I IN CUSTODY

I will focus on two eruptions. The first occurs in the middle of Matthew Arnold's essay of 1864, ‘The Function Of Criticism At The Present Time’. Arnold has been addressing the linked questions of the true nature of English literary criticism on the one hand and the true nature of English national culture on the other. If the first is ever to engage fruitfully with the second, literary criticism must become, he says, a de-politicized ‘absolutely and entirely independent’ activity. Only then will it be able to confront and finally defeat what he calls the ‘retarding and vulgarizing’ accounts of current Englishness recently put forward by two home-grown journalist/politicians, Sir Charles Adderley and Mr John Arthur Roebuck.

Then, casting round for an example of something concrete to set against the fatuous self-satisfaction of these apologists, with their cant about ‘our unrivalled happiness’ as members of ‘the old Anglo-Saxon race … the best breed in the whole world’, he quite suddenly and out of the blue quotes from a newspaper account of a specific criminal case:

A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperley Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.¹

The impact of that, even today, is considerable. A nugget of genuine domestic Englishness, the case of Wragg is curiously disturbing at a number of levels. Nomen est omen. The ‘hideous’ name Wragg, Arnold comments, itself challenges the pretensions of ‘our old Anglo-Saxon breed … the best in the whole world’ by showing ‘how much that is harsh and ill-favoured’ there is in that best. A literary criticism which ‘serves the cause of perfection’ by insisting on these contrasts between pretensions and reality in society must begin precisely here, at home. And although Mr Roebuck may not think much of an adversary who ‘replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath Wragg is in custody’, in no other way (says Arnold) will these songs of triumph be induced gradually to moderate themselves.² He doesn’t consider whether Mr Roebuck (nomen est omen indeed) might have been more effectively challenged by the murmuring of what a local newspaper reports to have been Wragg's own piteous, yet oddly piercing cry at her trial, setting her present state of custody tellingly against its opposite: ‘I should never have done it if I had had a home for him.’³

II HOMEBOY

Wragg's is a voice—and a name—that could easily have issued, a generation later, from the depths of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Like the snatches of conversation about pregnancy and marriage, and the drunken demotic pub-talk of that poem, her words somehow manage to speak from the domestic centre of a culture, indeed literally of house and ‘home’, whilst at the same time signalling a fundamental estrangement from it. But the second eruption I have in mind occurs in fact in a critical essay of Eliot's: one that has something of the same purpose as Arnold's, signalled by the fact that it has the same title: ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923).

In response partly to the vaporizings of the critic John Middleton Murry, Eliot here also takes up the question of literary criticism and the nature of genuine Englishness. Murry has argued that the latter is to be found vested in something which he terms the ‘inner voice’ of the nation: ‘The English writer, the English divine, the English statesman, inherit no rules from their forebears; they inherit only this: a sense that in the last resort they must depend on the inner voice.’⁴ Eliot's carefully honed New England sensibility, with its precise commitment to the inheritance of rules from forebears, immediately recoils from this ‘inner voice’ of Old England. Admitting, coldly, that the statement appears ‘to cover certain cases’, he begins a withering attack:

The inner voice, in fact, sounds remarkably like an old principle which has been formulated by an elder critic in the now familiar phrase of ‘doing as one likes’.

—and then the ice cracks and a most startling and memorable image suddenly erupts:

The possessors of the inner voice ride ten in a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice, which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear, and lust.⁵

Moral revelations vouchsafed in the corridor of a train of the Great Western Railway (as it then was) whilst pulling out of Paddington Station are no doubt few and far between. But even if they lack the force of holy writ, their impact can apparently be considerable. Faced with what might be called an excluding plenitude of rowdy Englishness, Eliot's criticism here starts to draw on rhythmic and metaphorical skills developed in the cause of the modernist aesthetic. What suddenly surfaces here is nothing less than the nucleus of a kind of imagist poem, something that Ezra Pound characterized as ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’.

