTL 105-106). Similarly, in the last scene with Mrs. Ramsay, we see her and Mr. Ramsay sharing a joint look at the lighthouse.

Getting up, she stood at the window with the reddish-brown stocking in her hands, partly to turn away from him, partly because she remembered how beautiful it often is—the sea at night. But she knew that he had turned his head as she turned; he was watching her. She knew that he was thinking, You are more beautiful than ever. And she felt herself very beautiful. . . . Then, knowing that he was watching her, instead of saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself, Nothing on earth can equal this happiness) (TTL 134).

On the other hand, Tobin’s point that these moments of connection are fleeting, inconclusive, and deceptive is well-taken. After all, Mr. Carmichael’s “way of looking [at the bowl] is different from [Mrs. Ramsay’s],” and even intense momentary feelings of rapport and love are powerless to bridge misunderstandings and accumulated resentments between the spouses. Woolf’s depiction of such scenes of misfired connections is of a piece with her general interest in “the desperate and mostly doomed attempt to understand and connect to the mind of others” as part of literary modernism’s suspicion that “true mutual understanding can never be achieved” (JA 52). Even though I agree with Tobin’s analysis, I believe that, in addition to exploring the modernist skepticism about representation of consciousness and intersubjective understanding, aesthetic (and often epiphanic) scenes of joint attention are instances of the reenactment of the originary scene.

What distinguishes the aesthetic moment from other circumstances of the emission of the sign is the subject’s awareness of the paradoxical oscillatory experience between the contemplation of the sign and its imaginary referent. The originary pleasure derives from the relief the participants on the imaginary scene experience when they realize that the impending violence of competing for the possession for a real object is successfully deferred. The contemplation of the aesthetic form captures the doubleness of the moment of formal closure, when the sign is both conventional and motivated or “no longer an act of ethical solidarity and not yet a mere instrument, but independently evokes its referent in the imagination, no longer as material object but as sacred being on the spectator’s scene of representation,” as Eric Gans writes in The Scenic Imagination (SI 84). The main difference between a regular and aesthetic use of the sign lies in the retention of the memory of the originary event in the latter case, when the sign still feels freshly emitted, still reminiscent of deferred violence. “What assures the affective link between the arbitrary sign and the experience of sacred interdiction,” Gans continues, “is the possibility of imaginarily, that is esthetically, evoking the scene by means of the sign. The esthetic moment is, so to speak, the becoming-portable of the sign” (SI 84). In A New Way of Thinking, Gans continues this line of argument, pointing out that in art, “´signs´ or representations cannot be divorced from the imaginary beings they generate in us” (NWT 201). An aesthetic emission of the sign is fascinated by the very act of the production of transcendence from immanence, verticality from horizontality, and focuses therefore on the newly emerged formal properties of the sign that bespeak its absolute arbitrariness, keeping apart and together within its attention span sign-as-the-form and sign-as-the-sacred. “What we call art,” Gans writes, “is the deliberate cultivation of [the] generative act. The artwork obliges us to experience over time an oscillation between perception of the representation and its meaningful interpretation that models the genesis of the originary sign” (NWT 205).

In light of this analysis of art, the choice of Lily Briscoe’s final epiphany as a representative model of the aesthetic moment feels especially appropriate. In her artistic process, Lily has been searching for balances and correspondences between her internal impressions of the external world and the representational means with which they could be captured. In her moment of distress over the progress of her painting, Lily despairs that “For whatever reason she could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary” (TTL 209). This is a fitting illustration of the generative act on, at least, two levels: firstly, the fact that Lily is an abstract painter, and so the painting that will be produced would be arbitrary on a literal level, as it were, constituting certainly a more arbitrary sign of what she wants to express than a figurative painting would have been; secondly, the fact that she is not even painting Mr. Ramsay on a boat—she is painting Mrs. Ramsay reading a book to James as this scene imprinted itself on her memory ten years ago. Yet the event of Mrs. Ramsay’s boat touching land generates the mysteriously elusive moment of formal closure, the closure of her painting and the closure of the narrative. The reader is none the wiser as to what clicked in Lily’s mind and allowed her to make sense of the connection between the arrival at the lighthouse and knowing where to put the finishing line in her painting of Mrs. Ramsay or what, in Eshelman’s terms, produced the lock or a fit between the outer frame of Lily’s story and the inner frame of Mr. Ramsay’s story, yet the narrative of Lily’s creation of an art work does feel complete on an emotional level. In other words, the outer layer of the story still follows the conventional laws of narrative closure, but, by acting performatively, it reveals the inner workings of the sign, which receives its formal closure by the fiat of the originary community’s consensus.

