Double Cain

Forter, Gregory

Double Cain1 GREGORY FORTER

I. "Do I, for God's sake, sound like that?"

There's something fishy in the work of James Cain, something that doesn't quite smell right. I mean this, first of all, as a metaphor, though I propose to take that metaphor seriously. And I mean it to crystallize what the more discriminating among Cain's critics have in fact sensed for some time: that central to the experience of reading him-central, we might say, to the fascinated revulsion that so often greets his work-is a disagreeable and depressing suspicion of having been "had." Cain seems somehow always to be cheating, to be playing dirty; the goods he delivers evaporate behind their thin glitzy wrappers, leaving only an overpowering scent of sulfur and sleazy sex; his effects grip and seduce us, sometimes even to furious abandon, but they also invariably muss us up since they are, in the end, dirty little effects, cheap and sensational tricks, shams-by no means the real thing at all. "The list [of ingredients that made Cain's first novel a success] must always include a large item of trickery," writes W.M. Frohock in his book about violence in American fiction (14, emphasis added). Or again, from Joyce Carol Oates's essay on Cain: "The freedom of women and money and power, and the promise of adventure.... These are his tricks, his gimmicks" (110, emphasis added). Trickery, gimmicks, tricks, "legerdemain" (Frohock 15): it's almost impossible to talk about Cain without acknowledging this fakery, the ersatz dimension to his work. So that when I open by evoking something fishy, I mean in part simply to make that acknowledgment-to insist colloquially that Cain's "up to no good"-and to assert that ultimately, for me as for others, this "no good" can't but show: the writing may be able to "perform dazzling tricks but it cannot quite make us believe in them" (Oates 117).

The reason for this is that Cain's "no good" has, to begin with, aesthetic connotations. "Cain ... never manages to become an artist" because "there is always something sleazy, something eerily vulgar and disappointing in his work" (Oates 110). Cynical and exploitative (110), neither "'poet"' nor "'philosopher,' he is "in the end ... simply an 'entertainer"'; and an entertainer, of course-if he's to be a good one-must possess "an uncanny knowledge of the perversities of his audience, [and of] the great range of their vulgarity" (114). This is the subterfuge, the artifice of Cain's "art": "masterful and intelligent" in itself (114), it understands and exploits the vulgarity of "mass man" (124), who pants only after crude entertainment and finds it-only-in the rankest of places: in a sexual violence that animalizes humanity, in the shocks of action and the twists of plot, in the indelicate obviousness-the flash and excess-of mass art. To entertain on a mass scale is itself here to trick; it's to take artistic shortcuts that drag the reader through filth and mud, renouncing thereby all high subtlety in favor of the basely obvious, the excessive, the grossly sensorial. "[T]he vulgar degrade all notable qualities," Oates continues, "especially that of subtlety. What is not exaggerated will be passed by" (120). Cain is thus driven to excess-driven to cheat: it amounts to the same thing-by his desire to satisfy the insatiable brutishness of the vulgar herd. It goes without saying that the vulgar themselves, being on this reading always already degraded, know and demand nothing but trash, and they consequently remain blissfully unconscious of anything sweeter-smelling. For them, the trick precisely doesn't show, and the danger of befoulment thus threatens only "us": the non-vulgar who, gradually becoming hip to the trick, finish Cain's books with a shuddering sense of having had foul and polluting contact with something like lower life forms.2

It's important, then, to be clear about this contact, to familiarize ourselves with these forms. Oates's essay betrays so evident a slumming sensitivity to the pleasures of vulgarity that her disgust tends finally to become somewhat vague and vaporous. We still need to ask: what is it exactly that the crudities of Cain's art put "us" into contact with? And here the answer is startling in its simplicity, crude in its very obviousness: if Cain inspires an aesthetico-moral nausea, if his work induces in critics a vertiginous aversion that can only be adequately expressed in disgust, this is because his books address us as though we were ourselves vulgar, placing us squarely in the uncouth and animal minds of their narrators and asking us, incredibly, to feel at home there: to find in those minds our own vulgar selves, debased in and as mass man.3 Frohock both makes and misses this point, I think, when he says that The Postman Always Rings Twice "is thoroughly immoral ... not so much because of the unpraiseworthy behavior of the characters as because of the unpraiseworthy behavior of the reader" (21). For the danger his essay actually describes is of a devolutionary identification so complete as utterly to void such distinctions:

The one fact the reader had become most convinced of was that Cain's hero [in Postman]was the kind of man who could not, in any circumstances, have written a story, and discovering that one has been enthralled, instead, by the in extremis jottings of a writer who could have made his living any time writing for M-G-M was like being caught by the rising house-lights wiping one's eyes after a particularly bathetic movie. (14)

The trickery here consists in our having been made to believe in our civilized superiority to the murderously unpraiseworthy, only to have that complacency shattered by the shock of excessive likeness. Frank Chambers, it turns out, has written the narrative we're reading; the very thing we were most convinced he couldn't do, that we needed most to believe was beyond him, he has in fact done. And if a "mad dog" (Cain, Postman 117,118) like Frank has the capacity for so supreme an act of civility, who's to say which of "his" vulgar atrocities I mightn't myself be capable of? The fantasy governing this discourse of disgust is one that links "illiteracy" to an asocial will that's at once preindividuated ("mass"), inhuman ("animal" [Frohock 19]), and altruicidal (Cain's heroes, as we know, carry destruction immanently within them); so that when it turns out that the murdering mad dog can in fact write, the resulting terror is that I myself, literate though I am, might be caught when the lights go up convulsed on all fours, mingling and putrefacting my unique civil self in the undifferentiated and murderous will of mass man. Cain's texts demand we partake of this movement, this effacement of the boundary separating our pacifically socialized and cultured selves from the unnamable that-preselvic, animal, internecine-that must be thought to "precede" the self. Frohock may figure this process sentimentally, but such a figuration need hardly deter us. "There is no doubt ... that brutality brutalizes, and sentimentality is but one form of brutality" (Oates 124).M Caught with my pants down, down on all fours, or caught "wiping [my] eyes after a particularly bathetic movie": the difference is in the end negligible, since both images capture the humiliation attendant upon an excessive and dehumanizing identification. The sentimentalist becomes a kind of weepy grotesque who effaces human complexity with an affective exaggeration that mimics the emotional fraudulence on screen. The brute, on the other hand, in perfectly symmetrical fashion, enjoys fantasmatically his affective reduction to animal (in)humanity, seeping creepily into an identificatory mire where "I" is "Frank" and Frank is me and the "emotional ... stunted[ness]" (Frohock 19) leading one of us to murder can be none other than "my" own.

We shall have momentarily to turn to Cain and flesh out this skeleton of animalized man, as well as of the mechanisms that animalize him. For now, let's just note that he indeed smells, this brute, that stench is both his preferred milieu and a perfectly proper trope for understanding him. Raymond Chandler, who has as good a nose as anyone for this kind of thing, could hardly be more explicit in his 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf:

I hope the day will come when I won't have to ride around on Hammett and James Cain.... Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain-faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlour and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God's sake, sound like that? Hemingway with his eternal sleeping bag got to be pretty damn tiresome, but at least Hemingway sees it all, not just the flies on the garbage can. (22-23)

This is disgust at its most confident, its purest, its most imperious. No manifest ambivalence clouds the issues, no delicacies curb the expression of a passionate loathing, and the passage thus has at least the virtue of honesty in its display of revulsion. Chanting the familiar refrain, it tells us again that Cain plays tricks: he's a "faux naif," not a genuine innocent, a "Proust in greasy overalls" rather than the real article. But it also insists that those tricks stink, making thereby disturbingly legible the unconscious logic in Frohock and Oates and suggesting we take as literally as possible the olfactory metaphor with which I began. Cain's crafty "way" is crafty because "dirty," with "Nothing ... clean and ventilated" about it; if "Everything he touches smells like a billygoat," if he is, for Chandler, no Proust, this is because the stains on his overalls mark him already as a feculent creature who deals in "slops" while attempting to mask their aromatic filth with the smell of a cheap stylistic perfume. The essence of Cain's trickery resides in the doctored fetor he transmits to us through his writing as a potential for malodorous contamination. To read him is to risk both smelling "like a billygoat" and developing a wayward "taste" for that smell. The explicit reference to sex, moreover, in Chandler's disgusted denunciation, suggests that what's at stake in Cain is an aberrant and dirty "erotic" impulse that's inseparable from the identificatory dangers that Frohock and Oates have helped us to define.

