The Seance of Reading Uncanny Designs In-7

The Séance of Reading:
Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing

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COUSINEAU, THOMAS J.
The Séance of reading : uncanny designs in
modernist writing / Thomas J. Cousineau. - Sibiu :
Editura Universităţii “Lucian Blaga” din Sibiu, 2022
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ISBN 978-606-12-1922-3
82.09
The Séance of Reading:
Uncanny Designs
in Modernist Writing
Thomas J. Cousineau
For Charlotte, Sophie, Sebastien,
Madeleine, and Damien
“A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his
heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.
It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though
we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when
reading.”
– Vladimir Nabokov,
Lectures on Literature
“Ritual death produces a bodily change. The soul

does not simply live inside the building; rather it is
incarnated in it. As a result of the sacrifice – of the
violent death – it continues to live here below in a
new, architectural body much longer than it would
have in its fleshly body.”
– Mircea Eliade,
Commentaires sur la légende de maître Manole
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Manole Complex /3
1. Fixing Things in The Great Gatsby / 21
2. Being Scrupulous in “The Sisters” / 39
3. Rebuilding Lisbon in The Book of Disquiet / 59
4. Doing It in Waiting for Godot / 79
5. The Eliot Way: Turning Back in

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” / 97
6. Playing It in Endgame / 113
7. Crafting Transfigurations in
A Short History of Decay / 133
8. Being Misfits in “A Good Man is

Hard to Find” / 151
9. Framing Things in Light in August / 169
Bibliography / 191
Introduction:
The Manole Complex
“Anything and everything, depending on how one

sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or a nothing,
a path or a problem.”
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
The Séance of Reading – a teaching and writing project

which began nearly twenty years ago – acquired its
definitive form when I learned thanks to a serendip-
itous exchange of emails with the Romanian scholar
Gabriel Badea in the Spring of 2015 about a folk ballad
known to all Romanians, but entirely unknown to me
at the time, called “The Legend of Master Manole,” in
which a master-builder named Manole has been com-
missioned by Prince Negru Vodă to build a monastery
at Curtea de Argeș. Try as they may, however, Manole
and his fellow builders cannot prevent the walls that
they construct during the day from collapsing at night:
But whate’er they wrought

At night came to naught,
Crumbled down like rot!
The next day again,
The third day again,
The fourth day again,
All their toil in vain!
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
The solution to their dilemma appears to Manole in a

dream from which he learns that the walls will contin-
ue to collapse until he and his fellow builders
Make an oath to wall

Whose bonny wife erst,
Whose dear sister first,
Haps to come this way
At the break of day
Bringing meat and drink
To husband or kin.
Unfortunately for Manole, his pregnant wife Ana is

the first to arrive that morning at the construction site.
As was foretold by the dream, the walls will now resist
collapse but at the cost of Ana’s life:
Her sweet voice alone

Came through with a moan,
“Manole, Manole,
Good master Manole!
The wall squeezes hard,
Crushed is now my heart,
With my life I part.”
Prince Negru Vodă, who beholds with delight the ed-

ifice that the sacrifice of Ana has made possible, asks
Manole
“Can you build for me,

With your mastery,
Yet another shrine,
A cloister divine,
Ever far more bright,
Of greater delight.”
When Manole – cheerfully but ill-advisedly – boasts

that such an achievement is surely within his reach,
4
THE SÉANCE OF READING
Prince Negru – presumably fearing that Manole will

build an even more resplendent shrine for one of
his rivals – orders that the scaffold be removed, thus
stranding Manole and the other builders on the roof.
As a desperation move, they fashion wings from the
roofing shingles and, attempting to fly, fall to the
ground below. As Manole prepares to leap, he hears
the plea of his wife Ana rising from the wall in which
he had buried her alive:
“Manole, Manole,
Good master Manole
The wall weighs like lead
Tears my teats still shed,
My babe is crushed dead,
Away my life’s fled!”
The ground on which Manole will, in his turn, be

“crushed dead” becomes the site of a miraculous trans-
formation:
There sprang up a well,

A fountain so tiny
Of scant water, briny,
So gentle to hear,
Wet with many a tear.
***
Thanks again to a recommendation that I received from

Gabriel Badea, I then read Mircea Eliade’s Commentaires
sur la légende de maître Manole and was particularly in-
trigued by Eliade’s contention that Manole’s wife does
not actually die: “She is, rather, transformed; her soul
leaves her body of flesh and bones and goes to live in
the stone and plaster body of the monastery” (Eliade
1994, 168; my emphasis). Likewise according to Eliade,
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
husband and wife are united beyond the grave thanks

to their violent deaths – an outcome that would not
otherwise have been accorded to them: “Not simply
dying, but dying a violent death, permits him – now
transformed into the fountain that sprang up on the
spot where he had fallen – to remain with his wife and,
more precisely, to exist at the same cosmic level as her-
self” (167-8). I was especially struck by Eliade’s coinage
of the metaphor “architectural body” to designate the
building into which a literal body is transformed by
its ritual death: “Thus, ritual death produces a bodily
change. The soul does not ‘live’ inside the building;
rather, it is incarnated into it. As a result of the sac-
rifice – of its violent death – it continues to live here
below in a new, architectural body much longer than it
would have in its fleshly body” (169).
I also learned from Eliade that the Manole Legend
stages the return in the form of a popular folk ballad of
archaic building-rituals, a primitive practice of which
I had not previously heard. After surveying a host of
legends related to rituals in which the construction
of a building necessitates a human sacrifice, Eliade
concludes that “[t]here is no important monument that
does not have – whether in reality or in legend – a vic-
tim who has been buried alive” (70). I likewise noted
several remarks in Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible
that touch upon the relationship between the Manole
Legend and building-rituals, including his observation
that this kind of sacrifice “introduces the idea that
life can be engendered from another life that has been
immolated” (Eliade 1962, 31) and that “[t]he soul of
the victim changes its fleshly envelope: it changes its
human body for a new ‘body’ – a building, an object,
even an operation – which it makes alive or animates”
(64; my emphasis). Eliade further argues that although
these archaic building-rituals have been abandoned in
6
actual practice, they nonetheless return in disguised

forms: “Often times, the body in which the victim
continues to live is so camouflaged that it is only with
great difficulty that we recognize its role in assuring
the latter’s survival” (194; my emphasis).
Eliade’s commentary on the Manole Legend re-
minded me uncannily of Sigmund Freud’s interpreta-
tion of the Oedipus Legend. Where Freud interpreted
Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as revealing infantile
psychic impulses, for which he coined the term the
“Oedipus Complex,” Eliade interpreted the Manole
Legend as the expression of archaic building rituals
that we might, in turn, call the “Manole Complex.”
Both of these “complexes” involve a violent act – the
killing of a rival or the offering of a blood sacrifice – in
order that a desired goal – whether the fulfillment of
an incestuous longing or the construction of a building
– be achieved. Likewise, Eliade’s belief that building
rituals return in disguised forms in the various proj-
ects that we pursue in our waking lives is analogous to
Freud’s discovery of the return in disguised form of the
repressed Oedipus Complex in our nocturnal dreams.
Not long after reading Eliade’s Commentaires, I
discovered on the internet the Moldavian painter
Igor Vieru’s diptych “Legenda Meșterului Manole,”
in which I immediately recognized an uncanny visual
realization – thanks to Vieru’s use of form and color
in such a way as to create a symbiotic relationship be-
tween Ana, Manole, and the monastery – of Eliade’s
notion, now baptized the “Manole Complex,” of bodies
that are incarnated into rather than simply inhabiting
the buildings to whose construction they have con-
tributed via their sacrificial deaths. Vieru’s painting
reminded me soon afterwards of Samuel Beckett’s late
play “Ohio Impromptu,” whose world premiere I had
attended in 1981 at Ohio State University. In Beckett’s
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
play, as in Vieru’s painting, the use of form and color

in such a way as to “incarnate into” the stage itself the
two characters who, at the same time, are “onstage”
is immediately apparent. A surely unintentional – but
nonetheless intriguing – illustration of Eliade’s con-
tention that Ana’s soul passes from her fleshly human
body into the stone of the monastery’s architectural
body occurs when we learn, in the text that Beckett has
written for them, that the two characters, at the end
of the play, “sat on as though turned to stone” (Eliade
1994, 476).
***
With this newly formed concept of the Manole

Complex in hand, I now found myself returning to
some of the long-familiar “literary monuments” that
I had been teaching for decades but now thinking of
them for the first time as disguised stagings of archaic
building-rituals. This “defamiliarized” way of reread-
ing familiar literary classics took on an especially sur-
prising turn when I directed my attention to the novels
of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, about which
I had published many years ago a book entitled Three-
Part Inventions. I soon realized that, if I had only known
of the Manole Legend while writing the chapter on
Bernhard’s masterpiece, a novel entitled Correction, I
would have immediately recognized its uncanny affin-
ity with the Romanian folk- ballad.
In Correction, Manole is replaced by Roithamer,
who, like his Romanian predecessor, is entirely identi-
fied with the art of building, which he describes as the
highest of all possible human achievements:
To build is the most wonderful thing in the world, it’s

the supreme gratification, “supreme gratification”
8
underlined. It’s what everyone longs to do, building,

but not everyone gets the chance to build, and every-
one who does build gets this gratification out of it.
Especially in building something no one has ever built
before. It’s the supreme gratification, “supreme grati-
fication” underlined, to complete a work of art one has
planned and built oneself. (Bernhard 1979, 200)
In its turn, the Monastery at Curtea de Argeș becomes

the “Cone,” a building to whose construction Roithamer
commits himself with single-minded devotion:
the idea to use his sudden windfall for building his

sister a cone, a cone-shaped habitation, and not only
that, but most incredible of all, to erect this giant
cone not where such a house might normally be lo-
cated, but to design it and put it up and complete
it way out in the middle of the Kobernausser forest
[. . .] all at once the road through the Kobernausser
forest was actually being built, a road that would go
to the exact center of the forest at an angle he had
calculated for months, working nights, because he
meant to build that cone in the exact center of the
Kobernausser forest [. . .] (11)
The obstacle to the completion of the monastery caused

by the nightly collapse of its walls returns in Correction
as the entirely realistic resistance to Roithamer’s proj-
ect by his brothers, who think he’s crazy:
to begin with, it was a rude shock especially to

Roithamer’s brothers who had never dreamt that
their brother’s crazy scheme could become a reality,
made into a reality by the crazy Roithamer [. . .] they
had tried to have Roithamer declared incompetent,
they instituted a proceeding to have him placed
under guardianship, but he was declared completely
sane by a team of doctors, in any case the experts
9
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
who had been hired and paid by Roithamer’s broth-

ers remained in the minority against the experts who
testified that Roithamer was sane. (13)
Roithamer also believes, doubtlessly with good reason,

that his Austrian compatriots are themselves hostile to
his pursuit. In his own words, anyone who attempts to
assert his individuality “is chronically exposed to vulgar
misunderstanding and vulgar vilification, sure to drive
him to destruction and to his death and to the annihi-
lation of his existence” (20-21). Such an individual must,
for this reason, meet resistance with resistance by refus-
ing to recognize the norms or to meet the expectations
of his community. Not to do so “would mean yielding
to a weakness, nothing less than a deadly weakness, it
would mean succumbing in a moment to the imbecility
which I have so far managed to escape” (24). In a similar
spirit, he affirms the necessity of “resistance to every-
thing that might stand in the way” (27).
While rereading the chapter on Correction that I had
written for Three-Part Inventions, I came upon a passage
that – as I then saw for the first time – points to the cu-
rious way in which the behavior of Roithamer’s sister
restages the passive acceptance by Manole’s wife of the
sacrificial role that she will play in the construction of
the monastery at Curtea de Argeș:
Roithamer’s sister acquiesces to her brother’s lead-

ing her into the finished Cone. Such behavior is
especially odd considering the fact, as was noted
earlier, that the Cone, which Roithamer assumes
will bring her “supreme happiness,” actually inspires
terror in her. She refused to take any part in the
planning of the Cone and never, in fact, even visited
the site while it was under construction [. . .] Oddly,
however, she never voices any objection. Rather, she
behaves like the docile victim in a ritual ceremony who
10
is led uncomplaining to the altar where she will be

sacrificed. (70-1; my emphasis)
Yet another uncanny echo of the Manole Legend

emerges when we notice the curious inversion where-
by the obligation to immure Ana in the walls of the
monastery at Curtea de Argeș in order to construct it
returns in the necessity of Roithamer’s sister dying in
order to complete the Cone even after it has been built.
Roithamer himself repeatedly alludes to the uncanny
distinction between the construction of the Cone and
its completion: “But the edifice as a work of art is fin-
ished only after the death of the person for whom it was
built and finished” (257); “My own ideas had led with
logical consistency to the realization and completion
of the Cone, when my sister was frightened to death,
the Cone was finished” (258); “To build an edifice for a
person, the most beloved person, as a crazy idea and to
destroy, to kill this person with the completion of that
edifice, the Cone” (259).
As in the Manole Legend, the completion of the
Cone (as distinguished from its construction) is only
“finally” completed by the death of the builder: Manole
falls to his death from the roof of the monastery and
Roithamer hangs himself from a tree. The union be-
yond the grave precipitated by their violent deaths,
such as Eliade attributes to Manole and his wife, is un-
cannily echoed by the narrator’s post-mortem uniting
of Roithmer and his sister:
At the moment he had finished, perfected the Cone,

he had put a period to his own life, with the Cone
perfected, Roithamer’s existence had come to a
close, that’s what he felt and that’s why he put an
end to his life, with the perfecting of the Cone two
lives had lost their justification, they had to cease,
I said to Hoeller and looked again at the two death
11
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
notices on the opposite wall to the left and the right

of the door, the life of Roithamer himself and that
of his sister, which he had uncompromisingly bound
up with his own life. (103)
Finally, the comments that Roithamer makes about the

intimate identification between his sister and the Cone
that he has built for her “supreme happiness” clearly
echo Eliade’s observation that Ana is “incarnated into”
the monastery at Curtea de Argeș rather than simply
inhabiting it. He tells the narrator, for example, that
its interior spaces “are designed to adapt themselves
to whatever state of mind my sister finds herself in as
she enters these spaces” (158). He then elaborates on
this contention: “The Cone’s interior corresponding to
my sister’s inner being, the Cone’s exterior to her out-
ward being, and together the whole being expressed
in the Cone’s character, the inside and the outside of
the Cone are as inseparable as the inside and outside
of my sister” (158-9); and further explains that it is
“three-storied because a three-storied edifice accords
with my sister’s character” (162), and that the identifi-
cation between the Cone and herself is as perfect as is
humanly possible: “it expresses her one hundred per-
cent, or let’s say nearly one hundred percent, because
a one hundred percent expression is impossible” (165).
If we now turn our attention to The Loser, the first of
the novels in the so-called artistic trilogy that Bernhard
wrote in quick succession several years after Correction,
we will observe that – unlike the earlier novel in which
the roles of Manole, Ana, and the monastery at Curtea
de Argeș are clearly played by Roithamer, his sister, and
the Cone – the survival of mortal bodies in an architec-
tural body occurs, as Eliade had observed, in a highly
“camouflaged” way. Roithamer’s “crazy” idea of build-
ing the Cone in the middle of the Kobernausser Forest
12
for his sister – whose echo of the Manole Legend is

reasonably apparent – returns as Bernhard’s eccentric
ambition of reinventing Johann Sebastian Bach’s fugal
compositions as a work of prose fiction. His success
in creating in The Loser the “musical prose” that is the
hallmark of all of his major work is inseparable – as
was true in the Manole Legend – from his “immuring”
in its pages – three protagonists who will “lose” both as
musicians and as writers of prose.
The narrator tells us that the three of them –
Wertheimer, Glenn Gould, and himself – “thought
we’d become famous and indeed in the easiest and
fastest way possible, for which a music conservatory is
the ideal springboard” (Bernhard 1970, 55). This “eas-
iest and fastest way” to the fulfillment of their dream
actually puts an end to it for Wertheimer and the nar-
rator, however, when they discover that they will never
match Glenn Gould’s achievement:
Wertheimer’s fate was to have walked past room

thirty-three in the Mozarteum at the precise mo-
ment when Glenn Gould was playing the so-called
aria in that room. Regarding this event Wertheimer
reported to me that he stopped at the door of room
thirty-three, listening to Glenn play until the end of
the aria. Then I understood what shock is, I thought
now. (155)
Wertheimer himself testifies to the intensity of the

shock when he asks the narrator: “How can I perform
in public now that I’ve heard Glenn?” (104).
Both Wertheimer and the narrator decide – after
realizing that neither of them could possibly hope to
match Glenn Gould’s virtuosity – to dispose of their
pianos: “Wertheimer had his Bösendorfer grand piano
auctioned off in the Dorotheum, I gave my Steinway
one day to the nine-year old daughter of a school-
13
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
teacher” (5). Tellingly, the narrator is delighted that the

daughter destroys his piano:
The teacher’s daughter took my instrument, one of

the very best, one of the rarest and therefore most
sought after and therefore also most expensive pi-
anos in the world, and in the shortest period imag-
inable destroyed it, rendered it worthless. But of
course it was precisely this destruction process of
my beloved Steinway that I had wanted. (7)
At first glance, Glenn Gould appears to have escaped

the fate of becoming a loser that befalls Wertheimer
and the narrator: “Glenn is the victor, we are the fail-
ures” (21), we are told. Evidence of the glory that he
achieves includes his being invited to the Salzburg
Festival to play the Goldberg Variations, after which
“the papers wrote that no pianist had ever played the
Goldberg Variations so artistically (3-4). However the
epithet “the loser,” which he coined for Wertheimer,
eventually applies as well to himself. We learn from
the narrator, for example, not only that “Glenn is said
to have suffered a fatal stroke in the middle of the
Goldberg Variations” (21) but – like the narrator want-
ing his piano to be destroyed by the teacher’s daughter
– he had, as it were, been practicing this way of putting
an end to his life for quite a long time: “Glenn had the
good fortune of collapsing at his Steinway in the mid-
dle of the Goldberg Variations. He claimed he’d been
trying to collapse for years, without success” (47).
We also learn that his death occurred not only while
he was playing but because of what playing had done
to him:
But Glenn didn’t die from this lung disease, I

thought. He was killed by the impasse he had played
himself into for almost forty years, I thought. He
14
never gave up the piano, I thought, of course not,

whereas Wertheimer and I gave up the piano be-
cause we never attained the inhuman state that
Glenn attained, who by the way never escaped this
inhuman state, who didn’t even want to escape this
inhuman state. (6)
Doubtlessly, the most incriminating of the narrator’s

characterizations of him as a loser occurs when he re-
marks that “[i]n the end people like Glenn had turned
themselves into art machines, had nothing in common
with human beings anymore, only seldom reminded
you of human beings” (91).
Bernhard also portrays his three protagonists as
losers in the art of prose writing. In what is clearly an
example of a tendentious authorial invention, Bernhard
has the narrator tell us that Glenn Gould, who left
a significant body of written work at the time of his
death, “actually left nothing behind. Glenn didn’t keep
any kind of written record” (36). As for the narrator
himself, we learn that “I came upon the idea of writing
something about Glenn, something, I couldn’t know
what, something about him and his art (73). He admits,
however, that “[t]o start to write is the hardest thing
of all and for months and even years I ran around with
this thought of writing something without being able
to begin . . .” (73). Even a strenuously protracted bout of
writing leads to an outcome that was prefigured by the
destruction of his piano: “I spent six weeks in uninter-
rupted writing about Glenn. In the end, however, when
I moved to Madrid, I had only sketches for this work
in my pocket and I destroyed these sketches because
they suddenly became an obstacle to my work rather
than a help” (73). After twenty-eight years of writing
(nine of which were devoted to Glenn Gould), he still
hasn’t published anything, an outcome for which he’s
15
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
grateful because publishing such “disastrous works”

would only have made him “the unhappiest person
imaginable” (75).
As for Wertheimer’s engagement with writing, the
narrator looks forward to examining the stacks of notes
that he expects to find when he visits his late friend’s
home (36). When he actually arrives there, however, he
discovers that Wertheimer
had burned entire stacks of paper in the so-called

downstairs stove, that is the stove in the dining
room. He, Franz, had helped his master with this
task, for the stacks of notes were so large and heavy
that Wertheimer hadn’t been able to drag them
downstairs alone. He had taken out hundreds and
thousands of notes from all his drawers and closets
and with his, Franz’s, help had dragged them down
to the dining room to burn the notes, solely for the
purpose of burning the notes he’d had Franz light
the dining room stove at five in the morning that
day, said Franz. (169)
The passage of the “soul” of writing from Wertheimer’s

incinerated notes into Bernhard’s musical prose is im-
plied in the closing scene of The Loser by Wertheimer’s
ordering an unturned piano: “Franz distinctly recalled
that during this telephone call his master kept insisting
that they send a completely worthless, a horribly unturned
grand piano to Traich. A completely worthless instrument,
a horribly untuned instrument” (170). We may reasonably
wonder here if Bernhard would like us to see a parallel
between Wertheimer playing Bach on this unturned
piano and his reinventing Bach’s fugal compositions in
a form of writing that radically “untunes” conventional
syntax.
Another aspect of Bernhard’s reinventing Bach
on his typewriter may be implied by the final sen-
16
tence of The Loser: “I asked Franz to leave me alone

in Wertheimer’s room for a while and put on Glenn’s
Goldberg Variations, which I had seen lying on
Wertheimer’s record player, which was still open”
(170). We should notice here that the novel concludes –
not with a recollection of Glenn Gould playing on the
stage of a concert hall – but, rather, with the playing
of a studio recording that was produced under circum-
stances that rather intriguingly parallel the situation of
a writer who writes in the isolation of his study.
Bernhard’s sacrifice of his protagonists – both
as musicians and as writers – prepares the way – as
Eliade’s interpretation of the Manole Legend helps
us to see – for the passage of the “soul” of music and
writing into the “architectural body” of The Loser. As
Michael Olson has said, “[i]nstead of analyzing Bach in
song and music sheets, as he did in his youth, Bernhard
switched to writing types of fugues in his adult years.
His typewriter, rather than his vocal chords, became
the medium with which Bernhard controlled his phys-
ical surroundings and modulated his artistic sensibili-
ty” (1991, 78).
Chantal Thomas has likewise observed that
Bernhard was, above all, an “instrumentalist of lan-
guage” (1990, 6). Bernhard himself wittily confirmed
the pertinence of this metaphor when, in the course
of claiming that his work cannot be translated, he told
Werner Wögerbauer that it must be “interpreted” in
German and “with my orchestra!” (Chabert and Hutt
2002, 57). Gitta Honegger contributes to this view in
her remark that “musical scores would echo in the syn-
tax of his writing; the operatic archetypes would ap-
pear in a dense web of signifying chains sliding across
the topography of his work; the operatic dramaturgy
would provide the underpinning of his philosophical
metatheater” (2001, 2). In a highly significant extension
17
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
of the musical metaphor, Bernhard told Wögerbauer

that his work is not only about entropy: it is also about
finding pleasure in writing as a pianist finds pleasure
in performing his music. He then continues: “What
others do with sounds, I do with words. That’s all there
is to it. Art consists solely in playing better and better
on the instrument that one has chosen. And if the roof
falls in on him, a great pianist continues to play. It’s the
same with writing” (Chabert and Hutt 2002, 58). We are
not surprised to learn (from his friend, Liselotte von
Üxküll) that, when Bernhard finished writing a text, he
would record it to see if it “worked” (70).
***
In the chapters that follow, I welcome you to a “séance

of reading” in which we will experience the uncanny
return of the Manole Complex in nine masterpieces of
literary modernism. Keywords that appear in the titles
of these chapters are intended to point your attention
to the covert way in which the “fleshly body” of a pro-
tagonist who has been sacrificed by his author has been
transformed into the “architectural body” of a work that
he both inhabits and is “incarnated into.” In F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for example, Jay Gatsby’s
determination to “fix everything,” which eventually
leads to his death, returns uncannily as Fitzgerald’s
mastery in fixing every detail of his novel – including
the highly dubious sequence of events that eventuates
in Gatsby’s death and Nick Carraway’s equally “fixed”
eulogizing of Gatsby – in order to produce a literary
triumph. The drift into senility and eventual death of
Father Flynn, caused by his being “too scrupulous al-
ways” in the exercise of his priestly duties, is likewise
transformed into the writerly triumph that James Joyce
achieves in his short-story “The Sisters” by employing
18
a narrative technique that he himself described as “scru-

pulous meanness.” In the chapter on Fernando Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet, the figure of the protagonist as
sacrificial victim is replaced by an early minor work –
Lisbon: What Every Tourist Should See – a shift that will
allow us to see the “camouflaged survival” of the cele-
bration of Lisbon’s literal monuments in the rebuilding
of Lisbon undertaken by Bernardo Soares, the narrator
of Pessoa’s literary monument, The Book of Disquiet.
Returning to the protagonist as sacrificial victim
in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the purposeful
ways of doing undertaken by the four principal char-
acters and which fall short of their desired outcome
are uncannily transformed throughout the play into
the covert activity of what we could call “purposeless
doing” that is staged by the actors who play their roles.
J. Alfred Prufrock’s turning back to crippling memo-
ries of his personal past is covertly doubled throughout
his love song by T. S. Eliot’s authorial turning back to
the impersonal cultural past (especially the Inferno and
Hamlet) as he writes “Prufrock.” In Endgame, playing
points ambiguously to two forms of “interdependence”
(Samuel Beckett’s word for what his play was about): on
the one hand, it designates what Beckett described as
the “war” waged by Hamm and Clov and, on the other,
the “cantata for two voices” into which it is trans-
formed by the actors.
In the chapter on Emil Cioran’s A Short History of
Decay – as in the one on Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet
– an early work, namely Transfiguration de la Roumanie,
replaces the protagonist, and the unfulfilled longing
for transfiguration in Cioran’s minor work survives
in a camouflaged way in the crafting of transfigura-
tions in his masterpiece. Returning once again to the
“mortal body” of a protagonist in Flannery O’Connor’s
short-story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” we notice
19
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
that the word “misfit” points not only to the behav-

ior of the Misfit himself – whose cruelty gives him no
pleasure – but also to O’Connor’s us of misfits as a
narrative technique – what Frederick Asals has called
her “aesthetics of incongruity” – from which she obvi-
ously derived immense pleasure. Finally, the telling of
stories that frame Joe Christmas as a “nigger,” which
leads to his lynching, is recounted in a novel in which
the framing of stories – most obviously in Faulkner’s
use of a comic frame tale to enclose the tragic main
story – is the hallmark narrative technique.
20
Chapter 1
Fixing Things in The Great Gatsby
“‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was

before,’ he said determinedly.”
The uncanny design of The Great Gatsby first emerged

for me when I realized that, although the word “fix”
appears only twice in the novel, the activity of fixing
itself curiously pervades, albeit in a largely covert way,
its every aspect. At times, it simply means “repairing,”
which is the service that Dr. T. J. Eckleberg once of-
fered to people with poor eyesight and George Wilson
currently does to car owners. The most intriguing of
its meanings – the one that especially directs our at-
tention to the transformation of a predicament into
a technique – is “to arrange an outcome through du-
plicitous means.” The chief purveyor of this form of
fixing is Meyer Wolfsheim, who, as Gatsby explains to
Nick, is “the man who fixed the World Series back in
1919” (Fitzgerald 1995, 78), a revelation to which Nick
responds with unconcealed astonishment:
The idea staggered me. I remembered of course that

the World Series had been fixed in 1919 but if I had
thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing
that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain.
It never occurred to me that one man could start to play
with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-
mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. (78)
21
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
Fitzgerald himself “fixes” the circumstances of what

came to be known as “The Black Sox Scandal” by at-
tributing to the machinations of a single man a feat
that was actually accomplished by a cohort of under-
world figures. Furthermore, as we shall eventually
see, Fitzgerald’s allusion to this legendary example of
“arranging an outcome through duplicitous means”
is not simply an anecdotal detail. Rather, it uncanni-
ly echoes the duplicitous acts of fixing achieved by a
group of three “fixers,” including Jay Gatsby, who fixes
the facts of his life, Nick Carraway, who narrates the
chronicle of Gatsby’s life, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who
arranges the sequence of the novel’s episodes. Far from
being a minor and otherwise dispensable character in
The Great Gatsby, Wolfsheim is its uncanny “eminence
grise” – the figure whose masterful combination of
both controlling and deceiving is covertly imitated by
his three protégés, who “play with the faith” of other
characters within the novel as well as its countless
readers.
Gatsby’s duplicitous – and ultimately unsuccessful
– self-fixing begins with the concealment of his birth
name behind one that presumably has more romantic
resonances:
James Gatz – that was really or at least legally his

name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and
at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning
of his career – when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop
anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior.
It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the
beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair
of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who
borrowed a row-boat, pulled out to the Tuolomee
and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and
break him up in half an hour. (104)
22
He likewise fabricates for himself an illustrious ancestry:
“I’ll tell you God’s truth.” His right hand suddenly

ordered divine retribution to stand by. “I am the son
of some wealthy people in the middle-west – all dead
now. I was brought up in America but educated at
Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated
there for many years. It is a family tradition.” (69)
To this he adds the recital of his putative wartime he-

roics – “I was promoted to be a major and every Allied
government gave me a decoration – even Montenegro,
little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!” (70) – be-
fore showing Nick the mementoes that lend credence
to his invention:
He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung

on a ribbon, fell into my palm.
“That’s the one from Montenegro.”
To my astonishment the thing had an authentic look.
Orderi di Danilo, ran the circular legend, Montenegro,
Nicolas Rex.
“Turn it.”
Major Jay Gatsby, I read, For Valour Extraordinary.
“Here’s another thing I always carry. A souvenir of
Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity Quad – the man
on my left is now the Earl of Doncaster.”
It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in
blazers loafing in an archway through which were
visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby, looking a
little, not much, younger – with a cricket bat in his
hand. (71)
Gatsby’s desire to “fix everything” leads him in the

present time of the novel to purchase a mansion across
the bay from Daisy Buchanan’s, at which he organizes
parties upon whose lavishness Nick fixes our admiring
eyes: “Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons ar-
23
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
rived from a fruiterer in New York – every Monday these

same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid
of pulpless halves” (43). We learn as well that “a corps of
caters came down with several hundred feet of canvas”
and that “buffet tables are garnished with glistening
hors d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against sal-
ads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys be-
witched to a dark gold” (44). The orchestra that Gatsby
engages is “no thin five piece affair but a whole pit full
of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and
cornets and piccolos and low and high drums” (44). The
party that Nick attends reaches the high point of hilarity
towards midnight, with guests emitting “happy vacuous
bursts of laughter [that] rose toward the summer sky”
and drinking their champagne “in glasses bigger than
finger bowls” while Nick observes that “[t]he moon had
risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of
silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of
the banjoes on the lawn” (51).
However, unbeknownst to Gatsby, he has been cho-
sen to serve as the victim whose sacrifice – reenacting
the archaic building-ritual that underlies the Manole
Legend – will allow Fitzgerald to construct his most
famous novel. In order to achieve this transformation
of Gatsby’s mortal body into the architectural body of
the novel that will bear his name, Fitzgerald invents a
plot whose sequence of events suggests that Gatsby’s
self-declared determination “to fix everything just the
way it was before” has surreptitiously passed into his
own authorial hands. This sequence includes: Tom’s
stopping at George Wilson’s gas station in Gatsby’s
car; his suggesting to Daisy after the scene in the Plaza
Hotel that she return home with Gatsby; Gatsby allow-
ing Daisy (despite her being drunk) to drive his car;
Myrtle running from the garage into the middle of the
road just in time to be run over by Gatsby’s car, which
24
is speeding past; George Wilson’s not identifying

