Philip Weinstein:	Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here. I have this strange sense. I've done this talk in different cities, but it feels stronger and stranger here, that I'm a kind of implicit, hidden, subtext theme for so many people who are here. The subtext is that I've seen former students from three decades who are gathered here. It makes a kind of structure; it's very strange. A lot of you I don't know, but it is wonderful. Well, it's nice to meet the ones I don't know. It's especially wonderful to see ones that you saw at another place who were important for you at a particular time at Swarthmore, and to see them again, and they're now native space.
	Unknowing the Work of Modernist Fiction. It's the title of the book, and it's taken me a very long time, longer than I wished, to figure out my argument in this book. Since I started teaching at Swarthmore over three decades ago, I always zeroed in on the same cluster of writers, modernist writers. I think I knew from the beginning that they were doing something very important, and I certainly knew from the beginning that they were doing something very difficult. I had a hunch that the difficulty and the importance were inseparable. So the book is really an attempt to figure out both. Why is this literature actually important? I need to remind you of that because I will be saying later in different ways, I know it's literature you're not reading now. And its difficulty has everything to do with that. So why also is it so difficult? Why does it need to be, want to be, that difficult?
	Let me start though by glossing two terms that are central in the book and in the title of the book, and in tonight's talk / today's talk, Unknowing and Modernist. Let me start with modernist and distinguish that term from another that looks just like or almost like, which is modernity. I think of modernity, it can be defined in different ways, but I think of modernity as the history of the west; a history that starts with the rise of western science in Western Europe and in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that comes to a kind of culmination in the revolutions of the seventeenth century in Britain and the eighteenth century in France and in America. It is a liberation of the liberal individual, of the cult of individuality and of liberalism is launched by the west and actually defines the west for the last several hundred years, and we're still in it. Even when we call culture postmodern, it's a further development of modernity, which gets launched several centuries ago and shows no sign of ending.
	The fictional art form; the form of the novel that modernity gives birth to is realism. Realism is an immortal genre because we still read it all the time. There may be some sense in which it's even hardwired into us, that fiction, that the primary moves it makes were first articulated as realism. There haven't been novels forever. In the west, they really emerged with Defoe, what we think of as novels, even Pilgrim's Progress in the late seventeenth century. But a novel will not have as its main character someone named Pilgrim, and it won't have as its setting a place called the Slough of Despond. What it will have is settings that are familiar and characters with familiar names: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Tom Jones. This is the eighteenth century novel.
	Modernity gives birth to realism. And like modernity, realism, realist fiction involves the freeing of individuals, some, always white, more often than not male; freeing of them from outer constraints as well as inner ones of illusion and irrationality. Realism writes for the middle class. Its watch word is "progress". Its conceptual motor is reason. Its material motor tends to be acquisition, achievement, that we can associate with the burgeoning capitalism. It is the west's favorite form of fiction, and its operative premise is "I can, once I get myself straightened out." That's going to be basic narrative line of realist fiction, and this is an endlessly appealing kind of story.
	Let me head off one possible confusion from the beginning, that realism does not mean reality, and it isn't really [inaudible 00:05:18] to tell us that. It's a set of conventions for writing the real, invented at a certain time, and followed in many ways right on up to our current day.
	Conventions for writing what seems important and seems real. When modernist writers, the ones I'll be talking about today, refuse those conventions. That's because they have things they need to say that can't be said in realist conventions, so they had to invent their others, and the stream of consciousness is one of them. We could talk about that later on. I'm not going to say anything directly about it tonight/today. The point is pretty here, that as human realities alter, they don't change 100%, but they do change in response to technological and other events, cultural events. New modes of writing are invented to articulate those changes.
	Now, by contrast to modernity, we have modernist or modernism. It refers to a cultural movement much more recent that arises in the late nineteenth century as a set of positive and negative responses to ongoing modernity. My book looks at three of the great modernist writers: Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner, whom I group around Freud. I think of them all as haunted writers, not by repressed sexuality as in Freud, but committed to a model of consciousness that at critical moments stalls, becomes opaque to itself, charged with more baggage than it can handle.
	Consciousness in a state of crisis. In my writers, modernism is an art of crisis. And its premise is "suddenly I can no longer". And its key term, and this is the one that took me six years to find, is "unknowing". 
	Unknowing is as central to the disorienting text of modernism as coming to know; coming to know the territory. It's central to the progressive text of realism. Why would novelists center their work on the shock of "suddenly I can no longer" rather than the resolution of "finally I can". To figure out what was at stake, what is at stake in unknowing, I knew I had to pay attention to what went earlier, to the prestige of earlier western practices of knowing. How did the rightness of coming to know get to be such a western norm so much so that we don't think about it itself evidently what we should be doing, what is at stake in subverting it.
	So I unpack in my book. I unpacked "unknowing" by exploring three dimensions of it: the subject, the human individual in fiction, the protagonist, and space and time. It's as simple as that. How do the main characters in these novels move through space and time? Because if an individual is going to come to know the world, then the world has got to be knowable. It's got to have become lawful, and that's what the Enlightenment did.
