Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 103)

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements Maurizio Ascari and Adriana Corrado Introduction

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1. The Grand Tour and the Mediterranean Manfred Pfister Travelling in the Traces of … Italian Spaces and the Traces of the Other

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Edward Chaney Egypt in England and America: The Cultural Memorials of Religion, Royalty and Revolution

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Marino Niola The Invention of the Mediterranean

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Alvio Patierno Vesuvius for Everyone in 19th Century France

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Paola Paumgardhen Goethe and Von Archenholz in Naples in 1787: Views of the City between Myth and Reality

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Adriana Corrado Glances at Naples, Centre of Campania Felix: First Step towards a Complex Cultural Theme

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2. Water and Cultural Memory David Skilton Water and Memory

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David Skilton Ruin and the Loss of Empire: From Venice and New Zealand to the Thames

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6 Eleonora Federici Rose Macaulay’s Fabled Shore: Driving through Cities and Landscapes

141

Franca Zanelli Quarantini Water, Mourning and the Quest for Origin in Irène Némirovsky’s Works

151

Olga Binczyk The Modern Voyage: In Search of Identity in the Light of Selected Works of English Writers of the 1930s

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3. Literature and Cityscapes Monica Spiridon The City of Texts

169

Susan Bassnett Seismic Aftershocks: Responses to the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

177

Katia Pizzi Sites of Exchange and Topographies of Memory at the Northeastern Borders of Italy

189

Monica Spiridon Memories of a Post-Metropolis: “Torre e Tasso” across the Atlantic

197

Peter Vassallo Valletta (meta)fictionalized historiographically in Thomas Pynchon’s V

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4. Borders and Conflicts Maurizio Ascari Borders, Frontiers and Boundaries

217

Maurizio Ascari Shifting Borders: The Lure of Italy and the Orient in the Writings of 18th and 19th Century British travellers

227

7 Graham Dawson The ‘Ulster’-Irish Border, Protestant Imaginative Geography and Cultural Memory in the Irish Troubles

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Jola Škulj Cultural Spaces in Border Territories

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Paola Villani The Redemption of the Siren

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Dianna Pickens Captive Naples

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Adriana Corrado Concluding Remarks

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Notes on Contributors

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Acknowledgements Having now passed the proofs of this volume for the press, we feel the duty, which is both a pleasure and a token of our profound gratitude, to thank the European Union for selecting and financing the ACUME project, which Vita Fortunati has created and coordinated with courage and tenacity, gathering together a substantial number of scholars and researchers, and urging them to interact. The end result constitutes an invaluable contribution from those who, working as they do, in the best of the European universities, have the capacity to reflect upon present-day problems and indicate possible courses of action to be pursued together. We hope this volume will contribute to ensure that culture may shine through the gloomy shadows of a present which is obscured by devastating ideologies so as to lead us towards a future of peace. As for us, with our modest critical effort, we aim to put ourselves at the service of this common project in the belief that culture can only aspire to trace a better future by reaching back to the roots of the long process that brought about the diverse European cultural identities, but also gave rise to the conflicts of the 20th century. We are fully aware of the pressing need to seek out new propositions to be passed on to the European Union, in the hope of contributing to build up a multi-faceted container of diversified cultural identities. We wish to thank Vita Fortunati for granting us the possibility of working together, and also Manfred Pfister, who not only contributed to this volume, but also read it thoroughly with great patience, offering us his expert advice. We also express our gratitude to Monica Spiridon and David Skilton, who alleviated our task thanks to their competence and kindness, as well as to Melanie Knospe and Rebekka Rohleder, for their precious help in proofreading the book. A further token of our appreciation goes to the publishers RODOPI, who backed us from the very start. Last but not least, our heartfelt thanks to the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa di Napoli for generously hosting the Conference Sites of Exchange: Cities, Borders, Rivers, Seas, which took place in September 2004 and was the first step upon the journey which has led to this volume. Maurizio Ascari and Adriana Corrado

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Maurizio Ascari and Adriana Corrado

Introduction 1. Places of Exchange and Places of Conflict In recent years, a number of important studies have been devoted to the relationship which exists between places and cultural memory. Suffice it to remember the monumental collective work edited by Pierre Nora – Les lieux de mémoire (1984-92) – or Aleida Assmann’s seminal Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (1999), in which places are seen and analysed as the mediators of cultural memory. The relationship between places and cultural memory is today at the very centre of a lively academic debate that provides scholars with useful methodological guidelines and theoretical frameworks, inviting us to carry out further research in this field. This volume gathers together many voices from all parts of Europe in an attempt to develop, or at least encourage, a collective reflection upon historical – and often mythical – locations and landscapes. But talking of places of exchange inevitably leads to a series of problems. True as it may be that European cultures, peoples, national identities, nations and nationalist claims have all contributed to the creation of what is known as modernity, it is also true that modernity has borne within it, since its very birth, the seeds of an all pervading Euro-centrism – a fertile breeding ground for colonialism and imperialism. Moreover, in this era of globalisation, the idea of exchange is decisively bound to the virtual space of technology – a space taken up by the media and the World Wide Web – rather than to that of specific places. As Anthony D. Smith points out, unlike the national cultures of the past, “Today’s emerging global culture is tied to no place or period. It is context-less, a true melange of disparate components drawn from everywhere and nowhere, borne upon the modern chariots of the global telecommunications system.”1 The more recent stages of globalisation – a phenomenon supported by technological development, which has permitted ever-increasing cultural and economical exchange on a planetary level – have deeply modified the 1

Anthony D. Smith, “Towards a Global Culture?”, in Global Culture, Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. by Mike Featherstone (London, Newbury Park and New Delhi: Sage, 1990), p. 177.

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relationship between community and place, favouring the rise of transnational cultures. We must not, however, forget that globalisation itself is the end result of a centuries-old process – Ronald Robertson situates its germinal phase in the 15th century2 – to which several phenomena connected to the encounter of differences have also contributed, such as travel (from medieval pilgrimages to the voyages of discovery and on to the Grand Tour in the 17th and 18th centuries, right up to the emergence of mass tourism) and widespread conflict (from the colonial empires to the world wars and on to the recent Gulf wars). A study of the manner in which places of exchange are represented, and of their cultural significance, entails an attempt to identify and understand the roots of the many socio-cultural events we are living today and which lead us to conceptualise in a wholly novel manner our relationship with places and cultures. According to the social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, in a world that is marked by an increasing circulation of people and information, the act of substituting the word cultures in the plural for the previous concept of culture in the singular is not enough. The image of the world as a mosaic of different cultures does not suffice to render the idea of the interconnections and conflicts that mark the age of globalisation, where cultures are no longer linked to particular territories or peoples. To encapsulate this new idea of a world where cultures are less and less circumscribed by boundaries, but rather tend to circulate and interfuse, Hannerz utilises a word of Greek origin – ‘ecumene’, which hints at the distant roots and long-standing history of today’s globalisation.3 Indeed, the link between today’s globalisation and the ideal (initially Christian, then of the Enlightenment thinkers and later socialist)4 of an ecumene – a world devoid of boundaries between nations – has been highlighted by many. In the past, however, this utopian ideal has often been tainted with a ‘missionary’ effort to assimilate other cultures in the name of religious or ideological orthodoxy. A postmodern ecumene should, of necessity, be regarded as a global arena where different identities come into contact and hybridise through a dialectical process of exchange. As sociologists and anthropologists point out, the crisis undergone by the nation-state has contributed to exacerbate the polarities which oppose cosmopolitanism and tolerance to fundamentalism (of whatever origin), while re-opening the debate regarding the dichotomy between centre and

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See Ronald Robertson, “Mapping the Global Condition”, in Global Culture, p.27. See Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections. Culture, People, Places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 3-7. See Mike Featherstone, “Global Culture: An Introduction”, in Global Culture, p. 4.

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periphery that traditionally structured cultural exchanges.5 And though the term globalisation is often considered a synonym of homogenisation (or more specifically of Americanisation), many scholars highlight the ‘creative’ possibilities which the intensification of exchanges brings about at a global level. According to Mike Featherstone, Postmodernism is both a symptom and a powerful cultural image of the swing away from the conceptualization of global culture less in terms of alleged homogenizing processes (e.g. theories which present cultural imperialism, Americanization and mass consumer culture as a proto-universal culture riding on the back of Western economic and political domination) and more in terms of the diversity, variety and richness of popular and local discourses, codes and practices which resist and play-back systemicity and order.6

Hannerz, too, points out that throughout the 20th century “the global ecumene has indeed been an organization of diversity”7 and “it is hardly self-evident that the end result of the cultural processes connected to trans-national center/periphery relationships must be a global homogenization of culture.”8 In order to portray the present day situation, Hannerz chooses the metaphor of “creolization” – a process which does not merely constitute “a constant pressure from the centre toward the periphery, but a much more creative interplay.”9 It should therefore be no source of wonder that in the post-modern cultural phase, places of exchange find themselves at the centre of a renewed anthropological, critical and artistic interest. This is clearly demonstrated by the proliferation of terms to define places of travel, from the definition of non-lieux coined by the French ethnologist Marc Augé, to that of places of flow or places of transit, or yet again to that of travelling places, as Alain De Botton designates them in The Art of Travel (2002), where he dwells upon the interest which hotels, petrol stations, diners and cafeterias held for a painter such as Edward Hopper. According to De Botton, the allure of these places is linked to the fact that they offer “a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world” seeing as “it is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves.”10

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See Featherstone, pp. 1-13; Roland Robertson, Globalization, Social Theory and Global culture (London: Sage, 1992); Anthony Giddens, Runaway World. How Globalization is Reshaping our Lives (London: Profile Books, 1999). Featherstone, p. 2. Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity. Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 261. Hannerz, p. 262. Hannerz, p. 265 See Alain De Botton, The Art of Travel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002), pp. 59-60.

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Although borders and boundaries were designed to demarcate, separate and safeguard, in the name of the nation, they must now open up and become also places of transit in order to achieve a necessary re-composition. Contact, not exclusion, should be our goal, for – as Bhabha wrote – “the boundary becomes the place from which something begins its presencing”.11 Though the idea of boundary can be intricate and even ambiguous, as the anthropologists hasten to remind us, a boundary can also be a place of exchange,12 of cultural mediation, where humanity on the move forges new grafts and forms of cultural hybridity, while the prejudice of a fixed, predefined cultural identity cannot but be on its last legs, as Rosi Braidotti wrote when bidding farewell to classical humanism.13 We must now think about how to build up that “nomadic identity”14 of which Braidotti speaks – an idea which is of great help as we attempt to define the course of action to be pursued, born of complex forms of integration and interaction, since “the borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation.”15 In other words, we must commit ourselves to the constant search for “cultural hybridity” which Bhabha16 refers to, and since no fixed or defined and historically accepted identity seems possible in a globalised world, we must make of diversity an irremissible value,17 to be combined with a set of universally shared norms. 11 12

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Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 16. According to Ugo Fabietti, a boundary should be seen as a place of encounter “which unites and allows for interaction at least through dialogue, and not for opposition. Thus, the boundary is no longer a geographical location […] but a space in which anthropology faces those problems of cultural translation which arise, today […] with an ever-increasing urgency.” Ugo Fabietti, “Frontiere, metafore, violenza” in Occidentalismi, ed. by Carla Pasquinelli (Roma: Carocci, 2005), pp. 206-7. All the translations into English of passages from books in Italian are our own. See Rosi Braidotti, “Memoria minoritaria e nomadismi sostenibili”, in Studi di genere e memoria culturale, ed. by Vita Fortunati, Gilberta Golinelli and Rita Monticelli (Bologna: CLUEB, 2004), p. 43. “The process of nomadic-becoming is by no means devoid of suffering and the crossing of limits does not shield us from violence [...] Nomadic-becoming requires an awareness of self as an interactive entity together with the art of knowing how to adapt one’s own intensity to the ways and times of its very promulgation.” Braidotti, p. 50. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 7. “I am attempting some speculative fieldnotes on that intermittent time, and intersticial space, that emerges as a structure of the undecidability at the frontiers of cultural hybridity.” Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation”, in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 312. “The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of

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2. Identity, ‘Otherness’ and Nation Over time, the ‘other’ has increasingly been portrayed as different in negative terms. Diversity has been seen as a weed to be plucked out, although already at the end of the 19th century Ernest Renan claimed that “The noblest countries, England, France and Italy, are those where the bloods are most mixed […] the leading nations of Europe are nations of essentially mixed blood.”18 It is from the words of a great contemporary writer, J.M. Coetzee, that we would like to set out, or more precisely from the question which the young protagonist of the short novel Youth (2002) asks himself, coming, as he does, from South Africa, and having migrated to England in search of himself rather than of a new homeland: How long will he have to live in England before it is allowed that he has become the real thing, become English? Will getting a British passport be enough, or does an odd-sounding foreign name mean he will be shut out for ever? And “becoming English” – what does that mean anyhow?19

What does being English mean in this case? What is the decisive factor that marks one’s national identity? Undoubtedly not the community of language, for the young South-African masters English perfectly, nor even the fundamentally Euro-centric culture within which he manoeuvres and to whose ways and models he bears witness. So what is it that defines one’s national identity? According to Benedict Anderson, at the root of national identity there is a narration: a sort of fictitious tale, a historical reconstruction, the search for a common past in order to give strength and unity to what had been neither coherent nor unitary.20 As we know, the 19th century was characterised by the fictitious building up of nations21 and of diversified national identities,

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difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.” Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 2. Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation” in Nation and Narration, pp. 14-15. J.M. Coetzee, Youth (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 103. “[...] the nation has been thought of and created only recently, but it considers itself ancient. Nationalist traits first emerged between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, but as regards that era, we speak of the re-awakening of nationalisms, as though they had just arisen from a lengthy slumber. We believe that nations have always existed […] a typical means through which modernity produces a tomorrow is that of building up a yesterday. Fashioning the new through the invention of a tradition. A fresh, new community is established by imagining that we belong to a remote, long-forgotten one”. Marco d’Eramo, Preface to Benedict Anderson, Comunità immaginate (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2003), pp. 7-8. “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation – or narration – might seem

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entrenched upon the different national languages, with the fatal consequences to be found in recent history. Other menacing forms of ‘nationalism’, however, now loom on the horizon in a world characterised by the most widespread mingling of peoples, races, ethnic groups and languages,22 but where forms of aggregation among homogeneous groups, at times self-alienated in new forms of ghettos, within established societies, can give rise to invisible yet hyperactive networks. In 1992 Benedict Anderson coined the expression “long-distance nationalist” to define a person who attempts to build up an imagined cultural identity which differs from that of the host country – “while technically a citizen of the state in which he comfortably lives, but to which he may feel little attachment, he finds it tempting to play identity politics by participating (via propaganda, money, weapons, any way but voting) in the conflicts of his imagined Heimat – now only fax-time away”.23 Anderson’s very words seem uncannily to anticipate those historical events to which the news reports of our times bear witness. Only by sweeping away the chauvinistic aspects of nationalism and by revaluing the contribution of each nation to global culture, we can start once more to build up new cultural identities, born of a generalised “nomadicbecoming”,24 to use Braidotti’s definition.

3. Tradition and the Making of New Cultural Identities Though it cannot be denied that literature, while contributing to the birth of nations, also nourished the offshoots of nationalism and imperialism, as Edward Said claimed, it is nonetheless true that literature – and culture at large – can still play a major role in this process of global exchange. Far from

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impossibly romantic and extremely metaphorical, but it is from those narrations that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west.” Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: narrating the nation”. In Nation and Narration, p. 1. “[...] nationalism is by no means obsolete. To the contrary, in the last 150 years the vast migrations brought about by the market, wars and oppression have profoundly damaged that which at one time appeared to be a natural concurrence between national sentiment and the fact of residing for one’s entire life in one’s mother land or father land. Throughout this process, ethicalities have been generated which follow nationalisms in complex and often explosive ways.” Benedict Anderson, “The New World Disorder” in New Left Rewiew (May 1992), p. 13. Benedict Anderson, “The New World Disorder”, p. 13. “Nomadic-becoming, requires an awareness of self as an interactive entity together with the art of knowing how to adapt one’s own intensity to the ways and times of its very promulgation.” Braidotti, p. 50.

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being a ‘thing of the past’, tradition should be regarded as the starting point for the creation of a new cultural phase at a global level. The classics, in particular derive their energy from the act of crossing national borders and reaching out for the ‘other’. Like vampires, the classics owe their protracted life to repeated ‘blood transfusions’ – i.e. repeated readings, or better ‘misreadings’, notably when the reception of these works involves distant cultures, which are contaminated by the classics and simultaneously contaminate them, engendering a continuous flux of ideas and forms. Needless to say translation plays a major role in this process, since – as T.S. Eliot claimed in What is a Classic (1944) – a work of literature becomes a real classic when it achieves universality, that is to say when it acquires significance not only in relation to a single national literature, but “in relation to a number of foreign literatures”.25 In other words, a classic is a model for artists who work within different languages and traditions. As Ezio Raimondi recently wrote, “The past, rather than an authority, becomes, in the modern era, a sort of ghost, a spectral force, a hidden energy which re-emerges through quotations. Those ghosts encroach upon our certainties, our gratification or the compromises we contrive with the present.”26 Far from being dead or superfluous, tradition is a powerful force in postmodernity, for it helps us bridge the gap between past and present, inviting us to reassess our certainties, and it also helps us bridge the gap between ourselves and ‘otherness’. Indeed, in this perspective, the postcolonial practice of ‘writing back’ – by means of which messages “are sent from (perceived) peripheries to the centre”27 – is both a way to explore the fissures and contradictions, the prejudices and shortcomings of the Western tradition and also to keep it alive. If our present is characterised by the continuous interaction of individuals who are no longer anchored in stability,28 but rather culturally nomadic – though not necessarily in terms of space – then a further perusal of the traces left by the past can lead to a new idea of culture, which can stem from the concept of “global ecumene” dear to Ulf Hannerz, avoiding the attitude of refusal Homi Bhabha denounced when he wrote that today “nationalist nostalgia cannot drown out the babel on the bluff.”29 In other words, one 25 26

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T.S. Eliot, What is a Classic? (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), p. 27. See Ezio Raimondi, Letteratura e identità nazionale (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 1998), p. XII. See Simon During, “Literature-Nationalism’s other? The case for revision”, in Nation and Narration, p. 151. Braidotti claimed that “the transformation of the paradigm of subjectivity” necessarily leads to “a process of reassembly of the coordinates of subjectivity […] an attempt to release the process of becoming from the dichotomy ourself/other.” Braidotti, p. 56. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 8.

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must steer clear of the errors of the past, marked by an all-pervading, centuries-old Euro-centrism, which later slid towards the logic of colonialism. We should not forget Renan’s meaningful words, “Let us not abandon the fundamental principle that man is a reasonable and moral being, before he is cooped up in such and such a language, before he is a member of such and such a race, before he belongs to such and such a culture.”30 We must thus set off from that which unites and does not separate, in our common journey towards a humanity which is composite and multilingual, in which each individual carries forth his/her own identity and pours it into a cultural continuum where everybody is gathered together,31 so that the future may become “a time of gathering”: Gatherings of exiles and émigrés and refugees, gathering on the edge of “foreign” cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos of cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-line, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present.32

With these words, Bhabha himself seems to be pointing us towards the idea of a global ecumene, which far from being conceived simply as a market for mass products, should be thought of as a cultural container of diversity. The search for profit should give place to a search for meaning. Standardisation should give place to translation.

4. The Volume In this volume we aim to take a closer look at the themes previously dealt with in the course of the conference held at the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa di Napoli from the 23rd to the 26th of September 2004, which centred upon the European places of history and culture. When taking up these themes once more for publication, we chose to subdivide the text into sections, the first of which revolves around the vital role of the Mediterranean and of some of the countries that surround it. We are thus

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Renan, p. 17. “[...] to suggest no salvation, but a strange cultural survival of the people. For it is by living on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind of solidarity.” Homi K. Bhabha. “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation”, p. 320. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation”, p. 291.

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setting aside the expression Mare Nostrum, so dear to the Romans, but which brings into effect an appropriation of peoples and places, and selecting the term Mediterranean – literally ‘between the lands’ – as more apt to describe the connective function performed by this area, originally the birthplace of the great civilisations of the ancient world. The lands bordering the Mediterranean then became, over time, ideal, if not mythical, milestones along the routes travelled by those in search of a shared past – in particular by those 18th century European travellers who helped to build up with their writings that cultural phenomenon we remember as the Grand Tour. As Aleida Assmann wrote, “The history of a past, interrupted, and only discernible in the traces left behind, can be of great significance for the era which follows, providing it recognises, in that past, some of its own foundations.”33 Thanks to their experience and their imagination, those travellers were trying to re-establish a common ground between that past and their present, filling in the gaps by means of words and tales.34 And they were by no means the first travellers to seek out a past steeped in history, in an attempt to bring cultural memory back to life, along routes which intersect across the Mediterranean, following a journey that was begun by the Greek geographer and traveller Pausanias in the second century A.D. and that is still far from being over. The second section leads us back to the theme of water, be it sea or river, all-embracing and in eternal movement, erasing any difference which constitutes an element of division. From this primary liquid, which purifies and levels, a new humankind will once more emerge – one must be allowed to hope – though it may be from the shipwreck35 of a common past. Overcoming the prejudices connected to the ideas of race or nation, this humanity will hopefully regard diversity as a sign of enrichment and see the advent of that nomadic ecumene that represents the ‘utopian’ fruit of globalisation.

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Aleida Assmann, Ricordare. Forme e mutamenti della memoria culturale (Bologna: il Mulino, 2002), p. 344. “The spiritual legacy of the past becomes attainable through the senses [...] the mysterious spirit of the past lives on again in the present.” Assmann, pp. 344-45. As regards the metaphor of shipwreck, we refer to the following passage: “After Simmel, we know that the overriding tone of the philosophy of culture is a tragic, melancholic one. But it is above all in the metaphor of shipwreck […] Salvation literally lies in the gathering of driftwood from the past – setting the metaphor aside: in the gathering of the fragments of disciplines now shipwrecked – in order to build a raft, an object which will bring about survival and, hopefully, new forms of life.” Michele Cometa, Introduction to Christina Lutter and Markus Reisenleitner, Cultural Studies, ed. by Michele Cometa (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2004), pp. XXX-XXXI.

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The third section focuses on the city as a place which was often planned and built for a group or a people whose origins and aspirations were regarded as homogeneous, but which has always been also a place of encounter, of convergence – a place where even the most diversified cultural experiences are shared, as Bhabha confirms: If I have suggested that the people emerge in the finitude of the nation, marking the liminality of cultural identity […] then in the west, and increasingly elsewhere, it is the city which provides the space in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out. It is there that, in our time, the perplexity of the living is most acutely experienced.36

The fourth and last section leads us to reflect upon what is meant by the term ‘border’, and the way in which border-territories, instead of being areas of interchange and contact, have frequently become sources of conflict. Already Renan wondered: “Can one say […] that […] a nation’s frontiers are written on the map and that this nation has the right to judge what is necessary to round off certain contours, in order to reach such and such a mountain and such and such a river, which are thereby accorded a kind of a priori limiting faculty?”37 The issues this volume tackles are delicate and complex. The Europe we know today is the result of centuries-long exchanges, but also of centurieslong conflicts. The encounter of differences engenders both curiosity and suspicion and there is no easy way to hybridisation. Europe is still a cultural and political entity ‘in the making’, and will always be. For this reason, Europeans should not abstain from the ‘great narrative’ of a ‘utopian project’, uniting in a communal effort to achieve a civilisation that is grounded on plurality and openness. Europe should do its utmost to maintain a strong link with its rich and varied cultural past and yet to reinvent itself so as to take up the challenge of a ‘small world’ where ‘otherness’ is here, among us.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict, “The New World Disorder”, New Left Review (May 1992), 3-13. —, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983).

36

37

Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation”, p. 320. Renan, p. 18.

Introduction

21

Assmann, Aleida, Ricordare. Forme e mutamenti della memoria culturale (Bologna: il Mulino, 2002; Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, 1999). Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). Braidotti, Rosi, “Memoria minoritaria e nomadismi sostenibili”, in Studi di genere e memoria culturale, ed. by Vita Fortunati, Gilberta Golinelli and Rita Monticelli (Bologna: CLUEB, 2004), pp. 37-58. Coetzee, J.M., Youth (London: Vintage, 2003). Cometa, Michele, Introduction to Christina Lutter and Markus Reisenleitner, Cultural Studies, ed. by Michele Cometa (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2004), pp. ix-xxxiv. De Botton, Alain, The Art of Travel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002). D’Eramo, Marco, Preface to Benedict Anderson, Comunità immaginate (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2003). Doyle, Don H., Nations Divided (Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 2002). Eliot, T.S., What is a Classic? (London: Faber & Faber, 1944). Giddens, Anthony, Runaway World. How Globalization is Reshaping our Lives (London: Profile Books, 1999). Global Culture, Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. by Mike Featherstone (London, Newbury Park and New Delhi: Sage, 1990). Hannerz, Ulf, Cultural Complexity. Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). —, Transnational Connections. Culture, People, Places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 2002). Occidentalismi, ed. by Carla Pasquinelli (Roma: Carocci, 2005). Raimondi, Ezio, Letteratura e identità nazionale (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 1998). Robertson, Roland, Globalization, Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992). Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). —, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin 2003).

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1. The Grand Tour and the Mediterranean

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Manfred Pfister

Travelling in the Traces of … Italian Spaces and the Traces of the Other I. Travellers search for and follow traces – and they leave their own traces in turn. Both, the traces followed and those left, are inscribed in the cultural memory relating to a particular place and can become powerful topoi in the mnemonic archive that makes up culture – topoi revisited, re-cited and reenacted. ‘Places’ and ‘traces’ do not only rhyme, they also converge semantically as powerful inscriptions in our cultural memory: without traces there are no places and vice versa, and together they construct both cultural difference and also larger identities that exceed cultural boundaries. One such place or topos was, and still is, Naples, as a number of the essays in this anthology demonstrate, among them Paola Paumgardhen’s on Goethe’s and Archenholz’ Naples, Alvio Patierno’s on the Vesuvius of 18th and 19thcentury French scientists and poets, and Dianna Pickens’ on the Neapolitan experience of American GIs and Fulbright scholars at the end of and after the Second World War. Travel writing plays an important role here. Even if there have always been travellers who have insisted on not following traces and on relying for their accounts on autopsy alone, only on what they have seen with their own eyes, at a closer look it becomes evident – be it only in their forceful gestures of negating intertextuality and erasing traces – that they, as all travellers, have always tapped the archives of the cultural memory of both their own and the other culture.1 And this is, of course, particularly true of a place like Naples, which is itself so rich in multi-layered cultural traces, traces that reach from the mythical Parthenopean Siren city to the modern ‘NaplesShanghai’ of the 20th century, as Paola Villani shows in the last section of this anthology, and which has been so densely overwritten with the traces of generations of travellers that the impossibility of saying anything new about it has become an often evoked exordial topos. Indeed, the Neapolitans

1

Cf. Manfred Pfister, “Intertextuelles Reisen, oder: Der Reisebericht als Intertext”, in Herbert Foltinek and others (eds.), Tales and “their telling difference”. Festschrift für Franz K. Stanzel (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993), pp. 109-132.

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themselves see their own identity in danger of disappearing underneath all this writing by others, as Adriana Corrado argues at the end of this section.

II. It is at this point, however, that I should, perhaps, explain what I mean by ‘traces’ in this context. This is, indeed, the main purpose of my introduction to this section of our book, and Italy and Naples will furnish me with most of my examples. Let me, as a first step, distinguish between material and textual traces. MATERIAL TRACES must be considered as the semantic prototype of what we call ‘traces’: footprints in the sand or the field, which previous travellers have left and which continuous traffic can gradually turn into trails and beaten tracks; the sedimentations, relics and landmarks they or previous inhabitants of the lands have left and which the traveller follows and will try to decipher in his text. The Grand Tourists followed such material traces, which had turned into beaten tracks, a network of connections made up of roads and passes, of vetturini, ciceroni and alberghi, of ancient ruins and other videnda. When they all stayed overnight on the same wind-swept heights of Radicofani on their way from Siena to Viterbo and on to Rome, they could not but be aware of generations of previous Grand Tourists suffering from the cold and the meagre fare in that miserable postal station, and some of them may even have been aware of following here in the tracks of medieval pilgrims on the Via Francigena down to Rome. Such material traces are part of the archives of cultural memory – both of the traveller’s and the travellee’s culture. Material traces are often under- or overwritten by TEXTUAL TRACES, i.e. the accounts of previous travellers distilled into maps, guidebooks or travelogues, but also texts originating in the other culture. This is what entangles travelling and travel writing in a web of intertextual references and allusions. Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Coryate on his way to Venice already saw himself as a “tombstone traveller” and traced with great enthusiasm the birth and burial places of classical authors, and with the Romantic period the abodes of English poets in Italy – Keats, Byron, Shelley, the Brownings – have become the destination of literary pilgrimages for British tourists in Italy, “walk[ing] in the footsteps of the illustrious dead”2 – not to mention paying homage to Giulietta’s or Julia’s balcony in Verona! Before them, in the 18th century, a Grand Tourist like Joseph Addison 2

Craufurd Tait Ramage, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1868), v. – I owe this reference to Sharon Ouditt.

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travelled through Italy in the tracks of the classical Greek and Roman poets – whom he considered much more a part of his own, than of Italian culture – with the express intention “to compare the natural face of the country with the landscapes that the poets have given us”. As Horace Walpole put it cuttingly: “Mr Addison travelled through the poets, not through Italy” and he “might have composed [his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, 1705] without stirring out of England”.3 This is borne out by what he observed and had to say about Naples: little about the city, but a lot about the “very noble scene of antiquities” nearby, in particular, of course, Virgil’s tomb, which provides him with yet another occasion for decrying the Italians of his own time, who admire Virgil more “for having made the grotto, than the Aeneid”.4 In one particular case, a few lines of verse sufficed to launch generations of English travellers on a poetic quest: Milton’s epic simile comparing the hosts of fallen angels in Paradise Lost with autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades High overarched imbower (I, 302-4)

sent hosts of Grand Tourists on a ‘Milton trail’ to the monastery hidden in dense forests a day’s ride away from Florence5 – a classic case of a poetic trace turning into a trail and that trail turning into a beaten track and overwriting the Italian landscape with the travellers’ own ‘pretexts’ and cultural memories! Such pretexts are not always poetical and literary and not always part of the traveller’s own culture. This applies particularly to a form of ‘archaeological travelling’ which engages with historical texts in its search for the material traces of a past frequently considered as greater or more authentic than the degenerate present. Thus, for instance, Norman Douglas in Old Calabria (1915), travelling through the South in search of traces of an older, happier, pagan and pre-Roman Italy, travelled in the tracks of the great French historian and archaeologist François Lernormant, who in his turn had already travelled in search of La Grande Grèce (1881-84), of the Magna 3

4

5

Quoted from The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), p. 467. The Fatal Gift of Beauty, p. 144. – The misunderstanding which Addison pokes fun at here can already be found in William Davies’ account of Naples of 1614. The only thing “noteworthy” which this English ship surgeon in Livornese captivity found in Naples during his diverse stays there was a “mine underneath a great Mountaine about a mile or thereabouts in length” “named the Grout, and by common report one Virgil a learned man was the Author of it, whose Tombe is aloft in each end of it”. Cf. the facsimile reprint the Trve Relation of the Travailes and most miserable Captiuitie of William Dauies… (London: Nicholas Bourne, 1614) in Algerina Neri, Uno Schiavo inglese nella Livorno dei Medici (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2000), pp. 100f. Cf. The Fatal Gift of Beauty, pp. 321f and 451f.

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Graecia of the Sybarites and other non-Italic cultural sediments hidden underneath the surface of present Southern Italy. Here, as with the many journeys in search of traces of the mysterious, half or entirely forgotten Etruscan culture such as Elizabeth Caroline Hamilton Grey’s Tour to the Sepulchres of Etruria (1840) or George Dennis’ The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848), reading the texts of historians and earlier travellers led to an often adventurous and demanding intertextual search for traces in frequently way-out and inaccessible places, where the traveller then compared his own autoptic reading of material traces and his own intuitions with the readings of earlier researchers. The quests across Europe and to North Africa for the ancient polytheistic culture of Egypt take us even further back in time, as Edward Chaney discusses in his essay. When D.H. Lawrence in 1927, on his last journey, also turned towards reading the traces of Etruscan Places, he sought to liberate himself as much as possible from the intertextual burden of previous writings and follow alone the MNEMONIC TRACES of a life-affirming and death-accepting mode of existence in the depth of his own unconscious. Such mnemonic traces are the third category of traces I wish to identify. They may, to a certain extent, be part of an intertextual web of associations and be conditioned by the formations of a cultural memory, yet the textual inscriptions lie so deep here that they cannot be adequately described in terms of specific verbal pretexts. They are, therefore, less immediately related to textual traces than to ICONIC and of PERFORMATIVE TRACES – to traces of images going back to one’s earliest memories or dreams, which, consciously, half-consciously or unconsciously, give orientation to the traveller’s desires; traces of earlier, kinaesthetically remembered performances, which can give to travelling the sensation of a re-enactment. This re-enactment may aim at a mere repetition of previous performances, as in the tourist rituals of following in beaten tracks, using the established means of locomotion and going through the motions of sightseeing or picture-taking, or in journeys that trace selfconsciously the footsteps of an admired model traveller. This re-enactment may however, also aim at defamiliarising the original performative experience by opting for alternative routes, means of travel or modes of interaction with the Other. Thus, it is one thing to travel like the Weimar government minister Goethe in the Grand Tourist’s coach across Italy; quite another, to walk it, as Johann Gottfried Seume did in his Spaziergang nach Syrakus, his “Ramble to Syracuse” (1803). This was, in the face of the politically troubled situation in early 19th-century Italy but also in merely athletic terms, an impressive performance – moreover a performance that evoked different images in the memory of Seume and set him off on different trails from Goethe’s survey of the cultural canon – bringing him close to the

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actual lives of ordinary people in Europe and Italy. Seume himself highlighted the importance of this performative difference: “Whoever walks in general sees anthropologically and cosmically more than those who travel in a carriage. […] As soon as you sit in a coach, you are already at a significant distance to ordinary human beings.”6 Goethe’s own experience of Italy (1786-88), to which he gave shape in his Italienische Reise (1816/17) much later, does, however, also bear out the importance of mnemonic traces based on images and performances rather than mere texts. Texts he had read in quantities before he embarked on his journey and some of them, for instance Volkmann’s Historisch-kritische Nachrichten von Italien, he actually took with him, to check in situ the textual and cartographic representations against his own impressions. But it was in Naples, after his diligent engagement with the canonised culture and its texts during his first stay at Rome, that he liberated himself largely from such textual pursuits und began to discover in the Italian Other images that had lain slumbering deep in his own memories. The experience of Paestum was crucial here: it cut across all his culturally encoded expectations and the shock was only overcome when he began to recognise in this “völlig fremde Welt”, this “totally alien world”, the traces of an archetypal archaic world which had escaped him in his life-long reading of Homer’s poems. At that point, at last, what was deep inside him and what he looked at simultaneously fell into place and it was only then that “the Odyssee became a living word” for him. 7 And climbing the Vesuvius – a performance, if ever there was one! – meant following arduous traces that led him back to the palaeontological prehistory of the earth and perhaps stimulated the return of images of a Urpflanze, with which he had occupied himself for some time.8 An even greater performance was seeking contact with the world of the Neapolitan lazzaroni, a contact considerably closer than previous foreign travellers had ventured to engage in (cf. the essay by Marino Niola). It was the proximity of his observations and interactions that evoked in him memories of a happier life than that of the North, a life in which “nobody works only for his living, but for his pleasure” and in which work and pleasure actually coincide.9 It was his performative transformation in close contact with the body politic and the corporeality of the people that allowed him to leave behind the 6

7

8 9

From the preface to Mein Sommer; quoted from Seumes Werke in zwei Bänden, ed. Anneliese and Karl-Heinz Klingenberg, 2 vls. (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1965), II, pp. 7 and 8 (my translation). J.W. von Goethe, Italienische Reise, in Goethes Werke, ed. by Herbert von Einem / Erich Trunz, 6th ed. (Hamburg: Wegner, 1964), XI, pp. 219 and 323 (my translations). Cf. Norbert Miller, Der Wanderer. Goethe in Italien (München: Hanser, 2002), pp. 246-249. Italienische Reise, p. 324. Italienische Reise, p. 338.

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accounts of previous travellers who had, for instance, calculated that there were “some thirty to forty thousand idlers in Naples”.10 By contrast, a merely rationally ‘enlightened’ traveller like Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, who was in Naples at the same time as Goethe but kept the city and its inhabitants at a safe distance, missed out on tapping any deeper resources of his self and never made the performative transformation, as Paola Paumgardhen demonstrates in her contribution to this volume.

III. The quest for traces of buried memories merits a separate category, if only because much of modernist and postmodernist travel writing is programmatically dedicated to it. Bruce Chatwin’s memories of a prehistoric piece of brontosaurus skin in the glass-fronted cabinet of his grandparents’ living room, which had stimulated his childhood fantasies and which sends the adult on a quest to its place of origin, is the postmodern locus classicus for this phenomenon. His search for traces of the lost material relic does not only take him to the “Lost Hope Sound” at the end of the world, in Patagonia, and back to a lost palaeontological past and its traces in the European cultural memory, the archives of images and texts about Patagonia, but also back to his childhood. As the great searcher for traces, W.G. Sebald, commented in an essay on Chatwin: his “wanderings to the end of the world are search expeditions for the lost boy in him”.11 Chatwin’s In Patagonia is just one instance of a general tendency in modernist and postmodernist travel writing to stage self-consciously what previous travel writers have tended to play down: the fact that travelling is always a travelling in traces, is always the pursuit of traces to be followed and read, and that the reading of these traces is more of an adventure or challenge than the travelling itself. Rather than erasing traces modernist and postmodernist travellers tend to foreground the material, textual and mnemonic traces which motivate and orientate the journey in complex and often aporetic narrative structures. For what is at stake in the reading of traces is both the traveller’s and the travellee’s cultural memory, and the private memories of the individual traveller. In an attempt to substantiate this claim, I shall highlight four variants of such travelling in pursuit of traces, which self-consciously turns the quest for traces into the 10

11

Italienische Reise, p. 332. – Cf. on this “Verwandlung in der Volksmenge”, Italo Michele Battafarano, Die im Chaos blühenden Zitronen. Identität und Alterität in Goethes ‚Italienischer Reise’ (Berne: Lang, 1999), pp. 179-188. Quoted from Manfred Pfister, “Nachwort”, in Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia, ed. M.P. (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), pp. 353-377, here p. 359 (my translation).

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main concern of travel narrations and which seem to me of particular significance in recent travel writing. My first variant is the ARCHAEOLOGICAL QUEST. Let me take as my example a text that will take us to contemporary Naples, Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s Journeys to the Underworld (1988). The “Underworld” of her title has, at the very least, four dimensions: the mythological underworld of chthonic deities, the archaeological caves and excavations of Central and Southern Italy, the social reality underneath the surface described by previous travellers, and, finally, her own deep memories reaching back to early childhood. Hers is a quest following traces of the Other in all four directions. Recollections of stories told her by her mother, stories about the female oracles and soothsaying women of ancient mythology, first sent her on a quest for the caves and grottos of the Sibyls in Rome, Tivoli, Cumae, Avernus and Marsala.12 As a well-read hobby archaeologist she goes about exploring their lives in situ, hoping that entering their spaces will reawaken in her the buried origins and sources of power lost to modern woman. Such a performative identification with a sacred Other goes beyond the merely archaeological project of identifying traces; it is a feminist pilgrimage towards sage and sapient witches and prophetesses, in whom the female poet and sexually freebooting woman traveller sees herself prefigured. Thus, her journey does not only take her to the mythological or archaeological past of the Sibyls, but also into the contemporary Italian, and in particular Neapolitan, reality of sexual relations, in which she tests in ever new encounters the mythical virility of Latin lovers only to find, more often than not, vain swaggering, anxious inhibitions and fear of the sexual emancipation of Anglo-Saxon women instead of a gloriously unselfconscious potency. The account of her journeys constantly oscillates between the mythical and the modern world, between a culturally canonised and an un-canonical reality, and makes comical capital out of short-circuiting the two worlds. A climax in this carnival conflation of high and low is reached at Baiae, the fashionable spa of the ancient Romans near Naples. Here she re-enacts in a parodic performance what her classical texts had pre-scribed: It’s not often that you get the chance to do it exactly where the poshest Romans did it. The Caesars might have done it here, Antony and Cleopatra, Virgil, Horace, Martial…who knows who […]. Now how could this perfect stranger have guessed I have a kink about sex in historic locations? (I once had it off in the Coliseum.) When at Baia do as the Romans did.13

In my second variant the search for traces is focussed on one particular previous author and his work. Intertextuality is, therefore, paramount here, 12 13

Fiona Pitt-Kethley, Journeys to the Underworld (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988), pp. 1f. Journeys to the Underworld, p. 25.

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though material and performative traces can also play an important role. I am speaking about biographies cast in the mould of travelling in the traces of the biographee, of following his footsteps across the trajectory of his life. Let me call this type BIOGRAPHY AS TRAVELOGUE. Of course, researching a biography has always involved a certain amount of fact-gathering travelling in the footsteps of the author, but in the writing of the biography the traces of these journeys have then been usually erased. After all, who wants to know how the biographer got hold of the facts? It’s the facts that count. More recently, however, we increasingly find texts which position themselves between travelogue and biography and make the biographer’s search for the traces of his author, and not the author’s life itself, the dominant principle of narrative organisation. To my knowledge, the first to do so was James Albert Symons in his Quest for Corvo (1934), drawing attention to the novelty of his method in the subtitle “Experiment in Biography”. This is not the life-story of the mysterious and scandalous fin de siècle writer Frederick William Rolfe, who called himself Baron Corvo, but the story of the quest for Corvo, the search for traces of his life, which takes Symons to strange and dark places in Venice or Rome. Accordingly, Corvo’s life is not narrated in a linear and conclusive fashion, but emerges in a series of journeys by a literary sleuth dedicated to identifying and reading the traces of the various phases of Corvo’s life and of the various places his texts project in order to unravel its mysteries. What is particularly modern about this “Experiment in Biography” is, of course, that it does not only drop the conventional claims of biographers to be able to offer the truth, the whole truth, about an author and his works, but exposes such claims as mere pretence. Since then, many have followed Symons’ model in factual or fictional travelogues, among them Julian Barnes in his novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which takes an English dentist and hobby Flaubert specialist to Normandy to establish once and for all the actual model for the parrot in “Un coeur simple”, only to end up in an aporia of proliferating parrots. Or, to give another example closer to our immediate concerns here, the travel writer, critic and biographer Richard Holmes has given to his book about English Romantic poets in Italy the significant title Footsteps (1986) and has defined his biographical project as “a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path, a following of footsteps”, as “acts of self-identification” or “self-projection” sought and performed in the encounter with “landscapes, buildings, photographs, and above all the actual trace of handwriting on original letters and journals”.14

14

Richard Holmes, Footsteps. Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 27 and 67.

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“Travelling in pursuit of traces” always involves tapping into the archives of cultural memory. There is, however, a specifically postmodern version of engaging with the resources of cultural memory in travel writing which I would like to call, in Bakhtinian terms, the CARNIVALISATION OF TRACES. Pitt-Kethley and her engagement with the Sibyls of Italy have already provided us with an example of this mode. It highlights traces by playing games with them, in particular with traces of great cultural status, with traces that represent great cultural capital. This can begin already with the narrative form: Travelling in pursuit of traces, as we have already seen, often invokes the time-honoured myth of a quest, a quest for some sacred site, object or experience as in the Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages. Postmodern travelling in pursuit of traces, however, where it evokes this narrative archetype, tends to subvert and exploit its cultural pretensions and sacred aura to comic effect. Thus, for instance, William Dalrymple alludes quite explicitly both in the title and the subtitle of his In Xanadu. A Quest (1989) to the pregnant shape cultural memory has given to journeys to make them significant and memorable. The title quotes, of course, the first line of Coleridge’s opium and Chinese dream, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan”, which in turn evokes a host of European travelogues about China, and at the same time it commemorates the great modernist classic of literary sleuthing, John Livingston Lowes’ The Road to Xanada (1927), which unravels the textual traces underlying Coleridge’s romantic poem. One of these traces is Marco Polo’s Milione and it is Marco Polo’s quest for the meraviglie of the East that Dalrymple’s “Quest” re-enacts. But he does no longer undertake it with the scholarly high seriousness with which, say, Freya Stark followed Alexander’s Path (1958) or Richard Holmes the Footsteps of his poets. Indeed, Dalrymple follows Marco Polo from Venice to Xanadu without bothering much about reconstructing his exact traces or reading his readings of cultural traces. What he focuses upon instead are the often absurd adventures on his way, which highlight the performative differences between his own modern mode of travelling and that of his legendary forerunner and stage them with comic narrative zest. Marco Polo’s meraviglie do not, of course, survive unimpaired such carnival conjunctions of high and low, of myth and modern banality. The disenchantment they work begins already with the phial of Holy Oil, which Dalrymple, like his medieval precursor, carries from Christ’s burial chapel in Jerusalem to China: his modern oil does not burn miraculously for ever, but has to be renewed and refilled from a mundane can of sunflower oil and is transported in an equally banal plastic bottle from ‘Body Shop’. And, of course, reaching the destination is not the moment of ecstasy a quest would suggest; it is a let-down rather, neither Marco Polo’s nor Coleridge’s

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China: “Our vision of Xanadu was nearer the heath scene in Lear than the exotic pleasure garden described by Polo.”15 Marco Polo and Dalrymple set out from Venice; for Thomas Coryate, the contemporary of Shakespeare, and for Tim Moore, following in his traces, Venice was Italy’s nec plus ultra bordering upon the Orient or Asia – as Naples was, for many Grand Tourists, Italy’s nec plus ultra beyond which Africa threatened. Moore’s journey, narrated in Continental Drifter. Taking the Low Road with the First Grand Tourist (2001), is, like Dalrymple’s, the modern re-enactment of a famous first journey, and it is performed in a similar carnival mood. The contrast in the title between the “Grand Tourist” and the “Low Road” makes that sufficiently clear, and the hilarious contrast between the famous “Odcombian leg-stretcher”, walking it across Northern Italy and the rest of Europe, and Tim Moore in his eccentric, decrepit Rolls Royce, which gets him into one silly scrape after another, engages the traveller’s and the reader’s interest more than the following and crossing of Coryate’s and later Grand Tourists’ traces, whose impressions are dutifully quoted every now and then and, more often than not, hilariously contradicted. Interestingly enough, Edward Chaney, contributor to the present volume, features in Moore’s book as the incarnation of the cultural memory relating to the Grand Tour: it was he who drew the journalist’s attention to Coryate in the first place and thus set a relationship going that develops from the author considering Coryate as nothing but a “grand bore” to an awareness that he may not have won “all […] running battles with Coryate”.16 All the travels in pursuit of traces and the quests for traces I have discussed so far have been, in terms of colonial voyages, “voyages out”, not “voyages in”, journeys away from one’s origins and not towards them. It is, however, mainly “voyages in” that we find among my fourth variety, which I will give a rather Proustian name: JOURNEYS OF REMEMBRANCE OF ONE’S ORIGINS. Though they do occasionally occur in male travel writing, they are more typically the form that female travelling tends to take.17 My example will, for obvious reasons, have to leave Italy behind here, though one might describe Pitt-Kethleys voyage out to Naples as precisely such a journey of remembrance of her own Sibylline origins or, more to the purpose, Adriana Corrado’s essay in the present volume as precisely such a recovery of her own Neapolitan identity from the stereotypes of foreign travellers that have

15 16

17

William Dalrymple, In Xanadu. A Quest (London: Collins, 1989), p. 298. Tim Moore, Continental Drifter. Taking the Low Road with the First Grand Tourist (London: Abacus, 2001), pp. 15 and 358. Cf. for this gender aspect of travelling Karen R. Lawrence, Penelope Voyages. Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1994).

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infected napoletanità across the centuries – a case of ‘Naples’, not ‘The Empire Writing Back’! More typical, however, are examples from a postcolonial context, where, indeed, it is the Empire writing back, as, for instance, in Amryl Johnson’s Sequins for a Ragged Helm (1988). This is the account of a nostos, a homecoming by a Black British writer in search of the traces of her origins in the Caribbean. Such a journey cuts across the colonial divide of “voyage in” and “voyage out”, for it is at one and the same time a quest for Johnson’s homelands and thus a “voyage in” and, as a journey away from the long-time home of the naturalised Briton, a “voyage out”. Accordingly, the perspective of the traveller is an instable one, oscillating between that of a British tourist sightseeing in former colonies and that of a migrant without a fixed centre to her life far away from her island of birth. The journey Amryl Johnson narrates is already her second journey home. During the first, the previous year, she was traumatised by an initial shock: the experience that her house of birth had just been destroyed, together with all material traces of what had always been present in her memories. Her nostalgic desire to tread again in the footsteps of her childhood, to literally relive her childhood once again and re-enact it in a commemorative performance – “Heel to toe within every footprint, matching the outlines until I was back on that one road. The same I had travelled”18 – had ended in a void. The traces she now follows on her second journey are mnemonic traces that go beyond the individual, private memories of her childhood, embedding them in deeper, half-lost sediments of a cultural memory of the Middle Passage and of slave labour on the sugar plantations. Fittingly, it is a monument that shows her the way into these depths of cultural memory – a huge iron wheel on Tobago, both material trace and symbolic reminder of the lost world of her origins. “The visit to the wheel becomes the postcolonial turning point of her entire passage, the point from where the scars of history inscribed on Caribbean landscapes can be retraced so that her tour turns from touristic travelling into a rite de passage of personal redefinition.”19 Only after this act of commemoration and remembrance does a personal homecoming become possible for her, the encounter with her mother, with which the book ends – and not with her return to England.

18 19

Amryl Johnson, Sequins for a Ragged Helm (London: Virago, 1988), p. 12. Tobias Döring, Caribbean-English Passages. Intertextuality in a postcolonial tradition (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 47.

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IV. A final word on the last term of my title: “the Other”. As quite a number of my examples have shown, travellers to Italy do not only seek an Italian Other in Italy, an Italy culturally encoded as closer to paradise, more sensuous, passionate, pleasurable and colourful than the North of Europe, as Marino Niola argues in his contribution on the “Invention of the Mediterranean”, or alternatively, and often at the same time, as a Siren-like femme fatale, often epitomised in the Parthenopean Naples and its volcano or, nowadays, in a Naples-Shanghai in the grips of the Camorra. Some of them seek an emphatically un-Italian Other underneath Italy’s surface or beyond its boundaries – an Other, as it were, to the second power – and in that they also follow culturally encoded traces: the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Trieste, as studied here by Katia Pizzi, the East in Venice (where Byron, for instance, studied Armenian on an island in the lagoon; cf. Maurizio Ascari’s essay), an expatriate England or Germany in Tuscany, Rome or the Campagna, Egyptian art in Rome and Torino, the chthonic Etruscan world of Lawrence, an Africa South of Naples or indeed in Naples, the older Calabria made up of Greek, Albanian or Arab sediments as explored by Norman Douglas or his Parthenopean Siren Land of the Sorrentine peninsula, a ‘Swabian’ Apulia, the Spanish, Bourbon and French heritage of the Regno delle due Sicilie, a Norman or African Sicily eccetera, eccetera… To follow such traces in the cultural memory has a double effect: it creates a mental map of Italy as a pastiche or patchwork of heterotopes and it links Italy with a wider Mediterranean, European and global world. Above all, however, it enhances the rich ambivalences of the images of Italy stored in European cultural memory: Italy (and Naples in particular) as at once the cradle and incarnation, and the margin of modern Europe, as a Siren, beautiful and fatal, as eternally the same and constantly changing.

Bibliography Battafarano, Italo Michele, Die im Chaos blühenden Zitronen. Identität und Alterität in Goethes ‘Italienischer Reise’ (Berne: Lang, 1999). Dalrymple, William, In Xanadu. A Quest (London: Collins, 1989). Döring, Tobias, Caribbean-English Passages. Intertextuality in a post– colonial tradition (London: Routledge, 2002). The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996).

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Goethe, J.W. von, Italienische Reise, in Goethes Werke, ed. by Herbert von Einem / Erich Trunz, 6th ed. (Hamburg: Wegner, 1964). Holmes, Richard, Footsteps. Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Johnson, Amryl, Sequins for a Ragged Helm (London: Virago, 1988). Lawrence, Karen R., Penelope Voyages. Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1994). Moore, Tim, Continental Drifter. Taking the Low Road with the First Grand Tourist (London: Abacus, 2001). Norbert, Miller, Der Wanderer. Goethe in Italien (München: Hanser, 2002). Neri, Algerina, Uno Schiavo inglese nella Livorno dei Medici (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2000). Pfister, Manfred, “Intertextuelles Reisen, oder: Der Reisebericht als Intertext”, in Herbert Foltinek and others (eds.), Tales and “their telling difference”. Festschrift für Franz K. Stanzel (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993), pp. 109-132. Pfister, Manfred, “Nachwort”, in Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia, ed. by Manfred Pfister (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), pp. 353-77. Pitt-Kethley, Fiona, Journeys to the Underworld (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988). Ramage, Craufurd Tait, The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1868). Seumes Werke in zwei Bänden, ed. by Anneliese and Karl-Heinz Klingenberg, 2 vols. (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1965).

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Edward Chaney

Egypt in England and America: The Cultural Memorials of Religion, Royalty and Revolution1 In many respects, Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home, now a museum visited by an international public, resembles the totem-filled tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh, even if Freud’s ashes were only temporarily kept in the house and then preserved in one of his Greek vases.2 In Freud’s study, his specially designed chair stands empty beside his desk, both transported from Vienna when he migrated to London in 1938. Still facing this chair, across the back of his desk is a small army of some thirty-five precious statuettes from the more than two thousand Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Asian artifacts which Freud began collecting in earnest after his father died and a decade or so after admiring his teacher Jean-Martin Charcot’s similarly museum-like house in Paris in 1885. Significantly there were very few monotheistic artifacts in his collection; ie, Judaic, Christian or Moslem, but two thirds of those he selected for his eternally preserved desk are polytheistic Egyptian.3 Behind 1

2

3

I should like to thank Maurizio Ascari, Nick Baker, Ann Barnes, Jessica and Olivia Chaney, Rita Copeland, Adriana Corrado, Sira Dermen, Keith Jacka, Michael Molnar, Ben Rickett, Margret Tonnesmann, Patricia Usick, Tim Wilks, Southampton Solent University CAP Fund and everyone at the Warburg Institute for help in preparing this paper. I would like to dedicate it to the memory of Joe Trapp. That Freud’s ambitions had long included a notion of this sort is suggested by his only partjoking reference to the marble tablet he imagined might one day be affixed to the Austrian house in which he first interpreted his own dreams. It would, he suggested, be inscribed: “Here the secret of dreams was revealed by Dr Sig. Freud on July 24, 1895”; Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud. Life and Work (New York: Basic Books, 1953-7), I, p. 388. Now in Golder’s Green Crematorium, the red-figure krater with a Dionysiac scene, containing his ashes, was a gift to Freud from Princess Marie Bonaparte. It stands on a plinth designed by Freud’s son Ernst, father of Lucian; see Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells eds, Sigmund Freud and Art: His personal Collection of Antiquities (New York and London: SUNY and Freud Museum, 1989), p. 32. There are now Blue Plaques commemorating both Sigmund and his daughter, Anna, on the front of the house in Maresfield Gardens. A letter written in that year to his future wife described a dinner at Charcot’s house, which was furnished with carpets, tapestries and Indian and Chinese antiquities: “in short like a museum”; see 20 Maresfield Gardens: A Guide to the Freud Museum (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998), p. 76. Initially, however, Freud’s collecting habits were both more modest and conventional. This, and the consolatory aspect of collecting, is revealed as late as December

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this display, against the wall, is the famous couch on which his analysands once lay, close to which he chose to die, surrounded by his books, antiquities and oriental rugs, on 23 September 1939. Although in London it is now in the adjoining library, dominating the wall above Freud’s couch in Vienna hung the large, coloured and framed print after a romantic 1906 gouache by Ernst Koemer [Fig. 1].4 This depicts the extraordinary temple at Abu Simbel, which was carved out of a cliff for Rameses II, whose four great seated statues thereby dominated the Nile and kept the 13th-century BC Nubians in awe, just as, since their excavation, they once more “awe and inspire” the 21st-century tourist. Freud famously compared psychoanalysis to archaeology, which he claimed to have spent more time reading than psychology. “It is as if Schliemann had dug up another Troy”,5 he wrote with characteristic pride and elsewhere, going on to equate himself with Champollion (who first deciphered the name of Rameses on the façade of Abu Simbel): “The interpretation of dreams is completely analogous to the decipherment of an ancient pictographic script such as Egyptian hieroglyphs”, a statement which, ironically, manages to minimize the extent to which his Interpretation of Dreams was itself an Egyptian idea.6 Though Freud’s own neuroses and tireless ambition may have encouraged unscientific methods, his development of a theory of the unconscious and application of the id, ego, superego and Oedipus complex to a talking cure,

4

5

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1896, when in the wake of his father’s death he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess that “I have now adorned my room with plaster casts of the Florentine statues. It was the source of extraordinary refreshment to me”; see Stephen Barker, “Father Figures in Freud’s Aesthetics” in Excavations and their Objects: Freud’s Collection of Antiquity, ed. by S. Barker (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 90; cf: Joan Raphael-Leff, “If Oedipus was an Egyptian”, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, XVII, 3 (1990), 309-35 and L. Gamwell ed., Sigmund Freud’s Jewish Heritage (New York and London: SUNY and Freud Museum, 1991). For documentation of Freud’s original arrangement, see Edmund Engelman, Bergasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices in Vienna 1938, intro Peter Gay (New York: Basis Books, 1976). Peter Loewenberg, “The Pagan Freud”, Excavations and their Objects, ed. by Barker, p. 20. Schliemann’s first major discoveries were made in 1873 when Freud was 18. Gamwell and Wells, p. 75; cf. Carle E. Schorske, “Freud: the psychoarchaeology of civilizations” in J. Neu ed., The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), pp. 8-24. This bears an interesting relationship to Marx’s notion of the reading of “social hieroglyphics”, a notion reused by Rosa Luxemburg in her Reform or Revolution (1899) when she refers to Marx being “able to decipher the hieroglyphics of capitalist economy”. Though his friend Ferenczi encouraged the idea of a visit to Egypt (three years after their 1910 vacation in Sicily together), Freud never went; see The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi, ed. by Eva Brabant et al., 2 vols. (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1992), I, pp. 512-13. Freud’s own early dreams featured animal-headed Egyptian gods prompted by the illustrations in his father’s bible.

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surely justify the attention we pay him, which is in any case inevitable since, in the words of W.H. Auden: “he is no more a person now / but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our lives”. And despite the partial nature of his application of psychoanalysis to what we now call cultural memory, the attention he paid in his reading, writing and collecting to ancient Egypt (Napoleon’s “cradle of the science and art of all humanity”) merits equivalent attention, comparing favorably with more recent scholars’ relative ignorance of the 3000 years’ worth of a civilization which provided the foundations, for better or worse (and with all its “discontents”), of our own.7 Around the corner from the Freud Museum, in front of the Tavistock Clinic, a similarly seated statue of Freud, sculpted by fellow exile Oscar Nemon, keeps watch over the 21st –century North Londoners [Fig. 2]. Meanwhile, not far away, in Highgate Cemetery, the massive bronze head of yet another patriarchal exile, Karl Marx, glowers over the other graves, including, directly facing his own, that of Herbert Spencer, the evolutionist whose phrase, “survival of the fittest,” was adopted by Darwin in subsequent editions of The Origin of Species, but, who like Freud, following both Darwin and Spencer in this, never abandoned his Lamarckian belief in the transmission of acquired or cultural characteristics.8 During a visit to Egypt, on Boxing Day 1879, Spencer became ill, falling into a state “in which fancies, afterwards seen to be morbid, took possession of me” to the extent that he almost cut short his visit and returned home.9 Fortunately, these “fancies” did not prove as extreme as those that had affected the painter,

7

8

9

Indeed we have a strange situation today in which the average middle- or even less than middle-class Westerner is more likely to have been on a “Nile Cruise” and seen Abu Simbel (and indeed watched TV documentaries on the Sphinx) than the average academic. As a result, in the words of Camille Paglia, “Egypt remains unabsorbed by humanistic education”; Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), p. 61. David Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London, Methuen and Co., 1908), p. 269, where Spencer writes in 1886 of current Darwinianism being “erroneous in ignoring altogether one of the beliefs set forth by Dr. Erasmus Darwin and by Lamarck – the belief that the inheritance of organic modifications produced by use and disuse, has been a cause of evolution. The thesis of this paper will be that this cause has been all along a co-operative cause, and that in its absence, all the higher stages of organic evolution would have been impossible.” This was written before the principal publications of August Weismann, whose experiments seemed to show that acquired characteristics or repeated mutation had no effect on heredity; David Young, The Discovery of Evolution (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), p. 167; F. Schiller in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., XXV, p. 635 and The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908-1939, ed. by R. Andrew Paskauskas (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1993), doc. 82. Duncan, p. 205.

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Richard Dadd in Egypt in late 1842. Providing a far clearer example of Oedipal father-hatred than Freud’s 17th-century German painter, Christoph Haizmann, or his case-study of Dostoevsky,10 or indeed most of the Frazerderived myths in his Totem and Taboo, which argues that parricide was “the principal and primal crime of humanity”, Dadd returned home from “the stream of new sensations” he encountered in Egypt in an extremely distracted state, compounded by sunstroke and his readings in Egyptian religion. His father volunteered to care for him rather than see him institutionalized, but on 28 August 1843 Dadd stabbed him to death. In the account he wrote at the request of Dr William Wood, the resident apothecary at the Bethlem Hospital for the insane, Dadd stated that so far as his religious views were concerned: I was inclined to fall in with the views of the ancients, and to regard the substitution of modern ideas thereon as not for the better. These and the like, coupled with the idea of a descent from the Egyptian god Osiris, induced me to put a period to the existence of him whom I had always regarded as a parent, but whom the secret admonishings I had, counselled me was the author of the ruin of my race. I inveigled him, by false pretences, into Cobham Park, and slew him with a knife, with which I stabbed him, after having vainly endeavoured to cut his throat.11

In his paranoid state, Dadd had become convinced that his father was the devil and that he had a mission as an envoy of God, or Osiris “to exterminate the men most possessed with the demon”.12 Dadd spent the rest of his life in Bethlem and the newly-built Broadmoor Hospitals, reading, playing the violin and painting with the encouragement of a succession of doctors whose enlightened regime helps confirm the impression that Foucault’s Histoire de la Folie is one of the most misleading histories of our time.13 Today, Freud’s reclusive, London-based grandson, Lucian, pharaoh-like principally in the quantity of his wives, concubines and children (though the latter are to date less numerous than Rameses’ 200 or so), paints in the so10

11

12 13

See Freud, “A seventeenth-century demonological neurosis” and “Dostoevsky and Parricide” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. by James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), XIX and XXI. Haizmann agreed a pact with the devil as a father substitute after his true father died. Patricia Allderidge, The late Richard Dadd 1817-1886 (London: Tate Gallery, 1974), pp. 22-24. Allderidge, p. 24. See E. Chaney, “‘Philanthropy in Italy”: English Observations on Italian Hospitals, 15451789”,The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass and Co., 2000), pp. 273 and 277. For one such physician, Sir W. Charles Hood, see his Suggestions for the Future Provision of Criminal Lunatics of 1854 and Criminal Lunatics (London: John Churchill, 1860); the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not include him. For his possible portrait, seated next to a red fez, one of Dadd’s finest paintings (and anticipating Lucian Freud’s earlier style), see Allderidge, p. 87.

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called western tradition, but this is a tradition which owes more than is usually acknowledged to Egyptian visual culture.14 In a small number of Lucian’s works the influence of Egypt is direct, and indeed his Still Life with Book of 1993 features an illustrated book on Egypt lying open to show two sculpted heads from the time of Akhenaten as its principal subject, albeit strangely sheltered by the bottom half of a cushion resembling female thighs and genitalia (if one is to be Freudian about the matter).15 In the late 1980s Lucian posed for a fine photograph by Julia Auerbach with this book, his treasured copy of the 1936 German edition of the James Breasted’s History of Egypt, a work which, together with the same author’s Dawn of Conscience, was a principal source for his grandfather’s Moses and Monotheism.16 On a visit to Berlin, Sigmund had given his 10-year-old grandson a copy of the Arabian Nights, illustrated by Edmund Dulac, a friend of the family who survived long enough to praise Lucian’s first one-man show in 1952.17 Lucian’s parents moved to London from Berlin in 1933 but the entry in Sigmund’s diary, dated 14 August 1935: “Ernst mit Lucian”, records that the architect Ernst Freud took his 13-year-old son with him on his annual visit to his father in Vienna.18 On 25 June 1938 Lucian and his brother, Stephan,

14

15 16

17 18

This is something David Hockney seems to have appreciated in September1963 when he chose to visit Egypt on having his travel sponsored by the Sunday Times Magazine. Due to the assassination of President Kennedy (who had spoken so eloquently in favour of rescuing Abu Simbel), the planned publication failed to materialize. Hockney worked in Egypt again in 1978, the year of his Egyptianizing design for Glynebourne’s Zauberflote, but security problems prevented his presence at the 2002 retrospective exhibition organized by Marco Livingstone: David Hockney: Egyptian Journeys (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002). Wyndham Lewis was another British artist who had appreciated the significance of Egypt; see his remarks, indebted to G. Elliot Smith’s Evolution of the Dragon (1919) in The Diabolic Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto and Windus Press, 1931). William Feaver, Lucian Freud (London: Tate Publishing, 2002), cat. no. 123. Feaver, pp. 13-14. For Breasted, see John A. Wilson, Signs and Wonders upon Pharoah: A History of American Egyptology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1964) and Nancy Thomas ed., The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt (Los Angeles: County Museum of Art, 1995). Feaver, p. 22. The Diary of Sigmund Freud 1929-1939, ed. by Michael Molnar (London: Hogarth Press, 1992), p. 188. Molnar records that Ernst would have liked to become an artist but (fatherlike?) concerns about poverty inhibited him (Molnar, p. 297). Lucian remembers his grandfather with affection: “always very good, very kind, very modest” (Molnar, p. 188). His relationship with his father was less straightforward. When Ernst died, Lucian’s mother attempted suicide but then resigned herself to becoming a principal model for her son, even unto death. Sanford Schwartz’s new biography of William Nicholson focuses on son Ben’s fraught professional and personal (including sexual) rivalry with his father (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2004).

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visited their newly arrived grandparents in Primrose Hill.19 Sigmund’s cryptic, phrase-a-day diary for that date merely mentions the visit of a “Mrs Gunn with Egyptian antiquity”, but he and his grandsons were documented inspecting goldfish in the garden pond in an amateur film by Princess Marie Bonaparte, now shown daily at the Freud Museum.20 A year later Lucian went to Cedric Morris’s East Anglian art school and, shortly after that, at around the time of his grandfather’s death, he was given the copy of Breasted’s Geschichte Aegyptens with which he posed for the Auerbach photograph half a century later.21 The distinctive recumbent manner in which Lucian poses so many of his sitters suggests the conscious or unconscious influence both of his grandfather’s psychoanalytical couch and of the Egyptian mummy, his dreaming figures, clothed or nude, staring into space until brought back to health and/or consciousness. The particular application of this supine pose to freaks, friends, wives, mistresses and mother alike (the latter depicted following her suicide attempt and eventually, mummy-like, in death itself), tends to support this hypothesis. In Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud went further than Breasted’s Dawn of Conscience to argue that Moses was an Egyptian who derived his iconoclastic monotheism from the revolutionary, sun-worshipping pharaoh, Akhenaten, and was then murdered by the ungrateful Jews he had led out of slavery.22 The book was completed in London and published in the last 19 20

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The film is now part of the video permanently on show at the Freud Museum. The Diary of Sigmund Freud, ed. by Molnar, p. 242. Freud also mentions the visit of Salvador Dali the following July; ibid., p. 244. Dali subsequently completed a portrait drawing of Freud. Feaver, p. 14. It is not clear who gave Lucian the book, perhaps his father, who had perhaps obtained it from his. One suspects it was a copy which had belonged to Sigmund but there is as yet no evidence for this. I thank Michael Molnar, director of the Freud Museum, for help in this and other matters. Feaver records Lucian’s comment on his grandfather’s death from an overdose of morphine to quell the pain caused by advanced cancer of the jaw: “There was a sort of hole in his cheek like a brown apple: that was why there was no death mask made, I imagine. I was upset” (p. 18). The latter idea (and more) is derived from Ernst Sellin, Moses und seine Bedeutung für die israelitisch-jüdische Religionsgeschichte (Leipzig: A. Deichart, 1922); see the discussions in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1991) and Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1997); cf., epitomizing the ongoing quest to identify the “real” Moses (and even his 3500 year-old staff, here alleged to be in the Birmingham Museum), Graham Phillips, The Moses Legacy: The Evidence of History (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2002). Freud’s copy of Breasted’s Dawn of Conscience is still in the Freud Museum, neatly underlined in places; I thank Michael Molnar for permission to inspect it. The notion that Moses was an Egyptian had been anticipated by Manetho and Strabo, both of whom are cited on this by Florence Nightingale in her 1854 Letters from Egypt (see below). Nightingale also identified with

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months of Freud’s life. Freud followed Breasted in believing that: “Our moral heritage…derives from a wider human past enormously older than the Hebrews, and it come to us through rather than from them.” Breasted had drawn attention to the striking parallels between Akhenaten’s “Hymn to the Sun” and Psalm 104, as well as the indebtedness of the Book of Proverbs to the so-called “Wisdom of Amenemope”.23 “My grandfather”, Lucian has said, “didn’t endear himself to the Jews by suggesting that Moses was an Egyptian, an Egyptian floating down the river. An outrageous book: his final kick at the Talmud.”24 Freud had long identified with Moses, even to the extent of spending “three lonely September weeks in 1913” in Rome, contemplating and sketching Michelangelo’s monumental seated sculpture of his hero, an experience which culminated in his tortuously argued essay on the subject the following year [Fig. 3].25 If he appeared to reject his own Jewishness by identifying with an inadequately-appreciated Egyptian in exile, Freud nevertheless prefaced Part III of Moses and Monotheism, the final section of his book which he wrote mainly in London, by stating that he had hitherto been restricted by “the enemy of all freedom of thought,” the Catholic Church, but was now persecuted “not only because of my work, but also because of my ‘race’,” by what he calls “the new enemy” (rather than

23

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Moses by imagining herself walking with him “under the palms; through the desert, where he killed the Egyptian… I do not know any man in all history with whom I sympathize so much as with Moses”. Assmann (p. 167), writes: that “by making Moses an Egyptian [Freud] deemed himself able to shift the sources of negativity and intolerance out of Judaism and back to Egypt, to show that the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism [father and guilt-focussed], came from outside it. But this time the source of intolerance is enlightenment itself. Akhenaten is shown to be a figure both of the enlightenment and of intolerant despotism.” Cf. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization; vol. I: the Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987), 384. Breasted, pp. 320-21. The papyrus was first published by E.A. Wallis Budge, Facsimiles of Egyptian Hieratic Papyri in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1923). Feaver, p. 14. Lucian also remembered reading about Akhenaten: “The terrific loneliness of the king. Not many monotheists around: all these little gods around and then one god only”. Ie., “Der Moses des Michelangelo” which he published anonymously in 1913 in his recently founded journal Imago: Jones, Freud, II, p. 411. Freud’s approach to Michelangelo’s Moses suggests agreement with the Egyptian definition of a sculptor as “he who brings to life”; Hans Schneider, The Small Masterpieces of Egyptian Art (Leiden and Eton: El Viso, Spain), p. 11. For Freud’s identification with Moses, see, eg, his 1909 letter to Jung: “If I am Moses then you are Joshua, and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry…”; Richard Webster, Why Freud was wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 372.

