The Mystery of a Hansom Cab as Spatial Artefact: Exploring Class and the Spatial Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Australia’s Favourite Whodunnit

Introduction

Published in 1886, Fergus Hume’s whodunnit, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (hereafter referred to as ‘The Cab’), is recognised as Australia’s first literary blockbuster (Sussex 5). It is also a quintessentially Melbourne novel. For Caterson, The Cab is remarkable for its ‘vivid evocation’ of Melbourne in its heyday, as ‘a thriving yet deeply divided Victorian metropolis’ (qtd. in Hume xiii). Indeed, as Lanning points out, one of the novel’s most remarkable features is that it presents Melbourne ‘not as a remote colonial outpost but as a modern, metropolitan city’ (1332). With The Cab’s use of real locations, described in great detail, Melbourne circa 1886 can be mentally ‘mapped’ by the reader against the timeline of the crime. However, the evocation of Melbourne is about much more than landmarks and place names. The novel also presents the reader with insight into the city’s history, culture and beliefs, as well as the attitudes and preoccupations of its people, all of which are filtered through the aesthetic and ideological lenses of the novel’s author, Fergus Hume. By doing so, it invites the reader to ‘saunter into a lost place, Marvellous Melbourne, a glorious if short-lived boom town of the 1880s’ (Sussex 2).

The novel opens with a crime: outside the Scots' Church, a drunken man is helped into a cab by another man whom the cabbie assumes is his friend; by the end of the ride, the drunken man is dead, and his ‘friend’ has hopped another cab to East Melbourne. Thus begins the central mystery, which requires a series of investigators of the professional and amateur varieties to unravel; these include two police detectives, a barrister, and the fiancé of the accused murderer. Unlike many other Australian mystery novels of the era, the text was not set on the goldfields or in the bush; it was set in the city (Lanning 1336). At the time, Melbourne represented a thriving metropolis. Rich with goldrush money, it was seen by many as the centre of entrepreneurism and technological progress in the southern hemisphere (see, for example, Twopeny 1). However, these same successes had led to growing social inequality and impoverishment. It was, in short, a city in which competing political economies and class relations were spatially embedded.

Literature is an important entry-point through which we can grasp this relationship between social class and spatiality. The ideologies that help constitute space and place, and are in turn constituted by it, are the same ideologies that authors like Fergus Hume take as their raw material and work into texts through literary forms, which are themselves ideological. This is crystallised in what Heino has described as a text’s spatial unconscious, an imprint of the spatiality of the society into which it is born (Space 178). Depending upon the ideologies being fashioned, the spatial unconscious can betray the lacunae and contradictions of those same ideologies. In turn, these lacunae and contradictions can work their way into the text’s representation of spatiality.

In his depiction of nineteenth-century Melbourne, Hume works from a middle-class liberal understanding of the world, an ideology which deeply structures how he depicts working-class and bourgeois spaces and places. This is an ideology which has been subjected to much study (see, for example, Rowse; Macintyre A Colonial Liberalism; Russell; Young; Sawer; Brett, Robert Menzies; Brett, Australian Liberals), and we shall unpack some of its constituent features below. The version of Melbourne depicted by Hume is one of extremes, promising pleasure and delight around one corner, and malice – even murder – around the next. This is consistent with Stallybrass and White’s assertion that, in detective fiction of the late-nineteenth century, the city ‘was produced as the locus of fear, disgust and fascination’ (125).

This conception of the world requires a clear bifurcation of the two essential classes of capitalism to establish the space for the middle-class to function as an intermediary that ensures the reproduction of capitalism through constructing the working-class as a problem to be ‘solved’. The ideological matrix Hume works with demands this bifurcation, and he is largely successful at creating it, particularly insofar as he sharply distinguishes and balkanises bourgeois and working-class spatiality. However, the working of ideology through literature often reveals its lacuna and limitations, which are given voice behind the back of the author, so to speak. Despite the structure of the ideology he works with, Hume is forced to reveal porosities between the spaces and places of capital and labour, porosities that both reinforce and corrode the dualistic spatiality of the novel’s literary world. In this sense, The Cab, and literature more broadly, can be considered a spatial artefact, a preserved entry-point into the spaces and places of the society in which it was born.

The Spatial Unconscious

The theoretical framework employed as the basis of the authors’ interpretation of The Cab is a synthesis between structural Marxist literary theory and radical geography, crystallised in the concept of the spatial unconscious possessed by all literary texts (Heino, Space 35–60). Representing an explicit effort to spatialise Jameson’s notion of a text’s political unconscious and Rodríguez’s understanding of a text’s ideological unconscious, the spatial unconscious of texts represents the ‘inherent imprint of the spatiality of the society into which they are born which we can mine for spatial knowledge’ (Heino, Space 178). It is thus a concept that is a specific intervention into the field of literary geography, ‘an emergent interdisciplinary field of research situated at the interface between human geography and literary studies’ (Alexander 3), premised on the idea that ‘[g]eography pervades the content, practice and meaning of creative writing; it is simultaneously intrinsic to, while weaving its way into, the very interstices of the written word’ (Saunders 436).

The notion of the spatial unconscious represents much more than a label simply serving as a fashionable reminder that ‘space matters’ (a point which is at this time more-or-less an axiom across the social sciences). Rather, the spatial unconscious posits that the spatial knowledge we can glean from literary texts has two very distinct features, with one relating to form, the other to content. Regarding the first, Heino (Space 42), following Eagleton (Criticism 72–85) and Rodríguez (xvi–xvii), has argued that the essence of the individual work of literature is as a form-determined expression of ideology. Ideology is obviously a concept with an enormous breadth of meanings and methodologies embedded within it (for an illustrative overview, see Eagleton, Ideology). In this paper, we follow the definition of Althusser, who inspired a distinct structural Marxist approach to literary analysis that we find particularly suited to literary geographic scholarship. Faced with the infinite complexity of the Real and the fact that it can only be grasped through textual/representational means, Althusser notes how societies produce ideology, ‘a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society’ (For Marx 231). Ideology goes to the very core of humanity’s existence, in that it ‘is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world’ (Althusser, For Marx 233). On the basis of this definition, Althusser argues that all human societies produce ideologies; there is no social formation that has or could be free from ideology (even a putative future communist one – Althusser, For Marx 231–32). However, ideology in class-divided societies is qualitatively distinct, in that ideological effects are harnessed to the struggle between classes – ideology transforms consciousness into subjectivity in light of this struggle, with dominant ideologies seeking to produce and reproduce ruling-class domination, subversive ideologies seeking to struggle against it. In so doing, ideology thus crystallises and materialises the class-power relations of the society in which it is born.

