Neither Irigaray nor Theweleit considers race, a category of otherness crucial to the formation of modernist narrative. As Jameson has made clear, Conrad occupies a privileged position in the history of that formation; quite possibly because he does consider the issue of race. Plato's cave is dark; the masculine subject moves from the dark maternal cave into the brilliant white sunshine of the father's truth. Dark race and low class (the cave, like the womb, is under, lower; the sun is above, higher), together with the maternal itself, erupt in a troubled conjuncture at the birth of modernist narrative.

The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 1897, and “Melanctha,” 1906, partly achieve modernist narrative: they undermine realism, though without yet establishing the modernist configuration of sous-rature.¹ In both texts, race, class, and childbirth figure together in the disruption of traditional narrative form. Nineteenth-century narrative forms persist, however, as structuring frames, sources of narrative impulse, in both texts: the heroic seagoing tale of masculine solidarity in gale-defying toil of the sailors on the Narcissus and the naturalist antibildungsroman of Melanctha's thwarted life. These frames are sufficiently functional, in fact, to control most responses to the texts. Criticism generally sees them as defining the two texts, allowing for some lapses, or complications, or inconsistencies. I would argue that the impact of modernist disruption is so great that it prevents the ostensible narratives from dominating the effect of the two texts.

In both texts, the source of disruption is the lure of what the ostensible narrative must discredit. Conrad is fascinated by the cowardly subjectivity of Wait, the “nigger,” and the attendant infamy of his double, Donkin, self-appointed spokesman of the proletariat. Stein is fascinated by Melanctha's point of view, which justifies her selfishness as she wanders in the realm of dangerous knowledge.²

Wait and Donkin are, of course, the bad guys of, and therefore crucial to, the heroic tale of the sea—theirs is the existential abyss over which the solidarity of the crew constructs itself. But their power in the text overwhelms that subordinate role and overwhelms at the same time the narrative structure that relies on it. Similarly, Melanctha's self-justification, the reasonableness of her view of her own self-destructive behavior, is necessary to Stein's nonjudgmental naturalist saga of thwarted aspiration. It must seem to Melanctha, and to the reader's sympathy (if not to the reader's ultimate judgment), that she does nothing wrong; fate is simply against her, as in the Laforguian epigraph to Three Lives: “Donc je suis un malheureux et ce / n'est ni ma faute ni celle de la vie.” (“Thus I am an unfortunate, and this is neither my fault nor life's.”) But Stein, by entering as fully as she does into the construction of that self-justification, unleashes into the text material too subversive to be contained by the detached, cool, fatalistic narrative she is ostensibly writing.

By Stein's own assessment, “Melanctha” was “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature.”³ All the characters in “Melanctha” are black; black characters appear nowhere else that I can think of in Stein's oeuvre.⁴ “Melanctha” was an adaptation of an earlier, fully conventional autobiographical work, Q.E.D., the story of Stein's painfully unresolved triangular relationship with May Bookstaver, the prototype of Melanctha, a white woman of Stein's own educated upper middle class.⁵ Transposing her story to the black working and middle classes coincided for Stein with the initiation of those remarkable reinventions of literary form that characterize her career in the twentieth century. (I would argue that “Melanctha” is the point at which Stein's work coincides most closely with modernism—after the [almost] modernist “Melanctha,” Stein moves beyond or outside modernism into avant-garde experimentalism.)⁶

By contrast, nonwhite characters inevitably appear throughout that portion of Conrad's work based on his experiences in Africa and in Eastern seas, work in which the interaction of white denizens of various imperialist “outposts of progress” with the native populations they are meant to “civilize” is a central recurrent theme, as it is of so much Conrad criticism.⁷ But in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” the uncharacteristic dominance of a black character in the narrative, as in the title, coincides with Conrad's own first “definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature” (in fact, the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” stands as Conrad's own modernist manifesto, in power and significance comparable to Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads).

Racial otherness, specifically the “blackness” we can connect to the dark and darkly suppressed maternal origin, functions chaotically in these texts. Race is a highly ambiguous force of disruptive fascination or fascinating disruption, contributing to the generic indeterminacy (ostensible story undermined, modernist alternative inchoate) of these narratives rather than to any racist or antiracist, conservative or subversive, thematic configuration.⁸

James Wait's famous entry into The Nigger of the “Narcissus” is marked by darkly comic confusion: the mate, Mr. Baker, hears as a rude challenge Wait's cry of his own name as he arrives late for the ship's first muster. Conrad deliberately puts the reader in the same position as Mr. Baker, so that we experience sequentially Wait's challenge to authority, his characteristic imposition of delay, and his unassailable explanation, which makes him “right as ever, and as ever ready to forgive” (15). The initial description of Wait is a marvel of complexity, encapsulating as it does this character's polysemous position in the text. One element of this opening characterization establishes Wait as a majestically superior being. He is a “tall figure” with a “sonorous voice … His head was away up in the shadows of lifeboats. … The nigger was calm, cool, towering, superb. … He overtopped the tallest by half a head. … The deep, rolling tones of his voice filled the deck without effort.” At the same time, Wait's superiority is ironized: “he stood in a swagger that marked time. … He was naturally scornful, unaffectedly condescending, as if from his height of six foot three he had surveyed all the vastness of human folly and had made up his mind not to be too hard on it.”

The notoriously pervasive light/dark imagery of this story (important for the patriarchal paradigm of Plato's cave) is ambiguous in this description of Wait: “The lamplight lit up the man's body. … His head was away up in the shadows … The whites of his eyes and his teeth gleamed distinctly, but the face was indistinguishable. … He held his head up in the glare of the lamp—a head vigorously modeled into deep shadows and shining lights.” In the ostensible narrative, light is good and dark is bad, just as sea is good and land is bad. Any responsible reading of this text would then note the complications and ambiguities that interrupt this predominant pattern. But the ambiguity of light/dark imagery here—the sheer overdetermined excessiveness of it—goes well beyond interruption.