Chandler himself tends more to enact than to reflect upon this conjunction. I want, therefore, to turn for a moment to Freud's late essay on "The 'Uncanny,"' which offers a remarkable theoretical account of the relations among sex, identification, violence, and smell. One of my claims will finally be that Cain knows things about these issues that even Freud is at pains to deny, and that this denial has everything to do with the theoretical ambitions by which Freud seeks to surmount a condition that he shows to be-precisely-insurmountable. Nevertheless, Freud's essay can help us provisionally to grasp the nature of the critics' fears and repulsions, and in particular, to bring quite clearly into view two points that Chandler's disgust intuits.

First, the rankness of "mass man" in Cain-the deathly reek of his inhumanity-is not just an "exterior" threat to an otherwise odorlessly pacific subjectivity, but is in fact immanent to that subjectivity, the very air it breathes. "Do I, for God's sake, sound like that?"-what can this mean if not, at least in part, "Oh my God, I sound like that!"? And does not the question therefore announce the implacable bind of a mimetic rivalry, where hatred is born of an agonizing sense of resemblance to a double (Frank Chambers, James Cain) whom I must repudiate if I and I alone am to be "myself"? To "sound like that" is to "sound" putrid, vulgar, indistinguishable from the mass-to have, in short, no real "voice" (singular and unique) at all. It's to be so mired in the vulgar other that the two of us remain a kind of muddy mass that's as yet unable to identify itself-no longer an other, not yet an "I," but simultaneously both of these, and therefore neither. And it is, of course, to the disconcerting return of just such a condition that "The `Uncanny"' traces the violence of this kind of specular relation. Once upon a time, in the "narcissistic," "animistic," or "savage" prehistory of the civilized self, "the ego was not yet sharply differentiated from the external world and from other persons" (42).5 Exterior and interior were then as one, to wish was fantasmatically to fulfill that wish, and the ego, in all its originally "unrestricted narcissism" (46), was at once everything since it had not yet learned its difference from "others," and nothing since it could not really have been "itself," properly speaking, until the institution of a boundary, a limit that both marks and divides. The ego is first a kind of mass ego, a preegoic and miasmal being-(in)-objects; it stands at the outset in an utterly familiar relation to all that "is not it." Once, however, this initial state has been "surmounted" (55), the return of the familiar in the figure of the double can breed in me only an instantaneous loathing, an unmitigated and everlasting contempt. I now encounter, exteriorized and alienated, what I once lived as my ownmost "identity." The double calls me back again to a teeming intimacy with the not-me, but the renewal of that intimacy can't but be uncanny

(the heimlich become unheimlich) since I now see "myself" outside myself, in a self-image that I must also recognize as "someone else."6 An alien self(-image), then, an intimate stranger-this figure confronts me as "the ghastly harbinger of death" (40). He wants nothing less than to drag me once more into that identificatory muck from which I've come, causing me entirely to cease to be (myself) and dissolving me again in a primordial mass that's "vulgar" in that it cannot say "I," "primitive" in its confusion of thought and deed, naively murderous in its magisterial assimilation of all difference to itself. "Do I, for God's sake, sound like that?" This means as well: "I do not sound like that," "I must not sound like that." The ego has no choice but violently to assert itself in the face of a debasing identification it must already have made. "I" am Raymond Chandler, "you," James Cain. Or better still: I simply am (the cultured, sociable, individuated self), while you, James Cain, are not. The mimetic double, being a doubled "me," must be completely and furiously dismissed in order that I might remain-myself.

This, then, is the first thing Freud helps us to see: that if Cain provokes a violently disgusted self-assertion, it's because his texts seek, both representationally and performatively, to degrade and primitivize the civilized self by reamassing it with its primordially familiar "others." The game-thus launched-is undoubtedly a deadly one; it takes two to play it, and we shouldn't therefore be too surprised to find that Cain seeks also to escape the very mass he simultaneously drags us into, waging an eternal war with his doubles ("Hammett," "Hemingway," "Chandler")7 over the absolute sovereignty and independence of his "voice." But let's not concern ourselves with this war here; we need, for now, to linger a moment longer with the Freudian uncanny, in order to bring out the second point that it helps us to find in Chandler's response.

For Freud continues: "It often happens that male patients declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genitals. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning" (51). Unheimliche Heim, familiar strangeness ...: the female genitals are the primal portal to an originary and dissolutionary mass (of) being. They are, in short, the synechdochical representation of a place where the "ego" really was "in" its "object," and we can thus begin to speculate about why Chandler's revulsion takes such an explicitly olfactory form. For these genitals-aren't they also a site for the male psyche's fantasmatic and proverbial aromatic investment? Do they not, according to a disgusted misogyny, "smell fishy"? And isn't the danger of succumbing to Cain's tricks then precisely the threat of being brought back there, to the fantasmatically violent reek of a place that was once "me," to a smell that's become the imaginary medium of my original being-in-objects? The logic of the double is an olfactory logic in that the ultimate referent of the resemblance I now see is the odor I attribute to the "object" I once was. It is, accordingly, the reminder of that smell that enrages me, drives me to murder. If the double appears to be taking "my" place, this is because that "place" is itself a return of the site where "we" were once identified-madly, blindly, (self-)destructively-in the overpowering indistinction of its smell. Out of that indifference a male subject has been born; a masculine ego now quite confidently says "I." But it does so without being able to deliver itself from the odor of that place where it was not yet itself, without ever escaping the naive bellicosity of its own prehistory as a mass that let neither subject nor object "be" (itself). Smell is the relic and perpetual promise of an inescapable violence." And it's this smell, then, that-as Chandler rightly senses-makes Cain guilty of a "double" dirtiness: first, because the reek of his work is invariably the reek of the genitals, and we all know that to write about them, to write about sex, is to "write about dirty things"; but second because, by writing about those things "in a dirty way," he makes sex smell too much, confusing it in the end with waste and shit ("A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door") and bemiring us thereby in something completely offensive: not a sociable sexuality, not a lasting and relatively odorless libidinal opening onto others, but a precivil and violent sexual amassment, briefly enacted and frenzied-fundamentally non-socializable-and governed above all, as we shall see, by the animal convulsiveness of the sense of smell.9

II. Love stinks

The violent smell of (violent) sex, then, the overpowering and murderous scent of a primordial "object-relation": this is where the trail has led us so far, and we may as well succumb at this point to the crudity and excess of that Cainian place. Nothing is to be gained by delicacies in a matter so evidently indelicate. Let us simply assert-what should by now be starting to come clear-that Cain's characters must fuck with their noses. Here they are, doing what they do best: She was so close I could smell her. (Postman 5)

I didn't look at her. But I could see her dress. It was one of these white nurse uniforms, like they all wear, whether they work in a dentist's office or a bakeshop. It had been clean in the morning, but it was a little bit rumpled now, and mussy. I could smell her. (Postman 6)

From then on, I began to smell her again. (Postman 11) A whiff of her smell hit me in the face, and I knew she was standing right beside me.... (Serenade 9)

Her dress slipped up, above her knees. tried not to look. It was getting hotter by the minute. I didn't look, but I could smell her. (Serenade 31) Her head touched my coat, and as it did I could swear she inhaled, as though sniffing what I smelled like. (Cloud 8)