Literature is a particularly important site of ideological contestation. Rodríguez (11–12), working from an explicitly Althusserian perspective, captures this in his notion of a text’s ‘ideological unconscious’, with literature being intrinsically embedded in a social formation’s ideological matrices. Literature is thus constitutively tied to a society’s ideological structures; the act of writing literature is simultaneously an ideological act. In this dual act, ideologies are worked into a textual product by specifically literary devices, such as narrative paradigms, genre and conventions. These constructs are themselves ideological, allowing Eagleton to describe literature as an ‘ideological production to the second power’ (Criticism 5). As the business of recording and recreating ‘the lived experience of human existence’ (Althusser, On Ideology 175), literature can thus both express and reveal the contradictions of the ideologies from which it is crafted and on which it operates.

The spatial unconscious is premised on this particular understanding of the form of ideological knowledge we can glean from texts. It is not the text’s strict fidelity to historical/geographical accuracy which is the keystone to its value (although this may be important in texts like The Cab, which derives its legitimacy in part from the fact that it purports to represent an accurate picture of late-nineteenth century Melbourne life); rather, it is the method by which literature allows us to decipher the power-relations, structures and contradictions of the ideology of a class-divided society (Macherey 117–51; Jameson 173).

This understanding as to the form of knowledge within the spatial unconscious is premised on a more-or-less orthodox structural Marxist literary approach. The novelty of the spatial unconscious turns more upon its second feature, that is, the content of this knowledge. On this score, the spatial unconscious draws heavily from the understandings of radical geographers, stressing the social construction and constitution of the spatiality of capitalist society (for an overview of this tradition, which includes scholars like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Andrew Herod, see Heino, Space 13–32). The social relationships of capitalism help generate these spaces, whilst these same relationships are themselves expressed spatially.

With the help of Lefebvre, we can go even further in arguing that space is not a purely material concern, an empty vessel within which things happen; nor is it purely a mental construct, akin to abstract mathematical reasoning. Rather, spatiality is a simultaneously physical, social and mental phenomenon (Lefebvre, Production 38–39) which we will see amply demonstrated in The Cab. Across these matrices, the construction of space and place is intrinsically tied to social class. Capital and labour each seek to impress their own political economy spatially. In the case of the former, capitalist political economy rooted in competition, abstract labour and the universalisation of exchange-value (Lebowitz 10-11, 82), tends to the production of abstract space (Lefebvre, Production 49–53), described by Butler thus:

Abstract space is the fragmentary, pulverised space created by the imperatives of a capitalist economy and the state’s involvement in the management and domination of space. It provides a nurturing environment for the survival and reproduction of capitalist social relations. Lefebvre outlines three characteristic tendencies that simultaneously attach to abstract space – orientation towards fragmentation, homogeneity and hierarchy (49).

As capitalism penetrates further and further into social life, therefore, we should expect the growing dominance of abstract space. However, there is more to spatiality than the desires and structure of capital. In particular, scholars such as Herod and Heino have noted how working-class forces also actively seek to impress their own political economy onto the spatial form. Heino (Space 27) has argued that, against the fragmentation, homogeneity and hierarchy of abstract space, working-class resistance often takes the form of active efforts of place-making, of attempts to counter the violence and abstraction of abstract space by creating meaningful, concrete social places. Indeed, this project of place-making occurs on both sides of the class divide – even as they function to create a regime of abstract space, the bourgeoisie actively carve out and construct their own places, creating a complex spatial fabric within which one social actor’s space can be the other’s place, and vice versa.

1880s Melbourne – A Class Canvas

Before beginning the substantive analysis, it is necessary to put in hand a brief overview of the constellation of classes that characterised Melbourne in the late-nineteenth century so we may situate the precise nature of the middle-class liberal ideology we argue Hume is operating with. By way of introduction, it has been argued that ‘the characteristic class structure of colonial Melbourne was a product of three epochs: the land rush of the 1830s and 1840s, the gold rush of the 1850s and the land boom of the 1880s’ (Davison, ‘Class’). The combined result of these events was a complex, multi-layered class structure.¹

A crucial component of the ruling-class atop the pyramid, and of especial importance in The Cab, is the squattocracy, wealthy landowners who had gained their land – and power – by dispossessing Australia’s First Nations peoples, thereby allowing them to exploit the land for agriculture and mining (Paul 52). Squatters’ capital, along with that from an emerging urban manufacturing and financial bourgeoisie, circulated through the city, manifesting itself in the very structure of Melbourne. For example, during the 1880s the city would host two grand exhibitions (in 1880 and 1888), where locals and tourists alike were presented with a vision of Melbourne as a hub of commerce and culture replete with trains, cable trams and multistorey buildings. Evidence of the city’s booming economy could be seen in the rising number of telegraph exchanges in the central business district (they would double from five to ten between 1880 and 1890) and the standardisation of street numbers, both of which were designed to facilitate rapid communication, which Davison refers to as ‘the city’s very lifeblood’ (Davison, Rise and Fall 161).

At the opposite pole of the class structure sat the urban working class, including labourers, domestic servants, factory workers and other manual workers, who were increasingly in demand as the city’s economy boomed. However, conditions were often harsh, particularly for workers without union representation (Bowden 54). Another group suffering despite the city’s economic success was the urban poor, what might be dubbed from a Marxist perspective the ‘lumpenproletariat’. Many of these were viewed, by the wider society, as if they were to blame for their misfortune (Blackburn 207), while the law treated them as criminals (Davies 52). Both the working-class and lumpenproletariat were conceived by those above them as a potential danger, with the Port Phillip Gazette noting that ‘[i]n large cities the working class possess an importance which could never even be dreamed of in the country … In large cities the working class may war with and overpower their superiors’ (qtd. in Davison, ‘Class’).

Betwixt this basic structural division between capital and labour stood Melbourne’s middle-class. By the 1880s, members of this rapidly-expanding class could be found in commerce, trade and manufacturing, as well as in professions such as law and medicine (Davison, Rise and Fall 114–15). The middle-class enjoyed a relatively comfortable lifestyle, partaking of the cultural activities the city had to offer. This included attending horseracing and the theatre, both of which could be reached by public transport. They also found, in the city, an adequate education for their children, which offered the next generation the means to find a profession of their own (Richardson 2).

