III—

Words at their most sublime have the force and feel of water. The ocean is The Awakening 's central character, the axis around which the narrative

turns. From the beginning it is represented as a linguistic presence, possessing a voice that speaks to Edna's soul. What it says simultaneously resists and impels symbolization. Unlike the green and yellow parrot whose voice inaugurates the novel by mechanically repeating the same unintelligible phrase and who, Chopin tells us, speaks "a language which nobody understood" (3), the sea speaks the language of the unsayable.^[20] Its voice, "seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation" (15), necessarily partakes of many tongues and reaches Edna "like a loving but imperative entreaty" (14). Perhaps because the ocean possesses a multitude of voices, the command it proscribes is never reducible to any single precept or act.

The sound of the ocean haunts the novel. Like a lover's half-forgotten touch, it betokens absence; indeed, it is a carrier of absence, giving Edna—or whoever hears it—access to a certain kind of knowledge. Hearing it, for example, implies the ability to hear the sound of "wake" within "awakening" and thus to recognize that the same word can signify both life and death, for "wake" simultaneously denotes consciousness of life and a funeral rite, a collective ritual for the dead. (There is a wake within The Awakening , but it takes place before Edna's death, at a feast she gives as a gift to herself.) That the same word has contradictory meanings, or means contradiction, points to the irreconcilable coexistence of opposites without the possibility of resolution. Signs of life are equally signs of death, and hearing the ocean's voice impels knowledge of their proximity.

Chopin consistently refuses a dualistic formulation of the relation between life and death, sleeping and waking, or pleasure and pain, and in so doing radically alters a Homeric (or romantic) view of the sublime in which the protagonist's encounter with a potentially overwhelming obstacle leads to heightened powers and a resurgence of life. Displacing the notion that the sublime attests to a polarization of opposites is the novel's insistence upon their co-implication. The voice of the sea indicates polarities only to combine them. Although, for example, Edna perceives the sea's touch as "sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace" (15), its waves also "sway," "lash," and "beat upon her splendid body" (27). Chopin thus implies that what lulls may just as easily lash, that what soothes also inflames, and that nursery songs can kill.

Sappho's lyric and Chopin's novel both describe what occurs in response to hearing a beloved voice. In The Awakening , as in phainetai moi ,

hearing the other's voice makes something happen: it is a singular event that engenders shock or crisis. The novel's beginning thus reproduces Longinus' description of the unique relation between orator and auditor at play in the sublime, in which the hearer's (or reader's) identification with the speaker (or text) allows the latter to imagine that he "has created what he has merely heard" (1.4). The rapport between Edna and the ocean's voice replicates not only that between orator and auditor in the Longinian sublime, but that between lover and the beloved in Sappho's poem: hearing its address inaugurates a desire where previously there was none. In this case the reader hears through Edna's ears, and what she hears is the ocean.

Chopin's representation of the ocean continually emphasizes its independence from the domain of vision. It is significant, for example, that Edna hears it for the first time in total darkness. Wakened after midnight by the return of her husband, Léonce, Edna sits alone on the porch and suddenly hears "the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour," a voice that breaks "like a mournful lullaby upon the night" (8). Absence of light allows awareness of a kind of presence one does not need eyes to discern: the sea's "mournful voice" breaks like a lullaby, a song sung by mothers to comfort their children and send them to sleep, as if its capacity to offer solace suggests a relation between the representation of absence and a distinctly aural register.

Throughout the history of the sublime the sea has often served as its most appropriate, if not exemplary, metaphor; and it is worth recalling some traditional representations of this relation the better to understand just how dramatically Chopin's construction of the oceanic sublime differs from them. In both Longinus and Burke, the sea is a major source of sublime sentiment. For Longinus the ocean's majesty is self-evident: he holds that "a natural inclination . . . leads us to admire not the little streams, however pellucid and however useful, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and above all, the Ocean" (42, Russell). For Burke the ocean is so appropriate a symbol of sublimity that he chooses it to illustrate the precept that "whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too" (53). Our differing responses to the sight of "a level plain of a vast extent on land" and to the "prospect of the ocean" show that the latter "is an object of no small terror" in a way that the plain, despite its vastness, is not: the ocean's capacity to arouse terror is the source of both its power and its sublimity (53–54). In Schopenhauer the ocean actually outranks all

