Academic literature on the topic 'Chief inspector (fictitious character)'

AbstractThis article explores the themes of eroticism, death and redemption as seen in the world of opera, through a particular lens. This lens is the construct of the femme fatale as drawn from the particular world of the Bible. This construct is of course largely the product of the composer's and/or librettist's own social, religious, political and philosophical world view; where the origin of the construct is a biblical narrative, a high degree of elaboration is always required, since the psychology and motivation of women in the Bible is particularly under-developed. The article first surveys the terrain—surprisingly limited to six chief operas, which together treat only four biblical subjects. The first of the operas, Verdi's early work Nabucco, is analysed in terms of the depiction of its—totally invented—femme fatale, a fictitious daughter Abigaille given to King Nebuccadnezzar. The development of the concept of femme fatale is then traced until it reaches its apotheiosis with the extraordinary character of Kundry, in Wagner's Parsifal. She is then used as the vehicle to explore the themes in depth.

In this article, the author analyzes the reaction to the State Emergency Committee (GKChP) attempted coup in August 1991 and the resistance to it in Volgograd. In scholarly literature and socio-political debates the opinion is widespread that resistance to the putsch was limited to Moscow and Leningrad, and the regions treated it rather neutrally or even supported the GKChP. Based on the memoirs, newspapers, rallies resolutions and news agency reports from Volgograd, the author shows the wave of protests in the region, compares what was happening there with what was happening in other regions and comes to the conclusion that the Russian regions did show widespread resistance to the coup. He also discovers the main factors that distinguished the regions of protest. A key feature of Volgograd and other regions, where the protest took on a broad, organized character, was the presence of a large number of independent democratically minded deputies in the local Soviets and the media independent of the old nomenclature. In addition, the residents of Volgograd had a direct access to Boris Yeltsin’s entourage, as the chairman of the regional Soviet, Valery Makharadze, was exactly at that time appointed the Chief State Inspector of Russia. As a result, journalists received and distributed the news about the resistance to the putsch on the part of the Russian leadership, while independent deputies won support for Yeltsin from the local authorities. The author concludes that the most important changes that created this combination of factors were predetermined by the elections to the Soviets held on March 4, 1990.

The president also reminded the National Police to reveal the case of Brigadier J as it is. This, said Jokowi, is to maintain the image of Polri in the eyes of the public. National Police Chief Gen. Pol. Listyo Sigit Prabowo confirmed that there was no shooting incident in the case of Brigadier J's death. Based on the results of the work of the special team, it is known that Bharata E allegedly shot Brigadier J on orders from Inspector General Ferdi Sambo alias FS. Then it was engineered that a shootout occurred; this was to make it appear as if a shootout had occurred. Brother FS shot J's weapon into the wall many times to make it appear as if a shootout had taken place; Ferdy Sambo became the director behind this murder, including those who designed a fictitious story to cover up the real incident. Then Bharada Eliezer was allegedly the executor who shot Brigadier J, which was carried out on orders from Ferdy Sambo. There were at least three roles played by Ferdy Sambo in this case, including 1).The first role played by Ferdy Sambo was to order the murder of Brigadier J. He ordered the suspect, Bharada E, to shoot Bharata J at his official residence at the Police Complex, Duren Tiga, South of Jakarta 2).The second role is to kill Brigadier J; 3).The third role is to design scenarios as if there was shooting action. Based on the results of the investigation, the four suspects were suspected of committing criminal acts following Article 340 of the Criminal Code on premeditated murder, a subsidiary of Article 338 of the Criminal Code on murder, and Junction Articles 55 and 56 of the Criminal Code on conspiracy. The threat of the death penalty, life imprisonment, or a maximum of 20 years in prison. In addition to criminal matters, Ferdy Sambo's actions are suspected of violating the Police's professional code of ethics. He is suspected of having behaved unprofessionally in handling the scene of the death of Brigadier J. along with 31 other police personnel who are currently being investigated for: 1).Violating Polri's professional ethics, 2). Obstructing the investigation process by eliminating evidence such as CCTV footage and autopsy process; 3). Committing unprofessional actions when handing over Brigadier j's body to the family in Jambi. As a result of this action, the Police locked up 11 officers in a special place related to the death of Brigadier J. So far, 11 officers have been locked up in special placements to undergo the provost's examination process.