Characteristically, like Pound's own famous ‘In a station of the Metro’:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

it involves modern urban transport systems, with their enclosed spaces and vivid, if ephemeral visual contacts. Ultimately, it offers an image which is both fleeting and concrete, confirming—as Richard Aldington put it—that an imagist poem properly manifests a ‘hardness, as of cut stone’.⁶ Yet it is also clear and concise, mimicking the episodic glance of the male urban flâneur. It meets, almost precisely, the requirement of T. E. Hulme for a ‘visual, concrete language’ which ‘… always endeavours to arrest you and to make you continuously see a physical thing’ (Speculations).⁷ And when the undoubtedly arrested Eliot inspected that intensely physical railway compartment, what he saw was an Englishness which, in a suddenly disturbing mode, seemed to have no resting place, no room, no home to offer him.

III EASILY FREUDENED

The concept of ‘home’ in that expanded sense is of course crucial to Freud's well-known paper of 1919, Das Unheimliche.⁸ Its aim is to distinguish a particular class of, or core of feeling within, the general field of ‘the frightening’, which could justify the use of a special name for it. Freud's immediate target is the apparently stable opposition between the heimlich, the ‘intimate’ or ‘domestic’, and the unheimlich, the strange or ‘uncanny’.⁹ His central tactic is to unpick and ultimately to dissolve that opposition.

Freud's case is that the ‘uncanny’ is not simply the new and the unfamiliar. Something has to be added to it in order to give it its ‘uncanny’ quality, and that something is, disturbingly, already well known to us: ‘the uncanny (unheimlich) is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.¹⁰ More disturbingly, ‘the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix “un” is the token of repression’. Thus the uncanny, says Freud, invariably involves something ‘which ought to have remained hidden, but has come to light’.¹¹

One key to the mystery lies in ‘an examination of linguistic usage’.¹² This reveals that the apparent polarities heimlich/unheimlich are not truly opposed. The ‘familiar’ begins to reveal surprising links with the ‘not known’. Indeed, as the different shades of meaning derived from heimlich develop, they start to exhibit qualities identical with their opposites until, on the one hand, the word ‘means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’.¹³ This migration of meaning finally reveals, as Freud puts it in a classic deconstructive manoeuvre, the interdependence of the terms: ‘Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich.’¹⁴

It is obviously tempting to try to situate Matthew Arnold's notion of a heimlich English culture in this context. His essay not only considers Englishness in terms of what Edward Said calls ‘an aggressive sense of nation, home, community and belonging’, of being ‘at home’ or ‘in place’ in a particular sphere.¹⁵ He defines it at last and most powerfully by pointing to the boundary beyond which the ‘placeless’ or the ‘homeless’ or the ‘uncanny’ begins. This is exactly where we encounter Wragg. She erupts in Arnold's text as a horrific, homeless spectre, revealing a suppressed dimension of the culture which a properly directed criticism will force us to confront. Such a criticism's last, and best function, Arnold seems to be saying, is to tell us what our ‘home’ culture is really like, and it does that by enabling us to see Wragg clearly, as a powerful signifier whose reiteration is enough to puncture the pomposities of Messrs. Adderley and Roebuck. Criticism's very detachment from the political, practical and polemical enables it, says Arnold, to confront these gentlemen with what their vision occludes: it points to an unheimlich suppressed by, but unavoidably included within, the English heimlich. Once more the focus is on nomenclature:

Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world’, has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than ‘the best race in the world’: by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing!¹⁶

Recognition of Wragg and her plight is not only seen as the central concern and duty of responsible criticism, but, in the course of Arnold's analysis, it becomes clear that her homelessness, like the plight of the homeless everywhere, serves to define what we mean by ‘home’. Wragg acts as a boundary marker, a gibbet and a dangling body which proclaims the limit of civilization as we know it, the absolute distinctions of an ‘English’ discourse, the end of the real, the natural, the ‘inside’, the ‘superior’, and the domestic, and the beginning of the strange, the unnatural, the ‘outside’, the ‘inferior’ and the uncanny. Wragg, in short, marks the spot where the heimlich is defined by the fact that the unheimlich appears.

