Displaced persons : conditions of exile in European culture 9781351943642, 1351943642

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
General Editors’ Preface
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Dispossession or Repositioning?
1 From Sir Orfeo to ‘Schir Orpheus’: Exile, and the Waning of the Middle Ages
2 Spiritual Exile: Translating the Bible from Geneva and Rheims
3 Language, Time and Politics in Shakespeare’s Macbeth
4 ‘Heaven’s Fugitives’: Exile and Nonconformity in the Restoration
5 Bodies in Exile: Egyptian Mummies in the Early Nineteenth Century and their Cultural Implications
6 An Inflexible Exile: Preserving the Self in South-east Europe
7 Atomic Physicists in Exile
8 The Blind Impress of Modernity: American Exile and Modernist Aesthetics in Lorca and Kafka
9 Auden, Exile and Community
10 States of Being not Being in States: Metaphysical Border Crossings in the Work of Milan Kundera
11 Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve: Sexual Transmutation as Psychophysical Exile
12 ‘Nothing of me is mine, not even the body I was given to inhabit’: Gender as a Land of Exile in Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair
13 Paradoxes of Hijrah (Exile): Tales from Algerian Men in Britain
14 The Left Side of Exile: The Dream of Tolerance in Francesca Duranti’s Sogni Mancini
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

DISPLACED PERSONS

Displaced Persons: Conditions of Exile in European Culture

edited by Sharon Ouditt

Studies in European Cultural Transition Volume Fourteen General Editors: Martin Stannard and Greg Walker

O Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2002 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Sharon Ouditt, 2002 Sharon Ouditt has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data Displaced persons : conditions of exile in European culture. - (Studies in European cultural transition) 1.Exiles - Europe - History 2.Exiles in literature I.Ouditt, Sharon 809.9'35'32521 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Displaced persons: conditions of exile in European culture / edited by Sharon Ouditt. p. cm. - (Studies in European cultural transition) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-0511-6 (alk. paper) 1. Exiles in literature. 2. Authors, Exiled. 3. Exiles. 4. Exile (Punishment) I. Ouditt, Sharon II. Series PN56.5.E96 D57 2001 809'.892069 l-d c 2 1 2001041330 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0511-9 (hbk)

Contents General Editors’ Preface Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Dispossession or Repositioning? Sharon Ouditt 1 From Sir Orfeo to ‘Schir Orpheus’: Exile, and the Waning of the Middle Ages Enrico Giaccherini

vii viii xi xii

1

2

Spiritual Exile: Translating the Bible from Geneva and Rheims Lynne Long

11

3

Language, Time and Politics in Shakespeare’s Macbeth Douglas Burnham

21

4

‘Heaven’s Fugitives’: Exile and Nonconformity in the Restoration Michael Davies

33

5

Bodies in Exile: Egyptian Mummies in the Early Nineteenth Century and their Cultural Implications 54 Susan Pearce

6

An Inflexible Exile: Preserving the Self in South-east Europe Andrew Hammond

72

1

Atomic Physicists in Exile Alex Keller

88

8

The Blind Impress of Modernity: American Exile and Modernist Aesthetics in Lorca and Kafka Martin Halliwell

9

Auden, Exile and Community Kathleen Bell

10 States of Being not Being in States: Metaphysical Border Crossings in the Work of Milan Kundera Daniel Cordle

102

115

128

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11 Angela Carter’s The Passion o f New Eve: Sexual Transmutation as Psychophysical Exile Nicoletta Caputo

138

12 ‘Nothing of me is mine, not even the body I was given to inhabit’: Gender as a Land of Exile inPatrick White’s The Twyborn Affair Carla Dente

149

13 Paradoxes of Hijrah (Exile): Talesfrom Algerian Men in Britain Yvette Rocheron

160

14 The Left Side of Exile: The Dream of Tolerance in Francesca Duranti’s Sogni Mancini 170 Marina Spunta Bibliography

181

Index

195

General Editors’ Preface The European dimension of research in the humanities has come into sharp focus over recent years, producing scholarship which ranges across disciplines and national boundaries. This new series provides a major channel for this work and unites the fields of cultural studies and traditional scholarship. It will publish in the areas of European history and literature, art history, archaeology, language and translation studies, political, cultural and gay studies, music, psychology, sociology and philosophy. The emphasis is explicitly European and interdisciplinary, concentrating attention on the relativity of cultural perspectives, with a particular interest in issues of cultural transition. Martin Stannard Greg Walker University o f Leicester

Notes on Contributors Kathleen Bell is a Senior Lecturer in English at De Montfort University. She has previously published on twentieth-century poetry (including W. H. Auden, who was the subject of her doctoral thesis) and has additional research interests in working-class writing and popular fiction. Douglas Burnham is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy at Staffordshire University. He has just published An Introduction to Kant s ‘Critique o f Judgement ’ with Edinburgh University Press, and has also published papers on topics such as post­ modern philosophy and philosophy and literature. Nicoletta Caputo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Florence. Her publications include articles on contemporary English fiction (on Angela Carter, on Martin Amis and on feminist rewritings of history) and a volume on Tudor interludes. She is currently studying the stage history and adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Richard III. Daniel Cordle is a Lecturer in American and English Literature at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science and the Two Cultures Debate, and has published widely on the relationship between literature and science, and postmodern American literature. Michael Davies is a Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester. His teaching and research interests lie in seventeenth-century English literature. His book, entitled Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works o f John Bunyan is forthcoming and, among other projects, he is presently working on literature and liberty of conscience in the Restoration. Carla Dente is Professor of English at the University of Pisa. Her research area is mainly in the field of drama studies and ranges from essays on English and Australian contemporary theatre to essays on Renaissance theatre (mainly Shakespeare). She is the author of a volume on Pinter and of a reading of The Merchant o f Venice based on the study of rhetoric/theory of argumentation, and has edited several collections of essays. Enrico Giaccherini is Professor of English at the University of Pisa (Italy), where he is currently Head of the English Department. A stubborn medievalist, he has published on Chaucer and the Gawain-Poet, Middle English romance, Tolkien and modem fantasy. He has also edited and/or translated into Italian, Pearl, Sir Orfeo and The Awntyrs o ff Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn.

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Martin Halliwell is a Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Leicester. He has published articles and essays on modem American and European literature, intellectual history and literary adaptations. He is the author of Romantic Science and the Experience o f Self (Ashgate, 1999) and Modernism and Morality (Macmillan, 2001). Andrew Hammond teaches at the Swansea Institute of Higher Education, and is pursuing doctoral studies in travel writing at the University of Warwick. He has published previously with ‘Studies in European Cultural Transition’. Alex Keller is University Fellow at Leicester University, having been Senior Lecturer in the History of Science there until 1997. Since publishing The Infancy o f Atomic Physics (Oxford University Press, 1983) he has been teaching courses on the involvement of modem scientific technologies in warfare, primarily atomic weapons. His interest in the Hungarian dimension was awakened by participation in conferences in Budapest in 1994 and 1996. He is presently completing an account of the discovery of nuclear fission. Lynne Long teaches at the University of Warwick in both the Centre for British and Comparative Cultural Studies and the English Department. Her main interests are in translation studies, particularly translating the Bible, and medieval and Renaissance literature. Her book Translating the Bible: From the 7th to the 17th Century will be published by Ashgate, and she is presently working on translations of the plays of Oscar Wilde. Sharon Ouditt is Reader in Modem Literary Studies in the English and Media Studies Department at Nottingham Trent University. She is author of Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (Routledge, 1994), Women Writers o f the First World War: An Annotated Bibliography (Routledge, 2000) and other essays on gender and literature. Susan Pearce is Professor of Museum Studies and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University o f Leicester. She is most recently author of On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (1995); Experiencing Culture in the Western World (1997); Collecting in Contemporary Practice (1998); and The Collector s Voice, Vols 1-4: Selected texts illuminating the history of collecting in Europe, c. 500 b c to the present day (Vols 1-2 Ashgate, 2000; Vols 3-4 forthcoming). Yvette Rocheron is Lecturer in Modem French Studies at the University of Leicester. She has held teaching posts in secondary and higher education in France and Britain. As a sociologist, she has been researching issues related to health and ethnicity in Britain, and has published articles on French television culture, immigration, mixed race families and multiculturalism.

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Marina Spunta lectures in Italian in the School of Modem Languages at the University of Leicester. Her main field of research is contemporary Italian fiction and linguistics. She has published on Antonio Tabucchi, Francesca Duranti and Erri De Luca, and has co-authored Italian language material.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to the contributors to this volume for their time and thoughtfulness, and for their prompt and good-humoured responses to enquiries. Thanks also to the General Editors for their encouragement, and to Erika Gaffney at Ashgate for her cheerful attentiveness.

Introduction Dispossession or Repositioning? Sharon Ouditt This volume of essays, in the series Studies in European Cultural Transition, had its moment of origin in a colloquium on the subject of ‘Exile’, held at Leicester University in 1999. While its final version may appear to be in something of a fallen and exiled state from that originating meeting (that is, fallen into formal essays, and exiled by time), its spirit is nevertheless informed by the papers delivered, and the discussions and debates that accompanied them, whether formal or informal. The subject of exile is perennially topical. We hear almost daily reports of the experiences of refugees, immigrants or exiles through the media, and the situations in Northern Ireland and Israel provide a constant reminder of the contingency of the terms ‘homeland’ or ‘native soil’. On the other hand, the topic has a lengthy historical and mythical dimension: the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the wanderings of Odysseus, the diaspora of the Jews all speak to a fundamental sense of loss, displacement and a desire to regain a paradisaical sense of unity and wholeness, whether spiritual or secular. For many, though, that loss is transformed from the pain of dispossession into an alternative way of seeing. For Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus the ‘silence, exile and cunning’1 of his self-imposed expatriation provides the means to express untrammelled his artistic vision. For Salman Rushdie, the idea of a homeland is intrinsically ‘imaginary’.2 For scholarly emigres such as Edward Said and Julia Kristeva, exile is the necessary condition of the intellectual. Exile, according to Said, is one of the saddest fates.3 Whether an individual, exposed and humiliated for social transgressions, or a member of a tribe or ethnic minority, deracinated for political or economic reasons, the exile is inconsolable nostalgic, bereaved of family and community, forever shadowed by the absence of stability. Yet, once established elsewhere, this experience o f lack may be accompanied by something more. The exile is resistant, uncoopted, aloof from the structures and demands of his or her new residence.4 The exile - and we are talking here specifically of the intellectual exile - is thus in the borderland position of being neither seduced by the comfort of familiarity, nor ensnared by subjugation to 1 James Joyce, A Portrait o f the Artist as a Young Man (1916; reprint London: Granada, 1977), p. 222. 2 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta, in association with Penguin, 1991). 3 Edward W. Said, ‘Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals’, Grand Street, 12/3 (1993), p. 13. 4 Cf. ibid., p. 116.

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civil and political decorum, but free from discomforting loyalties, capable of reflecting, and reflecting in particular on the gaps between cultures. In Said’s view: An intellectual exile is like a shipwrecked person who leams to live in a certain sense with the land, not on it, not like Robinson Crusoe, whose goal is to colonize his little island, but more like Marco Polo, whose sense o f the marvelous never fails him, and who is always a traveler, a provisional guest, not a freeloader, conqueror, or raider.5

The condition of the intellectual exile need not be consequent on the literal event of relocation: it may also, as Said makes clear, be metaphorical. In other words, any intellectual community may be made up of insiders and outsiders: those who feel at ease with the structures they inhabit, and those who are driven by a sense of dislocation, of dissonance.6 Essays in this volume by Martin Halliwell, Nicoletta Caputo, Carla Dente and Marina Spunta reflect on just this sense of dissonance. One is reminded also ofVirgina Woolf’s ‘outsider’, ‘alien and critical’ of her governing culture7 - and also of Julia Kristeva’s thoughts on the inevitability of dissidence in writing: ‘[h]ow can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity? Writing is impossible without some kind of exile.’8 The essays in this volume analyse renditions of exile over centuries and across disciplines. They range from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, and cover English literature, translation studies, cultural history, museum studies, history of science, French cultural studies and Italian literature. The collection begins with the story of a mythical but neverthless unwanted, enforced exile, and ends with exile as little more than an occupational hazard - the conjunction of economics, globalization and personal, political choice. In the process the condition loses its original power dynamic and, from being a form of punishment, becomes imbued with an element of autonomy and an almost utopian degree of optimism. Abdul JanMohamed suggests that we be wary of an all-encompassing use of the term ‘exile’, which tends to be charged emotionally with the plight of the unfortunate individual.9 He identifies four modes of border-crossing that permit distinctions to be made in terms of volition and stance towards the host culture. These are those used by the exile, the immigrant, the colonialist and the scholar. The conditions of the exile and the immigrant are differentiated by the fact that the exile experiences 5 Ibid., p. 121. 6 Ibid., p. 117. 7 Virginia Woolf, A Room o f One s Own (1929; reprint London: Granada, 1977), p. 93. The concept o f the female ‘outsider’ is, o f course, more fully developed in Three Guineas (1938; reprint Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 8 Julie Kristeva, ‘A New Type o f Intellectual: The Dissident’, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 298. 9 Abdul R. JanMohamed, ‘Worldliness-without World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition o f the Specular Border Intellectual’, in Michael Sprinker (ed.), Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 101.

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an unhappy or unwilled rupture with his or her original culture, while the immigrant leaves voluntarily, with the desire to become accepted as a member of the new society. The essays by Lynne Long and Alex Keller reflect these perspectives in interesting combinations. The colonialist and the scholar (or anthropologist, or traveller), according to JanMohamed, are less troubled by any disruption to their subjectivity. The colonialist maintains a steady, objective gaze on the new culture and applies to it his administrative, economic or military skills (see Andrew Hammond’s essay.) The scholar is equally driven by the requirements of objectivity: the new culture is there to be mastered and to be analysed, but not to impinge on the subjectivity of the individual, for fear that he or she might ‘go native’ (an equally important injunction for the colonialist) and thus relinquish professional status.10 While these distinctions are useful and can be applied in part to, or in partial conjunction with, most of the situations under discussion in this volume, they omit two crucial states: exile as a fall (from grace, from a metaphysicallyconceived state, from time) and exile as exemplification of the uncanny. In this volume the borders that are crossed are not limited to the geographical, and, although the structuring of subjectivity is central to the concerns o f both Said and JanMohamed, neither (by election) considers the spiritual condition which, in the premodem age, provided the metaphysical rationale for a sense of being, or not being, at home. The collection opens with Enrico Giaccherini’s analysis of two versions of the Orpheus experience. According to the ancient myth, Orpheus is blessed with outstanding abilities as a poet and musician. He can outsing Sirens, pacify Cerberus, tame wild animals and can even animate trees and rocks. He loses his beloved Euridice twice: first she dies and then, when he attempts to rescue her from the underworld, he makes the fatal error of looking back to ascertain that she is there, just before reaching the threshold. That lack of faith causes her to be lost to him forever, and he takes to the wilderness, exiled from the possibility of love, and tames the natural world with his tragic yet exquisite lamentations, until he is set upon, dismembered and flung in a river, his mouth on his severed head still crying out for Euridice. The details of that myth are treated rather differently by the anonymous thirteenth-century author of Sir Orfeo on the one hand, and Robert Henry son in Orpheus and Eurydice on the other. Giaccherini’s analysis focuses specifically on the episode of exile in both, reading the differences between them as indicative of a changing world view: Sir Orfeo, following a period construed as penance, rediscovers his ‘Dame Heurodis’ and begins his return journey towards being a legitimate sovereign. Henryson, on the other hand, far from being concerned with the traditional conventions of Christian divine rights, shows himself to be more interested in the Greek origins of the character and the classical doctrines of appropriate leadership, embodied in a disquisition on the planets and the music of the spheres. The suggestion is that Henryson’s version is heading away from 10

Ibid., pp. 101-2.

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romance and the medieval concerns of courtly love and divine grace, and moving towards a concern with the changing intellectual climate, which was to be dominated by humanism and the Renaissance. The next three essays deal variously with politics and religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lynne Long provides a lively account of translations of the Bible from Latin into the vernacular. Over the period of the Reformation both Protestant and Catholic groups found themselves in exile and, consequently, in a position to provide a translation of the Bible that might get through to a population as yet unfixed in its religious practices. The reign of Mary Tudor (1553-58) saw the exile of a group of Protestants, including John Knox and William Whittingham, to Geneva. Whittingham, an excellent scholar, set about producing a translation of the Bible that was both accurate and accessible to the ‘simple lambs partly wandering astray by ignorance’.11 A Bible that was portable, divided into chapters and verses and very popular with the general public made a virtue of exile at the same time as being a propaganda success. The Rheims New Testament, published in 1582 by a Catholic group, bore the signs of defensiveness. There was considerable resistance among educated Catholics to translations at all, but the fact that the holy text had been so fully appropriated by ‘the enemy’ meant that a translation became inevitable. Lynne Long analyses some of the doctrinal motivations behind elements of the translations and their successes or otherwise in becoming incorporated into common understanding. Her conclusion is that while the Protestant group were invigorated by their pioneering visionariness, the Catholic group in Rheims ‘just wanted to go home’. Douglas Burnham’s reading of Macbeth considers the uncanniness of exile at home. Macbeth, initially a heroic figure, is rapidly cast out of a sense of time and politics as noble, divine and governed by communicable sense, and into a confusion of delayed and misinterpreted messages, Machiavellian temporality and diseased desire. Macbeth’s fall is thus metaphysical and is only redeemed by the recapturing of ‘noble time’, the ‘measure, time and place’12 that enacts the restoration of the righteous kingly lineage. The play is thus seen as one in which Machiavellian machinations and emphasis on power over virtue, represent the full horror of exile from God’s kingdom. Michael Davies’ essay is concerned with literal and rhetorical exile over the period of the Restoration. The rhetoric of exile in this period, he argues, is complex and deployed by royalists and Nonconformists alike, signalling political divisions and allegiances that are not always clear. The piece begins with a brief discussion of Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of the most profound works of literature to deal with the theme of exile, and to deal with it through the issues of non-conformity 11 William Whittingham, ‘Preface to the New Testament’, in Alfred Pollard (ed.), Records o f the English Bible (London: Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press, 1911), p. 276. 12 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy o f Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), V.vii.103.

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and liberty of conscience which are central to this essay. It proceeds with an account of the return of the king from a literal exile, and his eventual and reluctant enforcement of a spiritual exile upon all Nonconformists who were imprisoned and faced other hostile forms of intolerance. Davies sets out to provide a more complex account of the royalist/Anglican/Nonconformist Puritan split that is so commonly seen as the paradigm of this period. Through his account of what are, in effect, prison narratives, of the appropriation and reappropriation of the biblical tropes of exile by royalists and dissenters, and through a reappraisal of the conciliatory attitude of Charles II and the instances of dissenters who were also royalists, Davies sets out to restore to the period a proper understanding of the history of Nonconformist persecution and suffering. In many ways, Susan Pearce’s account of the nineteenth-century exhibition of Egyptian mummies lies at the centre of this collection. It deals with the politics of exhibition, and with the psychic effects consequent on the wresting of these exhibitis from their original context and their placement in a consumer milieu bent on amassing material goods as a form of defiance against death. Pearce tells of nineteenth-century explorers tearing mummies from their tombs to display them in London, the imperial centre. In a later development some of those mummies were unwrapped, first in private, later as a public spectacle, masquerading as scientific inquiry but displaying more than a hint of the striptease in performance. The human viewers are thus faced with exiled humans on display. The dead human body becomes fetishized as the other, and the viewer begins to recognize the other in the self, which uncanny recognition opens the way towards the place of final exile - death itself. Travellers to the Balkan states might be seen to have more in common with Milton’s Satan than the unsettled Victorian viewers of Egyptian mummies as, for them, ‘[t]he mind is its own place’,13 and provided it is replete with the customs and practices redolent of ‘Englishness’, it can survive the ‘inhospitable ... and desolate’14 manifestations of south-east Europe. Andrew Hammond’s account of English travellers to the Balkans counterbalances Edward Said’s concept of the ‘border subject’ with that of the ‘inflexible exile’ - one who remains closed to the possibilities of hybridity, transgression and non-allegiance. An account of the writings of travellers as diverse as Robert Graves, Flora Sandes and Robert Carver provides an indication that an exilic identity, bolstered by a history of practices such as ‘clustering’, ‘routine’ and the maintenance of ‘personal authority’, and based on an Englishness as profound as it is patriarchally inflexible, continues to perpetuate an image of the Balkans as Europe’s internal ‘other’ and remains oblivious to the self-estrangement and consequent discursive violation that the experience of exile can provide. 13 John Milton, P aradise L ost, ed. Alistair Fowler (London and N ew York: Longman, 1968; reprint 1971), Book 1 ,1. 254, p. 59. 14 Ibid., Book XI, 1.332, p. 578.

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The subject of Alex Keller’s essay is a group of Jewish scientists, who originated in Budapest and whose extraordinary expertise in atomic physics coupled with the small scale of their place of origin, earned them the nickname, the ‘martians’. These men, displaced by restricted employment opportunities which were later exacerbated by the First World War and then the rise of Nazism, ended up in America (having variously alighted in Germany, England and elsewhere) where hospitality was warm, receptivity to their ‘theoretical’ ideas considerable, and employment prospects promising. They carried with them the apparently ‘universal’ language of atomic physics, but were dependent on national politics in their search for some kind of a ‘home’. America, was, of course, the destination of thousands of exiles and emigres towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Martin Halliwell, in his essay, argues that exile, whether real or imagined, initiates in modernist writing an impulse to grapple with what, following Richard Rorty, he calls the ‘blind impress’ of modernity. Both Lorca and Kafka - the former following his own experience and the latter imaginatively - seek to embrace the other, not by means of a synoptic, empathetic visionariness, but via a kaleidoscopic sense of visual limitation in the case of Lorca, and a labyrinthine disorientation in Kafka’s protagonist. W. H. Auden, unlike Lorca and Kafka, did not set out to identify with lower socioeconomic order experience. His exile, again to America, was of course voluntary, but in the context of a possible Nazi invasion of Britain. Kathleen Bell compares his position on exile to that of Hannah Arendt, another exile, but a political philosopher. While Arendt’s point of view is overtly political and concerned with the articulation of human rights, Auden appears anti-political. But, according to Bell, in his poetry we might read features of the condition of exile that he was more free to express, as his exile was voluntary and he was not estranged from the language of America. Arendt’s view is that human endeavour is confirmed by interacting politically, by making things and by engaging in repetitive labour. Auden, on the other hand, conceives of human development as a series of exiles and is conscious of the necessity of freedom to the growth of the poet. Their views on exile, while they do not add up to a consolidated position on the subject, are complementary and share a commitment to, and interest in, the human voice. Daniel Cordle’s reading of Milan Kundera sees exile as a temporal, rather than spatial, condition. Circumventing the more obvious readings of Kundera’s exile from his native Czechoslovakia, Cordle looks at The Joke, which pre-dates Kundera’s exile, and considers the borders between states of being (metaphysical borders) and between Enlightenment and postmodernist sensibilities (temporal and philosophical borders). Cordle takes on what appears to be a search in Kundera’s writing for a cultural home, a place in the past that was uncontaminated by the fractiousness, noise and speed of modem technology, and characterized instead by a common, human cultural project. He does not argue, however, that Kundera is a cultural reactionary: the ideas of authenticity for which he apparently seeks are problematized, revealed as illusory, but desired nevertheless. What we have, then,

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is metaphysical exile - exile from the self in which borders in identity and meaning are revealed, and in which an originating cultural moment is both sought and shown to be imaginary. Both Nicoletta Caputo and Carla Dente provide readings of exile from the self that emphasize sex and gender. Caputo analyses Angela Carter’s novel The Passion o f New Eve in which exile takes the form of a search for a kind of sexual or gendered identity that might be liberating for women. The protagonist, who starts the novel as a man, undergoes exile from the phallocentric security of masculine identity: in seeking his ‘self’ he is forced to discover a history of brutality, carelessness and violence that he re-enacts in the role of victim rather than perpetrator. This character can never, and never wants to, get ‘home’ in the sense of returning to how things were. A feminist allegory, the novel insists that exile from the sex-gender system can only be a good thing. Carla Dente’s analysis of Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair also reveals a quest novel - this time a quest for fullness of unity across genders and lifestyles in an exploration of sexual and national identities that entails anguish and fear. The male/female narrator is in a constant state of self-exile, in which the ‘I ’ is permanently exiled from a part of itself, an exile that is figured in terms of gendered identity, time and location. In Yvette Rocheron’s interviews with Algerian men who have emigrated to Britain, national identity, ethnic identity and religious identity are all open for renegotiation. Economic rather than political exiles, these men have now married, which removes the implicit tragedy in the narrative of migration. A core condition of Muslim migration is the betrayal by and of the native groups. But these men signal that the supposed unity between past and present is illusory, that they diffuse fixed definitions of ethnic identification by deploying strategies of resistance against it, and that, mostly detached from Algeria, they have entered into a form of pluralism that has turned into a narrative of no return. Francesca Duranti’s novel Sogni Mancini is similarly a narrative of no return. Rather like Auden, the protagonist is in voluntary exile in America, the land of opportunity. She has more in common, though, with Eve/lyn or the Algerian male exiles in that she seeks to embrace an inclusive subjectivity, a hyphenated identity, which is part of a dream of the creation of new forms of national identity. An Italian university professor, the protagonist declines the offer of a political ‘opportunity’ with a Berlusconi-style party for a freer world, in which community is hard to find, but at least professionalism is not based on patronage. The allusions to split subjectivity, to flexible self-definitions, all speak to the stuff of postmodemity, where travel, micro-narratives, displacement and self-fracturing create new possibilities for the marginalized or dispossessed. Lest this dream of exile appear too utopian, the protagonist is all too conscious of the effects of global capitalism, o f local problems such as homelessness and of the difficulty in negotiating an identity for herself. But she buys into the dream of individual freedom nevertheless.

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This volume thus considers a considerable range of exile experiences. From the tragic isolation of Orpheus to the optimistic flexibility of Duranti’s protagonist, the condition is considered via a range of interpretive mechanisms: spirituality, temporality, nobility, openness, non-allegiance and hybridity. Exile is, above all, seen to be the condition of the traveller - alert, anxious perhaps, questing, at once nostalgic for the place of departure, yearning for the closure of arrival yet attracted by the ambivalence of unbelonging.

Chapter 1

From Sir Orfeo to ‘Schir Orpheus’: Exile, and the Waning of the Middle Ages Enrico Giaccherini In the following considerations I will assume, for brevity’s sake, that the reader is familiar both with the classical Orpheus myth and, at least to some extent, with the treatment to which the theme was submitted by the unknown author of the late thirteenth/early fourteenth-century Sir Orfeo, and, later, by Robert Henryson in his Orpheus and Eurydice of the last third of the fifteenth century.1 These authors, in turn, would have been familiar with the Orpheus tradition from the three main sources of the story for medieval audiences, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Books X and XI), Virgil’s Georgies (Book IV), and Boethius’s Consolation o f Philosophy (Book III, meter xii), in the latter case directly and/or through Boethius’s medieval commentators (Remy of Auxerres, Guillaume de Conches, Nicholas Trivet and many others). This tradition is, in itself, a composite one. Indeed, the myth owes its popularity with modem listeners and readers to what might be called its romantic, almost Tristanian quality: the tragic fate of a pair of lovers separated by death, and Orpheus’s subsequent failure to rescue his beloved from the underworld due to his inability to resist the impulse to rest his eyes on Eurydice for an excess of love (‘avidus ... videndi’, ‘eager to see her’ (Metam., X, 56), as Ovid put it)2 - a perfect combination of eros and thanatos if ever there was one. However, both Ovid’s and Virgil’s versions (with Virgil, not surprisingly, much more attuned than the former to the socio-ethical implications of the myth, as Charles Segal,3 among others, has shown) still retain visible traces of a different, more ancient tradition, centred on the magic or, better, shamanic dimension inherent in the Greek Orpheus, gifted as he is with the supernatural powers of the singer and poet who brings order to the world especially through music.4 1 Quotations and line numbers refer to the editions o f the poems contained respectively in Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, ed. K. Sisam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); and in R. Henryson, The Poems, ed. D. Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 2 Quotations of, and translations from, classical texts are drawn from The Loeb Classical Library. 3 Charles Segal, Orpheus. The Myth o f the Poet (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 4 In the ocean-wide bibliography on Orpheus I found especially helpful the collection o f essays Orpheus: The Metamorphoses o f a Myth, ed. J. Warden (Toronto/Buffalo/ London: University o f Toronto Press, 1982).

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The clearest traces of this tradition are to be found in the episode of Orpheus’s retirement into the wilderness, and of the solitary life he leads there, accompanied only by the inhabitants of the forest, before he is dismembered by the Cyconian women. But while Ovid limits himself to a passing hint at this stage of the protagonist’s existence, concisely reminding the reader that Orpheus ‘betook himself to high Rhodope and wind-swept Haemus’ (X, 76-7), where he ‘with such songs ... drew the trees, held beasts enthralled and constrained stones to follow him’ (XI, 1-2), Virgil insists, at some length, not only on the divine singer’s capacity to tame tigers and move trees with his art, but also on the pathos of the forlorn hero’s wanderings in the harsh winter landscape of a nature turned hostile: Month in, month out, seven whole months, men say beneath a skyey cliff by lonely Strymon’s wave, he wept, and, deep in icy caverns, unfolded this his tale, charming the tigers, and making the oaks attend his strain; even as the nightingale, mourning beneath the poplar’s shade, bewails the loss o f her brood, that a churlish ploughman hath espied and tom unfledged from the nest: but she weeps all night long, and, perched on a spray, renews her piteous strain, filling the region round with sad laments. No love, no wedding-song could bend his soul. Alone he would roam the northern ice, the snowy Tanais, and the fields ever wedded to Rhipaean frosts, wailing Eurydice lost, and the gift o f Dis annulled. (IV, 507-19)

Boethius, on his part, while slightly more diffuse than Ovid, did not quite follow Virgil, in that he made no mention of nature’s reflection of Orpheus’s despair that Orpheus, Boethius says, ... who before had made the woods so nimbly run And rivers stand With his weeping measures, And the hind’s fearless flank Lay beside the savage lions, Nor was the hare afraid to look upon The hound, made peaceful by his song (11. 7-13)

Rewriting the myth at the end of the thirteenth century or shortly after, the poet of Sir Orfeo strategically removed the description of his griefstricken hero’s life in the woods to an earlier phase of the story, following the abduction of Dame Heurodis at the hands of the King of Fairye, but prior to Sir Orfeo’s meeting with the group of ‘sixty leuedis’ amidst which he recognizes his queen, whom he then follows into the celtic-type Otherworld she now inhabits. Given the radical (but not wholly original, as I and others have shown elsewhere5) reshaping of the myth’s conclusion worked by the Middle English poet, he did not have much choice: Dame Heurodis not dying a second death, Orfeo’s dismissal of his public role and withdrawal into 5 See especially P. Dronke, ‘The Return o f Eurydice’, Classica et M edievalia, 23 (1962), pp. 198-215; also the introductory section to my Sir Orfeo, ed. and trans. E. Giaccherini (Parma: Pratiche, 1994).

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3

self-imposed exile to mourn his loss in the wilderness (‘her king en exile 3 ede’, says the beggar near the end of the poem [1. 493]) could be justified exclusively in relation to the woman’s first and only disappearance. The theme is thus traditional, and the anonymous English poet’s treatment of it is, in many ways, equally so. Amplification of the source material is the typical literary device favoured by medieval romance writers and narrators in general - a procedure which usually goes in tandem with the other leading technique, repetition (er beb For ioie abouten him J)ai tep>; And alle be foules J)at J)er were Come and sete on ich a brere, To here his harping afine, So miche melody was berin; And when he his harping lete wold, No best bi him abide nold. (11. 237-80).

In an age in which the sacred nature of the office of king and ruler is felt to derive directly from God, voluntary abdication from the throne is acceptable, and indeed meritorious, in the eyes of the public only if it is brought to effect in the name of an even holier ideal - that of religion. King Orfeo does precisely that, in the fullest, medieval sense of the word ‘religion’. The description of the primitive life he lives in the woods is made up of a series of commonplaces that follow the pattern of the lives of the holy hermits and anchorites that were so popular in hagiographical literature from the early Middle Ages onwards. That Sir Orfeo is likened to these, besides, is unquestionably implicit in the fact that, at the moment of leaving his kingdom, he literally divests himself of all the external insignia of his role, ‘Bot a sclauin on him he toke’ (1. 228), donning, that is, a simple slavin, a pilgrim’s mantle. The recurrent opposition between his earlier lifestyle and the harsh conditions of his present one (the ‘He that ... now ...’ pattern, five times repeated) is rhetorically very effective, emphasizing his role as a penitent: and penitence - not just repentance - is the precondition for pardon and readmittance to the society of the faithful. Thus, grace will eventually be conferred again on Sir Orfeo, who will then, as a consequence, be free to start his journey back to civilization and to his kingdom, once more a legitimate sovereign. But, in this poem, the restitution of Holy Grace coincides with the restitution of the hero’s lady, Dame Heurodis: a clear enough demonstration of the fusion - as well as of the confusion - of the language of the religion of God with that of the religion of Love, of the transcendent with the human, which lies at the very heart of what we currently refer to as ‘courtly love’. A much debated and paradoxical notion, this is based on ambiguity; it is nothing more than a famous medievalist’s hypothesis, as has often been pointed out,7 but one, at least, that tries to explain a literary phenomenon which is conspicuous even in such a fundamentally popular narrative as Sir Orfeo. It must be admitted, though, that, whichever may have been the source, it has been expanded here to an inordinate length. The corresponding section in Virgil’s Georgies (the most likely source) consists, as we have seen, of 13 lines, which 7 The allusion is to Gaston Paris’s famous article ‘Etudes sur les romans de la Table Ronde. Lancelot du Lac. II. Le Conte de la Charrette\Rom ania, 12 (1883), 459-534. See the useful The Meaning o f Courtly Love, ed. F.X. Newman (Albany, NY: State University o f New York Press, 1972).

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5

have been extended to no fewer than 44 - that is, over one-fourteenth of the whole poem. Of these, only ten lines deal with Sir Orfeo’s power to charm the forest creatures with his music (while no mention at all is made of the trees themselves); all the rest describe the protagonist’s life in the wilderness as one season succeeds another, for ten long years, as compared with Virgil’s seven months and Ovid’s three years. The poet has done his best here to move the audience to pity and compassion for Sir Orfeo’s seemingly desperate plight, in order to provide the greater dramatic contrast, and relief for the audience, when he, and we, enter the enchanted atmosphere of the next episode - the meeting with the ‘wild hunt’ led by the King of Fairye, and with the ladies’ hawking party amongst whom Dame Heurodis is also riding. A parallel romance-type situation might be Sir Gawain’s wanderings through the Wirral in the winter season, suddenly giving way to the apparition of Bertilak’s enchanted castle. We could continue to analyse the passage at length, but what we have in the account of Sir Orfeo’s exile is, in short, a splendid display of consummate descriptive and rhetorical ability, carried through with great narrative gusto: the poet is clearly enjoying telling a good story for its own sake. If we turn now to Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice, we can see that, although traces of what has been called the ‘poetic’, orally-based ‘minstrel’ tradition of the Orpheus myth,8 best exemplified by Sir Orfeo, can be identified in the Scotsman’s poem, it should be said straightaway that no conclusive evidence of direct derivation can be adduced. The poem is only very slightly longer than its predecessor - it consists of 632 lines as opposed to 604 - but the impression is misleading. Indeed, the adventure of which ‘Schir Orpheus’- as the protagonist’s name has now become - is the hero reaches its natural conclusion at line 410. Some words that I have just used, such as ‘adventure’, and ‘hero’, are typical of the vocabulary of romance, but are in fact inappropriate here, as Henryson’s poem, in my view, hardly belongs to the romance genre. To give an idea of the different atmosphere by which it is pervaded, it will be enough to remember that, while Sir Orfeo was ‘In Inglond an he 3 e lording,/ A stalworj) man and hardi bo’ (11. 26-7) who lived in the city of Traciens, ‘For Winchester was cleped Ip of Traciens witouten no’ (11.49-50), Henryson’s Schir Orpheus may well be a king, but he remains first and foremost the son of the mighty god Phoebus and the muse Calliope, daughter of Jupiter and Mnemosyne: he is, in other words, the Greek, classical Orpheus. But to return to the main issue, after line 410, ‘Moralitas fabule sequitur\ as the rubric recites - a verse summary of the section on the Orpheus poem, which is part of the allegorical commentary on Boethius’s Consolation o f Philosophy written by Nicholas Trivet near the end of the thirteenth century.9 The Moralitas - the moral interpretation of the story proper - is therefore 224 lines long, thus taking over 8 K.R.R. Gros Louis, ‘Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice and the Orpheus Traditions o f the Middle A ges’, Speculum, 41 (1961), pp. 643-55. 9 The relevant section is published by Fox as an appendix to his edition o f Henryson’s poems (see above, n .l), pp. 384-91.

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one-third of the entire poem, while the story itself, correspondingly, has been cut down to roughly two-thirds of the length of Sir Orfeo. While this, as I want to suggest, does not necessarily imply that Henryson was particularly interested in the ‘moral’, it does add to the impression that he did not especially care for the story. On reading Orpheus and Eurydice, I find myself unable to concur with Kenneth Gros Louis’s statement that it is the ‘attractiveness’ with which Henryson endowed the characters and their tragedy that makes the Moralitas, by comparison, so ‘dull and ineffectual’.10 If there emerges, in this poem, an indisputable interest, this is aimed at its classical inheritance. A renewed concern for the classical pantheon is perhaps its most obvious feature, as the long genealogy with which Orpheus and Eurydice opens already suggests (and is also wholly consistent with Henryson’s practice in his more famous masterpiece, The Testament o f Cresseid - consider the splendid description of the planetary gods in Cresseid’s trial, to which I will shortly return). Moreover, the association of nobility of spirit and nobility of lineage, strengthened by education, is a notion that surely belongs to the Renaissance rather than to the Middle Ages. To confirm Henryson’s interest in the classical gods, one could then add the identification of the ‘Quene of fary’ who abducts Erudices with Proserpina (admittedly, following in Chaucer’s footsteps11), and, especially, the protagonist’s highly formalized invocation to Phoebus and Jupiter as he is about to set off on his journey in search of Erudices: T the beseike, my fair fader Phebus, Haue pete o f thi awne sone Orpheus; Wait thow nocht wele I am thi bame and child? Now heir my plant, panefull and petuous; Direct me fra this deid sa dolorus, Quhilk gois thus withoutin gilt begild; Lat nocht thi face with clowdis be oursyld; Len me thi licht and lat me nocht ga les To fynd the fair in fame that neuer was fyld, My lady quene and luf, Erudices! ‘O Iupiter, thow god celestiall, And grantschir to my self, on the I call To mend my mumyng and my drery mone; Thou geve me forse that I noucht faynt nor fall Quhill I hir fynd, for seke hir suth I sail, And nouthir stynt nor stand for stok no stone! Trou thy god-hede, gyde me quhare scho is gone; Ger hir appere, and put my hert in pes! ’ (11. 164-81)

10 Louis, ‘Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and E urydice\ op. cit., p. 646. 11 “‘And I,” quod she, “a queene o f Fayerye!”’: M erchants Tale, 2316; quoted from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). It may be significant that precisely in this tale can be found one o f Chaucer’s not-too-frequent allusions to Orpheus (1. 1716).

