The proper relation of art's forms to social facts has been a pressing problem for artists in this century, and so also has been the relation of psychoanalysis to political explanations of human behavior. For all their acute sensitivity to the society around them, the great modernist artists tended to give us survival by aesthetic escape into a contemplative and esoteric realm of imaginative creation. Yeats, for example, who is invoked in the epigraph of D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, often worried about his poetry's responsibility for actual destruction, but he always reaffirmed, though with increasing self-irony, that the purged fantasies of art were his most adequate response to the brutal fantasies ruining the social and political life of Ireland. Likewise Freud personally experienced discrimination as a Jew both in the matter of appointment to a medical professorship and when he fled the Nazis to England, yet his psychoanalytic theory privileges intrapsychic fantasies as the source of sickness in civilization; finally he did not put much stock in social facts as the cause of neuroses and psychoses. Modernist art and psychoanalysis in its classical form share the prejudice that significant reality is to be found not in empirical fact but in a complex inference drawn from mediating and disguising signs. They do not believe that it is possible to tell the significant story “straight,” the story, for example, of a person's identity or a genocidal campaign. Both typically translate from a temporal series of events into a conceptual structure of explanation which is at least one remove from empirical facts.

The postmodern artistic and historical temper is supposedly discontent with this consolation outside of history, but modernism in fact engendered two very different species of postmodern artistic reaction. On the one hand, certain “ludic” artists, or “surfictionists,”¹ dissolve the boundary of difference between sign and fact by asserting, as the modernists did not, that what usually passes as “fact” is as much a sign or “fiction” as anything else; therefore, the writer can playfully incorporate facts on the same plane of significance as fictional details into a work whose raison d'être is its own self-admiring game-playing rather than traditional objects of representation.² Whatever satirical force and social resonance this might produce is secondary to the self-reflexive purpose. Clearly this postmodern reaction is more an extension of modernism's aestheticist escapism than it cares to acknowledge. (However, the surfictionists' claim that their game-playing is also “historical” might imply that even they wish to be seen as incorporating the morality of truth to history into their art in their own way.) On the other hand, certain writers, like Saul Bellow or John Gardner, reassert the value of the representational, insisting that history's brutal fantasies result in part from art's elitist abdication of dialogue with the facts in power. If the distinction between fact and fantasy is not emphasized in this mode, it is only because art represents important social and moral content through transparent, not refractory, signs. Sometimes, as in Doris Lessing's late work, “fantasy” is given a prominent place only because the author is genuinely convinced of our untapped or evolving psychic and prophetic powers to extend the sense of the “real.” Ultimately this realistic fiction is traditional enough to uphold our commonsense understanding that there is an important moral distinction between aesthetic games and worldly facts, between sanity and schizophrenia, even between good and evil. It vehemently resists the absorption of reality into the autonomous structure of art, just as Marxists resist reduction of social ills to matter for the psychiatrist's couch.

The White Hotel is an interesting test case for whether, and how, certain serious artists of the late twentieth century are able to handle authentically the inherited problem of the relation between fact and fantasy, the empirical and the mediated. This novel seems to have touched a cultural nerve in the way that books that are both best sellers and respected works of art do. I suggest it does so because it embodies the excruciating predicament facing artists as legatees of the lunatic facts of recent history, of literary modernism, and of psychoanalysis. The book does not provide a solution to this predicament, though it inherently attempts one, nor does it provide much consolation, but it does take the measure of the dilemma more thoroughly and openly than most works of recent fiction.

The White Hotel³ opens with a series of letters among members of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic circle. In one letter from 1920, we learn that Freud is treating a young woman, Lisa Erdman, for “sexual hysteria” and that she has just given him an erotic fantasy poem full of the most blatant sexual imagery. The scene of this poem is an imaginary white resort hotel; the poem is written between the staves of a score of Don Giovanni. Freud of course counsels detachment and understanding toward this material. In the last letter of the series, written eleven years later than the others, we learn that Freud is about to publish Lisa's case history.

Next, in the first of many abrupt formal shifts in the novel, the long pornographic poem is presented to the reader, followed by another chapter that is simply an expanded prose version of the same imaginings. This version is Lisa's response to Freud's request that she annotate the poem during her therapy. In a third shift of form, we are then given Freud's case history of Lisa's “hysteria” and treatment, including his byzantine interpretive tracking of the meaning behind her symptoms. He concludes that her hysteria originated when, as a child, she accidentally witnessed her mother, her aunt, and her uncle making love on board her uncle's yacht. He also believes she has been sexually frigid with her husband because of this early trauma and because she is an unacknowledged lesbian. Subsequent to the therapy this woman resumes her musical career, which had been affected by her disease, and is able to function with only mild, undebilitating recurrences of her symptoms of breast and ovary pains.

In a fourth shift, the novel presents a chapter in the mode of mimetic realism that follows Lisa from 1929, eleven years after her therapy, through 1936, when she becomes an opera singer, marries a Russian Jew, and adopts his son, Kolya. In this section we have again a series of letters, this time between Freud and Lisa as he seeks her permission to publish her case history. At this later time, Lisa's reaction to her past therapy contains startling revelations of information she had withheld from Freud. The most important is that, as a girl and a daughter of a Jewish grain merchant in Odessa, she had been accosted in the street by sailors from her father's merchant ship and taken to the ship where, as she says, “they spat on me, threatened to burn my breasts with their cigarettes, used vile language. … forced me to commit acts of oral sex with them, saying all I was good for, as a dirty Jewess, was to—But you'll guess the expression they used. Eventually they let me go. But from that time I haven't found it easy to admit to my Jewish blood. I've gone out of my way to hide it” (p. 188). Ashamed of this episode and, more, of the fact that the memory of it had made her aroused, she had soon developed “asthma”—one of the symptoms of her “hysteria.” Lisa also now reveals that her frigidity with her husband, whose “family were horribly anti-Semitic,” was caused by her knowledge that “He said he loved me; but if he had known I had Jewish blood he would have hated me” (p. 190). Lisa explains to Freud that she had withheld this information out of delicacy about Freud's own Jewishness. On the other hand, she totally rejects these events as an explanation of her breast and ovary pains when she was a young adult. She insists that they were organic at the same time she tells Freud that in her therapy she “didn't always wish to talk about the past,” being “more interested in what was happening to me then, and … in the future. In a way you made me become fascinated by my mother's sin. … I don't believe for one moment that had anything to do with my being crippled with pain” (pp. 191-92).

Freud replies to her revelations:

I prefer to go ahead with the case study as it stands, despite all imperfections. I am willing, if you will permit, to add a postscript in which your reservations are presented and discussed. I shall feel compelled to make the point that the physician has to trust his patient, quite as much as the patient must trust the physician.

