"Hello, I must be going!" Handel's Ezio and the End of Opera Seria

Though it may come as a surprise to some, it seems that Ezio, always the blacksheep in Handel's operatic oeuvre, is experiencing something of a revival. Only last month, the Kammerorchester of Basel performed an undramatised version of the entire opera to a packed house and rapturous reception at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris; a major new production was staged (and broadcast on Germany national television) for the Schwetzingen Festival in May; and the BBC, in promoting their July performance on Radio 3 featuring Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg, have dubbed it Handel's "lost masterpiece", which in certain circles might be rather like callng Alexander Oliver Stone's lost masterpiece. In its day, Ezio was Handel's least popular opera, lasting just five performances, and was never revived in his life time. It was not until 1977 that the Handel Society revived the opera, staging its first London performance in nearly a quarter of a millenium, at the Sadler's Wells Theatre. 

By 1732, the high baroque style of opera seria was reaching the very acme of its formalization, and Ezio, with its lack of ensemble singing, strict division between arias and (mostly secco, ie accompanied only by cello or harpsichord continuo) recitative, is often considered rather the ideal type of this genre. The format, defined more by the Italian librettist Metastasio than any particular composer, involved a strict adherence to the Aristotelian unities (of action, of place, and of time); a classical setting, often freely adapting Graeco-Roman tragedies to suit the obsequious temperament of the baroque era; and an absolute paramount placed on the transcendent power of the voice. For this was the era of the great castrati and the prima donnas - the superstars of their day, famous for their virtuosic vocal chords and prodigious tempers, they weilded an enormous power, largely responsible for the tendency to end each scene with a big coloratura aria so the singer might show off their range before walking off stage to inevitabily rapturous applause.

Opera seria was primarily a music of the absolutist courts and a number of conventions in staging and lighting were employed to emphasise the identification between the kings and crown princes in the audience with the gods and emperors on stage. As such, a happy ending, emphasizing the mercy and noble spirit of the ruler, was compulsory. This final expression of mercy, often widely divergent from the source texts or historical facts, was necessary, according to Mladen Dolar, as an act of flattery to the monarch, emphasizing their humanity even whilst affirming their irrevocable otherness. "The logic of mercy," says Dolar, "relies on and engenders the logic of superego, the other side of the law." The law's 'other side' being the patriarchal figure which both suspends and guarantees the efficacy of the law, maintaining and enforcing the law whilst simultaneously acting as its inherent transgression. Opera seria thus provided a kind of structuring fantasy for the last days of the feudal system, before both were swept decisively away by the French revolution.

Already, in Handel's time, a serious rival to the dominance of opera seria was arising in the form of opera buffa, seria's less formal, more 'democratic' younger sibling, with plots more resembling Hollywood screwball comedies from the 1930s and a sense of high camp and low humour carried over from the Commedia dell'Arte. Though both existed side by side for some time (Mozart wrote several of each, though his two opera seria, Ideomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito, were amongst his biggest flops), it was increasingly the more casual, less stylised, opera buffa which found favour with audiences, and it was opera buffa which had the more pronounced influence upon the major operatic reforms of Gluck later in the century. If already in its day, Ezio was starting to look a little stuffy and old-fashioned, weighed down by the straitjacket of its classical structure, what chance does it stand today, more than two hundred years from the disappearance of the social system it reflected and ideologically supported?

Indeed, the years have in many ways hardly been kind. Nietzsche regarded any use of recitative as completely 'unmusical' and Adorno saw no musical qualities in any of Handel's work sufficient to justify their continued performance. Many contemporary books about the history of opera prefer to skip straight from Monteverdi to Mozart or Gluck, eliding the Metastasian period like some embarrasing episode in the family history. At best they might note the odd pleasing air or notable rhetorical flourish in an era otherwise marked by rigid formalism which lead to a dearth of innovation and questionable lack of taste. But what is there in Handel's operas, and perhaps Ezio in particular, that resists this kind of glib dismissal? 