	The Enlightenment made the world something you could accurately map, and do so in secular terms. Thanks to lawful time and objective space, an individual can learn to map the outer world and others in it accurately. The payoff for that is, that accurate mapping of others allows for an accurate self-mapping. You come to know yourself because you've come to know the world properly and responsibly. Personal identity gets confirmed by way of an achieved recognition of what is out there, an achieved knowledge of what is out there. The individual who would know the world that would be known are meant for each other in this model, and their successful marriage from its "finally I can", I've got the territory right.
	Realist fiction cannot proceed without these assumptions, but realism denies that the marriage that it celebrates at the end has been secretly arranged from the beginning. Instead, realism proposes that this is the great thing in realist novels. It proposes that the field of space and time and other people that the protagonist moves through is just objectively there, familiar, indifferent to the protagonist's desires; the world kind of as it is. That's the charm of realism; it's a familiar world. And yet somehow, when the dust clears, it will turn out to have been manageable and negotiable.
	Modernism won't make the movement through space and time anything like that manageable. It shows that the individual is always in a particular world dependent on the arrangement of space and time in that world, and able to come to know only if the spatial temporal ordering that makes knowing possible is in place. But if a writer disrupts the individual's compact for negotiating others and objects in space and time, well then the subject, the individual, loses his grasp on others, and when that happens, loses his own coherent identity. Identity is all reciprocal. If things out there are what I know them to be, then I'm what I remember myself to be also. Handshakes do the same thing. They are little humble gratifications that, "Yeah, you're you and therefore I'm still me."
	The fiction of Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner works to dramatize an uncohering of identity. They will not write the story of coming to know. In place of knowing, we get shock. And space, rather than remaining lawful, becomes uncanny. Here's an instance of uncanny, the best that I know of. Freud himself gives it in his essay on the uncanny.
	Freud talks about traveling as a tourist through some unknown Italian town and being lost in a neighborhood where he doesn't know why he's in that neighborhood. He didn't intend to be in that neighborhood, and it's the red-light district of this town, and he wants to get back to the railroad station. So he checks his coordinates and he makes the moves necessary to get back to the train station, but he finds himself returned to the red-light district. So he checks his coordinates once more and goes in a completely other direction to get to the train station, and he finds himself in the red-light district again.
	The question is, is he lost or is he found? Is he in a kind of space that he is unintentionally mapping, because something in him wants to be in that space. In other words, is the space what is just out there, or something he's doing by his way of moving around in it. He calls that that sense where the hair can rise in the back of your neck, that this is uncanny, like this space ... I trust you were all really you out there, but to what extent do we also produce the spaces or interact with the spaces that we inhabit. I think we do so more than we ever realize. We are in the lifelong business of habituating space. My wife never wants me to use this instance, but if you have to pee in the middle of the night, you usually can do it with your eyes closed. You know how to get to the bathroom. That space is made completely internal to you. You operate it; it's like an extension of you. You've had a kind of union with it.
	Proust, of my writers, Kafka too, are most powerful at exploring spaces that don't know us. When they don't know us, we are incapable. That's how space goes wrong. It becomes as subjectively produced as it is objectively out there. When time goes wrong, instead of being linear and progressive, it becomes traumatic.
	Trauma is the word used both in the psychoanalytic vocabulary and in the medical vocabulary. It means wound. Trauma as a time wound means that something's stopped and wounded you then and you're not over it now. That's why it is traumatic, so that you actually operate if you are traumatized on the scene of now and the scene of then. You incoherently cohabit two different timezones, and it means you're only partly present for now because you're still dealing with the then you've not negotiated. All of Freud's, or most of Freud's patients, suffered one way or another from trauma, and he had to find out what scenes were they still in that they didn't know about such that they could free themselves from it and have a future, to have a progressive story. They didn't have it when he met them.
	This struggle, these struggles, make up the materials, both of my novelists' writing and of the larger move that subverts western cultural norms that we call modernism. The represented world, our relation to it, leaves its former liberal conditions as knowable, masterable, and conducive to progress. That is the book's argument in a nutshell, and here's how it develops.
	I start with the Enlightenment and I unearth the progressive narrative that arises among four great western thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant. This would be a little heavy, but not real heavy. I'm not going to go at length into of them; I wouldn't know how to. There are a few things that I need from each to stitch together this story.
	Descartes. He conceives, he gives birth to the western subject, the western individual, who would know. The phrase that we have all heard of Descartes, Cogito Ergo Sum, states that; I think therefore I am. My essence is to be a thinking being. Descarte's phrase for the thinking being is Res Cogitans, Latin for "the thinking thing". Descartes creates this image of the human being as centered in the capacity to think; everything else is to be doubted. In becoming a thinking thing, I relegate to the margins everything else; parents, siblings, church, state, and culture, are all outside me. It's only the internal thinking that is me. This single knowing subject is born in a kind of alienation as a mental capacity.