I call to mind a saying of Heraclitus: “The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored.” It is not altogether true, I think; but success must depend on a fair harbour opening in the cliffs. (pp. 195-96)

But of course, psychoanalysis has also always claimed the ability to penetrate masks and defenses, and so Freud comes out of this looking considerably less authoritative than when the book started.

Lisa's protestations about her pains and the relevance of her remark about her concern for the future are further vindicated when, in the novel's next and fifth chapter, the story takes her to Kiev in 1941, where, because of her widowed fostering of her Jewish stepson, she is forced into the Podol ghetto and then marched along with the other Jews there to be shot at Babi Yar. She escapes the shots and falls into the huge pit full of bodies, surviving just long enough to be finished off by the bayonet rape of a soldier checking that everyone is dead. Thirty-three thousand people died in Babi Yar on September 29-30, 1941, and Thomas concludes this chapter by explicitly remarking on the individual complexity and dignity of each of them, explaining to the reader what happened to the pit full of bodies, and generalizing such demonic horror in relation to the Holocaust exterminations elsewhere. He closes the chapter by saying, “But all this had nothing to do with the guest, the soul, the lovesick bride, the daughter of Jerusalem” (p. 253).

In a final astonishing modal shift we are then given the sixth chapter, “The Camp,” which is a fantasy written in a realistic mode. In this tour de force Thomas imagines Lisa, Freud, her mother, and many others in the previous cast of characters, alighting after a train journey into a transit camp which has simultaneously the sensory reality of Palestine after World War II and the surreality of an imaginary place after death. It is not beatific here; people still bear the marks of their worldly wounds—Freud's cancerous jaw, Lisa's limp, the British soldier's one arm. It is a place of healing and compassion, but also a place where, as in Lisa's earlier fantasy of the white hotel, sexuality is not regulated by formal ties like marriage nor decorum respected in such matters as when Lisa drinks milk from her mother's breast. The tone is tentative and hopeful and deliberately privileges Lisa's optimism. The book ends with Lisa realizing that her pelvis and breast have not hurt that day, and, in fact, the book's last word is “happy.”

Placing itself deliberately at the conceptual crossroads of all the contending factions mentioned above, The White Hotel takes huge risks. First, it risks the accusation that it sensationalizes both Freudian sexual themes and the pornography of Nazi violence. The charge of pornographic sensationalism is not hard to refute superficially; for Lisa Erdman is depicted overall with dignity and subjective empathy rather than reduced to an object from start to finish. Even the more subtly disquieting possibility that she collaborates in her own reduction to a psychoanalytic object⁴ is refutable because the story shows her moving beyond Freud's sphere of influence and even ensnaring him in a huge interpretive trap by withholding evidence that his psychoanalytic acumen could not reach. She progresses from a pitiable “hysteric” to a competent, brave, and independent woman, and there is at least the possibility that she does it in spite of Freud rather than because of him.

The charge of using sensational and even “sacred” facts for the sake of the novel as an art work, a use that some would consider a deeper pornography, is, however, more difficult to refute. When Yeats, in what Thomas uses as the epigraph of this novel, says, “We had fed the heart on fantasies / The heart's grown brutal from the fare,” he meant the Irish freedom fighters' crazy fantasies of fratricide and rebellion rather than his own poetic fantasies that were the “responsible” antidote. But by the end of Thomas's novel, we cannot be sure that the epigraph has not been turned against itself—meaning that the novel perhaps criticizes the modernist aesthetic and the psychoanalytic “solutions” as fantasies contributing to social brutality. Yet this is only speculation, since I hope to show that reading this novel as a reassertion of literary realism entails even more serious questions.

The problem this novel poses of the relation of social fact to aesthetic image is not merely one of literary history. One cannot read the grave and terrible penultimate chapter, “The Sleeping Carriage,” which describes the heroine's bayonet rape and death in the pit at Babi Yar, without thinking it intends to bear historical witness to the Holocaust. If nowhere else in the book, this chapter alone would seem to argue that Thomas renounces the surfictionist approach in favor of representing facts. That is, he seems to take up the challenge described by the psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, who, as a result of work with survivors from Hiroshima, the German camps, and Vietnam, believes it is essential to amend the Freudian model of the psyche from one of repression of sexual urges to anesthesia from historical trauma, and to recognize the crucial role of artists in enabling our race's psychic and physical survival. Lifton believes that contemporary culture has succumbed to “psychic numbness” as a result of peripheral or direct awareness of all such atrocities and that psychiatrists only intensify the problem by searching for familial or intrapsychic origins when the causes really lie in political and cultural fact. Lifton believes that such numbing results in “desymbolization,” an inability to reckon with and master psychologically the apocalyptic realities of the contemporary world:

The problem is less repression of death than an impairment in the general capacity to create viable forms around it, [to bring] imagination to bear upon the unpalatable existential-historical truths, to expand the limits of that imagination on behalf of species survival … to overcome psychic numbing and …, in Martin Buber's words, to “imagine the real.”⁵

In answer to those who believe that the Nazi atrocities should never be depicted in imaginative literature because one should not try to speak the unspeakable (and some object to The White Hotel on this ground),⁶ Lifton replies that it is necessary to do the vital symbolic work enabling us to face, not only our individual death, but the imminent threat to our species. For Lifton, artists who brave such subjects touch the “mythic or formative zone of the psyche”; for, “only by creating, maintaining and breaking down and recreating viable form are we capable of experiencing vitality, and in that sense we may say that form equals life.”⁷ A handful of writers have taken up this challenge—Lifton discusses Camus, Vonnegut, and Günter Grass. The White Hotel enters this company, although it makes its task more difficult by avoiding totally the satirical bitterness that accounts for much of the energy in the work of other writers cited by Lifton.

What does Thomas's book reveal about the difficulty now of revitalizing the cultural imagination of holocaust through creative form? The predicament might be summarized thus: To “imagine the real” in our times would involve a rejection of modernism's “ritual despair” or “Olympian detachment” in autonomous forms⁸ and a reassertion of the mimetic mode which requires that we respect the resistance of some facts to absorption into the purposes of self-reflexive structures. In a time when avant-garde formalism dominates high art, the really bracing gesture might be to describe the historically real with imaginative empathy governed by factual precision. Therefore, Lifton's prescription about “breaking down and creating form” should not imply modernist or surfictional escapism. However, if one does no more than portray the brutalities in a pseudo-factual style,⁹ one implicitly risks reinforcing brutishness—as if to admit that the free play of imagination and the limited optimism of psychoanalytic theory are mooted by the sordid spectacles of powerful fact. The artist cannot return to modernism's transcendence of life through ironic and “despairing” art, nor the psychoanalyst to his world-renouncing myths, but neither can they adopt the moral and psychological pessimism implied by mere accurate description.

