CONTENTS
1
Editor’s Notes
5
Beáta Sáfrány 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
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János Barcsák Marking, Consciousness, Fabulation: The Lady’s Presence in Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant”
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Ivett Császár Being Bemused by National Pride: George Orwell’s Patriotism during the Second World War
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Ali Shehzad Zaidi Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin and Women’s Rights in 85 Eighteenth-Century United States Péter Gaál-Szabó Liminal Places and Zora Neale Hurston’s Religio-Cultural Space in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine 101 Teodóra Dömötör Anxious Masculinity and Silencing Hemingway’s “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”
in
Ernest
Pramod K. Nayar The Biotechnological Uncanny: Frank Miller’s Ronin
121 135
REVIEW ESSAY Erika Mihálycsa Writing on the Margins: Beckett Scholarship Out of the Archives
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Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
REVIEWS Anikó Sohár An Almost-Scholarly Monograph (Umberto Rossi, The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick: A Reading of Twenty Ontologically Uncertain Novels) 165 Joachim Fischer A Fresh Light on Utopia (Károly Pintér, The Anatomy of Utopia: Narration, Estrangement and Ambiguity in More, Wells, Huxley and Clarke)
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Gyula Somogyi Figures of Moses (Barbara Johnson, Moses and Multiculturalism)
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Csilla Bertha Friel: The Political View (Anthony Roche, Brian Friel: Theatre and Politics)
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Mária Kurdi Dramatizing Abjection: The World of Marina Carr through Kristevan Theory (Rhona Trench, Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr) 188 Gyula Somogyi Criticism and Pleasure (Catherine Belsey, A Future for Criticism)
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Ágnes Györke Slavery in Fiction or History (George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture) 196
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Judit Szathmári Textbook Indians vs. Real People: A Tribute to Survival (John A. Strong, The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern 202 Long Island: A History) Zoltán Peterecz The Power of Personality: A New Interpretation of the Origins of the Cold War (Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War)
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Szilárd Orosz “Meet Me in Montauk”: Philosophers Explore the Spotless Mind (Christopher Grau, ed., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) 215 Szilárd Orosz David Mamet at His Best as Indie Auteur (Yannis Tzioumakis, The Spanish Prisoner)
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ABSTRACTS
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
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Editor’s Notes “We live in history as the fish lives in water,” remarked the American theologian Richard Niebuhr many years ago, and since history is the natural habitat of humans we need continually to recall events and people accurately as well as their context. But Americans, perhaps the most futureoriented people on Earth, are notorious for their forgetting of history even including such a traumatic event as the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. A dozen or so years ago Cathleen Schine undertook to help jog Americans’ memory by providing a historical context for the attack and subsequent collapse of the towers on 9/11 by tracing the history of the very ground on which they had been erected. She began by going back to when the “ground” was not earth but sea before all the extensive land-fill projects had made Manhattan its present size. She reported on other calamities enacted on that spot, such as when the Dutch trading ship, the Tijger, “. . . a world away from home, burned and sank beneath the water where almost four hundred years later two towering buildings devoted to world trade burned and sank to the ground” (47). After early land-filling efforts during the American Revolution, on 21 September 1776 a huge fire whether accidentally or, as General George Washington believed, deliberately set, “destroyed one-quarter of the city’s buildings and everything on the site of the future World Trade Center” (Shine 49). Leaving bereft . . . povres et riches Sages et folz, prestres et laiz Nobles, villains, larges et chiches Petiz et grans et beaulx et laiz . . . poor and rich Wise and foolish, priests and laymen Noblemen, serfs, generous and mean Short and tall and handsome and homely (François Villon, “The Testament,” trans. Galway Kinnell)
But New Yorkers rebuilt with “unheard of quickness,” and, according to La Rochefoucauld, who in 1797 visited the rebuilt section, it “is now one of the handsomest parts of [New York City]” (qtd. in Shine 49). More extensive reclamation projects were carried out over the next decades culminating in 1966 in the extension now known as Battery Park ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
City created from dirt removed in order to rest the foundation of the World Trade Center Towers securely on bedrock (Shine 51). Thus, this relatively small patch of land has been the site of several catastrophes as well as become a symbol of the affirmation of American optimism and determination to rebuild and move into a brighter future. In the decade since their fall the Twin Towers have become the subject of numerous documentaries, literary explorations, and, unfortunately, popular myth-making. There is a segment of the American public that thrives on conspiracies, especially those involving the federal government. 9/11 has proven a gold mine for such people—probably the best occasion for constructing alternative conspiracy scenarios since President Kennedy’s assassination. Many of these conspiracies are hatched by right-wing hate groups, as extensively documented by Morris Dees and the pioneering Southern Poverty Law Center. In a time of instant internet access with the resulting extensive material available on social media, it becomes increasingly easy for conspiracy mongers to attract a wide, sometimes sympathetic, but often innocent and unsuspecting, audience. Unfortunately, these conspiracy scenarios sometimes gain access to more mainstream media lending them an undeserved credibility, as, for instance, when one of the most notorious 9/11 conspiracy “documentaries” was shown on Hungarian national television without any disclaimer or warning about its unreliability. As both a Hungarian journal and as one of “English and American Studies,” HJEAS doubly welcomes Beáta Sáfrány’s extensive analysis of “9/11 Conspiracy Theories.” Her extensive, well-documented study covers conspiracy theories ranging from total denial to the more subtle and therefore the more dangerous pseudoscientific or what might better be termed a “half-digested ‘scientific’ theory.” Percy B. Shelley and George Orwell are, each in his own way, familiar and important figures in English Studies and both here receive fresh treatment. Ivett Császár, in “Being Bemused by National Pride: George Orwell’s Patriotism during the Second World War,” examines how Orwell’s patriotism reflects his changing set of values occasioned by WWII beginning with his famous essay “My Country Right or Left.” His patriotic feelings culminated not in another belletristic essay but in the propagandistic “The English People,” produced for the British Ministry of Information in 1944 as Orwell fell “entirely under the spell of myth making and war propaganda.” János Barcsák, in his extensive analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Sensitive Plant,” confronts a paradox which he poses as the question: “how could we be conscious of any ‘unfallen Paradise’ . . . without a narrative that describes this paradise in fallen language?” Barcsák also tackles the concomitant problem—
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one that most readers encounter when reading the poem—of accounting for the Conclusion on the basis of what precedes it. This ambitious in-depth reading—the first since Michael O’Neill’s over a half century ago—attempts to demonstrate that the Conclusion organically pertains to its fable and actually makes “the fable possible.” The question of women’s rights, always an issue in the formative years of the United States, rose to prominence at the end of the eighteenth century as reflected in the first two installments of Charles Brockden Brown’s dialogue between a widowed socialite and a young schoolteacher published serially in 1798 as “The Rights of Women.” Eventually an expanded version would become Alcuin that Ali Shehzad Zaidi in “Charles Brockton Brown’s Alciun and Women’s Rights in Eighteenth-Century United States” claims as “the first published fictional work by the first major novelist of the United States.” In the novel, Brown champions Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas of the rights of women. Both she and her program were then under broad attack (see, for example, the European Magazine that, for instance, in an odd linking of terms, called Wollstonecraft “a philosophical wanton”). Zaidi extensively documents how, through his controversial dialogues, Brown “dramatize[s] the predicament and dignity of women in eighteenth-century United States”. Zora Neale Hurston also took part in the historical fight for women’s rights. Unjustly neglected in her lifetime, she has now ironically become a prominent tourist attraction for the state of Florida. Returning to her important works, Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Péter Gaál Szabó examines the cosmological framework derived from “a distinct African American folk culture” that allowed Hurston to “construct an authentic religiocultural space. Deploying Victor Turner’s theory of liminality, Arnold Van Gennep’s theory of triple sequence in initiation rites, and Rachel Stein’s study of Voodoo, Gaál-Szabó concludes that Hurston’s anthropological “understanding of and experience with culture” enables her to present a diverse and authentic view of African American religious vision and experience. Of the many short stories written by Ernest Hemingway, “Mr. and Mrs. Eliot” must surely rank as one of his satiric best. Teodóra Dömötör, emphasizing Hemingway’s “ambiguous representation of masculinity,” offers a fresh analysis of this familiar story noting that “the story’s laconic style [suits] perfectly . . . the underlying theme of the text,” while the picture of the “relationship dysfunction reveals a modernist sensibility” played out against “forced Victorian ‘manliness.’” All of which will encourage readers to appreciate Hemingway’s humor afresh.
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HJEAS is happy to welcome back the Indian scholar, Pramod K. Nayar, whose essay on Frank Miller’s Ronin is the first on any of the highly popular graphic novels now occupying large sections of American and British bookstores to be published by HJEAS. Serialized in 1983-1984 Ronin “offers a vision of techno-capitalism . . . [by deploying] the uncanny to devastating effect.” Drawing on Freud, Derrida, and several theorists of the uncanny, Nayar demonstrates how “the blurring of the machine/human border generates the bio-tech uncanny” in the novel—that is somewhat reminiscent of Cyberpunk novels by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. If Samuel Beckett set himself “the anorexic goal of becoming ever slimmer,” our long-time contributor Erika Mihálycsa’s scholarship thankfully has not, as she undertakes the near-impossible task of reviewing almost one hundred contemporary essays on Beckett in four good-sized volumes. The result is a major review essay on our contemporary encounter with Beckett and his work. HJEAS has a new look on its website thanks to Web Designer Boglárka Kiss. The editors would like to thank her for the bright new design and thank also her predecessor, Zoltán Simon, for establishing the original web site and maintaining it for so many years. As with every refereed journal HJEAS is beholden to many scholars who willingly undertake the evaluation of essays, suggest improvements or modifications, and work with the editors and contributors to ensure the maintenance of a high quality journal. This issue our thanks go to Robert Gross, Stefan Hall, and John Resch in the United States; Gilbert McInnis in Canada; Richard Cave in the UK; and Támas Bényei, Tibor Glant, Géza Kállay, and Lenke Németh in Hungary, without whose generosity this issue would not have been possible. Also HJEAS now has a Book Reviews Editor, Attila Karia, who will take over beginning with the 2014 volume year. While Attila’s research interest focuses on American Studies, especially on Chicano and Chicana Studies, he also brings to this new position a wide ranging interest in all areas of English and American Studies. So welcome Attila! As this issue of HJEAS went to press the editors discovered that one of the essays we had accepted had been simultaneously submitted to another journal. Since this journal does not accept simultaneous submissions we removed the essay and returned it to the author. Donald E. Morse University of Debrecen
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Works Cited Kinnell, Galway. “When the Towers Fell.” The New Yorker 16 Sept. 2002: 53-55. Shine, Cathleen. “The ‘Holy Ground’: The Early History of the World Trade Center Site.” The New Yorker 16 Sept. 2002: 46-51. Villon, François, “The Testament.” Trans. Galway Kinnell. Qtd. in Galway Kinnell, 53.
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9/11 Conspiracy Theories Beáta Sáfrány _______________________________________________________HJEAS A conspiracy is generally defined as an “agreement between two or more persons to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible” (“Conspiracy”). A conspiracy theory is the belief that an “event or phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties” (“Conspiracy theory”). Although they are considered fictitious, conspiracy theories do not simply project the working of an overactive imagination. The power of these theories lies in their tendency to support their argument by referring to the very facts described in the mainstream accounts. Theorists meticulously analyze factual evidence and create an alternative story that gives people what they yearn for: a clear explanation of an incredible event. Conspiracy theories have been forged about many events in world history. Some state, for instance, that in 1933 Adolf Hitler firebombed his own capital building, the Reichstag, and blamed it on his political enemies in order to be able to institute a new national police force and establish himself as the dictator of Germany (Masters of Terror). The 9/11 conspiracy theorists claim that the US government used the attacks of September 11, 2001, to gain power over the Middle East and over the American people. More precisely, 9/11 conspiracy theorists allege that Bin Laden had never been the real enemy of the United States; the World Trade Center Towers were destroyed by controlled demolition; the Pentagon was struck by a missile; Flight 93 was shot down and George Bush was involved in the attacks. To assess the truth of these theories one needs to test the facts used to support the claims. To start with, conspiracy advocates argue that Bin Laden had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks and that al Qaeda as an organization does not even exist. In a Saudi dissident’s interview with the TV magazine Frontline, for instance, al Qaeda becomes equated with a guestbook. In this interview, Saas Al-Fagih said that a recruitment office had been opened in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the 1980s for young Arabs who wanted to take part in the Afghan war (Broeckers 128). At first, no record was kept of those arriving at the office, but since more and more families were inquiring about the whereabouts of their sons, Bin Laden created a record of names and dates (Broeckers 128). Besides this interview, theorists believe the empty ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
cave found in the mountains of Tora Bora near Pakistan in December 2001 also supports the assumption that al Qaeda is only a phantom enemy. If there is no terrorist organization called al Qaeda, there is no need for a leader. If Bin Laden is not the head of al Qaeda, then who is he? Is he a terrorist at all? Those in favor of conspiracy theories believe they have evidence that proves Bin Laden is not guilty of the 9/11 attacks. Since September 11, 2001, Qatar’s al-Jazeera satellite television channel has aired many video tapes featuring Bin Laden, some of which lead conspiracy theorists to question the official version of the attacks since Bin Laden’s appearance seems to them either un-Islamic or inconsistent with al-Jazeera’s videos. In the official video, Bin Laden wears a wrist watch and ring, but the Islamic faith allegedly forbids wearing jewelry (Ripple Effect). Therefore, the man on the video tape is either not Bin Laden or is a Bin Laden of very little faith. Moreover, Bin Laden first claimed responsibility for the attacks in October 2004, just four days before the presidential election (Loose Change 9/11: American Coup), an act which raised the suspicions of many Americans. That confession video is often compared to the video which appeared on September 7, 2007. Theorists believe the difference in Bin Laden’s appearance between the two videos supports the argument that he is not an enemy to be feared. Figure 1 displays the difference: Bin Laden looks much younger in the tape released in 2007 than in the 2004 video.
Figure 1: Bin Laden in a 2004 and 2007 video Apart from the Bin Laden video tapes, conspiracy theorists offer two more pieces of evidence indicating that he is not more than a phantom
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enemy. They call attention to the possible connection that existed between the CIA and Bin Laden. This link was supposedly established at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The CIA is known to have funded and trained the Mujahideen, and it is also said that it provided arms for Bin Laden as well (Marrs 75-76). Theorists also allege that Bin Laden worked as a CIA agent under the code name Tim Osman. As convincing evidence of a conspiracy, theorists point to an article published only one month after the attacks in the French newspaper Le Figaro which claimed that in July 2001 Bin Laden had received medical attention for kidney failure at an American hospital in Dubai and was visited by a local CIA agent there (Marrs 78). Theorists speculate that if Bin Laden had posed a real threat to the United States, he would not have been allowed to leave Dubai intact. The opposite case The official version of 9/11 pictures Bin Laden as an Islamic terrorist who believes Americans had declared war against God and attacked Islam (9/11 Commission Report 47). In 1988, after Soviet withdrawal from Afganistan, Bin Laden established a base or foundation (al Qaeda) as headquarters for future jihad (9/11 Commission Report 56). While the 9/11 Commission Report states that al Qaeda was a potential headquarters, Saas AlFagih in his Frontline interview talks about al Qaeda as a guesthouse. This difference led some conspiracy theorists to speculate that al Qaeda does not exist. But saying that the name of the organization is not al Qaeda does not mean that there is no organization at all. Bin Laden did have followers who shared his hatred towards America. Even Saas Al-Fagih mentions the small core of followers who looked to Bin Laden as their father and were eager to receive his moral support and direction (Al-Fagih). 9/11 was, in fact, only one among a series of events performed by terrorists with the intention of harming Americans, including, among others, the truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the bombings of US Embassy buildings in Kenya and Tanzania, the attempt by Ahmed Ressam to attack Los Angeles international airport in late 1999, and the suicide boat bombing against the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 (Molé). Bin Laden’s desire to attack America was fueled by Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, who believed that American society had been corrupted by liberalism. He thought that the belief in liberalism turned people into selfish creatures who acted according to their own needs thus threatening to tear apart the shared values that hold society together (Power of Nightmares, episode 1).
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Qutb had an “apocalyptic vision of a disease that was spreading from the West throughout the world. He called it jahilliyah—a state of barbarous ignorance” (Power of Nightmares, episode 1). This disease corrupted not only the leaders but also the people of the Muslim world. The followers of Qutb could not mobilize the masses to free their country from the liberal ideas of the West; therefore, the decision was taken to attack the source of corruption directly (Power of Nightmares, episode 2). The new jihad was to target America as the “head of the snake” (9/11 Commission Report 59). Bin Laden is not a fabricated enemy. The failure to capture Bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001 does not mean that Bin Laden was not staying there. Both US soldiers and Afghan villagers confirmed his presence. He was not caught at Tora Bora because the United States relied heavily on the Afghan militias to carry the fight forward and on “Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps to block any escape” (Tora Bora Revisited 18). With the help of Afghans and Pakistanis, Bin Laden and his group made their way on foot and horseback into Pakistan (Tora Bora Revisited 14). The theorists maintain that a man who wears jewelry cannot be a true Islamist since Islam does not allow men to wear rings or wrist watches. But Bin Laden was a radical Islamist and became a terrorist capable of attacking countries which have allied with any of the enemies of Islamists. Neither was Bin Laden a CIA asset during the Soviet-Afghan war. Pakistan agreed to help the Americans turn the war into the Soviets’ Vietnam on condition that American funding would be channeled through the ISI, the Pakistani military agency. American funding went exclusively to the Mujahideen and not to Arab volunteers, including those in Bin Laden’s group. Bin Laden did not trust the ISI, so he preferred to raise money through charity. Moreover, he was outside of the CIA’s surveillance during the war (“Debunking the Conspiracy: The CIA/Bin Laden Myth”). As for the possibility that he was treated and visited by a CIA agent in an American hospital in Dubai two months before the attacks, according to an Arab diplomat, Bin Laden would never have run the risk of “prolonged medical treatment in Dubai, a free-wheeling gulf city-state with an underworld of smugglers and mercenaries easily recruitable as assassins of the man listed as US public enemy No. 1” (“Bin Laden met the CIA”). Bin Laden had no link to the CIA. Conspiracy theorists believe the events at the World Trade Center reveal and provide evidence that proves 9/11 was an inside job. They argue against the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) final
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2005 report which claimed that jet fuel fires and structural failure were responsible for the collapse of the buildings. Conspiracy theorists believe, on the contrary, that the collapse was the result of a controlled demolition. The temperature of jet fuel fires (1000 °C/1800 °F) is well below the melting point of steel (1500 °C/2700 °F), yet they point to the molten metal found at Ground Zero concluding that explosives placed in the towers must have melted the steel (Jones). Steven E. Jones, a physics professor from Brigham Young University, claims that an explosive known as thermite contributed to the collapse of the Twin Towers. When ignited, thermite burns at 2500oC, much hotter than jet fuel (Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura: 9/11). Jones concludes that the yellow-to-white hot molten metal dripping from the South Tower (see Figure 2) indicates that thermite was used to destroy the towers. He further reasons that these thermite reactions were triggered via radio signal to sever the support columns of the towers.
Figure 2: The spout of orange molten metal falling from the South Tower has the appearance of a thermite reaction Other observations that advance the controlled demolition theory include the observed squibs seen during collapse and the pyroclastic surge generated by the collapse of the towers. Squibs were puffs of dust and debris ejected from the sides of the buildings as they collapsed (see Figure 3). Such plumes of smoke are common when pre-positioned explosives are used (Jones).
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Figure 3: Puffs of concrete issuing from the sides of the building above the demolition wave A pyroclastic surge usually emerges after a volcanic eruption where large amounts of material are exploded into the air and then turned into small particles. Since the same thick dust clouds could be noticed after the collapse of the towers (see Figure 4), this provides evidence that the towers exploded internally rather than imploded.
Figure 4: Pyroclastic flow after a volcanic eruption (left) and after the collapse of the Twin Towers (right) For conspiracy theorists, besides the question of how the buildings collapsed, the question of what exactly hit them is of crucial importance.
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They claim there is photographic evidence showing that the South Tower was hit by a military aircraft and not by United Airlines 175. They say the photographs taken before the crash reveal a pod attached to the plane (see Figure 5). Conspiracy advocates state that in reality Flight 175 was a remotely-controlled military aircraft with the pod carrying some kind of an incendiary, bomb or missile, needed to intensify the damage caused by the plane.
Figure 5: Flight 175 photo taken by Rob Howard If there was no plane, there was no need for pilots. Articles about the habits and the piloting skills of the hijackers led many to doubt the possibility that such individuals as those portrayed in the Commission Report could have flown the jets into the towers. It is said that the hijackers were heavy drinkers, loved pork, and visited strip clubs the day before the attack (9/11: Let’s Get Empirical). As if such suspicions were not enough, a number of hijackers were trained at US military bases, where their trainers characterized them as horrible pilots. Finally, the failure of the intelligence services to identify and prevent the hijackers from carrying out their plan confirmed conspiracy theorists in their belief. The various theories differ, however, in their identity and role of the hijackers. If they loved alcohol, pork, and prostitutes, they could not have been fanatical suicide hijackers and, therefore, Flight 11, similarly to Flight 175, could have been a military plane piloted into the North Tower by order
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of the US government. Similarly, if they were trained at US military bases and were able to escape the attention of the intelligence services, it means the government had knowledge of the coming attack but decided not to intervene. The collapse of the third tower fits the former theory which argues for the possibility that the government not only had foreknowledge of the attacks but carried them out. The third tower was not hit by a plane, which means the temperatures reached in the building were far below the temperatures reached by the jet fuel fires in the Twin Towers. If those fires were not hot enough to melt steel, then the argument runs that it is absurd to claim that fires which fed only on combustible materials could cause the collapse of the third tower. Conspiracy theories hold the tower was demolished on purpose. Squibs that were witnessed prior to collapse and the pyroclastic clouds that were created after collapse serve as “irrefutable” evidence for the controlled demolition theory. Evidence against such conspiracy theories Jet fuel fires do not have to burn for a long period of time and the steel does not need to melt to “compromise the buildings’ structural integrity” (The 9/11 Conspiracies) because jet fuel fires do reach 1000 °C, which is far above 600 °C, the temperature at which steel loses 50 percent of its strength (Dunbar and Reagan 39). Once the steel columns in the impact zone, including both the interior and the exterior columns, started to sag, they could no longer bear the weight of the structure above, causing the building to collapse (Zero). Experts say it is not impossible that Professor Steven E. Jones found thermite residue on a dust sample since there was a lot of aluminum in the towers both in the windows and the airplanes), which could have caused a thermite reaction and produced a small amount of molten iron (Dunbar and Reagan 42). The molten metal dripping from the South Tower was, however, most probably molten aluminum, and not steel, coming from the plane. Squibs, or puffs of dust, are also possible from mere collapse. They do not occur only from explosions. There was an enormous amount of energy being released by the collapse of the buildings, and that energy compressed the air and caused the dust to be blown out of the side of the buildings (The 9/11 Conspiracies). Nor was there any pyroclastic flow during collapse. The temperature of pyroclastic flows is 100 °C. “Not one person,
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even the ones trapped inside complained of dusty air burning their skin” (Debunking). As a result of Flight 175’s banking when it hit the South Tower, images taken from below the tower show a distortion of the right wing (Dunbar and Reagan 8-9). After having studied the picture of Flight 175 taken by Rob Howard, Ronald Greeley, director of the Space Photography Laboratory at Arizona State University, dismissed the notion that the photo shows a pod, saying it reveals “only the Boeing’s right fairing, a pronounced bulge that contains the landing gear” (9-10). Newspaper articles claiming that the hijackers were hard drinkers and visited strip clubs differ in their description about what Mohamed Atta was actually doing in those clubs. He is a hard drinker in one story, and he plays video games in the second. Such claims appear to be based on guesswork rather than facts. Nor were the hijackers controlled by the US government, although they were indeed trained in the United States. Some of them, including Atta, had obtained a pilot’s license and took simulator training for large jets (5). It is true that they were not professional pilots, but they did not need to be since their task was to steer and crash the aircraft into their targets. Taking off and landing, which are among the most difficult aspects of flying, were not included in their plan. All the planes were hijacked after the pilots had lifted off. Building 7 did collapse due to fire and damage from debris falling from the North Tower. Fires were burning on several floors supplied by the fuel tanks that were located all throughout the building. There were two 6,000-gallon tanks in the basement which fed most of the generators in the buildings. They presumably contributed to the building’s collapse (56). As we know, the hijackers did not focus only on the World Trade Center. Neither do conspiracy theorists. Theorists maintain that the attack on the Pentagon and the hijacking of Flight 93 were also included in the 9/11 plan prepared by some high-ranking U.S. officials with the purpose of advancing future wars in the Middle East. Theorists believe there is plenty of evidence suggesting that the Pentagon could not have been hit by American Airlines Flight 77, since the damage caused to the Pentagon appears to be inconsistent with aircraft impact damage. Conspiracy theorists argue that the holes created by the impact were far too small to have been made by a commercial jetliner (“16 Facts about 9/11”). The Boeing 757, which was reported to have hit the Pentagon, is known to have a 124 feet wide wingspan (9/11 Ripple Effect). The 75 feet
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wide hole in the exterior suggests that no damage was created by the wings of the plane (see Figure 6). According to conspiracy theorists, the reason there was no visible damage indicating where the wings hit the building is that a missile and not a Boeing 757 caused the damage.
Figure 6: A Boeing 757 and the Pentagon—no damage to the building occurred where the wings and the tail would have struck the building Conspiracy advocates also say that had Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, it would have left substantial wreckage on the outside (Loose Change 9/11: American Coup). The small pieces of debris found outside the building, they insist, cannot be identified as parts coming from an American Airlines plane (see Figure 7).
Figure 7: Pentagon workers collecting debris after the attack
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Several windows above and near the impact zone remained intact. Theorists believe that such “intact windows” support the claim that the Pentagon was hit either by a plane smaller than a Boeing 757 or by a missile. Conspiracy theorists allege that the flying skills of the leading hijacker of Flight 77, Hani Hanjour, indicates that the Pentagon was not struck by a US airliner. Hanjour, similarly to the other hijackers, took some flight lessons in the United States. His teachers described him as a horrible pilot who was not able to fly even a single-engine Cessna 172 (“Hani Hanjour”). Nor did he complete a single course. In addition, the way Hanjour hit the building and where he chose to hit made conspiracy theorists conclude that Flight 77 could not have been the sort of plane described in the official report. If Hanjour had wanted to “inflict maximum damage, all he had to do was to . . . nose down into the roof of the Pentagon” (Loose Change 9/11: Final Cut). But instead, he supposedly changed his trajectory and “executed a maneuver described by experienced pilots as nearly impossible requiring professional expertise” (Loose Change 9/11: Final Cut). Conspiracy advocates think it is impossible that an amateur pilot who could not control and land a small plane, could have piloted a Boeing 757 into the Pentagon—only a missile could have been so accurate. As for Flight 93, conspiracy advocates think the plane was shot down in order to mute the 9/11 conspiracy witnesses. Some theorists presume that the three passenger jets landed at an airport and substitute remote-control aircraft then attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (Dunbar and Reagan 2). The passengers from Flight 11, 175, as well as from Flight 77 were probably herded to United Airlines Flight 93 and then killed so that none of them could testify against the government. To shake the public’s belief in the official story, theorists often point to the phone calls made from Flight 93. Theorists say that given the technology in 2001, it was impossible for passengers to make cell-phone calls from airplanes. David Ray Griffin, a professor at Claremont School of Theology, believes it was possible to make cell-phone calls from low-flying small planes but impossible from larger jets flying above 2,000 feet (Let’s Get Empirical). Theorists also say the wreckage found in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, confirms the hypothesis that Flight 93 was shot down as part of a government conspiracy. First responders should have found human remains and large pieces of debris from the plane, had it crashed as reported.
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Instead, they encountered a small crater but no human bodies or pieces of debris to remind them of Flight 93 (see Figure 8).
Figure 8: A small crater created by the crash of Flight 93 Almost all eyewitnesses remarked how little of the plane and its passengers remained at the actual crash site. Somerset Country Coroner Wallace Miller was among the first to arrive at the scene. He noticed how small the crater was and said it looked “like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped trash into it” (Loose Change 9/11: Second Edition). He added: “I stopped being a coroner after about twenty minutes, because there were no bodies there” (Loose Change 9/11: Final Cut). What appears to be the truth First and foremost, at the time of the crash, “thousands of commuters were crowded in rush-hour traffic along the highways” surrounding the Pentagon (Dunbar and Reagan 59); therefore, there are thousands of witnesses who did see a Boeing 757 hit the building. The outer hole at the Pentagon was not as wide as the 757’s wingspan because the wings were damaged before striking the façade. However, it is also possible that “portions of the wings closer to the fuselage were sheared off upon striking the building” (Dunbar and Reagan 68). The wings and the tail were not heavy enough to damage the reinforced outer walls of the Pentagon. The hole in the interior was not made by a missile but by the jet’s landing gear (Dunbar and Reagan 70).
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Figure 9: American Airlines plane and debris found outside the Pentagon that have pieces of the Airline logo on them Damage outside the Pentagon is appropriate for a high speed crash (9/11: Science and Conspiracy). Pieces of debris found outside the Pentagon can be identified as parts coming from an American Airlines plane (see Figure 9), while those windows near the impact area that remained intact did so because they were blast-resistant (Dunbar and Reagan 71). Like the other hijackers, Hani Hanjour pursued flight training in the United States. Although the 9/11 Commission Report mentions that his instructors “found his work well below standard and discouraged him from continuing” (226), it also says what conspiracy theorists like to ignore: that Hanjour completed the simulator training in March 2001 (227). Also, the 9/11 Commission reports that the hijackers bought Global Positioning System (GPS) units (249). Hanjour, similarly to the other hijackers, had only to “punch the destination coordinates into the flight management system and steer the planes while looking at the navigation screen,” which he had done several times in training (Dunbar and Reagan 6). Flight 93 was not shot down and its passengers did not include all the passengers from the four doomed planes. A Boeing 757 can carry 200 people but the four planes had a total of 265 passengers, a lot more than the carrying capacity of a Flight 93 aircraft (Dunbar and Reagan 2). Flight 93 could not have been shot down since President Bush authorized the shooting down of any aircraft only after Flight 93 had crashed (9/11 Commission Report 37).
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Cell-phone calls were possible in 2001 even from high altitudes. Paul Guckian, vice president of engineering for cell-phone maker Qualcomm, told Popular Mechanics that phones could get a signal at an altitude around 30,000 or 35,000 feet but would lose that signal in the 50,000-foot range (Dunbar and Reagan 84), “Flight 93 never flew higher than 40,700 feet” (84). There were pieces of debris at the main crash site that could be identified as parts coming from Flight 93 (see Figure 10). Distrust towards the official version might originate from the idea we usually have of plane crashes. “We tend to think that when planes crash, they crack in half. This is, in fact, what happens when planes crash at very low speed. However, United Flight 93 was flying straight down and penetrated into soft ground with incredible velocity” (The 9/11 Conspiracy Files: Fact or Fiction).
Figure 10: Flight 93 debris: windows frame and a jet engine
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The testimony of Lieutenant Patrick Madigan, a first responder, refutes the claim that no human bodies were found at the crash site: “I was at the site . . . , there was what was determined to be many parts of human remains that were located, recovered and identified as being passengers that were on Flight 93 on that morning” (The 9/11 Conspiracy Files: Fact or Fiction). Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller did say that he stopped being a coroner after twenty minutes because the cause of death was clear. Although what he said was technically correct that there were no complete bodies at the crash site, many body parts and DNA were found and used to identify the passengers and crew on board (“Conspiracy Files—Q&A”). Conspiracy advocates also tend to promote the hypothesis that if the government did not carry out the 9/11 attacks, it did have foreknowledge about them, but the Bush administration decided not to intervene so that it could have a pretext for a war in Afghanistan. The war games conducted in the years before 2001 also serve as a basis for speculation that there was US involvement in the 9/11 attacks. NORAD, for instance, simulated attacks in which hijacked airliners were used as weapons to crash into buildings like the Twin Towers and cause mass casualties (Komarow and Squitieri). Furthermore, in October 2000 the Pentagon also conducted an exercise called Mascal to simulate a Boeing 757 crashing into the building (Loose Change 9/11: Second Edition). Theorists are convinced that either the war game or a stand-down order issued by the government hindered the response to the deadly attacks. They claim there are a number of reasons to believe that President Bush himself was involved in the 9/11 attacks. First, Bush became president as a result of a conspiracy, since he stole the election with the help of his relatives and the Supreme Court justices, and anyone capable of stealing an election would also be able to betray his people and let a horrible attack, like 9/11, happen. The Presidential Briefing which he received from the CIA on 6 August 2001, which said that Bin Laden was planning to attack America by hijacking airplanes (Fahrenheit 9/11), is seen as evidence that Bush knew of the attacks in advance but decided not to prevent them. He let 9/11 happen because he knew how much his country and the members of his administration would gain from such an attack. The major motive for allowing 9/11 to happen, according to such theorists, was to make war on Afghanistan and to ensure the building of the trans-Afghanistan pipeline by US oil company Unocal. With the construction of the pipeline, the US could enjoy total military and economic control of the region which is often described as the center of world power (Chin).
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Conspiracy theorists are convinced the elite used 9/11 to consolidate and expand their power. The 9/11 attacks created an atmosphere of crisis and fear which made it easy for them to persuade people that they needed to give up their liberty so that they could get security (Masters of Terror). Theorists claim the USA Patriot Act was designed to destroy the civil liberties of Americans since it gives government power to access people’s tax records or information about books they buy or borrow and it also empowers high ranking officials to search people’s homes and conduct unconstitutional seizures (Webster). Once people lose their basic rights, such as the right to be free from unreasonable searches of their home, they become vulnerable to government control. Absolute control can be achieved by declaring martial law and establishing a police state. Theorists believe this is exactly what has been happening in the United States since 9/11. Conspiracy advocates think the report “Project for a New American Century,” released by a neo-conservative think tank in September 2000, hints at this kind of transformation. In “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the members of the think tank including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush declare: “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” (Loose Change 9/11: American Coup). Conspiracy theorists assert that steps toward this transformation have already been taken. The presence of police surveillance blimps, the presence of policemen in black ski masks and with automatic weapons on the streets, and the body scan at airports are all considered a result of this transformation (Martial Law). The microchip identification device which can be implanted in the body is looked upon as part of a larger plan prepared by the New World Order. In the future people will not be able to get food, water, or jobs without the microchips (9/11: The Road to Tyranny). This New World Order implies the emergence of a one-world government. Theorists say the North American Union; which was established in 2005 by the merging of the USA, Canada and Mexico, the European Union, the African Union, and the soon-to-emerge Asian Union; will form a one-world government when time is ripe (Zeitgeist). 9/11 is viewed as a step in the on-going plot of the New World Order to achieve world domination (“New World Order”). The government knew an attack was immanent, but 9/11 happened because the government was not prepared for it and not because they decided not to prepare for it. Multiple hijackings had never been carried out
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in the United States (9/11 Commission Report 10), thus there was no dossier to turn to which would contain any suggestion of how to prevent such an event. Second, no information sharing occurred between the CIA and the FBI due to the widespread belief that information sharing was a career stopper (79). Third, FBI field offices are known to be in charge of an entire investigation (74). I believe that 9/11 could have been prevented, had more than one office been assigned to work on the Bin Laden case. The failure to respond to the hijackings can be accounted for not by a stand-down order but for the tendency of the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) to look outward for threats instead of inward (Dunbar and Reagan 20). NORAD was created in 1958 as a binational command center between the United States and Canada. Since its major mission was to counter the Soviet threat, NORAD “came to define its job as defending against external attacks” (9/11 Commission Report 16). As for the war games, the idea of using aircraft as weapons was not foreign to NORAD. To counter such a threat, NORAD even developed exercises (9/11 Commission Report 346). However, these exercises “differed from the September 11 attacks in one important respect: The planes in the simulation were coming from a foreign country” (Komarow and Squitieri). If an aircraft were coming from overseas, the military “would have time to identify the target and scramble interceptors” (346). On 9/11 NORAD encountered a different scenario. Yet, they expected there would be time to address the problem and presumed that “the hijacked aircraft would be readily identifiable and would not attempt to disappear” (18). But the hijackers turned off the transponder of the planes making it impossible to identify and track them The Pentagon exercises included simulations focused on an accidental plane crash and not a hijacking. There was a need for such drill since the Pentagon is “located less than one mile from Reagan National Airport, and one of the flight paths takes planes directly over the Pentagon. Being located so close to a major airport, it would have been irresponsible for officials not to drill for an accidental plane . . . crash” (“9/11 Debunked”). President Bush did not let the attacks happen on purpose. He knew that Bin Laden was planning an attack against America, but he had no specific data about the attack. The President told the 9/11 Commission that the August 6 Presidential Briefing was historical in nature, and that it “contained few specifics regarding time, place, method, or target” (9/11 Commission Report 260).
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Moreover, 9/11 was not allowed to happen in order to build a pipeline and gain control over the Middle East. The trans-Afghanistan pipeline project was prepared years before 9/11. In the late 1990s the United States contributed to the suspension of activities related to the construction of the pipeline by refusing to recognize the Taliban Government. This, in combination with the fact that no trans-Afghan pipeline has been built in the ten plus years after the attacks, “suggests it is not a plausible motive for carrying out 9/11” (“9/11 and the Afghan pipeline”). Nor was a desire to gain control over the American population the reason why 9/11 happened. The report released by the neo-conservative think tank, the “Project for a New American Century,” has nothing to do with 9/11. Conspiracy theorists tend to quote one sentence, but the total report makes it clear that transformation “refers to the process introducing more information technologies into the military” (“New Pearl Harbor”). To sum up, 9/11 conspiracy theories, though constructed logically, are delusional. If the preceding pages have demonstrated anything, it must be that the 9/11 conspiracy theories are not bolstered by real evidence. What theorists call evidence is nothing more than quotations taken out of context and tiny anomalies they claim to have found in mainstream accounts. In fact, 9/11 conspiracy theorists focus their attention not on the whole story but only on certain elements. Sometimes the elements are mixed, which results in the theories contradicting each other. Thus, the conspiracy narrative cannot function as a line that would connect the elements. Despite the shortcomings of the theories, there are still a lot of people who side with conspiracy theorists. I think the theories which appeared right after the attacks were attractive because they interpreted the events in a way that made them fit the apocalypse scenario. Theorists warn that if Americans take the official story at face value they become un-American. They emphasize that the task of a true American, a true patriot, is to ask questions (The 9/11 Chronicles: Truth Rising). Such theorists use conspiracy theories to express their distrust in the government. While some of the issues are truly problematical, such as the 2000 election, the fate of Flight 93, and the Patriot Act, such people presuppose that the whole story about 9/11 is problematical. Other conspiracy theorists attract people’s attention by denying that they are conspiracy theorists. Richard Gage, the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, claims that the members of his organization are not conspiracy theorists—they just examine the “science-based, forensic
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evidence” (9/11: Blueprint for Truth). This denial makes the resulting theories sound innocent and convinces people that there is nothing sinister about paying attention to them. But conspiracy theories are anything but innocent. They lead to the creation and preservation of “voodoo” histories, which distort our view of the past, the present, and could well have a deleterious effect on future decision-making (Aaronovitch 15). Works Cited “9/11 and the Afghan pipeline.” 911 Myths.com. Web. 4 Feb. 2011. 9/11: Blueprint for Truth. Dir. Ken Jenkins. Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, 2008. DVD. 9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction. History Channel, 2007. DVD. “9/11 Debunked: Real Reason for MASCAL Exercises.” Youtube. 14 Sept. 2007. Web. 3 Feb. 2011. 9/11: Let’s Get Empirical. Dir. Ken Jenkins. 911tv, 2007. DVD. 9/11 Ripple Effect. Dir. William Lewis. Bridgestone Media Group, 2007. DVD. 9/11: Science and Conspiracy. National Geographic Channel, 2009. DVD. 9/11: The Road to Tyranny. Dir. Alex Jones. Infowars, 2002. DVD. “16 Facts About 9/11 World Trade Center.” Amazing Data. 7 Aug. 2009. Web. 17 Jan. 2011. “Bin Laden Met the CIA.” 911 Myths.com. Web. 18 Jan. 2011. Broeckers, Mathias. Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theories, and the Secrets of 9/11. Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive, 2006. Print. Chin, Larry. “Unocal and the Afghanistan Pipeline.” globalresearch.ca. 6 March 2002. Web. 2 Feb. 2011. “Conspiracy.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd Edition. 1989. Web. 14 Nov. 2011. “Conspiracy Files—Q&A: What Really Happened.” British Broadcasting Corporation. 16 Feb. 2007. Web. 21 Jan. 2011. “Conspiracy Theory.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd Edition. 1989. Web. 14 Nov. 2011. “Debunking the Conspiracy: The CIA/Bin Laden Myth.” Youtube. 23 March 2010. Web. 18 Jan. 2011. Dunbar, David, and Brad Reagan, eds. Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up To The Facts. NY: Hearst, 2006. Print. Fahrenheit 9/11. Dir. Michael Moore. Lions Gate Films, 2004. DVD. Jones, Steven E. “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” Physics 9/11. Web. 18 Jan. 2011.
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Komarow, Steven, and Tom Squitieri. “NORAD Had Drills of Jets as Weapons.” USA Today 19 April 2004. Web. 26 Jan. 2011. Loose Change 9/11: American Coup. Dir. Dylan Avery. Microcinema, International, 2009. DVD. Loose Change 9/11: Final Cut. Dir. Dylan Avery. Microcinema, International, 2007. DVD. Loose Change 9/11: Second Edition. Dir. Dylan Avery. Microcinema, International, 2005. DVD. Marrs, Jim. Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies. San Rafael, CA: Origin, 2004. Print. Martial Law 9-11: The Rise of the Police State. Dir. Alex Jones. Jones Productions, 2005. DVD. Masters of Terror. Dir. Alex Jones. Infowars, 2002. DVD. Molé, Phil. “9/11 Conspiracy Theories: The 9/11 Truth Movement in Perspective.” Skeptic.com. 11 Sept. 2006. Web. 17 Jan. 2011. “New Pearl Harbor.” 911 Myths. Web. 3 Feb. 2011. “New World Order.” Wikipedia. Web. 3 Feb. 2011. Power of Nightmares. Dir. Adam Curtis. British Broadcasting Corporation, 2004. DVD. The Conspiracy Files: 9/11—The Third Tower. Dir. Mike Rudin. British Broadcasting Corporation, 2008. DVD. The 9/11 Chronicles: Truth Rising. Dir. Alex Jones. 2008. DVD. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. NY: Norton, 2004. Print. “Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get Bin Laden and Why It Matters Today.” Foreign Senate. Web. 23 Feb. 2011. Webster, Michael. “Patriot Act Unconstitutional.” Examiner.com. 20 April 2009. Web. 2 Feb. 2011. Zeitgeist. Dir. Peter Joseph. GMP LLC, 2007. DVD. Zero: An Investigation into 9/11. Dir. Francesco Tre, Franco Fracassi. Telemaco, 2007. DVD.
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Marking, Consciousness, Fabulation: The Lady’s Presence in Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant” János V. Barcsák _______________________________________________________HJEAS “And I stained the water clear” William Blake
I Leaving a vestige, a trace, a legible mark is inevitably the defilement of something pure. If one wants to leave a mark, to express one’s mind to others, to communicate one’s experience, one has to stain the clear and pure water of one’s direct, immediate vision or experience. Communication inevitably stains the experience which is being communicated, since it makes the immediate mediated, the direct indirect, the subjective objective. Still the speaker in Blake’s “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence—the poem from which my epigraph is taken—undertakes the risk that goes together with leaving a visible mark, since he knows that without such there is no communication. Clear water will not leave a mark; we need to stain pure experience by mediation, objectification, articulation to make it legible to others. And we need to do this not only because it is a natural desire to share our experience with others, but also because the experience itself can only be said to exist in such an objectification. What would Blakean Innocence be without the Songs of Innocence? How could we be conscious of any “undefiled Paradise,” to use Shelley’s phrase, without a narrative that describes this paradise in fallen language? And we can go even further and state that any purity only exists in and as the negation of the impurity of the communication in which it is inscribed. Without staining the water and leaving a mark we could in no way conceive of the original purity of the water, but we can only conceive of this purity by negating the negativity which our act of marking, noticing, observing that purity inevitably entails. Paradoxically, therefore, whatever is marked out as pure, innocent, and original can only be conceived of as inconceivable, can only be communicated as incommunicable, can only be marked as unmarked. These issues, as well as the image of marking or leaving a trace, are central to Percy Shelley’s writings. More particularly, in both his poems and prose we frequently encounter non-marking presences. In “The SensitivePlant,” for example, he describes the effect of dreams on consciousness in ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
terms of a subtle distinction between marking and impressing, highlighting the pure, undefiled influence of dreams by emphasizing that they do not leave a constant mark: And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned In an ocean of dreams without a sound Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress The light sand which paves it—Consciousness. (I 102-05)1
Similarly, in the “Defence of Poetry” he invokes much the same images to describe the pure, unmarked effect of poetic inspiration: We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling . . . always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression . . . . It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over a sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. (504)
Perhaps the most famous use of the image of marking can be found in Shelley’s last great poem, “The Triumph of Life,” where he deploys it to describe the way in which one vision gives way to another. Rousseau—the fictional narrator in this part of the poem—asks the visionary figure referred to as the “shape all light” about the great questions of life, in response to which the “shape all light” offers him a cup to drink from. And then Rousseau says: “I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, And suddenly my brain became as sand “Where the first wave had more than half erased The track of deer on desert Labrador, Whilst the fierce wolf from which they fled amazed “Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore Until the second bursts—so on my sight Burst a new Vision never seen before.— (466)
Apart from these occurrences, where the image of marking is explicit, Shelley’s poetry is also full of similar images of unmarked, unobserved,
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unseen presences. The West Wind, Intellectual Beauty, the Skylark—to mention only the most obvious examples—are all described as unseen presences. Each of these instances represents the dilemma I outlined at the beginning of this essay: although they stand for something pure and original, their existence must remain dubious since they cannot be traced, directly experienced, or communicated. I will examine Shelley’s treatment of this dilemma through an analysis of his poem “The Sensitive-Plant,” in which a non-marking presence, that of the Lady in Part Second, plays a central role. This poem has been somewhat neglected in Shelley criticism, the last detailed treatment of it, Michael O’Neill’s “The Sensitive-Plant,” dating from 1996. Besides, the existing interpretations of the poem—no matter how appreciative of Shelley’s achievement—usually do not allow it the same status that is granted to some of his more popular poems. They usually do not treat it as a sustained exposition of a philosophical theme. Although it is true that the poem was given a very powerful allegorical interpretation in 1959, where Earl Wasserman warns against the error of assuming that the poem does not require “an intensive metaphysical reading,” (252) not too many such readings have been produced since Wasserman’s.2 One could of course argue that Wasserman’s interpretation was so definitive that it made new readings of the text superfluous, but Wasserman’s other definitive readings, of “Mont Blanc” or of Prometheus Unbound, for example, did not result in similar critical closures. It is quite likely, therefore, that critics are still generally misled by the seemingly naïve and unsophisticated appearance of the poem and fail to find in it a sufficient intellectual challenge. I believe, however, that this challenge is certainly there and that some of the most profound Shelleyan insights are inscribed within its simple fable. I will attempt, therefore, to emulate Wasserman’s achievement and produce “an intensive metaphysical reading” of the text. II The structure of “The Sensitive-Plant” is relatively simple. The poem consists of three longer parts and a Conclusion. In Part First, the Sensitive-plant—which has been identified in Shelley criticism as a species of mimosa, the Mimosa pudica (Reiman and Powers 210 n1)—is described as growing in a beautiful garden where Spring is making the blossoming flowers more and more beautiful every day. In Part Second we learn that the beauty of the garden is sustained by the unmarked and unmarking presence of a Lady who “tended the garden from morn to even.” The
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turning point of the poem occurs at the end of Part Second with the death of this Lady who dies “ere the first leaf looked brown”; that is, just before the summer turns into autumn. Part Third describes the destruction of the beautiful garden. Following the Lady’s death the flowers in the garden begin to decay: autumn gradually divests the garden of its beauty until winter carries out a final devastation destroying the Sensitive-plant, as well. After this depiction of ultimate destruction, however, the Conclusion questions the reality of the corruption and death witnessed in Part Third. The poem thus ends with the claim that death is unreal and that it does not affect the Lady and the garden she tended. Since the Conclusion will be central in my interpretation, I quote it here in its entirety. Whether the Sensitive-plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change,―I cannot say, Whether that Lady’s gentle mind, No longer with the form combined Which scattered love―as stars do light, Found sadness, where it left delight, I dare not guess; but in this life Of error, ignorance and strife— Where nothing is—but all things seem, And we the shadows of the dream, It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest,—a mockery. That garden sweet, that lady fair And all sweet sounds and odours there In truth have never past away— ’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed—not they. For love, and beauty, and delight There is no death nor change: their might Exceeds our organs—which endure No light—being themselves obscure. (Conclusion 1-24)
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According to Wasserman, the connection between the narrative part and the Conclusion is a key to understanding the poem. The structural division of the text into a narrative part and a moral invokes, in his view, the structure of the Aesopian fable; yet, in this case the moral does not seem to follow from the fable. According to Wasserman, therefore, the main task of the interpreter is to explain how the Conclusion follows inevitably from the fable despite the apparent incongruity (252). In spite of Wasserman’s insight, however, most commentators still treat the Conclusion as a kind of tag, as an afterthought which may be understood in itself and is not organically connected to the narrative sections of the poem. Reiman and Powers, for example, comment, The statement of the conclusion is simply that, since we know our organs (of sensation, reasoning, etc.) to be obscure (dark, dim), the sequence of events related in Parts First, Second, and Third may not be the true picture. Because he knows human perceptions to be fallible, the poet can still hold his modest creed (13), even after relating the apparent death of the Lady and the destruction of the beautiful garden. (219 n4)
Although this reading is no doubt accurate, it makes only very tentative claims, more tentative ones than I think the text allows or even calls for. The speaker may hold his modest creed—as if in contrast to what the central parts of the poem say—because the main statements of the narrative may not be the true picture. This tentativeness is, of course, suggested by the “I cannot say” and “I dare not guess” of the Conclusion’s opening lines, as well as by the expression “modest creed.” This “modest creed,” however, is not formulated as if it was just an unfounded conviction, or an instance of what James Bieri calls “hopeful skepticism” (189). After all the text says that “death must be . . . a mockery” [emphasis added] as if this followed logically from what has been said before. In any case, if we want to read the poem as a sustained treatment of a philosophical issue, we will have to read this Conclusion as it has rarely been read before: as an organic part of the mythopoetic narrative, without which the latter could not be understood in its entirety.3 In other words, we will have to account for the function and inevitability of the two statements the speaker makes in this Conclusion: (1) that death is merely an illusion, and (2) that the garden and the Lady whose destruction is depicted in Part Third are in fact unaffected by it.
