Stories and Portraits of the Self
Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
115
In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)
herausgegeben von
Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)
Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien
Stories and Portraits of the Self
Edited by
Helena Carvalhão Buescu João Ferreira Duarte
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Cover illustration: Mário Botas, Lulu – L’art, Indian ink and watercolour on paper, Signed and dated: “Mario 1981”, 230x310mm. Col. Fundação Mário Botas, Lisbon, inv. no. 37, Insc.: “LULU – L’ART” The editors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Câmara Municipal de Cascais (Portugal) in the production of this book.
Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-2328-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands
Contents Introduction: Signposts of the Self in Modernity PART I The Representational Dilemma
5 23
The Self as a Work of Art: Proust’s Scepticism Christopher Prendergast
25
(Re-)Constructing, (Re-)Membering Postcolonial Selves Paulo de Medeiros
37
‘Doing Identity’ in Fiction: Identity Construction as a Dialogue between Individuals and Cultural Narratives Aleksandra Podsiadlik
51
Self-Representation and Temporality: ‘Parabasis’ in Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas 65 Clara Rowland New Man: Marie Kessels’ Inner Portrait of a Writing Self Daniël Rovers
77
Good Intentions, Ethical Commitment, and Impersonal Poetry: The Work of Gerrit Kouwenaar Gaston Franssen
85
‘For-Getting’ Plural Selves: Narrative and Identity in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore Jan Rupp
99
The Straitjacket of Normality. The Interaction with the Psychiatrist in Maurits Dekker’s Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben Lars Bernaerts
111
The Self’s Struggle for Recognition: August Strindberg and the Other 123 Lars Dalum Granild Unshaded Shadows: Performances of Gender in Emily Dickinson and Luiza Neto Jorge Marinela Freitas PART II Signalling Identity The Identity Paradigm Peter Brooks
133
147 149
The Global I Roland Greene
161
Staining the Past with Ink in Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Memorie (1830): The Fallacies of Autobiographical ‘Writing’ Davy Van Oers
175
Between Autobiography and Fiction: Narrating the Self in Gabriel García Márquez’s Vivir para contarla Eli Park Sorensen
189
The Passion of Lena Christ: From Fictionalized Autobiography to Biographical Novel Mirjam Truwant
203
Dreams in the Mirror: George Steiner by George Steiner Ricardo Gil Soeiro PART III Images of the Self Across the Arts
219
235
Reading W. G. Sebald with Alberto Giacometti Timothy Mathews
237
The Impossible Self-Portrait Paula Morão
253
Between Literature and the Visual Arts: Portraits of the Self in William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Fernando Pessoa Anna Viola Sborgi
267
Photography and Shadow-Writing: Henry James’s Revisions of the Self in the New York Edition Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen
281
Consumed by the Audience. Inhibition, Fear, and Anxiety in the Oeuvre of Bruce Nauman Patrick Van Rossem
293
There Was Something about Mary: Mary Pickford’s Perfect ‘Little American’ Anke Brouwers
307
Paint it Red: Death Artistry as a Portrait of the Self Verena-Susanna Nungesser
321
Introduction: Signposts of the Self in Modernity In his book Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman describes and comments upon present-day Western societies in terms of the prevalent and momentous mix-up of private and public discourses. In his view, private issues and personal problems, as taken up by the media, have become (or are taken as) wholly public issues; conversely, what used to be the content of the ‘public sphere’ is now turned into ‘the private problems of the public figures.’1 In the light of this state of affairs, it is no wonder that politics, the public discourse of democratic societies, is being replaced in a pervading manner to use Peter Brooks’s phrase, by a ‘confessional imagination,’2 to which we will come later. It is no wonder, then, that in this environment the writing and displaying of lives, as well as the drawing of portraits, both literal and metaphoric, play an increasingly central part in the ongoing redistribution of genres and discourses. While traditionally biographies and portraits were privileged means of singling out individuals whose lives were seen as exceptional and thus worth freeing from oblivion by endowing them with a public image, the use of life writing at the anecdotal level of everyday existence is also historically well documented. A tell-tale instance of the extent to which in the seventeenth-century life writing had already become a commonplace activity is to be found in John Phillips’s translation of Don Quijote, published in 1687 under the title The History of the most renowned Don Quijote of Mancha and His Trusty Squire Sancho Pancha. In his Chapter 3 of Book II, John Phillips writes: I’le lay my life, Sancho, the son of a whore has made a Gallimawfrey of my Master’s Life, and crowded foul and clean, Higglede-pigglede, into his cloakbag. Pox take him, quo Don Quixote, I’le be hang’d if the Fellow ben’t some Narrative-writer, or one of those that scribble the Lives of Great Men, nowadays, as soon as the Breath is out of their bodies, in abominable Six-penny Duodecimo’s.3
Part of this is a translator’s addition, seemingly offered as compensation for the non-translation of what Cervantes wrote in the source text:
1 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p.70. 2 See Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), ch. 6. 3 Miguel de Cervantes, The History of the Most Renowned Don Quixote of Mancha and His Trusty Squire Sancho Pancha [sic], trans. by John Phillips (London: Thomas Hodgkin, 1687), p.308.
6
Introduction - Yo apostaré – replico Sancho que ha mezclado el hideperro berzas con capachos. - Ahora digo – dijo don Quijote – que no ha sido sábio el autor de mi historia, sino algún ignorante hablador, que a tiento y sin algún discurso se puso a escribirla, salga lo que saliere, como hacía Orbaneja, el pintor de úbeda, al cual preguntándole qué pintaba, respondió: ‘Lo que saliere.’4
In a felicitous move that goes a long way to vindicate the topic of this volume, the translator replaces the name of a painter with the mention to biographers, thus attempting to produce a comic effect equivalent to the original. That laughter should be brought about at the cost of ‘those that scribble the Lives of Great Men,’ though, only witnesses to the existence in the target culture of an industry of life writing significant enough to be worth parodying. In the seventeenth century, therefore, personal lives were already imbued with at least a potentially paradigmatic meaning as role models, offering a vivid picture of the construction of the modern self that struggles away from medieval anonymity. However, the breakthrough for lesser portraits and stories of the self occurred in the nineteenth century, with the rush for autobiography and the invention of photography. Both developments herald what we might call a democracy of representation, by which everybody, from the working class woman to the peer of the realm, is (or feels to be) entitled to represent himself or herself, as well as to be represented by others. Certainly this subject would deserve further examination, but let us just point out, at the moment, that what happened in the field of self-representation may perhaps be best understood with the help of Walter Benjamin’s well-known concept of the ‘decay of the aura,’ whose logic he ascribes to ‘the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “close” spatially and humanely.’ Democracy dessacralizes representation, and attributes to immanence a distinctive meaning that makes it a quality in itself, entitled to direct representation; however, as the uniqueness and distance of revered works of art is destroyed by the new art forms characterized by the closeness, and one might add, the intimacy of reproduction – film and photography –, the effect of aura that was associated with them shifted and migrated. Here is how Benjamin discusses it in a famous passage: The film responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the
4 Miguel de Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo on Quixote de la Mancha, ed. by Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1968), p.562.
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film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phoney spell of a commodity.5
Benjamin was writing in 1936 but the reification of the self he was hinting at never ceased to grow. Today it is not only movie stars, or any other type of celebrity, who get caught up in the over-arching process of commodification of their images and lives. Today literally anyone can and does appear in front of a TV camera in order to be ‘portrayed’ and to narrate his or her personal life as emotionally as possible to millions of spectators who act as consumers of a suitably packaged ‘personality.’ This blurring of the borderline between public and private discourses happens everyday in most TV channels across the world: clearly we have become a community of voyeuristes and confession-mongers, on the model of all those who rushed to buy Bill Clinton’s autobiography in the hope of catching a glimpse at the scandal of naked truth. And if there were no other reasons, this by itself would amply justify tackling the topic of the essays collected in this volume: Benjamin’s reflections are, if anything, still much more acute and illuminating today, helping us to think about what surrounds us in literary but also in everyday discourses, and assisting us while we critically consider how selfhood is shaped and more often misshaped through the stories and portraits we use to represent it. If one asks what the relationship between life writing and the drawing of portraits can be, the answer may come as a deceptively simple statement: both represent by different means the human person in body and soul. These are the terms through which classical theory of biography and autobiography, on the one hand, and portrait and self-portrait, on the other, would account for it. The situation, however, from whichever angle we look at it, is far from being straightforward. Firstly, we are never dealing with a neat distinction between two sign systems or, to put it in more traditional terms, between literature and painting, the two ‘sister arts.’ The representation of the self has been appropriated by all sorts of media and discursive practices each with its own poetics and pragmatics, each with its own devices and technological toolkits. Secondly, we are therefore bound to get a different image (or even several different images) of the human person’s body, not to mention its soul, as it circulates among media and is reshaped to suit their particular agendas. After all, as everybody knows, there is no such thing as a true-to-life representation. Finally, the whole picture becomes immensely complex when we bring into it the heterogeneous array of approaches, disciplines, and institutions that take stories and portraits of the self as their object, from anthropology to medicine, from historiography 5 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Collins/Fontana, 1973), p.233.
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to law, from religion to literary and cultural studies. The collection of essays assembled in this volume precisely engage with this diversity: they propose, for example, to investigate such topics as the limits of self-representation, the concepts of ‘normal’ and ‘the monstrous,’ interfaces between different artistic discourses, social, symbolic, and political connections particularly in postcolonial contexts, and so forth. One other way to look into it would be to focus on the representation of the self as a mode of construction of identity and memory, both individual and collective, also in the sense of Laura Marcus’s notion of ‘group memory.’ Quite a number of texts deal with issues related to this topic: depersonalization and impersonality especially in Modernism, as well the mask and impersonation as forms of ‘fake’ identity; the quest for identity, either through daily life, Jewishness or writing; gender issues with their cultural and political implications; the limits of life and writing manifested in eroticism, passion, and death, as well as in its articulation with the construction of a self as a work of art. This book may therefore be seen to join the growing research about self-representation in liminal situations as, for instance, the study of trauma and testimony, particularly as it regards the experience of Holocaust. One theme that features prominently in a great number of the essays collected here, either explicitly or as a semantic undercurrent, is life writing’s relationship to the production of truth. This raises a host of crucial problems, some of which have been dealt with by Michel Foucault in La Volonté de savoir. According to Foucault, since the Middle Ages Western societies have developed institutions and techniques to make people talk, that is to say, to extract the truth from and about them. In other words, the West invented the confession as a discourse of power, and as a way of asserting the means to enforce this power even in day-to-day situations. The classical means of wielding power through words is rhetoric, by which he who best manipulates language is sure to achieve the anticipated perlocutionary effects over the audience. One may look for one of the literary matrixes of rhetoric as power in the celebrated speeches of Brutus and Anthony in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. In confession, however, something strange happens that reverses the roles of speaker and listener, as far as power relations are concerned. Here is how Foucault puts it:
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[T]he agency of domination does not reside on in the one who speaks… but in the one who listens and says nothing, not in the one who knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is not supposed to know. And this discourse of truth finally takes effect, not in the one who receives it, but in the one from whom it is wrested.6
In confession, therefore, the more you report about yourself the more you give in to someone else’s authority. Rather than triumphantly changing the world on the model of Descartes cogito, the confessing subject is targeted from subjection. The reason why in this context it is silence that dominates and words that subject may be seen in the fact that the self is caught up in the inner logic of apparatuses geared towards truth telling. In this context, truth, however, is neither a matter of empirical data nor the discursive output of the subject’s idealized free initiative but the end product of those apparatuses, always already inscribed in the theories and techniques devised to subject subjects. So, from the torture chamber to the talk show, from the priest’s confessional to the analyst’s couch, I am bound to represent myself ‘truly’ in the words of an Other, and in a sense I will at least partially end up confessing what was pre-ordained in the teleological grinding-machine of the institution: I am a sinner, I am a spy, I am a communist, I am in love with my mother. We can get a glimpse of what makes confession such a powerful instrument of domination if we compare it with the condition of vulnerability as defined by G. Thomas Couser. In his view, vulnerable subjects are those ‘persons in state of dependency,’7 such as old age, disability, illiteracy, legal minority or terminal illness, and they are vulnerable to the extent that they are liable to be misrepresented. But once these representations are seen as acts that involve ethical and political issues, they can be challenged and countered. In a state of confession, however, no one misrepresents you: you misrepresent yourself, and engage in such misrepresentation. How can you challenge then the image of yourself, the truth of which you were made to believe in? This is precisely the situation at the core of Mme. de La Fayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves, which was at the heart of the huge polemics it brought about at the time of its publication, in 1678. Mme. de Clèves rightly understood that her unintended self-confession in face of her beloved, the Duc de Nemours, was exactly the reason why she could never marry him, even when at the eyes of the world there was nothing to prevent them from doing so. That confession would al6 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley, 3 vols (London: Penguin, 1981), I, p.62. 7 G. Thomas Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p.16.
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ways be there, hovering over them, and turning her into a specific vulnerable subject, a condition from which she would never be able to come back. By refusing Nemours, she asserts her capacity to represent herself through what she feels to be her own conditions for selfhood, however ‘invraisemblables’ they might seem to everyone else – and although these conditions ultimately entail her physical disappearance. To conclude these preliminary remarks on a kind of allegorical note, we would like to recall one of the great canonical poems of European literature, Samuel T. Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.’ At the dawn of Romanticism, Coleridge’s ballad is a remarkable example of fictionalized life writing: a first-person narrator tells his extraordinary and traumatic story to a spellbound wedding-guest as a sort of pre-Freudian, Wiederholungszwang: I pass, like night, from land to land, I have strange power of speech; The moment that his face I see I know the man that must hear me; To him my tale I teach.8
The story of the Ancient Mariner is indeed an exceptional chain of events that must be, for some mysterious reason, retold again and again, thus turning uniqueness into triviality by dint of repetition – but also signalling how much compulsory repetition is an integrant part of the weave of trauma itself. Against the grain of Romantic poetics, then, the poem points beyond itself to our own time, where the simulacrum of exceptional lives are daily made to unfold before audiences who behave pretty much like Coleridge’s weddingguest: ‘He holds him with his glittering eye -/ The wedding-guest stood still/ And listens like a three year’s child.’ We ourselves are also painfully aware of how much the mesmerizing of an audience faced with triviality may coexist with the utmost unthinkable traumatic situations: this is the contrast we are facing everyday. This is precisely the cluster of questions the present volume tackles. To tell one’s story, or to make a portrait of oneself, seem to entail, not necessarily as much a certainty about the celebratory importance of one’s image or one’s story, as frequently a doubt on whether or not this image or story can in fact have the power to impose itself as such. Other times, as we have seen, it is also the belief that the story told conforms to the average expectations of ‘everyone’s’ story of oneself that makes it a sure choice. So, if belief in a certain kind 8 Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1968), p.33.
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of exceptionality might seem, at first sight, the place where one starts from, we might as well be aware that it certainly is not the place where one arrives. Many of the case studies collected in this volume try to underline and therefore they also question these assumptions and the uncertainties to which they point, making the case for stories and portraits that frequently have a flittering relation to what was traditionally considered as representation. Identity construction, reconstruction, and (re)negotiation are singled out as totally engaging processes, in which personal as well as cultural memory and forgetfulness play a constantly dynamic role that must be acknowledged. In such a framework, the stories and portraits of the self outlined here also emphasize the fact that they are, not only context-bound, but time-bound as well. There is no way of thinking about the construction of self as art, or about gender or postcolonial issues, or even about the ethical commitments involved in the construction of selfhood, without underlining the temporal and historical constraints in which they are framed, as well as the play between memory and the manifold forms that amnesia, forgetfulness, and trauma may take. The representation of the self is as much about what is represented as is about what is left out of that representation – a labour as much of love as it is of mourning. Part I, ‘The Representational Dilemma,’ mainly addresses the image of the self as a long and dubious process in which this labour is, if not achieved, at least dealt with. The stories and portraits of the self assemble a wide range of regional, national, and transnational identities, some with specifically aesthetic concerns, others stressing particularly ethical, or ideological, or even psychoanalytical readings. Christopher Prendergast’s point of departure engages precisely this question, as he envisages, in the wake of the philosopher Charles Taylor, an historical model of selfhood, which in turn enables him to understand Proust’s representation of the self as a sceptical as well as an aesthetic formation, with decisive philosophical consequences. One of these consequences consists in what he terms the ‘representational dilemma,’ and from which this section takes its cue – an issue that, in more or less explicit terms, underpins all of the essays gathered here. Prendergast’s reflection on Proust is indeed foundational within the framework of this section, even if Proust’s answer to self-making takes the form of an aesthetic undertaking. Prendergast’s analysis of it highlights the way this dilemma cannot be avoided, if one is to engage in any kind of representation of the self. From this point of view, Proust’s case is not only a paradigmatic one, but may also be viewed as a paragon: the scepticism he ultimately uncovers is perhaps one of the most complex ways of being true to selfhood, especially under its modern wake. Constructive scepticism and the central place it grants to metaphor, Prendergast argues, is definitely an interesting way to respond to the representational dilemma, and it is hence only fair that this section opens up with a text where not only the
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problem is given shape, but where it also receives a possible answer, one which will in fact hover over the entire book. Paulo de Medeiros’s approach makes us aware of still another set of dilemmas, implied in the production of stories and portraits of the self, namely those involved in re-membering and re-constructing those very specific ghosts that usually go under the name of ‘postcolonial selves.’ Medeiros is clearly addressing another type of scepticism in the construction of selfhood and identity, which renders more intriguing as well as more interesting the very notion of hybridity, whose significance to postcolonial reflection is of course widely known. This ghost-hunting, which takes its cue from Hamlet, and Derrida on Marx, relocates the postcolonial debate within what is recognized to be ‘the European anxiety,’ thus as a decisive characteristic of European identity in a postcolonial, historical consciousness of the self. The wandering between African and European texts and contexts is as much part of the argument as the question itself, therefore signalling the awareness that it is in the comparative approach that we may be able to find very specific tools to address what we may conceive of as postcolonial modernity. Many of the essays in this chapter gain from being read against the background of Medeiros’s reflection, since he points out the paradoxical shape that the outcome of such reflection may take. How may we be aware of the limits put forward by the representational dilemma, and still able to integrate into selfhood the historical conditions that any notion of agency presupposes? This is at the centre of Medeiros’s contribution, as well as of many of the essays in this section. This of course also means that the making of identity has to be perceived as an ongoing activity, wavering between action and event, and differently combining construction, destruction, and (re)negotiation. From this point of view, identity is best to be found in the image of the dialogue, an argument which is at the core of Aleksandra Podsiadlik’s contribution. Centred on the analysis of a novel by Roddy Doyle, Podsiadlik’s text views the construction of selfhood as a kind of performative action, in which telling cannot but be a form of doing. This view also has its societal and even political consequences, as it firmly anchors individual identity within a dialogic process where cultural narratives represent a major feature of individual identity construction. The awareness of one’s position within this web of dialogues seems to be one of the central concerns addressed by Podsiadlik, as she questions female identity and its ties to the representation of gender and patriarchy. Self-representation comes out as a locus not only where dilemmas are played, but also where changes take place, as the self acknowledges to be firmly rooted in time and history. The links between self-representation and temporality are also central to Clara Rowland’s contribution, taking as its main field of analysis the novelistic landmark that the Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa embodies. The emphasis
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is put here on a whole set of instabilities that undermine the possibility of selfrepresentation, at least as a process which might be immune to the constant re-enactment of irony and therefore of revision. The question here, then, is not only that change and temporality affect the different images of selfhood produced, but also that these images are themselves subject to a revisionism that goes further than just mere change, and appears as a kind of palimpsest. The ‘permanent parabasis’ that Schlegel considered irony to be forms the prismatic lens through which Rosa’s work may be approached, thus closely linking the problem of identity to that of temporal organization. (A curious dialogue might be established between Proust’s and Rosa’s conceptions of temporality, and to their different but perhaps similar views on how self-representation evolves from the difficulties in writing and telling.) The two main literary paradigms that shape the stories of the self in Rosa’s novel, the Faustian pact and the ‘woman warrior’ model, are shown to reinforce the instability of identity and characterize it as a painful demystification of life and writing, constituting therefore a powerful reflection about the limits and conditions of self-reflexivity. It comes as no surprise, then, to understand that this self-reflexivity may take the form of a search for a ‘new man,’ as Daniël Rovers proposes in his text. Taking as his point of departure the above mentioned fusion of the public and the private, considered by Zygmunt Bauman as one of the characteristics of modernity, Rovers undertakes a close analysis of one of Marie Kessel’s books, showing that its ambiguous and hybrid genre position within the literary system may be connected to Montaigne’s conception of the essay as a form of self-fashioning and of self-observation. This tradition of the personal essay, seen under the prism of a foucauldian revisionism, enables Rovers to underline the way identity formation, in Kessel, rests upon the ability to renounce particular images of the self, and therefore to also think about writing as ‘abdicatory prose.’ We are facing an alternative to the Cartesian model of affirmation of identity, while we understand that diverse forms of instability and renunciation are as much a part of it as the more traditional images through which the self is mainly seen as that which may be told. The difficulties in telling that all of these contributions choose one way or another to underline, just make us more aware of the fact that the issues pertaining to the representational dilemma are indeed an integral part of all the stories and portraits of the self. One other possible way to address these difficulties is the modernist way. In short, the theory of impersonality tries to respond to these issues by way of a retraction into the realms of the impersonal, considered as perhaps the only safe basis for a theory of poetry and of poetics that is, at the same time, a theory of the self as non-self. This is precisely the context of Gaston Franssen’s text, in which the Dutch modernist poet Kouwenaar is taken as the paradigmatic
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model of such a retraction, and therefore of such a conception of the self (but one could of course think of other foundational names of modernism, such as Valéry, T. S. Eliot, or Pessoa). The side-effect of this theory, Franssen points out, is the problematic tension that lies at the heart of the interplay between impersonality and (auto)biographical intentions. But perhaps still more important than this, the question of intentionality is re-phrased within the framework of poetry itself as a form of a wider commitment of the self. A theory of impersonality gives a possible answer to the representational dilemma, while it raises a different kind of dilemma, even paradox: how to ground the philosophical question of personal commitment on a poetic theory that begins by retracting selfhood from a substantial view of, and therefore of intentionality. Franssen’s view is that, despite its absence, ‘an I’ is still indeed present in the text, that may account for personal commitment and hence to an ethical as well as a poetic representation of the self. Firmly grounded on this paradox, this representation takes its cue from the hermeneutical act, stressing the fact that no form of life writing or of self-representation (and therefore of personal commitment) is possible outside the framework of an act of interpretation, through which history is played as one of the truest forms that the self is entrusted to. If this is so, then history is not to be looked for only in and through the representation of contextual elements and constraints, but also (and perhaps decisively) in the fabric of the constitution of the self, and mainly in the constant interaction between memory and forgetfulness. That is precisely Jan Rupp’s contention, as he takes the dialogue between narrative and identity to be the central process through which the awareness of ‘plural selves’ is achieved in Caryl Phillips’s fiction. By situating his own argument in the lapse between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and by his own consideration that in such lapse an alternative claim for individual agency and coherence might be re-instated, although under a revisionary ratio, Rupp addresses the way such agency has to be situated within a re-fashioning of the self that is always a negotiation between remembering and forgetting. The ‘storied selves’ (Eakin) he talks about are therefore not independent from the narratives in which they are produced as story, and retrospection appears, in such a light, as a decisive tool in the process of identity formation: for-getting and re-membering not only do not appear as mutually exclusive but are taken as related operations, through which postcolonial identity has to be considered. History, ideology, and, again, personal commitment come to the fore in this reading of Phillips. We are now in a position to add, at this point, that the essays collected in this volume not only share the awareness of the instabilities and uncertainties implied in the understanding of the representational dilemma, but that they are also deeply conscious of the fact that this particular dilemma must not give in to what might be termed, following Prendergast’s reflection, a negative scep-
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15
ticism: for this negative scepticism proceeds through the flight from history and therefore leaves no grounds whatsoever in which to relocate any form of personal agency and of representation of the self. This is the problem at the heart of many of these essays, and it may be considered as one of the major theoretical and critical issues that they address. It comes as no surprise, in this context, to recognize that the same problem may also take the form of a psychiatric and psychoanalytical ‘story of the self’ – one of the instances mentioned above where we may be able to find Thomas Couser’s vulnerable subjects. In the conversation that occurs between the psychiatrist and his/her patient-narrator, the latter’s ability (or inability) to produce a plausible and reliable story of his/her self is not just a side-effect of such a dialogue and such an interaction, as Lars Bernaerts points out in his study of Maurits Dekker’s novel. The story upon which the psychiatric conversation rests is a product as much of the patient’s retrospection and memory as it is of the interaction that passes between the psychiatrist himself and the patient’s self portrait, that the former not only receives but also decisively reshapes. By underlining the different power positions to be found in both characters, Bernaerts goes a step further in the understanding that any story or portrait of the self is always imbued by narratives of that which Foucault recognized as the micropower. Any representation of the self therefore becomes a tensional and frequently agonistic negotiation of power and its uneven distribution in discourse formations, which are especially relevant in cases such as those portrayed in Dekker’s novel. Unevenness and inequality is also the framework within which the two last essays of this chapter choose to develop. Lars Granild’s text mainly addresses these issues within Strindberg’s anthropology and poetics. He argues that some of the most striking features of the Strindbergian texts – their portraying of problematic identities, shaped by the intersubjective battles in which they are immersed – have to be accounted for as a response to the self’s struggle for recognition, and his or her awareness of (at least a partial) failure to do so. Hegel’s dialectic of recognition, revised by Sartre, and read along the Bakhtinian notion of the Other, provides the theoretical background for the understanding of Strindberg’s prose texts: not as any progressive affirmation of self-identity, but as a problematic struggle for recognition by an Other that therefore becomes an integral part of the self portrayed. If this is not a story about a psychiatristpatient relationship, issues such as power, its instabilities, and its unevenness are as fundamental here as in the above mentioned essay. The Other ceases to be in Strindberg just an exterior correlation, and is to be taken as a central process constituted within the representation of the very self, and selfhood thus becomes a question of such struggle for recognition. But Strindberg himself does seem to envisage an alternative way out, which Granild terms ‘the reciprocity of identity,’ and that he tries to locate within the
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battle between monologism and dialogism. If the outcome of such a battle seems at the very least to be uncertain, we might perhaps gain from understanding that some alternative shapes also stem from it. Self-presence and selftransparency are an illusion that Strindberg is well aware of, and from which he might not be freed – but they may perhaps be seen under quite a different light when one uses them to question the representation of the self as gendered, as does Marinela Freitas in her essay. Taking as her field of analysis the poets Emily Dickinson and Luiza Neto Jorge, Freitas argues that the modern tendency to de-personalization has some intriguing consequences when read through the lens of gender as ‘performance’ (Judith Butler). The de-centring it presupposes brings to light the cultural, ideological, and political implications of textual constructions of the self and, while it destabilizes conventional attitudes towards feminity, it also enables the construction, in both poets, of what might be called ‘reciprocal identities.’ Again, the problem addressed here is how to recognize the uncertainties of any representation of selfhood while at the same time being able to ground the possibility of alternative individual agencies. Or, how to incorporate the representational dilemma without being caught up in the snare of the aporias opened up by negative scepticism. This is clearly a major theoretical concern of these texts, as they try to navigate between a critical awareness of the problem, and the alertness to the poetic as well as political dangers of viewing it as a dilemma with no answer whatsoever. Recognizing and reconstructing selfhood, we might perhaps state at this point, is a careful and (un)balanced negotiation between critical consciousness and anthropological and symbolic agency. The essays collected in Part II, ‘Signalling Identity,’ focus on the discursive, generic, rhetorical, and technological modes in which the self has been, in specific historical contexts, variously configured and ambiguously inscribed within conventional apparatuses geared towards producing truth-effects as regards the definition of one’s supposedly unique singularity. Peter Brooks perceives in post-Romantic nineteenth century a paradigm shift in the social construction of identity: rather than being predicated on the expression of inner world complexities, identity becomes a matter of ‘pseudoscientific technologies for knowing who people are,’ first and foremost that hallmark of criminology, fingerprints. At a time when in a seeming paradox the onset of mass society witnessed a veritable obsession with individual identity, this increasingly turns around bodily evidence and factual clues, as well as narrative: we are the stories we tell about ourselves, thus joining, even if implicitly, an autobiographical thread that runs through this section of the volume. While melodrama, ‘that highly characteristic form of the nineteenth-century imaginary,’ and the detective story, ‘the most characteristic invention of nineteenth-century literature,’ are suggested to ideally embody the narrative repre-
Introduction
17
sentation of identity as physical/factual signs, Brooks picks up as exemplary Balzac’s novel Le Colonel Chabert. In this story of lost and unsuccessfully reclaimed identity, he sees all the ingredients of the new paradigm coming together, involving sexuality, adultery, property, and most crucially, the law. He concludes what he calls his work-in-progress by hypothesizing the outset of another paradigm in our own time, one which will locate evidential truth beyond visual recognition, as in reading DNA codes. Roland Greene’s paper takes us further back to the Renaissance, where, in his view, a new relationship between self and the world emerges, a kind of mirror-like reciprocal definition in which the world in its different aspects functions as image/figure for the individual’s self-recognition. In fact, the world had changed, mostly owing to the new scientific mindset and the ongoing geographical discoveries, from the medieval conception of an undifferentiated abstract totality to becoming a complex ‘concept in several dimensions of geopolitics, science, and poetics,’ thus apt to be subjectively appropriated by the recent humanist invention of the self. As Greene deftly puts it, ‘it becomes hard sometimes to distinguish self from world, and a statement about one can often be taken as about the other’: this is the core of a trope he calls ‘the global I.’ He traces the several stages of its development, starting with Fernando de Roja’s La Celestina (1499), the early Shakespeare of The Comedy of Errors, and Pero Vaz de Caminha’s Letter to King Manuel on the discovery of Brazil: these texts illustrate the interchangeability of the terms used to describe both self and the world and can therefore be seen as opening up the space for the emergence of discourses and genres such as the picaresque, ethnography, and the literature of empire. It is, indeed, as if we were witnessing in writing the birth of perspective that was taking place in the visual arts. Greene does not go into this, rather he moves on to the end of the period, in which Shakespeare’s The Tempest helps us observe an alternative topos taking shape: insularity or ‘island logic,’ a utopian and ethical countering to the imperial and economic ethos at the heart of the global I. Looking cursorily at state-of-the-art research in the humanities in recent times, one gets the impression that ‘identity’ has become a sort of scholarly catchword; however, on closer view, it is easy to discern the wealth of groundbreaking studies that have turned the concept into the cornerstone of a whole new area of investigation, bordering on gender and cultural studies, among others. In a similar fashion, autobiography, as is well known, rose from a relatively peripheral genre to ranking high in the academic canon, helping to rescue countless texts and authors from oblivion. The four remaining essays in this section all deal with autobiographical issues and works. Davy Van Oers looks at Venetian novelistic autobiography of late eighteenth century, early nineteenth century, whose authors (Goldoni, Casanova,
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Da Ponte, and Gozzi), he maintains, show a ‘tendency to write their life as if it were a play, a comedy, a novel or a melodrama.’ In other words, life writing can be a matter of telling the truth as much as of abiding by norms and conventions which end up fictionalizing the author’s self-representation. Van Oers takes Lorenzo Da Ponte’s melodramatic Memorie as his case study, showing that, short of inserting meta-autobiographical declarations, Da Ponte resorts to other, implied strategies for signalling the presence of non-factual materials. Two of them stand out in Van Oers’ reading: firstly, the self-reflexive, almost parodistic device of staining the page with ink, blotting out the writing and thus inviting the reader to compensatory filling in of such ‘autobiographical blackouts’; secondly, the rhetoric of truth, that is, the overblown insistence on the truthfulness of his memories, which, according to Van Oers, is a tell-tale sign of Da Ponte’s awareness of the constructed make-up of his narrative. It is a paradoxical scenario that sounds pretty much like a reversal of Freud’s famous theory of denegation, by which the patient’s denial of the unconscious motivation constitutes his/her first acknowledgement of its reality. Eli Park Sorensen approaches Gabriel García Márquez’s Vivir para contarla in a similar vein, indeed shared by the four contributions on autobiography in this section: the genre lives a borderline, hybrid, unstable, and uncertain existence between fact and fiction. Like much recent literature on the genre, Sorensen draws on post-structuralist theory, notably Roland Barthes and Paul de Man, on the one hand, to substantiate his view on the ontological ambiguity of autobiography and, on the other and more interestingly, to argue that in García Márquez’s book the author’s authority does not simply collapse, it is paradoxically sustained by a return to his fiction. In a careful analysis of Vivir para contarla, Sorensen is able to uncover many echoes and intertextual reminiscences of some of his novels and therefore conclude that such a textual set-up not only configures the author as a reader of his own work in the process of life writing but also that ‘the fictions and the autobiography condition each other’s production of an ambiguous structure of referentiality.’ And this point, incidentally, is bound to remind us of a similar effect of referential ambiguity famously generated in the second part of D. Quixote. In ‘The passion of Lena Christ,’ Mirjam Truwant highlights the problematic nature of a chain of life writing and its subsequent rewritings, beginning with the German author’s autobiography (1912), going on to the biography published in 1940 by her second husband, another 1971 biography, and focusing finally at length on a biographical novel published in 2004. Predictably, the theoretical starting point concerns the ambivalence between ‘authenticity and performance’ played out by Lena Christ herself in dramatizing the conflict-ridden story of her life. Her husband’s reconstruction of Christ’s life further mythologizes a supposedly hysterical but talented woman from the point of view
Introduction
19
of a misogynist male with national-socialist leanings, and her latest biographer, while purporting to restore Lena Christ’s own female voice largely absent from the previous biographical materials, ends up recuperating the myth, albeit in reversal, and thus re-essentializing her life. By bringing gender issues to bear on her reading, Truwant manages to shed light on key aspects of the various plots in which Christ’s life is successively novelized; in the end, however, all we are left with is layer after layer of fiction. The last essay in this section moves away from literature and takes as its object a major figure in Western critical tradition: George Steiner. Ricardo Gil engages with Steiner’s autobiography, Errata: An Examined Life, in ways that bring out its affinity with García Márquez’s work as interpreted by Eli Sorensen: it is books that resonate throughout Errata, its author’s ‘textual homelands,’ rather than a full-fledged biographical self, which – Ricardo Gil points out – Steiner fails to communicate. Still, ‘errata’ aptly conveys the double meaning of a wandering life totally devoted to responsive and responsible reading, which, in Ricardo Gil’s dense analysis, puts forward the image of a contemplative thinker divorced from praxis. As is to be expected in our multimedial cultures, the self can be constructed and represented across a variety of media, sign systems or art-forms: images, for instance, are as fitting a material to account for subjectivity as words, a fact that is borne out by the essays gathered in Part III. ‘Images of the Self Across the Arts’ address our topic through a series of case studies involving painting, sculpture, film, photography, and performance mostly from a trans-semiotic perspective. Timothy Mathews starts out by proclaiming loud and clear his purpose: ‘I want to see what the art of Sebald can tell me about the art of Giacometti,’ which means, in fact, that he is going to construct his own object rather than picking it ready-made, as it were, from the surrounding cultural repertoire. His focus is on one of the stories collected in Sebald’s The Emigrants, ‘Max Ferber,’ an artist whom the narrator meets in Manchester in the 60s amidst a decaying urban landscape. In Mathews’s reading, the two voices in the text end up overlapping and telling a tale of grief, loss, exile, and forgetfulness. The interpretative stunt, however, happens when Mathews’s associates Ferber’s studio, as described by Sebald, to Giacometti’s studio in Paris and the character’s imaginary paintings with Giacometti’s miniatures of emaciated human figures. The hypothesis then arises that the two artists share a similar ‘doubt about the capacity of visual representation to place objects and especially people in place’ and ultimately both theirs and Sebald’s art give testimony to a frail and contradictory recovery from historical suffering. Paula Morão’s title, ‘The Impossible Self-Portrait,’ takes us squarely to the crux of her argument: the impossibility of representing the self as a uni-
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fied transcendental subject, a theoretical leitmotif, as is well known, of much poststructuralist discourse. She discusses the topic in a two-tiered way. Firstly, she describes some of the time-honoured techniques, conventions, practices, and devices for portraying the self employed by visual and verbal artists along history, such as confession, contemplation, meditation, and signature, among others. As illustrated by Rimbaud and painters such as Rembrandt, Courbet, and Rockwell, they bring out doubleness and fragmentation instead of selfidentical closure. From this Morão goes on, secondly, to show a parallel process of splitting the subject in verbal art by analyzing three of Fernando Pessoa’s poems, in which a most radical experiment in othering the self is played out. Anna Viola Sborgi argues along similar lines, although she covers, in a comparative reading, not only Fernando Pessoa but also the American poets William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. She addresses primarily selfportrait as practiced by the three poets, showing how in Moore’s work it functions as a kind of device to render identity as concealment and mutability. Specially salient are the linkages that can be noticed with contemporary visual arts, such as using objects as indexical signs for the representation of the subject, or the technique of montage of quotations, all of which Anna Sborgi associates to cubist painting. Williams likewise portrays his own – and others’ – selves, together with nature’s objects, as she points out, ‘in a non-naturalistic way,’ thus disclosing clear connections with Kandinsky and cubism. In Pessoa all the features she deems common to the three poets come conspicuously to the surface: representation of the subject’s relation to his/her surroundings, fragmentation, and dramatic monologue as a form of self-portrayal. One might add to her conclusion that they all ‘share techniques used in the visual arts of the time,’ that she zooms in accurately on a detail of the familiar terrain of the Modernists’ inter-artistic mindset. A wholly different approach to cross-media self-representation is to be found in Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen’s article. Interestingly, he takes as his main object the photograph of Henry James as it appears in the frontispiece of the New York Edition of his collected – and thoroughly revised – novels. Following a broadly deconstructive line, and bringing in contributions from the theory of photography, as well as his own interpretation of James’s autobiographical material, he argues that here the author’s portrait neither legitimizes nor authenticates his work. Rather, on the one hand, looking at his own past face, the gazing self is faced with the gaze of an other, producing the spectral effect of a fading subjectivity. On the other hand, confronting his past work, the revising author undergoes a similar experience, since writing is from the very beginning inscribed with the possibility of rewriting and therefore, as StougaardNielsen puts it with the help of a Derridian concept, ruined at the origin. In fact, not only the text but also the photographed face and the self are shown
Introduction
21
to be essentially open to re-vision and, for that selfsame reason, ‘de-generate,’ thus hinting at the condition for the generation of the work of art. The multimedial art of the American Bruce Nauman is the topic of Patrick Van Rossem’s essay. Bauman is depicted as a shouting artist, whose art is born out of fear of failing, of not being understood by an anonymous audience. A strange dialogical relationship then arises, based upon mistrust of the audience because, in Rossem’s words, ‘it could misunderstand [the artist] or narcissistically embody his work.’ Through a series of interpretative sketches of some of Nauman’s works, Rossem develops the idea of the cry as a trope for the agent’s highly controlled self-presentation and, building on Lacan, for the desire to be desired by the Other. But, in Rossem’s reading of Lacan, ‘we can never really know what is inside the other’s gaze,’ which leads to the distrust of the eye of the viewer; this accounts for the ‘anti-ocular stance’ of turning the camera upside down adopted in the video Stamping in the Studio, on which Rossem dwells at some length. Here the artist films itself repetitively pounding his feet on the studio’s floor, read as a sign of the author’s conscious and defiant presence, his desiring cry for recognition. The last two essays in the volume take us straight to the province of another art form, cinema, and in fact, the self-conscious construction of presence may very well be said to constitute the thematic core of the first one. Anke Brouwers delves into the birth of the star system in the USA, in particular as it was personified in, and articulated by Mary Pickford, ‘America’s Sweetheart.’ She shows how Mary Pickford carefully constructed her image out of the many different and contradictory roles she played in her films and how as a result media came to portray her as the perfect embodiment of the female American, functioning in fact as a powerful American myth. All in all, this was the product of a mix of Pickford’s self-presentation as a deft, no-nonsense but ethically inspired businesswoman and a persona able to achieve the imaginary reconciliation of opposites: modern and old-fashioned, gentle and firm, naïve and precocious, innocent and mischievous. In thus acquiring an iconic status, Brouwers argues, she becomes a mythical figure, lifting up the ideology of the American way of life to universal significance and – we would like to add – vindicating Walter Benjamin’s remarks quoted above. The volume is brought a close on an almost symbolic case study: the Hannibal trilogy, particularly the hugely successful The Silence of the Lambs. Verena-Susanna Nungesser approaches the trilogy as exemplary of a kind of psychological turn in the genre of the serial-killer movie: not only the traditional link between murder and art is increasingly awarded a central place in the plot – Se7en, of course, comes to mind – but also the killer is no longer depicted as a flat villain, rather he is endowed with a complex personality, a subjectivity whose twists and turns must be unravelled in order to sort out who
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did it. This new setup has consequences for the design of the detective, who becomes a ‘psychologically trained profiler’ that needs to set himself/herself in the same position as the criminal and is assisted by high-tech forensic resources – and here the CSI series come also to mind. Nungesser’s close reading of the three films follow these lines, focusing in particular on the relationship between the characters played by Anthony Hopkins and Jody Foster in The Silence of the Lambs, concluding that fictional self-construction joins an aesthetics of murder in portraying both killer and investigator as ambivalent individuals and dynamic psychological entities. This volume collects a selection of revised papers presented in the context of the International Seminar ‘Stories and Portraits of the Self’ held in Cascais, Portugal, in June 2005. The International Seminar is an annual summer school organized by the institutions participating in the HERMES network for European graduate studies, namely University of Aarhus (Denmark), University College London (UK), University of Giessen (Germany), Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), University of Lisbon (Portugal), and OSL – Onderzoek School Literatuurwetenschap (The Netherlands). The editors wish to thank all those whose enthusiasm and professionalism greatly helped to turn the Cascais Seminar into a productive and pleasant event, in particular Sofia Andrade, Sara Ramos Pinto, Margarida Reis, and Fátima Silva. Further thanks go to the Cascais Town Hall for their generous financial contribution both to the Seminar and the preparation of this volume, to the Centre for Comparative Studies, and the graduate Programme in Comparative Studies of the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, and the National Research Council (FCT) under the European Programme POCI 2010. Finally, thanks are also due to Marta Pinto and Ricardo Gil for their invaluable help in coping with the task of proof-reading. Helena C. Buescu João Ferreira Duarte
Part I The Representational Dilemma
The Self as a Work of Art: Proust’s Scepticism Christopher Prendergast (Cambridge University) The significant feature of this paper is the stress on ‘scepticism.’ Against the grain of conventional readings of Proust, which position him as the exemplary spokesman for the modernist idea of the self as a work of art, I shall argue that Proust builds into his great fiction a robustly sceptical view of the ‘aesthetic’ solution to the problem of living. The centerpiece of the account is a consideration of the Proustian narrator in relation to the painter, Elstir, and turns on the allegedly privileged role each accords to the operations of metaphorical seeing and construction. The key sequence is taken from the first encounter between narrator and Elstir in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.
Perhaps as a reaction to the saturation of our culture by a wholly naturalized model of selfhood, we have been encouraged by those of a more critical disposition – for example, the splendid book by the philosopher Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self 1 – to think of the self, or more accurately the sense of self, as an historical category. When we think of the self in this way, two themes tend to dominate. One is the notion of the self as foundational, generally seen as emerging in the seventeenth century and in particular associated with Descartes placing of the cogito at the origin of our knowledge of the world. The Cartesian project was emancipatory, in encouraging philosophy and science to break free of the grip of religious authority, but it also had, so to speak, an existential downside that was to reverberate across the centuries into modern times: namely, the priority granted to self entailed the separation of self and world, the famous subject/object split that Hegel (and the Romantics generally) were to contrast nostalgically with the allegedly happy oneness of self and world in antiquity, and Heidegger was later to lament as the great catastrophe of modernity. Hegel’s seminal diagnosis of the unhappy consciousness, human subjectivity exiled from the feeling of at-homeness, was to pose for him (and others) the problem of how to represent the self in the representational materials supplied by external reality (or, if you prefer – in the terms of this symposium – how to ‘frame’ the self). This representational dilemma was to travel through the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, finding its logical terminus in the splintered syntax of Beckett’s endlessly self-defeating attempts to articulate the self in the medium of fiction. The second major theme to emerge from our thinking the self historically originates less with Descartes than with Montaigne. Montaigne’s stress on the temporality of the self was accompanied by a corresponding stress on its vola1 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
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tility. Whereas in Descartes the self is given (by virtue of being foundational) and thus universal (by virtue of a rational competence – what he called ‘innate ideas’ – possessed by all mankind), in Montaigne it is not so much given as created, improvised through the flux of time as an ongoing activity of creative self-fashioning. This idea of the self as an invention has proved exceptionally durable, although, when considered historically, it can also lead to a high degree of confusion. In particular the idea has tended to attract two rather different propositions that are often treated as if they were the same. One has it that the self tout court is a modern invention; the other – more modest – has it that the modern self or the modern sense of self is an invention. I shall not enter this disputed territory here. I merely note it. But either way, the association of the self with the principle of invention poses another question to do with our topic of ‘framing’: namely, what supports the frame, if the self is something made-up, what are to be the grounds of its representation? These questions are the ones I want to consider here, in connection with the modernist writer most committed to the idea of the self – what he called the ‘true self’ – as an invention, a literary or artistic creation: Marcel Proust. My purpose however will not be simply to repeat the terms of the Proustian aesthetic of self-making (in particular Proust’s linking of self-articulation to the creative power of fictional metaphor), but – in line with the problematic of frame and ground I just described, and against the grain of the overt Proustian programme – to sketch an argument according to which Proust himself was skeptical of the very aesthetic he ostensibly celebrated in the closing pages of A la recherche (a skeptical take that, in its broader implications might require us to think again about the whole modernist affirmation of inventive self-fashioning from Nietzsche onwards). Hence of course my title ‘Proust’s Scepticism,’ which I now need to clarify, and especially what is meant here by the word ‘scepticism.’ So, what then do I mean under the general heading of Proust’s scepticism? Here let me set the stage with two preliminary clarifications, the first to do with the nature of Proustian scepticism, the second to do with its object. For the first of these clarifications, I want to draw briefly on the distinction in philosophy between radical scepticism and mitigated (or, as it is sometimes alternatively called, constructive) scepticism. Radical scepticism is the project that turns on the notoriously self-defeating proposition ‘I know nothing,’ and generally ends by skirting, when not enthusiastically entering, the zones of relativism and solipsism. There are of course versions of Proust which align him with both relativism and solipsism, but to my mind these versions are both unpersuasive and uninteresting. Mitigated or constructive scepticism is a very different matter, in so far as it avoids the traps of relativism and solipsism by holding fast to some standard of rationality from which to express and organize
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doubts as to certain propositions or representations. It is this variety of scepticism that I shall bring to bear on the Proustian enterprise or, more accurately and (I hope) more provocatively interesting, maintain that Proust himself, at least in certain moods, brings to bear on his own enterprise. As I say, this will sound provocative or, more bluntly, just plain silly. The writer, who conspicuously devalues acts of rational intellection (what his narrator calls ‘intelligence’) and who constantly opposes intuition to reason, will hardly seem a plausible candidate for annexation to the camp of the classically sceptical rationalist. This indeed is why I draw on this source, but lightly, and do so broadly for one reason only: to put in place a mode of sceptical inquiry that keeps intact the distinction between truth and error, the form of scepticism that serves the cause of truth in its campaign against error. Why that distinction is important to my case, I will come to it shortly. The second clarification concerns the object of Proust’s scepticism. This takes us onto equally tricky and controversial terrain. I do not mean here what is familiarly taken as the object or objects of sceptical critique in Proust: those thematic categories of A la recherche that go under the headings of love, friendship, society, travel, and so forth, the values and practices which link us to the world (in the worldly sense of world) and which the narrator renounces in the coincident discovery of the true self and the artistic vocation. By the object of scepticism I mean not the former but the latter, the very thing that is opposed to these categories, namely the artistic vocation itself or a certain version of it, the version over which the Proustian coterie has swooned for so long. This is not to suggest that we should stop taking seriously Proust’s view of the aesthetic solution to the problem of self-making, or, more pertinently, ascribe to Proust the intention of inviting us not to take it seriously. That would be perverse to a degree, and in the continuing flux of commentary we can still encounter strong versions of the aesthetic solution. Let me however make my first provocative move by marching straight into enemy territory, that place sacred to nearly all Proustians with a disposition to swoon: the place of that damned Madeleine. Not however to dwell on the worlds conjured out of cake and lime-blossom tea but rather to foreground a lexical-grammatical feature of the sequence, the two verb forms on which is poised the narrator’s answer to the question how to make sense of his experience, two infinitives, one interrogative, the other assertive: ‘chercher? pas seulement. Créer.’ There is a major Proustian ellipsis here; and it is in the gap opened up by this ellipsis that we could arguably situate the whole Proustian project, both its celebratory ambitions and its points of uncertainty and vulnerability. ‘Chercher’ evokes the ‘search’ in the meaning of that term which presupposes a potential discovery, a truth reached by means of an act of reflective understanding. ‘Créer’ points not to a discovery but to an invention: that is to say, the romantic-modernist
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location of the Search in the domain of fiction, the ‘as if’ experiment that is fiction. Thus, despite the language of transcendence that will come to the fore in Le Temps retrouvé, what is implicitly posited here is not a transcendent truth but a created one, a created self that exists in and only in the play of relations that constitutes the text. This however in turn generates a further question: what grounds this play, what authorizes the large claims to redemptive meaning that grow from it. The standard answer to these questions, and the one that Proust himself appears to give more or less unambiguously, is the one that stakes all on a particular textual use of, and meta-textual representation of, metaphor; the play of relations that constitutes the ‘creation’ is essentially metaphorical. As is well-known, metaphor in Proust is imbued with vast significance, above all in the celebrated passage from Le Temps retrouvé which has the term ‘métaphore’ issuing, triumphally, crescendo-like, from its hypotactic deferment. It emerges as a coda to the whole work of writing, the lynchpin of the work’s drastic reordering of time-space relations into a new redemptive synthesis (time salvaged from the shipwreck of time wasted). Given this huge investment, how then might one plausibly argue against the grain of this triumphalist rhetoric; how might one argue skeptically, in the sense of construing Proust himself as perhaps entertaining certain rationally based doubts as to this grand scheme, if only in the shadow and from the margin of his work? This is what I want to explore with you, as, precisely, a question, a doubt, that ‘shadows’ the work, no less, but also no more than that. One entry into this problematic space is by way of Elstir’s studio in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Elstir is above all remembered by the narrator for the extraordinary shock furnished by the seascape paintings at Balbec. The most striking feature of these paintings is the way they blur and in some cases reverse spatial relations and demarcations, with corresponding identityconfusions in the natural world. What most catches the narrator’s attention is Elstir’s practice of painting the sea as if it were the land, and the land as if it were the sea: Sometimes, at my window in the hotel at Balbec, in the morning when Françoise undid the blankets that shut out the light, or in the evening when I was waiting until it was time to go out with Saint-Loup, I had been led by some effect of the sunlight to mistake what was only a darker stretch of sea for a distant coastline, or to gaze delightedly at a belt of liquid azure without knowing whether it belonged to sea or sky. But presently my reason would re-establish between the elements the distinction which my first impression had abolished... But the rare moments in which we see nature as she is, poetically, were those from which Elstir’s work was created. One of the metaphors that occurred most frequently in the seascapes which surrounded him here was precisely that which, comparing land
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with sea, suppressed all demarcation between them... It was, for instance, for a metaphor of this sort – in a picture of the harbour of Carquethuit, a picture which he had finished only a few days earlier and which I stood looking at for a long time – that Elstir had prepared the mind of the spectator by employing, for the little town, only marine terms, and urban terms for the sea... On the beach in the foreground the painter had contrived that the eye should discover no fixed boundary, no absolute line of demarcation between land and sea.2
There is much to be said about this passage. Amongst other things, its terms clearly invite a comparison with Proust’s own writing; the writing of Elstir (of Elstir’s painting) is a model, a microcosm, another mise en abyme of Proustian writing in general. This is indicated by the passage itself in at least two respects: first, the fact that it begins with the narrator’s transcription of his own perceptions prior to describing Elstir’s seascapes, a transcription that is a pure mirror-image of Elstir’s pictorial method (‘I had been led by some effect of the sunlight to mistake what was only a darker stretch of sea for a distant coastline, or to gaze delightedly at a belt of liquid azure without knowing whether it belonged to sea or sky’). This in turn connects with the second element of the passage, namely, its emphasis on Elstir’s painterly practice as a form of metaphorical representation. The term ‘metaphor’ appears twice in the passage, and is further elaborated as a process of ‘re-naming’ things. Elstir’s paintings re-order the world by, as it were, removing primary names from things and giving them new, metaphorical names or by giving names to things otherwise unnamed or unnamable (that is to say, a painterly equivalent of the rhetorical process known as catachresis): Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. The names which designate things correspond invariably to an intellectual notion, alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with that notion.3
Elstir thus ‘renames’ things by actively reversing relations, painting the sea as land and vice versa. This corresponds to another figure in rhetoric: the figure 2 Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, trans. by Kilmartin (London: Randam House, 1992), pp.480-81. 3 Proust, p.479.
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of chiasmus, the function of which is to reverse the terms of an antithesis, to redistribute terms across the divide of an opposition. Chiasmus and metaphor often work together in the project of a general unsettling of given orders of representation. This can be particularly disturbing in the case of constructions of human identity, especially across the barrier of sexual and gender identities (as in Elstir’s ‘scandalous’ portrait, Miss Sacripant). It is indeed one of the grounds on which conservative opinion in traditional accounts of rhetoric is so suspicious of metaphor; in these accounts metaphor is often represented, paradoxically enough, by way of a metaphor, in the figure of the daubed and alluring Harlot, encouraging illicit ‘couplings’ – where couplings are to be understood in both the sexual and the semantic senses, bringing things together that should, on the stern view of rational discourse or social convention, be kept apart. Rationality here is accorded the villain’s role, the repressively censorious conservative hell-bent on stopping everyone letting it all hang out and having a riotously good time. There is however a problem with inhabiting this madly transgressive world, which reason, wearing its sceptical hat, is particularly well-equipped to pose: what if representing the world in this way is to get the world wrong? I can of course immediately detect the depressive cloud descending on my audience at prospect of reinstating the authority of rational discourse. Surely, you may be asking, I am not going to propose something so tediously wayward as the solecism of re-reading Proust through the prism of analytical philosophy, infelicitous speech-acts, and endless wittering about the necessary and sufficient conditions of the truth-values of propositions and so on. Surely not a pseudo-Fregean reading of Proust, which might have the virtue of novelty but only in the way the insane can be novel. Fear not, but if you are reluctant to take me at my word, we might evoke here another history and another tradition, the history and tradition from which Proust derives, as the writer positioned, in Antoine Compagnon’s striking phrase, ‘entre deux siècles’4 that is to say, the very heartland of the dislodging of reason by metaphor, the logical by the analogical, in the aesthetic thought of the nineteenth-century romantics and post-romantics. The nineteenth-century celebration of metaphor was nevertheless shadowed by anxiety as to its grounds. There was the worry of Coleridge and Baudelaire over the border between imagination and mere fancy, a worry which elsewhere in the writings of both and several of their contemporaries extends to positing unregulated catachresis as a form of ‘abuse,’ on a spectrum which includes the deviant, the fantastical, the unintelligible, and whose extreme point lies in the identification
4 Antoine Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989).
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of unlicensed metaphor wit, precisely, the discourse of madness and delirium, in which the subject is deemed to have lost all stable cognitive relationship with the surrounding world – what Keats called ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.’5 We already have of course a widely influential form of sceptical thought working in and on the tradition that links romanticism and Proust, and which is quite outside, even fiercely opposed to the idiom of the analytical philosophers, namely de Man; and this is perhaps the moment to clarify the grounds on which the case here differs from de Man’s. It turns, precisely, on the category of ‘grounds.’ A full elaboration of this would require trekking through the badlands of theory. Theories of metaphor are so numerous as to be almost too numerous to mention. A crude summary (here I follow the philosopher Bernard Harrison) would distinguish two intellectual tribes, the designationists and the translationists.6 Those (broadly in the philosophical tradition running from Locke to Frege) who hold to designation theories of meaning usually have a very hard time with metaphor or alternatively give metaphor a very hard time. Translationists, on the other hand, who place metaphor centre stage (playing with the ‘trans’ in the morphological structure of ‘meta-phora’), usually end up in a form of rhetoricism, the drift of which is towards the claim that everything is metaphor and, by extension, fiction. De Man – one the grandest translationists of modern times – brings this way of thinking to the example of Proust. Proustian metaphor crosses the frontier of binary logic; it suspends the law of identity and difference in function of a grand totalising ambition. It thus violates the logic of Truth as classically conceived (everything in the world is either ‘p’ or not ‘-p’), and hence, from the point of view of the more fanatical partisans of this conception of Truth, is an absurdity. This however is not the point of view of de Man. For him it is not a question of judging metaphor in the perspective of a rationally grounded model of Truth. Rather it is the category of Truth itself that is to be swept into the deconstructive abyss opened up by the truth of metaphor. In the chapter on Proust in Allegories of Reading de Man identifies a force that compels Proustian metaphor to self-deconstruct; more exactly he points to the origins which inhibit and undo its totalizing ambitions, namely its arbitrary and contingent origins. The edifice will not stand because the foundations, the ground beneath it are fragile or rather because there is no ground at all; the ‘epistemology’ of metaphor according to de Man teaches us that there is no ground, 5 John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, p.357. 6 Bernard Harrison, ‘“White Mythology” Re-visited: Derrida and His Critics on Reason and Rhetoric’, Critical Inquiry, 25 (1999), pp.505-534.
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only the abyss in which construction and deconstruction swirl without ever touching bottom, the dynamic tropological space of endless exchange, substitution, translation, which spells the end to all possible groundings, including that of Truth. It is thus less a question of metaphor as truth than of truth as metaphor (metaphor that has forgotten it is a metaphor, in the famous remark of Nietzsche’s that de Man also makes much of). Whether Proust himself actually thought like this (whether his interests can be plausibly transposed to this intellectual idiom, which, as I have previously hinted, I see as belonging more properly to the outlook of radical skepticism) I seriously doubt. Certainly within the nineteenth-century tradition I evoked a moment ago, the worry about metaphor is preeminently a worry from the point of view of rationality. In his essay titled ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor,’ de Man writes rather breezily: ‘one may wonder whether metaphors illustrate a cognition or if the cognition is not perhaps shaped by the metaphor.’7 If ‘one’ here is meant to include de Man himself, it is clearly disingenuous. De Man does not wonder about this at all; his answer is already in place. This may well be however something about which Proust wonders, as did so many of his literary predecessors. To see why and how, we need to return to Elstir’s studio (this time in the company of Vincent Descombes, author of that very remarkable and as far as I can tell seriously under-read book, Proust. Philosophy of the Novel.8 Descombes highlights a particular expression used by the narrator to describe Elstir’s pictorial effects, when he – the narrator – speaks of the ‘effort made by Elstir to reproduce things not as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions that our first sight of things is made of.’9 Here the term ‘impression’ is replaced by the term ‘optical illusion’ and, although in context it seems perfectly harmless, in no way interfering with or complicating the narrator’s ardent enthusiasms, it inadvertently discloses an ambiguity which Descombes dissects with exquisite precision. Recall the passage I quoted earlier, in which the narrator, looking out of his window at Balbec, momentarily confuses land and sea, in a manner that leads immediately into the account of Elstir’s paintings. The latter, you will also recall, are glossed as a form of metaphorical re-naming of the objectworld. However, closer attention to the passage yields some oddities. On the one hand, both the narrator’s perception and Elstir’s mode of represen7 Paul de Man, ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, Aesthetic Ideology, 112 (2) (1997), pp.974-975. 8 Vincent Descombes, Proust. Philosophy of the Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 9 Proust, p.483.
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tation reflect one of those ‘rare moments in which we see nature as she is, poetically.’ On the other hand, the narrator’s perception of a distant coastline as a stretch of sea is described as a ‘mistake’ (‘I had been led by some effect of the sunlight to mistake…’). Prima facie the notions of seeing nature as she is and seeing nature mistakenly sit uneasily one with the other. The ambiguity in fact points to the presence here of two quite different, even competing, conceptions of art, what we might call the impressionist and the modernist. According to the former, Elstir’s metaphorical renaming of the world reflects a perception, an impression (a first impression prior to its correction by reason). According to the second, the metaphorical transformation does not so much embody a perception as create a new object, an autonomous, purely visual, painterly object, unique to the canvas, without referential extension to the world. On this view, Elstir’s suppression of the demarcation between land and sea creates an object that is neither land nor sea but something else altogether, shall, we say, echoing the narrator, a ‘belt of liquid azure,’ a pure zone of colour (here of course we catch the tones of modernism). The object is produced by metaphor; metaphor is the object it creates, a form of catachresis in which the act of naming would be co-extensive with the act of creation (‘like God the father who created things by naming them’). In an art governed by the second conception, metaphor (as object-creating catachresis) is free to behave in any way it likes, constrained only by rules internal to metaphor-formation, since it is an art that proposes not to represent the world but to create a world that is alternative or additional to it. In an art governed by the first conception there are however other, external constraints. Being true to a perception (a first impression) of an object is not the same as having a true perception. It may be that the Proustian aesthetic is not bothered by this little local difficulty, in splendid disregard for the finicky obsessions of analytical philosophers and the like. Nevertheless, the use of the expression ‘optical illusion’ may give hostages to fortune, and serve as a warning sign – even in these early moments of ecstatic encounter with Elstir’s art – that the metaphoric order is fraught with risk. For, as Descombes observes, there is all the difference in the world between painting only what you see (where what you see is incomplete or blurred) and painting what you see as if it were something else. The first is indeed an impression, but the second is a chimera, a case not so much of the eye liberated from the tyranny of reason as tricked and bewitched by a deceptive manipulation of appearances. To be sure, Elstir does not intend a trompe l’oeil. He knows that he is not painting what he knows; otherwise we would have to conclude that he was either a madman or a conartist. But the risk of representing reality through the prism of optical illusions is some form of cognitive derangement, seeing become seeing-as in a man-
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ner that generates errors, mirages, category-mistakes (Elstir himself indeed admonishes the young narrator on the imperative necessity of not confusing dreams with reality). The correction of worldly error by truth is of course one of Proust’s great themes. I want to maintain however that this process also includes, however tentatively and fragmentarily, aspects of the non-worldly aesthetic mobilized to redeem the error-soaked world. The point may indeed implicate the question of aesthetics in another way; that is, the skeptical take itself has an aesthetic as well as an epistemological dimension, to do with generic status of A la recherche as a novel. Metaphorical seeing, you will recall, is equated in the long passage I quoted with poetic seeing (‘seeing nature as she really is, poetically’). Seeing poetically is not the same as seeing novelistically, as Descombes maintains in his interesting attempt, as a philosopher, to gloss what he calls ‘philosophy of the novel.’ Philosophy of the novel is of course not philosophy in the novel, nor is it a philosophical reading of novels. It is the attempt, by philosophical means, to extract the essence of the novelistic. In this endeavour Descombes proposes two criteria: the first is the testing of self by and against the reality of others; the self is not allowed to disappear into a purely private world of pure self-invention, were it to do so, then the text would cease to be properly novelistic. Secondly, the novelistic is geared to the depiction of error and its progressive rectification through time. Both aspects (other-orientation and error-rectification) converge on the narrative of initiation or apprenticeship, of which A la recherche is a distinguished example. This presumably is one reason why the novel has been seen from Hegel onwards as the genre peculiarly well adapted to the prosaic character of modernity, the genre of the disenchanted world. The movement from enchantment to disenchantment is one of the defining patterns of the novel. And A la recherche is no exception. But here the testing of self against the reality of others, the disintegration of illusion under the pressure of accumulated knowledge, is more than just an early twentieth-century reprise of the trajectories of the Bildungsroman. It also includes what has to be tested, corrected, and discarded in the counter-prosaic, salvation-promising discourse of seeing poetically. A la recherche has often been described as a ‘threshold’ work, and indeed the image of the threshold (‘le seuil’) is there from the beginning: the threshold between sleep and waking in which worlds dissolve and are reconfigured with which the novel begins. It is also a threshold work in the sense of trembling uncertainly between an offered aesthetic and a sceptical criticism of that aesthetic, the intimation that behind the enchanted realm of self-making from metaphormaking there lurks what in Le Temps retrouvé Proust calls the ‘illusory magic of literature.’
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Bibliography Compagnon, Antoine. Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989). De Man, Paul, ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, Aesthetic Ideology, 112 (2) (1997), pp.974-975. Descombes, Vincent, Proust. Philosophy of the Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). Harrison, Bernard, ‘“White Mythology” Re-visited: Derrida and His Critics on Reason and Rhetoric’, Critical Inquiry, 25 (1999), pp.505-534. Keats, John, The Letters of John Keats, ed. by Hydes Edward Rallins, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). Proust, Marcel, Within a Budding Grove, trans. by Kilmartin (London: Random House, 1992). Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
(Re-)Constructing, (Re-)Membering Postcolonial Selves Paulo de Medeiros (Utrecht University) If traditionally the emergence of the modern Self implies an act of fashioning unity across time, space, and biology, the construction of a postcolonial Self can only be conceived in opposite terms, as a dissolution of unity, hybridity, dislocation in time and space, multiplicity, in a haunted process of dismembering and re-membering, to which the idealized, unified, bourgeois Self can only appear as a shattered model, unreachable, perhaps undesirable, a caricature at best, a symbol of the wreckage of History at worst. Through a comparative analysis of some salient examples, among which Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Lobo Antunes’ O Esplendor de Portugal, and Germano Almeida’s O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno da Silva, this paper attempts to sketch some lines of resistance to traditional conceptions of the Self that parallel yet also radically differ from postmodern paradigms.
‘Thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio’ Hamlet (I, i, 42)
Postcolonial Selves are always either ghosts or in need to invoke ghosts. Postcolonial discourse, as well as discourse on nationalism, is foremost spectral. But so is the discourse on identity, be it personal or collective, because just as there is no possibility to construct identity without considering alterity, there is no way of assuming identity without memory. And memory, like it or not, haunts. It should be clear at the outset that I am not interested in yet another celebratory exposition on the virtues of postcolonial identity as a merry hybridity that one can embrace as a token form of solidarity with the oppressed. And I hope that it is also clear that in my view postcoloniality is neither dependent on simple chronology nor limited to those societies, which were indeed colonized. As I hope to make clear in the course of this paper, I tend to see postcoloniality as a condition of resistance to oppressive norms of power that can be operative on both sides of the binary colonizer/colonized. Indeed, if it is to be effective it should aim exactly at annulling such a reductive construct, not by forgetting history, but rather by re-membering it and speaking to it so as to re-construct a postcolonial Self that will not be just yet another negative, a reverse double, of the bourgeois Self expounded by the Enlightenment. But perhaps I should have begun by explaining the choice to start this discussion with the line Marcellus addresses to Horatio entreating him to speak to the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. For it is, as might be remembered, with that very line that Derrida has chosen to end his book on Specters of Marx, a book which only apparently is about politics, although it is also about that of course, a book which is above all a questioning of the ethical realms of theory, be it in literary or philosophical
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guise, and a book that exhibits, perhaps more than others by Derrida, a sense of urgency and a compulsion to anchor theoretical inquiry in societal phenomena. The hauntology that Derrida practices in that book cannot just be subsumed under the name of deconstruction and, stretching back to Hamlet as much as it does to Marx, it unfolds a process of questioning certain processes of identity construction and of European anxiety that go beyond its immediate object and I would like to claim for an examination of what can be understood as a form of postcolonial identity and anxiety in Europe.1 Specters of Marx is not only an invocation of Spirits, of a certain Spirit of Marx but via him of a form of analysis and resistance to a certain form of usurpation, of a name, Denmark, but also of Europe, of power. And, without pretending that in that book Derrida makes any approximation to postcolonial issues, it is still worthy of note that the book’s dedication, to Chris Hani, is an indictment both against Apartheid and murderous tyranny, an indictment that starts as if it were just a rhetorical game, ‘One name for another, a part for the whole: the historic violence of Apartheid can always be treated as a metonymy.’2 Just as it should be noted that by choosing to conclude with the beginning of Hamlet Derrida is calling attention not only to the scholar’s special abilities – it was thought that ghosts had to be addressed in Latin – but especially to the scholar’s duty to speak, to question, to speak out: But in memory, this time, of that impure ‘impure impure history of ghosts.’ Can one, in order to question it, address oneself to a ghost? To whom? To him? To it, as Marcellus says once again and so prudently? ‘Thou art a Scholler; speake to it Horatio… Question it.’ The question deserves perhaps to be put the other way. Could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back? If he loves justice at least, the ‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual,’ of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost.3
One name for another, Chris Hani the leader of the South African Communist Party who was murdered in 1993, in place of a new South Africa, but also Chris as the name of his brother Christopher, the name he adopted when he went into exile. Not just a rhetorical game then but still a problem of identity. 1 Much has been written on Derrida’s book, starting with the volume edited by Michael Sprinker that collects papers from a Symposium centering on that book, Ghostly Demarcations (London: Verso, 1999). However, the one article that comes closest to my own perspective, although it only reached me after the Hermes Symposium, is Christopher Prendergast’s ‘Derrida’s Hamlet’ published in SubStance, 106 (34.1) (2005), pp.44-47. 2 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), p.xiii. 3 Derrida, p.176.
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And, although it is much more, Hamlet is also, and centrally so, a problematization of identity: Barnardo: Who’s there? Fran. Nay answer me: Stand & vnfold your selfe. Bar. Long lieu the King.
That is how Hamlet begins in the Folio edition of 1623, with the questioning of identity on the part of the two sentinels, ‘Stand & vnfold your selfe,’ Francisco’s command and question back to Barnardo’s question of who he is. And the answer accepted by both, which is neither a naming of either, but rather a code, is still a name nonetheless, the name of the King, a name for another, ‘Long lieu the King,’ except that, or rather because, the King is dead and only the Ghost will come to speak the truth. Postcolonial texts are also at once problematizations of identity and invocations of a ghost, be it the ghost of history or more individual, particular ghosts, whose name nonetheless stands, or can stand, always, for another. The importance, for me, of Derrida’s peculiar way of reading in Specters of Marx is manifold, but here and now I will limit myself to its bearing for an understanding of how postcolonial Selves are always fragmented and re-membered, both in terms of memory as of embodiment, how the construction of identity in a postcolonial sense is always already a re-construction. In Specters of Marx Derrida also struck another note, one commonly used in the construction of identity, perhaps back to St. Augustine already but in a modern sense at least from Rousseau onwards, the confession, when he admits that the title for his essay had already been announced and printed, and only then did he remember that the Ghost is already there in Marx in the famous opening to the Communist Manifesto: ‘Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa.’ That particular ghost seems to have been comfortably laid to rest in Europe as transnational capitalism has accelerated the process of globalization to the point that even those States that still would claim the name of communism have themselves adapted as much as they could of capitalism without completely caving in, or, otherwise, as perhaps in the tragic example of Cuba, are for the most part in ruins, their promise of solidarity having collapsed from within as much as due to external pressure. But another specter perhaps has risen and that would be the specter of postcolonialism, because, as I would argue, Europe in the present, like it or not, can be said to be a postcolonial Europe, a Europe that is increasingly faced with the results of centuries of colonialism or, even in the case of states such as Germany whose colonial experience was rather limited, with migration issues that parallel and duplicate, perhaps in an even stronger manner, that of the traditional colonial empires. One way in which Europe, or the
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European Community at least, has been responding of late to such pressures is to try to close its external borders, to change its policies, to try to establish its identity in an oppositional manner. However, as so many of the daily conflicts show, the situation is not so simple and clear cut. As I hope to demonstrate in a few case studies, Europe must speak to its Ghost, which is both colonial and postcolonial, or at least that is the task of the scholar, ‘Thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio,’ if one is to hear some of the truth being revealed by memory, in an unfolding of the Self that goes beyond naming the (dead) King. I would like to start by referring to a recent television commercial aired on behalf of a Dutch insurance company, to then proceed to an examination of some images from a Cape Verdean film, and an analysis of some key elements in four novels, two Portuguese, one South African, and one English, all of them relatively recent. The commercial I have in mind, with the title of ‘Schoonmaaksters’ (The Cleaning Women) was one of the four finalists in the 2004 National competition for television advertising. As with most commercials for that company, it provides a brief sketch where invariably something disastrous happens, the implication being that in such circumstances the only solution is to have been covered by the insurer. In this one particular spot one sees two cleaning women in a bus, talking about their men’s underwear habits and then proceeding to enter the back door of a mansion. Once in they are confronted with an enormous disarray, which they assume is the result of a party gotten out of hand, and proceed to clean through the rooms, setting the furnishings straight, wiping away white powder from a glass coffee table, mopping red stains from the entrance hall until reaching the front door. Upon opening that door they see a large police apparatus in what is evident for the viewer a forensic investigation into a violent crime scene, the evidence of which they have just methodically disposed of unawares. The first striking element of this spot is the fact that the two cleaning women speak Brazilian Portuguese throughout the video that has running Dutch subtitles. The representation thus immediately assumes postcolonial implications because it appeals to a generalized Dutch sentiment on migrant Brazilians as being working class, uneducated minions, incapable of grasping what to the Dutch audience is clear from the beginning. On a surface level the video thus reinforces Dutch stereotypes refusing the women any real agency or even subjecthood, in various ways, from the fact that the video first shows us the women sitting in the bus without showing their heads to a crucial mistranslation. In effect, while one of the cleaners kneels on the floor and picks up the mess, she states: ‘Tanto dinheiro e tão mau gosto para a música’ (So much money and such bad taste in music), a charge that reveals not only a class perspective but also an aesthetic judgment. This indictment is however neutralized by the translation that renders it into a much more less charged question: ‘Hoe kun je nou feesten met zulke cd’s?’
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(How can you party with such cds?), something that cannot be justified by a need to shorten the equally short original statement but that does remove its charge. If one looks further into the production details of the spot, one learns that although it purports to reproduce circumstances in the Netherlands, it was actually shot in England by a British director and the two protagonists are cinema actresses who were flown in from Brazil for the occasion. With this in mind it is obvious that the commercial plays with the construction of difference, retaining the original Portuguese and providing Dutch subtitles, which is also an attempt to place the brief spot on a different level, that of the feature film, but that at the same time it seems to preserve that difference, not only neutralizes it by denying agency to the women, but renders them into acephalous postcolonial Selves. If the original dialogue establishes them as capable of passing a negative judgment on their employers through the charge already mentioned as well as the characterization of the children as ‘demónios’ (devils) and the lightly sarcastic reference to the probability of a Dutch woman mentioned by them (the victim of the crime perhaps) having silicone implants, the translation not only fails to reproduce that assertive Self but relegates it even further into the realm of subalternity. The commercial is funny as intended but only at the cost of the voice of those women and thus instead of having the potential to address neo-colonial societal circumstances in the Netherlands it successfully masks them. To briefly see how different the situation can be, I will refer now to a couple of images from a film adaptation of a novel by Germano Almeida, O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno da Silva. Germano Almeida is one of the best-known Cape Verdean authors and some of his novels have been translated into other European languages. Perhaps one should note that the English translation tries to domesticate the subject already in the title, omitting the first name of the eponymous character, Napumoceno, and retaining only the family names, while insisting on a form of exotic difference by preserving the original Portuguese ‘Senhor’ instead of its equivalent, ‘Mr.’ In the novel as in the film, there is a complex narrative structure that from the testament of a wealthy merchant offers pertinent criticism for Cape Verdean society, especially in relation to its transition from a colony to an independent nation. I have already had a chance to analyze this in a more extensive manner,4 so here I will limit myself to focus attention on two images, or rather a sequence of images from the film. Mr. Napumoceno reaches old age without any firm relationship, since the affair he had with his cleaning woman must stop when she becomes pregnant. However, at one point, right after independence, he sees an attractive young 4 Paulo de Medeiros, ‘Postcolonial Memories and Lusophone Literatures’, European Review, 13 (1) (2005), pp.151-161.
