[In the following essay, Caserio compares the writing styles of Paul de Man and Bowen, concluding that Bowen's works—particularly The Heat of the Day—more properly belong to the modernist movement rather than the postmodernist movement.]

The last chapter of Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism has an attractively odd and expressive shape. Entitled “Secondary Elaborations,” it meanders for 123 pages—more than a quarter of the volume's length. Instead of concluding, therefore, the argument's main drift mainly drifts; conclusion itself becomes secondary. I take it that this dilation reinforces Jameson's admirable inconclusiveness throughout his book about whether postmodernism arises after modernism ends or is itself modernism's secondary elaboration. Even where and when Jameson can substantiate as well as hypothesize the divide between the isms, he also can see “the postmodern debate” as an open one still. He can say of Roussel, Stein, and Duchamp that “they are the … eyewitness exhibits … for the identity between modernism and postmodernism. … It is as though they constituted some opposition within” the opposition between modernism and whatever has come after.¹ For the critic to assume opposition within opposition presupposes that modernism is identifiable and separable as such. And yet Jameson also supposes that modernism is no more identifiable and unitary than what succeeds it. The ideal critical and historical narrative of modernism and its sequel might well take the shape of Jameson's last chapter: a long-drawn wavering between different cultural eras, whose identities sometimes appear as definite and embodied, sometimes as indefinite and ghostly, in a way that posits the difference in cultural eras and uncannily erases it, too.

In the course of adumbrating such a narrative as the matrix for his arguments, Jameson newly intuits Paul de Man's place in literary history. Seeing that “a fully autonomous and self-justifying postmodernism seems finally impossible as an ideology,” Jameson suggests that de Man “offers the spectacle of an incompletely liquidated modernism” and is “a very old-fashioned figure indeed,” in whom the survival of “properly modernist values” is “peremptory and full-throated” (256). The rapid collapse of de Man's influence, under the pressure of intellectually unjustifiable political bashing, is thus regrettable because it blinds critics to what Jameson sees: our connection, even in our recent attachment to de Man, to the still-live presence of modernism. Is it not likely that throughout the century we have inhabited an era of what Jameson calls “various modernisms” (304)?

I propose that to simplify or deny the variety impairs our sense of the nature of narrative especially since the Second World War. I want to expound and add to Jameson's intuition about de Man for the sake of picking out from among the various modernisms in which we live two important competing pictures of narrative. One of them, de Man's, is an old-fashioned modernist one. I find a supreme example of the other in Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Heat of the Day. Published in 1949, and produced by the global conflict whose contribution to the continuity between modernism and its sequel has yet to be assessed adequately, The Heat of the Day encapsulates a theory and a practice of narrative that contrast with de Man's and yet do not add up to a purely innovative and identifiable postmodernism.² Bowen's text is infused with modernist assumptions about narrative, but at the same time it is constructed out of a suspenseful debate with them. Postmodernism may be only a mistaken name for the suspense. It may be mistaken because its proponents want to claim under its banner an utterly new state of affairs.

Linda Hutcheon appears not to join their ranks when in her widely cited Poetics of Postmodernism she professes her “typically postmodernist” acceptance of the idea that postmodernism both does and doesn't continue modernism.³ But, very different from Jameson's, her acceptance is perfunctory; its effects on her argument last no more than a few pages. In the rest of the text, glib generalizations drive apart past and present. We read (typically indeed) of “the hermetic ahistoric formalism and aestheticism that characterized much of the art and theory of the … modernist period”; in contrast to the evasive “much,” and in contrast to an alleged modernist terror of history, postmodernism starkly “has chosen to face [history] straight on.” A symptom of Hutcheon's preference for distinct boundary drawing is that she can give herself up to concluding assertions like the following: “A set of problems and basic issues … have been created by … postmodernism, issues that were not particularly problematic before but certainly are now” (88, 224). But the issues referred to, especially the ones about art's relation to history, were as certainly perplexing to Victorians and modernists as to anyone else. Moreover, despite stressing the exclusively “problematic” concerns of postmodernism, Hutcheon reduces problems to mere slogans. What thinking or feeling feels like under their impact is anesthetized. That Hutcheon can speak of facing history straight on and that she can make her thought itself a matter of typically postmodernist choices project postmodernism as an unprecedented free resolve always to identify and to face up to difficulties. In its breezy intellectual freedom, this is a coarsely self-assured narrative of cultural change, after all. In contrast, there is nothing glib or confident in The Heat of the Day's way of instancing narrative and of picturing what it is like to face history. Unlike the critic, the novelist suggests that her readers, no less than her characters, are caught up inside a narrative motion that unsettles certainties—certainties about the differences that define cultural eras and above all (as we shall see) certainties about the ability and value of making free choices, especially where choices and gender conflicts bear on each other.