The spectre continually haunting the notion of ‘criticism’, as described by Arnold and many others since, is that of its apparently essential secondariness: its status as something merely repetitive, something that is always already preceded. Michel Foucault's disingenuous statement that the hierarchical relationship primary/secondary, text/commentary is permanent, regardless of the nature of the documents which take on these functions, offers a classic formulation. He grants that ‘This differentiation is certainly neither stable, nor constant, nor absolute. There is not, on the one side, the category of fundamental or creative discourses, given for all time, and on the other, the mass of discourses which repeat, gloss, and comment.’¹⁷ Nonetheless he claims that the ‘principle of a differentiation will continuously be ‘put back into play’. We can annul one or other of the terms of the relation, but we cannot ‘do away with the relation itself’.

Foucault goes on to argue that ‘in what is broadly called commentary’, the hierarchy between primary and secondary texts plays two complementary roles. The ‘dominance of the primary text, its permanence, its status as a discourse which can always be re-actualised’ seems to make for an ‘open possibility of speaking’. On the other hand, the ‘only role’ open to commentary is to repeat: ‘to say at last what was silently articulated “beyond”, in the text’. Caught in a paradox, the commentary must ‘say for the first time what had, nonetheless, already been said, and must tirelessly repeat what had, however, never been said’. It offers a ‘repetition in disguise’, at whose furthest reach there lurks the spectre of ‘mere recitation’.

The first casualty of any probing of the notion of an unchallengeable relationship between primary and secondary will of course be that idea of repetition. Repetition presupposes a primary to which it is itself inevitably secondary. However, Freud's notion of the unheimlich immediately brings that relationship into question. Repetition of the same thing, he argues, is a major source of the uncanny, and it can finally be defined in terms which stress exactly that: it is that class of frightening things ‘in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs’.¹⁸ Freud's larger theory of repetition is of course fully developed in Beyond The Pleasure Principle on which he was working concurrently with his revision of Das Unheimliche. There, as part of a fundamental ‘need to restore an earlier state of things’, repetition achieves a kind of primary initiating status as it comes to be linked to the death drive.¹⁹ And certainly when heimlich and unheimlich merge, the Foucauldian ‘secondary’ seems to mingle with and almost to usurp its ‘primary’. Here, at least, the so-called ‘relation itself’ between them starts to seem collusive, rather than ‘given’, and the persistent sense that the one lies at the heart of the other hints at a potential obliteration of the distinction between the two.

For Arnold, it is clear that literary criticism is the activity which, drawing the uncanny to the attention of the domestic, or pointing out Wragg to Adderley and Roebuck, demonstrates their interdependence and insists upon it. If this is its function at the present time, then criticism (which may appear to be secondary, merely repetitive) has at least a prima facie case also to be seen as primary. Or rather, the whole primary-secondary relationship begins to seem ungroundable: perhaps there is, in respect of the literature/criticism nexus, no primary, no resting place, no home?

IV MEIN IRISCH KIND

If we were looking for an area of repression, in which unspeakable unheimlich secrets recurrently haunt the heimlich texts of British culture and prove to be their foundation as much as their undoing, the secondary that worryingly questions the standing of their primary, then we would do well to look slightly more closely at Matthew Arnold's account of the case of Wragg. The Victorian period broadly encouraged the operation of a complex system of social distinction which finally confined most of those determined as the ‘lower’ orders within the limits of what can be seen as a specific, unifying ‘race’. The common characteristics supposedly shared by the labouring classes, Jews, Southern Europeans and non-Europeans subjugated by empire, included moral degeneracy, physical uncleanliness and, in consequence, a systematic tendency towards desecration of the unified holy shrine of domesticity and hygiene. In Britain, any one instance of inferiority could readily be taken as a sign of the others and there are plenty of examples of a kind of ‘network of affinities’²⁰ supporting a programme of racial totalization which constructed foreigners—and the working class in general—as hovel-dwelling, bathroom-subverting, low-browed, dirty, cunning, dark-skinned ‘savages’.

