Thomas Dutoit

Ruins; or the Being of Time as History in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of Day

Disaster ruins everything while leaving everything as is (en l'état). (Blanchot 7, my translation) 'Whence the love of ruins.' (Derrida 1990, 72, my translation) 'The broken gable, the shattered columns, should attest the wonder that sacred construction work withstood even the most elementary forces of destruction, lightning (Blitz) and earthquake. The artificial (künstlich) ruinous thereby appears as the last inheritance of eminent antiquity merely factually transposed onto modern ground as a painted expanse of ruins or bombsite (Trümmerfeld).' 1 Published in 1949, The Heat of the Day describes life in London from the beginning of the first Blitz from September 1940 until the last months of the war against Germany. Ruined London gives Bowen the grounds for staging a general destruction that is profoundly enabling.

unwarranted privilege of presence that Heidegger takes to subtend it, considers that a Fort-sein (Being elsewhere, absent, non or not Being), to wit a 'bad' text, an apocryphal text, is as legitimate (or as illegitimate, and therefore as legitimate) as Dasein, the good text.

In Bowen's The Heat of the Day, Cousin Nettie's 'embroidery' is her 'guard or feint' (Bowen 1949, 180). As maker of texts, she does not herself enter the text as character: her refusal to enter life takes the form of her self-cloistering in a home from which she never exits, and into which her knitting abyssally retreats. Her knitting 'represents' the fact she herself enters no story, thereby protecting herself from history, which is ruin. Her Being is outside history. The entrance into history is the ruination of Being. Living outside story and history, she risks nothing ever happening. Contrary to Cousin Nettie, the present text on ruins in The Heat of the Day intends to enter the fray, and the fraying which any text risks being reduced. For an analysis of the theme of 'ruins' to be adequate to its object, it must be vulnerable, affected by its object; such analysis must not only be a work about ruins, but a work in ruins, experiencing ruins as process. 4 Unlike Cousin Nettie's 'embroidery,' it must not be a 'guard or feint.'

A study of ruins worthy of its subject needs, therefore, to be a ruin of study. To discourse on ruins, for a discourse to be in ruin, is, as is the case of the character Louie Lewis in The Heat of Day, to be the situation of, 'when I have no words,' for words on ruin are words in ruin: they fail to say their object, and thereby say it. Louie's language is a ruins because it fails to express what she wishes to say: 'Often you say the advantage I should be at if I could speak grammar; but it's not only that. Look the trouble there is when I have to only say what I can say, and so cannot ever say what it is really' (Bowen 1949, 212). 5Bowen's debt to ruins is re-financed by many critics, most recently perhaps by Leo Mellor, in his book Reading the Ruins. Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. This paper pursues a different ruinous path: ruin is not something that befalls, belatedly, upon what is constructed or living; rather, ruin is originally abyssal, making all prone to Destruktion in the Heideggerian sense or deconstruction in the Derridian, all a mode of surviving or presence lived as the past of the future.

Two times of ruins

Ruins have different moments, in The Heat of the Day, such as during the Blitz of autumn 1940, and then two years later, autumn 1942. In 1940, ruins are the life of yesterday, life as yesterday's being shorn off from tomorrow:

Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence-not as today's dead but as yesterday's living-felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected-for death cannot be so sudden as all that. Absent from the routine which had been life, they stamped upon that routine their absence. [Bowen, 1949, 79] All presence occurs as perception. The medium of perception are the dead, but not as 'today's dead.' Rather, vision, hearing, feeling occur in the milieu that is filled with 'yesterday's living.'

Ruins are where perception is pervaded by the living of yesterday, the living from yesterday. Life today is seen, heard and felt through the life of yesterday that is, by definition, present in its absence. What all sensation shares is the present as a shearing off. The day is what severs yesterday from tomorrow. I, living today, only sense insofar as I sense through 'yesterday's living.' I only sense insofar as my senses belong to yesterday, to those living yesterday, and to how yesterday lives. Ruins are my mode of perception. Life is the stamp of the dead. The die stamped on routine is the life of yesterday out of which only is possible today's living, living today.

In the ruins of autumn 1942, the dead no longer linger, and the living no longer live:

The first generation of ruins, cleaned up, shored up, began to weather-in daylight they took their places as a norm of the scene; the dangerless nights of September two years later blotted them out. It was from this insidious echoless propriety of ruins that you breathed in all that was most malarial. (Bowen 1949, 80) Thomas Dutoit Etudes britanniques contemporaines 43 (2011): 73-94 5 Ruins have become ambushes (i.e., the etymology of 'insidious'). 'Echoless,' their deceit is the absence of ghosts, of 'yesterday's living.' Ruins become propriety, what is proper, and even property. Ruined property becomes proper property. The ambush is possible because one no longer sees the ruins as ruins. That is, one no longer senses through yesterday's living. If Stella's love with Robert was possible in autumn 1940, it is perhaps because of the first stage of ruins, and if, in autumn 1942, Stella's love with Robert is damaged by Harrison's telling her that Robert is a spy, it is perhaps because of the becoming-proper of ruins.

Here, three paragraphs, the most stunning in The Heat of the Day. They depict the very moment in which Stella and Robert fall in love, simultaneous both with an adieu and with the detonation of bombs dropped on London.

It was a characteristic of that life in the moment and for the moment's sake that one knew people well without knowing much about them: vacuum as to future was offset by vacuum as to past [...] At the first glance they saw in each other's faces a flash of promise, a background of mystery. [...] [Stella] found herself [...] in the middle of studying this person [...] from whom she only turned away to wave goodbye to the friend who had brought her across the room.

The gesture of goodbye, so perfunctory, was of a finalness not to appear till later. It comprehended the room and everybody, everything in it which had up to now counted as her life: it was an unconscious announcement of the departure she was about to take-a first and and last wave, across the widening water, from a liner.

Remembered, her fleeting sketch of a gesture came to look prophetic; for ever she was to see, photographed as though it had been someone else's, her hand up. [...] They fixed their eyes expectantly on each other's lips. Both waited, both spoke at once, unheard.

Overhead, an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire-nosing, pausing, turning, fascinated by the point for its intent. The barrage banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked. Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling. with the shock of detonation, still be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off into the cataracting roar of a split building: direct hit, somewhere else.

It was the demolition of an entire moment. (Bowen 1949, 83, italics mine) The original moment, all and nothing at once, is a zigzagging movement between future and past, 'promise ' and 'background,' tele-photographic light, 'flash,' and enigmatic darkness, 'mystery.' Robert and Stella's origin is Stella's adieu to her life, everything and everybody that counted, become the 'uncounted.' They don't count; her conte, her story, is final adieu, 'departure', from a liner like The Titanic whose capsizing will be compared to marriage by Stella and Robert, much Ruins; or the Being of Time in History in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day 6 later in the novel. The zigzagging moment that is the dislocating movement of presence is written by 'Remembered' at the head of the sentence that recalls the drawing of a gesture the appearance of which only comes to her afterwards, from the future, which it announces as already in the present: 'prophetic.' The moment of being-together with the lover is a separation not only from her world, from the world, but is also an adieu to herself. That cleaver of Bowen's language, her figurative 'as though,' records this division. On the verge of joining lips, tongues, the encounter of Robert and Stella is an inaugural cut, marking the 'hiatus of a wound the lips of which will never come to close, never gather together.' (Derrida 2003, 54. Translation Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski) What brings these lips together, and keeps them forever separate, even in the most intense copulation, is the appeal to the other, unconditionally. Yet Bowen is more radical than Derrida, in insisting upon separation, on interruption as the condition of possibility of being-together.

'Unheard' is overwritten by 'Overhead,' unless it is that the bomber 'overhears,' eavesdrops, if one will, and even captures what it is they say, despite their own not being to hear what they themselves say. As each reaches her or his mouth to the other, the enemy plane 'noses' London, like Stella and Robert nose each other. From the ground, artillery spits up gunfire, from its mouth, its throat, 'coughed, retched,' vomit, froth or saliva that is lapped up by the bomber, 'drawing up bursts.' The text depicts warfare as lovemaking, if not vice versa. (Let alone the referent of 'banged.') The narrator, and the readers, are in the bar whose own mouth gapes, 'yawped.' The present, 'Now,' 'here,' is blown, blown out, made as much into a vacuum as the future or the past. The present of the joining of two people, the communication of two mouths, two speeches, two times two lips, is blown, in the sense of prompted by another 'dialogue,' between artillery and bombers. This singular moment of falling in love is rent, ruined, blown away. Roderick, at the beginning, had been the reason why the lovers did not move into the same house-the indifference of the embattled city to private lives, the exiguousness and vagueness of everybody's existence among the ruins could, but for Roderick, have made that easy. But by the time Stella's son, at the end of a phantom year at Oxford, was called up, she and Robert found themselves conscious of a submerged decision to go on as they were, for that 'time being' which war had made the very being of time. War time, with its makeshifts, shelvings, deferrings, could not have been kinder to romantic love. The two discussed any merging of their postal addresses not more seriously than they discussed marriage-happy to stay as they were, afloat on this tideless, hypnotic, futureless day-to-day.