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7

The latter element is in itself highly indicative of Henryson’s attitude towards his subject matter. By making Schir Orpheus decide to go in search of his wife, in fact, he resolutely marks his distance from the’‘popular’ tradition embodied in the previous Sir Orfeo romance, whose most original - or, perhaps, whose only real innovation in terms of plot lay precisely in the fact that its hero never manifests any intention of looking for Dame Heurodis. As far as Sir Orfeo feels and understands, she is forever lost. His meeting with her during his sojourn in the forest is totally unexpected, and comes upon him as an absolute shock. Henryson’s version, instead, goes back, via Boethius, to the classical source, Virgil, as is also witnessed, for example, by the restitution to his legitimate role of the character of Arystyus, totally absent in the earlier poem, and, of course, by Henryson’s strict adherence to the ‘received’ version of the myth, with his restoration of the tragic conclusion. To quote another critic who has written on Henryson’s poem, ‘The narrative is classical: the characters ... are post-rom ance in outlook and personality’.12And, for me, ‘post-romance’ also means, in the poem’s chronological and cultural context, post-medieval. But what becomes of the protagonist’s decision to become an exile in Henryson’s version? The place it occupies in the diegesis is the same as in Sir Orfeo - it follows, that is, Erudices’s maiden’s report of the queen’s abduction. But, in order not to miss it, one must read the text very carefully, because, strictly speaking, there is no ‘episode’ dealing with it. All we are told, is that the protagonist ‘... tuke his harpe and to the wod can go’ (1. 129), where he sings the ‘sangis lamentable’ (1. 184). I have already alluded to the kind of formalized ‘lament’ that Henry son was so fond of, and which can be seen in Cresseid’s two lyric passages in The Testament o f Cresseid - the heroine’s ‘Complaint’ based on the ‘Ubi su n f topos, and the final ‘Testament’ itself. Thus, it should be within the context of Schir Orpheus’s lyrical effusion that we must look for the sort of stuff corresponding, in the sources and parallel texts, to the narration of the hero’s self-banishment. What we have instead of the extended, highly pathetic passage in Sir Orfeo (and, up to a point, in the Georgies), is the extremely dramatically effective device of the narrator’s own voice interpolating in the second verse of Schir Orpheus’s complaint, to inform us that, to alleviate his sorrow, he played a lively tune’‘Quhill all the foulis of the wod can syng,/ And treis dansit with thar leves grene’ (11. 145-6), albeit to no practical consequence. The details here do nothing to further the dramatic action, nor do they add to the pathos of the scene, but are merely decorative; birds (no wild tigers here!) and trees do not participate in the protagonist’s grief, but dance merrily to his tune. The spirit is that of a mask, or a pantomime, or a ballet, rather than that of a tragic narrative. Then, in the next verse, we have Orpheus’s own voice resuming his complaint, in anticipation of the miserable existence that lies ahead of him, succinctly touching on a series of details which are clearly derived from the popular 12 C. Mills, ‘Romance Convention o f Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and E u rydice\ in A.J. Aitken, M.R McDiarmid and D.S. Thompson, eds, Bards and Makars (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1977), p. 59.

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tradition: ‘ . welcome, woddis wyld and wilsome way,/ My wikit werd in wildemes to wair!/ My rob ryall and all my riche array/ Changit sail be in rude russat of gray;/ My diademe in till an hat of hair;/ My bed sail be with bever, broke, and bair,/ In buskis bene, with mony bustuos bes’ (11. 155-61) (which are Virgil’s bees, once again). When the narrative resumes after this lyric interval, however, the scenario changes altogether. Virgil’s seven-month, Ovid’s three-year and Sir Orfeo’s tenyear exile are contracted into the brief space of time it takes King Orpheus to sing his lament. As soon as this is finished, with no transition at all, he embarks on his quest - but a radically different quest from that typical of the romance genre: ‘Syne passit to the hevin, as says the fable’ (1. 186). Instead of forests, temptations, enchanted castles and fights with giants and monsters, we have the Milky Way Watling-Street - and the planetary spheres - Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury - before Orpheus is landed once again on the Earth: the parallel with the pageant of the Olympian gods in The Testament o f Cresseid imposes itself. In one sense, the chronological extension which belonged to the traditional narratives is replaced here by its spatial counterpart: that is, the tradition Henryson resorts to is not the typically medieval one of romance, but must be looked for in the classical thread that links Plato to Cicero to later commentators such as Chalcidius and Macrobius. It is in the course of the description of Schir Orpheus’s passage through the spheres that we next encounter Henryson’s most extraordinary digression - the two stanzas devoted to an exposition of musical theory. These consist of a pyrotechnical display of musical doctrine, still partly obscure, possibly based on Macrobius, but with no precisely identifiable source, explicitly meant to illustrate and exemplify the Pythagorean notion of the harmony of the spheres, as well as the Platonic and Neoplatonic concept of Anima Mundi: Thare lerit he tonys proportionate, As duplar, triplar, and epetritus; Emoleus, and eke the quadruplate; Epogdyus, rycht hard and curius; And o f thir sex, suete and dilicius, Ryght consonant, fyve hevynly symphonyis Componyt ar, as clerkiss can deuise First dyatesseron, full suete I wis; And dyapason, symple and duplate; And dyapente, componyt with a dys; This makis five, o f thre multiplicate. This mery musik and mellifluate, Complete and full wyth nowmeris od and evyn, Is causit be the moving o f the hevyn. (11. 226-39)

It should be noted that this excursus too, as well as the entire passage of which it is part, is only indirectly relevant to the story: all it tells us, from the dramatic point of view, is that only when Orpheus has become fully master of his own art -

THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES

9

music - is he ready for his attempt to recover Erudices. What it does demonstrate, in my opinion, is the author’s personal interest in the doctrinal and philosophical implications of the myth, which, for him, largely prevail over its purely narrative aspect. All this is consistent with the renewed interest in pagan mythology, characteristic of the early Renaissance, which resulted in an effort aimed at the recovery of its classical form - a preoccupation that has an obvious parallel in the gigantic enterprise of the philological restoration of classical texts that remains the greatest achievement of that epoch. More specifically, throughout the Renaissance, and especially in the Neoplatonic Florentine circles of the second half of the fifteenth century, dominated by the figure of the humanist Marsilio Ficino, Orpheus is seen the very archetype of the artist and the musician, the civilizer, the legislator and the politician that Horace spoke of in his Ars Poetica: Orpheus was the one who taught ‘... publica privatis secernere, sacra profanisj concubitu prohibere vago, dare iura m aritisj oppida moliri, leges incidere ligrf (11. 397-9), (‘to distinguish the public from the private, the sacred from the profane, to prohibit sexual promiscuity, to establish husbands’ rights, to build fortified towns, to carve laws in wood’). I do not wish to subscribe to the opinion that Robert Henryson was a kind of Scottish proto-humanist, in the sense that Erasmus was. Professor MacQueen’s assertion that Orpheus and Eurydice ‘in fact is constructed on Neoplatonic principles to illustrate Neoplatonic doctrine’13 sounds to me decidedly over enthusiastic, and I remain unconvinced by his numerological analysis. Nevertheless, although possibly less pervasive and systematic than some might wish, the influence, and the interest, are undeniably there, as I hope to have shown, and they should be accounted for. The above-mentioned critic, as well as others, has convincingly argued in favour of the existence of strong cultural links between Glasgow, at whose University Henryson was incorporated in 1462, and Italy, and it is indeed possible that Henryson’s knowledge of Neoplatonism, Ficino and Orphism originated after, and was the consequence of, his arrival there. This renders unnecessary the old conjecture, for which there is a total lack of evidence, that Henryson himself had studied in Italy and had thus been in direct contact with Florentine intellectual circles: other similar hypotheses - for instance, that Poliziano’s Favola di Orfeo or Boccaccio’s De Genealogia should be regarded as direct sources for Henryson’s poem - are equally untenable, being undemonstratable in the former case and unnecessary in the latter. However, scant as the external evidence may be, I remain equally, if not more, unconvinced by those critics who, especially on the basis of the Moralitas that accompanies the story, see in the poem nothing but ‘mediaevalism’.14 My own view of the Moralitas coincides precisely 13 J. MacQueen, ‘Neoplatonism and Orphism in Fifteenth-Century Scotland’, Scottish Studies, 20 (1976), p. 74. 14 For example, J. MacQueen, Robert Henryson: A Study o f the M ajor Narrative Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); R.J. Lyall, ‘Henryson and Boccaccio: A Problem in the Study o f Sources’, Anglia, 99 (1981), pp. 38-59.

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with the position it occupies in the text: as I have just said, it accompanies the story, but is not an integral part of it. If, by a not infrequent accident of fate ‘habentsua fata libelli\ - that section had been lost, the poetical value of Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice, great or small as it may be according to critical opinion, would not have been affected by the loss. From a cultural, rather than an aesthetic, viewpoint, I agree with Douglas Gray that the poem is a ‘philosophical tale’,15 and that the appendix draws attention to certain moral implications of the tale. My opinion, however, is that it remains no more than an appendix, and those moral aspects do not represent the poem’s main focus of interest, which lies elsewhere. The poem is the product of a changing intellectual climate, to which Henryson intimately adheres, as The Testament o f Cresseid shows in a much bolder way. Here, instead, all this is expressed in a dubious, uncertain form, as if the poet did not dare to sever his ties with the conventions of the past in too explicit a manner. With the Moralitas - Henryson’s own little ‘Retracciouns’- he makes a concession, or pays some sort of lip service, to these conventions as a sign of his still precarious wavering between the set of values we elliptically identify as belonging to the ‘Middle Ages’ and to the ‘Renaissance’respectively. To the extent that the author of Orpheus and Eurydice may be said to identify with his protagonist, the Moralitas represents, in a sense, Henryson’s ‘backward glance’ - but not, in this case, a fatal one.

15

D. Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden: Brill, 1979), p. 236.

Chapter 2

Spiritual Exile: Translating the Bible from Geneva and Rheims Lynne Long Exile, defined as expulsion or the state of being expelled from a person’s native land, involves dislocation on several levels. There is physical dislocation, intellectual separation, cultural exile and the linguistic exile of functioning in an unfamiliar language. These dislocations, as experienced by a person or group of people, are interestingly similar to the effects of the process of translation on a familiar text.1 In the same way that, in exile, a person or group of people is uprooted and resettled in different, sometimes congenial, sometimes uncongenial surroundings, in translation a text or group of texts is removed from its familiar native context and reset in a foreign one. The subjects of this paper, religious groups in exile - one exiled to Geneva in 1553 the other to Rheims in the 1580s - were not only experiencing the physical dislocation of exile themselves, but were also engaged in the intellectual process of translating the Bible from its familiar Latin/Greek context into an English one. One of the greatest transitional periods in European history evolved in the sixteenth century when religious change and religious polemic were at their height. Martin Luther’s publication in 1517 of 95 theses attacking the sale of indulgences, celibacy, transubstantiation, papal authority and corruption in the religious orders, marked the beginning of spiritual turmoil for countries in Europe and Scandinavia. His supporters in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Saxony, Hesse and Brandenburg broke away from the Roman Church and established Protestant communities. In Geneva a separate Protestant movement was led by Zwingli and, later, Calvin. In a Europe where the tradition had been to follow the religion of the ruler, those who dissented were forced underground or into exile. The cultural shift caused by the beginnings of Reformation created exiled individuals such as Martin Luther and William Tyndale and exiled communities like the Protestant one at Geneva and the Catholic one at Rheims. What is interesting about the doctrinal challenge mounted by these individuals and groups is that its authentication was sought by means of a new translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular. This happened at several points along the Reformation time-line beginning with John Wyclif and his followers in the 1380s.2 1 The word translation comes from the Latin transferro, transferre, transtuli, translatum meaning to carry over or across and used physically and metaphorically. 2 John W yclif in the 13 80s, Martin Luther and William Tyndale in the 1520s, the Geneva Community in 1560, the Rheims community in 1582.

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In medieval and Renaissance times, the Bible and religion were synonymous with social and political organization in Europe. The Church and the state were interdependent and mutually supportive. Any change to religious thinking or practice altered the scenery of the social landscape. If the sale of indulgences ceased, so did the income of those who sold them: if the sacraments were reduced from seven to two, the customs and celebrations of society were changed correspondingly.3 The Church authorities decided whether you could read the Bible in your own language or not, how many times you had to attend church on Sunday, and whether you baptized your children as infants or waited until they were adults.4 Making a new translation of the Bible was a way of regaining control over your religion; it was a way of coping with the kind of intellectual exile that goes with religious difference and a way of reorganizing the social and ideological landscape to make it more comfortable and familiar to the translating community. We would perhaps expect to find similarities between groups exiled for religious reasons but, although both the Geneva and Rheims groups produced English translations of the Bible while in exile, that is where the resemblance ends. Their attitudes, their motives for translating and their methodologies could not be more disparate, as their religious ideas were at opposite ends of the Reformation scale. The Genevans were part of a progressive Reform movement; the Rheims group were conservative and orthodox. Each group was vulnerable at a different stage in the Reformation: the Protestants early on and the Catholics later under Elizabeth. We will look first at the Protestant group. Henry VIII’s young heir, Edward, was sympathetic to reform and, during his minority, the Protector, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, made many changes to the liturgy and to the way in which the Church ran its affairs. They hoped to carry on with reforms but the young king died before he came of age, and when his sister Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry and his first wife Catherine of Aragon, took over the throne, she thought that she would easily be able to return England to Catholic orthodoxy. Accordingly, she set about reversing the changes introduced in the previous reign, restored the Mass to its full importance, reintroduced Lenten ceremonies, reinstated confession as a sacrament, replaced statues which had been removed and withdrew permission for priests to marry. As they could no longer comfortably practise in England what was becoming identifiable as Protestantism, during Mary’s reign (1553-58), prominent figures such as John Knox,5 William 3 Luther introduced the idea that there were only two main sacraments instead o f the Church’s traditional seven. Henry V III’s tract against Luther, A ssertio Septem Sacramentorum, earned him the title o f ‘Fidei Defensor’ from the Pope. 4 The main belief o f the radical Anabaptist group, led by Zwingli in 1520s was that baptism should only be given to believing adults. They wanted the separation o f Church from state and suffered considerable persecution. 5 John Knox was famous for his treatise First Blast o f the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment o f Women, written in 1558 against women mlers in general, and the Catholic Mary Tudor in particular. When Mary died later the same year and the Protestant Elizabeth became Queen, Knox was forced to soften his views somewhat as Elizabeth,

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Whittingham and Christopher Goodman moved abroad into a more sympathetic community. Geneva had declared itself Protestant and independent in 1536 and had invited the Frenchman John Calvin to live there and develop an education system for the Protestant youth of Europe.6 It proved to be the ideal exile from which to monitor and influence what was happening back in England and, in fact, was hardly exile at all, as spiritually they were ‘at home’ and were free to practise and develop their religious ideas by producing translations, tracts and propaganda leaflets. Financed, printed and distributed by the Genevan community, Whittingham’s English New Testament of 1557 and the complete Bible which followed two years later, was also, as Martin Luther’s and William Tyndale’s had been, a vehicle for Protestant propaganda in the form of notes and commentaries included in the early editions. It was not the first English-language Bible of the sixteenth century, but it was the first one written for missionary purposes, and it established a new direction in Bible translation. The preface records the intended audience as the ‘simple lambs partly wandering astray by ignorance’.7 By this translation and by the other Protestant literature emanating from ‘the store of heavenly learning & judgement which so aboundeth in this City of Geneva’,8 the exiles hoped to keep active the impetus towards reform begun in England during the young King Edward’s reign and now halted by Mary. Whittingham’s scholarship was excellent. He had been a linguist at Oxford and had already produced a metrical version of 15 of the Psalms.9 He used Beza’s recently completed annotated Latin New Testament as well as ‘diverse Greek copies’. ‘Furthermore’, he tells us in the preface, ‘that the reader might by all means be profited; I have divided the text into verses and sections according to the best editions in other languages.’10 This was the first time that the English Bible had been given chapters and verses. In addition to the fact that dividing the text into sections made study easier, this system made evidence for particular arguments more accurately identifiable and consequently more authoritative. Analysis of the text could be supported by chapter and verse; sources for sermons and homilies could be more easily checked and made available to the reader. Another small but important practical point was the fact that the New Testament was printed in Roman type which was far easier to read than the usual Gothic, particularly for those whose eyesight or reading ability was poor. The final marketing stratagem was to produce the book in quarto, which meant that it could be carried about quite easily. although a woman, nevertheless espoused the ‘right’ religion. Knox was also well known for bringing Protestantism to Scotland. 6 The University at Geneva was founded in 1559. 7 William Whittingham, ‘Preface to the New Testament’ in Records o f the English Bible, ed. Alfred Pollard (London: Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press, 1911), p. 276. 8 Ibid., p. 276. 9 Christina Hallo w ell Garrett, The M arian Exiles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1938, 1966), p. 327. 10 Records, op. cit., p. 276.

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The community at Geneva provided ‘so many Godly and learned men; and such diversity of translations in divers tongues’11 that the exiles felt sufficiently confident to attempt such a huge undertaking. The Bible they produced was the one used by Shakespeare and the version taken to America in 1620 by the Pilgrim Fathers in The Mayflower. It had its own style and phrasing, some of which reappeared in the King James version (1611), and followed Tyndale, Coverdale, Matthew and Taverner - all of whom preceded Whittingham as Bible translators only when they had the best rendering. ‘Ambassadors of Christ’ (2 Cor. 5:20) and ‘through a glass darkly’ (1 Cor. 13: 12), both phrases that originated in the Geneva Bible, were retained in the 1611 version and appear in twentieth-century translations in modernized form. The consciousness of the translators of the condition and needs of the reader, besides being evident in the practical measures taken with the publication, are also reflected in the words of the Preface to the complete Geneva Bible. This was published in 1560, again at the expense of the Geneva community, and consisted of the New Testament revised and the Old Testament translated by a group of eminent scholars including Whittingham. In the Preface the act of translation is justified by the advance in scholarship since the previous translations: ‘albeit that divers heretofore have endeavoured to achieve [a translation] yet considering the infancy of those times and imperfect knowledge of the tongues in respect of this ripe age and clear light which God hath now revealed, the translations require greatly to be perused and reformed’. The Hebrew phrases have been retained ‘notwithstanding that they may seem somewhat hard in their ears that are not well practised... ’. The reader may expect the words to sound strange but Test the simple should be discouraged’, the difficult places are marked with a cross. The translation strategy prioritizes intelligibility and accessibility as in the question of Hebrew names, where some are restored to their proper form ‘yet in the usual names little is changed for fear of troubling the simple readers’. At this point the translator is assuming previous knowledge of the English text and appreciating that unfamiliar names or phrases may be offputting. Additions made to the text in order to complete the sense of the phrase are marked with different print; the chapters and verses are marked ‘so that by all means the reader might be helped’ in the study of the Scriptures. The reader also has the benefit of ‘certain maps of cosmography’12 to help place the action in context, something that Luther, half a century earlier, was unable to make use of either to assist his own translation or to clarify points for his readers. The finished product was judged to be ‘the most accurate and scholarly version yet made ’.13 It is easy to understand why the Geneva Bible became so popular with the general public when the practical aspects of its production are taken into account. 11 12 13 McFarland,

Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., p. 281. Olga Opfel, The K ing Jam es B ible Translators (Jefferson and London: 1982), p. 22.

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Ordinary people were not so distinctly divided into reformers and non-reformers, nor so totally committed to Catholicism or Protestantism, as contemporary propaganda would have us believe.14 They were, however, used to having access to books in the vernacular since Henry VIII had taken over the administration of the Church in England; these included the Psalter, the official prayer book and catechisms, all of which ‘ran through enormous numbers of repeat editions with print runs of twice the normal size’.15 Mary had been in power for only five years - not long enough to reverse the vernacular trend. In the reign of Elizabeth I that followed, the bishops were happy to have a vernacular Bible but not the Geneva version. Their official text, the Great Bible, had lost favour to the ‘marked excellence of the Geneva renderings’16 but, although there was a project to revise the Great Bible, the popularity of the Geneva version persisted. Quotations from it were painted on house and church walls and, interestingly, it was the Bible from which Miles Smith quoted when he wrote the preface to the King James’ Bible. The scholarship was of good pedigree; only the provenance was doubtful, since the group at Geneva included Calvin who had something of a reputation as an extremist, and even this disadvantage (Elizabeth was very wary of extremes) was not totally apparent in 1558 when the crown changed hands. It was not until later that Elizabeth I began to have difficulty with radical Protestant groups and, by that time, the Geneva Bible was well established in the popular culture. The translators were forward-looking, keen to modernize and stimulated by their reformed perception of religion into making a new version of familiar religious material. They were empowered by exile, not weakened by it. The effect they had upon the language and literature of the country from which they were exiled was unparalleled in the sixteenth century and was eclipsed only when the King James version took over in the seventeenth. The Rheims group, by contrast, unwillingly undertook translation as a temporary weapon in the fight to restore the status quo in the form of the Catholic religion. Their exile was caused in part by the actions of their own hierarchy as, until the confrontation with the pope, Elizabeth had not gone out of her way to seek out Catholics as long as they were discreet and did not practise openly. In 1568, however, the rather unsettled religious climate was shaken further when Mary Queen of Scots, widow of the French King Francis II, escaped from Scotland after having been deposed by the Protestant government in favour of her infant son, following the scandal of the murders of first her secretary and then her second husband, Lord Damley. Although she was promptly imprisoned by Elizabeth, her arrival in England 14 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Church and the N ew R eligion ’, in Christopher Haig, ed., The Reign o f Elizabeth I (London: Macmillan 1984). 15 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 259. 16 J. Isaacs, ‘The Sixteenth Century English Versions’, in H. Wheeler Robinson, ed., The Bible in its Ancient and English Versions (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1940, 1954), p. 186.

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provided a possible rallying point for English Catholics and a focus for plots against the queen. Two years later, Pope Pius V exacerbated the situation by excommunicating Elizabeth and announcing that she was no longer queen. In face of what amounted to an invitation to insurrection or invasion, English Catholics, who had hitherto been left alone provided that they did not break the law,17 were forced to choose between their religion and their nation. To be Catholic was to be a traitor, so Catholicism went underground and defiantly experienced something of a resurgence in popularity. As a result of these circumstances, William Allen, the English Cardinal, set up a college for English Catholic clergy at Rheims and priests trained abroad came secretly to England as missionaries to counter Protestant doctrine. In order to do this efficiently, a Catholic vernacular version of the Bible was prepared: the New Testament was completed at Rheims and the Old Testament was completed later when the college moved to Douai in Flanders. In the same way that the Geneva Bible was the religious propaganda literature of an exiled community, the Rheims New Testament, published in 1582, was an attempt by the Catholic clergy to regain some of the religious ground lost by not having an official vernacular translation of the Bible. This is not to say that the Catholic hierarchy had shifted its position on the question of English Scriptures; the preface makes it very clear that the Rheims New Testament was a response to a very particular need - namely, to counterbalance the Protestant Bible and the vernacular preaching available to the ordinary people. A letter written by Cardinal Allen at the time describes how the Catholic clergy were still hoping to bring back England ‘from schism to the path of salvation’ but felt themselves at a disadvantage as they ‘did not commonly have at hand the text of Scripture or quote it except in Latin’.18 They were therefore arguing their position in a different language from both their opponents and from those they wished to convince. ‘This evil might be remedied’, continued William Allen, ‘if we too had some Catholic version of the Bible, for all the English versions are most corrupt. ’19 Having obtained permission from the pope, the English college at Rheims gave the main responsibility for the work to Gregory Martin, one of its most famous teachers and a former Oxford scholar. William Allen himself and another ex-Oxford man, William Bristow, assisted him. The New Testament was published in 1582, but the Old Testament remained unpublished, although ready, until 1609-10 when the college moved back to Douai.20 The product of a community under attack, the preface to the Rheims Bible exhibits all the signs of a defence of an apparent change of policy. ‘The translation’, 17 Christopher Haig, Elizabeth I (London and N ew York: Longman, 1988), p. 37. 18 Records, op. cit., p. 299. 19 Ibid., p. 300. 20 As a result, the Old Testament was too late to have any influence on the King James translation, but the phrasing o f the Rheims New Testament was used in numerous places.

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it says, ‘is not published upon erroneous opinion of necessity that the Holy Scriptures should always be in our mother tongue’. Nor do the writers feel that the Scriptures should be read ‘indifferently of all’ or that it is more ‘convenient... to have them turned into the vulgar tongues than to be kept and studied only in ecclesiastical learned languages’. The only reason for the translation is the ‘special consideration of the present time, state and condition of our country’. Things were necessary under the contemporary conditions that ‘in the peace of the Church were neither much requisite, nor perchance wholly tolerable’.21 These words remind us that there was still opposition to Bible translation in principle long after it had become established in fact. There were still many, mostly orthodox clergy and well-educated laypeople, who regretted the English versions and blamed the schism in the Church on their wide availability. The college clergy at Rheims were demonstrating the same misgivings as Stephen Gardiner, when some 40 years earlier, at the height of the Geneva Bible’s popularity, he had presented to parliament a long list of Latin words to be retained in the proposed revision of the Great Bible ‘w sua natura’22 - as close to the Latin as possible. Having defended themselves for making the translation, the writers then go on to defend the source text. Having been obliged to work from the Vulgate, because in 1546 the Council of Trent had decreed that it was to be the official text, they give ten reasons why it is the best to use. However, although the Vulgate is the basis of the translation, extensive use is in fact made of the Greek, to the point of quoting it in the margin if necessary. The Latin text is also noted in the margin ‘when either we cannot fully express i t ... or when the reader might think, it cannot be as we translate ... ’ 23 The medieval idea of absolute authority in Jerome’s text and in the Church’s pronouncements has given way to a more defensive stance on the part of the translators; a more challenging and literate readership requires justification not only of the translation process but also of the doctrine defined by the translation process, especially when that readership has access to alternative translations. The tone of the first part of the preface is one of reluctance and resignation,24 yet having decided to undertake the task, the translators explain their strategy thoroughly. ‘We are very precise and religious’, they say, ‘in following our copy, 21 Records, op. cit., p. 301 22 The phrase Hn sua natura’ means retaining its character (both linguistic and ideological) by keeping its form as close to the original word as possible. Gardiner presented his list in 1542. See Records, op. cit., p. 273. 23 Ibid., p. 311. 24 This is supported by Allen’s letter in which he says ‘Perhaps indeed it would have been more desirable that the Scriptures had never been translated into barbarous tongues; nevertheless, at the present day, when either from heresy or from other causes, the curiosity o f men, even o f those who are not bad, is so great, and there is often such need o f reading the Scriptures in order to confute our opponents, it is better that there should be a better and Catholic translation than that men should use a corrupt version to their peril and destruction. ’ Ibid., p. 300.

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the old vulgar approved Latin: not only in sense, which we hope we always do, but sometimes in the very words also ... \ 25 Some words will sound strange at first, but the reader will soon become used to them and accept them in the same way as they have accepted such words as Passover and Pentecost. ‘And if Phylacteries be allowed for English Matthew 23 we hope that Didragmes also, Prepuce, Paraclete and suchlike will easily grow to be current and familiar.,26 Whilst this is a reasonable enough proposal, the Rheims translators failed to take into account the fact that the Latinate expressions they employed had already been translated into more familiar English terms in both the Great Bible and the Geneva version. Therefore it is not surprising that terms quoted in the preface such as ‘neophyte’, ‘evangelize’ and ‘reflorished’ did not readily replace the more accessible English already devised by previous translators, although it is only fair to record that some of the words later to be scorned by the writer of the preface to the King James’ version ‘holocaust’, ‘tunic’ and ‘rational’ - have since been assimilated into the language. Using Latinate language was one way of restricting the text and defining it according to orthodox doctrine, and the Rheims translators’ aim in translating was to do exactly that. The purpose of their work was to restate the text in Catholic terms as a counterbalance to ‘the Protestants’ presumptuous boldness and liberality in translating’. It follows, therefore, that they were unwilling to commit themselves in cases of ambiguity or where the meaning of the text was unclear: it was better to be literal and obscure than to overlay the text with imagined interpretation. ‘We presume not’, they continue in the preface, ‘in hard places to mollify the speeches or phrases, but religiously keep them word for word, and point for point, for fear of missing or restraining the Holy Ghost to our fantasy’ 27 This policy accounts for the rendering of part of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 rather awkwardly as ‘give us this day our supersubstantial bread’. ‘Supersubstantialis' was used by Jerome to render the Greek word 87Ciooaiov, the meaning of which is difficult to define and the position of which, in this context, is ambiguous. Jerome’s choice of ‘supersubstantialis' has never been satisfactorily accounted for, and in the Latin (Catholic) liturgy ‘quotidianum' was eventually substituted. The Rheims translators, restricted by their source text, played safe by retaining the Latin construction but, in doing so, rendered a familiar prayer unfamiliar. The fact that there were already acceptable English renderings of the Lord’s Prayer and other parts of the liturgy taken from the Bible meant that the Rheims translation could only become popular among those wishing to call attention to their Catholicism. Where the language involved a question of doctrine the use of ecclesiastical and technical terms can be excused but, as a further example, quoted by F. F. Bruce, illustrates, the policy of retaining Latinate words, rather than using more common English, was more than simply a matter of clarification or definition. Its purpose was to make a statement about reclaiming the text from the ‘adversaries’. In the story of the Good Samaritan 25 26 27

Ibid., p. 305. Ibid., p. 307. Ibid., p. 309

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the vocabulary in the Rheims translation is recognizably English until the Samaritan gives his instructions to the innkeeper. ‘Have care of him’, he says, ‘and whatsoever thou shalt supererogate, I at my return will repay thee. ’28 Here, we have a complex linguistic situation in which a person speaking Aramaic is telling a story about a Samaritan to a Jewish audience. The oral medium was written down first in trading Greek, then transferred into Latin and is here being rendered in English. The word ‘supererogate’ draws our attention for two reasons: first, the context is a spoken parable and, as such, needs to be intelligible; second, it is difficult to imagine that the Samaritan would use a word that subsequently came to have a specific theological connotation when giving a simple command to an innkeeper.29 In this particular case, the translators have sacrificed clarity and context in order to uphold the chosen source text (which uses the term supererogare) and to stamp the text with a Catholic marker, so achieving their aim of a ‘most sincere ... Catholic translation’.30 Despite its restricted aims and Latinate diction, the Rheims New Testament represents an important landmark in the process of rendering the Scriptures into English. Gregory Martin was a linguist as well as a theologian; he had studied the other English versions available and was not afraid to make discreet use of their best phrases while loudly condemning their faults. This was a position taken up later by the King James’ Bible translators as they in their turn condemned the Rheims version for its Latinity while adopting some of its better interpretations. Martin’s reference to the Greek text made improvements in the rendering of the definite and indefinite article; he also made use of phrases from both the Geneva Bible and Coverdale’s Latin/English diglot of 1538, the Latin text of which was the Vulgate. His premise that words that initially seemed strange would grow familiar was indeed true, but they were not destined to be the words of the Rheims New Testament but rather those of the King James’ Bible of some 29 years later. What conclusions can we draw from these very different approaches to the project of translating the Bible into English? What bearing did exile have on the attitudes demonstrated by the translators? Both groups felt alienated from the religious and social context in England at the time. Both translations were produced as vehicles for propaganda - as an alternative authority to the Church in power in England at their respective times, but also as a statement of ownership of the text. Making a translation of a text is an excellent way of securing a proprietorial hold on it, of marking it as an expression of the particular perspective of an individual or group. For the Catholics, the way to retain the Scriptures as their exclusive property was at first to refuse to translate; keeping the Bible in Latin and insisting on Jerome’s text as the only true representation gave them, as it were, sole 28 Luke 10: 35. F. F. Bruce, The English Bible (London: The Lutterworth Press, 1961), p. 118. 29 Supererogate - a theological term for what is done over and above the requirement o f God’s law; supererogation - the performance o f more than duty requires. 30 Records, op. cit., p. 304.

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distribution rights. The Rheims Bible became necessary after other English translations became freely available; it was an attempt to regain control over a text that had been appropriated by others. It was the same sort of mind-set that prompts unwilling exiles to re-create their source culture in a foreign context and cling to it without allowing the host culture to invade. In Geneva, however, the exiles felt comfortable with the context; it was a positive place where the energy of change was accepted and welcomed. Both the religious and social contexts were being re­ formed and the translation of the Bible was a natural result of this reorganization a way of furthering the reform that had already begun, and, in itself, a positively charged and highly motivated impetus. In short, the Genevans were not so much exiles as pioneers, relishing the experience of moving into new territory. By contrast, the Rheims group felt the loss of familiar scenery very deeply, and simply wanted to return home.

Chapter 3

Language, Time and Politics in Shakespeare’s Macbeth1 Douglas Burnham Introduction: at home with the Macbeths The conditions of exile and being at home are opposites, apparently mutually defining. The most unnerving form of exile, then, must be exile in the home when that which should be the safest, most intimate, the most at-an-end becomes alien and restless. Such an uncanny exile is a common feature of tragedy and of tragic figures,2 but of none more so than Macbeth. What can looking at this play in terms of the motif of exile show us? And, in turn, what can this play tell us about the concept of exile? This paper will explore these questions by treating the concept of exile in its relation to three other notions, all obviously very significant to Shakespeare’s play - namely, language, time and politics. My conjecture is that the condition of exile helps us understand what, for Shakespeare, is the interrelation among these three what I shall call a political metaphysics. Briefly, the basic thesis is that Shakespeare’s often remarked upon political conservatism, far from being unthinking, is quite elaborately underpinned by a philosophical conception of nobility and temporality. This underpinning is portrayed in the play positively, but above all negatively, through a portrait of Macbeth trapped in a fallen time that is structured as exile. However, in order properly to understand the dramatic action of the opening few scenes, and thus for us to get a proper grasp on the figure of Macbeth in the play, we must look briefly at aspects of the context of the play’s production in the early seventeenth century. This contextualization will form the first section of the paper. We shall then turn, in the second section, to the play’s treatment of language and message-sending, again in relation to the figure of Macbeth himself. In the final section, we consider the conception of time in the play, which then brings us to the ‘political metaphysics’ mentioned above. The shadowing It is generally accepted that Shakespeare’s Macbeth was written around 1606, and 1 Many thanks are due to Dr Darrell Hinchliffe for what he generously claims were mutually enlightening discussions on the themes in this paper. 2 See also Carla Dente’s discussion o f ‘exiles in their own countries’ in Chapter 12 o f this volume.

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is one of Shakespeare’s most topical plays. It is perhaps difficult to imagine the choice of subject matter not being determined by public interest in the history of Scotland. This interest particularly concerned the Stuarts (who traced their lineage back to Banquo), the relationship between Scotland and England and, of course, magic and witches - favourite themes of James I himself. Indeed, it is often suggested that the play’s subject matter, treatment of its political plot, characters and magical themes are all designed as flattery to James, who was more intimately involved in the theatre than Elizabeth had been. In this section we shall explore selected aspects of this political and intellectual climate, culminating in a discussion of Shakespeare’s delicately measured adaptation of the Macbeth story with respect to the account given in the well known Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed. First of all, the play marks - although, of course, not uniquely - a transition in the understanding and use of history in England. The influence of humanism led history from a ‘chronicle’-type, essentially medieval understanding of the subject as primarily the mere recording of a sequence of events (perhaps under the sign of a divine or mythological progress or decline), to a variety of new notions: (i) history used not merely as the legitimization of political claims, but in both the conscious construction of myths of right, and the critical investigation of the origins of institutions; (ii) history that is critical of its sources, scholarly and non-reductive in its method, aware of its epistemology; (iii) a history that conceives of its task at least partly as the preservation and purification of the documentary or archaeological records of the past; (iv) history that views its task as the construction of natural, human-order explanatory narratives, and is thus explicitly aware of its interpretative nature; (v) history that seeks to reanimate a form of existence from the past (Italian classicism most obviously but, more to our purpose, the attempts to reappropriate earlier, more ‘authentic’ modes of Christian life). These determinations or debates provide us with initial clues to how Shakespeare understands and permits himself to take over the historical sources for his history plays in general (and, for its political significance, Macbeth must be counted an honorary member of these) and for the narrative of Macbeth in particular. Arguably, Macbeth shows two more particular historical interests. One, which combines several of the above notions, was that Shakespeare was able to use the popularity of Holinshed’s Chronicles against his audience (or certain significant sectors of them), to manipulate their responses. We shall return to this point in a moment. The second (relying on the fifth form above) is a possible echo of the concerns of Protestantism in this period, carried out at the highest level (for example, by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Burghley) to ‘recover’ the history of pre-Conquest England as a time of an unsullied Christianity independent of the degradation of mainland European Catholicism. The admittedly speculative hypothesis that Shakespeare might have been influenced by this idea certainly helps to account for the dramatically and thematically peculiar emphasis placed on the portrait of Edward the Confessor in IV.iii. As we shall see, this portrait of Edward as the calm, radiant, divine centre of events fits well into our general

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conception of the play’s agenda. This hypothesis can be pushed still further, however. With the exception of Harold, who held the throne for all of two months, Edward was, of course, the last (though disconcertingly fragile) English king prior to the Norman Conquest. As Shakespeare sees it, then, Scotland is not only the homeland of England’s new King (James), but also the place of exile for an otherwise unbroken ‘authentic’ Christian tradition, which is at last returned to England (in time to fuel post-Gunpowder Plot anti-Catholic sentiment). A remarkably inventive flattery indeed! Moreover, the play may well mark the influence, and a critique upon the same, of the political thought of Machiavelli, well known in intellectual circles in England by 1580, although his works themselves were not available in English until 1640. Generally speaking, Machiavelli’s work had a fourfold importance: first, it reinforced a new interest in Senecan tragedy; second, it emphasized the actual behaviour of power, rather than an idealized or moralized portrait of it; third, it introduced the idea that political power is its own legitimization; and, fourth, it more generally suggested that human actions are to be judged only by their results, efficacy, and the value created and accumulated in and through those actions. In this, in an English context at least, Machiavelli might be seen as a strange kind of hyper-humanist, in which the Platonism and even spirituality, which characterized much o f Renaissance humanism, were set aside. Shakespeare, in Macbeth, dramatizes just such an idea, in order utterly to reject it in its metaphysical underpinnings. For all these reasons, the play is a fascinating document for the political and intellectual history of the British Isles. Throughout this paper we will be using the above ideas - and especially the influence of Machiavelli - to help us uncover the intellectual and dramatic content of the play. The story of Macbeth, together with many of the resonances described above, would have been familiar to a significant proportion of Shakespeare’s audiences, especially through the version in Holinshed’s Chronicles. This means that Shakespeare, to a greater degree than in most of his other work, can play with his audiences’ expectations. Holinshed’s Chronicles portray Duncan as a weak king, whom Macbeth effectively has a duty to usurp. Furthermore, Macbeth had a possibly legitimate claim to the throne through royal blood, and Duncan’s sons were too young to be rulers. (Of course, the system of election in medieval Scotland was not based upon primogeniture, but, all things being equal, the eldest son was the prima facie first candidate. Thus Macbeth, having taken the throne, worries about having no son.) The rebellion against Duncan began precisely because of discontent over Duncan’s lax punishment of criminals, and Holinshed makes much of Macbeth’s ten years of good rule following his coup, before his cruel nature reasserted itself and brought rebellion down upon him in his turn. In some ways, Shakespeare’s play reinforces this: Duncan arrives on the scene not only ignorant of the fact that Macbeth defeated the original rebellion but also that subsequently the Norwegians invaded twice, with the help of still other traitorous

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Scots - including a man whom Duncan previously, and naively, had considered his most trusted friend - and were both times defeated.3 Shakespeare’s compression of these wars into one continuous sequence (explicitly not the case in Holinshed) certainly orients the drama away from fields of battle and on to Macbeth’s encounter with the witches and all its implications, but also exacerbates Duncan’s distance from reality. Duncan seems out of touch, careless, hopelessly inept and weak (although, when it comes to ordering the execution of a traitorous former friend, he does not hesitate for a moment). Therefore, it is not impossible for an audience to construe Macbeth as a noble man performing a regrettable but responsible action in killing his king. Certainly, he is built up as a hero prior to his entrance, and his later regrets, misgivings and uncertainties about the crime are apparent enough and inappropriate in a true villain (for example, Iago, although Macbeth is true enough to the new non-Senecan style of tragedy Shakespeare was creating). Shakespeare helps us by omitting a dramatic and senseless act of cruelty committed by Macbeth upon MacDowald. Holinshed writes that Macbeth acts ‘remitting no piece of his cruel nature with that pitiful sight’,4 but this is not how the story is related in the play. However, if we are looking for heroic achievements in Macbeth, the progress of the play is against us. Macbeth’s regicide is portrayed on several levels as particularly evil, and all of nature reacts against the crime (owls screech, storms rage, horses consume each other). Furthermore, the character of Lady Macbeth is one of the great portrayals of singleminded immorality in all literature (although, of course, this singlemindedness is shown ultimately to be fractured by guilt and anxiety). No mention is made of Macbeth’s ‘natural’ claims on the throne (only ‘chance may crown me/ Without my stir’ (I.iii. 144-5) which is a different matter), and Duncan’s eldest son is said to have been old enough to have fought in the wars - so why not rule also? So how is Macbeth to be interpreted? Who is Macbeth? My point is that, for an audience already familiar with the story, Shakespeare will have both surprised and not a little confused them. The immediate purpose is to empty Macbeth as a character, to make him into a shadow of either of his historically determined selves - neither simply the hero, nor unequivocally the traitor. (As we shall see, the use of ‘shadow’ here is based on Macbeth’s famous soliloquy in Act V, scene v.) Of course, one effect of this is to make Macbeth interesting as a character - complex, disturbing, ‘alive’. Macbeth, we might say, is released from history - but perhaps, for the audience, only temporarily, for as we shall see, this shadowing is an aspect of a more complex destiny. The operations of shadowing can be conveniently figured by the notion of exile. For, who is the true exile in Macbeth? Certainly the play includes accounts of 3 Reference will be made throughout to William Shakespeare, The Tragedy o f Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 4 Raphael Holinshed, ‘The Chronicles o f England, Scotland and W ales’, in William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Signet, 1963), p. 148.