To put the predicament this way may strike some as too much either/or thinking. Instead, we should perhaps speak of a “dialectical” relation between fact and imagination. This is a familiar critical stratagem, but I think it will not do for novels like The White Hotel that formally pose precisely the question of whether there can be a dialectic between imagined detail and historical facts as horrible as the massacre at Babi Yar. In terms of Lifton's task of finding “life” for the species through form, what must be demonstrated is the ability of art—and in this novel, also psychoanalysis—to affect potently the course historical facts will take, whereas in such hopeful formulas critics too easily slide into the term “dialectic” as a refuge from this demonstration. The images in such works must seem more than compensatory, evasive, or merely decorative (as the modernists' artifices often were) in order to fulfill the moral and psychological function Lifton envisions for them. It is hard to believe that Yeats's “artifice of eternity,” as described in “Sailing to Byzantium,” would qualify.

Again, this issue is not confined to discussions of the role of art toward brutal facts. An observer of a recent conference that gathered survivors of the Holocaust at Yale to refute the challenge that the event never happened remarks that even there it was difficult to concentrate on the facts:

Much of the … conference, in fact, was devoted to theorizing. From time to time a conference participant made a plea for memory itself—for its preservation and persistence in pure and unexplained form. But the relentless purity of memory was hard to sustain, despite the dedication of the participants to the problem of the Holocaust, despite their devotion to clinical history, and despite the fact that a number of them were survivors themselves … with Holocaust memories of their own. Psychological theory repeatedly intervened, studies were cited, cases were presented, and intelligence was applied. The tragic irony of the conference's limited focus was never articulated … the psychological damage that was inflicted upon those survivors, incomprehensibly brutal and massive as it was, was still less compelling a problem of human experience than the physical exterminations themselves.

To be sure, the exterminations could not be reversed, while psychiatrists could at least hope to help, if not cure, those survivors whose lives had been so defiled and whose memories so contaminated. … Still, in the end, it was the reality of history rather than the god of psychoanalytic theory that brooded over the conference, at the highest level. And it was that reality that drove out the theory when, in the midst of it all, videotaped interviews from the archives of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project were shown, interviews of survivors talking not about Freud but about the black and lifeless sun of Auschwitz. That talk was about memory, its life and its death, and it stunned the group into reverent submission.¹⁰

Surely the readers of the chapter on Babi Yar in The White Hotel will agree that it portrays a “reality that drives out the [psychoanalytic] theory” which dominates the first part of the book. The rhetorical force of that chapter is greater than that of the rest of the novel put together. A hush settles over one's reading like that of the stunned conferees. And the force seems to depend a great deal precisely on that simple clear-sighted difference between fact and fantasy accepted by the modernists but rejected by the surfictionists. Yet considering the novel as a whole, we cannot be certain; fantasy, art, and theory remain in problematic relation to history. Let us see how the problem is figured by tracing the book's rhetorical process.

For the first half of the novel, The White Hotel seems nothing so much as a piece of surfictionist formalist adventurism. Our reading displaces rapidly from letters to and from Freud, through a “primary process” erotic fantasy poem written by Lisa, on toward her prose version of the same events, and then to Freud's case history of Lisa's “hysteria.” Thus we speculate that we might have in hand another of those verbal artifacts designed to show the arbitrariness of forms and signs as does fiction by contemporary writers like Borges or Robbe-Grillet or Coover. The freewheeling manipulation of forms seems to say that such “realistic” content can be emptied of its ordinary significance and expropriated for use in the symbolistic verbal structure that is this book. This expropriation is an especially daring move with something as supposedly objective as a case history. The construction foregrounds the forms themselves and emphasizes the gaps, as if to say that there are many ways of “writing” the reality of a person, none more or less authentic, and that the reality of a person is always “written,” that is, mediated by an arbitrary discourse. The section of post cards from the different hotel guests recounting differently the same events depicts synecdochally this arbitrariness of authority in written signs. To the rather stale Faulknerian point about differential perceptions of reality is added here the typical postmodern point that such perceptions by consciousness are greatly and differently conditioned by the media through which they are expressed.¹¹ The first part of the novel seems to confirm the often touted idea that every piece of “fact” is always already a “fiction.”

The subject matter of the Freudian hunt for the source of Lisa's hysteria seems an especially convenient peg on which to hang such a surfictionist performance, since for the classical Freudian these symptoms are signs of some deeper reality to be penetrated by always tenuous interpretive moves. The facts are not empirically available, but must be reconstructed, just as any narrative would need to be, from this displacing series of forms that Thomas uses. The game-playing spirit of psychoanalytic sleuthing correlates well with the game-playing of the novelist's art and the reader's fun. In this sense, quite apart from themes, Thomas and Freud are kindred spirits.

From early in the book when Lisa is Freud's patient, the reader feels her presence as a conventionally represented character because Freud and his correspondents discuss her that way in the opening letters; yet chapter four, in which Thomas for the first time begins the narrative account of the later period of her life, brings the reader up short because the formal emphasis shifts inexplicably from the different written forms that mediate Lisa's story to a narrative of the story itself. The earlier matter now becomes just “Lisa's past,” and she assumes interest as a subject rather than as an object of someone else's discourse. This shift to something nearer Lisa's own conscious self-understanding is what prevents the book from being a pornographic exploitation, but the principal effect of chapter four is to show the reader that Freud's cleverness was almost entirely off the mark. He had interpreted her hysteria as a fixation upon a girlhood fantasy in which she had witnessed her mother and aunt having intercourse with her uncle; out of polite concern for Freud's own Jewishness, Lisa had withheld from him the crucial facts about the trauma she suffered as a half-Jewess. Still, had the novel ended here, we might easily have seen this chapter as a culmination of the surfictionist view of facts I mentioned above. That is, Lisa's correction of Freud could read as one more demonstration that mere facts do not exist undistorted by interpretation. This would have had the main satirical effect of warning the reader against overweening confidence in one's theory and especially against the misplaced confidence of the psychoanalytic model, but it would not have damaged the surfictionist theory that “all fact is fiction.”

It is only with the introduction of the special subject matter of the massacre at Babi Yar that the book seems to swerve into an argument for the weightiness of the documentary discourse. The choice of subject here has the effect of making all the previous psychoanalytic sleuthing and artistic game-playing seem at the least morally frivolous, if indeed they are not somehow more directly responsible for history's nightmare. No longer are we left with Lisa's private joke on Dr. Freud and thus an affectionate swipe at psychoanalysis; we are now given a scene in which the previous mistaken interpretation of symptoms is shown to have dire public consequences. That does not mean that Freud's failure to penetrate to the ethnic trauma behind Lisa's hysteria is a direct cause of her being killed in Babi Yar. She might not have missed being sacrificed with her Jewish stepson even had she discussed the “Jewish problem” with Freud. Rather, Thomas reveals that the prescient “cause” of Lisa's “hysterical” breast and ovary pains was her premonition of something that would happen later to her in historical fact when the soldier gored her body in those places in the pit full of dying Jews at Babi Yar. Thomas seems to be arguing that Freud's larger failure to put himself in dialogue with real history is symptomatic of the failure of prominent analytical languages to make the world better by understanding what happens in history. Although Freud's failures are always treated gently in the novel, the Babi Yar chapter makes him, and implicitly anyone too caught up in such a tautological metalanguage, seem evasive of historical responsibility. In a letter early in the book, Ferenczi writes that while Jung was telling Freud about some “peat-bog corpses” in northern Germany that were “prehistoric men, mummified by the effect of the humic acid in the bog water, … Freud burst out several times: ‘Why are you so concerned with these corpses?’ … [and] slipped off his chair in a faint” (p. 5). When it comes, the action in the pit at Babi Yar—later filled by the Nazis with water to make a bog to hide the murders—seems designed as a brusque rejoinder: “Because, Dr. Freud, they are still there in the actual history of our own time. One should not shrink from it.”