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woman and falls madly in love with her. The two make it a habit of taking walks along the shore of the island and, although the film does not deviate much from the book, in this respect it introduces an extra element that is of significance as the camera shows in detail the wreck of a cargo ship close to the beach as background to the two human figures. The symbolism of such an image is hard to avoid, as it immediately represents the failures of colonialism, the rusty ruins of a recent past as Cape Verde only became independent in 1975 and its many wrecks have by now been transformed into one of the key tourist attractions. Beyond that, it is noteworthy that the wreck itself shows an enormous gap as if a slice of the ship had been cut out vertically, with the waves freely passing through it. As such, that ship also becomes a fitting image not only for the stranded colonial ambitions of Portugal, but also for the fragmented nature of postcolonial identity in the wreckage of History. The other sequence that interests me at the moment, and that takes place precisely with the wreck as background, involves a conversation between the two. Napumoceno stares at the young woman who inquires the reason for his behaviour. He answers that he wants to remember her but is unable to do so and once he does not see her, no longer knows what her features are like. Consequently, Adélia, the young woman, proceeds to give him a passport photo of herself so that he will not forget her. But Napumoceno refuses, saying that the Adélia in the photographic image is not his Adélia, she is the Adélia of the other. This brief exchange is significant on several levels. It represents the inability of Napumoceno to know Adélia, or even to understand her, which could be seen as his inability to understand the new post-independence order, a point of view that can be supported with other elements of the novel, such as her sudden appearance right after independence, her absent boyfriend sailor, her refusal to ‘belong’ to him even though at one point she does seduce him. But that brief dialogue also focuses on the relation of identity with memory and representation. Of course Napumoceno is right in refusing the photographic image as being Adélia, because the photo always involves a pre-ordained perspective and angle and also represents a fixed moment in time. But perhaps more salient even is the fact that, intent on ‘owning’ Adélia, Napumoceno cannot accept any representation of her but his, and so the image he would have of her through his infatuation remains a ghost image that constantly vanishes. Adélia does indeed at one point completely vanish and Napumoceno as a result of her loss quickly degenerates into a shadow of himself and dies demented, ceaselessly uttering her name. From these two moments in the film then I would like to retain a meaning for a postcolonial Self that is fragmented, ghostly, and impossible to fixate in space. Location of course is one of the key questions in postcolonial situations. One thinks immediately of the dislocated selves of millions of migrant work-
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ers, but dislocation and deterritorialization cut much deeper into the construction of the postcolonial Self. The problematics of space are at the core of O Esplendor de Portugal, one of Lobo Antunes’ novels that thematizes the postcolonial condition of Portugal and its colonies after decolonization, as Maria Alzira Seixo already remarked. One could go to the very first novel published by Lobo Antunes in 1979, Memória de Elefante, or to its almost double, also published in 1979, Os Cus de Judas (euphemistically but at least idiomatically translated as South of Nowhere) and see a problematization of the postcolonial. In those two novels that treat with a force until then unknown, what for several decades has remained as a silent interdiction in public discourse, scholarly or otherwise, the colonial wars that started in 1961 and lasted until 1974, Lobo Antunes already exposes the fragmentation and shattering of the postcolonial Self, speaking to the ghost of history and giving a voice to thousands of corpses. The narrator of that long, painful, and tortuous soliloquy that is more like a festering wound, is physically back in Portugal from active duty in Angola, but his spirit has never left, never will leave Angola and the experience of carnage. It is noteworthy that already then, the text had to present itself fragmented, cut in two, one almost a repetition of the other, a refinement of the other that tried to cut out any possibility for self-identification of the reader with its narrator. Much has been written on Lobo Antunes of course, and in reference to postcolonialism one essay by Maria Alzira Seixo and one by Ana Margarida Fonseca are of special note. Whereas Seixo extensively lists ways in which several novels of Lobo Antunes expose postcolonial issues, Fonseca directly applies some postcolonial theoretical insights to her reading of the novel, focusing on hybridity and identity, and, following the parameters expounded by Boaventura de Sousa Santos who sees Portugal as a semiperipheric nation and Portuguese colonialism consequently as a second rate colonialism, competently analyzes the novel as a reflection of that in-betweenness. Needless to say, I will be following on some of their remarks but at the same time I would like to point at slightly different issues. Seixo remarks on the problematics of space and time in the novel, noting how the novel’s chapters all set off by a date provide a merging between the diegetic present, a Christmas Eve in 1999, and the past, alternating between narrative voice and consequently also between spaces, between Angola where Isilda remained after independence and Portugal, to where her three children, Carlos, Rui, and Clarisse, left. What I would like to note is the fact that by doing so this novel goes further than previous ones by Lobo Antunes, not only because the time treated is much nearer to our present, but because the text is literally split between Angola and Portugal, yet the effect intended and achieved is to confuse both spaces, to conflate them so that even though their specifities are preserved one can exchange one for the other, and, safeguarding the necessary differences, read one for the other, see the civil
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war that will ultimately bring about Isilda’s death in a most violent manner, as if also taking place in the streets and apartments of Lisbon where her children live tortuous lower middle-class existences rendered exquisitely painful by their own estrangement. Seixo, as I have already remarked, also notes the play of time in the narrative structure, highlighting the fact that all times converge into the diegetic present, that one Christmas Eve when Carlos perhaps feels most the need to have his siblings around him and when he is left alone even by his wife. What I would like to note, however, is how this is not just a simple wrapping up of the novel’s varied times and spaces, Portugal and Africa, the time of colonization proper and the post independence chaos, but rather a way of showing time out of order. It is a time of violence, of physical and psychological murder, a time for ghosts, those of the Africans used for all purposes by the Portuguese colonists, as well as for the ghosts of their infancies, both those of Carlos and siblings as well as of Isilda’s own, a time for Isilda’s ghost, whose death is ignored by their children just as much as her life was, her letters unopened, unread. As in Hamlet’s famous line, to which Derrida so often refers, ‘The time is out of ioynt’ (Hamlet, I, v, 885). Postcolonial time is always already unhinged, the postcolonial is not a condition of independence, it does not come after, as its prefix would suggest, but rather is always there from the beginning of colonialism and as such marks the colonizer as much as the colonized and that is one of the facts that today, more than ever, one needs to look into, so as to be able to address it. O Esplendor de Portugal is a highly complex novel and here I can only isolate one or two points that might be useful towards an understanding of how Lobo Antunes exposes a postcolonial Self not only by deconstructing, in a strong sense of the term, that is by exposing its inner contradictions, the discourse of Portugal as a nation, starting with the parody of the title in its evocation of the national anthem, but also by re-membering and re-constructing those various Selves. The figure of Carlos is perhaps the one that most lends itself because of its concentrated economy of meaning. Carlos is both the first son and the bastard son, the epitome of colonialism and its indictment, fathered by Isilda’s husband on a young black employee and bought from her, Carlos always experiences in the flesh what the marks of hybridity are. The condition of the hybrid has been advanced by many in postcolonial studies, and certainly after Homi Bhabha, in a celebratory gesture as if the hybrid would serve to resolve all of the contradictions of the postcolonial world. It is Lobo Antunes’ merit not to follow on that particular bandwagon, not to make Carlos into a redeeming figure through which the sins of the colonial father might be expiated in good humanist fashion, by not making Carlos into a figure of joyful excess ready to bridge different realities. Indeed, it is by making the figure of Carlos
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one of the least sympathetic, by showing his still open wounds about his mixed heritage, his rejection by a profoundly racist grandmother, the condescending patronizing attitudes of the chief of police who also was his mother’s lover, the constant reminders of his impure identity by his friends, that Lobo Antunes more directly can address the ghost of colonial oppression. Carlos is a figure of a postcolonial Self, exiled from Africa in Portugal, as Portuguese or more so even than his siblings, but nonetheless always haunted, always fragmented, always in a constant state of deterritorialization. All of J. M. Coetzee’s novels deal in one fashion or another with issues of postcolonial identity, but also with what can and cannot be said, and who can speak to it. In his latest novel, Elizabeth Costello, the paradoxes of the postcolonial writer are foregrounded in the contradictions of the eponymous character, while postcolonial writing’s relation to the tradition of European writing, a certain tradition of resistance writing, in the figure of Kafka in general, and more specifically in the figure of Rotpeter, the ape who addresses a learned academy, are equally invoked. But the one novel that interests me most here today is Foe, published in 1986 before the abolition of Apartheid, because of the way in which Coetzee manages to represent the postcolonial Self as composed through fragmentation and because of his refusal to simply, in an act of ventriloquism, assume that he can speak for the Other, that he can represent the Other in a transparent way, while insisting on the imperative, the inescapability of having that voice even if it can only be represented as a silence. The novel problematizes postcolonial interventions on many levels which I think to be well known, so I will only refer in a very abbreviated manner to some of those. As for instance, the fact that in rewriting that classical of European travel writing that is Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee not only proposes an alternative, more contemporary reading but goes so far as replacing it, proposing in fact that we view the rewriting as coming before the writing. Foe is a book about fragmentation and mutilation, the fragmentation of the postcolonial Self and its mutilation perhaps more visible in the figure of a Friday whose tongue has been cut, a mutilation that is equated with a possible castration, loss of speech for loss of masculinity, fertility, and future, but also and forcefully so in the mutilation of the name of the author, Foe for Defoe, a strategy that not only enacts a change in the name that cuts it, but also restores it to its originality, removing its pretense at authorial authority, a name for another. The narrative also in its complex metanarrative and intertextual games substitutes the narrative passed down to us with what would have been before it, Susan Barton’s narrative for Defoe’s novel, while insisting on the impossibility of ever telling the one story that would make a difference because that is the story Friday would have to tell and he has been made silent, only his body can speak violently to us still. The novel has many other elements that would demand attention such as the
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fact that the language Susan Barton first uses in her attempts at communicating with Friday is Portuguese, but I will concentrate my attention simply on its conclusion, since the last chapter, mysterious at it may appear, is also crucial for an understanding of the novel’s goal. If the entire narrative at one level is a problematization of agency, of the right and duty to speak, the concluding chapter is a sort of vision in which apparently Susan Barton enters the shipwreck that presumably had been the object of Friday’s devotion in the island, where she finds again the corpses of Cruso and Friday, and where she speaks to him, to it, voicing the question ‘“Friday,” I say, I try to say, kneeling over him, sinking hands and knees into the ooze, “what is this ship?’’’ The answer, if it is an answer at all, comes as a kind of vomit out of Friday’s mouth: But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday. […] His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.5
Again, there is no celebratory tone here, no heralding of the hybrid as the way of the future, no gleeful self-satisfaction at representing the Other, at giving a voice to the postcolonial Self in a self-appointed contest of who might be more enlightened, more tolerant, more in tune with the dispossessed. But there is also no refusal to face up to the imperative to speak to it, to question, to face the ghost of History and of oppression, of silencing and dehumanization, even as one also assumes one’s own complicity in such a process as Susan Barton does when she reflects on the fact that she herself fears Friday might have been a cannibal. As a way of moving towards my conclusion allow me still to refer to yet another novel, another case study, Tim Parks’ Judge Savage. In it, the author presents the reader with the figure of a middle-aged judge, Daniel Savage, who has been recently appointed to the Court of Appeals and who is an important exploration of the postcolonial Self. Brazilian from origin, he is adopted as a child into an established English family who raise him with a privileged education. As he himself is aware, he is both perceived as black and not, and as such becomes a perfect choice for those who would want to appease their conscience or impress public opinion while safeguarding what are taken to be
5 J. M. Coetzee, Foe (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), p.157.
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established class perspectives. The judge has a double life and the novel makes this evident from the start in the opening phrases: ‘There is no life without a double life. And yet one grows weary.’ As a result of such a double life, of his affairs, especially of his involvement with a young Asian woman but also due to his Court work as the investigation of one of the cases leads him to discover a world he had been shielded from, that of the illegal Brazilian prostitutes along the motorway, Judge Savage becomes more and more involved in the cultural clashes of an English postcolonial society of which he is also a significant part. The novel is full of ironies, including the fact that his older brother, the biological son of his parents, not only seems to symbolize failure and oppression but also, on another level, is much closer to the real conditions of English society than he himself ever was, and the fact that his family name ‘Savage’ is not his, not a marker of his exotic condition, but rather that of his adoptive parents. Throughout the novel, Parks explores the paradoxes and contradictions of contemporary English life at the same time that he reflects on the individual self-construction of Daniel Savage as a figure of tragic hybridity, fully integrated and yet always perceived as other, as foreign. With that in mind it is also interesting to note how the reviews of the novel sometimes assumed that Savage is black, something that one may impute to the marketing strategies of the publisher that included on the cover of the original edition a striking photograph of a black man’s face under a powdered wig, or to a hasty reading of the novel or both, but in any case something that is frequently denied by the text as it remarks on the fact that although slightly darker than other English people, Savage was not remarkably different. Parks, himself a long time resident of Italy, is of course well aware of what it means to be dislocated, but curiously the reviewers often dismissed the book on the grounds that Parks cannot be in touch with English reality, in an essentialist move that bespeaks the extent to which Parks might indeed have gotten close to the problem and dared speak to it. Just as I am fully aware of the fact that the examples I brought here today have all been treated fleetingly, I also think that many others could be adduced. My purpose however was not to engage in full textual criticism of one or other of these case studies but rather to call attention to several points through those examples. First, that there is a need to conceptualize a postcolonial Europe instead of simply viewing postcolonialism as a way of calling attention to neglected African or Asian texts and cultures. Second, that in order to do so one should let go off the opposition between colonized and colonizer, not by forgetting it, not by pretending that those categories do not have a certain validity, but rather by engaging them and paying attention to the moments where they break down, when one no longer can neatly separate the different spaces. This is not an appeal to reject specifity, cultural, historical or otherwise, but rather an awareness that just as the world has been changed through colonialism, the
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change affected and continues to affect both Europe and those regions of the world that were subjected to Europe’s oppression. Third, I would like to call attention to the necessity of considering that the construction of a postcolonial identity, of a postcolonial Self can never just be a question of endowing it with supposedly redemptive traits and hope it will serve as our expiatory vehicle. If it makes sense at all to talk of a post-colonial Self it cannot be neither as a duplication of the unified bourgeois Self issuing forth of the Enlightenment tradition, something which in any case as early as the beginning twentieth century had already been called into question, nor a celebratory hybrid, a reversal that in itself would only serve to reaffirm the validity of the basic opposition and appeal to a basic essentialism. Instead, I am asking for a consideration of a fragmented, fractured, fissured postcolonial Self that may embody the contradictions of History and point, however tragically, to the pressing issues affecting us today. And this, I have also been arguing, might perhaps best be brought about by assuming the imperative to talk to all the ghosts that haunt European societies, ghosts that we might rather wish would just vanish, but instead just grow in power the longer we ignore them, the longer we refuse to talk to them. Close to us, indeed very close to us, at a neighbouring beach, about two weeks ago, on June 10th, the Day of Portugal, which also used to be known as the day of the Race, a mob of what has been reported as up to 500 poor young African people, seemed to have assaulted beach-goers in a chaos that lasted two hours. The media sensationalized the incident and only afterwards was it possible for the Police to discern that much of it had been efabulated. And just last Saturday there was a demonstration of the ultra-right in the streets of Lisbon that ended with violent confrontations, in which one could read signs calling for the expulsion of immigrants. You do not need me to remind you that these are not isolated events as their incidence throughout Europe has been on the rise. The Portuguese press has been recently running series of alarming stories highlighting the discriminatory circumstances under which Portuguese workers live in England. But the back cover story of the influential newspaper Público from 20th June, 2005, concerns rather the story of an adolescent born in Africa and left in Portugal by his parents, who has grown up without any legal identity at all, so that he would not even qualify for adoption, a case similar to many others. His ghostly existence as no one knows where and when he was born, and he of course cannot remember, is yet another postcolonial identity. When one stops to ponder incidents like these, one ought to be able to think as well on what one’s position entails, what the role of the humanities is and can be, indeed one ought to take on Marcello’s injunction, reiterated by Derrida, carried on by the writers I briefly discussed, and make it one’s own: Thou art a scholar. You are scholars. Speak to it.
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Bibliography Almeida, Germano, O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno da Silva Araújo (Lisboa: Caminho, 1991). ——, The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araujo, trans. by Sheila Glaser (New York: New Directions, 2004). Coetzee, J. M., Foe (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986; repr. London: Penguin Books, 1987). ——, Elizabeth Costello (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003). Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York, London: Routledge, 1994). Fonseca, Ana Margarida, ‘Identidades Impuras – Uma Leitura Pós-colonial de O Esplendor de Portugal’, in A Escrita e o Mundo em António Lobo Antunes, ed. by Eunice Cabral, Carlos J. F. Jorge, and Christine Zurbach (Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2003). Lobo Antunes, António, Memória de Elefante (Lisboa: Vega, 1979). ——, O Esplendor de Portugal (Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 1997). ——, Os Cus de Judas (Lisboa: Vega, 1979). ——, South of Nowhere, trans. by Elizabeth Lowe (New York: Random House, 1983). Medeiros, Paulo de, ‘Postcolonial Memories and Lusophone Literatures’, European Review, 13 (1) (2005), pp.151-161. Parks, Tim, Judge Savage (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003). Pereira, Ana Cristina, ‘João foi resgatado à deliquência aos oito anos e esteve seis à espera de registo’, Público, 20 June 2005, p.44. Prendergast, Christopher, ‘Derrida’s Hamlet’, SubStance, 106 (34.1) (2005), pp.44-47. Seixo, Maria Alzira, Os Romances de António Lobo Antunes: Análise, interpretação, resumos e guiões de leitura (Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2002). Shakespeare, William, Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. by G. B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968)
[accessed 12 March 2007]. ‘Schoonmaaksters’, dir. by Nicholas Barker (2004) [accessed 12 March 2007]. Sprinker, Michael, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London, New York: Verso, 1999). ‘Testamento. Dir. Francisco Manso. Co-production: Cape Verde, Portugal, Brazil, 1998’.
‘Doing Identity’ in Fiction: Identity Construction as a Dialogue between Individuals and Cultural Narratives Aleksandra Podsiadlik (University of Giessen) The present paper examines the process of narrative identity construction as represented in Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996). Focusing on the thematic level of the novel, the study investigates into the performative and dialogic nature of narrative identity construction. The protagonist’s acts of narration throughout the novel and her struggle over the meaning of her experience are viewed as a process of ‘doing identity.’ As an act of ‘doing,’ narrative is a site where identity is constructed through a dialogic process. The paper analyzes the dialogue between individual and various cultural narratives (in Doyle’s case, especially conservative narratives of gender). Simultaneously, ways in which formal features of the novel corroborate its thematic concerns are explored.
The present paper examines forms and functions of literary representations of identity construction, using the example of Roddy Doyle’s novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors.1 The study focuses primarily on the performative nature of narrative identity construction – on ‘doing identity’ – and the role of cultural narratives in the process (in Doyle’s case, especially cultural narratives of gender). Simultaneously, the paper asks questions about the correspondences between the type of identity construction presented in the novel and the narrative strategies employed. In other words, apart from analyzing the novel’s questioning of the patriarchal discourse by means of its content, the paper investigates the ways in which formal features of the novel corroborate its thematic concerns, in this way placing additional demands on the reader.
Theoretical framework The theoretical framework of the paper is constituted by narrative identity theory2 as well as by the concepts of narrative and narrative identity as defined by
1 Roddy Doyle, The Woman Who Walked into Doors (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996). 2 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
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narrative psychology and related fields.3 Consequently, in line with the recent developments within these disciplines, the present study conceptualizes identity construction as narrative identity construction and adopts a performative approach to narrative.4 Although the storied nature of human experience has been widely acknowledged, it is important to realize that telling life stories is not simply about representing identity, but much more about doing it in the act of telling. ‘The performance of narrative’ – Eakin stresses – is ‘integral to the experience of identity.’5 As an act of doing, narrative is a site where identity is constructed through a dialogic process: in the process both ‘reality’ (what happened to the narrator) and the narrator and listener themselves are structured anew as the narrator engages in a dialogue not only with his/her audience, but also with previous stories of the self and with the wider cultural context.6 The emphasis on the dialogical nature of the self is linked to Michail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, which stresses the value of a meaningful exchange among multiple voices both in the novel and in the world.7 However, what one has to realize is that the nature of the dialogues through which identity is constructed is combative rather than cooperative: identity construction 3 See e.g. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999); Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, ed. by Jens Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001). Narrative inquiry has proved to be a supremely productive area for the analysis of identity construction. As Mark Freeman observes, the studies into the narrative model of identity have already reached a ‘post-polemical’ phase concentrating on the particular aspects of the relationship between identity and narrative rather than postulating its existence. (Mark Freeman, ‘From Substance to Story: Narrative, Identity, and the Reconstruction of the Self’, in Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, ed. by Jens Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001), pp.283-298.) 4 In contrast to the referential view of identity, which treats autobiographical accounts as representing a pre-existing identity, the performative view assumes that constructing identity consists in a dialogic negotiation of meaning. 5 Paul John Eakin, ‘What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?’, Narrative, 12 (2) (2004), pp.121-132 (p.130). 6 Compare: ‘[p]erformativity contextualizes narrative within the politics of discourse, that is, institutionalized networks of power relations’ (Kristin M. Langellier, ‘‘‘You’re marked.” Breast cancer, tattoo, and the narrative performance of identity’, in Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, ed. by Jens Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001), pp.145-184 (p.151) ). 7 See e.g. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) or Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995). On the influence of Bakhtin on narrative research in social sciences see e.g. Brockmeier and Carbaugh.
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consists in a performative struggle over meanings, in which telling a given story in a given way in a given context is always informed by power dynamics. In other words, rather than being a peaceful and harmonious exchange, the act of self-narration is a site of power struggle, in which the principles of subordination and domination come into play.8 It is this struggle over meaning that is of special interest for the present paper. The present study in particular focuses on how – in the process of constructing identity – the homodiegetic narrator in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, a thirty-nine-year old alcoholic woman and battered wife called Paula, engages in a dialogue with the patriarchal discourse. In this dialogue she contests and opposes the master narrative of patriarchy rather than resigning and submitting to it: even though the novel seems to present a typical story of a woman intellectually, morally, and sexually subjugated by men throughout her whole life, such a simple account of a passive and victimized individual is by no means sufficient. To productively examine the nature of Paula’s dialogue with discourses of gender prevailing in conservative societies, the present study employs the concept of positioning, widely used in the analysis of identity construction based on oral narratives. There are two senses in which the concept is interpreted: according to the line of research pursued in the work of Hollway, Davies, and Harré, and Harré and van Langenhove,9 individuals are seen as having the freedom to choose between positions offered to them by master narratives. In this sense, individuals are endowed with a quasi-agentive status. The other perspective, advocated by Bamberg10 and adopted by this article, as one directly corresponding to the performative concept of identity, proposes that an individual agentively constructs identity in the course of day-to-day interactions. That is to say, in everyday dialogues through which identity is constructed, individuals actively position themselves with respect 8 On the criticism of Bakhtin’s failure to recognize the element of struggle in the dialogue see e.g. Gabriele Helms, Challenging Canada: Dialogism and Narrative Techniques in Canadian Novels (Montreal, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 9 Respectively: Wendy Hollway, ‘Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity’, in Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, ed. by Julian Henriques and others (London: Methuen, 1984), pp.227-263; Brown Davies and Rom Harré, ‘Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 20 (1) (1990), pp.43-63; Rom Harré and Luk van Langenhove, Positioning Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). 10 Michael Bamberg, ‘Positioning between Structure and Performance’, Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7 (1997), pp.335-342; ‘Positioning with Davie Hogan – Stories, Tellings, and Identities’, in Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of Individuals in Society, ed. by C. Daiute and C. Lightfoot (Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage Publications, 2004), pp.135-157.
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to master narratives, rather than being positioned by them. Although Bamberg focuses mainly on oral narratives, it is possible to apply his concept also to written ones. In the present analysis, the concept of positioning – understood as a discursive practice – is instrumental in the recognition of the narrator’s active role in constructing her identity and renegotiating her position within the framework of cultural narratives (here mainly narratives of gender within the patriarchal culture).
Thematic concerns of the novel: the process of self-narration in a world governed by conservative gender attitudes Paula’s struggle to establish the meaning of her experience and – especially – her dialogue with the patriarchal discourse is brought to the fore by the novel’s distinct focus on producing the autobiographical narrative. The Woman Who Walked into Doors problematizes the process of female identity construction in a world governed by conservative gender attitudes both explicitly and implicitly. It is this apparent concern with ‘doing identity’ as well as its reinforcement by narrative techniques employed in the novel that brings to the fore Paula’s dialogue with cultural narratives. In what follows, firstly, the paper investigates major thematic concerns in The Woman Who Walked into Doors and, secondly, the ways in which formal features of the novel contribute to its contents. Such an analysis allows us to productively investigate into the narrator’s dialogue with the patriarchal discourse. The main goal of the narrator in The Woman Who Walked into Doors is to produce a coherent narrative, which will enable her to understand past events and to provide her with a starting point for the (hopefully better) future. The description of her own suffering at the hands of Charlo is not interesting to Paula as such: it is only at the end of her narrative that the narrator provides the reader with a depiction of her injuries. Otherwise, despite a few accounts of acts of violence which appear in the course of her story, Paula focuses primarily on the act of narration, of writing, and re-writing of her story, and on struggling with her own memory and memory of family members. It is this act of narration as performed in a world structured by oppressive gendered hierarchy that constitutes the major thematic concern in Doyle’s novel. This explicit concern with construction of a reliable story is emphasized by a number of metanarrative comments, with Paula overtly remarking on the process of producing, selecting, and interpreting particular, fragmentary stories and their elements. Throughout the novel the narrator remains deeply concerned with a truthful depiction of facts, struggling to present the ‘real’ story: ‘I’m not [...] [r]ewriting history. I’m doing the opposite. I want to know
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the truth, not make it up.’11 Moreover, narrating her story, Paula does not rely only on her own memory, but attempts to confront it with memories of other family members. One such telling incident is when her younger sister, Denise, confirms Paula’s version of the past. This relieves Paula: ‘Jesus, I felt good. That proved it, what Denise had just said; I wasn’t just making it all up. My stomach landed and took off. I felt secure. I felt sane. It’s a valuable feeling.’12 Simultaneously, however, in the course of narration the narrator becomes more and more anxious about the possibility of re-presenting and comprehending past events and eventually she is able to observe: ‘I’m so wise now, so handy with the analysis. I make it up as I go along. It’s all shite [sic]. I change my mind every day.’13 The above passage reveals that Paula, whereas sincerely engaged in the production of a ‘true’ narrative, remains at the same time skeptical about her possible success, becoming gradually aware of the constructed nature of her memories. Indeed, despite persistent struggle to arrive at an unambiguous interpretation of the meaning of her past experience, for a long time the narrator is unable to produce a reliable story. Instead, the emergent life narrative is highly fragmented, consisting of several stories which concern different periods of the narrator’s life and different interpretations of the events. These periods are her allegedly happy childhood, her teenage years, the first romantic years with her husband Charlo, the history of her abuse, the story of Charlo’s death, and the ‘present,’ in which the process of constructing the story takes place. The stories are in many instances overlapping, contradictory, and competing for the narrator’s attention, and in the process of narrating Paula repeatedly modifies, re-arranges, and (un)covers particular versions of them, often resisting them rather than accepting them. At the same time, the narrator ponders on the choice of words, thus struggling both with her previous stories, previous versions of self, and with language. The narrator’s struggle over the meaning of her experience is further brought to the fore by the introduction of multiple perspectives into the narrative. Thus, apart from the voice of the narrator within the stories, there is a number of other voices and perspectives which often contradict the story of Paula. Moreover, Paula’s narrative is further dialogized through her own direct speech. The quotation that follows is representative of the voices present in the narrator’s consciousness:
11 Doyle, p.57. 12 Doyle, p.56. 13 Doyle, p.172.
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Aleksandra Podsiadlik I’m innocent, completely innocent. But they [the voices] keep coming back. What if? His brother spat at my feet at the funeral: I was to blame. Have you had a drink, Mrs Spencer? The doctor in Casualty. It was settled: I’d slammed the door on my own finger. John Paul [the son] looked at the bruises on my face and he hated me. Did you fall down the stairs, Paula? Did you walk into a door, Paula? What made him do that, Paula? […]. No. No. No! I’m innocent.14
As a result of such strategies of double-voicing, what the reader gets is not a ready-made narrative, but a multi-voiced story-in-the-making, a story negotiated in the narrator’s ongoing positioning with respect to herself and others. The narrator not only engages in a dialogue with her own inner voice, but she also incorporates the perspectives of others (e.g., family members, doctor, teachers, boys), from which she is often unable to distance herself. The following section demonstrates that this unfinished and fragmented structure of Paula’s story and its multi-voicedness is further emphasized by narrative devices employed in the novel.
Narrative strategies employed and their role in corroborating the novel’s thematic concerns Apart from explicit thematizing the process of narrating the story itself and – consequently – the narrator’s struggle to establish the meaning of her experience in the world defined by patriarchal discourse, Doyle’s novel addresses those concerns implicitly, through its highly fragmented, achronological structure, and the repetition of certain passages. This correlation between the thematic and the structural level of the novel reinforces its troubling content, thus further challenging the reader. In order to productively analyze how the narrative techniques employed in the novel contribute to its thematic concerns, it is necessary to take a closer look at the structure of the novel. The Woman Who Walked into Doors consists of thirty-one chapters. The chapters are of different length: the shortest is merely four lines long, others are over thirty pages long. Moreover, the chapters are subdivided into passages of unequal length, and some of the chapters, especially at the beginning of the novel, are italicized, which further highlights the fragmentation of the narrative. Certain chapters and certain passages constitute parts of larger stories dispersed throughout the whole novel. The novel starts with the scene in which Paula learns about Charlo’s death, but in the next chapter she describes her happy childhood. This, however, is followed by
14 Doyle, p.171.
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a very brief, italicized chapter depicting a scene which at first is hard for the reader to place in the overall context: I knew nothing for a while, where I was, how come I was on the floor. Then I saw Charlo’s feet, then his legs, making a triangle with the floor. He seemed way up over me. Miles up. I had to bend back to see him. Then he came down to meet me. His face, his eyes went all over my face, looking, searching. Looking for marks, looking for blood. He was worried. He turned my head and looked. His face was full of worry and love. He skipped my eyes. - You fell, he said.15
The passage, describing an act of violence, is then repeated as a part of a longer chapter dealing mostly with Charlo’s treatment of Paula and the results of it (chapter 25). Such fragmentation of the narrative and its lack of chronology, as well as repetition of particular passages, increase the demands placed on the reader by the content of the novel. Furthermore, in the course of the narrative, a dialogic relationship emerges between particular passages, chapters, and stories. In two cases the narrator overtly presents two alternative versions of the same event in a row (her first pregnancy/the first visit to a new home). Otherwise, the task of juxtaposing different versions is left to the reader, in this way actually involving him in the process of production of the story. The ways in which formal features of the novel contribute to the text’s interest in the narrator’s struggle over the meaning of her experience can be further examined by an exemplary analysis of one of the chapters. For this purpose chapter 4 (14 pages long) has been chosen. The chapter starts with Paula’s recollections of a happy family home, with integrated voices of Carmel and Denise (Paula’s sisters) and Mother (introduced by means of reported speech). The recollections are, however, interrupted by a conversation with Carmel (which contradicts Paula’s version). The narrator introduces direct speech, and there is a change of time, from her childhood to a past conversation with her adult sister. Proceeding with the narration, Paula comments on the conversation and returns to memories of her childhood, which she, however, contrasts with Carmel’s version. This causes Paula to ponder the reliability of her own memories, which is interrupted by a brief conversation with Carmel, followed again by memories (concerning both Paula’s youth and the youth of her own children), metanarrative comments and further interactions with Carmel’s voice, as well as with reported and direct speech of other characters. This fragmentation of narrative, its multi-voicedness, as well as the presentation of different, contradictory versions and a back-and-forth movement in time are
15 Doyle, p.5.
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characteristic of the whole novel and it is they that, alongside with its distressing content, decide about the novel’s success in exposing the ways in which traditional discourse of gender influences the lives of women. As far as the overall structure of The Woman Who Walked into Doors is concerned, it is worth noting that there is also a correlation between the structure of narrative transmission and the plot. Thus the first half of the novel mainly consists of chapters concerning the narrator’s happy memories of her childhood and early youth. The narratives are coherent, though moving back and forth; they contain references to whether the other family members agree or disagree on recollected events; their mood is nostalgic and sentimental. It is only in chapter 18, in the middle of the novel, that Paula finally focuses on the present: she admits that she is an alcoholic, and proceeds with narrating the present, which slowly gives way to an alternative story of the past, in which she actually speaks about her husband’s violence. The chapters are considerably longer, and they are more coherent. Even though Paula occasionally regresses in her narrative and comes back to the happy times with Charlo, she is eventually able to face the truth. The passages depicting violence are integrated into longer narratives, and they themselves are now longer and more detailed. Paula’s alternative narrative, emergent in the second half of the novel, provides a new perspective on the events represented in the first half, allowing the reader to comprehend them as acts of misrepresentation and suppression. The narrator’s long struggle with her account before she is able to admit what actually happened to her mirrors her long period of passivity: it is only after seventeen years of marriage that Paula resists her husband, retaliating and throwing him out of the house. To sum up: the explicit and implicit problematization of the process of identity construction in The Woman Who Walked into Doors not only amply demonstrates that identity is continually ‘done’ in the course of storytelling – continually performed in the endless process of self-narration, but it also exposes the actual influence of oppressive gender relations on female identity. Narratives, as the numerous stories of Paula prove, cannot be treated as ‘transparent windows into speakers’ minds, their subjectivities, or their “lived experience’’,’16 nor are they told in a social void. Instead, they have to be recognized as accomplished in the process of telling – a product of given circumstances (in case of Doyle’s novel mostly patriarchal narratives of gender) which strongly influence their meaning. Thus, following the narrator’s stories, it is possible not only to trace the process of producing the life narrative, but also to examine Paula’s effort to define the meaning of her experience in an environment structured by oppressive gender hierarchy.
16 Bamberg, ‘Positioning with Davie Hogan’, p.15.
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The dialogue with cultural narratives It is through the novel’s focus on the process of identity construction, and especially its multi-voicedness, that the investigation into the narrator’s dialogue with cultural narratives is brought to light: positioning herself with respect to the voices of others, the narrator ultimately positions herself with respect to cultural narratives, thus engaging in a dialogue with them. Paula’s dialogue in the novel can be traced on three levels: firstly, within particular stories there are already signs of the narrator’s active positioning with respect to the master narrative of patriarchy. These encompass Paula’s little acts of agency. Hence, on the one hand, The Woman Who Walked into Doors depicts a woman brought up in a conservative family and society: the voices of men represent a coherent and unified view of the world and impose their vision of the world on Paula. On the other hand, it is important to realize that although Paula is forced to comply with the dominant discourse, she simultaneously uses its elements to, firstly, survive, and, secondly, to negotiate for herself – within its frames – as much freedom and fun as possible. In doing so, she constructs herself as an agentive and creative individual, positioned by the master narrative, but, at the same time, actively positioning herself with respect to it. The narrator’s acts of agency encompass for example Paula’s preventive move of grabbing a boy who continually tries to feel her, which ensures ‘a nice big space’17 between them, masturbating another boy, an important agentive act because ‘I did it to him; he didn’t do it to me. I did it,’18 creative use of language (e.g. she stresses that she not so much ‘masturbated’ the boy as ‘wanked’ him, which entails an important difference for her), or ridiculing the normative positions: Where I grew up – and probably everywhere else – you were a slut or a tight bitch, one or the other, if you were a girl – and usually before you were thirteen. You didn’t have to do anything to be a slut. If you were good-looking; if you grew up fast. If you had a sexy walk; if you had clean hair, if you had dirty hair. [...] You were a slut if you let fellas put their tongues in your mouth and you were a tight bitch if you didn’t – but you could also be a slut if you didn’t. [...] But it stopped when I started going with Charlo. God, it was great. I could have walked around in my nip with twenty Major in my mouth combing my pubic hair and nobody would have said a word.19
17 Doyle, p.39. 18 Doyle, p.41. 19 Doyle, p.49.
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Secondly, Paula’s dialogue with cultural narratives can also be traced in the life-long process of producing particular stories. Thus, narrating the story of her teenage years, Paula stresses the degree to which her life has been conditioned by the environment in which she grew up. In her narration she employs the following strategies: narrative, direct comments by the narrating I, adoption of the voice of teachers, and introduction of dialogues. It is especially through the enactment of particularly traumatic scenes in dialogues that Paula positions herself as dependent and victimized: narrating the events, she loses the distance of the narrating I and becomes the experiencing self, thus further stressing her vulnerability. In this way, narrating the story, she criticizes the narrative of patriarchy by attributing the guilt for her vulgar change in the secondary school and the subsequent course of her life to a large extent to the specific environment in which she grew up. Thus, shifting the responsibility for her failure to the external conditions rather than her own capabilities, Paula attempts to resist the imposed view of herself as innately rude and dull. Alongside criticizing and resisting the master narrative of patriarchy, Paula resorts to the elements of culturally available narratives of happy family life (young and happy mother; strict but loving father; cozy, safe, and warm home full of music and laughter) and of romance (first romantic meeting with Charlo; sentimental music; attractive and caring boyfriend; courting; lovely wedding) in order to construct and maintain her identity as a woman with a happy past.20 To establish it she creates and consistently promotes the vision of her childhood, youth, and early years of marriage as a sunny, cheerful time, suppressing alternative versions. Such a vision constitutes her own emotional truth, which provides her with strength. Continually recognizing and reaffirming the picture, and reemphasizing the validity of its individual elements (especially the image of her father), Paula uses the retellings of the story to warrant her identity as a woman with a solid past, a great childhood, and a nice Daddy. Thirdly, in beginning to tell the alternative story which absorbs all the previous stories and depicts the years of abuse by her husband, Paula attempts to 20 An important corollary is that, through her constant mentioning of films and songs, the narrator establishes popular culture as a frame of reference, which, whereas in certain respects corroborates the rules of men, in others however provides Paula with the possibility to compare and judge the performance of the ‘real’ men (e.g., Paula is critical of her first sexual encounter with Charlo and compares his performance to that of Robert Redford). Nevertheless, Paula does not attempt to resist the narrative of popular culture; on the contrary, she embraces it fully and uncritically. She also attempts to live a life as set by popular culture (e.g., her choice of Charlo, who is an embodiment of the male ideal as promoted during Paula’s youth), and she allows the images invoked by films and songs not only to dominate her imagination (e.g. her imagined lovers) but also to speak for herself (e.g. when the songlines replace her own thoughts and words) and thereby to guide her life.
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position herself anew in relation to her environment, to negotiate a new space for herself. In doing so, she not only ends the lies and misrepresentations, but she also revises her old positions. This involves a change in her self-esteem: positioned for years as ‘the dope [...], the thick,’21 helpless and dependant, ‘a lump, a cow, [...] a useless cunt,’22 Paula slowly realizes that her life-long lack of belief in herself has resulted more from the propaganda of her environment than from her actual performance. Moreover, she stops constantly blaming herself and instead accuses Charlo and – indirectly – the community which, through its indifference, permits family violence. In this, she finally distances herself from the dominating gender discourse, opposing and dismissing it. Paula’s story culminates in the most important act of agency in her life: violent throwing her husband out of the house. It is this act that allows her to position herself as an agent, able to control her drinking, to earn her living and to take care of her children.
Conclusion The Woman Who Walked into Doors examines female identity construction in an environment structured by the conservative narratives of gender. The novel’s focus on the process of identity construction – on the actual ‘doing identity’ – provides insights into the mechanisms of identity construction with respect to cultural narratives, here specifically the narrative of patriarchy. It is important to realize that in constructing her identity, the narrator actively negotiates a space for herself, deliberately using available cultural resources, and thereby positions herself with respect to cultural narratives, while simultaneously being positioned by them. In this way she enters into a dialogue with cultural narratives, processing them strategically, reemphasizing, and reaffirming the validity of particular elements and suppressing others. In order to illustrate the process of identity construction in the context of cultural narratives, the novel employs techniques like meta-narrative comments, internal dialogization of the voice of the narrator and further questioning of the voice by the voices of other characters, as well as a highly fragmented, anachronic, and repetitive structure. The techniques draw attention to the dialogic and incomplete nature of identity construction: it is from the fragmentary and multi-voiced stories that different identities emerge, becoming in turn parts of the new identity of the narrator. Out of the numerous identities, incorporating them, adjusting them, modifying them, rearranging their importance, uncovering the silenced ones, Paula constructs her new identity as a survivor, a strong 21 Doyle, p.27. 22 Doyle, p.174.
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woman, a woman who still believes that she was ‘flushed down the toilet,’23 but who starts to realize that, firstly, it is not her that is to be blamed for it, and, secondly, that she is no longer dependent on others. The new identity incorporates the local identities claimed by the narrator in particular stories, and transcends their contradictions within the overall narrative of change.
23 Doyle, p.70.
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Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Bamberg, Michael, ‘Positioning between Structure and Performance’, Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7 (1997), pp.335-342. ——, ‘Positioning with Davie Hogan – Stories, Tellings, and Identities’, in Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of Individuals in Society, ed. by C. Daiute and C. Lightfoot (Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage Publications, 2004), pp.135-157. Brockmeier, Jens, and Donald Carbaugh, eds., Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001). Bruner, Jerome, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). ——, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). ——, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). Davies, Brown, and Rom Harré, ‘Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 20 (1) (1990), pp.43-63. Dentith, Simon, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995). Doyle, Roddy, The Woman Who Walked into Doors (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996). Eakin, Paul John, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999). , ‘What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?’, Narrative, 12 (2) (2004), pp.121-132. Freeman, Mark, ‘From Substance to Story: Narrative, Identity, and the Reconstruction of the Self’, in Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, ed. by Jens Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001), pp.283-298. Harré, Rom, and Luk van Langenhove, Positioning Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). Helms, Gabriele, Challenging Canada: Dialogism and Narrative Techniques in Canadian Novels (Montreal, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). Hollway, Wendy, ‘Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity’, in Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, ed. by Julian Henriques and others (London: Methuen, 1984), pp.227263.
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Langellier, Kristin M., ‘‘‘You’re marked.” Breast cancer, tattoo, and the narrative performance of identity’, in Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, ed. by Jens Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001), pp.145-184. Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative (London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). ——, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Self-Representation and Temporality: ‘Parabasis’ in Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas Clara Rowland (University of Lisbon) Starting with the analysis of autobiographical discourse in Grande Sertão: Veredas, this paper considers the way linearity in narrative and the unity of the Self may be equally questioned, in the novel, by the relationship between irony and temporality. The situation enacted, where a narrator retrospectively tells his experience after a final revelation affecting the whole plot, raises the problem of discrepancy between two different instances of the same Self/character, with a fundamental shift in knowledge and conscience. The narrated self acts throughout a fictional world that exists only reread and reorganized by the recollection of the conscious narrator who, in spite of his attempts to create a narrative already determined by conscience gained, is unable, through knowledge, to affect the course of the erroneous events leading to the moment of recognition or revelation and to stabilize the identities at play. This reflexive rereading of things past introduces in the text an ironic movement (or ‘parabatic,’ in De Man’s reading of Schlegel) that makes narrative possible only in a state of suspension, where action and retroaction contaminate each other, the first existing only through continuous ‘posthumous’ reconstruction, leading to a model of meaning determined by the idea of permanent revision. Tempo que me mediu. Tempo? Se as pessoas esbarrassem, para pensar – tem uma coisa! –: eu vejo é o puro tempo vindo de baixo, quieto mole, como a enchente duma água... Tempo é a vida da morte: imperfeição. A gente vive, eu acho, é mesmo para se desiludir e desmisturar. 1
The difficulties critics of Brazilian literature have found, during the last fifty years, in classifying the work of Guimarães Rosa since his first collection of stories seem to get thicker, and yet more productive, when commenting on his only novel, the gigantic Grande Sertão: Veredas, published in 1956. The gigantism of the novel is not merely physical: with its publication, a landmark in Brazilian literature has been established. The reality of the ‘Sertão,’ the Brazilian backlands, with its outlaw armies of gunmen (jagunços) ruling the land and fighting for power, has been elevated to a literary landscape, and the expressiveness of Brazilian Portuguese has been taken to unexplored extremes. Therein lays the force of the novel and the problem of its divulgation: Rosa’s work is an authentic challenge to translation. Different readings insist on the wide range of references and cultural elements brought by the polyglot 1 (‘Time that measured me. Time? If people stopped, to think – there is a thing! -: I see pure time coming from below, quiet and limp, like a flood of water... Time is the life of death: imperfection.’); (‘One lives, I think, just to delude and to unmix oneself’); João Guimarães Rosa, Grande Sertão: Veredas (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1986), p.20 and p.125.
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and world-travelled Rosa into his apparently ‘regional’ fiction, establishing a dichotomy between local and universal elements. In that sense, the interrogation of the problems that Grande Sertão raises as a novel has to deal also with its broader reflection upon identity and upon the identity of the novelistic genre, the textual dimension being a counterpart to the main issues conveyed: critics have well sensed the importance of the questioning of genre, exploring the relationship of Grande Sertão: Veredas to epic, stressing the necessary connection of the novel to the Bildunsroman model or referring it to Franco Moretti’s category Opere Mondo,2 thus delineating the state of exception of this novel in relation to literary history and to a nationalist literary frame. However, Grande Sertão, in its intermingling of a modern epic and adventurous ‘chivalric’ plot with the recuperation of two literary paradigms, Faust and the ‘woman warrior,’ is essentially a reflexive novel, where the metatextual dimension is introduced through the tension between oral and written forms, with effects upon the autobiographical model. The multiplication of levels implied in the novel’s construction considerably depends upon its temporal dimension, and upon the constant relation of instability and non-definition of identities to the retrospective attempt at self-representation. Bringing together the general problems of plot and narrative structure with a reflection upon temporality, the novel will enact the inextricability of narration and irony, leading to a model of construction of meaning determined by the idea of permanent revision and rereading of identity.
1. Reflexivity in Grande Sertão: Veredas, established through the autobiographic situation, sets the novel at the crossroads of a questioning of temporality and identity, depending upon the intrusion of irony in the narrative construction. The oral autobiography of an ironic subject will be unfolded in a continuous suspension of definitive meaning that relates Grande Sertão: Veredas to that permanent parabasis Schlegel used as a definition for irony. ‘Parabasis,’ one of the structural parts of Ancient Comedy, had the chorus stepping forward, taking off the mask and talking to the audience about the play, thus disrupting the fictional illusion. However, ‘parabasis’ is a momentary interlude: after the disruption, the fiction is resumed.3 Masks are put down, but only to be used 2 Ettore Finazzi-Agró, Um Lugar do Tamanho do Mundo (Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2001), pp.31-34 and Franco Moretti, Opere Mondo. Saggio sulla forma epica dal Faust a Cent’anni di Solitudine (Torino: Einaudi, 1994). 3 For a structural characterization of the role of parabasis in Ancient Comedy see T. K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy. Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
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again. It is this movement of affirmation and denial of identities, centred upon the special temporality of the interval, that Schlegel prolongs indefinitely making it permanent. Why is irony a suspension that is permanent, and how could that be related to Grande Sertão: Veredas? 4 In the first place, the whole novel, through the use of what Bakhtin, commenting on Dostoevsky, called ‘hidden dialogue,’5 is dominated by the voice of the narrator Riobaldo, an old jagunço who tells his life to a listener who is present only through the narrator’s discourse. From the dash that opens the novel to the infinity symbol that concludes it, it is Riobaldo’s voice that constitutes the novel. If we consider Riobaldo an ironic subject, the whole discourse (and the whole novel) would be permeated by irony, its meaning permanently suspended. To understand how Grande Sertão could be a ‘parabatic’ novel, we have to go back to De Man’s linkage of irony to the discovery of a ‘temporal predicament’ in ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’6 and try to see how the construction of an ironic identity and temporality intermingle in the novel. My point here is that both identity and the possibility of a narrative linearity (upon which the Bildung experience of the narrator would depend) are questioned by the correlation of irony and temporality. But to understand this effect in the narrative situation, one needs to focus on the dimension of time. In Grande Sertão: Veredas, the problem of temporality re-proposes itself at different levels. Ettore Finazzi-Agrò characterized Grande Sertão as the great novel of waiting, of a suspended time after grief.7 Riobaldo is living, as we will know by the end of the novel, ‘after the storms.’8 Old and motionless, unable to travel and to guide the stranger to the places of the past, Riobaldo is first described as someone who spends his time in reflexive activities: thinking, rethinking, rereading, remembering. And it is that experience read and reread, told and retold that the reader will experience through the listener. Being a retrospective narration, the novel sets up a viewpoint that is not spatial – the origin of the narrator’s voice corresponds to a spatial void – but essentially temporal and past-oriented. The rereading of things past that this narrative in4 Parabasis as a structural term from Old Comedy is explicitly brought by Guimarães Rosa into his work with Corpo de Baile, a collection of stories published in the same year as Grande Sertão. Using the term in the classifications of the two tables of contents that open and close the book, Rosa stresses the metatextual and self-declarative role of parabasis and exploits its intervallic nature as a marker for the organization of the book. 5 Michail Bachtin, Dostoevskij – Poetica e Stilistica (Torino: Einaudi, 1968), p.256. 6 Paul De Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p.222. 7 Finazzi-Agró, ‘Aporia e passagem: a sobrevivência do “trágico” em Guimarães Rosa’, Revista Scripta, 5 (10) (2002), pp.122-128 (p.122). 8 Rosa, p.527.
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volves will then necessarily raise issues of plotting and of temporal ordering of the told: the time of the telling (enacted in the fictional situation of co-presence of teller and listener) spreads out over three days – mirroring the actual reading time of the novel; and time is one of its main themes. The narrated ‘story’ is essentially to recover an expression from Peter Brooks’ study on plot, that of the gain of a knowledge ‘that is by definition always retrospective and too late, or perhaps knowledge of the too late.’9 The problem of identity appears, from the very beginning of Riobaldo’s narration, closely linked to that of temporal organization. During the first half of the novel, Riobaldo goes back and forth in a temporal line he is consciously avoiding, destabilizing the sketching of characters and their identities, and excusing himself with a set of justifications that stand for a characterization of the problems of memory and reflexive narration. In the first place, memory is selective and not chronological – ‘I remember things, before they happen’10; ‘There are ancient hours that stayed closer to us than others, of more recent date.’11 Secondly, this movement is reciprocal: not only does memory change the relations between the events, but the past is continuously moving – ‘Telling is very, very difficult. Not because of the years that passed. But because of the cleverness that certain past things have – to balance, to move from their places.’12 Furthermore, the subject looking back upon his life finds a correspondence between the segments of time and those of the self, thus denying unity in the perception of the past: ‘Each living moment that I really had, of strong joy or suffering, each of these times I see now it was like I were a different person!’13 The difficulty of telling, which echoes the danger of living used as a leitmotiv throughout the novel, depends on instability: instability of the thread that instead of uniting the self in a linear process of configuration divides it and forces it to deal with multiplicity; instability of the spatial relations between segments of time; instability of empirical and factual experience, now accessible only through a reconfiguration that implies an act of plotting, of shaping, of retroactive rereading that resists chronological threads. One could wonder whether this reshaping of the past gives the narration a stable viewpoint, an identity that would retrospectively unite the narrator as a whole. Although, from the elements pointed out, the ‘moving world’ the narrator has to face would seem to impose itself, Riobaldo’s late immobility could 9 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p.53. 10 Rosa, p.22. 11 Rosa, p.82. 12 Rosa, p.159. 13 Rosa, p.82.
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be understood as a safe ground for such a rereading, relegating instability to the past and synthesizing it in a stable point of reunion of disperse threads. Retrospection, however, is always accompanied by attempts at retroaction throughout the text. In fact, the claim for reconfiguration of things past seems to affect his own present identity, in a continuous denial that contaminates the immobile subject with the mobility of the experience he tries to sum up: ‘Riobaldo the jagunço. Was it me? It was and it wasn’t. It wasn’t! – because it is not, I don’t want it to be.’14 The temporal markers set out an open process of reconfiguration – the experience told is inaccessible outside language (as we know through the dichotomy mobility/immobility and as we will see when focusing upon the ironic dimension of this narrative) but is not a truly concluded experience. Therefore, destabilization of narrative threads seems to have a negative counterpart: the impossibility of fixing identity either in a totally negative or positive position, identity being non-interpretable even after the conclusion of ‘the story,’ even in the figure of the storyteller, since action and retroaction contaminate each other. At the same time, guilt seems to be at the heart of the narration, and the contractual relationship established between Riobaldo and his listener (a story for a confirmation) is often close to the demanding of judgement or forgiveness. ‘I was guilty of everything in my life, and didn’t know how not to be.’15 What is at stake here? The narrative, vast and erroneous, could be characterized as the interweaving of two main literary paradigms: the faustian pact and the ‘woman warrior’ model – both used as enactments of the instability of the distinction between good and evil. The character Diadorim is the main axis of this interweaving: the beloved companion of Riobaldo, the ambiguous warrior friend who guides him in his choices since an initial encounter in their youth, will engage Riobaldo in a chivalric quest for the revenge of his father Joca Ramiro. The chivalric reference makes more sense when the plot is revealed to be quoting the many medieval legends of woman warriors. Revenge is obtained, for Riobaldo, at a high price: a supposed pact with the devil will grant him strength and leadership, but will also be linked to Diadorim’s death. Diadorim dies fighting the killer of his/her father and it is only when facing the dead body (like Tancredi with Tasso’s Clorinda) that Riobaldo realizes the disguise of the woman warrior. This final revelation, the recognition of Diadorim’s true sex, however, works as such not only for the Riobaldo/object of the narrative – but also for the listener and to us readers. Riobaldo the narrator, as a teller who talks from the standpoint of conscience, will keep his secret until the last. Two questions 14 Rosa, p.187. 15 Rosa, p.251.
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here: first, we have a clear discrepancy between the subject and the object of representation, enacted through the tragic shift in knowledge – ‘If I knew then what I later came to know’16 or ‘what leads us to bad strange action is that we are close to what belongs to us, as of right, and we do not know it, do not know it, do not know it!’17 –, the knowledge of the too late that Peter Brooks spoke of. Secondly, the effect of surprise that Riobaldo receives through that moment is re-enacted, voluntarily, for the stranger (as well as for the reader). The well-kept secret, from the moment it is revealed, leads necessarily to an act of rereading. The narrative situation gets thus more complex: a conscious subject tells, without overtly revealing his conscience, the events of his life prior to the moment of understanding. In so doing, he is repeating, through the listener/reader, the passage from error to knowledge. The effect of disillusion seeks to reproduce itself, one could say. We could also sense that it is only through the tragic recognition that plot can make sense here. What we see can lead to two different levels: character and reader seem to repeat, through the very plotting of the text, the tension between precarious and definitive meanings that belongs to every reading in its dependence upon endings to reconfigure the whole; secondly, in terms of autobiographical representation, the division of the self through knowledge gained is so evident that Riobaldo has to ‘conclude’ the jagunço Riobaldo before entering the reflexive time of waiting and retelling. Action is terminated with that revelation, but only to begin an endless process of reconfiguration. Action thus gives way to pure language, to a negative topos of speculation and recreation. We can now begin to see how the narrator is put in the position of an ironic subject. Although they both concern identity, these two main literary references – Faust and the medieval tradition of young women going to war to make up for their father’s lack of male children, and ending up marrying the companionsoldier after the revelation of their own sexual identity – bring forth different questions to our text. Riobaldo’s supposed pact with the devil is the culmination of a process of definition of the self; until that moment, Riobaldo struggles to find his own identity, his own name, among the vicissitudes that lead him from one action to the next without real control. The fluidity of his identity is well rendered through the identification with different groups of gunmen and through Riobaldo’s ever changing denominations. He will be, for a long time, the man who ‘is not yet,’ The pact is his first individual and singularizing act, taking him to leadership and victory in the war but also giving him an identity – Riobaldo the jagunço – shadowed by the devil’s control. ‘Life is not even
16 Rosa, p.51. 17 Rosa, p.83.
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ours,’18 he will have Diadorim say, veiling the true motives of the impossibility of their love. The night that Riobaldo spends at a crossroads calling upon the name of the devil is the novel’s foremost point in the affirmation of a need for an identity: Riobaldo wants to ‘be,’ ‘become,’ in a personal struggle between God and the Devil. However, the pact is the central moment of a fusion with the Other, with the main representation of alterity and negativity throughout the novel. Being possessed by that which ‘doesn’t exist,’ that has to ‘divert us with its own non-existence,’19 the result of the void left by the mysterious ways of God’s action on the gigantic landscape of this sertão representing the world, Riobaldo achieves an identity that is, at the same time, a negation of itself. It should not come as a surprise that, in his retrospective narration, to prove that he was not who he was and to prove that the devil does not exist require the same insistence and desperate stressing. On the other hand, it is evident that the revelation of Diadorim’s true sex is another way of reinforcing the instability of identity. Masking and veiling are the main actions associated with this poetic character, being described by Riobaldo as his own ‘mist.’ The shadow of homosexual attraction is part of Riobaldo’s inner struggle, and the dismissal of this suspicion could, as in medieval romances, be reconciled through a redeeming marriage confirming the attraction and the disguise. Only that Grande Sertão’s revelation is posthumous: the problem is, first of all, a problem of temporality. Riobaldo is a tragic character in relation to time: it is, again, a knowledge that comes too late that is at stake here. Identities are rebuilt only to be eternally blocked from a positive fixing by the previous negation that occurred. The tearing down of the mask, being posthumous, is more of an anti-revelation than a revelation: it leads to a void, or to a mask conscious of being a mask but with no true identity behind itself. Riobaldo will say, after the death of his companion: ‘Because I, for such a long living of time, had denied in me that love, and friendship from now on was bitterly distorted; and the love, and her person, she had denied to me. What was I going to want to live for?’20 At the same time, for the reader, citation starts to work. Diadorim as a woman warrior appears to us as pre-determined by an external element, an external literary reference, prior to the narration (in an allegorical mode), and unreachable (the later attempts Riobaldo makes to find the reasons of the disguise end up in failure), at the crossroads of plot and destiny.
18 Rosa, p.133. 19 Rosa, p.273. 20 Rosa, p.536.
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2. The motives of the ‘woman warrior’ and that of Faust intermingled here depict the struggle for identity bringing about a victim and therefore blocking every possibility of resolving characters in stable identities. After the moment of recognition, the tragic character tells his story. This position is a truly temporal one, but let us see now to what extent it is ironic, or where lies the link between irony and temporality in Grande Sertão. In ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality,’ De Man, commenting on Baudelaire’s ‘De l’essence du rire,’ states irony to be a temporal predicament. De Man underlines as the key idea in Baudelaire’s definition of irony the dédoublement proper to those who, professionally, deal in language. The example he comments on can be useful to our purposes: the man who is walking on the street and falls. The comic situation, for most beings, is directed toward others, in an intersubjective relationship. For philosophers or writers, however, a reflexive activity is quickly triggered off, with two beings in presence, almost simultaneously, the fallen and the one who laughs, through a division of the self. Almost simultaneously: the disjunction implies a narrative sequence and a temporal split, before and after the fall. This disjunction is made in language and of language, stating a separation, a distance, from the empirical self that fell. And this split, being also temporal, seems to bring about the idea of a progress, of what De Man calls a ‘progression of self-knowledge’: […] the man who has fallen is somewhat wiser than the fool who walks around oblivious of the crack of the pavement about to trip him up. And the fallen philosopher reflecting on the discrepancy between the two successive stages is wiser still, but this does not in the least prevent him from stumbling in his turn. It seems instead that this wisdom can be gained only at the cost of such a fall. [...] The ironic, two-fold self that the writer or philosopher constitutes by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling (or rising) from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of this mystification.21
It seems evident that the axis of Riobaldo’s narration is this division: the reflexive, meditative re-thinker, through language, knows now more than he knew throughout the action he narrates to the stranger (and knows more than we do). This shift in knowledge, akin to the problems of autobiography as a genre, is enacted through the main anagnorisis that suspends, from the end to the beginning, the whole meaning of Grande Sertão. The fall, here postulated as the ‘death of the sea,’ is the accomplishment of the textual remission that 21 De Man, p.214.
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sets the allegorical structure of the text as one that lingers on a lost origin. After the fall, the story in itself is over, as the narrator stresses in the definite series of sentences that concludes the last battle of the book: ‘Here the story completed itself./ Here, the story completed./ Here the story completes.’22 Divided from action, Riobaldo will only tell and retell his tale – and retell it through a plotting that will have to submit itself to the ‘original’ plot – recreating, for the reader, for the listener, the same effect of demystification; reconstructing the mystification of the ‘mist’ of Diadorim, his mask, only to tear it down again with the same effect. We see now that representation of the past, reorganized into a non-chronological sequence, depends upon the light shed by the end of the tale. However, the more Riobaldo establishes his narration as retroactive rereading, the more the literary and ‘theological’ plot – the action that necessarily leads to a fall – will impose itself upon its narration. Riobaldo’s ordering of his tale will give way to the repetition of that other, predetermined plot: death and revelation. Conscience gained is then a central element of distance, of discrepancy and superiority of the old Riobaldo over the jagunço who knew not, as he himself incessantly repeats, what he got to know later – but this knowledge, this conscience of the fall, is unable to change the course of events that led to it. Says De Man: Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse in the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world.23
The breaking, through conscience gained, of the mystification and inauthenticity of the empirical self is then continuous and related to the structural irony of the text. In the triangle that focuses the impossibility of a coincidence between subject and object (Riobaldo the narrator and Riobaldo the jagunço) through the not-knowing of the listener/reader, we can see the presence of that suspension, of that breaking of fictional illusion, which Schlegel connected with Parabasis in Ancient Comedy. Parabasis, as a suspension from fiction, framed by fiction, that reveals the fiction’s fictionality only to return to it, represents the impossibility of reconciliation between language and the world.24 Posthumous as it is, Riobaldo’s reconstruction of the past moves in this ironic continuity, in this permanent parabasis condemned to the painful re-en22 Rosa, p.531. 23 De Man, p.222. 24 De Man, pp.218-219.
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actment of the demystification of life and of reading. From the beginning to the end, the narration is ironical because it is posthumous, and identity is divided because of this impossibility to apply the conscience to the past, the revelation to the mask. Back and forth in his efforts to transcend the singularity of his life plot, Riobaldo is forced to repeat the same movement over and over again, and to have his voice repeat the oscillations between veiling and unveiling that will never lead to a synthesis. The crossroads of irony and temporality will suspend the definition of identities – and the identity of the novel itself – in this permanent rebuilding of forms and roles that could be related to the keyword ‘travessia’ – crossing, passage – that closes the novel. The infinity symbol that concludes Grande Sertão is a mark of this desperate, human reflexivity – and the commitment of the reader to this labyrinthine game of rereading, forced, however, to go forth again, to fall, to go down himself.
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Bibliography Bachtin, Michail, Dostoevskij – Poetica e Stilistica (Torino: Einaudi, 1968). Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). De Man, Paul, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Finazzi-Agró, Ettore, Um Lugar do Tamanho do Mundo (Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2001). Finazzi-Agró, Ettore, ‘Aporia e passagem: a sobrevivência do “trágico” em Guimarães Rosa’, Revista Scripta, 5 (10) (2002), pp.122-128. Hubbard, Thomas K., The Mask of Comedy. Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Moretti, Franco, Opere Mondo. Saggio sulla forma epica dal Faust a Cent’anni di Solitudine (Torino: Einaudi, 1994). Rosa, João Guimarães, Grande Sertão: Veredas (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1986). Rosenfield, Kathrin, Os Descaminhos do Demo: Tradição e Ruptura em Grande Sertão: Veredas (Rio de Janeiro: Imago, São Paulo: EDUSP, 1993).
New Man: Marie Kessels’ Inner Portrait of a Writing Self Daniël Rovers (Free University of Brussels) In 2002 the writer Marie Kessels published her fifth book, Het nietigste (Utmost Paltriness), in which she reinvented the personal essay – the cashbook of daily life, as Montaigne once said. Her view of life can be linked to that of Friedrich Nietzsche, a wellknown admirer of Montaigne. Kessels’ ‘will for health’ implies a strong repugnance of the contemporary efficiency ethos that pervades her work place, a kiosk that is part of the privatized Dutch Railways. In her essays Kessels expresses an almost modernist longing for founding a structured self, a principium individutationis.
Marie Kessels could be considered the most unknown author in the Netherlands, despite the fact that her work has always been highly valued by critics and that her novels have been awarded several literary prizes. The reason for this is that Kessels does not give interviews and never appears in public, not even to collect the above literary prizes. She only appears in and through her work, a collection of highly personal, even intimate writings in which the dichotomy between the public and the private is neither thrown overboard nor strengthened, but intricately put forward as the realm in which we give meaning to our lives. In 2002, after publishing three novellas and a book of prose texts, Marie Kessels wrote Het nietigste (Utmost Paltriness).1 The book, classified by the publisher as a novel, a collection of short stories and a philosophical essay, signified a new departure for Kessels. This was observed right away in literary reviews. Critic Tom van Deel noted, for example, in an article in Trouw, that Kessels had somehow found a new form to write in, that resulted in an ‘inner portrait of a writing self.’2 What makes Het nietigste different from the rest of her works is indeed its form, or rather, its style. In Marie Kessels’ first three novellas female narrators extensively describe small incidents in their isolated, peculiar lives. The redundancy that made these novellas sometimes seem a bit tedious is absent from Het nietigste. It is no coincidence that this book – never mind the blurb – is not a novel. On the contrary, the novel seems to have kept Kessels’ style imprisoned for years. Now that her style has been set free, it can deal with a whole range of subjects, most important of which: the subject of the self. In Het nietigste, in a text called ‘Troonafstand’ (‘Abdication’), Kessels writes that in the past years she started to long for a minimizing or blurring
1 Only recently (November 2005) did Marie Kessels publish Niet vervloekt (Not anathemized). 2 Tom van Deel, ‘Graven in eigen geest’, Trouw, July 2002.
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effect of language, for the possibility to linguistically fold up reality so that a parcel would be formed wherein life would beat without really being visible.3 This general notion of ‘life’ is specified in the second and last paragraph of ‘Troonafstand,’ where it forms the core of a definition of literary or verbal accuracy. In other words: a definition of style. Literary accuracy, according to Kessels, should mean: ‘Afzien van zichzelf ter wille van het onaanraakbare, stuwende hart van het leven […] de vrijwillige, weloverwogen troonafstand ter verdediging van de stomme levenskracht, bij wijze van eerbetoon en als teken van overgave.’ 4 (‘To renounce oneself on behalf of the untouchable, impelling heart of life […] the voluntary, deliberate abdication in defence of the mute force of life, as a mark of honour and as a token of devotion.’) Although Kessels purports to renounce her self, she produces at the same time highly particular, individual texts. On the one hand, this can be explained by taking a closer look at her writing, as we will do shortly. We will see that Kessels in fact renounces two specified images of the self rather than her actual self. But on the other hand, the contradiction between the proclaimed self-renouncement and her self-centred texts, one might say, cannot be wholly resolved. To take a closer look at Kessels’ self-renouncing yet self-centred texts means first of all that we should examine the genre in which Kessels is writing. If it is not a novel that Kessels has created, what should this volume, Het nietigste, be called? The book contains some 80 prose texts, in which an I expresses her thoughts and feelings on a whole range of subjects, such as language, sex, work, women, men, tango, and money. If one looks at the length of these texts, all 2 to 3 pages long, one could assume that they are columns, a genre of throwaway (narcissistic) literature, as Dutch scholars Ruiter and Smulders once wrote.5 A column: a short prose text in which an I, not seldom a celebrity, shares his or her thoughts and feelings with a readership. The popularity of columns and weblogs too, especially the more subjective, non-political texts, seems to be a sign of the fusion of the public and the private, as Zygmunt Bauman observes in Liquid Modernity.6 The column, not unlike the television programme Big Brother, somehow forces us to become voyeurs, which can make one at times extremely uncomfortable. But the column is also threatening. Threatening be-
3 Marie Kessels, Het nietigste (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2002), p.141. 4 Kessels, Het nietigste, p.142. 5 Frans Ruiter & Wilbert Smulders, Literatuur en moderniteit in Nederland. 1840-1990 (Amsterdam, Antwerpen: De Arbeiderspers, 1996), p.313. 6 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambrigde: Polity Press, 2000).
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cause we may feel that, reading about all the intimate details of another self, we, too, may be forced one day to tell the story of our sorry selves.7 Het nietigste, however, is no ordinary collection of columns (indeed, no collection of ordinary columns). Although Kessels writes about themes dealt with in the average column, she does this in her own particular way, with style. In the text ‘De geur van de idylle’ (‘The smell of the idyll’), for example, Kessels writes about sex, explaining that she no longer undresses in the company of other persons. This refusal to have sex, so it seems, is almost a coming out. Kessels concludes her text by stating that at first human beings ‘bit each other,’ while later on ‘they became tame and meek.’8 If Het nietigste has to be labelled, then it should be called a collection of personal essays. That is to say: ‘A cash book of daily life,’ as Michel de Montaigne, the founder of the genre, once called it. I would prefer to get to know myself than the self of Cicero, he famously stated in his essay ‘De l’expérience.’9 In this essay Montaigne centres on daily life experiences. He informs his readers that he only makes love before going to bed, preferably standing, and states that he prefers to sleep in a rigid bed, alone, like a king, well covered. One could say that Montaigne somehow wrote about the paltriness of existence. Even the trivia of daily life seemed important to him, such as the kidney stones that were nagging him. He warns us, his readers, that we should not too easily dismiss simple experiences like this, no matter how insignificant they may seem at first. Do not focus too much on sublime or exalted feelings, Montaigne lectures. If someone should ever grumble that he or she has not done anything on a given day, Montaigne would reply: have you then not lived today? Like Montaigne, Kessels evades in her works, when writing about the self, the danger of indulging in sublime feelings. And like Montaigne, she writes about the full breadth of human life, including baser matters like sleeping habits. But when Kessels describes the so-called intimate details (which are evidently not details at all), this never becomes embarrassing or awkward, because her effusions are always related to the other, a readership, a ‘you,’ a ‘we,’ as can be observed in the fragment from ‘De geur van de idylle.’ Kessels avoids the egocentric or narcissist, because she writes without illusions about her self,
7 Columnists, however, seem to have a power that novelists may be jealous of. In the Netherlands, for example, it was a columnist, and former professor, Pim Fortuyn, who almost became prime minister. Fortuyn, running for prime minister as a maverick populist, was murdered on May 6, 2002. 8 Kessels, Het nietigste, p.10. 9 Michel de Montaigne, ‘De l’expérience’, in Essais, texte établi et annoté par Albert Thibaudet (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1930), pp.1025-1078.
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which is always considered as a self among other selves, an inner landscape waiting to be explored. Kessels’ essayistic way of writing should not just be linked to that of Montaigne. Surely the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, a well-known admirer of Montaigne, has also influenced her writing. The German philosopher tried again and again in his works to compel his select readership to pay more attention to the so-called life-enhancing matters, as opposed to all things transcendental. That is to say: things that our religious and philosophical traditions have taught us to long for. Nietzsche founded his philosophy on his own life, or rather, his own health. ‘[I]ch schmeckte alle guten und selbst kleinen Dinge, wie sie Andre nicht leicht schmecken könnten – ich machte aus meinem Willen zur Gesundheit, zum Leben, meine Philosophie…’10 (‘I tasted all good and even trifling things in a way in which others could not very well taste them – out of my Will to Health and to Life I made my philosophy...’), Nietzsche stated in his intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo. In ‘Der Wanderer und sein Schatten,’ he wrote that lack of knowledge of what is healthy is what makes this world such a miserable place.11 The Nietzschean will for health could be designated as the underlying current in Marie Kessels’ works, especially in Het nietigste. In the essay ‘Staan’ (‘Standing’), for example, she explains that she never sits during working hours. While standing, she writes, a human being is much more capable of dealing with stress and of coping with events that are not agreeable. If children were allowed to stand behind their desks in school, they would eventually develop into less frightful and stronger adults: ‘Als schoolkinderen toestemming kregen om achter hun lessenaars te staan, zouden ze zich beslist tot minder angstige en makke volwassenen ontwikkelen.’12 And like the philosopher handling the hammer, Kessels’ striving for health is much too radical to result in sophistry or feel-good philosophy. Het nietigste is not to be placed in the self-help section of your local bookstore. What makes up an important part of Kessels’ personal well-being is the possibility of saying no. It seems to be the condition for a more general (Nietzschean) ‘Lebensbejahung.’ Kessels’ prose is distinguished by a radical negativism. That is to say: it expresses itself first and foremost by saying no. A good example of this basic attitude of resistance can be found in the es10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe, Band 6 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), p.267. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I und II, herausgegeben von Giogio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe, Band 2 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), p.542. 12 Kessels, Het nietigste, p.55.
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say ‘Gedachten op 25 december’ (‘Thoughts on the 25th of December’). In the essay, Kessels describes and analyses her reaction to a neighbour’s simple question: Mijn buurvrouw Aysel (die geen Nederlands leest) belde aan met de vraag haar te leren een draagbare telefoon te bedienen, maar ik kon het niet, ik heb er geen verstand van enz. Nee schudde ik en greep naar mijn keel, een gebaar van verstikking bij wijze van uitleg. Ik liet haar zonder verdere plichtplegingen staan met dat ding in haar hand, misselijk bij de aanblik van het pakket instructies, maar nog erger misselijk bij de gedachte aan de pure goedheid waar zo dringend een appèl op werd gedaan.13 (My neighbour Aysel (who can’t read Dutch) rang the doorbell asking me to explain to her how she could use a portable telephone. But I couldn’t, I don’t have the knowledge etc. I shook my head: no. I grabbed my throat: a gesture of suffocation as a mode of explanation. Feeling sick at the sight of the box full of instructions, I let her stand at the door. And I felt even more sick thinking of that pure goodness, that she appealed for so urgently.)
The self Kessels renounces after having received a simple request, is a particular form of the self. It could be called the Christian self: a wholly ‘good’ and altruistic representation of the self. In several of her other essays Kessels is involved in a battle against another representation of the self in contemporary society. This self could be called the flexible, utilitarian self of late capitalism. Kessels herself defines it as ‘New Man,’ obviously a reference to the socialist avant-garde. New Man is the title of both an essay and the second part of Het nietigste. In this essay, the narrator describes how she is taught to make use of a new cash register in her workplace, a small kiosk, part of the privatized Dutch Railways. Kessels writes about her female instructor who has a mechanical honeycomb smile: ‘Een instructrice voor een nieuw mensentype, grenzeloos plooibaar, de gewoonten van gisteren al weer als ballast van zich afschuddend, ongevoelig voor de foeilelijke tekens op het scherm, voor de schrille geluiden en kleuren.’14 (‘An instructor for a new type of human being, that is infinitely pliable, that shakes off the habits of yesterday like a burden off its back, not sensitive to the shrill sounds and colours, the ghastly design on the screen of the cash register.’) And here again Kessels says no. She explains she did not move and just shook her head, while holding her hands against her body: ‘Ik verroerde me 13 Kessels, Het nietigste, p.179. 14 Kessels, Het nietigste, p.220.
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niet, schudde alleen mijn hoofd, nee, nee, en hield mijn armen strak tegen mijn lichaam.’15 Of course, she knows that in the end she will have to comply with the demands of the instructor, the company, and capitalism, but for the moment she can enjoy her resistance, thinking: ‘I will scratch that smile of your face, bitch.’ Her protest results in a particular, saturated, higher beauty. Kessels states: ‘De tijd tot stilstand gebracht om mijn verzetstroepen te mobiliseren en me niet tot een levend lijk te laten degraderen.’16 (‘Time is brought to a standstill to mobilize the forces of my resistance, to protect me from being lowered to the status of a living corpse.’) The self, so Kessels writes, is threatened with becoming a living corpse. Elsewhere she links the practices of her employer explicitly to those of the former Soviet Union, not seeing or wanting to see that a living corpse is more or less the self that a disciplinary or control society, as Foucault pointed out in his Surveiller et punir, is bound to produce.17 So we see that Kessels in her essays renounces two particular images of the self: the good, Christian self, and the flexible self of late capitalism. However, in resisting these selves, Kessels puts forward, both implicitly and explicitly, another form of self. In a possible reference to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Kessels calls this self the principium individuationis.18 She explains it as a personality-saving force that comes into action when our own uniqueness is being threatened. Kessels writes about the principium individutationis in several images. She describes it, for example, as a bare inner landscape, as a burning sun which makes up the core of her life, and as a mascot that will still stand firm after she has been blown of her feet. Kessels’ effort in some of the essays in Het nietigste to describe an essential or core self could be called paradoxical, since in describing this core self repeatedly, the ‘impelling heart of life’ Kessels said she strove for somehow almost seems to stop beating. Here Kessels shows an almost modernist longing for founding or finding a structured self, exhibiting, one could say, what Freud in his writings, his Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse for instance, calls the ‘Selbsterhaltungstrieb.’19 These efforts of Kessels can and should be opposed to the general outlook of her project, i.e., her lustful, never-ending, disseminating self-analysis, that seems to proceed from the no-
15 Kessels, Het nietigste, p.221. 16 Kessels, Het nietigste, p.221. 17 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 18 Kessels, Het nietigste, p.149. 19 Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, herausgegeben von Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, James Strachey, Studien Ausgabe, Band 1 (Frankfurt a M.: Fisher, 1982), p.400.
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tion that: ‘There is never a final point at which the character can be reduced to the status of an epistemologically accessible essential quality or list of qualities or “properties”.’20 It is noteworthy that the one essay in which Kessels actually deals with another person is in fact the most successful attempt at her stated ‘abdicatory prose.’ The essay referred to is ‘Afscheid van Jesse’ (‘Goodbye to Jesse’). Here Kessels says ‘yes’ for a change, namely to a six-year-old kid called Jesse. I would like to lay the world at this boy’s feet, with a royal gesture, Kessels writes in the opening lines of her essay. A gesture, one might say, that accompanies an abdication. Together with the boy the narrator visits an automobile museum, where he asks her to give him a little toy car. The narrator does not hesitate for a second and grants Jesse his request. But here, at the moment the narrator finally says yes, she is criticized right away by the other, the six-yearold. He tells her bluntly that she obviously is not used to dealing with children: ‘Je kunt wel merken dat je niet gewend bent om met een kind om te gaan, je zegt steeds maar ja…, ja…, ja….’ 21 (‘It is quite clear that you are not used to dealing with a child, you keep saying yes, yes, yes.’) A terrifyingly intelligent diagnosis, Kessels observes, and she considers the child henceforth as her equal. There is no autonomy, Derrida pointed out, without an inscription of alterity.22 It is no coincidence that the essay ‘Afscheid van Jesse’ is the longest in the book. In renouncing herself by saying ‘yes’ Kessels may be at the beginning of yet another style, a new style that always implies a new subject.
20 Thomas Docherty, Alterities. Criticism, History, Representation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p.60. 21 Kessels, Het nietigste, p.187. 22 Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.254.
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Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity (Cambrigde: Polity Press, 2000). Bennington, Geoffrey, and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). Deel, Tom van, ‘Graven in eigen geest’, Trouw, 9 July 2002. Docherty, Thomas, Alterities. Criticism, History, Representation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Freud, Sigmund, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, herausgegeben von Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, James Strachey, Studien Ausgabe, Band 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1992). Kessels, Marie, Boa (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1991). ——, Een sierlijke duik (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1993). ——, De god met de gouden ballen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1995). ——, Ongemakkelijke portretten (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1998). ——, Het nietigste (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2002). ——, Niet vervloekt (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2005). Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo, herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe, Band 6 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980). ——, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I und II, herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe, Band 6 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980). Montaigne, Michel de, ‘De l’expérience’, in Essais, texte établi et annoté par Albert Thibaudet (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1930). Ruiter, Frans, and Wilbert Smulders, Literatuur en moderniteit in Nederland. 1840-1990 (Amsterdam, Antwerpen: De Arbeiderspers, 1996).
Good Intentions, Ethical Commitment, and Impersonal Poetry: The Work of Gerrit Kouwenaar Gaston Franssen (Utrecht University) The Self is a highly problematic notion in modern poetry. Ever since Mallamé’s thoughts on ‘la disparation élocutoire du pöete,’ the poem is considered to be an autonomous object, existing independently of the person who made it. This notion of impersonality has had an important impact on literary criticism: one can think of the doctrine of ‘The Intentional Fallacy,’ or Sartre’s rigorous division between poetry and littérature engagée. This view on impersonality also typifies the reception of the work of Gerrit Kouwenaar (1923). This Dutch poet is considered to be a ‘language-focused poet,’ writing poems that do not represent individual opinions or biographical anecdotes, but merely are ‘things of language.’ Thus Kouwenaar is thought to be an ‘autonomous’ poet – a poet dégagé. In my paper, I will argue that this reading of Kouwenaar’s poetry is paradoxical and misrepresents the political and ethical implications of his work. Using narratological insights, I will show that critics presuppose an anti-intentional intention as the starting point of Kouwenaar’s writing. In doing so, they posit an identifiable Self (equated with Kouwenaar) as the speaking subject of his poetry. I will question this conventional reading, before turning to the concept of intentionality as developed by Paul de Man, which will allow me to show that the Self does play an important ethical role in Kouwenaar’s poems, but not in the manner that one would expect.
Striking similarities between poetic praxis and literary theory tend to stick to our minds, even if they turn out to be deceptive. Take for example the traditional approach to the notion of impersonality in modern poetry. Though the ‘Impersonality Theory of Poetry’ of T.S. Eliot,1 the New Critics’ plea for an objective criticism, and Roland Barthes’ proclaiming of the ‘la mort de l’auteur’2 have been extensively discussed, refined or even refuted, their legacy continues to have a profound influence on our opinions about poetry, its interpretation, and its relation to its maker. Even today, most poets, critics, and scholars still seem to agree that there is a considerable difference, if not to say an insurmountable gap, between the meaning of a poem and the personal intentions of the poet that put it to paper. Yet strangely enough, this almost clichéd notion of impersonality, as I will argue in this article, is permeated by arguments that are in fact closely related to those very same intentions. Using the poetry of the Dutch author Gerrit Kouwenaar (1923) and its interpretation as a case study, I will outline 1 T. S. Elliot, The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1960), pp.47-59. 2 Roland Barthes, ‘La Mort de l’auteur’, in Oeuvres complètes. Tome II: 1966-1973, ed. by Éric Marty (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994), pp.451-455.
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the paradox that lies at the heart of the impersonality theory. By relating this issue to the possibility of literary commitment, I will furthermore show that this paradox has substantial implications for the political or ethical significance of modern poetry. Some readers claim that impersonal poetry can never be a form of littérature engagée, since the very notion of impersonality also implies that any intention to commit oneself to a particular goal or ethical stand can never be an intrinsic part of the aesthetic artifact. Following Paul de Man’s lead, I suggest a revised notion of intentionality and argue that intentions do play an important, ethically charged role in the interpretation of modern poetry.
The case of Kouwenaar At first glance, there is hardly any other Dutch body of work less suitable to analyze in a case study dealing with the role of intention in poetry than the work of Gerrit Kouwenaar. To see why this seems to be the case, it suffices to take a look at a couple of interviews in which this poet expresses his opinions on the relationship between the poem and its author. In 1966, Kouwenaar (referring to himself, significantly enough, in the third person) claims: ‘Kouwenaar himself should not be present in his poetry any more.’3 A year later, in another interview, he states: ‘The poem is what works, I don’t. […] As soon as I have made it, I am not involved in it any more.’4 And more than twenty years later, he is still of the same opinion: ‘I aim at the autonomy of language. Every feeling or idea that is put into the poem, must acquire an independent value by means of the language, apart from me.’5 Many literary critics and scholars have adopted this image of Kouwenaar as a typical author of impersonal poetry. This is hardly surprising, since Kouwenaar’s opinions harmonize very nicely with a well-known tradition of modernist poetry, in which the aesthetic is preferred above the biographic, and fact must yield to fiction. ‘Poetry is not personal,’ claimed Wallace Stevens 3 All translations are mine. Ben Bos, ‘Gesprek met dichur-vertaler Gerrit Kouwenaar. Scheppen is hetzelfde als doodmaken’, in Archief de Vijftigers II. Interviews met Gerrit Kowwenaar, Lucebert, Sydem Polet, Paul Rodenko, Bert Schierbeek, Simon Vinkenoog, ed. by Hans Dütting (Baarn: De Pron, 1985), p.18: ‘Kouwenaar moet zelf in zijn poëzie niet meer aanwezig zijn.’ 4 D. F. Van de Poll, ‘Een gedicht als een dingetje vam “tal”. Proberen een pond suiker in de pöezie te maken’, Het Vaderland, 28 January 1967: ‘Het gedicht wèrkt, niet ik. [...] Als ik het heb gemaakt, ben ik er niet meer bij betrokken.’ 5 Rogi Wieg, ‘Geen goddelijke inspiratie, maar kastjes timmeren’, Elsevier, 16 December 1989: ‘Ik streef de autonomie van de taal na. Elk gevoel, of idee dat in het gedicht wordt gestopt, moet door de taal een zelfstandige waarde krijgen, los van mijzelf.’