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Malcolm, his brother, Macduff, Banquo’s son, and others all fleeing Scotland. But the real exile is Macbeth himself, precisely because, as we shall see, he is never ‘at home’ with his actions, with his rule, or with himself. Macbeth’s home - the place in which he might feel secure and genuinely empowered - is always one more crime away. This state of exile from oneself is, certainly, in part a stunningly effective portrait of a man with a guilty conscience but, more importantly, it is bound up with a whole cluster of concepts that describe the nature of language and time in relation to the central notion of divinely sanctioned nobility.

Messages These confused messages to the audience, vis-a-vis their inherited understanding of Macbeth, are taken up and echoed thematically in the play. The play is shot through with messages - arriving early or late, with strange news or news already known, equivocal or implausibly overwrought, overinterpreted or simply disbelieved. The opening scenes in particular are a series of messages running between Macbeth and Duncan, Macbeth and the witches, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Macbeth, for example, sends a letter to Lady Macbeth at their home, then a messenger bearing a message from another messenger arrives, who not incidentally has beaten Macbeth home, who himself has been riding to bring a message, ahead of Duncan who himself had wanted to be Macbeth’s ‘purveyor’. Messages, it seems, always get out of hand.5 Even the witches’ messages arrive too late: their instructions to fear Macduff are accompanied, a few lines later, by a message that he has already left for England. Messages are delayed, deferred, inhabited by difference. The play reveals an original mistrust of messages, and ultimately of language (that is, political language) at least under certain conditions.6 Moreover, Macbeth does everything by proxy, by message, at a distance. As, obviously, a king cannot do everything himself, the problem is not that Macbeth gives commands or sends messages, but rather that, for numerous reasons, he is (or we in the audience are) unsure of his absolute ability to command or act without equivocation. Structurally, then, Macbeth is in exile (at an enforced distance) from everything in his own country: from his own sovereign power, from his ‘family’ and even from his own hereditary home. The murder of Duncan is firsthand, certainly, but offstage, and Lady Macbeth has to finish the job. Macbeth hires villains to kill Banquo and the family of Macduff. He even (and it is significant that this is ambiguous in the play) hires spies to spy on the villains. He sneaks around his own seat of power like a thief, meeting assassins - not to mention all 5 There are mad circulations o f messages in, for example, Anthony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. They perform a similar dramatic function o f exemplifying tumultuous events on- and offstage; but in Macbeth, at least, the messages seem to be thematic. 6 Compare Kathleen B ell’s account o f the language o f exile in her ‘Auden, Exile and Community’, Chapter 9 in this volume.

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the strange apparitions that invade. By the end, he is taking messages to confirm other messages, and then sending out still other spies, finally beating them for bad news. He learns of Lady Macbeth’s condition, and then of her death from the doctor and from servants (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have no scene together for the entire second half of the play). In short, the very fault of Duncan - the reason why Macbeth might have felt it necessary to kill the king in order to save Scotland - has returned to haunt both Macbeth and Scotland. The whole kingdom seems to function like a network of noisy, misplaced, disbelieved and unbelievable messages which come in part from out of this world, and certainly not from any centre, any unequivocal voice. This is not a healthy, whole body politic. It resembles rather a body with a severe disorder of the nervous system - manifested on stage, for example, in the person of Lady Macbeth, as seen in the later acts. Similarly, the witches’ prophecies are, on more than one occasion, said to be messages from some other power, behind the scenes, as if the chain of messages, like the image of the mirror of the kingly descendants of Banquo, goes back indefinitely.7 Some other dramatist (probably Middleton) apparently sensed this disturbing absence and supplied Hecate to be the unequivocal source: to be that which acts and commands, rather than one who merely passes on. Being the source is her dramatic and symbolic function, in addition to her role as mere spectacle. The Hecate scene even begins with her chastising the Weird Sisters for acting on their own, retroactively trying to clear up the ambiguity of the messages of power at the beginning of the play (the very ambiguity that we consider absolutely essential to understanding the play). There is another set of messages, which constitute Macbeth’s haunting. It is his fate to inherit the language and thinking of the witches. Certainly, he is immediately unhinged by their presence - by their pronouncements of uncertain implication and origin, by the ambiguous nature of the Weird Sisters themselves. He is not at all the man that the Captain had led us to expect. Before he meets them, he has only one line, “So fair and foul a day I have not seen’, and it echoes one of their lines (‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’). This rhetoric of contradiction not only subsequently becomes a prominent characteristic of Macbeth’s rhetoric too, but moreover, it also becomes a key tool for his analysis of situations - his way of thinking. Shortly afterwards, he remarks: ‘This supernatural soliciting/ Cannot be ill cannot be good’ (I.iii.131-2) and then ‘That function is smother’d in surmise,/ and nothing is, but what is not’ (I.iii. 142-3). So immediate and striking is this influence on Macbeth that he trusts his life and state to the witches’ prophecies, uses them to construct battle and political strategy, giving him so much confidence to offset his guilt that, after the first push, he no longer needs the prompting of Lady Macbeth. The witches take on that role. 7 Though, o f course, the mode o f this ‘going back’ is absolutely different: the one o f a disturbing deferral o f authority; the other o f a continuously present authority throughout a ‘timeless’ history.

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How? The witches have cast a spell: ‘The charm’s wound up’ (I.iii.37),8 making him ‘rapt’. Macbeth is pursued and caught by them. This was why it was necessary for Shakespeare to use his audience’s knowledge of history to confuse them - the shadowing of Macbeth’s character is completed by his haunting. We never see him otherwise, not even for one line (we only receive a stream of messages reporting on this ‘other’ Macbeth), until his last scene, when the realization that he has been fooled descends, and the spell is broken - and what a magnificent creature he proves to be. I am not, of course, suggesting that Macbeth is possessed and not ‘himself’. On the contrary, Macbeth is, tragically, precisely himself. Thus, this issue is not about freedom and determinism. Such a claim here would be both anachronistic (since the typically modem obsession with the philosophical problem of freedom in relation to responsibility dates from later in the seventeenth century), and to misread the dramatic role of the witches. They do not, strictly speaking, act upon Macbeth, but rather form part of the metaphysical structure of his existence. From this perspective, the Weird Sisters and their ‘charm’ are like a stage apparatus highlighting a Macbeth never at home, never at ease, not the self he imagines or wants himself to be, as z/he were haunted,9 the primary manifestation of this dis­ ease being certain sets of linguistic functions (irony, ambiguity, contradiction, perpetual message-passing) together with, as we shall now see, the empty temporality of delay and deferral.

Exilic time and politics Haunting, action at a distance, delayed messages - what does all this mean? The theme of the play centres on time, of a certain way of being in and surrounded by time, of certain features of time unfolding. Macbeth’s bloody entrance into politics, it seems, is identical to the introduction of a time of historical change when individuals can become kings, wherein there can be acquisition of a value made and not just given, and where incompletion and loss become possible too. It is a fallen time, to be sure, but also Machiavellian. Macbeth says: Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had liv’d a blessed time; for from this instant There’s nothing serious in mortality All is but toys; renown and grace is dead, The wine o f life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of. (II.iii.93—8) 8 With reference to the theme o f time, it is worth pointing out that this expression is known to have been applied to the winding up o f clocks in 1601. O f course, it fits well also into the figure o f the Weird Sisters as spinners or weavers o f fate. 9 This perhaps forms a third paradigm o f the self in exile, in addition to the two alternatives discussed by Andrew Hammond in his ‘An Inflexible Exile: Preserving the Self in South-east Europe’ in Chapter 6 o f this volume.

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The irony is of course double: Macbeth wearing a mask for his countrymen after the murder of Duncan, but inadvertently speaking a truth of which he is not yet aware. Something has indeed happened to time. The formal structure of this time is given in the play’s opening line ‘When shall we three meet again?’ This is the structure of desire: the opening line refers to its own incompletion; it does not say now, it says future, always ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’. It is also the structure of exile - wandering, with no place at which to arrive. Dramatically, the whole play is like a commentary on this line. Ambition and desire are for that which is not present (as if it were present there would no longer be ambition and desire) and thus necessarily involve difference, delay and deferral. Lady Macbeth senses this, greeting Macbeth with ‘Thy letters have transported me beyond/ This ignorant present, and I feel now/ The future in the instant’ (I.v.56). But Macbeth can never knit up the ‘ravelled sleeve of care’ (II.ii.36) - that is, he can never complete his project as a whole in the present; his time always stretches away in front of him, just out of reach: If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly: if th’ assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease, success; ...

Actions become messages sent blindly into the future. The passage continues: We still have judgement here; that we but teach Bloody instructions which being taught, return To plague th’ inventor. (I.vii.lff)

This new time proves to be, in its very essence, a time of slippage and deferral. Macbeth’s message-taking and acting at a distance are also actions across time; hence the delays, interruptions and noise on the lines. He has to remind himself constantly not to delay: ‘The firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand’; ‘Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives’ (IV.i. 160-1; II.i.62; and cf. IILiv. 140-1). Moreover, such a time is experienced as empty, perpetually awaiting its fulfilment. This, of course, is the central idea of Macbeth’s famous soliloquy in Act V, scene v. There, the notion of an empty, meaningless time is stunningly combined with the equally important notion of being caught in a destiny which is imaged ironically as the light or candle of ‘all our yesterdays’. Where there is light, however, there will also be shadow, and here we can see that shadow imaged in two ways. Most clearly, it is the ‘poor player’, empty of signification, pacing the stage until his time is up. More generally, however, it seems to represent the negativity of a life stretched out from yesterdays, through tomorrows, to ‘dusty death’. This combination is all-important for understanding the conception of such time: for the life so stretched is precisely the life in empty time. Macbeth’s destiny

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that he inherits, as it were, from himself is exilic time, which empties, ‘signifying nothing’. Shakespeare opposes this Machiavellian temporality with a noble temporality, replete at every moment, the ‘measure, time and place’ (V.vii.103) orchestrated ultimately by the ‘grace of Grace’ (whereas Lady Macbeth cannot even die at the right time [V.v.18]). That there is operative in all Shakespeare a theologically determined conception of throne and state is no news, of course. More interesting, however, is to see this crossing over into a conception of time, of language, and of an authentic or noble political existence. Thus, we can see a distinctive political thinking beginning to take shape. Shakespeare’s politics, then, lies not so much in his overt and certainly worrying patriarchal and aristocratic sentiments, for these must be seen as historically contingent embodiments of a quite separate set of concepts - of noble political virtue and the temporality it inhabits.10 Let us explore this further. Above, we characterized Macbeth’s kingdom as an infernal circulation of messages, without unequivocal origin or destination. But it is only Macbeth’s kingdom that appears like this. For those outside it - and I mean metaphysically outside it - something very different takes place. Duncan’s sons flee because they know they cannot compete with the Macbeths in the sending of false messages: ‘To show an unfelt sorrow is an office which the false man does easy’ (Il.iii. 138— 9). One of the important details in Holinshed’s history which Shakespeare does not use is the sending of messages among Macbeth’s opponents. How, in the play, do they know Malcolm is in England? How do they know Macduffhas followed?11 How do they coordinate themselves in order to meet and join the English army? Macbeth controls language, and his spies are everywhere. Lennox has to resort to a kind of ironic code in order to speak of his fears (IILvi), but the transition from guarded speech to open rebellion is not clearly marked. It does not have to be, for any noble speech would ‘hit the thoughts’ of another nobleman. The only messages ever mentioned by Macbeth’s enemies, in fact, are prayers for angelic messengers: ... Some holy angel Fly to the court o f England and unfold His message ere he come . . . . (III.vi.45ff)

10 In themselves, this ‘nobility’ is not even necessarily anti-democratic. In other words, for example, as expressions o f virtue - the ‘I have that within which passes show’ o f Hamlet {Hamlet I.ii.85) or the ‘So young, my Lord, and true’ o f Cordelia {King Lear I.i. 106) (similarly in Cymbeline) are by no means necessarily spoken by members o f a hereditary ruling class. However, I make no claims that these two general levels (nobility as virtue, nobility as political class) are easily separated - indeed, the difficulty is part and parcel o f the historicality o f political life and thought as well as the necessary historical dimension to literary interpretation. 11 There is no need to pursue the thorny problem o f the relation between IILvi and IV.i with their contradictory reports on the state o f Macbeth’s knowledge. N o solution I have seen proposed seriously contravenes the thesis o f this paper.

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The noblemen do not need messages and messengers to communicate (and, similarly, do not worry about their language and thus, unlike Macbeth, have no doubt that their commands will be properly understood); it is as if they just know. And their knowledge is still more than Macbeth knows despite all his spies. Commentators have called this scene miraculous - this is by no means criticism, as we now suspect that is precisely the effect intended, for the action in this scene proceeds by Grace. Those who are exiled from Scotland because of their rebellion against Macbeth in fact are never in exile. Certainly, their beloved homeland is corrupted and stained, but they are dramatically and symbolically ‘at home’ anywhere amongst the nobility.12 One protracted but extraordinary scene, set in England, has Malcolm meeting Macduff. Malcolm doesn’t trust him, thinking that he might have been sent by Macbeth. So he equivocates, telling lies about himself, about how lustful, avaricious and, as a last resort, demonic he is. The crisis point of the narrative has been reached. Macduff finally throws up his hands in despair of saving Scotland: These evils thou repeat’st upon thyself Hath banish’d me from Scotland. O my breast, Thy hope ends here! (IV.iii. 112—14)

Only then does Malcolm believe Macduff is really on his side. It is not speeches, shows or testimonials but ‘noble passions’ that have done the trick, so that now ‘God above/ Deal between thee and m e’ (IV.iii. 120-1). Malcolm then ‘unspeaks’ his lies about himself. Language is here a barrier to true communication - a barrier that must be pushed to its limits before, through its cracks, meaning becomes present. This is reinforced by the next few lines, which describe the English king with his abilities of ‘heavenly gift of prophecy’ and the curing of disease, whose actions ‘speak’ him full of grace. At the height of his infection of Scottish politics, the disease that is Macbeth had spread nearly to the throne of England, to be reversed there by divine nobility. Macbeth - and, above all, Macbeth’s political power - is ignoble, and this word carries a metaphysical meaning. However, language is here redeemed; truth once more can speak, rather than be lost to a function of power.13 This redemption of language is also, of course, the redemption of time. One clear sign of this is the breaking of the cycle of delay and displacement of messages and actions. As we pointed out, Macbeth has constantly to remind himself not to delay: ‘The firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand’ (IV.i. 160-1). By contrast, Macduff demands immediacy, and for himself: ‘But gentle heavens/ Cut short all intermission; front to front/ Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and 12 We see a similar conception o f politics and exile in, for example, the two courts o f As You Like It. For an interesting parallel, see Michael Davies’ discussion o f ‘the difference between godly and ungodly responses to exile’ in Milton in his “‘Heaven’s Fugitives”: Exile and Nonconformity in the Restoration’, Chapter 4 in this volume. 13 There is a similar redemption o f the language o f manipulative power in The Tempest.

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myself (IV.iii.230). The acceleration of action at the end of the play, and the brevity of Act V, scene 2 to cover the complex operation of an English army marching north, are dramatic representations of this. It is worth pointing out, however, that before we (and the witches) meet Macbeth, his similarity in this to Macduff is reported and re-emphasized twice. Macbeth, it is reported, ‘ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell’ to his enemy and he fought ‘point against point’ (I.ii.21,56). This reported ‘innocent’ Macbeth is, from the point of view of the play, a kind of myth, outside of time. Duncan, in exactly the same speech as that in which he bemoans his inability to detect treason in his closest allies, praises and proclaims Macbeth Cawdor. Apart from this heavily ironic passage, however, after Macbeth’s first entrance, no one ever praises Macbeth in this way.14 On the contrary, in Act 1, scene 5, with delicately measured ambiguity, Lady Macbeth simultaneously suggests that Macbeth is a bit of a milksop and that he was already ambitious. The discordant temporality of this latter ambiguity is telling. To be sure, these opening scenes precipitate the ‘rising’ action of the play, culminating in the murder of Duncan (significantly, despite the theatre’s love of spectacle, entirely offstage). But, as we have already seen, symbolically Macbeth is ‘falling’ from the moment he sets foot on the stage, because he both generates, and is caught up in, a Machiavellian and fallen time. The innocent, noble Macbeth is a world and time away - an ideal that the real Macbeth can neither understand nor identify with. As with the reports of the two traitors at the play’s beginning (‘Nothing in his life/ Became it like the leaving it’ (I.iv.8-9)), the countenance of death breaks the spell on Macbeth. Death makes impossible a temporality structured as unfulfilled desire, and in turn makes possible a partial renewal of authentic nobility. Macbeth, in facing Macduff, thus recovers something of what we called above his mythical innocence: ... Before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff; And damn’d be him that first cries ‘Hold, enough!’ (V.vii.32-4)

Certainly, Macbeth remains the ‘fiend of Scotland’ but his tragedy lies partly in the fact that, only in facing death and stripped bare of his inherited baggage, do we see him in an authentic temporal structure like that which we heard said of him at the play’s beginning. This temporal structure is one condition o f nobility, in Shakespeare’s sense, because it frees language and action from the effects of diseased desire. For most of the play, though, Macbeth runs to stay still, trying to catch up with his own messenger, with what has sprung from his Pandora’s box.

14 Not even Macbeth himself, except as a kind o f tortured bravado (see Ill.iv. 1OOff or IV.i.64ff; and cf. V.v.lOff). Nobody wonders, in other words, ‘what has happened to the Macbeth we used to know?’

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Finally, Macbeth’s political desire is contrasted with the temporality of the divine presence of kingship itself. The normal - legal, natural and divine - progress of succession to the throne is not, strictly speaking, a historical succession. It is not just that this sequence of kings is continuous and governed by divine laws embodied in the institutions of succession. At his second meeting with the witches, Macbeth sees all the Stuart kings in the mirror at the same time. This is a preordained time - a time that, even from within it, is sub specie aeternitatis. Macbeth struggles to manufacture such a time but, ipso facto having to struggle, necessarily does so in vain. Macbeth accordingly despairs that his line and rule, being in time, will come to an end: ‘They hailed him [Banquo] father to a line of kings./ Upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown/And put a barren sceptre in my gripe’ (III.i.59). The sterility of Macbeth’s time is contrasted with, and redeemed by, the fullness of the time of divine nobility. Thus, Macduff, carrying Macbeth’s head, cries ‘The time is free’ (V.viii.55). The recapturing of this noble time is explicit in Malcolm’s final speech: ‘this, and what needful else/ That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace, we will perform in measure, time and place’ (V.viii.71-3). The ‘measure, time and place’ here is the calm restoration of a noble and divine time - a time personified both in the genuine, redeeming centre of the English throne (which, in its pre-Conquest purity is transferred in the person of Malcolm to Scotland for safekeeping), and in the apparition of the eight Stuart kings, in sequence but not in historical time, the last one holding a mirror reflecting all at once the righteous lineage. Such a time is the healing of the runaway, Machiavellian temporality instituted by Macbeth’s crime and desire. Shakespeare, then, as a historical thinker seems to be resisting the slow, perhaps inevitable, transition to a new and terrible world: a world in which one could and would wish to exile this life from God’s kingdom (and the political hierarchy and metaphysical conception of nobility which such a theology grounds) and thus make it possible to ‘jump the life to come’ and only be concerned with ‘judgement here’ (I.vii.7-8); a world in which value lies in consequences rather than in virtue, and in which nobility simply means power. Macbeth, in short, is a dramatized refutation of the unsustainability and necessary tragedy of such a world.

Chapter 4

‘Heaven’s Fugitives’: Exile and Nonconformity in the Restoration* Michael Davies Is this the region, this the soil, the clime, Said then the lost archangel, this the seat That we must change for heaven, this mournful gloom For that celestial light? ... Farewell happy fields Where joy forever dwells: hail horrors, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest hell Receive thy new possessor: one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven o f hell, a hell o f heaven.1

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, exile and fallenness are synonymous: to be fallen is to be banished, be it from Heaven or from the more earthly paradise of Eden. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that Milton’s epic should both begin and end with profound laments over exile following the respective falls of Satan and of Adam and Eve. Just as Satan, in the passage from Book I (quoted above), mourns the loss of heaven’s ‘happy fields’ when surveying hell’s dismal ‘soil’ (a word which encapsulates the degraded nature of the fallen angels’ state of banishment), so too do Adam and Eve stand aghast in Book XI at the prospect of eviction from a Paradise which also becomes physically and rhetorically ‘soiled’. While the fallen Eve grieves selfishly over what she perceives as the loss of her own Eden, her ‘native soil’, for Adam the prospect of being expatriated to ‘fitter soil’ provides more than a timely reminder of a newly gained mortality: they are, after all, being exiled to dust - ‘The ground whence thou wast taken’. Rather, Adam also fears what Satan himself suffers - banishment from the ‘Presence divine’ in ‘places’ which ‘Inhospitable appear and desolate,/ Nor knowing us nor known’ - a veritable ‘hell’ indeed.2 * Special thanks must be given to David Salter (Department o f English, University o f Leicester) and John Coffey (Department o f History, University o f Leicester) for providing many useful references during the writing o f this essay, and to Carina Vitti for her invaluable proofreading skills and perceptive comments. 1 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler (London and N ew York: Longman, 1968; reprint 1971), Book 1,11.249-55 at p. 59. All subsequent quotations w ill be taken from this edition. 2 Ibid., Book XI, 11. 259-333 at pp. 576-8.

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That we are finally meant to compare these polar responses seems to be a crucial part of the didactic plan of Paradise Lost. Indeed, the poem is framed by two ultimately very distinct reactions to banishment, although they may share a similarly ‘soiled’ rhetoric at first, in order to reinforce a fundamental lesson about how to respond to suffering and loss. For Adam and Eve, exile comes with a consolation obviously denied Satan through Michael’s instructions in Books XI and XII: the fallen pair gain, before leaving Eden, a Christian fortitude which will enable them to suffer their exile through a patience and godly perseverance made possible only by the revelation of salvation through Christ, the ‘redeemer ever blest’.3 Such a response is extremely important as it allows Milton to close his tragedy of the Fall in hope rather than in despair and it does so precisely by inverting and transcending the concept of ‘place’ (and therefore of exile) altogether: not only are these exiles promised ‘a paradise within... far happier ’but Eve announces a reformed conviction that Adam himself is now ‘all places’ to her in a godly and dutiful devotion which undermines all notions of geography: ‘with thee to go’, she pleads, ‘Is to stay here; without thee here to stay,/ Is to go hence unwilling’.4 In contrast, Satan’s response to exile in Book I offers only a false consolation in the fallen and carnal rhetoric of political justice. His lament over expulsion concludes bravely that it is ‘Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven’, while protesting a transcendence of ‘place’ through sheer force of will: ‘The mind is its own place’, he declaims, ‘and in itself/ Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’5 The rest of the poem demonstrates just how empty this assertion really is, particularly as Satan himself admits that his banishment into ‘infinite wrath, and infinite despair’ is utterly inescapable: ‘my self am hell’, he states.6 Milton’s point about exile in Paradise Lost is clear: the despair, revenge, and false heroism of Satan as he contemplates his expulsion at the beginning of the poem are to be rejected by the reader in the light of the godly response to exile presented at the end - one that emphasizes the victory of truth through suffering and the true transcendence of ‘place’ through Christian virtue.7 As Cedric Brown has recently put it, ‘the poem has as one of its main structures the marking of states of life as either being in the presence of God or being alienated from God’, because it is by such means that Paradise Lost ‘expresses godly discipline’.8 But Milton’s 3 Ibid., Book XII, 11. 356-573 at pp. 626-37. 4 Ibid., Book XII, 11. 587, 615-18 at pp. 638, 640. 5 Ibid., Book 1 ,11. 249-63 at p. 59. 6 Ibid., Book IV, 11. 73-8 at p. 194. 7 For further readings o f exile in Paradise Lost see Mary Christopher Pecheux, ‘Abraham, Adam, and the Theme o f Exile in Paradise L o st\ Publications o f the Modern Language Association, 80 (1965), pp. 365-71; Louis L. Martz, 'Paradise Lost: Princes o f Exile’, A Journal o f English Literary History, 36 (1969), pp. 232-49, and reprinted in Poet o f Exile: A Study o f Milton s Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 79-94; Christopher Fitter, “‘Native Soil”: The Rhetoric o f Exile Lament and Exile Consolation in Paradise L o st\ Milton Studies, 20 (1984), pp. 147-62. 8 Cedric C. Brown, ‘Great Senates and Godly Education: Politics and Cultural Renewal in Some Pre- and Post-revolutionary Texts o f Milton’, in David Armitage, Armand

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motivations for presenting such a point lie as much in the politics of his own time as they do in Christian doctrine. The fact that Paradise Lost concentrates so deeply on exile would seem to testify to Milton’s need to justify the ways of God to men in the face of the collapse of the Commonwealth and its revolutionary ideals. In these terms, Paradise Lost has often been read as the exilic product of Milton’s personal circumstances in the advent of political defeat. As Louis L. Martz has notably commented: By the time Milton at last began the writing o f his epic, ... his hopes had been shaken by the quarrelling o f sects, by the struggles o f ambitious leaders, and above all, by the refusal o f most o f his Englishmen to accept the Commonwealth o f Puritan Saints for which Milton had labored mightily with his pen. ... Thus Milton’s epic came to be composed, first, in an atmosphere o f imminent political failure, and then, o f total political disaster. The Sons o f Belial had returned to power, and Milton sat at home, blind, ageing, ill, most o f his income gone, in danger o f imprisonment or execution.9

Hence, ‘doubly exiled from the community of men, first by his blindness, and then by political isolation’, Martz concludes, Milton composed ‘his poem of exile, the last great poem of the European Renaissance’, his only consolation lying in the hollow and proverbial profession that ‘One’s country is wherever it is well with one’.10 But such an understanding as to why Paradise Lost speculates so intensely and so sustainedly upon exile remains problematic for a number of reasons. First, it places Milton’s sympathies too directly with Satan and his rebellious crew who, like Milton, mourn the failure of their revolution. Indeed, any overtly political reading of Satan’s war in heaven is soon betrayed (as many commentators have noted) by ambiguities and ironies that make such an interpretation practically impossible.11 Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds, Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 43-69 at p. 59. 9 Martz, ‘Paradise Lost: Princes o f Exile’, op. cit., pp. 232-3. 10 The Works o f John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson, 18 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-38), XII, pp. 114-15, cited in Martz, ‘Paradise Lost: Princes o f Exile’, op. cit., p. 233. For a plenary discussion o f Milton’s use o f Classical proverbs expressing consolation for those in exile, see Fitter, ‘Native Soil’, op. cit., pp. 152-7. 11 On the difficulty o f deciphering the politics o f Paradise Lost, especially in terms o f Satan’s seeming republicanism, see Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977, reprint 1997), pp. 365-75; Blair Worden, ‘Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny o f Heaven’, in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli, eds, Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 225-45; Armand Himy, ‘P aradise Lost as a Republican ‘Tractatus Theologico-politicus’, in Skinner, Milton and Republicanism, op. cit., pp. 118-34; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, R hetoric and P olitics, 1 6 2 7 -1 6 6 0 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 433-67. For Milton’s response to the Restoration more broadly see also Blair Worden, ‘Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration’, in Gerald Maclean, ed., Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 111-36.

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In any case, it would appear that Milton’s purpose in Paradise Lost, as we have already seen, is not simply to sympathize with the fallen rebels but to reveal the difference between godly and ungodly responses to exile: suffering for truth is the poem’s final message, not revenge. The second, and perhaps more important, problem such a reading leaves us with, however, is that it distances Paradise Lost from the historical context in which it was published. Instead, it makes the central concern of the epic Milton himself, both in terms of his own personal isolation as well as in lamenting the demise of the Puritan Commonwealth. According to such an explanation, Paradise Lost becomes an epic of personal exile, on the one hand, and a tragedy that focuses only on the politics of the past on the other. This kind of interpretation commits a very original sin indeed: it effectively exiles Paradise Lost from the politics and concerns of the Restoration, segregating it from the reign of Charles II in all but the most general terms of Milton’s ongoing and retrospective ‘experience of defeat’. This essay seeks to demonstrate that the concept of exile, which dominates Milton’s epic poem from beginning to end, represents nothing less than a central cultural and political paradigm of the Restoration as a whole. It will look at many works which, like Paradise Lost, manifest a concern over exile, focusing especially upon those issues that lie closest to the heart of Paradise Lost - the persecution of Nonconformity and liberty of conscience, arguably the most significant of all political factors in this period.12 There are two primary points of focus: the persecution and exile of Nonconformity at this time and how a rhetoric of exile, adopted and manipulated by both Anglicans and Nonconformists, operates within the complex political and cultural climate of Charles II’s regime, signalling clear and sometimes less clear political divisions and allegiances. As such, it is precisely the concerns about ‘native soil’ and responses to exile characteristic of the Restoration that works like Paradise Lost will be seen to be articulating and addressing. In order to demonstrate just how deeply rooted the concept of exile was during the Restoration, however, we must begin with the defining moment of the era: the return of the king. 12 For recent historical research on the significance o f religious toleration and liberty o f conscience for Restoration culture and politics, see especially Gary S. De Krey, ‘Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience, 1667-1672’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), pp. 53-83, and ‘Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679-1682’, in Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier, eds, Religion, Literature, and Politics in PostReformation England, 1540-1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 231-52; Gordon J. Schochet, ‘From Persecution to “Toleration”’, in J. R. Jones, ed., Liberty Secured? Britain Before and After 1688 (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 122-57; Tim Harris, ‘Revising the Restoration’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie, eds, The Politics o f Religion in Restoration England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 1-28, and London Crowds in the Reign o f Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), especially pp. 62-95; John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 15581689 (Harlow: Longman, 2000).

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It may seem an obvious point, but it is nevertheless worth remembering that the event of the Restoration itself hinges entirely upon the issue of exile. One need only regard contemporary accounts of Charles II’s return to his ‘Promised Land’ (as one recent biographer puts it) in May 1660 to recognize this.13 Having spent the greater part of 14 years travelling between Jersey, the Scillies, Hague, Paris and other European havens (before eventually establishing a government in exile in the Spanish Netherlands), Charles II was welcomed back into England with a rapture the enormity of which even the most sceptical of historians find difficult to counter.14 Descriptions of the ‘universal joy’ (as Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon wrote) recount how, with news of Charles II’s return, the nation went wild with riotous delight: ‘Great joy all yesterday night’, reports Samuel Pepys in his diary on 2 May 1660 (the day the king’s return was first declared), ‘and at night more bonefires than ever and ringing of bells and drinking of the King’s health upon their knees in the street, which’, Pepys added with some distaste, ‘methinks is a little too much. But everybody seems to be very joyful in the business’.15 Accounts of the king’s arrival at Dover on 25 May and of his progress through London four days later (on the king’s birthday, no less) are even more ecstatic. The diarist John Evelyn’s entry for 29 May famously noted how the king entered London ‘with a Triumph of above 20000 horse & foote’ (a somewhat exaggerated figure), ‘brandishing their swords and shouting with unexpressable joy: The wayes were straw’d with flowers, the bells ringing, the streetes hung with Tapissry, fountaines running with wine.’ Everyone was clad in ‘Cloth of Silver, gold and vellvet’ and ‘the windos & balconies all set with Ladys, Trumpets, Musick, & [myriads] of people flocking the streetes & was as far as Rochester ... And all this without one drop of bloud.’16 But while such descriptions remain compelling in themselves (indeed, Macaulay was to reproduce them practically verbatim 200 years later), the crucial point to note is that this was essentially a response to the end of exile, not only for the king but, it would seem, for the entire nation. With the return of Charles II, the kingdom was at last released from the bondage of a Puritan regime that had (according to the likes of Clarendon, at least) tyrannized its people through regicide and the corruption of social order, through the curtailment of freedom, and through high taxation.17 13 John Miller, Charles II (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), pp. 20-40. 14 On Charles IPs exile and return, see especially Godfrey Davies, The Restoration o f Charles I I 1658-1660 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), especially pp. 338-54; J. R. Jones, Charles II: Royal Politician (London: Allen Unwin, 1987), pp. 11-53; Ronald Hutton, Charles II: King o f England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 15-132; Miller, Charles I f op. cit., pp. 1-68. 15 The D iary o f Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1970), I (1660), p. 122. 16 The D iary o f John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), III (Kalendarium, 1650-72), p. 246. 17 See especially Harris, London Crowds in the Reign o f Charles I f op. cit., pp. 36-62; and N icholas Jose, Ideas o f the R estoration in English Literature 1660-71 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 1-30.

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With the restoration of the king, as promised in the Declaration of Breda (made by the king before his return, in April 1660), came an expectation of the reversal of all such misfortunes, and of benevolence, forgiveness and liberty for all. Not surprisingly, accounts of this time stress a restoration of English culture and of a sociopolitical system, which had, it seems, been exiled too. While Macaulay, in the nineteenth century, romanticized Charles II’s homecoming, claiming that he brought ‘the return of peace, of law, and of freedom’, the seventeenth-century Earl of Clarendon saw it as a much more miraculous purging of England’s past: ‘In this wonderful manner’, he asserted, ‘did God put and end in one month ... to a rebellion that had raged near twenty years, and been carried on with all the horrid circumstances of parricide, murder, and devastation, that fire and the sword, in the hands of the most wicked men in the world, could be ministers of.’18 When considering such reports, it is important to note the emergence of a distinct rhetoric of exile and return - one which effectively endows the monarch’s Restoration with infallible religious and nationalistic meaning. For many, the reinstatement of the king presented a ‘glorious ... deliverance’ for the realm as a whole, Clarendon referring piously to the fact ‘that God had not only restored the king miraculously to his throne, but that he had, as he did in the time of Hezekiah, “prepared the people, for the thing was done suddenly”, (2 Chron. xxix. 36)’.19 That the king’s return was seen as an act of God’s great providence is, in itself, not at all surprising: biblical analogies were rapidly adopted to typologize the miracle of the Restoration, pronouncing Charles II’s reign not only as an act of God (a ‘Restoration’ of great religious and political magnitude, therefore) but as momentous as any return from exile in the history of world, and especially in biblical history. Hence, John Evelyn’s account not only describes with gusto the king’s triumphant and evidently messianic procession into the city of London on 29 May; equally, he imbues it with a national and cosmological significance. The king’s return ‘after a sad, & long Exile, and Calamitous Suffering both of the King & Church’, he states, ‘was the Lord’s doing ...: for such a Restauration was never seen in the mention of any history, antient or modem, since the retume of the Babylonion Captivity, nor so joyfull a day, & so bright, ever seene in this nation.’20 The powerful implications of this overtly religious language, along with an equally strong emphasis upon the king’s repossession of the land of his ‘nativity’, clearly produced a heady rhetorical brew that was to pour itself easily and quickly into the literary commemorations which, as much as the celebrations of the masses, emerged to mark the end of Charles II’s exile. In fact, the literature surrounding the king’s return capitalized on the rhetoric in two significant ways. First, a body of 18 Lord Macaulay, The History o f England, from the Accession o f James the Second, ed. Charles Harding Firth, 6 vols (London: Macmillan, 1913), I, pp. 128-31; Clarendon: Selections from The History o f the Great Rebellion and the Life o f H im self ed. G. Huehns, intr. Hugh Trevor Roper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 367-8. 19 Clarendon: Selections, op. cit., pp. 368-9. 20 D iary o f John Evelyn, op. cit., Ill, p. 246.

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poetry arose to meet the returning king, which was to manipulate this discourse of nativity and religious restoration to great effect. Edmund Waller’s poem ‘To the KING, upon his Majesties Happy Return’ (1660) thus opens with a stock image of resurrected royalty bearing a majesty which outshines the rising sun, and it closes with the assertion that ‘Faith, law and Piety ... Justice and Truth’ ‘return again’ with a king sent by ‘Kind Heav’n ’.21 Other celebratory verses restate the king’s rights to the land of his birth, and how ‘His Native Country faint and languishing,/ Humbly implores the presence of her King’, a response presented both more powerfully and more ingeniously in John Dryden’s Astrea Redux in which the king’s return to England is famously described as if ‘the land approacheth you’.22 Through a remarkable inversion of place and space, Dryden’s verse marks the end of Charles’s exile not only by a return to his country but by a ‘land’ that, in repentance, ‘returns’ to him physically, politically and spiritually (the white cliffs of Dover being the kingdom’s ‘marks of penitence and sorrow’).23 Interestingly, though, Dryden’s great loyalist poem (the title of which means ‘Justice brought back’) also represents a second type of literary production accompanying the king’s return, one that not only celebrated the end of exile but which revived memories of the monarch’s lamentable experience of it in the first place. Dryden, for instance, is keen to recall not only the horrors of the Interregnum (‘For his [Charles’s] long absence church and state did groan,/ Madness the pulpit, faction seized the throne’), but also to romanticize the king’s banishment and its ultimate benefits. Although the wandering prince ‘found his life too true a pilgrimage’, nevertheless when ‘Forced into exile from his rightful throne’ after defeat at the battle of Worcester (3 September 1651), ‘He made all countries where he came his own’ and, Dryden asserts, he used this experience wisely by learning the art of government (‘viewing monarchs’ secret arts of sway’) like the ‘banished David’ of the Old Testament.24 Such lines demonstrate that the return of Charles prompted a resurgent interest in (if not romantic revisionism of) his experience as royal exile - one which recalled a royalist literature of defeat and banishment from the 1640s and 1650s (that of Richard Lovelace and Margaret Cavendish) on the 21 Waller’s poem is collected in Peter Davidson, ed., Poetry and Revolution: An A nthology o f British and Irish Verse 1 6 2 5 -1 6 6 0 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 489-92. 22 Rachel Jevon, Exultationis Carmen to the Kings most excellent majesty upon his most Desired Return (1660), 11. 95-6, in P oetry and Revolution, pp. 492-97 at p. 495; John Dryden, Astraea Redux (1660), in The Poems o f John Dryden: Volume I, ed. Paul Hammond (London: Longman, 1995), 1. 253, pp. 36-54 at p. 50. Other panegyric poems on the king’s return include Martin Lluelyn, To the K in gs most excellent M ajesty; Thomas Higgons, A Panegyrick to the King; Abraham Cowley, Ode upon the blessed Restoration and Returne; Katherine Philips, ‘Arion on a Dolphin, To his Majesty at his passage into England’. For readings o f this literature see especially Jose, Ideas o f the Restoration in English Literature, op. cit., pp. 31-6 6 ,1 6 4 -7 4 , andNorbrook, Writing the English Republic, op. cit., pp. 425-32. 23 Dryden, Astraea Redux, op. cit., 11. 250-55 at p. 50. 24 Ibid., 11. 21-2, 54, 74-9 at pp. 39-42.