Postal addresses, and the Being of time

It was more than a dream. (Bowen 1949, 87) Ruins give the conditions for living together, for being together. Being-together, being inseparable, is made possible by the destruction of partitions, of separations. Their destruction is what ruination is. Ruination is therefore the seeming possibility of immediacy. There is just Stella's son in the way.

His entrance in military service takes away the only thing separating them, be it only a phantom separation, unless the phantom is not what always separates. Yet they continue to live apart, separately. '"For that time being",' indicates something temporary, a time that is, well, temporal, only for a time, like all time is. For the '"time being"' means for the time that is, as long as it lasts.

'"For the time being"' is 'for the moment.' '"For the time being"' suggests a present as long it continues. This temporariness of time becomes the 'being of time'. Not Heidegger's Being and Time, but the very essence of time. This particular time seems to be a continuous present, but it is not the time of Being. The time of Being is what Heidegger set out to destroy in his Being and Time. He destroyed, submitted to destruction, which means to analysis, Being, by reinterpreting time so that time came to be thought as a dislocated time, comprised of a complex movement of past and future, of memory and anticipation. In his 1964 lecture course, Derrida named this deconstructed time 'trace' or 'text,' making Being be a differance of Dasein and Fortsein, presence and absence, each the metaphor of the other, without a clear privilege given to either, and with a privilege given to their between, their textual network, the relays between their postal addresses. For Bowen, war makes the 'time being' the 'very being of time,' which is as much as to say as Bowen is the Derrida-ization of Heidegger: to use common nouns, her fiction makes the supplement, postponement, act as, represent, the Being itself of time. This delegation means that the essence of Ruins; or the Being of Time in History in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day 8 time is not presence, not presence equal to itself, not simple presence-and so we can see why they (Robert and Stella) don't live together, why their excellent lovemaking relationship doesn't collapse, doesn't fall, doesn't ruin itself, into their moving in together with each other. The essence of time is that it is only 'for the time being.' It is makeshift. It is merely a substitute. A 'makeshift' is when you make a shift, as in when you make a substitution that is inferior to what it is substituted for but since what is substituted for is essentially lacking this explains why one necessarily and only has recourse to the substitute. For the time being is 'War time,' a time proper to war. This time is why you put off, the time of 'shelvings', setting aside, not finishing, but deferring to later. It is a finite time, because it is only 'for that time being,' only for the moment that is by definition temporary, but it is an unfinished time, because nothing gets finished once and for, since it is postponed, in 'deferrings.' 'Ruins' might make it easy to be together, but marriage would be the ruin of ruin itself, for marriage is the being-together and therefore the eradication of postal addresses, of a postal principle, of the 'postal resonance,' a 'communication from a distance'. (Derrida 1962, 36) Where there are postal addresses, there are echoes. Where there are echoes, yesterday's living still linger(s). Mediation, a general telecommunication, is that without which no love could move, be put into movement, let itself be quested or questioned. This is why 'the two discussed any merging of their postal addresses not more seriously than they discussed marriage.' The reference to 'postal addresses' is not accidental. It is essential. A postal principle obtains throughout The Heat of the Day. Letters and postmen rhythm the novel. Cousin Nettie's residence is adorned with 'postcards of electrically blue foreign lakes' (Bowen 1949, 181). The postal principle involves the fact that the spy Harrison is constantly 'posted' outside Stella's flat, and includes a dog supposedly named 'Spot,' in other letters, anagrammatically alike to 'post ', 6 hinting at a ruinous potential equivalence. Here, separate 'postal addresses' are more serious than 6 Bowen stages the transmogrification of these letters in an underground restaurant where Stella with Harrison, encounter, by accident Louie Louis and a dog, dubbed 'Spot', duplicating the fact that Louie's chance being-postedthere blows Harrison's cover of anonymous invisibility, in a passage starting with 'She came to a stop', passing through 'About a spot of something?', 'You-you've put us all on the spot, nicely', 'Spot, you bad boy!', 'Why do you call your dog Spot? He hasn't got any' (Bowen 1949, 194-204, my emphases).

'marriage.' To 'merge' mailboxes is the supreme metaphor, more powerful than its near homophone, 'marriage.' Marriage is to be thought as from the mailbox. Yet war time, the time that is only for the time being, the temporary temporality that is the very being of time, ushers in 'postal addresses' as that which preserve a distance, as that which refuses the collapse into the ideology of union.

The time of the wood

Stella goes to Mount Morris to inspect the house, bequeathed to her son by her son's uncle.

While there, she wanders out on the grounds, on a gloriously sunny October late morning. In a moment of the sheer presence of nature-'This was the peace of the moment in which one sees the world for a moment innocent of oneself' (Bowen 1949, 153)-Stella enters what she beholds as its beholder: 'One cannot remain away: while she looked up at sun-pierced triumphant golden fans of leaves it began to be she who saw them.' Bowen's narrator presents a classic topos: the entrance of time into nature as the existence of subjectivity. Stella's eye and I appear to make appear memory as loss of innocence. Bowen seems to distend the 'peace of the moment' as 'moment innocent of one self,' in properly breathtakingly beautiful, Arcadian, pre-lapsarian description, culminating in a sentence-ending nominative, of 'a breathless glory': 'and there travelled through the layered, lit, shaded, thinning and crossing foliage, and was deflected downward on to the laurels, a breathless glory' (Bowen, 1949, 153). We might be seduced into thinking that ruins befall upon this setting, only with its invasion by the subject of perception. Yet then we read the following, which indeed bequeathes the very setting:

In the hush the dead could be imagined returning from all the wars; and, turning the eyes from arch to arch of boughs, from ray to ray of light, one knew some expectant sense to be tuned in to an unfinished symphony of love.

The seeming of this to be for ever was astonishing-until a leaf fell slowly, veering towards her eyes as though she had brought time with her into the wood.

There cannot be a moment in which nothing happens. (Bowen 1949, 153) Ruins; or the Being of Time in History in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day 10

The 'dead could be imagined,' but who is imagining their return? 'The eyes' are turned from arch to arch, but whose eyes are they? There is 'some expectant sense' but it does not seem to belong to the unknown 'one.' The infinite symphony of love seems to belong resurrection itself. Love does not leave, love; not leaf, love rises, not fails. So seems love. Just before falling in love with Robert, Stella described herself after the 'fall of France' as on a leave of absence from life. 'She had had the sensation of being on furlough from her own life' (Bowen 1949, 81). Her fall into love is a fall into life, into a mode of presence inherently ruinous. When Stella is in the wood, as if in the 'infinite symphony of love,' love seems unending. Yet Bowen not so much as ruins this paradise regained as insists on a ruin always occurring. Contradicting, but from a delayed origin, the earlier 'peace of the moment in which one sees the world for a moment innocent of oneself,' now, but then already, 'There cannot be a moment in which nothing happens.' There is always something happening, contrary to any metaphysics of presence. A moment when nothing happens would be the metaphysics of presence: an eternal present. Its 'breathless glory' would not be alive. Such eternal present is only illusion, ruined always already by ruin itself, by the time of the fall and the fall of time. 'The seeming of this to be for ever was astonishing-until a leaf fell slowly, veering towards her eyes as though she had brought time with her into the wood.' Her eyes, not just the eyes, are approached by the falling leaf. The leaf and the fall, nearly palindromic, inscribed as from the novel's very incipit, do not just approach her eyes. They 'veer,' they turn to her, she, Stella, who turns in orbit until the dis(-)aster that makes her, too, veer off course, discon(-)stellated. (Her son considers that it is Stella who fell off the roof, when Robert fell from it to his death). 'Veering,' they turn. 'Veer' is not the seeming 'ever' that seems to precede, 'this to be for ever.' 'Veer' is not 'ever,' but it comes out of Stella's dream, her 'rêve': this outdoor scene came out of her deep sleep that morning just prior to this scene. Bowen's figurative language, that trait that runs through, divvies as its inaugural cut, all her writing, the 'as though' that intervenes here, is literally important, importing time itself: 'as though she had brought time with her into the wood.' Stella imports time into this prelapsarian wood, but it is only as if time had to be brought in, as if time, and more precisely historicity, were not already there. Stella is in wood, that place that in all Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe is the place par excellence of imagination. Stella's apparent step out of time in the wood followed her previous evening, inside the house, trying to see it through the eyes of her future daughter-in-law who Stella forms like 'ectoplasm' out of her 'flank.' In the house, Stella sees a picture of the ocean liner The Titanic vertically plunging, after having 'become for the moment immortal as a portrait' (Bowen 1949, 150;152)

Ruin makes perfect

When Stella returns from Ireland and is picked up at the train station by Robert, they ride in a taxi together. Estrangement characterizes their finding each other, Robert remarking to her that he is more intimate with her coat than with herself. Stella's reply stresses the perfection of ruination:

Who would like to feel less welcome back again than her own coat! Surely either we know each other absolutely or not at all-and how can we possibly wonder which? ... We are friends of circumstance-war, this isolation, this atmosphere in which everything goes on and nothing's said. Or we began as that: that was what we were at the start-but now, look how all this ruin's made for our perfectness! You and I are an accident, if you likeoutside us neither of us when we are together ever seems to look. How much of the 'you' or the 'me' is, even, outside of the 'us'? (Bowen 1949, 163).