Gatsby’s car to the police; his subsequently shooting
Gatsby to death before killing himself, a double mur-
der that makes the “holocaust” complete. To this we
may add the absence of nearly all Gatsby’s friends at
his funeral, which gives further tragic overtones to his
death. The implausibility of each one of these events
taken separately – and the utter implausibility of the
sequence that they form – led the English novelist L. P.
Hartley to summarize it as follows: “A train of disasters
follows, comparable in quantity and quality with the
scale of the Great Gatsby’s prodigies of hospitality.
Coincidence leaps to the helm and throws a mistress
under a motor-car. The car does not stop, which, all
things considered, is the most natural thing that hap-
pens in the book” (Claridge 1991, 178).
In the aftermath of Gatsby’s death – which Nick
Carraway imbues with explicitly sacrificial implications
by calling it a “holocaust” – the self-fixing that he had
pursued throughout his life is transformed into the post-
humous fixing that inspires Nick’s narrative of his life,
and which will eventually become the literary monu-
ment that bears his name. We notice, to begin with, that
Nick declines any number of opportunities to tell us
who Gatsby really is or even to refer to him by his birth
name. In the prologue where he lays the foundation
upon which he will build Gatsby’s posthumous fame, he
declares, rather evasively in the event, that “only Gatsby,
the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt
from my reaction” (Fitzgerald 1995, 6; my emphasis).
Similarly, Nick will later quote – without adding the cor-
rective that he had readily at hand – Meyer Wolfsheim’s
remark that, upon first meeting him, he recognized
Gatsby as a “man of fine breeding” (76).
Along with waiting until he is more than halfway
through his account of Gatsby’s life to reveal the truth
25
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
about his humble origins, Nick continually “fixes”

our attention on deceptively romantic images of him.
We see evidence of this form of fixing as early as the
prologue to his narrative, in which he eulogizes Gatsby
as an utterly exceptional quasi-divine figure: “there
was something gorgeous about him, some heightened
sensitivity to the promises of life [. . .] an extraordinary
gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never
found in any other person and which it is not likely I
shall ever find again” (6).
We see this deceptive strategy at work again at the
moment of Nick’s first sighting of Gatsby, in which the
effect that will later be produced by Gatsby’s account
of his wartime heroics is now produced exclusively by
Nick’s own words:
The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the

moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that
I was not alone – fifty feet away a figure had emerged
from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was
standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the
silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely
movements and the secret position of his feet upon
the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself,
come out to determine what share was his of our
local heavens. (25)
This is likewise true of the even more famous words

with which chapter one concludes:
But I didn’t call to him for he gave a sudden intima-

tion that he was content to be alone – he stretched
out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way,
and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was
trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and
distinguished nothing except a single green light,
minute and far away, that might have been the end
26
of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he

had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet
darkness. (25-26)
This arranging of words in such a way as to “fix” a de-

ceptive image of Gatsby in our minds continues even
as Nick becomes better acquainted with him:
The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long

Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of
himself. He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it
means anything, means just that – and he must be
about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast,
vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented just
the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy
would be likely to invent, and to this conception he
was faithful to the end. (104)
Along with obscuring Gatsby’s real origins and fixing

our gaze, instead, on romantically inflated images
of him, Nick fashions a language that is expressive
of Gatsby’s romantic aspirations but which Gatsby
himself was clearly incapable of speaking. In order
to appreciate this aspect of Nick’s “playing with our
faith,” we need only contrast it with moments in the
novel in which he quotes Gatsby directly. When, for
example, he discusses with Gatsby the arrangements
for the meeting with Daisy, Nick describes Gatsby as
inquiring “blankly,” remarking “vaguely,” saying “old
sport,’” and informing Nick “in an uncertain voice”
(89-90). When Daisy greets Gatsby with “I certainly am
awfully glad to see you again,” in place of the display
of eloquence that we may expect, we find Nick’s com-
ment: “A pause; it endured horribly.” Gatsby doesn’t
actually speak until, upon Nick’s entering the room, he
“mutters” to him – unnecessarily, in the event – noth-
ing more than “We’ve met before” (91).
27
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
The contrast between Gatsby’s laconic utterances

and Nick’s eloquence is made explicit in the scene
in which, having left the reunited couple alone for a
while, Nick then returns:
Daisy’s face was smeared with tears and when I

came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with a
handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change
in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally
glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a
new well-being radiated from him and filled the lit-
tle room. (94; my emphasis)
The change that Nick attributes to Gatsby does not, to

be sure, apply to the latter’s way of speaking, as we see
when he breaks the intervening silence with an utterly
banal greeting – “’Oh hello, old sport” – when he first
sees Nick.
The same alternation between what Gatsby sup-
posedly experiences wordlessly and what he actually
says recurs a moment later when Nick announces that
the rain has stopped: “When he realized what I was
talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sun-
shine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, like
an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the
news to Daisy. ‘What do you think of that? It’s stopped
raining’” (94). We notice that Gatsby, to be sure, says
nothing to Daisy about there being “twinkle-bells of
sunshine in the room” even though, according to Nick,
he “realized” that they were, indeed, there.
Similarly, when they come upon a photo of Dan
Cody in the course of the tour of his mansion that
Gatsby offers Daisy, Gatsby foregoes the opportunity
to launch into a panegyric of his mentor; resorting,
rather, to a characteristically colorless choice of words,
he tells Daisy simply, “‘He’s dead now. He used to be
28
my best friend years ago’” (99). A moment later, Daisy

looks out the window and sees what Nick describes as
“a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the
sea” which elicits an imaginative flight from her: “I’d
like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in
it and push you around.” To this invitation, Gatsby can
muster nothing better than the lamely prosaic reply, “I
know what we’ll do . . . We’ll have Klipspringer play the
piano” (99).
Three examples of the remaking of Gatsby’s mono-
syllables into the polysyllabic rhapsodies that Nick
ghostwrites for him seem to me especially worth noting.
In the first of these, Nick deduces from the expression
on Gatsby’s face rather than from his actual words that
his reunion with Daisy has been rather unsatisfactory:
As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expres-

sion of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s
face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him
as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost
five years! There must have been moments even that
afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams
– not through her own fault but because of the co-
lossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her,
beyond everything. He had thrown himself into to
it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time,
decking it out with every bright feather that drifted
his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge
what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. (101)
In the second, he offers us a ghost-written version of

Gatsby’s response to an especially intense experience
while walking one evening with Daisy in Louisville:
Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the

blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and
mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could
29
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
climb to it if he climbed alone, and once there he

could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incom-
parable milk of wonder.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white
face came up to his own. He knew that when he
kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable vi-
sions to her perishable breath, his mind would never
romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, lis-
tening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that
had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At
his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower
and the incarnation was complete. (117)
A third example of the words that Nick scripts for

Gatsby occurs shortly before he dies in his swimming
pool. In this final passage, Nick – who, of course, was
not an actual witness to this scene – takes his cue nei-
ther from the expression on Gatsby’s face nor from the
invented words that he claims to remember, but, pre-
sumably, from his own fondness for what Fitzgerald
himself called in a 1925 to Edmund Wilson his “blankets
of excellent prose” (Fitzgerald 1963, 342) coupled with
his intuition that Gatsby’s murder alone would not con-
fer upon him that the greatness that he intends for him:
I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it

[a phone call from Daisy] would come and perhaps
he no longer cared. If that was true he must have
felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high
price for living too long with a single dream. He
must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through
frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a
grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight
was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world,
material without being real, where poor ghosts,
breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about
. . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward
him through the amorphous trees. (169)
30
Such examples as these may lead us to conclude that,

although Nick remarks at one point that “Sometime
before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impres-
sion that he was picking his words with care” (1995, 53),
the more careful picker of Gatsby’s words is arguably
Nick himself.
Gatsby’s desire to “fix everything” is also at work in
his attempting to repair the irreparable forward-move-
ment of time, which is the subject of an often-quoted
conversation between him and Nick:
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You

can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously.
“Why of course you can!”
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were
lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of
reach of his hand. (116-7)
Gatsby had dreamt of recreating the past by returning

with Daisy to Louisville, where they will marry (116),
but his actual return to Louisville led him to recognize
that he has lost this dream forever. As Nick tells us,
Gatsby “came back from France when Tom and Daisy
were still on their wedding trip, and made a misera-
ble but irresistible journey to Louisville on the last of
his army pay.” After spending a week there, “walking
the streets where their footsteps had clicked together
through the November night and revisiting the out-of-
the-way places to which they had driven in her white
car,” he left “feeling that if he had searched harder he
might have found her – that he was leaving her be-
hind.” Hoping, “to save a fragment of the spot that she
had made lovely for him,” he recognizes to his chagrin
“that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the
best, forever” (160-1).
31
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
Gatsby’s failure to retrieve “the freshest and the

best” of his personal past is the sacrifice that must be
devised for him in order that Fitzgerald may success-
fully construct a literary monument which recreates
“the freshest and the best” of the literary past. Foremost
among these literary remnants is the poetry of John
Keats. In a letter addressed to his daughter Scottie,
Fitzgerald said of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that
“I suppose I’ve read it a hundred times. About the tenth
time I began to know what it was about, and caught the
chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise
with the ‘Nightingale’ which I can never read without
tears in my eyes.” In the same letter, he reserved his
highest tribute for “The Eve of St. Agnes,” praised as
having the “richest, most sensuous imagery in English,
not excepting Shakespeare.” His intense personal at-
tachment to Keats (which may remind us of Gatsby’s to
Daisy) leads him to confess that “[f]or awhile after you
quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling
and humming” (Bruccolli 1994, 460-1).
Among Fitzgerald’s several recreations of Keats’s
poetry in The Great Gatsby, Dan McCall points (in addi-
tion to the presence of a nightingale in the yard of the
Buchanan’s estate) to a line from a Keats poem – ”there
was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in
from the hall” (1971, 100), in which McCall detects an
echo of “there is no light,/ Save what from heaven is
with the breezes blown.” McCall suggests, as well, a
parallel between certain episodes in Gatsby and “The
Eve of St. Agnes”:
Keats’s palace is the ancestral home of Gatsby’s

mansion where “The silver, snarling trumpets ‘gan
to chide:/ The level chambers, ready with their
pride, . . . glowing to receive a thousand guests. . .
.” Keats’s hero partakes of the “magical glory” that
32
Gatsby will; on the Eve of St. Agnes young Porphyro

stands the way Gatsby later will stand, “with heart
on fire . . . beside the portal doors,/ Buttressed from
moonlight” imploring “all saints to give him sight
of” his beloved. Porphyro’s fondest wish will be-
come Gatsby’s: “that he might gaze and worship all
unseen. (523-4).
The most intriguing of McCall’s examples concerns the

scene in “The Eve of St. Agnes” in which Madeleine
dreams of the feast that her lover sets before her:
Candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;

With jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon. (156-7)
McCall connects this dream – “At which fair Madeline

began to weep,/ And moan forth witless words with
many a sigh” – to the famous scene in which Gatsby re-
gales the “sobbing” Daisy with a display of “his shirts
of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel . . . shirts
with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple
and green and lavender and faint orange with mono-
grams of Indian blue” (97-98)
Beyond such rewritings of specific details from
Keats’s poetry, Fitzgerald’s ambition to metamorphose
their “sensuous imagery” into a work of prose fiction
pervades the novel as a whole. Examples include the
words with which he has Nick Carraway record his first
impression upon entering Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s
mansion: “A breeze blew through the room, blew cur-
tains in at one end and out the other like pale flags,
twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of
the ceiling – and then rippled over the wine-colored
33
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea”

(Fitzgerald 1995, 12). The wind provides another poetic
figure just before Nick sees Gatsby for the first time:
“The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night
with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ
sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full
of life” (25). The municipal incinerator that Nick sees
while on his way into Manhattan with Tom Buchanan
at the beginning of chapter two is likewise poeticized
into “a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes
grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque
gardens” (26).
This passage is recalled towards the end of the
novel when Nick’s describes George Wilson as “that
ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the
amorphous trees” (168). The “amorphous trees” echo,
in their turn, the tree that Gatsby – to whom Nick
had lent his eloquence for the occasion – had seen as
a place where “he could suck on the pap of life, gulp
down the incomparable milk of wonder” (117). Such
poetic figures, of which these are only a small sam-
pling, culminate in the visionary metamorphosis that
Nick attributes – no longer to Gatsby, who has died
– but to the Dutch sailors:
I became aware of the old island here that flowered

once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of
the new world. Its vanished trees that had made way
for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers
to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a
transitory enchanted moment man must have held
his breath in the presence of his continent, com-
pelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither
understood nor desired, face to face for the last time
in history with something commensurate with his
capacity for wonder. (189)
34
In addition to recreating Keats’s “sensuous imagery”

and transforming it into what he himself called “blan-
kets of excellent prose,” Fitzgerald revisited the literary
past as he fashioned both the character of Gatsby and
the plot of the novel in which he would appear. Nick
tells us towards the beginning of his narrative that,
having decided “to go east and learn the bond busi-
ness,” he purchased a good number of books: “I bought
a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment
securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold
like new money from the mint, promising to unfold
the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and
Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of read-
ing many other books besides” (8). These many other
books include – although Nick tends not to mention
them directly –the several classics of western literature
with which Fitzgerald provides him in order that he
acquire from the greatest practitioners those “shining
secrets” of the writer’s trade that he will need in order
to achieve the literary glory to which he aspires.
Petronius’s Satyricon suggested two of the titles
Trimalchio and Trimalchio in West Egg that Fitzgerald
considered while working on the manuscript of Gatsby.
The only explicit remnant of this original plan occurs
at the beginning of chapter seven, where we learn that
“[i]t was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest
that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday
night – and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career
as Trimalchio was over” (119). Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
sonnet “Ozymandias” surfaces briefly in the famous
description of “a valley of ashes” at the beginning of
chapter two, in which Ozymandias’s “shattered visage”
reappears as Dr. T. J. Eckleberg’s “gigantic eyes [that]
look out of no face” and the “lone and level sands” are
recast as the “valley of ashes” itself.
35
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
Perhaps the most obvious of Fitzgerald’s recre-

ations of the literary past occurs in his revisiting of the
Daedalus Legend. We notice, for example, the descrip-
tion of Gatsby’s car, in which we detect echoes of both
the Minotaur and the Icarus episodes from this legend:
“It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen
here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant
hat boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and ter-
raced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a
dozen suns”(68; my emphasis). Fitzgerald similarly calls
to mind the Daedalus legend when he has Nick rhapso-
dize, in the midst of his trip to Manhattan with Gatsby,
that “with fenders spread like wings we scattered light
through half Astoria (68; my emphasis). The Icarian fall
into the sea that had been prefigured by Nick’s allusion
to the wing-like fenders of Gatsby’s car receives a plau-
sible metamorphosis when Fitzgerald arranges to have
Gatsby die in his swimming pool.
Beyond any doubt, the most important of these
recreations with respect to the recent literary
past is Fitzgerald’s revisiting of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, which, unlike the “unadaptable”
Midwesterners of whom Nick Carraway speaks, accom-
modates itself so well to Fitzgerald’s novel that quite
obvious signs of its presence are normally passed over
unnoticed. Among the various ways in which details
from Heart of Darkness pass into The Great Gatsby, where
they are “changed to other forms” (to recall the open-
ing line of Metamorphoses), the following are the most
significant: the plot involves Europeans who travel to
Africa to achieve wealth through the ivory trade; one of
these Europeans (Kurtz) is singled-out as being, unlike
the mediocrities that surround him) a person deserving
of special attention; Kurtz’s origins are rather obscure;
he is involved in activities that Marlowe refers to only
a “unspeakable practices”; Marlowe becomes involved
36
with Kurtz, but largely as an observer to his extrava-

gant behavior; his attitude towards the exploitation of
African resources is ambivalent: he’s involved in it, but
is also highly critical; the other Europeans ultimately
repudiate Kurtz and banish him from their company;
after Kurtz dies, Marlow meets someone (Kurtz’s fi-
ancée) who knew him before he left home for Africa
and who admires him greatly; Marlowe identifies with
Kurtz and tells his story – after he has returned home
from Africa – in such a way as to present him, in spite
of his flaws, as an essentially heroic figure.
I’ll conclude by reminding you that Fitzgerald was
himself very intent upon “fixing” the circumstances
of his own personal life. As he wrote in a 1933 letter
to John O’Hara, “I am half black Irish and half old
American stock; if I were elected King of Scotland
tomorrow after graduating from Eton, Magdelene and
the Guards, with an embryonic history that tied me to
the Plantagenets, I would still be a parvenu” (Fitzgerald
1963, 503). In Crack-Up, he tells us that, having failed to
fulfill his ambition of becoming “a big shot in college,”
he “set about learning to write” (Fitzgerald 1945, 76), a
decision that afforded him a new beginning as an au-
thor. A few pages later, he describes his achievement
of literary success in a way that suggests his transfor-
mation into a new man: “I have now at last become
a writer only. The man I had persistently tried to be
became such a burden that I have ‘cut him loose’” (83).
The publication of This Side of Paradise leads him to
remark, in appropriately Ovidian language, that “the
metamorphosis of amateur into professional began to
take place – a sort of stitching together of your whole
life into a pattern of work, so that the end of one job is
automatically the beginning of another” (86).
Fitzgerald’s account of his ascent to literary glory
curiously echoes the change of his own body into “other
37
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
forms” that Ovid confidently asserts in the Epilogue

to the literary model that Fitzgerald would revisit two
millennia later:
And now my task accomplished, such a work

As not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword
Nor the devouring ages can destroy.
Let, when it will, that day, that has no claim
But to my mortal body, end the span
Of my uncertain years. Yet I’ll be borne,
The finer part of me, above the stars,
Immortal, and my name shall never die. (1986, 379)
Given such encouragement, how could we possibly

resist the temptation to see in Nick’s first encounter
with Gatsby – whom he pictures as “com[ing] out to
determine what share was his of our local heavens” –
the resurfacing in West Egg of Ovid’s own dream – so
obviously shared by Fitzgerald himself – of ascending
into the heavens.
38
Chapter 2
Being Scrupulous in “The Sisters”
“He was too scrupulous always, she said.”
The “telltale tingle” promised by Vladimir Nabokov to

the reader who reads “with his spine” came to me only
after decades of reading and teaching James Joyce’s
short-story “The Sisters.” I had, of course, known for a
long time – and never failed to tell my students – that
Joyce himself had described the style of Dubliners, of
which “The Sisters” is the first story, as “a scrupulous
meanness.” Only recently, however, did I notice the
curious way in which the phrase chosen by Joyce to
designate the narrative technique that he deploys so
masterfully in this story echoes the moral and psycho-
logical affliction to which, according to his sister Eliza,
Father James Flynn was prone: “‘He was too scrupulous
always,’ she said. ‘The duties of the priesthood was too
much for him. And then his life was, you might say,
crossed’” (Joyce 2014, 8; my emphasis). Like the pur-
loined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s celebrated short-sto-
ry, the “purloined word” that causes the uncanny de-
sign of “The Sisters” to emerge had been in plain sight
all along!
Father Flynn’s own scrupulousness is clearly evi-
denced by the boy’s description of the education that
his mentor had once received and that he now imparts
to him:
39
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
He had studied in the Irish College in Rome and

he had taught me to pronounce Latin properly. He
had told me stories about the catacombs and about
Napoleon Bonaparte, and he had explained to me
the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass
and of the different vestments worn by the priest.
Sometimes he had amused himself by putting diffi-
cult questions to me, asking me what one should do
in certain circumstances or whether such and such
sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. [. . .]
Sometimes he used to put me through the responses
of the Mass which he had made me learn by heart.
(4-5)
The human toll of Father Flynn’s scrupulousness is

most dramatically revealed by the physical and psycho-
logical collapse precipitated by his dropping a chalice:
“It was that chalice he broke. . . . That was the begin-
ning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it
contained nothing, I mean. But still. . . . They say it was
the boy’s fault. But poor James was so nervous, God
be merciful to him!” (8). The intense guilt provoked by
his scrupulousness leads to his being found alone one
evening in the confessional:
They looked high up and low down; and still they

couldn’t see a sight of him anywhere. So then the
clerk suggested to try the chapel. So then they got
the keys and opened the chapel and the clerk and
Father O’Rourke and another priest that was there
brought in a light for to look for him . . .. And what
do you think but there he was, sitting up by himself
in the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and
laughing-like softly to himself? (8-9)
The idea that Father Flynn’s scrupulousness has, in

turn, poisoned the life of the young boy who tells his
story has been amply explored by Michael Groden and
40
Vicki Mahaffey, whose essay entitled “Silence and

Fractals in ‘The Sisters’” begins with the observation
that “most of what he [Father Flynn] teaches the boy
is technical, even scrupulous” and then continues with
the contention that:
Father Flynn is teaching the boy about the letter

(rather than the spirit) of the law, which according
to Saint Paul in 2 Corinthians “killeth.” That Joyce
seems to be associating this kind of exegesis with
death is indicated by the inadvertently morbid puns
with which the boys language is sprinkled: “The du-
ties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards
the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to
me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in
himself the courage to undertake them.” (2012, 34)
The author then call our attention to details suggesting

that the scrupulous education inflicted by Father Flynn
on the boy has likewise corrupted him:
He has taught him obedience in the form of deference

to his superiors and contempt for those individuals
he considers inferior. The price of this obedience is
a kind of muteness; the boy has lost confidence in
his own ability to interpret or understand ideas in
relation to his own experience. [. . .] The labyrinthine
complexity of the law that this priest enforces makes
the boy feel stupid, and the priest smiles and nods
in apparent approval of the boys insecure, hesitant
responses. (34-5)
They also point to several consequences in the boy’s

actual behavior, including his surprising inability to
mourn the death of his mentor, followed by his inabil-
ity to pray at Father Flynn’s deathbed, and his lack
of empathy – in their words – for his “exhausted and
bereft” sisters. They then conclude their study of the
41
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
victimizing consequences of scrupulousness with the

judgment that Joyce’s story “reveals how the accep-
tance of interpretive helplessness can initiate the educat-
ed into a culture of isolation, injustice (for which we
compensate by being petty in turn), and finally apathy”
(36; my emphasis).
Let’s notice in passing that Groden and Mahaffey’s
choice of the term “interpretive helplessness” to des-
ignate the effect of Father Flynn’s lessons on the boy
resonates curiously with the effect that Joyce’s writings
often produces on his readers. As William York Tindall
has observed of “The Sisters”:
one of the most complex and disturbing in the se-

quence, this story is a riddle. Nothing comes quite
clear. The nameless boy who tells the story is “puz-
zled” by hints and “intricate questions,” and so are
we. Raising such questions, teasing us with possi-
bilities, the story provides no answers. The key sen-
tence, “There was something gone wrong with him,”
comes last. We may guess what has gone wrong and
with what and with whom but we never know, and
that seems the point of the story. (1959, 13)
We may be reminded as well of Swiss psychoanalyst

Carl Jung’s struggle to come to terms with Ulysses,
which produced from him the admission that “[y]es, I
admit I feel I have been made a fool of,” which he then
followed with the admonition that “one should never
rub the reader’s nose into his own stupidity, but that is
just what Ulysses does” (1966, 113). His further obser-
vation that Ulysses is “a spiritual exercise, an aesthetic
discipline, an agonizing ritual, an arcane procedure”
(131) may likewise suggest to his readers the possibil-
ity that Joyce has willfully inflicted on them a painful
initiation similar to the one that he had suffered at the
hands of his priestly mentors but thanks to which he
42
also acquired the craftsmanship that he would use in

constructing his literary oeuvre.
Further evidence of the uncanny convergence be-
tween Joyce and Father Flynn is found in biographical
details that suggest that, like Father Flynn, Joyce was
himself “too scrupulous always.” This shared charac-
ter-trait was memorably recorded by Frank Budgeon,
who knew Joyce in Zurich. Joyce once told Budgeon
that he had been working hard all day on Ulysses but
only produced two sentences, Budgeon, with the ex-
ample of Flaubert in mind, suggested that Joyce must
have been struggling to find the “mot juste,” to which
Joyce replied: “No, I have the words already. What I am
seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.
There is an order in every way appropriate. I think I
have it” (1960, 19-20; my emphasis). Joyce likewise im-
plies his scrupulous devotion to the task of achieving
of this perfect order in the remark to his editor Grant
Richards to which I had alluded a moment ago: “I’ve
written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous
meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold
man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more
to deform, whatever he has seen or heard” (Joyce 1966,
134). He sounds even more like his priestly alter-ego in
another letter in which he says that he could not accept
any changes to what he has written without exposing
himself “to the thousand little regrets and self-reproaches
which would certainly make me their prey afterwards”
(135; my emphasis).
An especially intriguing example of Joyce’s own
scrupulousness is to be found in the care with which
he revised Eliza’s previously quoted diagnosis of her
brother’s condition. In the first published version,
written in 1904 for The Irish Homestead, it reads: “But
it was his scrupulousness, I think, affected his mind. The
duties of the priesthood were too much for him.” Joyce
43
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
rewrites this for the final version in 1906 as: “He was
too scrupulous always, she said. The duties of the priest-
hood was too much for him” (12; my emphases). This
change illustrates especially well Joyce’s own scrupu-
lous fidelity to the obligation of transcribing precisely
Eliza’s actual way of speaking. Scrupulosity is likewise at
work in several additional rewritings of her statements,
including: “Father O’Rourke was in with him yesterday
and gave him the Last Sacrament” to “Father O’Rourke
was in with him a Tuesday and anointed him and pre-
pared him and all” (9); “one night he was wanted” to “[s]
o one night he was wanted for to go on call” (12); “and
couldn’t find him” to “and still they couldn’t get a sight
of him anywhere”; and “[t]hen they knew something was
wrong with him” to “that made them think that there
was something gone wrong with him. . . .” (13).
The ambiguity of the word “scrupulous” as both an
affliction and a technique – depending on whether one
applies it to the “mortal body” of Father Flynn or to
the “architectural body” of the story that Joyce wrote
about him – may be observed as well in the word “rheu-
matic,” which Joyce added to the revised version of his
story and which Eliza uses in the course of reminiscing
about conversations with her brother James:
But still and all he kept saying that before the summer
was over he’d go out for a drive one fine day just to
see the old house again where we were all born down
in Irishtown and take me and Nannie with him. If we
could only get one of them new-fangled carriages that
makes no noise that Father O’Rourke told him about
– them with the rheumatic wheels . . .” (8)
Michael Timins opts for a symptomatic reading of

Eliza’s malapropism (“rheumatic” for “pneumatic”) as
well as her later “Freeman’s General” for “Freeman’s
44
Journal” and concludes that these malapropisms are

characteristic of syphilitic aphasia or speech defects”
(2012, 448). This may well be true. At the same time,
however, we notice that “rheumatic” rhymes playfully
with “pneumatic,” which suggests the possibility that
Liza’s turn of speech may be read not only as the symp-
tom that Timins detects but also , as Terence Brown has
suggested, a sign that “Eliza may also be unconsciously
employing a piece of inventive Dublin slang of a kind
common in the city in Joyce’s time as in now, where an
apparent solecism or bull is adopted with affectionate
zest” (Joyce 2014, 213; my emphasis). So also with the
journal-general confusion, which can be interpreted
both as a symptom of syphilis and as a piece of Dublin
slang.
The uncanny interplay between affliction and tech-
nique that we find in the word “scrupulous” – echoes
of which we hear in both “rheumatic” and “general”
– emerges as well in the three key words that Joyce
included in its extensively revised and expanded first
paragraph, which can be read simultaneously as symp-
toms of Father Flynn’s moral corruption and as the
materials that Joyce uses to construct his story:
Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly

to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded
strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in Euclid
and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it
sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and
sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed
to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.”
(2012, 1; my emphasis)
Joyce’s placement of these strangely sounding words

at the outset to his story encourages us to interpret
them as in some way associated with Father Flynn’s
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
decline. Florence Walzl responds to this opportunity

by pointing out that the original version of the story
contains “no mention of paralysis and no detail that
can be specifically pinpointed as hemiplegia (a unilat-
eral paralysis), let alone total paralysis. There are also
no suggestions of immoral conduct” (77).
Signs of the physical paralysis that afflicts Father
Flynn appear, to be sure, at several key points in the
story. The boy remembers that his aunt giving him a
“packet of High Toast,” a present that “would have
roused him from his stupefied doze” (5) and that he
needed to empty the packet into the snuff box because
“his hands trembled too much to allow him to do this
without spilling half the snuff about the floor” (5). Eliza
adds to this impression when she remarks: “Mind you,
I noticed there was something queer coming over him
latterly. Whenever I’d bring in his soup to him there I’d
find him with his breviary fallen to the floor, lying back
in the chair and his mouth open” (11).
Noticing that the boy remembers Father Flynn’s
having “died of paralysis” and, a moment later, imagines
that he is “absolv[ing] the simoniac of his sin,” Walzl con-
cludes that Joyce has cleverly created “a thematic union
of the two words into an association of guilt” (1961, 89).
She will subsequently claim that “[p]aralysis as a malady
is made an intrinsic part of the plot” (96; my emphasis).
In “Patterns of Paralysis in Joyce’s Dubliners: A Study
of the Original Framework,” Walzl further claims that
Joyce uses paralysis as a thread running throughout all
of the fourteen stories of the original collection, cre-
ating for each group an appropriately resonant image:
In the first group [childhood] the plot image is dis-

illusionment. In adolescence [. . .] entrapment. In
mature life [. . .] the image depicting such paralysis
of action is sterility. Finally, in the stories of public
46
life where it is presumed that healthy, functioning

society must express itself in ethical and intellectual
achievements if a high order, the failure or inability
to do so is expressed by images of corruption. (Walzl
1961, 222)
As was true with “rheumatic,” however, “paralysis”

points our attention to the uncanny convergence be-
tween the corruption of Father Flynn and the construc-
tion of a story in which the mirroring of narrative ele-
ments creates an effect of aesthetic stasis. Along with
the additions to the final version of “The Sisters” that
give to Father Flynn’s physical paralysis the ominous
moral and spiritual overtones that Walzl noted, Joyce
also made several additions that strengthen this effect
of stasis. The most important of these is the addition
of the scene in which the boy imagines that the ghost of
Father Flynn, who has entered his bedroom while he is
falling asleep, “began to confess to me in a murmuring
voice” (Joyce 2014, 3), a scene which is paired towards
the end of the story when the boy and his aunt enter
Father Flynn’s bedroom to kneel and pray at his corpse
(5-6). As a result, the paralysis that befalls a priest who
was “too scrupulous always” is uncannily paralleled by
the scrupulously arranged episodes of “The Sisters”:
Prologue: The boy thinks about Father Flynn’s impending

death.
A. He eats dinner with his aunt, uncle, and Cotter
B. He sees the ghost of Father Flynn.
C. He walks past the home of the priest’s sisters.
Interlude: He remembers the lessons that the priest

gave him.
C. He walks into the sisters’ home in the company
of his aunt.
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
B. He sees the corpse of Father Flynn.