There are unsettling certainties as well as uncertainties in Bowen's narrative. But to come to terms with the full effects of either modernist or nonmodernist narrative in her, one needs to compare and contrast her with a purer modernist norm. De Man's peremptory, full-throated modernism provides us with an up-to-date measure. Jameson's intuition ties de Man to Rilke's modernist “reinstatement of the primacy of literary and poetic language” (255). However, it stops short of a link to narrative, which would have to address the modernist assumption that story and history—narrative in general—are stumbling blocks to awareness. This assumption consolidates and gives a newly central place to similar nineteenth-century doubts. In high modernism, because of its central distrust of narrative, a new artistic pride of place is accorded a shift from narrative as a unity of diverse components to narrative as—at best—a series of unresolvable incoherences and disjunctions. (We will see the shift operating in The Heat of the Day, especially where it is influenced by the pure modernism of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.) The “scandal” of de Man—of his work rather than his wartime life—repeats for us not only the general aesthetic, political, and moral shocks of modernism (and the possible collaboration between modernism and fascism that surfaces in Pound and Wyndham Lewis) but the specific modernist attacks on narrative as a trustworthy mode of experience and thought. Even de Man's revival of allegory, a patently narrative form, is, I propose, actually the most old-fashioned and the most vital recent episode in modernism's undermining of story and history.

De Man wanted his famous early essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” to be an aggression against trust in the Romantic idea of the symbol. Since the unifying romantic symbol produces instantaneous revelations, it is antagonistic to the extensions of time and the divarications of meaning in narrative. Asserting that “time is the … constitutive category” of allegory, and that the allegorical sign can “consist only in the repetition … of a previous sign with which it can never coincide,” de Man emphasizes temporal sequence and extension as the essence of a story.⁴ Time, spacing out similar things and meanings, differentiates rather than joins them. Allegory, as de Man sees it, is a mark of an inevitable gap and difference between signs and meanings—a gap that can't be closed by either language or experience. In his later work de Man finds the absence of complementary coincidings in discourse or experience the result less of temporality than of an irreconcilable conflict between logic and language. But his emphasis on the absence of coinciding phenomena remains fixed. Hence he sees the essence of allegory—the noncoincidence of sign and meaning, of logic and language—everywhere, and so he sees narrative, of an allegorical kind, in whatever we say, think, and do.

It appears, then, that de Man restores narrative to a place of privilege modernism refuses to allow. But our first impression is wrong. Narrative, considered as allegory, is a sequence of disjunctions. Consequently, for de Man, wherever narrative represents sequence as continuity and unity, it lends itself to delusive imitations of the Romantic symbol. “The Rhetoric of Temporality” exclaims that novels are “caught with the truly perverse assignment” of bringing together temporal and structural elements, which de Man believes necessarily resist conjunction (Blindness, 226). De Man always opposes narrative's or history's claim to discover continuity and unity inhering in different and disjunct elements. After “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” de Man also subverts sequence: the chronological element on which stories depend. Sequence, he insists, is not a matter of before and after. Instead, it is a forced, tricky effect of metaphor. In the finale of “Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion,” de Man declares: “The (ironic) pseudo-knowledge of [the] impossibility [of homogeneous structural and logical continuities] pretends to order sequentially, in a narrative, what is actually the destruction of all sequence. [This] is what we call allegory.”⁵ No wonder the novel appears to de Man to have a perverse assignment. Narrative is what de Man designates as “truly perverse.” In this designation I locate a characteristically modernist antinarrative turn.

The sentence I have quoted (and tried to clarify with brackets) illustrates an essence of de Man's thought and style. De Man always insists that he is dealing with unqualified opposites: no sequence and all sequence, pretense and reality, impossibility and actuality, pseudo-knowledge and authentic knowledge. Abstract formal and semantic antonyms are a model for what de Man analyzes and how he analyzes it. In his treatment of disjunctions, he slides into representing them as oppositions. Whatever intellectual stimulus he provides comes from his making us think in terms of mutually exclusive logics and rhetorics. Novelistic narrative is to be understood either as symbol (an illusory understanding) or as allegory (the correct view). There is no in-between except as a perversion. The “lurid figures” Neil Hertz speaks of in de Man's prose (for example, de Man describes Shelley's metaphors as “violent” and “deadly”)⁶ are, I suggest, the surface elaborations of a deeper commitment to thinking in lurid oppositions. Curiously, we associate de Man with Derrida and with deconstruction, which suspends and subverts fixed binarisms and reminds us that oppositions, because they inhere in each other, are not purely opposite or disjunctive. But unlike Derrida, de Man makes us forget that the inherence matters. For him, and for us whenever we read in his light, narrative appears to be by its very nature a structure of lurid oppositions.

Following Elizabeth Bowen's lead, in contrast to de Man I propose that narrative may by its nature loosen the hold that oppositions and incompatibilities have on us. But de Man's version of narrative is part and parcel of modernism's program. Even formalist and structuralist narratologies show their modernist origin in the way they reduce stories to binary oppositions. Bowen already knows de Man's arguments, so to speak, because she inherits and incorporates modernism. Any reading of her narrative as an alternative to purely modernist practice must be prefaced by a response to the way The Heat of the Day embodies what it debates.