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for example.6 The poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé springs to mind here as well; a famous quote of his is: ‘[L’]ouvrier disparaît (ce qui est absolument la trouvaille contemporaine) et le vers agite un sentiment avec ses sursauts.’7 One can clearly distinguish the echo of these two quotes in Kouwenaar’s statements. Yet there is another reason for Kouwenaar’s widespread fame as an impersonal author, namely the fact that his opinions also resonate surprisingly well with widely accepted ideas that belong to the domain of literary theory. The case at hand, of course, is the seminal ‘Intentional Fallacy,’ a notion developed by New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley.8 The Intentional Fallacy doctrine forbids considerations concerning the intentions, or any other aspects related to the self of the author for that matter, to play a role in the evaluation and interpretation of literary works. Wimsatt and Beardsley urged the critical reader to abstain from referring to the inner life of the author by quoting from diaries or reported conversations, for example, when interpreting a poem or a novel. Instead, the reader should focus his attention on the work itself. Admittedly, it may seem strange to summarize this seemingly out-dated article here once again, but in spite of numerous convincing attempts to take the edge of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s argument, literary theory still bears the hallmark of their work. It is telling, for example, that their concept of the intentional fallacy is still included in many contemporary handbooks of interpretation or recent dictionaries of literary terms.9 This dissemination of notions like impersonality or anti-intentionalism through both the interviews with poets, as well as the theories of literary scholars, has had an important impact on the ethical assessment of modern poetry. For if modern poetry is indeed impersonal, it becomes difficult to see how it could be a form of littérature engagée – literature that takes up a standpoint in a particular debate in the socio-political sphere. After all, if the reader can no longer learn anything about the author’s self from the literary work, it becomes doubtful whether this work can be read as a political or ethical statement. It is quite telling, for example, that Benoît Denis in Littérature et engagement points out that the personality of the author makes up the core of the conventional perspective on commitment: ‘On le voit, dans la littérature engagée, 6 Wallace Stevens, ‘Adagio’, in Opus Pasthumaus, ed. by Samuel French Morse (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p.159. 7 Stéphane Mallarmé, Propos sur la poésie, ed. by Henri Mondor (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1946), p.136. 8 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, The Verbal Icon. Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp.3-18. 9 See for instance Chris Baldick, The Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.110; Hans Bertens, Literary Theory. The Basics (London, New York: Routledge, 2001), p.23.
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l’auteur est partout, et cette présence, nécessaire à la validation de son projet, risque cependant d’être quelque peu écrasante’; and Denis even goes on to quote Simone de Beauvoir, who stated that the notion of engagement requires ‘la présence totale de l’ecrivain à l’ecriture.’10 Such an emphasis on the personality of the author can only lead to the conclusion that a quest for impersonality, as one can discern in modern poetry, would make any form of commitment impossible.11 Several critics and scholars have tried to show that this holds true for the work of Gerrit Kouwenaar as well: his alleged inclination towards aesthetic autonomy and impersonality is predominantly interpreted as a turn away from commitment.12
Impersonal poetry, or life writing? Yet one could wonder whether this intertwining of impersonality, anti-intentionalism, and non-commitment does not distort the complicated relation between the poem and the intentional role of the self, thus possibly neglecting the ethical impact of modern poetry. The interpretational problems that arise from this traditional perspective on impersonality can be illustrated by looking at the following poem from Kouwenaar, taken from the collection Entirely Perfect Inedible Peach (Volledig volmaakte oneetbare perzik):13
10 Benoît Denis, Littérature et engagement, de Pascal à Sartre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), pp.43-51. 11 In fact, this is one of the crucial points that Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the forefathers of littérature engagée, brought forward in his seminal text Qu’est-ce que la littérature? See Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 12 See for instance C. W. Van de Watering, ‘(R)evolutie of regressie? Over een stuk Literatuur?’, in Traditie en Vernieuwing. Opstellen aangeboden aan A. L. Sštemann, ed. by W. J. van den Akker and G. Dorleijn (Utrecht, Antwerpen: Van Oorschot, 1985), pp.256-270; A. L. Sštemann, Verzen als leeftocht. Over Gerrit Kouwenaar (Amsterdam: Historische Uitgeverij, 1998), pp.121-145. 13 My translation: Gerrit Kouwenaar, Gedichten 1948-1978 (Amsterdam: Querido, 1982), p.557.
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het brood in de oven verbrandt
the bread in the oven is burning
Het licht is hetzelfde licht of je nu slaapt of je ogen bezeert aan wat je niet ziet
The light is the same light whether you are asleep or your eyes are hurt by that which you do not see
in het boek een blinddoek een ik in een wit maar een zwart maar je zit waar je zat, nog geen speld onder je loep een uitvergroot niks echt als een harige hand en onwaar en je spelt dat er sneeuw valt maar het brood in de oven verbrandt maar je zit waar je zit, in je hand een verwonderd boeket, maar geen hand die het bracht, geen geschenk –
in the book a blindfold an I in a white but a black but you sit where you sat, not even a needle
under your magnifying glass an enlarged nothing real as a hairy hand and untrue and you spell that there is snow falling but the bread in the oven is burning but you sit where you sit, in your hand a surprised bouquet, but no hand that brought it, no gift –
Kouwenaar’s poem poses numerous problems to its readers. Even the simplest questions are extremely difficult to answer: who is the speaking subject of this text? What is its topic or theme? What is the significance of these apparently ordinary items – the ‘needle,’ the ‘magnifying glass,’ the ‘bread,’ the ‘bouquet’? Luckily, the poet himself lends his readers a helping hand. For Kouwenaar may maintain that there is no relation between the poem and its maker, that that does not keep him from elaborating on the biographical sources of his work. About ten years after the publication of Entirely Perfect Inedible Peach, Kouwenaar described the situation that prompted him to write ‘the bread in the oven is burning’ as follows: It’s about my mother. She is as old as the hills, begins to lose the connection to reality, is getting forgetful. She cannot remember if there is something in the oven, if she put on some water for tea. […] That bouquet wasn’t supposed to be there, really, she wasn’t able to place it. Apparently, she couldn’t draw the obvious conclusion that we had brought
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Kouwenaar’s biographical excursion makes ‘the bread in the oven is burning’ much more accessible. Referring to this interview, one could argue that this poem is about the poet’s mother and her increasingly distorted view on reality. That would explain the ‘eyes’ that ‘are hurt’ (of je ogen bezeert) and the ‘blindfold’ (blinddoek). The burning ‘bread’ (brood) and the ‘bouquet’ could be associated with her forgetfulness: she overlooks the bread in the oven, and cannot interpret the ‘surprised bouquet’ (verwonderd boeket) as a gift from her son. The ‘book,’ the ‘magnifying glass’ (loep), the act of spelling (je spelt) can be integrated in such an interpretation as well: they are the symptoms of her diminishing sight. Reading is getting difficult for her; she is losing her grip on language and is thus estranged from her own identity, which would also account for the alienating phrase ‘an I’ (een ik). Interpreting Kouwenaar’s text in this manner even directs the attention to the ethical undertones in this poem, for it is not far-fetched to relate it to the concept of ‘life writing,’ as developed in G. Thomas Couser’s book Vulnerable Subjects. Ethics and Life Writing: ‘the bread in the oven is burning’ can be read as a portrait of a ‘vulnerable subject,’ a person that is mentally impaired and can no longer speak or write for herself. The poet functions as a surrogate voice, talking – Couser uses the term ‘ghostwriting’ – for his mother.15 In doing so, he is performing an important ethical task: he commits himself to her. Yet this reading of Kouwenaar is not unproblematic, to say the least. After having read the above interpretation, a different reader, one that does not want to ignore the traditions of impersonal poetry and the conventions of literary theory, might claim that this reading does not do justice to Kouwenaar’s opinions on poetry. After all, the author himself has explicitly stated that ‘Kouwenaar himself should not be present in his poetry any more.’ In other words, if his work is impersonal, the use of such personal information could be seen as a questionable reading strategy. Many literary critics – in the wake of Wimsatt and Beardsley – would second that. They would urge readers to stay clear of
14 ‘Het gaat dus over mijn moeder. Ze is stokoud, begint de relatie met de werkelijkheid te verliezen, raakt vergeetachtig. Ze weet niet meer of er iets in de oven staat, of ze theewater heeft opgezet. […] Dat boeket mocht er eigenlijk niet zijn, ze kon het niet plaatsen. De voor de hand liggende gevolgtrekking dat wij het hadden meegenomen, kon ze kennelijk niet maken, omdat ze dan moest toegeven dat er iets mis met haar was.’ Louis Houët, ‘Op den duur kan er veel tarra overboord. Gerrit Kouwenaar krijgt de prijs der Nederlandse letteren’, der Volskrant, 25 August 1989. 15 G. Thomas Couser, Vulnerable Subjects. Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p.26.
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such an intentional fallacy and to ignore all information regarding the biographical self of the poet when it comes to the process of interpretation. In the case of ‘the bread in the oven is burning,’ such a hermeneutical restriction has some far-reaching corollaries. Not only does it frustrate the interpretation outlined above, it also neutralizes the ethical impact of the poem. For if one is not allowed to interpret Kouwenaar’s work using intentionally charged information (like statements taken from interviews), it becomes almost impossible to analyze this text as a portrait of his mother. And if one cannot know for sure who is speaking in this poem on whose behalf, one must conclude, it seems, that this text can no longer be considered as an example of life writing, a form of literature that is ‘committed.’
The return of intentions Pursuing this argument further, one starts to realize that there is a strange paradox to be found at the heart of this anti-intentionalist interpretation. It is this: Kouwenaar’s image as an impersonal poet, oddly enough, is based on his interview statements.16 The same holds for his more famous fellow poets Mallarmé or Stevens. Scholars constantly refer to their personal opinions on poetry and quote extensively from their letters, their journals, or the essays in which these poets have outlined their poetical programmes. The argument that the poem should not be interpreted by referring to the poet’s intentions, in other words, is often construed by referring to his or her intentions to write impersonal poetry. The reader that wants to do justice to the legacy of the impersonal tradition, therefore, is caught in an interpretative deadlock: one cannot refer to Kouwenaar’s interview statements, because that would come down to an interpretation based on intentions; but at the same time, it is also dubious to read Kouwenaar’s work as poetry that is intended to be impersonal, because that could be considered to be an intentional fallacy as well. The reader is always at fault, it seems. Of course, there are ways to sail around this deadlock, though these strategies are not undisputed. As for Kouwenaar’s opinions on poetry, one could simply choose to ignore them; after all, the reader is not obliged to obey the author’s reading instructions. As for the restrictions regarding the intentional fallacy, one could argue that it might be possible to make statements about the intentions of the poet without making use of biographical evidence, simply by 16 Most of the prominent Dutch literary scholars refer to statements from interviews and essays when dealing with the poetry of Kouwenaar. See for example Sštemann, pp.39-55; Will Kusters, De killer. Over poëzie en poëtica van Gerrit Kouwenaar (Amsterdam: Querido, 1986); Ton Anbeek, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur 1885-1985 (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1991), pp.252-255.
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assuming that a reading of the text can indeed provide clues about intentions – though these might not be identical to the particular intentions that person who wrote the work had in mind. Wimsatt and Beardsley already hinted at such a possibility: ‘It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an artificer,’ they claimed.17 Ultimately, this line of thought leads to the assumption that there is an implied author at work in the literary work, whose intentions can be reconstructed by carefully scrutinizing the poem.18 On second thought, postulating an implied author turns out to be a deceptive solution. The poetry of an author like Kouwenaar is extremely ambiguous, so it is easy to see that it would not be difficult at all to derive different, even incompatible intentions – and thus several implied authors – from one and the same poem. The real problem is only deferred, then, for it is unclear how one should decide which implied author is the ‘real’ one. In an apt critique of the use of the implied author, Mieke Bal has shown how this concept can be implemented as rhetorical strategy that serves to substantiate and legitimize one’s interpretation: under the guise of an ‘objective’ reading, the interpreter simply makes us believe that he or she is summing up the meanings that are supposed to be intrinsic to the poem, and that these would give us an idea of the intention of the implied author. Yet in reality, such a reading is nothing more than a construction of one possible intention, eclipsing its alternatives. Bal concludes: The concept [of the implied author, GF] allowed projections of meaning by the critics to be unproblematically attributed to the author, thus, literally, authorizing interpretations while obscuring the hand that makes them – the critic’s.19
In order to arrive at a convincing method of interpretation that takes into account the notion of intentionality, one should hesitate to turn to the notion of the implied author; in other words, it seems to me that it would be more productive to redefine the concept of intentionality itself. One might want to consider turning to a broader notion of intentionality, related to the nature of subjectivity and consciousness. In Blindness and Insight, Paul de Man has made an attempt at such an approach. By thinking through the consequences of the work of interpretation as a hermeneutical circle, De Man tries to show that no literary work can be understood without some notion of intentionality – though these intentions have more to do with the interpretive act of the
17 Wimsatt and Beardsley, p.4. 18 This notion is developed in Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 19 Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p.271.
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reader than with the opinions of the author of a poem or novel.20 It is the reader, according to De Man, that presumes an intention when reading and that thus invests a ‘structural intentionality’21 in the work, which connects all its different elements and results in a meaningful totality: The completed form never exists as a concrete aspect of the work that could coincide with a sensorial or semantic dimension of the language. It is constituted in the mind of the interpreter as the work discloses itself in response to his questioning.22
De Man’s suggestion is to shift the agency of intentionality from the author to the reader: it is only the latter’s intentions that one could come upon in the act of interpretation. Such a redefining, that dovetails with phenomenological approaches to intentionality,23 offers the prospect of developing a reading strategy that can tackle the difficulties of impersonal poetry without falling into the impasse of the intentional fallacy; and what is even more important, is that it also provides a possibility to rethink the notion of literary commitment, as we shall see.
An allegory of intentionality and commitment To get an idea of the interpretive consequences of this revised concept of intentionality, we can turn once again to the interpretation of Kouwenaar’s poetry and its ethical implications. Applying the line of thought developed so far to the reading of ‘the bread in the oven is burning,’ it becomes possible to develop a radically different approach. Instead of reading this poem either as an impersonal work of art, or as a portrait of a vulnerable subject (and thus as a form of ‘life writing’), the reader could try to compare the limits or assets of both these different readings and to reflect subsequently on the intentions that he or she invests in the poem when choosing one of them. As a result, the ethical responsibility is transferred – just like the agency of intentionality was shifted – from the author to the reader: the latter becomes aware of the impact 20 One could thus argue that for De Man, intentionality is not defined as ‘individual intentionality’, but as ‘discursive intentionality’ (Jørgen Dires Johansen and Sven Erik Larsen, Signs in Use. An Introduction to Semiotics (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.72-73. 21 Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (New York: Methuen, 1983), p.25. 22 Paul De Man, pp.31-32. 23 See for example Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp.215-221, on the role of intentions during the interpretation of ‘le geste linguistique.’ For a recent study on to the importance of intentionality for phenomenology, see Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.8-16.
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of a particular interpretation and the ethical commitment (or lack thereof) that is the result of that reading. That is exactly, of course, what I have tried to do by confronting the different approaches to ‘the bread in the oven is burning’ in the pages above. Only if the reader becomes aware of the ethical implications of the reading strategy that he or she is committed to, can impersonal poetry achieve its full ethical impact. Yet there is more to it. Not only do the problems posed by the different possible interpretations of Kouwenaar’s poem point to the possibility of commitment, ‘the bread in the oven is burning’ can also be read as an allegory of the interplay between intentionality and commitment in interpretation. That this poem indeed is about interpretation, is not difficult to see: the many words that refer to the act of reading – words like ‘book,’ ‘the white’ (een wit), and ‘the black’ (een zwart), which could be associated with the colours of the book page and the ink, the ‘magnifying glass,’ the phrase ‘you spell’ – already suggest that language and interpretation are the main topics of this poem. Perhaps it is even possible that the ‘you’ (je) addressed in the poem is in fact the reader of this text him- or herself. Indeed, such an interpretation is possible. In the first stanza for example, we find the reader – one could call him or her the ‘Reader’ – of this poem being astonished by the ontological status of what is being described in this text: the ‘light’ (licht) mentioned in the first line turns out to be poetic or fictional light: light that is there (as a word, ‘light,’ on the page of a ‘book’), but not really present (as a light in ‘reality’ is). This uncanny status explains why the Reader is ‘hurting’ his ‘eyes,’ since he or she is straining to see that which in fact cannot be seen. In a sense, the ‘light’ has the same status as when one would see it in a dream, if one was ‘asleep’ (of je nu slaapt): it is there, yet at the same time, it is not there. The amazement caused by the fictional light is even enhanced by the next stanza. Since the Reader cannot see real light, it makes sense that the ‘book’ he is reading is compared to a ‘blindfold.’ Yet, in reading this book, the Reader is confronted with a speaking subject, ‘an I’ (een ik), a voice that seems to speak to him or her. As a result, the confusion increases: how can there be ‘an I’ on the white page, when the Reader expects nothing but darkness, due to the absence of real light? This confusion is reflected in the contradictory phrase ‘an I in a white but a black’ (een ik/ in een wit maar een zwart). The possible explanation that the presence of the ‘I’ is the result of an unnoticed change in the Reader’s world, is rejected: after all, the Reader is still alone with the book, in the same situation – ‘but you sit where you sat’ (maar je zit waar je zat). The unnerving simultaneity of absence and presence is continued in the next lines: even if the Reader would carefully study this text, enlarge it with a ‘magnifying glass,’ so to speak, he or she would not find anything: there
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will not be a ‘needle’ to find. The needle calls to mind several proverbs, like ‘searching for a needle in a haystack’ or ‘you could hear a pin drop’ (in Dutch: een speld in een hooiberg zoeken and je kon een speld horen vallen), and thus the phrase ‘not even a needle’ (nog geen speld) also denotes absence (for nothing is found) and silence (for nothing is heard). The humorous next line underscores this reading: if one actually were to enlarge the text, the Reader would only find ‘an enlarged nothing’ (een uitvergroot niks). And yet, despite this emphasis on total absence, the paradox is still not resolved: there continues to be ‘an I’ present in the text. The voice of the speaking subject seems so real. In fact, the Reader can almost see the ‘hairy hand’ (een harige hand) of the author, writing the very same lines that the Reader is looking at – but again, in reality, there is no hand to be seen (‘but no hand,’ maar geen hand), which is why it can be ‘real’ (echt) and ‘untrue’ (onwaar) at the same time. The only thing that the Reader can do is to ‘spell that there is snow falling’ (en je spelt dat er sneeuw valt): he or she can spell out the words of the poem, but the ‘snow’ implies that this can only lead to more whiteness, more absence, and more silence (which is also suggested by the homophony between the Dutch je spelt and geen speld). The final stanza marks a shift. The bread scorching in the oven might imply that reality is intervening and disturbing the Reader in the process of interpretation. Bread has to be made, food has to be eaten: everyday obligations are forcing themselves on the Reader. Yet, in Kouwenaar’s poetry, bread can often be interpreted as a metaphor for the poem itself.24 If that also holds true for this poem, then this warning – ‘the bread in the oven is burning’ – could be read as an incentive to act: the Reader is urged to consider the poem (‘the bread’) no longer as a process in the making (as something that is still ‘in the oven’), but as something finished, as an object in itself that should be detached from its origins and its maker. The closing stanza supports this interpretation. When the Reader has completed his analysis of the poem, he finds a ‘bouquet’ in his hand – not in the ‘hairy hand’ of the author, but in his own hand (in je hand). The giver of the bouquet is nowhere to be found though (geen hand), and so its presence causes quite some surprise (which explains why it would be an ‘astonished’ bouquet). It is tempting to take this bouquet as a metaphor for the poem as well. That may seem a stretched reading, but on closer consideration one can find a tight net24 Several critics have suggested such a reading in their reviews of Entirely Perfect Inedible Peach. See for example Anton Korteweg ‘Moeilijke gedichten. Gerrit Kouwenaars Volmaakte volledige oneetbare peezik in volmaakte nitvoering’, Het Paroo, 10 June 1978; Jan Van der Vegt, ‘De autonomie van de perzik’, NRC Handelsblad, 20 October 1978; and Willen Roggeman, ‘Poëzie doet tijd stilstaan. Sterke bundel van Gerrit Knowenaar’, De Nieuwe Gazet, 25 March 1979.
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work of semantic relations between the concept of a bouquet and that of poetry. The Dutch word bundel for example, means ‘poetry collection,’ but also ‘bundle’ or ‘fascicle,’ notions that are easily associated with a bouquet. Even more interesting is that the Dutch word for a poetry anthology is bloemlezing, which in a literal sense translates as ‘collection of flowers.’ In fact, ‘anthology’ itself is derived from the Greek anthos, which means ‘flower,’ and logia, ‘collection’ or ‘gathering’; some theoreticians of classical rhetoric even referred to a figure of speech as ‘flos orationis.’25 These etymological connections indicate that it would not be far-fetched at all to associate the ‘bouquet’ with the poem itself. If the bouquet is indeed a metaphor for the poem, then the final lines would read as follows: the Reader, after having read the poem, is left with a collection of poetic words and images in his hand – a fictional, poetic text. Its origins are unknown and its ontological status is unclear. Yet what is even more disturbing is that there is no one to ascribe this authorless text to. Who gave this bouquet to the reader and what were the intentions of the person presenting it? There is no answer to this question, since there is ‘no hand that brought it’ (geen hand/ die het bracht): its meaning and purpose is no longer manipulated by its maker (the ‘giver’). In fact, the poem is ‘no gift’ (geen geschenk) at all. It is up to the Reader to commit him- or herself to the process of finding a meaning in or a use for this present, to make sense of this astonishing bundle of poetic phrases. Interpreting Kouwenaar’s ‘the bread in the oven is burning,’ I would conclude it does not only illustrate, but also allegorize the role of intention and commitment in Kouwenaar’s work. The reader/Reader is faced with different, sometimes even incompatible ways to access this body of work with different strategies that result in the construction of numerous intentions and multiple implied authors. The contradictions and possibilities that manifest themselves in the interpretation force the interpreter to reflect on his or her own intentions and to assume responsibility. That is why one could call the poetry of Kouwenaar committed: it makes its readers aware of the fact that the act of making sense, whether it is the analysis of a poem, of a political manifesto or of a form of life writing, is not the responsibility of the author – who would then present the meaning as a gift to his audience – but that it is a task for the reader/Reader, a task one should commit oneself to in all seriousness.
25 Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der Modernen Lyrik. Von der Mitte des neunzenhnter bis zur Mitte des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1971), p.106.
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Bibliography Anbeek, Ton, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur 1885-1985 (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1991). Bal, Mieke, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Baldick, Chris, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Barthes, Roland, ‘La Mort de l’auteur’, in Oeuvres complètes. Tome II: 19661973, ed. by Éric Marty (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994). Bertens, Hans, Literary Theory. The Basics (London, New York: Routledge, 2001). Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). Bos, Ben, ‘Gesprek met dichter-vertaler Gerrit Kouwenaar. Scheppen is hetzelfde als doodmaken’, in Archief de Vijftigers II. Interviews met Gerrit Kouwenaar, Lucebert, Sybren Polet, Paul Rodenko, Bert Schierbeek, Simon Vinkenoog, ed. by Hans Dütting (Baarn: De Prom, 1985). Couser, G. Thomas, Vulnerable Subjects. Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2004). De Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (New York: Methuen, 1983). Denis, Benoît, Littérature et engagement, de Pascal à Sartre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001). Eliot, T. S., The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1960). Friedrich, Hugo, Die Struktur der Modernen Lyrik. Von der Mitte des neunzehnten bis zur Mitte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1971). Houët, Louis, ‘Op den duur kan er veel tarra overboord. Gerrit Kouwenaar krijgt de prijs der Nederlandse letteren’, de Volkskrant, 25 August 1989. Johansen, Jørgen Dines, and Svend Erik Larsen, Signs in Use. An Introduction to Semiotics (London, New York: Routledge, 2002). Korteweg, Anton, ‘Moeilijke gedichten. Gerrit Kouwenaars Volmaakte volledige oneetbare perzik in volmaakte uitvoering’, Het Paroo, 10 June 1978. Kouwenaar, Gerrit, Gedichten 1948-1978 (Amsterdam: Querido, 1982). Kusters, Wiel, De killer. Over poëzie en poëtica van Gerrit Kouwenaar (Amsterdam: Querido, 1986). Mallarmé, Stéphane, Propos sur la poésie, ed. by Henri Mondor (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1946).
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Roggeman, Willem, ‘Poëzie doet tijd stilstaan. Sterke bundel van Gerrit Kouwenaar’, De Nieuwe Gazet, 25 March 1979. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Sokolowski, Robert, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Sštemann, A.L., Verzen als leeftocht. Over Gerrit Kouwenaar (Amsterdam: Historische Uitgeverij, 1998). Stevens, Wallace, ‘Adagia’, in Opus Posthumous, ed. by Samuel French Morse (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). Van de Poll, D. F., ‘Een gedicht als een dingetje van “taal”. Proberen een pond suiker in de poëzie te maken’, Het Vaderland, 28 January 1967. Van der Vegt, ‘De autonomie van de perzik’, NRC Handelsblad, 20 October 1978. Van de Watering, C.W., ‘(R)evolutie of regressie? Over een stuk Literatuur’, in Traditie en vernieuwing. Opstellen aangeboden aan A.L. Sštemann, ed. by W. J. van den Akker and G. Dorleijn (Utrecht, Antwerpen: Van Oorschot, 1985). Wieg, Rogi, ‘Geen goddelijke inspiratie, maar kastjes timmeren’, Elsevier, 16 December 1989. Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon. Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).
‘For-Getting’ Plural Selves: Narrative and Identity in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore Jan Rupp (Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen) Given that discourses of the ‘re’ – ‘remembering,’ ‘retrieving’ – have come to pervade current debates over narrative and identity, Carly Phillips’s search for selfhood in A Distant Shore (2003) will go some way towards further highlighting this concern. But ultimately the novel remains a fragmented whole which eludes any attempt at synthesizing. As much as inspiring continuity, it foregrounds fissures in the narrative of identity where in order for the self to move on or, quite literally, to survive, previous aspects of identity have to be shed, commited to oblivion. Examining these points of transition, the paper seeks to conceptualize forgetting not exclusively and negatively as destructing meaning. Rather, it explores the concomitant possibility and simultaneity of an emerging presence – the paradoxical movement of ‘for-getting’ to be derived from the word’s etymology. Regarding Caryl Phillips’s perennial emphasis on the complex and continuously transforming nature of (diasporic) identity, this protean dynamic might even be considered a central prerequisite. To account for the proliferation of plural selves in contemporary fiction, and more broadly in a culturally fluid modern world, the dominant theories of regenerative recollection seem far from sufficient. As the paper will argue, they need to be supplemented by a similar focus on the (though not altogether unrelated and by no means binarily opposed) productive strategies of forgetting.
One of the most persistent caveats against our various post-identitarian moments has come from the area of postcolonial studies, more specifically from the ‘area of demarcation’ setting it apart from postmodernism. ‘The current post-structuralist/post-modern challenges to the coherent, autonomous subject have to be put on hold in […] post-colonial discourses,’1 Linda Hutcheon wrote in the late 1980s, when debate on the shared ground (or lack thereof) between postmodernism and postcolonialism was de rigueur. According to Hutcheon, the latter ‘must work first to assert and affirm a denied or alienated subjectivity: those radical post-modern challenges are in many ways the luxury of the dominant order which can afford to challenge that which it securely possesses.’2 While sharing reservations about the Cartesian individual, postcolonialism does indeed retain a claim for individual agency and coherence. Whereas 1 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Circling the Downspout of Empire: Post-Colonialism and Postmdernism’, Ariel, 20 (4) (1989), pp.149-175 (p.151). 2 Hutcheon, p.151. Laudable for making space for a postcolonial agenda in its own right, Hutcheon has been criticized for implicity sticking with postmodernism as a role model which postcolonialism cannot yet, but ultimately will, follow. See Diana Brydon, ‘The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy’, in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. by Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), pp.191-203.
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postmodernism postulates fluid, ever-changing selves, which almost by definition defy any integrated vision, postcolonialism is anxious to restore a sense of continuity in the face of disruption, mending the discontinuity wrought by colonialism, historical marginality, and migration. It is not the ‘‘‘old” autonomous subject [das ,alte‘ autonome Subjekt]’3 that returns in postcolonial literature, but rather a commitment to exploring the intricate, often elusive nature of identity, in which the ‘return of the meaning-making subject [die Rückkehr des sinnstiftenden Subjekts]’4 articulates itself. This article discusses Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003) as a prototypical literary example of the postcolonial quest for identity. However, while the novel reverberates with a staple of recent research into the relationship between narrative and identity – the narrativist theory of ‘storied selves,’5 and the insight from memory studies that such selves are always made in retrospect,6 made ‘whole’ in a process of ‘re-membering’ – it also testifies to a rather different moment of identity formation. This is a moment of ‘excess’7 generated by the ‘biographical fact of a “ceaselessly evolving identity”,’8 by what Caryl Phillips marvelled at in a Guardian article on December 11, 2004: ‘constantly reinterpreting and, if necessary, reinventing oneself is an admirable legacy of living in our modern culturally and ethnically fluid world.’ I propose to call this the moment of ‘for-getting’ plural selves, which is not a strictly ‘nihilistic’ forgetting, but rather that moment in and through which plurality of selfhood might be seen to emerge in the first place. As a hyphenated compound, ‘for-getting’ might not be as immediately successful as ‘re-membering,’ but it reveals a meaning more multi-faceted than the everyday use of the word forgetting suggests. As Harald Weinrich notes, 3 See Ansgar Nünning, ‘Die Rückkehr des sinnstiftenden Subjekts. Selbstreflexive Inszenierungen von historisierten und Subjekten und subjektivierten Geschichten in britischen und postkolonialen historischen Romanen der Gegenwart’, in Historisierte Subjekte – Subjektivierte Historie. Zur Verfügbarkeit unf Unverfügbarkeit von Geschichte, ed. by Stefan Deines, Stephan Jaeger, and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2003), pp.239-261 (p.239). 4 Nünning, ‘Die Rückkehr des Sinnstif tenden subjeckts’, p.239. 5 Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 1999), p.99. For another recent putting of the narrativist case see Jerome Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2003). 6 See Aleida Assmann, and Heidrun Friese, eds., Identitäten. Erinnerung, Geschichte (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999). For the intersection between memory, identity and narrative, see also Birgit Neumann, Erinnerung – Identität – Narration. Gattungstypologie und Funktionen kanadischer ‘Fictions of Memory’ (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005). 7 By ‘excess’ I mean the emergence of new aspects of identity – the surplus of identity content produced each time the existing state of identity is reconsidered by what I call the ‘for-getting’ of plural selves. 8 Eakin, p.x.
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the etymology of forgetting combines two diametrically opposed, to-and-fro movements – a positive movement of ‘getting’ by which something is gained, which is then reversed by the prefix ‘for.’9 Thus, the hyphenated spelling is supposed to draw attention to the possible productive capacities of ‘for-getting,’ to which Rand Richards Cooper, in his New York Times review of A Distant Shore on October 19, 2004, accorded a crucial, even life-sustaining function: ‘his [Phillips’s] novel reminds us […] that identities defy a single, settled view – especially because survival often requires leaving them behind.’10 While referring to different aspects of the identity narrative, ‘for-getting’ and ‘re-membering’ are by no means unrelated or mutually exclusive operations. Rather, the ‘excess’ of identity content produced at one point of the narrative syntagm by an act of ‘for-getting’ may well motivate an act of ‘re-membering’ at a later point, in order to accomodate fully the new identity content produced, or to retrieve that part of the narrative which may have been discarded. This dialogical relationship or interplay needs special emphasis in the case of Caryl Phillips, and postcolonial literature more generally, since the making of identity in the postcolonial arena is only seldom purely sovereign, but frequently forced-upon by outside requirements. While Phillips’s rumination on the ‘admirable legacy of living in our modern culturally and ethnically fluid world’ in the Guardian article quoted above speaks of wonder and amazement, his novels have probed the painful circumstances by which this condition has come about to begin with – how historically identities have come to be plural and fragmented through the rupture of colonialism and dislocation, whether forced or voluntary. These interventions make necessary the telling and ‘forgetting’ of new stories, while at the same time creating a desire for coherence, a desire to ‘re-member’ the complexity and disparity which emerge in their wake. Caryl Phillips’s writing has continuously highlighted this concern to track down and keep track of complex identities, often piecing them together from the shards of history. His first six novels are all historical novels, relentless accounts of the slave trade, the Holocaust, and the pains of migration. A ‘writer of wrongs,’ Phillips has won acclaim for taking on ‘history’s worst injustices.’11 9 See Harald Weinrich, Lethe. Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (München: Beck, 2000 [1997]), p.12. This dynamic can be illustrated further by the OED’s definition of the verb ‘forget.’ According to the OED, the origin of the word goes back to the Old English ‘forgietan,’ which in turn is formed on the Original Teutonic ‘getan,’ whose meaning is given as ‘to hold, grasp.’ The OED’s definition of the prefix ‘for’ is ‘with the notion of passing by, or abstaining from, or neglecting.’ 10 For the productive aspects of forgetting see also Kai Behrens, Ästhetische Obliviologie. Zur Theoriegeschichte des Vergessens (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005). 11 See Donald Morrison, ‘A Writer of Wrongs’, Time Europe, 11 May 2003.
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A Distant Shore, his seventh novel, is the first one to be set in the present, as well as the first one to be set in England since his debut novel, The Final Passage (1985). However, it is a present haunted by racism and the divisive legacy of empire, a time of crisis, unhomely homes, and shaken lives, leaving the book’s two main characters adrift from themselves. A Distant Shore is placed firmly in the tradition of Phillips’s previous novels, as the author himself has observed: ‘These all seem to be the same book, part of a continuum.’12 A Distant Shore presents the platonic relationship between an unlikely pair of protagonists, who are both stranded in a village in the North of England, at what seems to be a dead end on the journey of their lives. Solomon is a refugee from a war-torn African country, whose attempts to make himself a home in England will be brutally thwarted when he is murdered by a group of racist village thugs. Dorothy, a retired teacher in her fifties, has become estranged from herself and her country after a couple of personal blows and shortcomings: ‘England has changed,’ she observes darkly at the opening of the novel. For both Dorothy and Solomon, to speak with the novel’s title, England is a ‘distant shore,’ a place of bleak uncertainty that offers no sense of ‘home.’ This crisis of belonging corresponds to the inner limbo the novel’s protagonists are stuck in. Both have lost a coherent, continuous sense of self, because they have left behind or repressed parts of their personal stories. On the one hand, their identity narratives are expressed and mirrored by the narrative of the novel, a disparate structure that keeps shifting chronology and narrators, a sum-of-parts rather than an organic whole. Since this sum-of-parts does go some way towards restoring a relative continuity, it is also constitutive, or rather ‘re-constitutive,’ of the identities it illustrates. One way of construing the multi-perspectival, multiple-narrator structure of the novel is through its function to piece together identities which otherwise would remain unhinged and incomplete – which makes for telling evidence that ‘narrative is not merely an appropriate form for the expression of identity; it is an identity content.’13 Yet the fissures in the narrative of the novel point not only to pathological moments of loss in want of retrieval, but also to points of transition, to necessary if often painful moments of what I have called the ‘for-getting’ of plural selves. The ultimate denial to Solomon of any meaningful construction of identity – his violent death – is not a result of these identity makeovers, but rather the brutal fact of a racist environment in which plurality of selfhood is not allowed to exist. In this sense, the novel’s disconnected structure ultimately amounts to, and functions as, a powerful form of social criticism.
12 Quoted in Morrison. 13 Eakin, p.100.
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As will be shown in more detail below, Phillips’s A Distant Shore thus explores in a highly complex manner the nature and concomitant problems of plural selfhood; the way it can be accomodated and redeemed by regenerative acts of memory; the need, nonetheless, for plurality to exist and to ceaselessly emerge; and the conditions under which such identity negotiations are at all possible, or doomed to fail. Crucially, these issues are explored largely through narrative techniques and devices, at the level of ‘form as content,’ through the semantic charge that narrative form may take on and through the functions it may thus be subjected to. As Nünning points out, the ‘return of the meaning-making subject’ manifests itself most prominently in the emergence and ‘semantization’ of new narrative techniques, a potential by which literary narratives with their specific repertoire of narrative tools become a prime site for postcolonial meditations on the possibility and nature of subjectivity.14 One of the ways in which the lack of coherence haunting Dorothy’s and Solomon’s stories is signalled in A Distant Shore is through its use of multiple narrators, resulting in a convoluted sequence of homo- and heterodiegetic narratives. The novel is framed by and sets off with Dorothy’s confessional musings, moves on to the third-person account of an imprisoned African illegal, Gabriel, and subsequently inserts a section of tribal violence in Gabriel’s African homeland, narrated by a rebel militia leader known as Major Hawk. The novel then returns to Dorothy, this time in the third person, with a desultory account of her midlife career and marital failings. This is followed by Solomon’s ‘I’ and the muted but tentatively optimistic story of his new life, while utter disillusionment permeates the novel’s concluding I-narration, Dorothy’s gradual recovery from the novel’s tragedies, among them Solomon’s murder. This combination or mixture does not necessarily limit the authority of Dorothy’s or Solomon’s narrating ‘I,’ not least because the heterodiegetic parts use figural narration, a covert narrator who does not rival the characters’ perception. But the very fact that the novel hovers between these different narratives suggests that Dorothy’s and Solomon’s personal accounts do not or cannot give the whole picture. The novel’s temporal structure is likewise disconnected, and continuously interspersed with abrupt flashbacks. Some rough if confusingly reverse chronology is established in Dorothy’s opening and concluding I-narrations, both told at the same point in time when Solomon has been killed and Dorothy, after a nervous breakdown, is recovering from this news in a home. Other than that, however, there is a pronounced non-linear structure, a de facto coexistence of past and present that can be read as signalling trauma. Moreover, there is an extensive and often indiscriminate use of the present tense which serves very
14 See Nünning, ‘Die Rückkehr des sinnstiftenden Subjekts’.
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much the same purpose, blurring chronology. Both Dorothy and Solomon have gone through traumatic events that are thus represented and continue to reappear again and again. The killing of Solomon’s family, for instance, is narrated several times, as is the scene when Dorothy is informed of Solomon’s murder by the police. Some of these events are not only told more than once, but both from first- and third-person perspectives, placing even more emphasis on the pathology of discontinuous selves expressed by the alternation of homo- and heterodiegetic narratives. At the level of characters, in Solomon’s case, the issue of the lack of a coherent identity is complicated even further by his multiple names. He is called Hawk in battle, the civil war from which he escapes to England, while, once in England, he christens himself Solomon, renouncing his original African name Gabriel. The problem of plural selves thus becomes conspicuously manifest, because none of the names comprises all these selves – talking about Solomon excludes Gabriel and Hawk, strictly speaking. While it is true that Solomon’s multiple names are a telling symptom of his plural selves, speaking of ‘Solomon’s several names’ is not, because the self denoted by the name ‘Solomon’ does not have any other names. This lingering fuzziness could only be avoided by substituting ‘Solomon’s multiple names’ with rather lengthy and awkward expressions like ‘the character that refers to himself by multiple names,’ or by putting ‘Solomon/Gabriel/Hawk.’ Even then, however, the more general problem of piecing together Solomon’s plural selves would still remain to be solved. As Rand Richards Cooper noted in his New York Times review of A Distant Shore, which was referred to earlier: ‘How are we to see Solomon/ Gabriel/Major Hawk? As the victim forced to watch his family murdered in a brutal civil war […]? The pot-smoking rebel commander? The shabby illegal held in a British jail? Or the soft-spoken black gentleman in his driving gloves?’ Both Dorothy and Solomon react to their predicament by taking stock of their lives, a process overtly inscribed with the regenerative function of recollection. When Dorothy is admitted to a home after her nervous breakdown, her recovery is explicitly linked to the power of memory coming back: ‘My memory is getting stronger. I think that’s part of convalescing. If so, then it’s a good part for I don’t want to forget things. The people in this place give me tablets […], but although they don’t help me to sleep, they help me to remember.’15 In a later passage, the regenerative, all-embracing function of remembering is spelt out even more clearly: ‘The unit, as they like to call it […], is supposed to be a place that’s different from out there. […] Somewhere where you lick
15 Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (London: Vintage 2004 [2003]), p.71. Further page references to this edition of Phillips’s novel will be given directly in the text.
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your wounds and gather some strength […]. A place where you can learn to remember, and therefore understand your life’ (p.312). Solomon moves along a similar road to recovery, because he too puts his loss of a coherent self down to forgetting. In a passage that again testifies to the confusion of names discussed earlier, he observes that: ‘I was a coward who had trained himself to forget. […] I was no longer ‘Hawk.’ I was no longer my mother’s Gabriel. […] It was Solomon who was lying in a warm bed in a strange room among these kind people. It was Solomon. I was Solomon’ (p.297). Solomon’s regenerative recollection, moreover, explicitly involves the telling and retrieving of his personal story. In a quote that chimes strongly with the narrativist credo that identities are something wholly constructed by the stories we create about our lives, Solomon states that: ‘If I do not share my story, then I have only this one year to my life. I am a one-year-old man who walks with heavy steps. I am a man burdened with hidden history’ (p.300). What this seems to suggest – that a story is the sine qua non for identity – is even more plausible regarding the fact that Solomon is dead by the time the novel is told. Though not mentioned explicitly, the news of his murder and its devastating impact on Dorothy is present from the beginning in her opening I-narration. By the tenets of narrative theory, this makes the event of Solomon giving a first-person account almost impossible, at least if the narrative concerned follows the conventions of realist fiction, as Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore does. Epistemologically, first-person narrators are bound by ordinary human limitations16 and cannot recount their own death, for instance. Any firstperson narration seems to be premised on the tacit agreement that first-person narrators, if they are I-as-protagonists, may exist as living, real-life persons in the reader’s imagination, however much they are textual constructs. If characters cannot recount their own death, then, they can hardly give a first-person account of their life after they have died, either. So how can Solomon? It is mentioned rather in passing that he keeps a book, a diary maybe, in which ‘[s] ometimes I write things down’ (p.171) and which ‘helps [him] to remember’ (ibid.). On closer inspection, this book, insignificant though it may seem, provides the only logical access to Solomon’s character as seen through his own eyes, the only logical source of his story, his I-narration in the novel. It is not only true to say that Solomon does not exist without a story, or exists unsatisfyingly until this story is told. Since the flesh-and-blood character the reader pictures is no more, Solomon, for better or worse, exists as a story. There are fairly unambiguous associations of remembering with soundness and physical well-being in the examples just explored, and conversely fairly
16 See Susan Sniader Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), p.161.
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negative connotations of forgetting. Both Dorothy and Solomon put their loss of a continuous sense of self down to forgetting. The home Dorothy is admitted to, tellingly, is ‘[a] place where you can learn to remember, and therefore understand your life’ (p.312). However, it is useful to distinguish between different forms and conditions of forgetting. The forgetting that Solomon and Dorothy lament is repression, a response to trauma that is ideally transitory and will ideally give way to enable them to confront a past they could not bear to remember. But the process of working through traumatic memories – in psychotherapy, for instance –, is ideally transitory, too. After all, the use of therapy is to lay the past to rest and take the overpowering sting out of it. With respect to trauma, there are at least two fundamental types of forgetting: a repressive, negative forgetting before and a positive forgetting after therapy, or a negative and a ‘pacified’ forgetting.17 Trauma is thus a telling example of the close interplay between the processes of forgetting and remembering noted earlier. Traumatic memories are immediately linked with repression, a provisional response and provisional type of forgetting which serves to contain the trauma encountered. The process of coping healthily with trauma, then, is one of remembering, a ‘remaking of a self.’18 Curiously, however, this recovery is often enough phrased as a disengagement with the traumatic past, as a wholesome forgetting significantly different from repression, in other words, by which the past is ‘laid to rest.’ In A Distant Shore, one can make out other forms of forgetting besides repression, too. When Gabriel joins a group of refugees on a truck that will bring them out of the war-torn country, the novel observes that: ‘Gabriel knows that if he is going to live again then he will have to learn to banish all thoughts of his past existence’ (p.94). The passage does go on to mention traumatic experiences, but unlike repression, it describes forgetting as a highly conscious act: ‘Hurtling blindly down this highway, he knows that if he is lucky the past will soon be truly past, and that with every gasp of the acrid air beneath the heavy tarpaulin, life is taking him beyond this nightmare and to a new place and a new beginning’ (ibid.). Gabriel ‘knows’ he has to become a new person, not least because he has wielded terrible violence himself. He has to forget his violent self and ‘for-get’ a more peaceable one. In this sense, the etymology of forgetting, with its blend of seemingly contradictory movements, might also be understood as a complex movement of exchange, a vanishing and an emerging presence at the same time. It is no doubt significant that Gabriel later on christens himself Solomon, Hebrew for ‘peace.’ This forgetting – Gabriel’s
17 See Weinrich, pp.168-174. 18 See Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003).
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‘for-getting’ – might even be said to fulfil an existential function, considering that in the passage above, it will decide for Gabriel whether or not ‘he is going to live again.’ The context of war and forced migration makes it clear that the ‘for-getting’ of plural selves often enough involves painful negotiations of identity. Solomon notes, for instance, that ‘I accepted from people’ (p.297), but he also confidently appropriates his new selves, as the shift in identification from ‘it’ to ‘I’ in the same passage shows: ‘It was Solomon who was lying in a warm bed in a strange room among these kind people. It was Solomon. I was Solomon’ (ibid.). ‘For-getting,’ just like the concept of ‘pacified’ forgetting, in a simple but profound way seems to furnish a ‘viable’ self first and foremost attuned to the challenges of an ever-changing present. The notions of ‘re-membering’ and ‘for-getting’ make for very different but – as this article has tried to show – by no means incompatible, in fact even complementary readings. Phillips’s novel can either be read as staging and simultaneously trying to synthesize the discontinuous selves of its protagonists. From this perspective, the semantics of the novel’s structure on the one hand embodies the inevitable plurality of selfhood. The novel’s multiple narrators stand for a postcolonial subjectivity that defies any single way of representation. On the other hand, the novel’s multi-perspectival narrative signals an attempt to restore coherence, a fuller view of identity which eludes the two protagonists, which they try to regain by retrospectively taking stock of their lives. Their sense of continuous identity, withheld in their particular case because of disrupting experiences, but more generally also because the self never exists as an ‘entity,’ ‘unified and fixed,’19 is thus established as a ‘fiction of memory.’20 ‘Fictions of memory,’ derived as a literary-generic category21 from Eakin’s concept, in turn, is a fitting description for A Distant Shore. As against this positive semantic charge, the lingering fissures in the novel’s structure are not exclusively instances of loss, however. They are not instances where identities are in danger of falling apart because their stories do not add up. As Solomon’s multiple names, his necessary if painful identity makeovers show, the novel’s disconnected form is there for a reason, indicating a ceaselessly emerging plurality. This aspect of form, equally invested with meaning, might be seen to serve as a fairly authentic representation of the kind of border crossings that postcolonial selves engage in. The fissures in the novel’s structure, in other words, are points of transition – or, to pick up again the
19 Eakin, p.x. 20 Eakin, p.94. 21 See Neumann and Ansgar Nünning, ed., Fictions of Memory, special issue Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 10 (1) (2003).
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metaphor of border crossing by which identities ‘map out’ new terrain while moving across and between boundaries, they are borderlines where new selves emerge and new stories are told. The two readings, championing the notions ‘re-membering’ and ‘for-getting’ respectively, are compatible, because for plurality to truly exist, both sides of the border have to be considered. Receding selves have to be ‘re-membered,’ emerging selves have to be ‘for-gotten.’ Phillips’s novel does acknowledge a desire for continuity, one that resonates with the founding experience of modernity in an evermore fragmented world, with a longing ‘to see […] life steadily and to see it whole,’22 recounted here in E. M. Forster’s Howards End. But Phillips’s novel also suggests that ‘absolute’ continuity is never possible, let alone desirable. Identities are made and sustained, it seems to say, not only by the stories we have told in the past and retrospectively piece together, but just as well by the new stories we have to or want to come up with – to take up once more the narrativist speak of recent scholarship concerned with questions of identity formation. In this sense, the novel implies that identities can perhaps only ever be discontinuous for them to meaningfully endure, and that to ‘see […] life steadily and to see it whole’ must never become their sole concern. That the novel ends on a note of utter bleakness and failure, despite its nuanced exploration of the needs and requirements of identity, finally, constitutes a third way in which the novel’s form produces meaning beyond itself. The ultimate denial to Solomon of a viable self, of any self – his death – points to the significance of social relations in forming identity. In A Distant Shore, this is the hostile context of lingering racism by which Solomon is denied plurality, or in fact any meaningful sense of self at all. The novel’s precarious, disconnected structure, in this light, can also be read as a powerful criticism of the violent outside interference that postcolonial selves are often confronted with. This, then, is another reminder that it is not the ‘“old” autonomous subject’23 that returns in postcolonial literature, because the ‘return of the meaning-making subject’ (ibid.), whatever its claim for agency, is far too aware of the inevitable social embeddedness of this claim – a concern conspicuously alien to the solipsism of the Cartesian individual. If Phillips’s novel is to be believed, its opening observation that ‘England has changed’ is only partly true. Migration has resulted in some profound transformation, but it has hardly sunk in to the more subtle spheres of national self-understanding. As Phillips observed in a recent interview with the online journal ChickenBones: ‘I don’t think there’s been much cultural shift
22 Edward Morgan Forster, Howards End (London: Penguin, 2000 [1910]), p.165. 23 Nünning, ‘Die Rückkehr des sinnstiftenden Subjekts’, p.239.
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in England.’24 Solomon falls victim to a mentality that is radically opposed to change, nourishing on petty racism. The England of Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore is a country that only ever repeats, remembers its old stories and does not ‘for-get’ new ones, thereby constructing a suspiciously continuous national self.
24 A conversation with Caryl Phillips, ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic AfricanAmerican Themes (2003) [accessed 10 June 2005].
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Bibliography Assmann, Aleida, and Heidrun Friese, eds., Identitäten. Erinnerung, Geschichte (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1999). Behrens, Kai, Ästhetische Obliviologie. Zur Theoriegeschichte des Vergessens (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005). Brison, Susan J., Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003). Bruner, Jerome, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2003). Brydon, Diana, ‘The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy’, in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. by Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), pp.191-203. Eakin, Paul John, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 1999). Forster, Edward Morgan, Howards End (London: Penguin, 2000 [1910]). Hutcheon, Linda, ‘Circling the Downspout of Empire: Post-Colonialism and Postmodernism’, Ariel, 20 (4) (1989), pp.149-175. Lanser, Susan Sniader, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981). Morrison, Donald, ‘A Writer of Wrongs’, Time Europe, 11 May 2003. Neumann, Birgit, Erinnerung – Identität – Narration. Gattungstypologie und Funktionen kanadischer ‘Fictions of Memory’ (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005). Nünning, Ansgar, ed., Fictions of Memory, special issue Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 10 (1) (2003). ——, ‘Die Rückkehr des sinnstiftenden Subjekts. Selbstreflexive Inszenierungen von historisierten und Subjekten und subjektivierten Geschichten in britischen und postkolonialen historischen Romanen der Gegenwart’, in Historisierte Subjekte – Subjektivierte Historie. Zur Verfügbarkeit unf Unverfügbarkeit von Geschichte, ed. by Stefan Deines, Stephan Jaeger, and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2003), pp.239-261. Phillips, Caryl, A Distant Shore (London: Vintage 2004 [2003]). Weinrich, Harald, Lethe. Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (München: Beck, 2000 [1997]).
The Straitjacket of Normality. The Interaction with the Psychiatrist in Maurits Dekker’s Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben Lars Bernaerts (Ghent University) In the conversation with his psychiatrist a patient-narrator always reconstructs his self in an interactive way. Even if the reader does not get to hear the psychiatrist’s voice, his presence is very much felt. To find out how the psychiatrist modifies the patient’s selfportrait in literary representations we have to look into the conversational mode itself. In my paper I will discuss three aspects of this speech situation that affect the portrait of the mad narrator in the Dutch novel Why I Am Not Insane (Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben, 1929). Firstly, in the conversation with his patient the psychiatrist is the delegate of normality who wants to bring the patient closer to normality. In order to uphold the conversation the patient therefore tries to imitate this normality. Through the act of imitating, however, the idea of madness is maintained. Secondly, in confronting the Freudian psychoanalytic regulations with a speech-act criticism we can specify how the patient is forced to abandon the domain of reason and normality in the interaction with the psychiatrist. Thirdly, the patient-narrator is constantly aware of the threat attached to the psychiatrist’s illocutionary authority. At any time the latter can declare the patient sane or insane, while the patient has lost part of his performative power when he was diagnosed in the first place. This results in a particular conversational situation that affects the reconstruction of the self: the patient is constantly fathoming the aims of his hearer but fails to meet all the requirements. In the interaction with the psychiatrist the madman is being wormed into the straitjacket of normality.1 There must be something the matter with him because he would not be acting as he does unless there was therefore he is acting as he is because there is something the matter with him He does not think there is anything the matter with him because one of the things that is the matter with him is that he does not think that there is anything the matter with him therefore we have to help him realize that,
1 The author wants to thank the organizers and the other participants of the seminar for their useful suggestions, and Jürgen Pieters for his comments on earlier versions.
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there is something the matter with him because he thinks there must be something the matter with us for trying to help him to see that there must be something the matter with him2
In his volume Knots the famous psychiatrist R. D. Laing presents peculiar lines of argumentation in disturbed interaction that are ‘strangely familiar’ to the reader. The circular reasoning, characteristically produced by a mad self, is here reduced to its essence. Laing’s text makes the supremacy of the normal, the straitjacket of normality, visible. The continuous reversal presented in this poem is a topos in representations of madness and is often provoked by the admission to a mental institution or the presence of a psychiatrist, as in the novel we will discuss in this article. The questions evoked by the poem are addressed in the novel Why I Am Not Insane. Is the patient mad or is he only performing madness (‘acting’), or is he mad because he is performing madness? For the reading of Knots psychiatry is certainly a relevant frame of reference, seeing that Laing himself is a well-known antipsychiatrist. In antipsychiatry as well as in modern literary representations of madness the topic of ‘there is something the matter with him’ is constantly put under pressure, by means of questions like ‘who is really mad?,’ ‘what is madness?,’ and ‘who are you to judge my mental state?.’ The quest for the borders between insanity and sanity implied by these questions often leads to deadlocks that challenge the reader to choose position and to evaluate his own idea of normality. In the Dutch novel Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben (Why I Am Not Insane), the continuous reversal of who is normal and who is not is displayed in all its complexity, but now from the viewpoint of the speaking I. The novel was published in 1929 and written by Maurits Dekker. Referring to his situation the main character of the novel notes that ‘[h]et merkwaardig [is], tot welke dwaasheden een mens komen kan, die genoodzaakt wordt zijn weerspannige geest in het dwangbuis der normaliteit te wringen’ (It is remarkable what follies a man can be driven to when forced to worm his unruly mind into the straitjacket of
2 Ronald D. Laing, Knots (London: Penguin, 1972), pp.5-6.
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normality).3 The situation of the narrating I, called Vladimir Stephanowitch Wirginszki, is precarious, to say the least: according to his own introductory explanation, he is mistakenly diagnosed as a madman and put in a mental institution. Now he is addressing his psychiatrists in a final attempt to convince them he is not insane. In order to do so, he feels he has to reconstruct his past and present self with the silent aid of his primary readers, the psychiatrists. In the course of his defence he conjures up his past and extensively comments on the actions of his past self to construct a cognitive distance. He talks about the death of his mother, his escape to the city, his struggle for life in this city, his romances, and his marriage. His main goal is to convince his audience that he is not insane by displaying self-consciousness in the act of telling his autobiography. My main goal is to explain, with the silent aid of the reader, the crux of Why I Am Not Insane, which is put very aptly by Vladimir in this quote: ‘It is remarkable what follies a man can be driven to when forced to worm his unruly mind into the straitjacket of normality.’ Though there is no physical straitjacket in this mental institution, the ‘straitjacket of normality’ works as a powerful means of constraint in the conversational confrontation with the psychiatrist and it can paradoxically enhance the madness of the speaker. The psychiatrists do not cure, but rather stimulate insanity. The reference to the straitjacket reminds us of an earlier period in psychiatry, in which the physical constraint was more important. Since the so-called liberation of the mad in the eighteenth century, power has become more and more concentrated in the doctor/patient relation. The physical constraint has been replaced by the power of the spoken word, the gaze, and the mirror that confronts the patient with his own madness. Patients were urged towards selfconsciousness and loaded with feelings of guilt. At the end of the nineteenth century Sigmund Freud re-established the dialogue with the mad and detected their guilty conscience.4 Dekker’s novel is located in a time when Freud’s theories had already penetrated the mental institutions. To be sure, the psychiatrist and patient in the mental institution should not be confused with the psychoanalyst and his analysand in the consultation room, but the doctor/patient relationships in a psychiatric ward are influenced by Freudian principles. The latter are at work in Why I Am Not Insane, in the way the narrating I tells his life story and constantly accounts for his conduct and utterances, and in the obvious transference when the narrator addresses his psychiatrists. In Dekker’s novel it becomes quite clear that in the phrase quoted above Vladimir is referring to himself and to his narratee, the psychiatrists who read 3 Boris Robazki [Maurits Dekker], Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben (’s-Gravenhage: Leopold’s Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1929), p.118. English quotations from Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben are all my own translations. 4 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
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his defence. The narrator feels forced by his psychiatrists to act normally, which in his fervent plea boils down to acting with words. The narrator wants to convince, confirm, deny, apologize, etc. That is why normality is closely connected with linguistic and conversational conventionality in this text. To prove his sanity Vladimir has to act cautiously with words. He has to be careful and explicit at the same time when using speech acts.5 The particular narrative setting gives rise to a constant focus on the rhetoric itself. Literary texts in which a patient in an institution addresses his psychiatrist display a speech-act situation that marks a difficult relation to normality and reason. It is primarily in the speech interaction and in the rhetoric of the narrator that we can discover the straitjacket of normality. In confronting speech-act criticism with psychoanalytic regulations the dubious role of the psychiatrist will come to the surface. The presence of the psychiatrist exerts a major influence on the reconstructing self of the patient. In the fictional therapeutic interaction the psychiatrist attempts to bring the patient closer to normality and find out what is wrong with him so he can make or adjust his diagnosis. In Vladimir’s words: ‘de vervulling van Uw taak [dwingt] U de woorden van een dwaas aan de zuivere rede te toetsen en zijn verward gestamel in volle ernst te onderzoeken’ (The fulfilment of your task [forces] you to test the words of a fool against pure reason and to investigate in all seriousness his incoherent stammering).6 The psychiatrist’s presence as a narratee invites the mad patient to display rational behaviour, when reconstructing his past self. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist listens and tries to reinstall coherence in the story. Hence, the making or telling of the life story runs completely parallel to the reconstruction of the self. In the next sections of this text, I will discuss three elements in the interaction between psychiatrist and patient that affect the act of self-portraying to a considerable extent. First I will go into the role of the psychiatrist as a delegate of normality, secondly I will compare the psychoanalytic regulations that affect the doctor/patient interaction with the rules of everyday conversation and, finally, I will shed some light on the relation between the limited performative power of the patient and the threatening performative power of the psychiatrist.
5 I am referring to speech-act theory as it is developed by Austin and Searle: John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 6 Dekker, p.59.
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The delegate of normality When Vladimir entered the institution, he became isolated from the society into which he did not fit. On the one hand, the mental institution is cut off from normality; on the other hand, there is no place where normality is so concrete. Vladimir ended up in the ‘madhouse,’ the territory of madness, where reason and normality are represented by the psychiatrists he addresses. As a delegate of normality the psychiatrist is an authorized voice, invested with an unmistakably far-reaching power within the borders of the institution. Since the birth of the asylum he has exercised his power with a diagnostic gaze, as Michel Foucault discussed in his Histoire de la folie, but since Freud madness has been granted permission to speak. The power is now concentrated in the relationship between the doctor, who represents normality, and the patient, who has to be brought closer to it. As a result the patient cites or imitates the normality and rationality the psychiatrist stands for; and it is precisely in this imitation that we find the patient’s worming into the straitjacket of normality. This is also the case in Why I Am Not Insane: Vladimir exposes his awareness of what is normal and rational and exaggerates it, ending up in abnormality again. The process can be easily shown in a few examples. The first example, taken from Vladimir’s life story, illustrates the distortion of the concept of normality. One of the main character’s craziest moves is his demonstration to his wife that he is not insane. To prove his sanity he takes an axe and holds it above his wife’s head, declaring that at that moment he is not killing her, so he cannot be mad. In the eyes of the reader, his acting normally (not killing his wife) functions as parody and citation, not as normality anymore. Secondly, in the rhetoric of the narrator the same line is followed as he exhibits his awareness of the role of the psychiatrists he addresses as ‘grenswachter op het gebied van den waanzin’ (border guard on the territory of madness).7 He constantly tries to fathom the aims and thoughts of his readers and to act accordingly or to influence their point of view: ‘Na het lezen van deze mededeeling, kunt Gij zeggen: deze man is volslagen gek. Neen, dat is hij niet, hij is slechts volkomen openhartig’ (After reading this statement you might say: this man is raving mad. No, he is not, he is just being absolutely frank).8 He purports to know the thoughts of his narratee and he tries to manipulate those thoughts. Later on he admits before his psychiatrists that he plays the ‘terrible role of a normal, sane person,’9 he imitates normality in order to convince them of his sanity. In the parody, the idea of madness is maintained. 7 Dekker, p.118. 8 Dekker, p.55. 9 Dekker, p.114.
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The narrator worms his unruly mind in the straitjacket of normality, but the very act of worming shows the failure. Furthermore, the relation to normality is being more determined in the interaction than in the actions, more in doing with words than in simply doing. Therefore, we can specify this relation with speech-act theory.
Analysis and conversation Sigmund Freud’s prescriptions for the interaction between a psychiatrist and his patient do not coincide with the rules for everyday conversation. To a large extent (the literary representation of) the interaction between the psychiatrist and his patient is influenced by the cultural background of psychoanalysis. Whether these texts are presented as writings or as speech, they owe much to the Freudian stipulations for therapeutic interaction. In his technical writings about treatment Freud introduced and justified the guidelines for a successful analysis and for the attitude of the psychiatrist. He touches on crucial issues like transference and free association, but also makes suggestions about what position the psychiatrist should assume and what would be an appropriate fee. By formulating this advice he (performatively) installed the conventions that would control the therapeutic interview from then onwards and that would strongly influence all interaction between the psychiatrist and his patient.10 In short, Freud’s prescriptions gained a normative value. Just like Freud’s analyst, Dekker’s fictional psychiatrist is a tacit listener or reader who traces and interprets the resistances of the patient. What he wants to achieve with his patient can be summarized in the threesome Erinnern, Wiederholen, and Durcharbeiten – a threesome that is in fact at work in every literary self-portrait. The repressed has to be remembered, performed in the treatment, and worked through, as Freud explains in his essay ‘Erinnern, Wiederholen, und Durcharbeiten.’11 These three moments, silently elicited by the psychiatrist, constitute the interactive reconstruction of the self in psychoanalytic treatment. In spite of the psychiatrist’s silence his presence is understood as an incessant question: the psychiatrist invokes a flow of speech by his mere presence. Vladimir in Dekker’s novel devotes his whole apologia to this imaginary question of the psychiatrists. In the first sentence of the novel he announces that in his writings ‘I comply with your wish to defend myself in writing against a 10 It must however be noted that the role of the psychiatrist also bears part of the legacy of psychiatry that the psychoanalyst does not (cf. Foucault 1972). The two positions, of psychiatrist and analyst, never fully merge in their literary form. 11 Sigmund Freud, ‘Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten. Weitere Ratschläge zur Technik der Psychoanalyse II (1914)’, in Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1975), pp.205-215.
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misunderstanding.’12 But as he continues he does much more than that. In telling his whole life story he apparently answers an unspoken question. Further, the narrator often interrupts his story to address his psychiatrists again, so the stress is on communication, rhetoric, and the questioning presence of the other. Although Freud creates a new type of conversation, neither Freud, the psychiatrist nor the patient can ignore the normative principles of conversation as recorded and specified by H. P. Grice in his famous article ‘Logic and Conversation.’13 In one major respect Freud radically turns away from Grice’s conversational logic. Freud’s ground rule of free association is an assault on Grice’s maxim of quantity, which says ‘Make your contribution as informative as is required’ and ‘Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.’ These rules are deduced from the general co-operative principle, which says ‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk-exchange in which you are engaged.’ Although this normative principle had not yet been put into words like this, Freud was very well aware of the deviation he gave rise to. In his article ‘Zur Einleitung der Behandlung,’ he instructs the analyst to raise this issue at the start of analysis. Freud even gives an example in direct discourse of the way in which each analyst should inform his patient: Noch eines, ehe Sie [the patient] beginnen. Ihre Erzählung soll sich doch in einem Punkte von einer gewöhnlichen Konversation unterscheiden. Während Sie sonst mit Recht versuchen, in Ihrer Darstellung den Faden des Zusammenhanges festzuhalten, und alle störenden Einfälle und Nebengedanken abweisen, um nicht, wie man sagt, aus dem Hundertsten ins Tausendste zu kommen, sollen Sie hier anders vorgehen. Sie werden beobachten, daß Ihnen während Ihrer Erzählung verschiedene Gedanken kommen, welche Sie mit gewissen kritischen Einwendungen zurückweisen möchten. Sie werden versucht sein, sich zu sagen: Dies oder jenes gehört nicht hieher, oder es ist ganz unwichtig, oder es ist unsinnig, man braucht es darum nicht zu sagen. Geben Sie dieser Kritik niemals nach und sagen Sie es trotzdem, ja gerade darum, weil Sie eine Abneigung dagegen verspüren.14
12 Dekker, p.1. 13 Herbert Paul Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, in Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (London: Academic Press, 1975), pp.41-58. 14 Sigmund Freud, ‘Zur Einleitung der Behandlung. Weitere Ratschläge zur Technik der Psychoanalyse I (1913)’, in Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1975), p.194.
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(One more thing before you start. What you tell me must differ in one respect from an ordinary conversation. Ordinarily you rightly try to keep a connecting thread running through your remarks and you exclude any intrusive ideas that may occur to you and any side-issues, so as not to wander too far from the point. But in this case you must proceed differently. You will notice that as you relate things various thoughts will occur to you which you would like to put aside on the grounds of certain criticisms and objections. You will be tempted to say to yourself that this or that is irrelevant here, or is quite unimportant, or nonsensical, so that there is no need to say it. You must never give in to these criticisms, but must say it in spite of them – indeed, you must say it precisely because you feel an aversion to doing so.15)
Freud knew what he was asking: ‘What you tell me must differ in one respect from an ordinary conversation.’ The patient is thereby invited by the psychiatrist to let go of the maxim of quantity connected with normal and rational conversation. When Grice distinguished the conversational maxims, he stressed their rationality and purposiveness. The maxims stake out a rational, intentionally controlled, purposeful conversation. When the psychiatrist formulates the demand of free association he is actually asking his patient to move away from conversational logic and rationality. In Why I Am Not Insane the psychiatrist is present as a narratee, a position from which he tempts the patient to follow this guideline of free association. In this respect the presence of the psychiatrist only intensifies the rhetoric of madness of the I-narrator, a rhetoric that does not answer to Grice’s conditions of intentionality and purposefulness, so we can state that the psychiatrist modifies the self-portrait the I-narrator is making. The psychiatrist’s position in the interaction sheds new light on our point of departure: ‘It is remarkable what follies a man can be driven to when forced to worm his unruly mind into the straitjacket of normality.’ The ‘follies’ that are the result of the confrontation with normality (represented by the psychiatrist) belong to the same semantic field as the madness of the ‘unruly mind.’ In other words, as a delegate of normality the psychiatrist invites the patient to imitate or to cite conversational normality but as a delegate of psychoanalysis he obstructs the path to the rationality and logic that form the basis of this normality. In Vladimir’s case the conflict is perceptible in the intention to tell everything, which is intersected by his rhetoric, by his urge to act normal and to control the effect of his utterances.
15 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-analysis I) (1913)’, in The Case of Schreber. Papers on Technique and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1958), pp.134-135.
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Performative force and authority In the conversation with the patient there is a final important influence on the rhetoric of the reconstruction, namely the shifts in illocutionary power of psychiatrist and patient. To a great extent, the reconstruction of the mad self is performative: by naming thoughts, feelings, and life events, the patient is creating them in interaction with the psychiatrist.16 By testing ‘the words of a fool against pure reason,’17 the psychiatrist-reader limits and delimits their performative force. When J. L. Austin, the founder of speech-act theory, formulated and reformulated his theory in How to Do Things with Words, he was quite explicit about the notion of selfhood that is vital in his thinking. The subject of his felicitous performatives could not be drunk or mad, because the subject should be fully sound of mind. One of the conditions for successful speech acts is the speaker’s free and present, intentionally organized consciousness. In short, Austin (just like Grice) brought in a Cartesian concept of the self, a sincere and self-conscious subject.18 The mad self does not fit in Austin’s theory, because it cannot be held responsible for its words, as is generally acknowledged and exemplified in legal and psychiatric discourse. Due to his mental state the madman is far less capable of producing felicitous utterances. When the patient is brought in the mental institution, he loses his sanity, his self-determination, and a large share of his ability to act with words. His mind is ‘unruly,’ and that is why he is excused from the duty to speak the truth, but at the same time he is deprived of the possibility to perform successful speech acts. This fact is particularly striking in a legal context. When someone is declared to be of unsound mind – and this declaration is an explicit performative one – then this unsound person loses a lot of performative power. He loses the responsibility for his own words. In this context, it is significant that Vladimir calls the psychiatrists his judges19 and uses judicial metaphors to describe their role. The admission to the mental home marks the handing over of self-determination to the psychiatrist, which is comparable to the effect of a judge’s sentence. Vladimir shows great awareness of this fact, when in his life story he visits a psychiatrist, because he wants to be declared of unsound mind so as to avoid being prosecuted for insulting an influential millionaire. If he is declared
16 Cf. William Frawley, John T. Murray, and Raoul N. Smith, ‘Semantics and Narrative in Therapeutic Discourse’, in Narrative Theory and The Cognitive Sciences, ed. by David Herman (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003), pp.85-114. 17 Dekker, p.59. 18 J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p.29. 19 Dekker, p.91.
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of unsound mind, he cannot be held responsible for his words. Vladimir counts on the power of the psychiatrist to deprive the patient performatively of the felicity of his speech acts.20 Ironically, at the level of discourse, inside the ‘madhouse,’ the goal is the exact opposite. What is at stake in Vladimir’s monologue before his psychiatrist is the regaining of self-determination and of performative power. This struggle is particularly problematic because in order to obtain this power he already has to use it and, moreover, he has to acknowledge the psychiatrist’s authority. This is the main ‘worming’ Vladimir does in Maurits Dekker’s novel: he has to confirm – this means: put in a speech-act – the authority of the psychiatrist in order to get rid of it. His self-portrait is permeated by this understanding and it really drives him crazy to be in this position. Thus, the literary interpretation of the psychiatrist is the one who can declare his patient sane or insane. With words and on the basis of words he decides. It constitutes the authority of the psychiatrist in the psychiatric ward, which is felt right from the start in the patient’s words. The narrating I is fully aware of this authority and aims to manipulate it in his speech. Take for example these words of persuasion, an attempt to exhibit pelocutionary power: Na deze uiteenzetting kunt Gij mij gek noemen, maar dan gebiedt de rede U eveneens hen krankzinnig te verklaren, die onder bepaalde omstandigheden zintuigelijke waarnemingen doen van door anderen niet opgemerkte verschijnselen.21 (After this explanation you can call me mad, but then reason also compels you to also declare insane those who under certain circumstances make sensory perceptions of phenomena not observed by others.) Maar laat ik mij eens op Uw standpunt plaatsen [...] Wij zijn het dus met elkander eens: ik leed in die dagen aan vervolgingswaanzin. Getuigt het echter niet van een onwetenschappelijke oppervlakkigheid, daarom thans, zooveel jaren later, eenvoudig aan te nemen dat ik gek ben? Neen, zult Gij thans zeggen, zo is het niet. Wij weten reeds dat je gek bent en deze bizonderheid bevestigt en versterkt alleen onze diagnose.22 (But let me put myself in your position [...] So we agree: I suffered from persecution mania in those days. Isn’t it however a sign of unscientific superficiality, to now assume, 20 The authority of the psychiatrist, the context of the speech acts, and other preparatory conditions determine the effectiveness of this type of speech acts; cf. John R. Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 21 Dekker, p.94. 22 Dekker, pp.104-105.
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so many years later, that for that reason I am mad? No, you will say, it is not like that. We already know you are mad and this peculiarity only confirms and reinforces our diagnosis.) Mijneheeren, dit is de waarheid. Het oordeel is thans aan U. Uw vonnis wacht ik af met de onaantastbare gemoedsrust van een onschuldige en zelfs Uw medelijden vraag ik niet meer.23 (Gentlemen, this is the truth. Now you are to judge. I await your verdict with the unassailable inner peace of an innocent man and I am no longer even asking for your compassion.)
Vladimir extensively clothes his speech acts to make them sound truthful, because he realizes his point of departure is the mistrusted position of a madman. The performance of empathy is a well-considered strategy to manipulate his psychiatrist’s judgement and thoughts. He does not succeed in upholding his empathy, however, and his words start to contradict each other. His speech acts, already rendered ‘harmless’ by the diagnosis, fail again and again. The act of portraying his self is virtually made impossible because the access to the required performative power is blocked and because the effort to regain it is hollow.
Conclusion The self-portrait of the madman is determined by the invisible straitjacket of normality, but this straitjacket does not seem to lead to an interiorization of normality. In the interaction with the psychiatrist the patient’s laborious ‘doing with words’ shows that the psychiatrist’s presence is felt as an incessant question and as a threatening performative power. The patient’s countermove is his self-willed portrait of the psychiatrist in his own discourse under the guise of empathy. Although he may have lost control over his self-portrait, as a narrator he manages to control the portrait of the narratee, the representation of the psychiatrist. This is the remaining performative potency of the madman, by which the madman gets his revenge. After all, the representation of the other in one’s self-portrait is a strong means of constraint. It might set us thinking: who is really wearing the straitjacket? Vladimir’s representation of his readers, the psychiatrists, is compelling too. And so, an endless circular reasoning forces itself upon us, strangely familiar to us: ‘there is something the matter with him/ because he thinks/ there must be something the matter with us.’ 23 Dekker, p.235.
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Bibliography Austin, John L., How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Derrida, Jacques, ‘Signature événement contexte’, in Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), pp.365-393. Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Frawley, William, John T. Murray, and Raoul N. Smith, ‘Semantics and Narrative in Therapeutic Discourse’, in Narrative Theory and The Cognitive Sciences, ed. by David Herman (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003), pp.85-114. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Zur Einleitung der Behandlung. Weitere Ratschläge zur Technik der Psychoanalyse I (1913)’, in Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1975), pp.181-203. ——,‘Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten. Weitere Ratschläge zur Technik der Psychoanalyse II (1914)’, in Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1975), pp.205-215. ——, ‘On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-analysis I) (1913)’, in The Case of Schreber. Papers on Technique and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1958), pp.121-144. ——, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-analysis II) (1914)’, in The Case of Schreber. Papers on Technique and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1958), pp.145-156. Grice, Herbert Paul, ‘Logic and Conversation’, in Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (London: Academic Press, 1975), pp.41-58. Hillis Miller, Joseph, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Laing, Ronald David, Knots (London: Penguin, 1972). Robazki, Boris [Dekker, Maurits], Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben (’s-Gravenhage: Leopold’s Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1929). Searle, John, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). ——, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
The Self’s Struggle for Recognition: August Strindberg and the Other Lars Dalum Granild (University of Aarhus) This article describes the important role of the Other in Strindberg’s anthropology and poetics. I argue that some of the most striking features of the Strindbergian texts – i.e., the intersubjective battles, the protagonists unstable and problematic identity, and the instability, dynamism, and openness of his texts – are due to the protagonists’ failure to recognize the Other’s identity-forming role and hence their romantic desire for an absolute freedom, which is unattainable, because the total self-presence of the subject is shown to be an illusion. More precisely, I see the intersubjective battles and the main characters’ problematic identity in the light of Hegel’s dialectic of recognition and Sartre’s development hereof in his theory of intersubjectvity, and I show how their philosophical anthropology of recognition has its poetological equivalent in Bakhtin’s poetics of dialogism. More precisely, Bakhtin is used to detect the presence of the Other in Strindberg’s seemingly monological texts, which on closer inspection turn out to be internally dialogized. I argue that the destabilizing ambivalence, dynamism, and unruliness that characterize his texts are to be found in this fact.
The topic of this book, ‘Stories and Portraits of the Self,’ is without doubt interesting for a Strindberg scholar. Internationally, August Strindberg (18491912) is, to be sure, primarily known as a dramatist; however, he also wrote a number of prose works, at least seven of which can be called autobiographies.1 Moreover, his fictional writings are often filled with strikingly autobiographical traces and therefore inevitably encourage an autobiographical reading (e.g., The Father and To Damascus I).2 It is as if Strindberg deliberately directs attention to his own self; he is always posing for the readers, staging his self 1 The Son of a Servant I-IV, He and She, Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, Inferno, Legends, The Cloister/ ‘The Quarantine Master’s Second Story’, and Alone. (I use the English translation of the Swedish titles.) The best known of these are the libel Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, which tells the dramatic story of his first marriage and its dissolution, and Inferno, about a no less dramatic psychological crisis which led to his religious conversion. Both were written in French. Strindberg, who felt unrecognized and misunderstood in his homeland, saw himself as a European writer and desired to ‘conquer Paris.’ 2 This aspect of Strindberg’s writing has recently been studied by Wolfgang Behschnitt and is also a central point in Per Stounbjerg’s work about Strindberg’s ‘impure’ writing (Wolfgang Behschnitt, Die Autorfigur. Autobiographischer Aspekt und Konstruktion des Autors im Werk August Strindbergs (Basel: Schwabe, 1999); Per Stounbjerg, ‘Nettet og kniven. Om Strindbergs urene skrift i ‘Hjärnornas Kamp’ og i det hele taget’, Norsk Litterær Årbok (1988); Per Stounbjerg, Uro og urenhed. Studier i Strindbergs selvbiografiske prosa (Århus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2005)). Many interesting insights on this aspect are also to be found in Michael Robinson’s trail-blazing work on Strindberg and autobiography (Michael Robinson, Strindberg
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through his texts. This means that in both his autobiographical and fictional writings, Strindberg deals with identity questions and explores various aspects of the self. In this article I shall take a closer look at the important role of the Other in the construction of self-identity in Strindberg, for one of the most striking features in Strindberg’s literary works is the self’s struggle for recognition. The self is never a self-sufficient and autonomous monad, but is inextricably linked to the Other. Everywhere in his work the intersubjective relationships are described in metaphors of vampirism, botanical grafting, chemical ‘Wahlverwandtschaften,’ chains, viscous webs, marionette strings, and so on. As the autobiographical first-person narrator says about his wife in Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, ‘mon existence tient à un fil dont elle garde le peloton’ (my existence hangs by a thread from a ball of yarn she is holding).3 Strindberg also talks about social life as governed by a ‘law of accommodation’ – i.e., the self plays roles in order to accommodate itself to the Other.4 In short, the free and autonomous romantic ‘I’ is threatened in Strindberg as it is in modernity, where the total self-presence of the subject is often shown to be an illusion. The self is always already mediated (by the Other, by language, etc.). In this respect, Strindberg can be seen in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Kafka where the self is also threatened by the Other and therefore must struggle to exist, struggle to set forth its own self-image. As in Dostoevsky, however, the self in Strindberg is never willing to accept its dependency on the Other and demand absolute romantic freedom. In Strindberg’s work, we see therefore a recurrent dialectic between the self’s desire to be alone and its need to be together with others because identity dissolves outside social relations. According to my thesis, this is the main reason for the interpersonal struggles that are so characteristic of the theme and structure of a large number of Strindberg’s important texts.5 In Strindberg’s reception these struggles have in his naturalistic period traditionally been thematized and Autobiography. Writing and Reading a Life (Norwich: Norvik, 1986)). The subjective form of Strindberg’s drama is furthermore stressed by Peter Szondi, who characterizes Strindberg’s drama as expressionistic ‘Ich-dramatik’ (Peter Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas 18801950 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1963). 3 August Strindberg, August Strindbergs Samlade verk. Nationalupplagen, ed. by Lars Dahlbäck et al., 72 vols (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell/Norstedts, 1981-), XXV, p.446. All English translations are mine. 4 Strindberg, August Strindbergs Samlade verk, XX, p.166; Strindberg, August Strindbergs Samlade verk, XXI, p.136; Strindberg, August Strindbergs samlade verk, XXXI, p.124, 134 and 161. 5 The Red Room, The Father, Miss Julie, Creditors, Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, Tschandala, By the Open Sea, Inferno, To Damaskus I, The Dance of Death I, The Roofing Feast, Black Banners, and The Ghost Sonata.