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name this more specifically as Nazism).26 Following the Anschluss, Freud says: I left with many friends the city in which from early childhood, through 78 years, had been a home to me. I found the kindliest welcome in beautiful, free, generous England. Here I live now, a welcome guest, relieved from that oppression and happy that I may again speak and write – I almost said “think” – as I want or have to. I dare now to make public the last part of my essay.27

In an earlier draft of his Preface to Moses and Monotheism, written when still in Vienna, Freud refers to his reluctance to publish anything that might provoke the hostility of the Church (despite having already published The Future of an Illusion, his better known attack on religion): If our research leads us to a result that reduces religion to the status of a neurosis of mankind and explains its grandiose powers in the same way as we should a neurotic obsession in our individual patients, then we may be sure we shall incur in this country [Austria] the greatest resentment of the powers that be…28

On the eve of the Nazi occupation of not just Austria but most of the rest of Europe, Freud’s reiteration that: “such violent methods of suppression are by no means alien to the Catholic Church,” seems somewhat beside the point.29 Less anachronistic was Percy Bysshe Shelley’s attitude to the Anglican establishment at the beginning of the previous century when he was expelled from Oxford for publishing an anonymous pamphlet entitled: The Necessity of Atheism (1811). Considerably less cautious, arguably more courageous than Freud in his idealistic, proselytising rejection of the religion of his fathers, Shelley, like his Grand Touring companion Byron, was also sexually liberated beyond Freud’s dreams or indeed recommendation (perhaps closer 26

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29

It is perhaps significant that in the entire correspondence with Ernest Jones, covering the years 1908 to September 1939, Hitler is nowhere mentioned; see Paskauskas ed., passim. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, transl. Katherine [and Ernest] Jones (London: Hogarth Press, 1939), pp. 93 and 90. In a prior paragraph, written in Vienna, he had attacked Soviet Russia for robbing a hundred million people of “every possibility of freedom of thought… to-day the conservative democracies have become the guardians of cultural progress”. See also, for this earlier criticism of Marxism in theory and practice, Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1998). Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 91. Freud’s argument depends to a large extent on the Lamarckian notion of the cultural transmission and inheritance of acquired characteristics in the continuation of guilt in Jewish history; see Ronald Clark, Freud: the Man and the Cause (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 524. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 91. The more monotheistic Protestants were more supportive of Nazism than the Catholics. Though Cardinal Theodor Innitzer was all too sanguine, Cardinal Pacelli (the future Pius XII) and the Vatican firmly condemned the Anschluss.

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to Freud’s alienated grandson in this respect). His perpetually spontaneous response to his own Romantic libido can only have been possible due to the at least partial repression, denial or mere absence of Breasted’s conscience, the consequences of which led to exile or death and tragedy for wives, mistresses, children and sailing companions alike.30 In the real world, “Red” Shelley’s idealization of love and fellowship, translated into something as dire for those around him as Marx’s closely related idealism, mixed with a dose of Hegelian determinism, did for his family and then the rest of the world.31 Shelley’s Rousseauistic saga was already well underway when he eloped with Mary Godwin, a significant factor in the subsequent suicides of her half sister, Fanny, and his first wife, Harriet Westbrook.32 On Boxing Day 1817, a year after Shelley’s marriage to Mary (which took place twenty days after Harriet’s body was found in the Serpentine), presumably prompted by travellers’ reports of Belzoni’s success (where the French had failed) in removing the “half sunk and shattered visage” of the so-called “Young Memnon” from the Ramesseum at Thebes, Shelley and his friend Horace Smith began a poem each about the Memnon or Ozymandias, Diodorus’s “King of Kings”, who in an inscription on the base of his statue challenged all comers to: “surpass my works”.33 Shelley in particular, focussed upon the theme of hubris to nemesis, the alleged folly and supposed irony in 30

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For Shelley blaming the suicide of his first wife on her family, in a letter to Mary, see Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), p. 353. For a succinctly negative account of Shelley’s character, see “Shelley, or the Heartlessness of Ideas” in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988). In the present context, Shelley’s statement that “I never loved my father” might also be relevant; see The Letters, ed. F.L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), i. p. 230, as may his comments on his grandfather: “a complete Atheist…a bad man… a curse upon society” (ibid, p. 239). Red Shelley is the title of an uncritically enthusiastic book by the late Paul Foot, published in 1980. Fanny Wollstonecraft and Harriet Shelley (nee Westbrook) took their own lives in October and November 1816 respectively. The latter’s otherwise unaccusatory last letter to Shelley included the words “if you had never left me I might have lived…” (Holmes, p. 354). Diodorus of Sicily [The Library of History], ed. by C.H. Oldfather (London and Cambridge, Mass: Heinemann and Harvard UP, 1950), I, p. 47. Diodorus’s enthusiastic account of Ozymandias, who was clearly based on Rameses II, had been well-known since Poggio Bracciolini’s Latin translation of 1472 (further popularised by Serlio in Book III of his treatise on architecture, which adds much on Egypt, including the 1530s observations of the future Cardinal, Marco Grimani). In all versions, including Baldelli’s 1574 Italian version (p. 39), the statement (presumably once in hieroglyphs) was printed in upper case and highlighted: “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings, if anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass/see my works”. Belzoni says that Frederik Ludvig Norden saw Abu Simbel but it is usually thought to have been discovered in 1813.

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Ozymandias’s belief that his worldly achievements would survive to stun posterity, given the poet’s presumption that the pharaohnic king and all his works were now forever lost and forgotten.34 In the tradition of Poggio Bracciolini and, following him, Edward Gibbon, on the Capitol in Rome, or looking ahead, of Charlton Heston discovering the “half sunk” (Egyptianinspired) Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes,35 in his poem, Horace Smith imagined a hunter expressing: Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess What wonderful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.36

Interestingly, where Smith dwells exclusively and somewhat absurdly: “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below”, Shelley seemed better informed regarding the survival of a “shattered visage”. This colossal head had in fact been described by William Richard Hamilton in his pioneering Aegyptiaca, published in 1809, as: “certainly the most beautiful and perfect piece of Egyptian sculpture that can be seen throughout the whole country,” but 34

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Interest in these post-Napoleonic times in all things Egyptian was such that in February of the same year, Keats, Shelley and Leigh Hunt had met at the latter’s house and written competitive sonnets on the subject of the Nile; Holmes, p. 410; cf. Stanley Mayes, The Great Belzoni (London: Putnam, 1959), pp. 130-31. Shelley’s “To the Nile” illustrates the mixed blessing of human knowledge by contrasting the positive effects of the Nile’s flooding across “Egypt’s land of Memory” with the “blasts of evil” and “poisons” that also result. Ironically, an idea fiercely opposed by the author of the novel on which the film was based, Pierre Boulle, but now perhaps its best remembered scene; see Eric Greene, Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture (Hanover and London: Wesleyan UP, 1998), p. 200n; cf. note 43 below. A literary lawyer who came to look after Shelley’s financial affairs, Smith’s account of Shelley after their first meeting is perhaps worth recording. He commented on Shelley’s fashionable clothes, worn with “no thought for modish adjustment… yet it was impossible to doubt, even for a moment, that you were gazing at a gentleman”. Walking on Hampstead Heath with companions, after initial hesitation, when he warmed to a subject Shelley “talked much and eagerly, seemed to me a psychological curiosity, infinitely more curious than Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, to which strange vision he made reference. His principal discourse was, however, of Plato…” (Holmes, Shelley, pp. 359-60). One wonders whether Smith’s poem inspired Gustave Dore’s New Zealander, who sits contemplating the ruins of London; see Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), p. 2. Whether or not the makers of Planet of the Apes were aware of it another strikingly apocalyptic image of the Statue of Liberty was the decapitated one by Joseph Pennell, published in 1918 as an fundraising poster and incentive to buy Liberty Bonds; see Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), fig. 4.

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whether Shelley knew this or any of the more recent reports or had even seen a rough sketch (for pace his and Belzoni’s biographers he never saw the thing itself), he was determined to create a negative idea of this patriarchal image of authority:37 […] whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.

In fact within four months of the publication of “Ozymandias” (Diodorus’s misleading Greek rendition of the Egyptian “Rameses”), his seven-and-aquarter-ton bust arrived in London, just too late for Shelley to have seen it [Fig. 4].38 He left England forever on 13 March 1818 but the bust did not arrive at Tower Wharf until 17 April, entering the British Museum five days

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W.R. Hamilton, Remarks on Several Parts of Turkey. Part I, p. 177. Aegyptiaca also included the Greek text of the Rosetta Stone, complete with an English translation; see the Oxford DNB and Katherine Eustace ed., Canova: Ideal Heads (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1997), passim. In 1816, Hamilton was presented with a pair of rosso antico obelisks by the Pope (for his “museum”) and (subsequently?) owned a head of Rameses II which he kept in his Chelsea garden (Eustace, pp. 28 and 115). Confirmatory of Henry Salt’s artistic and archaeological credentials, his original instructions to Belzoni of 28 June 1816, might also be worth quoting here: “To the head is still attached a portion of the shoulders, so that altogether it is of large dimensions, and will be recognized, – 1st, by the circumstance of its lying on its back with the face uppermost – 2dly, by the face being quite perfect, and very beautiful – 3rdly, by its having, on one of its shoulders, a hole bored artificially, supposed to have been made by the French for separating the fragment of the body – and 4thly, from its being a mixed blackish and reddish granite, and covered with hieroglyphics on its shoulders. It must not be mistaken for another, lying in that neighbourhood, which is much mutilated.” (Belzoni’s Travels, ed. Siliotti, p. 103). Alberto Siliotti, in his edition of Belzoni’s Travels (London: British Museum, 2001), p. 321, n. 71, confirms that: “The bust of the ‘young Memnon’ arrived in London in the spring of 1818”, thus after the publication of Shelley’s sonnet in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner in January and Smith’s poem the following month (nos. 524 and 527, p. 73). Holmes (Shelley, p. 410) mistakenly says the bust arrived in the autumn of 1817 (together with the Rosetta Stone, which actually arrived in February1802 in the Society of Antiquaries, whence it was transferred to the BM in June 1803); while Mayes (Belzoni, p. 194), wrongly claims that “the Young Memnon had just arrived safely at the British Museum” when the sonnet was published in January 1818. In Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum (Lewisburg and London: Bucknell UP and Associated University Presses, 2001), Eric Gidal discusses “Ozymandias” without considering whether Shelley saw the bust, his reviewer in the History Workshop Journal (LVI [2003], pp. 267-71) Nigel Leask concluding that he did. For the irony of the sonnet itself conferring immortality on Rameses/Ozymandias, see Anne Janowitz, “Shelley’s Monument to Ozymandias”, Philological Quarterly, LX, 4 (1984), pp. 477-91. The bust arrived in Alexandria on 14 January 1817 (Belzoni’s Travels, ed. Siliotti, p. 155), thus provoking publicity which might have attracted Shelley’s attention. But it did not reach England until more than a year later, on 17 April 1818, almost a month after Shelley’s departure for the continent.

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later. By January 1819, when Shelley was in Naples coping with the consequences of having impregnated all three of his female travelling companions,39 the magnificent sculpture was finally installed in the Egyptian Room of the old Townley Gallery of the Museum.40 Rather than sneering, frowning or coldly commanding with “wrinkled lip”, the God-King Rameses’ face, superbly carved in the carefully pre-selected golden stratum of stone, which distinguishes itself from the speckled quartzite of the torso, seems more Buddhist – or at least Sphinx-like (even Voltaire-like) – in the calm serenity of its almost benign smile.41 Certainly Rameses wears a more benevolent expression than that on the Egyptian-inspired but freedompromoting French face of Frederic Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World (the inside of whose head is currently not accessible due to the threat of terrorism).42 But then Liberty’s Sphinx-like face is often thought to have been based on Bartholdi’s mother – another one for Freud. Bartholdi was certainly influenced by the colossi he saw on his two visits to Egypt, where he befriended Count Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps of Suez Canal fame. In fact he designed an earlier version of the Statue of Liberty for Lesseps in the form of a robed and torch-bearing female peasant representing Egypt, which would have stood as a lighthouse at the entrance to his Canal.

39 40

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See the remarkable “Appendix to Chapter 18” in Holmes, p. 483. Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes: The Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800-1939 (London: BM Press, 1992), p. 110. For a contemporary watercolour of the bust in situ, see pl. VIII; cf. fig. 34. Even today we tend to interpret the Sphinx through 5th-century Greek perception, as a monster that posed riddles and killed men rather than as “an Egyptian symbol for the superhuman power of a pharaoh”; see Henri Frankfort, “The Dying God”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXI, no. 3-4 (1958), pp. 141-2. Freud’s most distinguished Sphinx was a late 5th century BC Graeco-Italian terracotta one; Sigmund Freud and Art, ed. by Gamwell and Wells, no. 4387. Sphinxes were incorporated into the 13thcentury cloister of San Giovanni in Laterano; see James Stevens Curl, Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival: a recurring Theme in the History of Taste (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1994), pp. 46-7 and idem, in Interdiscplinary Science Reviews, XXV, 2 (2000), pp. 123-35. For later examples, see Jean-Marcel Humbert, Michael Pantazzi and Christine Ziegler, Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art 1730-1930 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1994). For Hegel, the Sphinx epitomised the Zeitgeist of ancient Egypt in which “the human spirit is trying to force its way forward out of the dumb strength and power of the animal… the Egyptians constructed their towering religious buildings in the same instinctive way in which bees build their cells…”; see Ernst Gombrich, “ ‘The Father of Art History’: A reading of the Lectures on Aesthetics of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)”, Tributes; Interpreters of our cultural Tradition (London: Phaidon, 1984), pp. 56-7 Warner, Monuments, pp. 4-8. Bartholdi had been inspired to produce a colossal sculpture by those he saw travelling in Egypt with Gerome. The glum expression on the eight and a half foot face of Constantine, once on a colossal statue in the Basilica (now Capitoline Museum, Rome), also looks forward to Liberty.

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The completed Liberty was presented by the French Republic to commemorate the centenary of America’s French-supported liberation from British tyranny on 4 July 1776.43 To some extent Shelley’s sonnet, influenced partly by his reading of Diodorus’s account of the stultifying conformity he encountered in the late Ptolemaic period, belongs to a long established negative (Orientalist?) view of Egypt, based on the Bible, on Roman (eg. Horatian) and Mediaeval disparagement of “that worst of women” Cleopatra,44 and the mistaken provenance of gypsies, who were excluded from England by Henry VIII’s “Egyptian Act” but included by Shakespeare as a “gypsy whore” in a slightly coarsened version of Plutarch’s Cleopatra, which makes it all the more ironic that we now call gypsies “Roma”.45 The widespread belief in the medicinal value of “mumia”, which turned innumerable early-modern Europeans into mummy-eating cannibals, did not improve the image of Egypt.46 Othello’s superstition is emphasized by the fateful handkerchief, given to his mother by an “Egyptian” (ie gipsy) charmer (or sibyl) who had: “dy’d it in mummy which the skilful / Conserv’d of maidens’ hearts” (III, iv).47 Following soon after the burning of Hermetic heretic, Giordano Bruno, Casaubon’s early 17th-century discrediting of the writings of Hermes Trismegistus tarnished

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For a refreshingly revisionist survey, see Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (London: BBC, 2005). Bartholdi’s Suez sculpture was either to have been called “Progress”, or “Egypt Bringing Light to Asia” (Warner, p. 8). Still more recent revelations regarding Napoleon’s revenge on the former slaves of Haiti may or may not another dimension to the debate on Britain’s record vis a vis France and America; see Claude Ribbe, Le Crime de Napoleon (forthcoming). See Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum: The Classic Study of Witchcraft, transl. Montague Summers (Dover, 1971), pp. 120-21: “The Kingdom of the Roman endured much evil through Cleopatra Queen of Egypt, that worst of women.” Cf. Cleopatra: from History to Myth, ed. by Susan Walker and Sally-Ann Ashton (London, 2004). See also, for the medieval confusion of Babylon in Egypt, Anne Wolf, How many Miles to Babylon: Travels and Adventures to Egypt and beyond, from 1300-1640 (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2003). For an often clearer view, see Okasa El Daly, Egyptology: the missing millennium in medieval Arabic writing (London: UCL, 2005). In general, cf. Bernal (and critics) and Assmann, passim. See the Arden edition of Antony and Cleopatra, p. xxxi. There is now a European Roma Rights Centre. Karl H. Dannenfeldt, “Egypt and Egyptian Antiquities in the Renaissance”, Studies in the Renaissance, VI (1959), pp. 7-27 and idem, “Egyptian Mumia: the sixteenth-century Experience and Debate”, Sixteenth-Century Journal, XVI, 2 (1985), 163-80. See also now Philip Schwyzer, “Mummy is become Merchandise: Literature and the Anglo-Egyptian Mummy Trade in the seventeenth century”, Re-Orienting the Renaissance, ed. Gerald MacLean (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 66-87. Cf. Dannenfeldt, “Egypt and Egyptian Antiquities”, p. 21; and for Falstaff almost “a mountain of mummy”.

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one of the major positive images of ancient Egypt; though thanks to St Stephen’s statement in the Acts of the Apostles (7:22) that “Moses was well versed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” and the later 17th-century elaboration of this by the likes of John Spencer and Ralph Cudworth, a generalized notion of its ancient wisdom survived.48 George Sandys visited Egypt and brought back artifacts, including “little models of stone” (including “the Idol Osiris, Anubis” etc), which he illustrated in his Relation of 1615 and donated to the Tradescants’ Lambeth Museum [Fig. 5].49 He otherwise anticipated Shelley by quoting Propertius on the inevitable “fall” of the pyramids and correctly described the Sphinx as having been carved from the rock, illustrating both [Fig. 6]. William Lithgow was, as ever, more journalistic, climbing the Great Pyramid but confusing the Sphinx with a colossus of Memnon.50 Unusually positive scholarly interest is manifest in the research of John Greaves, who inspected the Obelisk of Domitian with the Earl of Arundel’s art agent, William Petty, in the Circus of Maxentius 48

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Whose writings are so fascinatingly discussed by Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, passim; cf; Acts, 7:22. For John Woodward’s 1720s critique “Of the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians” (Archaeologia., IV [1786], pp. 212-310, see Arthur MacGregor, “Egyptian Antiquities”, in idem ed., Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1994), p. 174-78. Sandys, Relation of a Journey begun… 1610 (London: Clavel, 1670), pp. 100-01, MacGregor, p. 175; cf. M.L. Bierbrier, “The Sloane Collection of Egyptian Antiquities”, Aegyptus museis rediviva. Miscellanea in honorem Hermanni De Meulenaere, eds L. Limme and J. Strybol (Brussels: Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire/Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis, 1993), pp.15-33. Lithgow’s The Total Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations (Glasgow: J. MacLehose, 1906). Galileo refers to “those little clay figures which are said to be found in the ancient tombs of Egypt”, currently to be found in cabinets of curiosity; Erwin Panofsky, “Galileo as a critic of the arts”, Isis, XLVII, 1 (March, 1956), pp. 8-9. In 1586, the merchant John Sanderson had described mummies near the pyramids and “One little hand I brought into England, to show, and presented it to my brother, who gave the same to a doctor in Oxford.” ; cf. Dannenfeldt, pp. 20-21, and, for other 1580s travellers: Lawrence Aldersey and John Evesham, see John David Wortham, British Egyptology 1549-1906 (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971), pp. 13-16. Thomas Platter saw an infant mummy in Walter Cope’s collection 1599. In 1683 a rare Old Kingdom stele was donated to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. As well as Curl and Conner ed., see Tim Knox, “The Vyne Ramesses: “Egyptian Monstrosities” in British country house collections”, Apollo, CLVII (April, 2003), pp. 32-38, who reminds us of the c.1700 presence of Egyptian sculpture in the Wilton collection of the 8th Earl of Pembroke and the publications of his one-time protégé, Alexander Gordon (see below). By c.1720, Wilton’s Great Court featured “a lofty Egyptian column, which my lord [Pembroke] bought of Mr Talman”, which may have been the obelisk that John Talman had offered to acquire for George I in 1714; see Walpole Society, LIX (1997), p. 27. For drawings of Egyptian objects in Rome commissioned by John Talman; see note 57 below.

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outside Rome with a view to Arundel acquiring it [Fig. 7] and then travelled to Cairo to survey the pyramids, publishing the pioneering Pyramidographia in 1646 as a result.51 Milton, however, placed Isis among the fallen angels in Paradise Lost and in Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden chose Pharaoh to represent Louis XIV, Egypt thereby standing for wicked old absolutist (and papist) France.52 In London in 1688, John Evelyn, who on the Grand Tour more than forty years earlier had collected a handful of Egyptian objects, heard what he described as a “very excellent” sermon in which the parson waxed lyrical about our nation “being brought out of the Egyptian darkness of popery and superstition”, that is, liberated from the so-called tyranny of the Catholic James II by the more monotheistic Dutch-enabled Glorious Revolution.53 In 1737, probably inspired by Montfaucon’s Antiquity Explained, the singing antiquary, Alexander Gordon, published his enthusiastic illustrated commentaries on the Egyptian collections of William Lethieullier, Richard Mead and his contemporaries, but failed to complete his magnum opus on ancient Egypt before emigrating to America four years later. In December 1741, the year Gordon left but having benefited from his enthusiasm, Lord 51

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Greaves’s travel notebook, Bodleian Library Savile MS 49, fol.16v; cf Francis Springell, Connoisseur and Diplomat (London: Maggs Bros., 1963), p. 267. See also Wortham, pp. 1923, G.J. Toomer, Eastern Wisdom and Learning in the Study of Arabic in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Zur Shalev, “Measurer of all things: John Greaves (1602-1652), the Great Pyramid, and Early Modern Metrology”, Journal of the History of Ideas, LXIII (October 2002), pp. 555-575. Arundel’s attempt may have prompted Innocent X and Bernini’s plans to erect the Obelisk in Piazza Navona (and Kircher’s monograph); for, in the words of contemporary traveller, Richard Lassels (who knew most of those involved), it “made the Romans begin to think it a fine thing, and to stop the transporting of it into England”; see E. Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985), p. 407. Bernini then designed the scaled-down version of his obelisk-fountain which was eventually sent to Blenheim. Greaves may have sent Arundel the mummy he inspected in the late 1630s; see E. Chaney, The Evolution of English Collecting: Receptions of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2003), p. 105, n. 283. Greaves seems an obvious candidate to have sent Archbishop Laud the Egyptian “idola” known to have been donated by Laud to Oxford in 1636; for which see Helen Whitehouse, “Egyptology and Forgery in the seventeenth century”, Journal of the History of Collections, I, 2 (1989), p. 193. In fact Leibiniz had apportioned Egypt to Louis XIV in his scheme to encourage the European nations to fight non-Christian adversaries instead of each other; see Robert Blake, Disraeli’s Grand Tour: Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land, 1830-31 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 82. Meanwhile, Assmann (p. 251) but surprisingly not Bernal, documents Bossuet enthusing about ancient Egypt to Louis XIV in the 1680s. Evelyn, Diary, ed. by E.S. de Beer (Oxford, 1956), IV, p. 592. For his collecting of and interest in hieroglyphics, see ibid., II, p. 469; cf. Athanasius Kircher: The last Man who knew everything, ed. by Paula Findlen (New York and London: Routledge, 2004) and literature cited therein.

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Sandwich co-founded the short-lived Egyptian Society after his return from an unusually extensive Grand Tour.54 The greatest repository of Egyptian artifacts outside Egypt itself was Rome and, typically, the curiosity of merchants such as Lethieullier or aristocrats such as Sandwich was first aroused there, inspiring them to sail across the Mediterranean south to Alexandria and up the Nile. Apart from the obelisks, however (which had been well described by William Thomas in the mid-16th century)55, even in Rome, prior to the formation of Cardinal Albani’s collection, Egyptian antiquities were largely confined to the Vatican or Capitoline Museums and came from sites such as the Isaeum Campense or Villa Adriana in and around Rome rather than Egypt itself.56 The Palazzo Farnese could offer the odd 26th dynasty naophore (studied by Athanasius Kircher in the 1650s before its migration to Parma and Naples). The Palazzo Giusiniani had a serpentine vase with a supposedly Egyptian “idolo” on its lid, which Giuseppe Grisoni drew at John Talman’s request for Richard Topham’s paper museum (now at Eton College). Topham also acquired from Talman watercolours by Maratti and his pupil, Agostino Masucci, of the statues found in 1710 at the Villa Verospi (the former Gardens of Sallust) [Fig. 8], as well as drawings of other artefacts belonging to the Barberini, who had encouraged the Egyptian interests of interests of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Poussin and Kircher in the previous century.57 Though the tourists congregated in what Thomas Jones described as “a filthy vaulted room, the walls of which were painted with Sphinxes, Obelisks and Pyramids, from capricious designs of Piranesi”, even in the later 18th century, when many a cosmotheist Freemason might, like 54

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See the Oxford DNB for both, though the Egyptian Society is not mentioned (see instead entries on William Stukeley, Martin Folkes, Richard Pococke and F.L. Norden; and John Fleming’s Robert Adam and his Circle (London: John Murray, 1962), p. 327, for Gordon having been Secretary to the Society. Gordon believed that “this whole Terraqueous Glob derived religion, science and polishing” from the Egyptians; his unpublished treatise is BL Add MS 8834. Colonel William Lethieullier, who brought back a mummy from Saqqara in 1721, is not granted an Oxford DNB entry despite the fact that his Egyptian collection, with Hans Sloane’s (who bought much of Cardinal Gualtieri’s), formed the basis of the British Museum’s; for the Gualtieri sale, see M.I. Bierbrier, pp.15-33 and MacGregor, p. 176 and chapter 10. The credit given by Wortham (p. 26) to Thomas Shaw in the 1730s as the first to observe that “the ancient Egyptians had cut each obelisk out of a quarry as one block”, should in fact be accorded Thomas’s Historie of Italie of 1549, for which see Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour, passim. See Anne Roullet, The Egyptian and Egyptianizing Monuments of Ancient Rome (Leiden: Brill, 1972). Horace Mann had Cleriseau present Albani with a set of Alexander Gordon’s engravings in 1755 (Fleming, p. 164). See Eton College Collection, Bm 14.01. For help with Topham I thank Louisa Connor, Nick Baker and Cinzia Sicca’s John Talman project at the University of Pisa; for which see . For the statues, see Roullet, pp. 102-09 and figs.

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Mozart after his visit to Pompeii’s Temple of Isis, fantasize about Egypt, English interest in Egyptian art and archaeology remained relatively restricted, epitomized by the 18th-dynasty sculpture of Rameses’ secretary, Ptahmose, sitting isolated among the much younger classical and renaissance artefacts being admired by Zoffany’s milordi in his Tribuna.58 It was Napoleon’s invasion, followed by the British counter-coup, that precipitated the Egyptomania characterized by Thomas Hope’s Denon-inspired Household Furniture of 1807 and satirized by Robert Southey (in the wake of Rowlandson) in the same year: At present, as the soldiers from Egypt have brought home with them broken limbs and opthalmia… Every thing now must be Egyptian: the ladies wear crocodile ornaments, and you sit upon a sphinx in a room hung round with mummies, and the long-black lean-armed long-nosed hieroglyphical men, who are enough to make the children afraid to go to bed. The very shopboards must be metamorphosed into the mode, and painted in Egyptian letters, which as the Egyptians had no letters, you will doubtless conceive must be curious…59

All this, as well perhaps as the fact that some of the recently arrived Egyptian antiquities (including the still as yet undeciphered Rosetta Stone), had been confiscated from the French at Alexandria, is implicit in a description of the newly opened galleries in the British Museum published in the September 1810 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine. After describing the much improved access on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, ‘set aside for the free admission of all persons of decent appearance”, “the Ambulator” continues: Were an obscure individual like myself allowed to offer any strictures, I would venture to observe, that the Egyptian Collection, consisting chiefly of large stone coffins, and massive uncouth figures, ought never to have been placed on an upper story and among the elegant Greek and Roman sculptures. Besides, that their weight and huge bulk renders them only fit for a ground floor: their nature being chiefly sepulchral, it would be much more in character to see them in the solemn recess of a Catacomb, which, in this instance, should be fitted up in the Egyptian style… 60

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“Memoirs of Thomas Jones”, ed. A.P. Oppe, Walpole Society, XXXII (1951), p. 54. Though Townley fantasized that his beloved Clytie might be an “Isis-in the flower of the Lotus”, a fantasy that was developed by Wordsworth in his ‘Egyptian Maid’ (see Gidal, pp. 163-66), there is no other evidence of Egyptian interest in his collection. Townley’s somewhat effete Sphinx was 2nd century AD Roman. The display of Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum was combined with other curiosities and generally incoherent. Letters from England (London, 1807) in The Inspiration of Egypt: its Influence on British Artists, Travellers and Designers 1700-1900, ed. by Patrick Conner (Brighton: Brighton Museum, 1983), pp. 39-40. Gentleman’s Magazine (September 1810), LXXX, p. 209 in Susan Pearce and Ken Arnold, The Collector’s Voice: Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting, II, Early Voices (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

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In the latter suggestion may lie the origins of “The Egyptian Hall”, begun the following year in Piccadilly, the interior of which Belzoni subsequently fitted up as a facsimile of the newly discovered tomb of Rameses II’s father, Seti I.61 This exhibition inspired Horace Smith to write another Egyptian poem: “Address to the Mummy in Belzoni’s Exhibition,” but influenced perhaps by “the Ambulator” and conceivably even by Shelley (rather than the clergy as in France, where Drovetti’s collection was rejected),62 the Trustees of the British Museum, under the chairmanship of the Archbishop of Canterbury, were not persuaded to pay the Consul-General, Henry Salt, the required price for Seti’s magnificent alabaster sarcophagus, which was eventually purchased by John Soane for display in his house-cum-museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Meanwhile, so far from nothing remaining of Ozymandias’s “works”, in 1815 Byron’s Grand Touring friend William Bankes (the son of another British Museum trustee) had sketched a second, newly discovered colossal head belonging to a still largely buried (and then still unidentified) figure of Rameses on what he called “the façade of the Great Temple” of Abu Simbel.63 On 22 March 1813, the Anglicized Swiss explorer, Jean Louis Burckhardt, having just seven months earlier revealed Petra to the world, had gone on to discover this even more extraordinary temple almost by chance, as he was about to return from inspecting that of Nefertari alongside the Nile: “The head which is above the surface”, he wrote enthusiastically, “has a most expressive youthful countenance, approaching nearer to the Grecian model of beauty, than that of any Egyptian figure I have seen…”.64 Three years later, 61

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The identity of the sarcophagus could not yet be established. By the time of Belzoni’s exhibition (May 1821) this setting was especially appropriate for in 1819 J.B. Papworth had replaced the hitherto classical interior of the Egyptian Hall with an interior to match its facade (Inspiration of Egypt, ed. by Conner, p. 67; Curl, Egyptomania, p. 159 and Humbert, J.-M., Pantazzi, M., Ziegler, C., Egyptomania, p. 275, who say the exhibition travelled to Paris and St Petersburg). Lobbying by the clergy, already a handicap for Champollion, seems to have been a factor in the rejection of much of Drovetti’s collection by the French, which resulted in its purchase for 400,000 lire in 1824 by Carlo Felice, King of Sardinia, so that it now forms the nucleus of the Museum of Egyptology in Turin; Mayes, p. 292. The superb seated figure of the youthful Rameses is therefore now to be found there. Salt sold his second collection of more than 4000 objects to the French government for the Louvre for £10,000 in April 1826; see the Oxford DNB and Deborah Manley and Peta Ree, Henry Salt: Artist, Traveller, Diplomat, Egyptologist (London: Libri, 2001), pp. 244-45. Bankes wrote that “There could be nothing more vast of conception in Egypt or the world” than this façade; see Anne Sebba, The Exiled Collector: William Bankes and the Making of an English Country House (London: John Murray, 2004), p. 71 and Patricia Usick, Adventures in Egypt and Nubia; The Travels of William John Bankes (1786-1855) (London: British Museum, 2002). Katharine Sim, Desert Traveller: The Life of Jean Louis Burckhardt (London: Gollancz, 1969), p. 204; cf. the Oxford DNB entry which, however, does not mention Abu Simbel.

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in a letter to the African Association in London, dated 1 July 1816, Burckhardt commented on the similarity between this newly discovered head, complete with the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, and that of the Young Memnon or Ozymandias: “The expression of the face is the same; perhaps a little more gravity is perceived in those of Nubia, but the incomparable serenity, and godlike mildness are remarkable in both.”65 By the time Shelley was writing his celebrated sonnet, Belzoni had removed enough of the sand under which the other two and a half surviving seated statues and the entrance itself still lay buried to gain access to the interior of the temple at Abu Simbel, proudly engraving his signature as the first of many whose names ran chronologically down the stone surfaces as the rest of the sand was cleared. Belzoni’s 1821 Piccadilly display included a complete model of Abu Simbel recreated on a scale of one to thirty, a foretaste of the extraordinary, full-size Crystal Palace models 23 years later [Fig. 9].66 1821 also saw the arrival in London of the obelisk which William Bankes had acquired from the Nile island of Philae. Bankes’s friend, the Duke of Wellington, took a great interest in this trophy, lending a guncarriage for its transport to Kingston Lacy and laying the foundation stone in the centre of the garden [Fig. 10] .67 Shelley’s death by drowning in July 1822 caused his body to be even more wrinkled than the 92-year-old Rameses’ mummy and as a further irony, after Shelley’s corpse was burned on the orders of local bureaucrats, his ashes were buried in the Roman cemetery whose most celebrated landmark is a pyramid.68 Rameses’ great temple meanwhile became one of the wonders of the world, rivalled only by those sole survivors of the original Seven, the Pyramids, which, in “Queen Mab”, Shelley predicted would themselves fall (a not very happy image perhaps derived from Sandys’ translation of Propertius):

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Mayes, p.142; cf. Salt’s account of its beauty just 3 days earlier (above, note 36). Ibid., p. 262 and Usick, p. 154. Depending on the status of Wilton’s “Egyptian column” (note 47 above) and given the failure of Lord Arundel to acquire his obelisk, this would be the first genuine obelisk to arrive in England; see Usick, Adventures in Egypt, p. 154. In fact the foundation stone was laid in 1827 and the obelisk not finally erected until 1839, just two years before Bankes went into exile after being committed to trial for gross indecency with a guardsman; Richard Parkinson, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment (London: British Museum, 1999), p. 34; cf. T.G.H. James, “Egyptian Antiquities at Kingston Lacy”, Apollo, CXXIX (May 1994), pp. 29-33. The mummy of Rameses II was discovered at Deir-al-Bahari and is now one of the proudest possessions of the Cairo Museum. Shelley’s grave is in the Cimitero Acattolico, Rome, adjacent to the Pyramid of Cestius.

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It was just two months after Shelley’s death that Jean-François Champollion, on the basis of an inscription sent him by Jean Nicolas Huyot, architect of the Arc de Triomphe, deciphered the name of Rameses on the temple at Abu Simbel and thus confirmed it as one of Ozymandias’s supposedly vanished works.70 The decipherment of the Rosetta Stone followed two years later in 1824, facilitated by William Bankes and Thomas Young’s reading of the names “Ptolemy” and “Cleopatra” on the Kingston Lacy obelisk.71 In the late 1830s Robert Hay’s plaster casts of one of the great heads of Rameses at Abu Simbel, along with that of the recumbent figure at Memphis, were added to the display at the British Museum, inspiring a new generation of Victorian pilgrims to seek out the originals.72 By 1846, when Mrs [Isabella] Romer was publishing her two-volume Temples and Tombs of Egypt, with its frontispiece depicting Abu Simbel, and Harriet Martineau was following in her footsteps, the reading of papyri and inscriptions both in situ and now spread throughout museums and collections across the world showed how far Winckelmann and Hegel had been wrong in supposing self-awareness and notions of beauty to have originated with the Greeks.73 The newly deciphered hieroglyphs encouraged an ever more generous perspective where all things Egyptian were concerned, reviving aspects of the Hermetic tradition and reactivating a 69

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Cf. Sandys, Relation, p. 100. In fact, had Mohammed Ali not been persuaded by the British to desist from demolishing Egyptian temples for lime and graduating to the Pyramids for this and for building a dam across the Nile, they might indeed have been at least diminished. Parkinson, p. 35. Parkinson, p. 34. Evidently Champollion saw the Rosetta Stone for the first time in the spring of 1824 on a discrete visit to the British Museum with his brother; for W.R. Hamilton’s publication of the Greek text, see note 37 above. Champollion had meanwhile, in 1822, published his article on Bankes’s obelisk. Jenkins, p. 127. Hay’s casts were later reused for the heads of the two full-size models of the seated Abu Simbel figures at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Hay had been inspired by Belzoni’s Travels to visit Egypt on two recording journeys. His teams’ 47 volumes of notes and drawings (now in the BL and BM) remain unpublished. Hay married a 14-year-old Cretan girl he rescued from the slave market in Alexandria. The bulk of his Egyptian objects now forms the nucleus of the Boston Museum’s Egyptian Collection; see Oxford DNB. Gombrich, Tributes, pp. 56-7 and Winckelmann e l’Egitto: la riscoperta dell’Arte egizia nel XVIII secolo, ed. by Alfred Grimm and Gianna A. Mina Zeni, (Ligornetto: Museo Vela, 2004). Regarding self-awareness (Hegel’s term) one need only read the Egyptian, yet Hamlet-like, “Dialogue of a man with himself contemplating suicide”, to appreciate the extent of Greek indebtedness to Egyptian consciousness. For Martineau et al, see Joan Rees, Writing on the Nile: Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Amelia Edwards (London: Rubicon. 1995).

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Bruno-like but more widespread as well as scientific scepticism about the uniqueness of Christianity, and indeed its monotheistic source and successor, Judaism and Islam respectively. What had been satirized by Southey as superficial was becoming profound. In the tradition of Christopher Marlowe on reading of the American Indians, or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver returning from his travels, Harriet Martineau returned from Egypt a confirmed atheist, alienating her brother as a result.74 For some travellers the effect was not dissimilar to that experienced by the American astronauts who landed on the moon and looked back at their own planet to perceive both it and themselves as disturbingly small.75 By January 1850, when the 29-year-old, but already multi-lingual and intensively educated Florence Nightingale sailed up the Nile to visit Abu Simbel, she benefitted not merely from the British Museum’s collection and catalogues, the burgeoning of new scholarship and illustrated guidebooks, from the multi-volume Description de l”Egypte through the works of Belzoni, Champollion, Christian von Bunsen (who was a close friend), Lepsius and John Gardner Wilkinson; she was also able to read Martineau’s remarkable Eastern Life: Past and Present, which had appeared two years earlier.76 Martineau had written that: “a Nile voyage is as serious a labour as the mind and spirit can be involved in” and, as a similarly troubled mystically-inclined neurotic who had not yet found her vocation and would 74

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Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004) and Anne Barbeau Gardiner, ‘Swift Prophet: The Christian Meaning of Gulliver’s Travels”, Touchstone (October 2004), pp. 34f. Lord Lindsay who published his Letters on Egypt, Edom and the Holy Land in 1838 wrote in the manner of Poggio or Gibbon on the Capitol: “I have many schemes, grand noble schemes, floating before me […] the Providential history of Man which I told you I planned at Thebes sitting on the broken obelisk, a Poem… a Work on Art to lead men to the true moral religious dignity and object”; see Hugh Brigstocke, “Lord Lindsay and the ‘Sketches of the History of Christian Art’,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, LX, 1 (Autumn 1981), p. 35. For Irish-American Christian Baptist awe in the Egyptian galleries in the British Museum, reduced by their worship of animals, see Alexander Campbell’s “Letters from Europe” in the Millennial Harbinger, series III, IV (December 1847), no. XII. For the personal consequence of the mission on Neil Armstrong and his colleagues, see Andrew Smith, Moondust: in search of the men who fell to earth (London: Bloomsbury, 2005). For a comparison between the status of moon rock and the Rosetta Stone, see Simon Coleman and John Elsner, Pilgrimage Past and Present in the World Religions (London: BM Press, 1995), pp. 219-20. Florence Nightingale in Egypt and Greece, ed. by Michael Calabria (New York: SUNY, 1997), passim. This fascinating book is not mentioned in the Oxford DNB entry on Nightingale but then neither is her visit to Egypt, though it was probably her working visit to the Institute of St Vincent de Paul in Alexandria that confirmed her decision to become a nurse. The presence in the British Museum of Hay’s casts of Rameses” heads at Memphis and Abu Simbel may be relevant to her extreme enthusiasm for the originals of both these.

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never marry, Nightingale clearly took her predecessor’s injunction that it was “necessary to go back to Egypt for the key,” very seriously indeed.77 Even with such high expectations, Nightingale was overwhelmed by Rameses’ temples, as she writes in one of her letters home from this southern-most point of her tour: “I can fancy nothing greater. All that I have imagined has fallen short of Ipsamboul and thank God that we have come here. I can conceive nothing in Thebes to equal this, and am well satisfied to turn back now for we go no further.”78 Exploring first the temple of Nefertari, Nightingale sounded almost Nietzschean (or D.H. Lawrentian; even Bernalian?), revealing in the process much of what motivated her extraordinary later achievements in expressing her preference for the religion of the ancient Egyptians over that of the Romans and, by implication, over Victorian Christianity. (Meanwhile, in her private diary she was laying bare still more of her tortured soul, as well as details of scarcely suppressed feuds with her equivalently neurotic servant, the aptly-named Trout): The temple is small, the first chamber hewn in the rock and supported by six pillars, with the Athor head upon each; then a vestibule or pro sekos: then the sekos or sacred place, with her image in it. It was built by the great Rameses, of the nineteenth dynasty, who reigned thirteen centuries and a half before Christ… Everywhere Rameses” queens occupy as conspicuous a place as himself... I don”t think I ever saw anything which affected me much more than this (3000 years ago) – the king at his entrance into life is initiated into the belief that what we call evil was the giver of life and power as well as the good… The old Egyptians believed that out of good came forth evil, and out of evil came forth good: or as I should translate it, out of the well ordered comes the inharmonious, the passionate; and out of disorder again order; and both are a benefit. The Romans, who were a more literal people, and we their descendants, never understood this, and have set our faces against evil, like the later Egyptians, and scratched his nose.79

At Rameses’ own temple she elaborates further, initially in a more aesthetic mode: We clambered and slid through the avalanche of sand, which now separates the two temples. There they sit, the four mighty colossi, seventy feet high, facing the East, with the image of the sun between them, the sand-hill sloping up to the chin of the northern-most colossus. Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty; intellect without effort, without suffering. I would not call it intellectual either, it is so entirely opposed to that of the Jupiter

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Calabria, pp. 16-17. Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-1850, ed. by Anthony Sattin (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1987), p. 95. A more complete edition is now available in “Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and the Eastern Religions”, ed. by Gerard Vallee in vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2003). Letters from Egypt, ed. by Sattin, p. 96. . In his posthumously-published Apocalypse, Lawrence asked: “have we anything as good as the Egyptians for two or three thousand years before Christ?”

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Capitolinus; it is more the beauty of the soul – not a feature is correct – but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man. Yet the figures are anything but beautiful; no anatomy, no proportion; it is a new language to learn, and we have no language to express it.80

Visiting Abu Simbel just three months later on Good Friday 1850, Flaubert wrote that “the Egyptian temples bore me profoundly. Are they going to become like the churches in Britanny, the waterfalls in the Pyrenees?” The day before, he and his friend Maxime du Camp (who photographed as much as was visible of the facade), “beg[a]n clearing operations to disengage the chin of one of the exterior colossi.”81 Because of the then still uncleared sand, “as high as three feet below the top of the door” which she calculated must be 20 feet high, Nightingale explained that “into this temple you have to crawl on all fours”, but was infinitely more enthusiastic than her prematurely jaded French contemporary:82 When you have slipped down an inclined plane of sand twenty feet high… you find yourself in a gigantic hall, wrapped in eternal twilight, and you see nothing but eight colossal figures of Osiris standing against as many square pillars which support the rocky roof, their arms crossed upon their breast, the shepherd’s crook and the flagellum in either hand, for he is here in his character of judge of the dead, lord of Amenti, or the lower world of departed souls…83

Nightingale might almost have had Shelley’s sonnet in mind when she wrote of the carved relief of Rameses with his kneeling captives that she found inside the temple into which she had crawled: Ramese receives life and power from his patron Ra (after whom he is named)… It reminds one of another nation and another leader, whose name only differs by the omission of the first syllable from Rameses. But the most curious part of the thing is the sublime expression of this Rameses – I never saw so beautiful a countenance. It is not a man murdering other men; it is the type of power.84

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Ibid., p. 97. Flaubert in Egypt, ed. by Francis Steegmuller (London: Michael Haag, 1983), p. 142. After it had been entirely abandoned and buried for an unknown number of centuries, on 1 August 1817 Giovanni Finati, followed by Belzoni (who doesn’t mention this) were the first to enter “the finest and most extensive excavation in Nubia” (Belzoni, ed. by Siliotti, pp. 389; cf. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Giovanni Finati native of Ferrara, 2 vols, ed. by William Bankes (London: John Murray, 1830). Inside the temperature was over 50C. In the plates which he published in 1822 as supplements to his 1820 Travels, Belzoni includes a large engraving of the interior featuring the great figures of Osiris described by Nightingale, together with two observers holding torches. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 100.

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As she had hoped before setting out, Nightingale ultimately received more positive visions in Egypt than Richard Dadd had done and in the “exquisite little temple at Koorneh (Koorna)” at Thebes was indeed “called to God”; while a week later near Cairo: “God called me in morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation.”85 Before setting out for the Crimea in October 1854, and immediately after publishing her Letters from Egypt, she would have seen the pair of full-scale, polychrome (interestingly dark and somewhat Ozymandian) replicas of Rameses at the Crystal Palace’s extraordinary Egyptian Court, designed by former Egyptian travellers, Owen Jones and Joseph Bonomi Jr [Fig. 9].86 By the time Freud acquired his romantic print of Abu Simbel, a British dam across the Nile at Aswan had caused the waters around the temples to rise threateningly close. Three decades after Freud’s death, in order to prevent the temples from being entirely submerged by the so-called Sea of Nasser (created by a far higher, Russian-built dam), an unusually successful international campaign resulted in the entire rock surface of the hill from which the temple was carved, together with the adjacent temple of Nefertari, being sawn up and relocated block by block to higher ground above the new water level. Given the contrast Freud makes between ancient Egyptian culture and the Buddhist emancipation from ego, it is poignant that while UNESCO thus managed to save the great sculptures of Rameses in the 1960s, a direct order from the Secretary General of the United Nations supporting another issued by UNESCO failed to prevent the Sunni-dominated Taliban from destroying the even larger Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in March 2001. Though today’s “fundamentalists” are also motivated by Western revolutionary ideology, this tends to confirm Pascal’s dictum that “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction” (itself echoed by Gibbon’s “triumph of barbarism and religion”). It reminds us that religion and/or ideology can be more destructive than pragmatic economic progress or capitalism, to which both are usually antagonistic (despite capitalism’s allegedly Protestant roots). And monotheism, pioneered by Akhenaten and Moses, has proved especially destructive, its guiltinducing insistence on “but one God” excluding all other faiths, as well as those gods which had evolved within the host religion, Moses’ Golden Calf 85 86

Ibid., p. 17; cf. Calabria, passim. In a review dated 4 March 1854, the Athenaeum (p. 283), concluded that “a year’s bewildered tour through the Nile land would probably not convey so collective and accurate an impression of the various stages of Egyptian architecture as may be here gathered in a few hours”; see Conner ed, Inspiration of Egypt, pp. 91-4, cf. Curl, fig. 137. English Heritage recently acquired a volume of Philip Delamotte’s photographs of the Crystal Palace, now published by Ian Leith, The Crystal Palace Revealed (London: English Heritage, 2005).

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recalling Egypt’s Apis Bull in this respect. The Reformation revived equivalent iconoclasm where the Virgin, Saints and other “idols” of Roman Catholicism were concerned (Hinduism, with which Egyptian religion shares some features, seems to have survived in better shape in this respect).87 The late 4th century Coptic Christians outlawed hieroglyphs and defaced the reliefs from Alexandria to Philae, though the image of Isis breastfeeding Horus would reinsinuate it as Mary the Mother of God. The successes of the early Moslem iconoclasts reminded the 8th and 9th-century Byzantines to honour their own first two commandments, in whose name the 16th-century German, Swiss, Danish, Dutch Protestants and French Huguenots destroyed much of their cultural memory, as did the English Puritans, who then returned to power in the 1640s to repeat the exercise as well as burn some 200 witches after even the Spanish Inquisition had abandoned this practise.88 The late 18th-century French revolutionaries attempted to destroy both royalty and religion, erecting a religion of the state in their place which, after defeat and further theorizing in the 19th century, re-emerged in the form of those 20th-century “political religions” in whose names attempts were made to eliminate entire classes, races and cultures in Russia, Europe and China.89 In terms of a single act of destruction, today’s Islamic terrorists could be said to have outdone all of these by so spectacularly destroying those modernist icons of American capitalism, the Twin Towers, together with thousands of those who worked within them, in Septermber 2001.90 While the World Trade Center (first attacked in 1993) is being rebuilt around a newlydesigned “Freedom Tower” reminiscent of an Egyptian obelisk, it is reported

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See Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977; 2nd ed. 1992). Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion, pp. 318-19. Eric Voegelin’s Political Religions was published in Vienna in 1938, the year in which, like Freud, he was obliged to leave the city. See the edition in The Collected Works, vol 5: Modernity without Restraint, ed. by Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). These 4th and 5th century statues were 36 and 52 metres tall respectively; protests from countries with large Buddhist populations, Japan and India, were unsurprisingly vigorous; see R. Stephen Humphreys, “The Destruction of Cultural Memory”, Middle East Studies Association (Summer 2002), . An even larger (196 ft) figure of the Buddha was carved into the face of a cliff overlooking the Min River near Kiating, China, c. 700AD. For strict Moslems, structures whether in the form of statues of the Buddha or skyscrapers should not be taller than the nearest mosque; see Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest (London and New York: Continuum, 2002) though his account of the origins of “territorial loyalty” and its virtues should surely have begun with ancient Egypt. Artefacts were again deliberately defaced at Philae in the early 19th century, now by the French, out of jealousy that the British had obtained them; see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire (New York: Knopf, 2005).

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that the Bamiyan Buddhas are to be painstakingly reconstructed in their original changeless form. Whether Shelley would have approved of the destruction, or indeed reconstruction, of these “colossal Wreck[s]” or “cultural memorials” is not clear. Whether he would have approved of the colossal carved heads of four democratically-elected American Presidents at Mount Rushmore is equally uncertain [Fig. 11]. We only know that he vehemently disapproved of George Washington’s adversary, George III, the future Charles III’s favorite monarch, but according to Shelley: “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king” who epitomised patriarchal (Ozymandian?) tyranny.91 Approval of Mount Rushmore would surely have been reduced by the knowledge that the creator of this “national shrine to Democracy”, Gutzon Borglum, was an anti-semite, a keen member of the Ku Klux Klan and had been above all inspired by the colossal sculpture of dynastic Egypt, whose obelisks had already provided the model for the then tallest load-bearing structure in the world (taller than the tallest pyramid), the Washington Monument. Though designed in 1838, long before the arrival in America of a genuine obelisk, the Washington obelisk was not completed until after three years after the 1881 erection of this twin of London’s Cleopatra’s Needle in New York’s Central Park, thus too late for its function as a unifying cultural memorial to avert the Civil War which further postponed its completion. Meanwhile, the Manhatten Detention Complex, commonly known as “The Tombs”, was built in the style of the Egyptian temple at Denderah and used to incarcerate Confederate prisoners of war.92 In the light of “Ozymandias”, Shelley would surely have had something to say about Borglum’s announcement, made at the unveiling of Washington’s sixty-foot head in 1930, that “this was a face that would outlast all the civilization it represented.”93 Shelley’s failure to see any virtue in the conservative governments of either Ozymandias or George III anticipated Karl Marx,

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“Sonnet: England in 1819”; cf. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven and London, Yale UP, 1992) and Schama, Rough Crossings (re Sierra Leone). Ironically, Shelley’s much-admired Rousseau is supposed to have kept a portrait of George III in his living room in memory of support received; see Edward Edwards, The Lives of the Founders of the British Museum (London: Trubner and Co, 1870). In the 1860s the future Edward VII visited Egypt twice; see Wortham, pp. 85-6. Richard G. Carrott, The Egyptian Revival. Its Sources, Monuments, and Meaning. 18081858 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 121-25 etc. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 394 and 387. Borglum wrote a paper on “The Jewish Question” and hoped that a Knight of the Klan would become President but in the end patriotism prevailed and he criticized Hitler. It was Borglum who perfected Liberty’s torch after years of problems with it (Warner, p. 9).

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judgement upon whom may be left to fellow-German exile and indeed onetime Marxist and concentration camp prisoner, Karl A. Wittfogel. The subtitle of Wittfogel’s fundamental 1954 survey of Oriental Despotism is “A Comparative Study of Total Power”, which may explain why Edward Said fails to cite this crucial work anywhere in Orientalism. Wittfogel analysed the totalitarian tendencies of what he calls the “hydraulic civilizations” of ancient Egypt and China and concluded that: Marx clearly overrated the oppressiveness of Oriental society, which he held to be a system of “general slavery”. Ironically, but suitably, this designation can be used for the new industrial apparatus society. We can truly say that the October revolution, whatever its expressed aims, gave birth to an industry-based system of general (state) slavery.94

Bibliography: Allderidge, Patricia, The late Richard Dadd 1817-1886 (London: Tate Gallery, 1974). Assmann, Jan, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1997). Belzoni’s Travels, ed. by Alberto Siliotti (London: British Museum, 2001). Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization; vol. I: the Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987). Bierbrier, M.L., “The Sloane Collection of Egyptian Antiquities”, Aegyptus museis rediviva. Miscellanea in honorem Hermanni De Meulenaere, ed. by L. Limme and J. Strybol (Brussels: Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire/Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis, 1993). Blake, Robert, Disraeli’s Grand Tour: Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land, 1830-31 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982). Breasted, James, The Dawn of Conscience (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1933). —, A History of Egypt from the earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1905).

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Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Yale UP, 1954), p. 441. Ironically, while he was writing book on the inevitably centralist and authoritarian governments produced by hydraulic societies, President Nasser seized the Suez Canal, partly in order to use its tolls to pay for the Russian-built damn that would supersede the British one and create the largest manmade lake in the world. In 1966 Mao Zedong launched the so-called cultural revolution, insisting on smashing what he called “the four olds”: ideas, culture, customs and habits.

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Carrott, Richard G., The Egyptian Revival: its Sources, Monuments, and Meaning 1808-1858 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978). Chaney, Edward, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985). —, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass and Co., 2000). Clark, Ronald, Freud: the Man and the Cause (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980). Clayton, Peter A., The Rediscovery of Ancient Egypt: Artists and Travellers in the 19th Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982). Coleman, Simon, and Elsner, John, Pilgrimage Past and Present in the World Religions (London: British Museum Press, 1995). The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 19081939, ed. by R. Andrew Paskauskas, introduction by Riccardo Steiner (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1993). The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi, ed by Eva Brabant and others, 2 vols. (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1992). Curl, James Stevens, Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival: a recurring Theme in the History of Taste (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994). Daly, Okasa El, Egyptology: the missing millennium in medieval Arabic writing (London: UCL, 2005). Dannenfeldt, Karl H., “Egypt and Egyptian Antiquities in the Renaissance”, Studies in the Renaissance, VI (1959), pp. 7-27. Diodorus of Sicily, ed. by C.H. Oldfather, 12 vols. (London and Cambridge: Mass: Heinemann and Harvard UP, 1950). Duncan, David, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London: Methuen and Co., 1908). Evelyn, John, Diary, ed. by E.S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 1956). The Evolution of English Collecting: Receptions of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, ed. by Edward Chaney (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2003). Excavations and their Objects: Freud’s Collection of Antiquity, ed. by Stephen Barker, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). Feaver, William, Lucian Freud (London: Tate Publishing, 2002). Flaubert in Egypt: a sensibility on tour, transl. and ed. by Francis Steegmuller (London: Michael Haag, 1983). Fleming, John, Robert Adam and his Circle (London: John Murray, 1962). Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. by James Strachey, Anna Freud et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74).

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—, The Diary of Sigmund Freud: 1929-1939, ed. by Michael Molnar (London: Hogarth Press, 1992). Gidal, Eric, Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum (Lewisburg and London: Bucknell UP and Associated University Presses, 2001). Gombrich, Ernst, Tributes; Interpreters of our cultural Tradition (London: Phaidon, 1984). Greene, Eric, Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture (Hanover and London: Wesleyan UP, 1998). Hamilton, W[illiam] R[ichard], Remarks on Several Parts of Turkey. Part I, Aegyptiaca (London: T. Payne, 1809). Holmes, Richard, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974). Humbert, J.-M., Pantazzi, M., Ziegler, C., Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art 1730-1930 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1994). Humphreys, R. Stephen, “The Destruction of Cultural Memory”, Middle East Studies Association (Summer 2002). Online source . James, T.G.H., “Egyptian Antiquities at Kingston Lacy”, Apollo, CXXVIII (May 1994), 29-33. Janowitz, Anne, “Shelley’s Monument to Ozymandias”, Philological Quarterly, LX, 4 (1984), 477-91. Jenkins, Ian, Archaeologists and Aesthetes: The Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800-1939 (London: British Museum Press, 1992). Jones, Ernest, Sigmund Freud. Life and Work, 3 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1953-7). Knox, Tim, “The Vyne Ramesses: ‘Egyptian Monstrosities’ in British country house collections”, Apollo, CLVII (April, 2003), 32-38. Lewis, Wyndham, The Diabolic Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto and Windus Press, 1931). Lithgow, William, The Total Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations … 1632 (Glasgow: J. MacLehose, 1906). Livingstone, Marco, David Hockney: Egyptian Journeys (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002). MacGregor, Arthur, ed., Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1994). MacLean, Gerald, Re-Orienting the Renaissance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Manley, Deborah, and Ree, Peta, Henry Salt: Artist, Traveller, Diplomat, Egyptologist (London: Libri, 2001). Mayes, Stanley, The Great Belzoni (London: Putnam, 1959).

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Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Giovanni Finati Native of Ferrara, ed. by William Bankes, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1830). Neu, Jerome, The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge: CUP, 1991). Nightingale, Florence, Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-1850, ed. by Anthony Sattin (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1987). —, Florence Nightingale in Egypt and Greece, ed. by Michael Calabria, (New York: SUNY, 1997). Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990). Parkinson, Richard, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment (London: British Museum, 1999). Raphael-Leff, Joan, “If Oedipus was an Egyptian”, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, XVII, 3 (1990), 309-35. Rees, Joan, Writing on the Nile: Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Amelia Edwards (London: Rubicon, 1995). Roullet, Anne, The Egyptian and Egyptianizing Monuments of Ancient Rome (Leiden: Brill, 1972). Sandys, George, Relation of a Journey begun… 1610 (London: W. Barrett, 1615 and 1670). Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995). —, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (London: BBC, 2005). Sebba, Anne, The Exiled Collector: William Bankes and the Making of an English Country House (London: John Murray, 2004). Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Letters…, ed. by Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, ed. by Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells (London: SUNY, New York and Freud Museum, 1989). Katharine Sim, Desert Traveller: The Life of Jean Louis Burckhardt (London: Gollancz, 1969). Smith, G. Elliot, Evolution of the Dragon (Manchester UP and London: Longmans, 1919). Starkey, Paul and Janet, Travellers in Egypt (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998). Usick, Patricia, Adventures in Egypt and Nubia; The Travels of William John Bankes (1786-1855) (London: British Museum, 2002). Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works, 34 vols. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990-). Warner, Marina, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985).

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Webster, Richard, Why Freud was wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (London: HarperCollins, 1995). Wilson, John A., Signs and Wonders upon Pharoah: A History of American Egyptology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1964). Wortham, John David, British Egyptology 1549-1906 (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971). Winckelmann e l’Egitto: la riscoperta dell’Arte egizia nel XVIII secolo, ed. by Alfred Grimm and Gianna A. Mina Zeni (Ligornetto: Museo Vela, 2004). Wittfogel, Karl A., Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale UP, 1954). Yerushalmi, Josef Hayim, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1991). Young, David, The Discovery of Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992).

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Figure 1 (above): Ernst Koemer, Abu Simbel (1907 coloured engraving in the Freud Museum). Figure 2 (left): Oscar Nemon, Statue of Sigmund Freud (photo E. Chaney). Figure 3 (middle): Michelangelo's Moses (San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome). Figure 4 (right): Rameses II (British Museum: photo E. Chaney).

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Figure 5: Travellers, Sphinx and Pyramids; engraving from George Sandys, Travells (1615; 1670 edition), p. 104 (photo E. Chaney).

Figure 6: Egyptian artifacts, engraving from George Sandys, Travells (1615: 1670 edition), p. 100 (photo E. Chaney).

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Figure 7 (top): John Greaves, Notebook, Bodleian Library MS 49, fol. 16v (photo E. Chaney). Figure 8 (bottom): Agostino Masucci, Ptolemy II; excavated at the Villa Verospi in 1710 (Eton College Collection, Bm.14.01) (Courtesy of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College).

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Figure 9: The statues of Rameses II from Abu Simbel; copied by Owen Jones and Joseph Bonomi for the Egyptian Court at the Crystal Palace in 1854. Photo by Philip Delamotte (courtesy of English Heritage).

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Figure 10: Kingston Lacy, William Bankes's Philae Obelisk. Photo E. Chaney.

Figure 11: Mount Rushmore.

Marino Niola

The Invention of the Mediterranean All of the merits and all of the flaws of the Neapolitan people come from one of its remarkable qualities: the predominance of a sense of beauty, deriving either from its Greek origins or from the territory that it occupies. Saredo Parliamentary Inquiry, 19011

The Land of Light Its glare is so fiery that for the first time the earth is reflected in the sky, giving it the appearance of continual lightning; in turn the sky is repeated in the sea and nature is set ablaze by this triple image of fire.2

That is how Vesuvius appeared to Madame de Staël: a gouache turned into prose, a spectacular mise en scène of a mythologically Meridional nature. It seemed to have been made to inspire descriptions in the exquisite tone of the landscape painters, to dictate emotionally charged letters that have contributed to making the most famous gulf in the world an icon of the Mediterranean. After the Physis, the baroness turns to a description of the Polis: They arrived at Naples, by day, in the midst of that huge population, at once so lively and so idle. First they crossed the Via Toledo, seeing the Lazzaroni lying on the pavement or withdrawn into wicker baskets which they use as dwellings day and night. There is something very original about the uncivilized state existing there side by side with civilization.3

In these words, where the Neapolitan populace appears at least as far from Europe as were the American Indians, the Bantu or the Hottentots, a perfect mythologem of modernity emerges: the difference between the new civilisation of the North and the ancient civilisation of the South, a difference 1

2

3

The Saredo Parliamentary Inquiry was a survey done by the Italian Parliament on the conditions of life in the South of the country a few decades before the unification. It is therefore an official document of the state and not a literary text, regardless of its tone. Madame de Staël, Corinne: or Italy, trans. by Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 225. de Staël, p. 195.

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that has the Mediterranean as its symbol. It was above all at the beginning of the 18th century, in fact, that the South became the chosen place of an indispensable meridian difference for building a modernity that was identified with Northern civilisation. And the past was configured as ‘elsewhere’ – even more so than before – a place of entry for an ‘otherness’ founded upon a double distance, on the evocation of a time and space that was equally remote. All of the major witnesses of the Grand Tour – from Berkeley to Goethe, from Charles de Brosses to Madame de Staël, from Von Platen to Gregorovius, from Rilke and Benjamin to Melville and Lawrence – would see in the South the “Land of Light”, the opposite pole from the land of the setting sun, that is literally the West, the Occident. So the South became a metaphor for a temporal threshold of a mythical past that preceded the time when history changed gears, and archaeology became the material and symbolic vehicle for this “invention of the Mediterranean.” In this hairpin turn of the history of European culture, archaeology took the form of an allegory, a topological space in which the contemplation of the ruins, of the remnants of the past, became a kind of mourning of forms, an indispensable rite de passage for putting an end to a hereditary controversy about who had the right to call himself heir, North or South? Should the rightful heir be the mature son, because he is the modern expression of that illustrious past, or his brother whose only merit is that he is the incarnation of that past, like a living relic? The place in which this mythology of otherness is inscribed is the Mediterranean: a place in time, an indispensable moment for the articulation of an identity that has to be written against the background of the difference that forms it, of a sauvagerie making up its civilisation, of an antiquity that makes it modern. In the myth of the South as a source there is a nostalgia for the Eden-like Mediterranean as the infancy of the world, as an interim in history but also – reversing the signs of the myth to the negative – an archetypal image of a ‘Southernness’ seen as an infantile fixation at a stage of underdevelopment or a sub-modern condition. It is no coincidence that this representative convention whose paradigmatic references exercised such influence on the representation of the South, is both ideologically and linguistically tied to the proto-ethnographic literature on the savages of the Americas, on their customs compared to those of our ancestors. I am thinking above all of Father Gabriel Sagard, the author of Grand voyage du pays des Hurons, a true best seller at the time to the point of being in the library of every savant (marked with the number 3059 in

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Voltaire’s library) and of Father Lafitau, who in 1724 printed the celebrated Moeurs des sauvages américains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps.4 The conventional description of the people of the South borrows its vocabulary, metaphors and rhetoric from these successful travel accounts and from the remarks on the primitive contained within them, and in the end they produce a sort of conceptual superimposition that makes the urban, unrefined populace into reincarnated ancients, or even fossils. Although the Mediterranean people are portrayed as modern ancients, their antiquity is described with a vocabulary of primitivism and sauvagerie, as in the case of the Neapolitan ruffians. It is this ‘forcing together’ of the identification between the temporal and spatial distance, between the ancient and the primitive, that marks the philosophy of the history of evolutionism up to Morgan and Frazer. If the metamorphosis of the wild man into the primitive man makes him a historical being, then the customs and the belief in exotic humanity lose their extraneousness when they are “referred to as those of the ‘early times’ in which the ancients left us their testimony.”5 So the European man can recognise himself in the wild man learning to know himself, as Rousseau said in his often discussed tenth note to Discours sur l'inégalité. It is sufficient to broaden his own history to allow homo selvaticus among his ancestors. By mixing his profile with that of his doubles – Egyptians, Persian, Shiites, Germans, etc. – he takes his place alongside the vaster myth of the origin of man.

A Population that is Still Greek During the course of progress of the human spirit, the most bizarre customs and the most revolting superstitions were a characteristic of all of the populations that were still barbaric before their entrance into history. For Voltaire, this progress started upon the advent of writing and experienced a decisive acceleration in the 15th century when the civil populations entered into a new phase of history. At the same time, the primitive populations

4

5

Cf. Gabriel Sagard, Grande viaggio nel paese degli Uroni. 1623-1624 (Milano: Longanesi, 1972) and J. Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages américains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Paris: Saugrain aîné, 1724). Cfr. Michèle Duchet, Le origini dell'antropologia. Viaggiatori ed esploratori del Settecento (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1976), p. XIX (all non-English texts have been translated by Marino Niola, unless otherwise indicated.)