Undoubtedly the novel associates modernist narrative with separate parts disjunctively opposed to each other. Its story about life in London during the Second World War is divided between Stella, a War Office worker in love with Robert Kelway, a colleague who she does not know is a Nazi agent; and Louie, a young working-class woman whose husband is away in the army. The main characters and their stories intersect only once, in chapter 12, the novel's center. Because, under the impact of such disjunction, narrative becomes hard to follow, the significance of Stella and Louie's encounter is uncertain. Their chance meeting suggests that only the contingent binding of the text motivates the women's ties, that their stories do not otherwise cohere. Robert Harrison, an English spy who forces his attentions upon Stella by revealing her lover's treachery, and who also accidentally brings Louie into her path, is arguably like the author, because he interconnects the opposed narrative units by arbitrary, coercive means. And since the spy's attempt at forcibly connecting things ends in the breakup of Stella's love affair, the failure of his own erotic designs on her, and the irrelevance of Louie's intrusion, the disjoining function of the author figure is emphasized. One can see that this breakup of conjunctions, the mark of Bowen's antinarrative modernism, derives from Mrs. Dalloway, in which the stories of Clarissa and the insane ex-soldier Septimus Smith are bound together even though the two characters do not know each other and never meet. Woolf's text solicits the reader, like Clarissa herself (who by accident hears about Smith's suicide), to impose on their nonmeeting a meaning that the text's own disjunctiveness opposes.

Bowen's use of disjunction in form and content lends itself to the de Manian idea that narrative is only an illusion of continuity, essentially an allegory, a forced yoking together of disparate and opposite elements. In a crucial passage in chapter 10 Bowen's novel elucidates the “day” of its title and names the narrative we call history as both the novel's guide and as the lovers'. Stella and Kelway, sitting at dinner, apparently alone, are actually accompanied and directed by history, the third party to their affair. Both the passage's form—a sudden, striking intrusion by the authorial voice—and its content will be seen to correspond with de Manian ideas:

But they were not alone, nor had they been from the start, from the start of love. Their time sat in the third place at their table. They were the creatures of history, whose coming together was of a nature possible in no other day—the day was inherent in the nature. Which must have been always true of lovers, if it had taken till now to be seen. The relation of people to one another is subject to the relation of each to time, to what is happening. If this has not been always felt—and as to that who is to know?—it has begun to be felt, irrevocably. 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. Could these two have loved each other better at a better time? At no other would they have been themselves; 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—but then what else is love?

[The narrator goes on to say that to love is to live “under a compulsion.” “Under what compulsion, what?” The answer is indirectly given in the final sentence of this two-paragraph interjection: “To have turned away from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.”]⁷

If we read in a de Manian light, we first notice that the narrator's voice, arriving out of nowhere and breaking the narrative sequence, imposes by violent fiat history's presence—the meaning of the scene. By forcing cognition upon text and reader via an assertive performance, by paradoxically declaring a revelation about what in life is claimed to be fundamental and inherent (why then does it need revelation?), the voice exemplifies the disjunction dear to de Man. Moreover, although the revelation purports to close gaps between appearances and their meanings, the narrator is actually severing it from truth. Coming after a scene in which Kelway has denied to Stella that he is a Nazi spy, the revelation now collaborates in his deception of the still-unwitting reader. The narrative discloses only that there is more here than meets the eye, not that the third place is occupied by an inescapable Nazi agency in specific, no less than by historical time in general. Because the narrative double-crosses the truth, it becomes itself double, with two opposite meanings. It allegorizes: its lying stands for the truth disjoined from it; its truth telling stands for the lie it hides. The narrative's facing of truth is, we can say, a “de-facing” (one of de Man's favorite lurid figures), because it is caught up antithetically—allegorically—in Kelway's lying. At such crucial moments, the texture that Bowen's modernism gives her narrative corroborates de Man.

But de Manian ideas and the pure de Manian modernism are not the whole story; The Heat of the Day also pursues “a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that.” Bowen's plot does not thicken simply by cultivating disjunctive opposites; we must also read the narrative as struggling against self-identification with allegory and disjunctive utterances. The narrator's acquaintance with history as a thing not opposed to intimate sensation means that history is not allegory, because it pervades us; it is inherent, not imposed. Even Bowen's characteristic ungainly phrasing—“on from now, every moment”—results from her habit of ruining or muting oppositions, even at the level of syntax. Moreover, the narrative voice's declarative agency collapses into fumbling stupidity: “Under what compulsion, what?” The voice's initial assertiveness may well be not opposed to but twinned, from the start, by dull passivity. The agencies of love and history work, it seems, in an absence of the distance and the difference between antithetical meanings. Lurid oppositions are only the chance configuration taken by things that are disturbingly alike.

The character who most typifies history and narrative in The Heat of the Day is Louie. She becomes the third party both to Stella and Robert Kelway and to Stella and Robert Harrison, the informer. The passage about how the lovers' historical era “sat in the third place at their table” prefigures another dinner date in the novel's great twelfth chapter, when the third place between Stella and Harrison is intrusively taken by Louie. Thus the later scene, which wears the membrane between Stella's and Louie's stories to the thinnest, seats Louie where the earlier passage situates the figure and the face of everything. Louie arrives there because she has lost her way looking for a blind date, but she also arrives by a deliberate (and silly) series of lies. Through her, Bowen suggests that we might expect history—our history, at least—and narrative, too, to act stupidly and blindly, calculatingly and deceptively, all at once, in a way that makes us recognize the disjunction and opposition among motives and actions, but doesn't solidify or reify their disjunction and opposition. De Man's modernism does reify them.