I know my lover absolutely, and I don't know him at all. Stella misses that both, in differance, obtain, unless her wondering which is which attests as much. Ruinous London makes their relationship perfect: Stella adds, 'our perfectness!' Ruins constitute their 'we,' them as 'us.' In ruins, there is no 'I' and no 'you.' The ontological entity is the 'us' that is perfect, fills up all time and space. This ontology of 'us' is precisely perfect, however, because of ruins. Ruins are what make the 'you' and the 'I' not be, but only be ghosts, survivors of the 'us.' The 'I' or the 'you' will survive, alone, when the 'us' is decimated, by separation, by falsehood, by fall, by ruin, by death.

The 'I' or the 'you' can only be ghosts, either the one who is lost as a phantom or the one who remains as survivor. The apostrophic contraction in 'ruin's' in Stella's statement could be read to read, 'all this ruin is made for our perfectness': that reading means that their full closure together is sealed by the absence of any world around them. But 'ruin's' also means that 'all this ruin has made for our perfectness': perfect unity is made by a division that is at the origin and the end of the relation, because they were and will be again separated. Ruin makes for perfection.

Immunity in ruins

Writing in the great age of immunization, of inoculation, whereby what is lethal is used in order to attain a relative immunity precisely from the lethal, Bowen's writing of ruin, her destruction of the metaphysics of presence, subtly incorporates a re-thinking of immunity. There is no pure immunity in Bowen because the outside is always the inside of the inside. Conventionally understood, immunity would be the privileged: it is the fact of being exempt from a charge. If there is no immunity in Bowen, it is because of ruination, lost immunity. Presence to self is not immune from absence, from the loss of what presence thinks it has. This lack of immunity is originary. Yet this originary separation and loss are what redefine presence (life) as survival of, through, original separation and loss. Moreover, they are what make a deconstructed love or intimacy possible, whence the love of ruins (double genitive): love from, love for, ruins.

The narrated time in The Heat of the Day begins on the day when Stella realizes that loss might have already intervened in her life, despite her sensation, during the Blitz on London and into 1942, that she had not yet lost anyone: 'So far, nothing had happened to anybody she knew, or even to anyone she knew knew-today, however, tingled all over from some shock which could be the breaking down of immunity' (Bowen 1949, 81). Indeed, this day was 'the morning' when 'she was certain that [Robert] was dead' (Bowen 1949, 81). The day before, Harrison had intimated to her that Robert was working for the Germans (possibly since even before her relationship with Robert began). Later in the novel, when Robert explains to her how he thinks of his being a spy, he explains that he immunizes himself: '"Words, words, like that [i.e., 'betrayal'], yes-what a terrific dust they can still raise in a mind, yours even: I see that. Myself, even, I have needed to immunize myself against them; I tell you I have only at last done that by saying them to myself over and over again till it became absolutely certain they mean nothing. What they once meant is gone"' (Bowen 1949, 231). Stella's being 'certain' and Robert's being 'absolutely certain' denote different things.

Robert believes himself immune from deception because, in a Nietzschean embrace of ruin, he has made all language nothing but deception, whereas Stella's loss of immunity is the loss of love as if it were not, had not been, constituted by separation (here embodied by Harrison's intrusion).

Generalized ruin, for Robert, is translated, by Bowen, into sheer equivocity: whether Robert leapt from the roof to suicide or was executed by being pushed off it, whether it was even a 'fall or leap' Ruins; or the Being of Time in History in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day 14 (Bowen 1949, 250), is left undecided by the novel. Holding out a more encouraging prospect is Bowen's previous novel, The Death of the Heart (1938).

Sixteen-year-old Portia has been excoriated by her love relationship with twenty-three-yearold Eddie, by his and Anna (Portia's half-brother's wife) betrayal of her:

[T]he idea of betrayal had been in her, upon her, sleeping and waking, as might be one's own guilt, making her not confront any face with candour, making her dread Eddie. Being able to shut her eyes while he was in this room with her, to feel impassive marble against her cheek, made her feel in the arms of immunity-the immunity of sleep, of anaesthesia, of endless solitude, the immunity of the journey across Switzerland two days after her mother died. (Bowen 1998, 256) Such immunity is, as form of catatonia, probably inherently ruined, but it is a stage of the autoimmunity that Bowen's fiction moves towards as the survival of the heart. During Portia's phase of new love with Eddie, her immunity was at an earlier stage:

Everything became threatened.

There are moments when it becomes frightening to realize that you are not, in fact, alone in the world-or at least, alone in the world with one other person. The telephone ringing when you are in a day-dream becomes a cruel attacking voice. That general tender kindness towards the world [...] comes from a pitying sense of the world's unreality. ... A pact with life, a pact of immunity, appears to exist-But this pact is not respected for ever-a street accident, an overheard quarrel, a certain note in a voice, a face coming too close, a tree being blown down, someone's unjust fate-the peace tears right across. Life militates against the seclusion we seek. In the chaos that suddenly thrusts in, nothing remains unreal, except possibly love. (Bowen 1998, 170) Everything is real, i.e., separated, shorn, save, perhaps, for the illusion of a moment, love, which is the only thing that seems unreal, i.e., intimate in an unseparated way. Yet 'pity the selfishness of lovers ... it is impossible' (Bowen 1998, 170). What Bowen takes her reader to is an awareness, a wariness, about irreducible separation-pending ruin always already inscribed in any encounter-that itself is the condition of possibility of a partage, a sharing that is the experience of shearing. This ruin of immunity, this ruin of a false privilege, of an exemption from separation-from death-is in fact the emboldening form of ruin, a recognition of the unique chance and occasion being in the world is.

Thomas Dutoit Etudes britanniques contemporaines 43 (2011): 73-94 15 If ruin in The Death of the Heart appears more encouraging than The Heat of the Day, it is because the former leaves us with Portia's relative and rebuilt but always precarious immunity:

'No, don't kiss me now.' 'Why not now?' 'Because I don't want you to.' 'You mean', he said, 'that I didn't once when you did?' She began to put on her hat with an immune little smile, as though all that had been too long ago. The tears shed in that series of small convulsions-felt by him but quite silent-had done no more than mat her lashes together. (Bowen 1998, 276) Portia survives here the ruin of her love for and with Eddie, blocking him away, and moving forth with her 'immune little smile.' Her lashes are matted together, in an image of her capacity to sustain, to hold up, in the pas au-delà, the stepping-forth over the lack of foundation. Bowen leaves us with the immunity that consists in our knowing ourselves not to be immune, with the protection against ruin that comes from a recognition of an indomitable ruin out of which is born life, desire, love.

Love in ruins

But then she paused in the act, i raising her eyes: he and she returned to looking at one another at leisure, with a sort of enchanted familiarity, across the gold-rimmed cups.

But they were not alone, nor had they been from the start, from the start of love ii .

Their iii time sat in the third place iv at their table. They were creatures of history, whose xiii [Here, the overlap of 'story' and 'history', and this is very enigmatic: what does this mean? from now on, stuff that was 'now' behind now, behind the fact that the third is at the table, belongs to history more and more. History is going now to be that the 'now' is made the now by the third. History is going to be made present by the fact that that which ruins presence is invited to the table ]   xiv [Dasein happens once] xv [this is referred to in the scene in the underground restaurant: the ruin is there the absence of medium that characterizes perception, theception through, per-; and this is a clear reference to the transparency of Chapter 5, {Bowen, 1949, 80}] xvi [Bowen here seems to be saying that war is the condition of possibility of love, or at least that war is propitious for love, and therefore that there is a predilection for love in the Dasein, in the context given by war, by war-time. That seems to be what Bowen endorses, but the book undoes that. What else is love? Love is this.

Love is, it seems, this thinning of the membrane between the this and the that, love is the appearance of non-appearance, it is the appearance of immediacy. Love is the medium of immediacy. Love is the Thomas Dutoit Etudes britanniques contemporaines 43 (2011): 73-94 17 movement, that third presence, however still, however unheeding in their trance two may try to stay. Unceasingly something is at work. Even, each beat of the other beloved heart is one beat nearer the destination, unknowable, towards which that heart is beating its way; under what compulsion, what?-to love is to be inescapably conscious of the question-to love is to be inescapably conscious of the question. To have turned away from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything. [Bowen, 1949, 169, italics mine.] representation of non-representation, is the representation of presence, of simple presence, of presence to itself, love is the semblance of the disappearance of difference. Love is the metaphysics of presence. Yet, with war, the threat of ruination, one still has to think that this immediacy is itself a modality of ruination, because it would get rid of separation, of the membrane, the mediation, that hiatus that makes love what it is, which is an else, an other irreducible to the two, that third at the table ]   xvii [What makes love is the third at the table. There is no such thing as love, if love is understood as being alone together; the only thing is a being separate and a being separated. This being-separated is the only thing, and that is what Bowen calls love. What undoes love is what love undoes. In The Heat of the Day, this hiatus-and this hiatus is the irreducible isolation of each individual-is what ruins the privilege of the present, or ruins the illusion of being together. This ruin, however, is that without which no love, understood at the third at the table, is possible. So, that which seems to be the principle of ruin of love, is the love of ruin, and the love of love, and the ruin of ruin.]