In Britain, one of the chief objects of this kind of derision was of course the Irish. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, Irish servants who had been summarily shipped to service in the British West Indies were liable to join forces with black slaves in rebellions against their common masters.²¹ By the nineteenth century the word ‘Irish’ functioned broadly in English as a term signifying the wild, intemperate, aggressive behaviour and illogical untutored argument deemed characteristic of savagery in general. That many of the poorest sections of Britain's industrial cities could be nominated ‘Irishtown’ or ‘Irish Court’ without demur is a telling detail in respect of the degrading, grubby context in which Arnold is at pains to locate Wragg:

by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing! And ‘our unrivalled happiness’—what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills—how dismal those who have seen them will remember—the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child! … And the final touch—short, bleak, and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness; or (shall I say) the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo-Saxon breed!²²

Wragg's context, involving dirt, labour, poverty, moral irresponsibility and the defilement of domesticity in the form of her illegitimate child and her infanticide, surely presents her in this sense not as Anglo-Saxon, but as something Anglo-Saxons have ‘lopped off’ in an attempt to dispose of it: as Irish, a representative of that ubiquitous, emasculated, and by now thoroughly ‘feminized’ Celtic culture whose apparent nature Arnold, in his writings elsewhere, had done much to characterize.²³ We need make nothing of the fact that, not five miles from the dismal Mapperley Hills (how dismal those who have seen them will remember) the map shows a quite separate, ‘lopped off’ town called—exquisitely—Arnold. For Wragg's anarchic, anti-patriarchal, unheimlich eruption in Arnold's text as the Other repressed by a self-satisfied Anglo-Saxon bourgeois and colonial ideology, invites us by its own force to see her as a version of an immemorial displaced figure. It is one which, despite the demands of and for Home (Ireland's claims for ‘Home’ Rule climax in 1870, with the founding of the Home Rule movement) seems forever doomed to wander homelessly in the English psyche:

Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?

That these lines, for English speakers, urge a return to Eliot as much as to Wagner is not accidental. The Waste Land's use of the sailor's song from Tristan und Isolde is a significant part of the poem's focus upon wandering, rootlessness and homelessness as a feature of the Western experience in the twentieth century. And when we return to Eliot's essay ‘The Function of Criticism’, his diatribe against the ‘inner voice’ seems to spring from similar concerns. The central objection to the ‘inner voice’ is that it is exclusive. If its presence defines true Englishness, in a sense that Heimat points to, then its absence must bar the American Eliot from that company, however successful had been his elocutionary exertions over the years in sedulous pursuit of the English ‘outer voice’.

Eliot's overriding critical notion was always of course of an adjustable ‘order’ or tradition of truly great Western writers, in which the advent of newcomers made a regular realignment necessary: the ‘outsider’ is thus accommodated, domesticated, put ‘in place’ and made ‘at home’. Eliot's conversion to the established church starts after the publication of The Waste Land and perhaps represents, as Edward Said has suggested, a turning away from the difficulties of filiation (natural continuity between generations: something prohibited by his exile and the difficulties of his marriage to Vivien) and towards the alternative involvements available through affiliation, that is the bondings offered by ‘institutions, associations and communities’.²⁴ This would certainly encourage a sense of the weaving of the individual talent into the web of connections afforded by the great Western ‘tradition’, so that an inherited American, Republican, and Protestant commitment might eventually be transformed into the infamous English affiliative trio of Royalism, Classicism, and Anglo-Catholicism.

Natural justice suggests that the strenuous pursuit of such strange Gods should be rewarded by a modicum of acceptance. Eliot's uncomprehending resentment when the ‘inner voice’ of Englishness turns out to be vested elsewhere is correspondingly acute. Its monument is the sudden eruption into the text of ‘The Function of Criticism’—garnished for better effect with a broad range of modernist poetic devices—of that over-full railway carriage, whose denizens can be derided for asserting their insufferably boisterous, fully affiliated Englishness as football supporters on a trip to foreign parts (i.e. Swansea) at the expense of the exclusion from their number of a would-be fellow-traveller.

European readers will of course be aware of the phenomenon of football as the focus of riotous affiliative nationalism in the twentieth century. In this, as in other regards, the United States retains an unviolated innocence (at least until the World Cup arrives there) so that Eliot's American experience can hardly have prepared him for behaviour of this sort. That perhaps confirms—despite his best efforts at Anglicization—how American he had remained. By their football supporters shall ye know them, and indeed it seems to have been precisely by those means that his discovery is made of an unheimlich spectre of exclusion located at the very heart of the English heimlich (what offers to be more heimlich for a Harvard educated traveller in pursuit of the great Western tradition than a seat in a carriage of the Great Western Railway?)