Of course, if we claim that Louie typifies or best describes history or narrative in the novel, we may be playing into de Manian hands. For de Man, typification suggests the triumph of allegory, and description suggests the illusion of attempts (such as the realist novel's and traditional history writing's) to fuse performative acts of language with descriptions of the world. He would be quick to “binarize,” to show as intractable, the oppositional and allegorical nature of these elements. But Bowen uses scenes like Louie's meeting with Stella to show how story and history break down our trusted oppositions. Thus she both owes a debt to and stands apart from Woolf, who in Mrs. Dalloway lays an essential modernist emphasis (the principal artistic and intellectual excitement of the novel) on the heterogeneity and contingency of narrative elements, but whose narrative, such as it is, solidifies their disjunction. All momentary unities—for example, Clarissa's sympathetic response when she hears of the ex-soldier's death—evaporate.

To be sure, Woolf's avowed intention was to show the interconnections of persons and things deep below the surface of gaping separations and “to criticize the social system” that might after all create the gaps.⁸ This avowal has been the sympathetic object of recent criticism. Alex Zwerdling knits the novel's elements together so that they unitedly picture the determining powers and blindnesses of England's postwar ruling class. Even Septimus's madness, for Zwerdling, only looks like an antithesis to the governing-class spirit; in fact, Zwerdling finds, Smith's mental distortions prove him a mirror match of ruling-class distortions of the world.⁹ Zwerdling asserts a tightly woven sociological thematics as the vehicle of the novel's unity. But his redaction of the narrative leaves out any understanding of Woolf's choice, pace her avowals, to wager the novel's originality on her disruption of formal unity through a mimesis of contingency. Zwerdling must finally confront this disruption in the character of Clarissa, who he admits is “made up of distinct layers that do not interpenetrate” (139). But there is little reason not to admit the same for the narrative itself.

The experiment of Mrs. Dalloway is intended, I submit, to inspire readers to resist how critical storytelling like Zwerdling's does not just retell the novel but positively forces Woolf's deliberately separated elements into one or another unified set of meanings. When “dominators and tyrants,” each “the giant figure at the end of the ride,” rise up from Woolf's text, the narrative does not always motivate their appearance by assigning them to text-unifying, character-bound focalizers; moreover, by their intrusive nature, such allegories—even when named Proportion, Conversion, Empire, Emigration, or Emancipation—deface sociological realism.¹⁰ But without allegory, the text suggests, there is neither realism nor reality. In disruptive allegorizing resides Woolf's own proto-de Manian understanding that narrative (so called) is the arbitrary forcing of an illusory meaning and coherence upon ineluctably disjoined and opposed elements. Like the allegorical figures, Septimus's inability to fit in or be “naturally” coherent keeps faith with modernism better than Zwerdling's criticism.

Zwerdling would find more support in Bowen than in Woolf for his intention to see narrative disjunctions become narrative and historical unities. A characteristic disjunction in Woolf's novel is the nonmeeting of Clarissa and Septimus's harried Italian war bride, Rezia. Bowen's Louie revises Rezia. The meeting that Bowen stages between Stella and Louie joins what Woolf keeps apart. Though the ties between the two women are the merest threads, there is also an unmistakable solidarity between them. In spite of the contingencies of history, their individual and class differences fuse into sudden similarity: they are creatures of a collective experience of world war that makes them startlingly alike. Writing before the Second World War brought the world back into uncanny union with the state in which it had existed during the First, Woolf newly envisioned history itself as the perennial disruption that facilitates allegory. Writing after modernism and the Great War and yet still abreast of both, Bowen newly envisions history and the Second World War as an uncanny union of opposite and disjunct things.

Unlike allegory, narrative for Bowen is a form of telling that allows us to feel the full impact of elemental contingency and heterogeneity and at the same time the solidarity among contingent and heterogeneous elements. In “Shelley Disfigured,” de Man says that when and where “we cannot tell the difference between sameness and difference,” we find ourselves in “an unbearable condition of indetermination which has to be repressed” (51). But just what is this unbearable condition? Certainly it is not the state constituted by lurid opposites. They, presumably, are bearable as well as determinate. De Man prefers the wars of his antitheses to the unbearable sameness between opposite or different entities. For Bowen, narrative and history comprise the odd condition in which we perceive difference and disjunction and yet cannot tell sameness from difference or continuity from rupture. It is narrative which de Man, on the other hand, thinks of as the unbearable condition that has to be repressed. The encounter between Louie and Stella, even Bowen's treatment of the setting, illustrates the combined differences and absence of differences that constitute story and history. “There survived in here not one shadow”; the narrator emphasizes “the seeing of everybody else by everybody else with … awful nearness and clearness” (232). Bowen makes even the minor actors stand out in the hot glare of the restaurant, as if to articulate their stark separateness and their power as agents of detection and description. Yet collectively they are also obscure and passive. Those who do the scrutinizing are themselves under scrutiny, as the impenetrable merged objects of their own detection. Like all the others, Louie is on both sides of the divide: she is a lone agent who manipulates Stella and Harrison and, without knowing them, even describes them to themselves; but she is also a faceless member of the chorus, an unintending, inarticulate, opaque blunderer on the scene. We cannot tell finally if her opposite traits are different things or the same thing. As narrative and history make their way through fields of oppositions, they have, Bowen suggests, the same mixed character and the same effect on us that Louie does. Narrative is the necessary third term standing among and beyond oppositional constructions.

