Condomization in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes Tom Rice (bio) Early in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel that earned its notoriety by speaking frankly and graphically about sex, D. H. Lawrence’s spokesperson of the moment Tommy Dukes contends “that sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them”—”sex is a sort of communication like speech” (70, 72). But Dukes leaves unspoken the other half of this equation: sex is talk because talk is just another form of sex. Typically, for him, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence deconstructs the hierarchies privileging thought over act and oral discourse over sexual intercourse, central to Western philosophical and religious thought, conversely asserting that a sacred communion is embedded in the profane activity of speech. Lawrence recognizes the hierophany—in Mircea Eliade’s terms (11)—already encoded in our language: namely, communication is communion, “intercourse” signifies both verbal and sexual exchange, and “conversation” means both speech and cohabitation (via the French converser, meaning both “to talk with” and “to live with”).1 James Joyce exploits an identical double signification of “conversation” for the conclusion to his story “The Dead” when Gabriel Conroy checks into the Gresham Hotel, expecting “communion” with his wife Gretta. Ironically, before he sleeps, Gabriel does have intercourse, but not sex, with Gretta. T. S. Eliot similarly correlates discourse with intercourse throughout The Waste Land, associating speechlessness with emasculation, the male lamenting “I could not / Speak” in the hyacinth-girl episode, for example, or the female imploring her impotent gentleman caller in “A Game of Chess” to “Stay [End Page 129] with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak,” just as he associates garrulousness with promiscuity in the same section’s pub scene (Complete 38–39, 111–12, 139–73). Elsewhere in Eliot, J. Alfred Prufrock’s problem seems to be that he cannot converse with his beloved, in either sense of the term. That Prufrock’s internal monologue, however, is more eloquent than anything he might say (“Shall I say [ . . . ]” [Complete 70]), should remind us that the internalization of speech in the stream of consciousness technique, most clearly seen in Virginia Woolf, both emphasizes physical isolation and privileges spiritual, bodiless, telepathic, and definitely nonsexual communication. Clearly, this association of speech with sexuality—discourse with intercourse—is a common subtext among the writers of the early part of the twentieth century. I want to argue, however, not only that this subtext is pervasive in modernist writing, but also that thwarted communication, both among characters in these works of literature and between their authors and their audience, comes to represent a kind of prophylaxis. Modern writing may necessarily be “difficult,” as Eliot contends, because it reflects the complexity of contemporary life (“Metaphysical” 1104). But much of this difficulty results from what we might call the condomization of the text: with the exception of Lawrence, these writers I have cited seem to self-protectively sheathe their texts, shield their words from their audience, not so much from the fear that their words might be made flesh, as from an anxiety that a more direct conversation with the public body might expose their works to some kind of contamination. Edmund Wilson, although speaking of Joyce, could well be describing the effect of several of Joseph Conrad’s fictions when he claims, it’s “as if he did not, after all, quite want us to understand his story, as if he had, not quite conscious of what he was doing, ended by throwing up between us and it a fortification of [opaque language]—as if he were shy and solicitous about it, and wanted to protect it from us” (217). The Italian anatomist Gabriele Falloppio, after all, developed the sheath in the sixteenth century as a protection from venereal disease, namely syphilis, not as a means of birth control.2 Moreover, this figurative condomization of the text approaches the literal in Conrad’s political fictions The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911), as this author, a generation older than the major modernists, once again strongly anticipates the defining features of British modernism. My principal focus in this essay...

Our aim was to determine the frequency and characteristics of a fractionated pattern of diaphragm and upper airway muscle activity and airflow during wakefulness and sleep in adult goats. A fractionated breath (FBr) was defined as three or more brief (40-150 ms) interruptions in the diaphragm activity not associated with multiple swallows, eructation, mastication, or movement. During a FBr, the discharge pattern in the diaphragm and upper airway muscles showed complete cycles of inspiration and expiration. Whereas the interval between peak diaphragm activity of the breath preceding the FBr to the first diaphragm peak of the FBr was 15-20% less than the average interval of the preceding five control breaths, the breath-to-breath interval of the five breaths after a FBr did not differ from the control breaths before the FBr event. In normal goats, FBr was evident in only 4 of 18 (22%) awake goats and in only one of these goats during non-rapid eye movement sleep. In 35 goats with implanted microtubules in the medulla, FBr were present in 14 (40%) goats. In these goats with FBr, 78% (11 of 14) had one or more implantations into or near the facial, vestibular, or raphe nuclei. The effect of perturbations in these nuclei is probably nonspecific, because injections into these nuclei with mock cerebrospinal fluid or excitatory amino acid-receptor agonist or antagonist produced both increases and decreases in the frequency of the FBr while not altering their characteristics. Finally, a swallow occurred at the termination or during the first breath after 60% of the FBr. We speculate that the FBr manifest 1) the disruption of a neuronal network, which coordinates breathing and other functions (such as swallowing), utilizing the same anatomic structures, and/or 2) transient changes in synaptic inputs that increase the rate of the normal respiratory rhythm generator or allow an ectopic, anomalous generator to become dominant.

