Existence, Historical Fabulation, Destiny (Analecta Husserliana)

EXISTENCE, HISTORICAL FABULATION, DESTINY

A NA L E C TA H U S S E R L I A NA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VO L U M E I C

Founder and Editor-in-Chief: ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Hanover, New Hampshire

For other titles published in this series, go to http://www.springer.com/series/5621

EXISTENCE, HISTORICAL FABULATION, DESTINY

Edited by A N NA - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A The World Phenomenological Institute, Hanover, NH, U.S.A.

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning A-T. Tymieniecka, President

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2009920093

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

THE THEME

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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PA RT I EXISTENCE, LOGOS, AND IMAGINATION JADWIGA SMITH / Contextualizing Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Concept of Fabulation

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SECTION I LAWRENCE KIMMEL / The Mythic Journey of a Changeling

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ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ / Aura; Ontological Materiality of Existence and Fabulation

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WILLIAM D. MELANEY / Sartre’s Phenomenology of History: Community, Agency and Comprehension

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IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE / Historical Fabulation as History by Other Means: Shakespeare’s Caesar and Mofolo’s Chaka as Opposites in Rubiconesque Leadership

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MICHEL DION / The Dialectics Between Self, Time and Historical Change According to Milan Kundera

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SECTION II FRANCK DALMAS / Lived Images/Imagined Existences: A Phenomenology of Image Creation in the Works of Michel Tournier and Photography

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LUDMILA MOLODKINA / Aesthetic and Historical Framework of Russian Manor as a Genre

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VICTOR GERALD RIVAS / The Portrait of A Real Live Man: Individuality, Moral Determination and Historical Myth in the Light of Henry James’s The American

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REBECCA M. PAINTER / Healing Personal History: Memoirs of Trauma and Transcendence

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MATTI ITKONEN / Once I Was: A Philosophical Excursion into the Metaphors of the Mind

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SECTION III RAYMOND J. WILSON III / Existence and Historical Fabulation: The Example of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties

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CHRISTOPHER S. SCHREINER / Metaphysical Fabulation in the Berkshires: Melville’s ‘Arrowhead’ and the Anachrony of Thought

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BRUCE ROSS / Being is Believing: The Underpinnings of Walter Benjamin’s Deconstruction of Historicism

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SECTION IV BERNADETTE PROCHASKA / Historic Fabulation and T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”

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TSUNG-I DOW / Harmonious Balance as the Ultimate Reality in Artistic and Philosophical Interpretation of the Taiji Diagram

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JERRE COLLINS / Time After Time: The Temporality of Human Existence in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

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PA RT II

TOWARD DESTINY

SECTION I BERNADETTE PROCHASKA / Destiny in the Literature of Walker Percy, Leo Tolstoy and Eudora Welty

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REBECCA M. PAINTER / The Interior Quest: Memoir, Lens of Personal Destiny

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

CEZARY JÓZEF OLBROMSKI / Collective Intentions and the Phenomenology of Time – The Theory of Non-Domination in Communication

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SECTION II ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ / Interpretation of Destiny

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MICHEL DION / Human Destiny at the Edge of Existential Categories of Life: Musil and Kundera in Dialogue

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SECTION III VICTOR KOCAY / Aspiring Beyond: French Romanticism, Nietzsche and Saint-John Perse

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BRUCE ROSS / Words Turn into Stone Haruki Murakami’s after the quake

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VICTOR GERALD RIVAS / On the Modern Opposition of Fate, Destiny, Life, Doom and Luck in the Light of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady

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RAYMOND J. WILSON III / Gail Godwin: Negotiating with Destiny in the Odd Woman and “Dream Children”

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ROBERTO VEROLINI / The Soul and its Destiny: Readings and Dialogues on Science, Philosophy and Religion – A Meeting with Vito Mancuso and Orlando Franceschelli

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NAME INDEX

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THE THEME

Surging from the ontopoietic vital timing of life, human self-consciousness prompts the innermost desire to rise above its brute facts. Imaginatio creatrix inspires us to fabulate these facts into events and plots with personal significance attempting to delineate a life-course in life-stories within the ever-flowing stream – existence. Seeking their deep motivations, causes and concatenations, we fabulate relatively stabilized networks of interconnecting meaning – history. But to understand the meaning and sense of these networks’ reconfigurations call for the purpose and telos of our endless undertaking; they remain always incomplete, carried onwards with the current of life, while fluctuating with personal experience in the play of memory. Facts and life stories, subjective desires and propensities, the circumambient world in its historical moves, creative logos and mythos, personal freedom and inward stirrings thrown in an enigmatic interplay, prompt our imperative thirst for the meaning of this course, its purpose and its fulfillment – the sense of it all. To disentangle all this animates the passions of the literary genius. The focus of this collection is to isolate the main arteries running through the intermingled forces prompting our quest to endow life with meaning. A-T. T.

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AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

Essays presented in this collection are gathered from two successive and thematically interlinked conferences of the International Society of Phenomenology and Literature (an affiliate of the World Phenomenology Institute) annual conferences, number 31 (held May 16th and 17th, 2007 at the Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts) under the title: Existence and Historical Fabulation and Conference number 32 (held on May 5th and 6th, 2008 at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, Cambridge, Massachusetts) on the topic: Human Destiny in Literature. Our authors are sincerely thanked for their studious contributions and participation in the discussions which make an essential feature of our conventions. Our faithful secretary Jeff Hurlburt and Springer publisher deserve as usual thanks for their expert editorial help. A-T. T.

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SECTION I

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THE MYTHIC JOURNEY OF A CHANGELING

Once upon a time, there was a creature that crawled out of the sea and. . . Once upon a time, there was a creature made perfect who met a serpent in a garden and. . . Once upon a time, there were heroic creatures on earth that strove against the gods and. . .

There are many such tales in the archaic moorings of our collective memory, but one in particular that seems inclusive if indeterminate: Once upon a time there was a creature that came out of the darkness with a only a faint memory of water, and sand, and cold, and fear to discover that its very life depended on telling a story about its origins—of which it had no clear memory, and its destiny—of which it had no certain knowledge. What more fabulous to conceive than this creature which, having lost its tail, dreams of growing wings? It is a being whose nature transforms itself and the world it inhabits but, for all this, keeps running up against its own limits: neither Ape nor Angel, it remains a creature caught between, looking through a fractured mirror at possibilities always just beyond reach. It is a changeling creature, a child seeming stolen from the gods. I

Historical fantasies in language and life: The nature and reach of language has been variously construed by philosophers with only a common acknowledgement that it is the single instrument we have toward a comprehensive critical discernment of life and world. It remains a critical issue, however, whether the entire range of meaning can and should be used in comprehending truth and reality. It may be well to clarify at the outset the difference in these two questions. Truth has many forms, indeed truth is a matter of form. Reality, on the other hand, however and wherever manifest, is a matter of flow rather than form. Its modality is one of continual transformation. If the limits of our world are the limits of our language, then it makes a world of difference if we confine our language to facts. Even the most fundamental forms of knowledge in science are discontinuous and subject to paradigm shifts, but reality is itself formless and suffers no such fixations. Inquiries concerning truth invariably require a calculus of language with an abridgment of meaning, but if we move 11 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 11–25. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

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from the question of what is true to what is real there can be no final abridgement of language and no abstractions into a calculus. The world of reality unlike the world of truth refers to the whole of what is possible—that is, to whatever is meaningful within the range and sense of language. In ancient classical philosophy the long standing ‘quarrel’ that Plato alludes to between literature and philosophy is framed in many different ways, most particularly as that between mythos and logos. It has an historical sequel in the divide between Plato’s rejection of the value of rhetorical discourse and its reinstatement by Aristotle. Two philosophers in the modern period have similarly commented on a kind of conceptual schism in the relation of language and world: With regard to Nietzsche’s rhetorical claim that there are no facts, only interpretations, Wittgenstein offered the logical corrective that not everything can be an interpretation. While these seem to be contradictory claims (as Wittgenstein so intended in his reminder to Nietzsche) they can also be regarded as compatible remarks about and within the world of sense and meaning. Interpretations can only be interpretations of something, of course, but that something can be other than a fact—e.g. it may be an assumption or postulate, or else be grounded in a social or existential commitment unrelated to a factual claim. The point here is that to call something a fact whether in common sense or science, is to give it a value, or accept it as constituted by a value. The world is not reducible to facts in the absence of some determining structure of agreement as to what will count as a fact. In scientific discourse and practice this is commonly expressed as ‘all observations are theory laden’ with the general implication that all seeing is ‘seeing as. . .’ To put it differently, no intelligible world—including that of physics—consists in a totality of facts. The world in which we live is not made up simply of things, nor is it comprehended by facts: facts are not the building blocks of meaning, only one of its potential attributes which in turn requires interpretation. To put the matter in terms other than interpretation and as it will be addressed in this essay: the world in which we live is meaningful in terms of the stories that we tell, stories that we share, stories we remember and stories that we live. Stories and the lives they embrace are neither constituted nor limited by an independent description of facts. They are formed and edited in terms of the perspectives and interpretations we bring to the experiences we share. Aristotle’s indelible inscription in the bedrock of western thought—that Man is a creature with Logos—is a point of departure and a point directly in question concerning the issue historical fabulation. In the specific context and currency of his time Aristotle’s definition focused on the rational discourse of self governance so that his original claim split into the memorialized definition

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that as a possessor of Logos or speech, Man is a rational and a political animal. These two features of Logos are of course the result of an interpretation of a founding claim that intellectual history has since adopted as the defining capacity of human-being. So understood it has the effect of restricting the cognitive limits of language to discursive reason. But another interpretation can and has been given to ‘Man is a creature with Logos’ (words/ speech/ language) that does not center in logic nor serve the narrow limits of control in reason and rule. As a creature with Logos, Man is understood as having the capacity to tell stories—that is, as an alternative to Aristotle’s governing definition, Man is a story-telling animal. Man is a creature graced not only in a faculty needed to reason and govern, but able to put her life and experience into stories. The stories we live by are legion—collectively they comprise the different human concerns investigated by religion, history, philosophy, biology, economics. . . Within each of these collective accounts the dominant interpretation in western intellectual and political history has been that of rule and reason, logic and legislation—that is, it has biased Aristotle’s interpretation of Logos. This bias has tended to establish and direct the central use of language to that of control—of the environment, of the world, of others, of ourselves. Such a bias in philosophical terms represents an ambition to reduce meaningful discourse to the category of facts and so use language (Logos) to constrain the myriad possibilities of imagination toward a matrix of control. This project was made explicit in logical positivism but it is residual as well in the general culture. It is instructive to consider what a shared life-world would become if it were reduced to a discourse of facts, in which no stories are told, or rather, just one story, the recounting of facts according to the master narrative in which all facts are given or from which they are derived. As a case in point, and reflective of a dominant male culture still in keeping with the Classical Greek bias, the traditional form of autobiography has been that of factual summary. In Lionel Trilling’s wonderful story about college teaching, Of This Time, Of that Place. . ., a class of first year students is assigned to write an initial essay about who they are and why they have come to the college. The responses all take the form: ‘My name is James Bierbower III. I was born on. . .in. . .and went to school at. . .my father, James Bierbower II and his father. . . were born and raised. . .’—a series of related facts and events that frame the endowed life of an entitled class at a small liberal arts college. The one exception to this litany of sameness is a student who begins his essay by seeming to reject the essay question: ‘Of this time, of that place, of some heritage. . . what does that matter to those of us now engaged in the creative adventure of learning. . .?’ It turns out, of course, that it does matter, and throughout the term, the teacher is hard pressed and finally unable to locate this student on any spectrum of acceptable

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discourse and decides that he cannot pass his work. However brilliant in other ways, the boy simply does not fit in, nor fit the mold of common sensibility grounded in the factual discourse of learning and life. His work is eventually consigned to a discard pile of student failures. There is a tragic context in the telling of this story which would take us aside from the limited point of our interest here which is to note the standard of autobiography in the listing of facts and events in standard categories of social accountability. In contrast to this factual encasement the emerging literature of the feminine movement has produced new voices that have found a different way to shape the possibilities of autobiography more in keeping with the complexities of our changing life stories. In this literature a life-story can well begin at any point that constitutes a significant sense of its coherence and importance, nor is one limited to a single starting point or narrative. One might begin a story of her life: ‘I was abandoned by my parents. . .’ and so a life narrative unfolds in terms of that critical perception and experience. But at another juncture, or just as well, this autobiography may be transformed along with the life of its telling: ‘I first met my birth mother on my graduation from middle school. . .’ Where one starts is critical for the narrative, obviously, and also critical for the life of its telling, but that place is not assigned by any objective order in terms of its importance or the coherence of the narrative. Language is a tool for many purposes, and the meaning of a life cannot be determined independently of the story in which it is framed; to the extent that there are optional narratives, there exist also different life possibilities. No one is stuck with one set of determining facts, no matter how hard the circumstances of her life. In a world fast losing its tether to religious conviction, moral objectivity, universal reason, political solvency, ecological sensibility. . .it may be that all we have left are stories to replace the once endowed gods, the enshrined templates of True, Good, Beautiful, Sacred. . .except of course that the gods and these various testaments were all and in themselves stories and the products of stories. Hopefully we can avoid succumbing to any insistence that there is only one way to see the world (e.g. physics), one way to consider life (biology), as once people were persuaded or forced to think there was but one God—their own (theology.) I trust it is not necessary to note here that this is in no way to dismiss the importance of any particular story—e.g. physics or biology—or to debunk any efforts to assess truth, goodness, or the sacred. This is only to suggest that the meaning and value of any discourse is related to the context of the stories being told. Our lives individually and collectively are comprised of stories in which events are recorded, interpreted, evaluated, edited, but also in which possibilities, disappointments, alternatives, dreams, regrets, hopes are woven into the narrative; occasionally, our experiences may be sufficiently shaken by joy or

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sorrow such that a whole paradigm shifts in the narrative. It is in this sense that historical fabulations surround our most ordinary lives, extend and inform the range of our possibilities as human beings. We are in fact not bound by facts. If we have a nature, it is one that we have given to ourselves in some accepted story or other and which remains ever a work in progress. Does this mean there are no facts that form the boundaries of life and world? No, only that the facts in our lives are first of all dependent on the meaning of our experience—individually and collectively, existentially and historically—in its myriad forms and flaws; it is only in this flexible and variable way that the meaning of our lives is ever ‘determined by the facts.’ What I am arguing for, then, is more a plea for the centrality of metaphor in language (Logos) and of imagination in life—for the possibilities embedded in a living language that is addressed to the comprehensive if indeterminate richness and complexity of human existence. To put it in another way the division of Logos from Mythos and the related genders of language that estrange and hermetically seal facts from the reach of fiction and fantasy must be reconciled in order to create the life stories in which we find meaning.

II

True stories: some say that in the beginning there was a great void and out of Chaos came Desire and Destiny and the ensuing generation of first things. Others say that in the beginning darkness covered the earth but the creator brought forth light and knelt down in its early mist to breathe life into the clay. Still others say that in the first three seconds of the universe there was a cosmic mix of mass and energy that generated life. Like most autobiographies, the self-life-writing of human-being can begin at any particular moment that is memorable or that the retrospective mind finds especially compelling. Some picture human life to be that of a naked ape whose existence in the world of his own making is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Others imagine that of one race are gods and men. The story seems to depend on where and when the teller, and what the point of telling or taleing. But no story holds title to truth for, of course, the story itself is in process, the subject in transit, the end in question. We attribute to the writers in the age of Classical Greece, particularly the critical historians and philosophers, the intuition that it was important to get things right, to give reasons and argue for perspectives about the name and nature of Man. It is not uncommon to suppose that in the gradual transformation of mythos into logos—of emergent sense into manifest truth—that we have left well behind as vestigial myth the primal energy and spiritual core of

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generative stories. But to think so is a mistake. History is still a story, allegory survives at the heart of philosophical discourse and metaphor generates invention at the base and boundaries of scientific inquiry. Mythos remains subliminally operative and functionally transformative in the living culture of the storytelling animal whose very life blood is possibility. Still, we would like to get it right; indeed the literal bias of the modern temper rather insists on it, but we must trace back this particular obsession to its archaic source in wonder if we are to understand its nature and risk. Arguably, the first point of critical separation of the mythic and historical, the factive from the fictive, is found in the development of ‘the Socratic Method.’ The Platonic Dialogues mark the distinctive turn to an insistence on rational discourse as the touchstone of value and this also allegedly marks the fatal fracturing of reason and passion in philosophical inquiry. However, we will try to discern in this most enigmatic of the triumvirate of Classical Greek philosophers the more fundamental and sustaining resource of mythic energy that keeps open the possibilities of human imagination. Further developing the counsel of Socrates and framing the paidaeic project of Aristotle, Plato’s poetic dialogues contain countervailing and contrapuntal elements of both mythos and logos. It is the philosophical convergence of discursive logistics and dramatic erotics which make his work such a compelling study of Man as a changeling creature caught-between. Throughout the Platonic corpus there are countless instances and uses of myth, allegory, and extended metaphor imbedded within the discursive logic of his Dialogues A long history of scholarship has argued the point and import of Plato’s wide and effective use of what otherwise and in the context of his valuations he seems to dismiss as nonsense or insidious. Should we believe what he says against what he does? The rhetorical, dramatic, and figurative uses of myth are so obviously deliberate and intentionally integrated such that they cannot be dismissed as incidental accessories. So what then are we to make of the fabulations of Plato in the midst of the serious business of a search for truth? It is one thing to credit the great tragic dramatists with imaginative license and emotive excesses in the search for the darker reaches of the pathological in human perversions, marking the territory of That Way Be Dragons. But et tu Plato? How and why myth and to what end in the larger body of his work? I want to look briefly at one of Plato’s Dialogues, more precisely at two sections of the Symposium, which I take to be a crucial index of what the thinker was about in his task of truth-telling concerning the nature and destiny of human kind. I suspect it is more usual to think of the Symposium as a derivative, supplemental, or even incidental relief text in the Platonic corpus,

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rather than generative for the whole of his systematic inquiry into Truth, Wisdom, and the Form of the Good. But the erotic genesis of inquiry is the whole point of the text of this dialogue and as such marks the conceptual beginning of Plato’s central project of achieving a synoptic vision of reality. Of the two myths to be discussed in Plato’s Symposium one is familiar and oft-cited (the speech of Aristophanes), the other is more complex and variously interpreted (the dialectical teaching of Diotima). Both occur in the context of a gathering of friends to celebrate the victory of a tragic dramatist during the festival of Dionysos. The evening is given to drinking and conversation, and an invitation is given to each person to address an encomium to Love. In Aristophanes’ speech, Plato has the great comic dramatist relate a fabulous myth which depicts the human condition as one driven by desire resulting from a radically divided soul in which the separate parts are condemned to search the world for completion and fulfillment by reuniting with its other half. Characteristically, the effect of Aristophanes’ myth is a deep mix of comic pathos. The original rotund creatures possessed of two heads, four arms, four legs, etc., were so aggressive, obnoxious, and threatening that the god split them in half—creating a vast community of half-life beings whose plaintive existence is driven by an obsession to recover their whole identity through the other. Given the great plurality of people and expanse of the world, and given the complexities of ordinary human association along with the risk and pain of experimental intimacy, the prospect of reconciliation is not optimal. At root this fabulation has the telling truth and compelling reality of common human experience. If Socratic wisdom consists in striving the whole of our lives so that the end of all our striving will be to return to where we began and know the place for the first time—that is, if the journey of the intellect is for the mind to come to understand what in some important and archaic sense it already knows, then this myth represents an important parallel with respect to the journey of the heart. There is in each person a life-long striving to arrive whence we began, and there is the hope that if we are fully alive, sensitive and open to the risks of desire, then we may finally come to ourselves in simple fulfillment of the nature of our existence. However poignant the human situation seems under Aristophanes’ comic tale, there is promise as well—a further analogue to the myth of human discord that placed hope in the bottom of Pandora’s Box. The series of encomia to love in the Symposium predictably reflect the character of each speaker and further index the relation each has to this most intimate and binding phenomenon of social existence. Recall that the series begins with a speech in praise of that first impulse of desire in the journey toward beauty and truth: the physical attraction to the body of the ‘other.’ But in terms of Aristophanes’ interpretive myth this means that we are drawn out of ourselves toward ourselves. Each speech expands the domain and level of this

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impulse, in which Love, Desire, Eros, is depicted variously as a young playful and vigorous god, as a great benevolent god of age and wisdom, as the most beautiful of gods. . .until it is the turn of the old satyr Socrates. Subsequent to Aristophanes’ account, and leading up to Socrates’ interrogatories, the host and honoree of the symposium, the new and victorious playwright Agathon, flushed with victory, pictures the god in his own image, as if he were looking into a mirror for a likeness. One is reminded of Nietzsche’s remark about one loving that in which they find their own strength. It remains for Socrates to lift the discourse to embrace the whole of humanity.