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found themselves thrust outside this new phase and therefore experienced almost no progress during this long arc of time. It was a singular encounter that would modify the entire profile of human history, in which some fault lines, some gaps and some inequalities appear, a sauvagerie that was not only present in the remote past or in another place, in the stupid laziness and indigence of the Negroes, of the Bantu and of the Lapp but also in the barbaric acts of the villains, of a bêtise of which Europe carries many traces in the urban and primitive populace, in the peasants and ruffians that populated las Indias de por Aca. Men that were indistinguishable from brutes according to Voltaire’s description in Essai sur les moeurs.6 And if there had been even more of a historical ‘becoming’ about these so-called savages, more progressive energy than around the peasants or the Neapolitan ruffians, it is because the populous, aggressive and learned societies were as they were precisely because of this inequality: in other words, it was precisely this difference in historical temperature that produced the transforming dynamis. It is as if history – in the Voltairean schema – oscillated between the agents of progress and an insensitive people. In this ideological and philosophical climate, the geographical South became the archaeological and landscaped setting for the re-enactment of the classical world, the “paradise inhabited by devils”: a place marked by a monstrous contrast between beauty and terribilità, as Goethe would say with accents that seem to anticipate the famous Leopardian image of nature “with a countenance both beautiful and terrible”:7 The Terrible beside the Beautiful, the Beautiful beside the Terrible cancel one another out and produce a feeling of indifference. The Neapolitan would certainly be a different creature if he did not feel himself wedged between God and the Devil.8

Separating de facto the place from the men, it is Goethe once again who speaks of the Bay of Naples as a place that is full of the past, where it is still possible to hear the murmur of the ages, the living word of Homer: A word about Homer. The scales have fallen from my eyes. His descriptions, his similes, etc., which to use seem merely poetic, are in fact utterly natural [...] They represented things and persons as they are in themselves, we usually represent only their subjective effect; they depicted the horror, we depict horribly; they depicted the pleasing, we pleasantly, and so on. Hence all the exaggeration, the mannerisms, the false elegance and the bombast [...] If what I say is not new, I have had vivid occasion to feel its truth. Now that my mind is stored with images of all these coasts and promontories, gulfs and bays, islands and headlands, rocky 6 7

8

Cf. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs (Paris, Gallimard, 1963). Giacomo Leopardi, “Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander”, trans. by J.G. Nichols, in The Canti: with a Selection of his Prose (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 98. J.W. Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. by W.H Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 215.

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cliffs and sandy beaches, wooded hills and gentle pastures, fertile fields, flower gardens, tended trees, festooned vines, mountains wreathed in clouds, eternally serene plains and the all-encircling sea with its ever-changing colours and moods, for the first time the Odyssey has become a living truth to me.9

The very same Stimmung is perceived also by Von Platen10 who takes up the contrast – that was already in Goethe – between the calculating coldness of the modern ratio of the North and the ancient warmth of the South, and was echoed a century later by Rainer Maria Rilke.11 Such a difference between the place and the men is described in a passage of the Italienische Reise where Goethe returns explicitly to the ethnological topos chosen by Voltaire to incarnate the problematic theme of the conflict between nature and civilisation, The morning was cold and damp, for it had been raining a little. I came to a square where the large paving stones seemed to me to have been swept unusually clean, and was surprised to see a number of ragamuffins squatting in a circle with their hands pressed to the flat stones as if they were warming them. At first I thought they were playing a game, but the serious expression on their faces suggested some more practical purpose for their behaviour. I racked my brains trying to guess what they were up to, but found no satisfactory explanation, so I had to ask someone why these little monkeys formed this circle and took up such a peculiar posture. I was told that a blacksmith in the neighbourhood had been putting a tyre on a cartwheel. This is done as follows: the iron band is laid on the ground, shavings are piled on it in a circle and set alight to make the iron sufficiently malleable. When the shavings have burnt themselves out, the tyre is fitted on to the wheel, and the ashes are carefully swept up. The little street Arabs take advantage of the fact that the paving stones are still hot and stay there till they have absorbed the last bit of warmth from them.12

In agreement with the Goethe’s tableau is the page by Madame de Staël on Corinne’s arrival in Naples, containing a description, in lively tones, on the habits and the customs of the Neapolitan populace that reminds us of the exotic enfants-sauvages to which Goethe compares the Neapolitan street urchins, Among these men [Lazzaroni] there are some who do not even know their own names and go to confession to admit sins anonymously since they cannot say what the name of the sinner is. In Naples there is a subterranean grotto where thousands of Lazzaroni spend their lives, emerging only at midday to see the sun; they sleep the rest of the day while their wives spin. […] You can see Calabrians set out to cultivate the land with a violinist at their head and dancing from time to time to take a rest from walking […] In some respects the common people of Naples are not at all civilized, but they are not horrish in the manner of other

9 10 11 12

Goethe, p. 310. Cf. August Von Platen, Eklogen und Idyllen in Werke (Stuttgart-Tubingen: Cotta, 1853). Cf. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1907 bis 1914 ( Leipzig: Insel, 1933). Goethe, pp. 199-200.

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Here the description of the baroness Holstein takes on the ‘paradoxographic’ tones of a Herodotean voyage.

Enfants-Sauvages “Devotion, frivolity, cruelty! These are the main traits of this class of people!” reads the caption of an illustration, in a book published in Frankfurt in 1799, Neapel und die Lazaroni, that bears the significant subtitle Ein charakteristisches Gemälde für Liebhaber der Zeitgeschichte. The etching shows a group of scoundrels with the banner and treasures of Saint Januarius, with others dancing and singing, while on the side there is a Pulcinella who is dancing with a bloody knife. They are the “phenomenal beings”, the “lost savages in a European city that Archenholz describes in Tableau de l'Angleterre et de l'Italie, regarding the Neapolitan ruffians, with extraordinary temperaments and habits that are almost inexplicable”,14 “hommes étonnants” as general Championnet describes them in his report to the directoire. Like the “beasts” of Vico, the Partenopean wild men scream constantly, a habit that might frighten those “who did not know that this was their usual behaviour”, notes Madame de Staël, who attributes such animal exuberance to an “excessive vitality and they do not know what to do with it, because they combine to the same degree laziness and violence.”15 Dumas too speaks of the Neapolitans as a species that would soon be extinct since their expulsion from Eden coincided with 1799 and the French occupation. Here we find the idea of the bonheur négatif that characterised the savage condition, the primitive happiness of the daughter of nature, typical of the debates in the 18th century. The savage, without vices or virtues, would be characterised by a privileged state of anomie through a lack of rules. Free from needs, ambitions, luxury and vices, he lives in a condition of ignorance, of simplicity, blindness and barbarity, nature without virtues and without vices, a ground zero of pure negativity. It is the Mediterranean variation on the myth of the good savage, like the one we find also in the Voyage of Berkeley, where the image of an urban and rural world exposed to the nemesis of the sun: a community of children of nature whose qualities – indolence, laziness, 13 14

15

de Staël, pp. 191-193. Benedetto Croce, Aneddoti e profili settecenteschi (Milano-Palermo-Napoli: Remo Sandron, 1914), pp. 248 and following. de Staël, p. 221.

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and insensitivity to the arts – are in many ways assimilable and assimilated by the quality of the primitive socius together with the idea that the climate has an influence on its character and the behaviour, which caused president De Brosses to speak in similar terms about the sentimental shamelessness of Neapolitan women.

It is a common savage happiness made up of sentimental inconstancy and elementary passions, which are not polisées. One need only think of what Saint-Non and Lalande wrote about the inclination toward fighting and knives, or the words of Henry Swinburne who compared the country-folk of the South to Gypsies, Arab shepherds and African hunters. The idea of natural happiness in warm countries, where men and things obey the great “function of nature against reason”, is echoed even in certain pages from the 20th century – like the most poetic from Il mare non bagna Napoli by Anna Maria Ortese.16 In Goethe it has a paradigmatic moment and subtracts from the historical discourse the reality of the people from the South absorbed in the dream of a private Eden through “a process of invention by the savage of the South” that ends up establishing a tie between their ‘solar’ nature and primitiveness, for which the blame is on the volcano, the sulphur or the sun that blinds and obscures.17 The myth of the happy savage and the savage brute often coexist as variants of that characterisation that Berkeley too gives to the inhabitants of the Island of Ischia when he describes them as creatures that are ‘innocently’ suspended between good nature and evil nature, both of them irrational and without pity. In Berkeley’s words a “myth of an archetypal organisation of the natural world” seems to emerge, that would be echoed in Western thought, triggering a double imagery that influenced, on the one hand the descriptions of a tropical paradise, where the good savage lives, and on the other contributed to the restyling of the Mediterranean Eden as a paradise inhabited by devils where men do not measure up to nature. Indeed, what prevents them from experiencing natural happiness is a “vile inclination” for the “vendetta”, a feral and pre-social violence that is also a child of nature. 16

17

Ortese writes “In the extreme and brightest lands of the South, there is a function hidden for the defence of nature against reason; a maternal genius of unlimited power whose jealous and eternal task is to protect the sleeping state of the population. If that defence were to drop only for a moment, if the sweet and cold voice of human reason were to penetrate that nature, it would be shocked […] Other causes have been named for the immobility of these regions, but they have nothing to do with the truth. It is nature that controls life and organises the pains of these regions. […] It is here, where ancient nature, once the mother of ecstasies, has taken refuge, that the reason of man, as dangerous as it is for her reign, must die.” Anna Maria Ortese, Il mare non bagna Napoli (Milano: Adelphi, 1994), pp. 117-118. Atanasio Mozzillo, “Aspetti della società popolare a Napoli tra il XVIII e il XIX secolo”, in La dorata menzogna (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1975), p. 64.

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The primitive and the ancient are therefore joined and brought back to the same natural origin that gave life to the historical architecture of the West while the savages, the primitives, or rather the ‘nature people’ of the old and new world remained faithful. The former were motivated by a sort of innocent native equilibrium, and the latter, on the contrary, by an excess of antiquity because of the corruption due to the weight of the years that had reduced a history that was in decline to dust, giving over the ruins to nature.

Nature’s Firstborn The utopian transfiguration of the pagan world – along with its relativistic reassessment coming from the ethnological vein – indicates a common origin for the passion for the classic style (neoclassicism) and the passion for the primitive and folklore (neogothicism) that are both present in the European culture of the 18th century. This inspired a search for the origin through both neoclassicism and primitivism. Antiquity as an active utopian metaphor indicates both “the directions of philosophy” and “the crisis of modern Europe: the search for a balance between sensibility and reason, and, at the same time, the interrogation of a pre-logical field actually overlaying life and customs of primitive men, to the condition of savages in the new world”.18 It is no accident that in the first studies of comparative ethnology, in the first part of the 18th century, the awareness emerged of a connection between classical aspiration and primitivism. On the one hand the figure of the savage often became part of landscape paintings, depicting the generosity of nature and the ancient myth, and on the other it is the myth of primitive happiness that resonates in an Arcadian echo. It is no accident that many descriptions of the primitive nature of the lands of the New World spring from the inexhaustible writings of Ovid. The pages of the first book of the Metamorphoses provide a great amount of constitutive materials for both old and modern primitivism. And it is no accident that James G. Frazer, the father of modern evolutionary anthropology, was a classical philologist and author of the celebrated studies on the Fasti. At a time not so distant from that of Goethe, Leopold Von Ranke wrote of a naturalised historical authenticity – or, if need be, of an “illustrated” nature – that was the place where the ancient became a topos in which history, going back in time, crossed the border into the mythical dimension of an 18

Renzo Dubbini, Geografie dello sguardo. Visione e paesaggio in età moderna (Torino: Einaudi, 1994), p.83.

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uncorrupted society, immune to the effects of civilisation. A dimension derived in equal measure from monuments of nature and of civilisation: This same sky, situated between Rome and Greece and that unites them with such an intense presence as to render every historical explanation superfluous, this sky that is only nature, immediately plunges us into an atmosphere that seems to me to be similar to that of the ancient centuries.19

Such immediacy that escapes all historical explanation is not of a reflective – or reflected – nature, but of an intuitive nature that appears suddenly like Heidegger’s Lichtun. This process, that goes back at least to the middle of the 18th century and has Saint Pierre as one of its paradigmatic examples, brings about the elaboration of “an ‘analogical’ concept of ruins that brings together the natural ruins to artificial ones, the work of man and his intelligence”.20 If on the one hand a large tree with a cavernous trunk covered with moss gives us the sense of the infinite in time, the sense of a past is covered but at the same time shown in what Shakespeare called the formless ruin of oblivion, on the other hand the destruction of art “acts upon the spirit in such a way that it is impossible to separate it from natural causes.” It is not by chance that the description of the remains of antiquity leads to lofty and ponderous considerations – authentic forms of allegory – while that living archaeological catalogue, which is made up of the habits and customs of the people of the South, inspires a rhetoric of the picturesque that is a minor variation of the other. Antiquity – rather, the 19th century image of antiquity that shines through the neoclassical whiteness of Tagliolini’s porcelain and Canova’s and Thorvaldsen’s marble – has become a canon that the cultured classes modulate in the arts and in literature, and that the populace incarnates without knowing it. A simple fragment of the past does not interpret antiquity, it is antiquity. It does not have intelligence, nor is it a living body. It is a swarming multitude of bodies that fill the dregs and alleyways like an obscure human underbrush, perturbing and enigmatic like the past that comes to light out of archaeological excavations. To the extent that chairs were rented to tourists from Northern Europe in the alleyways of Santa Lucia so that they could observe the spectacle of popular life while seated comfortably. Instead, in other cases, popular life appears as an idyllic symbol in the “tarantella” dances, in the scenes of local colour, almost always with a natural background, so that the “beauty” could almost classically soften and rectify the relationship between the two cities. The gap between the place and 19 20

Dubbini, p. 67. Dubbini, p. 67.

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the inhabitants, between urbs and civitas could almost be recomposed in the name of that harmony that appears in the pagan grace of the street urchins or in the heavenly nature of the “panoramas”. One begins this way to delineate a long-term distinction between cultures and nations that are subject to history and people who are inert carriers, ignorant of “traditions”. It is to this ideological and cultural season that books such as La mimica degli Antichi investigata nel gestire napolitano belong: the author of this treatise, Andrea De Jorio, in illustrating the reasons for the work “of ancient and modern gestures”, sustains that: “Given that one helps the other, they can mutually benefit by finding a new way of explaining the ancient, as well as the attention that should be paid to the modern.”21 Therefore, the last becomes a surplus of meaning for “guessing the meaning and strength of the other.” A perfect example can be found in a text by Winckelmann about a small bronze statue from Herculaneum, perhaps of Priapus, when he says that this Priapus seemed to make a kind of strong gesture that was common for Italians, but completely unknown to Germans.22 He then goes on to a description of a well known apotropaic gesture.

A Kind of Southernness in Time Modernity can be understood as an exchange between the heirs of the ancients, who invest in the inheritance, becoming Moderns, and those who remain Ancients, without developing. In the XXXV of the Pensieri, Leopardi defines the Neapolitan as a people “above all, almost barbarous or almost civil”23 while, in the Zibaldone, the same author defines Germany as the true heir to Greek Philosophy and writes, “since the Modern Age is the time of thought, its homeland is in the North, while Italy preserves a bit of its native imagination.”24 The people of the South are therefore different from the Northerners just as the ancients are from the moderns. Leopardi concludes writing that “Antiquity itself and the inmate naturalness of the ancients is a sort of Southerness in time.”25 So time becomes an ‘elsewhere’ in which modernity celebrates, upon buried civilisations, its rite of passage to the adult age, establishing it upon a sequence of death and rebirth, on a genealogical incorporation of the heredity 21

22 23 24 25

Andrea De Jorio, La mimica degli Antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (Bologna: Forni, 1832), p. XIII. Cf. De Jorio, p. 176. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone (Roma: Newton Compton, 1982), p. 893. Leopardi, Zibaldone, pp. 881-882. Leopardi, Zibaldone, pp. 882.

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of the Ancients and on the ‘ancestralisation’ of archaeology while the Southerners remain ancient, without emancipation and without development, frozen for eternity in the static image of a history that is held prisoner by myth. (Translated by Bronwen Hughes)

Bibliography Croce, Benedetto, Aneddoti e profili settecenteschi (Milano – Palermo – Napoli: Sandron, 1914). De Jorio, Andrea, La mimica degli Antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (Bologna: Forni, 1832). de Staël, Madame, Corinne: or Italy, trans. by Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Dubbini, Renzo, Geografie dello sguardo. Visione e paesaggio in età moderna (Torino: Einaudi, 1994). Duchet, Michèle, Le origini dell'antropologia. Viaggiatori ed esploratori del Settecento (Roma – Bari: Laterza, 1976). Goethe, J.W., Italian Journey, trans. by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Penguin Books, 1970). Leopardi, Giacomo, “Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander”, trans. by J.G. Nichols, in The Canti: with a Selection of his Prose (New York: Routledge, 2003). —, Zibaldone (Roma: Newton Compton, 1982). Lafitau, Joseph-François, Moeurs des sauvages américains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Paris: Saugrain aîné, 1724). Mozzillo, Atanasio, “Aspetti della società popolare a Napoli tra il XVIII e il XIX secolo”, in La dorata menzogna (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1975). Ortese, Anna Maria, Il mare non bagna Napoli (Milano: Adelphi, 1994). Rilke, Rainer Maria, Briefe aus den Jahren 1907 bis 1914 (Leipzig: Insel, 1933). Sagard, Gabriel, Grande viaggio nel paese degli Uroni. 1623-1624 (Milano: Longanesi, 1972). Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). Von Platen, August, Eklogen und Idyllen in Werke (Stuttgart – Tubingen: Cotta, 1853).

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Alvio Patierno

Vesuvius for Everyone in 19th Century France Mount Vesuvius is one of the most celebrated Italian sites of memory. Due to its proximity to the ‘dead city’ of Pompeii and the bustling city of Naples the volcano stands as a powerful symbol of the sublime conflict between civilisation and the forces of nature. In Le Vésuve et la sirène,1 Anne-Marie Jaton reminds us that Naples is a city that brings all of the Italian stereotypes upon itself. An article dated 5th May 1860, from Monde illustré, a Paris weekly for the larger public, underlined how much any discourse about the city was inseparable from the existence of the volcano: “Naples is not where you think it is. One must see it from Sorrento and from the summit of Vesuvius in order to impress it upon your memory.”2 Focussing on the 19th century, we are going to reflect upon the impact that this place had on the consciousness of those French travellers who visited, studied or more modestly dreamed of it. Our aim is to collect and discuss the multifaceted images that thus contributed to shape the collective memory of the Vesuvius in France. Who knew of Vesuvius in 19th century France and how did they come to know it? Which representations and which ideas did the French of the Empire, the Monarchy of July or of the Affaire Dreyfus have of the mythical Parthenopean mountain? We aim to provide possible answers to those questions following two lines of research: first, a brief examination of some printed scientific publications and second, a synthesis of the most particular and representative literary approaches. Without repeating the complete history of Vesuvius, it can be said that for all of the 18th century – first and above all after the discovery of the Vesuvian cities3 – and until the first decades of the 19th century, the memory of Vesuvius was in the hands of scholars who, through dissertations, treatises, travel diaries and memoirs, created a new approach to the volcanic phenomenon, moving from a literary or historical culture to the search for scientific of experimental knowledge. Geologists and botanists, physicists and biologists put the volcano at the centre of their research – Father

1

2 3

Anne-Marie Jaton, Le Vésuve et la sirène, le mythe de Naples de madame de Staël à Nerval (Pisa: Pacini, 1988). Trans. by Dianna Pickens. The article was written by Joseph Doucet. The first excavations were made by Prince d’Elboeuf in 1710-1711. The Bourbon excavations began in 1738.

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Giovanni Maria Della Torre4 in Italy, Abbot de Nollet5 or François de Paule Latapie,6 to speak only of the French, studied the components of lava or made stratigraphical studies. The frequent eruptions of Vesuvius during the two centuries attracted even greater flocks of tourists, and the first to arrive were literary travellers. All or nearly all of the great Romantics made the pilgrimage to Vesuvius. Some added it to their travels to the Orient, such as Madame de Staël, Lamartine and Stendhal, because they were attracted by the “disquieting ruins”, as Letizia Cagiano de Azevedo observed.7 While at the start of the 18th century the trip to the Vesuvius area represented simply “a day full of curiosities”8 for illustrious travellers, the visit to Vesuvius was progressively popularised and transformed into a real adventure. The railway that connected Naples to Resina in 1839 played a major role in this process,9 but the vogue of the volcano further increased at the end of the century, when it was added to tourist packets. Vesuvius therefore became the object of a marketing operation, as Alexandre Dumas remarked in Il Corricolo (1873): Its eruptions, that one can follow with precision by looking at a collection of coloured engravings, all have a different character and always offer the most magnificent and picturesque scenes. One could say that the volcano prepared its own effects, varied its phenomena, and calculated its explosions with a perfect sense of its own role. All of which has increased its fame.10

1. The Volcano of the Scholars: Discover and Inform All sorts of travellers – pilgrims, students and scholars, merchants, writers, magistrates, artists and exiles – recorded their excursions to the volcano, 4

5 6 7

8

9

10

Giovanni Maria Della Torre, physicist and volcanologist and a member of the Herculaneum Association of 1755, was the Director of the Royal Library and Printing Office. Among his works is Storia e fenomeni del Vesuvio (Naples, 1768). The study was published in Memoires de l’Academie des Sciences (1750). The Botanist identified the various pyroclastic flows in 1776. Letizia Norci Cagiano, “Le rovine inquietanti. I dintorni di Napoli nell’immaginario dei viaggiatori francesi alla vigilia della scoperta di Ercolano”, in Il vesuvio e le citta vesuviane 1730-1860 (Napoli: CUEN, 1998), p. 181. Elena Auricchio-Elena Sarnataro, “Un’escursione al Vesuvio: momenti e figure di un itinerario”, in Il Vesuvio e le città vesuviane 1730-1860, p. 197. The railway is cited in various works: see G. de Nerval, “Iseum, Souvenir de Pompéi”, L’Artiste (1847); Th. Gautier, “Arria Marcella, souvenir de Pompéi ”, La Revue de Paris (1852). Alexandre Dumas, Impressions de voyage, Le Corricolo, tome II (Paris: Dolin, 1843), p. 251. Trans. by Dianna Pickens.

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often plagiarising previous accounts. In the first half of the 18th century visitors were erudite – savants – looking for geological news to put into their own scientific memoirs. With the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii, Vesuvius entered into a new era, thanks to the ashes that describe the tragedy of a single moment buried intact. Known until then only through the letters of Pliny the Younger, Vesuvius provided new knowledge from the past along with a new approach to the present, attracting travellers and antiquaires on one side and savants on the other, and so historiography and geology were joined. And thus the modern myth of Vesuvius was born. Georges Vallet11 distinguished two moments of discovery and therefore two directions in the spread of information. While the first travellers – such as President de Brosses, who came to Herculaneum in 1739 – visited Vesuvius to experience antiquity, in the second half of the 18th century scholars from all over Europe were moved by a desire to understand the catastrophe through methodical observation both of the findings and of the techniques of excavation. Observations around Vesuvius helped to propagate the essential geological notions of accumulation and layering, and even contributed to defining archaeology as a science. But how much scientific information about the discoveries at Vesuvius became widespread between the 18th and the 19th century? In his valuable study Du Vésuve au Puy-de-Dôme. La volcanologie des dictionnaires,12 Jean Ehrard reminds us that in 1752 Jean-Etienne Guettard (a naturalist working for the Duke of Orléans) ascertained the volcanic character of the chain of Puys of Alvernia thanks to the similarities that the materials bear to the lava sediment of Vesuvius which was deposited at the PalaisRoyal in Paris. It was from that date that the modern age of French volcanology began, thanks to the Vesuvius – Puy-de-Dôme axis. Several dictionaries, from the Encyclopédie by Diderot to the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle by Pierre Larousse (1866-76) updated and illustrated the new scientific data relative to the Campanian volcano. In 1765, in volumes IX, XVI, and XVII of the Encyclopédie, the entries Lave, Vésuve et Volcans (under the name of Baron D’Holbach) proposed a geological twinship between Alvernia, a volcanic region, and Campania, remembering the communication of La Condamine presented in 1757 at the Académie Royale des Sciences upon the discovery at Herculaneum of the

11

12

Georges Vallet-Laura Mascoli, “Le dialogue des sciences de la nature et l’archéologie au moment des découvertes d’Herculanum et de Pompéi”, in Ercolano 1738-1988, 250 anni di ricerca archeologica (1988), pp. 429-438. See Jean Ehrard, “Du Vésuve au Puy-de-Dôme. La volcanologie des dictionnaires”, in Il Vesuvio e le città vesuviane 1730-1860, pp. 163-178.

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foundation of lava that proved the “antiquity of the Vesuvius eruption.”13 Vesuvius received the homage of a double entry signed by the Chevalier de Jaucourt – Vésuve (Géographie moderne) and Vésuve, éruptions du (Histoire des volcans). The presence of Vesuvius in the Encyclopédie (“an oven of flame so famous for its terrible fires, that it deserves a separate entry”)14 contributed to create those Vesuvian stereotypes that subsequently filtered into 19th century literature. The followers of the Enlightenment were happy to communicate the idea of the disparity between the weakness of man and the force of an indomitable nature. More than the Encyclopédie, the Larousse dictionary chose Campania to illustrate the phenomenon of volcanology and Vesuvius, among the many volcanoes, receives the most attention, becoming an emblem of all volcanoes because of its antiquity and threatening character. According to the Larousse dictionary, volcanic and earthquake activity had the same causes and the distinction between live volcanoes and dormant volcanoes was relative, leaving one to understand that neither tradition nor history could provide security. For most of the 19th century the scientific debate concerning the origins and activity of volcanoes attracted great attention, feeding the curiosity of the public. As an instance of the morbid attraction that the Parthenopean mountain exerted halfway through the 19th century, it suffices to quote just a few lines from the entry Vésuve, in the famous Encyclopédie des gens du monde,15 describing the last part of the ascent, after a brief stop at the hermitage: “From that point all of the vegetation disappeared [...] the rising heat of the lava, the sulfurous vapours and the smoke that evaporated from the cracks, of the formidable detonations, announce the nearness of the dreaded crater […].”16 Those ‘pseudo-scientific’ works that were intended for the general public often depicted Vesuvius as a modern Titan. Among all of the miscellaneous periodicals, Le Magasin pittoresque (a reasonably priced illustrated weekly founded in 1833 and edited by Hachette) was perhaps the one with the largest circulation. Without scientific pretence – the articles were not signed – the weekly used the results of Vesuvian research to give information that was decidedly outdated, while the texts were accompanied by illustrations that were intended for educational purposes. In the thirty or so articles dedicated to Vesuvius and the two ‘dead cities’ between 1835 and 1857, the overall importance of Vesuvius was relatively 13 14 15 16

Jean Ehrard, p. 165. See Jean Ehrard, p. 167. A text of clear scientific information. Encyclopédie des gens du monde, vol. XXII (1844). Quoted in Jean Ehrard, p. 176.

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modest, as Antoinette Ehrard17 writes in her study of the periodicals of the 19th century. The longest article, four pages in 1840, entrusts the description of eruptive activity to a passage from Corinne by Madame de Staël, and illustrates the geological study of the Vesuvian site with numerous excerpts. An article from 1846 simply presented a “daytime promenade on Vesuvius” following the traditional contrast of the sulphurous vapours on the one hand and the brightness of the gulf on the other, treating ironically the climb on foot or on a sedan-chair. Le Magasin pittoresque, although incomplete and simplified, allowed readers, who would never have come to Naples, to have a general idea of Vesuvius, enough to stimulate their imagination in search of exotica at a good price.

2. The Literary Mountain It is irrelevant for our purposes to know that the French (and not only the French, if one remembers Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy) could be disappointed or enchanted with respect to the vestiges of the past. More important is the growing popularity of Vesuvius and the climbing of it, which remained a ‘must’, even though it had been done and described so many times, because no one wanted to miss the private experience of throwing rocks into the crater or going down into it to collect lava samples and everyone felt his/her own importance as a source of information. But although 18th century travellers tried to escape from the mysterious atmosphere of Naples and the surrounding areas, the Romantics and the visitors of the 19th century were moved by the ‘horror’ aspect of natural phenomena such as the Solfatara and its effluvia, the dog grotto and its lethal vapors and also Vesuvius – as Letizia Norci Cagiano writes – “with its unfathomable crater, the menacing smoke, and the unpredictable eruptions.”18 For the entire 19th century, Vesuvius obviously profited in some way from an increase in audience,19 both in Italy and abroad. For the French of the middle of the century, Naples remained, after Venice, the “most picturesque city in Italy”. Between 1848 and 1870 there were about one hundred and ninety travelogues tackling this subject. At the beginning of the century there was the Vesuvius of Chateaubriand – beautiful, terrible and evil, but already 17

18 19

See “Pompéi pour tous”, Le Magasin pittoresque. Quoted in Antoinette Ehrard, in Il Vesuvio e le città vesuviane, pp. 303-19. Letizia Norci Cagiano, p. 189. See Alphonse de Lamartine, Trois mois au pouvoir (Bruxelles: Société typographique belge, 1849); Jules Zeller, Histoire de L’Italie depuis l’invasion des barbares jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1853).

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desecrated, as is that of Lamartine in his best seller Graziella. The positivist historian Hippolyte Taine chose the volcano as the first and last image of the city in his Voyage en Italie,20 while in 1879 Ernest Renan wrote in the famous Journal des Débats, “Before my very eyes I have the great actor of the drama of 79, Vesuvius, that since then does not seem to have ever calmed its boiling anger.”21 Madame de Staël admitted to having had in Italy just four intense pleasures, “the sea, Monti [Vincenzo], St. Peters and Vesuvius […]”22 Her Corinne ou l’Italie (published with great public success in 1807) marks the passage from travelogue to travel narrative. The description of the Vesuvius phenomenon in itself is replaced by imagination and myth. Staël’s book significantly opens the doors to a speculative Vesuvian literature that orients the sensibility of the reader towards an infernal vision of Vesuvius. The fame of Vesuvius was enough to turn it into an object of consumerism. The volcano was utilised in literature with a dual purpose: on the one hand, its actual existence ‘guaranteed’ the authenticity of fiction which utilised it as a setting; on the other, its renown was a powerful source of cultural energy. Vesuvius is present in the biggest editorial successes of the decade. A case in point is Fragoletta (1829) – a scandalous historical novel by Henri de Latouche, who addressed the subject of the impossible love between a hermaphrodite and a captain who was a follower of Championnet during the republican experiment of 1799. Other minor novels could be cited, such as Les compagnons du Silence (1857) by Paul Féval, who also authored Les Mystères de Londres. In this novel, Vesuvius punishes and redeems the evils of man in its purifying lava, and the same happens in James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre, which was published in London in 1847. The mountain and the Vesuvian cities continued to be ‘uncovered’ as the century went on. Geographically more accessible thanks to the improvement of the roads, historically restored thanks to the excavated findings that were transported to the Museum of Studies, Vesuvius became physically and culturally more usable, without losing its fascination. Writers were forced to avoid stereotypical treatments in order to offer to the progressively more demanding reader of Vesuvian literature an original vision of the Parthenopean colossus. French readers also developed their own idea of 20 21

22

Hippolyte Taine, Voyage en Italie (Paris: Hachette, 1866). Ernest Renan participated in the 18th centenary of Pompeii; letter published on 14/10/1879 (an account of his participation of the archeological mission organized by the Commissione delle Antichità Italiane). Madame de Staël, Letter to Vincenzo Monti (February 23, 1805), Correspondance générale (Paris: Hachette, 1985), tome V, deuxième partie, “Le Léman et l’Italie, 1804-1805”, p. 510.

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Vesuvius little by little, as positivism spread in the 19th century and the ensuing conceptual paradigms increasingly penetrated the discourse of travel literature. The imaginative treatment of the site convincingly activated the paradox of the dead place being ‘alive’. Limiting ourselves to one example of literary aporia, Théophile Gautier – the theoretician of ‘l’art pour l’art’ – wrote in 1851 the fantastic tale Arria Marcella, which is set in Pompeii. A romantic dandy, Octavien, visits the Museum of Studies in the company of two friends. The vision of a coagulated lava flow that corresponds to the imprint of a breast sends him into ecstasy. Walking at night among the ruins of Pompeii, that incredibly has returned to its original state, he meets Arria Marcella, a beautiful girl, in whom he recognises the perfect form of the breast seen at the museum. While they make love, the father of the Pompeiian girl, a converted Christian, transforms the impenitent girl into a handful of ashes. Beyond the undeniable historical data, Gautier created, in a space based on irrationality, an ideal reality. The Vesuvian ashes cover the unfathomable profundity of a life that has always existed. Archaeology opens itself to metaphysics and Gautier can conclude, like Swedenborg, that “nothing dies, everything always exists, nothing can destroy that which once was.”23 In the name of beauty, Vesuvius and Pompeii represent, against the utilitarianism of modern civilisation and inhibiting Christianity, a dream-like compensation. The issue of Monde illustré dated 5th May 1860 dedicated two pages to Naples with a classic iconography – on the left the Royal Palace and in the background Vesuvius smoking. Around 1880 Vesuvius would definitely enter the circuit of mass tourism with the creation of the funicular by the English travel agent Thomas Cook, whose “anonymous company of the Vesuvian train” offered what is called today an ‘organized trip’. As an example of the role Vesuvius played as a modern tourist icon, we can cite an obscure poet that Paul Verlaine revealed to the larger public in his publication Les Poètes maudits of 1884 – Tristan Corbière. The second of his six poetic efforts inspired by Italy that were included in the ferocious posthumous collection Les Amours jaunes (1873) is dedicated to the volcano. Its title has a clear satirical import – Vésuves et Cie, as if the volcano were run as a company. The surprising tenderness of the poem – notwithstanding the provocation of the title – comes from the double identity the mountain assumes in the memory of the poet, who remembers with a feeling of nostalgia the volcano that was painted on the lampshade he had in his room as a child:

23

Théophile Gautier, Arria Marcella, Souvenir de Pompéi (Paris: Charpentier, 1885), p. 242.

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Alvio Patierno Vesuvius, is that you again? You who made me a happy boy in Bretagne – in the time that faith moved mountains – above a beautiful lamp, at my aunt’s house. [...] As an adult, I saw you at the Opéra-comique a role created by you a long time ago: The last day of Pompeii [...]24

Finally, starting from the second half of the 19th century, Vesuvius became a cliché, an object of cultural consumerism, as Maria Del Sapio Garbero remarks, “In the fin-de-siècle exoticism the projection of literature toward other places is reduced to collecting.”25 In the 20th century the mountain became the “territorio vesuviano”, the epicentre of a complex set of interlocking technical, scientific, social and administrative problems that bring back the myth of Vesuvius to a prickly reality, leaving behind its space-time image that Georges Vallet, preparing the convention on Vesuvius and the Vesuvian cities in 1994, proposed to summarise as follows: “Vesuvius, or the future of the past.”26

Bibliography Alexandre Dumas e il Mezzogiorno d’Italia, ed. by Alvio Patierno (Napoli: CUEN, 2004). Chateaubriand, René de, Œuvres romanesques et voyages, vol. II, ed. by Maurice Regard (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). Corbière, Tristan, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Pierre-Olivier Walzer (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, le XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1972). Diderot, Denis, Encyclopédie (1751-1770). Doria, Gino, Viaggiatori stranieri a Napoli (Napoli: Guida Editore, 1984). Dumas, Alexandre, Impressions de voyage, Le Corricolo (Paris: Dolin,1843). Encyclopédie des gens du monde (1844).

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25

26

Tristan Corbière, Les Amours jaunes, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Pierre-Olivier Walzer (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 783. Transl. by Dianna Pickens. Maria Del Sapio Garbero, “La Sfinge e la chimera: miraggi di pienezza nella biblioteca fin de siècle”, in Per una topografia dell’altrove, ed. by Maria Teresa Chialant and Eleonora Rao (Napoli: Liguori, 1995), p. 181. “Le Futur du passé”. Georges Vallet, title of the third section of the international convention Il Vesuvio e le città vesuviane 1730-1860, in ricordo di Georges Vallet, 28-30 March 1996, Napoli, Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa (Napoli: CUEN, 1988), p. 579.

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Fernandez, Dominique, Le Voyage d’Italie. Dictionnaire amoureux (Paris: Plon, 1997). Flaubert, Gustave, Correspondance I 1830-1851, ed. by Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). Gasparini, Paolo and Silvana Musella, Un viaggio al Vesuvio: il Vesuvio visto attraverso diari, lettere e resoconti di viaggiatori (Napoli: Liguori, 1991). Gautier, Théophile, Arria Marcella, Souvenir de Pompéi (Paris: Charpentier, 1885). Goncourt, Edmond et Jules de, L’Italie d’hier, notes de voyage 1855-1856 (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1894). Hersant, Yves, Italies, Anthologie des voyageurs français aux XVIIIe et XIXesiècles (Paris: Laffont, 1988). L’Illustration, journal universel (Paris, 1843). Jaton, Anne-Marie, Le Vésuve et la sirène, le mythe de Naples de Madame de Staël à Nerval (Pisa: Pacini, 1988). Lamartine, Alphonse de, Trois mois au pouvoir (Bruxelles: Société typographique belge, 1849). Larousse, Pierre, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (1866-1876). Leed, Eric, La mente del viaggiatore. Dall’odissea al turismo globale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992). Leroux, Pierre, Encyclopédie nouvelle (1841). Le Magasin pittoresque (Paris: Hachette, 1833). Le Magasin universel (Paris: Furne, 1833). Le Monde illustré (Paris, 1860). Mozzillo, Atanasio, Viaggiatori stranieri nel sud (Milano: Ed. di Comunità, 1982). Per una topografia dell’altrove, ed. by Maria Teresa Chialant and Eleonora Rao (Napoli: Liguori, 1995). Staël, Madame de, Correspondance générale (Paris: Hachette, 1985). Taine, Hippolyte, Voyage en Italie (Paris: Hachette, 1866). Venturi, Franco, Storia d’Italia, vol. III (Torino: Einaudi, 1973). Il Vesuvio e le città vesuviane 1730-1860, ed. by Giuseppina Cafasso, Jean Ehrard, Giulia Papoff, Laura Vallet (Napoli: CUEN, 1998). Zeller, Jules, Histoire de l’Italie depuis l’invasion des barbares jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1853).

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Paola Paumgardhen

Goethe and Von Archenholz in Naples in 1787: Views of the City between Myth and Reality At the end of the 18th century, that which Samuel Johnson called The Age of Travel, precisely in the year 1787, Naples was a fundamental and unforgettable destination of the Italienreise (travelling in Italy) in the works of two illustrious German travellers, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz. Experiences, impressions, and considerations connected with the Parthenopean city, the meticulous and careful ‘work in progress’ of the erudite travellers (gebildete), are registered in a detailed travel notebook, that upon their return would constitute a precious canvas for the translation of their own tours into writing. The return to Germany constitutes, therefore, a new departure, this time for a narrative voyage in which the travellers, by going back in time, revisit the places of memory, recuperating the visual, auditory and olfactory perceptions and transforming them into poetry, reorganising a new interior itinerary that brings them back to themselves after the encounter with the other. The result is astonishing as the two eminent Germans give us two of the most intriguing and prestigious travel chronicles of the Reiseliteratur (travel literature). We are referring specifically to the Italienische Reise1 (1786-1788) and Rom und Neapel 1787.2 The first thing that strikes us is the clear correspondence of the initial aesthetic annotations registered by travellers when they encountered the nature of the mythical South. Listen to Goethe: Yesterday I spent indoors reading, waiting for my slight indisposition to pass. We spent today in ecstasies over the most astonishing sights. One may write or paint as much as one likes, but this place, the shore, the gulf, Vesuvius, the citadels, the villas, everything, defies description. […] Now I can forgive anyone for going off his head about Naples. […] I won’t say another word about the beauties of the city and its situation, which have been described and praised so often. As they say here, Vedi Napoli e poi muori! – See Naples and die!’3

And von Archenholz:

1 2

3

J.W. Goethe, Italienische Reise (Köln: Könemann, 1998), pp. 200-204. J.W. von Archenholz, Rom und Neapel 1787 (Heidelberg: Manutius Verlag, 1990). To be indicated as RuN (translated by me throughout this paper). J.W. Goethe, Italian Journey (London: Penguin, 1970), pp. 186-189. To be indicated as IJ.

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Paola Paumgardhen There is probably no corner of the earth as marvellous as the Neapolitan landscape. […] The sea, the Isle of Capri and Vesuvius. Altogether this forms an indescribable whole. In the first few days, arts and people are forgotten and one dedicates oneself solely to inanimate nature.4

In the presence of the mythical Mediterranean world, the two Northern travellers are assailed by the characteristic sensation of being lost, so much so that the suggestive and incomparable views of Naples, the Eden-like paradise – the exultation of bright, warm colors and a luxurious and generous nature, and the ecstatic epiphany of antiquity – reveals itself as unutterable, incommunicable and inexpressible in any art form. So, Naples as a fantastic, blessed and opulent city produces dreamlike images that not even the most fervid imagination can represent, but only, as von Archenholz senses from the first comments, if it is observed from a distance: Already [in the time of Hannibal and Virgil] nature had given its riches to this land. In reality even the most elaborate imagination cannot even begin to describe the beautiful, grand and extraordinary things that come before enchanted eyes.5

So which view of Naples do Goethe and von Archenholz propose in their Reiseberichte? Is it an idyllic image of Naples as myth, or a disenchanted and objective representation of Naples as reality? Certainly multiple views, divergent, contradictory, and above all complementary are all necessary to give us a more truthful and wholesome picture of our city in its complexity. It is thus that the term view – which corresponds to the Italian veduta and the German Ansicht – should be adopted in its double meaning of panorama and opinion, since we are not dealing with travelogues (such as guide books) whose function is primarily informative, but with literary texts that are imbued with emotions, memories and reflections. Naples is therefore not only the Bourbon Naples of 1787 but also the Naples of Goethe and von Archenholz, a place of memories where the life, the education, the interests and the expectations of the observers are con-fused to the point of being inextricable. A brief, contrastive analysis of the texts will give us two diverse faces of Naples corresponding to the classic Weltanschauung of Goethe and to the Enlightened view of von Archenholz. Let us begin with the Italian Journey. On September 2, 1786, at the age of 36, Goethe said goodbye quickly and eagerly to his most intimate friends and Duke Karl August of Weimar, the great grandson of Frederick the Great of Prussia. As a youth Wolfgang had already made the voyage to Italy virtually many times, when his dreamy gaze had traced the route taken by his father, Johann Caspar, on the map used thirty years before on his Grand Tour. The dreamed-of departure for the South was postponed many times by the poet, 4 5

RuN, pp. 219-220. RuN, p. 219.

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first because of his obstinate attachment to love stories that ended badly, that with Lili Schönemann and later the unacceptable and unforgettable with Charlotte von Stein, imagined travel companion and depository of the first notes from Italy. Later, the job as minister of the Weimar Republic kept Goethe much longer on the other side of the Alps. Finally, the flight to Italy became imperative, the liberation from the sentimental and professional chains that had already suffocated the artistic liberty of the newly healthy Stürmer. So in defence of his freedom, Goethe assumed a false identity; in Italy he would be the painter Jean Philippe Moeller, and only the anonymity would allow him, in fact, to be untraceable and not to be recognised as the celebrated poet of Werther. Goethe regarded Italy as the cradle of classic humanism, as a place where an artistic education could be achieved according to the principles of Winckelmann. Thus his Italienreise became a way to legitimise classicism, a training ground for life and for the classic arts. In Naples, Goethe stayed from February to June 1787, with an interruption of nearly a month and a half in which, in the company of the German painter Christoph Heinrich Kniep, a professor and the Accademia di Napoli, visited Sicily. The impact of the city was intense: in this magic place the harmony between art and nature became miraculously concrete. In Naples, Goethe assiduously frequented the small colony of German painters including Philipp Hackert, Wilhelm Tischbein, Angelika Kaufmann and Johann Christopher Kniep, under whose guidance the visit of the natural and artistic treasures of the city and its surroundings and exercised what Germans loved to call the Doppelbegabung (the double talent), or the art of being a painter and a poet in unison, paesaggista through painting and poetry at the same time. The Nordic Goethe let himself become inebriated by the opiate of a warm, happy and seductive city that mitigated even his German temperament, as he himself said, “Naples is a paradise; everyone lives in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness, myself included. I seem to be a completely different person whom I hardly recognise”;6 at any rate, as he repeats near the end of his stay in the city, without ever falling into laziness, “It is high time for me to escape from here […] Furthermore, the longer one stays here, the idler one gets”.7 Nevertheless, without ever giving in totally to laziness, the poet cultivated his literary interests untiringly – he worked diligently on Iphigenia and Tasso – and his archeological interests, for he visited Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Paestum. In the luxuriant South, he also continued his scientific studies, such as geology (the poet climbed to the top of Vesuvius three times) and botany (he pursued his research on the

6 7

IJ, p. 207. IJ, p. 314; p. 326.

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Urpflanze, the primitive plant whose organic and harmonious development he regarded as an archetype of art and society). Though attentive to the social conditions of the South, as the intense conversations with Filangieri show, Goethe tended to exalt only the virtues of a people that “enjoy the world to the full”,8 assuming a myopic attitude toward the dependent, lazy and miserable classes, and failing to predict the catastrophic events of the Revolution of 1799: True, one cannot take many steps before coming on some poorly clad, even ragged, individual, but it does not follow that he is a loafer or a good-for-nothing. On the contrary, I would say, though this may seem like a paradox, that in Naples it is the poorest class which works hardest.9

In February 1933 the German painter and poet Felix Harlaub went around Naples without allowing himself to be overcome, like many of his compatriots, including Goethe, by the bewitching sensuality of Parthenope and denounced the mendacity of the idealised images of a city only apparently healthy and beautiful, but mined by an insidious lethal disease. The sensuality of the fictitious and anachronistic representation of the Naples of Goethe, who transfigures the sick body of the city into an organic and harmonious figure, like the Urpflanze, does not deceive the lucid and detached Hartlaub, by now sceptical that the Mediterranean myth can enchant him, like Ulysses when he hears the seductive song of the Mediterranean siren, listens with his mind to the echo of a society that is irremediably infirm. The erotic character of many untruthful stories about Naples written by German travellers did not seduce the ex-official of the 7 years war, Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, either, who lived in Naples at the same time as Goethe. A publicist, historian, writer and not least passionate traveller, von Archenholz was forced to abandon Berlin because of the failure of a brief military career sacrificed for gambling, and he started in 1763 a tour around England, France and Italy that would take him back to Germany just 17 years later. Von Archenholz, like his friend and travel companion Georg Forster, a scientist explorer and writer of the unforgettable travel diaries, travelled English style, with a vigil and disenchanted eye, as a follower of the Enlightenment and a Protestant. As a reporter on the French Revolution (Bemerkungen über den Zustand Frankreichs), though not completely insensitive to the charm of the Mediterranean nature and art, he travelled all over Naples as a follower of the Enlightenment, historian and anthropologist, tied to the principle “to show the very age and body of the time, its form and

8 9

IJ, p. 321. IJ, p. 320.

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pressure”,10 therefore, to provide with his writing an objective testimonial of a live organism, made of a dynamic and changing substance. Upon his return to Germany, von Archenholz elaborated on his impressions of the voyage in a voluminous work on England and Italy, the second part of which is limited to Italy, and markedly to Rome and Naples, as the title of the volume shows (in truth the report on Naples is slim and much shorter than the one dedicated to Rome). Upon its publication, the book was a sensational success, so that it even landed in the hands of editorial pirates, who immediately smelled the economic success of the work. Von Archenholz gained the sympathy and esteem of his friend Wieland, to whom the text is dedicated. Although Goethe, in a letter to Herder, criticises the “pedantic, contemptuous manner” of the author, during his stay in Ferrara, the author of the Italienische Reise, observing two annoying English tourists, comments: “They grumble incessantly about everything and might come straight out of the pages of Archenholz”.11 Rom und Neapel 1787 does not present itself in the canonical form of the travel notebook, instead it is more of an objective and unparticipative narrative; the author lines up a series of anecdotes that, more or less, tell the story in an unquestionably brilliant, ironic and overpowering way. Naples appears to the enlightened von Archenholz as “die unaufgeklärteste Nation in Italien”,12 the most anti-Enlightenment nation in Italy. His map of the city traces a crossroads of music, religious superstition, ignorance and intemperate lifestyle. The word Andacht (devotion) assumes importance from the beginning of the account as it outlines a peculiar form of religiosity that is as self-destructive as it is superstitious. On this subject, the chapter entitled “Das Blut des Heiligen Januarius” (“The blood of San Gennaro”) is important. The miracle of the Patron Saint of Naples is described in pungent terms by the protestant von Archenholz, who defines the incredible popular representation as a farce: This farce is repeated several times during the year, with an unspeakable exaltation on the part of the population, if the blood melts immediately, as a sign of the good disposition of the patron saint toward the city of Naples.13

Therefore, von Archenholz is the opposite of Goethe who judges the irrational devotion to the Neapolitan Saints a perfectly natural and perhaps universal expedient for exorcising the phobias of death or the devil, “and when the mouth of hell nearby begins to roar, they have recourse to the blood

10 11 12 13

J.W. von Archenholz, England und Italien (Heidelberg: Manutius Verlag, 1993), p. 55. IJ, p.116. RuN, p. 119. RuN, p. 22.

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of St Januarius. Well, in the rest of the world, too, in their fight with death and devil, people resort to blood, or would if they could”.14 Von Archenholz as a follower of the Enlightenment and anthropologist sees his intention to educate the individual to emancipate itself as futile. Naples is, unfortunately, the cradle of incivility, hometown of subversive rogues and scoundrels, of pitiless assassins and unpunished bandits. The Historian from Danzica would also remain deeply indignant at the cruel practice of castration, a “abscheuliche Verstümmelung”,15 reserved for the children of the plebeians, who would with any luck turn into opera singers. I quote from Rom und Neapel 1787: Naples has human classes of its own, that one can only find here. This city is the land of castratos, the only residence of the lazzaroni and the capital of the bandits. It is only in this singular city that horrible mutilations occur, that in European operas are seen to be so necessary. There are people of the lower classes who force their own sons to undergo this operation, in the hope that they will someday become the ‘fortune’ of their parents.16

At the end of his Neapolitan journey, von Archenholz recognized that he had spent some happy days and had met some venerable Italians, but the enthusiasm of an educational trip did not oscure the wohlgeprüfte Gesinnung (‘the vigil mind’) that always guaranteed the truth. So what is the true Naples? The Naples of von Archenholz, who in the most un-Enlightenment city of Italy defined and reinforced his own Enlightenment? Or Goethe’s dreamy memories of a happy and harmonious land? I would say that each traveller projected onto Naples his interior world. Perhaps Goethe, too, when he returned to Germany, just before the French Revolution, faced with the unmanageable disorder governing Europe at that time, thought that the Italienische Reise should not be published because of its inappropriate themes and postponed its publication for thirty years. And yet, the confessed joy will always be authentic for him, “because his thoughts could always return to Naples”,17 to his Naples, observed with the enchanted eyes of the classic poet whose image will always be impressed upon his soul. One can sense in these German impressions identified in Goethe and von Archenholz, the roots of an ambivalence that perhaps still exists in the Naples seen and experienced as myth or reality, in an alternation of views between aesthetic transfiguration and realistic representation that flow together still today in the collective imagination.

14 15 16 17

IJ, p. 210. RuN, p. 227. RuN, p. 227. IJ, p.186.

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Bibliography Archenholz, J.W. von, England und Italien (Heidelberg: Manutius Verlag, 1993). —, Rom und Neapel 1787 (Heidelberg: Manutius Verlag, 1990). Goethe, J.W., Italian Journey (London: Penguin, 1970). —, Italienische Reise (Köln: Könemann, 1998).

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Adriana Corrado

Glances at Naples, Centre of Campania Felix: First Step towards a Complex Cultural Theme 1. ‘See Naples and die’ is an old cliché which has contributed to a considerable extent to the construction of an imaginary, or perhaps today one should say virtual, cultural identity for this city. It is endowed with a dual significance: a wholly positive one, on the one hand, as a place of extreme, supreme beauty, the ideal synthesis of all that a human being can possibly desire, to the point of his/her almost gratefully accepting death, dying that is, after beholding the perfection which connotes this city; on the other hand, however, an entirely negative value if one is to understand that in Naples dying comes easily and commonly, be it because of illness, misery, assaults, violence, both of a moral and physical nature, gunshot wounds, or because of organised crime which in Naples is called camorra, the ragged though legitimate daughter of the Mafia, and thus no less violent. A present-day intellectual and novelist, an attentive observer of Neapolitan life, Fabrizia Ramondino, wrote in a wonderful work dedicated to her, and my, great city: Whichever way you choose to look at her, whether you observe, watch, spy, gaze languidly, feast your eyes, peek, wink, goggle, peer, look away or even close your eyes, whether you practise clairvoyance or voyeurism, whatever eye you choose to cast upon her, it is much like looking through a kaleidoscope. Shapes and meanings endlessly come together and break apart, governed by chance, ruled by the principle of indetermination rather than that of fortuity.1

Still today, this is the way in which we Neapolitans are also forced, accustomed or conditioned to observe our city each and every time we seek to understand her2 many facets, striving to free ourselves of the memory, the traces which linger on in the depth of our very eyes, left there also by the too

1

2

Fabrizia Ramondino & Andreas Friedrich Muller, Dadapolis. Caleidoscopio napoletano (Torino: Einaudi, 1992), p. IX. All the translations into English of passages from books in Italian are my own. In English towns, cities and nations themselves are usually considered “neutral” but in Italian, and in particular in the case of Naples, the feminine is often used to emphasize the emotional and passionate qualities this city embodies.

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many reproductions, mainly paintings, which, throughout the centuries, have shown her to the world: Naples, our picture postcard city! And thus our own gaze mingles with, and is indeed conditioned by that of the many travellers of the past. But what real impression could they form upon seeing Naples, such an entangled, chaotic melting pot throughout the centuries? Most likely some of these travellers loved her immediately, but often violated or disparaged her when trying to depict her as they wished her to be or idealising her according to an interpretative yardstick wholly foreign to Naples, while others have abused and demonised her for being too far removed from their often reassuring and, let’s be honest, even modest or restrictive models, born of the logic of the industrialised nations of Reformed Christianity. Also thanks to these travellers over time, progressively and almost unwittingly, there emerged a ‘method’, a way of observing ‘otherness’ and diversity: I believe that Naples and Campania have gradually become a sort of anthropological and cultural laboratory from which the more evolved peoples, in accordance with the lines of development traced by modernity, built up their relationships with ‘other’ cultures, defining, though only from one single, narrow point of view, different cultural identities, not at all real identities but identities built up in the realm of narration or simply in that of the imagination.3 The models these travellers employed to understand Naples were typical of liberal or enlightened cities, designed and built for different social classes, the poor kept, in a fitting manner, well apart from the aristocracy and the social-climbing entrepreneurs, the nouveaux-riches, those middle-classes which were progressively merging with the true aristocracy thanks to their new money. The rich and powerful had to be kept well away from the poor or, if you prefer, the proletariat, as it was once called. Such social stratification Naples has, perhaps, never known. This may well be a good thing, as I firmly believe, since it has saved her from standardisation, allowed her to retain her vitality, and made of her the unclassifiable, indefinable, small metropolis she still is today, while confirming her status as an unsurpassed cultural centre. Naples is in fact a city where the rich, the powerful, the aristocratic, the intellectual, the lower middle-classes and the poor, as in the past centuries, still today mingle and live side by side. Where, within the imposing centuries-old mansions, the palazzi, one can still find hideous mazes of overcrowded slum dwellings, inhabited, as though they were worthy abodes, by those who have always been poor.

3

That which Pasquinelli defines: “[…] the mise en scène of others.” Carla Pasquinelli, Introduction to Occidentalismi, ed. by Carla Pasquinelli (Rome: Carocci, 2005), p. 12.

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These bassi, as they are called in Naples, are not real dwellings but hovels where the very poorest, owing to the close proximity, also learn to distinguish, to recognise the corrupting influence of money itself, to despise the nouveaux-riches, the so-called sagliuti (those who have ‘climbed up’ or risen too rapidly) when they flaunt their wealth and splendours in the face of those who have nothing; while also acknowledging and paying tribute to the true aristocrats, even the aristocrats of the mind, all those who are aware how much respect should be granted to the weakest. But how can the hurried traveller, both today and in the past, be aware of all this? Accustomed, as he perhaps is, to weighing up a person rapidly and classifying him or her on the strength of a mere glance? It is indeed undeniable that from the Renaissance throughout the whole of Europe a unique social model was promoted, based on one single idea of progress, later instilled with the rationality of the Enlightenment, a model to be adhered to and, whenever possible, imposed upon others without pausing to wonder whether other paths towards progress might be sought out. A model upon which, by antithesis, the idea of manifold, diverse, ‘other’ places was built up, places which would then often become the future colonies to be enfolded within the ‘protective’ cloak of the Empire. Naples, though never a colony, is thus described from the 18th century on, above all by English travellers, who then went on to become writers or painters, employing parameters which were at the time wholly experimental and without doubt unconscious, but which later were to become the only means to relate to ‘otherness’. With Naples, as was going to be the case with Oriental countries later, it is the differences, the tendency towards transgression and the excessive sexual charge which are emphasized, all considered to be deviant forms of behaviour not in line with that unique social model. Indeed Braudel claimed that Naples was the gateway of the East towards the West and that of the West towards the East, and this can certainly not be denied, much in the same way as Cairo or Beirut have always been. Naples lends herself to all this in her never clearly revealing a marked distribution of her inhabitants within the traditional social classes. Here everything is mingled and reshuffled. And so, in the second half of the 18th century, when the first grandtourists in considerable numbers began to pass through Italy aware, as they must have been, of Ascham’s severe words when back in 1570 he warned his fellow countrymen that they ran the risk of turning into devils4 merely by

4

“Inglese Italianato, è un diavolo incarnato” namely “[…] you remain men in shape and fashion, but become devils in life and condition.” Roger Ascham, in The Fatal Gift of

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crossing Italy, what could they possibly think when they dared to penetrate as far as Naples? They were attracted or repulsed by a reality which appeared primitive to their eyes, whose inhabitants did not seem to be any longer the legitimate descendants of the Greek and Roman cultures within which these grand-tourists sought out the roots of their own history, roots which they then started to re-elaborate through their own narration. A successful way of building their own cultural identity. And while the English traveller went about building up his own ideal cultural identity he at the same time tended to define the others as different from himself, and the Neapolitans being evidently different, as diverse as can be, appear to be perfectly suited also to the role of the primitive. It is comprehensible then, since it was in that wholly incomprehensible, intricate South that forms of ‘otherness’ are sought out, that all this should happen systematically in the case of Naples. The long and tormented history of Naples, however, must never be forgotten or taken for granted. From the myth of those lands yearned for and beheld by Ulysses, inhabited by the Sibyl, unheeded prophetess, to the great settlements of the Magna Grecia, following the traces of the mythical Parthenope, up to the foundation of Neapolis, with its centre, clear evidence of which is still to be found in the excavations, deep in the soft warmth of the city’s entrails.5 Lands trodden by Virgil himself and that had become the pathways to the Underworld, the centre of the Campania Felix, situated along the boundaries of Imperial Rome to whom it offered thermal spas and pleasant places of leisure, from Herculaneum to Pompeii, and from the Phlegraean Fields to Capri, dear to Tiberius, a place of manifold delights and perversions. “Capri, like hashish, is supposed to bring out the demon, whatever its nature, lurking at the bottom of the human personality, and people go ashore at the Marina Grande hypnotised in advance by its reputation,”6 as Norman Lewis wrote, in more recent years, after his Neapolitan experience. And after the glories of the past, there followed long, dark centuries when this area was prematurely condemned to becoming a conquered land, under the dominion of sovereigns and tyrants, at times enlightened, more often bent

5

6

Beauty. The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Manfred Pfister, (Amsterdam: RODOPI, 1996), p.79. And vestiges of the ancient port of Neapolis, dating back to the IV century BC, came to the light just a few months ago in the heart of Naples, under our very feet, while excavation work was being carried out to build a missing stretch of the city subway system. Thus, the old breaks into the new and forces us to pause for breath, it hinders the present and still today conditions the future. Norman Lewis, Naples ’44. An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth (London: Eland, 2002), p.102.

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on raiding and plundering, with the sole aim of possessing and corrupting her, like a much loved woman made to become a mere meretricious commodity. And all this up to the long years of the Spanish dominion, which eventually made of her the capital of a kingdom both central and peripheral, destined then to foster the proud and noble revolution of 1799, all too soon doomed to failure due to its lacking any form of popular consent! And on to the unification of Italy, which, yet again, relegated Naples to a marginal position, thus favouring the emergence of a ‘Meridional issue’ still to be solved,7 at the very heart of which stands Naples. I strongly feel the need to recall all this, without ever forgetting that Naples is really a city of extremes that attracted or shocked writers like Cervantes and de Sade, Montesquieu, Goethe, Shelley or Stendhal, Ruskin, Gor’kij or Freud, Gissing and Norman Douglas, to quote but a few: sadly the many famous travellers who have visited this land throughout the centuries have provided us with descriptions too often banal if not trite, repeating stories already told by others in which the streets of Naples, rarely truly visited, are reported as permanently noisy and steeped with too many people, crowded by beggars and crooks ready to cheat the foreigners who were merely looking for art and archaeology under a radiant sun, in the limpid air, where food and wine had to be good and at hand. These visitors were too often ready and keen to notice only what they were looking for and never what was really there, around them. A reality too difficult to comprehend. And even though, in recent years too, we still hear the rallying cry of politicians and intellectuals8 encouraging the young to abandon Naples to her irredeemable destiny, what I really feel strongly about, here and now, is the desire to try to present the city as a whole, with her areas of light and shadow, her colours and her darkness, where a rich and intricate humanity throbs and pulsates, downtrodden, often buried under aeons of history, a city which has been striving to be heard for far too long now.

7

8

With considerable responsibility on the part of the establishment, be it political or economical: a famous visitor has tried to describe this phenomenon in these terms: “It is no secret: the South was considered by some as a calamity, a malediction […] Everybody knows what is going on, yet nothing changes. In fact, whenever the South starts moving it is only to make its problems even more complex and difficult […] the mafia. It is called camorra in Naples, and drangheta in Calabria: to take the place of the lawful state and to make organized crime a means of “communicating” with the populace.” Tahar Ben Jelloun, State of Absence, trans. by James Kirkup (London: Quartet Books, 1994), pp. X –XI. Eduardo de Filippo, one of her present day children, in 1981 exhorted his fellow citizens: “[…] if you want to do the right thing, get away from Naples!”

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2. In an attempt to delineate some elements of her extremely mixed-up cultural identity which is, indeed, Mediterranean but also deeply European, as it has preserved its classical roots intact along with its Baroque shapes and outlines which have long granted it the standing of a post-modern reality, I will refer to a metaphor Tahar Ben Jelloun utilized to describe Naples. The writer compared the city to a novel whose chapters represent the various stages of her history but whose global meaning, whose thread of continuity, has often in some way been lost. As though each chapter were to stand alone, almost like sheets of paper in the wind! As I possess greater familiarity with English literary culture, it is certainly more appropriate for me to begin with England which, among the great and, at the time, young, future European nations, established in the late MiddleAges strong cultural relations with Italy and the Campania region. The contacts and contrasts were, initially, merely of a so-called ‘cultural’ nature, that is to say based upon what the English were able to read about remote lands since travelling was rare indeed and little was known about foreign places. It is a paradox that on this basis and with the passing of time English prejudices against the Italians increased both in number and in magnitude. This could well be due to the spread of the Italian humanistic culture, which constituted a sought-out backdrop and premise, widely exploited by English culture, by its budding intellectuals, and even by its Tudor sovereigns in order to establish their modernity, which, however, led to complex, unbridgeable rifts, and marked irreversible differences. A clear example of this is the way in which Machiavelli’s political theories made their way to England, nourishing English political thought and moulding the figures of sovereigns, be they real or merely represented, set upon the stage by the great Shakespearian or Jacobean theatre, while in reality the English had a rather superficial knowledge of Machiavelli’s works, and this led them to understand, include and ascribe all the negative aspects of politics to Machiavelli, thus reading ‘Machiavellian’ to mean only sinister, perverse and occult. In much the same way the reign of the Catholic church, jeopardised by temporal power, purveyor of indulgences for eternity in exchange for certain benefits and coarse advantages here on earth, began to be seen as obscure and arcane. And with the Reformation the chasm widens, setting the members of the Reformed Church against the Catholics. The former, according to their Calvinistic credo, torn between good and evil, trapped within an irreconcilable duality and following paths which foresee no return but merely a struggle between salvation and damnation, the latter, on the other hand,

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namely the Catholics, always willing and ready to mediate, reconcile and redeem, even when it appears impossible and inconceivable, and to forgive through confession, a sacrament which God, or others in his stead, often corrupt and cruel, handed down to men. And Naples is said even to have been visited by Dr. Faustus! This abyss was further widened by the obscure, occult, but notorious activities of the Inquisition, which fed the fantasies of both scholars and, to a greater extent, the common people. Thus Italy gradually loses her Renaissance aura and becomes a land of barbarity, backwardness, moral and physical degeneration. And Naples, too, more than other places which are spoken of or written about, but which no one truly knows! It is only during the second half of the 18th century that a renewed love for classicism brings the Enlightenment culture of Northern European states to show once more an interest in Italy.9 At this point, however, a distinction is established between Italy – legitimate heir or daughter10 of the Greek and Roman cultures, which the English would in a certain sense like to make their own, in an attempt to redefine their past and better delineate their own cultural identity – and the Italian people, their contemporaries. And if neoclassicism is to be the model worth imitating, then Italy must indeed be visited, or rather, it must be visited to then be imitated. The wealthy and/or learned Englishmen, who had discovered Piranesi, begin to hear about Herculaneum and Pompeii, where the excavations had recently begun.11 Although they had been building Palladian villas for some time, the English now began to design their streets and buildings according to the parameters of harmony, balance and proportion, labelling the whole ‘neoclassical’ and feeling a strong urge to see Italy with their very eyes, that country being known as the cradle and mother of ancient Rome which, in turn, had been nourished and born of the culture of the Magna Grecia. Italy, which up to then had been either totally ignored or violently demonised, though there had always been an awareness of her seductive powers and of her ‘picturesque’ nature, as the English were wont to say, also 9

10 11

“Having hosted the Roman modification of ancient Greek civilization as well as the revival of this hybrid during the Renaissance, Italy became the focus of extraordinary fascination for the emerging nations of Northern Europe after the disintegration of medieval Christendom.” Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour. Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass, 1998), p. XI. See note 3. The news of the commencement of the Herculaneum Excavations in 1738 and of those in Pompei in 1748 spread rapidly throughout Europe and the Campania area became one of the “musts” in every grand traveller’s itinerary.

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due to the works of Salvator Rosa, started to be visited to an ever greater extent. Though wild and rupestrian his paintings appealed to that part of a possible observer that had managed to maintain a certain degree of irrationality, desire, even violence. A reflection of man as he truly is, a mixture of good and evil, soul and body, but also sin and forgiveness. Often, however, Salvator Rosa’s reproductions/representations of the landscape became so well-known and familiar that they created a sort of barrier, even in the case of great intellectuals such as Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole, to the point that Walpole wrote: “Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings, Salvator Rosa – the pomp of our park and the meekness of our palace! Here we are, the lonely lords of the glorious desperate prospects.”12 I would now like to focus my attention upon Naples from the 18th century on, as it is at this point that the eye of the visitor, the ‘Grand-Tour’ traveller, is cast upon the city – a city which up till then had hardly ever been seen but only imagined or written about on the basis of the abstract idea of a place rich in stratified, age-old culture – this eye now comes to life and sees, visits, describes, illustrates, depicts, narrates,13 but also often deceives. The ‘Grand-Tour’ had been slowly becoming a consolidated practice and Naples was considered the capital of a Reign which one must indeed visit but, at the same time, when the first visitors begin to flock to her, Naples ironically becomes a stereotype: a place in which to seek only what one wishes to find, and not to truly see. She began to be reduced to a picture postcard! And if people like Horace Walpole tried to depict Naples as she truly was, declaring that he hated all the descriptions one normally finds in travel books14, we must always remember that Walpole was the son of the English Prime Minister and did not hesitate to play at the same time his part against the Papacy in Rome, in an almost obsessive anti-papist crusade. Thus, the true traveller often finds himself torn between a stereotyped image which stems from classical culture and the need to demonise Italy, seat of Papacy, and more specifically Naples which, within a few square 12

13

14

Horace Walpole, Selected Letters, ed. by W.S. Lewis, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 5. Edward Chaney writes: “Though Vesuvius was always a star attraction before the mideighteenth century it was the area to the West of Naples, the Phlegraean Fields popular south-easterly sites, which founded the tourists’ tight schedule.” Chaney, p. 117. As a man, Horace Walpole was totally ravished by the ruins of Herculaneum since he favoured the darker, more obscure and mysterious side of Naples and of those parts of Italy he visited, as these were more suited to his complex personality which was, to a great extent, pre-romantic.