In Being and Time, Heidegger defines Dasein as a mode of care between birth and death whose unity is based in temporality. This Dasein is characterized by a 'movement [Bewegtheit, a 'movedness', a 'being waylaid'] of existence that is not the motion [Bewegung] of something present-at-hand. [...] The specific Bewegtheit of extended self-extending, we call it the happening [Geschehen] of Dasein, the historicity of Dasein. The question of how Dasein holds together is the ontological problem of its happening' (Heidegger 1986, 374-75, my translation). The German word, Bewegung, is formed on the root of Weg, 'way' but also 'away.' A faithful translation of Bewegtheit in English could be waylaid. Derrida opines, 'I believe the problem of Bewegtheit as non-motion was the most important problem in Heidegger's own view', adding that 'the moving [Bewegtheit] or the historical sequence (the movedness of historicizing, of historical production: die Bewegtheit des Geschehens), in which something happens, enters history [s'historialise], geschieht, does not let itself be thought, grasped, according to a movement as the changing of place. The enigma of happening towards which Heidegger recalls us is this Bewegtheit unthinkable according to Bewegung' (Derrida 1964-65, Lecture 7). The 'third presence' in Bowen is not the movement of Stella or Robert, of anyone or anything present at hand. This 'presence of movement' is that 'everything is on its way to somewhere else'; 'each beat' of the other heart is 'beating its way' but to an 'unknowable' destination, a radical elsewhere, the else of where, the other of place and time.

If Stella and Robert are 'creatures of history', if their 'relation' is 'subject' 'to what is happening', it is because of this 'third place', this 'third presence', that is time being waylaid by history. Just as Heidegger insists upon the fundamental enigma [Rätsel] of this historical happening or happening of history [Heidegger, 1986, 392], Bowen's narrator also extends herself in aporetic enigmatic extension, as figured by the gaping irresolution of the paroxystic question: 'under what compulsion? what?-to love is to be inescapably conscious of the question' [Bowen, 1949, 169].

What pro-or com-, im-or ex-, pulsion, what unnameable 'movement' or 'being waylaid', is underway, being traced if not that of their being traced by 'their time [sitting] in the third place at the table'?

A cogito of farewell

The rift, between Robert and Stella, widens in the back of a taxi. It is night, and pitch black in the back of the taxi. Each is invisible to the other, with the presence of a driver. Stella has asked Robert if he is a spy for the Germans. The lovers, who had been, they thought, bound to each other in sheer intimacy, are shorn by this question so radically that, despite being in the same car and apparently same time, it becomes as if they are neither in the same car nor even together alone at all. All dialogue comes from Robert:

Robert could be felt turning round slowly [...], to stare at the place where she invisibly was. 'Someone comes to you with a story: with you, the story takes-seeds itself in some crack that you felt between us. Some crack-should I have known it was there?' [...] 'How do you expect me to know what's true, now? All I can say now is, how well you hide things-you may have been having another lover all this time for all I know; and I'm not sure I wouldn't rather it had only been that. This other thing seems colder, more up against me. This thing locked up inside you, yes; yes, but always secretly being taken out and looked at-and how without going mad am I to let myself imagine at what moments In the night, how did I not hear it ticking under the pillow like your watch? [...] While I've talked, you've been adding up what I say? We have not, then, been really alone together for the last two months.' (Bowen 1949, 164-65) The ontic ruin Robert identifies here is one that happens after the origin: Stella learns that Robert is, or might be, a spy after almost two years of love, and then keeps this information away from Robert for two months before telling him; but this knowledge that happens to their relationship as something after it is built into the novel as something more basic and radical in at least three ways.

First, indications from the text suggest that Harrison only exists as the allegory of Stella's own selfcensorship, hence Harrison in some ways might only be her super-ego as it were, denying her her pleasure (Harrison is the idea that a woman or a man should serve the body politic, and not pleasure the personal, private and sexual body); second, Stella and Robert's relation begins thanks to ruins, is borne out of ruins, is a product of ruination (Bowen 1949, 80-81); third, narratively, the narrative time of the loss of the relationship precedes the narrative time of its origin, even if the narrated time of the origin precedes in chronological time its loss. Finally, adieu and separation are the origin of any relationship, ruin the abyssal foundation of any love/ friendship: One day death will necessarily separate us. Fatal and inflexible law: one of two friends will always see the other die. The dialogue, as virtual as it may be, will forever be wounded by an ultimate interruption.

Comparable to no other, a separation between life and death will defy thought right from a first enigmatic seal, that which we will endlessly seek to decipher. No doubt the dialogue continues, pursuing its wake with the survivor. The latter believes she guards the other in herself-she did so already while the other was alive-henceforth, the survivor lets the other speak inside herself. She does so perhaps better than ever, and that is a terrying hypothesis. But survival carries within itself the trace of an ineffaceable incision.

Interruption multiplies itself, one interruption affecting another, in abyssal repetition, more unheimlich than ever. ... This melancholic certainty ... begins as of the friends' lifetime itself. Not only by an interruption but by a speech of interruption. A cogito of farewell, this good-bye without return, signs the very breathing of the dialogue, of dialogue in the world or of the most interior dialogue. Mourning waits no longer at that moment.

Ruins; or the Being of Time in History in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day 20 From this first encounter, interruption anticipates death, interruption precedes death. Interruption casts over everyone the gloom of an implacable future anterior. One of us two will have had to remain alone. Both of us knew this in advance. And right from the start. One of the two will have been doomed, from the beginning, to carry alone, in herself, both the dialogue which she must pursue beyond the interruption and the memory of the first interruption. (Derrida, 2003, 20, trans. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski) This originary interruption, separation as the ruin from which and over which any relationship is constructed and deconstructed, is how Bowen in fact depicts ruins in The Heat of the Day. Bowen gives it her own twist, when she has Stella tell Harrison about how, after his disappearance subsequent to Robert's death, and during the interval of several years prior to his return, she continued a mental conversation with him: 'After I gave up thinking I should see you again, I still went on talking and talking to you in my own mindso I cannot really have felt you were dead, I think, because one doesn't go talking and talking to any one of the them: more one goes on hearing what they said, piecing and repiecing it together to try and make out something they had not time to say-possibly even had not time to know' (Bowen 1949, 273).

I am most intimate with the other when the other is absent When that other is dead, then I hear best what the other says I hear what the other did not her or himself hear her or himself even to be saying

  Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day is something like Martin Heidegger's Being and Time meets Jacques Derrida's The Postcard: Thomas Dutoit Etudes britanniques contemporaines 43 (2011): 73-94 7

  . Strangely not unlike Elizabeth Bennett in Darcy's portrait gallery in Pemberley, Stella confirms the most useful description we have of Bowen's writing: 'Bowen's novels are like Jane Austen on drugs' (Bennett-that's Andrew, not Elizabeth-and Royle, xv) 7 . Those drugs are powerful enough to make a 'wood' veer into a 'would.' Those drugs are her literature. If, as topos for imagination, the wood is the place for the 'would,' then what Bowen does is 'as though' she 'brought time with her into the wood.' Bowen brings 'time' into the timeless, ever-present, forest, the wood, le bois, but she also brings temporality, which by definition is inauthentic temporality, historicity, into presence. She brings time into what would be eternal presence. She brings time into Being, that Being which the philosophical tradition posits as presence. Yet it is only 'as though' she brought time into the conditional, unactualized, place of the would. For, time is already there. 'There cannot be a moment in which nothing happens.' Bowen's narrator withdraws what she had given us, in her final sentence. The ruination of the metaphysics of presence, in other words, the unviability of any being not always already given to time and to history, engenders and structures this symphony of love. Bowen's The Heat of the Day is obsessed with falling. From the leaves falling in the first page, to the leaves and bombs fallen on London when Stella falls in love, and to Robert's falling off the roof, 'fall or leap' (Bowen 1949, 250), as the text puts it, making 'leap' be a version of 'leaf.' Whether leaping or falling from the roof, as counter-signature to The Heat of Day, falling from the roof is what befalls me in writing to this enigmatic text.

  coming together was of a nature v possible in no other day vi -the day was inherent vii in the nature. Which must have been always viii true of lovers, if it had taken till i [of pouring out coffee] ii [The start of love is the advent of separation, severance.] iii [and 'their' time is not theirs, that is the point, the possession of 'their' time belongs to neither one of them] iv [this third place is in the first place] v ["Die allegorische Physiognomie der Natur-Geschichte {...} ist wirklich gegenwärtig als Ruine."(Benjamin 1955, 155) vi ['day': it is singular, this is not myth; the Dasein is unique] vii [Time inheres in physis, and time is grounded in history, in historicity, in something thoroughly inauthentic; inheritance inheres.] viii [it may be true for all lovers, and therefore mythic, but each time differently, uniquely] Ruins; or the Being of Time in History in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day 16 now to be seen. The relation of people to one another is subject to the relation of each to time ix , to what is happening x . If this has not been always felt-and as to that who is to know? xi -it has begun to be felt, irrevocably xii . On from now, every moment, with more and more of what had been 'now' behind it, would be going on adding itself to the larger story xiii . Could these two have loved each other better at a better time? At no other would they have been themselves xiv ; what had carried their world to its hour was in their bloodstreams. The more imperative the love, the deeper its draft on beings, till it has taken up all that ever went to their making, and according to what it draws on its nature is. In dwelling upon the constant for our reassurance, we forget that the loves in history have been agonizingly modern loves in their day. War at present worked as a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that, it was a becoming apparent xv -but then what else is love? xvi No, there is no such thing as being alone together. xvii Daylight moves round the walls; night rings the changes of its intensity; everything is on its way to somewhere else-there is the presence of ix [Time, and history, being in time, and the time being in history {and here we have Bowen's reference for the 'time being' and 'being in (war) time'}] x [Geschehen, the base of history or Geschichte] xi [The narrator embarks on a solo here. Bowen even appears to intervene in the text as the narrator begins to refer to her time, to a time of 1949, to a time of the 1940s, as is seen with the switch to the present perfect, and the verb 'begin' that singles out a doubled now] xii [There is no going back, but why is this no return singular in the 1940s?]