III

The love and pursuit of wisdom in its most general as opposed to professionally philosophical sense is a journey without a destination. As such the journey itself a fabulation of human sensibility—desire in search of its ground, the soul in search of its sense and limits. Its object is the subject itself. The Greeks analyzed desire as a lack, as an immediate and compelling sense of incompleteness, and as such at the heart and impulse of all movement. It is significant that Plato places the mythic account of desire at the root of human endeavor in the character and voice of the comic poet, who begins in a playful and vulgar style in keeping with his reputation. The burlesque gives way however to a more somber rendition of desire in human longing for a soul mate that will reconcile the divided self. Recalling why Zeus split in two the strident creatures of the originating species, there is reason to question the wisdom of any reunion. However poignant the plight of the human being so divided, this reminder of what a permanent reconciliation would restore in the form of the two headed many armed monster suggests the human being is a finer and nobler creature when caught up in the infinite and insistent space of desire. This sense of the incompleteness of human endeavor is familiar characteristic of the eristic activity and aporetic discourse of the early ‘Socratic’ dialogues, but it is true also in the more ambitious epistemic extensions of the later dialogues. There is, for example, a characteristic lack of closure even in the Republic when the question is put at the end of the long discussion, looking back on the constructed ideal system of rational order of human community ‘But how and when will all this come to pass. . .?’ To which Plato has Socrates respond “Not until philosophers become kings and kings philosophers.” In both conceptual and historical terms, this must mean something like ‘When hell freezes over.’ A reconciliation of ideas and the framing of ideals is one thing, but human life fraught with desire is something quite other, and Plato again counters the idyllic rationality of the Republic as well as the exacting epistemic but still incomplete efforts at

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birthing knowledge in the Theaetetus with the great dialogue and dialectic of desire in the Symposium. The lesson of the Symposium in the larger body of Plato’s work suggests that the rational framing of the instrumentality and power of Logos requires an associated discourse of Mythos, and a generative base of Eros. Reason and passion, inference and inclination, deduction and desire are always in play if not in concert. Aristotle confirms this same point in his founding insight that wisdom begins in wonder. He includes what amounts to a cosmic addendum that acknowledges desire at the root of all things—that the principle of all motion is attraction. In the different context and concern of the Symposium, the teaching of Diotima is that only the gods remain unchanged: in mortals attributes pass away and age, but they leave behind a new generation of possibilities that enable mortal life a share in immortality. Plato’s efforts to circumscribe the limits of desire on the positive side, that is, at the highest reach of intelligence and imagination, invariably meet with a discursive aporia at which point he resorts to the dramatic figuration of myth, metaphor and allegory. Although Plato was patently hostile to the use of fabulation and provided extended critiques of differing orders against the various arts and their disfiguring conceits, he nonetheless found it necessary to supplement and contextualize his vision of human aspiration and achievement in figurative terms. Many of these dramatic vignettes have made their way into the canon of world literature quite apart from the abstract corpus of Plato’s philosophical work. The most famous is likely the ‘Allegory of the Cave’, from the Republic, which is sufficiently well known not to require detailed description here. The fabulation of this allegory is first of all a portrait of the human condition as an imprisonment of the senses. The world into which we awaken is a life buried in the deep cave of a shadowland in which phenomena play across a dimly lit cavern and knowledge is limited to guessing the sequence of their occurrence. Shackled to this world of shadows in a flickering and false light of enfeebled perception, the ambitions of relational desire is limited to cleverness, where prizes are awarded to those who provide the most persuasive story of sequencing. This allegory is usually read in epistemic terms as a figurative framing of Plato’s theory of knowledge, one that requires the transcendence of phenomenal appearance toward an ideal world of enlightenment independent of the senses. So considered, it serves as a dramatic analogue to Plato’s discursive explication of ascendance to the realm of intelligibility in the equally famous theory of the divided line. Our interest in this essay, however, will remain with the developmental issue of desire and with the apparently necessary discourse of fabulations through which the nature of desire finds adequate expression. At the basic erotic level the crudity of desire demands immediate gratification in a physical object, a raw craving for the other. In the Symposium this

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level consists in an enflamed desire for the body of a beautiful youth. In the corresponding allegorical context of the Cave, however, it is clear that such an appeal leaves desire in possession of an empty husk, the faint satisfaction of an embracing shadow. Plato’s cave and its shadow-world recalls the Underworld of Homer, in which the wandering Odysseus meets the shade of great Achilles who soon disabuses him of any notion that power, authority or prestige exist among the faded creatures of Hades. Desire is empty in such regions, whether in Hades or among the idle and vacant distractions of a world devoid of transcendence. At the same time, however, Plato makes clear that it is in the visceral commonplace of craving that one discovers in oneself the base stirrings of a desire. It is through effort and direction that this primitive desire becomes the aspiration of wisdom—a desire which, taken root, transforms the self and the world it inhabits. Plato’s measured constraint in this initial position is to insist that from any level of apprehension deserving the name “humanity” it makes little difference whether the movement is that of an organism above or a shade below: fulfillment is hollow without a transcendent aspiration of desire. The life journey from out of the cave is not only toward cognitive enlightenment, but one in search of moral and emotional maturity. Once free of the shackles of immediacy, desire effects a transformation of intellect and imagination toward the soul’s fulfillment. It is convenient to mark the stages of this ascendancy of desire in the lexicon of Love within classical Greek literature in terms of libidos (the first and sustaining movement of life energy) through Eros (the cathecting immediacy of desire on available objects) to philein (recognition of the mediating reciprocity of the desire of others) to agape (the fulfillment of desire in realization of human possibility.) This characterization of the growth and maturation of desire which is developed in the Symposium is a moral and emotional analogue to the wisdom of human aspiration that begins in the movement out of the cave into the light in Plato’s Republic. So who and what is this creature that struggles out of the cocoon of the senses, who emerges from a primitive encapsulation and begins its journey to overcome the remnants of its birthing? Plato’s answer is to describe a philosophical animal, one whose realization of desire gradually transforms a world of contingency and necessity into a realm of freedom and beauty—a creature that in transforming its environment transforms itself. Plato’s metaphor for this changeling creature is that of pregnancy: a human being is a creature of desire whose manifest destiny in wisdom is to give birth in beauty. The characteristic figure in this process is Socrates as midwife as described in the Theaetetus. This self-description and model of the teacher is confirmed throughout the Platonic corpus, in which we discover Socrates assisting others both in finding a source of the beautiful and of assisting in

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the birthing and examination of the created offspring. In the Theaetetus, it is argued that while all men are pregnant, not all are ready for the labor that will bring forth promising offspring. Even the most earnest among those who labor bring forth wind-eggs and become discouraged in their passion. The Symposium gives an account of the origin and development of this idea of birthing, and this once again requires the figuration of the fabulous: males are pregnant and laboring to give birth, seeking a transcendence not only of the prison of the senses but of the time of their tenure in the world. The point of all pregnancy, as explained in the concluding wisdom of Diotima, is immortality—either through the natural physical begetting of children, or through the intellectual and imaginative creation of immortal thoughts, deeds, or works. IV

That Plato was ever in search of truth and reality is not in question, of course, but it is also the case that in order to do this he must construct a world in which his former teacher appears throughout as a protagonist of mythic proportions. No less an authority than Shelley, who translated the Symposium, refers to the poetic structure of the Platonic corpus in his essay on the Defense of Poetry arguing that Plato was essentially a poet such that the truth and splendor of his imagery are matched by the melody of his language. Shelley claims to be following Plato in holding that the exercise of every imaginative art is poetry. His further thesis in a famous and often contested passage is that poets who imagine the indestructible order of beauty are more than authors of language, music and painting but are also founders of civil society and inventors of the arts of life. Shelley’s claim that poets become teachers by drawing near to the beautiful and true reflects his general understanding of Plato’s work grounded in the force of the poetics of the Symposium. There is reason to believe that the historical Socrates, as he remarks in his own words in the Phaedo, is not a mythologist, not a ‘teller of stories’. His basic attitude was critically opposed to the fancy of poetic conceit, and the purpose of his inquiry essentially aporetic—to bring discourse only to the point of its limits. Not so Plato; although he burned his tragedies when he took up philosophy at the death of Socrates he retained a poetic sense for the importance of the mythic in his development of the genre of philosophical drama. The major emphasis of his work is committed to transcendence toward a synoptic vision of reality, which could not be fully developed within the logistical constraints of argumentative discourse. Plato is more than a creator of particular contextual myths. His incorporation of the mythic begins and is sustained through his depiction of Socrates—a character of mythic proportions who is a fusion

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of logos and mythos, ethos and pathos. Among the countless fabulations of Socrates throughout Plato’s Dialogues perhaps the most important for our purposes is found in the closing sequence of the Symposium. In a mock encomium to the god of love, the drunken interloper Alkibiades likens Socrates to the Sileni, the seduction of his words having the same effect as the flute playing of the demon Marsyas. That Socrates is here and throughout depicted as an erotic force comparable to the fabled satyr of Dionysian passion is evidence of Plato’s commitment to revitalize the tradition of myth that was being displaced from the literature of his time. Euripides’s dismissal of myth from the Dionysian ritual of drama in favor of common characters and ordinary life signaled an end to the tradition and depth of the tragic vision once achieved in Aeschylus and Sophocles. In its place Plato offers a new mythic genre that provides a conceptual and creative base to revitalize the possibilities inherent in the metaphysical depth of tragic drama. Although Plato no longer probes the darkness of the human soul characteristic of tragedy, his dialectical drama draws on the residual depths of the earlier drama. The Platonic Dialogue neither rivals nor replaces the great tradition of the tragic dramatists, but as evidenced in the Symposium, it does transform into a new key a human drama grounded in passion. In the Symposium Plato constructs a variegated account of the strange creature Eros in such a way to mirror the various mythic images of the satyr figure of Socrates. Neither god nor man, the daemon Eros is the child of Poros and Penia—an offspring of the coupling of affluence and poverty; he is, in the solemn description of the priestess Diotima, rough and disheveled, without house or shoes one who sleeps in the open streets and alleys of the world. However, he was conceived during the birthday celebration of Aphrodite so he is a lover of beauty and a pursuer of good, and thus a driving force in the relations and aspirations of human beings toward virtue and wisdom. Neither Eros, love nor Socrates, teacher possess the good, the true, or the beautiful, but they are so disposed in nature that they aspire to these things, and in so doing inspire others to do the same. We are thus given the condition of human-being as divided and infused with need and longing, but having manifest possibility, pregnant with the prospect of great thoughts and deeds needing only to be brought forth in beauty. The journey of man is always toward the fulfillment of this possibility—the birthing of human excellence through the love of another. The self is divided in its very nature throughout Plato’s range of mythic images. The description in the Republic is the familiar political myth of human soul as tripartite, composed of intellect, spirit, and appetite. Later in that same work Plato constructs a fabulation fashioned after the mythic beasts of the Chimera, Scylla, and Cerberus. This image of the soul is the mythic figure of a three headed beast or rather three beasts joined together ‘naturally’: the first

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a multicolored beast with a ring of man-heads that grow and change at will, the second beast that of a lion, and the last in the figure of an ordinary human being, the composite given the outward features of the latter. In the Republic, Plato’s subject is the just soul, and his analysis here is that the manifest soul will be determined by which of the beasts are fed and nurtured—if the first two are favored and the last neglected or starved then the different parts of the beast will devour and kill one another. To achieve a harmony of soul, clearly the human intellect must make the courage and strength of the lion an ally in order to control and domesticate the many appetites of the multiform beast of the passions. The nature of the soul for Plato is movement; the virtue of the immortal soul is life. Prior to its incarnation the soul, as it is pictured in the Phaedrus, is winged and feeds on the pure forms of the true and the good, but incarnated in human form it is weighed down in visceral accessories and torn by good and bad desires. In yet another tripartite image this soul is depicted in terms of a charioteer with a team of horses, one good, one bad. The soul is attracted, as in the Symposium first to the sight of a beautiful youth, which brings to mind the idea and ideal of beauty itself. The soul takes wing at the aspect of beauty but there ensues a struggle between the two horses, between the base and higher impulses of passion. The task of the charioteer is to bring the team into harmony of action and aspiration. It is clear that neither love nor beauty alone will satisfy the need of the soul for fulfillment, but also that both the carnal and the spiritual impulses of the soul remain active in its journey. The detail and stages of this journey is the subject text of the Symposium and the capstone of that dialectical discussion is the teaching of Diotima in which she instructs the young Socrates on love. She teaches that the object of love is not beauty, as many think, it is birth. Procreation is the closest things mortals can get to immortality. At this most basic level of generative desire, Diotima explains that its source is not reason, for animals too are seized by desire and will sacrifice everything to protect their offspring. Mortal nature itself is locked into an imperative to overcome mortality. If wisdom is to achieve birth in beauty then clearly its object is immortality Even where the question of a Dialogue is more narrowly directed to epistemology—the nature of knowledge rather than love or wisdom—the imperative of desire is still present. Socrates is depicted in the Theaetetus as a midwife assisting in the labor of bringing to birth the truth that is in each person, a truth through which one participates in immortality if only for the moment its realization. The sole resource for this birthing is the reproductive capacity to constantly replace the past generation with a new one. An individual is constantly renewed and constantly losing other qualities. Plato observes that no characteristics, traits, beliefs, desires, delights, troubles or fears ever

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remain the same. And it is the same with knowledge: it comes and goes, is manifest and is replaced. Despite Plato’s modal paradigm of form, clearly he acknowledges here the more fundamental flow of reality in our perception of human life and world.

V

The question finally is why a master dialectician like Plato who insisted that all values be rational resorts to fabulation. The simple answer is that the human creature and its world at issue is itself fabulous. Any adequate description of the changeling whose mortal nature is freedom and whose passion is immortality cannot be circumscribed in any but mythic idioms. Implicit in Nietzsche’s insight that the genius of classical Greek drama was its celebration of both gods, Dionysos and Apollo, is the parallel notion that no culture can be fully alive to human possibility that has lost its sense of myth I am suggesting, however, that Nietzsche is wrong to dismiss Plato from attending the shrines of these gods, albeit in a different way from the tragic dramatists. We have already noted Plato’s engagement and extension of the mythic tradition through the various forms of metaphor and fabulation. The seminal nature of Eros in the Symposium that frames the rest of his work indicates Plato’s broader though seldom acknowledged recognition of the tensions of Logos and Mythos at the heart of his dialectic. The extent and importance of fabulation in Plato’s work makes it clear that his rational dialectic should be regarded also as a passionate journey that embraces the creative fissions and fusions that fully constitute human reality. If philosophy remains rooted in the pursuit of wisdom, then it must track and trace the machinations of imagination that frame the always-to-be-determined nature of the forever divided creature that would be god. The trick in discerning this fabulous beast is not to domesticate its prodigious achievements but also to celebrate the imaginative reach and the splendor of its failings. To do this, philosophy must reconnect with the mythic tradition kept alive in the poetry of the world’s great literature. To say that the human-being of the creature caught between is undetermined is in moral terms to acknowledge that its nature is freedom. In Sartre’s expression it is not what it is, and is what it is not. The language of fabulation allows for the loosening of the logistical binds that traditionally have fixed the nature of this transformational enigma. The cultural convergence of the various allegedly rival discourses of ethics politics, economics, biology and theology attests to the dominant tradition that seeks to delineate the defining limits of this changeling creature. But each completed tapestry of culture

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includes a ghostline to the literature of fabulation. The mythic impulse in literature must continue to search for resonance with the uncanny, the surreal, and those existential fragments of imagination that bear witness to the flow of reality beneath the form of conjecture. The fictive discourse of fabulation keeps alive the Dionysian impulse that resists fixation and keeps faith with an alternative discourse in which the understanding of human being is enriched under the aspect of exception. Trinity University

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ

AU R A ; O N T O L O G I C A L M AT E R I A L I T Y O F E X I S T E N C E A N D FA B U L AT I O N

ABSTRACT

Aura by Carlos Fuentes points to the significance of existence and fabulation in its discourse and in the relevance and irrelevance of historical truths. The meta-language forms sequential storytelling, editing and writing possibilities, real or not, with similar functions. A pseudo-psychoanalytical model of reality creates a textual unconscious as poetic discourse. The representation of truth and its signification is a Kantian idea (Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, V.I, New York, Humanities Press, 1970, 194–5) by the innermost recesses referencing existence not as essence but as answer to and for oneself (Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought, Humanities Press, NJ, 1997). The narrative suspends historical time and essence of the non-existing General Llorente in a convergence suspending signification based on vraisemblanc in a double reconciled interpretation. Its diegetic implementation, mimesis; forms derivations of a phenomenon that relates to actions at each prohiresis, in an Aristotelian sense. Truth and fabulation are intrinsically intertwined and parallel to valorizations and consequences, evident in fictional truth; the unfolding of existence reduced to presence as interpretative reality within historical fabulation, rendering historical reconstruction and existence as testimony of a self punctuated history which can be textual and human. Aura by the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes is a narrative of a story within a story, a novel based on a biography being re-written by one of the central characters, a student named Felipe, a detail which is mentioned only once in the first paragraph, then the plot continues without ever mentioning his name again. The biography which he edits and re-writes pertains to a historical character and the inter-textuality questions the ontology of existence and degrees of fabulation in discrepancies created based on the public image of a general, whose memories are recount by those who knew him and others who did not. An attitude and configuration is being construed by those who have not known this individual personally based on the image staged for public consumption creating discrepancies between the private and the public image. 27 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 27–35. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

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Fuentes uses an effective writing technique creating a ghostly ambience to point to the real versus unreal, using a character named also Aura, who wonders in and out as the plot unfolds, making it difficult to distinguish what actually happens. Her role as mediator in essence guides us through philosophical issues as: What is the true nature of existence? What fabulation has been created on the historical plane? The semi-real atmosphere in the plot points to what could be identified in post-modernity as the production of image. We are living at a time when virtual reality has its place and many uses of technology create ways to represent presence which previously never existed, some are true, some are not. There is a departure from presenting facts as truth, confusing the perception of verisimilitude because globalization emphasizes fluidity, flexibility and self-reinvention in the market place. The images are being marketed as products therefore many individuals do not seem to care if they are truthful or not. The visual has taken prevalence over the written after the marketing of television which it has increased in the last decades. There is a generation that has grown with this process. The use of images has created a confused ambience in how things could be perceived which renders more significance to possibilities in a multiple fragmented world reality. In the novel one has to focus on the imaginatio creatix, the possibilities and differentiation being presented over what actually happened. The notion of what captures the ways of the world is now constantly changing in people’s mind. The truly real about what you think of yourself or what others perceive you to be is constantly blurred by shifts in identity perceptions enmeshed in the many technical advances and cultural changes. Consequently an individual character as it is portrait by mass media culture is affected and distorted by the same media that propels it. It is even more in reference to popular figures since the more they get to be known the more different perceptions about his/her image exist. Each human reality is always a direct project to metamorphose its own for itself and into an in-self. Individualization with its range of variables and perceptions and the constant dispersal of ideas aids to obliterate the establishment of any permanence in meanings. Is questionable where the true authentic self remains as where the public versus private separates in an individual existence. The realm of modernity and imagination presents fantasy and denial as viable roles to play. The contemporary era has created a thin reaction to these issues and has underscored the understanding that relates to self and society. We see daily a multiplicity of cultures and identities co-existing at a given time and place in any of the world metropolis. Dislocation and dispersal are now prevalent characteristics of postmodern times; as fantasy, denial, abandonment of fixed social status and hierarchy of power relations. It is difficult to enable to understand the historical and practical dilemmas of life.

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One of man’s constant dilemmas is to bestow meaning upon the world and upon his own life. Sartre in L’Etre et le Néant deals with the risk in trying to overcome personal groundlessness and yearns to become what he names: “En-soi-Pour-soi” (Sartre, 1950), leading to the question of human reality (la réalité humaine), the awareness of the essential ambiguity of the human condition and the boundless capacities for self-deception. We are both subjects that are world-related and world-constituting. There is an ontological gulf between historicity and the history that proves metaphysically unbridgeable. True knowledge and opinions should have reality as their object as opposed to appearance. If we give up truth as correspondence to reality, as it seems to be happening now, and we are left with conflicting opinions and no truth at all. The interpretation of lived experience tends in a way to constitute truth (Eugene T Gendlin, 1973). This covers arguments one uses for oneself and a whole range of discourses. The general aim is for persuasion and conviction whatever audience is being addressed and whatever subject matter is dealt with, becoming clear why Fuentes centered the novel on editing a biography; to present philosophical aspects in a nomos/physis debate, to address ontological issues that ought to concern us since technology is affecting how we think and react to the main events in our lives. Language, its use and manipulations play a role in any truth being presented. All events, past or present carry within possibilities of actually being real and as such relates to the understanding of the projecting character, fictional or nonfictional. Experiences contained in understanding are interpreted as being. A person’s capability knows its finitude and presupposes that it surrenders to signification without knowing what could be found. Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method, asserts to it without disputing difficulties in otherness for mediator and/or receptor. . . .that this kind of understanding does not at all understand the ‘you’ but rather the truth you tell us. (Hans–Georg Gadamer, 1989, xxiii)

The role Aura has as mediator points to the questioning of ontological issues. Post-modern ontological inquiries deals with what is significant, inferential, different and coincidental, specially referring to the personal in the world realm which is more questionable when includes virtual reality as part of the possible and credible image of a being. Aura produces an explicit attempt to holistically articulate the correctness of existence, materiality and fabulation. A historical figure is a life structured and expressed in a work, no longer understood or produced by the non-reproducible and idiosyncratic individual experience but mostly by what others attain, articulate and think of it. The

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reading of a biographical text is at best interpretational. (Jacques Derrida, 1974). In Aura the meta-language in the memories being edited, adds several sequential to the plot and increases ambiguity focusing on new version of events through other characters’ perceptions, as when Felipe revises the memoirs or the widow’s perspectives contradicting insights and Aura who creates more contradictions as we understand that she in non- corporeal. . . .all concepts hitherto proposed in order to think the articulation of a discourse and of an historical totality are caught within the metaphysical closure . . . (Jacques Derrida, 1997, 1999)

As readers we become aware of the duality when actions becomes more than the appearance of themselves; giving hidden, subterranean possibilities relating to main incidents or persons placed fragmentarily as information throughout the text. This fragmentation provides insight about the existence recalled, dwelling on images transforming under historical pressures. Literally images are being created before our eyes and we are not sure of this transformation because through time views of history change. Every epoch has its ideals, taboos and dissonances to which individuals are constrain to. The psychology and motivation of the general, the central character in the biography, become crucial structuring elements dealing with the historical consciousness of the given time. As events take place, references become convincing whether the referent is fictional or not, in both circumstances they perform a similar function to create a credible and marketable image of who he was. Transcendentally the structure of subjectivity makes possible that all kinds of objects present themselves to us. Aura as connector of text, characters, author, and reader forms part of virtual reality. The image of Aura is a fictional creature in someone’s imagination, created probably by the editor but we remained unsure of whom. Her role of living metaphor does not follow a traditional logic and the narration schematically reflects on several contexts, it argues and thinks things through, suggesting that at the core of the reality in question lays a paradigm regarding the interrogative nature of practical reasoning. Facts are recorded as possibilities, as a video game, for they do not speak for themselves but are there to be interpreted (WJT Mitchell, 1983). Consequentially the existential could be seen optimally as inevitable and insurmountable, by products or derivation of the plot, precisely because it discusses contrast, demonstrates, seeks and inquires wisdom. Existence is an answer to and for oneself and at the age of information technologies it has its own adverse effect over and above the intended. In Aura, Felipe as well as the reader participates in constructing reality.

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Lees esa misma noche los papeles amarillos, escritos con una tinta mostaza; a veces horadados por el descuido de una ceniza de tabaco, manchados por moscas, El francés del General Llorente no goza de las excelencias que su mujer le habrá atribuido. Te dices que tú puedes mejorar considerablemente el estilo, apretar la narración difusa de hechos pasados. . . Nada que no hayan contado otros. . . (You read that same night the yellowish papers, written with a mustard colored ink; at times neglectedly pierced with ashes of tobacco, stained with flies. The French of General Llorente does not enjoy the excellence his wife had attributed. You say that you can considerably better the style, tighten the diffused narration of past occurrences. . . Nothing that has not being told by others. . .) [Translation’s mine]. (Carlos Fuentes, 1988, 30)

The narrative achieves a time inversion, past as present, with factors creating a historical convergence punctuating history, what is being re-written will remain certain for posterity. According to Jean-François Lyotard we face an open space time, a recombining intersection of prelude and absence. (Jean-François Lyotard, 1988, 31–6). These are transmutations in spatial and temporal coordinates that have political, individual and social implications, obvious in the attention lavished on identity in post-modern culture, commonly concerning celebrity figures. The transfiguration marks a delegitimization of the deep structures of experiences and subjectivity of the self. Products of human agency tend to surpass what individuals merely intended; self understanding cannot itself be merely understood in terms of what was consciously intended. Dudas al caer sobre la butaca, si en realidad has visto eso; quizás sólo uniste esa imagen a los maullidos espantosos que persisten, disminuyen, al cabo terminan. (You doubt as you let yourself fall in the armchair that if in realty you saw it; maybe you only united the image to the horrific miaows that persist, diminish and finally end.) [Translation’s mine]. (Carlos Fuentes, 1988, 31)

One is confused to the point of questioning what events that took place, non-existent facts transformed into real ones. Hermeneutical truth is rhetorical, essentially historical in nature and context bound. The text discloses fundamentals about the significance of existence and the possibilities that can exist, including the virtual that have resulted from rhetorical transformations. An intense storyline lucidly explores nature of characters’ essences. As fictional entity Aura seeks the believable while she might not be able to live to expectations. Some of the images purposely created, are studied and polished to set in motion the public image, based on wishes and distortions which takes us to fabulation as integral part of the intentionality for public consumption. Felipe and later the widow re-write events to emphasize optimum behavior. In The Gravity of Thought, Jean-Luc Nancy presents the question of

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existence as a construed reality that lies not in the basis of essence but in the answer given to and for oneself. The telling of partial truths can facilitate at times personal freedom as well as damage it. Fuentes questions ontological validity, using virtual images forming a new present, diminishing the value of what was known or said. The past is treated as otherness, distancing or freeing from reality, creating a historical horizon addressing alterity. There is an attempt to conceptualize reality which the notion that we could arrive at a conclusive interpretation about the essence of life seems nonsensical at best. The world presents itself subject in multiple insights and our own expectations of its meanings. A truly historical way of thinking has also to keep in mind its own historicity. Only then will it give up pursuing the phantom of a historical object, the topic of linearly advancing research, learning instead to recognize in the object the Other of its own, therewith bringing to recognition the One and the Other. The true historical object is not an object, but rather the unity of the One and Other, a relationship in which the reality of history consists just as much as the reality of historical understanding. (Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1988, 70)

There are competing views of the world rather than one, no main narrative or universal claims but knowledge as multiple, content, dependent and fragmentary; recounting what exist out there. Reality is not definite or a fixed criterion to be arrived at, when it seems that the ultimate judge is the interpretative community one belongs to. Gadamer in Truth and Method hypothesizes that one has to place oneself within a historical horizon from which a tradition presents itself not to defeat historical understanding. Each one relates to others as subjects of inquiry under the rubric of human nature, under the form of self-relatedness and in relation marked by openness. We are binding interpreters seeking understanding in a given situation. The message at the height of hyper-reality is that there is no reality that counts but the image. Fiction and reality are not metaphysical opposites. In human affairs and in the reality being lived, the real is many times brought into being by means of imaginaries, especially in the media where the public image exist, providing the concrete reason for Aura’ existence in the novel. A possibility exists for fiction to function in truth and to induce effects of truth in order to bring about a true discourse on existence, to intuit or discover and represent the true nature of things. The notion of transcendental consciousness is basically the immediate selfpresence of a waking life. In the realm one calls one’s own, concepts find a systematic unity (Husserl’s account of language). In the text, comments by Felipe alerts us to philosophical inquires inextricably linked to editing. At the heart of human subjectivity and in facing reality are passions and representations of unconscious creations as well as truth. Duality, fragmentation and