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kilometres, seems to comprise all the worst possible horrors. A city entrenched upon itself, whose borders are formed by the sea and the hills, a city made up of layers, where magnificent palazzi can be found standing side by side with miserable hovels, where luxurious arcades provide shelter for the beggars, scoundrels and outcasts, while bejewelled ladies stroll to the theatre or to the comic opera, a genre to which the Naples of the time, caught between past and future, copiously contributed. A conventional image of Naples is being portrayed by members of the British aristocracy travelling abroad with the aim, also, of seeking neoclassical vestiges to re-enforce their own hierarchical power and who, as I have already said, use their own parameters to evaluate and understand Neapolitan society. But, I insist, how can the traveller, an aristocrat or a scholar, used to the reassuring comfort of the English countryside and to the new London streets, designed according to a neo-classical model which cuts and dissects the city, emphasising the class divisions and keeping the rich as far as possible from the poor, understand Naples? That’s why most likely they quite often tended to reproduce Neapolitan people in a conventional way like drunken Sileni or cupids and Dionisi during harvesting and grape-picking. Poor ragged Neapolitans, already depicted in all their reality by the great painter Gaspare Traversi, reappear now as if they were the dancing inhabitants of the old Pompei, descending from those same walls to entertain the grand tourists. How indeed can this traveller understand and not be troubled, upset, even shocked by Naples? When her Gulf unfolds before his very eyes, pliant and bathed in light, enclosed, embraced on the one side by Vesuvius, the volcano which frequently and violently erupts with devastating effects, and on the other by Capo Posillipo, with its wild, rupestrian, wooded landscape, whose hues and shapes seem to have flowed from the paintbrush of Salvator Rosa, a royal promontory which bleakly looms over an azure sea merging out there with the sky. The picturesque style seems also to offer the Grand Tour traveller an insight into the relationship between art and nature and becomes a way of portraying a benevolent setting, filled with folkloristic scenes, depicting common people, even in the 19th century, in a purely conventional way but viewed with a paternalistic slant. And this is also the possible explanation for Fabris’ sublime paintings, Hamilton’s scientific observation, and the reproduction of cheap and ever more numerous gouaches, made from vegetable matter that proved to be genuine souvenirs, inexpensive and easy to carry, which stir up a sort of frenzy for antiques, a need for real evidence, taken from life or reproduced in

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a workshop and easy to export. Becoming in time veritable picture postcards which started a fashion that went on to re-enforce the written testimonies of travel books, diaries, letters or documents together with the vogue of collecting works of art, though of little value, which spread rapidly among the English as another sign of the economic power of single families.15 As for the violent, sublime Vesuvius, ever present in all these reproductions, I wish to recall Hester Lynch Piozzi’s vivid descriptions as she is, I believe, one of the few visitors to Naples endowed with her own personal vision and emotions. We are in the year 1785, “ We have been entertained”, she writes, “by a beautiful eruption of Mount Vesuvius – which on the night of our arrival flamed away so as to be easily seen 35 miles off; and there was a prodigious storm at sea besides, with the most horrible lightning I ever saw – and the bluest... The thunder here too is singularly laud and awful... while I write this the sea rages with a violence I never saw surpassed.”16 Indeed, what could be more sublime than that landscape for this English lady, whose heart brimmed with love for Italy, as she serenely gazed from afar upon that seething, bubbling nature, safe perhaps in the arms of her handsome tenor Gabriele Piozzi to the point of writing, “I never want for amusement nor much seek those of society.”17 It is from these words that the Naples described in vivid traits by a novelist who never visited it, namely Ann Radcliffe,18 takes its body and soul, not to mention its fire. Unnoticed by most of the travellers, Naples had always had its share of intellectuals, who loved and ‘lived’ their city, yet whose voice was seldom heard beyond the Alps, due to the existing language barriers. These scholars were men such as Antonio Genovesi, Ferdinando Galiani, Gaetano Filangieri or Giovan Battista Vico, who had already taken a critical stand against the prevailing excesses of the rationality of the Enlightenment (“the dolls of reason” as Genovesi defined them) in order to curtail an excessively optimistic outlook of modernity while trying correctly to emphasise true reality, not only that of Naples, to then envisage and plan a possible different form of transformation of reality towards the future. Seeking a more moderate and more humane interpretation than that offered by the ruling and

15

16

17 18

“[…] thus the urge to beautify or to collect, like the urge to travel, became strong enough to survive occasional bouts of Puritanism.” Chaney, p. 20. Hester Lynch Piozzi, The Piozzi Letters: 1784-1821. Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi (Formerly Mrs. Thrale) (London &Toronto: Associated University Press, 1972), pp. 175-176. Piozzi, p. 176. Ann Radcliffe, in The Italian, re-enforcing the many written testimonies of travel books, diaries, letters, heavily draws upon Mrs Piozzi’s first hand, passionate pages.

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prevailing Enlightenment, founded only on the ethics of utility and gain, Genovesi dreamt of certain traits of a more human and realistic form of Enlightenment possible for all countries and peoples. Skipping decades, throughout which many clichés about Naples grew and gained strength within both the European19 and the American imagination, all of this comes to an end around 1839 with the advent of photographic reproduction and the very first package tours. The birth of photography and the dawning of mass tourism in the second half of the nineteenth century helped to diffuse, among the peoples of Northern Europe, also the images of a post-unification Italy20 in which the gap between the civilized North and the primitive South21 was constantly emphasised.22 I do however believe that the process of building up the identity, in part fictitious, of the Neapolitan territory began, as I have already stated, long before. It can indeed be traced back to those Grand Tour travellers, cultured and refined, yet not devoid of prejudice towards every form of ‘otherness’. To all those ‘others’, be they primitive, from Naples, Calabria or Sicily, though neither black nor yellow, one had to propose (or indeed impose) that one single model of a liberal, positivistic society, Christian yet Reformed and Calvinist to the core, whose categories of good and evil could also be adopted to judge and define them. As for the capital, it is not Naples herself that is portrayed, described or deciphered, since there is no true desire to narrate, depict or understand her,

19

20

21

22

I would like to recall here the words used by Stendhal, in 1817, to describe the grandeur of his visit to the San Carlo Theatre, the Opera House: “The opening night at the San Carlo theatre has finally come around: follies, torrents of people, a dazzling hall […] At first I thought I had been born away to the palace of some Eastern emperor. My eyes are dazzled, my soul enraptured… This opening night is given over to sheer pleasure.” Stendhal, Rome Naples et Florence, 3 vols. (Paris: Le Divan, 1927), vol. I, p. 158. The translation into English is mine. Italy became a united country and one nation in 1860. “Naples and Southern Italy have long been the privileged laboratory which has generated stereotypical images and clichés regarding the ‘internal’ otherness of the peninsula […] Thus, in the wake of the initial casual contacts, an ambiguous degree of affinity between Southern Italian peasants and ‘primitive’ peoples emerges once more, and this will quite often recur in the travel literature of the times.” Alessandro Triulzi, “Lo sguardo coloniale” in Occidentalismi, pp.109-110. “Naples (together with Sicily), is the first place to stage, in a wholly experimental manner, a public representation of the way in which post-unification Italy views its other ‘interior’, now a fellow citizen and the composite national ‘museum of peoples’. Trivulzi, p. 110. A totally barbaric South, plagued by brigands and where only the shared sense of precariousness and the considerable social disruption, common to all, seemed to keep people united.

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but indeed to build up an image of her. The aim is to depict her, and the relationship between narration and reality is of little matter.23 And Naples and her inhabitants continued to be looked upon with eyes inured to the logic of full industrialisation, nature beaten into submission, quashed by the rationale of a prevailing capitalism, which places all the inhabitants of one country, or of one town in different social strata, almost castes, which often do not even communicate among themselves. One of the most telling examples of this type of report is provided by John Ruskin, a great and sensitive scholar, who visited Naples in 1841 but seemed somehow unable to be objective and only succeeded in giving a totally personal description of Naples. His description of the capital of the Reign of Two Sicilies is steeped in the stereotypes of earlier reports24 which unfolded before his eyes and succeeded in making him lose his temper. In his own words we learn that: “[…] we got to Naples, and we were stopped again first by the Dogana, and then at the passport office, till I lost temper and patience and could have cried like a girl, for I was quite wearied with the bad roads. The approach to Naples and the weather thoroughly blue, in fact, and cold […] How little could I have imagined, in my home corner, yearning for a glance of the hill-snow, or the orange leaf, that I, should, at entering Naples, be so thoroughly out of humour as ever after a monotonous day in London […] but the weather is bad.”25 How can it be that it is cold, in the country of the sun? Simply because it was January! But the traveller heading South could easily get his latitudes and temperatures mixed up in those days! But Vesuvius soon soothed his bad temper, “[…] the moon was up – full […] I caught the first sight of Vesuvius – a dark defined grey shadow in the moon light, and felt like myself again”.26 The big, threatening mountain was so ravishing that, on leaving Naples two months later, Ruskin wrote: “Left Naples today, disgusted with everything but Vesuvius who rose in a bold grey mass […] Sorry to bid him good bye. I wish Vesuvius could love me, like a living thing; I would rather make a friend of him than of any morsel of 23

24

25

26

“[…] it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not ‘truth’ but representations.” Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 21. “[…] I am not sure, on the whole, however, that I am not a little disappointed in Naples. I think there is a slight degree of gloom or perhaps, more strictly, of less gaiety than I expected […] quantities of children cramming down macaroni and cracking walnuts; half garrison seemed not above ten years old.” John Ruskin, The Diaries of John Ruskin. 18351847, ed. by Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp.141-142. Ruskin, pp. 139-140. I would like to stress that he believed that the Italians with their Dogana had very little respect for the rights and necessities of British travellers! Ruskin, p. 140.

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humanity. Rascals the Neapolitans are, one and all: I fancy they will see something of the inside of Vesuvius one of these days.”27 And if “Naples in the Winter is certainly an ugly, dirty, naked, noisy, disgusting metropolis: thorough disappointment. The worst of it, to me, I think, was the air of sophistication about it; there is no marked character, no condensed effect. It is all scattered, pretending, imitative, changing.”28 Ruskin’s words confirm once more that the capital city has managed, to a certain extent, never to fall into that sort of trap prepared by superficial or supercilious travellers arriving from countries with different and better defined social systems, and always ready to judge what they were often quite unfit to judge. This effort has however been paid for dearly by the city, at the cost of ever-increasing poverty that has led the entire population to live elbow to elbow within the space of a few square kilometres, in a joyful, and certainly tolerant conviviality, ignoring, as always, even the threatening menace of the various conquerors! 29

3. Apart from the usual, numerous descriptions of Naples, sometimes too hastily written, the pages of the greatest writers in the world have gone on describing the city, and the whole of Campania, for the priceless value of its classical excavation sites, the sea with its beautiful colours, the marvellous, unique islands scattered across the Gulf like a necklace of rare pearls or the amazing Vesuvian eruptions, which took place in succession until the end of the 2nd world war, when the volcano locked itself up in a discreet but threatening silence, which has lasted until today, I have also come across a number of more recent texts, novels, short stories and diaries written by more courageous and less prejudiced people who have perhaps known and made a real effort to understand the true city, the sorrowful one, wrecked and broken after two world wars but able to regain fresh vigour and rise again, to establish its new foundations upon roots which are deep and ancient, and thus often ignored, full of sorrow and hope, full of sea and sun. There was, for example, a German writer and famous philologist, the Jew Victor Klemperer, who spent a short time in Naples and wrote a diary in 27 28 29

Ruskin, p. 166. Ruskin, p. 166. “[…] Naples and its traditions – the city had ignored and finally overcome all its conquerors, dedicated entirely and everlastingly to the sweet things of life.” Lewis, p. 44. It is Norman Lewis who speaks of Naples in these terms, feeling perhaps that he too was one of the conquerors!

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1914-15, entitled Neapel im Krieg, in which he attempts to capture and accurately convey the Volksgeist, the true spirit of our people and their continuous passing back and forth from high to low culture. While the city then went on to become a theatre of war and a land immersed in the struggle for freedom, at the end of the 2nd World War, Naples left her mark, as I was saying, on the pages of works, and not only Italian ones, whose authors were able to look at her and understand her, finally ridding her, it seems to me, of the usual useless clichés, antithetical syntheses of good and evil, as is customary in the Calvinist culture, and to restore her to her full-bodied, sorrowful vitality. I refer, for example, to authors such as Norman Lewis, Robert B. Ellis, John Horne Burns, John Steinbeck and others still. Or to the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, or, more recently, to Edoardo de Filippo or Anna Maria Ortese, all of whom have written beautiful, profound texts, brimming with emotion, in which the city lays herself bare. And the Neapolitans? Those people Norman Lewis refers to when writing: “This adds to the general impression of the civilization and impressive humanity of our Italian ex-enemies. For this reason, since humanity is above partnership, the Italians are no doubt equally kind to the Germans who come to them for help […] and I find deplorable that we should show anger and vindictiveness when cases of Italians showing even ordinary compassion to their one-time allies come to our notice.”30 Are they the same people Ruskin described in totally different terms? Those Neapolitans that in Lewis’ words seem to be able to show the same humanity towards the winners as towards the losers! “It was one of those golden mornings of Naples. Within minutes of chugging out of the harbour, the town behind us was afloat in layers of mist, and all its strong colours, its reds and its corals, faded to a pacific grey.”31 Is this still the same Naples? And why then does it appear so different from the Naples Ruskin and others tried to describe? Here even the poor, ragged children of the populace32 have been rescued and given a new dignity, “The scugnizzi of Naples and Benevento are intelligent, charming and above all philosophical – notably more so than children from protected homes”33 writes Lewis or “[…] I went back to the scugnizzi, who don’t seem to be afraid of anything, and remain the major source of unsullied truth.”34

30 31 32 33 34

Lewis, p. 107. Lewis, p. 101. See note 23. Lewis, p. 149. Lewis, p. 162.

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Naples and its inhabitants constitute a really complex reality: if the city looks Oriental and tangled like the pages of a novel, this is due to the fact that Naples has been a centre of culture, or better of different cultures, for centuries, for thousands of years, a place of memory and memories, homeland of myths and mysteries, of the only speaking and also writing oracle in history, the Cumean Sybil. The city has been host to deep forms of faith and religiousness, often on the verge of fanaticism, ever since. The Neapolitans are in fact a people born of the encounter, overlapping, clashing and mixing of different races, and religions too, which has generated both tolerance and cynicism. People like us rationally laugh at the idea of the “monacelli”,35 but continue to shelter and protect them, small and jocose as they are,36 and still wait for the periodical and systematic miracles of San Gennaro, our patron saint, though all the while fully aware that there is very little the Saints can do against the real actors of History, men, men of power and learning, even though they come from the most potent nations of dominant cultures which, for centuries have tried to remove all possible doubts and obliterate all mysteries, which, however, obstinately, time and again, continue to reemerge. Here. Where the ‘others’ have incessantly arrived in the course of the centuries and, though they might have been tolerated, have always been accepted and given the opportunity to integrate themselves and so contribute to the building up of a sort of multicultural identity. On the borders, where races and different cultures meet and mingle to bring about new beginnings, even new utopias, after regenerative baths or baptisms. For Naples regenerative baths have to be of blood, just as wars and revolutions almost seem to have been necessary in order to strive forth yet again and recover our better energies. It is from sufferings, be they centuries old or relatively recent, like those of the last world war, from blood and in blood, that the Neapolitans have always been able to become heroes once more! Indeed, it was during those days of war when observing Naples from afar that Norman Lewis wrote, “All Naples lay spread out beneath us like an antique map, on which the artist had drawn with almost exaggerated care the many gardens, the castles, the towers and the cupolas. For the first time, awaiting a cataclysm, I appreciated the magnificence of this city, seen at a

35

36

Tutelary geniuses who ‘reside’ in our houses according to popular traditions of classical origin. The “monacelli” are like relatives, always available and even functional as festive excuses to cover up for our forgetfulness and laziness; actually the embodiment of our little faults.

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distance which cleansed it of its wartime tegument of grime, and for the first time I realised how un-European, how oriental it was.”37 And then the Vesuvius exploded. It was 1944 and it has kept silent ever since. A sleeping giant, which seems to retain endless energy within its bowels. But now the image of Naples should really be reshaped, reread, rewritten, and European literatures/literature could help us to define a new stage in our long march through History. Naples is both Mediterranean and Oriental but mostly European since we too are, or better are supposed to be, children of a post-Enlightenment culture, born of a too ambitious rationality that always pretends to understand, classify, judge. But Naples is also made up of mystery. And we are proud of our diverse ancestries, which might make of modern Naples a model of integration. I would like to come to an end in this headlong race, which is only the beginning of a much longer research project, by invoking the words of Shirley Hazzard, a well-known contemporary Australian writer,38 who in 1988 wrote: “The city itself was marked by a volcanic extravagance. Its characteristics had not insinuated themselves but had arrived in inundations – in eruptions of taste... in a positive explosion of the baroque... Nothing in moderation might have been the motto of these people; who were yet, like their city, ultimately a secret.”39 Past and future still mingle in her daily life, while Naples, the multifaceted capital, has to be helped to build up her future. The words of Lewis, when he was leaving Naples, could be of great encouragement: “A year among the Neapolitans had converted me to such an admiration for their humanity and culture that I realise were I given the chance to be born again and to choose the place of my birth, Italy would be the country of my choice.”40 In that case the bloodshed had really served, yet again, to purify and baptise Naples and the… Neapolitans. So, even today, after yet more years of exploitation, no longer by invaders or foreigners but by her own children, corrupt members of today’s political classes, Naples might indeed need baptism once more, even though this may entail suffering, in order to enjoy a new start.

37 38 39 40

Lewis, p.40. In the last few decades Shirley Hazzard has spent a few months every year in Naples. Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon (London: Virago, 2003), pp.71-72. Lewis, p. 183.

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Bibliography Chaney, Edward, The Evolution of the Grand Tour. Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London: Frank Class, 1998). The Fatal Gift of Beauty. The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam: RODOPI, 1996). Hazzard, Shirley, The Bay of Noon (London: Virago, 2003). Jelloun, Tahar Ben, State of Absence, trans. by James Kirkup (London: Quartet Books, 1994). Lewis, Norman, Naples ’44. An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth (London: Eland, 2002). Occidentalismi, ed. by Carla Pasquinelli (Rome: Carocci, 2005). Piozzi, Hester Lynch, The Piozzi Letters: 1784-1821. Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi (Formerly Mrs. Thrale) (London &Toronto: Associated University Press, 1972). Ramondino, Fabrizia & Andreas Friedrich Muller, Dadapolis. Caleidoscopio napoletano (Torino: Einaudi, 1992). Ruskin, John, The Diaries of John Ruskin, ed. by Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, 1835-1847 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). Said, Edward W., Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003). Stendhal, Rome Naples et Florence, 3 vols. (Paris: Le Divan, 1927). Walpole, Horace, Selected Letters, ed. by W.S. Lewis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973).

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2. Water and Cultural Memory

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David Skilton

Water and Memory Water and cultural memory make for a gathering of ideas necessarily somewhat different from those parts of this volume dealing with space, place and cultural memory. The shift in literary and cultural analysis from an overwhelming concentration on time to a sensitivity to space is clearly pointed up in the introductory remarks to the other parts of this collection. The peculiar propensity of places to cause memories to adhere to them means that we have ways of registering the passage of time in the physical environment; and because a unique location will hold a memory of years ago, the illusion of identity of place will short-circuit time. Thus when we walk past one of a number of significant spots in a city (significant to us, that is) which are apparently little changed over the past years, we are living at two or three moments of our unimportant histories, at the same geographical point as identified by GPS technology. When we mourn the passing of an urban scene, it may be less the loss of what was there before that we regret, but the loss of the power of the place to evoke le temps perdu. Thus we seek to hold on to the traces of solid things which are in flux around us, as they offer the reassurance of the continuity of our identity through time, only to withdraw it suddenly, capriciously and traumatically. When our memory is of a ruined city, as so many older European memories are, the replacement of bomb-site by prosperity is welcome, but no less poignant. This banal observation is no more than a glance at the heraclitean principle, and it is scarcely surprising that the predicament of the may-flylike individual, living for a day, the rest being memory or anticipation, is more acute when faced with memories linked to the flowing of water as well as the flux of time: for while the connections of water and memory are rich and manifold, water itself does not retain the imprint of human activity. As Byron memorably puts it in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin—his control Stops with the shore [...] (1603-06)

Water and memory have a supremely powerful yet uneasy relation, typified by the cunning townsfolk in the Danish folk tale, who hide their church bells from the enemy by rowing out to sea, throwing them overboard, and cutting a

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notch in the gunwale of the boat to mark the spot where they have dropped them. Moreover our watery features of geography defy generalisation. The sea may be that over which Carthaginian figs could travel with threatening celerity, or that across which merchants brought the teas of China in a threemonths’ voyage. The gaze across the sea from Dover to the Pas de Calais, or vice versa, cannot be the same as the rapt imaginings of a Viking or a Genoan explorer, gazing eagle-eyed, like Keats’s “stout Cortez”. The excitement of setting sail in one’s imagination in a tall ship with Walter de la Mare, with his “I must go down to the sea again”, is unlike the cold grip of fear that comes from imagining the crossing to Vinland in a Viking longboat. Then again either the sea may be teeming, or, as in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “Oed’ und leer das Meer”. In The Mill on the Floss the individual lives of Maggie and Tom Tulliver on the mill at the confluence of the Ribble (ripple) and the Floss (Fluss) are swept down to the all-encompassing sea by the powerful urge of George Eliot’s religious humanism to be as symbolically rich as Christianity. Crossing salt water can destroy life and be one of the triggers of the Indian Mutiny, or can be a baptismal rebirth. The cultural presences of these vast watery spaces are too varied, and each culture has a repertoire requiring an entire volume to catalogue. Rivers might at first sight appear to behave much better. The Danube and the Rhine marked the limits of the Roman Empire. The little Rubicon marked the limit beyond which an army’s movement became civil war. The four ancient rivers of paradise are symbolised in the renaissance fountains of Rome. A river divides Buda from Pest, and a bridge unites them. In childish folklore, the Thames is the only river to flow between two seas, Chelsea and Battersea, and the Glaswegian taxi driver of north of the Clyde will deny all knowledge of the geography of the “South Side”. Even when marking borders, rivers have a transnational function, and the great rivers of Africa have their own trading or “river” languages. For Richard Jefferies during the heyday of Victorian respectability, the Thames, too, had its own register of language, being a free zone allowing swearing, all the way from Tilbury to Cricklade. Yet, as the above examples suggest, as sites of memory, they are once again so varied that generalisation falters. It is as well that we are not here required to consider lakes and geysers in this context. Attempting to capture water in a theoretical net is a torture for a critical Tantalus. Gaston Bachelard, so influential in adding space to time as a major factor in literary criticism, and so rightly summoned for aid by the introducers of other sections of this volume, is of more limited help when dipping his sieve in water. Yet where his L'Eau et les rêves (1942) is relevant, he

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works his usual magic in broadening out the implications of a text to suggest that it is in touch with the boundless and the ineffable, and Zanelli’s treatment of “Water, mourning and the quest for origin in Irène Némirovski's works” displays these strengths to the full. As she expressively phrases it, “Némirovsky’s texts are mirrored in water” at moments of crisis: A typical symbol of life, water becomes an alluring symbol of death in Némirovsky’s novels, where death by water acquires manifold meanings—a rebirth in Les Mouches d’automne, an apocalyptic climax in Le Spectateur, and an opaque ending, appropriate to an opaque life, in David Golder. “L’eau coule toujours, l’eau tombe toujours, elle finit toujours en sa mort horizontale […] La peine de l’eau est infinie”, as Bachelard wrote.

Bachelard is well chosen as the key to these works, and the thought and ideology of these two writers map on to each other perfectly. Outside his culture and period, Bachelard has been most strongly contested in his work on water, particularly with regard to his evocation of the “eternal feminine”,1 the case for which is propped up here and there by appeal to the accidents of French grammatical gender, in a way which seems simplistic to us nowadays, since the publication of George Lakoff’s influential Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Chicago, 1987), the case having always seemed less than compelling in those regions where water and the sea are grammatically neuter. These include the parts of northern Europe examined in Binczyk’s paper, in which the rootless, restless characters of Isherwood’s Berlin take on a symbolic typicality which the critic applies to her exploration of travel in British writings of self-discovery of the nineteenthirties. Binczyk taps into the quest for identity as registered by English writers of entre-deux-guerres. As she remarks, “the modern phenomenon of people’s restlessly going places can be viewed as acquiring a unique meaning of a desperate quest for new grounds to re-negotiate one’s identity.” Living on an island on the edge of a mighty ocean, Britons conceive of the confines of their country as bordering on the limitless. Even from the South Coast, the vision is of boundless seas, not predominantly a short sea-hop to the Pas-deCalais. This urge to see the unknown at a great distance, rather than worry about figs being landed from nearby Carthage, accounts for the popular standing of R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island. In this book the youthful hero’s quest for manhood ironically turns all its adult readers into dreaming children, and in the counter text it generates in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the escapism of Stevenson’s readers is presented as a dreamworld, and travel as imaginary, and an escape from growing up. In this sea-faring view of the world it is appropriate that Binczyk’s treatment culminates in Auden and 1

See for example Wendy O’Shea-Meddour, “Gaston Bachelard’s L'Eau et les rêves: Conquering the Feminine Element”, French Cultural Studies, 14 (2003), 81-99.

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MacNeice visiting Iceland. There, if anywhere, the horizon is distant. The twentieth century enjoyed celebrating explorers straining after invisible prospects. Prince Henry the Navigator, in his modern depiction in Lisbon, not only stretches his sight to the other side of the world, but to an enlarged imperial future for Portugal, and his yearning is echoed in the tense stance and the penetrating gaze of Leif Ericson in Stirling A. Calder’s statue of 1930 standing over Reykjavik. So Auden and MacNeice sought out a place where the traveller is almost forced to imagine an aspiration of hundreds of years ago, and to think into an adventure supported by a technology so little known to us as to be terrifying in its indefiniteness and flimsiness. But the result for the poets was disillusion. The traveller steeped in Europe could not escape. Auden found little to do in Reykjavik but ‘soak’ in the only hotel with an alcohol licence. The ’thirties search for identity through travel leaves even the adventurous hardly further forward in their quest than the meaningless migrants of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. Rose Macaulay explores a new frontier for women and technology, and symbolically does so along a coast which brings with it associations with her favourite reading, taking her simultaneously into the past and into the future: Fabled Shore is the true description of this long strange coast and its haunted hinterland, to which Homer sent Odysseus voyaging [...] Indeed most Greek legends were at one time placed in that far western land that stretched, mysterious and unknown, beyond the Pillars and the familiar Mediterranean. [...] The Massiliot sailor and I made [...] the same journey, he by the sea, I by the land. [...] all the way down this stupendous coast I trod on the heels of Greek mariners, merchants and colonists, as of trafficking Phoenicians, conquering Carthaginians, dominating ubiquitous Romans, destroying Goths, magnificent Moors, feudal counts, princes and abbots.

This is a particularly modern Odyssey, where the world is explored in terms of gender rôles and technology, as Macaulay faces the simultaneous hazards of mechanical breakdown and incomprehension of the population she is driving through at the vision of a lone woman driver. Federici most ably illuminates this by a wide range of quotations, including Edith Wharton’s “The motor-car has restored the romance of travel.” Class, nationality, language and divergent cultural practices add up to a complex mix of twentieth-century ingredients, and Macaulay triumphs on behalf of the emancipated well-to-do women of Britain, leaving the next frontier of class to be negotiated during and after the Second World War. Contact of a different kind between empires and cultures is analysed in Skilton’s paper on the first regatta to be held on the Thames in 1775, which enacted the succession of maritime, mercantile empires, Britain rising as Venice finally fell. This was also the year which laid the foundations for one of the amplest occurrences in the history of translatio imperii, the transfer of sway from the British empire to the United States of America. A

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contemporary perception of the regatta was enriched by references to the fall of Troy, the foundation myth of Rome, and, obliquely, the Norman conquest of England. The Thames had recently risen to the position of the world’s greatest port, and now stood metonymically for London and for England. The banks of the Thames, therefore, like many a sea-coast, were the meeting place of cultures: as Anna Barbauld wrote, in dated language which might today cause her bona fide to be unfairly questioned, Streets, where the turban'd Moslem, bearded Jew, And woolly Afric, met the brown Hindu [...] 2

International contact and exchange by means of sporting events are now commonplace, but this paper suggests that adoption by one culture of a competition from another culture may be laden with significances of which the participants are scarcely aware. And the particular event described comes imaginatively to life because the site of memory, a great river, is, culturally speaking, a living thing. As John Burns remarked in 1943, at another point in history at which the Thames, London and Britain were almost synonymous with the fate of Western civilisation, “The Thames is liquid history.”3 We are here in the intellectual territory mapped out by Simon Schama in his Landscape and Memory of 1995, and at the same time in touch with the commonplace, folk imagery in which the river is the life of the individual and of Everyman, with “[a]ll things [...] possible in the windings between fount and sea”.4 This river, like George Eliot’s River Floss, flows out into the illimitable, eternal sea. The experiences charted in this collection of essays are many and various, and attest to an endless fascination and indeterminacy in the interplay of water and memory in European culture.

Bibliography Barbauld, Anna Lætitia, The Poems of Anna Lætitia Barbauld, ed. by Wiliam McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athen GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994). Daily Mail, 25 January 1943.

2

3 4

Anna Lætitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (London, 1812); quoted from The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. by Wiliam McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athen GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 152-61, ll. 65-6. Daily Mail, 25 January 1943. Edward Thomas, The South Country (London: J. M. Dent, 1993; first published 1909), p. 17.

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O’Shea-Meddour, Wendy, “Gaston Bachelard’s L'Eau et les rêves: Conquering the Feminine Element”, French Cultural Studies, 14 (2003), 81-99. Thomas, Edward, The South Country (London: J. M. Dent, 1993; first published 1909).

David Skilton

Ruin and the Loss of Empire: From Venice and New Zealand to the Thames In an earlier article I analysed visions of the anticipated ruins of London and the visits to them of future tourists from North America, and demonstrated their relation to the translatio imperii (or transfer of empire) from Britain to the United States.1 In the present paper I discuss the Thames as the imaginary meeting place of past, present and future imperial powers, and take as my starting point the moment of the introduction of the regatta from Venice to the Thames in June 1775. There is evidence that this first English regatta was a patriotic celebration devised in part to address a fear that the American Colonies might be lost, and that the ruin of London would then follow. Although London was routinely called “Augusta” or the new Rome, Rome was not the only imperial city in the repertoire of eighteenth-century comparisons. When sinfulness was the subject, Babylon was called into play,2 and when London was being praised for its commercial dominance, the Phoenicians, Corinthians, Venetians, or Ligurians might be summoned up, as they are in Richard Glover’s poem, London: or, The Progress of Commerce in 1739.3 Mounting a Venetian regatta on the Thames would display London as successor to Venice as a city whose empire was based on trade and naval power, and doing so just as strife with the American colonies was breaking into open conflict showed a more-than-usual sensitivity to the succession of empires. Tassini, the nineteenth-century historian of Venice, explains that the original purpose of the regata in the fourteenth century was to exercise youth in rowing for service in galleys and other vessels of war,4 whereafter it served to celebrate Venice’s maritime greatness. It was symbolically appropriate to attempt the same function for Britain as new emergencies arose. This 1

2

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David Skilton, “Tourists at the Ruins of London: the Metropolis and the Struggle for Empire”, forthcoming in Cercles in 2005. ‘Babylon’ was often used as a purely jocular name for the capital. For example, when Anna Seward reports, “So the brilliant Sophia has commenced Babylonian”, Macaulay’s marginal comment is, “That is to say, she has taken a house in town”. See G. O. Trevelyan, Marginal Notes of Lord Macaulay (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), p. 8. Richard Glover, London: Or, The Progress of Commerce (Dublin, 1739). Giuseppe Tassini, Curiosità veneziane - ovvero origini delle denominazioni stradali di Venezia (8th edition, Venice: Filippi Editore, 1970), entry ‘Canal (Volte)’.

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northern regata was aptly tricked out in the colours of the Royal navy, royalty was present, and there was the kind of patriotic display which was usual when these things came together with a London crowd and abundant alcohol.5 A regatta had been mounted in Venice in 1764 in honour of Edward Augustus, Duke of York, and the idea of an imitation on the Thames seems to have come to a group of noblemen meeting in a London club, Thomas Lord Lyttelton, often known as “the Wicked Lord Lyttelton”, prominent among them. In typical eighteenth-century fashion, the event was celebrated by a poem in heroic couplets, Regatta; A Poem. Dedicated to the Right Honourable Thomas Lord Lyttelton,6 which, while describing a scene of pleasure graced by numerous ladies as fair as Venus or Cleopatra, emphasised the links between sport and warfare: O may the spark of emulative fire Never within our British youth expire! Bright may it burn, until the sacred flame Light Moderns to their great Forefathers’ fame! Rouz’d at the thought, the deeds of ancient days Burst in full splendor on wrapt fancy’s gaze.

The first chosen forefather is Edward I, followed by the Black Prince and Sir Francis Drake: Old Time rolls backward his devouring tide, And our dread Edward spreads his glories wide: Once more thro’ Palastine the host he leads, Where for his Maker and the Cross he bleeds. O’er Cressi’s plain the warrior next is bore, Crown’d with fresh wreaths and steep’d in Gallic gore; Again proud Spain’s Armada ploughs the wave, And Britain’s thunder makes the deep a grave.

This is usual stuff, of course, but taken together, the different aspects of the poem add up to something more than a routine compliment to a wealthy nobleman. The poem exalts warfare above the gentler arts of painting and sculpture (pp. 4-5), before attempting to refute those who would have it that luxury was enervating the population and undermining the economy, as was 5

6

See Warwick Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1896), pp. 213-14; Annual Register for 23rd June 1775, p. 133 (online source visited 26.11.03); and F. H. W. Sheppard, “An Eighteenth-Century Regatta on the Thames”, History Today, 9 (1959), 823-9. Regatta; A Poem, Dedicated to the Right Honourable Thomas Lord Lyttelton (London, 1775), pp. 13-14. I am grateful to the Henry H. Huntington Library and Art Gallery for supplying a photocopy of this work.

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assumed to be the case for the nations of Europe whose fortunes were in decline: Happy Britannia! where wealth still supplies The fountain, dissipation’s fervour dries; Where Luxury’s profusion excites no dread, And industry by proud excess is fed: The splendid ball, the motley masquerade Are marts for commerce, firmer pops to trade; There peasant and mechanic both demand Subsistence from the waste of Pleasure’s hand […] (p. 5)

Having, like most eighteenth-century writers, attributed British wealth to trade, this poet steps out of age-old poetic tradition to praise aristocratic extravagance as an encouragement to trade, so reinforcing his compliments to Lyttelton, as notorious for the latter. It being 1775, however, the analysis does not stop there. Britain is once more on the brink of a major conflict, and one which could pull it down from its imperial pre-eminence. The traditional strengths of the island kingdom are therefore rehearsed in terms reminiscent of John of Gaunt: Genius of Britain! whose all-bounteous hand Blessings unnumber’d grants this happy land, Who nature’s mounds for walls and bulwarks gave, And moat’st it with the ocean’s roaring wave;

In the terms of such patriotic praise, the poet’s nation cannot be defeated from without, but must be brought down by domestic dissent: The guardian influence of thy pow’r bestow, To save this nation from its deadly foe, Discord, that bas’lisk to all human joys, Whose touch contaminates, and whose breath destroys.

The example of Rome is a dreadful warning: Rome once, like Britain, man with awe survey’d, ’Till, sapp’d by faction, vital strength decay’d: Freedom too flourished in that gen’rous soil, Planted by nature, and matur’d by toil. Hence spread her fame thro’ the admiring world, Where’er the Roman banner was unfurl’d; […] Where now shall weeping patriotism turn, To find the sage’s or the hero’s urn? Lost is distinction in the wreck of things, And peasants mingle in the dust with kings. Where Rome’s high senate once had fix’d a seat, The midnight curfew tolls for Monks to meet. O may this realm like changes never know, Not waste with years, but more in splendour grow […] (pp. 13-14)

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This is commonplace aristocratic sentiment, but timely in 1775. More interesting is the recognition of the possible future ruin of London. The American conflict was seen to threaten Britain’s empire and its capital, the loss of empire entailing also the ruin of the metropolis. For a moment the vision was fleetingly glimpsed of a London destroyed as Rome had been destroyed before. A line of Virgil stands as epigraph on the title page of this poem: nauticus exoritur vario certamine clamor (Æneid iii.128) (“The oarsmen’s shout rose upward, as the contest ebbed and flowed” – S.R. Lyons)

This is well chosen, not only echoing (as classical scholars tell us) the rhythm of the Trojan oars, but introducing the theme of empire. A link between the regatta and translatio imperii is further reinforced by the fact that the line was applied by the twelfth-century poet, Baudri de Bourgueil (1085-1130), to the conquest of England in 1066.7 The possibility of impending doom may have triggered Lyttelton’s own more famous poetic vision of the future ruins of London, visited in the year 2199 by a tourist who writes home to a friend in Boston, “the capital of the Western Empire”.8 Though none of those present on the occasion of the London regatta on 23rd June, 1775 could have known it, the event nearly coincided with the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, as though Clio herself were exploiting the aquatic celebration to point up the fate of empires. Before leaving the subject of Venice and London we should note that for Thomas Lyttelton, as for numerous of his contemporaries, Venice stood for a freedom for “[t]he plausible serpent of Hagley” to indulge in his favourite vices of “Lust” and “mad Intemperance”.9 John Gray, author of a twelvevolume History of the World, wrote to Tobias Smollett from Genoa, March 23rd, 1771 that he had met […] young Lyttelton, whose […] mind is the most susceptible of delusive flattery of any that ever I met with […] He ventured to play at Venice like a madman. He lost 1000 sequins in cash, and 2800 upon credit, which, in point of honour ought to have been paid within 24 hours, but which still remains unpaid, and made him come away without taking leave, when I left Venice. He and I travelled together to Milan […] About a fortnight after our arrival, his mistress arrived from Venice, when I left them, and came hither.10

7

8

9 10

See Pierre Courcelle, Lecteurs païens et lecteurs chrétiens de l’Énéide, 2 vols., Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres ns.4 (Paris 1984 [1985]), vol. 1, p. 243 n 96. Poems, by a Young Nobleman, of Distinguished Abilities, lately deceased; Particularly the State of England, and The once flourishing City of London. In a Letter from an American Traveller, Dated from the Ruinous Portico of St. Paul’s, in the Year 2199, to a friend settled in Boston, the Metropolis of the Western Empire (London, 1780). George Huddesford, The Second Part of Warley: A Satire (London, 1778), p. 14. Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926), pp. 244-5.

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We should not dissociate the display of the regatta from the pleasure-seeking of the milords, since both are implicated in British views of Venetian decadence, nor overlook the brave attempt by the poet of Regatta to make dissipation appear one of the motors of the British economy. The Thames continues to be at the centre of most following literary intimations of the loss of empire, be they Lady Holland’s, Thomas Love Peacock’s, Anna Barbauld’s, Shelley’s, or by hands unknown or unremembered. For Barbauld, the Thames was bordered by Streets, where the turban'd Moslem, bearded Jew, And woolly Afric, met the brown Hindu […]

and for the historian and imperial administrator, Thomas Macaulay, the Thames was also the focus, and one of his visions of the future ruin of London, from 1840, endured as a rhetorical commonplace for the rest of the nineteenth century, being given huge additional currency by Gustave Doré’s famous illustration, “The New Zealander”, in London, a Pilgrimage in 1872.11 In the period of the second British Empire, Macaulay’s identification of the New Zealander as the symbolic tourist who will represent a new world when power shall have passed from the old one, once more centres on the Thames. Macaulay put him on London Bridge in 1840, as a sonorous conclusion to a review of von Ranke’s History of the Popes, in which, having run through a quick summary of the Whig view of the history of the English Reformation, Civil War and Glorious and Bloodless Revolution, he warns the reader not to be complacent about the apparent triumph of the English Protestant settlement, on the grounds that the Church of Rome has endured for ages, and will endure for ages more. Adam Smith may have predicted the collapse of Roman Catholicism in The Wealth of Nations, under the weight of its own contradictions, and Madame de Staël may have made Corinne imagine the future ruin of St Peter’s, while Carlyle was in the habit of referring to the Roman Catholic Church as a galvanised corpse;— but Macaulay concluded his review with a salutary reminder of its strength and antiquity, and the prediction that it “may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s”.12 The use of this image throughout the remainder of the nineteenth

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Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (London: Grant, 1872), facing p. 188. T.B. Macaulay, review of L. von Ranke’s The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Edinburgh Review, 72 (October 1840), 227-58.

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century has been well documented,13 and it usually stands simply as a rhetorical device inviting the reader to look back on the present from a supposed future. Earlier visions of American visitors convey an acute awareness of translatio imperii to the United States. The historical significance of the New Zealander is rather different, and derives in part from historical developments in the nineteenth century and from memories of Cook’s voyages in the previous century, Macaulay’s image probably deriving from a passage in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall following an account of the socalled Picts or painted people who lived in today’s Scotland, beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire: If, in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed, we may contemplate, in the period of Scottish history, the opposite extremes of savage and civilised life. Such reflections tend to enlarge the circle of our ideas; and to encourage the pleasing hope, that New Zealand may produce, in some future age, the Hume of the Southern Hemisphere.14

This passage derives some of its force from the respect in which some of the indigenous populations of the Pacific were held at different times in Europe. Gibbon’s remark is elaborated by one of the English translators of Labillardière’s Relation de voyage à la recherche de le Pérouse (1800), who takes it into the realm of the anticipated ruin of Lyttelton and Volnay by asking: whether […] the advantages of civilisation may not, in the progress of events, be transferred from the Europeans, who have but too little prized them, to those remote countries which they have been so diligently exploring? If so, the period may arise, when New Zealand may produce her Lockes, her Newtons, and her Montesquieus; and when great nations in the immense regions of New Holland, may send their navigators, philosophers, and antiquaries, to contemplate the ruins of ancient London and Paris, and to trace the languid remains of the arts and sciences in this quarter of the globe.15

William Lisle Bowles feared 13

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W. Bolton, letter to The Times, 13 September 1860, p. 11; Michael Bright, “Macaulay’s New Zealander”, The Arnoldian: A Review of Mid-Victorian Culture, 10 (1982), 8-27; Robert Dingley, “The Ruins of the Future: Macaulay’s New Zealander and the Spirit of the Age”, in Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science fiction, ed. by Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley (London: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 15-33; and David Skilton, “Contemplating the Ruins of London: Macaulay’s New Zealander and Others”, Literary London Journal, 2(1) (March 2004), (). Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. by David Womersley, 3 vols (London: Allen Lane, 1994) I, 1001. Jacques Julien de Labillardière, Voyage in Search of La Pérouse Performed by Order of the Constituent Assembly (London: John Stockdale, 1800), pp. vi-vii. There is another translation, An Account of a Voyage in search of La Pérouse, published in the same year in London by J. Debrett in 2 vols.

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That the dark tide of time might one day close, England, o'er thee, as long since it has clos’d On Ægypt and on Tyre: that ages hence, From the Pacifick's billowy loneliness, Whose tract thy daring search reveal’d, some isle Might rise in green-haired beauty eminent, And like a goddess, glittering from the deep, Hereafter sway the sceptre of domain From pole to pole; and such as now thou art, Perhaps NEW-HOLLAND be.16

Dumont d’Urville, who voyaged to the Antipodes from 1826-9, may be Macaulay’s model for predicting the growth of a great civilisation in New Zealand. He compares the Maoris of his own day with the Gauls at the time of Roman greatness, who “have just made Europe tremble at the sound of their arms”, and with the Britons, whom “twenty centuries have sufficed to raise […] to the first rank among the nations”. New Zealanders, he thinks, are so placed as to be able to rise to the same heights as nineteenth-century Britons, who “today […] dominate the whole world by the influence of their wealth and the overwhelming power of their ships”, drawing on the example of “the North Americans, freed from the yoke of Albion”, who may, “before many years have run, be able to challenge the English rule of the seas”.17 Augustus Earle, who stayed in New Zealand for nine months in 1827, considered that the natives of [New Zealand] are “cast in beauty’s perfect mould:” the children are so fine and powerfully made, that each might serve as a model for a statue of “the Infant Hercules:” nothing can exceed the graceful and athletic forms of the men, or the rounded limbs of their young women. These possess eyes beautiful and eloquent […] while the intellects of both sexes seem of a superior order; all appear eager for improvement, full of energy, and indefatigably industrious […]

Two year after Macaulay set down his memorable image, a magazine devoted to emigration to Australia and New Zealand had equally little to say in favour of Australian aborigines, but considered the indigenous people of New Zealand to “possess the germs of civilisation”.18 The transformation of the New Zealander from noble savage to representative of a new civilisation is complete in Anthony Trollope’s treatment of the 16

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William Lisle Bowles, The Spirit of Discovery; Or, The Conquest of the Ocean (London and Bath, 1804), pp. 112-13. Olive Wright, New Zealand 1826-1827, from the French by Dumont D’Urville (Wellington, [1950]), p. 127. Augustus Earle, A Narrative of a Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand, in 1827; together with a Journal of a Residence in Tristan d’Acunha (London: Longman, Rees, Arme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1832), pp. 258-9; and the Australian and New Zealand Monthly Magazine (1842), 19.

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figure a few years later in an unpublished manuscript of 1855-6 as “some future polished tourist” with a “jewelled cane” who will have brought his young bride “to see the ways of men as they lived in the ancient days”. Trollope gives a thorough nineteenth-century account of the commonly accepted, rosy picture of the comparative strengths of Britain (which in this manuscript he always calls “England”) and the weaknesses of other European nations. “Her navy rides not only triumphant but entirely dominant in every sea to which she has a mind to send it.” The Crimean War, which has inflicted on enemy nations “the pangs of exhausted means, and […] the death agonies of spasmodic energy” has left Britain able to carry on “her course all but unruffled”: “Thriving tenants pay their punctual rents to thriving landlords. Merchants send out countless travellers […] Luxury, no whit abated by the war […] encourages by a liberal expenditure every new production that adds to its indulgence”: What though Nineveh and Babylon fell and Tyre and Carthage; though Greece kissed the dust, and Egypt’s kings and lordly Rome; though Byzantium is what it is; though Venice crumbles to the shore a pauper’s slave; though golden Spain has become a by-word among nations; and Germany, strong in arms as she is, knows not which way to turn her head; still England stands erect.

Yet Trollope is clear that, like its predecessors, London will one day fall, and in the future tourists from America and the antipodes will view “the slime of old Father Thames” with wonder. “‘Here on this little river,’ they will say, ‘lay half the wealth of the world of old. Here on these horrid muddy banks lay the rich ships of which their writers speak with such pride. Yes here.’”19 The same sense of power and inevitable doom fills Henry James’s description of the River in a magazine article of 1877 which became part of English Hours and which speculates about the decline of British influence in the world, though not explicitly naming the symptoms – the rise of Prussian power, and the unwillingness or inability of Britain (without a large standing army) to intervene in Continental affairs such as the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein and the Franco-Prussian War. Of the view of the Thames, James says though it is ugly it is anything but trivial. Like so many of the aspects of English civilisation that are untouched by elegance or grace, it has the merit of expressing something very serious. Viewed in this intellectual light the polluted river, the sprawling barges, the deadfaced warehouses, the frowsy people, the atmospheric impurities become richly suggestive. […] I don't exactly understand the association, but I know that when I look off to the left at the East India Docks, or pass under the dark hugely piled bridges, where the railway trains

19

Anthony Trollope, The New Zealander, ed. by N. J. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 3-11.

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and the human processions are for ever moving, I feel a kind of imaginative thrill. The tremendous piers of the bridges, in especial, seem the very pillars of the Empire aforesaid.20

If we remember that it was British inaction over the Schlesvig-Holstein Question which enabled Prussia to turn her forces against Austria, in turn causing the withdrawal of Austrian forces from the Veneto, we see the part these things played in the creation of modern Italy. When we look at the meeting of the cultures which I have mentioned in this paper, ancient, modern and future, as they encounter each other through the ages on the Thames, we find also the appropriation of a symbolic sporting event. Mazzini, writing from London in the mid-century, remarks that he has witnessed on the Thames “one of those races which we call regattas” (“una gran corsa di barche, di quelle che noi chiamiamo regatte”).21 In fact it was called the second Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, a competition which has never been called a “regatta”, perhaps because it was a celebration of Muscular Protestant Christianity, and not to be associated with Catholic Italy. Certainly many other aquatic meetings have been dubbed regattas ever since, and, because the foreseen translatio imperii to the United States has made English a world language, countless millions of people probably believe the word to be English.22

Bibliography [anon.], Regatta; A Poem, Dedicated to the Right Honourable Thomas Lord Lyttelton (London, 1775). Australian and New Zealand Monthly Magazine (1842). Bolton, W., letter to The Times (13 September 1860), 11. Bowles, William Lisle, The Spirit of Discovery; Or, The Conquest of the Ocean (London and Bath, 1804). Bright, Michael, “Macaulay’s New Zealander”, The Arnoldian, 10 (1982), 827. [Brown, James] Britain Preserved (London, 1800). Dingley, Robert, “The Ruins of the Future: Macaulay’s New Zealander and the Spirit of the Age”, in Histories of the Future; Studies in Fact, Fantasy 20

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Henry James, “London at Midsummer”, Lippincott’s Magazine (November 1877), quoted from English Hours, 2nd ed., ed. by Alma Louise Lowe (London: Heinemann, 1960), p. 103. Letter of 15 April, 1841, Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, 94 vols. (Imola: Paolo Galeati, 1908-), XX, p. 155. For an early prediction of the domination of the world by the United States through the medium of English, see Britain Preserved: A Poem, in Seven Books (London, 1800), attributed to James Brown, Book vi.

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and Science fiction, ed. by Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley (London: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 15-33. Doré, Gustave and Blanchard Jerrold, London; A Pilgrimage (London: Grant, 1872). Earle, Augustus, A Narrative of a Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand, in 1827 (London: Longman, Rees, Arme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1832). Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. by David Womersley, 3 vols. (London: Allen Lane, 1994). Glover, Richard, London: or, The Progress of Commerce (Dublin, 1739). Huddesford, George, The Second Part of Warley; A Satire (London, 1778). James, Henry, English Hours, 2nd ed., ed. by Alma Louise Lowe (London: Heinemann, 1960). Labillardière, Jacques Julien de, Voyage in Search of La Pérouse Performed by Order of the Constituent Assembly (London, 1800). [Lyttelton, Thomas], Poems, by a Young Nobleman, of Distinguished Abilities, lately deceased (London, 1780). [Macaulay, T.B.], review of L. von Ranke, The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Edinburgh Review, 72 (1840), 227-58. Mazzini, Giuseppe, Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini 94 vols. (Imola: Paolo Galeati, 1908- ). Melville, Lewis, The Life and Letters of Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926). Sheppard, F.H.W., “An Eighteenth-Century Regatta on the Thames”, History Today, 9 (1959), 823-9. Skilton, David, “Contemplating the Ruins of London: Macaulay’s New Zealander and Others”, Literary London Journal, 2 (1) (March 2004) (). Trollope, Anthony, The New Zealander, ed. by N.J. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Wright, Olive, New Zealand 1826-1827, from the French by Dumont D’Urville (Wellington, NZ: A.H. & A.W. Reed, [1950]). Wroth, Warwick, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1896).

Eleonora Federici

Rose Macaulay’s Fabled Shore: Driving through Cities and Landscapes Rose Macaulay’s Fabled Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal (1949) is a first-hand travel account of the author’s journey through the coast of Spain and Portugal driving a eleven-year-old car. Macaulay was known as a desperately bad driver who adored to drive and really enjoyed travelling at full speed. In her essay “Driving a Car” included in Personal Pleasures (1935) the author affirms that for a ‘modern woman’ driving is a bliss, a pleasure, a joy: To devour the flying miles, to triumph over roads, flinging them behind us like discarded snakes, to rush [...] from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve, a summer’s day, up hill and down, by singing fir woods and blue heath, annihilating counties and minifying kingdoms – here is a joy [...] With open throttle and hands lightly on the wheel we scud the roads, watching the needle mount [...] All is bliss.1

Driving was presented by the author as a way to cope with restlessness and as a means of freedom from feminine roles. Writing for The Outlook, the London Conservative Literary Weekly, Macaulay discussed the subject of ‘woman’ as ‘the eternal topic’ of men’s writings. She stated that women’s clothes are always under scrutiny, women’s behaviour is constantly discussed according to social values and morals and in the overall, “women are a problem to be discussed and dealt with […] women are regarded in some quarters rather as a curious and interesting kind of beetle, whose habits repay investigation”.2 Women and driving was certainly another central topic at the time, and as Virginia Scharff has widely demonstrated in her study Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, the prejudice against women drivers was shared by many people: Critics of women drivers [...] cited three presumed sources of women’s inferiority at the wheel: emotional instability, physical weakness and intellectual deficiencies [...] Women, the men point out, suffer from natural impulsiveness and timidity, inability to concentrate

1

2

Rose Macaulay in Constance Babington Smith, Rose Macaulay: A Biography (London: Collins, 1972), p. 131. Rose Macaulay, “Woman: the Eternal Topic”, in Jeannette N. Passty, Eros and Androgyny: the Legacy of Rose Macaulay (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1988), p. 160.

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and single-mindedness, indecisiveness and foolhardiness, weakness and utter estrangement from things mechanical.3

In popular culture women drivers were often regarded as incompetent, due their lack of mechanical knowledge, and also dangerous, since they were considered to be too emotional for this ‘technical practice’. Women’s supposed incapacity to control vehicles was linked to the idea that as ‘angels of the house’ women should be protected from the burden of an increasingly chaotic traffic they were not able to master. On the other hand, women drivers constituted a new potential market of car buyers. Economic reasons were central in the increasing access of women to driving and in the first half of the 20th century the automobile became a housewife commodity especially in suburban spaces. Moreover, the automobile was seen more and more as a ‘proper’ means of transport for women that saved them from the physical and moral dangers of public transportation. The most famous image of a woman driver is certainly Tamara De Lempicka’s Self-Portrait (1925), a painting that has become the icon of an independent and glamorous woman at home behind the wheel. As Attilio Brilli underlines in La vita che corre. Mitologia dell’automobile, De Lempicka symbolises the perfect chauffeuse, symbol of elegance and feminine impudence. In symbiosis with the car the woman driver stands for the “new woman” and at the same time, represents the “femme fatale”. Travelling on her own, the driver was disrupting gender roles and detaching herself from the domestic sphere. A woman on the road “still signalled femininity displaced from its founding attachment to domesticity and requisite sessility. This was femininity trespassing upon the domain of the constitutively masculine”.4 The woman driver was a ‘mobile subject’ crossing social and cultural borders; no more chaperoned, she was leaving home, taking control of the mechanical means and thus deconstructing the traditional opposition between woman and technology. Moreover, she was choosing the modalities of her journey: the distance to cover each day, the directions to take and the stages of the journey in an unknown country waiting to be explored. The iconography of the automobile permeated the first half of the century, it became a symbol of freedom, progress and a possible change in the perception of social and gender roles. For a woman, climbing an automobile meant freedom from patriarchal roles:

3

4

Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 26 Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives: 20th century Women’s Travel Writing (Minneapolis, U. of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 17.

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Simply getting into a motor vehicle made women too prominent to escape notice; actually taking the wheel made them too astonishing to escape controversy. For women the journey from back to front seat, from passengerhood to control of a vehicle deeply identified with men, began in public and entailed repeated confrontations with popular manners, morals and expectations.5

First of all, the woman driver was a subversive icon of femininity which deconstructed the connection masculinity/automobile/speed born with Futurism. Like the airplane for aviators the automobile made the man a hero of “prosthetic masculinity”.6 While the driver became the symbol of a new masculinity, a new figure of man in power of technology, the automobile was ‘feminised’ and seen as an object of technological desire that needed to be continually checked, controlled and examined. For this reason, the passage from passenger travelling in an enclosed position in the rear seating to woman driver made a great impact on the cultural imaginary of the time. As Julie Wosk has rightly emphasised, “through their ability to drive, and sometimes repair, their own automobiles they found a way to forge a new identity for themselves that included the ability to master machines”.7 The change from passenger to driver deconstructed another stereotype of the time, the shared intimacy between wealthy women and chauffeurs which was not perceived in a positive way because it represented a threat to social and class boundaries. Driving, the working-class man was in charge of the machine while the wealthy woman was a mere passenger who shared a too closed and intimate space with a subaltern. The cultural gap between social status and control of technology caused concern not only about gender roles but also about relationships between social classes. Notwithstanding the prejudices against women drivers, women began to take the wheel and also wrote articles in support of their driving capabilities; for example, in 1904 the journal Motor published an article by Mrs Sherman Hitchcock of Providence, Rhode Island, where she outlined: There is a wonderful difference between sitting calmly while another is driving and actually handling a car herself. There is a feeling of power, of exhilaration, and fascination that nothing else gives in equal measure. When the ponderous car begins to move and the motor seems a living, breathing thing responding to your slightest touch, easy to control and simple to manipulate, then comes the realization of ‘motoring’ in its truest sense.8

5 6 7

8

Scharff, pp. 16-17. Smith, p. 171. Julie Wosk, Women and Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 115. In Scharff, p. 28.

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This description is similar to Brilli’s notion of the “automobile metamorphosis” where the car is portrayed as a humanised machine, a living creature responding to the driver’s mastery and control. The ambivalent and changing relationship between women and automobiles can be tracked down also in reading women writers’ journeys on the road. If driving was an empowering experience for women that made them gain self-confidence and enabled them to become public figures in motion, writers began to tell their own stories as capable drivers. Probably the best-known text on a driving journey by car is Edith Wharton’s A Motor Flight through France (1908) where the author asserted: The motor-car has restored the romance of travel. Freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to each town through the area of ugliness created by the railway itself, it has given us back the wonder, the adventure, and the novelty which enlivened the way of our posting grandparents. Above all these recovered pleasures must be ranked the delight of taking a town unawares.9

In Wharton’s text the automobile is the vehicle of motion of an élitarian traveller who enjoys the pleasures of a travel on the road in undiscovered and unexplored tracks. In this journey account the car is portrayed as an individualised mode of mobility during which the driver chooses to change the course and the speed, stops whenever she decides to and changes the transits. The driving experience is portrayed as the fulfilment of all her expectations. A journey by car affects the temporal, spatial, and inter-relational dynamics of travel and as Wharton well outlines in her text, the driver can avoid impoverished ugly urban areas, omit what she does not want to see and search for routes where she can intensify a new aesthetic pleasure through a succession of visual and sensory impressions. Choosing this kind of itinerary and travel experience the driver returns to a romanticised gaze upon the landscape she visits; she sees it from a distance, with the automobile’s window filtering it. Actually, as Sidonie Smith has highlighted in her study: Vehicles of motion [...] fix and unfix distances – perceptual, temporal and social – between the traveller and the landscape through which she moves. Propelled through space, the traveller becomes conscious of constantly shifting sensual data and impressions – sounds, sights and smells. In this way the speed at which new impressions press upon the traveller’s consciousness, the spatial distance that separates her from the source of those impressions, and her perception of potential intimacy and disconnectedness can expand and contract [...] depending upon the mode of transport.10

9

10

Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), p. 1. Smith, p. 23.

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The new technology changes the traveller’s perspective on the landscape she crosses and in the early accounts of journeys on the road the focus is not on speed but on the scenery the traveller encounters. Starting from this assumption Brilli divides automobile travel accounts into two categories: the first is the travel to unknown and exotic places where the driver has to face many troubles, such as for example, roads curling like snakes and inhospitable accommodations, xenophobic behaviour of the inhabitants and all sorts of accidents and delays during the journey. This kind of narration borrows elements from the adventure story and the diary and the protagonist is shown to live an out-of-the-ordinary experience far away from his social milieu and culture. The second category presents a journey by car in a foreign country chosen as a favourite destination for its historical, cultural and artistic interest. Here the travel is divided into different stages aiming at discovering the historical and cultural past of the visited country through its cities, monuments, archaeological sites, that is to say all the “signs of the past”, the historical and artistic heritage together with important cultural memories. Rose Macaulay’s travel account of the travel to Spain and Portugal belongs to this second category. The writer is an acute observer of the world in which she wanders looking for the natural beauty of the country, its architecture, art, history and cultural signs. In her introduction to the text the author makes clear it is a travel through the mythological heritage following the step of the “ghosts from a hundred pasts”: Fabled Shore is the true description of this long strange coast and its haunted hinterland, to which Homer sent Odysseus voyaging [...] Indeed most Greek legends were at one time placed in that far western land that stretched, mysterious and unknown, beyond the Pillars and the familiar Mediterranean. [...] The Massiliot sailor and I made [...] the same journey, he by the sea, I by the land. [...] all the way down this stupendous coast I trod on the heels of Greek mariners, merchants and colonists, as of trafficking Phoenicians, conquering Carthaginians, dominating ubiquitous Romans, destroying Goths, magnificent Moors, feudal counts, princes and abbots.11

The discovery of the Mediterranean coast is accomplished through its historical heritage trails. The writer follows the tracks of ancient travellers, merchants and sailors and gazes at the various layers of artistic and cultural traditions which have permeated the ‘spirit’ of the places. Originally entitled “Ora Maritima” from Avenius’s poem, Macaulay’s travel account was published with the title Fabled Shore because “the booksellers believed that their clients would take it for a girl’s name, and when they came to read the book, be profoundly disappointed and return it”.12 Here the author ironically 11

12

Rose Macaulay, Fabled Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal (London: Readers Union, 1950), p. 14. Macaulay, p. 13.

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recalls the economical reasons that led her to choose a new title, avoiding a literary intertextual one and opting for a more ‘touristic’ advertisement. Fabled Shore refers to the theme of magic and fantasy, to the notion of travelling as a tourist to escape from ordinary life and search for a fantastic land where it is possible to live, even if for a short period, a different life experience.13 The Spanish shore is a fabled shore also because the driver is looking for a landscape she has already in her mind, it is a romanticised journey through which the author fulfils her aesthetic pleasure. It is a journey through history that in Spain “lies like a palimpsest, layer upon layer, on the cities, on the shores, on the old quays of little ports, on the farm-houses standing among their figs, vines and olives gardens up the terraced mountains”.14 Driving along the Mediterranean coast Macaulay follows the tracks of previous tourists with the help of guidebooks, art books and history texts. The writer utilises Avenius’s poem as a “log-book” and affirms that “the only trouble with this as a guide is that most of the capes, rivers and town no longer bear their Roman names”.15 While driving through Spain Macaulay acknowledges that a journey to Spain is not perilous any more but extremely romantic. Moving through the territory the author finds out new possible places to visit; she reassures would-be tourists about the safety of the place, she informs the readers that roads are practicable and people extremely friendly with foreigners; all reasons that should invite new British visitors to Spain. For the author this is a place where travellers can wonder and discover new tracks while re-discovering history and layered cultural memories. The contact with the inhabitants is important for the writer who, in order to be able to communicate with Spaniards, utilises a Spanish motoring phrase book. It is the contact with the inhabitants that makes her journey different and enables her to grasp something of this culture. During her journey Macaulay realises that Spaniards are very helpful with a woman driver: If they see a woman changing a wheel on the road, they leap from their camions or their cars and offer help; it is, I suppose, one side of their intense and apparently universal astonishment that a woman should be driving a car at all. All over Spain, except in the more sophisticated cities, my driving by was greeted with the same cry [...] accompanied by ‘Olé, Olè! Una senora que conduce!’. For Spanish women do not drive cars.16

As a woman driving on her own Macaulay feels a “harmless oddity”, a weird foreigner going around in an unknown country. She is told that Spanish 13

14 15 16

Graham Dann, The Language of Tourism. A Sociolinguistic Perspective (Wallingford: CAB International, 1996). Macaulay, pp. 14-15. Macaulay, p. 18. Macaulay, p. 41.

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ladies do not travel about alone, do not drive and soon realises that for Spaniards staring is “a national sport”17 that a foreigner must endure without embarrassment and that can unexpectedly be turned into a positive matter making it a means to interact with people. Macaulay’s detailed account of places and people always starts from the roads she covers, roads that become sites of cultural exchanges as much as her automobile becomes a site of cultural encounters. After sharing the intimacy of the car with local passengers asking for a lift the author’s gaze changes: Going back again through Torremolinos, I picked up a stout and agreeable woman laden with bundles and baskets, who asked me if I could take her to Marbella, twenty-eight miles on, as she had missed bus. [...] She had me in such a state of pleasant anticipation about Marbella that I sped quickly on. We talked agreeably all the way about her family, the coffee she was taking them, the beauty of her married daughter, the terrible price of food, why I had come to Spain, why I was alone, why Spanish women did not drive cars nor Spanish little girls ride donkeys in the streets like their brothers.18

In the intimacy of the car, a mechanical body that encloses its passengers, the author learns about Spanish culture from their voices and tales. Moreover, this enclosed space makes the driver perceive reality in a different way. She sees the landscape from the windscreen and her attention is caught by the necessary gestures of driving, sometimes feeling the physical strain of the journey: “Next day I drove down again to the coast, along a mountainy road whose bends were less like hairpins than like sharp dog-tooth moulding. It was, I think the most zig-zag road I had yet met; my arms ached with dragging the wheel round, my foot from pressing the brake.”19 The reader is informed about the cities the driver goes through, the borders she crosses, the different atmospheres she perceives in the different stages of the journey. As Kirstin Ross observes in her text Fast Cars, Clean Bodies the automobile offers to the traveller a new perspective of the visited places: “the automobile and the motion it creates [...] become integrated into the driver’s perception: he or she can see only things in motion – as in motion pictures”.20 Automobile journeys produce the experience of “evanescent reality, the perception of a detached world fleeting by a relatively passive viewer becomes the norm”.21 This same perception is presented by Macaulay who reports: “The scenery is doubled in charm by being seen at this rate; it

17 18 19 20

21

Macaulay, p. 51. Macaulay, p. 176. Macaulay, p. 168. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 39. Ross, p. 39.

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flashes by with the vividness of a string of jewels, glimpsed, admired and gone”.22 Thus the travel becomes a kaleidoscopic experience for the driver enjoying the dynamic perception of the landscape and where the negotiation with the unfamiliar territory is filtered through the modality of motion and the position of the perceiving subject. Travelling impressions change because on the road “the landscape becomes accessible from all angles, so that fixed perspectives dissolve into an abundance of views, a multitude of vantage points”.23 Macaulay is not an elitist traveller. Her travel is commissioned and financed by her publisher so that she can write a book on the countries she is visiting. It is not a luxurious holiday, she even sleeps in the open air enjoying the wind whispering during the night. It is surprising that when she was driving to Spain and Portugal in the sometimes unpaved roads of the Mediterranean coast frequently facing mechanical problems, the author was sixty-six. Certainly her journey is quite an adventure: I learnt that cars are not as firmly held together as one has hoped. One piece after another is apt to drop from them; there is a sudden intimidating clatter, and it will be either a bumper or an exhaust pipe [...] the steering axle, that still attached at one hand, has broken its bolts at the other and is clattering with the noise of machine guns along the road.24

The intrepid driver was certainly seen as an eccentric English lady driving alone in a foreign country and always looking for a place where she could swim. Interestingly, in the text the rhythm of the style follows the rhythm of the journey in constant motion from place to place and the travel account is given with a versatile style: […] back and forth between swift glimpses of beauty, ironic observations on a present-day situation or historical event, defenses of modes of life or of architecture currently underrated, moments of personal delights or of unavoidable discomfort [...] evocations of long-vanished life from the ruined mosaics of a Roman villa […] that holds the reader fascinated.25

Landscapes and cities are presented through sketches of the contemporary context together with signs of the past. The present is interlinked with the past, it is a landscape of “ruined grandeur”26. However, as Alice Bensen has already emphasised, “although necessarily referring to ancient invasions and 22 23

24 25 26

Macaulay, p. 23. Wolfgang Sachs, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University Of California Press, 1992), p. 155. Macaulay, p. 40. Alice R. Bensen, Rose Macaulay (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), p. 143. Alice Crawford, Paradise Pursued: the Novels of Rose Macaulay (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinsonn UP, 1995), p. 152.

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massacres, [the novel] does not concern itself with the political aspect of contemporary Spain”.27 Spain does seem stuck in its past as the author, following a well-known stereotype acknowledged by an ‘authority source’ – a Spaniard – affirms: “a rather intelligent man said to me ‘We Spanish don’t live in this century at all, but several centuries back’”.28 Clearly, Spain is exoticised and perceived through the foreigner’s gaze; the writer looks for places she has already encountered and ‘visited’ in her readings; it is an image of Spain always compared with previous travellers’ accounts. What comes out in Macaulay’s text, a text which in some sections is extremely ironic, is the combination of passages of romantic appreciation and ironic sketches of Spanish customs and habits. Illustrating the world she is exploring, the author indulges in information about her experience and perception of the country and its inhabitants. Spain is presented as a landscape that haunts her imagination but also as a place where she can relax and feel free, a land of delight. As Jane Emery underlines in her biography, Macaulay “creates a living landscape: the ‘wild and disconcerting’ roads climb and slide; the sea whispers and croons, the ruins have ‘the awful fascination of dark towers in a dream’”.29 She writes of ruined castles, villages by the sea, baroque churches and “does not forget the history of the Spanish Civil War as she drives past bombed fishing villages and burned-out churches”.30 As Emery observes, in this book the author merges the voice of the scholar who has deepened the object of her study, the voice of the journalist reporting facts and anecdotes, the voice of the social observer talking about Spanish people and the voice of the poet, “prophetic dreamer in contact with other times”.31 We would add to this list also the voice of irony, which enables her to juggle between cultures. Following Samuel Johnson’s advice that “The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean” – a passage the author quotes at the very beginning of Fabled Shore – Macaulay presents to the reader a journey into a fabled country, a country perceived through its historical and cultural layers of memories fantasized by the foreign traveller.

27 28 29 30 31

Bensen, p. 143. Macaulay, p. 85. Jane Emery, Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life (London: John Murray, 1991), p. 281. Emery, p. 281. Emery, p. 283.

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Bibliography Babington Smith, C., Rose Macaulay: A Biography (London: Collins, 1972). Brilli, Attilio, La vita che corre. Mitologia dell’automobile (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999). Crawford, Alice, Paradise Pursued: the Novels of Rose Macaulay (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1995). Dann, Graham, The Language of Tourism. A Sociolinguistic Perspective (Wallingford: CAB International, 1996). Emery, Jane, Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life (London: John Murray, 1991). Macaulay, Rose, Fabled Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal (London, Readers Union, 1950). Passty, Jeannette N., Eros and Androgyny: the Legacy of Rose Macaulay (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1988). Ross, Kristin, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). Sachs, Wolfgang, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University Of California Press, 1992). Scharff, Virginia, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991). Smith, Sidonie, Moving Lives: 20th century Women’s Travel Writing (Minneapolis, U. of Minnesota Press, 2001). Wharton Edith, A Motor-Flight Through France (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908) Wosk, Julie, Women and Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001).