	What is the opposite number? Everything else that is not the thinking thing, Descartes calls Res Extensa, extensive or material thing. This is the alienated world, not me, but that I can map and can come to know. This alienated world, the world was not alienated in western thought prior to this arrival of a scientific paradigm that turned nature into fact, to matter, into not us, but knowable by us. Of this nature, this natural world, alienated us near materiality, and awaiting scientific knowledge, is Res Extensa. And the two, of the knowing subject, Res Cogitans, and the world out there, make a marriage that launches western science and realistic fiction. The subject freed from cultural norms has appeared in Descartes, but he needs a lawful field of operations, and that's what he gets, thanks to Isaac Newton.
	Newton invents a system of the world, that's his phrase, that proposes a gravitational field that calculates the movement of matter in both the furthest heavens and an apple falling from the tree. The world is now wholly understandable as a force field within Newtonian formulae. And for 150 years, really up until the early twentieth century with Einstein, these formulae held authority as that's what the world is we knew. This was an authority that was enormously important for all kinds of other western projects including, I think, colonialism, because we know how the world really works, and it's understood through rational formulae. Others who don't are benighted or primitive or in need of our guidance. Newton provides the map, secular, material, and knowable, that the questing liberal subject needs.
	I then draw on John Locke, whose essay concern human understanding, lays out philosophically the story of how you can best make use of that map. It is a story of trial by error, a beginning as a blank slate, that's Locke's phrase I think we've all heard, and it's a radical phrase. Blank slate means parents, culture, everything else that we might think as in us, is actually not at our core. At our core, we are capable of empirically making our own way. This is a single individual's story, a blank slate, but that can be written on effectively. We are capable of knowing more and more by way of trial and error. That story grounds western fiction. All three of these thinkers contribute to a narrative of individuals freed from outer constraints and prepared to strive in a knowable, mappable world, urged to reach their potential. I think that's still our story.
	The plot developed thus far goes like this. It moves progressively from dawn to day, it doesn't go very far into the evening. I am born. I learn swiftly that I do not yet know, but am capable of knowing. I am not predicated. No inherited schema contains me. But the world I inhabit is predicated, knowable by way of trial and error, God-given perhaps, but material and secular in its operations. I can learn to negotiate objects and others in the familiar space and time of this schema, obtaining property as I go. My doing this confirms reflexively my identity as an agent in my own life. I cannot obtain everything, but if observant, prudent, and self-aware, I can get what I deserve. I am, it seems, every man. I am also white, male, bourgeois, developed mental acquisitiveness.
	There's one last element required of this narrative, something that will allow it to continue to speak to my rightful desire to become all I can and get what is appropriate for me on the one hand, but also to honor my Judeo-Christian conviction that the career of systematic self-advance is one of vice rather than virtue. In order therefore that this story not end up in a kind of Hobbesian nastiness, an affair of individuals struggling to amass all they can, that will take the hindmost, it has to be ethicalized.
	And so I attend to the fourth thinker, Immanuel Kant, whose categorical imperative governs, or ought to govern the entire schema. The categorical imperative is just this: Always treat others as ends unto themselves and never as means to your end. An imperative thrown out against ... This models otherwise insistent development on instrumental thinking and on the priority of the individual. Kant, the Kantian model, the Kantian imperative sounds also like the Sermon on the Mount.
	So, the narrative must be moralized, but without repudiating earlier givens, and that's probably impossible. At its heart, it is a contradictory story. An Enlightenment narrative torn by these opposed beliefs that on the one hand it's a story of ego, of self-flourishing as far as one can take it, and on the other it's a story of altruism, of self-restraining, treating others as ends rather than means.
	Treating others as ends, that's a tall order for this story, which has so prioritized the individual knowing subject, and has actually posited the reality of others and objects as knowable only because they answer to my categories for knowing them. This is a story in which I come first, and in which you become recognizable because you entered my categories for knowing you. [inaudible 00:24:49] remains the central Cartesian tenet here; doubt of everything else. Descartes, in one of the Meditations, talks about his own body in the most hair-raising way about, "Is it really mine? How would I know?" And he does little tests with it. Talks about animals' bodies in the same way. It's that body is Res Extensa. Inside this immaterial core is Res Cogitans. 
	There is a wonderful twentieth century theologian named Levinas, a philosopher and theologian named Emmanuel Levinas, who I think most powerfully attacks this story. He does so by arguing that the individual, at the center, never engages in real risk, that is everything I encounter eventually reduces to my categories for encountering it. Levinas calls this master plot a Return to Ithaca, a Homeric return home to my own self-sameness in which when the day is done, all my ventures, thanks to later recognitions, are grounded and confirmed, and finally I can, finally I know, I have mapped the territory.