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one hand, and, on the other, resurrected stories of Charles II’s romantic and adventurous escape from England after the battle of Worcester.25 Indeed, there was an immense demand for material on this subject at the time of the king’s return, accounts of the miraculous escape (most involving the donning of various disguises and hiding in oak trees) being published prolifically from 1660 onwards 26 Thus, along with the king himself, who regaled his companions with such stories of his escape on the night before landing at Dover, it seems that the nation too wanted to indulge its fears, fancies and good fortune by replaying Charles’s miraculous and heroic exile 27 With the Restoration, English history could be rewritten both usefully and popularly to the king’s advantage: Charles II’s exile was transformed from a tragedy into a romance almost overnight.28 25 See, for example, L ovelace’s poems ‘To Lucasta. From Prison’ or ‘The Grasshopper’ (both from Lucasta [1649]), demonstrating the ‘Cavalier sorrow, Cavalier depression’ that Peter Davidson sees as ‘an essential element’ in understanding ‘the Cavalier response to defeat and adversity’ in the mid-seventeenth century (Poetry and Revolution, 1li). Similarly, the romantic fictions o f Margaret Cavendish (who was exiled with her future husband, William Cavendish, Marquis o f Newcastle, from 1644-60) seem to reflect (as with many romances) states o f exile and travel. In ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ (in Natures Pictures [1656]) the heroine, aptly named Travellia, is forced into adventures abroad following ‘a plaguey rebellion’ in ‘the Kingdom o f Riches’ (in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), pp. 47-118). For an account o f Royalist literature more broadly, see Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 26 See, for example, William Matthews, ed., Charles U s Escape from Worcester: A Collection o f Narratives Assembled by Samuel Pepys (London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1967) and A. M. Broadley, ed., The Royal Miracle: A Collection o f rare Tracts, Broadsides, Letters, Prints, & Ballads Concerning the Wanderings o f Charles II. After the Battle o f Worcester (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1912). See also Clarendon’s account o f Charles II’s miraculous escape in G. D. Boyle, ed., Characters and Episodes o f the Great Rebellion, Selected from The History and Autobiography o f Edward, Earl o f Clarendon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), pp. 245-58. 27 Pepys records (23 May 1660) that, before landing in England, Charles II ‘fell in discourse o f his escape from Worcester. Where it made me ready to weep to hear the stories that he told o f his difficulties that he had passed through’ {Diary, 1 ,155-6). The king went on to dictate a full account o f his escape and subsequent adventures to Pepys in October 1680, but was infamous for telling and re-telling such stories at court in any case. See Matthews, Charles IPs Escape from Worcester, op. cit., pp. 1-16; Jones, Charles II, op. cit., pp. 24-6; Hutton, Charles II, op. cit., pp. 67-70. 28 Evidence for the romancing o f Charles IPs exile can be found in a number o f surprisingly disparate sources. John Miller, for instance, makes the period o f royal exile seem particularly enjoyable: ‘ [ ] all was not doom and gloom ’, he writes. ‘Being footloose conferred a certain freedom. From the age o f eighteen Charles was largely freed from the control o f his parents, and so from their decorum and straitlaced views o f morality. With his young companions, he could dance and sing, drink and make love’ ( Miller, Charles II, op. cit., p. 5). A similar picture o f royalist exile-as-holiday is reproduced quite famously in Aphra Behn’s Restoration comedy The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers (1677). In the nineteenth century the French novelist Alexander Dumas was also to portray the exile and return o f the Stuarts with great pathos and vigour in his famous Musketeer novels, Twenty Years After (1845), set around the events o f 1648-49 in England and France, and especially

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Confronted with such an overwhelming response to the end of Charles II’s exile, it is easy to overlook the less favourable responses to the Restoration which, though from ‘a small minority’, certainly were vocal.29 While Christopher Hill reports some particularly hostile reactions to the Restoration (‘A pox on all kings. I do not give a turd for never a King in England’, one ‘London lady’ is reported to have announced), it is also clear that not all verses on the king’s return were celebratory either.30 In his Speculum Speculativum (1660), the republican poet George Wither versified blatant unrest, stating that the ‘sickness’ that was once ‘cur’d by taking of the Head away’ from the ‘Body’ of the nation, has returned with more ‘malignant humours' and ‘Gangrenes' than before.31 Moreover, Wither’s rhyme seeks to negate altogether the emphasis on the king’s ‘nativity’ extolled in royalist eulogy: for Wither, the Restoration is merely ‘A bloodless Massacre' which ‘will be bloody’ given the ‘admittance of those Strangers J Who first begun our plagues, renew our dangers’. In seeking to alienate the monarch from his ‘native soil’ (to reverse, in other words, the panegyric strategies adopted by the likes of Waller and Dryden), such lines remind us that the rhetoric of exile could easily be turned against a returning monarch who was essentially a ‘stranger’ both to the people and to government. Wither’s verse thus testifies to the fact that the political ramifications of the Restoration were, at the point of Charles II’s return and long after, wholly uncertain. As Ronald Hutton points out, on the eve of the Restoration, ‘It was completely unclear, not merely whether Charles would make a good king but over what secular and religious governments he would preside’: the ‘general rejoicing’ that accompanied the monarchical return, Hutton explains, ‘was so unrestrained’ because it had ‘purely negative sources: the end of the republic, the end of exile’.32 Even Pepys’s account of the return seems to be tainted by an irreverent scepticism which was subsequently to pervade Restoration politics almost entirely: as the King’s party landed in glory at Dover, Pepys inauspiciously reports coming ashore The Vicomte de Bragelonne (1847), set in 1660 and involving Charles II who, at one point, recounts his defeat at Worcester and his subsequent exile to Louis XIV o f France: ‘From that moment’, Dumas has the exiled English king state, ‘my history became a romance’ ( The Vicomte de Bragelonne, ed. David Coward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 69-71). I owe thanks to David Salter for these references. 29 See, for instance, Harris, London Crowds in the Reign o f Charles //, op. cit., pp. 50-52, and Jose, Ideas o f the Restoration in English Literature, op. cit., pp. 1-30. 30 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991; originally published 1972), p. 354. See also H ill’s Some Intellectual Consequences o f the English Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), pp. 14-15. 31 Davidson, Poetry and Revolution, op. cit., pp. 508-11. The same imagery o f ‘Kingly Government’ as the source o f the nation’s ‘Sores and Phistula’s ’, a ‘D isease’ that needs to be taken away, was used on the eve o f the Restoration by the republican John Streater in A Shield Against the Parthian D art (1659), pp. 17-18, cited in Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, op. cit., pp. 6-7. See also Norbrook’s comments on Wither’s Speculum Speculativum, op. cit., pp. 428-31. 32 Hutton, Charles //, op. cit., p. 132.

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‘with a dog that the King loved (which shit in the boat, which made us laugh and me think that a King and all that belong to him are just as others are)’.33 History was to witness how such scepticism about the monarchy was to become more fully realized and how initial euphoria would soon degenerate into disappointment. On one level, the Court rapidly gained a sordid reputation for debauchery, licentiousness and corruption, which became impossible even for the most loyal supporters of the regime to ignore. On another, however, many of the promises made before the king’s return (in the Declaration of Breda, for instance) seemed to have come to nothing. This was especially the case for Nonconformists. Promised liberty of conscience in April 1660 (that is, the freedom to gather and worship separately from the Church of England), over the course of the next 25 years Nonconformist and Dissenting churches (particularly Baptists, Quakers and Congregationalists or Independents) were to face periods of the most severe persecution ever experienced in English history.34 The end of the king’s exile, it seems, was to mark the beginning of the prolonged exile of English Nonconformity. Unlike the emigration of Puritans to America following the Laudian ‘reforms’ of the Church of England in the 1630s, however, the Restoration witnessed the more invidious internal exile of dissent: banishment came through a harsh programme of imprisonment, harassment and legally-enforced intolerance. To some extent, this persecution was to be expected. On the news of the king’s return, there came a wave of violent reactions to Nonconformists who, presumably, represented the worst of the now defunct Puritan ‘tyranny’. Ministers who had gained sequestered livings (following the ejection of clergy during the Interregnum) found themselves driven out of their parishes and houses while suffering ‘abuse and assault’.35 Equally, Nonconformist churches faced almost nationwide harassment: Quakers, it seems, were attacked in 15 counties during May and June of 1660 alone, and in many counties gatherings were both attacked and disbanded.36 33 D iary o f Samuel Pepys, I, 158. 34 For accounts o f the persecution o f Nonconformity in this period, see especially Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978; reprint 1985), pp. 221-62; Gerald Cragg, Puritanism in the Period o f the Great Persecution, 1660-1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957); Gordon J. Schochet, ‘From Persecution to “Toleration”’, in J. R. Jones, ed., Liberty Secured: Britain Before and After 1688 (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 122-57; Richard L. Greaves, D eliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 16601663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Enemies Under his Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664-1677 (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1990), and Secrets o f the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish P lot to the Revolution o f 1688-89 (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1992); N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture o f Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), pp. 25-67. 35 Hutton, The Restoration, op. cit., p. 126; Jones, Charles I f op. cit., pp. 48-9. 36 Hutton, The Restoration, op. cit., p. 126. Bill Stevenson’s research usefully offers another perspective on persecution o f Nonconformists, at least on a local level. While hostility towards sectarians was prevalent following the Restoration (especially towards

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In the course of the next few years, such outbursts of localized violence and persecution were to be reinforced by a Cavalier parliament with deep Anglican sympathies which, regarding Nonconformity as the source of all sedition and a dangerous threat to the stability of the restored monarchy, passed a series of punitive parliamentary acts to curb the power of dissenters to gather, to worship and, presumably, to rebel. Hence, the Act of Uniformity of 1662 saw the expulsion (on 24 August, ‘Black Bartholomew’ day) of at least 961 ministers who refused to accept the Common Book of Prayer and vow unconditional allegiance to the monarch. Meanwhile, the numerous acts encompassing the ‘Clarendon Code’ were to leave Quakers, Baptists and other Nonconformists crippled by imprisonment, the confiscation of goods and of property, transportation and, of course, the threat of execution.37 For Nonconformists these were dark times indeed. Yet, as with the exile and return of the king, there arose a similar body of writings by Nonconformists, which would document (and later celebrate) the suffering of such persecution for the sake of conscience. The Restoration is, after all, responsible for some of the greatest prison-writings that now form part of the English literary canon. One need only consider the works of John Bunyan or George Fox’s Journal to recognize this. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim s Progress famously opens with a dreamer who lays down in a ‘den’ (glossed unequivocally as a ‘gaol’) and whose dream of a pilgrim who suffers at the hands of Apollyon and the persecutory crew of Vanity Fair serves to make the same Christian point about exile as does Paradise L ost in a time of persecution, it is necessary to recall that man’s life on earth is in itself merely an exile, a wandering ‘through the wilderness of the world’. More immediate in its effect, though, is Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief o f Sinners, in which the psychological terror of his ‘perpetual banishment’ from home, family, and congregation becomes palpably clear. Being separated from his wife and children is, he states, ‘as the pulling the flesh from my bones’, and he also describes with terrifying vividness how his faith was tested in prison by continual and intense fears over being hanged.38 Other writings testify more openly to the degenerate conditions of the gaols where Nonconformists were held (often for years), many of which were clearly overcrowded, vermin-infested, damp, ill-lit prison-holes designed to be as Quakers), ‘persecution by the church or state did not necessarily bring alienation at parish level’. ‘Cooperation, not conflict’ may well have been ‘the order o f the day’ as far as many parish communities were concerned in relation to non-conformists (see ‘The Social Integration o f Post-Restoration Dissenters, 1660-1725’, in Margaret Spufford, ed., The World o f Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3 6 0 87 [pp. 363-7, 387]). I owe thanks to John Coffey for this reference. 37 Hutton, The Restoration, op. cit., pp. 170-71, 178-9; Watts, The Dissenters, op. cit., pp. 221-62; Coffey, Persecution and Toleration, op. cit., Ch. 7, ‘The Restoration, 1660-1688’ (forthcoming). 38 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the C hief o f Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 95-101.

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uncomfortable (if not as life-threatening) as possible.39 In his Journal, George Fox recalls being imprisoned ‘in a smoky tower’ at Lancaster ( 1663- 64) in which the smoke ‘stood as a dew upon the walls’ and where he was ‘so starved with cold and rain that my body was almost numbed and my body swelled with the cold’, principally because ‘it rained in upon my bed’ throughout ‘the cold winter season’.40 Similarly, the Quaker Edward Burrough died in Newgate prison in 1663 (at the age of 28) from ‘the fever’ rife in Restoration gaols. He spent his last days on a straw mattress ‘saturated’ by the ‘filth’ oozing from an open drain: ‘Yells and curses filled the crowded room.’41 The Baptist Henry Adis also relates with great pathos his ill-treatment and imprisonment in London around the time of the Venner Rising (January 1661). Having been imprisoned ‘not for what we have done, but for what we are’ (and after his house had been searched for ‘Arms and Ammunition ’ over ‘nine several times’ and even six times ‘in one night, and by several parties’), Adis rightly protests against such maltreatment: ... we are oppressed in Judgements and are injuriously tom from our callings and our Families, and most barbarously penned up in Prison-holes; and my self and some others o f our Society [General Baptists], thmst into a damp, dark, dirty, Dungeon, without either Light or Air, Bed or Bedding, first nine, and after twelve o f us together, scarce able to lie down one by another.42

Like many Nonconformists, Adis and his fellow Baptists had been branded ‘with that most Stigmatical Title of Traytors’ and made poor ‘by the hand of oppression’ resulting in the Tosse of our Liberty, Goods, yea and Life and all’ 43 With such accounts in mind, it takes no great leap of the imagination to see where Milton gained the inspiration for some of his descriptions of hell. The ‘heaven’s fugitives’ of Paradise Lost face a similar loss of liberty in a place clearly the same as the hell-holes of these reports: Milton’s hell too is a ‘dungeon horrible’, a ‘dark opprobrious den of shame’, a ‘prison of... tyranny’ 44 Such a cross-fertilization of images and descriptions between Nonconformist prison-writings and M ilton’s masterpiece reinforce the fact that Restoration Dissenters also developed a rhetoric of exile at this time as potent as any produced 39 For a full account o f the Nonconformist experience of incarceration during the Restoration, see Cragg, Great Persecution, op. cit., pp. 88-127. 40 George Fox, The Journal, ed. and intr. Nigel Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), pp. 347-8. 41 Cragg, Great Persecution, op. cit., p. 107. Cragg’s account o f Burrough’s death is based on Francis Howgill’s ‘Prefatory Testimony’ in The Works o f Edward Burrough (1672). Again, I must thank John Coffey for drawing my attention to the circumstances both o f Burrough’s demise and o f Fox’s experiences o f imprisonment (see Persecution and Toleration, Ch. 7 ‘The Restoration, 1660-1688’ [forthcoming]). 42 Henry Adis, A Fannaticks Letter Sent out o f the Dungeon o f the Gate-House Prison o f Westminster (London: 1660 [1661?]), pp. 6-9. 43 Ibid., pp. 9, 14. 44 Milton, Paradise Lost, op. cit., Book 1 ,1. 61 (p. 47); Book II, 11. 56-60 (p. 93).

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in royalist poetry or polemic (and one to which Milton was evidently sensitive). For Nonconformists, Restoration England had become the very Egypt or Babylon (if not the ‘hell’) from which Charles II’s return had, according to his panegyrists, supposedly released all British peoples. It comes as no surprise, then, to find the likes of Bunyan and Milton using the very same typologies adopted by royalists celebrating the king’s return to describe their own suffering as Nonconformists and to enable them to endure persecution through godly perseverance. While The Pilgrim s Progress offers a narrative of heavenly reward for the faithful’s pilgrimage through the wilderness of the world, the preface to Grace Abounding offers a discourse concerning a very different (and potentially much more radical) exile and promise of return. Here, addressing his congregation from prison, Bunyan offers comfort and encouragement to a persecuted church in a blend of spiritual and political exhortation: ‘The Milk and Honey is beyond this Wilderness’, he states, ‘be not slothful to go in to possess the Land.’45 Milton, however, less than a month before the Restoration itself, would be far more explicit in his typologizing. In welcoming Charles II, England was, he felt, lamentably ‘choosing them a captain back for Egypf and thus preferring a return to bondage from the way of true ‘liberty’.46 This typological rhetoric of exile performed a crucial role in allowing Nonconformists to construct their experience of suffering and their sense of banishment in the Restoration as part of the broader history of persecution which the ‘true Church’ had always faced. Such language authenticated the Nonconformist cause as much as it provided a sorely-needed promise of deliverance. But, at the same time, these Nonconformist appropriations of biblical types and metaphors also served to reinforce division in Restoration political culture. Not only did Dissenters wrest the same Scriptural tropes of exile from the royalist panegyrists but, in turn, this rhetoric was reappropriated and thrown back at Nonconformists with even greater force by their Anglican opponents. The Nonconformist ‘cant’ of Scriptural figures and metaphors quickly became cited as both cause and source of Nonconformist radicalism, if not downright savagery. Hence, one of the principal ways in which Anglican polemicists could denounce Nonconformity and justify its persecution during the Restoration would be to attack the dangerous and barbaric use of Scripture-language, the very biblical allegories and types that we find employed in the ‘Preface’ of Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and defended so emphatically in the ‘Apology’ of The Pilgrim s Progress. Famously, the Anglican Bishop Samuel Parker would attack the seditious nature of Nonconformists and their language as being that of ‘a Wild and Fanatique Rabble9, a ‘Brain-Sick People'

45 Bunyan, Grace Abounding, op. cit., p. 4. 46 John Milton, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, 2nd edn (April 1660), in Milton, Prose Writings, ed. and intr. K. M. Burton (London: Dent, 1958), p. 244. The same imagery and biblical referencing is also used in Paradise Lost, Book XII, 11. 211-35 at pp. 620-21.

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who were ‘the rudest and most barbarous ... in the world’ 47 Such religious madmen, Parker argued vitriolically, are but treasonous plotters, who, in seeking to undermine all civil government, merely hid their sedition amid a ‘Shifting of Phrases’ and a ‘maze’ o f ‘slovenly Similitudes’, ‘wanton and lascivious Allegories’, and ‘lushious M etaphors’ which, he suggested wryly, should be banished by ‘an Act of P arliam ent’.48 The significance o f such extreme rhetoric should not be underestimated. In referring to Nonconformists as rude and barbarous, Anglicans like Parker were reinforcing a tradition of framing Restoration dissent as the traitorous offspring of a regicidal Commonwealth, of a ‘rabble’ (as Dryden put it) ‘Blind as the Cyclops, and wild as he’ that ‘owned a lawless salvage liberty’ 49 But in depicting Nonconformists as ‘salvage’ barbarians, whose ‘variety of Phrases and forms of Speech’ reflect ‘the peculiar Shibboleths of each Tribe’, Anglicans such as Parker and Dryden also sought to pinion dissent within an invidious rhetoric of alienation and empire.50 The effectiveness of such language lies in the fact that ultimately it seeks to exonerate the repression and persecution of Nonconformists by presenting them as little better than those ‘savages’ discovered in the New World, ‘Ere empire’s arts their breasts had civilized’, and whose barbarous customs, language and beliefs signalled the need for a process of forcible and, if necessary, violent civilization.51 The intention of such tropes is evident: this language sought to marginalize Nonconformists as foreign barbarians whose language (as the etymology o f ‘barbaric’ suggests) was as dangerous, as incomprehensible, and as alien as their political and religious creeds. Nonconformists were thus inscribed in the Restoration as exiles in their own native land. According to the account given so far, it would seem that the rhetoric (or rhetorics) of exile which emerged during the Restoration can be seen as both expressing and reinforcing some of the fundamental divisions and hostilities central to the period’s politics. Depending on how it was used, the language of exile could signal very clearly one’s political identity: Nonconformist or Anglican, Tory or 47 Samuel Parker, A D iscou rse o f E cclesia stica l P o litie (London: 1670), pp. iv-xiii. 48 Parker, A Discourse o f Ecclesiastical Politie, op. cit., pp. 75-6. 49 Dryden, Astraea Redux, op. cit., 11. 4 3 -7 at p. 40. 50 Parker, A Discourse o f Ecclesiastical Politie, op. cit., p. 75. 51 Dryden, Astraea Redux, op. cit., 1. 48 at p. 40. For similar imagery see also Waller’s ‘To the KING, upon his Majesties Happy Return’, where he describes how God had ‘Tam’d savage hearts’ prior to the king’s return (1. 87), while referring also to ‘Rude Indians torturing all the Royal race’ (1. 95). For discussions o f the politics o f Anglican attacks on Nonconformist ‘cant’ in the Restoration see especially Roger Pooley, ‘Language and Loyalty: Plain Style at the Restoration’, Literature and H istory, 6 (1980), pp. 2-18; Keeble, The Literary Culture o f Nonconformity, op. cit., pp. 240-62; Brian Vickers, ‘The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment’, in Rhetoric and the Pursuit o f Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (University o f California: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985), pp. 1-76; Joel Reed, ‘Restoration and Repression: The Language Projects o f the Royal Society’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 19 (1989), pp. 399-412.

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Whig, Royalist or Republican. It is in such a state of affairs, in which persecution led to both the actual and the rhetorical exile of Nonconformity, that we can now place Milton’s Paradise Lost, a poem immersed almost entirely in the issues of banishment and suffering. While Milton’s fallen angels find themselves condemned within a dungeon that many Nonconformists, incarcerated over conscience, could readily recognize as their place of exile during the Restoration, the descriptions of the soon-to-be expelled Adam and Eve frequently draw upon parallels with indigenous peoples of the New World before their enslavement by ‘empire’: Milton’s Nonconformist couple are presented as ‘uncivilized’ in a manner distinctly more sympathetic than Dryden’s and Parker’s in their Anglican depictions of the rebellious rabble.52 In these terms alone, therefore, it becomes crucial to recognize just how sensitive M ilton’s epic is to the discourse surrounding the persecution of Nonconformists. Exile in Paradise Lost has its roots not simply in a Satan-like lament over the failure of a past revolution (as Martz and others all too frequently posit) nor in the continuing advocacy of a retrospective republicanism (as David Norbrook has recently posited) but in the more immediate and ongoing exile of Nonconformity in the Restoration - one that, as Milton’s Adam sagely concludes, must be suffered ‘for truth’s sake’, with ‘good/ Still overcoming evil, and by small/ Accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak/ Subverting worldly strong’.53 But, equally, it would be wrong not to recognize that, when it comes to exile and Nonconformity, the Restoration of Charles II offers a more complex picture of political divisions and allegiances than has been depicted so far. In terms of the crucial issue of liberty of conscience for Nonconformists, for instance, Restoration politics is particularly complicated partly because, despite the persecutory policies evinced by the Cavalier parliament, the returned king himself evidently wished to pursue religious toleration on behalf of his Nonconformist subjects.54 Such polity is evident, of course, in the Declaration of Breda (the cornerstone of the Restoration itself, laying down in April 1660 the ‘conditions’, as it were, for the king’s return), and which promised (as has already been noted) liberty to all tender consciences. The motivation behind such a commitment may have been far more political than humane: Hutton suggests that an alliance with Nonconformity would, hopefully, offer the restored monarchy security against radicalism and revolt, while a number of other equally Machiavellian reasons (including a desire to restore an absolutist 52 See Milton, Paradise Lost, op. cit., Book IV, 11. 2 8 8 -9 4 ,3 8 8 -9 2 at pp. 212-13, 218; Book IX, 11. 1100-126 at pp. 502-3. 53 Milton, Paradise Lost, op. cit., Book XII, 11. 565-70 at p. 637. For discussions o f Paradise Lost in relation to the Restoration issues o f dissent and liberty o f conscience, see also Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The Whig Milton, 1667-1700’, in Skinner, Milton and Republicanism, op cit., pp. 229-53, esp. p. 231, and ‘The First Reception o f Paradise Lost (1667)’, Review o f English Studies, 47 (1996), pp. 479-99. Thomas Corns has also recently attested that Paradise Lost ‘remains a dissenter document o f the 1660s’, in Regaining Paradise Lost {London: Longman, 1994), pp. 130-34 at p. 133. 54 See Watts, The Dissenters, op. cit., pp. 221-62; Jones, Charles II, op. cit., pp. 43-59, 79-107; Hutton, The Restoration, op. cit., pp. 166-80.

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regime, to secure war funds from Louis XIV of France, or to prepare the way for the restitution of Catholicism in England) can be cited to explain the king’s prolonged interest in this cause.55 Whether we interpret such regal concern over toleration cynically or not, what cannot be denied is that for a major part of the Restoration (until at least 1675-76), Charles II personally sought to secure liberty of conscience for Nonconformists through a number of acts and declarations of ‘Indulgence’, the most spectacular being the 1672 Act of Indulgence under which hundreds of Nonconformists, including Bunyan, were released from gaols and permitted to gain licences to meet and to preach (but which the king was forced to retract a year later as wholly unconstitutional, if not dangerously arbitrary). Such events indicate that, amidst the persecution of Nonconformity during the Restoration, there were also periods of peace and return, largely sponsored by a king whose interests lay, for a certain time at least, in liberty of conscience.56 In turn, recognizing this unusual alliance between Nonconformity and the Crown can have significant effects upon how we perceive Restoration literature, culture, and politics more broadly. Although Charles II was to instigate some of the harshest periods of persecution facing Nonconformists in the 1680s, prior to that, until the mid-1670s at least, a peculiar alliance of Stuart and Nonconformist interests had emerged - one which destabilizes the concept of the Restoration as bearing simple, clear-cut divisions between the persecutory regime of the restored monarchy and a Nonconformity which lamented the demise of the Puritan Commonwealth. Instead, the Restoration brought a king initially sympathetic to the Nonconformist cause alongside a body of Nonconformity which could and would remain largely pacifist in nature and loyal to its Protestant prince.57 Given such conditions, it becomes possible to recognize how, in the Restoration, the issue of liberty of conscience not only led such notoriously debauched aristocrats as George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester to champion the Dissenting cause against the intolerance of Anglicans and Latitudinarians like Samuel Parker, but how it also informed some Nonconformist responses to the return of the king in ways that are ultimately more complex than we might have imagined. A case in point can be found in the writings of the London General Baptist leader and radical, Henry Adis (whose pitiful account of persecution and imprisonment at this time we have already witnessed). Although almost totally ignored (by historians and literary scholars alike), Adis’s writings are particularly interesting because they reveal just how complicated the politics of the Restoration 55 Hutton, Charles I f op. cit., pp. 201-12, 266-74, 284-5, 306, 455-7, and The Restoration, op. cit., pp. 178-80. See also Watts, The Dissenters, op. cit., pp. 247-9; and John Spurr, ‘Religion in Restoration England’, in Lionel K. J. Glassey, ed., The Reigns o f Charles II and James VII & II (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 90-124 at pp. 93-4. 56 Stevenson, ‘The Social Integration o f Post-Restoration Dissenters’, op. cit. 57 On this subject see also my article, “‘Bawdy in Thoughts, Precise in Words”: Decadence, Divinity and Dissent in the Restoration’, in Michael St John, ed., Romancing Decay: Ideas o f Decadence in European Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 39-63.

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could be. An upholsterer of Covent Garden, Adis had a history of being incarcerated for his beliefs, having spent some years (possibly eight) in gaol during the 1640s before publishing tracts which condemned the parliamentary rebellion against Charles I and which called for the return of justice to a land oppressed by tyranny and arbitrary power.58 Adis was, then, a religious radical who was also, it seems, a royalist sympathizer, or who at least believed (like many Nonconformists, presumably) in the right of the king to rule unchallenged as God’s appointed magistrate.59 Unsurprisingly, then, his response to the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 is almost as ecstatic as John Evelyn’s and, interestingly, he adopts a very similar rhetoric when praising the king’s return. In A Fannaticks Mite Cast into the K ings Treasury (1660), Adis (having been denied personal audience with Charles II) addressed his sermon to him in print, marking the joy and merriment evident ‘ever since Thou wast brought again into this Land of Thy Nativity, with that great Solemnity and Triumph’. As with the royalist verses, Adis too views this Restoration as ‘an high Act of Divine Providence’ which ‘hath [...] daunted the spirits of thy Domestick enemies, made thy Friends merry, and the rude multitude mad’.60 But Adis’s celebration of restored monarchy is more complicated than Waller’s or Dryden’s principally because it adopts a royalist rhetoric of exile and return not to praise the king but, it seems, to condemn the debauched status of the kingdom as he now sees it: the king ‘who from his long Exile and Restraint is brought again into this Land of his Nativity’ (that all-important phrase) is called upon by Adis to rectify the ‘Licentiousness, Luxury and Lasciviousness, Revilings, Rendings, and Tearings, Roarings, Rantings, & Swearings’ (the list goes on) currently corrupting England’s moral fibre and to which, Adis bravely acknowledges, even the king himself is a significant contributor.61 Further complications arise, however, when considering Adis’s two other main concerns in A Fannaticks Mite. First, Adis’s loyalist status is qualified somewhat by the fact that, although he pledges loyalty, obedience and peaceful conduct to the king (as in all his other Restoration writings), nevertheless he refuses to vow (that is, take any binding oath) to Charles II: he will obey, support and pray for his monarch but, he states unequivocally, ‘I 58 See Henry Adis, A Cup fo r the Citie, and her Adherents (London, 1648), and A Spie, Sent out o f the Tower-Chamber in the Fleet (London, 1648). 59 Royalist radical Nonconformists may not have been so rare in the Restoration. See also, for example, Robert Wild’s poem The Loyal Nonconformist (1666) which is most pertinent to Henry A dis’s concerns about swearing oaths: the poem offers the position o f the true English ‘Protestant’ who will ‘maintain’ the ‘person, crown, and fame’ o f the king but for whom, ultimately, ‘conscience is a greater king than he’ (11. 11-20, in George de F. Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs o f State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714, 7 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963-75), I, pp. 302-6). This poem was answered in an anonymous Anglican satire, Swearing and Lying (1666), also in Poems on Affairs o f State, op. cit., I, pp. 307-11. 60 Henry Adis, A Fannatick s Mite cast into the King s Treasury: Being a Sermon Printed to the King Because not P reach’d before the King (London, 1660), pp. i-ii. 61 Ibid., p. 59.

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shall neither Swear nor Fightfor Thee’.62 Second, what Adis campaigned for most in his Restoration tracts was liberty of conscience, ‘a free Toleration for Men and Women to worship God, without either Constraint or Restraint’ (a condition which, in itself, would free men from becoming bound to the monarch by oaths of allegiance), and it is this issue which subsequently dominates all of A dis’s Restoration writings.63 In A Fannatick’s Mite, therefore, Adis’s strategy is clear: at this point in the drama of Charles II’s return, he is as intent upon reminding the king of his early promises of liberty of conscience to Nonconformists as he is upon celebrating them. It is with both tact and force, then, that this Baptist leader prays that the king will ‘prosecute that lovely, laudable, prudent, pious, Conscientious and Christian, that truely Noble & most Heroick Princely PROCLAMATION, by him issued forth at his first coming amongst us again’, so that ‘England, though now even the sink of abominations, may ... become, as it shall be once said of Jerusalem, to be a Praise of the whole Earth’.64 Such language, sweeping across the apparent extremes of a radical religious vision of England as the New Jerusalem and a royalist rhetoric which presents the king as the divinely ordained prosecutor of God’s reforming will, indicates just how complex a figure Adis finally is. What is more crucial to note, however, is that Adis grounds his call for liberty of conscience in a rhetoric which seeks repeatedly to endorse the Nonconformist cause with the personal approval of Charles II, whether through an appeal to the king’s personal interest in toleration or, most interestingly, to his experience as an exile. This strategy is particularly useful, for instance, when (having been arrested and imprisoned in the aftermath of the Venner Rising, January 1661) Adis denounces such persecution by protesting that ‘we have yet the Word o f a King for the quiet Enjoyment o f our Meetings, the which we had from Breda, and since Confirmed to some o f our Friends by verbal Expressions, as well as in the Act o f Oblivion'.65 By claiming a special relationship with the restored monarch, Adis can make some important political capital out of his imprisonment; he certainly feels he has the licence to attack persecutory magistrates such as Sir Richard Browne (the Mayor of London responsible for persecution in the city at this time), whom Adis vilifies not only as ‘a bitter Enemy to King Jesus’ 62 Ibid., pp. vi-ix. According to Adis, the swearing o f oaths (a factor which was to play such a crucial part in persecuting Nonconformists) was not only against God’s will but, in binding men to one cause or another, led inevitably to civil war and the bringing down o f monarchs. This issue is a prevalent theme in almost all of his writings, from his 1648 tracts (A Cupfo r the Citie and A Spie, Sent out) to his Restoration writings, especially A Declaration o f a Small Society o f Baptized Believers, undergoing the Name o f Free-Willers (London, 1659) and A Fannaticks Testimony Against Swearing (London, 1661). 63 Henry Adis, A Fannatick s Address, humbly presented to the King and his Peers (London, 1661, and reprinted in Lord Somers s Collection o f Tracts, 3rd Collection, London, 1751), 4 vols, II, pp. 220-31 at p. 226. 64 Adis, A Fannaticks M ite, op. cit., p. 59. 65 Henry Adis, A Fannatick’s Letter Sent out o f the Dungeon o f the Gate-House Prison o f Westminster (London, 1660 (1661?)), p. 23.

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but as ‘a far greater Enemy to King Charles the Second’ for putting ‘the Kings Friends to hardship’ and ‘debarring Gods People their Liberty'.66 More significant, though, is the fact that Adis also capitalizes on the king’s patronage of Dissenters’ liberty of conscience by adopting and adapting the royalist rhetoric of exile to reinforce just how close the Nonconformist cause is to the king’s personal experience as an Englishman who has suffered banishment. Just as Adis celebrated the providential return of Charles II to ‘this Land of Thy Nativity’, so too does he appeal for the cessation of persecution by applying exactly the same rhetoric of ‘nativity’ to the Nonconformist cause. For magistrates ‘to Imprison, Punish, or Banish from the Land o f their Nativity, any that own the Gospel of C hrist\ Adis states vehemently, ‘is to prove themselves Persecutors’, and persecution itself was, of course, a most foreign and un-Protestant phenomenon, a ‘Rome-bred Monster’.67 It is finally through the familiar rhetoric of exile and ‘nativity’, then, that Adis frames his all-important appeal for liberty of conscience, a discursive twist which, politically, proves to be very shrewd indeed. Rather than simply recalling the king’s Declaration of Breda to justify a policy of religious toleration, Adis emphasizes the necessity of such freedom through a presentation of the monarch and Nonconformists as united not only by a congruous vision of ‘liberty’ but, more importantly, by the shared experience of exile from the ‘land’ of their ‘nativity’, their ‘native soil’. Adis’s appeal to royalty for liberty of conscience is thus simple: Nonconformists are, he could claim, suffering the same kind of persecution and banishment in the Restoration that had forced the restored monarch himself into exile during that darkest period of the Interregnum. Evidently, the rhetoric of exile proved to be a very versatile (as well as complex) political discourse in Restoration polemics, not only for the republican Milton or the royalist Dryden, but for those Nonconformists such as Henry Adis whose allegiances and responses to Charles II’s return remained fraught with apparent contradictions. The conclusion to Henry Adis’s case is, moreover, quite telling. With the persecution of Nonconformity increasing as the Restoration progressed, the king apparently being incapable of securing general toleration despite his many appeals to the contrary, the situation became too much for someone such as Adis, committed to liberty of conscience above all else, to bear. In June 1662, he submitted a personal petition to the king to be transported voluntarily (with his own and six other families) to Surinam under the penal terms of the recently passed (and thoroughly punitive) Quaker Act. Landing there in 1663, Adis thus became a Restoration exile in the fullest sense of the word, reporting in A Letter Sent from Syrranam (1664) that, in this colony, both he and his family at last enjoyed

66 Henry Adis, A Fannaticks Alarm, Given to the mayor in his Quarters, By one o f the Sons o f Zion, become Boanerges (London, 1661), pp. 4, 29-30. 67 Ibid., pp. 13,23.

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unmolested ‘the freedom of our Liberties in the service of our God’.68 Henry Adis was one of Milton’s ‘heaven’s fugitives’ indeed. In England, however, those Protestant Nonconformists suffering an equally harsh type of banishment in gaols and prisons were to wait another 25 years to be granted toleration on their ‘native soil’by (and with some irony, it might seem) the Catholic King James II through an Act of Indulgence which was (even more ironically) to result in his own permanent exile in France from the winter of 1688-89 onwards. Liberty of conscience for Protestant Dissenters was thus finally sanctioned in the political settlement following the Glorious Revolution and the instatement of the Protestant William of Orange in 1689. At this point, perhaps unsurprisingly, a familiar rhetoric re-emerged: ‘As far away as Jamaica’, Richard Greaves has noted, transported Nonconformists and exiled rebels of the Monmouth uprising (July 1685) rejoiced on hearing that ‘the captive Leader [James] was gone into captivity’, and that with ‘King William settled in the throne of the kingdom’ the nation had at last been ‘delivered from Slavery’, with ‘the People of God in possession of their Liberty’.69 The Restoration is thus framed by two convenient bookends in Stuart history: Charles II’s return from exile and James II’s flight into it, both events hedged by the crucial issue of liberty of conscience. But this was not to be the end of the matter altogether. Nonconformity and its banishment were to resurface again well into the next century, and beyond. On the fearful brink of a return to intolerance at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe would expose Anglican intolerance through the satirical pyrotechnics of The Shortest-Way with Dissenters ( 1702). At the same time, and for the same reason, Edmund Calamy was soberly reviving memories of the persecution of the Restoration’s Nonconformists and Presbyterians in his monumental Account o f the Ejected Ministers ( 1702, 1713). Calamy’s purpose in remembering those ministers (many of whom, like Adis, were royalist in sympathy and had refused to take the ‘Ingagement’ during the Interregnum) is to reclaim a history of Nonconformist persecution and suffering which was in grave danger of being exiled from the collective memory of the nation and which, he perceived, needed to be resurrected at a time of imminent religious and political crisis. ‘To let the Memory o f these Men Dye is injurious to Posterity’, Calamy wrote, his intention being to recount ‘these Sufferings [...] that 68 Henry Adis, A Letter Sentfrom Syrranam (London, 1664), pp. 3-4. For details o f A dis’s petition to be transported see W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar o f State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661-1668, Vol. 5 (London, 1880), entry 310 (8 June 1662), pp. 92-3. 69 Matthew Meade, The Vision o f the Wheels seen by the Prophet Ezekiel (London, 1689), pp. 39-40, 77, 97-8, and quoted in Greaves, Secrets o f the Kingdom, op. cit., pp. 330,426. For assessments o f toleration secured through the Glorious Revolution see Schochet, ‘From Persecution to “Toleration”’, op. cit., pp. 122-57; Richard L. Greaves, ‘Conventicles, Sedition, and the Toleration Act o f 1689’, in John Bunyan and English Nonconformity (London: Hambledon Press, 1992), pp. 207-22, and Secrets o f the K ingdom , op. cit., pp. 290-330.