The description culminates in a deliberate gesture of racial stereotyping: “a head vigorously modeled into deep shadows and shining lights—a head powerful and misshapen with a tormented and flattened face—a face pathetic and brutal: the tragic, the mysterious, the repulsive mask of a nigger's soul” (15). That final phrase has a powerfully defining impact, in the word “repulsive” itself, strong for Conrad, and in the suggestion that “a nigger's soul” cannot be seen directly, it is too dark and obscure, but it can be represented at a distance by a barbaric, simultaneously revealing and concealing “mask.” Negative as the overall impact of this characterization undeniably is, however, it is also marked by an ambiguity generated by the strong positive modifiers: “vigorously,” “shining,” “powerful,” “tragic,” and “mysterious.”

“Mysterious” is clearly a key word, designating Wait's dangerous appeal. Again, in the ostensible narrative, Wait represents the moral darkness of the soul, the abyss of self-indulgence, cowardice, and stagnation against which the crew must define itself in masculine solidarity of sea-worthy endeavor. Through much of the narrative, we perceive Wait in that light (or darkness). During the ludicrous “mutiny,” for example, Wait is described as “that moribund carcass, the fit emblem of their [the mutinous crew's] aspirations” (94). But his death sequence is narrated (part of it, indeed, from his own point of view) with moving power and for the most part with sympathy. We enter fully into his compelling, damned subjectivity, much as we do Jim's in his account of the Patna episode. It is not merely a matter of the pity Captain Allistoun feels for Wait, “standing there, three parts dead and so scared—black amongst that gaping lot—no grit to face what's coming to us all … Sorry for him—like you would be for a sick brute” (98). Allistoun's subsequent, less distanced comment is more revealing: “One lone black beggar amongst the lot of us, and he seemed to look through me into the very hell” (98). As “nigger,” Wait is privileged to look through all of us into “the very hell,” to make accessible the dark substratum (cave) from which the subversive material of modernism is erupting, projecting its darkness onto the Father's light itself, making it “a luminous, arid space where a black sun shone” (87, Jimmy's deathbed nightmare).

Similarly, the crew's attitude toward Jimmy is not simply one of weak pity and self-destructive susceptibility, as it must be in the ostensible narrative. In fact, the narrative characterizations of the crew's attitude are deliberately, recurrently, and often perfectly ambivalent. The narrator accords Wait great stature even when damning most forcefully his corrupting influence:

He fascinated us. He would never let doubt die. He overshadowed the ship. Invulnerable in his promise of speedy corruption he trampled on our self-respect, he demonstrated to us daily our want of moral courage; he tainted our lives. Had we been a miserable gang of wretched immortals, unhallowed alike by hope and fear, he could not have lorded it over us with a more pitiless assertion of his sublime privilege.

(37)

Other expressions of the crew's attitude are more neatly, perfectly ambivalent: “We hesitated between pity and mistrust” (29). “We knew he was dry and comfortable within his little cabin, and in our absurd way were pleased one moment, exasperated the next, by that certitude” (41). “We could not scorn him safely—neither could we pity him without risk to our dignity. So we hated him, and passed him carefully from hand to hand” (57).

Dr. Jefferson Campbell, the transformation in “Melanctha” of the Gertrude Stein character in the autobiographical Q.E.D., might say just the same thing (though in different language) of his ambivalent feeling toward Melanctha. The position of race in the configuration of ambivalence in “Melanctha” is in many ways very different from that in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”—the characters' in “Melanctha” are all black. However, the visibility of the characters' race disappears and reappears throughout the text. In long sequences, particularly in the central movement of the novella that treats the love affair of Jeff and Melanctha, racial specificity (except in the speech rhythms) is suspended—we enter into what Conrad might call the truth of the characters, independent of racial stereotype or antistereotype, as we do into the truth of Jimmy's dying.

Nonetheless, it is clear that the race of Stein's characters enables her, as Wait's blackness enables Conrad, simultaneously to undo her own naturalist narrative and to explore dangerous thematic possibilities. Stein uses American racial stereotyping both in the service of, and against the grain of, her ostensible naturalist story. As Conrad does in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” she incorporates race into this fiction chaotically, undecidably.

Repeated passages of crude, profoundly offensive racial stereotyping should not be, but almost always are, overlooked by Stein critics.⁹ I would guess that sequences such as the following, which comes right at the beginning of the novella, have kept “Melanctha” off numerous syllabi:

Rose Johnson was a real black, tall, well built, sullen, stupid, childlike, good looking negress. She laughed when she was happy and grumbled and was sullen with everything that troubled. …

Rose laughed when she was happy but she had not the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine. Rose was never joyous with the earth-born, boundless joy of negroes. Hers was just ordinary, any sort of woman laughter.

Rose Johnson was careless and was lazy, but she had been brought up by white folks and she needed decent comfort. Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature. Rose had the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people.

(85–86)

The attributes of this repellent racial stereotyping that were liberating for Stein are apparent here: “abandoned laughter,” “earth-born, boundless joy,” “promiscuous unmorality.”¹⁰ Stein carefully distinguishes the “yellow,” partly white, “complex and intelligent” Melanctha from the lazy, stupid, sullen, careless, black Rose, but it is Melanctha's “negro” qualities—her abandonment, her promiscuity, and her connection to the boundless joy of the earth (quite obviously, post-Cixous and Irigaray, maternal jouissance—that excite Stein, quite literally, and unleash her new writing. It is Melanctha's “wandering,” which summarizes and encodes the “negro” element of her racial identity, that necessitates the self-justifications that simultaneously confirm the naturalist narrative and carry Stein past the point of no return in acknowledging the excitement those “negro” qualities make her feel.