A. He refuses to eat the wine and crackers that
Nanny serves.
Epilogue: Eliza talks about Father Flynn’s actual death
Along with this pairing of episodes, we notice (a detail

to which we will return later) that Joyce has created a
tripartite structure in which the central episode – which
gathers together an unspecified number of meetings
that the boy had with Father Flynn in the past – is
flanked on either side by accounts of events that hap-
pened only once.
The effect of aesthetic stasis created by the scrupu-
lous mirroring of episodes in “The Sisters” is paralleled
by Joyce’s equally scrupulous mirroring of its small
details. The opening sentence of the story, “there was
no hope for him this time,” spoken by the boy, returns
at the very end in Eliza’s “there was something gone
wrong with him.” “The darkened blind” (1) that the boy
observes from the street below Father Flynn’s bedroom
is later alluded to when, after entering the bedroom, he
notices “the lace end of the blind” (5). “I had thought his
words idle” (1) returns as “an idle chalice on his breast”
(9); the boy’s “com[ing] downstairs to supper” (1) returns
as his descending to “the little room downstairs” (6);
Cotter’s suggestion that “there was something queer”
about Father Flynn (1) will reappear as Eliza’s noticing
that “there was something queer coming over him lat-
terly” (7); “the duties of the priest towards the Eucharist
and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so
grave” to the boy (4), returns as “duties of the priest-
hood”, which, invoked now by Eliza, “was too much for
him” (8); midway through the story, the boy remembers
Father Flynn “spilling half the snuff about the floor” (5),
and, towards the end, Eliza remembers “finding him
with his breviary fallen to the floor” (11). “The head of
48
a corpse” (1) returns as “such a beautiful corpse” (6),

and the two candles (1) that the boy mentions returns in
“them two candlesticks out of the chapel” (7) that Eliza
recalls Father O’Rourke having brought.
As is true of “paralysis,” the strangely sounding
word “gnomon” likewise points both to a moral and
psychological stumbling block that afflicts its protago-
nist and to a masterfully arranged building block that
contributes to the construction of the story itself. In
her Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners,” Margot
Norris begins with her contention that Joyce made the
figure and the function of the gap, the silence, and the
figure of incompletion an inescapably foregrounded
trope in the story. By doing so he guaranteed that it
could not be missed, and would therefore serve as
“a clew and a clue, a guiding thread and a key to the
entire volume’s hermeneutical enigma” (2003, 16; my
emphasis). She then proceeds to interpret this clue as a
symptom to be diagnosed: “Psychoanalytically, we can
conjecture that an epistemological gap or a missing
piece of knowledge (as opposed to a random absence)
must have a negative psychological origin in repression
motivated by fear, a sense of danger, or a reluctance.
Politically, we know that textual censorships are moti-
vated by the need to suppress an injurious disclosure,
a dangerous knowledge, a threat against authority” (19;
my emphasis).
Norris further contends that the gaps and silences
which we find in “The Sisters” function as a synecdo-
che, not for the book as a whole, but precisely for the
book as an un-whole, a volume of incompletion, a col-
lection of stories each of which is riddled by gaps and
silences that afflict it with incompletion” (18; my em-
phasis). She elaborates on this metaphor of affliction in
her argument that the initial story of Dubliners is “the
un-whole model of a collection of un-whole stories by
49
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
suggesting that its state of un-wholeness opens the pos-

sibility that its gaps and ellipses will open into a moral
universe of unwholesomeness, an unwholesomeness at
the heart of all the stories that points to what Joyce
himself in his 15 October 1905 letter to Grant Richards
called ‘the special odour of corruption which, I hope
floats over my stories’” (Joyce 1966, 123) (18).
Norris’s “transgressive reading” (her term) of gaps
as symptoms includes the following items, all of which
are based on her guiding assumption that a gap neces-
sarily conceals the presence of a victim whose predic-
ament must be brought to light by suspicion: “Cotter’s
conversational gaps imply that the boy had unwitting-
ly entered into a relationship with an unwholesome
priest” (Norris 2003, 19); the adult narrator suffers from
a “performative unease” which is “symptomatized in
the fragmented and elliptical conversations he reports
and in his own unremembered and unfinished dreams
and confessions” (20); the broken chalice could be a
symptom of “one of the priest’s strokes or the discov-
ery of some misconduct on his part with an altar boy”;
“the wholes in the innocent readings continually open
up the possibility of the unwholesome” (26).
Michael Groden and Vicki Mahaffey likewise an-
alyze ”The Sisters” in a way that calls our attention to
concealed secrets and the damaging effects that they
have had on the lives of individual characters: “‘The
Sisters’ is full of damaged characters – the priest espe-
cially but also the sisters and the boy, and even the story
itself may be seen as damaged. The impulse is to try to
heal, to cure, and understandably much criticism of the
story tries to restore the missing corner, to turn the gno-
mon back into the parallelogram” (2012, 31). In a further
application of this key term, they argue that “with the
priest’s encouragement, the boy of ‘The Sisters’ has be-
come a kind of living gnomon, a damaged figure whose
50
damage replicates the wound of his tutor on a smaller

scale” (47). James Wohlpart, in his essay “Laughing in
the Confession-Box: Vows of Silence in Joyce’s ‘The
Sisters,’” offers the related view that “Father Flynn be-
comes a gnomon – an incomplete figure – in his inabili-
ty to reveal the sins of the Dubliners and thus purge the
conscience of his race” (1993, 409).
The most obvious example of gnomons that could
be connected with corruption is what Norris calls the
“conversational gaps” in Cotter’s statements about
Father Flynn. These begin with “No, I wouldn’t say he
was exactly . . . but there was something queer . . . there
was something uncanny about him. But I’ll tell you my
opinion . . . .” (Joyce 2014, 1-2). Cotter then continues, “I
think it was one of those . . . peculiar cases. . . . But it’s
hard to say. . . .” (2), to which he adds that “a young lad
[should] run about and play with young lads of his own
age and not be . . . Am I right, Jack” and “When children
see things like that, you know, it has an effect. . . .”(3).
Joyce, however, produces a “telltale tingle” in his
readers by transforming Cotter’s suspicion that there
is something “uncanny” about Father Flynn into an
aspect of the “uncanny design” of his story – an effect
that he achieves by creating a covert double of “hid-
den secrets” in the form of what we might call “open
secrets.” When, for example, the boy’s aunt asks Eliza,
“Did he . . . peacefully,” we know that the missing word
is “die.” Likewise, our hunch that “And everything . .
.?” is a question about Father Flynn having been given
the last rites is immediately confirmed by Eliza, who
understands the aunt’s question perfectly well: “Father
O’Rourke was in with him a Tuesday and anointed him
and prepared him and all” (9). At other times, an ellip-
sis may simply indicate a silent pause in which Eliza is
recalling a memory, as for example, her brother plan-
ning to take them all for a drive down to Irishtown:
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
“He had his mind set on that. . . . Poor James!” (11). So

also, her “It was that chalice he broke. . . . That was
the beginning of it” (12) may simply be Joyce’s way of
remaining faithful to the pauses that we often make
while speaking. Likewise, “But still. . . . They say it was
the boy’s fault” apparently indicates nothing more than
a shift in her train of thought. Similarly, the ellipsis in
“another priest that was there brought in a light for to
look for him. . . . And what do you think but there he
was” (13) apparently contains no secret at all.
To these examples of gaps that Joyce uses both as
symptoms of corruption and as materials for the con-
struction of “The Sisters,” we could add any number of
details that are absent from the story without leading
us to interpret them suspiciously. These include the
boy’s name, the reason that he is living with his aunt
and uncle rather than with his parents, whom we pre-
sume to be dead, where in Dublin the story takes place,
etc., etc. In comparing the first published version of
the story with its final revision, we notice that, along
with scrupulously constructing it by adding details
that contribute to the effect of parallelism, Joyce also
deleted several that were extraneous to the effect that
he was striving to achieve. We don’t really need to
know, for example, that James lives with his sisters on
Great Britain Street, or that Cotter is “the old distiller
who owns the batch of prize setters.”
With respect to the associations of “simony” with
moral corruption, Florence Walzl, after pointing out
that in both Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, the priestly vocation “is a call to power
and pride, not service and humility,” argues that Father
Flynn also “has emphasized the power and authority
of the Church and priesthood” (95). She likewise calls
attention to the dubious motivation underlying Father
Flynn’s way of teaching: “Religious matters described
52
in the catechism with succinct dogmatic clarity, be-

come in his explanations obscure and ambiguous. Even
stranger is his habit of raising casuistical questions of
morality and when the boy is unable to answer, of smil-
ing amusedly” (95).
Among suspicious readings of the connection
between simony and corruption, perhaps the most
common is the assumption that it actually serves as a
euphemism for “sodomy.” In his letter to Stanislaus on
20 August 1912, Joyce observes that George Roberts,
the managing editor of the Dublin publisher Maunsel
& Co. had already suspected as much: “[he] asked me
very narrowly was there sodomy also in The Sisters and
what was ‘simony’ and if the priest was suspended
only for the breaking of the chalice” (Joyce 1966, 305).
Margot Norris’s analysis of this particular suspicion
begins with her considering the “truly horrifying”
implications of our confronting truths that have been
scrupulously avoided by the other adults in Joyce’s
story, including “the immorality of broken clerical
vows with diseased sexual partners compounded with
the criminality of a priest preying on, and perhaps
faintly infecting, a kindly child” (2003, 26).
According to Norris, this suspicion also applies to
ourselves as readers: “The function of the reader in this
case becomes highly problematic as well, as the unde-
cidabilities produced by the boy’s willful or uncon-
scious cover-up prevent us from exonerating him from
complicity even as we recognize that he must not be
blamed” (26). She also finds the sisters themselves to be
possibly complicit: “What of the sisters, if we assume
the priest’s guilt of syphilis and sodomy? Their role in
the story then becomes far more sinister, incriminated,
and tragic” (27).
Unlike a suspicious reading of simony that analyzes
it uniquely as a sign of corruption, our “uncanny read-
53
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
ing” discovers it to be yet another word that points to

the unsuspicious convergence between corruption and
construction. Simony contributes to the construction
of Dubliners in two way first, by creating a mirroring
relationship between “The Sisters,” in which the only
so-called evidence of Father Flynn’s simony is the boy’s
word, and “Grace,” the last story of Dubliners according
to Joyce’s original plan, in which, although the word
itself never appears, every detail of Father Purdon’s be-
havior nonetheless implicates him in the moral failing
that it designates; second, the boy’s accusation of “si-
mony” against Father Flynn makes Joyce – a self-con-
fessed simoniac – his “covert double.”
Father Purdon is a Jesuit priest who shares his sur-
name with a street in Dublin’s red-light district and who,
much more clearly than Father Flynn, “prostitutes” his
priestly vocation. Joyce has, in effect, constructed an
inverted symmetry between his two simoniacs: Father
Flynn, as Wall argues persuasively, finds sadistic plea-
sure in making simple things exceedingly difficult for
a young boy whose confusion he finds amusing. Father
Purdon, his alter-ego, makes difficult things simple in
order to create a pleasurably reassuring experience for
the men who attend the retreat that he is preaching.
We notice, in particular, that he begins his sermon by
reading a text in which Christ advises “the children
of this world” to make friends “out of the mammon of
iniquity” (Luke 16:8-9) which he then describes as “one
of the most difficult texts in all the Scriptures” (Joyce
2014, 149; my emphasis). As Terence Brown points out
in his notes, however, “Father Purdon, it seems, has no
interpretive difficulties” (265). He smooths the path to
understanding by informing his audience of well-to-
do Dubliners that “It was a text for business men and
professional men” and further assures them
54
that he was there that evening for no terrifying,

no extravagant purpose; but as a man of the world
speaking to his fellow-men. He came to speak to
business men and he would speak to them in a busi-
ness-like way. If he might use the metaphor, he said,
he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished
each and every one of his hearers to open his books,
the books of his spiritual life, and see if they tallied
accurately with conscience. (149).
His comforting message that “Jesus Christ was not a

hard taskmaster” may remind us of the boy’s contrast-
ing fear of the expectations that the Church has of
her priests, as explained to him by Father Flynn: “The
duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards
the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me
that I wondered how anybody had ever found the cour-
age to undertake them” (4).
Along with creating a symmetry between the
simple-made-difficult and the difficult-made-simple
forms of simony, we notice that the implicitly tripartite
structure of “The Sisters” that I referred to previously
returns as the explicit division of “Grace” into three
settings (a pub, Kernan’s bedroom, a church), which is
clearly demarcated by asterisks. The different ways of
pronouncing Latin to which Father Flynn introduces
the boy in “The Sisters” likewise reappears in “Grace”
as the question raised concerning the correct version
of Pope Leo XIII’s motto (143). Additionally, the boy’s
accusation of simony against Father Flynn is echoed
by Mr. Kernan’s question to Martin Cunningham about
certain popes who were not “up to the knocker” (144).
Finding Father Flynn in the confession-box at the end
of “The Sisters” may plausibly return as Mr. Power’s
saying that “[w]e’re all going to make a retreat togeth-
er and confess our sins – and God knows we want it
badly” (146). The candles that the boy observes at the
55
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
beginning of “The Sisters” and that Eliza mentions

at the end reappear as the protestant Mr. Kernan’s
request that candles, which he refers to as the “mag-
ic-lantern business,” not be present at the retreat to
which he has been invited (147). “Gnomon” returns as
“quincunx” (148) and the three men (the clerk, Father
O’Rourke, and another priest) who find Father Flynn
“wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself” (9) in
the confessional reappear as “the two gentleman and
one of the curates” (128) who carry the disabled Mr.
Kernan up the stairs which he had fallen down.
The second contribution of simony to the construc-
tion of Dubliners emerges when we reflect that Joyce
himself clearly (and proudly) lays claim to priestly
powers in a way that reminds us of the illegitimate
acquisition of these powers with which the name of
Simon Magus is legendarily associated. Joyce’s desire
to acquire priestly powers for himself is made clear in a
letter to his brother Stanislaus in which he asks: “Don’t
you think there is a certain resemblance between the
mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? To
give the people a kind of intellectual pleasure or spiri-
tual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life
into something that has a permanent artistic life of its
own [. . .] for their mental, moral and spiritual uplift”
(Joyce [Stanislaus] 1958, 103-4). This appropriation of
the priestly power associated with the Eucharist is
paralleled by Joyce’s writing a story – what he called “a
chapter in the moral history of my country” – which is
in the form of an extended confession in which Joyce
himself confesses the sins of characters who are inca-
pable because of their moral blindness of making their
own confessions.
In “The Sisters” Joyce creates a priest whose en-
feeblement deprives him of the powers that had been
conferred upon him at the time of his ordination: not
56
only does Father Flynn “break” the chalice in which

the priest traditionally consecrates the wine, but he
likewise perverts the confessional, as we learn in
Eliza’s earlier-quoted account of the effort to track him
down after he has disappeared. But his enfeeblement
is an opportunity for Joyce to play the role of the artist
as a successful simoniac, one whose fulfillment of what
we might call “the duties of the artist” has as its coun-
terpart a Catholic priest for whom “the duties of the
priesthood was too much.”
Two episodes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man explicitly point to the shift of priestly powers
from a priest who is accused, whether rightly or not,
of simony to an artist who wears it as a badge of honor
that occurs implicitly in “The Sisters.” In the first of
these, the director of studies describes the two powers
– to forgive sins and to transform bread and wine into
the body and blood of Christ – that will be his if he
joins the priesthood:
To receive that call, Stephen, said the priest, is the

greatest honour that Almighty God can bestow upon
a man. No king or emperor on this earth has the
power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in
heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself
has the power of the priest of God: the power of the
keys, the power to bind and loose from sin, the power
of exorcism, the power to cast out from the creatures
of God the evil spirits that have power over them,
the power, the authority to make the great God of
Heaven come down upon the altar and take the form
of bread and wine. What an awful power, Stephen!
(Joyce 1993, 151-2)
In the second of them, Stephen observes in the Dean of

Studies the enfeeblement that his acceptance of such
powers has produced:
57
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
His very body had waxed old in lowly service of the

Lord – in tending the fire upon the altar, in bear-
ing tidings secretly, in waiting upon worldlings, in
striking swiftly when bidden – and yet had remained
ungraced by aught of saintly or of prelatic beauty.
Nay, his very soul had waxed old in that service with-
out growing towards light and beauty or spreading
abroad a sweet odour of her sanctity – a mortified will
no more responsive to the thrill of its obedience than
was the thrill of love or combat his aging body, spare
and sinewy, greyed with a silver-pointed down. (178)
This same pattern – involving, ambiguously, both the

rejection and the appropriation of priestly powers –
that we find openly acknowledged in A Portrait is pres-
ent in a covert way in “The Sisters,” a story in which
Joyce takes scrupulosity – the personal flaw that afflicts
Father Flynn – and makes it into the aesthetic tech-
nique that he will wield so flawlessly as he responds by
other means to the “call” of the priestly vocation.
58
Chapter 3
Rebuilding Lisbon in The Book of
Disquiet
“We shall now ask the tourist to come with us. We

will act as his cicerone and go over the capital with
him, pointing out to him the monuments, the gar-
dens, the more remarkable buildings, the museums -
all that is in any way worth seeing in this marvellous
Lisbon.”
– Lisbon: What Every Tourist Should See
“This dawn is the first dawn of the world. Never did

this pink colour yellowing to a warm white so tinge,
towards the west, the face of the buildings whose
windowpane eyes gaze upon the silence brought by
the growing light.”
– The Book of Disquiet
The epigraphs that I have chosen for my talk are in-

tended to evoke the “telltale tingle” produced in us
when we discover the uncanny way in which the “mor-
tal body” of Lisbon. What Every Tourist Should See – the
guidebook in which a self-styled cicerone provides
visitors with a tour of Pessoa’s native city – passes
into the “architectural body” of Pessoa’s literary mon-
ument, The Book of Disquiet, whose author/narrator
Bernardo Soares writes, not for tourists, but for “mil-
lions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot,
their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes” (Pessoa
59
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
2003, 16). There are, to be sure, striking differences be-

tween the two works: one written in English; the other
in Portuguese; one filled with useful facts about the
city in which Pessoa was born, the other described by
its narrator as a “factless autobiography”; one clearly
organized in such a way as to follow step-by-step the
itinerary chosen for the tourist by his guide, the other
a chaotic collection of fragments with neither a be-
ginning, nor a middle, nor an end. One is written by a
lordly cicerone who feels perfectly at home in Lisbon
and who takes obvious pride in the many treasures
with which he will beguile the tourist, the other by a
lowly bookkeeper who describes himself as feeling like
“an exile where I’d always though I was a citizen” (39).
Both Lisbon and its revisiting in The Book do have in
common, however, the vision of Lisbon itself as a virtu-
ally uninhabited city, an experience to whose proprietary
pleasure Bernardo Soares pays tribute in The Book:
This is one of the strangest sensations that the for-

tuity of encounters and absences can bring: that of
finding ourselves alone in a place that is normally
full of people and noise, or that belongs to someone
else. We suddenly have a feeling of absolute owner-
ship, of vast and effortless dominion, and – as I said
– of relief and serenity. (409)
As I shall be inviting you to observe this afternoon, the

Lisbon “owned” by the cicerone who conducts the tour
is a beautiful city made of a variety of things – buildings,
statues, and public squares – that produce a singularly
pleasurable effect. In the sublime city to which Soares
the bookkeeper lays proprietary claim, on the contrary,
pleasure is inseparable from unease.
The monumental buildings enshrined in Lisbon
that Soares must sacrifice in order to rebuild Lisbon
60
in his masterpiece (as Manole had to immure his wife

Ana in order to construct the Monastery at Curtea de
Argeș) return in The Book as the achievements of mas-
ters – not of stone – but of writing. Soares sets the stage
for this transformation of beautiful monuments into
momentary visitations of the sublime when he tells us
that “[p]rose encompasses all art, in part because words
contain the whole world, and in part because the un-
trammelled word contains every possibility for saying
and thinking” and that “structure, which the architect
must make out of given, hard, external things,” [. . .]
we build with rhythms, hesitations, successions and
fluidities” (227).
The cicerone’s presentation of Lisbon as a city in
which beautiful things abound is evident from the
opening lines his guidebook:
For the traveller who comes in from the sea, Lisbon,

even from afar, rises like a fair vision in a dream,
clear-cut against a bright blue sky which the sun
gladdens with its gold. And the domes, the monu-
ments, the old castles jut above the mass of houses,
like far-off heralds of this delightful seat, of this
blessed region.” (2008, 11)
The beautiful Lisbon of the guidebook is filled with

examples of public squares, statues, buildings, and
other man-made objects whose instantly recognizable
beauty commands our admiration. We are told early
on, for example, that The Tower of Belém is “a mag-
nificent specimen of sixteenth century military archi-
tecture” (11) and later learn “it is with astonishment
and a growing appreciation that the stranger beholds
its peculiar beauty” (61). The Praça do Commercio is
proudly described as “a vast space, perfectly square,
lined on three sides by buildings of a uniform type,
61
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
with high stone arches” (15). The Santa Justa Elevator

“always compels great admiration from tourists from
everywhere” (17).
Unlike beauty – whose pleasurable effect depends
solely on a simple act of attention – the sublime trans-
forms a potentially unpleasant object into the source
of an uncanny mixture of pleasure and unease as, for
example, in Soares’s description of his Lisbon:
Since the dull beginning of the hot, deceitful day,

dark clouds with jagged edges had been ranging over
the oppressed city. Towards the estuary they were
grimly piled one on top the other, and as they spread,
so did a forewarning of tragedy, in the streets’ vague
rancor against the altered sun. (2003, 183)
Unlike such beautiful sites as the Tower of Belém, the

Praça de Commercio, and the Santa Justa Elevator,
Soares describes the Rua dos Douradores, where he
lives and works, in a way that seems, rather, to create
an initially disagreeable impression:
Yes, I distinctly see – with the clarity of reason when

it flashes in the blackness of life and isolates the
objects around us that make it up – all that is shod-
dy, worn-out, neglected and spurious in this street
called Douradores which is my entire life: this office
that’s sordid down to the marrow of its employees,
this monthly rented room where nothing transpires
but a dead man’s life, this corner grocery whose
owner I know in the way people know each other,
these young men at the door of the old tavern, this
toilsome uselessness of the unchanging days, these
same characters repeating the same old lines, like a
drama consisting only of secrecy, and with the scen-
ery turned inside out . . . (187)
62
For obvious reasons, the cicerone does not make the

Rua dos Douradores a stop on the tourist’s itinerary.
On the other hand, he does give prominent mention to
the Rua do Ouro (“The Street of Gold”):
Let us choose Rua do Ouro, which, with its commer-

cial importance, is the main street of the city. There
are several banks, restaurants, and shops of all kinds
in this street; many of the shops, especially towards
the upper end of the artery, will be found to be as lux-
urious as their Parisian equivalents. (2008, 17)
Literal gold is itself a frequently invoked aspect of

the beauty of Lisbon. We learn, for example, that the
Lisbon Cathedral
contains a perfect treasure of ritual objects of all

sorts, in gold, silver and precious stones, of very
considerable value. One of the most remarkable ele-
ments of that treasure is the famous Custodia da Sé,
which is 90 centimetres high and is gold all through,
with diamonds, emeralds, rubies and other precious
stones. (33)
Likewise, the cicerone tells us that the things worth

seeing in the Palacio das Necessidades include “paint-
ings, portraits, inlaid work, gold and silver works” (52),
while the Museu de Arte Antiga boasts “a show-case
containing the celebrated Custodia dos Jeronymos, all
in enamelled gold,” of which we learn further that
This astonishing specimen of Portuguese gold-work

was wrought in Lisbon by Gil Vicente by order of
King Manuel I and following a sketch by Garcia de
Rezende. The weight of the gold is about 30 marks,
and, as the inscription shows, this piece was wrought
from the first gold received as a tribute from the
King of Qilva. (67)
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
In the gold-work room of the same museum, we find a

collection that is “chiefly composed of ritual objects,
from the extinct convents and of many others in gold
and silver, many of them adorned with precious stones,
as for instance the Relicario da Madre de Deus which
is of enamelled gold set with pearls, emeralds and ru-
bies” (68).
As we noticed a moment ago, there is nothing the
least bit “golden” about the physical aspect of the Rua
dos Douradores. However, its name, which translates
as “The Street of the Gilders,” recalls a time when it
was home to Jewish goldsmiths. This led me to wonder
if it was the associations of its name that led Pessoa to
choose it as the “shoddy, wornout, neglected and spu-
rious” street that Soares would “gild” by doing with
words what the Jewish gilders had once done with
gold. I suggested this possibility to Madalena Lobo
Antunes, a Facebook friend in Lisbon currently writ-
ing a doctoral dissertation on The Book, who pointed
out that along with the reference to gold in “doura”
the name Douradores also contained the word “dor”
(meaning “pain,” “anguish,” or “trouble”). Thanks to
this discovery of a double-meaning that produced an
unmistakable “telltale tingle,” I suddenly realized that
this otherwise negligible detail – not so much a street
that no tourist would notice but a word – epitomizes
the uncanny design of a literary monument in whose
“aesthetics of the Dying Sun” (2003, 114) the beautiful
and the painful are indissolubly linked.
We notice the incongruous convergence of plea-
sure and unease in the several places in which Soares
alludes metaphorically to the gilder’s craft. For exam-
ple, he expresses at one point his desire “to goldenly
stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by
flowers” (45) and tells us that “In my dreams I learned
[. . .] to gild, with the sun of artifice, the dark corners
64
and forgotten furniture” (173). Likewise, in the course

of mentioning his inability to derive a philosophy from
the various thoughts that occur to him, Soares explains
that “Lucid vague thoughts and logical possibilities
occur to me, but they all dim in the vision of a ray of
sunlight that gilds a pile of dung like wetly squished
dark straw, on the almost black soil next to a stone
wall” (58). At another point, he describes his life as “tat-
ters of nothing tinged by a distant light, fragments of
pseudo-life gilded by death from afar with its sad smile
of whole truth” (216). And at page 453, he observes that
“the light strikes things so perfectly and serenely, gild-
ing them with sadly smiling reality. And all the world’s
mystery descends until I see it take shape as banality
and street.”
Here, then, are some examples, chosen more or less
at random, of the transformation of beautiful public
squares, buildings, and monuments with which Lisbon
is so replete into the sublime arrangements of words
that emerge serendipitously throughout The Book:
The City:
■ On the city’s northern side, the clouds slowly co-
alesced into just one cloud, black and implacable,
creeping forward with blunted grey-white claws
at the ends of its black arms. (183)
■ In that flash, what I’d supposed was a city proved
to be a barren plain, and the sinister light that
showed me myself revealed no sky above. (262)
■ [. . .] above the rooftops of the interrupted city,
the blue of the always brand-new sky closes the
mysterious existence of stars into oblivion. (439)
Its Buildings:
■ I search in myself for the sensations I feel before
these falling threads of darkly luminous water
65
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
that stand out from the grimy building façades

and especially from the open windows. (41)
■ Great marvels of architecture [. . .] motley chaos
of heaped up buildings that the daylight weaves
together with bright spots and shadows. (94)
■ Against the blue made pale by the green of night,
the cold unevenness of the buildings on the sum-
mer horizon formed a jagged, brownish-black sil-
houette, vaguely haloed by a yellowed grey. (438)
Its Streets:
■ [. . .] the sky’s blue began to spread over the street’s
paving stones, then the vehicles sang a different
song. (29)
■ My faint vision is fringed by a light from far away;
it’s from the street lamps that border the deserted
street down below. (31)
■ Silence emerges from the sound of the rain and
spreads in a crescendo of grey monotony over the
narrow street. (41)
■ And the colours of the flowers, the shade of the
trees, the geometry of streets and flower beds – it
all fades and shrinks. (67)
■ Distinctly, as if it meant something, the empty
matchbox resounds in the street, declaring to me
its desertedness. (102)
We notice as well the way in which the public

buildings to whose impressive dimensions the
cicerone calls the tourists attention in Lisbon are
transformed into such vast, dimensionless spaces as:
Ruins:
■ I’m the ruins of buildings that were never more
than ruins, whose builder, halfway through, got
66
tired of thinking about what he was building. (61)

■ [. . .] the grandiose commotion of empires and
cultures — all of this strikes me as a myth and a
fiction, dreamed among shadows and ruins. (132)
■ The palace of the prince I never was is now ruins
in a distant past. (300)
■ The beauty of ruins? They’re no longer good for
anything. (330)
■ My manor house from before I had life fell into
ruins. (341)
Abysses:
■ I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay
until the coach from the abyss pulls up. (1)
■ We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky. (11)
■ [. . .] the night of the unknown abyss and the chaos
of nothing making sense [. . .] (13)
■ In the cove on the seashore, among the woods and
meadows that fronted the beach, the fickleness of
inflamed desire rose out of the uncertainty of the
blank abyss. (19)
■ [. . .] the normal man, when sick or old, rarely
looks with horror at the abyss of nothing, though
he admits its nothingness. (40)
■ May I at least carry, to the boundless possibility
contained in the abyss of everything, the glory of
my disillusion like that of a great dream [. . .] (54)
Voids:
■ The cape of the common sea beyond which all is
mystery is perhaps more human than the abstract
path to the world’s void. (125)
■ What a procession of voids and nothings extends
over the reddish blue that will pale in the vast
expanses of crystalline space! (184)
■ All is emptier than the void. (196)
67
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
■ My soul is a black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling

a void, the racing of an infinite ocean around a
hole in nothing. (262)
Deserts:
■ I see myself in the midst of a vast desert. (17)
■ [. . .] the tracks in the desert of the camel without
burden or destination . . . (45)
■ “There’s an infinity in a cell or a desert.” (90)
■ There were two of them [. . .] they strolled hand in
hand through the desert of the abandoned path-
ways. (342)
***
I now invite you to continue our exploration of the sac-

rifice of the beautiful things with which the cicerone
regales the visitor to Lisbon and their uncanny return
as visitations of the sublime in The Book by noticing
the frequent allusions to Portuguese royalty that we
find in Pessoa’s guidebook. Arriving at the Pantheon,
the cicerone had informed the tourist that
on the right lies King Joao IV, founder of the Braganza

dynasty, which began with the revolution of 1640,
prepared by forty noblemen, led by the great patri-
ot Joao Pinto Ribeiro. [. . .] In the middle lies Dom
Pedro IV, who was King of Portugal and Emperor of
Brazil; there are two crowns of the urn, representing
the two countries over which he reigned. (2008, 28)
He will later mention Alfonso de Albuquerque: “that

great historic figure, the greatest of viceroys of India
and the founder of modern imperialism” (62).
References to royalty do occur in The Book as well;
however, in place of illustrious figures from Portuguese
history, we find imagined personages “taking place in a
68
city built out of my soul” (2003, 114). The sublime aesthet-

ics of “the Dying Sun” is clearly at work, for example, in
his description of himself as “a feudal lord of swamps at
twilight, solitary prince of empty tombs” (216), as “Prince
of the Great Exile, who as he was leaving gave the last
beggar the ultimate alms of his desolation” (55). In a pre-
viously mentioned passage from page 300, he announces
that “the palace of the prince I never was is now ruins in
a distant past” which may recall his lamenting at page
22 that “[e]verything about me belongs to a glossy prince
pasted, along with other decals, in the old album of a little
boy who died long ago.”
We also notice beauty’s uncanny way of returning
as the sublime in the treatment of elevated places in
both works. In Lisbon, we learn that the pedestal on
which the statue of Pombal will be placed “it will be
36 metres high, commanding five large avenues which
meet on that spot” (2008, 22), that from the courtyard
of a particular church “a magnificent panorama of the
city and river may also be enjoyed, almost as fine as
the one from Senhora do Monte” (27), and that the St.
George Castle “is built on an eminence which com-
mands a view of the Tagus and of a great part of the
city” (34). In The Book, on the other hand, Soares en-
joys from the vantage of his nondescript fourth-floor
rented room, not simply commanding but a boundless
panorama: “Behind me, where I’m lying down, the si-
lence of the house touches infinity” (2003, 31); “I throw
an empty matchbox towards the abyss that’s the street
beyond the sill of my high window” (102); “I step over
to my window overlooking the narrow street, I look at
the immense sky and the countless stars, and I’m free,
with a winged splendor whose fluttering sends a shiver
throughout my body” (46).
Likewise, the statues mentioned in Lisbon are all
of prominent historical figures whose achievements
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
provide such pleasure as material things are able to

afford us. We learn that “[i]n the center of the square
[Praça do Commercio] stands the bronze equestrian
statue of King José I, a splendid sculpture by Joachim
Machado de Castro, cast in Portugal” and that “[t]he
pedestal is adorned with magnificent figures depicting
the rebuilding of Lisbon after the great earthquake in
1755” (2008, 16). In The Book, however, statues provoke
an uncanny mixture of pleasure and unease, as when
Soares tells us that “[a] statue is a dead body, chiseled
to capture death in incorruptible matter” (2003, 178).
Similarly, at page 61, he describes, not the statue of
an important historical figure, but the “unique and
haughty statue of our Tedium, a dark figure whose in-
scrutable smile gives its face a vague aura of mystery.”
Military campaigns are similarly described, de-
pending on where they appear, in ways that provoke
either unalloyed pleasure or pleasure mixed with
trepidation. In Lisbon, the cicerone informs us that “[d]
uring his reign [King Carlos], Portugal obtained sev-
eral brilliant victories in Africa – those of Mouzinho
de Albuquerque over the rebel chief Gungunhana in
Mozambique, and those of Major Roçadas over the
Cuamata tribe in Angola” (2008, 29) and that the Tower
of Belém “is indubitably one of the finest monuments
in Lisbon and one of the most expressive memories of
Portuguese military and naval power” (60).
In The Book, Soares’s sublime descriptions of
military exploits emphasize powerlessness as when he
declares: “How many Caesars I’ve been, but not the
real ones. I’ve been truly imperial while dreaming, and
that’s why I’ve never been anything. My armies were
defeated, but the defeat was fluffy, and no one died. I
lost no flags” (2003, 102) and when he envisions “the
troops of a disbanded army whose commanders had a
glorious dream, which in them – now trudging through
70
the scum of marshes – has been reduced to a vague no-

tion of grandeur” (59).
We notice a similar transformation of the beauti-
ful into the sublime in The Book in the presentation of
the maritime history of Portugal. In Lisbon, the Tagus
River is described as “forming one of the largest natu-
ral harbors in the world with ample anchorage for the
greatest of fleets” (2008, 11), the Praia do Restello as
being “famous as the point from which the ships sailed
forth for the Great Discoveries” (60), the Geographical
Society as “an interesting colonial and ethnographical
museum, which comprises naval relics, models of gal-
leons and national and African boats . . . specimens of
fibre textiles and of such like stuffs, products of Angola,
Mozambique, Macau, Timor, etc.” (35-6), and the Tower
of Belém as “one of the most expressive memories of
Portuguese military and naval power” (60). In The Book,
Soares describes his own voyage of discovery in ways
that lay claim to his being an explorer of an even higher
order than his Portuguese ancestors. He begins with the
bold assertion that
Your ships, Lord, didn’t make a greater voyage than

the one made my thought, in the disaster of this
book. They rounded no cape and sighted no far-
flung beach – beyond what daring men had dared
and what minds had dreamed – to equal the capes
I rounded with my imagination and the beaches
where I landed with my . . . . (125)
After distinguishing between the “Real World” that

was discovered “[t]hanks to your initiative, Lord” and
the “Intellectual World” that will be his domain, Soares
claims that his quest will be pose the greater challenges:
Your argonauts grappled with monsters and fears. In

the voyage of my thought, I also had monsters and
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
fears to contend with. On the path to the abstract

chasm that lies in the depths of things there are hor-
rors that the world’s men don’t imagine and fears to
endure that human experience doesn’t know. (125)
He will return to this claim towards the end of the

text: “I, far away from the paths to myself, blind to the
vision of the life I love, . . . . . I too have finally arrived
at the vacant end of things, at the imponderable edge
of creation’s limit, at the port—in—no—place of the
World’s abstract chasm” (125).
If we now turn our attention to the transformation
of the beautiful into the sublime as this applies to
painting, we notice that the cicerone takes us to the
National Museum of Contemporary Art, whose “fine
paintings and sculptures dating from 1850 onwards”
are the work of dozens of artists whose names he only
too willingly shares with the tourist. These, along with
the sculptures, drawings, and water-colours that also
contribute their individual excellences to the glory of
the collection as a whole lead him to conclude that
“[t]here is, in fine, much to see and to admire in the
museum, which is fitly installed” (2008, 37). Impressive
paintings are housed in other museums as well, in-
cluding the Artillery Museum, which the cicerone
describes as “indubitably the most remarkable one in
Lisbon” (30):
The paintings, signed by master like Columbano,