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they may not be repeated’ and to recover the lives of ‘worthy Men, whose Names rather deserv’d Embalming’ than erasing.70 Calamy’s aim was to retrieve the Nonconformist past and the cause for toleration and liberty of conscience from potential oblivion. It seems that today’s readers and critics of Restoration literature - Nonconformist or otherwise - face much the same imperative.

70 Edmund Calamy, An Abridgement ofMr. Baxter s History o f his Life and Times. With An Account o f the Ministers, &c. who were Ejected after the Restauration, o f King Charles I f 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1713), pp. iv, vii, xxvi-xxvii. For a further discussion o f Calamy’s Account see David L. Wykes, ‘“To Let the Memory o f These Men Dye is Injurious to Posterity”: Edmund Calamy’s Account o f the Ejected Ministers’, in R. N. Swanson, ed., The Church Retrospective: Studies in Church History 33 (Suffolk: Boy dell, 1997), pp. 379-92. For an account o f Calamy’s text, and o f John Walker’s polemical response to it, Sufferings o f the Clergy (1714), a history o f those clergymen persecuted and evicted during the period 1642-60, see A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), pp. ix-lxi, and Walker Revised (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), pp. v-xxvii.

Chapter 5

Bodies in Exile: Egyptian Mummies in the Early Nineteenth Century and their Cultural Implications Susan Pearce Introduction In the edition of his poems entitled The Memory o f War and Children in Exile, James Fenton included a piece entitled ‘The Pitt Rivers’ which brings together the themes of exile and the particular kind of exotic material of which the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, is a prime example.1 The poem says: Beware. You are entering the climate o f a foreign logic And are cursed by the hair O f a witch, earth from the grave o f a man Killed by a tiger and a woman who died in Childbirth, ...

Here Fenton sets out a contemporary view of the nineteenth-century world of exotic collections as exemplified by the material in the Pitt Rivers Museum. This material has been wrenched from its own time and place by aggressive and imperialistic plundering and reconfigured in the exile of alien museum display, with the intention of rendering it impotent and anodyne, telling only the story which its new masters wish it to tell. But Fenton senses a chasm between the intention and the effect. The ‘climate of a foreign logic’ exposes not the material to the viewer, but the viewer to the material; the spectator is cursed by witch hair or grave earth as the depersonalized and objectified material reassumes its life potency and the exiled repressed asserts its native individuality as a revenant. This is the poetic truth behind virtually all museum material, but it emerges with particular force - a force which has carried it into the mainstream of popular culture, in the area of ancient Egyptian mummies, about whom cluster a powerful complex of dislocating emotions. Here, the theme of exile emerges, as it did for Fenton, within the gap between the reified exhibition object and the living person in his or her own life, which the 1 James Fenton, The Memory o f War and Children in Exile, Poems 1968-1983 (Harmondsworth: King Penguin, Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 81-84.

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mummies once were. The mummies were tom from their tombs (‘earth from the grave’) by early nineteenth-century explorers such as Giovanni Battista Belzoni and Henry Salt, and, as we shall see, deprived of their substance by examiners like Thomas Pettigrew and Giovanni D ’Athenasi. The people they once were, were robbed of their own life stories to be turned by exhibition into a carnival for London audiences where the fragments of their own stories written on their coffins and bandages were used as historical titillation, rather than history. The audience, however, like all audiences, had their own stories of exile. The significant commodification of their own lives and relationships within the developing social mores of impersonal exchange had, to an extent, reified their existences, substituting a narcissistic relationship to apparently erotic objects, like the sight of preserved bodies, for human relationships - a theme which the mummy fiction of the later nineteenth century and the films of the twentieth century continued to explore. This paper will endeavour to unravel the themes of exile as they emerge within the early nineteenth-century appropriation of mummies, and were bequeathed to later nineteenth-century fiction and twentieth-century cinema. The essence of exile is separation from, and loss of, what the speaker of a Germanic language identifies as ‘home’ - that is, a perceived integrity of time, place, people and circumstances, which convey a sense of identity through belonging. But, because we are complex creatures, our deepest senses of what constitutes ‘home’ can contain some elements so at odds with conventional morality that they can only be dealt with through the appropriation of equally complex material like preserved ancient bodies. Interrelated themes of exile appear within the mummy complex, and these may also be conceived as stages in an interior journey away from any supposed home of innocence and towards our final home, the enduring home of the grave. Three principal themes may be distinguished: the culture and practice surrounding the imperialist appropriation of mummies as exiled humans on display; the broader socioeconomic context of the early nineteenth century from which emerged a commodified and fetishistic lifestyle in which most people began to be exiled from their own lives through the reciprocal use of each other as spectacle; and, closely linked with this, the spectator’s fantasy of a more complete exile from him or herself as subject to him or herself as object, when the objectified dead human begins to turn into an acting subject through the operation of Fenton’s curse. The final resolution of these tensions brings us face-to-face with the mutual fate of audience and mummy in death as exile and home.

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The consumption of mummies, 1815-562 The early modem consumption of mummies saw them as representatives of arcane wisdom3 and as semi-magical medicine.4 Mummies were embraced within a world vision, which perceived the exotic as part of the cosmological order in which European man was allotted a role, a sense of unity emphasized by the actual ingestion of mummy substance as medicine. This mode of perception had begun to fade as the eighteenth century progressed, but it was not, in relation to Egyptian mummies, replaced by much in the way of a new specific stance; indeed, Masonic activities, for example, continued to reflect older attitudes in relation to Egyptian antiquities.5 Within this esoteric philosophy it would be possible to explore notions of distance, difference and exile, but the sense of an underlying conceptual and physical unity makes such notions different in kind from what was to come. By the mid-nineteenth century, mummies, in the mode of fictional representation, had changed their character, and the themes of death, reincarnation and evil curses make their appearance. The first story is usually considered to be Theophile Gautier’s Romance o f a Mummy (1856), and the highlights include Rider Haggard’s She (1887), Conan Doyle’s ‘The Ring of Thoth’ (1890) and his ‘Lot No.249’ (1892) and Bram Stoker’s The Jewel o f the Seven Stars (1912). The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 rekindled interest, reflected inevitably in the principal public media of the day, and gave us the run of mummy films, of which The Mummy Returns (2001) is the latest instalment.6 Mummies had, in complex ways, been 2 1815 is chosen because it was the end o f the Napoleonic Wars; 1856 because it was the date o f the publication o f Theophile Gautier’s Romance o f a Mummy which seems to be the first piece o f ‘mummy’ fiction, characteristic o f the later nineteenth century. Mummy unwrapping probably continued after 1838, Pettigrew’s last effort, but no longer occupied the centre stage. 3 Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1972). 4 See John Sanderson in Sir William Foster, The Travels o f John Sanderson in the Levant 1584-1602 (Hakluyt Society, Second Series, No. LXVII, London). Sanderson describes: ‘The Momia, which is some five or six miles beyond, ar thowsands o f imbalmed bodies, which weare buried thousands o f years past in a sandie cave, at which ther seemeth to have bine citie in tim[e]s past. We were lett doune by ropes as into a well, with wax candles buminge in our hands, and so waulked upon the bodies o f all sorts and sised [read sizes], great and smaule, and some inbalmed in little earthen potts, which never had forme; thes ar sett at the feet o f the great bodies. They gave no noisome smell at all, but ar like pitch, beinge broken; for I broke offf] all parts o f the bodies to see howe the flesh was turned to drugge, and brought home divers heads, hands, arms and feet for a shewe.’ 5 J. S. Curl, Egyptomania. The Egyptian Revival: A Recurring Theme in the History o f Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); and S. Pearce, ‘Belzoni’s Collecting and the Egyptian Taste’, in A. Yarrington, ed., The Lustrous Trade: M aterial Culture and the History o f Sculpture in England and Italy c 1700-1830 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000). A recent guide to mummification is S. Ikram and A. Dodson, The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the D ead fo r Eternity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 6 The first mummy film seems to have been the silent entitled The Mummy o f the King o f Ramsee (1909), followed by other ‘silents’, but the classic run begins with The

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personified and endowed with the capacity both to bridge the gap between inanimate museum object and past living human, and to highlight a deeper abyss of desolation and loss in the face of a common mortality.7 The earlier nineteenth century stands between these two cultural modes of experience, and it is to its appreciation of the mummified death that I wish to turn. Sometime in the 1820s, Giovanni D’Athenasi, working for Henry Salt, the British representative in Alexandria, found the funerary ensemble of Homedjitef, a priest of Amun at the temple of Kamak around 240 b c . The material, including the very large black-painted coffin with its hieroglyphics, the gold mask and mummy, was purchased by the British Museum in 1835 at the sale of the Salt collection. At much the same time, the burial of Hor, priest of Monthu, was found at Keir el-Basi, and the material distributed among a number of collectors. During the same years further mummy material was reaching Britain and America. Among the material that reached a wide audience was one of the Salt mummies, which was purchased for the collections held by the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, and the same Society also bought a second mummy, which had been acquired in Thebes by J. Passalasqua.8 The mummy of An-set-shu-mut was donated to the Devon and Exeter Institution in 1819 by Rev. Fitzherbert Fuller. She was said to have been obtained in Said, Upper Egypt and was transferred to the Exeter City Museum in 1868-71.9 In 1823 the mummy of ‘Padihershef’ acquired by the Boston Medical College through Lee, British Consul at Alexandria, went on tour to raise money for the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Mummy starring Boris Karloff (1932), followed by The Mummy s Hand (1940), The Mummy s Tomb (1942), The M ummy’s Ghost (1944) and The Mummy’s Curse (1945), all made in Hollywood. The British series began with The Mummy (1959), Curse o f the Mummy s Tomb (1964), The Mummy s Shroud (1966) and Blood from the M um m y’s Tomb (1971). The Awakening appeared in 1980 (USA), and The Mummy in 1999 (followed by The Mummy Returns, 2001). Both Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and The Awakening are based on Stoker’s The Jewel o f the Seven Stars; The Mummy (1959) and The Mummy (1999) are both re-workings o f The Mummy (1932). This list is far from complete. 7 The significance o f this fiction is treated in N. Daly, ‘The Obscure Object o f Desire: Victorian Culture and Fictions o f the Mummy’ in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 28, 1 (Fall 1994), pp. 1-51. This paper has inspired many trains o f thought, and I am very grateful to Jasmine Day for drawing it to my attention. 8 For Leeds material see P. Brears, The Curiosities and Rare Things: The Story o f Leeds Museum (Leeds: The Friends o f Leeds City Museum, 1989). 9 Information about the Exeter collection has been kindly supplied by John Allan. None o f the mummy material in Bolton Museum, Glasgow City Museum or National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside seems to have been acquired earlier than the mid­ century, but further work would produce more information. When the writer was Curator o f Antiquities at Exeter City Museum, she had the task o f disposing o f a large group o f unidentifiable mummified material which comprised odd bits o f human body, odd bits o f animals and a relatively complete male human mummy; these had been stored for many decades in damp conditions and were in an advanced state o f decay. They were burnt in the Exeter Crematorium, following the completion o f appropriate certificates.

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Mummies of this kind taken from the sands of Egypt (as the phrase always went) generated in Western audiences, seeing them for the first time, a selfconsciousness in the act of viewing. O f course, the mummies engendered an immense curiosity regarding their nature as preserved human bodies and about techniques of mummification which, in defiance of the normal natural laws, had achieved preservation in the face of decay. But, more unsettling than this, the spectacle of reified humans on public display began to stimulate a new way of seeing humanity. At once almost tangible and yet separated from the present by the gulf of centuries, these ancient figures were visibly in perpetual exile from their own lives. And the fascination of the audience of that time was, inevitably, shot through with morbid, erotic pleasure, granted an aura of respectability by the scientific and archaeological discourses in which the exhibition took place. Given this, it is not surprising that the viewable consumption of mummies developed into a public spectacle as the fashion for unwrapping and dissection took hold. In 1821 Augustus Bozzi Granville ( 1783- 1872) who had acquired from Thebes the mummy of a woman, Irtyersenu (c . 600-550 b c ) , conducted an unwrapping and dissection of the remains in his London house. This was a private occasion, and Granville was overtly interested in a medical examination of the process of mummification and the reasons for death. He published his conclusions in 1825, in the scientific manner, and his materials remain in the British Museum.10 Granville’s may not have been the first such experiment. In 1820 Thomas Pettigrew met Giovanni Battista Belzoni, an archaeological explorer in Egypt, and, probably in the following year, he conducted the unwrapping of one of the mummies acquired by Belzoni. This was apparently an all-male select-invitation event, held in London, and was essentially conceived (especially by Belzoni) as a way of generating interest in the exhibition of the reconstructed tomb of Seti I which he was planning to put on at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, in the following year.11 Thomas Pettigrew,12 a surgeon and anatomist, knew most of those interested in the Egyptian antiquities, like Belzoni, Lee and Burton, and was valued by them as a helpful medical man and, in 1821, he had the opportunity to acquire a mummy of his own, from Sakkarah, probably again dating around 400 b c .13 This mummy was also examined by Pettigrew privately in his house in Spring Gardens, London. By the end of 1821, therefore, London had been the scene of three recorded 10 On display in the Egyptian Room, 1999. 11 S. Pearce, ‘Giovanni Battista Belzoni’s Exhibition o f the Re-constructed Tomb o f Pharoah Seti I in 1821’, in Journal o f the History o f Collections, 12,1 (2000), pp. 109-25; and Pearce ‘Belzoni’s Collecting and the Egyptian Taste’, op. cit., pp. 194-212. 12 W. Dawson, ‘Pettigrew’s Demonstrations upon Mummies. A Chapter in the History o f Egyptology’, Journal o f Egyptian Archaeology, 20 (1934), pp. 170-82; his Memoir o f Thomas Joseph Pettigrew (New York Medical Life Press, 1931); also C. El Mahdy, Mummies, Myth and M agic in Ancient Egypt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983). 13 The mummy had been brought back to England by Charles Perry in 1741, and its cases are described and illustrated in his View o f the Levant { 1743), a circumstance which reminds us that some complete mummies were coming into Britain before around 1815.

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mummy unwrappings. Two of these were private and one of restricted access, but they coincided with the impressive Belzoni exhibition, and gossip about them must have circulated in conjunction with the exhibition, where two further mummies were displayed. These were among the first ever to be put on public view in a part of London frequented by the middle and upper classes. It is interesting that the first mummy investigations took place behind closed doors and with an all-male audience. This unequivocally highlights the unacknowledged erotic character of the event - especially given that one of the mummies was a woman - and reveals men only too conscious of the eroticism implicit in their activities, and requiring the cover of scientific investigation as a form of protection. It is worth bearing in mind the sexual connotations of the term ‘exhibition’, and that serial killers are apt to ‘display’ their dissected and mutilated victims in ritualistic ways. Interest in mummies seems to have died down until 1833, the year of the sale at Sotheby’s of Henry Salt’s third collection of Egyptian antiquities. This took place after Salt’s death, and the material was brought to London by D ’Athenasi. Several mummies were on offer, and one was purchased (for £23) by Pettigrew and another (for £36.15s) by his friend Thomas Saunders. Pettigrew undertook the unwrapping of both mummies in the lecture theatre of Charing Cross Hospital (where he was Professor of Anatomy) on Saturday 6 April 1833. This was a gala occasion which included three peers, Sir Henry Hanford (President of the Royal College of Physicians), Edward Hawkins (Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum) and many others of the learned and fashionable worlds. This became the first of many such occasions. Soon after, Pettigrew unrolled another mummy from the Salt Sale in June 1833 (this time a priestess from around 1000 b c ) in the presence of a similar gathering. John Davidson (1797-1836), another doctor, the owner of a mummy of similar date, gave a public unrolling, with Pettigrew’s assistance. This took place on 13 July 1833 at the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution, again before a distinguished audience. An account of the proceedings and accompanying address was published, with coloured plates, in the same year.14 Davidson’s mummy had been one of two brought from Thebes by John Henderson (1780-1867). The other had gone to the Royal College of Surgeons, and Pettigrew was given permission to examine it. This examination took place on Thursday 16 January 1834, and fortunately we have a detailed account recorded in the diary of William Clift (1775-1849) who was conservator of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons from 1793 to 1844.15 On Monday 13 January 1834, Clift records: Preparing the Theatre &c. against the meeting on Thursday. Assisting in answering the numerous applications for Tickets:- folding and sealing up visitors tickets. 14 T. Pettigrew, An Address on Embalming generally, delivered at the Royal Institution on the unrolling o f a Mummy (London: James Ridgeway, 1833). 15 Diary o f William Clift preserved in the Royal College o f Surgeons, London, quoted in Dawson, ‘Pettigrew’s Demonstrations upon Mummies’, op. cit., pp. 173-74.

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On Wednesday 15 January he tells us: Prepared large Notices against the Meeting to-morrow, to obviate as much as may be the effects o f disappointment to those who will not be able to gain admission: ‘Gentlemen who may be disappointed in witnessing the unrolling o f the Mummy this day, will have an opportunity o f viewing it in the Museum every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 12 till 4 o ’clock. Jan. 16.1834.’ ‘The three lower [tiers of] seats are reserved for Trustees o f the Hunterian Collection and British Museum, Visitors and Members o f the Council.’

For the event on Thursday 16 January, Clift records a list of distinguished visitors who gained admittance, and another list of those who did not. A similar list of those present was drawn up by Edward Belfour, Secretary of the College. The audience included a prince, several lords and bishops, (ex)members of the government and parliament, leading doctors, military and naval officers, and men of the arts; neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the Bishop of London could find places. Clift describes the scene: Thursday, 16th Jan. - This day, at twelve o ’clock, the doors o f the Theatre were opened from Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and from Portugal Street; and all the seats were very soon occupied, and the greatest good order and regularity prevailed. The windows were soon obliged to be further opened to admit cool air, and all were perfectly satisfied, though great numbers were obliged to stand. Visitors in considerable numbers arrived very early and filled all the Seats; many were obliged to stand; and many others retired from all the doors who could not find admission. The president took the Chair precisely at One o ’clock, the time appointed. Mr. Pettigrew immediately began his address, describing the various methods employed from the earliest periods downwards - exhibited various parts o f his own mummy - and a portrait copied from an original lately discovered on opening a Mummy in the British Museum sent by the late Henry Salt Esq. which is executed in a very superior manner . . . .

The mummy and its case remain in the College’s Museum. Material from these examinations went into Pettigrew’s book, History o f Egyptian Mummies, published in 1834. It was dedicated to William IV, and illustrated with plates by Cruikshank. The atmosphere of the event is unmistakeable. The packed house, the anxiety about arrangements and the additional opportunities to view all indicate the theatricality of the occasion. We sense the hustle and jostle of those awaiting entry, and the eagerness of those willing to stand. The emotional tone is that of a slave market or a strip show, decently veiled by the venue, in which the human object is alienated by the audience’s gaze.

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This event attracted considerable attention and further unrollings were staged. Pettigrew examined a mummy at the Royal Institution, London, on 27 May 1836, lengthy accounts of which appeared in the press.16 He decided to give a course of public lectures on Egyptian antiquities, which would culminate in the unwrapping of a mummy. The six lectures were given at Exeter Hall in the Strand during 1837. The surviving ‘Syllabus’17 tells us that the lectures will be ‘more especially as connected with the Processes of Embalming’ and would be ‘copiously illustrated by Specimins and Drawings’. Tickets of admission to the course ‘to which Ladies will be admitted’ cost one guinea for front seats and gallery, and half a guinea for back seats. The first lecture covered the funeral ceremonies of different nations, the second Egyptian tombs, the third mummies and the embalming process, the fourth bandages, coffins and sarcophagi, and the fifth papyri and hieroglyphics. The sixth provided the culminating unrolling of a mummy and took place on 6 March 1837. At the last lecture, Pettigrew announced that a further mummy from Memphis, belonging to Giovanni D ’Athenasi would be unrolled at Exeter Hall on 10 April. This event had a strong commercial flavour. D’Athenasi’s flyer18 for the event said: Giovanni D ’Athenasi Respectfully informs the Public, that On the Evening o f Monday, the 10th o f April Next, at Seven o ’clock, the Most Interesting Mummy that has as yet been discovered in Egypt will be unrolled in the large room at the Exeter Hall, Strand, which may be now seen at the House o f Mr Leigh Sotheby, Wellington Street, Strand.

It was arranged that: Tickets, as under, with a description o f the Mummy, may be now had o f Giovanni D ’Athenasi at No.3 Wellington Street, Strand. A limited number o f Seats will be reserved, immediately around the Tables on which the Mummy will be placed, at Six Shillings. Seats in the Balconies and Platform, Four Shillings. All the other Seats in the centre o f the Hall and Gallery, Two Shillings and Sixpence.

The Literary Gazette estimated that 500-600 people were present.19 Pettigrew continued the good work in the provinces, repeating his lectures and unrolling in Jersey in 1837, at Canterbury, for the newly formed British Archaeological Society, 16 Gentleman s Magazine, 6(1837), p. 82, dated 27 May. Under the title ‘Egyptian Mummy’ we are told ‘T. J. Pettigrew, Esq. F.R.S. and S.A. undertook the task o f bringing again into light, after the lapse o f perhaps thirty centuries or more, one o f the inhabitants o f ancient Egypt, before one o f the most crowded assemblies within the walls o f the Royal Institution. It is one brought by the late Mr. Salt from Thebes, and purchased by Mr. Pettigrew at a sale o f Egyptian antiquities a few months since.’ Pettigrew was a Fellow o f the Royal College o f Surgeons, the Royal Society and the Society o f Antiquaries o f London. 17 The syllabus for the lecture is pictured in Dawson, ‘Pettigrew’s Demonstrations upon Mummies’, op. cit., Plate XXIII. 18 The flyer is illustrated in ibid., Plate XXIII. 19 Literary Gazette, 15 April (1837).

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in 1844, and at Worcester, before the same audience in 1848, in what seems to have been his last major project with mummies before his death in 1865. With the Charing Cross Hospital event in 1833 began the second phase of mummy examination in which the earlier private, almost clandestine, men-only, experiences were replaced by increasingly public events. These began in the precincts of the Royal College of Surgeons, an all-male body of unimpeachable scientific reputation able to convey a similar air to proceedings held on its premises. The chord struck by the spectacle is clear from the rush for tickets, and by the socially superior character of the audience. This led to the two completely public events in Exeter Hall in 1837, at which ladies were permitted, and to the unrollings outside London. The mummies were perceived as elements of the exotic other part of legitimate imperial plunder which had no context of its own and, in this exiled state, were rightfully appropriated superficially as a source of modernist, scientific knowledge, and more fundamentally as a titillating exposure of human flesh with strong necrophiliac overtones. The cost of tickets ensured that the audience was middle class even at the most popular functions, and the relationship of the others to the various learned societies guaranteed that audiences were from the educated or privileged sections of society. It is, of course, exactly this social order which controlled, and profited from, the material wealth of the kingdom, and it is to this wealth, its consumption, and its relationships to the nature of exile that we must now turn.

Material worlds in the early nineteenth century The sudden growth of interest in mummy spectaculars around 1821 and then in 1830s suggests the need for some explanation, and this is best sought in the contemporary socioeconomic context from which emerged a voyeuristic desire to commodify all kinds of material as spectacle in which people, alive and dead, produced each other as fetishized objects of interested regard. Following the seminal work of Benjamin20 and Bourdieu,21 which, together with that of Braudel22 and Campbell,23 has traced the history of the world of material goods since the late medieval period in detail, attention has turned away from the production of goods and towards their consumption. This shift has involved studying the history of the demand for, and circulation of, material things, but also, and 20 W. Benjamin, in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, trans. John H. Schocken (New York, 1969). 21 R Bourdieu, Outline o f a Theory o f Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 22 F. Braudel, Capitalism and M aterial Life 1400-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973). 23 C. Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit o f Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

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more fundamentally, consideration of the ways in which desirability in material is created and the implications this has for social action. Clearly, these two issues go hand-in-hand, for without the economically-based development of a consuming society the social-psychological changes could not follow, but equally without the altered mind-set in which ‘desire’ becomes a version of ‘need’, economic developments are unlikely. The structures of production and circulation have been traced recently by Carrier24 and Philips.25 Philips considers the nature of retailing in the long century after 1800 and argues that ‘production and consumption should not be seen as autonomous, independent, causal factors but rather that they should be considered in the context of what Marx termed “a separation in unit”.’26 In a series of maps, Philips shows that, in the period following 1800, a great deal more shopping (in the contemporary sense of the word) took place in Britain, especially south-eastern Britain; in Marxist terms we could say that, for many people, the gap between production and consumption widened significantly as alienation between producer and consumer increased significantly, albeit patchily. Although arguments about the nature and extent continue, there is no doubt that in Britain (and France, to go no further) this process was enhanced, perhaps underpinned, by the flow of imperial produce, creating what Daly has rightly called the new empire of objects, of which the collection and the museum are important parts. The acquisitive activities of Belzoni, Salt, D ’Athenasi and others did not add conspicuously to the sum of knowledge and understanding of an ancient civilization; this had been done by the French contributors to Denon’s Description de I Egypte27 and was to be continued by the work of English excavators such as John Wilkinson and Flinders Petrie. What Salt and the others did was to act as entrepreneurial purveyors of a particular kind of imperial good. Middle-class homes became dense with things: the wood of the chair came to be covered with stuffing encased in fabric, the fabric was concealed beneath covers, and the covers were covered with antimacassars; windows had light inner curtains, and heavy outer curtains, the outer curtains were lined, and the double fabric embellished with ties, tassels and braid; and so on. An expertise in all the new goods became an indispensable aspect of middle-class housekeeping, and of a way of life, which increasingly integrated culture and material goods. It seems clear that by about 1870, or soon after, particularly for the affluent classes (many, of course, made affluent by exploiting 24 J. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (London, Routledge, 1995). 25 M. Philips, ‘The Evolution o f Markets and Shops in Britain’, in J. Benson and G. Shaw, eds, The Evolution o f Retail Systems c 1800-1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992). 26 Philips, ‘The Evolution o f Markets’, op. cit., note 29, pp. 53-54. 27 Description de I Egypte, ou, Recueil des Observations et des Recherches qui ont ete faites en Egypt pendant I ’expedition de I ’armee frangais, public p a r les ordres de Sa M ajeste Napoleon le Grand, published in 20 volumes, 1809-29.

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these shifts) the balance had shifted crucially. Overall in Britain, consumption was greater than production in terms of material goods, and for individual families and people the move away from direct production/negotiation for needs, and towards commodified or reified commercially-based purchases to satisfy demands, was essentially complete. The period we are concerned with, roughly 1820-60, witnessed the gathering strength of the change. The social and emotional implications of the change have often been traced. New kinds of spectacle and display emerged - including the display behind shop windows and in museum cases. The flaneur appeared and so, perhaps more diffidently, did the first flaneuses; objects were dislocated from needs and became fetishized objects of desire, to be fantasized about in their own right. As objects became more like people, with inherent characters, histories and desirability, so their ‘realness’ took on a new dimension. They appeared as the heroes of their own stories, in which their essential link to their own pasts was a crucial factor. Objects began to be personified as embodying the past in which they had participated, and to which they could therefore offer access - a stance that stands at the root of archaeology, a discipline which developed at the same time, and in which both the Egyptologists and Pitt Rivers were very important players. By about 1820 Egyptian and other material was seen as the key to access to the ‘real’ past. A new kind of exile emerges here, which the mummies and their deployment as objects for display encapsulates and extends. As people began to exile themselves from their subjective individuality through their increasing desire to consume each other as spectacle, just as they consumed material commodities, so the commodities themselves became active agents endowed with biographies and pasts which rendered them desirable. This was true of exotic material of all kinds, and especially true of exotic material from the past; but it takes on an added intensity when the ancient material was once human, and alive. The psychological complexities of the fashion for mummy unwrapping are matched by its relationship to consumerism and the dissolution of modernist categories which this implies. As I have said, Salt, Belzoni and the others acted as purveyors of a particular kind of good - an essentially imperialistic good with all that this implies for the construction and consumption of the exotic ‘other’ which Said has explored. But mummies, like all other exotic material, take their value from their quality of desirability, whose ‘usefulness’ rests precisely in the psychological and experiential sphere just described. The financial value of a mummy (which, as we have seen, was not inconsiderable - certainly thousands of pounds in contemporary terms) bore no relationship to any production value: quite apart from anything else, the time and place of its production were unknown and, in any case, what production value, in standard economic terms, could rest in a dead human body? Early nineteenth-century society demanded material like mummies as part of the new need to start absorbing and domesticating consumerbased values which left behind the old world of production for a new one of individual consumption in which there could be no fixed categories. As Daly puts

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it, ‘The museum and the collector provide the framework for experiencing and thus managing the new object world’.28 There is a further crucial dimension. ‘The new object world’ of desirable consumer goods had disaggregated much of the classic modernist value system based on a rock-solid dualism but it struggled to repress the disintegration of what was seen as the vital, unbridgeable gulf between ‘subject’ (seen as the experiencing, browsing, value-allotting, possessing individual) and ‘object’ (the inert material awaiting the gaze which conferred interest and desirability), because this gulf alone preserved the fundamental premise of an essential self possessed of a meaningful biography and moral/social responsibility. But mummies subvert this basic categorization, offering the possibility that the rational classification of subject and object can break down. Mummies are dead bodies and are, as such, objects, in much the same way as our own bodies are objects to us, to be pierced, tattooed or sunburned. But mummies are also the physical presence of what were once living people, with life stories of their own, who viewed their own bodies as we do ours. This ambivalence is part of the power of the unwrapping experience, where examination becomes violation. As the subject-nature of the mummy develops, so the self of the viewer becomes objectified within the mummy’s gaze - a reversal which lies at the heart of the succeeding mummy fiction, a process well traced by Daly. Mummy unwrappings force the viewer to acknowledge the lure of fantasy in which exile from one’s own self as subject creates a self as acted-upon object by a dead object turned back into personified subject.

The consumption of the dead The deliberate public unwrapping and display of mummies therefore matches the moment, in the early nineteenth century, when in Britain a crucial point in the trajectory of balance between consumption and projection was marked. In this imperial system, material goods were steadily acquiring the fetishistic, detached and experiential values associated with consumption, and the psychic role, within this, of preserved human bodies as active agents is particularly intense. This can be associated with that state of mind usefully called ‘gothic’, which, like consumption, had its roots deep in the eighteenth century. The work of Bakhtin and his many commentators has illuminated the nature of the gothic,29 revealing it to be the type of anti-modernism, developed, of course, as an antidote to modernism at the time when its social and emotional demands were becoming oppressive. The gothic aesthetic offers an alternative to the social morality of ‘joined-up behaviour’ in 28 Daley, ‘The Obscure Object o f Desire’, op. cit., pp. 31 and 35; also S. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995), esp. pp. 160-68. 29 R. Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy (London: Routledge, 1993) and references there.

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which an essential self, the hero of its own life story, creates narratives of choice, progress and integration. Instead, we have sequences of moments experienced as strong emotion created, very frequently, by what is done to us rather than by what we do. Life is presented as incoherent, fragmented, and mediated through inexplicable sudden changes of mood and circumstance. It comes to us as a passing spectacle in which participation is spasmodic and uncoordinated. Our experience of death comes to us in this fashion - as senseless, uncontrollable and shocking. The quality of the corpse, and of our experience of it, has been vividly described by Julia Kristeva. As she says: ... as in true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part o f death. 30

The spectacle of the mummified corpse, like any other, shows each of us the ‘border of my condition as a living being’. The corpse shows the negation of T which lies on the other side of the border, the ... breaking down o f a world that has erased its borders. ... It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. So it is thus not lack o f cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. .. .31

Kristeva’s use of the word ‘uncanniness’ was, of course, deliberate, and takes us directly to Freud’s famous paper on the ‘uncanny’, the unheimliche, meaning literally ‘un-homely’.32 Here, he says ... the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class o f frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter o f indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect. In the second

30 Julia Kristeva, The Powers o f Horror (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 37. The recent literature on the body as site o f social and psychological practice is very large. See H. Hugdahl, The M ind-B ody Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); C. Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993); R. Thomas, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles o f the Extraordinary Body, (New York: N ew York Press, 1996). 31 Kristeva, The Powers o f Horror, op. cit., p. 37. 32 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works o f Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute o f Psycho-Analysis, 1953-74), Vol. 17, pp. 217-56 at p. 220.

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place, if this is indeed the secret nature o f the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimlich, for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process o f repression . . . . Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return o f the dead, and to spirits and ghosts.

Freud, needless to say, relates all this to sexual repression; the original unheimliche place was that old true home of us all, the mother’s body - especially her genitals. More interesting than the genital connotation is the theme of the uncanny and unhomely as close to us all the time: ancient Egyptian mummies, like all horrors, may appear to loom out the abyss of the Other, but their motiveless and disruptive malice within the social world is soon revealed as an ancient enemy all too domestic amongst us. Abraham also drew on the notion of umheimliche and his idea of the phantom and the crypt are helpful here. The phantom, he says ‘is nothing but an invention of the living.... What haunts are not the dead but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others. ... What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others.’ ‘The phantom’, he continues, ‘which returns to haunt bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other’ so that descendants of an original act - an act by definition terrible because it ended in the death of those who have preceded us - re-enact the old story in one way or another. Abraham cites the case of a man whose grandmother had denounced his mother’s lover, sending him first to forced labour (‘breaking rocks’) and then to the gas chambers: he grew up to spend his weekends geologizing (breaking rocks) and catching butterflies and killing them with a cyanide bottle.33 In a similar way, the audience at a mummy unwrapping were rerunning, in reverse, the ceremonies of laying out and deposition which they knew they were destined to repeat. Equally compelling is Abraham’s rich concept of the ‘crypt’ which, briefly, involves the idea of a buried secret about which we can only speak by mechanisms of distancing; the cryptophor - that is, the person who carries this dark secret with him but has inherited it, and is not himself guilty in the matter; and the cryptonymy or operation of statements about the secret and the ways in which these can be unravelled. Of cryptonymy,34 we are told: We are used to treating symbols like archaeologists who attempt to decipher the written documents o f an unknown language. What is given is ‘something’ with a meaning. Many o f us live with the convenient misconception that in 33 N. Abraham and M. Torok, ‘Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology’, in The Shell and the Kernel, Renewals o f Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 171-72, 175. 34 N. Abraham and M. Torok, ‘The Symbol or Beyond Phenomena’, cited in E. Raskin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis o f Narrative (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1992), esp. pp. 38-41.

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DISPLACED PERSONS order to decipher [the document] it is sufficient to add meaning to the ‘thing’ or the hieroglyphs. ... Yet in so doing [we] merely convert one system o f symbols into another and this latter system still stops short o f laying open its secret. Actually, the reading o f a symbolic text cannot be content with registering one-to-one equivalence between two terms. The work o f deciphering will be completed only if we restore the entire circuit o f functions involving a multiplicity o f subjects and in which the symbol-thing is simply a relay . . . . Here a first distinction must be made between, on the one hand, the symbolthing considered as a hieroglyph or symbolic text - the lifeless symbol and, on the other hand, the symbol included in a process, the symbol in operation, endowed with meaning and implying concrete subjects, together considered a functioning unit. To interpret a symbol consists in converting the symbol-thing into an operating symbol. A thing must never be taken as the symbol o f another thing.35

Abraham cites the description of Ophelia’s death with its ‘fantastic garlands’ which include ‘dead men’s fingers’ as part of the hidden meanings within the play concerning the poisons plants give and the uses that are made of them - the ‘crypt’ of the play of which both Hamlet and Ophelia are cryptophors. Amongst the mummies, the buried secret is, of course, death and decay, and of this we are all cryptophors. The mechanism of distancing, the way in which at the conscious and outward manner the experience of viewing death is managed, the ‘something’ with a meaning ‘which merely converts one system of symbols into another ... [and] stops short of laying open its secret’ is the scientific style and language of the reportage. Of the unwrapping at the Royal College of Surgeons on Thursday, 16 January 1834, Clift tells us: The bandages were now removed as carefully as circumstances and time permitted. The outer smooth cloth being removed, exposed the circular handbreadth rollers, which extended from head to foot several times in succession:- others oblique and diagonal very neatly but without much regularity or uniformity till we reached the very innermost layer or two which firmly adhered to the surface by a coat o f asphaltum.36

‘The surface’ is scientific/symbolic language for the dark, desiccated and strangely stretched skin of the dead person. Clift continues: Part o f the face was exposed, and showed that a pair o f artificial eyes, apparently o f enamel, had been placed on or substituted for the natural ones.

35 36 p. 174.

Ibid., p. 38. Quoted in Dawson, ‘Pettigrew’s Demonstrations upon Mummies’, op. cit.,

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His language covers the horror of the dead eyes which have been taken out,37 and substituted by false ones. The Morning Chronicle reported the unwrapping at the Royal Institution as follows: An enormous quantity o f linen was removed from the body, and Mr. Pettigrew remarked that he had measured the length o f the linen removed from the mummy which he had opened in 1833, and found that it exceeded 2000 yards, and that upwards o f 60 yards had been drawn from nostrils which had been forced into the cavity o f the head. The body was found enveloped in four large linen sheets. It then appeared that the viscera had been removed by an incision in the flank, and were rolled up and placed between the legs. The liver was also found placed in the abdomen.38

Here the exact measurements and the judicial ‘remarks’ offered by Pettigrew cloak the realities o f evisceration and mummification in an acceptable style. The mechanisms of scientific showmanship which Pettigrew employed in an effort to dehumanize the mummy are well demonstrated in the description of the examination of the Jersey mummy. The report for 8 September 1837 in the Jersey British Press says: When the flowers and fillets were removed the whole body appeared covered with a sheet that was laced at the back, in a manner, said Mr. P., which might give a lesson to our modem stay-makers (laughter). The sheet was tied in a knot at the back o f the head, and when it was renounced [sic] the multitudinous rolls o f bandages came into view ... as the unrolling went on, the room became filled with a strong but not very disagreeable odour, arising probably from the resinous materials used in the process o f embalming. ... After removing this [layer] a layer o f bandages appeared with a coloured border. Mr. Pettigrew had this exhibited to the audience (applause). ... The lecturer now exclaimed ‘Here at length is something to repay one’s caution (applause): in a preceding lecture I mentioned the scarabeus as an ornament found frequently between the bandages: I will now lift this portion o f the covering, and you will see a very fine one’. Here the mummy was carried round, and every one rose to see the ornament on the breast, which was a fine scarabeus formed o f greenish porcelain. ... A new description o f bandage now appeared, and the arms and legs were shown to be separately bandaged. ... At length the left foot was displayed to sight, and though black and shrivelled, it excited much applause . . . .

Here, Pettigrew deploys fairly crude humour which produces laughter, and enjoys repeated applause as more is revealed, culminating in the ‘much applause’ which followed the uncovering of a black and shrivelled left human foot. Audience participation in the unwrapping is skilfully managed, and was taken to its final spectacle at the Canterbury Congress, when 37 The Mummy (1999) makes the same point about the horror o f eye substitution, here from the living to the dead.