Racial stereotypes and counterstereotypes function in complex, undecidable concatenations throughout the text. It is worth noting that the only character conceived as a noncontradictory racial stereotype, the gambler Jem Richards (Melanctha's desperate last attempt to save herself through heterosexual involvement), is the least vividly realized character in the text. The rest of the characters simultaneously embody and contradict racial stereotypes. We have already seen that Rose Johnson is in a sense a classic stereotype, but Stein carefully counters that stereotype by making her an orphan who was raised by whites and who therefore “needed decent comfort.” Also, having been raised by whites, she never laughed with the “wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine.”

Rose's foil is Jane Harden, Melanctha's first (erotically cathected) woman ally and mentor (Rose is her last). Jane is, schematically, Rose's opposite: intelligent where Rose is stupid, reckless and generous where Rose is careful and shrewdly selfish. Again, Stein simultaneously employs and undercuts racist stereotype. Jane, like Melanctha, is intelligent and light-skinned, and the two qualities are linked: “Jane was a negress, but she was so white that hardly any one could guess it. Jane had had a good deal of education” (103). But, in spite of her “white” qualities, Jane is “bad” in a racially stereotyped way: “Jane Harden had many bad habits. She drank a great deal and she wandered widely” (104). The light-skinned, well-educated, intelligent woman suffers and dies from the “promiscuous unmorality of the black people,” while the “sullen, stupid, childlike” black woman carefully marries and ensconces herself within a safe, bourgeois life.

Jeff Campbell is the most bourgeois, moralistic character in the novella; he has devoted his life to redeeming blacks from their “carelessness” and “simple promiscuous unmorality,” or, as he would tellingly put it, their constant need for new “excitements.” Before he becomes involved with and educated by Melanctha, he leads a life of narrow predictability and timidity. Stein assigns to him her own problem, as she had diagnosed it in Q.E.D., of excessive intellection and concomitant blockage of emotion (“thinking rather than feeling”): evidently, sexual inhibition. But he is dark-skinned, more strongly identified with “the race” than Melanctha, both by the narrative and by his own concept of his mission in life (to save black people from themselves). Furthermore, he is described more frequently than any other character as laughing with the “wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine.”

Melanctha herself constitutes the novella's most complex deployment of racist stereotype. The text makes it clear that her intelligence and general appeal are attributable to her light skin, the predominance of her “white blood”: “Melanctha Herbert was a graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive negress. She had not been raised like Rose by white folks but then she had been half made with real white blood” (86). However, the key characteristics that distinguish her from Jeff, and generate plot, are not her “white” intelligence, grace, and attractiveness but her need to “wander,” which Jeff links to the need of “the negros” continually to seek new “excitements” Stein takes Melanctha's “wandering” much more seriously than either she or Jeff takes “negro excitements”—the former is at least in part an earnest desire for a deeper knowledge of life, while the latter is mere restless self-indulgence. Nonetheless, it is apparent that Melanctha's crucial “wandering,” which thematizes the formal “wandering” of the text, at least partly falls into the category of, or looks like, the “simple promiscuous unmorality of the black people.” The portion of the text devoted to viewing Melanctha's troubles from her own point of view constructs, as I have said, a persuasive rationalization of, or justification for, what Jeff Campbell considers her untrustworthy, shameful, “wandering” behavior, a justification that makes him the guilty party in his ungenerous inability to trust Melanctha: “I certainly am right the way I say it Jeff now to you. I certainly am right when I ask you for it now, to tell me what I ask you, about not trusting me more then again, Jeff, just like you never really knew me. You certainly never did trust me just then, Jeff, you hear me?” (157–58).

Melanctha is also characterized as strong and determined, with a “break-neck courage” and proud stoicism in the face of pain. She derives these positive attributes from her father, a very negative, harsh, violent character, whose blackness is always emphasized whenever he is mentioned: “Melanctha was pale yellow and mysterious and a little pleasant like her mother, but the real power in Melanctha's nature came through her robust and unpleasant and very unendurable black father. … Melanctha's father was a big black virile negro. … James Herbert was a common, decent enough, colored workman, brutal and rough to his one daughter” (90–91). James Herbert is another repellent racist stereotype, “big black virile” and also working class, who brutalizes his wife and daughter and has a knife fight in a bar. But he is the source of “the real power in Melanctha's nature,” which encompasses a great deal more than courage, determination, and stoicism—it is an existential power, a force of being, much like James Wait's.

Class is a less overtly visible issue in “Melanctha” than it is in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” but it functions undecidably along with race in Stein's dislocation of conventional naturalist narrative. The class status of each character is carefully, though unobtrusively, established. Melanctha, through her father, is working class; her association with the middle-class doctor Jeff Campbell is an important upward move for her. The educated Jane Harden provides Melanctha's initial access to middle-class possibilities. Rose offers a less upwardly mobile but stable version of bourgeois domesticity, though Melanctha's association with her is clearly a last step downward, just as much because her husband Sam is working class as because Rose herself is unworthy of Melanctha. Melanctha's last lover, Jem Richards, is a member of the quasi-criminal (non)class of reckless, rootless gamblers. Her move toward him abandons the class ladder in a gesture not of subversion but rather of hopelessness—upward mobility might not offer much, but it is the only game in town.

In this account, the class status of the characters accords with the naturalist antibildungsroman protagonist's trajectory of rise and fall through the class system (see, for example, Sister Carrie). But, again, the energizing, positively valued “wandering” that radicalizes this text, the source of its subversive power as an early modernist work, is just as much associated with lower-class status as it is with blackness. This empowered subversiveness disrupts the naturalist class trajectory. Jane Harden's positively valued “wandering,” which gives her the “wisdom” that she imparts to Melanctha, is at odds with her middle-class educational attainments; in fact, it leads directly to her expulsion from college. Similarly, it is Melanctha's “wandering” that makes her relationship with Jeff, her move to the middle class, impossible, while, in the meantime, his contact with Melanctha's “wandering” broadens and deepens him. Her move downward here is not an inevitable outcome of the great impersonal social machine grinding down the helpless individual; it is rather the outcome of her magnetic “power,” which is like (and is originally ignited by) Jane Harden's.