other forms of natural display. Transfixed and uplifted by its sight, the "undismayed beholder" watches "mountainous waves rise and fall, dash themselves furiously up against steep cliffs, and toss their spray high into the air; the storm howls, the sea boils, the lightning flashes from black clouds, and the peals of thunder drown the voice of the storm and sea." Indeed, Schopenhauer holds that such oceanic immensity yields "the most complete impression of the sublime."^[21] In each case, however, the ocean's sublimity is bound up with vision: the sea is something a detached observer looks at, usually from afar. That Edna is transfixed by the ocean's sound rather than its sight is important because here Chopin revises typical constructions of the oceanic sublime. Edna transgresses Kant's injunction that "we must be able to view (it) as poets do, merely in terms of what manifests itself to the eye [was der Augenschein zeigt ]—e.g., if we observe it while it is calm, as a clear mirror of water bounded only by the sky; or, if it is turbulent, as being like an abyss threatening to engulf everything."^[22] Edna's relation to the ocean would, according to Kant, be neither poetically nor philosophically correct: merely looking at the sea holds no particular interest for her. She has a natural, if untutored, aptitude for painting and "a serious susceptibility to beauty" (15), yet only the ocean's voice and touch affect her. Chopin's oceanic sublime is not something "we must regard as the poets do, merely by what the eye reveals," but rather functions as a mode of address.^[23] As in Sappho, sublime encounters are occasioned by something heard.

Edna's first encounter with the sublime is marked by an identification with what she hears. The sound of the ocean's "everlasting voice," which disrupts the everyday world she has taken for granted, speaks a language radically different from any she has previously heard and it leaves a mark: "an indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day" (8). Sound tears and Edna has been torn. Thus begins her awakening.

Learning to swim is merely its continuation. Although hearing the ocean's voice awakens her desire, Edna does not venture into it until she has been touched by another kind of sound, namely, by one of Chopin's preludes. Listening to music composed by the artist whose name replicates the author's own is a prelude to immersion in that which she has heard. Passion comes in waves that sway the soul, but sound also gives rise to waves and hearing them precedes Edna's awakening.

Toward the end of a festive midsummer soirée, Robert Lebrun arranges for Mademoiselle Reisz, a renowned but eccentric pianist, to play for the assembly. Hearing the prelude has a dramatic effect on Edna: usually music "had a way of evoking pictures in her mind" (26), but now she sees nothing; what she hears possesses and overcomes her. That Edna's most profound encounters are occasioned by what she hears suggests that hearing may entail entanglement in a way that seeing does not. For hearing, as Gerald C. Bruns reminds us, is not the spectator's mode:

The ear is exposed and vulnerable, at risk, whereas the eye tries to keep itself at a distance and frequently from view (the private eye). The eye appropriates what it sees, but the ear is always expropriated, always being taken over by another ('lend me your ears'). The ear gives the other access to us, allows it to enter us, occupy and obsess us . . . hearing means the loss of subjectivity and self-possession . . . [and] puts us in the mode of being summoned, of being answerable and having to appear.^[24]

Bruns's gloss on Heidegger's On The Way To Language also applies to Edna's response to Chopin: "the very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent out a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier's spinal column . . . she waited for the material pictures which she thought would gather and blaze before her imagination. She waited in vain. She saw no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair" (27).

How to say something that cannot be said, that confronts us with the inability to present it? The problem that has occasioned the discourse and theory of the sublime is the same as that posed by The Awakening : the difficulty of symbolizing an excess that resists visual or linguistic formulation but is there nonetheless. Edna's experience of what Hertz would call "blockage"—her inability to translate sense-impressions into images—calls for a radically different mode of perception, but one that does not lead to an enhanced sense of self. Adorno's conviction that music's value resides in its ability to call "for change through the cryptic language of suffering" is enacted by the prelude's effect on Edna: she trembles, chokes, is blinded by tears, and then, as if to seek deeper knowledge of the "cryptic language" she has heard, she learns to swim.^[25] The figurative parallel between the prelude, whose notes arouse passion in her soul, and the ocean, whose waves like music beat upon her body, is established just before Edna, with the other guests, walks down to the ocean and swims for the first time.