As Gans points out, Kant was one of the first thinkers who attempted to analyze the obscure and arbitrary nature of aesthetics in his Critique of Judgment. Judgment in Kant is precisely the faculty that is responsible for adjudicating correspondences. Aesthetic judgment or the judgment of taste is grounded in the intuition of a “subjective harmony of the imagination with the understanding without an objective harmony—where the presentation is referred to a determinate concept of an object” (CJ 92). Judgment without an underlying concept means that we do not (strangely enough, perhaps) judge objects based on symmetries or proportions, such as the golden mean, etc., but judge them directly: “a judgment of taste . . . is pure, it connects liking or disliking directly with the mere contemplation of the object” (CJ 92). This is why aesthetic judgment of taste is both universal(shared by all, universally communicable) and subjective (not based on objectively defined concepts). This claim of universal subjectivity makes Kant’s analysis of the beautiful deeply insightful from the anthropological perspective because, as Gans rightly points out, the only way to bring together the notions of subjectivity and universality is through their origin in the consensus of the emergent human community.

By glossing Kant’s analysis of taste, Gans brings up the interesting idea of thisness. Indeed, what does it mean to “grasp an object [by intuiting] unity and purpose ‘without a concept’” (NWT 202)? Regular judgment uses concepts to interpret sense data. On seeing a horse, we identify it as a horse using the concept of “horseness” that we have formed. “The esthetic object . . . is one that shares with the members of ‘natural kinds’ the wholeness that we associate with living species, yet unlike these, it cannot simply be named by a species concept. In experiencing the particular living unity of this horse I do more than judge it a good example of horseness; I intuit it as a purposeful individual being, existing for itself and not merely in order to exemplify its species” (NWT 202). In other words, non-aesthetic judgment sees categories, while aesthetic judgment sees individualities.

This analysis dovetails nicely with the rest of the discussion about beauty and epiphanic vision in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Hero. The protagonist of both novels invokes Aquinas’ idea of beauty, according to which the mind grasps beauty in three stages: as wholeness (or integrity), symmetry (or harmony), and finally, radiance (or clarity). This observation captures something that is central to epiphany. As we perceive a beautiful object, we experience a subtle shift of perspective, whereby ordinary vision becomes special, extraordinary vision: it makes the thing on which it focuses appear symbolic, significant, or larger than life in our imagination. Under its searching light, the object becomes epiphanized, according to Stephen Hero‘s protagonist. But the next moment, the privileged kind of vision changes back to ordinary vision and the object, once again, becomes ordinary. Stephen says that claritas comes from the Aquinian notion of quidditas, the whatness of an object. It has been remarked, however, that the notion Joyce really needs is that of haecceity or thisness, which comes from Duns Scotus (see, for example, Kearney (EJ)). It is our recognition of the haecceity of the thing that makes it radiant. As Stephen explains to his friend Lynch in the Portrait: “The instance wherein the supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure” (PA 213). To a reader not coming from the perspective of Generative Anthropology, the idea of some special, arresting vision that can produce an exalted experience of radiant thisness may appear baffling, metaphoric, or even mystical. How can thisness be experienced? How can it create a spiritual manifestation of recognition? What can be recognizable about this particular object, the object that I have not encountered before? To answer this question, I will look closer at the three steps of aesthetic apprehension and compare them to Charles Peirce’s fundamental categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness.