The certain discovery of the historical third term everywhere is disturbing. Most importantly, it disturbs—and makes uncertain—our understanding of choice, which is an essential concern of de Man's modernism and which is intimately tied to his antinarrative idea of allegory. It is one of our cultural conventions to see the Second World War as an arena of necessary and free choice in which we still must take sides and be sure that we have not chosen to collaborate with or to love the wrong parties. De Man's case shows how fixed the convention is. No immediate American issue engages our ideology of free choice more intensely than the rise and fall of Nazism. Although after the war de Man was exonerated by the Belgians who punished collaborators, American critics have fallen into partisan furor about his guilt, probably because all us partisans—pro and con—subscribe to his luridly oppositional cast of mind. American commentators (conditioned to reenact the Second World War as a drama of absolute free choice) insist that de Man should be judged in a framework of violently antithetical alternatives. What side did he choose? Any narrative of his life, and of his actual exoneration by his postwar peers, is unacceptable unless it is an allegory (a de Manian allegory!) of radically free ethical agency.

There is an affinity between de Man's theory of ethics and the academic furor over the revelation that he, along with his countrymen, submitted to Belgium's Nazi conquerors. Before returning to The Heat of the Day, in which Bowen ties her sense of narrative not only to history but to the novel's picture of agency and ethical choice, we need to look at how the lurid oppositions of the latter-day modernist de Man involves his idea of narrative with his idea of ethics.

De Man's followers trace the ethics in his literary criticism to one of his founding lurid oppositions: logic or motivated meaning versus groundless arbitrariness.¹¹ According to him, every performance of meaning—what we do with words, in contrast to what the words describe—is rooted in an absence of logical or naturally given motivation. Since de Man sees meaning and logic as unmotivated and therefore as violent impositions upon meaninglessness and illogic, he sees language itself as a violent positing agency. The violence of imposition—of sign upon sign, thought upon thought, event upon event—then creates the sequences, and the destruction of all sequences, consistent with allegory. “The positing power of language is both entirely arbitrary … and entirely inexorable,” de Man writes in “Shelley Disfigured” (62). Translated into ethical terms, this means that we have complete freedom of choice, because choice partakes of the violent freedom in language's impositional agency. We also have no choice but to be the free agents of language's violence. Moreover, since ethical power and language are based on the same arbitrariness, any choice (moral or linguistic) is paradoxically groundless. Independent of truth, fidelity, and principle, ethics is inevitably a clash of subjective assertions driven by an impositional force that has no external measure or reference point. Choice, then, is a kind of allegory: the ethical act can consist only in a violence of position with which signs of the act—and reasons for it—can never coincide.

Bowen gives us quite another narrative or picture of choice. Ironically, the Nazi Kelway, who cannot bear ethical dilemmas caused by the inability to distinguish sameness from difference, most nearly approaches the viewpoint of de Man and his judges. The dilemmas appear when The Heat of the Day exhibits the choosing as a process at once free and constrained, active and passive, because choices are determined by historical and cultural contexts and contingencies. Unable to cope with the mixture, frustrated by checks on his decisional violence (as a de Manian might say), Kelway betrays his country.

Stella is sadly amazed by how Kelway's pursuit of his own agency has separated him from his life with others. Bowen laments his denial of cultural and national historical dependence upon England: “Rolled round with rocks and stones and trees—what else is one?—was this not felt most strongly in the quietus of the embrace? … [Stella] could not believe [that she and her lover] had not … drawn on the virtue of what was around them” (274). Metonymy, which asserts a likeness between different and contiguous things, draws on—is influenced by—the virtue and the power of context. De Man treats metonymy as the sign of the contingency and arbitrariness of contiguous contexts, just as he treats ethical choice as the expression of arbitrariness or contingency of will. A de Manian ethics motivates Kelway's attitude toward his historical, national, and cultural environment. Considering himself an impositional force independent of any determining ground (of any national, collective history, of “the virtue peculiar to where they were” [Bowen, 275]), he combats what he takes to be the chance contiguity of national context and history with an equally arbitrary counterassertiveness. In contrast, although Stella thinks that she and Kelway have actively and freely drawn their volition and power from their cultural milieu, she also thinks their national culture has moved them inextricably into allegiance with it. Historical and cultural context has limited their freedom to be arbitrary and groundless. Bowen justifies Stella's inability to accept Kelway's version of the full-throated modernist's positing power, which sunders and dislocates itself from contexts to live out an allegory of freedom. (A version of this separation of freedom from the constraints of context appears in de Man's actual life, in his internationalist way of being at home anywhere and nowhere and in his erasure of his influential Belgian history.) Through Kelway, Bowen suggests, finally, that unqualified freedom of choice, far from being a bulwark against fascism, is actually on a continuum with it.