Edna's first swim is neither an attempt to appropriate the ocean's power nor a submission to it. It does not represent a struggle for dominance over a force that, as in Homer, has the power to engulf her, but rather, as in Sappho, allows a relation to "the unlimited" in which she seeks "to lose herself" (29). Swimming offers a way of entering apartness; finding her "self" is, paradoxically, a matter of entering the water of the Gulf of Mexico and learning how to lose that which she has found:

That night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who all of a sudden realizes its power, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-confidence. She could have shouted for joy. She did shout for joy, as with a sweeping stroke or two she lifted her body to the surface of the water . . . she turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out from the unlimited in which to lose herself. (28–29)

Learning to swim also entails awareness that the ocean can be lethal. Swimming too great a distance from the shore and at the limits of her strength, Edna experiences a "flash of terror"; "a quick vision of death" smites Edna's soul but she manages to regain the land.^[26] She perceives her experience as an "encounter with death" (29) yet makes no mention of it.

Nor do most of Chopin's critics. For although, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out, "in the past few decades The Awakening has become one of the most persistently analyzed American novels,"^[27] surprisingly few critics have discussed the role of the ocean and its voice, an omission made all the more startling given Chopin's insistence upon it.^[28] Dale Bauer, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Patricia Yaeger discuss the ways in which the sea functions as a metaphor for Edna's awakening, yet none of these critics recognize that it is also a metaphor for language itself. Nor are they attuned to the ways in which Edna's newly awakened desire must also be understood as a desire for the sublime.

In "The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire," Gilbert and Gubar offer a meticulous and insightful interpretation of "oceanic imagery" in The Awakening . According to these persuasive critics, the sea provides an alternative to patriarchal culture: lying "beyond the limits and limitations of the cities where men make history, on one

of those magical shores that mark the margin where nature and culture intersect" (102), it also provides an element "in whose baptismal embrace Edna is renewed, reborn" (103). For Gilbert and Gubar the novel not only tells the story of Edna's awakening and initiation into a "pagan paradise" in which "metaphorically speaking, Edna has become Aphrodite, or at least an ephebe of that goddess," but examines the consequences that "would have befallen any late-nineteenth-century woman who experienced such a fantastic transformation" (106). They propose that the novel be read as "a feminist myth of Aphrodite/Venus, as an alternative to the patriarchal Western myth of Jesus" (96), in which the Gulf, incarnated by the white foam of the sea from which the goddess emerges, is Aphrodite's birthplace. Just as Gilbert and Gubar find in Edna a modern Aphrodite, so they mythologize and idealize the sea and its "magical shores," for their apparent attentiveness to the ocean ignores the very register Chopin emphasizes—that of sound, not sight. Privileging vision, in this case the image of Venus rising from the waves rather than the voice of the ocean Edna hears, allows them to offer the comforting, if implausible, message that the embrace of Chopin's ocean promises only fulfillment, never terror, and that the one may be neatly separated from the other. Such an idealization upholds a vision of plenitude that a more sustained attention to the ocean's voice would function to resist. Chopin's construction of the ocean suggests not self-presence but self-dispersal; it invites the soul "to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation" (15); and what it instills is the desire for loss.

Emphasizing only the sea's beneficent aspects, Gilbert and Gubar are able to put forward an entirely reassuring interpretation of it. Not only is Edna swimming "into a kind of alternative paradise"; the novel is itself "a new kind of work, a mythic/metaphysical romance that elaborates her female fantasy of paradisal fulfillment" (104). Their reading ignores not only the question but the consequences of asking what hearing the ocean's voice entails and enables a view of the novel's conclusion in which the ocean functions solely as a redemptive site, an "alternative paradise": "Edna's last swim may not seem to be a suicide—that is, a death—at all, or, if it is a death, it is a death associated with a resurrection, a sort of pagan female Good Friday that promises an Aphroditean Easter" (109). Gilbert and Gubar's commitment to a thematics of redemption mirrors Hertz's and Weiskel's treatment of the sublime as a sustained, if interrupted, progression toward transcendence. In each case what is envisioned is an ocean without

undertow, a voice that is able to tell everything it knows, and the possibility of desire without loss.