We argue that it is most productive to read The Cab as emanating from the ideological world view of this middle-class. There are of course many facets to this world-view, including an imitation of aristocratic values, close observance of rules of gentility and decorum, and a rigid gendered division of labour whereby ‘leisured’ wives became the guardians of respectability and networks (all of which we shall see come into play in The Cab: Russell 435; Young 71). However, the most significant element of this ideological structure, we argue, is the conception of a society bifurcated into two warring classes, labour and capital, between which the middle-class must act as an intermediary and representative of the general will. It is essentially in these terms that Menzies hailed the middle-class as the ‘forgotten people’ in the 1940s, the ‘backbone of the nation’ (qtd. in Connell and Irving 350). Brett has noted that Menzies’s appeal is to insert this class as protagonist into what is constructed as a false class war: ‘…it becomes society’s integrating centre – the class which is not a class, which holds society together, and which is able to include anyone who shares its values and its sturdy moral qualities, no matter what their economic position.’ (Robert Menzies 43)

Although Menzies’s positioning of the middle-class in this intermediary role was a creature of the twentieth century, it had antecedents in the nineteenth. Despite the fact that the Australian middle-class of this period did not enjoy the power of its equivalent in the metropole (Barcan 69), it nevertheless found itself involved in a range of social struggles where it often played the role of a lynchpin: for example, the struggles for colonial democracy and to repeal draconian Masters and Servants legislation (Schofield-Georgeson 62–106). Perhaps the best example can be found in the actions of middle-class liberals in the aftermath of the ruinous Great Strikes of the early 1890s, whereby industrial arbitration was forwarded as a way to forestall a destructive class struggle between labour and capital (see, for example, Macintyre, ‘Neither Capital nor Labour’ 182). As we shall unfold in greater detail below, there are two key structural features of this ideological matrix. Firstly, given the somewhat ambiguous nature of the middle-class in terms of what constitutes it and who belongs, there exists an inordinate fixation on morality and virtue as markers of class (often reflected by an imitative attitude to the values of the ruling class: Young 71). Secondly, there is evidenced a deeply ambivalent relationship to the working-class/lumpenproletariat, combining both pity and fear. Working-class ills are to be ministered to, the depredations of capital attenuated, but in a way that reproduces the working-class largely as it is. This ideological matrix is thus deeply hostile to radical working-class politics.

There are a number of ways we might deduce that Hume is working from this ideological worldview. At the simplest level, it could be argued that, coming from a middle-class background, he of necessity works from that stable. There is an important sense in which this might be true – the ideological understandings put in hand through one’s upbringing can form a frame of reference even if one were to consciously reject the ideology from which that frame is derived. However, a simple identification between the ideological background of the author and their work risks being too crude, in that it neglects the impact of more consciously chosen ideological frames and moreover assumes that the work is a direct emanation of the writer as a subject rather than as an act of literary production (a useful distinction made by both Macherey and Rodriguez). Here, whilst not being blind to the middle-class origins of Hume, we prefer to identify the ideology he works with as middle-class by dint of the content and form of the text itself; that is, this middle-class liberal ideology is detectable in its textual effects (a method of analysis employed by both Althusserian literary scholars and Jameson). Our concern in this article is to trace those effects in terms of how it informs and sustains its depiction of the spatiality of late-nineteenth century Melbourne; in a word, how it helps construct the novel’s spatial unconscious.

Two Themes

We contend that two key ideas, or motifs, represent the spatial unconscious of The Cab and encapsulate its articulation of the spaces and places of nineteenth century Melbourne through middle-class ideology. Each crystallises a particular set of spatial relationships through the ideological operation of the form and content of Hume’s text. These motifs are division, the sharp separation between bourgeois and working-class spaces; and porosity, the permeable personal and structural borders that allow movement between these locations.

Division: The Balkanisation of Bourgeois and Working-Class Spaces

Hume’s Melbourne is characterised by a fundamental class antinomy. It is a world with a very definite patchwork of bourgeois and working-class spaces and places, separated by porous borders and spaces of common usage that simultaneously link and demarcate them. Hume creates in The Cab a bright, vivid and intensely descriptive account of the places occupied by the bourgeoisie of Melbourne. His depiction of the Melbourne Club, the Yabba Yallook station and the St Kilda mansion, haunts of the protagonists of the leading Frettlby family, is central to the construction of the text’s spatial unconscious.

One of the city’s oldest institutions, the Melbourne Club features as the stronghold of a colonial bourgeoisie, which included elements of the aforementioned powerful squattocracy which had seized land (more-or-less illegally) in the early years of colonisation. The club was not Hume’s invention; it was an institution with a long history by 1885. In Massina’s Guide to Melbourne (1878), the building in which the ‘Melbourne Club House’ was situated, and the club itself, appear to have been conflated, with the writer observing, ‘The building is of a most substantial and massive description, and is the earliest and most influential of its kind in the southern hemisphere’. With amenities including a ‘fair table’, a ‘small library’, and a ‘racquet-court’, R. E. M. Twopeny suggested that it had ‘all the usual appurtenances of a London club’ (14).

The Yabba Yallook station serves as the magnificent rural homestead of the Frettlby family, led by the prominent squatter Mark Frettlby. It is described in luscious terms: ‘The homestead of Yabba Yallook station was a long low house, with no upstairs, and with a wide verandah running nearly around it. Cool green blinds were hung between the pillars to keep out the sun, and all along were scattered lounging chairs of basketwork’ (250–51). The terms of this description are instructive when compared to the following description of the classic colonial bungalow of British India: ‘the archetypal bungalow in the 19th century consisted of a low, one-storey, spacious building, having a symmetrical internal layout, with a veranda all around, situated in a large, landscaped compound’ (Desai and Desai). Such an architectural form adapted styles from the metropole to local conditions, and in so doing ‘became a symbol of Britain’s commercial and military might’ (Desai and Desai).

A similar process is at play with Yabba Yallook. It is one of the quirks of the Australian squattocracy that, although their rudimentary attempts to establish a kind of feudal countryside were an abysmal failure, they nevertheless reproduced the cultural forms of the British landed nobility in a colonial context (Irving and Connell 51–54). Hume validates this attainment of the aesthetic symbols of culture when he describes Frettlby holding court at Yabba Yallook: ‘A charming country house, where at certain seasons of the year, he dispensed hospitality to his friends, like the lord of an English manor’ (57).