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multiplicity have become a contemporary medium in our time. Post modernity with its proliferation of media simulations unleashes multiplicity of identities and cultural paradigms without central or authoritative coordination. Cultural experience generalizes media communication while information technologies are at the core of importance in any symbolic exchange. The fundamental issue of fracturing knowledge in post-modernity has produced conceptual displacement related to the creative and self-instituting capacity of the unconscious imagination. It explores the foundation of the physicality of life and creates a specifically modernist tension between rationality and imagination. The argument develops on ontological issues, interpreting webs of signification through meaningful actions that have spun and in which the characters find themselves caught up. Each us as humans daily integrate our experiences into the texture of our psychic world. Ousted from an established terrain of theoretical and practical reason, identity and subjectivity in a post-modern context are positioned within a politically and culturally variable social contingent, in linguistic and discursive practices which are always coordinated in space-time zones. What goes along with the current postmodernist tendencies effectively endorses and promotes ideological mystification. In an age of hyper reality truth conditions vary from one specific context to another, involving criteria according to evidences and in most cases, there is no established form of generalized theory for facts. Aura discloses an unchanging fundamental for existence, pointing the possible in the real and fabulated, to an ontological gulf between historicity and real history which proves metaphysically unbridgeable. There is a difference between being and beings when one questions intelligibly what happened as the past shapes the future and each individual thou freely have limitations due to previous conditioning. It is very hard to escape from ideas, myth and conditions that have being established in one’s own time. I am myself and my circumstances, and if I do not save them, I cannot save myself. Benefic loco illi quo natus es. (José Ortega y Gasset, 1960, 8)

As Ortega y Gasset articulates it is impossible to extricate oneself from the environment one is part of and this ought to be considered in ontological questionings. A notion that captures the meaning of existence changes constantly as more and more images are being produce through media outlets. The transformation that embodies Aura, sometimes undecipherable, becomes helpful to differentiate relationships. Felipe and the widow, who commissioned the editing, are manipulating the events being written. Aura transforms as quasi cinematic

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presence into a metaphor of functionality questioning the meaning of presence. The evolution of the biography and the technology of simultaneous communication undermine the notion of reality, as truth and fabulation are intrinsically intertwined here, historically and individually. In an age of hyper-reality fiction more and more displaces reality and simulacra reigns supreme showing a vital concern about credulity. One is aware that there is more than one way to interpret reality. One abstains from judgment because of evident conviction of fictional truth in the unfolding of presence and that the conviction that descriptions of life are directly constituitive to the communicating and the use of language of individuals. Al despertar, buscas otra presencia en el cuarto y sabes que no es la de Aura la que te inquieta, sino la doble presencia de algo que fue engendrado la noche pasada. [When awakening, I look for the other presence in the room and know that it is not Aura that unsettles me, but a double presence of something that was given birth to the night before] (Carlos Fuentes, 1988, 31)

The narrated history, the content of the representation and internal meanings are perceived to be connected to visual effects more than words. Interpretative reality plays here with what is existence within the historical, rendering consequences and confutations by reconstruction. Existence becomes a testimony of the self suspending significations including singularities which inscribes in them one and the same historicity. One ends with the conviction that in the postmodern realm of human understanding in a post-modern world, most of what seems real is left to speculation, that there is no specific answer to ontological questions but a phenomenological approach to understanding that facilitates to ask the right question. Temple University, Philadelphia BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, T.W., The Jargon of Authenticity, London, Routhledge, 1973. Adorno, T.W., Negative Dialectics, London, Routhledge, 1984. Baudrillard, J., Oublier Foucault, Humanities in Society No3 (Winter 1980), 87–111. Derrida, J., Of Grammatology, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Derrida, J., Writing and Difference, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1978. Echeverría, E.J., Criticism and Commitment: Major Themes in Contemporary Post-Critical Philosophy, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1981. Elliott, A., and Charles, L., The New Individualism; the Emotional Cost of Globalization, London, Routledge, 2006. Ernorth, M., Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1982.

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Fuentes, C., Aura, Ediciones Era, S.A., México, 1988. Gendlin, E.T., “Experimental phenomenology” in N. Nathanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973. Gadamer, H.-G., Truth and Method, New York, Crossroad, 1989. Gadamer, H.-G., “On the circle of understanding” in J.M. Connolly and T. Keutner, trans and ed., Hermeneutics Versus Science?, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Gasché, R., The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1986. Habermas, J., Theory of Communicative Action, Boston, Beacon Press, 1984. Habermas, J., The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity, 1987. Heidegger, M., Identity and Difference, New York, Harper & Row, 1969. Husserl, E., Logical Investigations, VI, II, New York, Humanities Press, 1970. Husserl, E., Cartesian Meditations; An Introduction to Phenomenology, Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993. Jalbert, J.E., Hermeneutics or phenomenology: Reflections on Husserl’s historical mediations as a ‘Way’ into transcendental phenomenology, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 8, 1982, 98–132. Lyotard, J.-F., Peregrinations, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988. Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition; a Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Mitchell, W.J.T., ed., The Politics of Interpretation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983. Nancy, J.-L., The Gravity of Thought, New York, Humanities Press, 1997. Nancy, J.-L., The Sense of the World, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Ogilvy, J., Many Dimentional Man, New York, Oxford University Press, 1977. Ogilvy, J., Self and World; Reading in Philosophy, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Ortega y Gasset, J., Meditaciones del Quijote, ideas sobre la novela, Madrid, Revista de Occidente, 1960. Sartre, J.-P., L’Etre et le Néant, Paris, Gallimard, 1950. Ulmer, G., Applied Grammatology, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

WILLIAM D. MELANEY

S A RT R E ’ S P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F H I S T O RY: C O M M U N I T Y, AG E N C Y A N D C O M P R E H E N S I O N

ABSTRACT

The paper argues that Sartre’s work as both a literary critic and social philosopher is deeply indebted to his early commitment to phenomenology. The first part of the paper examines the nature of reading and writing in the account of literary meaning that is presented in the transitional text, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? While acknowledging the political turn that occurs in Sartre’s work, we then discuss how the theme of history emerges in the later essay, Questions de méthode, as one that opens up a “double reading” of human motivation. Our conclusion maintains that the Marxist phase of Sartre’s work is based on the hermeneutical notion of comprehension, which provides an anthropological grounding for his existential philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre’s contribution to philosophy was crucial to the reception of Husserlian phenomenology in France during the early post-war period. This reception was mediated by a growing interest in the work of Martin Heidegger, but it also provided Continental philosophy with a unique agenda that can be examined as a special case. However, the widespread view that Sartre abandoned phenomenology for political concerns has made a thoughtful appraisal of his work difficult to sustain in professional circles. Underlying this view is the perception that Sartre’s ‘conversion to history’ was basic to the political turn that occurs in his later work. We would like to reconsider the degree to which this historical thematic can be linked to Sartre’s long-standing commitment to phenomenology, which remains important to all phases of his work. With this goal in mind, this paper will begin with a discussion of Sartre’s early attempt to define literature and to clarify the space in which it appears. The paper will then examine how Sartre assesses the performances of history in phenomenological terms. Our conclusion will establish links between phenomenology and the hermeneutical orientation that accompanies this new historical outlook. 37 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 37–50. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

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Only in the perspective of time can we appreciate the phenomenological importance of Sartre’s seminal 1947 essay, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Various interpretations of this widely read study have prevented the phenomenological dimension from emerging in an essential way. Sartre’s proclivity for philosophical realism is probably the major obstacle to a rediscovery of this crucial dimension. No one would deny that the early Sartre privileges the virtues of prose over the values of poetic association. This early essay notoriously revives an apparently Fregean opposition between psychic meaning and the indications of sense. However, when considered in phenomenological terms, Sartre’s interest in verbal transparency has less to do with the actual existence of objects than with the capacity of language to clarify our engagement with the world on a subjective level. From this standpoint, we might say that Sartre’s dismissal of poetry is less of a rejection than a displacement that restores an ‘active’ role to language as it functions in everyday life. The distinction between prose and poetry rests on the difference between a language that signifies and one that mutely evokes but cannot communicate what it improperly intends. The artist detaches meanings from the world and presents them as autonomous, whereas the prose writer mingles with the world in order to signify what can be directly known. At the same time, Sartre contends that the distinction between prose and poetry reveals how language can be approached from different standpoints. This basic distinction enables Sartre to define the poet as someone who relates to words as things rather than as signs. This virtual possibility is perhaps inscribed in the nature of language. Language functions through signs that are always in some way ambiguous. Ambiguity, however, provides us with opportunities for taking up different positions with regard to how the sign can function in the world. The sign can be considered from two points of view: “For the ambiguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified, or turn one’s gaze towards its reality and consider it as an object.”1 The first mode of access is that of the prose writer who produces literary works that establish a dialogue with those who act in the world, whereas the second mode of access is that of the linguist who approaches language as the object of a human science. At the beginning of his argument, Sartre seems to have limited himself to two proper modes of access to language, relegating the poetic use of language to a marginal role in a rational semiology.2 Nonetheless, we cannot interpret this limitation as a subordination of language to a contemplative view of the world. Sartre emphasizes that the prose writer is not simply a stylist for whom “the word is a gentle breeze which

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plays lightly over the surface of things, grazing them without altering them,” any more than the person who speaks is a pure witness who remains outside a visible order.3 On the contrary, the writer is not only self-conscious but conscious of being seen at the moment that he becomes conscious of himself. In his early masterwork, L’Être et le néant, Sartre situates the conscious ego in a fundamental relation to an emergent other whose sudden appearance accompanies the upsurge of self-consciousness.4 Subjectivity, therefore, is already intersubjectivity, as Husserl contends. Moreover, we demonstrate a capacity to transform ourselves to the degree that we are able to integrate social perceptions of our various moves in a revised self-image. Sartre’s conception of the self as a being-in-the-world is quasi-dialectical to the extent that it rests on a phenomenological analysis of subjectivity as co-constituted. However, the movement of self-consciousness cannot be interpreted according to a rigid or formulaic conception of dialectics. The role of beauty in this unfolding process is to persuade in a manner that does not involve coercion or angry force. When beauty “acts by persuasion like the charm of a voice or a face,” we can be sure that the point of contact between self and other is a place of mediation, rather than a site of conflict.5 Furthermore, the world of the prose writer leads as a matter of course to an assessment of how literature requires both writers and readers, instead of existing on its own in a depersonalized setting. Literary works should not be confused with the products of a craft: “When it is a matter of pottery or carpentry, we work according to traditional patterns, with tools whose usage is codified; it is Heidegger’s famous ‘they’ who are working with our hands.”6 Here Sartre could be responding to the reduction of art to craft that seems to occur in Heidegger’s hermeneutical approach to the work of art.7 In distancing himself from Heidegger, Sartre also looks forward to a conception of art that is centered around literature rather than around the visual arts. No doubt literature is concerned with how our lives are given shape and form through the signs of writing: “It is our history, our love, our gaiety that we recognize in it.”8 Our proximity to literary results is precisely what prevents us from considering them as objective. Sartre contrasts the place of objectivity in the perception of art to the preeminence of subjectivity in artistic creation. The dialectical nature of art is particularly evident in the case of literature, which demonstrates how the act of writing always entails the act of reading. Sartre contends that the writer never reads himself but produces signs that require an outside interpreter in order to be understood. The writer creates a work that exceeds the limits of his own subjectivity and only discovers its objective meaning after he ceases to recognize it as his own. What this means is that, contrary to popular doctrines, the writer does not write for himself but always writes for others. The reader for whom he writes functions as a subject

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in relation to a literary object that never fully appears. This non-appearing object cannot be thought apart from the reader’s subjectivity. It would seem, therefore, that the construction of the literary object is dialectical to the precise extent that it engages the reader on a subjective level, just as it derives meaning from an inexhaustible literary work. Sartre contends that the dependence of the writer on the attentive reader challenges the formalist view of reading as inessential to the literary work. This dependence assumes existential importance to the extent that literature can be envisioned as an appeal: “To write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language.”9 Sartre’s mode of address highlights the emphatic but non-coercive nature of literary production. Moreover, in claiming that writing is an appeal, Sartre underscores both the irreducible nature of the literary work and the role of the reader in responding to the work itself. In the former case, we learn that writing can be an appeal because it is in some sense irreducible. Literature derives from the writer’s subjectivity so that “the appearance of the work of art is a new event which cannot be explained by anterior data.”10 At the same time, when considered from another point of view, the literary work engages the reader in an essential way: “The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it.”11 The freedom of the reader does not extend to the point of determining the work’s content; on the contrary, it serves as the formal condition that grounds the reception of the work in a delimited consciousness. Sartre readily acknowledges that his own conception of freedom resembles what can be found in Kant’s aesthetic thinking. However, unlike Kantian aesthetics, Sartre’s approach to literature provides the imagination with a constitutive, rather than a regulative, function. The imagination participates in the grounding of aesthetic interpretation, but its spontaneity is restricted when “it is called upon to recompose the beautiful object beyond the traces left by the artist.”12 Sartre’s conception of reading would be incompletely understood if it did not allow us to see how literature negotiates between self and other. His concern for the role of the reader in co-constituting the literary work anticipates the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and the phenomenology of Wolfgang Iser. Reading brings to life what literature evokes, and the relationship between reader and text is asymmetrical.13 But Sartre also looks forward to a position that was more fully and somewhat differently developed by Emmanuel Lévinas. The writer provides us with an experience of freedom through which we recognize the other as other than ourselves. Sartre contends that reading requires an atmosphere of trust which cannot be conveyed apart from a spirit of generosity. Both writer and reader must give themselves over to an acceptance of the other without whom freedom would remain purely subjective.

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In relating the history of Western literature to the evolution of the reading public, Sartre discusses how the heterogeneous nature of writing derives from a division in the way that language can be understood. Far from functioning as a seamless totality, language possesses a material character that the writer invariably accepts in taking up a unique literary style. However, rather than separate the writer from the world, language functions on the basis of a productive distinction between things and thought. The material aspect of language does not conceal the world but maps over this more basic distinction.14 It also helps us understand how in thinking we do not merely transform things into ‘ideas’ but allow Being to “sparkle as Being, with its opacity and its coefficient of adversity, by the indefinite spontaneity of Existence.”15 Being exceeds us and produces in us an awareness of what cannot be freely changed. At the same time, Being cannot be thought apart from the categories of subjective existence. Sartre’s reflections on the development of literature throughout the nineteenth century culminates in a discussion of how the writer might have responded to the reality of a divided reading public. By addressing a particular readership in concrete terms, the writer might have performed a critical function in awakening the less privileged social sectors to enduring injustices. This unexplored option might have produced a diversity of works and brought together divergent points of view. Sartre reminds us, however, that the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1870 distorted the potential of Marxism to provide a more pluralistic vision of social life.16 By suppressing ideological options that might have enriched the Marxist tradition, this historic event had the devastating effect of reducing socialism to a rigid orthodoxy. At this stage in his analysis, nonetheless, Sartre is not yet prepared to explain how phenomenology can contribute in fundamental ways to historical understanding. II

Those who argue that Sartre’s contribution to social philosophy involves a radically new departure tend to restrict phenomenology as a guide and influence to the early phases of his thought. To be sure, Sartre began with a strong interest in psychology and epistemology, which yielded only in time to historical and political concerns. However, the argument in favor of considering Sartre’s investment in phenomenology as continuous with his entire life’s work has not yet received its due, nor has it been clearly stated in a way that adds something original to the phenomenological heritage. Sartre’s preamble to his philosophical attempt to renovate Marxism, Questions de méthode, provides a basis for interpreting the data of history in systematic terms, allowing the past to be revisited and relived as essentially intelligible. What remains to

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be proven is that phenomenology can illuminate Sartre’s social philosophy in fundamental ways. In discussing how existentialism might correct and supplement dialectical thinking, Sartre reminds us that Kierkegaard, no less than Hegel and Marx, has become irreplaceable to a contemporary view of the world.17 He readily acknowledges that, compared to Hegel, Kierkegaard is not even a philosopher. However, in suggesting that the existing human being cannot be reduced to an intellectual abstraction, Kierkegaard indicates a realm of being that is heterogeneous to pure thought: “Whatever one may say or think about suffering, it escapes knowledge to the extent that it is suffered in itself, for itself, and to the degree that knowledge remains powerless to transform it.”18 Kierkegaard, unlike Hegel, established an infinite distance between man and God. Moreover, the faith that he identifies with subjectivity cannot be reduced to a moment in a dialectical process that culminates in philosophical knowing. While Hegel opens up the possibility of mediation, Kierkegaard “marks a progress toward realism, since he insists on the primacy of the specifically real over thought.”19 In this case, Sartre emphasizes the non-identity of reality and knowledge. With certain qualifications, we might even compare Kierkegaard’s realism to that of Husserl, who refers to the object that transcends whenever the mind confronts it on an intentional basis.20 Furthermore, in criticizing Marxist orthodoxy, Sartre once again discusses how the hasty assimilation of facts to ideal hypotheses can distort a genuine appraisal of concrete situations. The false essentialism of Marxist historiography does not allow us to uncover the relationship between part and whole. Marx himself was more perceptive: “In other words, he gives to each event, in addition to its particular signification, the role of being revealing.”21 The quest of the historian is for a synthetic ensemble rather than for a Platonic idea. If Marxists during a later period move too quickly from facts to conclusions, they have lost touch with the concrete realities that are always subject to interpretation. Concepts lose their elasticity in systems of thought that exclude actual encounters: “They are no longer keys, interpretive schemata; they are posited for themselves as an already totalized knowledge.”22 Change in this situation has been reduced to identity in a system of interpretation that depends on preconceived notions of its subject-matter. Sartre’s response to this situation would be difficult to understand apart from his starting-point in phenomenology, which provides a coherent basis for reconsidering the role of human agency in public life. Sartre argues against an economic determinism that would reduce historical events to conflicts between rival interests. When the Girondists opt for war in the wake of the French Revolution, they do not merely express a mercantilist bias in the sphere of policy. Sartre disagrees with the historical analysis of Daniel Guérin, which

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he considers in some respects to be exemplary. Hence, instead of reducing Girondist attitudes to economic considerations, Sartre reminds us that “the political reality for the men of 1792 is an absolute, an irreducible.”23 From a certain standpoint, therefore, Sartre’s view of historical causation can be interpreted as an attempt to restore an old-fashioned view of human agency that accepts political motivation at face value.24 No doubt Sartre is opposed to the tendency of various historians to bury political contradictions in economic facts. We might object, nonetheless, that the Girondists disguised their true objectives in political rhetoric in order to conceal an underlying commitment to economic imperialism. Sartre offers a fascinating counter-argument to this sophisticated objection to the more political reading. An actor playing Hamlet, who crosses his mother’s room and kills Polonius, not only ‘acts out’ a set of stage directives but also earns his living as an actor in a certain society. This is entirely obvious. However, Sartre contends that long-range results which are present in an imaginary act cannot be understood in a restricted setting.25 The values of an imaginary prince are expressed in an actor’s movements, just as the actor imagines that he is Hamlet when he thinks of himself as appearing on stage. By way of analogy, when the revolutionaries of 1789 call themselves Cato, they position themselves as members of a class that discovers History and also attempts to stop it. Historical fabulation enables specific individuals to emerge as “heirs of a classical culture” that is both universal and outmoded.26 The historian who fails to grasp the double meaning of historical fabulation is invariably at a loss to interpret a particular course of action in complex terms. Sartre clarifies how impersonation can be an imaginative response to a political and economic challenge. The revolutionaries who imitate Cato are interested in substituting virtue for politics and in forming a myth that carries them into an unknown future. The fundamentally ambiguous nature of this gesture is what renders it useful to historical interpretation. A careful examination of this rhetorically charged gesture demonstrates how a particular class can have the dual role of both advancing a revolutionary movement and bringing it to a premature end. Nonetheless, double meaning is perfectly compatible with the singularity of historical events. The French Revolution, for example, is a singular ‘event’ that cannot be reduced to economic concerns or assigned an entirely political meaning. From this standpoint, existence constitutes the site of praxis and provides the motive for a whole school of thought: “Existentialism, then, can only affirm the specificity of the historical event; it seeks to restore to the event its function and its multiple dimensions.”27 Sartre’s approach to historical agency can be related to his interpretation of writers and their works. Literature is a vocation that enables the writer to order his own life according to specific ends while assuming a basic comportment in

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the world. Sartre argues that literature is a fundamental choice that allows us to infer the unity of a life as a productive task.28 Flaubert, for instance, chooses literature over other options during a period of experiencing intense rivalry with an older brother who has already won paternal esteem. The choice of becoming a writer is inseparable from a personal trauma, and yet the outcome of this trauma establishes the parameters of a life that will remain the same from beginning to end. This does not mean that our original choice must prevent us from maintaining some sort of tension between identity and difference. On an interpretive level, nonetheless, we remain interested in discovering the underlying coherence of a life that would otherwise lack integrity: “What the totalization must discover therefore is the multidimensional unity of the act.”29 Nonetheless, Sartre clearly rejects the strategy of reading literary works from a purely biographical standpoint. The production of a literary work is a singular ‘event’ that contains a plurality of meanings. These meanings are not reducible to what emerges at the moment of the work’s composition. To be sure, the literary work enables us to pose questions concerning the life that surpass the experience of the lived. At the same time, the explanation of the work exceeds whatever can be learned about the life that produces the work in the first instance. Sartre discusses the relationship between the life and work in a way that sustains the work’s relative autonomy: The life is illuminated by the work as a reality whose total determination is found outside it – both in the conditions which produce it and in the artistic creation which fulfills it and completes it by expressing it. Thus the work – when one has examined it – becomes a hypothesis and a research tool to clarify the biography.30

In the domain of criticism, Flaubert’s work reveals the traits of a certain writer who discovers his place in a limited social structure and remains related to a unique childhood drama. Nonetheless, the critic must be willing to acknowledge at every interpretative juncture that the literary work contains meanings that exceed the scope of biographical inferences. Sartre also suggests how the literary work, like the historical act, contains different meanings when examined from different perspectives. A writer who constructs a work that embodies the values of one period may anticipate the concerns of a world that lies ahead. The attitudes inscribed in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary were prevalent in the post-romantic generation of 1830. They shaped the young Flaubert in ways that have long-term significance and became evident only in retrospect. However, while falling behind his contemporaries, Flaubert looks forward to the anti-romantic disgust of 1845 and writes a ‘prophetic’ novel that could be enlisted in the cause of social or political criticism.31 In addressing two different audiences, Flaubert demonstrates how temporal distance can be overcome on the basis of shared attitudes. Of course,

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the novel only achieves a critical meaning if the new historical situation can be interpreted in ways that at least partially contradict the values of romantic defeatism. The novel from this standpoint would enact a despair that is by no means inevitable but expresses only a temporary setback for a more creative response to human existence. While discussing how the literary object can be recovered as both complete and in the process of formation, Sartre opens up two possible readings of Madame Bovary that are perhaps equally valid. We might identify one possible reading with a ‘classical’ conception of phenomenology that begins with an analysis of Emma Bovary herself.32 The classical reading would demonstrate how Emma is consumed by the imaginary in her failure to master the real. This reading would emphasize how Emma’s inability to distinguish imagination from reality brought about her own undoing. Sartre’s own remarks on Flaubert, however, are dismissive of the ‘realist’ label and also support a reading that takes the author’s identification with Emma Bovary as the starting-point for a very different analysis. This second reading would also be phenomenological in emphasizing the appearance of the self as a fictional construct, just as it would enable us to discover the writer in his own creation, thereby validating his image of himself as the female protagonist.33 More importantly, this second reading would suggest how the creation of an imaginary being fulfills a role of the writer and pertains to a unique human project. While it would be easy to make use of this equivalence in order to fault the writer for his femininity, pessimism and escapism, we might achieve more by showing how he attempts to invent a way out that seeks recourse in the imaginary. Sartre cautions us against assuming that Flaubert merely evaded a responsible sense of self in constructing his literary surrogate: “This project has a meaning, it is not the simple negativity of flight; by it a man aims at the production of himself in the world as a certain objective totality.”34 III