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in light of his Darwinism (i.e., the struggle for existence) and Nietzscheanism (i.e., the struggle for power) and, after his religious conversion, in the light of his Swedenborgian ideas about castigating spirits.6 My thesis, however, is that the interpersonal struggles are to be seen as existential battles for recognition which fundamentally have to do with the identity of the self rather than with material struggles for survival or power or with metaphysical castigation. Selfidentity is fundamentally dependent on the Other, as Hegel shows in his dialectic of recognition in Phänomenologie des Geistes. The self’s identity is to a large degree determined by the Other’s gaze. To gain full self-consciousness the self has to learn to see itself in the Other. It has to be recognized. According to Hegel’s famous master and slave dialectic, this presupposes a free and reciprocal recognition of each other’s freedom and subjectivity. Recognition which has been attained through power is therefore worthless for it does not come from a free subject, but from a slave. It comes from somebody you yourself do not recognize, so therefore his recognition is, of course, worthless. A professor, for instance, wants to be recognized by her peers, not just by her students. The freedom and reciprocity of the logic of recognition is different from the logic of power and survival. This is the main point in Hegel’s theory, and the failure to recognize this fact is, according to my thesis, the reason for the unstable and problematic identity of Strindberg’s heroes and autobiographical selves. They want to force recognition from the Other, but as a consequence they get stuck in the sadomasochistic logic of the master and slave dialectic where a true – i.e., free and reciprocal – recognition of their identity is never attained. In this respect, Strindberg’s anthropology bears a striking resemblance to Sartre’s description of intersubjectivity in the third part of L’Etre et le néant; or, as Garcin expresses it in Sartre’s drama Huis clos, ‘l’enfer, c’est les autres’ (hell is other people). Hell is other people for Strindberg and Sartre because the self has an outside – a ‘being-for-others’ – which it does not determine and which does not fit its self-image (its ‘for-itself’ in Sartre’s terms). It is ‘for-others,’ but nevertheless it is my being.7 Through its outside the self is defencelessly exposed to the Other’s alienating gazes and judgements, and its freedom and autonomy are thereby compromised. The self suddenly experiences its free subjectivity as an object for the Other. The Other’s gaze makes the self petrify 6 In his post-Inferno writing, Strindberg tends to regard intersubjective struggles in a metaphysical perspective. With Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic, Strindberg ultimately understands the Other as punishing and upbringing agents of ‘the powers.’ See Göran Stockenström, Ismael i öknen. Strindberg som mystiker (Sverige: Uppsala, 1972). 7 As Sartre explains, my being-for-others is not an empty image in the mind of the Other, for I recognize it as mine in such feelings as shame, pride, and fear. Shame reveals that I see myself as I appear to the other, that I recognize that I am as the Other sees me. Shame is shame about oneself before the Other.
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in its facticity, in a fixed objective being which it is, but which as a free subject it is alienated from, partly because it neither determines nor controls it and partly because according to Sartre’s radical concept of freedom nothing ‘is’ or is ‘nothing.’8 This complex of problems is distinct in the autobiographical novel Le Plaidoyer d’un fou. According to the autobiographical first-person narrator, Axel, the book has been written to prevent the worst of all nightmares: that upon his death his life story should be told as seen through the eyes of his emancipated blue-stocking wife.9 The apologia is Axel/Strindberg’s desperate struggle to deny the ‘legend’ that his wife has been spreading: that he is a jealous madman, an objectification which has given his ‘personnalité des contoures précises, et au lieu du poëte innocent une figure mythologique se crée, noircie, estompée, contoyant le type criminal’ (personality fixed contours; instead of the pure-hearted bard, a blackened, sooty mythological figure, bordering on criminal, emerges).10 Axel therefore wants to ‘laver [s]on cadavre’ (wash his corpse) – i.e., to free himself of the picture that has been cemented of him in public opinion through his wife.11 Strindberg and his protagonists are so focused on the Other’s opinion about them because it alienates the self ‘for-itself.’ The Others present an image of their selves which they do not recognize, but which they nevertheless must recognize as their being, namely their being-for-others. In a childhood episode in Strindberg’s first autobiography, The Son of a Servant, the alienating gaze of the other is paradigmatically illustrated.12 Strindberg’s alter ego Johan is
8 As the title of Sartre’s book indicates, Sartre divides the world into two ontological categories or dimensions: ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ (or, as he also calls them, ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself’). This division corresponds to the traditional philosophical division between object and subject. More precisely, being is the ontological category of the material world (nature, the body, etc.), and nothingness the category which characterizes human consciousness because it, as freedom, nothing ‘is.’ Consciousness or subjectivity is, in Sartre’s view, not a substance (res cogito), but a project. It is no-thing; rather it is pure potentiality. This is what he means by his famous expression that for human beings existence precedes essence (Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1996)). In fact, the categories of being and nothingness are, according to Sartre, irreconcilable; they are nevertheless not independent of each other. Nothingness arises by negating being, which is ontologically primary. However, as the opposite of being, nothingness is different from being. The being of consciousness, so to speak, is to ex-ist – to ‘stand out of’ being. Hence, the internal dialectical relation of consciousness to being is characterized by continuous struggle. The same is true of the for-itself’s relation to the Other because my being-for-other has the objective and finalized character of the in-itself. 9 Strindberg, August Strindbergs samlade verk, XXV, pp.514-15. 10 Strindberg, August Strindbergs samlade verk, XXV, pp.479-80. 11 Strindberg, August Strindbergs samlade verk, XXV, p.267. 12 Strindberg, August Strindbergs samlade verk, XX, p.16.
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wrongly accused here of stealing wine. Confronted with the accusation, however, he immediately blushes. This is of course interpreted as a sign of guilt, and his stubborn denials only make the situation worse. But Johan does not blush because his theft was uncovered – he really did not steal any wine – but because his self-identity is not recognized. His shame is a reaction to his beingfor-others. If the others’ opinion of him was indifferent to his self-identity, he had no reason to be embarrassed and offended because he himself knows that he neither stole nor lied. These examples confirm the importance of the reciprocity of identity in Strindberg. This is important to stress because it runs counter to Strindberg’s own manifestly expressed anthropology whereby he divides human beings into two groups, ‘the great’ and ‘the small.’ The great are the independent ones who give and act, and the small the dependent ones who take and react.13 Of course, Strindberg views himself as belonging to the category of the great; however, the many autobiographies that Strindberg wrote clearly show that he is not indifferent to the gaze of the Other. The Fall, for him, is that he, as a public figure, has no backstage. He is always on stage, always exposed to other people’s threatening looks and words. Through his autobiographical writing he poses for the reader’s gaze in a desperate attempt to impress his self-image upon the reader. He wants to ‘ejaculate into them the semen of his spirit,’ as he characterizes his role as author. The posing – i.e., the performative dimension of his autobiographical writing – is an attempt to break free from the alienating gaze of the Others by seducing them to recognize his self-image. It is an attempt to evade the Others’ free recognition and through himself gain an outer expression by objectifying himself in the text. The attempt to exclude the Other – i.e., to view the autobiography as a privileged form of subjective selfunderstanding and self-expression – is, however, doomed to fail because an autobiography is also a communicative act. As soon as Strindberg finishes the text, he can no longer control it. In the text the writer becomes written, caught in the web of narration, language, genre, myths, metaphors, and so forth. The picture that the text reflects back to him is no longer of living and free subjectivity, but a reified object which exists independently of its author and depends on the reader to be revitalized. The recognition still depends on the Other’s – i.e., the reader’s – free subjectivity. Since Strindberg is unable to reconcile himself to the restriction on his freedom which his being-for-others implies, 13 This anthropology is first explicitly unfolded in Vivisections (Strindberg 1887, p.29). Curiously enough, Strindberg’s very Nietzschean terms and thoughts were developed about a year before Strindberg was introduced to Nietzsche by Georg Brandes. In his ecstatic letters to Brandes after reading Nietzsche, he therefore also proudly proclaims that he has ‘partly anticipated Nietzsche’ (Letters to Georg Brandes 12/4 & 22/4 1890. August Strindberg, August Strindbergs brev, ed. by Torsten Eklund and Björn Meidal (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1968-2001), VIII (1964).
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in work after work he must resume the struggle to regain his free subjectivity – hence the many autobiographies. Strindberg’s autobiographical project paradigmatically reflects Anthony Giddens’s thesis about the self’s continual rebuilding of identity in modernity.14 One might wonder how this philosophical anthropology of recognition is specifically relevant to a literary study of Strindberg the link between philosophical anthropology and poetics we find in Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, which is an aesthetics of recognition. This clearly emerges from his notes on the rewriting of the Dostoevsky book, which contain several passages with striking similarities with Hegel’s and Sartre’s phenomenological and existential theories of intersubjectivity.15 Anthropology and poetics are intertwined in Bakhtin as they are in Strindberg. Monologism is thus defined in terms similar to those used to describe the unequal recognition in the masterslave relationship: Monologism, at its extreme, denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach (in its extreme or pure form) another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. […] Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word.16
With Bakhtin I will argue, therefore, that the conditions of the subject which I have described through Hegel’s and Sartre’s anthropology of recognition also manifest itself on a poetological and linguistic level as a battle between monologism and dialogism. Bakhtin’s dialogical theory of language and literature provides, in fact, important tools to detect the presence of the Other in Strindberg’s seemingly monological texts. On closer examination they turn out to be internally dialogized.17 Strindberg and his monologizing narrators and protagonists always ‘throw sideward glances’ and ‘strike polemical blows’ at other people’s words. This makes the discourse double-voiced and 14 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991; repr. 1996). 15 See, for instance, Michail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; repr. 1997), VIII, pp.287-88. (The notes are published as an appendix to the English translation of the Dostoevsky book.) 16 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp.292-93. 17 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp.181-270; Michail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981; repr. 1998), pp.259422.
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prevents the texts from closing in petrified ideological and rhetorical monologism. Like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Strindberg experiments with a point of view by incarnating the ideology in a free and living – i.e., situated – human voice. His protagonists are what Bakhtin calls ‘voice-ideas’ or ‘idea-forces.’18 I am not suggesting that Strindberg’s texts are polyphonic. On the contrary, in Strindberg there is never a ‘macro-dialogue’ between equal and independent ideological voice-ideas; only his protagonists are voice-ideas. Toward the other characters the texts are often extremely monologizing and therefore these characters never gain an independent voice. The texts, however, are dialogic in the sense that the consciousness of his ideological protagonists is dialogic and the discourse, hence, internally dialogized. In the discourse we hear a ‘micro-dialogue,’ a cacophony of the threatening others’ repressed voices. Read symptomatically as internally dialogical texts they represent a threatened self’s dialogical consciousness. The monologicity can be seen as a reaction to the threatened autonomy; a defence mechanism against dialogicity as the condition of human existence.19 In other words, the rhetoric of the text undermines its manifestly expressed – i.e., its monological – ideology and self-representation. The ideology and the hierarchies which constitute the foundation of the text are destabilized in the literary text. In the otherness of the text the writer is himself written. These characteristics of Strindberg’s poetics – i.e., the unruliness, instability, and openness – have to be seen in connection with his anthropology. Throughout his work, even in his naturalistic writings, Strindberg is sceptical of integrated and rounded ‘characters.’20 He describes the self as a patchwork determined by contradictory and complex inner and outer forces. This is connected with his romantic longing for freedom. It is a way of relativizing determinism, and a consequence of his own paranoid anxiety of finalizing second-
18 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp.31-32, 85, and 89. 19 In contrast to Bakhtin, it is not my general intention to propagandize for the dialogical literature at the expense of the monological one. But without the inner dialogicity many of Strindberg’s highly ideological and self-staging texts would have been propaganda or personal character assassination rather than art works. I use Bakhtin’s concepts because they are well suited to capture important features of the consciousness of the protagonists and the form of the texts – i.e., capture the core of the destabilizing ambivalence, dynamism, and unruliness. 20 This is expressed in some concluding remarks about the self and the autobiographical project in ‘The Son of a Servant’ (Strindberg, August Strindbergs samlade verk, XXI, pp.214-15), a conclusion that is paradigmatically restated in the famous foreword to Miss Julie and radicalized in the short foreword to A Dream Play where the notion of character and self is dissolved. We also find the critique in Open letter to Intima Teatern and The Blue Book. In the latter, character is also associated with the law of accommodation and its inauthentic social role.
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hand definitions, of the objectifying gaze of the other.21 Living persons, unlike characters, are not automatons which can be fully described from the outside, and texts, consequently, are not determined plot machines. Strindberg’s view of characters is reminiscent of Bakhtin’s. Bakhtin distinguishes between the plot-determined ‘character’ of monologic literature and the open and free ‘personality’ of dialogic literature. In dialogic literature the focus is on the characters’ ‘unfinalizability’ and on ‘eventness.’22 This is also the focus of Strindberg. His naturalism and later his metaphysical fatalism are always at odds with his romantic desire for freedom and autonomy; hence his frequent identification with titanic rebellions. His protagonists, like Dostoevsky’s, always revolt against any externalizing and finalizing definitions of them. They are not human natures which emanate cut-and-dried from the author; rather they retain their inner unfinalizability. This means that they are not represented second-hand; the author does not have a surplus of vision that objectifies and finalizes them from the outside. They have the capacity to signify directly, as Bakhtin expresses it. In this respect Strindberg’s poetics could be called a poetics of freedom. The complexity and situationism of his main characters break down the apparent monologic determinism (whether naturalistic, ideological, or metaphysical) and enforce a dialogical freedom.23 In Strindberg we find characters in situations; characters who are nothing but what they make of others and others make of them. What is Edgar in The Dance of Death I other than what he makes of Alice and Alice makes of him? And the other way around. What is Axel in Le Plaidoyer d’un fou other than what he makes of Maria and Maria of him? They are all defined by their relation to the other. In conclusion, the implications of my thesis are at least threefold. First, it captures a complex of problems in Strindberg’s oeuvre that is independent of its radical ideological upheavals. For this reason, the thesis can contribute to creating a new aggregate picture of his work. For in contrast to most of the Strindberg reception, my approach attempts to synthesize and recontextualize his work. I try to detach his work from psychoanalysis and from the almost positivistic biographical and comparative tradition which only looks at Strindberg’s own intentions, experiments, and knowledge horizon. Second, the thesis inserts Strindberg within modernism and its exploration of the lost 21 The anxiety of externalizing determinations also manifests itself on the meta-level as a critical attitude towards genre conventions and, as a consequence of this, in his experiments with different forms as a flight from the restrains of discourse. We might speak of an anxiety of influence in the Bloomian sense. 22 These considerations primarily draw on Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, chapters 1 and 2. See also p.297. 23 On a meta-level the dialogical freedom expresses itself in Strindberg’s mixing of diverse genres and types of discourse.
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self-presence because the dialectic of recognition mirrors the clash between the romantic-modern endeavour to gain autonomy and the modernist recognition of the illusion of total self-presence and self-transparency, and as in modernism the clash also manifests itself at a formal level in an anti-authoritarian, Dionysian, and cacophonous poetics in Strindberg’s work. Third, with Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism the thesis ties together anthropology and poetics and positively explains what is often seen as Strindberg’s Achilles’ heel both as a writer and as a psychologist: the lack of tight compositions and stringent characters, the mixing of different genres and fictional modes, etc. – in short, the contradictoriness, ‘messiness,’ and roundabout dynamism of his texts.
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Bibliography Bakhtin, Michail, The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981; repr. 1998). ——, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; repr. 1997 [(1929/1963]), VIII. Behschnitt, Wolfgang, Die Autorfigur. Autobiographischer Aspekt und Konstruktion des Autors im Werk August Strindbergs (Basel: Schwabe, 1999). Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973; repr. 1975). Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991; repr. 1996). Hegel, Georg W. F., Werke. 3. Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1986; repr. 1996/1807). Robinson, Michael, Strindberg and Autobiography. Writing and Reading a Life (Norwich: Norvik, 1986). Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’Etre et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). ——, Being and Nothingness. A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. by Hazel E. Barns (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992/1943). ——, Huis Clos (Paris: Gallimard, 1972 [1944]). ——, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1996 [1945]). Stockenström, Göran, Ismael i öknen. Strindberg som mystiker (Sverige: Uppsala, 1972). Stounbjerg, Per, ‘Nettet og kniven. Om Strindbergs urene skrift i ‘Hjärnornas Kamp’ og i det hele taget’, Norsk Litterær Årbok (1988). ——, Uro og urenhed. Studier i Strindbergs selvbiografiske prosa (Århus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2005). Strindberg, August, August Strindbergs Samlade verk. Nationalupplagen, ed. by Lars Dahlbäck et. al., 72 vols (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell/ Norstedts, 1981-). ——, August Strindbergs brev, ed. by Torsten Eklund (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1964), VIII. Szondi, Peter, Theorie des modernen Dramas 1880-1950 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1963 [1956]).
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Unshaded Shadows: Performances of Gender in Emily Dickinson and Luiza Neto Jorge1 Marinela Freitas (University of Porto) Drawing on Judith Butler’s notions of gender as ‘performance’ and gender norms as ‘regulatory fictions,’ I will try to explore the broader tendency to de-personalization (and decentring) which has characterized post-Baudelairean poetics and post-Nietzschean philosophical reflection on subjectivity, particularly present in most of the lyric poetry of modernity and late modernity. In this context, I will focus on Emily Dickinson’s and Luiza Neto Jorge’s textual constructions of identity, and of gender in particular. Both poets destabilize (by way of queering) conventional attitudes towards femininity, disrupting feminine stereotypes and the repressive social conventions of their time. Femininity is, thus, taken as a social construction, simulated, questioned, and, often, refused – which allows the construction of alternatives to the traditional, fixed binary gender system. ‘I have lately come to the conclusion that I am Eve, alias Mrs. Adam.’ Emily Dickinson, ‘Letter to Abiah Root’ (1846) Aprendam o simulacro daquilo que me retém no meu vulto de animal excessivo vegetação mais intensa [Learn the simulacrum of what sustains me in my shadow of excessive animal intenser vegetation] 2 Luiza Neto Jorge (1966)
No text can be read outside a protocol of reading. In the case of modern poets, the impersonal theory of poetry is certainly one of them. Commonly associated with the works of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, or Eliot, it constitutes a poetical refusal of the romantic reading protocol, by way of deliberately exploring a discoincidence between the poetic persona and the empirical person (what Hugo
1 This paper has been written within the project ‘Interidentities/Comparative Poetics’, of the Margarida Losa’s Comparative Literature Institute, Faculty of Arts of the University of Oporto, R&D Unit, financially supported by the ‘Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia’, within the ‘Programa Operacional Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (POCTI), Quadro de Apoio III (POCTI-SFA-18-500).’ 2 Except when noted, all English translations are mine.
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Friedrich has called depersonalization3). Thus, by creating abstract subjects, modern poets expect to render difficult (if not impossible) autobiographical projections of the reader on the text. This reading protocol is summed up in a well-known sentence by Mallarmé: ‘Literature […] consists in doing away with the Gentleman who writes it.’4 But when we read modern poetry written by women we often have the feeling that ‘doing away with the Lady who writes it’ is not always that easy: on the one hand, because for a long time women had to deal with a number of cultural and editorial restrictions that are relevant for the analysis of their strategies of depersonalization; and on the other hand, because they were writing within a tradition constituted and shaped by male writers and male subjectivities. And the ‘lady’ they would supposedly do away with sometimes has nothing to do with who they really are. In fact, like Sidonie Smith has noted, what does the word ‘woman’ know about ‘selfhood’ or what does ‘selfhood’ know of her?5 And this question, although difficult to answer, may be crucial to understand women’s poetical construction of subjectivity in their search for a poetical voice. Modern women poets also create lyrical subjects that tend to abstraction (or that are not autobiographical), that aim at a certain dis-identification with the person that writes them; but some of their self-portraits (or portraits of the self) stand out by the very fact that they are ostensibly feminine. And femininity tends to concretion, not abstraction, in the sense that it could suggest a reading protocol that would accept an autobiographical projection on the text; and, yet, the fictional, abstract, and impersonal features of the modern poetical text do not allow it. So, how can we solve this apparent contradiction: the existence of an ostensive inscription of femininity within an impersonal poetics? Should we read it as an over-identification, or should we try to understand it in the context of an overstatement of gender, which reacts to the very tradition of modernity and its apparently neutral subject? I am not saying that conventional traits of femininity (or masculinity) should be elided; I am just trying to understand why they are highlighted when it comes to femininity. 3 Hugo Friedrich, The Structure of Modern Poetry: From the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p.20. 4 ‘La Littérature […] consiste à supprimer le Monsieur qui reste en l’écrivant.’ Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘La musique et les lettres’, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. by Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945 [1894]), p.657. English translation by Friedrich, p.82. 5 Sidonie Smith, ‘Resisting the Gaze of Embodiment: Women’s Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century’, in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. by Margo Culley (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp.75-110 (p.80).
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My contention is that the creation of highly gendered subjects may also work within a wider scope of modern strategies of decentring the subject: being excessively feminine may have the opposite effect of blurring conventional traits of femininity, of creating an effect of depersonalization by an excess of definition. To understand the importance of gender in the construction of female subjectivity, it may be useful to have a quick look at the example of Baudelaire and the role he assigned to women in his theory of modernity and of the modern artist. There are many women in Baudelaire’s work – prostitutes, lesbians, monsters, saints, comedians, etc. – but none of them are artists. Yet, they are intrinsically linked to the definition of the modern artist: they are not subjects of art, but they are the object of the artist’s gaze, the projection of their aesthetic (and sexual) desires. They are not flan uses, but they embellish the public (and male) space of the city; they are not dandies, but they are also part of the phenomenon of fashion. And, yet, despite this exclusion, Baudelaire unconsciously hints at what will exactly be one of the sites of fracture in women’s construction of subjectivity. Let us take a look at his description of women and their effect on the male gaze in The Painter of the Modern Life (1863): What poet, in painting the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful woman, would venture to separate her from her costume? … thus making of the two, the woman and the dress, an indivisible whole?6
So, what delights the artist is a woman’s artificiality, the way her outside look is carefully embellished by her clothes, producing a powerful effect. In fact, women’s outside look is itself an effect of fashion, of make-up (all of which are key Baudelairean concepts that identify the artificial with the artistic). However, and although Baudelaire praised women for their ‘costume,’ he did not regard them as artists because he considered them too natural: they were unaware of their artificiality, since for a woman to embellish herself was according to her nature.7 It was not an artistic gesture, because, for Baudelaire, women did not know how to separate their body from their soul (that is, their artistic consciousness); in fact, he believed that women had no soul, they were just body.
6 ‘Quel poète oserait, dans la peinture du plaisir causé par l’apparition d’une beauté, séparer la femme de son costume ? … faisant ainsi des deux, de la femme et de la robe, une totalité indivisible?.’ Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, in Oeuvres complètes, pref., pres., and notes by Marcel A. Ruff (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968 [1863]), p.31. 7 See Teresa Cruz, ‘Posfácio’, in Charles Baudelaire, O Pintor da vida moderna, trans. by Teresa Cruz (Lisboa: Vega, 2004), pp.63-102 (p.77).
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Despite his well-known misogyny, Baudelaire’s view on women is a good example of how, at an artistic level, they sometimes seem only to exist as the silent object of a desiring (male) gaze.8 Now, it is exactly this object position that some modern women writers often contest, searching for ways of constituting themselves as subjects. We must not forget that the Cartesian dualism mind/body, later re-described as the dualism culture/nature, has for a long time been associated with the masculine/feminine pair. But women’s association with the body may also be the site and the instrument for the production of new modes of subjectivity.9 Indeed, what is seen as an ‘indivisible whole’ is nothing but an effect of garments, as well as an effect of stylized, repeated bodily gestures, which, together, produce the ‘artificiality’ of femininity, or, we could even say, of being a woman. There is nothing ‘natural’ about it. To be masculine or feminine does not involve giving expression to a naturally developing inner truth: it means performing and representing yourself in sanctioned and expected ways.10 And the awareness that femininity can be taken as a social construction is one of the sites of questioning in modern poetry written by women. In fact, when ‘being a woman’ is taken as a performance, we may not be far from the aesthetic gesture of the dandy, what Teresa Cruz calls the ‘poetics of being other.’11 Judith Butler’s work on the performativity of gender, in her influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, may enlighten this question. According to Butler’s theory, a gendered identity is always a social and discursive construction, performatively generated through the body. To be female or male is a ‘cultural performance,’ a fictive production that is manufactured by the repetition of bodily gestures, movements, and styles of
8 As Maria Irene Ramalho well puts it, ‘[n]a tradição, por razões bem conhecidas, as mulheres surgem prioritariamente, não como poetas, mas como musas, mudas e de preferência mortas (como a Beatriz de Dante). E é difícil, mesmo aos mais argutos desconstrutores dos discursos, ultrapassar esse modelo.’ [As a priority, and for well-known reasons, women appear in tradition not as poets, but as muses, as dumb and preferably as dead beings (like Dante’s Beatrice). And it is difficult, even to the wittiest deconstructors of discourses, to overcome that model.] Maria Irene Ramalho, ‘A Sogra de Rute ou intersexualidades’, in Globalização: Fatalidade ou Utopia?, ed. by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2001), pp.525-555 (p.533). 9 For a discussion of mind/body dualism and gendered representations of the body, see Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 [1993]). 10 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th anniversary edn (New York: Routledge, 1999 [1990]), pp.xxviii-xxix; Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p.76. 11 Cruz, p.77.
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various kinds. So what we take to be an ‘internal’ essence of gender is instead a surface signification, an appearance of substance, a performative effect.12 This effect of gender is produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence, or, in other words, by the normalizing power of gender norms. This is why Butler understands gender norms as ‘cultural fictions’ that regulate subjectivity by way of shading its differences and naturalizing it.13 And the only way to denaturalize it is to be found in ‘the possibility of a failure to repeat [those bodily gestures], in a de-formity, or a parodic repetition’ that exposes the performative effect of a stable and permanent identity as a politically tenuous construction.14 According to the queer perspective – and it should be noted that Butler’s work, along with the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, is at the founding basis of queer theory – the body is a variable border, a field of interpretative possibilities, and gender is an ongoing discursive practice, open to intervention and re-signification. Therefore, to adopt a queer reading may be useful as a theoretical perspective from which to challenge the normative. And it is precisely this questioning of seemingly given, fixed notions, such as ‘sexuality’ and ‘gender,’ ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ that helps us understand the ‘difficulty of the “I” to express itself through the language that is available to it.’15 To elicit this problematic, I would like now to turn to the poetical works of two women writers: the nineteenth-century North-American poet Emily Dickinson and the twentieth-century Portuguese poet Luiza Neto Jorge. Although their work is a century apart, they are two frontier poets whose textual constructions of identity, and of gender in particular, provide interesting examples of how they articulate the discourses that regulate them as subjects with their poetical responses to them. In fact, they both queer – in the sense that they destabilize, de-legitimize or denaturalize – conventional attitudes towards femininity, disrupting feminine stereotypes and the repressive social conventions of their time. Emily Dickinson anticipated many of the processes that are usually associated with the poetry of modernity and the tendency to abstraction and to depersonalization was one of them. Indeed, in a letter written in 1862, she was already warning one of her readers – her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, with whom she corresponded for years, sending him her poems – that he should 12 Butler, pp.xv, xxviii, 179. 13 Butler, pp.32-33. Butler borrows the concept ‘regulatory fiction’ from Michel Foucault’s discussion of identity as a regulatory fiction, a culturally restricted principle of order and hierarchy (in Foucault’s introduction to the English translation of Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century Hermaphrodite [1980]) (cf. Butler, pp.31-32). 14 Butler, p.179. 15 Butler, p.xxiv.
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not expect to find her autobiographical self in her poetry. Her words were: ‘When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person –’ (L 268).16 This warning was triggered by the fact that Higginson, who had never seen Dickinson, asked her to send him her portrait, to which Dickinson answered: Could you believe me – without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves – Would this do just as well? (L 268)
This self-portrait is also a good example of how Dickinson tried to escape from the coeval feminine stereotypes. In fact, Dickinson always rebelled against the nineteenth-century image of the ‘True Woman,’ according to which women should be pure, pious, dependent, domestic, i.e., the specular image of the ‘Common Man,’ who was talented, competitive, self-reliant.17 In fact, these gender fictions were also responsible for the conventional association of women writers with ‘sentimentality’ (and this may partly explain why Dickinson’s writing is so intentionally deviant, regarding other contemporary women writers18). What the audience expected to find in women’s writing was a moral ideal of woman, and not the representation of woman as an individual. The feminine discourse socially accepted was one that elided the individuality of the ‘I’ in the decorous silence of the stereotype – a strategy of contention that the very same Thomas Wentworth Higginson called ‘gospel of silence.’19 The following poem, written around 1862/3, is a good example of how Emily Dickinson subverts this conventional identity of gender:
16 All references to Dickinson’s letters will be signalled with an L, followed by their number, and correspond to Johnson and Ward’s edition: The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1986). All poems signalled with an F, followed by their number, correspond to R. W. Franklin’s edition: The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1999); and the poems signalled with a J, to Johnson’s edition: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber, 1975). 17 For a discussion of the concept of ‘True Woman’ see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 18 See Ana Luísa Amaral, ‘Emily Dickinson: Uma Poética de Excesso’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Porto, 1995), p.337. 19 Quoted in Joanne Dobson, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), p.57. Putting it in Dobson’s words, a woman writer’s duty was ‘to be both present as a feminine voice and absent as a uniquely female presence’ (p.57).
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I tie my Hat – I crease my Shawl – Life’s little duties do – precisely – As the very least Were infinite – to me – I put new Blossoms in the Glass – And throw the old – away – I push a petal from my Gown That anchored there – I weigh The time ‘twill be till six o’clock I have so much to do – And yet – existence – some way back – Stopped – struck – my ticking – through – We cannot put Ourself away As a completed Man Or Woman – When the Errand’s done We came to Flesh – opon – There may be – Miles on Miles of Nought – Of Action – sicker far – To stimulate – is stinging work – To cover what we are From Science – and from Surgery – Too Telescopic Eyes To bear on us unshaded – For their – sake – not for Our’s – Therefore – we do life’s labor – Though life’s Reward – be done – With scrupulous exactness – To hold our Senses – on – (F 522)
The subject of this poem clearly exhibits conventional gender signs, but we should not forget that ‘we cannot recognize performances of alterity without the markers of the normative,’ as Suzanne Juhasz and Cristanne Miller have noted.20 Indeed, the infinite, mechanical repetition of stereotypic feminine activities like tying the hat, creasing the shawl, putting new blossoms on the 20 Suzanne Juhasz and Cristanne Miller, ‘Performances of Gender in Dickinson’s Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. by Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.107-128 (p.113).
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glass, allow for the simulation of a female gender. However, a gap is opened in the citation of these bodily gestures: she feels that her own internal ticking – her true, inner existence – has already stopped ‘some way back,’ although her performance should last until six o’clock. Again, the ‘indivisible whole’ of femininity (or of gender) is nothing but appearance, because, as the subject of the poem is fully aware, ‘We cannot put Ourself away/ As a completed Man/ Or Woman.’ Nevertheless, the poem also reminds us that we cannot show ourselves as we really are because that would be disrupting. That is why we cover our body, and protect ourselves from the inquisitive (or telescopic) eyes – that may here stand for society, or science and its grip on the body. ‘Unshaded,’ ‘unprotected,’ or like Juhasz and Miller suggest, ‘un-gendered,’ we are culturally deviant and we will not have a social existence.21 We would endanger the status quo and the maintenance of our own identity. This is why a performance is sustained – ‘with scrupulous exactness/ To hold our Senses – on –.’22 A hundred years later, we find Luiza Neto Jorge writing in a social and cultural context that, for different reasons, still confined women to repressive stereotypes. With Portugal living under dictatorship, censorship was always eminent and, for women writers, speaking about the body, questioning gender and sexual roles, or exploring eroticism, often led them to be accused of pornography, as if they were, personally, committing an offence against society. In literary terms, the Portuguese sixties, marked by a revisiting of modernist tendencies, by now blended with the avant-garde context of art movements, surrealism (which was a late phenomenon in Portugal), experimentalism, and even the emergence of performance art, also favoured the exploration of impersonal strategies. At the time, to some poets, rescuing the autonomy of the poetical word was a priority and a return to discursive strategies of abstraction was seen as a way to it. Neto Jorge was clearly one of those poets. Much of the poetry of Luiza Neto Jorge tends to lyrical abstraction, which does not exclude the creation of subjects that are sexually undefined or excessively defined as female. In fact, many of the bodies we find in her poetry (and there are plenty) are gendered and sexed bodies, whose identity, nevertheless, resists definition by their ability to metamorphosis, to dissemination, and to blurring. As Manuel Gusmão has noted, we can hardly relate this poetry to a stable figuration of a feminine identity, as if the poet hinted at the fact that identity is always relational and can, at a certain extent, imprison the body, 21 Juhasz and Miller, p.116. 22 In Johnson’s version, the last stanza is preceded by the following lines: ‘Twould start them –/ We – could tremble –/ But since we got a Bomb –/ And held it in our Bosom –/ Nay – Hold it – it is calm –’ (see J 443). This image of an intense, explosive inner self that would endanger its surface identity if displayed is very explicit in Dickinson’s series of poems on the volcanoes.
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despite its illusive or fictional character.23 In a poem called ‘Minibiografia’ (Minibiography) (1988), written a year before her death, Neto Jorge wrote: […] Porque envelheço, adoeço, esqueço Quanto a vida é gesto e amor é foda; Diferente me concebo e só do avesso O formato mulher se me acomoda. […] (Because I grow old, get sick, and forget How much life is gesture and love is fucking; I conceive myself differently and only in reverse Does the format woman suit me.)24
Again, we find the idea of ‘being a woman’ as something that is performatively generated in a life of gesture, in the mechanical image of sex, in the format ‘woman’ that only suits the subject in reverse. After all, this is a subject that constructs its identity through difference and deferral.25 The deconstruction and refusal of a ‘ready-made’ feminine identity, as well as the insistence on the view of femininity – and masculinity – as a format, was already present in her first works, in a sequence of poems called ‘Os Corpos Vestidos’ (Dressed Bodies) (1964), where we can find the following poem: DEITA-SE COMO UM OBJECTO Deita-se como um objecto um metal fundido entregue ao seu peso a si Quando ele se ergue debaixo do peito tem a sombra enterrada lá vive a mulher espaço habituado a fêmea 23 Manuel Gusmão, ‘A Invenção do corpo amoroso em Luiza Neto Jorge’, Inimigo Rumor, 13 (2002), pp.163-175 (p.168). 24 Luiza Neto Jorge, Poesia, org. and pref. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1993), p.151. 25 See Rosa Maria Martelo, Em Parte Incerta: Estudos de Poesia Portuguesa Moderna e Contemporânea (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2004), p.161; Gusmão, p.168.
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Vivendo imposta ao espelho retocando os seios como os sábios sabem para sair em contacto com a sombra num terror deixar-se em poucos lábios
(LAYING DOWN LIKE AN OBJECT Laying down like an object a molten metal abandoned to its weight to itself When he rises underneath the chest there’s the shadow there buried lives the woman space used to female Living constrained to the mirror retouching the breasts like the wise know to go out in contact with the shadow to let go in a few lips, in terror) (Jorge, p.63)
The erotic encounter of two bodies is the pretext for the questioning of sexual roles. The body is put in the expected position, laid down like a lifeless shaped object, burdened with its own weight, on its own. The woman is merely a shadow projected under the male body or her own body (since the surrealistic presentation of the bodies blurs their identities). The woman, or the shadow in which she is buried alive, is a (claustrophobic) space which is only female out of habit. Again, there is nothing natural about it. She is compelled to look at herself in the mirror (permanently confronting her with the image she performs), retouching her breasts – not only to embellish her body, but to feel it as well, to assure herself of her existence. And, through these conventional feminine activities, she prepares herself for the orgasmic fusion: between her and his body (perhaps like in a ‘spinning door,’ which will make them endlessly switch places, as we may read in another poem26); or we can read it as the mo-
26 Jorge, p.207.
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ment when the woman tries to synchronize herself with the shadow, with her performance, for the orgasmic experience – as if, to use Dickinson’s metaphor, both ‘tickings’ (or clocks) could be set by the strike of the hour on the body. But, like in Dickinson’s poem, the revelation of what has for long been covered or buried is felt as a moment of terror and of pleasure as well, or should we say, of awe – for others, and for the self, whatever that may be. To sum up, I would say that the inscription of femininity traits is not incompatible with an impersonal poetics. On the contrary, this is precisely what Dickinson and Neto Jorge do: they depersonalize their poetical subjects by making them ostensibly feminine and, at the same time, by decoding them excessively, as if the excess of definition would ultimately lead to an impossibility of categorization. This strategy is not far from what Luce Irigaray would propose some years later, in This Sex Which is Not One (1977): women, she suggested, should not be a shadowy ‘mere copy,’ but should play with mimesis instead, assuming the feminine role deliberately – ‘[w]hich means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus begin to thwart it.’27 We must therefore redefine our reading protocol: to read modern poetry written by women may apparently imply the possibility of an autobiographical projection through the insistence on the coincidence of a gender identity; however, this identity is so over-determined, that when it takes us to the writer, it is only to throw us back into the text again, the only place where the feminine subject can exist as an unstable identity that resists definition. Indeed, by leading to the implosion of sex and gender dichotomies, Neto Jorge and Dickinson’s intensive questioning of feminine identity allows for the destabilization of a norm felt as imprisoning, but it also ends up by creating a precarious subject (in the sense that it adopts a provisional position of subject, only to undermine the essentialist assumptions by which it was previously constituted). But it is this provisional position28 that gives both poets wider latitude of expression. Again, queer theory is rather valuable to elicit this question: what these poets do with their ‘negative performances’ (or performances of fracture) is not to come up with a ‘third gender’ or with an alternative model; what they aim at is resisting categorization and affirming, as queer theory later will do, a subject that is ‘a doing, an effecting, a becoming,’ and that, because of that, does not fit the stabilizing mould of a conventional ‘feminine’ or of a false ‘neutral,’ the one that shapes the literary tradition.
27 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p.76. 28 Similar to what some recent critics have termed ‘strategic essentialism.’ See Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York, London: Routledge, 1996), p.194.
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To conclude, let me go back to Mallarmé and the Gentleman he intended to do way with. The protocols imposed by the texts written by women may then be two-fold: they have to do away with the Lady, but they have to do away with the Gentleman as well: the gentleman who has written the word ‘woman’ in the literary tradition, who has inscribed a male subject in a poetical tradition, disguised as a neutral subject, a male mould of subjectivity where women do not fit. I do not believe Dickinson and Neto Jorge had a feminist agenda, but I do believe that their work accounts for the contingencies of being a woman and a writer: sometimes they are the shadows of the desire of a male gaze, and other times they are unshading the shadow, turning the spotlight on it and on those for whom it is performed. But what I am certain of is that their poetry exceeds it all, so I would like to think that they both are at what Jean Tortel has called ‘the shadow line’ and that António Ramos Rosa has defined as ‘the line from which poetical clarity may arise, with its margin of undecidability, of interrogation, of chance, of randomness, and, precisely because of it, of freedom.’29
29 António Ramos Rosa, A Poesia Moderna e a Interrogação do Real I (Lisboa: Arcádia, 1979), p.15.
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Bibliography Amaral, Ana Luísa, ‘Emily Dickinson: Uma Poética de Excesso’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Porto, 1995). Baudelaire, Charles, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, in Oeuvres Complètes, pref., pres., and notes by Marcel A. Ruff (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968 [1863]). Bordo, Susan, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 [1993]). Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th anniversary edn (New York: Routledge, 1999 [1990]). Carlson, Marvin, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York, London: Routledge, 1996). Cruz, Teresa, ‘Posfácio’, in Charles Baudelaire, O Pintor da vida moderna, trans. by Teresa Cruz (Lisboa: Vega, 2004), pp.63-102. Dickinson, Emily, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber, 1975). ___, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1986). ___, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1999). Dobson, Joanne, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989). Friedrich, Hugo, The Structure of Modern Poetry: From the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). Gusmão, Manuel, ‘A Invenção do corpo amoroso em Luiza Neto Jorge’, Inimigo Rumor, 13 (2002), pp.163-175. Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Jorge, Luiza Neto, Poesia, org. and pref. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1993). Juhasz, Suzanne, and Cristanne Miller, ‘Performances of Gender in Dickinson’s Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. by Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 107-128. Mallarmé, Stéphane, ‘La Musique et les lettres’, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. by Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945 [1894]). Mansfield, Nick, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
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Martelo, Rosa Maria, Em Parte Incerta: Estudos de Poesia Portuguesa Moderna e Contemporânea (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2004). Ramalho, Maria Irene, ‘A Sogra de Rute ou intersexualidades’, in Globalização: Fatalidade ou Utopia?, ed. by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2001), pp.525-555. Rosa, António Ramos, A Poesia Moderna e a Interrogação do Real I (Lisboa: Arcádia, 1979). Smith, Sidonie, ‘Resisting the Gaze of Embodiment: Women’s Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century’, in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s) ts of Memory, ed. by Margo Culley (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp.75-110. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
PART II Signalling Identity
The Identity Paradigm Peter Brooks (University of Virginia) By the ‘identity paradigm,’ I intend to point to that large concern of modern societies with the identity of the individuals who make them up, and particularly with ways of knowing that identity: finding, stipulating, and classifying the marks by which we say who people are. If the question of identity is first stated in its modern form by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, starting in the early nineteenth century, with the increased bourgeois perception of a dangerous urban underclass, issues of social identity become more acute. This paper will move from the dramatic example of an identity in question furnished by Balzac’s novella Le Colonel Chabert to broader narrative and legal questions about the discovery and authentification of identity.
It was an article three years ago in the New York Times, concerning a decision in Federal District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania, that caught my eye: a decision denying that fingerprint identification met the standard of scientific evidence set by the Supreme Court decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals in 1993.1 It came from Judge Louis Pollak (former Dean of the Yale and University of Pennsylvania law schools), in a case called United States v. Llera Plaza. Pollak noted that other recent federal cases have called fingerprint identification ‘the very archetype of reliable expert testimony’ and ‘scientific knowledge,’ but that it failed on the grounds of testability and especially falsifiability. ‘Scientific methodology today is based on generating hypotheses and testing them to see if they can be falsified,’ wrote Justice Harry Blackmun in Daubert (cit. at 34). It is the test of falsifiability that allows one to know not only that a proposition is true a good deal of the time but that it is universally true. Fingerprint identification, while mustering a considerable body of expertise, does not in the final analysis meet this test. It is indeed the final step in fingerprint identification – the determination of a match between two sets of fingerprints – that involves a subjective judgment rather than a scientific procedure. Pollak cites forensic scientist Dr. David Stoney: ‘The determination that a fingerprint examiner makes… when comparing a latent fingerprint with a known fingerprint, specifically the determination that there is sufficient basis for an absolute identification is not a scientific determination. It is a subjective determination standard. It is a subjective determination without objective standards to it’ (at 37-38). Therefore Pollak ruled that experts may present analysis of fingerprints, and point out observed similarities 1 The first Pollak opinion comes in United States v. Llera Plaza, 179 F. Supp. 2d 494, (E.D. Pa. 2002), vacated by 188 F. Supp. 2d 549 (E.D. Pa. 2002); see also Daubert v. Merrell Dow Phamaceuticals, Inc. 509 U.S. 579.
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between prints, but ‘will not be permitted to present testimony expressing an opinion of an expert witness that a particular latent print matches, or does not match, the rolled print of a particular person and hence is, or is not, the fingerprint of that person’ (at 69). But if you go to look for Pollak’s opinion in Llera-Plaza, you will not find it; it has now been ‘unpublished.’ Faced with the outcry from prosecutors and police across the land, Pollak took the unusual step of reversing himself two months after the original decision, and, by way of a new evidentiary hearing, readmitting fingerprints as within the realm of technical expertise, comparable to the testimony of an expert on metal fatigue or tire failure, for instance. Our criminal justice system, and our culture at large, are not ready yet to do without fingerprints. I was struck by Pollak’s critique of fingerprint identification because, like most Americans, I grew up believing in its infallibility – though I admit to having always had sneaking suspicions about the claim that every set of fingerprints is absolutely unique to the individual, and unalterable over time. It seemed to me comparable to the proposition that no two snowflakes ever are duplicates. It is at least counter-intuitive. And as I thought about Pollak’s critique, it dawned on me that our belief in fingerprints may most of all represent a will to believe that our very identities are carried in our digital imprints – as an infallible signature of who we are. The unique and invariant fingerprint would correspond to a belief unfolded since the Enlightenment and Romanticism that each of us is unique, irreplaceable, never seen before and never to be seen again. The initiatory statement of the belief comes, as one could have predicted, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the first page of his Confessions, where he claims that nature ‘broke the mould in which she cast me’ (‘briser le moule dans lequel elle m’a jeté’).2 Rousseau here invites comparison to Montaigne’s famous statement: ‘Each man bears the entire form of the human condition’ (‘Chaque homme porte la forme entière de l’humaine condition’). He does not, that form is broken once Rousseau has been moulded. It is also part of Rousseau’s contention that this uniquely characterized individual is essentially the same over time, despite ageing and loss and sorrow and even the attempts of his enemies to present the world with a ‘disfigured portrait,’ a lying version of Jean-Jacques. This fear of a disfigured identity presented to the world – and especially to posterity – anguishes Rousseau during his paranoid later years. The very last page he wrote – the opening to the unfinished tenth of the Reveries of a Solitary
2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions. Autres textes autobiographiques (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), p.5.
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Stroller – announces his sameness despite difference. Rousseau begins by noting it is Palm Sunday and exactly fifty years from the day he first met Madame de Warens, a meeting which, he claims, ‘decided what I was to be for the whole of my life, and produced by an inevitable linkage the destiny of the rest of my days’ (‘décida de moi pour toute ma vie, et produisit par un enchaînement inevitable le destin du reste de mes jours’).3 Mme de Warens fixed, stabilized his mobile adolescent character; without his years with her, he might never have known who he really was. It is a moving text in that Rousseau near his end asserts through this anniversary his essential sameness, the ‘linkage’ of his self at age sixty-six to the identity established at age sixteen. Despite the disfigured external portrait, he claims an unaltered identity. But to make that claim, Rousseau demonstrates, requires engaging in an ever-renewed autobiographical project. The self is narrative: it must be retrieved from the past, the lines of continuity leading from past to present traced and retraced. Think, in contrast, of a pre-modern example of imposture, or identity theft. Natalie Davis in The Return of Martin Guerre shows us that the problem of authenticating, or exposing, the claim to be Martin Guerre by the man who was really (apparently, probably) Arnaud du Tilh, is made almost impossible by the lack of socially and legally validated marks and tokens of identity.4 We are in a time before identity cards, before photographs and fingerprints, and – when the persons in question are peasants – portraits and signatures and even mirrors. At the trial of the apparent impostor, only the cobbler – who maintained an ‘archive’ of lasts for making shoes – offers anything that approaches scientific evidence: the pseudo-Martin’s feet appear to be smaller than the Martin last on file. The rest of the evidence reposes on memory of what Martin looked like many years before, how he spoke, and how adeptly the pseudo-Martin can simulate recall of persons and relations. The evidence of Bertrande, wife of Martin who accepted the pseudo-Martin as authentic, has particular importance because it is judged that she can discern the touch and the intimate bodily details of the man who has arrived in the village of Artigat claiming to be her husband. If the pseudo-Martin is on the whole easily accepted and assimilated in Artigat no doubt it is because, as Davis argues, he is wanted there: his absence has created a gap, a problem in domestic and kinship and social structure. And the legal system is on the verge of ratifying the pseudo-Martin’s identity precisely because he fills this gap, gives the Guerre household the heir, landowner, husband, son-in-law, and father that it has been lacking. The only thing that
3 Rousseau, p.1098. 4 See Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
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keeps the Parlement de Toulouse from ruling favourably on his claim to be Martin Guerre is the sensational last-minute appearance of the ‘true’ Martin, hobbling in on his wooden leg. It is striking to us, post-Rousseau and post-Freud, that no one at the trial of Martin Guerre talks about his childhood – so much a part of our modern sense of selfhood and identity. The testing of who he is does not seem to involve memories of childhood at all. It has more to do with social and kinship structure than individual psychology. Identity in Rousseau, in contrast, lies in a claim of an inner core of selfhood to self-recognition over time, to the assertion of sameness in apparent difference and temporal change. It depends on a psycho-biography in narrative form. In the nineteenth century, the problem of defining, knowing, and testing identity becomes more acute and anxious. It activates various pseudo-scientific technologies for knowing who people are (as we say). Physiognomy and phrenology – techniques for reading identity from face and skull – gave way to ‘Bertillonage,’ the system of cranial and other measurements that were supposed to identify the criminal recidivist. Photography from the moment of its invention in 1839 was put to use for the police mug shot. This was a time of vast social dislocation, and especially of urban growth. Population density, especially in London and Paris, gave the impression of a vast new proletarian population (mostly immigrants from the provinces). As Louis Chevalier pointed out in his classic study, the working classes came to appear, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the dangerous classes.5 Part of the official bourgeois response was to control through classification, to establish new markers of identity. Prostitutes, for instance, were required to carry a card if streetwalkers, to be assigned a number if in a brothel. Once registered in the police files, they could be erased and rehabilitated only with the greatest of difficulty: the whole point, as Alain Corbin has shown, was to prevent any confusion between the deviant ‘marked’ woman and the respectable bourgeoise. The fear was that a deviant element might show up under the guise of the respectable. What if the mayor of your town turns out to be a former convict? Hence a society officially committed to its Inspector Javerts, charged with ferreting out the criminal in disguise. As the novelist who remains the best guide to this period, Balzac, repeatedly tells us, in the ‘stupid’ nineteenth century people increasingly look alike. All the men dress in bourgeois black: you cannot any more tell the social status and the identity of someone from his costume alone. There is a generalized semiotic crisis, which means that you need to pay attention to small, apparently insignificant signs: how someone ties a cravat, or how fresh his gloves are, or
5 See Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses, classes dangereuses (Paris: Plon, 1958).
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his gait as he walks in the anonymous urban crowd. Balzac worked intermittently throughout his career on a never-finished ‘Pathology of Social Life,’ which is all about the new semiotics of modern urban existence. Balzac was of course fascinated, even obsessed by the problem of criminal identity. There are whole novels that turn on false appearance and mistaken identity. There are secret societies, such as Les Treize, whose occult action on the world is suspected but never seen. His novels are mostly set in the 1820s, though largely written after 1832, the date when the legislature, on humanitarian grounds, abolished the practice of branding convicts on the shoulder. This abolition of ‘la marque,’ as it was known, became to Balzac (as to other writers) a symbolic moment in the semiotic crisis. His representation of the crisis pervades his work, nowhere more than in that shadowy key figure of the Comédie humaine Jacques Collin, alias Vautrin, alias the Reverend Father Carlos Herrera, aka Trompe-la-Mort, who is always in disguise, very often hidden from view in an attic from which he pulls the strings of the action on the ground floor, who can speak in many languages including one invented by himself and his criminal associates – an absolutely protean figure, who will end by passing from the ranks of crime to those of the police. A key moment of Le Père Goriot involves drugging Vautrin so that he can be slapped on the shoulder, to make the latent mark, the TF (for Travaux Forcés) reappear, and furnish the police with the evidence they need to arrest the man they know as Collin. Collin’s branded flesh again becomes crucial at the climax of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, when the magistrate Camusot is trying to penetrate his alias as the Spanish priest Carlos Herrera. He has Collin stripped to the waist, then tells the bailiff to strike his shoulder with an ebony bat. What emerges from the blow to the shoulder is a confused palimpsest of lines and gouges, holes that result from a gunshot wound (which we know was self-inflicted, to efface the brand) with the dubious trace of letters underneath. That highly characteristic form of the nineteenth-century imaginary, melodrama, repeatedly turns on questions of marking and identity. The token of identity that permits the eleventh-hour recognitions that establish rightful identities, brand evil, and reward virtue, became known as la croix de ma mère, from this particularly over-used piece of religious jewelry left, most often, in the cradle of the abandoned infant, and retrieved at the crucial moment. But there are plenty of other marks of identity, especially ones on the body itself, birthmarks, or intentional markings, such as the crosses cut into the arm in Dumas’s La Tour de Nesle. This preoccupation with marks on the body – often hidden until the dénouement – of course renews a very old tradition: think of Odysseus’ recognition by his old nurse Eurykleia, when he returns in disguise to Ithaca, by way of the scar on his thigh which her fingers recognize as she washes his feet; or of the birthmark in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline; and countless
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other examples that fall, generally speaking, in the romance tradition, where disguise and recognition are essential to the plot. But the search for sure indicators of identity seems to become particularly acute and anxiety-laden in the nineteenth century. Historian Carlo Ginzburg, in a notable essay on ‘Clues,’ teases out the implications of the huntsman’s lore for narrative in general, and particularly the kind of narrative exemplified in the detective story – a nineteenth-century invention – that seeks to solve a mystery, discover the hidden. The hunter works from concrete particulars, clues that need to be enchained in a narrative to reach a significant end, which is generally the identification of the quarry. The hunter’s lore, says Ginzburg, is characterized by the ability to move from apparently insignificant experiential data to a complex reality that cannot be experienced directly. And the data is always arranged by the observer in such a way as to produce a narrative sequence, which could be expressed most simply as ‘someone passed this way.’ Perhaps the very idea of narrative (as distinct from the incantation, exorcism, or invocation) was born in a hunting society, from the experience of deciphering tracks.6 On Ginzburg’s hypothesis, narrative would be a cognitive instrument of a specific type, one ‘invented’ for the decipherment of details of the real that only take on their meaning when they are viewed as clues, then linked in a series, enchained in a manner that allows one to identify that animal or person who passed this way. This is what Sherlock Holmes’ searches are all about: reality becomes semiotic when it reveals that its particulars are clues that can be enchained, in a meaningful sequence, to the end of discovery. ‘It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true,’ as Watson admiringly exclaims to Holmes at the end of one of their cases.7 If plots of recognition are age-old, in modernity they seem to have a predilection for the hunter’s knowledge by way of individual clues linked, metonymically, into a narrative solution. Ginzburg’s hunter’s paradigm intersects in modern societies with the identity paradigm: the need to know who the ‘others’ of society are. It is a paradigm that is intricated with both legality (the law investigates and polices identities) and with narrative (your identity lies in the story you can tell). These two prongs of the search to know identities converge tellingly in another text by Balzac, the short novel Le Colonel Chabert, which concerns the effort of this hero of Napoleon’s armies – felled with a head wound at the battle of Eylau, 6 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Spie. Radici di un paradigma indizario’, in Miti Emblemi Spie (Torino: Einaudi, 1986), p.166. English trans. by Tedeschi: John and Anne C., ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), p.103. I have modified the Tedeschi translation in order to give a more literal rendition. 7 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Red-headed League’, in The Adventure of the Speckled Band and Other Stories of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Signet, 1965), p.83.
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declared dead and buried in the common pit – to reestablish his identity several years later, when things have changed not only in the usual posthumous ways – his wife has remarried, for instance – but changed also through a momentous historical reversal, the coming of a Restoration that wishes to bury the Napoleonic past, to repress it, pretend it never existed, in order to return to a prior state of society represented by the royal decree the law clerks are reading out loud, in order to copy it, as the story begins: a decree restituting to the old nobility lands expropriated during the revolutionary period, a decree rendered in 1814, initiating the Restoration. The decree forcefully announces an end to the regime in which Colonel Chabert achieved his identity, made, as we say, a name for himself, and the coming of a new world of legalism (represented on the national level by La Charte, creating a constitutional monarchy). Chabert, who began life as an orphan in the Enfants-Trouvés, is a self-made man, created through the army, which was of course during the Napoleonic era the great social institution for rapid advancement, where one could go from an inherited identity, as humble peasant for instance, to the achieved identity of general or even marshal, and a title of nobility, literally in a matter of months. But Chabert in 1818 must press his claim not on the battlefield but in what the novel calls a ‘cavern of litigation.’ Who he is cannot be proved simply by a cavalry charge; it must be negotiated through the motions and counter-motions of the law office and the law court, working toward the desired outcome of a public recognition of his identity, and the accompanying civil rights and emoluments. The situation is oxymoronic. When upon Chabert’s first visit to the cavern of litigation one of the clerks asks for his name, he replies: ‘Chabert.’ ‘Is it the colonel who was killed at Eylau?’ asked Huré, who hadn’t yet said anything and was eager to add his mockery to that of the other clerks. ‘The same, sir,’ replied the old man with a heroic simplicity. And then he left. (p.31)8
He claims the identity of a man whose public and legal identity is that of a dead hero, whose final acts of bravery and whose decease have been published in the Victoires et conquêtes of the Grande Armée. Another of the clerks comments: ‘Il a l’air d’un déterré.’ To say that someone looks like a man exhumed from the grave – ‘a l’air d’un déterré’ – of course to use a metaphor expressing his generally ghastly appearance. But what if the metaphor is not one – since it is literally the case that Chabert has been dug from the grave, has in fact dug
8 Quotations from the Folio edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); translations are mine.
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himself from the battlefield pit for the dead of Eylau? – Chabert’s heavy task is to make others believe in the blinding literality of this apparent figure, to unbury, himself, and establish his continuous identity as Colonel Chabert. Derville the lawyer is the necessary mediator of Chabert’s identity narrative: in the modern world of post-Waterloo legalism – see that decree being copied in the opening scene – questions of identity must be proved through litigation, not in battlefield heroics. Derville is convinced by Chabert’s gothic tale of death and rebirth – like the classical hero’s descent to Hades and return – but he realizes that it has no public currency in and of itself. When Chabert has finished telling his story, Derville responds: ‘Il faudra peut-être transiger’: you may have to negotiate a settlement. To which Chabert reacts with outrage: ‘Negotiate?’ echoed Colonel Chabert. ‘Am I dead or am I alive?’ [‘Suis-je mort ou suis-je vivant?’] (p.57). Chabert’s absolutism here – dead or alive? – corresponds to his military mentality but also the romantic, we could say Rousseauist, intimate, inward understanding of the truth-value of his narrative of identity. Rousseau wants us to know what he calls his ‘dispositions intérieures,’ his inward self. Derville, however, understands that this is not enough, that identity is forged in all sorts of transpersonal networks, intersubjective negotiations. The self, as psychologist Jerome Bruner has argued, is ‘transactional.’9 Balzac’s original title for this novel indeed was La Transaction. It is Derville, man of the law, who understands the transactional nature of the self, and particularly the nature of the legal transactions involved. Very briefly: the transaction must engage in the first instance the Comtesse Ferraud, Chabert’s ex – and still? – wife. Derville realizes that she, too, has a ‘buried story,’ such that she lives with a ‘moral cancer.’ She is of humble origins – Chabert says he picked her up at the Palais-Royal, indicating she had been a prostitute – and her advancement and enrichment through Chabert, and then Chabert’s death, were succeeded by marriage to an impecunious aristocrat. The problem is that with the return of Louis XVIII and the establishment of the Restoration, Comte Ferraud has come into some property of his own in addition to his wife’s riches, has developed political ambitions, and begun to feel he might have made a better marriage. His caste is once again at the summit of society and power, but he is unlikely to be made a Peer of the Realm. If his marriage to the Comtesse Ferraud were to be annulled and he were then to marry the daughter of a Peer who had no sons of his own but wished to have his peerage transmitted to his son-in-law: there would lie the path to glory. Thus the position of the Comtesse is potentially precarious, and the return of her former spouse, urging his claim to be the real husband, very threatening
9 See Jerome Bruner, ‘The Transactional Self’, in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p.67.
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to her. The accuracy of Derville’s narrative hypotheses is confirmed when he presses the Comtesse toward the horrified realization that if she becomes the object of a lawsuit by Chabert, she might lose the Comte Ferraud’s support, since he might be glad to see his marriage to her annulled. Derville’s advice to her, then, is the same as to her sometime spouse: ‘Transiger.’ The rest of the novel is about how and why this transaction fails, and how the Comtesse manages to trick Chabert, and finally disillusion him to the point where he chooses to give up his claim to his rightful identity, and to disappear from society. The burden of negotiating Chabert’s story with that the Comtesse wishes to impose appears to be too heavy: the personal is weighted by the sociohistorical stories, carrying a freight of political and cultural meaning. For all his willingness to have Derville attempt to turn his dramatic story into a socially acknowledged identity, Chabert remains fixed in the Napoleonic past. The loss of Napoleon, his supreme father, has also brought the loss of patrie and patrimoine, both irrecuperably alienated. ‘Notre soleil s’est couché, nous avons tous froid maintenant’: ‘Our sun has set, now we are all cold,’ Chabert says to Derville: the sun has set on an entire historical epoch, and its irreconcilable partisans now have entered an ice age. There is a continuing absolutism in Chabert’s understanding of the world, familiar to psychoanalysts working with patients who will not abandon past affects. His ‘Am I dead or am I alive’ is his bottom line. He does not want to put his watch ahead to Restoration standard time, and he finally gives up on the negotiation, abandons his title and his very name, Chabert, to re-assume simply the name assigned him in the orphanage, Hyacinthe. The novel ends with an epilogue set in 1840, some twenty-two years after the main action, when Derville and his associate Godeschal come upon a destitute Chabert, seated before the old age hospice in Bicêtre, who has ‘fallen back into infancy’ and fearfully denies his identity as Chabert, which has brought him nothing but litigation and trouble in the contemporary world. And we are told that Derville now tells Godeschal ‘the preceding story’ – making of the lawyer the very author of the narrative. At its end, Derville laments that there are three figures in society who always wear black, as if in mourning for all virtues and all illusions: the priest, the doctor, and the lawyer. Of all of these, he says, the lawyer is the most unfortunate since he learns over and over again the worst traits of humanity. It is at the last the figure of the lawyer as novelist that emerges: the black-coated man of the law who knows all of society’s sordid hidden stories. Derville, along with the moneylender Gobseck, reappears in more Balzac novels than any other character. Like the Balzac who invented him, Derville understands that getting at modern stories of personal identity must pass through the narrow passages of the law. The social need to identify, to police, and to
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classify made the nexus of the lawyer and the policeman crucial, and made, too, the detective story the most characteristic invention of nineteenth-century literature. It would be interesting of course to pursue all the implications of this nexus, for instance in marriage, the legalized form of desire and sexuality that offers the predominant plot structure of the nineteenth century, contract and transgression: the discovery of both desire and the law in adultery, and all the consequences for narratives of inheritance, property, money, self-definition. All questions of who we are and what we want pass through the straits, the détroit, to evoke a Lacanian image, of the law’s definitions of the human. There are many different, though intersecting, lines of identity to explore here. In the context of our few remaining moments, let me just follow one – and also ask that it be understood that I can present only a part of a work-in-progress. If identification and triage of a European criminal population was difficult, the problem posed by the subject peoples of the colonies was far worse. To European eyes, they all looked the same. They had no ‘identifying marks.’ It was eventually an official of the British Raj in Bengal who ‘discovered’ fingerprinting. It seems probable that Bengalis had long been using tip sahi, a kind of fingerprint signature. Their English rulers, who had been desperately trying to track identities among the population, adapted it to their own uses (then quarrelled about which Brit had discovered it). The technique quickly migrated back to Europe. Systems were worked out for categorizing and retrieving prints according to type – here Francis Galton of the composite criminal photographs was the key analyst and classifier, particularly intent on using fingerprints for social and racial classification: he was disappointed when he could not show that African fingerprints resembled those of the higher apes more than those of Caucasians. There is a disquieting historical link between the use of this kind of identificatory mark and racist classifications.10 Fingerprinting quickly became the queen of identifying marks, the key to criminology. Western cultures came to believe in those two infallible characteristics of fingerprints: their uniqueness and their permanency – came to accept these truths perhaps more on faith than on evidence. When fingerprint evidence entered U.S. courtrooms early in the twentieth century, it appears to have been rapidly accepted – no doubt because it was so much needed and wanted – and never truly subjected to scientific testing. Legal scholar Jennifer Mnookin has noted that the error rate in fingerprint identification is essentially unknown, and has never really been tested.11
10 See Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). 11 Brooklyn Law Review, 13 (2001), p.19.
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Judge Pollak’s first Llera-Plaza opinion (now withdrawn) suggested that the process of fingerprint identification belongs to Ginzburg’s ‘hunter’s paradigm,’ not to a harder science. It enchains a series of concrete particulars in a ‘case,’ and shows how they are linked to one another toward identification of an animal, or person, who has been there and left traces. We are, as in the detective story or the melodrama, in a paradigm of recognition by way of clues that become significant though a narrative sequencing. But the instruments of the paradigm may be shifting: we now more and more believe that truth lies beyond the visual, in the evidence discovered through heat-imaging sensors, for instance, or in the codes read in DNA. The visual alone no long satisfies us. Yet we have not moved out from the old visual paradigm – as the outraged reaction to Judge Pollak’s attempt to demystify fingerprints shows. We are waiting for the development of a new paradigm which we can have faith. As we wait, we may perhaps find ourselves at the tail-end of that romantic identity paradigm that wants to see our identities stamped even, indelibly and unalterably, on our fingertips. To conclude somewhat arbitrarily – this is an ongoing project – I am tempted to reach back to a romantic poet, to John Keats, to ‘This living hand, now warm and capable,’ probably the last lines he wrote, proffering, as to eternity, the reality of his fingertips as his identity, as poet and biographical person, – see here it is – I hold it towards you.
The Global I Roland Greene (University of Stanford) The paper will deal with two topics of comparative interest: how scholarship especially of the last twenty years has described literature of the late Middle Ages and early modern period in terms that reflect the state of things before the emergence of individualism – that is, refusing to ascribe an anachronistic ‘selfhood’ to the works of an era before such a term became current, and having to recover or invent an approach that is historically responsible – and how recent scholarship has developed models of cultural interpretation particular to our own period of post-individualist thinking. That is, the first phase of the paper will address a kind of historical scholarship that has had some success in unlocking the outlook of the late medieval and early modern periods, while the second phase will describe a general approach in comparative literature that can be adapted to any historical and cultural situation. The paper will conclude with a consideration of the differences between these two complementary approaches. The primary materials discussed include Petrarch, La Celestina, Vaz de Caminha’s Carta, and Shakespeare. ¡O vida de congoxas llena, de miserias acompañada! ¡O mundo, mundo! Muchos muchos de ti dixeron, muchos en tus qualidades metieron la mano; a diversas cosas por oydas te compararon; yo por triste esperiencia lo contaré, como a quien las ventas y compras de tu engañosa feria no prósperamente sucedieron . . . . Yo pensava en mi más tierna edad que eras y eran tus hechos regidos por alduna orden; agora, visto el pro y la contra de tus bienandanças, me pareces un labarinto de errores, un desierto espantable, una morada de fieras, juego de hombres que andan en corro, laguna llena de cieno, región llena de espinas, monte alto, campo pedregoso, prado lleno de serpientes, huerto florido y sin fruto, fuente de cuydados, río de lágrimas, mar de miserias, trabajo sin provecho, dulce ponçoña, vana esperança, falsa alegría, verdadero dolor.1 (Oh life, full of troubles and misery! Oh world, world! Many have written of its practices and compared it with many things, but they spoke from hearsay. I will describe the world as one who has been cheated in its false marketplaces. . . . When I was young I thought the world was ruled by order. I know better now! It is a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men run in circles, a lake of mud, a thorny thicket, a dense forest, a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a river of tears, a sea of miseries, effort without profit, a flowering but barren orchard, a running spring of cares, a sweet poison, a vain hope, a false joy, and a true pain.)2
1 Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. by Peter E. Russell (Madrid: Castalia, 1991), pp.598-99. 2 Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, trans. by Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955), p.159.
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The body of writing that we call the literature of the early modern world begins in passages like this one from La Celestina, Fernando de Rojas’s prose drama of 1499, in which – we might say – a self with a history confronts ‘the world’ as a complex entity, and evokes the dynamic relation between them. This kind of confrontation is foundational enough to Renaissance writing that we tend to see as unexceptional, and perhaps we imagine that it has always existed; but it is evidence of the developing sense, from about 1450 on, that the self and the world were in a reciprocal, mutually defining state of relation, and that the concept of the world, which had been singular and totalizing, was proving to be multiple and partial. In part this conviction is a rhetorical adaptation of the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa, one of the first early modern figures to think comprehensively about the relation of self and world, who proposed several conceits – including man as god and world as game – with which to bring the relation into scrutiny.3 In part, too, it is the result of geographical discoveries that unsettle the known world and bring ‘new worlds’ to light; in part it is probably concomitant with the elaboration of the centralized state and the rise of absolutism, which fortify categories such as ‘state’ and ‘self’ while complicating others such as ‘world.’ And in part it is the characteristic humanist attraction toward the inherent liabilities in the term itself, for ‘world’ is a term they (and we) cannot do without and yet also a term the dimensions of which can scarcely be agreed on. From about 1450, every usage of ‘world’ is potentially the taking of a position as to what is a world, what is a self in relation to a world, and how the term ‘world’ itself either suffices or fails to serve. Perhaps this shift is already visible in the passage from La Celestina. The speaker Pleberio, who has just witnessed his daughter’s death, describes a unitary world in the process of becoming plural, a collection of epithets that are all but impossible to hold together in a single conception. The idea of the world is broken into and reimagined to reveal unexplored depths of deceit and human misery; and the idea becomes dynamic as the speech continues, one depiction shading into the next and the chain of them suggesting a number of possible narratives. It is hard not to see, as the passage winds down, that what was presumed to be a single world ‘ruled by order’ has become – in Pleberio’s experience, and for his audience as well – many worlds, opening into infinity. While it might be tempting to see Pleberio’s soliloquy as an expression of personal disillusionment recast as a statement about the world itself, I suggest it is also an observation about the changing understanding of the world put into the 3 See Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. by Mario Domandi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), pp.10-45, and the introduction by Pauline Moffitt Watts to Nicholas de Cusa, De Ludo Globi/The Game of Spheres, trans. by Watts (New York: Abaris Books, 1986), pp.13-51.
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terms of subjective experience – that is, the emotional and the empirical have changed together, and accordingly everything about ‘the world’ looks different. For that matter, the singularity that was formerly ascribed to the world has been transferred to its observer, with poignancy: in spite of all the worlds of suffering he witnesses, Pleberio is finally ‘alone.’ This essay concerns a transitional era in the history of Western individualism, in which the humanist invention of the self from Petrarch forward, a commonplace of intellectual and literary history, is complicated by a corresponding reimagining of the ‘world’ as a concept. Before this era, in the first phase of the humanist enterprise from about 1400 to 1500, the self is the site of considerable intellectual energy while the world remains largely singular and totalized. It is the self that changes, is the subject of comparisons, has compartments, while the world stands apart from the self, in a zone established in part by medieval conventions such as contemptus mundi that treat the world as a totality to be regarded warily, in part by debates in several intellectual disciplines over the nature of the mutual entanglement of the two concepts.4 During this era of change, say from 1450 to 1600, ‘the world’ comes into importance as a concept in several dimensions of geopolitics, science, and poetics, from Machiavelli to Sidney to Galileo. For the present essay, perhaps the salient fact is that the increasing complexity of the world inflects selfhood, so that at the end of this period, it becomes hard sometimes to distinguish self from world, and a statement about one can often be taken as about the other. This episode is, I believe, not exactly a neglected chapter of early modern intellectual history – the relation of self and world was a staple of twentieth-century scholarship on the Renaissance – but nonetheless a motif that has too seldom been transposed out of platitude and into literary history, especially for the vividly expanded Renaissance of the past generation. The groundplan of this episode is established under early humanism, when philosophers such as Cusanus take as fundamental the mutual definition of self and world. Ernst Cassirer remarks on a statement by Cusanus that epitomizes his thought, that the human mind ‘is a divine seed that comprehends in its simple essence the totality of everything knowable,’ but that ‘must be planted in the soil of the sensible world.’5 For much of the next phase of early modern European individualism, a major preoccupation is the making of adjustments to that foundational idea – imagining how the mind or self can be imbedded in the world, elaborating as Pleberio does one term or the other, resolving the 4 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p.122. 5 Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, p.45. Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp.3-96, offers a fine analysis of Cusanus’ thought.
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dialectical tensions between them in various ways. Cassirer famously accounts for this development as producing a new concept of nature and the ‘whole world of objects,’ in which the “object” is now something other than the mere opposite, the – so to speak – ob-jectum of the Ego.’ Rather, he argues, the object becomes the work of the subject, toward which ‘all the productive, all the genuinely creative forces’ of the self are directed, and the outcome is a new vision of art and science, to which I add new understandings of politics and empire.6 The centerpieces of this essay, then, will be two instances of worldmaking in Shakespeare, early and late, that depict the imaginative setting his plays inhabit, and display what we might call a period style, not of writing but of thinking. The first instance is what is arguably the earliest moment in the Shakespearean canon in which a character speaks in soliloquy: this is the brief speech in The Comedy of Errors, Act I, Scene 2, by Antipholus of Syracuse. With no one else onstage, he voices his feelings as a separated twin, a Syracusan abroad, and a sixteenth-century Englishman in Hellenistic disguise: I to the world am like a drop of water, That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth (Unseen, inquisitive), confounds himself. So I, to find a mother and a brother, In quest of them (unhappy), ah, lose myself.7
Seemingly simple, this statement is stamped with its historical moment, but is not easily seen apart from the critical fictions imposed on it by early twentiethcentury scholarship. In 1935, a generation after the rise of Imagism, and in the era of international formalism, Caroline Spurgeon published Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, a venture at modernizing the biographical criticism that had been in vogue for many years before that.8 The book argues that ‘images’ such as the drop of water in this soliloquy reveal the preoccupations of the man who wrote the plays. Accordingly Spurgeon classifies Shakespeare’s images (as well as Marlowe’s, Bacon’s, Chapman’s, and Dekker’s) into categories according to subject matter (the senses, outdoor life), and draws con-
6 Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, p.143. 7 William Shakespeare, ‘The Comedy of Errors’, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. by G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p.117, lines 35-40. Further citations of this edition will include act, scene, and line numbers in the body of the article. 8 Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935).
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clusions about the historical man: his gardener’s imagination, his interest in medicine, his sympathy for snails. All of this would be a harmless exercise except that Spurgeon’s terminology, which lined up with that of the New Critics and other mid-century formalists, was adopted by critics of the following generation, and became a powerful default for critics since: the ‘image,’ a concept derived from modernism, thus became an instrument for describing early modern poetry, not in terms of ideas but in reference to feelings that are ostensibly communicated by means of vivid language from poet to reader. The atomistic nature of this approach is evident when we consider that in the soliloquy from The Comedy of Errors – perhaps Shakespeare’s first use of the so-called image – ‘drop of water’ and ‘ocean’ are the relevant images, while according to this approach ‘world’ is not an image at all. But how would the passage appear to us if we had a different scheme with which to view it: not the anachronistic model of mid-twentieth-century criticism, but an approach that tries to identify and describe the soliloquy as an instance of an outlook particular to Shakespeare’s time and place – a period style, but more than that, a period world-view. Such a naming and describing might go something like this. What Pleberio’s soliloquy anticipates is a development in European literature over the course of the sixteenth century in which first-person speakers, across a variety of genres from lyric poetry to the essay to drama to emergent prose fiction, imagine a relation between themselves as singular individuals and the world as an entirety with parts and aspects; and the rhetorical form this imagining takes is the kind of statement that joins I and the world in a fashion that emphasizes the friction of these terms, provokes the shock of their incommensurability and disproportion, and often throws off a startling figure of speech – as in the passage from The Comedy of Errors – as the only available way of their inhabiting the same sentence. To take the broad view, this imagined relation between the particular subject and the world – call it, for the moment, ‘the global I’ – is a significant principle of continuity between the humanism of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the explosion of vernacular poetries in the mid-sixteenth century, and the transition into the seventeenth century and the baroque – in fact we might say that the baroque is the most complete exploitation of this topos, that there would be no baroque without it. The apex of ‘the global I,’ however, coincides with the period of Shakespeare’s career, and his plays, his fictions, his worldmaking often include searching explorations of what such a statement enables him and his contemporaries to think. It is as though the topos were a collective project across the sixteenth century, proposed by the earliest writers such as Rojas, nurtured by Garcilaso, Ronsard, Camões, and Montaigne, and passed on to Shakespeare (not to mention Marlowe) as a foundational item in his poetics.
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Let me look backward here, at how the relation between self and world was configured before this distinctive period. In the humanist world-view of Francis Petrarch and his immediate successors, world is still often indivisible as a concept: Piovonmi amare lagrime dal viso con un vento angoscioso di sospiri, quando in voi adiven che gli occhi giri per cui sola dal mondo i’ son diviso. (Bitter tears rain from my face with an anguished wind of sighs, when it happens that I turn my eyes to you for whom alone I am divided from the world.) .... Quando’io son tutto vòlto in quella parte ove ‘l bel viso di madonna luce, et m’é rimasa nel pensier la luce che m’arde et strugge dentro a parte a parte, i’ che temo del cor che mi si parte, et veggio presso il fin de la mia luce, vommene in guisa d’orbo, senza luce, che non sa ove si vada et pur si parte.9 (When I am all turned toward the place where shines my lady’s lovely face, and in my thought the light remains that burns and melts me within bit by bit, since I fear for my heart, which is breaking, and see my days near their end, I go without light like a blind man who does not know where to go and still departs.)10
In these two consecutive sonnets from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 17 and 18, we are still a long way from Pleberio’s soliloquy in which ‘the world’ has many aspects and, in naming them, one makes a statement about the self. Rather, this is still the Petrarch of the ‘Ascent of Mont Ventoux,’ who sets out into a natural world, that of Mont Ventoux, which he conceives in one striking aspect (he is moved by ‘nothing but the desire to see its conspicuous height’) but ultimately resists in all its complexity, returning to the
9 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1996), pp.72 and 76. 10 Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p.52.