But let me be entirely outrageous. The eruption that confronts Eliot in that carriage is a phenomenon for which we English have a particular and revealing name: hooliganism. The provenance of the word ‘hooligan’ is clear, disturbing, and once more involves nomenclature. It probably derives from an account (published in 1899) of the exploits of a fictitious denizen of Irish Court in East London, ‘Patrick Hooligan’.²⁵ In short, ‘hooligan’ carries the clear connotation ‘Irish’. It offers a classic displacement of violent disorderly behaviour on to a despised and supposedly ‘savage’ subculture, with the implication that it is racially characteristic. Throughout the twentieth century, the increasingly broad deployment of the term in Britain has been part of a series of complex ideological manoeuvres by which the British have tried to negotiate an engagement with what they still presume to call the ‘Irish problem’—that is, by writing off the activities of an anti-colonial movement as the typical behaviour of degraded barbarians. That the rise in what is now firmly perceived and routinely denounced as ‘football hooliganism’ in Britain increasingly parallels the rise of violent rejection of British rule in Ireland no doubt warrants further investigation in these terms.

Of course from time immemorial there has been a tradition in Britain and throughout Europe of Carnivalesque behaviour which, with its riotous upturning of accepted values and hierarchies, its commitment to ‘rough music’ and the crude extra-legal settling of scores, has appeared to override civil authority and has sometimes fostered serious political challenge to it. And more recently in Britain there has been a tradition of rowdy, law-breaking behaviour which—if practised by, say, undergraduates at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge—could be safely written off as ‘high spirits’, or part of the tradition of the undergraduate ‘Rag’. But this kind of boisterousness has increasingly—once it is seen to attract lesser breeds without the law—invited the moralizing tendencies of magistrates and sociologists as a prelude to its denunciation as the work of ‘football hooligans’.

The brief but memorable eruption of football hooliganism into Eliot's ‘The Function of Criticism’ is a matter of some moment; not least because it resonates with the eruption in Matthew Arnold's ‘The Function of Criticism’ of a similar, violently disorderly force. Linked to Eliot's not only by a potential Irish dimension, but by a name—Wragg—in which, as Arnold (quintessentially an Oxford Man) would know, the spectre of youthful disruptive behaviour also lurks—this side of Ionia, Attica and the Ilissus at least—it stands as a factor with which British culture—and its literary criticism—has had to come to terms.

V FIRST AID FOR THE CHOKING VICTIM

However, at what Foucault calls the ‘preconceptual’ level, Arnold's essay and Eliot's perhaps share much more extensive common ground. Together they tell us a good deal about the ideological freight carried by literary criticism at the moment of its installation as a key component of Anglo-American culture. Both promote and reinforce a fundamental division between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’, between ‘home’ and ‘away’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, in which the complexities surrounding the heimlich are actively at work. For Arnold, ‘foreignness’ involves the ‘free play of ideas’ which can only influence for the good an English insularity committed to the merely practical. For Eliot, the ‘foreign’ offers an ordered, hierarchical stability to shore against what he sees as the disorder likely to flow from the chaotic and potentially revolutionary ‘inner voice’ on which John Middleton Murry and later D. H. Lawrence seem to insist.

Of course, that is only the crudest sketch of the terrain in question, but in general terms it seems to confirm that the subject position offered by both examples of this discourse—and I am taking Arnold's and Eliot's essays as crucially definitive locations and formulations of a discourse that will for a generation supply the common coin of academic literary criticism in the English-speaking world—systematically presents the critic in terms of a sophisticated ‘foreignness’ projected as part of the cool appraising stance of the outsider. Coleridge's notion of a praetorian cadre of teachers operating within society as a select ‘clerisy’, or Arnold's idea of the recruitment of an elite fifth column of trained academic ‘aliens’, comes disturbingly to mind. The Arnold-influenced Newbolt Report (1921), direct precursor in Britain of professionalized academic literary criticism, speaks chillingly of University teachers of English as Missionaries.