  [...] Thomas Dutoit Etudes britanniques contemporaines 43 (2011): 73-94 19 'Between you and me this is inconceivable.'[...]

'La ruine n'est pas devant nous, ce n'est ni un spectacle ni un objet d'amour. Elle est l'expérience même : ni le fragment abandonné mais encore monumental d'une totalité, ni seulement, comme le pensait Benjamin, un thème de la culture baroque. Ce n'est pas un thème, justement, cela ruine le thème, la position, la présentation ou la représentation de quoi que ce soit.' [Derrida, 1990, 72].

Cousin Nettie (and Mrs Kelway, also a knitter outside any story) represent a text that is only grammar, pattern, without any personal story.

Subsequent to writing this paper, I received Veering. A Theory of Literature by Nicholas Royle. However, Nicholas Royle presented a paper on veering to our research group at the University of Lille in March, 2007.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

---, La carte postale. Freud à Socrate, et au-delà, Paris : Flammarion, 1980. HEIDEGGER, Martin, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986[1927]. MELLOR, Leo, Reading the Ruins. Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ROYLE, Nicholas, Veering. A Theory of Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.


Richard Anker

Jack Hitt's Act

Just ... Thomas Dutoit

Mimésis dans les lettres américaines, sous la direction de

Inmate actor: 'It was so complicated'" (Hitt 57' 10'') "Only if the earth always began its drama all over again after the conclusion of the fifth act, [...] could the powerful human being possibly desire monumental history in its absolute iconic veracity, that is, with every fact depicted in all its peculiarity and uniqueness. [...] Until then, monumental history will have no need for that absolute veracity: it will continue [...] to diminish the differences between motives and causes in order to present, to the detriment of the causae, the effectus as monumentalthat is, as exemplary and worthy of imitation. (Nietzsche, 99) "Pierrot est le frère de tous les Hamlet qui hantent le texte de Mallarmé." (Derrida, 1970, 17) "La question ici posée est celle de la mise en scène, c'est-à-dire de la mimesis." (Anker, 12) Here, too: the question raised is that of radio piece Act V as a performance, itself staged, simultaneous to that of Act V as being about a staging of a play, Hamlet, in a prison. Chris Harris -one of the inmates acting in the play, and one of the four inmates playing the role of Hamlet -summarizes Hamlet by transposing it into the terms of contemporary America: Let me put it in terms of the year 2000. So what we have is an upper middle class youngster--19, 20 years old--who comes from a well-to-do family. They own quite a bit of land. The people in the small town respect him and love him. And his uncle murdered his father and is now married to his mother. So all kinds of serious issues there. All kinds. Interpreting then, or miming, Chris Harris, let us cast Jack Hitt's Act V in terms of mimesis. So what we have is a writer -quite accomplished -who writes a radio piece for the program This American Life about a lady theatre director -talented, experienced -who stages a famous play about murder, revenge and ghosts in a maximum security State prison with convicts doing time for murder and other violent crimes as its cast of actors. So all kinds of mimesis there. All kinds.

Crimes, mimes, that rimes. In German "rime" (reimen) can mean both "sounds similar" and "is significant." What is the relation of criminality and mimesis? Why

In Hitt's Act V, he also occupies the position of literary critic on Hamlet. His literary critical interpretation of Hamlet begins as an embodiment of one particular theory of mimesis, and undergoes in the course of his acting experience a considerable change that is at the core of (our argument about) mimesis. Through acting, he attains a deconstructed notion of identity that liberates him from the prison-house of conventional identity that had itself resulted in his criminal behavior. This paper is therefore an analysis of mimesis from the point of view of its place in and relation to imprisonment.

In Prison Mimesis ... "La mimésis théâtrale […] donne le modèle de la mimésis générale." (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1986, 25) At bottom, Jack Hitt's Act V endorses Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage."

All the people spotlighted in the Jack Hitt's Act V are actors. However, if Agnes Wilcox, the director of Hamlet in the prison is, in the show, cast in the role of herself, as director, and if Jack Hitt himself, as author of Act V, is, as its own director, selfcast, all the prisoners are notable, not only for the roles of characters in Hamlet that they play, but, above all, for how their very identity in their lives in prison or before prison was already a role in a bigger play. Act V stages mimesis in prison "outside" society, but records how one is already imprisoned in mimesis, identified mimetically, inside society. I shall argue that the inmates' particular mode of being, in prison, is their Beingimprisoned. Furthermore that their mode of Being (Da-sein), their status as subjects, is the result of the incarceration of mimesis. As Richard Anker and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have argued, ever since Plato mimesis has been conceived of as dangerous Revue Française d 'Etudes Américaines, 135. 1 (2013): 94--109

Mimésis dans les lettres américaines, sous la direction de Richard Anker 3 because it threatens the ipseity --the "properness" --of subjectivity. A subject whose identity is based on mimesis has no proper identity; or rather, because mimesis is anterior to subjectivity, such subjectivity is always an effect of mimesis. Such an ungrounded form of subjectivity poses a threat to the stable order of society, which is why mimesis, as such, if it is not subordinated to a "logic" of the subject, represents a threat. Its ritual expulsion constitutes one of the "inaugural scenes" of the Western tradition (Anker 21). For mimesis resides at the core of The Republic, of Plato's theory of the political state: "La question de l'art est la question centrale de la République -ou de la république" (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1976, 227). The question of art is also the central question of Act V, and, as will be argued in this part of the paper, of the American justice system, which incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, China included.

Focusing on the specificity of Big Hutch's criticism of his own character, Horatio, and on this prisoner's reading of Hamlet, the author of Act V, Jack Hitt, considers that the place (prison) from which Hutch delivers them confers upon the play its specificity, to wit, a new alertness to the status of the prison in Hamlet:

Have you ever heard anybody talk about Shakespeare's characters this way? Hutch was always doing this, talking tough, but then betraying a real gift for literary criticism […]. In fact, he pointed out a weakness in the structure of the story I'd never heard before in all my experience with the play, that Hamlet's dilemma over killing Claudius isn't really much of a dilemma. (15'20''-15'36'') Hitt adds that Hutch's rewriting of Hamlet consists in literalizing metaphor: "Denmark's a prison," Hamlet tells Rosencrantz in Act Two. And Hutch says you could do a version of the play that takes this central metaphor literally. All the characters in the play are types he sees in the [prison] yard every day. The Claudiuses, who'll do anything for the emblems of power--money, drugs, high-end tennis shoes, Poloniuses who kiss up to the powerful, Rosencrantz and Guildensterns--rats, he called them--spies who run to the administration with information. (23'47"-24'14'') "'Denmark's a prison,'" while of course the place in which "Denmark's a prison" is spoken is also a prison. Recognizing the mise-en-abyme in the play, Hamlet, where a "play within the play" tends to blur the distinction between theatre and reality, Big Hutch, literary critic-prisoner playing scholarly Horatio, extends this blurring to the distinction between theatre and prison, with the idea that while theatre in prison might be a way of suspending his prisoner's status, society is already imprisonment. All is already theatre (hence, prison equals theatre), and, second, all in the play is already prison (i.e., Denmark equals prison). Thus, prison is not outside society, but society is inside the prison. There is thus a radical perturbation in the supposedly secure distinction which those of us not in prison blithely maintain between the outside that being inside prison is and the inside society that not being imprisoned is.

Without diminishing either the violence of their crimes or the suffering of their victims, the question is: how is prison for criminals similar to exclusion for mimes, actors, poets? Regarding the expulsion of mimesis, at stake in The Republic is mastering the rational part of the soul so that the dangerous mimetic impulses of desire and rivalry by which violence (injustice, adikia) is triggered and threatens community are controlled (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1976, 231). Mimesis, intimately related to the rivalry of desire and the desire of rivalry, instigates and fuels violence. Mimesis is thus clearly a socio-political issue: it becomes violent and it perturbs social and political stability.