Almost uniquely amongst the major composers of the 18th century, Handel was neither, truly, a court composer, like Salieri or Haydn, nor a church composer like Bach, though he is often thought to have been both. His appointment as Kapellmeister of Hannover was but shortlived, for Handel immediately absconded to London upon being appointed; and despite numerous official appointments, he evidently never felt really at home playing jester to the British throne and spent little time at court. Handel's place, from the very beginning of his career in Hamburg, was in the theatre. Few composers can have devoted so much of their lives to pursuing so fervently, and almost single-handedly, a commercial enterprise such as opera production on the London stage. Even the move away from opera towards oratorio towards the end of his life was motivated largely by commerical considerations. Handel thus stands on something of a continuum of British producer-entrepreneurs that extends even to Joe Meek and Pete Waterman.

Neither should one be too scadalised by the mention in this context of pop music producers. Handel was never an 'academic' composer, and he was frequently somewhat looked down upon in elite musical circles, in Hamburg, Florence and London. Frequently out of step with the latest fashions in Italy, and cutting something of an ungainly figure in London's polite society, Handel could never count on the support of the press nor of the establishment. His appeal, then, was always to the ear of whom we might tentatively call the 'man on the street'. As such his operas retain a melodic freshness that nas never dated, and a stylistic variety foreign to his more au fait contemporaries. Newman Flower describes how Handel's tunes "swept with swift insidiousness to all corners. To all drawing-rooms. To drinking dens." The audience for opera in London at the time was broad, and it is no small testament to Handel's popularity with all classes that several of his melodies were even cribbed for The Beggar's Opera, something of a grandaddy, both to the English music hall and the German singspiel. 

Ezio is one of only three operas Handel composed from a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, and scholars have often wondered why so few (he composed nearly fifty operas in total) when he had success producing numerous pasticcios based on Metastasio's librettos. It may be that Handel found the texts of this Italian poet, whose name is so indelibly linked to the very definition of opera seria, just too too much. Perfect for a quick pasticcio, bolting together a few melodies from other operas to fill up the season, but otherwise just a little too on the money. Ezio conforms so perfectly to the conventions of opera seria that it almost becomes its own meta-analysis, exposing and exploding its own formalities even in its slavish conformism. In one scene in particular Varo stands up the front of the stage explaining at great length in florid, melismatic stanzas, how much of a hurry he is in, and how he really doesn't have any time to waste. Patricia Juliana-Smith, in an essay which calls Handel, "perhaps the gayest of opera composers," says of his operas that they, "seem to the post-modern perspective nothing so much as camp critiques of received notions of heroism and romance." But is it so much to suggest that a contemporary of Swift may have had his own satirical intent without requiring any 'post-modern perspective'?

Ezio is a story all about unreliable narrators. The drama, the intrigue, the major twists of the story are all the result of characters giving a false narrative of events. Almost all the characters in the opera tell lies, and they tell those lies, invariably, to the king. The king thus acts as a kind of Lacanian big Other as the one who must not be in full possession of the truth. The only character who refuses to lie is Ezio himself and he is repeatedly punished for it, whilst none of the liars are ever punished. The king of England at the time, George II, was one of Ezio's few contemporary fans, apparently, turning up to every performance but the first. And in a sense, even given their wide audience, opera seria were always addressed to the king, as noted above. But doesn't an opera about unreliable narrators, which addresses the king, whilst simultaneously establishing the king as he who must be lied to, raise questions about the unreliability of its own narrative? And indeed, if we compare Metastasio's libretto with it sources in Racine's Britannicus and Roman history, we find that the happy ending is, in fact, a 'lie'.

Whilst in most opera seria, the granting of mercy by the monarch is acted out essentially freely and out of their own benevolence, thus affirming their essential humanity and, simultaneously, their power over humanity, as per Dolar's analysis quoted above, in Ezio the act of mercy is only undertaken under considerable physical threat. Massimo has roused the wrath of the people who are already rising up and attacking the emperor's palace, and it is only by the re-appearance of Ezio and Caeser's granting of his acquittal that the uprising is quelled, with the mob literally at the gates. Behind Ezio's apparently fawning tacked-on happy-ending then, there is a not so veiled threat to the figure of the monarch: use your power benevolently or risk the wrath of the people (a threat that may have registered somewhere, less than a hundred years after the English revolution). 