Malhoa, Velloso Salgado, [etc.] . . . sculptures by
Simoes de Almeida (the nephew), Oliveria Ferreira,
Sousa Rodrigues and others; the gilt inlaid-work
and other decorative elements – all these render this
museum a remarkable store of masterpieces, which
no visitor to Lisbon should miss seeing. (31)
72
In The Book, this showcasing of literal paintings is

transformed by what Soares calls “a sublime logic”
(2003, 114) into his metaphorical painting of Lisbon:
“The city’s uneven mountainous mass looks at me
today like a plain, a plain covered by rain” (69); “. . .
on the frozen avalanche of overlapping rooftops it is
a greyish white, damply tarnished by a lifeless brown”
(434); “. . . and the whole ensemble is staggered in
diverse clusters of darkness, outlined on one side by
white, and dappled with blue shades of cold nacre”
(435). As Françoise Laye has aptly commented, Soares
looks upon Lisbon “like an impressionist painter who
never tires of detailing its thousand and one nuances,
which are like an immense prism that refracts the var-
ious lights of ‘his’ city” (2008, 42). We sense the aptness
of this remark when, for example, Soares describes the
impression made by a slowly dissipating fog:
Since early morning and against the solar custom of

this bright city, the fog had wrapped a weightless
mantle (which the sun slowly gilded) around the rows
of houses, the cancelled open spaces, and the shift-
ing heights of land and of buildings. But as the hours
advanced towards midday, the gentle mist began to
unravel until, with breaths like flapping shadows of
veils, it expired altogether. By ten o’clock, the ten-
uous blueing of the sky was the only evidence that
there had been fog. (2003, 201)
In the fragment that follows this one, the impression

created by the approach of autumn leads to a more in-
ternalized sensation:
It’s still not autumn, there’s still no yellow of fallen

leaves in the air, still none of the damp sadness that
marks the weather when it’s on its way to becoming
winter. But there is a hint of expected sadness – a
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
sorrow dressed for the journey –in our hazy aware-

ness of colours being smattered, of the wind’s differ-
ent sound, of that ancient stillness which spreads in
the falling night across the ineluctable presence of
the universe. (202)
We notice, too, Soares’s readiness to use the word

“landscape” ambiguously to refer both to the surround-
ing natural world and to a type of painting:
Whatever it was, the entire landscape was cloaked

by a hazy uneasiness made of forgetfulness and
attenuation . . . . It was hard to tell if the sky was
filled with clouds or fog. It was all a torpid haze that
was coloured here and there, a greyness with just a
hint of yellow, except where it had dissolved into a
false pink or had bluely stagnated, though this blue
may have been the sky showing through rather than
another blue overlaying it. (385)
At page 189, Soares similarly describes a rainy day in

a way that may lead us to wonder if this is an actual
scene or an impressionist painting: “The air is a veiled
yellow, like a pale yellow seen through a dirty white.
There’s scarcely any yellow in the grey air, but the pale-
ness of the grey has a yellow in its sadness.” This paint-
erly metaphor returns at page 241, entitled “Triangular
Dream,” in which his description of a light that “had
become extremely sluggish yellow, a yellow that was
filthy white” and a scene in which “the distance be-
tween things had increased” leads him to conclude
that “in the composition of the space itself, a different
interrelationship of something like planes had changed
and fragmented the way that sounds, lights and colours
use space” (my emphasis).
Among the sublime mixings of pleasure and unease
that our reading of The Book produces in us, perhaps
74
the most intriguing has to do with the presentation of

death. Lisbon, on the one hand, refers to it only infre-
quently, and such reference as we do find have to do
largely with the beautiful tombs that contain the mortal
remains of prominent Portuguese figures. We learn, for
example, that Prince Alfonso lies “in a sumptuous silver
coffin weighting over six hundred kilos” (2008, 29), that
the Church of Sao Roque contains several tombs of note-
worthy figures (42), and that the Almeida Garrett Chapel
contains “the tombs of Luís de Camoes and Vasco da
Gama [. . .] In the upper part of this chapel is the tomb of
King Sebastian” (58). The cicerone likewise recalls that
“the great constable Dom Nuno Alvares Pereira,” who
founded the Convento do Carmo, “professed, died,and
was buried there”(41) and that it was in the Baptism
Chapel of the Monastery of the Jéronimos that, “on
the 21st December 1918, the body of Dr. Sidónio Pais,
President of the Republic, was set; the body being fol-
lowed to the monastery by a crowd of many thousands,
in a moving and heart-felt demonstration” (56).
Such illustrious figures as these return in The
Book in the person of the lowly assistant-bookkeep-
er Bernardo Soares, whose acute susceptibility to
thoughts of his eventual extinction appears, for exam-
ple, when he reflects that “each new autumn is closer
to the last autumn we’ll have, and the same is true of
spring or summer; but autumn, by its nature, reminds
us that things will end” (2003, 202). Such thoughts can
also be provoked in the absence of any identifiable
cause: “Sometimes I feel, I’m not sure why, a touch of
foretold death” (40). Perhaps the most incongruous of
these reminders occurs when Soares transforms var-
ious signs of daily life into a cluster of memento mori:
The day will come when I see no more of this, when

I’ll be survived by the bananas lining the pavement,
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
by the voices of the shrewd saleswoman, and by the

daily papers that the boy has set out on the opposite
corner of the street. I’m well aware that the bananas
will be others, that the saleswomen will be others,
and that the newspapers will show – to those who
bend down to look at them – a different date from
today’s. But they, because they don’t live, endure, al-
though as others. I, because I live, pass on, although
the same. (170)
On the other hand, what Soares calls the “visceral

logic” (473) that rejects the knowledge of death emerg-
es throughout The Book precisely at those moments
where we experience the presence of what Soares calls
“truly static things . . . woven by eternity” (304). The
appeal of aesthetic stasis – in contrast to the physical
inanition that it so closely resembles – is also sublime-
ly expressed by Soares’s imagining
if our life were an eternal standing by the window, if

we could remain there for ever, like hovering smoke,
with the same moment of twilight forever paining
the curve of the hills [. . .]. If we could remain that
way for beyond for ever! If at least on this side of the
impossible we could thus continue, without com-
mitting an action, without our pallid lips sinning
another word! (101)
One of the most intensely sublime of these passages

appears at page 31, which begins with what appears
to be the straightforward expression of a death wish
(complete with a likely allusion to Hamlet’s “To be or
not to be” soliloquy), which then modulates into the
longing to exist in some region of life vastly beyond the
merely material world:
To cease, to sleep, to replace this intermittent con-

sciousness with better, melancholy things, whis-
76
pered in secret to someone who doesn’t know me! [. .

.] To cease, to end at last, but surviving as something
else: the page of a book, a tuft of disheveled hair,
the quiver of the creeping plant next to a half-open
window, the irrelevant footsteps in the gravel of the
bend, the last smoke to rise from the village going to
sleep, the wagoner’s whip left on the early morning
roadside . . . Absurdity, confusion, oblivion – every-
thing that isn’t life.
I’ll conclude my talk by inviting you to think of Lisbon

and The Book as equally timeless works, albeit for
quite different reasons. Lisbon survives because the
cicerone is highly selective in what he shows to the
tourist – those monumental aspects of Lisbon that are
essentially unchanged from the city that Pessoa him-
self once knew. As Tony Frazer says in his introduction
to Lisbon, Pessoa “loved the city, knew all its corners,
and scarcely left it after his early years there, following
his school-days in Durban. The book can still be used
as a guide today (2008, 8). While Lisbon will have pe-
rennial value for us as long as the city whose cultural
treasures it so lovingly describes is not destroyed by an
earthquake like the one that demolished it in 1755, The
Book will survive, not because of the literal monuments
made of “given, hard, external things” whose beauty
it celebrates but because of the uncanny comingling
of pleasure and unease that Bernardo Soares achieves
in a literary monument made of “rhythms, hesitations,
successions, and fluidities.”
77
Chapter 4
Doing It in Waiting for Godot
“He’s doing it on purpose!”
The first encounter with Waiting for Godot that pro-

duced in me the “telltale tingle” promised by Vladimir
Nabokov to the wise reader who reads with his spine
happened in the Spring of 1976, when I attended a per-
formance of Warten auf Godot, the German production
that Beckett himself had directed at Berlin’s Schiller
Theatre and which was presented for two evenings in
Paris at Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud’s
Théâtre d’Orsay. What I immediately noticed – some-
thing for which my previous encounters with Godot had
not prepared me – was the uncanny way in which Didi
and Gogo, on the one hand, and the actors who were
playing their roles, on the other, were not “doing it” in
quite the same way. While Didi and Gogo were waiting
for Godot, the actors who were playing their roles were,
instead, pausing – an “action” that created the uncan-
ny double of waiting. When Estragon sees Lucky fall
for a second time, he complains that “He’s doing it on
purpose,” an exclamation that explicitly describes the
behavior of the two principal characters in Waiting for
Godot – who wait in the expectation of some extrinsic
benefit – at the same time that it points implicitly to
the behavior of the actors, who pause in order to create a
visual effect that is intrinsic to their activity.
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
The nature of the reward for which Didi and Gogo

are waiting is not entirely clear:
Estragon: What exactly did we ask him for?

Vladimir: Were you not there?
Estragon: I can’t have been listening.
Vladimir: Oh . . . nothing definite.
Estragon: A kind of prayer.
Vladimir: Precisely.
Estragon: A vague supplication.
Vladimir: Exactly.
The vagueness of their request is matched by the un-

certainty as to whether it will be fulfilled:
Estragon: And what did he reply?

Vladimir: That he’d see.
Estragon: That he couldn’t promise anything.
(Beckett 1954, 14)
Notwithstanding these uncertainties, the extrinsic na-

ture of the reward for which they are waiting is beyond
doubt, as we see when, in Act II, Vladimir, thinking
that Godot has finally arrived (it’s actually Pozzo and
Lucky) believes that their purposeful waiting will final-
ly be rewarded: “It’s Godot! At last! Gogo! It’s Godot!
We’re saved!” (83).
The distinction between characters who wait and
actors who pause emerges especially at moments in the
play in which Vladimir’s reminder that “We’re waiting
for Godot” (in obedience to Godot’s offstage directive
to them) is followed by Beckett’s stage direction to the
actors:
Estragon: Let’s go.

Vladimir: We can’t.
Estragon: Why not?
80
Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot.

Estragon: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) (7)
Examples of pauses provoked by the stage direction

“halts” include: Estragon moves to center, halts with his back
to the auditorium (8); Vladimir halts, straightens the stool,
comes and goes, calmer (36); Enter boy, timidly. He halts (52);
Enter Vladimir agitatedly. He halts and looks long at the tree,
then suddenly begins to move feverishly about the stage (62);
Vladimir halts, the boy halts (106). The similar effect of a
tableau vivant is created by the stage direction “silence,”
which occurs more than one hundred times.
The transformation of waiting, which is the per-
sonal predicament endured by Didi and Gogo, into the
theatrical technique of pausing came to mind as well
while I was reading the chapter on Waiting for Godot in
a book by Roger Blin, its first director. As Blin points
out, Beckett’s placing of pauses within his actors’
speeches forces them to deliver their lines in a stylized
rather than a naturalistic way:
The poetry of Beckett’s texts comes essentially from

the number of ellipses around which the words are
spoken. All of the sentences are punctuated abun-
dantly. There are in Beckett’s texts sentences that
can be spoken straight through, but which are divid-
ed by ellipses that cause the phrase to move towards
something else. It’s the quantity of ellipses and their
placement in the dialogue which gives the rhythm
and the respiration of the text, the lyrical rhythm that
requires a very special effort on the part of the ac-
tors. (1986, 94; my emphasis)
Among the many examples of actors’ pauses, which

transform Didi and Gogo’s mortal act of waiting for
Godot into the “architectural body” of Waiting for
Godot itself, we find:
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
■ Vladimir: One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) it’s a

reasonable percentage. (Pause.) Gogo. (1954, 5)
■ Estragon: “That would be too bad, really too bad.
(Pause.) Wouldn’t it, Didi, be really too bad? (Pause.)
When you think of the beauty of the way. (Pause.) And
the goodness of the wayfarers. (Pause. Wheedling.)
Wouldn’t it, Didi? (11).
■ Pozzo: (angrily). Don’t interrupt me! (Pause. Calmer) If we
all speak at once we’ll never get anywhere. (Pause.) What
was I saying? (Pause. Louder.) What was I saying? (29)
■ Pozzo: It is pale and luminous like any sky at this hour
of the day. (Pause.) In these latitudes. (Pause.) When the
weather is fine. (37)
■ Vladimir: Then I can keep it. Mine irked me. (Pause.)
How shall I say? (Pause.) It itched me. (81)
Another telltale tingle occurs when we notice the way

in which Pozzo and Lucky’s movements are transformed
into the “form in movement” that Beckett likened to
a musical composition based on repeated motifs and
that he strove to achieve with his actors. Both Pozzo’s
and Lucky’s movements are motivated by the expecta-
tion of an extrinsic reward. Pozzo hopes “to get a good
price” by travelling to the market, where he intends to
sell Lucky (31). Lucky, in turn, performs the movements
commanded to him by Pozzo because he believes that
he will, in this way, gain his master’s favor:
Pozzo: He wants to impress me, so that I’ll keep him.

Estragon: What?
Pozzo: Perhaps I haven’t got it quite right. He wants
to mollify me, so that I’ll give up the idea of parting
with him. No, that’s not exactly it either.
Vladimir: You want to get rid of him?
Pozzo: He wants to cod me, but he won’t.
Vladimir: You want to get rid of him?
Pozzo: He imagines that when I see how well he car-
ries I’ll be tempted to keep him on in that capacity. (30)
82
The transformation of these goal-oriented movements

into “form in movement” is especially noticeable
in what Beckett calls in his notebooks Vladimir and
Estragon’s “perpetual moving apart and coming togeth-
er again.” Beckett also indicates that these movements
are to unfold in three precisely demarcated phases in
such a way as to imprint a rhythmical effect. Vladimir
and Estragon’s approach to Lucky – to take just one ex-
ample among so many – requires three distinct move-
ments: the first is stopped by the question, “What ails
him?” and the second by “Careful!” The third finally
brings them face-to-face (22). Similarly, the movement
of Godot’s messenger towards the center of the stage is
divided into three stages. He passes in front of the tree
in response to Vladimir’s “Approach, my child,” then
moves a bit closer when Estragon shouts, “Approach
when you’re told, can’t you,” and comes to a halt at the
center after Estragon’s “Will you approach!” (53).
Dougald McMillan and Marsha Fehsenfeld’s
Beckett in the Theatre provides us with abundant in-
formation regarding the precision with which Beckett
envisioned the “form in movement” that would be
produced onstage by his actors. I’ll offer you here just
a brief sampling of details that especially caught my
attention. The authors begin by pointing out that the
first fifty-three pages of Beckett’s production notebook
are entirely concerned with
the coordination of lines and movements in the

parallel divisions of the play. Having broken down
the action of Godot into one hundred and nine units,
he then indicated for nearly each one of them “the
positions of the actors on stage, the directions they
face, the directions in which they move, and the cues
for each movement or gesture they make.
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
Especially noteworthy is their concluding observation

that “[Beckett’s] control of the action is so precise that
at places where ad-libbing of movement seemed ap-
propriate it is indicated in the directions” (1990, 91; my
emphasis). We learn, further, that Beckett designated
two kinds of movement – “little turns” and “approach
by stages” – under the heading “recurrences” in capital
letters (99). He likewise distinguished clearly between
the two geometrical shapes created by Vladimir and
Estragon’s movements:
Vladimir tends towards the tree in a curved path

drawing a resisting Estragon with him; Estragon
tends towards the stone in a straight line moving
away from Vladimir, who follows him. Like arc and
chord in a geometry exercise, these two contrasting
patterns of movement connect the cardinal points of
tree and stone and define the boundaries of a closed,
circular universe and exhibit the differing tenden-
cies of Vladimir and Estragon. (103)
McMillan and Fehsenfeld also tell us that: “The move-

ments of the moon and the boy in each act echo the
arcs and chords laid out in the approaches to the stone
and tree and integrate them structurally in the play.”
An otherwise negligible change that Beckett made in
the original stage directions contributes significantly
to this uncanny integration:
In both acts, instead of turning to run offstage as in

the text, the boy moves backward from Vladimir in
two stages and then finally ‘calmly backward off –
the straight line of a chord. The moon rises simul-
taneously in a perfect arc and comes to a stop as the
boy leaves the stage, disappearing into ‘the edge of
deep shadow’ to be created by lighting. (106)
84
Along with these examples of the uncanny transfor-

mation of purposeful movements into “form in move-
ment,” we notice, too, the curious way in which Beckett
silently directs the actors playing Vladimir and Estragon
to perform the same movements that Pozzo had audibly
commanded of Lucky:
• Pozzo: Back! (1954, 18)

Estragon stops halfway, runs back [. . .] (18)
• Pozzo: Forward! (44)
Estragon: (step forward). You’re angry? (Silence. Step
forward.) Forgive me. (Silence. Step forward.) (12)
• Pozzo: Stop! (20)
Estragon stops halfway, runs back . . . stops again, runs
back. (17)
They stop looking at the sky. (27)
Vladimir: He stops, broods, resumes . . . he stops, broods,
resumes . . . he stops, broods. (63)
• Pozzo: Turn! (21)
• Estragon: goes limping to extreme left. . . turns, goes to
extreme right. (7)
Estragon: turns to Vladimir. (8)
Vladimir: half turns. (12)
Vladimir and Estragon: turn towards Pozzo. (24)
• Pozzo: Closer! (21)
Vladimir: (looking closer). Looks like a goiter. (22)
Silence, They [Vladimir and Estragon] draw closer,
halt. (84)
We may add to these examples the many times that

Lucky “advances” in response to Pozzo’s commands,
which are replicated by the same movement as direct-
ed by Beckett for other characters:
■ Pozzo advances threateningly. (19)

■ The boy advances timidly. (53)
■ Vladimir: (He advances towards the heap). (92)
■ (Pause. Vladimir advances, the Boy recoils.) (106)
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
Roger Blin invites us to understand the fundamental

difference between these same orders depending on
whether they are given by Pozzo or by Beckett when
he points out that the purpose of the movements in-
dicated by Beckett is “to enhance the dialogue” (1986,
95) – a cooperative interplay of words and movements
in contrast to the coercive relationship imposed by
Pozzo’s commands.
***
Another intriguing aspect of the uncanny effect pro-

duced by the convergence of two different ways of
“doing it” in Godot occurred to me when, several years
after seeing Beckett’s own production of his play, I
was rereading Emil Cioran’s Cahiers 1957-72 with a
view towards gathering together remarks made by the
Romanian writer about Beckett, with whom he had
been good friends. The entry dated 13 June 1970, in
particular, caught my attention:
Evening with Suzanne B. If I understood correct-

ly, Sam was displeased with the article that I had
written on him. It wasn’t, in fact, a very good one.
But this didn’t stop me from feeling chagrined, as
though I had been rejected. I returned home tired
and in despair. [. . .] I spoke on the phone with Paul
Valet about my article on Beckett. We agreed that
Nietzsche’s superman was ridiculous (because theat-
rical), while Beckett’s characters never are.
Beckett’s characters do not live in the tragic but in
the incurable.
It’s not tragedy, but misery. (1997, 810; my emphasis)
Thanks to Cioran’s distinction between tragedy and

misery, I suddenly became aware of the uncanny way in
which what we might call Beckett’s “theater of misery”
86
both revisits and recasts the communal rituals that we

find in Greek tragedy in forms that have been freed
from their extrinsic goal.
Greek tragedy stages two related ways of “doing it
on purpose” – as we see in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King,
in which the goal of ending the plague that has de-
scended on the city of Thebes is to be pursued both by
enacting a sacrificial ritual and by performing choral
lamentations. The first of these requires the expulsion
of the murderer of King Laius, as we see in the follow-
ing exchange between Oedipus and Creon:
Creon:King Phoebus in plain words commanded us

to drive out a pollution from our land,
pollution grown ingrained within the land;
drive it out, said the God, not cherish it,
till it’s past cure.
Oedipus: What is the rite
of purification? How shall it be done?
Creon: By banishing a man, or expiation
Of blood by blood, since it is murder guilt
Which holds our city in this destroying
storm. (2000, 14; my emphasis)
The second of them involves the plea for divine inter-

vention in the form of choral odes that alternate between
strophes and antistrophes, as for example:
Strophe
Whatsoever escapes the night
at last the light of day revisits
so smite the War God, Father Zeus,
beneath your thunderbolt,
for you are the Lord of the lightning, the lightning
that
carries fire.
Antistrophe
And your unconquered arrow shafts, winged by the
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golden corded bow,

Lycean King, I beg to be at our side for help;
and the gleaming torches of Artemis with which she
scours the Lycean hills,
and I call on the God with the turban of gold, who
gave his name
to this country of ours,
the Bacchic God with the wind flushed face [. . .]
(197-211)
The nightly beatings that Estragon receives before

spending the night “[i]n a ditch” and Pozzo’s announced
intention of taking Lucky to a market where he will
sell him – along with the suggestion that Lucky’s dance
be called “the scapegoat’s agony” – appear to echo the
ritual practices whereby a group inflicts suffering on a
designated individual. The fact that Lucky has a rope
tied around his neck and that Vladimir and Estragon
contemplate hanging themselves from the tree – one of
only two stage props with which Beckett has provided
them – makes lynching an inevitable point of reference.
Remember, too, Vladimir’s song about the dog who is
beaten:
A dog came in the kitchen

And stole a crust of bread.
Then cook up with a ladle
And beat him till he was dead. (Beckett 1954, 62)
None of these violent ways of “doing it” however, ever

actually leads to a tangible benefit for any of the char-
acters. Beckett’s play returns us, in effect, to a time
when misery had not yet been transformed into tragedy
because an individual actor had not yet been separated
from the chorus in order to play the role of designated
victim in its “rite of purification.”
88
Beckett likewise revisits the choral odes that solic-

it divine assistance in Greek tragedy; however, while
maintaining their antiphonal structure – formed by
the alternation between strophes and antistrophes – he
recasts them in such a way as to deprive them of their
extrinsic purpose. In his own production of Godot,
Beckett directed his actors in a way that suggested
– via the ensemble quality of the movements and ges-
tures – the virtual chorus that they formed. In particular,
he often positioned them on stage in such a way as to
produce clearly visible geometrical figures – thus sug-
gesting that the visual network of their relationships
had priority over any single individual, an effect that is
heightened by the back-and-forth movement of the di-
alogue between Vladimir, as we notice in the exchange
to which I referred at the outset of my talk:
Estragon: What exactly did we ask him for?

Vladimir: Were you not there?
Estragon: I can’t have been listening.
Vladimir: Oh. . . Nothing very definite.
Estragon: A kind of prayer.
Vladimir: Precisely.
Estragon: A vague supplication. (13; my emphasis)
In their later evocation of “all the dead voices” we may

likewise hear an echo of a choral lamentation from
classical tragedy:
Vladimir: They make a noise like wings.

Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like sand.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Silence.
Vladimir: They speak all at once.
Estragon: Each one to itself.
Silence.
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Vladimir: Rather they whisper.

Estragon: They rustle.
Vladimir: They murmur.
Estragon: They rustle.
Silence. (69)
The overall effect of Beckett’s revisiting of choral odes

in his “theater of misery,” however, is to transform
them from sacred lamentations into theatrical routines.
Among the purely stylistic techniques that he employs
in order to achieve this effect, we notice in particular:
Simple repetition of a word or phrase:

Vladimir: It hurts?
Estragon (angrily): Hurts! He wants to know if it
hurts!
Vladimir (angrily): No one ever suffers but you. I
don’t count. I’d like to hear what you’d say if you
had what I have.
Estragon: It hurts?
Vladimir (angrily): Hurts! He wants to know if it
hurts.(3)
Free association:
Vladimir: Consult his family.
Estragon: His friends.
Vladimir: His agents.
Estragon: His correspondents.
Vladimir: His books.
Estragon: His bank account. (14)
Rhyme:
Vladimir: Moron!
Estragon: Vermin!
Vladimir: Abortion!
Estragon: Morpion!
Estragon: Sewer-rat!
Estragon: Curate
90
Vladimir: Cretin!
Estragon: (with finality). Crritic! (85)
Synonyms:
Vladimir: We could do our exercises.
Estragon: Our movements.
Vladimir: Our elevations.
Estragon: Our relaxations.
Vladimir: Our elongations.
Estragon: Our relaxations.
Vladimir: To warm us up.
Estragon: To calm us down. (86)
Ruby Cohn’s catalogue of what she calls “doublets” in Just

Play (1980, 98-100) makes us aware of yet another aspect
of Beckett’s recasting choral odes, which were performed
with an extrinsic purpose in Greek tragedy, into antiph-
onal patterns whose intended effect is wholly intrinsic.
They include:
Simple doublets:
Estragon: Come come, take a seat I beseech you,
you’ll get pneumonia.
Vladimir: So much the better, so much the better.
(1954, 36)
Interrupted doublets:
Estragon: Looks to me more like a bush.
Vladimir: A shrub.
Estragon: A bush. (8)
Distanced doublets:
Estragon: What is it?
Vladimir: I don’t know. A willow. (8)
Estragon: (looking at the tree). What is it?
Vladimir: It’s the tree.
Estragon: Yes, but what kind?
Vladimir: I don’t know. A willow. (107-8)
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Echo doublets:
Estragon: In a ditch.
Vladimir: (admiringly). A ditch! (2)
***
Yet another telltale tingle occurs when we become

aware of the way in which the “antiphonal” effect that
we have observed in the words that are spoken in Godot
also occurs in the repetition-with-difference of small
physical details within Act I, such as:
■ In the opening scene, we see a tableau vivant that

pairs Estragon sitting on the stone and Vladimir
standing by the tree.
■ Estragon removes and examines his shoes, a ges-
ture that Vladimir echoes with his hat.
■ Estragon’s asking Vladimir if they are “tied” to
Godot is paralleled by entry of Lucky, who is lit-
erally tied to Pozzo.
■ Pozzo’s stool mirrors Estragon’s stone.
■ Vladimir offering Estragon a carrot is repeated by
Pozzo allowing him to scavenge a bone.
■ Vladimir and Estragon standing together coun-
terpointed with Pozzo sitting and Lucky standing
a certain distance from him.
■ Vladimir kicking Pozzo’s stool returns as Pozzo
stomping on Lucky’s hat.
■ Vladimir and Estragon lifting Lucky up and
standing on either side of him is echoed by their
crouching on either side of Pozzo while listening
for his watch.
■ The arrival of the Boy, unaccompanied by Godot,
replays the arrival of Lucky accompanied by Pozzo.
■ The final tableau (Vladimir and Estragon sitting
together on the stone) revisits the initial tableau.
92
***
A further aspect of the uncanny design of Waiting for

Godot emerges when we notice that the antiphonal
pattern that Beckett creates by pairing visual details
within Act I is replicated by the division of the play as
a whole into two acts, among whose echoing effects we
notice, in particular, that:
■ Estragon is joined by Vladimir in Act I and

Vladimir by Estragon in Act II.
■ Estragon attempts with great difficulty to take off
his shoes in Act I and to put them on again in Act
II.
■ Vladimir mistakes a turnip for a carrot in Act I
and a black for a red radish in Act II.
■ Pozzo (now blind) and Lucky (now deaf) enter
stage left in Act I and stage right in Act II; a rope
is still tied around Lucky’s neck, but it has been
considerably shortened.
■ Lucky falls to the ground in Act I and both he and
Pozzo fall in Act II.
■ In Act I, Vladimir and Estragon stand on either
side of Lucky after raising him, thus creating a vi-
sual representation of Christ and the two thieves;
in Act II, the crucifixion of Christ is represented
by all four characters falling to the floor in what
Beckett described as a “cruciform” pattern.
■ The messenger who appears in Act II is the
brother of the one who came in Act I; both roles,
however, are played by the same actor.
■ Both Acts I and II end with the same exchange
between Didi and Gogo: “Well, shall we go?” fol-
lowed by “Yes, let’s go” (59, 109). In Act I, howev-
er, Beckett staged this scene with Didi and Gogo
sitting together on the stone; In Act II, they are
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
standing beneath the tree.