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contemplation of his own selfhood.11 The impetus for Petrarch’s retreat from a world that obviously attracts him is a sentence in Saint Augustine’s Confessions – ‘and men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars, and desert themselves’ – that is already a statement of ‘the global I,’ with much the same shape as Antipholus’ soliloquy: going out into the world, I lose myself.12 The interchangeable subject and object of every such statement, I and the world, move together and apart in different formations; are imagined now as univalent, now as differentiated; and produce utterances of many orientations. In the first era of humanism after Petrarch and Cusanus, the divided self of the former (‘i’ son diviso’) gives way to a similarly compartmentalized world – a symmetry between subject and object. Where lyric poetry and philosophical meditation were the principal modes of the earliest humanist reflection, the emergence of a differentiated world, and its circumstantiation of ‘the global I,’ allows for the emergence of literary and philosophical containers such as the prose drama of La Celestina. How then do we get to the state of things in about 1500, to the multidimensional world of Pleberio? This is a question, I suspect, one could pose to several intellectual and literary historians, and receive any number of equally valid answers. The rise of a post-Aristotelian philosophy of nature and the growing accommodation of the intelligible world in other disciplines must be part of this story.13 Since I have nominated Pleberio’s speech as a kind of transitional gesture, I would like to concentrate for a moment on what might be called the colonial explanation – a hypothesis that argues from the premise that the new realities of overseas empire complicate the available ways of thinking about the world. Here we turn to the chronicler of the Portuguese discovery of Brazil, Pero Vaz de Caminha. In his letter to Dom Manuel, Vaz de Caminha tells of the encounter between the Portuguese revenue officer Diogo Dias, 11 Francesco Petrarca, ‘Familiarium Rerum 4.1’, in Opere, 2 vols (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1975), p.386; the translation appears in ‘The Ascent of Mont Ventoux’, trans. by Hans Nachod, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. by Ernst Cassirer et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p.44. Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Renaissance Thought, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp.13-50, gives an account of Petrarch’s philosophy that includes his subordination of the external world to the self. 12 Petrarca, ‘Familiarium Rerum’, p.390; Cassirer, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, p.44. 13 See, for example, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially the chapters by Alfonso Ingegno on the philosophy of nature (pp.36-63) and by Katharine Park and Eckhard Kessler on psychology (pp.455-534); and the overview by Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, pp.123-91 (p.153).
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‘an agreeable and pleasure-loving man,’ and a group of Tupinamba Indians. Dias crossed the river near the landfall at Porto Seguro in present-day northeastern Brazil and: meteu-se com êles a dançar, tomando-os pelas mãos; e êles folgavam e riam, e andavam com êle muito bem ao som da gaita. Depois de dançarem, féz-lhes alí, andando no chão, muitas voltas ligeiras e salto real, de que êles se espantavam e riam e folgavam muito. E conquanto com aquilo muito os segurou e afagou, tomavam logo uma esquiveza como de animais monteses, e foram-se para cima. E então o Capitão passou o rio com todos nós outros, e fomos pela praia de longo, indo os batéis, assim, rente da terra. Fomos até uma lagoa grande de água doce, que está junto com a praia, porque toda aquela ribeira do mar é apaülada por cima e sai a água por muitos lugares. E depois de passarmos o rio, foram uns sete ou oito dêles andar entre os marinheiros que se recolhiam aos batéis. E levaram dalí um tubarão, que Bartolomeu Dias matou, lhes levou e lançou na praia. Bastará dizer-vos que até aquí, como quer que êles um pouco se amansasem, logo duma mão para a outra se esquivavam, como pardais, do cevadoiro… O Capitão ao velho, com quem falou, deu uma carapuça vermelha. E com toda a fala que entre ambos se passou e com a carapuça que lhe deu, tanto que se apartou e come ou de passar o rio, foi-se logo recatando e não quís mais tornar de lá para aquém. Os outros dois, que o Capitão teve nas naus, a que deu o que já disse, nunca mais aquí apareceram – do que tiro ser gente bestial, de pouco saber e por isso tão esquiva. Porém e com tudo isto andam muito bem curados e muitos limpos. E naquilo me parece ainda mais que são como aves ou alimárias monteses, às quais faz o ar melhor pena e melhor cabelo que às mansas… Mandou a Capitão àquele degredado Afonso Ribeiro, que se fôsse outra vez com êles. Êle foi e andou lá um bom pedaço, mas à tarde tornou-se, que o fizeram êles vir e não o quiseram lá consentir. E deram-lhe arcos e setas; e não lhe tomaram nenhuma cousa do seu. Antes – disse êle – que um lhe tomara umas continhas amarelas, que levava, e fugia com elas, e êle se queixou e os outros foram logo após, e lhas tomaram e tornaram-lhas a dar; e então mandaram-no vir. Disse que não vira lá entre êles senão umas choupaninhas de rama verde e de fetos muito grandes, como de Entre Doiro e Minho.14 (began to dance among them, taking them by the hands, and they were delighted and laughed and accompanied him very well to the sound of the pipe. After they had danced he went along the level ground, making many light turns and a remarkable leap which astonished them, and they laughed and enjoyed themselves greatly. And although he reassured and flattered them a great deal with this, they soon became sullen like wild men and went away upstream.
14 A Carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha, ed. by Jaime Cortesão (Rio de Janeiro: Livros de Portugal, 1943), 7v-8r.
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And then the captain crossed over the river with all of us, and we went along the shore, the boats going along close to land, and we came to a large lake of sweet water which is near the seashore, because all that shore is marshy above and the water flows out in many places. And after we had crossed the river some seven or eight of the natives joined our sailors who were retiring to the boats. And they took from there a shark which Bertolameu Dias killed and brought to them and threw on the shore. It suffices to say that up to this time, although they were somewhat tamed, a moment afterwards they became frightened like sparrows at a feeding-place… To the old man with whom the captain spoke he gave a red cap; and in spite of all the talking that he did with him, and the cap which he gave him, as soon as he left and began to cross the river, he immediately became more cautious and would not return again to this side of it. The other two whom the captain had on the ships, and to whom he gave what has already been mentioned, did not appear again, from which I infer that they are bestial people and of very little knowledge; and for this reason they are so timid. Yet withal they are well cared for and very clean, and in this it seems to me that they are rather like birds or wild animals, to which the air gives better feathers and better hair than to tame ones… The captain ordered the convict, Affonso Ribeiro, to go with them again, which he did. And he went there a good distance, and in the afternoon he returned, for they had made him come and were not willing to keep him there; and they had given him bows and arrows and had not taken from him anything which was his… He said that he had not seen there among them anything but some thatched huts of green branches, and made very large, like those of Entre Doiro e Minho.)15
This chronicle crowns a long history of travel writing in Portuguese and other vernaculars.16 Why is this document, the beginning of the record of Portuguese empire in the New World, peculiar as an evocation of ‘the world’? The imperial motive, the utter newness of the American continent, and the pressure of a humanist imperative to yoke self to world – these factors establish the conditions for a discourse that transfers the properties of segmentation and internal diversity from the observer to the world he observes, opening a new mode of writing and thinking about the world as such. It is as though the repertory of descriptive models for selfhood developed under the humanist program in its
15 ‘Letter of Pedro Vaz de Caminha to King Manuel’, in The Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral to Brazil and India, trans. by William Brooks Greenlee, Hakluyt Society 2nd series 81 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1938), pp.22-23. 16 The most stimulating account of such writing is Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). On the Portuguese see Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580 – Europe and the World in the Age of Expansion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), and Malyn Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400-1668 (London: Routledge, 2005).
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first phase, to about 1500, is made to accommodate a new but complementary purpose, namely addressing the world in terms that had been reserved for the self. With that adjustment, new genres such as the picaresque – where the complexity of the observed world is often greater than that of the observing self – become thinkable, ethnography becomes as rich in potential as autobiography, and a literature of empire, as opposed to mere travel writing, comes into existence for the first time. In Vaz de Caminha’s account one can almost hear Pleberio, his exact contemporary: this world is a dense forest, a rushing river, a sweet lake, and its people are wild men, timid, like birds, like the inhabitants of the Douro. Each of these statements c. 1500 is indistinguishably about self and world, a self-reflexive and contradictory confession of mutual involvement. The rhetorical convention I have called ‘the global I’ belongs to this development, of course: it consolidates the involvement of self and world into a concise topos, rendering the endless isocolon of Pleberio’s soliloquy into a stark motto. With that backward glance in mind, then, I return to the later phase of the period from about 1450 to 1600, when the ‘the global I’ becomes a stock device for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, marking both continuity with the earlier humanists and a lapidary revision of them. In The Comedy of Errors, the first soliloquy introduces a reference point of the global to be measured against the subjective experience of Antipholus and several other characters. Once underway, this measurement becomes indispensable to the worldmaking of the play, as though every standpoint must be marked against the horizon, or as Antipholus of Ephesus’s sister-in-law Luciana puts it: ‘There’s nothing situate under heaven’s eye/ But hath his bound in earth, in sea, in sky’ (II.1.16-17). Shakespeare implants that couplet in a great-chain-of-being speech about how everyone submits to someone; but the distinctively contemporary implication in what is very much a received idea is that to know where we are, we must know our horizon, and the topos of ‘the global I’ expresses that inquisitiveness. To elaborate, when Antipholus of Syracuse proposes his own relation to the wider world through what Spurgeon and many recent editors call the ‘image’ of the drop of water, he is proposing to speak of that relation in fluvial terms. The singular individual touches the horizon by flowing toward it like water, and that fluvial way of thinking about identity becomes a commonplace. When in Act II, Scene 2, Antipholus of Ephesus’s abandoned his wife Adriana, he addresses the man she believes is her husband and unawares echoes his first soliloquy, Ah, do not tear away thyself from me; For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall A drop of water in the breaking gulf, And take unmingled thence that drop again,
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The Global I Without addition or diminishing, As take from me thyself and not me too,
(II.2.124-29)
he replies that he understands not ‘one word’ of her lament over his supposed adultery. One word is probably what he does understand, in that he hears his own account of ‘the global I’ coming from the mouth of a stranger and cannot imagine how it got there; to his profession of incomprehension Luciana replies, ‘Fie, Brother, how the world is chang’d with you.’ The same Antipholus’ attempted courtship of Luciana likewise builds on ‘the global I’ as he insists that she is a mythological figure who explains his relation to the world in its entirety, My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope’s aim, My sole earth’s heaven, and my heaven’s claim,
(III.2.63-64)
but she will have none of it. It is the nature of ‘the global I’ that as a discourse, it makes either no sense or too much sense; it is either a disorienting conjunction of literally disparate terms or a kind of world-picture that convinces perfectly. In this way, Antipholus of Syracuse’s own evocation of ‘the global I’ is all too resonant as the play’s language of courtship. And the power of the topos here is sealed through parody, when in Act III, Scene 2, Dromio of Syracuse celebrates his kitchen-wench Nell by measuring himself against her as world: she is ‘no longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her,’ he says (l.113-15), and goes on to identify Scotland, France, and the rest as physical regions of her body – ‘the global I’ literally embodied, by groping. Injecting what I am calling ‘the global I’ into his play as a convention into which his characters pour their own urges and observations, Shakespeare and his immediate generation write their own late-century episode in the development of this topos, and render it foundational to the worldmaking of their plays. The imaginative movement from self to world by means of figures, measurements, and even (as in the case of Dromio) gestures positions Shakespearean fiction along the diachronic axis of humanist ideology, along the synchronic axis of a generational outlook; it is both his own, in the sense that it is utterly basic to his thought, and it comes from somewhere, from a discrete early modern tradition. But as worldmaking must be enacted by various topoi in the early plays – and of course ‘the global I’ is only one of several such conventions that contribute to Shakespeare’s ways of making fictions – the late plays witness an increasing interest in the unmaking of the world, or at least in exploring alternative topoi that make the circuit from self to world seem less natural and more problematic. From Shakespeare’s supposed first play to his last: ‘the global I’
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that is actively explored in The Comedy of Errors probably comes to seem, for Shakespeare’s generation, less like an exploratory and more like a totalizing habit of thought, and so it eventually gives way to the countervailing topos that dominates his last play, The Tempest: that of insularity. Insularity in early modern thought is hardly the literal fact that it has since become – where to a modern observer, something plainly is or is not an island – but like ‘the global I,’ a conceptual formation that proposes an imagined resolution to a social contradiction.17 If La Celestina is hypothetically the work that broaches ‘the global I’ to the sixteenth century, Utopia is perhaps the text that establishes insularity as an early modern vantage: it introduces a way of thinking that is properly called utopian, and opens the prospect of a more dispersed and multifarious phenomenon that I have called island logic.18 The dichotomy between islands and continents is a feature of the modern worldview that is so entirely naturalized, it comes to seem inseparable from the way things are.19 But the profusion of islands in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury fiction, philosophy, and natural history suggests that the dichotomy was often actively undone even as it was in the process of formation. Islands make possible the observation of their own constructedness, and the constructedness of other measures of the world, because they enforce a certain clarity: they have definable borders, they are conceptually autonomous from the world at large, and they encourage attention to the conditions of indigeneity and importation. In this latter dimension especially, islands often undermine some of the mystifications of capital and power. Suddenly, in the light of insularity or island logic, the exertions with which capital fashions a world according to its own unquestioned values come to look like exertions, we are encouraged to notice the trail of investment that furnishes the island with people and materials, and – quite simply – those whose power is untraceable and natural elsewhere are much more easily questioned. We are encouraged to ask, on an island as nowhere else, not only what is native and what is not, but how these categories are established, and whether what is naturalized by history and capital might be unmasked as constructed, imported, or interested. When Shakespeare chooses his first and only island setting for an entire play, then, 17 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp.67, 87-88; and ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’, in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 – Theory and History of Literature 48-49, 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), II, p.75. 18 ‘Island Logic’, in The Tempest and Its Travels, ed. by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), pp.138-45. 19 Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
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he is finding his own way through a trope that reliably undoes the world as his audience knows it. He and the play are undertaking an exercise in island logic, a way of thinking that is counterposed to worldmaking. In an age that sees new worlds insistently built up for commercial, imperial, philosophical, or poetic purposes, island logic breaks them down again, undoing the entirety from the standpoint of the part. Celebrated in productions such as utopias, romances, and isolarii (explain), islands are held at a premium in the sixteenth century not merely out of geographical curiosity but because they afford a perspective that can have only an oblique relation to the accumulating and totalizing world-views of the imperial and economic centers. How many fiction-writers from Rabelais to Cervantes have an island book in their repertory? How many historians from Oviedo to Guicciardini to Stow have an island episode in their histories? In this light, The Tempest is Shakespeare’s island play, and it applies island logic to its contemporaneous world as well as to its own models and procedures. In his classic essay ‘Prospero’s Wife,’ Stephen Orgel asks a question that ought to figure in any discussion of The Tempest, and that proceeds from island logic: ‘what is the nature of Prospero’s authority and the source of his power?’20 Within the confines of the play, Prospero controls both how island logics are let loose and how they will be reconciled back into a comprehensive European worldview. The capacity to submit others to alternative logics and bring them back again is what the play calls ‘magic,’ and Prospero is the only magician in sight. Moreover, the least powerful character, Caliban, is not only unable to control the provision of logics but has no mainland to return to: he is all partial perspective. The conclusion of The Tempest sees Prospero managing the reintegration of the European characters, obviously excluding Caliban, into an inflected version of the world they started from. When they linger over what they have experienced in the play, Prospero reassures them that ‘You do yet taste/ Some subtleties o’ th’ isle, that will [not] let you/ Believe things certain’ (V.1.123-25), and promises their restoration. This denouement is intellectually successful if dramatically ineffective. But outside The Tempest – and this is the factor that accounts for a considerable part of its unquantifiable power – we spectators are encouraged to apply an island logic to the play itself, with no Prospero to guide us back; what we might make of the play by these lights is its most radical aspect, for it introduces the method of its own unmaking. Island logic leads us to ask of The Tempest questions that it will not ask in itself. There are many of these: one might say 20 Stephen Orgel, ‘Prospero’s Wife’, Representations, 8 (1984), p.8; rpt. in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p.58.
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that the scholarship on The Tempest is most interesting where it strays farthest from an evidentiary logic and persuasive power, because island logic asks us, authorizes us, not to invest too much in such things. One of the ethical imperatives of island logic, after all, is what Don Quixote urges on Sancho Panza in his advice to the prospective governor, that is to ‘try to discover the truth out of the rich man’s gifts and promises, just as you seek it in the poor man’s sobs and prayers’ – behind the totalized world as you find it.21 Perhaps the paradigmatic exercise of island logic is Sancho’s, where as governor he resolves a dispute between two men over whether a debt has been paid by breaking open a cane to disclose money hidden inside. To bring this argument back to its beginning, I would like to suggest that of all the many questions in and about The Tempest provoked by island logic, one of the most durable is one that follows from Orgel’s fundamental question about the nature of Prospero’s power: that is, what power remains in ‘the global I’? Prospero is the complete realization and the direct heir of the topos of ‘the global I’ as Shakespeare explores and adapts it in his early works, but what might have seemed a thrilling way of positing a relation between the self and the world twenty years earlier now in the era of The Tempest seems in need of a critique, and thus the two topoi with equally convincing humanist pedigrees – ‘the global I’ and island logic – jostle each other in this play and keep themselves off balance. ‘The global I’ represents the continuing allure of an imagined relation between the singular self and the world (and with the provision of Prospero’s books as well as Ariel, his is not simply an imagined relation, but a direct and dispositive one). Island logic or insularity is the ethical counter to such a relation, questioning it, interrupting it. The speculative remarks of Pleberio and Antipholus have hardened into the magic of Prospero; and the procedure of Shakespearean worldmaking, having been made, must be unmade. 21 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, ed. by Diana de Armas Wilson, trans. by Burton Raffel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p.581.
Staining the Past with Ink in Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Memorie (1830): The Fallacies of Autobiographical ‘Writing’ Davy Van Oers (Utrecht University) Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838) states in his Memorie (1830) that in order to dry the ink of his writings he sometimes uses the inkwell instead of the sand box. By saying so, Mozart’s famous librettist admits that he stains his literary portrait, and thus the past, his life, with ink. The motivations behind this meta-autobiographical declaration, however, are ambiguous and involve moreover a typical issue discussed in autobiographies, that of the relationship between fact and fiction. This paper will investigate the role of ‘writing’ itself in structuring the relation between fact and fiction. According to some critics (Battistini 1990, Freeman 1993), ‘graphy’ is responsible for both a non-mimetic and a non-fictional reconstruction of the Self. However, rewriting the Self genders a specific autobiographical and textual life that would not have existed without ‘writing.’ The paper will discuss the expression of a meta-autobiographical consciousness of the manipulating power of melodramatic ‘writing’ in Da Ponte’s autobiography by analysing the rhetoric of truth the author elaborates in order to intercept the fictionalizing effects of language. La vida no es la que uno vivió, sino la que uno recuerda y cómo la recuerda para contarla.1 (Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers, and how one remembers it in order to recount it.)
Among the many stories a writer enjoys making up, perhaps none is as difficult to tell as the story of his own life. Vivir para contarla. This title of Gabriel García Márquez’ autobiography, translated as Living to tell the tale, shows that, as far as the author is concerned, life is not only biographical life. For Márquez, life creates narrative and narrative creates life; fictions change life, as the ‘actors’ influence and are influenced by fictions and life. All through the book, the real and the maybe-real rub shoulders with each other. Márquez’ title takes up a key concern in critical literature on autobiography. In the ever-increasing body of theoretical work pertaining to the study of the relationship between fact and fiction, critics continue to discuss the reasons for
1 Gabriel García Márquez, Vivir para contarla (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2002).
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the composite character of autobiography.2 Although the blend of documentary elements and narrative imagination has been studied extensively during the last century, scholars nowadays continue to ask themselves why it is impossible to draw distinct and unequivocal lines between, in the words of Goethe, Dichtung and Wahrheit. In this regard, the Italian critic Andrea Battistini states that for a non-transparent relationship between real life and written life three obstacles are responsible.3 Firstly, the exterior authority of the ‘other’ often obliges an autobiographer to adapt his life to social, moral, cultural, and historical conventions. This kind of censorship can be conscious or unconscious and is accompanied by a deliberate or unintentional interior censorship, the second obstacle indicated by Battistini. Finally, since language is both a ‘transit’ and a blockade of real life, Battistini indicates the act of ‘writing’ as third obstacle. On the one hand, language records and protects life, as without writing there is no trans-lation of life. On the other hand, inevitably, language itself (re)creates life, the translation being only a ‘copy’ of the real life: it blocks biographical being and identity. Language and writing have a regenerative value: they create a ‘textual’ life that differs from the biographical one. This is not a new perspective in the critical field of studies on autobiography. Various scholars have investigated the role of writing and of narrative structures in shaping the autobiographical life.4 Freeman, for example, with
2 See: Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975); Elisabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts. The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Marziano Guglielminetti, Memoria e scrittura. L’autobiografia da Dante a Cellini (Torino: Einaudi, 1977); Paul De Man, ‘Autobiography as Defacement’, Modern Language Notes, 94 (1979), pp.919-930; Georges May, L’Autobiographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979); Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography. Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); James Olney, Studies in Autobiography (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Nora Catelli, El espacio autobiográfico (Barcelona: Lumen, 1991); Georges Gusdorf, Lignes de vie. (1) Les écritures du moi. (2) Auto-bio-graphie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991); Robert Folkenflik, ed., The Culture of Autobiography. Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Bartolo Anglani, I letti di Procuste. Teorie e storie dell’autobiografia (Bari: Laterza, 1996); Gis le Mathieu-Castellani, La Scène judiciaire de l’autobiographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996); Franco D’Intino, L’autobiografia moderna. Storia forma problemi (Roma: Bulzoni, 1998); Philippe Lejeune, Pour l’autobiographie (Paris: Seuil, 1998); Almut Finck, Autobiographisches Schreiben nach dem Ende der Autobiographie (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1999); Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Autobiographie (Stuttgart, Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2000), and many others. 3 Andrea Battistini, ‘Genesi e sviluppo dell’autobiografia moderna’, The Italianist: Italian autobiography from Vico to Alfieri (and beyond), 17 (1997), pp.7-22 (p.189). 4 See: Jerome Bruner, ‘Life as Narrative’, Social Research, 54 (1987), pp.11-32; Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self. History, Memory, Narrative (London, New York: Routledge, 1993).
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his concept of ‘rewriting the Self’ maintains that ‘the narrative imagination, engaged in the project of rewriting the self, seeks to disclose, articulate, and reveal that very world which, literally, would not have existed had the act of writing not taken place.’5 Casting the memorial as text preserves life from oblivion. Nevertheless, this trans-scription immediately blocks mimesis because of the impossibility of evading the fictionalizing effects of language. Many contemporary autobiographers have also emphasized the life-recreative value of writing. Jarmila Oékayová, for instance, a Czech writer who moved to Italy where she writes about her immigration, draws attention to the necessity of writing a partly fictional text based upon her own non-fictional activities. Writing gives her the opportunity to recreate facts that would otherwise be too traumatic to tell in the register of reality. However, this narrative reconstruction is the individual sense she sees or wishes to see in some experiences of life, as the ‘essenziale invisibile agli occhi’ (essential is invisible to the eyes) (title of her autobiography).6 This paper will discuss the expression of a consciousness of the manipulating power of writing that is present in some autobiographies. I shall be doing so by focusing on an earlier period in Italian literary history where the same phenomenon as illustrated in contemporary writers as Márquez and Oékayová can be indicated. My aim is to show that in the so-called Venetian novelistic autobiography of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century this kind of awareness can be inferred from the presence of rhetorical strategies.
Theatrical and novelistic reconstruction of life in Venetian autobiography What is so specific about the ‘writing’ of the Venetian novelistic autobiography? In this period, often indicated as a climax of European autobiographical productivity (Rousseau, etc.), four Italian authors, all of Venetian origin, decide to write their memoirs: Giacomo Casanova and Carlo Goldoni in French, Lorenzo Da Ponte and Carlo Gozzi in Italian. Only Gozzi (1720-1806), a determined aristocrat who struggled against every aesthetic and ideological innovation, the famous antagonist of Goldoni on the Venetian theatre stage, writes his Memorie inutili (1797) in his hometown, all three other authors are abroad. Goldoni (1707-1793) writes his Mémoires (1787) in Paris where he tries to continue his reform of the Italian comedy, initiated in Venice. Casanova (1725-1798) writes his Histoire de ma vie (1798) working as a librarian in the castle of Dux in Bohemia and Da Ponte (1749-1838) writes his Memorie 5 Freeman, p. 223. 6 Jarmila Oékayová, L’essenziale invisibile agli occhi (Milano: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997).
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(1830) in the United States. Just like his good friend Casanova, Da Ponte was a born womaniser who spent a great deal of time abroad, in Gorizia, in Dresden, and in Vienna where he wrote the libretto of Mozart’s most famous operas, Nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and Così fan tutte (1790). He also lived in London where he worked at the King’s theatre, and finally in the United States – in Philadelphia, Sunbury, and New York – where he wrote his memoirs. In spite of their geographic dispersion, all these authors share a common Venetian autobiographical topography – the tendency to write their life as if it were a play, a comedy, a novel, or a melodrama. This kind of self-dramatization could be considered a typical expression of the eighteenth-century Venetian sense of spectacularization of life. In this regard, many scholars have outlined thematical and structural interferences between this cluster of autobiographies and the genres of the novel and the theatre (creation of suspense between different chapters, the use of novelistic narrative skills in autobiographies and vice versa, the presence of theatrical dialogues in autobiographies, etc.).7 That is the reason why it is commonly known as ‘Venetian novelistic autobiography.’ However, most scholars do not report on a meta-autobiographical awareness of the manipulating power of novelistic ‘writing.’ I should like to indicate that this kind of awareness exists, although the Venetian authors themselves hardly accentuate it deliberately in their texts. My hypothesis is that the interception of the fictionalizing effects of language by means of a rhetoric of truth confirms an awareness of the recreative value of writing and language. This study will address this problematic by analyzing the specific ‘antidote’ Da Ponte constructs in his Memorie to ‘absorb’ the inevitable narrative alterations.
The rhetoric of truth in Da Ponte’s Memorie: ‘melodramatic’ writing Da Ponte is the only one of the four Venetian authors who does not begin his memoirs with a preface, so meta-autobiographical declarations can be found only throughout the text. Are there any poetical statements which indicate the manipulation of facts due to the composite ‘novelistic’ character of his autobiography? In the Memorie, there are no explicit declarations of novelistic poetics such as we can find for instance in Goldoni, who declares that his au-
7 See: Franco Fido, ‘Topoi memorialistici e costituzione del genere autobiografico fra Sette e Ottocento’, Quaderni di retorica e poesia, 1 (1986), pp.73-85; Andrea Battistini, ‘Genesi e sviluppo dell’autobiografia moderna’, The Italianist: Italian autobiography from Vico to Alfieri (and beyond), 17 (1997), pp.7-22.
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tobiography is the ‘commedia della (sua) vita’ (comedy of (his) life)8 of which he is the ‘héros de la pièce’ (hero of the play).9 Despite the absence of a poetics of novelistic autobiography, the typical osmotic process is very present. Da Ponte rewrites his life in a melodramatic manner. Indeed, ‘melodramatic imagination’ is central to his self-representation, as shown by the typical hybrid structure of ‘short stories and novellas’10; glancing through his memoirs, one often has the impression of reading a play, full of comic and melodramatic dialogues, etc. As I mentioned earlier, it is precisely these parallels with other genres that have been noticed and analyzed by several critics. Since there are no meta-autobiographical declarations which immediately refer to the fictionalizing effects of ‘novelistic’ writing, the obvious question, then, is – are there in Da Ponte more general allusions to the narrative construction of a non-factual reality? Bearing this in mind, I would like to begin with Casanova who writes in the Preface of his autobiography: ‘Si tu n’as pas fait des choses dignes d’être écrites, écris-en du moins qui soient dignes d’être lues’ (If you have not done anything that is worth writing, al least write something that is worth reading).11 For Casanova, written life can fill up a certain vacuity of real life. However, he is conscious that this gap-filling can be understood as deceit: ‘j’ai toujours aimé la vérité avec tant de passion, que souvent j’ai commencé par mentir’ (I have always loved the truth with such a passion, that I often began to lie).12 His townsman Da Ponte accuses Casanova’s prolific pen of being too inventive: ‘Tacque assai spesso quello che avrebbe dovuto e potuto dire per dovere di storico; e per empire bene o male que’ vuoti, e amalgamare, dirò così, la sua storia, permise alla sua prolifica penna di crear molte cose di pianta’13 (He frequently omitted what he might have, and should have, said out of duty as an historian; and to fill in badly or well those lacunae, and
8 Carlo Goldoni, ‘Prefazioni di Carlo Goldoni ai diciassette tomi delle commedie edite a Venezia da G.B. Pasquali’, in Tutte le opere di Carlo Goldoni, ed. by Giuseppe Ortolani, 14 vols (Milano: Mondadori, 1935-1956), I (1935), pp. 621-757 (p.655). 9 Carlo Goldoni, Mémoires de M. Goldoni pour servir à l’histoire de sa vie et à celle de son théâtre (Paris: Aubier, 1992), p.12. 10 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1995), p.149. 11 Giacomo Casanova, Histoire de ma vie. Texte intégral du manuscrit original, suivi de textes inédits, 3 vols (Paris: Laffont, 1993), p.3. 12 Casanova, p.8. 13 Lorenzo Da Ponte, Memorie, 2 vols (Milano: Claudio Gallone, 1998), p.409. Further references to this edition will be integrated in the text: Da Ponte 1998, followed by the page number.
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consolidate, so to speak, his plot, he allowed his prolific pen to invent things out of whole cloth).14 As this statement shows, Da Ponte is aware that the act of writing, when it fills in ‘badly or well […] lacunae,’ undermines the objective true-to-life content of an autobiography. Moreover, he even alludes to a ‘writing’ process that stimulates elements of a non-factual reality, but he does so in a rather ambiguous way. He states: Per un curioso accidente mancherà una pagina a questa storia. Io l’aveva già scritta, quando per rasciugarne l’inchiostro colla sabbia, invece del polverino pigliai per isbaglio il calamaio e versai sopra quella l’inchiostro. Non avendo tempo di ricopiarla, lascerò che il mio leggitore vi scriva quel che gli piace.15 (By a strange accident, a page will here be missing in my story. I had already written it; but then thinking to dry the ink, by mistake I took up the inkwell in place of the sand box and poured over it ink instead of sand. I have not time to recopy it. I shall therefore allow my reader to write it over as he may please.)
Da Ponte declares that he sometimes stains his writings, and thus the past, his history, with ink, which makes some episodes of the history illegible, and open to the imagination of the reader. In the tension between covered and uncovered historicity, we should address, therefore, the question of how to interpret this kind of autobiographical blackouts. In a retrospective telling, completeness of life cannot be told, as autobiography, by its very nature, is always incomplete. So Da Ponte has to shape his memory. However, the question arises why he selects in the surplus of events certain moments to be autobiographically told and others not. Da Ponte conceals something from his reader, but what he wants to say by means of this silence is rather unsettling. Maybe his reticence tells us that the covered written words have recreated his life in a way that could damage his reputation. Although this narrative construct could be his personal truth, it might well be better not to insist upon it. I want to understand ‘personal truth’ here as defined by, among others, Roy Pascal. This critic solves the paradox between fact and fiction by arguing that autobiographical truth cannot be understood as an objective truth, but rather as an intentional truth, ‘in the confines of a limited
14 Lorenzo Da Ponte, Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, trans. by Elisabeth Abbott (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), p.439. All further translations of Da Ponte’s Memorie will be taken from this edition. 15 Da Ponte, Memorie, pp.270-71.
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purpose.’16 ‘Even if what they tell us is not factually true, or only partly true, it always is true evidence of their personality,’ observes Pascal.17 Da Ponte’s retrospection is a personal interpretation of life open to many autobiographical gaps. As he declares, many of these are due to his ‘decenza (o) delicatezza’ (public decency (or) sense of delicacy).18 It is, therefore, important to stress that Da Ponte wrote his Memorie in the United States where he began a new life as professor of Italian and where he founded the first Italian Opera house of New York. Autobiography is always a myth-construction and Da Ponte wants his portrait to correspond to the eighteenth-century canon of courtesy, politeness, and refinement. Certainly, he is not likely to be remembered by later generations as an immoral womanizer. Perhaps, years before he liked to talk about his life in just this way but later, seeing himself in retrospect it became more fitting for him to take up a more serene pen. In his self-dramatization, Da Ponte elaborates a typical ‘melodramatic’ structure, determined by its motion towards an ‘éclat of virtue’ and ‘innocence,’ as indicated by Peter Brooks.19 Not by accident, Da Ponte rephrases Dante’s words: ‘che bello ora tacere, siccome era il parlar colà dov’era.’20 Certain things cannot be said, or cannot be said anymore, and are better to be covered with the ‘tenebre del mistero’ (‘veil of mystery’).21 The inkwell-image is illustrative in this respect. Da Ponte relates that he helped a ‘giovinetta assai gentile e vezzosa e di maniere molto lodate’ (charming, pretty young girl of very estimable character) to escape from her unfaithful husband.22 A few letters from this man were discovered in which he announces his plan to kill his wife while she was giving birth to their child, creating by this deed the possibility of a new life with his mistress. Although there is here a typical ‘melodramatic’ polarization of good and evil, Da Ponte works up to an ambiguous triumph of virtue. As he narrates, his honour and pity incite him to seek a safe shelter for the pregnant woman. Although he says that the affection among them ‘avrebbe potuto divenire pericolosa’ (might have become a dangerous thing),23 Da Ponte frequents the lady’s house assiduously where she 16 Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p.83. 17 Pascal, p.1. 18 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.279. 19 Brooks, p. 26. 20 ‘Parlando cose che ’l tacere bello, sì com’era ’l parlar colà dov’era’ (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, IV, pp.104-105). 21 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.14. 22 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.268. 23 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.269.
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‘riceveva (Lorenzo) sempre con una riconoscenza sì viva e con un tal trasporto di gioia, che non andò guari che tutti questi nobili sentimenti...’ (welcomed (Lorenzo) always with so lively a gratitude and with such transports of joy that it was not long before all those noble sentiments…).24 Here Da Ponte, ‘by a strange accident,’ metaphorically pours ink on his pages. However, it might at this point be wondered at why Da Ponte did not simply invent another happy ending. If what he had written earlier was too dangerous to tell, as it could undermine the construction of his honourable reputation, why then did not Da Ponte resort to narrative gap-filling? My answer would be that this would not have fitted in anymore with his promise that all that he said was true. Indeed, even though he does not say everything, what he says is in fact true: ‘omnia nunc dicam, sed quae dicam omnia vera,’ as he states.25 Da Ponte promises to narrate only the truth in order to create an aura of absolute honesty. Throughout his memoirs, very often we can find declarations such as – ‘ecco la verità’ (here is the truth).26 It becomes a Leitmotiv that pops up so often as to finally become rhetorical, and hyperbolic. By means of this rhetoric he wants to create the illusion of telling ‘pel dovere di storico’ (through (his) plain duty as historian) a true story.27 He creates himself as an honest historian. His pen does not write everything but when it writes, it will, to use Da Ponte’s very words, transcribe ‘parola per parola tutto l’essenziale; non vi sarà la minima alterazione’ (word for word, in the essentials: there will not be the slightest alteration’.)28 The rhetoric of truth is an assignment that should generate confidence. He wants to create his legend by dispelling any doubt harboured by the reader. He almost implores his reader to rely on him, by addressing himself in a confident manner to his ‘cortese lettore’ (courteous reader).29 Omissions and reticences due to his ‘public decency (or) sense of delicacy’ are openly confessed by Da Ponte to strengthen his honesty towards his reader. Thus, his memoirs will contain a limited truth (or, for Pascal, ‘true evidence of (his) personality’) that can be easily imputed to a mnemonic evidence, just like Carlo Gozzi states in his autobiography – ‘ci saranno delle altre verità di que’ tempi, ch’io non mi ricordo’ (probably, there are other truths of those times which I don’t remember).30
24 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.270. 25 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.486. 26 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.182. 27 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.201. 28 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.182. 29 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.43. 30 Carlo Gozzi, Memorie inutili, ed. by Paolo Bosisio, 2 vols (Milano: LED, 2006), p.270.
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The (inevitable) incompleteness of written life should suggest authenticity and guarantee honesty towards the reader. Even more, as we saw in the inkwell-image, the reader becomes a co-autobiographer because he is allowed to write Da Ponte’s illegible pages ‘over as he may please.’ Indeed, Da Ponte, by saying often ‘lo pensi chi legge’ (let him who reads imagine),31 leaves many gaps open to the imagination of the reader. Examples of these gaps are numerous. For instance, Da Ponte gives only the first and last letter of the name of a person, a city, etc.32 That readers effectively did fill up certain gaps, can be seen in the work of Abbott who translated the memoirs from Italian into English. In the original Italian text, we can find Da Ponte talking about a ‘nobilissima famiglia Moc…o,’33 in the English translation we read: ‘the noble Mocenigo family.’34 Abbott has immediately ‘written over’ the empty space. Da Ponte wants to obtain the confidence of his reader by means of a rhetoric of truth. Even though it is a truth with gaps, that which he effectively writes, is always true, at least that is the impression he wants to give. To consolidate his honesty, he states his preference for staying silent instead of telling lies. All this shows that he is very preoccupied with the fact that his reader would be convinced of the true-to-life content of his memoirs. I would argue, therefore, that in this exaggerated insistence on truth, we can read a kind of awareness of Da Ponte that his memoirs must be full of narrative arrangements of biographical reality. Why persistently try to convince the reader of this truth, when he was sure of the factual reality of his memoirs? In other words, it is a clear indication of Da Ponte’s consciousness of the fallacies of the act of writing. Although he never indicates explicitly that ‘writing’ changed his life, the repetitive and hyperbolic mention of truth – which clearly takes part in a melodramatic rhetoric35 – indicates Da Ponte’s awareness of it. Thus, the rhetoric of truth appears as a kind of ‘antidote’ against the fictionalising effects of ‘writing.’ But after all, turning to the inkwell-episode, we could wonder why Da Ponte mentions at all the story of the pregnant lady. Why did he not simply keep complete silence? Here another function of the rhetoric of truth enters. I would suggest that it is intended not only to create an aura of absolute honesty, but also to avoid the panegyrics or the satires of future biographers casting
31 Da Ponte, Memorie, pp.276-277. 32 ‘Duca di M...a’ (Da Ponte, 1998, p.19). 33 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.24. 34 Da Ponte Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, p.51. 35 Brooks, p.40.
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doubt on the authenticity of his portrait. Thus, this rhetoric is also used against the deforming effects of future biographers. Da Ponte uses a typical autobiographical topos inaugurated by Petrarca. Indeed, just like Petrarca who states in his famous letter to posterity – ‘ita enim ferme quisque loquitur, ut impellit not veritas sed voluptas’ (almost everyone speaks in accordance with capriciousness, but out of line with the truth),36 Da Ponte is also concerned about the ‘partial’ writing of his future biographers. In his memoirs he writes that he had asked a friend to look for a ‘veridico scrittore’ (author of authority) who could transcribe his memoirs in order to proclaim ‘una verità che la malizia degli altri nascose’ (a truth which the malice of others has been hiding).37 He is preoccupied with the idea that ‘un raggio di luce (che) rifolgorerà quando che sia sulla memoria onorata (di) Da Ponte’ (the ray of light (that) may some day play upon the honoured memory (of) Da Ponte) will shade away as a result of the undermining ‘writing’ of biographers.38 In this way, the rhetoric of truth could be considered a kind of remedy not only against the ‘writing’ of the Self, but also against the ‘writing’ of the Other. So, in Da Ponte, the continuous insistence on truth is a signal of the awareness that ‘writing’ recreates reality. Turning to Battistini, it reveals that ‘il vero soggetto dell’autobiografia non pi un’essenza a priori, ma una fiction culturale e linguistica, un fragile ma vitale organismo diegetico contesto di parole’ (the real subject of an autobiography is no longer an a priori essence, but a cultural and linguistic fiction, a fragile but vital organism of words).39
Conclusion This affirmation of Battistini allows us to return to my initial questions. My intention was to discuss reflections on the Self as a ‘vital organism of words’ in some historical Italian autobiographies. We are led to the conclusion that in the so-called Venetian novelistic autobiography of the late-eighteenth and earlynineteenth century a consciousness is present of the manipulating power of the act of writing. I argued that the presence of rhetoric strategies indicates this kind of awareness. My hypothesis was that the interception of the fictionalizing effects of language by means of rhetorical devices confirms an awareness of the ability of writing to engender signification. I focused on the memoirs
36 Francesco Petrarca, ‘Posteritati’, in Prose (Milano, Napoli: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1955), pp.1-19 (p.2). 37 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.129. 38 Da Ponte, Memorie, p.129. 39 Lo specchio di Dedalo, p.16.
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of Lorenzo Da Ponte in order to discuss the specific ‘remedy’ he constructs to deal with narrative arrangements of factual reality. As I showed, explicit meta-autobiographical declarations of the typical ‘writing’ of the Venetian novelistic autobiography are very rare in Da Ponte. Yet, many episodes of his memoirs are maybe as truly (melo-)dramatic as his opera libretto’s. Often Da Ponte’s prosaic language contains ‘librettistic’ phrases that could easily figure in Don Giovanni instead of in the inkwell-episode. Da Ponte remembers his life ‘in order to recount it;’ he rewrites it as a novelistic melodrama. I argued that his concern about truth indicates an awareness of this novelistic and theatrical recreation of life. His exaggerated insistence on truth, by which he aims to obtain the confidence of his ‘courteous’ reader, shows that Da Ponte must have been preoccupied with the idea that through memory and writing his biographical life would be manipulated. What he writes out of his memories would not be neutral, but coloured by his personal interpretation of life. This kind of truth is not objective at all: because of Da Ponte’s ‘public decency (or) sense of delicacy’ memories are filtered and in the absence of memories that can be narrated, there are gaps open to the imagination of the reader, as illustrated in the inkwell-image. Paradoxically, he maintains that what he effectively writes is completely true, in spite of the incompleteness of truth. He does so by means of a strong rhetoric construct from which must arise an aura of absolute honesty. An important function of this rhetoric lies in its possibility to evade the narrative arrangements of real life, rewritten by the Self and the Other. In short, in this paper I intended to illustrate an historical example of the awareness of the life-recreative value of language and writing. The obsession with truth, as discussed in Da Ponte, is something that can also be read in Gozzi and Goldoni. Thus, it could easily be hypothesized that this kind of obsession is typical of Venetian novelistic autobiography, if it were not for Casanova. Indeed, Casanova does not elaborate similar rhetorical devices. On the contrary, he declares at the beginning of his memoirs that he will often be dishonest. Is this in contradiction with Da Ponte, Goldoni, and Gozzi who proudly announce that they will tell the whole truth? It is, in fact, merely a paradox. Since Casanova immediately states that writing will inevitably deform reality, he allows deceit in his autobiography. Da Ponte, Gozzi, and Goldoni confirm the manipulations of writing in a more implicit way, that is, by means of a continuous insistence on truth. This construct confirms the existence of the ‘writing obstacle.’ In autobiography, being and identity are overwritten by language. Da Ponte’s Memorie is a carefully staged melodramatic production in which he is both director and leading man. Also Mozart’s librettist lived and remembered to tell his tale.
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Bibliography Anglani, Bartolo, I letti di Procuste. Teorie e storie dell’autobiografia (Bari: Laterza, 1996). Battistini, Andrea, Lo specchio di Dedalo. Autobiografia e biografia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990). Battistini, Andrea, ‘Genesi e sviluppo dell’autobiografia moderna’, The Italianist: Italian autobiography from Vico to Alfieri (and beyond), 17 (1997), pp.7-22. Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1995). Bruner, Jerome, ‘Life as Narrative’, Social Research, 54 (1987), pp.11-32. Bruss, Elisabeth W., Autobiographical Acts. The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Casanova, Giacomo, Histoire de ma vie. Texte intégral du manuscrit original, suivi de textes inédits, 3 vols (Paris: Laffont, 1993). Catelli, Nora, El espacio autobiográfico (Barcelona: Lumen, 1991). Da Ponte, Lorenzo, Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, trans. by Elisabeth Abbott (New York: Dover Publications, 1967). ___, Memorie, 2 vols (Milano: Claudio Gallone, 1998). De Man, Paul, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, Modern Language Notes, 94 (1979), pp.919-930. D’Intino, Franco, L’autobiografia moderna. Storia forma problemi (Roma: Bulzoni, 1998). Eakin, Paul John, Fictions in Autobiography. Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Fido, Franco, ‘Topoi memorialistici e costituzione del genere autobiografico fra Sette e Ottocento’, Quaderni di retorica e poesia, 1 (1986), pp.73-85. Finck, Almut, Autobiographisches Schreiben nach dem Ende der Autobiographie (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1999). Folkenflik, Robert, ed., The Culture of Autobiography. Constructions of SelfRepresentation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Freeman, Mark, Rewriting the Self. History, Memory, Narrative (London, New York: Routledge, 1993). García Márquez, Gabriel, Vivir para contarla (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2002). Goldoni, Carlo, ‘Prefazioni di Carlo Goldoni ai diciassette tomi delle commedie edite a Venezia da G.B. Pasquali’, in Tutte le opere di Carlo Goldoni, ed. by Giuseppe Ortolani, 14 vols (Milano: Mondadori, 1935-1956), I (1935), pp.621-757.
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Goldoni, Carlo, Mémoires de M. Goldoni pour servir à l’histoire de sa vie et à celle de son théâtre (Paris: Aubier, 1992). Gozzi, Carlo, Memorie inutili, ed. by Paolo Bosisio, 2 vols (Milano: LED, 2006). Guglielminetti, Marziano, Memoria e scrittura. L’autobiografia da Dante a Cellini (Torino: Einaudi, 1977). Gusdorf, Georges, Lignes de vie. (1) Les Écritures du moi. (2) Auto-bio-graphie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991). Lejeune, Philippe, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). Lejeune, Philippe, Pour l’autobiographie (Paris: Seuil, 1998). Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle, La scène judiciaire de l’autobiographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996). May, Georges, L’Autobiographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979). Oékayová, Jarmila, L’essenziale invisibile agli occhi (Milano: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997). Olney, James, Studies in Autobiography (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Pascal, Roy, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). Petrarca, Francesco, ‘Posteritati’, in Prose (Milano-Napoli: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1955), pp.1-19. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina, Autobiographie (Stuttgart, Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2000).
Between Autobiography and Fiction: Narrating the Self in Gabriel García Márquez’s Vivir para contarla Eli Park Sorensen (University College London) In my paper I wish to look at the ways in which Gabriel García Márquez portrays his life story in the autobiography Living to Tell the Tale (2003). Throughout the autobiography, everything is seen in relation to his formation as a writer of fiction, a perspective which is emphasised by deliberately echoing episodes and characters from his fiction. For example, in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) the village Macondo is ‘built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like pre-historic eggs,’ while the autobiography’s Aracataca is ‘located on the banks of a river of transparent water that raced over a bed of polished stones as huge and white as pre-historic eggs.’ While One Hundred Years of Solitude uses a proleptic narrative figure (‘Many years later’), the autobiography uses the formula ‘I remember’; within the form of the autobiography, García Márquez’s life is remembered and recounted as integrated parts of the fictive worlds of prolepsis, which he has spent his life constructing, and which in the meantime have become parts of his own past of lived life, a life he can only render autobiographically, by paradoxically using a fictive, pseudo-iterative mode of representation. A l’origine il y eut la ruine. A l’origine arrive la ruine, elle est ce qui lui arrive d’abord, à l’origine. Sans promesse de restauration.1
Telling the tale of living In an essay on the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, Paul de Man asserts that within the field of literary studies, the notion of the self ‘appears in a bewildering network of often contradictory relationships among a plurality of subjects.’2 De Man goes on to indicate four distinct types of the self:
1 Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle. L’Autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990), p.69. ‘In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration’ (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind. The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.65). 2 Paul de Man, ‘Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self’, in Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Methuen & CO., 1983), pp.36-50 (p.39).
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[T]he self that judges, the self that reads, the self that writes, and the self that reads itself. The question of finding the common level on which all these selves meet and thus of establishing the unity of a literary consciousness stands at the beginning of the main methodological difficulties that plague literary studies.3
The issue of a common denominator of the four distinct types of the self that Paul de Man mentions is one that is playfully addressed in the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez’s fictive works, such as in Cien años de soledad (published in 1967) where a paradoxical contemporaneity is staged near the end of the book, when the fictive character Aureliano reads parchments that were written hundred years earlier: Macondo era ya un pavoroso remolino de polvo y escombros centrifugado por la cólera del huracán bíblico, cuando Aureliano saltó once páginas para no perder el tiempo en hechos demasiado conocidos, y empezó a descifrar el instante que estaba viviendo, descifrándolo a medida que lo vívía, profetizándose a sí mismo en el acto de descifrar la última página de los pergaminos, como si se estuviera viendo en un espejo hablado.4
Although García Márquez’s fictive works are characterized by explicitly metafictional, anti-mimetic strategies of representation, they have always included an abundance of biographical and historical material; García Márquez’s novels and short stories are all unmistakably inscribed as well as circumscribed in a specifically personal, geographical, and historical context. It is this specific and unique representational problematic in the fictive oeuvre of García Márquez which raises a number of interesting aspects in relation to the ways in which he approaches the genre of autobiography, that is, Vivir para contarla from 2002. Central to a contemporary discussion of the genre of autobiography is ‘the fundamental problem of instability or hybridity’.5 Although numerous attempts have been made to define the genre generically and taxonomically, the ontological question of autobiography as a cultural paradigm remains a vital
3 De Man, ‘Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the self’, p.39. 4 Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2004), p.495. ‘Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror.’ Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. by Gregory Rabassa (London: Penguin Books, 1977), p.383. 5 Laura Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses. Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p.7.
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resource in a contemporary discussion.6 The discursive uncertainty, open-ness and elusiveness that hover around the genre, allow the autobiographical text to constitute ‘a point of departure from which to address problematics which are often not made explicit’;7 as an optic, a ‘network,’ through which the relationship between issues such as the concept of the author, structures of reference, Otherness, and so on, are imperatively addressed and discussed, directly or indirectly, within the levels of representational strategies circling around the haunting and hybrid figure of ‘the self.’ The instability of borderlines is one that is strongly felt in García Márquez’s memoir Vivir para contarla, which constitutes the first part of what is planned to be an autobiographical trilogy. As the inaugurating work on the author’s life, Vivir para contarla mainly recounts the time of the author’s childhood, and the first literary successes as a young writer in a historically turbulent Colombia. As such, it is also a meditation on beginnings, origins, sources, roots, and aetiologies in general; and in particular a reflection on the genesis of García Márquez’s distinct mode of writing, whose intricate trace he has elaborately explored in his fictive works, works that have ‘made’ his name, so to speak, that is, the proper name ‘Gabriel García Márquez’ identifying the Nobel-prize winning author. How does the author García Márquez approach the task of narrating his life story? How does he negotiate the textual borderlines between the notion of the signified, the extra-textual ‘I’ or ‘self,’ and then the signifier, the semiotic self, ‘a discursive ploy by which to create a unified experience’8? In the following, I wish to argue that Vivir para contarla constructs a paradoxical double-text through which the work’s trace of writing is inscribed in a mirroring cul-de-sac of inter-textual play, which seeks to reclaim and confirm the ‘authoredness’ of both García Márquez’s life narrative as well as his oeuvre, that is, an authorial framework of meaning and reference. The price of the construction of this pseudo-transcendental signified is, however, paid with the ever-present possibility of a radical subversion and reversal through the very same figures of reading.
6 On this issue, see in particular Avrom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); H. Porter Abbott, ‘Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories’, New Literary History, 19 (3) (1988), pp.597-615; Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses. Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); and Gunnthórun Gudmundsdóttir, Borderlines. Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003). 7 Marcus, p.7 8 Leigh Clayton, ‘The Absent Signifier: Historical Narrative and the Abstract Subject’, in Ethics and the Subject, ed. by Karl Simms (Amsterdam-Rodopi, 1997, pp.77-83).
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To those readers who are familiar with the figures of García Márquez’s fictions, one of the most characteristic aspects of Vivir para contarla is probably the many direct and indirect references to the author’s novels, particularly in the beginning, the opening chapter, which stages the author’s return to his native village, Aracataca, located on ‘la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos,’9 a recounting identical, word for word, to the description of the partly fictive village Macondo in Cien años de soledad.10 Together with García Márquez, we remember countless episodes, anecdotes, quotations, gestures, voices, characters, and a lot of other things that we know from his fiction, and which are imperceptibly and seamlessly weaved into the autobiography’s text. To the reader, the autobiography’s many echoes of García Márquez’s novels seem to activate a fictive memory, like an uncanny déjà-vu, which makes the text unfamiliarly familiar.
Authors, autopsies, and the autobiography From a formal point of view, one of the familiar aspects of García Márquez’s fictive works is first and foremost the radical questioning of a stable, unambiguous paradigm of reality, a subversive and transgressive narrative style, which destabilizes all categorical notions of pure origins and absolute authoritative patterns of referentiality. It is a transgressive narrative style which constantly suspends the myth of authorial agency, e.g. the author as a god, ‘the unitary cause, source and master to whom the chain of textual effects must be traced, and in whom they find their genesis, meaning, goal, and justification,’11 functioning illusorily ‘as a barrier against interpretation: the text cannot mean what he did not consciously want it to mean.’12 After his eventful obituary of the author in 1968, leaving the notion of the text in fragments, as ‘un tissu de citations,’13 with no other ‘origine que le 9 Gabriel García Márquez, Vivir para contarla (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2002), p.11; ‘The banks of a river of transparent water that raced over a bed of polished stones as huge and white as prehistorie eggs’ (García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, trans. by Edith Grossman (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), p.5). 10 García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, p.9; ‘[…] like prehistoric eggs’, García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, p.7. 11 Séan Burke, The Death and Return of the Author. Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p.23. 12 Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p.101. 13 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes – oeuvres complètes, tome II, 1966-1973, ed. by Éric Marty (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994), p.494; ‘a tissue of quotations’, Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, ed. and trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p.146.
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langue lui-même, c’est-à-dire cela même qui sans cesse remet en cause toute origine,’14 Roland Barthes later returns to the concept of the author in the essay ‘De l’oeuvre au texte’ (1971) in which he attempts to maintain the ‘life’ of the reader, ‘l’espace même où s’inscrivent […], toutes les citations don’t est faite une écriture’ 15 while at the same time allowing the haunting figure of the ‘author’ to re-enter the text: Ce n’est pas que l’Auteur ne puisse ‘revenir’ dans le Texte, dans son texte; mais c’est alors, si l’on peut dire à titre d’invité [...]. Il devient, si l’on peut dire, un auteur de papier; sa vie n’est plus l’origine de ses fables, mais une fable concurrente à son oeuvre; il y a réversion de l’oeuvre sur la vie (et non plus le contraire).16
Barthes’ attempt to divert the pressure of authorial subjectivity away from the text, by reversing the movement of life-to-work into work-to-life, is one which, however, also re-establishes an extra-textual link which is ‘always open to reversal, and so on, ad infinitum.’17 Seán Burke comments that ‘Once the route has been opened […], then any power of legislation against the life also influencing the work has been abdicated.’18 This process of reversal plays a fundamental role in Vivir para contarla, in which the pressure of direct authorial subjectivity is also one that returns as a haunting figure. As an autobiography, that is, a text whose mode of referentiality seemingly is dependent on ‘actual and potentially verifiable events in a less ambivalent way than fiction.’19 the work initially demands to be read differently than García Márquez’s fictive works. But as soon as the actual reading begins, the ambiguous referential structure of García Márquez’s autobiography threatens to collapse the distinctions and differences between the fictional and autobiographical elements, thus seemingly abdicating the claim to become an authenticating, authoritative Ur-text of his fictive works. Far from being unique, however, Paul de Man argues that this collapse constitutes an inescapable feature of all modes of writing. What differenti14 Barthes, Oeuvres complètes, p.493; ‘origin that language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins’, Barthes, Image Music Text, p.146. 15 Barthes, Oeuvres complètes, p.495; ‘the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed’, Barthes, Image Music Text, p.148. 16 Barthes, Oeuvres complètes. ‘It is not that the Author may not “come back” in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a “guest” […] no longer the contrary)’, Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, p.161. 17 Burke, p.32. 18 Burke, p.32. 19 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN, 94 (5) (1979), p.920.
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ates, then, the genre of autobiography from other modes of writing, and, in particular, what differentiates García Márquez’s autobiography from his fictive oeuvre? De Man opens his reflection on the genre of autobiography by questioning, like Barthes, the notion of the movement of life-to-work: We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?20
Paul de Man goes on to argue that the referent is an illusory figure which is already included within the structures of the signifiers, an effect of linguistic traces, but he also seems to allow the possibility of a reversal in both directions, ‘with equal justice,’ contrary to Roland Barthes’ position; however, the ‘technical demands’ of the genre of autobiography, that is, the linguistic and rhetorical figures, constitute a hall of mirrors, the product of ‘the alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading,’21 in which the authorial voice illusorily appears in the text through a tropological and metonymic structure of displacements that render the distinction between fiction and non-fiction as ‘undecidable.’22 It thus follows that autobiography, rather than a genre or mode, is ‘a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts,’23 and yet, ‘by the same token,’24 no text can be said to be autobiographical. Hidden within the mirroring and projective figures of readability, Paul de Man’s radical claim implies a short-circuit of the process of reversal, from life-to-work as well as work-to-life, a short-circuit in which writers as well as readers are trapped in the suspending figure of an infinitely accelerating, revolving wheel of absolute undecidability, one that renders autobiography as ‘an all-inclusive genre precisely to the extent that it remains impossible to conclude whose life is being written – or read.’25 The reading-effect of digressive and elusive memory traces that Vivir para contarla evokes, does indeed seem to subvert the generic borderline dividing the fictional from the autobiographical; and yet, exactly because of the text’s 20 De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, p.920. 21 De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, p.921. 22 De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, p.921. 23 De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, p.921. 24 De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, p.922. 25 Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces. On the Institution of Authorship (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, 1988), p.124.
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‘over-determined’ reading-effect, one may also say, ‘with equal justice,’ that it constitutes an effect maintaining the borderline, at the risk of descending into a process of reversal ad infinitum, a process which nevertheless steers clear of the before-mentioned aporetic short-circuit. The borderline exists, invisibly and visibly, cognitively and physically, at the same time; as a ghostly figure of readability guided by the dense web of unfamiliarly familiar quotations, gestures, characters, traits, episodes and so on authored by García Márquez. Rather than collapsing the distinction between the autobiographical and the fictional, the referential traces of Vivir para contarla seem to maintain the authorial agency, the ‘transcendental authority,’26 paradoxically on the basis of a return to García Márquez’s fictive works.
Between autobiography and fiction: Vivir para contarla Tracing the origins of his self, García Márquez begins his autobiographical narrative with a nostalgic anecdote from the author’s youth: ‘Mi madre me pidió que la acompañara a vender la casa.’27 The anecdote tells the story of the last time García Márquez, at that time a young journalist living in Barranquilla, returns to his childhood village, Aracataca. Like many of García Márquez’s novels, Vivir para contarla seems to begin with something that looks like an ending; the sale of the old family house means that the last bond connecting García Márquez to the world of his childhood will be broken. Vivir para contarla begins in medias res, at a point of intersection, where the autobiographer recalls his young self re-encountering his origins, thus self-consciously staging the event of his ‘I’ entering the scene of writing. When García Márquez and his mother on their journey to sell the house arrive at the train station in Aracataca, the first thing that greets them is silence: ‘Lo primero que me impresionó fue el silencio. Un silencio material que hubiera podido identificar con los ojos vendados entre los otros silencios del mundo.’28 Like the ravaged Macondo during the last chapters of Cien años de soledad, Aracataca has, since the banana company left the place, consisted of no more than a dispersed collection of sad ruins. The opening of Vivir para contarla stages a setting in which Aracataca becomes the point of departure of García Márquez’s broaching the origins of his scene of writing, a location of absence. As the autobiographer remembers the young García Márquez walk-
26 De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, p.923. 27 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.923; ‘My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house’, García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.3. 28 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.30; ‘[…] in the world,’ García Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.20.
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ing through the deserted streets, the text of Vivir para contarla dissolves into a series of unreal and incoherent dreamscapes, where haunting figures from the past greet him on every corner,29 and where his fragile memory trace leads him along unraveling detours becoming more and more digressive, bewildering, and eradicating. The reader who is familiar with the author’s fictive works will sense the same eerie ghostliness as García Márquez; ‘No hab’a una puerta, una grieta de un muro, un rastro humano que no tuviera dentro de m’ una resonancia sobrenatural,’30 evoking true as well as ‘recuerdos falsos’31 in equal amounts. When they finally arrive at ‘la casa fantasmal,’32 where García Márquez was born, the mother is so taken aback by its deteriorated condition, that she does not recognize it as the house in which she once lived, exclaiming in disbelief; ‘-¡Ésta no es la casa!’33 But García Márquez never finds out which version of the house she refers to; ‘durante toda mi infancia la describ’an de tantos modos que eran por lo menos tres casas que cambiaban de forma y sentido, según quien las contara.’34 The many contradictory versions, not only of the house but of almost every incident he recalls, play a fundamental role in the unfolding of the founding history of García Márquez’s identity as a writer. He remembers how people during his childhood each told stories ‘con detalles nuevos, añadidos, por su cuenta, hasta el punto de que las diversas versiones terminaban por se distintas de la original.’35 Responding to this confusion, the child García Márquez invents his own truth: ‘yo las absorb’a como una es-
29 For example when he passes the house of the Belgian, evoking the memory of the veteran from the First World War who committed suicide by inhaling gold cyanide, like in El amor en los tiempos del cólera (first published in 1985). 30 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.31; ‘There was not a single door, a crack in the wall, a human trace that did not find a supernatural resonance in me,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.22. 31 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.80; ‘false memories,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.63. 32 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.43; ‘the spectral house,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.32. 33 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.44; ‘This isn’t the house!,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.32. 34 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.44; ‘in the course of my childhood it was described in so many different ways that there were at least three houses that changed shape and direction according to the person who was speaking,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.32. 35 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.115; ‘with new details that they added on their own, until the various versions became different from the original,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.92.
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ponja, las desmontaba en piezas, las trastocaba para escamotear el origin.’36 It is a technique that García Márquez still uses when he writes his memoir; the autobiographical text is in itself a variation of an absent original. In La Poétique de l’espace from 1957, Gaston Bachelard analyses the topos of the ‘maison natale,’ the house where one is born, which according to him constitutes an intimate threshold of human consciousness, housing or situating the origins of imagination: ‘La poésie, dans sa grande fonction, nous redonne les situations du songe. La maison natale est plus qu’un corps de logis, elle est un corps de songes. Chacun de ses réduits fut un gîte de rêverie.’37 The house where García Márquez was born similarly evokes the experience of the threshold, between past and present, dream and reality, a ghostly walk. García Márquez builds his autobiography around the texture of eradicating memory traces of the childhood home, physically deteriorated, burdened by its many stories that never add up to one final narrative, but, on the contrary, constantly demand imaginative and creative re-tellings; the house becomes a mise-enabîme figure of the autobiography itself, a house in which each room contains countless details of ‘un instante crucial de mi vida.’38 As García Márquez walks down the hallway in the house, it is as if he steps into a mirror hall of his own fictive world.39 Having accepted Barthes’ belated invitation, so to speak, García Márquez enters as a ‘guest’ in the house of fiction. To the readers, it is as if we are allowed a rare glimpse behind the stage of García Márquez’s fictive universes, peeking into the concealed darkness of a store-room filled with old theatrical properties, decorations and costumes used in earlier performances.
36 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.104; ‘I soaked them up like a sponge, pulled them apart, rearranged them to make their origins disappear,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.83. 37 Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace, 9th edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), p.33; ‘The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams. The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams. Each one of its nooks and corners was a resting-place for daydreaming,’ Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 2nd edn, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994), p.15. 38 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.44; ‘a crucial moment of my life,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.33. 39 García Márquez describes each room intimately; in one of the rooms there is an enormous dictionary of the Spanish language which according to his grandfather contained all existing words; there is the workshop where his grandfather produced little gold fishes; and there is the room which stored seventy chamber pots used when classmates visited García Márquez’s mother; all of these details and events, together with many others, make an appearance in Cien años de soledad.
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In Vivir para contarla’s grandiosely self-staging spectacle of his return to Aracataca, García Márquez effectively reclaims the ‘authoredness’ of his fictive works, an ‘authoredness’ mirrored and reversed endlessly in a cul-de-sac of intertextual play, by re-enacting the departure of ‘Gabriel García Márquez,’ not as the ‘guest’ but as the writer. At the time he joins the mother on the journey to sell the house, he remembers ‘todo lo que hab’a impresionado mi infancia, pero no estaba seguro de qué era antes y qué después, ni qué significaba nada de eso en mi vida.’ 40 Now, ‘Muchos años después’41 he knows that it was the beginning marking the event of the birth of the author: Ni mi madre ni yo, por supuesto, hubiéramos podido imaginar siquiera que aquel cándido paseo de sólo dos d’as iba a ser tan determinante para mí, que la más larga y diligente de las vidas no me alcanzar’a para acabar de contarlo. Ahora, con más de setenta y cinco años bien medidos, sé que fue la decisión más importante de cuantas tuve que tomar en mi carrera de escritor. Es decir: en toda mi vida.42
After his return from the journey with his mother to Aracataca, a world of withering stories reeling on the border of oblivion, threatened by total silence, García Márquez is bursting with inspiration, ‘y sin respirar apenas empecé la nueva novela con la frase de mi madre: ‘Vengo a pedirte el favour de que me acompañes a vender la casa,’43 that is, the way Vivir para contarla, ‘la novela de mi vida,’44 begins. The autobiography constructs a double-text of fictional and biographical traces, each becoming the other’s meta-text, which in a circular way stages the life story of García Márquez, steering the reader into the landscape of the author’s fictive works, while equally pointing back towards the biography of the author, ad infinitum. In a parodic, tautologically 40 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.79; ‘everything that had made an impression on my childhood but was not certain what came earlier and what came later, or what any of it signified in my life,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.62. 41 García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, p.9; ‘Many years later,’ García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, p.7. 42 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.11; ‘Neither my mother nor I, of course, could even have imagined that this simple two-day trip would be so decisive that the longest and most diligent of lives would not be enough for me to finish recounting it. Now, with more than seventy-five years behind me, I know that it was the most important of all decisions I had to make in my career as a writer. That is to say: in my entire life,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.5. 43 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.123; ‘and almost without breathing I began the new novel with my mother’s sentence: ‘I’ve come to ask you to please go with me to sell the house,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.99. 44 García Márquez, Vivir para contarla, p.124; ‘the novel of my life,’ García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, p.100.
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self-originating mythology, the ‘author’ García Márquez reinstates the authorial presence of his life story and his works through figures of readings that necessarily become ghostly, haunted by the trace of fiction itself, to the same extent as ‘García Márquez’ necessarily names a ghost-writer, a writer of the ghostly memory of his past; that is, the uncannily authored presence of unfamiliarly familiar texts haunting the text of his self. Vivir para contarla is an autobiography acutely aware of the labyrinthine, genealogical trace of writing, searching for a primary, original referent, an autobiography in which García Márquez disappears by appearing in the text, entering other texts in order to enter the text of his self. In a very literal way, García Márquez becomes the reader of his own life, authored by himself, a character reading while writing a life remembered through the fictive works carrying his proper name, works that he has spent his life producing, and which in the meantime have become integrated parts of his lived life; a text in search of a mode of representation that is capable of expressing the ‘unity of a literary consciousness,’45 the common level on which all the different types of the self meet. In a mirroring structure, the autobiography confirms the truthfulness of García Márquez’s fiction, whereas this confirmation challenges the truthful referentiality of the autobiography; Vivir para contarla becomes his fiction’s own bio-graphical narrative, whose reality is conditioned by the fictionalization of the autobiographical discourse. Like two fragments of the same mirror, representing García Márquez’s life, the fictions and the autobiography condition each other’s production of an ambiguous structure of referentiality, consisting of an endless series of textual displacements, which ultimately constitute the originating circumstances of the author’s life; a life lived in order to tell the tales of life.
45 De Man, ‘Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self’, p.39.
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Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter, ‘Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories’, New Literary History, 19 (3) (1988), pp.597-615. Bachelard, Gaston, La Poétique de l’espace, 9th edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978). ——, The Poetics of Space, 2nd edn, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994). Barthes, Roland, Image Music Text, ed. and trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977). ——, Roland Barthes – oeuvres complètes, tome II, 1966-1973, ed. by Éric Marty (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994). Burke, Seán, The Death and Return of the Author. Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Clayton, Leigh, ‘The Absent Signifier: Historical Narrative and the Abstract Subject’, in Ethics and the Subject, ed. by Karl Simms (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp.77-83. De Man, Paul, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN, 94 (5) (1979), pp.919-930. ——, ‘Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self ’, in Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Methuen & Co., 1983), pp.36-50. Derrida, Jacques, Mémoires d’aveugle. L’Autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990). ——, Memoirs of the Blind. The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). Fleishman, Avrom, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). García Márquez, Gabriel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. by Gregory Rabassa (London: Penguin Books, 1977). ——, Love in the Time of Cholera, trans. by Edith Grossman (London: Penguin Books, 1989). ——, Vivir para contarla (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2002). ——, Living to Tell the Tale, trans. by Edith Grossman (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003). ——, Cien años de soledad (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2004). Gudmundsdóttir, Gunnthórun, Borderlines. Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003).
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Kamuf, Peggy, Signature Pieces. On the Institution of Authorship (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, 1988). Marcus, Laura, Auto/biographical Discourses. Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). Moriarty, Michael, Roland Barthes, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
The Passion of Lena Christ: From Fictionalized Autobiography to Biographical Novel Mirjam Truwant (Catholic University of Leuven) The aim of this paper is the comparative study of the diverse modes of identity-construction and myth-building centered on the figure of the German regional author Lena Christ (1881-1920). The research will take its starting point in a transmediatic corpus of (auto)biographic literature, as well as dramatic performance and film, whereby the main emphasis will be placed on the literary component. The highly tragic character of this Bavarian woman writer’s existence, as described in her autobiography, formed the inspiration for two biographies (one of which written by Christ’s second husband, himself an author), a film and more recently also novelized biography and a semi-fictional life-dramatization in the form of a theatre monologue. We will on the one hand study their cross-overs and divergences in character construction, generated by the difference in medium literary genre, intended effect, gender-related perception, and temporal distance. Another focus will be on the interplay between Lena Christ as both a (to different degrees) ‘real’ and fictional person, the means by which the transition from fact to fiction is achieved, and finally, especially with respect to the theatricalized version of the story of Christ’s life, on the contrastive portrayal of her self-perceived existence, as illustrated by citations from her autobiography, and life as lived by her novels’ protagonists.
‘The infelicitous life and romantic death of the illegitimately born waitress, nun and writer, tormented by her mother and twice married’ – with this melodramatic subtitle the 1968 tv-film The Lena Christ Case1 briefly summarizes the course of life of this early twentieth century Bavarian author and thereby situates itself entirely in the tradition of a rather problematic line of reception that successfully established itself immediately after her death in 1920, but especially from 1940 onwards, a line which until today largely invests the image of this woman. The following historical overview of the successive constructions of the German author Lena Christ will first elaborate on the manner in which an autobiography may obstruct/construct the image of its author by balancing on the inherently problematic borderline between authenticity and performance. Subsequently, I show how an early biography can have a lasting effect on the later understanding of a writer and her works, when for decades, its distorting life portrayal and its myths of female subjectivity and authorship have been invariably rehearsed and some of its debatable contentions re-adopted. The final objective, however, is to show how the attempt of a present-day female 1 Hans W. Geissendorfer: ‘Der Fall Lena Christ. Das ungeschickte Leben und der romantische Tod der unehelich geborenen, von ihrer Mutter gepeinigten, zweimal verheirateten Serviererin’, Klosterfrau und Schriftstellerin (München: Bayrischer Rundfunk, 1968/69).
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writer to emend this mythologized image and to try and catch a more convincing glimpse of Lena Christ, simultaneously courts the danger of falling victim to the constraints of similar patterns, which equally reduce the biographical subject to a certain construct and fail to grasp its necessarily ever-escaping ‘essence.’ It was in fact Lena Christ herself – this peculiar starting point makes this case the more interesting – who furnished the conditions of the possibility of a focus on the above mentioned tragic aspects of her life. When she was 30 she was prompted by her second husband Peter Benedix2 to depict the adverse fate she had suffered so far in an autobiography. Along general lines, this autobiography deals with Christ’s earliest childhood with her grandparents in rural Bavaria at the close of the nineteenth century, her resettlement at the age of 7 with her newly-wed mother in Munich, where she then grows up as the daughter of innkeepers. The persistently tense relationship to her mother, from whose gross ill-treatment she suffers, induces her at the age of 17, when she already has several suicide attempts behind her, to enter a convent, where she will stay for one and a half years. At twenty she gets married; her husband soon turns out to be a violent alcoholic, and 7 years later she flees from this unhappy marriage with her 3 children. Consumptive and completely empoverished, she sinks to the lowest of social life. This is where the first part of Christ’s life story ends, only shortly before she gradually works her way up again and meets Benedix – the beginning of her life as a writer, of a new existence which, however, does not end less dramatically than the preceding one. Christ’s life story, Memories of a Redundant Person,3 in which the conflictual mother-daughter relationship is the central focus, is, however, explicitly termed a novel, and this logically implies an occasional transgression of the dividing line between fact and fiction – a practice which is, in fact, already inherent to the genre as such, as every autobiography offers an opportunity for self-invention and self-transformation and displays only ‘a version of the author’s own life, anchored in verifiable biographical fact.’4 Further, for autobiography, which, together with biography, traditionally occupies a position in the no-man’s land between historiography and literature, the fictitiousness of fact for which Hayden White and the New Historicism have sharpened our awareness with regard to history in general, is even more obvious. Thus by 2 His original surname was Jerusalem, but this was changed into Benedix in 1937. Ghemela Adler, Heimatsuche und Identität. Das Werk der bairischen Schriftstellerin Lena Christ (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1991). 3 First edition: Lena Christ, Erinnerungen einer Überflüssigen (München: Albert Langen, 1912). We refer to the 2003 edition. 4 Paul Jalm Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography. Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1585).
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making use of narrative strategies such as the selection and arrangement of certain events, the facts of a life are turned into a plot. Christ explores the border-line position of this genre even further by turning her life story into a novelized autobiography, and she does so by, for instance, embellishing her account with situations or events which did not actually occur as she describes them, but which nonetheless clarify the general temporal and local context of the society she grew up in.5 Her most obvious manoeuvre to achieve a limited degree of fictionality is, however, providing her closest relatives with false names. Where the ethical motive for this intervention may be obvious – warranting the privacy of her next of kin –, the initial impetus for this move could also be a certain self-protection against possible allegations of non-veracity in depicting her mother’s cruelty and her ex-husband’s violence. By explicitly categorizing her autobiography as a novel, she may have claimed a degree of poetic licence, wanting to pre-empt accusations of untruthfulness (though the history of reception will prove such an intention to be in vain). As Leigh Gilmore makes clear, the relation of trauma to language is ambivalent, being both that which is beyond the representable, and that which has yet to be articulated in order to be overcome. Self-representation of trauma even seems a theoretical impossibility, the paradox being that where a trauma ‘is typically defined as the unprecedented,’ the autobiographical subject, by considering himself worth of becoming the subject of an autobiography, is supposed to be both ‘unique and representative,’6 a requirement Lena Christ’s extraordinary life account cannot live up to. The life story of women in general already does not have a representative status, challenging the universalized middle-class male life-trajectory and the monopoly of the biographical hero as male hero.7 And as Gilmore further elucidates: first person accounts of trauma by women, for example, are likely to be doubted… because their self-representation already is at odds with the account the representative man would produce. A first-person account of trauma represents an intervention in, even an interruption of, a whole meaning-making apparatus that threatens to shout it down at every turn. Thus a writer’s turn from the primarily documentary toward the fictional
5 Just to give one example: whereas Christ in her novel alleges that her stepfather’s father all in all had had 14 wives and 39 children, Goepfert reduces the number of marriages and offspring to ‘only’ 2 and 20 respectively. Christ, pp.57-59 and Günter Goepfert, Das Schicksal der Lena Christ (München: List Verlag, 1971). 6 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography. Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001). 7 Anne-Kathrin Reulecke, ‘Die Nose der Lady Haster’, in Biographie als Geschichte, ed. by Hedwig Röckelein (Tübingen: Diskord, 1993).
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marks an effort to shift the ground of judgement toward a perspective she has struggled to achieve.8
Christ uses narrative techniques to create suspense: she focuses extensively on the episodes depicting the violent outbursts of her mother, whereas periods during which their coexistence obviously was more harmonious are merely summarized. The other taboo of domestic violence – intramarital sexual abuse – proves more difficult to be broken down: only a comparatively negligible number of pages is devoted to the description of the seven years Christ’s first marriage lasted. By supplying only sparse details concerning her most intimate life, she fends off the voyeurism of the curious reader – but compensates for this frustration by heightening the dramatic tension of this last part of her novel by other means, by, for instance, letting herself give birth to 4 living and 2 stillborn children – that is at least one more child than the 3 living children actually attested. So Christ’s autobiography has to be taken with a grain of salt, since it is a dramatized version of her life, just as the life as she actually lived it already was an artificial construct.9 In daily life Lena Christ was inscrutable; in her autobiography not less so. This fact in a way delivers the possibility of her remaining an unapproachable subject in the biographies to come. This first literary achievement of Christ remained, though praised by the critics, largely unnoticed by the public. The same goes for a subsequent novel and collection of stories. Not until 1914 did she break through as an author, when she was the first to publish a series of sketches describing the everyday atmosphere following the outbreak of WWI – an accomplishment widely acclaimed for its authenticity and ‘male fists,’10 earning her a decoration from the Bavarian sovereign. Two more novels followed, and when she in 1920, in the middle of inflation, took her own life as a result of fear of an impending conviction for having forged paintings, she had acquired the status of a renowned author throughout Germany. Her death made the front pages, but all attention seemed to be directed towards the scandal surrounding her passing away. Benedix, who had played a dubious role in her far from romantic suicide, met the public’s craving for sensation with an obituary elaborately dwelling on private matters, devoting no more than two sentences to her literary achievements. After Christ’s death, he continued to obtain the bigger part of his income from the sales of her literary works, a state of affairs which easily explains why he promoted her works with fervour – thereby not shying 8 Gilmore, p.23. 9 It is exemplary that on the two occasions during her lifetime she was involved in a lawsuit, she unceasingly created new versions of the ‘actual course of events’ in an attempt to escape a penalty. Adler, pp.51-59 and pp.62-65. 10 Adler, p.90.
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away from gross exaggerations and distortions. In 1940, Benedix published a biography wherein he established a programmatic parallel between his first spouse and authors like Hölderlin and Kleist11: the former mentally ill, the latter debt-ridden and driven to suicide at a young age, and both the creators of immortal compositions, initially being refused access to the canon, but eventually granted the prominent place in literary history they deserved.12 So, on the one hand, Benedix creates this image of Christ as an ingenious story-teller, even worthy the more elevated denotation of ‘poet,’13 while at the same time he disparages her as a woman who suffered from mental illness and hysterical fits associated with a maternal genetic predisposition, and even characterizes her as an ignorant creature from ‘jenen Bezirk des Unbewußten […], in dem Kinder und Tiere noch daheim sind [...],’14 a naïve, natural talent driven by higher powers, unreflective, and free of any literary intentions. He stressed her rural ancestry in order to emphasize that had it not been for him, this unschooled woman never would have developed into a poet. He also does so because this image of the down-to-earth Bavarian regional writer complied with, first, his artistic, ideological, and political views, being a representative of the ‘Heimatkunstbewegung,’15 and, second, with his marketing strategy, in the service of which he also deployed the statements of Josef Hofmiller (18721933), once the most significant Christ critic.16 Benedix’s biographical construction, created in the midst of the nationalsocialist era, started to lead its own, independent life. It resulted in stylization and mythologization, and would subsequently dramatically affect the history of Christ’s after life and of her works’ reception. Not only Benedix’s subjectivity and his personal involvement with Christ were responsible for the kind of typology imposed on her, she was also stylized according to the 11 Peter Benedix, Der Weg der Lena Christ (München: Ludwig Baur Verlag, 1950). 12 Benedix, p.238. 13 Though not that gifted that she could assert herself in the male-connoted domain of drama, according to Benedix (Benedix, pp.155-156). 14 ‘The realm of the unconscious […], where children and animals are at home’ (Benedix, p.11). 15 Adler, pp.95-99. The ‘Heimatkunstbewegung’ was a turn of the century literary movement which, in reaction to modern civilization and metropolitan (decadent) literature, idealized peasantry and rural life, and thus prepared the ground for the later national-socialist blood and soil literature, which moved away from the orginal plea for a return to healthy, rural life and posited a connection between race and territory. 16 Hofmiller had recognized in Christ a female Ludwig Thoma (1867-1921, a famous Bavarian regional author and a contemporary of Christ), more closely tied to the farmer community by her blood than he was. This classification of her work as ‘Literatur des heimlichen Deutschland’ (‘literature of the homely Germany’), suppressed by fashionable urban literature, was based on a fundamental misreading of her work as a peasant’s idyll, in spite of the fact that she depicted rural life in all its harshness. Adler, p.27.