It seems pointless to speculate on Handel's relationship with King George at the time, of course (from what I can gather they had their ups and downs...), and at any rate biography and intentionality need not have the last word in the analysis of any text. For all its formalism, there's a lot to like in Ezio - however we might interpet it. It is easy to sneer at the imagination of a 1960 East German music festival in dubbing Handel, "The people's composer - a true revolutionary!" But isn't it more exciting to gamble on the possibility that the composer of the Messiah and royal Fireworks Music might just be more interesting, less stiff, than we had supposed? That there might just be some latent utopian potential, some spirit in this work, missed by the crowds at its first performances, such would strike me as a wager worth pursuing. And now that tickets for the opera cost less than tickets for a rock concert, with both the cheapest and the most expensive tickets at the Royal Opera House in London selling for less than the cheapest and most expensive tickets for a concert at Wembley Arena, now that heads of state are more likely to patronise the latest indie band than the most talented composer, to call for a new appreciation of opera seria as populism, and pop music, seems not just conceivable, but urgent, essential.

E(nmity)-Mail

You don't need to be a confirmed Lacanian to realise that to read an email is, already, to misread an email. One could evoke the old Russian formalist distinction between fabula and syuzhet: there is the actual bare words of the email itself (syuzhet), and then there is the story, and the affect, we interpret and, in a sense, invent ourselves, from these words (fabula). As in film, the two can never fully coincide, nor do we have any guarantees that that latter conforms in any way to the author's intentions. In a film, it could certainly be argued, this does not matter. With Stanley Cavell, we can argue that the filmic object is what we remember of it and how we interpret it. When dealing with emails, this presents fairly obvious practical problems. 

Will Schwalbe and David Shipley, authors of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home (a book which I have not read, so please forgive me if I repeat anything they say) are fond of saying that "email is an affectless medium" and offer various tips for better, friendlier, more productive, email communication. But why should this be so? Why do we need to overcompensate for the coldness of electronic communication with emoticons and multiple exclamation marks? Why is it so hard to imagine a book of the collected emails of some great author, poet, or statesman, when so many similar collections of 'snail mail' letters exist? 

I suspect one reason is the way email simulates intimacy. Its model has really never been the letter, and it is rare to apply the formal rules of letter writing - even to a complete stranger - that come so naturally when using the postal service. When writing emails, we tend to write as though we were talking ("Hi, how's it going?" scarcely "Dear Sir,") and so we read as though we were listening. Email fakes an imaginary presence which tends towards the illusion of making the medium seem invisible, whereas a letter will always remind us of its own frame. When reading, we tend to superimpose a tone of voice - and almost inevitably a different tone of voice to the one with which it was written - onto an email without thinking about it. This then skews our understanding, creating a kind of paranoid hermeneutic which would be quickly dispelled if we were talking in person (due to cues - themselves as good as invisible - such as tone of voice, facial expression, etc.).

Yet, despite all the formal signs to the contrary - the dear sirs, the letterheads, the yours sincerelys - a handwritten letter actually is more intimate. For even without any understanding of graphology, a letter retains the mark of the body (it's grain, if you like, following Barthes) - the slope of the characters, the pressure on the paper, little crossings out - all speak to us directly from the fingers whether we consciously realise it or not. We can pour our heart out in a letter, somehow we can only vent spleen in an email. And it wouldn't take much surfing (pick a message board or a comments box at random to see what I mean) to find evidence that this problem of false, forced directness is far from restricted to email, but infects almost all web-based communication.

Then again, perhaps behind my words (and those of Messrs Shwalbe and Shipley), there is an implied idealist vision of communicational utopia, wherein, if only we all understood the medium better we would all just get along fine and all the world's problems might be boiled down to a simple matter of misunderstanding. I can't help thinking of the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which, by removing all barriers to effective communication between different cultures, causes "more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation". The crucial thing, perhaps, is to recall, with Lacan, that we understand the other's speech best when we recognise the impossibility of our own understanding, the necessary and constitutive gap which makes any communication possible. 