To understand the banishment of mimesis from the city relative to the banishment of criminals from civil society, it is necessary to understand the danger it "represents." The structure of representation necessarily triggers the uncontrollable proliferation of doubles; moreover, of doubles that ignore that they are such, being caught up as they are in representation. As in any world that slides into tragedy, there thus remains but anti-heroes (such as criminals) and the city-state. Everyone identifies with the latter each time a new antagonist appears. Thus is the breakdown of the polis announced in tragedy and in its philosophical double, the Platonic dialogue (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1976, 235). In The Republic, the artist is therefore expelled outside the polis in the attempt to contain the uncontrollable proliferation of mimetic violence, in the polis, precisely outside it. The comparison with Act V consists in the fact that every prisoner depicted, as prisoner, is defined by the status of "actor"; each either calls himself or identifies others, insofar as criminals, by the term "actor." These "tough" guys, like the inmate-actor Derek "Big Hutch" Hutchinson, landed where they are, in prison, for playing the parts of the bad guys in really violent crimes. The prisoneractors of Hitt's play all insist on this. There is not an actor in Act V who does not confess to have been playing a role when committing the crime --the illegal act --that landed him in prison.

Yet one forgets why mimes and mimesis --the poet, the writer of theatre -were expelled from society; and one fails to measure the disturbing adequacy (or mimesis) between the poet and the excluded, the hyphen-hiatus linking poet and prisoner, actor and actor. If the poet is expelled, it is because the poet is the representative of mimeticism. Mimesis must be expelled because mimesis is the danger of the "originary absence" of subjective properness: the danger of being always external to a fixed secure place (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1976, 245).

Of course Act V is not The Republic, and the criminal behaviour that got people like Big Hutch into prison cannot entirely be identified with Plato's actors.

The latter are expelled because they are actors. The former are expelled from civil society --and they come to realize this --because of a piece of bad acting that doesn't recognize itself as such. "Bad acting" means unacknowledged (i.e., bad) role-playing that wrongs (i.e., is bad to) unwilling spectator-victims. In The Republic, the actor is expelled because the violence his mimesis is thought to be the origin of will undo the polis; in Act V, the criminal is expelled (into prison, i.e., from the polis) because of violent crime that has endangered society. Yet while the criminal is recognized by the criminals-turned-actors to have already been an actor when committing the crime, albeit a bad actor insofar as he was unaware of his acting, he is not recognized as actor by the State which, in accordance with Plato's logic, only identifies the criminal action ontologically: it will not base its eventual paroling of the prisoner on the idea that the prisoner is only acting. In Act V, inmates acting in Hamlet come, belatedly, to this recognition of their actions as acting. One of the prisoner-actors, James Word, defines the kind of acting that landed him in prison as a cowardly form of mimesis:

You know what I'm saying? And Laertes, he falls into the manipulation. And he becomes a bad guy for a little while because he's being deceitful now. You know, I never really looked at it and it's somewhat cowardly. And I can relate that to my past life as a criminal. To put a gun in somebody's face, that's an unfair advantage. And, you know, so that's a cowardly act.

That's what criminals are. We're cowards. When we're criminals, we are cowards. (32'47"-33'15") The "cowardly act" is an "act" (deed) of a coward, yet also, precisely, an "act": a mimetic performance, not avowed as such. Of the other actor already mentioned, Big Hutch, Hitt says that he is plagued by the "Jack Nicholson syndrome": "The actor's persona is bigger than any role he might play." This clinging to identity as ontological, this eschewing of mimesis, is what inhibits the imprisoned actors from becoming full-fledged actors: literally imprisoned still for the crimes they've committed but metaphorically unshackled, free of their anti-mimetic false identities.

Like Hutch and Word, other prisoners evolve through their acting, realizing that they can become other, that a becoming-other can define them. Inmate-actor Brat Jones Mimesis in American Literature, ed. Richard Anker Thomas Dutoit, "Just ... Mimesis: Jack Hitt's Act V" 6 defines himself as changed by the encounter with literature, and "not the person he was" when he committed his crime, i.e., he was a mask cast upon himself. All in prison is already acting (see inmate-actor Tim's remark about "personas," relayed by Jack Hitt; and James Word's self-analysis as actor). Edgar, the inmate playing Claudius in the play, says he "consider[s]" himself "no great actor," but he, like other perpetrators of violent crimes acting in the prison production, gives to his role a reality that actors in general --without such criminal records --may not be able to gain access to. This is a general point made by Ira Glass (the creator of This American Life) and by Jack Hitt: how does a play about the murder, the contemplation and enactment of its revenge by further murder, play, when its players are murderers and other violent criminals?

In Act V, as in maximum-security prisons throughout the United States, the prisoners are expelled from society: thrown in prison. 1 With the prison population in the US, quintupled in the past twenty years, representing one quarter of the world's prisoners today, with its greatly increased prison term times for smaller and smaller offenses, and with these sentences indisputably targeted at the impoverished population in the US (itself increasing since the late 1990s, tallying 46 million people by the estimates of the Census Bureau), it may not be an exaggeration to claim that Immanuel Kant's penal solution, exclusion --i.e., "expulsion" [Kant 241]) outside all civil society (stranded islands in the middle of distant oceans) for criminals convicted of bestiality --has an uncanny resemblance to the Platonic "geste d'expulsion," as applied to the perpetrator of mimesis, shifted from the poet-conductor of mimesis, therefore criminal, to the criminal-actor, therefore mimetician. From a State in Plato that expels the mimetician, we come, in the United States, to a State that is a prison State, and where the state of the prisons is one of the defining characteristics of the American State, relative to other States in the world, even if its prison policies are unmistakably influencing those of States across the world.

If mimesis is what links

The Republic and Act V, relative to expulsion from society, how does it, when located in prison, challenge the foundations of society, the legal system, and their ontologically based requirements of subjectivity?

Just Knowing

Lacoue-Labarthe fait apparaître en [la vérité d'adéquation ou l'homoiôsis] un abîme, une puissance perturbatrice et déstabilisante qu'elle tient d'une mimesis pré-originaire. Du coup, cette "vérité" n'est plus simplement dérivée d'une autre, plus originaire. Hantée par la mimesis, elle joue maintenant un rôle (Derrida, 1987(Derrida, -2003, 225), 225). Derrida places the "truth" of mimesis in quotation marks because it is a truth intrinsically divided, whereas a truth should be one: equal to itself. Mimetic "truth" is "pre-originary" because its "originality" is that of the copy, of representation. The presence of absence --representation, mimesis --"is" ghostliness. "Truth" is therefore haunted by mimesis (the irreducibility and pre-originarity of the ghost, of representation). Hence, "truth" is an actor, a performance of a role and not a stable fixed position outside representation. Mimesis is the ghost, making truth into an actor.

This is what Plato's republic, and the legal system, will attempt to quarantine, outside.

To appropriate mimesis is to sequester the ghost, elsewhere (but, unlike Kant's penal solution, inside national borders). Whence the making of the ghost the proper, the product, the production, in lieu of the ex-proper. The "subject" is less (de-)constituted by a split between absence and presence than it is fractured and is dispersed by the instability of the improper. That fractal dispersion accounts for the ghost of appropriation that both dominates every analysis of mimesis, of mimeticism, and is the plot of its economic, hence political, significance (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1976, 259).

The split is not between this or that (Hamlet and Act V, Hitt and Wilcox, prisoner and actor, being and becoming, etc.), which after all would only consolidate a society largely structured on an us versus them, an inside versus outside split (the not poor and the poor, the not incarcerated and the incarcerated, etc.); rather, the split is fractal.

It exceeds dialectical re-appropriation; or such (re-)appropriation is but the ghost thereof.

To this aspect of mimesis as ghostliness, as disquieting instability of the improper, it must be added that Shakespeare played the Ghost, in the first productions of Hamlet of which he was both the writer and director. The ghost is, already, the author, the artist, the poet, the dramatic poet, the tragic poet. On an onto-typo-graphic level, the ghost in the play figures Shakespeare like Socrates in the dialogues figures Plato. In The Republic, the expulsion of the actor is ironic because the mimesis that enables The Republic is Plato plastically striking himself in the image of Socrates (the name "Plato" itself in Greek stems from plattein, from which comes "plastic," and means "to form, to mould" [Lacoue-Labarthe, 1976, 267]). What gives Act V some of its dramatic force is the fact that prisoners play the parts, including that of the ghost, written by the proto-chameleonic, thus improper, "Shakespeare" whose ghostly negative capability enabled him to "be" everyone and no one.

Prison mimesis (Act V) radicalizes artistic mimesis (Hamlet, but also The Republic), showing what is ultimately at stake with mimesis "itself." The mime is not an on, the Greek word for a "being," an étant. This non-being means that, in order to to (re)present everything, it is necessary for the mime to be nothing in itself, to have nothing proper, save an aptitude "equal" to all sorts of things, roles, characters. This paradox of the comedian formulates a law of impropriety or non-property, which is the very law of mimesis (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1986, 27). The lack of property is the natural state of the comedian, but physis, nature, are to be therefore understood as that which is always only thought through representation. The lack of proper identity is the fact of mimesis: originary supplement, art is what gives, what there is, since physis only is given by art (poiesis, mimesis). The artist is a subject without proper quality, yet this subject without subjectivity is multiple, indeed infinitely plural (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1986, 28-29). The artist thus is, by turns, everything and nothing. Prisoners are ghosts. They are removed from social life. Yet they survive, in prison. They live beyond the end of their social life. They are (like) ghosts, surviving, living beyond.