The effects of spontaneous swallows on breathing before, during, and after solitary swallows were investigated in 13 awake goats. Inspiratory (TI) and expiratory (TE) time and respiratory output were determined from inspiratory airflow [tidal volume (VT)] and peak diaphragmatic activity (Dia(peak)). The onset time for 1,128 swallows was determined from pharyngeal muscle electrical activity. During inspiration, the later the swallowing onset, the greater increase in TI and VT, whereas there was no significant effect on TE and Dia(peak). Swallows in early expiration increased the preceding TI and reduced TE, whereas later in expiration swallows increased TE. After expiratory swallows, TI and VT were reduced whereas minimal changes in Dia(peak) were observed. Phase response analysis revealed a within-breath, phase-dependent effect of swallowing on breathing, resulting in a resetting of the respiratory oscillator. However, the shift in timing in the breaths after a swallow was not parallel, further demonstrating a respiratory phase-dependent effect on breathing. We conclude that, in the awake state, within- and multiple-breath effects on respiratory timing and output are induced and/or required in the coordination of breathing and swallowing.

The pharyngeal constrictors have been hypothesized to play an important role in the regulation of upper airway (UAW) patency in patients with sleep apnea. However, little research has focused on the activation and control of muscles that determine the lateral and posterior wall of the retropalatal airway dimensions. Our aim was to investigate the effects of slow wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep on the activation of pharyngeal constrictor (thyropharyngeus; TP) and dilator (stylopharyngeus; SP) muscles during eupneic breathing and induced central apneas. In nine goats, we found that eupneic TP and SP activity progressively decreased from awake to SWS (57 and 56%, respectively; P<0.01) and further in REM (25.6 and 19.9%, respectively; P<0.01). In contrast, diaphragm activity decreased equally during SWS and REM (89.3 and 87.7%, respectively; P<0.01) compared to awake. Following induced apneas while SP activity was eliminated in every state, maximal TP activity was highest in awake state (318.6% of control; P<0.02), less in SWS (157.6%; P<0.02), and nearly absent in REM (117.3%; P>0.02). During the recovery from an induced apnea when diaphragm activity was at 95% of its' control, awake TP activity remained significantly elevated and SP reduced (P>0.02) while TP activity during SWS was elevated and SP had returned to control level. During REM, TP and SP activity were not different from their reduced controls (P>0.02). The data supports our hypotheses that SWS and REM sleep causes a reduction in the eupneic TP and SP activity, as well as a reduction in TP response to induced apneas. However, the relative imbalance in TP vs SP activity during the recovery from an apnea (awake and SWS) suggest that an imbalance of active neuromuscular forces may contribute to upper airway narrowing in mixed apneas, but not in central apnea during sleep.

Our aim was to investigate the effects of the negative pressure reflex on mechanically opposing pharyngeal muscles during wakefulness, slow-wave sleep (SWS), and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. In four goats with isolated upper airways, we measured tracheal airflow and electrical activity of the thyropharyngeus (TP; constricting), the stylopharyngeus (SP; dilating), and the diaphragm (Dia). In the wakefulness state in response to negative pressure tests, TP decreased (65%), SP increased (198%), and tidal volume (V-T) (66%) and rate of rise of Dia (Dia(slope), 69%) decreased (P< 0.02). Similarly, during SWS, the negative pressure response of TP (31%), V-T (61%), and Dia(slope) (60%) decreased, whereas SP (113%) increased, relative to SWS control (P< 0.02). In REM sleep, the negative pressure response by TP and SP were small, whereas both V-T (38%) and Dia(slope) (24%) were greatly decreased (P< 0.02) compared with REM control. Inspiratory duration remained unchanged in response to negative pressure tests in all states. These data provide evidence that mechanically opposing inspiratory and expiratory pharyngeal muscles are reciprocally controlled and their response to negative pressure are state dependent.