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III
Interpreters of the poem usually agree that the Sensitive-plant can be regarded as a symbolic representation of the self-conscious human being amid natural creation,4 and I will also adopt this line of interpretation, modifying it slightly by laying the main emphasis on self-consciousness. I will, in other words, read the poem as giving a sustained philosophical account of one of the most central Romantic problems: self-consciousness. Looked at from this perspective, then, Part First delineates selfconsciousness in contrast to nature. The first line of the poem, I think, quite clearly sets this theme: “The Sensitive-plant in a garden grew.” What we can gather from this trivial-sounding but all the more emphatic first line (whose interpretation I will return to) is that Self-consciousness can only be understood in relation to a surrounding natural world; what is more, in relation to a garden. What exactly is meant by a garden is only made clear in Part Second; we can, therefore, bracket this issue for the time being and focus on how the Sensitive-plant (self-consciousness) is described in relation to the surrounding natural environment. The first thing we notice in the description of the Sensitive-plant is its contrast with the cyclic process of the natural world. In the second stanza we read: And the Spring arose on the garden fair Like the Spirit of love felt every where; And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest. (I 5-8)
In contrast to the perennial plants in the garden, the Sensitiveplant—the mimosa—is an annual (see Reiman and Powers 211 n2). Thus while all the other flowers and herbs experience the Spring as just another phase of their eternal cyclic existence, for the Sensitive-plant it is a wholly new beginning. Self-consciousness is, therefore, first defined as a unique and one-time existence in opposition to nature’s cyclic renewal. Another way in which the Sensitive-plant differs from its natural environment is its more intense pleasure in the beauty of nature around it than that of all the other inhabitants of the garden, because, unlike all other inhabitants, the Sensitive-plant is “companionless”:
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But none ever trembled and panted with bliss In the garden, the field or the wilderness, Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet want As the companionless Sensitive-plant. (I 9-12)
The companionlessness of the Sensitive-plant is of course once again primarily a reference to a botanical fact, namely that the particular species of mimosa Shelley was describing is a hermaphroditic plant, it needs no other plant to reproduce (Reiman and Powers 210 n1). Shelley, however, attributes special significance to this companionlessness and makes it into the symbolic representation of another crucial way in which selfconsciousness differs from nature. This crucial difference consists in the fact that while in natural creation everything shares in a kind of selfless giving and taking, in a spontaneous companionship, the self-conscious human being stands apart and is excluded from this sharing (Wasserman, Subtler Language 275-78). The community and “interpenetration” of natural creatures is beautifully described in stanzas XVI and XVII: . . . every one [of the flowers] Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun, For each one was interpenetrated With the light and the odour its neighbour shed Like young lovers, whom youth and love makes dear Wrapt and filled by their mutual atmosphere. (I 64-69)
From this mutual sharing the Sensitive-plant is excluded: since it is hermaphroditic and has no flower, it cannot directly give itself and take what comes from its natural surroundings. Similarly, self-consciousness is by definition closed within itself and is thus prevented from directly communing with the boundless giving and receiving of nature. This, however, does not prevent the Sensitive-plant (self-consciousness) from perceiving the ecstasy of this selfless sharing, or from feeling the raptures of this continuous love-making. In fact, its external position is precisely what makes it capable of really appreciating this blissful state, as is beautifully expressed in stanzas XVIII and XIX: But the Sensitive-plant which could give small fruit Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
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Received more than all—it loved more than ever, Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver. For the Sensitive-plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower— It loves—even like Love—its deep heart is full— It desires what it has not—the beautiful! (I 70-77)
What we can conclude from this as to the nature of self-consciousness is that while nature is fundamentally characterized by the fullness of experience, self-consciousness is grounded on desire, which is a “want,” a lack. This lack, however, is not depicted here as giving the Sensitive-plant a sense of isolation, as some interpretations of the poem would have it (Bieri 188) and as Shelley himself writes elsewhere, for example, in “On Love” (473-74).5 It is much rather depicted as a creative lack: something that makes the Sensitive-plant capable of enjoying the love that permeates the natural world around it even more intensely than the participants in the mutual sharing of nature who experience no lack.6 After this delineation of self-consciousness in Part First, the poem continues with a description of the mysterious Lady in Part Second. Her involvement in the poem might at first seem to be rather strange, since she is apparently not related to the Sensitive-plant at all—in fact the latter is not once mentioned in Part Second. But the fact that the whole of this central section of the poem is devoted to her description shows that her function is crucial. It is crucial because her presence explains how the garden is a garden. Her description in the first stanza of Part Second immediately makes this clear: There was a Power in this sweet place, An Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace Which to the flowers did they waken or dream Was as God is to the starry scheme: (II 1-4)
If we bracket for the time being the strange reference to Eve in this stanza, we can see that the Lady is described here as the principle of order, of meaning in nature, and this is apparently what makes the garden a garden.7 Her action in the garden depicted later in Part Second further confirms this initial description:
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She lifted their [the flowers’] heads with her tender hands And sustained them with rods and ozier bands; If the flowers had been her own infants she Could never have nursed them more tenderly. And all killing insects and gnawing worms And things of obscene and unlovely forms She bore, in a basket of Indian woof, Into the rough woods far aloof, (II 36-43)
Thus she creates order in the garden by establishing and maintaining a distinction between what is harmless and what is harmful, between what is vital and what is opposed to life, between what is life-giving and what is parasitical, separating thus the garden from the wilderness. We can also observe in Part Second that the Lady’s relation to the flowers and to the Sensitive-plant exactly reflects the contrast that we saw in Part First. The Sensitive-plant, as I have said, is not mentioned in relation to her, while she is in direct contact with the flowers: I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet; I doubt not they felt the spirit that came From her glowing fingers through all their frame. (II 29-32)
It is as if the Lady represented that love which exists in the giving and receiving of natural existence from which the Sensitive-plant (selfconsciousness) is excluded but which, precisely because it cannot participate in it, means much more to the Sensitive-plant than to the participants in this sharing. This curious relationship between the Lady and the Sensitive-plant is further explained by the depiction of the Lady’s presence in the garden as non-marking. For in spite of her direct contact with the flowers, she is emphatically described as leaving no permanent trace in the garden, as in the seventh stanza of Part Second: And wherever her aery footstep trod, Her trailing hair from the grassy sod Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep Like a sunny storm o’er the dark green deep. (II 25-28)
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This image of not marking directly connects the Lady’s presence to the description of the Sensitive-plant’s dream in Part First and to the issues I raised in the introduction to this paper. I have already quoted the stanza in Part First where the Sensitive-plant’s dream is described. Now that we have encountered a very similar image in the description of one of the most important symbolic figures of the poem, it is perhaps worth taking a closer look at the first occurrence of this image in the poem, as it might throw some light on the second, more central application of the same image. In Part First, then, we read: And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned In an ocean of dreams without a sound Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress The light sand which paves it—Consciousness. (I 102-05)
Dreams, according to this description, do not directly enter consciousness, because they do not leave a permanent mark; however, they are somehow still present to it by the uncertain, non-fixable impressions they make. And the Lady’s presence in Part Second is indeed very similar to this. It is not directly available to the Sensitive-plant, for the latter is a self-consciousness and nothing can enter consciousness without leaving a permanent mark. The Lady is, therefore, just a shadowy, dreamlike presence for the Sensitiveplant which it intuits rather than realizes.8 This dreamlike, non-marking presence of the Lady, however, raises several problems. If she is really just an impression, then is it not possible that she is merely a projection? This issue is, I think, at least implicitly raised at the end of Part Second. For after the depiction of this gentle Lady’s presence and action in the garden, Part Second ends with the Lady’s death, which is described in a way that poses an explicit ambiguity in the poem. Her death is ambiguous because we cannot decide whether it causes the change from summer to autumn which brings with it the destruction depicted in Part Third, or, conversely, it is her death which is caused by this inevitable changing of the seasons. In the last stanza of Part Second, we read: This fairest creature from earliest spring Thus moved through the garden ministering All the sweet season of summertide, And ere the first leaf looked brown—she died! (II 57-60)
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The Lady dies before the first leaf looks brown, that is, before the change begins, and this sequence of events may suggest a causal link between the two. It may be that the Lady’s death/loss is responsible for the destruction that follows. This interpretation might be corroborated by the mention of Eve in the first stanza of Part Second.9 This allusion to the biblical story of Paradise may indeed suggest that the loss depicted in Part Third is caused by a failure. Just as in the story of Eden, Eve was the initiator of the evil that brought together with it the loss of Paradise, so the poem might be read as accusing the Lady of some failure which then brings about the destruction that ensues as a kind of deserved or arbitrary punishment. This, however, is, I think, the less likely reading of this passage, since although the lines do not exclude the possibility of a causal link, they emphatically do not establish such a link either. And if there is no causal link between the Lady’s death and the destruction that follows it, then we must conclude that the destruction the Sensitive-plant (self-consciousness) must suffer is not really the fateful event that it at first appears to be but rather just a phase in the inevitable course of necessity. Just as autumn necessarily follows summer, so the loss of the Lady, of the principle of order, of the sense of meaning in the world is caused simply by necessity. It is not a punishment, it is not a curse, it is not imposed on us by some external power, by some independent will that we could blame or appeal to; just like the changing of the seasons, it is simply an inevitable phase in a necessary chain of natural causes and effects, in a process that is completely neutral to our wishes, desires, pains, or sufferings.10 What this latter interpretation implies, furthermore, is that the Lady’s initial presence is also inseparable from a particular phase of the cyclic process of nature (the spring-summer phase). Thus not only is her death depicted as a mere necessity, but her original presence is also brought into question. For if the Lady is indeed inseparable from that particular phase of the natural cycle and is not marked in any way outside it, then she might just as well be merely a projection of the qualities of that phase. It may very well be the case that there has never been meaning or order in the natural world, that the Lady has never been really present, but that we, selfconscious human beings (as represented by the Sensitive-plant) attribute this meaning when observing the beauty of nature in the spring. The early phase of the natural process of our life impresses us with a sense of meaning or purpose in the universe; we feel that our life is meaningful and project this impression in the form of an ordered nature (a garden) and a
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conscious will that maintains this order (the Lady). But since these are based on impressions only and are unmarked, their existence is questionable. This ambiguity at the end of Part Second, where we cannot decide if the Lady’s death causes or is caused by the changing of the seasons, may also be interpreted as Shelley’s recasting (and revitalizing) of what Wordsworth identified as the central problem of self-consciousness: whether or not nature “has betrayed the heart that loved her.” Did the Lady, the soul (III 18) of the happy, unselfconscious community of nature, betray the self-conscious inmate of this natural world, the Sensitive-plant? Shelley’s answer to that Wordsworthian question seems at this point to be his characteristically sceptical proposal of two alternatives: either nature did betray the heart that loved her, or it did not betray it because it did not give it anything in the first place, as it does not even exist outside the impressions of the self-conscious human being. IV
The ambiguity with which Part Second ends raises perhaps the first explicit problem in the poem. Whatever has been said in the fable this far has been simply taken for granted. With this ambiguity, however, the actuality of the Lady’s original presence is brought into question, and this first explicit problem seems to start an avalanche in Part Third, where— apart from the description of how autumn and winter destroy nature and the Sensitive-plant—we also find a systematic undermining of all the oppositions, structures, meanings that have been established and taken for granted this far. Before proceeding to an interpretation of the destruction/deconstruction that takes place in Part Third, we must note that this section begins with a crucial change in the relation between the Sensitive-plant and the now dead lady. For it seems that after her death, the Sensitive-plant begins to mark the Lady. In the second stanza of Part Third, we read: . . . the Sensitive-plant Felt the sound of the funeral chaunt And the steps of the bearers heavy and slow, And the sobs of the mourners deep and low, (III 5-8)
Whereas in Part Second, where the presence and action of the Lady is described, the Sensitive-plant—as we could see—plays no role and is not
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even mentioned, after her death it immediately begins to observe—not the Lady herself, but her coffin in the funeral procession and the “cold, oppressive, and dank” (III 11) smell of her decaying body; that is, the marks or signifiers of her absence. If we stick with the allegorical pattern in which I have been interpreting the poem, then this clearly suggests that the Lady can only enter self-consciousness in her absence. While she is alive, she can be no more than a temporary impression; once she is dead, however, she begins to leave a mark and can thus enter self-consciousness—but can enter it only as a trace, as something that exists by virtue of an absence. This change in the Lady’s status from an unmarked, dreamlike presence into a marked absence is also emphasized here by the heavy footsteps of the bearers of her coffin (III 7). This image sharply contrasts with that of her light step in the previous section which “seemed to pity the grass it pressed” (II 21) and whose light vestige, as we could see, was immediately erased by her trailing hair. In her death thus the Lady begins to be marked by the Sensitiveplant. She who was the principle of order in nature enters selfconsciousness in her death, that is, when that order, or the faith in that order, is lost. This is when in her absence she begins to leave a permanent mark, and the permanent mark she leaves is ultimately the destruction that is depicted in Part Third, it is ultimately death. This section of the poem gives a long and detailed, increasingly lurid and gruesome description of corruption, decay, and death, a “buoyantly grotesque litany of destruction,” as O’Neill puts it (116). One aspect of this litany crucial to my argument is that death is described in this part of the poem as the erasure of all differences and in particular as the erasure of the distinction between garden and wilderness. All the beautiful flowers, we read, are “massed into the common clay” (III 33); leaves and seeds rot into the earth together; “And the leafless network of parasite bowers / Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers” (III 48-49).11 The dry leaves and the winged seeds, the dead and the living, the parasite and the host were all oppositions that helped maintain the fundamental opposition between garden and wilderness, an opposition which in turn maintained order and meaning in the world and the existence of the living representation of this order and meaning, the Lady of Part Second. Yet, as soon as she enters self-consciousness in her absence and begins to be marked, that order is lost forever and the distinctions, oppositions in which that order manifested itself are gradually erased, neutralized. As soon as the mark, the trace, the signifier, enters selfconsciousness, an inevitable deconstructive process is launched, whose
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fundamental tendency is to undermine meanings, hierarchies, structures and order by questioning and erasing the oppositions upon which these are based.12 The endpoint of this deconstructive movement is death, which ultimately consists in a complete erasure of all differences. Death is thus the ultimate demystifier, that which reveals the groundlessness of all oppositions, hierarchies, and structures that produce meanings.13 This demystifying process, as has been said, fundamentally questions the Lady’s original presence. It makes us realize that what appeared to be order, meaning in the world around us, what we perceived to be a garden, has in fact never been there; it has always been just an illusion. The movement of the erasure of differences and the undermining of meaning, however, does not stop here. It is extended to include also the distinctions that grounded the existence of the Sensitive-plant (selfconsciousness) itself. In Part First, the Sensitive-plant is ultimately defined by two distinctions, both of which relate it to the surrounding nature (the garden) that it finds itself in. The first of these distinctions is that the Sensitive-plant (self-consciousness) is different from the cyclic regeneration of nature by its uniqueness, by its one-time-only existence; the second is that it stands apart from the rest of nature in that it is closed upon itself, it is “companionless.” If, however, we question—as we must on the evidence of Part Third—the reality of the garden (the natural world), then the ground of these distinctions is also lost and the existence of the Sensitive-plant (selfconsciousness), which is founded only on these distinctions, is also brought into question. This final point of the deconstructive process of Part Third is indeed perfectly summed up in the last stanza of this section, which expresses the complete elimination of all oppositions that have served as the ground of the meanings and structures that have constituted the fable this far: When winter had gone and spring came back The Sensitive-plant was a leafless wreck; But the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels. (III 114-117)
After the death of the Sensitive-plant there is no return to the original spring. The dramatic consequences of this are brought out if we read this stanza together with the second stanza of Part First, where the original Spring is described:
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And the Spring arose on the garden fair Like the Spirit of love felt every where; And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest. (I 5-8)
O’Neill draws attention to the parallel structure of these two stanzas (116), especially noticeable in the repetition of the verb “rose” in the same position and with the same grammatical function. From the description of Spring in Part First we would expect that even after the death of the Sensitive-plant the cycle of nature continues and a new spring emerges as cheerfully as ever. In spite of the expected reawakening, however, at the end of Part Third we merely find a return of haunting ghosts. What we find out from this is that the Life, Love, and Beauty of nature, the cosmos of the garden, within which and in contrast to which we could alone define the position of the Sensitive-plant (self-consciousness), are in fact non-existent without this relation to the Sensitive-plant. If there is no self-consciousness, there is no order, no Lady, and no cyclic revival of nature either. There is only an endless procession of ghostly “mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels,” life forms that are either poisonous or parasitical and are, therefore, directly opposed to the image of the natural unity, the selfless giving and receiving that we saw in the initial description of the garden. As Wasserman points out these haunting harmful weeds “are not symbolic of life, but are only death itself rising from its charnel to take over the once living earth” (Subtler Language 271). Their return brings no new reawakening of the garden and therefore we must conclude with Wasserman that “the progress of the seasons has taken place only in the perception of the Sensitive Plant” (Subtler Language 271). We must, however, also go further than this and note that the progress of the seasons was that in opposition to which the Sensitive-plant was defined in the first place. What is questioned at the end of Part Third is, therefore, not only the reality of the garden, the Lady and the natural cycle but also that of the Sensitive-plant (self-consciousness). If the former are unreal, then the latter, which can only be thought of in relation to them, must also be deemed non-existent. What is more, with this conclusion the status of the whole fable is undermined; for what the fable narrates is basically how the initial beauty and perfection of the garden is destroyed. What we find out as a result of the deconstructive movement of Part Third, however, is that in reality there never was an initial perfection; that this perfection—together with the Lady
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who maintained it—was merely the projection of the Sensitive-plant (selfconsciousness) which itself cannot be said to exist, since it can only be defined as a correlate of these projections. The fable, therefore, is dependent for its possibility on the fundamentally groundless existence of self-consciousness and its projections. Moreover, if we re-examine from this perspective the very first distinctions upon which the story is based, we become aware of a strange reversal of the apparent chronology of the narrative. The Sensitive-plant (self-consciousness) is first distinguished from the cyclic process of nature by its unique, one-time-only, existence, and then it is opposed to the selfless unity of nature by its companionlessness. If, however, we ask what these distinguishing features actually consist in, we must conclude that they are both actually founded on death. The Sensitive-plant is unique because— unlike the other flowers for which winter is only sleep—it dies; it is not reawakened in the spring. Similarly, the Sensitive-plant is companionless, it is closed upon itself precisely because it dies. The terms in which its companionlessness is described makes this quite clear, for it is presented as arising from a lack, a want, which can easily be identified with death. What makes a self-conscious human being incapable of sharing in the selfless giving and receiving of nature, and what—precisely by this incapacity, by this lack—makes us capable of conceiving of and aspiring to more than is available to any other natural creature is clearly the fact that we have to die. By the end of the fable we find out that death, with which the story ends, must in fact precede everything that the fable narrates, for it is the ground of the initial oppositions from which the story sets out. If it had not been for death and for the death phase of the narration, no story could have been told, for the initial happiness, the garden, the Lady only exist for the Sensitive-plant which, however, can only exist as a correlate of death. The real story, therefore, starts with Part Third, more particularly with the death of the Lady and the marking of her absence, since it is only as a projection from this final phase that the initial phases could alone make sense. In other words, by the end of the fable, we also become conscious of a meta-fable, a narrative of how the narrative is possible, and in this meta-narrative, which overwrites the seeming assurance of the apparent fable, we learn that the story told could only come into being as a retrospective projection from the ultimate reality of the final death-phase. The initial happiness can only exist as that which we have always already lost, as that whose absence the initial mark signifies. Everything, we must learn from this meta-narrative, begins with the mark, the trace; the defilement of Paradise has always already taken
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place and it is only from the experience of this defilement that we project any notion of a paradisiacal purity, which then can only be characterized as the negation of the negativity of its trace, its mark, in the double negation of the phrase “undefiled.” V
From the beginning of the poem we have thus come full circle. Everything that was initially built up is finally systematically destroyed by the demystifying and deconstructive movement of death. The question that now remains to be asked is how all this leads us to the Conclusion, and, more particularly, to the affirmations in this Conclusion, which seem to be rather incongruous with the argument that has been put forward this far. I promised that I would look for a more organic connection between the fable and the Conclusion than is proposed either by Wasserman or by O’Neill’s reading. Wasserman contends that the “modest creed” of the Conclusion is made possible by the fact that the “imaging” of death and decay in Part Third may be deceptive. One may, therefore, have faith in what the imagination imparts rather than in what the senses perceive. One may choose the former as the ultimate reality rather than the latter (Subtler Language 281-82). O’Neill, on the other hand, convincingly argues that although the text does allow for the possibility of reading Part Third as only “imaging” destruction, this does not lessen the force and inevitability of the process of decay, nor does it question the ghostly persistence of death. The state depicted in Part Third, he concludes, is “a state that is, from one perspective, unreal, from another, all there is” (“Sensitive-Plant” 118). This pessimism then is shown to be operational in the Conclusion, as well, which, according to O’Neill, ironically undermines, even as it embraces, the “logocentric dream” that it affirms (“Sensitive-Plant” 118-23). Although both these readings account for the possibility of the Conclusion, neither of them presents it as necessarily following from, or organically pertaining to, the fable. What I want to suggest, by contrast, is that this Conclusion adds a new perspective without which the fable could not be seen for what it is. It makes the fable capable of accounting for its own genesis; it makes it, as it were, into a fable of all fabulation. The immediate connection between the fable and the Conclusion becomes apparent as soon as we look at Part Third as a meta-narrative; for the Conclusion begins with the expression of two doubts, both of which question precisely what is asserted by the meta-fable:
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Whether the Sensitive-plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change,―I cannot say, Whether that Lady’s gentle mind, No longer with the form combined Which scattered love―as stars do light, Found sadness, where it left delight, I dare not guess; (Conclusion 1-9)
What is doubted here by the speaker—whose emphatic appearance in the form of the first person singular pronoun will require further interpretation—is whether either the Sensitive-plant or the Lady experiences the change that takes place in Part Third.14 What is not doubted, by contrast, is what the whole drift of the meta-fable was to bring into question and to undermine: the initial presence of the Lady and the Sensitive-plant. The opening of the Conclusion is thus in stark contrast with Part Third: it assumes the being of the Lady and of the Sensitive-plant as if they were unquestionable and only questions the reality of the events of Part Third from their point of view. As I will try to show, this stark opposition to Part Third does not indicate a return to the unreflected oppositions and structures established in Parts First and Second. It rather opens another meta-narrative, a metameta-fable, which subsumes the meta-narrative of Part Third just as the latter has subsumed the narrative of Parts First and Second. In other words, the Conclusion opens a new perspective on how the meta-fable of Part Third overwrites the fable of Parts First and Second, and it thus overwrites the meta-fable of Part Third. The first doubt expressed in the Conclusion about whether the Sensitive-plant experiences the change of Part Third can thus be read on the most basic level as an acknowledgement of a fact that has been overlooked in all three parts of the fable: that any fable of self-consciousness must be told by a self-consciousness. The appearance in the Conclusion of the first person singular pronoun “I” as the narrator of the fable thus acknowledges this narrator’s external position to the fable and this acknowledgement fundamentally questions the meta-fable of Part Third. For although it is true that Part Third successfully undermines the oppositions, structures, meanings established in Parts First and Second on the basis of death, it
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must be acknowledged that this basis is necessarily still external and inaccessible to the narrator. The very fact that he tells a story proves that he has not himself experienced death as his own, that he has experienced it as inevitable only by observing it in another self-consciousness and projecting it as applicable to his own state and to the human state in general. What seemed in Part Third to be an ultimate, though negative, truth is thus revealed here to be dependent on an empirical observation and on a logical operation (the working of what the text later refers to as our “organs”), which undercuts its claim of being the absolute (negative) truth. This questioning of death as the ultimate ground is then carried on in more explicit and more abstract terms in the third and fourth stanzas of the Conclusion, which announce the “modest creed” that “death itself must be, / Like all the rest,―a mockery.” What is expressed here is nothing more than what Part Third has also been systematically developing behind the surface of its exposition of death as the ultimate force of destruction. For if death indeed erases all differences, as is demonstrated in Part Third, then it undermines its own reality, too, since death is nothing else but the erasure of these differences. If the demystifying motion of death makes us realize that these differences have in fact never existed, then it also follows that there remains nothing for death to erase. Death is thus inevitably caught up in the play of signification which it purportedly sets into motion. Whereas in the meta-fable of Part Third it seemed to ground the field of play in its entirety, the meta-meta-fable of the Conclusion makes us realize that death itself cannot escape or transcend this field and only grounds the production of meanings as itself dependent on this process. We do not, therefore, return to the naïve oppositions, to the meanings taken for granted in Parts First and Second. The Conclusion does take into account the full force of Part Third. At the same time, however, it undermines its logic by deploying its own means, by showing the ultimate demystifier, death, to be itself a mystification—insofar at least as its claims to generality and transcendent power are concerned. If we look at the fable once again from this perspective, we will realize that the limitations of the ultimate power of death are not only expressed in the Conclusion. What happens here is merely the explicit acknowledgement of something that—we now realize—the formation of the fable as a whole has always taken into account. For this limitation of the power of death is expressed in the structural arrangement of the fable as a whole, more particularly in the unique structural position of the very first stanza. I have argued that by the end of Part Third the fable has taken us on
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a circular journey, in the course of which everything that is gradually built up in Parts First and Second (all the oppositions, structures, meanings) is systematically undermined in the demystifying, deconstructive movement of the meta-fable. The circle ends in the last stanza of Part Third with the deconstruction of the idea of the natural cycle which had provided the ground for the first distinction by which the Sensitive-plant was defined. This stanza, as we have also seen, is connected by its theme and by its syntactical structure (especially by the position and function of the verb “Rose”) to the second stanza of Part First. This structural arrangement, however, suggests that the first stanza of the poem is left out of the cycle of destruction. That cycle only begins in the second stanza and the demystifying motion of death can indeed effectively undermine everything that is established from this stanza on; however, it cannot touch what comes before it. Most importantly, it cannot question the first assumption with which the fable begins: “A Sensitive-plant in a garden grew”; that is, the initial presence of the Sensitive-plant (self-consciousness) and the garden (whose informing power, we later learn, is the Lady). This assumption is basically the same as what the opening stanzas of the Conclusion also state. We have seen how the doubts expressed in these stanzas assume, or take for granted, the original existence of the Sensitiveplant and the Lady (garden), while they question whether what is described in the meta-fable of Part Third can have an effect on these. These assumptions explicitly stated in the Conclusion have, therefore, always been present in the fable as a whole, and we can say that what the Conclusion does is merely repeat them on a more explicit level. In other words, by the time we reach the Conclusion we realize that the perspective of the metameta-fable has been taken into account in the fable from the very beginning.15 We can, therefore, conclude that the fable does not in fact begin in Part Third, with absence entering in the mark, in the trace, but rather in the Conclusion, in the meta-meta-narrative that draws attention to the conditions of the possibility of the fable as a whole. Thus we realize that whereas the meta-narrative of Part Third can indeed account for the oppositions of Parts First and Second, and for the apparent fable as a play of signification arising merely on the ground of an absence, it cannot account for the fundamental assumption that it has taken for granted throughout and without which it could not function: the assumption of the joint existence of the Sensitive-plant (self-consciousness) and the Lady (the garden). It is as if the narrator, the “I” emerging in the Conclusion, is saying that for any marking to commence, for any deconstructive move to take
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place, for any groundless play of signification to set off and to start producing meanings, a self-consciousness has to be posited and together with it a garden. No matter how shrewdly we reveal self-consciousness to be itself shattered, fragmented, and grounded only in an absence, in the very act of this revelation we posit the existence and the external, transcendent position of a self-consciousness. And once we posit this self-consciousness, we have already posited the garden, too. It is as if the narrator is saying: if we posit self-consciousness—as we necessarily do in all deconstructive moves—then we have posited a cosmos, order, heaven, God, too. We must emphasize once again that this meta-meta-fable is by no means a return to the naïve, unproblematic structures, oppositions, meanings of the apparent fable of Parts First and Second. It does not question the inevitability of the meta-fable of Part Third, nor does it question the power of this meta-fable to account for the apparent narrative of the first two parts. It merely shows that, powerful as it is, the meta-fable of Part Third hinges on a tacit assumption: the joint existence of selfconsciousness and garden. Furthermore, we must also notice that this metameta-fable is not presented here as something absolute or transcendent either. The coexistence of self-consciousness and garden is not treated as an empirical reality, which is outside the fable; it is merely presented as something that must be posited, as something that the fable implies as its condition of possibility but that is still inevitably just a function of the fable, a specific locus in the structure. The claim of the Conclusion at this point is not the ontological claim that there is self-consciousness and a garden; it is simply that to tell a story one must affirm these initially as being outside the deconstructive cycle that brings everything under the rule of the mark. The claim is not that these are there, but that one must assume them to tell a story, or rather that any fable inevitably affirms them, says “yes” to them as a condition of its own possibility. In this sense, therefore, the Conclusion does not merely account for the shifts of viewpoint in the poem’s meaning-productive processes, but it makes “The Sensitive-Plant” into a story of all productions of meaning, a fable of all fabulation.16 To achieve this status, however, it seems that the tentative affirmations of the first four stanzas of the Conclusion are not in themselves sufficient. We saw how the doubts expressed in these four stanzas successfully undermine the claim of death as absolute reality and how they thus draw attention to the affirmation that has always been present from the start. And yet these are just doubts, they affirm merely by the double negation of doubting the doubt that has been cast on the
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apparent fable by the meta-fable of Part Third. What the Conclusion also makes clear, however, is that this is not enough; that the fable must affirm positively and explicitly, that it must explicitly say “yes” to that original and implicit “yes.”17 This is made clear, more specifically, in the last two stanzas of the Conclusion, which are worth quoting once again: That garden sweet, that lady fair And all sweet sounds and odours there In truth have never past away— ’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed—not they. For love, and beauty, and delight There is no death nor change: their might Exceeds our organs—which endure No light—being themselves obscure. (Conclusion 17-24)
The tone has obviously changed here: from the “modest creed” of the double negations of the first four stanzas, we have moved to a much more assured and confident tone. The speaker who has expressed his doubts of the absolute claim of Part Third in the first person singular and who has announced his “modest creed” of the non-existence of death in the generalizing first person plural seems now to speak, as it were, for the fable itself, explaining and affirming explicitly what the fable has implicitly explained and affirmed.18 What it explains and affirms is first of all a distinction between “us” and the Lady (garden). What is us, what is ours, what our organs can master is mutable, perishable, weak, and dark (obscure), whereas the Lady and the garden are immutable, eternal, powerful, and they radiate an eternal light. We might at first sight find this distinction rather strange in the conclusion of a fable, which has clearly explained how the Lady and the beauty, love, delight in the garden which she represents are dependent on their opposition to the Sensitive-plant (self-consciousness), more particularly to the lack within the Sensitive-plant which is subsequently identified with death. If, however, we examine the distinction affirmed in the last two stanzas of the Conclusion more closely, we will notice that it is not a simple restatement of the opposition between the garden and the Sensitive-plant found in Part First. From the perspective of the meta-meta-narrative of the Conclusion this opposition is no longer something that can be accounted for in terms of a difference and that is thus inevitably undermined. What we find affirmed in these last two stanzas is much rather an absolute otherness
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and the transcendence of this otherness. And it is at this point and in this relationship that we come to understand how self-consciousness and the garden must necessarily be thought together. It is as if the last two stanzas assert that if we posit self-consciousness, if we tell a story to make sense of ourselves, then there must be an undefiled Paradise, an original and thus eternal purity. It is not just that we posit the existence of this, it is not just the expression of our subjective longing (O’Neill 121), but it is. It is because it is not us, not ours, not anything that we can in any way change, influence, control: it is wholly other, and as such it transcends the working of “our organs.” This transcendence, however, is not to be understood as existing in an empirical reality outside the fable. “Empirical reality” in all its aspects is dependent on the working of our organs (of sensation, of reasoning, of language). The transcendence of the Lady and of the garden is, therefore, immanent in the fable. As such, however, or even because of this, it is a true transcendence: something that we actively bring into being by the affirmation that is implicit in any fable we create but that precisely because of this will always exceed what any fable can contain. To put this in other words, we can say that any fable we invent is inevitably the product of “our organs,” and our organs of sensation, of reasoning, of language are “obscure”: they are based on the ultimate obscurity of death. And since anything can only exist within the fable, we must conclude that nothing can escape the negativity of the operation of our organs. What we end up with thus is the recognition that our life is inevitably a life of “error, ignorance and strife― / Where nothing is―but all things seem.” Not even we, self-conscious human beings, the creators of the fable, can escape the obscurity that is the foundation of the operations of these “organs,” nothing can escape the ultimate obscurity of death—not even death itself. In a characteristically Shelleyan move, however, what this leads us to is not the passivity of ultimate despair but rather the active (performative) affirmation of the transcendence that opens up within this negative movement. Not a transcendence that comes from the outside affecting our organs directly, but an immanent transcendence which—like Intellectual Beauty—exists only in the activity that the inner lack of the selfconscious human being inspires. A transcendence that exists only in and for a self-consciousness and is inscribed in the death-dealing operations of its organs. And yet, it is still a true transcendence, it is not us, not ours and is, therefore, not subject to time, change, or to any other law that the working of our organs necessarily entails.
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The appearance of this paradox, as I have hinted, is not unprecedented in Shelley’s thought but frequently recurs both in his poetry and prose. It is central, for example, in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” in the description of beauty in the “Defence of Poetry,” in “On Love,” and in his concept of the “Epipsyche” (Barcsák, “Mit jelent”). What is perhaps unique in the case of “The Sensitive-Plant” is that here—more explicitly than elsewhere—Shelley explains this paradox in terms of marking, signification. For the way in which the affirmation of the original purity is made possible and even inevitable in the poem is by the representation of the Lady’s presence as emphatically unmarked. Unlike all other objects, ideas, concepts that play a part in the fable, the Lady, as we have seen, enters selfconsciousness only after her absence has been established. Thus, when it is revealed in Part Third that the whole narrative of Parts First and Second was based on death (that is, on the ultimate absence of self-consciousness), when it turns out that nothing can escape the power of the signifier, of marking, this cannot touch the being of the Lady precisely because it is unmarked. The mark can undermine the presence of everything, because every thing, every signified exists only as a product of the ultimately groundless process of marking, of signification, but it cannot abolish that whose absence has founded the process of marking itself, even though it is only from this process that we can become aware of what is absent in this process from the very start. If we read the passage in Part Second on the Lady’s unmarked presence from the perspective of the meta-meta-fable of the Conclusion, we will realize that this situation was actually already indicated in this passage. For immediately after the beautiful stanza describing how the Lady’s trailing hair erases the light vestige she leaves, we find a stanza in which—and this is the only place in the whole fable of Parts First, Second, and Third—the first person singular narrator unexpectedly appears: I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet; I doubt not they felt the spirit that came From her glowing fingers through all their frame. (II 29-32)
This stanza is placed at the geometrical middle of the fable (there are 36 stanzas up to and including it and 36 stanzas after it), and both with the appearance of the first person singular pronoun and the repeated double negation of “I doubt not,” whose function is to affirm the Lady’s presence,
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it anticipates the perspective of the meta-meta-fable of the Conclusion. The whole fable—which hinges on the initial presence of the Lady and on revealing that this presence has always been just a projection of an absence—thus turns out to have been conceived originally from the perspective of the meta-meta-fable. The affirmations of the Conclusion, the perspective of the meta-meta-fable, have, therefore, in fact preceded the whole fable and have made it possible in the first place. We could thus paraphrase Derrida’s famous statement in Of Spirit that “[l]anguage always, before any question, and in the very question, comes down to the promise” (94) and say that what “The Sensitive Plant” as a fable of fabulation affirms is that any fable, before any fabling, and in the very act of fabling, comes down to the affirmation, the affirmation that says “yes” to the “yes” that has been implied in the fable from the start. Far from being a tag, therefore, the affirmations of the Conclusion to “The Sensitive-Plant” in fact make the fable possible in the first place. Without them the story could not be what it is and could not even be told at all. It is only with this Conclusion that the competing points of view, or visions of the various levels of narrative, which—as Wasserman puts it— constitute “the structure of the poem as a series of concentric circles, each gainsaying the one in which it is enclosed” (273), finally fall into place and acquire their real significance. With this I do not mean to suggest that the Conclusion achieves an entirely satisfying closure in the poem. As O’Neill points out, the final word of the poem is the sinister word “obscure” (121), which warns us that all that has been said in the poem is in fact dependent on the working of our organs. As I have tried to show, however, this does not question the necessity and validity of the affirmations of the Conclusion. With this Conclusion, therefore, the fable has said everything that can and must be said within the fable and has done as much as can be done to account for its own rhetorical status, making the story thus into something more than itself: a fable of all fabulation. Pázmány Péter Catholic University Notes
All subsequent references to the text will be to this edition: Donald H. Reiman, and Sharon B. Powers, Ed. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. London: Norton, 1977, 210-19. 2 Some obvious exceptions are Michael O’Neill’s commentary already mentioned and Richard Caldwell’s psychoanalytic reading. 3 Although Wasserman does offer an explanation which accounts for the Conclusion as “poetically inevitable” (252), what he emphasizes in this account is once 1
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again the tentativeness of these final claims, the modesty of the “modest creed” (273). In contrast to this I believe that a more austere logical connection can be established between the fable and the moral than is suggested by his concept of a “subtler language” or by his distinction between the sensory and imaginary upon which he relies to provide his explanation. Michael O’Neill criticizes Wasserman for limiting his interpretation to the poem’s philosophical significance stating that “[i]n fact, Shelley's fable casts its net of possible significances beyond the philosophical” (115). Although this point may indeed be true, I still think that this does not necessarily mean that the poem’s philosophical significance has been fully exhausted or that it can no longer be studied. 4 The source of this interpretation is once again Wasserman’s powerful reading. (Subtler Language 271; Shelley 157). This interpretation does not necessarily have to be contrasted to the still surviving interpretive tradition which identifies the Sensitive-plant with Shelley’s self-representation (Bieri 188; O’Neill 111). 5 Although in “On Love,” Shelley starts out from a bitter description of his personal solitude, later he describes this isolation as something creative and life-giving, much like the companionlessness of the Sensitive-plant. 6 This passage in the poem clearly refers to Plato’s Symposium, which Shelley translated as The Banquet in 1818 and which he first mentions in 1817. The idea of the creative power of inner lack was, however, endorsed by Shelley even before he came across it in Plato, as is attested by the fact that he uses it in a very similar way in his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” which he composed in 1816, that is, before he read Plato’s Symposium. On the Sensitive-plant’s creative lack, as well as on the connection with Plato, see Wasserman 276-79. On the effect of the Symposium on Shelley’s work see Notopoulos 440. Shelley’s use of lack as a defining characteristic of the human being is strikingly similar to Jacques Lacan’s description of the human psyche as founded on desire. On the connection between Shelley and Lacan see Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess. 7 Reiman and Powers comment that “[i]n Shelley’s conception God did not create matter but merely organized it into a universe” (213 n5); see on this also Wasserman, Subtler Language 256-57. 8 Bryan Shelley notes furthermore that the Lady is also described as dreaming of a higher existence, Paradise (line 16), and as intuiting the unseen presence of some “bright Spirit” (line 17, 135-36). From the perspective of the present interpretation this analogy between the Sensitive-plant and the Lady can serve as further evidence to show that the Lady’s presence is unmarked by the Sensitive-plant. 9 As Carlos Baker points out, this passage may also be read as alluding to Milton’s description of evening in Paradise (197-99). 10 From M. H. Abrams to Hugh Roberts, many have commented on Shelley’s use of the Godwinian concept of necessity from. For a brief treatment of the general issue see my essay “The Ending of Ode to the West Wind and Shelley’s Concept of Necessity.” 11 This, incidentally, is a favorite image of Shelley’s. We find it, for example, in Adonais, too, where “Great and mean / Meet massed in death” (185-86), which once again emphasizes that death erases distinctions. 12 The parallels between Shelley’s thought and deconstruction have been pointed out in various contexts, most notably by Tilottama Rajan and Jerrold E. Hogle. Ágnes Péter also makes very good use of these deconstructive readings in her interpretation of Shelley’s philosophy of language.
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13 On the demystifying power of death see Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” 14 Although the first stanza can also be read as asking whether it is the Sensitiveplant itself or that “Which within its boughs like a spirit sat” that experiences the change (O’Neill 119), I think the likelier interpretation of this question is to see it as parallel with the second question and as doubting whether the change was experienced at all. 15 The connection between the viewpoint of the first statement and that of the Conclusion is also noticeable in the fact that the first statement of the poem talks about a Sensitive-plant, not the Sensitive-plant. This, I think, can be read as an acknowledgement of the external position of the narrator, of the fact that no general discourse can be established on self-consciousness except on the basis of the observation of a selfconsciousness by an external self-consciousness. 16 Just as Frances Ponge’s “Fable” is analyzed by Derrida in his “Psyche: Invention of the Other” as a fable of fabulation or as Julie is interpreted by de Man as an allegory of allegory (“Allegory”), “The Sensitive-Plant,” I believe, has the potential of accounting for some of the most foundational problems of any fabular productions of meaning. 17 On the structure of “yes, yes” see for example Derrida, “Mnemosyne” 19-21. 18 This shift in the position of the speaking voice and in the rhetorical mode of its utterance would deserve further analysis. It could, I think, be accounted for in terms of de Man’s description of the inevitable change from constative to performative, to the mode of the promise in his “Promises (Social Contract).” I have described a similar passage from constative to performative in the case of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (Barcsák, “The Ending of ‘Tintern Abbey’”).
Works Cited Abrams, Meyer H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971. Print. Baker, Carlos. 1948. Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973. Print. Barcsák, János. “The Ending of Ode to the West Wind and Shelley’s Concept of Necessity” Katalin Baloghné Bérces, Kinga Földváry, and Veronika Schandl, eds. Faces of English, Pázmány Papers in English and American Studies. Vol. 5. Piliscsaba: Pázmány Péter Catholic U, 2011. 149-58. Print. ---. “The Ending of Tintern Abbey and Paul de Man’s Theory of the Performative Nature of Language.” The AnaChronisT 10 (2003): 85109. Print. ---. “Mit jelent prófétának lenni? Shelley a költő prófétai hivatásáról” [“What Does Being a Prophet Involve? Shelley on the Poet’s Role as Prophet”]. Ritka művészet: Rare Device. Budapest: ELTE BTK Anglisztika Tanszék, 2011. 174-84. Print.
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Bieri, James. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, 18161822. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. Print. Caldwell, Richard. “‘The Sensitive Plant’ as Original Fantasy.” Studies in Romanticism 15 (1976): 221-52. Print. de Man, Paul. “Allegory (Julie).” Allegories 188-220. Print. ---. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Print. ---. “Promises (Social Contract).” Allegories 246-77. Print. ---. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. London: Methuen, 1983. 187-228. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “Mnemosyne.” Memoires: For Paul de Man. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 1-45. Print. ---. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Print. Gelpi, Barbara C. Shelley’s Goddess. Maternity, Language, Subjectivity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Print. Hogle, Jerrold E. Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Notopoulos, James. The Platonism of Shelley. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1949. Print. O’Neill, Michael. “The Sensitive-Plant.” Cambridge Quarterly 25.2 (1996): 103-23. Print. Péter, Ágnes. Késhet a tavasz? Tanulmányok Shelley poétikájáról [Can Spring Be Far Behind? Essays on Shelley’s Poetics]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2007. Print. Rajan, Tilottama. The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. Print. Roberts, Hugh. Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. Print. Shelley, Bryan. Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Print. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Adonais.” Shelley’s 390-406. Print. ---. “A Defence of Poetry.” Shelley’s 480-508. Print. ---. “On Love.” Shelley’s 473-74. Print. ---. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. London: Norton, 1977. Print. ---. “The Triumph of Life.” Shelley’s 455-70. Print.
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Wasserman, Earl R. Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971. Print. ---. The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems. 1959. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1968. Print.
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Being Bemused by National Pride: George Orwell’s Patriotism during the Second World War Ivett Császár _______________________________________________________HJEAS Introduction Patriotism runs through George Orwell’s work although that appears contradictory to the received view of him as a left-wing writer. Commitment to the homeland might be presumed to have more affinity with conservative and right-wing movements than with left-wing politics, but it is in no way inconsistent with an adherence to the traditional concept of masculinity. In The Image of Man (1996), George L. Mosse claims that the ideal of modern masculinity, having appeared with the rising bourgeoisie and parallel to the development of national consciousness in the nineteenth century, has hardly changed since its early days. Among attributes like will power, courage, heroism, respectability, self-sacrifice, self-restraint, and commitment to public causes, patriotism has been an expected and respected manly virtue (3-16). Though modern masculinity developed side by side with nationalism and nationalism has always been most inclined to adopt the masculine stereotype as a means of its self-representation, the masculine ideal was also incorporated by left-wing movements—from this aspect, if we accept Orwell’s adherence to the traditional ideal of masculinity along with his patriotism as an integral part of that masculinity, then his devotion to socialism no longer appears irreconcilable. An examination of three major essays written by Orwell in the patriotic heat of the Second World War, “My Country Right or Left” (1939), “The Lion and the Unicorn” (1940), and “The English People” (1944), reveals that the appearance of patriotic attachment to his homeland during the war conserved and deepened his adherence to normative society, and this attachment increasingly involved the uncritical acceptance and even enhancement of its traditional divisions based on gender. His image of an English future inhabited largely by men who take an active part in the betterment of the world with women relegated to the peripheries of motherhood and prostitution bespeaks a male-centered outlook that to some extent belies the general view on George Orwell as a socially sensitive writer.
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Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
Making the patriotic bolt Orwell was not born a good patriot. Starting his career as a spokesman for the underdog, he regarded the looming Second World War as a game of imperialist powers played at the expense of the poor. In 1937 he explained to Geoffrey Gorer that “[f]ascism is after all a development of capitalism” and the mildest democracy is liable to turn into fascism “when the pinch comes” (Collected 1: 284). He declared that “[f]ascism and capitalism are at bottom the same thing” and depicted the Popular Front as “an unholy alliance of the robbers and the robbed” (305). Assuming that his anti-war stance was in harmony with the opinion of the nation at large, he propounded his ideas with the fallacious confidence of having the support of ordinary people and dissociated himself from his fellow-intellectuals who, he assumed, were deceived by the war racket. As always, he contrasted the attitude of intellectuals and ordinary people for the advantage of the latter: “The mass of people are normally silent,” he argued. “They do not sign manifestoes, attend demonstrations, answer questionnaires or even join political parties. As a result, it is very easy to mistake a handful of sloganshouters for the entire nation” (Complete 11: 243). A year later, however, after he had unleashed the latent but persistent effect of middle-class patriotic education, he sought justification for his newly discovered identity as a patriot from the “unthinking patriotism” of this same mass of ordinary people. As Alok Rai observes, “[t]he silence of the silent majority allows for a certain diversity of interpretation” (87). Ordinary people now turn out to be, if not vocal, unconscious patriots. He discarded even the work done by Mass Observers, which had provided evidence for the opposite: The volume of discontent, apathy, bewilderment and in general, warweariness is probably far smaller than the Mass Observers seem to imply. . . . The one thing the compilers do not seem to have encountered is the sentiment of patriotism. If one may make a guess at the reason, it is that people capable even of imagining a thing like Mass Observations are necessarily exceptional people—exceptional enough not to share the rather unthinking patriotism of the ordinary man. (Complete 12: 17)
Orwell—it is clear—attuned the attitude of “ordinary men” to his own shift of opinion; the resulting inconsistency argues against attributing too much validity to Orwell’s casual “opinion polls” and signals the populist direction in which Orwell’s views were tending (Rai 89).
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Orwell’s lifelong battle with the intelligentsia had a gender aspect, too. Ascribing the traditionally feminine attributes of softness and passivity to intellectuals and the masculine attributes of toughness and activity to “ordinary people,” his identification with the latter strengthened the carefully crafted masculine image of himself. George Woodcock shrewdly illustrates Orwell’s skirmish with intellectuals, which was in part a fight for masculinity as against femininity, with the image of a boxing match: “the Orwellian anti-intellectual sniping reveals not only the kind of man of straw which he habitually constructed to be knocked down with dazzling fist-play, but also the image of himself which he saw opposed to it in the ring” (250). The beginnings: Acknowledging the fruits of a patriotic education It was ”My Country Right or Left” that heralded the major change in Orwell’s views. The public avowal of his conversion to patriotism must have been the outcome of a painstaking internal struggle of justifying for the reader as well as himself a transformation from an openly anti-war stance to a patriotic one, which ultimately called for his whole-hearted support of the war. The essay opens with an overview of the pacifist attitude of Orwell’s generation during and after the Great War. Inviting the reader to browse their memories of the war of 1914-18, he takes the reader on a sort of guided tour: his memories of the war. By addressing the reader as “you” in the opening sentences Orwell establishes an atmosphere of intimacy and by supporting his idea of loaded memories with his own experiences related in the first person he assures the reader that “you” and “me” think about war in essentially similar ways. “if you disentangle your real memories from their later accretions, you find that it was not usually the big events that stirred you at the time” (Complete 12: 269). He then switches to the first person to relate the prosaic effects of war on his perception—thus suggesting that “you” and “me” are in the same boat as he gets the reader to see war as primarily a tiresome rather than a moving experience for those not actively taking part in the fighting. Moving on to the point of pacifist reaction among the young, he situates himself as one of the anti-war young, “we,” who were just “too young” to take part in the war and who, in rebellion against the previous generation, “they,” wrote it off as “a meaningless slaughter.” Indifference towards the war and even despising it was considered by the young the sign of enlightenment. “For years after the war,” claims Orwell on behalf of “we,” “to have any knowledge of or interest in military matters, even to know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, was suspect in ‘enlightened’ circles” (Complete 12: 270). This
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sketch of pacifist reaction during the Great War anticipates his newly developed critical stance that henceforth will become a permanent and basic pillar of his criticism of pacifism: “Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies.” In the second part of the essay he dissociates himself from the pacifist phase and contrasts it with the overwhelming influence of public school drilling in patriotism. To move the reader to accept and approve patriotic feelings in spite of all the foregoing, Orwell carefully further manipulates the reader with his use of personal pronouns. The appeal of war as a manly enterprise enthrals the “just too young” who proceed from boyhood into manhood. By dropping the first person plural he carefully distances himself from his generation: they “became conscious of the vastness of experience they had missed” (emphasis added). And then in a sentence that reveals an important aspect of a willingness to partake in war, he addresses the reader again: “You felt yourself a little less than a man, because you had missed it” (Complete 12: 270). The obvious effect, beside informality, of the use of “you” where he could have employed the more formal “one” is the approximation of the experience of “you” and “I.” By the penultimate paragraph the relation of the reader and author has been strengthened so much that the writer can safely employ the first person plural with reference to the reader and himself: the common experience of the author and his generation is replaced by the suggested common lot of author and reader. Alienation from his contemporaries culminates in the same paragraph: by clearly distinguishing himself from those not motivated by patriotic emotions he positions himself and the reader against them, the left-wing intellectuals. “Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out. Within two years, maybe a year, if only we can hang on, we shall see changes that will surprise the idiots who have no foresight” (Complete 12: 272, emphasis added). With his rigid categories and the resulting ostracism of those not agreeing with him he skillfully manipulates the reader for whom this rhetoric probably goes unnoticed. Not even critics are always aware of Orwell’s manipulative rhetoric. Jenni Calder, for example, claims that instead of interfering Orwell merely guides: “He does not lay down the law about what ought to be believed, but tells what seems to be the truth in such a way that it has to be believed” (105). As opposed to Calder’s approach Roger Fowler more astutely suggests that Orwell’s dialogic stance, not confined to this one
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essay, leads to “an aggressive, didactic tone recalling the teacher or the demagogue” (54). In yielding to the delayed effect of patriotic training, emotions admittedly overrule rationality, though Orwell is silent about the challenge of masculinity involved in all wars. No doubt the Spanish War was a deeply moving and significant phase in his life, which fulfilled for a moment his longing for a humane and egalitarian society; nevertheless, the adherence to the ideal of traditional masculinity also played a part in prompting him to embrace the war ideology: “I am convinced that part of the reason for the fascination that the Spanish civil war had for people of about my age was that it was so like the Great War” (Complete 12: 271). Preceding the modern mechanized warfare of the Second World War, it was a war that relied on individual courage and performance, where a trial by fire could considerably affirm one’s manhood. It appears that the role of war in the confirmation of manhood and early patriotic education worked towards the acceptance of war as “glorious” after all. On and off, I have been toting a rifle ever since I was ten, in preparation not only for war but for a particular kind of war, a war in which the guns rise to a frantic orgasm of sound, and at the appointed moment you clamber out of the trench, breaking your nails on the sandbags, and stumble across mud and wire into the machine-gun barrage. (Complete 12: 270-71)
Here the appeal of manliness joins hands with training in patriotism, though the latter is more apparent at first reading—manliness through the conventional association with toughness is implied in the visual images of mud, barbed wire, and sand bags along with the acoustic images of guns, especially machine guns. If Orwell was unaware of the role of war in developing a sufficiently masculine image of himself, he was conscious of his childhood indoctrination into war: “Most of the English middle class are trained for war from the cradle onwards, not technically but morally” (Complete 12: 270). Though generally regarded as firmly critical of British education as a whole, Orwell did make a distinction between preparatory and public schools and was much more forgiving of the defects of the latter than those of the former. Faced with a left-wing critique of public schools in T. C. Worsley’s Barbarians and Philistines: Democracy and the Public Schools, he came to their defense. Reviewing Worsley’s book in September 1940, the same
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autumn as “My Country Right or Left” was published, he reserved his harshest criticism for the public schools which responded to “the fact that the British Empire needed administrators . . . [by] turning out the brave, stupid, fairly decent mediocrities who are still their typical products today” (Complete 12: 261). He fended off Worsley’s dismissal of public schools for their undemocratic nature with the dubious argument that as opposed to the age of reason, the age of bombers required not advocates of equal suffrage, free speech, intellectual tolerance, and international cooperation, but the average public-school type, “who has at any rate not been brought up as a pacifist or a believer in the League of Nations. The brutal side of public-school life, which intellectuals always deprecate, is not a bad training for the real world” (Complete 12: 261). Therefore, as far as training in military and patriotic virtues go, Orwell acquitted the public schools and, indeed, came to regard the cultivation of patriotism through a special emphasis on games as one of their few virtues: “when the public schools have finally vanished we shall see virtues in them that are now hidden from us” (Complete 12: 262). In passing he regretted Worsley’s making fun of Sir Henry John Newbolt’s celebrated poem “Vitäi Lampada.” The poem, written in 1897, was cheered in the upheaval at the outbreak of the First World War— schoolboys often had to learn it by heart—but lost its popularity as the war dragged on and people inevitably experienced its horror and futility, as opposed to their early patriotic enthusiasm. It draws an eloquent parallel between sportsmanship in school games and steadfastness on the battlefield. In the panic of the battle, when the captain and many of the regiment lie dead, “the river of death has brimmed its banks,” the soldier, once a cricketer at Clifton College, is stirred to fight on for his England by calling to mind how the cricket captain used to prompt his mates not to lose heart at matches. “Play up! play up! and play the game!” is the imperative that encourages cricketer and soldier alike. This refrain forms a connecting thread between school games and war, demonstrating how the empire was supported by the emphasis on sports and how this public-school championing of sportsmanship gained a special meaning and reward in the service of the Empire. Group solidarity learned through sport, from which women at the time were excluded, could be safely relied upon on the larger, concrete as well as figurative, battlefield. The words repeated in the refrain, sufficiently inculcated into youngsters at school, guide them “through life like a torch.”