There can be little doubt that Sartre assumes an increasingly hermeneutical attitude when approaching the problems of history. Nonetheless, we are often at a loss in trying to contextualize the strain of hermeneutics that characterizes his ambitious undertaking. The tradition that begins with Schleiermacher and extends to Dilthey and Heidegger is certainly a crucial influence on his later position. Manfred Frank has discussed how Sartre’s reading of Flaubert continues this tradition, while combining a hermeneutics of the individual with the insights of historical materialism.35 While Frank’s remarkable analysis deserves close study, we might go one step further in suggesting how the notion of the individual provided Sartre with a non-foundational thematic that

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departs from traditional theories of knowledge. Sartre’s view of comprehension is completely at odds with an appropriative conception of knowledge that resolves all differences in a seamless totality. We discover his distance from this tradition when we learn that comprehension is never reducible to a contemplative stance. Comprehension is either related or identical to praxis, which lies at the heart of every human project that organizes a meaningful life. Our discussion of Flaubert has already shown us that Sartre assigns phenomenological significance to the literary work as a possible source of biographical knowledge. To insist on the relative autonomy of the literary work is not to argue that it is unrelated to the life of the writer. Flaubert’s vocation as writer is central to an existential project that reveals the singularity of a particular individual who embodies a general truth. We would not be able to grasp this singularity apart from the writer’s achievements: “It is the work or the act of the individual which reveals to us the secret of his conditioning.”36 In maintaining that the significance of the work or act does not derive from external conditions, Sartre reaffirms the ‘space’ of the imaginary as an improvisatory site in which human destiny can be assessed and varied. It would seem that Sartre assigns literature a unique role in demonstrating how singularity reveals the general in any particular instance. However, literature is perhaps only the expression of a more basic capacity that defines human beings as perpetually in the process of becoming. Man is a signifying being who constantly goes beyond the present and explains his actions in the light of future goals. The signs that he creates refer to absent objects or to objects that remain hidden in time. Sartre identifies signifying with an act of surpassing that enables human beings to separate themselves from their empirical conditions: To surpass present conditions toward their later change and to surpass the present object toward an absence are one and the same thing. Man constructs signs because in his very reality he is signifying; and he is signifying because he is a dialectical surpassing of all that is simply given.37

The capacity for language is what distinguishes man as a cultural being and sets him apart from the order of nature. In the act of signifying, human beings begin to move in a space that is irreducible to the empirical conditions in which they find themselves. From the standpoint of what is yet to come, this space is ‘empty’ but it also provides the basis for imaginative variation and free invention, which enable the individual to discover both absence and presence in the movement of verbal signs in a world of meaning. Human conduct, however, is not only constituted through significations but presents itself to us as the occasion for hermeneutical comprehension. In observing someone cope with a shared situation, I grasp the field of my material space as something that can be crossed and unified through practical

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activity. Comprehension is the term that describes this synthetic effort of bringing together self, other and material space. Moreover, in opposition to a short-sighted positivism, Sartre argues that our comprehension of the other necessarily takes place through a certain perception of human ends. This does not mean, of course, that such ends are equivalent to the objective results which enable living persons to establish contact with the world. Flaubert’s early and tentative reflections on a novel that would eventually become Madame Bovary should not be confused with the novel itself. However, these reflections are significant as ends and turn out to be binding to the degree that they allow us to relate the future to the present in all of its concrete detail. By the same token, we recover Flaubert himself through a regressive effort that moves from the objective book to the set of subjective intentions that once animated the living writer. This concern for ends is ultimately what enables Sartre to identify existentialism with anthropology as a human concern. Edmund Husserl earlier discussed how the sciences in general make use of their own subject-matter but never question their relationship to what they assume to be true.38 In a similar manner, Sartre will argue that the human sciences have generally failed to ask questions about their own foundations. The reason for this failure resides in the mistaken notion that scientific activity allows us to constitute the laws of the human world instead of providing an existential basis for revealing them. Anthropology has despaired of discovering a human essence that could provide us with an objective source of scientific legitimacy. In offering the ‘ideology’ of existence as the basis for anthropological reflection, Sartre merely suggests that the role of comprehension in the acquisition of knowledge can show how every human project embraces a mode of praxis that unites immediate existence with an incomplete but always vital understanding of the other. Words sometimes have regressive meanings and function as mere indicators, but they also refer us back to a process that is interminable. This process is none other than comprehension itself, which should not be confused with knowledge but functions as the indirect ‘foundation’ of all we know. Sartre’s philosophical contribution to the study of man challenges the way that knowledge is usually grounded in a stable relationship between knower and known: This perpetual dissolution of intellection in comprehension and conversely, the perpetual redescent which introduced comprehension into intellection as a dimension of rational non-knowledge at the heart of knowledge is the very ambiguity of a discipline in which the questioner, the question, and the questioned are one.39

Sartre’s reference to ambiguity in this remarkable excursion into anthropology as a human science is perhaps what best preserves the openness of his phenomenological approach to history. In accepting the indeterminate

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relationship between knowledge and comprehension, we have already begun to place the ‘event’ of existence within the contested site of historical experience. American University, Cairo NOTES 1

Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 6. Dominick LaCapra, however, has argued effectively that Sartre’s opposition between poetry and prose quickly breaks down upon close examination. He even suggests that the category of the proper, in this case represented by prose, ‘deconstructs’ itself during the course of an exposition that becomes increasingly ‘poetic’ as it unfolds: 2

The writing is in no sense pure ‘prose,’ and it even seems to be more on the side of poetry – heavily allusive, evocative, connotative, persuasive, if not cajoling, even lyrical, and replete with metaphors and obscure resonances. It shows that what the text tries to say cannot be taken at face value. Dominick Lacapra, A Preface to Sartre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 73. 3 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 13. 4 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), pp. 340–400. 5 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 16. 6 Ibid., pp. 28–29. 7 Cf. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 15–86. This essay employs craft production to renovate the concept of the work for hermeneutical purposes. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s use of the peasant shoes as an example of a work leads back to Van Gogh’s painting, which opens up the question of truth as ontological disclosure. It could be argued, therefore, that Heidegger never dispenses with art as a key to revealing what would otherwise remain inadequately revealed in everyday life. 8 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 29. 9 Ibid., pp. 33–34. 10 Ibid., p. 34. 11 Ibid., p. 34. 12 Ibid., p. 35. 13 Cf. Wolfgang Iser, “Asymmetry Between Text and Reader,” The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 163–79. Iser discusses the concept of indeterminacy in Roman Ingarden’s approach to literary works. His criticisms suggest how interpretive discord can shape the reader’s assessment of textual meaning. Hence reception theory could be understood as an attempt to deepen Sartre’s more radical claim about the way that literary meaning is co-constituted, rather than merely constituted on an eidetic basis. 14 The material aspect of language is precisely what complicates Sartre’s later conception of the writer as a poet who employs ordinary language as a non-literal resource: “The literary writer is a custodian of ordinary language, but he goes beyond it, for his material is language as non-significant or misinformation.” Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Plea for Intellectuals,” Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), p. 272. While Sartre’s later position seems to be diametrically opposed to the earlier reduction of literature to prose, we cannot

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help but notice that he sometimes fails to exclude ‘poetic’ uses of language from his earlier, rather programmatic agendas. 15 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 88. 16 Ibid., p. 114. Sartre briefly discusses how another sort of Marxism might have triumphed if the Paris Commune had not been crushed by external forces. This imaginary socialism “would have been coloured with a thousand nuances” and thus could not have developed into a monolithic ideology. While Sartre’s historical reflections have a speculative cast, they cannot be dismissed as entirely implausible or outmoded in a time that has witnessed the collapse of Communist orthodoxy. Paul Ricoeur has explored this aspect of the Marxist tradition more extensively in Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 17 A more complete discussion can be found in Jean-Paul Sartre, “Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal,” Between Existentialism and Marxism, pp. 141–69. In this essay, Sartre explores the notion of the singular universal as a hermeneutical category and places Kierkegaard in the company of Marx as a seminal intellectual influence. 18 Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 10. 19 Ibid., p. 12. 20 Husserl explains that the thing is transcendent, rather than immanent to experience, in a manner that brings phenomenology close to ‘classical’ realism. Transcendence in this sense is not a concern of experience but pertains to the thing as such in its mode of being given: “Thus the Thing itself, simpliciter, we call transcendent. In so doing we give voice to the most fundamental and pivotal difference between ways of being, that between Consciousness and Reality.” Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), pp. 133–34. 21 Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 26. 22 Ibid., p. 27. 23 Ibid., p. 41. 24 Jameson argues that Sartre’s acceptance of political motivation at face value does not correspond to what occurred after most revolutionary upheavals in the twentieth century. Cf. Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 267–68. We might suggest in response that Sartre’s phenomenological analysis indeed qualifies the value of economic reform as a strategy that has little chance of success if it is inadequately linked to political tasks. 25 Sartre, Search for a Method, pp. 45–46. 26 Ibid., p. 46. 27 Ibid., p. 124. 28 The concept of an original project is presented theoretically for the first time through the example of Flaubert, the monumental figure who enables Sartre to produce a lengthy intellectual biography in which the vocation of literature performs a central role: The irreducible unification which we ought to find, which is Flaubert, and which we require biographers to reveal to us – this is the unification of an original project, a unification which should reveal itself to us as a non-substantial absolute. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square, 1956), p. 717. Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 111. 30 Ibid., p. 142. 31 Ibid., pp. 64–65. 32 The ‘classical’ reading of Flaubert would center around the opposition between the imaginary and the real as well as the attempt to substitute imagination for reality. Hazel E. Barnes has pursued this reading in her insightful account of Madame Bovary in Sartre and Flaubert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 340–61. 29

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Needless to say, both the ‘classical’ and the autobiographical readings of Flaubert could be combined in various phenomenological analyses to argue that literature and history are important to the novels themselves. In emphasizing the writer’s failure on the level of social engagement, Sartre tends to offer a literal interpretation of Flaubert’s famous statement, “I am Madame Bovary.” This same statement could be used to support that idea that literature saved Flaubert, while it doomed Emma Bovary. Flaubert’s text, however, provides an image of his age that places in question the possibility of authorial detachment. 34 Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 147. 35 Cf. Manfred Frank, “Archäologie des Individuums. Zur Hermeneutik von Sartres Flaubert,” Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), pp. 256–333. 36 Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 152. 37 Ibid., p. 152. 38 Ibid., p. 168. 39 Ibid., p. 174.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barnes, Hazel E. Sartre and Flaubert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Frank, Manfred. “Archäologie des Individuums. Zur Hermeneutik von Sartres Flaubert.” Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993. pp. 256–333. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadler. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. pp. 15–86. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London and Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978. Jameson, Fredric. “Sartre and History.” Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. pp. 206–305. Kaelin, Eugene F. An Existentialist Aesthetic: The Theories of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962. LaCapra, Dominick. A Preface to Sartre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Ricoeur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal” and “A Plea for Intellectuals.” Between Existentialism and Marxism. Trans. John Mathews. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. pp. 141–69, 228–85. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Family Idiot, I: Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857. Trans. Carol Cosman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search for a Method. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What is Literature? Trans. Bernard Frechtman. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

H I S T O R I C A L FA B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O RY B Y OT H E R MEANS: SHAKESPEARE’S CAESAR AND MOFOLO’S C H A K A A S O P P O S I T E S I N RU B I C O N E S Q U E LEADERSHIP

ABSTRACT

My paper argues that analyzing the characters of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (Zulu) in terms of the interrelationships of each character’s secret self, private self, and public self offers a more plausible account of the nature and ends of each character’s ambition and leadership style: in the case of Caesar as a democratic dictator and in the case of Chaka as a demonic dictator. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar probably premiered in 1599 as the Globe’s inaugural play and first appeared in print in the First Folio (1623). The compilers of this Folio place the play under Shakespeare’s tragedies and title it The Tragedie of Julius Caesar, but in the Folio’s table of contents the title becomes The Life and Death of Julius Caesar. An editorial essay in the (1980) 3rd edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Scott, Foresman publisher) aptly notes the implication of this double title: the Folio’s table of contents lists the play “as The Life and Death of Julius Caesar as though it were a history” (Bevington 1032). This double or alternate title phenomenon hints at the fact that Shakespeare’s drama fabulates (rather than fabricates) out of history the life and death of Julius Caesar, the Roman general and ruler who lived from about 100 B.C. to 44 B.C. Shakespeare principally owes his history for his Caesar play to Thomas North’s 1579 English translation of Jacques Amyot’s 1559 French translation of a Latin translation of Plutarch’s (A.D. 2) book Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. However, Shakespeare refashions or remodels this Plutarchian history by omitting or adding or modifying certain events or characters. For instance, Plutarch does not have a deaf Caesar, but Shakespeare does. Shakespeare shortens or resituates the historical chronology: he conflates the October 45 B.C. celebration in Rome of Caesar’s defeat of Pompey’s with the annual February Feast of Lupercal, which commemorates the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus. In Shakespeare, both celebrations occur March 14, one day before the ides of March. Octavius Caesar 51 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 51–76. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

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reaches Rome long after Caesar’s death but in Shakespeare he gets there on the day of Caesar’s assassination. Furthermore, the forging of the second Roman triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavius Caesar, and Aemilius Lepidus, which in Plutarch occurred over a year after Caesar’s death, occurs in Shakespeare shortly after his death. In Act III, a Roman mob attacks Cinna the poet, but in Plutarch the mob attacked Cinna the poet because it truly mistook him for Cinna the conspirator. The play ends with the victory of the triumvirate in the 42 B.C. Battle of Philippi. Hemingway’s “theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” seems relevant to Shakespeare’s Caesar (Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 75). In Shakespeare’s Caesar drama we feel the character of Julius Caesar as Caesar tries to make his public life consistent with his private and secret self. Similarly, when a 1928 critic challenged the historical accuracy of Thomas Mofolo’s 1925 novel Chaka, the novel’s author replied, “I am not writing history, I am writing a tale, or I should rather say I am writing what actually happened, but to which a great deal has been added, and from which a great deal has been removed, so that much has been left out, and much has been written that did not actually happen, with the aim solely of fulfilling my purpose in writing this book” (Mofolo xv). In the first two sentences of the opening paragraph of chapter 5, the novel’s we-narrator addresses (though vaguely) the novel’s purpose or focus: “The events in Chaka’s life were overwhelming because they were so numerous and of such tremendous import; they were like great mysteries which were beyond the people’s understanding. But since it is not our purpose to recount all the affairs of his life, we have chosen only one part which suits our present purpose” (153). Hemingway’s thinking also applies to Mofolo’s historical fabulation. In Death in the Afternoon, he advises, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the reader is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” (Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon 192). Mofolo focuses on one part of Chaka, the part behind the historical parts of Chaka, the part Chaka forever tries to hide from the public. This secret self of Chaka goes under the alias Isanusi, a so-called soothsayer, the godhead of his diabolical trinity of himself, Ndlebe and Malunga – a trinity which mostly functions as Chaka’s secret self. In a 1950 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin contends that “There is no document of Civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Benjamin 256). Mofolo’s we-narrator dwells on Chaka’s tragic attempts to convert his private world and his public world into his secret world. What happens when a leader tries to force his own family and

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confidantes in his private life and the people (the Zulus) in his public life into the tyranny of his secret life? Isanusi means soothsayer in Sesotho. “Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them,” declares Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus 89), Shakespeare and Mofolo remodel biography, specifically ambition and leadership, in terms of the interrelationship of the selves of one’s being in the world: the secret self, the private self, and the public self. Both Caesar and Chaka evince a Rubiconesque ambition, an irreversible Macbeth-like vaulting ambition which overleaps itself and falls on the other side beyond one’s ends of being onto the ends of being in general. However, Caesar and Chaka exude differently this Rubiconesque ambition in such ways that make Caesar live and die a democratic dictator while Chaka lives and dies a demonic dictator. In both cases we feel how their secret selves relate to their private and public lives. The Soothsayer in Julius Caesar and Isanusi in Chaka function respectively as windows into the nature of the interrelationship of character and fate or of acts of one’s self and acts of destiny, destiny or fate in the sense of all others (such as family and friends in one’s private life and the people in one’s public life). In Caesar we have a democratic tyrant who dwarfs all his contemporaries in ambition, in military success, and in political achievements. In Chaka, we find a monomaniacal despot whose thirst for blood never ends. Apparently, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Mofolo’s Chaka do not believe in a fate that acts no matter how one acts, but they do believe in a fate that acts when one fails to act. The main conflict in Julius Caesar lies in the consequences of the acts of Caesar and the acts of the cast as the movement of the interrelationship of the acts come to an explosive end. Caesar’s intra-psychic fight drives his secret self (the self when no one around to hear or see or sense what one does or thinks), his private self (the self known only to confidants and confidantes), and his public self (the self accessible to anyone). In each case, a soothsayer forces a decision. Similarly, the long silent encounter between the acts of Chaka and the acts of those inside and outside his inner royal court finally explode and Chaka’s character and destiny show themselves. The Soothsayer triggers the battle of and for Caesar’s selves. Chaka’s secret self assumes the alias Isanusi (the soothsayer), head of the diabolic trinity of Ndlebe and Malunga. It appears every human has a secret life, a private life, and a public life, with only the nature and degree varying from person to person. Even Mother Teresa (Agnes Bojaxhiu) had a secret self. The cover of the September 1, 2007 issue of Time carries the headline “The Secret Life of Mother Teresa.” The magazine’s 8-page cover story reviews the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk-edited book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, which consists “primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years” (38). The secret life involves the agnostic or even atheistic tendencies that haunted her almost all

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her life. Secret self and its attempt to bridge or widen the gap between it and the private or public self has from immemorial times been a source of curiosity and sometimes insight about human character. Apparently, what often passes for one’s destiny or fate involves how one does or does not insert or assert oneself in the acts of being in the ever-recurring drama of the ends of one’s being and the ends of being in general. As Nietzsche aptly suggests Emersonianly, “ultimately one experiences only oneself” (121). Shakespeare and Mofolo appear to present a non-metaphysical fate, a fate grounded in the acts of one’s being and in the acts of being in general. Julius Caesar opens in 44 B.C. in Rome. The first scene, a public street, shows in shorthand Rome’s recent and not so recent history relative to Pompey and Caesar, with Caesar experiencing and enjoying the height of power. Roman tribunes Flavius and Murellus spar with a Cobbler about why he cobbler and his fellow workers or commoners stay idle on this day. The Cobbler tells the tribunes that he and his fellows have taken the day off to see and celebrate Caesar for his victory over Pompey’s sons. The tribunes force these Roman commoners to leave. Scene 2, the first Soothsayer scene, comes. Note that the Soothsayer has only nine lines out of the play’s total lines of 2540, yet these few lines, especially the line “Beware the ides of March,” reverberate throughout the play and beyond. History often shows Caesar as a general or top politician or husband who enjoys issuing orders rather than receiving orders. His private self and public self seem immune to orders. Act I, Scene 2, begins with music so loud that it drowns his wife’s name Calpurnia, as he Caesar calls it commandingly. When Caesar speaks, people listen. So Casca summons the music to stop, “Peace, ho! Caesar speaks” and the music stops. Caesar calls his wife again, “Calpurnia,” and she answers, “Here, my lord.” His command to his wife continues, “Stand you directly in Antonio’s way/When he doth run his course.” His orders shift to Antony, “Forget not in your speed, Antonio,/To touch Calpurnia, for our elders say/The barren, touched in this holy chase,/Shake off their sterile curse.” Antony replies deferentially, “I shall remember:/When Caesar says ‘Do this,’ it is performed.” Caesar re-commands Antony, “Set on, and leave no ceremony out.” At the end of these serial Caesar commands, the music resumes and the Soothsayer shouts, “Caesar!” (I, 2, 14). Caesar wonders who calls his name, “Ha! Who calls?” Once more, Casca orders silence so that Caesar can hear and be heard, “Bid every noise be still. Peace yet again,” and music ceases. Caesar proceeds, “Who is it in the press that calls on me?/I hear a tongue shriller than all the music/Cry ‘Caesar!’ “ Caesar orders the person to “Speak,” for “Caesar is turned to hear.” Then the Soothsayer warns Caesar, “Beware the ides of March” (I, 2, 20). For the first time a mere mortal orders mighty Caesar to beware of something. No one commands Caesar to do or not do something unless he already wants to do it.

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Caesar asks, “What man is that?” Ironically, we see for the first time in the play the two men for whom this date (the ides of March) would also most matter, the same two men who would lead the anti-Caesar conspiracy: Brutus and Cassius. Brutus becomes the first to identify the speaker as a soothsayer. He tells Caesar “A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.” Caesar orders for the man to appear before him, “Set him before me; let me see his face.” So in another ironic Judas Iscariot-like moment, Cassius commands the Soothsayer to “come from the throng” and “look upon Caesar.” The Soothsayer complies. Brutus’s first words in the play concern Caesar and the Soothsayer, and Cassius’s very first gesture in the play involves Caesar and the Soothsayer. As the Soothsayer faces Caesar, Caesar asks him, “What sayst thou to me now? And orders him to “Speak once again.” The Soothsayer repeats his dare, “Beware the ides of March” (I, 2, 25). But Caesar dismisses the Soothsayer as “a dreamer,” and adds, “Let us leave him. Pass!” All heed Caesar and leave except Brutus and Cassius. Still in Act I, Scene 2, right after this Soothsayer warning to Caesar, Cassius begins to lay or strengthen the foundation for anti-Caesar conspiracy by first working on Brutus. Cassius asks Brutus if he would observe the forthcoming ceremonial public race (which would include Antony). When Brutus says no, Cassius prays he does. Brutus blames his hesitation on the fact that he is “not gamesome” and lacks “that quick spirit that is in Antony.” Cassius refuses to give up on Brutus. He points out, “Brutus, I do observe you now of late. . ../You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand/Over your friend that loves you.” Brutus tells Cassius not to worry, for his demeanor and behavior have nothing to do with him and that he still counts Cassius among “my good friends.” Cassius asks rhetorically, “good Brutus, can you see your face?” Brutus concedes that “the eye sees not itself/But by reflection, by some other things.” Cassius gradually progresses in his effort to manipulate Brutus through flattery. He laments the point that Brutus has “no such mirrors as will turn/Your hidden worthiness into your eye,/That you might see your shadow” In Act I, Scene 2, Lines 140–142, we glimpse Caesar’s philosophy of life when Cassius (as he tries to work on the anti-Caesar-leaning mind of Brutus) broods over why Caesar bestrides the Roman world “Like a Colossus, and we petty men/Walk under his huge legs, and peep about/To find ourselves dishonorable graves.” Cassius concludes in a Caesarean manner, “Men at sometime were masters of their fates/The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” In other words, one should not believe in a fate that acts no matter how one acts. Rather one should believe in a fate that acts only when one fails to act. Fate often works in Caesar’s life non-metaphysically through the acts of those in his private world and his public world. Timing also acts sometimes as a corollary of fate. When motivation and timing match productively for us, we usually compliment fate but when they do otherwise we

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curse fate. Later in Act IV, Scene 2, Lines 270–276, Brutus speaks of a time to seize time: There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures

The Soothsayer frames the plot of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Right from the play’s beginning (in Act I, Scene 2, Line 20) the Soothsayer warns Caesar, “Beware the ides of March.” In a sense the whole of Julius Caesar is about the ides of March, especially the ides-motivated intellectual (sometimes ambivalent) emotions of Julius Caesar and of Caesar’s time in general. Coming to terms with this date and the consequences of this date consume directly or indirectly the time, labor, and integrity or villainy of every character from then on to the end of the play. For Caesar, telling Caesar to beware of something or anything amounts to testing or questioning the courage or audacity or bravery of Caesar. Who dare tell Caesar what to do or not to do other than Caesar? All who wish Caesar well beseech Caesar to stay home on the ides of March and unbeknown to him those who wish him ill or want to trap him for death lure him out on the ides of March. Caesar (from the start) reads Cassius’s character correctly. He notes, “Cassius has a lean and hungry look/He thinks too much,” and he concludes, “Such men are dangerous.” But Caesar trusts Antony absolutely and lets Antony’s misreading of Cassius prevail. Antony advises Caesar, “Fear him not, Caesar, he’s not dangerous” (I, ii: 195–197). Caesar’s reading seems sensible. For Antony, Caesar’s assessment of Cassius apparently rests on physiognomy or mere impressions. That one looks lean and hungry or that one thinks too much does not make for a dangerous man. Caesar’s conclusion may be accurate but it lacks any substantiation. Similarly, Antony’s objection may be right but it too lacks any supporting evidence. In Act II, Scene 2, Caesar asks his servant, “What say the augurers?” The servant replies, “They would not have you to stir forth today./Plucking the entrails of an offering forth,/They could not find a heart within the beast.” Caesar then comments on the augurers’ message: The gods do this in shame of cowardice. Caesar should be a beast without a heart If he should stay at home today for fear. No, Caesar shall not. Danger knows full well That Caesar is more dangerous than he. We are two lions littered in one day,

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And I the elder and more terrible And Caesar shall go forth.