Similarly, it is not Rose Johnson's stupidity or laziness that hurts Melanctha, finally, but rather Rose's narrow bourgeois selfishness (her tenacity in clinging to her domestic security) that pushes Melanctha down the final step toward her ignominious death. And it is Melanctha's working-class black father, again, who gives her the strength of her nature without which there would be no story. In both of these instances, conventional assumptions about the impact of class status overtly endorsed by the text are overthrown.

Class functions much more overtly in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” and, apparently, in the service of the ostensible narrative: Donkin, unlike Jimmy purely villainous, is both representative and self-appointed spokesman of the militant urban working class. Everything about him constitutes an overt attack on that class: he is “the independent offspring of the ignoble freedom of the slums full of disdain and hate for the austere servitude of the sea” (9). He is also, much more uncomplicatedly than Wait, a force of disruption in the sailors'-solidarity-in-toil plot, deliberately fomenting mutiny rather than passively functioning as a tantalizing existential abyss. At every opportunity, Conrad makes Donkin offensive, absurd, insidious, and evil, never inspiring sympathy despite his destitution. Unlike Jimmy, he has never been even “half a man,” as Captain Allistoun puts it in explaining his act of sympathy (his irony heavy where Donkin is concerned, Conrad continually has him provoke the crew by insisting that he is the only real man on board). His opportunistically rabble-rousing harangues on the rights of the working man (“his filthy loquacity flowed like a troubled stream from a poisoned source” [78]) are always motivated by laziness, selfishness, envy, greed, and a simple desire to wreak havoc. As programmatically as can be, Donkin is Conrad's conservative condemnation of militant working class socialism and trade unionism, which he evidently finds not only destructive but ludicrous: “They [the near-mutinous crew] found comfort of a gloomy kind in an interminable and conscientious analysis of their unappreciated worth; and inspired by Donkin's hopeful doctrines they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed crew of satisfied skippers” (80).

It is impossible to argue that Conrad's hatred of Donkin is in any way mitigated; it is tempting to argue that such unmitigated hatred bespeaks overcompensation—what potentiality does Donkin represent so threateningly attractive that Conrad must so violently repudiate it? Most of the language in the above passage does in fact support its ostensible point, the condemnation of what Donkin offers. The “wealthy and well-fed crew of satisfied skippers” is a violation of Conradian solidarity: skippers are lone men, like Captain Allistoun in the storm; solidarity comes from common toil and is disrupted by wealth, satisfaction, and skipperlike autonomy. Similarly, Donkin's motives constitute a violation of solidarity because they are inveterately selfish. But why do “Donkin's hopeful doctrines” inspire in the crew a vision of a “lonely ship” on a “serene sea”? The “serene sea” is an image of Conradian transcendence, though here of course also an image of group delusion. But the loneliness of the ship does not fit in this universe of willful self-deception. Why include in such a banal, sugarplum fantasy that off-note of the ship's loneliness, such a key motif in Conrad's fundamental vision of our existential condition? The loneliness of the ship is the loneliness of the human lot, for which human solidarity is the antidote, in literature as on the sea. The artist's appeal is to “the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn” (Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” viii).

This is just the kind of visionary language that might express what Conrad's defensive cynicism condemns in the crew's enthusiastic dreaming, and “solidarity” is, of course, a socialist word, an idea at the heart of the socialist vision.¹¹ It is the socialist vision that, more than any other in the bourgeois period, appeals to the desire to overcome isolation, atomism, and precisely the venal, destructive, craven self-serving that Conrad assigns to Donkin. Conrad's language in the Preface (the “solidarity” that “binds together all humanity”) is, I would argue, influenced by precisely the “hopeful doctrine” of socialism that he must repudiate with excessive violence in the character of Donkin; excessive because the appeal of a subversive “doctrine” at odds with his professed conservatism is so strong.¹²

Solidarity “binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.” In The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” the Narcissus gives birth to James Wait and is also the site of his death; Wait in himself binds together the dead, the living, and the unborn: “he had the secret of life, that confounded dying man” (30). Irigaray's ideas about the position of the repressed maternal origin in patriarchal representation have powerful implications for The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” The Narcissus itself, wonderfully the actual name of the ship that inspired this story,¹³ evokes both the destructive self-absorption that is the prime moral ill Conrad attacks in this novel, the antithesis of solidarity, and also that specularization in patriarchal representation by means of the endless reproduction of the selfsame that Irigaray attacks as the prime moral ill of Western culture. I will argue that the Narcissus is also the site of a (partial) return of the repressed maternal origin that invisibly underwrites the reproduction of the selfsame: a move toward entering it into representation.

During the remarkable Cape of Good Hope gale, the Narcissus becomes a woman in labor: “He [Captain Allistoun] kept his gaze riveted upon her as a loving man watches the unselfish toil of a delicate woman upon the slender thread of whose existence is hung the whole meaning and joy of the world” (39).¹⁴ Under the extreme duress and life-death liminality of the gale, which images, I would argue, precisely the massive upheaval in culture that is the modernist historical moment, the ship whose name quite literally evokes the endless self-reflexivity of the masculine subject makes visible within itself the buried origin, the “secret of life” lodged within the threat of death: the maternal womb. The revelation of that womb at the center of the ship and the text occurs as the Narcissus reaches the climax of its “downward” (southern) journey around Africa: again, downwardness (here geographical, elsewhere social), darkness (the “dark continent” inhabited by black people), and the empowered maternal are conflated.¹⁵

The Narcissus, in the most remarkable sequence of the novel, gives birth to the black James Wait at the southern extremity of Africa, assisted by the crew in their finest moment of selfless solidarity-in-(superhumanly difficult) toil. Wait becomes imprisoned in his little cabin when the ship turns on its side, and a group of the crew's most sympathetic characters (including the narrator, whose position I will discuss later) defies death, gravity, and seemingly insuperable physical obstacles to rescue him. The imagery of this rescue is rife with suggestions of childbirth, as Albert Guerard makes clear (see n. 14), and echoes the difficulty and suspense of “the unselfish toil of a delicate woman upon the slender thread of whose existence is hung the whole meaning and joy of the world.”