In Act V, the relationships that inmate-actor-characters have with ghosts are spotlighted. Hutch/ Horatio grounds his entire critical and authorial project on his creed of ghosts. Hutch's critique and revision of Hamlet is based on his "if, then": "if I am strong enough to believe in ghosts, then I am strong enough to believe what that ghost tells me." This logic will be undone, in fact, by Act V, by Hitt's composition but also by Hutch's own ultimate performance, in many ways the philosophically deconstructive argument or purpose of Act V. Yet prior to airing out how Hutch-Horatio deconstructs Big Hutch-author, how Hutch is introduced merits attention. Mimésis dans les lettres américaines, sous la direction de Richard Anker 9

Chris Harris

On every Sunday after the noon meal, the four of us [the four prisoners who share Hamlet's role in four separate Hamlets] will assemble. We'll have our little gray Hamlet books and we'll proceed down to the track. And if you are simply walking by, what you'd probably hear is--you'd hear this chatter of somebody giving their lines clearly, the rest of us with our heads down in the books walking in the line. Now, there are people, because there are benches that are all throughout the inside of the track. So there are people that actually watch us. So you'll hear this old, English style speech. You know, "Ho, Horatio," and these people are like, ho, what?

Jack Hitt

One of the problems of doing any play in prison is that being a good actor is the exact emotional opposite of what it takes to be a successful inmate. Rather than close off all feeling and look tough, you have to open your vulnerable self up and withstand often cruel laughter as you try to find some authentic emotion within you. In this way, a level four, high-security prison is no different from high school. And so, most of the inmates who audition for Agnes tend to be, actor-y people. The theater types of prison.

Back in 1999, they just had to put up with abuse from the bigger, meaner inmates. But that changed. In fact, a lot changed after Agnes cast the role of Hamlet's best friend.

Big Hutch

My name is Derek "Big Hutch" Hutchinson. I play Horatio, the scholar.

Jack Hitt

You might be surprised to learn that Derek "Big Hutch" Hutchinson is big. He has a smooth, bald skull and hooded, threatening eyes, the kind of guy that if you met him you might think, he's probably serving 120 years for armed robberies. And that would be correct. Hutch isn't like the rest of the cast. And he's the first person to tell you. (11'08"-13'15") Hitt places this excerpt from Harris just before the introduction of Hutch because in fact Hutch plays the role of Horatio. "Ho, Horatio" as "ho, what?" not only forces us to pause (the meaning of the apostrophic, imperative verb "ho" is "stop, pause"), but introduces a new ratio: "Hutch is not like the rest of the cast" but he is part of the cast, and thus Hutch/ Horatio introduces a new distribution and ratio. Not only (as we'll see) because he introduces a logic of calculated risks and ratios, but also because he is (as we'll see) the critic among the cast, miming the drama critic Jack Hitt, not to mention the fact that he is, as Horatio, the scholar, versed in the language of the ghost. He is able speak to the ghost, who in Shakespeare's Hamlet was played by the playwright, Shakespeare himself: Hutch can speak to the ghost, to the author, to the mimetician, and in Act V, this means that he mimes the writer, Jack Hitt. If the "rest of the cast" are the "theatre types of [the] prison," they are keys struck, typed (and cast) by the writer (and director). Hitt, whose name is related to typein (hit, playing the role of the "blue whale," his "persona" as Tim puts it, is representation, but the law would very probably not only deduce from it his utter disrespect for law, but also may establish the referent (his criminal inclination, his dangerousness) from the mimesis. Big Hutch's position coincides with the law's, sealing him in it: "c'est justement l'ontologique : la possibilité présumée d'un discours sur ce qui est, d'un logos décidant et décidable de ou sur l'on" (Derrida, 1970, 14). Act V, on the contrary, is about not being able to identify, to stabilize mimesis. Act V opens, puts into movement, unprisons. Hitt hints to Hutch another hatch, which consists in the idea that a representation is without such a referent, and that his future memories of his past might be thought otherwise than as a repetition (effectus) masquerading as logic (causae). As Derrida might put it: "mais c'est […] une référence sans référent" (Derrida, 1970, 24). If Jack Hitt tempers Big Hutch's certainty of the necessity of swift revenge ("Are there no reasons to delay taking swift action? Even if you're convinced that you've been wronged? I mean, that's why he stages the play within the play, right? To make sure that Claudius is the bad guy"), Big Hutch's faith in representation makes him see no problem:

See, that's where we have to go back. Now, if I'm strong enough to believe in ghosts, then Turning mimesis into truth, Hutch misses Hamlet's "real" (mimetic) dilemma, the dilemma of mimesis, sealing himself inside a mimetology that only the role of Horatio will release him from. Horatio, played by Hutch, dislodges Hutch from Hutch when, in a crucial moment at the end of the final act of Hamlet, Horatio, as Hitt says, "has Hutch under control and the audience in his hand, he [Horatio] has the one great line to deliver and, as Hutch might say, he [Horatio] nails it. 'Now cracks a noble heart ... good night sweet Prince/ In flight the angels sing thee to thy rest'" (52'55").

Horatio, acted character, takes over from Hutch, and in this line about a certain "flight," Hutch is divested of Hutch and Hutch's vengeance-based reading, for, unlike earlier in the show when literary critic Hutch admits his inability to "fly on out" of mimetic vengeance, here Horatio releases Hutch from himself, delivering him of the mimetic "logic" which had imprisoned him in the first place.

Hutch-Horatio's radical transformation, shifts the dilemma of mimesis onto those of us, some of whom might be judges, who do and can have a say about the question Jack Hitt raises at the end of Act V:

Revue Française d 'Etudes Américaines, 135. 1 (2013): 94--109

Mimésis dans les lettres américaines, sous la direction de Richard Anker 13 Are we forever the prisoner of our actions? It's a good question. It was Hamlet's question. And it's the unresolvable conflict in our penal system. Why do we put people in jail? To rehabilitate them and restore them to our company or to punish them, regardless of how much they might change? 55'10-55'25

Doubled Loyalty

Jack Hitt's Act V is admirable because it resists attempts to recuperate mimesis into a process of truth. His radiophonic staging of Act V as theatre resists veridical collapse by hewing to the role of theatre in much the way that, for Derrida, Mallarmé advocated a certain idea. We quote Derrida from his unpublished 1967-68 course "Littérature et vérité: le concept de mimesis": "l'Idée n'est pas autre chose pour Mallarmé qu'un certain néant, je dirais même qu'elle n'est rien d'autre que la mise en scène --le théâtre de rien. Mise en scène qui n'illustre rien, qui illustre le rien, l'espace ou l'espacement comme rien" (Derrida, 1967-68, 1:11). To make this theatre into an idea you could use as proof (as in, "theatre shows that the men have changed"), is to misunderstand that the very idea of it is the idea of theatre, is the theatre of the idea, the theatre of theatre and the idea of the idea as theatre. We may say of Hitt what Derrida writes of the French poet: "Mallarmé déplace l'interprétation classique ordonnant la mimesis à la vérité selon un geste [...] subtil, [...] discret, presqu'infime mais décisif lorsqu'il décrit la mimique sans qu'il soit jamais question d'imitation, de vraisemblance ou de vérité" (Derrida, 1967-68, 1:15). Akin to Mallarmé, Hitt's gesture is a "tout autre geste" the function of which is not to invert truth and falsehood, but "plutôt de faire de la vérité un moment ou une fonction d'un jeu qui en lui-même n'est ni vrai ni faux et échappe indécidablement à cette alternative. Il s'agit donc de mettre, de remettre la vérité en jeu et dans ce jeu de voir à quoi répond le désir de vérité" (Derrida, 1967-68, 3:7).

If one has not recognized this function of mimesis, then one risks interpreting

Act V as the attempt to know, to derive knowledge from theatre for the sake of the tranquil decision-making of a legal court. This would be to give in to the gesture of eliminating from mimesis its tropical (or tropological) resistance to theory: "D'où le geste le plus ancien et le plus constant vis-à-vis d'elle [i.e., mimesis], et qui est de la circonscrire 'théoriquement', de la mettre en scène et de la théâtraliser pour tenter de la prendre au piège du (sa)voir" (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1976, 247). Act V precisely and steadfastly resists, desists from, such theoretical theatrical trapping of knowledge. It

  It depends upon a certain what? On how a befuddled what? arrests common perception. A "Ho, what?" announces Hutch. A "Ho, what?" names the question and the stupefaction faced with the ratio, with what Hutch represents (refigured, in his self-introduction: "I play Ho[-]ratio, the scholar"), with what this play Hamlet represents in a prison, and with what Act V is doing generally relative to prison, punishment, revenge, rehabilitation, justice. Revue Française d'Etudes Américaines, 135. 1 (2013): 94--109

I

  'm strong enough to believe what that ghost tell [sic] me. If I'm strong enough to believe you're a ghost, then I'm sure you know what happened to you.(16'39"-16'57'')

The penal system is "a theatre for the performance of society's founding political myths" (Haslam, 50); that theatre is a politico-economic management of poverty and of ethnic affiliation.

strike, type) remarks how Hutch is the exception in the cast (by his non theatre type persona), but the composition of Act V also lets one induce that he is exceptional, too, by his status as critic, by his closeness to the ghost (-/) writer, and by what turns out to be nothing less than his mimetic rivalry with Hitt.

Everything here, at bottom the difference between vengeance and justice, revolves around understanding what (a Ho-) ratio is.