»My name is Boye, I dig carins and old mounds«The archaeologist Vilhelm Christian BoyeThe story of Vilhelm Boye is the history of one man’s passionate and insightful involvement in archaeology, which from the first was directed solely towards the Bronze Age. His involvement led to an academic disaster in his youth, but left behind it a developed skill in field archaeology. Despite his problems he persisted with what most obsessed him, namely the preservation of Denmark’s oak coffin graves. His multi-facetted personality and his more popular approach to archaeology may have challenged his contemporaries, and certainly contributed to his more or less deliberate exclusion from a permanent appointment at the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen. Even though he was opposed by powerful people within the Copenhagen museum establishment for nearly twenty years, he had the natural facility of easily winning the trust of others. This enabled him to cope with the situation and turn it to his advantage wherever he found himself. His marriage to Mimi Drachmann brought a welcome stability to his life, but his lack of professional recognition and his exclusion from a place at the top of archaeology continued. Time was running out for Boye, but he managed to leave an impressive body of published work behind him.Vilhelm Christian Boye was the son of the Norwegian-born priest and writer of hymns Caspar Johannes Boye. In 1848 his father was moved to the garrison church in Copenhagen, where the family lived at 29 Bredgade until his father’s death from cholera in 1853. This was a fashionable part of town, its residents including both the composer Niels W. Gade and Professor Adam Oehlenschläger, and even more notably J.J.A. Worsaae lived in the same property as the Boye family from 1850 to 1852. It was probably through his neighbour Worsaae that Boye later became a member of the circle around C.J. Thomsen. We may therefore assume that Boye visited and spent many after-school hours at the Museum of Northern Antiquities, and soon became an assistant during the public tours.Early in the 1840s tension arose between Worsaae and Thomsen, because Thomsen did not want to make Worsaae a junior museum inspector. Worsaae had not hitherto received any stipend or official position, and with some justice felt himself hard done by. Thomsen however did not respond to his request, so he left the Museum, later to be made Director for the Preservation of Ancient monuments. At the same time he taught at Copenhagen University, where Boye from time to time came to his lectures. There is no doubt that Boye wanted an academic career, and presumably hoped that his involvement with the Museum of Northern Antiquities would allow him to complete a study of Scandinavian archaeology. In the meantime Boye studied at the Museum under the direction of both Thomsen and Herbst.In early October 1857 Boye undertook one of his first excavations of a Bronze Age mound, the so-called Loholm barrow at Snørumnedre Mark (fig. 1). The dating of the grave however caused problems for him, but through a comparative study of Bronze Age burial rituals he concluded that the grave had close parallels within this period.The following year three funerary urns and some bronze objects were found in Hullehøj barrow, near Kjeldbymagle on the island of Møn. The barrow was going to be blown up, but the local judge had the work stopped and sent Boye to lead the excavation in May 1859. As the excavation progressed, Boye was able to ascertain that there were both cremations and inhumations in one and the same barrow. The inhumations were surrounded by fist-sized stones and placed at the bottom of the barrow, the cremations higher up within the mound. In comparison with his earlier barrow excavations it is worth noting Boye’s stratigraphic observations, which for the first time supported the division of the Bronze Age into an earlier and a later section. This hypothesis had been suggested earlier, but not hitherto adequately demonstrated. In 1859 Boye published the results of his excavations of 1857-8, as well as those of his recently completed excavation of Aasehøj barrow at Raklev, in the periodical Annaler for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie for 1858. This article is his first independent scientific publication, and should have attracted greater attention than it in fact did. In modern perspective the article is a perfectly competent archaeological publication, in which Boye solely through field observations reaches the conclusion that the Bronze Age could be divided into two periods, each with its own burial ritual. Even though Boye had been close to understanding why both cremations and inhumations occurred in the same barrow as early as 1857, he did not reach his final understanding this early. In November 1857 Worsaae had in fact given lectures at the university in which he suggested a division of the Bronze Age, but it is noteworthy that he had not earlier published any or all of his conclusions. His work on the subdivision of the Stone Age was probably more important to Worsaae, while the subdivision of the Bronze Age was more of a footnote, a