■ Their final exchange is initiated by Estragon in
Act I but by Vladimir in Act II.
***
While I was writing my book on Waiting for Godot for

the Twayne’s Masterwork Studies series some thirty
years ago, I came upon an essay written in the 1960s
by the Hungarian critic Gabor Mihályi, who, without
the benefit of having seen Beckett’s own production,
had a similar experience of the uncanny double formed
by the characters on the one hand and the actors who
play their roles on the other. Mihályi said, most memo-
rably for me, that “to read the play as a whole provides
an experience that is as shattering as it is somber and
cheerless. On stage, however, the negation of negation
comes over with increased impact: stage and actors give
the spectator the catharsis he seeks in vain in the book”
(1966, 278; my emphasis).
Mihályi’s remark alludes in its own way to the
presence in Godot of the otherwise overlooked inter-
twining of intrinsic and extrinsic reasons for “doing
it” as well as the sharply contrasting effects that each
produces. His comment also helps us to see that the
cathartic relief that we expect to experience defini-
tively at the end of the play with the arrival of Godot
occurs continuously everywhere throughout it thanks to
the actors’ liberation from the burden under which the
characters labor. I would add to Mihályi’s experience
of seeing Godot in performance that both the negation
and the negation of the negation have their source in
the ambiguous relationship between the subservience of
the characters to their masters and the obedience of the
actors to their director.
94
I’ll conclude by reading to you a passage from Simone

Weil’s The Need for Roots while inviting you to see in the
distinction that Weil makes between slavery and obedi-
ence the key to our understanding the profound differ-
ence between the two ways of “doing it” that contribute
to the uncanny design of Waiting for Godot:
Those who keep masses of men in subjection by ex-

ercising force and cruelty deprive them of two vital
foods, liberty and obedience; for it is no longer in the
power of such masses to accord their inner consent
to the authority to which they are subjected. Those
who encourage a state of things in which the hope
of gain is the principal motive take away from men
their obedience, for consent, which is its essence, is
not something which can be sold.
There are any number of signs showing that the men

of our age have now for a long time been starved of
obedience. But advantage has been taken of the fact
to give them slavery. (1952, 15)
95
Chapter 5
The Eliot Way: Turning Back
in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“Time to turn back and descend the stair”
T. S. Eliot coined the expression “the Eliot way” to ex-

plain his mother’s inability to decide whether to visit
him in England, describing it as an affliction that makes
it “impossible for any of our family to make up their
minds.” James Longenbach tells us that he also called
this illness the “Boston Doubt” – “a scepticism that is a
product, or a cause, or a concomitant, of Unitarianism.”
He further maintained that wherever someone infected
with the Eliot Way stepped, “the ground did not simply
give way, it flew into particles.” In a remark that will
have special pertinence to our study of the uncanny
design of “Prufrock,” Eliot revealed that such people
“want to do something great but they are predestined
failures” (2011, 28).
In a comment that will remind us of the distinc-
tion that Eliot makes in his essay “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” between “the man who suffers” and
“the mind which creates,” Longenbach then goes on
to argue that “Eliot’s first great artistic success grew
from the effort to distance himself from the threat of
such failure by dramatizing it. Not only the voice but
the very linguistic texture of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’’’ embodies the typically Eliotic stalemate
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
between fortitude and inertia” (28; my emphasis). As

Longenbach further observes, “the Eliot Way is coun-
termanded by a willed decisiveness, a determination to
act that is nurtured so privately that to anyone else it
appears irrational” (28). There is, as it were, a second
“Eliot Way” – a covert double in the form of “Eliot’s
way” of writing a poem – that involves Eliot’s fashion-
ing in Prufrock a surrogate upon whom he displaces
the affliction from which members of his family suffer
and then converting Prufrock’s personal predicament
into an aesthetic technique.
The subtitle of my talk – which alludes to Prufrock’s
declaration that there will be time to “turn back and de-
scend the stair” – is intended to call your attention to the
convergence between these two contrasting yet comple-
mentary aspects of “Prufrock.” On the one hand, it re-
minds us of Prufrock’s constantly returning throughout
the poem to memories of his past life that effectively
thwart his initial resolve to achieve a purposeful goal (the
asking of the “overwhelming question”). On the other
hand, uncannily shadowing Prufrock’s return to his
personal past (which confirms his role as a “predestined
failure”), Eliot himself achieves “something great” (the
writing of a groundbreaking modernist poem) by con-
stantly turning back to the literary past. Recalling Mircea
Eliade’s interpretation of the Manole Legend, we may
say that Prufrock’s mortal body – which is constantly
engaged in “turning back” – becomes the architectural
body of “Prufrock,” a poem that transforms what is a
personal predicament for “the man who suffers” into a
poetic technique for “the mind that creates.”
As Nancy D. Hargrove reminds us in her essay,
“Parisian Influences in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock,’” Eliot turned back both to his own life and to the
literary tradition in fashioning the persona of Prufrock.
With respect to his personal life, she tells us that
98
Eliot himself was to a great extent a model for his

main character so that, as Marjorie Perloff has
claimed, Prufrock cannot be separated from the poet
who invented him. However, his speaker derives not
only from biographical roots but also from identi-
fiable Parisian sources. Eliot merges two distinctly
Parisian male figures drawn from the poetry of
Baudelaire and Laforgue to create Prufrock.
As for the literary past, Hargrove goes on to explain that
[i]n the mid nineteenth century, Baudelaire coined

the term flaneur to describe an upper-class, educated
and cosmopolitan man who strolled through the
streets of a great modern metropolis, specifically
Paris, observing with curiosity and detachment
its sights and people of all classes. And in the late
nineteenth century, Laforgue reinvented the dandy:
a type who was interested in fashion and manners,
possessed impeccable taste and elegance, was highly
intellectual, disdained the bourgeois and working
classes, and possessed an ironic impassivity, con-
veyed with a cynical tone of voice – all traits that
equally describe Laforgue himself. (Stayer 2015, 50)
The co-presence of these two ways of turning back oc-

curs toward the end of the poem when Prufrock utters
his famous disclaimer, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet,
nor was meant to be.” At first glance, we see only
that Prufrock is revisiting his already amply detailed
self-diagnosis as a “predestined failure,” which he then
continues to elaborate on throughout the rest of the
paragraph (which Eliot insisted on keeping despite
Ezra Pound’s recommendation that he delete it):
Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –
Almost, at times, the Fool.
At the same time that Prufrock is merely turning back

on himself, however, Eliot is accomplishing “some-
thing great” both by turning back to Hamlet’s most
famous soliloquy via the phrase “to be” that concludes
the first line and by implicitly portraying the “a bit
obtuse” Prufrock as a latter-day Polonius. He then,
albeit much less obviously, combines these allusions
to Hamlet with the passage in Inferno II – “For I am
not Aeneas, am not Paul”(1984, 32) – in which Dante
voices his unworthiness to undertake the journey into
the afterlife that Virgil has proposed to him.
Eliot likewise merges Hamlet and Inferno in the
overwhelming question that Prufrock prefers not to
reveal, which combines both the question that Hamlet
poses in his most famous soliloquy:
To be or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
(Shakespeare 2008, III, i, 57-61)
and Guido da Montefeltro’s admission – in the lines

from Inferno 27 that Eliot quoted in Italian as the epi-
graph to “Prufrock” – that he would prefer not to speak
If I thought my reply were meant for one

who ever could return into the world,
this flame would stir no more; and yet, since none –
If what I hear is true – ever returned
100
alive from this abyss, the without fear

of facing infamy, I answer you. (Dante 1984, 61-66)
Hamlet’s uncertainty as to the course of action that he

should undertake returns throughout “Prufrock” in a
variety of ways, including Prufrock’s receptivity toward
“a hundred indecisions,” his wondering “Do I dare/
Disturb the universe?” and “how should I presume?”,
his asking “Shall I say?” rather than actually saying it,
as well as his not knowing whether he should “Have
the strength to force the moment to its crisis,” “wheth-
er it would have been with it, after all,” how he should
part his hair, and whether he “dare to eat a peach.”
With respect to Guido, his reticence pervades
“Prufrock” in the sense that his unwillingness to talk
about the past misdeeds for which he is suffering
eternal punishment returns in Prufrock’s own ten-
dency to reminisce about his past in such a way as to
obscure rather than to reveal the decisive events that
have shaped it. Guido, having overcome his reticence
thanks to Dante’s assurance that he will never reveal
his “infamy” to anyone, does give us a detailed account
of his actions. Prufrock, by contrast, manages to speak
at great length to his unnamed companion without
ever really saying anything precise about his past – or
even about his present circumstances, for that matter.
Prufrock’s avoidance of self-revelation – along with
being a personal trait traceable to Eliot himself – may
also echo an admission made by Guido:
While I still had the form of bones and flesh

My mother gave to me, my deeds were not
Those of the lion but those of the fox.
The wiles and secret ways – I knew them all
And so employed their art that my renown
Had reached the very boundaries of earth. (73-78)
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Having in mind Guido’s self-description as a “fox” may

remind us, additionally, of Ezra Pound’s nicknaming
Eliot the “possum,” a creature similarly known for its
elusiveness. In this respect, Richard Badenhausen re-
minds us of John Middleton Murray’s complaint that
Eliot “seemed like a chameleon, constantly changing
to protect himself” (2004, 29).
A “telltale tingle” may also be produced in us when
we notice the uncanny way in which Prufrock’s hiding
details of his personal past is covertly doubled by Eliot’s
hiding remnants of the literary past in “Prufrock.”
What Prufrock hides is permanently hidden, so well
has he concealed it. Eliot, on the contrary, conceals
things that are meant to be revealed, the most obvious
example being the epigraph from Inferno XXVII that
he quotes in Italian without identifying its source but
which he expects to be only temporarily hidden from
non-speakers of Italian.
The entire poem, in fact, may be thought of as a
modernist “Easter Egg Hunt,” in which part of the plea-
sure in reading it will consist in our finding the secrets
that Eliot has planted for us. One of the least obvious
of these is the “No, I am not Prince Hamlet,” in which
few of us will discover without learned assistance the
reference to Inferno II. Some of our “finds” will, to be
sure, always remain hypothetical. I have myself often
wondered, for example whether Eliot may have intend-
ed Prufrock’s “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’/ Let us go
and make our visit” as a “turning back” to the moment
in Inferno I when Virgil tells Dante that, rather than as-
cending the mountain directly, he must go another way:
“It is another path that you must take,”

He answered when he saw my tearfulness,
If you would leave this savage wilderness.”
(Dante 1984, 91-93)
102
Unlike Prufrock, who never explains his reluctance

to reveal the overwhelming question, Virgil does tell
Dante why the direct path is not advisable:
This beast,
The cause for your complaint, lets no one pass
Her way – but harries all to death. (72-4)
***
The ambiguous implications of “turning back” – as

both a sign of Prufrock’s personal predicament and
as the aesthetic technique that Eliot uses to construct
his love song – applies as well to the voices that echo
throughout “Prufrock.” Prufrock himself repeatedly
hears spoken words that are a stumbling stone for him.
These include such lines as:
■ In the room women come and go

■ Talking of Michelangelo
■ They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”
■ They will say: “But how his arms and legs are
thin!”
■ I have known the voices dying with a dying fall
■ If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
■ Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
For his part, Eliot repeatedly turns back as he con-

structs “Prufrock” to written words that he uses as
building stones, a point that he famously raises in his
essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
One of the facts that might come to light in this pro-

cess is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet,
upon those aspects of his work in which he least
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of

his work we pretend to find what is individual, what
is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with
satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his pre-
decessors, especially his immediate predecessors;
we endeavour to find something that can be isolated
in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a
poet without this prejudice we shall often find that
not only the best, but the most individual parts of
his work may be those in which the dead poets, his
ancestors assert their immortality most vigorously.
And I do not mean the impressionable period of ad-
olescence, but the period of full maturity.” (1960, 48)
As Richard Badenhausen has commented, “Eliot

tended to view the writing process as one that could
succeed only through the presence of a companion [. . .]
He believed that the assistance of a collaborator could
help fix experience in some definite form and bring the
creative act to a close” (2004, 5-6; my emphasis).
The best known of the “collaborators” who accom-
pany Prufrock on his visit are, as Nancy Hargrove had
previously suggested, Charles Baudelaire and Jules
Laforgue. Of Laforgue, Eliot himself has said, in “What
Dante Means to Me,” that
he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach

me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of
speech. Such early influences, the influences which,
so to speak, first introduce one to oneself, are, I
think, due to an impression which is in one aspect,
the recognition of a temperament akin to one’s own,
and in another aspect the discovery of a form of ex-
pression which gives a clue to the discovery of one’s
own form. (1960, 126)
In the same essay, Eliot credits Baudelaire with teach-

ing him, “first, a precedent for the poetical possibil-
104
ities, never developed by any poet writing in my own

language, of the more sordid aspects of the modern
metropolis, of the possibility of fusion between the
sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric, the possi-
bility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and
the fantastic.” He then continues, “from him, as from
Laforgue, I learned that the sort of material that I had,
the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, in an
industrial city in America, could be the material for po-
etry; and that the source of new poetry might be found
in what had been regarded hitherto as the impossible,
the sterile, the intractably unpoetic” (126).
Among the less well-known examples of a dead an-
cestor whose written voice contributes to the making of
“Prufrock” the poem (in contrast to the spoken voices
that “unmake” Prufrock the man) – Peter Lowe alerts
us to the decisive importance of Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
who “greatly contributed to Eliot’s view of the mod-
ern city and, in Crime and Punishment’s protagonist,
Raskolnikov, provided a valuable model for Prufrock’s
self-conscious indecision” (2005, 1). As Lowe recalls,
Eliot himself confirmed the “profound impression”
made by the three Dostoevsky novels – Crime and
Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov – that
he had read before completing “Prufrock” (2). Pursuing
the parallel between Prufrock and Raskolnikov, Lowe
suggests that “both men are ‘products’ of the mod-
ern cities they inhabit” and that “life in these cities
forces people further into their own isolation, to
the point at which their sense of self-consciousness
becomes a torment to them.” He further argues that
“both Raskolnikov and Prufrock seek release from
this self-consciousness, but both are blighted with in-
decision and struggle to commit the actions that they
believe would liberate them from their isolation” (3).
The most fascinating aspect of Lowe’s discussion
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
of the parallels between Crime and Punishment and

“Prufrock” concerns the contrasting ways in which
Dostoevsky and Eliot use the Lazarus story. For
Raskolnikov, “this story stands as a token of divine
grace that brings a man back from the dead” – an ex-
perience that will be confirmed in his own life by the
love of Sonia. In contrast, Prufrock’s plaintive lament,
“Would it have been worthwhile . . .To say I am Lazarus
come back from the dead” only confirms, as Lowe ob-
serves, his “intensified isolation” (16). In contrast to
Raskolnikov, who “finds release in opening his heart to
Sonia,” Lowe remind us that “Prufrock remains pain-
fully alone with himself, excluded even from the songs
of the mermaids” (21).
Here now (with grateful acknowledgement of
Christopher Ricks, whose notes on “Prufrock” called
many of them to my attention) is a sampling of Eliot’s
incorporation into his own “something great” of words
written by his predecessors:
“And there will be time”

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to
every purpose under the heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
“Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)
brought in upon a platter”
“And his head was brought in a platter, and given
to the maid, and she brought it unto her mother.”
(Matthew 14:11)
“To have squeezed the universe into a ball”
“Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball” (“To His Coy
Mistress”)
“To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/ Come
back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”
“Then he said, I pray thee therefore father, that
thou wouldest send him [Lazarus] to my father’s
house.” (Luke 16: 27)
106
“I have heard the mermaids singing”

“Teach me to hear the Mermaids singing.” (John
Donne, “Go and Catch a Fallings Star”)
“Till human voices wakes us, and we drown.”
“until the sea again closed – over us.”
(Inferno XXVI, 142)
As I likewise discovered while reading Ricks’s notes,

Eliot also turns back to phrases that he himself had writ-
ten for some of the poems that preceded “Prufrock.”
These include, while being by no means limited to:
“Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels”

“restless on winter nights” (“Do I know how I feel”)
“The yellow smoke . . . Licked its tongue . . . Slipped
by the terrace”
“the cat which flattens itself . . . Slips out its
tongue” (“Rhapsody on a Winter Night”)
“Time to turn back”
“Time to regain the door” (“The Death of the
Duchess”)
“a dying fall”
“This music is successful with a dying fall”
(“Portrait of a Lady”)
“tea and cakes and ices”
“With cakes and ices” (“Goldfish”)
“At times, indeed, almost ridiculous”
“at last a bit ridiculous” (“Entretien dans un parc”)
“seaweed red and brown”
“And about his hair the seaweed purple and brown”
(“So through the evening, through the violet air”)
***
A further aspect of the uncanny transformation of “the

Eliot way” from a personal predicament into a poet-
ic technique emerges when we realize that this same
activity – depending on whether it is undertaken by
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
Prufrock or by Eliot – leads ambiguously to both comple-

tion and incompletion. Turning back as the cause of an
uncompleted act includes, in particular, the series of sub-
sidiary “overwhelming questions” that stymie Prufrock:
■ “Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?”

■ “So how should I presume?”
■ “And how should I begin?”
■ “And would it have been worth it, after all”
■ “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a
peach?”
Additionally, his repeated claim that “there will be

time” – with its promise of endless “indecisions” and
“revisions” – suggests Prufrock’s readiness to avoid an
action rather than to perform it.
Turning back as an aesthetic technique that produc-
es completion is present most obviously in the rhymed
couplets that spring up regularly in the midst of the
dominant free verse in which “Prufrock” is written.
They include:
■ Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
■ In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
■ And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions.
■ Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons
■ Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
■ I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear my trousers rolled.
■ Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a
peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon
the beach.
108
I find it especially intriguing that, despite the effect of

dithering randomness that Prufrock’s love song gener-
ally produces, Eliot should mark the precise midpoint
of his carefully constructed poem with a rhymed cou-
plet:
Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?
This way of “turning back” at the midpoint of

“Prufrock” is uncannily mirrored by the way in which
the poem as a whole turns back on itself by pairing
lines that appeared in its first half with comparable
lines in its second. Examples of paired lines such as
these, which we could call “semantic couplets,” appear
throughout the poem:
■ “a patient etherized upon a table”

“Till human voices wake us and we drown”
■ “Let us go through certain half-deserted streets”
“Shall I say I have gone at dusk through narrow
streets”
■ “In the room the women come and go”
“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each”
■ “To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .”
“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;”
■ “The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the
window-panes”
“And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes”
■ “That lift and drop a question on your plate”
“brought in upon a platter”
■ “Before the taking of a toast and tea.”
“After the cups, the marmalade, the tea”
■ “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair”
“Though I have seen my head [grown slightly
bald]”
■ “‘Do I dare?’ and ‘Do I dare’”
“Do I dare to eat a peach?”
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■ “My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to

the chin”
“I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
■ “And I have known the eyes already, known them all”
“And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat
and snicker”
Perhaps most uncanny of all (because most covert), is

the way that Eliot begins Prufrock with two verses of
terza rima written by Dante, which he quotes in Italian,
and then concludes with two verses adapted from terza
rima spoken by Prufrock:
Here is Dante:
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
And now Prufrock:
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind lows the water white and black.
We have lingered by the chambers o the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaward red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
***
To the phonetic and semantic couplets that “turn

back” to form the building stones with which Eliot
constructs “Pufrock,” we should add as well his echo-
ing of the thematic divisions of his poem – an aspect of
which I first became aware thanks to R. G. Peterson,
who has demonstrated in precise detail the uncanny
110
way in which the poem “focuses inward on its numeri-

cal center” a device that is “consistent and highly sym-
metrical, based on the repetition in reverse order of
nine thematic groupings of obviously related images”
(1976, 25). Peterson names these nine paired divisions:
“Change of consciousness” (lines 1-3 and 124-131);
“The self” (lines 4 -12 and 111-123); “The city” (lines
15-25 and 99-110); “The social self – indecision and mis-
understanding” (lines 30-34 and 87-98); “Refinement”
(lines 37-44 and 81-86); “The social self – crisis” (lines
49-53 and 65-80); “Pure sensation” (lines 55-56 and 73-
74); “Ineffectuality” (lines 57-60 and 70-72); and “Erotic
sensation” (62-64 and 67).
I’ll conclude my talk by suggesting to you that we
think of this concentric design of “Prufrock” as yet
another aspect of Eliot’s poem that points ambiguous-
ly both to “predestined failure” and to “great things.”
Peterson has Prufrock the man in mind when he inter-
prets this pattern as signifying “the extreme self-cen-
teredness of the ineffectual lover” (25). Its quite pos-
sible, however, that what was for Prufrock a stumbling
stone is, at the same time the building stone to which
“Prufrock” owes its construction.
To return to the double-meaning concealed within
the title of my talk, we may say that Eliot’s way of writing
“Prufrock” involved his displacing the predicament of
what he called the “Eliot way” onto Prufrock himself
while, at the same time, transforming the “mortal
body” of his alter-ego into the “architectural body”
of a poem that “turns back” – not from a potentially
hurtful encounter with other people – but toward a
much-desired meeting with his literary predecessors.
Prufrock himself is drowned by “human voices” at the
end of Eliot’s poem, but “Prufrock” itself is buoyed up
from its opening to its closing words by the voices of
what Eliot called “the dead poets, his ancestors.”
111
Chapter 6
Playing It in Endgame
“Since that’s the way we’re playing it . . .”
When he was asked how Beckett himself interpreted

Endgame, Jack MacGowran replied “Interdependency—
that man must depend upon his fellow man in some way
no matter how awful; a love-hate relationship between
Hamm and Clov which exists right through the play”
(McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1990, 173). Beckett further
explained that “There must be maximum aggression be-
tween them from the first exchange of words onward.
Their war is the nucleus of the play” (205; my empha-
sis). However, Beckett also said of Endgame that it was
“a cantata for two voices” (163), a remark that suggests
the uncanny presence of a covert intention in the form
of what we might call “maximum cooperation.” In a way
that may remind us of the distinction between actors
and characters with which my reading of Waiting for
Godot began, the “it” that is being “played” throughout
Endgame points in two mutually exclusive yet inextri-
cably intertwined directions: first, towards the “war”
that Hamm and Clov are waging and, second, to the
“cantata” that the actors who are playing their roles are
performing.
With respect to the war between Hamm and Clov,
Beckett said of Clov that he “is constantly not doing
what Hamm wants him to do” and that both characters
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
“hurt each other mentally. They’re mentally both very

damaged people anyway” (174). Clancy Sigal recalled
that, during rehearsals, Beckett was “fascinated as
Hamm and Clov wrench out their splendid racking
arguments” (179). We likewise learn that he urged the
actor performing what he called “Hamm’s Curse” to de-
liver these lines with “more venom” and that “[h]e walks
forward slowly and smiles intently on MacGowran and
Magee shouting hatred on each other” (183).
As Sean Weller and Dirk van Hulle point out in their
The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Fin de partie/Endgame,
Beckett was especially intent on escalating this “war”
as he was working on the English translation of his play:
Both verbal and physical forms of violence are in-

creased in the process of translation. The linguistic
violence is intensified in various ways, including
particular lexical choices, syntactical reductions,
and the addition of exclamation marks. The physical
violence is intensified through revisions to the stage
directions. (2018, 299)
Notice, in this respect, the many times that Beckett

inserts “violently” into his stage directions:
■ Hamm: How are your legs?

Clov: Bad.
Hamm: But you can move?
Clov: Yes.
Hamm: [violently] Then move! (2009, 6)
■ Hamm: [Pause. He straightens up. Violently.]
That’s enough. Back! (26)
■ Hamm: [violently] But you have the glass!
Clov: [halting, violently] No, I haven’t the glass! (28)
■ Hamm: Nothing stirs. All is—
Clov: Zer—
Hamm: [violently] Wait till you’re spoken to! (29)
■ Hamm: Then it’s not worth opening it?
114
Clov: No.
■ Hamm: [violently] Then open it! (64)
■ Hamm: Do you know what’s happened?
Clov: When? Where?
Hamm: [violently] When! What’s happened? Use
your head, can’t you! (74)
***
With respect to the “cantata for two voices” produced

by the interdependency of the actors who are play-
ing the roles of Hamm and Clov as distinct from the
characters themselves, Donald McWhinnie remarked
of Clov’s first and last soliloquys: “There’s a kind of
musical guide to the structure of his speech that is
more important than the interpretation of his speech”
(McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1990, 176). Michael Haerdter
remarked that “[i]n the Nagg-Nell dialogue Beckett sits
in front of the ashbins again like a conductor and indi-
cates intonations” (Hulle and Weller 2019, 233). We also
learn that Beckett is attentive to the symmetries that
will contribute to the cantata-like effect of Endgame. In
the prayer scene, for example, we learn from Michael
Haerdter that “he is concerned with the symmetry of
the three pairs of praying hands and the attitudes of the
heads” (209) and that he gives precise instructions to
the actors playing Nagg and Nell with respect to their
hands “at a set distance apart and their symmetrical
placement on the rims of the ashbins” (211). Speaking
of Hamm’s final monologue, Haerdter also noticed that
“Beckett has one ‘No!’ and one ‘Clov!’ inserted in order
to strengthen the melodic symmetry here as well” (224;
my emphasis).
Yet another detail related to the cantata produced
by interdependency of his actors has to do with
Beckett’s instructions to the actor playing Hamm re-
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
garding the four different voices that he must create

for his character when he recites the story of the man
who comes begging “bread for his brat”: a first for
the initial monologue, a second for Hamm speaking
to the man, a third for the man speaking to Hamm,
and a fourth for Hamm “to recite his epic” (205). We
likewise learn that Beckett, when directing the prayer
scene, emphasized the “instrumental effect which he
wants to have realised clearly and rhythmically” (229;
my emphasis). As Donald McWhinnie observes in this
respect, Beckett is “very free about stage business,
about areas of dialogue, about whether Hamm is mad,
for example. But about certain areas of the text, and
about the importance of rhythm, he is rigid” (176).
Michael Haerdter likewise alludes to the musical
effects that Beckett strove to achieve when he notes
that the play “is now fully orchestrated; in some pas-
sages the instruments even make music” (222). He also
observes that “musical terms are turning up more often
now. By ‘legato’ Beckett designates the swift, soar-
ing type of speech [that] is supposed to free the ‘pure
acting’ from a false burden of meaning. Also ‘adante’,
‘piano’, ‘scherzo’ are recurring directions” (223). Ernest
Schroeder, referring to Beckett’s orchestration of what
he calls the “script” of Endgame reminds us, once again,
of the uncanny way in which – to recall Mircea Eliade’s
interpretation of the Manole Legend – the war-like
interdependence of the “mortal bodies” of Hamm and
Clov is transformed by the actors who play their roles
into the cantata-like interdependence of the “architec-
tural body” of Endgame itself:
The marvelous musicality of this script became

evident. Supervised by Beckett with utter accuracy
in three languages, examined and improved for the
German version even to details of punctuation: when
116
such scripts are produced for the musically attuned

ear, their sense structure becomes apparent auto-
matically. Their musical and intellectual expression
converge” (239; my emphasis).
Let us now notice the curious way in which “war” and

“cantata” – as uncannily complementary forms of in-
terdependency – converge in these exchanges between
Hamm and Clov, in which the content explicitly gives
expression to their conflict but the form creates the
impression of complementarity:
■ Hamm: Go and get two bicycle-wheels.

Clov: There are no more bicycle-wheels. (2009, 8)
■ Hamm: Give him his pap.
Clov: There is no more pap. (9)
■ Hamm: Nature has forgotten us.
Clov: There’s no more nature. (10)
■ Hamm: Give me a rug, I’m freezing!
Clov: There are no more rugs. (66)
■ Hamm: Is it not time for my pain-killer?
Clov: Yes.
Hamm:Ah! At last! Give it to me! Quick!
Clov: There’s no more pain killer. (70)
■ Hamm: Put me in my coffin.
Clov: There are no more coffins.
***
A different kind of “cantata for two voices” is created

at certain places in Endgame where Hamm’s and Clov’s
spoken words echo written words that we find in the
Bible, abundant examples of which have been provided
by C. J. Ackerley, among which I’ve selected the follow-
ing for you:
■ Clov: Finished, It’s finished. (1)

John 19:30: “When Jesus therefore had received
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed

his head, and gave up his spirit.”
■ Hamm: Can there be misery – [he yawns] – loftier
than mine? (2)
Lamentations 1:120: “Behold, and see if there be
any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”
■ Hamm: And what do you see on your wall? Mene,
mene? (12)
Daniel 5:25-26: “And this is the writing that was
written Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.”
■ Hamm: But humanity might start from there all
over again! (37)
Genesis 9:1: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish
the earth.”
■ Hamm: . . . and because there won’t be anyone left
to have pity on. (37)
Psalms 69:20: “I looked for someone to take pity,
but there was none; and for comforters, but I found
none.”
■ Hamm: That the rivers and the seas will run with
fish again? (52)
Ecclesiastes 1:7: “All the rivers run into the sea.”
■ Hamm: Our Father which art—(37)
The Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father which art in heaven
. . .”
■ Hamm: Lick your neighbor as yourself! (68)
Matthew 19:19: “Thou shalt love they neighbor as
thyself”
■ Clov: When old Mother Pegg asked you for oil for
her lamp and you told her to get out to hell [. . .]” (75)
Matthew 25:8: “And the foolish said unto the wise,
Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out.”
In addition to Ackerley’s examples, we may notice a

similarly echoing effect in Hamm’s story of the man
who comes to him begging food for his son:
Well to make it short it finally transpired that what

he wanted from me was . . . bread for his brat? Bread?
118
But I have no bread, it doesn’t agree with me. Good.