The Frettlbys’ St Kilda mansion serves as their urban abode and is the scene of a constant stream of dinners, parties and gatherings that bring together the Melbourne glitterati. Again, Hume legitimates the cultural sophistication of the mansion through establishing a direct equivalence to the mother country, describing the mansion as, ‘a magnificent town house down in St Kilda, which would not have been unworthy of Park Lane’ (57). It is instructive that the mansion is located in St Kilda, which had then already attracted the reputation, along with other places like Toorak, as being a wealthy and fashionable suburb (Davison, Rise and Fall 55).

Hume appeals to the senses when describing these places, with the combined effect of making them more tangible for the reader while distinguishing them from the squalid environs of the lower classes. He uses light to depict bourgeois spaces as open, illuminated and pleasing to the eye. Mark Frettlby ‘very sensibly detested’ gas lighting within the home and opted instead for ‘nothing but lamps’ (361), which create a sense of intimacy for his guests. Even outside, the night is brightened, for the members of high society, by a collage of lighting effects. Beyond the Frettlbys’ fence is the St Kilda esplanade and the pier. When walking along the pier, accused murderer Brian Fitzgerald finds his attention captured by ‘the long line of the Williamstown lights like a fairy illumination’ beneath ‘a sky such as Doré loved … the serene moon shedding down her cold light on the fantastical cloudland beneath’ (77).

Archetypally, light and sight represent humanity’s capacity to understand and influence the world around them, while darkness makes us vulnerable to the dangers of the world and unable to take advantage of its benefits (Osborn 115). Hume’s use of light gives these bourgeois places their safety, their enlightenment and, perhaps most importantly, their comprehensibility. Even when dark is invoked, it is soft, gentle and normally interplays with light. This is evidenced, for example, in a touching scene where Mark Frettlby’s daughter Madge plays with the waters of a fountain at the Frettlbys’ St Kilda mansion at night:

It is curious the unearthly glamour which moonlight seems to throw over everything, and though Madge knew every flower, tree, and shrub in the garden, yet they all looked weird and fantastical in the cold, white light. She went up to the fountain, and seating herself on the edge, amused herself by dipping her hand into the chilly water, and letting it fall, like silver rain, back into the basin. (333)

Sound is also used to generate a positive impression of these bourgeois places. Throughout the book, parties at the Frettlby mansion and Yabba Yallook serve as a hub of music, with guests gathering around the piano and belting out a range of tunes. These include pieces from classical musicians such as Strauss, Offenbach, Mendelsohn, as well as more contemporary ditties such as Somewhere by Paola Frost and Going Down the Hill ‘which had been the rage in Melbourne musical circles during the last two months’ (279). Urbane debate as to the virtues and/or flaws of various artists, as well as the prowess of the performer, lend a genteel, if sometimes petty, air to the place. For the reader of the period, who would presumably have been familiar with at least some of this music, these references offered a virtual soundtrack to accompany various scenes. This focus on music is narratively justified within the novel by upper middle-class lawyer Calton’s observation that Melburnians’ love of music is only equalled by their love of horse racing. In tapping into this deep love, and locating it squarely in the bourgeois homestead, Hume displays his middle-class values of gentility and bourgeois imitation, particularly when as critical an observer as Twopeny (91) observed that even working-class homes often had a piano.

Hume’s bourgeois places are thus open, genteel and cultured. Perhaps most importantly, the middle-class liberal desire to emulate these values (and the concomitant dread of the working-poor, about whom we shall have much to say below) leads to a stress on the physical and social segregation of these sites. Institutions like the Melbourne Club, for example, are protected both by a physical separation (in this case, staff working the entrance, who can deny entrance of non-members to the inner sanctum) and a cultural one. This cultural separation is represented by a discourse which very quickly marks out strangers. To this end, an episode in which a waiter working at the Melbourne Club describes his dealings with a working-class girl named Sal Rawlins is instructive. Speaking to Brian Fitzgerald’s barrister, Calton, he recalls that she was:

‘A young woman, sir,’ said Brown, in a tone of disgust. ‘A bold thing, beggin’ your pardon, sir; and no better than she should be. She bounced in at the door as bold as brass, and sings out, “Is he in?” “Get out,” I says, “or I’ll call the perlice.” “Oh, no you won’t,” says she, “you’ll give him that,” and she shoves a letter into my hands. “Who’s him?” I asks. “I dunno,” she answers, “it’s written there, and I can’t read; give it him at once.” And then she clears out before I could stop her.’ (152)

From this description, the waiter’s contempt for Sal, and women of her ilk, is evident in the descriptors he chooses for her, including ‘bold’, ‘no better than she should be’, ‘bold as brass’, and in his characterisation of the manner in which she spoke and behaved, ‘sing[ing] out’ rather than speaking in the hushed tones expected of women at the time, and ‘shov[ing] a letter into [his] hands’ rather than passing it to him. He also highlights her use of the colloquial ‘I dunno’ rather than the more polished ‘I don’t know’. The irony is that the waiter himself is presumably from a working-class background, evidenced through his lack of refinement since he too misspeaks, using the abbreviation ‘beggin’ for begging, and referring to the ‘perlice’ rather than the police. The spatial unconscious of Hume’s text thus captures an essential element of spatiality generally: it is partly performative, requiring people to act out specific roles in specific spaces and places. Despite the fact the waiter is probably closer to Sal Rawlins’s station than Calton’s, he has internalised the norms of a bourgeois place and actively polices it.

As with the bourgeois places we have just explored, Hume attempts to construct a literary geography in which working-class places are clearly demarcated from those around them. In fact, Hume attempts an even more stringent containerisation of this spatiality through concentrating it essentially in a sole location – the slum of Little Lonsdale (or ‘Little Lon’, as it was then popularly known). Readers of The Cab would presumably have recognised this setting, despite the fact that it is never actually mentioned directly by name. Unlike the topography of the wider city, which Hume describes with a specificity that makes mapping the actions of the middle-and upper-class protagonists an easy matter, Little Lon is identified only indirectly. It is described as ‘one of the Melbourne back slums’ (160), in an unspecified location somewhere ‘off Little Bourke Street’ (172).