	I test this Enlightenment narrative with its contradictory emphasis on both my flourishing and my need to respect yours, by developing an anatomy of realist fiction, which is occurring at the same time a little later, and that resembles it. First, introducing the subject or the protagonist, then familiarizing the subject, then space and time travel, finally recognition. I posited these four moves are the bones of the realist novels.
	Realist fiction almost always introduces early on its protagonist by bringing him close up. Now you can test this on your [inaudible 00:27:08], that most novels you pick up, you know within the first five pages which is the horse to bet on, who's this going to be about, who's going to be opened up to have life adventures, because most people in any novel are not opened up. They are kept at a certain distance from us. They silhouette this precious moral drama that the protagonist will go through. That's the one that will move in space and time and make mistakes, trial and error, and learn things.
	We so assume this, that we're frustrated when a novel, like Faulkner's Light in August takes 80 pages before you know which horse to bet on. It opens on someone else, and then yet someone else, and then two others, and when it gets to the one that's going to be the central figure, you don't know that until the next 150 pages that have gone back to this central figure's infancy and childhood. Not only close up and early on, but reliably close up.
	That is not like Kafka's figure Joseph K in The Trial who ... This is the first sentence of Kafka's Trial, who someone must have reduced, for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning; opening sentence of the book. That's a narrative situation putting us in a familiar bedroom, because he's waking up and there are two warders, maybe they're warders. They're wearing uniform, but he doesn't know how to read these uniforms. They don't symbolize any system of authority he knows, but they are in his room, at least he thinks they are in his room. The situation putting us in a familiar bedroom with the protagonist, that ought to be realistic, that something's wrong with the room, something that was never wrong with it before, and he's woken up in that room for umpteen years. What we don't know at the first ... Any first time reader naively believes, and has every reason from earlier readings to believe, that you will find out why they arrested him.
	In realism, we will find out exactly what's on his mind or what's in his path. It is a scandal of The Trial, that 225 pages later, you still don't know why he was arrested. And worse, you're not sure he was arrested, and there are two ways that story can be domesticated, and all first-time readers expect first one way and then later the second. The first way we always expect, because our reading has taught us to expect is, we'll find out why they arrested him. That means we trust they're really out there and they've really come in to do this. We trust that the narrative is giving us reliable figures in space and time.
	If that fails, we have a second narrative. We prefer not to use this one, but it also works, which is, in our minds we say after that first sentence, we say, "So thought Joseph K." Once we say to ourselves, "So thought Joseph K," we've got control over it again because he's just a nutcase and we know that we have recovered where the trouble is. We've been able to circumscribe it; it's in Joesph K. Unfortunately, Kafka's text never lets you be certain whether the space is uncanny and he's projecting it, or the space is real and they're out there. That unknowing runs throughout the entire novel. 
	Next, familiarizing the subject. Novels swiftly go into the social world of their protagonist, and those protagonists come to know that world, become familiar with it, and we've become familiar with it and more familiar with the main characters. Think of Elizabeth Bennet, how we know her through her four sisters and her mother and her father. Immediately, she's given a family that tells us a lot more about her. We come to recognize swiftly the worlds that these people are in in realist fiction.
	It's not that realism doesn't deal in misrecognitions, but it shapes them mainly in the form of mistakes eventually set right. Again as in Pride and Prejudice, a host of Wickhams, who are in time replaced by Darcys, that the business of moving from Wickham to Darcy is the business of growing up emotionally in Pride and Prejudice. Wickham is there to be misread and then to be seen through. Darcy lets us know who Wickham is; Wickham lets us know who Darcy is. This is how fictions are smart. These realist fictions are smart because they keep giving us more comparative information about which characters are to be relied on or reliable, have learned something.
	Space and time travel is how characters do learn things in realist fiction. People move around a lot in realism and everyone learns from it. The realist world of space and time, because it's lawful, accommodates an incremental series of Lockeian trials. First sightings prepare for later and more reliable ones. Descartes established doubt to be productive. Locke stressed ignorance as the first step toward knowledge. So certain entities on a realist canvas will be misread when they're first presented, so then eventually they may be reread accurately when they're re-presented.
	And then the clincher, recognition. Realism's supreme moments center on recognition. I'll give you one. Dickens' Great Expectations. You will probably remember it because it's hard to grow up in American culture or British one and not get this book at one point or another in your schooling, that it opens on the marshes in a stormy scene, where a little boy named Pip is out there. He's just gone to see the gravestones of his departed parents whom he's never known. And he's suddenly seized by a convict named Magwitch, who's wearing a convict's outfit and he's got a ball and chain around his legs, and Pip steals a file from home, where he's been brought up by his step-sister. He steals the file and brings food so that this poor hounded creature, Magwitch, can escape, because they're out trying to find him. He's escaped from prison.