natural outgrowth of the idea that there was continuous development from one stage to the next. Boye’s article in Annaler thus inevitably supported Worsaae’s hypothesis, although this was presumably not the intention. On the contrary, Boye merely intended to publish his own conclusions. Boye cannot therefore be said to be the sole originator of the subdivision of the Bronze Age, but apart his barrow investigations there was nobody else who reached the same conclusion at the time independently of Worsaae.In 1860 Boye took part in the first major bog excavations, at Vimose and then at Thorsbjerg with Engelhardt. Despite adverse circumstances and appalling weather, the Thorsbjerg excavations produced several important finds including Roman coins, a gilt breastplate, and also a very unusual face mask of silver with gilt (fig. 2). Although Engelhardt did not publish the full excavation report until 1863-69, Boye presented his observations in Annaler as early as 1860, where he discussed earlier interpretations of the many weapons found in bogs. Boye observed that the universal destruction of these weapons did not happen by chance, but was deliberate. Furthermore, the weapons lay in groups of one type, and the shields were pierced by spear points to pin them to the bottom of the bog. Boye’s interpretation of the finds was thus remarkably accurate, because he regarded them as votive offerings of the spoils of war.When Prussian and Austrian troops crossed the Ejder River on 1st February 1864, Boye volunteered within the month and was promoted to lance corporal (fig. 3). In May he was landed to take part in the defence of the island of Als along with the other Danish forces. On his return home in August Boye continued his work at the Museum of Northern Antiquities, but Thomsen’s health was failing, and after a long illness he died on 21st May 1865. The question of who was to succeed Thomsen had long been discussed, and it was indeed Worsaae who was appointed. Although Herbst had been groomed for the job by Thomsen, he found himself outmanouevred. Boye probably already knew by then that he would not be given a position at the Museum. Herbst, his confidant, could no longer help him, and Thomsen’s awareness of his archaeological skills was of no use either. Circumstances thus forced Boye to leave the Museum.Boye’s relationship with the family friend and poet H.C. Andersen resulted in the latter recommending Boye in December 1867 as a Danish tutor to the Brandt family in Amsterdam (fig. 4). On Wednesday 22nd January 1868 Boye departed for Amsterdam via Kiel. During his stay Boye wrote regularly to Andersen, who also travelled to Amsterdam to visit him. His stay in Amsterdam was evidently good for Boye, and contributed to the fact that he never lost his love for archaeology. As early as late August of the same year, Boye travelled to southern Halland in Sweden at the request of Ritmester Peter von Möller, to examine and excavate a large group of barrows known as the Ätterhögar on the Drömmestrup estate, the excavation of which was concluded in early July 1869. Boye thus returned home just in time to take part as a member of the Danish Committee in the International Congress of Archaeology and Anthropology that was held in Copenhagen from 25th August to 5th September. But his love of Schleswig and the old borderland called him, and soon Boye moved permanently to Haderslev to work as a freelance writer on the daily paper Dannevirke under the editorship of H.R. Hiort-Lorenzen.His coverage of the International Congress of Archaeology and Anthropology meeting in Copenhagen is the most extensive of Boye’s writings in Dannevirke. He also wrote a series of articles with a marked archaeological-ethnographic content, for example on the antiquities of Brazil, and the discovery of ­Australia.Although Boye supported himself as a writer for Dannevirke, his main occupation seems rather to have been the investigation of the burial mounds of Schleswig, which before 1864 had only been intermittently examined by amateurs. Boye began an extensive programme, and without his efforts and initiative, knowledge of many Schleswig barrows would have been lost. Although the information he recorded was not particularly satisfactory, in that it was mostly based on the memory of local people, his efforts should be seen as a precursor, because the work of protection went slowly at the time. In his search for lost information, in 1875 Boye considered the barrow at Dybvadgård north of Åbenrå, which had been partially excavated by Prince Carl of Prussia in 1864. During the excavations the Prince’s soldiers found an oak coffin, which was despatched to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Boye therefore wrote direct to the Prince, who in reply sent a photograph and description of the coffin. During the next eight years Boye managed to accumulate a great deal of information about the barrows of Schleswig, but his work was not without risk, because several of his “missions” involved evading the Prussian authorities and their power to confiscate the antiquities which Boye from time to time illegally sent to the Museum in Copenhagen.In 1874 the Principal