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models prevailing in this specific socio-cultural and literary context.17 It is not surprising, then, that Christ’s literary production was successfully instrumentalised in the service of the national-socialist ‘Blut und Boden’ ideology, as a 1945 dissertation strikingly illustrates, as it draws on hereditary characteristics.18 The image of Christ as a madwoman on the one hand and the misunderstanding of her work as a glorification of pastoral life on the other, persisted after 1945, when in 1950 Benedix republished a hardly revised edition of his biography, in which only the names of a number of ‘blood and soil’ poets he had previously associated Christ with were eliminated. This version formed the basis of further reception, in, for instance, von Gugel’s dissertation from 1959, which – although at times critical of Benedix’s contentions – underwrites the hysterical and difficult character of Christ and tries to establish a link between her poetic disposition and her so-called ‘tribal affiliation,’ and in the above mentioned 1968 tv-film that, though formally experimental, derives its material exclusively from Christ’s autobiography and Benedix’s biography.19 In 1971, following the fiftieth anniversary of Christ’s death, a change of course seemed to announce itself when Günter Goepfert promised an objective account of Lena Christ’s life, intending to close some biographical gaps and basing himself on reliable sources, as opposed to the subjective, poetically alienated ‘memories,’ and the self-centred account of Benedix. Goepfert regarded his publication as the ultimate key to the destiny and the work of the – according to him – ‘grandest old-Bavarian female poet.’20 But appearances are deceptive, since Goepfert soon falls prey to a discourse that bears strong resemblance to Benedix’s misogynist parlance. Goepfert appears as a typical example of the modern mediating biographer, who promises genuine insight on the basis of a psychological character study. He includes himself into the story as a narrator, and makes use of strategies that should augment the impression of authenticity.21 Goepfert’s problem, however, is that – though he promises a different and more reliable version than Benedix’s – he largely draws on the latter’s assertions and often states that ‘we may well believe him,’ even when there is no convincing reason to 17 Christian von Zimmermann, Fakten und Fiktionen. Strategien fiktionalbiographischer Dichtervorstellungen in Roman, Drama und Film seit 1970. Beiträge des Bad Homburger Kolloquiums, 21.-23. Juni 1999 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2000). 18 Gertraud Troll, Lena Christ (München: Ludwig Maximilians Universität, 1945). 19 Adelheid Von Gugel, Lena Christ. Leben und Werk (München: Ludwig Maximilians Universität, 1959). 20 Goepfert, p.9. 21 Such as quotations, specifying dates, locations, sources, and references to the statements of contemporaries and previous biographers. Von Zimmermann, p.5.
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actually do so. At the same time he often casts doubt on Christ’s own account, and he does so implicitly on the basis of Benedix’s characterisation of her as a hysterical psychopath. Christ is thus alleged to suffer from a false memory, and even though Christ’s Memories is a novel, he subjects it to ‘a literal truth test,’22 wanting to convert her story of trauma into a representative life account. Her mother’s violent fits of temper are partly acknowledged, partly reduced to a parental practice generally accepted within the specific social class she belonged to (lower middle class) and typical of their geographical and historical context. The sexual aggression of her first husband he interprets as ‘wishes and expectations’ ‘most young potent men’ have, thus placing the blame for the failed marriage exclusively with Christ’s physical and mental constitution.23 Goepfert’s biography has proven to be as tenacious as the myths installed by Benedix, since four revised editions have succeeded the publication of 1971, the last amended version dating from as recently as 2004. In the meantime, however, there have been several attempts to do more justice to the life and work of Christ. In 1991, a dissertation was dedicated to an urgently needed thorough examination of Christ’s literary legacy,24 and in 2002 two other women independently offered an artistic approach, this time to shed a new light on the person of Christ. Both convert her into a doubly fictional figure, by creating a patchwork of life story and novel extracts.25 I will here focus on the biographical novel by Asta Scheib, entitled In the Gardens of the Heart. Biographical fiction has not been a marginal phenomenon the past thirty years, and it cannot be deemed coincidental that the exponential upsurge of women writing (about) women’s biographies coincided with the beginnings of the feminist movement in the 1960s.26 What those novels with a historical woman as a protagonist have in common is the ‘attempt to ‘rehabilitate’’ them 22 Gilmore, p.14. 23 Goepfert, pp.24, 27, 36, and 64. 24 In her preliminary remarks, Adler emphasizes that previously, the prevailing focus on the reflection of autobiographical issues in Christ’s work led to the equation of life and work, the preoccupation with her tragic fate and the neglect of a more theoretical approach of her writings (Adler, p.13). This statement affirms Anita Runge’s conclusion that especially women’s writings are highly susceptible to the tendency of being interpreted autobiographically, being commonly considered to be drawn from life. Anita Runge, ‘Geschlechterdifferenz in der literaturwissenschaftlichen Biographik. Ein Forschungsprogramm’, in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. by Christian Klein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), p.114. 25 I will not go deeper into the first artistic ‘re-creation’, Bettina Mittendorfer’s successful theatre monologue The Dream of Lena Christ (script by Jörn van Dyck), which earned the actress an award. 26 Anne-Kathrin Reulecke. ‘Die Nase der Lady Hester’, in Biographie als Geschichte, ed. by Hedwig Röckelein (Tübingen: Diskord, 1993), pp.117-142 and 132.
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by granting them a voice;27 an ambition Asta Scheibs emotionally motivated agenda underwrites.28 Although Lena Christ at one time actually had a voice, she only had one for the period reaching up to her late twenties. For what happened in her life afterwards, we are largely dependent on Benedix’s testimony, and it is exactly against this highly questionable testimony that Scheib raises a corrective voice. A prerequisite to succeed in annihilating the pertinacious Christ-myth is the rectification of Benedix, and Scheib’s intention is exactly to expose the malignancy of this disreputable character who highly influenced Christ (and her image).29 This implies a modification of Bird’s rather general comment on women-centered biographical novels that ‘women hitherto largely known only through their association with great men were being rediscovered.’30 Since Benedix, a wannabe author, had always stood in the shadow of his gifted wife,31 but nonetheless simultaneously had had control over the myth construction of her, it would in Christ’s case be more appropriate to say that she was a woman ‘hitherto largely known through the image-making of a man, himself hitherto largely known only through his association with a great woman.’ Together with Bird we can indeed observe how ‘in fictional representations, the relation of the woman to the male subject itself seems to be of central concern.’32 The configuration Lena-Peter needs to be remodelled and the degree of mutual dependency redefined. To achieve this, Scheib deploys diverse strategies, of which I will only briefly mention some. A first strategy is the attempted filling-out of biographical gaps with new characters the task of which it is to expand Christ’s social environment. Lotte Pritzel, a historical avantgarde artist whose contact to Christ is possible but not documented,33 seems to be a figure of central importance. Together with the artistic circle she belongs to, this succesful doll maker and costume designer constitutes an artistic, ideological and social antipode to the conservative and whimsical Benedix and allows Christ a partial escape from his sole influence. 27 Stephanie Bird, Recasting historical women. Female identity in German biographical fiction (Oxford: Berg, 1998), p.1. 28 Asta Scheib in her e-mail to me from May 10, 2005. 29 Asta Scheib in her e-mail to me from May 10, 2005. 30 Bird, pp.4-5. 31 The fact that der Weg der Lena Christ occasionally digresses on episodes that solely concern Benedix are a clear indication that this was indeed so, and he must have seen this biography as an ideal opportunity for self-portrayal and for directing the spotlight on himself. 32 Bird, p.5. 33 Pritzel was befriended to the notorious writer Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow, who in her turn had the same editor as Lena Christ, Korfiz Holm. See Reventlow’s diary entry for Tuesday, 29 March, 1910, available at: .
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Another strategy is to stress Lena’s standard of knowledge, which was not as low as Benedix preferred to make it appear. Scheib also emphasizes the authority Christ gains both socially and within the literary system as a recognized writer and additionally directs the attention to her artistic disposition in fields other than the literary. A further strategy is to partly rewrite certain events as described in Benedix’s biography, so as to give them an entirely opposite denotation and to cast a more deprecatory light on the role of Peter Benedix. The episode which most strikingly illustrates this is a scene of hypnosis, regarded by Benedix as cogent proof of Christ’s supernatural powers. Benedix seemed to be convinced – on paper anyway – that Christ was a highly suggestible person, whom he could easily hypnotize. On the basis of his observations, he concluded that her literary activity, which he interpreted as ‘écriture automatique,’ was executed in a state of trance, and Hofmiller’s statement ‘nicht sie, sondern es schreibt’34 could perfectly underwrites this image construction of an hysterical and naïve natural genius. In reality, a phase of intensive study of sources and preparatory work preceded each writing process, as some documents and early manuscripts attest.35 With historical hindsight, when such theories of hypnosis and hysteria no longer hold the same scientific significance as in the fashionable turn of the century psychiatric discourse – which Benedix, a former student of medicine, was familiar with – it is rather he who appears as being naïve. And this is exactly what Asta Scheib takes advantage of in order to dethrone Benedix – not without a hint of sarcasm.36 Beaten with his own rod, he is thrust into the role originally reserved for Christ, while she, by playing fossum to grant him the childlike pleasure of hypnotizing, takes control over the situation and gains the superior position. A last intervention by Scheib to be highlighted is the occasional reversal of the power-ratio within Benedix and Christ’s relationship. This is most obvious when some aspects of the Christ-myth are simply projected back onto Benedix. On top of the childish-naïve behaviour just mentioned, Benedix is elsewhere also explicitly referred to as a hysteric, tormented by daemons and subconscious drives.37 Thus precisely the most persistent Christ-myth turns itself against its creator and thereby forces him into a female connoted position
34 Hofmiller, as quoted in Benedix, p.132. 35 Adler, p.70. 36 There is also a faint echo of deceptive experiments with hysterics pretending to be successfully hypnotized as they took place at the end of the nineteenth century in the Parisian mental asylum La Salpétrière under the direction of Charcot. 37 Asta Scheib, In den Gärten des Herzens. Die Leidenschaft der Lena Christ (München: dtv. 2004), pp.195 and 350.
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and makes him appear ridiculous.38 As the genre description of A.H. Schmitz’s comedy from 1914, ‘der hysterische Mann. Lustspiel in drei Aufzügen’ clearly suggests, a hysterical man could only be an object of derision. Also in a number of other respects, Benedix occupies the ‘female’ position: he is financially supported by a female author, whose writings are by some critics categorized as astonishingly male, and he is devaluated to a mere assistant and supposed to help the woman who initially did his writing work ‘bei wichtigen schriftstellerischen Arbeiten.’39 In this context it may be illuminative to refer to Goldstein and the parallel he draws between hysteria as a malfunction of the female procreative organs and hysteria as a failure of male artistic creativity. Goldstein quotes Flaubert, who claimed that ‘the simple act of writing installs hysteria in [his] head,’ thereby illustrating the inhibiting impact a hysterical state of mind has on one’s capacity of verbal expression.40 The line that can be drawn from this conclusion to Benedix as a failed writer seems obvious. The power-ratio thus has been gradually reversed, and the master-subordinate relationship subsequently ironised. ‘Herr’ Benedix is turned into a ‘Herrli,’41 and whereas this form of address is a real – and neutrally – transmitted one, it is used by Scheib to challenge Benedix’s masculinity and dominance.42 This last example illustrates how Scheib cannot escape thinking in binary oppositions by simply inverting the situation, and thus recreates as essentialist a picture as Benedix or Goepfert before her. Her endeavour to furnish a correction of the Christ-myth also collapses in a number of other respects. Already the title – In the Gardens of the Heart. The Passionate Life of Lena Christ – evokes some stereotypical concepts traditionally associated with womanhood – not exactly the best of choices for a novel which tries to deconstruct a writer’s image consisting of exactly such notions. Asta Scheib continues – already in the title – a line of reception she actually wanted to break with. Also ‘the biographical illusion’ – to speak with Bourdieu – of Christ’s life as a necessary, predestined catenation of events pointing towards an inescapable tragical ending is shared with the anteceding Christ biographers, who retrospectively impose meaning on Christ’s existence. Or as Scheib stated in an interview: 38 The hysteria discourse has always been, and more so during the ‘age of nervousness’ (i.e., at the turn of the century), sex-differentiated: the disorder which with regard to women was commonly reckoned to be naturally caused hysteria was in the case of male patients diagnosed as the civilization disease neurasthenia. Benedix himself uses the term ‘Nerven’ for his selfcharacterization without reservation. Benedix. p.31. 39 ‘with important literary activities’ [my translation]. Scheib, p.323. 40 Jan Goldstein, ‘The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth Century France’, Representations, 34 (1991), p.43. 41 Distorted diminutive form of ‘Sir’, also used to refer to a male petowner. 42 Goldstein, p.115.
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Ich beschäftige mich mit Menschen, die in ein Leben hinein geboren wurden, das ihnen nicht gemäß ist. Auch nach menschlichen Maßstäben nicht. Lena Christ hatte keine Chance. […] Ohne München wäre sie früher zerbrochen. Sie hatte keine Chance.43
In other words: she was predestined to tragedy from earliest childhood, her doom was determined by the essence of her being and in the end not alterable (only restrictedly delayable) by circumstantial factors. Such a view on life does not leave much space for personal development nor for time-differentiation.44 Rather than showing progression, Christ’s lifeline seems to be intersected by constantly recurring basic constellations and key-events: this allows for a reading of for instance her relationship to Benedix as just a reenactment of the earlier exploitation by her mother, and the figure of Dr. Kerschensteiner, the renowned historical pneumologist who treated Christ’s TB, then appears as only an incarnation of Christ’s early love, a young priest, just as the lute-player Fabbri, whom she had an affair with, in his turn will embody Kerschensteiner. This same figure of Dr. Kerschensteiner, who here appears as a positive opponent of Benedix and as the object of Christ’s platonic love, poses another problem. On the one hand, he, the new authoritative voice of science, is supposed to restrict Benedix’s influence, but, on the other hand, the now partly dissolved creative and existential dependence of Christ on Benedix is simply replaced by a mainly emotional dependence on the scientist. So when in Scheib’s novel it is no longer Benedix but Kerschensteiner who initially encouraged Christ to put down her turbulent life account in writing, this does not change anything about the basic fact that she in neither case appears as an autonomous writer, since the actual impetus for this creative activity is situated outside of her. Kerschensteiner not only figures as the one Lena writes for, but also as the one person she ardently loves and in whose presence she can reach a sense of wholeness. The same goes for her publisher Korfiz Holm and lover Fabbri, who functions as a mere substitute for the unattainable Kerschensteiner. Thus only in the relationship to a man, ‘[der] ihren Leib und Seele zusammen[hält]’45 can 43 ‘I deal with people who were born into a life that does not fit them. Not to human norms either. Lena Christ did not stand a chance. […] Without Munich she would have succumbed earlier. She did not stand a chance [my translation].’ Interview with Brigitte Gießler of 15.9.2002 for bayrische Rundfunk online: . 44 The stronger the tendency towards life-mythologization, the less time is differentiated. Peter André-Alt, ‘Mode ohne Methode? Überlegungen zu einer Theorie der literaturwissenschaftlichen Biographik’, in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. by Christian Klein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002). 45 Scheib, p.366: ‘[who] holds together her body and soul.’ Another example can be found on p.288.
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she find access to her inner-self. This image of female subjectivity – woman as a castrated entity, as lack, nothingness, as a void to be filled – echoes early, and from a present-day point of view highly debatable psychoanalytical thinking. And even though Christ really may have uttered such thought in one of her letters,46 one has to keep in mind that even ego-documents do not consist of private reality, but are themselves the product of societal gender- and sexuality discourses.47 Christ’s secret passion for her doctor, uncomfortably reminiscent of the stock themes of cheap romance, is only one of a number of gaps with a certain degree of ‘sensation potential’ which are colourfully filled in. Other examples worth mentioning are Christ’s convent-friendship with Sister Cäcilia, which in this novel has been transformed into a forbidden lesbian love-affair, the vividly described rape and maltreatment of Christ by her first husband, her secret erotic phantasies about Dr. Kerschensteiner and the bed scenes with her lover Fabbri. All of these mercilessly degrade Lena Christ to the object of the maleconnoted voyeuristic gaze of the reader, which is nearly as suppressive as the mythologized position Scheib wants to save her from.48 On the basis of the above mentioned essentialist ‘relapses’ we can conclude that Asta Scheib does not seem to entirely succeed in her restorative enterprise. What In the Gardens of the Heart mainly lacks is a self-reflexive handling of narrative models and biographical information which exposes the constructedness of the novel and would arguably more drastically critique the unacknowledged constructedness of the earlier biographical efforts. The failure of such an enterprise can primarily be ascribed to the author’s unreflective sympathy for the protagonist, since total empathy and blindness for the specificity of a certain historical setting prevent an effective dialogue with the past.49 The use of an absent third-person omniscient narrator increases the impression of reality and also prompts the reader to a naïve identification with the protagonist and to the unresistant absorption of so-called facts. Bird brands such a narratorial approach ‘hermeneutically reactionary’ and pleads for a mode which relativizes the role of the creative author and valorizes
46 Lena to Benedix: ‘I was only worth something thanks to you, and I have been reduced to a nobody, since I have not got you any longer. I am anchorless, feeble and lifeless [my translation].’ Goepfert, p.120. 47 Schmidt, p.144. 48 So Reulecke’s finding that hierarchies of meaning and patterns of feminity systematically catch on in biographies appears easily applicable to this case, where the female protagonist is regularly reduced to pure physicality. Reulecke, p.131. 49 Dominick LaCapra, cited in Bird, pp.19-20.
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that of the reader, who should be actively involved in a subversive reading.50 According to Felman: [gilt] die ideale Leserin als den Verfasserinnen und Verfassern von Texten ebenbürtige dekonstruktivisch orientierte Theoretikerin, die durch ihre Lektüre eine Defiguration des Geschlechterverhältnisses vornimmt und damit dessen Rekonstruktion einleitet.51
There are several possible ways out of dead-end biographical constructs for the author. The solution Toril Moi suggests is a ‘personal genealogy’ which should replace a narrative and linear life-description by a reconstruction of the complex network of power-based and subject-generating intertexts.52 Such a mode of proceeding may especially be profitable to discuss women’s lives, because it undermines traditional discourses of knowledge: When the overlapping ground between the categories of fiction, social history, psychological observations, and sociological insight is recognized as fertile [rather] than dangerous, for a biographer, because it contains contradictions in the very roots of knowledge, it can work very well for women whose lives also contradict the validity of this knowledge.53
Another conceivable answer to the biographical problem is – even though some think that this may degrade the result to a mere mechanical product54 – biographical metafiction or quest-biography in which the thematization of biographical work itself is of central concern.55 This necessarily exposes the role of the biographer and his affinity to the biographical object and warns the reader not to fall into the trap of absolute truth claims, for, as Freud al-
50 Bird, p.148. 51 ‘the ideal reader is a deconstructively orientated theoretician, who is equal to the authors of texts, and who, while reading, defigures the gender ratio and thus induces its reconfiguration’ [my translation] (Felman as referred to by Rinnert, 2002, p.121). 52 Runge, p.119. 53 Terese Iles, cited in Runge, p.120. 54 Herman Kurzke, ‘Zur Rolle des Biographen. Erfahrungen beim Schreiben einer Biographie’, in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. by Christian Klein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), p.173. 55 von Zimmermann, p.6.
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ready understood, writing the story of one’s life equals committing oneself to deception.56 A successful attempt at writing a fictional biography, we may conclude, postulates a transparency of how source material is incorporated into a fictional frame and should display the author’s self-relativisation and increase the awareness of the reader towards constructions of subjectivity, instead of, like Asta Scheib, trying to create an airtight image and suggesting its reality, only to eventually and inevitably fail in this utopian enterprise.
56 ‘Whoever becomes a biographer, commits himself to lying, to concealment, hypocrisy, whitewashing and even to dissembling his lack of understanding, because biographical truth is unattainable, and if it would be up for grabs, it would be useless’ [my translation]. Freud, quoted in Thomas Anz, ‘Autoren auf der Couch? Psychopathologie, Psychoanalyse und biograhisches Schreiben’, in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. by Christian Klein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), pp.87-106.
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Bibliography Adler, Ghemela, Heimatsuche und Identität. Das Werk der bairischen Schriftstellerin Lena Christ (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1991). André-Alt, Peter, ‘Mode ohne Methode? Überlegungen zu einer Theorie der literaturwissenschaftlichen Biographik’, in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. by Christian Klein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002). Anz, Thomas, ‘Autoren auf der Couch? Psychopathologie, Psychoanalyse und biograhisches Schreiben’, in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. by Christian Klein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002). Benedix, Peter, Der Weg der Lena Christ (München: Ludwig Baur Verlag, 1950). Bird, Stephanie, Recasting historical women. Female identity in German biographical fiction (Oxford: Berg, 1998). Christ, Lena, Erinnerungen einer Überflüssigen (München: dtv, 2003) pp.57-59. Eakin, Paul John, Fictions in Autobiography. Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985). Gilmore, Leigh, The Limits of Autobiography. Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001). Goepfert, Günter, Das Schicksal der Lena Christ (München: List Verlag, 1971). Goldstein, Jan, ‘The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth Century France’, Representations, 34 (1991), pp.134-165. p.143. Klein, Christian, ed., Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002). Kurzke, Herman, ‘Zur Rolle des Biographen. Erfahrungen beim Schreiben einer Biographie’, in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. by Christian Klein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002) . Reulecke, Anne-Kathrin, ‘Die Nase der Lady Hester’, in Biographie als Geschichte, ed. by Hedwig Röckelein (Tübingen: Diskord, 1993). Runge, Anita, ‘Geschlechterdifferenz in der literaturwissenschaftlichen Biographik. Ein Forschungsprogramm’, in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. by Christian Klein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002). Scheib, Asta, In den Gärten des Herzens. Die Leidenschaft der Lena Christ (München: dtv, 2004).
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Schmidt, Gary, ‘Literarische Deutungen eines Lebens und biographische Interpretationen eines Textes: Der Tod in Venedig in Thomas-Mann-Biographien’, in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. by Christian Klein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002). Troll, Gertraud, Lena Christ (München: Ludwig Maximilians Universität, 1945). Von Gugel, Adelheid, Lena Christ. Leben und Werk (München: Ludwig Maximilians Universität, 1959). Von Zimmermann, Christian, ed., Fakten und Fiktionen. Strategien fiktionalbiographischer Dichtervorstellungen in Roman, Drama und Film seit 1970. Beiträge des Bad Homburger Kolloquiums, 21-23 Juni 1999 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2000).
Dreams in the Mirror: George Steiner by George Steiner Ricardo Gil Soeiro (University of Lisbon) Caught in a process of suspension and deferral, so that it comes too late (as if the book never fully gets itself told), the closing sheet of the errata represents the formal statement that the book just read or to be read has become provisional at the very time of its elaboration and even before reaching the reader’s hands. Focusing primarily on Errata: An Examined Life (1997), by George Steiner, this paper wishes to address the way in which, in this particular autobiography, one perceives a fusion of life and work. Indeed, this metonymical dislocation, which takes Steiner to become the book (to be one with it), ultimately points out to the symbiosis between a) intelectual pursuits and b) the intensity of biography. This is our argument: not only life and work go hand in hand, but also Steiner’s emotional history is often overshadowed by his many ‘textual homelands’ (in this sense, one can see how Errata resumes, in nuce, all of Steiner’s work). Errata: a non-confessional autobiography or a coda that mutes any excessive feeling of triumph? Steiner’s defiant wielding of the convex surface of his self (Ashbery’s phrase) forces the reader to participate in the narcissistic process, preventing him or her from looking away, and inscribing a place for the reader within the text as one part of the mirrored scene.
Do you know what the Kabbala teaches? That the sum total of the evil and miseries of humankind arose when a lazy or incompetent scribe misheard, took down erroneously, a single letter, one single solitary letter, in Holy Writ. Every horror since has come on us through and because of that one erratum. You didn’t know that, did you? (George Steiner, Proofs and Three Parables) Il y a dans lire une attente qui ne cherche pas à aboutir. Lire c’est errer. La lecture est l’errance. (Pascal Quignard, Les Ombres Errantes)
‘I know that I was an error and was errant, that I never lived, that I existed only because I filled time with consciousness and thought. [...] I seek and don’t find myself,’1 replies melancholically the disquiet assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude to the ungraspable 1 Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude, trans. by and int. by Richard Zenith (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited in Association with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1991), pp.25 and 80.
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Delphic precept ‘Know thyself.’ If this is so, if, to the point of vertigo, the ‘I’ becomes ‘el desconocido de Si Mismo,’2 how is it then possible to weave, however obliquely, a portrait of the menacing, anxiety-provoking ‘Other’ and thus gain admission to an absolutely unique and indomitable alterity? ‘Kennen wir George Steiner? Können wir ihn überhaupt kennen?’ asks Joschka Fischer, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, upon the occasion of the award of The Ludwig-Börne Prize (2003) to George Steiner, venturing to confront the absolute impossibility of embracing the otherness of the other. Fischer’s question only deepens our perplexity about the claim to be able to know this other ‘whom ideas still have the power to shock and exhilarate, scandalise or enthral. Steiner may be one of the last of the great breed of European humanists; but he is also an intellectual showman with a canny sense of theatre, a flamboyant conjurer who pulls author after author out of the apparently bottomless hat of his erudition.’3 An initial theoretical foundation stone needs to be laid before we can proceed with George Steiner’s ‘Dreams in the Mirror.’ All Steiner’s work enacts encounter. Reading him requires us to relive the risk and the responsibility endemic to his own image of reading. As a preface to Antigones, Steiner quotes Walter Benjamin on the ‘lightning bolt,’ the illuminatory flash of insight, of urgent response, to a text. ‘The text is the thunder-peal rolling long behind.’ The act of reading, underlined by the crucial concept of responsibility, ‘houses a primary notion of “response,” of “answerability.” To be responsible in respect of the primary notion of semantic trust is [...] to accept the obligation of response though [...] in an almost paradoxical freedom. It is to answer and to answer for. Responsible response, answering answerability make of the process of understanding a moral act.’4 It is, therefore, in this light that we will try to read Steiner. In this paper, accepting this laborious Penelope-task, I will try to come to an understanding of what George Steiner’s autobiography Errata: An Examined Life (1997) sets in motion. It is my contention, and the informing hypothesis of this essay, that Errata succeeds in presenting Steiner’s work, thus functioning like a magnifying lens, focusing and intensifying cardinal leitmotivs which come back to haunt him. While achieving this, it nevertheless fails in staging a biographical self, thus voicing Paul de Man’s intuition that ‘the interest of autobiography [...] is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge – it does not – but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of
2 Octavio Paz, O Desconhecido de Si Mesmo (Lisbon: Vega, 1992). 3 Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fisch, Spivak, Z iz ek and others (London, New York: Verso, 2003), p.180. 4 George Steiner, Real Presences. Is there Anything Real in what we say? (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989), p.90.
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closure and of totalization.’5 I will be addressing the implications of this failure later on in the light of Steiner’s concept of responsibility. To begin to unravel this delicate knot, it is first necessary to examine the consistent vein of melancholy which runs throughout Errata and finds echo in the finding that ‘Errors grow more unbearable as they become irreparable.’6 As the title poignantly suggests, caught in a process of suspension and deferral, so that it comes too late, the closing sheet of the errata (thus displaying its testamentary dimension), being an added excrescence or a ‘prosthetic limb,’ represents the formal statement that the book just read or about to be read became provisional at the very time of its elaboration and even before reaching the reader’s hand. From this perspective, it might reasonably be argued that the book is blemished by the list of errata. Despite scourging it, it does so, après coup, when it is already too late to correct it without leaving behind the visible traces of error. By stressing the bookish quality of his ‘examined life’ (the book’s subtitle), Steiner makes clear from the outset what his concerns will be, fully realizing the extent of this initial move. Let us surely note, then, that by staging a self uneasily caught up inside the intellectual circle – thus overshadowing his emotional life and presenting a self almost dispossessed of its interiority – Steiner inhabits (and he does so passionately) his many ‘textual homelands’ while, by the same token, he refuses to be trapped in Narcissus’ prison of complete self-absorption. The following lines, extracted from the collection of essays George Steiner: A Reader, are a fitting testimony of the first meaning of Errata: There are errors one ought to commit at the unguarded outset. Too poised a beginning, the production of first writings that bear only on exact targets and go armoured against the objections of the established or the academic, do not, I think, hold much promise of original development. There are early indiscretions of spirit, magnitudes in the questions posed and the themes chosen, which are an essential, though subsequently vulnerable, prelude to getting things right. Miniaturists and precisians of the middle ground tend to stay themselves. They may never, as Nietzsche’s imperative bids us, ‘become what one is.’7
There are few, as Hölderlin said, who are compelled to catch the lightning with their bare hands.
5 Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp.70-71. 6 George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p.153. 7 George Steiner, George Steiner: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p.7.
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Let me further highlight what I take to be the second meaning of Errata, namely that of the Latin ‘errante,’ a topos which we could refer to as ‘The Wandering Jew.’ The child of Viennese parents who moved to Paris in 1924, and then to the United States in 1940, George Steiner describes himself as a perpetual migrant, everywhere a guest and nowhere at home.8 His childhood fashioned in him a kind of refugee consciousness, which would form the core of his identification as a Jew: Steiner not only lives in exile, he lives the exile. For him, exile is an emotional, spiritual, and cultural condition from which one must never – indeed, can never – sever oneself. The anomaly of Jewish rootlessness, which most Jews over the generations have perceived as a divine punishment, is depicted by Steiner as a great virtue. The Jew in exile now wore a tragic, heroic mantle. The traditional image of the Jew as a perpetual stranger become an ideal, extolled by intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, Edmond Jabès, Jean-François Lyotard, and Zygmunt Bauman. Unable to put down roots in foreign lands, the Jews developed a talent for abstraction and a facility in the international languages of music, mathematics, and the hard sciences. Since the tribal and national particularisms of the gentiles were alien to them, Jews began exploring the universal aspects of humanity. Steiner declares: ‘Admittedly, I am a wanderer, a Luftmensch, liberated from all persecutions and the irony, the tension and the sophistry these arouse in the Jewish sensitivity, into a creative impulse which is so powerful that through its power it reshapes large sections of politics, art, and the intellectual structures of our generation.’9 In fact, I would very much like to linger on this matter for a moment in order to emphasize my belief that Steiner’s self-identification with the ‘wandering Jew’ carries formal reverberations for his work which are, indeed, consistent with his characteristic crossing of boundaries, with his continual trans-lation.10 His eclectic interests are reflected in writings which cover such diverse fields as chess and mountain-walking, linguistics, cultural criticism, philosophy, and 8 For a more detailed account of George Steiner’s Jewishness, see: Assaf Sagir, ‘George Steiner’s Jewish Problem’, Azure (2003), pp.130-154; Edith Wyschogrod, ‘The Mind of a Critical Moralist: Steiner as Jew’, in Reading George Steiner, ed. by Nathan A. Scott Jr. and Ronald A. Sharp (Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp.151-179; PierreEmmanuel Dauzat, ‘Du Juif errant aux Errata’, in Steiner: Cahiers de l’Herne, ed. by PierreEmmanuel Dauzat (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2003), pp.9-19; Moshe Idel, ‘George Steiner: un prophète de l’abstraction’, in Steiner. Cahiers de l’Herne, ed. by Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2003), pp.122-143. 9 George Steiner, ‘The Wandering Jew’, Petahim, 1 (1968), p.21. 10 ‘Le risque qui attend le poète et, derrière lui, tout homme […] de ne pouvoir demeurer parce que, là où l’on est, manquent les conditions d’un ici décisif ; là, c e […] à l’écart, là où règne la profondeur de la dissimulation […] est l’effrayant,’ Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p.319.
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the religious underpinnings of literary imagination. With thrilling virtuosity and dazzling inventiveness, Steiner’s brilliant oeuvre retains its urgency and its power to provoke. In this light, his more recent works can best be understood as an outgrowth of his earlier ones. Connections have to be made not only across a long time-span, but also between the different literary modes which this astonishingly versatile writer has employed. Steiner’s activities as a philosopher, novelist, literary critic, and journalist are interlocking. Whatever his chosen form of expression, he is always expressing and developing a total and related world view. Steiner’s immense achievement lies less in any single work than in the totality (the symphonic whole) of his summa summarum. In one account of two competing versions of George Steiner, Guido Almansi11 refers to Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘The Fox and the Hedgehog.’12 In this essay, Berlin uses the Archilochean opposition as a touchstone with which to divide writers, artists, musicians, and thinkers into two categories. He cites a fragment from Archilocus as his starting point: ‘the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ This distinction enables Berlin to create two versions of the intellectual. On the one hand, the centrifugal fox, who chases many unrelated chickens, so to speak, and, on the other hand, the centripetal hedgehog, who subordinates each thought to a central, inexorable vision. According to Almansi, Steiner is an arch-fox among critics. By ignoring the usual intellectual or academic criteria of literary criticism, Steiner – the promeneur solitaire – soon establishes a distance from the purely theoretical. Choosing to wear his literary heart upon his sleeve, he embarks upon his career by creating a space in which to stand alone, unauthorized by scholarly approbation or tradition. The next lines offer a particularly fine rendering of this Steinerian move: Today, the ‘polymath’ [...] is distrusted. He has few colleagues. He will commit errors and oversights, perhaps trivial or readily corrected, but of a kind which exasperates the specialist, which casts doubt on the work as a whole. I have, on occasion, been careless over detail, over technical discriminations. Impatience, a disinclination to submit work in progress to expert scrutiny, the pressure of deadlines and public platforms – too numerous, too diverse – have marred texts which could have been, formally at least, unblemished. An unripe restlessness, bougeotte in French, has made me drop subjects, problems, disciplines once I thought, erroneously perhaps, that I had seized their gist, that
11 Guido Almansi, ‘The Triumph of the Hedgehog’, in Reading George Steiner, ed. by Nathan A. Scott Jr. and Ronald A. Sharp (Baltimore, London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994). 12 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox. An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967).
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I knew where the matter led. My belief that cows have fields but that passions in motion are the privilege of the human mind has long been held against me.13
These words tend to be endowed with a self-defeatingly corrosive lucidity. Here I shall merely suggest that in the fulsome Steinerian rhetoric of ‘failure,’ we cannot help but overhear his strident pathos of ‘extraterritoriality.’ If Steiner is here echoing a humbleness and drawing upon the rhetorical device of the captatio benevolentia, he is also playing a Horatio to a dead Hamlet, an uncloaked Prospero, deprived of his charms, begging for the indulgence of an audience.14 For this ‘juif errant,’ permanently inhabiting the border areas, human beings are ‘extraterritorial’15 and are able to function and live across borders and boundaries while still maintaining their humanity. Steiner invokes the winged-God Hermes as the deity of an intermediary realm: the go-between and trickster, the patron of thieves, translators, and interpreters, the master of tricks and transformations. Wege, nicht Werke, Steiner would repeat after Heidegger.16 His longstanding scepticism regarding systematic thought has placed him in a sometimes contentious position in relation to theory, even as his own 13 Steiner, Errata, pp.154-155. 14 In its paradoxical force, Steiner’s examined life draws heavily on Augustine’s Confessions (reenacting the Christian imperative to the confession of sins, thus promoting that inwardturning gaze which is the origin of autobiography). It would be interesting to compare Steiner’s Errata with Derrida’s reading of Augustine’s pathbreaking autobiography. The text by Jacques Derrida is ‘Circonfession’ (1991). For a thorough account of Derrida’s autobiography, see the following articles: Paulo de Medeiros, ‘To Double Witness Bound: Derrida, Death, and the Haunting of Writing’, in Literatura e Pluralidade Cultural, ed. by Isabel Allegro de Magalhães, João Barrento, Silvina Rodrigues Lopes, Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 1999), pp.265-272; Jill Robbins, ‘Circumcising Confession: Derrida, Autobiography, Judaism’, Diacritics, 25 (4) (1995), pp.20-38; Stephen Spender, ‘Confessions and Autobiography’, in Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. by James Olney (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp.115-122. 15 George Steiner, Extra-Territorial. Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp.3-11. 16 Nevertheless, let it be stated that Steiner still recognizes cohesion: ‘[...] I venture to think that there is cohesion. The first page of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky declares the ‘Real Presences’ that were to come more than thirty years later. The Death of Tragedy addresses directly themes that Antigones concentrates and deepens. There is very little in my ensuing books and essays which is not announced in Language and Silence. As both hostile and sympathetic readers have underlined, In Bluebeard’s Castle intimately prefigures The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. The matter of music, which has moved to the resistant center for me, is raised and questioned in the very earliest essays. After Babel, in its reflections on the ontology of hope in the discovery of the future tense of the verb, anticipates the dramatization of the grammars of the messianic in Proofs […]’ (George Steiner, ‘A Responsion’, in Reading George Steiner, ed. by Nathan A. Scott Jr. and Ronald A. Sharp (Baltimore, London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp.279).
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work has been notably sensitive to, and informed by, contemporary theoretical discussions, displaying a distinctly hostile animus towards the systematizers (Kierkegaard, Hamann, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or Heidegger are among the many voices that proclaim, through their superior if virtually unbearable burden of singularity, the absurdity of systems). As Steiner himself recognizes, so much in his writings evokes Blake’s ‘idiot questioner,’17 being no more than the product of ‘an intuition grown impatient.’18 But he is also seeing with two sets of eyes, the full four-fold act of vision, like Blake’s Four Zoas: I grew possessed by an intuition of the particular, of diversities so numerous that no labour of classification and enumeration could exhaust them. Each leaf differed from any other on each differing tree (I rushed out in the deluge to assure myself of this elementary and miraculous truth). Each blade of grass, each pebble on the lake shore was, eternally, ‘just so.’ No repetition of measurement, however closely calibrated, in whatever controlled vacuum it was carried out, could ever be perfectly the same. It would deviate by some trillionth of an inch, by a nanosecond, by the breadth of a hair – itself a teeming immensity – from any preceding measurement. I sat on my bed striving to hold my breadth, knowing that the next breath would signal a new beginning, that the past was already unrecapturable in its differential sequence. Did I guess that there could be no perfect facsimile of anything, that the identical word spoken twice, even in lightningquick reiteration, was not and could not be the same? (Much later, I was to learn that this unrepeatability had preoccupied both Heraclitus and Kierkegaard.)19
In fact, Steiner’s writing provides not only a wonderful exhibition of intellect and a fine demonstration of rhetorical agility, it also exposes his heart, a rare display in contemporary scholarly or critical circles.20 Such nakedness can be a problem. As Steiner himself puts it, ‘to try to tell of what happens inside one-
17 Steiner sees this urge of questioning as the defining pulse and dignitas of our humanity: ‘It is the vertigo of asking which activates an examined life,’ George Steiner, Dix raisons (possibles) à la tristesse de pensée (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), p.172. 18 Steiner, Errata, p.5. 19 Steiner, Errata, p.3. 20 See Philonenko’s following testimony: ‘Justement parce que son expérience est si singuli re, si riche, si intime, elle échappe à la nécessité logique. Cette richesse personelle est contingente, particuli re, irréfutable parce que vécue, mais précisément parce que vécue, affectée d’un coefficient irrationnel. Je ne veux pas dire par là que George est un irrationnaliste au sens vulgaire du terme – je veux seulement dire que tous les a priori qu’il est susceptible de rencontrer sont pour lui une borne (non une limite) et qu’il ne peut en rendre compte en s’appuyant sur sa seule expérience’ (Alexis Philonenko, ‘George Steiner comme “survivant”’, foreword to George Steiner, Le Sens du sens (Paris: Vrin, 1988), p.129).
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self as one affords vital welcome and habitation to the presences in art, music and literature is to risk the whole gamut of muddle and embarrassment.’21 To speak of Steiner’s autobiographical urge in these terms, however, immediately begs an obvious question: is the same thing to be found in Errata? For Bryan Cheyette, ‘Errata, a non-confessional autobiography, is a perfect embodiment of Steiner’s psychic division. It refuses to make explicit his inner being by confusing an “examined life” with the unexamined language of feeling’22; for Maya Jaggi, it remains ‘brief and curiously reticent’23; for Anthony Gottlieb, ‘[t]he book is primarily a tour of ideas, not of places or people. Steiner’s family, teachers and heroes appear only as fleeting shadows.’24 Refusing (partially, at least) to hold the mirror (even the convex mirror, according to John Ashbery’s famous self-portrait25) up to nature, Errata provides a further opportunity for reflection upon Steiner’s writings, with its prodigious variety of subjects. I do believe that, for Steiner, a sui generis rendering of his self is, in fact, taking place here, while ostensibly not taking place. He is trying to hide a secret while, simultaneously, laying it bare, thus producing what I would call a crypto-confessional autobiography. ‘How,’ might Steiner have asked, echoing Yeats’s poem, ‘can we know the dancer from the dance?’ How can we know about life from intellectual pursuits? There is no point denying it, though. One would expect from this ‘odyssée mélancolique des erreurs d’un parcours intellectuel’26 a more confessional account of George Steiner’s life. Instead, Errata shows us Steiner through a glass darkly.27 Self-revelation of the inner life is perhaps a dirty business. Why does this not happen? Contrary to what one might expect, the reasons, I believe, spring mainly from Steiner’s hermeneutic postulates. The ‘text,’ in his view, is the true homeland of the People of the Book. More than any other people, he argues, the Jewish people ‘read, reread without cease, learnt by heart or by rote, and expounded without end the texts which spell out its mis-
21 Steiner, Real Presences, p.178. 22 Bryan Cheyette, ‘Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner’s Post-Holocaust Fiction’, in The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable, ed. by Andrew Leak and George Paizis (New York: MacMillan, 2000), p.69. 23 Maya Jaggi, ‘George and his dragons’, Guardian, 17 March 2001, p.18. 24 Anthony Gottlieb, ‘Idea Man. Review of Errata: An Examined Life, by George Steiner’, New York Times Review of Books, 12 April 1998, p.18. 25 I am here referring to John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.’ 26 Dauzat, p.12. 27 George Steiner, ‘Through That Glass Darkly’, in No Passion Spent. Essays 1978-1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp.328-347.
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sion.’28 A total and ongoing immersion in Jewish texts turned the Jew into the quintessential bibliophile, for whom ‘the text is home; each commentary a return.’29 Moreover, Steiner also attributes a quality of belatedness and exile to reading, particularly in relation to praxis: ‘Reading, textual exegesis, are an exile from action, from the existential innocence of praxis, even when the text is aiming at practical and political consequence. The reader is one who (day and night) is absent from action.’30 As I hope I have made clear by now, Steiner’s belief in critical commitment and ‘answerability’ as a ‘responding responsibility,’ his sense of the now broken ‘covenant’ between word and world which once entailed the notions of ‘semantic trust’ and truth as answerability to the meaning of the world, and his recognition of the ethical implications of Rimbaud’s deliberate disintegration of the ego, all point to an acceptance of an ‘ethic of the word,’ in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase.31 Furthermore, his hermeneutics clearly seek to preserve both the ontological freedom of the text and the freedom of the individual, whether reader or critic. His suggestion of cortesia as an attitude of welcoming vulnerability similarly implies a reciprocity grounded in freedom. As he says, our experience of art and of reading are those of an ‘ontological encounter between freedoms.’32 Nevertheless, I find a troubling element, a dissonant ringing in the ear, circulating within Steiner’s hermeneutic freedom. The problematic element is that of passivity, albeit ‘dynamic,’33 which seems to detract from the reader’s freedom. It is useful here to briefly note the similarities in Steiner’s thought with Levinas’ ethic of transcendence34 in which, under the direction of the Infinite, ‘the “I think” [...] is [...] a subjection to the other. The I is a passivity more passive still than any passivity, and a “hostage for the other.” 28 George Steiner, No Passion Spent, p.312. 29 George Steiner, No Passion Spent, p.307. 30 Steiner, No Passion Spent, p.305. 31 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Creativity of Language’, in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. by Mário J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p.477. 32 Steiner, Real Presences, p.198. 33 Steiner, George Steiner: A Reader, p.91. 34 Steiner accords Levinas’ philosophy little more than perfunctory glances. Here is one of Steiner’s most striking readings of Levinas: ‘Levinas, in his unbroken dialogue with Heidegger’s celebration of being, argues that only altruism, only the resolve to live for others, can validate and make acceptable the terror of existence. We must transcend being in order to “be with.” A noble doctrine, but also an evasion. No self-sacrificial motion, no struggle for reparation, goes to the heart of the question. Is there in creation an enormity of irrelevance so far as human life is concerned? Have we no natural place, no at-homeness in the world, being instead unwelcome guests, as is proposed in Euripides’ Bacchae, in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Timon
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The subject is hostage to the other in an “extreme of passivity in responsibility” which keeps nothing for itself, “responsibility” such that everything in me is debt and donation.’35 Similarly, Steiner feels compelled by the mysterious, immanent otherness of the text, whose imperious presence acts as a transforming catalyst upon the reader. Emphasizing our purely receptive role, he argues, with Heidegger, that ‘[e]ven where there is a readiness, [...] the true entrance into us will not occur by an act of will. The process of penetration, of implantation, suggests a chemical bonding, involuntary and, very frequently, initially unnoticed.’36 Steiner is baffled by the apparent ineffectiveness of art, literature and music, their ability to exert a humanizing influence and to act as a deterrent from great evil. As he puts it, ‘the spheres of Auschwitz-Birkenau and of the Beethoven recital, of the torture cellar and the great library, were contiguous in space and time. How could this be?’ Not only so, but he is forced to contemplate the possibilities of a dialectic between ‘certain energies in “high culture” and barbarism,’ a dialectic in which we are all implicated in a ‘political-social indifference’ fostered by the humanities in their ‘ideals of disinterested abstraction.’37 When, in Errata, Steiner claims that he has found himself ‘wondering, fantastically childishly, whether human history is not the passing nightmare of a sleeping god,’38 he resembles a latter-day Job, wrestling with God, demanding answers and agonizing over the appalling contradiction of the Shoah. True to his own criteria, Steiner does not offer definitive solutions to the problem of tragedy. Allegory, he maintains, is often more helpful than explanation, and honest literary criticism has more to do with ‘passionate, private experience seeking to persuade’ than with ‘rigour’ or ‘proof.’39 Rather than turning to theodicy, Steiner therefore presents a fictional postscript to his The Death of Tragedy, telling a story about a train journey undertaken with travelling companions who recount various tales of wartime atrocity and suffering. The passengers are subdued into silence by the unfathomable horror of their experiences, until one old man recalls a mediaeval parable which might shed or in the death-watch parables of Beckett? In the “language games” of religious faith the question becomes simply this: does guilt, does some unimaginable irresponsibility attach to God’s making? Picture to yourself the slow death of a tortured child’ (George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p.33). 35 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, in The Levinas Reader, ed. by Séan Hand (Oxford, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p.178. 36 Steiner, Real Presences, p.179. 37 Steiner, George Steiner: A Reader, p.11. 38 Steiner, Errata, p.169. 39 George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p.351.
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(sombre) light on the incomprehensible. The parable tells of a Rabbi entering a synagogue and encountering God, sitting in a dark corner. The Rabbi asks God why he is there, and God replies in a small voice, ‘I am tired, Rabbi, I am tired unto death.’40 Believing that literature deals essentially and continually with the image of man, with the shape and motive of human conduct, it follows for Steiner that any serious thought about literature and the social implications of literature must begin with the terrors of the Nazi death camps. Belsen and Auschwitz must be seen as relevant to any responsible life of the imagination. The shocking enigma that so-called civilized society can revert to mass-murder should dominate our rational reflections and bewilder our sense of identity. Haunted by this antinomy (this liaison dangereuse or this Wahlverwandschaft, in Goethe’s choice of words), Steiner is profoundly concerned with the relationship of literature and words to the inhuman.41 In his book In Bluebeard’s Castle, he further ponders this brutally ironic hypothesis, the possibility that the humanities foster an indifference to real suffering and need, rendering us ‘fellow travellers to barbarism.’42 Taking a hermeneutic step beyond sociological and historical contextualization, Steiner argues that the holocaust marks a ‘second Fall.’43 Following Freud,44 after the Copernician Revolution had dispossessed man of his umbilical position in the organization of the cosmos, depriving him of the excellence of his centrality, and after Darwin had reduced him to a mere link in the evolutionary process of living beings, there came Psychoanalysis exiling man from himself, devastating the ‘I’ as an ordering source, stressing the presence of a propulsive energy that man does not control, and establishing the unconscious as the genesis of the psychic processes which are, thus, foreign, ‘ex-centric’ to the Self. Steiner, I believe, would add to these cosmo40 Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, pp.352-353. 41 See, particularly, George Steiner, Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1967). 42 Steiner, George Steiner: A Reader, p.11. 43 Steiner’s thought has always been modelled by a theological frame. See the following example: ‘The major philosophic systems since the French Revolution have been tragic systems. They have metaphorized the theological premiss of the fall of man. The metaphors are various: the Fichtean and Hegelian concepts of self-alienation, the Marxist scenario of economic servitude, Schopenhauer’s diagnosis of human conduct as harnessed to coercive will, the Nietzschean analysis of decadence, Freud’s narrative of the coming of neurosis and discontent after the original Oedipal crime, the Heideggerian ontology of a fall from the primal truth of Being. To philosophize after Rousseau and Kant, to find a normative conceptual phrasing for the psychic, social, and historical condition of man, is to think ‘tragically’ (George Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p.2). 44 Sigmund Freud, ‘Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse’, Imago, 5 (1917), pp.1-7.
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logical, biological and psychoanalytic ‘injuries’ yet another: Auschwitz, which I would call the anthropological ‘injury.’ Steiner has opened the last door of Bluebeard’s Castle, knowing that the last door in the castle has led on to realities which are ‘beyond the reach of human comprehension and control’ and he has done so ‘with that desolate clairvoyance, so marvellously rendered in Bartók’s music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity.’45 Picking up the thread I have left behind, as a ‘servant’ and ‘shepherd’ to the masterful autonomy of the text’s being, the reader feels ‘banished’ from the world of action. Acknowledging the absence of the reader from the world of action, Steiner nevertheless remains genuinely surprised and perplexed that the world of the text does not necessarily influence or change the world of action. Convinced of the solitary nature of reading, he asks neither whether nor how the ‘stasis’ of reading could be balanced by the ‘impetus’ of the text’s provocation, which could then be ‘transformed into action only through a decision whereby a person says: there I stand!’46 Like Thales, the legendary founder of philosophy, George Steiner is another (although masterfully brilliant) fallen stargazer.47 Divorced from practicality, immersed in the contemplative life, he greatly admires the quixotic nature of the life of the mind, equating ‘soledad with the very possibility of speculative and constructive labours of first rank. This [...] is Montaigne’s reiterated conviction in his tower; as it is that of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in the blinding aloneness of high noon.’48 Errata bears witness to this retreat into an abstract or virtual sphere of one’s own creation, abandoning the chastening limitations of the Lebenswelt. This is, I dare say, Steiner’s ‘mistake.’ By intransitively being wedded to the life of mind, he runs the risk of finding himself divorced from the world, and, consequently, startlingly discovering that ‘the cry in the tragic play [may] muffle, even blot out, the cry in the street.’49 Errata draws to a close with a passage that naturally dampens any excessive feeling of triumph: ‘“He who thinks greatly must err greatly,” said Martin Heidegger, the parodist-theologian of our age (where “parodist” is meant in 45 George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle. Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p.106. 46 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative III, trans. by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p.249. 47 For a political discussion of this paradox, see, for example, Wendy Steiner, ‘La Trahison des clercs’, in The Scandal of Pleasure. Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp.163-208, as well as George Steiner, ‘The Cleric of Treason’, in George Steiner: A Reader, pp.178-204. 48 Steiner, Grammars of Creation, p.183. 49 Steiner, Real Presences, p.144.
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its gravest sense). Also those who “think small” may err greatly. This is the democracy of grace, or of damnation.’50 There is despair, but there is, just as inexorably, consolation.
50 Steiner, Errata, p.171.
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Bibliography Works by George Steiner Steiner, George, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). ——, Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1967). ——, ‘The Wandering Jew’, In Petahim,1 (1968), p.6. ——, In Bluebeard’s Castle. Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). ——, Extra-Territorial. Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1972). ——, After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1975]). ——, On Difficulty and Other Essays (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). ——, Heidegger (Hassocks: The Harvester Press Limited, 1978). ——, Nostalgia for the Absolute (Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1983). ——, George Steiner: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). ——, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). ——, Le Sens du sens (Paris: Vrin, 1988). ——, ‘The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the Shoah’, in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. by Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1988), pp.154-171. ——, Real Presences. Is There Anything Real in What We Say? (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989). ——, ‘The Scandal of Revelation’, Salmagundi, 98-99 (1993), pp.42-70. ——, ‘A Responsion’, in Reading George Steiner, ed. by Nathan A. Scott Jr. and Ronald A. Sharp (Baltimore, London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp.275-285. ——, No Passion Spent. Essays 1978-1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). ——, Errata: An Examined Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997).
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——, Grammars of Creation (London: Faber and Faber, 2001). ——, Les Logocrates (Paris: L’Herne, 2003). ——, Dix Raisons (Possibles) à la Tristesse de Pensée (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).
Works on George Steiner Almansi, Guido. ‘The Triumph of the Hedgehog’, in Reading George Steiner, ed. by Nathan A. Scott Jr. and Ronald A. Sharp (Baltimore, London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp.58-73. Cheyette, Bryan. ‘Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner’s PostHolocaust Fiction’, in The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable, ed. by Andrew Leak and George Paizis (New York: MacMillan, 2000), pp.67-82. Dauzat, Pierre-Emmanuel, ‘Du Juif errant aux Errata’, in Steiner. Cahiers de l’Herne, ed. by Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2003), pp.9-19. Eagleton, Terry, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fisch, Spivak, Z iz ek and others (London, New York: Verso, 2003). Gottlieb, Anthony, ‘Idea Man. Review of Errata: An Examined Life, by George Steiner’, New York Times Review of Books, 12 April 1998, p.18. Idel, Moshe, ‘George Steiner: un prophète de l’abstraction’, in Steiner. Cahiers de l’Herne, ed. by Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2003), pp.122-143. Jaggi, Maya, ‘George and his Dragons’, Guardian, 17 March 2001, p.10. Philonenko, Alexis, ‘George Steiner comme ‘‘survivant’’’, foreword to George Steiner, Le Sens du Sens (Paris: Vrin, 1988), pp.123-145. Sagir, Assaf, ‘George Steiner’s Jewish Problem’, Azure (2003), pp.130-154. Wyschogrod, Edith, ‘The Mind of a Critical Moralist: Steiner as Jew’, in Reading George Steiner, ed. by Nathan A. Scott Jr. and Ronald A. Sharp (Baltimore, London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp.151-179.
Other references Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox. An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967). Blanchot, Maurice, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955).
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De Man, Paul, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). De Medeiros, Paulo, ‘To Double Witness Bound: Derrida, Death, and the Haunting of Writing’, in Literatura e Pluralidade Cultural, ed. by Isabel Allegro de Magalhães/João Barrento/Silvina Rodrigues Lopes/Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 1999). Derrida, Jacques, ‘Circonfession’, in Jacques Derrida, ed. by Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991). Paz, Octavio, O Desconhecido de Si Mesmo (Lisbon: Vega, 1992) Freud, Sigmund, ‘Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse’, Imago, 5 (1917), pp.1-7. Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘God and Philosophy’, in The Levinas Reader, ed. by Séan Hand (Oxford, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Pessoa, Fernando, The Book of Disquietude, trans. and introd. by Richard Zenith (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited in association with The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1989). Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative III, trans. by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). ——, ‘The Creativity of Language’, in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. by Mário J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). Robbins, Jill, ‘Circumcising Confession: Derrida, Autobiography, Judaism’, in Diacritics, 25 (4) (1995), pp.20-38. Spender, Stephen, ‘Confessions and Autobiography’, in Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. by James Olney (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980). Steiner, Wendy, The Scandal of Pleasure. Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
PART III Images of the Self Across the Arts
Reading W. G. Sebald with Alberto Giacometti Timothy Mathews (University College London) This is a paper about suffering, but also about joy, about the collapse of human relations but also the re-building of them. It is about visual art and writing, in particular the sculpture of Giacometti and the writing of W. G. Sebald and its variety of genres. Giacometti insists that the development of his style of sculpture, his distinctive tall and emaciated figures, arises from the formal problems of visual representation in general. He writes of his unresolved problems in representing the human form; of the failure of perspective and optics to account for vision; to account for seeing a person and his or her form in time and in space; for the relation of memory to the present moment. Others however will see Giacometti’s work in terms of its interpretable content: a comment on modernity; a comment on the relation of art to the unconscious; a comment on suffering and torture, including the Holocaust. Sebald’s The Emigrants includes a story about an artist, and the content of that artist’s work is filtered indefinitely through the forms of Sebald’s own writing. This combines autobiography, fiction, history, documentation both real and invented, photography… Gradually the intimate passages from the art of this fictional artist to his childhood experience of exile and persecution, to the real, historical suffering of the generation he represents, emerge through Sebald’s narrative filters: those of the generations, of fiction and history, history and memory, writer and reader. Both suffering and the ability to testify to it seem to depend on the inability to locate them. This paper explores ways of understanding without appropriating, translating without silencing, remembering through loss.
Where is Alberto Giacometti? The question seems to arise materially from an engagement with his art and the invitations it seems to extend. Much of his art is a life-long exploration of visual representation itself, of the attempt to visualize objects in a two or three-dimensional space; to place people in space. But that placing is elusive, and the places seem to dissolve, making Giacometti’s idiom at once unique and beyond reach, perhaps even untouchable – this creator of such tactile-looking pieces. One way of accepting this invitation to engage with an art that wonders how anything can be engaged with is to ask what it can tell us about the art of others. In this essay, I want to see what the art of Sebald can tell me about the art of Giacometti. How does Sebald’s The Emigrants, first published in 1993 under its original title Die Ausgewanderten, ever become a book about pain, about trauma, about almost unbearable loss, and the inhumanity of the Holocaust? How has Sebald’s writing become appropriate to that? For those still unfamiliar with Sebald’s by now widely admired writing, perhaps the reviews it has attracted
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would not suggest that it had such a content. Sebald was born in 1944 and died in 2001 in a car accident caused by suffering a heat attack while driving with his daughter. Here are some quotations from reviews that I have gleaned from the covers of the various editions of his books in English: - It’s like nothing I’ve ever read […]. A book of excruciating sobriety and warmth and a magical concreteness of observation […]. I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization. I know of few books written in our time but this is one which attains the sublime. Susan Sontag - The delicate accumulation of vanishing details of four slowly diminishing lives hints at the vast amount of life that has been irrevocably lost and forgotten. This is one of those books that is so good its sadness is paradoxically enlivening against all the odds. A.S. Byatt - The writing seems long distilled, intensely pre-meditated and yet utterly fresh. It has an unaffected earnestness, a loner’s earnestness. Karl Miller
And some more other comments, some more journalistic still: - Full of moving things and happenings. One of the most important writers of our time. - Strange, mesmeric, sublimely beautiful. - So convincing; spellbindingly accomplished; a work of art. - Sebald writes about how grand events echo in the lives of individuals, and of the corrosive effects of time and memory. - Childhood, displacement, loss nostalgia and, above all, fear – the fear of history, of event, of human cruelty, of the pain of recollection – find their deepest and most brutal expression here. His art is a form of justice – there can be no higher aim.
Apart from the last one, perhaps, what strikes me about these remarks is in how appropriate they are, without necessarily engaging with anything particular or substantial about Sebald’s writing. They seem appropriate to the way Sebald himself systematically avoids his own subject matter, refutes the idea that his subject can be said. One of the stories of The Emigrants begins with the narrator, easily assumed to be Sebald’s first-person autobiographical self, renting a house with his wife at the bottom of someone’s garden near Norwich. That landlord’s history, it emerges, has been affected profoundly but in unspoken
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ways by European history.1 The next one, on the other hand, starts with the narrator telling his readers about the suicide of his former school teacher at the age of seventy. But the tone has hardly changed, from the beginning of one story to the next. In this second story, the tone is still that of a conversational, though moving, report of a passing. Sebald seems to confirm this by quoting a notice from the supposed local press, ‘Grief at the Loss of Popular Teacher.’ Those bits of review I quoted just now capture something of how the subject of Sebald’s writings is never there, pushed aside and away in the telling. And yet neither does this seem to me inspired by a post-modernist adoration of the absence of centre and the abdication of narrative dominion. For the self-dispersing subject of this writing, all the more there for its ambivalently emergent and decaying status, is pain. In another book, Austerlitz, first published in 2001, Sebald’s intermittent interlocutor talks of the marks of pain which, as he said he well knew, trace countless fine lines through history. In his studies of railway architecture, he said when we were sitting in the Glove Market later that afternoon, tired from our wandering through the city, he could never quite shake off thoughts of the agony of leave-taking and the fear of foreign places, although such ideas were not part of architectural history proper. Yet, he said, it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity. The construction of fortifications, for instance… 2
For Benjamin, to think history as a dialectical materialist is to ‘blast open the continuum of history.’ The past is cancelled, not only in the sense of preserved, but also forgotten.3 By emphazising those ideas of cancellation and forgetting in Hegel’s idea of the Aufhebung, by saying that ideas are conceived on the basis of oblivion, Benjamin opens a space for a language of the trace and of gesture. In Sebald, it seems that this continuum consists in the fortifications he evokes through the voice of Austerlitz, and that once these are made to disappear, an authentic material history of pain emerges. If not liberation from it, Sebald offers some witness to that pain, but not one that fortifies against it. Like Giacometti’s, Sebald’s witness to pain is made in the inability to place it, or to fix its time; either the time of the witness or the time of pain. The time of witness and the time of pain are each made in accumulation, and in Sebald each seems to leave to other untouched. As some of those snippets of review
1 W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. by Michael Hulse (London: The Harvill Press Rantom House, 1997). 2 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. by Andrea Bell (London: Penguin, 2002), pp.16-17. 3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. and int. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1970), p.254.
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suggest, this ability of Sebald’s writing to give voice to what has been silenced and placed beyond our reach is also the source of its joy, its artistry, and its sublimeness. What I think this amounts to is witness that lacks mediation; or a witness without a position from which to witness. Or witness swamped and silenced by the variety of its mediations. Both the lack of mediation and mediation itself can be the source of alienation or pain. The loss of place is both thematic and structural in Sebald’s meditations, which take the form of digression, documentation, association, conversation, narrating, and reminiscing. Exile and grief on the one hand; a determined indeterminacy of narrative point of view on the other. The writing contains both leitmotifs of passing and formal narrative constructions of it. Passing makes the voices of grief, makes the shapes and patterns of its own silencing; and this also makes for that sense of a desperate, and desperately fragile desire to live which characterizes Sebald’s writing. One such leitmotif is a sense of aimlessness and futility that overcomes Sebald’s narrators from time to time. This aimlessness drifts into all the narrators’ conversations and his perceptions, covering them over with a singular textual dust all their own. I am going to concentrate on one of the stories of The Emigrants, which takes its name from its character, Max Ferber. And for the moment, I am going to call the narrator Sebald, not because narrator and author are simply equivalent, but because in my imagination Sebald’s voice is implacably consumed in its various narrative figurations; that is how it lives. So in this story called ‘Max Ferber,’ Sebald recounts arriving as a young student in Manchester. Rather than the Manchester of the late 1980s and 90s, renewed by digital and service industries, this is the Manchester of the 60s, with its decaying heavy industry and rampant unemployment; and Sebald arrives in the early morning at a time when the city is particularly inactive and immobile. This is reflected in the stagnant atmosphere of the hotel he stays in: ‘The day of my arrival at the Arosa like most of the days, weeks and months to come, was a time of remarkable silence and emptiness,’ he writes.4 This emptiness extends to the objects around him, both familiar and unfamiliar. Neither familiarity nor unfamiliarity either produces or attenuates this sensation of vacuum. This is neither nausea nor pleasurable weightlessness; it makes a series of spaces each of which is unique, each is displaced. Each object or person we find there threatened with dropping entirely from worth and value; and yet in each of these spaces renewal and re-birth might at least be imagined. One such displaced object is the Teas-maid, which is an alarm clock and tea-making machine combined, a piece of home technology popular in the 60s, and which the owner of the Arosa Hotel provides Sebald with as a token of her
4 Sebald, The Emigrants, p.153.
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welcome. Those of us who will remember the object will react differently to seeing the photo of it in Sebald’s text to those who have never heard of it or seen it before. The two lots of people may well find much to discuss; or both may be bored and uninvolved; but either way, this will not produce a shared experience, it will be an experience of the unshared. Sebald includes a photo of it, a black and white one that has a graininess and general styling which impregnates it with a context, a palpable context that still resists definition. This comes over with a simplicity that is not the same as immediacy. For the photo itself, like all others in The Emigrants and all Sebald’s other books, is unattributed. The status or the authenticity of the photo, as well as of all the photos Sebald uses, is in doubt. Nor does Sebald say how he has come about it. Did he take it himself? The narratives in The Emigrants do not make any direct mention of his travelling with a camera. Austerlitz tells us about his life with one, but that voice is a much later one for Sebald. Who might have given him this photo of the Teas-maid then? And why? Where did he get this photo? In Sebald’s text, the Teas-maid is suspended in space, placing it outside chronological time. The associations it carries lack a platform on which they might be brought together or made into a coherent memory. This is emphasized again by the fact that Sebald talks of the Teas-maid from the point of view a young German lecturer just arrived in England in the 1960s, whereas in fact he is writing in the 90s. His perspective is now the one of having lived in Britain and acclimatized himself to its culture, to the point where the unfamiliar is no longer in contrast with the known but part of it. And Sebald seems to make all this self-evident; a matter of experience, rather than theory. The theory of deferral simply reflects the experience of living with forgetting. Here is what Sebald writes about the Teas-maid: I did not come to till almost half past three [in the afternoon], when Mrs Irlam knocked at my door. Apparently by way of a special welcome, she brought me, on a silver tray, an electric appliance of a kind I had never seen before. She explained it was called a teas-maid, and was both an alarm clock and a tea-making machine. When I made tea and the steam rose from it, the shiny steel contraption on its ivory-coloured metal base looked like a miniature power plant, and the dial of the clock, as I soon found as dusk fell, glowed a phosphorescent lime green that I was familiar with from childhood and which I had always felt afforded me an unaccountable protection at night. That may be why it has often seemed, when I have thought back to those early days in Manchester, as if the tea maker in my room brought to me by Mrs Irlam, by Gracie – you must call me Gracie, she said – as if it was that weird and serviceable gadget, with its nocturnal glow, its muted morning bubbling, and its mere presence by day, that kept me holding on to life at a time when I felt a deep sense of isolation in which I might well have become completely submerged.5 5 Sebald, The Emigrants, pp.154-155.
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Oddly, the tea maker provides a source of security, when every effort to secure it in time and space trembles and disappears. Sebald is observing something that disappears in the observing. That seems to be the point of what he is trying to say. Emphasis emerges from aimlessness. The roving, perceiving and sensing eye seeks something to see and that might be told. Here, what is told is some ability to keep emotional collapse at bay. But that is also to acknowledge such a collapse. So this moment in the text is made of transitions. Perhaps it is like one of Winnicott’s psycho-analytical transitional objects.6 But it does not have the shape or contours of an object, it is a transition that is implacably temporal. Moreover, rather than a transition towards a place in society, this is a transition towards further collapse and loss. Memories push their way back into consciousness, but are engulfed and lost again there, and memory joins forgetting. Another example of that comes from Sebald’s comparison of the tea maker to a miniature power plant. This means that the tea maker is also a miniature of the decaying industrial landscape of Manchester into which Sebald has inserted himself, and which not only mirrors but causes his sense of imminent psychic drowning. The photos Sebald puts in the book, again unattributed, show this decay, but there are other photos of the heyday of industrial wealth in Manchester.7 But all the photos are styled in such a way as to suggest the passing of what it is they show, which is the great canals, warehouses and factory chimneys of heavy industry in Manchester in the 1950s and 60s. For Sebald here, to show the history of these edifices is to show their passing; for that is what can be seen of them. Sebald’s textual and visual polyphony does not resurrect them, the narrative point of view in the present predominates, however indeterminately, even if that point of view is one of decay. Sebald seems to have researched the edifices of Capitalist history in Manchester and describes that materially here in the text, but he has also textualized that history, developed a language for what the present continues to hide from view in the living experience of history. In Sebald’s writing, to be rooted in a historical moment is to reside in a residue of gestures that seems to fit like a skin, one which stretches to fit our sensations and perceptions. Perhaps we cannot even imagine having such a discursive coating to everything we do, so naturally does it voice our responses, and so seamlessly does it weave the past as an image of the present. In such a way, Sebald shows both the loss of self and the acquisition of a style.
6 See D. W. Winnicott, Between Reality and Fantasy: Transitional Objects and Phenomena, ed. by Simon A. Grolnick and Leonard Barkin (New York: Aronson, 1978). 7 Sebald, The Emigrants, pp.159-168.
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This style arises not so much from an unconscious made of repression, but more from an ambient, living unconscious. The unconscious in Sebald’s writing is not somewhere else, as a certain strand in Freud’s thought suggests; it is not a different stage as he calls it in The Interpretation of Dreams, on which the hidden but crucial dramas of the mind are played out, inaccessible to all but the psychoanalytical method.8 Here, the unconscious is more like the sum of perceptions, articulations, and gestures that make up what we know and forget. Forgetting combines with various kinds of exile and grief and takes over Sebald’s idiom as a whole, particularly in The Emigrants. But how does it interact with the voices of others, at least the others Sebald shows us in the book? If Sebald’s state of mind is stylized through his experience of industrial decay in 60s Manchester, the elements of this stylized decay also come together in the form of an event, albeit one that is tenuously placed in space and time. This dissolving event is Sebald’s meeting with the painter he names Max Ferber. He introduces this event by mentioning another of his desperate meanderings in Manchester, and the reader might wonder where any new beginning, or the emphasis required for an event, is going to come from. Sebald says it was a bright day, but so silent that he reports, or invents hearing sighs coming out of the Great Northern Railway Company depot, a railway long since gone at the time Sebald is struggling with this narrative. Slowly in this slow paced writing, the indeterminacy of his despair is gathering expressiveness, emphasis, the sense of a difference between something being there and not being there. But what? Walking by disused gasworks and a slaughterhouse, he begins to think of Gothic castles with parapets and battlements, and then for no reason of Nüremberg Lebkuchen, biscuits from Nüremberg, and he is unable to get the name of that city out of his mind where the huge Nazi rallies were held and then the war crimes trails after the war. A reason begins to emerge after all for Sebald’s desolation, the Holocaust, not a reason that is hard to find for anyone to be overcome by despair. And yet Sebald is not a witness, he was born in 1944 and he was not there. But nonetheless a reason for his despair has emerged, its self-evidence making it all the more pervasive and resistant to category or place. The chance discovery of Max Ferber’s studio, and the meeting with Ferber himself, are now a further transitional object; perhaps this time Sebald will be able to move from pain
8 Sebald, The Emigrants, pp.232-233.
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to saying his pain. But if so, he will do it by inventing another voice, still another voice through which to do it.9 By the time Sebald meets Ferber in this narrative, Ferber has given up travelling and hardly ever leaves his studio. In that respect, Ferber and Sebald in the story are very different. Nonetheless, Ferber shares many of the characteristics of Sebald, including a passion for research into the otherwise irretrievable moments monuments of history. And also a passion for photography as part of that, a way for each one of them to identify a moment in its transience. Gradually, as so frequently elsewhere in Sebald’s writing, the voice of the narrative is taken over from Sebald himself by another voice, and here it passes from Sebald to Ferber. Sebald is not so much in dialogue with Ferber, but his voice is taken over by Ferber’s, and that is emphasized by Sebald’s identification with Ferber, increasingly apparent but unspoken in the text; never more so than in its final pages, where Sebald shows himself in another hotel room, this time in the Manchester Midland Hotel much admired by Ferber, and writes of everything but his devastation at his friend’s dying, the dying of his friendship, and his own dying within that.10 The voice of Sebald is dissipated in the process of building up this identification in the overlapping narratives of the text. So now the text we read is made in the oblivion of Sebald’s own voice, even though the text has been written and is being offered to us by Sebald himself, the writer. A writer discovering voice by inventing ways of representing his own loss. So if Sebald, born in 1944, is not to be a witness to the Holocaust, will Ferber be? Rather than a voice for that emerging, it is the problems of voice and voicing that continue to engulf all the speakers, writers and readers involved in making this book. Even though Ferber is older than Sebald, he is nonetheless still a boy or a teenager in the late 20s and 30s, we are told, and so his reminiscences are filtered through his later adult interpretation of himself as a boy reading the behaviour of his parents. And there is more. Ferber’s nar9 Sebald, The Emigrants, pp.158-160. I am enormously grateful to Marion Gymnich for pointing out to me a feature of this passage redolent of Sebald’s general way of indicating the unconscious at work in daily life by including layers of association in his text of which he indicates no awareness nor seems to invite any. Sebald at this point is walking past the former Ordsall Slaughterhouse in Manchester, whose Gothic look is in fact reminiscent of the picture on a tin of Nüremberg Lebkuchen, although this remains unstated. Moreover, the makers of the Lebkuchen are Häberlein & Metzger, the latter name being also the word for butcher, which takes us back to the slaughterhouse, not only the one in Manchester but those of the concentration camps as well. So the chance, ‘absurd’ rising of this idea to the surface of Sebald’s mind is not absurd at all, in the sense of lacking an explanation; and by formal analogy with this feigned and maintained unawareness of the workings of his own text, or possibly unfeigned, Sebald shows forgetting living and breathing in everyday thought. 10 Sebald, The Emigrants, pp.232-233.
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rative voice takes over, at various points at least, from Sebald’s own, as I say. But the new voice in the text keeps the style of the previous one. Ferber talks in the style that Sebald writes in. The new voice does not unequivocally take over the previous one but is then also taken over by it. The difference between here and there, mine and yours is blurred, it decomposes just as Sebald and us with him might have thought that a new departure or revelation was about to emerge. The handing over of the narrative voice combines with another loss of voice. This transition of one voice to another begins to produce an acute sense of grief, the reason for which is clear to the extent that a voice has been lost. But the cause of this grief is still obscure, though also evident simply by mentioning the Holocaust. But that self-evidence is still out of reach to Ferber and Sebald. Though a structure has been found to show grief within this handing over of voices, grief is still without its cause and its object. To those that were not there, it is the form of Sebald’s fiction that shows grief emanating from the Holocaust, not content. Or not yet. That is the witness Sebald offers. So when he speaks in the text, Ferber’s voice gradually substitutes itself for Sebald’s own. But nonetheless, Sebald’s voice also returns in the text, and though each is inflected by the other, the two mirror each other as well. In addition to their shared passions that I mentioned before, they also share the habit of leaving gaps in what they say. Their discourse is made up of silences as much as affirmations, and this happens sometimes for reasons that are said and sometimes for reasons that are not. In the same way that Sebald addresses his reader, Ferber in the text tells Sebald of things he himself also only now partially knows, or remembers, or can bear to think of. Here is one of the things he tells Sebald. I still did my homework under Mother’s supervision; we still went to Schliersee for the skiing winter and to Oberstdorf or the Walsertal for our summer holidays; and of those things we could not speak we simply said nothing. Thus, for instance, all my family and relatives remained largely silent about the reasons why my grandmother Lily Lanzberg took her own life; somehow they seemed to have agreed that towards the end she was no longer quite in her right mind.11
The philosophy of Wittgenstein, alluded to here and for which Sebald expresses his fascination more explicitly in the long novel Austerlitz, combines with the psychoanalytical theory of repression, particularly the repression of trauma. The unspeakable cannot be spoken of; that is, the inhumanity we see or the pain we suffer. And neither can the passing of that into the oblivion of which the present moment consists, in all its indeterminacy. Out of that non-speaking,
11 Sebald, The Emigrants, p.183.
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a language emerges nonetheless, gestural and spontananeous: it seems natural not to discuss grandmother Lanzberg’s suicide, just as natural as mother supervising my homework, or walking quietly with my father in the Alps. But this is a kind of spontaneity that is also symptomatic. We are left to find for ourselves reasons why an elderly Jewish woman of whom we will hear nothing further would take her own life in the early 1930s, to piece that together by trying to remember what we have been told about the Jewish ghettos of Europe, for example, as well as the Jewish quarter of Manchester, which Sebald tells us not longer existed at the time of his arrival there in the 60s. Or the photo Sebald says that Ferber has given him, but which in fact he must have found for himself, of the Nazi’s burning books on the ‘Kristallnacht.’12 And as we do that, we might hear again the voices we ourselves have grown up with and grown up getting used to losing. Once again, the unconscious is not somewhere else, but here. Through evoking these voices formally and structurally, and through the various temporal digressions of the narrative, Sebald takes a step closer in the dark to indicating the traces of the overpowering sense of self-decay that has characterized his language and his behaviour from the start. And from there, a further step also towards showing not what an individual might remember of the Holocaust, but that we all both remember and forget, that we forget in the remembering. As Edgar Allan Poe and Jacques Lacan together remind us, what is the most evident about what we look for and about how we see is exactly what remains invisible to us.13 The studio Sebald imagines for his imaginary double, for Ferber, and that he imagines discovering in the Manchester deserts, bears an uncanny resemblance to the studio of Giacometti. Like Ferber, Giacometti did not travel widely and only ever had the one studio, his own studio in Paris which he occupied until his death in 1966. Like Ferber, he is attached to the signs of detritus, anything that can remind him brutally but also sensuously and educationally of the inevitable failure of his art. Dust is a central and overpowering feature in the psychic life of both Ferber and Giacometti, and of their studios.14 Here are some of Sebald’s observations about Ferber’s studio, comments which are written by imagining the memory of a conversation. Once again, this is writing in which one voice passes to another, its double, its substitution. This is what he writes:
12 Sebald, The Emigrants, p.184. 13 See Jacques Lacan’s reading of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ (‘La Lettre volée’), in Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966). 14 See, for example, Jean Genet’s descriptions of Giacometti’s studio in Jean Genet, ‘L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti’, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1952).