By the time of the novel’s publication, Little Lon had a firmly established reputation as a squalid hive of vice. In 1881, a royal commission into crime in the area had concluded that it was frequented by garroters, thieves and other small-time criminals, whose enterprises were supported by a network of publicans, pawnbrokers and moneylenders, all of whom stood to profit from their crimes (McConville 82). Massina’s Guide warned potential tourists away from the area, while Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia (Morris), by contrast, dedicated one of only four Melbourne-based chapters to its depiction. This demonstrates that, even as it was despised, Little Lonsdale and its surrounds held a fascination for the middle- and upper-classes. Graeme Davison suggests that this fascination may have been, in part, an attempt to demonstrate antipodean affinity with the great cities of Europe, all of which had slums. He opines that was also a way of the middle-class reassuring themselves of the difference between rich and poor (Davison, Outcasts 1). In Hume’s depiction of Little Lon, there is clear evidence of what historian Alan Mayne refers to as ‘bourgeois rationalizations for the uneven social outcomes of urban development – which blamed slumland immorality, criminality, and the collective pathologies of ethnic minorities’ (318). The novel thus suggests that this neighbourhood represents a challenge to the bourgeois social order in several ways.

Again, Hume invokes the senses when describing Little Lon, creating the impression of an amorphous, impenetrable and foreboding environment. The movement from the cosmopolitan Bourke Street, through the working-class Little Bourke Street and to the Little Lon slum is experienced as a progressive loss of light: ‘Turning off Little Bourke Street, the detective led the way down a dark lane’ (178). As Calton and the street-savvy detective Kilsip penetrate to Mother Guttersnipe’s abode at the heart of Little Lon, light is indeed almost wholly lost. Unlike the benign darkness of bourgeois places, darkness here is oppressive and sinister, hiding the essential spatial structure of the environment from outsiders like Calton, who must experience it step-by-step:

[Calton] found himself in a low, dark, ill-smelling passage, at the end of which they saw a faint light. Kilsip caught his companion by the arm and guided him carefully along the passage. There was much need of this caution, for Calton could feel that the rotten boards were full of holes, into which one or the other of his feet kept slipping from time to time, while he could hear the rats squeaking and scampering away on all sides. Just as they got to the end of this tunnel, for it could be called nothing else, the light suddenly went out, and they were left in complete darkness.

‘Light that,’ cried the detective in a peremptory tone of voice. ‘What do you mean by dowsing the glim?’

Thieves’ argot was, evidently, well understood here, for there was a shuffle in the dark, a muttered voice, and then someone lit a candle with a match. (180–81)

As is evidenced by the foregoing passage, Hume brings into play other senses by which to radically separate bourgeois and working-class places. Smell is invoked through reference to the ‘ill-smelling passage’ (180). Sound is also used to establish a direct contrast with the genteel surrounds of Yabba Yallook and the Frettlbys’ St Kilda mansion; whereas these are characterised by the dulcet tones of classical pieces and modern ditties, Little Lon’s musical atmosphere is considerably less refined and darkly carnivalesque. When Calton and his guide reach their destination – Mother Guttersnipe’s abode – a woman sick with either drink or consumption ‘commenced singing a snatch of the quaint old ballad of Barbara Allen’ (185). Even this modest musical outburst is too much for Mother Guttersnipe, who threatens to choke her for ‘singin’ them beastly things, which makes my blood run cold’ (185–86).

To the extent that we ever hear any musical numbers from Mother Guttersnipe, they are of a brutal, animalistic type. Letting flow a string of curses and a type of war dance in response to discovering that she would not be receiving reward money, ‘Calton, remembering the tales he had heard of the women of Paris at the Revolution, and the way they danced “La Carmagnole,” thought that Mother Guttersnipe would have been in her element in that sea of blood and turbulence’ (226). For the eminently upper-middle class Calton, this performance equates in his mind revolution with the lumpenproletariat, the dregs of the working-class – that is, revolution is the movement of the Mother Guttersnipes of the world. In this moment, the deep-seated middle-class fear of the lower classes, revolving around their presumed savagery and penchant for violence, bubbles to the surface.

This middle-class fear is further manifested in the deeply animalistic terms through which the denizens of Little Lon are depicted. A group of Chinese men appear to Calton as if they are ‘chattering shrilly, like a lot of parrots’ (179), while a young girl, tasked with guarding Mother Guttersnipe’s crib, regards Calton’s guide, Detective Kilsip with a mixture of defiance and fear, ‘as though she were a wild animal, cowed against her will’ (181). Mother Guttersnipe herself is described as ‘a repulsive looking old crone … [with] a hook nose, like the beak of a bird of prey, and a thin-lipped mouth, with two long yellow tusks sticking out like those of a wild boar’ (183).

Whatever their differences, Hume shows how the spatial roles of working-class places are every bit as performative and personal as those of bourgeois environments. Consistent with what we view as his desire to create a sharply defined class duality, Hume depicts working-class people as guarding their own places through unique forms of discourse. This is so stark as to render the environment next to incomprehensible to Calton without the aid of the street-smart Kilsip, who is well across ‘thieves’ argot’ (181). This discourse is sometimes conveyed through the spoken word but is more often demonstrated through characters’ non-verbal behaviour. Regarding the former, an instructive example can be found when Calton and Kilsip first visit Mother Guttersnipe’s crib, interrupting in the process her telling the fortune of a ‘villainous-looking young man’ (181) who Calton believes is headed for Pentridge prison or the gallows. He reluctantly departs, ‘muttering as he went out something about “the bloomin’ cheek of showin’ swells cove’s cribs”’ (184). More commonly, the denizens of Mother Guttersnipe’s crib communicate the out-of-placeness of Calton through an attitude of sullen silence, insolence and barely-veiled hatred. Just as the waiter jealously defended the cultural barriers guarding the space of the Melbourne Club from working-class intrusion, so too do Hume’s working-class characters defend their places discursively.

Hume has thus attempted to create a literary geography marked by a very strict balkanisation of bourgeois and working-class spaces and places. As we have demonstrated through references to sources of and about the time of nineteenth-century Melbourne, there is a material sense in which this separation is true. However, as Jameson (173) has acknowledged in the context of George Gissing’s slumland novel The Nether World, the real knowledge-value of this strict distinction lies clearly in its unfolding of the logic of middle-class liberal ideology, which demands a clear and abrupt separation between capital and labour. It is only in the gap opened by this separation that the middle-class can insert itself as an intermediary (Brett, Robert Menzies) one that attempts to remedy class antagonism by projecting the working-class as a problem to be ‘solved’. As explored above, this belief was a central tenet in the middle-class liberalism of leading figures in nineteenth and early-twentieth century Australian politics (including, for example, Alfred Deakin: Brett, Australian Liberals 20-21).