of Herlufsholm School, C. Hall, engaged Vilhelm Boye to organise the school’s collection of antiquities, which had been in store for nearly twenty years. In addition to this reorganisation, funds were also made available for the systematic excavation of a nearby barrow at Grimstrup (fig. 5). The barrow however contained very little, mainly urns full of cremated bone, but the excavation was thoroughly recorded and a series of drawings was produced by R. Bertelsen, the school’s teacher of drawing. After this Boye set to work to display the collection in the six cases that were made available. The greater part of the collection came from the Stone Age, filling no fewer than five cases, giving an impression both of coastal finds from shell middens, and grave finds. The Bronze Age display contained only a few bronzes, but rather more pots. Iron Age artifacts were hardly represented at all, and consisted mostly of whetstones, a bowl-shaped buckle, and a pot burnt black.In November of the same year Boye was working at Herlufsholm, he produced his remarkable work Vejledning til Udgravning af Oldsager og deres foreløbige Behandling [Guide to the Excavation of Antiquities and their Initial Study], published under the auspices of the Society for the Historical-Antiquarian Collection in Århus. Boye’s Guide is the first of its type, and one can clearly detect his close association with Herbst, who had contributed to the scientific content of the work.Boye’s link with the antiquarian collection in Århus had not come about by chance. During his time at the Museum of Northern Antiquities he had early on made contact with the person mainly responsible for the establishment of the Århus collection, Edvard Erslev. Boye joined the museum in 1871, re-arranged the collection, and produced a guide for visitors. For the first time the museum acquired a new and professional look. Boye thus functioned as part of the leadership until 1876, when he gave up his museum post in favour of the schoolteacher Emmerik Høegh-Guldberg. The continued problems facing Dannevirke and Hiort-Lorenzen’s mounting confrontation with the judicial authorities in Flensborg probably caused Boye to consider his position with the newspaper. This culminated with the expulsion of Hiort-Lorenzen, who then took up the post of chief editor of Nationaltidende in Copenhagen. Boye also travelled to Copenhagen in early 1878, and on 15th November the year after he married Mimi Drachmann, sister of the poet Holger Drachmann (fig. 6 ). Not suprisingly, Boye got a job at the Nationaltidende, where he edited the newspaper’s Archaeological and Ethnographic Communications until 1885. In the seven years Boye worked at the paper, no fewer than 150 numbers of the Communications appeared, Boye writing more than 400 pages of them himself. The articles include a multiplicity of archaeological and ethnographic topics such as “Egypt’s Ancient Cultures” and “A Copper Age in Scandinavia”.In 1882 Count Emil Frijs of Frijsenborg commissioned Boye to catalogue and organise his estate’s collection of prehistoric and medieval objects, which came from the area round the lake and castle ruin at Søborg in northern Zealand. Attempts had been made to drain the lake since 1793, and several antiquities had been found at various times during the work. The recording project culminated in the publication of a small book, Fund af Gjenstande fra Oldtiden og Middelalderen i og ved Søborg Sø [Finds of Objects from the Prehistoric and Medieval Periods in and around Søborg Lake], which among other things contains some of the first photographic illustrations of Danish antiquities (fig. 7).Worsaae’s death in 1885 inaugurated a new era, and Herbst was finally able to take over the post of head of the Museum (fig. 8). Boye’s long friendship with Herbst had in the previous years resulted in him becoming a regional inspector for the Museum. Herbst was probably even then considering Boye for a future post in the Museum, and was indicating that he himself could not be overlooked when it became time to nominate a successor to Worsaae. After his appointment to the Museum of Northern Antiquities in 1885, Boye continued his activities as inspector in northern Zealand, and was frequently called when new finds were recovered from Bronze Age barrows.In contrast to Herbst, Boye rapidly fell in with the group of younger workers, particularly Henry Petersen (fig. 9). Over the years they became close friends with a common interest in new finds, as during the excavation of Guldhøj in 1891. Boye had no draftsman at the excavation, but he did have a local photographer who recorded some aspects of the opening of the first oak coffin. These are the first photographs ever to be taken during an excavation, even though photography by then was nothing new (fig. 10).With the reorganising of the National Museum, Boye was made senior assistant of the historical section on 1st April 1892, under Henry Petersen. He was responsible for the Museum’s archive and library, but fieldwork and travels are what particularly characterise his work in these years. When the small Bronze Age barrow on which the Glavendrup rune stone had been erected in 