She started unbuttoning my shirt, first pulling my necktie aside, until it was open down to my belt, and then pushing her face inside, and nuzzling into my armpit.... After some moments of that she seemed to wilt, crumpled in my arms, and lay with her eyes closed, her head against my chest.... Pretty soon she opened her eyes, and began whispering to me, "Okay, Mr. Kirby, I'll say it, why I could like Burl Stuart, across the drugstore table, and couldn't stand him that other way, or possibly marry him. Mr. Kirby, he stinks. Maybe he's your brother, maybe he smells nice to others, but to me he smells like feet. He makes me sick to my stomach. But you don't, you have a heavenly smell.... You smell like grass, grass that's just been cut...." (Cloud 43)

It would be pointless to extend the catalogue further, as the examples at hand already exhibit a nearly compulsive monotony that tells us all we need to know. Love, these excerpts say, is blind ("I didn't look," "I tried not to look," "eyes closed," and so on); it strikes not so much the eyes as the nasal passage, is both stimulated and sustained in an olfactory tremor that's all the more damning for being completely irresistible, all the more binding because it operates in a medium beyond the subject's active control. The Cainian subject gets turned on by way of a sense it can't turn off. Where vision, here, marks at least the possibility of a certain libidinal voluntarism-the sight of Cora's sulky lips may make Frank "want to mash them in for her" (Postman 2), but he can always try to quell his violent passion by looking away-smell is what invariably defeats such intention, enveloping and eclipsing it in an odoriferous cloud that opens the self onto the other only in the mode of a fatal enslavement.

For on this we must absolutely insist: however depraved or "unenlightened" he might seem-however crude and dirty his tricks-Cain partakes of a long tradition in Enlightenment thought that classifies smell as the sense of a radical unfreedom. Smell "interfer[es] with individual freedom," writes Kant, because "other people are forced to share a scent whether they want to or not" (45). It does violence to the sanctity of the self by opening it, exciting it, agitating it, independently of all subjective intention. It makes stealthy use of a vital necessity--one must, after all, breathe-to infiltrate and conquer individual autonomy with a coerced olfactory "sociality": one "shares," but involuntarily, one connects with others, but only by way of an irresistible compulsion. And it performs this tyrannical violation of self, at least as Cain wants us to see it, in the name of an essentially erotic fatality. "I didn't look, but I could smell her," "A whiff of her smell hit me in the face": the odor that blinds and binds me is almost unfailingly an odor wafted from the sexual other, an indomitable sexual effluvium that binds me to that other and that leads inexorably, in and through this redolent subjection, to crime, social transgression-a virtually ontological destructiveness. Cain's universe is pervaded and governed by the violence of an implacable olfactory desire. If his plots typically resemble "a tunnel that narrows in circumference with each page"; if "The infinite possibilities and prospects that seem to offer themselves at the opening of each novel become a circumscribed set of necessities that compel the characters' last acts" (Skenazy 46), this is because the world of possibilities is from the outset conceived of as simultaneously libidinal and olfactory-as, in short, the impossible promise of a smelly sexuality that bonds me to others only coercively, and that thus guarantees the violent ruination of myself (the subject), the other(-object), and ultimately, of the social bond itself.

This, then, is the "fatality of passion" (Skenazy 46) in Cain, the inextricable libidinal bind of his work.10 Without an initiatory object-cathexis-without, that is, the hero's more or less immediate investment of (narcissistic) libido in the world of objects-there would be no Cainian "sociality" at all, since in Cain the universe quite clearly "extends no farther than the radius of one's desire" (Oates 111). It's desire and desire alone that makes the narrative world "show up," bringing its objects into a dreamlike focus and elaborating the rhythm of its unfolding. The opening of a Cain novel is thus typically also the "opening" of the hero; it recounts the broaching of an egoic envelope in a momentous but apparently adventitious encounter, and it thus marks the birth of an object orientation that's here the condition of worldly emergence:

I was in the Tupinamba, having a bizcocho and coffee, when this girl came in. (Serenade 3)

Then I saw her.... Except for the shape, she really wasn't any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her. (Postman 2)

A woman was standing there. I had never seen her before. She was maybe thirty-one or -two, with a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair. She was small, and had on a suit of blue house pajamas. She had a washed-out look. (Double 8-9)

Let's not be taken in by the centrality of vision in these examples ("Then I saw her," "I had never seen her before"), as we'll see in a moment that this is merely a favorite of Cain's tricks, the lure of a libidinal normality. For now, what's crucial is the absolute and almost metaphysical sense of necessity conveyed by the repetition of such an encounter. The Cainian hero, like it or not, cannot not love; despite the measured offhandedness of the tone, despite a casualness that makes it all seem-for the hero, at least-fortuitous, the sheer numerical insurgency of these moments indicates that for Cain there's no imaginable alternative to an originary love-bond that quite literally makes his world "go round." The other abrupts-the hero invests himself-the narrative world unfolds. Such a sequence is primal, foundational, structurally and ontologically indispensable. Everything follows from it-nothing, strictly speaking, precedes it-because the entire point of the encounter with the other is to banish all that comes "before" into the murky depths of novelistic prehistory while liberating the hero from a loveless "past" into a present completely saturated with (object-)love. Prior to that liberation-prior, in short, to object-love-there's only the splendid and unthinkable squalor of narcissism. "I was in the Tupinamba," "Then I saw her," "I had never seen her before": in the repressed beginning before these beginnings, the "I" exists alone, unbonded, in a "relation" to "itself" and a non-relation to others which requires that the subject be freed into love in order to save it from the state of war. For what, after all, can this narcissism be except that condition we noted earlier, where ego and object mutually annihilate each other in an identificatory amassment that knows no bounds? "[I]n the last resort," writes Freud, narcissism must be sacrificed and "we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill" ("Narcissism" 66). The openings of Cain's books enact just this sacrifice, and Cain knows full well that the name of the sickness that narcissism threatens is violence, everlasting warfare-an identificatory belligerence that respects no difference and that only the bonds of love can cure." And yet, try as he might, Cain seems unable to speak this name. No sooner does he begin to utter it-no sooner does he begin retrospectively to imagine a moment "before" object-love-than he instead ends up saying something very much like "love" after all. "You have been with a man" says Juana to John Sharp in a crucial scene of Serenade;Iz "I speak of man you love." "Oh, I'm a fairy, is that it?" "Yes.fl

"Well thanks, I didn't know that." (141) The truth, of course, is that he did know it, that "Every man has got five percent of that in him, if he meets the one person that'll bring it out" (144), and that Sharp has, before the novel's "present," met just that person in Winston Hawes. The "illness" the novel sets out to cure would thus seem quite manifestly a "libidinal" one. Cain's opera-singer hero has made an unacceptable (because) homosexual object choice, which is utterly originary at the level of histoire-the "actual" sequence of events-even if it's revealed in the discours-the order in which the events are narrated-only when Hawes uncannily resurfaces more than half-way through the novel. At that point, when Sharp lifts up the telephone receiver to find Winston on the other end, "homosexuality" would seem to become the retroactive name for all that ails him. We now discover that his "unhealthy" attachment to Winston had led to a fantastic debilitation of masculine prowess whose primary sign is the ruined voice with which we find the hero at the book's beginning. "Hoaney," Juana continues,

these man who love other man, they can do much, very clever. But no can sing. Have no toro in high voice, no grrr that frightens little muchacha, make heart beat fast. Sound like old woman, like cow, like priest. (142) The crudity of the "theory"'-its sheer and homophobic idiocy-is no doubt staggering, but let's at least make sure we grasp its full implications. The passage says that homosexual desire is incompatible with the vocal art because it makes men's high notes sound too tame. It takes away their masculine "toro," the "grrr" that's the mark of a healthily dominative relation to the other sex, and replaces it with the lamentably mild and effeminate sounds of "old woman, cow, priest." If gay men are nonetheless said to be "clever"-if they can, nonetheless, "do much"-this serves merely to extend offhandedly the indictment of a "sexuality" that's here imagined as a fundamentally virulent form of disorder.