This is how Stephen in Stephen Hero explains these three steps to his friend Cranly.

-You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. . . . Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. . . . That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends.

. . .

-What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity.

. . .

Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn’t make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany (DOE).

Whenever three ways of cognizing an object are brought up, they trigger an association with the Peircean phenomenological categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Peirce sees these categories as the three fundamental components of thought that apply to our perceptual apparatus, that is to say, we perceive the world in terms of either firstness, or secondness, or thirdness. There is nothing above thirdness, only recursive agglomerations of further thirdnesses.

Firstness is a “positive internal character of the subject itself” or the “mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else.” It is also a “quality of feeling.” Examples of firstness could be the quality of redness or hardness in themselves, unrelated to any object to which they could be attached (PF).

Secondness is a “brute action of one subject or substance on another” or a “mode of being of that which is such as it is, with respect to a second.” It is the idea of effort prescinded from the idea of purpose . . . the experience of effort cannot exist without the experience of resistance. Effort is only effort by virtue of its being opposed; and no third element enters” (PS).

Finally, there is thirdness, which is an “influence of one subject on another relatively to a third” or a “mode of being of that which is such as it is, in bringing a second and third into relation to each other.” While firstness has to do with feelings, secondness with experience, thirdness relates to thinking. Whenever we speak of thirdness or a triadic relationship, Peirce explains, “you will always find a mental element in it.” This is another way of saying, of course, that thirdness is the category of representation. Linguistic signs, symbolic systems, mathematical relations, and lawful regularities in sciences are all manifestations of thirdness (PT).

In linguistics, the three categories have been connected to the three kinds of sign—iconic (standing for the thing itself), indexical (standing for something else), and symbolic (mediating between two things). It is only with the emergence of the symbolic that language begins, although symbols may be used to represent icons and indices. While animals understand indexical connections, according to the received view, they cannot use signs as conventions—for this you need the symbol. And indeed, you need a third term to create an arbitrary connection between two others. However, when we put the three stages of apprehension side-by-side with the three phenomenological categories, we discover that they do not match up. The first step, one of apprehending integrity, which divides the universe into two parts, the object and its background, takes us directly into secondness, which is not surprising since pure firstness must be pre-cognitive. Consequently, the synthesizing second step is only possible on the level of thirdness since in order to evaluate symmetry (or harmony), we need to consider the object’s relational aspects. But what then do we do with the third step of radiance? After all, according to Peirce, there is nothing above thirdness. Are Aquinas and Joyce mistaken about this division or is there something like fourthness? On the contrary, I would like to suggest that they display a sound anthropological intuition.

Significantly also, Eric Gans expressed doubt about the Peircean schema, writing “what I find lacking in the Peircean . . . notion of the sign is precisely the absence of a passage through the absolute difference of the sacred/significant” (NWT 205). We need another category to explain “the frisson that accompanies our encounter with a successful artwork” (NWT 205)—the state of oscillation. I propose that we call the “fourthness” of the epiphanic seeing by the name of “mediated firstness.” What we recognize as an epiphany is the prelinguistic and pre-cognitive moment of the object’s still being an appetitive object of mimetic contention before the origin of language. What is radiantly flickering at the heart of the ecstatic experience of epiphany is the oscillation between two images: those of the object as firstness, to which we no longer have access, and the object as sign representing or mediating this original lost firstness. Epiphanies are thus paradigmatic aesthetic moments, which produce a re-enactment of the originary scene. But they also focus our attention on the belatedness of the sign, and, at the same time, promise that its lost essence can be recovered through their performance of mediated firstness. Once we understand something in its symbolic, epiphanic, larger-than-life sense, for example, this group of people not just as two parents watching their children play, but as the symbolic incarnation of family itself, we have produced an alignment of the double frame, which locks meaning into place. What is interesting about performatist mechanisms, described by Eshelman, is that they make these reenactments self-consciously explicit. The reason we accept a lock or fit between the inner and outer frame is because the minimal inner frame “[consists] of an intuitively perceived unity of sign and thing,” which we take for granted (P 5). This is only possible, as Eshelman writes, because the minimally possible inner frame is grounded in the originary scene, which creates an illusion of a natural link between the thing and the sign. Even as meaning in a performatist work (and I consider epiphanies performatist) seems to be imposed from above by the “arbitrary or dogmatic quality” of the outer frame, it is made possible from below by the inner frame, which secures the connection between the sign and the referent: “the inner frame of the sign,” he writes, “makes possible the outer frame of the human” (P 5). Thus to return to Lily’s epiphany, the firstness that it makes visible is Mrs. Ramsay’s luminous quality of turning life into art, but it can only be appreciated retrospectively, ten years after Mrs. Ramsay’s death.