The moment of Lisa's rape in the pit takes the reader's breath away. It is difficult to descend from such a rhetorical peak of rapt horror, and many readers are annoyed that Thomas did not end there. What could possibly be left to say after such a stark reconstruction of just one of our century's many horrible facts? The best “imagination” of such facts might be only to render them accurately. To make them “heroic” in any way, to attempt consolation, might be a betrayal. How can the artist's free imagination play “dialectically” with such facts? Evidently, Thomas thinks it can because he finishes the novel in a place set beyond history, “The Camp.” Since this chapter's place and action have no mimetic relation to history, the reader will treat the chapter as an example of the discourse of poetry or literature, the discourse of the poet's imagination. Up to that point realism had effaced or written over the formal games of the book, but in view of the final chapter we now must ask whether Thomas means us to have read the realistic chapter as “just one more possible discourse,” no more compelling than the others, and inserted just before the poet's own special “word” on the events and meaning of Lisa's history. Has Thomas resorted to the tired idealism of the modernists in the face of history? Can the material, historical horrors really have nothing to do with the spirit and soul?

Before exploring further the problem of the book's rhetoric in “imagining the real,” we must link the discussion more explicitly to the other equally major question of the book—the question of Woman. This is not just parallel to the problem of history's nightmare as embodied in the Holocaust. The two questions are deeply joined in this book, and we can justify Thomas's having joined them for at least two reasons. First, a literary reason external to this novel: woman and Holocaust victims are liable to a similar fate when portrayed in intellectual or literary history. Both tend to be pictured either as enmired or enslaved in a positivistic series of actions unassimilable to any ethos or ideology moving the real affairs and dominant spiritual preoccupations of the world, or as so sublime (in the case of the Holocaust, so sublimely terrible) that there is, again, no basis on which to join them to historically powerful ideologies or moralities. Lisa Erdman, while typical of her century, is not representative of the ideas that have dominated it. So also the Holocaust, if wrongly portrayed, appears marginal to the rest of our significant human experience. Woman as traditionally portrayed offers no image to emulate in significant action;¹² at best she inspires men in history or poetry to gather their own quite different energies in her name. She offers no such image because she has no discourse traditionally associated with public power. When not vilified or condescended to for her unideological, pragmatic existence at the level of daily facts, she is praised as a muse figure—die ewige Weibliche—in both poetry and history. While substantively this is not the problem of the Holocaust witness, formally it is homologous; the same gap between the raw “banality of evil” in the camps and the sublime resonance of the victims' suffering plagues writers who try to speak about it with meaning for the rest of our civilized world. How to make the fate of a woman or a camp inmate significant in the terms of the mainstream of civilization? For contemporary culture the oppression of women in history might seem cognate with the oppression of ethnic groups in the twentieth century; certainly there is often even a common psychological and physical brutality. But even if the Jews were more brutally treated in the Holocaust than is the fate of woman, the important thing both share is the attempt by dominant patriarchal cultures to make their sufferings seem marginal to the history of the human race, to make their historically and materially particular fates seem unrepresentative of the wider culture's depraved condition. The stories of these Jews and these women ought to matter in their representativeness as the stories of male heroes have. But The White Hotel shows that, although Lisa lived and suffered the social problems of her time, she had no way to speak of them or act with historical effectiveness; she was a Cassandra in the prophecy of her body's symptoms, for hysteria is not a recognized public discourse.

The second reason that the question of woman and the question of the Holocaust are inextricable is therefore internal to the novel. One of its strongest données is that this woman as a representative human being might have, probably does have, powers that could redeem history's horrors if she were only really heard in the civilized and material world. The revelations that, first, Freud had misinterpreted the cause of her “hysterical” sexual frigidity with her husband and, second, that the pains in her breast and ovary foreshadowed what would happen to her at Babi Yar, while “magical” in realistic terms, are surely meant to show symbolically that her discourse is more attuned to historical reality than the theories of Freud or any other political and moral metalanguage that could not foresee the coming of racist fascism. Her femaleness is thus indispensable to the theme of the book; this novel could not have had a male hero. Thomas suggests that woman has a kind of knowledge the world could use. Here is the chance to portray a female hero's effectiveness in the real terms of history. Yet Thomas lets the chance go by; he finds no way to portray woman's knowledge in other than stereotypically mythic terms or to make her death seem portentous for figures in power. Thus, Thomas does not rectify through his art, as Lifton said the artist must do, the problem of the cultural unrepresentativeness of woman and the Holocaust victim.

Interestingly, Thomas shares this problem with Lifton, who also makes an argument about “Woman as Knower.”¹³ Since Thomas's novel bears much resemblance to Lifton's argument, it will be useful to pause for a moment over Lifton's essay to show how the psychiatrist, like the novelist, reveals an odd inability to imagine woman as an actor for her own sake and with direct power in history. The essay shows that the predicament of “imagining the real” exists in psychiatric theory as well as literature. Lifton believes that there is a general shift in the psychology of knowing in the postmodern world:

There would appear to be a convergence between premodern, non-Western patterns and postmodern tendencies. … a protean style of self-process, characterized by an interminable series of experiments and explorations. … What I wish to suggest here is that feminine knowing may make specific contributions to this style. … [whereas the traditional world is governed by] a pair of related myths, essentially male in their theoretical absoluteness: the myth of the magnificently independent and wholly unfettered self; and the polar myth of the totally obliterated self. … her form of organic knowledge may humanize these harshly abstract polarities. …

Much of woman's psychic potential stems from her close identification with organic life and its perpetuation; from this potential she derives a special capacity to mediate between biology and history. … Woman's organically rooted traditional function as informal knower can be distinguished from man's traditional explorations of ideas and symbols on abstract planes. … Yet her knowledge has been “informal” only in the sense that it has been relegated to a kind of social underground, as if such knowledge were not quite proper or acceptable [surely this describes Lisa's hysterical symptoms as treated by Freud in the novel]. … But recent developments in many fields of thought have created radical shifts in standards of intellectual acceptability, and have, in fact, placed special value on those very modes of knowing which had been previously part of the feminine informal underground. …