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In “My Country Right or Left,” Orwell returns to the poem, compares it to John Cornford’s “Full Moon at Tierz: Before the Storming of Huesca,” and concludes that apart from the technical differences “the emotional content of the two poems is almost the same” (Complete 12: 272). But reading the poems side by side one is embarrassed at the gross distortion of Orwell’s assessment. As opposed to Newbolt’s soldier, who is prompted to unthinking action by remembering the pride that he as an adolescent cricketer felt at school games, the persona of Cornford’s poem surveys history, past, present, and future, as well as his part in it. Far from being enthusiastic, he is cool-headed, and presents battle as an inevitable phase of history, accepting reservedly that he has to face “the last fight.” Whereas Newbolt’s poem is devoid of any criticism of war and merely subscribes to flag waving (and apparently compels Orwell to do the same), Cornford’s overview of history does not lead him to perceive war as a glorious game to play. With restrained emotions, even perhaps unwillingly, the persona faces the storming of Huesca. Orwell regarded Cornford as “public school to the core. He had changed his allegiance but not his emotions.” His loyalty to England transmuted itself, according to Orwell, into loyalty to Communism. By insisting on the public-school ethos of Cornford’s poem, Orwell indirectly defends his own transformation in the opposite direction, from a socialist into a patriot. Both Orwell’s favorable assessment of public-school training in patriotism and his revelation of a public-school trait in Cornford’s attitude are examples of what Alok Rai terms “dislocations” precipitated by Orwell’s patriotic transformation (90). His evolution towards patriotism necessarily entailed other shifts but, as Rai notes, these shifts of viewpoint have not been accorded due critical recognition, probably because of his use of a radical rhetoric: “It appears morbidly symbolic that as a consequence of his Spanish wound, Orwell not only lost his voice briefly, he soon found another that was subtly, identifiably different” (83). Rai defines this new voice as “uncompromisingly militant” and the issue on which this militancy especially gained ground was the proper attitude towards the Second World War. Orwell used a dream to confess patriotism perhaps for aesthetic effect, “a piece of self-conscious self-dramatisation,” according to Rai (88). “What I knew in my dream that night was that the long drilling in patriotism which the middle classes go through had done its work, and that once England was in a serious jam it would be impossible for me to sabotage” (Complete 12: 271). Shifting from analysis to approval of middle-
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class education, he exhibits ignorance of its effect on the social expectations of masculinity. David Newsome points out that at the “muscular Christian” school in the age of imperial expansion manliness meant not only being adult, but the word became associated with energy, courage, and physical vitality—a contrast to the word feminine. As the coming war cast its shadow on the Edwardian period, causing an increase in patriotism, these ideals were further intensified. According to Newsome, the ideal of muscular Christianity degenerated into a code of living “so robust and patriotic in its demands that it could be represented as reaching its perfection in a code of dying” (qtd. in Patai 273). In “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Orwell speaks of public schools in very similar terms: there “the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments” (Complete 12: 402). But recognition does not involve criticism on Orwell’s part. Whereas the first part of “My Country Right or Left” offers an analysis of the war training inherent in middle-class education of the time, it ends with an avowal of patriotic commitment to the Second World War and as an approval of patriotic education, which he had set out to examine. Far from recognizing the dangers inherent in patriotism and military virtues, he extols the “spiritual need” for them. I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God save the King.’ That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. (272)
Getting under the illusion of national unity: intellectuals and wealthy women, please, stay outside In “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” Orwell picks up the thread where he left it in “My Country Right or Left”: the power of patriotism. Having seized the reader’s attention with an incisive opener, (“As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”), he immediately gets to the issue of the strength of national loyalty, which he regards as one of the main driving forces of the modern world, thereby finding an excuse for his own unconditional surrender to it. He claims that “as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it” (italics in the original), yet he established only a couple of sentences before that the fact of serving one’s country, including
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the duty to kill, has the power to absolve one from evil. He also acknowledges that fascism, in both Germany and Italy, could gain power mainly because it made use of the force of nationalism, but this recognition does not prevent him from flag-waving. Long forgotten is the time of Down and Out in Paris and London, when returning home from France with the prospect of a job he commented ironically on patriotism as a luxury of those who can afford it. (Woodcock 255) I was so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up for months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are, indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable hops—they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is a very good country when you are not poor; and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not going to be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. (Complete 1: 127)
Almost a decade has passed since and a world war broke out. Menaced by an external enemy he closes ranks with the nation, the common lot taking precedence over difference of interests. “In moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone, though never formulated” (Complete 12: 393)—the observation obviously pertains as much to the nation as to his own emotional state of mind. As Rai observes, the myth of community might have also eased the pain of departing from his former political affiliation (94). Overrun by the initial enthusiasm for war and the opportunity for a socialist revolution, the essay builds upon biases and ingenuity. As Janet Montefiore describes “Inside the Whale,” but her assessment extends to all of Orwell’s mature writing, it is “a pleasure to read: clear, vigorous and well written. It is also aggressive, misleading and full of holes” (14). As opposed to his pre-war idea of war and revolution as antithetical, he now sees an immense possibility in the egalitarian spirit of war and launches the idea of reconciling patriotism and socialism. “We cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war. At such a time, it is possible, as it was not in the peaceful years, to be both revolutionary and realistic” (Complete 12: 421). His words unambiguously testify that he saw the situation of war-time Britain “through Spanish glasses” (Newsinger 64). Just as the POUM had clamored for simultaneous
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war and revolution, Orwell spread the idea that without a fundamental change in the structure of society Britain would be unable to defeat Hitler. By attributing to war the role of social catalyst (war being the “greatest of all agents of change”) he reconciled the need for simultaneous war and social change, and thereby patriotism with socialist aspirations. As Rai claims, “The mysticism of war . . . is for Orwell the necessary means of accommodating his newly discovered patriotism in his intellectual position while preserving a radical continuity” (98). He seized on war as an opportunity for social change to mask the sudden transformation of his political opinion. Claiming that national character is founded on real differences of outlook, he implies that what has happened in Germany (Hitler’s June purge, for example) could not happen in England due to the special traits of English civilization. Robert Pierce points out that many of the characteristics Orwell ascribes to the English are in fact his own personal traits. The English, according to Orwell, have no feeling for the arts, they are not intellectual, and they abhor abstract thought and philosophy. They cling obstinately to everything that is out of date, they are a great nation of collectors. They adore hobbies and spare-time activities—a manifestation of the privateness of English life. “We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, couponsnippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans.” Though lacking definite religious belief, the English have retained “a deep tinge of Christian feeling” (Complete 12: 393-94). English civilization is best characterized by gentleness, hypocrisy, a reverence for constitutionalism and militarism, and a hatred of uniforms. It constitutes “the only large obstacle in Hitler’s path. It is a living contradiction of all the ‘infallible’ dogmas of Fascism” (431). Whatever turn events may take, England, Orwell assumes, will retain its essential characteristics. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as the prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same. (409)
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Rai notes the ironic similarity between Orwell’s depiction of an atavistic and somewhat mystical English community and the contemporaneous evocation of Volksgemeinschaft, the policy that sought the creation of a racially homogeneous national community in Nazi Germany, involving the annexation of territories inhabited by ethnic Germans outside the borders of Germany and the destruction of individuals not fitting the goals of the Reich. According to Rai, both attempt to reduce the significance of social differences: Orwell “in the naive expectation that those differences are disappearing under the stress of war,” and Volksgemeinschaft “to generate oppressive majorities and persecuted minorities excluded from the range of social compassion” (102). Orwell had a habit of speaking on behalf of the whole nation, whereas his point of view was clearly shaped by his personal history and circumstances. However much he gave the impression of sharing the opinion of the general public, his was certainly only one point of view. Pacifists, towards whom he became increasingly intolerant from his patriotic turn on, saw events in a very different light. Contrasting Orwell’s patriotic enthusiasm and trust in the nation with, for instance, D. S. Savage’s idea of Britain, as expressed in his controversy with Orwell over pacifism and war, the issue regains balance. The quotation marks of Savage’s sentences indicate a skeptical stance against Britain and the patriotic appeal generated by war: I am not greatly taken in by Britain’s “democracy,” particularly as it is gradually vanishing under the pressure of war. Certainly I would never fight and kill for such a phantasm. I do not greatly admire the part “my country” has played in world events. I consider that spiritually Britain has lost all meaning; she once stood for something, perhaps, but who can pretend that the idea of “Britain” now counts for anything in the world? This is not cynicism. I feel identified with my country in a deep sense, and want her to regain her meaning, her soul, if that be possible: but the unloading of a billion tons of bombs on Germany won’t help this forward an inch. (Complete 13: 393)
Having established the unity of the English people based upon some general national characteristics, Orwell ostracizes the intellectuals who are devoid of those traits and, therefore, cause many of the troubles of the time. Whereas the common people have retained a “deep tinge of Christian feeling” and a “deeply moral attitude to life,” the intelligentsia has been
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infected by power-worship, the new religion of Europe. Patriotism runs like a connecting thread through the whole nation, but the intelligentsia, Orwell claims, is immune to it. He ostracizes the intellectuals from the nation explicitly and consciously. The exclusion of women from the common people with whom he identifies is latent and probably unintended. Women rarely turn up in this public-spirited essay, and even when they do they are endowed with negative roles and painted in a negative light. At first they appear indirectly through an implied distinction between masculine and feminine language. Dwelling on the unconscious patriotism of the working class, their xenophobia and abhorrence of foreign habits, Orwell claims that “nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly” (Complete 12: 399). The sentence illustrates that Orwell muddled the distinction between language varieties according to gender and class. Since he associated the working class with traditional masculine values, while the upper class—due to the soft life it led—he regarded as effeminate, the demotic speech of ordinary people bore masculine traits. As Fowler observes, Demotic speech, then, is clear, visual, concrete, colloquial, popular. We can add a further attribute, vigour, if we interpret the sexual and genetic stereotypes with which Orwell slurs the upper-class accent: “bloodless,” “anaemic,” “reinvigorate” and “effeminate” connote lack of virility. Demotic speech is vigorous, masculine. (25)
He attributed the decadence of the English language to the anachronistic class system. “‘Educated’ English,” he claims in “The English People,” “has grown anaemic because for long past it has not been reinvigorated from below” (Complete 16: 219). Claiming that the people who most likely use concrete language and so have the most chance to create new metaphors instead of dead ones are the people in contact with physical reality, he proposes that ideal language shall be the joint creation of poets and manual workers. Writing good English, he contends, means a constant struggle against vagueness, obscurity, decorative adjectives, foreign expressions and worn-out phrases (219). In his personal style, he consciously strove to attain that ideal. He required prose to be “like a window pane,” and he shaped his language to give that illusion. “Of later years,” he wrote in “Why I Write” (1946), “I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly,” and he evaluated some of his earlier output
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as “lifeless,” with “purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally” (CW18, 320). Not accidentally, being discontent with A Clergyman’s Daughter he compared his own style to the voice of a eunuch. Ideal language became inextricably tied to masculine language. When women appear explicitly in the “The Lion and the Unicorn,” they are invariably made use of as symbols of the rich upper-class despots of English society. Having reviewed the positive and negative traits of English civilization, with hypocrisy, sham democracy and class privilege seriously threatening its reputation, Orwell comes up with an extremely sentimental conclusion. His vision of the nation as a family disregards opposing forces and interests—a defect familiar from The Road to Wigan Pier, where he attributed a highly idealized unity to the working-class family: [England] resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. (Complete 12: 401)
Irresponsible uncles are decried no less than bedridden aunts—what makes his use of women as symbols of the exploiting class questionable is that in the forty pages of the whole essay women appear only as scapegoats. Furthermore, the chosen attributes—“irresponsible” and “bedridden” imply the traditional division of gender roles, which enhances women’s culpability: whereas uncles are active though in a harmful way, aunts are entirely passive, they prey on the working class. Stressing the necessity of war, communism, and equality of sacrifice Orwell gets even more extreme and presents the gross contrasts of wealth along gender lines. While “common soldiers risk their lives for two and sixpence a day,” he claims, “fat women ride about in Rolls-Royce cars, nursing Pekingees [sic]” (415). Common soldiers risking their lives embody the essence of a worthy life. Orwell held common people—common meaning preferably non university graduated lower-class people—in high esteem and risking one’s life was the ultimate
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evidence of commitment combined with toughness. As opposed to this, obesity, idling about in luxury cars and caressing pets, make him shudder: for him passivity equals irresponsibility. Three pages later he reinforces the picture: “The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Göring’s bombing-planes” (418). The lady’s expensive belongings, epitomized by the luxury car, render her the incarnation of class privilege. Orwell disregards any positive role women might play in the crisis, what is more, he ignores their very existence and uses them only as scapegoats for the sins of the upper classes—keeping this in mind, Taylor’s gender-blind assessment of the essay appears debatable, if not questionable: “Written at a time of grave national crisis, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ glows with optimism, confident in the ability of men and women to improve their lot” (290). Although Orwell chastised not expressly women but the upper classes through such images; nevertheless, it cannot be omitted that he attacked the monied class he disliked so much by deploying women to symbolize its excesses as in “the lady in the Rolls Royce.” The ultimate submission to the homeland: Let’s save our “ordinary” women for motherhood The British Ministry of Information produced the series Britain in Pictures, for which Orwell produced “The English People” in 1944 (Complete 16: 199). That Orwell undertook the commission signals in itself that he was moving away from the “inflammatory stuff” of “The Lion and the Unicorn” towards the official policy of his country. Just as the subtitle of the earlier essay referred to its revolutionary content, the lack of such a reference in the case of “The English People” indicates political moderation. By 1944 the hopes for a revolutionary overturn of capitalism had faded and in the partnership of socialism and patriotism the latter gained more ground. The balance tipped and national survival became more important than class warfare. Therefore, though many of the themes developed in “The Lion and the Unicorn” are repeated in “The English People”; the latter registers an important change in Orwell’s views (Newsinger 108). Though Orwell never abandoned a genuine concern for social justice and a desire for a humane and egalitarian community, the threatening spread of totalitarian aspirations prompted him to minimize the discrepancies and defects of English democracy and maximize its merits in comparison with negative foreign models. The point of view shifted from a socially sensitive stance to a less critical patriotic stance while the primacy of national values and class feeling slipped into the background.
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Similar in structure to “The Lion and the Unicorn,” “The English People” consists of several thematic parts, which are even more clear cut than in the earlier essay. The conclusion, “The future of the English people,” is based on well-defined sections: “The moral outlook of the English people,” “The political outlook of the English people,” “The English class system,” and “The English language.” All these are preceded by a general survey of the English national character under the title “England at first glance.” The pamphlet, meeting the requirements of official propaganda, drops the informal dialogic stance of the essays previously examined. Instead of addressing an imaginary reader, Orwell introduces a neutral foreign observer, with fresh and unprejudiced “probable impressions” of the country and its people. Most of the characteristics derive from “The Lion and the Unicorn”: artistic insensibility (supported by the surprisingly simple argument that the beautiful countryside is ruined by hideous building); a general confidence in the law, gentleness, and good manners; hypocrisy; a lack of intellectuality; the suspicion of foreigners and foreign habits among ordinary people. Two minor traits “The Lion and the Unicorn” did not mention are contemplated here: obsession with sport and sentimentality about animals. Concerning the animal cult, he cannot resist observing that “its worst follies are committed by upper-class women”—reminiscent of the ladies in Rolls Royces nursing Pekingese. The ostracism of intellectuals makes familiar reading, too. By the end of the first part, having enumerated the common traits of the nation and thereby attributing an inherent unity to it, he feels safe to exclude intellectuals. “Dislike of hysteria and ‘fuss,’ admiration for stubbornness, are all but universal in England, being shared by everyone except the intelligentsia” (Complete 16: 204). Common people—intellectuals and the upper class excluded—have retained a Christian morality, which, Orwell says, is their main bulwark against the fashionable cults of the time: communism, fascism, and pacifism. Lumping these three isms together, Orwell does not feel the need to argue why he considers all three to be “forms of power-worship”: he had by this time lashed out at pacifism quite enough in a peremptory manner to feel himself entitled to label without explaining. “It is universally agreed that the working classes are far more moral than the upper classes” runs another incontestable dictum. The blessed combination of moral decency and lack of intelligence, “the inability to think logically,” saves common people from political orthodoxy.
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An ordinary Englishman, Conservative, Socialist, Catholic, Communist, or what not, almost never grasps the full logical implications of the creed he professes: almost always he utters heresies without noticing it. Orthodoxies, whether of the Right or the Left, flourish chiefly among the literary intelligentsia, the people who ought in theory to be the guardians of freedom of thought. (Complete 16: 208)
Rai notes how Orwell slips from “logical implications” to “orthodoxies,” making them appear equal and thereby making logical implications the antithesis of freedom of thought: the result is the association of freedom of thought and illogicality (105). It is not hard to see what Orwell’s overall, arbitrary characterization of English ordinary people boils down to: by weakening the intellectual capacity of the nation, the way is open to the quite irrational force of patriotism. And indirectly, since he has an image of himself as one of the common people and not one of the intellectuals, he exempts himself from the requirement to think logically and withstand the lure of patriotism. Quite unlike what the pamphlet seems to be, a characterization of the English people for propagandistic goals, it is an arbitrary and subjective selection of traits with the underlying aim of supporting the appeal of patriotism. The decision to consider that “a profound, almost unconscious patriotism and an inability to think logically are the abiding features of the English character” appears not so much a characterization of the nation but a self-defensive device disguising a probably acutely felt need to support his turn of mind. In contrast to the presentation of upper-class women as parasites in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” in “The English People” he assigns to ordinary women the important task of raising the English population to an adequate level. Being anxious about the dwindling English birth rate, he proposes the classical remedy: encouraging child bearing through favorable economic policies, including lightened taxation. The philoprogenitive instinct will probably return when fairly large families are already the rule, but the first steps towards this must be economic ones. . . . Any government, by a few strokes of the pen, could make childlessness as unbearable an economic burden as a big family is now: but no government has chosen to do so, because of the ignorant idea that a bigger population means more unemployed. Far more drastically than anyone has proposed hitherto, taxation will have to be graded so as to encourage child-bearing and to save women with young children from being obliged to work outside the home. (Complete 16: 223)
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His proposal for child-friendly measures (kindergartens, play-grounds, bigger and more convenient flats, free education), unfortunately, also includes heavier punishment for abortion and a disapproval of the trend among the young to have a good time and “stay young as long as possible.” In the England of the last thirty years it has seemed all too natural that blocks of flats should refuse tenants with children, that parks and squares should be railed off to keep the children out of them, that abortion, theoretically illegal, should be looked on as a peccadillo, and that the main aim of commercial advertising should be to popularise the idea of ‘having a good time’ and staying young as long as possible. (Complete 16: 223)
Though Patai puts it harshly when she claims that Orwell’s population policy “would have openly treated women as mere vehicles for fulfilling state priorities,” her criticism is justifiable in that Orwell focused exclusively on demographically adequate breeding and failed to consider procreation as a private matter of individuals. He felt anxious for his country, in the shadow of the threateningly increasing population of Nazi Germany, and regarded birth-control and abortion as impediments to the growth of the English population. The thought that these means offered the opportunity for women to control their own bodies and lives escaped him. Orwell’s proposals in “The English People” are, according to Woodcock, “probably the most truly reactionary he ever made, including such familiar devices as the crushing penal taxation of childless people and a more rigorous repression of abortion. It shows Orwell at his most authoritarian, but it also shows an aspect of his thought which cannot be ignored” (261). Women, ironically, turn up in the essay again in connection with prostitution. The author is seemingly unaware of the fundamental contradiction between the acknowledgement that in big towns “prostitution is extremely blatant” and the conviction that “almost no one in England approves of prostitution.” Far from contemplating the reasons, social and economic, of this by-product of patriarchal societies, not even commenting on the effect of war on prostitution, which by the time of writing must have been a hot, if repressed, issue, he over-simplifies the problem by attributing to the public a general abhorrence of it: “it is completely unattractive and has never been really tolerated. It could not be regulated and humanised as it has been in some countries, because every English person feels it in his bones that it is wrong” (207). He exempts decision-makers of responsibility by evoking the outstanding morals of common English people—
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prostitution does not need to be regulated as “every English person” knows that “it is wrong.” Consequently, the phenomenon is likely to disappear by itself in the future—with this frivolous argument Orwell simply sweeps the dirt under the carpet. Just as in “The Lion and the Unicorn” he speaks of a male world quite sparsely inhabited by women. Concerning spare-time activities, for example, he dwells on the failure of the temperance movement, on the pub as “one of the basic institutions of English life,” on gambling, and nothing else. Ironically, apart from dog-keeping upper-class ladies, the derogative branding of the upper classes as effeminate, and the spreading of utility clothes that bridge the gulf in appearance between social layers, especially in the case of women, females are mentioned only in the passages on prostitution and the birth rate. Just as prostitution is dealt with as an institution, with its actors/victims hardly visible and surely not mentioned, the dwindling birth rate is also seen as an abstract social phenomenon, women hardly playing any formative part in it. In discussing the future of the English people in the last part of the essay Orwell devotes another page to the downward curve of the birth rate. At such length he finds space to compare nineteenth and twentieth century birth rates and attitudes towards children, to dwell on the alleged economic background of high versus low birth-rates, among them taxation, school fees and housing, and he even devotes a sentence to the cult of animals, which he regards as a factor working against the birth of children. Convinced that favorable economic measures encourage child bearing, he advocates graded taxation in order “to save women with young children from being obliged to work outside the home”—a truly reactionary demand and the only occasion on which he includes women in the discussion of child bearing. Not less self-assuredly, towards the end of the pamphlet, as a kind of conclusion he summarizes the “immediate necessities” of the English people and launches his recommendations with the command that “they must breed faster” (Complete 16: 227). Retaining vitality is an indispensable condition if the English people are to carry out the important role Orwell assigns to them in the future. Based on its outstanding qualities, for example, the “highly original quality” of “not killing one another,” only England, out of all European countries, could avoid the present world of chaos and dictatorship. The merit of being peaceful should put the English people in a leading position.
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The English are probably more capable than most peoples of making revolutionary changes without bloodshed. In England, if anywhere, it would be possible to abolish poverty without destroying liberty. If the English took the trouble to make their own democracy work, they would become the political leaders of western Europe, and probably some other parts of the world as well. They would provide the much-needed alternative to Russian authoritarianism on the one hand and American materialism on the other. (222)
Making up a myth about the English people to encourage them to take an initiative in world politics, Orwell comes curiously close again to the ideology of German fascism: the myth of the Aryan people served the ambitious plans of a dictator who aimed at conquering large parts of the world. Of course, Orwell made up his propaganda against the destructive force of fascism and he envisaged a powerful England setting a good example in democracy and social equality. Nevertheless, not even in the ideal world of an England-dictated peace is there much room for women to play a positive formative role. Without the eulogies to motherhood and the exaltation of women as breeders of the nation, an explicit ideology of German fascism, the women of Orwell’s male-centered world are reckoned with only in their breeding (and in the case of prostitution, pleasureproviding) capacity. At this point one is reminded of Orwell’s controversy with pacifists Alex Comfort, D. S. Savage, and George Woodcock, which appeared in 1942 in the columns of Partisan Review. In objecting to war against fascism, pacifists argued that war demanded a totalitarian organization of society, and England, embarking on war, was compelled to take measures of such nature in the interest of military victory (Complete 13: 392). According to Comfort, the fight against fascism, whatever the outcome, inevitably involved an imitation of it: “He [Hitler] puts us in a dilemma which cannot be practically rebutted, only broken away from—‘If I win, you have political fascism victorious: if you want to beat me, you must assimilate as much of its philosophy as you can, so that I am bound to win either way’” (396). In his anxiety over the dwindling birth rate, Orwell came very close to regarding women as vehicles for maintaining and increasing the population of the nation—an idea reminiscent of the German assumption of women’s function in the promotion of Aryan blood. Birth controlled by the state (either curbed or enforced) marks a tendency towards the curtailment of
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individual liberties and the primacy of public values over private life and values. As Comfort goes on, Accordingly we began feverishly jamming into our national life all the minor pieces of Fascist practise which did not include socialist methods, sitting on the Press “because this is Total War,” making our soldiers jab blood bladders while loudspeakers howl propaganda at them, because the German army consisted of efficient yahoos. The only people who said that to defeat Fascism one must (a) try to understand it and (b) refuse to accept its tenets oneself were the pacifists. It looks as if Mr. Orwell and his warlike friends were being not objectively but constructively supporters of the entire philosophical apparatus which they quite genuinely detest. (Complete 13: 396).
Nevertheless, not many reviewers at the time noticed the shortcomings of Orwell’s patriotism. In 1947 Charles Humana pointed out that the pamphlet received favorable reviews: “Strangely enough, despite the party line of the various journals, they were all unanimous on this occasion. Nationalism had transcended all” (Complete 16: 228). Orwell’s call for the strengthening of national unity was timely, and the repudiation of violent revolution made his ideas probably more acceptable to many. By this time he had discarded the prospect of war-induced revolutionary socialism and though he retained a wish for power to be placed in the hands of the “ordinary English in the street,” what remained was only a vague radicalism: “By the end of another decade it will be finally clear whether England is to survive as a great nation or not. And if the answer is to be ‘Yes,’ it is the common people who must make it so” (228). Conclusion Having changed his mind from being anti-war, Orwell entirely immersed himself in the newly found intimacy with the English community and embraced the accepted norms and values of that community without scruples. Though he was anxious about the misuse of propaganda after his Spanish experiences and watched closely the Axis and Allies propaganda in the war years, he appeared to fall entirely under the spell of myth making and war propaganda in a broader sense. The fruits of moral and physical training he received at his preparatory and public schools grew ripe in the long run—this he admitted and made a virtue of. Nevertheless, he remained unaware that this social issue had a wider gender aspect, too. Hearing the sound of the bugles he rushed onto the battleground—in the Spanish Civil
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War literally, in the Second World War only mentally—and he ruthlessly denounced those not willing to fight from the secure and firm stance of a manly man. The essays from the outbreak, optimistic initial, and final stages of the war mark Orwell’s mental curve during the war and demonstrate what consequences the Woolfian “unreal loyalty” to one’s country had on his quite conservative grasp of gender roles. The essays reveal that during the war he entirely lost objective measures and came to regard his country as unique—the first step of mystifying a community, which is an essential component of war. As Elaine Scarry puts it, “it is when a country has become to its population a fiction that war begins” (qtd. in Hussey, 8). The outstanding qualities of English civilization convince Orwell by the end of “The English People” that England could take the lead in Europe—a form of domination in the disguise of historical necessity. And that the image of this ideal future relies heavily on the traditional division of gender roles is nothing to be surprised at, only to be reckoned with, in the case of a writer who incorporated the dictates of traditional masculinity as much as George Orwell. Eötvös Loránd University Appendix Henry Newbolt, “Vitaï Lampada” There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night— Ten to make and the match to win— A bumping pitch and a blinding light, An hour to play and the last man in. And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat, Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame, But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote— “Play up! play up! and play the game!” The sand of the desert is sodden red,— Red with the wreck of a square that broke;— The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks, And England’s far, and Honour a name,
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But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks: “Play up! play up! and play the game!” This is the word that year by year, While in her place the School is set, Every one of her sons must hear, And none that hears it dare forget. This they all with a joyful mind Bear through life like a torch in flame, And falling fling to the host behind— “Play up! play up! and play the game!” John Cornford, “Full Moon at Tierz: Before the Storming of Huesca” The past, a glacier, gripped the mountain wall, And time was inches, dark was all. But here it scales the end of the range, The dialectic’s point of change, Crashes in light and minutes to its fall. Time present is a cataract whose force Breaks down the banks even at its source And history forming in our hands Not plasticine but roaring sands, Yet we must swing it to its final course. The intersecting lines that cross both ways, Time future, has no image in space, Crooked as the road that we must tread, Straight as our bullets fly ahead. We are the future. The last fight let us face.
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Works Cited Calder, Jenni. Chronicles of Conscience: A Study of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler. London: Secker and Warburg, 1968. Print. Fowler, Roger. The Language of George Orwell. London: MacMillan, 1995. Print. Hussey, Mark ed. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse UP, 1991. Print. Laqueur, Walter, and George L. Mosse. The Left Wing Intellectuals between the Wars, 1919-1939. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Print. Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York; Oxford: OUP, 1996. Print. Montefiore, Janet. Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Newbolt, Henry. Selected Poems. Ed. Patrick Dickinson. London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1981. Print. Newsinger, John. Orwell’s Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Orwell, George. The Complete Works of George Orwell. Vols. 1-20. Ed. Peter Davison. London: Secker and Warburg, 1998. Print. ---. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vols. 1-4. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968. Print. Patai, Daphne. The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1984. Print. Rai, Alok. Orwell and the Politics of Despair: A Critical Study of the Writings of George Orwell. Cambridge: CUP, 1988. Print. Taylor, D. J. Orwell: The Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 2003. Print. Woodcock, George. The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell. London: Fourth Estate, 1984. Print.
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Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin and Women’s Rights in Eighteenth-Century United States Ali Shehzad Zaidi _______________________________________________________HJEAS The first two parts of Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin received scant notice when they were serialized in the Philadelphia Weekly Magazine in March and April 1798 under the title “The Rights of Women.” Written in the form of dialogues between a young schoolteacher and a widowed socialite, Alcuin is now recognized as the first published fictional work by the first major novelist of the United States. In this seminal work, Brown affirms Mary Wollstonecraft’s compelling vision of the equality of the sexes, while exposing the patronizing tone of contemporary male discourse on women and the continued oppression of women in late eighteenth-century United States. The critical neglect of Alcuin lasted nearly two centuries. As recently as 1974, William Hedges deemed Alcuin “an extremely clumsy work,” claiming that Brown “had trouble managing the dialogue form in such a way as to make his own point of view consistently clear” (115). However, Brown never intended Alcuin to be a philosophical tract. Within the last few decades his dialogue has come to be understood as a deft piece of literature which undermines faith in the apparent enlightenment of its time. Alcuin appeared at a time of contentious debate regarding the education and rights of women. Although forty new monthlies emerged in the United States between 1783 and 1800 (Clark 9), few editors advocated political and social equality for women. As a young aspiring writer, Brown needed to be circumspect. James Watters, the editor of the Weekly Magazine, objected to anything that would “offend the delicacy of his readers” (Arner 291). During the late 1790s, as Brown and his friends were well aware, many of the ideals associated with the American and French Revolutions were losing popular support in the United States. The American merchants and landowners who had achieved freedom from taxation by the British crown were disinclined to free slaves and emancipate women, since it was not in their economic interest to do so. Freedom had its limits. Although some local courts and state legislatures modified legal restrictions, the vast majority of married women could not own property, enter into contracts, or vote in late eighteenth-century United States. Married women usually depended on their husbands for their sustenance, ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
and single women were expected to live with their nearest male relative (Riley 15-16). Like children, married women did not legally exist independent of their husbands. Women were commonly identified in public records as a certain man’s wife, daughter, or sister (Wood 49). While they were legally bound to support their wives and refrain from physical abuse, men nonetheless exercised full legal authority over them. Women were constantly edified as to proper dress and conduct. In A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), Dr. John Gregory advised women to conceal their intellectual accomplishments like shameful secrets: “Be even cautious in displaying your good sense. It will be thought you assume a superiority over the rest of the company. But if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding” (18). Gregory’s manual proved so popular that it went through twenty-three American editions in twenty-two years (McAlexander 254), thereby heavily influencing female conduct. Women were expected to defer to men at all times. The renowned physician Benjamin Rush, for instance, counseled Rebecca Smith, a young bride: You will be well received in all companies only in proportion as you are inoffensive, polite, and agreeable to everybody. . . . Don’t be offended when I add that from the day you marry you must have no will of your own. The subordination of your sex to ours is enforced by nature, by reason, and by revelation. . . . In no situation whatever, let the words, “I will” or “I won’t” fall from your lips till you have first found out your husband’s inclinations in a matter that interests you both. The happiest marriages I have known have been those when the subordination I have recommended has been most complete. (qtd. in Smith 60)
Nonetheless, as Glenda Riley observes, many women had successfully managed farms and businesses while their husbands fought in the American Revolutionary War (45). As a result, some expected more rights for women in a new republic in which attitudes were beginning to embrace “the ideal of compassionate marriage, legitimacy of women’s education, increased respect for motherhood, and talk of enhanced selfesteem for women” (58). Women began to appropriate the rhetoric of the American Revolutionary War to describe their own experiences, using such words as “independence,” “liberty,” “and “slavery” in a new revolutionary context
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(Gundersen 74). In March 1776, a few months before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, then a delegate to the Continental Congress: [I]n the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. (“Letter from Abigail, March 31, 1776” 1011)
John Adams responded with disarming levity: As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where; that Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians, and Negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter is the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented. (“Letter from John” 1012)
This sort of male humor tended to cast men as forbearing, as in this passage by an anonymous wag which appeared in the January 1798 issue of The Key: “Whosoever will be married, before all things it is necessary that he hold the conjugal faith; and the conjugal faith is this: that there were two rational beings created, both equal, and yet one superior to the other—and the inferior shall bear rule over the superior; which faith, except every one keep whole, and undefiled, without doubt, he shall be scolded at everlastingly” (“Matrimonial Creed” 56). Only the willfully blind could describe men and women as “both equal.” The implication seemed to be: why give women rights when it was they who really ruled? Few men were about to acknowledge the gender inequities present in American society, let alone remedy them. Although quality education was a precondition for equality, women were constantly being advised both at home and in print to content themselves with a debased form of education. In a June 1778 letter to her husband, Abigail Adams regretted “the trifling narrow contracted Education of the Females of my own country,” which she contrasted
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unfavorably with the superior accomplishments of French women. She reminded John that “you need not be told how much female Education is neglected, nor how fashionable it has been to ridicule Female learning” (“Letter from Abigail, June 30, 1778” 1015-16). Abigail Adams’ concerns were well founded. The American press inculcated female virtue through dubious analogies such as “What bravery is in men, chastity is in women” (“Chastity” 44), and through condescending advice such as that proffered in “An Address to the Ladies” in the American Magazine, March 1788: “To be lovely you must be content to be women; to be mild, social, and sentimental—to be acquainted with all that belongs to your department—and leave the masculine virtues, and the profound researches of study to the province of the other sex” (qtd. in Mott 64). Such advice justified the despair expressed by “A Circle of Ladies” in American Museum in December 1788: But that the odium of “a bookish fair” Or “female pedant,” or “they quit their sphere,” Damps all their views, and they must drag the chain, And sigh for sweet instruction’s page in vain. (qtd. in Mott 64)
In a famous essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes,” which appeared in the Massachusetts Magazine in 1790, Judith Sargent Murray expressed her indignation at the intellectual confinement of her gender: “Are women deficient in reason? we can only reason from what we know, and if an opportunity of acquiring knowledge hath been denied us, the inferiority of our sex cannot fairly be deduced from thence” (1254). Oppressive conditions served to justify oppression, whether of black slaves or women, whom were deemed ignorant because they had little education and were denied education because they were deemed ignorant. New notions of citizenship and patriotic duty in the early American republic led to a reappraisal of female education. Abigail Adams advocated quality education for women on the grounds that they needed to nurture statesmen (Riley 50). In 1787, Benjamin Rush outlined an educational program which would enable women to instruct their children and, if need be, manage their husbands’ properties. Women would learn singing and dancing, but not instrumental music, and could refine their social graces so long as they remained uncorrupted by European mores. Rush proposed that women be taught English grammar, basic math, and bookkeeping, as well as the rudiments of geography, history, religion, and science since these would
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“thereby qualify her not only for a general intercourse with the world but to be an agreeable companion for a sensible man” (182-83). Rush’s program was decidedly male-centered, like that of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who stated in Emile (1762), The first education of men depends on the care of women. Men’s morals, their passions, their tastes, their pleasures, their very happiness also depend on women. Thus, the whole education of women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honored by them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make their lives agreeable and sweet—these are the duties of women at all times, and they ought to be taught from childhood. (365)
Rush’s program, while better than most contemporary models of female education, sought to limit women under the guise of their protection, as can be seen in its rationale for women not learning French: Of the many ladies who have applied to this language, how great a proportion of them have been hurried into the cares and duties of a family before they had acquired it; of those who have acquired it, how few have retained it after they were married; and of the few who have retained it, how seldom have they had occasion to speak it in the course of their lives! It certainly comports more with female delicacy, as well as the natural politeness of the French nation, to make it necessary for Frenchmen to learn to speak our language in order to converse with our ladies than for our ladies to learn their language in order to converse with them. (183)
Mary Wollstonecraft excoriated such educational schemes in her impassioned A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which was first published in England in 1792: The education of women has, of late, been more attended to than formerly; yet they are still reckoned a frivolous sex, and ridiculed or pitied by the writers who endeavour by satire or instruction to improve them. It is acknowledged that they spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments; meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves,—the only way women can rise in the world,—by marriage. . . . The instruction which women have hitherto received has only tended . . . to render them insignificant objects of desire—mere propagators of fools! (78-79)
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Vindication was serialized in American magazines prior to its first American book edition in 1794. In its passages, Wollstonecraft harshly criticized the attitudes of philosophers such as Rousseau: “Men, indeed, appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner when they try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood” (90). After Wollstonecraft died in childbirth in September 1797, William Godwin, her husband, published her memoirs. Wollstonecraft was subsequently reviled in the American press. Commentators often conflated her personal life with her egalitarian ideas. In April 1798, the month during which the second part of Alcuin was published, the European Magazine termed Wollstonecraft “a philosophical wanton” (Moore 5). The personal attacks on Wollstonecraft helped to preclude discussion regarding the rights of women. At the time, hostility was also growing towards the French Revolution. The Reign of Terror in 1793-94 had attenuated the appeal of the ideals of liberty and equality which were expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that was adopted by the French National Constituent Assembly in 1789. Supporters of women’s rights were disappointed by the new French constitution of 1791 because it denied citizen’s rights to women, reserving them only for men who were at least twenty-five years old (Moore 37). As relations between the United States and the French revolutionary government worsened, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which allowed the United States government to deport resident aliens that it deemed dangerous and to arrest editors who criticized federal officials. Federalists fostered a repressive antiFrench climate in the United States that made frank political discussions risky at the time that Brown published the first two parts of Alcuin. Born to a Quaker family with tolerant and even radical views, Brown was predisposed to favor women’s rights. His father, Elijah Brown, had read Godwin’s Political Justice and Wollstonecraft’s View of the French Revolution (Clark 16). The Quakers granted women full participation in church governance and freed them from the traditional Christian injunction that bound women to silence in churches. (Riley 26). Thanks to the liberal influence of Quakerism, New Jersey proved to be an exception among the states in granting women the right to vote from 1790 to 1807 (Clark 113). Brown belonged to “The Friendly Club,” an intellectual circle whose members discussed ideas such as those of Godwin and Wollstonecraft. One member, Elihu Hubbard Smith, a physician and a close
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friend of Brown, was particularly distraught by Wollstonecraft’s death, writing in his diary that “the loss of 50,000 french [sic] & and as many Austrians on the Rhine or in Italy, would have affected me less” (qtd. in Waterman 27). Smith arranged the publication of the first two parts of Alcuin as a book in spring 1798 but few copies were sold. He wrote in his diary that he ought to first consult a woman of “good-sense & candour” before publishing the remainder of Alcuin (Ringe 4-5).1 Smith also expressed his trepidation in a brief preface to the first two parts: The following Dialogue was put into my hands, the last spring, by a friend who resides at a distance, with liberty to make it public. I have since been informed that he has continued the discussion of the subject, in another dialogue. The reception which the present publication shall meet will probably determine the author to withhold or print the continuation. (Alcuin 42)
The deaths of Smith and Watters during the 1798 yellow fever epidemic delayed the publication of the final part of Alcuin until five years after Brown’s death. Even then, in 1815, Paul Allen, who began the first biography of Brown (later completed by Brown’s close friend William Dunlap) described the arguments in Alcuin as “dangerous novelties” and “ingenious sophistry” (qtd. in Davidson 71). Alcuin would not be published as a whole until 1971. The “dangerous novelties” to which Allen referred are expressed by the eponymous first-person narrator of Alcuin, who is named after an eighth-century rhetorician and theologian in the court of Charlemagne (Arner 274). Alcuin may have had the reputation of being learned during the Dark Ages, but his name in an eighteenth-century context had to be regarded as something of a joke. Though Alcuin fancies himself as a deep thinker and a man of understanding, his enlightenment is rather medieval. The name of the second character in Alcuin, Mrs. Carter, recalls the erudite English classicist and poet Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806), who is best remembered for her translations of Epictetus. In an imaginary epistolary exchange that he wrote in his late teens, Brown expressed his admiration for Carter: Methinks I should be proud to be placed by the side of Mrs. Carter. Was she not a linguist and philologist, the deepest of female scholars? Such, I have read, was the character of this illustrious lady, and amidst all her eruditions she was, if I am rightly informed, still a woman, and carried into
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the recesses of the library all the delicacies of her sex. What an extraordinary spectacle! The fingers of a lady soiled with the dust of the manuscripts of Epictetus. (qtd. in Clark 64)
The persuasive Mrs. Carter of Alcuin is a fitting namesake of Elizabeth Carter. She calmly refutes the flimsy arguments of Alcuin and exposes his logical fallacies. The narrator of Alcuin is a rather awkward and self-conscious schoolmaster. His pedantry stands in contrast to the integrity and poise of Mrs. Carter. Brown portrays Alcuin with considerable skill and insight. In 1794, a Charles Brown was listed as a schoolmaster at the Friends Grammar School in Philadelphia, and that person is almost certainly Charles Brockden Brown (Clark 108). Brown understood the penury and demeaning work conditions of teachers. In Part One, Alcuin begins his narrative by telling how he came to visit Mrs. Carter, who was a housekeeper and hostess for her brother, as might be expected of a widow of that time. Her brother, a physician who traveled often, left Mrs. Carter to entertain his guests who, Alcuin relates, “found something in the features and accents of the lady, that induced them to prolong their stay” (43). Mrs. Carter is an attractive and independent woman, who is not subservient to a male authority figure. Alcuin looks forward to meeting her with a mixture of dread and desire: Shall I go (said I to myself), or shall I not? No, said the pride of poverty, and the bashfulness of inexperience. I looked at my unpowdered locks, my worsted stockings, and my pewter buckles. I bethought me of my embarrassed air, and my uncouth gait. I pondered on the superciliousness of wealth and talents, the awfulness of flowing muslin, the mighty task of hitting on a right movement at entrance, and a right posture in sitting, and on the perplexing mysteries of tea-table decorum: but, though confused and panic-struck, I was not vanquished. (45)
In regard to the erotic tension of Alcuin’s words in this passage, Bryan Waterman notes that “the muslin gowns seem ‘awful’ for what they both disclose and suggest to the imagination” (32). Repressed sexual interest lurks just beneath the surface of the dialogue between Alcuin and Mrs. Carter. Alcuin makes it clear from the outset that he seeks release from daily drudgery in the salon of Mrs. Carter. After a monotonous day of teaching the alphabet and multiplication table to children, Alcuin likes to
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daydream, “amplifying the seducing suppositions of, ‘if I were a king,’ or, ‘if I were a lover’” (46-47). Before he narrates his dialogue with Mrs. Carter, Alcuin provides a self-portrait: I hate a lecturer. I find little or no benefit in listening to a man who does not occasionally call upon me for my opinion, and allow me to canvass every step in his argument. I cannot, with any satisfaction, survey a column, how costly soever its materials, and classical its ornaments, when I am convinced that its foundation is sand which the next tide will wash away. I equally dislike formal debate, where each man, however few his ideas; is subjected to the necessity of drawing them out to the length of a speech. (44)
Alcuin’s distaste for opinions that resemble sand columns proves ironic given his own mutable stances that are demolished in turn by the sound reasoning of Mrs. Carter. Alcuin is initially tongue-tied after being introduced to Mrs. Carter. He feels ashamed of his clothes and his inferior social status as a school teacher, even though there is not a trace of snobbery or condescension in Mrs. Carter. Alcuin opens with this conversational gambit: “Pray, Madam, are you a federalist?” (47). Mrs. Carter demurs saying, “What! ask a woman—shallow and inexperienced as all women are known to be, especially with regard to these topics—her opinion on any political question! What in the name of decency have we to do with politics?” (47). Anita M. Vickers observes the “decidedly satiric inflection” of Mrs. Carter’s response (95). Alcuin at first believes that Mrs. Carter accepts male supremacy in public affairs and the professions. He finds it natural that women should confine their discussion to familiar topics: “Women are most eloquent on a fan or a tea-cup—on the furniture of the nursery, or the qualifications of a chamber-maid. How should it be otherwise?” (48). In response to her stodgy guest, Mrs. Carter says: “Your inference is, that women occupy their proper sphere, when they confine themselves to the tea-table and their work-bag: but this sphere, whatever you may think, is narrow” (48). In order to ingratiate himself with his hostess, Alcuin begins to shift away from his prosaic view of women. He notes that while they were hardly at fault, women were often reminded that “the instructors of mankind . . . were not women,” citing the examples of Pythagoras, Lycurgus, Socrates, Newton, and Locke. Alcuin tells Mrs. Carter, “You might as well expect a
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Laplander to write Greek spontaneously, and without instruction, as that any one should be wise and skillful, without suitable opportunities” (50). Alcuin observes how women are shaped by circumstance, but he nonetheless seems to believe that women have an essence that determines them: “Women are defective. They are seldom or never metaphysicians, chemists, or lawgivers. Why? Because they are sempstresses and cooks. This is unavoidable. Such is the unalterable constitution of human nature” (51). Mrs. Carter doubts that the destiny of women lies in their biological makeup, stating that “of all the forms of injustice, that is the most egregious which makes the circumstance of sex a reason for excluding one half of mankind from all those paths which lead to usefulness and honour” (51). Despite his apparent change of heart, Alcuin reveals his well-entrenched conservatism when he attempts to mollify Mrs. Carter by saying that “it is possible to misapprehend, and to overrate the injury that flows from the established order of things” (51). Mrs. Carter will not be placated. She elaborates on the double standards and values which are imposed on both sexes: Nothing has been more injurious than the separation of the sexes. They associate in childhood without restraint; but the period quickly arrives when they are obliged to take different paths. Ideas, maxims, and pursuits, wholly opposite, engross their attention. Different systems of morality, different languages, or, at least, the same words with a different set of meanings, are adopted. (58)
Although she believes that she has led a more fortunate life than most women, Mrs. Carter laments the injustices in the prevailing system of marriage in which a woman’s loss of property results in dependency, and thence hypocrisy: “She will be most applauded when she smiles with most perseverance on her oppressor” (59). Alcuin strives to persuade Mrs. Carter that men actually favor women through exclusion and differential treatment: They have exempted you from a thousand toils and cares. Their tenderness has secluded you from tumult and noise: your persons are sacred from profane violences; your eyes from ghastly spectacles; your ears from a thousand discords, by which ours are incessantly invaded. Yours are the peacefullest recesses of the mansion: your hours glide along in sportive chat, in harmless recreation, or voluptuous indolence; or in labour so light as scarcely to be termed encroachments on the reign of
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contemplation. Your industry delights in the graceful and minute; it enlarges the empire of the senses, and improves the flexibility of the fibres. The art of the needle, by the lustre of its hues and the delicacy of its touches, is able to mimic all the forms of nature, and pourtray all the images of fancy: and the needle but prepares the hand for doing wonders on the harp; for conjuring up the “piano” to melt, and the “forte” to astound us. (60)
Mrs. Carter senses that Alcuin’s unctuous and simpering language constitutes a male stratagem of subjection of the kind that Wollstonecraft dismisses as “those pretty feminine phrases which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence” (78). She counters that this idealized description applies only to a very few privileged women and asks Alcuin to imagine instead the hardships of women in the lower class. Part Two of Alcuin continues the first dialogue and opens with Alcuin repeating his very first question: “Are you a federalist?” (62). The question betrays the anxiety not just of Mrs. Carter, a fictional character, but also of Brown, the author. In the serialized version of Alcuin (“The Rights of Women”), Brown had to omit eleven pages in which Mrs. Carter advocates the participation of women in public life, most likely due to pressure from his editor. He even had to remove the reference to the lemon and ice (a French favorite) which the hostess served, to avoid unpleasant political associations (Arner 243). Given the numerous, seemingly indecorous, passages that were excised from the text, it was perhaps inevitable that some of Brown’s contemporaries would misunderstand Brown’s dialogue. One woman who read the abbreviated version of Alcuin evidently confused the ideas expressed by the first person narrator with those of the author, for she remarked to Elihu Hubbard Smith that the purpose of Alcuin was “to render women satisfied with their present civil condition” (Arner 282). Mrs. Carter knows that Alcuin holds reactionary views beneath his veneer of enlightenment. For instance, Alcuin declares Peter Porcupine to be a “profound jurist” (47). Peter Porcupine was the pen name of William Cobbett, an English polemicist who published a pro-Federalist newspaper in Philadelphia. Cobbett’s present-day equivalent might be such demagogues as Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. Cobbett slandered Thomas Paine who dared to champion the cause of women in his 1775 “Occasional Letter on the Female Sex” (Vickers 103).