Of course, Arnold professes sympathy for Wragg, whilst Eliot maintains a frigid scorn for the possessors of the ‘inner voice’. But both accept—as colonizing ‘outsiders’ who claim to be able to see what the savage aboriginal ‘insiders’ cannot—the necessity of recognizing the paradoxical Englishness of each eruption. Eliot's essay is important because it sanctions the transfer of aspects of its own eruption to Arnold's and establishes a resonance—albeit deeply submerged—with the case of Wragg. Freud's point is confirmed in both: the unheimlich represents a repressed dimension of the heimlich. Meanwhile, the links of football hooliganism with an older tradition of Carnival, and even the ‘psychological onomatopoeia’ of Wragg's name (of which Arnold as we have seen makes a great deal) begin to hint at a sanctioned loosening of moral strictures. And that disturbing prospect starts, darkly, and surprisingly, to suggest the Mapperley Hills and Paddington Station as unlikely locations of a long-hidden and unified unheimlich that literary criticism, at its academic inception in Britain, feels it has somehow to engage with.

In short, I am suggesting that the essays of Arnold and Eliot cohere around the eruptions of this Wragg-Hooligan nexus. Its vague roots lie, I would also suggest, in a forgotten—or repressed—dimension of British culture. In proposing its consideration as a single unit, I do so with only residual misgivings about the reduction and false clarity this imposes on its shadowy complexity. It is hardly counter-intuitive, after all, to suggest that the unheimlich lying within the heimlich in the modern English psyche has something to do with Ireland. And this is no more than to say that Ireland can always be perceived by an inherent prejudice as the Anarchy to a Culture whose presuppositions are and always have been English.

What confronts both Arnold and Eliot, as they consider the function of literary criticism in its post-industrial setting, is thus the stirring of a pre-industrial ghost: a wholly disconcerting prospect in which that which is ‘away’ in football terms, startlingly erupts into that which is ‘home’. As Missionaries, their project is nothing less than the imposition of a law and order on this savage chaos. Their central aim is to ‘map’ it, to establish the contours of ‘home’, by imposing an apellation which we have perhaps for too long endorsed: English. As part of the process, both offer to speak on behalf of a complex and hitherto covert, but none the less authentic Englishness, an ‘inside’ which apparently reluctantly agrees to emerge in order to take on the policing role of ‘outside’. But by the stratagem of backing thus humbly into the limelight, ‘authentic’ Englishness—Wragg, the absurd claims of the ‘inner voice’—manages in my view to obscure something far more radical, far more deeply ‘inside’ and implicated with itself. In calling up this deep-seated internal challenge to the ‘law and order’ of English literary criticism and nominating it, however rawly, as ‘Irish’, I suppose I am finally trying to outline a principle which out-Arnolds Arnold and out-Eliots Eliot: one which challenges fundamental ‘English’ presuppositions in the most fundamental way; which ultimately refuses their very logic, their very ordering of the world, their very notion of causality, of the plausible in scholarship, the very oppositions on which this depends—and which refuses in the end the distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘criticism’, and between those modes of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ on which—as in Arnold and Eliot—it apparently insists.

The voice which has most relentlessly made this challenge over the years is inevitably an Irish one. It is of course that of Oscar Wilde. It speaks most cogently in the essay which presents his astonishing reply to Arnold and, as it were in advance, to Eliot: ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891). In effect, what this essay awards to criticism is a primary not a secondary role:

Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name … criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does. … Anybody can write a three volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature … criticism is itself an art. … It is to criticism that the future belongs. … There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now. It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.²⁶

The work of a true—albeit dandified—Hooligan, this polemic effortlessly reverses the apparently immutable hierarchy identified by Foucault, just as Wilde's whole life from the level of a paradoxical literary style to that of committed sexual role, seems to have been geared to the reversal at all levels and in all respects of the English sense of how things are and should be. ‘Considered as an instrument of thought,’ he writes, ‘the English mind is coarse and undeveloped. The only thing that can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.’²⁷ For reversals on that scale, of course, he paid the price that Hooligans pay.

The principle at stake may nevertheless be allowed finally to challenge the notion of ‘mere’ repetition which lies at the heart of traditional ideas of literary criticism, certainly in its professionalized form in the Academy. I hope to have suggested that a different notion of repetition might finally engage us. It is one whose aim is the generation of the new in terms of the only kind of newness we can recognize because its source is the old. I am speaking of a criticism anxious, not merely to raise the spectre of the unheimlich, but also intent, not on nullifying it, but on somehow including and promoting the unheimlich within the material it examines—indeed of openly scrutinizing those elements that its initial impulse is to try to occlude or swallow. When such a criticism then takes the criticism of the past as its raw material—puts Arnold's and Eliot's criticism, that is, on the syllabus, with a standing equal to that of their so-called ‘creative’ writing, it will be releasing repetition from its servitude to precedence, and presenting it as a vital source of the new.