Jimmy is trapped on the other side of a bulkhead separating his cabin from the carpenter's shop. The position of the ship puts that shop beneath the crew, and Jimmy's cabin beneath the shop: a double downward encaving. This positioning is emphasized by Conrad's language, which also makes Jimmy's bulkhead-barrier very like a cervix: “The next door was that of the carpenter's shop. They lifted it, and looked down. The room seemed to have been devastated by an earthquake. Everything in it had tumbled on the bulkhead facing the door, and on the other side of that bulkhead there was Jimmy dead or alive” (51). We already know that this birth will be difficult, “the unselfish toil of a delicate woman.” The “earthquake” brought on by this eruption from the womb-cave tumbles blocking obstacles onto the vaginal opening, making the birth even more difficult.

The obstacles are the dangerous contents of the carpenter's shop: “The bench, a half-finished meat safe, saws, chisels, wire rods, axes, crowbars, lay in a heap besprinkled with loose nails. A sharp adz stuck up with a shining edge that gleamed dangerously down there like a wicked smile” (51). What the earthquake explodes are the tools and materials of masculine (self-)construction. Exploded, those tools and materials become vaginal teeth: the potentially death-inflicting sharp edges “gleam[ing] dangerously down there like a wicked smile.” That simile cannot, given everything else, be accidental. Masculine (self-)construction, undone here, reveals itself as constituting the “threat of castration” that masculine subjectivity has projected onto the all-powerful maternal, defining the maternal as deadly, its sharp “vaginal teeth” always gleaming in a wicked smile, the locus of death rather than life, because it is the unattainable locus of life.

The womb prevails as locus of life here, but, again, life and death are ultimately undecidable in this novel (as are light and dark), as in the ambiguity of the narrator's formulation “on the other side of that bulkhead there was Jimmy dead or alive.” Ship and crew work together to give birth to a man essentially already dead, and at the penultimate moment of the rescue, the narrator announces Jimmy's sudden silence by saying, “He was as quiet as a dead man inside a grave; and, like men standing above a grave, we were on the verge of tears” (54). But Archie manages to rip a hole in the bulkhead, and Jimmy rushes it in another, and the most explicit, vaginal birth image: “he pressed his head to it, trying madly to get out through that opening one inch wide and three inches long” (54; he is “crowning”). Jimmy's final emergence completes this explicit birth metaphor, with the crew acting as midwives: “Suddenly Jimmy's head and shoulders appeared. He stuck halfway, and with rolling eyes foamed at our feet. We flew at him with brutal impatience, we tore the shirt off his back, we tugged at his ears, we panted over him; and all at once he came away in our hands as though somebody had let go his legs. With the same movement, without a pause, we swung him up. His breath whistled, he kicked our upturned faces” (55). As we have seen, it is James Wait who embodies the force that disrupts the ostensible seagoing tale of The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” He also embodies the conflation of race, class (he is Donkin's familiar; Donkin is his privileged friend and wears his clothes), and the maternal in the textual dynamic of that disruption.¹⁶ This textual dynamic corresponds of course to historical fact: colonialized nonwhites, the militant working class, and feminist women were the others disrupting white male bourgeois hegemony. They erupt together undecidably for Conrad in this early modernist narrative.

“Melanctha” opens with a childbirth episode. Like Conrad's, it emphasizes difficulty, torment, and life-death liminality. These are the opening paragraphs of “Melanctha”:

Rose Johnson made it very hard to bring her baby to its birth.

Melanctha Herbert, who was Rose Johnson's friend, did everything that any woman could. She tended Rose, and she was patient, submissive, soothing, and untiring, while the sullen, childish, cowardly, black Rosie grumbled and fussed and howled and made herself to be an abomination and like a simple beast.

The child though it was healthy after it was born, did not live long. Rose Johnson was careless and negligent and selfish, and when Melanctha had to leave for a few days, the baby died. Rose Johnson had liked the baby well enough and perhaps she just forgot it for awhile, anyway the child was dead and Rose and Sam her husband were very sorry but then these things came so often in the negro world in Bridgepoint, that they neither of them thought about it very long.

(85)

The shocking aspects of this episode, particularly given its position as entry into the text, have been almost universally overlooked. The adjectival racism in the description of Rose is overshadowed by the blanket condemnation of “the negro world in Bridgepoint,” in which the death of a baby is no big deal. And to open a novella so casually and nonjudgmentally with what amounts to infanticide, then to move on quickly to other matters as if it had not happened, is a drastic textual strategy indeed. There is something nightmarish in that quiet “perhaps she just forgot it for awhile.” It introduces a world of unthinkable deprivation of nurturance and echoes the indifference of Melanctha's own mother toward her—Melanctha had, as a child, overheard her mother say that she wished Melanctha, the difficult daughter, had died instead of Melanctha's brother, the beloved son.

The painful, difficult birth-into-death of the black Johnson baby parallels James Wait's birth and death. Both are intimately implicated in the disruption of traditional narrative. Again, it is the “promiscuous unmorality of the black people” associated with the working-class Rose Johnson that constitutes the subversive force of “wandering,” both thematically and, as we will see, formally in this novella. As in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” the maternal in “Melanctha” is the locus of those powerful, dark forces that are just as compelling, and potentially liberating, as they are damned. The word Stein chooses to describe Melanctha's subversiveness, “wandering,” suggests the classical notion that hysteria, the prime manifestation of thwarted female rebellion, is a “wandering womb”: that dark cave that modernism partly brings to light. The new story is being born—the birth is painful and the progeny cannot yet live, but the process, as embedded in form, is irreversible.