At first it appears that Caesar would heed the Soothsayer’s caution as his wife Calpurnia persistently and passionately persuades him not to honor this date. On the other hand, Chaka seems to hide behind a metaphysical fate that acts on one all the time. However, fate for Chaka, mostly means Isanusi (also a soothsayer but of a sorcerer or witchcraft type and as such differs from Shakespeare’s Soothsayer). Oddly, Isanusi devilishly subscribes to a parallel Caesarean philosophy of life. He heads a diabolic trinity consisting of himself and his two servants, Ndlebe and Malunga. Isanusi acts as Chaka’s destiny or Chaka’s crutch fate. In chapter 18 of Mofolo’s 1925 novel Chaka, Isanusi says “there is a time in the life of a human being which he must seize at once or else forfeit numerous blessings which will never come his way again till he is buried in the cold earth; whereas if he is alert and vigilant, he will receive blessings which will never again slip out of his grasp” (124). Isanusi first meets Chaka (an exiled or runaway teenager) in chapter 6 and thereafter Chaka willingly surrenders the movement of his life to Isanusi. Isanusi becomes the surrogate for Chaka’s secret self, as opposed to Chaka’s private self or public self. The words – beware the ides of March – carry with them a history of Roman antiquity in general and a biography of Julius Caesar in particular. Shakespeare relies heavily on Plutarch’s own portrait of Julius Caesar. In other words, Shakespeare’s drama telescopes the time of Julius Caesar, all of his life of 56 years, from about 100 B.C. to 44 B. C. and a good portion of Roman antiquity. To have some strong sense of Caesar’s voracious ambition, it would be helpful to bring to the foreground through historians Plutarch and Suetonius the life of Caesar which lies buried in Shakespeare’s play. According to Plutarch, Gaius Julius Caesar came from a poor but respectable family; his uncle, Lucius Julius Caesar, rose to become a Consul during the Social War of 90 to 87 B.C. Julius Caesar’s own father, who bears the same name Gaius Julius, also rose as far as Praetor (a position just below Consul) before he died in 86 B.C., when his son Julius Caesar was about 15. His mother, Aurelia, doled on him and raised him in a neighborhood full of people from lower social class. Julius Caesar’s aunt, Julia, married Gaius Marius, a very wealthy Roman, a heavyweight player in Roman politics and warfare, who died in his sixth term as Consul. When Julius Caesar began his career he found himself in the middle of the growing conflicts between Marius and his rival Consul, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Cinna became Consul and made Julius Caesar a Flamen Dialis (head priest) of Jupiter, which he soon lost. Marius and Cinna opposed Sulla. Shortly thereafter, Caesar (in 84 B. C.) married Cornelia, Cinna’s daughter. Cinna died in the hands of his own mutinous soldiers. By 81 B. C. Sulla had crushed all

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opposition and become the unchallenged victor and dictator. Sulla proscribed his enemies by execution or property confiscation. Caesar’s name appeared on the proscription list. While Sulla’s agenda favored the Optimates (the conservative wing of the Senate) or the boni (the good men), as Cicero usually called them, Caesar’s agenda favored the populares (the common people). Caesar ran away from Rome to hide in the countryside. Caesar’s mother pressured Sulla and he removed Caesar’s name from the proscription list. Sulla ordered Caesar to divorce Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, his former rival. Caesar refused and Sulla confiscated her dowry. Suetonius quotes Sulla as saying of Julius Caesar, “in this one Caesar you will find many a Marius.” In 80 B. C., at about age 20, Caesar left Rome for Asia to work for the Asian governor Praetor Marcus Minucius Thermus. Caesar’s bravery at the siege of Miletus won him the very high honor of the corona civica (oak crown), which a recipient wore for standing applause in front of the Senate. Sulla died and Caesar returned to Rome, where he tried to sharpen his rhetorical and oratorical skills by serving as a trial lawyer, a job which allowed him to take on the political elite. In 75 B. C. on his way to Rhodes to study under Apollonius Molon, Cilician pirates kidnapped him for about five weeks for a ransom of about 5,000 gold coins but Caesar vainly insisted that a man of his kind was worth at least 12,000 gold coins. Before he left he told the captors that he would return to kill them. The death of his cousin, Gaius Aurelius Cotta, returned Caesar (now 27) to Rome from Rhodes, in 73 B. C. By appointment Caesar replaced Cotta as Pontiff (priest). Caesar usually lived beyond his means. His debts mounted fast. By election, he soon became a military tribune. He and Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of Rome’s richest men, became very close friends. Crassus began funding his lavish lifestyle. In 69 B. C. Caesar won the election for Quaestor. However, Caesar’s aunt (Marius’s wife) died and Caesar violated Roman tradition by making her funeral a huge public laudation, the kind usually reserved for historic figures. Caesar sang the praise of Julia’s husband (Marius), a man the Optimates of the Senate vilified. Caesar flaunted Marius’s popular images unseen since Sulla’s time and claimed Ancus Marcius Rome’s fourth king and Venus the goddess as part of his lineage. The crowd enjoyed Caesar’s performance and frustrated the Senate’s effort to undermine it. Cornelia (Caesar’s wife and mother of their infant daughter, Julia) died. Caesar again violated Roman tradition by having a public laudation for his wife, a very young woman. Caesar used the opportunity to honor Cinna (Cornelia’s father), another man the Senate’s Optimates hated. Caesar left Rome to serve under Antistius Vetius, the governor of Further Spain. On his way to Spain, Caesar encountered a statue of Alexander the Great, an encounter which made him note that Alexander at only age 30 had

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conquered many nations while he Caesar at 31 had done nothing memorable. He increasingly identified with the people of Cisalpine Gaul who never ceased to complain about their being oppressed ever since Sulla’s time. The Senate impeached Caesar for treason but failed to convict him. In 67 B. C., Caesar married his second wife, Pompeia (the daughter of Quintus Pompey and the granddaughter of Sulla). Caesar was now a Senator. As senator, he supported both the Lex Gabinia measure to grant Pompey unrestricted power to deal with Cilician pirates and the Lex Manilia, a later measure to grant Pompey the ability to command the whole east against the Mithridates. But the rivalry between Pompey (Caesar’s father-in-law) and Crassus (Caesar’s overgenerous benefactor) intensified. Before he could help advance the second measure to help Pompey, Caesar became (by appointment) the curator of the Appian Way. In 65 B. C., Caesar and Bibulus (Caesar’s rival and a member of the Optimate faction of the Senate) became (through election) curule aedile, a magistrate position, responsible for maintaining temples and public buildings and for holding public games on state holidays. Caesar erected statues of Marius for public display but Caesar’s popularity with the people made Senate’s objections to his agenda irrelevant. As Caesar’s debts increased in 63 B. C., he ran for and won two offices: the office of Pontifex Maximus (Rome’s head priest) and the office of Urban Praetor. The former, a non-political position with high pay, lifetime tenure, and political advantages somewhat insulated him from his debts. However, the Catiline Conspiracy delayed his being the Praetor in 63 B. C. and widened his disagreement with the Optimates of the Senate. Lucius Sergius Catiline, a candidate for Consul, faced the charge of plotting to violently overthrow the Roman Republic and to kill Cicero. Catiline lost the Consular race and escaped from Rome to be part of the rebellion in Etrurie, where he lost his life in battle. In 63 B. Caesar became the Urban Praetor and advanced his populares agenda. At this time, Pompey’s eastern conquests had ended and so he headed back to Rome. Caesar supported Pompey’s return plan but the Optimates killed it because they feared that Pompey would become another Sulla. Caesar lost his Urban Praetorship but through a threat of violent intrusion by a mob Caesar regained the position. Pompey apparently did not want to be a Sulla or a dictator at all. Pompey gave up his troops, returned to Rome, and sought land bills for his military veterans. The boni rejected the plan, but Caesar endorsed it. Caesar worked to end or lessen the long rivalry between Crassus and Pompey. Then the annual women-only Bona Dea celebration, which Pompeia (Caesar’s wife), hosted at their home became scandal-ridden. Publius Clodius Pulcher, a patrician politician with a wild side, came to the celebration incognito as a woman, but Pompeia identified him and he escaped. Consequently, Caesar divorced Pompeia and declared that his wife had to be

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above reproach or suspicion. Cicero brought Clodius to trial but failed to convict him. 61 B. C. came with Caesar as the proconsular governor of Further Spain. He left Rome and reached Rhone where some of his soldiers expressed dismay at the barbaric or wretched life of the villagers there. Caesar replied that he would rather be the first man among these local villagers than be the second man in Rome. Wherever he went from 61 to 60 B. C. Caesar defeated Roman enemies and one such military achievement earned him the title of imperator, which qualifies him for a triumph in Rome. Caesar decided to run for Consul but he had to be in the city of Rome to run. On the other hand, he also wanted his triumph. Roman tradition demanded that for his triumph to hold he had to remain outside the city of Rome but such delay would deny him the opportunity to run for Consul. He abandoned the opportunity for a triumph to celebrate his conquests in Spain and marched into Rome to run for Consul. Initially, controversy over Caesar’s age qualification for Consul brewed. Was Caesar 40 or 42 in 60 B. C? The Optimates opposed his decision to run. Caesar’s popularity with the people assured his political victory. He suggested to Pompey (Crassus’s rival) the idea of amicitia (coalition). Pompey had not given up his bid for land for his veterans of the eastern wars. Crassus had vested interests in the east. Caesar later married his third wife, Calpurnia (the daughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso and the one we find in the Shakespaeare drama under discussion). In 60 B. C. Caesar formed a secret coalition which included Crassus (his wealthy benefactor) and Piso. Though Caesar won his race for Consul, the boni-supported Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus (his former co-aedile) also got elected as the junior Consul. In 59 B. C. Caesar helped pass a law that mandated the public release of all Senate debates and proceedings. Caesar himself eventually wrote seven volumes on the Gallic Wars and three volumes on the Roman Civil War. He wrote a land bill for veterans of Pompey’s eastern wars, a bill that Cato’s Optimates still rejected even though it compromisingly excluded Campania lands in order to attract their support. Caesar’s co-Consul Bibulus boasted that it would never pass and actively opposes it. Caesar then carried his campaign straight to the people. Existence of the first triumvirate came to light. Pompey and Crassus supported the land bill, and it became law. In shame Bibulus returned to his home and spent the rest of his consular year trying to void Caesar’s legislation. Caesar wrote a pro-Crassus tax bill that would help Crassus’s business interests; the people’s assembly passed it. He also advanced anti-corruption laws to make provincial governors more accountable. The first triumvirate often took bills directly to the people’s assembly and bypassed the Senate, an approach which though technically legal later became a basis for the attempts to prosecute Caesar. Caesar’s relationships with Crassus, Piso (his

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new father-in-law), and Pompey (his new son-in-law) seemed secure. Pompey had married Caesar’s daughter, Julia. With the help of the Tribune Tublius Vatinius, the Lex Vatinia gave Caesar the ProConsulship of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum, which he held for about five years. When the governor of Gallia Narbonensis (Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer) died, Caesar added the territory to his domain. Caesar took over his control of Cisalpine Gaul, Transalpine Gaul, and Illyricum in 59 B. C. In 58 B. C. Caesar defeated the Helvetii (a Celtic tribe in today’s Switzerland). When Germanic incursions into Gallic land and diplomacy failed, Caesar defeated Ariovistus (the leader of the Germanics) on the battlefield. Publius Licinius Crassus, Caesar’s young lieutenant and son of triumvir Crassus, played a key role in this Roman victory over Ariovistus. In 57 B. C. Caesar defeated the warriors of Belgae, a confederation of northern tribes in northern Gaul. When news of his victory reached Rome, Cicero succeeded in obtaining a Supplicato (a public offering of gratitude) for Caesar. A Supplicato usually lasted five days. Pompey’s Supplicato lasted ten days, but Caesar’s lasted fifteen days. In 58 B. C., Publius Clodius Pulcher, who earlier had violated Caesar’s home, became Tribune of the Plebs. He supported Caesar’s agenda and pushed Cicero (who had prosecuted him in the Catalini Conspiracy) into exile. But Clodius soon fell out with Caesar. The Crassus-Pompey rivalry continued unabated. Clodius sent Cato to Cyprus, a move that created unrest in Egypt. Ptolemy the XII (the young king of Egypt) escaped from Egypt into Rome to secure Pompey’s intervention. Clodius did not want Pompey to intervene. Clodius used street gangs to help in his cause and Pompey through Titius Annius Milo (the 57 B. C. tribune) got his own gangs to do the same. Pompey and Consul Cornelius sought the return of Cicero from exile. In 57 B. C. Cicero returned and endorsed the fifteen-day Suupplicato for Caesar for the victory over the Belgae warriors. Cicero appointed Pompey to a five-year term as Cura Annonae (manager of grain supply) to deal with the pervasive grain problem. Clodius’s and Milo’s street gangs ran amuck as the two men tried to prosecute each other for the use of violence. Milo is tried and at the trial Crassus and Pompey testified for Milo. Clodius attempted to divide Crassus and Pompey by publicly complimenting Crassus and castigating Pompey. Caesar’s supporters appeared to be morphing into his opponents. Clodius, Cicero, Bibulus, Cato, and the rest of the Optimates hold Caesar’s Consulship responsible for all the ills that plague Rome. In 56 B. C. Caesar pushed for Roman control of all of Gaul. He planned for his next military campaigns in Gaul, Britain, and Germania, but all was not well in Rome. Caesar returned to Cisalpine Gaul as Pompey stayed in northern Italy to carry out his grain commission duties. Caesar summoned the triumvirs (Crassus, Pompey, and of course Caesar himself) and about 200 senators to

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Luca for a conference. Caesar needed his command extended to guarantee immunity from recall and prosecution. Pompey and Crassus to become coConsuls in 55 B. C.: Pompey to get Spain and Crassus, Syria. Pompey got uneasy with Caesar’s growing army and Crassus sought a chance for military glory and loot in the east in Parthia. With nothing settled at the conference, Crassus and Pompey headed back to Rome to run for the 55 B. C. elections. Crassus and Pompey became joint Consuls. Clodius and Crassus’s rivalry cooled. Crassus left to rule his province. Pompey remained in Rome at the helm of state affairs. Maintaining law and order increasingly leaned on the boni. Caesar stopped Germanic incursions into Gallic territory by crossing the Rhine River into Germania and thus became the first Roman to cross the Rhine. Also in 55 B. C. Caesar invaded Britain and became the first Roman to cross the channel to the island of Britain. Rome granted Caesar another twenty-day period of thanksgiving for his expedition to Britain. He returned to Cisalpine Gaul but Britain did not leave his mind. In 54 B. C. he invaded Britain for the second time. When Crassus’s 55 B. C. joint Consulship with Pompey ended, Crassus decided to live out his dream for wealth and the kind of military glory that the other triumvirs enjoyed. Crassus was last in battle about twenty years before, in the battle against Spartacus. In 54 B. C. Crassus went to his province of Syria in order to attack the Parthian empire. Many senators opposed Crassus’s intention since Parthia had done nothing to injure Roman interests. Crassus’s son, Publius Crassus, joined his father in 54 B. C. With Publius’s help, Crassus crossed the Euphrates into Mesopotamia in 53 B. C. In the battle at Carrhae, the Partians trapped some of his men and promised peace if Crassus himself would negotiate with them. The Parthians kidnapped Crassus at the meeting and executed him and his Roman legions. Not until 20 B. C. would Augustus Caesar (Rome’s first emperor and Julius Caesar’s grandnephew), recover from a Parthian temple the lost standards of Crassus’s lost legions. Crassus’s death began the death of the triumvirate of Crassus, Caesar, and Pompey. Crisis gathered as Caesar returned from his second invasion of Britain in 54 B. C.: all was not well in Gaul, word reached him that his daughter, Julia (Pompey’s wife), had died in childbirth. After her death, Pompey aligned more and more with Caesar’s enemies (the Optimates). To resuscitate his alliance with Pompey, Caesar made two offers to Pompey: Octavia (his grandniece) would marry Pompey and he, Caesar, would divorce his wife and marry Pompey’s daughter. Pompey rejected both offers. Soon after Julia’s death, news of Caesar’s mother’s death arrived. The violence between Clodius and Milo ultimately claimed the life of Clodius, and the prosecution of Milo forced Milo into exile. Pompey acted now as the only Consul for the year. Pompey married Claudia, the daughter of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio, one of the

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boni. Metellus later assumed joint Consulship. Pompey had earlier promised to protect Caesar from his enemies by letting him recover his imperium via public office when Caesar’s Gallic term expired. Caesar scored victory over Vercingetorix’s Gallic forces at Divio. Vercingetorix surrendered and moved to Rome to spend five years waiting for a ritual execution. Caesar secured another twenty-day Supplicatio (the third). The Gallic wars ended after eight years. Caesar secured every honor in the ancient Roman traditional course of honor. Chaka also climbs and extends the Zulu course of honor in a manner similar to and different from Julius Caesar’s. According to Mofolo’s novel, Chaka’s father, Senzangakhona, rules Mazulu, a small old nation. He has three or four wives, who bear him no boys but only girls and thus no heir apparent to the throne. He stages a feast that attracts young women from the neighboring villages. One girl, Nandi, attracts the king. Nandi (tall, beautiful, and erect) falls for him too. After the feast, Senzangakhona persuades her to do with him “an ugly deed” that violates “the law of nature and man” (5). Disappointed, Nandi walks away from Senzangakhona’s “evil design.” Nevertheless, she gives in ultimately and pregnancy results. The king married her and she joins his household. When her delivery nears, he sends her back to her village to live with her mother. She delivers the baby boy and Senzangkhona names him Chaka and asks Nandi to bring him for a short stay so that father and son can be acquainted. Nandi then returns to her home at Ncube’s to keep infant Chaka “away from witchcraft since” rumor says that “Senzangakhona’s wives had been bewitched so that they would not carry male children” (7). Those who know Chaka from childhood claim that his eyes betray his “royal blood.” They describe him in animal terms as “the cub of a lion” or “the nurseling of a wild beast” or “a new-born little lion” (8). A Bugane woman folk doctor warns Nandi that when Chaka becomes “a man, he must never be accompanied by another man when he goes to bathe,” that “he must go entirely alone” unless the other person is a woman (9). Senzangakhona’s second wife delivers a son, Mfokazana. Nandi returns to her husband’s household in Nobamba, with Chaka ready to be weaned. Shortly after, another most senior wife delivers a male child, Dingana. The arrival of Mfokazana and Dingana problematizes the royal succession line and worsens the lives of Chaka and his mother. The senior wives declare Mfokazana the king-elect, with Dingana next in line. Then another senior wife delivers a son, Mhlangana. This arrival of a fourth son ruins the lives of Chaka and his mother. Senzangakhona still loves Nandi very much and this love gesture irritates his senior wives with jealousy. When they fail to make their husband announce the royal succession line, they secure the services of a sorcerer who would make their husband turn his heart away from Nandi. Nandi becomes pregnant again and returns to

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her home at Ncube’s to deliver. The senior wives pressure Senzagakhona to exile Nandi permanently from Nobamba. They insist that “though Chaka was born first,” the royal succession line should read thus: Mfokazan, Dingana, and Mhlangana (10). They dismiss Nandi as a dog and remind their husband that Nandi conceived Chaka out of wedlock while they themselves were virgins when he married them. They threaten to report the matter to their husband’s bigger king, “the Great King Jobe” (10). Their husband gives in and rules out Chaka as his heir apparent and makes Mfokazana the king-elect. He also banishes Nandi from Nobamba. The senior wives further demand that Nandi and her child (Chaka) be banned from Ncube’s also and be forced to return to her own home at Lageni’s. The we-narrator says that Senzagakhona’s pain in giving up Chaka and Nandi or child and wife “was like swallowing a stone.” The public sides with the senior royal wives, wishes Chaka were killed and brand him as “a child of sin” (11). As a boy, Chaka undergoes much harassment, teasing and suffering in the hands of his peers. Nandi summons the Bungane woman doctor, who gives him some medicines prepared from “the liver of a lion, the liver of a leopard, and the liver of a man who had been a renowned warrior in his lifetime.” The narrator says that once vaccinated with these medicines, Chaka henceforth “had an uncontrollable desire to fight, and it had to be a serious fight” involving “heavy sticks and spears” (14). Chaka soon becomes the leader of the herdboys. He shows his prowess by killing a lion when still a boy. His father carries the news to “his overlord Dingiswayo,” the successor to the now dead King Jobe. This lion feat brings fame to Chaka but shames the males (young and nonyoung) and generates envy in the village. Young women compose and sing a praise song which celebrates his physical courage and castigates the cowardice of Senzangakhona and other male children (Chaka’s half brothers) whom the women now regard as “no men” at all. Similarly, Nandi’s female age-mates compose their own praise song which celebrates Nandi as the only woman for she alone is the mother of a child hero or a child wonder. This women’s praisesong dismisses Senzangakhona’s other wives as useless since they are mothers of cowardly sons. In those days of might rather than good looks, according to the narrator, women were not attracted to cowardly men no matter how handsome the men were. A woman wanted a man who could protect her, a man whom others feared. Brave men regardless of how ugly become objects of adoration and praise-poems or praise-songs. The two praise songs (one for Chaka and the other for his mother) generated much ill will among men, especially the young ones. The narrator states that “evil spirit spread until it influenced people like Mfokazana” and others to plot “to kill Chaka” cruelly at a feast. A messenger from Dingiswayo tells Senzangakhona that the big king wants to

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see Chaka and know Chaka. It begins to dawn on Chaka that his father works not to save him but to burn him. In chapter 4, with his mother to guard him from “the evil spirit among the people,” Chaka goes to a Bokone river to bathe. Out of his mother’s sight, he ominously encounters a “huge water monster” snake with “two long tongues,” which at one point the monster wraps around Chaka’s neck. This encounter makes him fear, an unprecedented cowardly kind of fear. When the snake disappears back into the water, Chaka hears “out of the reeds . . . a heavy, stentorious [sic] voice,” which thrice says among other things that the mighty water snake is only for the eyes of favored ones. Another voice, a soft one follows, hailing him (like the three witches in Macbeth): “Hail! Hail! This land is yours. . .. You shall rule over nations and their kings. You shall rule over peoples of diverse traditions. . . . And all things shall obey you with unquestioning obedience. . .. Yet you must go by the right path” (24). These developments at the river seem ominous and alarm Nandi, who quickly calls for the Zwide woman native doctor to intervene with her magical medicine, Nandi gets the news that the doctor has just died. However, the doctor leaves message before her death that her client, Chaka, be transferred to another doctor, her mentor, the one who “taught her everything she knew about medicine.” According to the message, the new doctor now has the task of completing the “work of strengthening Chaka” medicinally (25). The new doctor doubles as both doctor and diviner, which supposedly makes him superior to the dead doctor. The dead doctor’s message also says that Nandi must not seek the new doctor “for he will come to you on his own accord, since he will divine for you where you are.” The message adds that while the old doctor uses only medicines, the new doctor “sometimes uses the divination of the head. He will see danger” ahead and Chaka “will have time to avoid it. The doctor/diviner divines wars before they are fought or contemplated. He can foretell without failure who will win a war. Chaka’s enemies slander his name and link him with “all things evil.” Rumor also claims it Chaka is not “human” at all. They associate his mother’s pregnancy and his birth with some abnormality. But this slander does not slow “Chaka’s fame” (26). In chapter 5, Chaka rescues Mfokazana’s girl from a menacing hyena. Gossip thrives on latent family troubles in the royal household: Mfokazana hits Chaka on the head, and Dingana attacks Chaka. The chapter ends with the narrator editorializing: “it is indeed true that the fruit of sin is amazingly bitter, because we do not see any transgression on Chaka’s part . . ., yet . . . his father commands that he should” die. The narrator adds that “the cause of it all” is “that Nandi and Senzangakhona suffered from guilt.” Senzangakhona fears that “his crime would be exposed,” so he plots “to kill his own son” (34). Chaka, their son would assume and absorb this guilt and he and