Then perhaps a little corn?
[Pause. Normal tone.]
That should do it.
[Narrative tone.]
Corn, yes. I have corn, it’s true, in my granaries. But
use your head. (60)
Hamm’s narrative echoes the conversation between

Christ and the centurion who has come to ask him to
cure a servant who is suffering from palsy, a request
that Christ readily grants (Matthew 8). His mention
of his having corn in his granaries will likely call to
mind the story of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream
(Genesis 41). Hamm’s taunt to the man, in which asks if
he believes “[t]hat there’s manna in heaven still for im-
beciles like you?” (Beckett 2009, 61) is surely intended
to echo the miraculous food that the Lord gave to the
Israelites and which saved them from starving during
their forty-year journey through the desert (Exodus 16).
***
Another aspect of interdependence emerges when we

pause to think that “finish” – the first word spoken in
Endgame – refers to the uncanny way in the play itself
stages ambiguously both Hamm and Clov’s desire to
finish their relationship by ending it and Beckett’s de-
sire to finish his play by perfecting it – a goal that is
inseparable from his leaving unfinished the outcome
desired by his characters.
Nagg’s story of the tailor dramatizes as overtly as one
could possible wish this symbiosis of finishing and unfin-
ishing that occurs covertly throughout Endgame. On the
one hand, we have the Englishman, whose only concern
is that the trousers he has ordered be finished in time for
the event at which he plans to wear them and who is led
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
to exclaim in exasperated response to the tailor’s repeated

delay: “God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it’s indecent, there
are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made
the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are
not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in
three months!” (30). On the other hand, we have the reply
of the tailor, for whom finishing is much more a matter of
perfecting than of merely ending:
“But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look –

− [disdainful gesture, disgustedly]
− at the world—
− [pause]
− and look—
[loving gesture, proudly]
− at my TROUSERS! (30)
Beckett’s tailor-like devotion to the challenge of per-

fecting Endgame is memorably captured by the exchange
between himself and his wife, who attended a final re-
hearsal. In response to Suzanne’s expression of approval
– “C’est formidable” – Beckett replied, “Il y a encore du
travail à faire” (McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1990, 234). It’s
worth recalling as yet another confirmation of his fidel-
ity to his craft that Beckett decided to direct the play in
Berlin when he discovered while looking at photographs
of the first Berlin production that “’everything is wrong
in it. The ashbins are separated, you can see Hamm’s
feet, they’re touching the ground” (230).
McMillan and Fehsenfeld’s account of Beckett’s di-
recting Endspiel, the German version of Endgame for a
production at Berlin’s Schiller Theater in 1967 is filled
with details that confirm this analogy between Beckett
and the tailor. They tell us, for example, that he
[p]repared and brought with him to Berlin a

Director’s Notebook. [. . .] It consists almost exclu-
120
sively of detailed stage directions for the action at

each of the lines of the text. For the larger patterns
of actions like Hamm’s two “little turns” and Clov’s
“thinking walk” there are diagrams. At a few places
like the opening, the prayer scene, and Nagg’s curse
special tableau or mime effects significantly expand-
ing the stage directions of the text are designated.
(185; my emphasis)
We also learn that such changes as Beckett introduced

into the published text of the play “serve to create or
to reinforce verbal echoes or correspondences in the
play” and that “the majority of the changes accommo-
date the details of stage action to the themes of the
play.” They offer as an example:
One of the major motifs of the play – Clov’s constant

attempt to reach his doorway – is greatly strength-
ened by Beckett’s new directions. [. . .] Clov no longer
returns to his place each time after bringing Nagg’s
biscuit, taking Nagg’s pulse, and looking to see if
Nell is still alive. Instead, he starts from the bins
toward the door after each of these actions and is
involuntarily halted at his “spot” by a question or a
command from Hamm. (194-5)
***
The co-presence of two competing meanings of “fin-

ish,” which is made explicit in Nagg’s anecdote, is
present implicitly in the opening line spoken by Clov:
Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be

nearly finished. (Beckett 2009, 8)
For Clov, “finished” means quite simply “ended.” He

wants his punishment to be over and done with, just
as the Englishman wants work on his pants to be fin-
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
ished. We may suspect, however, that Beckett is more

interested in perfecting the arrangement of words in
Clov’s opening line than he is in bringing his suffering
to an end. We notice, in particular, that he begins with
a two-syllable word (“finished”), then a three-syllable
sentence (“it’s finished”), followed by a four syllable
phrase (“nearly finished”), concluding with a five-word
sentence (“it must be nearly finished”). Not only do
the components of the sentence build in a progressive,
rhythmical way (“rhythm” being a quality that Beckett
persistently attempted to achieve in his productions of
the play) but also that the final grouping gathers to-
gether the fragmentary words that preceded it into a
finished sentence that coexists with the unfinished goal
that it expresses.
What we sense intuitively about the tailor-like care
that Beckett may have expended on the organization
of Clov’s opening line is confirmed by Dirk van Hulle
and Shane Weller’s The Making of Samuel Beckett’s
“Endgame”/”Fin de partie,” in which the authors tell us
that “[t]he translation of this statement would prove
to be a considerable challenge to Beckett – as, indeed,
would the translation of various other remarks on end-
ing in the play. He began with:
“The end, it’s the end, it’s coming to the end, per-
haps it’s coming to the end.”
He then revised this first attempt as:
“The end, it’s the end, it won’t belong now, it can’t

be long now.”
Which he then completely changed to:

“Finished, it’s finished, it’s nearly finished, it must
be nearly finished.”
122
The first typescript reads:
“The end, it’s the end, nearly the end, it must be

nearly the end.”
He then returns to the version beginning “Finished,”

from which he deletes the second “it’s”:
“Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be

nearly finished.” (278-9)
This uncanny symbiosis between finishing and unfin-

ishing is also covertly present, in Clov’s pantomime.
On the one hand, his opening of the window curtains
is delayed by his “stiff, staggering walk” as well as by
his repeatedly forgetting to bring the step-ladder with
him: “He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at
window left. He goes out, comes back immediately with a
small step-ladder [. . .] takes six steps (for example) towards
window right, goes back for ladder.” Yet another delay
is created by his forgetting that he does not need the
ladder in order to open the ashbins: “He gets down, takes
one step towards window right, goes back for ladder [. . .] He
gets down, goes with ladder towards ashbins, halts, turns,
carries back ladder and sets it down under window right” (7).
At the same time, the unintended delay caused by
Clov’s infirmities is covertly doubled by the intention-
al delay that Beckett creates by deciding to dispense
with the stage curtain that appeared in earlier ver-
sions of Endgame and to replace it with a succession
of surrogate curtains whose opening prolongs an
operation that normally takes but an instant. Rather
than having a single stage curtain that simply opens in
one fell motion to disclose the stage to the audience,
Endgame contains two out-of-reach window curtains
that Clov will be required to open at the beginning of
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
his pantomime. His opening of these curtains is then

repeated with variations by other acts of uncovering:
of the sheet that covers the ashbins in which Nagg
and Nell are sequestered; of the covers of the ashbins
themselves, which he both opens and closes; and of the
sheet that covers Hamm. Hamm himself will complete
this sequence of uncoverings by removing the hand-
kerchief that covers his face. While the opening of the
curtain in a traditional play is “finished” (in the sense
of completed) once this operation has been performed,
this same operation, like Clov’s opening word, must
continue until Clov has “nearly finished” a routine that
will then be completed by Hamm.
Another curious feature of Beckett’s finishing
this “unfinished” way of opening the stage curtain is
the ambiguous relationship between both seeing and
not seeing that it creates. In a conventional play, the
opening of the curtain allows us to see what, until that
moment, we had not been able to see. In Endgame,
however, each experience of seeing is also a kind of not
seeing. After opening each of the curtains, Clov looks
out of the windows that had been hidden from our
view; we, however, see only the windows themselves,
not what lies on the other side of them. So also with the
removal of the sheet covering the ashbin as well as the
opening of their covers: Clov sees, and reacts to, what
lies within each, but we don’t. Similarly, when he re-
moves the sheet covering Hamm, we only partially see
Hamm, whose face is covered by a large handkerchief;
even when Hamm removes the handkerchief, our expe-
rience of seeing is “unfinished” because he is wearing
dark glasses that conceal his eyes from our inspection.
Clov’s pantomime – in which the opening of the
surrogate stage-curtains is both finished and un-
finished – is paralleled throughout Endgame by his
declared purpose of leaving Hamm. Beckett himself
124
wittily alluded to the “unfinished finishing” of Clov’s

leavetaking when he observed that “[i]n Godot, the au-
dience wonders if Godot will ever come, in Endgame,
it wonders if Clov will ever leave” (qtd. McMillan and
Fehsenfeld 1990, 163). Rather than allowing Clov to
finish leaving Hamm, Beckett repeatedly echoes his
initial resolve to leave by inventing for it a number of
appropriately unfinished variants. Here is their first
exchange on this subject:
Clov: Why do you keep me?

Hamm: There’s no one else.
Clov: There’s nowhere else.
[Pause.]
Hamm: You’re leaving me all the same.
Clov: I’m trying. (2009, 13)
Moments later, Hamm is surprised to discover that the

promised departure has not yet occurred:
Hamm: Well! I thought that you were leaving me.

Clov: Oh not just yet, not just yet. (16)
Beckett will then have Clov hesitate to leave before

exiting, not to the outside, but to his kitchen:
Hamm: All right, be off.

[He leans back in his chair, remains motionless. Clov does
not move, heaves a great groaning sigh. Hamm sits up.]
I thought I told you to be off.
Clov: I’m trying.
[He goes to the door, halts.]
Ever since I was whelped.
[Exit Clov.] (21)
Towards the middle of Endgame, Hamm and Clov

engage in an inconsequential exchange that leads
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nowhere but that does allow Beckett to introduce yet

another variation of unfinished leavetaking:
Clov: So you all want me to leave you?

Hamm: Naturally.
Clov: Then I’ll leave you.
Hamm: You can’t leave us.
Clov: Then I won’t leave you. (45)
An additional echo occurs when Clov’s promise to

leave fails to elicit a direct response from Hamm:
Clov: I’ll leave you

Hamm: Did you ever think of one thing?
Clov: Never.
Hamm: That here we’re down in a hole. (46)
In a later exchange, Hamm and Clov will shift roles:
Hamm: I can’t leave you.

Clov: I know. And you can’t follow me. (53)
In the final scene of Endgame, we see Clov – who a few

moments previously has uttered his final I’ll leave you”
(88) – preparing to leave rather than actually leaving:
“Enter Clov, dressed for the road. Panama hat, tweed coat,
raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag. He halts by the door
and stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed
on Hamm, till the end” (90).
We may notice in this final variation that the stage
direction “he halts,” along with interrupting Clov’s im-
minent leave-taking, uncannily echoes the stage-direc-
tion that Beckett had given for his very first approach
to Hamm: “He whistles. Enter Clov immediately. He halts
beside the chair” (10). Clov’s final “halt” – along with “un-
finishing” his departure – may recall for us the literally
dozens of times throughout Endgame that Beckett has
126
given him this stage direction. To these, we could add

the hundreds of times that both Hamm and Clove – in
the midst of finishing an action – are made to leave it
unfinished by the stage direction “pause.”
Beckett likewise introduces a variation on Clov’s
unfinished departure by echoing it in certain exchang-
es between Nagg and Nell, as for example:
Nell: Have you anything else to say to me?

Nagg: No.
Nell: Are you quite sure?
[Pause.]
Then I’ll leave you.
Nagg: Do you not want your biscuit?
[Pause.]
I’ll keep it for you.
[Pause.]
I thought you were going to leave me.
Nell: I am going to leave you. (26)
Shortly before this exchange, we saw that joining to-

gether is as “unfinished” for them as is leave-taking:
Nagg: Kiss me.

Nell: We can’t.
Try.
[Their heads strain towards each other, fail to meet, fall
apart again.]
Nell: Why this farce, day after day? (21)
In yet another variation, we see Hamm, who wishes

that Nagg and Nell would finish their conversation,
adapts Clov’s opening words to his own purposes:
Hamm: [exasperated] Have you not finished? Will

you never finish?
[With sudden fury.]
Will this never finish? (30-31)
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We notice an additional echo of Clov’s unfinished de-

parture in the as-yet-unfinished dog that he has been
making for Hamm:
Hamm: You’ve forgotten the sex.

Clov: But he isn’t finished. The sex goes on at the end.
[Pause.]
Hamm: You haven’t put on his ribbon.
Clov: [angrily] But he isn’t finished, I tell you! First
you finish the dog and then you put on his ribbon!
[Pause.] (39)
***
I’ll finish where I could have begun by saying a few

words about the chess metaphor implied by the title
that Beckett chose for Endgame. The most intriguing of
the comments made about the “uncanny design” that
makes a game played on a board into a play performed
on a stage was offered, unsurprisingly, by Beckett him-
self, who had this to say about Hamm:
He’s the king in this chess match lost-from-the-

start. He knows from the beginning that he is
making meaningless moves; for instance that he
won’t get anywhere with the boat gaff. Now at last
he’s making a couple of meaningless moves still,
as only a poor player does, a good one would have
given up long ago; he’s only trying to postpone the
unavoidable end. Each of his motions is one of the
final useless moves to delay the end.” (qtd. McMillan
and Fehsenfeld 1990, 228)
The uncanny transformation of a predicament into a

technique that we began by noticing in Nagg’s anec-
dote of the tailor will emerge one last time for us when
we notice the curious way in which the meaningless
128
moves that Beckett attributes here to Hamm are co-

vertly doubled by his own highly meaningful moves.
The speech that Beckett called “Nagg’s curse” may
lead us to suspect Hamm’s meaningless moves – are, in
fact, the unfinished “counter-attack” that he has been
making throughout his long life in response to a move
made by his parents a long time ago:
Whom did you call when you were a tiny boy, and
were frightened, in the dark? Your mother? No. Me.
We let you cry. Then we moved you out of earshot,
so that we might sleep in peace.
I was asleep, and happy as a king, and you woke me
up to have me listen to you. It wasn’t indispensable,
you didn’t really need to have me listen to you.
I hope the day will come when you’ll really need to have
me listen to you, and need to hear my voice, any voice.
Yes, I hope I’ll live to then, to hear you calling me like
when you were a tiny boy, and were frightened, in the
dark, and I was your only hope. (2009, 64)
Hamm’s futile counter-attack to the “offstage” move that

his parents made by ignoring his cries may be observed
in every detail of his “onstage” behavior, including:
■ The “lamentation” that he utters in his opening

words:
“Can there be misery –
[he yawns]
– loftier than mine? (9)
■ His threat to starve Clov:
“I’ll give you just enough to eat to keep you from
dying. You’ll be hungry all the time.” (12)
■ His asking for relief from his own pain:
“Is it not time for my pain killer?” (6)
■ His cruelty to his parents:
“The old folks at home! No decency left! Guzzle,
guzzle, that’s all they think of.” (16)
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■ His refusal to offer food to the man who has begged

“bread for his brat”:
“Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on
earth, there’s no cure for that!” (77)
Hamm’s failed effort to avenge his parents’ attack with

an effective counter-attack is covertly transformed
throughout Endgame into Beckett’s successfully de-
ploying a great many moves that – rather than declar-
ing war on each other – contribute to the proliferation
of cantata-like echoes throughout the play.
The most intriguing of these echoes has to do with
the way in which a play that begins with “finished” –
a word that we expect to find at its conclusion – ends
with its final episodes arranged in such a way as to
suggest the symmetrical arrangement of pieces at the
beginning of a chess match – before, that is, any moves
have been made. On one side of the board, we have as it
were, the “white pieces” played by the opening scenes
of Endgame:
■ Clov’s immobility (“brief tableau”)

■ Clov’s pantomime (uncovering)
■ Clov’s monologue
■ Hamm’s monologue
■ Dialogue between Hamm and Clov
Facing them from the other side of the board are the
“black pieces,” played by the concluding episodes:
• Dialogue between Hamm and Clov

• Clov’s monologue
• Hamm’s monologue
• Hamm’s pantomime (covering)
• Hamm’s immobility (“brief tableau”)
130
In the production of Endspiel that he directed in

Berlin in 1967, Beckett made a number of additional
“meaningful moves” whose purpose, as McMillan and
Fehsenfeld explain, was to “bring the end of the play
into closer parallel with the beginning” (1990, 202-3; my
emphasis). Among these, let’s notice in particular:
■ “In the production text, Hamm’s two interventions

[into Clov’s first monologue] are omitted. Clov’s
first and last long speeches are uninterrupted
monologues delivered as if Hamm did not exist.”
■ “Both monologues are punctuated almost exactly
midway by the identical stage direction ‘slight
move to the door immediately checked.’”
■ “Hamm’s dialogue and action at the beginning and
end are also made to coincide more exactly.”
■ “Hamm’s action with the handkerchief is changed
in the production text to give greater emphasis to
the prop as a drape at the beginning and end of the
play.” (203)
The interplay throughout Endgame of the “maximum

aggression” displayed by the actions of Hamm and
Clov and the “maximum cooperation” that we observe
in the construction of the play itself reminds me of a
passage from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace in which
the author offers us a distinction – between the futile
desire for vengeance and the search for another way
of restoring a balance that has been disturbed – that
captures so perfectly the difference between Hamm’s
“meaningless moves” and Beckett’s alternative strat-
egy: “When we are harmed by someone reactions are
set up within us. The desire for vengeance is a desire
for essential equilibrium. We must seek equilibrium on
another plane” (2002, 6).
131
Chapter 7
Crafting Transfigurations in A Short
History of Decay
“The entire political and spiritual mission of young

Romanians must be summed up in the absolute de-
sire for a transfiguration [. . .] the metamorphosis of
our entire way of life.”
– Transfiguration de la Roumanie
“Wisdom is the last word of an expiring civilization,

the nimbus of historic twilights, fatigue transfigured
into a vision of the world . . .”
– A Short History of Decay
In his essay entitled “Sur Cioran: esquisse de défrag-

mentation,” Norbert Dodille draws our attention to
“two little tales” that Emil Cioran tells – one about
the difference between French and Romanian eating
habits and the other about the distinction between his
early minor work, written in Romanian, and the mas-
terpieces that he produced after deciding to switch to
French. As Dodille points out, we tend neither to in-
vestigate the eating habits of the residents of Rășinari
(Cioran’s birthplace) in order to establish the validity
of the first of these distinctions nor to ask ourselves
whether Cioran’s Romanian oeuvre is as lacking in lit-
erary merit as he claimed (Dodille and Liiceanu 1997,
86). With respect to French vs. Romanian eating habits,
Cioran had this to say:
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
I was staying in a little hotel in the Latin Quarter. On

the first day, when I went down to the reception desk
to place a phone call, I came upon the receptionist,
his wife and their son as they were in the midst of
deciding on their luncheon menu. They were pre-
paring it as though it were a battle plan! I was so
amazed. In Romania, I always ate like an animal, that
is to say, unconsciously. I realized that, in Paris, eat-
ing is a ritual, a civilized act, almost the statement of
a philosophical position.
And now for the difference between his writings in

Romanian and in French:
When I wrote in Romanian, I did it without thinking;

I simply wrote. Words were not independent of me. [. .
.] in French, writing was no longer an instinctive act,
as it had been when I wrote in Romanian; it required
deliberation, just as eating was no longer an inno-
cent act. (Cioran 1995, 28-9)
Cioran also said of On the Heights of Despair, originally

written in Romanian, that “it’s very badly written [. .
.] it can’t be translated because it has no rigor; it’s the
Romanian style – everything about it is wrong” (316). In
his Pléaide edition of Cioran’s oeuvre, from which the
books written in Romanian are conspicuously absent,
Nicolas Cavaillès confirms this distinction when he
comments that Cioran arrived in Paris as a Romanian
writer with nothing more than countless pages that
had been written “to flatter his demons or his fruit-
less ambitions; pages that were worthy, at best, to be
thrown into the sewers of the City of Light and the
dustbin of history” (2013, 1300).
Wittily echoing the title of one of the most popular
of the books that Cioran wrote in French, L’inconvenient
d’être né, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston retrospectively des-
134
ignates “the inconvenience of being born Romanian”

as Cioran’s principal subject before his departure for
Paris and “the inconvenience of being born” plain and
simple after his arrival there. As she explains: “Being
Romanian was for Cioran a calamity he did everything
in his power to transcend” (2009, 11-12). Cioran him-
self added credence to this view when he said: “I want
to cure myself of my birth in a death agony beyond the
continents, in the shifting sands of a desert, in an im-
personal shipwreck” (qtd. 86). According to Zarifopol-
Johnston, Cioran’s later writings are still about his
“juvenile errors,” such as one finds in the virulent an-
ti-Semitism of La Transfiguration de la Roumanie, but
Cioran himself is now a “contemplative commentator
on his own past. The wound is now hidden from view
under writing which has sublimated the martyred au-
thor’s ordeal. The bandage – writing – is the wound’s
only trace, and the sufferer, now a master of style, is in
control of his agony” (14-5; my emphasis).
Similarly, Patrice Bollon maintains that Cioran
“spent his whole life hovering about his Romanian
mistake” (1997, 27; my emphasis), that “ the philosophi-
cal and political interest of his work has entirely to do
with this subterranean disavowal of his past,” that “ev-
erything he wrote was never anything more than the
consequence, the ceaseless commentary on this false
step (28; my emphasis), and that “it is important to re-
turn to the Romanian years in order to understand how
he, ‘the just man,’ could have committed such a blunder
(30; my emphasis). Thanks to his adoption of French as
the language in which he would write his mature work,
he becomes, according to Bollon, “a new Cioran – a
blank page, or nearly so, on which he would be able to
write a new destiny [. . .] a ‘second birth’” (121).
Alexandra Lavignel-Lavastine interprets this
“blank page” as a sign of Cioran’s duplicitous attempt
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
to dissimulate behind the pretense of his being a “man

without a biography” his flirtation with the Iron Guard
during his Romanian period. She further opines that
the rarity of interviews that Cioran gave in France is
“not unconnected from his concern with hiding his
political years. [. . .] The reflex of protectionism and
solidarity created an extremely effective screen that
blocked the revelation of analyses and documents that
would have thrown a compromising light on his past”
(2002, 124). It’s worth noting in this respect that Cioran
created, not a blank page, but a blank chapter in the
1990 Romanian edition of Schimbarea la față a României
by deleting chapter 4, which contained the notorious
remarks about Jews in particular, but also Hungarians,
Roma, and his fellow Romanians themselves.
Constantin Tacou, in his preface to the 2009 French
edition, comments in this respect that Cioran’s
first writings in Romanian – this “youthful folly”

– were a constant source of reproach for him and
remained for him a source of deep concern. Fearful
of misunderstandings, he foresaw with a tormented
lucidity the negative echoes and perverse effects that
his youthful writings could have in the contempo-
rary context and particularly in Romania, which had
just emerged from fifty years of a dictatorship and
where the public was not used to seeing points of
view freely expressed. (2009, 10)
***
In a way that will remind us of the uncanny return of

Fernando Pessoa’s Lisbon: What Every Tourist Should See
in his The Book of Disquiet, what I find most intriguing
about this two-part division of Cioran’s career is the
“telltale tingle” produced by our reading his early minor
work Schimbarea la față a României (Transfiguration de la
136
Roumanie) in tandem with his later masterpiece, Précis

de decomposition (A Short History of Decay). What emerg-
es is not the effort to hide or in some way to come to
terms with a guilty past but, rather, the persistence of
Cioran’s longing for transfiguration. In Transfiguration
de la Roumanie, this takes the form of his prophetic dream
of transfiguration, which he explicitly avows every-
where that one looks; in A Short History, he implicitly
transforms this dream of a prophet into the craft of an
anti-prophet. No longer a future prospect that he wishes
for Romania, it becomes, rather, an activity pursued in
the present moment that he – a Romanian writer now
writing in French – is constantly bringing to fruition.
In place of the transfiguration of Romania into a nation
worthy of a role on the world stage, Cioran now shifts
his attention to the challenge of producing a world-class
literary masterpiece.
In her preface to Transfiguration de la Roumanie,
Marta Petreu points out that Cioran was preceded by
two other writers who used the word “transfiguration” in
relation to the question of Romanian identity. Constantin
Rădulescu-Motru wrote that “the transfiguration experi-
enced by Romanian society in the last century as a result
of political influences is a nearly unprecedented fact in
the history of human societies.” Dimitrie Drăghicescu ,
noting that Romanian history is essentially the result of
borrowings from its various conquerors, concluded that
“our history is thus a series of transfigurations” (19).
Cioran himself used the expression “transfigura-
tion of Romania” for the first time in a letter written in
Munich and dated 29 April 1934, in which he says (in a
remark whose implications for the future direction of
his writing are obvious) that
[f]rom the moment that I am certain that a transfig-

uration of Romania is illusory, the Romanian ques-
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
tion will no longer exist for me. The entire political

and spiritual mission of young Romanians must be
summed up in the absolute desire for a transfigura-
tion [. . .] the metamorphosis of our entire way of life.
(qtd. Marta Petreu in Cioran 2009, 18-9)
In Transfiguration, Cioran presents himself as a nation-

alist prophet who announces that “[t]he worst wound of
Romania [is] the breath of byzantine spirituality which,
grafted onto a different culture, becomes paralysis”
(95) and argues that “[i]f we could be perfectly objective
with respect to Romania, it would matter little to us
whether or not it played a role on the world stage. [. . .]
But someone passionately attached to Romania could
not accept that she be condemned in perpetuity to the
mediocre destiny that has been hers until now” (108).
The dream of transfiguration that Cioran the prophet
has in mind comes to the fore when he desclares to
his compatriots that “[o]ur existence could acquire
meaning only through a definitive and essential leap
[. . .] a limitless ardor so that our life could become
fire, our élan vital infinite, and our ruins no more than
memories” (129). The metaphor of fire appears once
again when he abjures them “to solemnly swear to be
different, to burn in the flames of blind fanaticism, to
set ourselves ablaze in the name of an other vision, to
have, as our only thought, another Romania” (130).
Long after the publication of Transfiguration,
Cioran admitted, in a brief essay entitled “Mon Pays,”
to his own difficulty in believing in the possibility of
bringing to fruition this prophetic dream of transfig-
uration. As he says there, “I became the object of my
hatred. I hated my country, everyone in the universe; it
remained for me to go after myself: which I did by fol-
lowing the detour to despair.” To which he then adds:
138
I attached myself to my country because I sensed that

it gave me the pretext for a thousand torments and, in
thinking about it, I would have at my disposal a mine
of suffering. I found at hand an inexhaustible inferno
where my pride could be exasperated at my own ex-
pense. And my love was a punishment that I demand-
ed against myself and a ferocious Don Quixotism. (68)
***
I want now to consider five ways in which Cioran’s

dream of transfiguration in Transfiguration is trans-
formed into his crafting transfigurations in A Short
History of Decay. The first of these concerns the prophet
himself, who – having written a minor work – returns
as the anti-prophet, who becomes the author of a mas-
terpiece. At the outset of A Short History, Cioran asks
himself: “Having killed the prophet in me, how could
I still have a place among men?” (1998, 7). The answer
– as is clearly indicated by the title of the section in
which this question appears – is that he becomes the
“anti-prophet” who, rather than proposing a solution to
the Romanian problem as he had in The Transfiguration,
declares that “[t]he abundance of solutions to the as-
pects of existence is equaled only by their futility,”
the revelation of which would discourage anyone who
“would try to be effective and to turn himself into a
savior” (6). He likewise praises the mind for which
“true and false have ceased to be superstitions, thanks
to which it becomes the ‘destroyer of all criteria’” (95)
A central feature of this self-transfiguration emerg-
es when we consider Zarifopol-Johnston’s observation
that Cioran’s image of himself as “the ‘abuser of the
universe,’ its ‘universal calumniator,’ are carefully
constructed versions of himself” (2009, 9; my empha-
sis). As she points out, already in the early Romanian
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
work On the Heights of Despair, we see Cioran devising

for himself a theatrical role in the form of the would-
be suicide, a role that allows him to commit suicide
“metaphorically while managing to survive the call
of death by releasing through his invented character
the surplus of lyrical energy he felt surging through
him” (77). Cioran confirmed the idea of his theatrical
self-transfiguration in an interview that he did with
Gerd Bergfleth. When Bergfleth pointed out that
Cioran had said somewhere that Macbeth was his “al-
ter-ego,” he replied: “Absolutely. [. . .] When I think of
Macbeth, I identify with him, and when I think about
him, he remains my brother. Macbeth is a thinker, just
like Hamlet” (Cioran 1995, 153). I’m reminded as well
of Sanda Stolojan’s observation that his aphorisms are
“the theater in which Cioran produces his brilliant
mental performances.” They are a stage on which he
presents, as though they were characters in a play by
Shakespeare, “his moods and his ideas” (Dodille and
Liiceanu 1997, 47). Stolojan adds to this the highly per-
tinent remark that the “vehemence and melancholy”
that one finds in Cioran’s confessions “make one think
of the desolation of Ecclesiastes and the disenchant-
ment of Hamlet, this other expert on the subject of
fatal lucidity” (49).
Patrice Bollon describes this aspect of Cioran’s
self-transfiguration with particular pertinence: “To
think thus amounts for him to exploring the ‘impasses’
of thought, to making an inventory of the obstacles that
trip up the ‘speculative thinker’ whose every movement
towards the exterior are blocked and interrupted by the
very complexity of his attitude” (1997, 150). Bollon like-
wise points out that “one of the major ‘trademarks’ of the
French Cioran [is] the balancing between several opposed
propositions that are presented as equally true and be-
tween which no choice appears to be possible” (92).
140
In Transfiguration, Cioran the prophet is an “abuser”

of various ethnic groups who serve, albeit in quite dif-
ferent ways, as obstacles to achieving the nationalist goal
of becoming a “great culture.” With respect to the Jews,
for example, he tells his fellow Romanians that “[i]f we
gave absolute freedom to Jews, I am sure that they would
change everything, including the name of our country”
(2009, 241-2). In A Short History, Cioran, now transfigured
into an “abuser of the universe,” attacks humanity in gen-
eral without distinction as to ethnicity. Man becomes, in
effect, his own obstacle. We learn, for example, that “[t]he
human being delivered to himself, without any partiality
for elegance, is a monster” (1998, 9); that the human
mind “yields to the temptations it has sought to es-
cape” (9); that “[c]reator of values, man is the delirious
creature par excellence, victim of the belief that some-
thing exists” (14); that “true madness is never due to
chance or to the disasters of the brain, but to the false
conception of space the heart creates for itself. . . .” (27);
and that the human soul is “the most corrupt place that
exists between earth and heaven [. . .] the place where
madness lies down in tenderness, cloaca of utopia and
den of dreams” (30).
***
The second way in which a prophetic dream is transfig-

ured into anti-prophetic craft concerns the shift from
Romanian, which Cioran describes as an “extremely
elastic language,” into French, a “straight-jacket”
language that he found to be “completely sclerotic.”
His adoption of French as the language in which he
would write despite the enormous inconvenience that
it represented allowed him to exchange the impossibil-
ity of transfiguring Romania into the mere difficulty of
transfiguring himself into a French writer. The self-de-
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
structive passions that had placed him in futile conflicts

with others are now replaced by an apprenticeship that
he shares with native-speakers of French. It was while
studying French, in fact, that Cioran discovered how
much this difficulty of writing French correctly was
troubling even to native speakers of French: “you don’t
find that in German literature; no one speaks of the
difficulty of writing in it, at least on the level of expres-
sion. It’s a French obsession” (Cioran 1995, 45-6). To
which he adds that “there is, above all, the superstition
of perfection. [. . .] To say that so and so writes German
perfectly doesn’t really mean anything. The same thing
with English. In any event, no one says it. (76). What he
calls “the torture of writing in French” (308) is, to be
sure, a repeated lament in his interviews.
***
The third aspect has to do with the return in A Short