Bowen implies that it is impossible either to participate in or to know the narrative called history if we do not recognize that it somehow deprives us of free agency. History and choice express both volition and ethical and political constraint. As Paul Ricoeur says (following Marx), “We are only the agents of history inasmuch as we also suffer it.”¹² This paradox inextricable from history and Bowen's version of narrative is poignantly unsettling because it affects the novel's judgments about Kelway's alliance with Nazism and about English women's power of choice between the two world wars. Where Kelway is concerned, Stella and the narrative shock American assumptions about how Nazis and their collaborators should be portrayed and judged. Kelway's revelation of his political treachery to Stella breaks their connection by hollowing out their intimacy; yet he “was right,” the narrative says, about one thing: that “it was not for … [her] to judge him” (277). His vaunted freedom of choice is also passivity. The narrative patiently corroborates Kelway's impatient hypothesis that the war has both an active and a passive side and that it can be seen as “just so much bloody quibbling about some thing that's predecided itself” (282). After his last meeting with Stella (we cannot tell if they decided to make it the last), Kelway dies. Is his death a suicide or an accident? The narrative refuses to decide for us; it chooses to make no choice. Are choice and no choice different things or the same thing? Here, we see, the narrative continues its life as a form of not telling the difference between sameness and difference.

Calling our dilemma unbearable, as de Man does, makes sense especially when it means not judging Nazi collaboration: if narrative can be this morally uncertain, it is no wonder that we want to oppose its hold on us and submit its form to logical and ethical rectification. Bowen's narrative is no more bearable in relation to gender issues. However much it debates pure modernism, it shocks our value systems in the same way as modernism proper. The Heat of the Day expresses perplexingly mixed attitudes to woman's volition. It shows that their withdrawal from choice has made life bleak for English women across thirty years of world war. Stella has lost her brothers and (in effect) her husband to the First World War; now she loses her lover to the Second, just as her son is about to be sent to the front. Louie, young enough to be Stella's daughter, is of the second generation of war-deprived women. Her parents have already been killed in an air raid; then the husband with whom she has barely settled in is called by the army to the Continent and also killed. Louie's son by a passing stranger will be almost as much an orphan as she herself is. Side by side, the two women represent a long nullification of female lives. Sufferers of history to the same extent as they are its agents, the women of The Heat of the Day suffer it indeed. In a contemporary American context, contemplation of their suffering is hard. Since my position on abortion is pro-choice, I find Bowen's depiction of the uncertainty of women's agency very troubling (and her not judging Kelway exceedingly so). Whether or not Bowen herself is troubled by what she shows, she ends the novel happily, on a note of calm cheer. Stella is to marry again, and Louie is a content unwed mother. The women weather their long day's extremity. Yet the renewal of their lives does not involve clear-cut will.

A history of socially determined gender differences goes a good way toward explaining Bowen's perplexing presentation, but it is not the full explanation. Free will is not an ethical ideal or natural right in Bowen but a historically changing construct, tainted by male interests and traditions. Women are caught in a viselike predicament. They pursue an ideology of freedom, a de Manian decisional violence more “natural” to male than to female history, which in effect belongs to the enemy both at home and abroad. A similar idea of the enemy's omnipresence occurs in Woolf's Three Guineas: “Behind us lies the patriarchal system; before us lies the public world. … Each is bad.” The solution, Woolf proposes, is an Outsider's Society, whose female members' conduct fuses choice with passivity, public initiative with “complete indifference” to male traditions of public activism. Seeing Bowen's presentation of choice as a variation of Woolf's “To be passive is to be active” helps clarify Bowen's depiction of women's ethical life.¹³ At the same time, it negates an appearance of misogyny in the text. Kelway's attraction to the ethics of fascist Germany, we are told, stems from shame inherited from his father over lost male freedom and decisiveness: the English male “has so lost caste” by “pleas[ing] and appeas[ing] middle-class ladies” (257). Since Stella is a middle-class lady, Bowen's tone is worrisome, especially when we couple it with her unattractive portrayal of Kelway's mother and sister. Of all the novel's women, the Kelways are the freest to choose and direct their lives, yet Bowen clearly doesn't like them. Is it possible that Bowen so closely identifies with Robert Kelway and with male caste against middle-class ladies that she not only is antifeminist but also can suspend her judgment of the Nazi collaborator? But another possibility is more plausible. The Kelway women need Robert's presence whenever they have a crucial decision to make, for example, to sell the family house. They are still dependent on their men, so their power of choice is illusory. But more authentic freedom of choice isn't the solution. Bowen's frostiness toward middle-class ladies comes from the perception that increased decisional power will not resolve gender conflict.