Porosity: Flows of People and Capital

Despite Hume’s efforts to represent the strict bifurcation of bourgeois and working-class spaces and places, a close reading of the text reveals porosities, both personal and structural, between these realms, porosities that call into question the sharply defined categories of The Cab’s literary world. In this world, there are two main means by which movement occurs between bourgeois and working-class spaces and places. The first relates to the passage of individual persons between them. We argue that this is a movement which Hume explicitly provides for as, in his hands, it is a process that respects the spatial rootedness of performative social roles and so reinforces the basic dualism he seeks to create. The second is a structural movement, constituted largely by the capacity of money to act as a spatial solvent, and thus is a key component of abstract space. This, we argue, is an element that seemingly works behind Hume’s back, an unwitting result of his textual fashioning of the ideology of an emergent capitalist society.

Despite the balkanisation of the spaces and places of the literary world of the novel, Hume does allow the movement of people across and between these locations. For our purposes, there are two primary instances of this in the text: Calton’s visits to Mother Guttersnipe’s hovel in Little Lon; and Sal Rawlins relocation from that same hovel to the Frettlby households in Yabba Yallook and the St Kilda mansion.

In the attempt to exonerate his client Brian Fitzgerald, Calton is forced on numerous occasions to enter Little Lon. From the beginning, Hume establishes an essential spatial term of this movement: Calton is not fit to navigate the space himself. Rather, he requires the guidance of Kilsip:

“Keep close to me,” whispered Kilsip, touching the barrister on the arm; “we may meet some nasty customers about here.”

Mr Calton, however, did not need such a warning, for the neighbourhood through which they were passing was so like that of the Seven Dials in London, that he kept as closely to the side of his guide as did Dante to that of Virgil in the Infernal Regions. (178–79).

Aside from the comparison to Dante’s Inferno, which further entrenches Little Lon as a place of perdition, it is clear from this passage that Calton is clearly out-of-place to such a degree that he can navigate neither the physical nor cultural landscape of this environment unaided. In an extract we referred to previously, Calton finds himself in a suddenly pitch-dark stairway, not possessing the ‘thieves’ argot’ that allows Kilsip to rectify the situation (181). As the two men navigate progressively narrower laneways, he wonders ‘how human beings could live in them,’ likening the experience to ‘walking in the valley of the shadow of death’ (180). He also panics at one point about the threat of catching any of the illnesses presumably common in the district, a common middle-and-upper-class fear of contamination by those they considered impure or contaminated (Pittard 3).

When Calton eventually penetrates this unwelcoming space and finds himself in Mother Guttersnipe’s ‘den’ (the term he uses to describe it), his response is one of revulsion, fear and horrified awe, strengthening the ideological binary between bourgeois and working-class places that Hume has established. Of Mother Guttersnipe, Calton reflects that ‘she was worthy of the pencil of Doré to depict, such was the grotesque ugliness which she exhibited’ (183). The terms of this construction are instructive – his disgust is registered precisely through the terms of an upper-class aesthetic. When she takes umbrage at Kilsip drawing attention to her constant drunkenness, her voice is suddenly ‘full of hatred and suppressed malignity’ (187), making Calton shudder with fear. This is not the only time he associates the old woman’s outbursts with the threat of violence and disorder, including of the social variety. Indeed, as discussed previously, he likens a war dance she performs to the Terror of the French Revolution. After travelling to this environment, which Calton finds physically and morally insalubrious, in which there is no spatially-ordained role for him to play, he wants only to find sanctuary: ‘Thank heaven,’ said Calton, taking off his hat, and drawing a long breath. ‘Thank heaven we are safely out of that den…but, come, let us have a glass of brandy, for I feel quite ill after my experience of low life’ (189).

Given that Calton had earlier that evening offered Kilsip cigars and whisky in his plush office, we are led to conclude that he will be retiring to that same location. Hume makes clear that this is a redoubt of bourgeois/middle-class sensibility (remembering our previous assertion that the latter is imitative of the former) through a recollection brought to Calton's mind as he attempts to curry influence with Kilsip in the office: “Diplomacy,” said Calton, to one young aspirant for legal honours, “is the oil we cast on the troubled waters of social, professional, and political life; and if you can, by a little tact, manage mankind, you are pretty certain to get on in this world.” (168). This is a bourgeois/middle-class attitude with a clear spatial message: upon exposure to the horrors of Little Lon, Calton must withdraw to his place, a place over-girded with his own upper middle-class meanings and understandings, to reconstitute himself. In so doing, Hume attempts to close the gap torn in the separation between working-class and bourgeois spaces and places in a manner that strengthens the initial dualism.

Hume attempts the same kind of spatial closure in his treatment of Sal Rawlins. Sal, the working-class girl who delivered the message for Brian Fitzgerald at the Melbourne Club, proves to be a key witness to establishing the latter’s innocence. After a lengthy search that stretches across the continent, Sal returns to Melbourne, where she takes refuge with her grandmother, Mother Guttersnipe. To find Sal, Calton must return to Little Lon. When he sees her, he finds in Sal the epitome of a fallen woman, a point that Hume invokes via the sense of sight: ‘she was a tall, slender woman of about twenty-five, not bad looking, but with a pallid and haggard face, which showed how ill she had been. She was dressed in a kind of tawdry blue dress, much soiled and torn, and had an old tartan shawl over her shoulders’ (219–20).

The negative connotations of the words ‘tawdry’, ‘soiled’ and ‘torn’ are strengthened when Sal describes how she has been living, using the distinct yet unrefined dialect of Little Lon: “I tooked up with a Chinerman…an’ lived with ’im for a bit” (221). At this revelation, Calton’s disgust is obvious, to which Sal acknowledges that it must seem ‘orful’; and yet she defends Chinese men, suggesting that they “treat a pore gal a dashed sight better nor a white cove does. They don’t beat the life out of ’em with their fists, nor drag ’em about the floor by the ’air.” (221). Here, Mother Guttersnipe’s abode becomes the meeting-place for two distinct ideologies, as middle-class indignation at breaches of abstract racial purity clashes with a working-class political economy that favours concrete connection, the content of social relationships over their form (Lebowitz 201–02).