Franca Zanelli Quarantini

Water, Mourning and the Quest for Origin in Irène Némirovsky’s Works – Nous sommes nés là-bas, nos racines sont là-bas … – Vous voulez dire: en Russie ? – Non. Plus loin … plus profond … I. Némirovsky, Les Chiens et les loups

In the works of Irène Némirovsky (1903-42) the recurring themes of Jewish roots and exile are intertwined with the biography of the writer, who died in Auschwitz. Set in Russia, Ukraine and Finland (the countries that hosted the Némirovsky family after their flight from Russia), they redesign a fictional and autobiographical map whose ultimate stage is France, which was regarded by the writer as a home-country rather than a land of exile. Characteristically, it is nineteenth century realist French culture that sets the tone of Némirovsky’s fluid and geometric sentences and also presides over the neat classical structure of her novels. Némirosvski, who always wrote in French, took advantage of this acquired form to contain the restless progress of her characters, who are often marked by an instinct for fight and conquest, by an unsated longing. “Je m’efforce de couler dans une forme française, c’est-àdire claire et ordonnée, et aussi simple que possible, un fond qui est naturellement encore un peu slave”1, she wrote, provisionally effacing the vast differences between the cultures and languages she imbibed. The Jewish theme is the link between Russia – a repository of memories and atmospheres – and Paris, the conflict of identities being a constant and complex concern of Némirovsky’s works. The Slav background produces a clear-cut antithesis between the refined world of Paris and Russia, which is usually depicted by the writer as obscure and archaic, poor and sauvage, but which is the ultimate destination of various characters who fail to reach a compromise with Western Europe. A case in point is the hero of David Golder. A ruthless businessman living in Paris, Golder realises he is derided by his wife and is the father of an illegitimate child. Golder is about to die on board a boat that left from Teïsk, 1

Jean-Paul Beaumarchais, Irène Némirovsky, in Beaumarchais-Couty-Rey, Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française (Paris: Bordas, 1987), p. 1627.

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his hometown, with the sole comfort of a Jewish boy, who is emigrating to make his fortune and who reminds Golder of his younger self. The circular itinerary of Golder, who reverts to Yiddish in his last few hours, is not a source of inner peace, for the man cannot forget Paris and Joyce, his beautiful albeit dissipated daughter. Golder’s identity remains divided and troubled and although Golder dies with the familiar sensation of the Russian snow refreshing his face, he is actually thinking of Paris and of the money his daughter is waiting for. As soon as Golder retrieves the memory of his origin, he also betrays it and they are both wrecked in a neutral and dirty sea, halfway between Russia and Europe. Here, like elsewhere in Némirovsky’s works, water carries with it a human destiny “en vertige”, a character whose unstable identity merges with a dark liquid element that is both punishing and appeasing. Némirovsky’s texts are mirrored in water every time her characters experience an identity conflict and feel the need to cross – the verb traverser is extremely frequent in her writing – to the other bank, although their effort is generally doomed to failure. A typical symbol of life, water becomes an alluring symbol of death in Némirovsky’s novels, where death by water acquires manifold meanings – a rebirth in Les Mouches d’automne, an apocalyptic climax in Le Spectateur, and an opaque ending, appropriate to an opaque life, in David Golder. “L’eau coule toujours, l’eau tombe toujours, elle finit toujours en sa mort horizontale […] La peine de l’eau est infinie”,2 as Bachelard wrote. While the major role played by the hero in this novel reminds one of Balzac’s realism, in other texts the identity conflict concerns marginal figures, such as the old Russian servant in Les Mouches d’automne (1931) or the rich aesthete Hugo Grayer in Le Spectateur (1939). What these characters share is precisely their marginality with regard to the main currents of history. Being foreign to the reality that surrounds them, being devoid of an intimate past, the two characters will end up overturning – consciously or not – their relationship with the memory of their origin and water will play a major role in this process. In Les Mouches d’automne Tatiana Ivanovna Karine is so devoted to the family she serves – the Karines – that she is almost forgetful of her dead son. Even the Russian revolution cannot shake the devotion of this faithful housemaid, and when her masters flee to Odessa, she stays in their house. At a later stage, the woman leaves home – with the Karines’ diamonds hidden in her clothes – and is reunited with the family in Odessa. She also follows them to Paris, where they live in a poor flat. Like autumn flies that are doomed to death, the Karines survive through a long decline. Tatiana observes, 2

Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves (Paris: Corti, 1942), p. 9.

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remembers, admonishes and at times raves. On a winter night, while it is snowing, she leaves their flat and reaches the bank of the Seine, “Il lui semblait qu’il fallait seulement la traverser et que, de l’autre côté, était Karinovka. Elle voyait scintiller les lumières des terrasses à travers la neige.”3 In her bewildered mind, the call of the snow triggers a hallucinatory process of recognition and the hope to reach – beyond the cold expanse of water – her beloved homeland. Tatiana’s dignified descent into the river is symbolic of the archaic journey towards the roots of her present being, Russia. While little by little her masters grow used to their new life, unburdening themselves of ‘useless’ memories, Tatiana washes herself clean of the sin of oblivion. Her voyage d’eau, is a sort of reversed initiation which enables the old woman to recover her youth. The image of Tatiana’s body floating on the water evokes not only a mémoire-naufrage (a drifting or wrecking memory), but also a mémoire-navire4 – a boat memory, so to speak, that is peacefully navigating towards the place of one’s origin. While Les Mouches d’automne shows the ancestral force of the Slav roots, Le Spectateur is the story of a man who has long regarded his privileged cosmopolitan identity as self-contained, if not airtight, allowing no contact with the external world, “Il était neutre, lui, ‘citoyen de no man’s land’, disait-il de lui-même en souriant. Il existait ainsi une poignée d’êtres sur la terre […] qui, par leur naissance, leurs ascendants, leurs attaches, par un caprice du hasard, mêlaient en eux tant de sangs différents qu’aucun pays ne pouvait les dire siens.”5 Being used to observing the ‘spectacle’ of the world as if from outside, Hugo Greyer idles away the summer of 1939 in Paris and on hearing that war has been declared simply comments “Quel dommage!”6 A few days later, while travelling on the luxurious transatlantic liner that is taking him back to America, feeling the assurance of somebody who regards himself as neutral, Grayer thinks of war in Europe as a truculent Shakespearean tragedy, reassured at the idea that an invisible curtain divides it from his life. On that same night, the feeling of sublime attraction he experiences while imagining the imminent disaster – “[L’Europe] était d’une irréelle horreur et en même temps son souvenir gardait une certaine beauté”7– is interrupted by the sirens alerting the passengers. Before leaving his cabin, he strives to put his jacket 3 4

5

6 7

Irène Némirovsky, Les Mouches d’automne (Paris: Grasset, 1988), p. 148. See Marie Vautier and Karyn Marczac, “Naufrage ou navire: la mémoire de l’écriture migrante des années quatre-vingt et quatre-vint-dix au Québec”, LittléRéalité, 92 (1997), 65-78. Irène Némirovsky, Le Spectateur, in Dimanche et autres nouvelles, préface de L. Adler (Paris: Stock, 2000), p. 337. Némirovsky, Le Spectateur, p. 337 Némirovsky, Le Spectateur, p. 340.

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on, but is forced to betray his usual code of behaviour and face the event in his shirt. For the first time, this discreet and refined gentleman is reduced to thinking, like a refugee, that “La vie vaut plus que le vêtement”, and the impersonal narrator comments “D’où, de quels souvenirs abolis remontaient ces vieilles phrases?”8 In order to understand the implications of Grayer’s noncommittal cosmopolitan identity, one should keep in mind that the character’s surname could possibly hint at a Jewish origin, also in view of the fact that Némirovsky only vaguely describes his family, telling us that his mother is Italian and his father of “origine nordique”. Although the Jewish origin of Grayer is rather a possibility than a certainty, Némirovsky consistently emphasises the negative character of Grayer’s ambiguous neutrality. Having been separated from “ceux de son clan” – a social class being the only group Grayer consciously belongs to – the hero is forcefully mixed up with a crowd of “sauvages”, i.e. third class passengers. When the liner is severely damaged by another torpedo Grayer dives overboard and is saved by the people in a lifeboat. Almost unable to move, Grayer shares this small space with a servant and two small Jewish girls, who were travelling to reach an orphanage in Uruguay. Grayer, who is used to observing other people’s tragedies without participating in them, is now involved in this disaster in the first person, with his whole mind and body. Bereaved of his privileges, Grayer is confined, together with the other survivors, to a lifeboat that is destined to sink – due to the adverse wind – together with the transatlantic liner. Only now does Grayer focus his attention on the water, Elle était affreuse. Elle semblait labourée par le vent qui faisait remonter à sa surface une sorte de vase invisible au grand jour ou du haut des paquebots; l’écume, les herbes marines, mille débris qui gisaient là depuis la veille ou depuis le commencement des siècles formaient une boue liquide, verdâtre que Hugo contemplait avec horreur. Où était la mer fraîche des matins de septembre sur les plages de France? C’était donc cela qu’elle recelait dans ses profondeurs? De tous côtés, les vagues le soulevaient et retombaient autour de lui, et des fumées, des ombres, des fantômes montaient vers lui.9

The putrescent matter that floats on the water surrounding Hugo Grayer – “neutre, sur un paquebot neutre, sur la mer qui n’appartient à personne”10 – is linked to the theme of the origin and to those “souvenirs abolis” that have painfully resurfaced in the hero’s mind over the last few hours. The loss of his clothes and of the class distinctions on which Grayer’s life was based is followed by this close contact with a dark sea from which strange shapeless 8 9 10

Némirovsky, Le Spectateur, p. 342. Némirovsky, Le Spectateur, p. 346. Némirovsky, Le Spectateur, p. 342.

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ghosts emerge, redolent of a time before civilisation. At the same time, the body of the once elegant and detached Grayer reasserts its material presence – “glacé, solitaire, malheureux, tremblant”, soaked in “écume de mer” and “vomissements”, in other words ‘unpresentable’. This vulnerable and pitiable creature is addressed with increasing familiarity by one of the maidservants who are on the boat. Not only does she abandon the courtesy form, but she also takes his hand, hoping to soothe his anxiety, but the main character – who is unable to establish an authentic relationship with his fellow human beings as well as with himself – cannot draw any revelation from this experience, resenting both his hopeless condition and the pity of the creatures who share his fate. There is no shade of inner salvation in this shipwreck, for Grayer’s neutrality is a sign not only of his past social privileges, but also of his inability to live his human condition to the full, to recognise the fact that he ‘belongs’ somewhere and to acknowledge his origin. Le Spectateur, which was published in 1939, is uncannily rooted in history. In this story Némirovsky not only mentions Hitler, “tourmenté d’insomnie et de convoitise”11 and the Anschluss, but she also has Grayer claim that “la violence est haïssable” and that one must “s’opposer au mal”12, although these words do not translate into any concrete effort on his part. Three years after writing this story, the Jewish Némirovsky disappeared in Auschwitz, a place Lyotard identifies with the end of the modern rational consciousness. According to the philosopher, after such a place artists can no longer indulge in the consolatory rules of a poetics of the beautiful in art, but have to look for a new kind of ‘sublime’, in order to enquire into what resists description. The scum floating on the primordial water surrounding the lifeboat where Grayer is dying is an image that proves capable of symbolising the unspeakable, or – to quote Lyotard – a “concevable qui ne peut être présenté”.13 Having been deprived of his clothes as well as of his social identity and therefore reduced to his mere corporeal dimension, Grayer experiences a condition of loss that prefigures the extermination camps. Although he has tried in every possible way to eschew personal tragedy and pain by means of neutrality, Grayer is fated to die in the middle of those non-territorial waters that seem to mirror his lack of commitment. After witnessing the shipwreck of Europe without much emotion, Grayer is the protagonist of a different shipwreck, both individual and collective. Against any form of indifference to the pain of our fellow human beings, Némirovsky cries out aloud the necessity to 11 12 13

Némirovsky, Le Spectateur, p. 335. Némirovsky, Le Spectateur, p. 349. Jean-François Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants. Correspondance 1982-1985 (Paris: Galilée, 1986), p. 33.

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acknowledge the other(s) as a mirror of oneself, or rather to find one’s truer self in the other(s). (Translated by Maurizio Ascari)

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston, L’Eau et les rêves (Paris: Corti, 1942). Beaumarchais, Couty, Rey, Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française (Paris: Bordas, 1987). Lyotard, Jean-François, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants. Correspondance 1982-1985 (Paris: Galilée, 1986). Némirovsky, Irène, Les Mouches d’automne (Paris: Grasset, 1988). -----, Le Spectateur, in Dimanche et autres nouvelles, préface de L. Adler (Paris: Stock, 2000). Vautier, Marie and Karyn Marczac, Naufrage ou navire: la mémoire de l’écriture migrante des années quatre-vingt et quatre-vint-dix au Québec, “LittléRéalité”, 92 (1997), 65-78.

Olga Binczyk

The Modern Voyage: In Search of Identity in the Light of Selected Works of English Writers of the 1930s1 The motif of a voyage, and especially a sea voyage, has for long been present in world literature, often serving as a means to get an insight into the true state of affairs of a personal, spiritual and/or social nature, the lament of The Wanderer, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner being only a few of the most widely recognised British illustrations of the problem. Modernity, however, with its prevailing mood, with a noticeable frequency referred to as apocalyptic, seems to offer unprecedented interpretations of the theme. The period is marked by the all-pervading inertia and the growing awareness of the dissolution of such long-established sources of values as faith, social bounds, history and tradition. The widely felt fragmentariness of modern reality is convincingly reflected in W. B. Yeats’ dramatic observation that “things fall apart” and “the centre cannot hold.”2 With the beginning of the 20th century, the characteristic of the previous decades’ fascination with technological achievements, which promised to make “all the pipe dreams of the old high cultures [...] come true,” seems to change into the alarming projection of the Economic Man becoming a nameless part of the new mechanical actuality.3 The idea of the dehumanising transformation of the world and the self according to the principle of usefulness is interestingly reflected in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Triumph of the Machine”, where we read: So mechanical man in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine will be driven mad from within himself, and sightless, and on that day the machines will turn to run into one another traffic will tangle up in a long-drawn-out crash of collision

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3

An extended version of the presented paper has appeared in Academic Papers of College of Foreign Languages, Wissenschaftliche Beitrage DerbHochschule: Literature and Linguistics. Literatur und Linguistik, vol. III, Wydawnictwo WSL (2005). W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2 (3rd edn.), ed. by M.H. Abrams, G.H. Ford and David Daiches (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1974), p. 1925. Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 146.

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and engines will rush at the solid houses, the edifice of our life will rock in the shock of the mad machine, and the house will come down.4

The war-like image emerging from the above lines finds its actual equivalent in the First, and then the Second World War, the two events marking the most calamitous points in mankind’s history. Lawrence, in the “Nightmare” chapter of his Kangaroo, a book written upon fleeing England after the War, writes: “It was in 1915 the old world ended.” Referring to a Zeppelin raid, the same author says: “So it seems our cosmos is burst, burst at last [...] the earth also. So it is the end – our world is gone, and we are like dust in the air.”5 The war, to follow A. W. Friedman’s well-aimed observation, was for Lawrence “the last act of a death-dominated civilisation.”6 Never before 1918 had nine million people been executed at a time, and never before then had the value of human life been so seriously underestimated.7 The inter-war period appears, to quote V. Cunnigham, just a “short break” for making dreadful accounts of losses before the coming of the destructive wave of the “last” world war, which was to make the “beastly, bloody nightmare” of the contemporary world.8 At the same time, the 1930s appear to be the time of a desperate pursuit of any possible antidote to modern trauma, and it is the act of travelling, of leaving one’s old land behind, that seems to be one of the most promising cures. The following analysis of selected writings of the 1930s British writers will hopefully help to get a deeper insight into the character of the modern voyage and the condition of modern travellers. Drawing on the topographical understanding of human life, advocated by such modern thinkers as C. Taylor and C.O. Shrag, the modern crisis can also be recognised as one’s failure to give “an account of oneself,” to define one’s location in relation to the so called “constitutive good,” the centre of one’s moral map, dictated by history and tradition specific to the community a person belongs to. Lost in the contemporary world, incapable of identifying its ‘past steps,’ the modern self cannot delineate its present and its potential future locations, cannot develop the narrative of its life any longer.9 Since the essence of travel is displacement “in time, in space, and in social hierarchy,” “an estrangement from the protective environment of the familiar in order to discover the newness of oneself and of things,” the 4 5 6 7

8

9

D.H. Lawrence, “The Triumph of the Machine”, in The Struggle of the Modern, p. 144. D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 12-13. Alan Friedman, “D.H. Lawrence: Pleasure and Death”, Studies in the Novel, 32 (2002), p. 207. The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought, ed. by W. Outhwaite and T. Bottomore (Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 703. V. Cunnigham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.37. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. In Search of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 26-51.

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modern phenomenon of people’s restlessly going places can be viewed as acquiring a unique meaning of a desperate quest for new grounds to renegotiate one’s identity.10 According to Louis MacNeice, one of the 1930s English poets, “The tourist in time and space, emotion and sensation/ Meets many guides but none has the proper orientation./ We are not changing ground to escape from facts/ But rather to find them […] / [...] to get […] focus/ You have to stand outside the crowd and caucus.”11 MacNeice’s idea corresponds to the declaration of W.H. Auden, recognised as the most mobile writer of the period (he visited about twenty seven countries on four of the world's seven continents altogether), who claims that “an effect of going to distant places is to make one reflect on one’s past and one’s culture from the outside.”12 Vivid travel notes from all over the world are also to be found in Stephen Spender’s Journals 1939-1983 and in D.H. Lawrence’s novels and his travel writings, which reflect the author’s nomadic existence, marked by his stays in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Australia, the United States and Mexico. Still another travelling writer of the period in concern, Christopher Isherwood, in his Goodbye to Berlin expresses his peripatetic disposition by asking, How many seas and frontiers shall I have to travel, on foot, on horseback, by car, pushbike, aeroplane, steamer, train, lift, moving staircase or tram? How much money shall I need for that enormous journey? How much food must I gradually consume on my way? How many pairs of shoes shall I wear out? How many thousands of cigarettes shall I smoke? How many cups of tea shall I drink and how many glasses of bear?13

We can observe that modern travel often involves one’s crossing the sea, which is called by W.H. Auden “the state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilisation has emerged and into which, unless by effort of gods and man, is always liable to relapse.” One’s crossing the sea, then, can stand for a “necessary evil,” a risk taken by society in danger “from within or without,” as the writer phrased it.14 The hope to find a safer and better world, where, to use Baudelaire’s statement, “order, beauty, luxury, calm, and voluptuousness reign,” seems to be realised not only through the modern

10

11

12

13 14

Dictionary of Literary themes and Motifs, ed. by J. Seigneuret, vol. 2. (New York: Greenwood Press Westport, 1988), p. 1293. Louis MacNeice, “Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard”, in Poems 1925-1940, by Louis MacNeice (New York: Randomhouse, 1940), p. 92. W.H. Auden, The Enchafaed Flood: Or, the Romantic Iconography of the Sea (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 8. Christopher Isherwood, “A Berlin Diary”, in Goodbye to Berlin (Granada: Triad, 1977), p. 15. J. Raban, ed., The Oxford Book of the Sea (Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 427-428.

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British writers’ artistic creation, but also through their own life experiences.15 One of the most attractive among numerous travel directions opted for by the writers of the 1930s is Germany, a country symbolising liberalism and widely understood freedom (which seems to be especially important when we think about the stated homosexuality of Auden, MacNeice, Isherwood, and even Spender). The promised land, however, becomes the apotheosis of the European disenchanted world confronting its doom. Its spirit of sadness and the false safety it offers, together with the observer’s growing awareness of the general desolation of any frameworks on which one could base one’s existence, are strikingly reflected in the words of the narrator of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, who says: “[...] an immense waste of unhomely ocean. Berlin is like a skeleton which aches in the cold: [...] the city, which glows so brightly and invitingly in the night sky above the plains, is cold and cruel and dead. Its warmth is an illusion, a mirage of the winter desert. [...] It has nothing to give.”16 Longing for anything that could somehow direct their lives, the inhabitants of this spiritual wasteland can be “made to believe in anybody and anything.” They willingly follow the Marxist idea of the brotherhood of comrades or the Nietzschean concept of the superhuman, so often promoted by Hitler. “Surprised, but not particularly shocked” – such is the reaction of the witnesses of the alarming atrocities taking place in Berlin’s streets. The promising ideologies virtually reach the point of fanaticism; for many, “this sort of things happens too often nowadays.”17 Their response is indifference, but indifference of a hysteric kind, which results from their conscious “self-defence,” their making “everything exist on the same level” to avoid being touched.18 Thus modern chaos also affects language, now a “devaluated currency,” in the words of Isherwood.19 Although old obsolete phrases seem no longer reliable, they often function as a kind of buffer between the man of the time and the reality getting out of hand. This idea can be drawn from the following excerpt from Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains: The vocabulary of newspaper invective [...] The word Liebe, soaring from the Goethe standard, was no longer worth a whores’ kiss. Spring, moonlight, youth, roses, girl, darlings, heart, May: such was the miserably devaluated currency dealt in by the authors of all those

15

16 17 18 19

Charles Baudelaire, “L’invitation au voyage”, in The Flowers of Evil and Other Works-Les Fleurs Du Mal Et Oeuvres Choisies: a Dual-Language Book, ed. by Wallace Fowlie (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), p. 24. Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, pp. 187-188. Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, p. 200. Stephen Spender, Journals 1939-1983 (London and Boston, Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 37. Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 89.

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tangos, waltzes, and fox-trots which advocated the private escape. Find a dear little sweetheart, they advised, and forget the slump, ignore the unemployed. Fly, they urge us, to Hawaii, To Naples, Never-Never Vienna.20

Clichés cannot, however, help to win back one’s capacity for identifying one’s place on both the political and spiritual maps of the time concerned. Remembering Taylor’s idea of paralleling one’s movements in the spiritual area with one’s crossing of physical space, we can detect an interesting analogy between the image of the modern self desperately trying to reestablish its location in contemporary reality and the gallery of characters presented in Isherwood’s Berlin novels. Most of them are lonely drifters, with no future plans except for fortune-telling, trying to conform to the new circumstances whether they like them or not, “like an animal which changes its coat for winter.”21 They live in, what Spender calls, “an exhausted state of communion.”22 They are constantly shifting from place to place in an infinite quest for still new sensations, they hope to run away from the European trauma by ignoring it. Their constant motion, however, can be treated as the syndrome of the modern self’s desolation. Clive, a heavily drinking millionaire, treats his journeys as the basis he desperately tries to organise his life upon. In the light of what he confesses to the narrator of the story, we can interpret his ceaseless moving from one country to another as an unsuccessful struggle to hide his anguish. “He often began to explain to us why he drank so much (I never once saw him sober. [...]),” we read in Sally Bowles, “it was because he was very unhappy.”23 In the case of Sally Bowles, another of the author’s Berlin acquaintances, her untiring journeying appears to go together with her unwillingness to take any emotional engagement in things. Declaring an abhorrence to primitive (as she perceives them) maternal instincts and disinterest in what is going on around her, she cannot, at the same time, suppress her melancholic yearning to find something that would somehow determine the direction of the shattered narrative of her life. After the abortion she says to Christopher: Do you know, last night, I sat here for a long time by myself and held this cushion in my arms and imagined it was my baby. Having babies makes you feel awfully primitive, like a sort of wild animal or something, defending its young. Only the trouble is, I haven’t any young to defend [...] I expect that’s what makes me so frightfully bad-tempered to anybody just now.24

Interpreted in more general terms, the above reflection can also suggest the 20 21 22 23 24

Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains, p. 89. Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, p. 206. Spender, Journals 1939-1983, p. 27. Spender, Journals 1939-1983, p. 133. Spender, Journals 1939-1983, p. 62.

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gradual apocalyptic process of self-dehumanisation due to the once broken bounds with the natural world. Another travelling character whose portrayal gives a wider horizon on the complexity of the modern voyage is Mr Norris, the protagonist of Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains. Similarly to Sally or Clive, he realises the never-ending journey across physical space, yet what is most striking about his wandering is its aesthetic character. “To see me at my best,” he claims, “you must see me in my proper setting. A good table. A good cellar. Art. Music. Beautiful things. Charming and witty society. Then I begin to sparkle. I am transformed.”25 He calls himself a man of “Paris and Athens,” the aesthetic experience functioning as the hypergood in his life. In this aspect, he can remind us of the Baudelairian dandy. The prototypical dandy can be, however, recognised as the heroic heir to the stoical “will to live a beautiful life,” while Mr Norris, with his nonsensical aesthetic needs, is the caricature version of the modern aristocrat.26 “I was astonished,” Isherwood recollects his first encounter with Norris, […] to find how much he had travelled. He had suffered from rheumatics in Stockholm and draughts in Kaunas; in Riga he had been bored, in Warsaw treated with extreme discourtesy, in Belgrade he had been unable to obtain his favourite brand of toothpaste. In Rome he had been annoyed by insects, in Madrid by beggars, in Marseille by taxi-horns. In Bucharest he had exceedingly unpleasant experience with a water closet. Constantinople he found expensive and lacking in taste.27

In reality, Mr Norris has nothing in common with the genuine dandy to whom Baudelaire ascribes the “exceptional nature” of one who can fortify the will and discipline the soul through “the unshakeable attachment through all obstacles to what seems trivial [it means to one’s appearance and dress which distinguishes him].”28 Existing in the abstract, artificial reality, Norris becomes a ridiculous traveller without a travel destination, a game for his degenerate secretary Schmidt. All the so far discussed characters observed by Isherwood’s “camera eye,” “with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,” create the image of a confused human entity, more or less aware of its impasse, ceaselessly changing places, unable to find a reliable shelter in any of them. They seem to be doomed to their homeless roaming, like the narrator of Goodbye to Berlin, who austerely concludes: “I find myself relapsing into a curious trance-like state of depression. I begin to feel profoundly unhappy. 25 26

27 28

Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains, p.49. C.O. Shrag, The Self After Postmodernity (New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 69. Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains, p. 10. Taylor, p. 436.

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Where are all the lodgers now? Where, in another ten years shall I be myself? Certainly not here.”29 A comparable portrait of a lonely wanderer can be found in Louis MacNeice’s “Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard”, in which he describes the man of his time as the apocalyptic “Embryo” that “rummages every latitude/ looking for itself, its nature, its final pattern,” his observation following his Icelandic experience.30 If Berlin can symbolise one’s journey ‘inward,’ towards the core of the European inter-war predicament, Iceland, in the light of the contemporary writers’ literary output, can be treated as the iconic, “most isolated, impoverished and introverted,” resting place where “Europe is absent.”31 Auden’s famous assertion: “North means to all reject”32 and MacNeice’s manifesto of “the obscure but powerful ethics of Going North” seem to support our understanding of one’s voluntary exile from one’s native devalued standards dictated by one’s history and tradition as one’s quest of a new vantage point that would make it possible to see one’s past from a distance.33 In analysing the modern travellers’ hopes, it is helpful to define what is so appealing in Iceland that cannot be found on the old continent. The answer to this question can be traced in the contemporary writers’ thinking of Iceland as the classless “holy ground” of dreams and mysteries, of people who subject their lives to one lore of the “ancient saga,” one simple system of values.34 This remote place is “the end of our way,” as a character called Ryan gladly admits in MacNeice’s “Eclogue from Iceland”. These words may implicate the speaker’s need and readiness to recreate the narrative of his life in reference to the newly offered frameworks of Icelandic reality, to the law of nature.35 And it is one’s immersion in the natural landscape that helps a person to get a deeper and clearer insight into the true state of things, despite the overwhelming confusion of the contemporary European world. The idea of the soothing power of one’s aesthetic experience emanates from the lines of “Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard”, in which we read: Here we can take breath, sit back, admire [...] Among these rocks can roll upon the tongue 29 30 31

32 33 34

35

Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, p. 15. MacNeice, “Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard”, p. 93. W.H. Auden, “Journey to Iceland”, in W. H. Auden. Collected Poems, ed. by E. Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 126. Auden, “Journey to Iceland”, p. 126. MacNeice, “Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard”, in Poems 1925-1940, p. 91. Jason Cowley, “Why Iceland is Hot: Jason Cowley Visits Europe’s Nearest Approximation to a Classless Society, and Asks What Secrets Lurk in the Dark”, in New Statesman, Vol. 131, Issue 4618 (2002), p. 53. MacNeice, “Eclogue from Iceland”, in Poems 1925-1940, p. 57.

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Morsels of thought, not jostled by the throng, Or morsels of un-thought, which is still better, [...] Here we can practice forgetfulness without A sense of guilt, fear of the tout and lout.36

A similar intuition can be detected in Auden’s conclusion that “[...] a visionary experience can be a device to exclude as much as possible of the hostile world from one’s system [...] But at its most authentic the visionary experience illuminates what is excellent in the world without excluding or denying what is bad.”37 The concept of one’s reaching a greater awareness of one’s self and the world through one’s confrontation with uncorrupted nature can bring to our mind the Romantic epiphany of one’s spiritual transcendence through communion with nature. However, unlike Romantics, who sought in nature the means through which some greater spiritual power was to manifest itself, Modernists, by contemplating row natural surroundings, hope to achieve a truer view on reality.38 “Not to escape facts, but rather to find them” – this is their motto.39 The image of reality that emerges from Auden’s and MacNeice’s poems and numerous letters to their British friends does not fulfil the writers’ dreams. What they find in Iceland is, despite their initial excitement and awe, the infinite disillusionment. The expected “spirit and phrase of ancient sagas” and the image of “the lover riding in the lonely dale [...]/ the plover’s single pipe” seem to become, at some point, more irritating than admirable.40 “Reykjavik,” Auden writes, “is the worst possible sort of provincial town as far as amusing oneself is concerned, and there was nothing to do but soak in the only hotel with a licence.”41 This abrupt end of childhood dreams about the Icelandic myth, however, appears to be a necessary step on the writers’ way to deeper understanding of who they are and what their place in the chaotic world of their time is. “I have the feeling,” we read in Auden’s letter to Isherwood, “that [...] we are too deeply involved in Europe to be able or even to wish to escape.” On still another occasion, the same author says: “I am much more conscious now of being British and Upper Middle Class Professional than I ever was when I lived in England.”42 With respect to Taylor’s claim that “our present positions are always defined in relation to past ones,” we cannot deny that the role of history and 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

MacNeice, “Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard”, p. 94. Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (London: Heinemann, 1986) p. 151. Taylor, pp. 419-457. Davenport-Hines, p. 147. MacNeice, “Iceland”, p. 133. Cowley, p. 53. Davenport-Hines, p. 147.

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tradition is crucial in establishing one’s notion of one’s self. One has to be “a human agent among human agents,” belonging to a given society that has arrived at a particular moment in time.43 Thus, even though one’s own cultural heritage appears to fail to function as a reliable basis for developing one’s future, it still remains an indispensable factor influencing the shape of the self. That is why the journey undertaken by MacNeice and Auden is “false,” as the latter intuits in his poem “The Voyage”.44 A corresponding feeling of ‘not belonging’ is reflected in the fragment of ‘Iceland’: So we who have come As trippers North Have minds no match For this land’s girth;45

The above words, together with Isherwood’s and Spender’s observations quoted before, seem to support our thinking of the modern man as of a homeless self stuck in an apocalyptic time without place, the entity “rummaging every latitude/ looking for [...] its final pattern,” to use once more MacNeice’s powerful statement.46 The awareness of the predicament, however, seems to be, at the same time, a step towards self-knowledge, a means for the distorted modern self to grasp its actual shape. “In short,” concludes MacNeice in his “Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard”, “we must keep moving to keep pace/ Or else drop into Limbo, the dead place.”47 The action, then, appears to be crucial to one’s dealing with the apocalyptic flux. By becoming an observer collecting multiple facets of the contemporary reality, one has a chance to regain one’s selfhood.

Bibliography Auden, W.H., W.H. Auden. Collected Poems, ed. by E. Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976). —, The Enchanted Flood: Or, the Romantic Iconography of the Sea (Random House: New York, 1950). Baudelaire, Charles, The Flowers of Evil and Other Works – Les Fleurs Du Mal Et Oeuvres Choisies: a Dual-Language Book, ed. by Wallace Fowlie (New York: Dover Publications, 1992). 43 44

45 46 47

Davenport-Hines, p. 147. W.H. Auden, “A Voyage”, in W. H. Auden. Collected Poems, ed. by E. Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 143. MacNeice, “Iceland”, p. 133. MacNeice, “Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard”, p. 93. MacNeice, “Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard”, p. 93.

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The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought, ed. by W. Outhwaite and T. Bottomore (Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Cowley, Jason, “Why Iceland is Hot: Jason Cowley Visits Europe’s Nearest Approximation to a Classless Society, and Asks What Secrets Lurk in the Dark”, New Statesman. vol. 131. Issue 4618 (2002). Cunnigham, V., British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Davenport-Hines, Richard, Auden (London: Heinemann, 1986). Dictionary of Literary themes and Motifs, ed. by J. Seigneuret, vol. 2 (New York: Greenwood Press Westport, 1998). Friedman, Alan. “D.H. Lawrence: Pleasure and Death”, Studies in the Novel, 32 (2002). Isherwood, Christopher, Mr Norris Changes Trains (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). —, Goodbye to Berlin (Granada: Triad, 1977). Lawrence, D.H., “The Triumph of the Machine”, The Struggle of the Modern, by S. Spender (London, Methuen, 1963). —, Kangaroo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). MacNeice, Louis, Poems 1925-1940, by Louis Macneice (New York: Randomhouse, 1940). The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2 (3rd edn.), ed. by M.H. Abrams, G.H. Ford and David Daiches (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979). Shrag, C.O., The Self After Postmodernity (New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). Spender, Stephen, Journals 1939-1983 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985). —, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). Taylor Charles, Sources of the Self. In Search of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

3. Literature and Cityscapes

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Monica Spiridon

The City of Texts Over the last decades, a methodological shift has occurred in the area of cultural studies: the traditional interest in time and in its analytic virtues has been significantly superseded by the obsession with spatial phenomenology. Contemporary theorists identify symbolic mapping as one of the main arenas of social, cultural, racial, national and gender identities. A significant side effect of this turn-around in postmodern cultural theory is the influx of such categories as lieu, place, landscape, territory, architecture, topography, geography, mapping, region, realm, area, location, dwelling etc. This type of theoretical drive finally develops into a conceptual crossroads that, in the absence of a better term, might be called cultural territoriality. Its interest lies in a culturally valued space: a space perceived through the particular systems of active and influential cultural norms and conventions.1 Among the heralds of this conceptual and methodological direction we should mention the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre. The starting point in his studies is his criticism of Gaston Bachelard’s famous Poétique de l’espace, whose main phenomenological emphasis is centered on the so called phantasmic inner spaces. In his turn, Lefebvre uses the semiotic approach to space favored by modern urban and architectural studies. This type of perspective opens out into an interdisciplinary articulation of anthropology, philosophy and sociology, which challenges the traditional opposition between empirical space and mental space.2 1

2

Homi Bhaba, “The Third Space” (interview) in Identity, Comunity, Culture Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990); Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. Württenberg Imperial Germany and National Memory. 1871-1918, (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); J.Duncan, N. Duncan, “(Re)reading the landscape”, in Environment and Planning: Society and Space, 6 (1998), pp. 117-126; David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination”, in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80 (3) (1990), 418-434; Geography and National Identity, ed. by David Hooson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Michael Keith, Steve Pike, Place and the Politics of Identity (London & New York: Routledge, 1993); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974); Henri Lefebvre, Writing on Cities, Selected, translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman, Elisbeth Lebas (Oxford U.K., Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell, 1996).

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In some of his lecture notes released just before his death, Michel Foucault also contends with the double illusion of our spatial representations. According to Foucault, socio-humanistic research on space should concentrate on uniting a perceived, a conceived and a lived space. Foucault seems to imply that what we used to automatically call a socio-cultural space is by no means an empty vessel to be filled with historical events, with characters and with objects or to be colored according to our specific point of view. On the contrary, it is better to acknowledge that we live in incongruous spaces, populated by networks of relationships where the most ordinary reality encounters the most surprising phantasmagorias.3 Following the same path as Lefebvre and Foucault, Edward Soja’s transdisciplinary contributions on the subject pave the way towards a new cultural theory of the city, closely intermingled with urban studies. A new object of interest appears, implying the transition from landscape to cityscape and to a humanly crafted constellation of meanings assigned to urban scenery. 4 Although recent, this theoretical turn is deeply rooted in late modernism and it has a series of outstanding forerunners like Walter Benjamin, among others. In Benjamin's investigation of modern urban spaces, the category of cityscape played a dominant role.5 Benjamin’s intellectual legacy has been constantly reviewed and reinterpreted by his successors and heirs: ”One of the ways of accessing other dimensions of the cityscape is to examine the figures that populate it. Social theories of modernity have often had recourse to real and metaphorical figures in order to illuminate their methodology and substantive theories. Walter Benjamin in his ambitious prehistory of modernity had recourse to the figures of the archeologist and the critical allegorist, the collector and the flâneur in order to amplify the nature of his methodological approach to the construction of Paris as “capital of the nineteenth century.”6 Going beyond the framework of the traditional studies on urban space, as well as beyond the history of ideas and the narrative and aesthetic constructs of literary theories, this manifold approach focuses on practices of representation, on symbolic structures, on the textual and immaterial city and features clearly manifest tendencies. 3

4

5

6

Michel Foucault, ”Questions on Geography”, in Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 63-77; Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, 16 (1986), 22-27. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Spaces (Oxford U.K. and Cambridge Mass: Blackwell, 1996). Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and other Writings (London: New Left Books, 1979); Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999). David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity. Critical Explorations (London: Blackwell, 2001), p. 7.

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One of the most important might be identified as semiotic. It places a clear emphasis on the city as an analytic instrument, on the symptomatic status of the city, on the building of counter-cities and of cultural valorized loci.7 The complex imaginative praxis revolving around urban signs opens wide the exploratory horizons towards the semiotics, to the hermeneutics and further more the mythology of the city: “Once the city became a system of signs, we needed a transcendental signifier (be it God, Nature, History, or the Rational Mind) to hold the other signs in place. Without a transcendental signifier, urban signs begin to float, and meaning gives way to mystery."8 Another significant direction pertains to the wider horizon of the interdisciplinary interest in the so called “lieux de mémoire”. In the wake of Pierre Nora it emphasizes the ways in which memory shapes places and at the same time is being shaped by them.9 The equation between city and memory is revealing to an important area of contemporary cultural theory. We currently assign clusters of heteroclite symbolic recollections to our familiar space and turn urban spaces into instruments of the mutual interaction between identity and memory. Through the processes of spatial representation, memory helps us rescue irreversibly lost stretches of the past by connecting them to the present. “The buildings and spaces of the city are formed in, and themselves form, memory while memory becomes spatialized.”10 Beyond their methodological and conceptual diversity, the four studies included in the following section of this volume illustrate the main trends above mentioned, putting cities in the foreground as spaces of cosmopolitanism, of individual and collective consciousness, memory and imagination. At the same time they keep a door wide open towards the relationship between the history of the city on the one hand and both the history of Western civilization and the history of modern literature, on the other. In one of the notable studies dedicated to the cityness and to the urban landscape in literature, Richard Lehan maintains that the successive ages of the city and the different historical faces of the literary text are interconnected and mutually illuminating: ”We have moved in this study from the centered, 7

8

9 10

Alexander Gelley, “City Texts: Representation, Semiology and Urbanism” in Politics, Theory and Contemporary Culture, ed. by Mark Poster (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) pp. 237-261. Richard Lehan, The City in Literature. An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), p. 265. Pierre Nora,”Les lieux de mémoire”, Representations, 26 (1989), 7-25. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, “City Imaginaries”, in A Companion to the City, ed. by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (London: Blackwell, 2003), p. 13 .

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scriptable world of Enlightenment London to the discontinuous, decentered, unscriptable world of postmodern Los Angeles. But neither construct is real, identical with the physical city. Ideologically charged, each construct carries an agenda – a way of preserving or transforming Enlightenment London or a way of relating Los Angeles to postmodernist mandates”.11 Attempting a close look at the representations of the city in modern culture and emphasizing the differences between the various discourses of the metropolis, the four studies follow a path that begins in the Enlightenment and progressively moves towards Postmodernity, following the main landmarks of the modern urban landscape. According to Susan Bassnett, events such as the catastrophic earthquake which occurred in 1755 in Lisbon expose the close relationship between the rationalism of the eighteenth century and the various perceptions and descriptions of the Portuguese metropolis. In addition to that, the reconstruction of the destroyed city urgently implies both a “real” and an imaginary reconstruction, which handles a diversity of individual and collective representations and recollections. The author of the study constantly switches between various intermingled discourses (eyewitnesses’ accounts, travelogues, letters, memories, including her father’s and her own). Overall they illustrate the deceitful borders between direct experience and memory, between rebuilding the urban landscape and reshaping it with the aid of memory in a theoretically endless hermeneutic circle. From Katia Pizzi’s point of view, the perception of the city is closely interconnected with modernist literature. According to the author the modernist mentality values existential approaches most. The representation of the real city is always mediated by the symbolic practices of selfidentification of an individual more or less trapped within the turmoil of the metropolis. In a series of texts written by Italo Svevo and Stelio Mationi, as well as in several modernist films, the multicultural city of Trieste is identified as a site of intense psychological exchange. Seen by Pizzi as a metonymy of the generic modern metropolis, Trieste becomes the starting point of predominantly autobiographical texts that identify its urban landscape as a middle ground between the inside and the outside. Although from different points of view, the following contributions written by Spiridon and Vassallo insist on two postmodern “city-texts” both introduced by Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 and V. According to contemporary critical studies dedicated to the cityness in Pynchon’s novel, the city dweller and the quest for meaning in a chaotic urban universe appear as the main reading tropes: “In his novels the wasteland quest plays itself out in an entropic landscape. In both V and The Crying of Lot 49, consciousness 11

Lehan, p. 285.

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is lost in the indeterminate maze that becomes the postmodern city. Pynchon sees the modern city as the end of a historical process.”12 In the wake of Walter Benjamin’s views on the flâneur and the flânerie, Monica Spiridon’s contribution tracks down several key metaphors of urban reading which also function as figures of memory in Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49. The author of the study follows the footsteps of early European memory reenacted on several levels in the postmodern metropolis of Los Angeles, as perceived by Pynchon’s inquisitive characters (some of them writers, theater directors and actors). In the same universe of Pynchon’s imaginary urban landscape, Peter Vassallo’s contribution focuses on the city of Valletta as a stage for living memory, (inter)textual symbolism and mythology. According to Vassallo, in his novel V Pynchon deconstructs the modernist discourse on space, by rewriting The Waste Land. The novelist engages his fictional characters in a highly symbolic quest. Following a spatial itinerary in the city they get progressively entangled in a complex activity of revealing eclectic layers of meaning, leading from history to myth. In spite of their diversity, contemporary approaches focusing on the simultaneous significations that revolve around cityscapes lay a special emphasis on the different points of view and on the diverse strategies of representation engaged in any process of symbolically identifying an urban space. The increasing complexity of urban representation finally blurs the current ontological border and stimulates a rich dialogue and negotiation between various types of discourses: “The city in our actual experience is at the same time an actually existing physical environment and a city in a novel, a film, a photograph, a city seen on television, a city in a comic strip, a city in a pie chart, and so on.”13 For some theorists the category of urban palimpsest is the trope that can tie together divergent artistic and media practices, articulated in complex forms that have their sources in public memory. This particular type of approach offers an inventory of simultaneous and erratic faces of the urban space, that change according to the instruments of its cultural representation: verbal, pictorial, architectural etc.14 Every so-called “real” space is a mere product of the storage of various significances, be they parallel, telescoped, conflicting, overlapping, exclusive, complementary etc. These kinds of mixed symbolic meanings are 12 13 14

Lehan, p. 267. Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 48. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts. Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

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specific to every human community. They are mostly representations of the Self and of the Other. Recollection endows these representations with various values: ethical, ideological, political, religious, social, economic etc. Within a particular community, these values are shared, having previously been selected, secured and sorted out through specific ritual procedures.15 According to Henri Lefebvre reading the city-text involves the constant movement of interpretation between multiple levels and dimensions of the cityness: There is the utterance of the city: what happens and takes place in the street, in the squares, in the voids, what is said there. There is the language of the city: particularities specific to each city which are expressed in discourses, gestures, clothing, in the words and use of words by the inhabitants. Finally there is the writing of the city: what is inscribed and prescribed on its walls, in the layout of places and their linkages, in brief the use of time in the city by its inhabitants.16

In the terms stated by J. Hillis Miller in Topographies, we could move from the Heideggerian dream of harmonious and unified cultures rooted in one particular place to an understanding of literary topography, as open to potentially limitless mapping, according to various contextual strategies.17 In seeing the city as a product of imagination we are, of course, examining it as a text. In this way the metropolis is rendered legible by multiple acts of the imagination as it is constantly invented and reinvented by different readers, since different readers of the city invent different texts.18 We might conclude that any investigation of the complex and fascinating processes of representing a city, inevitably puts the explorer in a somewhat uncanny position, ideally described by Italo Calvino in his Invisible Cities: I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways and the degree of the arcades’ curves and what kind of zinc scales over the roofs; but I already know that this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between measurements of its space and the events of its past. As this wave of memories flows in, the city soaks up like a sponge and expands.19

15

16 17 18

19

Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). Henri Lefebvre, Writing on Cities, p. 115. J.Hillis-Miller, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Gerald L. Bruns, “Cain: or The Metaphorical Construction of Cities”, Salmagundi, 74-75 (1987), 70-85; Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981); Babylon or New Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature, ed. by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, DQR Studies in Literature, 32 (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005). Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage, 1977).

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Bibliography Babylon or New Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature, ed. by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, DQR Studies in Literature, 32 (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005). Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999). —, One Way Street and other Writings (London: New Left Books, 1979). Bhaba, Homi, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). —, “The Third Space” (interview), in Identity, Comunity, Culture Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990). Bruns, Gerald L., “Cain: or The Metaphorical Construction of Cities”, in Salmagundi, 74-75 (1987), 70-85. Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage, 1977). Confino, Alon, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. Württenberg Imperial Germany and National Memory. 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Duncan, J. and N. Duncan, “(Re)reading the landscape”, in Environment and Planning: Society and Space, 6 (1998), 117-126. Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces”, in Diacritics, 16 (1986), 22-27. —, ”Questions on Geography”, in Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 63-77. Frisby, David, Cityscapes of Modernity. Critical Explorations (London: Blackwell, 2001). Gelley, Alexander, “City Texts: Representation, Semiology and Urbanism” in Politics, Theory and Contemporary Culture, ed. by Mark Poster (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 237-261. Geography and National Identity, ed. by David Hooson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Harvey, David, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination”, in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80 (3) (1990), 418-434. Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory, ed. by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). Hillis-Miller, J., Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Huyssen, Andreas, Present Pasts. Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Keith, Michael and Steve Pike, Place and the Politics of Identity (London & New York: Routledge, 1993). Lefebvre, Henri, La production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974).

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—, Writing on Cities, Selected, translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman, Elisbeth Lebas (Oxford U.K., Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). Lehan, Richard, The City in Literature. An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Nora, Pierre,”Les lieux de mémoire”, Representations, 26 (1989), 7-25. Pike, Burton, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981). Soja, Edward W., Thirdspace Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-andImagined Spaces (Oxford U.K. and Cambridge Mass: Blackwell, 1996). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

Susan Bassnett

Seismic Aftershocks: Responses to the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 On December 26th, 2004 a giant tsunami caused by an earthquake measuring nine on the Richter scale struck the shores of countries around the Indian Ocean, devastating great tracts of land, obliterating whole communities, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of people. On our television screens, in our homes with refrigerators overflowing with festive food for Christmas, we Europeans watched in horror and awe, as the world’s largest relief operation began to be mounted. Religious leaders around the world led prayers for the dead and injured, politicians and heads of state expressed their shock and sadness at the news, (though few, including the British Prime Minister, cut short their annual holidays), journalists filled metres of columns with eye-witness reports from the disaster zone, with accounts of how tsunamis happen, with true stories of survival or of bereavement. Terrible images of human suffering were nightly beamed around the planet. A few days later, on January 2nd, 2005, British newspapers reported what appeared to be a controversial statement by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. A stark headline in The Sunday Telegraph proclaimed “Of course this makes us doubt the existence of God.” That same phrase was used on the front page of the newspaper also, where the headline was: “Archbishop of Canterbury admits: This makes me doubt the existence of God.” Within twenty-four hours the newspaper had been forced to publish a disclaimer, stating that in fact the Archbishop had said nothing of the kind. The newspaper had completely misinterpreted the Archbishop’s words, for what he had actually said was something rather different. His essay was a carefully argued, intellectual examination of the meaning of faith in a world riven by anguish. He did not so much question the existence of God, but rather argued that belief in God becomes the one way of making sense of tragedies that would otherwise render meaningless the very state of human existence. He referred to another traumatic event that had carried particular resonance for him, as a Welshman: the day in 1966 when a man-made coal heap collapsed in a poor Welsh mining town, and buried alive hundreds of children in the village school. The disaster at Aberfan, the Archbishop said, happened when he was still a student, but on that occasion, as in December 2004, the question it posed was simply how is it possible “to believe in a God

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who permits suffering on this scale?” Struggling with that question, like countless theologians and mystics before him, Archbishop Rowan Williams found his faith affirmed, rather than destroyed: The extraordinary fact is that belief has survived such texts again and again – not because it comforts or explains but because believers cannot deny what has been shown or given to them […] Somehow in all of this, God simply emerges as a faithful presence. Arguments “for and against” have to be put in the context of that awkward, stubborn persistence. 1

The views of the Archbishop are those of an intellectual, liberal priest of the twenty-first century, writing in an age and in a society that is no longer entirely comfortable with religion. In the aftermath of the Indian Ocean disaster, more space has been taken up in the media debating the ethics of technology provision (could the region have been warned in time had enough money been spent on supplying governments with relevant information?) than with debates about the existence of God. For in the twenty-first century, the apportioning of blame is an intrinsic element of discussion in the face of any disaster, hence accusations of discrimination against the poor of the underdeveloped world by those who might have provided the financial means to provide early warning systems has been a constant source of discussion. Here we can see at its clearest the contrast between our own time and the eighteenth century, as we recall the kind of debates that echoed around Europe in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Today journalists focus on technology, on the provision of aid, on the political issues that have led to some parts of the world struggling with inadequate infrastructures and massive debt; in the eighteenth century, in the age of Enlightenment, the shock waves of the earthquake struck at the core of the new philosophical thinking about the nature and role of man in what was, for some, a postreligious moment. The 2004 tsunami happened the day after Christmas, so during one of the most joyous festivals of the Christian calendar. The Lisbon earthquake struck on All Saints’Day, another hugely significant Christian festival, and happened at a time when hundreds of people were attending Mass. The coincidence of a date that conjoined catastrophe with a key date in the Church calendar featured prominently in reactions to the earthquake. In Protestant countries, anti-Catholic polemicists were quick to draw attention to what they perceived as the idolatry of the religion they despised, suggesting that God had punished such excesses. In Portugal and elsewhere, hell-fire preachers of all persuasions, including Catholics, denounced sin from the pulpit and argued that the earthquake was God’s response to the godless

1

Rowan Williams, “Of course this makes us doubt the existence of God”, The Daily Telegraph (Jan 2nd 2005).

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behaviour of humankind. The Jesuit Gabriel Malagrida suggested in a published sermon, O juizo da verdadeira causa do terremoto, que padeceu a Corte de Lisboa no primeiro de novembro de 1755 that the earthquake was proper punishment for undue leniency towards heretics. Anti-religious thinkers put forward their views, claiming that the earthquake was clear evidence of the absurdity of believing in an omnipotent, kindly deity. Whatever the intellectual, ethical or religious standpoint, the Lisbon earthquake could be utilised in arguments to support a case, since it offered options of interpretation. In England, the Methodist preacher John Wesley was profoundly disturbed by the news from Lisbon and by what it might portend. “Is there indeed a God that judges the world?” he wrote, disturbed by the thought that God might have been punishing the Portuguese for their support of the Inquisition. Not long afterwards, Charles Wesley composed a series of hymns occasioned by his butler’s reflections on the earthquake.2 In one of these, there is an unmistakable apocalyptic tone: Woe! To the Men, on Earth who dwell. Nor dread th’Almighty Frown, When God doth all his Wrath reveal, And shower his Judgements down! Sinners, expect those heaviest Showers, To meet your God prepare, When lo! The Seventh Angel pours His Vial in the Air!3

John Wesley published a pamphlet, Serious Thoughts occasioned by the late Earthquake at Lisbon a few weeks after the event, which proved so popular with readers that it ran to six editions. His dark, exuberant style of writing which touched the innermost fears of his readers stressed the sensationalist horrors of the earthquake, drawing parallels with the Day of Judgement and warning that nobody could escape God’s wrath. This kind of writing, and indeed this kind of thinking was rooted in the English tradition of radical Protestantism, with its anti-Catholic bias and its puritanical insistence on righteousness. The question underpinning such thinking, of course, was whether or not the object of God’s anger was a particular religion, i.e. Catholicism, or whether it was much more broadly outrage at the sinfulness of humankind. 2

3

John Wesley, Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Late Earthquake at Lisbon, 1755, in Thoughts, Addresses, Prayers, Letters, Vol. II of The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1996). Charles Wesley, Hymns Occasioned by the Earthquake March 8, 1750, To which is added An Hymn upon the pouring out of the Seventh Vial, Rev. xvi.xvii, and Occasioned by the Destruction of Lisbon (Bristol: Farley, 1756).

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In contrast, Voltaire’s Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne seems more inspired by sadness, by grief for the human suffering caused by the earthquake and by the futility of hope in a better world. What crime have the dead children of Lisbon committed, Voltaire asks, and how can we say that Lisbon is more corrupt or more decadent than any other city on this earth: Lisbonne, qui n’est plus, eut-elle plus de vices Que Londres, que Paris, plongés dans les délices?

Then comes his devastatingly powerful line that connects the tragedy of Lisbon with the reality of continuity, for life goes on as normal once the news of the catastrophe has lost its immediacy: “Lisbonne est abîmée, et l’on danse a Paris.”4 There is immense sadness in this line, not the anxious concern of a Wesley who fears eternal damnation, but the grief of a philosopher who sees so clearly the reality of the human condition: no matter how much suffering there is in the world, human beings will strive for survival regardless of the pain all around them. Voltaire was very much affected by the Lisbon earthquake, and was to return to it again in his masterpiece, Candide. Above all, he reflected on the destruction of innocence: Quel crime, quelle faute, on commis ces enfants Sur le sein maternel écrasés et sanglants?

Figures of the dead vary, but it can safely be assumed that some twenty thousand people at least died on November 1st, 1755, when the city of Lisbon was hit by an earthquake probably also measuring nine on the Richter scale. Buildings shuddered and collapsed up and down the steep streets of the thriving port, renowned for the wealth of gold and ornament in its churches, convents and palaces, the fabulous wealth acquired from the Portuguese empire in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Many works of art were destroyed, either in the first great shock that toppled the buildings or in the fires that broke out subsequently and raged for days unchecked. As so often happens in major earthquakes, fire spread rapidly, but what chilled the blood of the citizens of Europe as they learned of the disaster, was that shortly after the first great traumatic shock, a tidal wave swept across the lower part of the city, overwhelming survivors seeking to escape across the Tagus to safety. Barely two hours after the first quake, the waters of the river were sucked out into the ocean, then roared back in, sweeping away everything in their path. Eye-witness accounts tell of waves twenty feet high, that surged three times over the coastal land from Cascais to Lisbon. The aftershocks continued for several days, causing continued fear of further destruction.

4

Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756).

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In her book on English travellers to Portugal, Rose Macaulay reproduces the notes left by an English merchant, one Thomas Jacomb, who was caught up in the earthquake but survived. His account of what he saw on that day still has the power to move us to pity, perhaps all the more so as we read it today in the aftermath of the December 2004 tsunami. Here is Jacomb’s sketch of the chaos immediately following the earthquake: In the streets of Lisbon […] saw many coaches, chaises, carts, Horses, Mules, Oxen etc. some entirely, some half buried under Ground, many People under the Ruins begging for assistance, none able to get nigh them, many groaning under Ground, many old and hardly able to walk, now without shoes and stockings and still hurrying to save life, but now no distinction of Sexes, Age, Birth or Fortune are regarded.5

Besides the account of Thomas Jacomb, Macaulay includes a letter home to her mother from Kitty Witham, a young English nun whose convent was so badly damaged that the sisters were forced to move out and sleep in the garden. Kitty’s description of the moment of the quake is surprisingly modern, as she gives very precise details of what she was doing at the time, what it sounded like and how she reacted: I was washing up the tea things, when the Dreadfull affair hapned. Itt began like the rattleing of Coaches, and the things befor me danst up and downe upon the table, I look about me and see the Walls a shakeing and a falling down then I up and took to my heels, with Jesus in my mouth, and to the quire I run, thinking to be safe there, but there was no Entranc but all falling arownd us, and the lime and dust so thick there was no seeing. I mett with some of the good Nuns they Cryed Out run to the low garden, I ask where the rest was, they sayde there […]6

Kitty Witham’s description of the moment the earthquake struck has an immediacy that speaks to us across the space of two hundred years. Here is a young nun, performing her basic daily chores, when something happens that literally moves the earth under her feet. Her letter gives a breathless account of the fate of other English people in Lisbon, including the death of her cousin Harry. The raw state of Kitty’s emotions is plain to read: at one point she writes “God knows how long we have to live for I believe this world will not last long”, but then what appears to be her natural optimism takes over and we find her reassuring her mother that “if the Earthquake had hapend in the Night as itt did not thank God, we should all or most of us have been Killd in Our Beds.” She concludes by asking for money to help rebuild the convent, which was forthcoming since Macaulay notes that by 1760 the convent had been rebuilt and was thriving. The presence of an English community in Lisbon was not changed by the earthquake.

5 6

Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal (London: Cape, 1946), p. 274. Macaulay, p. 269.

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When I was a child, I lived in what is now a suburb of Lisbon but which was then a village, Algés. My mother used to take me into the city on shopping expeditions, and I remember particularly that after we had been to Grandella department store, now vanished forever, we would go to buy icecream in the Rua Garrett, that would be packed into small cork buckets so that it stayed miraculously cool all the way home. But a shadow cast itself over those outings: the shadow of the ruins of the church of the Carmo, rearing up into the air, arches cruelly pointed as though reproaching heaven, a gutted wreck of what had once been a Gothic beauty. Destroyed by the earthquake, I was told, the ruins had been left as a reminder to future generations of the insecurity of life and the unfathomable power of God. Hurrying to the delights of the ice cream shop, I would try not to think about the ruins. My fear of earthquakes was made the more real by those broken, fire-blackened stones. That fear became reality one day in 1955, when another earthquake shook the city. This was a pale reflection of the great quake of 1755, though people in North Africa close to the epicentre suffered great losses. By the time the tremors hit Portugal, they were much weakened, but caused anxiety nevertheless. I remember a loud noise, which sounded to my ears like trams, just as Kitty Witham had compared the initial sound to coaches, and pictures swayed on the walls for a moment or two. A wall in the British Embassy gardens fell down, and we children were taken to look at it. Imagine, I thought, a great wall reduced to rubble in seconds! It had collapsed in the centre, as though pushed inwards by a giant hand. The randomness of that great force clutched at my child’s heart. Other children’s hearts, across the whole of Europe, were turned to ice by the details of that other earthquake, exactly two hundred years earlier, when the ground had reared up like a primeval creature, cracks had opened in the earth into which people had fallen and vanished forever, whole families had been buried alive, bedridden hospital patients, unable to escape the rushing flames that tore through the remnants of buildings had been burned to death and then the wave, the great tidal wave of water from the broad Tagus, depicted by Shakespeare as fathomless, had roared down upon the hapless survivors. My father talked to me about the Lisbon earthquake and about people’s reactions. Some, he said, superstitious idiots in his opinion, had seen the earthquake as a sign from God about the wickedness of men, a warning to people to end their evil ways and change their lives before it was too late. But, my father said, what we really needed to reflect on was that earthquakes are natural disasters, that could not be prevented and could not be explained either. They simply happened, and they had to be dealt with. When I remembered the Lisbon earthquake, he told me, I should not imagine the

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horror of it all or worry about whether it was divine retribution: I should reflect on what happened afterwards, on how the city was rebuilt, the morale of a nation restored, the survivors helped back to life again. Macaulay’s third English eye-witness is Abraham Castres, envoy of King George in Lisbon. Castres’ house survived reasonably intact, and he took in a host of refugees from the English and Dutch communities. He had to assist with repatriating survivors, inform the Portuguese government of the aid promised by Britain, establish a list of the dead and deal with the grievances of British merchants and traders whose business interests lay in ruins. Castres coped with aplomb, but the strain shows in the following letter: The miserable objects among the lower sort of His Majesty’s subjects, who all fly to me for bread lie scattered up and down in my garden with their wives and children. I have helped them all hitherto, and shall continue to do so, as long as provisions do not fail us, which I hope will not be the case, by the good order M. de Carvalho has issued in that respect.7

M. de Carvalho was the Marquis of Pombal, the man who took charge in the aftermath. My father approved of Pombal’s strategy, just as his predecessor, Abraham Castres had done. To Pombal is attributed the famous statement in response to a question about what was to be done: Enterrem-se os mortos, cuide-se dos vivos. Bury the dead and feed the living, strong pragmatic sentiments that had my father’s full approval. The rationalism of the eighteenth century found an echo in the post-war English diplomatic world, whose favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling’s If urged real men to keep their heads, when “all about you/are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” Pombal had taken control in the dark days of panic and despair and had sought not only to rebuild the infrastructure necessary for survival, but to restore hope to a demoralised people. In his book on the Lisbon earthquake, T.D. Kendrick is sympathetic to Pombal, though he notes that “it was really the Portuguese people who saved the situation” since “Pombal could have achieved little in the earthquake crisis if he had not been strongly and willingly supported.”8 What Pombal does seem to have supplied is leadership, and a determination not to succumb to pessimism. Kendrick notes that a constant theme in sermons, tracts, and moralising poetry all over Europe was that “God in his anger had destroyed Lisbon”.9 Pombal, and my father two centuries later, rejected that view. When disasters happen, despair can quickly follow. But so also does tough pragmatic thinking and problem-solving. Both appear to be normal reactions to abnormal situations: for some, the enormity of the event makes action and rational thought difficult, even impossible, while for others, it 7 8 9

Macaulay, p. 278. T.D. Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake (London: Methuen 1956), p. 47. Kendrick, p. 93.

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focuses the mind and the energies. What accompanies all reactions, however, is the underlying sense of interrogation: how, why, to what end has the disaster happened? For some, the question is answerless: things happen, and that is all. For others, there is the need to seek explanations. In the eighteenth century, reactions were multiple to the Lisbon tragedy. While some saw it as a harbinger of the end of the world, others saw it as evidence of the nonexistence of divinity, while still others saw it as a sign from an enraged higher power. Standing aside from all such responses, a few tried to make sense of what they saw as clearly a natural phenomenon. One such man was John Mitchell, or Michell. Born in 1724, the Reverend Mitchell was a scientist who was fascinated by all kinds of phenomena and has been hailed as the first man to contemplate the idea of a black hole in space. In 1760 he published a work inspired by the Lisbon earthquake, Conjectures concerning the Cause and Observations upon the Phaenomena of Earthquakes. What intrigued him was the fact that reverberations of the earthquake could be felt at great distances from Portugal. The surface of lakes as far away as Switzerland and Loch Ness in Scotland rose and fell some two to three feet for over an hour after the earthquake hit. Mitchell sought explanations for this kind of long distance tilting, and came to the conclusion that there might be different kinds of earthquake. Those caused by volcanic eruptions tended to be localised, which led him to conclude that volcanoes acted as safety valves for pressures building up beneath the surface of the earth, whereas other kinds of earthquake appeared to spread out over great distances in wave patterns. Arthur Holmes, author of the seminal Principles of Physical Geology states plainly that Mitchell “can be hailed as the originator of the wave theory of earthquake transmission and as a founder of […] geophysics.”10 Mitchell endeavoured to calculate the speed of these waves, and sought to analyse earthquake movements through Newtonian mechanics. From such pioneering thinking the notion of seismic waves and the science of tectonics would eventually come into being. Much of the religious terror occasioned by the earthquake of 1755, to say nothing of the small earthquake of 1955 that I remember so vividly, might have been alleviated by some understanding of the movement of tectonic plates. These great plates grind against one another ceaselessly below the earth’s surface, and force the delicate crust of the planet into such unbearable tension that from time to time a crisis occurs, and the ripples of the force field the plates generate shudder up from the depths and rise to strike the surface in a great destructive earthquake. The grinding of the plates goes on all the time,

10

Arthur Holmes, Principles of Physical Geology (London, 1966), p. 900

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deep down below us, and the same forces that caused the Alps and the Andes and the Himalaya to rear up into the clouds are still at work beneath our feet. When earthquakes occur, they tend to happen along designated fault lines, points in the planet’s crust where the tectonic plates meet and clash. One such line runs up the western side of the Americas, up through Chile and Peru, through California and up to Alaska, another runs through the Pacific Ocean, another caused the devastation of December 2004, still another regularly brings death across Central Asia, from China to Turkey, while the fault line that puts Portugal in danger runs up from Saint Helena out in the Atlantic, then in from the Azores, and causes earthquakes across North Africa and the Mediterranean. Millions of people live over the fault lines, in the path of seismic waves and tsunamis. Sometimes, horribly, the epicentre of an earthquake can be a great distance away from where the wave strikes with greatest force. Would Voltaire have been less melancholy had he known about seismic waves, one wonders? It might at least have helped him with his anti-clerical stance and his anxieties over the existence of a god. It might also have comforted him, had he realised that although it is impossible to predict the moment when such catastrophes are going to happen, it is possible to map the movement of seismic waves and hence understand and make sense of the apparently random. For the randomness is what terrifies, more than the event itself. And what marks out some catastrophic events from others and causes them to acquire an almost mythical status in the popular imagination that endures over the centuries is not so much the scale as the timing, and the presence of eyewitnesses who recorded what they saw for posterity. The eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompei was not, in terms of loss of life an eruption of particular significance, but thanks to eye-witness accounts it came to symbolise destructiveness and the fragility of human expectations and achievements, and serves as a reminder that even at the height of its power, Rome could still be defenceless against the onslaught of nature. The attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 will be remembered because the whole world watched the horror unfold on their television screens, in a city that seemed to epitomise wealth, security and modernity. The 2004 tsunami aroused such pity because it happened at Christmas, at a moment when the Christian world at least feels itself especially blessed and protected, and because incredibly, some people filmed the sea in all its violence. In Lisbon, in 1755, there were no video cameras to record anything and no great writers to leave traces of their reactions. News of the earthquake travelled slowly, and it was ten days or so before the first reports of the disaster reached other European capitals. But the Lisbon earthquake struck at

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a particular historical moment, at one of those hinge moments that swing civilisation in or out of an historical time. The mid-eighteenth century was an age characterised by questioning, when everything was being interrogated: the existence of God, the power of man, the meaning of nature, the boundaries of knowledge, the role of science, the shape of the world and the heavens. At such a time, a great earthquake affecting one of the capitals of Europe, a city built upon the successes of the Portuguese maritime empire, raised questions that posed a challenge to the assurance of the new enlightened intellectuals of the age. In December 2004, the questions most commonly heard were far more banal. In Britain, television commentators debated whether or not they were witnessing the biggest aid operation in history. As pointed out at the start of this essay, statements by religious leaders were swiftly misunderstood. For today, the emphasis is on progress, on modernity, on technology as the future for humanity. The great debates, the clash between religious faith and belief in human possibility that characterised the age of Voltaire are no longer real. Today, the debates are primarily economic and ecological, for these are the frameworks that dominate our lives. We are as fearful as our ancestors were, but what we fear is different. While Voltaire was questioning the existence of evil in the world, a small boy of six years old living in a respectable German town heard stories of the Lisbon earthquake. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, recalling his childhood, wrote later that his peace of mind was disturbed for the very first time in his life by a disaster that took place somewhere else in the world. The Lisbon earthquake changed consciousness across Europe, it became a landmark of horror, a reminder than man is not above anything, and that for all our belief in the power of the intellect, the triumph of the mind and the capacity of the human body to bear us into old age, the cage of skin that hangs around our bony frames can be torn away in seconds by forces that we cannot even understand. The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 was, in terms of human destruction, a far worse disaster than the Lisbon earthquake. Its impact, however, will not be so great, for it has not touched the consciousness of an age the way the 1755 disaster touched European consciousness. It will be remembered as a great, tragic event, along with other natural catastrophes. The destruction of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11th, 2001 is probably more comparable in terms of impact to the 1755 earthquake, for it too prompted fundamental questioning about the interaction between the peoples of the world, and that questioning process has barely begun. Yet in December 2004, as the first images of the devastated villages began to appear on our television screens, my thoughts went back to childhood, to the sound

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of what seemed to be trams colliding, to the rubble in the embassy gardens, to my nightmares of the earth moving and the sea swallowing everything in its path, nightmares inspired by what happened in Lisbon two hundred and fifty years ago. And then, I also remembered my father, remembered his pragmatism, his very British assessment of Pombal, whose statue gazes down over the city that he helped to rebuild, on the way he urged me not to listen to prophecies of an impending apocalypse or threats of divine retribution, but to focus on the inherent goodness of human beings and on the need for practical thinking to help the survivors. The Archbishop of Canterbury echoed those sentiments, when he drew our attention to the way in which doubt can actually inspire faith rather than destroying it. And of course we have that other story which is woven into the many narratives of the Lisbon earthquake, the story of John Mitchell and his investigations into the movement of water in a lake thousands of kilometres away from the epicentre, investigations that supplied the basis of a theory of seismic waves. Science and religion, practical thinking and faith, human kindness and metaphysics are, in our contemporary world, no longer in conflict.

Bibliography Holmes, Arthur, Principles of Physical Geology (London, 1966). Kendrick, T.D., The Lisbon Earthquake (London: Methuen 1956). Macaulay, Rose, They Went to Portugal (London: Cape, 1946). Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756). Online source (visited 15. 11. 2001). Wesley, Charles, Hymns Occasioned by the Earthquake March 8, 1750, To which is added An Hymn upon the pouring out of the Seventh Vial, Rev. xvi.xvii, and Occasioned by the Destruction of Lisbon (Bristol: Farley, 1756). Wesley, John, Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Late Earthquake at Lisbon, 1755, in Thoughts, Addresses, Prayers, Letters, Vol. II of The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1996). Williams, Rowan, “Of course this makes us doubt the existence of God”, The Daily Telegraph (Jan 2nd 2005).