Woman's innate dependence upon biological rhythms … central to her nurturing capacities … may provide her with psychobiological sensitivities useful for grasping the more irregular historical rhythms which confront us.¹⁴

This sounds very like the case Thomas seems to try to make for Lisa; yet when we follow Lifton's argument further a curious thing happens. We have just been told that woman's traditional epistemology fits well with the rapid movement in postmodern “protean” culture, but when Lifton explains exactly how this is true, he does not say that the mode of woman's protean understanding and being will substantively displace the old “male abstractions” or that she will, perhaps for the first time in the history of culture, join her knowledge to power in the social and political sphere so that the world will have a new, more “feminine” script to guide it. Rather, it turns out that the woman will function as a refuge, a crucible, a handmaiden, a muse, for the daring individuals (can we doubt they are males?) who are risking the rapid changes out in the society:

her organic conservatism, epitomized in her nurturing, and specifically maternal, function, becomes a crucial vehicle of social change. The set of feelings and images she transmits to the infant constitute an individual basis for cultural continuity and a psychic imprint of the perpetuation of life itself. … But during periods of great historical pressure toward change, precisely this imagery makes possible the individual participation in change by providing a source of constancy … with which subsequent imagery of change can interact without threatening the basic integration of the self.¹⁵

The example given by Lifton of such a process is the support given to militant Japanese students from their “intense relationships with their mothers, in contrast to their distance from their quietly disapproving fathers. … The emotional support received from their mothers could thus often confirm the student's own sense of the nobility of their group's vision.”¹⁶ Remarkably, there is nothing here to suggest that the content of feminine knowing is put into the world as a direct power. Lifton apparently does not envision the feminine working in its own name or public discourse; it is merely a vehicle for something new to be born, perhaps some new set of male abstractions that her influence might humanize. The change will not be influenced by the kind of knowing woman has, but rather by the fact of it. Nothing in the above remarks by Lifton would suggest the impossibility of a group of militant young Nazis gaining support from their mothers. In fact, the use of the concept of motherhood by the Nazis is notorious.

To be fair, Thomas seems to sense that this traditional view of woman as a conservator allowing males to change the paradigms of social history will not quite do. Although she is very nurturing, Lisa Erdman is not depicted only as the classic nurturer sending men off to their projects with a kiss. Much of the book's merit lies in Thomas's effort to portray her as a powerful agent who continually transgresses the absolute dichotomies of “male” thinking, and that effort makes it all the more disappointing when he does not fully succeed, but rather, in a way slightly different from Lifton, also finally relegates woman to the status of a muse. If the effort is to portray the deep link between woman's knowledge and prevention of nightmares in history, he fails because he cannot dramatize her power changing the course of history. And since in this novel the males do not redeem history either, Thomas seems to suggest that the only hope for us who would be instructed in solutions is to celebrate Lisa's knowledge in the mythic, written poetic artifact that is the last chapter of The White Hotel. Thomas brought Lisa only so far before her power in history was deferred and defeated by the power of his own pen. Not that we must criticize him personally; for as we shall see below, the problem may be endemic for anyone trying to fashion new images for woman in fiction or to write in an authentic way about the atrocities of the civilized world.

For much of The White Hotel it seems almost as if Freud is Lisa's muse as much as she is his. He helps her to a certain extent to form a strong self. With intelligent irony this part of the book shows, under the polite veneer of the doctor-patient dialogue, a battle between Lisa and Freud for conceptual control of the facts. Freud steers the focus to a youthful “Medusa” image of maternal incest, but when Lisa in her own mind rejects that explanation of her symptoms, their battle may be seen as one involving Lifton's “re-symbolization” and addressed to the same problem that preoccupies Lifton—numbness from apocalyptic awareness—because Freud and Lisa are working on a “hysteria” that had its origins in Lisa's assault as a Jewess by the sailors, and this assault is part of the larger fabric of the Holocaust's racist apocalypse.

When Freud and Lisa correspond eleven years after her treatment because he is about to publish her case history, this battle for control of the symbols becomes explicit for the first time in the novel. Lisa almost totally revises the perspective on the facts of her life from what they had accepted during “therapy.” While amusingly she is always careful to say that she is probably only a “raving, lonely spinster,” she strong-mindedly supplies new meanings for some of the key incidents they had dealt with. Ironically too, she shows that she had always been a more sexually healthy “liberated woman” than Freud had given her credit for; she reveals that the erotic fantasy Freud had taken as a sign of her disease was conceived in a deliberate and detached mood to pass the time and “to be honest to my complicated feelings about sex” (p. 183). Furthermore, she reveals that the fantasy was sparked by the very real physical “effrontery” of the waiter at her hotel. Her belated responses show that Freud had not “imagined the real” Lisa, but rather, without quite realizing it, had subordinated her to the imperatives of his own narrative.

The relation of Freud and Lisa shows three things: first, how much Freud owed to his woman “hysteric” in order to engender his psychoanalytic discourse;¹⁷ second, how much the psychoanalytic discourse remained defensively deaf to real social facts and thus, in one way, betrayed the patient's “hysterical” insights and capacities because of faulty symbolization of the facts;¹⁸ third, how strong a patient must be not to capitulate to this faulty symbolization and how inevitably self-doubting she will be when she ventures her own—especially when the patient is a woman trying to speak of what she knows as an actor in history rather than as part of a timeless “family romance.” When we look back at the early part of the novel we see what a healthy gesture it was for a woman of her time to write frankly and spontaneously about sexual desire in a way that linked it to her nurturing capacities, and, without knowing why, to write it in the space between the lines of the libretto of Don Giovanni.¹⁹ She seems symbolically to correct, or at least counteract, the archetype of the male attitude toward woman as a sexual object. Though she says in her late letter that “It shows I was crazy,” we can only read that remark as Thomas's intended irony; her deference to Freud does not run very deep. She is polite to him, but she is even more resistant to his formulations than she was earlier.