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DISPLACED PERSONS At eight o ’clock the theatre presented a gay appearance, being well filled with a most respectable audience; the leading families o f the neighbourhood were present. All the boxes were filled (the pit had been boarded over), ‘and the most intense interest prevailed throughout these altogether novel proceedings.’ The Pictorial Times says that ‘the stage decorations were got up with great care, Mr. Pettigrew and the mummy being in the centre, supported on either side by antiquities tastefully arranged so as to give full effect to this imposing scene ... .’ As the unrolling proceeded the cloth became more and more difficult to unroll, being impregnated with bituminous matter, and it had to be cut away with knives. After working hard for about an hour, the face was uncovered, showing a ‘complacent smile’ on the mouth, and enough o f the body to reveal its form. The greatest interest was evinced by the spectators, ‘and from time to time pieces o f the bandages were handed to the ladies in the boxes’, although the cloth ‘had a peculiar and disagreeable smell’. ‘The dust pervaded the atmosphere and was inhaled by all persons near.’ Dr. Pettigrew then sawed o ff the back part o f the skull, to see what was inside, and found that the brains had been replaced by pitch. After an hour and a half ‘the mummy, which proved to be that o f a young man, was raised to its feet, and presented to the company, and was received with enthusiastic applause’.39

The distancing produced by the tasteful arrangements was apparently not disturbed by the disagreeable smell or the noxious dust which those present breathed in. Finally, the dead young man was raised upright, like the living human he once was, and introduced to the audience like a live person, a remarkable piece of theatre. Taylor quotes a piece of light verse produced at the time: E’en on that sink o f all iniquity, the Stage, The sacrilegious monsters dared engage On Friday evening to strip a corpse A Mummy called they it - and what was worse, Sawed through the head - as it had been a cheese; (Praise be where due, the powder made them sneeze) Then placed upon its feet the insulted dead, Gave three wild yells, called cheers - and went to bed.40

Clearly, some of the participants felt - albeit crudely - that the dead had been insulted, and that the audience had been less possessed by a state of scientific inquiry than by unhealthy excitement, as a way no doubt, of negotiating the crypt of death revealed by the entertainment. The note of hysteria in the applause comes through the text; we can sense an element of shamefaced excitement which is discharged in loud laughter. We may wonder if the gallows humour of the young mummy’s introduction to the audience served to focus, rather than distract, as intended, from the human reality in the 39 R. Taylor, Journal o f the British Archaeological Association, XXXVII (1932), pp. 327-49. 40 Ibid., p. 340.

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presented cadaver and its clear message of ‘As I am so thou soon shalt be’. At this moment the merging of the quick and the dead seems very close, in all its oppressive psychological reality.

Some conclusions The vogue for unwrapping mummies provides a particular focus for significant trends in the interlinked social, economic and emotional discourse of middle-class London, and some similar provincial audiences, in the generation flourishing between 1820 and 1860. Within this vogue there is a development which progresses from small, private and male-only events around 1820 to large-scale, public theatre spectaculars in the later 1830s. This seems to be part of the economics and aesthetics of consumption, which gathered pace dramatically during the first half of the nineteenth century. It can be matched by the three forms of exile in which the mummy unwrapping was implicated, and which have been traced here. Mummy unwrapping can be perceived as a public spectacle in which a dead human being could be consumed in a narcissistic experience detached from any obligation to form a relationship. The theme of exile emerges, as it did for Fenton, within the gap between exhibited objects and their own life contexts. The mummy, severed from his or her own context in time and space, lacking a personal and person-creating life narrative, was presented as a brief moment of pleasurable interest in the lives of the onlookers. The erotic frisson offered by the extended body and the gradual unveiling, as the bandages were peeled away, was concealed beneath a show of scientific examination, although in the hysterical laughter of the big occasions, truer emotions come through. This is the mummy as exotic other exiled from his or her own life only to be dehumanized and reified in a carefully stage-managed exhibition. Within this lies a more complete exile, affecting both mummy and spectator, which resides within the voyeuristic and commodified life style just referred to, and made possible by the inflow of imperial exotica. Individuals are reduced to a mummy-like version of their supposedly sovereign selves, wandering rootless in a marketplace and serving as each others’ passing show. Within this setting, objects can begin to take on a powerful life of their own, and herein lies the especial potency of the mummy which can take on particular power to become the active agent it once was, a theme which fiction and non-fiction was later to develop. But as either the exotic object in exile or the powerful living dead reinhabiting its own life in ways that can make exiles of others, the mummy is horrible. The possibilities of sadomasochistic transference, and the ultimate voyeuristic shock of desiccation and decay in which we stare our ultimate fate in the face, need not be stressed. As Abraham has shown, the crypt may be within us all, but the desire to see dead humans exposed is assuredly in itself a kind of exile. What this exile is, of course, is that which unites mummy and audience: the inalienable long home of final exile in death.

Chapter 6

An Inflexible Exile: Preserving the Self in South-east Europe Andrew Hammond After all, this was the Balkans, where after a while a man begins to suspect his own shadow o f following him with ill intent.1

In late 1916, as the German army lay siege to Bucharest, Queen Marie of Romania hastily gathered her entourage and decamped to the Moldavian town of Iasi. There was little chance of refuge even here: Iasi had been beset by starvation and disease, and with the enemy advancing from the west, and her Russian ally succumbing to revolution, the prospect of defeat and humiliation became a daily anxiety. It would seem a wretched position for this English princess, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, to find herself in. After a sheltered childhood in England, one imagines her union with Ferdinand in 1893, and exile from the royal circles of the West, had already caused severe misgivings about the marital arrangements of European dynasties. For the signs of self-pity, however, one searches her war memoirs in vain. Marie’s nostalgia for England had gradually diminished, giving way to a devotion to Romania long before the years in Iasi had begun. In awe of its cultural traditions, she had cast off the constraints of her station and gender, and had taken to cross-dressing in native costume, riding out alone across isolated country, fraternizing with troops in frontline trenches and to dining with peasants in impoverished villages. So great was her new affinity that when she wrote from Iasi of the ‘tears, sorrow and regret’ of being ‘banished’, and her ‘fearful yearning for the home I had lost’,2 it is not England to which she refers. The memoirs dwell on a separation from central Romania that had been, for her, a far more grievous exile. Queen Marie’s integration into an adopted homeland offers some indication of the flexible, hybrid possibilities of exilic identity. In the crossing of national borders, a cultural and psychic dislocation is produced that can entail profound consequences for the encultured self. Whether exile, migrant or traveller, the loosening of the bonds of cultural practice, with its vertiginous sense of loss and dissolution, occasions in the subject both a reformulation of personal identity and an accompanying opportunity for social transgression. The experience is similar to what Frances Bartkowski calls ‘the traveler’s sublime’, a little death to the self in 1 Robert Carver, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania (London: John Murray, 1998; reprint London: Flamingo, 1999), p. 277. 2 Marie, Queen o f Roumania, The Country that I Love: An Exile s Memories (London: Duckworth, 1925), pp. 138, 71, 143.

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which the sudden advent of release ‘seems to seduce new selves into being’.3 Such a response to estrangement has clear import for those supposedly hegemonic discourses that constituted the former selfhood. Edward Said has developed, in his work, a notion of the border subject - a position of non-allegiance, or in-betweenness, where physical departure from home reconfigures one’s relationship to power and authority. Writing with perhaps his own border crossing into the West in mind, Said claimed that, by retaining an autonomy from the home and host culture and by exchanging cultural ‘dogma and orthodoxy’ for ‘the exile’s detachment’, identification could be eased from the coercive grasp of collective subjectivity: ‘Exiles cross borders,’ he believed, and in so doing ‘break barriers of thought and experience’.4 It is an area upon which critics such as Homi Bhabha, Abdul R. JanMohamed and Anthony Coulson have also expanded, opening up a postcolonial understanding of exile as syncretic or interstitial space invested with social and intellectual potential.5 Alongside such achievements, however, there lies another, more inflexible response to displacement - the one with which this paper will engage. The sustained theoretical focus on estrangement-as-release can elide the fact that it is the very space o f exile where the practices binding the self have frequently gained formulation. The process I have in mind is exemplified by that coalition of myth and convention that we term ‘Englishness’, to be understood here as modes of personal subjectivity and behavioural custom shared with the national group.6 The various characteristics of this identity - common sense, decency, forbearance and industriousness - are not transcendental categories, emerging from some deep internal essence, but articles of faith which derive their vigour and relevance from the same terrifying presence of otherness that delivered Marie into liberation. In this alternative exile, the displaced British citizen, alienated from home, adrift amongst alien mores, confronted with the imminent perils of insignificance and vacuity, revitalizes the customary channels of behaviour to generate stability and assurance. The result is a solidification of the original self: ‘a petrified subject’, as Syed Manzurul Islam terms it, whose rigid construction of personal boundaries ‘only returns the self to the self and most obstinately prevents any [...] crossing of 3 Frances Bartkowski, Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement (Minneapolis and London: University o f Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. xx, 86. 4 Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, Granta, 13 (1984), p. 170. 5 See, for example, H. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins o f the Modem Nation’, in The Location o f Culture (London and N ew York: Routledge, 1994); A. R. JanMohamed, ‘Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-As-Home: Toward a Definition o f the Specular Border Intellectual’, in Michael Sprinker, ed., Edward Said: A C ritical R eader (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackw ell, 1992); and A. Coulson, ‘Introduction’, to A. Coulson, ed., Exiles and Migrants: Crossing Thresholds in European Culture and Society (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1997). 6 The idea o f ‘Englishness’ underpinning my discussion involves a set o f beliefs and practices which, though most obviously associated with, and developed in, geographical England, has also widely manifested itself in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The term is preferred to ‘Britishness’, which I interpret as a more hybrid configuration that incorporates, rather than defines itself against, non-English or regional identities.

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the line’.7 The point is aptly demonstrated by the era of British colonization, where transgression and hybridity gained little foothold amongst the army of soldiers, settlers and administrators, whose contribution to the tremendous processes of global expansion necessarily entailed staunch resistance to disorientation and doubt. Here, the adherence to forms of Englishness not only consolidated personal identity, but served the more exacting requirements of territorial appropriation and imperial power. In exploring the nature of this inflexible exile, my primary aim is to address the question of how, when faced with the apparently overwhelming challenge of otherness, the British exilic subject is able to maintain the original pattern of selfhood. To put the question more precisely, I wish to discover how the exile’s move away from the West manages to avoid the anxieties and enforced adaptations which, as postcolonial critics such as Said have detailed, so often define the opposing migrations into the Western metropolis. In order to discern the cause of disparity, it might seem natural to turn to the memoirs and journals that emerged from the loci of British colonialism: the pertinence of colonial rule to wider constructions of national identity, combined with the extreme shock of difference that ‘colonial exile’8 would provoke, render what might appear an auspicious fund of material. In placing the accent on colonialism, however, one risks overshadowing two features of inflexible exile which are of vital importance to emphasize. On the one hand, inflexibility is not predicated on involvement in national expansion per se9but can emerge as readily from exile within Europe, for example, as from migration to European colonies. On the other, inflexibility is less a specificity of past colonial settlement than a process of ongoing possibility which, even today, can attend the experience of border crossing for both voluntary and involuntary exiles.9 It is for such reasons that I turn to British exile in the Balkans, a region whose poignancy as a spatial and temporal site of difference will, I believe, offer a more exemplary guide to the retention of Englishness. The memoirs of consuls, militarists, engineers and surveyors, often driven into south-east Europe by financial or professional necessity, commonly illustrate inflexibility in both the enacted identity of exile and the scripted selfhood of the text. In moving through a range of these journals from Victorian and Edwardian times to the contemporary period, I hope to illustrate the persistence of what I locate as five practices and beliefs which, while not necessarily complex in themselves, combine to form the British exiles’ intricate and highly resilient pattern of self-preservation. 7 Syed Manzurul Islam, The Ethics o f Travel: From M arco Polo to Kafka (Manchester and N ew York: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 3. 8 The term is Patrick Brantlinger’s: P. Brantlinger, Rule o f Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 94. 9 As suggested here, my concept o f exile is reasonably inclusive, containing refugeeism (involuntary exile) and expatriation (voluntary exile). For a good discussion o f contemporary definitions o f exile, see Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘ExsuP, in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998).

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The first is the elementary attachment of such exiles to the company of compatriots, a feature James Buzard summarizes neatly as ‘the clustering tendency of the English’.10 Eschewing the mores of the host culture, the custom has been to gather in social formations of such solidity, practising activities of such national particularity that it is as if a small piece of England has been wrenched from the homeland and deposited on foreign shores. For an idea of the mechanisms involved, Robert Graves’ arrival in 1903 for duty at the British consulate in Salonika offers a brief introduction. At that time, Salonika was the administrative centre of Ottoman Macedonia, a multi-ethnic town whose rich cultural diversity and daily outrage against the imperial authorities, presented ample scope for those inner upheavals to which the stranger is prone. Graves’ response has the touch of mastery. After casting himself into the circle of British consular staff and pressmen, one of his first acts as Consul-General is to provide himself and his ‘colony’ with a timetable of demonstrably English pursuits. Graves writes: These were not at all to be despised for the Gulf provided excellent boating and bathing, while across the water first-class wild-fowl shooting was to be found at the mouths o f the Vardar and Galliko rivers, and there was good riding ground within easy reach o f the city. We found a suitable place for a lawn tennis court near the Consulate, and in his few leisure hours Heard superintended the levelling and laying out o f a hard court, and began to look about for a sailing-boat and a couple o f ponies.11

What is interesting here, over and above Graves’s importation of English sport, is his extraordinarily comprehensive method for tackling the business of leisure. Beneath the informality of the prose a widespread strategy of territorial marking seems to be occurring which, in its very scale and resolution, suggests the crucial importance that leisure had assumed for the British. Taking their consulate as the central coordinate, Graves and his colleague, Beauchamp Heard, mapped the surrounding territory as though it were a colonial possession, constructing a matrix of social activity through which - as it transpires in the text - the British proceeded to maintain independence from local mores. The exclusion of the latter is dramatized by the broad erasure of any indigenous human or cultural presence from the passage. This is British cultural space - in short, a zone of civility and energy where any ‘locals’ who happen to have entered, as servants, guests or intruders, themselves become the foreigners. Once the organized structure of leisure had begun, it is perhaps not surprising that ‘the rather miscellaneous British community’12 could 10 James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture', 1800-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 87. 11 Sir Robert Graves, Storm Centres o f the Near East: Personal Memories, 18791929 (London: Hutchinson, 1933), p. 199. 12 Ibid., p. 196. Though Graves’ method o f social clustering is informed by the assumptions o f an imperial age, the activity itself (as with each method o f self-preservation) is far from exclusive to this period. One thinks o f the groupings o f present day expatriate communities, for example, or o f the enduring appeal o f the tour group.

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cohere through social alienation and political upheaval without any damage to their Englishness. As is common with these exilic groupings, the first channel of resistance had been set in place. The patterns of play followed by the British in Salonika are connected to the second method of retaining Englishness - that of a strict adherence to personal routine. A notable feature of Victorian and Edwardian exilic texts is the way in which their evocation of indigenous culture, often the stated raison d ’etre of textual production, is constantly interrupted by depictions of the small particulars that constitute the exiles’ daily life. Lady Blunt’s recurrent focus on her domestic arrangements in Macedonia, say, or Maude Parkinson’s mention of regular ‘afternoon teas’ in Romania,13 are not instances of individual indulgence, but part o f an extensive adoption of routines - of washing, grooming, worshipping, celebrating - that see the exile reproducing the civilized codes of the domestic population. No matter how far the exile has travelled, such passages inform us, the personal itinerary is being formed from the practices of national culture, and identity is being maintained in the face of otherness. ‘We carry our nation everywhere with us’, as Thackeray concluded, dryly, ‘and are in our island, wherever we go.’14 This utilization of routine gained particular urgency for those exiles outside the safety of a British community - severed from social ritual, such personal performance could help them avoid that major bugbear of imperial civilization, ‘going native’. Perhaps the most effective routine to be followed was that of work. The devotion to labour was a vital tenet of English identity, but also a function for maintaining that identity during the treacherous descent into elsewhere. Graves’ reference to Heard’s ‘few leisure hours’, for instance, is more than an idle remark. In a device typical of the Balkan memoir, the author draws the reader’s attention to a respectable pursuit of industry and duty which - as his text confirms - sheltered his staff within English practice, and reduced the opportunity for social transgression even further. It is of no small significance that even the most casual of travellers displays a certain obsession with the work ethic. Andrew Crosse’s Round About the Carpathians (1878), for example, depicting a journey around what is now Serbia and Romania, illustrates the kind of keen industriousness that the Victorian would apply to the supposedly simple act of taking a holiday. Imbued with ‘the true holiday feeling’,15 the author’s departure for the Balkans nevertheless initiated a round of early risings, arduous hikes and horse treks, not to mention researches, en route, into the region’s flora and fauna. When time allowed, then Crosse, a fellow of the British Chemical Society, was not averse to galloping off to inspect the shafts and 13 Lady Fanny Blunt, My Reminiscences (London: John Murray, 1918), pp. 66, 186, 215, 271, 302; and Maude Parkinson, Twenty Years in Roumania (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921), p. 155. 14 William Makepeace Thackeray, quoted in Buzard, The Beaten Track, op. cit., p. 90. 15 Andrew F. Crosse, Round About the Carpathians (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1878), p. 1.

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blowers of any local mineral works. Although also true of an exilic community, this personal exertion had two particular benefits for the lone British wanderer. In the first instance, it could establish one’s character and integrity for a British readership, especially when set against the constructed iniquity of the local populace. Such opposition is seen in Crosse’s portrait of the southern Romanians (or ‘Wallacks’), whose predisposition to ‘intolerable delay’ and ‘slovenly ways’ drove our ‘restless Englishman’16 to a pitch of distraction. ‘The peasants in the Hatszeg Valley’, he claims, are all Wallacks, and as lazy a set as can well be imagined; in fact, judging by their homes, they are in a lower condition than those o f the Banat. So much is laziness the normal state with these people that I think they must regard hard work as a sort o f recreation. Their wants are so limited that there is no inducement to work for gain. ... If the Wallack could be raised out o f the moral swamp o f his present existence he might do something, but he must first feel the need o f what civilisation has to offer him .17

The accusations of racial indolence in the text, when contrasted to Crosse’s own gruelling efforts, place him even more firmly on the side of British enterprise and progress. It should be no surprise, however, to find such portraits resorting to dubious empiricism (‘judging by their homes’) and guesswork. As the second benefit of the process, Crosse’s punishing schedule allows scant contact with the people he so confidently denounces and, apart from servants, or the odd member of the owning class, the journey is achieved in uninterrupted alienation from indigenous society. It is one of those details which problematizes the attempt to distinguish the practices of travellers and long-term exiles. Flora Sandes’ seven-year stint in the Serbian Army, for example, or Henry Barkley’s 12 years’ overseeing railway construction in Bulgaria,18 may have required more organized structures of labour than that of Crosse, yet finally resulted in exactly the same distance from a host culture which, had they stepped outside the bounds of routine, would certainly have threatened to swamp them. It is a short step from the cosseting of the selfhood in work to the next method of self-preservation - the observance of strict codes of masculinity. Significantly, the English notion of ‘manliness’- that compound of honour, camaraderie, chivalry and courage - was undergoing systematic redevelopment in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While home institutions certainly abetted the process, expansion abroad was increasing those spheres of activity deemed appropriate for Victorian 16 Ibid., pp. 8 ,1 6 4 ,2 0 0 . 17 Ibid., pp. 141-42. 18 While I shall outline Sandes’ military service in more depth below, details o f Barkley’s time in Bulgaria can be found in his two autobiographical works, Between the Danube and Black Sea; or, Five Years in Bulgaria (London: John Murray, 1876) and Bulgaria Before the War: During Seven Years’Experience o f European Turkey and Its Inhabitants (London: John Murray, 1877).

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and Edwardian manhood, offering realms in which ideologies of the gendered subject could be actualized, codified and, via the journal, transmitted back to police the conduct of both domestic and exilic populations.19 The etiquette that resulted was far from merely restrictive. In a fine instance of discursive production, dedication to the decorum that the nation expected of its male colonials could create both the sense of collective belonging and, when performed against the perceived decadence and duplicity of the ‘locals’, a sense of personal triumph. Moreover, English masculinism was predicated on an inflexible code of behaviour, a certain manner of regulating the self, which, especially for the solitary exile, could stave off that ever-present threat of colonial dissolution. In the Balkans, similarly, the masculinity displayed by Crosse and Graves, in both their work and leisure, is a factor that helps rein in these wandering subjects and preserve them within the wider beliefs and practices of Englishness. A more profitable example to pursue is Robert Macfie’s With Gypsies in Bulgaria (1916), in which masculinity - and masculinity alone - saves the author from the most gross transgression. Set during the build-up to the Second Balkan War, the text focuses on Macfie’s attempts to leave Bulgaria after his stay - a feat that military mobilization, with its restrictions on civilian movement, seems to have rendered impossible. Undaunted, Macfie learns some words of Romany, dresses in local attire, and heads off to the Romanian border with a ragged, and rather illegal, gypsy caravan. Initially, it is difficult to see how one could gain greater distance from the conventions of Georgian Britain, yet the self-regulating codes of English manhood come into effect. First, in contrast to the drunkenness and treachery of the Bulgars, the diligence, courage, sobriety, and comradeship of his fellow travellers indicates that a company not unsuitable for a British male has been chosen. Second, his presence within the fraternity offers Macfie the opportunity to rehearse his own adherence to such masculine decorum, particularly when set, as the journey is, within a locale of danger and adventure. Finally, the evocation of his closest associate as ‘bright, manly, and intelligent’, with a beauty comparable to the ‘statues ... erected at Olympia to commemorate athletes’,20 hints at that characteristic bonding of English masculinism which, fused with a carefully maintained aloofness, further preserves him within familiar models of social behaviour. His preservation within Englishness becomes unequivocal in a parallel which Macfie draws to the ‘similar’21 life he later experiences at Flanders. There, his corps were together in ‘camps and bivouacs’ for over a year: 19 For a discussion o f the links between masculinity and imperialism see Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography o f Adventure (London and N ew York: Routledge, 1997). Philip Dodd surveys the development of masculinity within British society in ‘Englishness and the National Culture,’ in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, eds, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 1-28. 20 ‘Andreas ’ [Robert Macfie], With Gypsies in Bulgaria (Liverpool: Henry Young and Sons, 1916), pp. 88-89. 21 Ibid., p. iv.

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... enjoying that peculiarly tender intimacy and unselfishness, exercising that wonderful forbearance and tolerance, which, rare alike in the city streets and country mansions o f so-called civilisation, attain their majestic perfection ... through long association in the field, and after common trials - summer’s heat and dust, winter’s cold and mud, discomfort, hunger, thirst, fatigue, sickness, danger, and often heroism.22

As Macfie is careful to contrive, the passage is so apt a description of his gypsy wanderings, even down to forms of accommodation and vagaries of climate, that the experience seems little more than preliminary training for that ultimate adventure of English masculinity - the First World War. His critique of the decadent civilization of the West, repeated at points throughout the text, is not enough to suggest disloyalty or transgression. In the absence of any compatriots, and with an inability to pursue routine, the foregrounding of masculinism redeems Macfie in both textual and exilic space, and proves ultimate fidelity to the nation from which his vagabondage might appear to have distanced him. Naturally, the use of gendered identity for self-preservation was not always a favourable option. Adherence to the codes laid down for one’s sex may have been helpful for assisting the male, but involved the migrant British woman in a whole host of complications. To preserve the female self in the ideals of domesticity and motherhood, as the prime example, disallowed the conjunction of movement, adventure and expression which underpinned the pursuit of a literary exile. The result, in short, is the silenced spouse - that peripheral, insubstantial presence one often discovers inhabiting the margins of the male exilic text. So common is this silencing that the existing accounts of female exile gain considerable value, not least for the understandably complex negotiations of identity they exhibit. As Lisa Lowe argues in the context of travel writing, the female relationship to cross-cultural discourse is strained and ambiguous and, at times, through diverging perceptions of sexuality and social practice, can not only destabilize British constructions of the cultural other, as Lowe shows,23 but also disrupt hegemonic constructions of the encultured self. The most pertinent point of disruption for our topic concerns what I perceive as a certain balancing of obedience and transgression. Here, the movement into foreign adventure and literary endeavour will entail violation, with its infringement of cultural boundaries and patriarchal law; yet any violation is tempered with loyalties that maintain the selfhood in the face of dissolution or censure. From my reading of British memoirs, there are two specific forms that such balancing can take. On the one hand, transgression is merged with the acceptance of constraints such as male chaperones, domestic routines and rigid 22 Ibid., p. iii. 23 Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 35. For more sustained discussions o f the subject, see Sara Mills, Discourses o f Difference: An Analysis o f Women s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and N ew York: Routledge, 1991), and Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures o f Travel (London: Leicester University Press, 1996).

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dress codes, thereby reducing the sense that either female decorum has been breached or non-English identity assumed.24 On the other, violation of male space is pursued more wholeheartedly, and, compensating for the decrease of ‘femininity’ by an increase of nationality, reputation is preserved by ensuring that the masculinism adopted is of a thoroughly English variety. To illustrate the latter case, Flora Sandes’ account of Serbian military service during the First World War is particularly useful, not least for the fact that her masculinism blends with our fourth method of preservation, as I go on to detail below. Her life in Serbia began just as the armies of the Central Powers were entering the country from the north and east. Although she worked at first as a medical orderly, the increasingly depleted state of the army, coupled with her ability both to shoot and to ride, led to an unprecedented invitation to join the ranks as private. It was with unconcealed delight that Sandes passed from the status of nurse - ‘surely the most womanly occupation on earth’ - to a military ‘adventure and comradeship’ which effected ‘practically a man’s life’.25 Her engagement in reconnaissance, guard duty, trench life and the bitter raids and skirmishes along the Serbian front leave one in no doubt about her repudiation of ‘femininity’ and its delicate convention. A more male brand of Englishness, however, is assumed with a vengeance. The life is adopted on terms which strictly coincide with English notions of soldierly demeanour, and which resonate with those male military memoirs that were flooding the British market until the late 1920s. In somewhat desperate conditions, the courage and integrity she maintains in the field, the decency and self-sacrifice she shares with the troops, not to mention her fondness for quoting Tennyson and Kipling during battle, all conserve her within the codes of the home culture in a manner not dissimilar to Macfie’s self-preservation amongst Bulgarian gypsies. Femininity may be renounced, but she remains a ‘representative of England’,26 as the Serbs call her, whose tenacity and pluck accede to the collective self-image. That Englishness has indeed remained undiminished is evidenced at those moments when she finds herself in the sudden presence of countrymen. After one long stretch with the Serbs in the mountains, for example, Sandes rides down into a local town ‘to see the sights’: The first sight I did see was a real live English sergeant-major walking down the street. I could hardly believe my eyes, it seemed so long since I had seen 24 See the chaperoned journeys o f Mary Adelaide Walker and Viscountess Strangford (both taken in the absence o f the male family member - brother and husband respectively - who had occasioned their displacement from home): M. A. Walker, Through M acedonia to the Albanian Lakes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864); Viscountess Strangford, The Eastern Shores o f the Adriatic in 1863: With a Visit to Montenegro (London: Richard Bentley, 1864). 25 Flora Sandes, The Autobiography o f a Woman Soldier: A B rief Record o f Adventure with the Serbian Army, 1916-1919 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, c. 1927), pp. 9, 16, 9. 26 Ibid., p. 13.

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an Englishman, and I did not know there were any there. I almost fell on his neck in my excitement, and he seemed equally astonished and pleased to see a fellow countrywoman. He took me up at once to the headquarters o f the British Adriatic Mission, and fed me on tea and cakes ... 27

Belying her previous incarnation, Sandes’ resumption of social clustering and social routine (‘tea and cakes’) is immediate, and indicative of a love and loyalty for the homeland that no measure of direct authorial commentary could surpass. Moreover, the passage indicates that her violation of feminine convention has not been entirely completed. The appearance of the sergeant-major - a pertinent metonym for patriarchal England - sees Sandes reduced to a rather gushing passivity, after which her only contribution to the meeting is to be led away and fed on treats. It was no doubt such lack of conflict between this ‘woman soldier’ and the British military hierarchy that helped reviewers bestow cautious praise for her otherwise irredeemable incursion into masculine space.28 This retention of Englishness was also assisted by the next means of selfpreservation, the attainment of personal authority. In their displacement to foreign climes, the English had an uncanny knack of procuring a status equal or higher to their former class and station, and thereby surrounding themselves with a range of social and professional barriers. The colonial project provides exemplary material, but the majority of voluntary and involuntary exiles in the Balkans also achieved authority and used it as a means of maintaining identity. The Victorian and Edwardian traveller, for example, was rarely without a horde of servants and dragomans whose presence at least intimated a position of control and mastery. In terms of more prolonged exiles, Lady Louisa Paget’s position as coordinator of a relief team in Serbia,29 or Barkley’s administration of the railway projects, precluded subordination to even the most high-ranking of local officials and impeded genuine fraternizing, let alone dissolution, within the general host population. Flora Sandes’ experience, I would argue, is another case in kind. Even as a private, her very nationality rescued the Englishwoman from insignificance or disregard, conferring on her a number of undue privileges, ranging from personal attendants to standing amongst the officer class. Yet her gradual rise through the ranks, through corporal and sergeant finally to lieutenant, established an ever-increasing distance between herself and that overpowering mass of non-commissioned infantry. The training sessions with her vod, or platoon, illustrate one of the processes by which Sandes 27 Flora Sandes, An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army (London, New York and Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916), pp. 172-73. 28 Julie Wheelwright presents selected reviews o f An English Woman-Sergeant in her ‘Captain Flora Sandes: A Case Study in the Social Construction o f Gender in a Serbian Context’, in John B. Allcock and Antonia Young, eds, Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in the Balkans (Bradford: Bradford University Press, 1991). On the question o f these reviews, Wheelwright suggests the alternative argument that it was Sandes’ work for an allied nation that led critics to play down her transgression o f patriarchal law. 29 See Lady Paget, With Our Serbian Allies: Second Report (London: Serbian R elief Fund, 1916).

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could keep the indigenous population physically and psychologically tamed. ‘Only once did they play me up at drill’, she writes, and then I had to punish the vod, en masse and on the spot, with extra drill; consequently we arrived back in barracks at supper time, mutually annoyed with each other. These peasant soldiers were just like children though, for, next morning, they crowded round, said they were sorry, and would never do it again.3*

Far from enduring the ravages of loss and anxiety, Sandes’ comfortable command of the Serbian troops - with their ‘simple minds’31 and peasant candour - evokes the class-based assurance of an eighteenth-century squire, or the racially-presumed poise of a colonial administrator. The use of such authority by an Englishwoman, moreover, is particularly germane, for it reminds us that the discourses - of class, gender, race - that comprise identity are not only multiple, but of such pertinacity that the relinquishing of one does not necessarily entail escape from the others. It also reminds us, yet again, that a discursive structure like Englishness is not solely prohibitive. The image of Sandes - a vicar’s daughter from Norfolk - drilling a Serbian platoon is no doubt a compelling one; but it finally dramatizes the way in which discourse invariably compensates its adherents with gratification and status. Until now, I have focused on the preservation of Englishness through practices enacted during the period of exile. In doing so, I am not unaware of the problems surrounding autobiographical material. A narrative of displacement like that of Sandes’ is, of course, simply narrative, a scripted exile, as it were, that should not remain unquestioned as a document of exilic activity. Whether this would deny the existence of our practices of self-preservation is another matter. It is less the sheer ubiquity of their description that interests me, than the persona of the exile that emerges from the text. Restrained, prosaic, confident, cheerful, aloof, not without certain self-deprecating irony, the narrators show no sign of having suffered unduly from the exilic disintegration and self-estrangement that Kristeva, in a suitably violent image, terms the ‘shattering of the former body’.32 Similarly, the narrative form, with its linearity, structure and scientific naturalism, speaks not of past hybridization, but of unchallenged faith in unity and enduring coherence. As if to crystallize the lack of assimilation, the scriptings of exile, apart from the occasional questioning of patriarchy, also tend to reproduce British moral and philosophical certainties without query or modification. As Crosse’s construction of the Wallacks exemplified, the perceived savagery of the Balkans is constantly contrasted to the Enlightenment rationality, civility, progressiveness and stability of the homeland a range of virtues which, with that curious circularity of British racial discourse, the exiles’ own self-representations (un)consciously dramatize. Clearly something 30 Sandes, Autobiography o f a Woman Soldier, op. cit., pp. 204-5. 31 Sandes, English Woman-Sergeant, op. cit., p. 91. 32 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (St Albans: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 30.

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has happened - something I locate in their groupings, routines, masculinism and mastery - that has retained these British subjects within domestic ideology. On the issue of autobiographical material, we need not assume, either, that the exile’s adherence to such ideology should be gleaned solely through a study of textual self-representation. If ideology is manifest during the period of scripting, there is reason to believe that the personal history with which the script engages has itself been suffused with ideological assumption, and that such assumption has left its trace in the patterns of scripted behaviour. The point seems to me important, for the ideology held by the encultured exile is much more than simply textual expression. It is both the incentive underlying practices like clustering or routine and a means of self-preservation in itself - not a practice, certainly, but a rigidly held system of belief whose generation of certitude and strength forms the fifth and final explanation for the extraordinary inflexibility achieved by the English in south-east Europe. To exemplify the issue, one could return to the ideological convictions of the Victorian and Edwardian exile. The easy assurance and moral supremacy assumed during the period, indicative of a nation at the height of imperial prowess, would further account for their success at patrolling the boundary between self and other. The faiths of Englishness, however, despite the immense political and cultural transitions of the twentieth century, are as present and as powerful today, and it is our own ideology in the post-1989 era that appears more pertinent to address. The exilic memoirs that have appeared since the lifting of political barriers describe short exiles no doubt, but exiles which offer no evidence that the social and psychological barriers that the Victorians erected through belief and practice are themselves about to crumble. Robert Carver’s experience in Albania, detailed in The Accursed Mountains (1998), is an important illustration in kind. Although his stay is not the most extensive of the period, the author offers a methodical exposition of the political and moral judgements being made by more long-term exiles, and usefully clarifies the way in which such ideology can support their chosen isolation. His series of j oumeys took place in the summer of 1996 when, during the administration of Sali Berisha, Albania was continuing its slide into social and economic collapse. The text’s approach to representing the malaise, particularly its placing of blame solely on congenital causes, wholly conforms to the denigratory traditions of Balkanist discourse, to borrow Maria Todorova’s phrase.33 Rejecting the ‘cant’ of ‘cultural relativism’, as he terms it, Carver builds an extraordinary portrait of a thievery, mendacity and most horrendous barbarity which, essentialized in both time and space, feeds into his forthright denunciation of Albania as zone o f ‘ignorance, evil, corruption and sin’.34 The author is no less forthcoming about his adherence to the enlightened Englishness that channels his representation. Addressing what he sees 33 Despite its tendency to overunify the discourse, Todorova’s book remains the best analysis o f Balkanism: see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 34 Carver, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania, op. cit., p. 191.

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as the ‘cycle’ of tradition and sloth debilitating the country, and wondering how a society based on ‘order’ and ‘prosperity’ could be developed, Carver prescribes a very English dose of ‘hard work, independence, honesty and fair dealing’, or else, failing that, the ‘strict discipline’ of authoritarian rule.35 It is a political and cultural perspective, on the one hand, which would not look out of place in the most intransigent of Victorian journals. On the other hand, this staunch refusal to yield cultural assumption, or to assign value to the cultural other, informs Carver’s unrelenting detachment from the Albanians he meets. While obliged by the necessities of his research to seek out company, Carver recoils from the host population and desires as little genuine interaction as possible. Like Crosse before him, his status as traveller reduces the possibility of either clustering or routine, and, although his comparative wealth certainly lends him a measure of authority,36 it is the utter conviction of moral and philosophical superiority that finally gives Carver the energy to maintain his aloofness. The following exchange with Mimoza, the mother of an Albanian contact, exemplifies how such boundaries are erected. Carver has been silent, listening with a certain discomfort as Mimoza’s life story unfolds, until she makes the suggestion that Albania’s poverty might be similar to poverty found in Britain. It is a comment tailor-made to challenge this most resolute of Englishmen: It would have been so easy to lie. I couldn’t do it. I had to be truthful and therefore almost unbearably brutal. ‘No, Mimoza. Albania is as poor as Africa at its very poorest. Nowhere in Europe is this poor.’ ‘She looked at me with small, hurt eyes . . . . ‘Do cultured, educated people in Albania take bribes?’ I asked. ‘O f course.’ ‘You need people who w on’t take bribes. If you have a bribery culture, everyone can be bought and nothing can be trusted - not doctors, not schools, not politicians, not the police ... - because they are all corrupt and therefore worthless.’ She looked utterly wretched and made no reply, but looked away from me and out o f the window at the sea o f swarming, pulsating people.37

After a period during which Mimoza has dominated, Carver’s intrusion alone indicates a move to self-assertion. The reference to ‘African’-style poverty, however, and particularly the sudden lecture on corruption - with its implied opposition to a virtuous West - reduces her to final silence and delivers Carver from any further interaction. Any hint of remorse about his brutality is unnecessary. The lecture is predicated on presumed moral integrity, derived from his status as ‘European’, but 35 Ibid., pp. 171,246. 36 This condition o f financial freedom (along with the ability to keep to one’s native language) has commonly heightened the British sense o f authority abroad, a feature more clearly manifest in the realms o f tourism. 37 Carver, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania, op. cit., p. 141.

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also on a secure belief in his own capacity for ‘truthfulness’ - a belief even more immodestly expressed in his claim that, due to the ‘propaganda’ rife in the country, an ‘ill-informed foreigner who had read one history book on Albania knew more of the reality of [its] past than the most erudite Albanian’.38 The knowingness and belligerence in which Carver envelops himself is heightened during meetings with indigenous males, who, unlike Mimoza, Carver loathes with a passion. With a few tentative exceptions, his behaviour in their company is marked by suspicion, truculence and dislike, and yet he avoids any sense of anxiety or alienation by his resilient belief in moral and ideological righteousness. The structures of belief that sustain him, and the wholesale maintenance of selfhood that results, is currently repeated by the majority of long-term exiles, for whom Carver’s portrait of incessant, life-endangering discord and criminality is not unrepresentative. ‘After all, this was the Balkans’, as Carver justifies their collective drive to self-preservation, ‘where after a while a man begins to suspect his own shadow of following him with ill intent’.39 It was a fascinating image to choose. If there is any single conception that could crystallize the British exile’s motives for psychic, as well as physical, preservation it is that of the shadow, a strange synthesis of darkness and menace haunting the exilic body with monstrous persistence. For such a Balkanist archetype, more importantly, the image appropriately indicates the exile’s own significance as the site of discursive emergence. The rigid structure of Enlightenment binarism, that ‘ready-made conceptual grid’,40 produces a regional portrait that exists not as material actuality, but as an insubstantial imagining cast down by the epistemological body of the homeland. The adherence to binajism may have created the threat of otherness, casting a shadow wherever the stranger sets foot, but is ultimately productive of personal solidity, with the presence of the other holding no danger for one who remains tightly secured inside British cultural ideology. It is this ideological conviction that also produces the authoritativeness of the exilic text, and originates those physical practices of preservation that are being achieved as triumphantly by a contemporary such as Carver as by a Victorian such as Crosse. In highlighting this resemblance, I do not wish to establish an essentialized view of British experience in the Balkans. There was a period of migration concurrent with Marie’s reign in Romania which, with its exhilarated response to the conditions of exile, frequently rejected the security of clustering and routine, and showed 38 Ibid., p. 127. 39 Ibid., p. 277. The humanitarian memoirs that emerged, en masse, from the various crises o f the 1990s exemplify the current ideological presumptions o f more long­ term British exiles. Sophie Thumham’s Sophie’s Journey: The Story o f an A id Worker in Romania (London: Warner, 1994) is one instance in kind. 40 I have borrowed the phrase from Leslie W. Rabine: Rabine, ‘Scraps o f Culture: African Style in the African American Community o f Los Angeles’, in Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton, eds, Borders, Exiles, D iasporas, Cultural Sitings Series (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 59.