Mediated firstness goes hand-in-hand with the experience of belatedness and retrospective nature of narratives because the originary scene incorporates the originary belatedness and retrospection. In order to avoid violence threatened by the contesting desires and abandon their appropriative gestures, the participants must somehow pre-understand the danger of the center in its constraining power to defer appetites (NWT 32). While the participants are still drawn to the center by the memory of the sacred’s appetitive attractiveness, the sacred center, in an opposing motion, pushes back. Elsewhere I have analyzed these counter forces as the originary doubleness of narrative (NJ). I suggest that the figures of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay can be seen as metaphors of this doubleness. While Mr. Ramsay’s quest to “reach R” represents the forward movement of desire, Mrs. Ramsay, in her defensive stance, is backward-oriented, her cautionary wisdom a repository of scary scenarios. Despite Mr. Ramsay’s lack of emotional self-sufficiency and his dependence on Mrs. Ramsay for support and encouragement, he is the optimistic partner in this union, while Mrs. Ramsay, despite her nurturing strength, is the one who sees life as “terrible and hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance” (TTL 66). In connecting real Mr. Ramsay and imaginary Mrs. Ramsey with a line in the center, Lily’s moment of epiphany seems to me to function as a meta-narrative performatist commentary on the emergence of language and the origin of narrative.

There is something exemplary in the epiphanic moments in To the Lighthouse in their self-consciousness scenicity of being aesthetic experiences par excellence, re-enacting the originary event as event, not as a memory, on the scene of representation, which engages the joint attention of the participants. Joint attention is the phenomenon made possible by the originary moment and making possible, in its turn, the originary scene’s later re-enactments. In addition to the examples already given, here are two more important examples. The scene when Lily is struck by the Ramsays appearing as a paradigmatic model of the family has a double configuration of joint attention: as Lily and William are observing the Ramsays, the couple is jointly observing their children. Similarly, in the last scene, Lily is observing the boat together with normally aloof Mr. Carmichael. But in this instance, they are sharing a moment of intimacy. “Old Mr. Carmichael stood beside her, looking like an old pagan god, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was only a French novel) in his hand. . . . They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same things and he had answered her without her asking him anything. He stood there spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly, compassionately, their final destiny” (TTL 225).

One could object that the scene of Lily’s epiphany when she understands that Mrs. Ramsay made life stand still takes place entirely in Lily’s imagination and is thus not an actual reenactment of the originary scene, but I would suggest that this scene is, in some sense, the most interesting example. By seeing in front of her inner eye Mrs. Ramsay observing herself and Charles Tansley throwing stones in the water, she is watching her earlier self jointly with Mrs. Ramsay, seeing herself through Mrs. Ramsay’s eyes. This moment is vertiginous, circular, evocative, and recognizable. My final suggestion is that a moment like this compresses the paradigm of narrative self-consciousness. It is vertiginous because it makes visible the operation of the mimetic paradox. It is circular because it encodes the prospective and retrospective orientation of narratives. It is evocative because it stresses the belatedness of representation. And it is recognizable because it expresses what Barthes calls the deja-lu (already read) quality of intertextuality. Lily seeing herself inside the inner frame is not just a metaphor but an actual performance of narrative closure, suggesting that closure involves both transcendence and self-referentiality.