Perhaps the climax of their conflict over resymbolizing spirit-numbing material comes in the passage where Lisa writes to Freud:

What torments me is whether life is good or evil. I think often of that scene I stumbled into on my father's yacht. The woman I thought was praying had a fierce, frightening expression, but her “reflection” was peaceful and smiling. The smiling woman (I think it must have been my aunt) was resting her hand on my mother's breast (as if to reassure her it was all right, she didn't mind). But the faces—at least to me now—were so contradictory. And must have been contradictory in themselves too: the grimacing woman, joyful; and the smiling woman, sad. Medusa and Ceres, as you so brilliantly say! It may sound crazy, but I think the idea of the incest troubles me far more profoundly as a symbol than as a real event. Good and evil coupling, to make the world. No, forgive me, I am writing wildly. The ravings of a lonely spinster! (p. 192)

The most important thing here is that Lisa reintroduces moral categories into a scene that Freud had deliberately encouraged her to think of only in psychological terms. Not that she thinks back on her mother and aunt moralistically; she is thinking about such things in broader ethical terms. Just so does the book as a whole move Lisa out of Freud's psychoanalytic realm into the realm of the ethical when she chooses to be a stepmother to Kolya and dies with him. Lisa's rewriting of this figure's meaning is, then, part of a general movement in the first two-thirds of the novel away from Freud's interpretive hegemony and toward a portrayal of Lisa as a directly ethical authoress of her life. The mode of depiction in the third, fourth, and fifth chapters is as important as, if not more important than, their reported content. Our sense of her as an ever more effective agent comes to a large extent from the formal shift from indirect to direct modes of writing about her; for, conventionally, woman is associated with oblique and indirect modes of knowing, acting, and being represented. The move from the earlier indirect portrayals to the direct, lean prose of “The Sleeping Carriage” contributes to our sense of her growing dignity in history as much as the tale of what happens to her. The depiction of Lisa as freeing herself from male modes of discourse is not long-lived, however. It is as if she escapes Freud's hegemonic discourse only to pass into that of another well-meaning male—the author. I would argue that, for all he intends a paean to Lisa in his final pages, Thomas has failed to solve the predicament at the heart of the book, which I mentioned above, for either the Holocaust or for woman.

To return to the book's rhetorical process: its success finally stands or falls according to one's reading of the last chapter, “The Camp.” To have left Lisa dying shamefully in the pit would have shown her commitment to good works in the real world and her historical awareness defeated by raw political power. To have left her there in silence would have annulled any sense of triumph in the control she acquired in her life after Freud because it would be fatuous to pretend that such a death in itself is ever a victory. It was the very nature of the Nazi exterminations to prevent such an old-fashioned sense of heroism. This is one of the reasons that the Holocaust numbs our imaginations. We can make sense of Attila the Hun; he was a barbarian invading civilization. But the Nazi atrocities or nuclear war or Vietnam are so numbing to the imagination precisely because they do not respect this binary opposition. The forces of civilization are themselves barbaric, and so, how to imagine them? How fit them into the ongoing tale of culture? (Of course, Conrad's Marlow, playing on the opposition “civilized/savage,” saw this many years ago.) History defeated these Nazi victims, and it is an insult to them to pretend otherwise. They did not die nobly or for a good cause. One must not make them sublime in their deaths, even if the deaths numbered millions. Of course, religious transcendence is at least theoretically a palliative, but it will not be very credible in the twentieth century, as Thomas seems to realize in the insistent physical realism of “The Camp”'s setting. He seems to recognize that any consolation for these deaths must be depicted as coming from reform within that same real world that produced the Nazis, not from some transcendental assertion. But that would include also the transcendental assertion of the power of myth or poetry to provide the cure. In this sense, the boundary of practical conceptual difference between history and poetry needs to be reaffirmed, not removed, in reading The White Hotel. Has Thomas given us in the last chapter something that can overcome the conceptual paralysis induced by the numbing facts? Has he prevented a nihilistic ending and at the same time been faithful to the ethical implications of Lisa's life and death story?

One obvious way of reading “The Camp” is as a traditional dialectical effort to show that good and evil are as complementary as Lisa feared, and to induce some sense of acceptance in the reader about that. Thomas himself refers to the novel as a “synthesis of visions.”²⁰ That statement must have an ethical force if we are to be persuaded: in other words, he must somehow make the atrocities seem inevitable. But if this book justifies itself at all, is it not because it recalls for us, through its “pseudo-documentary” elements, things that we absolutely cannot accept? It is true that empirically both good and evil exist in the world, but evil is given historical specificity here—as is the much lesser, perhaps necessary, evil of psychoanalysis—and to portray it in the mode of general philosophical pessimism is as bad as subsuming it to glorious metaphor.

The book does not seem, however, to rest in philosophical pessimism either, but to try to offer a purgatorial sense of hope. To be fair to Thomas, he has depicted not just a never-never land in which Lisa's virtues are imagined as useful, but he has also ingeniously laminated mythic poetry and historical concreteness together in this last chapter by describing the “purgatorial” camp in the sensuous terms of historical Palestine. And the fusion works literarily, even if its content seems ephemeral compared, for example, to Dante's allegory. But even though the image of Israel reminds us that there is a country on the earth politically dedicated to preventing such future nightmares, the main sense of consolation here is the way previous motifs, images, and characters are given yet another imaginative twist. In content and even more in the sheer narrative fact that Thomas adds this section, the “resolution” of the book seems to be by formal legerdemain, and all the burden falls on the poetic artifact as such to “answer” to the mistaken therapy and the Nazi massacre. The main reason “The Camp” does not convince us is that its sense of renewal is aesthetic rather than ethical. Here everyone's sins are forgotten in a spirit of forward-looking hope and radical tentativeness. Thomas seems to have dramatized the events in the chapter by literalizing the poet's lines quoted by Freud at the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “What we cannot reach flying, we must reach limping.” This fits well with Lisa's generous spirit, and in that sense her authority is vindicated. But moral distinctions between good and evil were essential to Lisa's “hysterical” understanding and to the force of the previous part of the book. What guarantee do we have in “The Camp” that the Gestapo will not show up a bit later, somewhat sheepish, to be nurtured by Lisa and the others?²¹ One need only ask the question to see how aesthetic Thomas's answer to history really is.