What we can retain from Foucault is surely the notion that, as part of the project of modernity, the essence of a truly modern criticism will not involve the reinforcement of so-called transcendental standards or structures, or any of the other lineaments of a tired, not to say oppressive scholarly tradition. It will rather call for a kind of principled and self-inventing betrayal of that tradition whose investigation of criticism's own presuppositions will wilfully promote the, by traditional standards, bogus connections and parallels of the sort that I have been shamelessly deploying: their aim an expansion of the possibilities of our use of criticism as a material intervention into history rather than the prosecution of what we misguidedly think of as scholarly ‘facts’ or ‘truth’.

Such a project absolves Criticism from any commitment to the tetchy pursuit of true judgement or, worse, the soul-gelding aridity of quellenforschung. Instead it turns into a creative genre in its own right; one whose fundamental mode is a sort of pre-emptive repetition: a matter (I begin, I dare say, to sound ‘Irish’) of getting the repetition in first, its central feature the active identifying, confronting and using of the unheimlich, the pressing home of Freud's deconstructive proposal that the unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of the heimlich, until those positions are virtually reversed. Until, that is, the heimlich appears almost as a sub-species of the unheimlich, and we begin to face the possibility that ‘home’ is only the tamed and taming doll's house we construct as a poor bulwark against the apparitions that permanently haunt us.

That the various rooms of one's home may be comfortably lined with books, plays and poems perhaps just intensifies an unease which lies at the heart of that vision of domesticity. And perhaps it serves finally to confront us with a prospect which is genuinely frightening because truly known of old and, though long repressed, long familiar: the appalling possibility that home is where the art is: that, in terms of the unheimlich critical vision, what we think of as home and what we think of as art are in some way shockingly coterminous in their role as mere vehicles for the most paltry of human comforts.

It is a view whose implications have undergone a crucial probing in those numerous voices which have spoken and continue to speak of the homelessness, expropriation, expatriation and exile that are central features of life in our century. The range is vast, and perhaps the case of Wragg, for whom custody clearly stands in a deeply ironic opposition to the ‘home’ which would have prevented her crime, lies at one end of it. At the other, a hundred years, two world wars, revolutions and holocausts on, lies the work of Theodor Adorno. His judgement that ‘Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable’ concludes, at its uttermost bitter reach, that ‘Today … it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home’.²⁸

In respect of art, the sort of homeless, ‘hooligan’ criticism that I am advocating must eventually subscribe to a morality of that sort. And if it is finally able to plumb the deepest entrails of a culture, beyond the level at which any way of life feels itself to be ‘at home’, bringing to the surface—or, better, bringing the surface down to—whatever inhibits that culture's genuine nourishment, then it may aptly, and in the name of a more beneficial notion of eruption, be finally linked to a strategy whose simple design, I have lately observed, seems, astonishingly, to be outlined on the walls of every American restaurant. For there, in that most portentous of modern locations, an exotic rubric suddenly and darkly speaks of ‘First Aid For The Choking Victim’.

Central to the welfare of any Choking Victim (and surely most of us will from time to time have felt included in that company) is the principle that there is a sort of eruption which can be good for you, and that in its most benign form—that of regurgitation—lies the basis of a new beginning. In the circumstances—and to mention nomenclature for the last time—it strikes me as only slightly uncanny that the name given to this most radical of critical gambits happens to be ‘The Heimlich Manoeuvre’.

Notes

1. Matthew Arnold, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. III, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 273.

2. ibid., p. 274.

3. ibid., p. 479.

4. See T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber, 1951), p. 27.

5. ibid., p. 27.

6. I am here and in what follows drawing extensively on Andrew Thacker's provocative argument in his ‘Imagist Travels in Modernist Space’, Textual Practice, 7, 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 224-46.

7. See Thacker, art. cit., pp. 239-40.

8. Usually translated as ‘The Uncanny’. See Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVII, Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), pp. 217-56.