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The entire furniture was advancing, millimetre by millimetre, upon the central space where Ferber had set up his easel in the grey light that entered through a high northfacing window layered with the dust of decades. Since he applied the paint thickly, and then repeatedly scratched it off the canvas as his work proceeded, the floor was covered with a largely hardened and encrusted deposit of droppings, mixed with coal dust, several centimetres thick and thinning out towards the edges, in places resembling the flow of lava. This, said, Ferber, was the true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure. It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, and that nothing further should be added but the debris added by painting and the dust which continually fell and which, as he was coming to realise, he loved more than anything else in the world. […] The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him. He might reject as many as forty variants, or smudge them back into the paper and overdraw new attempts upon them; and if he then decided that the portrait was done, not so much because he was convinced that it was finished as through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper.15
This is the passage of thoughts and perceptions that makes up Sebald’s initial immersion in this text with his interlocutor and alter ego, his friend in the making, even his reader in the imagining. It starts off with describing dust, which is the last stages of the falling apart of things. But the starting point also consists in the opposite of that, which is some lava-like build-up and solidification; quickly Sebald also introduces a progressive squeezing out over time, and the development of attachments, any place for Ferber to paint, to place his work, perhaps even to understand it. From that hybrid starting-point, the passage finds its way to the eruption of these ancestral faces and figures. This is an eruption which is itself covered in ashes and dust, the visible signs of its own decay, and yet here decay is also the stuff of revelation. Might I think of Giacometti’s figures in this way? Especially those that develop in his distinctive style from the late 1940s onwards? Interestingly Sartre in both his essays on Giacometti credits him with an anthropological power to inaugurate a new mythology, both to show and to start the beginning of culture, to develop totems and icons that represent a situation, allow it to be assumed and controlled. But like Ferber’s, Giacometti’s figures do not emerge from a secure place, but a complex one whose elements will not coalesce. Here is an especially stark piece, Tête sur tige of 1947. The date engulfs the piece in its historical moment, the time when the horrors of the Nazi camps
15 Sebald, The Emigrants, pp.161-162.
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were still coming to light, especially in France where Giacometti lived. But this is a piece that bears witness without being there; it is a witness from the time and the space of those who were not there and never will have been. For in any case seeing everything is not given to us, whether from close up or afar. Perspective seeks to bring the world under the dominion of the visible. Giacometti’s piece and others from the period show the history of perspective and also its collapse. Representation of the cube as well as the sphere symbolize the power of perspective to place objects in space and in that way to know them. But here only one of the four uprights of a cube is left. The cube has all but disappeared that might otherwise have placed this head in time and space, show the suffering it has endured, reveal the body it has lost. The metal impaling rod kills the past while making our understanding of it; the present we can only see, the only present we can see. We see what we see and not what we cannot. Giacometti will invent different ways of showing the human form rooted in the material of its seeing, of seeing and being seen, but neither the time nor the place of the witness can be made whole. His forms allow us to imagine and witness a new beginning, without making what is witnessed the graven image of the present. Unlike Giacometti’s works, Ferber’s paintings do not exist and cannot be seen, only read, visualized through that mediation, but this is also a substitution of the painting by the text. We imagine the painting from the situation of not being able to see it. Of course Giacometti’s art can be seen. But it is made nonetheless of the same profound doubt about place, the ability of the artist to place himself in relation to the people he represents in his two-dimensional or three-dimensional art. This is a doubt about the capacity of visual representation to place objects and especially people in space, a space where we can locate them and know them. In perspective, things at a distance seem small, and the mind makes optical adjustments to see that smallness in terms of a real size, in terms of what we can spatially assume about the objects and people there in different places from our own. But for Giacometti, if we see things at a distance as small, that is because from where we see them, they are small. It is that quasi-literal smallness that forms the basis of his own re-investigation of the possibility of realism, the realism of showing things as he sees them. But this is only another way of saying, in fact of confirming, that what we see substitutes itself for what we cannot see and cannot know. In his recent book Realist Vision, Peter Brooks talks of scale model, the miniature, the model in general, and suggests that from realist writing to the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss and to Freud’s psychoanalysis, the miniature is a form through which to master the world, to understand it, perhaps become free
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of it.16 These miniatures of Giacometti, on the other hand, form the basis of a different kind of realism, one that shows us that art does not capture or master. For Lévi-Srauss the myth-maker is able to use the miniature as a practice through which to come to grips with his or her culture, in an almost palpable and tactile way, certainly with the approach and the sensation of handiwork, and by contrast to the conceptualized, abstracted approach of the applied scientist as well as the industrialist. But Giacometti’s most tactile of sculptures and his immersion in the problems of scale confronts him with what cannot be touched. The figures in Giacometti’s Quatre figurines sur base from 1950 are small not as a result of the visualization of distance, they are neither small nor large, neither clearly here nor there, neither definitively with us nor lost to us. Nor both. Giacometti does not offer us a celebration of these various possibilities but a witness to each one taking the place of the others and substituting itself for it. A witness to the dominion of the point of view, but at the same time a resistance to its complacency. Through his representation of figures, Giacometti discovers a space for them which has no place, and which in that way testifies to his failure to represent them or to account for them, and to a special kind of grief at the loss which that entails. But it also testifies to the capacity to think what is beyond the thinking and the knowing; and to think without appropriating or colonizing. Sebald finds a way of discussing the miniature as well, and I want to conclude with that. He finds a way of discussing the miniature through his elusive mirror image, our friend the painter Max Ferber, whose first name is in fact also the nickname of Sebald himself in real life. Sebald had already alluded to the miniature by comparing the teasmade to a power plant in Manchester. But on this occasion, Max Ferber is taking pain killers that produce a combination of dream and hallucination, and in which he cannot remember when he was awake and when asleep. An indeterminate psychic space, then, made up of elements that are incommensurate with each other, but which self-evidently merge nonetheless. In amongst those states, Max’s own position as an artist is further overrun by that of his father who, we are told, was an art dealer before being killed with his wife and relatives by the Nazis. And from within that space of a lost place for himself and his art, our Max who is indeterminately Max Sebald or Max Ferber sees a Jew called Frohmann. Frohmann is carrying a miniature model he has made of the Temple of Solomon: and he was now travelling from ghetto to ghetto exhibiting the model. Just look, said Frohmann: you can see every crenelation on the towers, every curtain, every threshold,
16 Peter Brooks, Realist Vision 1-2 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2005).
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every sacred vessel. And I, said Ferber, bent down over the diminutive temple and realized, for the first time in my life, what a true work of art looks like.17
But we, the reader, do not. No photograph here, whatever its status. This is a miniature made of invention, but also historical research. But this research survives here in the form of a fictional miniature. That is the invitation it extends to us: to imagine what we cannot know, to engage with what is unknown or lost to us by allowing it to remain unknown, even in the witnessing of it. To attempt to remember the loss of the Jews under Hitler, the loss of life and culture daily renewed, is inevitably to contribute to that loss, to absorb it in the point of view of the present, even though the present is also an unstable place. But this is also a way of showing not so much the theory as the realism of the point of view, which is that what it seeks to show and is made lost in the showing. In that way Max Ferber and Max Sebald together, each living in the loss of the other, allow those ancestral sighs of transience to be heard. That is the art that Giacometti also proposes: an unresolved plurality, a plurality of elements that do not come together, made of motion and immobility, the unseen in the seen, anthropological and present time, revelation in oblivion. Perhaps Giacometti’s Chariot, also of 1950, suggests that the art of Sebald and Giacometti together suggest community without appropriation, and decay with creativity, grief with life.
17 Sebald, The Emigrants, p.176.
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Bibliography Benjamin, Walter, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. and int. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1970), p.254. Originally Schriften (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955). Brooks, Peter, Realist Vision, 2 vols (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2005). Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955-1974). Originally Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1944-52), II/III. Sebald, W. G., The Emigrants, trans. by Michael Hulse (London: The Harvill Press Random House, 1997). Originally Die Ausgewanderten (Frankfurt a. M.: Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co. Verlag KG, 1993). ——, Austerlitz, trans. by Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2002). Originally Austerlitz (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2001). Winnicott, D. W., Between Reality and Fantasy: Transitional Objects and Phenomena, ed. by Simon A. Grolnick and Leonard Barkin (New York: Aronson, 1978).
The Impossible Self-Portrait Paula Morão (University of Lisbon) In the literary tradition, as well as in painting, writers and artists have used all kinds of techniques to deal with the problems of self-portrait. Some follow the examples set by ancient tradition, others seek their references in fellow artists close to them, others still try to find new and original paths. But the main question remains: in a self-portrait, what is the role played by the real person? What strategies do artists and writers use to either come closer to what they think is true, or to move away from that, building fictional selves? This paper addresses these problems by looking at both pictures and some of Fernando Pessoa’s poems as case studies of what we usually call self-portraits.
1. A theoretical outline In the attempt to fight against the inexorable flowing of time that devours everything, everyone, and eventually even all memory, the I (self) finds itself in a difficult position. In thinking of portrait and self-portrait, it is the visual arts that primarily come to mind, but in fact the tradition of this kind of representation can be seen far back in the early works of literature as well; therefore, the problems raised in literature are similar to those we find in the visual arts. In painting, film, photography, and the performative arts of our time, it is not difficult to find examples of self-study by artists. This type of self-representation is governed by a number of practices already associated with the search for the ‘true’ self. In searching for its deep self and in facing the limits and the possibilities of that kind of self-representation, the I employs strategies such as contemplation and meditation, among others. While this may be an ancient problem, it has been in the more recent times that scholars have been particularly interested by it, beginning with the very important role that individualism in European Romanticism played for studies of self-representation. Against this backdrop, certain key elements of the modern and contemporary period surface as being of special importance. The first one is the relevance of the research and writings on consciousness and the unconscious by Freud and other authors in the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, whose theories aim at the understanding of the inner world. As such, it is impossible today to work in the field of selfrepresentation without possessing a working knowledge of the recent studies in neurosciences, psychology, and psychoanalysis. Another factor we must bear in mind is the eminently modern awareness that the unity of the self is precarious, if not impossible. We can see an example of this in the famous
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passage of the letter of Rimbaud to Georges Izambard, known as the ‘lettre du voyant’ (13 May 1871):1 [J]e veux être po te, et je travaille à me rendre Voyant: […] Il s’agit d’arriver à l’inconnu par le dér glement de tous les sens. Les souffrances sont énormes, mais il faut être fort, être né po te, et je me suis reconnu po te. Ce n’est pas du tout ma faute. C’est faux de dire: Je pense: on devrait dire: On me pense. – Pardon du jeu de mots.Je est un autre. Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon, et nargue aux inconscients, qui ergotent sur ce qu’ils ignorent tout à fait!
Rimbaud is tackling here some of the issues we will come back to further in this essay. Put into context, this passage lays bare the hard work that the I experiences in conquering his double status as a poet and a visionary, and raises the question of the significance of the first-person pronoun: it is not I that thinks within me, but an undetermined ‘On’ (someone: ‘On me pense’) from whom the I within me thinks, which is why Je est un autre. This arrangement highlights the distressing gap between the first and the third person that linguists such as Émile Benveniste will later come to study.2 This fragment of Rimbaud’s letter (as well as all of his work), and even his precocious disappearance as a poet, is exemplary of a certain modern flare for looking in the mirror and finding excessive and even abysmal ways in which to represent itself. Moreover, this letter clearly shows the I trying to create a distance and even dissociating from itself – seeing the self as an other. This is something very common in everyday life, even if we do not think about it: every day we face ourselves in the mirror, sometimes not recognizing what looks back at us; or, when walking on the street, we often see ourselves reflected in the shopwindows and the same sense of estrangement may occur. It is also common to talk to ourselves as if addressing a second person, a you. In these everyday life situations we are on the verge of dissociation from that self we take for granted as a unified I. Added to this is the importance in Western societies of some very old practices which carry with them a moralizing intent, raising the issue of mortality as a condition as well as a destiny of mankind. I refer not only to some of the myths and symbols I will describe further on, but also to the ritualized prescription for some forms of self-analysis in the Catholic tradition (which are 1 Arthur Rimbaud, in ‘Rimbaud à Georges Izambard, Charleville, [13] mai 1871’, Oeuvres complètes, édition établie, présentée et annotée par Antoine Adam, Collection Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp.248-249. 2 Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale –1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); ‘Structure des relations de personne dans le verbe’ (1946), ‘La nature des pronoms’ (1956), ‘De la subjectivité dans le langage’ (1958); pp.225-236, pp.251-257, pp.258-266.
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especially relevant in countries like Portugal). The preparation for confession, which itself is rigorously codified, draws on very ancient techniques: previous self-examination, confession itself, contrition (affirming the purpose of repentance), and act of fulfilling the penitence prescribed by the priest. Traditionally, the soul-searching that precedes confession is guided by a thorough line of questioning. The person doing the confession was required to reflect on the Ten Commandments, church law, and even obligations to the state. This ritual, which is much simpler and much less dramatic nowadays, was for some centuries a very powerful weapon in establishing a number of moral and social rules and also in creating a feeling of guilt in quite a few generations of believers, mainly those who ignored the ancient roots of such practices. In fact, Augustine’s Confessions, Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ,3 or the books that provide guidance to the monastic communities are some of the great models that were giving shape to self-discipline and codes of conduct for a number of centuries in Western culture, mainly in Catholic countries. Some of the practices described earlier, such as soul-searching and meditation, approach the atmosphere of concentration and isolation required by many artists and writers as a conditio sine qua non of their work. In many cases they keep studios or work-spaces outside their homes. We find the same practices in those we generally call ‘spiritual people,’ ever since ancient hermits first cast away their earthly possessions and went away to the desert or to similarly depopulated places where they could not be bothered by common life and where they were free to contemplate the mysteries of man and the divine. In the quest for solitude there lies a condition for achieving individual perfection, as illustrated by St. Jerome, a bishop and the first translator of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin (c. 340-420), and who is commonly depicted at work in his study, accompanied by the lion he rescued when he was a hermit. We find this environment of spiritual contemplation in lay people as well; the inner self is sought after through solitude or by talking to oneself, sometimes using the reflective surface of water as a mirror, or using fire (most likely cigarette or cigar smoke in modern days) as a medium for meditation, thus melding with oneself away from real life and time. Then there are artists of a more peripatetic persuasion who are inspired by a good, ambling walk; the rhythm of leg action and the lack of a destination slow down their attention to the exterior world while maintaining automatic levels of connection to reality. 3 In preparing this text I used the following editions: St. Augustine, Confissões, bilingual ed., trans. by Arnaldo Espírito Santo, João Beato, and Maria Cristina Pimentel, int. by Manuel B. Costa Freitas (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2004); Thomas de Kempis, A Imitação de Cristo, trans. by M. F. Gonçalves de Azevedo (Lisbon: Estampa, 1991) (cf. The Imitation of Christ, e-text edition, translated into modern English from Latin, , 1994).
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We know that throughout history the image of artists, writers, and learned persons has often been associated with this type of meditation, and it is very easy to caricature. Contemplation, in fact, is characterized by many mental operations; aside from the apparent exclusion of the outside world I already referred to, I would also like to highlight the phenomenon of becoming a double of oneself. This can be taken much further than the rising of another I in the self, for it can go further on to the creation of something akin to a phantasmal4 soul, a twin-soul or a double, materializing as the super-ego. Essentially, all of these practices make clear something I believe is the centre of the self-representation process: the I is defined as an axis mundi, surpassing all of the splitting doubts about his own identity. This brings us to the myths of crucial importance in understanding self-representation. We must be very aware of their supra-historical and ancient origins in configuring the quest for the limits of human consciousness. Let us begin by recalling the myth of Oedipus, as it is told in Greek mythology:5 the Sphinx asks all the travellers passing by her, including Oedipus, a question concerning the identity of humankind. Oedipus believes his answer solves the riddle, but he does not realize he is also foretelling his own tragic destiny. In the myth of Narcissus, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (III, 339-510), the problem of identity is also central: Narcissus reduces the world to himself, seeing himself as the exclusive object of love, thus putting himself unknowingly at the edge of perdition. Some other myths are relevant to our subject: Sisyphus, who is the embodiment of the painful Eternal Return, and Medusa, the only mortal of the three Gorgon sisters, who is in turn medusa-ed by Perseus and paralyzed by her own image reflected in Athena’s mirror. These symbolic narratives reveal the enigma of self-knowledge and identity. The question evolves from Who is Man? to Who are you?, and finally to Who am I?, thus coming back, full-circle, to the first and universal quest of Man. There is a sort of palimpsest between the identity of the collective and of the individual that circulates repetitively in a specular fashion. The subject of Man is empiric and singular, but especially when pursued in an artistic or literary form; the quest for our ‘self’ illuminates the limits of subjectivity and of the inter-subjective exchange. In other words, the quest has a very fragile lining which connects the impulse for self-representation to what I would call the alo (other) representa4 The definition is to be read as: ‘a poetic/literary figment of the imagination; an illusion or apparition.’ Coming from Greek to Latin, it means, ‘to make visible’, or ‘to show.’ The New Oxford Dictionary, version 1.00., on-line edition (Oxford: University Press, 2005). 5 In the entry for ‘Oedipe’ of Pierre Grimal Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et latine, 7th edn (Paris: P.U.F., 1982), we can find a complete list of the Greek texts that reference Oedipus.
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tion. Self-portrait is thus defined spatially as the portrait of the self as another I that doubles its ‘self’ over to meet up with its ‘inner other.’ Other extensions of the problem surrounding self-representation, and the narcissistic affirmation of the self as an author, include name and signature.6 The choice of the name which an author uses to sign his work for publication is, in the Portuguese case, very interesting, for in general it implies a reductive choice from the full civil name. An example will help us understand this process: using the most common protocol for this purpose (suppression of the second given name and the mother’s patronymic), Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa signed his poetry and prose as Fernando Pessoa. But this author created a galaxy of other authors under whose names he wrote and published, thus forming the vast universe of his heteronyms with biographies and works of their own, all distinctive from and sometimes even in conflict with one another. If civil names identify and hold a person accountable for his/her actions, authorial names are instead ambiguous in nature and slide towards the mythical or symbolic. This is evident in the pen names that the Baroque authors used in their poetic academies. It is most interesting to consider those pseudonyms which became autonomous and superimposed on the civil name of an author. Such is the case of the Portuguese contemporary novelist Mário Cláudio, pseudonym for Rui Barbot. It is not uncommon to hear people addressing this author as ‘Dr. Mário Cláudio,’ but the academic degree belongs to Rui Barbot and not to Mário Cláudio. This example is symptomatic of the complex matter of naming and identifying an author in cases where the pseudo-name is a symbolic form of creation of the other whose borders are almost imperceptibly seamless to the empiric self. The pseudonym gains almost the same status and carries with it almost the same weight as another character in the book. It is a sort of second baptism or a christening that confirms an identity created by the author himself, who, by gaining power through distancing himself from his ‘self,’ chooses in the end how he wants to be called.7 Signature in works of art had a traditional weight that is changing today with the use of computers. For centuries, signature was a means to authenticate 6 Contrary to the anthroponymic systems of other European languages, the Portuguese one is complex: to the given name, which itself can be double, two patronymics are added – one from the mother and one from the father. For example, José Francisco [given name] Silva [maternal patronymic] Sousa [paternal patronymic]. This structure can get even more complex and has gone through several changes over the course of time. 7 I will have to leave the other aspects to the problem for another opportunity: the various manifestations of the I in private life, with its intimate distinctions like nicknames and hypocorisms/ pet names – of which it is necessary to free oneself or one will keep them the rest of one’s life – or the choice of an abbreviated name for use in public life (such as the signing of documents or academic publications, for example).
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the authorship of a document or a painting; today we have finger-prints, retinal scans, DNA, etc. However, the symbolic value of signature is still very important to identity papers as well as in manuscripts or the arts. Some examples will help us go a little further in understanding fully the importance of signature in well-known painters such as Van Gogh or Picasso; contemporary artists like Marcel Duchamp or Lucio Fontana inscribe their names as self-portraits, and Ben makes use of the canvas as a palimpsest where scriptural and pictorial come together.8 These artists bring back the ideographic value of calligraphy to visual representation that has been blurred by print and information technology, and so painting seems to recover the plastic relevance of hand-writing. Name and signature in self-representation bring us back to the symbolic and mythic grounds of authorship, for they are closely connected to the institution of the I as a Narcissus. Inscribing the name in a text or in a painting constitutes the self as an effigy, in the same manner in which it has been accomplished by visual techniques: the name is engraved in the written work as on the canvas, and so the author is represented by printed letters or by drawing. Like Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ this is the gesture of someone stating ecce auctor, thus inscribing and glorifying his name in the monumental face of the text. On the other hand, this gesture is in itself double-edged: the monumentalization of the I has an euphoric and narcissistic fa ade that says ‘look at me, it is I,’ but at the same time there is a nightly, Saturn-like side to this process, for the inscription fecit (made by…) also means an ending, a symbolic death. The finished work becomes a symbolic tomb, as Baroque artists knew very well: writing and sculpture or painting assure that time as a predatory force is beaten, or at least its devastating effects over mankind are diminished, and these inscriptions survive as the memory of what has been. As Horace wrote, ‘exegi monumentum aere perennis.’9 Time as an element of human nature, associated with mortality, is connected to the vanitas motif which comes from Biblical sources and is especially relevant in the written and visual arts of the seventeenth century.10 The awareness that life on earth is ephemeral becomes a moral principle which leaves an important trace in literature and the arts, along with melancholia and the related tempus fugit. We can add yet another extension to these motifs: 8 Cf. works reproduced in the catalog Moi! Autoportraits du XXe siècle, Pascal Bonafoux, dir. (Paris: Skira/Musée du Luxembourg, 2004); Marcel Duchamp, Autoportrait signature, 1964; Lucio Fontana, Io sono Fontana, 1966; Ben, Regardez-moi, cela suffit, 1962. 9 Carmina, III, 30 (‘I have built a monument more lasting than bronze’). 10 Special attention was paid to: Genesis, 2, 7; Ecclesiastes, 1 and 3, 20 ss. For further study of vanitas, see the following catalogue: Alain Tapié et alii, ed., Les Vanités dans la peinture au XVIIe siècle – Méditations sur la richesse, le dénuement et la redemption (Caen, Paris: Musée des Beaux-Arts/ Musée du Petit Palais, 1990).
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we have already seen that the compulsion to question oneself and to establish the evolutionary phases of the I is the main purpose of self-analysis. But the hyper-consciousness of the impossibility of self-knowledge and self-representation as a means of opposing death facilitated the production of all sorts of unfinished and fragmentary works, as well as others where the artist pictures himself/herself at work or using himself/herself as a model. Some examples in paintings by very different artists include Velazquez,11 who locates himself in the realistic context of the portrait of the royal family. In works by Rembrandt or De Chirico,12 we find the continuous search for the self in the context of tradition, as the artist makes himself a model in disguise or as a means of studying facial expression. Johannes Gumpp13 poses doubly as the painter studying and representing himself while painting his reflection in a mirror, but we know he is really outside of the canvas and behind our visual parameter. We find in Jacques Henri Lartigue14 a similar situation in which the photograph refers to the painting in his self-portrait, or in Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait where he is depicted painting, surrounded by references to the history of self-portrait and to the American identity of the artist. In the nineteenth century, Gustave Courbet15 perfectly illustrates the painter who over the years goes back to self-portrait, thus inscribing time’s effects on his face as an issue in his work. His monumental painting L’Atelier du peintre – Allégorie réele déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (359 x 598 cm, 1855) is a manifest of Realism, and pictures the artist not only surrounded by the instruments of his art, but also accompanied by real characters, all of whom form the ‘allégorie réele’ of the artist, of his art, and of the historical period he lived in.
11 Reproduction of the self-portraits of this artist can be found, for example, in 500 Self-Portraits, int. by Julian Bell (London, New York: Phaidon, 2000) (paperback: 2004). 12 Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot, eds., Rembrandt by Himself (London: The Hague National Portrait Gallery/Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, 1999). To learn more about De Chirico, see the catalogue referred to in footnote 8, as well as the following: Jole de Sanna, De Chirico – La metafisica del mediterraneo (Roma: Rizzoli, 1998). 13 Work cited in footnote 8. 14 Works by Lartigue and Rockwell can also be found in the catalogue cited in footnote 8. 15 Several of Courbet’s self-portraits, including L’Atelier du peintre, can be found in Sarah Faunce, Courbet (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993). See also: Jörg Zutter & Petra temDoesschate Chu, Courbet – Artiste et promoteur de son oeuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1998).
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2. The impossible self-portrait – Three poems by Fernando Pessoa We will now take a brief look at three of Pessoa’s (and his heteronyms’) poems where self-representation is at stake. Fernando Pessoa’s case is paradigmatic of the context of authors searching the essence of the I in their texts, and who have been forced in that process to face their image in the mirror, looking at phantasmal shadows, doubles, and alter egos that emerge from the reflection. His life as a citizen was one of a very quiet, polite nature and his professional occupations were banal. He worked as a translator and commercial correspondent in great contrast to his intellectual and inner life, which was full of events. It is as if his life as a poet was another kind of existence, in that fractured way that others before him had already explored, as did several of the Romantic and other nineteenth-century authors who experienced writing as a nightly and secret activity. But Pessoa is a singular case in the literature of his day, for very soon he started creating and developing the heteronyms as a galaxy of poets, building biographies and very individualized works for each of them. In the names of all those poets (Fernando Pessoa himself included), he wrote simultaneously ‘in every manner,’16 as if the mirror in which he gazed was composed of the shattered pieces of his impossible image, as though he were on a Sisyphus-like quest which was always restarting and forever unfinished. However, this is not the place to develop all these topics, which several critics have already abundantly approached. I just want to illustrate them with three poems – one by Pessoa himself and two by the heteronyms Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. Looking at these texts, we will notice some of the issues I mentioned previously, such as the perplexity of the I in facing his own image. The first poem is signed by Álvaro de Campos, the engineer, the cosmopolitan modernist who is very interested in technical progress but who is also very much aware of his inner life. Here is a poem written in 1913:17 1
I look at myself without perceiving I’m so addicted to feeling that I lose myself if I get distracted From the actual sensations I receive.
16 The phrase ‘in every manner’ (‘de todas as maneiras’) stands out in several of Pessoa’s texts, showing the importance the poet attributed to Phenomenalism (Sensacionismo). 17 I thank Richard Zenith, who kindly gave me permission for using his as-of-yet unpublished translation of the sonnet by Álvaro de Campos ‘Quando olho para mim não me percebo’ (‘I look at myself without perceiving’) for this article.
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The air I breathe, this liquor I drink, Belong to my very way of being. I never know how to get beyond These sensations of mine I don’t seek.
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Or have I ever ascertained If I really feel what I feel. Am I what I seem to myself – the same?
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Is the I I feel the I that’s real? Even with feelings I’m a bit of an atheist. I don’t even know if it’s I who feels.
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In the first line we come across self-analysis (‘I look at myself’) and a symbolic mirror where the I is perceived visually as a metaphor for introspection. But this process is bound to failure (‘without perceiving’), and so is rational selfknowledge. The sonnet develops several lines of thought in this direction; the next three lines show the subject dealing with feelings and sentiments that apparently lead him outside of himself, and even cause him lose the central unity of his ‘self.’ In the typical structure of the classical sonnet, the second stanza amplifies this in two complementary ways: it insists on sensation and epicurean pleasures (‘The air I breathe, this liquor I drink,’ l.5); on the other hand, these feelings seem to be tainted by the very mental process that conceives them, as though coming from an involuntary place (lines 7-8). That is why the subject is left in an uncertain, non-conclusive, and paradoxical state (‘I never know,’ ‘I don’t seek’). The uncertainty concerning self-knowledge is stated repeatedly in the last two stanzas. The contrast between knowledge gained empirically through the senses and rational knowledge is established: feeling and sensations (lines 1-5) seem to be in opposition to the cognitive and rational which describe the self-image (‘perceiving’ – l.1, ‘I never know’ – l.7, ‘I don’t seek’ – l.8, lines 8-9). This confrontation points to the gap between thinking and feeling (which is typical of all of Pessoa’s work), and it becomes clearer that the prospect of self-portrait is impossible, for this I has been divided between the will to self-knowledge, ruled by reason, and that kind of abandonment to feeling and to the slowing down of time by instinct and pleasure which comes as an inheritance from hedonism and from the melancholic tradition. The splitting of the subject reaches its climax in the last line (‘I don’t even know if it’s I who feels’), where the emerging double comes out in an even more complex way, for the alter ego that is Álvaro de Campos is himself a mental construction of Pessoa’s, a persona of the author. The formal classical perfection of the sonnet emphasizes that this is mostly a poetic construction: the I in quest of himself is
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a paper character, behind whom the face of the real author is both hidden and refracted, walking around the labyrinth he himself created. Similar problems are to be found in many other texts, as is the case of the poem by the erudite and Latinist heteronym Ricardo Reis ‘Countless lives inhabit us,’18 dated November 30, 1935 (just a fortnight before Pessoa’s death): 1
5
7
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Countless lives inhabit us. I don’t know, when I think or feel, Who is it that thinks or feels. I am merely the place Where things are thought or felt. I have more than just one soul. There are more I’s than I myself. I exist, nevertheless, Indifferent to them all. I silence them: I speak. The crossing urges of what I feel or do not feel Struggle in who I am, but I Ignore them They dictate nothing To the I I know: I write.
The poem opens up with a maxim stating that the I is on the verge of imploding, or that it is a mythical maze through which all the voices composing the self wander, and so the I becomes a vast space where those ‘countless’ that ‘inhabit us’ are unknown. The plural ‘us’ allows for the needed analytic distance and yet at the same time shows the subject as a member of the human race. From line 2 onwards, the poem amplifies and gives details of this maxim, evolving from ‘us’ to ‘I,’ but the echo of Shakespeare’s ‘The island is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’ (The Tempest, III, 127-128) remains. The proliferation of echoes in Pessoa’s poetry recognizes the multiplicity of inside and outside voices that echo through the construct of the subject, those coming from the author and those coming from tradition, and between which there is constant dialogue. In this ode by Ricardo Reis we can find the conflict between feeling and thinking that we already noticed in çlvaro de Campos, as well as the multiple I which alternates between the first or in the third person. The third stanza attempts to solve 18 Fernando Pessoa & Co. – Selected Poems, sel. and trans. by Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 1998).
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the problem arising from the ‘Crossing urges’ (l.11), meaning the instincts and impulses that stand in opposition to reason. But here another element comes to the fore, stemming from the tradition of self-analysis as well: the search for the self is represented as a ‘struggle’ (l.13) in an inner ‘place’ (l.4) – an arena – where ‘more than just one soul’ (l.6) clash. Suddenly the super-ego rises in a narcissistic way and wins the battle: ‘I exist, nevertheless,/ Indifferent to them all’ (lines 8-9). His weapon consists of words, for he ‘silence[s]’ all the others, and the I ‘speak[s]’ (l.10), putting himself in the centre stage as the protagonist. Finally, in the third stanza, speech turns into written words (‘I write,’ l.15), instincts are ignored and the poet emerges as a hero through his writing. He then becomes ecce poeta, with all the elements composing his portrait. ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennis,’ I have built a monument more lasting than bronze – my poetry, my work.19 This shattering apart of the I is always related to the building of the symbolic effigy of the face as singular and unique, but this is again a task made for Sisyphus – unfruitful and perpetually re-begun – as we observe in many other poems. We find the subject as an intermediary of itself in other poems, such as the following one by Pessoa (himself),20 dated 1933: 1
Between sleep and dream, Between me and my mind Is what I think I am, Flows a river without end.
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Elsewhere it first unravels, By shores of many kinds, Upon those various travels Where all the river winds.
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It comes where I have docked, The house I am today. It goes if I reflect; I wake, it has gone away. And who I feel and dies In this self-to-self bond Sleeps where the river flows This river without end.
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19 Cf. footnote 9. 20 Fernando Pessoa, ed. by Eugénio Lisboa with Juliet Taylor, trans. by Keith Boswell (Manchester: Carcanet/Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/Instituto Camões/Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro, 1995).
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Consciousness, represented in the gap ‘Between sleep and dream,’ brings the I to the centre stage as a divided object (this is even clearer in Portuguese, because of the different forms of the pronoun). All of this leads the way to the ‘river without end’ (l.4) that represents both the self and time as a Heraclitean river that is always flowing and will never stop. There is also the image of solid material, the ‘house I am today’ (l.10) where the travelling I docks at last (lines 7 and 9), and the verbs evolve from ‘I think’ (v.1) to ‘I am’ (l.10) and ‘I reflect’ (l.11). Like the image of a serpent biting its own tail, the poem ends by reaffirming the dispersion of the self, and thus the quest for identity remains perpetually unfinished. In a number of other poems we find the I facing itself in a mirror and doubting its own mental sanity. To find out who the I is, he goes back by introspective analysis and discovers the phantasmal shadow of the self as an enemy and a traitor. Can self-analysis find out the truth about the ‘forgotten thing’ that he can not clearly see? When we compare the two versions of the poem ‘Fito-me frente a frente’ (‘I look on myself face to face’),21 we realize that this is not possible, not only because the rewriting makes it clear that the problem is left unsolved, but also because the latter version is even darker and more enigmatic than the earlier one.22 Describing and portraying the self, no matter what strategies and techniques an author employs, appears to be a rather difficult task because literature and the arts resist closure and hence any attempt to be transparent or realistic. Portrait and, moreover, self-portrait demand a series of mental procedures and stylistic choices which confront the artist and the writer with the difficult task of getting hold of his/her finished image as a result of self-representation. In the end, this difficulty is one of building up a satisfactory self-image – or, if you will, defying the evidence of the impossibility that is attached to selfportraiture. We readers must be cautious and conscious of that process when we study self-representation. If not, we risk being drawn inside the labyrinth, facing the hidden monsters behind any self-portrait – including our own.
21 In the original, the two versions (1930 and 1931) can be found the following volumes: Poemas de Fernando Pessoa – 1921-1930, ed. by Ivo Castro (Lisboa: IN/CM, 2001), p.187; Poemas de Fernando Pessoa – 1931-1933, ed. by Ivo Castro (Lisboa: IN/CM, 2004), p.47. 22 This is the original second version (30-3-1931): ‘Fito-me frente a frente./E conheço quem sou./Estou louco, é evidente,/Mas que louco é que estou?//É por ser mais poeta/Que gente que sou louco?/Ou é por ter completa/A noção de ser pouco?//Não sei, mas sinto morto/O ser vivo que tenho./Nasci como um aborto/Salvo a hora e o tamanho.’
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Bibliography Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale – 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Brilliant, Richard, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991). Clair, Jean, Méduse – Contribution à une anthropologie des arts du visuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Derrida, Jacques, Mémoires d’aveugle – L’Autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990). ——, Sauf le nom (Paris: Galilée, 1993). Grimal, Pierre, Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et latine, 7th edn (Paris: P.U.F., 1982). Gusdorf, Georges, Les Écritures du moi – Lignes de vie 1 (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990). ——, Auto-bio-graphie – Lignes de vie 2 (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990). Marin, Louis, La Voix excomuniée – Essais de mémoire (Paris: Galilée, 1981). ——, Sublime Poussin (Paris: Seuil, 1995). ——, L’Écriture de soi – Ignace de Loyola, Montaigne, Stendhal, Roland Barthes (Paris: P.U.F., 1999). Nancy, Jean-Luc, Le Regard du portrait (Paris: Galilée, 2000). Pommier, Édouard, Théories du portrait – De la Renaissance aux Lumi res (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). Ricoeur, Paul, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990). Rimbaud, Arthur, ‘Rimbaud à Georges Izambard, Charleville, [13] mai 1871’, in Oeuvres complètes, edn établie, présenteé et annoteé par Antoine Adam, Collection Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Rugg, Linda Haverty, Picturing Ourselves. Photography and Autobiography (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). Vernant, Jean-Pierre, La Mort dans les yeux: figures de l’Autre en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Hachette, 1985). Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Entre mythe et politique (Paris: Seuil, 1996). Woodall, Joanna, Portraiture – Facing the Subject (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 1997).
Between Literature and the Visual Arts: Portraits of the Self in William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Fernando Pessoa Anna Viola Sborgi (University of Genoa) This essay examines comparatively different strategies for self-portrayal in the poetry of three modernist authors sharing a deep interest in the developments of the avant-garde in the visual arts: William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Fernando Pessoa. By highlighting the connections with the visual portraiture of the time, the essay outlines the evolution of a modernist, non-naturalistic kind of literary portrait, in which the authors constantly oscillate between representing and disguising themselves, thus merging the boundaries between portrait and self-portrait.
The changes in representation in the visual arts, occurring between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, affected the portrait genre so radically that, since then, critics even hypothesized the death of the portrait,1 both in the visual arts and literature. At the same time, however, the portrait has turned out to be one of the most practised genres of the twentieth century, evolving in a wide-range of forms and through the most diverse media. What is dead, therefore, is not the portrait as such, but its traditional interpretations. The genre transformed into a practice, which, though it can scarcely be systematized in a unique set of norms, has led to more modern interpretations. In addition to this, the distinction between self-portraiture and portraiture becomes more and more blurred. The tendency to disguise oneself is increased by the non-naturalistic representation of the subject, which contributes to shape to a greater degree the portrait of the other as a portrait of the artist, as well. The Americans poets William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) and Marianne Moore (1887–1972) and the widely known Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) were at the centre of the avant-garde movements in their own countries. Williams’s interest in the visual arts was lifelong and it started before his coming into contact with the avant-garde. He briefly considered taking up painting as a career, but chose writing instead for the practical reason that it was more compatible with his main work as a doctor. Moore and Williams both actively participated in New York’s cultural life in the 1910s and 1920s and were connected with the group of painters, photographers, and writers gathering around Alfred Stieglitz and his 291 gallery and his magazine Camera 1 See William A. Ewing, About Face, Photography and the Death of the Portrait, catalogue of the exhibition About Face (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2004), pp.9-15.
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Work. Through Stieglitz and through the correspondence with American modernist expatriates, such as Pound and T.S. Eliot, Moore and Williams came into contact with the new tendencies in the visual arts and contributed to shape the American avant-garde. As is widely known, Pessoa was the main mediator of foreign artistic influences into avant-garde movements in Portugal, and he did not only interpret the new ideas: he created his own ‘–isms.’ These authors’ production is ample, both in quantity and in time, but their earlier production of the 1910s and 1920s, coinciding with the climax of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, reveals more affinities with the visual arts. Marianne Moore practised portraiture extensively both in poetry and prose, especially in the earlier part of her career. Her huge private correspondence2 provides interesting insights on her portrayal techniques because it contains numerous prose portraits of friends and acquaintances. A constellation of pseudonyms appears in these. They are mostly drawn from the animal world and are used to describe herself, her friends, and members of her family. For instance, she often refers to herself in the third person and with different names, such as: Rat, Fangs, Gator, Basilisk, Feather, Weaz, Uncle, Willow, and Dactyl. These extra-literary references often come up in Moore’s poetry as well. Selfportraiture in Moore’s work is characterized by ambiguity: on the one hand, the poet tries to disguise herself in every possible way,3 on the other, the poems are disseminated with a whole world of personal references. In her portraits and self-portraits animals frequently disguise human subjects. Black Earth, for instance, is a dramatic monologue uttered from the vantage point of an elephant. The later title of the poem Melanchthon4 refers both to Martin Luther’s collaborator, Philipp Melanchthon,5 whom Moore deeply admired, and to an elephant wind-up toy, which she possessed and had named after him.6 It is therefore not clear whom the poem refers to and critics have interpreted it in
2 The correspondence consists of about 30.000 letters to family members, fellow-artists, and friends ranging from Hilda Doolittle to William Carlos Williams, from Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot. See Marianne Moore, The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, ed. by Bonnie Costello (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). 3 It is no chance that Moore’s favourite animals are armoured ones. 4 Moore continued to revise her early poems until her death, publishing vastly different versions of them. Black Earth was first published in April 1918 in The Egoist, edited by T.S. Eliot. Detailed information about the publication history of the poems can be found in the critical volume containing Moore’s early poems: Marianne Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924, ed. by Robin G. Schulze (Berkeley: University of California Press 2002). 5 This was the Greek translation of his German surname Schwarzerd. Both terms meant ‘black earth.’ 6 See Bonnie Costello, Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1981), p.57.
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different ways.7 It could be both a portrait of Melanchthon or, more likely, a self-portrait of Moore expressing the meditations prompted by his figure and concealing the author under the thick elephant skin. The poem dwells on Moore’s concerns on identity and on the relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual self, which are merged together and are therefore difficult to distinguish. At the end of the poem, Moore refers to the impenetrability of the soul by saying: ‘The I of each, is to the I of each/a kind of fretful speech/ which sets a limit on itself.’8 Moore does not dismiss bodily experience as a lower dimension of being, but she points out its fundamental importance for the completeness of the self: […] The sediment of the river which Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used to it, it may Remain there; do away with it and I am myself done away with, for the patina of circumstance can but enrich what was there to begin with […] 9
This also implies that identity is not immutable, but is created by the stratification of experiences in time. Linda Leavell10 has pointed out the similarity between Moore’s techniques of portrayal and specific genres in the visual arts, such as the single-object portrait. In this genre, both in painting and literature, the object (or an animal in Moore’s poetry) acts as an index of the subject represented, to such an extent that it is very difficult to separate the subject from the metaphor representing him/her. This happens for example in some of Moore’s portraits such as ‘To a Chameleon/You Are Like the Realistic Product of an Idealistic Search for Gold at the Foot of the Rainbow’:11 the subject of the metaphor is mysterious and it is difficult to understand whether the poem
7 For different interpretations of the poem see Costello, pp.56-62 and Linda Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (Baton Rouge, London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), pp.155-160. 8 Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore, p.89. 9 Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore, p.87. 10 My discussion of Moore’s self-portrayal has been partly informed by the analysis of Moore’s portrayal techniques and of their connections with the visual arts in Leavell, pp.96-134. 11 Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore, p.53.
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is about a person or an actual chameleon. In the case of painting the metaphor is often provided by an object. For instance, in Francis Picabia’s Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz (1915), a broken camera and the words ‘Ici, c’est Ici Stieglitz’ are the only elements to identify the subject of the portrait. The words indicate the immediacy of the subject’s representation, but, without them, we would be wondering whether or not the portrait represents Stieglitz or an actual camera. In the same way, we wonder to what extent elephants and chameleons in Moore’s poetry disguise actual human subjects. This is increased by the fact that only in the first versions of the poems, published in modernist magazines, Moore openly named her subjects in the titles. When she published them in her first authorized collection Observations (1921), names disappeared from the titles and were moved to the notes at the end of the book. For instance, Moore’s portrait of Bernard Shaw was first ‘To Bernard Shaw: A Prize Bird, in 1915’ in The Egoist and became ‘To a Prize Bird’ in Observations. Unless we read the notes, the allusions to the subjects of the poems, arbitrarily chosen by the author, remain a mystery to us. This also parallels the contemporary evolution in visual portraiture towards a non-naturalistic form concealing the subject. It can be observed in the portraits of analytic cubism Picasso made in 1910, such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s and Ambroise Vollard’s, in which we are able to guess the real subject only thanks to some clues12 disseminated by the author within the painting. The artist persona is represented in Moore’s poetry also through her use of quotations. With a technique resembling assemblage in painting, she constructs poems with quotations from the most diverse sources: literature, scientific essays, newspapers, and snatches of conversations. This practice shares the same ambivalence of painted assemblage. On the one hand, it is made with materials, which, being external to the artistic medium, maintain their own specific character of real objects. On the other, they are transformed by the artist’s selection. An example of this technique is the The Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry (1924) by the American artist Arthur Dove – a painting in which Moore herself was quite interested. This assemblage is made of various pieces referring to the person represented. Still, the allusions made by the artist are not immediately recognizable by the public and remain very private. As Leavell suggests, by using this technique in her portraits and self-portraits, Moore is able to deal with one of her main concerns, the interaction between reality and imagination. She succeeds in representing, to quote one of her most famous verses, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’13 She aims at a poetry dealing 12 For instance, the African mask painted in Picasso’s portrait of Kahnweiler functions in this way. 13 This is line 25 of Poetry, one of Moore’s best known and most revised poems, see Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore, p.73.
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with reality, but she operates a selection based on her personal tastes and interests, thus portraying herself as the artist’s persona. In When I Buy Pictures (1921), Moore further specifies her relation with objects. The author regards herself as their ‘imaginary possessor,’14 implying both the appropriation of objects for her imagination, but, at the same time, the imaginary quality of her possession. Obviously this is more easily achieved in painting than in poetry because words are always re-used.15 In order to highlight the heterogeneity of the quotations from the text, Moore maintains the quotation marks, or, in the later editions of the texts, appends notes to them. Also, these fragments are not chosen because of their particular value, nor to situate the poem in a wider literary tradition, but because they are objects picked up by the artist from the real everyday world. Furthermore, Moore was particularly interested in those human enterprises which imply cataloguing and selecting things, such as museums, exhibitions, zoos, but also editorial enterprises such as anthologies and miscellanies (for instance, her own editorial experience at the Dial). She often commented that these enterprises represented an unintentional portrait of the mind of the curator.16 Likewise, the inventories of objects, the animals, and the quotations in her poetry also function as a form of self-portrait. Moore’s interest in people’s surrounding environment is also relevant here. In one of her 1922 poem People’s Surroundings17 she lists a series of different living environments as a clue to the personality of their inhabitants and, according to Leavell, the list of disparate people and settings ending the poem represents a challenge to the reader to discover the author’s mind. Furthermore, Moore left to the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia not only her manuscripts, but also the furniture and objects of her living room, which was thus recreated in a one-room installation, as a final self-portrait of the author.18 This practice can be related both to assemblage and to cubist painting of the time, where the self is constructed in relation to the surrounding space and objects and can not be separated from it. If any portrait can be both a portrait of its author and of its model, in Moore’s poetry, the artist persona virtually enters the space of the portrait of others unlike herself.19 The subject represented and the artist’s persona are
14 Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore, p.101. 15 Leavell, p.116. 16 Leavell, pp.155–160. 17 Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore, p.108. 18 Leavell, p.130. 19 The portraits are often about other writers (for instance, Shaw, Browning, to name but a few), thus raising important issues about Moore’s self-perception as an artist and showing her likes and dislikes as to literary style and technique.
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engaged in an explicit and continuous dialogue and in a reciprocal exchange of gazes revealing the two. In the realm of painting we can in most cases only imagine this tension between artist and model as going on ‘outside the picture:’ in Moore’s portraits it is made explicit. This inter-subjective dynamic also characterises Williams’s portraits. In many of these texts the author is depicted as doctor. Williams’s professional activity offered him the chance of drawing several portraits from his patients.20 The author’s role is mainly to observe the reality surrounding him, especially the local American population he was encountering in his daily practice. The presence of the author’s voice, though inscribed within an inter-subjective dialectic reminds us, however, of his fundamental role of interpreter of the reality described. Examples of this interaction can be found in such texts as Portrait of a Woman in Bed (1917),21 Sympathetic Portrait Of A Child (1917), and The Young Housewife (1916).22 Just like Moore, Williams worked extensively with other forms of portrait both in poetry and prose. If his early work is mainly composed of portrait-poems, also his Autobiography (1951) and his five-volume poem, Paterson (1946-1958), in his later production, can be seen in the perspective of self-portraiture. Within Williams’s explicit self-portraits,23 the speaking I of the poem is overtly a writer meditating on the practice of writing itself, as in the early To Wish Myself Courage. In this poem, included in Williams’s first published collection The Tempers (1913), the poet sees his work in the perspective of the future. Being now young, he will be able to write something more significant and free from the stress of youth only when he will be older. Once again, the self develops in time. Also, the difficulty of representing oneself emerges. To express it in Williams’s words: ‘How can I
20 Moreover, in these texts Williams often meditates on his profession, as, for instance in Le Médecin malgrê lui, a self-portrait appearing in Poems (1919) in which he ironically considers the option of becoming a perfect doctor and forget about writing. 21 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. I 1909 –1939, ed. by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions Books, 1986), p.87. This dramatic monologue uttered by a woman called Robitza seems at first sight to refer to a scene between a doctor and his patient. However, as it has been pointed out by Litz and MacGowan, the main character of the poem may be the protagonist of Williams’s own play The Comic Life of Elia Brobitza. The monologue thus apparently represents the woman’s reaction to the overseer of the poor trying to evict her from her house. See Williams, The Collected Poems, p.486, notes. 22 Williams, The Collected Poems, p.94 and p.57. 23 By explicit self-portraits I mean all those poems where the objective of self-portrayal is made clear by the title of the poem itself or, in the case of Pastoral and self-portraits, by the title of a set of poems.
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ever be written out as men say?/Surely it is merely an interference with the long song – /This that I am now doing.’24 The relationship between man and nature, and, more generally, between the self and the world,25 is a key concern for Williams, since his 1914 poem The Wanderer26 where a fusion between the poet and the Passaic River takes place.27 It is a union that does not imply the loss of the self, but a reconstruction of the self in relation to the external world. As Williams wrote in a letter to Marianne Moore: ‘As a reward for this anonymity, I feel as much a part of things as tree and stones.’28 This merging also takes place in other explicit self-portraits, such as Pastorals and Self-Portraits,29 a set of eight poems composed in 1914, mostly unpublished before the poet’s death.30 In the whole set, both the two self-portraits (numbered 1 and 2) and the other compositions deal with the self in relation to nature. SelfPortrait 1 is identifiable as such only by the title, because its content is quite enigmatic at a first glance. The whole poem is based on an antithesis between ‘dark’ and ‘light,’ between the earth and the sky, and it is not addressed to the self of the poet, but to the ‘you’ represented by the earth. But if we examine Williams’s wider conception of nature the poem becomes clearer. The poet tries to merge with nature through a process of empathy and ‘contact,’ to borrow one of Williams’s key terms. The world is in a constant process of birth and decay, and this poem refers to this conception. All the poems in this set describe the poet’s attempt to establish a deep connection with nature, but this is not always a straightforward process. Pastoral 2, for example, is a description of this, of the poet’s desire To fling aside clothes And crawl naked There among you Cold as it is!31 24 Williams, The Collected Poems, pp.16-17. 25 Williams also wrote about the relationship between man and the modern technological world represented by the city, a common practice of the avant-garde movements, but nature in a Whitmanesque tradition and the local American element hold a fundamental importance in his work. 26 Williams, The Collected Poems, pp.27-36. 27 Williams describes this experience in the poem with these words: ‘And I knew all – it became me’, Williams, The Collected Poems, p.35. 28 William Carlos Williams, William Carlos Williams: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Charles Tomlinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p.133. 29 Williams, The Collected Poems, pp.42-50. 30 Only Pastoral 1 was published with some changes, before the poet’s death, in the 1917 collection Al Que Quiere! 31 Williams, The Collected Poems, p.46.
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which is frustrated by his social constraints and by his fears: […] this hide I have drawn about myself To shield me Has bound me more subtly Than you have imagined.32
The same desire to melt with the surrounding world is experienced in Portrait of the Author, one of Williams’s many spring poems, published in the 1921 collection Sour Grapes. The budding trees, the ‘birches’ which ‘are mad with green points,’33 exemplify the renewal of spring. However, this renewal is not accomplished yet, the birches open their leaves coldly, one by one. The poet shares this tension through his strong desire to overcome the separation between himself and the other human beings, exemplified by the ‘redfaced, living man, ignorant, stupid.’34 But as the buds do not flourish, his will does not translate into action and he remains still and isolated. As Peter Halter has suggested,35 colour is the constructive element in this poem and mirrors Williams’s interest in Kandinsky’s theories of expression. The use of the colours in the poem reproduces the tension between the burning desire to break through isolation and the coldness in which the poet finally remains. The poet identifies himself with the yellowish green of the blossoming nature in spring. This green, which pervades the poem, is in Kandinsky’s theory produced by the attempt of making yellow colder thus carrying within the tension between the energy of the yellow and the blue component, which slows down its frantic movement. The coldness and the slow movement of the leaves opening one by one act as a counterforce preventing the energy of spring to break through.36 Williams therefore depicts the dynamic forces in nature in a non-naturalistic way and seeks an integration between the self and the world, which is again similar to the one taking place in cubist and futurist painting. The representation of the subject in his/her interaction with the external world becomes fundamental in Pessoa’s poetry, which can be considered an extensive self-portrait of the author entrusted to the poet’s heteronyms, with their different personalities and literary attitudes. Within his overall work, though, the production of the futurist and sensacionista heteronym Álvaro de Campos and 32 Williams, The Collected Poems, p.47. 33 Williams, The Collected Poems, pp.172-173. 34 Williams, The Collected Poems, pp.172-173. 35 Peter Halter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and William Carlos Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp.54-56. 36 Halter, pp.54-56.
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the poetry of interseccionismo by the ortonym Fernando Pessoa are the most interesting in the perspective of the interaction between literature and the visual arts.37 The theory of sensacionismo is central to Pessoa’s work and provides interesting connections to contemporary movements, such as Italian Futurism, and in particular, to the theory of the stati d’animo elaborated by Umberto Boccioni. In Pessoa’s view, three levels of sensacionismo can be found in poetry. The first two correspond to two movements created by himself: the paulismo, a one-dimensional sensacionismo where feelings convert into images which follow one another along the text and the interseccionismo, which is a bi-dimensional sensacionismo, where planes representing different sensations intersect. The highest grade of sensacionismo is dramatic poetry, where several characters created by a single author embody different sensations. A few poems unquestionably illustrate the inter-artistic elements in Pessoa’s self-portraiture: the ortonym’s 1915 Chuva Oblíqua (Oblique Rain) and A Passagem das Horas (1916-1923), and Ode Marítima (1915) (Time’s Passage and Maritime Ode) by Álvaro de Campos. Chuva Oblíqua38 is a voyage towards the self, which, throughout the poem, proceeds from the external space of the real world to the mental space within the artist’s imagination and back. The darkness of the poet’s room intersects with the landscape outside his window and with the further dimension of the ‘infinite’ harbour he imagines. This intersection of planes (the interior, the real landscape, the dreamt one) is reproduced with several variations all through the poem, such as in the crossing of the closed space of the church and the rainy external scene in the second stanza, and between Pessoa’s hand, the sheet of paper he is writing on and the Egyptian Sphinx and pyramids he is imagining, in the third stanza. The poet’s sensations transform into actual landscapes. The interaction of planes in the poem is also, in a futurist perspective, a temporal one. The self in Chuva Oblíqua simultaneously contains the present and the reminiscences of the past that come to his mind. Images of childhood are significantly concentrated in the final part of the poem, thus showing the poem’s progress towards a happy self which is now lost. Contrarily to traditional autobiographical conventions, the past of childhood is not overlooked from the distant viewpoint of the present: the two temporal dimensions are completely melted. An example in the visual arts similarly showing both the intersections in space and the development of the self in time could be Diego Rivera’s Portrait of Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1915). The figure is integrated within the surrounding environment through 37 For a wide analysis of the influence of the visual arts on Fernando Pessoa’s, in particular of Futurism, see Fernando Alvarenga, A Arte Visual Futurista em Fernando Pessoa (Lisboa: Editorial Notícias, 1983). 38 Fernando Pessoa, Poesia 1. 1902-1929, ed. by António Quadros (Mem Martins: Publicações Europa-América, 1995), p.124.
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the different planes in space. Moreover, in order to counterbalance the static dimension of the canvas and to illustrate the subject’s movement in time, Rivera breaks down Ramon’s action of smoking a pipe in three different images. Ode Marítima reproduces a landscape similar to Chuva Oblíqua’s. The poet is represented in his interaction with the real port surrounding him and with the imagined ports and navigations prompted to his mind by the environment. On the formal level however, the poem is characterized by a stronger dynamism and simultaneity, in a futurist fashion. The poet loses himself in the landscape and at the same time in the sensations evoked by it, such as, for instance, the feelings stimulated by departures and arrivals of other voyagers: ‘O mistério alegre e triste de quem chega e parte’39 (The happy and sad mystery of all who arrive and depart).40 The transformation of sensations and emotions into landscape can be exemplified by Umberto Boccioni’s 1911 Stati d’animo (States of Mind), which is a set of three paintings,41 each showing different feelings caused by arrivals and departures at a train station. A Passagem das Horas – Ode sensacionista is constructed similarly, but the emphasis on the sensations increases as it is shown by the best known passage in the poem: the synthesis of Pessoa’s sensacionismo, both as a modality of self-representation and as a movement melting with all the other avantgarde movements experienced before: Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras, Viver tudo de todos os lados, Ser a mesma coisa de todos os modos possíveis ao mesmo tempo, Realizar em si toda a humanidade de todos os momentos Num só momento difuso, profuso, completo e longínquo. 42 (TO FEEL everything in every way, To live everything from all sides, To be the same thing in all ways possible at the same time, To realize in oneself all humanity at all moments In one scattered, extravagant, complete, and aloof moment).43
39 Álvaro de Campos, Poesia, ed. by Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2002), p.107. 40 Álvaro de Campos, Maritime Ode: A Poem by Álvaro de Campos, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (Lisboa: Portugal-Frankfurt 97, S.A, 1997). 41 Gli addii (The Farewells), Quelli che vanno (Those who go), Quelli che restano (Those who stay). 42 Álvaro de Campos, Poesia, p.196. 43 Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa & Co: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 1998), p.146.
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This merging of the poet with the external space also echoes Pessoa’s key concern for fragmentation and de-personalization. The different feelings become the different persona in Pessoa’s heteronymic view: Multipliquei-me, para me sentir, Para me sentir, precisei sentir tudo, Transbordei, não fiz senão extravasar-me, Despi-me, entreguei-me, E há em cada canto da minha alma um altar a um deus diferente.44 (I multiplied myself to feel myself, To feel myself I had to feel everything I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out, I undressed, I yielded, And in each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god).45
Of course, Pessoa’s heteronymic construction confers to his self-portraiture a deeper complexity. By entrusting the portrait of the self as the artist persona to his heteronyms, he creates a very interesting ‘Chinese-boxes’ technique. Selfportraits by the heteronyms are at the same time self-portraits of the author. De-personalization and poly-personalization are not necessarily opposite in Pessoa’s case and can coincide. A common feature of these texts is the representation of the relation of the subject to his/her surrounding environment, a problem shared by every genre in Modernist art, but more manifest and momentous in such a subject-based genre as portrait. Different grades of fragmentation are to be found. Moore and Williams’s selves are not unitary in a conventional sense, but they experience fragmentation as a feature characterizing mainly the external world. Pessoa goes further, operating a cubist dissection of himself as much as of the external world. Furthermore, while Moore and Pessoa hide themselves in the poems, with the help of objects, personifications, and masks, Williams’s attitude is different. Though the poet’s I loses himself in the identification with nature, the ‘I’ is often very assertive and explicitly presented. It is also interesting to note that if both Moore and Williams experiment on the dramatic monologue, the relationship between Pessoa’s drama em gente (drama in people) and Browning’s dramatic monologue based on character in action has been
44 Campos, Poesia, p.198. 45 Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa & Co., p.146.
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also pointed out.46 The dramatic monologue is a form of portrait47 and a very peculiar one, because it disguises the subject by enacting him/her through a narrative persona. The permanence of this form within Modernist literature and its frequent connection with the visual single-object portrait might lead to further clarify the evolution of the literary portrait. One must also consider the different way in which these authors take up portrait and self-portrait explicitly as a genre. Both Moore and Williams experiment with it quite consciously, often showing specific correspondences in the visual arts. As far as Pessoa is concerned, he does not seem to deal explicitly with a genre, but there is little doubt that the whole heteronymic construction is a huge portrait of the self and of the heteronyms. No matter then how consciously these authors take up the genre, it is relevant here to observe that, when they describe themselves and others, they do so with modalities that share techniques used in the visual arts of the time. This does not necessarily mean that we are dealing with a mere problem of influence of one discipline (the visual arts) on the other (literature), but it certainly testifies a shared research on portrayal modalities, often leading to a similar outcome. Another aspect emerging is the relationship between reality and imagination. Again, if this is a problem common to all modernist art, the portrait genre particularly highlights it. As Wendy Steiner has pointed out, there is a ‘paradox of the co-presence in portraiture of two different and normally antagonistic set of norms, the aesthetic and the specifically referential.’48 Our poets solve this problem by finding a balance between the two opposites and by creating an indexical form of portrait, in which they can replace the explicitly referential with objects and feelings, which, though not depicting the self figuratively, represent the subject through different forms of association.
46 For a deeper analysis of this connection, see George Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Literature (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000). 47 See Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1978), p.23. 48 See Steiner, p.4.
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Bibliography Alvarenga, Fernando, A Arte Visual Futurista em Fernando Pessoa (Lisboa: Editorial Notícias, 1983). Campos, Álvaro de, Poesia, ed. by Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2002). ——, Maritime Ode: A Poem by Álvaro de Campos, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (Lisboa: Portugal-Frankfurt 97, S.A, 1997). Costello, Bonnie, Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1981). Ewing, William A., About Face, Photography and the Death of the Portrait, catalogue of the exhibition About Face (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2004). Halter, Peter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and William Carlos Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Leavell, Linda, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (Baton Rouge, London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). Monteiro, George, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Literature (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000). Moore, Marianne, The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, ed. by Bonnie Costello (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). ——, Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924, ed. by Robin G. Schulze (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Pessoa, Fernando, Poesia 1. 1902–1929, ed. by António Quadros (Mem Martins: Publicações Europa-América, 1995). ——, Fernando Pessoa & Co: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 1998). Steiner, Wendy, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1978). Williams, William Carlos, William Carlos Williams: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Charles Tomlinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). ——, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. I 1909-1939, ed. by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions Books, 1986).
Photography and Shadow-Writing: Henry James’s Revisions of the Self in the New York Edition Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University of Aarhus) The main subject of this paper is the face of Henry James as it appears in Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photographic frontispiece to the New York Edition of James’s collected Novels and Tales published between 1907 and 1909.1 In the following, I shall propose one way of looking at the material text – the body language of the New York Edition – in an attempt to interpret the relationship between the author’s ‘face’ and the ‘body’ of the work.
Gérard Genette has called attention to the way in which books present themselves to their readers through material features or paratexts such as typography, title pages, prefaces, and, although overlooked by Genette, frontispieces. Such a feature as, for instance, the frontispiece is significant to a reader’s reception of the work, Genette would claim, since it functions as an ‘interpretive threshold,’2 or a ‘“zone indécise” entre le dedans et le dehors,’3 between the inside (the text itself) and the outside (readers and institutions) of the text. Especially interesting paratextual traits are those that assign the text to a particular individual designated as its author. According to the book historian Roger Chartier: ‘Le plus spectaculaire de ces traits est la représentation physique de l’auteur dans son livre’4 (‘The most spectacular of those traits is the physical representation of the author in his book’5). Chartier claims that the function of the author’s portrait in the paratext of a book is that it reinforces the notion that the words of the text are the expression of an individual who 1 The New York Edition frontispieces by Coburn were only printed as such in the first edition of the Novels and Tales published by Scribner’s in New York 1907-09. Only in the latest Norton Critical Editions of James’s novels will the frontispieces be found printed with the prefaces (though not as volume frontispieces) and the New York Edition revisions. It has more or less become standard now to print the of the Henry James’s New York Edition, though the early and most heavily revised novels (Roderick Hudson, The American, and The Portrait of a Lady) are printed, on some occasions, in editions based on the American and English first editions. The frontispieces are rarely accompanying the reprinted revised texts but their plates may be found in David McWhirter, ed., Construction of Authorship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), fig. 5-28. 2 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.2. 3 Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987), p.8. 4 Roger Chartier, L’Ordre des livres: Lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothèques en Europe entre XIVe et XVIIIe siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Alinea, 1992), p.60. 5 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p.52.
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gives authenticity to the work.6 Now, then what is the function of the portrait of the author in a work such as the New York Edition? What characterizes this ‘performance’ of the representation of the self on the threshold of the work? I shall in the following think of this performance of illustrative authorial self-presentation in relation to Henry James’s attempt to ‘figure out’ the nature of textual revisions; the New York Edition contains, apart from the frontispieces, thoroughly revised versions of James’s novels, and the famous prefaces in which James distils the art of the novel. More importantly in relation to this paper, the prefaces contain considerations relative to the experience of ‘seeing the work again,’ with the author seeing himself as figured in the gap between the original and the revised text. As an example of this figure of the self presented in the verbal paratext of the preface, I shall in the end discuss the performance of authorial self-revision in James’s preface to The Golden Bowl, in which he portrays the author looking at himself as a projection of shadows or silhouettes on a wall.7 One way of appreciating the complexity of Henry James’s work is to attempt to grasp the practice of perceiving and interpreting faces – both literal and figurative – in the novels and certainly also in some of the paratexts. In the famous ‘house of fiction’ metaphor from the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James posits the narrator or the author behind ‘a number of possible windows’ signifying a multitude of Cartesian perspectives available to the individual will. While the author/narrator’s individual voyeurism is safely hidden from the outside ‘human scene,’ he is not so entirely veiled that the reader may not perceive him and pass judgement on his ‘moral reference’ based on the frame chosen for perception (the windows). The author/narrator within James’s ‘house of fiction’ is ‘made aware’ of his own face being the object of another’s gaze: The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. […] [T]hey have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. […] The spreading field, the human scene, is the ‘choice of subject’; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the 6 ‘[S]a fonction est identique: constituer l’écriture comme l’expression d’une individualité qui fonde l’authenticité de l’oeuvre’ (Chartier, L’Ordre des livres, p.60). (‘[T]he function of the author’s portrait is to reinforce the notion that the writing is the expression of an individuality that gives authenticity to the work’ (Chartier, The Order of Books, p.50). 7 See Henry James, ‘Preface’, in The Golden Bowl (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p.26.
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‘literary form’; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher–without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist.8
The author/narrator is ‘made aware’ that his chosen point of view designates ‘his moral reference’: ‘Tell me what the artist is,’ James writes, ‘and I will tell you of what he has been conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless freedom and his ‘moral’ reference.’9 The windows figure as materializations of his consciousness, and as such open for a gaze from the outside to gain access to his interior consciousness. This is not a Cartesian self-mirroring but the gaze of the other upon the self from an undefined zone; a parergonal zone belonging to the reader or the revising author. This particular condition of looking at faces while uncannily being aware of the exposure entailed in observation is a fundamental awareness in James’s art of the novel. Looking at the face of the other offers the possibility for self-identification, and an uncanny experience of subjectivity disappearing in the gaze of the object. As Slavoj Z iz ek rephrases Lacan: ‘When I am looking at an object, the object is always already gazing at me, and from a point at which I cannot see it.’10 Looking at the portrayed face reminds one of a fascination with ‘seeing myself seeing’ – a ‘perverse position,’ following Z iz ek, where the subject is on the side of the object – or, if we adopt Jacques Derrida’s conception of the self-portrait in Mémoires d’aveugle: l’autoportrait et autres ruines (1990),11 to which I will return later, this type of self-viewing is always preconditioned by a certain blindness: the object is gazing at me from a point which I cannot see. When I ‘write’ my self, I cannot see it. This is the impossibility of autobiography, as well as the shadowy nature of self-portraiture. In ‘John Delavoy,’ one of Henry James’s many tales about authors and bibliophile grave robbers, the narrator, equipped with a field glass and a gossipy companion, encounters the sister of the great author in the most public of nineteenth-century spaces, the theatre. The narrator proceeds to describe the late ‘John Delavoy’ as ‘the most unadvertised, unreported, uninterviewed, unphotographed, uncriticised of all originals.’12 The fascination with reclusive authors – authors who resist public scrutiny of their person and private lives 8 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York, London: Norton, 1995), p.7. 9 James, The Portrait of a Lady, p.7. 10 Slavoj Z iz ek, ‘Looking Awry’, October, 50 (1989), pp.30-55 (p.35). See also Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2001), p.50, for a similar discussion of Z iz ek and James. 11 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. by PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1993). 12 Henry James, ‘John Delavoy’, in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Penguin, 1986), p.405.
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– is a phenomenon well known to bibliophiles of the past few centuries. It still forms a topic for novels, as in Don Delilo’s Mao II, and a playful game of hideand-seek in the life and literary career of Thomas Pynchon, probably the author of our time about whose private life we (delightfully) know least. Readers applaud the reclusiveness but, like the narrator in ‘John Delavoy,’ readers cannot help but desire to know the face behind the work and the man behind the face. In ‘John Delavoy’ the un-photographed and now dead author turns out only to be depicted in a sketch made by his sister, a portrait drawn in pencil, the ‘only representation of the sort in existence, […] it had a quality that, in any collection, would have caused it to be scanned for some signature known to the initiated.’13 This drawing was ‘a thing of real vision,’ the narrator adds, and it acquired even more taste since the author had avoided all representations of his own face especially in photographs. I recall this tale in order to situate my reading of the frontispiece photograph figuring Henry James in conjunction with his ‘critique’ of such authorportraits and illustration in general. The theme of illustration is presented in ‘John Delavoy,’ when the narrator, writing an article about the author, is being stalled by his editor because he wants to include a portrait of the author in his magazine. This scene, on a biographical note, recalls James’s complaints about illustrations in especially literary magazines of his day. He warned on several occasions against the predominance given to illustrations in modern publishing, and he was particularly sceptic about the visual desire for photographic illustrations. Henry James has been canonically ‘constructed’ as the Master of the novel, a rather pompous figure, captured in John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait from 1912. Recent interests in the author’s sexuality, his failed attempt to break through in the theatre and a general heightened interest in the discontinuities within James’s work have led to quite a different portrait of the author. James’s latest biographer, Fred Kaplan, draws a decidedly human and accessible image of the author which resembles less the James of Sargent’s portrait and more the posturing ‘everyday-ness’ of the James captured by Alvin Langdon Coburn standing leisurely in the garden of his English home in Rye in 1906. John Carlos Rowe also finds in Coburn’s photographs of James in 1906 a clear expression of ‘vulnerability, self-doubt, worry, even as they offer us the dominance of head and eye, of intellect and vision, which virtually holds James up.’14 The heroic author has finally come half-way out of the closet as queer. We might get the sense that such a reading of Coburn’s photograph has more
13 James, ‘John Delavoy’, p.412. 14 John Carlos Rowe, ‘Foreword’, in Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, ed. by David McWhirter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p.xxiv.
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to do with the human and documentary nature of photography in contrast to the generic pompous nature of portrait painting, than with particular features and traces of personal ‘vulnerability.’ The substitution of the painterly with the photographic, of the authoritarian with the vulnerable author, are products, of course, of a changing critical and cultural climate. We find in the face of the author a proxy for ourselves, a mirror in which we see ourselves seeing what we want to see. The same interpretive selection of authorial imagery is at work in James’s reworking and revision of his own figure. In a 1902 letter to Mrs. Frank Mathews, who had sent him a photograph of himself as a young man, James writes about the encounter with his younger self: The photographer has retouched the impression rather too freely, especially the eyes (if one could but keep their hands off!) but the image has a pleasing ghostliness, as out of the past, and affects me pathetically as if it were of the dead – of one who died young and innocent. Well, so he did, and I can speak of him or admire him, poor charming slightly mawkish youth, quite as I would another. I remember (if now all comes back to me) when (and where) I was so taken: at the age of 20, though I look younger, and at a time when I had had an accident (an injury to my back,) and was rather sick and sorry. I look rather as if I wanted propping up. But you have propped me up, now, handsomely for all time, and I feel that I shall go down so to the remotest posterity.15
The technical properties of photography portraiture, the retouching by another’s hands, and the propping neck rest applied by photographers due to the long exposure time of early photography, are here used as signifying the intentions of another on his own image. The photograph, nevertheless, gives the author access to his past. He remembers his back injury called forth by the propping prosthesis. Simultaneously, the image produces a recollection of himself as another, himself as dead, and his past irretrievably lost; ‘the pleasing ghostliness’ inherent in not only this particular photograph but in the medium generally, according to James. Laura Saltz, in her study of James’s references to photography in his autobiographies, finds that ‘[i]n writing of the subject of the image as if he were dead, James both objectifies and disowns his past self.’16 Though James might be found to disown his past self in his writing on photography, we should, I surmise, find that James is concerned not only with his own portrait but with a general observation of the possibility of self-observation and 15 Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters of Henry James (New York: Scribner, 1920), I, p.406. See Laura Saltz, ‘Henry James’s Overexposures’, Henry James Review, 25 (2004), pp.254-266, for an excellent discussion of James’s anxiety about photographic portraits of himself and their place in his autobiographies. 16 Laura Saltz, ‘Henry James’s Overexposures’, Henry James Review, 25 (2004), pp.254-266.
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a fundamental experience of otherness involved in self-portraiture. The photograph as autobiography offers the possibility of recollection of a former self and renders this self as other, even, seemingly, deceased and dismembered. In the first part of James’s autobiography, A Small Boy and Others (1913), the ghostliness of photography is again exposed when the author looks at a photograph of an actor from his youth. The photograph does not offer any insight into the personality of the portrayed. The portrait is ‘rather dismal,’ James writes, showing ‘the histrionic image with the artificial light turned off, the fatigued and disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling some closed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blighted for want of custom.’17 This image from the past, in James’s re-seeing it, is ‘extinguishing the light – the very life – of its subject.’ The ‘disconnected face’ is ‘an empty, darkened shell, a death mask.’ Reduced to its mere self, it gives no hint of the inward life of its subject, and as such documentary evidence it does not offer James any access to his experience of the person’s inherent self hood – it is again the mere image of the self as dead, the photograph as a death mask, as a face disconnected from the self, a mere sign swinging outside a deserted inn. This experience echoes Susan Sontag’s way of thinking the photograph as ‘not only an image (as painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real like a footprint or a death mask.’18 In the letter to Mrs. Frank Mathews James described the sensation of seeing his own photographic representation as a death mask, the trace of a former self; a sensation that Sontag finds to be at the very heart of photography. Sontag alludes to the indexical nature of photography by describing it as another kind of trace, a footprint. In James’s New York Edition the trace of a former self ‘stenciled off the real’ in a photograph shares register with the act of textual revision. James perceived the practice of revision or rewriting as tracing ‘uncontrollable footsteps’ of his former self.19 Photography and textual revision seem supplemental as visions of the self behind the mask of writing. If to James the photographic portraits lack in expressive suggestions of the self, they do, as figures, spark recollection. James remembers sitting for his first daguerreotype with his father in 1854. This portrait was used as frontispiece to the first edition of his autobiography. ‘Sharp, again,’ James writes, ‘is my sense of not being so adequately dressed as I should have taken thought for had I foreseen my exposure.’20 The exposure of the young James links to a 17 Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (London: Gibson Square, 2001), p.55. 18 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977), p.154. 19 James, The Golden Bowl, p.20. 20 James, A Small Boy and Others, p.46.
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memory of a comment by Thackeray who once visited the James family. He commented on the same jacket James wears in the portrait and with his words, in James’s recollection, exposed the queerness of his own self, as he remarks in the autobiography: ‘It had been revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow queer.’21 The flash of memory reveals an early experience of queerness, but a queerness of the self intimately linked to the flash of the camera, the flash of memory. Photographs, then, expose not only James’s self as lost to him and deceased (‘as if it were of the dead – of one who died young’), but also implies the anxiety of exposure to the eyes of a distant posterity. It is, of course, interesting that this particular photograph figures as the frontispiece to A Small Boy and Others. The evident exposure of this particular image figures as a parody of the exposed self-generation of the author. If we follow Chartier’s insight, that the image of the author as frontispiece functions as a figure for the authority and individuality of the author, as a kind of signature, James’s use of photographic images suggests Derrida’s notion of the signature, implying the actual or empirical non-presence of the signer, an anxiety-ridden trace of the self as other and fully exposed as such. This photographic signature as a trace of the self is what we also find in Roland Barthes’s thinking about photography in La Chambre claire: [L]a Photographie […] représente ce moment très subtil où, à vrai dire, je ne suis ni un sujet ni un objet, mais plutôt un sujet qui se sent devenir objet: je vis alors une microexpérience de la mort (de la parenthèse): je deviens vraiment spectre.22 (The photograph represents the very subtle moment when […] I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (or parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.)23
It is, then, in the very nature of photography and its relation to the experience of the self, according to Barthes and James, to be a specter – or, we might elaborate on the double meaning of the specter as both a product of spectatorship and the disappearance of the subject as a product of the other’s gaze; the impossibility
21 James, A Small Boy and Others, p.46. ‘Queer’ in the early twentieth century did not have the gendered connotation with which the term is associated today (as in queer studies). In James’s use, ‘queer’ merely means strange or different (hence the experience of otherness). 22 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980), p.30. 23 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p.14.
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of non-distorted self-mirroring in a Lacanian sense. James is truly becoming a specter, haunted by his own ghost, in his own frontispiece to his autobiography. Chartier tells us that the practice of the presence of the author in the frontispiece installs the identity of the author to his work, exposes a sense of authority. Indeed it seems as if photography’s materiality and its relation to autobiography signal a potent choice for the visual medium of the New York Edition frontispieces, since photography as autobiography exerts control over the self-image, by, as Roland Barthes has it, its adherence to referentiality: ‘le référent adhere.’24 As we are reminded, this self-construction is at the same time undercut, since it also stands apart from the self, tries to envision and read the self from a temporal distance. This is exactly the problem encountered in the preface following the portrait, the author’s problem of seeing the work again over an expanse of time. And it is as such that we can think of both the frontispieces and prefaces of the edition as autobiographic. Paul de Man reminds us that autobiographical discourse is essentially a discourse of self-restoration. Autobiography is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs in all texts, and de Man also points to the fact taken up by Genette and Chartier, that the work’s presence guaranteed by the paratextual features like title page and frontispieces itself is autobiographical or pointing deictically to the presence of a self, though this fact also seem to suggest that no text essentially can be autobiographical.25 The textuality of autobiography is its own worst enemy it seems, and with this I shall finally turn to Coburn’s portrait of James in the New York Edition. This frontispiece photograph is not a representation of James’s younger self. It is a portrait of the artist as mature man – the revising author, the author who looks back by way of gazing into the pages of the twenty three volumes that are to follow. The frontispiece photographs in the Edition, as Ira B. Nadel suggests, might be thought of as an ‘act to transport his works from their original date of publication into the present if not the future.’26 In fact, the lapse of time represented by the image of the mature author imposed on the younger texts, though in updated version, might be seen to play on the reciprocal construction of authorship by installing the author as both a product of the work and in the same turn signifying the work as ‘springing out of the forehead’ of the author – the author’s non-presence.
24 Barthes, La Chambre claire, p.18. 25 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp.67-81 (p.70). 26 Ira B. Nadel, ‘Visual Culture: The Photo Frontispieces to the New York Edition’, in Henry James’s New York Edition. The Construction of Authorship, ed. by David McWhirter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p.95.
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It is obvious how this image on one level can be read as a traditional invocation of the authority of the author’s position in his work, and how it suggests the presence of the author as the creative ground of the Edition, but if we look at the preface in which James discusses the reasons for choosing photographic frontispieces and his ghostly experience of seeing himself as the original author, we have to read the photograph as expressing a more subtle relation between the author and his work, the author and his younger self. James playfully juxtaposes the textual strategies of youth and maturity evoking antiquated methods of transcription derived from the visual culture of his youth, through the trope of the silhouette. In the preface to The Golden Bowl James describes the relationship between his two ‘selves’ as shadows on a wall: Into his very footprints the responsive, the imaginative steps of the docile reader that I consentingly become for him all comfortably sink; his vision, superimposed on my own as an image in cut paper is applied to a sharp shadow on a wall, matches, at every point, without excess or deficiency.27
Derrida finds this ‘superimposition of the self on its shadow,’ of drawing on the silhouette of the other, to be at the heart of self-portraiture and the origin of drawing as such.28 Drawing originated as a kind of skiagraphia or shadow writing where ‘perception’ of the self is possible only as recollection.29 Drawing and writing are, in this iconic myth of the origin of drawing, closely related to blindness and opacity and not to the transparent ‘light-writing’ of photographia. According to Derrida the self-portrait is also like a ruin, another figure in the family of supplements: La ruine ne survient pas comme un accident à un monument hier intact. Au commencement il y a la ruine. Ruine est ce qui arrive ici à l’image dès le premier regard. Ruine est
27 James, The Golden Bowl, p.26. 28 In Memories of the Blind, Derrida discusses J.B. Suvée’s painting Butades or the origin of Drawing to further his argument about the absence of the model and blindness inherent in the self-portrait. The iconography of Butades relates the origin of drawing to the absent lover whose image Butades traces on a wall from recollection or from his shadow. The shadow’s link to self-portraiture is evident, since the act of drawing on the shadow makes the disappearance of the self visible. Henry James’s shadow-writing (revision) is, in my mind, closely related to this kind of recollection. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 29 ‘La perception appartient dès l’origine au souvenir.’ Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle: l’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990), p.54.
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l’autoportrait, ce visage dévisagé comme mémoire de soi, ce qui reste ou revient comme un spectre d s qu’au premier regard sur soi une figuration s’éclipse. La figure alors voit sa visibilité tient à la structure écliptique du trait, seulement remarquée, impuissante à se réfléchir dans l’ombre de l’autoportrait. Autant de propositions réversibles. On peut aussi bien lire les tableaux de ruines comme les figures d’un portrait, voire d’un autoportrait.30 (The ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory of itself, what remains or returns as a specter from the first moment one first looks at oneself and a figuration is eclipsed. The figure, the face, then sees its visibility being eaten away; it looses its integrity without disintegrating. For the incompleteness of the visible monument comes from the eclipsing structure of the trait, from a structure that is only remarked, pointed out, impotent or incapable of being reflected in the shadow of the self-portrait. So many reversible propositions. For one can just as well read the pictures of ruins as the figures of a portrait, indeed, of a self-portrait.)31
Henry James’s self-observation is in its origin conditioned by the decay of the model’s face in the drawing on the wall; a blindness, in the sheer impossibility of seeing oneself drawing oneself (as in Norman Rockwell’s ‘Triple SelfPortrait’ or Velásquez’s ‘Las Meninas’). This is obvious in the phenomenology of the painted or drawn self-portrait. I want to suggest an argument, then, which across texts, paratexts, and epitexts, across media, registers the same opacity or blindness in the work of photography, autobiography, and textual revisioning. Seeing oneself, is, both in autobiography, in photography, in the origin of painting, seeing oneself as other; not only as different in the mirror image of the self – but as dead, as a shadowwriting, where even the perceiving and writing self becomes opaque, a disconnected face, the object of an absent gaze residing in an un-restorable ruin that is the very possibility of the emergence of the work of art. The degeneration of the text through re-membering allows for a new work that was already there inscribed in the foundation of the original text; the text as ruin has inscribed the possibility of revision already at the original inscription. The ‘text itself’ as the ‘self itself’ is ruined in its origin. The literary work of the Edition in the case of Henry James is de-generate in its very origin; it is open to revision, and not only open, but conditioned by the revisionary gesture of the writing de-generate self: degeneration, in fact, as a textual and epistemological condition in the work of Henry James.
