Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Imitation Games

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00295132-3458389

1945-8509

Justin Neuman,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

When pressed by an earnest undergraduate to define modernism or queried by a more sophisticated one on what “we” really mean by the term, I usually respond with an epigram like “I'm against you, and all your old, dead things,” as Ursula Brangwen quips in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (428). Joking aside, I am hoping they will come away from the conversation, or at least my course, with a sense that the art we call modernist gravitates around a few key events and concepts: the First World War, the Second Industrial Revolution, the Freudian unconscious, Darwinian evolutionary theory, and so on. An attempt to make it new in fragments that happened on or about December 1910. In The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious, Nidesh Lawtoo sets out to reframe this traditional account, offering readers a very different and far more specific narrative about the central problematics, key texts, and intellectual genealogies of literary modernism. For Lawtoo, modernism is produced by a dynamic of attraction to and repulsion from imitative behaviors and desires. In other words, modernism is all about mimesis.While aimed well over undergraduate heads, Lawtoo's argument is both surprising in its novelty and suggestive in the range of its implications. As the titular phrase “mimetic unconscious” indicates, what Lawtoo has in mind by mimesis is quite different from the textual representation of everyday reality that the term connotes in Erich Auerbach's famous book of that title. Instead, building on René Girard's theory that all desires have their roots in mimetic rivalries, what makes mimesis particularly interesting for Lawtoo has to do with the way in which it denotes physical forms of imitation as more recognizable through its cognate “mime.” There is also something uncanny about mimesis for Lawtoo, who wants to show us “mimesis not as straightforward imitation, then, but rather mimesis as a disconcerting form of unconscious communication that troubles the boundaries of individuation” (2). Foregrounding hypnosis rather than dreams, identification over repression, and reflex over rationality, Lawtoo's “mimetic conception of the unconscious” identifies imitative behavior as the motor-force of subject formation.Tracking this concept across philosophical and literary archives, Lawtoo devotes single-author chapters to Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Bataille as well novelists Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence, reading for moments of crisis provoked by imitative behavior. During the course of the book, Lawtoo identifies the power of mimesis at work on various scales: in intimate encounters through the transmission of gesture, facial expression, and dialect; in groups through drama, music, or dance; and at the level of the nation or the crowd through more complex modes of contagion and charismatic leadership. Thus when Lawtoo argues that the modernists were uniquely obsessed with imitation, he has in mind neither the preoccupation with original form that marks so-called high modernists like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein nor a concern with artistic aura in an era of mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin would have it. Instead, he argues that the modernists revered and feared imitation because they saw it both as one of the innate building blocks of intersubjectivity and as a vector of contagion linked to the spread of racism, sexism, colonialism, totalitarianism, and other social ills.In addition to illuminating some of the more occult theories circulating in the scientific and pseudoscientific discourses of the period, Lawtoo frames the book's theoretical contribution as a corrective to the subsequent rise of Freudian approaches to the unconscious, which he sees as particularly prone to ignore the dynamics of imitation. Concerned that “for a long time, European modernism has been viewed through a distinctly Freudian lens,” Lawtoo sets out to recuperate a “modernism without Freud or, better, modernism through a pre-Freudian, but still emphatically psychological lens” (13). The picture of unconscious life and the nature of the ego that comes into focus through this lens, Lawtoo argues, was “dominant in fin de siècle Europe. And if the so-called Freudian ‘discovery’ eclipsed it, the mimetic unconscious will continue to remain dominant among modernists” (69). Framing the argument in these terms, however, means caricaturing Freud and Freud's interlocutors rather than seeing them as integral to Lawtoo's argument and his audience. In fact, Freud places a great deal of emphasis on the way in which a child observes and imitates his or her parents in the course of the Oedipal drama, and there is plenty of room for an imitative theory of subject formation in the account of sexual object choice that Freud develops in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Post-Freudians like Nicholas Abraham and Mária Török, meanwhile, have much to say on the subject of phantoms that would be of direct relevance here, especially in The Shell and the Kernel, where they develop a theory of intergenerational memory and psychic dispossession based on the haunting power of traumatic phantoms passed down by direct unconscious communication between parent and child.Building on Girard's theories of imitative desire, Lawtoo makes a compelling case that, on a very basic level and from the earliest hours of life, imitation plays a role in the development of language, ethics, and cognition as well as in everyday modes of emotional literacy. What is at stake here is “that