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Katia Pizzi

Sites of Exchange and Topographies of Memory at the Northeastern Borders of Italy Perched on the northeastern borders of Italy, the city of Trieste has both thrived and suffered as a result of its skewed geographical position. Compounded with its proximity to a border largely experienced as a source of displacement and anxiety, almost a chronotope in the Bakhtinian sense, the city’s geographical and historical eccentricity has gradually constituted Trieste as peripheral, marginal, and irresolute: a quintessentially liminal city locked between a number of diverse and frequently conflicting memories, cultures, and heritages, from Mitteleuropean to Italian, from Jewish to Slav. As such, it has come to cover an important, indeed unique, symbolic position in the imagination of Italians. Trieste’s unusual status has typically been featured in its modernist literature. Beginning from its topography, so typically angular, rugged, and vertical (it is no accident that metaphors connected with sites of confinement recur in literary portrayals of Trieste), the city as a whole has emerged as a landscape of the mind, largely forged and perpetuated by its literature, a sound chamber of memory where streets, corners, squares, and banks have all acquired symbolical meaning and are continuously set against their numerous literary renderings.1 Contrary to that postulate of autobiographical writing whereby “the self is inside each one of us, and […] is a pre-given structure”, Trieste’s largely autobiographical literature, has featured the city as a transitive, dialectical space with respect to the Self of the narrator, a conduit of constant exchange between the inner and outer whereby the former is inter-related with and, in many cases, moulded by the latter.2 Trieste’s discursive, but also contradictory and displaced identity was well understood, for instance, by filmmakers. Without dwelling at length on the cinematic fortunes of Trieste, it is worth noting that themes of an

1

2

Trieste has typically been personified with a view to reinforcing its status as particular and specific. Personification, usually employed in the iconic representation of nations, from Marianne to John Bull to Uncle Sam, is here applied to the city itself. Cf. Robert Elbaz, The Changing Nature of the Self: A Critical Study of the Autobiographical Discourse (London and Sydney: CroomHelm, 1988), p. 153: “the myth of autobiography involves two related postulates: that the self is inside each one of us, and that it is a pregiven structure, a finished product, and a free one at that […].”

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exquisitely local nature, such as the quest for Self and identity, the mystery embodied by women pursued in a coil of dark and dingy back streets and alleys, Trieste’s role in the collective imagination as both frontier and military front, were features all prominently employed in film particularly during the postwar and cold war periods, when Trieste’s contended geopolitical position was under closest international scrutiny. In the Neorealist film Alfa Tau! (1942; directed by Francesco De Robertis), and in various other contemporary films following in its wake, Trieste stands as metonymy of a generic metropolis, a radically modern and crowded urban space, and a seedy microcosm populated with spies, clandestines, refugees, and exiles operating in a climate of ambushes, betrayals, and unrestrained passions and violence. Sleeping-car to Trieste (1948; directed by John Paddy Carstairs), Clandestino a Trieste (1951; directed by Guido Salvini), La ragazza di Trieste (1951; directed by Bernard Borderie), and particularly Cuori senza frontiere (1949; directed by Luigi Zampa and starring Gina Lollobrigida and Raf Vallone), where the clichéd sentimental plot is overpowered by the pressing territorial concerns following the allocation of significant portions of formerly Italian land to Yugoslavia after the end of the War, all portray Trieste along the lines of a dangerously attractive and evocative Casablanca. Consonant with postwar historical developments, as well as the place and role played by the city in the Italian collective imagination, the Trieste emerging in cinema implicitly confirms Edward Timms’s argument that in modern literature: “there is no longer any position outside the city from which it can be viewed as a coherent whole. The poet, novelist or painter is trapped within the turmoil of the metropolis”.3 Although Trieste can only partially be viewed as a metropolis, despite many Futurist claims to the contrary, Timms implies here that a modernist approach to the city must be, first and foremost, existential. The artist’s position must then be that of an insider, whose experience of the city is from within, closely related to, in fact, conflated with, the turmoil of her/his unconscious mind. I would like to take Timms’s point further here and argue that this mutual exchange constitutes much of modern Triestine literature. A substantive number of local authors superimposed, merged, and inscribed their Selves into the city. These authors include better- and lesser-known writers of the prewar and interwar generation, from Italo Svevo (1861-1928) to Scipio Slataper (1888-1915), from Carlo Stuparich (1894-1916) to Virgilio Giotti (1885-1957) as well as contemporary ones such as Giuliana Morandini (b.1938), Renzo Rosso (b.1926), and the recently deceased Stelio Mattioni (1921-1997), analysed below. All of the authors quoted above welcome the

3

Timms, “Unreal city – Theme and Variations”, p. 3.

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autobiographical genre as a means of enclosing, almost burying, themselves further and further within the city walls. In reflecting a difficulty in severing their umbilical chord with Trieste, their predilection for autobiographical narratives articulates a clear diffidence for alien horizons, a trait impeccably elucidated by Claudio Magris in his discussion centred on the Oedipal relationship between Triestine writers and their city.4 My contention is that this reluctance to sever the fetters with their native city has frequently produced a compulsion to inscribe themselves completely in Trieste, to plunge their Selves in the city, and “be at one with the city […] at one with the air the city and himself [the protagonist Daniele Solospin] breathed together”, as eloquently put by Enzo Bettiza.5 An authoritative, canonical example is provided in the novels of Italo Svevo, the internationally renowned Triestine author who exercises to this day the most widespread and incisive influence on local writing. “Svevo blurred the line between art and autobiography. […] Trieste and his own life were always the source of his work”, as Charles Russell puts it.6 In his first novel, Una vita (1892), Alfonso, the author’s alter-ego, marches up steep Triestine alleyways and the panoramic road leading to the village of Opicina in pursuit of his recovery from a nervous breakdown. Through Alfonso’s climbing, Trieste’s sharp verticality is highlighted throughout. Recognizable sites and landscapes are distorted and reshaped by memory, remoulded on the basis of Svevo’s own memories and mental topographies. Trieste’s rigorous and angular, even hostile, geometricity is profoundly dissonant with the disorder, apprehensions, and turmoil agitating the autobiographical protagonist’s mind. In the following novel Senilità (1898) the presence of the city is even more pervasive. The protagonists Emilio Brentani and Angiolina meet in Passaggio Sant’Andrea, a favourite boulevard for Sunday strolling, and, later, along the rugged road leading to Opicina. They kiss and ‘make love’ in every corner of Trieste: They had made love in all the suburban roads of Trieste. […] They remained folded in a long embrace, with the city at their feet, as silent and dead as the sea which, from that height, seemed one vast expanse of colour, mysterious, undefined. Motionless there in the silence, city, sea, and hills seemed to be all of one piece, as if some artist had shaped and

4

5

6

Cf. Claudio Magris, “Una storia si chiude”, in Dietro le parole (Milan: Garzanti, 1978), pp. 175-179. Enzo Bettiza, Il fantasma di Trieste (Milan: Longanesi, 1958), p. 123. The translation is mine. See Charles Russell, Italo Svevo: The Writer from Trieste: Reflections on his Background and his Work (Ravenna: Longo, 1978), p. 127.

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coloured all that matter according to his own strange fancy, and dotted the intersecting lines with points of yellow light which were really street lanterns.7

In its leaden greyness, Trieste takes after Emilio’s sister Amalia, who lives a marginal, self-constrained existence, while the city’s ruthlessness is personified by Angiolina who conceals the materialism of a pragmatic Giolona behind the glory of her sun-kissed hair and sky-blue eyes. Like Alfonso, the autobiographical Emilio is committed to and unable to escape a Trieste identified with unhappiness and betrayal. The city is cut out of a heavily layered oil painting, dominated by shadows and punctuated with sudden brush-strokes that cover the previous impression, continually imposing a new, if still uncertain, order. Even in Svevo’s best-known novel, La coscienza di Zeno (1923), the meanderings of the autobiographical protagonist replicate the wind-swept, misaligned, and tortuous verticality of Trieste. His consciousness appears to be perpetually in search of a direction that psychoanalysis appears unable to indicate. Zeno is progressively drawn to projecting his own tormented, ambiguous and compromised Self onto the city, in short, to collude Trieste with his own Self. A similar collusion between the disquieting geometricity of Trieste and the Self of the autobiographical protagonist provides the narrative framework of the novel Il richiamo di Alma (1980) by Stelio Mattioni.8 Set in Trieste at an unspecified time of the XX century, Il richiamo di Alma displays a number of features already encountered in Svevo and other major Triestine writers. Without ever mentioning the city by name, Mattioni lists and revisits throughout the narration an extremely accurate, circumstantial topography coinciding with Trieste’s own. Rare, if non-existent, hints to a plausible chronology allow all characters, who generally remain nameless and whose numbers are kept to an absolute minimum, to interact awkwardly among themselves and within a historical vacuum. Though their movement is typically apparent rather than real, they walk through and round a Trieste reduced to a metaphysical, De Chirico-like space, populated with few objects and forms of a highly abstract or symbolic nature, “as if in a rarefied atmosphere, amongst buildings and people who were real, but out of focus at the same time, as if in a mirage.”9 The narrative, strictly framed within fixed 7

8

9

Italo Svevo, As a Man Grows Older, translation by Beryl de Zoete (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 22. Born and in Trieste in 1921, Stelio Mattioni’s first publication was the collection of poems, La città perduta (Milan: Idos, 1956). Mattioni later became essentially a prose writer and featured Trieste in all of his subsequent work. In the course of approximately 40 years, Mattioni published a dozen novels and collection of stories, including Il sosia (Turin: Einaudi, 1962) and Il re ne comanda una (Milan: Adelphi, 1968). Mattioni died in 1997. Stelio Mattioni, Il richiamo di Alma (Milan: Adelphi, 1980), p. 76. This and all following translations from the novel are my own.

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trajectories, relies on a dialectics of open-closed and up-down, highlighting the psycho-geographical verticality of the city throughout. The first person narrator, whose name is never disclosed and who clearly functions as the author’s alter-ego, roams streets, marches up steep roads or down vertiginous sloping alleys in the exhausting pursuit of a mysterious young woman called Alma. Alma is elusively found and rapidly lost again in the most prominent streets, squares, corners and back-alleys of this metaphysical Trieste, and particularly in the semi-abandoned, sordid, and yet powerfully resonant area of Cittavecchia.10 Alma’s name and frequent metamorphoses, from Persephone to Virgin Mary, from Eve in the Garden of Eden to Trieste itself understood as necropolis in the final pages, barely conceal her original model, drawn from the figurations of Anima as devised by Carl Gustav Jung. Since early on, Jung’s symbols and psychoanalytic theory were both authoritative and widespread in the Triestine and Julian area thanks particularly to the efforts and cultural influence exercised by the local intellectual and editor Roberto (Bobi) Bazlen (1902-1965). Bazlen not only introduced Jungian analysis in Italy via the Triestine route, but he also played a pivotal role in bringing about Mattioni’s literary career, identifying him early on as a writer of Jungian inspiration and providing him with the opportunity to publish his fiction with the appropriate publishers Adelphi. Il richiamo di Alma opens in aunt Francesca’s small flat, situated on the first floor of a building located in Via del Monte, and more precisely in her large garden, “a garden which was both open and closed at the same time”.11 Circumstantial topographic details suggest that from this garden: “one could hear the city as if from behind a wall, so that one could imagine it as one wished, even as non-existing, or existing merely as the distant whisper of the undertow or of one’s own blood running through one’s veins.”12 Mattioni strikes a delicate, careful balance here between a real topography, registered by the eye, and a symbolic one, experienced through consciousness. Complete absorption with the city, indeed the flowing of Trieste inside him like his own blood running through his veins that numerous other local writers also described, are recurrent states of mind for the autobiographical protagonist. Exploring the city’s labyrinthine topography, remaining engulfed in the vortex of its back streets, coincides with losing himself in a pattern of sinister symbols punctuated by complex literary references and allusions. The resulting sense of estrangement is both compelling and all-encompassing: the 10

11 12

Cittavecchia is featured in much literature from Trieste and, most notably, in the celebrated poem “Cittavecchia”, in Umberto Saba, “Trieste e una donna” (1910-1912), in Il Canzoniere, 5th edn (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), p. 81. Mattioni, Il richiamo, p. 11. Mattioni, Il richiamo, p. 12.

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protagonist cannot help but walking down the familiar streets of his hometown as if for the first time: “in my wanderings I always walked down the same streets. I do not wish to mention them by name, but they all circled round one particular location, exactly where I was destined to meet Alma, as if in the centre of a labyrinth.”13 Mattioni conveys here an illusion of movement within an extremely narrow, concentric, and progressively shrinking space. The protagonist’s Self, his Anima, are to be found at the centre of these concentric circles, ultimately in his own psyche, where this mental tour of Trieste is ultimately revealed as a journey of psychic selfdiscovery. However, no conclusive analysis as to Alma’s ultimate nature is forthcoming here. After allusively exposing her naked body against a landscape steeped in literary references and allusions, from classical mythology to Dante’s Divina Commedia, Alma is never to be seen again by the protagonist who decides to sever his umbilical chord with his native city by moving out of Trieste. However, a further clue to Alma’s relevance is provided in the final pages of the novel, when, minutes before leaving the native city he will never return to, the protagonist visits Trieste’s necropolis, or Orto Lapidario, located on top of the hill of San Giusto. Here, he is struck by an ancient tombstone displaying the etched name of Alma, followed by the motto: “se ti ami, amami” (“you must love me, if you love yourself”).14 The circularity and self-referentiality of this motto leave little doubt as to the collusion of Alma/Anima with Trieste and with Self. Orto Lapidario is one of the highest grounds in Trieste. From this altitude, intoxicated by a heady perfume of grass and soil, Mattioni contemplates Trieste itself as if reflected in a dusty mirror: a necropolis, the custodian of a sterile archaeology of memory. “I contemplated the city from high up [...] as if it was an extension of the place where I was standing, strewn with emblems and tombstones. Engraved on those stones were dates, names, messages that […] failed to communicate anything and generated nothing but an anonymous and endless scanning.”15 At this highly charged juncture, the city is called upon as provider of Self, as well as of historical and literary identities. Trieste itself is a graveyard where debris of memory, a useless scanning, a self-perpetuating circle of themes of strictly local interest prevail in similar fashion to the dusty tombstones filling the Orto Lapidario. Strewn as it is with disparate cultural and literary emblems and relics, Trieste’s own topography becomes a primary condition for the protagonist’s quest for Self. However, understood 13 14 15

Mattioni, Il richiamo, p. .26. Mattioni, Il richiamo, p. 156. Mattioni, Il richiamo, p. 154.

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as fossil, the city condemns the protagonist to a self-awareness he must expiate in the loneliness of ostracism knowing no return: its demands for complete identification leave little else for him to do other than leave Trieste once his Anima has been revealed to him. As such, Il richiamo di Alma, is not merely a disturbing and original novel, but also a tribute to the authority of both psyche and of Trieste. If it is indeed true that “there is no longer any position outside the city from which it can be viewed as a coherent whole”, Mattioni has not merely successfully inscribed his own Self in the city.16 He has also woven one more thread in the tapestry of Triestine literature. Under the guise of Mattioni’s “crypto-autobiography”, Trieste’s topographies of memory continue to thrive.17

Bibliography Bettiza, Enzo, Il fantasma di Trieste (Milan: Longanesi, 1958). Elbaz, Robert, The Changing Nature of the Self: A Critical Study of the Autobiographical Discourse (London and Sydney: CroomHelm, 1988). Magris, Claudio, “Una storia si chiude”, in Dietro le parole (Milan: Garzanti, 1978), pp. 175-179. Maier, Bruno, “Mattioni tra confessione e narrazione”, in Il gioco dell’alfabeto: Altri saggi triestini (Gorizia: Istituto Giuliano di Storia, Cultura, Documentazione, 1990), pp. 139-148. Mattioni, Stelio, La città perduta (Milan: Idos, 1956). —, Il re ne comanda una (Milan: Adelphi, 1968). —, Il richiamo di Alma (Milan: Adelphi, 1980). —, Il sosia (Turin: Einaudi, 1962). Russell, Charles, Italo Svevo: The Writer from Trieste: Reflections on his Background and his Work (Ravenna: Longo, 1978). Saba, Umberto, Il Canzoniere, 5th edn. (Turin: Einaudi, 1978). Svevo, Italo, As a Man Grows Older, translation by Beryl de Zoete (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). —, Senilità, in Romanzi, ed. by Pietro Sarzana (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), pp. 405-637. Timms, Edward, “Unreal city – Theme and Variations” in Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, ed. by 16 17

Timms, “Unreal city – Theme and Variations”, p. 3. Cf. Bruno Maier, “Mattioni tra confessione e narrazione”, in Il gioco dell’alfabeto: Altri saggi triestini (Gorizia: Istituto Giuliano di Storia, Cultura, Documentazione, 1990), p. 140. “Mattioni’s [...] works […] are far more ‘subjective’ and autobiographical (or cryptoautobiographical) than it is generally supposed.” The translation is mine.

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Edward Timms and David Kelley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, c1985).

Monica Spiridon

Memories of a Post-Metropolis: “Torre e Tasso” across the Atlantic Contemporary Los Angeles is currently identified by cultural geography, by urbanism, by architecture, by the visual and the verbal arts as a Third Space – a conceived, a perceived and a lived space – both a meeting point and a melting pot of group recollections. Cities have always been typical spaces of exchange, where conflicting and confusing perceptions and representations continually crisscrossed spaces where memories have been negotiated and processed The starting point of our analysis is Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49. From Pynchon’s point of view, the twentieth century Californian metropolis becomes a manifold projection of collective memory. First, it is a Post-European city. The memory of the famous European mail network “Torre e Tasso” has been transferred across the Atlantic and staged in California as a part-real part-imaginary detective plot: the Mafia type communication network: W.A.S.T.E. As a “second order” urban space, LA embodies the memory of the American Dream and of the Beautiful America of the sixties. Last but not least, contemporary Los Angeles is a typical Postmetropolis, as described by Edward Soja and many other theorists: a nowhere, a commuter shed, a non-lieu bereft of memories. Authors such as Pynchon or DeLillo clearly underline this. Assigning meaning to a place like this turns out to be structurally and semiotically a fascinating process, highlighting the ontological power of language as well as the intermingling of recollection and writing.

I. The Return of the “Flâneur” In recent decades we have witnessed a renewed discourse on the flâneur and the practices of flânerie, mostly due to the rediscovery of Walter Benjamin’s analysis of this symbolic urban European figure. According to Benjamin, the city as an aid to historical memory opens up “the immense drama of flânerie that we believed to have finally disappeared.”1 1

Walter Benjamin,”The Return of the Flaneur”, in Selected Writings, vol 2. 1927-1943, pp. 262-267, p. 264.

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The activity of watchful observation in a modern metropolis is a multifaceted method of apprehending and reading a labyrinth of complex signifiers. Following not only Walter Benjamin’s line of argument but also the critical stances of contemporary historians, urban theorists, anthropologists as well as sociologists, we can regard the flâneur as an interceder and as a performer of spatial memory. In order to evaluate things in their still remembered significance, the flâneur had to wrest the spatial details out of their original context – maintains the sociologist Georg Simmel. To read them means to produce new constructions, to derive more meaning from them than they possessed in their own present: “That which is written is like a city, to which the words are a thousand gateways.”2 In his well-known novel The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon significantly connects these two cultural themes: spatial memory and flânerie. Pynchon’s representation of European pre-modernity and its projection into the American present require a distinctive mode of remembering. In Pynchon’s novel, the twentieth century Californian metropolis San Narcisso – a fictitious equivalent of Los Angeles – becomes a manifold projection of European spatial memory. Even for professionals of urbanism, Los Angeles is an atypical city, a “re-creation” in all possible aspects: “a bazaar of repack-aged times and spaces. A theme park-themed paradise”.3 Considered from this perspective, Pynchon’s San Narcisso can be singled out as a Post-European city. Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of Pynchon’s novel, is a flâneur of the contemporary mass society and an active and multifunctional agency of recollection. Her name draws us back to the genetic ground of European mythology, connecting one of its main actors, Oedipus – an inborn interpreter of riddles – to contemporary transatlantic society. The novel moves the European cultural memory into a fictitious American urban space, open to repetition and to theatrical performance. By the mid-nineteenth century, the story of the famous European mail network Torre e Tasso (Thurn and Taxis) and that of its war with the mysterious outlaw Trystero has been transferred across the Atlantic and staged in Southern California, as a part-real/ partimaginary detective plot, revolving around the Mafia type communication network: W.A.S.T.E. To quote the urbanists, contemporary Los Angeles is a nowhere bereft of memories, a so-called “Lite City”. Fiction writers such as Thomas Pynchon 2

3

Michael Opiz, “Lesen und Flanieren. Über das Lesen von Städten, vom Flanieren in Büchern”, in Aber ein Sturm weht von Paradies her. Texte zu Walter Benjamin (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), pp. 162-181. Edward Soja, Postmetropolis. Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 238.

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clearly underline this. Assigning meaning to a “Lite City” is, structurally and semiotically, a fascinating process, highlighting the ontological power of language as well as the intermingling of recollection and writing:4 Trying hard to take stock and to evaluate the endowment of her deceased friend Pierce Inverarity, Oedipa realizes that gradually she is getting caught up into a totally different enterprise: rebuilding a symbolic legacy of America. Unconsciously and even against her own will she turns into the restaurateur of a significant part of European spatial memory: the genesis of the postal network Torre et Tassis in the Holy Roman Empire. Omedio Tassis, banished form Milan, organized his first couriers in the Bergamo region around 1290. “From about 1300, until Bismarck bought them out in 1867, Miz Maas, they were the European mail service. […] Some said that the name Taxis came from the Italian “tasso”, badger, referring to hats of badger fur the early Bergamascan couriers wore.”5 The urban area of San Narcisso, where Oedipa keeps strolling almost randomly day and night, bears a perfect analogy with the theoretical model of a so-called Third Space.6 As defined by Edward Soja – who seeks to understand spatiality as it is simultaneously perceived, conceived and lived – a Third Space is both a meeting point and a melting pot of group recollections.

II. The Masks of Recollection In order to resuscitate the European past in the urban American present, Pynchon’s protagonist takes on the three main functions of the modern flâneur, identified by Walter Benjamin: successively or simultaneously, Oedipa Maas is an actor/ spectator, an archaeologist and a detective. 1. The Theatre of Memory The relationship between the flâneur and the city is currently identified as one of estrangement. To the flâneur, his city represents a showplace. San Narcisso as a whole is a mentally projected space, staging a show about the build up of the Holy Roman Empire through an well-articulated network of communication. The protagonist of The Courier’s Tragedy, a play directed by Randolph Driblette in a theater of San Narcisso, is the young “Niccolo, masquerading 4 5 6

Edward Soja Postmetropolis, p. 247. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), p. 96; p. 106. Edward Soja, Third Space. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 351.

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as a special courier of the Thurn and Taxis (Torre et Tasso), a family who had held a postal monopoly through most of the Holy Roman Empire.”7 Pynchon strategically blurs the boundaries between the actors and the spectators of The Courier’s Tragedy on the one hand, and the actors and the spectators of the living theatre of memory called San Narcisso, on the other: “The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside. Oedipa did not know where she was.”8 In Pynchon’s novel, there are several strolling actors and strolling spectators and their status is highly ambiguous. Newly arrived in San Narcisso – the dream factory of the movie world – Oedipa successively meets a whole bunch of actors, directors, and playwrights, not to mention several professors of theatrical creative writing and theatrical literary criticism. Pierce Inverarity’s own lawyer and Oedipa’s collaborator – Metzger – is a former movie star. Almost all the events occurring in Pynchon’s novel can be seen as performances in the theatrical meaning of the word. The Crying of Lot 49 comes to an end before either Oedipa or Thomas Pynchon’s reader can understand more clearly if the whole plot was, or was not, a shrewd and ingenious “mise en scène” by Pierce Inverarity, the constructor, the owner and, why not, the author of the city called San Narcisso as well as of its European memory. 2. The Archaeology of Recollection It has often been pointed out that the flâneur’s activity of observation and recording of the metropolitan space is not confined to seeing or viewing. The flâneur must listen carefully to stories, scraps of quotations, as well as search for clues amongst the “dead data” of the metropolis or in the archives, like a historical investigator. Therefore, the archaeologist as a particular flâneur figure emphasizes both the significance of language and of the research for traces of the past in the layers of urban memory from the present downwards. Theorists insist upon the necessity of a hermeneutic intention in such excavations: “A good archaeological report must not only indicate the strata from which its discovered object emanates, but those others, above all which had to be penetrated: the ever-same in the new; antiquity in modernity; representatives of the real in the mythical; the past in the present and so on.”9 The memory of the postal network built between the beginnings of the Holy Roman Empire and the French Revolution, that helped unify the European space, including Italy – the homeland of an outlandish and 7 8 9

Pynchon, p. 66. Pynchon, p. 126. Walter Benjamin, “Excavate and Memory”, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 42.

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fantastical race according to Pynchon – has been concentrated in a theatrical plot in which the place called Lago di Pietà plays an essential part. A different layer of memories, related to a Second World War tragedy and having as its stage the same Lago di Pietà, provides the starting point for a series of historical cross-fertilizations. In a third move, all these overlapping recollections have eventually been relocated across the Atlantic and resumed in a somehow distorted way around the artificial lake created by Pierce Inverarity near San Narcisso: These bones came from Italy. A straight sale. Tony Jaguar says he harvested them all from the bottom of Lago di Pietà. Lago di Pietà was near the Tyrrhenian coast, somewhere between Naples and Rome, and had been the scene of the now ignored (in 1943 tragic) battle of attrition in a minor pocket developed during the advance on Rome. For weeks, a handful of American troops, cut off and without communications, huddled on the narrow shore of the clear and tranquil lake while form the cliffs that tilted vertiginously over the beach Germans hit them day and night with plunging, enfilading fire.10

3. Memory and Secrecy Memory often intermingles with secrecy, calling for a detective investigation. It has been argued already that the representation of the figure of the detective and earlier that of the flâneur in mystery fiction served to reassure the reading public that the apparent chaos of impressions and the overwhelming diversity of relations and experiences in the twentieth century metropolis was both intelligible and legible. Oedipus has frequently been seen by literary criticism as the starting point of a fictional road leading from European Antiquity straight towards Agatha Christie’s famous detective characters. If the detective is traditionally ‘an eye’ in stories where a keen ‘sight’ is a major requisite and if we accept the affinities between flânerie and detection, then ‘flânerie’ as observation involves modes of seeing and of reading. By the late nineteenth century the activity of detection was supported by the new media of communication, which at the same time opened up the possibility of new forms of criminal activity. As a sophisticated individual detective, Oedipa is able to make connections in an increasingly complex and opaque milieu. It is in the labyrinth of the masses and its interaction with the built labyrinth of the city, rather than in the empty streets of the metropolis, that secrets are revealed to Oedipa – synchronically and diachronically connecting Europe and America through manifold recollection.

10

Pynchon, p. 61.

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III. Memory, Intertextuality and Self-reflective Mirroring Acts of cultural anamnesis can be regarded as equivalents of literary intertexts. The spaces of memory present in fictitious cities are crossroads of allusions, of inscriptions, of the extension and the transcription of primary texts. In The Crying of Lot 49, the most diverse texts, quotations and scraps of information are flocked together in constellations of meaning rendered possible by their similarity. In her quest of the original Torre et Tasso story, Oedipa explores piles of manuscripts, post stamps, magazines, old original and fake editions, turned into popular theatre, into videotapes or cartoons: From obscure philatelic journals furnished her by Genghis Cohen, an ambiguous footnote in Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, an 80-year-old pamphlet on the roots of modern anarchism, a book of sermons by Blobb’s brother Augustine also among Bortz’s Wharfingeriana, along with Blobb’s original clues, Oedipa was able to fit together this account of how the organization began.11

One of the essential records she comes across is An Account of the Singular Peregrinations of Dr. Diocletian Blobb among the Italians, Illuminated with Exemplary Tales from the True History of that Outlandish and Fantastical Race.12 Dr. Blobb’s narrative bears witness to the benefit of the memory repository rebuilt piece by piece by Oedipa: Diocletian Blobb had chosen to traverse a stretch of desolate mountain country in a mail coach belonging to the Torre et Tassis system, which Oedipa figured must be Italian for Thurn and Taxis. Without warning, by the shores of what Blobb called “The Lake of Piety”, they were set upon by a score of black-cloaked riders, who engaged them in a fierce, silent struggle in the icy wind blowing in from the lake.13

During her endless rambling across the San Narcisso County, Oedipa is stubbornly fighting to restore the European memory of a vast territory bereft of meaning and which could have been gradually transformed into a transatlantic “Waste Land”. (In the name of Trystero’s network W.A.S.T.E., the reference to T. S. Eliot is transparent): There was the true continuity. San Narcisso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America. Were the squatters there in touch with others, through Trystero; were they helping carry for those 300 years of the house disinheritance? Surely, they’d forgotten by now what it was the Trystero were to have

11 12 13

Pynchon, p. 158. Pynchon, p. 156. Pynchon, p. 157.

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inherited; as perhaps Oedipa one day might have. What was left to inherit? That America, coded in Inverarity’s testament, whose was that?14

The backbone of Pynchon’s fictitious world is provided by a rich intertextuality closely interconnected to self-reflective mirroring – two privileged tools of spatial memory. In The Crying of Lot 49, both San Narcisso city, the territory of Oedipa’s wandering, and the motel Eco’s Courts where she decides to settle down for a while, help resuscitate the mythological ground surrounding the story of Echo and Narcissus. Apart from this, the narcissist dimension of Pynchon’s narrative is enhanced by a classical mise en abyme. The centennial story of the Torre et Tasso organization and of its struggle with the Trystero usurpers is mirrored by the Courier’s Tragedy, written by the fictitious author Richard Wharfinger. As a matter of fact, this bizarre play script is a rereading and a remembering of the American post-European history. And, at the same time, a sort of symbolic compensation for “the loss of memory and remembering that – according to Norman Klein – seems particularly intense in the geo-history of Los Angeles.”15 In almost the same way as in Las Vegas, the urban empire built by Pierce Inverarity obviously aims at aping the Old Continent, turning everything around into mere scenery. In this huge urban theatre, Oedipa’s deceased friend seems to have decided to keep alive the American echoes of the tragic events which occurred centuries ago near the Lake of Piety: There had been the bronze historical marker on the other side of the lake at Fangoso Lagoons. On this site, it read in 1853 a dozen Wells, Fargo men battled gallantly with a band of masked marauders in mysterious black uniforms. We owe this description to a post rider the only to witness the massacre, who died shortly after. The only other clue was a cross, traced by one of the victims in the dust. To this day the identities of the slayers remain shrouded in mystery.16

In an indirect but highly suggestive manner, Pynchon imagines a genuine bridge of memory closing the cultural gap between the two shores of the Atlantic: “Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three, / Turning taxi from across the sea …” reads a childish short poem accidentally heard by Oedipa in the streets. “Thurn and Taxis, you mean?”17 – she concludes, emphatically underlining that for Pynchon’s contemporary flâneur crossing the Atlantic is a symbolic passage in time that only memory is able to secure. 14 15

16 17

Pynchon, p. 178. Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 372. Pynchon, p. 89. Pynchon, p. 119.

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By Way of Conclusion Pynchon’s novel is a poignant narrative of the modern metropolis, the site of the ruins of previous orders in which European histories, memories and traces entwine continually and recombine in the construction of chaotic horizons. The Crying of Lot 49 requires a mode of reading open to the prospect of a continual return to events, to their re-elaboration and revision, of a retelling, re-citing, and re-sitting of historical and cultural knowledge. In Pynchon’s fictitious city, the spaces of Oedipa’s rambling and their intersecting networks provide the basis for an image of the metropolis as a highly complex web, verging on the chaotic (at least as far as the individual’s sense perception is concerned.) The lived space of Pynchon’s Post-metropolis depends upon the re-calling and remembering of earlier European fragments and traces that flare up and flash in the present, as they come to live on in new constellations. Cities have always been typical spaces of exchange, where conflicting and confusing perceptions and representations criss-crossed continually: spaces where memories have been negotiated and processed. In The Crying of Lot 49, memory is not an instrument for the reconnaissance of what is past but is rather its medium. The medium of what has been lived, just like the soil is the medium in which ancient spaces lie buried. Whoever tries to gaze more closely at one’s own buried past must proceed like a man who excavates. In several of his essays – notably in “Bridge and Door” – Georg Simmel already drew attention to the main dimensions of culturally projected spaces: inside and outside and above and below.18 Pynchon’s San Narcisso is simultaneously intended as both an imaginative Bridge between the two continents and as an American Door open to European memories.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter, “The Return of the Flaneur”, Selected Writings, vol. 2. 1927-1943, ed. by M. Bullock and M.W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999) pp. 262-267. —, The Arcades Project (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999). —, “Excavate and Memory”, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pp. 576-577.

18

Simmel, Georg, “Bridge and Door”, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings ed. by D. Frisby, M. Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 170-174.

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Brand, Dana, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth Century America, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Chambers, Iain, Migracy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994). Chorney, Harold, City of Dream (Toronto: Nelson, 1990). Frisby, David, Cityscapes of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Grossvogel, D.J., Mystery and its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Hessel, Franz, Ein Flaneur in Berlin (Berlin: Arsenal, 1984). Klein, Norman, M., The History of Forgetting : Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London and New York: Verso, 1997). Krakauer, Siegfried, Strassen in Berlin und Anderswo (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1964). —, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). Mumford, Lewis, The City in History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961). Olalquiaga, Celeste, Megalopolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Opiz, Michael, “Lesen und Flanieren. Über das Lesen von Städten, vom Flanieren in Büchern”, in Aber ein Sturm weht von Paradies her. Texte zu Walter Benjami (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), pp.162-181. Rignall, J., Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (London: Routledge, 1992). Soja, Edward, Third Space. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). —, Postmetropolis. Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Simmel, Georg, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in Simmel on Culture, ed. by D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 243-255.

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Peter Vassallo

Valletta (meta)fictionalized historiographically in Thomas Pynchon’s V1 In Thomas Pynchon’s V (1963), now a cult novel, the two main characters Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil personify two distinct modes of perception as the mind attempts to make sense of the empirical world: one embodied in Stencil (as the name implies) obsessed with seeing connections and patterns everywhere, and the other in Profane shuttling and yo-yoing without purpose from nowhere to nowhere, seeking authenticity in a world which slides gradually into the inanimate.2 In the course of its eccentric quest-plot both these characters find themselves pursuing the elusive and enigmatic Lady V (presumably a female spy and mistress of situations) who lures them mysteriously to the city of Valletta, one of the many manifestations of V; previous manifestations being Veronica (true icon), Vheissu, (a dream world of annihilation), Venus (sexual love), Victoria, probably Queen Victoria (empire), Venezuela (revolution) and Vesuvius (energy). Valletta, the capital of Malta, a island rock floating in the center of the Mediterranean, is historically the new Renaissance city built in grid shape by specific order of the indomitable Grand Master of the Order of St John, Fra Jean Parisot de la Valette as a monument (bearing his name) to his resounding victory against the Turkish army of Suleiman the Magnificent in the Great Siege of 1565, six years before the decisive naval battle of Lepanto. It is a city constructed by the leading architects and engineers of the time in which the streets are designed to intersect at right angles thereby conveying a sense of purpose, order and stability. It was by design (Francesco Laparelli’s design), a city built by gentlemen for gentlemen, with its palace, auberges (representing different langues), mansions and churches.3 1

2

3

The title of this paper is based on Linda Hutcheon’s definition of historiographic metafiction and the problematizing of the separation of history and fiction in Chapter 7 of A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1988). For a similar interpretation see Tony Tanner’s excellent chapter on Pynchon entitled “Caries into Cabals” in City of Words: American Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), pp. 153180. Pynchon also sees Profane and Stencil as modern versions and distortions of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza. See Roger De Giorgio’s detailed account of the building of Valletta in his A City by an Order (Malta: Progress Press, 1985).

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In this paper I propose to explore some of the significant ways in which Valletta is represented in Pynchon’s V as the focal point of a quest (mainly ironic) where man’s desire for meaningful order and purpose shifts inexorably into chaos and entropy. Stencil and Profane in their complementarity, I would suggest, are embodiments of two distinct defense mechanisms adopted by the postmodern mind as a kind of smoke screen for an undesired direct engagement with reality which could be interpreted as an exploration of the decentered world of postmodernity. Valletta, in this extravagant and extraordinary work, is both a real city graphically described with its mansions and brothels in accurate detail, which suggests that the elusive Tom Pynchon must have physically been in this city in the mid-fifties. It has been convincingly argued that Pynchon had actually based his descriptions of Valletta on personal experience rather than playing the ‘old trick of borrowing Baedeker’ to create what Barthes has called the effet du réel.4 All the details of the streets, kiosks, newspaper stands, latrines, brothels are too precise (and too personal) to have been taken from any guide book. However, the city of la Valette, as it is portrayed here, is also a literary construct, similar to one of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, or Borges’s Tlön, a city of words which reveals a cast of mind, a fusion of the analytical and imaginative functions of the brain. It is also a city which straddles historical eras by superimposing the present onto the past, linking the Second Siege of Malta (the blitz of Valletta in World War II) with the first Great Siege and the ferocious assault on the Fort of St Elmo, thereby constructing the illusion of a meaningful pattern “in the hothouse of the past”. At one stage in the final chapters of the book, Stencil is overwhelmed by the city of Valletta and begins to feel alienated from time and history. In London his experience was that history pointed to a development, an evolution – “the monuments of London seemed to be remembrances only”, but in Valletta “remembrances seemed almost to live”, Valletta seemed “serene in her own past, in the Mediterranean womb, in something so insulating that Zeus might have quarantined her and her island for an old sin and an older pestilence.” Valletta’s stillness which both fascinates and bewilders Stencil, makes her unreal – a city that ceased to exist and was assumed again in the “textual stillness of her own history”. This is a moment of stasis, a kind of déjà vu for Stencil, obsessed as he is with pattern making. In Valletta the wheel of history turns full cycle, and the present and the future 4

Arnold Cassola in his essay on “Pynchon, V, and the Malta Connection”, in Pynchon, Malta and Wittgenstein, ed. by P. Bianchi, A. Cassola and P. Serracino Inglott (Malta: Malta University Publishers, 1995) argues convincingly that these details show that Pynchon must have visited Valletta in the mid-fifties and that he was partly basing the Valletta episodes on his own actual experience.

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converge on the past. The Axis planes dropping tons of bombs daily (in 1941), the Turks ensconced on the heights of Sciberras (the high rock on which Valletta is to be built) firing rounds of cannonball (in July 1565) on the stubborn defenders of the little fort St Elmo, all merge in a significant historical moment. Out of the debris of the blitz of Valletta, three extraordinary characters emerge: Fausto Majistral the First, the Second and the Third in the process of Stencil’s quest for V. An elusive and enigmatic character Fausto Majistral II – a composite of Fausto I and II – is born “out of the debris, crushed stone broken masonry, destroyed churches and auberges of the city”. He is a character whose attributes are non-human, an emblem perhaps of modern man’s birth out of the debris of the past, dislocated from his origins.5 The authoritative narrator’s voice to which the traditional reader defers, is undermined, in the later chapters, by the metanarrative of a journal “Fausto’s Confessions” given to Stencil by Paola Majistral (Fausto’s daughter) in a bundle of type-written pages. They are mainly ironical reflections on the “St Giles fair called history” on how facts are distorted by memory, dislocated and recomposed in what is described as the “colourful whimsy of history”, which impugns the authority of all narrative discourse, including the narrative mode of the text itself – actually Pynchon’s V. The frequent interpolations of inferior verse, a travesty of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (supposedly composed by the mediocre poet Maratt) point to the leit motif of Pynchon’s novel, a chaotic world out of which we shore up fragments against our ruin: the exuberantly carnivalesque world of what (with our obsession for pattern making) we would call history – in this case the irresistible urge to authenticate narrative discourse, transforming, as it were, “random caries into cabals”. A similar process is evident in Oedipa Maas’s obsessive questing, in The Crying of Lot 49, in order to try to come to grips with the nature of her world from within the value structure she inherits from her culture. Fausto Majistral (the self-conscious intellect seeking the inspiration of the north wind from Provence, as the surname implies) is a Maltese poet and an intellectual. He is an embodiment of cultural memories unleashed by war, a hybrid character composed of primeval Maltese elements of Semitic and Phoenician origin but also a product of British colonialism. Increasingly aware of the limitations imposed by language (Colonial English and native Maltese), Fausto sees himself as a “dual man, aimed in two ways at once” – an abstraction perhaps created by the conditions of modern culture, a product 5

See Peter Serracino Inglott’s fine study of the enigma of Pynchon’s Fausto Maijstral in “The Face of Malta: Fact and Fiction in Pynchon’s V”, in Pynchon, Malta and Wittgenstein, pp. 39-54.

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of cultural discourses. As the confessional journal proclaims, “Perhaps British colonialism has produced a new sort of being; a dual man, aimed two ways at once: towards peace and simplicity on the one hand; towards an exhausted intellectual searching on the other”, conflicting and complementary attributes (the Stencils and Profanes of this world) leading inexorably to inanimation. For manhood to exist (in a predominantly matriarchal society) it must identify itself with the massive rock on which Valletta is built, and to which Majistral points when Stencil asks for guidance in his restless and purposeful quest for V. For V is also Valletta, the wishedfor guarantee against entropy – that inexorable second law of thermodynamics stating that energy is constantly running down and will eventually ‘stop like a clock’. Valletta is significantly the site where V, in the guise of the bad priest, disintegrates. As the narrative steers Stencil’s quest to a climax the prosthetic V is trapped beneath a fallen beam during an air raid over Valletta and the children playfully dismantle her. They first remove a wig, and this reveals a crucifix tattooed on the scalp, then an artificial foot, then the false teeth and a glass eye with an iris in the shape of a clock, and last, with the point of a bayonet, they dig the star sapphire from her navel. In the throes of death she utters non-human cries that seem to sound like “the wind blowing past any dead reed.” – V is metamorphosed into a fetish . It is amid the debris of bombed Valletta that the quest appears to come to an end with the bizarre disintegration of V – an ironical quest which now mocks man’s constant endeavour to construct meaning through discourse. In a materialistic, mechanistic and technological post war society cultural values move relentlessly in the direction of the non-human.6 In V the quester finally merges with the quest as narratorial authority is undermined and problematized. In the concluding chapters of the book, historical Valletta constructed on precise documentary detail blends into a mythical Valletta which transcends notions of time, retreating into a primordial rocky height “Xaghriet Mewwija” (the original Phoenician name of the rock on which the city was built) where primitive homo sapiens eked out his survival in a subterranean ‘city’ of caverns and grottos, clinging to the myth of Mara, a primitive deity worshipped in prehistoric temples, symbolizing womanhood (‘mara’ in Maltese means ‘woman’) and the beginnings of a matriarchal society. It is here that the tortuous and rambling plot fuses the real into the imaginary, reinforcing the notion of elusiveness and purposelessness. For, as Richard Poirier has perceptively observed, “in Pynchon’s novels the plots of wholly 6

See Deborah L. Madsen’s discussion of this point in her chapter entitled “Verbal Vivification in V”, in The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991), p. 37.

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imagined fiction are inseparable from the plots of known history”.7 Valletta is a city on a rock insulated in time in which purpose and purposelessness converge. Its strait parallel streets leading to infinity on the four points of the compass (four of the streets were originally named ‘tramontana’, ‘mezzodì’, ‘levante’ and ‘ponente’) are constant reminders of purpose and direction, latitude and longitude, the secure sense of getting one’s bearings. On the other hand, the hothouses of Strait Street (the Metro, the Union Jack frequented by Pappy and Fat Clyde which actually existed in the nineteenfifties) subvert the dignified purpose of the city with its suggestion of exuberant chaos and carefree mindlessness, the natural habitat of the Whole Sick Crew. Significantly, it is here in ‘the Gut’ (the sailors’ name for Strait Street) that the ubiquitous Kilroy, that elusive and insolent character created in the minds of American and British servicemen during World War II, with his foolish nose peeping over the wall, is in his element. He is everywhere and nowhere in latrines (gents), in cupboards, underneath beds, and in almost every nook and cranny, mocking man’s perennial quest for identity. Always a step ahead of his pursuer, he is the motivator of the tantalizing quest. Kilroy as American and British servicemen knew instinctively was always there before one reached one’s objective. If, in the course of the rambling plot of V, human characters gradually drift into the inanimate, the reverse is also the case; inanimate creatures surreptitiously take on human form. A masterful disguise: a metaphor taking the shape of a band pass filter (which a sketch of the legendary Kilroy sketched by Pynchon, in Chapter Sixteen, resembles), Kilroy, inanimate and inert for years becomes “grandmaster of Valletta” surveying the carnivalesque chaos of it all: jazz, jitterbug, beer, barmaids, brawl, sawdust and all. And late in the night even the statues of knights and ladies and Turks displayed on the walls of the Metro pub, in a state of suspended animation, now take over and surrealistically come to life as the last sailors stagger out of the hothouse, and begin to “descend from their pedestals and ascend stately to the dance floor” bringing with them their own light: the “sea’s phosphorescence” and, forming sets, dance in dignified silence until sunrise, while Kilroy voyeuristically peeps over the wall. Like a latter day Tiresias (the allusions to The Waste Land are numerous), Kilroy has in effect forseen it all. The reality of lived experience (the sailors’ – and Pynchon’s own experience of the Gut in Valletta) is filtered like an electric current into the realm of phantasmagoria. The past is metaphorically electrified or galvanized as it silently impinges on the present. Pynchon borrows his metaphor from the science of electromagnetism. The sketch of 7

Richard Poirer, “The Importance of Thomas Pynchon”, in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. by George Levine and David Levernz (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1976), p. 23.

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the filter band transmitting alternating currents energy, thereby creating a magnetic field, which he reproduces in a sketch in the text, is cleverly made to look like the sketch of Kilroy as he existed in the collective imagination of most British and American servicemen in World War II. The human quest alternating between the Stencils and Profanes of this world is the source of energy which temporarily keeps entropy at bay. It is here, significantly in the designed new city of Valletta, that the quest and the quester become fused into each other, creating a magnetic field of momentary equilibrium. Valletta is purpose, linearity, and stability having as it were a positive charge. But it is also mindlessness, chaos, instability – a negative charge, in electrical terms. Its calm composure can all too suddenly be transformed into turbulence. A significant instance (which Pynchon mentions) was the case of the violent ‘Sette Giugno’ bread riots of 1919, which originated in the streets of Valletta and which Pynchon goes out of his way to describe towards the end of the novel. For in Valletta ‘the politics of the street’ can overtake the most stable façade of governments, and order and respectability can suddenly by overturned by citizens from all walks of life who are suddenly, and inexplicably, transformed into rioters. In Valletta the sedate main street and the chaotic hothouse in the narrow street known to all sailors, fuse into each other. As the characters fade out of the city of la Valette we are left with a mythical version of history symbolized by Mara. Pynchon playfully explains the mystery why, towards the end of the Great Siege, the Turks at the moment of plucking victory suddenly and inexplicably withdraw into a confused retreat. Baffled historians have explained this as the Pasha Mustapha’s overestimating the size of the Don Garcia de Toledo’s relief force from Sicily. But Pynchon creates a myth of his own – it was the witch (enchantress) Mara who seductively mesmerized the Sultan (Suleiman) and duped him, in macabre fashion, into sending the commander of his army, Mustapha, encamped on Xeghriet Mewwija, the order to withdraw, Pynchon’s point being that it is myth that has the last word. Myth prevails in the end for it is born out of the “colourful whimsy of history” and has the beguiling power to dissolve the chronicles of mundane historical facts. The ultimate ‘message’ that would seem to emerge from the labyrinth of Pynchon’s V is that V always exceeds the sum of her parts, and that the linear, comforting chronicle of history is transmogrified into the alluring miasma of myth.

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Bibliography De Giorgio, Roger, A City by an Order (Malta: Progress Press, 1985). Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1988). Madsen, Deborah L., The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991). Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. by George Levine and David Levernz (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1976). Pynchon Malta and Wittgenstein, ed. by P. Bianchi, A. Cassola and P. Serracino Inglott (Malta: Malta University Publishers, 1995). Tanner, Tony, City of Words: American Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971).

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4. Borders and Conflicts

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Maurizio Ascari

Border, Frontiers and Boundaries In the last few decades anthropologists, historians, philosophers and literary critics have shown an increasing interest in the cultural significance of borders, frontiers and boundaries, as well as in the relevance of these concepts as analytical tools, often in an attempt “to decolonize knowledge”,1 as Mary Louise Pratt wrote – that is to say to deconstruct the Eurocentric assumptions of discourses ranging from fiction to travelogues and ethnography. The word frontier was often used as the correlative of a jingoistic imperialism, to indicate an advancing line – the march of ‘civilisation’ and ‘progress’ against the ‘savage’, the ‘primitive’, the ‘barbarian’. As the American historian F.J. Turner wrote in his seminal The Significance of the Frontier in American history (1893), “the frontier is the outer edge of the wave – the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”2 Although this late 19th-century book is inevitably tainted with colonialist prejudices, Turner insightfully acknowledged the bilateral effect the ‘frontier’ produces on the populations that are involved in this encounter: The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the mocassin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him.3

In Turner’s eyes, as a result of this encounter, both the coloniser and the ‘wilderness’ are changed and the result bears little semblance to the native countries of American settlers. By explaining the birth of the United States as the hybridisation between Europeans and the American “wilderness”, Turner showed that he was aware of the complex exchanges the process of coming into contact with ‘otherness’ implies. Yet one should also notice that by calling the American territory “wilderness” and by insisting on its sparsely populated character, Turner minimised the presence of natives, contrasting 1

2

3

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 2. F.J. Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Ic., 1966; facsimile reprint of Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1894), p. 200. Turner, p. 201.

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this frontier with what he called “the European frontier – a fortified boundary line running through dense population.”4 As we can see, in the discourse of space, frontiers take on a symbolic – rather than objective – value, circumscribing entities that are actually cultural constructions. In the 19th century inner European frontiers were likewise involved in a process of myth-making pivoting on the nation, but the fallacious quality of these ideological strategies was denounced by enlightened thinkers such as Ernest Renan, whose oft-quoted essay “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (“What is a nation?”, 1882) aimed to deconstruct several elements of the nationalist ideological apparatus. Ironically calling into question the myth of “natural frontiers”5 marked by rivers or mountains, Renan underlined the conventional character of these boundaries, “First of all, is it the mountains or the rivers that we should regard as forming these so-called natural frontiers? It is indisputable that the mountains separate, but the rivers tend rather to unify. Moreover, all mountains cannot divide up states.”6 In the course of the 20th century, the developments of anthropology fostered a more systematic and critical attitude towards those conceptual constructs relating to space that had been elaborated to encapsulate pseudotruths serving the interests of power structures such as the empire and the nation. In a recent essay, the Italian anthropologist Ugo Fabietti underlined the violence that is implicit in the notion of frontier, which was often used – by anthropologists themselves – to define a contact zone and simultaneously a dividing line between the outposts of the ‘West’ and ‘other’ cultures. By dividing ‘our’ civilisation from ‘otherness’, this notion stands for a chauvinist mode of relating to the other by means of mechanisms of distance and control, appropriation and domination.7 While thinkers have become increasingly suspicious of the term frontier, which implicitly projects pre-conceived assumptions on ‘otherness’, the concept of boundary has enjoyed a growing popularity, notably since the anthropologist Fredrik Barth explored it in his by now classic introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Difference (1969), a miscellaneous volume that marked a new era of ethnic studies. Calling into question the traditional view of cultural variation as discontinuous and arguing for the necessity of a deeper investigation into the nature of cultural boundaries, Barth dismissed “the simplistic view that 4 5

6 7

Turner, p. 200. Ernest Renan, “What is a nation?” (“Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”), in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 18. Renan, p. 18. See Ugo Fabietti, “Frontiere, metafore, violenza. Note su alcuni paradossi dell’antropologia”, in Occidentalismi, ed. by Carla Pasquinelli (Roma: Carocci, 2005), pp. 205-11.

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geographical and social isolation have been the critical factors in sustaining cultural diversity”8 and underlined the permeable nature of boundaries. Ethnic identity is defined not by separation, but by interaction, for “categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on any absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation”.9 Barth’s argument proved so fertile that since 1969 “virtually all discussion in anthropology of ethnicity and boundary have referred back to this essay”,10 as is shown by volumes like The Anthropology of Ethnicity. Beyond Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1994).11 As social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz wrote at the end of the 1990s, “Barth’s 1960s work did much to make us think of boundaries as something across which contacts and interactions take place; they may have an impact on the form and extent of these contacts, but they do not contain natural isolates.”12 While in the past anthropologists where interested in boundaries as lines of demarcation, having to do with discontinuity and difference, now boundaries “do not really contain, but are more often interestingly crossed.”13 Moreover, the ethnic/social and the cultural dimensions of a community should not be seen as coinciding, but their relations should be problematised. Barth himself is still working on the versatile and powerful concept of boundary. In a recent essay he discussed the various levels of abstraction that are implicit in this word (“from an imagined line drawn on the ground […] to a schema for conceptualising the very idea of distinction”),14 also with the aim of underlining the epistemological limits of those Eurocentric paradigms that threaten to confine our thoughts to a hall of mirrors.15 8

9 10

11

12

13 14 15

Frederik Barth, Introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. by Frederik Barth (Oslo: Univ. Forlaget – London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 9. Barth, Introduction, pp. 9-10. Anthony P. Cohen, Introduction to Signifying Identities. Anthropological perspectives on boundaries and contested values, ed. by Anthony P. Cohen (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 2 The Anthropology of Ethnicity. Beyond Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, ed. by H. Vermeulen and C. Govers (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1994). See also Symbolising Boundaries, ed. by Anthony P. Cohen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986) and Beyond Boundaries, ed. by Gìsli Pàlsson (London: Berg, 1993). Ulf Hannerz, “Flows, Boundaries and Hybrids: Keywords in Transnational Anthropology” [published in Portuguese as “Fluxos, fronteiras, hibridos: palavras-chave da antropologia transnacional”, Mana, 3.1 (1997), 7-39]. Online source , p. 7. Hannerz, p. 2. Fredrik Barth, “Boundaries and connections”, in Signifying Identities, p. 20. See Barth, “Boundaries and connections”, pp. 34-5.

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In the 1980s and 1990s this new interest in boundaries spread from anthropology to literary disciplines, triggering a process of cross-fertilisation and contributing to the development of cultural and postcolonial studies, which have deeply refashioned the discourses of identity and difference. The term transculturation is a case in point. Coined by Fernando Ortiz in Cuban Counterpoint (1947) as a substitute for the term acculturation, which might suggest a unidirectional cultural change,16 this label was subsequently utilised by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992) to redefine the exchange between bordering cultures more objectively, exploring not only “how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture”,17 but also a reverse phenomenon, i.e. the transculturation “from the colonies to the metropolis”.18 Pratt also reassessed the nature of boundaries thanks to the notion of contact zone19 – a theoretical tool whose aim is to redress the cultural prejudices which are implicit in the term frontier. To clarify the meaning of this label, Pratt repeatedly re-defined it from different perspectives, first describing contact zones as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today”,20 then restating this concept in relation to that of frontier: Contact zone in my discussion is often synonymous with “colonial frontier”. But while the latter term is grounded within a European expansionist perspective (the frontier is a frontier only with respect to Europe), “contact zone” is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect.21

Discrediting the notion of frontier as the result of a one-sided biassed perspective, which implies an epistemic violence and is redolent of a colonialist project, Pratt reminded us that “Borders and all, the entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out.”22 As we have seen, while in the past the border between two nations was often simplistically perceived as dividing two homogeneous identities and cultures, by the end of the 20th century this binarism was being called into 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

See Hannerz, pp. 13-4. Hannerz, pp. 13-4. Hannerz, pp. 13-4. Pratt first developed this concept in “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Profession, 91 (1991), 33-40. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 4. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 6-7. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 6.

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question by both anthropologists and postcolonial scholars alike. Starting from this premise, in his seminal The Location of Culture (1994) Homi Bhabha advocated a new model of culture, so as to acknowledge the contribution of minorities to the development of national cultures as well as the complex intersections that define identities in our postmodern society, “It is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.”23 The articulation of difference is regarded by Bhabha as “a complex on-going negotiation”24 that engenders hybrid identities. In the postmodern age of travelling and communication, boundaries are unceasingly dislocated and relocated, trespassed and transgressed, as is proved by the vogue of terms such as inter/transnational, inter/transcultural, global, hybrid, creole, migrant, cosmopolitan as well as communication, translation, diaspora and syncretism. Indeed, in recent years the metaphor of the border has become so topical precisely because it is associated with the idea of change – boundaries are seen as useful cultural tools only insofar as they are incessantly renegotiated. A case in point is Redrawing the Boundaries – the volume Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn edited in 1992 to map the everchanging territory of literary studies, “Foregrounding the issue of boundaries has reminded us that literature is not something given once and for all but something constructed and reconstructed, the product of shifting conceptual entitlements and limits.”25 The postmodern suspicion of binarism and of fixed boundaries has also helped to radically reshape the humanist view of identity. The modern subject traditionally constructed himself – in Rosi Braidotti’s words – “as much through what he excluded as through what he included in his sense of agency or subjectivity”. The modern ‘I’ was defined by means of the boundaries that separated it from “signifying others” that acted as “boundary-keepers” – such as the opposition between us/them in terms of race or male/female in terms of gender, but the post-humanist subject “feeds upon its structurally excluded others”.26 Philosophers have tried to capture this blurring of boundaries by means of new figurations of the subject such as the nomadic subject and the cyborg. Far from pertaining to a separate realm of thought, these figurations 23 24 25

26

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 2. Bhabha, p. 2. Redrawing the Boundaries. The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1992), p. 5. Rosi Braidotti, “The Paradox of Nomadic Embodied Subjectivity”, Textus, “Discourses on/of the Body”, ed. by Vita Fortunati, Stephen Greenblatt and Mirella Billi, 13.2 (JulyDecember 2000), p. 393.

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should be regarded as related to the ‘material’ aspects of the postmodern age. Thus the nomadic subject is a correlative of late postmodernity, which has blurred the boundary between local and global, for “advanced capitalism functions as the great nomad, the organizer of the mobility of commodified products.” On the other hand, the cyborg embodies “the blurring of the boundaries between humans and machines [that] is socially enacted at all levels: from medicine to tele-/communications, finance and modern warfare, cyber-relations define our social framework.”27 Since conceptual and material borders interact in an unceasing exchange, “The proliferation of discursive practices of ‘otherness’ in philosophy and social theory cannot and should not be separated from material and geo-political power relations in the age of post-industrialism, post-coloniality and post-communism.”28 Braidotti’s emphasis on the link between the conceptual constructs and the material aspects of society brings us back to the new roles played by borders and frontiers in the postmodern age. The Treaty of Schengen (1985) changed our conception of internal EU borders, making it easier to move from one EU country to another,29 but Schengen also aimed to put in place more effective controls at the external borders of the EU. This frontier is not the provisional limit of an expanding society (like the ‘mythical’ Western frontier of the United States) but rather an attempt to keep other less privileged people out – a postmodern capitalist version of defensive barriers aimed at preventing ‘invasion’, such as Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China. What Turner rather imaginatively defined as “the European frontier” has turned into a reality; yet, his late 19th-century image of a “fortified boundary line” hardly suffices to encompass the implications of this postmodern frontier. Although the geo-political boundaries of Europe are patrolled by the police to prevent immigrants from illegally entering into its territory or smugglers from illegally importing goods or drugs, other channels of communication have been opened, for a network of flights now connects virtually all the cities of the world, relocating the traditional line of frontier in the space of several international airports. As we have seen, both the conceptual and the material nature of frontiers, borders and boundaries have deeply changed during the last few decades. Yet nationalism and imperialism have far from disappeared and the recent developments of terrorism have taught us that the asymmetrical contact zones between different cultures can still be a source of conflicts. Moreover, these contact zones are located everywhere – in the heart of Europe’s major cities 27 28 29

Braidotti, p. 401. Braidotti, pp. 394-5. With the exception of the UK and Ireland, while non EU countries like Norway and Iceland are part of the Schengen area.

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as well as in faraway seaside resorts, on board international flights as well as in cyberspace. In our globalised world, we need flexible conceptual tools to deal with an increasingly transient and complex reality and our postmodern view of borders aims to fulfil this task. The emphasis on borders as places of flow and hybridisation, rather than as lines of discontinuity, statically implying a set of differences, also helps us understand their relevance in a conference on Sites of Exchange. The essays that are included in this section of the volume deal with the interaction between political and cultural borders, repeatedly underlining their symbolic value, their provisional and conventional nature, their openness to communication and exchange. They also deal with conflicts and with the representation of war – an issue which engenders another boundary, that which divides what can be told from what does not find its way to the public. In “Shifting Borders: the Lure of Italy and the Orient in the Writings of 18th and 19th Century British travellers”, Maurizio Ascari draws on Edward Said’s seminal study of Orientalism to investigate the ambivalent role Italy played – in the eyes of travellers –within the symbolic geography of Europe, notably within the binary opposition between East and West. By comparing British travelogues to Italy and to India, Ascari underlines both the ‘orientalisation’ of Italy and the function references to Italy acquired in the latter texts as intermediate terms of comparison, bridging the gap between inter-continental differences. In “Cultural Spaces in Border Territories”, Jola Skulj utilises Lotman’s concept of semiosphere (i.e. “the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages”) to study the specificity of borderland cultures. Focussing on the case of Slovenia, Skulj underlines the importance of dialogism in border regions, where “the realization of a cultural self” entails “a responsive act.” Borderland cultures – with their unstable histories and their open-ended identities – are sites of exchanges that maintain the semiosphere “in a state of creative ferment”, thus contributing to its fertile heterogeneity. Starting from these reflections, Skulj stresses the importance of discussing literature in relation to space, so as to conceive a “remodelled comparative approach”, acknowledging the relevance of minor or peripheral cultures. Graham Dawson’s paper – “The ‘Ulster’-Irish Border, Protestant Imaginative Geography and Cultural Memory in the Irish Trouble” – rests on Said’s concept of “imaginative geography”, i.e. the process of setting up boundaries in our minds, which is “intrinsic to the formation of collective identities that are defined against the other”. Imaginative geographies do not necessarily coincide – but usually interact – with political borders. Dawson

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discusses the history of the ‘Ulster’-Irish border (which was created in 1920) and the connotations it acquired for the Protestant communities on either side, acknowledging the importance of studying this material and imaginative barrier to understand the cultural identity both of the nine-county Ulster and of the three so-called “lost-counties”. In “Captive Naples” Dianna Pickens concentrates on the representation of Naples in the photographs, fiction and journalism that Americans published during and after World War II. Her analysis of this varied material enables Pickens to discover the existence of a boundary between what one was allowed and not allowed to say, i.e. between legitimate and illegitimate discourses. While war correspondents, journalists and writers were involved in a propaganda campaign and were inevitably influenced by various kinds of censorship, both political and self-imposed, Pickens calls our attention to the work of two post-war writers – John Horne Burns and William Fense Weaver – who managed to produce highly unusual accounts of Naples, grasping and rendering the complexities of war. The creative freedom of these artists, however, was a rather isolated case, as is proved by the more ‘orthodox’ works Fulbright scholars wrote in the following years, within the frame of the cold war. Naples is also at the heart of Paola Villani’s “The Redemption of the Siren”, where the city is shown to be at the origin of a double myth – that of an enchanted and enchanting land, where learning and corruption, light and darkness coexist. According to Villani, it was in the wake of World War II that the mythical and the real Naples came to coincide and the city became “a symbol of the universal suffering of humanity.” In her paper Villani discusses some post-war Italian novels – ranging from Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle to Anna Maria Ortese’s Il mare non bagna Napoli – dealing with this season of war and poverty, of mud and ashes, of hunger and prostitution. By exploring the recurrence of metaphors concerning the body (such as rape, blood or disease) in these works of fiction, Villani uncovers an underlying narrative of sickness and healing, of sin and redemption.

Bibliography The Anthropology of Ethnicity. Beyond Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, ed. by H. Vermeulen and C. Govers (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1994). Beyond Boundaries, ed. by Gìsli Pàlsson (London: Berg, 1993). Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

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Braidotti, Rosi, “The Paradox of Nomadic Embodied Subjectivity”, Textus, “Discourses on/of the Body”, ed. by Vita Fortunati, Stephen Greenblatt and Mirella Billi, 13.2 (July-December 2000), pp. 393-412. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. by Frederik Barth (Oslo: Univ. Forlaget – London, George Allen & Unwin, 1969). Hannerz, Ulf, “Flows, Boundaries and Hybrids: Keywords in Transnational Anthropology” [published in Portuguese as “Fluxos, fronteiras, hibridos: palavras-chave da antropologia transnacional”, Mana, 3.1 (1997), 7-39]. Online source (visited 12. 06. 2005). Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Occidentalismi, ed. by Carla Pasquinelli (Roma: Carocci, 2005). Pratt, Mary Louise, “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Profession, 91 (1991), 33-40. —, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Redrawing the Boundaries. The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1992). Signifying Identities. Anthropological perspectives on boundaries and contested values, ed. by Anthony P. Cohen (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Symbolising Boundaries, ed. by Anthony P. Cohen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). Turner, F.J., The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Ann Arbor, University Microfilms, Ic., 1966; facsimile reprint of Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1894).

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Maurizio Ascari

Shifting Borders: The Lure of Italy and the Orient in the Writings of 18th and 19th Century British Travellers In his seminal study on Orientalism, published in 1978, Edward Said claims that “the Orient was almost a European invention,” which “helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image”.1 This definition of the Orient as a ‘mirror’ of the Occident has now become a truism in literary studies. We know that Said subsequently had repeated opportunities to elaborate on his view of Orientalism and in his 2003 Preface to the book he still reasserts that “neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability”.2 At the core of the scholar’s enquiry is the desire to re-think “what had for centuries been believed to be an unbridgeable chasm separating East from West.”3 Recognising the opposition between East and West as a cultural construction conniving at the Imperial adventure is for Said the first step towards a deeper understanding between European societies and other civilisations.

Orientalizing Italy Starting from the framework of Said’s theories, I would like to investigate the shifting nature of the symbolic border dividing East and West, notably the unstable position of Italy within this binary order and the ambiguous superimposition of spatial and cultural categories such as the South and the East. An innovative approach to this problem is offered by Manfred Pfister, who applies Said’s theoretical tools to the study of differences within Europe, “There is an intra-European “Meridionism” as well as a global Orientalism, and the rich and richly documented history of British travellers’ perception of, and interaction with, Italy offers itself as a particularly significant instance of it.” Although – as Pfister claims – intra-European Meridionism did not have the same “devastating political consequences that Orientalism brought 1

2 3

Edward W. Said, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), pp. 1-2. Said, p. xii. Said, p. 352.

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upon mankind by legitimising colonialism”,4 this widespread attitude influenced most 18th and 19th century British travelogues on Italy, setting up a series of oppositions between terms such as North vs. South, Protestant vs. Roman Catholic, civic liberty vs. despotism.5 What I wish to analyse is not this generalised Meridionist stance, but a phenomenon which partially overlaps with it, that is to say the use of images and comparisons that relate Italy to the Orient. I will label this rhetorical strategy as the ‘Orientalization’ of Italy and in order to probe the elusive nature of 18th and 19th century symbolic geography I will contrast it with a somewhat diverse phenomenon, i.e. the ‘Italianisation’ of the Orient in British travelogues on India. As an example of the Britons’ orientalist attitude to Italy I have chosen to deal mainly with William Beckford’s travel impressions. Before approaching Beckford let me remind you that the Orientalist vogue in 18th century Britain was hugely indebted to an editorial enterprise that took place at the beginning of the century, when Antoine Galland’s French edition of the Mille et une Nuit was translated into English as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1706-21). The cultural impact of this text was enormous and contributed to the rise of a new sub-genre of Oriental tales and letters.6 The pervasive presence of the Orient in Beckford’s works is partly the result of his youthful reading of this extraordinary collection of stories. The Orient provided Beckford with an imaginary place he could escape to in order to avoid the strictures of 18th century morality, which prevented him from fulfilling his sexual preferences and his highly aesthetic propensities. As an example of the wish-fulfilling, compensatory value the Orient had for young Beckford, and of the censorious attitude of his environment, Kenneth Graham quotes a passage from a letter written by Beckford’s tutor, the reverend John Lettice, informing the orphan boy’s godfather that “about a month ago, that splendid heap of oriental drawings, &c. which filled a large table at Burton, has been sacrificed at the shrine of good taste. Mr. Beckford had firmness enough to burn them with his own hand”.7 The episode is an apt symbol of the pressure Beckford’s environment put on his exuberant imagination, to curb his tendencies and normalise his identity.

4

5 6

7

The Fatal Gift of Beauty. The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam – Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), p. 3. The Fatal Gift of Beauty, p. 5. See Robert L. Mack, Introduction to Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (Oxford – New York: Oxford UP, 1995), pp. xvii-xviii. Quoted in Kenneth W. Graham, Introduction to William Beckford, Vathek with The Episodes of Vathek, ed. by Kenneth W. Graham (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview P, 2001), p. 36.