	Pip later finds that he is to entertain great expectations, because an anonymous benefactor has levied a huge fortune on Pip, and he's introduced to Miss Havisham, whose stepdaughter or ward, Estella, Pip falls in love with. As the story goes on, Pip goes to London where he has ... He grows up in London following his great expectations. Two-thirds of the way through the book, Pip is in his mid 20s. He's become snobbish. He has expensive chambers in downtown London, and on a dark and stormy night, like the weather at the beginning, someone comes in from down below. He hears someone knocking at the door, and he sees coming up the steps, a figure he does not recognize. This figure starts to talk about that time on the marshes and starts to talk about the amount of money that has been levied on Pip, announces that he is Magwitch the convict, and that it has all along been him, the benefactor.
	This is the moment of recognition for Pip. The money he thought coming from Miss Havisham, so that he could marry Estella, that class drama of rising, all wrong. It was instead coming from a convict, and Pip would at this moment, has to re-see everybody. And indeed, everyone in the book now looks different. Miss Havisham, not Pip's benefactor. Estella, not meant for Pip. Magwitch, not just an out and out criminal, but a man who has befriended and made possible Pip's own development. Joe, the man who brought up Pip and who Pip has disdained because he's lower class and speaks broken English. Most of all, Pip himself. All different. I said earlier that identity is reciprocal. If Pip gets Estella, Miss Havisham, Magwitch, and Joe wrong, he's gotten himself wrong. His investments have been wrong all along, and now he knows it. Everything comes into a new and disturbing focus.
	These recognition scenes, and you have others probably not quite as dramatic, but in any work of western realism, appear as crescendo moments and they can even clarify an entire life, made possible by coming to know your world better, and therefore coming to know yourself better. If you ask how this can happen, how the realist protagonist can at these privileged moments rise above the flow of his own life in time and eventually see who he is, can replay the narrative, like replay the real, and see where he was then and what he gotten wrong then, if you ask how this can occur, you see that it must rely on accurate memory, reliable memory. You have to be able to remember it all in order to know where you screwed it up, where you made the wrong investments, emotional/moral investments. This tells us that identity in realism, individual identity, is as a coherence that is sustained throughout time.
	The conscious eye, in Enlightenment thinking and in realism, possesses limitless, reliable memory. Pip has to, for my purposes, what's more interesting is that he can, remember his past accurately. Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Anna Karenina in Anna Karenina, suicidally remember their past accurately. Memory cannot be evaded, and realism launches its recognitions by way of that resource; was blind but now I see. That's the bread and butter story, I think, of realist fiction, and it moves with a systolic/diastolic rhythm of eventual progress and enlightenment, coming to know the territory. Finally I can.
	Why and how would modernist writers refuse this appealing story? Well, some suggestions. First, this bread and butter story of progress can be unbearably smug. And second, not just smug, but latently colonizing. It assumes that the rest of the world is somehow just out there waiting for our getting to know it better and to master it better. There's the notorious attack on Conrad's Heart of Darkness by Chinua Achebe, an African writer, that goes really just this way, where Achebe says, "Conrad takes the entire continent of Africa as a backdrop so that Kurtz can get to know his soul, or so that Marlow can. Africa is really a lot more interesting than this backdrop, this silhouette, so that the individual drama can come into focus." That Conrad wants that individual drama, and Achebe is saying, "There are lots of people out there that are not just backdrop for this story and they aren't just savages."
	The argument would be that the figure ground model in realism is out of whack. The individual at the center, me, huge. And the ground, everything that surrounds the individual at the center, small, very small. John Maynard Keynes once remarked, "I don't think one realizes how very discreet, in the mathematical sense, one's existence is." I think I know what he means by that, that one's existence is infinitesimal within the immeasurable field of countless others, what you wouldn't realize just by reading the canon of western realist fiction. That fiction is committed. As Virginia Woolf once put it in a gender context, to producing mirrors that make the male subject look twice his size. Modernism tends to correct this visual error by puncturing the balloon of individual male project, reduces its sway, made is smaller than male subject, shares the canvas with others whom he may not succeed in knowing and converting to dimensions of his self-sameness. 
	Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is not a novel, it's impossible to say exactly what genre it does fit into, and it's written in 1843 instead of in the early twentieth century, nevertheless serves, in my argument, as the proto modernist text. It's about Abraham and Isaac. It does this by treating the Bible's Abraham as though he were a figure in a modern novel, a modernist novel, that is, somebody caught up in his experience rather than gaining control over it; someone at risk of losing himself entirely rather than finding himself. Kierkegaard's Abraham has not read Genesis and learned that he gets Isaac back. That's something for us, when we read Genesis, it only takes five minutes, to get to the verse that tells us, "It's okay Abraham. There's a substitute sacrifice. You don't have to do it."
	Kierkegaard writes 200 pages about the interval before the sacrificial lamb is provided, a ram. What would it be like to be caught in the middle? What would it be like, and the more you probe that, the more disturbing it is. This story is worse than Job. At least with Job, it's someone else doing it. Here, Abraham must put to death the thing he loves best, his child. Best, but not as deeply as he must love his God. Abraham had to wait until he was in his 90s even to get this child, this promised son, and now it's demanded of him by God to put this same son to death, not a reason is given. Kierkegaard makes much of the fact that this is unspeakable. How do you go to Sarah and say, "Well, I'm taking him out now. We're going to Mount Moriah and I'm coming back without him." And if she were to ask why, the answer would be, "God has ordered me to do this." It makes no ethical sense whatever.