the ego is not born in isolation but in a relation of mimetic and unconscious communication with others,” a theory advanced by a “neglected (some would say suppressed) tradition” including a cadre of fin de siècle continentals like Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Hippolyte Bernheim, and Pierre Janet (17, 13). Not only were these thinkers aware of the importance of imitation as a cognitive mechanism, Lawtoo argues that their theories on the subject anticipate contemporary research in neuroscience on mirror neurons that came to widespread public attention in the 1990s. While the popular reception of this work casts “mimetic” mirroring in an overwhelmingly romantic light, Lawtoo emphasizes that the modernists had a more suspicious view of imitation because of the way it inheres directly in the body and bypasses conscious reflection. He is particularly interested in how the modernists understood imitation as an agent of “psychic dispossession,” a force capable of disrupting the ego through trance, hypnosis, and mass hysteria, referring to these conditions as forms of “mimetic patho(-)logy,” an orthography he uses to express “the dual sense of mimetic sickness, and critical discourse (logos) on mimetic affects (pathos)” (6).Even given the ubiquity of the term in Girard's writing and its use in the title of the series “Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture” in which the book appears, mimesis is asked to do a great deal of heavy lifting in Lawtoo's prose. First, there is the slipperiness of the phenomenon he is attempting to describe: “[C]alled ‘imitation’ by social psychologists, ‘contagion’ by crowd psychologists, ‘trance’ by religious anthropologists, ‘identification’ by psychoanalysts, ‘hypnotic suggestion’ by pre-Freudian psychologists, mimesis is a chameleon concept,” he admits (11). Lawtoo further burdens the term by using it not only to refer to his theory of imitative action but also as a more generic modifier, appending the term to a host of nouns to form “mimetic prejudices,” “mimetic problems,” a “mimetic hunt,” “mimetic theory,” “mimetic sickness,” “mimetic phantom,” and a “mimetic point.” The way in which mimesis functions as an illness or pathology can be seen most clearly in Lawtoo's reading of Nietzsche's Daybreak, which is also the source of the gothically inflected “phantom of the ego” that haunts the book's title and launches its introduction. To understand the emotions of others, Nietzsche writes, we imitate “with our own body the expression of his eyes, his voice, his walk, his bearing . . . then a similar feeling arises in us in consequence of an ancient association between movement and sensation” (qtd. in Lawtoo 39). Lawtoo reminds us, however, that Nietzsche reserves his fiercest invective for the imitative behavior of the modern mass subject. This dichotomy means that both the celebrated übermensch and the despised herd are inherently destabilized by a hardwired predilection to mimetic behavior. Lawtoo's take on Nietzsche is thoroughly compelling, particularly in how he traces this contradiction back to the Dionysian and Apollonian division in The Birth of Tragedy, where we first see a conflict between what Lawtoo calls a “Romantic sense of individuality that posits a deep, original, authentic interiority at the source of one's ego” and the destabilizing forces of “an instinctual mirroring reflex that can be contained but not completely suppressed” (42–43).Lawtoo's most incisive analysis can be found in the chapter on Joseph Conrad, an expanded version of a 2010 prizewinning article published in Conradiana, “The Horror of Mimesis: ‘Enthusiastic Outbreak[s]’ in Heart of Darkness.” In that essay, Lawtoo sets out to test what he calls, quoting Heart of Darkness's phrenologist, a “little theory”: “that Conrad's interest in identification is but an instance of his more general engagement with what . . . [he calls] psychic or affective mimesis, a form of behavioral imitation whose primary characteristic consists in generating a psychological confusion between self and other(s)” (Lawtoo, “Horror” 46). The book version routes us through reflections on teaching Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and a suggestive reading of Conrad's early short story “An Outpost of Progress” before sinking its teeth into Heart of Darkness. In a sentence, the chapter tells the story of how Conrad's work “not only entails a critique of colonial ideology, but also addresses why the modern subject is so vulnerable to such ideology and how this ideology is communicated to a multitude of subjects” (106; emphasis in original). Against, say, Chinua Achebe's argument that despite the novel's critique of colonial ideology, “Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist,” Lawtoo patiently examines the sources and attributions of the novel's free indirect discourse to argue that its sexism and racism do “not stem directly from the internal narrator, let alone from Conrad, but from his listeners instead” (124).Lawtoo's interest in Conrad runs deep; he is the editor of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought: Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Labarthe and is currently at work on a monograph on Conrad under contract with Michigan State University Press. The reading offered here illuminates a connection between the way in which Conrad sought to move people with words and the problematic attraction his characters feel for the frenzied pathos of indigenous dance and ritual. Perhaps more important, by insisting on the instinctual nature of imitative response, Lawtoo clarifies why Conrad and his characters are so tantalized and terrified by the prospect of “going native”—taking on the cultural traits, patterns of speech, and modes of life of the colonized. For Conrad, such imitative behaviors