For three gorgeous days in June, against the scenic backdrop of Victoria’s charming Inner Harbor, attendees at the 2014 Generative Anthropology Summer Conference explored the theme of “Deferral, Discipline, Knowledge.” The idea of deferral was a nod to GA’s roots. Eric borrowed the idea from Derrida, whose notion of différance he combined with Girard’s idea of mimetic desire. The result was the originary hypothesis: the idea that humanity originates when mimetic violence (Girard) is deferred by the linguistic sign (Derrida). Deferral leads to discipline and knowledge. The originary hypothesis is the basis of a discipline (generative anthropology), which explains the ethical reasons for the pursuit of knowledge. All knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is traceable to anthropological self-knowledge, knowledge of the origin of the human.

The eighth annual meeting of the Generative Anthropology Society lived up to the high standards we have come to expect from previous years. Indeed, the event exceeded a number of previous benchmarks. The program was fuller, the sessions longer, the funding more generous, and the attendance the highest since Ottawa in 2009. Presenters came from five different continents including North America, Australia, Europe, Asia, and, for the first time, Africa. Thirty percent of papers came from individuals who had not previously presented at GASC. Most gratifying of all, despite the fuller program, the intellectual caliber of the papers remained extremely high. One normally expects a few valleys and peaks over the course of three days of solid papers, but here was a seemingly endless summit. No doubt the cohesiveness of the group, which remained in one location for the duration of the conference, helped to sustain this high level of exchange. Thanks to generous funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, it was possible to hold sessions in the same hotel where attendees were housed. The Inn at Laurel Point provided ideal meeting space, with delicious food and excellent service, all in an unbeatable waterfront location. From a conference organizer’s point of view, keeping people in one place was a no-brainer. But I never dreamed that this practical consideration would influence so directly the intellectual content of the meeting. More time together meant more time to talk. And more time to talk meant more intellectual momentum for the conference as a whole.

Of the many exhilarating discussions that unfolded I wish to note one in particular. Thanks to the initiative of Andrew Bartlett, who wrote to Raymond Tallis about our conference and, what is more, successfully applied for a grant from his institution to fund a second plenary speaker, we were able to stage a highlight-reel event at the mid-point of the meeting. After giving his keynote on the spread of Darwinitis and Neuromania in contemporary definitions of the human, Ray was joined by Eric at the podium, and the two engaged in a conversation about generative anthropology’s vision of the human. Unusually for a speaker of his stature and reputation, Ray had spent some time familiarizing himself beforehand with generative anthropology. And Eric in turn had taken the trouble to read several of Ray’s books of philosophical anthropology. The result was an incisive exchange between our two plenary speakers. It became clear that Ray and Eric agreed on many fundamental issues, including the necessity of reflecting minimally and rigorously on the distinctiveness of humanity, even if they differed in how best to model this distinctiveness. I will not rehearse the main points of their conversation here. Instead I encourage you to witness it for yourself. Video recordings of both plenary lectures are available at the GASC 2014 website. To locate the conversation between Ray and Eric, click on Ray’s lecture. The dialog occurs at 1:05:58 of his video.

Given the richness of the GASC 2014 program, it has not been hard to fill this issue. Six papers were ready for publication by the Fall deadline; and more will be published in the Spring.

Our first paper is by Ben Barber, one of five graduate students to deliver a paper at the meeting. Citing Derrida’s critique of Levi-Strauss, Ben asks why recent theorists like Derrida have viewed language as inherently violent. Ben argues that these theorists have not truly grasped the ethical significance of aesthetic deferral. Turning his eye to the English romantics, Barber finds a similar oversight in Hazlitt’s distaste for the political conservatism of Wordsworth’s later poetry. He argues that Hazlitt misses the point of Wordsworth’s aesthetics, which, Ben says, “pioneers a poetics that imagines the appropriation of the centre by the periphery.”