	Kierkegaard's narrative dilates on Abraham, keeps attending to the knife that's going to be raised, the sacrifice that's going to have to take place. It dilates on Abraham as though we, like Abraham, did not know what comes next, which is as though time were what it actually always is in life, unmastered, and the future not yet known. We may not get out of here today. Things can happen. Our commonsense tells us, this is our greatest protection, that this space in time, as we're experiencing today, will be like they were yesterday, and that no untoward catastrophe will take place. We trust in that. That trust makes our sanity and survival possible. We actually don't know. The future is radically not known.
	This Abraham, Kierkegaard finds out, is terrified, that is he's going to be a murderer, and he's suddenly ejected from his entire moral universe. He's on the edge of scandal. He trembles. Now, why and when do we tremble? I think we tremble when we suddenly lose control over our embodied being at a moment in space and time. When we have the sense that something monstrous is upon us, a something that our habits cannot habituate, something that we fear we will encounter this at the cost of ceasing to be ourselves. That's not a return to Ithaca. Let me put some of it together.
	The Enlightenment narrative of "coming to know" assumes lawful time and space as waiting for the mapping energies of a questing individual, a knowing subject. This is everyone's favorite story because it proposes that we are a species that sustains our identity in our course through space and time. This again is a precious fiction, and I'm not castigating it, but it is a fiction that narratives keep telling us that it's still us. It's us all the way through. That wonderful pronoun "I" does more work than any other word in the language, especially English "I", which is just this one letter, straight up with these two little horizontals at the top and the bottom. Lots of different people float into that pronoun, but it never changes, and it conveys the kind of ... and we use it every day of our lives. It conveys a fantasy of being same centered, same me, right on through.
	We have narratives that allow us to do this. Western fiction, some critics, a critic Peter Brooks especially argues, "It's shaped primordially for this purpose, to confirm identity." Brooks claims that narrative, this is his verb, "perverts" time, by representing human behavior as a mastering of time by way of achieved self-recognitions over time. Returns to Ithaca. 
	We humanly accommodate time by perverting it into narrative or into stories. This is what we do. Sartre describes this trick perfectly in his novel Nausea. Quote: This is what I thought. For the most banal event to become an adventure, you must begin to recount it. This is what fools people. A man is always a teller of tales. He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, and he tries to live his own life as if he were living a story. But you have to choose, live or tell. End quote.
	Live or tell. Live a life without knowing how it comes out, or tell a life from the in-supplied perspective of knowing how it comes out; that's to turn it into story. Realism knows it is returning to Ithaca, and it tells the story from the unannounced perspective of an Ithaca already returned to.
	Note that the key tense of all verbs in realist novels is the past tense. That's an enormously reassuring tense. It says that whatever is going to happen here, someone has survived it to tell the tale. It's all in the past. And the cunning of realist novels is that the past tense eventually seduces you into thinking that this is present activity, but it also keeps assuaging you that it has happened and the speaker of it is still there to continue doing the speaking. Realism knows that it is returning to Ithaca. This past tense is also constitutive of what we think of as stories and I just ... Let me dilate for a moment on story.
	Every time you listen to the news or watch it on TV, this word is indispensable, story. "For this story we go to ..." Well, events aren't stories. They've got to be massaged into stories. They have to be retrospectively mastered to be turned into a narrative, then they can be reported on. And we get our daily feed of stories and we are all too likely, I think, to believe that we now know what happened. What we have is the human processing, or turning into narrative, of materials. That's something, more elegantly, novels do, but it's not limited. Fiction-wise, it's not limited to novels.
	Kierkegaard and the modernists who come after him produce narratives that are difficult, I think, because they dislocate the act of telling so that it looks more like the unmasterable conditions of living. The moment of now, if you decouple it from what went earlier, you break into the legibility of what preceded it. The moment of now becomes opaque, its sheer presence, without the clarifications that are provided by what went earlier, and they're prepared for what comes later.
	Freud is the theorist of opaque presence, of individuality unmoored from a legible becoming in time. I think it's fair to say that Freudian analysis is an attempt to supply a legible becoming in time to a patient who is confused about his becoming or her becoming in time, who's got no story for how you got from there to here, and who's got no future. So that Freud is useful, perhaps most for me, in a lot of ways for me, but perhaps most in that he knows that like my modernist writers, the time you go to is earlier time. It's not some future projected time. Freud had to unravel the riddle of earlier time for his patients, and he developed a whole set of techniques for doing this. He's the doctor of unknowing. And for that narrative in fiction, we go to Proust, Kafka, Faulkner.