are much more than mere performance; as Lawtoo shows us, they are “endowed with a kind of affective, rhythmic power to sweep not only women and Africans, but also white male colonialists, off their feet” (125).In the third chapter, “D. H. Lawrence and the Dissolution of the Ego,” Lawtoo investigates a major novelist's minor side, foregrounding the so-called leadership novels of the 1920s—little-read works like Aaron's Rod and The Plumed Serpent—and other nonfiction writing that Lawrence penned while living in Australia, Asia, and the American Southwest during the final peripatetic decade of his life. Lawtoo wants us to see how Lawrence's encounters with ethnic others, and in particular with non-European dance and religious traditions, expose the lure and the heresy at the heart of imitation. On one hand, through the unconscious and nonverbal registers of the sensorium—through movement, rhythm, sound, smell, and touch—Lawrence's characters achieve a form of communication that “reduces, for an instant, the gap that divides the self and other” (155). On the other hand, seeking this utopian connection comes at a cost: the “direct nonlinguistic psychophysiological communication that flows like a current from the other to the self” renders Lawrence's characters vulnerable to a “hypnotic capitulation to leader figures and . . . the ethical and political consequences that stem from massive mimetic contagion, a contagion that Lawrence denounces as a modern ‘disease’” (145).Exfoliating various layers of the dual-nature mimesis is a rewarding line of inquiry, but Lawtoo's decision to ground his argument in an intentionally obscure corner of the Lawrence archive is a miscalculation. Not only would the book be of relevance to a wider audience if it had engaged the quartet of major novels spanning Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), there would also be more at stake for the argument. While Lawtoo acknowledges that the novels he examines lack “the canonical status of the major novels of the middle period,” he justifies his choice of texts on the grounds that they “allow us to bring to light a little-discussed, mimetic side of Lawrence” (146). Lawtoo's analysis of dance, rhythm, and psychic dispossession in the leadership novels, however, calls to mind a range of similar scenes and themes in Lawrence's major works that would provide more than enough grist for his critical mill.Among the scenes no reader could forget but that go unexamined here include the repeated image of naked dance, which Lawrence uses to suggest privileged modes of self-actualization and to mark forms of joy that grow organically from the body in motion. It is a trope we see through Anna Brangwen, dancing naked and pregnant before her bedroom mirror: “[B]ig with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen, to the unseen Creator who had chosen her, to Whom she belonged” (Lawrence, Rainbow 169). We see an aquatic version in her daughters, the protagonists of Women in Love: “Ursula had thrown off her clothes and had slipped naked into the water, and was swimming out. Quickly, Gudrun joined her . . . ‘how lovely it is to be free’ said Ursula . . . when they had run and danced themselves dry” (Lawrence, Women 141). Perhaps most famously, we see it when Connie Chatterley “slipped on her rubber shoes again” after making love with Mellors, “and ran out with a wild little laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain and spreading her arms, and running blurred in the rain . . . bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches, swaying up again and coming belly-forward through the rain, then stooping again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance” (Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's 262). Likewise, something like a mimetic unconscious is at play when the ever-punctilious Paul Morell slips into the dialect used by his father, a man he professes to hate in Sons and Lovers, in a moment of coital intimacy: “[H]e caressed her cheek with his fingers, and kissed her. ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘Never thee bother . . . but tha shouldna worrit, . . . dunna thee worrit,’ he implored, caressing[ly]” (Lawrence, Sons 356).The Phantom of the Ego will be most appealing to readers with a strong background in psychoanalysis and continental philosophy, but the book has much to offer cultural historians as well: details that accumulate steadily as we learn about how interwar publics understood the coercive power of a charismatic leader, the unpredictable behavior of mobs and crowds, and states like trance and hypnosis. Conrad and Lawrence, however, even including the latter's major novels, offer rather narrow windows through which to view the diverse vistas of “modernism and the mimetic unconscious.” Modernism's many pseudo-autobiographical works, which use imitation as a central conceit—Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, for instance, or Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—would raise different questions about mimesis, and I would be particularly keen to see the argument cut its teeth on the work of Virginia Woolf. More than any other major modernist, Woolf is keenly attentive to disruptions and destabilizations of the ego, and her novels work out a vision of mental life in which the unconscious exceeds consciousness as the submerged mass of an iceberg exceeds its exposed tip. Perhaps in future work, Lawtoo will bring his considerable critical acumen to bear upon Woolf's phantom (“the Angel in the House”), her “moments of being,” or the role of mimesis in scenes like the resolution of To the Lighthouse, when Lily Briscoe sees Mrs. Ramsay's shadow (the phantom of her ego?) on the stairs and, having “had her vision,” completes her painting with a single, nonmimetic line (Woolf, Lighthouse 209).