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willingness to decrease reliance on both masculine codes and social authority.41 What I do mean to establish, however, is that the conceptual structures of Englishness, rarely associated with our postmodern age, are both continuing to gain formulation and, when encountering otherness, continuing to instil the comforting sense of inviolable selfhood. An elucidation of the techniques of self-preservation - to return to a question I posed at the outset - finally hints at why migration to the West tends on the whole to be a very different affair. There appears little doubt that the sustained inflexibility enacted by the British exile is far less available to the south-east European arriving in Britain, to cite a pertinent example of recent immigration. The Bosnians, Roma and Kosovan Albanians, still fleeing from various crises in the region, are unlikely to negotiate British society with the wilful disregard and arrogance of a Crosse or Graves, and even less likely to preserve over time their former patterns of identification. The reason, I would argue, resides specifically in the final two methods of self-preservation I have surveyed. While the process of social clustering has indeed carved out immigrant space in Britain, and while routine and masculinism may be performed within that space, the wider authority granted the British exile and, by extension, his or her unchallengeable assumption of cultural superiority is achieved only with considerable difficulty 42 Lacking Graves’ imperious command of the surroundings, in need of the financial freedoms of Crosse and Macfie, unblessed with Sandes’ effortless social mobility (all privileges which Westerners are continuing to attain elsewhere), such exiles must subordinate themselves within a vast, impersonal economic system that withholds consideration, respect and regard, and for which a flexible model of selfhood consequently appears the only possible option. The issue is less one of individuals, their abilities or qualifications, than one of a wide-ranging regional inequality. Post-Cold War Europe has witnessed a shift from the old division of the continent to that of simply ‘Europe’ and the Balkans, with the latter evoked, as Carver demonstrates, through a denigratory regionalism that leaves one in no doubt as to its position in the European hierarchy. Amongst other things, such denigration has abetted a continental system which, on the one hand, can promote the freedoms and entitlements of a Western traveller like Carver in south-east Europe, and on the other can tie the south-east European in a bureaucratic web of restricted mobility and economic constraint.

41 I am indebted to Xavier Girard for his suggestive association o f ‘exile’ and ‘exhilaration’: Girard, cited in Linda Nochlin, ‘Art and the Conditions o f Exile: Men/Women, Emigration/Expatriation’, in Suleiman, ed., Exile and Creativity, op. cit., p. 49. For what could be considered a late example o f exhilarated exile, see Louisa Rayner’s Women in a Village: An Englishwoman s Experiences and Impressions o f Life in Yugoslavia under German Occupation (Melbourne, London and Toronto: Heinemann, 1957). 42 Although his focus is primarily on the exiled writer, Joseph Brodsky offers an evocative portrait o f the insignificance that migrancy into the West tends to produce. See J. Brodsky, ‘The Condition We Call Exile’, The New York Review o f Books, 21 January 1988.

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Naturally, a full account of the new imbalance of power in Europe, with its long-term political and economic implications, is beyond the scope of this paper. It is perhaps enough to mention, in conclusion, that there is an increasing need to deconstruct the binarist assumptions underlying the Western denigration of the Balkans and, to this end, a study of inflexible exile offers a distinct site of critical possibility. A retrieval of the impassioned exilic texts produced in Marie’s day could certainly unsettle the myth of eternal otherness propounded by much crossEuropean representation. Yet more important is an analysis of what I have termed ‘inflexible exile’, for it is predominantly through inflexible responses to the cultural encounter in south-east Europe that our preconceptions of the region are being devised. Here, critical awareness of the self-preserving practices of our Balkan commentators, and an exposure of the multiple privileges underlying them, could help destabilize the beguiling authority of records in which self-estrangement, with its dual potential for revelation and discursive violation, remains entirely absent.

Chapter 7

Atomic Physicists in Exile Alex Keller O f all those technologies that sprang from a theoretical scientific inquiry, surely the most powerful and the most ominous is nuclear energy. Even if we do deconstruct our nuclear armoury, the nuclear power station is likely to survive, as it is one of our most international technologies. There is one such station that could be anywhere on this planet, but for the inscription, which is in Hungarian. In front of the reception area is a fountain surrounded by several portrait busts of Hungarian physicists: it is evidently implied, and with good reason, that these men played a notable part in the origins of nuclear power. All of them, however, did so in exile.1Although they all came from Budapest, and at least four went to one or other of the two leading secondary schools of the city, soon after graduation they decided that, in order to pursue their studies further, they would have to leave their native land. These four were Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller. They all moved eventually to the United States and, despite having settled there only a few years before the outbreak of war, were prominent in the Manhattan project, the development of an atomic weapon, during the Second World War. Did a sense of regret accompany their decision to leave Hungary? One at least, Eugene Wigner, professed a strong attachment to the language and culture of his native land and another, Leo Szilard, admitted to his brother Bela that he felt that the day on which he finally took the train to Austria was the saddest of his life.2 All four were manifestly brilliant individuals, but regarded as a little strange everywhere they went, with the consequence that they, and a few others of similar background, were nicknamed ‘the martians’3 - a term originally applied to only one member of 1 G. Pallo, ‘Scientific Migration from Hungary’, Icon, IV (1998), pp. 210-19 is the most recent study. 2 W. Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993; reprint Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1994 ), p. 50. This is a biography o f Szilard, described as ‘with Bela Silard’, Leo’s younger brother. For Wigner, see Eugene Wigner, The Recollections o f Eugene Wigner as told to Andrew Szanton (New York: Plenum Press, 1992). 3 Pallo, ‘Scientific Migration from Hungary’, op. cit., p. 215, wishes to limit the term to those directly involved in the American atom bomb project (Szilard, Teller, Wigner, von Neumann), at most extending it to those who contributed in other ways to the American war effort, or were engaged in similar basic physics research, such as von Karman and von Hevesy, and some others. These have a wider usage o f this nickname; including other sciences. However I have used also two papers delivered to the International Commission for the History o f Technology meeting at Budapest, 1996: T. Frank, ‘The Chemistry o f Budapest: the Social Construction o f Hungarian Genius’; and G. Marx, ‘The Martians’ Vision o f the

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this group, John von Neumann, who was recognized as the most outstanding intellect among them, but was later extended to the others. Although the name was given in jest, it highlighted the fact that so much talent had come from such a small area and that they spoke a language quite unlike any other (although spoken in the very heart of Europe) - a language which left them with a curious and distinctive accent whenever they spoke any other tongue. Was Hungary, and in particular the capital Budapest, some kind of intellectual hothouse? If so, why, then, did they decide to leave it? In fact Budapest only became the capital of Hungary after the 1848 revolution, which had been a failed bid for independence from the Habsburg empire. Only a few years before that, the first chain bridge had linked the twin cities, Buda the ancient capital on the bluffs overlooking the broad Danube, and across the river, the bustling market town of Pest. 4 Until then, for more than a century and half after Buda and Pest had been recovered from the Turks, the capital of Hungary had been Bratislava - Pozsony to the Hungarians, and Pressburg to the Germans - conveniently close to the imperial seat at Vienna. After 1867 the new capital grew by leaps and bounds, attracting immigrants from all parts of the kingdom: Serbs and Croats in the south, Romanians in the east, Slovaks in the north, Germans in both east and west, and a Jewish population which also steadily increased, not only from all comers of the kingdom, but also from other Habsburg territories - in particular Galicia, which had been Austria’s share of partitioned Poland. As a result, the last quarter of the nineteenth century through to 1914 has been claimed as Hungary’s, and above all Budapest’s, Golden Age. At the turn of the new century, Budapest had acquired the biggest parliament building in the world, a new stock exchange, an impressive opera house and art gallery, and was constructing the longest single span bridge in Europe across the Danube. Since 1867 the city had tripled in population, and to match - and cope with - this expansion it was among the first to have an underground metropolitan railway, and the first to have a news service disseminated by telephone to all subscribers. The slight air of decadence which affected Vienna, although it was still a centre of art, literature and science, hardly touched Budapest. A Society of Social Studies questioned almost all the accepted political doctrines of the day in an atmosphere of enthusiasm for new ideas and new technologies. As one Hungarian writer comments, with, of course, a certain nostalgia, Budapest might emulate Paris and Vienna, ‘but in enterprise and sensationalism, she resembled New York’.5 Future’. Both papers were intended for a collection o f papers on the ‘martians’,which was published in Hungary: G. Marx, S. Francis, B. Hacker and G. Pallo, eds, The Martians (Budapest: Eotvos University, 1997), but I have not been able to consult it. 4 This account o f Hungary’s ‘Golden A ge’ is largely drawn from P. Ignotus, Hungary (London: Ernest Benn, 1972). A fascinating depiction o f the city, perhaps a little romanticized but full o f detail, is given by J. Lukacz, Budapest 1900 (London: Weidenfeld & N icolson, 1989). 5 Ignotus, Hungary, op. cit., p. 126.

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In this atmosphere of economic and cultural boom the Jewish community was prominent. By the end of the nineteenth century they comprised about 5 per cent of the total population of the kingdom of Hungary, although still higher figures have been suggested for the years immediately before the 1914-18 war. In Budapest itself they numbered more than a fifth of the city’s inhabitants. Moreover, since rural Hungary had remained quasi-feudal in social structure until well into the nineteenth century (serfdom was only abolished in the 1848 revolution), almost all the trade in the country was carried out by Jews. It was they who were financing economic growth and often introducing new industries to the country; moreover, with emancipation confirmed after 1867, they were moving into the professions, so that by the first decade of the new century nearly half the lawyers and journalists in the capital, and an even greater proportion of the doctors, were also of Jewish extraction. Among the lawyers were the fathers of von Neumann and Teller.6 A move out of Judaism altogether, in the form of conversion to Christianity, was well under way but how far these conversions were accepted as genuine by ‘old Christians’ remains open to doubt. Although Jews, converted or not, were encouraged to become industrialists, some opposition to their entering the universities and the law in such numbers was already being expressed. O f course, by no means all highly talented Hungarians were of Jewish extraction - we need only think of the composers, Bartok, Kodaly, Dohnanyi - nor, indeed, were all of them talented Hungarian scientists, but it was true of all the ‘martians’. It may be that the passionate devotion to intellectual activity, to thinking about and questioning every accepted idea with which they grew up helped to nurture their remarkable fecundity in physics. Perhaps the mathematical ability, which in previous generations had enabled some to make fortunes in commerce, could now be applied to abstract scientific questions. Certainly, there was a very competitive atmosphere, not least among the new middle classes, and those whose background was Jewish were expected to try that much harder in order to succeed. However, grand sociological explanations can not be imposed on such a tiny sample. When the Jewish population of Budapest was well over 100 000, and when more still, particularly in the ranks of the economic and social elite, were nominally no longer Jews, it has to be pointed out that 99.9 per cent were not geniuses, and indeed more than 90 per cent were not successful professionals either. All the martians were from comfortable, often extended, families, in which two or even three generations, with their servants, might live next door to one another, or share a substantial villa. Teller attended the Minta secondary school, a ‘model’ school founded on principles set out by Moritz von Karman, himself of Jewish extraction, and attended also by his son Theodor, later a pioneer of theoretical 6 W. O. McCagg, Jewish Nobles and Geniuses in M odem Hungary, East European Monographs III (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). McCagg remarks that von Neumann ‘unfortunately ... died when still young, and prepared no intellectual memoirs’ (p. 69, n. 36). But cf. a good biography; N. Macrae, John von Neumann (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992); for Teller, S. A. Blumberg and L. G. Panos, Edward Teller, Giant o f the Golden Age o f Physics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990).

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aerodynamics and aircraft design. This was one of the best schools in Europe at the time, and had its local rivals - notably the nearby Lutheran gymnasium, which Wigner and von Neumann attended. However, the number of universities and university students does not seem to have kept pace with economic development so that many well-educated people, in a city where first-class secondary education was available to those who could benefit from, and pay for it, subsequently found their ambitions frustrated. Thus of the outstanding physicists bom in the 1880s, whose names are often linked to the martians, both Theodore von Karman and George von Hevesy began at the university of Budapest, but completed their higher education in German-speaking lands, and both worked there first, although von Hevesy did return to Budapest to teach after the First World War. All this progress and the exuberance inspired by it were shattered by the First World War. As a consequence of the treaties which broke up the Habsburg empire, and gave independence to all those nationalities which demanded it, Hungary was much reduced in size and prosperity after 1918. One of the martians, Eugene Wigner, recalled his father asking how many chairs in physics there were in Hungary, urging his son to draw the obvious conclusion from the answer - three or four.7 But there was more to it than that. The families of the martians were indeed quite well off, but definitely ‘nouveaux riches’. All were, as has been noted, of Jewish extraction. Some like George von Hevesy, John von Neumann and Theodor von Karman had been ennobled (hence the von) very recently; they were second- or third-generation gentlemen at most, elevated because of the family’s role in the development of commerce or industry in the Habsburg empire. The Emperor Franz Joseph had, at first, only granted noble status to converts, however formal their conversion, but, by the turn of the century, he no longer insisted, and the number of Jewish noble families was by then running into three figures.8 Many of these families had moved to Hungary only recently and had certainly not lived long in the capital. At that time, probably the grandparents - certainly the great-grandparents of the martians would have regarded Hungary, or Galicia for that matter, as a land of exile, as they would any land outside Palestine. Their prayers and their customs insisted that, wherever they were bom and for however many generations their families might have lived there, they were a banished people who could never feel really at home anywhere. A process of ‘Magyarization’ had, nevertheless, been taking place since the rise of Hungarian nationalism in the 1840s. In 1867 nearly half the Jews of Hungary spoke German or Yiddish (which is in effect a German dialect); by the time of the First World War that proportion had fallen to one-third, and three-quarters claimed 7 Wigner, Recollections, op. cit., p. 62. 8 McCagg in Jewish Nobles and Geniuses, op. cit., seeks to establish a connection, but given the small number o f geniuses, several o f whom came from non-noble families, he can only fall back on the general atmosphere o f questioning, competition within a relatively narrow circle (given the special situation o f upper middle-class Jews in Budapest), and the consequent stress on intellectual prowess.

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to speak Magyar9 as their mother tongue. Sometimes they changed German surnames to Hungarian ones, as did the family of Szilard, formerly Spitz. To what extent this acculturation, with a marked decline in religious belief and practice, led to an emotional uprooting, rather than a re-rooting in the majority culture is difficult to assess. Politically this same socio-ethnic group provided several of the leaders of the brief Hungarian communist revolution of 1919, including its head, Bela Kun. The collapse of the revolution led to a notorious ‘White Terror’, and many conservative Hungarians blamed communism, as well as capitalism, on the Jews. A Hungarian journalist, Judit de Marffy from a ‘good’ family and then in her teens, later recalled that ‘practically all the commissars had been Jews and that wherever one looked, one saw a Jew in a responsible position. Nor had they behaved either intelligently or decently.’10 As soon as the revolution collapsed, Kun and other leading commissars fled the country. Certainly there had been a ‘Red Terror’, as well as massive expropriations, during those few months of Bolshevik power. Most historians, however, agree that the counter-revolutionary ‘White Terror’ killed many more people, and that Jews in general became the target or, as the same writer comments, ‘their revenge degenerated into a kind of pogrom’. She describes how she saw a White Guard officer, a cousin, ‘chasing a miserable little Jew, another of those poor, pusillanimous creatures who believed little in Bolshevism, but much in their own advancement and had grabbed all positions as they fell vacant’.11 She claims that the cousin, overcome with remorse, then left the White Guards and went home to his estate, now restored to the family. But evidently not everyone felt the same. One consequence was a wave of conversions to Christianity in precisely those middle-class Jewish circles. Given that Jewish communists had clearly repudiated the Jewish religion, it might seem naive and optimistic for other Jews to do the same in the hope of shrugging off any association with these dreadful people. Indeed, many in the wider Hungarian society did treat these conversions as insincere, and persisted in thinking of the new Christians as still being Jews. Besides, the attachment of these families to Judaism had been quite precarious. Bela Szilard claimed that his mother ‘never attended Jewish services, but instead practiced what she called “her natural religion”. These ideas she based loosely on the teachings of Jesus.’12 It would seem that all the martians regarded the Jewish religion as an outworn creed, to which they were linked only by family ties. Recollections give the impression that their parents’ generation went to synagogue once a year, had the bare minimum of religious instruction to transmit, and probably knew more about Christianity than about Judaism. Judging by accounts of meals in the Szilard 9 Frank, The Chemistry o f Budapest, op. cit., p. 10. 10 Judith Listowel, This I Have Seen (London: Faber & Faber, 1943), p. 27. De Marffy later studied at the London School o f Economics, married the Earl o f Listowel (who voted Labour), and in the 1930s she became passionately anti-Nazi. So her honesty in recalling her feelings at that time is all the more to be respected. 11 Ibid., p. 28. 12 Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows, op. cit., p. 21.

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household, the dietary laws of Judaism at least were ignored completely. In practice, they all became totally secular in outlook: they evidently did not consider that their new faith obliged them to go to church any more often than they had gone to the synagogue. Once outside Hungary they all dropped any pretence of being Christian believers, and retained their Jewishness only in an ethnic sense. The only one to retain his Jewish religion seems to be Cornelius Lanczos, also linked to the martians, who ends the introduction to his book on Einstein’s most successful years with a pious Hebrew invocation and at about the same time delivered a public lecture on ‘Judaism and Science’.13 Nevertheless, something of the sense of being Jewish must have remained with the others, because they all married women of the same ethnic background, even if not Hungarian, at least in their first marriages. Meanwhile in Hungary a ‘numerus clausus’ was imposed, restricting the number of Jewish students at universities. This supposedly did not apply to the children of converts, but in practice prejudices against them ensured that it did. When Szilard and his brother tried to re-enter their college after the troubles had died down, they were pushed down the steps on account of being Jews who should no longer study there, despite their protestations that they were now Calvinists. The younger martians, von Neumann and Wigner, both bom in 1903, were still at school; Teller, bom in 1908, was only eleven at the time of the revolution. Their families had suffered more from the communists - Wigner’s father had managed a tannery, which was seized - and did not need higher education until matters had eased somewhat. Nevertheless, they were very much aware of how all Jews were held to blame (as Edward Teller recalled, it was during that period that he had first heard his parents talk of anti-Semitism).14 So, although, when they reached university age, they were able to get in, they undoubtedly would have experienced an atmosphere of suspicion. The first land of exile for those who felt themselves thus excluded was Germany, which would have demanded a relatively easy transmission. All the martians had grown up in the Habsburg empire in whose territories German was the only tongue in which Slovaks could speak to Slovenes and Croats to Carpatho-Ruthenians. Many Hungarian Jewish families had retained their old German surnames and, even if they spoke Hungarian within the home, almost all were bilingual. Older people such as von Karman and Von Hevesy had in fact gone to study, and then to teach in German-speaking lands well before the First World War. Von Hevesy, who had returned to teach at Budapest university, left again in 1920, on account of the unpleasant atmosphere of counter-revolutionary Budapest, even though he had not been directly involved in any pro-communist activity. Leo Szilard, who had sympathized to some extent, did come under suspicion of propagandizing communism in the university and, after being excluded, thought it best to leave, however much he might regret having to do so. He and his brother Bela were 13 C. Lanczos,The Einstein D ecade (1905-1915) (London: Elek, 1974), p. viii; also Judaism and Science (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1970). 14 Blumberg and Panos, Edward Teller, op. cit., p. 11.

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eventually cleared of any active complicity in the revolution, but still he considered that it was better to stay abroad. So bright young Hungarians, and not only Jewish Hungarians, could readily finish their education and begin their careers in Weimar Germany, which was liberal and innovative, and where every rule and assumption of the past was questioned even more passionately and ruthlessly than in prewar Budapest. Szilard does mention in his memoirs that ‘the number of foreign students who were admitted was limited’ and that ‘[t]he attitude towards foreign students was not friendly in this respect’, and his editors explain that, at this point, ‘we omit a paragraph’ about Szilard’s difficulties in obtaining a visa.15 Perhaps the German authorities also distrusted him on political grounds, or maybe it was just the desperate postwar economic situation that made them discourage foreigners. Certainly those who came later, like Wigner and von Neumann, did not complain of any discrimination. The physics community there, however, was in the throes of a tremendously exciting intellectual revolution. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was rapidly achieving general acceptance, at the same time as the new, equally radical, quantum physics was being hammered out from year to year, almost from month to month. Paul Forman has suggested that this radicalism was one aspect of the critical tone of mid-1920s Weimar Germany.16 The study of fundamental physics remains rather different from contemporary revolutions in art or the theatre. Since the whole universe is composed of the same, universal building blocks in terms of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles and the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that reaches from body to body, research into their character and actions should also be identical everywhere, thus enabling physicists to move easily from country to country. In the 1920s, the particles which comprise all atoms were understood to be of two or three types only, differing merely in their mass and electric charge. Every electron was considered to be identical to every other electron; their positions relative to others, the forces at work between them, their particular velocity, or angular momentum might produce diverse effects, which ultimately should be explicable through mathematical operations that were the same in principle for every human mind that sought to comprehend them. More than other sciences, physics is universal. Modem physics is thoroughly quantified in approach to problems; ideally, the answer should always be an equation. Three centuries earlier, Galileo had declared that the book of nature is written in mathematical figures. The mathematics might have become much more complex and more subtle, but the concept still held. During the nineteenth century, spectroscopy had revealed that the same elements are to be found throughout this inconceivably vast cosmos. Since the general acceptance of Newtonian mechanics and the cosmology derived from that science, 15 Leo Szilard, Leo Szilard; his Version o f the Facts, eds S. Weart and G. W. Szilard (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), p. 8. 16 P. Forman, ‘Weimar Culture, Causality and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 3 (1971), pp. 1-115.

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all major discoveries had been transmitted through concepts accepted across all local national or linguistic boundaries. Therefore it was much easier for scientists trained in contemporary physics to move to a different country than for most others. Even so, until the 1930s, scientists themselves did often perceive a subtle difference in the way in which their science was pursued. In Britain and the USA it was supposed to be more closely linked to experiment and more empirical. When a young British physicist L.L.Whyte, at Britain’s premier physics laboratory, the Cavendish at Cambridge, complained about his research to Ernest Rutherford undoubtedly the country’s most outstanding physicist - Rutherford asked what was wrong. Whyte explained that he would have preferred a more theoretical approach: ‘[t]heories, principles, ideas’ attracted him more than constant experiments. ‘Then go and join the continentals’, replied Rutherford.17 The distinction should not be pursued too far. Whyte was quite unhappy at Cambridge altogether, and subsequently dropped out of the university. He continued to consider himself a scientist, and did maintain his connections with continental Europe but really became an industrialist, working in science-based technologies. Rutherford’s outburst probably referred to his distrust of quantum theories, which he considered to be too much like old natural philosophy - insufficiently grounded in experiment and observation. But there were plenty of scientists in Britain, as in North America, who embraced relativity and quantum theories with great enthusiasm. One could even claim that the two aspects complemented each other, in the way that British observations of the solar eclipse of 1919 confirmed Einstein’s theory. Nevertheless, Jews from outside Germany would certainly have become aware that there too the Jews were blamed for the country’s ills. Judit de Marffy, visiting in 1923, describes the ‘unhealthy’ atmosphere, as she then perceived it, with restaurants filled with ‘men with oily skins and hooked noses. During the inflation years the way these German Jews lorded it over everyone was so outrageous that one could not help becoming anti-Semitic.’18 As she hastens to explain, ‘no-one resented their behaviour more angrily than the old Jewish families’. Those who so offended her (‘spivs’ might be the nearest equivalent to the German term she uses) were men who had done well out of the war and the inflation which followed. They, of course, fitted the stereotype. As for the great majority who did not, ‘[she] did not think of them as Jews at all’. Ironically, throughout the 1920s, voices were heard in Germany insisting that true German science was experimental, and the metaphysical fantasies - relativity and quantum theory - were not rooted in the real world. They were ‘Jewish science’, which should be rejected by real Aryan Germans. In practice ‘Aryans’ had been quite as much engaged as ‘non-Aryans’ in the development of the new physics, 17 L. L. Whyte, Focus and Diversions (London: Cresset Press, 1963), p. 47. A much more subtle view o f the contrast is provided by S. Schweber, ‘The Empiricist Temper Regnant: Theoretical Physics in the USA, 1920-1950’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 17 (1986), pp. 55-98. 18 Listowel, This I Have Seen, op. cit., p. 34.

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and it is very difficult to see anything particularly Jewish about the new physics of the early twentieth century. Experimental skill, mathematical insight and the ability to conceive of theoretical models which will explain the phenomena are rarely combined in the same person, although, of course, there are notable exceptions. It has been shown, however, that even the national comparisons sometimes drawn can be exaggerated and, in so far as they exist, they are transmitted through slight differences in educational systems, so that to suppose racial distinctions in these matters is absurd. It can be argued that, whereas a general introduction to philosophy plays an important part in the last stages of schooling in many continental European countries, in the English-speaking world that is, at best, a university option. That might make scientists in the latter countries less inclined to a philosophical approach. O f course, as we have seen, Jewish children attended the same schools as others, and in the Habsburg empire were trained in the same way as their ‘Aryan’ fellows and shared their approach to scientific questions. During the 1920s, however, denunciation of supposedly ‘Jewish corruptions’ of ‘Aryan’ culture became increasingly strident. In 1920 an assault on Einstein as the most prominent creator of ‘Jewish science’ was launched by Philipp Lenard at a general meeting of German association of scientists. Although of German extraction, he too was bom in the kingdom of Hungary, in Bratislava. A Nobel laureate in physics, he had been a prominent figure before the First World War. Apparently the war embittered him - before the end of 1914 he produced a diatribe against British colleagues who had previously been his friends; soon after the war he was to become one of Hitler’s first admirers. In this he was to be joined by another physicist who had made useful contributions to science in earlier days Johannes Stark, also a Nobel laureate. As the new decade of the 1930s began, Nazism was soon kicking viciously at the door of power. Soon after Hitler became chancellor, Lenard and Stark managed to obtain positions of authority from which they could promote their ideas. Lenard wrote in the preface to his exposition of ‘German physics’: ‘German physics? One will ask - 1 could also have said Aryan physics or physics of the Nordic man, physics of the explorers of reality, of the tmth seekers ... in reality science, like everything else man produces, is racially determined, determined by blood. ’19 Eventually other German scientists were able to prevent his suppression of theories which he and Stark held to be ‘Jewish’. However, scientists regarded as racially Jewish had left the country by then. Hitler’s accession and the Nazi purge of racial or political undesirables from the civil service, which included all public schools and universities, provoked a great migration from Germany from 1932-33, and from Austria in 1938.20 19 Cited from Lenard’s ‘Deutsche Physik’ by A. Hermann, ‘Lenard, Philipp’, Dictionary o f Scientific Biography, 8 (1973), p. 182. D. Fleming and B. Bailyn, eds, The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America 1930-1960 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press o f Harvard University Press, 1969) and L. Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe 1930-1940 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968) are the classic studies o f this migration from Germany and

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This new flight into exile was on a much larger scale than that from Hungary in the 1920s: about 2000 may have gone into exile at that time.21 In physics alone, one of the martians, Wigner, and a German colleague, Ladenburg, sent round an appeal on behalf of no fewer than 28 fellow physicists who had been dismissed. Understandably, the Hungarians were among the first to leave as they had already migrated once and, however good their command of the German language, they were not Germans, and had no real roots in the country. A return to Hungary was an unattractive prospect; General Gombos, who had become prime minister in 1932, seemed to be more influenced by fascism and nazism than were his immediate predecessors. As a result, von Hevesy, who in 1920 had taken refuge with his old friend Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, but left again to take up a post in Germany in 1926, now promptly left to rejoin Bohr, and eventually moved on to Sweden. Wigner and von Neumann had been invited for relatively short visits to Princeton in the autumn of 1930, when the Nazi menace was advancing but had not yet achieved power; they both returned briefly to Europe, but in 1933 decided there was no possibility of a return to Germany, and settled in the USA. For his part Szilard boasted that he accurately predicted the course of events, and so knew to take the train out on the very last day before the Nazis set watch upon the borders.22 In this much greater migration many went first to Britain. However, as a German physicist, Hans Bethe, remarked, ‘although I had had an excellent time with my colleagues and my friends in England’ (he had a temporary lectureship at Manchester 1933-35) ‘it was clear there that I was a foreigner and would remain a foreigner. In America the American people made me feel at once that I was going to be an American - that maybe I was one already. [So,] I felt perfectly at home.’23 Others reacted similarly. Szilard was convinced that Cambridge distrusted him because he wanted to patent his ideas; he had even persuaded the great Albert Einstein into collaborating with him on a new mechanism for refrigerators.24 If aristocratic Cambridge considered him unsuitable for pure science, London did provide him with laboratory space for his research, in which he and a British collaborator did some valuable work. However, it was not only that refugee scientists felt that they Austria, in particular to the United States. With regard specifically to physics, see Paul Hoch, ‘The Reception of Central European Refugee Physicists o f the 1930s: USSR, UK, USA’, Annals o f Science, XL (1983), pp. 217-46; and ‘Emigres in Science and Technology Transfer’, Physics Technology, XVII (1986), pp. 225-29. Amore recent and more thorough study can be found in M. Ash and A. Sollner, Forced Migration and Scientific Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). In a preface Fleming him self notes that previous studies had been ‘skewed in favour o f the most salient individuals’, as is implied by Fermi’s very title. 21 C. Weiner, ‘A New Site for the Seminar: Refugees and American Physics in the 1930s’ in Fleming and Bailyn, The Intellectual M igration, op. cit., pp. 190-234. 22 Szilard, Leo Szilard, op. cit., p. 14. 23 J. Bernstein, Hans Bethe, Prophet o f Energy (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 44. 24 Szilard, Leo Szilard, op. cit. pp. 44-45.

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would remain forever foreign; permanent posts were limited. The Association of University Teachers was concerned that the newcomers should not be offered available vacancies over the heads of natives. Even the Association of Scientific Workers, whose inclination was definitely further to the left, was anxious not to endanger their members’ chances of employment.25 This does seem to be a purely trades union-type approach, for the university system in Great Britain was then relatively small, and openings limited. It is unlikely that any deeper, ideological sentiments were involved, at least at that level, whatever age-old suspicions may have lingered in the minds of individuals. So, although many establishments were generous and enthusiastic about creating temporary posts, the refugees generally had to look elsewhere - most obviously in the USA - if they hoped for a tenured position. Even in those days a much greater proportion of the population went on to higher education in the USA than in Europe, which meant a greater number of universities, many of which employed more staff in larger departments. The Rockefeller Foundation helped many of them on their way, although quite often after a stay in a European country such as Denmark. A surprising number of refugee scholars went first to Turkey, a country then eager to modernize itself. Others, less surprisingly, went to Palestine. Many found a temporary haven with Bohr in Copenhagen, but were aware that in such a small country so close to Nazi Germany they might not be safe for very long. Thus von Hevesy returned to Denmark but, when the Germans invaded, escaped to Sweden where he remained. Lanczos, after a period in the USA, found a final home in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and ended his days as a citizen of the Republic of Ireland. But Szilard, von Neumann, Wigner and Teller all arrived in the USA during the 1930s. Yet, even in the USA, tolerance was not unbounded as, once again, established academics did not wish to see too many new immigrants appointed to jobs for which American nationals were qualified.26 Moreover the same doubts about the desirability of all these Jewish intellectuals from Mitteleuropa were voiced privately in the USA no less than in Britain, perhaps. Nevertheless, it was much easier to find professional jobs in America, where national tradition insisted that any foreigner could eventually become a true American. Another Hungarian emigre, the humourist George Mikes, followed his entertaining view of the British, How to Be an Alien, with How to Scrape Skies, explaining that nobody really wants to be an alien, as he would always remain, in Britain, whereas nearly everybody on the planet would like to be an American 27 25 P. Hoch, ‘Refugee Scholars in Britain’, History Today (1985), p. 55. 26 R. E. Rider, ‘Alarm and Opportunity: Emigration o f Mathematicians and Physicists to Britain and the U.S., 1933-1945’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 15 (1984), pp. 107-76. 27 George Mikes, How to be an Alien (London: Allan Wingate, 1946 ); How to Scrape Skies (London: Allan Wingate, 1948). Mikes, a refugee from the communist regime in Hungary, followed these two publications with several other witty treatments o f the national characters o f various countries.

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As a result of all these factors, then, most of the refugee scientists ended up in the United States. Wigner, in his memoirs, lists a number who moved country several times, but usually the USA was their final stop.28 In atomic physics a high proportion had the same racial origins as the martians, or at least would have been regarded as such by the Nazis: George Marx names among the continental scientists who contributed to the discovery of nuclear fission or its exploitation in the American nuclear weapon project, four Germans, four Austrians and four Italians; three of the Germans, all four Austrians and two of the Italians would have had to bear a ‘J’ in their passports under Nazi rules.29 Paul Hoch has hailed these emigrant atomic physicists as bridge-builders, linking fields in which central European physics had been pre-eminent with the experimental tradition in the USA, where their new colleagues had, during the 1920s and early 1930s, been mainly intent on developing ever larger and more powerful instrumentation, such as the cyclotron (in which incidentally the descendants of an earlier migration, second- or third-generation Scandinavian-Americans, had distinguished themselves). Theoretical issues, as in Rutherford’s laboratory, had been relatively neglected. As has been suggested earlier, although H och’s interpretation is widely accepted, as in all such general interpretations, individual cases may not conform to the broader rule. Now, once transferred to the New World, the refugee physicists did find their feet; sooner or later, the newcomer could cease to be an exile in the land of the Pilgrim Fathers. The leading Italian among them, Enrico Fermi, announced, on landing at New York in January 1939, that ‘we are founding the American branch of the Fermis’. (But remember his message on achieving a controlled nuclear chain reaction nearly four years later ‘The Italian Navigator has landed’.) His wife Laura, subsequently a distinguished historian of the scientific immigration, did not find it so easy to adjust; she and the maid who had travelled with the Fermis (exile in style!) found American shopping, eating, housekeeping and manners quite strange.30 As for the martians, all of whom had grown up in households with servants, they had to adjust to looking after themselves. Presumably bachelor days in German universities had already obliged them to a simpler way of life. Szilard, however, seems to have solved such problems by spending much of his life in hotels. Scientists might have other difficulties, too. Wigner recalled Princeton in the 1930s: ‘the town had no coffeehouses in the European sense, where scholars and their students went for lively, extended conversation. And Americans spoke far too much English and not enough German or Hungarian.’ Although he realized that Hungarian would not be spoken much in the USA, he still added, ‘I was discouraged to find that this beautiful language was almost completely unknown in New Jersey, and the great culture that had grown from it was equally unknown. Even well28 29 30 p. 143.

Wigner, Recollections, op. cit., pp. 156-58. Marx, ‘The Martians’ Vision o f the Future’, op. cit., p. 2. L. Fermi, Atoms in the Family (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1954),

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educated Americans had never heard of the Hungarian poets Sandor Petofi or Mihaly Vorosmarty, or my teachers Ratz and Polanyi.’31 Wigner, like the Italian emigre Emilio Segre, sometimes felt resentment at being passed over occasionally for a tenured post, or for the extension of a short-term one, despite their excellent qualifications, and suspected that their immigrant status might be a factor. Hoch has also pointed out that many of these exiles ‘side-stepped’, changing from one field of research to another that was less fully occupied in the new country. Or they might innovate, setting up new branches of science or technology.32 In the end, nearly all did settle more or less satisfactorily. Nevertheless that sense of being uprooted did not quite leave most of them,33 however comfortably established they might have seemed. Perhaps that accounts in part for the ultra-patriotic views of national defence adopted during and after the Second World War by Edward Teller, von Neumann, Wigner and others. Szilard was occasionally investigated as a potential security risk in America and was always regarded as a dubious character by Groves, the military head of the atom bomb project, but he was never removed from the research programme at the Metallurgy Lab. The others were in varying degrees anti-communist, so while Szilard engaged in efforts to bring about atomic disarmament after the Second World War and vigorously opposed McCarthyism, Teller was promoting the idea of a hydrogen bomb in the USA. Von Neumann put his remarkable talent to work on developing new weapons for the American armoury, and Wigner argued publicly that civil defence against nuclear assault was both feasible and highly desirable. All, then, could maintain that they were now at home in their adopted country. As a young man, Szilard had been inspired by H. G. Wells’ notion of an organization of the intelligentsia of all nations to take mankind forward into the new scientific era, and would never accept that he should keep out of politics, even when he espoused views that were unpopular with government or public opinion. He even tried his hand at science fiction (not very successfully) as a means of persuasion. So he, at least, was not afraid of being thought unpatriotic. Nevertheless, for the others, fear of communism could easily reinforce a sense of duty to strengthen American military muscle. Were they really quite at home, however? Both Szilard and Teller, politically so different, were regarded as difficult characters who did not take easily to working in a team; they were individuals who thought hard and deeply but who always tried to go their own way, even in the Manhattan Project. Was this a matter of personality, derived perhaps from their upbringing or heredity?

31 Wigner, Recollections, op. cit., p. 134. 32 Hoch, ‘Emigres in Science and Technology Transfer’, op. cit., pp. 227-28; ‘Migration and the Generation o f New Scientific Ideas’, Minerva, 25 (1987), pp. 209-37. Something o f Hoch’s status in this discussion may be gauged by the dedication o f Ash and Sollner’s volume, Forced Migration and Scientific Change, op. cit., to his memory after his early death. 33 Fermi, Atoms in the Family, op. cit., p. 143.

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Or did they often feel still not quite at home, and, perhaps subconsciously, uneasy in their new homeland? Did they not still feel nostalgic for their native land and its culture? Wigner certainly did. Even Teller, according to a Hungarian friend, still speaks Hungarian better than English. Among those who worked on the American atom bomb project during the Second World War was Rudolf Peierls, a native of Berlin. He had been one of those who came first to Britain and returned there from the USA after the war. He had also spent some time in the infant USSR, where he had married. Eventually, however, he spent much the greater part of his adult life in Britain, where his children grew up. All the same, he chose to entitle his autobiography Bird o f Passage, as if he were an exile everywhere, even in his native land, as well as the land of his adoption.34 Perhaps the same could be said of the martians too.

34

R. Peierls, Bird o f Passage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Chapter 8

The Blind Impress of Modernity: American Exile and Modernist Aesthetics in Lorca and Kafka Martin Halliwell Do you know the N ew York sky? You should, it is supposed to be known. It is outstanding. It is a serious thing.1

The American philosopher Richard Rorty has argued that the experience of modernity derives from ‘chance’ and ‘mere contingency’, in contrast to the ‘necessary, essential, telic, constitutive’ impress optimizing the social coherence o f classical Greek culture and the neo-classical Enlightenment.2 If classical philosophy is characterized by ideas of necessity and wholeness, then the ‘fallen’ condition of modernity can be described as a ‘blind im press’ in which the ‘fragmented’ self is cursed with imperfect and limited vision. Rorty goes on to describe the term in two precise ways which differentiate the modem condition from Romanticism: first, ‘blind impress’ represents a post-Darwinian awareness that there is no universal design, as distinct from the Romantic belief in intrinsic natural order and, second, the term suggests that the modem individual is unable to see outside his or her narrow perspective, whereas Romantic thinkers emphasized the primacy of emotional openness and pathos. For Rorty, the ‘blind impress’ marks a shift from the scientific precision of the microscope to what Gillian Beer calls the ‘imperfect vision’ and ‘extreme tenuity’ of modem perception.3 The visual theorist Victor Burgin translates this contingent experience into an explicitly optical language. He argues that whereas classical theories of representation offered ‘the image’ as ‘a mirror’ of ‘an ordered reality’, the ‘fragments’ of the modem mirror are ‘perpetually in motion’ and ‘reflect nothing reassuring’.4 1 Louise Bourgeois, The Puritan (1990), part of the exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois: Memoria y arquitecture’, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, November 1999-February 2000. 2 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 26. 3 Gillian Beer, “‘Authentic Tidings o f Invisible Things”: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century’, in Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, eds, Vision in Context: H istorical and C ontem porary P erspectives on Sight (N ew York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 90-91. 4 Victor Burgin, ‘Paranoic Space’, in In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley, CA: University o f California Press, 1996), p. 120.