"Everyone has their half an hour of Hulotism every day." Jacques Tati

A new exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française, in Paris, celebrates Jacques Tati as modernist and deconstructionist. The curators have taken a still from the pharmacy scene in Playtime, wherein the green light of the shop's sign gives its wares and its customers a sickly pallor, and captioned it with a reference to Derrida's famous analysis, in Dissemination, of the crucial ambiguity of the word, 'pharmakon' in Greek, and the role it plays in Plato's Phaedrus. In Socrates speech in the Phaedrus, writing is offered to the king by the god Thoth as a "remedy" (Pharmakon) for his ailing memory, but the word pharmakon is inherently slippery, meaning as much poison as cure. “If the pharmakon is ‘ambivalent,’ it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed," says Derrida, "the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/ body, good/ evil, inside/ outside, memory/ forgetfulness, speech/ writing, etc.).…The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the différance of difference." 

Like middle period Chaplin, Tati's Monsieur Hulot is an (almost) silent man in a  world full of noises. Just as the little tramp in Modern Times, Hulot in Mon Oncle may sing and whisper in people's ears but almost never speaks out loud. In a scene early on in Les vacances  de Monsieur Hulot we discover why. Arriving in the hotel, laden with luggage, Hulot is unable to introduce himself until having the pipe pulled out of his mouth by the receptionist, like a baby's dummy. It is the pipe that has stolen his voice, one partial object effaced by what is, in a sense, another. Hulot's pipe, though not quite permanently between his lips, is none the less somehow in him more than himself, like Lacan's objet petit a, it is more a part of Hulot than his own body. Look at the famous silhouette on the poster for Mon Oncle, it is by the pipe that we recognise him, and by which he becomes a kind of phatic image. As his frame juts forward when he walks, once gets the sense it is the pipe leading the way, calling the shots.  John Towsen equates the removal of Tati's pipe for the exhibitions poster on the Paris metro (!) to the removal of Chaplin's cane.

Not that noise is threatening or disturbing to this quiet man, as they sometimes are to Chaplin, rather it is a source of endless wonder and amusement. In Mon Oncle he spends considerable time positioning his window just so to reflect a pool of light where a little bird is perched, encouraging it to sing. One thinks, also, of his seemingly endless fascination with the noises made by chairs in Playtime. Bazin speaks of Hulot's world as one of a "sonorous inanity" that is nonetheless "undeniably human," claiming it is the sound of Tati's films that give them their "weight" and "moral dimension." As such, it is through sound effects that Tati brings everyday objects to life, and by reducing speech to a meaningless chatter, makes objects of his cast. We find ourselves in the magical world of Disney's Fantasia, where each little individual noise that has been bestowed upon each individual object becomes its spirit. Tati's moral philosophy, then, as revealed by his sound world, is object-orientated.

Of course, if there was one country for whom the controversial personal life of Charles Chaplin could never besmirch the heroic status of his tramp, it was France, and Hulot is very close to Charlot. But it was Buster Keaton who named Tati as his heir. Like Keaton, Tati can be seen as a theorist of technology, somewhat in the mode of Paul Virilio. For Virilio, "The invention of the substance is also the invention of the “accident.” Seen this way, the shipwreck is indeed the “futuristic” invention of the ship, the air crash the invention of the supersonic plane, and the Chernobyl meltdown, the invention of the nuclear power station." In this sense, Hulot, in all his calamitousness, is revealing the truth of the objects he encounters. "You must learn to get along with modern technology," says his sister, Madame Arpel, "become more modern." But in his subtle détournement of the Arpel's lime green sofa, Hulot shows himself the true modernist by transforming it into the close cousin of a Le Corbusier chaise longue.

Unlike Keaton's hardworking young man, however, Tati seems to be permanently on vacation. In his use of the camera and in the editing suite, Tati is a very different director to both Keaton and Chaplin. In his long, still takes, and wide-angle framing, Tati is very much a post-Rosselini comedian, with the austerity of Robert Bresson. There is a stillness and calm to his frame, even as chaos reigns amidst its subjects. The impassive features of Monsieur Hulot are somehow reflected in his international style image of Paris. "The biggest star of all is the set," Tati once said, and his characters, especially the Arpels in Mon Oncle, frequently resemble nothing so much as cuckoo clocks announcing the time. Michel Chion credits Tati's films with a certain "awareness of the cosmos," citing a childhood memory of watching Mon Oncle, "what I really liked about it was that night fell, and you had the feeling you were breathing night air." This sense of space, of air, is complemented by the soundtrack - the ever-present tweeting of bird song in Les vacances, and the ebb and flow of traffic, coming almost to resemble the babbling of a stream, in Playtime. "But what would Mr. Hulot be without vacation?" Asks Bazin. "We can even imagine that Mr. Hulot himself disappears for ten months of the year and then reappears spontaneously, in a kind of jump cut, on the first of July, when the alarm clocks finally stop and, in certain privileged places on the French coast and in the countryside as well, a provisional time creates itself, between parentheses as it were — a duration softly whirling, closing in upon itself, like the cycle of oceanic tides."