For Winston's "cleverness" is part and parcel of an excessively cultured "homosexual" disposition that the novel reads as the flaccid cause of a pervasive cultural decay. Suspiciously rich ("there's something about rich people that's different from the rest of us" [127)), fundamentally dilettantish, he "[doesn't] care about art, the way you or I do, as something to look at and feel," but "want[s]" instead "to own it" (127). He wants, in short, to "ma[kel a whore out of [music]" (127); though "You can't," as Sharp insists, "own music, the way you can own a picture," you can at least own "a big hunk of it"-can own, for example, "the singer" who sings for you (128)-and it's in this sense that the relation between homosexuality and artistic prowess must properly be understood. The homosexual bond is a bond of unfreedom that ruins the artist by buying him, financially subjecting him, pimping him-making him, in short, "depend ... on [the other] like a hophead depends on dope" (131). While Hollywood may thus be thoroughly "homosexualized" in that it, too, thinks "singing is something you buy" rather than something that's "good for its own sake" (99), Winston is at the origin of even that decadence since he seems himself to own Hollywood (135). Furthermore, the novel codes his pandering as still more iniquitous than the studios' because he pimps art, not for the money, but for the narcissistic profit of his own febrile and excessively refined pleasure:

You went to his concerts, but you didn't sit out there at his rehearsals, and see him hold men for an hour overtime, at full pay, just because there was some French horn passage that he liked, and wanted it played over and over again-not to rehearse it, but because of what it did to him. And you didn't walk out with him afterwards, and see him all atremble, and hear him tell how he felt after playing it. He was like some woman that goes to concerts because they give her the right vibrations, or make her feel better, or have some other effect on her nitwit insides. (128)

It's this feverish and feminine self-absorption, this prostitution of art for the vibratory enrichment of one's overly cultured and "nitwit insides," that threatens the sexual and artistic prowess of the individual artists Winston "owns." Bound over by his cash and his emotional paternalism-"you're in trouble," Hawes says; "[t]ell it to Papa" (132-33)those artists lose all masculine autonomy to become instead the feminized shadows, the instrumental whores, of an internal and erotic operatic gratification. The gay man's passion for cultural "capital" enslaves and pimps the "straight" male artist for the sake of the expansion of its narcissistic territory. And of course the result of this cultural harlotry is nothing less than the emasculating "blindness" of death (57). "Something in me had died," says Sharp of his vocal "crack up" (57), and "my voice" had not "one particle of life [left] in it" (49): the bond of gay love is an unbonding bond in that the narcissistic predilections of its decadent aestheticism portend the death, the radical destruction, of at least the "dependent" partner in that contract.

What, then, are we finally to make of this bond? Can we really continue to speak of it as a simple libidinal attachment? Or should we not be more suspicious than ever of such a description, especially since the text itself, as though compliantly doing our work for us, is so very eager to call that bond by the name of the love that dares not speak its name? Of course we should, and the terms with which to elaborate that suspicion are already at our disposal. The danger of gay desire consists as we've seen in its tendency to abolish the other's autonomy; it threatens independence because it reduces the other to a fantasmatic function of the ego's narcissistic enjoyment, and this means finally that the homosexual attachment is not just libidinal but also-and above all-identificatory:

[Little by little, he began making suggestions. Then I began dropping in on him in the morning, and he'd take me through some [vocal] things I had been doing wrong. He was the best coach in the world, bar none. Then he began to take my acting apart, and put it together again. It was he that cured me of all those operatic gestures I got in Italy.... He made me learn a whole new set of gestures, done naturally, and he made me practice for hours singing sotto voce without using any gestures at all.... I got so I was with him morning, noon, and night, and depended on him like a hophead depends on dope.

Then came my crack-up, and ... I had to leave Paris. (13-31)

What's perhaps most extraordinary about this passage is the way it starts by sounding the note of sexual seduction ("he began making suggestions") and ends by describing an unmistakably mimetic transformation. The seduction might indeed be said to reside in a "coaching" that identifies the other with the self. Sharp conforms himself to the dictates of Winston's imagination, "learn[s] a whole new set of gestures" and an entirely different style of singing, precisely in and as the mark of his submission to the homosexual's seductively predatory wiles. The gay "proposition" seduces the subject by making him over on the model of another. If the bond it induces causes Sharp to lose his manly voice-if suddenly, because of it, he's no longer half the man he used to be-this is because that bond entails rather a relation of "being" than a strictly "sexual" possession. It rewrites, in fact, "having" as "being," transposing the theme of erotic possession into the key of the subject's utter and radical dispossession: to possess him is to kill him ("Something in me had died") by making him "be" me; it's to love him to death in the name of my imperious narcissistic dilation, to ventriloquize in "his" place by bequeathing him "my" gestures and assigning him "my" priestly and bovine-my thoroughly effeminate-voice. "Do I, for God's sake, sound like that?" The answer in Sharp's case is undoubtedly "yes," since the eroticomimetic "bond" I'm describing is above all a (non)bond of (de)subjectifying hypnosis. John sounds like "that" because he is That, because, "hypnoti[zed)" by Winston's "live [conductor's] stick" (129, emphasis added), he dies into the other(-subject) so completely that that other no longer appears to him as another,

does not in fact "appear" at all, but is lived immediately as his ownmost psychic self. The hypnotized person "executes... the order of the hypnotist without seeing or knowing that an order is involved and that the order is addressed to him," writes Borch-Jacobsen. "He does not [merely] submit himself to the other, he becomes the other, comes to be like the other-who is thus no longer an other, but 'himself"' (Freudian 228, 230). Bound, then, by this hypnotic bond, Sharp must perish as an autonomous being to be reborn as a subject-object, a mass (of) being, an other self (which is not other, and which is no self) whose injunctions he now executes and whose voice he now "mimes"-blindly, madly, somnambulistically. The "bond" of "gay love" is a bondless bond that (re)amasses the self with the other in a suicidal-murderous and delirious compact. Lovelessly loving, it mocks the possibility of a pacific "relation" by killing the self amorously, into the other, and making that other "live" only in and through (the corpse of) the loved self. This "self" that isn't one, then, this other-subject-it is "like a man who [has] gone blind" (Serenade 57), and it is like a man who has gone dumb; it no longer sees (that it's) the other (that it is) because it's too enthralled in being it, and it speaks in the end with a voice like Cain's that, no longer singular, no longer unique, is the deplorable mark of subjective, masculine, and artistic death: vulgar and "common," effeminately cow-like-"without," once more, "one particle of life in it [or] one echo that would make you like it" (Serenade 49).

Let us, however, be perfectly clear about the nature of this "feminizing" "murder." If the other here augurs my masculine death in that he makes me "be" (like) him, it's equally true that, in becoming him, I myself-whoever that might be!-must be transformed into the figure of a feminine and hypnotizing assassin. I am (in) him and he is (in) me; perishing into this collectivity of being, I can't but be united with its blind and dumb identificatory fury, can't but be reborn as the other who simultaneously murders me. And lest we doubt that this "feminizing" identification signifies the devolution of an animal regression, we need only listen to the text in order to have that doubt dispelled:

I ran in the bedroom, flopped on the bed, pulled the pillow over my head. wanted to shut it out, the whole horrible thing [Juana) had showed me, where she had ripped the cover off my whole life, dragged out what was down there all the time. I screwed my eyes shut, kept pulling the pillow around my ears. But one thing kept slicing up at me, no matter what I did. It was the fin of that shark.... I kept telling myself she was crazy, that Winston had no more to do with what happened to me in Paris than the scenery had. But here it was, starting on me again the same way it had before.... I closed my eyes, and I was going down under the waves, with something coming up at me from below. Panic caught me then. (144)