Our next paper comes from Anthropoetics and GASC regular Ian Dennis. In a rich and provocative discussion, Ian explores the continuum of aesthetic deferral from high to popular art. Pursuing GA’s thesis that market exchange defers resentment more effectively than ritual, Ian suggests that “all high art contains the seeds of its own popularization.” Today the artwork exists in the context of a generalized market that encourages personal desire and, therefore, its corollary, resentment. High art is revelatory of the originary structure of desire, but ethically speaking it cannot compete with the market system, which undermines the center-periphery asymmetry assumed by high art. This breakdown is reflected in the spread of high art from center to periphery—or, to put it as Ian does, from the singular high-cultural mode to the plurality of experiences in pop culture. Ian analyses this transition in terms of a provocative typology of aesthetic feelings, attitudes, and moods.

We were fortunate to have in our company a few regulars of the Girardian conference, including two of Girard’s oldest students, Andrew McKenna and Sandor Goodhart. In his fascinating discussion of Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot, Sandor argues that despite their obvious differences, Derrida and Gans rely on a conception of time that is specific to the Western philosophical tradition. But there may be an alternative way of looking at time, one that attends more precisely to our contemporary situation in, as Sandor puts it, a “time of disaster.” Sandor finds this alternative in Beckett’s paradoxical play Waiting for Godot.

Readers of this journal will be familiar with the work of Marina Ludwigs. In her dazzling contribution to this issue, Marina examines the structure of epiphanic moments in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Observing that the novel’s ending is often regarded as emotionally unsatisfying, Marina suggests that this dissatisfaction is given by the double frame with which the novel ends. The outer frame, which involves the plot of Lily Briscoe, gives us an authentic epiphany, while the inner frame, involving the plot of the Ramseys, forces the novel to closure. Taking her cue from Raoul Eshelman’s notion of performatism, Marina argues that this complex double structure recreates the revelatory structure of the originary aesthetic sign. Woolf’s epiphanic scenes reflect the complexity of the human experience of events.

I said that a full 30 percent of papers came from newcomers to the GA conference. Our next paper is by one of these newcomers. Yet Kenneth Mayers is no newcomer to GA. On the contrary, he is one of Eric’s oldest students, having attended UCLA from 1984 to 1995, when he received his PhD in Comparative Literature. Indeed, it was Ken who originally encouraged Eric to begin conducting a regular seminar in generative anthropology. We are very glad to have reestablished contact with Ken and to welcome him to our conference. Like Sandor, Ken takes up the topic of Beckett and modern culture, but he reaches a quite different conclusion. Ken argues that Waiting for Godot is centered on the idea of waiting as resistance. This resistance is not merely a resistance to modernism with its aesthetic of cultural mastery. It also thematizes the condition of market society, in which relationships of domination are temporary and contingent rather than permanent. In market society, Ken concludes, resentment can be transformative and constructive rather than, as in agrarian societies, reactive and destructive.

The last paper in this issue is by Andrew McKenna, a longtime supporter of generative anthropology. In a characteristically stimulating and packed contribution, Andrew analyses the structure of irony in Voltaire’s Candide. This irony, Andrew says, consists of two distinct stages. First, there is the knowing smile as we appreciate the humor of the passage; second, there are the tears, when (in an awkward moment of self-recognition) we see our complicity in the sacrifice of the young slave depicted by Voltaire. Andrew extends this pity for the victim beyond the colonialism of the 18th century to the global economy of the 21st. Guilt is effective only if it changes sacrificial behavior. Andrew’s essay provides a caution to those who uncritically extol the virtues of the market. In their singular pursuit of profit, Andrew says, “market exchanges are people-neutral,” but this neutrality has a serious downside, which is the neglect of an underlying anthropological truth, namely, “our ineluctable, structural, complicity in malfeasance.” As heirs of the Enlightenment, we have freed ourselves from the sacrificial beliefs of institutional religion, but we have not freed ourselves from the anthropological reality of sacrifice.

Next year, GASC returns to High Point, NC, where GA veteran Matthew Schneider will host the Society’s ninth annual meeting. The theme of the 2015 conference is “Models of the Human, Analog and Digital.” I look forward to seeing you there!