For Dale Bauer, however, the ocean does not speak at all, an extremely surprising omission given that her Baktinian reading of the novel emphasizes such notions as "dialogue," "heteroglossia," and above all, "voice." In Bauer's view, Edna's relationship to the sea reflects her need to withdraw from a constraining and oppressive society and return "to a womb-like sea. Hers is also a retreat to the imaginary realm in which the only 'voice' with which Edna must contend is the sea's."^[29] That Bauer puts the word "voice" in quotation marks is perhaps indicative of her own assumptions about language, namely that the domain of the unrepresentable and excessive, here symbolized by the sea, belongs to a "pre-linguistic, imaginary realm" (149) that has no relation to speech and language. Bauer's assurance that we can distinguish the cultural (or spoken) from the natural (or silent) elides Chopin's representation of the ocean as that which blurs the difference between the two. Whereas The Awakening foregrounds these issues, Bauer's reading precludes them. And whereas the sea as represented by Chopin conjoins realms usually assumed to be separate, Bauer reinstates the distinction the ocean's voice displaces. Her failure to hear is perhaps symptomatic of the view that language is, or ought to be, a site of plenitude, offering a realm in which everything can be said and nothing need go unheard. That language may possess a force that, as in Sappho, threatens to overwhelm the auditor and bring her close to death is perhaps something that current readings of The Awakening wish to avoid.

While Patricia Yaeger's "'A Language Which Nobody Understood': Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening " is unquestionably the most sophisticated critical treatment of these issues, it nonetheless shares the assumption that language, in principle if not practice, should offer a refuge from, rather than an amplification of, the unsayable. According to Yaeger, Edna's quest is for an alternative form of communication, a speech and voice of her own. In this regard she compares the speech of the parrot to the voice of the sea: both are expressions of "the absent or displaced vocality" Edna seeks; both "emphasize Edna's need for a more passionate and intersubjective speech that will allow Edna to revise or rearticulate her relation to her own desire and to the social reality that thwarts this desire."^[30] But whereas Yaeger conflates the voice of the parrot and that of the sea, I wish to emphasize their differences. While Yaeger finds in the parrot's nonsensical jabber and the sea's voice alike metaphors for "a

potential lack of meaning in words themselves" (203)—meaning, that is, in the words available to Edna—I contend that the voice of the ocean attests to the incommensurable in a way that the parrot's mechanical babble does not, and that in so doing it depicts an alterity that is, strictly speaking, unsayable.

Yaeger is the only critic of The Awakening to find in Jean-François Lyotard's theory of "the differend" a useful way of explaining Edna's linguistic predicament and its outcome. And while I agree that "Edna's absent language is not a manifestation of women's permanent expulsion from 'masculine speech' but of what Lyotard calls 'le différend' " (204), I disagree with her understanding of just what this concept implies. According to Lyotard:

In the differend, something "asks" to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away. This is when the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are summoned by language, not to augment to their profit the quantity of information through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist.^[31]

Lyotard employs the notion of the differend to describe practices that remain beyond the grasp of representation. Unlike Wittgenstein's injunction, "What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence," his goal is to make the presentation of the fact that the unpresentable exists as much the concern of a critical politics as of aesthetic practices. Lyotard's differend has much in common with his concept of the sublime.^[32] For the differend, which entails both "the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom)" (13), foreshadows Lyotard's insistence that the sublime entails "the pleasure of a displeasure" (165) and recalls his famous definition of sublimity in The Postmodern Condition : "the real sublime . . . is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept."^[33] In The Differend pain accompanies silence while pleasure accompanies the invention of a new idiom, but for our

purposes what matters is that the differend and the sublime both emphasize something that is fundamentally inexpressible.^[34] Both concepts underscore the dimension within language that, like the voice of Sappho's beloved or Chopin's ocean, testifies to the unsayable. Both signify neither absence nor presence but rather the possibility of an absolute and untranslatable otherness.

Yaeger's essay precludes consideration of the single element upon which Chopin and Lyotard insist: the force of the incommensurable. Whereas Lyotard maintains that to testify to the differend is a matter of calling attention to the disjunction between radically heterogeneous genres of discourse, for Yaeger such testimony is equivalent to recovering the silence left by the ocean's, and Edna's, not yet articulate voice, and by replacing the unsayable with speech. According to Yaeger something crucial is missing and language—a new idiom—will repair the differend by putting speech in the place of silence. I would contend that the ocean's voice intensifies the hearer's relation to that which cannot be translated into speech, making audible an absence to which she must nonetheless bear witness. In The Awakening hearing entails the recognition that something remains to be said, and this linguistic residue exceeds what can be put into words. The search for new "idioms," then, is not simply a matter of putting speech in the place of silence, of filling in gaps and replacing absence with presence, but of attesting to an excess that resists the attempt to translate sheer heterogeneity into a univocal message. Chopin's evocation of the ocean functions as a differend not because it replaces a flawed or missing speech-act with a more successful one, but because it stresses the impossibility of paraphrasing the singularity and particularity of its voice, and thereby allows us to hear a silence that might otherwise have remained unheard.