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In spite of these efforts, the Orient is at the heart not only of Beckford’s masterpiece Vathek, but also of Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, the travelogue Beckford published in 1783 and withdrew before it was distributed because his family though it too eccentric for a future politician. Right from its title, the text is presented as a rhapsody of dreams rather than an inventory of places, and the Oriental quality Italy acquires in the eyes of Beckford comes as no surprise, notably when Beckford deals with Venice, The variety of exotic merchandize, the perfumes of coffee, the shade of awnings, and sight of Greeks and Asiatics, sitting cross-legged under them, made me think myself in the bazars of Constantinople. ‘Tis certain, my beloved town of Venice, ever recalls a series of eastern ideas and adventures. I cannot help thinking St. Mark’s a mosque; and the neighbouring palace, some vast seraglio; full of arabesque saloons, embroidered sophas, and voluptuous Circassians.8

Colourful descriptions of Venice as a crossroads between different civilisations abound in Beckford’s text, where the sea city is described as a modern Babylon, due to the variety of languages that can be heard in its narrow streets.9 Less predictably, Beckford sees even the Venetian inland as an exotic place, as is proved by this description of the river Brenta: “Our navigation, the tranquil streams and cultivated banks, in short the whole landscape, had a sort of Chinese cast, which led me into Quang-Si and Quang-Tong.”10 Elinor Shaffer claims that in this passage and elsewhere Beckford “fashioned an erotic language borrowed from Oriental travels he had already read […] before leaving home, in particular the Chinese travels of the French Jesuits.”11 According to Shaffer, Beckford used the Orient as a “subtext” to express “erotic feelings for which no words are permissible”,12 like his attachment to a young Venetian aristocrat. Undoubtedly, Beckford’s Orientalist attitude to Venice partly sprang from the special role that city played in his quest for identity, but we should also bear in mind that Venice had been traditionally regarded as Europe’s gateway

8

9

10 11

12

William Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, ed. by Robert J. Gemmett (Rutherford – Madison – Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1971), p. 253. “I observed a great number of Orientals amongst the crowd, and heard Turkish and Arabic muttering in every corner. Here, the Sclavonian dialect predominated; there, some Grecian jargon, almost unintelligible. Had Saint Mark’s church been the wonderous tower, and its piazza the chief square of the city of Babylon, there could scarcely have been a greater confusion of languages.” Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, p. 119. Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, p. 133. Elinor Shaffer, “William Beckford in Venice, Liminal City: The Pavilion and the Interminable Staircase”, in Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds. English Fantasies of Venice, ed. by Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff (Amsterdam – Atlanta (GA): Rodopi, 1999), p. 77. Shaffer, p. 79.

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to the East.13 Interestingly, however, this is not the only Italian city Beckford ‘Orientalizes’, as is proved by his description of the Duomo in Pisa: The capitals of the columns and carving of the architraves, as well as the form of the arches, are evidently of Grecian design, but Gothic proportions. The dome gives the mass an oriental appearance, which helped to bewilder me; in short, I have dreamt of such buildings, but little thought they existed.14

By conflating contrasting aesthetic categories such as Classical and Gothic, the hybrid architecture of the Duomo satisfied the eighteenth century taste for a dreamlike variety and unpredictability, for contamination and excess, that also gave rise to a new pictorial genre – the capriccio. Beckford’s pictorial attitude also marks his view of Pisa’s Campo Santo, culminating in a passage where the word caprice is explicitly mentioned, “The place is neither sad, nor solemn; the arches are airy; the pillars light; and there is so much caprice, such an exotic look in the whole scene, that, without any violent effort of imagination, one might imagine one’s self in fairy land.” The transition from a realistic to a visionary mode of perception is by now complete and seems to coincide with the utter ‘Orientalization’ of the Tuscan city: Not an animal appeared in the streets, except five camels laden with water, stalking along a range of garden walls, and pompous mansions, with an awning before every door. We were obliged to follow their steps, at least, a quarter of a mile, before we reached our inn. Ice was the first thing I sought after, and when I had swallowed an unreasonable portion, I began not to think quite so much of the deserts of Africa, as the heat and the camels had induced me, a moment ago.15

Since Beckford does not offer any explanation to account for this unexpected parade of camels we might imagine that in this passage reality is definitely overcome by imagination, but it suffices to read Hester Lynch Piozzi’s account of her journey to Italy in 1784 to realise that truth is stranger than fiction, “I have been this morning to look at the Grand Duke’s camels, which he keeps in his park as we do deer in England. There were a hundred and sixteen of them, pretty creatures! And they breed very well here, and live quite at their ease, only housing them the winter months.”16 Although Beckford’s Pisan camels suprisingly correspond to a matter of fact account of the local fauna, in the subsequent chapters of his travelogue 13

14 15 16

Venice was not only the hometown of Marco Polo and the Western terminal of the silk road (the ancient trade route that linked China to Europe), but also the seaport from which pilgrims to Jerusalem embarked on their journey, not to mention the extent of the city’s Eastern Mediterranean dominions. Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, p. 166. Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, p. 168. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey Through France, Italy, and Germany, ed. by Herbert Barrows (Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1967), p. 176.

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reality and imagination coalesce to form something that was probably hitherto unattempted by travel writers – an amalgam of external and inner impressions that turns Italy into a country of the mind, a place of escape and a land of desire. This process reaches its climax in Beckford’s description of Rome, where the British traveller imagines turning Saint Peter’s into a personal palace of pleasure, a retreat from the outer world, a self-contained temple of aesthetic sensations where the writer might spend his whole life in the company of a dear friend. This fantasy of self-fulfilment through the senses is characteristically mediated by an Orientalist mode of perception, since Saint Peter’s is likened by Beckford to the Chinese palace of Emperor Ki, “which was twice as large as St. Peter’s (if we may credit the gran annals) and lighted alone by tapers; for, his imperial majesty, being tired of the sun, would absolutely have a new firmament of his own creation, and an artificial day. Was it not a rare fantastic idea?”17 Beckford’s whimsical re-invention of Saint Peter’s as a luxurious abode, not dissimilar from Vathek’s palace of the five senses or from the Gothick folly of Fonthill Abbey, may be linked to what Graham describes as a recurring pattern in Beckford’s fiction, a grotto in the centre of the Earth, where “Magically sequestered from his world and his time, Beckford in his dream-vision may fulfill his longings.”18 As we have seen, Beckford’s frequent comparisons between Italy and exotic places, distant in space and often in time, have the primary function of intensifying the otherness of the Italian scenes. This process had an essentially escapist value for Beckford, but it was also used by other writers with a mixture of desire and diffidence. The history of the Britons’ centurieslong love affair with Venice has been explored in several insightful critical works.19 We all know how important Venice was as a site of erotic transgressions and imaginative projections20 and we also know how

17

18

19

20

Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, p. 193. Shaffer analyses the passage I quoted as an instance of Beckford’s deliberate tendency to violate “sacred spaces”. See Shaffer, pp. 77-79. Graham, Introduction to Beckford, Vathek with The Episodes of Vathek, p. 37. A case in point is the “Palace of Subterranean Fire” – where “true friends can frolic together in perfect rapture” – in “The History of the Two Princes and Friends, Alasi and Firouz”. See Beckford, Vathek with The Episodes of Vathek, p. 183. It suffices to mention Tony Tanner’s Venice Desired (1992) and Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds. English Fantasies of Venice (1999), ed. by Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff. As Shaffer writes, “Venice was at the centre of Beckford’s imaginative life, second only to Fonthill itself. It was the place where he seems decisively to have crossed over into a world of the illicit which he both feared and embraced.” Shaffer, p. 73.

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influential Beckford’s travelogue was for 19th century travellers, albeit in its 1834 revised version.21 My contention, however, is that the so-called textual attitude Said analyses – that is to say the tendency to approach a distant reality by means of texts that describe it, prefiguring the traveller’s experience and exorcising, in Said’s words, “the disorientations of direct encounters with the human”22 – is a phenomenon which does not simply concern the Western approach to the East, but also the European approach to intra-European differences. We all know how important travelogues and other kinds of texts have always been in shaping travellers’ impressions, but I wish to underline an interesting element in the development of this symbolic geography. While at the beginning of the 18th century the main interpretive key to Italy was still the Roman antiquity – as is proved by texts like Joseph Addison’s Remarks (1705) or Thomas Gray’s correspondence – in the course of the century the Orient itself became a touchstone for Italy, inviting us to reassess the terms of the binary opposition between West and East and to acknowledge a complex set of interchanges.

Italianising India In order to verify how permeable the symbolic border between West and East is in travel literature, let us now move on to British travelogues on India. First of all, I wish to acknowledge that I was inspired to explore this field by an anthology edited by Indira Ghose – Memsahibs Abroad. Writings by Women Travellers in Nineenth Century India (1998). Reading this text I realised how interesting the perspective of 19th century British lady travellers was, for the 21

22

This tendency to ‘Orientalize’ Italy survived well into the 19th century. In the 1870s, for instance, an American expatriate like Henry James still compared the Pope to “some inaccessible idol in its shrine” and likened the Roman carnival to “some public orgy in ancient Babylon”. Henry James, Italian Hours, ed. by John Auchard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 124, 137. We should not forget that the 19th century is also “the century of cosmopolitism”, that is to say of cultural hybridisation, as James Fenimore Cooper remarks while describing his visit to Florence, “I met at a soirée, lately, besides a proper sprinkling of Tuscans, and Italians from the other parts of Italy, French, Swiss, Germans from half a dozen states, English, Russians, Greeks, Americans from several different countries, Dutch, an Algerine, an Egyptian, and a Turk. There were in addition, sundry adventurers from the islands of the Mediterranean. This is the age of cosmopolitism, real or pretended; and Florence, just at this moment, is an epitome both of its spirit and of its representatives.” James Fenimore Cooper, Gleanings in Europe. Italy, ed. by John Conron and Constance Ayers Denne (Albany: State U of New York P, 1981), p. 23. Said, p. 93.

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roles women played within the Imperial machine were less ‘specialised’ than those of their male counterparts, allowing them more time and freedom for aesthetic appreciation and cultural understanding. Female travelogues on India reflect – as Ghose underlines – the aesthetic categories that influenced the discourse of travel in Europe, from the picturesque to the sublime and the romantic. What Ghose also makes clear is the negative impact Evangelicalism had on the travellers’ perspective in the course of the 19th century, substituting a disdainful attitude towards ‘heathen’ societies for the sympathy and curiosity that had marked the early generation of travellers.23 Emma Roberts still belongs to this early period, since her popular Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society was published in 1835. I will use her text to explore a phenomenon which is related – albeit by contrast – to the Orientalist view of Italy. My contention is that British travellers, in need of terms of comparison to relate the otherness of India to the cultural background of their British readers, took advantage of the Italian ‘metaphor’ as a sort of middle ground between West and East, also by virtue of the ambiguous position Italy had within the symbolic geography of Europe. Being short of aesthetic categories to describe Indian architecture to her British public, Roberts not only repeatedly uses the adjective Gothic but also compares Benares to Venice, due to the synchretism of styles that marks both cities: The florid ornaments of wood and stone profusely spread over the fronts of the dwellinghouses, bring to mind recollections of Venice, which Benares resembles in some other particulars; one or two of the lofty narrow streets being connected by covered passages not very unlike that far-famed Bridge of Sighs.24

The impressions of Italy mingle in the traveller’s mind with a series of literary references, and to render the intense emotions she felt in Agra Roberts compares them to Lord Byron’s attitude to Venice, with the following result: Perhaps Lord Byron himself, when he stood upon the Bridge of Sighs, his heart swelling with reminiscences of Othello, Shylock, and Pierre, scarcely experienced more overwhelming sensations than the humble writer of this paper, when gazing, for the first time, upon the golden crescent of the Moslems, blazing high in the fair blue heavens, from the topmost pinnacle of this splendid relique of their power and pride. The delights of my childhood rushed to my soul, those magic tales, from which, rather than from the veritable

23

24

See Indira Ghose, Introduction to Memsahibs Abroad. Writings by Women Travellers in Nineteenth Century India, ed. by Indira Ghose (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998), p. 7. Emma Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society, 3 vols (London: Wm. H. Allen and Co, 1835), I, p. 226.

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pages of history, I had gathered my knowledge of eastern arts and arms, arose in all their original vividness. I felt that I was indeed in the land of genii25.

While in the case of Byron the magic of Venice is enhanced by cultural referents like the works of Shakespeare and Thomas Otway, Roberts’s aesthetic pleasure is heightened by her youthful reading of the Arabian Nights.26 Further examples of this hybridisation between India and Italy can be found in Fanny Parkes’s Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (1850), where one reads “With the Neapolitan saying ‘Vedi Napoli, e poi mori’ I beg leave to differ entirely, and would rather offer this advice – ‘See the Taj Mahal, and then – see the Ruins of Delhi.’”27 The writer also compares the fronts of the palaces in Lucknow to those of the palaces in Naples and Rome,28 while Julia Charlotte Maitland likens the confusion of people and goods in the streets of Bangalore to the impression one experiences when landing in Naples.29 Moreover, these travelogues provide various examples of the proximity catholics and ‘heathens’ had in the eyes of Britons. While Maitland draws a parallel between a religious ceremony conducted by Bramins and “a Roman Catholic mass”,30 Parkes represents the street market in Landowr as the site of an unforeseen contamination between Italy and India, “Many years ago, a curious little rosary had been brought me from the santa casa of our Lady of Loretto – a facsimile of the little curiosity was lying for sale in the Landowr bazaar, amongst a lot of Hindustani shoes!”31 These travellers evoked Italy in order to bridge the gap between the British cultural background and the disconcerting otherness of India, thereby betraying the instability of the border between East and West. Instead of a binary model, their comparisons imply a more complex interplay, a progressive shading from one geo-cultural position to another. On the one 25 26

27

28 29

30 31

Roberts, II, pp. 300-301. “The reader of Eastern romance may here realize his dreams of fairy land, and contemplate those wondrous scenes so faithfully delineated in the brilliant pages of the Arabian Nights.” Ibid., Vol. II, p. 295. Needless to say, Roberts’ account is a further example of what Said describes as textual attitude, i.e. the tendency to rely on books when “a human being confronts at close quarters something relatively unknown and threatening and previously distant.” Said, p. 93. Fanny Parkes, Begums, Thugs and White Mughals (First published as Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, during four-and-twenty years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the Zenana (London: Sickle Moon Books, 2002), p. 311. See Parkes, p. 111. See Julia Charlotte Maitland, Letters from Madras, during the years 1839-39, by a Lady (London: John Murray, 1843), p. 290, in Memsahibs Abroad, ed. by Indira Ghose, p. 41. Maitland, p. 159, in Memsahibs Abroad, ed. by Indira Ghose, p. 83. Parkes, p. 329.

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hand this rhetorical strategy paved the way for a fuller aesthetic appraisal of Indian civilisation, which was thereby linked to the hub of European art and civilisation. On the other it reasserted the dual and stereotyped role Italy had played within the cultural and symbolic order of Europe at least from the Renaissance – as the cradle of European civilisation and also as an exotic place, the land of romance and misrule, notably in the eyes of travellers coming from Protestant and Anglican countries, whose approach revealed a mixture of suspicion and desire. In conclusion, Meridionism and Orientalism jointly call into question the notion of a stable geographic border between West and East, inviting us to trace a more complex symbolic map of the world and to acknowledge the existence of connective spaces, such as Italy, which work as thresholds within this network of cultural exchanges.

Bibliography Addison, Joseph, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy in the Years 1701, 1702, 1703, in The Works, ed. by Richard Hurd (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890), 6 vols., I, pp. 354-538. Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, ed. by Robert L. Mack (Oxford – New York: Oxford UP, 1995). Beckford, William, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, ed. by Robert J. Gemmett (Rutherford – Madison – Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1971). Beckford, William, Vathek with The Episodes of Vathek, ed. by Kenneth W. Graham (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview P, 2001). Billi, Mirella, “The Impact of Italy on Beckford’s Taste, Aesthetics and Literary Style”, in The Beckford Society. Annual Lectures 2000-2003, ed. by Jon Millington (The Beckford Society, 2004), pp. 67-88. Cooper, James Fenimore, Gleanings in Europe. Italy, ed. by John Conron and Constance Ayers Denne (Albany: State U of New York P, 1981). The Fatal Gift of Beauty. The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam – Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996). Gray, Thomas, Correspondence, ed. by Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1971), 3 vols. James, Henry, Italian Hours, ed. by John Auchard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). Memsahibs Abroad. Writings by Women Travellers in Nineteenth Century India, ed. by Indira Ghose (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998).

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Parkes, Fanny, Begums, Thugs and White Mughals (First published as Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, during four-andtwenty years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the Zenana, 1850) (London: Sickle Moon Books, 2002). Piozzi, Hester Lynch, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey Through France, Italy, and Germany, ed. by Herbert Barrows (Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1967). Roberts, Emma, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society (London: Wm. H. Allen and Co, 1835), 3 vols. Said, Edward W., Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003). Tanner, Tony, Venice Desired (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992). Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds. English Fantasies of Venice, ed. by Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff (Amsterdam – Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999).

Graham Dawson

The ‘Ulster’-Irish Border, Protestant Imaginative Geography and Cultural Memory in the Irish Troubles Ireland today is partitioned by an international border. Established by the Government of Ireland Act enacted in 1920 by the then-unitary state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, initially this divided the British jurisdiction over Ireland as a whole into two administrative zones, each with devolved powers: a twenty-six county ‘Southern Ireland’ centred on Dublin, and a six-county Northern Ireland’ centred on Belfast. The administrative boundary between these devolved jurisdictions was transformed into an international border as a result of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The Treaty ended the Irish War of Independence 1919-21 and brought into existence an effectively independent Irish Free State (later to become the Republic of Ireland) in the ‘southern’ jurisdiction. It also formalised the partition of Ireland in the form of a constitutional “exclusion”, enabling a six-county statelet of Northern Ireland, or ‘Ulster’, to opt out of the new Free State and remain within the UK.1 International borders constitute real geopolitical divisions between states and peoples, but they also have powerful shaping effects upon the subjective identities, meanings and memories that become attached to and invested in the objective, physical spaces of the social world. Edward Said coined the concept of “imaginative geography” to describe the process of setting up “boundaries in our own minds” between “a familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space beyond ‘ours’ which is ‘theirs’.” For Said, imaginative geography is intrinsic to the formation of collective identities that are defined against the other: “‘they’ become ‘they’ accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from ‘ours’.”2 Within such “mental boundaries”, according to Peter Read, “layers of meaning” become ascribed to a place, and emotional attachments are built up and deepened over time, in memories of social life.3 These constitute “senses of belonging” that 1

2 3

Ged Martin, “The Origins of Partition”, in The Irish Border: History, Politics, Culture, ed. by Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), pp. 57-111. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 54. Peter Read, Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 2, 7-8.

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define and (potentially) exclude those others who are perceived to inhabit a different imaginative world composed of other remembered associations and attachments.4 However, imaginative geographies do not always align neatly with social and political boundaries. Read suggests the concept of “contested attachment” to describe how “rivals [...] dispute not only physical possession but others’ rights of emotional attachment to the same place”; a contest produced by “wider issues of power, group dynamics, conflicting ideologies and institutions”.5 The establishment of borders demarcating the extent of territory and its human populations over which a state claims jurisdiction, and associated conflicts over nationality, sovereignty, and the rights of minorities, are thus fundamental to the formation of “boundaries in our own minds”. The concept of imaginative geography points to the interconnections between these cultural and political processes and the psychic and emotional dimensions of attachment and identification; between, that is, the boundaries of states and communities in social space, and the borders of psychic space in the minds of the women and men whose lives are shaped by such demarcations. Since its inception, the Border that split Ireland in two has been politically controversial and violently contested. For Irish nationalists, the Border represented an unacceptable division of the sovereignty and territory of the newly independent Irish state. For most Ulster Unionists, the Border established a defensive bulwark guaranteeing the separation of a small section of territory and preserving its constitutional connection to Britain: the Union. The six-county ‘Ulster’ was constructed specifically to sustain the Union within the largest viable territory where Protestants and Unionists – a minority of 1:3 in Ireland as a whole – could establish a permanent 2:1 majority, and thereby maintain political, economic and cultural domination, over a Catholic, nationalist minority.6 The complex patterns of local settlement prevailing throughout the north of Ireland, in which the Catholic and Protestant populations lived in a “patchwork” of largely endogamous but “inextricably mixed” areas, meant that the Border could not align these political communities neatly each within its preferred state.7 Rather, it severed both of them in two. As Joe Lee puts it: “Partition had long existed in the mind. Now it existed on the map. But what a map! The geographical boundaries did not attempt to follow the mental boundaries.”8

4 5 6 7 8

Read, p. 3. Read, pp. xi, 236, 2. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912 - 85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1-4. Martin, pp. 83, 86-7. Lee, p. 45.

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This essay explores aspects of the Protestant imaginative geography of this ‘Ulster’ – Irish Border, investigating its significance, particularly for the Ulster Protestants who live beside it ‘at the edge of the Union’, but also for the Protestant communities on the other side. It focuses on the relation of past, present and place in these Protestant communities, as manifest in their cultural memories that have helped to constitute the Border as an imaginative location of a particular kind. The analysis examines cultural memories of the partition itself and of the Troubles that erupted again in 1969 with a specific intensity in the ‘Border counties’ of Northern Ireland, and considers ways in which imaginative geography is involved in psychic, cultural and political reparation in the context of the peace process begun in 1994. Partition had a profound impact on the Protestant and Unionist communities of the original nine-county province of Ulster. In the three socalled “lost counties” of Ulster – Monaghan, Donegal and Cavan – some 70,000 Protestants constituting on average between 18 – 25 per cent of the population (and up to 40 per cent in pockets), found themselves in 1920 divided from their co-religionists and fellow Ulster Unionists, and subsequently incorporated in 1922 into the new Irish Free State.9 ‘Three Counties’ Protestants suffered decline in their economic prosperity, political power, and the cohesion of their culture, the loss of their British citizenship and Unionist political identity, and a profound “sense of betrayal and desertion” at the breaking of the Solemn League and Covenant (signed in 1912 by 250,000 Ulster Protestants who pledged “to stand by one another in defending [...] our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom”) by their colleagues on the Ulster Unionist Council.10 In the Six Counties, substantial populations of Protestants living along the southern and western extremities of Counties Armagh, Fermanagh and Tyrone, and the north-west edge of Co. Londonderry, found themselves inhabitants of what had become the Border region of Northern Ireland.11 This complex relation of Protestants and Unionists to the Border is not widely remembered, primarily due to the latter’s function as the political and ideological focal point of post-partition ‘Ulster’-Protestant identity. The unequivocal demand for its preservation has been the bedrock of Unionist and loyalist politics ever since the Northern state was created. This structural

9

10

11

Martin, pp. 84-5; Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland: The Orange State (London: Pluto, 1980), p. 24; Terence Dooley, The Plight of the Monaghan Protestants, 1912-26 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), p. 11. Dooley, pp. 37-40, 51-5 (p. 37); R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 466-7; David Fitzpatrick, The Two Irelands 1912-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 139-40. Lee, p. 2; Martin, pp. 84-96.

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and institutional significance has shaped the imaginative geography of the Border as a defensive bulwark, likened at partition by British administrators to the North-West Frontier of India, that was established and fortified to defend the separate existence of Northern Ireland in the context of the armed conflict of 1919-22.12 Over the next forty years, a form of Ulster nationbuilding took place in what was seen as “a Protestant state” that maintained “Protestant supremacy over Catholics even in predominantly Catholic areas”.13 Unionists engaged in “a retreat from a sense of Irishness and the development of a heightened sense of British identity”,14 predicated on the bulwark of the Border which demarcated the territory of the Irish and Catholic other. The continuing significance of the imposition of the Border at the moment of partition for identity-formation among Border Protestants in Northern Ireland can be gauged by the tendency of older people to refer to the Republic of Ireland, after more than half a century of its existence, as “the Free State” (which ceased to exist constitutionally in 1937). Leslie Finlay from the West Tyrone Border, whose parents were both “born British” in Donegal, explains that “they became Southern Irish citizens overnight by a stroke of the pen. [...] Britain handed over Donegal and the other twenty-five counties – to them. To the Free State government. And we always called it the Free State [...] that was the ould people’s way that’s coming through.”15 Felicity McCartney remembers how: “My mother was from South Armagh and the friends and neighbours we visited there often walked across [the Border] for cheap butter and some had farms which straddled the Border [...] I was amused at the way my mother and her cronies, County Armagh protestants, talked about people from ‘away up in the Free State’ as if it were a thousand miles instead of only four!”16 A further index of these complex shifts in belonging structured by the Border was the “unprecedented flight” of Protestants from the Free State area (where the minority population declined by one third from 1911 to 1926, due to Republican violence among other factors), into Fortress Ulster.17 In Co. Monaghan, a 23 per cent decline resulted from the high rate of Protestant migration into the North, particularly to the Border area of Co. Fermanagh,

12 13 14

15 16

17

Martin, p. 85; Farrell, pp. 21-80. Lord Craigavon, quoted in Farrell, p. 92; Lee, p. 46. Brian Walker, Dancing to History’s Tune: History, Myth and Politics in Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1996), p. 119. Leslie Finlay, interviewed 27/3/2000. Felicity McCartney, in The Border: Personal Reflections from Ireland, North and South, ed. by Paddy Logue (Dublin: Oak Tree Press, 1999), pp. 86-9 (p. 87). Kurt Bowen, Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1983), p. 24.

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where numerous descendants of these migrants still live.18 The cultural memory of this migration and the wider effects of partition on Three Counties Protestants has been rendered largely private and invisible, and its history is still to be written. For the Monaghan writer, Darach MacDonald, this is because “it doesn’t fit any of the constructions”: these people are “not ‘Southern Unionists’, but Ulster Unionists cut off from Ulster”; inhabitants of a historical grey area in a context where, due to the polarising effects of partition, historical experience is represented as “either orange or green”.19 The Orange Standard, newspaper of the Protestant Orange Order, provides one of the few arenas where the migration has been remembered publicly. Orange Lodges in the North with names like the “Rising Sons of County Monaghan and County Cavan” were “founded by brethren expelled from the South”. The “fate of the southern Unionists” is a central theme in Orange cultural memory. This contrasts the North, where the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was defeated by “firm government” and the “military presence along the border”, to the South where a “pogrom against Protestants” took place during the “terrible summer of 1922”, causing “thousands of Orange and loyalist families” to flee north. Orange historians interpret this “pogrom”, together with an assault on British culture and the “symbols of British rule”, as a cultural war to drive the Protestant and loyalist people out of Southern Ireland, with lessons for the North.20 The Ulster Unionist politician, Raymond Ferguson, points out that: “The stories that travelled with these immigrants reinforced the Protestant folklore and bolstered the political imperative of separation from the south”; while another Fermanagh Unionist, Arlene Foster, suggests that the decline in the Protestant population of the South is the basis of “a fear that lives here [in Northern Ireland], especially in Border counties”.21 These fears were reactivated after 1969 in the war between a renascent IRA and the British state that underpinned Ulster Unionism, over the continuing existence of Northern Ireland. The Border areas of the Northern Counties Armagh, Fermanagh, and Tyrone were transformed into some of the most violent locations of the war as the IRA, using the territory of the Irish Republic as a ‘safe haven’, launched attacks on British Crown forces, many of whom were locally recruited Protestants serving in the Ulster Defence

18

19

20 21

Dooley, pp. 47-8; Raymond Ferguson, “Locality and Political Tradition”, in Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland: Varieties of Britishness, ed. by Maurna Crozier (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1990), pp. 40-5 (p. 43). Darach MacDonald, interviewed 31/7/2001. See his historical novel, The Sons of Levi (Monaghan: Drumlin Press, 1998). Orange Standard, May 1990. p. 8; August 1992, p. 15; and see also Nov. 1992, p. 8. Ferguson, p. 43; Arlene Foster, interviewed 29/7/1999.

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Regiment (UDR) or the Royal Ulster Constabulary; and on the farms, businesses and cultural institutions of the Border communities where they lived and worked. This has been experienced as an attack on Protestant belongingness in Ireland.22 The fear and risk involved in living close to the Border figures prominently in Protestant cultural memory of the Troubles and in many personal life stories, like that of “Edward Gordon”, a UDR soldier, who tells of two attacks on the family farm near Pettigo, Co. Fermanagh: “The farm actually came down to the very Border. Along the river. [...I]t was so handy – that’s why I was got.” Personal memories also testify to the violation of the private space of the home that often characterised these attacks. “Mrs Gordon”, who was nearly killed, recalls how “they shot into the kitchen”. She links this personal experience to a wider atmosphere of pervasive danger threatening the local Protestant and Unionist community as a whole: “It was a hard time, back then down this end of the country. [...] It was all around.”23 The Border itself became the site of particular kinds of terror practised by the IRA, including the dumping of bodies of executed victims on Border roads, sometimes wired to a booby-trap bomb; and the use of ‘human bombs’ – kidnapped victims forced to drive vehicles loaded with explosives – to attack the British Army’s Border checkpoints.24 Such events had a powerful psychic impact on the entire local Protestant community, and significant numbers of them responded to this atmosphere of fear and threat by moving away into safer towns frequently just a few miles “inland”:25 an expression that itself captures the experience of the Border as an absolute frontier, like a shoreline. Ulster-Protestant imaginative geography of the Border is infused with the qualities of this collective psychic reality, a compound of the collective fear, loss, anger and traumatic disturbance induced in Border-Protestant communities by the IRA campaign.26 Knowledge of what has happened here,

22

23

24

25 26

Graham Dawson, “Ulster-British Identity and the Cultural Memory of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ on the Northern Ireland Border”, in History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain, ed. by Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), pp. 356-71. “Mr E. and Mrs G. Gordon” (pseudonyms), in FEAR Fermanagh Ltd, Research Document and Development Plan (n.p. : [1997]), ‘Personal Stories’ section (unnumbered). See, for example, Toby Harnden, ‘Bandit Country’: The IRA and South Armagh (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), pp. 197-225; Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men and Women who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles, ed. by David McKittrick and others (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishers, 1999), no. 341 (James Elliott), p. 178; Susan McKay, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2000), pp. 227-8. Orange Standard, March 1993, p. 7; FEAR, p. 12. Dawson, pp. 361-5.

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at any particular site of violence, in ‘the past’, is carried or seared unforgettably in the living memory of those affected; as well as inscribed upon the familiar places of a local landscape. Joan Bullock was one of those Protestants who continued to live with her family throughout the Troubles in their cottage beside the bridge across the River Woodford at Aghalane, which marks the Fermanagh/Cavan Border near Belturbet. In 1997, she gave Henry McDonald a “terror tour” of incidents that occurred in the immediate vicinity of her home: The bridge was blown up by loyalist paramilitaries. It was used by the IRA to cross over from Cavan in the South to launch attacks in Fermanagh. Just here, 50 yards from the house, is where the IRA placed claymore mines to kill soldiers on patrol. Up there is what’s left of the sign over the garage my husband Storey and his brother used to own. It was blown up after my brother-in-law spoke on the BBC about Tommy’s murder.27

The most serious of these incidents had occurred in September 1972, when her husband’s cousins were shot dead by the IRA at their home-farm at Killynick, a mile away. A neighbour, who “saw a car full of men going towards the border”, described the scene in the farmhouse as “a shambles”.28 Joan Bullock’s son, Simon, a baby at the time, remembers his father telling him the stories of these events,29 figuring a local landscape of memory, invisible to outsiders. The sense of intense psychic disturbance evoked in the stories of horror and loss told by Border Protestants, that in many cases has persisted without dissipating over many years – such that “to this day I haven’t got over it and probably never will”30 – is a hallmark of traumatic experience. The critical literature on trauma emphasises its quality of ‘freezing’ the ordinary processes of remembering and forgetting, such that those who have suffered a traumatic episode remain attached to an internal landscape formed in the past, and experience difficulties in integrating it psychically with other parts of the self and new circumstances.31 Emotionally, this involves the construction of a defensive border that divides one part of the psyche from another to preserve “a safer space, a retreat”; a process known in psychoanalysis as “dissociation” or “splitting”.32 These psychic discontinuities are projected into the

27 28 29 30 31

32

Quoted in Henry McDonald, “Families return to the farms of sorrow”, Observer, 2/11/1997. Lost Lives, no. 602 (Thomas Bullock), p. 267. McKay, p. 234. “Mr Gordon” in FEAR. Selma Leydesdorff and others, “Introduction: Trauma and Life Stories”, in Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors, ed. by Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff and Graham Dawson (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2004), pp. 1-26 (pp. 13-14). Susan Rose, “Naming and Claiming: The Integration of Traumatic Experience and the Reconstruction of Self in Survivors’ Stories of Sexual Abuse”, in Trauma, pp. 160-79 (p.

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social world, demarcating sites of trauma from the places of everyday life. As part of her “terror tour”, Joan Bullock took McDonald to visit the nearby house where her husband’s cousins were killed and which had remained “empty and untouched”33 ever since: The bullet holes over the door [...] are still there. The peeling white and flower-patterned paper clings to the wall of an upstairs bedroom. Faded copies of the Daily Mirror, jaundiced by years of damp, stick out of cupboards and drawers. Their reports tell of internment in Ulster and the war in Vietnam.

Since the family believed the killings to be part of an IRA strategy to drive Protestants away from Border areas, “no-one from the family has dared move into the house”. The unused farmhouse itself, along with the memories of what happened here twenty-five years ago, had both been “frozen in time”.34 Psychic splitting and its associated ‘freezing’ of the past is both exacerbated by and contributes to the breaking of connections and links in the social and political world. For Border Protestants in the North, a sense of isolation and disconnection from wider social networks, of being peripheral and marginalised, has stemmed from the geography of their location. Hazlett Lynch, of the Border victims’ group Voice, from the West Tyrone Border, describes this area (only some sixty miles from Belfast) as “the most extreme western part of Northern Ireland [...] neglected and ignored [...F]olk here felt very much excluded, almost from Northern Ireland, because they were living right at the extremity of things.”35 This sense of isolation has been heightened by the Troubles. When McDonald visited Joan Bullock in 1997, he noted how the road ended abruptly at the bridge beside her cottage. This was one of the many Border roads (fifty out of a total of fifty-eight in Co. Fermanagh alone) closed or destroyed during the war in a defensive reinforcement of partition. Closed roads and crossings, and the heavily fortified military checkpoints on the few Approved Roads, transformed stretches of the Border into a landscape comparable to the Berlin Wall or “No Man’s Land during World War I.”36 This further compounded the difficulties of maintaining cross-border contacts stemming from partition, since when, for example, Protestant congregations have been divided from their church or chapel.37 After the Aghalane bridge had been destroyed by loyalists to prevent IRA

33 34 35 36

37

167). See also Graham Dawson, “The Imaginative Geography of Masculine Adventure”, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 39 (1996), 27-45. McKay, p. 235. McDonald, Observer. Hazlett Lynch, interviewed 27/3/2000. Oistin MacBride, “The Roads to Nowhere”, Irish American Magazine (May/June 1993), 504 (pp. 50, 52). Dooley, p. 54.

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incursions in 1972, the three-mile journey to Belturbet in the Republic now took forty-five minutes, and the Bullock family became “cut off from all the nearest neighbours”. Simon Bullock’s most distinct memories of childhood concerned the family’s isolation: “It was a major mission to go and hang out with your mates.”38 A process of cultural erosion has been further intensified by the sense of loss consequent on the decline of the Protestant population and its religious and social institutions in the Border settlements.39 In such a situation, the breaking of connections in social space may establish a vicious circle, contributing to psychic divisions that in turn may feed into continuing social disintegration. By the same token, the possibility of psychic reparation is mutually intertwined with the rebuilding of social and cultural connection and exchange across historic divides, as aspects of conflict resolution set in train by the peace process. Narratives of reparation have focused on themes of the return to lost places and the rebuilding of damaged places. Imagery of the ruined-but-repaired (or at least reparable) building has been deployed to symbolise processes of psychic restoration, reparation, and renewal emerging in response to psychic deathliness, destruction, and disintegration. During summer 1997, for example, in the context of a renewed IRA ceasefire and the commencement of multi-party peace talks, public interest was seized by stories of the possible return of displaced Border Protestants to restore their houses and farms abandoned some twenty-five years earlier.40 These motifs can also be identified with respect to the charged sites where killings took place. In 1997, new economic opportunities emerging through the peace process persuaded the Bullock family to renovate their empty farmhouse and make it habitable again.41 By 1999, as work neared completion and Joan Bullock planned imminently to move into the house, she showed around Susan McKay, who records that: “We entered by the back door, the way the gunmen came, and she described the murders. ‘However’, she said with a sigh, ‘that’s in the past now. It is a beautiful place, isn’t it?’”42 According to the psychoanalyst, Dori Laub: “Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion”, while psychic reparation requires survivors “to reassert the veracity of the past and to build anew its linkage to, and assimilation into,

38 39 40

41 42

McKay, p. 236. FEAR, p. 21. Impartial Reporter, 21/8/1997; Irish Times, 26/8/1997; Newsletter, 26/8/1997; Observer, 2/11/97; Irish News, 6/11/1997. McDonald, Observer. McKay, p. 235.

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present-day life”.43 When Joan Bullock is able to place her relatives’ killing “in the past”, the site of the “shambles” may be restored as once again a “beautiful place”, and life there can be resumed. The restoration of the damaged house and the resumption of everyday life within it, are at once the symbols of and the vehicles for a psychic reparation, in which the haunted place and the memory of the terrible events that occurred there, are reintegrated into a social reality that is no longer overshadowed by them. Reparative processes have also been set in motion through efforts towards the rebuilding of cross-border geographical and social links, initially by the reopening of closed Border crossings, which has transformed the conditions of everyday living for local communities. By 2001, when I visited the Fermanagh/Cavan Border, the opening up of “all European frontiers to free movement and trade” envisaged at the implementation of the Single European Market nine years earlier, had largely been achieved. I had taken my passport to cross on the former Approved Road from Enniskillen to Swanlinbar, but the British Army’s Border post and barrier at Mullan had been dismantled and by-passed by a wide, newly tarmaced main road, that skirted the ruins of the checkpoint hut. The Border here had vanished, to be replaced by a sign stating only “Welcome to Co. Cavan”. Twelve miles away, a new bridge at Aghalane, built with money from the European Union’s peace and reconciliation fund, was opened in 1999 “to carry the European highway into Belturbet”.44 For Simon Bullock, now able to go for a drink in the towns of Co. Cavan, the restored link to the South generated a new geographical consciousness: “It is like as if we were living on an island and we don’t know it. They speak with a different accent. [...] The towns are so different too. Our towns have been bombed and wrecked and rebuilt - theirs are so old-fashioned.”45 Emerging from the isolation of the war years to enter into new connections across the former divide, the places of everyday life appear strange and unrecognisable, bearing the marks of differential development in the communities north and south, engendered during twentyfive years of separation. However, some Protestants, like “Doreen” from the Fermanagh/Monaghan Border near Rosslea, have a more ambivalent response to the demilitarisation of the Border due to the peace process. While acknowledging that it had been “‘very inconvenient when the roads were blocked’ [...], she had been happier [and ‘felt safer’] when there were blocked 43

44 45

Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening”, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 57-74 (p. 69); Dori Laub, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival”, in Felman and Laub, pp. 75-92 (p. 76). McKay, p. 235. Quoted in McKay, p. 237.

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roads, barriers, checkpoints and soldiers in the army post”,46 in a visible manifestation of the Border’s traditional defensive function. A further reparative development in the course of the peace process has been the emergence of cross-border community-development projects focused on the specific needs of Protestant communities. In 1995, for example, Derry and Raphoe Action (DARA) was launched to work with “mainly rural Protestant communities in the counties of Londonderry, Tyrone and Donegal”. In 2001, DARA reported anxieties about the preservation of a distinct Protestant culture, including “fear of assimilation [... and] loss of identity”, among Donegal’s “silent minority” of 14,000 Protestants (now some 10 per cent of the county’s population), despite their clear identification as Irish, and good relations with the Catholic majority.47 For DARA, addressing these matters of faith, identity, and community in Co. Donegal involves the strengthening of “links between Protestants on both sides of the border”, and their “work[ing] together on social, economic, cultural and environmental issues”.48 These forward-looking alliances also involve Protestants and their Catholic neighbours in reparative remembering, an intrinsic part of peace-building that has generated new initiatives, such as the archive established by the Raphoe Reconciliation Project to enable “local people and visitors [...] to explore the historical roots of division and to create new bonds of friendship, reconciliation and community through discussion and dialogue”.49 Present-day Protestant cultural identity in the three ‘lost counties’ of ninecounty Ulster, and in the Border counties of Northern Ireland, cannot be understood, protected, or developed without an engagement with the troubled and divided histories of these Border-Protestant communities, and the complexity of their neglected and privatised cultural memories. These are not comfortable histories to address, nor is the polarised legacy of memory and identity instituted by the Border easy to negotiate. For all his involvement with cross-border development work, Derek Reaney, a community worker with DARA in Co. Tyrone, whose own grandfather moved into Northern Ireland from Co. Wicklow during the partition and “never again crossed the Border”, believes that:

46 47

48

49

Quoted in McKay, p. 227. Protestants in Community Life: Findings from a Co. Donegal Survey (Raphoe: Derry and Raphoe Action, June 2001); ‘Donegal’s silent majority’, Strabane Weekly News, 16/8/2001, <www.ulsternet-ni.co.uk/str3301/spages/SMAIN.htm> visited 30/7/2004. Derry and Raphoe Action page, Raphoe Reconciliation Project website, , visited 30/7/2001. Raphoe Reconciliation Project website, , visited 30/7/2001.

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The Border is a symbol for the problems in this island. Two different communities, two different peoples and two different cultures. [...] For those who are from a unionist position, the Border is a line in the sand [...I]f and when it disappears, it will remain in the hearts of men and women. Today that red line on the map is not just ink, it is blood, sacrificed in the name of peace and freedom and it will simply not disappear as easily as some would wish.50

This is a salutary reminder that, for the Protestant people of the Border areas, cultural memories of violent conflict are not erasable, but deeply inscribed within current imaginative geography, where subjectivities and senses of identity continue to be shaped, in often contradictory ways, by the psychic borders of partition.

Bibliography The Border: Personal Reflections from Ireland, North and South, ed. by Paddy Logue (Dublin: Oak Tree Press, 1999). Bowen, Kurt, Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1983). Dawson, Graham, “The Imaginative Geography of Masculine Adventure”, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 39 (1996), 27-45. —, “Ulster-British Identity and the Cultural Memory of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ on the Northern Ireland Border”, in History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain, ed. by Helen Brocklehurst, and Robert Phillips (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), pp. 356-71. Derry and Raphoe Action page, Raphoe Reconciliation Project website, (visited 30.07.2001). Dooley, Terence, The Plight of the Monaghan Protestants, 1912-26 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000). Farrell, Michael, Northern Ireland: The Orange State (London: Pluto, 1980). FEAR Fermanagh Ltd, Research Document and Development Plan (No place of publication, [1997]) Ferguson, Raymond, “Locality and Political Tradition”, in Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland: Varieties of Britishness, ed. by Maurna Crozier (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1990), pp. 40-5. Finlay, Leslie, Interviewed 27/3/2000. Fitzpatrick, David, The Two Irelands 1912-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Foster, Arlene, Interviewed 29/7/1999. Foster, R. F., Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1989). 50

Derek Reaney, in The Border, pp. 172-4.

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Harnden, Toby, “Bandit Country”: The IRA and South Armagh (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999). Impartial Reporter, 21/8/1997. Irish News, 6/11/1997. Irish Times, 26/8/1997. Laub, Dori, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival”, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 75-92. Laub, Dori, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening”, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 57-74. Lee, J.J., Ireland 1912 - 85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Leydesdorff, Selma and others, “Introduction: Trauma and Life Stories”, in Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors, ed. by Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff and Graham Dawson (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2004), pp.1-26. Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men and Women who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles, ed. by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishers, 1999). Lynch, Hazlett, Interviewed 27/3/2000. MacBride, Oistin, “The Roads to Nowhere”, Irish American Magazine. May/June 1993, 50-4 MacDonald, Darach. Interviewed 31/7/2001. —, The Sons of Levi (Monaghan: Drumlin Press, 1998). McKay, Susan,. Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2000). Martin, Ged, “The Origins of Partition”, in The Irish Border: History, Politics, Culture, ed. by Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), pp. 57-111. Newsletter, 26/8/1997. Observer, 2/11/1997. Orange Standard, May 1990; August 1992; Nov. 1992; March 1993. Protestants in Community Life: Findings from a Co. Donegal Survey (Raphoe: Derry and Raphoe Action, June 2001). Raphoe Reconciliation Project website, (visited 30. 07. 2001). Read, Peter, Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Rose, Susan, “Naming and Claiming: The Integration of Traumatic Experience and the Reconstruction of Self in Survivors’ Stories of Sexual

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Abuse”, in Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors, ed. by Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff and Graham Dawson (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2004), pp. 160-79. Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003). Strabane Weekly News, 16/8/2001. Walker, Brian, Dancing to History’s Tune: History, Myth and Politics in Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1996).

Jola Škulj

Cultural Spaces in Border Territories Cultural spaces located at the crossroads of cultures, from remote periods and modern ones, are exemplary dialogic. How can the complex reality of cultural life behind the borderland literature be comprehended? How can the semiosphere that grounds the cultural reality of the literature in such territories be explained? The semiosphere is a notion invented by Lotman and defined as “the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages”,1 and as “that synchronic semiotic space which fills the borders of culture, without which separate semiotic systems cannot function or come into being”.2 In cases of borderland literatures the semiosphere is certainly different and its complexity calls for critical re-examination now more than ever, when literary studies employ ground-breaking methodologies aware of the need to overcome totalizing insights and concepts. The semiosphere does not overlap with the notion of cultural code, nor with the view of national literature, and particularly not in the case of cultures in border territories. How can we consider (and evaluate) the semiotic space of Slovenian cultural existence and the effects of its shifting realities through history if we agree that culture in borderlands creates “its own type of internal organization” and also “its own type of external disorganization”?3 Cultural spaces are semiotic realities which through their historical existence unfold the indeterminate and unpredictable role of the processes that remodel them. Being the land forming a border or frontier also in a cultural sense, implies an uncertain, intermediate district, space, or condition; but at the same time, the boundaries operate as a mechanism of semiotic (cultural) individuation. The boundary is a zone of semiotic polyglotism, which both separates and unites; it represents the co-existence of differences, an encouraging meeting point of ongoing cultural contradictions, and of confronting incongruent traditions. At boundaries, semiotic space transposes otherness and authorizes the one’s won cultural potential to articulate the self in intersection with others. At boundaries the ever-shifting processes of cultural spaces are intensified. As a site of exchanges, borderland territory maintains the semiosphere in a state of

1

2 3

Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1990), p. 23. Lotman, p. 3. Lotman, p. 142.

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creative ferment. As a border zone artistic experience of coupling and mixing different cultures, Slovenian cultural space openly—though probably unconsciously—embraced an idea of the extreme edge of the semiosphere as a site of incessant dialogue. Its best founding literary texts and “mythic” figures bear witness to how Slovenian cultural space willingly acknowledged otherness as an open set, and identified it as an eloquent image to activate the economy of its own cultural (and nation’s) survival. But was not it paradoxically at the same time an obstruction to its own recognizable self? To consider textual memory as a history of borderland territory more effectively (i.e. to read well the memory in texts as semiotic storage) two points in question are to be detailed: first, the nature (or identity) of culture in borderland territory; and second, the culture as facts in a given semiosphere.

1. On the Nature of Culture in Borderland Territory, and on Identity Issues Histories of literatures and cultures in borderlands (as well as border-crossing regions) testify to the presence of numerous multilingual residues and surviving traces of contacts. The multilingual nature of these areas in earlier periods and, simultaneously, the incidence of diverse interests (political, economic, cultural) on the territory, with disparities in philosophies (or in sets of principles) behind language differences, certainly empower the invention of a borderland cultural identity (as well as a political and economic one) through a different profile. Such cultures are not only defined by establishing their existence dialogically through their past cultural relations; they are also, as far as the features of their identities are concerned, much more essentially grounded in dialogism. The cultural sense of self, providing distinctiveness and continuity in its cultural existence over time, is in such places certainly much more alert to establishing itself on a solid basis. The realisation of a cultural self in a border region is a responsive act. (Slovenia is good example: its national identity was long accomplished through cultural pursuits as a substitute for a state and economic sovereignty.) In border regions dialogism is a basic need: it is a philosophy and a way of life. Dialogue is not just a simple instrument foregrounding cultural identity; it is a more or less deep-seated structure. To understand better the invention of borderland identities Derrida’s note on invention is quite helpful. He argues that it “distributes its two essential values between two poles: the constative – discovering or unveiling, pointing out or saying what is – and the performative –

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producing, instituting, transforming”.4 Concerning the invention of cultural identity and the scenarios of a nation’s being, the first value focuses on the Self in its very presence, in the state of being present-at-hand (as things are), identity as sameness (Latin: idem) and the second, the performative value which implies “producing, [ongoing event of] instituting, transforming”, brings into focus the self as self-ness, identity as selfhood (Latin: ipse)5. Performative value focuses on the self in a pragmatic relation, involving (the interests of) the co-existing other. Selfhood is, to quote Heidegger, “one of the existentials which belong to the mode of being of Dasein” and “to the same sphere of problems belong such concepts as being-in-the-world, care, being-with, etc.”6 Specificity in the constitution of borderland culture can be found in its innate experience of cultural otherness, in its approval of the reality of differences, in its recognition and respect for the existence of the other. Borderland cultural identity is grounded in the acknowledgement of the validity of the gap between the self and the otherness of the other. Dialogue is its primary constituent, the very mode of its existence. Its mode of being involves its open-ended identity. In borderland literatures, the self is in responsive and interested dialogic relation with otherness, and the other is accepted as a distinct, individual entity. The hetero-cultural experience in-

4

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Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other”, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. by Peggy Kamuf (London: Harvester, 1991), p. 206. The distinction between two different kinds of identity is elaborated in Ricoeur’s view on the issue in his article “Identité narrative”, first published in Esprit, 1988. He discussed the idea a few years after his main work Temps et récit (1983-5) was published and it was printed in English translation as “Narrative identity” together with revised and reworked papers of a Warwick Workshop in Continental Philosophy organized in 1986, where Ricoeur was among the participants. Being aware of the considerable difficulties attached to the question of identity as such Ricoeur intervened in it and put forward the thesis that “the concept of narrative identity offers a solution to the aporias of personal identity”. On Paul Ricoeur. Narrative and Interpretation, ed. by David Wood (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 188-199, p. 192. To resolve difficulties relating to the notion of personal identity he knew the conceptual framework should be submitted “to analytical scrutiny [that] rests on the fundamental distinction [...] between two main uses of the term of identity: identity as sameness (Latin: idem, English: same, German: Gleich) and identity as selfhood (Latin: ipse, English: self, German: Selbst).” Cf. Ricoeur, p. 189. The main problem, however, is that “selfhood is not sameness” (Ricoeur, p. 189). Ricoeur acknowledges that “the confusion is not without cause, to the extent that these two problematics overlap at a certain point”. Ricoeur, p. 189. He insists that the break which separates idem and ipse is “frankly” ontological, not just grammatical, or even epistemological and logical. Cf. Ricoeur, p. 191. I refer to Ricoeur’s distinction in an earlier article: Jola Skulj, “Literature as a Repository of Historical Consciousness: Reinterpreted Tales of Mnemosyne”, in Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, ed. by Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 411-19. Quoted in Ricoeur, p. 191.

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grained in borderland identity grants the culture, which is usually minor or peripheral, its affirmative approach to the diversities of other cultures and, of course, within itself. The specific, unstable history behind culture in border regions, which is very familiar with its own multifaceted reality in the passage of time, equips it with its inherent awareness that selfhood is not inevitably sameness. Self has a capacity for survival or strong healthy growth precisely because of its hybridity. The self of a borderland culture, its very status of being an individual reality existing over time, enables the culture to unfold its different faces of identity not escaping or evading the very core of its being (nor its self-confidence) and not denying itself as a distinct entity in its many-sided dynamism. Self through its alterations (Late Greek hetérosis) – that is, through being hybrid (i.e. formed or composed of heterogeneous elements) and not hubristic (i.e. insolent or disrespectful or unaccustomed; Greek hybris excessive pride or self-confidence, arrogance) – cares for its future and economizes its qualities and intrinsic worth. Hetérosis or hybrid vigour – to employ the terms used in genetics – with reference to selfhood or the identity of a culture, is a sign of a capacity for continued existence or strong healthy growth. A borderland culture is a manifestly retold story. Through such an identity, cultures in border regions clearly reveal their capacity for survival. There is an inherent requirement for the continuation of a meaningful or purposeful existence of semiotic spaces having given and transgressed (constantly transformed) languages as a cohesive resource. Slovenian culture as a case of a cultural border territory confirms the persistence of such a force openly interacting with otherness – not from weakness, but as a forceful and promising, dynamizing option of survival economics. The nature of culture in border regions reminds us that reducing the meaning of identity to sameness (idem) and forgetting that selfhood (ipse) may imply diverse possibilities of existence arises from a metaphysical understanding of being which dominated European thought until the beginning of the last century and the modernist breakthrough. As memory kept in semiotic spaces demonstrates selfhood embodies an ample storage reshaping culture. Only in reductionist (metaphysical) thought can blindness to complex issues of reality occur. Identity is a fact, an entity quite concrete in its being, an actual ongoing condition or circumstance, not something postulated. Culture is not a sum of phenomena, but a living totality, where the notion of totality should be understood pragmatically (not metaphysically), i.e., as something inconclusive in its character, an open, non-finite entity. Understanding cultural identity as dialogism implies that the measure of authenticity or originality of an inherent national subjectivity has a lesser role than it played in the minds of the romantics and throughout the nineteenth century. Culture is a meeting

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point of several cross-cultural implications. In the notion of the “soul of a nation” (Herder7), which is related to the topic of cultural identity, the conceptual frame of the idea of the national is due to a romantic view of an absolute and autonomous self which is, of course, inadequate at a time of a mutually related world and a post-national concept of state (citizenship). It appears that in the globalizing world (and in the integration of Europe in process) borderland or peripheral countries, with their particular experience and the demanding task in their histories of inventing and instituting cultural identities on border crossing territories surely become well-equipped with views of dialogism or “scopic vision”8 to challenge and overcome still persistent totalizing attitudes (and politics) of a planetary vision of culture (and the world). Borderland cultures exhibit supplementary qualities of conceivably more sensitive and responsive approaches to otherness. Views on the heteronomy of cultural worlds are there more palpable, and in border regions the fact of “the ungraspable other as the figured origin of our definitions”9 is much easier to apprehend. The metropolitan countries – another geocritical notion found in literary and cultural studies (Moretti, Spivak) – lived through less distressing experiences of inventing their identities and are – as a result of their own cultural position in the past (as colonizers) – frequently less perceptive of the heteronomy of cultural worlds. Metropolitan cultures (far from the boundaries or limes) become used to their unthreatened position at the centre of a circle where there are neither movement nor other angles of insight. A central point or axis, a line used as a fixed reference, represents – as known from physics – a site of no exchange. Franco Moretti10 in his comparatist claims, finds peripheral views on cultures very instructive. The edge is resourceful; it enables a different point of view, and is highly aware of multiplied focuses. The awareness that the other is never accessed directly, nor with certainty, suggests different reading practices. The same points in the challenging task to overcome totalizing insight into a planetary vision of culture and to practice “scopic vision” are found by Gayatry Spivak in her Wellek Library Lectures when charting her future view for the field of reformed comparative literature as a bordercrossing discipline “honed by careful reading”.11 Aware of a “forever 7

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Mohanty finds Herder’s views already as “powerful attacks on the Enlightenment’s universalist conceptions of reason, morality, and history, arguing instead for the irreducibility of cultural particularity and diversity”. Literary Theory and the Claims of History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. xii. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 108. Spivak, p. 32. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”, New Left Review, Jan.-Feb. (2000), 54-68. Spivak, p. 108.

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deferred arrival into the performative of the other in order not to transcode, but to draw a response” she advocates “a role of comparative literature in a responsible effort”.12 But the ingredients of such ideas were inherent in Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue. Yuri M. Lotman also turned to the legacy of Bakhtin in the last decade of his life in his elaborate work Universe of the Mind (1990) on text, semiospheres and the semiotics of history.

2. On Culture as Facts in a Semiosphere Texts are semiotic data, although due to their semiotic life, i.e. their ongoing semiosis, their identity as “transmitted and received texts is relative”.13 Lotman argues that because of cultural traditions (the semiotic memory of culture) and the inevitable factor of the individual way with which this tradition is revealed to a particular member of a collective, [...] it will be obvious that the coincidence of codes between transmitter and the transmittee 14 is in reality possible only to a very relative extent.

By reason of the “inner, as yet unfinalized determinacy of its structure”, text “acquires semiotic life”.15 Texts “preserve their cultural activity” and “reveal a capacity to accumulate information, i.e. a capacity for memory”.16 The text’s memory, “the meaning-space created by the text around itself [always] enters into relationship with cultural memory (tradition) already formed in the consciousness of the audience”.17 This means that texts are to be seen as “important factors in the stimulus of cultural dynamics” and are themselves “a reservoir of dynamism when influenced by contacts with new contexts”.18 A text is involved in a semiotic space and it results in “the complex semiotic mechanism which is in constant motion”.19 A text has its life in the reality of semiosis and a reality becomes “the single-channel structure”20 for decoding (or extracting meaning from) its encrypted message. When a reality happens to be the text’s communicating channel – and we must bear in mind that 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Spivak, p. 13. Spivak also claims, “If a responsible comparativism can be of the remotest possible use in the training of imagination, it must approach culturally diversified ethical systems diachronically, through the history of multicultural empires, without foregone conclusions.” Spivak, pp. 12-3. Lotman, p. 13. Lotman, p. 13, my italics. Lotman, p. 18. Lotman, p. 18. Lotman, p. 18. Lotman, p. 18, my italics. Lotman, p. 203. Lotman, p. 124.

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natural language is constantly renewing codes and that (as Lotman also reminds us) “living culture has a ‘built-in’ mechanism for multiplying its languages”21 – then that “single-channel” is realized in a plurality of options. An ongoing event of cultural tradition and the individual mode of entering into the text, both factors are involved in an ever changing platform of circumstances. A text turns out to be “immersed in a semiotic space and it can only function by interaction with that space”.22 Semiosis entails “the whole semiotic space of the culture in question” and this is the space Lotman terms the semiosphere (by analogy with the biosphere as Vernadsky defined it). “The semiosphere is the result and the condition for the development of culture, [...] the totality and the organic whole for living matter [JS culture] and also the condition for the continuation of [JS cultural] life.”23 Living culture is a function of the semiosphere in its particular space-time. “The semiosphere is marked by its heterogeneity.”24 A semiotic space is “at one and the same moment and under the influence of the same impulses” still “not [...] a single coding structure, but a set of connected, but different systems”.25 In Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere “the possibility of a preverbal or non-verbal modeling system” is suggested, as Han-liang Chang commented in his paper at a conference on cultural semiotics in Tartu (Estonia, 2002). In his earliest explanation, published in Russian in 1984, Lotman found the semiosphere “a semiotic continuum filled with semiotic structures of different types and with different levels of organization”.26 In another definition he defined the semiosphere as “the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages, not the sum total of different languages”; in a sense it “has a prior existence and is in constant interaction with languages [...] Outside the semiosphere there can be neither communication, nor language.”27 Here we are back to the issue of how to comprehend the semiosphere of the borderland literature. Are the effects of past shifting realities on border cultural territories as ever remaining in existence? Lotman considers a semiosphere “as a single mechanism” and argues “that all elements of the semiosphere are in dynamic, not static correlations, whose terms are constantly changing”.28 Is it correct to say that all possible contacts having come down

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Lotman, p. 124. Lotman, p. 124-25; my italics. Lotman, p. 125. Lotman, p. 125. Lotman, p. 125; my italics. Republished in Lotman, “The Semiosphere”, Soviet Psychology, 27 (1989), 40-61 (42-3). Lotman, pp. 123-24. Lotman, p. 127.

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to us from the past are latent in the ever-modifying semiosphere? Lotman is affirmative on the issue: In the history of art [...] works which come down to us from remote cultural periods continue to play a part in cultural development as living factors. [...] What ‘works’ is not the most recent temporal section, but the whole packed history of cultural texts. [...] In fact, everything contained in the actual memory of culture, is directly or indirectly part of that 29 culture’s synchrony.

The semiosphere represents a holistic world model (as claimed by Mikhail Lotman) behind actual cultural processes, although one should see it as a constantly reread entity, a reworked actuality, or a redefined network of cultural traces shaped through ongoing dialogism. The idea of the semiosphere is an exemplary observation on spaces of transgressiveness. Lotman remarks: Besides, at all stages of development there are contacts with texts coming in from cultures which formerly lay beyond the boundaries of the given semiosphere. These invasions, sometimes by separate texts, and sometimes by whole cultural layers, variously effect the internal structure of the ‘world picture’ of the culture we are talking about. So across any synchronic section of the semiosphere different languages at different stages of development are in conflict, and some texts are immersed in languages not their own, while the codes to 30 decipher them with may be entirely absent.

The distinct notion of semiosphere is capable of grasping cultural deposits enacted in the extensive dormant network and the “continued process of emission and transmission of energy [...] not only between historical periods of one culture, but also between inter-cultural and cross-cultural systems”.31 By employing the idea of semiosphere as a generator of information the debate on the literature and space can be more elaborate and can shift our views to a “post-positivist realist” conception of objectivity (Mohanty). It enables us to grasp the cross-cultural realities of individual cultures and the valuable dialogue behind their historical routes, which are asymmetrical because the structure of the semiosphere as an expression of “the currents of the internal translations”32 is in itself asymmetrical. A thorough (semiotic and hermeneutical) approach to the semiosphere of cultures can provide insights into the obvious asymmetries of cultures in history and help us to bridge the inevitable “untranslatability” of art. Lotman’s “philosophy of culture”, his complex theoretical observations on the dynamism and phenomenology of culture, actually semiotically intervenes in the debate about history or, to be more precise, it brings to the fore a view of different routes behind the 29 30 31

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Lotman, p. 127, my italics. Lotman, p. 126. Han-liang Chang, “Is Language a Primary Modeling System? On Juri Lotman’s Semiosphere”, Sign System Studies, 31/1 (2003), 9-23; here quoted from an electronic version of his paper (). Lotman, p. 127.

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histories of literatures and their spatio-temporal contexts. His work responded to Bakhtin’s heritage, while at the same time attaining a more complex perspective on mechanisms of culture as that universe of mind, which in literature – like tales of Mnemosyne – preserves facts and advocates (re)readings of consciousness in the semiotic spaces of texts to map past modes of human historical existence. The challenging and inspiring idea of the semiosphere is one of those epistemological issues in the recent uncompromising critique of universalism which provide us with an elaborate and useful conceptual alternative to the earlier notion of objectivity. Such ideas seriously constitute an invitation to reconsider some of the key arguments and positions in contemporary views on literary histories. As a concept grasping comparativist residues in semiotic data, it is at hand to be for a future planetary vision of a responsive comparative literature. Re-imagining the discipline, in her criticism of (cultural) area studies programmes, Spivak reminds us that comparative literature was made up by Western European “nations”,33 and through her further comments she re-evaluates certain aspects of literature teaching practice at philological departments. In her ideas for a “depoliticized” and “an inclusive comparative literature”34 as a “loosely defined discipline [...] to include the open-ended possibility of studying all literatures”35 she claims that “the real ‘other’ of Cultural Studies is not Area Studies but the civilization courses offered by European national language departments, generally scorned by comparative literature”.36 Similarly Moretti finds the close reading practiced by national literary scholars, especially, of peripheral or – as Even-Zohar (1990) calls them – ‘weak’ literatures, very rewarding. Both actually support a more detailed insight into literatures, into their spatiotemporal placement and their real, verifiable ties with other texts and literatures, and such answers can be well obtained through detailed analyses of the semiosphere. Such encouragement to focus on literatures and space can be understood as an advocacy to understand better the multitudinous world of literatures, their diverse cultural grounds and intricacies. Through notions like semiosphere the discussion of literature and spaces can bring us closer to grasping representations of alterity in a remodelled comparative approach, to understand correctly the asymmetries of literatures and historical movements, and to realize within literatures their much more incongruent nature, their heterogeneous development, and the inner hybridity outlining their “tradition”. The view may well “confirm the inequality of the world literary 33 34 35 36

Cf. Spivak, p. 8. Spivak, p. 4. Spivak, p. 5. Spivak, p. 8.

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system: an inequality which” – as Moretti argues – “does not coincide with economic inequality [...] and allows some mobility – but a mobility internal to the unequal system, not alternative to it”.37 To conclude, I am back to the view of the semiosphere of Slovenian culture, which is due to border contacts exemplary asymmetrical. Diverse border languages certainly multiply its heterogeneous entities. Slovenian limits (the Karst region, Carinthia, Prekmurje in Eastern Slovenia) are strong “area[s] of semiotic dynamism [...] where new languages [of art] come into being”.38 Formed by border-crossing reality and the intrusions of alien cultural codes into canonic norms, Slovenian culture has been actively exposed to the mechanisms of semiotic individuation, as its best authors – Trubar, Prešeren, Kosovel, Kovaþiþ, Boris Pahor, Tomaž Šalamun, etc. – testify. The periphery of a culture as a zone of contact with otherness is most sensitive to its own “untranslatability” in Lotman’s sense. As a bordercrossing literature, its ground is rewarding for the working mechanisms of the semiosphere – for mechanisms of ongoing dialogue, as well as of constant “translations” – and manifestly inscribes in itself its own need for asymmetry and for its own otherness.

Bibliography Chang, Han-liang, “Is Language a Primary Modeling System? On Juri Lotman’s Semiosphere”, Sign System Studies, 31/1 (2003), 9-23. Derrida, Jacques, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other”, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. by Peggy Kamuf (London: Harvester, 1991). Even-Zohar, Itamar, “Polysystem Studies”, Special Issue of Poetics Today, 11/1 (1990), 1-268. Lotman, Yuri M., “The Semiosphere”, Soviet Psychology, 27 (1989), 40-61 (In Russian 1984). Lotman, Yuri M., Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. by Ann Shukman (London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1990). Lotman, Mikhail, “The Paradoxes of Semiosphere”, Sun Yatsen Journal of Humanities, 12 (2001), 97-106. Mohanty, Satya P., Literary Theory and the Claims of History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997). Moretti, Franco, “Conjectures on World Literature”, New Left Review, Jan.Feb. (2000), 54-68.

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Franco Moretti, “More Conjectures”, New Left Review, Mar.-Apr. (2003), 73-81 (78). Lotman, p. 134.

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Moretti, Franco, “More Conjectures”, New Left Review, Mar.-Apr. (2003), 73-81. Ricoeur, Paul, “Narrative Identity”, in On Paul Ricoeur. Narrative and Interpretation, ed. by David Wood (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 188-99. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

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Paola Villani

The Redemption of the Siren “Those who have no roots, and are cosmopolitan, go toward the death of passion and of the human: to avoid being provincial you must have a living village in your memory, to which the image and the heart always return, and that science and poetry have reshaped into a universal voice”.1

Doubtless, the ‘myth’ of Naples has been more successful than the real, or ‘true’ Naples. One could say that throughout the centuries the legend of urbs Neapolis has won over history, facts and men, and has been delivered as an ‘ideal’ patrimony of humanity. ‘Ideal’, because the myth has often been set aside by the Machiavellian ‘effective truth’.2 The Siren ‘Parthenope’ has entered into a legend that has not always done her justice, but that has had success in the world, with all the elements needed to go beyond the narrow limits of space and time. Therefore, the myth of Naples would confirm the original hermeneutic acceptance of the myth itself, as in the Greek mythos, in which the city is presented as a collection of deviant representations with respect to the historical truth, rationally demonstrated or directly experienced (logos). Naples is often presented to humanity not as a ‘place of memory’, but as a ‘memory of a place’, a collection of representations from the imagination, of a religious, sacred, and ritualistic or sociological and philosophical nature. It was a double myth: on the one hand, the enchanted, poetic land, the cradle of the highest humanity and wisdom; on the other, Naples as a magic but dark place, Neapolis as a true Siren, the symbol of

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Ernesto De Martino, L’etnologo e il poeta, Preface to A. Pierro, Poesie (Roma: M. Dell’Arco, 1958). It would be a complex, and perhaps futile, operation to try to re-trace the long critical history of the interpretation of the myth from its birth, as a voluntary truth-reveailing operation, to a rudimental form of science, and on to its becoming a product of the religious spirit applied to themes which regarded the community. The “science of myths”, however, agrees to set the beginnings within the world of ancient Greece and, more precisely, at the distinction established by the historians of the archaic and classical age (specifically Herodotus and, to a greater extent Thucydides).

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irresistible and fatal temptation, and therefore by association, a symbol of evil, for a city of immense charisma that is like no other. Legend and history have had distinct outcomes and destinies: their pathways often intersect, but they have created different faces for the same city and the same culture. In some moments throughout its history, however, due to a natural and involuntary movement one might call telluric, the two Naples’, the historical one and the mythical one, have almost completely coincided. So the myth has become, in the words of Giambattista Vico, a ‘vera narratio’. One of the moments that can certainly be put in this category is the Naples of the Second World War, and in particular the Naples of ’43, torn by the conflict and the nazi-fascist occupation. Naples had to open its doors to another foreign population: the liberators. It was after this contingency that the very Neapolitan Ermanno Rea already felt the need to highlight the two Naples’, to rediscover the city beyond the stereotypes, to find the real face of the city, the other Naples, forgotten or transfigured by travel literature and by folklore.3 So, in this historical context, the Siren city seems to liberate itself from the burden of its thousand portraits, those that have unjustly denigrated it and those that have sung of its splendors; to regain possession of itself and return to being the centre of national political life as well as culture, altogether a symbol of the universal suffering of humanity. Those wounds that had afflicted it before, impeding development, were now war wounds, the misery that was sublimated in the poverty of war. The ‘American Naples’ asked for a ransom, the ‘siren’ wanted ‘redemption’ and the high cost of the blood of many of its citizens nearly washed away the ‘marks of sin’ that they wanted to see upon it, right or wrong. Much has already been written on the American Naples4 (‘NapoliSciangai’5) in political or literary history. Now we must look at this prolific period following this interpretive key in the progressive ‘redemption’ of the

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The essay by Rea is called “Le due Napoli” (1949) and is found in Fate bene alle anime del Purgatorio. Illuminazioni napoletane (Milano: Mondadori, 1977). Antonio Papa, “Napoli americana. Commentari”, Belfagor (31 June 1982), p. 249: “Metropolis-behind the front lines of Cassino, land of epidemics and of natural calamities, Naples was the theatre of the first impact between the economy of survival of great urban masses and the wartime consumerism of the conquerers, in a singular mix of phenomena of moderniwation and regression: according to a largely generalized model, but not without original characterizations.”. This is the title of one of the most illuminating descriptions of the city at that time: Nello Ajello, “Napoli-Sciangai”, in Nord-Sud (December 1954), p. 103. On daily life in Naples see Ferdinando Isabella, Napoli dall’8 settembre ad Achille Lauro (Napoli: Guida, 1980); Paolo De Marco, Polvere di piselli. La vita quotidiana a Napoli durante l’occupazione alleata (1943-1944) (Napoli: Liguori, 1996).