The feminizing Winston is also this panic-inducing shark,l3 and so of course is Sharp (a very slight alphabetical contortion on his name produces the very word), since to be swallowed up in this identificatory fantasy is to be nothing less than incorporated: to be made fantasmatically a corporeal part of a blood-thirsty and man-eating monster. Devoured by the other, I'm dragged "down" to its prehistoric depths, intestinally worked over, ingested and reassimilated to a bellicose and preegoic animal (in)humanity. It makes for the moment little difference whether we call this transformation "hypnotic" or "devouring"; in either case, it marks both the death of the subject and its regressive rebirth as a kind of beastly automaton whose murderous mission it (the subject) now compulsively mimes. (The animal is of course no more "free" from this mime than the hypnotized person, since it remains enslaved to an instinct whose imperious command"Eat!"-it doesn't even know it's obeying.) Winston gets down on all fours, incarnated as a "Big bull," and "charg[es]" repeatedly at Juana's cape (156-57); John closes the novel by miming this animal farce as tragedy when, having already become bull-like by regaining his vocal toro, he sings a song that fingers Juana for the Mexican authorities, then charges after her to her ultimate death in a scene that's played next door to a bullring and staged as a bullfight from the bull's perspective ("I caught a flash of red," "I could see the red of her dress" [195-96]). "Homosexual" panic is in this novel a terror at the prospect of an animalizing and homocidogenic bond; if that bond "feminizes," if the bull-shark speaks with the voice of "old woman" and "cow," this is because the feminine is imagined here, just as in the Freudian uncanny, as the originary site of a doubled relation where subject and object mutually annihilate each other in the womb-like prehistory of subjective time. Winston's return to the novel's "present" is the return of the repressed feminine as homocidogenic mimesis. It initiates a bond that feminizes, kills, and enforces the hypnotic emulation of that murder. The strain, meanwhile, between the hypnotic and devouring versions of this bond should teach us that neither model is really adequate to the task; it's ultimately smell and smell alone that wraps me in the madness of an erotico-mimetic embrace, and it does so in a fashion that ruins forever the very possibility of a non-violent relation to the object of love or desire.

For Juana, you see, has this ear-a bull's ear, to be precise, given to her by a bullfighter. It's "good and rank," with "pieces of gristle hanging out of it," and it "st[inks] so much you [can] smell it five feet away" (30). At the climactic party that will end in Winston's death, a scene staged explicitly in terms of the "homosexual" threat ("the worst drag ... you ever saw in your life," Sharp calls it, with "girls in men's evening clothes" and "young guys with lipstick on" [151]), she emerges with this relic, carrying as well a sword and a bullfighter's cape:

They had got a little sick of bull fighting, but when they saw the ear they began to yell again. They passed it around, and felt it, and smelled it, and said "Peyooh!" Winston took it, held it up to his head and wobbled it, and they laughed and clapped. He got down on the floor again and bellowed. Juana laughed. "Yes, now you are no more jackass. Big bull."

He bellowed again. I was getting so nervous I was twitching. I went over to her. "Take that stuff back. I'm fed up on bullfighting, and that ear stinks. Take it back where you got it and-"

I grabbed for the ear. Winston dodged. She laughed and wouldn't look at me. Something hit me in the belly. When I looked around I saw that one of the fags in woman's clothes had poked me with a broomstick. "Out of my way! I'm a picador! I'm a picador on his old white horse!"

Two or three more of them ran back and got broomsticks, or mop handles, or whatever there was there, to be picadors, and began galloping around Winston, poking at him. Every time they touched him he'd bellow.... [He) began charging [the cape], on one hand and his knees, still holding the ear with his other hand and wobbling it. Pudinsky began to [play] the bullring music from Carmen. (157)

The passage, in a sense, is the "essence" of the novel, its primally fragrant scene. Raising the specter of a devolutionary mimesis, it says that the threat of the homosexual bond is the danger of animalization, and it insists that John must at all costs avoid becoming that. It tells us as well, in the very same breath, that this mimesis is an erotogenesis: the mime assigns its players their erotically murderous parts; it binds "fags" together in a libidinal contagion that, compelling them both to act out the impulses of others ("Two or three more of them ran back and got broomsticks") and to play in blindness their operatic roles ("Carmen"), leads to their "poking at" the groveling Winston in an erotic and imitative fratricidal rite. Later, we know, John too will join in this rite, acting the part of the raging bull whose passion leads to the other's murder. For the moment what's crucial is that the passage at hand, even as it presages the moment of John's metamorphosis, saturates the scene of eroto-mimesis in the rank and malodorous atmosphere of the ear. It's the ear that sets this drama in motion, inducing the entire identificatory debauch and reducing the cast to somnambulistic animals. No sooner does Juana reenter the party, no sooner do the characters smell the fetid organ, than the murderous "homosexual" mime begins: Winston descends to his animal mire, the "fags" snatch up their broomsticks, and everyone becomes uncannily possessed to act out the homicidal passion play that they don't even know they're performing. Under the spell of this primal smell, they believe that they're entering freely into a socio-theatrical pact-believe they know that they're "only playing"-whereas in fact they really are participating in a "bullfight" that ends only with Winston pinned to the sofa, "blood ... foaming out of [his] mouth," while Juana " stand{s} over him, talking to him, laughing at him, telling him [he's going] down to hell" (157). If Juana alone remains immune to this contagion (she knows all along that she's going to kill Winston), this is merely to signify that, as "Mother" (147), she's the fantasized origin of all that the others mime: she "is" the rank identificatory animal that men "are," and risk becoming. Both human and animal, bullfighter and bull (the ear is after all hers), Juana represents the doubled mass that a civilized masculinity ought to have surmounted and that it must, therefore, now locate elsewhere. It's "she" (and not me) who kills Winston, she who "emits" the smell that orchestrates the return of a delirious and somnambulistic sociality. It's she who forces men to share this smell-the metaphoric odor of their intrauterine being-in a bond of unfreedom that "births" them into ,the repetition of a murderous being-(in)-objects. And it's she who therefore allows us to see what the novel insists that we do see: that in the beginning is the smell, the odor-an overmastering and blinding aroma that binds even as it enslaves, enforcing an erotic connection to others only in the mode of a mimetic violence that the text at once requires we avow and projects as an abhorred femininity. Smell is here the psychic reminder of a fantasmatically "maternal" bellicosity, which binds people together-ties them, quite literally, in love-knots-in a coercive-erotic and savage mimesis that can only succeed in flinging them apart.

III. Narcissus Odoriferous

But that isn't all. If the "homo" in the "homosexual"-the threat of his likeness, the danger of the double-leads ineluctably to the indistinction of a vaginal mime, the "sexual" in that same figure takes us somewhere close, but also some lace different. It takes us, in short, to the anus; we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves there, since anal eroticism is almost always "in the air" where dominant representations of homosexuality are concerned. When Winston takes up the ear from Juana and sinks down to his hands and knees, his explicit coding as a gay man tends to evoke that particular form of eroticism, and to refigure the smell of the ear as the smell of his own uplifted rear. Given, moreover, that the scene imagines the gay man as animalized and animalizing, this figuration gestures in turn toward a fabulous Freudian myth concerning human prehistory, in which men were only bound together in asocial "bonds" of an essentially olfactory and finally anal kind. Long long ago-this fable says-in the animal womb of human time, individual "humans" came together only briefly, frenziedly, to experience the most intense sexual pleasure "man" has ever known. Sex at that time was a smelly business; both anally and genitally pungent, it "convulse[d] our physical being" in a way it has never done since (Civilization 28). But sex at that time was not yet human sex; it was animal sex, archi-narcissistic, in that it did not seek as good sex should to bring about ever larger social units, but tended rather to foster an uncivilized and violent separation. It was not a sex guided by the civilizing hand of love, but a sex in the grip of the death drive.

Civilization proper, as Freud continues, is Erotic through and through; it "is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind" (77). The sex of our beastly ancestors couldn't perform this combinatory function because it was a sex prompted by the periodic smell of the menstrual process, and it consequently brought humans together only occasionally, momentarily, impermanently. It was only when that sex became harnessed to the Erotic function that it could properly be called "civilized" or sociable at all, and this of course happened, according to this obscene but provocative myth, when the human animal stood up.