Sal Rawlins’s subsequent ‘salvation’ is brought about through her willingness to testify on Brian Fitzgerald’s behalf, and through Madge’s offer to give her a home at Yabba Yallook and the St Kilda mansion in response. In her new bourgeois surrounds, Sal undergoes a transformation in the way she speaks, dresses and behaves. This is evident in the way she carries herself when she is reintroduced to Calton and Kilsip, when she demonstrates that she is capable of using an elevated syntax and vocabulary. She responds to their questions in a dignified tone, speaking ‘quietly’ (366) and ‘calmly’ (367). It is only when she is overtaken by the ‘excitement of the moment’ that she ‘recur[s] to her Bourke Street slang’ (368).

In the novel’s denouement, Sal’s redemption arc is complete when she chooses to use the modest stipend provided for her out of Mark Frettlby’s estate not on herself, but on her ‘fallen sisters’ (408). The narrator reveals that this decision would have a lasting impact upon the women Sal chose to help in the years to follow, stating ‘many an unhappy woman was saved from the squalor and hardship of a gutter life by the kind hand of Sal Rawlins’ (408). Here, the middle-class liberal ideology which Hume works with must strike a delicate balance. Concerned as it is with the lot of the poor, Hume has allowed her to ascend from the corrupting and impoverished environment in which she was born into upper-class gentility and education. However, as the poor are seen as a problem to be ‘solved’ and framed by the apparent insolubility of working-class and bourgeois spaces and places, this arc must perforce take the form of a spatial relocation from the former to the latter. The corrupting influence of Little Lon can be combatted, the novel suggests, by physically and therefore emotionally and psychologically moving away from it.

Once again, Hume has attempted to plug the porosities opened in the spatial unconscious of the book through doubling down on the intrinsic rootedness of certain social roles in certain spatial contexts. Sal does indeed make a physical and cultural journey from a working-class place to bourgeois ones, but the passage strips her of the hallmarks of the former and substitutes in the social roles of latter. The capacity to move between spaces is thus constructed in such a way that it reaffirms the radical differentiation and balkanisation of the working-class and bourgeois spaces and places of this capitalist landscape, a differentiation we have demonstrated is demanded by the middle-class liberal ideology Hume is setting in motion in the text. However, Hume has unwittingly revealed deeper forces at play, forces registered in the text’s spatial unconscious. In this context we would draw attention to the spatial movement of capital across and between the spaces and places of Hume’s Melbourne. Of prime significance here is the crucial role of money in constituting abstract space, the basic parameters of which we explored earlier in the article.

It will be recalled that abstract space ‘is the fragmentary, pulverised space created by the imperatives of a capitalist economy and the state’s involvement in the management and domination of space’, a space characterised by a homogeneity, hierarchisation and fragmentation that is functional to the reproduction of capitalist social relations (Butler 49). Key to the constitution of abstract space is the universalisation of the commodity form. As Marx traced exhaustively, capitalism sees the goods and services produced by labour take the form of commodities. The commodity form is characterised by an internal contradiction between its use-value (its actual utility as a good or service to the consumer) and its exchange-value (which registers the amount of socially-necessary labour time embodied in it, and thus the proportions in which it can be exchanged for other commodities) (Marx 125–31).

Capitalism sees a simultaneous movement whereby exchange-value is privileged over use-value at the same time that the reach of the commodity-form continually expands. The spatial manifestation of this process is the creation of abstract space, ‘which dances to the tune of the homogenizing forces of money, commodities, capital and the phallus. It denies the celebration of lived difference, of tradition, of jouissance, of sensual differential space’ (Merrifield 524). This abstract space fragments and parcellises space at the same time that it poses a measure of exchangeability (rooted in the dominance of exchange value) upon it (Butler 49). As against efforts (both bourgeois and, more particularly, working-class) to produce delimited, meaningful social places, abstract space acts as a spatial solvent in that it seeks to render the whole world in the raiment of exchange value, reducing the differences between locations to ‘rational’ economic considerations such as cost and profitability (Heino, Space 14). Lefebvre (Production 268–69) uses the modern city, networked in a global division of labour, as a paradigmatic example of a landscape where abstract space had established dominance.

Money, as the universal expression of exchange-value in a capitalist society, is a primary medium through which this spatial dissolution is effected. Writing in the late-nineteenth century, Hume was documenting a recognisably capitalist society that was nevertheless in its infancy, characterised by capitalist production of certain goods and services but continued petty-bourgeois, subsistence production in many others (Heino, Regulation Theory 15). Moreover, the continued power of the squattocracy, which always had quasi-feudal ambitions, served to heighten the spatial divide between the country and the city (Connell and Irving 114–15). In other words, we have a society which is moving to the rhythm of capital accumulation but is not yet dominated in its entirety by it.

The spatial unconscious of The Cab seemingly registers this state of flux behind Hume’s back. The key episode here revolves around the plot twist whereby Sal Rawlins turns out to be Sal Frettlby, a product of Mark Frettlby’s ill-fated romance with Mother Guttersnipe’s daughter, Rosanna Moore. Hume establishes early in the piece that Mother Guttersnipe has a lust for money. At the point of departing after their first visit, Calton gives her ‘some loose silver, which she seized on with an avaricious clutch’ (188). This markedly changes her behaviour: ‘[t]he sight of money had a genial effect on her nature’ (189). However, the revelations around Rosanna Moore and Mark Frettlby reveal a far deeper sense in which money is coming to be the organising principle of this society.

When they visit Little Lon for the final time in the novel, Calton and Kilsip find Mother Guttersnipe rapidly approaching death. It is at this point that they discover that, after living in the midst of abject poverty, she has been sitting on a small fortune in gold, a payoff from Mark Frettlby. It is worth quoting this episode at length:

“I’ll give you money to save me,” she shrieked, “good money – all mine – all mine. See – see – ’ere – suverains,” and tearing her pillow open she took out a canvas bag, and from it poured a glittering stream of gold. Gold – gold – it rolled all over the bed, over the floor, away into the dark corners, yet no one touched it, so enchained were they by the horrible spectacle of the dying woman clinging to life. She clutched up some of the shining pieces, and held them up to the three men as they stood, silently, beside the bed, but her hands trembled so that sovereigns kept falling from them on to the floor, with metallic clinks.