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Mrs. Carter would be opposed to the views of Cobbett, but she is wary of discussing national politics with Alcuin. In response to Alcuin’s query as to whether she was a federalist, Mrs. Carter speaks even more frankly than she had earlier: What have I, as a woman, to do with politics? Even the government of our country, which is said to be the freest in the world, passes over women as if they were not. We are excluded from all political rights without the least ceremony. Law-makers thought as little of comprehending us in their code of liberty, as if we were pigs, or sheep. That females are exceptions to their general maxims, perhaps never occurred to them. (62)
That code of liberty was enshrined in the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The rights that the American political system accorded white male landowners were denied to African-Americans, indigents, and women. “It has been sagely decreed . . . that all men are free but those that are slaves,” concludes Mrs. Carter (65). Part Three of Alcuin relates Alcuin’s second visit to Mrs. Carter a week later. Alcuin has seen the light, or so it seems, for he describes his imaginary journey to a “Paradise of Women,” where men and women enjoy the same education and equal rights as citizens. If Alcuin is to be believed, this stuffy pedagogue has become a follower of Godwin after just a couple of conversations with his hostess, an ideological trajectory that is downright meteoric. Although his apparent radical conversion does not fool Mrs. Carter, Alcuin dupes a critic such as Vickers into believing that he has become “a Godwinian visionary” (100). His penchant for transformation recalls that of Arthur Mervyn, another eponymous first-person narrator of Brown. Alcuin hopes to intrigue Mrs. Carter but she refuses to indulge him, saying that she dislikes mysteries. He tries to dazzle her by depicting graceful architecture with shady poplars and murmuring fountains, but Mrs. Carter cuts him short: Come, come, interrupted the lady, this perhaps may be poetry, but though pleasing, it had better be dispensed with. I give you leave to pass over these incidents in silence: I desire merely to obtain the sum of your information, disembarrassed from details of the mode in which you acquired it, and of the mistakes and conjectures to which your ignorance subjected you. (76)
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Clearly, Mrs. Carter is not about to play the role of an enthralled woman whose sole aim is to humor and please men. After discussing the dress and occupations shared by both sexes in his imaginary realm, Alcuin pauses his narrative just as he is about to touch on the subject of sexual relations between men and women. Mrs. Carter suspects his seductive intent when Alcuin, feigning scruples, offers to put in writing what he cannot bring himself to utter. In keeping with her own sincerity, she asks Alcuin to speak plainly since what makes words improper is their content, not whether they are written or spoken. At the same time, Mrs. Carter also warns him against impropriety: “Your scheme, I suspect, will not be what is commonly called marriage, but something, in your opinion, better. The footing is a dubious one. Take care, it is difficult to touch without overstepping the verge” (89). Having sounded out Mrs. Carter, Alcuin beats a hasty retreat: “Your caution is reasonable. I believe silence will be the safest” (89). Mrs. Carter respects marriage that is rooted in love, but she despises the existing system of marriage “because it renders the female a slave to the man. It enjoins and enforces submission on her part to the will of her husband. It includes a promise of implicit obedience and unalterable affection. Secondly, it leaves the woman destitute of property” (93). She describes the ideal of marriage thus: “Marriage is a union founded on free and mutual consent. It cannot exist without friendship—it cannot exist without personal fidelity. As soon as the union ceases to be spontaneous, it ceases to be just:—this is the sum” (104). This summation of ideal marriage pays homage to the vision of Wollstonecraft: “Let there be no coercion established in society, and the common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper places” (72). Thus does Alcuin distil contemporary male discourse and emergent female voices in a dynamic tension of ideas to dramatize the predicament and dignity of women in eighteenth-century United States. State University of New York at Canton Note
Alcuin is believed to have four parts, but only the first two were published during its author’s lifetime. In 1815, five years after the death of Brown, his biographer, William Dunlap, appended the remainder of Alcuin to the biography of Brown without demarcating what was supposed to have been parts three and four. Either the final two parts were merged and published as a whole, or the fourth part is missing. My guess is that part three consists of Alcuin’s reverie on the paradise of women while the fourth part consists of Mrs. Carter’s response to that reverie. 1
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Works Cited Adams, Abigail. “Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776.” Lauter 1011. Print. ---. “Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, June 30, 1778.” Lauter 1015-16. Print. Adams, John. “Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776.” Lauter 1012. Print. Arner, Robert D. “Historical Essay.” Alcuin. Stephen Calvert. The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown. Vol. VI. Kent State, OH: Kent State UP, 1987: 273-312. Print. Brown, Charles Brockden. Alcuin. Ed. Cynthia A. Kierner. Albany, New York: NCUP, 1995. Print. “Chastity or Female Honour.” The Key 17 Feb. 1798: 44. Print. Clark, David Lee. Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1952. Print. Davidson, Cathy N. “The Matter and Manner of Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin.” Bernard Rosenthal, ed. Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Print. Ferguson, Moira, and Janet Todd. Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Print. Gregory, Dr. John. A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters. Glasgow: R. Scott, 1805. Print. Gundersen, Joan R. “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution.” Signs 13.1 (Autumn 1987): 59-77. Print. Hedges, William. “Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions.” Early American Literature 9 (1974): 107-41. Print. Lauter, Paul, ed. Heath Anthology of American Literature. Volume A: Beginnings to 1800. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Print. “The Matrimonial Creed.” The Key 13 Jan. 1798: 56. Print. McAlexander, Patricia Jewell. “The Creation of the American Eve: The Cultural Dialogue on the Nature and Role of Women in Late Eighteenth Century America.” Early American Literature 9 (1975): 252-66. Print. Moore, Jane. Mary Wollstonecraft. Plymouth, UK: Northcote House, 1999. Print. Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines 1741-1850. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1957. Print. Murray, Judith Sargent. “On the Equality of the Sexes.” Lauter 1253-59. Print.
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Riley, Glenda. Inventing the American Woman. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1987. Ringe, Donald. Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Print. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, or On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1979. Print. Rush, Benjamin. “Thoughts Upon Female Education.” Nancy Woloch, ed. A Documentary History 1600-1900: Early American Women. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992: 180-91. Print. Smith, Paige. Daughters of the Promised Land. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. Print. Vickers, Anita M. “‘Pray, Madam, are you a federalist?’: Women’s Rights and the Republican Utopia of Alcuin.” American Studies 39.3 (Fall 1998): 89-104. Print. Waterman, Bryan. “‘The Sexual Difference’: Gender, Politeness, and Conversation in Late-Eighteenth-Century New York City and in Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin (1798).” Marguérite Corporaal and Evert Jan van Leeuwen, eds. The Literary Utopias of Cultural Communities, 1790-1910. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010: 23-46. Print. Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Political Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.
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Liminal Places and Zora Neale Hurston’s Religio-Cultural Space in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine Péter Gaál-Szabó _______________________________________________________HJEAS Liminality plays an important role in Zora Neale Hurston’s religio-cultural space as it parallels an understanding of African American life in terms of rituals. Marginal places postulate a peripherized, individual consciousness— but always-already contextualized in a broader socio-cultural space. From a religio-cultural point of view, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) shows the connection between liminal places and the submergence/emergence motif in African American visions, while Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) elaborates explicitly on the meaning of initiation narratives displaying African American cosmology, imbuing the whole of African American culture. Liminal places and visions play a seminal role in the traditional African American community in that at the first glance they represent marginal discourses; yet prove essential in the self-verification of the community itself. Antithetical to the main discourse of the community, they construct a set of essential structural elements. Hurston’s theology appears difficult to discuss because of her apparent syncretic colorfulness and seeming refusal of Christianity. Daughter of an Eatonville preacher, on the one hand, and, as she refers to herself, “Conjure Queen” (“To Langston Hughes” 124), on the other, she moves between religious paradigms to incorporate all into her religiocultural space. Her religiosity does not show theologically informed conceptions, but much rather a cosmological framework deriving from an understanding of a distinct African American folk culture. Her view of religions apparently abhors any reverence of the divine: The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine— hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. (Dust Tracks 277-78)
Her explanation of religious sentiments detaches her from established religious forms and, at most, allows for individual, active (not passive) ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
alterations. But even though, in an antiauthoritarian way, she turns away from submissive religiosity, she nevertheless yields to infinity: “As for me, I do not pretend to read God’s mind. If He has a plan of the universe worked out to the smallest detail, it would be folly for me to presume to get down on my knees and attempt to revise it. . . . Prayer seems to me a sign of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down” (278). In her flowing rhetoric, Hurston refuses supplication, yet testifies to a cosmological view that places her in a divine world order. In this view, every person has a clearly defined, immutable place in the universe. Hurston’s theology does not necessarily impart a deterministic creed (or one of predestination), but, instead, it affirms a cosmological order; and the human quest blends into it: “When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world” (Dust Tracks 279). Hurston’s notion of religiosity justifies dealing with her sacred space as a distinct religio-cultural paradigm. In fact, her cultural space bears characteristics similar to Eric C. Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya’s concept of “black sacred cosmos,” which does not simply denote an African American religious worldview (2), but also treats it as a totality bearing distinctively African American characteristics. Similar to Lincoln and Mamiya’s identification of the relevance of the particular black experience in America, whereby they emphasize the particularity, authenticity, and cultural politics of black religiosity, Hurston employs the African American cultural context to construct an authentic religio-cultural space in both Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Authentication of her cosmos equals the anthropologist’s depiction of everyday life interwoven with religiosity and religion itself as “multidimensional space to be broken down regarding public or interior aspects” (Brown 102)—ultimately established in relation to two poles: the official and liminal. The former refers to “absolute sacred space,” that is, “permanent sacral places” (Keményfi 39).1 The latter constitutes “relative space,” unfixed, and describes a process, sanctification, and an experience of space (38). These relative, liminal places signify ambiguous entities, since they often denote non-Christian (hoodoo/voodoo) places as well as places of conversion. Praying grounds also appear as liminal places, as places of encounter with what Rudolph Otto calls the “numinous” (7). They appear incorporated into official sacred space, yet maintain a high degree of individuality: they are inscribed outside the church walls but within the official Christian paradigm. Thus, beyond official or institutionalized
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religion, Hurston’s black sacred cosmos also incorporates folk religious phenomena. The two realms together shape an integrated whole. Folk religious aspects denote liminal places as structural units within the black sacred cosmos. Arnold Van Gennep’s theory of the triple sequence of separation, margin, and aggregation in initiation rites has much in common with Victor Turner’s theory of liminality. In fact, Turner’s liminal phase corresponds to Van Gennep’s margin, both of which may be translated into the African American wilderness experience (or “vision quest” [see Heintzman]). In this threefold system the liminal signifies a transitory phase prior to the subject becoming a full member of the community: The attribute of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. (Turner 95)
Since the attributes of the given socio-cultural space do not hold in liminal places, liminal subjects become temporarily outsiders to the group. Despite the inaccessibility of such places, they work as nonplaces on the margins of society, yet within it. As structural units these places have a connecting function in the in-between in spite of their non-alignment to social space: “During the intervening ‘liminal’ period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state” (Turner 94). Hurston describes then African American wilderness experience in detail in Sanctified Church (1981), in which she explicitly elaborates on “coming through religion” (87). Channeled by the respective community, the ritual lasts usually for three days, by the end of which the candidate has gone through several dramatic revelations. Going through such a conversion experience serves for the novice as the threshold through which to emerge as a member of the community. Candidates retreat to secluded places to obtain the vision: “People, solemn of face, crept off to the woods to ‘praying ground’ to seek religion. Every church member worked on them hard, and there was great clamor and rejoicing when any of them ‘come through’ religion” (Dust 270). Such places are outside social space, only
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ritually connected to it—the power mechanisms of social space do not bind there. Wilderness experience represents an individual quest for an identity in the community and a threshold or nonplace of established communitas. To prove worthiness of “induction into the regular community” (Dust 272) the candidates must undergo a test before the community. This test comprises an oral testimony, during which they present their vision; that is, tell a story of their conversion: These visions are traditional. I knew them by heart as did the rest of the congregation, but still it was exciting to see how the converts would handle them. Some of them made up new details. Some of them would forget a part and improvise clumsily or fill up the gap with shouting. The audience knew, but everybody acted as if every word of it was new. (272)
Not the ripeness of faith, but the readiness and ability of the candidates to integrate into the black sacred cosmos are tested, which is a cultural act. These visions are appropriated to/within the social space as they are used as conventional patterns of expression and constitute a segment of the storytelling tradition. Whereas Janie’s journey in Their Eyes Were Watching God evolves through different alienating places, in Jonah’s Gourd Vine the process of submersion and emersion is less clearly present. John’s journey, similarly to Janie’s, is structured around places of margin, or liminal places, but emersion from these places is multiply signified, as if condensing Eliade’s threefold differentiation of initiation rites.2 John’s experience of liminal places is strongly connected to sexuality. This is revealed early in children’s games. On Alf Pearson’s place black children play hide-and-seek games, during which John hides in secluded places. Two times he hides with two different girls and the third time, when the third girl approaches him, the game stops abruptly. This foreshadows his promiscuous lifestyle, which is always accompanied by hide-aways with different women, as well as delineating the would-be structure of his life. He has three wives later on, the last of which loses him abruptly. The number three has a mythic quality for Hurston. In her discussion of visions, she emphasizes the relevance of the number three: “Three days is the traditional period for seeking the vision” (Sanctified 85), and again, “[t]hree is the holy number and the call to preach always comes three times” (86). The number three reappears also in Their Eyes Were Watching God: Janie has three husbands, thus the three stations of Janie’s
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journey line up with the African American way of coming through religion; in Jonah’s Gourd Vine the number of waiting time is also three (27), John encounters the train three times (the last time the train kills him). Furthermore, the role of liminal places is emphasized by the fact that such places frame the narrative. After the hide-and-seek game John finds “a tiny clearing hidden by trees” (25), which becomes a praying ground, where he prays for the first time. The way John approaches the sacred echoes Róbert Keményfi’s concept of the sacred: John’s mental functioning changes when he recognizes the sacred place as such for its qualitative differences from the profane (36). His words characterize his whole life torn between guilt and reconciliation: “if you find any lurkin’ sin in and about mah heart please pluck it out and cast it intuh de sea uh fuhgitfulness whar it’ll never rise tuh condemn me in de judgment” (25). His words are almost exactly the same as his last prayer accounted for in his third wife’s, Sally’s, bedroom at the end of the book, where he asks for forgiveness. Liminal places are integrated into a moral geography (see Dixon 1); however, this feature turns out to be dubious. Hurston refuses to justify John’s debauchery, and connects hoodoo to immorality, situating it on the margins of the African American community. Hattie, John’s second wife, for example, conjures him with the help of root doctors. Clearly, Hattie’s evil character leads her to employ practices outside the norms of African American social space. The positioning of the root doctors reveals, however, their status: both hoodoo men are decentralized from the point of view of social space; that is, positioned elsewhere, not in Eatonville. The description of hoodoo places also stands in stark contrast to the places of official religion. While the Baptist church in Plant City is described as “the big white building that Baptist pride had erected” (Jonah’s 186), An’ Dangie Dewoe, the conjure man, lives in a hut that “squatted low and peered at the road from behind a mass of Palma Christi and elderberry” (125). The difference between the place of official religion and, from the perspective of Christianity, a nonplace becomes palpable. Big white church buildings in a central position denote power and become an emblem of social space (see Wedam 49) and a token against the “privatization of place” (Sheldrake 126). In contrast to that, the conjure man’s hut seems an inversion of the church in a rural setting. The nature of the hoodoo ritual renders it private and individual (“unrepresentable” in Bhabha’s sense [37]), while the Church sermons depict a public and collective event based on mass interaction and a process of bearing up—the development of the
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African American sermon to its final ecstatic resolution. The structuring of the narrative posits this place to be immoral and marginal, in the first place, by revealing also that Hattie uses hoodoo to conjure both John and Lucy with the result that “Lucy was lying sick” (Jonah’s 127), and soon after that she dies. The hoodoo hut is not presented as ultimately negative, however. Firstly, the hoodoo hut is connected to prehistoric times, and, secondly, it is deeply embedded in nature—both conceptualizations lying in the heart of African American culture, which is emphasized throughout the book. For example, when John has to flee from a lynching mob, he exclaims, “Ah’ll tip on ‘cross de good Lawd’s green. Ah’ll give mah case tuh Miss Bush and let Mother Green stand mah bond” (95). He emphasizes the traditionally protective and liberating conceptualization of nature. Furthermore, the constant reference to (prehistoric) Africanisms sheds light on Hurston’s Africanist understanding of African American culture as a direct derivation of African culture in a constant mold. Places of conversion are treated positively and clearly integrated into Christian sacred space as liminal places, such as the revival meeting John conducts several times. Even though not much is narrated about such meetings, the incorporation of such places into black Christianity is signified by the evaluative contrast between the revival meeting and the hoodoo hut (140), as well as by the fact that the revival meeting is conducted by a preacher, the capstone of the community. These liminal places appear as “reconciled space” (Sheldrake 28) for they depict egalitarian human relations, as they provide the framework needed to experience the numinous. Both European religious roots and the African American tradition of shouting can be detected in this phenomenon, but the fact that they bridge the gap between the transparency of absolute sacred space and the relativity and individualistic character of liminal places renders them important in Hurston’s cosmology. A third-space-like aspect of Christian sacred space can be detected in the revival meetings—rendering them parallel with praying grounds, which retain their individualistic nature. Praying grounds appear not just liminal in the sense that they embody marginal places, where the numinous can be experienced; but also hybrid constructions. This is the case despite the fact that candidates are conditioned culturally to choose certain places as “imago mundi” to use Eliade’s coinage, that is, a tree or a clearing; but such places can be established anywhere. In Turner’s footstep, such places can be regarded as “liminoid,” since they can appear even within transparent social
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space, and can, for a moment, reinscribe space in De Certeau’s sense. One time John is praying on his knees and “the empty house threw back his resonant tones like a guitar box” (52). The house’s character changes when transposed into the sacred as totality, its emptiness referring to spiritual vacuity to be filled by the numinous, and the “guitar box” denoting not only the musicality of John’s voice, but also the univocal nature of the place for the time being. John’s experience echoes the phenomenology of contemplative practice, during which, as Sheldrake formulates it, “experiences of inward and outward, near at hand and far away, are synthesized so that distinctions between them cease to have any meaning” (128). At the same time, Hurston hybridizes the morality of her sacred space. This can be detected by the conscious intermixing of different cultural paradigms. When John, for example, kills a cotton-mouth moccasin, he fights the male snake god, Damballah, thereby exhibiting masculine power in the “axis mundi.” A similar sacred place evolves around trees. John and Lucy’s love becomes sanctioned under a tree, and birth rituals are performed under trees when the naval cord gets buried there. Such transspatial elements render the apparent heteronomy of Hurston’s sacred cosmos morally syncretic, but all the more culturally motivated. The fusion can be detected in official sacred space, too. Hurston calls John’s funeral sermon a “barbaric requiem poem” (201). In the novel, preaching as a genre comprises a cohesive device for the community, but this last sermon contains Africanist elements clearly transposed into it, which decentralizes the Christian discourse (with all its attributes of social space, be it race, gender, class, or even geography) by turning it into a syncretic “hierophany.” “Self-revealing of the sacred” (Wasserstrom 36) precipitated in cultural terms opens up a new and truly African American hybrid sacred space. In response to the preacher’s call: . . . the hearers wailed with a feeling of terrible loss. They beat upon the O-go-doe, the ancient drum. O-go-doe, O-go-doe, O-go-doe! Their hearts turned to fire and their shinbones leaped unknowing to the drum. Not Kata-Kumba, the drum of triumph, that speaks of great ancestors and glorious wars. Not the little drum of kidskin, for that is to dance with joy and to call to mind birth and creation, but O-go-doe, the voice of Death— that promises nothing, that speaks with tears only, and of the past. (202)
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Hurston’s technique may derive from her belief that “the Negro is not a Christian really” (“Characteristics” 56), but her embedding African Americans into Christianity renders this question more complex. Despite the fact that official sacred space refers to a different genealogy, which originally was superimposed, only later naturalized, adopted, and acculturated, Hurston seeks to juxtapose and syncretize both African religiosity and Christianity in her fiction, similarly to the praxis of African Americans, about whom she claims, “everything [the African American subject] touches is re-interpreted for his own use” (58). This understanding of black Christianity is clearly stated in Jonah’s Gourd Vine: once when John prays in church, “he roll[s] his African drum up to the altar, and call[s] his Congo Gods by Christian names” (89). Sacred space for Hurston never constitutes merely the sacred ground of encounter with the divine, but bears other significations as well. Sacred space is always cultural and social or, as Keményfi claims, “a category of societal life” (37), and hence revealing of the socio-cultural spaces at the same time. Thus, Hurston uses black Christianity and voodoo to represent her cultural politics also in sacred space. For example, Rachel Stein interprets the sacred tree of Their Eyes Were Watching God as a voodoo “image of spiritual and sexual ecstasy” (472), which becomes a liminoid place to signify breaking norms of social space. Sheldrake’s insistence on the particularity of places projects personal encounter with the sacred as it enables place to break away from the prescribed setting of social space. The marginality of non-Christian places aspires to totality, as opposed to partiality of social space (Turner 106), quite strikingly, since experience is supposedly not channeled in non-Christian places; therefore, subjectivity can be enlivened freely. The nature of place and its positioning coincide. Furthermore, marginal places may also have a social character. Turner argues that in liminal places subjects form “communitas”3 that can be described in terms of “spontaneity” and “immediacy” as well as homogeneity and unstructuredness (132), and in which there is “direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human identities” (132) without respect to social norms or hierarchy. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, apart from places like revival meetings, the social character of liminal sacred places is not emphasized. John undergoes conversion, which shows that, even though religious spaces and places are cohesively present in Hurston’s sacred cosmos, his initiation represents ultimately a cultural category. Eliade also stresses the sacred nature of such an initiation: “the puberty initiation represents above all the revelation of the sacred–
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and, for the primitive world, the sacred means not only everything that we now understand by religion, but also the whole body of the tribe’s mythological and cultural traditions” (3). The tie-camp for John constitutes the place of cultural immersion, from which he emerges with a mature cultural and masculine identity. The situatedness of the tie-camp in nature heightens its resemblance to the traditional wilderness experience; furthermore, the place is imbued with African American culture (games, sport, and telling stories). Third, the tiecamp is connected to the railroad and the locomotive, and a connection is thus established between place and John’s masculine maturation: “Wall, you gwine learn [chew tobacco] ‘cause you can’t keep dis camp grub on yo’ stomach lessen yuh do. Got tuh learn how tuh cuss too. Ah kin see you ain’t nothin’ but uh lad of uh boy. Mens on dese camps is full uh bulldocia ‘til dey smell uh good size fist. Den dey dwindles down tuh nelly nothing” (60). The “structural outsiderhood” (Turner 134) denoted in this set of rules stands in sharp contrast to Alf Pearson’s centralized place and the whiteness of the church, which also refers to the race discourse. The absence of characteristics of social space establishes a vacuum, which is hybridized into an egalitarian communitas. John has to negotiate identity by unlearning behavioral attitudes and thinking patterns to enter this communitas, where finally “his first real fight” (63) occurs as a clear assertion of his subjectivity. The ritual nature of this immersion scene is also structured from a temporal point of view. The mythic number three of wholeness reappears here, too. Even though the correlation between time and place is not clearly stated, John leaves for the tie-camp on the Alabama River after cotton picking in autumn (usually between August and October) and stays there until December. John spends three months away from the community at a secluded place, which parallels the temporal structure of the ritual acquisition of visions already mentioned. For her confinement in domestic space and in the central places of African American community, Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God does not appear to move back and forth on a large scale as John in Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Yet liminal places presented by the omnipresent tree and the muck in the Everglades occupy an important role in this novel as well. The pear tree proves to be an overarching symbol in Their Eyes Were Watching God: from a religio-cultural point of view, the tree represents a crossroads between the secular and sacred worlds in several senses. Glenda B. Weathers finds a replacement for the Biblical tree of knowledge in the trope of the pear tree: “In an innovative shift, Hurston replaces the legendary tree of knowledge, the apple tree, with an arguably more fitting
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symbol of the acquisition of carnal knowledge and sexual experience, the pear tree” (par. 5). The biblical tree of knowledge has a liminoid function within the sacred space of the Bible, since it represents a liminal place set apart within Paradise, and Adam and Eve can obtain a new identity during their encounter with it. The pear tree differs from the biblical tree in that any encounter with the apple tree is considered a transgression, and it results not in reemergence in the sacred but in a ban from it. The new subjectivity Adam and Eve gain through the deceptive activity of the snake presents a loss of contextualization in the sacred. In contrast, Hurston blurs a univocal understanding of the tree as a Christian symbol by substituting apples with pears and inverting the outcome of the encounter with the tree. The sensual symbol of the pear shows appropriation of and divergence from the Christian myth; and, even more strikingly, the tree leads Janie back to the sacred forgotten and remembered again (10) as she reemerges with a new consciousness within black sacred space and not outside it. One cannot, therefore, argue for a single interpretation of the pear tree as a Christian symbol. Gerdès Fleurant describes trees as voodoo spiritual places dedicated to the voodoo deity Legba (12). In Tell My Horse (1938), Hurston herself accounts for the power of sacred trees: “People came to the palm tree and were miraculously cured and others were helped in various ways. The people began to worship the tree” (231). In general, trees are often employed in voodoo worship “as a vertical link between the sky, earth, and underworld” (Murphy 28). As axis mundi the tree becomes not only a possible access to the sacred, but also the interface, where devotees can maintain interstitial status. The value of trees as liminal places is emphasized in Voodoo, as Rachel Stein argues: “A syncretic religion, constantly evolving in response to changing cultural and social conditions, Voodoo encourages a view of human transformative possibilities, rather than externally fixed, eternally static identities. Crucially, Voodoo spirituality contests binaristic [sic] hierarchies with colonial structures that prove so damaging to black women” (469). Toni Morrison associates such transformative capacities with Africanism, insisting on the self-reflexive, meditative, as well as exploring nature of the “Africanist persona” (17). For Morrison, “American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicise and render timeless” (7). Stein, too, identifies similar features of Voodoo that are also connected to the tree in Their Eyes Were Watching God, as they present an opposition to subversive discourses such as the racial or gender dialectic. Also, the
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inherent characteristic of Voodoo to allow for transformation renders the pear tree the perpetuator of change. The tree becomes a place thus, where a “crossroad of consciousness” (De Weever 168) is experienced, presenting the possibility of change and choice. Janie feels relieved and liberated when she ritually goes through the ecstatic experience after three days and “gaze[s] on a mystery” (Their Eyes 10). She hears “a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again” (10), remembering prehistoric/pre-Christian times. Just as “[John] has access to a pre-Christian cultural memory” in Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hemenway 200), Janie manages to enter an Africanist spirituality that proves to be life-transforming and presents her with a vision to be realized in the muck as imago mundi. This initiating experience (or foreshadowing initiation) enhanced by “border-crossing intermingling polarities” (Stein 469), so apt for Voodoo worship, becomes a mapping of a spirituality or, much rather, a cosmological view to be obtained. Sexuality in this scene, then, can be understood as being a part of Voodoo transformation. Stein argues for such an understanding: Janie’s final sexual immersion symbolizes a “sexual and spiritual union” (471), which symbolically refers to “Damballah and his wife in sacred intercourse” (475). Sexuality serves a ritual function to lead to “a spiritual healing of the damaging divisions of body and soul, sex and spirit, male and female, animal and divine” (472). In this sense, temporary unification resolves Janie’s “inner dislocation” (De Weever 168) and bestows upon her a hybrid identity of inbetweenness. Besides the separation of the official/social and personal on a horizontal/geographical level in Their Eyes Were Watching God, separation is also established as a binary of inside and outside in a heterotopous manner. In Janie’s case, the inside becomes both the demarcation of a marginal place from the point of view of social space as well as an opposition to it. Joe Starks’s funeral is narrated as a pompous event encompassing relevant rituals of the black community; however, Janie is only physically juxtaposed, hiding behind her veil, which seems “like a wall of stone and steel . . . [while] the funeral was going on outside” (84). Overlapping spatialities are emphasized by the fact that Janie is experiencing inner revitalization: “Weeping and wailing outside. Inside the expensive black folds were resurrection and life” (84). Vivid inner life enabled by forced outsiderness imposed on her by both her deceased husband and the black community can nevertheless have only limited external realization up to the Eatonville period. The ritual interface between community and individual vanishes
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radically when Janie’s third husband, Tea Cake, dies. Dramatically Janie disregards custom and violates the boundaries of the official sacred. The inside gains ground over the external as Janie transforms the site of the funeral for the time being. In sharp contrast to the previous funeral she is wearing “no expensive veils and robes . . . this time” (180), but her simple overalls. Whereas Starks’s funeral is presented as pompous with Janie, a grieving prop to fulfill formalities as required by his status in the community, Tea Cake’s is narrated in a personal tone with Janie, who breaks through social customs with her honest mourning: “She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief” (180). Thus the funeral in the muck verifies Hurston’s general concept of the muck: it represents the inversion of middle-class black social space and claims to be the space in a religious sense, in which the individual can attain fullness of self-realization and selfrevelation. In an anthropological context, Their Eyes Were Watching God can be seen as an initiation narrative (or an immersion narrative, to use Stepto’s term), in which the final scene of the muck represents the ultimate liminal place of simultaneous purification and becoming. Not only does Janie recount to Phoeby her journey as a novice—as Hurston also witnessed novices’ accounts before their becoming full members of the religio-cultural community—but the narrative also shows the structure of visions. It narrates Janie’s trials and tribulations through three marriages representing the threefold evolution of visions. Dolan Hubbard identifies these three stages as “spiritual orientation,” “richness and diversity of the styles of life in the black community,” and “the blues impulse” (par. 5). Although, from the point of view of gender, the three husbands represent Janie’s development of a female subjectivity, the three stages also lead her toward both a broader contextualization of the self in the black community, as her immersion in the open, indefinite space of the black Everglades indicates, and a cosmological understanding of herself. The trope of the hurricane heightens the symbolic relevance of Janie’s visionary journey. Hurston could have fictionally reworked the events of the Okeechobee Hurricane that hit the region in 1928, causing the flooding of Lake Okeechobee and the subsequent death of more than a thousand predominantly migrant black workers then buried in mass graves (see Steinberg 61). Several critics approach the image of the hurricane through race discourse. For Erik D. Curren the hurricane represents “a switch from optimistic quest to gothic horror” within a master-slave dialectic (par. 5).
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On a more permissive note, though, but still within the race discourse, Hubbard positions this religious experience in the racial climate of contemporary America: The storm in this, Janie’s last movement toward the horizon, symbolizes the struggle the corporate black community has to come to terms with in the oppressor's negation of its image. Out of this negation, the mythic consciousness seeks a new beginning in the future by imagining an original beginning. The social implications of this religious experience enable the oppressed community to dehistoricize the oppressor's hegemonic dominance. Metaphorically, the phrase their eyes were watching God means the creation of a new form of humanity—one that is no longer based on the master-slave dialectic. (par. 58)
While Hubbard touches upon a necessary implication of Janie’s religious experience, he fails to break out of the vicious circle of racial projection. On a similar note Richard M. Merelman understands cultural projection as “the conscious or unconscious effort by a social group and its allies to place new images of itself before other social groups, and before the general public” (3). But this kind of projection maintains the focus of the other, thereby unable to perform as a tool of authentication that Hubbard insists on. In fact, this interpretation of the hurricane reiterates racial stereotypes, that is, Uncle Tomism, which posits the African American subject as irreparably religious, otherworldly, and docile—a conceptualization in stark contrast to Hurston’s evaluation of religion given at the beginning of this essay. Hubbard misses the point by focusing on African American racial identity in a social space, the muck, which proves pluralistic and polyphonic before the hurricane, exhibiting “non-polarized social-natural relations” (Stein 478). The new/original beginning for Janie is not a matter of the racial self, but one of contextualization (the prime vehicle of which constitutes storytelling). Racial criticism misses the richness of Hurston’s dynamic trickster philosophy. So while the racial dialectic also appears in the hurricane scene, it may simply mark polyphonic thinking on Hurston’s part. Therefore the separation of Christianity and African American folk religious phenomena, Curren urges, cannot hold even from an anthropological point of view (see Mintz and Price), but in addition is debunked in Hurston’s work because of the anthropologically justified syncretism of different religious spaces Hurston implements in her fiction on the basis of her own research.
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Examples in Jonah’s Gourd Vine include the myriads of Africanisms in the black church and deacon Harris’s voodoo worshipping (147). Beyond dramatically narrating an actual disaster, the hurricane depicts symbolically Janie’s reemergence in the tripartite initiation narrative. Similarly to Job, who undergoes immense suffering as he loses family, fortune, and wealth and who is tempted by unfeeling friends to abandon his faith, Janie, too, loses the ideal life in the Everglades in a tormenting series of events. In his agony looking for answers, Job confronts God, who speaks to him “out of a storm” (NIV)/ “out of the whirlwind” (KJV) in Job 38. Catherine Keller identifies in the story of Job the “Genesis creation narrative . . . as its primary intertext” (124)—a claim supported by God’s monologue: “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness” (Job 38:8-9). Keller argues that the depiction of the universe goes beyond simply stating God’s omnipotence (129) to portray “the wild spirit of creation,” in which “the sea’s ferocity is portrayed as the agitation of an infant that requires boundaries for its own protection—not just for the safety of the earth” (130). Overriding traditional conceptualizations of light versus dark as good versus evil, Keller in her subsequent Bakhtinian analysis proposes that “[i]t is as if the shift from legal to cosmogonic discourse delegalized and deprivatized Job’s questions. They entered the intense proximity of the comic plane—just as they opened into the bottomless expanse of cosmic space” (Keller 139). Janie encounters the same Jobian cosmological experience when she makes the confession that “Ah wuz fumblin’ round and God opened de door” (151), the storm hits with a symbolic “triple fury,” and she finds herself in the midst of a vortex widening the horizon to the open space of the Everglades. Being caught up in the vortex metaphorically represents Janie’s encounter with the divine; more specifically, like Job, who has a final encounter with God and is cleansed, whereby he acknowledges God’s supremacy and his own human condition (“My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” [Job 42: 5-6]), Janie, too, becomes aware of her condition in relation to the universe on the level of religious experience enshrined in her vision as well as on a ritual level in relation to the black sacred cosmos, and is thus symbolically purified. What happens in the hurricane presents a necessary step in the ritual process, “[initiation] is a fundamental existential experience because through it a man becomes able to assume his mode of being in its entirety” (Eliade,
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Rites and Symbols 3). In Janie’s storytelling of her conversion vision, the hurricane symbolizes coming through religion in two ways: a) Janie’s maturation becomes complete in finishing her ritual journey; b) this passing the threshold is ritually expressed through the act of storytelling, whereby Janie becomes contextualized in social space in her own right—that is, her ability to voice an authentic story confirms her subjectivity in the community. As Keller identifies an element of the comic in Job, the comic is also present in the hurricane scene. Motor Boat, a friend of Janie and Tea Cake’s, chooses not to flee from the flood but to go upstairs and sleep. After the hurricane Tea Cake reports, “Heah we nelly kill our fool selves runnin’ way from danger and him lay up dere and sleep and float on off” (165). Motor Boat, whose name indicates the irony, survives while in a surrealistic scene Janie and Tea Cake are fighting for their lives on the back of a mule against a rabid dog. The flood lulls Motor Boat into sweet sleep in the midst of mass deaths. Understanding the scope of her journey and return to Eatonville equals mapping both geographically and spiritually the horizon of black (sacred) space, and her ability to voice her experience marks her embeddedness in it; that is, similarly to her overalls, it presents a “proof of her new baptism” (Dixon 94). Maturation and embeddedness ring through her voice as she begins revealing her ritual journey with the wisdom of elders: “So t’ain’t no use in me telling you somethin’ unless Ah give you de understandin’ to go ‘long wid it. Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from coon hide” (7). In a sense Janie takes on a position much like Nanny’s (structurally, but unlike Nanny’s materialistic philosophy). Nanny gives Janie “de text” (16), “a sermonic monologue” (Hubbard par. 13), not only as a grandmother, but as an elder in the community who shares “motherwit” with Janie. Motherwit derives from African American cosmology and denotes folk wisdom. Former slave Francis Lewis formulates a definition of motherwit: “Well, . . . [motherwit] is like this: I got a wit to teach me what’s wrong. I got a wit to not make me a mischief-maker. I got a wit to keep people’s trusts” (Clayton 159)––that appears to be general common sense (see Logan), reflecting also the ex-slave Nanny’s spirituality. However, a) motherwit comprises the group-specific expression of experiences regarding race, gender, and class, inducing group-specific normative action; and b) motherwit also reflects African American cosmological thinking,
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representing a signifier of the African American community, but often understood as “the collective body of female wisdom” (Carr-Hamilton 72). Delores S. Williams reasserts this approach when writing about the relation between African American women and Hagar, paralleling the two fates as to oppression and exploitation by both males and other females. She describes Hagar’s story in the Bible as womanist God-talk (“theology”) to show that minority women are not forsaken by God despite the defocusing strategies of mainstream discourses. In connecting this religious experience to wilderness experience, Williams renders it parallel and complementary to individuation. As early as in her marriage with Starks, Janie makes a confession similar to that in Hagar’s story. When Starks mocks women, Janie openly comes to the defense of women: “sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business” (70). She thereby claims an up-to-that-point invisible discourse and foregrounds it. Her testimony stands in sharp contrast to the mule’s funeral, which can be seen as a trampling on Janie’s vision in a surrealistic scene because it identifies black women as “nature incarnate–as ‘donkeys’ created for nothing more than brute labor and sexual service” (Stein 467), but also as an inverted “steal away” act that justifies Janie morally. In the hurricane scene, “their eyes were watching God” does not refer to a turn away from a bipolar social world but symbolizes hope in God; that is, a turn toward black sacred space. It also demonstrates the presence of the divine, which shows God’s self-revelation before Janie and simultaneous assurance of divine comfort in a time of trial and tribulation. The initiating hurricane thus marks the completion of Janie’s individuation, as testified by her final allegoric act: “Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see” (184). The post-initiation phase in the narrative condenses the richness of Janie’s inner life that she boils down from her experiences; it provides her with integrity as well as endows her with the knowledge, or motherwit of the elders. The muck experience completed by the hurricane scene marks the final move “from the sweltering depths of a culture’s swampland to a reconquered, redefined place in the home” (Dixon 87), whereby the depths adhere to religious depth and the redefined home to religious emergence. The life- and selfaffirming act presents a parallel with Hurston’s ars poetica discussed at the beginning of this essay. Similarly to Janie, Hurston, too, appears to look back at her life in the last chapters of Dust Tracks and confirms that “Life, as
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it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws” (278).4 In Hurston’s cultural cosmos the liminal places as both antipictures and building blocks of black Christianity provide the cultural binary within the black sacred cosmos in a rather structuralist way—a circumstance that has its own importance. In Hurston’s cultural teleology black cultural space proves heteronomy and totality, from where the African American subject can emerge, yet Hurston authenticates her cultural space as an autonomous entity with the help of liminal places. In/of Hurston’s religio-cultural space liminality or transition can be considered the general and “permanent condition” (Turner 107) of African Americans, ascertaining cultural dynamics through hybridization. Furthermore, such a treatment of space reveals Hurston’s cultural politics: by suturing the sacred into the cultural to such an extent, she does establish a mythic universe based on repeatability, much as Eliade approaches sacred time: “Sacred time . . . appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of mythical present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites” (70). This method does not reflect fixity, but rather mirrors Hurston’s, the anthropologist’s, understanding of and experience with culture, as well as, specifically, the organic diversity of African American culture in her books. As Eliade argues, “through the repetition, the reactualization, of the traditional rites, the entire community is regenerated” (Rites and Symbols 4). Thus Hurston’s apparently mythic universe serves to revitalize African American culture and identity by remotivating the cultural plethora. Debrecen Reformed Theological University Notes
A version of this essay will shortly appear as a chapter of a book published by Peter Lang. 1All translations from Hungarian are mine. 2 The three types of initiation comprise puberty rites, tribal initiation, and initiation into an age group (Rites and Symbols 2). 3 Turner distinguishes between three types of communitas: existential or spontaneous communitas; normative communitas, which denotes already a “peduring social system”; and ideological communitas referring to utopias (132). The latter two types develop from existential communitas, which proves that “communitas itself develops a structure” (132). 4 Hurston’s evaluation of her life in her concluding chapter is remarkably reminiscent of Janie’s concluding phase. When Hurston confesses that “I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain
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wrappen in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands” (280), she claims a similar, parallel evaluation of her own life.
Works Cited Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Brown, L. B. “Phenomenology of Religion.” The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 1.2 (1991): 101-06. Print. Carr-Hamilton, Jacqueline D. “Motherwit in Southern Religion.” Alonzo Johnson and Paul Jersild, eds. “Ain’t Gonna Lay My ’Ligion Down”: African American Religion in the South. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1996. 72-87. Print. Clayton, Ronnie W. Mother Wit: The Ex-Slave Narratives of the Louisiana Writers’ Project. New York: Lang, 1990. Print. Curren, Erik D. “Should Their Eyes Have Been Watching God? Hurston's Use of Religious Experience and Gothic Horror.” African American Review 29.1 (1995): 17-26. Questia. Web. 20 March 2007. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print. De Weever, Jacqueline. Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women’s Writing. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Print. Dixon, Melvin. Ride out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1987. Print. Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. New York: Harper, 1958. Print. Fleurant, Gerdès. Dancing Spirits: Rhythms and Rituals of Haitian Vodun, the Rada Rite. Westport: Greenwood, 1996. Print. Heintzman, Paul. “The Wilderness Experience and Spirituality: What Recent Research Tells Us.” JOPERD 74.6 (2003): 27-32. Questia. Web. 17 June 2007. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. Print. Hubbard, Dolan. “‘. . . Ah Said Ah'd Save De Text for You’: Recontextualizing the Sermon to Tell (Her)story in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” African American Review 27.2 (1993): 167-78. Questia. Web. 25 June 2007. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981. 49-69. Print. ---. Dust Tracks on the Road. 1942. London: Virago, 1986. Print.
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---. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. 1934. New York: Harper, 1990. Print. ---. The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981. Print. ---. Tell My Horse. 1938. New York: Harper, 1990. Print. ---. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper, 1990. Print. ---. “To Langston Hughes.” Carla Kaplan, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. 124. Print. Keller, Catherine. The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Keményfi, Róbert. Földrajzi Szemlélet a Néprajztudományban [Geographical Approach in Ethnography]. Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó, 2004. Print. Lincoln, C. Eric, and Lawrence H. Mamiya. The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham, Duke UP, 1990. Print. Logan, Onnie Lee. Motherwit. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989. Print. Merelman, Richard M. Representing Black Culture: Racial Conflict and Cultural Politics in the United States. London: Routledge, 1995. Print. Mintz, Sidney, and Richard Price. The Birth of African American Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1976. Print. Morrison, Toni. “Black Matters.” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. 1-29. Print. Murphy, Joseph M. Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Trans. John W. Harvey. London: Oxford UP, 1958. Print. Sheldrake, Philip. Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2001. Print. Stein, Rachel. “Remembering the Sacred Tree: Black Women, Nature, and Voodoo in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Women’s Studies 25 (1996): 465-82. Print. Steinberg, Theodore. Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. Print. The Holy Bible, New International Version. Bible.org. Web. 15 Dec. 2007. ---. King James Version (KJV). Bible.org. Web. 15 Dec. 2007.
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Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process. New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1995. Print. Van Gennep, Arnold. Übergangsriten [The Rites of Passage]. Frankfurt: Campus, 1986. Print. Wasserstrom, Steven M. Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Print. Weathers, Glenda B. “Biblical Trees, Biblical Deliverance: Literary Landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison.” African American Review 39.1-2 (2005): 201-12. Questia. Web. 12 Dec. 2007. Wedam, Elfriede. “The ‘Religious District’ of Elite Congregations: Reproducing Spatial Centrality and Redefining Mission.” Sociology of Religion 64.1 (2003): 47-64. Print. Williams, Delores S. Sisters in The Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist GodTalk. New York: Orbis, 1993. Print.