"The Dead Don't Talk."

If Hitchcock's rule of suspense states that the very terrifying thing that everything in the montage is leading you to expect must never actually happen, in the gialli cycle of films that spanned Italy's long 1970s, the thing almost invariably does happen, and usually in a manner even more gruesome and terrifying than we were led to expect (the death of the drunk in Lucio Fulci's Il Gatto Nero is exemplary here). But if these films differ from the Hitchcockian model in this sense, they nonetheless share that "specifically visual intelligence" that Fantastic Journal saw in the Red Riding Trilogy on Channel Four. Like Hitchcock's films, gialli almost always tell their entire story, even the characterisation, anything, in fact, that might be of interest, through the images (or rather through a combination of image, music and sound design that specifically excludes dialogue). Interviewed in 1994 at a U.K. horror convention, Lucio Fulci apologised that the only uncut print of his film, Zombie Flesh Eaters, available for the screening was in Italian and without subtitles, "But the dialogue isn't really important. The dead speak the international language."

It is partly this absence at the linguistic level that sets the gialli apart from the American film noir they are so often compared to. Despite having a similarly pulpy literary source, gialli and film noir differ on a number of levels: for the hardboiled language and frequent recourse to voice-over in noir, gialli substitutes minimal, superfluous speech; for noir's succession of cops and professional private eyes, gialli offer up a series of bumbling amateur detectives (Tonino Valerii's Mio Caro Assassino, being a rare exception), who often cause more death than they prevent; in place of the complex psychology of motive evoked by noir to explain its murders in terms of the symbolic order's own inherent transgression, murder in a giallo film is often explained in terms of a highly libidinised supernatural phantasy (the Lacanian Real); and for noir's long shadows and chiaroscuro lighting, gialli substitute a predilection for bright, over-saturated reds and yellows (giallo is Italian for 'yellow', a reference to the yellow covers of the Mondadori publishing house's yellow-backed paperback thrillers of the 30's and 40's). It may be instructive to compare the cool, reserved, minimalism of Jacques Tourneur's (1942) Cat People, in which nothing is ever quite seen, with the lurid maximalism of Fulci's (1981) Il Gatto Nero, in which everything is always seen, and usually in unpleasantly tight focus. Despite similar thematic ground, the style and sensibility of the two films could scarcely be more different.

Radio's Uncanny Origins

If Guglielmo Marconi had once considered the possibility of using his wireless telegraph as a means of contacting the dead, it would not be long before the same technology was being put to the service of mass slaughter. Already, by the dawn of the twentieth century, Marconi had demonstrated his new technology to the British and Italian navies and it was not long before it was in regular military use for the purpose of ship to shore communication and, with the invention of the thermionic valve, would prove an essential part of strategy and manoeuvres in the First World War. However, at this time, the use of wireless was still largely reserved for point to point communication and the idea that broadcasting, at that time considered a nuisance side effect of the technology, might become its principal use was largely foreign to those who used it. This was all to change in 1916, during the Irish Easter Rising.

On the 25th April, the day after Easter Monday, as the British troops called in reinforcements and declared a state of marshal law in Dublin, the Irish volunteers made the first broadcast from the post office on Sackville Street, using the same point to point technology to make a diffused message in the hope that their message, the declaration of an Irish republic, would reach the American press (Marshall McLuhan). In the same year, an employee of the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company of America called David Sarnoff would suggest to his bosses the possibility of radio becoming a “household utility” much as the piano had been; and so began the domestification of the radio at the very moment of the realisation of its revolutionary potential.