There is a muted, compromised version of free choice that seems to belong exclusively to women between the wars. At one point Stella recognizes that “her kind”—women—“knew no choices, made no decisions,” but her woeful insight is almost reversed, as if the narrative cannot make a forthright assertion even about the fact of women's deprivation. Stella's kind makes no choices about “meaning” and “knowledge”—but “knowledge was not to be kept from them; it … reached them by intimations—they suspected what they refused to prove. That had been their decision” (174). Women between the wars have a form of indefinite knowledge and choice. Their mode of decision mutes the antithesis between what is done and not done, what is known and not known. Suffering—and internalizing—the repression of agency, women have found a compensatory way to avoid seeing the world in the light of lurid oppositions. Kelway (and, presumably, the Nazis) have made the world a holocaust because they insist on seeing nationality, gender, race—all things—as lurid oppositions; because they refuse to suffer and internalize their awareness that agency is not the pure antithesis of patience.

We come here to the limit of explaining The Heat of the Day in terms of the history of gender and political oppositions. Harriet Chessman argues that both Louie and Bowen have difficulties with language because there is a female nature that resists a male-centered “power to represent and define.”¹⁴ I disagree, insofar as Chessman implies that narrative is a product of male coercive powers of representation and definition. Chessman would situate the reading of Bowen on a de Manian theoretical site where narrative is pitted against nonnarrative and male against female, without qualification. The story of Stella and Louie would be the story of purely will-less women victimized by men, the sole possessors of activity and choice.¹⁵

Bowen suggests instead that by virtue of being women her Stellas and Louies have led lives that make it hard to tell if activity and passivity, choice and no choice, are different or the same; but she also suggests that by virtue of being women her heroines represent what history and narrative are, in our century, for women and men alike. Chessman's reading accurately derives from the aspects of the narrative in which Bowen engages the gender antitheses (female silence versus male eloquence, for example) that belong to the convergence of feminism with modernism.¹⁶ But Bowen tests and subdues these antitheses also. The compromised version of free choice is revealed by women's experience but only appears to belong to them exclusively. Bowen shows Stella's son Roderick knowing and acting in the same muted way as his mother—and in the same inarticulate way as Louie. Roderick's decision to revive the Irish estate where he was conceived blends with his irresoluteness in interpreting the will of the cousin who has bequeathed it to him. The will never receives a preferred meaning, so early on (in chapter 4) the perplexing of choice is forecast as the historical matrix and the historical future of modern men and women alike. Roderick shapes his future by submitting his initiative about the inheritance to a latter-day madwoman in the attic, his cousin's widow. The plot suggests that a man can have a womb of his own if he conforms in conduct to a female example. Male or female, however, consciousness, decision, and conduct all conform to narrative's unsettling character.

Stella has long lived a lie about her role in the failure of her early marriage. She did not leave her husband after the First World War. The public story says otherwise, and Stella may have allowed it to persist because it assigns “her kind” an unqualified freedom to act and choose. But history is stranger than this fiction. At the end of the novel Roderick gropes toward a formulation of his mother's—and Bowen's—story:

If there's something that is to be said, won't it say itself? Or mayn't you come to imagine it has been said, even without your knowing what exactly it was? … Robert's dying of what he did will not always be there, won't last like a book or picture: by the time one is able to understand it will be gone, it just won't be there to be judged. Because, I suppose art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting?

(300)

Roderick's vagueness appears almost idiotic, and the reticence and ambiguity of the very object of discussion are staggering, but they nonetheless express narrative's (and art's?) essential way of mattering precisely by confusing activity and passivity, determinacy and indeterminacy.

“We forget that the loves in history have been agonizingly modern loves in their day.” The distinction of Bowen's novel, its claim on critical attention, is its powerful demonstration that the careers of love are agonizing because they belong to history and therefore to narrative as Bowen instances it: they belong to the narrative network of distinctions and disjunctions that is simultaneously a network of likenesses and continuities; they belong to the sequence of choices and decisions that undoes both. In making palpable the difficulties that narrative raises for logical articulation and for morality and politics, The Heat of the Day embodies narrative as a problem which it perhaps is by nature. Modernism expresses recognition of the problem in its distaste for narrative.

But in assigning Bowen to modernism, I have suggested that she defies narrow (and peremptory) understandings of the term. If, as Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism concludes, postmodernism “problematizes” everything in an unprecedented way, why could it not enlist Bowen's novel of 1949 for the emphatic presentation of narrative and history as problematic checks on awareness and action? Unconscious of the literary-historical irony of her argument, however, Hutcheon tends to assign pride of place to disjunction and opposition. Claiming Foucault as a central postmodernist muse, she strikes a note of certainty and celebration in response to his opposing one thing to another. In Foucault, Hutcheon writes approvingly, “contradictions displace totalities; discontinuities, gaps and ruptures are favored in opposition to continuity, development, evolution” (97). It sounds to me only like pure modernism—and de Man. It does not sound radically, uniformly postmodern, and it does not sound like Bowen, for it is only half of the story of Bowen's version of story.