For at that point the role of the smelling apparatus "was taken over by visual excitations, which, in contrast to the intermittent olfactory stimuli, were able to maintain a permanent effect" (51n). Love ceased to be blind, dropped the scales from its eyes, and became thereby a constant factor in the life of the human being. Since, moreover, "the founding of families" (and thus, of society itself: civilization is always in Freud familial-social) results from the fact that "the need for genital satisfaction [now] took up its quarters as a permanent lodger" (51), we can begin to decipher one of those series of equivalence so common in Freud's work, and so telling: human society is a regime of permanence, a regime of vision, a regime of love. What it takes to bind people together in a community is an unending love, whose work is facilitated by the permanence of visual stimuli insofar as what gets "seen" is first and foremost the others' genitals.l4 There are thus, on this reading, either (permanent) social bonds of an essentially Eroticovisual nature, or there are no bonds, no relations, whatsoever. Either I smell the other and remain completely self-enclosed, a mere roaming and sniffling Narcissus whose very sexual union with the other is curiously non-Erotic and non-bonding; or I see the other and join with him lovingly, in a sociable manner that bonds us without annihilating our subjective autonomy and difference.

The only problem with this sociogenic myth, of course, is that in the regime of smell as well there was a libidinal "bond," a relation to the (animal) "other," but a bond that was impermanent, violent in its sexual imperiousness, ruled by a blind and olfactory convulsiveness that bonded me periodically only to "myself" in the mode of a lovelessly loving other. For who can this other be but myself, as soon as we grant that it's his smell that compels me to act out in blindness my own libidinal-instinctual nature? Drawn and bound to the animal other by the irresistible pungency of his odor, I'm pierced by that odor, compelled to share in the smell of the other and to take him breathlessly in. I frantically inhale his fatal emanations, and this inhalation infiltrates and convulses me from within, crumbling my being down to the core and commingling me with (the smell of) the other in a quivering mass of panting prehumanity. The bond of olfaction is an originary enslavement that unites me in a transient and loveless dissolution to an other whom I equally destroy with "my" smell. "Before" the regime of visual love, before even the cannibal's devouring and identificatory affections the smell of love bound "men" in a mutually interpenetrative and violent heap of animal-human being. Bound them, yes-but not civilly, not pacifically. This aromatic sexuality very precisely ruins the equation of love with pacific sociality by destroying subject and object in the very gesture of lovingly bonding them; far from fostering the unrelated self-enclosedness that Freud imagines he fears, it succors instead what we must insist is an excessive and passionate relation of non-relation: a (non-) bond of love with no one-no subjects-left to enjoy it; a narcissistic (un)bondedness in which "I" am "me" only to the extent that I now mime "myself" by obeying an olfactory instinctual injunction that comes to me implacably from the other. Man here "socializes" with his fellow man in a sightless and erotic mimetic compulsion that prevents him from freely socializing at all. And if, finally, we take seriously Freud's contention that "civilization is a special process, comparable to the normal maturation of the individual" (49-50), we must grant as well that his fable imagines a contemporary reliving of this relation of nonrelation in the development of the individual psyche. Each one of us, on this reading, must pass through something like an archaic olfactory primacy-a "nasal" phase, so to speak-that predates both the ambivalence of oral identification and the pacific communality of visual object-love.

But where, exactly, are we to locate this utterly primal "phase"? Let us listen once more to the recounting of the myth: it is, Freud tells us, "anal eroticism" that "succumbs in the first instance to the `organic repression"' of smell (52n). When man stood up, he lost all (conscious) interest in the smell of the other's anus. But he also, unfortunately, lost a good deal of "interest" in sex itself, since it was not only his anal eroticism which threatened to fall a victim to organic repression, but the whole of his sexuality; so that since this, the sexual function has been accompanied by a repugnance which cannot further be accounted for, and which prevents its complete satisfaction and forces it away from the sexual aim into sublimations and libidinal displacements.... All neurotics, and many others besides, take exception to the fact that "inter urinas et faeces nascimur [we are born between urine and faeces]." The genitals, too, give rise to strong sensations of smell which many people cannot tolerate and which spoil sexual intercourse for them. Thus we should find that the deepest root of the sexual repression which advances along with civilization is the organic defence of the new form of life achieved with man's erect gait against his earlier animal existence. (59-0n)

If there's nothing to seek beyond these speculations, it's perhaps necessary at least to translate them in order to say what Freud refuses to say. For what the passage surreptitiously-but nonetheless clearly-"argues" is that, in the binding blindness of an olfactory beginning, we did not differentiate between the anus and the genitals. Organic repression targets both genital and anal sexuality because it doesn't matter to the regime of olfaction where the smell comes from, but merely that it binds in a coercively erotic convulsion. Olfactory love is autotelic love that goes no further than itself; it seeks no connection beyond an immediate and mutually annihilative amassment, and it therefore could not care less from which organ it takes its quivering cue. Despite Freud's emphasis on the centrality of the menstrual cycle, then-despite, that is, his insistence on the periodic and genital nature of the animal's libidinal relations-the introduction of anal eroticism raises the twin specter of a fundamental genital irrelevance and a permanently unbonding bond. The anus never ceases to put out its beckoning smell; its appeal is ongoing, continual, everlasting, and there was therefore nothing to prevent the human animal from more or less constantly obeying the wild and olfactory mimetic order of the other-himself. The frenzy of rutting, the incontestable aromatic rewards to be reaped from the genitals, sexual intercourse itself, and even sexual reproduction-all of this no doubt took place, but only as the strictly incidental benefits of a sexuality motivated by the constant and reproductively useless conjunction of nose and anus. The very movement from olfaction to visuality-a movement Freud correlates to the moment when man stood up--could indeed be thought as man's ambulatory erection into a register that can finally "distinguish" the genitals. Where the nose fails, the eye succeeds; where smell amasses, vision maintains a respectful distance that lets things show up as they "truly" are: other as other, genitals as genitals, anus as anus. Without the installed supremacy of such an organ, we could never overcome a primal and aromatic ontological confusion, where all is in all and each in the other, where I am the other, the other is me, and anus and genitals are the interchangeable occasions for a savage and "onanistic" olfactory paroxysm.l6

The "new form of life" must, therefore, repress the olfactory centrality of the lower life form, even at the extraordinary risk of "the whole of [man's] sexuality"; if it fails to do so, the genitals may never show up clearly enough for the reproductive sexuality that's at the root of the first bond-the familial bond-to take place with the requisite regularity. The human animal stakes his sexuality in a repressive gambit that makes sex sociable by seeking to separate the genitals from the anus. It should thus come as no surprise that, in the gesture of that repression, the womb becomes for the civilized psyche the remnant of an olfactory sexuality, but only to the extent that that womb is itself fantasmatically conflated with the rectum. If "Many" people "take exception to the fact that ... we are born between urine and faeces," if "the genitals ... give rise to strong sensations of smell which many people cannot tolerate and which spoil sexual intercourse for them," this is because the socialized psyche performs a yoking of genitality and anality-of womb and rectum-in which the womb comes to be meaningful only as the phylogenetically terrifying and repressed recapitulation of an olfactory phase that could just as well be called nas(an)al. No wonder that in Cain the other visually abrupts, banishing the "gay bond" into novelistic prehistory and launching the hero into object love. The gay man's conflation of genitality with anality signals the return of a prehistoric sociality: an animal (a)sociality that stands to civilization as the death drive stands to Eros, narcissizing all bonds by organizing them around an olfactory convulsiveness that doesn't even care to know what (reproductive) genitality is. Serenade's equation of the homosexual with the woman is both a misogynist-homophobic convention and an attempt to expose the masculine projections that locate eroto-mimesis elsewhere: in the anus and womb-the womb and anus-that threaten subjective dissolution in the violence and homocidogenesis of smell. The gay man's eruption in the textual present thus marks the greatest strength of the Cainian novel. It seeks to trick us with a disgusting return of the organically repressed, to bemire us in a smell that it makes us know is no more the mother's or the gay man's than it is at last "our own." In the beginning "is" that odor: even Freud can find it there. But here we must once more add with Cain: that smell is me, and it is you, for it's the medium where I "was" you in the rectal womb where we first met as an annihilatory indistinction that cannot be surmounted. There is here no "birth" from that "womb" but stillbirth, no object-love that doesn't stagnate from the start in death, mimesis, olfaction. There's no victory of vision over smell that doesn't remain contaminated by the nasal, no genitality that isn't also anal, no (homo)sociality that's not somehow "vaginal." There's no human being who isn't the rankest and most bellicose of primitive animals, no "man" who's not decomposed in the smell of the projected "feminine" others who disgust him.