	Well, I begin the Proust, Kafka, Faulkner part of my book by looking at Freud, but I won't do more with him now. I do not propose Freudian readings. I don't think they're very interesting. I mean, I certainly believe in repressed sexuality, but we repress a lot more than that and more interesting things than that. These writers are looking really at social materials that can't be brought to mind, as in Kafka, can't be lived in consciousness. These are what are repressed, and they always explode in these texts.
	What I'm interested in using Freud for is to show how his seminal concepts, the uncanny, trauma, self-unknowing, play out as narrative categories in fiction. Uncanny space turns unlawful. Things slip, cease to be familiar, or are hauntingly familiar but still somehow unknown, and unbound time ceases to be linear, no more progress. As the protagonist compacts with reconfirming, space and time shatters, knowing becomes unknowing. 
	We've known for a long time, all readers and critics too, that one has trouble reading these modernist novels, and that's one of the reasons you don't go back to them after you had to read them in college. More precisely, one has trouble reading them the first time around. If you went back, you'd see a lot more. Subsequent readings uncover a lot of the ordering mechanisms that are deliberately concealed, made unrecognizable at first. That took me 20 years to come to the next point I want to make about that. What I now think, is that this means that the difficult modernist text, is about time. It is it's about time, as trouble the first time around. You're in the dark. Of course, that's how we actually always experience time. It's always the first time around.
	Rilke puts it like this in his one piece of fiction, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, in beginning of the twentieth century. Rilke writes: There are no classes in life for beginners. It is always the most difficult, but is asked of one right away. Later, things get easier. We get our structures. We manage to map space. You know how to get to here on time for this lecture. I always talk to my students, especially when I'm teaching Proust, about the difference between what by then, because by then they're juniors usually, sophomores or juniors, the difference between the way Swarthmore College, as an organized space, operates for them now; and how it did, if they can remember those first two or three days. You didn't know how to map the space. That's true for any space you go to. We're not born knowing how to map spaces. We gradually domesticate them by going over them again and again and again.
	On this model, the Rilkean model, life happens outside the rules, outside the classroom. But realist fiction is much more pedagogic, and it gives us what happens first, which prepares us for what comes next, which prepares us for the resolutions at the end. It turns life into a life class.
	Thinking life itself, we never exit from a perpetual present tense. That may, whenever crisis arrives, and I think there's no one in this room for whom it hasn't one time or another or more often than once, arrived: a sudden illness, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the collapse of a relationship, of any project, a swift loss of control, where the pattern fails, the plan is no longer intact. Whenever that happens, and it can and does happen at different points to all of us, we are somehow returned abruptly to a first grade that we never seem to graduate from. One can't. I suggest that we live out our lives in a perpetual dialog between the creator in us and the creature. And in times of stress, we are reduced to creature creatureliness. Our great creaturely move is to cry. And when we cry, the creature cries. We're not even into language, but that's the distress of having lost the pattern, lost the narrative.
	I think it's no surprise that modernist novels that are willing to be this unfriendly are not going to have a huge readership. Most people will not read a book a second time to find out what was going on. That's because everyone knows time is short, and perhaps shorter than we know it is, and you don't want to mess with it. You preserve it for other allocations.
	My writers all access their characters at moments when their lack of mastery, their unknowing, is on display. There's a very great scene in Proust where he's been on the phone with his grandmother, who's a tremendously important figure for Marcel. He's heard something wrong in her voice; she doesn't sound like herself. So without telling her, he goes to visit her. She doesn't know he's coming. The scene unfolds as he is looking, I think he's looking through the window, getting ready to come into the room, and she is visible to him. She's knitting. She looks completely wrong. He's looking at a woman he's never seen before, because unless she puts herself together to engage him, the pact that he has for years been operating out of, his relationship with her, is no longer intact.
	Our pact with others, with anyone we care about, is long out of date. Our visual pact. What we see with people is not what's there. We see our relationship with them. This is why your parents always look old to you in life, and I think many of you have the experience of looking at a picture of a dead mother or father, and they're young, and you never saw them this young; you can't because you see a relationship with them. Likewise for your children, they will always be young. Because we ratified that pact with them earlier, we see ... that is we see in time. We think we see in space, but we're seeing [inaudible 00:59:09] time ridden compacts that don't change except when they have to. And they will change cataclysmically.
	This is also a moment that's happened, I suspect, to all of you, and I bring it up with my students, where if you go home after you've been away for six months or a year and see your parents, for a moment, you see the time on their face. They're older. And you only see it for a moment because then the curtain drops and the familiar and necessary fictional image, that is the post-dated one, the outdated one, drops back into place. 
	What Proust shows is that, our moves through space and time are subjectively inflected all the time. They're not the way Newton talks about motion through time and space. The worst part of that moment for Marcel is that if that's not his grandmother, then he's not himself, because her confirming, ratifying gaze is not occurring, and he feels at the end of this long ... It's a three-page analysis and it's absolutely compelling. He feels at the end, he is the stranger in the house, not she. 