The opening childbirth episode is characteristic of this text, with its disturbing, painful content covered over by understatement, by the cool detachment of the narrative tone and by the fatalistic stance Stein borrows from naturalism—life is cruel, “it is no one's fault,” as in the Laforguian epigraph, and there is nothing to be done about it, since “these things came so often in the negro world in Bridgepoint.”¹⁷ It is also characteristic of the text in that the difficult birth of a black working-class baby can be seen as a metaphor of a new story not yet quite ready to be written.¹⁸ The episode itself is much more important to the plot than it initially appears to be: we find out by the end of the story that Melanctha's involvement with Rose Johnson, emphasized in the opening of the narrative as Melanctha's kindness to Rose and the crucial importance of her presence and nurturance to the life of that baby, is her final attempt to save herself before she falls through the holes in the social order into death.

The baby is Melanctha's as much as it is Rose's, in that it depends on Melanctha for its life as much as it depended on Rose for its birth. Also, Melanctha dies shortly after the baby—their lives are linked. Coming at the beginning of the novella, the birth figures the painful, difficult eruption, out of a “darker” (race), “lower” (class) place, the mother's womb, of a new kind of narrative, figured also in the womblike “wandering” of Melanctha. As Melanctha wanders through the text, she disrupts its ostensible naturalism, but what she offers cannot yet form its own text.

I have been discussing disruption of conventional narrative in these two texts from the point of view of my Irigarayan paradigm, but it was a purely stylistic similarity that initially drew my attention to these two texts as early modernist narratives; I subsequently began to see the remarkable parallels between them in the importance of race, class, and the maternal as loci of disruption. The similarlity in stylistic disruption resides in radical dislocation of narrative position.

The indeterminacy of narrative in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” is notorious—there is a first-person narrator, but he has no consistency. At times he functions in actual positioning as an omniscient third narrator, as in the opening of the novel or in the sequences narrated from Wait's point of view and from the (impossible) point of view of an observer in Wait's cabin during his one-to-one deathbed encounters with Podmore and Donkin. At times he is a full-fledged first-person narrator, an embodied but unidentified crew member, as in the rescue of Wait during the gale, where, as participant, he gives a close-up, first-hand account. In most of the novel, he moves back and forth through various degrees of detachment and involvement, including frequent use of the first-person plural that seems to make him an embodiment of solidarity itself, a representation of the crew's group identity, more than an individual crew member.¹⁹ Generally, the narrative occupies the detached position for the ostensible, masculine-heroic seagoing tale, while the first-person position appears in sequences where the narrative moves closest to the subversive, modernist Wait.

Very shortly after The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Conrad finds his great first-person narrator Marlow, who makes modernist narrative possible, as so many critical works have explained. The narrative position of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” is, as literally as can be, undecidable, in transition between traditional and modernist narrative. Narrative position in “Melanctha,” technically omniscient third, shifts far more frequently than that in The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” However, just like Conrad's, Stein's narrator moves back and forth through various degrees of closeness and distance. While the narrative inconsistencies of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” are famous, those of “Melanctha,” more subtle though more radical, have been overlooked.²⁰

Narrative position in “Melanctha” shifts in and out of characters' consciousnesses, sometimes located entirely within the consciousness of the character from whose point of view we are at that moment seeing the story, sometimes hovering just above that point of view, sometimes entirely outside it. Moreover, the detached narrative voice has various degrees of detachment. These complicated shifts can occur within the course of a short passage or even a single sentence:

Melanctha sat there, by the fire, very quiet. The heat gave a pretty pink glow to her pale yellow and attractive face. Melanctha sat in a low chair, her hands, with their long, fluttering fingers, always ready to show her strong feeling, were lying quiet in her lap. Melanctha was very tired with her waiting for Jeff Campbell. She sat there very quiet and just watching. Jeff was a robust, dark, healthy, cheery negro. His hands were firm and kindly and unimpassioned. He touched women always with his big hands, like a brother. He always had a warm broad glow, like southern sunshine. He never had anything mysterious in him. He was open, he was pleasant, he was cheery and always he wanted, as Melanctha once had wanted, always now he too wanted really to understand.

(137)

The first half of the above passage is narrated in relation to Melanctha, but the narrative position moves from outside to inside her consciousness. In the first three sentences, the narrator shows us Melanctha from Jeff's, and the text's, erotically desiring point of view: the “pretty pink glow” on her “pale yellow and attractive face,” the hands “with their long, fluttering fingers, always ready to show her strong feeling.” The next sentence moves suddenly to Melanctha's point of view: she “was very tired with her waiting for Jeff Campbell.” That is Melanctha's language, her tone. “She sat there very quiet and just watching” next uses a language common to the narrator, Melanctha, and Jeff—like the “we” used by the narrator of The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” this language establishes a communal narrative voice. Although technically third person, the narrative that uses this group language is functionally positioned somewhere between third and first person, like the narrative of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” as a whole.

Then, suddenly, the narrative moves far outside and above the voices and consciousnesses of the characters: “Jeff was a robust, dark, healthy, cheery negro.” From that sentence until the last half of the last sentence of the passage, we have a description of Jeff that combines a string of racist stereotypes with a denial of Jeff's erotic feeling for Melanctha: Jeff is a “robust, dark, healthy, cheery negro”—a recurring descriptive motif for him; “He always had a warm broad glow, like southern sunshine”—a recurring descriptive motif for “the negros.” At the same time, “His hands were firm and kindly and unimpassioned. He touched women always with his big hands, like a brother. … He never had anything mysterious in him.” This remarkably revealing juxtaposition of bland, sentimental (as opposed to contemptuous) racist stereotype with denial of eroticism is delivered in the most detached of the text's narrative voices. As in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” narrative distance corresponds to adherence to the conventional story; in this case, an uncomplicated, uncontradicted racial stereotyping in conjunction with the denial of Melancthan subversive eroticism. The tone of this detached, distanced voice is the neutral, nonjudgmental, almost clinical tone of the naturalist narrative Stein is ostensibly writing.