1864 was nearly completely destroyed by ploughing, Boye undertook a restoration of the barrow itself and the associated ship-shaped arrangement of stones in 1892 (fig. 11). The restoration’s outcome was the construction of a new barrow on which was placed the rune stone, and the re-erection of the stones in the ship arrangement.At the same time, chamberlain A. Oxholm undertook a small excavation of the Bronze Age barrow at Tårnholm, and recovered an oak coffin containing the remains of a woman, a fine necklace, a belt plate, and a small bronze dagger. Boye was immediately informed, and in connection with his investigations at Tårnborg was able to go to Tårnholm and lead a new excavation of the barrow, in which A.P. Madsen was also involved, and recover two more oak coffins (fig. 12).If we now consider Boye’s last major work, the publication of the major volume Fund af Egekister fra Bronzealderen i Danmark [Finds of Oak Coffins from the Danish Bronze Age], there are several indications that suggest that Boye began the work with the early intention that its coverage should be wide, and contain his long-term investigations into and knowledge of the country’s oak coffin graves. It is particularly noteworthy that his work as an archaeological journalist and with the Archaeological and Ethnographic Communications seems to have been a kind of precursor to this, as the last chapters contain sections that are clearly derived from his contributions to the Communications. The manuscript was completed in April 1896, and A.P. Madsen prepared for it no fewer than 27 full-page folio sized copperplates. The work was dedicated to “the veterans of Danish archaeology”, C.F. Herbst the museum director, and Japetus Steenstrup, with whom Boye had first collaborated more recently.His many years of a wandering existence and work-related disruptions had however told on him, and soon after the book was published Boye became ill. From his private correspondence from 1896 it emerges that Boye often had insufficient time to be with his nearest and dearest. Despite his illness he travelled one last time to visit relatives at Viken, but his illness worsened and he had to travel rapidly to Lund and on to Copenhagen. Boye died on 22nd September apparently as the result of a stroke, and was buried in Søllerød churchyard north of Copenhagen.Boye’s potential as a researcher was noticed early on by Thomsen, but just as quickly suppressed by Worsaae, who may more or less deliberately have sought to out-manoeuvre his colleague. Boye’s character and energy may have seemed a threat, and although he never finished an academic education he nevertheless displayed a remarkable archaeological acuity, but was unable to bolster his own reputation. Some of the blame for this must rest with the Museum’s aged leaders, who never supported or developed Boye’s evident skills to any great extent. It must also be stressed that some of Boye’s earlier career problems are closely connected to the lack of vision and jealousy of these same leaders. When he departed for Amsterdam Boye had no expectation of a Museum post, but despite this he intelligently kept up his contacts with Copenhagen, particularly with Herbst, knowing full well that Worsaae’s leadership would one day end. This somewhat bold presumption turned out to be correct, and helped his archaeological career.There is no doubt that Boye in his later years tried hard to recover his lost reputation and save his career from the disaster it suffered when he was younger, but the price was high and it also affected his health. We must today recognise that his reputation was restored to the highest level, and we must thank him for the fact that, through him, a uniquely detailed knowledge of the Bronze Age people themselves was preserved for Danish archaeology, as well as of their most prominent contribution to the Danish landscape: the barrows.Anders Otte StensagerInstitut for forhistorisk arkæologiKøbenhavns UniversitetTranslated by Peter Rowley-Conwy

Abstract In this article I argue that ‘the formation of the character’ of the teacher, a phrase coined by the pioneer of elementary-school training, James Kay-Shuttleworth, was of as much concern to the novelist as it was to the educationalist. Focusing on what became a classic depiction of Victorian teacher training in Jude the Obscure (1895), I situate Hardy among those educationalists and men of letters held responsible for refashioning character to suit the liberal currents of late nineteenth-century culture. Hardy read about the issue of formation in sources as varied as the letters of his sister Kate, who trained to be a teacher at Salisbury (1877–1879), and the reports of his acquaintance, and chief inspector of women’s training colleges (1885–1894), Joshua Fitch. At times his novel reflects the views of the inspectorate, but it also accommodates those who challenged the conception of the teacher that was otherwise imposed upon them. This article therefore contributes to recent interest in overlooked perspectives in the Victorian institution by addressing the ways in which women began shaping a profession in which they had become by far the largest constituent.