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his mother would face it by invoking a metaphysical intervention which metamorphosizes into a diabolical trinity of Isanusi, Ndlebe, and Malunga, which functions as a cover for Chaka in the form of Chaka’s secret self. Chapter 6, the crucial chapter where Isanusi and Chaka meet, finally arrives. Chaka’s thirst for kingship shows as he gloats, “How I shall take my revenge the day that sun of mine shall rise” (35). Clearly, Chaka’s ultimate ambition to be king and his desire for revenge precede the arrival of Isanusi. Isanusi does not originate Chaka’s ambition to be king. Isanusi merely activates Chaka’s secret self. Chaka dissimulates the different acts of his being: the acts of his secret self, the acts of his private self, and the acts of his public self, which at one time or another increasingly become undifferentiated as they merge with the ends of his secret self. Before Sanusi appears, Chaka repeatedly declares not if he becomes king but when he becomes king. Fate and character are about to match wits. Isanusi would impersonate fate (or the secret ends of Chaka’s secret life). Chaka leaves his Ncube village to spend time in the forest. While there, he falls asleep by a tree. When he eventually wakes up, he finds “a man doctor standing right there by him, looking at him in a strange way.” Chaka’s body shivers immediately as he sets his eyes on this man. Chaka grabs his own spear, “afraid that” this man “had nearly” murdered him “in his sleep.” He soon realizes this man appears here not to kill him but as a friend and a doctor. The man greets Chaka as Chaka “from the royal house.” Chaka says humbly that “I am not a person of the royal house, but one from a little village.” But the man says, “It would be a wonder if you were not from the royal house” since Chaka’s appearance and manner of speech indicate royalty (36–37). The man claims that he can read people. To make Chaka believe this claim, the man reveals something about Chaka that only Chaka knows, “In your tuft of hair there is a medicine to bring you luck and kingship” (38). He also identifies to Chaka the woman doctor associated with this tuft of hair. Chaka begins to wonder joyfully if this man is not “the isanusi [meaning soothsayer or diviner in Sesotho language] who, it had been said, would come to him!” Chaka realizes quickly that if the man is the isanusi then Chaka’s “affairs were going to take a new turn.” When Chaka asks him twice or thrice where he is coming from and where he is going, the man at last answers by pointing at the sky with his stick and saying, “Ngivela kude le! (‘I come from far away yonder!’)” (39). The doctor’s statement renews Chaka’s confidence, “and he saw clearly that his father’s kingship was now his, that he had that day secured it, and it would not any longer slip out of his grasp as long as he was with this man” (40). This man, this Isanusi, this so-called soothsayer symbolizes Chaka’s secret self, not his alter ego. Chaka uses Isanusi or Isanusi’s alter ego to hatch and reinforce the ends of his being in the ongoing conflicts or contradictions regarding his secret self, private self, and public self. The Faustian oath Isanusi insists on Chaka

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taking guards Chaka’s secret self. Chaka takes the oath eagerly and voluntarily: “I bind myself to abide by your commandments in every way in which you will command me.” He wants Isanusi to make him “a great king,” an “independent king,” the king of kings “to whom all lesser kings owe allegiance.” Isanusi then declares, “You must believe in me, I will never deceive you,” and he draws Chaka’s attention to “the affairs of this world,” where “people live by favoritism and bias, by hatred and by strength.” He adds, “now you too must part with mercy from this very day, because mercy devours its owner” (41). In chapter 7, Isanusi arms and scarifies Chaka’s body with some cultic or juju-like “medicine of kingship” (including “the brain of a crocodile”) that would insure the obedience of others to his commands (42). However, he warns Chaka that his present medicinal ware lacks a medicine that involves “the spilling of blood,” a medicine that is “extremely evil” but also “extremely good.” To choose this complementary medicine also means Chaka choosing death over life. Isanusi invites Chaka to the search for the medicine. The novel refers to a lone tree in Bokone with sap that looks like human blood. Only a human whose body has been armed with medicines can cut it without dying. To cut it a human must be totally naked. When one chops it, it cries “like a goat.” Isanusi, the doctor, vaccinates Chaka with the medicine from this “tree of witchcraft,” this supernatural tree. Isanusi administers other medicines, including “snake poison” (43). From another tree far away, Isanusi makes a stick and a spear for Chaka. The spear has a short handle with a medicine-stuffed base. One end of the stick is stuffed with “that terrible evil medicine”. He advises Chaka to obey Dingiswayo because Chaka’s desired kingship would come through Dingiswayo. Isanusi instructs Chaka on the routine to follow whenever he (Chaka) needs him (Isanusi). The routine includes going to the river, submerging part of the reed in water and whispering “Isanusi” into the reed. And in battle if Chaka sees “death at hand,” he should strike his forehead where the stuffed medicine lies and then call “Isanusi” and help would come in a jiffy and what more, Chaka’s “enemies will flee when they hear my name” (44). Then Chaka asks curiously, “Doctor, we have already been together several days now, talking about one thing, but you have not yet told me your name. Who are you?” The doctor replies, “Neither did you tell me yours, I discovered it for myself with my own intelligence. When you call me, say ‘Isanusi’.” Chaka points out, “But ‘Isanusi’ is not your name, it simply describes what you are, whereas what I am asking is your name.” The doctor responds, “You speak the truth, but I am Isanusi both by name and by deed.” Chaka concedes, “I was about to ask you, Isanusi, how many days it would take you to reach me, starting from where you will be when I call you.” Isanusi promises to arrive quickly or a little late, depending on whether where Chaka calls from is near or far from him. Nonetheless, if unable to make it he can always send one of

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his servants. He adds that the day Chaka takes over the throne, one of these servants would come to live with him to watch over him. As Chaka says, “But doctor, will they also . . .,” Isanusi interrupts, “You must not say ‘doctor’ when you speak to me, you must say ‘Isanusi.’ Be careful not to say ‘doctor’ when you summon me, and thus make it impossible for me to hear your call.” Apparently worried, Chaka asks, “But you are a doctor, aren’t you?” Isanusi retorts, “Yes, I am, but my name is Isanusi, and that is the name I use in addressing the dead, and it is by that name that they know me.” Chaka resumes his earlier unfinished question, “I was about to ask you, Isanusi, whether those servants of yours will know where I am?” Isanusi says, “With precision.” Chaka wonders, “How will they know?” Isanusi turns the question around, “How did I know? The way that I knew is exactly the way they too will know.” He informs Chaka that “the great king who once visited you at the river is a person who loves war; if you do not spill blood, he will not be pleased with you.” He reminds him that “the medicine with which I have vaccinated you is a medicine of blood” and “if you do not spill much blood, it will turn against you and kill you instead.” Isanusi reiterates without mincing words, “Your sole purpose should be to kill without mercy, and thus clear the path that leads to the glory of your kingship” (45). Chaka calls Isanusi doctor again and Isanusi commands him not to say doctor anymore, “You must say ‘Isanusi’.” Chaka adds fame to kingship as what he desires. He wants fame that comes through bloody, deadly spear battles. Isanusi notes, “Chaka, I tell you there is nothing that is too difficult for a man. If you are a man, and you know how to work with your spear, everything will happen the way you want it.” He adds that the spear brings cattle, brings fame, and ensures royal rule. The spear rules he who does not know how to use the spear. The spear kills those who don’t know how to kill with the spear. (46) What Isanusi says next reminds me of a similar saying by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Isanusi says, “The diligent cultivator of sorghum is the person who knows the time for working in the fields, who, when the proper month comes, gives up beer parties and feasts, and rises at the crying of the cock to go to his garden, caring nothing about the cold and the fury of the sun, his one aim being that that moment should not pass him by.” Julius Caesar tells us that there’s a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Isanusi’s maxim continues his seize-the-moment advice. He tells Chaka, “If you like, you must be like that. You must be a cultivator of kingship: let your spear be your hoe, use it, and use it intelligently. Where necessary, you must reduce everything to total annihilation, sweep it all away, and never let your enemy escape lest he should afterwards rise against you. Remove the weeds from your garden of kingship with war, and that is how you will achieve your fame.” Isanusi’s parting words, Chaka, “you must work like a man with that

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spear of yours, so that the day we meet again you will tell me of the great things which you have done” and of how “Dingiswayo regards you.” As they near Dingiswayo’s place, Isanusi leaves saying that he does “not want to meet Dingiswayo because they hated each other” (46–47). In chapter 8, Chaka escapes from home as an erring human but after his meeting with Isanusi he changes “greatly” and has “a completely different spirit” and personality. Now “it is only his flesh that is coming back, only his outer self; as for his true self, that has remained at the place from which he is returning” (47). His Isanusi world conceals his motivating thoughts from outsiders. Before withdrawing into his Isanusi life, the narrator describes Chaka as “amazingly persistent,” “ never letting anything “stand in his way.” and retaining his humanity (48). His formal initiation into the Isanusi world, Chaka’s secret evil world, marks Chaka’s ultimate loss of his humanity. He now thinks that “the law of this world” licenses him to kill anybody anytime for any reason (regardless of innocence). He returns determined to fight a war without end. When others flee for their lives, Chaka all by himself uses the Isanusimade short spear to kill a madman who has been frightening, plundering, killing, and harassing Bokone’s people and livestock. When Dingiswayo and his armies attack Zwide’s men (a perennial enemy), Chaka joins Dingiswayo and plays (through several invocation of the name Isanusi) a decisive role in the defeat of the enemy. On the recommendation of Chaka’s fellow soldiers, King Dingiswayo makes Chaka a regiment commander. Chapter 9 informs us that Chaka used to confide in his mother about medicines his doctor had given him, but after Isanusi the situation reverses. He relegates his mother to the background. She no longer belongs to his secret life. She now at best belongs to his private life. Chaka does not disclose the Isanusi affair to his mother. The narrator speculates that Chaka fails to reveal the Isanusi phenomenon in his life to his mother because he believes “Sanusi was a sorcerer” and if his mother knows this fact, she would warn him to end the relationship. People usually associate sorcery with witchcraft or wizardry or some supernatural or metaphysical spirits or powers. However, Chaka says he does not care about Isanusi’s identity, be he a sorcerer or not as long as this Isanusi-connection yields the kingship he so desires. He reminds himself that he has resolved to do any deed regardless of how ugly “if only it led him towards that kingship” (55). His paramount objective: to be king at any cost. Two of Isanusi’s servants or intercessors (Ndlebe and Malunga) appear before Chaka. Malunga reveals that Ndlebe would be Chaka’s ears and he Malunga would be his arm. Both have access to his inner or secret mind and would assist him in wartime, and in peacetime they would analyze his plan with him, which means Chaka has “an idea in your mind you must tell me, and I shall seek a way” to turn it into action” (59). Chaka tells nothing about the two Isanusi men

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to his mother other than that “he had found himself a fool who would carry his blankets” (60). In chapter 10, Chaka introduces Ndlebe and Malunga as his “servants” from his “home” and immediately adds, “Let me correct that and say that one of them is my servant who carries my blankets.” Their presence makes Dingiswayo’s body shudder and after their departure, he wonders, “Chaka, are you saying that both of them come from your home?” Chaka says, “Yes, O King.” The king continues, “Have you known them since childhood, or have you met them only recently?” Chaka states confidently, “I grew up with them, O King.” Ndlebe and Malunga embody and extend Isanusi’s world and by default Chaka’s secret life. For his public life to succeed Chaka believes he has to protect his secret or esoteric world from public incursions or betrayal. Dingiswayo dismisses Ndlebe as retarded and Malunga as frightening, “truly evil” and “full of guile and treachery. He orders Chaka to take Malunga away, and re-wonders: “Are you telling me that you have known him also from childhood?” (61). Malunga senses Dingiswayo’s unease and returns home, leaving Ndlebe in charge of assisting Chaka. Dingiswayo sends Chaka’s regiment to battle with Zwide’s forces. Ndlebe exposes to Chaka the secret cave where Zwide and some of his men hide as a strategy. They pry them out. With Ndlebe on Chaka’s left side with a battle axe and Malunga on Chaka’s right side with the short spear, Chaka’s warriors kill the fleeing warriors of Zwide and capture Zwide himself. Ndlebe performs the lion share of the intelligence work on the battlefield, but Chaka claims and gets credit for all the military achievements and successes on the battlefield. Dingiswayo releases Zwide the prisoner a few days later and promotes Chaka to commander of all of Dingiswayo’s armies, a promotion that brings envy. In chapter 11, Senzangakhona (Chaka’s father), the man who persecuted Dingiswayo in his youth, fears and envies the growing alliance between King Dingiswayo and his son, Chaka. Dingiswayo’s memory of Senzangakhona’s persecution still lives and plots revenge. Chaka now lives in Dingiswayo’s royal palace and feels more confident he would get his father’s kingship since so far everything Isanusi has predicted has come true. Ndlebe identifies anti-Chaka plotters (Dingiswayo’s paternal uncle and two men) to Chaka who informs Dingiswayo of it. Dingiswayo puts the plotters to death. Ndlebe informs Chaka of the death of Senzangakhona, still a very young man. Without Dingiswayo’s permission and even knowledge, Senzangakhona’s royal advisers install Mfokazana (Senzanghona’s second son and son of Senzangakhona’s second wife) as the new king. Ndlebe informs Chaka and Chaka informs Dingiswayo of the installation. Dingiswayo readies Chaka to take over the kingship from Mfokazana, Chaka’s younger half brother. Dingiswayo now

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assumes the role of Chaka’s father. In chapter 13, with Dingaswayo’s blessing and Dingaswayo’s two regiments, Chaka wages war against Mfokazana and kills him. Dingana and Mhlanga (Chaka’s other half brothers) did not participate in the decisive battle between Chaka and Mfokazana but still Chaka wanted to kill them too. He spares their lives only because Ndlebe intervenes. The narrator wonders why Ndlebe pleads for the lives of Chaka’s enemies? Malunga also appears at the battle that kills Mfokazana. Isanusi, who first appears in chapters 6 and 7, appears the second time in chapter 13. Isanusi meets Chaka at the river a day before Chaka’s installation as king. He reminds Chaka that “the spear I made for you must do its work in the proper way.” He insists, “If you wish for kingship as great as that of Dingiswayo’s, and even a hundredfold greater, if you seek the fame for which you were crying, let that spear remain covered with blood, fresh blood, not dried up.” He reminds Chaka that “the medicines with which I inoculated you were ugly, and if you don’t kill, they will turn against you and kill you instead.” Isanusi gives Chaka another chance to back out, so “if today you think you have killed enough, that you are satisfied with the kingship and the fame you have achieved, that you wish for nothing more, you must tell me at once, this very day, so that I may dilute the strength of the medicines that are in your blood in order that they may not kill you.” Chaka far from reducing his ambition reaffirms his absolute belief and confidence in Isanusi’s terms. Isanusi, Chaka, Malunga, and Ndlebe visit the grave of Senzangakhona, who speaks. He says that he feigned his hatred of Chaka (his son) and ends his speech from the grave with a blessing for Chaka, “May you be a powerful king who is not ruled; may you conquer all your enemies. May your shield protect you from your enemies’ spears, and may your spear kill; may your nation pay you much respect and fear you. Be a man; be a king” (82). All leave the grave except Isanusi. In chapter 14, Chaka realizes his ambition to be king. Dingiswayo presides over the installation. Chaka compliments Dingiswayo for giving him asylum and for making him “a human being again” (85). To please Chaka, whom he knows “craved for war,” Dingiswayo orders an attack on Matiwane’s village. The village falls and Dingswayo captures the village’s cattle. With Dingiswayo’s encouragement and help, Chaka takes Noliwa (Dingiswayo’s sister and daughter of the late big king, Jobe) as his bride. Ndlebe tells Chaka that Dingiswayo would die within ten days and urges him to “Be prepared” (90). In chapter 15, Zwide (Dingiswayo’s old nemesis) unexpectedly attacks Dingiswayo (who has dismissed his warriors for the day so they can rest). Chaka captures him, beheads him, and pins his head on a stick for display at Dingiswayo’s royal home for his subjects to behold. Malunga urges Chaka “to rejoice because the death of one king is the beginning of the reign of the one who succeeds him and the one who will succeed Dingiswayo is you” (92). Chaka immediately regains

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his courage. Ndlebe informs Chaka that a Zwide attack on the Bathethwa is underway. Dingiswayo’s armies pledge their support, call him their new king, and plead with Chaka to protect them and the people from Zwide. They implore him to marry Noliwa. When Zwide crosses Mfolozi-Mhlophe river, Chaka orders all his experienced warriors to attack and kill all Zwide’s people (men, women, and children) except the young men, whom he has “incorporated into his armies.” Chaka wipes Zwide’s big nation off the earth and turns his villages into ruins. The novel’s multiple narrator switches to a singular voice, “I do not believe that there was ever a human being whose life was as full of mystery as that of Chaka. Dingiswayo’s life was full of darkness and secrecy, but these could be unraveled and be made intelligible; but Chaka’s life has been cloaked in dark mystery until this very day” (96). Isanusi appears before Chaka for the fourth time in chapter 16, where he discloses to Chaka, “I am Isanusi the Diviner,” an admission which embarrasses Chaka. Ndlebe and Malunga admit to Chaka that they aborted Chaka’s attempt to pay ransom to Zwide for Dingiswayo’s freedom and return. They point out to Chaka that though he now reigns as the king of kings, he has yet to reach “kingship of the stature that Isanusi tells us you are craving for.” Isanusi advises Chaka not to marry Noliwa, and in fact not to marry at all, “If I were you I would not marry. Marriage splits kingdoms apart” (98). Before Isanusi leaves he assures Chaka that all would go well with mutual trust and mutual love between Chaka and Isanusi’s two servants whom he “will remain with.” He identifies Ndlebe’s duty as intelligence: detecting for Chaka gossip, secrets, and evil plot. Malunga is responsible for arming Chaka’s forces with appropriate medicines. Isanusi poses a question to Chaka and advises him to answer only after thinking through the question. He prefaces his question by recalling what he has so far obtained for Chaka, his father;s kingship, king of kings (Dingiswayo’s kingship), and fame. He then asks, “Are you now satisfied, or do you still want something beyond that?” Chaka urges Isanusi to “take me to the very limits of your wisdom and your strength.” Chaka wants kingship and fame greater than what he now knows or has. Isanusi warns Chaka not to ignore the fact that as Chaka’s royal ambition gets bigger so does Chaka’s “payment due to me.” Chaka assures Isanusi, “Payment is nothing to me, there is nothing I would spare as long as you take me to the things I desire.” Isanusi cautions Chaka about the difficulty of attaining his kind of royal goal since it requires some “medicine that must come from you, not me” (100). This medicine has to come from the blood of a sacrificed human. Isanusi says he knows no other way of gaining such kingship except through the blood of such a person. He adds that he knows someone from his own country who (when seeking such kingship) sacrificed his first-born child to strengthen his royal city by using the son’s blood to fortify the city gates. As Chaka tries

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to answer immediately, Isanusi tells him to think carefully before replying. Shortly after Chaka responds, “I, Chaka, do not ponder long over a problem.” Chaka accepts Isanusi’s conditions in full and since he has no children he wonders if the blood of his mother or brothers would be suitable. Isanusi says no and notes that Chaka has omitted Noliwa, the one who most fits the sacrifice criterion. Isanusi contends that there is a kingship greater than what he now has but he cannot get it unless he Chaka himself kills Noliwa. Isanusi confirms what Chaka has always known but has been in denial of. Isanusi tells Chaka, “Chaka, we are teaching you witchcraft, how sorcerers kill their own children or their parents in order to ensure that they shall be efficient in their sorcery” (101). He gives Chaka a whole day to think through this witchcraft vow. Chaka concludes that Noliwa means “nothing” and as such he can sacrifice her. Besides, a big kingdom would yield him women even more beautiful than Noliwa. Isanusi says to Chaka, “I am not binding you to do anything, but I am leaving the decision entirely up to you, because we doctors simply give a person the medicine he wants, even though it may be one that kills. We are barterers, accepting no responsibility . . .. You must understand that there is neither force nor compulsion; you are to act according to the wishes of your own heart” (102). Isanusi functions as the mouthpiece of Chaka’s heart, Chaka’s secret self. Chaka tells him, “I have heard you well, you have told me the price of that kingship, and now I am deciding on my own to buy it myself, because I like it.” Isanusi gives Chaka a year to decide, but when Chaka pleads for a shorter time, they agree on nine months. Before Isanusi leaves, he suggests that Chaka change the (ugly) name of his nation to something beautiful. Chaka agrees and renames his nation “Zulu” (the sky) and its people “Mazulu” (people of the sky). At this point the narrator switches to a multiple (we) narrator and recalls the “evil gossip” in his early childhood that Chaka “was not quite like other human beings, and that he had been sired by a tikoloshe, an evil genie” and hence Senzangakhona exiled him and his mother. But now that he is king the people sing again his praise, his beautiful face, his tallness, and his impressive manner of commanding his soldiers in war and they even partially equate him with God. The legend of groom Chaka and bride Noliwa as messengers of God grow (103–104). Chaka reads differently the scandal surrounding his biological origin as pointing toward his royal greatness. Chapter 17, describes the state of the Bathethwa nation under King Dingiswayo as prosperous economically and then notes that after Chaka changes the national name, he begins the Zulunization of his other national neighbors. He looks at the nations of Basotho and Batswana and he says, “My kingdom will begin right here where I am, and spread along the breadth of the earth, till it reaches its very ends. There will be but one king, not many, and

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that king will be me!” (106). Chaka builds a new royal city, and kills without any question anybody who arrives accidentally at “the city gates” unmet and unseen (108). Ntululu (Great House), Chaka’s personal dwelling within the royal court admits very few people (such as Isanusi, Ndlebe, Malunga). It also houses the king’s medicine pot and small royal stone. He builds many military villages. He abolishes circumcision for boys because it unnecessarily takes away from their military time. Boys undergo military indoctrination very early in life. Promotion in the military would rest on meritocracy or performance. Marriage diverts, so he prevents his troops (except the best regiment) from marrying. Chaka sets the non-marriage example himself: he never marries. The reader observes that “among all the things that are held in high regard by the black people, there is none held dearer than marriage” (114). Chaka got rid of spears with long handles and stopped the practice of a warrior carrying a bundle of spears. Now each warrior carries one spear, the one with a short handle (the one for stabbing an enemy and not for throwing or hurling at an enemy). As Chaka grows older he begins to see himself as the voice of God. His warriors greet him as “Bayede” (which means one “who stands between God and man” (115). We are told that Chaka has “only one purpose in mind: war” (117). In chapter 18, the nine months Isanusi and Chaka set for Chaka to decide between the kingship and the now-pregnant Noliwa arrive. Isanusi appears before Chaka for the fifth time and asks Chaka, “Have you chosen to live with Noliwa as your wife . . . or have you chosen the kingship?” Chaka says, “I, Chaka, do not know how to speak two things with one mouth. What I have spoken I have spoken, Isanusi” (122). For the last time, Isanusi asks, “What do you choose for yourself, Noliwa or the kingship?” “The kingship,” Chaka wastes no time replying. Isanusi beams with joy and lauds Chaka for answering “like a man” and for not acting like “someone whose mind is fickle” (123). Isanusi echoes a theme reminiscent of Julius Caesar’s statement that “a tide” exists “in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” Isanusi says to Chaka, “truly there are not many like you for recognizing the right moment; for there is a time in the life of a human being which he must seize at once or else forfeit numerous blessings which will never come his way again till he is buried in the cold earth” (124). Chaka himself kills Noliwa. In chapter 19, the narrator notices that the last trace of humanity in Chaka disappears after Noliwa’s death. Chaka can no longer distinguish between war and indiscriminate killing. Grief befalls Nandi, Chaka’s mother, when news reaches her that her own son has killed Noliwa, the woman she loves and treats like a daughter-in-law. Having exterminated those in his private life, Chaka now concentrates on those outside it.. He attacks Buthelezi and Qwabe territories. He destabilizes “the whole of Nguniland,” where peace and prosperity hitherto reigned. Executions and massacres of thousands and thousands of