Bowen's bizarre description of the effects of the 1940 blitz on London life emphasizes, and at the same time narrows, the lurid gap between the living and the dead. “Most of all the dead … made their anonymous presence—not as today's dead but as yesterday's living—felt through London. … They continued to move in shoals through the city day—for death cannot be so sudden as all that.” Indeed, “the wall between the living and the dead thinned” (91-92). The description is cryptic not just because of its content but because Bowen uses content to project narrative's and history's double natures, their distinction (in this case) between the quick and the dead and their simultaneous “thinning” of the distinction. Literary history always has to face and bear such an uncanny confluence. Yet the quick also want to oppose the dead. Hutcheon, unavowedly pursuing a modernist muse that she claims to have passed away, hides and buries the bodies that subvert the difference of historical eras she openly avows. She mentions Beckett and Nabokov only once, and just in passing—perhaps because Murphy (1938) and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1939) have all the characteristics of fiction Hutcheon assigns exclusively to fiction of the last twenty-five years.¹⁷ Narratives that rely on lurid oppositions—and, in the end, Hutcheon's is one of them—continue to have a high prestige among us, but they also have their intellectual weaknesses and embarrassments. The sense of narrative that, like Bowen's, takes the oppositions in stride yet also involves them in their own demise admits the embarrassments as signs of the inevitable, hard-to-bear nature of narrative and history alike. Jameson's narrative of postmodernism is more trustworthy than Hutcheon's, because it is amenable to bearing more complexity than either a high modernist or a high postmodernist narrative form permits. It is also amenable to bearing the inability to choose between the alternatives. As such, Jameson's sense of narrative gratifyingly illustrates one of the not so full-throated “various modernisms,” of which Bowen is a remarkable instance.

Notes

1. Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 302.

2. It is worth suggesting that Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, an exemplary candidate for any definition of postmodernism, derives partly from Bowen's works inspired by the Second World War, especially the “ghost” stories—“Mysterious Kôr,” “The Demon Lover,” “The Happy Autumn Fields”—which she produced at the same time as The Heat of the Day. Such a specific influence needs to be supplemented, however, by a sadly lacking general exploration of the impact of the Second World War on English and American narrative forms.

3. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 51-52.

4. De Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 207.

5. De Man, “Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion,” in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 23.

6. Hertz, “Lurid Figures,” in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 82; de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, by Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Seabury, 1979), 64.

7. Bowen, The Heat of the Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), 194-95.

8. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, with Andrew McNeillie, vol. 2 (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-84), 263, 248.

9. Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 132-33.

10. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953), 17, 85, 151, 165, 275. Woolf determines her readers' response to the obvious allegorical figures in the novel in a way that demands general meditation on the shaping role of allegory in her realism, first by exhibiting Mrs. Dalloway's imagination of Miss Kilman as an allegory-like giant spectral form (16-17), and then by reinvoking such a form (85ff). The focalizer of the second form is an unknown “solitary traveller,” disjoined from the rest of the text. The traveler's bizarre appearance also has no immediate dramatic or psychological motive. Later, when named allegorical figures appear in the novel, the reader is recalled to pages 85ff. in order to think about how allegorical figures, and their constituent signifiers and signifieds, are themselves solitary, separate travelers. Allegorical signs and their referents are brought together only by a forceful imposition of conjunction and meaning. Mrs. Dalloway herself becomes a giant allegorical form, whose meaning at the end of her ride is more difficult to read than critics admit.

11. See especially J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), and essays by Miller (“‘Reading’ Part of a Paragraph in Allegories of Reading”) and by Werner Hamacher (“Lectio: De Man's Imperative”) in Reading de Man Reading. I have made another attempt to weigh de Man's narrative theory in relation to his followers' ideas about de Man's ethics in “‘A Pathos of Uncertain Agency’: Paul de Man and Narrative,” Journal of Narrative Technique 20 (1990): 195-209.

12. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 216.

13. Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 74, 107, 119.

14. Chessman, “Women and Language in the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen,” in British Modernist Fiction, 1920 to 1945, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 302.

15. In her excellent doctoral dissertation on Bowen, Renée C. Hoogland criticizes Phyllis Lassner's Elizabeth Bowen (London: Macmillan Education, 1990) for reading The Heat of the Day in a way that “reasserts and validates women's exclusion from symbolic power” (“From Marginality to Ex-centricity” [University of Amsterdam, 1991], 144 n. 22). Hoogland's comprehensive and delicate reading steers clear of the hazard. My account and hers diverge insofar as she emphasizes Stella's story as a process of “increased gender-consciousness” (124) and “potentially redemptive self-awareness” (142). I emphasize not Stella's character but the narrative's.

16. See the highly debatable discussion of patrius sermo in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), chap. 5.

17. A proper list of the omissions that enable Hutcheon's arguments would be very long. It might well have to begin with Robert Louis Stevenson, whose work instances everything described in Hutcheon's chapter 8, “Intertextuality, Parody, and the Discourses of History.” There are no index entries in Hutcheon for Roussel, Stein, or Duchamp. Hutcheon's omission of Nathanael West, Flann O'Brien, and Aldous Huxley especially abet her exaggeration of the “certainly” new and “problematic” innovations of the 1960s and after.