History of certain keywords that had previously appeared
in Transfiguration in such a way that their originally
prophetic implications have now become anti-prophetic.
Whereas Zarifopol-Johnston speaks of a wound that has
become hidden from view, I find more intriguing the
pervasive presence of these words that go unnoticed by
readers who focus too narrowly on the “guilty secrets”
that Cioran is presumably intent on hiding.
In Transfiguration, for example, the first-person plu-
ral pronoun refers exclusively to Romanians, to whom
Cioran issues such reprimands as: “The organicist
conception of natural evolution condemns us to iner-
tia, to the slowness and the sleepiness which have been
our lot for a millennium of anonymity.” (Cioran 2009,
106); “Psychologically, we have not shown a tendency
towards effective solidarity, and historically, not being
a nation, we have been deprived of a foundation upon
142
which to construct solidarity” (237); and “[h]ow happy

we would be, we Romanians, if someone exaggerated
our raison d’être to the world, if we were embraced by
a destiny that we caressed in secret, in a holy delirium
of grandeur” (242-3). In A Short History, this pronoun
returns, but it now designates, not Romanians in par-
ticular, but humanity in general, as when Cioran the
anti-prophet tells all of us that “[w]e must be thankful
to the civilizations which have not taken an overdose of
seriousness, which have played with values and taken
their pleasure in begetting and destroying them” (1998,
8); “Ennui is like a sickness we have survived, but one
which has absorbed our possibilities, our reserves of
attention and has left us impotent to fill the void which
follows upon the disappearance of our pangs and the
fading of our torments” (15); and “[w]e betray ourselves,
we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable,
each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, begin-
ning with our own” (17).
I offer you here a selective list of the many key-
words whose implications are similarly “transfigured”
by Cioran’s craft as they pass from Transfiguration to A
Short History:
Ardor
Transfiguration: “Our existence could acquire
meaning only through [. . .] a limitless ardor so
that our life could become fire.” (129)
A Short History: “Before our old age, a time will
come when, retracing our ardors, and bent be-
neath the recantations of the flesh, we shall walk,
half-carrion, half-specter [. . .]” (62)
Cosmic
Transfiguration: “. . . great cultures are composed
of totalities possessing a cosmic character whose
grandeur surpassed the human.” (109)
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
A Short History: “Like the mind, the heart creates

utopias: and of them all, the strangest is the utopia
of a natal universe, where we rest from ourselves,
a universe that is the cosmic pillow of all our las-
situdes.” (32-3)
Destiny
Transfiguration: “Having acquired an ethnic iden-
tity, the French people crossed the threshold of
history. This is how it is with every people who
possess a destiny.” (86)
A Short History: “Decomposition presides over the
laws of life: closer to our dust than inanimate ob-
jects to theirs, we succumb before them and rush
upon our destiny under the gaze of the apparently
indestructible stars.” (40)
Ecstasy
Transfiguration: “I see the culmination of a great
culture in the ecstasy of its force” (2009, 113).
A Short History: “Man should listen only to him-
self in the endless ecstasy of the intransmissible
Word.” (17)
Glory
Transfiguration: “A nation that is not haunted by
the obsession with glory is deprived of a vital driv-
ing force, secret but no less effective.” (2009, 109)
A Short History: “I resign from movement, and
from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole
glory [. . . ]” (24)
History
Transfiguration: “History signifies cultures [. . .]
which achieved individuality on all levels, of which
they created convergences and relationships that,
although internal, could be grasped.” (83)
A Short History: “History is nothing but a proces-
sion of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised
144
to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the

improbable.” (86)
Prophecy
Transfiguration: “He who does not become in-
volved in prophecy [. . .] is deprived of a life in the
future.” (81).
A Short History: “In the fervent mind you always
find the camouflaged beast of prey; no protection
is adequate against the claws of a prophet [. . . ]” (4)
Rupture
Transfiguration: “At a certain moment in their
somnolent evolution, a fruitful rupture occurs
which raises them [minor cultures] to the level of
great cultures.” (105)
A Short History: “This [the poetry of Shakespeare
and Shelley] is the hernia of the image, the tran-
scendent rupture of poor words, born of everyday
use and miraculously raised to the heart’s alti-
tudes.” (65)
Saved
Transfiguration: “In great cultures, the individual
is saved.” (114)
A Short History: “The poet would betray himself
if he aspired to be saved: salvation is the death of
song, the negation of art and of the mind.” (28)
Solution
Transfiguration: “Each great culture is a solution
to all the problems.” (83)
A Short History: “The abundance of solutions to
the aspects of existence is equaled only by their
futility.” (6)
***
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
The fourth aspect of the transfiguration of the proph-

et’s dream into the anti-prophet’s craft concerns the
way that the impressive dimensions of the monu-
ments created by major cultures return (as they did in
Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet) as vast, dimen-
sionless spaces. In Transfiguration, Cioran had told his
readers that
The builders of cathedrals at the dawn of the mod-

ern period, the builders of pyramids in Egypt or the
heroes of the Homeric world lived without distancing
themselves from their creations; each stone that they
placed, each sacrificial gesture contributes to strata
arranged according to a definite world order, an ar-
chitecture that, whether cosmic or divine, had little
to do, in any case, with the merely human. (2009, 85)
These become in A Short History such examples of an

even more impressively extra-human order as:
The Abyss
“No gleam to slow our descent: the abyss sum-
mons us, and we lend an ear.” (52)
“Who has not coveted ignominy in order to sever
for good the links which attach him to others [. . .]
and thereby to reach the peace of the abyss?” (56)
“What perfection of the abyss have I come to, that
there is no space left for me to fall in?” (134)
“Who can fail to see the moment coming when
there will be no more religion, when man, lucid
and empty, will have no word on hand to desig-
nate his abyss?” (137)
The Desert
“I want to be cured of my begetting in an agony
outside the continents, in some fluid desert, in an
impersonal shipwreck” (57)
“I have no desire to people my deserts by Your
146
presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to

dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.” (86)
“There was a time when solitaries stripped them-
selves of everthing, in order to identify with them-
selves; in the desert or in the street, delighting
in their nakedness, they attained to the supreme
fortune, they were the equals of the dead . . .” (173)
Nothingness
“The only initiation is to nothingness.” (12)
“If with each word we win a victory over nothing-
ness, it is only the better to endure its reign.” (17)
“Labor builds on nothingness, creates and consol-
idates myths.” (23)
“I have sought for the geography of Nothingness,
of unknown seas and another sun.” (57)
Ruins
“It is because all men who cast a glance over their
past ruins imagine – in order to avoid the ruins
to come – that it is in their power to recommence
something radically new.” (68)
“On the ruins of Knowledge, a sepulchral lethar-
gy will make us al into specters, lunar heroes of
Incuriosity . . .” (137)
“In the realm of art [. . . ] an “ideal” is established
only on the ruins of its predecessor.” (178)
The Void
“Where can so much Void and Incomprehensibility
lead?” (10)
“And if we meet others, it is to degrade ourselves to-
gether in a race to the void, whether in the exchange
of ideas, schemes, or confessions.” (17)
“[. . .] while on life’s circumference, the soul prome-
nades, meeting only itself over and over again, itself
and its impotence to answer the call of the Void.” (22)
“Thus melancholia emanates from our viscera and
joins the cosmic void.” (28)
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***
A final aspect of Cioran’s crafting of transfigurations

comes into view when we notice that the expository
prose in which he wrote Transfiguration is itself trans-
figured in A Short History into a kind of prose that
adopts at times the techniques of poetry. Cioran him-
self alludes to this particular aspect of his craft when
he notes that:
Whereas verse permits everything – you can pour

into it tears, shames, ecstasies, complaints above
all – prose forbids you to give vent, to lament: its
conventional abstraction is opposed to overflowing.
Prose requires other truths: verifiable, deduced,
measured. But what if you were to steal those of po-
etry, if you pillaged its substance and dared as much
as the poets? Why not insinuate into discourse their
indecencies, their humiliations, their grimaces and
their sighs. (99)
Here, then, are some examples of Cioran “insinuating”

poetic figures into his expository prose:
Climax
“Nostalgia for a world without ‘ideals,’ for an
agony without doctrine, for an eternity without
life [. . .]” (6-7)
Hyperbole
“The zigzagging of a gnat seems to me an apoca-
lyptic enterprise.” (24)
Identity of Opposites
“In this slaughterhouse, to fold one’s arms or to
draw one’s sword are equally vain gestures.” (38-9)
148
Metaphor
“Apart from a few examples of exhaustive mel-
ancholy, and a few unequalled suicides, men are
merely puppets stuffed with red globules in order
to beget history and its grimaces.” (66)
Metonymy
“When we refuse to admit the interchangeable
character of ideas, blood flows [. . .] firm resolve
draws the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter.” (4)
Paradox
“Give life a specific goal and it immediately loses
its attraction.” (11)
Parallelism
“Once man loses his faculty of indifference he be-
comes a potential murderer; once he transforms
his idea into a god the consequences are incalcu-
lable.” (3)
Personification
“Under the sun triumphs a carrion spring; beauty
itself is merely death preening among the buds. .
. .” (68)
Syllepsis
“I resign from movement, and from my dreams.” (24).
***
I’ll conclude by suggesting – with Mircea Eliade’s in-

terpretation of the Manole Legend in mind – that we
should read A Short History of Decay – not as a “blank
page” that conceals Cioran’s early work – but as the
“architectural body” of a literary monument whose
construction was made possible by the sacrifice of the
“mortal body” of Transfiguration de la Roumanie. Both
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
the minor work and the masterpiece into which Cioran

transfigures it converge in a way that creates an uncan-
ny reciprocity between (remembering Bernardo Soares
remark about “anything and everything”) a hindrance
and a marvel. We may think of this convergence as in-
volving the transfiguration, in Cioran’s own words, of
the “tears” that he cannot shed because of “a defective
functioning of the lachrymal glands [that] dooms us to
the martyrdom of dry eyes” (43) into “the transcendent
rupture of poor words” (65).
150
Chapter 8
Being Misfits in “A Good Man
is Hard to Find”
“I call myself ‘The Misfit,’ he said, ‘because I can’t

make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone
through in punishment.’”
The uncanny design of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

emerges right at the beginning of Flannery O’Connor’s
short story when the grandmother warns her son Bailey
against taking his family to Florida:
Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is

aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward
Florida and you read here what it says he did to these
people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children
in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it.
I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did. (1955, 9)
The telltale tingle that Vladimir Nabokov promises to

wise readers is produced by our noticing – not simply
that “The Misfit” is the name of a dangerous criminal
who has escaped from a federal prison – but that he
calls himself “The Misfit.” The sentence spoken by the
grandmother is itself a misfit because we expect it to
begin with her warning Bailey of a “fellow that they call
The Misfit.” We quickly realize that “being misfits” –
which I have chosen as the title of my talk – applies not
only to the protagonist whom O’Connor has burdened
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with this personal predicament but also – uncannily, in

the event – to the narrative technique that she has cho-
sen for her way of writing the story – what Frederick
Asals has called “her aesthetics of incongruity.”
O’Connor compounds this ambiguity by having
The Misfit designate himself as he does, not because
of some anti-social act that he has committed, but be-
cause of an unjust act committed against himself. As
he tells the grandmother: “I call myself The Misfit [. . .]
because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all
I gone through in punishment” (28). His defeat by this
initial misfit is further deepened by the unsatisfactory
explanation offered to him by the psychiatrist who
treated him at the penitentiary:
It was a head-doctor at the penitentiary said what

I had done was kill my daddy but I know that for a
lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the
epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it. He
was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist church-
yard and you can go there and see for yourself. (26)
His deepening of his predicament by such discrepan-

cies as these leads him, as well, to interpret the gospel
account of Jesus raising the dead in a way that brings
him to yet another predicament:
He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off

balance. If he did what he said, then there’s nothing
for you to do but throw away everything and follow
Him, and if he didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do
but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way
you can – by killing somebody or burning down his
house or doing some other meanness to him. “No
pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had
become almost a snarl. (28)
152
The Misfit tells the grandmother that – whatever the

specifics of his crime – he was “buried alive” in the
penitentiary (25), and O’Connor has, to be sure, bur-
ied him alive in the self-inflicted “prison” that she has
devised for him and from which there is no exit. As he
said of life in the prison, so also with life in O’Connor’s
story: “Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up, it was a
ceiling, look down it was a floor” (130). The one escape
that he imagines – by creating a “fit” between pleasure
and meanness – leads him to the terminal misfit that he
expresses in the story’s concluding words: “It’s no real
pleasure in life” (133).
O’Connor suggested at times that The Misfit could
potentially have what she called an “afterlife” beyond
the impasse to which he arrives at the end of her
story. She described him, for example, as “a ‘spoiled
prophet’ who could go on to great things” (1988, 465).
Elaborating on this idea, she asserted that
I don’t want to equate The Misfit with the devil. I

prefer to think that, however unlikely this may seem,
the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard-seed, will
grow to be a great crow-filled tree in The Misfit’s
heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to
turn him into the prophet that he was meant to be-
come. But that’s another story. (1969, 112-3).
T. W. Hendricks echoes O’Connor’s suggestion by

interpreting The Misfit’s concluding words about the
grandmother as implying his belief that
he could have been the grandmother’s sentinel. If he

had been the grandmother’s sentinel, he would have
warned her to give up her banal and hypocritical ver-
sion of Christianity and seek a deeper involvement
with Christ. In this respect The Misfit is following
the example of Ezekiel, who urged the Jewish exiles
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
to stop thinking about the Temple as the home of

Yahweh and seek him in their own hearts instead.
(2009, 208)
I’d like to suggest as an alternative to this reading that

we look for signs of The Misfit’s “afterlife” – not in the
“another story” that O’Connor never wrote – but in the
“architectural body” of the most famous story that she
ever did write and in which she has so craftily immured
as well as immortalized him. O’Connor herself alludes
to the uncanny transformation of a protagonist who
has made himself “The Misfit” into a story that is itself
made of misfits in her essay, “The Grotesque in Southern
Fiction,” in which she explains that her work is “almost
of necessity going to be violent and comic, because of
the discrepancies that it seeks to combine” (1969, 43; my
emphasis). O’Connor’s art of combining discrepancies
emerges throughout “A Good Man” in so many small
details whose effect depends on the incongruities that
they contain. Among these, we notice that Bailey’s wife,
who has a face that “was as broad and as innocent as a
cabbage,” is wearing “a green head-kerchief that had two
points on the top like rabbit’s ears” (1955, 9). His mother
has a “big black valise that looked like the head of a hip-
popotamus” (10). The cotton field that they drive past “has
five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small
island” (12). Bailey’s jaw is described as being as “rigid as
a horseshoe” (17) when he refuses the children’s request
to take a detour past the house with the secret panel
about which the grandmother has told them. When their
car overturns, the family’s cat is described as “clinging
to his neck like a caterpillar” (19). The woods into which
they will be led to their slaughter “gaped like a dark open
mouth” (21). Hiram, one of The Misfit’s henchmen, is
described as taking Bailey (a young man) “by the arm as if
he were assisting an old man” (23).
154
Along with such details, we also notice O’Connor’s

authorial crafting of misfits in certain of the names
that she fashions for her characters, including: “Butts,”
which is Red Sammy’s surname but also a slang term
for buttocks; “Mr. Teagarden,” which is both a proper
name and common noun; “The Tower,” which refers
both to a medieval castle and to Sammy’s Butts’ gas
station/diner. To these examples, we could add “Bailey,”
which, although generally used as a surname, is the
given name of the son in the story. Furthermore, as Hal
Blythe has suggested, his name may remind us – incon-
gruously, in the event – of Harry Bailey, the inn keeper
in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Blythe
argues that O’Connor’s story is an ironic rewriting of
Chaucer’s masterpiece in which, however, she recounts
a journey to death rather than to renewal. Having ob-
served that both “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and
The Canterbury Tales combine the taking of a vacation
with a spiritual goal and arguing that O’Connor’s
purpose in writing the story – which is a rewriting of
“The Pardoners Tale” (in which the protagonists, while
searching for gold, meet their deaths) is to contrast –
we could say to dramatize the “misfit” between – the
medieval and modern worlds with respect to religious
values. Blythe then concludes that the meaning of the
story rests with the message that “the modern world
is a nonspiritual place, devoid of goodness, ruled by
mammonism and evil, and the reward is not a seat in
heaven or even the Tabard Inn, but a puddle of blood in
the Georgia dirt” (1996, 51).
O’Connor also creates incongruities with respect
to small factual details. The restaurant where the fam-
ily stops for lunch, for example, is described as “set in
a clearing outside of Timothy” (1955, 6). As Hallman
Bryant has usefully pointed out, however, there isn’t
any town in Georgia called “Timothy” (303). This leads
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
him to conjecture that O’Connor may have chosen this

name in order to evoke the book of the Bible called
Timothy. One passage, in particular, “He [the husband]
must manage his own family well and see that his
children obey him with proper respect” (1 Timothy 3:
4-5) comments ironically on Bailey’s insufficiencies
as a father. Bryant also calls attention to the misfit
between two contradictory meanings of the image of
the tower that are evoked by the name of Red Sammy’s
establishment: “In Christian iconography towers are
ambivalent symbols, that is, they speak in bono or in
malo, to use the vocabulary of medieval exegetes, and
can represent either good or evil quality” (305).
Thanks to Hallman Bryant, I discovered yet anoth-
er misfit with respect to a small detail in O’Connor’s
mention of Stone Mountain as one of the sights the
family passes by on their journey to Florida: “She
[the grandmother] pointed out interesting details of
the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in
some places came up to both sides of the highway; the
brilliant red clay banks streaked with purple; and the
various crops that made rows of green lace-work on
the ground” (3). As Bryant informs us, however, “Stone
Mountain, which is north of Atlanta, could not have
been on the route of a family travelling south from
Atlanta to Florida” (302).
The most memorable of the misfits that contrib-
ute to the construction of the “architectural body” of
A Good Man is arguably O’Connor’s portrayal of The
Misfit himself, which combines any number of cannily
contrived discrepancies. We notice, above all, the in-
congruous relationship between the horrific cruelty of
the slaughter over which The Misfit presides and his
polite formality, which is particularly observable in his
way of speaking: “Good afternoon,” he said. “I see you
all had you a little spill” (126); “The boys want to ask
156
you something,” he said to Bailey. “Would you mind

stepping back in them woods there with them?” (128);
“I’m sorry I don’t have on a shirt before you ladies,” he
said, hunching his shoulders slightly. (129); “Lady,” he
asked, “would you and that little girl like to step off
yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and join your hus-
band?” (131).
As for his being shirtless, The Misfit explains to
the grandmother that “[w]e buried our clothes that
we had on when we escaped and we’re just making do
until we can get better. We borrowed these from some
folks we met” (129). Readers who have been alerted to
O’Connor’s fondness for “making discrepancies” will
think that she may have her own authorial reasons for
arranging this detail. Among the ways in which it con-
tributes to the construction of her story, we notice that
it allows her to create a strikingly incongruous portrait
of The Misfit’s physical appearance:
The driver got out of the car and stood by the side
of it, looking down at them. He was an older man
than the other two. His hair was just beginning to
gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave
him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face
and didn’t have on any shirt or undershirt. He had
on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was
holding a black hat and a gun. The two boys also had
guns. (126)
Along with creating a misfit between his scholarly

appearance and his bare midriff, The Misfit’s shirtless-
ness affords O’Connor the doubtlessly pleasurable op-
portunity of having him don Bailey’s yellow shirt after
he has ordered her son’s murder:
Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back from the

woods. Bobby Lee was dragging a yellow shirt with
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
bright blue parrots in it.
“Throw me that shirt, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said.

The shirt came flying at him and landed on his
shoulder and he put it on. The grandmother couldn’t
name what the shirt reminded her of. (130)
One senses – perhaps with a telltale tingle or two – the

pleasure that O’Connor herself must have experienced
while inventing such cruelties as these – a pleasure
that makes her, in effect, The Misfit’s double – with
the difference, of course, that she deprives him of the
pleasure that she reserves for herself.
***
Looking now at O’Connor’s story as a whole for signs

of the “architectural body” into which the mortal body
of The Misfit has passed we notice the ways in which
– having created what appears to be an unbridgeable
discrepancy between its two parts, in the first of which
the family is setting off on a Summer vacation, in the
second of which they are all murdered – O’Connor
then sets about in so many ways to “build bridges” by
making them mirror each other. In this respect, the
overall design of the story has the same incongruous
shape as the small details that it contains. Red Sammy
and The Misfit, for example, seem to have nothing in
common – one is the self-described “[f]at boy with the
happy laugh,” the other is a sociopath who murders
people. We notice, though, that O’Connor – in a way
that will remind us of the incongruity between The
Misfit’s scholarly appearance and his shirtless torso
– creates a comparable misfit between Sam’s highly
flattering self-advertisement on the signs that promote
his combination garage and restaurant and the quite
158
contrasting description that he gives of his physical

appearance: “His khaki trousers reached just to his
hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a sack
of meal swaying under his shirt” (7). We notice, too,
that both Red Sammy and The Misfit have nicknames,
the difference being that, while Red Sammy had been
given his by other people, The Misfit’s is self-chosen.
He uses this name in a highly unconventional way (to
blame others rather than himself) – while Red Sammy’s
nickname lends itself to a conventional explanation
(his complexion or his red hair). The phrase “a good
man,” which O’Connor has the grandmother apply to
both men, likewise “combines discrepancies.” The first
time that the grandmother uses it, she is obviously flat-
tering Red Sammy as well as implicitly asserting her
control of the situation (she is the one who offers the
authoritative explanation of Red Sammy’s behavior). In
the second of them, control has decisively shifted from
her to The Misfit and the phrase that had been used so
confidently now acquires an air of desperation.
Other examples of O’Connor’s using her “aesthet-
ics of incongruity” to bridge the discrepancies between
the two parts of her story include her use of the word
“sprang” to connect The Misfit’s reaction when the
grandmother reaches out to him – “he sprang back as if
a snake had bitten him” (22) to two earlier episodes: one
in which “[t]he monkey sprang back into the tree” (14)
and the other in which “Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto
Bailey’s shoulder” (19). The cemetery that the family
passes in part one returns in part two as the town of
Toomsboro, Georgia, which O’Connor, who renames it
“Toombsboro,” makes into the uncannily appropriate
resting place of the grandmother and her family. The
promise of a secret panel with which the grandmother
entices the children is similarly echoed by the “gaping”
mouth of the woods through which they pass to their
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
deaths. The grandmother’s concern for how she might

appear to onlookers should she be killed in a highway
accident:
Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed

with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple
spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of
an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway
would know at once that she was a lady. (11)
returns in the masterfully constructed misfit that is our

final glimpse of her:
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and

stood over the ditch, looking down at the grand-
mother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood
with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her
face smiling up at the cloudless sky. (29)
The detail of the cloudless sky itself sends us back to

the earlier episode in which the children are imagining
the clouds as resembling cows and automobiles as well
as to the later one in which The Misfit, “look[ing] at the
six of them huddled together in front of him, remarked
‘Ain’t a cloud in the sky . . . Don’t see no sun but don’t
see no cloud neither’” (15).
Perhaps the most intriguing of the misfits that
contribute to the ”architectural body” into which
The Misfit has been transformed has to do with the
relationship between the treat that the grandmother
promises the children – in the form of an old plan-
tation with a secret panel – and the woods in which
they will go to a hidden place. Here is the grandmother
remembering the plantation: “She said the house had
six white columns across the front and that there was
an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wood-
en trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat
160
down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden” 16).

Realizing that Bailey won’t waste time making a detour
to “an old house,” she embellishes her memory of the
plantation in a way that she know will appeal to the
children: “‘There was a secret panel in this house,’ she
said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she
were, ‘and the story went that all the family silver was
hidden in it when Sherman came through but it was
never found . . .’” (16-7; my emphasis).
When the grandmother realizes her mistake (the
plantation is actually in Tennessee), “her feet jumped
up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the
valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the bas-
ket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat
sprang onto Bailey’s shoulder” (18-9) – a sequence of
events that culminates in their car’s overturning and
their fateful meeting with The Misfit. At first glance,
we would be inclined to conclude that, not only their
car overturned, but that the destination promised by
the grandmother has turned into its opposite. We may
wonder, however, if O’Connor – more crafty even than
the grandmother in this respect – may have staged
what we call a “covert double” of a Southern plantation
as the setting that she, in her turn, has chosen for the
slaughter of the family.
We notice, in this respect, that the first half of “A
Good Man” contains several references to the dis-
tinction between white and black Southerners. When
the grandmother sees what the narrator describes as
“a Negro child standing in the door of a shack,” she
says to the children, “Oh look at the cute little pickan-
ninny.” When June Star remarks that “[h]e didn’t have
any britches on,” she usefully explains to him that “[h]
e probably didn’t have any [. . . .] Little niggers in the
country don’t have things like we do” (12). Remember,
too, the grandmother’s story about the “nigger boy”
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
who ate the watermelon on which had been carved

the letters “E. A. T” – the initials of Mr. Edgar Atkins
Teagarden, which he mistakes for an invitation to
“eat,” which he accepts.
Such references as these to racial distinctions disap-
pear in the second part of “A Good Man,” but the image
of the “large cotton field with five or six graves fenced
in the middle of it” (12) may possibly return – and, if so,
in a strikingly uncanny way – in “the woods, tall and
dark and deep” (20) that will become the “unfenced”
cemetery of the family. The possibility that O’Connor
would like her readers to see that the grandmother’s
mistake about the location of the old plantation has
made the family into unwitting players in a “disguised
reenactment” of plantation life acquires a degree of
plausibility when we think about their curiously pas-
sive acceptance of the orders given to them by The
Misfit, which makes them, as it were, his virtual slaves.
It may well be that O’Connor would like us to see The
Misfit that she has made between the grandmother’s
recollection of the plantation as a place “where you sat
down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden” and
the horrendous cruelty of plantation life that she has
staged in this disguised reenactment. To this, we could
add the further possibility that the slaughter of the
family in obedience to The Misfit’s orders should be
seen as the covert double of the “scorched earth” pol-
icy pursued during the Civil War under the leadership
of General William Tecumseh Sherman – an episode
in Southern history to which the grandmother refers
when she tells the children that the owners of the plan-
tation hid their silver “when Sherman came through.”
Our suspicion that O’Connor not only has an excep-
tional talent for inventing misfits but that she also finds
in making them the pleasure in meanness that she denies
to The Misfit is surely aroused, as well, when we see her
162
having the grandmother bargain with The Misfit at the

end of her story by offering him “all the money I’ve got”
(21) – an offer to which (doubtlessly with O’Connor’s
blessing) he responds, with appropriate meanness,
“there never was a body that gave the undertaker a tip”
(21). O’Connor likewise draws upon her own ample re-
serves of cruelty when she describes the grandmother
as ”rais[ing] her head like a parched old turkey hen cry-
ing for water” (21) and, a moment later, as not knowing
what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank
down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her” (22).
O’Connor also makes a presumably pleasurable misfit
between the violence of the murder – “he shot her three
times through the chest” – and the calm that immedi-
ately follows: “Then he put his gun down on the ground
and took off his glasses and began to clean them” (22).
To this, O’Connor adds the misfit between The Misfit’s
cruel order for the disposal of the grandmother’s corpse
and the solicitude that he displays towards “Pity Sing,”
the family’s cat, whose name incongruously recalls
“Pitti Sing” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado”
and who alone survives the slaughter: “‘Take her off and
throw her where you thrown the others,’ he said, picking
up the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg” (22).
I’m reminded here of Patricia Yaeger’s contention
that “a poetics of torture [. . .] becomes the foundation
of O’Connor’s best work” (Rath and Shaw 1996, 187), an
aesthetic that accounts, in Yaeger’s words, for “the plea-
sure she asks us to feel in the pain her characters endure
[. . .] the extraordinary display of cruelty and laceration
in O’Connor’s fictions and the repression of this lacer-
ation by the sleeping critic” (188-9). Yaeger further con-
tends that “[i]t is this punitive subjectivity, this delight
in sadism, that gives O’Connor’s stories their peculiar
vivacity. [. . . ] O’Connor’s fictions give pleasure because
of their perverse dalliance with sadistic agency” (190).
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
Another uncanny aspect of O’Connor’s “aesthetics

of incongruity” emerges when we shift our attention
from the personal meanness that O’Connor has fash-
ioned for her protagonist to the spiritual meaning that
she attributes to her story. She tells us in one of her
essays that the writer “is looking for one image that
will connect or combine or embody two points; one is
a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not vis-
ible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just
as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees”
(O’Connor 1988, 42). In “A Good Man,” this “point in
the concrete” occurs when the grandmother has a sud-
den revelation just before she is shot dead:
His voice seemed to crack and the grandmother’s

head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face
twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry
and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies.
Your one of my own children!” She reached out and
touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang
back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three
times through the chest. Then he put his gun down
on the ground and took off his glasses and began to
clean them. (1955, 22)
We may think that this is nothing more than a hor-

rifically cruel scene of a killing in which the grand-
mother’s reaching out to The Misfit is a desperate
attempt to save her own life. However, as O’Connor
explained to her audience at Hollins College in 1963,
the grandmother’s gesture is precisely the kind of ac-
tion that “indicates where the real heart of the story
lies.” O’Connor has also described the grandmother’s
recognition of The Misfit as one of her babies was “a
moment of grace” (1969, 112). As she explains in a letter
to John Hawkes:
164
The Misfit is touched by the Grace that comes

through the old lady when she recognizes him as
her child, as she has been touched by the grace that
comes through him in his particular suffering. Her
shooting her is a recoil, a horror at her humanness,
but after he has done it and cleaned his glasses, the
grace has worked in him and he pronounces his
judgment: she would have been a good woman if
he had been there every moment of her life. True
enough. (1988, 389)
O’Connor returns to this point in an essay titled “On

Her Own Work,” in which she explains that “while pre-
dictable, predetermined actions have a comic interest
for me, it is the free act, the acceptance of grace partic-
ularly, what I always have my eye on as the thing which
will make the story work. In the story, ‘A Good Man Is
Hard to Find,’ it is the grandmother’s recognition that
The Misfit is one of her children; in ‘The River,’ it is the
child’s peculiar desire to find the kingdom of Christ; in
‘The Artificial Nigger,’ it is what the artificial nigger
does to reunite Mr. Head and Nelson. None of these
things can be predicted. They represent the working of
grace for the characters” (1969, 115). O’Connor further
suggests that the writer’s search for the “point in the
concrete” that will join the visible to the invisible will
be mirrored by the reader’s participation – whether
conscious or not – in making this misfit work: “[He]
makes this connection from things he is shown. He
may not even know that he makes the connection, but
the connection is there nevertheless and it has an ef-
fect on him” (99).
Many of O’Connor’s readers have not only made
this connection between the visible meanness of “A
Good Man” and its invisible meaning but have de-
cribed its “effect” on them at some length. I’ll begin
with Marshall Gentry, who argues that
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
[o]ne aesthetic problem with the notion that

O’Connor’s characters can be transformed only
by an external force is that it raises doubts about
whether many of them are transformed. Not every
work by O’Connor ends unambiguously, or should,
but if the ultimate state of a character’s soul depends
upon a momentary acceptance of grace, an action
impossible to dramatize completely, then the climax
of virtually every work by O’Connor occurs, as it
were offstage. (1985, 76)
In other words, there will necessarily be a “misfit” be-

tween the visible event and its invisible significance. On
the visible level, we see the grandmother reaching out
to touch The Misfit who responds, not by touching, but
by shooting her. On the invisible level, however, both The
Misfit and the grandmother are touched by “a moment
of grace.”
Katherine Keil, for her part, sees a parallel between
the grandmother and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient
mariner: they are both alienated from their fellow man,
and both are rescued from their alienation by a “wretch-
ed” creature – the mariner by his glimpse of water snakes,
the grandmother by her encounter with The Misfit: “At
the moment of her earthly death, she is awakened to their
conjoinment in divine creation” (2006, 46). Jessica Hooten
replaces “alienation” with “extreme individualism,”
which O’Connor thinks may “leave people as self-focused
wanderers without community who use other as means
to their own ends” (2008, 198). Hooten then contends that
the grandmother “loses her earthly life, but in the last
moment when she renounces her individualism, she may
also be finding spiritual life” (200). In similar spirit, Doyle
Walls argues that “[v]iolence serves as a catalyst to pro-
duce the grandmother’s moment of grace at the climax
of the story, when she ‘makes the right gesture’ to The
Misfit.” He contrasts this with her failure to “make the
166
right gesture” in the episode involving the naked black

child. Walls sees in this contrast an allusion to Matthew
5:31-46, in which Jesus separates the sheep, who clothed
him, from the goats, who claimed not to have noticed his
nakedness” (1988, 44).
***
I began my talk by pointing to the uncanny way in

which the first sentence spoken by the grandmother –
“Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose
from the Federal Pen” – is not only about The Misfit
but is itself a misfit because of the way that it departs
from the common usage of this epithet. Let’s conclude
now by noticing the even more blatant misfit between
the title of “A Good Man” and the legendary blues song
from which it is borrowed. The emotional effect of this
capstone with which O’Connor completes the “archi-
tectural body” of her story depends on our knowing its
source – a romantic ballad in which a clear distinction
is maintained throughout between “a good man” and
“the other kind”:
A good man is hard to find,