When Big Hutch, analyzing Shakespeare's Hamlet for Jack Hitt, says "I don't see the conflict" (15'37"), revealing that he does not understand why Hamlet, after the revelation by the ghost concerning how his father was killed, does not immediately kill Claudius, we observe that Hutch is still fully inscribed in the logic, or in the system, of justice (Gerecht) as vengeance (Gerächte), eye for eye. At the end of the radio piece, however, Big Hutch will have evolved, far from a simplistic eye-for-eye conception of justice.

The reading of Hamlet put forth at first by Big Hutch is a reading of vengeance. He reads the play according to the genre of the revenge play, proper to Jacobean revenge tragedy. Another reading, which Horatio teaches to Big Hutch at the end of Hitt's Act V, unveils the economic closure of the reading governed by vengeance initially proposed by Big Hutch. This other reading makes the economic closure and circular fatality appear: Big Hutch will never get out of prison if he is not submitted to or subjugated by what will in fact happen to him at the end of Act V when, on stage playing Horatio, he becomes Horatio, that is to say, this "chump" with whom "I don't normally would associate" (sic).

In other words, as literary critic, "Big Hutch" "thinks" that it is totally natural, automatic, to kill him who killed your father. In his literal transposition of the central metaphor of "Denmark is a prison" which Hamlet mentions to Rosencrantz, he imagines the scenario that he considers to be more realistic than that imagined by Shakespeare. If "Denmark's a prison," and if Hamlet is going to have what he considers a true dilemma, then Hutch's re-written scenario for Hamlet is this:

Here's how it would happen. Claudius killed this guy here because the guy had the biggest dope business in prison or something. Gertrude will be some sissy. You find them everywhere in prison. But the guy they kill will be Hamlet's brother [who is also in the same prison]. So now, being in the prison world, he must defend that honor. But he's got a girl talking about, you only got five years. You did your two. Do one more, they're going to parole you. Come on home because I love you and bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. He has another brother in business out there that he can get with to help raise his status. So he has Revue Française d 'Etudes Américaines, 135. 1 (2013): 94--109

Mimésis dans les lettres américaines, sous la direction de Richard Anker 11 all these things to look forward to on the street. But if he let's that killing go, he's going to have the roughest three years of his entire life. He'll be the piss pot of the institution. So he has this dilemma. Would he be strong enough to survive it and fly on out of there? Aaaahhhh, Hutch wouldn't. I aaaahhhh ain't going to lie. 18'20-19'

Releasing the true neurotic dilemma of Hamlet which he sees lacking from Hamlet, Hutch's scenario holds that nothing prevents Hamlet from immediately killing Claudius, just as, for Hutch, nothing prevents a father from taking revenge on the person who would have raped the father's daughter. Justice is expeditious vengeance.

There is nothing to ponder; it is not even tragic, since tragedy is not the natural or automatic, but rather choosing the wrong action after having tried to choose the good.

When he first appears in Act V, totally unlike what Hitt calls the "actor-y" types, the "theatre types of prison," Big Hutch presents himself not as killer whale but as a blue whale so large as to control the entire ocean of writers, even swallowing the author of authors, Shakespeare. His hubris is what makes his transformation moving.

Yet in his usurpation of author-position he is the character of Act V closest to its author, Jack Hitt. His writing of the "real" dilemma is, also, more an operation of calculation and profit margins than anything else. In his version, Hamlet in year 2000 must merely weigh probable future goods (his girlfriend; his brother who'll hire him [and having a job offer greatly speeds up being paroled]) against the probable present evils incumbent upon him if he avenges his brother's death instead of waiting the three years and being "the piss pot of the whole institution" (18'43"). His rewriting, if acute, reduces the "dilemma" to a calculation of pros and cons. Ho, ratio.

In Hamlet, the ghost's injunctions upon Hamlet to act (to avenge his father's death) incite Hamlet to act (to stage the play in the play) in order to determine the truth of the ghost's speech. Big Hutch's criticism of Hamlet is that there is no dilemma, because mimesis, for him, permits the establishment of truth: (15'47''-16'17") The five times repeated "No" suggests that the certainty of Big Hutch is his (unconscious?) miming of King Lear. Implicitly, Big Hutch endorses a decision by prison officials to keep him in prison, on the basis of the truth value of his acting. His dislocates critical, theoretical, assurance. In the example of the "critic" Big Hutch, his literary criticism of Hamlet is itself dislocated by both Horatio and Hitt's counterreadings.

If the actor-prisoner-character-person is to be let out early on parole, it must be able to be said of him (by warden, judge, or parole board) that he is no longer the same as he was going into prison but is now unified, a stable ipseity or sameness. Yet these inmates change (by) their acting. "Now," as Hutch might put it, "in the prison world," this subject is the site of circulation between, say, an insufficient resemblance to rehabilitated, proper citizen, and dis-and re-sembling deficiency "proper" to the untrustworthy criminal. In this way, the subject confounds the relation of memory (of who he was/is) and view (who he appears to be becoming). The mimetic constitution of the subject makes the play, that is requisite for access to truth, undecidable. Hutch learns thusly what acting "is" and that Act V itself amounts to a rethinking of mimesis.

However, if Lacoue-Labarthe's critique of mimesis entails that truth itself, haunted by mimesis, is also a role play(ed), then Hutch "has this [new] dilemma": for he now appears before a double law, before which he must comparaître in the juridical sense of the term. To wit: The law of mimesis, on the one hand, and the law of the judge or legal system, on the other, call forth a double allegiance in the subject that is mutually exclusive. If Big Hutch's loyalty is bestowed upon the law of mimesis, then he is an actor without any stable, reliable, identity. If his loyalty is bestowed upon the law of the judge, then he must renounce acting --give up precisely that which enabled his change from the chain of identity --in exchange for identity, i.e., for the "bad" acting he had learned in prison theatre to renounce. At stake here is how one understands "rehabilitation," reentering society across the threshold of expulsion and re-integration. What makes the prisoners' paradoxical knowledge of their "status" of actor tragic is not only that it came after incarceration, in the mode of regret at having caused terrible suffering and even sometimes death, but also the character of mimetic "consciousness itself," a "consciousness" that is destabilized by the lack of foundation Revue Française d 'Etudes Américaines, 135. 1 (2013): 94--109

Mimésis dans les lettres américaines, sous la direction de Richard Anker 15 of mimesis. These inmate-actors become aware of their mimetic quality -James Word, for example, realizing he could really act because as a criminal, or becoming a criminal, he was already acting -insofar as they repress mimesis, since this awareness, this "self-knowledge," has to unknow itself as mimetic, in order to be consciousness. To be "conscious" of mimesis is either to deny mimesis or, paradoxically, consciousness. Either Big Hutch renounces that which made change possible (mimesis), in order to convince the judge that his identity is stable, or he renounces that (consciousness) which is an effect of mimesis. To do so would involve arguing the case to the judge that even he, the judge, is an actor, and that the legal system is based on the repression of mimesis just as Plato's Republic was based on the expulsion of actors.

For us, the "spectators" of this "comedy," Big Hutch and all inmates-becomeactors embody the face-off of these two irreconcilable laws, and they are summoned to appear before these two contrary instances, the instance of juridical, ontological law and the "instance" of mimesis. When he overcomes what Hitt calls his "Jack Nicholson syndrome" and nails the role of Horatio, Big Hutch (synecdoche for all prisoner-actors having become full-fledged actors) "comprehends," grasps, his mimetic identity but by the same token puts himself apart from, loses touch with, any grounding which would make comprehension, strictly speaking, possible. This is another way of stating the radical undecidability alluded to earlier. Insofar as a "decision" can be articulated here, it is an impossible one of doubled loyalty. As subject, he owes allegiance to two antithetical laws. Yet society, as embodied by the judicial system, will only (re-)integrate the criminal who will be able to claim that he has overcome mimetic "blindness," and achieved the truth about mimesis.

Of course where Plato, in The Republic, wanted to exclude the actors from society, Hitt's prisoners in becoming actors are trying to get back into it. Still, the threshold negotiated is the same. The prisoner-actor has to conceal his awareness of the fundamentally mimetic character of his identity, or being, if he wants to get out of prison, and into our own world of either/or, either theatre or reality. A judge (in our Platonist tradition) wants to hear that the "reformed" inmate can "lucidly" or "consciously" decide between the two. Being in the world (Da-sein) depends on it. To phrase it otherwise: the prisoner-become-actor, implicitly at least, sees a ghostliness in things that his judges either refuse to admit, save in a purely theatrical context, or readily accept to commit into asylum or prison. Yet confronting the mimetic double Mimesis in American Literature, ed. Richard Anker Thomas Dutoit, "Just ... Mimesis: Jack Hitt's Act V" 16 bind or double allegiance ("proper" selfhood and lack of proper identity) means that a prisoner become actor like Big Hutch is summoned to appear before the law of mimesis in a way that no judge, as judge, can ever know, or ever admit to knowing. A judge cannot know just mimesis. Act V however gives us to think just mimesis, only mimesis, as a just mimesis, a "consciousness" of this double allegiance, a "consciousness" that is not unified, and thus not consciousness, unless, masquerading as cause, it represses the mimesis of which it is the effect.