If we search the chapter for ethical representations, we find at most a posture of waiting. Although Lisa is resolutely certain that “‘wherever there is love, of any kind, there is hope of salvation … Wherever there is love in the heart’” (p. 271), none of the characters is shown acting upon evil through an act of moral will. Everyone here, as in most transit camps, is waiting for something better to happen to them. They are not in control of their own existences; there is something feckless about them, even though Thomas clearly wishes their hope to represent an alternative to the moral darkness of the preceding chapter. It cannot possibly look equal to the forces of actual history, whether Freud's influence or Nazi power. And waiting has always been woman's fate especially. If we read the chapter as an aesthetic closure, however, we see that the book fails to turn its toehold on “imagining the real” into a firm standing place of some new postmodern synthesis of poetry and history. It is true that Lisa's discourse refused to be bound by “male abstract polarities”—even the mind/body polarity—and therefore it is more easily compatible with the poetic license that in “The Camp” plays havoc with the usual conceptual boundaries. She is a boundary skeptic throughout the book, and that is what makes her different from Lifton's “conservator” woman. Both her poem and her subsequent life and death register her refusal to segregate female sexual pleasure from maternal nurturance, love from death, or even gender from gender. She refuses the mother's role in life, preferring the ambiguous status of stepmother to patriarchal conceptions of “family.” This alternative perspective on family is emphasized in “The Camp.” But, whereas the transgression of boundaries looks healthy when set against the reifications in psychoanalytic thought or Nazi ideology, it does not look healthy if it divorces moral judgment from nurturing acceptance. The merit of Lisa's body's messages was in their morality and their historical accuracy. Whatever limited significance she has as a portrait of woman's superior knowing is annulled if she can be shown to triumph only within some frankly poetic structure like this imagined place, the camp. To read the last chapter as an encomium to her woman's knowing is to betray her because she is once again thrust into a discourse not her own, making her place in the author's poetic artifact her “proper” teleology. To say that her death had “nothing to do with the soul” trivializes the mimetic significance of her gesture of dying for another as a woman and a Jew in a world where woman are raped and Jews persecuted. To allow the artifact to have the last formal word in the novel is not so different from Freud's decision to give priority to the requirements of his case history for the Goethe Centenary when he writes to Lisa, after the revisions she makes of her story, “I prefer to go ahead with the case study as it stands, despite all imperfections. I am willing, if you will permit, to add a postscript in which your later reservations are presented and discussed” (p. 195). Both men, Freud and the author, expropriate Lisa's discourse into their own. This is conventionally woman's place as “knower,” and thus represents no real advance on that front as the book had seemed to promise. The failure seems especially egregious when the problem is to redeem real historical brutalities like the Holocaust through the imagination.

The problem we have with this book as a civil war between myth and history is not really a function of the author's skill or ineptness. One can hardly imagine a more exhausting and beautiful literary attempt at synthesis than the last two chapters of The White Hotel. The book may well become a classic because of the powerful writing, its formal craftsmanship, and its confrontation with weighty matters in such a way that readers will return to it again and again to find some new connections and debate about its problems. The problem may be that any postmodern book that attempts to revise the image of woman or redeem historical atrocity will be subject to a double logic of reading that is “deconstructive.” Jonathan Culler has described such a double logic:

It is essential to stress … that there is no question of finding a compromise formulation that would do justice to both presentations of the event by avoiding extremes, for the power of the narrative depends precisely on the alternative use of extremes, the rigorous deployment of two logics, each of which works by excluding the other.²²

The “double logic” of The White Hotel is that, on the one hand, the story's power hangs on showing that a woman's “hysterical” prescience about history is more politically realistic than more “hallucinatory” metalanguages like psychoanalysis. Its power, that is, derives from its pseudo-documentary witness to historical fact and its insistence that woman's knowledge is historically relevant to that fact. On the other hand, the story's power hangs on its provision of a mythic construct that resymbolizes the numbing facts and argues that the historical, material consequences are not paramount. Or—to put the predicament in formal rather than mimetic terms—by one logic the writer must set his poetic creations in the accurate footing of history's facts (so as to avoid being like Freud with his “beautiful theory”); yet by another logic the writer must create a self-reflexive literary structure in which realistic content becomes transformed in the poetic mill. Neither the Holocaust nor Woman's place in the world finish by looking different in the history of consciousness.

One may argue that in The White Hotel Thomas has joined myth and history as he has precisely in order to challenge the dissociated sensibility of the modern and postmodern age. In this reading, the point would be to contemplate the very problem that the failure to unify myth and history convincingly rests with our culture's reading codes, in which political realism and religious or poetic vision cannot be combined. No mythic literary product could seem to have much to do morally with the facts of the century's history, given the marginality of poets, and likewise no believable image exists for depicting woman's way of knowing as actually rather than virtually efficacious. Thus we should be content to hover in the crossfire between an aesthetic reading—the book as a necklace of discourses on which none of the different beads is privileged—or an ethical reading—the book as a limping, almost despairing, realistic portrayal of political and social evils. We should not bother to search for a more profound necessity in the link between its formal free-handedness and its particular content. However, it is important to recognize that to advocate this spirit of “negative capability” in the reader, or to imply, with Sir Philip Sidney, that “the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth … and therefore, though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not” would itself place the reading strictly in the aesthetic mode rather than provide a true synthesis of poetry and history, aesthetics and ethics. This recognition is especially desirable in view of certain formulations now being made by critics concerning the problem. Alan Wilde, for example, has argued that postmodern writers exhibit a different kind of irony than modernist writers did. This “generative irony,” he says, rejects the Olympian detachment of the modernist “reductive irony” of the abstract or mythical order in favor of a stance that recognizes that “consciousness is implicated in the world, is intentional, and that reflexivity, however ingenious, can never abrogate that relationship.”²³ Surely The White Hotel seems written out of a wish to follow that second pattern. But in Wilde's view that is a project by which the art work “add[s] itself to the world without … substituting itself for it, thereby making reality, and art as well, not less but more various.” He says that “generative ironists puzzle over the legacy of the modernist heroic and contrive in its place a syntax of interrogation.”²⁴The White Hotel does have such a syntax of interrogation, but it is interesting because it has a good start toward an ethical position too. “The Camp” does create what Wilde calls an “enclave of value in the face of, but not in place of”²⁵ the psychoanalytic and the Nazi discourses, but it is mere wordplay to think that its “interrogation” is any more efficacious toward history than the modernists' contemplative structures.

Similarly, Robert Alter says that the self-conscious novel is a type that “systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and that by doing so probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality”; it shows a “dialectic between fiction and ‘reality’ … a play of competing ontologies” which is “always simultaneously aware of the supreme power of the literary imagination within its own sphere of creation and its painful or tragicomic powerlessness outside that sphere.”²⁶ But where is the real dialectic here? What would it be unless the artist could show art's power toward the real? And if it cannot, does it not remain in the ranks of the aesthetic, the same consolation found by the modernists, with slightly more ironic qualification? The momentum of the above statements goes in the direction of aesthetics rather than ethics because, for example, variousness is an aesthetic value. But in cases where the stakes are as high as Lifton says they are, what is wanted is an artistic vision that can be a convincing model for the facts. Thomas seems to recognize this need in the way he offers “The Camp” as a frankly alternative vision and in the way he chooses Yeats's lines for the epigraph, deliberately raising the question of the usefulness of the “modernist heroic.” Interestingly, the gambit of the novel does not succeed, not because Thomas fails to give a convincing literary synthesis, but rather precisely because, in succeeding in that synthesis, he necessarily fails the ethical dimension of the book, its mimesis. Necessarily, because the literary and the politically realistic codes compete with one another in our culture. Perhaps the issue is not so important for many contemporary historical facts, and so the writer's play with them is innocuous. But no one could think that about the history of the Holocaust, and, for those who recognize it as a serious problem, the history of woman in cultural discourse.