“All mine – all mine,” she shrieked loudly. “Give me my life – gold – money – cuss you – I sold my soul for it – save me – give me my life,” and, with trembling hands, she tried to force the gold on them. They did not say a word, but stood silently looking at her…’ (325–26).

This powerful passage shows the relationship between money and abstract space. Both the real Little Lon, and that of the novel, were fuelled – at least in part – by a shadow economy associated with vice, including crime, prostitution, alcohol and drug use. However, in this episode we have squatters’ capital, crystallised as money, kept in a pillowcase in the heart of a working-class slum. Capital, here generated by the economic activity of a squatter’s runs like Yabba Yallook, has penetrated (with no apparent difficulty) into a landscape largely bereft of it; capital is proving the blood in the veins of this new colonial society. We have here an unconscious registering of the fact that society is beginning to move in tune to the rhythm of capital (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 18–19, 61–65), a foundational moment in the creation of a regime of abstract space.

Just as important as the capital flow's movement are the terms upon which that movement takes place. We have already traced that the transition of individual people between working-class and bourgeois locations is beset by a host of frictions constituted by location, discourse and cultural mores, frictions Hume deploys to affirm the fundamental separation of those spaces. Money, as value-in-motion, is beset by none of these same frictions. Indeed, it is part of the constitutive character of money as a universal equivalent that it is by nature abstract. Whether found in a back room at the Melbourne Club or in a pillow-case in Little Lon, the pile of sovereigns commands exactly the same power to purchase other commodities and/or earn interest. As Marx (164–69) illustrates through the concept of commodity fetishism, this abstract power of money clouds its social origins in mystery, with money appearing as the source of value rather than its expression.

And what are the results of this mystical conception of money? An attributing to it of all manner of power, most specifically the power of the abstract to conquer the concrete. Pay close attention to the words of Mother Guttersnipe: ‘“Give me my life – gold – money – cuss you – I sold my soul for it – save me – give me my life,” and, with trembling hands, she tried to force the gold on them’ (326). In her dying moments, she maintains that gold can buy life: that the abstract power of money can overcome that most concrete of natural processes, death. The fact that it cannot does not obviate the significance of this conception of money.

One of the most important, yet entirely unspoken, elements of the text is that, in its own way, the bourgeoisie holds this exact same conception of money. Brian Fitzgerald’s life is ultimately saved through the vehicle of money; if not for his social connections and access to the best of legal representation, the chain of evidence which ultimately vindicates him would never have been uncovered. Had Mother Guttersnipe or her ilk been in the same position, they would have so surely been hung that there would essentially be no story to tell. Life and death can, then, depend upon the capacity of the abstract to conquer the concrete.

The capacity of money to make both working-class and bourgeois spaces and places move according to its rhythm is thus a key moment in the constitution of a regime of abstract space, which is defined in part by its homogenisation of space. The Cab thus reveals a far deeper structural process that works as a spatial solvent, homogenising these spaces and places in terms of their rationality and functionality to capital.

Conclusion

Literature, particularly realist literature such as The Cab, demands for part of its effect on an acknowledgement by the reader that it does more-or-less accurately represent the spatial structure of its setting (Tally 150–51). However, whilst there are definite elements of historical truth in The Cab’s depiction of these spaces and places, the clarity of this spatial structure, and the classes to which it corresponds, speaks more to an aesthetic handling of a contradictory society in which middle-class liberal sympathy with the poor was tempered by revulsion of those same poor and horror at what they might become. In this sense, The Cab creates a spatial structure that both reflects a middle-class sensibility and accords it a definite role in ‘fixing’ it, a role that was central to how that middle-class perceived itself.

By this rationale, the middle-class could be seen as a third force, mediating between the implacably opposed categories of capital and labour. As we saw, it was precisely in these terms that, building on the growing middle-class of the nineteenth century, Menzies hails this middle-class as the ‘forgotten people’, the backbone of the nation in the mid-twentieth century. For middle-class ideology to function effectively as a social force betwixt capital and labour, a dualistic spatial world must be created. Charity towards the poor, combined with fear and revulsion of them, necessarily takes the form of poverty being a problem to be ‘solved’. This problem is particularly amenable to an aesthetic solution, whereby the poor ‘over there’ can be helped through a process of physical and moral transformation ‘over here.’

In this regard, the spatial unconscious of The Cab is not a disinterested reflection of the spatiality of the society in which it was born; rather, it bears the imprints of a distinctive, classed intervention into those very spaces and places. The novel, Australia’s first literary blockbuster, disseminated around Australia and throughout Europe and America, served to strengthen the stratification and balkanisation of the spaces and places of late-nineteenth century Melbourne, a balkanisation that speaks as much to a middle-class ideology that sees itself as the mediating force between forces in binary opposition. The Cab works to entrench this binary from both the side of capital and the working-class.

Hume thus attempts to resolve the contradiction between bifurcated social spaces and the reality of movement between them at the level of the individual, which in itself demonstrates the fundamental symmetry between his project and bourgeois categories of the self. Indeed, criticism of Little Lon and its citizenry by representatives of the upper and middle classes, including Fergus Hume, would ultimately lead to its destruction (along with other slums) in the name of progress, as the city sought to rid itself of what Dixon refers to as ‘the symbolic filth of class pollution’ (39). That this was a fundamentally ideological view, as opposed to a strictly material one, has been confirmed by archaeological studies in the early 2000s uncovering physical evidence from cesspits and the ruins of streets and buildings. Thanks to their work, we now know that, by razing Little Lon, Melburnians destroyed a thriving working-class community (Mayne 319). That it was nevertheless destroyed speaks to the capacity of capital’s abstract space to conquer working-class spatiality, a then-inchoate possibility that was essentially plotted out aesthetically by Hume well before the event.

In the midst of a rapidly but unevenly developing capitalist society, the spatial unconscious of this text has thus aesthetically identified spatial forces that were then only embryonic. This is a story that Hume, as a man of his time, is unable to tell explicitly. His middle-class liberal ideology, demanding at it does a sharp differentiation between the rich and the poor, is unsuited to grasping common structural forces working across and through them. However, it is through the use and fixing of ideology in the literary text that we can detect its lacunas and necessary silences. Hume’s ideology is put into contradiction through the working of the text, and it is precisely in this process, as Macherey (117–51) suggests, that the true knowledge-value of the text resides.