You always get the other kind,
Just when you think that he is your pal
You look for him and find him fooling ‘round some
other gal,
Then you rave, you even crave
To see him laying in his grave;
So if your man is nice
Take my advice
And hug him in the morning
Kiss him every night,
Give him plenty lovin’, treat him right
For a good man nowadays is hard to find.
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
O’Connor’s fondness for combining discrepancies is

amusingly at work in her suggesting that The Misfit
– who appears to be so obviously “the other kind” –
may actually be the good man who would have made
a good woman of the grandmother that “[s]he would
have been a good woman [. . .] if it had been somebody
there to shoot her every minute of her life” (1955, 22).
The “wise readers” among us may experience one last
”telltale tale” when we realize that, whether or not The
Misfit was the good man that the grandmother needed,
he most certainly was, not only “a good man,” but the
perfect man to keep O’Connor company as she was
writing her most perfect story.
168
Chapter 9
Framing Things in Light in August
“Now the final copper light of afternoon fades; now

the street beyond the low maples and the low sign-
board is prepared and empty, framed by the study
window like a stage.”
I first read William Faulkner’s Light in August as a

graduate student in the 1960s, but its uncanny design
didn’t emerge for me until fairly recently while read-
ing Randall Wilhelm’s article “Framing Joe Christmas:
Vision and Detection in Light in August,” in which the
author argues that the narrator of Faulkner’s novel “uses
the window frame for a variety of narrative functions,
each one implicated in the framing of Christmas as a
murderer” (2011, 401; my emphasis). The word “frame”
has, of course, always been a commonplace in discus-
sions of Light in August, but, like so many other readers
and teachers, I had always used it exclusively to describe
Faulkner’s way of surrounding the main story of the
novel – which involves the tragic fates of Joe Christmas,
Gail Hightower, and Joanna Burden – with the comic
“frame-tale” of Lena Grove’s quest to find the father
of her baby, who is nearly born in the first chapter and
then recently born in the last. Faulkner himself (in a
comment quoted by Wilhelm) refers to this aspect of
framing when he compares a writer’s arranging the key
episodes of his work to “dressing a showcase window”
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
and then continues by saying that “It takes a certain

amount of judgement and taste to arrange the different
pieces in the most effective place in juxtaposition to one
another” (Gwynn and Blotner 1995, 45).
Thanks to Wilhelm’s article, I realized for the first
time that Faulkner uses framing ambiguously both as an
instrument of accusation and as an aesthetic technique:
the members of the novel’s fictional community unjust-
ly frame (in the sense of “arraigning”) certain characters
as guilty of punishable acts and Faulkner frames (in
the sense of “arranging”) the incriminating stories that
they tell in such a way as to produce a quite different
effect on his readers. The forward movement of the plot
of Light in August, which begins with the framing of Joe
Christmas as a “nigger” and concludes with his lynch-
ing as a “murderer,” coexists uncannily with the static
structure of the novel as a whole, which is epitomized by
the frame-tale with which it begins and ends as well as
by the celebrated passage in which the narrator, allud-
ing to John Keats’s “Ode on A Grecian Urn,” compares
Lena Grove’s slow progress to the seemingly motionless
movement of mule-drawn wagons:
Backrolling now behind her a long monotonous suc-

cession of peaceful and undeviating changes from
day to dark and dark o day again, through which
she advanced in identical and anonymous and de-
liberate wagons as though through a succession of
creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something
moving forever and without progress across an urn”
(2002, 7)
***
As Wilhelm points out, in a novel which is replete

with powerful visual renderings of violent scenes, we
are not actually shown the murder of Johanna Burden.
170
All that we know as reasonably certain is that Joanna

intended to shoot Joe, but that the gun she had chosen
as the murder weapon misfired:
They [Joanna’s eyes] were as still as the round black

ring of the pistol muzzle. But there was no heat in
them, no fury. They were calm and still as all pity and
all despair and all conviction. But he was not watch-
ing them. He was watching the shadowed pistol on
the wall; he was watching when the cocked shadow
of the hammer flicked away.” (282-3)
After noting Faulkner’s reticence in this regard as well

as the absence of any tangible proof of Christmas’s
guilt (bloodstains on the clothing of a murderer who
nearly severed the head of his victim with a razor, for
example), Wilhelm cites Stephen Meats’ contention, in
his article “Who killed Joanna Burden?,” that the more
probable killer is Joe Brown. After reviewing the avail-
able evidence, Meats concludes with a “reasonable
doubt” defense for Joe Christmas, whose “guilt is an
assumption and nothing more” followed by a criticism
of “all of us – the sheriff, Gavin Stevens, Percy Grimm,
the community, and the reader [who] are more than
ready to pass judgment” (Meats 1971, 277).
Wilhelm then develops Meats’ critique by detailing
the various ways in which the narrator – mimicking, in
this respect, the behavior of the townspeople – man-
ages to imply Christmas’s guilt without ever actually
proving it; in this, he is abetted by readers of Light in
August, who “are unaware that their vision is not “natu-
ral, but constructed” (Wilhelm 2011, 399; my emphasis).
According to Wilhelm, the authority invested in the
novel’s omniscient narrator offers him “a position of
supreme visual power and control, a position crucial
for his arrangement of the reader’s experience in Light
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
in August” (399; my emphasis). He further contends

that “[t]he narrator repeatedly frames Christmas in a
series of boundary structures such as windows, doors,
mirrors, ponds, even pools of light – that mark him as
a visual cipher to be read, always within the context of
the murder he has supposedly committed or will com-
mit in the future” (400). He notices, for example, that
“[t]he boy’s nightly escapades are framed by the win-
dow from which he escapes the McEachern home and
the narrator spends a lavish amount of time describing
Joe’s slow descent from the darkened window down
the side of the house past the sleeping foster-parents”
(402). Faulkner’s presumed motivation is to suggest to
the reader “the archetypes of the ‘rebellious child’ and
‘the thief in the night’.” Similarly, Faulkner’s use of a
barn door to frame “Joe’s punishment for not learning
the Presbyterian catechism” creates “a boundary struc-
ture that directs the reader’s gaze and foregrounds Joe
as one compromised by sin” (402).
Wilhelm concludes his ethical reading of Light in
August by suggesting that what is at stake in Faulkner’s
decision to have Christmas’s story told by a narrator
who tendentiously shapes it so that “there is only one
possible killer and only one possible motive” (397) is
his authorial intention of encouraging his readers
to eventually recognize their susceptibility to being
duped: “Through the use of his narrator/arranger – the
‘private eye’ who leads others astray – Faulkner sug-
gests that our cultural vision is selfishly myopic at best,
criminally blind at worst, and for all our knowledge and
humanity we can never be certain that we really see
what we are looking at” (406). Wilhelm likewise detects
signs of a moralizing intention in Faulkner’s use of
the comic frame tale to distract our attention from the
tragedy that has befallen Joe Christmas: “Forgetting
about Joe is a moral crime Faulkner suggests, but one
172
which is taken lightly [. . .] the reader seems to fall for

this escape rather easily” (405).
***
With Wilhelm’s ethical reading of Light in August as my

starting point, I would now like to draw your atten-
tion to the quite different aesthetic use of framing that
emerges when we notice the uncanny way that framing
passes from the “mortal bodies” of the characters in
Light in August, for whom it is a predicament, into the
“architectural body” of the novel, for which it is a tech-
nique. Let’s observe to begin with that the foundation
upon which Light in August rests is framed by a firmly
maintained distinction between “white folks” and
“niggers.” The word “nigger” (which occurs approx-
imately 130 times) makes its first appearance in Joe
Brown’s complaint that his job at the saw mill involves
his “starting in at daylight and slaving all day like a
durn nigger” (Faulkner 2002, 44), and is used for the last
time by the unnamed furniture repairer and dealer who
refers to Jefferson as the town “[w]here they lynched
that nigger” (497). Most of its intervening appearances
serve to divide the townspeople into two mutually ex-
clusive communities. Mooney, the foreman at the saw
mill, clearly distinguishes between the work habits of
each group: “a nigger wouldn’t last till the noon whis-
tle, working on this job like some white folks work on
it” (44); we are later reminded of the strict segregation
of the races by the suggestion that Joe Christmas, if
the so-called truth about his Negro blood is revealed,
risks being sent to “the nigger orphanage”; much later,
he lives in the “nigger cabin” on Joanna Burden’s prop-
erty (79), and Joanna herself wants him to study law
at a “nigger school” (276). The sexual mores of Negro
women are likewise held to be different from those of
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
white women, a detail that comes to light when the

Negro woman who lives with Hightower says that she
quit because he asked her to do something that was
“against God and nature,” to which some of the young-
er men respond that “if a nigger woman considered it
against God and nature it must be pretty bad” (72).
The most detailed exposition of this foundational
distinction between the two races is offered by Gavin
Stevens, who presents a lengthy explanation as to why
Joe Christmas, after escaping from jail, undertakes
a flight that takes him alternately to back and white
communities:
But his blood would not be quiet, let him save it. It
would not be either one or the other and let his body
save itself. Because the black blood drove him first
to the negro cabin. And then the white blood drove
him out of there, as it was the black blood which
snatched up the pistol and the white blood which
would not let him fire it. And it was the white blood
which sent him to the minister, which rising in him
for the last and final time, sent him against all reason
and all reality, into the embrace of a chimera, a blind
faith in something read in a printed Book. (449)
***
We next notice that the accusatory framing of Joe

Christmas as someone guilty of blurring the boundary
between “niggers” and “white folks” is itself aesthet-
ically framed by Faulkner’s making him the central
panel of a triptych of characters whose side panels
“frame” Gail Hightower, and Joanna Burden – by whom
this transgression is shared: Joe is a “white nigger,”
Joanna is a “nigger lover,” and Gail Hightower is said
to have sexual relations with a Negro woman. Our first
encounter with Joe Christmas’s accusatory framing oc-
174
curs in chapter 6, when the dietitian at his orphanage,

fearing that he will reveal her sexual encounter with her
lover, decides to tell the matron about his Negro blood.
The actual truth about Joe’s ancestry is, to be sure, ob-
scure; he is a Negro only by conjecture. (Faulkner had
given him a Negro father in an early draft of Light in
August but left his parentage indeterminate in the pub-
lished version). So indistinguishable is he with respect
to skin color from the other children at this all-white
orphanage, that it is only his “framing” as a Negro by
the dietician that will, as it were, make him one: “‘All
I need do is to make the madam believe,’ she thought.
And then she thought He will look like a pea in a pan
full of coffee beans” (130). Joe is similarly framed by the
other children at the orphanage, all of whom call him
“Nigger” (127). He subsequently frames himself when
he tells his girlfriend Bobbie “I got some nigger blood
in me” (196); not long afterwards, he is beaten for being
a “a nigger son of a bitch” (218).
Gail Hightower himself has no “nigger blood”; fur-
thermore, he was born and bred into a well-to-do south-
ern family, had a father who served in the Confederate
Army, and was well on his way to becoming a respected
pillar of the community when he arrived in Jefferson to
serve as the minister in its Presbyterian church. His fa-
ther, however, did not share the community’s acceptance
of slavery: “But though born and bred and dwelling in
an age and land where to own slaves was less expensive
than to not own them, he would neither eat food grown
and cooked by, nor sleep in a bed prepared by a negro
slave (467). We learn as well that his father was “an abo-
litionist almost before the sentiment had become a word
to percolate down from the North” (472).
What we might then call the suspect “abolitionist
blood” that was passed on to Hightower by his father
manifests itself in certain aspects of his behavior that
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
frame him as an outsider. He allows a Negro woman to

live with him in his house (71), for which “un-white”
misdeed he is beaten unconscious by the Ku Klux Klan
(72) and, as we had learned just a bit earlier, was judged
as “done damned” by the community as a whole (60-
1). His having delivered a stillborn baby to a Negro
woman further contributed to this accusatory framing:
“Because within two days there were those who said
that the child was Hightower’s and that he had let it die
deliberately” (74).
Joanna Burden, although unambiguously white,
possesses the equivalent of “nigger blood” in the eyes
of the community. As Byron Bunch explains to Lena
Grove, who has asked him about the house that she sees
burning in the distance: “It’s a right big old house. It’s
been there a long time. Don’t nobody live in it but one
lady, by herself. I reckon there are folks in this town
will call it a judgment on her, even now.” Byron then
enumerates the offenses that would lead the communi-
ty to regard the destruction of Joanna’s home as a sign
of divine retribution: “Her folks come down here in
the Reconstruction to stir up the niggers. Two of them
got killed doing it. They say she is still mixed up with
niggers. Visits them when they are sick, like they was
white. Won’t have a cook because it would have to be a
nigger cook. Folks say she claims that niggers are the
same as white folks. That’s why folks don’t never go out
there” (53). As Joanna herself tells Joe Christmas, her
Yankee origins frame her in the eyes as the community
as an undesirable alien: “They hated us here. We were
Yankees. Foreigners. Worse than foreigners: enemies.
Carpetbaggers. . . .” She likewise supposes that Colonel
Sartoris was considered a “townhero” for killing her
grandfather and her brother (249).
***
176
Faulkner also turns the accusatory framing directed

against Joe Christmas to aesthetic purposes by cre-
ating a second triptych of characters formed by Lena
Grove, Byron Bunch, and Lucas Burch who are framed
as violating marital rather than racial norms, a form
of waywardness, however, that attracts, at worst, only
mild rebukes rather than condemnation. Lena Grove is
framed as an unmarried mother. However, unlike her
brother, who, upon discovering her pregnancy, “called
her whore” (6), Armstid, who drives her into Jefferson,
notices – but in a nonjudgmental way – “ that she wears
no wedding ring” (12), and he expects that “womenfolk
are likely to be good [to Lena] without being very kind”
(12). Armstid’s wife is actually more than kind to Lena,
telling her to stay off her feet rather than helping in the
kitchen (17) and giving her own savings to the unwed
mother-to-be before she departs (22). She chastises
Lena, not for her pregnancy, but for her naïve belief
that Lucas will welcome her arrival wherever he hap-
pens to be: “And you believe that he will be there when
you get there. Granted that he ever was there at all.
That he will hear you are in the same town with him,
and still be there when the sun sets” (21).
Byron Bunch, in turn, is framed as an unmarried fa-
ther. His friend Gail Hightower warns him against serving
as Lena’s would-be husband: “there begins to come into
Hightower’s puzzled expression a quality of shrinking
and foreboding as Byron talks quietly, telling about how
he decided after they reached the square to take Lena on
to Mrs. Beard’s” (82-3). Hightower likewise counsels him
against “attempting to come between man and wife” (307)
and advises him to marry a virgin rather than sacrific-
ing himself “to a woman who has chosen once and now
wishes to renege that choice” (316). The price that Byron
pays for failing to follow Hightower’s advice is, however,
nothing more than his becoming occasionally the object
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THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
of good-natured scorn: “Byron Bunch, that weeded another

man’s laidby crop, without any halvers. The fellow that took
care of another man’s whore while the other fellow was busy
making a thousand dollars” (416).
Lucas Burch, for his part, has fathered a child
without, however, bothering to become a husband. He
flees from Lena shortly after discovering that he has
impregnated her and, after arriving in Jefferson, moves
into the “nigger cabin” where Joe has been living.
Upon entering the cabin after the birth of Lena’s baby
(and where he expects that his reward for identifying
Joanna Burden’s killer awaits him) and discovering
the unwelcome surprise that does actually await him
there – “he was gone, through the window, without
a sound, in a single motion almost like a long snake”
(432). As was true with Byron, however, Lucas’s way-
ward behavior leads to nothing more threatening than
his becoming the object of sarcasm. He is described
as a man who “was just living on the country like a
locust” and who “can’t even do a good job of shirking.”
He reminds Byron of “one of these cars running along
the street with a radio in it. You cant make out what it
is saying and the car aint going anywhere in particular
and when you look at it close you see that there aint
even anybody in it” and Mooney, his foreman, “of a
horse. Not a mean horse. Just a worthless horse” (37).
***
This technique of framing of characters in such a way as

to contribute to the formal design of Light in August may
also be observed in Faulkner’s framing the episodes of
this novel. We notice this technique most obviously in
his arrangement of the novel’s first and last chapters:
Lena arrives in Jefferson in chapter 1 and departs in
chapter 21. In both chapters, she comes and goes in
178
the company of an amicable man – first Armstid, then

the unnamed furniture dealer – who offers to take her
in their wagons. Her first thought, expressed silently
in the opening paragraph of the novel, is “I have come
from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama
a-walking. A fur piece” (3). The final words of the novel,
which she speaks aloud, echo this thought: “My, my.
A body does get around. Here we aint been coming
from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already
Tennessee” (507). A similar framing occurs between
the story that Lena tells Mrs. Armstid in chapter 1
about Lucas leaving her – whose purpose is to deceive
her into believing that Lucas is better than he is by in-
venting a tale about his going in search of better work
prospects – and the story that the furniture repairer
and dealer tells his wife in chapter 21 for the purpose
simply of amusing her at Byron’s expense.
Faulkner adds to this effect of aesthetic framing by
likewise arranging the first and last appearances of Joe
Christmas and Gail Hightower: Christmas arrives at
the saw mill at the beginning of chapter 2, where he is
immediately framed as an outsider: “He looked like a
tramp, yet not like a tramp either [. . .] there was some-
thing definitely rootless about him” (31). Words like
“stranger” and “foreigner” come naturally to the lips
of his co-workers, whose foreman says to them: “We
ought to run him through the planer [. . .] Maybe that
will take that look off his face” (32). The violence that
is invoked here as only a potential threat is finally ful-
filled when Percy Grimm kills and castrates Joe in the
kitchen of Gail Hightower’s home at the end of chapter
19: “Grimm emptied the automatic’s magazine into the
table; later someone covered all five shots with a folded
handkerchief.” Following the castration, Grimm taunts
Joe Christmas with the prophecy that “[n]ow you’ll let
white women alone, even in hell” (465).
179
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
As for Gail Hightower, we first see him sitting at

the window of his study in the first sentence of chapter
3: “From his study window he can see the street. It is
not far away, since the lawn is not deep. It is a small
lawn, containing a half dozen low growing maples. [. .
.] From the window he can also see the sign, which he
calls his monument” (57). The window, the street, the
maples, and the sign all return in the opening sentence
of chapter 20: “Now the final copper light of afternoon
fades; now the street beyond the low maples and the
low signboard is prepared and empty, framed by the
study window like a stage” (466), and the window alone
reappears at the very end of the chapter when we see
Hightower “leaning forward in the window, his ban-
daged head huge and without depth above the twin
blobs of his hands upon the ledge” (493). As was true
with the first and last appearances of Joe Christmas,
the chapters in which we see Hightower for the first
and last times are framed by acts of violence: in chap-
ter 2, we learn that he was beaten into unconsciousness
by the Ku Klux Klan; in chapter 20, this physical attack
returns as the (completely gratuitous) blow that Joe
Christmas deals to Hightower’s head with his mana-
cled hands: Grimm and his men “stooped and raised
Hightower, his face bleeding, from the floor where
Christmas, running up the hall, his raised and armed
and manacled hands full of glare and glitter like light-
ning bolts, so that he resembled a vengeful and furious
god pronouncing a doom, had struck him down” (463).
As a variant of the aesthetic framing created by
introducing Lena Grove, Joe Christmas, and Gail
Hightower in the novel’s opening three chapters and
concluding with them in the three final chapters,
Faulkner places the murder of Joanna Burden’s in
chapter 4 and then recounts her first meeting with Joe
Christmas as well as the distant past of her family –
180
not in chapter 18 (which would complete the four first

chapters/four last chapters arrangement) – but in chap-
ter 11, precisely at the center of a twenty-one chapter
novel. We notice, as well, Faulkner’s arranging in this
chapter a face-to-face meeting between Joanna – who
tells Joe virtually everything about the tragic history of
her family (241-255) – and Joe himself, who knows vir-
tually nothing about his origins:
“You don’t have any idea who your parents were?”

If she could have seen his face she would have found
it sullen and brooding.
“Except that one of them was part nigger. Like I told
you before.”
She was still looking at him; her voice told him that.
It was quiet, impersonal, interested without being
curious.
“How do you know that?”
He didn’t answer for some time. Then he said: “I
don’t know it.” (254)
***
Faulkner’s arranging the episodes of Light in August

to produce an effect of aesthetic framing occurs not
only in selected chapters but throughout the novel as a
whole. All twenty-one chapters of Light in August are or-
ganized in such a way as to create a loosely constructed
triptych, with the couple formed by Joe Christmas and
Joanna Burden, which occupies the entirety of chapter
11, placed precisely at its midpoint. On either side of
this pivotal chapter, Faulkner constructs episodes in
the form of “framed panels.”
Joe’s early years at the orphanage, for example, are
recounted in chapter 6, where we learn of the circum-
stances that led to his expulsion; his actual arrival at the
orphanage is not, however, recounted until chapter
181
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
16. His sexual relationship with Bobbie (a prostitute

whose masculine name at first confuses him) begins
in chapter 8; gender confusion then returns in chapter
12, where Joanna Burden is described three times as
“manlike.” Joe hits McEachern over the head with a
chair midway in chapter 9, leaving him – at least so he
thinks – for dead; this motif then returns at the end of
chapter 19, when he hits Hightower over the head with
his manacled hands, leaving us to wonder if he has per-
haps died (Faulkner claimed that he hadn’t).
Yet another mirroring of framed episodes occurs
between the two accounts of Joe’s flights: in chapter
10, we see him in flight from the McEachern’s for a
period of fifteen years, during which time he moves
back and forth between black and white communi-
ties; in chapter 19, a similar flight – this time from the
town jail and lasting only a few hours – takes him once
again from one racial community to another. Finally,
Faulkner presents the birth of Lena’s baby in such a
way as to frame it in relation to the birth of the negro
baby over which Hightower had similarly presided
many years previously: In chapter 17, as Hightower and
Byron are preparing to leave Hightower’s home and to
be on their way to the “nigger cabin” in which Lena is
about the give birth, Byron asks Hightower if he has
“the book you used when the nigger baby came” (394).
The episode to which Byron is referring here occurred
in chapter 3, where we learn that Hightower “ran back
to his house and took one of his books from the study
shelf and got his razor and some cord and ran back to
the cabin and delivered the child. But it was already
dead” (70).
Faulkner also creates an effect of aesthetic framing
by narrating in close proximity to each other certain
episodes that are widely separated in time. We notice,
for example, that Joe is framed as a “nigger” by the
182
dietitian at the orphanage (an event that occurred in

1900) in chapter 6 and again in 1932 by Joe Brown, an
event that is reported in chapter 5, where Joe tells the
sheriff that Joe is “part nigger” and taunts him with the
charge of “Accus[ing] the white man and let[ting] the
nigger go free” (97). Likewise, the birth of Lena’s baby
in 1932 is recounted in chapter 17, just a few pages after
the account in chapter 16 of Joe Christmas’s birth, an
event that occurred either in 1895 or 1896.
***
Recalling Wilhelm’s assertion that the narrator “uses

the window frame for a variety of narrative functions,
each one implicated in the framing of Joe Christmas,”
we notice that, in fact, Faulkner uses windows (refer-
ences to which occur more than one hundred times
in the novel) with much greater frequency to arrange
connections among otherwise unconnected scenes. To
begin with a simple example, Lena Grove sneaks out
of her sister’s house via her bedroom window twice.
The first time she goes to meet her lover, Lucas Burch,
she “had learned to open and close again in the dark
without making a sound, even though there also slept
in the leanto room at first her oldest nephew and then
the two oldest and then the three” (5). In the second,
she decides to go in search of Lucas, who has fled after
learning that she is carrying his child. In this instance,
Lena herself draws the parallel between the two scenes
for us: “she climbed again through the window. It was
a little difficult this time. ‘If it had been as hard to
do before, I reckon I would not be doing it now,’ she
thought” (6).
Faulkner also writes a window scene for Lucas
Burch, who – having been tricked into thinking that a
reward awaits him in the cabin that he had shared with
183
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
Joe Christmas and discovering that the “prize” is Lena

with their new-born baby – decides to flee in a way that
accomplishes two purposes: first, it allows him to escape
undetected by the sheriff who stands outside guarding
the door, and it provides Faulkner with a way of arrang-
ing a connection between this scene and the two that we
have mentioned previously: “Then he was gone through
the window, without a sound, in a single motion almost
like a long snake. From beyond the window she heard a
single faint sound as he began to run” (432).
The circumstances of the death of Hightower’s
wife – “she had jumped or fallen from a hotel window
in Memphis Saturday night, and was dead” (67) – may
also create a subliminal link between those scenes in
which Joe and Lena “go out the window” and the many
scenes in which we see Hightower himself sitting mo-
tionlessly at his window. As was already mentioned,
we first see Hightower looking out of this window,
“from which he can see the street,” at the beginning
of chapter 3; as the chapter continues, Faulkner shows
him “tak[ing] his place in the study window just be-
fore dusk . [. . .] waiting for that instant when all light
has failed out of the sky” (60); at its conclusion, we see
him “still sit[ting] at the study window, the room still
dark behind him” (75-6). Hightower’s study returns in
the final section of chapter 13, which begins with him
“sitting in the study window in the first dark” (311) and
concludes with him “lean[ing] there in the window,
in the August heat, oblivious of the odor in which he
lives” (317) and “hear[ing] now only the myriad and in-
terminable insects, leaning in the window, breathing
the hot, still rich maculate earth, thinking of how when
he was young, he had loved darkness, of walking or
sitting alone among trees at night” (318). The entirety
of chapter 20, in which we will see Hightower for the
last time, has the study window as its setting. It begins
184
with him sitting by it, remembering his youth, passing

from there to memories of his middle age, and being
left at the end “leaning forward in the window,” a detail
that creates an uncanny counterpoint to the ambigu-
ous circumstances of his wife’s death.
Faulkner likewise creates connections between the
murder of Joanna Burden, the circumstances of which
are never clarified, and other violent episodes that are
likewise marked by indeterminate circumstances. We
know beyond any doubt, for example, that, Joanna
Burden is dead, but not who killed her. We then notice
that Faulkner juxtaposes her murder with the killing
of Milly’s lover, in which we know who attacked him
(Doc Hines) and with what (a gun), and the outcome
(he’s dead), but not who he was (Milly claims that
he was a Mexican, but Doc Hines thinks otherwise).
Another scene that comes to mind is the clash be-
tween Joe Christmas and Mr. McEachern in which we
know the identity of the assailant (Joe) and the victim
(McEachern), the manner of assault (hit over the head
with a chair), but not the outcome, which Faulkner
declines to clarify: “McEachern lay on his back. He
looked quite peaceful now. He appeared to sleep: blun-
theaded, indomitable even in repose, even the blood on
his forehead peaceful and quiet” (204).
Such a description is doubtlessly intended to en-
courage readers to connect McEachern’s final moment
in the novel with that of Gail Hightower. Once again,
the identities of the assailant (Joe Christmas) and the
victim (Hightower) are known, but not the outcome.
Instead, we have a description of Hightower bleeding
from the head (where Joe had struck him with his man-
acled hands) which recalls the blood on McEachern’s
head while adding to the detail of his physical wound
his inner thoughts, to which we were not privy with
McEachern: “Yes, leaning forward in the window, his
185
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
bandaged head huge and without depth above the twin

blobs of his hand upon the ledge, it seems to him that
he still hears them: the wild bugles and the clashing
sabres and the dying thunder of hooves” (493). In both
instances, however, as with the murders of Milly’s lover
and of Joanna Burden, Faulkner withholds a crucial
piece of information (the outcome) as he coordinates
the related details of his “showcase window.”
Along with declining to identify with certainty the
murderer of Joanna Burden – and choosing, rather, to
frame connections between the scene of her murder and
other scenes likewise marked by “missing pieces” –
Faulkner stages the corpses of Joe and Joanna in such
a way as to create an uncanny mirroring. As though
he were intent on framing Joanna’s near-decapitation –
“She was lying on the floor. Her head had been cut pret-
ty near off,” (91) – in a way that would unite her in his
reader’s memories with Joe, Faulkner arranges to have
Percy Grimm castrate Joe with a butcher’s knife, a ges-
ture that is both a savage act and an artful juxtaposition:
“Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in
upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his
hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a
released breath” (465). Faulkner constructs Hightower’s
final moments as a third “panel” in what then becomes a
concluding triptych by describing, at the end of chapter
20, the vanishing of the memories that have held him
prisoner since his childhood as “some ultimate dammed
flood within him [that] breaks and rushes away” (492) – a
detail that is framed in such a way as to mirror the final
moments of Joe Christmas’s life – recounted at the end
of chapter 19 – in which “the pent black blood seemed
to rush like a released breath” (465).
I’ll conclude by noting that Faulkner’s strategy of
framing quite different episodes in such a way as to
call our attention to their uncanny similarities resem-
186
bles Mrs. Hines’s hallucinatory conflation of the birth

of Lena’s baby with the birth of Joe Christmas, two
events that occurred more than thirty years apart: “Her
movement roused it [Lena’s baby] perhaps; it cried
once. Then the bafflement too flowed away. It fled as
smoothly as a shadow; she looked down at the child,
musing, woodenfaced, ludicrous. ‘it’s Joey,’ she said.
It’s my Milly’s little boy’” (397-8). We remember that
Mrs. Hines’s confusing these two distinct events is a
source of consternation to Lena:
“She keeps on calling him Joey. When his name aint

Joey. And she keeps on . . . .” She watches Hightower.
Her eyes are puzzled now, questioning, doubtful.
“She keeps on talking about – She is mixed up some-
way. And sometimes I get mixed up too, listening,
having too . . . . . . .” (409).
We notice, as well, that “mixing things up” is a form

of behavior that generally meets with communal dis-
approval. We learn, for example, that Joanna Burden
is, at least according to rumors, “still mixed up with
niggers” (53). He hasn’t told Lena “that Brown or
Burch is mixed up with Christmas in this killing” (321).
Thinking of Hightower, Byron regrets that he “cant
do anything without getting him mixed up” (417). Mrs.
Beard chastises Byron, and men in general, because of
their need for “getting some woman mixed up in it to
help you” (418).
Along with what characters do, “mixing things up”
can also apply to what they say. In his Sunday sermons,
for example, Rev. Gail Hightower creates confusion by
his way of expounding a passage from scripture. We see
him
up there in the pulpit with his hands flying around

him and the dogma he was supposed to preach all
187
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU
full of galloping cavalry and defeat and glory just

as when he tried to tell them on the street about
the galloping horses, it in turn would get all mixed
up with absolution and choirs of martial seraphim,
until it was natural that the old men and women
should believe that what he preached in God’s own
house on God’s own day verged on actual sacrilege.
(62; my emphasis)
Nabokov’s “wise reader” is likely to experience a “tell-

tale tingle” when he realizes that the loss of control
signified by Hightower’s way of mixing things up – as
was also true of Mrs. Hines – is uncannily mirrored
throughout Light in August by Faulkner’s display of
masterful control in his way of mixing up the episodes
of his novel so as to assure that the accusatory framing
that generates its plot, to which the “mortal bodies”
of Joe Christmas, Joanna Burden, and Gail Hightower
fall victim, will be sacrificed so that (recalling for one
last time Mircea Eliade’s interpretation of the Manole
Legend) the “soul” of framing itself will pass into its
“architectural body.”
188
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Acknowledgements
The essays gathered here for the shared purpose of con-

juring the uncanny return of archaic building-rituals in
modern literary works began as a series of guest-lectures
that took place in various Romanian universities over a
period of several years. I owe my regular visits to the
country that has become the center of my professional
life since retiring from Washington College in 2013 to
The Romanian – U.S. Fulbright Commission, whose
offer of an appointment as a Fulbright Scholar brought
me to the University of Bucharest in the Fall of 2014.
Weekly meetings with the students who participated in
the master’s seminar that I offered there were crucial to
the gradual shaping of a project that has now achieved
its final form – a process that, in the words of William
Butler Yeats, involved “much stitching and unstitching,”
especially because I wanted the completed work to seem,
again with Yeats in mind, the expression of “a moment’s
thought.” Among the many Romanian colleagues who
invited me to speak to their their students, I would like
especially to thank Diana Banea, Ilinca Diaconu, Elena
Ionescu, Rodica Mihăilă, Roxana Oltean, Ioan Pânzaru,
and Lidia Vianu of the University of Bucharest; Ovidiu
Matiu, Ana-Karina Schneider, and Gențiana Stănișor
of Lucian Blaga University; Ruxandra Cesereanu and
Simona Jisa of Babeș-Bolyai University; Mihnea Dobre
of the University of Bucharest’s Institute for Research
in the Humanities; and Gabriela Toma of The National
Museum of Romanian Literature.
Thomas J. Cousineau, Professor of English (Emeritus)
at Washington College (USA), Fulbright Scholar at the
University of Bucharest, and Fulbright Specialist at Lucian
Blaga University in Sibiu, edited the newsletter of the
Samuel Beckett Society for several years and co-directed
the “Présence de Samuel Beckett” celebration of the Beckett
centenary at Cerisy la Salle in Normandy. He is the author
of After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, Waiting for
Godot: Form in Movement, Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in
Modernist Fiction, Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas
Bernhard, and An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book
of Disquiet.

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The Séance of Reading:

Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing

Sibiu, Str. Lucian Blaga nr. 2A

Editor: Vlad Pojoga

Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a României

“Ritual death produces a bodily change. The soul

1. Fixing Things in The Great Gatsby / 21

2. Being Scrupulous in “The Sisters” / 39

3. Rebuilding Lisbon in The Book of Disquiet / 59

4. Doing It in Waiting for Godot / 79

5. The Eliot Way: Turning Back in

6. Playing It in Endgame / 113

8. Being Misfits in “A Good Man is

9. Framing Things in Light in August / 169

“Anything and everything, depending on how one

The Séance of Reading – a teaching and writing project

But whate’er they wrought

The solution to their dilemma appears to Manole in a

Make an oath to wall

Unfortunately for Manole, his pregnant wife Ana is

Her sweet voice alone

Prince Negru Vodă, who beholds with delight the ed-

“Can you build for me,

When Manole – cheerfully but ill-advisedly – boasts

Prince Negru – presumably fearing that Manole will

The ground on which Manole will, in his turn, be

There sprang up a well,

Thanks again to a recommendation that I received from

husband and wife are united beyond the grave thanks

actual practice, they nonetheless return in disguised

play, as in Vieru’s painting, the use of form and color

With this newly formed concept of the Manole

To build is the most wonderful thing in the world, it’s

underlined. It’s what everyone longs to do, building,

In its turn, the Monastery at Curtea de Argeș becomes

the idea to use his sudden windfall for building his

The obstacle to the completion of the monastery caused

to begin with, it was a rude shock especially to

who had been hired and paid by Roithamer’s broth-

Roithamer also believes, doubtlessly with good reason,

Roithamer’s sister acquiesces to her brother’s lead-

is led uncomplaining to the altar where she will be

Yet another uncanny echo of the Manole Legend

At the moment he had finished, perfected the Cone,

notices on the opposite wall to the left and the right

Finally, the comments that Roithamer makes about the

for his sister – whose echo of the Manole Legend is

Wertheimer’s fate was to have walked past room

Wertheimer himself testifies to the intensity of the

teacher” (5). Tellingly, the narrator is delighted that the

The teacher’s daughter took my instrument, one of

At first glance, Glenn Gould appears to have escaped

But Glenn didn’t die from this lung disease, I

never gave up the piano, I thought, of course not,

Doubtlessly, the most incriminating of the narrator’s

grateful because publishing such “disastrous works”

had burned entire stacks of paper in the so-called

The passage of the “soul” of writing from Wertheimer’s