30 Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle, p.72. 31 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p.68.
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Bibliography Barthes, Roland, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980). ——, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Chartier, Roger, L’Ordre des livres: Lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothèques en Europe entre XIVe et XVIIIe siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Alinea, 1992). ——, The Order of Books, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). de Man, Paul, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Derrida, Jacques, Mémoires d’aveugle: l’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990). ——, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Genette, Gérard, Seuils (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987). ——, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Jacobs, Karen, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2001). James, Henry, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Penguin, 1986). ——, The Golden Bowl (London: Penguin Books, 1987). ——, The Portrait of a Lady (New York, London: Norton, 1995). ——, A Small Boy and Others (London: Gibson Square, 2001). Lubbock, Percy, ed., The Letters of Henry James (New York: Scribner, 1920). Kaplan, Fred, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1992). McWhirter, David, Henry James’s New York Edition. The Construction of Authorship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Saltz, Laura, ‘Henry James’s Overexposures’, Henry James Review, 25 (2004), pp.254-266. Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977). Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Looking Awry’, October, 50 (1989), pp.30-55.
Consumed by the Audience. Inhibition, Fear, and Anxiety in the Oeuvre of Bruce Nauman Patrick Van Rossem (University of Gent) In the paper Bruce Naumans’ self-presentation (in video art) is considered in relation to the avant-garde idea of symbioses between the artists’ individuality and the specific manipulation of the medium. Both the proliferation of sense-experience in the 1960s’ (influenced by Samuel Becketts’ writtings) and the transformation of artistic practice from private event into public condition are considered as impulses for Naumans’ intensive and recurring self-presentations. Self objectivation is looked at via a distinctive use of Bakhtins’ concept of the dialogical and his ideas on the (im)possibility of a self-portrait and the concept of the supperaddressee. The later is identified with the audience, a vector within contemporary art determining the artists’ presence within the work of art. These ideas on reader-criticism will then be linked to Rosalind Krauss’s devastating critique on video art and its characterisation as ‘aesthetics of narcissism.’ Her obliteration of the audience as a constitutive factor within the visual artists’ self-presentation and the influence it has on the choice of a particular medium is criticised. Naumans’ self-presentation is hereby lifted from the negative sphere of (Freudian and Lacanian) narcisism and considered an aspect within the larger sphere of media specific reflections and their relation to the artists’ self-objectification in an artistic reality that can be identified as a public rather than a private condition.
A cry amidst an audience Je crie, donc je suis. Mais si personne ne se retourne, je cesse instantanément d’être, mon cri n’ayant pas été entendu. … Le cri rentré est devenu mesure par l’action de la retenue, par un contrôle qui le canalise. Le jaillissement bref s’est mué en durée. (I shout, therefore I am. If my cry remains unheard and no one turns round, my existence instantly stops. … The returned cry becomes a measure. Its surge has changed into quiet duration.)1
When shouting becomes a strategy for being noticed and thus for being, all other measures must have failed. That is, if we - but how could we otherwise -, accept that in our existence there is a need for the other. However, even shouting, as Michel Seuphor wrote, can be unheard. Cries then lodge themselves into our inner being. They become devouring isolating forces (‘je cesse instantanément d’être’) or compel us to change our ways (‘Le cri rentré est devenu mesure’). But ‘Le cri’ in Seuphor’s analysis is more than just shouting. It is a 1 Michel Seuphor, Le Style et le cri – Quatorze essais sur l’art de ce siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965), p.245. All translations are mine.
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cry born from a desire to share one’s perceptions and convictions. Written in 1965, Michel Seuphor’s remarks should not surprise us. To a modernist critic, the passing of the classic division of the visual arts, the end of the painting supremacy and the waning focus on style must have seemed a ‘déluge.’ Amidst many cries, a sense of direction is difficult. Seuphor writes: ‘Lorsque le cri nous environne de toutes parts, la confusion règne et l’ordre tôt ou tard fera l’appel du pied. Car il est nécessaire que nous nous entendions’ (When we are surrounded by cries, confusion rules. Sooner or later a desire for understanding will introduce itself via an ‘appel du pied.’ For understanding is a necessity).2 According to Seuphor this ‘appel du pied’ resides in the development of a distinctive style. Only style can give voice to those surging desires and differentiate us amidst those pounding cries: ‘Le cri que je pousse me proclame semblable aux autre… mais le style dans lequel je me construis me différence irrévocablement’ (My cries are identical to those of other people. But the style wherein I construct myself differentiates me in an irrevocable manner).3 But apart from the many styles, media, and conceptual stances that characterized the visual arts in the sixties, there was one more development that proved to be an imposing condition. Artists saw themselves confronted with a substantially enlarged audience for art. Instigated by the media and the boosting economy, crowds increasingly found their way to the museum and art gallery. In 1964, Allan Kaprow – acclaimed as artist but definitely underrated as an art critic – pointedly evoked what this could bring about: Artists are faced with an involved public… It is not bent on hating them, and it is better to be loved well than loved to death. … Their job is to place at the disposal of a receptive audience those new thoughts, new words, new stances even, that will enable their work to be better understood. If they do not, the public’s alternative is its old thoughts and attitudes, loaded with stereotypes, hostilities and misunderstanding.4
Artists increasingly faced an anonymous crowd, rather than the ‘usual’ art crowd. Groping in the dark towards its motives for looking at art, and its capacity to understand artistically mediated content, proved for some to be a distressing situation. In the oeuvre of American artist Bruce Nauman, the possibility of failing becomes the site of artistic endeavour: the cry, in its most raw form, a literal ‘appel du pied,’ taken up as a figure of fear. Fear of failing, failing to signify 2 Seuphor, p.261. 3 Seuphor, p.251. 4 Allan Kaprow, ‘The Artist as a Man of the World’, in Allan Kaprow – Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life, ed. by Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993), p.55.
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intentionally, failing to be understood, thus failing to exist. His oeuvre presents itself as an intense preoccupation with the presence of the audience. Not only do we meet an artist performing a self via a suffocating self-control, keeping a tight watch on his intent but also haling the audience to take notice of its possible misunderstanding. How does one relate to this newfound audience? Through which media can an artist reach an intentional stance and meet his own, subjective desire for perseverance and presence? Desire seems to move through the fear of failing, meanwhile highlighting an existential drama filled with isolation and anxiety wherein desire clings to one meagre and controlled sign: a shout in the dark, a stamp of the foot, an illuminated word…
Facing an audience: mistrust Please Pay Attention Please (collage and letraset, 27, 5 x 27,5 in 1973). These are not my words, but they could be. For what they intend to achieve is a perlocutionary effect, you: the audience, paying attention. But why does American artist Bruce Nauman almost beg for our attention? Could it be that we are not paying attention enough, willingly or unwillingly? Nauman’s direct appeal to the audience implies a condition – the condition of a speech-act – that has not received thorough attention within visual art criticism.5 The idea of an implied addressee in the creation act and its consequential effect upon the structure and the identity of the work of art have been at the core of this rejection. But whom does the artist address in his plea for attention? It is of course someone one never really knows. Theorist Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out that we should not understand him as an abstraction: Contemporary literary scholars usually define a listener who is immanent in the work as an all understanding, ideal listener. … This, of course, is neither an empirical listener nor a psychological idea, an image of the listener in the soul of the author. It is an abstract ideological formulation.6
5 In 2003 Janet Kraynak published a preface to the collected writings of and interviews with Bruce Nauman. Her introduction gives a survey of Nauman’s use of language, both written and spoken. The author, however, does not analyze Nauman’s relation to his audience and the consequences this has for his use of media and the nature of his self-presentation. See: Janet Kraynak, ed., Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words – Writings and Interviews (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press, 2003), pp.1-45. 6 This quote comes from the unfinished text Methodology for the Human Sciences, written by Bakhtin just before his death in 1975. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Methodology for the Human Science’, in M. M. Bakhtin. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p.165.
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For Bakhtin such views cannot bring anything new to the work, for it was also dialogically created to answer a picture, an idea in the mind of the artist on the identity of his audience. We argue that for Nauman this presence is stifling, prompting him to shout and whisper at us in one of his sound installations Get Out Of My Mind Get Out Of This Room (audio tape, room, 6 min. loop, 1968), prompting him also to resort to straightforward textual messages to reach his audience. Titles also fulfil this denotative and/or instructive function. A Wax Mold of the knees of Five famous artists [wax impressions of the knees of five famous artists] (7 x 39,7 x 216,5 cm, 1966) is a flat horizontal fibreglass sculpture containing five knee imprints. They are markings showing Nauman’s understanding of the indexical sign as interchangeable, arbitrary, and devoid of content. They no longer seem able to refer to a particular artistic idiom. All the signs, belonging to five different artists, are alike. In 1967 Nauman states: To go and look at it was to try and think whether you liked to look at it, or just how involved you were in looking at art in general; that was not quite enough though, you had to know these other things too.7
‘You had to know these other things too’ reveals Nauman’s desire to signify intentionally. It also shows his mistrust of his audience’s ability or willingness to understand his art. However, if he mistrusts the audience, it is not because of its presence – an artist obviously needs one –, and more: ‘there is a need to present yourself – to present yourself through your work is obviously part of being an artist’ Nauman says.8 He also says: ‘… I mistrust audience participation. That is why I try to make these works as limiting as possible. I can only give so much… It has more to do with me not allowing people to make their own performance out of my art.’9 Nauman mistrusts the audience because it could misunderstand him or narcissistically embody his work turning it into its own performance, its own image, in fact its property, thus ending his desire for presence and perseverance. MAKE ME THINK ME (Fig. 1) and EAT ME FEED ME (oil stick, charcoal, graphite and tape on paper, 112,4 x 161,9 cm, 1990) are like written down shouts, revealing the presence of the audience and its consummating interpretative act. ‘I can only give so much,’ Nauman stated in the above quote. It seems that in the face of the beholder, the ‘act’ art can only act out its own dependency upon this other and testify about his devouring 7 Kraynak, p.106. Originally published as: Joe Raffaele, ‘The Way-Out West: Interviews with Four San Francisco Artists’, ARTnews (1967), pp.39-40 and pp. 75-76. 8 Kraynak, p.326. Originally published as: Jonas Simon, ‘Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman’, Art in America, 76 (1988), pp.140-149 and p.203. 9 Kraynak, p.113. Originally published as: Willoughby Sharp, ‘Nauman Interview’, Arts Magazine, 44 (1970), pp.22-27.
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understanding. No longer is the audience thought of as a posterior condition. It is a presence encountered by the artist’s ‘jaillissement bref,’ prompting him to restrain his desire and need to present himself. But as we shall see, this does not lead to Seuphor’s idea of instantaneous death or inertia. Rather, the returned cry, thrown back upon itself in the creative act due to the imagined encounter with this supposedly (narcissistically) misunderstanding viewer, gives way to an ongoing ‘appel du pied’ as cry gives way to a trope.
Controlled desire Cultural critic Mieke Bal once stated that when we are standing before a work of art, ‘… the question of artistic intention loses its obviousness, for the artist is no longer there to direct our response. He disappears, gives his work over to a public he will not know. What happens after the work has been made is not determinable by artistic will.’10 Artists however do not necessarily like this. The sculpture Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals (neon tubing, frame, 177,8 x 22,9 x 15,2 cm, 1966) incorporates this very idea. Not being present even proves to be a morbid condition. The luminous accentuated contours and skeleton shape highlight death. Only the title reminds us of the absentee. Words in Nauman’s oeuvre, whether written or uttered, are always imperative or denotative. They register the cries need to be, but fail to elaborate further. In a neon light wall sculpture Nauman accentuates the words ‘Run from Fear’ (in yellow light) ‘Fun from Rear’ (in red light) (neon tubing, frame, part 1: 19 x 116,8 x 2,8 cm; part 2: 10,8 x 113 x 2,8 cm, 1972). Instead of running from fear, of being fearful to face his need to present himself, I argue that the artist works through the fear. However, the need for perseverance and presence leads to a restraining control. Video or film, with their undeniable quality of pointing to the real and the technical capacity to introduce duration, register this desire. In LipSync (videotape, black and white, sound, 60 min., 1969) Nauman videotaped his own mouth while saying repetitively the words ‘Lip Sync.’ During the video we see the artist’s lips constantly moving in and out of sync with the audiotape containing the artist’s speech. Linguist Émile Benveniste analysed first person speech. The author writes: ‘Le monologue est un dialogue intériorisé, formulé en langage intérieur, entre un moi locuteur et un moi écouteur’ (Monologue is an interiorized dialogue between an I that speaks and an I that
10 Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities – A Rough Guide (Toronto, London: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p.254.
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hears).11 This split, Benveniste argues, points to a conflict in the self.12 After all, the I that hears has to give meaning to the words uttered by the I that speaks, causing an estrangement and shifts in signification between what is said and heard. This split between the I that speaks and the I that hears within the dialogic monologue can be aligned with Nauman’s appearance in LipSync. Here he wears headphones and listens to the audiotape we are hearing, trying to keep his own speaking in sync with what he hears. However, Nauman does not stop when failing to do so. He actually works through the failure of selfcoincidence. Sometimes the artist’s lips are back into sync with the words, only to lose the synchronization again… In his desire to overcome the alienation wherein consciousness is split and the uttering source is dislodged of its intentional stance, Nauman cuts his words short, only giving voice to his desire to be present and in control. For the artist this also points to the real. In 1989 Christopher Cordes asked Nauman if art making ever became a separate activity. The artist replied: ‘Yes, at different times it has. That’s one of the reasons why words started coming into my work in the first place.’13 However, words – as LipSync shows – also run the risk of getting estranged from their origin. The real then – in the form of Nauman videotaping himself – is inserted as to indicate the very source of these words. It also emphasizes his concern about their proximity to his intent.
Being in the screen The returned and measured cry now only gives voice to an exhausting endeavour: to persevere by self-restraining and constant self-control. Nauman refuses to elaborate and cuts his words short, amputating his desire to be present and smothering wholehearted expression. ‘People die of exposure,’ Nauman inserted in the collage Consummate Mask of Rock (graphite, paper, tape, typewritten text, 100,3 x 49,5 cm, 1975). The cause of this near death lies, as I have argued, with the beholder’s threatening presence and the waning capacity of traditional art media to enforce an unsolicited look. The latter was described by Jacques Lacan as a ‘dompte-regard.’14 It refers to the capacity of painting to make the viewer see in accordance with the perception of the artist. Lacan says: 11 Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), pp.85-86. My translation. 12 Benveniste, p.86. 13 Kraynak, p.367. Originally published as: Christopher Cordes, Bruce Nauman: Prints 19701989, A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Castelli Graphics, Monk Gallery, Chicago: Donald Young Gallery, 1989), pp.22-34. 14 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XI; Les Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), p.100.
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Le peintre, à celui qui doit être devant son tableau, donne quelque chose qui, dans toute une partie, au moins, de la peinture, pourrait se résumer ainsi – Tu veux regarder? Eh bien, vois donc ça! Il donne quelque chose en pâture à l’œil, mais il invite celui auquel le tableau est présenté à déposer là son regard, comme on dépose les armes. … Quelque chose est donné non point tant au regard qu’à l’œil, quelque chose qui comporte abandon, dépôt, du regard. (The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, of the painting, might be summed up thus – You want to see? Well, take a look at this! He gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons.)15
Painting, according to Lacan, possesses the power to relax the eye from the lure of the gaze. The latter is born within ‘le manque constitutif de l’angoisse de la castration’ (the lack that constitutes castration anxiety).16 This lack causes the condition whereby ‘ce que je regarde n’est jamais ce que je veux voir’ (what I look at is never what I wish to see).17 For what I wish to see is dictated by the lure of the gaze. It is the subject sustaining himself in a function of desire. This lure proves to be tiresome for the eye.18 But it is painting, in its ability to tame the gaze, that also proves to Lacan that man knows how to play with the mask; that he is not entirely caught up in the imaginary capture triggered by the luring gaze.19 For man’s desire, Lacan states, is a kind of ‘désir à l’Autre qu’il s’agit, au bout duquel est le donner à voir’ (it is a question of a sort of desire on the part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing).20 It is desire, the need to be desired by the other that makes man manipulate his presence in the screen. The screen, in the visual realm, is both a protective instance and a locus of mediation within the field of the other. According to Lacan this corresponds to the power of painting: ‘En quoi se donner à voir apaise-t-il quelque chose? – sinon en ceci qu’il y a un appétit de l’œil chez celui qui regarde. Cet appétit de l’œil qu’il s’agit de nourrir fait la valeur de charme de la peinture’ (How could this showing 15 Lacan, 1973, p. 93. Translation taken from: Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991). 16 Lacan, 1973, p.70. Translation by Alan Sheridan. 17 Lacan, 1973, p.95. Translation by Alan Sheridan. 18 Lacan, 1973, p.106. Translation by Alan Sheridan. 19 Lacan, 1973, p.99. Translation by Alan Sheridan. 20 Lacan, 1973, p.105. Translation by Alan Sheridan.
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satisfy something, if there is not some appetite of the eye on the part of the person looking? This appetite of the eye that must be fed produces the hypnotic value of painting).21 The alignment of painting with the idea of the screen is interesting. The play with the mask, being that play with one’s own appearance in the screen, is compared by Lacan with what he calls ‘the rain of the brush.’ This is displayed movement; a sovereign act Lacan calls it, wherein the artist gradually lays down his gaze. The beholder is able to follow the painterly gestures, consequently reaching the ‘moment of seeing.’ But Lacan is wary of what he calls expressionism. For here the artist is led by the demands of the gaze. Lacan is of course not looking for those instances wherein the gaze dominates. Therefore he is also wary of the desire of the artist to present himself: ‘On pourrait croire, que, tel l’acteur, le peintre vise au m’as-tu-vu, et désire être regardé. Je ne le crois pas’ (It might be thought that, like the actor, the painter wishes to be looked at. I do not think so).22 However, the need to present oneself is very much a part of Nauman’s desire. He states: ‘some artists need lots, some don’t.’23 But the rain of the brush was no option: ‘It seems to me that painting is not going to get us anywhere, and most sculpture is not going to, either, and art has to go somewhere.’24 Nauman has stated many times that he liked painting, that maybe he would have painted, but did not because ‘you tend to believe that what is shown or, a film is really true – you believe a film, or a photograph, more than a painting.’25 Nauman’s search for this moment of seeing, wherein the viewer understands and is made to see in concordance with the artist’s perception of things, also seems to come from a desire to retain a close proximity between life and art: It also has to do with the confusion about being an artist and being a person, and whether there is a difference between the two. … It seems as though more of my life is concerned with things I care about that I can’t get into my work. It is important to me to be able to get these things into the work so that art isn’t just something I do off in the corner… I want there to be more continuity, going hiking isn’t doing art, but I want
21 Lacan, 1973, p.105. Translation by Alan Sheridan. 22 Lacan, 1973, p.101. Translation by Alan Sheridan. 23 Kraynak, p.326. Originally published as: Jonas Simon, ‘Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman’, Art in America, 76 (1988), pp.140-149 and p.203. 24 Kraynak, p.180. Originally published as: Jan Butterfield, ‘Bruce Nauman: The Center of Yourself’, Arts Magazine, 49 (1975), pp.53-55. 25 Kraynak, pp.105-106.
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the feelings that I have there to be available in the other parts of my life. I don’t want the art to be too narrow.26
In the videos and films we can see how Nauman reaches this concordance between art and his personal desire for a more subjective presence. All the works are performed repetitive actions and, I argue, carry references to painting and sculpture. In Manipulating a Fluorescent Tube (videotape, black and white, sound, 60 min., 1969), the artist manipulates a light tube and holds it close to his body, illuminating certain parts of it. In Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (film, 16 mm, black and white, silent 10 min., 1968), Nauman has laid out the contour of a square in white tape on the floor of his studio. Slowly he balances and walks upon it. In Stamping in the Studio (Fig. 2) the artist is seen walking and running around while stamping his feet, bringing forth a monotonous rhythm. In Walk with Contrapposto (videotape, black and white, sound, 60 min., 1968) he slowly paces up and down while adopting a contrapposto carriage. Light, the square and rhythm are of course characteristics of painting. The contrapposto refers to sculpture. However, Nauman shows the impossibility – or fear – of blending with the light. Indeed, of taking up the brush to create a rain of rhythmically painted gestures. No longer is he willing or able to step into the perimeter of the square. Neither is he able to step away from it. To carry the artist’s anguish, sculpture needs to be made alive. Only through showing us that a symbolical embodying form is no longer an option for him, that it can no longer guarantee his presence, can he meet his desire for perseverance and his need to communicate intentionally. Of course, this is a performance. But it is nonetheless an image of an artist seeking ways to embody his cry, finding this stifling due to an imagined unbelieving or unfit other and being compelled to show himself via a medium – video and film – that proves his existence and positions him as source. Embodied presence is consequently exchanged for the presence of a body in the screen. But this presence incarnates bereavement, alienation, estrangement, and anxiety. For the body of the artist, instead of some other medium, has now become the support on which he will have to rely. It appears both as a burden and a necessity, impossible to sustain, but nevertheless the only option.
26 Kraynak, p.368.
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Fig. 1 - Bruce Nauman, Make Me Think Me, 1994. Graphite and tape on paper, 142 x 97.2 cm Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2006.
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Lacan’s own appearance on screen, in Télévision, provides an insight into this complex concept.27 For here he says: ‘Car il n’y a pas de différence entre la télévision et le public devant lequel je parle depuis longtemps, ce qu’on appelle mon séminaire. Un regard dans les deux cas: à qui je ne m’adresse dans aucun, mais au nom de quoi je parle’ (For there’s no difference between television and the public before whom I’ve spoken for a long time now, a public known as my seminar. A single gaze in both cases: a gaze to which, in neither case do I address myself, but in the name of which I speak). Lacan clearly hints at the fact that we can never really know what is inside the other’s gaze. Or know why they are actually watching and listening. Therefore we will always be in the screen, in the gaze of the viewing other. A locus that remains inapprehensible to us. So the only possibility is to speak in its name, as it always will be an imagined one. For Lacan this meant that his speech and appearance would not, as Shoshana Felman pointed out, address understanding, but that it would pierce the scopic drive by teasing and frustrating. But for Nauman the screen is not the space through which a gaze will be addressed. The artist in fact opts to subvert this ocular site of mediation entirely. For the eye of the viewer is also distrusted. Nauman ruptures the screen by becoming an anti-ocular presence, both targeting and obstructing vision, but also touching and convincing us in ways the ocular never can. His persuasive trope does not start with the image, in fact it starts with sound and rhythm.
Stamping in the studio In Stamping in the Studio Nauman is seen running around, creating a monotonous rhythmic stamping. By turning the camera upside down he takes up an anti-ocular stance, showing us his distrust of the eye. In their thoughts on the ‘ritornello,’ Deleuze and Guattari argue that the rhythmic repetitions of a leitmotiv create expressive intensities. However, a monotonous and metric rhythm, such as a military march, only reproduces itself.28 Nauman’s repetitious stamping claims first stage and lodges itself over time in the ear, body, and mind of the viewer. By repetitively pounding his feet, as in a military march, he ruptures the screen and intensifies our perception of his activity. In fact showing us – via the ear – an intentional subject, persisting in his activity, getting tired, 27 For an extensive analysis of the screen both in Télévision and Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse and Lacan’s own appearance in the screen, see: Shoshana Felman, ‘The Figure in the Screen’, October, 45 (1988), pp.97-108. We follow Felman’s analysis and understanding in our own use of Lacan’s appearance. 28 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), p.382-383.
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Fig. 2 - Bruce Nauman, Stamping in the Studio, 1968. Videotape, black and white, sound, 60 min. © Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
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slowing down, and being in control. If anything, it positions us as what Bakhtin called a ‘superaddressee,’ a kind of witness whose responsive understanding is presumed.29 And Nauman takes us to a level, which he will be sure that we will understand: ‘you can feel that tension, you can feel that foot,’ he says. But what are we witnessing? Is Nauman not positioning us as witnesses of himself becoming bodily self-aware? Saying I am here, but also recording it as proof of his existence as an intentional, conscious, and self-aware subject at the site of creation? Telling us that what is behind the screen is more than an unconscious agency directing the artist at the site of creation, the studio. But what, in fact, control, attention, persistence, and conscious decision are. But the ‘donner à voir’ has become a literal ‘appel du pied’ as cry has become a trope. The artist’s desire for perseverance, presence, and understanding is hereby restricted and clings to a single sign, a pounding stamp, an echoing cry. Self-presentation cuts through time and through the unceasing expansion and amplification or the return to established media. If anything, the artists’ self-presentation during and after the sixties, asks – more than before – to be considered within the crisis of signification surrounding the visual arts. Our culture has shown the most intense desire to think the author gone, I feel that in fact he has never been more present, showing him or herself as a trope or agent in the multimedia œuvre.
29 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of the Text’, M. M. Bakhtin. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p.126.
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Bibliography Bal, Mieke, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities – A Rough Guide (Toronto, London: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘The Problem of the Text’, in M. M. Bakhtin. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). ——, ‘Methodology for the Human Science’, in M. M. Bakhtin. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, mille plateaux (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980). Felman, Shoshana, ‘The Figure in the Screen’, October, 45 (1988), pp.97-108. Kelley, Jeff, ed., Allan Kaprow – Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993). Kraynak, Janet, ed., Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words – Writings and Interviews (Cambridge: Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press, 2003). Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire, livre XI; Les Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973). ——, Télévision (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974). ——, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. by Alan Sheeridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991). Seuphor, Michel, Le Style et le cri – Quatorze essais sur l’art de ce siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965).
There Was Something about Mary: Mary Pickford’s Perfect ‘Little American’ Anke Brouwers (University of Antwerp – Fund for Scientific Research) During the silent feature film era (c. 1914-1928), Mary Pickford was the most famous movie star in the world. Dubbed ‘Our Mary,’ ‘Little Mary,’ and ‘America’s Sweetheart,’ Pickford’s public persona was that of the child-woman, a young girl on the verge of adulthood who represented and defended America’s most cherished ideals: equality, liberty, morality, and patriotism. The star’s persona was a consciously self-made image and celebrated the Protestant ideal of self-sufficiency and individualism, but it was equally an image shaped and polished by the movie-going audience and therefore also democratic at heart. Pickford’s public self offered a figure of consensus, neutralizing the ambiguities inherent in the American experiment (individual/community; freedom/restriction; nature/ culture), and proof of the possibility of a straightforward and wholesome ‘Americanness.’ If we consider Lévi-Strauss’ notion of the reconciliatory function of myths, it is no surprise to find how Pickford’s self-image was mythologized and became in many ways the guiding light in America’s search for self-definition.
1. ‘Be an American!’ In 1919 Mary Pickford appeared in a promotional film for the buying of war stamps to help pay for the costs of World War I. Mary is in her little girl costume, in a white frock and with her golden curls beautifully coiffed, as she is writing on a blackboard the words: ‘Be an American, help Uncle Sam pay for the war. The fighting is over but the paying aint.’ Mary’s attention is called by someone off-screen and she sheepishly adds ‘not’ to her message. She is again prompted to change the message and she now replaces ‘ain’t’ by ‘is.’ The image dissolves and now we see Mary writing: ‘Buy war saving stamp!’ The apparent authority figure off-screen again calls her attention and she dutifully adds a little ‘s.’ Mary then smiles sweetly to the camera, and makes a polite little bow. In 1919, after the smash successes of Tess of the Storm Country (1914), The Poor Little Rich Girl (1916), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Pickford was a powerful star. She was about to found her own studio, United Artists, with Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and David W. Griffith, to ensure greater control (and winnings) over her films. Despite her apparent problems with grammar and her obedient smiles, Pickford was an extremely intelligent business woman, unquestionably the most powerful woman in Hollywood and, contrary to appearances, a seasoned player in the industry. Nevertheless, the sweet girl in this short piece of war propaganda was the living example of what American soldiers had been fighting for. The choice of
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Pickford as token ‘little American’ was quite deliberate and revealing of her status and fame. The Pickford character was, as film historian Kevin Brownlow describes it, ‘the ideal American girl’: she was ‘extremely attractive, warmhearted, generous, funny – but independent and fiery – tempered when the occasion demands.’1 I would add to the description Pickford’s peculiar and contradictory mix of both innocence and budding sexuality, of gentleness and firmness, of fragility and competence, of naiveté and precocity, of girlishness and tomboyish-ness, of something typically American and a more universal appeal, all in all a little old-fashioned but a modern girl nonetheless. These seeming incompatible traits had formed in Mary Pickford, the star in both public and private life, a quite logical and non-paradoxical self. This conception of Mary Pickford was not new. As early as 1916 a promotional poster for Paramount had appeared in which Mary Pickford’s most famous roles were depicted in small photographs. The poster reveals that Pickford was not at all limited to playing the part of a little girl but, more significantly, that she was extremely versatile and able to play a Dutch, Japanese, or Italian girl; a young girl, an adolescent, or a grown woman; a poor harlot, a peasant, or poor little rich girl, and despite this ontological diversity still be appointed the straightforward title of ‘America’s Sweetheart.’2 Indeed, Pickford was in many ways the complete package: multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan, at home in all kinds of homes, whether they be rich or poor, and it was exactly this diversity, this ease with which she occupied radically different selves that made her the more ‘American’ for it. For this paper I will look into what exactly constituted the ‘Americanness’ of ‘America’s Sweetheart’ – Pickford was an immigrant Canadian – and attempt to explain what made her so beloved. (In the rest of the world Mary was conveniently dubbed ‘Sweetheart of the World,’ but Pickford’s extreme patriotism would not let us forget that she was America’s first.) I have suggested above, paradoxically perhaps, that it was Pickford’s diversity, her ‘in betweenness’ that made her more easily understood as being essentially American. As an actress it was part of Pickford’s profession to create new selves for each new role, and to keep those aspects or traits that suited her. This project of perfection made her an active partaker of that Franklinesque personal quest to become a representative American, to become, in D. H. Lawrence’s more skeptical phrasing, that ‘dummy American.’3 In this ongoing selection of po1 Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Colombus Books, 1989), p.11. 2 The films advertised were: The Foundling (1915), Rags (1915), Madame Butterfly (1915), Hulda from Holland (1916), Poor Little Peppina (1916), Hearts Adrift (1914) A Good Little Devil (1914), Tess of the Storm Country (1912), all Famous Players Productions. 3 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in American Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), p.15.
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tential selves, the actor was able to suspend the necessity of actual choice, or even to make it superfluous altogether. He or she could simply embrace different personal characteristics or ‘personalities’ at different times. As the poster with the different faces of Mary shows, the ‘real’ Mary at the center, America’s Sweetheart did not have to choose one single culture or set of values. She managed that mythical ‘cosmopolitan blending of a hundred peoples into one.’4 I want to argue here that the Pickford character tapped into existing cultural myths and that she became part of, an icon of, American mythology. Her mediating position made her well-suited for the job: she appeared to be in perfect harmony with both past ideals and present ideas, a recognizable, approachable, and imitable figure, simultaneously ‘just like everybody else’ and yet extraordinarily exceptional. She was both representative and unique. Like other popular mythological figures – that of the hunter, of the man who knows Indians or the reluctant hero, all peripheral figures balancing between community and individualism, civilization and primitivism – Pickford’s standard role or persona of the ‘growing girl’ (John Tibbetss’ term) was an iconic figure similarly mediating America’s ideological tensions. The particular shape of her career, the interplay between her public and private self made her the perfect mascot for America’s most cherished, if often ambiguously conceived, ideals such as equality, democracy, liberty, and morality.
2. ‘Contain multitudes’: Pickford and myths Walt Whitman’s famous lines from Song of Myself, ‘Do I contradict myself? /Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes),’ illustrate the poet’s conception of himself as beyond straightforward and binary categorization. In the context of classical American cinema from the sound film onward, Robert B. Ray has argued that Hollywood employs thematic and formal paradigms to hide that film is a highly decision-based medium and to neutralize thematic contradictions or incompatibilities.5 Ray invokes the work of Lévi-Strauss who argued that myths worked out contradictions in social life into symbolic terms and who stressed the reconciliatory function of myths. Ray notes that ‘by discouraging commitment to any single set of values, this mythology fostered an ideology of improvisation, individualism, and ad hoc solutions for problems depicted as crises.’6 However, Ray adds, in the refusal
4 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land. The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.3. 5 Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985). 6 Ray, p.63.
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to choose between binary oppositions or an array of choices (e.g. ‘selves’) American mythology ‘goes beyond the reconciliatory function attributed by Lévi-Strauss’ in that ‘[…] it systematically mythologized the certainty of being able to do so.’7 For Ray it was not until the talkies (from c. 1928) that film developed its most potent means to propagate this mythology of reconciliation. (He specifies sound and external factors such as World War II and the Depression as key factors in the systematization of this myth.) I would argue that silent film was already an operative medium for the distribution of the American myth, even if it was done less systematically. According to Paula Marantz Cohen’s observations, silent film was ‘ideal’ for the expression and distribution of American myths. She even ascribes silent film more efficiency and democracy in the dissemination of this mythology than other established arts such as literature and the theatre. Cohen even considers the latter media as ‘derivative’ media, modelled on existing (non-American) traditions and burdened by their dependence on words.8 Moreover, from its earliest days cinema was considered a helpful tool in the assimilation process of immigrants as neither knowledge of the English language nor the ability to read were prerequisites to see and (roughly) understand films dealing with specific American topics or relating the American way of life.9 In this respect, silent film ensured a democratic and wide-ranging distribution of American mythology.10 For Richard Slotkin, myths provide the ‘intelligible mask for the enigma that is called “the national character”.’11 They are created from a ‘mythopoetic imagination,’ a mode of perception that orders the world according to symbolic and poetic frameworks and they perform both ‘a psychological and social activity. Myths are articulated by individual artists and have their effect on the 7 Ray, p.64. 8 Paula Marantz Cohen, Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.12-13. 9 See Robert Sklar, Movie-made America. A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1975) and Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema. 1907-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 10 The truly ‘democratic’ nature of early film reception is under dispute. Academics disagree about the dates, numbers, and the exact gender, class, and race identities of early cinema-goers. Some film historians argue that in the post-nickelodeon years, movie theatre exhibitors developed strategies to lure in a ‘better’ (higher class) audience and consequently cinema became an art form that mixed genteel cultural practices with mass entertainment. Surely, film reception was mediated by variables but cinema was at least generally considered and propagated as to be able to suspend the difference between lowbrow and highbrow culture. See Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: the Silent Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p.30. 11 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), p.3.
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mind of individual participant, but their function is to reconcile and unite these individualities to a collective identity.’12 The synthesizing, unifying function of myths was similarly stressed by Barthes, who added a notion of the reassuring function of myths in that they smooth over inconsistencies, contradictions, dialectical activity. En passant de l’histoire à la nature, le mythe fait une économie: il abolit la complexité des actes humains, leur donne la simplicité des essences, il supprime toute dialectique, toute remontée au-delà du visible immédiat, il organise un monde sans contradictions parce que sans profondeur, un monde étalé dans l’évidence, il fonde une clarté heureuse, les choses on l’air de signifier toutes seules.13 (Passing from history to nature, myth economizes: it erases the complexity of human actions and imbues them with the simplicity of something essential, it masks all dialectic, all is lifted to the immediately visible, it organizes a world without contradictions because without depth, a world steeped in truth, it creates a happy clarity, things appear to have meaning from themselves.14)
Myths thus create a self-evident world that appears to posses meaning from itself and deny the artifice of cultural expressions. But when can we say something actually works as myth? For Slotkin, something – an image, a narrative, an object, a person – truly functions as myth when a ‘religious response,’ a collective response of ‘total identification’ is evoked.15 The response to myths is thus close to divine worship. As I will show below, the adjectives and expressions used by fans, critics, and admirers alike in describing Pickford reveal such a religious response, something akin to collective worship. Barthes’ structuralist interpretative model explains myths as sign systems of ‘the second degree,’ i.e. they reduce (they ‘bracket’) the original meaning of an image in favour of a new mythical concept.16 Mary Pickford became a myth when a picture of her was no longer just Mary Pickford with the golden curls playing with puppies, but when – as in Barthes’ own example of the saluting black soldier who is transformed into a confirmation of French imperialism – Mary Pickford’s image becomes an authentication of the idea(l) of America itself, of youth, regeneration, individualism, family values, patriotism, and the American dream. 12 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence. My emphasis. 13 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989), p.231. 14 My translation. 15 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, p.8. 16 Barthes, p.199.
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3. Sunshine and shadow: Pickford’s star narrative Critics traditionally tag 1909 as the beginning of the star phenomenon. This is the time when the first ‘names’ appeared as promotional assets and when the knowledge audiences had of a particular actor or actress stretched out into the personal realm. Richard DeCordova explains that ‘[w]ith the emergence of the star the question of the player’s life outside his/her work entered discourse.’17 Slotkin adds that ‘there existed an illusion that the star actually inhabits the fictional world on the screen and his passage from film to film is taken as a kind of biography.’18 To fill in the gaps between two films, or between two ‘biographical chapters,’ threads of the personal narrative of the star’s life were inserted in the overall narrative. Leo Braudy notes the snowball-effect star personae suffer(ed) since snippets from every role and public and private appearance ‘stick’ to the actor, so that his/her image becomes the amalgam of a public and private ‘autobiography.’ Significantly, Slotkin also suggests that ‘the inescapable confusion between actor and role, between “real life” and the fiction made about it, […] mimics the conceptual structure of myth.’19 Stars performed a ‘social function,’ some form of cultural work in that they offered a personality tailored to modern demands.20 The overall feeling of unsettlement characteristic of modernity, the unease over the modern self, could be soothed by the star whose self-assured public and self-promotion provided audiences with ‘models on how to be’ (as Paula Marantz Cohen claims), or like the ideal autobiographical subject models ‘on how to live,’ liberated from social and political theories’ (as Karl Weintraub suggested21). The excessive magnetism to arouse this kind of devoted response was not given all Hollywood actors. Richard Dyer notes that ‘charisma’ was attributed to precisely those stars who directly addressed the ‘specific instabilities, ambiguities, and contradictions in the culture.’22 Dyer illustrates this with the example of Alistair Cooke who offered an explanation for Douglas Fairbanks’ enormous popularity by pointing 17 Richard De Cordova, ‘The Emergence of the Star System in America’, in Stardom. Industry of Desire, ed. by Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1998), pp.17-29 (p.26). 18 Richard Slotkin, Gunfigther Nation. The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), p.243. 19 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p.242. 20 See Jib Fowles, Starstruck. Celebrity Performers and the American Audience (Washington: Smithsonian University Press, 1992). 21 Laura Marcus gives a detailed account of Weintraub’s writings on autobiography in Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp.135-178 (p.171). 22 See Richard Dyer, ‘Charisma’, in Stardom. Industry of Desire, ed. by Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1998), pp.57-59 (p.58).
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out that the Fairbanks-persona answered the pressing question of what constituted the ideal modern American male: in Fairbanks’ case athleticism, optimism, and self-assurance.23 Not only the contemporary state of the American male was under pressure, but women were at the centre of radical changes as well. Similar to Fairbanks, Mary Pickford provided answers for the modern American female. The continuity between the roles Pickford played on screen and the roles she played in her public and private life established and confirmed the notion of Pickford as representative of American womanhood. Pickford liked to present herself as a respectable and ethical woman, balancing her modern ideas with ‘Victorian’ decency. Although her power and money would have been considered highly unwomanly for a Victorian – Pickford’s other nickname as ‘the Bank of America’s Sweetheart’ also stuck – Pickford was a clever and unsentimental negotiator. To counterbalance that aspect of her personality she also promoted an image of the unspoiled and obedient daughter by being chaperoned by her mother, who was officially in charge of the financial aspects of her career. Although there were frequent rumours and articles about her astronomical wages – a newspaper featured a picture of Pickford with the caption ‘this little girl earns 100.000 a year’ – money never stained Pickford’s immaculate image. In 1931 British film critic C.A. Lejeune recalled this reliance on sentiment Pickford’s ‘sagacity of sagacities’ and ‘paradoxically typical of her cold-common-sense, her business surety.’24 Pickford’s modern professionalism, emancipation and consumerism were thus ornamented in oldfashioned morality. She was scandal-free, did not drink or party, donated generously to charity work and orphanages (a most striking symbol of Victorian sentiment), went to bed early and prided herself on a disciplined Protestant work ethic. But of course Mary could be fun too: she fulfilled the demands of the modern heroine, manoeuvering between virtue and vice, never sexually explicit but no prude either. A 1920 article in Photoplay underscored Mary’s mediating trick: ‘She is… a good businesswoman… but she is, nonetheless, just a girl, able to meet other girls on their own footing, able to talk… with… a winsome sort of friendliness, wearing her honors, but wearing them lightly.’25 Surely, Pickford’s career was not exclusively managed by herself. Even though Pickford exercised her individual power whenever she could, her star image was partly constructed by the studio’s she worked for (most notably 23 See Douglas Fairbanks, Laugh and Live (New York: Britton Publishing Company, 1917) and Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade. Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 24 C. A. Lejeune, ‘Mary Pickford’, reprinted in Richard Dyer McCann, The Stars Appear (Metucken, New Jersey, London: The Scarecrow Press, 1992), p.112. 25 Jeanine Basinger, Silent Stars (Hannover, New England: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), p.59. My emphasis.
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Biograph and Artcraft). Her frequent collaborations with screen writer Frances Marion, directors of photography Walter Stradling and Charles Rosher, and directors D. W. Griffith and Marshall Neilan also played a constitutive role. In an interview with Kevin Brownlow, Pickford was quite straightforward: ‘My career was planned, there was never anything accidental about it. It was planned, it was painful, it was purposeful.’26 Yet it was not just from within the industry that her image and career was developed. The construction of Pickford’s star persona is also an example of a, perhaps oxymoronic, ‘democratic individualism.’ Pickford’s persona had been shaped not just by her own work ethic and determination but also by her fans, whose advice was sought through magazines and whose huge following made it possible for Pickford to continue working under her high production values. Paula Marantz Cohen notes: ‘What movie fans seemed to understand was that the stars were constructed personalities – “made” selves in a uniquely American, democratic sense.’27 And Pickford understood this too. In 1925, after two relatively unsuccessful films with grown-up roles (Rosita and Dorothy of Vernon Hall), Pickford placed an advertisement in a magazine to ask what role she should do next. The suggestions that poured in were clear enough: the public wanted more of the little girl and they suggested Pickford play Anne of Green Gables, Alice in Wonderland, or Heidi. So Pickford made Little Annie Rooney (1925) for her next project. Once again she plunged into childhood to start the endless process of growing up again. Pickford, who had always considered herself the ‘servant of the public,’ complied.28
4. ‘Beginnings of ladies’: Pickford and the Child-Woman How did the persona of Pickford as the young child woman function as an American myth? In the nineteenth century children were often portrayed as precociously wise and angelic figures. Their goodness and unearthly wisdom made them unfit for this world and they usually died untimely deaths.29 This romantic conception of the innocent child had found resonance in the poetry of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, who associated children with the new beginning which characterized the American nation and its budding national literature. Children, like the American West and American literature, ‘represented
26 Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Columbus Books, 1989), p.135. 27 Marantz Cohen, pp.154-5. 28 Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, p.132 29 Look for example to Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Beecher, and Horace Bushnell.
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future potential, an optimistic belief in what lay ahead.’30 Of course, the relatively new medium of film was youthful as well and shared these connotations. Pickford’s child roles were still connected with the moral and spiritual sanctity attributed to children in the nineteenth century, which is illustrated by recurring scene of a bedridden little Mary, struck by paralysis (thrice), poisoning, or illness. But Pickford, of course, does not die (few stars ever could) but through stubborn survival becomes an example for other ‘perfect little Americans.’31 Lori Merish has argued that from the 1930s onwards this Victorian child image would be replaced by a ‘commodification of cuteness,’ the child as pure spectacle with fewer explicit ties to the romantic conception of children of the previous century.32 Critics have focused their attention on the problematical fact that Pickford was a grown woman playing a young girl. Gaylyn Studlar sees the Pickford persona as a defenseless sexual object who is denied her own subjectivity and has labelled Pickford the object of ‘a cultural paedophilic gaze.’33 Some male viewers may indeed have enjoyed to see Pickford on film as an antidote to the sexually assertive flapper who was often a source of unease. In this scenario, Pickford perhaps triggered a feeling of nostalgia for a nineteenth-century ideal of womanhood that preferred women innocent and childlike.34 Studlar goes on to argue that women on their part liked Pickford because as a young girl she was still free of social and cultural restraint that comes with female adulthood. In my view, the Pickford persona’s lack of sexual subjectivity seems to invite a rather different response in that ‘Our Mary’ came to be loved ‘cerebrally’ or ‘sacredly.’ Indeed, the ‘divine worship’ associated with myth reveals itself in the frequent comments made by critics and admirers alike. Pickford was not 30 Kathy Merlock-Jackson, Images of Children in American Film. A Sociocultural Analysis. (Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, 1986), p.17. 31 In Little Annie Rooney (William Beaudine, 1925), Annie (Pickford) believes that in order to save both her brother and her lover she will have to sacrifice her own life. After having embraced her role as martyr, Annie is reassured by a surgeon that a blood transfusion will save her lover but not kill her. 32 Lori Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple’, in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp.185-203. 33 Gaylyn Studlar, ‘Oh Doll Divine. Mary Pickford, Masquerade and the Pedophilic Gaze’, in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp.349-373. 34 Studlar, ‘Oh Doll Divine’, pp.361-362. Mary Pickford’s successor at Paramount-Artcraft and look-alike, Mary Miles Minter was actually 14 years old when she played similar roles. Films such as The Innocence of Lizette and A Dream or Two Ago (both Kirkwood, 1916) explicitly thematized and fully exploited Minter’s appearance of both youthful innocence and sexual allure.
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lusted after as, say, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, or even Mae Marsh. Only the suggestion would have been ‘blasphemous,’ as Edward Wagenknecht firmly put it.35 Pickford is described as ‘divine,’ ‘cherubic,’ ‘angelic,’ and ‘clean and decent,’ possessing a ‘Madonna-like exaltation.’ One Photoplay reporter wrote in 1917, ‘[i]f everybody were as pure-minded as she, there would be no sin in the world.’36 Surely, as ‘Our Mary,’ the connection with the saintly and virginal was quite explicit. Alistair Cooke cheekily commented that Pickford was the kind of girl ‘[…] so fragile and winsome that every man wanted her – for his sister.’37 When Pickford appeared (uncredited) as ‘Our Mary of the Shrine’ in Douglas Fairbanks’ The Gaucho (1927), she was indeed the only actress truly suited for the role for ‘[t]here was something heavenly about her.’38 (Her only rival in that department would have been Lilian Gish.) Putting the problematic of an adult woman performing a child aside, Pickford’s status as an icon enforces her mythical power. Pickford’s dynamic personality on and off screen, whose youth, health, and optimism were especially appealing during times of global political turmoil and social, technological, and cultural change could unite a nation in its childish simplicity. As a national icon, it counted as ‘high treason’ to reject or dislike the star.39 Pickford’s optimism also seems to be a product of the progressive impulse and attitude characteristic of the sentimental heroine of popular woman’s fiction by such authors as Marion Harland, Catharine Beecher, Mary J. Holmes, and Louisa May Alcott. These dynamic heroines were different from the meek and weak women glorified by the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’40 and somewhat removed from the ‘freakishly’ radical feminist movement. Fittingly, they represented a consensual ideal of ‘real’ womanhood that has ties with both traditions.41 Most of the Pickford girl roles, The Poor Little Rich Girl (1916), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, The Little Princess (both 1917), M’Liss (1918), Heart O’ The Hills (1919), Pollyanna (1920), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921), 35 Edward Wagenknecht, The Movies in the Age of Innocence (New York: Limelight Editions, 1997), p.139. 36 Studlar, ‘Oh Doll Divine’, p.366. 37 Dyer McCann, p.125. 38 George Eastman House’s curator James Card cited in Wagenknecht, p.142. 39 Poet Vachel Lindsay cited in Wagenknecht, p.141. 40 Barbara Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood: 1800-1860’, American Quarterly, 18 (1966), pp.151-74. 41 See Frances B. Cogan, All-American Girl. The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-NineteenthCentury America (Athens, London: The University of Georgia Press, 1989) and Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction. A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1997) for nuanced discussions of the discourse on ideal womanhood in the nineteenth century.
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Little Annie Rooney (1925), show her as a figure juggling contrasts and tensions. Most striking is the tension between Pickford’s innocence and precocity, her meekness and recklessness, her sweetness and wildness, a tension that is close to what distinguishes the Victorian sacred child from a modern tomboy (and perhaps flapper-to-be). Yet, this ‘tension’ is never strident: the imaginary solution Pickford’s characters and the plots of her films offer are a happy reassurance of the American way of life. The Pickford character was not exclusively concerned with offering consensual solutions to social contradictions. Another ulterior motive for her unruly behaviour is to protect or help others. This reformist streak ties her to a wave of reformist initiatives and activities in the United States of the time but she also stands apart from this tradition because she does not adopt the reformist’s Victorian modus operandi of pedantic didacticism and meddling in achieving their philanthropic goals.42 We find examples of her characters’ helping nature in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm where she tries to uplift and accommodate a poor family, in Poor Little Rich Girl she protects the good name of her mother, in Tess of The Storm Country she pretends to be the mother of a bastard child to protect its upper class mother, and in Heart O’ the Hills she has the economic survival of the community in at heart. Despite Rebecca’s naughty behaviour, she is essentially more moral – more loving, forgiving, and charitable – than her aunt. As Gwendolyn (Poor Little Rich Girl), Pickford pulls tails and ruins dresses of girls who mock her mother’s social outgoing nature. As young Mavis Hawn (Heart ‘O the Hills) Pickford may not shun occasional violence or aggressiveness but really only wants to protect her community and create a surrogate family for herself. As Tess (Tess of the Storm Country) she baptizes a dying bastard child herself when the priest refuses to perform the act. For one higher purpose or other Pickford starts fights, carries guns, breaks into houses, robs a stagecoach, swears like a drunkard, ties up the town’s sheriff, objects to religious hypocrisy, and generally bends the rules of female propriety. Without compromising her sense of morality and compassion, the American woman as portrayed by Pickford had toughened up. The Pickford persona offered a mythical world with a wide-open future, an America that was still in the process of becoming, of developing towards that promised perfect nation of opportunity, potential, and progress. Pickford’s child-woman was a transitional figure connecting the past to the present and, in the mediating process of growing up, moving towards the future. 42 Reformers appear in several silent films of the period such as The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912), The New York Hat (1912, D.W. Griffith), Regeneration (1915, Raoul Walsh), Intolerance (1916), A Dream or Two Ago (1916, James Kirkwood), Hell’s Hinges (1916, Charles Swickard), Easy Street (1917, Charlie Chaplin), Daddy-Long-Legs (1919, Marshall Neilan), It (1927, Clarence Badger), among many others.
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Fig. 1 – Mary Pickford as suffering Japanese Cho-Cho-San in Madame Butterfly (Sidney Olcott, 1915). Photo courtesy Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education.
Fig. 2 – Mary Pickford’s naughty but adorable Rebecca in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Marshall Neilan, 1917). Photo courtesy Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education.
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Bibliography Baym, Nina, Woman’s Fiction. A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1997). Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989). Basinger, Jeannine, Silent Stars (Hannover, New England: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). Bowser, Eileen, The Transformation of Cinema. 1907-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Braudy, Leo, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977). Brownlow, Kevin, Mary Pickford Rediscovered. Rare Pictures of a Hollywood Legend (New York: Henry N. Abrams in association with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1999). ——, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Colombus Books, 1989). Cogan, Frances B., All-American Girl. The Ideal of Real Womanhood in MidNineteenth-Century America (Athens, London: The University of Georgia Press, 1989). De Cordova, Richard, ‘The Emergence of the Star System in America’, in Stardom. Industry of Desire, ed. by Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1998), pp.17-29. Dyer, Richard, ‘Charisma’, in Stardom. Industry of Desire, ed. by Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1998), pp.57-59. Dyer McCann, Richard, The Stars Appear (Metuchen, New Jersey, and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1992). Fairbanks, Douglas, Laugh and Live (New York: Britton Publishing Company, 1917). Fowles, Jib, Starstruck. Celebrity Performers and the American Audience (Washington: Smithsonian University Press, 1992). Higashi, Sumiko, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: the Silent Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Lawrence, D. H., Studies in American Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978). Nash Smith, Henry, Virgin Land. The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999). Marantz Cohen, Paula, Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Marcus, Laura, Auto/biographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). May, Larry, Screening out the Past. The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
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Merish, Lori, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple’, in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp.185-203. Merlock-Jackson, Kathy, Images of Children in American Film. A Sociocultural Analysis (Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, 1986). Pickford, Mary, Sunshine and Shadow (New York: Doubleday, 1955). Ray, Robert B., A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985). Sklar, Robert, Movie-made America. A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). Slotkin, Richard, Regeneration Through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987). ——, Gunfigther Nation. The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America) (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). Studlar, Gaylyn This Mad Masquerade. Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). ——, ‘Oh Doll Divine. Mary Pickford, Masquerade and the Pedophilic Gaze’, in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp.349373. Tibbets, John C., ‘Mary Pickford and the American “Growing Girl”’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 29 < http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0412/is_2_29/ai_77609480> [accessed 3 May 2005]. Tompkins, Jane, West of Everything. The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Wagenknecht, Edward, The Movies in the Age of Innocence (New York: Limelight Editions, 1997). Welter, Barbara, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood: 1800-1860’, American Quarterly, 18 (1966), pp.151-74.
Paint it Red: Death Artistry as a Portrait of the Self Verena-Susanna Nungesser (Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen) This essay will be dealing with the phenomena of the serial-killer film and understands the term ‘portrait’ in two ways – in a literally and in a figurative sense: The metaphor of ‘killing as an art’/‘art as death-bringing’ already used in a number of literary works reappears in serial-killer films such as the Hannibal-Trilogy (1991-2002), where the connection between killing and art is emphasized as well. Frequently murderers pursue photography, paint, or they collect artworks. Art thereby grants us a look at the protagonist’s character and behaviour: by representing the sensitive, misunderstood side of the murderer that contrasts sharply with the destructive acts of killing and/or by giving clues to the motives of the killer. Both possibilities help to establish the characters as a ‘psychological entity’ through which the recipient can enter worlds of experience. The second understanding of portrait evolves out of forensic insights: following the thesis that killers – sometimes consciously but mostly subconsciously – give away a lot about their personality/identity by their choice of victims, weapons, their method of killing and placing the dead bodies. Consequently, the scene of crime is also a portrait of the killer’s self.
In John Irving’s novel A Son of the Circus (1994), a murderer pursues art on his victims’ bodies by drawing a twinkling elephant on their stomachs. Aware of the well-known metaphor of ‘killing as an art’ or ‘art as death-bringing’ used in a number of literary works,1 Irving inverts this metaphor humorously by letting his character take it a bit too literal. Popular serial-killer films of recent years also make use of the link of death and art – but instead of inverting the metaphor they functionalize it to establish characters as ‘psychological entities.’2 The killer’s affinity to art or certain artworks grants us a look at the protagonist’s character and behaviour: by transmitting the sensitive and misunderstood side of the murderer that contrasts sharply with the destructive act of killing and/or by giving clues to the intentions and motives of the killer. The recurring reference to the murderer that pursues photography, paints, or collects artworks in contemporary films is far from being accidental. The 1990s mark the shift from the minimally drawn to the highly complex serial-
1 We just have to think of Edgar Allan Poe (‘The Oval Portrait’), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), Max Frisch (Blaubart), John Fowles (The Collector), or Kurt Vonnegut (Bluebeard: A Novel). 2 Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, Grundkurs anglistisch-amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Klett, 2001), p.95.
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killer.3 Bound to that development is also a change of the killer’s counterpart, the investigator.4 Unlike Sherlock Holmes or Auguste Dupin, today’s fictitious detectives or police officers represent no longer the ‘absolute principle’ of a rationalistic society.5 Much more they are in the same position as the recipient – they have to read and interpret but they also need the ability to set themselves into the same position as the criminal to understand. The process of reading and the investigator’s empathy lead to the second notion of ‘portrait’ referred to in this essay. It evolves out of forensic insights, following the thesis that killers – sometimes consciously but mostly subconsciously – give away a lot about their personality and identity by their choice of victims, weapons, their methods of killing and placing the dead bodies. Consequently, the scene of the crime is also a portrait of the killer’s self that has to be interpreted.6 Literature and the mass media both ‘represent our civilization’ and they function as ‘instrument[s] of exploration’ fulfilling ‘anthropological needs.’7 The major success of the serial-killer film in particular seems to correspond with the recipient’s wish to encounter worlds of experience that fiction allows him to enter. Together with the profiler8 the viewer delves into an unknown territory and transgresses borders someone else, the criminal, has crossed before. The process of watching the film, following the action, interpreting the information about the case and apprehending the perpetrator’s motivation links the recipient to the investigator. Accompanying the profiler in solving the puz3 Parallel to the psychological approach that often makes use of high art to gain insight into the killer’s mind (e.g. Se7en, David Fincher, USA 1995; Kiss the Girls, Gary Fleder, USA 1997; The Wisdom of Crocodiles, Po-Chih Leong, GB 1998) there was a media-critical one. After the more or less ignored Peeping Tom (Mike Powell, GB 1960) John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (USA 1986) started off a series of films reflecting about the link of death/ crime and the media. Further examples are Dominic Sena’s Kalifornia (USA 1993), Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (USA 1994, based on Quentin Tarantino’s script), and Jon Amiel’s Copy Cat (USA 1995). 4 With respect to The Silence of the Lambs, the film vital for the described alteration, Maggie Kilgour talks about a ‘doubling of the detective and criminal and their mutual relation to Freudian models’ (Kilgour 1998, p.42) that is of significance for both Harris’ novel and Demme’s adaptation. The relation is even more complex because ‘[b]oth [= investigator and criminal] are detective and analyst and also patient under analysis. Both are interpreters, each reading the other for clues to the secret knowledge they desire’ (Kilgour 1998, p.42). 5 Siegfried Kracauer, Der Detektiv-Roman: Ein philosophisches Traktat (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), p.54. 6 Cf. the book by Europe’s leading forensic Thomas Müller (2004). 7 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Towards a Literary Anthropology’, in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. by Ralph Cohen (New York/London: Routledge, 1989), pp.208-228 (p.210). 8 Since the enormous success of The Silence of the Lambs numerous TV-Series were created that focus on the work of forensic scientists (e.g. Profiler; the various CSI-formats; Crossing Jordan).
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zle of the crime and gaining an insight into the criminal’s mind fascinates and tempts more than ever before. This becomes clear, when one recalls the film that incorporates all these elements more than any other up to the 1990s and which signifies the paradigm shift. Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (USA 1991) marks both the development of a mad murderer to a highly complex killer and the change of a police-officer to a psychologically trained profiler. In contrast to Michael Mann’s low-budget film Manhunter (USA 1986), an earlier – less recognized – adaptation of the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, Demme’s realization of Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs was produced by a big Hollywood-studio and starred popular actress Jodie Foster. She plays Clarice Starling, a young FBI-trainee with whom the viewer can identify and sympathize – presumably, more than with the established profiler Will Graham in Manhunter. But Clarice is not just an apprentice, she is also a woman.9 Hannibal Lecter, Starling is instructed to interview, directly sees through the FBI’s intentions: on the one hand Jack Crawford’s female protégé is the first woman he and the other inmates of the Baltimore asylum have seen in years, on the other hand she reminds him of the fact that the victims of the current series of killings are young women, too. Depicting a young female investigator in spe as a counterpart of a sophisticated serial-killer not only foregrounds the complex and hybrid structure of The Silence of the Lambs.10 It also offers the opportunity to see through the eyes of an eager novice the world of forensic science and profiling. This unknown territory fascinates the viewer as much as the female protagonist. In the following I will analyse the parallels of the method of investigation and the act of watching the investigation. I will do this by a close viewing of the films that form the Hannibal-trilogy (1991-2002).11 By taking into account the relation of murder and art, based on the conceptions of ‘portrait’ described above, I will link the method of close viewing to the investigative look of the profiler mirroring the process of reception. Nevertheless, it has 9 Taubin calls The Silence of the Lambs ‘a profoundly feminist movie’ (Taubin 1993, p.129) and Kilgour regards Starling ‘a new type of woman and part of a current vogue for female detectives… battling not only against the killer of women but against the feudal sexism that still haunts the system’ (Kilgour 1998, p.45). Nevertheless, up to now Clarice Starling is the one and only popular female investigator of a film that was not only successful at the box-office but also with the critics. 10 Among other genres it can be regarded as a story of initiation or novel/film of development with both, Lecter and Crawford taking over the role of the fatherly mentor. 11 This article refers to the films according to the novels’s chronology and not with respect to the release of the adaptations. The analyses concentrates on the films starring Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter – consequently the already mentioned Red Dragon-realisation by Michael Mann (Manhunter, USA 1986) will not be interpreted. A further reason for this decision is the fact that Mann’s film excludes the relation of art and murder dealt with in the novel.
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to be considered that in contrast to earlier so-called ‘Whodunits’12 the recipient does not only follow the investigator’s perspective but also the one of the criminal. In our case, most of all Dr. Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lecter, the cultivated and sophisticated murderer, who draws pictures and works as a curator in Florence in the third part of the Hannibal-trilogy. Furthermore, ‘ToothFairy’ Francis Dollarhyde who identifies himself with the famous painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun by the ingenious William Blake13 referred to in the title of the first part and ‘Buffalo Bill’ Jame Gumb from The Silence of the Lambs, who expresses himself through surrealistic symbolism.14
Red Dragon (2002) Hannibal Lecter, Francis Dollarhyde, and Jame Gumb deliver multi-faceted insights into the relation of murder and art. Most obviously, in the first part Red Dragon, in which the title-giving painting by William Blake, serves the killer as a means of identity or better as a symbol of transformation. As a child Francis Dollarhyde suffered from a hare-lip and was treated badly by his grandmother who raised him.15 The viewers get to know this through voices speaking from the off and through Dollarhyde’s diary – a mixture of entries about the past, drawings, and newspaper cuttings. The great red dragon, dealt with in the diary as well, represents strength for the physically and psychologically harmed man. An operation enables Francis to speak properly. His daily work-out and the tattoo on his back showing the red dragon make Francis feel powerful. But the red dragon seems to ask for something in return for his support. It seems to talk to Francis, claiming victims. In two consecutive full-moon nights Francis
12 The most prominent examples are the fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie and their adaptations that focus on the investigation of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, Hercule Poirot, or Miss Marple and her partner Mr. Stringer. 13 William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun (1806-1809; Watercolor 34.3 x 42 cm Brooklyn Museum, New York): . 14 Cf. Jürgen Müller, ‘Le chien américain ist ein Falter’, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (7 March 2001), p.61. 15 Like The Silence of the Lambs Red Dragon also refers to Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho (USA 1960) as well as the real case of the serial-killer Ed Gain. The relationship to the (surrogate) mother is of importance for both, the real murderer Gain as much as for characters inspired by his case (Norman Bates, Francis Dollarhyde, and Jame Gumb).
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kills two families. He proceeds in the same manner and establishes a ritual.16 Therefore the tabloid press gives him the nick-name ‘Tooth Fairy.’ After viewing the families on their home-made videos at work, Dollarhyde observes the families themselves. At night he breaks into their houses and destroys all mirrors. Then he kills the children, the husbands and finally the wives after putting pieces of mirror into his victims’ eyes. After studying the crime scene FBI-profiler Will Graham utters the thesis that the mirrors in the houses have been destroyed because the murderer still feels somehow disfigured. However, he has set the pieces of the looking-glass into his victims’ eyes in order to have the impression of being watched. He longs for having an audience while acting god-like, for having witnesses of his transformation into the mighty red dragon. When the dragon expects Dollarhyde to kill his blind colleague Reba McClane, who he is in love with, he travels to the Brooklyn Museum (New York) where the original of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun is kept. Hoping to take away the power the image has on him, Dollarhyde tears the picture into pieces and literally eats it. After that he makes Reba believe that he commits suicide, sets his house on fire and flees to the island, where the responsible FBI-agent Will Graham and his family live. Dollarhyde’s attempt to kill the Grahams fails. He dies, while his great idol Hannibal Lecter, who gave him the Grahams’ address, is still alive at the Baltimore asylum.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991) In the second and most popular part of Harris’ Hannibal-trilogy, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ dominates the action. Although once again in search of another serial-killer, this time the young FBI-trainee Clarice Starling interviews the former psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter to get information of how to catch ‘Buffalo Bill,’ a man who skins his female victims. At first sight, Lecter and the suspected murderer Jame Gumb, who used to be his patient years ago, seem to establish a binary opposition: Lecter is regarded as ‘rich, wise, clever, helpful, and funny,’ while Jame Gumb is seen as ‘working-class, stupid, dense, and dull.’17 The basic idea that there is a crucial difference between the two characters Lecter and Gumb is obvious. But there are links between the sophisticated cannibal in custody and the white-trash murderer still free. Both are influenced by art. But while 16 The responsible FBI-agent Graham calls up the connection of death and art by stating ‘He signifies his work.’ 17 Janet Staiger, ‘Taboos and Totems: Cultural Meanings of The Silence of the Lamb’, in Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception, ed. by Janet Staigner (New York, London: New York University Press, 2000), pp.161-178 (p.164).
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Lecter carefully keeps up his image of the cultivated murderer with good taste, ‘Buffalo Bill’’s/Jame Gumb’s link to art is less explicit. Lecter loves to listen to classic music, he reads high literature and he pursues art. His cell is filled with etchings that enable him the view, he cannot have otherwise. And as soon as he gets to know agent Starling, Lecter draws her, too.18 The cocoon of the death’s head moth (also known as Acherontea Styx) ‘Buffalo Bill’ places into the throats of his female victims before putting their bodies into water provides an insight into this killer’s psyche. The development from larva to pupa and finally to moth mirrors Gumb’s longing for transformation. He kills and skins women to make himself a dress, to alter himself on the ‘outside’ after he was denied an operation for a sex reversal.19 The destruction and radicalism of his desire to become a different person of a different sex is expressed through the death’s head-moth. This insect becomes the image to represent the horrors of The Silence of the Lambs and the development of its protagonist Clarice Starling. The impressive symbolism of the moth has its roots in nature and in art – most prominent in surrealism: The skeleton head of the butterfly looks as if it is formed out of female nude bodies. This idea was realized in the famous photograph In Voluptate Mors (1951) by Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsmann,20 which again refers back
18 The intimate talks of the two are always held with a strong barrier between them: the first three times Starling visits Lecter in his Baltimore asylum, the fourth meeting takes place in a provisory cell in Memphis. Before parting they touch through the bars. The tender touch of their fingers and the handing over of Lecter’s drawings in this final meeting is a sign for the special relationship they have – even though it is ironically commented by Lecter as: ‘How attentive … they will say, we’re in love’ – The relation of Lecter and Starling is less an amorous one than the one of mentor and protégé in combination with substituting a beloved person – while Lecter helps Starling to overcome the traumatic loss of her father who got killed in duty, Starling becomes a kind of stand-in for Lecter’s sister who died early. The latter is not made explicit in the films but in Thomas Harris’ novels (in particular Hannibal). Nevertheless, Lecter ‘protects’ Starling throughout the series (e.g. by supporting her aims and by killing the men that treat her bad: e.g. Miggs, Chilton, and Krendler). 19 After the release of The Silence of the Lambs there was a debate whether homosexuality was presented in a stereotypical and/or disrespectful manner and in how far sexual otherness was defamed (Cf. Staiger 2000). Even though the film may risk portraying Jame Gumb in a less psychological way than the other criminals of the trilogy, it is remarkable that The Silence of the Lambs is the first successful serial-killer film that addresses the issue of homo- and transsexuality (in contrast to films such as Psycho or Dressed to Kill, Brian de Palma, USA 1980). At the same time critics oversee Clarice Starling’s remark that transsexuals are not known for being violent and that Gumb’s former psychiatrist Dr. Lecter states that ‘Buffalo Bill’ is not a real transsexual. Much more he believes and tries to be one – a fact that is supported by his stereotypical behaviour. 20 .
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to the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt and his painting The Hireling Shepherd (1851/52),21 where inside the hand of the shepherd is a death’s head-moth, which symbolizes the threats endangering the idyllic scene in nature.22 Another surrealistic photograph by Salvador Dali links Lecter and Gumb with their common ‘friend’ Benjamin Raspeil: while Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs claims that Raspeil was killed by Jame Gumb, Red Dragon and Hannibal disclose that the untalented musician Raspeil was killed and cooked by Lecter, who wanted to free the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and its audience from further less delightful performances. In their first talk in The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter tells Clarice Starling through a riddle where to find the remains of ‘Ms Hester Mofet.’ This pun23 and the way Benjamin Raspeil’s remains are kept in the Baltimore storage facility include hints on ‘Buffalo Bill’ and what drives him. After removing the American flag, Starling discovers a car which contains dressed display dummies and the preserved head of Gumb’s former lover Raspeil. While the head of Raspeil possesses the future trademark and the symbol for the killer’s longing for transformation, the death’s head moth, the car refers back to Dali’s The Rainy Taxi (1938).24 It seems that Lecter was and is indeed a talented psychiatrist able to copy the pattern of another serial-killer and to combine it with his own behaviour. His playful way of flirting with this talent becomes obvious in his references to art: aware of the death’s head moth symbolism and its link to surrealism he surrounds the moth hidden inside Raspeil’s head by a more explicit allusion to surrealism by the way he decorates the room of the storage facility. Like the dream-like images of surrealism, the room also incorporates beautiful and disturbing elements that form a unique unity. Thus, the discovery of Benjamin Raspeil’s head can unfold the intended effect on Starling and the viewer which could best be described as ‘uncanny,’ or even ‘sublime.’ A familiar but at the same time strange aesthetic and atmosphere are created. Although Starling – and with her the recipient – search for the hint promised by Lecter, the actual detection of the preserved head in the darkness of the car marks a moment of both shock and relief: shock because of the confrontation with 21 William Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd (1851-52; Oil on canvas 30 1/16 x 43 1/8; Manchester City Art Galleries): . 22 Cf. J. Müller, p.61. A phenomenon of nature is transformed into art. So, the symbolism of the death’s head moth gets a further twist by uniting the nature-art-dichotomy on the one hand and by referring intermedially to a landscape-painting on the other hand. 23 The anagram ‘Hester Mofet’ stands for ‘the rest of me.’ 24 .
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death, murder, and decapitation; relief because Starling has passed Lector’s test successfully and without being harmed.25
Hannibal (2001) After his successful escape from jail, Lecter settles at the place that already served as his view in his Baltimore cell. Some time after drawing the Dome Santa Maria del Fiore, he moves to Florence and makes use of his knowledge of art and art-history to make a living. The Italian architecture, the plazas, and the sculptures at every corner in combination with John Mathieson’s camerawork establish an exceptional atmosphere dominated by the art and culture of ‘old Europe.’ Therefore, the setting already foregrounds the importance of art. The action stresses this even more: after the mysterious disappearance of the curator of Florence’s famous art-museum Lecter takes over the job at the Ufficii. The psychiatrist Dr. Lecter becomes the art-historian Dr. Fell – but his presentations offer clues to his true nature. In one of his lectures he talks about death-scenarios in art, warning the police-officer Rinaldo Pazzi to take action against him. But Pazzi ignores the words from Lecter (‘greed, hanging, self-destruction’) as well as the warning from his American FBI-colleague Clarice Starling. Pazzi wants the reward for catching Lecter, but he has to pay for his eagerness with his life. Lecter kills Pazzi in the same manner one of his ancestors was killed centuries ago. After showing Pazzi an illustration of the hanged Francesco Pazzi, he pushes the police-man over the balcony. Like the Pazzi from the time of the Medici Rinaldo Pazzi hangs high above the nightly Palazzo Vecchio.
Killing for killing’s sake – the special case of Dr. Lecter These examples are just a few illustrating the death artistry of the three serialkillers of the Hannibal-trilogy. There are further references in the films as well as in the novels by Thomas Harris. As stated at the beginning of my essay the link of art and death fulfils certain functions. The longing for transformation expressed through art or particular artworks supplies an insight into the complex psyche of Francis Dollarhyde and Jame Gumb: while Dollarhyde tries to overcome a traumatized childhood, Gumb attempts to realize what others 25 The genre repetitively makes use of elements characteristic for gothic- and horror-fiction. The most obvious references to the gothic tradition in The Silence of the Lambs are the gloomy settings such as the cellar of Gumb’s house and the dungeon-like asylum, the characters (Lecter as a gothic villain, Starling as a maiden-in-distress), and the plot (initiation, transgression, taboos).
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refused him.26 Hannibal Lecter’s connection to art is of a different kind: it enables him to set himself off against ordinary serial-killers by consciously bringing in aspects of his self. Lecter’s choice of victims and the deeds themselves express his freethinking. Every act of killing is a sophisticated statement – to quote Agent Starling: ‘he kills to express his contempt or in the belief to do public a service.’27 Lecter more or less regards himself to be a rebellious hero who frees himself of social norms and the opinions of society in a series of what Nietzsche called a ‘Personalhandlung,’ Gide considered to be an ‘acte gratuit’ or Sartre meant by the ‘acte de liberté.’28 Hence, Hannibal’s actions deny moral and law and express his strong longing for individualism, transcendence, and autonomy. To emphasize his unique status he refers to exquisite ways of expression such as chamber music, nouvelle cuisine, and art. Particular artworks inspire the way he kills or the way the hiding place of the dead body is decorated. So, on the one hand he wants to be different, on the other this enables him to play with both, his victims as well as with the guardians of the law. The guardian he likes to play with the most is Agent Starling. After their first encounters in The Silence of the Lambs described above, Lecter contacts her years later. From Florence he writes her a letter. It contains a drawing of a famous theme in art-history – namely that of the artist and the muse. This image represents Lecter’s understanding of his relationship to Clarice, but it is also a portrait of his self. Obviously, he regards himself as a kind of artist who reformulates the artistic credo l’art pour l’art into killing for killing’s sake. The artist longs for a constant dialogue with the woman who seems to inspire him through her attempts to catch him. Contacting her – he states himself in the letter – is equivalent to his need to return to public. Art consequently not only helps Lecter to articulate his feelings, more importantly it serves him as an inspiration for sophisticated acts of killing that should ensure his big ‘comeback.’ Ergo, Lecter’s self-satisfied series of murders (expressed by the fact that he eats his victims) carries a totally different signature than the compulsive deeds of Dollarhyde and Gumb. While Gumb and Dollarhyde can only hope for a bit of sympathy of the viewer, the character Lecter has become a cult-figure and a bearer of sympa26 Both cases introduced above allude to real cases such as the ones of Ted Bundy, Gary Heidnick or the already mentioned Ed Gein. 27 Lecter’s attitude and his deeds form a constant pattern of behaviour. His victims seem to ‘provoke’ their treatment – for instance Mason Verger, who is presented as a man with a paedophilic inclination or agent Paul Krendler, the man who pesters Clarice Starling sexually and who is also responsible for her being relieved of her duties at the FBI. 28 Cf. Martin Raether, Der acte gratuit: Revolte und Literatur (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1980).
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thy. This fascinating but at the same time shocking fact goes back to the just described attitude towards his deeds. Unlike the two traumatized killers Lecter kills not out of fear but out of lust. He is not driven but he desires. He not only sets himself off from other serial-killers, in living a hedonistic principle beyond restrictions and norms, he also does what we the viewers do not dare, but what we experience indirectly by watching Hannibal ‘The Cannibal.’29
Conclusion I decided to follow a wide understanding of ‘portrait’ and to leave behind more traditional notions such as the ones of nineteenth-century scholars. While these presumably would have dealt with the recurring element of the diary in serialkiller films,30 I chose to analyze the connection of art and murder instead and portrayed three serial-killers who signify their work by developing rituals as much as artists do signify their artworks. Visiting this ‘museum of cruelties’ is a very specific approach, but it helps to touch upon a number of issues that can contribute to analyses of the phenomenon of the serial-killer and the popularity of serial-killer films. The metaphor of the murderer regarding himself as an artist is no longer just a metaphor. It has become a means to transport the growing complexity of the various discourses that get together within serial-killer fiction. Forensic insights have enriched crime-novels and -film and the conception of characters in the genre: both killer and investigator have developed into dynamic ‘psychological entities.’ The recurring link of murder and art forms the leitmotif of Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal. Reformulating an established metaphor of literary tradition served the novels and the adaptations starring Anthony Hopkins to bring together textual and ‘extratextual fields of reference,’31 to reshape already existing discourses and to mediate this to the recipient. By focusing on the motives and the ritualized deeds the evil serial-killer of the
29 One just has to recall the ending of The Silence of the Lambs where Lecter tells Clarice at the phone that he is ‘having a good friend for dinner.’ Even though Lecter just announced the killing and consumption of Dr. Chilton the common reaction of the audience is a satisfied smile. Lecter’s transgression of not one but two taboos is approved of because Chilton ‘deserves’ his treatment. Like children listening to fairy tales, the viewer is not shocked by the brutal act, much more he longs for the punishment of the evil and enjoys the ironic fact that the not less evil punisher can take revenge for years of bad treatment. 30 Cf. recent examples of motion pictures in which the diary of the murderer is of importance: Se7en, The Wisdom of Crocodiles, Identity (James Mangold, USA 2003), and of course Red Dragon. 31 Iser, pp.208-228 (p.216).
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tabloid press and the mad murderer of slasher movies have gained a totally different image. The references to highly symbolic artworks – such as the mighty red dragon or the skull formed out of nude bodies – not only express the longings of fictitious killers inspired by real cases. The direct impact of the pictures’ sublime aesthetic is intensified by the visual effect of filmic representation. Thus, the Hannibal-trilogy and further serial-killer films use art as a medium in its literal sense – as a gateway to worlds of experience and as an extrapolation of the killers’ inside making comprehensible what cannot be understood otherwise.
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Bibliography Hannibal. Dir. Ridley Scott. Universal/ MGM/ Dino de Laurentiis Corporation/ Scott Free. 2001. Irving, John, A Son of the Circus (London: Bloomsbury, 1994). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Towards a Literary Anthropology’, in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. by Ralph Cohen (New York, London: Routledge, 1989), pp.208-228. Jancovich, Mark, ‘Genre and the Audience: Genre Classifications and Cultural Distinctions in the Mediation of The Silence of the Lambs’, in Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, ed. by Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2001), pp.33-45. Kilgour, Maggie, ‘Dr. Frankenstein meets Dr. Freud’, in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), pp.40-53. Kracauer, Siegfried, Der Detektiv-Roman: Ein philosophisches Traktat (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979). Müller, Jürgen, ‘Le chien américain ist ein Falter’, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 March 2001, p.61. Müller, Thomas, Bestie Mensch: Tarnung, Lüge, Strategie (Salzburg: EcoWin, 2004). Nünning, Vera, and Ansgar Nünning, Grundkurs anglistisch-amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Klett, 2001). Raether, Martin, Der acte gratuit: Revolte und Literatur (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1980). Red Dragon. Dir. Brett Ratner. Universal/ Dino de Laurentiis Company/ MGM/ Mikona Productions. 2002. Staiger, Janet, ‘Taboos and Totems: Cultural Meanings of The Silence of the Lamb’, in Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception, ed. by Janet Staigner (New York, London: New York University Press, 2000), pp.161-178. Tasker, Yvonne, The Silence of the Lambs (London: bfi Publishing, 2002). Taubin, Amy, ‘Grabbing the Knife: The Silence of the Lambs and the History of the Serial Killer Movie’, in Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. by Pam Cook and Philip Dodd (London: Scarlet Press, 1993), pp.123-131. The Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Strong Heart Production/ Demme/ Orion. 1991. Theweleit, Klaus, ‘Sirenenschweigen, Polizistengesänge: Zu Jonathan Demmes Das Schweigen der Lämmer’, in Bilder der Gewalt, ed. by Robert Fischer, Peter Sloterdijk, and Klaus Theweleit (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag der Autoren, 1994), pp.35-68.