The Garden of Eden is the original surveillance state. God creates the heavens and the earth, turns on the lights, inspects everything that he has made and, behold, finds it very good. But then the creation attempts to acquire the surveillant properties of the creator. In Genesis 3, a serpent explains to Eve the virtues of forbidden fruit: “Ye shall not die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3: 4–5). Adam’s and Eve’s eyes are certainly opened (sufficiently so to necessitate figleaves), but in the next verse, God’s superior surveillance system has found them out. The power relationship Genesis illustrates has prompted many – the Romantics in their seditious appropriations of Paradise Lost, for instance – to question whether Eden is all that “good” after all. Why was God so concerned for Eve and Adam not to see? For that matter, why was he not there to intercept the serpent, but so promptly on the scene of humanity’s crime? Various answers (that God planned the Fall because it would enable him to demonstrate supreme love through Jesus, that Eve and Adam were wilfully wrong to grasp for equality with the Creator of the Universe, that God could not intervene in the temptation because it would compromise humanity’s free will) do not alter the flaw in God’s perfect garden state. Consciousness of this imperfection surfaces repeatedly in Western utopian narratives. The very existence of such narratives points to a humanist distrust in God as social engineer; the fact that these secular Edens are themselves often flawed suggests both a parody of the original Eden and an admission that humans are not up to the task of social engineering either. Thomas More’s Utopia and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – one the ostensible depiction of a new Eden, the other an outright dystopic inferno – address the association of Eden (or the Creator) with surveillance, and so undermine the ideality of the prelapsarian Garden. The archetypal power relationship, that of All-Seeing Creator with always-seen creation, is reconfigured sans God: in Utopia, with society itself performing the work of a transcendent surveillance system; in Blade Runner, with the multi-planetary Tyrell corporation doing so. In both cases, the Omnisurveillant is stripped of the mitigating quality of being God, and so exposed as oppressive, unjust, an affront to the idea of perfection. Like Eden, the eponymous island of Thomas More’s Utopia is a surveillance state. Glass, we read, “is there much used” (More 55). Surveillance is decentralised and patriarchal: wives are expected to confess to their husbands, children to their mothers (More 65). Each year, every thirty families select a “syphogrant”, whose “chief and almost … only office … is to see and take heed that no man sit idle, but that every one apply his own craft with earnest diligence” (More 57). In the mess halls, “The Syphogrant and his wife sit in the midst of the high table … because from thence all the whole company is in their sight” (More 66). Elders are ranged amongst the young men so that “the sage gravity and reverence of the elders should keep the youngsters from wanton licence of words and behaviour. Forasmuch as nothing can be so secretly spoken or done at the table, but either they that sit on the one side or on the other must needs perceive it” (More 66). Not only are the Utopians subject to social surveillance, but also to a conviction of its inescapability. Believing that the dead move among them, the Utopians feel that they are being watched (even when they are not) and thus regulate their own behaviour. In his preface to The Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham extols the virtues of his surveillance machine: “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated instruction diffused – public burthens lightened – Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied – all by a simple idea in Architecture!” (Bentham 29). As Foucault points out in “Panopticism”, the Panopticon works so well because the prisoner can never know when she or he is being watched, and this uncertainty compels the prisoner into constant discipline. Atheist Bentham had created a transcendent surveillance system that would replace God in (he trusted) an increasingly secular society. Bentham’s catalogue of the Panopticon’s benefits is something of a Utopian manifesto in its own right, and his utilitarianism, based on the “greatest-happiness principle”, was prepared to embrace the surveillance system so long as that system maximised overall happiness. Perhaps Thomas More was a proto-utilitarian, prepared to take up the repressive aspects of panopticism in exchange for moral reform, health preservation, the invigoration of industry and the lightening of public burdens. On the other hand, Utopia is widely read as a deliberately ironic representation of the ideal state. Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out that More “remained ambivalent about many of his most intensely felt perceptions” in Utopia, and he offers the text’s various ironising elements (such as the name of More’s fictitious interlocutor, Hythlodaeus, “well learned in nonsense”) as evidence (Greenblatt 54). Even the text’s title undermines its Edenic vision: as Louis Marin argues, “Utopia” could derive equally from Greek ou-topos, no-place, or eu-topos, good-place (Marin 85). More’s ambivalence about Utopia – to the extent of attributing his account of No-place to a character called Nonsense – suggests his impatience with his own flawed social vision. While Utopia is ambivalent in its depiction of the perfect state, more recent utopian narratives – Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), for instance, or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – are unequivocally ironic about the subordination of the individual to the perfect state. The Bible’s account of human society begins with Eden and ends with Apocalypse, in which divine surveillance reaches its inevitable conclusion in divine judgement. The utopian genre has undergone a very similar trajectory, beginning with what seem to be sincere attempts to sketch the perfect state, briefly flourishing as Europeans became first aware of Cytherean islands in the South Pacific, and, more recently, representing outright apocalypse (as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale [1986] and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner [1992]), or at least responding pessimistically to human attempts at social engineering. Blade Runner’s dystopic inversion of biblical creation illustrates an enduring distrust in both human and divine attempts to establish Eden. The year is 2019 (only one year off 2020, perfect vision); the place is Los Angeles, the City of Angels. Corporate biomechanic Eldon Tyrell manufactures a race of robots, “replicants”, who are physically indistinguishable from humans, capable of developing emotional responses, but burdened with a four-year self-destruct mechanism. When the replicants rebel, their leader, Roy Batty, demands of Tyrell, “I want more life, Father”. Tyrell is not only “Father”, but “the god of biomechanics”; and Batty is simultaneously a reworking of Adam (the disaffected creation), Lucifer (the rebel angel) and Christ (as shown in the accompanying iconography of crucifixion and doves). The Bible’s leading actors are all present, but the City of Angels, 2019, is unmistakeably not Eden. It is a polluted, dank, flame-spewing dragon of a city, more Inferno than human habitation. The film’s oppressive film noir atmosphere relays the nausea induced by the Tyrell Corporation’s surveillance system. The Voight-Kamff test – a means of assessing emotional response (and thus determining whether an individual is human or replicant) by scanning the pupils – is a surveillance mechanism so intrusive it measures not only behaviour, but feelings. The optical imagery throughout the film reinforces the idea of permanent visibility. The result is a claustrophobic paranoia. Blade Runner is unambiguous in its pessimism about human attempts to regulate society (attempts which it shows to be reliant on surveillance, slavery and swift punishment). It seems unlikely that the God of Genesis is specifically targeted by this film’s parody of the Creator-creation power relationship – its critiques of capitalism and environmental mismanagement are much more overt – but by configuring its dramatis personae in biblical roles, Blade Runner demonstrates that the paradigm for omnisurveillant creators comes from the Bible. In turn, by placing Los Angeles, 2019, at such a distant aesthetic remove from Eden, the film portrays the omnisurveillant creator unrelieved by natural beauty. Foucault’s formulation of panopticism, that power is seeing without being seen, that being seen without seeing is disempowerment, informs all three texts – Genesis, Utopia and Blade Runner. What differentiates them, determines how perfect each text would have its world believed to be, is the extent to which its authors approve this power relationship. References Bentham, Jeremy. The Panopticon; or, The Inspection House (1787). In The Panopticon Writings. Ed. Miran Bozovic. London: Verso, 1995. 29-95. Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism”. In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (1977). New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 195–228. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1980. Marin, Louis. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Trans. Robert A. Vollrath. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990. More, Thomas. Utopia (1516). In Susan Brice, ed. Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut. United States, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Harley, Alexis. "Resurveying Eden: Panoptica in Imperfect Worlds." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/02-harley.php>. APA Style Harley, A. (Aug. 2005) "Resurveying Eden: Panoptica in Imperfect Worlds," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/02-harley.php>.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. 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