Walter Pater

ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 comes political propaganda 'reconstructive' readings become unprofitable and unwise" (124). For a similar reason, criticism of her work may be beside the point. Pearce is not writing for my consumption. If I wince at her generalizations about male behavior, she may simply have scored a blow in the battle of the sexes. But what if there is no battle of the sexes? And what if there is more to feminism than a new set of sexual stereotypes? Frederick Kirchhoff Indiana University—Purdue University at Fort Wayne Walter Pater Jay Fellows. Tombs, Despoiled and Haunted: "Under-Textures" and "After- Thoughts" in Walter Pater. Foreword by J. Hillis Miller. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. xxv + 188 pp. $32.50 THE TITLE of this book comes from Julien Gracq's The Dark Stranger (Un beau ténébreux), 1945. As quoted by Jay Fellows, the source passage is as follows: ... hands versed in the mysteries that unseal the tomb, turn the bezel of the ring which gives the wearer invisibility; I myself become that ghostly despoiler of tombs when with a light breeze blowing off the sea, and the rising tide becoming suddenly more noticeable, the sun at last disappeared [sic] behind the fog that afternoon of the eighth of October 19—. The idea that unseals Pater's textual tomb is the following from Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, quoted by Fellows in a heádnote: And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must not all of us have been there before? And return and walk in that other land, out there, before us, in this most dreadful lane—must we not eternally return? The dominant images in the book are "the oscillating no one and beau ténébreux of Julien Gracq" and the " 'nightmare silhouette' " and " 'grave and luminous boy'," a " 'child . . . who brings death to light' " of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization. The method is that of a montage. Scraps torn from Pater's contexts—images, phrases that almost call up images, brief descriptions of actions, and even long passages of prose— are arranged together on a board, so to speak, in a new pattern, one that only Jay Fellows, with the aid of the writers already quoted and others, could have created. Fellows presents his pattern as an "under-texture" he has discovered, as critics do when using this method. He uses the standard image of the palimpsest again and again, trying to persuade 504 Book Reviews readers that the pattern is an inscribed subtext which is more important than the printed text, which is subject to normal hermeneutic procedures . The extracted phrases are assimilated into Fellows's discourse, but when a long passage from Pater appears in his book there is almost always a disjunction. The passage will not assimilate, because it is too clear, and too clearly a development of a more impersonal subject than Fellows is interested in. It is too suggestive of the context from which it comes. There is mind in it, in the sense in which Pater uses mind in "Style," "constructive intelligence." In other words, as a general rule, a lengthy quotation from Pater breaks onto Fellows's darkened stage like a well-formed, sunlit figure with a confident face, in sharp contrast to the gloomy grotesques gathered in the shadows. According to Fellows, the persona in the pattern, or Pater's "linguistic consciousness," realizes that he is in danger of losing his sense of identity, of self. He fears that he will move so far from "the Center of sanity, a place of potential integration and recuperation," a lost Eden of "white memory," that he will be dismantled. He is ever seeking his origin, where wholeness resides, but he ironically recognizes that if he should ever find it, it would be a blank, "an abyss of nihilism." Always trying to return, what he actually does is create, through afterthoughts, a surface of life, a world over the abyss that he can erase or add to at will, from opposed tendencies expressed and repressed, "under a lighting...