9. I am aware that the modern German word heimlich does not necessarily carry the sense that the Austrian Freud seems to ascribe to it. His detailed philological analysis covers several pages and is none the less remarkably thorough. Its aim, of course, is less to specify individual meanings than to focus on the spurious ‘opposition’ of heimlich and unheimlich.

10. Freud, op. cit., p. 220.

11. ibid., pp. 241-5.

12. ibid., p. 220.

13. ibid., pp. 224-5.

14. ibid., p. 226. This classic deconstructive analysis perhaps lingered to haunt the German language in the twenty years following Freud's paper. At its furthest reach, heimlich has links not only with Heimat, the ‘homeland’, but even perhaps—via geheim—with the secret forces of terror raised to exclude the Heimat's enemies. This generates a kind of oxymoron whose grim climax occurred when Freud joked of the Geheime Staatspolizei, after they had ransacked his heimlich Vienna home, that he could ‘heartily recommend the Gestapo to anybody’. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 642.

15. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber, 1984), p. 12.

16. Arnold, op. cit., p. 273. Christopher Ricks has commented on Eliot's no less intense interest in such matters. Certainly, Eliot's inventions for the correspondence columns of The Egoist include names that would have confirmed Arnold's despair: ‘Charles James Grimble (The Vicarage, Leays)’ and ‘Helen B. Trundlett (Batton, Kent)’, to say nothing of ‘Muriel A. Schwarz (60, Alexandra Gardens, Hampstead NW)’. Note also Eliot's constant invention of names in the spirit of nomen est omen: Professor Channing-Cheetah, Nancy Ellicott, and supremely, J. Alfred Prufrock. Of course Eliot also had his trouvailles to match Arnold's Wragg and Roebuck, such as Sir Alfred Mond. See Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber, 1988), pp. 1-24 and 242-3.

17. Michel Foucault, ‘The order of discourse’ in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 52-64. See also Foucault's The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), pp. 78-81.

18. Freud, op. cit., p. 234.

19. Das Unheimliche itself presents a valuable complication of the matter for the actual writing of it is so saturated with the issues of repetition that they begin to call into question the very principles on which parts of the argument seem to rest. The War itself had of course decisively undermined linear notions of sequence and consequence. It is, Freud says, as a result of the ‘times in which we live’, that he presents his paper ‘without any claim to priority’ (op. cit., p. 220). In a letter to Ferenczi in May 1919 he indicates directly that he has dug an old paper out of a drawer and is rewriting it (p. 218), whereupon the editors of the Standard Edition admit that ‘Nothing is known as to when it was originally written or how much it was changed.’ They even contribute the straight-faced comment that ‘The passages dealing with the “compulsion to repeat” must in any case have formed part of the revision’ (p. 218). In short, Freud's revisionary return to the paper means that a crumbling of the primary-secondary relationship characterizes the very composition of the argument before surfacing as one of its most disturbing features.

20. I take the phrase from Luke Gibbons's invaluable, ‘Race against time: Racial discourse and Irish history’, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, 1991, p. 98.

21. See Christopher Hill, People and Ideas in 17th Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 169-70.

22. Arnold, op. cit., pp. 273-4.

23. See Luke Gibbons, op. cit. There was a notable rise in cases of recorded infanticide in Britain in the 1860s, together with a tendency to regard the crime as an ‘Irish’ solution to the problem of poverty—a point of view informed perhaps by recollections of Swift's A Modest Proposal. See R. Sauer, ‘Deadly motherhood: Infanticide and abortion in 19th century Britain’, Population Studies, vol. 32 (1978) pp. 81-93. I am indebted to Dr Jo McDonagh of the University of Exeter for this and a great deal more information on the topic.

24. See Edward Said, op. cit., pp. 8 and 17.

25. See Clarence Rook, The Hooligan Nights (1899) (Oxford University Press, 1979), especially pp. 14-20.

26. See Richard Ellmann (ed.), The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (London: W. H. Allen, 1970), pp. 355-403, passim.

27. ibid., p. 403.

28. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 1951, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1951), pp. 38-9. Edward Said has recently drawn attention to these passages in his BBC Reith Lectures (1993).