Thus one does not know by what “generic contract”²⁷ to read this book, yet at the same time one cannot hover between the two genres, given its content. One is reminded of the lament of one of John Barth's twins, joined to his brother belly-to-back: “To be one, paradise; to be two, bliss. But to be both and neither is unspeakable.” An honest reading of the novel will not speak of “dialectic” or “synthesis” because the competing elements are not successfully resolved into a third term that escapes being wholly aesthetic. The novel shows that the culture still has a problem finding a way to “feed the heart on fantasies” that are healthy and yet have power in history. It shows that Lisa's knowledge as woman, as analysand, and as Nazi victim is literally still unspeakable in any mainstream discourse because the poet can do no more than translate, as Freud did in psychoanalysis, the discourse of her body and the insane discourse of the Nazis into a discourse foreign to the victims' own understanding of themselves, which is poetry. Unfortunately, the reason for optimism in the book's final word, “happy,” is not that this woman changed history or endured it as culture's representative, but that the male poet-bird has gone bravely out on the limb in the last chapter, calling attention to his power of sympathy and poetic transmutation through his imagining of an unreal woman.

Notes

1. In Surfiction: Fiction Now … and Tomorrow, ed. Raymond Federman (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), pp. 7-8, Federman uses this term for the kind of experimental fiction that does not “imitate reality, but … exposes the fictionality of reality … [and] says that ‘life is fiction’ … not because it happens in the streets, but because reality as such does not exist, or rather exists only in its fictionalized version.”

2. See, for example, Robert Coover's The Public Burning or E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime.

3. D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel (New York: Viking, 1981). References are to this edition and are indicated in the text.

4. In a review of another book involving Freud, Jung, and the patient Sabina Spielrein, Thomas remarks on the similarity of the psychoanalytic session to a classic seduction. D. M. Thomas, “A Secret Symmetry,” New York Review of Books, 29 (May 13, 1982), pp. 3, 6.

5. Robert Jay Lifton, The Life of the Self: Toward a New Psychology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), pp. 129-130.

6. Elie Wiesel says, for example that “a novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or it is not about Auschwitz”; Michael Wyschograd says, “Art takes the sting out of suffering … It is therefore forbidden to make fiction of the holocaust … any attempt to transform the holocaust into art demeans the holocaust and must result in poor art”; Adorno says, “the so-called artistic representation of naked bodily pain, of victims felled by rifle butts, contains, however remote, the potentiality of wringing pleasure from it.” All are quoted in Barbara Foley, “Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives,” Comparative Literature 34, No. 4 (Fall 1982), pp. 330-60.

7. Lifton, The Life of the Self, p. 70.

8. These are Philip Stevick's terms in Alternative Pleasures (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1981), p. 149.

9. Barbara Foley uses the term “pseudo-factual.” Her article provides a sweeping, incisive review of the ideological problems raised by different modes of Holocaust writing. She prefers the “pseudo-factual” mode to the realistic or the surrealistic because it denies both the “epistemology of the realistic novel [which relies on known social] … analogies and congruent ethical schemes” and the “historical or epistemological skepticism [which implies] … the impossibility—or unimportance—of knowing what is real” (pp. 351, 354). Yet Foley's argument depends on a clear prior definition of a work's mode; The White Hotel tantalizes by a modal combination of extreme irrealism, ordinary realism, and pseudo-factual elements that makes history's role in the book much more than “local effects.” Therefore it cannot be easily judged according to Foley's valid ideological distinctions.

10. Walter Reich, “The Enemies of Memory,” The New Republic, 186, No. 16 (April 21, 1982), pp. 22-23.

11. The idea of the influence of the medium upon the consciousness supposedly using it finds its most general formulation in Jacques Derrida's idea that the “speech” of putatively direct consciousness is always already inhabited and disrupted by “writing,” where “writing,” now become a common critical term, indicates the “absence of the ‘author’ and of the subject-matter, interpretability, the deployment of a space and time not its [the consciousness's] own … and the fact that speech too—grafted within an empirical context, within the structure of the speaker-listener—is structured also as writing, that is, in this general sense, there is ‘writing’ in speech … writing is the name of what is never named.” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator's Introduction,” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976], pp. lxix-lxx.)

12. Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope, in The Female Hero in American and British Literature (New York and London: R. R. Bowker Company, 1981), pp. 6-7, say: “With the rise of individualism, democracy, and secularism, men were expected to develop their individual identities. Women, on the other hand, continued to be taught a collective myth: They should be selfless helpmates to husband and children. Men increasingly were encouraged to achieve in the secular, pragmatic world; women were to be spiritual and not to corrupt themselves with dealings in the marketplace. In general, female independent selfhood was and still is defined by the traditional patriarchy as theologically evil, biologically unnatural, psychologically unhealthy, and socially in bad taste. Literature, therefore, tends to portray the woman who demonstrates initiative, strength, wisdom, and independent action—the ingredients of the heroic life—not as a hero but as a villain. …”

    “When female heroism is not condemned, it often is simply ignored. It may be seen as less interesting than male heroics, such as killing bears and Germans, rescuing women from other men, and scoring touchdowns. …”

    “Unless the heroism that women demonstrate in the world is reflected in the literature and myth of the culture, women and men are left with the impression that women are not heroic; that their heroism, when it occurs, is a reaction to the moment and that they ultimately revert to dependence on a man; and that the woman who elects a life of courage, strength, and initiative in her own behalf is an exception, a deviant, and doomed to destruction.”

13. Robert Jay Lifton, “Woman As Knower,” History and Human Survival (New York: Random House, 1970).

14. Lifton, “Woman as Knower,” pp. 272, 270-71, 273.

15. Lifton, “Woman as Knower,” p. 274.

16. Lifton, “Woman as Knower,” pp. 274-75.

17. On this point see, for example, Dianne M. Hunter, “Psychoanalytic Intervention in the History of Consciousness: Beginning with O,” Trinity Review, 46, No. 1 (Fall, 1980), pp. 18-23.

18. Several contemporary women critics are revealing Freud's own defensive denials toward the social facts lived by his female patients; they argue that hysteria was an appropriate response to real social conditions such as seductions by men in their lives combined with a taboo about speaking out. See, for example, Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982) or Toril Moi, “Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud's Dora,” Feminist Review, 9 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 61-74.

19. Louise DeSalvo of Hunter College has exhumed a remark by Freud in a letter to Fliess (May 25, 1897) in which he refers to the catalogue of his own works as il catalogo delle belle—suggesting that perhaps he unconsciously identified with Don Giovanni since he refers to Leporello's cataloguing of his master's seductions.

20. Lesley Hazelton, “D. M. Thomas's War Against the Ordinary,” Esquire, November, 1982, p. 100.

21. I owe this speculation to a conversation with my colleague Walter Reed.

22. Jonathan Culler, “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative,” The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 177.

23. Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981), p. 141.

24. Wilde, pp. 142, 149.

25. Wilde, p. 148.

26. Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978), pp. x, 182, 98.

27. This is Foley's useful term, p. 340.