The formation of the British Broadcasting Company in 1922, at the suggestion of the Post Office, was largely a pragmatic attempt both to appease the commercial interests of the wireless manufacturers and to suppress the possibility of unrestrained amateur broadcasting. It was the BBC’s first Managing Director (and, later, first Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation), John Reith, who would articulate the philosophy of public service that would come to define the BBC’s mission (with true missionary zeal) in terms of universalism and national unification. Reith’s universalism was threefold, as Georgina Born explains,

First, universal availability: a national service meant that the entire population of the United Kingdom should be able to receive a high-quality broadcast signal. Second, there was a commitment to a form of social and cultural universality, in that the BBC undertook to produce both a regional and a national programme service. The audience was conceived both as a unity and as socially and culturally diverse. The BBC was to be an impartial arbiter, assessing the various constituencies and tastes and responding accordingly. Third, there was a universality of genre in the policy of mixed programming from the outset, BBC radio broadcast a wide range of genres each day and week, including news, talk, sports, drama, religion, light entertainment and a variety of music – both popular and classical. 

Reith’s universalism was centred around a concept of “the best of everything,” conceived as politically neutral and, ultimately, transparent, but which was to prove highly flexible given the different articulations of subsequent Director-Generals. The drawing together of the diverse strands of audiences and programming in the specific manner undertaken by the early BBC was thus responsible for a “new kind of public, commensurate with the whole of society, which it brought into being.” .

The BBC, under the “massive, totalitarian, and idiosyncratic” stewardship of John Reith came to exist in a ‘hegemonic relation’ to the British populace, “the nation [as] one man,” in Reith’s famous phrase - a spectral substitution whereby, “a certain body tries to present its particular features as the expression of something transcending its own particularity.” (Ernesto Laclau) The form of this relationship was through the metaphor of the National Family (David Morley) and the image held in the mind of BBC programme-makers of their audience was of “a family audience, seated round the fireside at home.” The radio thus became instituted, not just as a piece of furniture at the heart of the family home, but as the principal symbolic association between the domestic family and the nation state. At the heart of radio’s familiar homeliness, however, was an unsettling movement of the uncanny.

In Sigmund Freud’s (1919) essay on ‘The Uncanny’ [Das Unheimliche] he lays stress on a certain undecidability to be found in standard dictionary definitions of unheimlich’s apparent opposite, heimlich [homely]. Freud’s dictionary defines heimlich as both the “familiar and agreeable” and “what is concealed and kept out of sight.”. Freud thus sees in heimlich a meaning “which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”. This precisely is what is at work with regard to the position of the radio in the family home in modern Britain. By bringing the public sphere into the very heart of the private space of the home ), broadcasting created a structural indeterminacy between inside and outside, an intimacy that whispers in your ear, and the exteriority of an actuality constituted through outside broadcasts, summed up by Lacan’s concept of extimité or extimacy. The extimate object is the disembodied voice, which “functions as a strange body… a ghost-like apparition which can never be pinned to a definite visual object;” (Slavoj Zizek) The appearance of the voice, transmitted and transfigured through the ether, was perceived as a kind of uncanny intrusion from the very first radio transmissions, as Harlow describes of an early long distance transmission by R. A. Fessenden on Christmas Eve, 1906,

They listened eagerly, and to their amazement heard a human voice coming from their instruments – someone speaking! Then a woman’s voice rose in sound. It was uncanny!

Briggs, A., The History of Broadcasting in The United Kingdom Volume I: The Birth of Broadcasting, 1961, London: Oxford University Press; 

Cardiff, D. & Scannell, P., ‘Broadcasting and National Unity’, in Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century, Curran, J., Smith, A. & Wingate, P. (ed.s), 1987, London: Methuen, pp.157-173;

Morales, C., ‘Radio From Beyond the Grave’, in Radiotext(e), Strauss, N. (ed.), 1993, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 330-2;Scannell, P. & Cardiff, D., A Social History of Broadcasting – Volume One 1922-1939: Serving the Nation, 1997, Oxford: Blackwell;

Seaton, J., ‘Broadcasting History’, in Power Without Responsibility, Curran, J. & Seaton, J., 1981 [1997],London: Routledge.