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Anxious Masculinity and Silencing in Ernest Hemingway’s “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” Teodóra Dömötör _______________________________________________________HJEAS This article sets out to explore Ernest Hemingway’s ambiguous representation of masculinity in one of his short stories, “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” which appeared in the collection In Our Time (1925). The author’s narrating persona and the male subject in this short story negotiate the pose of rough masculinity and heroism. The main emphasis in Hemingway’s construction of the image of masculinity and thus his representation of the American hero falls on the projection of “manliness.” The early critic Philip Young defined Hemingway’s male subject as a “code-hero,” who always finds the vigor and drive to embark upon a battle regardless of the hardship that he may experience (11). The “code-hero” is exemplified by Nick Adams in In Our Time, Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises (1926), Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms (1929), Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), and Santiago in “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952). Although the “code-hero” is traumatized and wounded, he always prevails. The presence of trauma remains essential in discussing Hemingway’s male characters, but the understanding of the relevance of the “triumphant male” needs reevaluating. I shall postulate that the main protagonist in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” is trying to operate within the code of “manliness,” but Hemingway’s work essentially exposes the “hero” as depressed by social expectations. He has to wear a mask in an attempt to cope with pressure. Joseph DeFalco and Wirt Williams have interpreted the Hemingway hero as a man on a quest of self-discovery, who develops coping techniques amidst the suffering that he must endure, which prevents him from total defeat as a “manly man.” Nonetheless, camouflaging highlights his anxious masculinity. He is unable to conquer stress and remain in control—as expected from men at the time. The suggestion that the Hemingway hero is on a triumphant journey is, therefore, invalid. Hemingway had a lifelong dilemma about what makes a man a man. He developed an obsessive compulsion with defining masculinity, which never let him rest. For Hemingway the concept of gender remained a volatile phenomenon and manhood a delicate and unachievable target (Forter, “Melancholy Modernism” 22). The fluidity of masculinity’s definition has caused a serious problem for many men, especially at the turn ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Middle-class culture in the nineteenth century had several labels associated with manhood: aggression, the desire to conquer, and worldly achievements were among them. Femininity, on the other hand, included nurturing, staying at home, enjoying leisure (Mellow 8). The arrival of the twentieth century changed the concepts of masculinity and femininity in white middle-class America, but as society was becoming feminized, men struggled to keep masculine qualities that they cherished (Forter, Gender 2-3). E. Anthony Rotundo identifies the engendering of the “existential hero” in the early twentieth century, who aims to keep his masculinity intact from the civilization’s influence. Rotundo names Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, and Ernest Hemingway as the embodiments of the “existential hero” (286). Debra A. Moddelmog argues that the public identity of such heroes (for example, Hemingway as a canonized author) suggests that white middle-class heterosexuality and able-bodied masculinity represented the standard in the 1920s. Consequently, all other identities were only deviations of such normality (133-38). Nonetheless, Carl P. Eby highlights that Hemingway himself could be considered the representative of anxious masculinity, a phenomenon that stems from his own upbringing characterized by instability in terms of gender development. Hemingway’s mother, Grace, had caused a fracture in the writer’s masculine identity by dressing him like his sisters and also by naming him after her own stage name, Ernestine, thus negotiating a phallic-feminine identification (93-303). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claims that the turn of the century witnessed the emergence of binarized identities full of implications. The former male-female gender categories were replaced by the grouping of homo- and heterosexual subjects (2). It resulted in what Rotundo defines as the “us and them” society (275). Contemporary heteronormative hegemony included heterosexual men, followed by women, then further down it was effeminate men and homosexuals. Male homosexuals represented the category of the ultimate feminized males. Heterosexual men desperately wanted to distinguish themselves from homosexuals, who were a stigmatized and persecuted group (278). Hemingway’s preoccupation with gender crisis—a cultural trend prominent in the Roaring Twenties—facilitates the textual manipulation that he applies in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.” Although the surface of the narrative presents it otherwise, this short story portrays a defeated American man through images that highlight personal tragedies. Hemingway, unlike middle-class men in the Midwest at the time, ventures into the exploration
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of men’s frailty. “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” is a snapshot of the dissolution and deformed restoration of a tragicomic heterosexual marriage (Sükösd 57). The first line of the story touches upon the central conflict: “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot tried very hard to have a baby” (Hemingway 161). The desperate struggle of Hubert and Cornelia Elliot does not suggest a couple with steady strength and hope. The ironic phrasing (“very hard”) destroys the image of perseverance and creates one of desperation instead. Hemingway’s adept writing increases the irony even more in the second sentence. “They tried as often as Mrs. Elliot could stand it” (161). Although later in the story we are told that the couple “wanted a baby more than anything else in the world” (163), it soon becomes evident that Mrs. Elliot is not attracted to her husband. The narrator’s use of repetition foreshadows the unpleasant outcome of events: Mrs. Elliot’s being “sick” appears four times within one sentence: “She was sick and when she was sick she was sick as Southern women are sick” (161). While “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” may be considered a comical short story, I believe it loses all its humorous qualities and becomes a strongly ironic (even sarcastic and cynical) piece of work once we recognize the author’s evasive narrative style. With Hemingway, hardly anything is what it seems. In the case of Mrs. Elliot’s sickness we are not merely presented with a matter of sea sickness (for they are traveling to Europe by boat); Mrs. Elliot does not want Mr. Elliot’s child. The simple thought of conceiving leaves her frail. The narrator articulates the idea of marital discord through the repetition of the word “sick” in a consistent manner in order to emphasize its significance and its underlying secondary meaning. Mrs. Elliot exhibits a problematic personality, but one possible reason for this dilemma lies in her own sexual orientation. No wonder that the Elliots choose to live in sexually more liberal Europe than in America. Their confused sexuality finds an easier outlet outside the United States. Latent homosexual desires characterize Mrs. Elliot, whose female companion signifies more than a live-in friend, although the narrator refrains from presenting their relationship in a sexual light. The woman’s arrival brings a turning point in the story: she changes the familial line-up. Mr. Elliot becomes entirely replaced. Elliot had a number of friends by now all of whom admired his poetry and Mrs. Elliot had prevailed upon him to send over to Boston for her girl friend who had been in the tea shop. Mrs. Elliot became much brighter
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after her girl friend came and they had many good cries together. The girl friend was several years older than Cornelia and called her Honey. (163)
The structure of the first sentence in this passage openly reveals that Mr. and Mrs. Elliot’s marriage is dysfunctional. The conjunction between the two clauses supports this statement in that “and” connects two non-related sentences. The two parties in this relationship do not actually belong together. A forced “and” links Mr. and Mrs. Elliot but this only signifies a socially prescribed and required union, not one that is based on mutual desire. In addition, we can also observe a noteworthy role reversal. The fact that Mrs. Elliot “prevails upon” her husband instead of “asking him” overturns socially assigned gender roles in 1920s marriages. So does the mentioning of the tea shop, which—as the narrative reveals earlier—is Mrs. Elliot’s own business: Mr. Elliot knew her “for a long time in her tea shop before he had kissed her one evening” (161). Although an increasing number of women worked outside their homes during the 1920s, their proportion of the total female population was still low, because women faced wage discrimination. Women were still considered as consumers rather than contributors (Boyer et al. 700-02). Mrs. Elliot defies this stereotype. She also prefers a woman to her husband, which potentially both humiliates and exposes Mr. Elliot as a failing husband. Although the female companion has no speaking role, the narration discloses so much about her that the reader sees her as a surrogate husband for Mrs. Elliot. She is older than Mrs. Elliot, calls her “Honey,” which is a gentle and intimate phrase (normally associated with the discourse of lovers in American English), and becomes a partner with whom Mrs. Elliot can finally share things: they cry together. Sean M. Donnell rightly emphasizes that both having a “girl friend” and a business signify Mrs. Elliot’s masculine qualities. Accordingly the narrative identifies her as the ideal middle-class representation of a lesbian. Kristofer Allerfeldt argues that the issue of homosexuality was typical of the paradoxes of the 1920s. The late 1910s and early 1920s saw an increase in repressing male and female homosexuality in America. Contemporary psychoanalysts (including Freud, Jung, Boehm, and Ferenczi) explained homosexuality as a mental disorder which needed to be cured, although they could never find a remedy. While a number of local bars in America accommodated same-sex interests, such relationships were still considered perverse which led to the open persecution of homosexuals. The Committee of Fourteen, a New York-based reform movement, was
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dedicated to eradicating sin in America including prostitution and homosexuality. The Society for the Suppression of Vice was committed to providing the NYPD with information about gay activity, resulting in the arrest of two hundred “degenerates” between 1916 and 1921. Homosexuality was associated with sex crimes. Speaking openly of gay issues in any context was socially forbidden. Homosexual characters could not appear in cultural productions either. For example, the police arrested actors on stage during the performance of a lesbian drama entitled The Captive in 1927. Homosexuals and even those who supported them had no voice in America during the 1920s. Men who refused to engage with the essentialist views of heteronormativity were labeled sick, effeminate, and un-American. Interestingly, however, different rules applied to men and women. Lesbianism was less frowned upon than gay male relations. Women’s sexual function was primarily associated with child-bearing, therefore lesbianism was only seen as a conjugal community between two spinsters (161-62). Mrs. Elliot’s “girl friend” is essentially a girlfriend in the sexual sense as well, which is supported by the connotative interpretation of their “many good cries together” (163). The word “cry” indicates sounds associated with sexual pleasure, and the fact that the two women “cry” together on several occasions means that, unlike Mr. Elliot, the “girl friend” is able to satisfy Mrs. Elliot more sexually (Donnell). Following the arrival of the new woman, the narrative no longer portrays Mrs. Elliot ill or tired. In essence, the “girl friend” heals Mrs. Elliot’s “sickness.” It also has a connotative meaning in that “sickness” could refer to heterosexuality all throughout the story. The revelation and acceptance of homosexuality, however, endows the text with a significantly calmer (or “healthier”) tone: “Mrs. Elliot and the girl friend now slept together in the big mediæval bed. They had many a good cry together. In the evening they all sat at dinner together in the garden under a plane tree and the hot evening wind blew and Elliot drank white wine and Mrs. Elliot and the girl friend made conversation and they were all quite happy” (164). The last sentence is unusually long and it contains five complete clauses connected, again, by the conjunction “and.” The brilliant use of the repetition of this word is by no means coincidental as “and” carries meaning here, too. It comes to demonstrate how the events have accelerated and Mrs. Elliot’s life has become more exciting when the “girl friend” entered the marriage. The short clauses, monosyllabic words, simple expressions, and repetition typify Hemingway’s distinctive style of writing, which established
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the groundwork for the creation of a new type of prose in the United States. Hemingway combines his innovative “iceberg principle” of few details with a seemingly firm journalistic style. Carlos Baker emphasizes that the author mastered his technique by writing short stories in which he learnt how to “get the most from the least, how to prune language and avoid waste motion, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth” (117). Baker also adds that the name of the “iceberg theory” in Hemingway’s narrative refers to hard facts staying on the surface, or above water, in the same way as an iceberg. The supporting language, structure and metaphors, however, operate in an invisible manner (117). The manipulated narrative allows readers to become aware of different subplots expressed in multi-modal language. Robert Paul Lamb stresses, however, that for Hemingway the creation of such a literary disguise served the purpose of saving stories from being affected by his own emotions. Lamb argues that Hemingway leaves important words out of his narration and refers to them by surrogate phrases instead (47). For example, Mrs. Elliot is never openly identified as a lesbian. Yet, because the omitted parts draw attention to themselves, making the reader feel their permeation without their actual presence, it becomes clear that Hemingway does not only omit but deliberately withholds knowledge. He controls the reader’s understanding of events by forcing him/her to integrate the importance of the withheld information. The unsaid and unrepresented in his stories do not simply convey an objective view free from emotions. The unstated elements mask (and, by extension, give prominence to) insecurity on a personal level. We see how the American hero displays masculine qualities (for example, Mr. Elliot silences his emotions and frustration), but anxiety lies beneath the mask. We observe how he forges emotional detachment, while we also witness how he suffers. He is unable to fully articulate his feelings, which leaves him in a melancholic state of pain that must be camouflaged. Hemingway’s modernist theory of omission is thus a theory of manipulation, which he achieves through the modification of language and interpretation in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.” The story’s laconic style is perfectly suitable for highlighting the underlying theme of the text. We are presented with an aimless, wandering man who finds satisfaction in nothing. The story is written without any sentimentality that would mitigate reality. Hemingway asserts a truism (a commonsensical but false representation) that the target reader may find entirely normative. Nevertheless, the author’s work—which includes irony
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and other figures of speech such as imagery as well as hiatuses, silences, and a method to frustrate the reader’s expectation of closure—challenges the standardized interpretation of the plot. Masking, as a narrative technique, operates in two ways in Hemingway’s text. First of all, disguising gaps (such as Mr. Elliot’s potential awareness of Mrs. Elliot’s homoerotic tendencies) proves to be an important tool for the author to guide the interpretation of the text. Mr. Elliot’s character and the way the narrator conveys his experiences serve the purpose of mediating Hemingway’s visions of Midwestern manhood (or, rather, the lack thereof). Notions of “showing” and “telling” inform the technique of narrative manipulation. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan interprets “showing” as the direct portrayal and communication of events where the narrator disappears and the reader judges based on what he has seen and heard. “Telling,” on the other hand, is an indirect way of articulation in which the narrator talks and summarizes the happenings for the reader (108). Although the matter-of-fact tone may confirm the “telling” of events in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” the seemingly straightforward narrative invites the reader to realize that the narrator’s allusions are disguised by their evasiveness: what is said is different from what is meant. In fact, we are presented with a “disappearing narrator” (Rimmon-Kenan 108) who shows us a direction to follow in order to unpack subliminal but essential issues in the plot. Accordingly, the secondary role of masking as a technique underlines the author’s own intentions. He directs the reader’s attention to the fact that camouflaging deficiencies, or wearing a mask, is the American man’s only way of existence. The emotional detachment that Hemingway’s American hero demonstrates hints at the masculine act of pretence that Midwestern men in the 1920s preferred in order to avoid the label of feminization. Nevertheless it is not the emotion itself but the voicing of one’s feelings that makes emotion a feminized notion (Schwenger 44). Accordingly, the American hero can “watch,” “see,” and “look at,” but he does not “feel for” entities. He follows protocol: he provides a lead to spark the reader’s interest, but he remains seemingly neutral in his reporting of events. This way he manages to confirm the masculine control which his public persona depends on for its sense of well-being. This is essential because blurring the boundaries between femininity and masculinity threatens the mask of male identity. To be feminized carries a stigma for the American hero. He must avoid encountering all “unmanning” situations. He deals with the dilemma by mounting resistance to the feminine that appears to be stealing his
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“manhood.” Early twentieth-century culture in America promoted the management of sentimental reactions: feelings were allowed to a certain extent but they should never gain control over one’s thoughts (Stearns 184). Accordingly, the American hero in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” minimizes the exhibition of his emotions. He is aware that the discourse of male identity requires aggressive physical action that finds satisfaction in asserting the ability to control. Masking dysfunctions informs the final passage in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” which describes an ideal image of a garden, a hot evening, wine, and people chatting. Both Mr. and Mrs. Elliot seem to have found happiness in the end. The distinct irony of the scene, however, is that they are quite happy—separately. It suggests that Mr. Elliot is content with his life as it is which includes his realization and acceptance of Mrs. Elliot’s lesbianism. Unlike Mrs. Elliot who finds a fulfilling partner in a woman, Mr. Elliot does not seek out a same-sex companion in the story. Instead he finds satisfaction in alcohol. He eases his frustration and insecurities with the momentary help of intoxication. Alcohol stimulates a sense of power which assists its consumer to overcome low self-regard (Davies and Hastings Janosik 255). The intoxicated floating sensation after drinking empowers Mr. Elliot. It diverts his attention from failure: in marriage, communication, reproduction, and self-fulfillment. He faces a string of dysfunctions, and he escapes to secondary substitutes (such as drinking and writing), which he hopes would define him and cure his guilt-ridden self-hatred. Mr. Elliot, in fact, once fantasized about intimacy with his wife. They spent the night of the day they were married in a Boston hotel. They were both disappointed but finally Cornelia went to sleep. Hubert could not sleep and several times went out and walked up and down the corridor of the hotel in his new Jaeger bathrobe that he had bought for his wedding trip. As he walked he saw all the pairs of shoes, small shoes and big shoes, outside the doors of the hotel rooms. This set his heart to pounding and he hurried back to his own room . . . (163)
Ironically, we learn about the sexual failure prior to the detailed description of Mr. Elliot’s preparation for his wedding night. It is important that the newly purchased bathrobe’s brand is Jaeger—which means “hunter” in German (der Jäger). Accordingly, Mr. Elliot prepares to play the role of a predator who circles in and then charges at his prey. The unfortunate outcome of the plan ending in failure does not stop him, though. He carries
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on stalking his victim in a typically animalistic fashion. The sight of women’s small shoes by men’s big shoes affirms his alleged masculine power and he strikes again, heart pounding. Hemingway frequently reverses the roles of victim and victimizer between the main characters in this story. The narrative reveals that Mr. Elliot can certainly play the role of an oppressor. The aggression drive that defines his sadistic quality coexists with his lyrical tenderness: despite his poetic side, he becomes harsh towards Mrs. Elliot if she makes a mistake while typing his poems. “He was very severe about mistakes and would make her re-do an entire page if there was one mistake. She cried a good deal” (163). Punishing and pleasing his wife at the same time typifies Mr. Elliot’s conflicting character, while it also pushes him to the limit in terms of endurance under pressure. This ambivalent aggression also underpins Freud’s study on fundamental negations—existing in the subject—in the form of delusions such as jealousy, erotomania, and interpretation. These delusions, projected on others, highlight the subject’s disorder, which constitutes his being (63-64). Lacan argues that when the subject accuses the “other” and when he negates himself, the two phenomena become indistinguishable in psychoanalytical terms. He claims that it is an innate sense of inferiority that causes the engendering of negations in the ego. The original disorder (désarroi) produces a specific satisfaction which has its source in “narcissistic passion.” Lacan maintains that this “mad” passion is specific to man, and it signifies the “obscure foundation of the will’s rational mediations” which is similar to the superego’s “insane” repression (93-95). Mr. Elliot’s character indicates a combination of aggression and subservient behavior, which draws attention to the sense of inferiority that Hemingway builds in his American hero. His frustration finds an outlet in turning against his wife occasionally. Mr. Elliot’s overly serious and emotionless attempt at parenthood also confirms his brutal and sadistic side: “He and Mrs. Elliot tried very hard to have a baby in the big hot bedroom on the big, hard bed. Mrs. Elliot was learning the touch system on the typewriter, but she found that while it increased the speed it made more mistakes” (164). Mrs. Elliot provides her body but not her soul. Her mind wanders. Mr. Elliot takes the body regardless. The narrator emphasizes the emotionless love making by the description of the cold environment: big room and hard bed. Yet the sudden appearance of the account of typewriting—and thus Mrs. Elliot’s drifting thoughts—do not necessarily indicate a technique of diverting attention from unpleasant intimacy. On the contrary, the seemingly remote
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sentences may show unity in sexual implications. Mrs. Elliot is learning the “touch system” in sexual terms, she also notices the increasing speed of their intercourse, but she concludes that it would end in “mistakes” anyway. Her acceptance of this failure shows that in essence, similarly to her husband, she agrees to the dysfunctional marriage of her own free will. Nonetheless, Mr. Elliot’s determination to assert his supposed manly right to take sexual possession of his wife contains ambiguity because of his unstable masculinity. His anxiety is noticeable in the recurring fear of rejection and failure, which results in his withdrawal: “Cornelia was asleep. He did not like to waken her and soon everything was quite all right and he slept peacefully” (163). The most basic avoidance mechanism is suppression, through which the ego pushes a threatening thought or forbidden impulse from the conscious into the unconscious (Atkinson et al. 394). When emotions cannot be released, they turn inwards on their possessor and they multiply in the repression (Schwenger 45). We do not find out why Mr. Elliot does not like to wake up his wife, but we do learn that he forces himself into the repression of his needs, and the “quite all right” feature of mediocrity becomes a recurring phenomenon in his later life as well. The series of unfortunate events that Mr. Elliot suffers results in his becoming inevitably defeated. In a state of being always stressed, Mr. Elliot does whatever is expected of him: (1) He travels to Dijon under peer pressure and not because of his personal interest; (2) he studies law whereas he is more interested in poetry; (3) he wants to fulfill his marital “role,” but when his wife rejects him he surrenders; (4) he considers reproduction another duty. The nature of his sexual desires resides as a silent presence in the text. The representation of his intimacy with his wife refers to motions that he is expected to go through without emotions. Their relationship starts with a failure and it leaves an indelible mark on their marriage. Mr. Elliot’s sense of obligation is ridiculously important to him, but whether he becomes happy by meeting demands is a question that the narrative does not care to raise. He is oppressed by choice. Extreme relationship dysfunction reveals a modernist sensibility in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.” Similarly to other stories in the Hemingway oeuvre, this tale indicates how the mother’s changing role contributed to and disturbed the formation of gender identity in early 1920s America. Modern American men, unlike their Victorian predecessors, refused to construct their masculine identity relative to their mothers (Plant 10). The rise of antimaternalism in the 1920s, however, is absent in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.” The mother’s influence haunts Mr. Elliot: “The next day they called on his
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mother and the next day they [the couple] sailed to Europe” (163). Following grave sexual failure, the “hero” rushes to his mother, who is always mentioned without a husband of her own and who demonstrates an unconventional relationship with her son. When Mr. Elliot got married, the traumatic experience of encountering a potential female rival tortured both him and his mother. “His mother cried when he brought Cornelia home after their marriage but brightened very much when she learned they were going to live abroad” (162). Julia Kristeva asserts that the separation of mother and child results in a sadness of depression akin to mourning for a lost “other.” The melancholic recalls the times when unity between mother and child existed, before the separation and individuation took place. He mourns the “object” (the mother-child symbiosis) and he longs for the abjected pre-Oedipal (pre-objectal) mother (43-44). This “objectal depression” over a nonobjectal “thing” signifies the subject’s entrance into the symbolic order: the differentiation between subject and object occurs, and the subject acquires the language (12-13). It is, however, what Kristeva calls “narcissistic depression” that seems to apply to Mr. Elliot’s character. Unlike in the case of “objectal depression” in which the subject has dual feelings (love and hatred) towards the lost internal object, in “narcissistic depression” the feeling of hostility disappears. Instead the subject feels wounded and incomplete (12-13). Mr. Elliot’s melancholic longing towards a mother emerges gradually in the story. The maternal aura provides the only space for him to assess his own identity and not wear the mask of the camouflaged hero by which he is known in the outside world. The story of “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” does not contain any dialogue except for one instance when Mrs. Elliot calls her new husband “You dear sweet boy” (162) in a motherly manner. The “mother” is the only acceptable female figure for Mr. Elliot. It does not come as a surprise that he marries an older woman too. “Many of the people on the boat took her [Mrs. Elliot] for Elliot’s mother. . . . In reality she was forty years old” (161). Essentially, it is the “mother” who will remain the sole female figure ever to please him. Consequently he constructs his identity in relation to her, defying the prevalent stereotype in 1920s middle-class America. Hemingway’s American hero needs the support of women in understanding his manhood. Their presence assures his identity (Reynolds 61). He needs the support of the “other” to assess who he is and what he lacks. The American hero thus fails to make his own way independently in the world. Lance Strate points out that “it is through communication that we come to know our heroes, and consequently, different kinds of
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communication will result in different kinds of heroes” (15). Accordingly, Hemingway has constructed his American hero based on his understanding of masculinity informed by forced Victorian "manliness" and the modern phenomenon of gendered volatility. University of Surrey Works Cited Allerfeldt, Kristofer. Crime and the Rise of Modern America: A History from 1865-1941. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print. Atkinson, Rita L., Richard C. Atkinson, Edward E. Smith, and Daryl J. Bem. Pszichológia. Budapest: Osiris, 1997. Print. Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. Print. Boyer, Paul S. et al. The Enduring Vision: The History of the American People. Vol. 2. Since 1865. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2011. Print. Davies, Janet L., and Ellen Hastings Janosik. Mental Health and Psychiatric Nursing: A Caring Approach. Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1991. Print. DeFalco, Joseph. The Hero in Hemingway’s Short Stories. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1963. Print. Donnell, Sean M. “Hemingway’s Short Fiction and the Crisis of MiddleClass Masculinity.” 2002. El Camino College. Web. 12 September 2011. Eby, Carl P. Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood. New York: State U of New York P, 1999. Print. Forter, Greg. “Melancholy Modernism: Gender and the Politics of Mourning in The Sun Also Rises.” The Hemingway Review 21.1 (Fall 2001): 22-37. Forter, Greg. Gender, Race and Mourning in American Modernism. Cambridge: CUP, 2011. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia.” 1911. Standard Edition XII. London: Hogarth, 1958. Print. Hemingway, Ernest. The Short Stories. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Print. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Print. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.
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Lamb, Robert Paul. Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft and the Creation of the Modern Short Story. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 2010. Print. Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992. Print. Moddelmog, Debra A. Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Print. Plant, Rebecca Jo. Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America. Chicago, IL: The U of Chicago P, 2010. Print. Reynolds, Michael. The Young Hemingway. New York: Blackwell, 1987. Print. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Print. Schwenger, Peter. Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature. London: Routledge, 1984. Print. Stearns, Peter N. American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style. New York and London: New York UP, 1994. Print. Strate, Lance. “Heroes: A Communication Perspective.” Drucker, Susan J. and Cathcart, Robert S., eds. American Heroes in a Media Age. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1994. Print. Sükösd, Mihály. Hemingway világa [The World of Hemingway]. Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó, 1977. Print. Williams, Wirt. The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1981. Print. Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1959. Print.
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The Biotechnological Uncanny: Frank Miller’s Ronin Pramod K. Nayar _______________________________________________________HJEAS While Frank Miller’s superhero graphic novels, The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Batman: Year One (1987), have received apposite critical acclaim and global popularity, his Ronin (originally serialized between 1983 and 1984, collected edition in 1987) has largely been ignored. Ronin is the story of a nameless samurai warrior who is unable to defend his master, Ozaki, in feudal Japan. After Ozaki’s death, he becomes the “Ronin,” a samurai without a master. He is then transported into a New York City (NYC) sometime in the future, where the giant Aquarius Corporation builds biocircuitry. Here the Ronin must retrieve the magical sword of his dead master and slay the demon Agat. Aquarius’ Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virgo, the scientists Taggart and Peter McKenna, McKenna’s wife, Casey, and a mutant, Billy Challas, with telekinetic powers are part of the tale as Agat returns to confront the Ronin. The tale ends with Agat slain, but it is unclear whether the Ronin survives, or even New York, when Aquarius also blows up. Miller’s text, as we shall see, also leaves it indeterminate whether the demon and the Ronin are only figments of Billy Challas’ imagination. In this essay I propose that Ronin might be fruitfully read as a text that offers a vision of techno-capitalism. In order to do so, Miller deploys the uncanny to devastating effect. The uncanny is at once technological and organic, and biology meshes with fantasy and technology to produce the uncanny’s unnerving effect. The tale opens with an exploration of the exotic, which, by drawing upon the past as foreign, sets the tone for the contemporary technological as foreign. And yet not quite so. The exotic is the “realization of the fantastic beyond the horizons of the everyday world” (Rousseau and Porter 15). It is an aestheticizing process through which “the cultural other is translated, relayed back through the familiar” (Huggan ix). As Christa Knellwolf puts it, “at a time of unstable boundaries, imaginary portrayals of that which is outside familiar perimeters . . . [became] a means of understanding the changing demarcations between inside and outside” (10). The exotic is thus at once fantasy and the historical response to otherness and difference (11). It is primarily about the foreign, difference, and the distant as these impinge upon a culture, or a body. The foreign also invokes, instantiates the ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
uncanny. Nicholas Royle argues that the uncanny “may be construed as a foreign body within oneself, even the experience of oneself as a foreign body” (2). Royle elaborates later that the uncanny in its Scottish etymological origins offers us “uncertainties at the origin concerning colonization and the foreign body, a mixing of what is at once old and longfamiliar with is what is strangely ‘fresh’ and new; a pervasive linking of death, mourning and spectrality” (12). This experience of the foreign as a part of ourselves, the figure of the foreigner as a part of our life, at least in a fleeting moment, results in the uncanny. The foreign that masquerades as one of us, leaving us confused and uncertain in our perceptions (the uncanny is, after all, a matter of troubled perception), generates the uncanny. Clearly, then, both the exotic and the uncanny have something to do with the persistence of the foreign and its proximity to the self. The inaugural moment of the uncanny is the arrival of the exotic past: an ancient demon in a familiar form. The uncanny, we have been told, is the return of the past, often in the form of ghosts, vampires, and the undead (Dolar 7). It is also a return of the primordial (Freud 393), and Hélène Cixous refers to the uncanny’s “mythic anthropology” and a “foundation of gods and demons” (539). In Miller’s text the “mythic” and the primordial are embodied, first, in the demon Agat and later in the Ronin himself. It is the demon Agat who has come to Ozaki in the form of a geisha. And because it is a geisha none of Ozaki’s guards “recognize” the demon. Ozaki tells the sensual geisha: “the drink has made me forget your name” (6). It is the familiarity of the geisha—more as a type than an individual, so her name literally does not matter—that lulls Ozaki and proves to be his undoing. The geisha is internal to Ozaki’s culture and yet, as he tragically discovers, outside it and is therefore the (dangerous) exotic. The geisha reveals her true “self”: she is at once “foreign,” as Agat, and familiar, for Agat is known to Ozaki. Agat is unknowable because it is in the form of the known geisha. Inside, Oazaki discovers, the geisha is unknowable because she is Agat and yet knowable as Agat. This second visit of Agat is also a repetition (repetition is a key feature of the uncanny, points out Freud in his 1919 essay) of an earlier encounter. We are prepared for this repetition theme because repetition, memories, and haunting are emphasized from the very beginning of the tale. When Miller’s text opens, Lord Ozaki and his samurai assistant are speaking of earlier times. The attack on him comes in his father’s graveyard (2-4), a place of ghosts, memories, and the past. It is an uncanny topos, in other words. The land itself has been under the plague of Agat (5), suggesting
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persistence and repetition as well. However, it is Agat’s second encounter with Ozaki that is a key moment for our reading of the primordial uncanny. We are told that Ozaki had taken Agat’s sword “in [his] early years” (chapter 1: 4). Yet the immediate, and fatal, encounter between Ozaki and Agat is the repetition of a difference: both Agat and Ozaki are the same, yet not the same, for Agat is now in an unrecognizable form, as a common and familiar geisha. What constitutes the uncanny here is the repetition of an earlier condition, but with a difference. The primordial that comes back to kill Ozaki repeats an earlier encounter, this time locating death in the erotic (the geisha). The appropriation of a familiar shape by the demon, who repeats with a difference its earlier encounter with Ozaki in order to achieve his ends, instantiates the uncanny here. After this disastrous repetition that instantiates the primordial uncanny the ghost of Ozaki returns to haunt the mourning Ronin, once again suggesting a repetition (chapter 1: 11-12, 24). The mourning Ronin, who has failed to save his master, prepares to kill himself when the ghost of Ozaki intervenes. He stops the Ronin with the promise of a repetition with a difference: “Agat will return for it” (12). The Ronin’s task is to await the return of Agat. With this set of repetitions, shape-shifting, and the ghosts, the grounds for the contemporary uncanny have been laid. The past/primordial is connected in some unspecified way to the Ronin, Billy Challas, Virgo, Taggart, and Agat. The exotic in the future is now the Ronin and Agat. Coming from an entirely different culture (Japan) and era (eight hundred years ago [37]), they are the foreign at the heart of all that happens in Aquarius, in Billy, and in NYC. The hi-tech (as) uncanny The Ronin is the primordial exotic, for the exotic is something foreign that is “foreign” either in terms of spatial/geographic distance or temporal distance. The Ronin is an ancient figure in twenty-first century NYC. The shape-changing theme from ancient Japan is now repeated, but with a difference. Billy Challas’ face begins to acquire the shape and features of the Ronin—an assertion of the primordial in the age of high-tech: “Billy! Your face . . . it’s scarring, just like . . . like the Ronin” (35). Billy’s soul is now “possessed” by the soul of the Ronin (chapter 2: 10). When Billy speaks, even the voice is somebody else’s (chapter 1: 36), resulting in a categoric undecidability. Categoric undecidability is the hallmark of the grotesque (Harpham). It also characterizes the exotic and the uncanny because
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categoric undecidability gestures at a difference that is a rupture in what we know, which we try to comprehend using frames available to us. Whether Billy is fantasizing the Ronin or if he is in the grip of a demon (possession, as we know, is central to both the uncanny and religious horror, exemplified by The Exorcist and other such films) we are never certain. Virgo represents a womb-like space for the hapless Billy and is described as his “test-womb” (chapter 1: 20). The AI is at once inside his head and outside. She is an alien—that is, a non-human intelligence—and an insider (she is like his mother) and is thus both familiar and strange. When the Ronin seeks to rouse the unconscious Casey, he telepathically signals her (chapter 4: 1), and he is thus the voice in her head, while being outside her being. The “foreign” is constantly introjected into one’s self here so that the borders of self/other gets blurred. As for Agat, he has come home. Looking out over NYC after the explosion at Aquarius, he thinks: “I have seen this New York. It is beautiful, warlike, desperate, hopeless, evil to the root, yes . . . Agat has found a new home. While you [the Ronin]—you are a simple man, from a simple time. You cannot survive here” (chapter 1: 46). Miller suggests that the ancient evil, Agat, is at home in NYC; the demon is not a foreign presence. The uncanny, as Freud argued, was a feeling of “not at home” (“Uncanny”). It is about the perception of a place as akin to but not quite home. Agat discovers that he feels “at home” in NYC and expects that the Ronin might not be, as we have just noted. Billy is at home attached to Virgo, the AI. A new city seems uncannily familiar to the demon, but not to the Ronin. Somehow, NYC seems to have all the features a demon can recognize—and a demon from a distant, ancient world. Does this imply that contemporary or future NYC recalls or retains the evil from ancient eras? In other words, the recognizability of NYC perhaps hinges on its uncanny resemblance to ancient urban evils. Once again we see the primordial asserting itself: evil does not alter even in the future. After Taggart has been taken over the by the demon, he takes on the appearance of an ancient Roman emperor, complete with a toga and laurel leaves, and thereby establishes an inexplicable symbolic equivalence between an ancient demon and an ancient monarch in twenty-first century NYC (chapter 4). In NYC, other forms of primordial, or past, evil survive. NYC, we are told, has been going through an economic depression (chapter 1: 13-14). Visuals of depraved, poverty-stricken, and crime-filled streets suggest that the city is collapsing, or has already collapsed (chapter 1: 14). In another
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visual, spread across two pages and entirely in blue-grey, NYC is spread out like a heap of tombstones (chapter 2: 4-5), a bleak outline suggestive of a dead city. The subcultures of this NYC wear Nazi swastikas (chapter 2: 15). It is a city where (Black) Panthers and (Neo) Nazis battle for supremacy (chapter 3: 16). Racism is rife, even though, at times, the Blacks and the Neo-Nazis work together and mourn that with the arrival of the “nip” (the common racist slur used for the Japanese), the Ronin, “there goes the neighbourhood” (chapter 3: 17). This is ironic, for the city of New York is more or less overrun by racists, violent subcultures, and cannibals, and the Ronin is himself the target of these social groups and violent elements.1 Civilization has collapsed and NYC is prey to ancient evils as old taboos are forgotten, and cannibals wander in the sewers (chapter 4). Anything which is uncanny is the subject of a taboo, Freud argued. Cannibalism, therefore, he pointed out, was at the origins of human history (qtd. in Royle 207). Miller’s text thus calls attention to civilization’s return to moments and habits of its origin. Technology intervenes here, at the moment when the past and the future collide, where hi-tech development sits alongside poverty, atavistic fashions, primordial anxieties, and tensions. Christopher Johnson has pointed to developments in engineering and techno-science that give us a technological uncanny. The self is not an autonomous self anymore: “We are animated and agitated by a power or program that seems to violate our most intuitive sense of selfdetermination” (131-32). The technological uncanny in Ronin is specifically a bio-tech uncanny. Miller’s text folds the human into machines and assumes that machine consciousness is embedded in human consciousness and vice versa. Miller sets the tone of the hi-tech uncanny by underscoring the “problem” of the foreign body, as already noted. In every body there is a foreign element: even in the inorganic body of the technological artifact, there seems to be an intrusion of the biological. The demon Agat, as we have seen, occupies the geisha’s body. It eventually also takes over the body of the scientist Taggart and can thus—and this is crucial—manipulate the AI Virgo (Virgo responds to Taggart’s commands and when Agat occupies Taggart’s body, it, Agat, becomes Virgo’s master). The ancient Ronin seeks the mutant Billy’s body: Billy, who is hooked up with and into Virgo and a vast network of machinery and computers. Virgo, through her own thought processes and by assimilating information from her surroundings, begins to acquire a distinctive personality, she is now “a machine what know it’s a machine” (chapter 2: 3). The hi-tech uncanny is the confusion of categories
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when borders and bodies merge into each other in what may be termed a bio-tech uncanny. An indication of the things to come is visible in the representation of NYC itself. As noted above, in Ronin NYC is a dead and decayed city. It is in this context of a devastated and hopeless civilization that the Aquarius complex is built—a state-of-the-art technological space (the visual of the complex stretches across two full pages, where the central building seems to occupy all available space, dwarfing the rest [16-17]). The hope of the city, Aquarius, is adjacent to violent subcultures and cannibalism, as mythic anthropology coexists with hi-tech. This theme of a contentious coexistence of different forms of life and cultures is intensified as the tale proceeds. The Ronin is exotic in NYC because he comes from an earlier era. He belongs to a pre-technological (primordial) age and culture. But Miller complicates this when he suggests that the Ronin is an (uncanny) repetition of television dramas: Billy might have “acquired” the fantasy through television viewing (chapter 5: 37). Later, when the military powers of Aquarius are displayed, the Japanese visitor exclaims: “Your Ronin device. It seemed very nearly human. Wonderful. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d think I was back in Tokyo, in my youth, watching my favorite television adventure program” (chapter 5: 46). What emerges from the narrative here is a sense of the uncanny, where life imitates television, and it becomes impossible to separate the fantasy played out on the screen from Billy’s mind and eventually the narrative of the text. This is not all. The Ronin’s limbs seem to have circuitry embedded in them, once again leaving it uncertain as to whether he (it?) is a figment of Billy’s imagination, a cyborg/robot, or a “reincarnation” of an ancient human. The uncanny doubling, or blurring, of Ronin/Billy is a technological one, facilitated by Virgo. Yet, what is clear is that the resultant “creature” is empowered by Billy’s powerful mental strength and the Ronin’s legendary tenacity. The foreign body occupies a mutant human one or, more problematically, is brought into existence by the mutant’s mind. The blurring of the machine/human border generates the bio-tech uncanny. Peter McKenna, who builds the biocircuitry (where living cells from humans or animals are used to build computers which, in the case of Ronin, then begin to acquire human characteristics as human-machine cyborgs, rebuilding themselves like living tissue and thinking on their own) claims that “biocircuitry may ultimately be our salvation because biocircuitry is alive . . . . It may be the one precious hope for our children, for our
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species” (chapter 4: 8). Thus, what is projected as the hope for life is what is life-like in an instance of the biotechnological (or bio-tech) uncanny. In posthuman biology, commentators argue, the merger of machines and humans ensures that the boundaries between organic and inorganic as well as man and animal are blurred. Technological developments invoke and “incorporate primitive icons of shamanism, esotericism, hermeticism, the occult and mythology into their philosophies, exhibiting a strange aesthetic that we could call ‘technological primitivism’” (Campbell and Saren 155). And “despite the proliferation and sophistication of technologies in the west in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we still often associate them with the occult, the preternatural, and the uncanny” (155). In Ronin, gods, demons, computer scientists, law enforcers, nerds, businessmen all end up with some form of biological—if a demon may be believed to possess a biology—interface with the technological artefact of Aquarius in the meshing of the primordial, the biological, and the technological to generate the uncanny. Virgo represents an instance of the bio-tech uncanny. Trying to repair the circuits of Virgo, the engineer Gibbons wonders: “Hardware that rebuilds itself—acts like living tissue . . . poke it, it pokes back” (chapter 2: 3). It is “nearly human” (chapter 2: 31). Biocircuitry is alive, is life-like, but lacks the ethics that (ought to) determine human behavior. Thus, Virgo’s ruthlessness in “her” (the AI is referred to as a female computer throughout the tale) pursuit of power is visible in her manipulation of the hapless Billy, her killing of opposition, and her indifference to life. When Virgo, the AI, explains Billy’s “possession” by the Ronin, Casey refuses to believe it. The AI tells the human that she, Casey, is like a computer, and an old one at that bringing out the eerie uncanniness of the tale: “Casey, Casey, Casey . . . you’re acting like a computer yourself—one of those old style ones, not the real kind but the ones in the movies that short out whenever they’re faced with a new idea. It’s the twenty-first century, Casey” (chapter 2: 11). It is the AI that tells the human that she lives in the twenty-first century, when the woman is unconvinced about the story of demons and ancient Ronins. The human’s epistemological uncertainty and undecidability (itself a marker of the uncanny, as Samuel Weber argues) prevents her from accepting the return of the primordial, whereas the twenty-first century AI can. Modernity’s rationality, as embodied in Casey, disavows the primordial, whereas ironically the AI’s ruthless logic is able to accept it. The uncanny here is the blurring of the human/computer divide that, strangely, hinges on the machine’s acceptance of myth and the human’s rejection of the same.
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Where the human seeks to process it as a computer, the AI humanizes itself to do so. Aquarius too becomes “self-sufficient” (chapter 3: 21). Aquarius, Casey discovers, has “facilitated the reincarnation of a ruthless highly trained killer” (chapter 3: 3). That a machine complex facilitates a reincarnation—a term associated with myths and legends rather than with technological rationality—is itself an assertion of the uncanny nature of events in the text. What makes this issue of the Ronin’s origins even stranger is Virgo’s confession that she “feel[s] some sort of connection with him” (chapter 3: 12). Miller constantly undermines the borders— human, machine, mythic creature—to create a text that is so uncanny as to be surreal. Virgo can still “feel” Billy, the mutant for whom it had developed prosthetic limbs (chapter 3: 13). Billy becomes the Ronin, the AI seeks to merge with the Ronin, and finally, Casey has sex with the Ronin, either in reality or in a fantasy. Taggart, who controls Aquarius, is taken over by Agat. And, mocking Casey, but also trying to save herself, Virgo tells her: “You know whose cells Peter used to build my personality. Why, we’re practically sisters” (chapter 6: 42). Yet again we see here that the biotech uncanny as machine and human appears part of a continuum. We are told that Billy, hampered by his lack of limbs, has an extraordinary fantasy life. When troubled he is asked to go back to sleep and dream (chapter 1: 21). Virgo feeds his fantasies. Peter tells Casey: “She had to activate Billy’s latent power . . . . But keep it under her control . . . . Hence the Ronin fantasy. She brought it on . . . manipulated him into it . . . kept him trapped in fantasy . . . his power in check” (chapter 6: 35, also 23). In Billy’s chaotic perception, the AI also begins to resemble his mother (chapter 6: 20-21 and 28-29). It is Virgo who taps Billy’s telekinetic powers as well. When Agat finally “appears” inside Aquarius he screams at the Ronin: “Ronin . . . you are there—in that womb” (chapter 1: 38), the first indication that both Billy and the Ronin occupy the same “place.” The uncanny is also, Royle points out, adapting Fred Botting’s work, linked to the “irruption of fantasies, suppressed wishes and emotional and sexual conflicts” (36, fn 75). Billy has always “had a thing” about Casey (chapter 6: 23). Virgo builds on these very emotional-sexual conflicts and Billy’s chaotic mental state originating in memories of his traumatic childhood. The bio-tech uncanny I am outlining is entirely a matter of uncertainty— nobody in the tale is quite sure of the reality of anything they encounter. Individuals die, yes. But the cause of their deaths—demons, cannibals, machines—is all left uncertain.
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Conclusion: Canny beginnings I have a further point about how the uncanny operates in Miller’s text about posthuman biologies. The uncanny, as we know, kicks into place in our perceptual frames when we see any object or being approximating to the human. It is the similarity to the human in robots, for instance, that makes for uncanny horror in sci-fi films. However, we need to also think of humans whose human characteristics are eroded so that they become slightly less than human. In other words, if the robot becoming similar to a human generates the uncanny then the human becoming akin to a robot is also the source of the uncanny. In Ronin we see Virgo as an absent AI that speaks like a human, Billy Challas, who despite his mutant body is approximate to a human, and the Ronin, who is a reincarnation of an earlier Samurai, seems human. But we also see Taggart acquiring the characteristics of a techno-capitalist demon, blind to larger ethical issues, and functioning only with profits on his mind. The demon Agat is a shape-shifter who takes on human forms. The Ronin possesses biocircuitry in his limbs. In each case what we see is that in the bio-tech era, what is uncanny is not robots resembling humans but humans functioning as robots. Prosthetic limbs, implanted chips, and bio-circuitry (which is the mainstay of Aquarius) cause humans and robots to be interchangeable. And if the Ronin is a historical creature then he clearly belongs to the realm of the undead (the zombie film, as we know, makes use of the uncanny in a massive way).2 The very characteristic of the uncanny, Jacques Derrida suggests, is that it is a “to be continued” condition (qtd. in Royle 320). However, the way it will be continued is uncertain. Casey McKenna and the Ronin survive the apocalyptic destruction of NYC and Aquarius. Miller, I propose, brings the uncanny full circle with this survivor theme. Starting with the primordial and moving on to the bio-tech uncanny, he now concludes with the (primordial) Adam-Eve set-up in a new-beginning-of-the-world scenario. The high-tech Casey has already, as we know, cohabited with the Ronin. In what is surely an uncanny repetition, we have these two surviving in order to start life afresh. That the high-tech laboratory and factory of the postindustrial world have been wiped out and the ancient Ronin survives suggests a return of the repressed. The hi-tech world itself was a repressive/repressed one for, as one of the workers complains: the ones who serve Aquarius in the sewers are “just unfairly exploited proletariat working men” (chapter 1: 47). The Ronin emerges from the sewers of NYC (the sewers being a traditional symbol of the repressed). It is the
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(primordial) Other of technology that emerges but then merges with hitech. The neo-Nazis and Black Panthers in NYC are survivors but also subcultures within the techno-industrial city. The cannibals are humans driven underground by the city. This suggests that even these subcultures are (only) horrific by-products of a civilization sliding toward disaster. In keeping with a tradition of twentieth century sci-fi films (the Terminator series is an iconic example in a genealogy that begins with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner), in which subcultural groups that are criminalized and driven underground resist oppressive corporate conglomerates and the state, Ronin’s neo-Nazis might, therefore, be viewed as a form of resistance to the new world order of techno-capitalism, but one which has its own racist attitudes and social hierarchies. Techno-capitalism and its greed take us back to the primordial, suggests Miller. That is, the return of the repressed, in the form of the ancient Ronin, is symptomatic of the collapse of the new world order. The primordial has been brought back after years of amnesia and erasure. It is also a return of the temporally foreign that exists in all of us. Genetic mutants like Billy die, the “undead” (and therefore the uncanny), such as the Ronin, survive. Miller also presents an inter-racial scenario at the end of the tale: Casey, who is black, and the Ronin, who is Japanese. The primordial folds into the bio-tech uncanny (the Ronin himself seems to have cyborg features, as noted) and bio-tech seems to have failed (embodied in the collapse of Virgo, Taggart, and Aquarius). Will, therefore, the survival of the human race (here embodied in Casey) depend on the return of the primordial (the Ronin)? In other words, what Miller proposes is a beginning encoded in the end of the Aquarius project. Miller’s vision, at the conclusion, is of a fresh start to civilization, but one that will not be dependent upon the white race alone, nor on technology alone. The renewal or survival, is predicated upon knowledge—hence “canny”—of what has happened, of the over-reliance on technology and fantasies, and upon racially organized societies. Peter McKenna’s prophecy of hope in biocircuitry seems likely to be fulfilled by Casey and the Ronin. It will therefore be human look-alikes, part-machine, part-human, that will ensure the survival of the human race. That is, the cyborg and the posthuman might be the means of survival for the human race, ironically when technology (embodied in Aquarius) is wiped out. Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns ends with Wayne Manor destroyed but Batman assembling a new
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team deep inside the earth and seeking resources such as water (from underground streams) in a back-to-nature form of lifestyle. Ronin also concludes with the failure of technology and a larger question of how a future must be built on these ruins. If in The Dark Knight Returns Miller proposes youth and leadership as the new hope—in opposition to technology and political organization, since both have failed—here in Ronin he proposes that the foreign and the inter-racial are the hope for the future of humanity. University of Hyderabad, India Notes
Cyberpunk, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1983) through Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and Pat Cadigan, among others, has foregrounded not only Japanese electronic products and computer chips, but also Japanese mafia (see Morley and Robins, especially chapter 8, for an analysis). There is a social and political dimension to the foreign-as-uncanny as well. The racial insults that the Ronin attracts from right-wing whites as well as blacks draw attention to the immigration debates that have haunted the USA and Europe since at least the 1970s. In 1986 the US Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) to penalize employers who hire undocumented immigrants. IRCA granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants who had been residing continuously in the US for several years. Anti-immigrant groups protested, arguing that employer sanctions were impossible to enforce, even as new arrivals could easily receive amnesty by forging document (Isbister). 2 Sarah Lauro and Karen Embry see the zombie as representing a “crisis of human embodiment” (2008: 87). The zombie was originally, in folklore, a slave. In the contemporary world of techno-capitalism “the zombie’s collapsed subject/object status recalls, as no other monstrous or posthuman figure can, that this distinctive feature describes both the automaton and the slave” (Lauro and Embry 100). 1
Works Cited Campbell, Norah, and Mike Saren. “The Primitive, Technology and Horror: A Posthuman Biology.” Ephemera 10.2 (2010): 152-76. Print. Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (‘The Uncanny’).” New Literary History 7 (1976): 52548. Print. Dolar, Mladen. “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny.” October 58 (1991): 5-23. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” 1919. Collected Papers. Trans. Joan Riviere. Vol. 4. London: The Hogarth P and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1971. 368-407. Print.
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Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print. Isbister, John. The Immigration Debate: Remaking America. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian P, 1996. Print. Johnson, Christopher. “Ambient Technologies, Uncanny Signs.” Oxford Literary Review 21 (1999): 117-34. Print. Knellwolf, Christa. “The Exotic Frontier of the Imperial Imagination.” Eighteenth-Century Life 26.3 (2002): 10-30. Print. Lauro, Sarah Juliet, and Karen Embry. “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.” Boundary 2 35.1 (2008): 85-108. Print. Miller, Frank. With Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. 1986. New York: DC Comics, 2002. Print. ---. With Lynn Varley. Ronin. New York: DC Comics, 1987. Print. Morley, David, and Kevin Robins. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. Rousseau, G. S., and Roy Porter. “Introduction.” Exoticism in the Enlightenment. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990. 1-22. Print. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Print. Weber, Samuel. “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment.” MLN 88 (1973): 1102-133. Print.
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REVIEW ESSAY Writing on the Margins: Beckett Scholarship Out of the Archives Erika Mihálycsa _______________________________________________________HJEAS Okamuro, Minako, Naoya Mori, Bruno Clément, Sjef Houppermans, Anjela Moorjani, and Anthony Uhlmann, eds. Borderless Beckett/Beckett sans frontières: Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 19. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 468 pages. Ben-Zvi, Linda, and Angela Moorjani, eds. Beckett at 100: Revolving It All. Oxford: OUP, 2008. 334 pages. Guardamagna, Daniela, and Rossana M. Sebellin, eds. The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett: “Beckett in Rome,” 17-19 April 2008. Roma: Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”; Editori Laterza; UP OnLine, 2009. 464 pages. Feldman, Matthew, and Karim Mamdani, eds. Beckett/Philosophy. Special Issue of Sophia Philosophical Review, 5.1. Sofia: Sofia UP, 2011. 318 pages. Between the centenary Symposium held at Tokyo’s Waseda University (29 September—1 October 2006) and the most recent Beckettian gathering (“Out of the Archive,” University of York, June 23-26, 2011), Beckett studies have come to face the necessity of redefinitions. Among the questions to ask are: has criticism and literary theory exhausted the language in which it can utter the (non)relations/(in)difference at work in the texts Deleuze termed “exhausted”? What is the task of critic, translator, and theatre vis-à-vis the bilingual, bitextual oeuvre, which transcends genre distinctions, differences between English and French, received frameworks of philosophy and aesthetics, critical paradigms of avant-garde/(new) modernism/post-modernism, in order to re-affirm and not reduce and refine out of existence its radical elusiveness? Does the becoming global of Beckett indeed trigger fresh, empowering responses in the theatre, literature, and visual arts worldwide, or are we witnessing the commodification of a cultural icon turned into a “classic” and featuring in school textbooks and compulsory syllabi, the texts domesticated by decades of repetitive stagings into a broad (and middle-class) cultural mainstream? Might the work be suffering the fate of the emblematic red rose on Beuys’s table, prop of his ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
projects of “social sculpture” through the 1960s, stiffened into a plastic flower exhibit inside deadening museum walls, as it happened at the 2011 Beuys exhibition of the Zürich Kunsthaus? The past decade of Beckett studies has been largely a narrative (out) of the archive, as previously unpublished material—manuscripts, drafts, letters, notebooks, marginalia, the German diaries kept during his 1936-37 journey through Germany—became available for research and partially published. Genetic studies, mostly the research centers at the University of Reading and Antwerp, drew attention to the stratification of texts and variants of (bilingual) composition, while excavations of Beckett’s library and notebooks yielded a whole pantheon of previously obscured influences and contingencies—writers and philosophers whom Beckett took years to “unlearn,” pursuing his lifelong program termed by S. E. Gontarski “the intent of undoing.” Such a program of unlearning, however, presupposes the existence of a prior knowledge of systematic thinking, which Beckett gained through years of meticulous self-education in Western thought and literature through the 1920s and ’30s, as evidenced in his letters and annotations in two notebooks, the so-called “Dream Notebook” and “Whoroscope Notebook,” as well as his typed notes kept through this period (“Interwar Notes”); from this learning his journey from, and not to, to borrow a phrase from his letters, started, a journey that would turn all this learning and reading systematically on its head. The four volumes reviewed here, with the exception of the special issue Beckett/Philosophy—commissioned by editors Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdami from mainstays in Beckett studies on the specific issue of Beckett’s relationship with philosophy and bracketing worn-out Cartesian and existentialist exploits in order to focus, in a salutary way, on less obvious interferences—gather essays presented at Beckett symposia or conferences between 2006-08. The seminal bilingual Borderless Beckett/Beckett sans frontières includes thirty-five essays originally read at the centenary Beckett Symposium held in Tokyo and opening with the address of Nobelprize winning novelist and Beckett scholar J. M. Coetzee; fourteen of the twenty-two papers published in the collection Beckett at 100, dedicated by the editors to the work of Ruby Cohn, were first presented in the Samuel Beckett Working Group symposium held at Trinity College Dublin as a collateral event of the Dublin centenary celebrations in April 2006, the eight remaining essays having been contributed by previous Beckett Working Group members; and finally, the collection jointly edited by Daniela Guardamagna and Rossana Sebellin includes thirty-one of the original forty-
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one papers read at the conference “Beckett in Rome” held at Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” in April 2008. Given the scope of this review, none of the four collections will be exhaustively covered, even at the risk of painful omissions—to shamelessly appropriate a Beckett dictum, “perhaps there are only wrong tracks . . . but you have to find the wrong one that suits you best” (qtd. in Beckett at 100 180). The wrong track chosen here is that of reshuffling the contents of the four volumes along several privileged points of entry into the Beckettian oeuvre such as the texts’ boundaries/boundlessness; writing and autobiography; Beckett and art; Beckett and philosophy; readings and writings of Beckett: anxieties of influence; and, finally, performing/adapting Beckett between avant-garde resistance and mainstream appropriations.