No bond, then, but unbondedness. No love except the unloving animal passion of a deadly and olfactory mimesis.

I rd like to thank the following people for their attentive reading, their numerous and careful suggestions, and their unfailing capacity to let this project "be": Mitch Breitwieser, Susan Courtney, Kristin Handler, Seth Moglen, Carolyn Porter, Kay Silverman, and url Skinlll.

2 Since my analysis will be more concerned with the fantasy underlying the fear of befoul nent than with tracing that fear's class politic, it's perhaps worth marking here my basic agreement with Raymond Williams's claim in an extraordinary early essay, that 'there are in fact no masseS but only ways of seeing people as masses" (11). William would no doubt have rejected my psychoanalytic predilections, but I at least like to think that the present essay contributes to an understanding of just what underwrites, psychically speaking, the possibility of such a seeing and the horror at such a ma Any effort to pursue the emergence of an olfactory di course of class, meanwhile, might begin with Alain Corbin's Foul and Fragrant, especially part three 3 As a good many of his critics have noted, Cain's decisive innovation as regards the crime novel was to abolish the figure of the detective and to narrate from the point of view of-indeed, through the mouth of-the criminal. Thus Richard Bradbury argues that "James M. Cain's contribution to the writing of crime fiction was to recognise the potential afforded by writing from within the crim Ys' perspective" (89); and Paul Skenazy, here as always Cain's most discerning critiq suggests that "Cain reversed the narrative perspective of the mystery genre. HIs novels are the detective story turned on its head, seen from the bottom vp" (157. We shall as7). we h*il ee that this "turning on its head" and looking "from the bottomup" are precisely tactics for miring readers In the swamp and fifth of "mass man though in ways that even Frohock and Oates would undoubtedly have a hard time accepting.

James Baldwin makes the connection between sentimentality and brutality more powerfully than Oates in his discussion of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cain's: `Sentimentality, the ostentatious par ding of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentiment Ust betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom's Cabin-like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants-is a catalogue of violence" (141. Baldwin explicitly Identifies Cain and Postma as part of this 'hard-boiled" heritage: `Both Gentlesen's Agreement and The Postman Ais Rings Tmic exemplify this terror of the human being the determination to cut him down to size. And in Uncle Tom's Cain's *Jhn we may find foreshadowing of both" (16). 'The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe" QO). Baldwin's point is that a humane racial politics cmo uillnot do af the category of the human as a sentient complexity and in this regard it may simply be true that the kinds of pleasures in vulgarity Cain offers are incompatible with a racial-humanist politics. This hardly, however absolves us of the responsibility for figuring out just what those pleasures might be, or of describing their processes and operations. I pursue the issue of race in Sncnade, and articulate it with the novel's problem tics of smell sexual difference, and identification, in a section of the essay that I've had here to cut for reasons of space

Freud himself, In his irrepresible drive to recapitulate ontogeny 9 recapitulation of phylogeny, uses "animistic," "narcissistic" and *savage" more or less interchangeably, since `each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to [the] animistic stage in primitive men (46). The infantile ego, the Narcissus-child, is In short a contemporary reincarnation of the srage; Freud can thus write in Totem and Taboo that 'The animistic phase [in human history] would correspond to narcissism both chronologically and in its content," and it's clear that narcissism must therefore be sacrificed (to object-love, as we'll see) if the child is ever to be properly "socialized" (90. The present essay could be thought to elaborate the Impossibility of just that sacrifice-the impossibility of socialization itself.

6 Cf. Borch-Jacobsen, LAcan 45: "In the presence of [the double], I am once more in an absolutely familiar relation with the notme, with the other-but In the form of a no less absolute uncanniness, since the other me is now seen on the outside.. ['T]he ego sees itself outside itself, in an image all the more estranging because it is narcissistic, all the more alienating because it is perfectly similar." My reading of mimetic violence owes an obvious debt to Borch-Jacobsen remarkable body of work though it should be clear that I'm finally more interested in the olfactorily debasing potential of the double than in showing, as he does, that the entire specular and theatrical vocabulary by which psychoanalysis comprehends the subject (mirror reflection, representation, the "other stage of the unconscious) is a kind of elaborate defense against the recognition of subjectivity as something profoundly anti-specular.

The names are virtually interchangeable for my purposes, so long as we remember that they very precisely do not designate a "father-figure Indeed, there can be no question here of a pacific-Oedipalizing identification with a paternal imago, since, as Borch-Jacobsen has cogently argued, the logic of the double marks the ruin of Oedipus by exposing the father as a mere brother(-rival) whose injunction to peaceable identification can carry no authoritative weight. See the final chapter of Freudian subj.

Freud seems dimly aware of this logic when, in a remarkable passage of The Uncanny " he describes a "silly" story that produced in him a powerfully "uncanny effect: "In the midst of the isolation of war-time a number of the English Strand Magazine fell into my hands; and, amongst other not very interesting matter, I read a story about a young married couple, who move into a furnished flat in which there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening they begin to smell an intolerable and very typical odor that pervades the whole flat; things begin to get in their way and trip them up in the darkness; they seem to see a vague form gliding up the st irs-in short, we are given to understand that the presence of the

table causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of that sorY (5051). The passage on the unhleimick Heim of the female genitals follows immediately upon this, so that we might risk the following. albeit speculative, reading: the couple's move Into their new home represents a return to the primal womb-Hcnn, which "smell precisely to the extent that it portends a primitive and "animal" assimilation of self. For what is the fear of the crocodile if not a fear of being swallowed up, assimilated, incorporated? If the home is in this uncanny fantasy a womb, that womb smells of a reptilian savageness that seeks to reengulf the civilized self and make It its own; "1" was once (in) that crocodile-womb, and "IY now proposes to make me again a part of it The smell of the crocodile thus marks the return of a native hostility that reamasses me with its animal intention to extinguish and incorporate all difference. This crocodile, then this womb: it is me--and I am it-immediately, madly, hungrily. It augurs not merely my death but also my murderousness: my incorporative reassimilation to a bellicose and preegoic animal (in)humanity. And though the predominant psychoanalytic metaphors for this Identificatory destructiveness are metaphors of orality a eliminate the other by eating him; I orally incorporate and make him a part of myself), passages like this one enable us to hypothesize that the psychic vestiges of this being-theother are primarily-achaically-pc: the womb-home is a plan that's "familiar" by its smell, that returns as smell; before any mouth that devours or any ego that identifies, I am identification with the other in and through the smell that binds us in a suicidal-murderous pact respecting neither self nor other. See Freud, Group 37 and Totlm 142, pain, for the association of identiflcation with devouring orality.

Bersani (chapter 1) Gallop (chapter 2), and Marcuse (chapter 2) have been particularly useful to me in conceptualizing the olfactory dimension to my argument, and-especially-in helping me to think through the implications of Freud's olfactory blindnesses.

lo For the sense of this fatality, we, besides SkenaW, Oates 111 and Frohock 2D21.