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‘body’ of Naples. In those years, the city truly was an international crossroads, crossed by many Italian or foreign travellers, literary men, allied soldiers or scholars, that immortalized the images of pain, as in the famous ‘fresco’ by Paul Ginsborg. In reality, in this ideal transfiguration of the liberation, the ‘suffering’ had already started in 1942, with the first of three tragic events of the Second World War in Naples: the bombarding of the port after the first air raid, on December 4th, 1942. It was then that the organization of the Neapolitan antifascists began. Intellectuals and politicians united forces. Adolfo Omodeo, on the 16th of July 1943, at just six days from the Allied landing in Sicily, in the name of the opposition groups, wrote a letter-manifesto published only in the foreign press that declared that the Italians were ready for an ‘active collaboration’ with the allies, who were not considered enemy invaders but comrades in the work of ‘human redemption’6. The armistice of September 8th surprised everyone. In spite of this preparatory work, the landing of the allies threw disorder onto a city that was already on its knees. One reads in the il Mattino of September 11th: “Naples is like a besieged city that has no reserves or provisions. It completely lacks all basic hygiene supplies, and totally and definitively lacks transport systems”7. The Neapolitans, however, were ready to collaborate. At the Neapolitan Committee for National Liberation, nearly 80,000 unemployed workers presented themselves, ready to work. This provoked the reaction of the German troops, and the savage murder of a sailor (who had been accused of having shot a Nazis) in front of the University on September 12th, 1943. This is one of the best remembered episodes of the period. At the end of the month, the so-called ‘Four Days’ (‘Quattro Giornate’) began, and for many they represented “one of the shining moments in the history of Naples, that once again had found the heroic impulse that it had shown many times over the centuries, in battles as in popular uprisings and riots”.8 Encroaching upon the glorious, apologetic scaffolding, which the historians have erected around the ‘Four Days’ as a “popular and creative

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Giacomo De Antonellis, “Contributo alla Storia di Napoli negli anni 1918-1948”, in Storia di Napoli (Napoli: ESI, 1971), p. 151. il Mattino (11 September 1943). Carlo Criscio, Un cuore alla radio. Napoli 1943-1944 (Napoli: Criscio, 1954), p. 21. Similar enthusiastic tones on the ‘Four Days’ (‘Quattro giornate’) are used by Artieri: “the Resistance began here, in this city, [Naples]; it started with the beautiful epic of the ‘Four Days’, which was exemplary not only for its courage, but even more rare, for the wisdom and the moderation of the political passion shown when the last of its episodes was over and the last generous blood was spilled.” G. Artieri, “Breve storia di un’epopea”, in Le quattro giornate di Napoli, ed. by Giovanni Artieri (Napoli: Marotta, 1963), p. 15.

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fight for the liberation from Nazism”,9 is the doubt, the mere hypothesis that the episode constitutes a historiographical myth. This hypothesis is inserted in a revisionist view that strips the ideological weight from the facts. At the end of the 1940’s, in this direction, with a real pioneering, demystifying spirit, we find the historian Edmondo Cione.10 Whether it is a historiographic myth or not, one incontrovertible fact which came out of those dramatic moments is the tragic character of that historical context. The first executions started in the Vomero quarter, but the entire city was involved until it became a single spectacle of devastation, described by many in sorrowful terms. It is on this occasion that the glory of the ‘scugnizzi’ arose. It was not a true ‘Resistance’,11 but it certainly was an occasion of mini ‘heroism’ that was previously unknown to the national press. Among the protagonists of this Phartenopean resistance, there was the ‘Corpo di Liberazione’ sustained by Omodeo and Croce. Little by little, the outline of the scenario of a collective tragedy emerged, remembered by many in frescoes of a rare effectiveness. The well-known account by Aldo De Jaco is eloquent, [...] a poor and desperate city, abandoned to its hunger, prisoner of an enemy that had received orders to reduce it to ‘mud and ashes’ ... ; a city that had been struck and shattered by more than a hundred bombardments, that had seen thousands of its inhabitants die and in the end had rebelled – and it was the first great city of Europe to do so – against the occupiers who were busy raking the houses to take the husbands away from their wives, parents away from their children, and send them to Germany to work and die for Hitler’s cause.12

9

10

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Gguido D’Agostino, Le quattro giornate di Napoli (Milano: Newton & Compton, 1998), p. 11. Cione asserts that the ‘Four Days’ “should certainly be pruned of all of the apologetic exaggeration by some anti-fascits and cleared of every political significance.” Edmondo Cione, Napoli e Malaparte (Naples: Pellerano-Del Gaudio, no date [1950]), p. 61. So the Neapolitan population rebelled not for political reasons, but only for the “tremendous war conduct of the Germans, though objectively necessary, was always very harsh [...]” (Cione, pp. 61-62). On the meaning of the Four Days, between the two extremes of devaluation on one side and defence on the other. Biagio Passaro and Francesco Soverina, “A difficult antifascism: the South of Italy (1943-1980)”, in Il Presente e la storia, 45 (June 1994), pp. 43-84; Antonio Drago, “The interpretation of the Four Days according to two fundamental options,” in Mezzogiorno 1943. La scelta, la lotta, la speranza, ed. by Giovanni Chianese, (Napoli: ESI, 1996), p. 387 ff. G. De Antonellis, “Contributo alla Storia di Napoli negli anni 1918-1948”, in Storia di Napoli, (Napoli: ESI, 1971), p. 155: “Even though for the Campania area it is difficult to speak of resistance, in the proper sense, in that it lacks the specific characteristics of this ideological and military movement, the battles and the massacres that involve the Neapolitan area must be remembered.” A. De Jaco, Le quattro giornate di Napoli, (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1972), p. 7.

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On the first of October in 1943, a Friday, among the first to enter the city was Gino De Sanctis, who remembered the experience in his Diario dimenticato (Forgotten Diary).13 “An unfinished victory”, mixed with tragedy and furor, is what overwhelmed Naples when the Allies landed. Among the observers who were most moved to pity by post-war Naples was the famous John Huston, who found himself in Naples in the first months after the allied occupation.14 In those years, then, a unique symbology of the American Naples often utilizes the image of a ‘body’ united with that of violence, of rape, to represent the suffering Parthenope. A symbology used, even before the wellknown novel La Pelle, in one of the most illuminating and still little known novel-chronicles on this theme, Il Regno del Sud, by Agostino degli Espinosa. This ‘body’ of Naples is lacerated by deep wounds. Daily life, soon after the liberation, is shown as a mixture of poverty and delinquency, hunger, unemployment, and a wave of inflation that increased the cost of living by 293 percent. Of the seven hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants registered in the city in 1945, the unemployed were more than one hundred thousand. There was no electricity, gas, water, and telephone and telegraph service was interrupted.15 The plague of prostitution spread so much that – according to Norman Lewis – it came to involve around one hundred and fifty thousand women.16 Perhaps it was a way to exorcise the war,17 but it was also a social and economic problem of vast dimensions, that brought grave consequences to

13

14 15 16 17

Gaetano De Sanctis, “Brani di un diario dimenticato”, in Le quattro giornate, ed. by G. Artieri (Naples: Marotta, 1963), p. 142. The author also refers to the Island of Capri, where Benedetto Croce had sought refuge: “Capri was liberated from the first day of the landing. For days and days the Neapolitans saw their island in the sea as a fortress of salvation, a hope. We heard that in that fortress Benedetto Croce, the Maestro who had taught ‘the religion of freedom’, had flown to the safety from his villa in Sorrento. It is a sign.” De Sanctis, p. 142. J. Huston, Cinque mogli e sessanta film (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1982), pp. 135-136. Papa, pp. 253-254; De Marco, p. 117. Norman Lewis, Napoli ’44 (Napoli: Adelphi,1998), pp. 136-137. Sergio Lambiase, Gian Battista Nazzaro, Napoli 1940-1945 (Milano: Longanesi, 1978), p. 135: “It is as if the exhausted city had awakened from a nightmare: to uninhibit desire, to concede oneself is another way to celebrate, in an orgy of ‘enraged’ offers, to exit from a long tunnel of fear. It is, in a certain sense, like wanting to dissipate the insecurity, the precariousness, the suffering endured in an excess of life without any other purpose than to live in excess”. Lewis identifies a ‘structural’ prostitution that involved around forty-two thousand women, as well as one described as ‘cyclical’ “this was the prostitution practiced within the unsuspected middle and lower-middle classes that was founded on the complicità of the nuclear family” Lewis, pp. 31-32.

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the health sector as well because of the large increase in venereal diseases.18 The sale of bodies – as well as the loss of dignity of the person – insistently occupies the pages of Malaparte’s novel La Pelle, where bodies are sold for less than food: Bruised disheveled women with painted lips, with pale cheeks encrusted with rouge, horrible and pitiful, waited on the corner of the alleyways offering to passersby their miserable merchandise: little boys and girls, eight or ten years old, that the Moroccan, Indian, Algerian, Malagasy soldiers touched, reaching under their dresses or slipping their hand through the buttons of their shorts. ... The price of little girls and boys, in the last few days had fallen, and continued to fall. While the price of sugar, oil, flour, meat and bread continued to increase, the price of human meat fell day by day.19

It was that same widespread sale of bodies that brought to the fore the price of that rare commodity, ‘virginity’, in the well-known and scandalous chapter entitled “The Virgin of Naples”.20 In the name of the “disgusting, damned skin”, humanity had not only lost its civil sense, but also its soul and dignity. And Malaparte is there to describe the American Naples, loser and winner at the same time, a city of pain and passion, in the above-mentioned book – the most famous of his trilogy on war21 – in which he identifies all that is tragic in that moment and that place, and reconnects it to the Christian symbology of the ‘passion”, because, in the end, “Christ was Neapolitan”: “No group of people on this earth has ever suffered as much as the Neapolitan people. It has suffered hunger and slavery for 20 decades, and it doesn’t complain. It doesn’t curse anyone, it doesn’t hate anyone: not even misery. Christ was Neapolitan”.22 The ‘Liberation’ was not able to bring Naples ‘freedom’: it was clearly something else. Malaparte’s journey did not remain isolated, because, other than being a crucial point in Italian political life, the American Naples assumed an important position in cultural matters. So much so that the ‘flight to Italy’ by many intellectuals finished right here in the Campanian capital. 18

19 20 21

22

This increase was recorded between October 1943 and December 1944. On this topic see Giovanni Chianese, “Ceti popolari e comportamenti quotidiani a Napoli”, in V. Lombardi and others, Alle radici del nostro presente. Napoli e la Campania dal fascismo alla Repubblica (1943-1946) (Napoli: ESI, 1986), p. 55 ff; De Marco, p. 39 ff. As Parente comments (Parente, p. 311): “Neapolitan prostitution in those years always had an impelling economic base: the need for food, clothing, and money move this market made of mediations and corruption, where minors act as able hunters of clients for mothers and sisters”. Curzio Malaparte, La Pelle (Milano: Mondadori, 2003), p. 9. See Malaparte, La Pelle, pp. 37-49. Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle was published in France in 1949 (Paris: Denoël, 1949) and in Italy in 1950 (Roma-Milano: Aria d’Italia, 1950). About the war, Malaparte also wrote Kaputt (1944) and Cristo proibito (1950). See Malaparte, La Pelle, p. 7.

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Between 1943 and 1944 Mario Soldati, Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia, Corrado Alvaro, and editorial organizers such as Leo Longanesi came here; publicity initiatives were started, such as the theoretical magazine of the Communist Party, La Rinascita and the literary magazine “Aretusa”, directed by Francesco Flora.23 Unlimited, and perhaps redundant, is the list of Italian testimonials on the Naples of the liberation. A gallery of personalities, historians but also fiction writers, poets and dramatists, native and ‘adopted’ Neapolitans, who couldn’t put aside their memories of that incredible and original disastrous show of the Parthenopean siren put on her knees first by the war and then by the liberation. In this brief rationale, though, one cannot ignore the weight of the memoirs-denunciations of non-Neapolitans like Malaparte, or like Corrado Alvaro and Ortese, who are non-Neapolitan only on their birth-certificates. One might say that Naples has gone down in history thanks to literature. A narrative that many define as ‘irregular’ or worse ‘amateurish’, but that, extending a formula that was once used for the neo-realist Levi, could be called “provocatively impure”,24 intended as a point of confluence of many cultural components, but also animated by a memorial deposit that unhinged the narrow confines of chronicalistic realism and animates pages of great artistic, and, one would say, also ethical value, pages of great humanity. It is the humanity of offense, of the offended and suffering world, to paraphrase Vittorini, that does not permit us to define this narrative as a ‘documentary’. A narrative that starts with reality, but goes beyond it, reaching spatial and temporal limits (Naples after the war). A metaphor of the existence of universal values. A metaphor in which, to use an idea from Montale and Eliot, the ‘poetics of the object’, becomes an ‘encounter’ with the ‘evil of living’, the evil that, like the lava flowing from Vesuvius, invades alleyways, streets and town squares, overwhelming the people. The war might therefore be seen as an ‘eruption’ of the ‘evil of living’, an objectification of a Southern European way that becomes existential. Entering Naples becomes a true descent into hell. Even an outsider such as Mario Soldati finds himself having to confront these people to which he has the contrasting sentiment of

23

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In “Aretusa” a first reconstruction can be found in Dante Della Terza, “Tra Napoli e Roma: Aretusa e Mercurio, due riviste dell’Italia del dopoguerra”, in Italy and America 1943-44. Italian, American and Italian American experiences of the Liberation of the Italian Mezzogiorno (Naples: La Città del Sole, 1997), p. 411ff. On Neapolitan literature in that period see Enzo Golino, “Dopo il ’43”, in Napoli dopo un secolo, ed. by Francesco Compagna and others (Napoli: ESI, 1961), pp. 401-428. G. De Donato, Preface to Carlo Levi, Coraggio dei miti. Scritti contemporanei. 1922-1974 (Bari: De Donato, 1975), p. XI.

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attraction and repulsion, as he writes in his autobiographical Lettere da Capri.25 So a particular category is created with this literature that is natural, psychological and sociological all at once: Homo neapolitanus, who escapes all identification or any collective view26. Homo neapolitanus inspires pages of high poetry, destined to make itself universal and to give a new, truer image of the city. In the face of this burning panorama of pain, the very same category of neorealism, already in itself debated, is destined to fall to pieces or at least to open itself to a spiritual and universal meaning. Because the story of Naples in 1943 is the story of a humiliated and tragic alienation. The South, too, is part of this great metaphor of existence as well, as Carlo Levi so masterfully states. Carlo Levi gives testimony to the feral “Bestial Neapoletanness”, during his stay in Naples immediately after the war, in L’Orologio. That touching experience, in the ‘body’ of the city27, is a metaphor that drew inspiration from an effective bestiary. Levi offers enlightening reflections on antifascism which, written for the whole of Italy, adapt very well to the Parthenopean capital, for the anxiety of “passion and responsibility”, and the “incapacity to be free” that the author finds at the base of fascism, in his wellknown article Paura della libertà (Fear of Freedom).28

25

26

27

28

See Mario Soldati, Le lettere da Capri (Milano: Mondadori, 1967) [also Garzanti, Milano 1959], pp. 204-205. See Mario Stefanile, La letteratura a Napoli (1930-1970), in Storia di Napoli, X (Napoli: Società Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1971), p. 603: “[...] and if Fucini or Malaparte [Naples] describe the city as evil and dirty, merciless and suspicious, sordid and dirty one might also say that Naples owes its extraordinary life force to all this, and to the certifiable presence of a ‘homo neapolitanus’ that defines itself beyond all of the rhetoric as the fruit of a unique plant, with thousand roots buried in an experience of collective life that is shaped as a story of abuse and tolerance, dominations and innumerous sufferances.” Again on the homo neapolitanus: “Protagonist and spectator, both hero and victim, patient and carnivorous in its truth and its legend, dominated by the natural and social environment, still today the product of a thousand contrasting elements that are nonetheless reconcilable, though grudgingly, one inside the other, this is how homo neapolitanus passes steadily from the news to the same history of literature, in the theatre, and even in the poetry and in that rough and ready popular poetry that is in their songs.” (Stefanile, p. 604). Carlo Levi, “Tra Prometeo e Sant’Antonio”, in Le mille patrie. Uomini, fatti, paesi d’Italia, (Roma: Donzelli, 2000), p. 211. The article was writeen in 1939 but, because of censorship, came out in 1946, the year after his masterpiece Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. See Carlo Levi, Paura della libertà (Torino: Einaudi, 1946).

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In 1944, Naples also hosted Corrado Alvaro, who lived a “brief and bitter experience” in the city.29 A Southern and European writer, who should be remembered among the pioneers of the ‘new realism’ traces a picture only apparently less hard, attentive to the stories of single individuals. In this desolating wartime panorama we can also find Anna Maria Ortese: “Returning to Naples in ’45, was like I had predicted upon my arrival. I found myself on a street”.30 Ortese figures among the protagonists of that cultural rebirth of Naples in the fifties. At the end of the war, the city quickly gave birth to a new cultural period, where promising young writers were destined to mark a real change. They were the young literary scholars of “SUD”: those scholars Ortese had portrayed in “Il silenzio della ragione”, a controversial chapter of Il mare non bagna Napoli. Here the author describes the dark evil of a literary generation who, perhaps knowingly, sealed its own destiny.31 Il mare non bagna Napoli was soon defined as a “gratuitous defamation”32 according to a destiny that not long before had been that of the arch-Italian, Malaparte. And yet perhaps few others knew how to paint the grating picture of those years like Malaparte did in a suggestive ‘fresco’ of the disease of Naples. Though the condemnation by Ortese was highly intellectual, metaphysical, perhaps less ‘concrete’, but always ‘true’, the Malapartian evil was above all a physical one, a disease. It was ‘the plague.’ This ‘plague’ caught Naples not only as an endemic illness, such as in Virgil’s Georgics or in Boccaccio’s Decameron, but rather as an existential disease, like in Camus’s La peste. With his ‘plague’ Malaparte also seems to echo the ‘informal’ French artist Artaud, who saw in the plague a beneficial liberating scourge, because it “lowers the mask, uncovers lies, laxity, vileness and hypocrisy”:33 The atrocious suspicion that the atrocious disease had been brought to Naples by the liberators themselves, was certainly not right: but it became a certainty in the soul of the people when they realised, with a confused wonder and superstitious terror, that the allied 29

30 31 32

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Federico Frascani, Le due Napoli di Corrado Alvaro (Napoli: Arturo Berisio, 1969), p. 5. “There are many writers in the last half-century, after having encountered Naples, left their impressions on the page. But very few have been able to approach the city with a sincere intention of understanding it and having done so, been able to leave. Anna Maria Ortese, Dove il tempo è un altro, MicroMega, 5 (1990), p. 139. Anna Maria Ortese, Il mare non bagna Napoli, p. 117. To define the novel as “a gratuitous defamation of Naples and the Neapolitans”, that, like that of Malaparte, signals a break in the tradition of ‘Neapolitanness’ was, at the time an article by Gino Grassi. See Gino Grassi, “Una gratuita diffamazione di Napoli e dei napoletani” in Roma, 13 August 1953. Also joining the choir was the socialist-communist newspaper “La Voce del Mezzogiorno”, that ran an article signed G.N., Una Napoli senza uomini, on 15 September 1953. A Reconstruction of the debate about the novel is in Nello Ajello, “Ortese spacca Napoli”, la Repubblica (15 May 1994). Antonin Artaud, Il teatro e la peste, in Il teatro e il suo doppio (Torino: Einaudi, 1995), p. 150.

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soldiers were strangely immune to contagion. ... As soon as the disease struck, everyone became the spy of the father and the mother, of the brothers, the children the spouse, the lover, the couple and their dearest friends; but never of themselves. ... The extraordinary character of such a new disease was this: that it did not corrode the body, but the soul. Limbs stayed apparently intact, but inside the covering of the healthy meat the soul was broken down; it dissolved. It was a type of moral disease, against which there was no defense.34

In this ‘scandalous’ novel, Malaparte’s description of a feral humanity provoked passionate debates, not only in the Neapolitan area. In an editorial climate that was already quite difficult, many slashing reviews of his work appeared, with the very Neapolitan signatures of Rea and Stefanile to the well-known Emilio Cecchi,35 until the official sentence, by a motion of the City council on February 2nd, 1950.36 In the end, however, the Malapartian

34 35

36

Malaparte, La pelle, pp. 25-27. See, for example, the reviews: Mario Stefanile, “Sulla pelle di Napoli”, Roma (30 January 1950); Domenico Rea, “La pellaccia di Malaparte”, in Il Giornale (7 February 1950). Twenty years later, Stefanile had, at least in part, revised his positions. See Mario Stefanile, La letteratura a Napoli (1930-1970), p. 649: “Both [scil. Kaputt and La pelle] are not the result of a moral compromise but of a profound interior nihilism, a kind of ‘cupio dissolvi’, the sadist pleasure in the torture of others and of oneself at the very limit of tolerance.”. On the contrary, Emilio Cecchi, who had already condemned the novel in the columns of L’Europeo on February 12, 1950, and would remain firm in his judgment. See Emilio Cecchi, Il Novecento, in Nicola Sapegno, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. IX, (Milano: Garzanti, 1974), p. 689: “Let us say, without even needing to raise our voices, that [Malaparte] has done, God forgive him, one of those things that one really should not do. Silente and hypocrisy are almost better, than this ambiguous cleverness. He has brought misery, shame, and atrocities into play, and stripped them of all decency, in order to use them for literary purposes.” ha risposto il noto biografo malapartiano, Giordano Bruno Guerri, a well known biographer of Malaparte, answered back: “Dear Cecchi, with silence and hypocrisy one becomes an Italian Academic” Giordano Bruno Guerri, L’Arcitaliano. Vita di Curzio Malaparte (Milano: Leonardo, 1991; I edn Milano: Bompiani, 1980), p. 252. The motion obtained the “moral banishment of Mr. Curzio Malaparte because he wrote a book full of oscene lies about Naples and the Neapolitans.”. the motion, made by the town councillors Giuseppe Cicconardi and Michele Parise, found very few discordant voices. Even Mario Alicata, representative and town councillor, defined the author as a “mediocre writer, scandalmonger and publicity hound”. See Antonio Palermo, “E torna ‘la pelle’”, La Voce della Campania (11 February 1979); Renato Caserta, Quel buio a Napoli (1943-1944), (Napoli: Aba Edizioni, 1997), pp. 47-48. The news was taken up by il Mattino in an article by Titti Marrone on June 3, 1998 and concluded with the re-qualification of Malaparte by the City Council led by Antonio Bassolino. Intellectuals who had attended the convention “Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto” held at the Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, on May 7-10, 1997, led the motion. See Carmine Di Biase, Introduction to Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, proceedings ed. by Carmine Di Biase (Naples: CUEN, 1999), p. 7 ff. On the debite that Malaparte cause in Neapolitan circles see also Edmondo Cione, Napoli e Malaparte; L. Parente, “Una città contro. La polemica Napoli-Malaparte nel secondo dopoguerra”, pp. 303-324; Sergio Campailla, “La pelle (e

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picture did not differ from the novel-reportage The Gallery, by the young American officer John Horne Burns (a book that earned the author the nickname ‘American Malaparte’),37 or from the diary of Norman Lewis, the very famous Napoli ’44.38 Nor did it differ from the book Operation Eclipse! by the journalist Alan Moorehead,39 while even cruder official reports were issued by the allies. The pages of La Pelle are connected by an ideal thread to the chapter that closes Kaputt, “Il Sangue” (‘Blood’),40 where all humanity has feral traits. It is a humanity degraded by misery and desperation; women “dressed in lurid rags, covered with hair, with breasts hanging out of their blouses torn to shreds” or figures on the borderline between “beasts” and men, or entire groups of men in caverns of tufa stone, “as strange populations in tattered rags, that in the subterranean labyrinth had found refuge and salvation from the bombs, lived for three years in a frightening promiscuity, rolling around in their own excrement [...] continuing in their odd jobs, in their shops, in their dark contraband”.41 From the crude and grating Malapartian realism, one can almost hypothesize that the plague, a symbolic image of the war itself, was really a cathartic disease, a pathway of purification that permitted Neapolis to redeem itself. This disease burns everything, but it also justifies everything, and conducts everything to an ideal road to moral purification, before the historic one. The Naples of ’44 is no longer that barbaric city of delinquency that Leopardi saw. That “semibarbaric and semi-African” people had become “oppressed”. There is therefore almost a Manzonian “provident misadventure” that brings about the birth from the ashes of a dishonest humanity, the great people of heroism. The suffering of Neapolitans was a suffering whose “antiquity, fatality, mysterious nature made sacred and in the presence of which my suffering was nothing but human and new, with profound roots in my antiquity”.42 In this interpretative key we can inaugurate a new reading of Naples, which includes and synthesizes previous readings, engulfing in itself an oleographic picture of travel literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, together with the opposing sad descriptions of a corrupt city. Both of these faces, double-face Janus of a single great mythological figure, are fused in

37 38 39 40 41 42

l’anima) di Malaparte”, in Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, pp. 137-145; ora in Sergio Campailla, Controcodice (ESI: Napoli, 2001). See Masolino D’Amico, “Malaparte americano”, in La Stampa (10 April 1993). Now Norman Lewis, Napoli ’44 (Milano: Adelphi 1993). See Alan Moorehead, Operazione eclissi (Milano: Garzanti, 1969). The novel was published for Vallecchi in 1944. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, pp. 400, 401, 403. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, pp. 403-404.

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the ‘liberated city’ on its knees. The Second World War and the ‘Four Days’ can therefore also be seen as a road to redemption, which fully validates the crudest testimonies without depriving the city or, indeed, the homo Neapolitanus in any way. I will conclude with a brief and incomplete mention of the ‘indigenous’ authors who have portrayed the city with courage, eschewing any summary condemnatory judgments. Their sorrowful tones come from the heart of the city, so to speak. That is the case of Eduardo de Filippo, who at the end of the war, when faced with the gulf of destruction and in the frenetic anxiety of reconstruction – a reconstruction that did not only involve streets, homes, schools, churches, and entire cities, but also the political institution, and above all the bodies and souls of men – raises his sorrowful cry in Napoli Milionaria. De Filippo’s work achieved a great success, both in its 1945 theatrical version and in its 1950 cinematographic version.43 Strong accusations, however, followed on the part of intellectuals,44 who contrasted Malaparte and Eduardo, and the debate even resulted in an interrogation at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. Eduardo’s reaction was welcomed by the left-wing press.45 These debates cannot cancel an irrefutable fact, i.e. the rebirth of a Southern and Phartenopean literature. A rebirth that was baptised in 1945, but that had planted its roots before, in the glorious ‘Four Days’. In those years, after almost thirty years “of non-participation one could say that Italian literary life is still more European”,46 Naples returns to be the inspiring muse of great masterpieces. In the brief period of a few years the postwar publications on Naples are uncountable. “It was a new literature that was 43

44

45

46

Eduardo was not in Naples in 1943. He returned from Rome only in 1945, when he formed the Theatre company called “Compagnia Umoristica Eduardo e Titina De Filippo” later named “Il Teatro di Eduardo con Titina De Filippo”, that debuted at the beginning of 1945 at the Teatro Gloria in Naples. It was in this Naples after the war, that he wrote Napoli milionaria!, the play that inaugurated the cycle of plays called “giorni dispari” and on March 25, 1945 it was put on stage at the San Carlo Opera theatre for a benefit matinée. On the debate between Eduardo and the people, both intellectual and non-intellectual, of Naples, see, among others, Federico Frascani, La Napoli amara di Eduardo De Filippo (Firenze: Parenti, 1958). “Some newspapers have written that I have denigrated Naples. but I [...] actually cleaned up the ‘infamous sub-ground floor apartments’ And what can an artist do but denounce the state of things? That is our job. I have not denigrated Naples, but in other films I will show how it really is, I’ll show the inside of the apartments, I show all of the reality of Naples. [...] The misery really exists. And I denounce it”. From an article by Augusto Pancaldi, L’Unità (10 October 1950). On the debate created by the play, see Quarenghi, Vicoli stretti e libertà dell’arte, in Eduardo De Filippo, Teatro, ed. by N. De Blasi and Paola Quarenghi, (Milano: Mondadori, 2000), vol. II, p. CXLV ff. Mario Stefanile, p. 597.

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made as an authentic truth of fantasy”.47 This literature went beyond neorealism, for it was able to draw from a burning reality the sad pages of poems, songs or theatre pieces. That is how masterpieces of real ‘Neapolitan’ literature were created, written and signed in Naples by homines neapoletani. It was an immense mass of titles, that did not presuppose a common narrative school, a unified approach to writing, and did not mark a reprise in Neapolitan publishing, if one considers that a large part of these novels were printed in the editorial capitals of the time, Florence, Milan, or Turin. That is how Speranzella48 was created, a dramatic postwar chronicle by Bernari, who after the success of Tre operai, named his work for an antique street that cuts through the Spanish Quarter from Toledo to Sant’Elmo like the more famous Spaccanpoli. That is also how Spaccanapoli was created, for its passionate and convulsive writing of the very Neapolitan Domenico Rea,49 or the coeval L’Oro di Napoli by Giuseppe Marotta.50 A few years later, the first novel by Michele Prisco was published, La provincia addormentata, and also that of Luigi Incoronato, La scala a San Potito.51 To the almost mythical transformation of the Vesuvian province of Prisco, Incoronato puts in contrast a portrait of clandestine and indigent Naples. To this already wellrepresented group, ten years later, Aldo Stefanile would be added.52 Among the more suggestive transfigurations of the native city, taking up the same metaphor of the feral and animalistic reality, there is that of Raffaele La Capria, who almost attempts a justification of the ‘matericatellurica’ image of a Naples, in a “pantheism of a life and tangible material”53 that was previously offered by Malaparte. (Translation by Dianna Pickens) 47

48

49 50 51

52

53

Mario Stefanile, p. 600. For an overview of Neapolitan literature in the nineteen-fifties, see, among others, Paolo Varvaro, Percorsi culturali a Napoli, in Il silenzio della ragione. Politica e cultura a Napoli negli anni Cinquanta, ed. by Giovanni Chianese (Napoli: ESI, 1994), pp. 135-180; G. Botta, Narratori napoletani del secondo dopoguerra (Napoli: L’arte tipografica, 1955). Carlo Bernari, Speranzella (Milano: Mondadori, 1949). The novel won the Viareggio Prize in 1950. Several years previously, Bernari had written about the same subject in Napoli guerra e pace (Roma: Edizioni di “Cronache”, 1946). Domenico Rea, Spaccanapoli (Milano: Mondadori, 1947). See Giuseppe Marotta, L’oro di Napoli (Milano: Bompiani, 1947). See Michele Prisco, La provincia addormentata (Milano: Mondadori, 1949); Luigi Incoronato, La scala a San Potito, Mondadori, 1950. About the bitter experiences of war, Incoronato dedicated also Le pareti bianche, a book edited in 1968 after his death by Mondadori. Aldo Stefanile, I cento bombardamenti di Napoli; i giorni delle Am-lire (Napoli: Marotta, 1968). This is the definition by Fabiano Fabbri. See Fabiano Fabbri, “Malaparte scrittore ‘informale’: la vita sotto ‘la pelle’”, in Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, pp. 41 e 51. Fabbri, further observes p. 41-42: “A world [that of Malaparte], let it be clear, governed by violent impulses, in perpetual formation, ready to change immediately into the

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Bibliography Ajello, Nello, “Napoli-Sciangai”, Nord-Sud (December 1954). Artieri, Giovanni, “Breve storia di un’epopea”, in Le quattro giornate di Napoli, ed. by Giovanni Artieri (Napoli: Marotta, 1963). Asor Rosa, Alberto, Genus italicum. Saggi sull’identità letteraria italiana nel corso del tempo (Torino: Einaudi, 1997). Bernari, Carlo, Speranzella (Milano: Mondadori, 1949). Bo, Carlo, Inchiesta sul neorealismo (Torino: Edizioni Radio Italiana, 1951). Borri, Giancarlo, Invito alla lettura di Anna Maria Ortese, (Milano: Mursia, 1988). Campailla, Sergio, “La pelle (e l’anima) di Malaparte”, in Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, Proceedings of the Conference ed. by Carmine Di Biase (Napoli: CUEN, 1999); now in Sergio Campailla, Controcodice (ESI: Napoli 2001). Caracciolo di Castagneto, Francesco, ‘43/’44 Diario di Napoli (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1964). Caserta, Renato, Quel buio a Napoli (1943-1944) (Napoli: Aba Edizioni 1997). Chianese, Giovanni, “Ceti popolari e comportamenti quotidiani a Napoli”, in Vera Lombardi and others, Alle radici del nostro presente. Napoli e la Campania dal fascismo alla Repubblica (1943-1946) (Napoli: ESI, 1986). Cione, Edmondo, Napoli e Malaparte, (Napoli: Pellerano-Del Gaudio, no date [1950]). Clerici, Luca, Apparizione e visione. Vita e opere di Anna Maria Ortese (Milano: Mondadori, 2002). Criscio, Carlo, Un cuore alla radio. Napoli 1943-1944 (Napoli: Criscio,1954). D’Agostino, Guido, Le quattro giornate di Napoli (Milano: Newton & Compton, 1998). De Antonellis, Giacomo, La fine del fascismo a Napoli (Milano: Ares, 1967). De Donato, Gigliola, Preface to Carlo Levi, Coraggio dei miti. Scritti contemporanei. 1922-1974 (Bari: De Donato, 1975). De Jaco, Aldo, Le quattro giornate di Napoli (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1972). De Marco, Paolo, Polvere di piselli. La vita quotidiana a Napoli durante l’occupazione alleata (1943-1944), (Napoli: Liguori, 1996). De Martino, Ernesto, “L’etnologo e il poeta”, Preface to A. Pierro, Poesie (Roma: M. Dell’Arco, 1958).

purest material every time a weak attempt at representation tries to insinuate itself into the shapeless magma”.

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De Sanctis, Gaetano, “Brani di un diario dimenticato”, in Le quattro giornate, ed. by G. Artieri (Napoli: Marotta, 1963). Degli Espinosa, Agostino, Il regno del Sud, with a preface by G. Russo (Milano: Rizzoli, 1995). Di Biase, Carmine, Introduction to Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, Proceedings of the Conference ed. by Carmine Di Biase (Napoli: CUEN, 1999). Dorfless, Gillo, L’estetica del mito da Vico a Wittgenstein (Milano: Mursia, 1990). Drago, Antonio, “La interpretazione delle Quattro Giornate secondo le due opzioni fondamentali”, in Mezzogiorno 1943. La scelta, la lotta, la speranza, ed. by G. Chianese (Napoli: ESI, 1996). Falaschi, Gianni, Carlo Levi (Firenze: Il Castoro, 1971). Frascani, Federico, La Napoli amara di Eduardo De Filippo (Firenze: Parenti, 1958). —, Le due Napoli di Corrado Alvaro (Napoli: Arturo Berisio, 1969). Galasso, Giuseppe, Napoli (Roma – Bari: Laterza, 1987). Ginsborg, Paul, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, trans. by M. Flores and S. Perini, 2 vols (Torino: Einaudi, 1989). Golino, Enzo, “Dopo il ’43”, in Francesco Compagna and others, Napoli dopo un secolo (Napoli: ESI, 1961). Greco, Lorenzo, Censura e scrittura: Vittorini, lo pseudo-Malaparte, Gadda (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1983). Guerri, Giordano Bruno, L’Arcitaliano. Vita di Curzio Malaparte, (Milano: Leonardo 1991; 1st edn Milano: Bompiani, 1980) —, Malaparte dopo la caduta dei muri, in Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, ed. by C. Di Biase (Napoli: CUEN, 1999). Huston, John, Cinque mogli e sessanta film, trans. by P. Chiesa (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1982). Incoronato, Luigi, La scala a San Potito (Milano: Mondadori, 1950). Isabella, Ferdinando, Napoli dall’8 settembre ad Achille Lauro (Napoli: Guida, 1980). Isnenghi, Mario, “Belfagor”. Giornali e giornalisti (Roma: Savelli, 1975). La Capria, Raffaele, L’armonia perduta (Milano: Mondadori, 1986). —, L’occhio di Napoli, (Milano: Mondadori, 1994). Lambiase, Sergio and Nazzaro Gian Battista, Napoli 1940-1945 (Milano: Longanesi 1978). Levi, Carlo, L’Orologio, (Torino: Einaudi, 1953). Lewis, Norman, Napoli ’44 (Milano: Adelphi, 1998). Malaparte, Curzio [Erik Suckert], L’Europa vivente ed altri saggi politici (1921-1931) (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1961).

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—, Kaputt (Milano: Mondadori, 1997). —, La Pelle (Milano: Mondadori, 2003; 1st edn 1950). Marotta, Giuseppe, L’oro di Napoli (Milano: Bompiani, 1947). Moorehead, Alan, Operazione eclissi (Milano: Garzanti, 1969). Ortese, Anna Maria, “Dove il tempo è un altro”, MicroMega, 5 (1990), 139. —, Il mare non bagna Napoli (Milano: Adelphi, 1994 [1953]). Palermo, Antonio, “E torna ‘la pelle’”, La Voce della Campania (11 February 1979). Papa, Antonio, “Napoli americana. Commentari”, Belfagor (31 June 1982). Pardini, Giuseppe, Curzio Malaparte. Bibliografia politica (Milano: Luni, 1995). —, Il fascismo integrale nella concezione di Curzio Suckert Malaparte, in Nuova Antologia, 3 (July-September 1994), 185-225. Parente, Luigi, “Una città contro. La polemica Napoli-Malaparte nel secondo dopoguerra”, Italia contemporanea, 215 (June 1999), 308. —, “Zola, l’affare Dreyfus e Napoli”, in Il terzo Zola. Emile Zola dopo i “Rougon-Macquart”, ed. by G.C. Menichelli (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1990). Passaro, Biagio and Soverina Francesco, “Un antifascismo difficile: il Sud d’Italia (1943-1980)”, Il Presente e la storia, 45 (June 1994), 43-84. Prisco, Michele, La provincia addormentata (Milano: Mondadori, 1949). Quarenghi, Paola, “Vicoli stretti e libertà dell’arte”, in Edoardo De Filippo, Teatro, ed by N. De Blasi e P. Quarenghi (Milano: Mondadori, 2000). Rea, Domenico, Fate bene alle anime del Purgatorio. Illuminazioni napoletane (Milano: Mondadori, 1977). —, “La pellaccia di Malaparte”, Il Giornale (7 February 1950). Santarelli, Enzo, Mezzogiorno 1943-1944. Uno “sbandato” nel Regno del Sud (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1999). Soldati, Mario, Le lettere da Capri (Milano: Mondadori, 1967 [1959]). Stefanile, Aldo, I cento bombardamenti di Napoli; i giorni delle Am-lire, (Napoli: Marotta, 1968). Stefanile, Mario, “La letteratura a Napoli (1930-1970)”, in Storia di Napoli, vol. X, (Napoli: Società Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1971). Suckert Ronchi, Edda, Malaparte (Città di Castello, 1993). Varvaro, Paolo, “Percorsi culturali a Napoli”, in Il silenzio della ragione. Politica e cultura a Napoli negli anni Cinquanta, ed. by Gloria Chianese (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1994).

Dianna Pickens

Captive Naples Until relatively recently, most of the Americans travelling to Naples were artists and writers who were attracted by the treasures of antiquity in order to learn from those great artisans and masters, and to gaze upon their masterpieces and the same landscape that had inspired their work. Instead, the Second World War brought something entirely new to Italy: young American soldiers who were sent to fight overseas and who were thrown into a land and a culture that at first seemed incomprehensible, and in some cases shocking, given the dramatic circumstances of their ‘visit.’ The first to record the events as they unfolded were the journalists and photographers, who arrived in Naples with the 5th Army as part of the Press Corps of the Allied forces. However earnest and talented they might have been, their work was highly influenced by censorship – both political and self-imposed. The “War Effort” was a rallying cry, and a strong moral deterrent to material that might portray American soldiers as anything other than the saviours of the European continent. Even a great writer such as John Steinbeck admitted that the stories he had written, “all really happened. The lie is in what wasn’t said.”1 But their job was only to record the events as they happened, or as they were supposed to happen; they had been sent to support military operations and the men who accomplished them, and for the most part they followed their orders, and turned their attention toward strictly ‘Allied’ subjects. Once the occupation was complete, the activities of day-to-day living began, and life in Naples seemed to gravitate toward the ‘Galleria Umberto I’, which also inspired more than one perceptive memoir. Friendship, love and business thrived in the Galleria Umberto I, and among the soldiers were two young men who would soon after the war become distinguished writers. Two of the most perceptive books are The Gallery (1947) by John Horne Burns, and A Tent in this World by William Fense Weaver. Both were inspired to make their first attempts at writing novels by describing their experiences in Naples during the war. The written accounts that they share are two of the most intriguing pictures of this city and its transformation during those excruciating months.

1

John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 10.

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After the war, the American government sent another kind of army of ‘cultural ambassadors’ who were dispatched to promote American culture abroad with the Fulbright program. While Europe was in the process of picking up the pieces after the decimation of war, these young idealists were convinced of their own “(cold) war effort” to show Europeans the advantages of adopting an American-style democracy as opposed to Russian Communism. Many books were written by American soldiers who had been to Naples during the war and were compelled to return, and those books written after such experiences tended to concentrate on the dichotomy of the new world and the old, on the differences between the two continents rather than on the similarities, and on the heartfelt belief in the superiority of their own country.

A Question of Focus An army of journalists and photographers accompanied the troops from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and among many others, Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White and John Steinbeck arrived in the Naples area at the invitation of the Allied Forces. The most famous images of this part of Italy, from the Salerno landing to the battle of Cassino, are marked by an apparent realism, though the authors themselves tended to discount the value of the absolute truth in their reporting. Margaret Bourke-White was unique in that she was the only woman to be sent to the war, through an agreement between LIFE Magazine and the Pentagon, to be the official photographer for the American Airforce. She, too, was concerned that her version of the war be published, but was not always successful in doing so. An expert at aerial photography, she flew with the bombers and witnessed the Allied bombing campaign of the area near Cassino. She went on to complete her reportage in a hospital near the front lines, where she was conscious of the fact that she was taking “dramatic photographs.” But the men “were suffering” and her duty, as she saw it, was to document everything. Unfortunately, on the way to publication, a very strange thing happened – the photographs disappeared. She was “furious” and wanted to go to Washington herself to find out what had happened, and there she discovered that all of the material had arrived in the two shipments, but had somehow gone missing between the Pentagon and darkroom of the censor’s office. LIFE was able to put together a story with what remained, but for her it was no consolation. “They say that anything can happen at the Pentagon,” she later wrote, but “even now it still hurts.”2

2

Margaret Bourke-White, Il mio ritratto (Roma: Contrasto, 2003), p. 216.

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Other writers who were in Naples during the war like Thornton Wilder, who was not there as a journalist but as an intelligence officer, refused to write about their experiences, because he had seen the beauty of Naples before the war and could not accept the drastic changes that had occurred as a result of the Allied occupation.3 Ernie Pyle, probably the most beloved of the war reporters in America, and the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, the creator of the famous “Willie and Joe” cartoons, also arrived in the Naples area at the invitation of the Allied Forces and wrote for The Stars and Stripes Newspaper, but neither treated subjects outside the realm of the soldiers themselves, as The Stars and Stripes was published almost exclusively for the armed forces. Perhaps another explanation for the lack of complete reporting comes again from John Steinbeck, who may have allowed himself to see more of his surroundings, but limited himself to telling stories that served the purpose of entertaining and sustaining the morale of both the soldiers and their families back home. In the introduction to Once There Was a War, he admits that not everything that happened made it into his stories, and “That they were not reported was partly a matter of orders, partly traditional, and largely because there was a huge and gassy thing called the War Effort [...]”4 He is also quite explicit in describing the exact nature of the rules that governed their behavior as journalists and he seems to laugh at how ridiculous they sound: There were no cowards in the American Army … A second convention was that we had no cruel or ambitious or ignorant commanders. If the disorganized insanity we were a part of came a cropper, it was not only foreseen but a part of a grander strategy out of which a victory would emerge. A third sternly held rule was that five million perfectly normal, young, energetic, and concupiscent men and boys had for the period of the War Effort put aside their habitual preoccupation with girls.5

But he also tries to justify their attitude, when he writes, “Yes, we wrote only a part of the war, but at the time we believed, fervently believed, that it was the best thing to do… So here they are, period pieces, fairy tales, halfmeaningless memories […] a sad and jocular recording of a little part of a war I saw and do not believe, unreal with trumped-up pageantry […]”6 The stories collected in Once There Was a War, though written in haste with clear propagandistic objectives in mind, are tiny masterpieces. Steinbeck knew how to support the troops and to elicit the reaction he wanted in his readers, but he noted something different in the photographer Robert Capa: 3

4 5 6

See Letizia Cerio, Ex Libris (Capri: La Conchiglia, 1999), p. 60 and Roberto Ciuni, Stelle e strisce sui faraglioni. Gli americani a Capri (Capri: La Conchiglia, 2005). Steinbeck, pp. 8-9. Steinbeck, p. xiii. Steinbeck, p. xx.

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“Capa knew what to look for,” Steinbeck reportedly wrote, “and what to do with it once he found it. He knew, for example, that you can’t photograph war, because it is above all an emotion.” Capa, he writes, “could show the horror of an entire people through the face of one little boy. His camera took in the emotion and kept it […]”7 Capa himself discounts the absolute truth of the images he captured, while claiming a higher one. In his autobiographical book Slightly Out of Focus, it is clear that writing the truth was often very difficult, but it was in the interest of truth that he sometimes allowed himself to go a bit beyond it, other times to stop just before it. The events and the people he describes, however, always had something to do with the truth. While most journalists paid more attention to the victorious soldiers, Capa’s account of the arrival of the 5th Army in Naples is unique in that he notes the hunger for both food and peace, as well as the suspicion that lurked in the local people. He wrote that taking pictures of a victory was like taking pictures of a church wedding ten minutes after the bride and groom have left, and that in Naples the ceremony was short and the guests, with their stomachs empty, had quickly left, wondering if the young couple would have already argued by the next day.8 In Naples he was able to seek out events where others did not, and worked with the local people to find the best pictures. Once, he paid a local photographer for his undeveloped rolls of film, and much to that photographer’s surprise, they were then published in LIFE Magazine under his name, Sandro Aurisicchio de Val.9 In another incident, when Capa was returning to his hotel one day, he saw a small crowd of people, silent in front of a school. As with all great photographers, he also knew how to wait, to see what would happen. He took off his hat and grabbed his camera and pointed it at the faces of the women stricken by pain, clutching photographs of their dead children. He continued to take pictures until the caskets were taken away. He said that those photos were the truest and most sincere testimonial of the victory: images taken at a simple funeral at a school.10 The experience was not without significance for him personally. “The feet of those children”, he wrote, “were my authentic welcome to Europe, the land where I was born.” Being both a European and a (future) American, he recognized the people in the first European city to be liberated after the war as being like him. Naples itself remained largely unrepresented in America for most Americans who saw and read published accounts during the war, except for 7 8 9 10

Robert Capa, Leggermente fuori fuoco. Slightly out of Focus (Aosta: Contrasto 2002), p. 9. Capa, p. 128 See LIFE Magazine, Special European Edition, November 8, 1943. Capa, p. 128-132.

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the occasional stories about American efforts to eliminate disease among the local population, and one particular issue of LIFE in 1943, in which some images are shown of posing Neapolitan boys who participated in the ‘Quattro Giornate’ (‘Four Days’) battle to oust the remaining Germans. Like the empty stage of wartime productions at the San Carlo, Naples itself was largely a bleak backdrop for the actors in question: the American soldiers.

A Closer Look In 1947, two books were published with entirely new visions of Naples during the war: The Gallery by John Horne Burns and A Tent in this World by William Fense Weaver. John Dos Passos is reported on the front cover as saying that The Gallery was “The first book of real magnitude to come out of the last war,” and the book went on to collect rave reviews in America, as well as harsh criticism. A highly unusual account that has relatively recently become popular again because of the homosexuality of the author, Burns observes all that goes on at the Galleria Umberto I, and portrays the various characters, both American and Italian, as people who are simply trying to survive the circumstances of war.11 Burns is unusual in his ability to describe the atmosphere, the sights, and the sounds of occupied Naples. He observes from a unique viewpoint as a homosexual in uniform and as an Irish-American Catholic in a Catholic country. In addition, through his inevitable comparisons of American and Neapolitan traditions, lifestyles and culture he denounces the shallowness of American culture, the crimes committed by the Allies against the local people, and his own bitterness at the delusion of finding his own culture wanting. Burns also captures the distinctive sounds that surround him, especially of the characteristic Italian spoken by the Neapolitans.12 He is entranced by the sound of it, yet he understands enough of the language to sense its power to wound, despite its happy sound.13 Finally, he turns his attention to the Neapolitan dialect, which he describes as: “Italian chewed to shreds in the mouth of a hungry man”.14 His portrayal of the women of Naples and the world that surrounds them is indicative of the respect he has for them, as he tells the story of “Momma” a woman originally from Milan who owns the gay bar in the Galleria, and 11 12 13 14

John Horne Burns, The Gallery (New York and London: Harper Brothers Publishers, 1947). Burns, p. 209. Burns, p. 210. Burns, p. 210.

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only feels alive when she is at the bar with her “boys,” and Giulia, who struggles to maintain her dignity, and her virginity, even when she falls in love with an American soldier. In these ‘portraits,’ he draws a stark contrast between the crass, boorish and ungrateful soldiers, and the generous, graceful nobility of the Neapolitan women who are forced to put up with the disrespectful young men that surround them. The San Carlo Theatre also figures prominently in his memories. The first ‘portrait’ in the book, “The Trenchfoot of Michael Patrick”, tells the story of a young soldier who lacks the ability to break through his own intense loneliness, is unable to convince a Neapolitan girl to accompany him to the Allied operated San Carlo Theatre to see La Boheme, one of the operas most frequently sung during the war, and resigns to go without much hope of distraction. Despairing and inebriated, he crosses from The Gallery to the theatre, where he encounters another world. His encounter with opera music, in what is considered one of the most beautiful theatres in the world, is overwhelming, and because he is so struck by it, he is forced to question his own culture: What was there here in the sweetness of this reality that he’d missed out on in America? … He laid his head on the plush railing by his arms. His tears fell on his knees. He wept very quietly but at length. It was okay to cry because he knew with clarity and brilliance exactly why he was crying. For his own ruined life, for the lives of millions of others like him, whom no one had heard of or thought about. For all the sick wretchedness of a world that no one could, or tried to, understand. For all who passed their stupid little lives in the middle of a huge myth and delusion.15

The myth and delusion that Burns recognized in his own society was distilled for him, not only by the trauma of war, but specifically in Naples, the first European city to be occupied by the Allied Forces, in 1944, “Our propaganda did everything but tell us Americans the truth: that we had most of the riches of the modern world, but very little of its soul […]”16 Like other Americans, William Fense Weaver landed in Naples during the war, was prompted by his memories to return and was able to understand his own culture through his observation of Neapolitan culture. His book, A Tent in this World, was first published, both in English and in Italian, in Italy in 1950. In it, he is at first fascinated by Naples, then disturbed by the Neapolitans, then surprised at the changes he sees in his own behavior: “[…] the important aspect of a voyage is what happens within the voyager. In real travel, the country one explores is himself. Speaking a foreign language, one examines what one says. In an unfamiliar tongue there are no

15 16

Burns, p. 15-17. Burns, pp. 259-260.

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commonplaces.”17 Meanwhile, the author begins to realize that the Naples he knew during the war was an exception, that the city has a long history of resurrecting itself from disastrous circumstances, and that he might learn something from their ability to adapt to and overcome all circumstances, as they have for centuries. “I realized what a wonderful quality this adaptability is. I need much more of it myself.”18 He also recognizes a longing for Naples that he did not expect: “in the three and a half years I was away there was always in me the strong desire to come back.”19 Part of his fascination with the city is linked to the people he had met who were “poor, hungry, and sick” but were able to maintain a certain style and dignity that to him were unexplainable. In remembering an acquaintance he had met during the war he describes how “immediately he became a symbol for me: this boy who, in spite of all this, could talk only of poetry and made appointments with friends to discuss his latest work. He seemed another personification of that spirit I felt all around me then.”20 His desire to return to Naples is linked to this image, to the unexplainable grace with which the people of Naples met their fate. As Burns put it, “For though we Americans were a conquering army, when history is written, it will show that the Neapolitans conquered many of us.”21

Strangers in Italy These two books written by Americans during the war were unique in that they were more sympathetic and participative toward the Neapolitan struggle to survive the circumstances of war, but books by Fulbright scholars written after the war, like the articles written by war correspondents, were once again influenced by a sort of self-censorship as a direct result of their dedication to the mission at hand. Herbert Kubly, in his Award-winning book published in America as An American in Italy and in England as A Stranger in Italy, reflects upon the distorted perception that Italians had of Americans, and yet he never quite seems to overcome his own prejudices when describing the people he encounters. The book traces his travels across Italy as a Fulbright scholar in a mission to dissuade Italians from the myth that, “for all our 17

18 19 20 21

William Fense Weaver, A Tent in this World (Kingston, New York: McPherson and Company, 1999), p. 128. Weaver, p. 126 Weaver, p. 17-18 Weaver, p. 110. Burns, p. 304.

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bathtubs and our cars and our skyscrapers, we are without moral purpose; that we are the New Carthage – all money and no spirit; that we are, in short, a country without a soul.”22 Although the stated purpose of the book is to communicate for the Italians, the very first words of the book belie his ambivalent sentiments toward the Italian people in general: “Italy is the land of human nature. Italians are an undistorted people rich in soul and wise in the mysteries of the human heart. The have produced an unusually large proportion of the world’s great saints and more than their share of sinners.” Naples for him is “Italy distilled to its essence, the most Italian of Italian cities.”23 Kubly often mixes religious and literary metaphors in his descriptions, especially when he first encounters Naples: “No American who arrives in Naples can escape the terrifying onslaught. The moment one steps off a train or a ship, he is the unwitting Pied Piper of nipping, clawing demons, chanting their evil litanies like choir-boys of l’inferno.”24 It is also threatening, noisy, and intensely entertaining, a bit like going to the theatre, where Pulcinella seems to represent the Neapolitans themselves: “The Neapolitan wears his emotions as brightly as Joseph’s cloak. His life is an expression of laughter and tears, gaiety and sadness, birth and death. He is dynamic, cunning, corrupt, comic, warm and wise…Pulcinella, traditional clown lover with a hunched back and grotesque nose, is a Neapolitan. So is the great film comic, Toto, Italy’s modern Pulcinella. Built like a great amphitheatre around her beautiful bay, Naples is an eternally unfolding play acted by a million of the best actors in the world. The comedy is broad, the tragedy violent. The curtain never rings down.”25 Like Burns, he is impressed with the San Carlo Theatre, but perhaps because he is not as emotionally raw as the soldiers who were just back from the front lines, he fails to be moved by the opera in question, in this case La Traviata. He notices the reaction of the audience, however, whose participation “is what makes the difference between hearing opera at San Carlo and say, New York’s Metropolitan. In America opera is for musical connoisseurs to whom the libretti of Verdi, Puccini and Bellini often seem lurid, hysterical or downright silly. In Italy the stories are part of life; arias are the popular music of the people.”26 His descriptions are quite arresting in their vividness, though he seems to see only the hysterical qualities and the degradation of the people and chooses to describe only that, in an attempt to 22 23 24 25 26

Herbert Kubly, Stranger in Italy (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1955), p. 9. Kubly, p. 123. Kubly, p. 318. Kubly, p. 123. Kubly, p. 149.

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convince his readers that the American people must help the poor Neapolitans. He ventures into the “human jungle” of Naples to see a puppet show, and to the Galleria Umberto, “the geographical and spiritual heart of Naples.” He describes the beggars there, who are “the most pathetic in Italy” meets a series of technically non-Neapolitans (one is from Ischia, the other had lived in America for a short time) who tell him that Neapolitans are “untruthful and insincere. The know nothing of honour”27 or say, “He is Neapolitan. He has no control of himself.”28 In the chapter entitled La casa dello scugnizzo, he attempts to explain the presence of so many children in the streets. “Children were bred like insects with no thought for their welfare. In every corner of the world there are always children who do not know their father. In Naples many scugnizzi do not know their mother.”29 Although he tries to describe Naples in detail, everything is coloured by his belief in his mission, so that the grotesque inhabited grottos of Naples are illuminated by the three ‘heroic’ American volunteers who were trying to help the people who lived there. On a trip to Capri, “a toy island with a toy enchantment”, he makes a foreign resident speak for him, complaining about the “shiftlessness of Italian labourers,” and “poor workmen, these Italians. Irresponsible, lazy, not to be trusted.”30 See Naples by Douglas Allenbrook is one of many sentimentally loaded books that have been written more recently by former soldiers who had lived in Naples during the war, and later returned to the city under the volcano by the bay. Allenbrook returned as a composer and Fulbright scholar, and his vision of Naples is less hostile than Kubly’s, though his memories are mixed with nostalgia for his youth. Almost immediately, Naples appeals to his senses, as he remembers his first glimpse of Vesuvius during the war, and then the port, where a fellow sailor was shocked by the proposals made by the scugnizzi, but he “was taken, sold on the place, seduced by the looks of the people, by the brilliance of their eyes and the quickness of their wits. He goes on to describe the bombed city, where, “urban life teemed [...] despite the desperation and the disease that we were told was rampant in it.” For him, Naples did not seem to change, even when he returned years later. “This was only my first glimpse but later years never erased my feelings for the place.”31 He is aware that the beauty of the landscape could not completely 27 28 29 30 31

Kubly, p. 129. Kubly, p. 133. Kubly, p. 319. Kubly, p. 161. Douglas Allenbrook, See Naples (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), p. 120.

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erase the destitution of the population that still lived in caves while “corrupt, crafty crooks perfectly at ease with Lucky Luciano,”32 relaxed on the terrace of the Hotel Vesuvius. His memoir is a mixture of schoolbook history, opera music, haunting memories, intense youthful sex, and a grudging respect for certain families he meets during his adventures in Naples. However, while he is entranced by the special history and qualities of the city, he often criticizes that uniqueness. “Naples obstinately, even stupidly, insists upon itself as being a very world of its own. The city has its own language, its own poetry, its own music, its own brand of melancholy – all framed by the glory of the bay and the blessed islands and haunted by the sleeping volcano.” His mixed feelings for the place seem to be personified by his first love, Laura. “Any recollection of her implies that city’s history, tying the person, the love, and the memory to a singular spot with its own singular history,” Naples. Laura seemed to give him something, to serve his purposes at the moment, but it was not to be a lasting affair. It is not surprising that he later describes Naples and Positano as “a never-never land, an adolescent’s perennial fulfilment,” and all of Italy as a “Venus’s flytrap” where visitors are captured “by the quick eyes and supple limbs of its inhabitants.” Although his description of his wartime experiences may be closer to the truth of the situation in Naples during the war, the fact that it took more than fifty years to write it is indicative of the cultural taboo associated with writing such memoirs.

Conclusion Sandwiched between the ‘official’ version of Naples as described by American journalists, and the politicized vision of Fulbright scholars, there seems to have been a very brief window of comprehension and respect which came during the Second World War from the most surprising source of all: simple but sensitive soldiers who were courageous enough to speak plainly about their experiences in Naples. That The Gallery was published immediately would prove to be vitally important, since the cold war had already begun and the McCarthy years were soon to follow. Significantly, A Tent in this World was not published in the United States until 1999. Those who came later seemed less willing to question their own culture, given the objectives implicit in the Fulbright program. As Steinbeck put it, “that is why, when the war was over, novels and stories by ex-soldiers … proved so

32

Allenbrook, p. 6.

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shocking to a public which had been carefully protected from contact with the crazy hysterical mess.”33

Bibliography Douglas Allenbrook, See Naples (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995). Bourke-White, Margaret, Il mio ritratto (Roma: Contrasto, 2003). Burns, John Horne, The Gallery (New York and London: Harper Brothers Publishers, 1947). Capa, Robert, Leggermente fuori fuoco. Slightly out of Focus (Aosta: Contrasto 2002). Cerio, Letizia, Ex Libris (Capri: La Conchiglia, 1999). Roberto Ciuni, Stelle e strisce sui faraglioni. Gli Americani a Capri (Capri: La Conchiglia, 2005). Kubly, Herbert, Stranger in Italy, (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1955). LIFE Magazine, Special European Edition, November 8, 1943. Steinbeck, John, Once There Was a War (New York: Penguin, 1994). Weaver, William Fense, A Tent in this World (Kingston, New York: McPherson and Company 1999).

33

Steinbeck, p. xviii.

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Adriana Corrado

Concluding Remarks When bringing to a close this journey of collective reflection around themes such as boundaries and borders, places of encounter and of conflict, cultural and national identity, cosmopolitism and fundamentalism, some comments still appear to be necessary when considering the present-day cultural situation marked by the event of globalisation which seems to have shattered the space-time categories of modernity. Indeed, the term globalisation should not be read to mean – and nor should it risk achieving – a sort of homogenization or westernization, as the dominant cultures might well wish or hope for, and as the marginal cultures fear,1 thus opening the way to the threat of global conflict. Dangers of this kind are today laid out in full view, though the more vigilant scientists had already foreseen them, aware that the break in the consolidated equilibrium of the opposing blocks, together with the decline of the great 19th century ideologies, for many years the mainstay of relative stability after the two world wars, called for an immediate appeal in favour of harmonious coexistence and total integration, not, however, to be reduced to a mere cultural mosaic as, already in 1996, Ulf Hannerz wrote: […] interconnectedness across great distances is not altogether new […] That image of a cultural mosaic, where each culture would have been a territorial entity with clear, sharp, enduring edges, never really corresponded with realities. There were always interactions, and a diffusion of ideas, habits, and things, even if at times we have been habituated to theories of culture and society which have not emphasised such truths.2

So cultural syncretism, hybridisation, creolisation, point of arrival of the relentless process of global nomadism, in which the whole of mankind partakes and contributes, this is our possible future. So that technology may be submitted to man and not be the cause of his marginalisation or alienation, opening up the way for eyes to meet, tongues, different as they may be, to converse and religions, all religions, to carry out their distinct rituals, in order to help us bring to the light those common traits, evidence of man’s characteristic yearning to overcome all that is contingent and therefore restrictive if not blind. 1

2

As Ulf Hannerz fearfully reminds us. See Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections. Culture, people, places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 17-19. Hannerz, p. 18.

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That we may not be divided by the word of those who, though men themselves, do not speak the language of men, that the prophets may find a common interpretation, that a new global culture may proceed unhindered, in the respect of diversity towards all that unites.

Notes on Contributors Maurizio Ascari is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bologna (Italy). He is the author of In the Palatial Chamber of the Mind (1997), La leggibilità del male (1998) and I linguaggi della tradizione (2005). He has also edited and translated works by Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, William Faulkner, Jack London and William Wilkie Collins. Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, which she founded in the 1980s. She is author of over 20 books, and her Translation Studies, (3rd ed. 2002) which first appeared in 1980, has remained consistently in print and has become the most important textbook around the world in the expanding field of Translation Studies. Her Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (1993) has also become an internationally renowned work and has been translated into several languages. Recent books include Exchanging Lives (2002), a collection of poems and translations, Sylvia Plath: an Introduction to the Poetry (2005) and with Peter Bush, The Translator as Writer (2006). She also writes for several national newspapers. She is a member of the West Midlands Arts Council, the West Midlands Life Board and the British Council Arts Board. She chairs the board of the Warwick Arts Centre. Olga Binczyk is an assistant at College of Foreign Languages in CzĊstochowa and a doctoral student at the University of Wrocáaw (19th and 20th century British Literature Research Centre, Poland). Her fields of interest include poetry and narrative fiction in the first half of the 20th century. Adriana Corrado is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples, Italy. She has published several books, essays and articles, mostly in the field of Utopian literature and the English Gothic novel. To mention but a few: William Godwin illuminista romantico (1988); Da un’isola all’altra. Il pensiero utopico nella narrativa inglese da Thomas More ad Aldous Huxley (1988); Mary Shelley, donna e scrittrice. Una rilettura (2000); Quattro storie di vampiri nell’Inghilterra dell’Ottocento, ed. by Adriana Corrado (2002); Dall’utopia all’utopismo. Percorsi tematici, ed. by Vita Fortunati, Raymond Trousson and Adriana Corrado (2003).

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Graham Dawson is a cultural historian at the University of Brighton in England whose research has focused on the inter-relation of cultural memory, narrative and identity, and the memory of war in modernity. He is author of Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London and New York, 1994), and a co-editor and contributor to Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors, and Commemorating War: The Politics of Memory (both Piscataway, New Jersey, 2004). He is currently completing a book on cultural memory, the Irish Troubles and the peace process for Manchester University Press. Eleonora Federici (MA and PhD, University of Hull) is ricercatrice of English at the University of Trento. Her main research areas include cultural studies, gender studies and translation studies. She has published various articles on intertextuality, contemporary British and Canadian fiction and has edited (with Vita Fortunati and Annamaria Lamarra) The Controversial Woman’s Body: Images and Representations in Literature and Art (2004). Marino Niola is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples, Italy. He is at present Director of the Regional Research Centre for Cultural Traditions and Festivities and of the Regional Centre for Immigration Problems. His recent books on the theme of urban cultures within the Mediterranean area include Il corpo mirabile (Roma: Meltemi, 2002), Totem e ragù (Napoli: Pironti, 2003), Il purgatorio a Napoli (Roma: Meltemi, 2003) and Il presepe (Napoli: L'Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2005). Alvio Patierno is a school teacher and a part time professor of French Culture at the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, in Naples (Italy). He has published numerous articles: his main fields of research include the influence of French theatre in Naples, in the second half of the 19th century, and the presence of French Travellers in Southern Italy. Paola Paumgardhen is a lecturer in German Literature at the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples, Italy. She has published a number of articles on German Jewish Literature, which is her main field of interest. Manfred Pfister is Professor of English at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is co-editor of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch and Poetica and author of Das Drama. Theorie und Analyse (Munich, 1982; Engl.: CUP, 1988; Chinese: Beijing University of the Performing Arts Press, 2004). Among his recent

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book publications are ‘The Fatal Gift of Beauty’: The Italies of British Travellers (1996), Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice (1999), Laurence Sterne (2001), A History of English Laughter (2002), and editions of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (2003) and Samuel Butler’s Notebooks (2005). Dianna Pickens teaches English at the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa and the University Federico II in Naples, Italy. She is currently completing her PhD dissertation on Thornton Wilder and Italy, for the European School of Advanced Studies. Katia Pizzi has published extensively in the field of modern Italian Studies, with particular reference to the literature and history of the northeastern borders (esp. Trieste), women’s writing (esp. Jewish and nationalist) and children’s literature and illustration (esp. the Futurist avant-garde and international comics). Pizzi’s publishers include Oxford University Press, Routledge and Claudiana. She is currently preparing the Italian edition of her volume A City in Search of an Author: The Literary Identity of Trieste (London-Sheffield-New York: Sheffield Academic Press-Continuum, 2001), which will be published in 2006. She lectures in Italian Studies at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. David Skilton, who is Research Professor in English at Cardiff University, was educated at King’s College, Cambridge and Copenhagen University. He has written on the Victorian novel and edited numerous works by Anthony Trollope and others. He is currently working on Victorian literary illustrations, and preparing a book on visions of London in ruins. Jola Skulj is a senior research fellow at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovene cademy of Sciences and Arts. Her research interests focus on theoretical and methodological aspects of literature (textuality, novel, narrativity, historicity, cross-national and cross-cultural issues as dialogism) as well as on historical studies of the 20th century. Her recent publications include: “The novel and its terrain(s) of reinterpreted identities in the age of globalization” in Genre of the Novel in Contemporary World Literature: a leap or a standstill?, ed. by Jüri Talvet (Tartu, 2004), “Literature and space: textual, artistic and cultural spaces of transgressiveness” in Literature and Space: Spaces of transgressiveness, ed. by Jola Škulj and Darja Pavliþ (Ljubljana, 2004). She was the president of Slovenian Comparative Literature Association (SCLA). Since August 2004 she is a member of the ICLA

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executive committee, since May 2003 a member of executive committee of European Network of Comparative Studies/Réseau Européen d’études comparatistes (REELC/ENCLS) and in October 2003 she was elected into ICLA Research Committee on Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Monica Spiridon is a Professor of Literary Theory, Comparative Literature, Semiotics and 20th Century European Culture at the University of Bucharest. She is a member of the International Comparative Literature Association and acting president of the ICLA Research Committee on Eastern and SouthEastern Europe. She has authored numerous academic studies published in scholarly periodicals and several chapters in books published in Germany, Italy, Canada, Greece, The Netherlands, France, Portugal, Hungary, Slovenia and the U.S. She is the author of several books of comparative literature, literary theory and cultural studies. Among her most recent publications, Les conflits de l’identité aux confins de l’Europe. Le cas roumain (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). Peter Vassallo is Professor of English and Head of the Department at the University of Malta where he is also Director of the Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies. He is editor of the Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies. Paola Villani is an Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples, Italy. She has published books on Giacomo Leopardi, Guido Morselli, Carlo Del Balzo, on 19th and 20th century literature, and is the author of numerous essays published in Italian and European scientific reviews and journals. Franca Zanelli Quarantini teaches French Literature at the University of Bologna. Her main fields of research include Romantic authors such as Stendhal, Gautier, Hugo, Musset, as well as 19th century realism. She has recently published a critical work on the theme of the forest in French literature and another on the relationship between text and image in the 18th and the 19th century French novels. She is currently preparing the first Italian edition of the works of Olympe de Gouges.