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(even) his own people become the normal order of his rule. Chaka descends more and more into demonic land as whatever he touches becomes an inferno. He decrees that “to say that I, Chaka erred is a great wrong” (132). He elevates Mzilikazi to commander of the nation’s elite regiment, which means he may marry. Chaka banishes cowardice from Zululand. In chapter 20, he ravages Maqwabe and the Mafuze, Bathembu, and the Machum. He intensifies his Machiavellian principle. He attacks and provokes attacks everywhere. The narrator observes, “Whether they died by the spear or from hunger mattered little to him so long as they were dead” (136). Chaka-induced persecutions, suffering, and serious hunger force some Zulus and others into cannibalism. People call him “Chaka, originator-of-all-things-evil” (137). After the war with the Mangwane of Matiwane, Chaka stops participating in person in battles. He makes Mzilikazi (aka Moselekatse) the commander of all Chaka’s commanders, with Manukuza as next in command. Mzilikazi tries to break away or free himself from Chaka by reminding people that “Chaka is a human” and not “god” (139). Manukuza and Moselekatse soon desert Chaka. The desertions disappoint and frustrate Chaka who now systematically defiles and destroys Zululand. Envious Chaka cold-bloodedly executes even his loyal commanders, such as Nongogo and Mnyamana, whose popularities among the troops and people he could no longer stomach. When the people repeatedly realize that Chaka’s spear does “not spare even those who had served him so well,” their dissatisfaction with Chaka gathers momentum (147). Chaka’s half brothers Dingana and Mhlangana fan this growing anti-Chaka spirit. In chapter 22, Chaka continues to defile or rape many beautiful young girls; he even kills many of them. He kills at birth any children he has fathered. Chaka eventually kills his mother the way he killed Noliwa. His killings or executions become a sadist’s sport. In chapter 23, the multiple narrator states that there are many parts to Chaka but they have chosen “the part which suits our purpose,” the litany of his barbarities or evils (153). Nightmares plague Chaka in chapter 24. He attributes his condition to witchcraft and decides to “go into the veld” until Isanusi arrives to strengthen him again (157). He accuses the Dukuza regiment of bewitching him. The novel’s end, chapter 26, also marks the end of Chaka. Apparitons of Noliwa and Nandi haunt him as they appear and vanish. With spears, Dingana stabs Chaka on one side, Mhlangana stabs Chaka in the back, and Mbopha (Chaka’s head royal councilor) stabs Chaka on another side. The three spears converge “inside Chaka’s stomach, and at that very moment Isanusi” appears “before Chaka to demand his reward.” As Chaka lies there dying, he says to Dingana and Mhlangana, “You are killing me in the hope that you will be kings when I am dead, whereas you are wrong, that is not the way it will be because umlungu, the white man, is coming, and it is he who will rule you, and you will be his servants” (167). Chaka dies. His corpse lies

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in the veld for the beasts to feast over, but the next day the people find the body intact. Even hungry hyenas did not touch it. Dingana orders the body buried lest it rises again. Thereafter the Zulus think of “the days of Chaka” as when “the Zulus “were once a strong nation” and “other nations dreaded them” (168). In Isanusi Chaka experiences himself, his inner self, his secret self – that part of himself he could not for the most part appropriate publicly. In Isanusi, Chaka fulfills the ends of his being and thus changes forever the being of his people. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar lives and dies as a democratic dictator and Mofolo’s Chaka lives and dies as a demonic dictator. University of Nebraska REFERENCES Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bevington, David. Ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 3rd ed. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1980. Caesar, Julius. The Civil War: Together with the Alexandrian War, the African War, and the Spanish War Trans. Jane F. Gardner. New York: Penguin, 1976. Caesar, Julius. Seven Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Trans. Carolyn Hammond. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. 1942. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1959. Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964. Mofolo, Thomas. Chaka. [1925]. Trans. Daniel P. Kunene. London: Heinemann, 1981. Plutarch. Fall of the Roman Empire: Six Lives. Trans. Rex Warner. New York: Penguin, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Trans. Adrian Del Caro. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Ed. William Montgomery. Intro. Douglas Trevor. In The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller. New York: Penguin Books, 2002, pp. 1295–1336. All Shakespeare references are to this text. Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars. Trans. Robert Graves. Revised by Michael Grant. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

MICHEL DION

T H E D I A L E C T I C S B E T W E E N S E L F, T I M E A N D H I S T O R I C A L C H A N G E AC C O R D I N G T O M I L A N KUNDERA

ABSTRACT

Milan Kundera (1929- ) has produced literary works focusing on various themes connected to social and political life, as well as categories of human existence. In this paper, we would like to reflect how Kundera deals with historical change within his novels and short stories. We will see how historical change cannot be explained without understanding the essence of two basic concepts: (1) the Self: the way it is perceived by others; our self-image; (2) Time: the basic link between Time and memory. Finally, we will describe how historical change, according to Kundera, is revealing a quest for meaning of life, a basic struggle for freedom and justice, a way to overcome suffering and to actualize the historicality of human being. INTRODUCTION

Milan Kundera is a Post-modern novelist who looks at the paradoxical character of human life and the interpretation of historical events as well. For Kundera, we are facing the meaninglessness of our dehumanized world. Kundera seems to adopt Albert Camus’ viewpoint on meaninglessness and existence. But Kundera’s perspective cannot be reduced to Camus’ ideas. Indeed, Kundera is much more concerned with History, and more particularly with the desecration of History. Kundera looks at History as the end of a “dreamy innocence”, a subject of self-mystification. That’s why Kundera is questioning all possibilities of human existence that remain unknown, unexplored. Kundera ne revient pas à l’univocité du personnage et du sens de l’action fondée sur un ordre immuable des choses et une image du monde stable. Il laisse au contraire entrevoir que toute histoire peut se raconter de différentes façons, que son sens peut s’interpréter de différentes manières, et que la fiction choisie n’est jamais qu’une simple possibilité entre autres. Il souligne le caractère créatif des histoires et leur statut ontologique d’hypothèses.1

As said Kvetoslav Chvatik, the aesthetics of Kundera’s novels is not an aesthetics of the mimesis (the exact replication of reality), but rather a semiotic 77 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 77–90. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

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aesthetics of all possible worlds. Kundera’s novels reveal that life is never a pure repetition. They also manifest to what extent life is ambiguous, so that the only relevant way to talk about human life is to identify all human possibilities, the mysterious set of all possible human worlds. (. . .) le romancier insiste fortement sur le fait que ce n’est pas la  réalité  que ses romans examinent,mais bien l’existence, ou pour le dire autrement, le monde de tous les possibles, que ceux-ci soient incarnés ou non par ses personnages.2

In this paper, we will analyze Kundera’s novels out of the themes of self, Time and historical change. We would like to show to what extent Kundera’s novels are revealing a dialectics between those three basic philosophical concepts.3 We believe that we cannot isolate one of the three concepts from the others. We cannot understand the essence of the self without considering the nature of Time and historical change. We cannot grasp the nature of Time without looking at the essence of the self and of historical change. We cannot reflect the essence of historical change without considering the nature of self and of Time. In Kundera’s novels, those three philosophical concepts are interconnected. 1. The Self In our deeper self, there is a discrepancy between what we are, on one hand, and what must be and want to be, on the other hand (P, 52). We can neglect our self-image because we can never fully be our self-image. We cannot be what we perceived of our self (IM, 465). We should recognize our self as it is. We must identify ourselves to our self. But it is not enough. In order to have a specific individuality, we must passionately identify ourselves to our life and death. In doing so, we will no longer be a single “entity” within the whole “same” humanity. We will be someone who can never be replaced by others (IM, 26–27). The unique character of our self can be cultivated in adding new qualities and traits of our self: we are then identifying ourselves to such new elements of our self, but we could loose the basic, unchanging nature of our self. The problem is that if we want to make people adhering to our personal qualities and traits of our self, we are then denying the “unique” character of such self (IM, 151, 153). Our existential life means that we are bearing a “suffering self”: the most painful experience in life is to be our self (and thus not to be an idealized self that contradicts the way we perceive our self) (IM, 381). Kundera said that there is a very powerful capacity to remould the reality in order to place it in pure and total continuity with our ideals (P, 272). But if we are very honest, said Kundera, and look at our self, we can only find out the image of the self which is looking at our self (VEA, 56). This is almost a Buddhist approach of the self, an approach

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that was developed by the Madhyamika-Prasangika school. But when we hear correctly other messages sent by Kundera, we can understand that he adopts a communicational approach of human existence. Kundera believes that we can only be fully ourselves when we are totally among others (VEA, 179). In discussing with others, we can become aware of what we are (the essence of our being), of what we think (the essence of our thinking) (P, 21). Moreover, there is a psychological mechanism through which we will put barriers in order to be in a situation where it is impossible to reveal our deeper feelings (P, 119). Emmanuel Levinas put the emphasis on such a self-perception that is intrinsically linked to our relationships with the others. Martin Buber considered that the “I-Thou” relationships is the explanatory pattern for the development of the self.4 Although Kundera’s novels reveal a basic concern for self-perception, Kundera is much more focusing on the communicational processes through which we could define our self rather than the I-Thou relationships. Kundera puts the emphasis on the various ways in which a given being is trying to understand himself (herself) in front of others, rather than focusing on the strict dialogue between I and Thou. We are revealing ourselves in undertaking given actions. Action is the origin of self-perception. As said Kundera, in a spontaneous action, we are revealing ourselves as we are (VEA, 196). It is not relevant to know the nature of given actions, since our actions are always revealing the fact that we remain ourselves throughout such actions (RA, 201). The uniqueness of the self is hidden within what cannot be imagined about human being. We can only imagine what is identical (or common) among all beings. The individual self is what is radically different from the general, the universal. It is something we cannot describe in advance. The individual self is what we must discover, what we must conquer in the other’s individuality. Nothing is so difficult to grasp than the self (ILE, 286). Someone who wants to be admired by others is dependent on them. He (she) cannot live without their positive perception of his (her) self (VAA, 145). But we must never be dependent on others’ expectations. In doing so, we would never find out what we are. We would be a “nobody”, a not-individualized person. We should rather be what we are (P, 272–273). Even in love relationships, we are bothering about the way the person we love perceives our self. This anxious pursuit of our selfimage in other’s thinking cannot be avoided. If we are indifferent to the way the other is considering our self, we are no longer loving him (her) (IM, 193). We cannot be indifferent to the way people look at our self. Our self-image exerts a decisive role in our self-esteem. Being indifferent to others’ perception of our self is humanly impossible (IM, 319). Sometimes we become aware that others’ perception of our self is quite different from the way we perceive it. For instance, we do not know exactly why people could find us ridiculous.

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Our self-image is indeed a mystery (IM, 189). The way others perceive our self is not a superficial view. Our self cannot be fully described. It always remains confusing. We cannot master the way people look at their selves. We could try to control such perception, but we cannot exert a major influence on it (IM, 194). Some people are more attached to a superficial view of others’ self than to the reality itself (IM, 504). 2. Time and Memory (a) Time: The pace of Time is so rapid that human beings cannot follow it (RA, 187). Temporal dimension of life is the distance between what has been (the past) and what actually is (the present) (IG, 93). Out of a given part of our self, we are living beyond Time. In given moments of our life, we become aware of the fact we are growing old. Most of the time, we consider ourselves as “beings without age” (IM, 14). Being mortal is a basic human experience. But human being is unable to accept this fact. Human being cannot know how to be a mortal being (IM, 320). In that context, beauty is a revolt against Time, the annihilation of duration (LRO, 92). Kundera is deeply concerned with the past (as a “dead present”) and the future (as the source of the absolute newness). Past events play a major role in his novels. According to Kundera, the past is a dead present. But the past always lives in our present life. The past still influences our present (P, 246). As said François Ricard (2003), the past is enlightening the present. Such an aspect of Kundera’s perspective is quite close to Hans Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy:5 Mémoire et miroir, le passé crée ainsi autour du présent un horizon ironique et herméneutique qui à la fois le banalise et l’illumine.6

We are going through our present reality as if we were blind. Sometimes, we become what we are going to live and experiment. Later, when we will look behind and examine our past life, we will grasp what we have lived, the meaning of our past life (RA, 13). We should not develop the trend to always go back in our past life. But generally speaking, we often put the emphasis on our past life, in spite of our will (and of our self) (RA, 196). Kundera is not so much concerned with the present. According to Kundera, the present is nothingness that is slowly approaching its own death (LRO, 147). Death is non-being as infinite void (LRO, 277–278). Kundera is quite fascinated by the future, although past events remain the basic explanatory pattern of his novels. According to Kundera, we cannot know exactly the contents of the future. So, how could we know the meaning of our present if we cannot circumscribe the future? If we cannot know the relation between our present and our future (how our present is determining what will be our future), we

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cannot morally judge our present. We cannot say if our present condition is morally good or bad (IG, 165). This is a kind of Nietzschean assertion that tries to reinvent moral notions and to introduce a transmutation of human values. Moreover, it is a way to reveal the paradoxical character of the future. Future is both the source of consolation and fear. On one hand, we usually take refuge in the future in order to avoid any kind of suffering (ILE, 241). On the other hand, future is the origin of fear. If we could be released from the bondage to future, we could no longer be afraid of anything (L, 10). But future is much more than such a paradoxical ground of human existence. Future is the source of the absolute newness. Future will be absolutely new (and thus pure) or it will never arise and will remain full of stains (VEA, 261). (b) Memory: Memory actually keeps a very small portion of our past life experiences and perceptions. Such finitude of human memory is an integral part of human nature as such. Someone who could gather in his (her) memory everything that he (she) has lived in the past would not be a human being. Indeed, nostalgia reveals its application to specific experiences and perceptions. Nostalgia reveals the existence of past events, the power of the past on our mind (IG, 91–92). Nostalgia does not increase the potentialities of memory. It is rather focusing on its inner pain (IG, 42). Nostalgia reveals the basic finitude of our memory. Love, friendship, and emotions are based on our finite memory. We do not know why our memory keeps some past events and perceptions while others are not safeguarded and disappear. Such choice is not voluntarily made (IG, 141–142). The capacities of memory vary from an individual to another, but the intensity of our consideration for others is variable. We could share with others some past life experiences we have lived together, while we do not keep the same remembrances. We do not keep in mind the same elements or perceptions of such experiences. Kundera believes that such difference is due to the fact that we could have more affection or consideration for others than they have for us (IG, 145). It is interesting to notice how Kundera looks at duration and it basic relationships with memory. On one hand, memory (and beauty) gives a form to duration, so that what is formless cannot be grasped by our memory (L, 51). On the other hand, our past life experiences and perceptions that are safeguarded by our memory are not subjected to duration (IG, 148–149). In other words, memory (and beauty) gives a form to duration, while supporting the “no-duration” character of the past experiences and perceptions it can store up in the daily life. Remembering our past, keeping it “living” in our self is probably necessary to safeguard our personal identity. More particularly, our friends remain the most important witnesses of our past. Friendship is required for the right functioning of our memory. Our friends are our memory (ID, 61–62).

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3. Historical Change According to Kundera, an ideal is what we will never be able to discover, to find out in human existence (ILE, 289). Ideals are usually intrinsically linked to worldviews, especially when they constitute the motive of social transformation. Kundera said that we must firstly know the world as it is, before any attempt to transform it radically (VEA, 61). However, Kundera looks at human existence and society in a way that reflects the various ambiguities of human condition, precisely because realism makes subtle and elusive dimensions disappearing (VEA, 64). (a) Events and Meaning of Life: This is an illusion to affirm that we lead our own “existential adventures”, as if we could decide of their nature and pace. Those existential adventures could be radically imposed from external conditioning factors and should then never be considered as characterizing our self. In that case, such adventures are driven from unknown (foreign) powers and lead our own existence (RA, 51).When existential adventures (or events) happen very quickly, nobody can be sure of the contents of such events and even of oneself (L, 159). Usually, when an unavoidable existential adventure (or event) will happen in few moments, we make the pace of events going much more rapidly, as if we would like to show that we still keep power on the way such events will happen (VEA, 182). An event is more important, more meaningful if it depends on a large number of hazards or chance events (ILE, 76). But is there any basic connection between an event and its duration? Kundera said that no event is present in its duration, except at the beginning (within a very short duration) (L, 112). In a given historical (limited) period, communism has been a doctrine that helped people to find out their meaning of life (IG, 190). The problem is that such meaning of life that is rooted on communist beliefs has become the only one that was possible to inhabit personal consciousness, so that to be personally rejected by the communist party meant to loose our meaning of life (P, 181). If we accept that the world is full of unquestionable meaning (heteronomy or autocracy), then human being is crushed and disappearing. If I would not believe I am living for something that is greater than my personal life, I would be unable to live (RA, 278). We are not living for our self only (RA, 279). It is sad to live when we are unable to take anything seriously (RA, 302), that is, when it is impossible to question given meanings that are imposed by various social institutions. Every human life has immeasurable meanings. Depending on the way we describe the present or the past life of one or the other individual in a given community, it will be the biography of a well-renown and respected Chief of State or the biography of a tough criminal (RA, 38). On the other hand, if the world would actually loose its meaning, human being can no longer live in such world (LRO, 107).We usually believe that any event in our life has

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an inner meaning. In other words, our life experiences reveal a message that life is giving to us. Life would then be gradually expressing some secrets. Our life experiences would thus form a mythology that could open us to the truth. Kundera believes that such perception could be an illusion, but that we cannot repress such need to decode the meaning of our life experiences (P, 247). As said Kundera, it is useless to abandon ourselves to illusions (VAA, 27). Human being can never know what he (she) should want to be, what he (she) should want to do, or what he (she) should want to think about/believe. He (she) has only one life and he (she) cannot compare his (her) current life with former lives. He (she) cannot correct himself (herself) in further lives (ILE, 19). This is a clear rejection of reincarnation. There is no means to check which decision is the right one, since there is no possible comparison between various kinds of decision. Everything is lived for the first time and without any kind of preparation. Life looks like a sketch. A sketch is a draft of something, the preparation of a final piece or work. But life as sketch is a draft of nothing as such, a draft without any final piece or work (ILE, 20). Human lives are composed as musical scores. Human being is led by a sense of beauty. He (she) transforms unintentional events in a motive that will thus impregnate the “life score”. Human being will repeat and modify his (her) life score, as the composer does with the theme of his (her) sonata (ILE, 81).The extremes reveal the frontiers beyond which life is extinguishing. The passion for the extremes (in art or politics) is a disguised desire for death (ILE, 139). The meaning of life is to play with life. If our life is too lazy to give us any kind of delight or fun, we should help it to do so. Human being must constantly create new existential adventures (RA, 28). (b) Politics, History and Freedom: Criminal political regimes have been moulded by enthusiastic people who believed they had discovered the unique way to Paradise. Later, we found that this Paradise did not exist at all and that those enthusiastic people were actually criminals (ILE, p. 254). A too passionate faith is the worst ally. The habit to strictly “follow the book” makes us committing meaningless actions, or saying meaningless words. A too excessive faith has no positive fruit or impact. It is true for religions and political systems as well (RA, p. 79).We are responsible of our own country (VAA, 155). If we would be only responsible for those actions we were actually aware of, idiots would always be absolved of their fault. It is not the case. Human being must know. He (she) is thus responsible of his (her) ignorance as a fault (RA, p. 127). Responsibility (and fault) is not the only existential category we must take into account. Suffering is the basis of our “unique” self. Through the experience of pain, the world disappears. We are lonely (IM, 299–300). Moreover, everybody is competing against others about the intensity of his (her) own pain. We usually believe that we are suffering more intensively than others, because

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we all want to be recognized as a victim (IG, 50). The Greek philosopher Epicure (341–270 B.C.) understood the happy life in an extremely sceptical way: the absence of suffering is the origin of pleasure. Suffering is then the basic notion of hedonism: we are happy insofar as we can avoid suffering. However, pleasures often create more suffering than pleasures. So Epicure said we should only search for prudent and modest pleasures. Epicurean wisdom implies a deep melancholy.7 Human being understands that the only self-evident fact (and thus value) is pleasure. Hedonism is rooted in selfishness. But, said Kundera, the true problem of hedonism is its utopian character. The hedonist ideal is not compatible with human nature as such (L, 16–17). The awareness of our responsibility and suffering is presupposed in any attempt to initiate a deep social change. But we cannot change the whole world. Rather we can change our life and live freely (VEA, 75–76). Although we must never annihilate others’ freedom, it does not mean that freedom is unlimited. An unlimited freedom is not indeed human freedom. Freedom is inherently linked to responsibility (P, 38–39, 159). The worst thing is not that the world is not free at all, but that human being actually knows no longer what it means to be free (VEA, 75). It is a great relief to become aware that we are free beings, or that we have no specific mission to accomplish in this life (ILE, p. 454). History is not only the record of dramatic situations in human life. It is also impregnated in daily life (VEA, 357). History is nothing but a series of transitory changes, while eternal values are immutable and do not require any memory (LRO, 301). We must never be the object of History, but rather the subject of History (P, 184). Every historical period has its own symbols (P, 236) and ideologies (IM, 176). Human being is unable to think about the end of History, or the end of the present era. Human life imitates History: it is buried in a still slowness, and then it progressively speeds up (RA, p. 60). Human being is constantly rewriting History. The past could give birth to revolutions, so that we could want to destroy past events or remould them. We can master the future only in order to change the past (LRO, 43). About Kundera’s first novel (La plaisanterie), Chvatik (1995) said: On pourrait aussi dire que l’Histoire elle-même est l’héroïne du premier roman de Kundera, la ruse de l’histoire moderne qui, dans l’Europe du XXè siècle, broie les individus avec une cruauté aussi impitoyable que le destin de la tragédie antique.8

(c) Social Change, Kitsch, and Revolution: There is no deep social change without a group of individuals who are devoted to a superior end and who are giving their whole life in order to reach such end (P, 354–355). Those who make their ideas publicly known will eventually (this is a true risk!) convince others of the truthfulness of such ideas, and thus to influence them. Indeed, they will assume the role of people who tends to change the world (L, 33–34).

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The first chapter of Genesis said that the world as been created as it should be and thus that being is good. This is the “categorical harmony with being” (ILE, p. 356). Such categorical harmony with being has an aesthetic ideal: a world where the despicable is negated (ILE, p. 356). Kitsch excludes everything that is basically unacceptable within human existence ILE, p. 357). If there would be no difference between the noble and the despicable, human existence would loose its basic dimensions. In that case, human existence would have an unbearable lightness (ILE, p. 351). According to Kundera, kitsch is the conjunction between being and “having-forgotten” (ILE, p. 406). The origin of kitsch is the categorical harmony with being. But what is the ultimate ground of being? There are many answers to that question, and every answer is giving a specific kind of kitsch: catholic kitsch, protestant kitsch, Jewish kitsch, communist kitsch, fascist kitsch, democratic kitsch, feminist kitsch, European kitsch, American kitsch, international kitsch. Since the French Revolution, there is a strict distinction between the “right wing” and the “left wing”. However, it is practically impossible to define the essence of the right wing and the essence of the left wing. Political movements are not grounded on rational attitudes, but rather on representations, images, words and archetypes; the whole set of those components of the political discourse or behaviour is the essence of a given political kitsch. Political kitsch has unified the left wing for many centuries. The Great March is a path towards brotherhood, equality, justice, and happiness. The Great March is always facing impediments. Otherwise, it would never be the “Great March”. People belonging to the left wing are able to integrate one or the other theory into the Great March. They are not characterized by the fact that they would share the same beliefs (ILE, p. 373–374). The left wing cannot exist without the kitsch of the Great March. The identity of the kitsch is not determined by political strategies. It is rather determined by images, metaphors and words. It is thus possible to transgress some habits or customs, and to express our concerns against the interests of a communist country. But it is not possible to substitute the words with other words. Those words are essential to the nature of the Great March. That’s why they cannot be changed. Those who would like to save their face will safeguard the pureness of their own kitsch (ILE, p. 381). The Great March continues and focuses on a different country (Israel, Palestine, Cuba, and so forth). The Great March is a procession of people who are walking during a rush. However, the Great March will soon go to its final end (ILE, p. 391). The scene is progressively reducing, so that one day, it will only be a simple point, without any spatial dimension (ILE, p. 390).