In the middle of that last sentence, the narrative position shifts again, moving first partly, then entirely inside Jeff's consciousness: “and always he wanted, as Melanctha once had wanted, always now he too wanted really to understand.” Jeff's wanting, “as Melanctha once had wanted,” to “understand”—a word linked in this text to “wandering” and finding “wisdom”—signals the extent to which he has assimilated, and been affected by, what Melanctha represents. Narrative closeness to Jeff's point of view signals, similarly, the extent to which Melanctha has rewritten this text. (Q.E.D. was narrated consistently in detached omniscient third.)

Over against the remarkable parallels between these two early modernist texts is (among, of course, numerous others) the enormous difference, attributable to authorial gender, in predominant attitude toward the title character. As “nigger,” James Wait is a destructive force in Conrad's conservative seagoing tale. Characteristically for male modernists, Conrad is attracted to what he overtly condemns: his ambivalence, and therefore the modernist elements of the text, emerge from the overly powerful attraction Wait's negative qualities exert. Melanctha, on the other hand, is the protagonist of Stein's ostensible naturalist story. Despite our irritation at her irresponsibility, we are made to want the best for her; despite the lengthy digression to Jeff's point of view in his affair with her (and despite the fact that it is Jeff's affair that reenacts Stein's with May Bookstaver, making Jeff the closest character in the novella to an authorial stand-in), it is Melanctha's story that this fiction tells. It is precisely Stein's attempt to see from Melanctha's point of view in order to justify it sufficiently for the requirements of naturalist “neutrality,” to enter into the kind of consciousness that had eluded her while she was still at least emotionally and intellectually in the closet,²¹ that leads her to wander well beyond the limits of the naturalist fiction she thought she was writing. She is a female modernist in this text; therefore her ambivalence stems from her fear of the rebellious freedom and eroticism to which she is attracted.

Both of these texts are certainly rich and strange, and Conrad's is set at sea, but water does not function in them as it does in most of the other texts treated in this study. At certain moments in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” the language used to describe the ocean has the kind of feminine suggestiveness that appears so much more consistently in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. For example, members of the old generation, represented here by Singleton, are described as “the everlasting children of the mysterious sea” (20).²² At the outset of the voyage the sea is described, in language suggestive of Irigaray's reading of Plotinus or Kristeva's account of “women's time,” as “a great circular solitude,” whose “smiling greatness … dwarfed the extent of time.”²³ Similar language appears at the end of the novel, when “Donkin chafed at the peace—at the ship—at the sea that, stretching away on all sides, merged into the illimitable silence of all creation” (113). But these are momentary alignments of the mighty ocean with the feminine (it is also the “sea of life” on the next to last page). These alignments have no consistent import in the thematic structure of the text. The sea is the power of the absolute in this text, and site of “good” where land (earth) is “evil.” It is therefore more masculine logos, either violently punishing or serenely transcendent, than it is illimitable, silent, all-encompassing feminine matter.

Water as such hardly appears at all in “Melanctha.” When it does, however, it is a “moistness” associated directly with the dangerously attractive feminine earthiness and life-force that Stein has projected onto “the negros”: “Jeff always loved to watch everything as it was growing, and he loved all the colors in the trees and on the ground, and the little, new, bright colored bugs he found in the moist ground and in the grass he loved to lie on and in which he was always so busy searching” (149). Jeff's relation to nature provides a totally nonthreatening arena for the release of his erotic feeling, his connection to the maternal feminine. But when this feeling is allowed to include Melancthan human eroticism, it becomes dangerous:

And they [Jeff and Melanctha] loved it always, more and more, together, with this new feeling they had now, in these long summer days so warm; they, always together now, just these two so dear, more and more to each other always, and the summer evenings when they wandered, and the noises in the full streets, and the music of the organs, and the dancing and the warm smell of the people, and of dogs and of the horses, and all the joy of the strong, sweet, pungent, dirty, moist, warm negro southern summer.

(154, italics added)

When moist natural fecundity is expanded to include or acknowledge its human component, it suddenly becomes smelly, dirty, “negro,” and associated with wandering. Although the overall tone of the above passage is very positive, it provides the setting for one of the crises of the novella. On the next page, Jeff, during one of these episodes of “warm wandering” (155) with Melanctha, suddenly becomes bitterly disgusted by what they are doing and turns against her, inflicting on her an irremediable injury and bringing about the (protracted but inevitable) decline and fall of their happy love for one another.

Water, as “moistness,” is clearly gendered feminine and also functions as site of the ambivalence of “Melanctha” toward the subversive forces that disrupt its ostensible narrative structure. But since water makes only those two brief appearances, it cannot be considered an important element of the text. In Stein's later, more radical work Tender Buttons, language relating to water generates not just another representation of otherwise apparent gender-aligned thematic configurations, but the largest representation and constructor of the deliberately polysemous meanings of the text.

Notes

1. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” in Three Great Tales (New York: Vintage-Random House, n.d.); Gertrude Stein, “Melanctha,” in Three Lives (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1936). Subsequent quotations from these sources will hereafter be cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

2. The argument of this chapter is indebted to Lisa Ruddick's “‘Melanctha’: The Costs of Mind-Wandering,” in Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 12–54. Ruddick does not deal directly with the issue of race, but treats Melancthan mind-wandering as a subversive, destabilizing, ambiguous force in the text, discussing it in relation to Stein's constructions of gender and to William James's work on modes of attention.

3. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1933), 54.

4. The relevance of the issue of race to Stein's work, however, also comes to mind in relation to the original production of Four Saints in Three Acts, which used a black cast.