It may here be helpful to anticipate by remarking that, at least as the late Freud tries to Imagine it, the difference between love and identification is fundamentally one of peace versus war, life (we might say) against death. While both processes fanta matlc Uy 'internalize the object-introjecr it, in a manner of speaking-identification places that object in the place of the ego and therefore abolishes it as such; it so completely absorbs and integrates the object that it (the object) disappears as an autonomous entity, and the ego becomes `enriched" at its expense Love, on the other hand, puts the object in the place of the egoidwl, and H's this that enables a miraculous preservation of the other, despite Its Internalization. Since the distance between the ego and its ideal can never be abrogated, the ego s loving idealization of the object turns out to be a gesture of respect that retaina the other as an autonomous agency and,indeed, subjects the ego to the dictates of that agency. Love is thus the antidote to identification in that, where the latter can't but kill the object, the former tries to let it live. See Freud, Group, especially chapters 7 and 8. In the end, of course, Freud has immense difficulty sustaining this distinction, In part because to speak of the ideal is already for him to speak of an identificatory model, and It's this collapse of love into war that Cain's texts must be seen to enact

12 The problems this novel has caused readers, for reasons that I hope will become clear In the exposition, is nowhere more evident than in their compulsive tendency to misremember the characters names. Cain s biographer, Roy Hoopes, calls Juana Juanita" Q83); Bradbury calls her "Maira" and, as though unaware of the main characters full name, unf iiingly refers to John Sharp as '*ack (9CZ 93); even Skenazy, who quite judiciously (and quite alone among Cain's critics) condemns the novers hornphobia, repeatedly refers to Winston Hawes as "Stephen" (54).

The representation of the gay man's over-refined and febrile character might seem incommensurate with this figuration, but the fact is that the novel Imagines excessive culture as a sign of regressive Array. Just as, in the terms of emotional responsiveness, the brute is merely the flip side of the sentimentalist, so too the pursuit of aestheticism is here supposed to be less than human in its abundant and naic commitment to the cultivation of selfish pleasure. Self-cultivation of Ylfish pleasure Self-cvkivation is on this model strangely ani-cultural-anti-dvi)--and we need only recall in this regard Freud's equation between the narcissist and the savage (see above, nii, and Group 37), and his attribution of a 'charm " narcissism to both `the great criminansr in literature and "certain animals ... such as the large beasts of prey ('N rr 7). The novel itself plays on the coincidence of the andently primitive and the exceedingly cultured when Winston returns from Mexico with a sculpted Aztec 'cricket' that's 'at least five hundred years old": If Manship had done It," he vaunt&, 'they'd have thought it was a radical sample of his work The line of that belly is pure Brancusi. It's as modern as a streamlined plane, and yet some Indian did it before he even saw white man" (Scm 149).

The point here isn't, of course, that the love Freud places at the source of sociality is genital (sexual) through and through. Quite the contrary. Civilization and Its Discontents argues centrally that man must sublimate part of his directly sexual libido into aim-inhibited love-that is, into "brotherly love-in order to overcome a "natural aggressive[nesr that opposes the binding work of civilization (Tn). This sublimation entails a severe 'restriction upon sexual life" (62); it's part of the reason for the civilized Individuals almost metaphysical unhappiness, since there is, alas, only so much libido to go round, and if I must distribute it inhibitedly to everybody, I'll no doubt have little left over for an uninhibited indulgence that provides me with the greatest satisfaction of all. Nevertheless, civilization does allow at least one "location" for Ca reduced form of) that satisfaction in the familial couple, and this explains the importance Freud grants to directly sexual trends in this social genesis. For what must above all be accounted for in such a genesis is the movement from a narcissistic and animal asociality to that "first" social unit called the family. If that movement is to be effected, if the primal social unit is to emerge, the human animal must mme to desire satisiion repedly from the same object, and it's the sight of that object's genitals that, on the somewhat repressed logic of Freud's reading, makes this continuity conceivable. The role of the genitals "intermittent olfactory stimulr is usurped by .permanent" visual excitations when the animal man stands up (Sln); at that point, the nose is no longer in position to be the excitable organ. Even if the olfactory excitations were more constant than they apparently are, the nasal passage wouldn't be close enough to the genitals to smell and be aroused by their emanations. The eye, on the other hand, is privy to the other's privates at all times once man begins to walk upright, so that it takes over as the recipient of erotic stimuli and places man in a more or less constant and erect state of excitation. What else is there to do, at this point, but found a family, in order to keep one's sexual objects always close at hand, always at the ready to appease an imperious and unending sexual urge (51)? The problem of inhibiting that urge arises only secondarily, as a problem of binding both within and beyond the now-instituted familial unit.

IS ,T.[* mM* es he cannibal, is we know, has remained at [the oral phase of; he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond" (Grow 37).

Freud himself makes the connection between vision and the installation/maintenance of objectal distance, though in terms somewhat different from my own. 'The object of the smptophillic instinct he writes, "although it... is a part of the subject's own body, nevertheless is not the eye tseU ("Instincts" 96). That 'instinct" rquires a distn between the ^source" of pleasure (eye) and the "object of pleasure (the thing looked at). Where the mouth derives an autoerotic enjoyment from its own activity and tends consequently, to fuse itself with and become its (own) object, the eye derives such enjoyment, not from the act of gazing itself but from gazing at other parts of the subject's body. There is thus established a relation of necessary separation between the eye and its objects, and the two can never precisely coincide. Even indeed, when such a coincidence appears to take place, even when the eye seems in fact to take pleasure in looking at itself, that `Ibe[f' must be somehow "exorbited placed outside itself reflected back (as in a mirror) from a distanced location that doubles the organ of pleasure and refuses the fusing of source and object. Sucking my thumb, I may well take pleasure in the mouth 9 movements to such an exclusive extent that the thumb becomes irrelevant (`negligible says Freud [96]); when, however, I look at a reflection of my own eyes, it's ' `the eyes I see" rather than `the eyes I see with that are central to the pleasurable experience. See, in this regard, Metz's claim that if ft is true of all desire that it depends on the infinite pursuit of its absent objects, voyeuristic desire along with certain form of sadism, is the only desire whose principle of distance symbolically and spatially evokes this fundamental rent" (60). Doane has recently argued that this 'prindple of distance" works in the cinema at the expense of women, aligning femininity with an excessive claseness-to-itself that can never achieve the requisite distance for a fully authentic and "subjective seeing.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. "Everybody's Protest Novel." Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1955. 13-23.

Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. The Freudian Subject. Trans. Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.

,Lacan: The Absolute Master. Trans. Douglas Brick. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Bradbury, Richard. "Sexuality, Guilt and Detection: Tension between History and Suspense." American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre. Ed. Brian Docherty. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. 8-99.

Cain, James. Cloud Nine. New York: Mysterious, 1984. . Double Indemnity. 1936. New York: Vintage, 1978. . The Postman Always Rings Twice. 1934. New York: Vintage, 1978. . Serenade. 1937. Three by Cain. New York: Vintage, 1989.1-1%.

Chandler, Raymond. The Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. Ed. Frank MacShane. London: Cape, 1981.

Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Trans. Miriam L. Kochan, Roy Porter, and Christopher Prendergast. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Doane, Mary Ann. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator." Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991.1732. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961.

. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 1921. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1959.

. "Instincts and their Vicissitudes." 1915. General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York Collier, 1963. 83-103. . "On Narcissism: An Introduction." 1914. General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier, 1963. 56-2. . Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. 1912-13. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1950.

. "The 'Uncanny."' 1919. Studies in Parapsychology. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier, 1963.1960.

Frohock, W.M. The Novel of Violence in America. 2nd ed. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1957.

Gallop, Jane. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.

Hoopes, Roy. Cain. New York: Holt, 1982.

Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. New York: Vintage, 1955.

Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, et. al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Man Under Sentence of Death: The Novels of James M. Cain." Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties. Ed. David Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1968. 110-28.

Skenazy, Paul. James M. Cain. New York: Continuum, 1989. Williams, Raymond. "Culture is Ordinary." 1958. Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. London: Verso, 1989. 3-18.

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