	We cannot recognize the past and passing time that is in the face of others we care for. This would be reciprocally to recognize the past and passing time within our own. Here's another instance of it. Those of you whom I've taught in the past and who've come to this lecture, are seeing a much younger person than those of you whom I've never seen. You see here time relation if you got to know me earlier, you're still kind of seeing that. Thank you for it. This unthinking compact, that I'll misrecognize you so long as you continue to misrecognize me, that only shatters at unwanted moments of discovery, where knowing becomes unknowing.
	Let me turn to Faulkner for a moment and then close this. He seems to have taken seriously Nietzsche's remark, late nineteenth century German philosopher, a remark he never read; he never read any Nietzsche but he sure took it seriously, this remark. I'm afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. What would that mean? What that means is that grammar is that little linguistic confirmatory structure we operate every day of our lives: subject, verb, predicate. I give this lecture. It is a model of agency, of power. I move through the verb onto the object. I'm in an authorizing position of power. And language lets us know all the time, so long as we've remained within grammar, that we are in control. This subject, verb, predicate, is the hallmark of grammar, and for Nietzsche it is a fantasy control that we don't really have, but that the language keeps reasserting.
	In Faulkner, the stream of consciousness is a technique for shattering the subject, verb, predicate. Joyce and Faulkner probably are our two greatest stream of consciousness writers. They give the flow of moment by moment shards of consciousness rather than the elegance of subject, verb, predicate, where I do my thing. Here's a moment in Faulkner's Light in August, when the main character, Joe Christmas, a deeply disturbed young man, he doesn't know how disturbed he is. He can't remember his past; back to reliable memory.
	For Joe Christmas, the phrase Faulkner uses for Joe Christmas' childhood, he introduces that childhood a hundred pages into the book with this phrase: Memory believes before knowing remembers, believes longer than knowing recollects. Memory believes, our memory is in us, and it believes in perfect Freudian fashion. It hasn't forgotten anything, but it's outside of the tissue of knowing. We don't know what we remember on this model, but that doesn't mean there isn't remembering. So the things that Christmas has been through and that he's forgotten, we've seen as we read this novel. He's in a desperate and about to be murderous relationship with a woman named Joanna Burden. At this moment, he can no longer sustain that relationship. He can't be in her presence anymore. It's after midnight and he's outside her house. He's getting ready to go into the house and an act of murder will take place within minutes. He does not think, "I'm going to kill Joanna." That's subject, verb, predicate. He thinks, "Something is going to happen to me." Something is going to happen to me. 
	Look at the grammar. In the place of the subject is something, not even knowing what. In the place of the poor agent, rather than being a subject, is this weak little object of a preposition, to me. The something is going to explode. He thinks it's going to happen to him. Joanna can't even get into that sentence. She's going to be the dead one in about five minutes, but he can't think any of that. This is not realist progress, or coming to know the territory, or "finally I can". It is a time troubled figure who Faulkner has had to invent a grammar to say they're troubled, because as he doesn't master his life through space and time. Faulkner's text are soaked in southern tradition, but in his great novels, that tradition doesn't help at all. It's denatured and suffocating. Realism assumes the viability of cultural norms and it was useless for his purposes. Realism is friendly to its reader, and of limited help as a writer. You want to make a lot of trouble.
	I want to return to time as trouble and close this. Trouble tends to be mounted in realism in order to be surmounted; a distracting force field presented in order to be removed, dark clouds in a weather that is finally mandated to be sunny. We will get resolution.
	Given Sartre's live or tell, realism chooses tell, and labors cunningly to make it look like live. I think in a number of courageous ways, modernism chooses live, and of course its impossible work is cut out for it. How can you write about live without turning into tell? Once you put live into narrative, you're going to be constrained by narrative and the books will end up somehow resolved. The difference is, and this also is why you don't go back to these books, they take a long time getting there. You struggle through these modernist texts in unknowing for a scandalously long times; scandalously true for fiction, not true for our lives, but true for fiction where we expect more clarity and light.
	You can't ultimately, but the heroism of my three writers resolves in their innovative attempts to do this, to get the dislocatedness, the unknowing of living into prose. And most notably from my study, they brought the trouble of time into their narrative forms. I think the truth is that we are not knowing in time in the way that realism proposes, and that the larger part of our actual experiences aren't ensured by knowing. Our lives unfold in an unending present that becomes opaque whenever it leaves the grooves of habit or expectation. I think in reality, we learn slowly in time and by debt of many repetitions. Nor do we own our space except in tentative, provisional, and short-term ways. Our relation to the outer world resembles renting, or indeed borrowing, more than it does owning. And for many aspects of our lives, we cease after a certain point to learn it all, who is wise in love, who even becomes wise in love.
	These are unfriendly truths about life and time and space, and the work of modernist fiction is to convey their importance while continuing to honor their unfriendliness. And it's the ungratefulness of that work, it's modernism's putting into narrative what narrative itself seems designed to repress, is that for which we should be most grateful. Thanks.