5. Gertrude Stein, Q.E.D., in Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings (New York: Liveright, 1971). For an illuminating account of the transformation of Q.E.D. into “Melanctha,” see Leon Katz's introduction to this volume.

6. I discuss Gertrude Stein's complex relationship to the modernist and avant-garde traditions in “Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon,” in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (London: Macmillan; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 8–20, and in “Half In and Half Out of Doors: Gertrude Stein and Literary Tradition,” in A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example, ed. Bruce Kellner (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 75–83.

7. And also, of course, in Nostromo. Some books and articles focusing on imperialism in Conrad: Patrick Brantlinger, “Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?” Criticism 27, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 363–85; Hunt Hawkins, “Conrad and the Psychology of Colonialism,” in Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, ed. Ross C. Murfin (University: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 71–87; Robert F. Lee, Conrad's Colonialism (The Hague: Mouton, 1969); John McClure, Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (London: Macmillan, 1983); Alan Sandison, The Wheel of Empire: A Study of the Imperial Idea in Some Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1967).

8. Conrad is ostensibly conservative, like James; Stein is ostensibly “neutral,” as in naturalism. See n. 14, below, for references to discussions of Conrad's politics.

9. I am guilty of that oversight in A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). In my case, and I suspect in many others, it is a result of mortified denial rather than indifference.

10. This projection of repressed sexuality onto blacks is a staple of racism. The difference in “Melanctha,” as in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” is that Stein and Conrad enter into the subjectivity of their racially other characters.

11. Wonderfully, “solidarity” continues to be a crucial Polish word.

    As Ian Watt says in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), “The word solidarity came into English in 1848, the Year of Revolutions and of the Communist Manifesto … Conrad's conservative tendencies, however, were in uneasy conflict both with his sceptical realism about human history, and with his basic social attitudes which, though certainly not democratic, were in many ways deeply egalitarian and individualist” (109–10).

    Webster's Second International quotes the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” as its only instance of usage in its definition of “solidarity.”

12. Watt is not alone in finding political tendencies in Conrad that are in “uneasy conflict” with his overt conservatism. Ford Madox Ford's account of Conrad's politics seems to have made Conrad's conservatism a given. He called Conrad “at heart an aristo-royalist apologist” and said that “the whole Left in politics was forever temperamentally suspect for him” (Mightier Than the Sword) [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938], 65). Gustav Morf, however, takes the opposite position in his influential The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad (New York: Haskell House, 1965), viii, seeing Conrad as “an incipient or repressed revolutionary” and his fiction “as a record of struggle with those latent tendencies.” (I agree with Morf.) In Conrad's Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), Avrom Fleishman, like Watt and also like Eloise Knapp Hay in The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), argues for the complexity and inconsistency of Conrad's politics: “Conrad was open to the prevailing political ideas of his time” (ix). Irving Howe argues that Conrad was fascinated by the anarchism he overtly discredits in his fiction, linking it to the disruptive work of the writer (as Conrad saw it) and to a subversive Dostoevskian strain in Conrad (“Conrad: Order and Anarchy,” in Politics and the Novel [New York: Avon, 1957], 79–115). And F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), sees Conrad as a liberal humanist.

13. See Watt, Conrad, 88–94, for a detailed account of Conrad's fictional adaptation of his 1884 voyage as second mate on the Narcissus.

14. See Albert Guerard's insight, crucial to this chapter, in Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958; New York: Atheneum, 1970): “The actual rescue is presented as a difficult childbirth” (112).

15. I am indebted to Chris Goulian for this insight.

16. But, as Stephen Murdock notes in his unpublished paper “Racial Taxonomies and (post-)Modern Language in Conrad's The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’” Donkin is also the most racist character in the novella. Again, race is chaotically, undecidably articulated in this text.

17. For an analysis of the contradiction in Three Lives between painful content and cool, flat narrative tone, see DeKoven, A Different Language, 29–35.

18. That new story was very purposefully written by Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970).

19. A great deal of work has been done on narrative point of view in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” the most influential and liberating of which is by Guerard, in Conrad. Of the “waverings of point of view” that “disturb logicians,” Guerard says “the best narrative technique is the one which, however imperfect logically, enlists the author's creative energies and fully explores his subject” (107). For more recent work on this issue, some of it incorporating the evidently relevant ideas of deconstruction, see Jeremy Hawthorn, “The Incoherences of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’,” Conradiana 11, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 98–115; Jakob Lothe, “Variations of Narrative in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’,” Conradiana 16, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 215–24; David Manicom, “True Lies/False Truths: Narrative Perspective and the Control of Ambiguity in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’” Conradiana 18, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 105–18; Marion C. Michael, “James Wait as Pivot: Narrative Structure in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’,” in Joseph Conrad: Theory and World Fiction, ed. Wolodymyr T. Zyla and Wendell M. Aycock (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1974), 89–115; and Werner Senn, Conrad's Narrative Voice: Stylistic Aspects of his Fiction (Berne: Franche, 1980).

20. There are of course much more radical, and extensively discussed, stylistic innovations in “Melanctha”; innovations virtually all of Stein's critics have felt obligated to account for. In A Different Language, I argue that these innovations belong to the avant-garde rather than the modernist tradition.

21. Stein was obviously not only aware of her sexual preference but a sexually active lesbian when she wrote Q.E.D. in 1903, yet, as that novel makes clear, she was still plagued by guilt and inhibition. See Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein In Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), on the profound effects of that guilt and inhibition on her career.

22. The American title of the first edition was The Children of the Sea (Watt, Conrad, 105, n. 7).

23. Julia Kristeva, “Women's Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 13–35; reprinted in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 187–213.

Additional coverage of Stein's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1917–1929; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 104, 132; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 4, 54, 86; Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Vol. 15;DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-Studied Authors, Novelists, Poets,; Major 20th-Century Writers, Vols. 1, 2; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 18; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 6, 28, 48; and World Literature Criticism.