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Eva Le Grand (1995) rightly said that kitsch opens up an ecstatic and illusory worldview that sacrifices reflection (thinking) to the profit of “feeling glorification”: Il revient justement à Kundera d’avoir rappelé que le kitsch est une catégorie existentielle et qu’il faut le concevoir surtout comme une attitude du Kitschmensch, comme l’expression de cette fascinante et indéracinable faculté humaine de substituer les rêves d’un monde meilleur (paradis perdu comme avenir radieux) à notre réalité, bref de travestir le réel en une vision idyllique et extatique du monde à laquelle on sacrifie sans scrupules tout conscience éthique et critique.9

In that sense, we could say that kitsch is reducing the plurality of human existence to a false, one-sided existence. Kundera’s perspective is thus very close to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of one-dimensional existence. Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) criticized Western societies (especially, USA) because of the trend to emphasize the uniformity of thought (“pensée unique”). Marcuse explained how human being is now without any faculty of opposition (the “critique”) and is thus imprisoned within a given political worldview.10 This is exactly the perspective that Kundera uses to look at political movements as well as human existence and being. In the kingdom of kitsch, there is a dictatorship of the heart (ILE, p. 361). Universal brotherhood can only be grounded on kitsch (ILE, p. 362). The true function of kitsch is to hide death (ILE, p. 367). Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and of all political movements. In a society where many political movements exist, we can avoid the influence of kitsch. Individuals keep their uniqueness. Artists still freely create what they want. But where there is only one political movement which holds the power, we are in a totalitarian kitsch. Everything that could put damage to kitsch is excluded of social life: (1) every expression of individualism: individualism contradicts universal brotherhood; (2) every expression of scepticism: the specific doubt is progressively widening so that at the end of the process, the doubt is about life itself, (3) every expression of irony: everything must be taken seriously (ILE, p. 363). In a totalitarian kitsch, answers are provided in advance, so that there cannot be any other question. The opponent of totalitarian kitsch is human being who is questioning every aspect of reality (ILE, p. 368). Totalitarian kitsch stimulates human struggling against the distortion of reality. According to Epicure, said Kundera, the wise man does not search for any activity that is basically linked to struggling (L, 18). It is particularly true if struggling means imposing our will over others’ will. But, said Kundera, we should remind that life is basically a struggle (IM, 226). Saying that we strive for happiness and justice is revealing that we are struggling “against” some people. Moreover, we are saying that during such struggle, those who have initiated it will forget the inherent (less glorious) aspects of the struggle (IM, 227). According to Kundera, there are five meanings (or aims) to “struggling”: (1) striving for happiness; (2) striving for justice: the word “justice”

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refers either to the human justice (blind and cruel justice) or to the “superior justice” that we cannot understand, that is beyond our capacities (VAA, 295); (3) striving for future; (4) striving for peace; (5) striving for peace although it implies destruction of all by all (IM, 138). All we do, whether it is poetry or science, is a revolt. Human being is always in revolt against something: against oppression, or, if there is no longer oppression, revolt against our existential condition we have not chosen (L, 96–97, 121). Only those who fight against totalitarian regimes cannot struggle in keeping questioning and doubts in their mind. They need a certainty and a simple truth that must be easily understandable for most of people - such truths that can easily provoke “collective tears” (ILE, p. 368). In the context of social struggling, revolution appears as a basic source of hope. However, revolution does not want to be studied as an object. Revolution rather calls us to become part of it. In that sense, Kundera said that revolution is a lyric phenomenon, a way for human being to become integral part of his (her) world (VEA, 294). Revolution would transform the whole human life, including family and love. If it would not be the case, it would not be a real revolution (VEA, 267). The human self-liberation will be applied in all spheres of human existence; if not, it will not be a real liberation (VEA, 269). Revolution gives to future a specific meaning. Future is no longer a mystery. Future is rather known through books, conferences, propaganda tools, discourses and brochures. We thus have no reason to be afraid by our future. Future is giving a certainty within a present moment that is full of uncertainties. That’s why revolutionary people take refuge in such future (VEA, 296). Karl Marx (1818–1883) said that humanity has lived until now its prehistory.11 Our true history will only begin with the proletarian revolution. Proletarian revolution implies the transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (VEA, 177–178). Two revolutions happened almost simultaneously: (1) the discovery of the automatic writing (and thus the powers of the human unconscious) by André Breton (1896–1966) and other surrealists;12 (2) the socialist revolution in Russia. The liberation of human imagination (from surrealism) means the same shift in the kingdom of freedom than the abolition of economic exploitation (VEA, 178). In the pre-revolutionary society, love was distorted by “money concerns”, social perceptions and prejudices. Love could then never be fully itself. It was the shadow of its real essence. In the revolutionary period, there is a new era that gets rid of the power of money and the influence of prejudices. Such historical period can make human beings more humanistic, so that love will radically increase (without any kind of comparison with love as it was expressed during the pre-revolutionary period) (VEA, 349).

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During revolutions, life is impregnated by risk, courage and threats of death (ILE, p. 152). Those who struggled for revolution are proud of their involvement: they are proud to be on the right “side”. Later, the line distinguishing the right and the wrong disappears. Then, those people who struggled for revolution are frustrated. They are searching for new lines, new frontiers that could separate the right and the wrong. Because they are atheistic, they can decide that atheism is the right “side” and that believers of one or the other religion represent the “wrong side”. Such attitude gives them a feeling of superiority over the group of believers (RA, p. 263). Even the most rigorous revolutionary sees violence as a required evil, while the goodness of revolution is re-education (RA, p. 274). Understanding revolution as re-education is not a true revolutionary assertion. It is rather a classical (Marxist) way to look at revolution. The reason why Kundera is thus presenting revolution is that re-education as the basis of Marx’s notion of revolution has been neglected in communist countries. Kundera deepens the implications of re-education as the basis of revolution. According to Kundera, re-education could be closely linked to poetry and youth. Poetry plays a major role during revolutionary historical periods. Poetry gives to revolution its voice, and revolution releases poetry from its inherent solitude. Poetry, youth, and revolution are the same thing (VEA, 256). Revolutionary youth works for a radically new world based on a single idea. They are not open to any kind of compromise, in love and in politics as well (VEA, 331). Revolution and youth are intrinsically linked one to the other. Revolution presupposes that some benefits will be created. However, such benefits do not come alone; they are accompanied by uncertainties and a deep transformation of customs and habits, particularly for the adults. Youth is not erased by the phenomenon of fault, so that revolution could protect youth from its dangers. The uncertainty of revolutionary eras remains an advantage for the youth (VEA, 245). CONCLUSION

The most serious questions are those that are asked by children. These questions do not have easy answers, and most of the time, no answer at all. Questions for which there is no answer are giving limitations to human possibilities and are thus providing the frontiers of human existence (ILE, p. 201). It is in that context of philosophical questioning that we should understand Kundera’s literary principle according to which we should never take given assertions and try to isolate them from others. Philosophical (existential) questions that cannot be answered are reflected through the interconnections of various components and discourses that constitute the basic materials of the

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novel. Kundera deeply believed that any assertion must be confronted to other assertions, situations to other situations, gestures to other gestures, ideas to other ideas, event to other events that are interconnected in a given novel. (. . .) aucune des affirmations qu’on trouve dans un roman ne peut être prise isolément, chacune d’elles se trouve dans une confrontation complexe et contradictoire avec d’autres affirmations, d’autres situations, d’autres gestes, d’autres idées, d’autres événements. Seule une lecture lente, deux fois, plusieurs fois répétée, fera ressortir tous les rapports ironiques à l’intérieur du roman sans lesquels le roman restera incompris.13

Kundera’s novels presuppose that we cannot know the ultimate truth on the various components of reality, whether they are things, events and beings (even oneself). We always are in a state of ignorance and self-delusion when we are trying to understand the reality. Kundera seems to believe that it is impossible to grasp the whole (interconnected) reality, so that the only possible attitude towards reality is to reveal its “absolute relativity”. (. . .) l’oeuvre de Kundera, celle d’un des plus grand ironistes de cette fin du XXè siècle et du plus impitoyable démystificateur de tous les Absolus, nous apprend avant tout une  vérité  fondamentale; celle de l’absolue relativité de toute chose humaine et, partant, l’inachèvement et la relativité de toute connaissance – celle de l’homme, de soi-même, comme celle de toute œuvre artistique authentique.14

Insofar as Kundera is demystifying all truths or Absolutes, he looks like an existentialist novelist. Indeed, he is struggling against any kind of absolutes, as Albert Camus (1913–1960) clearly did in his works.15 We could even look at Kundera’s philosophical viewpoint as implying a Nietzschean denegation of any “will to believe in fixed realities”, although Kundera’s critique of religion is not so strong than Friedrich Nietzsche’s atheistic view.16 Université de Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada NOTES 1

Kvetoslav Chvatik, Le monde romanesque de Milan Kundera (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 16. Eva Le Grand, Kundera ou La mémoire du désir (Montreal: XYZ, 1995), p. 27. 3 In this paper, we will use abbreviations in referring to Kundera’s novels: La vie est ailleurs (VEA), La lenteur (L), L’identité (ID), L’immortalité (IM), L’ignorance (IG), Le livre du rire et de l’oubli (LRO), La valse aux adieux (VAA), La plaisanterie (P), L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être (ILE), Risibles amours (RA). 4 Martin Buber, La vie en dialogue (Paris: Aubier, Montaigne, 1959); Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968). 5 Hans-Georg Gadamer said that we all belong to History, so that any authentic understanding is a dialectics between the movement of (past) traditions and the movement of the (contemporaneous) interpret (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Vérité et méthode. Les grandes lignes d’une herméneutique philosophique (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p.133. 2

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6 François Ricard, Le dernier après-midi d’Agnès. Essai sur l’œuvre de Milan Kundera (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 117. 7 Épicure, Lettres et maximes (Paris, PUF, 1995). 8 Chvatik, op.cit., p. 89. 9 Le Grand, op.cit., pp. 38–39. 10 Herbert Marcuse, L’homme unidimensionnel (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1964). 11 Karl Marx, Contribution à la critique de l’économie politique (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1957). 12 André Breton, Position politique du surréalisme (Paris: Livre de proche, 1971); André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Pauvert, 1962). 13 Milan Kundera, Les testaments trahis (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 241. 14 Le Grand, op.cit., p. 26. 15 Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); Albert Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Crépuscule des idoles (Paris: Gallimard, 1974); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 261–453.

REFERENCES Chvatik, Kvetoslav, Le monde romanesque de Milan Kundera, Paris, Coll. “Arcades”, Gallimard, 1995. Kundera, Milan, L’ignorance, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 4155, Gallimard, 2005 (2000). Kundera, Milan, L’identité, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 3327, Gallimard, 2000 (1997). Kundera, Milan, La lenteur, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 2981, Gallimard, 1998 (1995). Kundera, Milan, Les testaments trahis, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 2703, Gallimard, 1993. Kundera, Milan, L’immortalité, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 2447, Gallimard, 1993 (1990). Kundera, Milan, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 2077, Gallimard, 1989 (1984). Kundera, Milan, Le livre du rire et de l’oubli, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 1831, Gallimard, 1985 (1978). Kundera, Milan, La vie est ailleurs, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 834, Gallimard, 1987 (1973). Kundera, Milan, La valse aux adieux, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 1043, Gallimard, 1986 (1973). Kundera, Milan, Risibles amours, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 1702, Gallimard, 1994 (1968). Kundera, Milan, La plaisanterie, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 638, Gallimard, 2003 (1967). Le Grand, Eva, Kundera ou La mémoire du désir, Montréal/Paris, XYZ/L’Harmattan, 1995. Ricard, François, Le dernier après-midi d’Agnès. Essai sur l’œuvre de Milan Kundera, Paris, Coll. “Arcades”, Gallimard, 2003.

JA DW I G A S M I T H

C O N T E X T UA L I Z I N G A N N A - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A’ S C O N C E P T O F FA B U L AT I O N

ABSTRACT

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Book three of Logos and Life is devoted to the exploration of the life-significance of literature and the fabulating creativity of the human being. Her work is to be viewed in contrast to the postmodern treatment of narrative as an ever-present factor in private or social discourse and ultimately without any essential or epistemological foundations and values. The fabulating creativity of literature as a particular form of aesthetic involvement in the arts is specifically human: it enagages the individual human being in a given historical time and culture. However, Tymieniecka eschews the underlying possibility of relativism, so strongly implied in postmodern thinking, on the grounds that the richness of life’s variables is not “random.” Instead, these variables constitute the very primeval laws of life. It is the vocation of literature to embrace these variables and, thus, to engage in philosophical investigation as well. From formalism to postmodernism, from the interest in a variety of narrative strategies and techniques to the concept of narrative as crucial to a political discourse of power—we have witnessed a continuous reinterpretation of one of the fundamental human activities of telling stories, writing stories and critiquing stories. A contemporary field of narratology represents one of the disciplines specifically interested in the production of narratives and their existence through written, spoken and visual language in a variety of media, whether in film, graphic novels, television news, miming, etc. The traditional focus of literary studies on the rules, structures and conditions of telling a story in literary texts, folk stories or myths, as initiated by Shklovsky and Propp, is now augmented by a strong interest in telling stories and producing narratives in other fields. Whether in political science, sociology or cultural studies—we observe a shift toward analyzing the ways of grasping knowledge and conveying it through various narratives as a means of interpreting social and political control or execution of power. Modern psychology, though no longer under Freudian sway, certainly has its share of incorporating private stories and interviews into its general body 3 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 3–8. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

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of knowledge, particularly in its clinical component. Such acceptance of private stories on a large scale is also evident in the field of history influenced, though at times reluctantly, by a new historical push in the direction of obliterating a distinction between a document and text, any text. A postmodern approach to history accepts individual stories of average citizens and grants them an important role in constructing some larger historical narratives with unclear boundaries, negotiable by textuality and varied historical context. Whether indicated as Lyotard’s “grand narratives” or Foucault’s “episteme,” these attempts at reinterpretation of validity of historical experience, primarily in social sciences, explain all normative behavior as contextualized by ever changing historical processes or, in other words, narratives not grounded in any essential norms and values. Lyotard’s thought, so instrumental to the poststructuralist distrust in the human being’s epistemological faculties and the human being’s role as the central subject of knowledge, stresses such non-rational elements of human existence as sensations, emotions and subconscious reflexes. According to a grand narrative of the postmodern era, an individual human being is ultimately unaware of his or her role in the production of any grand narrative, past or present. To introduce, at this point, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Book Three of Logos and Life, devoted to the life-significance of literature, is a calculated effect: only in contrast to the prevailing context of the postmodern treatment of narrative as ever present factor in private or social discourse but ultimately without any essential or epistemological foundations and values, we can appreciate her work on the fabulating creativity of the human being. “Fabulating” or “fabulation” as used by Tymieniecka should not be confused with the use of the term by Robert Scholes who incorporated it in his work The Fabulators, dealing with the twentieth-century novels not fitting into the traditional category of realism because of their experimentation with the fantastic, mythical or gothic, in other words, what we would call now magical realism. In the Introduction to Book Three of Logos and Life, Tymieniecka talks of the fundamental role of individualizing each human life through unfolding in successive steps of that life’s inward/outward functioning. However, “The Human Condition is a set of functional virtualities which accounts for the emergence of the specific type of living beingness that is man within which the interiorization/extoriorization vectors of life assume a unique amplitude and significance” (10). The human being, then, is able to grapple with “the final metaphysical question” about the onto-poietic factors behind the individualizing progress of life and “the first elemental factors behind the establishment and subsistence of life” (10). Thus, the fabulating creativity of literature as

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a particular form of the aesthetic involvement in arts is specifically human: it is engaging the individual human being in a given historical time and culture. However, Tymieniecka eschews the underlying possibility of relativism, so strongly implied in the postmodern thinking, on the grounds that the richness of life’s variables is not “random.” Instead, these variables constitute in their “inward/outward orientation” and “dominant/submissive dimensions,” the very primeval laws of life. It is the vocation of literature to engage in and embrace these constants of the onto-poiesis of life, and thus engaging in the philosophical investigation as well. Though philosophy and literature are frequently encroaching upon each other’s territory, each claiming superiority in grasping reality, truth and essential human values, Tymieniecka avoids a trap of qualifying the role of philosophy or of literature as a better vehicle of “the cognition of knowledge of anything” (17). Instead, she observes, the task of superior grasp of knowledge does not pertain to literature because literature reaches the much deeper level of human existence. Literature portrays the human world and existence postfactum, after the events of life are experienced and lived; only then these events are recreated through the “creative vision” in literature in order “to establish contact to convey experience” (18). Thus, unlike philosophy, literature does not attempt to establish some positive knowledge of life; rather, literature remakes the so-called facts, establishes understanding of order or truth and reshapes them into the unique personal vision. Lucidity and clarity of a philosophical treatise are replaced by the “subliminal logic of the significance of life” (20). In other words, the conscious state emerges out of a pre-intentional and prenoematic state. The subjective circuit, then: “Is already ‘pre-objectivized,’ that is, with respect to it the intimate inner-realm of the self, has already assumed its universally valid posture, ‘direction toward’ objectiivized forms, and should in fact be considered to be already the ‘intersubjective’ circuit of interiorized life” (23). But this mediation between the subjective and intersubjective for each human being has to take place in the flux of life, relating each individual human beingness to the totality of life and all its brutal forces. This is accomplished because of Imaginatio Creatrix. Thanks to Imaginatio Creatrix, the aesthetic, the moral, and the intellectual emerge as taming and stabilizing roles amidst nature and its vital forces. This creative orchestration establishes the means of “the stabilization of the inner/outer flux of life’s force” (25), and ultimately the humanization of nature. Chaos and fragmentation, unreason and lack of comprehension are replaced by “structurizing intentionality . . . as if ‘exorcising’ the frightening tentacles which threaten life’s poise” (26). The most crucial function of the creative orchestration, then, is making sense out of the vital stream of life, and this is, ultimately, the primordial function of fabulation. Thanks to it, the human being projects, integrates, and endows

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with meaningfulness those individual interests with those of the vital stream of life: “there occurs in fabulation a basic end uniquely important, dramatization of the events and their effects, a modeling of views about human predicament” (30). Three basic principles of fabulation—the tragic, the comic, and the epic—play each a crucial role in life-significant creative arts of story-telling or writing. Tymieniecka clearly warns against treating a literary work as a handy tool for transmitting to the reader a rational view, patterned and arranged in orderly schemata, reaching down to the first principles; “rathers, literature provides the reader with means to recognize his or her most” “secretive, inert, waiting bundles of emotions, concerns, forebodings, anxieties” (33). Illuminated in new, defamiliarized ways, they reach the current life. Why does one need this intermediary, this creative act of literature? The answer is in the fact that though everyday life-experience of the human being is already in “the lucid zone,” above the brute forces of vital nature, not all is clear and controlled for an individual and an individual within a social network. This lack of clarity occurs because beneath this lucid zone there are still present elemental forces of nature, giving us “spontaneous urges to move, to advance, to rush forward” (34) beyond the everyday repetitious activities of life. No wonder, says Tymieniecka, that every great civilization is advanced by its art, literature, and laws. Though almost a cliché, and Tymieniecka is aware of it, this statement should reclaim its value in light of phenomenology of life: “Art and literature appear as crystallization of the answers to the deepest longings of the subliminal soul, thereby, responding to the needs of the human spirit as it takes off,” compensating for the fact that the human being “fails to become his own master within the intricate web of life, and longs for completion, compensations, reward, and redemption.” (35–36). The fabulating function comes to life as the result of the first movement of intellect, triggered by natural curiosity to know as well as need to question. Whatever the form of fabulation—from dance to stories, to music and societal laws—it deals with the tormented, convoluted, unclear, chaotic, etc., and endows it, after “imaginative de-composing,” with patterns. Thus, “the brute and opaque fact of life are imaginatively transfigured into elements of existence, and to confront them, there emerge the elemental passions of the subliminal soul” (38). The new patterns endow the old and convoluted entanglements of the human being with a universal validity, as instigated by the fabulating imagination. The links between these patterns and all the individual and experiential traits possessed by the readers, viewers and listeners are conditioned by “the three primogenital sense-giving factors or virtualities”: the poetic sense, the moral sense, and the intelligible sense. The fabulation then:

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intentionally transfigures life’s nude facts in accordance with the propensities, virtualities, and factors of the human condition. The result is prototypical models of human character, conduct, societial organization, vision of humanity; the stage is set for the ideals which will fashion a culture’s style. (39)

Tymieniecka continuously stresses the role of a literary work as a source of gaining insight into the significance of life. Initially, the text or the stage play or film makes the recipient focus on the particular fabula, but that is not enough because each individual will qualify the elements of the fabula from the point of view of some personal experiences, establishing the possibility of conflicting interpretations. However, Tymieniecka warns against the relativistic position which inevitably results from accepting all interpretative versions are correct. What is ignored in such a critical approach, so currently favored, is the fact of the existence of a fabula. Instead of relativity: inasmuch as the possibility of relating personally to some or other special point in complex texture of the work of literature is established by the works’ intentional-ideally unchangeable-structure, these clues are intentional knots of significance in the pattern that makes the fabula ciphered in the script. They punctuate the significant “nervous system” of this pattern as it emerges from it structural formal—material moments. (44)

Because fabula originates from subliminal sources, it connects with “elementary drives, pulsations, stirrings, etc.,” and it helps to distinguish between “Nature without” and “Nature within,” that is to establish some significance in the eyes of the human being (45). Tymieniecka illustrates the concept of fabulation with her several page-long discussion of drama, particularly Greek. She sums up the most important observations about what ultimately distinguishes great literature; she makes a connection between an intentional structure of a given work and its lasting value. It is through a “pattern of intentional knots of significance” that the fabula is ciphered in order to be deciphered by the readers or viewers, and ultimately igniting some imaginative and passionate responses in the subliminal soul. Hence, the life significance of the literary work depends on its poetic enjoyment, a crucial factor in the human condition, necessary for fully embracing psychic acts. It should be stressed again, then, that it is not the intellectual faculty of the human being but the aesthetic enjoyment which allows for the exploration of the significance of life and self-understanding. Tymieniecka returns to the issue of fabulation in 2006, in her essay titled “Logos’ Timing of Life—Fabulating History.” This time, she investigates the role of the interrogative logos as a primogenital function of fabulation and, as explained by her in Book Three of Logos and Life, with Imaginato Creatrix as an instrumental factor. The interrogative logos is behind a sense of history because it is involved in the introspective probing of the conscious life by the human mind, and it also questions the contribution of individual memory as well as the common human condition. This common human condition

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reaches out also to all acts of communicating the story of life. The human mind, through various ways of experiencing the reality of life, individually and collectively throughout time, forms and reforms models of experiencing, reflecting the deepest human concerns. Thus, Tymieniecka gets involved in the contemporary discussion about the role of an individual human being as defined by the context of various societal functions and historical events: To understand now means not only to situate an event within the network of life in its natural unfolding, but also to relate it to traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation. This quest spirals up to find or establish a sphere of sense higher than that of vital significance. (xvii)

In other words, instead of postmodern stress on an infinite play of social and historical variables, Tymieniecka explores the possibilities of human communication. She points out that fabulation allows, thanks to imagination, to go beyond the historical, factual marking of reality. This going beyond the identifiable marking of social reality does not lead, however, toward relativism or even nihilism, so characteristic of our contemporary thinking because fabulation is essential to human communication, to the exploration of the deeply personal as well as communal, connecting the past and the present: “The human condition bends toward the rays of fabulation, a love of fabulation being a life force” (xviii). As a life force, it is not to be confused with the ontological grounding of truth or knowledge; it is an impetus to search for meaning of human condition. Stories, then are not to be understood in a Lyotardian sense—as a final destination in the constitution of relativistic knowledge. Instead, stories have a crucial epistemological value because they are fundamental to the very inception of human communication and the explanation of the possibilities of knowledge, including the eventual judgment about the ontological acceptance or exclusion of relativism. WORKS CITED Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. Logos and Life. Book III. Analecta Husserliana.

S E C T I O N II

FRANCK DALMAS

L I V E D I M AG E S / I M AG I N E D E X I S T E N C E S : A P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F I M AG E C R E AT I O N IN THE WORKS OF MICHEL TOURNIER A N D P H OT O G R A P H Y

The act of reading or looking at a work of art is subjective in essence, but then it loses this subjectivity in the process when the subject’s consciousness projects itself into the object of interest, ultimately brought back to the subject as a newly objectified act. It is the purpose of this article to show the relationship between literature and the visual arts by studying their mutual borrowings and thus recognize the valuable critique of phenomenology behind creativity and art reception. To discuss this relationship, I will only consider the medium of photography and the works of the French writer, Michel Tournier. Around the photos of arti