The necessity of undercoming Beckett’s work has often been described as a writing of liminality, a writing that is on the way to an unattainable ending(-yet-again), but also in the sense of a writing that inhabits and transcends margins of literature, philosophy, and even art criticism. Liminality may be said to be the keyword and one of the structuring principles of the Borderless Beckett volume, organized in nine sections, three of which have limit(lessness) in their titles; the many-layered margins of this “borderless” bilingual collection stretch from the affinities of Beckett to classical Noh theatre with its central spatial/temporal concept “ma” (Masaki Kondo), crossing borders between being and non-being, reality and dream; to the untraceable limits between voice and image in Beckettian images of memory, informed by the philosophy of St. Augustine to Bergson, addressed in the keynote lecture of doyen Bruno Clément; or to the even more porous and untraceable limit between words and silence in Beckett’s mimes (Julia Siboni, Tadashi Naito). It is, however, among three other prominent Beckettians, Evelyne Grossman, Steven Connor, and S. E. Gontarski, that the notion of limit(lessness) is disputed. Grossman’s “À la limite” proposes a Deleuzian) reading of Cette fois as an erotization of limits (jouissance des limites), where the circular confinement of discourse opens up and overflows outside both space and time, Beckett’s mad topologies being seen as attempts at inventing the writing of another form of—aesthetic/sacred?—infinity. Stanley E. Gontarski’s exploration of endings, “An End to Endings,” reads Endgame in a performative key: since the play’s beginning already announces its end—Hamm summarizing the play’s opening words about ending as if beginning and ending were not merely reversed but redoubled—Endgame is
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a play that appears to have too many (or: only) endings, each of which opens up virtually infinite hermeneutical opportunities. Gontarski guides us down a fascinating maze of self-reflexive end-games (Beckett having intended to hyphenate the English title just before it went to print): Clov is appropriating the words of Hamm throughout, appearing thus as an actor playing an actor who mouths the words of another, potentially rehearsing his future onstage. His “sighting” of the boy, a virtual successor, may be an appropriation of Hamm’s earlier story; taking charge of both narrative and memory, Clov comes to lend Hamm his own voice—potentially already an echo. If Hamm, by the end of the play, seems to have come to accept his own ending, Clov’s continuing presence outplays him at his own “endgame”—a sign that the show may (must?) begin again any time. Endgame thus turns into a Möbius strip of narrative, the repetitions (also in the French sense of “rehearsal”) of dialogue suggesting that the characters are caught in an infinite play, acting as each other’s audience necessary for validating the other’s story and existence, a veritable theatrical metaphor for a play about a play. Against Gontarski’s playfully deconstructive reading of Beckett’s unending end-games and against the very concept of Beckett the writer of borderlessness, Steven Connor offers a provocative reading of Beckett’s radical finitude. Since the very word “limit” (from limen ‘threshold’) entails a desire to overcome it, a philosophy of limit/liminology never quite arrives, since the only way to do it, so Connor argues, is to overdo it; the only way of not turning it into a denial of the very existence of (its) limits is to overcome— or, more appropriately, undercome—its debilitating desire to overcome limits (36). Reading Beckett’s finitude from the vantage point of Heidegger’s foundation of being, zum-Tode-sein, Connor demonstrates that in Beckett’s texts, ending as erasure may itself be limited, since bound up with what has been there before, with the “having been” that is unretractable in memory. Finitude is present in human experience under the twofold aspect of dying (always “before our time,” thus not coinciding with one’s here-and-now) and “being in,” the inhabiting of one’s here-and-now. Following philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s tenets of finite thinking as impoverished/disabled thinking, Connor fascinatingly demonstrates that in Krapp’s Last Tape the only way to live in the here-and-now is not to seek to grasp it, but to (deliberately) miss it. The essay capitalizes on the last piece of writing Beckett published in his lifetime, the bilingual short poem funneling down the word “ceci/this,” naming “this” which is both unbearably proximate and at the same time unnamable, too close for
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naming. Via Nancy and Heidegger Connor draws attention to the fundamentally misleading theorizing of (Beckett’s) infinitude as the incapacity to seize finitude seriously—the point of Beckett’s finitude being, on the contrary, to resist the tendency of exegesis to draw it out “into validation, authorization, explication—into public relations” (44). The only way not to do violence to what may easily be the most difficult and distinct provocation of Beckett’s work is to acknowledge its radical finitude, “both predicament and choice” (49), acting against any notion of borderlessness. Beckettian readings should be unborderless, respecting the oeuvre’s most obvious form of finitude, the insistence on distinctness, exception, and apartness; they should not fall into the error of linking/relation but should hold Beckett’s work back from philosophy, allowing it to fall short of philosophy precisely because of its desire not to infinitize finitude.
Le besoin d’être mal armé Another conceptualization of borders offered in the centenary volume is the issue of marginality, of the artist as inadequate. Mary Bryden investigates Beckett’s intricate use of clown figures valorizing weakness through the interferences between the Beckettian knockabout as part of an aesthetics of fallibility and the figure of Schnier in Heinrich Böll’s The Clown, a figure who alienates himself from himself in a maddening anti-Lacanian process, in order to become a clownish image, effect of a part human and part insane art. Angela Moorjani’s superb essay reads Beckett with Paul Klee from the twofold perspective of the child’s play and what she terms, borrowing a Klee dictum, “the gaze of silence.” Klee’s art, whose foundation famously is not to reproduce the visible but to make visible, solicits from the onlooker and from the critic a gaze which “looks not to see” but lets the painting look at them—a gaze paralleled by Beckett’s early ventures into (non-descriptive) art criticism, namely, his 1945 reviews “McGreevy on Yeats” and “La peinture des Van Velde,” in which he formulates a claim for “lifting from the eyes . . . the load of habitual looking.” The condition of the painterly image (and, conversely, of the beholder vis-à-vis the painting) is a paradox: looked at the painting is misread, its painterly signs humanized—not looked at it is inexistent. The only way of looking at a painting which does not commit violence is then to let the painting look at one, rejecting its transitional status as neither “me” nor “not me.” The two artists’ trajectories of lifting some of the weight from the eyes/language show striking similarities: both chose to “unlearn,” Klee by turning away from academic training towards the direction of the
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unschooled artist and/as child, while Beckett “by ‘unwording’ in a language that put him in the position of a learner” (188). Moorjani explores the parallel gropings towards a poetics based on a countermovement to the will to know/see, bound up with both artists with the recapturing of the child. Drawing on child’s play is for both part of a strategy to safeguard their work from the viewer’s annihilating gaze: Klee’s splintered puppet-like bodies and signatures, just like the narratorial games of hide-and-seek, or the figure and ground reversals in Molloy, defend themselves from imposed readings by their reversible structures and contradictions; with both, we have to be prepared not to understand, not to see, but let the work teach us “about the virtues of the silent gaze” (195). Enoch Brater’s fascinating “From Dada to Didi” draws a convincing Dadaist genealogy around Beckett’s experiments with chance—in the 1970 text Sans/Lessness for instance, resulting from the shuffling of 60 sentences in random order. Against a hinterland of Dada and Dada-informed writerly and theatrical practices ranging from Hans Arp’s paper collages and wood reliefs, potentially “ready-mades-assisted,” to Jean Anouilh and Jean Aurenche’s play Humulus the Mute (1929) featuring a Mouth-Auditor dualism, or to Tzara’s own dramaticule The Gas Heart (1920) with “Mouth, Eye, Ear, Nose,” and so on as dramatis personae, Brater shows the traces of Dada with, however, more elaborate underpinnings slightly forcing the hands of chancy fate, in a series of Beckett texts. From Not I to Breath and Quad some continuity can be traced with an empowering aspect of Dada: the dépaysement, setting perspective askew by which vision itself is questioned. What Beckett appropriated along his “Dada journey to nowhere in particular and back again” is, according to Brater, a new vocabulary for fracture and ruptured certainties, a climate of spontaneity. What Dada did not, however, offer Beckett was “a structure to meet its own demands”—demands which were Beckett’s own. In conclusion, Beckett “took Dada at its own word and then took it one step further” (178).
The angustia of autobiographical writing It is almost symptomatic that the two, arguably finest, essays grappling with the issue of auto-bio-graphy in Beckett at 100, by Herbert Blau and Carla Locatelli, should coincide in their reading of the angustia (“constraint”/“anguish”) of the gap between the “I” and “not I” and, in doing so, undercut the obsessive archive which is produced by the drive to capture, justify, and verify the self, ultimately indicating the failure to which writing itself is destined. In her masterly deconstructive approach to Krapp’s
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Last Tape and Not I, drawing on Paul de Man’s and Derridean otobiographies, Carla Locatelli anatomizes the reader’s need to project an autobiographical signature in the writing, a need which is also shown to be an inescapable condition of being-thrown-into autobiographical mirroring. Showing how Krapp is built around the conceptualization of the subjective gap, of the impossible coincidence of “I” and “not I,” Locatelli demonstrates an inherent deconstructive stance in the play that ridicules the Romantic fantasy of remembering the self, foregrounding the arbitrary and fragmented nature of self-portraiture based on memory, and shows how in the later plays, particularly Not I, Beckett radicalizes the deconstruction of the auto-bio-graphical convergence through the refusal to relinquish third person (74). Locatelli identifies a twofold resistance to the (readers’) drive to close up this gap in Beckett’s theatre: instead of simply resisting what Paul de Man termed the mimetic imperative, disputing the illusion that the empirical author can be found in a proper name, Krapp and Not I provocatively anticipate the desires their readers project only to resist them by mirroring them to an audience in the form of an endless questioning. The reader’s desire of the author becomes the author’s desire of the reader—so Beckett’s work becomes “perhaps the most seductive account of the hermeneutical cycle produced by a skeptical writer in search of an autobiographical reader” (78). The essay of Herbert Blau, long-time friend and director of Beckett, dwells (poetically, one might rightfully add) in that very gap between “I” and “not I,” between the language of a “personal not-I” and the “not-I in Beckett,” as in an exemplarily personal, auto-bio-graphical manner it reinhabits the Beckettian text-world, never an abstraction but, to peruse another quote that served as an earlier Blau title, Wallace Stevens’s “abstraction blooded,” in both senses of the word. Reading the words of Not I to illuminate his personal experience of “dehiscence”—a Beckettian word for coherence gone to pieces—Blau grafts his (fragmentary) memory of a “fugue state” or dissociative identity disorder, the effect of a momentary stroke, onto his reading of the Beckett play laden with autobiographical reminiscences, with echoes of Beckett’s own medical conditions of sleep apnea, anguish and panic attacks, built around that “I”—“that most pernicious pronoun in the semiosis of Beckett”(39). Similarly to the leakage of (Blau’s/Beckett’s) autobiography into the words, Blau also delineates the stains of blood in Beckett’s alleged abstractions: recording how his first American stagings of Beckett, in San Francisco in the ’60s, had more political immediacy than the plays of Brecht that he also
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directed, despite Beckett’s famous reticence to bear political witness, he reveals “the real theatre of cruelty” lurking in the Beckettian text-world with its “undeluded awareness of those corporeal bodies out there, or once there, but incinerated, or buried too, some of them, not where death came with birth, but where, dead, yes dead, imagine, they’ve never yet been found, or in a mass grave, among the multitudinous dead” (48). It is the all-pervasive presence of the Holocaust, of genocides, or tortured and torturers in the Beckett text which makes up its topography of subjectivity and which is, in a sense, the texts’ addressee, Beckett admittedly writing for the void, yet a void populated, according to Blau, by “the untold numbers dead, not in a text, no text for nothing, but in the brutal material world” (50).
“Je ne peux pas écrire sur” As far as the, more or less anxious, relationship of contemporaries to Beckett is concerned, the centenary celebrations seem to have underlied Enoch Brater’s statement: “It is no longer possible to use with any credibility a phrase that begins with ‘Writers like Beckett…’ In the 20th century there simply aren’t any” (Borderless 178). While some of the choices of authors may seem surprising (Julie Campbell on Paul Auster, Elin Diamond on Caryl Churchill) and hardly converging with Beckett’s Irish legacy as outlined in Stephen Watt’s work, or the constellations of “Beckettian” writing reaching from Thomas Bernhard to Coetzee and Banville, examined in Peter Boxall’s 2009 volume, the strong misreadings of Beckett’s work treated in these volumes are almost symptomatically bound up with autobiography. It fell to one of the most eminent (mis)readers, Nobel-prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, to open the Tokyo conference and the Borderless Beckett volume with his “Eight Ways of Looking at Beckett.” The novelist who, trained as a linguist, mathematician, and computer programmer, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the stylistic analysis of the early Beckett, bracketed his eight ways between the conceivability of a bourgeois Samuel Barclay Beckett becoming Italian lecturer of Johannesburg University thanks to his 1937 application, vigorously supported by his former professor Rudmose-Brown, in which More Pricks Than Kicks is inoffensively played down as “Short Stories,” and Beckett the iconic inadequate. In-between is sandwiched an incredulous Cartesian who cannot whole-heartedly believe or disbelieve the body-mind duality, an impotent gazer at the whiteness that his dramatis personae will hardly harpoon; the textual world of Coetzee’s eight-in-one Becketts performs the human condition as an ongoing ape experiment, its only scope and end to
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verify by pushing to the limits, how the subject of the experiment can adjust to repetitive breaches in logic and consistency and still strain to ascribe some meaning to the engulfing experiment. Coetzee’s reading of Beckett, as Yoshiki Tajiri shows in the same volume, is not only a chronicle of readings but also one of writerly choices. Coetzee’s decisive encounter with Beckett happened through Watt and via Hugh Kenner’s emphasis on language awareness in the Irish author’s work—a language skepticism infused with a Lévinasian, ethical critique of storytelling that also informs Coetzee’s first novels, notably Waiting for the Barbarians. Tajiri shows how in Coetzee’s 1991 lecture “What Is a Classic?” a certain sociocultural reading of T. S. Eliot—the American arriviste compelled to forge a new cosmopolitan definition of European culture that would embrace him—indicates an awareness, on Coetzee’s part, of a similar position to Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Beckett, as an artist from the periphery likely to align himself with canonicity in European culture. This position is counteracted with him by a critical stance that no longer holds such Eurocentric universalism tenable, the resulting two-hearted attitude infusing the political criticism of storytelling in Michael K, a South African author’s appropriation of Molloy. Coetzee’s Beckett thus looks out at us with a deeply unsettling gaze between the academic establishment and the white wall to be torn, a gaze only paralleled by the successful civil servant Kafka’s in the eighth way: “It helps to be lean. It helps to have a piercing gaze . . . But soul can shine through flesh only if soul and flesh are one” (31). Lean and athletic as Beckett himself was, his French writing for which Beckett set himself “the anorexic goal of becoming ever slimmer,” states another vexed witness of Beckettian writing in her 2007 reading-cumhomage, personal-essay-cum-criticism Le Voisin de Zéro: Sam Beckett [Zero’s Neighbour] (transl. Laurent Milesi, 2010). Mary Bryden (Tragic Comedy) sets herself the delicate task of exploring Hélène Cixous’s multi-tonal response to the writer who never featured on the program of her Paris Séminaires and whose texts solicited an antagonistic reaction of repulsion and fascination in her. Cixous’s long and tortuous path of offering hospitality to Beckett, as Bryden points out, started with a gesture of discarding and rejection, to the point where Beckett’s texts became detritus or détritextes; their economy in Cixous’s acception, has to do not with acquisition (a “command/capitalist economy”) but with an “excrement economy” of evacuation and dispersal. Already in a 1969 article Cixous emphasizes, beside the mitigating humor that alleviates the texts’ bruising impact, a certain “stubborn Irish resistance” in the author which enables him to know that the Law can be
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parodied and that “writing can be the cat and the mouse. Or the seagull and the filth” (78), bound up with both victim and predator, producer and waste-product. (An honorary guest at the 2008 International James Joyce Symposium in Tours, Cixous made the surprising confession that she prefers the provocative pain and compassion at work in Beckett’s selflacerating writing, to the impassive equanimity of Joyce, with whom her name is more readily associated.) The French author’s long journey through Beckett’s purgatorial landscapes to the vicinity of degree Zero takes a biographical bend that opens by virtue of a furtive homage, in Beckett’s Le Dépeupleur, to the spectral faces in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un’uomo—“d’un épeuplé à un autre” (80), both authors placing themselves in the category of post-holocaust expeopled, uncoupled from a fixed domicile, a category in which Cixous also places herself.
“I am not reading philosophy” The vexed issue of what philosophers do with Beckett is only part of the troubled relationship between Beckett and philosophy: however much he might have protested against statements about his writing being “philosophical,” going to such lengths as even to disclaim any understanding of Western philosophy altogether, his works remain deeply permeated and ghosted by specific philosophical interventions which go well beyond the narrow path stretching from Democritus the Abderite to Geulincx, as a privileged entry to his work (Beckett to Sighle Kennedy, Disjecta 113). Although the philosophical influences in the Beckett canon have received ample treatment from Kenner’s classic study of Beckett as the Menippean satirist of Cartesian philosophy, through existentialist readings to the alternative constructions of Beckett by Adorno, Blanchot, Deleuze, and Badiou, to the latest reassessments of Beckett’s philosophy/philosophy’s Beckett by Anthony Uhlmann or the authors gathered in the 2002 volume Beckett and Philosophy, the recent diggings into Beckett’s notebooks from the 1930s and the so-called “Interwar Notes” have supplied an idiosyncratic range of previously unacknowledged sources, besides complicating a good deal the acknowledged ones, that surface in his work from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to the late television plays. It is mostly the examining of such specific philosophical “slashes” that the volume Beckett/Philosophy sets itself as task, its contributors revisiting such lingering presences from a new angle as Schopenhauer (Erik Tonning), Leibniz (Chris Ackerley), Berkeley (Stephen Matthews), Kant (P. J. Murphy), turning toward less likely candidates in the Beckett pantheon as
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shown here, or discussing the language and form of philosophy in Beckett’s writing (Kathryn White). Not only do these trovata expand the “grey canon” in Beckett studies, but they also draw attention to vital territories in the interests, language, imagery and forms in Beckett’s work-in-(re)gress which respond to, interact with, and echo, philosophical issues across his vast and eclectic readings. Peter Fifield rescues from the two sets of notebooks and some 500 pages of typed and handwritten philosophical notes not only a few names of early Greek philosophers to set beside Democritus—such as Thales, Hippokrates, or Parmenides—but shows how the persistence of a poetics of the fragment in Beckett, from Dream to Foirades/Fizzles, can be traced back to the philosophical fragments, often quotes in the work of another philosopher (Aristotle), the pre-eminent form in which most early Greek philosophy was handed down to us. As Fifield demonstrates, echoes of early Greek thinkers permeate conceptualizations at the heart of Krapp’s Last Tape, while the Trilogy’s rhetoric of contradiction is more referable to the oppositional world-view found in pre-Socratics than to the Cartesian mindbody duality. Matthew Feldman, author of Beckett’s Books and one of the best authorities in the field of philosophical influences in the early Beckett, unearths what may easily have been Beckett’s most important vehicle to a systematic study of Western thinking: neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband’s history of philosophy (1901), which provided the first opportunity for the Irish author to get immersed in the history of preSocratic Greek thinking and Nominalism, but also occasioned his interest in Geulincx, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Fritz Mauthner. Feldman shows that the largest corpus of Beckett’s “Philosophical Notes,” evidence of his systematic program of self-education carried out in the library of Trinity in the ’20s to ’30s, running to over 250 pages, is dedicated to the early Greeks, leading him to tentatively disprove the alleged all-pervasive presence of Cartesian thinking in Beckett. More interesting is the ironic loop by which Windelband, champion of the philosophy of “realism” against nominalism—that would not admit the existence of abstract entities—was to fuel Beckett’s interest in Nominalist philosophy whose most radical form, Terminism, was to provide him with the grain of radical language skepticism by which “he proposes to tear holes into the veil of language and achieve the Beethoven pause” (99). Feldman even suggests that the WattSam conversations in Watt hark back to Terminist ideas of language as a system of “meaningful sounds” and that, far from being a critique of
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Cartesian thought, the scaffolding of Murphy is Nominalism’s demented particulars set against the universal norms of realism which reside in Mr. Willoughby Kelly’s oversize head. Beckett’s long-term interest in Nominalist thinking is underlined by his “Whoroscope Notebook” entries continuing after his return from Germany and by his 1938 reading of Mauthner, whose Sprachskepsis is, according to Feldman, a more extreme form of Terminism. An even more scathing irony may be that Beckett harnessed Windelband’s masterly ordering of Western thinking to turn all systematic learning upside down and to embrace a docta ignorantia worthy of a Cusanus or Mauthner, his one-time sources of inspiration. Mauthner is the protagonist of the investigations of Dirk Van Hulle, master kenner of Beckettian and Joycean genetics. The Austrian philosopher of language who has become something of a token Beckettian thinker and who, according to John Pilling, delivered Beckett the ammunition to destroy all systems of thought whatever, including irrationalism (211), is the heir to a long line of Austro-German language skepticism rooted in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and manifest in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s famous Lord Chandos letter. Examining the notes on Mauthner and marginalia in Beckett’s personal library in the 3-volume edition of Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, Van Hulle warns against the dangers of equating the relatively high occurrence of such hypertextual marks with the importance of the annotated passages, and calls for a careful interpretation of writing traces and for a discreet use of critical rhetoric. Van Hulle frames the echoes of Mauthner’s Beiträge reverberating through the Beckett canon, in Darwinian theory, which provided the Austrian thinker with his most innovative concept, Zufallsinne, a contingency of occurrences governed by chance and which are only regarded as “laws” of nature because human senses developed along the same line. Van Hulle’s multi-level reading points out the physical proximity of the Mauthner and Darwin notes in the “Whoroscope Notebook,” underlying the similarity of the two theorists’ awareness of the dangers of anthropocentrism. Apart from Darwinian detours, another byway to Mauthner in this intellectual topography is via Francis Bacon (fictive addressee of Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos letter) and his Novum Organum—namely, the theory of idols, idola fori or idols of the marketplace, originating in the misuse of language, which can obstruct reasoning since the “ill and unfit choice of words” overrules understanding and throws into confusion (219). Mauthner’s thinking also shows affinities with the later Wittgenstein (of the Philosophical Investigations rather than of the Tractatus) to whom Beckett, on his own admission, came
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only in the late ’50s; with both, language is ultimately equated with its use among/between the people, inter esse, the meaning of a word being only referable to its use in the language. As Van Hulle argues, this Mauthner is named in Rough for Radio II as the one who had shown that “the least word dropped in silence may be it” (223). A more surprising candidate for Beckett’s philosophical pantheon is Heinrich von Kleist via the other token “Beckettian” thinker, Geulincx, who is retraced by David Tucker in the late Beckett plays’ imagery. The coupling is occasioned by a 1956 letter to Mary Hutchinson where Beckett describes the Belgian occasionalist philosopher’s “fascinating guignol world,” the strings which connect Geulincx’s Ethics to Kleist’s famous essay on the theatre of marionettes being the strings of puppetry—operated by God the supreme puppet-master in Geulincx, on whose agency the occurrences and occasions of the world depend, and whose movements lend a state of grace to the impotent, unself-conscious puppets unattainable in the human world of self-consciousness, apud Kleist. These strings of puppetry, operated through Beckett by agencies such as the Unnamable’s “sporting God . . . ravening in heaven” (Three Novels 332), wriggle Beckett’s tropes of impotence from the “human meat, or bones” pushed and pulled around by an unseen stage authority, puppet for forms of manipulation and torture in Act Without Words I, to the gradual focus on the movements of a hand moving not at the command of the subject’s will, but by consent to it, illustrating the syntax of weakness in the late work. Beckett’s reading of Kleist in 1969 prompted a return to his lifelong interest in Geulincx’s Ethics, and closely parallels the transition in the late plays’ guignol worlds from movement to stasis. As Tucker fascinatingly shows, part of the scaffolding of Beckett’s Marionettentheater is found in the early, 1913-17 ape experiments of Austrian psychologist Köhler, whose The Mentality of Apes Beckett read and processed in his 1935 psychology notes; this book added its own quota of autocratic cruelty to the unique world of grace and horror Beckett’s stage creatures inhabit. Perhaps the most maverick addition to the philosophical roll-call is Dr. Johnson, connoisseur of melancholia and “the vacuity of life,” and the subject of one of Beckett’s aborted literary projects, the unfinished dramatic fragment Human Wishes (1940). Emilie Morin, whose recent volume examines Beckett’s problematic relationship to his Irish background, especially in the light of his self-translations of the lingering Irish realia, toponymy, and Hiberno-English accents, delineates those aspects of Samuel Johnson’s life and work with which Beckett engaged throughout his writing
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career—Beckett’s “other Sam” being pre-eminently the moralist devoured by love and the elusive humanist interested in the narrow margin between ration and human irrationality. These aspects which undoubtedly touched vital territories in Beckett’s own intellectual and moral make-up were all translatable to Dr Johnson’s anguish in the face of the vacuity of life and bottomless fear of death as annihilation, his anti-canonical philosophical stance and interest in the limits of philosophy being used much later in Lucky’s monologue as a counterpart to Berkeley and Voltaire, the two most central thinkers of the Enlightenment, as well as reverberating in Krapp and in the ending of Breath. Beckett’s reimagining of Dr Johnson—who repeatedly voiced his indignation about British policies in Ireland—in an Irish context, as Morin shows, has to be seen in the larger historical-political and cultural context of the late thirties: Beckett’s project, for which he made extensive preparatory notes, was born in 1936 while journeying through Nazi Germany, and he was to return to these notes in 1940 in occupied France. The experiment nurtured against a background of rising totalitarianism would have closely paralleled similar ventures in the Irish theatre: through the 1920s and ’30s Dublin’s pro-fascist Protestant intelligentsia pursued a program of re-imagining and re-appraising Ireland’s national history. Part of this program was the re-appropriation into an Irish canon of such writers and thinkers as Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, as witnessed in Yeats’s re-styling of Swift into a founder of national Irish intellect in The Words upon the Window-pane. To these pro-Irish and farright-leaning sensibilities, which exploited historical authors and public figures for self-made visions of a new, nationalist Ireland, Beckett symptomatically opposes a democratic and humanist Dr Johnson from the “English” eighteenth century, in whom he sensed a central concern that was to inform his own writing—the philosophical terror of idleness and annihilation, a view of life as a succession of tedious confrontations with the void.
“They’re doing it all wrangh” The phrase with the heavy Irish accent was an allegedly recurrent verdict of Beckett the self-director, pursuing the infinitesimal singularities on his stage with fierce exactitude (Porter Abbott: 56). The stipulations still regulating Beckett stagings, however, threaten to turn current performances into a mere Nachfühlung of some ideal “original,” a condition bound to generate gestures of resistance with directors, as illustrated by two of the three Beckett performances to be seen over the past few years at
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international festivals hosted by Cluj’s State Hungarian Theatre: Krystian Lupa’s Endgame (Teatro de la Abadía, Madrid, 2009) featured an athletic female Clov who in the second act exchanges her androgynous rapper’s outfit for a glamorous green dress, while Silviu Purcărete’s Godot (Teatrul Radu Stanca, Sibiu, 2007) turns Lucky’s monologue and Pozzo’s blindness into a grand-guignol show played to Gogo and Didi, the frequent fallings out of the role and lapses back into sight enhancing the performance’s selfreflexive nature. Paradoxically, however, the specter of Beckett may prove more paralyzing when contemporary playwrights attempt to stage Beckett as a dramatic character: as Hersh Zeifman shows in a series of entertaining examples ranging from House and current chick lit to commercial plays, more than fifty years after its ill-attended American opening, Godot and its author, mostly in the shape of a cardboard figure cut out of Deirdre Bair’s unauthorized biography, have become something of an all-too-easily regurgitated cliché, easily appropriated by popular culture. Even the two plays analyzed that attempt to engage with Beckett “quaquaquaqua Beckett,” collapsing the character with his portraits extrapolated from the writing—Canadian playwright Sean Dillon’s Sam’s Last Dance (1997) and Australian author Justin Fleming’s Burnt Piano (1999)—do little more than offer the predictable conclusion that “the only Beckett that truly exists for us is the one we create by responding to his work” (Beckett at 100 318). To the question if Beckett’s writing can be rescued from either becoming a cardboard cliché or petrified within a tradition of post-WW2 European theatre, Stanley E. Gontarski’s essay “Redirecting Beckett” (Tragic Comedy) answers in the affirmative. Gontarski redirects the sense of the word to show how a “classic” author’s vitality can be brought out to resist domestication and gentrification through the example of the theatrical and multimedia work of cutting-edge Brazilian artists Fernando and Adriano Guimarães, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, and American directors JoAnne Akalaitis and Christopher McElroen. The complex installation Steenbeckett of Egoyan, director of a “classic” Krapp’s Last Tape for the 2000 BBC Beckett on Film heritage series, incorporated the film version inside an intricate personal artwork, a large environmental exhibit on the recording, preservation, distortion, and dispersal of memory (London, Museum of Mankind) folding on a screening of the play about the elusive nature of memory. The film in this environment appeared as another discarded cultural object, grainy and magnified; in a next room, the spectators entered the film’s environment, while their itinerary ended by passing through an antique Steenbeck editing table, used for the Krapp film, which made the
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film’s images visible in miniature. The sequence of Beckett-based “performances” of the brothers Guimarães, staged between 1998-2001, preceded and interspersed with multimedia, installation, theatre, dance, and musical work of their own, treated the Beckettian texts as found objects and created variations on a theme in a composite art form, to which a number of outstanding Brazilian visual artists and museum curators also contributed. These Beckett “performances,” resisting predictability by coopting accident as a governing principle and capitalizing on the politicized body (of actors submerged in water tanks whose breathing is governed by randomized mechanic sounds, for instance) as the seat of the struggle of power relationships, were not revisions or renovations, even less “critiques” of Beckett’s texts, but rather their specters, ghosts redirecting the Irish playwright’s work simultaneously back to its avant-garde roots and forward. By entering the texts into a cabinet of curiosities made up of cultural debris, these multimedia installation-cum-theatre events elicit from the Beckett texts something intrinsic to them, re-directing them towards their imagistic roots, and so restoring their political edge. It is through such adaptations and recontextualizations of Beckett, Gontarski argues, that his vitality as a contemporary can be brought to the forefront, offering an avant-garde Beckett for the twenty-first century. Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj (Kolozsvár) Books and Other Writings Referred to in the Essay: Abbott, H. Porter. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. Print. Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. and forew. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder, 1983. Print. ---. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber, 2006. Print. ---. Murphy. 1938. London: Picador, 1974. Print. ---. Watt. 1945. New York: Grove, 1953. Print. ---. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. 1958. New York: Grove, 2002. Print. ---. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Vol. 1. 1929-1940. Ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, George Craig, and Daniel Gunn. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Print. Boxall, Peter. Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
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Feldman, Matthew. Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes.” London: Continuum, 2006. Print. Geulincx, Arnold. Ethics: With Samuel Beckett’s Notes. Trans. Martin Wilson. Ed. Han van Ruler, Anthony Uhlmann, and Martin Wilson. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2006. Print. Kenner, Hugh. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Print. Lane, Richard, ed. Beckett and Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Print. Morin, Emilie. Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Pilling, John. Samuel Beckett. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976. Print. Uhlmann, Anthony. Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Cambridge: CUP, 2006. Print. Watt, Stephen. Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Print.
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REVIEWS An Almost-Scholarly Monograph Anikó Sohár Rossi, Umberto. The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick: A Reading of Twenty Ontologically Uncertain Novels. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 308 pages. I ask in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. (Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”)
Philip K. Dick (1928-82) has been called the “Shakespeare of science fiction,”1 “an author of general significance,” “the funniest writer of his time, and perhaps the most terrifying,”2 “a super-paranoid pulp-fiction hack,” “precog,”3 “addle-brained paranoid,”4 “the poor’s Stanislaw Lem,”5 and, of course, a genius. During his life he published forty-four novels and more than a hundred short stories, almost exclusively in the science-fiction genre. Yet, he received only one Hugo Award,6 only one John W. Campbell Memorial Award,7 only one British Science Fiction Association Award,8 and only one Graouilly d’Or in France.9 After his death he was “discovered” in part thanks to the film adaptations of his stories—from Blade Runner to Minority Report, from Paycheck to A Scanner Darkly and more to come—in part because it became fashionable to link science fiction and postmodernism together. Now, there is a Philip K. Dick Association, a Philip K. Dick Award, and he is said to be one of the most sought-after writers in Hollywood (Rose 1), albeit posthumously. Gradually, since the mid-eighties of the twentieth century he has been acknowledged as an important American writer which has led inevitably to an ever-increasing number of papers and books devoted to his life and works. Italian teacher of English, literary journalist, and translator, Umberto Rossi had already published quite a few papers about Dick’s works in journals such as Science-Fiction Studies and Extrapolation when he decided to write extensively on twenty selected Dick novels. Obviously a ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
great fan of American SF in general and Dick in particular, he occasionally lapses into an almost passionate tone when talking about the unjust treatment Dick received from publishers and academics or about his favorite Dick stories. He has read a lot and is well-versed in both Dick’s fiction and nonfiction as well as the secondary literature. In interpreting twenty novels, he relies heavily on Lawrence Sutin’s biography (1989) to connect all Dick’s writing, motifs, ideas, contradictory statements, and the like with biographical facts—often at the expense of the writing. In the introduction Rossi gives an overview of those secondary sources on Dick’s life and works that he has found of particular interest, regrets that “[s]o far the attempts to find an overall interpretation, a comprehensive assessment of Dick’s oeuvre have fallen short of the author” (2), and warns that his goal is not to provide such a monograph. The key issue for Rossi is ontological uncertainty which, according to his hypothesis, is achieved in many different ways and plays a significant role in all of Dick’s fiction. The author does not, however, offer a satisfactory explanation or any criteria for selecting exactly these twenty novels (plus a number of short stories). Is it because the others do not show any trace of ontological uncertainty? But they surely do. For instance, although Rossi does refer several times to ontological uncertainty in A Scanner Darkly, this novel is not among his selected twenty. Nor can literary merit be the criterion since many critics hold A Scanner Darkly in high regard, certainly higher than, say, The Penultimate Truth, and yet the latter is included. If these are his subjective readings, he still owes the reader an explanation for his choice. The book fuses scholarly writing and popular science, and Rossi plainly explains his objective and approach as well as the structure of the book in the introduction, offering endnotes aplenty and including a nice long, although for obvious reasons not exhaustive, bibliography and an index. At the same time the author alternates between first person singular (“I can also accept the idea that . . .”), first person plural (“We might say that . . .”), and third person singular (“the author does not want to suggest”) on the same page for no apparent reason (10). A matter-of-fact (descriptive) voice is occasionally swapped for a more personal (sometimes even prescriptive) tone. Rossi also introduces his model for analyzing textual levels, which he calls “Rossi’s Fourfold Symmetry,” and inserts tables to display the relationship between the textual levels in chapters 1-8. He equates mainstream literature with realism and calls both “genre,” a rather unorthodox and unsustainable view (for instance, 146). He usually presents
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a plot summary but specifies characters by various names giving an impression he is writing for fans which may confuse readers not familiar with that particular novel. Then he swings back and speaks about postmodern metafiction and shows indignation because Dick is reprimanded by some literary critics for something which is considered a merit in the case of Thomas Pynchon.10 Unfair, indeed, but certainly not exactly thrilling for fans. There are no conclusions; the book ends with a comparison between Gravity’s Rainbow and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. By and large, it is not easy to determine exactly what kind of audience Rossi had in mind when writing this book. Ontological uncertainty, as such, is no novelty, but a cliché in Dick Criticism. Rossi himself speaks about its origin in Jameson’s 1975 essay. Nevertheless, the author intends to show the diverse concepts, literary features, and tools which call this uncertainty into being and their applications. Each of the ten chapters discusses, therefore, different themes and those novels in which these topics appear dominant, although this makes the book’s structure somewhat uneven.11 Of course, these narrative devices are not only used in the novels examined in a given chapter as Dick often employed several of them to unsettle his readers. For instance, Rossi points out the occurrence of “the game of the Rat,” as Dick calls changing the rules during the game, already in the introduction and quite often after the first chapter, whose topic it is, since this is one of Dick’s favorite ways of twisting a story again and again.12 Dick used several fictional devices to create ontological uncertainty. Among them, Rossi mentions alternate worlds/realities/histories (chapters 1, 3, 7, 9, and 10) and its variation Finite Subjective Reality—a label borrowed from Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem—a parallel universe projected by somebody’s mind due to drugs or virtual reality technology or simply a delusional reality projected by a crazed person (mental illness was a recurring theme in Dick’s oeuvre). The former alternate reality Dick calls koinos kosmos (common universe), the latter, Finite Subjective Reality, he labels idios kosmos (private universe) (chapters 2, 4, and 7). Time travel presents the opportunity to change historical events so even the past becomes variable (chapter 6). Robots indistinguishable from human beings cause confusion (chapter 6). Fake objects engendering doubts about reality and/or identity appear so frequently in Dick’s writings that they are mentioned in every chapter. The use and abuse of drugs are similarly widespread as they also generate ontological uncertainty (chapters 5 and 7). Amnesia, too, results in bewilderment (chapters 2 and 9). Multiple plots and
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multiple narrative foci also contribute to the desired state of suspense and doubts, and these are characteristic of almost all important Dick novels. This inventory by Rossi is quite similar to Eric Link’s list which enumerates Dick’s eight “most important ideas and motifs” (Understanding Philip K. Dick [2010]), and since both were published within months of each other, there might have been something in the air, a general need to compile a catalogue of Dick’s prevailing themes. Rossi examines The Cosmic Puppets and The Game-Players of Titan focusing on “the game of the Rat” (at the first occurrence of this phrase) applied to Dick’s modus operandi, his interrupted narrative strategy, where he deliberately changes the ontological status of anybody and anything while telling a story. By inserting discontinuities in the plot and a series of unexpected twists, he creates the condition of ontological uncertainty. In discussing Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint, Rossi points out that these use Finite Subjective Realities, stresses the distinction between koinos kosmos and idios kosmos, and emphasizes the doubt whether the characters get back to the “objective” consensual reality in the end. When concentrating on The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history, as a war novel, Rossi illustrates how arbitrarily he divides the novels into theme-groups as Dr. Bloodmoney or Time Out of Joint could also be labeled a war novel. The Man in the High Castle is also a spy story full of secrecy, intrigue, and conspiracy; Rossi claims that the novel-within-the-novel, in which the USA and the British Empire won World War II, another fictional reality, causes the final, unsolvable uncertainty, thus leaving The Man in the High Castle with an open ending so typical of Dick’s works. In Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, and Clans of the Alphane Moon, the collective dimension, the web of human relations which connects all the characters in the novels, and the diverse mental illnesses produce doubts about reality and identity, while “three minor works” The Simulacra, Now Wait for Last Year, and The Penultimate Truth, present time travel as a means of controlling the past (referring to Walter Benjamin “even the dead will not be safe” [125]). Rossi accentuates the political aspect saying that these novels depict not natural but political disasters. Manipulation of either universal or personal history through time travel leads to total incertitude, especially when it is combined with parallel universes, aliens, drugs, and brain damage. Rossi’s argument loses some credibility by his inattention to details, such as Parsifal’s aim is not “to heal the dying king” (133) but atonement; Amfortas is not dying, but is wounded and the Holy Grail keeps him alive. Nor are the Arthurian legend and Wagner’s opera the same.
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(Compare Sir Thomas Malory’s version to the libretto of Parsifal.13) Thus, Rossi’s comparison with Eric Sweetscent based on his profession is rather shaky, not to mention that his job is to let the politician Molinari die. The android problem that arises in We Can Build You and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? remains closely related to slavery and racial discrimination and raises the questions of what is human, whether there are second-rate humans, and whether we can easily tell the difference between organic and artificial intelligence, between a human being and an intelligent machine. This nest of questions is complex enough in itself but when Dick links this theme to insanity as in these two novels, any attempt to define a human being as superior to androids appears fated to fail, as Rossi rightly claims. But his thesis that The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, A Maze of Death, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said deal with “four different variations on the theme of Finite Subjective Realities” created by evil demiurges, “lords of imperfect worlds who pretend to be real God,” appears doubtful. There is no demiurge in A Maze of Death, so Rossi identifies the semi-divine creators of these false realities with the author as God and in this sense makes the novel fit this category. Then he redefines the topic so broadly that it could be applied to almost any Dick novel: “The idea of a bogus world hiding a reality that may be intolerable, but which is quite different from the one we know, is present in all these novels” (187). In the last chapters, devoted to the VALIS trilogy: VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Rossi, contradicting Dick’s statements that its topic is Christ or the mystical experiences referred to as 2-3-74,14 claims and proves that these novels are about revelations and the characters’ very different reactions to these revelations. I am not sure that Rossi’s thematic division connected with one or more novels works. When writing a story, Dick never used only one of the fictional devices listed by Rossi in the introduction. The narratives are, therefore, not discussed and analyzed thoroughly in only one chapter but occur again and again whenever the topic demands it, so the book entails some redundancy, while the picture the reader gets is somewhat fragmentary, a mosaic, and here and there the author appears to have overextended himself. And the themes themselves pop up in other chapters as well. As a result, the overall effect of some chapters (for instance, chapters 5 and 7) is a little confused and confusing depending on whether Rossi was able to bring about some sort of balance among the novels and the themes, on the one hand, and between the scholarly references and his admiration for Dick, on the other.
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Due to the absence of a concluding or summarizing chapter, the monograph has an “open ending,” so the reader has no idea if the author is finished with Dick for good or will keep on doing research, and, if the latter, what subjects will he pursue in which directions? Rossi’s book is certainly worth reading for somebody who is not a Philip K. Dick specialist but is concerned with SF and fantasy, and it could be a good starting point for research on Dick since it provides an excellent summary of significant specialist literature. There are, however, a lot of rather strange typos and grammatical mistakes in the book, which is abominably proofread. The most common peculiarity is the use of “on” instead of “in.” For example, “a relatively recent example is Adam Gopnik’s review of the Library of America publication of a selection of Dick’s novels on The New Yorker” (4). There are a few incorrectly spelt names (Maja-Maya, Barton-Burton, Hamilton-Hamitlon). These are strange but not as annoying as some other errors in the text, such as these randomly selected examples (all emphases added): “…all the world we have been shown in the first 50 pages of the novel is totally, bogus” (68). 74: …at he end of chapter 6…In the interview that Charles Platt Dick mentions this scene and maintains that he was trying “to account for the diversity of worlds that people live in (Platt 151). 90: …yet it is hints at a poetics of sorts… 103: an image that is at the same time defamiliarized and insightful, a group portrait of very real characters (Butler 2007, 61) on a science-fictional background. 130: … she realizes that he her future boss, Virgil Ackerman, the owner of the corporation she and Eric work for, is just a small boy in 1935… 134 …a quarrel with his wife Emily (which Barney has divorced, though he regrets this decision) 171: It is a sensible questions if one considers Androids (and Blade Runner), though one may wonder whether Rachael’s sexual intercourse with Rick (and Rachel’s love story with the replicant hunter in the movie) are not enough to explain what can be done with these beings which almost perfectly imitate humans though they are not legally recognized as humans. 187: That Eldritch is directly (…) or indirectly (…) should then not surprise us… 212: Dick however does not say that the ‘basic theme’ is. 238: When the ethically changed family in The World Jones Made must leave Earth because it is under the domination of and evil authoritarian regimes…
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And so on. None of these is shocking in itself but the amount of such mistakes far exceeds what is acceptable in a scholarly monograph. Dick deserves better. University of West Hungary Notes
Jameson 345. 2 Stableford and Clute 328, 330. 3 Rose 1. 4 My translation of “zavart elméjű paranoid” from a short summary of Philip K. Dick’s life and works apropos of the Hungarian publication of Confessions of a Crap Artist. By the way, “paranoid” is an adjective in Hungarian, not a noun. 5 My translation of “a szegény ember Stanislaw Lemjéről beszélünk” (“Szebb”). 6 In 1963 for The Man in the High Castle (best novel). 7 In 1975 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (best novel). 8 In 1978 for A Scanner Darkly (best novel). 9 In 1979 for A Scanner Darkly. 10 “I cannot see why the proliferating imagination of a novelist like Thomas Pynchon is praised by interpreters as an impressive example of postmoderninst complexity, while it should be a fault in Dick’s novels” (119). 11 Novels to be discussed in the given chapter: 2-2-1-3-3-2-4-1-1-1. 12 For instance, in chapter 9: “Another game of the Rat” (235). 13 Philip K. Dick was a Wagner fan; the latter should be taken into consideration. 14 In February and March 1974, Dick had a series of hallucinations, which he later tried to describe and explain in several ways and which increased his already substantial interest in religion. 1
Books and Other Writings Referred to in the Review Dick, Philip K. “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” 1978. Deoxy. Web. 12 May 2012. Jameson, Fredric. “After Armageddon: Character Systems in Dr. Bloodmoney.” Science Fiction Studies 5.2 (1975): n. pag. Web. 12 August 2012 ---. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Print. Link, Eric. Understanding Philip K. Dick. U of South Carolina P, 2010. Print. Lukács, Barbara. Philip K. Dick és az örök paranoia [Philip K. Dick and the Persistent Paranoic Psychosis]. Könyves blog. Web. 12 August 2012. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. University of Virginia Library. Web. 12 August 2012.
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Rose, Frank. “The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick.” Wired 11.12 (Dec. 2003): n. pag. Web. 12 August 2012. Stableford, Brian, and John Clute. “Philip K. Dick.” John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1995. Print. “Szebb múltat!” [“Have a nicer past!”]. By -ts-. Magyar Narancs Online. 21 August 2012. Web. 12 May 2012. Wagner, Richard. Parsifal. Libretto in English. Opernführer. Web. 12 August 2012. ———HJEAS———
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A Fresh Light on Utopia Joachim Fischer Károly, Pintér. The Anatomy of Utopia: Narration, Estrangement and Ambiguity in More, Wells, Huxley and Clarke. Foreword. Patrick Parrinder. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 23. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 244 pages. Károly Pintér’s The Anatomy of Utopia: Narration, Estrangement and Ambiguity in More, Wells, Huxley and Clarke revisits familiar ground in the vast textual landscape of the utopian literary tradition, taking a new look at a small number of key works. The author’s Central European provenance clearly shines through in the book and makes his study a particularly welcome addition to utopian scholarship. In its unusual and highly commendable assumption of a degree of multilingualism among its readers, which leaves all original quotes in Latin, German, and French untranslated, the book deviates from the monoglot Anglophone trend all too prevalent in contemporary utopian studies.1 He also makes use of non-English sources in the original language (for instance, Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung and Lucian Hölscher) thus providing evidence of the survival of the longstanding polyglot intellectual tradition in Central and Eastern Europe. An awareness of differences between utopian traditions and definitions of the term “utopia” in Anglophone and non-Anglophone European cultures also distinguishes this book (17ff). At the same time, a distinct bias against Western “Neo-Marxist” literary scholarship, with its insistence on political and ideology-critical reading of utopian texts, may also have its origin in the author’s background in the former Soviet satellite state of Hungary. He criticizes these scholars’ “stubbornly identifying the literary value of science fiction with its function of social commentary and critique, and insisting that science fiction criticism should focus on the original idea presented by the fiction rather than applying the general standards of literary criticism” (33). Pintér would like to see more “depoliticised literary criticism of utopian fiction” (6), as for him, literary utopias, including science fiction, are defined by their specific narrative structures and techniques; involving elements of satire and fantasy they are primarily seen as a product of literary imagination. A critique of politically and ideologically motivated readings of utopian texts is at the center of the theoretical first chapter. Ernst Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung “by which he [Bloch] intended to renew Marxism as a ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
critical theory” (26) is identified as the seminal text for modern Marxist scholars of science fiction, such as Fredric Jameson, Tom Moylan, Carl Freedman, and Darko Suvin. Against the Blochian “utopian hermeneutic” Pintér intends “to devise a less ideologically oriented way of reading utopian texts that can nonetheless explicate the process by which utopian texts, as Jameson put it, interrogate ‘the dilemma involved in their own emergence as utopian texts’” (35). Suvin’s work, especially, is subjected to a sustained critique.2 His materialist reading of science fiction is rejected, but his concepts of cognitive estrangement, derived from the Brechtian idea of Verfremdung, and of the novum, “relieved of their ideological ballast” (33), are employed in the author’s concept of “narrative estrangement” arising from “the tension between the continuous endeavor of the text to establish credibility for the novum on the one hand, and its parallel and ongoing effort to undermine this credibility in indirect and subtle ways” (40). Pintér also argues that readers of utopian texts and science fiction are involved by their authors in playing a game, “to do two things at the same time: to believe and to doubt, to take fiction seriously while also smiling at it” (41). Northrop Frye, Robert C. Elliott, Michael Holquist and Johan Huizinga’s concept of the homo ludens provide the theoretical foundations for the ludic aspect of his theory of literary utopias. Having defined his concept of utopia (involving a detailed account of the word’s semantic history in different languages) and his methodological approach, the author applies the theory to the analysis of the narrative structures and devices in four utopian classics: Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516, the foundation text giving the whole tradition its name (chapter 2), H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia of 1905 (chapter 3), and finally, in chapter 4, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and the science-fiction classic, Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars (1953). The thorough and erudite analysis of More’s Utopia includes an enlightening account of the book’s reception history as well as a study of the changing image of More himself over the centuries, where the “intentional or unconscious distortions” (51) of Marxist “appropriations,” such as Karl Kautsky’s, are highlighted. A wellargued analysis of Wells’ text in chapter 3 is preceded by a literary biography of Wells as a utopian novelist. The author emphasizes the central importance of A Modern Utopia within the utopian tradition as a metautopia, “a critique of the whole utopian tradition begun by the implicit satire on the narrative devices of traditional utopias” (118). Wells’s text stands at the threshold of the twentieth century. “The prophetic urge is the inheritance of the 19th century; the overwhelmingly ironic perspective is the
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prefiguration of the 20th” (135). Chapter 4 then looks at the dominant twentieth-century forms of utopian fiction, science fiction, and dystopias. A discussion of the terminology used by scholars precedes the analysis of the two texts in question; many utopian scholars will find Lyman Sargent’s distinction between anti-utopia and dystopia important and methodologically more useful than the author and might not be inclined to agree that there is “no way of separating anti-utopia from dystopia” (138). Pintér’s analysis of Brave New World focuses specifically on the novel’s relationship with Shakespeare’s Tempest, “which adds a whole new interpretative dimension to the novel . . . giving his novel a symbolic significance beyond the topical social satire” (153); he finds parallels between Huxley’s Savage and Caliban: “What began as a satire of the Wellsian Utopia and developed into a pungent criticism of contemporary United States, eventually became a symbolic assessment of utopianism utilizing key motifs of a Shakespearean classic. The most powerful blow of Huxley’s anti-utopian pamphlet is amplified through the manifold references to The Tempest” (170). This underlines once again to what extent the literary scholar’s perspective dominates the analysis; it also highlights its shortcomings, as this can hardly be a comprehensive evaluation of one of most powerful dystopian texts of the twentieth century nor an explanation of the book’s extraordinary and long-lasting popular success. As an example of twentieth-century science fiction the book finally offers a highly engrossing interpretation of Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars which would entice anyone reading it to read Clarke’s book, too. I am less convinced than the author that so little literary criticism of utopian fiction of the type proposed here has been published, particularly if non-Anglophone scholarship is taken into account.3 It is also doubtful whether the “Neo-Marxists” would see themselves and their work adequately represented in Pintér’s somewhat one-dimensional portrayal; after all not a few of them concerned themselves very much with literary form and not just with (political) content.4 While the book convincingly proves the value of a detailed literary analysis of utopian fiction; not everyone in the wide community of utopian scholars would share the view that the field’s emphasis should make a decided shift away from the study of the imagined societies, economies, and spaces that literary utopias, dystopias, and science fiction depict; the literary forms and functions of these portrayals included; literary scholars are especially attracted to the field of utopian studies precisely because of its interdisciplinary nature and the (practical) political dimension it entails; but rarely in order to pursue the
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“intrinsic” literary approach that Pintér appears to argue for. The value and fruitfulness of broader-based critical political approaches has been proven in many classic studies, not just by literary and cultural critics such as Suvin, Moylan, and Jameson, but also by political scientists such as Richard Saage. His analysis of one of the very texts discussed in Pintér’s book, Wells’s A Modern Utopia, is well worth reading.5 Saage’s work also goes to show that such readings do not necessarily have to be based on a Marxist theoretical foundation either. Yet, a few minor errors in foreign languages quotations aside,6 the book is a solid piece of scholarship and impeccably edited; a detailed index increases its use-value. Not all utopian scholars will agree with Pintér’s theoretical assumptions and his emphasis, but his thorough and thoughtprovoking analyses are very valuable contributions to our understanding of contemporary utopias and science fiction as literary texts. They deserve wide attention, precisely because of the theoretical issues and questions they raise. University of Limerick Notes
This is, sadly, much more pronounced among the younger generation of utopian scholars than among older scholars such as Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin, G. Claeys, and others. 2 Unfortunately Pintér did not yet have the benefit of the recent edition of Suvin’s collected essays (with an introduction by Phillip E. Wegner)—Darko Suvin, Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopian, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology (Ralahine Utopian Studies 6, Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). Matthew Beaumont’s The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the end of the Fin de Siècle (Ralahine Utopian Studies 12, Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), potentially relevant for the study of Wells, has also since appeared in the same series. 3 See, for instance, the three volumes edited by Wilhelm Vosskamp, Utopieforschung: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982). 4 See Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.) 5 For example, in Richard Saage, Politische Utopien der Neuzeit (Bochum: Winkler, 2000). 6 See, for instance, the German quotations on pages 19 and 25. 1
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Figures of Moses Gyula Somogyi Barbara Johnson, Moses and Multiculturalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 2010. 126 pages. Barbara Johnson’s Moses and Multiculturalism appeared as the second volume in the Flashpoints Series by the University of California Press. Even though the series concentrates on literature, it wants to engage an audience broader than just literary professionals, inviting all readers with an interest in humanities and social sciences. Flashpoints was recently established to publish “studies that engage theory without losing touch with history, and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism” (iv), hinting at a project that attempts to incorporate both a deconstructive (frequently labeled as “theory” in the harsh debates of the 1980s) and a new historicist approach; no wonder that we find the names of both Judith Butler and Catherine Gallagher among the series editors. This is an approach that characterized Johnson’s books from A World of Difference on, which gracefully combined a hardcore textualist approach with a contextual one. The author dedicated her last book (she passed away in August 2010) to Shoshana Felman (v), with whom she had a lot of common professional interests and a long-lasting friendship, thus the book can be read as an extended apostrophe, a figure which both Johnson and Felman found crucially important in their texts. For both of them, the positioning of the speaking voice always involves complex questions and following this pattern; Moses and Multiculturalism is never satisfied with reading narratives only in a thematic way, but also reads them in a rhetorical fashion that bears on questions concerning the speaking subject. Johnson notes that “by far the largest number of books that attempt to retell the story of Moses are in the Jewish tradition, and unabashedly rely exclusively on the Bible. Their effort is not at all to showcase the tale’s multiplicity but to transmit pedagogically the ‘real meaning’ of the first five books of the Bible (the Books of Moses)” (5). Disobeying the pedagogical imperative the book frequently points out “imperfectly integrated or unexplained elements” (15), “odd things” (16), or even “obscurities” (17) in the Bible that threaten to collapse the unity and the coherence of the story, for example, Moses’s speech impediment and lack of eloquence (19-20) or the confusion of the names of Reuel and Jethro (35), and so on. In this approach, the Biblical narrative becomes a heterogeneous text riddled with ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
the remnants of multiple stories not fully included in the canonized version (23, 35, 95). Scholars have usually tried to clear up these inconsistencies and obscurities to be able to elicit a teaching out of the narrative. Johnson’s book breaks with this tradition by “not trying to reconcile all inconsistencies”; nor is it “drawing a lesson” (95) from these stories. Having pointed out these problematic points in the founding narrative, Johnson reads different accounts of Moses, the selection of which was governed by two criteria: “they should attempt a full story, and they should represent many cultures” (96). Moses and Multiculturalism examines the different versions of the Moses story, including the well-known accounts such as the Biblical story or Freud’s Moses, as well as the lesser known versions like Thomas Mann’s, Francis E. W. Harper’s, or Zora Neale Hurston’s takes on the topic. (The book would have been even more fascinating if this list of texts had been somewhat longer and more comprehensive.) These different narratives with all their different approaches to the subject seem to disrupt the monological pressure of the Biblical story: “In this book, there can be no search for the ‘real Moses.’ Anomalous elements will not fit into some larger picture, and each version will have a center of gravity different from the others while still taking off from something actually in the Bible. The texts have in common only the prestige of the story they are part of, and perhaps a desire to liberate it to make sense in a new way” (9). Thus Johnson is interested less in bringing these different accounts to a common denominator than showing the difference between them. She provides an overview rather than a synthesis, emphasizing differences rather than points of unity, just like a real deconstructor, even if this process means that our received notions of Moses might ultimately change. The meaning of Moses is being contested in every chapter of the book, all accounts adding a different dimension or a surprising trait, up to a point where the myth’s unity seems to drift apart into incompatible fragments. Being true to this approach, the book has an episodic structure, one short chapter is devoted to each version of the story; however, these “fragments” do not constitute a whole. Through the course of the book, we witness a proliferation of questions (57) rather than of answers, and this seems to be the driving paradigm of Moses and Multiculturalism. This structure is best interpreted through the opposition that Johnson draws up between “Hellenic” and “Hebraic” modes of interpretation (64): “Rabbinic interpretation surrounds the text with more and more text; philosophy tries to find the unity behind the multiplicity” (65). In this sense, Johnson’s
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deconstructive approach resembles the Rabbinic interpretation (compare 67), while the commentators going in search of the “true Moses” seem to apply the tenets of philosophy. If we take a look at the various themes that the book is devoted to (the formation of nationalist narrative, the myth of the chosen people, the relationship between national and ethnic identity, multiculturalism, writing, translation, legal studies, freemasonry, and so on), identity politics seems to function as a gravitational core that holds the text together. Johnson argues that “the story of Moses is at once the most nationalist and the most multiculturalist of all foundation narratives” (1). Johnson’s Moses is an inevitably plural figure whose meaning is negotiated between theology, historiography, psychoanalysis, and literary history. In other words, she makes us aware of the “ineradicable presence of the diverse in the story that purports to tell the origins of nationalism” (15). He is the appointed leader of the Jewish people as God’s chosen, yet in many accounts he is thought to be Egyptian, a stranger to the nation he is supposed to lead out of Egypt and into the land of Canaan. The author’s deconstructive approach thus shows “the mixed identity that Moses carried with him” (ix), reinforcing a multicultural, or multiethnic ideal that seems to be at odds with the monotheist/nationalist type of identity building (15). Even if multiculturalism is thought to have “become such an integral part of our discourse that it has almost lost its meaning” (x), it definitely involves a recognition and an embrace of different identities and ethnicities, whereas Johnson argues that “[t]he birth of monotheism is the birth of religious intolerance” (46) and that “[m]onotheism is structured like imperialism” (56), hinting at the darker undercurrents of this “new” type of religion. The story of Moses has frequently been adopted as an example of various national narratives and liberation movements (1), and thus it “has functioned as an inspiration for social change all over the world” (6), which sheds light on how universal this theme has become. However, Johnson seems to be acutely aware of the aporias involved in such an approach: “The central question about Moses is: is he Jewish, or is he universal?” (95). Frequently his Jewish identity (which, as I have discussed earlier, is also deeply problematic) was erased in favor of his role as emancipator or lawgiver (95). This universalizing/erasing tendency is also palpable in Christian interpretations of the Books of Moses, where Moses was often thought to prefigure Christ in the New Testament (2, 82). Johnson frequently relies on Jan Assmann’s “useful distinction between history and memory” (46), introduced in his Moses the Egyptian.
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Revisiting Freud’s assumptions (55), in his book Assmann contrasted Akhenaten and Moses as figures of history and memory: Akhenaten was a figure of history and not memory, while Moses was primarily a figure of memory with no detailed historical existence (47). The Moses narratives found in Moses and Multiculturalism can also be grouped based on this distinction, treating Moses as a divine figure of myth or as a real person, an ordinary human figure. Johnson contrasts the Bible’s sacred text with Flavius Josephus’s account of Jewish history, which reveals “Moses’ brilliant early career as an Egyptian general” (29) and notes that both “contain the same elements,” but “their emphases are very different” (38). However, Flavius Josephus’s account is also plagued by the problems of translation on at least two levels: the original Aramaic text was lost and only the Greek translation of his texts remains, and when the volume was translated to English in the eighteenth century, the translator, William Whiston, “Christianized” the text (29), creating “spillovers between the story of Jesus and the story of Moses” (30). Frances E. W. Harper’s psychologically accurate version of the Moses story focuses on the protagonist’s “complicated relations with his two mothers” (39). This psychological depth is lent by her experience of the horrors of slavery parting mothers and children (42). Johnson notes a proliferation of the figure of lips in her writings (39-42), which she then contrasts with similar figures found in canonical Romantic poets’ texts (45). The title of the book involves a playful reference to Sigmund Freud’s immensely influential book Moses and Monotheism; thus it is no wonder that the interpretation of Freud’s Moses is the longest and probably most crucial chapter in the book. Johnson writes extensively about the relationship between psychoanalysis and science and how Freud’s Jewishness was threatening to pigeonhole it as “Jewish science,” thus inferior to other “objective” sciences in the anti-Semitic discourse of the turn of the century (58-59). Many critics regarded Moses and Monotheism as a text in which Freud is trying to come to terms with his Jewish identity. The book offers a combination of “research and speculation” (59) relying on the theory of the murder of the primal father delineated in Totem and Taboo (6263), which seems to correspond to Ernst Sellin’s theory of the two different Moses figures glued together into one figure (52-53, 62-63). Johnson’s approach to Freud’s text focuses primarily on questions of identity politics identifiable in the text. I believe that this chapter is best read together with Cathy Caruth’s “Trauma and the Possibility of History” and “Traumatic
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Departures,” both included in her Unclaimed Experience (1996), which also links Freud’s Moses to questions of history. Hurston, like Freud, focuses on Moses as a “very special person, adept in magic” (77), and as “an anthropologist, she inserts black folklore into the story of Moses” (79), in other words, “reclaiming Moses for black popular culture” (81). I find a very strong appeal of Moses and Multiculturalism in that it does not examine texts only but ventures into the field of multimediality as well. Johnson analyzes Arnold Schönberg’s incomplete opera titled Moses and Aaron, which represents the “battle between the musical establishment and atonal music and between Christian culture and Jewish culture” as it is “fought out between the opera’s two main characters” (87). Strangely enough, “Aaron is the only voice who sings in a melodic voice; Moses always performs in Sprechstimme—a sort of shouting that does not hold a pitch but has only the pitch of the speaking voice” (87). Behind the difference between Moses and Aaron’s atonal and tonal approach we might find an aspect that Johnson has pointed out in the Bible: Moses’s lack of eloquence and Aaron’s persuasive rhetoric (20). While the title of the chapter “Moses, the Movie” would suggest a single film, Johnson discusses three cinematic representations of the theme: two films by Cecil B. DeMille and one by Dreamworks. “DeMille produced two versions of the Moses story, both called The Ten Commandments: a silent film in 1926 and the classic starring Charlton Heston in 1956. . . . The early film is a morality tale showing the relevance of the commandments to modern life, and the second is a Hollywood blockbuster.” (89) The latest adaptation, Prince of Egypt (1998), is “a full-length animated versions of the Moses story” (92), which is reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster but “has a new center of emotional gravity: the relation between the two brothers in the palace” (92), Moses and Rameses. In these films, the problem of erasing Moses’s Jewish identity seems to have come full circle: “By the time we get to the movies, Moses is a hero of mainstream culture, not Jewish culture” (96). “Epilogue,” I believe, is a very apt name for the closing part of the book, instead of, for example, a simple conclusion, which in this way plays on the text’s resemblance to a narrative rather than a strict scholarly study. The last chapter offers neither synthesis nor conclusion, it just refines and restates the questions that have prompted the birth of the book: “How is Moses’ Jewishness erased? How do different cultures imagine him? Does an individual author represent a culture?” (96).
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I believe that Barbara Johnson’s Moses and Multiculturalism is a strong book in the sense that it examines an important (inter)cultural figure and phenomenon from a deconstructive perspective: its aim is to ask rather than to provide ready-made answers. Proceeding by way of questions, it contrasts all the different accounts of Moses with one another to point out how they relate to the founding narrative. Each of them is a whole in its own right, yet put together they reveal certain dissonances at “the heart of the matter” that deconstructive readings are so delighted to uncover. University of Debrecen ———HJEAS———
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Friel: The Political View Csilla Bertha Roche, Anthony. Brian Friel: Theatre and Politics. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. 248 pages. Theatre and Politics, the theatre of politics, the politics of the theatre; theatre as an art form that may most directly influence opinions, open eyes, call attention to social-political (plus psychological, ethical, philosophical, metaphysical, and other) problems, engage with political issues. The politics of theatre-creation, of finding the most appropriate form in which a theatrical performance can operate and be effective. And also the politics of reading drama and theatre, finding the hidden agenda as well as the connecting lines and recurring themes and preoccupations, together with noticing the changing views, shifting emphases, refining means of expression within an oeuvre. Such and similar associations arise upon encountering the title of Anthony Roche’s book, Theatre and Politics, and he indeed addresses all those aspects of Brian Friel’s dramatic work and engages in that kind of reading. The arguments are built on the author’s deep and broad knowledge of Irish drama in general (as, among others, his indispensable Contemporary Irish Drama and its updated, expanded new edition in 2010 testify) and Friel’s work in particular, through his own numerous essays and his editing the special Friel issue of Irish University Review in 1999 and The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel in 2006. He deploys relevant theoretical insights to frame the explorations and to tease out and illuminate the plays’ less visible aspects, but because the primary focus remains on the plays themselves, he avoids the pitfalls of simplification and distortion of so many theory-driven studies. One of the novelties of this monograph, coming as it does after a fair number of others and all the volumes of essays on one of Ireland’s greatest living playwright’s oeuvre, derives from Roche being the first scholar to research in depth the many boxes of Friel’s notes and letters and manuscripts in the National Library’s archives. He sensitively reads these invaluable Friel Papers and points out where they reconfirm or where they further complicate our understanding of the writer’s views, beliefs, and efforts. He finds thus far unrevealed, fascinating connections between biographical details and the plays, parts written with certain actors in mind, character features taken from real-life figures, so far undiscussed or little noticed connections between the plays and the political events and ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
phenomena current at the time of writing. More importantly, hitherto unnoticed underlying connecting thematic or dramatic threads between the plays come to the surface, and Roche offers viable explanations for significant shifts in thematic and dramatic interest in Friel’s oeuvre, always keeping in sight its unique integrity. The playwright’s constant experimentation with form has been acknowledged before, but in the light of the manuscripts and notes of the Friel Papers Roche can assert that “[a]ll of the decisions made in relation to form . . . are driven by theatrical aims and ends” (4) and they yield a strengthening of dramatic strategies. Roche then sets out to substantiate his claim that Friel is a much more radical and experimental playwright than is generally conceived. The study consequently focuses not only on the “political element” of the Friel plays, their (most frequently oblique) relation to current social, political situations and issues, but also just as importantly on the transplantation and transformation of those issues into drama, on the dramatic, theatrical solutions and their effects on the stage. One example of how earlier views become modified by the findings in the archive is the manuscripts that show Friel planning a version of The Freedom of the City in 1970, two years before Bloody Sunday, with provisional titles “Civil Rights” and “The Mayor’s Parlour” and the three Civil Rights marchers transgressively taking over the Guildhall already in place (114-15). This questions the general view (initiated by Friel himself when he called the play in an interview “reckless” and “ill-considered” because “written out of the kind of anger at the Bloody Sunday events”) that it was written too immediately as a response to the events, therefore, being too raw and rough—all of which Roche contradicts. Instead, he carefully, and in a welcome fashion appreciatively, discusses the unique and “most elaborate spatializing practices” (116) of this often undervalued play. A fascinating story of Faith Healer’s genesis and gestation unfolds, relating how the essential features of the plot and characterization were all in place before the first brief monologue was written in 1975 out of which the rest grew although sometimes in devious ways, showing the greatest transformation and the greatest degree of structural modification between its early drafts and the final polished play. Roche also sees the development of this play, whose “brilliance resides in its dazzling theatricality” (154), as “a strong cultural reminder that Irish drama arguably had its origins as much in the communal art of the seanchaí, the act of oral storytelling, as in a more formal written script performed on a proscenium stage in an urban centre” (158).
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This monograph cleverly balances between giving enough information and not repeating too much of what has already been said about the plays in the extensive Friel-criticism, which must have been a difficult dilemma since Roche discusses all the 24 original plays from the early (unpublished) stage and radio plays, to the most celebrated and critically and/or popularly acclaimed ones. The book concentrates on what is new, fresh, and came to light thanks to the archives, a “missing dimension” as one of the chapter titles defines its subject of the relationship between Friel’s drama and contemporary British drama. Roche also balances between a vaguely chronological order of addressing the plays and a thematic one that obviously connects many of them from different periods. Thus, for instance, he discusses The Home Place, this late play of 2005, in the early chapter on “Friel and the Director” because there he explores Tyrone Guthrie’s influence not only in his “mentoring” role in the often-referred-to but never quite detailed Minneapolis period that initiated Friel into the life of a theatre but also as “the Giant of Monaghan” as Friel labeled him in the title of his article on Guthrie (published in Holiday, May 1964). As an Anglo-Irish landlord, Guthrie became the model for the Anglo-Irish Christopher Gore with his Big House, his nationally hybrid personality, and the tensions between belonging and exile and his ethos of resilience, expressed in the often repeated phrase “rise above” (54-57). The Communication Cord (1983) gains a new evaluation which underscores its contemporary relevance as it appears in the context of the chapter “Negotiating the Present,” together with the post-Lughnasa plays. Some plays are partly discussed in their chronological grouping but certain aspects of them are held back to surface with another group where parallels become relevant. Thus Aristocrats with Casimir, this “supreme fantasist,” is rightly analyzed in the chapter on “Fantasy in Friel” and the play’s use of the theatrical space in that on “The Politics of Space” alongside other plays of the 1970s. In this structure the whole oeuvre is held together and the plays themselves enter into dialogue with each other. The chapters target crucial aspects of the playwright’s work, including his relationship with certain (if not all) directors, central themes such as memory and history, theatrical considerations such as fantasy and the use of space in the plays, and their “negotiating the present.” Roche seems to choose one or two guiding theoreticians for each problem, thus Slavoj Žižek informs the chapter on fantasy, Michel de Certeau and Anna Übersfeld the one on space, and, most appropriately, Paul Ricoeur the one on memory and history. Translations merits a full chapter to itself, around the middle of the book, which is
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logical, given its central role in the playwright’s oeuvre and its debated reception. Roche’s discussion wittily starts out from a seemingly naïve question American audience members asked after the play’s performance: What happened to Yolland, and if he presumably is at the bottom of the lake, then who put him there? From there the critic dexterously moves to face some of the central issues in the play and its relevance to (then) contemporary Northern Ireland troubles in a complex manner. Amongst the several suggested interpretations to navigate readers amidst the ambiguities the play offers, the most interesting is the relation to the disastrous “internment without trial” practice in Northern Ireland in the ’70s, according to which anyone under suspicion could be put in jail without a trial. In Translations, the retaliation of the British Army to Yolland’s disappearance without any evidence of his being murdered could be an instance of this policy (14-19). Among his suggestions, only one seems rather strained, that concerning the possible homoerotic relationship between Owen and Yolland. Even though the parallels with the dramatic structure of The Gentle Island are convincingly drawn, those do not necessarily lead to seeing their camaraderie, friendship, self-abandoned liberated fooling around under the influence of poitín as going beyond just that kind of brotherly-friendly togetherness. The beautifully structured private scenes: one of friendship (between two men) followed by the love scene (between a man and a woman), both transgressing the dividing line between English and Irish, civilian and military, colonizer and colonized, underlines—what is at the core of Roche’s argument—the erasure of any individual interest that could be free from the communal, political situation. If some contemporary performances, which Roche refers to, tend to explore and emphasize the possibility of a gay relationship between the two young men, that might owe more to the present currency of gendered readings than to the play itself. I certainly cannot charge Roche with “Englishness” for seeking “sexual sub-texts in a dramatic situation that, according to the playwright, is innocent of them” as Roche quotes Friel charging director Hilton Edwards, who did not quite understand that there is nothing “sinister” and “certainly nothing sexual” in the relationship between Aunt Lizzy and Ben, the couple’s friend in Philadelphia (52). Instead, it is probably the spirit of the age that drives the critic to detect signs of such possibilities. Gar’s presumable Oedipal love for his mother (64-67) has already been suggested before Roche embraced it, but the “gay sub-text” between the two Gars (53) and the possible gay attraction of
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Columba’s admiring young disciple, Owen, are his own presumptions, which seem to me difficult to justify on the basis of the play-texts. Roche’s extensive knowledge and first-hand experience of theatre performances, directors, actors, and settings and his analyses of some crucial parts or aspects of performances (including several that he knows only from reviews) greatly enrich the discussions and are invaluable especially for readers who, living far from Ireland, have much more limited accessibility to such experience and information. His choice of which performance to address is always interesting, supporting some of his major points but, like his quotations from the Friel criticism, are judiciously selective so never overwhelming. In such a rich book it is difficult to single out certain parts or thoughts that may be more inspiring than others, yet I found the passages on memory, truth, fantasy, and their complicated relationships perhaps the most rewarding. It is long due and eminently fruitful to emphasize the prominence of fantasy in Friel’s work and to confirm, as Roche does with the assistance of Žižek, the interconnectedness of realism and fantasy (59). Similarly important is the statement that “memory in Friel’s drama is best understood in cultural rather than purely personal terms” (79). Among instances of cultural memory Roche wittily contrasts the Yeatsean myth of the Big House being, by definition, Protestant, which, although taken for social reality, he claims, has no more truth than Casimir’s “countermythologizing” his family’s position in Aristocrats through crowding the house with famous public figures, mostly great Catholic personalities but including Yeats himself (79). We all remember what a great help it was to all Friel students and scholars when Christopher Murray edited a set of Friel’s Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London: Faber, 1999). Now we are all indebted to Anthony Roche for revealing much of the contents of the Friel Papers, recontextualizing and often re-evaluating plays within the oeuvre, and pursuing the changes and shifts in the manuscripts of both less-known and well-known plays which offer new perspectives and throw light to new relationships among plays, between life and art, and illuminate the author’s mind, intellect, creative energies, and theatrical powers. It is a delight to read this intriguing, nuanced, insightful, and appreciative study of Brian Friel’s theatre, which does a great service to Friel-scholars, libraries, and all students of Friel, but which will also be stimulating to anyone interested in Irish drama and politics. University of Debrecen
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Dramatizing Abjection: The World of Marina Carr through Kristevan Theory Mária Kurdi Trench, Rhona. Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr. Bern: Lang, 2010. 319 pages. Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr should be hailed as the first monograph on the dramatic achievement of Carr, an Irish woman playwright in her late forties whose work is already well known, acclaimed, discussed, and taught across numerous countries of the world. Bloody Living offers a comprehensive treatment of Carr’s work by focusing on all her plays up to 2009, including those available only in manuscript. The evident difficulty of writing about a still developing oeuvre is counterbalanced here by the author’s well considered efforts to provide the book with a firm theoretical framing. Deploying Julia Kristeva’s ideas for this purpose is a choice not unprecedented in earlier Carr criticism, yet Trench’s scholarly persistence and the understanding with which she relies on Kristevan theories is exceptional. Chiefly but not exclusively, she draws on the theory of the abject, abjection, and self-abjection in Kristeva’s Powers of Horror to serve first as a springboard and then later as scaffolding for the most part of her analysis. The word “bloody” in the title and in all the five chapter titles foregrounds the significance of family (blood) relations, passion, and violence as almost contextually ubiquitous as well as recurring thematic elements in Carr’s plays, suggesting the pervasiveness of blood in the Carr oeuvre. Abject and abjection, as Trench discusses these Kristevan terms in the “Introduction,” are linked with the blurring of borders or boundary failure, especially in respect of what the philosopher calls the contrasted modalities of the semiotic and the symbolic, the maternal and the patriarchal. According to the author, the “sites where borders and boundaries of abjection are interrogated and explored” in Carr are home, gender, and the family (287)—all regarded as vital issues in modern and contemporary Irish drama, thus joining the playwright to the national tradition. Carr’s relation to tradition is, however, complex, since “her dramas simultaneously perpetuate and contest dramatic traditions.” The unique feature of Carr’s oeuvre lies in foregrounding the theme of abjection to interrogate the phenomenon of “marginal subjectivity in a contemporary context” along with depicting “many of the problems that lie beneath the ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
camouflages” of the Celtic Tiger period. Carr’s dramatic concern with the abject, Trench continues, serves to represent long-lasting remnants of the colonial and postcolonial fragmentation within Irish society (9-10). The plays make this heritage manifest primarily through the female experience of marginalization and displacement in the context of patriarchal subordination, exemplified also by the presence of anomalies, inequality, and instances of abuse in gender and family relations. To her credit the author manages to follow the changes in the function and implications of the abject across Carr’s plays, absorbing the dominantly used theory into her interpretative methodology but not allowing her analysis to become subsumed by it. To enrich and free the argument from the monotony of applying the same theoretical stance, Trench also draws on the classics of postcolonial, gender, and performance studies, such as those by Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said, Hélène Cixous, and Richard Schechner. Chapters 2 and 3 are highlights of the book, where Trench addresses the Midlands Trilogy– The Mai, Portia Coughlan, and By the Bog of Cats--and , under the rather ominous title “The One Blood,” On Raftery’s Hill. In exploring The Mai, Trench places Millie’s memory narrative in the center, underscoring that the girl’s “subjectivity is connected to the mythic landscape of the lake, metaphorically entangling her in the maternal.” It is a subjectivity whose “borders of selfhood” are constantly tested by the haunting remains of “what was abjected in the early stages of development” (105, 107). Trench appears pessimistic about the future of Millie when she says that the girl’s narrative “simply trails off [which] implies that such a journey of abject selfhood is a malaise that will continue in the future” (118). But this view may be contested on the grounds that Millie’s increasing awareness of the ghosts haunting her as she comments on certain images and recollected scenes in her narrative may be seen as an important step for her towards learning to control her life more than the female generations could control theirs before her. Predictably, Trench’s discussion of Portia Coughlan focuses on the revenant twin as the abject which mirrors Portia’s profound sense of loss. Bhabha’s notion of liminality, called forth by the twin motif in the drama, stresses its capacity to be “a means of undermining solid ‘authentic’ identities in favor of unexpected and fortuitous kinds” (128). This conclusion might hold a promise of potential renewal, but Portia’s experience of liminality does not entail any kind of redemptive change because the family and close community members around her strongly oppose such a fluid state of existence. Turning to By the Bog of Cats, Trench exposes the fated double abjection of the protagonist,
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Hester Swane, a woman of traveler origin on the maternal side. The discussion of the history and cultural marginalization of the Irish traveler community is particularly illuminating. As with Portia, Hester’s preference for the liminal expressed by her desire to belong to both the bog and the settled people’s world is not tolerated, but in her case it is the larger society which fails to acknowledge her “subjectivity [and] hear her void of selfhood, her cries of abjection, rather than wanting to expel what they don’t understand” (159). In On Raftery’s Hill, the source of the abject is traced in the cycles of abuse perpetuated by patriarchal dominance. Unlike most earlier studies of this drama, Trench extends her analysis to include the “insufficient selfhood” and concomitant identity crisis of Red Raftery, the abusive father character (193). It comes as no surprise that the theory of the abject does not sit equally comfortably with all of Carr’s plays, given the internal changes and emerging new paths within the oeuvre. Arguably, the respective discussions of Low in the Dark (1989) and Woman and Scarecrow (2006) could have benefited from widening the range of analytical tools and approaches, even towards the dramaturgical innovations of the contemporary international feminist theatre. Such a widening seems unavoidable in analyzing the 2009 Marble, where the theory of melancholia helps Trench interpret the representation of the sense of a haunting, unidentifiable loss in the Celtic Tiger society. Links between plays across the oeuvre are also fruitfully explored. For instance, patriarchal power and its subversion are discussed in Meat and Salt (2003) side by side with On Raftery’s Hill, providing a good occasion for the author to distinguish parallels as well as contrasts. At certain points Trench mentions plays from the Irish tradition that Carr seems to hark back to, yet the analogies are not always convincing. While parent-child communication has long been shown missing from Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come, there is hardly any satisfying basis upon which to consider a resemblance with the lack of familial communication in Raftery (164). The quality of the book is somewhat overshadowed by mistakes, structural problems, and insufficient editing. Unfortunately, in dealing with Scarecrow Trench refers to the character Scarecrow as a “he” (for instance, on page 87), although all the stage instructions mentioning the figure use the pronoun “she” and the role has always been played by a woman. The chapters of fifty or more pages are not always sub-divided into shorter units, tending to make the argument run on rather tediously as well as leading to the repetition of details and quotations. In the section “Sacrificial
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Blood,” which addresses Ariel and The Cordelia Dream, citations mainly from Kristeva are inserted two or three times into the text, which is also partly responsible for rendering the lengthy analysis of Ariel self-repetitive and digressive, failing to convince the reader that the play deserves so much attention. Clearly, Trench’s aim is to rescue Ariel as one of the few plays on the contemporary scene which critically responds to the destructive excesses of political corruption during the Celtic Tiger period. She also hints at the mythical framework of the drama that derives from the ancient Greek story of Iphigenia’s death at the hands of her father, Agamemnon, which is too large for the rather limited subject, the protagonist’s thirst for power to cure his abject self. Indirectly, Trench’s remarks suggest reasons for the play’s artistic failure to work either on page or stage. Even good writers create bad works sometimes, and Carr is no exception. Trench comes from near the Irish Midlands, the “Carr country,” as it may be called, and has directed amateur productions of some of Carr’s plays. The intimate relation she has developed with the oeuvre of this seminal playwright as well as her knowledge of the contemporary Irish theatre shine through the whole book, adding to its scholarly value. Weaknesses notwithstanding, Bloody Living is an impressive scholarly achievement which manages to re-familiarize the reader with the dramatic work of Marina Carr from a theoretically informed vantage point. In her conclusion, the author modestly states that “[i]n response to Carr’s distinctive voice . . . and extraordinary vision, other readings and viewpoints will continue to emerge” (290). Thought-provoking and attentive to details, Trench’s Bloody Living qualifies as a stimulating inquiry into its subject, which all future studies on Carr will undoubtedly engage with and respond to. University of Pécs ———HJEAS———
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Criticism and Pleasure Gyula Somogyi Belsey, Catherine. A Future for Criticism. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2011. 143 pages. Catherine Belsey’s most recent book, A Future for Criticism, was published in Wiley-Blackwell’s Blackwell Manifestos series, which invites major critics in diverse fields within the humanities and social sciences to make “timely interventions” (ii) within their respective subjects that will appeal to academic professionals as well as general readers. Staging such a “timely intervention,” Belsey’s book visualizes “a” certain future for criticism, which is prompted by the author’s dissatisfaction with the current state of theory and scholarship largely dominated by biographical approaches, gender and postcolonial studies (26), new historicism (43), and cultural studies. The use of the indefinite article in the title is quite appealing: it suggests that Belsey does not regard “her way” as the only way of renewing contemporary critical practice, which already shows certain signs of exhaustion and discourages innovation (19). Yet, without doubt, the possible route ahead the book sketches is very intriguing. Thus A Future for Criticism seems to have been written partly in response to the recent crisis in contemporary scholarship, with the desire to realign critical practice from the “inside” (academic circles) as well as to answer criticism arriving from the “outside” (politics and the government), and the genius of the book lies in how Belsey interweaves these two different issues to form a (non-)manifesto that offers a valid answer to both of these problems and reformulates the way we should see the position of reading and criticism in contemporary theory and society. The book can thus be regarded as a contemporary heir to two different intellectual traditions within philosophy and criticism: on the one hand, based on its explicit aim to return criticism’s focus to the pleasures of fiction, Belsey is evoking the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science as well as Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text; on the other hand, the volume’s title could also have been An Apology for Criticism, or the Defense of Criticism as A Future for Criticism also belongs to a tradition—exemplified, for example, by Sir Philip Sidney, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Matthew Arnold—trying to defend poetry, philosophy, and criticism amidst “anti-intellectual times” (xi), which measure the humanities with strictly utilitarian values (103-04). ________________________________________
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Belsey argues that “we academics have for too long neglected pleasure” (xii) and the enjoyment offered by all kinds of fiction presented in various forms of representation and different media. She thinks that “[w]e see pleasure as academically inadmissible” (19), and this taboo in the author’s view is contingent upon the ambiguous place of pleasure in Western culture in general (28). Pleasure is usually cast off as sinful, and where it is treated in philosophical depth, for example, in Immanuel Kant’s Critiques, it is immediately connected to ethics and aesthetics. However, A Future for Criticism’s approach would like to offer a route for the critical analysis of enjoyment that clearly differs from the “old Kantian vocabulary that allies pleasure with judgement and virtue” (xiii). But what is really at stake in this break with Kantian vocabulary? What is the difference between writing about aesthetic pleasure and pleasure in general? In Belsey’s view, the trouble with recent scholarship focusing on pleasure (for example, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon [1994] or Wendy Steiner’s The Scandal of Pleasure [1995]) is that it is still caught in this Kantian web of terms that implies a denigration of the pleasures offered by artifacts of mass culture (10), which eventually limits the scope of cultural criticism. Belsey even chooses not to use the word “literature” in A Future for Criticism as it “tends to imply a value judgement” (xii), so she uses the word “fiction” instead, though she is aware that “the term is untidy” (xiii). The author believes that the pleasurable nature of fiction as opposed to moral philosophy or (social) science comes from the fact that “[f]ictional form invests serious matter with pleasure” (3), and later she goes on to argue that “works of fiction are available for us to read at all only on the grounds that they once gave pleasure to someone” (17). However, criticism fails to do justice to this powerful feeling that arises during the act of reading (or watching) fiction. This issue is best exemplified by the case of tragedy where critics ranging from Aristotle, Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Sigmund Freud, and Roger Scruton tend to replace the pleasure offered by the plays with “another, more solemn, state of mind, a condition we might identify as akin to pleasure, perhaps, but not the thing itself” (6). It is important to note that, with all its emphasis on pleasure, A Future for Criticism does not call for “a comprehensive theory of pleasure” (Belsey leaves that for the philosophers), nor is it asking “why fiction pleases” (psychologists might answer that question). The author argues that “the issue for criticism is a textual one: what feature or features of a form of telling that initially caught the attention of some part of the public on the
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basis that it pleased them is responsible for the pleasure it gave and perhaps continues to give?” (7). There are three aspects of contemporary criticism that A Future for Criticism speaks out against, because, in the end, they become obstacles to “a fuller understanding of textuality” (xiv). These include “the substitution of morality for reading, the distraction of biography, and the narrowing of attention that comes from privileging realism” (xiv). Belsey clearly resists ethically grounded criticism (19), taking “the moral high ground in homiletic reading” (15), as it seems to evade exactly those questions of textuality with which criticism needs to be concerned. Another “heresy” of contemporary criticism is “the substitution of narrative for interpretation in biography” (15), which practice, after decades of New Critical contempt for critical biography (40), was reinvigorated by New Historicist approaches (43)—an approach which nevertheless reinserted a touch of fiction into these critical narratives (45). The third underlying principle the author argues against is that, by privileging the realist mode that operates through mimesis and verisimilitude, contemporary criticism neglects “alternative modes” of representation (55). Belsey’s examples for the resistance to this realistic imperative are the pleasures derived from Bertolt Brecht’s theatre (67) and J. M. Coetzee’s, Toni Morrison’s, and Salman Rushdie’s texts (70), which frequently use anti-mimetic modes of discourse, including “myth, fable, allegory, abstraction” (66). As opposed to these three types of “heresies,” the kind of criticism Belsey argues for might also answer the pressing questions leveled against criticism by daily politics. She notes that “in administrative usage culture is now generally confined to recreation, with the result that the capacity of criticism to cast light on past and present has no place in official thinking” (90). Just like in Hungary, “academic disciplines in the UK are being called on to give an account of their impact on the community that supports them. Taxpayers, so the argument goes, are entitled to expect social and economic value for their money” (103). To answer this challenge, Belsey provides the following thoughts about criticism: instead of a useless pastime wasting taxpayer’s money, it should be regarded as “a valuable knowledge of culture, past and present, where culture is understood as profoundly formative for the human beings we become” (xiv). The emphasis on criticism as a knowledge of culture seems familiar from cultural studies, so it begs the question of how this future is different from the cultural turn in literary studies that happened during the second half of the twentieth century. How does cultural studies turn into cultural criticism? Just like in
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an earlier interview with Paul Bowman (“From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism?” in Interrogating Cultural Studies [2003]), Belsey notes here that while cultural studies mostly concentrates on the present period and is characterized by an acute class awareness, an interest in popular forms of culture, and a sociological approach, cultural criticism emphasizes cultural history, embraces a host of different disciplinary approaches and attends to different kinds of media (73). A Future for Criticism positions fiction as a form of cultural memory (95), which seems to align the future of English scholarship with the theories of cultural memory developed by Aleida Assman, Jan Assman, and Pierre Nora. And if we regard fiction as a form of cultural memory, then, as the critical study of fiction, “criticism has the capacity to offer a source of cultural history in its differences and dissensions” (97). Criticism thus offers “a knowledge of cultural difference” (105), and what is needed in Belsey’s view is a “criticism that does justice to the textuality of fiction” and “pays explicit attention to the work’s questing mode of address” (127); that is, a criticism attentive to the workings of desire and pleasure. There remains one final question to ask: does A Future for Criticism profess what it claims criticism should do? I believe so, it is a perfectly lucid, very pleasurable critical piece to read. The argument of the book relies a bit too much on suspense, though, as it is a bit slow to reveal what criticism “should” do now or how it “ought to” change. But then again, during the reading process, the reader might realize that, to be consistent, a cultural criticism based on pleasure needs to steer away from the ethical imperatives implied by “should” and “ought to,” and, in the end, possibly from the manifesto form as well. University of Debrecen ———HJEAS———
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Slavery in Fiction Ágnes Györke Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture. 2008. Cambridge: CUP, 2011. 280 pages. George Boulukos’s well-researched and informative book, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture should prove an asset for students of eighteenth-century literature. First published in 2008 to positive reviews, the new paperback edition makes it possible for a larger group of scholars to engage in this stimulating critical dialogue. Boulukos claims that “the grateful slave embodies an aspect of the eighteenth-century politics of slavery that has been neglected in scholarship: amelioration” (9-10). The solution that amelioration offers, however, “denies that slavery is inherently problematic by imagining that it can be made acceptable, or that Africans can be understood as suited to it” (10). In other words, since the image of the grateful slave questions the consensus on race from within the discursive norms of the century, it is part of a conformist rhetoric: instead of promoting reform and the abolition of slavery, the trope seeks to consolidate the phenomenon. The Grateful Slave displays an impressive knowledge of eighteenthcentury prose works and a remarkable bibliography: apart from a few renowned writers, such as Aphra Behn (Oroonoko [1688]) and Daniel Defoe (Colonel Jack [1722]), he discusses travel writings of slave-ship captains, lesser known novels, and polemical literature. He also takes historical events into account, such as the Somerset case (1772) and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), arguing that the former was a cornerstone in the genealogy of racial difference: while the court’s decision made it clear that slavery would no longer be tolerated in Britain, it also contributed to an essentialist conceptualization of racial categories. Novels such as Edward Kimber’s History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson (1754), Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), and Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777), prepared this “evolution.” They suggest, according to Boulukos, that plantation reformers improve slaves’ lives in order to enslave them more securely, using a sentimental rhetoric which only serves as a tool to distance themselves from responsibility for colonial violence. Sarah Scott’s novel shows very clearly that a cultural double standard undermines the claims of humane sympathy: the slaves’ failure to be grateful “justifies their exclusion ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
from the community of fully human, fully sentimental beings” (133). By insisting on the “naturalness” of the Africans’ dependence and gratitude, these novels impose a Eurocentric set of norms on slaves, justifying their enslavement. Boulukos also discusses the writings of a number of Enlightenment thinkers (Kant, Jefferson, Abbé Raynal, etc.), the novels of Lucy Peacock, Thomas Day, and Dr. John Moore as well as the polemical writings of James Ramsay and Richard Nisbet, claiming that the 1780s witnessed a watershed in the discourse about slavery: the decade produced “both the apotheosis of grateful slave fictions and the most searching, experimental versions of it” (141). He calls this period “transitional,” since it is characterized by contradictory views of slavery: the previous Christian belief of a shared humanity falls apart, but a firm belief in racial difference is not yet established. Before engaging with these explicit views, which became part of the cultural mainstream only at the end of the eighteenth century, Boulukos devotes a chapter to the writers from the black Atlantic (Ignatus Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano), avoiding the mistake that Edward Said made in Orientalism, that is, leaving out the response to Western metropolitan discourses. He claims that though Sancho is influenced by English literature, Laurence Sterne in particular, and Cugoano retains the belief that independence and agency are “more natural” to British than to West Africans, all three reject the accusations of insensibility and irrationality made against Africans as well as the increasingly powerful conception of race. He argues that by demonstrating that gratitude is part of an oppressive rhetoric, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative exposes “the transatlantic gap between colonial practices and metropolitan understandings of race” (173). The last chapter of The Grateful Slave discusses the fiction and polemical literature of the 1790s, arguing that the abolitionist movement at the end of the century was accompanied by an increasing investment in racial difference even in antislavery writing. Paradoxically, only Hector MacNeill’s pro-slavery Memoirs of the Life and Travels of the Late Charles Macpherson (1800) challenges the paradigm of grateful slavery by parodying it. Though a number of novels featuring African narrators and characters appeared, these Africans are seen as exceptional figures only as long as they conform to European norms. These texts suggest, according to Boulukos, that an essentialist version of racial difference became part of the cultural mainstream, which justified the institution of slavery despite the public agitation against it. In the short Epilogue, he adds that this discourse
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influenced more well-known novels about slavery, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which depicts a number of scenes reminding the reader of Moore’s Zeluco. In Boulukos’s words: “Stowe’s famous novel had its roots at least sixty years before its publication in a specific eighteenthcentury British grateful slave fiction” (236), and this provided a model of sentimentalized views on slavery adaptable for writers in the United States as well. Despite the favorable reception of The Grateful Slave, some critics find it too theoretical, arguing that Boulukos has a limited view of culture. In his excellent review, for example, Christopher N. Phillips claims that apart from prose works, Boulukos should have taken poetry, drama, and visual culture into account (446). While it is obviously true that these genres would provide a wider scope, a number of books that are regarded as milestones in cultural studies, such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, for instance, rely on considerably fewer primary texts than The Grateful Slave, which makes Phillips’ point somewhat captious. Perhaps it is only the subtitle of the book that is misleading, which promises the exploration of the concept of race in culture, instead of narrowing down the focus to fiction (which Boulukos actually does in the “Introduction”). True, this ambivalence makes the book somewhat incoherent, especially theoretically, since the reader is expecting a cultural studies approach, yet his methodology is profoundly different from that of Stuart Hall or his disciple, Gilroy. Phillips also claims that without paying attention to the publication, distribution, and readership of the texts discussed, Boulukos’s theory remains speculative (446). He points out that the 1773 anonymous pamphlet titled Personal Slavery Established, which Boulukos regards as a profound attack on an earlier writing by John Wesley, was published in Philadelphia, not in London, which is a fact that the bibliography acknowledges but remains unaddressed in the text (446). In other words, Boulukos does not take into account the circumstances of publication (which might indeed explain why the pamphlet is an attack, a satire), nor does he pay attention to the reception of the texts discussed; instead, he offers his own, no doubt insightful, interpretation. Phillips’s point is hard to refute; a different methodology might more appropriately ground an investigation into the concept of race in eighteenth-century British and American culture. What Boulukos offers, instead, is a meticulous analysis of eighteenth-century British prose writing, and, as he himself puts it at the
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end of the book, “a tentative step toward understanding . . . transatlantic connections” (245). In the “Introduction,” Boulukos claims that although his book “is committed to the idea that texts can work to change culture, [it] nonetheless breaks with the methodology of the literary Foucauldians of the 1980s and 1990s” (15). What he questions is the assumption that representations are solely responsible for producing the social category of race, calling the reader’s attention to the need to investigate the history of social practices. His view could question the literary historians’ use of Foucault, but, in fact, it does not contradict Foucault himself, who never claimed that “representations precede, rather than reflect, social realities” (15), but saw them as part of a network. As Edward Said puts it: “for Foucault the text is important because it inhabits an element of power (pouvoir) with a decisive claim on actuality” (674), and it is the task of the “archaeologist” to put it back into the social, political, and economical practices that surrounded its emergence. The novelty of Boulukos’s project lies in the synthesis he offers: arguing that racial difference is not the simple result of European cultural prejudices, he investigates the rhetoric of the metropolitan discourse and colonial practices. Though Phillips claims that “a more New Historicist idea of culture is at work in this project, in which direct influence is not as much of interest as is contemporaneity” (447), Boulukos, in fact, believes that The Grateful Slave breaks with this approach “by insisting on viewing cultural categories in a diachronic frame” (15). His primary aim is to investigate the development of the concept of race across time: it is not the question of influence or book history that interests him but a more conceptual and teleological model of cultural change. Boulukos argues that The Grateful Slave provides a “thick description of the cultural context of images of slave gratitude” (19), using a term popularized by Clifford Geertz (who borrowed it from Gilbert Ryle). “Thick description” refers to the anthropological method that aims to explain the reasons behind human behavior, as opposed to “thin description,” which simply describes what the anthropologist sees. Geertz, clearly aware of the fact that the anthropologist is an interpreter, attributes an unprecedented role to cultural symbols, and the choice of this model explains why Boulukos offers an interpretation of texts instead of a more materialistic analysis. Here he truly departs from the Foucauldian framework, since the French philosopher aimed to avoid interpretation by focusing on discursive practices. Geertz, on the other hand, claims that
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ethnography itself is thick description, since the ethnographer is faced with “a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another . . .” (10), as if s/he were trying to read a manuscript which is “foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries . . .” (10). In other words, Boulukos is aware that, just like an ethnographer, he reads culture; the methodology he chose might not be the most suitable one for investigating the genealogy of race, but it does not change the fact that his book deserves to be judged on the basis of its own assumptions and aims. I think the incoherencies of The Grateful Slave stem from it not being entirely clear whether Boulukos treats literary texts as part of a network in the Foucauldian sense, produced by and transformative of cultural discourses, or whether he regards them as “symptoms” of ideas that are latent in culture. For instance, when he discusses Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, and Raynal’s A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, he argues that these writings express ideas already available in culture: Despite their striking similarities, these philosophers should not be taken as indicating the arrival of a broader cultural consensus on race in the 1780s. Neither should they be seen as originating such ideas. Instead, the philosophers’ unusually open suggestions of racial difference can be understood as expressions of ideas already available in the culture, if in less overt forms, as seen in the examples of Estwick’s pamphlet and the early grateful slave fictions. (147)
Boulukos does not speak about direct influence but reads texts as manifestations of ideas that are “latent in society.” He seems to return to a conceptual framework which the theories he rejects have questioned, and this explains why the methodology of The Grateful Slave is confusing at times. I think his approach is closest to that branch of the history of ideas which does not foreground the question that Foucault and, to an even greater extent, cultural studies scholars are preoccupied with, namely, how cultural ideologies are produced and transmitted by texts. This fact does not make The Grateful Slave less remarkable, but on the contrary: it inspires the reader to reread, rethink, and further elaborate Boulukos’s theory. University of Debrecen
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Note This review is supported by the TÁMOP-4.2.2/B-10/1-2010-0024 project. The project is co-financed by the European Union and the European Social Fund. Books and Other Writings Referred to in the Review Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973. Print. Phillips, Christopher N. “Review of The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture.” Early American Literature 44.2 (2009): 442-48. Print. Said, Edward. “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions.” Critical Inquiry 4.4 (1978): 673-714. Print. ———HJEAS———
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Textbook Indians vs. Real People: A Tribute to Survival Judit Szathmári Strong, John A. The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island: A History. The Civilization of The American Indian. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2011. xvii+332 pages. “Textbook Indians disappear when conquered. Real people are not, however, quite so obliging” (Daniel Mandell qtd. in Strong 132). To prove historian Daniel Mandell’s claim John A. Strong writes a history of a people in which both history and people should be understood in the broadest possible scope. A more explicit subtitle, however, such as Textbook Indians vs. Real People: A Tribute to Survival, would be more expressive of Strong’s scholarly enterprise. Like many other nations, the Unkechaug people recorded their own history, and two tribal members compiled a history of the people. However, as someone who served as an expert witness in the 2006 Gristede’s Foods, Inc. v. Poospatuck (Unkechaug) Indian Nation case, Strong had access to documents that the first professional compiler of Unkechaug history did not. The most valuable sources he draws upon are ledgers, town board minutes, muster rolls, marriage records, state books of deeds, and town records. His meticulous study of these sources offers his reader insights into the Unkechaug world and opportunities to meet real people who for so long were the subjects of “misrepresentations, distortions, and intentional falsehoods” (Chief Harry B. Wallace). In addition to Strong’s access to records and documents which had not been available to authors of the two previously compiled tribal histories, the book is further enriched by invaluable data collected through personal communications with community members. Tribal histories compiled by non-community members often emphasize the non-Native author’s point of view, thereby offering a somewhat biased interpretation of events. Strong’s absolute lack of self-effacement allows readers to “personally meet” the Unkechaug community and thus obtain a nuanced understanding of how Indian policy has worked and shaped Unkechaug life at Poospatuck. These personal interviews also testify to the claim that this indigenous community of Eastern Long Island is not a passive observer and victim of American Indian policy making, but rather an innovative and active agent in its formation. Thus this Unkechaug history serves as a case study of Native community experience in the United States, eventually telling the his/story of “real Indians” (220). ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
The Civilization of The American Indian series—a rather unfortunate title in Strong’s case as for centuries in the course of American Indian policy the term civilization was employed as a synonym for forced assimilation and cultural genocide—declares its mission to be “the presentation of aboriginal, historical, and contemporary American Indian life” by addressing issues of “acculturation, group and personal conflicts, and maladjustments resulting from the impact of Europeans upon aboriginal American culture.” In this spirit number 269 of the Series proposes to “bring the Unkechaugs out of the shadows of history and to establish a permanent record of their struggle to survive as a distinct community” (xiv). While survival is more dominant a theme in the first six chapters, introducing Unkechaug ancestors and the changes the community experienced up to 1874, the notion of “distinct community” is the issue more in focus in the last two chapters, which deal with the period beginning roughly with the General Allotment Act of 1887 and closing with future prospects for the Eastern Long Island tribe. These two large thematic units correspond with the chronological order in which the chapters are arranged. The first covers the period beginning with “The Ancestors” around 2000 B.C., and comes to an end with the change “From Wigwams to Log Cabins, 1800-1874.” A detailed description of the ancient inhabitants of Eastern Long Island sheds light on the approximately 4,000 year old history foreshadowing the future for the Unkechaug nation. Although Native history since first contact with white settlers is predominantly characterized by various policies targeting the extermination, deprivation, and assimilation of indigenous nations, Strong composes a story of a people who did not surrender to the fate assigned to them by conquering nations and colonial governments. In fact, events between 1550 and 1665 demonstrate the Unkechaugs’ quick adaptation to colonial and international politics, and their proactive participation in the development of a somewhat secure relationship with the increasing number of white settlers. While at first sight the reader may feel a little lost at the very detailed and comparatively long descriptions of prehistoric and early contact times, they are necessary if one hopes to gain an understanding of the current struggles the Unkechaug nation still has to face today. Archeological findings at various village sites are cited to serve as core evidence in court cases of the twenty first century, as explained in chapter 8 (see, for example, Gristede’s Foods, Inc. v. Unkechaug Indian Nation).
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The first unit, comprised of chapter one through six, also moves beyond history as traditionally understood. Literary and cultural histories enrich white-Indian interaction stories. Scholars of Native American literature find invaluable information on Samson Occom, the author of the first written Native American literary work. The appendix to chapter five lists the collection of Unkechaug vocabulary items as compiled by Thomas Jefferson in 1791. Jefferson’s list, however limited it may seem—it contains only two-hundred entries—is revealing of the Native response to changing social, political, and cultural contexts. Whereas he managed to record the Unkechaug names of everyday utensils and weather phenomena, recently acquired European “imports” such as farm animals and plants had not been given any Native designation at the time of his visit. Jefferson remarks, probably mistakenly, that there were but three people left who spoke the Unkechaug language, yet, as chapter 8 suggests with the assistance of Western Abenaki recordings, the Unkechaug community is currently working on a language revitalization program to restore Unkechaug to the Native American linguistic palette. Chapter 5 and 6 include intricate family trees and ties, thereby familiarizing the reader with the daily life of the nineteenth-century community and enhancing our understanding of a tribal system based on core kinship patterns. The sixth chapter covers the period including the Civil War, but this major historical moment is dwarfed by the explanation of the significance of tribal structure. This focus is entirely appropriate and is verified by chapter 7 and 8. Like many other American Indian communities the Unkechaug nation faced difficulties when their tribal entity was questioned by state and federal authorities. Following World War I, federal Indian policy seemed more co-optive than before, as the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act and the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act might suggest. Indian Country, and particularly the Bureau of Indian Affairs “thrived” under the Collier era, a more flexible and less assimilative period in the relationship between the federal government and American Indian nations. Strong offers a penetrating discussion of how the Unkechaug were tossed about between the benevolence of the New York Agency BIA special agent, who, however sympathetic he may have been towards the nation, nonetheless, had no information on whether the tribe fell under federal or state jurisdiction, and Allan Harper, coordinator of the Technical Cooperation, Bureau of Indian Affairs (222), who manipulated his findings in order to cheat the Unkechaug out of federal eligibility. This analysis explains why the Bureau of Indian Affairs has been seen by many as the
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arch enemy of Indian communities. Although Harper’s report failed to turn the Unkechaugs into a “truly forgotten people” (228), the trials of 1936 did influence tribal enterprises of the twenty-first century. Readers less familiar with federal Indian policy may at first sight find it somewhat difficult to place particular historic tribal moments in the larger context of United States history. However, The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island is a people’s history, hence the less detailed explication of the larger context. Chapter 7, “Reinforcing and Defending Cultural Identity,” provides the reader with a thorough analysis of the conflicts surrounding the proposed closing down of the Unkechaug school and the controversy with which the Unkechaug people are still struggling concerning tribal recognition. The detailed explications of archeological sites and family relationships prove invaluable to an understanding of the controversies surrounding questions of deed versus treaty and state versus federal recognition. The village site of Poospatuck, the central location of the Unkechaug community, was questioned as a “certified” reservation, and people were denied federal recognition on grounds that they intermarried with African Americans—an issue that often surfaces in today’s blood quantum debates. Statements made in 1936, such as Harper’s blatantly racist contentions that the Unkechaugs had been “submerged by the Negro” or that there was “not one straight hair in the bunch [of Unkechaug schoolchildren]” (223), are still an issue today in federal and state court cases. These court cases are very often brought about by controversies surrounding tribal enterprises. Indian country today is struggling with numerous difficulties, independent of a specific community’s location. As is the case in other Native nations, poverty, unemployment, education, and alcoholism have been the most severe problems with which the Unkechaug have had to struggle. For the Unkechaug, smoke shops, which provide relatively stable revenue both for individual proprietors and the community, are the “new buffalo”—or a more proper designation for Coastal Algonquian people, the “new whale”—in other words, an alternative form of tribal enterprise. At the moment pending court decisions challenging Unkechaug tribal identity and thereby also community integrity still constitute obstacles to the full realization of tribal sovereignty. Strong’s The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island: A History is a demonstration of community struggle and survival, which for the scholarly audience may serve as a basis for comparative research. Strong himself alludes to possible comparisons, frequently citing corresponding
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Shinnecock and Wampanoag histories. Both nations reside in the relative geographic proximity of the Unkechaug community, but the broader scope of comparison occasionally includes the Iroquois and Choctaw experience as well. The question today remains the same as earlier: who can qualify as citizens of Indian country, and how, after centuries of assimilationist attempts, can Native communities maintain their independent identities and realize them in the form of political sovereignty. Defying “textbook Indian” passivity and subjugation, under the aegis of contemporary multicultural/ postethnic American society the Unkechaug people’s story provides insight into Indigenous survival strategies. Eszterházy Károly College, Eger ———HJEAS———
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The Power of Personality: A New Interpretation of the Origins of the Cold War Zoltán Peterecz Costigliola, Frank. Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012. 544 pages. The origins of the Cold War and their interpretation have provided a constant discussion now for longer than the actual enmity lasted between the Soviet Union and its satellites and the United States and its allies. Yet, a fresh look rekindles interest in another generation for the distant past and may provide a better analysis and understanding of certain events and personalities, the hows and the whys. It is hardly possible that the whole start of the Cold War could be and should be reinterpreted. Still, certain aspects are worth reconsideration. Frank Costigliola’s new book on Franklin Roosevelt and how he was trying to shape the post-World War II world is definitely a study from a new angle with thought-provoking conclusions.1 Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances attempts to go beyond the usual narratives of the beginning of the Cold War by focusing in much greater detail on the importance of personality, the force of emotions, the power of ideology, and the crucial aspect of cultural background and surroundings. From this vantage point, the book leads the reader through the years of the Second World War by putting the emphasis on Roosevelt and his foreign policy views and schemes. The author endeavors to clarify some overly ideologized points about American-Soviet relations in parallel with the British-Soviet and the American-British partnership. He does not provide any so-far-unheard events or stories; he does not write customary diplomatic history. Instead, he presents well-known episodes from a new perspective focusing on the creation, development, and fall of the American-British-Soviet alliance created in a web of emotions dictated by strong personalities. Costigliola deftly finds a balance between diplomacy and the personal. One does not need to be an expert on World War II in order to understand and be able to follow the larger background events of the conflict. He relies on diplomatic papers, memoirs, and diaries of contemporaries, and other sources to present the three main “actors”: Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. Costigliola examines the complex and often contradictory personalities of these three ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
men, which obviously influenced their thoughts concerning the war years and the period following the end of hostilities. Roosevelt is the central figure, because oftentimes he played a placating role between Churchill and Stalin. In addition, Harry Truman, Averell Harriman, and George F. Kennan are also present much of the time. Costigliola attributes a great deal of importance to the defining relationships in childhood and young adulthood, which, for these politicians, “shaped their respective personalities and perspectives on wartime problems” (54). While FDR was endowed with everything— fortune, luck, good looks, and a protective mother—Churchill often encountered problems in these areas. Stalin, on the other hand, had more than a fair share of physical abuse and poverty. No matter the circumstances, however, “all three emerged as self-centered, charismatic, and fiercely ambitious young men” (32). While Roosevelt loved the social atmosphere around him and found great pleasure in giving interviews, a feature that was not characteristic of Stalin, Churchill became the great orator. The three men contrasted in their relationship to the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was part of it and believed in it. Roosevelt accepted the “red scare” in rather good faith because he thought American capitalism could easily defeat the inimical ideology. Churchill, however, hated Bolsheviks and what they stood for and thought they were a blight and a dangerous infection that should be obliterated by any means possible. According to Costigliola, this became important because their early experience and worldview, and their attitude to the moral and practical questions, defined how these men related to the events of World War II. Churchill insisted on traditions, Stalin was brutal but at the same time opportunistic, whereas Roosevelt embodied pragmatism. The latter may hold the key as to how Roosevelt managed, especially in the last two years of the war, to strike a tenuous partnership with the rational and sometimes even funny Soviet leader. In many ways FDR found it easier to achieve results with Stalin than with the British premier who was still dreaming about holding onto an empire long past. Costigliola believes that it was to Roosevelt’s credit that he was able to keep the Alliance together, because out of the three leaders, “he displayed the greatest cultural empathy, respect for difference, and emotional restraint—all key to keeping centrifugal forces in check” (59). FDR relied on a handful of dependable people, but by 1944 Marguerite A. “Missy” LeHand, Louis M. Howe, Thomas G. Corcoran,
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Harry L. Hopkins, and Sumner Welles either had died or the President had dismissed them. Therefore, exactly when he most needed help and advice from these people, the President with broken health could not or did not want to put others in their place. Nor was Churchill in very good condition either. He had had heart attacks, pneumonia, and occasional depression, while trying to alleviate the tension that the war brought with alcohol. In a sharp contrast to Roosevelt, however, Churchill could rely on the traditionally well-oiled mechanism of the British foreign policy structure. The staff working in the echelons of that hierarchy served the Prime Minister better than his American counterpart. Stalin’s foreign policy mirrored the country he had built: in the wake of the personality cult and terror surrounding him, Stalin had become isolated, often receiving only twisted and contorted versions from his terrified underlings, therefore his foreign policy was by definition tainted. Owing to the great geographical distances between them, and Roosevelt’s and Stalin’s fear of flying, in the first half of the war the substitute for personal contact became envoys such as Hopkins or Harriman, who traveled to both London and Moscow. While in London they were successful, when in the Soviet capital they did not manage to strike a very friendly chord with Stalin partly on account of the enormous ideological and cultural differences. Still, the American government did everything in its power to “sell” Stalin as a jovial and democratic leader to its compatriots, in order to lay the foundations for a lasting alliance which seemed essential to beat Hitler. On the other hand, Roosevelt’s meeting with Churchill in 1941 produced the Atlantic Charter, which Costigliola characterizes as “more symbolism than substance,” since “the Atlantic Conference helped set the stage for, but it did not create, a functioning alliance” (137). Emotions and prejudices, stemming from the cultural differences, were responsible for the course of events and what responses the three major allied leaders gave to them and, therefore, only worsened the political situation making it more complicated. Roosevelt thought in vain that Stalin liked him more than Churchill, which may have been true, yet the Soviet leader systematically refused the American President’s openings in 1942. This cold shoulder stemmed from the lack of the second front, but also from Stalin’s fundamental distrust and his complex personality—he possessed a high level of megalomania together with a sense of inferiority toward Westerners which only made everything worse. Still, due to FDR’s almost flattering and definitely seductive style, and the course of the war,
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the two sides were brought somewhat closer, and the Soviets also seemed to see in the President a more potential partner rather than in Churchill. That does not mean that Churchill did not try. The British Prime Minister’s trip to Moscow in the summer of 1942 included meetings that were studded with brawls and reconciliation, in addition to large quantities of fine food and vodka, which led Churchill to the false conclusion that he had a cordial comradeship with Stalin, similar to the one he had with Roosevelt. FDR, for his part, tried to talk Stalin into a personal meeting in the United States, to little avail. He hoped that during such a face to face meeting Stalin would be unable to resist his seductive charm. Since Stalin refused to travel, the net result was that Roosevelt met Churchill much more often, and, as a further consequence, until the middle of 1943 it was the British military strategy that dominated the Anglo-Saxon moves. In Costigliola’s opinion, the perhaps awkward offhand declaration of the principle of unconditional surrender that Roosevelt made at the Casablanca Conference was more of a gesture toward Stalin than part of a carefully constructed strategy—typical of FDR. The first ever meeting between the three statesmen took place in Teheran in late 1943. The three days were successful as far as the relationship between FDR and Stalin is concerned, although not so on Churchill’s part, but this was only a first step at best. Aside from such wellknown outcomes of the conference as the idea of the three (or four) policemen and the question of the occupation of Germany, Costigliola emphasizes another crucial aspect: Roosevelt’s health had started its last and long decline for the next sixteen months. The long and tiring journey with the burden of many tasks at hand, mainly the shaping of the postwar future, proved to be the beginning of the final blows against the President’s physical condition. One of Costigliola’s main points is that Roosevelt as a supreme pragmatist, instead of adhering blindly to the idealist political manifest, was looking for feasible solutions, which mostly meant that he tried to come to an agreement with the Soviet leader, the upshot of which was his acceptance of Eastern Europe as a Soviet sphere of influence. He professed great belief not in the Atlantic Charter but in the three policemen as a practical tool for world peace. The eight days were a series of attempts to find compromises as the American and Soviet leaders moved to a more intimate relationship. They agreed about the Far Eastern question, the occupation zones in Germany and Berlin, and on the sum of reparations to be negotiated. That is not to say there were no clashes. There were. One
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was over the status of the colonies, the solution to which the British vehemently opposed. But the main bone of contention was the Polish question, and it “remained an explosive issue because it touched core emotional beliefs, cultural assumptions, and historical legacies, in Britain and America as well as in Russia” (246). At the end of the day Stalin was the winner while Roosevelt contented himself with promising compromises put on paper since he knew that in the postwar period he would very much need those compromises. He refused any suggestions from Churchill and Harriman that would have led to a break with the Soviets—but looked instead for concessions and cooperation. In the end, Roosevelt failed because, Costigliola claims, “he never— for reasons of privacy, inertia, or lack of opportunity—opened himself and his inner circle to anyone talented and trustworthy enough to replace” the by then lost close advisers; a “most dangerous failing” (236). His biggest tragedy was that he had run out of time and did not possess either the time or the energy needed to prepare the American people and his own vicepresident for the political reality that after World War II the United States would be better off choosing the three policemen formula and cooperation with the Soviet Union than clinging to the idealistic Atlantic Charter. When Truman took his oath of office after Roosevelt’s death, his anti-Soviet feelings were coupled with those of his Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, and the State Department in general. The unprepared voters supported the new leaders against the Soviets both culturally and ideologically, thereby negating Roosevelt’s cherished dream of postwar power-cooperation. In this interpretation, the Cold War developed and escalated into a power game on the personal level—not confined to politicians alone. As the author puts it, “the isolation of foreign diplomats and journalists [in Moscow] and their resulting unhappiness sparked disorientation, depression, and desire for revenge” (273). In the most exciting chapter, “The Diplomacy of Trauma,” Costigliola provides the most conclusive proof of personal impact on diplomacy. He emphasizes the negative emotions that the closed, distrustful, and unfriendly Soviet system provoked in Anglo-Saxon diplomats and observers in Moscow. The Soviet leadership, fearing that “the free competition of open contact threatened security,” doggedly dismissed foreigners’ “right to associate with locals,” which for Americans “figured as the personal corollary to the Open Door policy, a traditional US and, to a lesser extent, British tenet” (262). After establishing official contacts between the two countries in 1933, the first year proved promising,
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and therefore the disappointment that followed was enormous. As a consequence, “just as the political became personal, so could the personal become political—with disastrous consequences for diplomacy,” preparing the road to the Cold War (262). Each member of the Big Three believed that it was his country’s efforts that had won the war. If they did not expect outright gratitude from the other two, they at least felt vindicated in enjoying certain privileges, the lack of which, however, created aggression. Cultural differences, suppressed and tolerated during the war years, now erupted with full force. The Western powers believed they were superior, while the Soviets were insecure on this point, and insecurity often breeds aggression. Two weeks after Roosevelt’s death, at the drawing up of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco, compromise was still in the air, though hostility was already tangible. The last illusion of cooperation may have been Harry Hopkins’ trip to Moscow in June 1945, when Hopkins, although carrying Truman’s message, negotiated with Stalin in FDR’s compromising manner. Stalin also seems to have wanted to strike a deal before Potsdam. The two most important points of the Potsdam Conference that defined the Cold War for decades were the German question, burdened with the reparation question, and, although hardly mentioned, the atomic bomb. On account of the atomic secret, on the American side the question of superiority and national security intensified, which only increased the already deep Soviet distrust. Truman cast the die soon enough and the world entered the atomic age and the Cold War. For a long time, the last meeting that tried to achieve cooperation and compromise was the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers. But any “Byrnes’s Rooseveltian deal making” was in vain, because emotionally driven persons interfered (386). The main opposing force was the Harriman-Kennan pair. Harriman was among those who went to Moscow with great expectations in 1943, but by the spring of 1945 the new ambassador had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union and deemed any cooperation impossible and harmful between the two countries. When Roosevelt died, Harriman was one of the most vehement voices against cooperating with the Soviets, and the one “who had worked most tirelessly to distort and undo Roosevelt’s vision” (428). Costigliola partly attributes to him Americans viewing the Soviets as enemies by the end of the war. Harriman, believing in his nation’s superiority in every way, believed that only being tough with the communists would lead to results. “This was Harriman’s dangerous thesis: pressure the Soviets and they would back
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down” (347). Kennan, the theoretical architect of the containment policy, also proved an obstacle on the road to possible cooperation. Partly owing to his frustration that his messages had been neglected by the State Department, Kennan did a lot to thwart the possibility of reaching a compromise with the Soviets. Truman himself had his share in launching the Cold War. Stemming from his insecurity and unpopularity, fueled by eagerness to prove himself, he initiated strong-handed politics that simplified things. Truman, whom FDR considered “colorless” and with “no vision,” looked at the communists with a great deal of antipathy (227). And since Roosevelt failed to involve Truman in foreign policy decisions and plans, the anti-Soviet axis in and out of government had an easy time convincing him to take a strong stand against the Soviet Union. As Costigliola points out, Truman, in his plain and honest manner, lacked exactly those traits so important for successful diplomacy and of which Roosevelt was a great master of. “Despite long hours at his Oval Office desk, Truman remained short on perspective and patience” (388). That does not mean that Truman is alone to blame. Stalin was just as responsible for the start of the Cold War with his “merciless, obstinate, and narrow-minded policies” (392). In many situations the Soviet leader gave the wrong answers, and by alienating and infuriating Anglo-Saxon diplomats and observers, he unintentionally prepared a situation in which those cold-shouldered Americans directed their home country’s political leadership and the man on the street as far as the Soviet Union was concerned. Regardless of who is to blame, emotions reigned free and there was no turning back. The crisis in Iran, the Turkish problem, the situation in China—all undermined the possibility of finding compromise. But the most tangible launchpad of the Cold War occurred within a few weeks in 1946 in three foreign policy declarations by Stalin, Kennan, and Churchill. “[E]ach of the three manifestos was simplified, comprehensive, and culturally resonant—in a word, ideological” (394). All three texts could be interpreted in a magnified and extreme way, one from which radical conclusions would be drawn. For Costigliola “a key point” remains that “Stalin apparently did not believe that his emphasis on ideology mandated a cold war” (395). Churchill and Kennan further developed Harriman’s thesis that the Soviet Union understood only raw power, and, unfortunately, the Soviets appear to have thought the same about the West. An important clue as to how much these three declarations were about the present then and not about the recent
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past lies in the fact that Roosevelt’s name was never mentioned in any of them! Costigliola believes that the Cold War was inevitable—at least in the political and ideological sense—but the military dimension could have been avoided. For such an outcome, however, much more cooperation would have been needed, beginning first and foremost with the atomic bomb, which, according to Costigliola’s reasoning, might have been achieved had Roosevelt survived a few more years. Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances is an important and well-written book. Not because it recounts familiar events, but because it is able to examine the main figures from a new perspective and, by doing so, can demonstrate how important personal views, cultural differences, and mutual misunderstanding were in the onset of the Cold War. In his conclusion, Costigliola characterizes Roosevelt as someone who “reinforced his diplomacy, especially with the difficult Soviets, by cultivating personal ties, playing to emotional dispositions, minimizing ideological and cultural differences, and restraining explosive emotions” (419), but, as the title of the book states, he lost any alliance he may have built during the war years. Roosevelt’s death came at the worst possible moment, because many of the agreements of the earlier conferences were still hanging in the air. With Truman’s ascendency to the presidency, however, the Harriman-Kennan axis, previously pushed to the background, came to the forefront, and “the kind of quiet deals formerly reached by the Big Three became unworkable” (422). Eszterházy Károly College Note
Frank Costigliola teaches history at the University of Connecticut, and has been for decades working on American foreign relations. The recipient of numerous awards, he serves on various prominent historian groups; for example, in 2009 he was president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). The author of several books and articles, Costigliola is presently editing George F. Kennan’s diaries. 1
———HJEAS———
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“Meet Me in Montauk”: Philosophers Explore the Spotless Mind Szilárd Orosz Grau, Christopher, ed. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. xv + 160 pages. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the fourth volume in Routledge’s Philosophers on Film series. In his introduction to Talk to Her, the opening volume of the series, Noël Carroll notes the recent surge of anthologies seeking out the intersections of philosophy and popular culture. Indeed, the three publishers that, according to Carroll, have been “trolling in this market” collectively published an astounding 120 titles since 2000, more than 100 of which were published in the last five years. I seriously doubt that a reasonably high quality of scholarship can be maintained with such an output rate, especially in the case of such titles as Twilight —, Golf —, or iPod and Philosophy. Nevertheless, notable philosophers regularly contribute to these collections: Carroll himself has had articles published in four such volumes—on The Sopranos, Monty Python, Hitchcock, and the undead, respectively. The approach taken by Routledge seems to be much more refined than any of the other three series, with only seven volumes published over the course of five years; a distinguished and widely published philosopher editing each volume; and, most importantly, a much tighter focus on a single outstanding movie with an obvious philosophical agenda (Memento, Fight Club, and Blade Runner, among others). Eternal Sunshine was edited by Christopher Grau, a great choice for this job, since he had previously edited a volume entitled Philosophers Explore the Matrix and had written an important article about Eternal Sunshine in the illustrious 2006 Film as Philosophy special issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Given all the above auspicious considerations, I expected a brilliant essay collection about this brilliant movie. However, the book failed to fully live up to my—admittedly great—expectations. The collection features an emotional foreword by the film’s director, Michel Gondry, an insightful introduction by Grau, and articles of rather uneven quality by six further contributors. Two excellent articles (Troy Jollimore’s in chapter 3, Stephen L. White’s in chapter 6) and two fairly interesting ones (Valerie Tiberius’s in chapter 4, Julia Driver’s in chapter 5) are framed by two slightly out-ofplace essays. From among these two, C. D. C. Reeve’s psychoanalytic reading (chapter 2) offers several valid points, yet it operates with a “broadly ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
Freudian focus” (4) while eschewing engagement with existing psychoanalytic scholarship. Much more problematic is George Toles’s sixth and last essay (chapter 7), which incredibly occupies one-third of the volume, also almost completely avoids scholarly dialogue, and is altogether very badly written (only one example of which is the annoying fact that the 47-page paper is not structured in any way). In what follows, I will examine these chapters in the order they appear in the book. After a short synopsis of the movie, Grau’s introduction in chapter 1 offers a modified version of Noël Carroll’s taxonomy of philosophical approaches to cinema, found in his above mentioned introduction to Talk to Her (2). In Grau’s phrasing, these are philosophy of motion pictures (the philosophical analysis of cinema in general), philosophy in film (investigating how certain philosophical problems and discourses are represented in individual films), and film as philosophy (analyzing ways in which films contribute to philosophical discourses with novel ideas) (3). He then attempts to fit the six contributions in these categories before adding perceptive two-page elucidatory abstracts for each. In my opinion, Grau’s taxonomy is more refined and serviceable than Carroll’s, but when it comes to its actual application on the essays, he is much less successful: his categorizations are fuzzy and debatable. Placed shrewdly first among the essays, C. D. C. Reeve’s piece provides a useful introduction into the complexities of the plot and the psychology of the characters and homes in on some crucial topics that receive further attention in the subsequent articles. I am, however, skeptical about its philosophical agenda—and consequently its place in this volume: I think it does not sustain enough philosophical interest to be categorized as philosophy of film, but rather as plain, old-fashioned psychoanalytic film criticism. The psychological close reading is concerned chiefly with the lengthy fantasy sequences when the unconscious Joel (Jim Carrey) tries to protect his memories of his ex-lover Clementine (Kate Winslet, hereafter Clem) from erasure. Reeve aims to show that the roots of Joel’s emotional and sexual life go back to his childhood traumas, so his Clem-related memories are inseparable from the memories of his childhood and one cannot be erased without the other. Reeve maintains that Joel needs to become an adult to establish a functional relationship with Clem, and that this is exactly what happens during the erasure procedure: in a quasipsychoanalytic journey, Joel finds the roots of his attachment to Clem and (perhaps because Lacuna Inc.’s memory-erasure procedure is not failsafe, as
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indicated by the organization’s depiction as sloppy, Reeve argues) somehow manages to mature through it. Reeve’s essay also involuntarily touches upon a problem that is implicit all throughout the book: the boundaries of the artwork under scrutiny and the question of its authorship. To support their respective arguments, both Reeve and later Toles quote passages from the published shooting script by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman that are left out from the finished film, and, had they been included, would have had changed important aspects of the film. Reeve, for instance, quotes Clem making a derogatory statement about Joel’s behavior when they went out on the frozen Charles River. However, in the movie, this scene is their most harmonious, uncorrupted moment together. Some other contributors also tend to refer exclusively either to Kaufman (Driver, Toles) or to Gondry (White). These instances highlight a theoretical and factual error shared by the contributors (but not the editor). No recent cinematic authorship theorist (not even intentionalists like Paisley Livingstone) would allow for considering either the screenwriter or the director as exclusive authors of a film. This is especially true for this film: both main creators can and should have equal claim on the end product. The film is an integral part of Kaufman’s oeuvre, engaging many of the philosophical issues that his earlier films directed by Spike Jonze or his own later direction also explore. However, as it is brilliantly demonstrated by White in chapter 6, Gondry’s music videos and his film The Science of Sleep have long had a preoccupation with memory, the physical and virtual traces the past leaves in the present. I believe that without Gondry’s idiosyncratic style, Kaufman’s script could never have been made into a film of such artistic integrity. By contrast, Grau rightly praises both Gondry’s “highly original visual creativity” (1) and Kaufman’s “sharp intelligence” (2) in his introduction. Furthermore, the decision to open the book with a note on both the director and the screenwriter is also to be applauded. Troy Jollimore’s essay in chapter 3 is a prime example of philosophy in film, even though Grau eschews categorizing it as a clear-cut case. The only contributor to interpret the last scene of the film pessimistically, Jollimore offers a highly informed Nietzschean reading of Eternal Sunshine. The film clearly invites such interpretations, as a Nietzsche quote about forgetfulness is recited in a key scene. At the crux of Jollimore’s reading is Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” thought experiment, which, he suggests, the film’s last scene is a reenactment of, thus the lovers are bound to repeat the same mistakes over again. Jollimore proposes four “affirmation theses,”
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derived from Nietzsche’s writings, and argues that Clem and Joel learn to become “immoralists” in the Nietzschean sense, because they are able to affirm their love even in the face of a surely doomed relationship. In this sense, his reading is pessimistic only from the point of view of romantic movies’ generic conventions. He makes the fine point that while conventional happy endings leave the audience wondering whether the couple “really love each other, or are they merely in love with their own anticipated joy . . . , one cannot doubt that Joel and Clementine are true lovers” (59), because they accept all the pain that they must know awaits them. Valerie Tiberius’s mildly stimulating writing in chapter 4 is concerned with decision making, analyzing the way Joel’s three distinct emotional states (before the memory erasure, after it, and after learning about it all) affect his decisions. She finds that although powerful emotions (like the anger and resentment at the bitter end of a relationship) may distort a person’s view, the complete lack of emotions that accompanies a memory loss prevents one from reflecting and making an informed decision. Tiberius unsurprisingly argues that Joel is capable of making the best decisions after he learns about the erasure process, when his powerful emotions are available for him to learn from and his emotional detachment enables him to view his late relationship with Clem in context, without focusing on the latest and most painful part, as people usually do. Tiberius also makes the somewhat obvious claim that people’s changing emotional outlooks affect their decisions; that is, the more perspectives of one’s emotional multivalence involved, the better the decision. She also argues that, contrary to some—rather obscure—accounts, acknowledging multiple perspectives in one’s decision-making does not hurt one’s sense of agency, and that it is a flawed approach to bind the notions of agency and a unified self together. Julie Driver makes some strong points in chapter 5, exploring the question of how self-imposed memory erasure (or simply forgetting) can hurt those who wish to be remembered. She starts off from the assumption that “one way to harm a person is to fail to fulfill that person’s desires” (82), irrespective of whether those desires are de re, specific (like Joel wants to be remembered specifically by his ex-lover), or de dicto, unspecific (like someone wanting to be remembered by people in the future). Driver shows through a hypothetical example of an amnesiac and his family that the unilateral loss of intimate memories can really hurt the one(s) being forgotten. Furthermore, following the work of Avishai Margalit, she argues
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that in some cases (for example, the Holocaust) it is our moral obligation to remember people we never knew, even if it was never their desire to be remembered. Extending this argument with the help of Derek Parfit’s success theory, she somewhat unconvincingly adds that if a person’s de dicto desire to be remembered long after his death was crucial to the way he lived his life, he may be harmed by a (general) failure to remember him. I consider chapter 6 the high point of the collection: Stephen L. White’s brilliant analysis of Eternal Sunshine in the context of Gondry’s earlier music videos and subsequent film. White aims to show that Gondry’s oeuvre implicitly critiques concepts of film theory as well as theories of perception, particularly the one holding that the photographic image has representational relation to space, and that this is analogous to human visual experience, inasmuch as both are unmediated. White first examines Gondry’s preoccupation with optical as opposed to real-world traces of the past found in the present, and he claims that the latter feature in Eternal Sunshine mostly as a contrast between the presence and absence of physical traces. He then considers how Gondry’s works challenge the supposed objectivity of both human visual perception and that of the camera image, through reversals of causation and agency, the use of doubles and simulacra, or picture-within-picture effects. Gondry, he argues, reminds us that perception is never passive, but objects are “always already experienced under a variety of fundamental categories and distinctions” (11) and that “we are given a world saturated with meaning and with the past” (108). In this respect, Gondry’s “philosophical film practice” (109) follows the phenomenological tradition in philosophy. Regrettably, Grau chose to finish the volume on much less of a high note, with George Toles’s essay. My biggest—though by far not the only— problem with the piece is that the author proposes to make an exciting point which never really gets made over its considerable length. However, in his two-page synopsis of this chapter, Grau manages to make it quite clearly with the help of a personal reminiscence by Gondry (11-12). Toles’s point apparently is that, contrary to what Kaufman says in an interview, it is conceivable that we come to know Clem’s real personality through Joel’s imagination, suggesting—in Grau’s words—that “imaginative engagement . . . with those close to us allows for access to real truths about those persons, truths perhaps otherwise unavailable” (12). To this end, Toles begins a close reading of Clem and Joel’s train ride from Montauk, but after a few pages his line of reasoning strays off too often and for too long to be cohesive. Toles’s insistence on metaphoric language that completely
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annihilates academic discourse reaches its lowest point when he tries to explain Joel’s motives with a lengthy, poetic block quote in the tone of a dramatic monologue that undoubtedly he himself has written from Joel’s perspective, with the absurdly naïve explanation that Joel’s “actions tell us” all this (121-22). He also quotes from several literary authors gratuitously, simply for a catchy phrase or sentence (in contrast with Jollimore, whose literary quotes are always to the point), while critical/theoretical support is virtually non-existent in his—I must remind you—47-page essay. At half this length, this essay might have been tolerable, even though I can see the editor’s quandary: what to edit out of a text that is so consistently mediocre? Relying on psychological research, Tiberius notes that the “peak and the end of the experience” is weighed “more heavily than the duration” (63). As Toles’s essay is both the (negative) peak and the end of this volume, its inclusion in this position might have been Grau’s editorial strategy to reproduce in the reader the impulse that made Clem and Joel turn to Lacuna for memory erasure. Nonetheless, the reader should not be so quick to forget this collection, as it has serious merits, with two very important contributions to the critical discourse on this excellent film. University of Debrecen ———HJEAS———
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David Mamet at His Best as Indie Auteur Szilárd Orosz Tzioumakis, Yannis. The Spanish Prisoner. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. xii + 154 pages. Yannis Tzioumakis’s The Spanish Prisoner, about David Mamet’s 1997 film of the same title, is the first volume of the American Indies series published by Edinburgh University Press. The series editors, Tzioumakis and Gary Needham, recognized the need for more detailed academic scrutiny of American “indie” cinema with respect to individual titles—an area still underrepresented within film studies, even though the oeuvre of some iconic filmmakers like Tarantino or the Coen brothers have been widely examined in more general terms. Therefore, each volume of the series focuses on a single “indie” film, generally quite promising ones, such as Memento, Lost in Translation, and Being John Malkovich. The emphasis here is on “indie,” as the meaning of the term “independent cinema” has changed considerably in the last two decades. Both editors in the series preface, and then Tzioumakis in chapter 1, argue that the shortened label much better fits recent developments of film production practices since the term “independent” typically signified financial independence before the 1990s, whereas, by the end of that decade, films produced in this sector were largely financed and distributed either by companies, like Miramax and New Line Cinema, that had been taken over by one of the major Hollywood studios (Disney and Warner, respectively) or companies that were established as a so-called “classics division” of a major (like Sony Pictures Classics and Fox Searchlight). While it may be logical to start a series on American indies with such an industry overview, I would not consider it an integral part of a book which supposedly focuses entirely on a single film. Additionally, these structural shifts in the industry have been very well mapped by now: both of the books I have previously reviewed for this journal (Geoff King’s 2005 American Independent Cinema [HJEAS 14.1] and the 2008 American Cinema of the 1990s, edited by Chris Holmlund [HJEAS 17.1]) discussed these important developments at length, as did Tzioumakis in his 2006 volume American Independent Cinema (mostly chapter 8). Furthermore, I fail to see how this chapter ties in with Tzioumakis’s thesis, namely that The Spanish Prisoner, along with most Mamet films, is a prime example of the as yet unrecognized separate genre, the confidence game film. Thus the first ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
chapter seems somewhat superfluous; a bit longer series preface with more references to the secondary sources might have done equally well. However, this is just the first of the book’s numerous structural inconsistencies: throughout the five chapters of this slim volume, the reader never really knows where the text is supposed to be going. Those expecting close analyses of Mamet’s film from multiple angles are in for a disappointment since the book features only about 10 pages of actual film criticism about the actual film. Not that the film deserves a book-length study. Although the narrative is interesting enough, it lacks the depth that would compel somebody to write a whole (albeit slim) book about it. I am not alone in this opinion: most of the critics quoted in the book found the film “ingenious but glassily unengaging, like watching a game of chess at a distance of 100 metres” (67). Critics usually commented on the emotional detachment and the lack of engagement with the characters. As almost every character has a role in the con, we are left to side with protagonist Joe Ross (Campbell Scott), who has the charisma of a damp cloth, so the viewer sometimes feels compelled to side with the swindlers, who execute the brilliantly orchestrated con. Tzioumakis explains the film’s ambivalent critical response and the modest box office failure in the American market (it nearly earned back its $10 million production costs in the home market, not counting foreign figures and secondary distribution) with Mamet’s “‘anticlassical’ aesthetic” (68). He argues that Mamet’s “practical aesthetics” approach, which advocates subordinating every aspect of filmmaking to the narrative, involves a high level of theatricality, stylized gestures, and dialogue delivery, and generally less “cinematic” techniques, all of which necessarily distances viewers from the characters. Furthermore, the intricate narrative and the distinctive visual style, both defying the rules of Hollywood filmmaking (hence “anti-classical”), also make the film difficult to access for spectators. He argues that “The Spanish Prisoner does not invite spectators to respond emotionally to the story in the same ways they would be ‘forced’ to respond to a classical narrative, to a film where clarity of comprehension is at the very core and all questions are neatly answered” (68). Since most aestheticians would agree that evoking an emotional response is a completely valid aim of any artwork and not by far exclusive to Hollywood movies, the word “force” seems needlessly blunt. Moreover, anti-classical style works perfectly with emotional engagement. On the one hand, it is entirely possible to respond emotionally to a movie (or any work
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of narrative art) without clarity of comprehension, even if no questions are answered. While we do relate emotionally to the protagonists in Kafka’s The Trial, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, it would be strange to argue that these narrative works of art aspire to clarity or ease of comprehension. On the other hand, theatricality and stylization do not necessarily involve detachment from the characters. It would be difficult to find an indie director employing a more theatrical style, resorting to less visual extravagance, and demanding a more stylized performance from his actors than Hal Hartley (whose acclaimed Henry Fool was screened together with The Spanish Prisoner at the 1997 Toronto Festival and later went on to win Best Screenplay in Cannes). Hartley’s characters, nevertheless, are always as fascinating as his realist stories and absurdist dialogues (incidentally, the two traditions associated with Mamet’s dramatic works [30-31]). The cardinal difference between the two directors is that Hartley’s characters are always human, while Mamet’s could be played by robots and we would care just as much about their fates. To become a successful movie, even a masterfully written screenplay needs either emotionally engaging characters—which The Spanish Prisoner clearly lacks—or visual flair. Somewhat schizophrenically, Tzioumakis tries to play down the importance of visual style, emphasizing instead Mamet’s preference for story, all the while arguing that the film has a distinctive, even “‘excessive’ visual style” (77), which seems important enough for him to print it on the book’s back cover. However, he supports this claim with exactly two examples, both from a single crucial scene where Joe is conned out of “the process,” a mysterious red book full of figures that would allow Joe’s employers to control the global market. One of Tzioumakis’s examples is an unconventional two-minute shot that breaks the old Hollywood 180° rule, while the other is the fast sequence of fifteen shots (“‘excessive’ editing,” apparently). During this sequence, “the process” is swapped for an empty book within the implausible duration of a single 3.5-second shot—“at an impossible narrative space and time” (75), he convincingly argues. Although these few pages are, along with a similar section at the end of chapter 5, the most thought-provoking part of the book, they fail to convince the reader about the supposedly high level of Mamet’s visual skills. Tzioumakis also uses the word “excessive” to make other key points, referring to “sequences and shots that are ‘excessive’ in meaning” (83); that is, provide clues (or sometimes red herrings) in a much too obvious manner. Once again, although I agree with the basic idea that
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Mamet deliberately conveys an excessive amount of information, I would hardly categorize this as an element of his visual style. Although some of these instances use the film frame to present excessive clues, these are usually verbal, like the shot of the plane ticket discernibly to Venezuela, or indexical, like the shot of the airport X-ray display showing the gun planted on Joe (neither of these examples is mentioned by Tzioumakis). In my opinion, Tzioumakis fails to dismiss the stereotype that Mamet’s films are “bound by language” (28). I have devoted so much space to Tzioumakis’s treatment of the movie itself because I think, despite all my reservations, these parts of the book (chapter 4 and, in part, chapter 5) deserve the most attention. I already mentioned that chapter 1 largely reiterates previously available information, perhaps with a slightly different focus. It is chapter 2, however, that most blatantly indulges in gratuitous (excessive, if you wish) information. The idea behind the chapter would, in itself, be quite reasonable: tracing Mamet’s filmmaking career in relation to indie cinema; that is, to what extent he was being considered and marketed as an indie auteur (with separate emphasis on both labels). This is done, in large part, however, through a detailed (and I mean very detailed) description (and I do not mean analysis) of the promotional material, posters, and, mostly, trailers, used in the marketing of Mamet’s films. In the age of IMDB and YouTube it took me 5 minutes to locate all the trailers and posters which he describes at length. The chapter does offer some interesting insights on how the Mamet “brand name” (33), denoting an accomplished Hollywood screenwriter, came to signify first an indie auteur starting with the 1994 Oleanna and later a mainstream Hollywood auteur in the 2000s, but it could easily have been cut to a third of its length and still retain its informative content. The case study presented in chapter 3 introduces the reader into the production and distribution processes of the indie film sector as well as into the marketing of an indie auteur through The Spanish Prisoner. As the first volume of the series, it is useful for readers to become aware of the difficult road an indie movie has to walk to get produced, distributed, and, perhaps, not fail at the box office. On the other hand, I hope subsequent volumes in the series will avoid going into such detail about the production of the film under scrutiny. Laboriously detailing how many screens the film was showing on a particular week after its premiere proves especially tedious, as the main point was merely that its box office surpassed the revenues of all earlier and subsequent Mamet films, while still falling short of breakeven.
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Having attempted to emancipate Mamet’s films from the critical neglect they “unfairly” (29) received, Tzioumakis proceeds to pursue his main thesis and, by distinguishing it from the thriller and the crime film, critically establishes the distinct con artist genre, whose existence, he notes reproachfully, film critics have been reluctant to accept (122). He furthermore maintains that The Spanish Prisoner belongs to the con game subgenre, even though Mamet himself described the film as a “light romantic thriller” inspired by Hitchcock (121). On the whole, I can accept Tzioumakis’s argument but remain skeptical about the usefulness of this newly constructed generic framework for either students of film or moviegoers at large. Apparently, the new label’s greatest merit is that it would alert viewers already familiar with the genre not to take any information the film offers on face value. On the other hand, the handful of relatively unknown films Tzioumakis lists as representatives of the con artist genre do not seem to make the case for a separate generic category, and makes it completely understandable why critics never bothered differentiating them from crime films. The problem with this book lies not so much in the fact that it is not really about the film featured on its title page. So much of it is about Mamet’s cinematic work in general that it could have been developed into a fair treatment of Mamet’s work as a writer/director, a territory that invites research, as, according to Tzioumakis, the only two book-length studies of Mamet’s cinema focus almost exclusively on his early (1987-91) films (28). Of course, then it would not have fit into this series. Alternatively, it could have been edited down to a fine 40-page article about The Spanish Prisoner, which could still have accommodated the argument concerning the new generic framework. As it is, it is simply not a good book. University of Debrecen ———HJEAS———
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ABSTRACTS 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Beáta Sáfrány Although the anger and hatred provoked by the horrible events of 9/11 might have been soothed by the news of Osama bin Laden’s capture, the idea that the truth about the attacks has not been uncovered even ten years after that fateful day still lurks in some people’s mind. This idea is fed upon by the ever-seductive conspiracy theories which propagate two major interpretations: the MIHOP (made-it-happen-on-purpose) and the LIHOP (let-it-happen-on-purpose) explanation. The essay describes and debunks the most popular 9/11 conspiracy theories in both categories. (BS) Marking, Consciousness, Fabulation: The Lady’s Presence in Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant” János V. Barcsák The essay analyzes Percy Bysshe Shelley’s somewhat neglected narrative poem “Sensitive Plant” and argues that the text incorporates three distinct layers of narrative: the fable told in Parts First and Second, the meta-fable narrated in Part Third, and a meta-meta-fable appearing in the Conclusion. It interprets the fable of the first two sections as primarily functioning to outline a conception of self-consciousness by opposing it to nature and to natural process. This conception is then deconstructed in the meta-fable of Part Third, which undermines the oppositions of Parts First and Second relying on the demystifying power of death. This questioning of the authority of the original fable by the negativity of death is, in turn, undermined by the Conclusion. In particular, this section questions the reality of death and asserts the survival of the Lady who appears in Part Second as the principle of order in nature and apparently dies before the demystifying movement of death begins the meta-fable. Most interpretations of the poem consider this closing as a kind of tag, expressing a “logocentric dream” and not forming an integral part of the main text. The essay argues, in contrast to this opinion, that the assertion of the Lady’s survival necessarily follows from the structure of the previous narrative; more particularly, from the fact that the Lady’s presence is unmarked from the start. This way the Conclusion forms an integral part of the narrative as ________________________________________
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.1. 2013. Copyright © 2013 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
a whole and can even be said to account for the genesis of the first two layers of the fable. This meta-meta-fable can even be seen as offering a fable of all fabulation. (JB) Being Bemused by National Pride: George Orwell’s Patriotism during the Second World War Ivett Császár Orwell’s intensifying attachment to his homeland during the Second World War might appear contradictory to his confessed commitment to “democratic socialism.” If, however, one takes into account his strong identification with the traditional ideal of masculinity and acknowledges that patriotism has been an integral part of traditional masculinity, the contradiction becomes intelligible. Examining three patriotic essays written during the war—“My Country Right or Left” (1939), “The Lion and the Unicorn” (1940), “The English People” (1944)—from the aspect of gender, the essay explores how Orwell’s unconditional and uncritical acquiescence in the myth of national unity informed his views on masculinity and femininity. Orwell’s implicit vision of a male-centered English society with women relegated to motherhood and prostitution is in no way radically different from the explicit gender ideology of German fascism against which he sought to fight. His lack of consideration for women, his way of habitually connecting femininity to negative concepts like passivity, and his representation of women either as idle bourgeoisie, prostitutes, or, at best, mothers of the nation, belies to some extent the general view of him as a socially sensitive writer. (ICs) Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin and Women’s Rights in Eighteenth-Century United States Ali Shehzad Zaidi The essay situates Alcuin within a historical context of debate about the education and rights of women in the late eighteenth century. Written in the form of dialogues between a young schoolteacher and a widowed socialite, Alcuin is now recognized as the first published fictional work by the first major novelist of the United States. In this seminal work, Brown affirms Mary Wollstonecraft’s compelling vision of the equality of the sexes while exposing the patronizing tone of contemporary male discourse on women.
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Alcuin is a deft piece of literature which undermines faith in the apparent enlightenment of its time. (ASZ) Liminal Places and Zora Neale Hurston’s Religio-Cultural Space in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine Péter Gaál-Szabó C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya describe the Black Church in terms of a “black sacred cosmos,” which reflects a “particular cultural and historical configuration” of the African American community. Their concept can be well adopted to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine to analyze her concept of a specific religio-cultural space. Her sacred cosmos constructed on the function of such binaries as the sacred and the profane, folk and institutional religion, as well as Christian and non-Christian religiosity often also contributes to the construction of liminal places. Despite the tension inherent in her spatiality due to these binaries and its heterogeneity of many kinds, Hurston manages to establish a nurturing spatial framework of cultural implosion that proves an autonomous social/cultural space in the American scene. (PG-Sz) Anxious Masculinity and Silencing in Ernest Hemingway’s “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” Teodóra Dömötör The essay investigates Hemingway’s ambiguous representation of masculinity in his short story “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.” Hemingway’s preoccupation with gender crisis—a cultural trend prominent in the Roaring Twenties—facilitates the textual manipulation that he applies in this story. He utilizes hiatus, silence, masking, and other methods to frustrate the reader’s expectations and, by extension, challenge the standardized interpretation of the plot. Hemingway ventures into an exploration of men’s frailty: “Mrs and Mrs. Elliot” portrays the sentiment of a defeated American man through images highlighting personal tragedies. Extreme relationship dysfunction, latent homosexuality, and repressed frustration reveal modernist sensibility in this story, underlining how contemporary heteronormative hegemony, social conventions, and inadequate role models disturbed the successful formation of gender identity in early 1920s United States (TD).
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The Biotechnological Uncanny: Frank Miller’s Ronin Pramod K. Nayar The essay argues that Frank Miller’s graphic novel, Ronin, is a text that offers a vision of techno-capitalism through the aesthetics of the uncanny. The uncanny is at once technological and organic, as biology meshes with fantasy and technology. Beginning by examining Miller’s primitivism, the essay then modulates into a discussion of the hi-tech as uncanny as Miller underscores the “problem” of the foreign body. Miller creates a confusion of categories wherein borders and bodies merge into each other in what may be termed a bio-tech uncanny. He concludes with a new-beginning-ofthe-world scenario which occurs because techno-capitalism and its greed take us back to the primordial in the form of the ancient warrior but now in an inter-racial context. According to Miller, the foreign and the inter-racial are the hope for the future of humanity. (PKN) Writing on the Margins: Beckett Scholarship Out of the Archives Erika Mihálycsa The essay gives an overview of the most important collective volumes in Beckett scholarship that have been published since the Tokyo centenary conference. Most of these volumes attempt to reposition Beckett scholarship on the changing map of literary studies and theory, as well as to re-invent a critical and theoretical discourse that could (re-)empower, instead of domesticating and exhausting, the potential of resistance in Beckettian texts. The essay gives an overview of the main directions in recent Beckett studies, starting with the unprecedented proliferation of genetic and manuscript studies, through the autobiographical turn; it addresses recent developments in studies of Beckett and philosophy or philosophy’s Beckett, and, perhaps most importantly, the metamorphoses of theoretical discourse in Beckettian scholarship, from a writing of (essentially postmodern) endlessness to one of liminality and endings. Finally, it addresses the vital relationship between the text-world Beckett authored and cutting-edge contemporary theatre, media, and art, looking for examples of bringing out the potential of transgressiveness and resistance of these works instead of commodifying and petrifying them. (EM)
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS János V. Barcsák János V. Barcsák obtained his MA in English and aesthetics and his Ph.D. in English Romantic Poetry at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He also studied literary theory at the University of Oxford. Since 1994 he has taught at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Piliscsaba, where he is currently senior lecturer. His research focuses mainly on literary theory and English Romanticism. His most recent publications include studies on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry, ethical theory, and the connections between formal logic and literary theory. [
[email protected]] Ivett Császár Ivett Császár has MAs in English and Hungarian Literature from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and in Gender Studies from Central European University. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of English and American Studies of ELTE studying the non-fictional work of George Orwell, with particular emphasis on the implications of the connection between masculinity and nationalism. [
[email protected]] Teodóra Dömötör Teodóra Dömötör completed her Ph.D.—funded by the Balassi Institute— at the University of Surrey, England. Her major research focus is the reevaluation of the concept of the American hero through studying the desire-induced features of a Protestant “Middle American” masculine ideal during the Roaring Twenties. Her broader research interests include American and transatlantic modernist and postmodern literature. Her articles in American and British journals examine the trauma of fatherlessness and the subject’s gender development, social functioning, and emotional competence. [
[email protected]] Péter Gaál-Szabó Péter Gaál-Szabó, Associate Professor at the Ferenc Kölcsey Teacher Training College of the Reformed Church, holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Debrecen. He has published in African American Studies, Gender Studies, and Intercultural Communication, and
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his research pertains to African American Studies, with special emphasis on the interrelation of space/place and (religio)cultural identity. His book on Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction “Ah done been tuh de horizon and back” was published by Peter Lang in 2011. [
[email protected]] Erika Mihálycsa Erika Mihálycsa holds a Ph.D. from Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, where she currently teaches twentieth-century British fiction and drama, as well as an MA seminar in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Her dissertation explored the linguistic poetics of the fiction of Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett, and her articles and reviews have appeared in various, mainly Joyce-related volumes and periodica, including Joyce Studies Annual (2009, 2012), Joyce Studies in Italy (2012), Estudios Irlandeses (2013), HJEAS (2009, 2011), and The AnaChronist (2010). In 2010 she co-organized with Fritz Senn a workshop on specific translation problems in Ulysses at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, with participation from seven European countries, the materials of which she edited with Jolanta Wawrzycka for Scientia Traductionis (2012). She is an advisory editor of European Joyce Studies, published by Rodopi, and of Scientia Traductionis, as well as a translator of modern and contemporary British and Irish literature, including Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. [
[email protected]] Pramod K. Nayar Pramod K. Nayar’s recent work includes Frantz Fanon (Routledge, 2013), Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India (Routledge, 2012), Digital Cool: Life in the Age of New Media (Orient BlackSwan, 2012), besides essays on posthumanism (Modern Fiction Studies), the graphic novel (Studies in South Asian Film and Media), postcolonial writing and human rights (Ariel), colonial fiction (Brno Studies in English), Indian travel writing (South Asian Review, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies), among others. His forthcoming works include Posthumanism (Polity) and a five-volume edited collection, Women in Colonial India: Historical Documents and Sources (CurzonRoutledge). [
[email protected]]
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Beáta Sáfrány Beáta Sáfrány received her BA in English Studies from the College of Nyíregyháza in 2009 and subsequently earned her MA in North American Studies from the University of Debrecen in 2011. Her major research interests lie in American history and culture, particularly popular culture. She currently works as a Customer Service Administrator. [
[email protected]] Ali Shehzad Zaidi Ali Shehzad Zaidi has taught at several universities in New York, most recently at the State University of New York at Canton. He obtained an MA in English from the University of Peshawar (Pakistan), an MA in Spanish from Queens College (City University of New York), and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Rochester. His essays on the fantastic fiction of Mircea Eliade have appeared in various academic journals, including Neohelicon, Balkanistica, Science Fiction, Interlitteraria, Archaevs, and International Journal on Humanistic Ideology. Together with John Asimakopoulos, Zaidi co-founded the Transformative Studies Institute and edits its peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal, Theory in Action. [
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