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If, as Rorty claims, Nietzsche was the first thinker to renounce the desire to attain an inclusive panoramic view of truth, epitomized by Emerson’s Romantic image of the ‘transparent eyeball’ and Kant’s universal moral consciousness, then it is useful to consider the way in which modernist writers engaged with postNietzschean thought as expressive of two kinds of exile: voluntary and imagined.5 Modernist literature often echoes Nietzsche’s nihilistic perspective: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) both portray withdrawn characters suffering isolated psychic states. However, there are other modernist strains - such as the Hindu evocations at the end of The Waste Land (1922) and Lily Briscoe’s moment of being at the close of To the Lighthouse (1927) - in which signs of hope emerge from a creative response to modernity. In order to test the applicability of Rorty’s description of the ‘blind impress’ as a depletion of clearsightedness, this essay discusses two texts - by Lorca and Kafka - which offer affirmative visions of exile. Although there are more differences than similarities between their work, their responses to America focus on crucial issues in modernist aesthetics. Lorca’s American experiences in Poet In New York(Poeta in Nueva York, 1940) are first-hand, whereas Kafka imagines his fictionalized America (Amerika, w. 1927) from a European vantage-point. During the first 30 years of the twentieth century New York provided a powerful symbol of modernity for many European writers who were drawn to it geographically and imaginatively as a ‘gateway city’ between European and American culture.6 Among European visitors to New York were Freud, Jung, Lorca and Gorky, while others, such as Kafka, Joyce, Mayakovsky and Musil, explored the lures of America from a distance. Although the American visitors are more accurate in terms of cultural specifics, there is a certain parity between firsthand and imaginative accounts: for example, the bifocal visions of Lorca and Kafka fuse an inability to perceive clearly with the possibilities of imaginative ‘seeing’. The visual spectacle of Manhattan proved particularly potent for modernist writers, as the artist was forced to negotiate between new cultural experiences and the restrictions of vision imposed by the verticality of the city due to the rapid growth of skyscrapers between 1890 and 1930. Lorca’s uncertain sexual identity and his hatred of imperial Spain directly parallel Kafka’s troubled libido and his sense of being doubly removed from Czech culture as a German-speaking Jew. If these experiences of alienation represent a feeling of exile from a dominant culture, then their American experiences revise the notion of exile yet further. Lorca, a self-imposed exile in New York, had to reorientate himself in relation to Spanish culture, whereas Kafka imagined exile in a fascinating, but hostile, environment. From its very inception America has been used as a potent metaphor for cultural exile; as Leslie Fiedler argues in Waitingfo r the End (1964), 5 There is, o f course, a third type o f modernist exile, exemplified by the enforced migration o f intellectuals from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. 6 Quoted by Edward Said in Maya Jaggi, ‘Out o f the Shadows’, The Guardian, Saturday Review (11 September 1999), p. 7.

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‘It is the dream of exile as freedom which has made America; but it is the experience of exile as terror that has forged the self-consciousness of Americans.’7 This ambivalent notion also marks out the modem intellectual as being the inhabitant of borderlines, both inside and outside dominant culture. Edward Said writes about such a condition of exile as being ‘a challenge or a risk ... a positive mission, whose success would be a cultural act of great importance’.8 This strong sense of exile - o f ‘willed homelessness’ - offers an ‘enabling theory’ which aligns geographical and imaginative travel in a ‘specular’ relationship with two cultures; but, for the individual aware of the contingent condition of modernity, this rarely provides a comprehensive view.9 Both Lorca in Poet in New York and Karl Rossman, Kafka’s protagonist in America, give themselves over to American culture (almost to the point of self-sacrifice) in their attempts to develop moral awareness of it and to resist aligning themselves with nationalistic sympathies or ‘the coercive tendencies of fixed, indigenous identities’.10 Their conditions of exile are not fully rationalized; rather, the borderline position of the ‘exilic wanderer’ which they adopt is primarily experiential, with confident self-consciousness either held in abeyance or banished as being an unreal spectre of Enlightenment thought, in favour of imaginatively beholding the Other.11 Lorca’s posthumously published poetry collection, Poet in New York, charts his visit to America between spring 1929 and May 1930. He was encouraged to leave Spain after suffering an emotional breakdown, and his troubled mind is expressed in the chaotic and threatening images which convey his impressions of the city. Throughout the poem’s sequence, Lorca’s urban experience is rendered explicitly in visual terms, reflecting the distorted expressionism of Picasso, Miro and Dali. Instead of privileging the clear vision of the artist, Lorca distanced himself from late-nineteenth century impressionism. In his lecture ‘Thoughts on Modem Art’ (1928) he claimed that ‘sight was a slave to what it saw, and the soul of a painter was a sad creature chained to his eyes, having no space or criteria of its own, unlike the souls of poets and musicians’.12 Although he wished to avoid optical and cultural blindness, he argued that visual distortion offers the artist a freedom to bypass the restrictions of orthodox modes of representation. In Poet in New York and his pencil sketches, like ‘Self-Portrait of the Poet in New York’ in which the boundaries between the poet and the city blur at the edges, Lorca attempts to free 7 Leslie Fiedler, Waiting fo r the End (New York: Stein & Day, 1964), p. 84. 8 Edward Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, in The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 6-7. 9 Abdul J. JanMohamed, ‘Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition o f the Specular Border Intellectual’, in Michael Sprinker, ed., Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 99. 10 Ibid., p. 118. 11 Edward Said, ‘Media and Cultural Identity’, in Information and Misinformation in Euro-Arab Relations (The Hague: Luftia Rabbani Foundation, 1988), p. 45. 12 Frederico Lorca, ‘Thoughts on Modem Art’, reprinted in Helen Oppenheimer, Lorca: The Drawings (London: The Herbert Press, 1986), p. 128.

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himself from the tyranny of the eye and the old ways of seeing by merging himself with the city.13 Rather than providing an uncritical celebration of urban life, this stance allows him to break down the conventional subject-object dichotomy between the ‘seer’ and the ‘seen’ in order that, in his jumble of imagery, he might discover the secret ‘pictorial centre’ of objects which he claims ‘the copy artist cannot perceive’.14 The first poem in Poet in New York, ‘After a Walk’ (‘Vuelta de paseo’), provides a good example of this technique of optical immersal. He claimed later that the poem was composed after he had ‘wandered alone’ through Manhattan, ‘exhausted by the rhythm of the huge electric billboards of Times Square’.15 The opening line ‘Cut down by the sky’ (repeated as an apostrophe in the closing line) suggests a violent vertical force which strikes down the poet from above. Instead of providing light and generativity, with a violent ‘cut’ the sky delays the emergence of the speaking subject until the fourth line: Cut down by the sky. Between shapes moving toward the serpent and crystal-craving shapes, I’ll let my hair grow.16

The reader is given no sense of exact location here; the people of the city are reduced to ‘shapes’ that move inexorably toward a malevolent ‘serpent’ who consumes the city by obliterating the source of light. The poet’s response in the fourth line hovers between defiance and blase flippancy to the anonymity of city life, as if he too cannot locate himself spatially within the city except as a passive object (‘I’ll le t... ’) into which the shapes metamorphose in the last stanza: ‘Bumping into my own face, different each day.’ The middle three stanzas begin ‘with ...’, which may be read as a muffled articulation of a struggling community, but actually emphasize the isolation and fragmentation of city life. The string of violent images - ‘the amputated tree that doesn’t sing’, ‘the child with the blank face of an egg’, ‘the little animals whose skulls are cracked’, ‘the bone-tired, deaf-and-dumb things’ - hover between a description of identifiable, but wounded, organisms and creatures so damaged that they have been reduced to the status of ‘things’. The ugly juxtaposition of images conveys the poet’s sense of despair as he struggles to maintain his older European identity in this city-island. As a collection, Poet in New York shifts between an exploration of the objects and images of the city and a meditation on the adjustments that the poet has to make to his own identity. Just before leaving Spain, Lorca wrote to his friend, Carlos Morla Lynch, that ‘New York seems horrible, but for that very reason I’m 13 For a discussion o f Lorca’s New York paintings see ibid., pp. 85-102. 14 Ibid., p. 130. 15 Frederico Lorca, P oet in New York, trans. Greg Simon and Steven F. White (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 186. 16 Ibid., p. 7.

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going there. I think I’ll have a very good time.’17 He expresses his feelings in the face of the ‘horrible’ city, but also the benefits he hopes to accrue from his visit. In another letter written on voyage to America, he expressed his reservations about his trip in the form of self-doubt - ‘I look in the mirror of the confining cabin and I don’t recognize myself. I seem to be another Federico’ - as if he must ritually shed his European skin in order to adopt a new hybrid form.18 This idea is reinforced on his arrival in New York, which he sees as ‘BabyIonic, cruel and violent’ but filled with ‘a great modem beauty’.19 Lorca’s reassessment of his identity during the Atlantic crossing enables him to focus on a city which ‘from far away seemed gigantic and disordered’but which, on closer inspection, has a ‘symphonic’ quality.20 This notion of a horrific, but beneficial, experience suggests that the poem sequence is an attempt to reforge the language and experience of cultural exile. Lorca believed that his journeys through the city would lead him to uncover hidden truths among the urban debris. For example, ‘After a Walk’ opens with an image of the violent sky that blinds the innocent child (‘with the blank face of an egg’), but it cannot totally ‘amputate’ the poet’s ability to make sense of this chaos. Throughout the sequence the poet struggles to maintain his identity, but this is characterized as much by his inability to see as by a visual description of urban spectacle: for example, the third poem, ‘Dawn’ (‘La aurora’), describes ‘four columns of mire/and a hurricane of black pigeons/splashing in the putrid waters’ 21 Eliot’s spiritual drought in The Waste Land is symbolized by a lack of fresh water and the fetid canal of the Fisher King, whereas Lorca views the ‘unanswered sea’22 surrounding the island as the real potent force, but it is guarded by what he describes in the titles of two more poems as the ‘pissing multitude’ of Manhattan and the ‘vomiting multitude’ of Coney Island.23 Another example of diminished sight is evident in ‘Blind Panorama of New York’ (‘Panorama ciego de Nueva York’), in which the poet once more describes his imaginative and perceptual blindness when faced with an alien panorama. To some degree this is true of all cross-cultural experiences, but, as Lorca suggests in a poem packed with descriptive negatives, the experience of New York City exemplifies a certain European blindness to America in the early twentieth century which cannot be overcome either by simply embracing or rejecting an American identity. If ‘panorama’ suggests an inclusive vision, optimized by Whitman’s soaring views of Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge, then Lorca’s poem is testimony to the disorienting experience of the Manhattan street plan and the overwhelming vertically o f the skyscrapers which compounded the linguistic and cultural 17 Frederico Lorca, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. David Gershator (London: Marion Boyars, 1984), p. 146. 18 Ibid., p. 148. 19 Ibid., p. 149. 20 Ibid., pp. 151, 155. 21 Ibid., p. 11. 22 Ibid., p. 186. 23 Ibid., pp. 57, 53.

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differences he experienced in America.24 This is figured in ‘Blind Panorama of New York’ by incomplete images which metamorphose into broken spaces: ‘the birds will soon become oxen/They could become white rocks’; ‘the sky often shrugs them into ragged togetherness’; ‘a tiny space alive in the crazy union of light’ 25 These images suggest that cultural blindness does not derive from a total lack of sight, nor a refusal to see, but rather an inability to grasp fully and represent adequately the alterity of the Other. In a city that shuts out light and atomizes individuals, encounters with strangers remain fleeting and darkly disturbing, lending Lorca’s ‘blind impress’ an inherently modem feel. The natural world may be contaminated or perverted, but New York serves to galvanize his poetry into surrealistic life: for example, in ‘Dance of Death’ (‘Danza de la muerte’) the poetic vision takes on the geometrical form of the city. Although urban topography is often blurred in the poems, Lorca describes the New York buildings more explicitly in his accompanying lecture: The angles and edges o f Gothic architecture surge from the hearts o f the dead and buried, but these climb coldly skyward with a beauty that has no roots and reveals no longing, stupidly complacent and utterly unable to transcend and conquer, as does spiritual architecture, the perpetually inferior intentions o f the architect. There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them 26

He contrasts the blind faces of the ‘stupidly complacent’ New York skyscrapers to the more ‘spiritual architecture’ of Granada, but the former are more ‘poetic’ in their battle for dominance with the sky. Here, Lorca seems to show a greater sympathy with an America-inspired modem poetry than the late-romantic Hispanic modernismo from which he had begun to distance himself. On the one hand, he describes the skyscrapers as having no spiritual ‘roots’ and, on the other, he sees something inspirational in their bmte juxtaposition with nature. The lack of spirituality and morality which the poems bemoan arises from the fact that the skyscrapers are not adequate memorials for those workers now ‘dead and buried’ beneath the mass of steel and glass. Although the sequence was written around the 1929 Wall Street crash (described as a ‘rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea’),27 the poems echo the earlier, more jubilant, verse of the Chicagoan poet Carl Sandburg by celebrating of the ‘soul’ of the anonymous workers who built the city skyscrapers.28 Similarly, in contrast to the ‘terrible’ and ‘cruel’ sight 24 In his letters Lorca underplays both o f these aspects: he claims he is able to ‘adjust’ him self to the city and he is ‘making quick progress in English’, both o f which brush over the problems he had o f adjusting culturally and linguistically to American life. See Lorca, Selected Letters, op. cit., p. 151. 25 Lorca, Poet in New York, op. cit., pp. 73-75. 26 Ibid., p. 185. 27 Ibid., p. 189. 28 See, for example, Sandburg’s ‘Skyscraper ’, published in Chicago Poems (1916), reprinted in Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems (New York: Gramercy Books, 1992), pp. 75-77.

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of Wall Street, it is the inhabitants of New York who redeem the city in Lorca’s eyes, especially the forgotten workers and immigrants: ‘the Chinese, Armenians, Russians, and Germans’ and the ‘human warmth’ of Harlem.29 Of the nine sections of Poet in New York, two are dedicated entirely to ethnic groups: the second section ‘The Blacks’ (‘Los Negros’) comprises three poems focusing on Harlem life and the ninth ‘The Poet Arrives in Havana’ (‘El Poeta llega a la Habana’) introduces a single poem ‘Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms’ (‘Son de negros en Cuba’), forming a joyful climax to the sequence by marking Lorca’s escape from America during his visit to Cuba in the spring and summer of 1930. Together with ‘Dance of Death’ (‘Danza de le muerte’), these poems offer a less self-preoccupied appraisal of American life than the other city poems, as the poet sympathetically gives himself over to the black experience which he described as ‘the most delicate, most spiritual element’ of his trip, sensing that their experience of exile mirrored his own.30 These four poems are much more rhythmical than the city poems, as Lorca attempts to connect his passion for deep song (cante jondo) in his earlier Andalusian poems to the tempo and the pitch of African jazz and blues, in a similar way to Langston Hughes’s development of a poetic form midway between verse and song. But rather than an uncritical celebration of ethnic rhythms, Lorca’s poems highlight the difficulties and the moral pitfalls of the poet trying to give himself over to a foreign culture. If the Harlem poems represent what David Johnston calls Lorca’s ‘search for community’31, then the first poem o f ‘The Blacks’ section, ‘Standards and Paradise of the Blacks’ (‘Norma y paraiso de los negros’) suggests a radical Otherness which cannot be bridged easily with empathy: throughout, the blacks are continually referred to as ‘They’. The first two stanzas begin ‘They hate’, followed by a series of images associated with Caucasian American culture: ‘the bird’s shadow on the white cheek’, ‘the conflict of light and wind’, ‘the great hall of snow’ and ‘the punctual handkerchief of farewell’. These images are contrasted in the third and fourth stanzas by a darker set of cultural markers: ‘the deserted blue’, ‘the swaying bovine faces’, ‘the deceitful moon of both poles’, and ‘the science of tree trunk’. Here, the language of primitivism both stigmatizes the blacks as Other (the ‘bovine faces’ and naked ‘torsos’) and suggests a mysterious current (‘the crackling blue’) which can only be beheld intuitively or through fellow-feeling. However, rather than the African-Americans being little more than savages, that is a term Lorca reserves to describe white America: ‘Oh savage, shameless North America!/ Stretched out on the frontier of snow. ’ His primary worry for the black New Yorkers is that they will sacrifice their ‘primitive impetus’ for ‘the mechanical impetus’ of the city and thereby forget the ‘original light’ of their culture.32 29 Lorca, Poet in New York, op. cit., pp. 186, 189. 30 Ibid., p. 186. 31 David Johnston, Federico Garcia Lorca (Bath: Absolute Press, 1998), p. 102. 32 Although Lorca can be accused o f being a ‘romantic racist’ in his exoticization o f the Harlemites, his empathy with their exiled condition is continuous with his ‘sympathetic

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In the long second poem of this section, ‘The King of Harlem’ (‘El rey de Harlem’), he adopts a bardic voice which moves between a description of present urban conditions and visions of future triumph: an almost Blakean ‘cry of encouragement to those who tremble and search’,33 but also a prophetic warning that the New York blacks should not become like the whites. The moral dilemma for Lorca is how to speak for the blacks without overstepping his own cultural relationship to them as a white Spaniard abroad. His Harlem poems explore the possibilities of cross-cultural vision, but only in the last poem, the unreservedly joyful ‘Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms’, does he find a real sense of cultural synergy. Here, Lorca joins the Cagian dance, free from the cold rationality of the urban ‘machine’ in which the Latin rhythms of the Cubans echo the soul of ‘the great Andalusian people’.34 Rather than waiting for the ‘sterile sunshine’ to return to New York, this last poem gestures towards Lorca’s aesthetic and moral ideal in which debilitating exile is overcome: ‘the wide-awake and true poem where beauty and horror and the ineffable and the repugnant may live and collide in the midst of the most incandescent joy’.35 If Lorca’s poems are both stimulated and tarnished by the shadow of New York, then Kafka’s fictional exploration of America charts the same ambivalence. Kafka was stimulated by the idea of America as an imaginative panorama in his work-inprogress novel ‘The Man Who Vanished’ (‘Der Verschollene’, w. 1912-13), published posthumously in 1927 by his friend Max Brod with the title Amerika. Although Kafka did not visit America, he had three cousins and two uncles living there and his cultural knowledge derived largely from reading James Fenimore Cooper, Karl May, Franklin’s Autobiography, Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and an article by Arthur Holitscher, ‘America Today and Tomorrow’ attacking American social values and advertising culture (published in the periodical, Neue Rundschau, March 1912). The imaginative possibilities of America were very strong for Kafka: where else could his protagonist, Karl Rossman, go to disappear from Europe than into the cultural void ofAmerica? For Kafka, America epitomized the worst excesses of mass industrialization, where the rational factory systems of Frederick Taylor banished cultural exuberance and quashed the promise of individual freedom. As Michael Lowy claims, Kafka’s ‘moral and religious hostility to industrial, capitalist “progress” is accompanied... by a nostalgia for traditional community, for organic Gemeinschaff, a communal ideal which could not thrive in what he imagined to

understanding’ o f the plight o f the Moors, Jews and gypsies in Spain which, he argued, ‘all granadinos carry inside them’; see Ian Gibson, The Assassination o f Federico Garcia Lorca (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 22-23. 33 Ibid., p. 189. 34 Ibid., p. 198. 35 El Defens or de Granada, 7 May 1929, pp. 129-30; quoted in Richard Predmore, Lorca s New York Poetry: Social Injustice, D ark Love, Lost Faith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1980), p. 6.

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be the ‘invasive’ streets of New York.36 Mark Anderson indicates a number of interesting inaccuracies in America which cannot be explained away by Kafka’s lack of firsthand knowledge of the country: Liberty holds a sword rather than a flame; on his arrival in the city, Rossmann pays for a meal with pounds rather than dollars; and the narrator ‘refuses to name any famous street, building, or tourist sight that would allow its readers to recognize and find themselves in the space Karl Rossmann traverses’.37 As these examples suggest, despite his own limited knowledge of America, Kafka explores the symbolic potential of a naive European abroad for very deliberate aesthetic ends. Written from within the heart of Europe, Kafka’s work might seem far removed from Lorca’s immediate experiences of New York. Nevertheless, Poet in New York and America are comparable in four main respects: their concern with cultural exile, and with European disorientation in the face of accelerating Americanization; their use of the ‘innocent abroad’ motif, and the troubled sexuality of their narrators. As such, the incompleteness of their work (Lorca’s loose collection of poems and Kafka’s unfinished novel) formally complements these blurred and imperfect visions of New York City. America opens as the protagonist Karl Rossmann enters New York harbour on a German liner, forced to leave Europe by his parents after being seduced by a servant girl who had given birth to his child. A complex mixture of naivete - the innocent abroad seduced by his father’s employee - and sexual experience combine to make Rossmann an unstable figure who spends much of the first chapter, ‘The Stoker’, on board the liner searching for his umbrella (a symbol of male potency) and his luggage (a symbol of personal identity). On seeing New York harbour ‘a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illuminate the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before’.38 A mixture of familiarity and virginal experience suggests a tension within Karl’s psyche which is bound up in the iconic site of Liberty Island: ‘the arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven’.39 Karl’s personal and sexual insecurities are projected on to the image of the statue; the figure holds a sword rather than a flame as a threatening figure of authority rather than the symbol of freedom. His only verbal response to the scene is the utterance ‘So high!’, which suggests a soaring angle of vision. However, the sublimity of the scene is undercut by the ‘swelling throng of porters’ who push Karl towards the rail of the liner where he seems likely to fall.40 36 Michael Lowy, ‘Libertarian Anarchism in A m erika\ in Mark Anderson, ed., Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siecle (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), pp. 120-21. 37 Mark Anderson, Kafka s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siecle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 107. 38 Franz Kafka, America, trans. Edwin Muir (London: Minerva, 1992), p. 12. 39 Ibid., p. 12. 40 Ibid., p. 12.

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Despite Karl’s claim that he is ‘quite ready’ to go ashore and take his first step on American soil, he is distracted from disembarking by the realization that he has left his umbrella ‘down below’. Here, the reader is confronted with the verticality of vision opposed to the descent into the ship (‘below decks’) to retrieve his umbrella. Rather than any panoramic description of Manhattan, the narrator describes a characteristic Kafkaesque landscape - ‘endless recurring stairs, through corridors with countless turnings’ where he loses himself ‘completely ’ - that result in delaying Karl’s arrival in America for the remainder of the first chapter, during which time he meets the ship’s stoker and encounters his Uncle Jacob.41 This opening description illustrates the ‘blind impress’ which Karl experiences as a result of his ethnic and personal insecurities at the moment he is greeted by the mythical symbol of American independence and freedom. The failure of Karl’s imagination is spatially mapped out in the dark labyrinthine ways of the ocean liner, acting as a horizontal symbolic counterpoint to the verticality of the city before him, which is not described directly until the next chapter 42 The reader is encouraged to read Rossmann’s movements below decks as symptomatic of his feelings of disorientation when faced with a new culture, but they can also be read as a strategy, subconsciously devised, by which he prepares himself for the confusion of his altered circumstances, acting out a number of spatial and interpersonal moves in the bowels of the liner. This view of the first chapter positively develops Michael Lowy’s reading of America as a novel of ‘negative messianism’ and ‘negative anarchism’ 43 For Lowy, the novel simply offers a ‘critique of a world entirely devoid of liberty’ with ‘the positive “beyond” of this world ... radically absent’.44 Although the novel provides no metaphysical comforts from cultural exile, it can be read as an attempt to explore possible ethical devices with which to contend with the lack of morality prevalent in Rossmann’s America. In other words, if the novel is read less as a political critique of American capitalism and more as an exploration of moral anarchism as an antidote to the dehumanizing forces of industry and bureaucracy, then America can be read alongside Lorca’s New York poems as a work galvanized into life by the systems it seeks to critique. This affirmative vision may be attributed to Kakfa’s sense that America ‘was more optimistic and “lighter” in mood’ than his other work 45 The second chapter of the novel is the only one to take place inside New York; the following chapters move away from the metropolis in widening arcs. Unlike the arrival of most poor European immigrants to New York who must learn by 41 Ibid., pp. 12-13. 42 In his diary from 1917, Kafka resorts to an optical register when he describes ‘The Stoker’ as being Dickensian in its ‘barbarism’, but ‘enhanced by the sharper lights I should have taken from the times [the early century] and the duller ones I should have got from m yself’: Franz Kafka, The Diaries o f Franz Kafka, 1910-23, ed. Max Brod (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 388. 43 Lowy, ‘Libertarian Anarchism in A m erika\ op. cit., p. 122. 44 Ibid, p. 127. 45 Kafka, America, op. cit, p. 255.

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‘hard experience’, Karl falls under the protection of his uncle and quickly ‘became used to his new circumstances’.46 Although his first visual experiences of the city are from the safety of his apartment, there seems to be a permeable membrane between inside and outside which positions Karl as a borderline experiencer. Rather than providing him with a ‘vantage point’, his balcony ‘allowed him here little more than a view of one street’ and a ‘constant stream of traffic’. Human life on the street is reduced to the movement of particles in a system and the ‘inextricable confusion’ of the traffic hits Karl’s ‘dazzled eye as if a glass roof stretched over the street were being violently smashed into fragments at every moment’ 47 The shock of the city echoes Lorca’s poetic descriptions and, here, the ‘flood of light’ offers Karl little more clarity than the darkness and mire that Lorca encounters. His uncle warns him that these initial impressions are bound to be ‘unreliable’ and he frowns upon Karl when he finds him gazing at the city as if he already knows, as an assimilated European immigrant, that the confusion cannot be sorted out by visual acuity and would only lead to his ‘ruination’. Mark Anderson is particularly interested in the way traffic (‘ Verkehr’) is represented in America as an economy of confusion as much as exchange: from Karl’s early experience of street traffic which changed ‘its direction every minute’,48 to the confusing exchange of European and American ideas, to the movement of lifts in his later role as lift boy in the Hotel Occident and, as Anderson argues, to ‘the “traffic” or “commerce” of the sexes’.49 As for Lorca, Kafka’s view of perception cannot be located at a fixed point but as a series of sensations in constant movement.50 With this in mind, if the modem city provides the artist with ‘a stage for theatrical performance’ then: ... the big city as a theatrical, depersonalized space marked by its ‘traffic’ and hence by the problem o f ‘accident’ - o f Unfall, but also ‘contingency’ fZufall), chance, and death - ... is the double optic through which Kafka’s early texts view the modem world.51

As such, America offers the same double view of New York as Lorca’s poems: while the city’s impersonal systems, and the accidents they cause, epitomize the ‘contingency’ of modem urban life, its theatricality offers aesthetic attractions to individuals who can immerse themselves in the environment with enough protection to prevent themselves from being completely lost in it.52 Reflecting his balcony46 Ibid., p. 42. 47 Ibid., p. 43. 48 Ibid., p. 54. 49 Anderson, Kafka s Clothes, op. cit., p. 109. 50 To substantiate this point, Mark Anderson cites Kafka’s essay ‘On Perception’ (‘Uber Apperception’) not published until 1966: ibid., p. 100. 51 Ibid., p. 101. 52 Anderson argues that ‘theatricality’ is more akin to the Parisian experience, whereas N ew York is ‘cinematic’ in its ‘relentless movement o f framed images’: ibid., p. 120. It is perhaps better to consider the intermingling o f ‘the theatrical’ and ‘the cinematic’

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view of the traffic, Karl’s American journey is not unidirectional: although he moves away from the city, from Mr Pollunder’s labyrinthine house in the country outside New York to his final train ride towards Oklahoma, like his experiences in the bowels of the ocean liner, his journey is picaresque in its wandering and uncertain in its goal.53 Karl’s exile in America is so strange because he believes he ‘no longer has a home’ (compounded later when he loses his only photograph of his parents) and because he has no fixed point from which to judge distance or direction.54 After his uncle has spumed him for disobeying orders, on leaving Mr Pollunder’s country house Karl ‘could not tell with certainty in which direction New York lay [because] he had paid too little attention to details which might have been useful to him now’.55 One of the lessons he had leamt on the liner was that space and direction cannot be rationally mapped and so, faced with this dilemma, he chooses ‘a chance direction and set out on his way’. If there is a purpose to Karl’s journey - other than the task of finding work, food and shelter - it is his doomed efforts to help others. Despite his early realization that ‘in this country sympathy was something you could not hope for’, he oscillates between responding sympathetically to others and bolstering himself when he receives little in return. For example, Karl visits Mr Pollunder’s country house to please his host but only incurs the wrath of his uncle, and on meeting two immigrant travellers - the lazy Irishman, Robinson, and the fiery Frenchman, Delamarche on his journey away from New York, Karl offers unconditional friendship, but is robbed and later treated contemptuously by them. Although this can be partly explained as a symptom of cultural naivete and the persecution complex that dogs most of Kafka’s protagonists, for Karl, fellow feeling is a moral act as he proves later when, working as lift boy, he sacrifices his tips to help Robinson who drunkenly reappears, needing a bed. Because he leaves his lift service momentarily to help the Irishman he is sacked by the authoritarian Head Porter and, to make matters worse, accused of acting ‘without thinking’.56 Whereas Lorca had the cultural and economic freedom to imaginatively encounter African-American culture, Kafka’s protagonists live in a universe in which they constantly collide with authority figures or systems which undermine any sense of agency. Only when Karl is offered a ‘decent life’57 by joining the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, in which profession is of little importance, does he enter a symbolic space in which he can identify with in early film for characterizing the optical urban spectacle which Lorca and Karl Rossmann experience. 53 This uncertainty mirrors the form(lessness) and incompletion o f the novel. Kafka declared in a letter to Felice Bauer that it was ‘falling apart’ in front o f him: ‘I can no longer contain i t ... it has recently become altogether too disconnected; wrong things appear and cannot be made to disappear’: Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. James Stem and Jurgen Bom (London: Minerva, 1992), p. 200. 54 Kafka, America, op. cit., p. 42. 55 Ibid., p. 89. 56 Ibid., p. 167. 57 Ibid., p. 235.

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another culture without threat of persecution. Although Karl’s train journey towards Oklahoma seems at last to have some purpose (he has the window seat on the train offering him a view), because the novel is incomplete the reader is left to wonder whether he will at last find some direction and discover ‘his freedom, even his old home again and his parents, as if by some celestial witchery’.58 Just as Lorca moves toward an act of poetic self-sacrifice in his Harlem poems, Karl also learns to position himself sympathetically with the subaltern. The nickname he uses on joining the travelling theatre is ‘negro’ (a name he had been given when working as a lift boy in the Hotel Occident) which, although he later regrets not using his own name, positions him alongside other ‘destitute’ characters who the theatrical group are willing to employ. This is not to claim that Karl emerges from the novel as a fully-fledged moral protagonist, but merely that his struggle to act on behalf of, and to sympathetically align himself with, the Other, implies a moral conscience struggling to assert itself in a hostile environment. Karl’s perceptions of America are periodically marred by either too much light or too little: under both conditions his blindness becomes a metaphor for not being able to assimilate with a culture which continuously denies him an identity other than that of worthless immigrant. It seems that only by occupying an equivalent lowly status within the American cultural system - the ‘negro’ - can Karl begin to overcome these Manichean optics and reforge his identity. On this level, when Kafka claimed his stories ‘are a way of closing’ his eyes, he describes less a refusal to see and more a willingness to fictionally stage the psychic conditions of being the Other.59 Similarly, Lorca continually stresses how little he knows about the world (‘I know hardly anything at all’), but he is adamant that he will ‘always support those who have nothing’ and he retains the hope that a redeeming Tight should come down from above’.60 In this way, both writers interweave an exploration of political and moral identity within their modernist expression of exile. Although Lorca describes himself as an educated middle-class European, only with the erasure of combative boundaries between insiders and outsiders does he believe that alienation can be alleviated and ‘justice for all’ achieved: not by the subaltern capitulating to the dominant culture nor by the observer ‘possessing’ or ‘capturing’ the space of the Other, but by a mutual willingness to see the position of each other. Neither Poet in New York nor America shows the fruition of such justice nor the kind of cultural education that this would entail but, by deploying metaphors of sight and blindness, they indicate that in the mythical land of opportunity (New York acting as a synecdoche for America) the ‘blind impress’ can offer either the curse of limited vision or the opportunity to close one’s eyes and imagine the Other. 58 Max Brod, ‘Postscript’, America, op. cit., p. 255. 59 Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, 2nd edn, trans. Goronwy Rees (New York: N ew Directions, 1971), p. 31. 60 Lorca, interview in El Sol, 15 December 1934; cited in Oppenheimer, Lorca: The Drawings, op. cit., p. 115.

Chapter 9

Auden, Exile and Community Kathleen Bell The term ‘exile’ is no longer a fashionable one. The current trend in politics is to differentiate between types of exile: ‘asylum seeker’, ‘economic migrant’ and ‘illegal immigrant’ are all common terms in political and journalistic parlance, each carrying with it its particular imputation of danger to state and national identity. This terminology has replaced that familiar in the 1930s and 1940s, which referred to ‘exiles’ and ‘refugees’ (as well as the disturbing term ‘aliens’, with its deliberate concentration on otherness), as if to escape from the connotations of persecution with which the known facts of history have invested these words. When choosing a theory by which to comprehend the past situation, it is helpful to find one which speaks also to the present. Hannah Arendt’s brief passages on exile and statelessness in her first major work in English, The Origins o f Totalitarianism, reflect on the problems of statelessness (and its corresponding loss of human rights) in a manner which seems to bear just as strongly on the situation of refugees at the beginning of the third millennium a d as in the years leading up to and including the Second World War. For instance, she writes: The stateless person, without right to residence and without the right to work, had o f course constantly to transgress the law. He was liable to jail sentences without ever committing a crime. More than that, the entire hierarchy o f values which pertain in civilized countries was reversed in his case. Since he was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomaly for which it did provide, that o f the criminal. The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale o f the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived o f human rights. ... The same man who was in jail yesterday because o f his mere presence in this world, who had no rights whatever and lived under threat o f deportation, or who was dispatched without sentence and trial to some kind o f internment because he had tried to work and make a living, may become almost a fullfledged citizen because o f a little theft. Even if he is penniless he can now get a lawyer, complain about his jailers, and he will be listened to respectfully. He is no longer the scum o f the earth but important enough to be informed o f all the details o f the law under which he will be tried. He has become a respectable person.1

1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins o f Totalitarianism (1951, rev. edn San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1973), pp. 286-87.

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Arendt, in a footnote, relates this to the plight of West Coast Japanese-Americans in the Second World War, who were interned and forced to sell their property at too low a price. A Japanese-American professional thief, she points out, who was in jail when the army ordered internment, would have been in a better general position than a law-abiding Japanese-American, being able to retain his property and having a lawyer to look after his interests.2 The strength of the parallel can be seen from its continuing applicability. The contemporary exile who enters a country by hijack is automatically guaranteed trial and legal representation, and has a good chance of being assured a place of safety after trial and sentence. The passengers on the hijacked aeroplane, by contrast, may be suspected of wishing to become exiles and are therefore liable to immediate detention without trial and speedy deportation to ensure that they neither seek asylum nor find a means of existing without legal status. Powerful as they are, Arendt’s comments on exile can seem an almost incidental aside in relation to The Origins o f Totalitarianism as a whole. They have force, however, in relation to Arendt’s own experience as a refugee, first in France and then in the USA, after the Nazis came to power in Germany. The resultant homelessness is described in her article ‘We Refugees’: We lost our homes, which means the familiarity o f daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are o f some use in the world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness o f reactions, the simplicity o f gestures, the unaffected expression o f feelings.3

As Lisa Jane Disch comments, this homelessness ‘is the loss of a sense of place that is not just geographic but also moral and cultural’.4 It is a view which continues to resonate in relation to Arendt’s overall arguments as set out in her 1950 introduction to The Origins o f Totalitarianism, that ‘human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities’.5 If Arendt is right, and the problems of statelessness, rootlessness and marginality remain crucial to our political understanding today, some grasp of what exile entails might assist the achievement of a political solution which, in a democracy, is the responsibility of all. For those whose citizenship is secure, the difficulty of understanding exile lies in the strangeness of the condition itself. It might be helpful, 2 Ibid, p. 287. 3 Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, in Ron H. Feldman, e d . The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern World (New York: Random House, 1978) quoted in Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits o f Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994; reprint 1996), p. 173. 4 Ibid. 5 Arendt, Origins o f Totalitarianism, op. c it, p. ix

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therefore, to consider the effects of exile through the works of a writer whose exile was chosen rather than compelled and who was not (unlike many exiles) estranged from his native language. In the poetry of W. H. Auden it is possible to trace features of the exile condition which he may have in common with other exiles who are less able to speak of what they endure. Auden’s choice of American exile in January 1939 was a controversial one. He had been aligned with progressive and revolutionary forces in Europe and his decision to live in America, particularly after the outbreak of war in September 1939, was seen as running away from danger. The facts were more complex, as recent biographies of Auden make clear. Apart from anything else, a return to England at the outbreak of war would have involved leaving Chester Kallman, with whom Auden had started a relationship which Auden, at any rate, regarded as a marriage. Even if it had been possible for a man to take his homosexual lover back to England, Kallman’s Jewishness, as well as his homosexuality, would have rendered him acutely vulnerable in the event of a German invasion (which seemed likely in the early years of the war). Clearly, a distinction must be drawn between Auden’s situation and that of those compelled into exile during this period. Auden had chosen his exile and was, after entering on his new relationship with Kallman, happy. He no longer felt loyal to his own nation above others (although he was concerned for friends, family and places in England). He was, moreover, able to continue in his work as a writer and teacher, and needed merely a few adjustments to his familiar native language. But the need to draw this distinction also points to the fact that Auden’s exile is an accessible one. Moreover, if a chosen exile highlights features of the exile experience in general, we can begin to gain from this more imaginable experience some sense of the more drastic experience of the unwilled exile. Auden’s decision to choose exile pre-dated both his meeting with Kallman and the outbreak of war. It seems to be prefigured in some of his earliest works. In ‘Paid on Both Sides’ (written in 1928 and published in the Criterion in January 1930), the Chorus looks at life as a gradual exile with evolutionary benefits.6 This may be related to the view of human life as founded on exile from Eden, with which Auden would have been familiar from his Anglican childhood. This interest in exile continues throughout Auden’s poetry before his decision to settle in America. By late 1938, when Auden was putting together his sonnet sequence, ‘In Time of War’, he figured human development as a series of exiles, as man (and he evidently did mean ‘man’ rather than ‘humanity’) gradually moved from the country to the city and from dependence on nature to the freedom offered in an economic and mechanized world of choice. Auden, at this stage, saw freedom itself as 6 ‘To throw away the key and walk away/ Not abrupt exile, the neighbours asking why,/ But following a line with left and right/ An altered gradient at another rate/ Leams more than maps upon the whitewashed wall/ The hand put up to ask; and makes us well/ Without confession o f the ill’: W. H. Auden, The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 12.

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something imposed by evolutionary compulsion. He wrote in the twenty-first sonnet of the sequence (also called ‘Exile’) ‘The life of man is never quite completed’,7 and, in the penultimate line of the sequence, ‘We live in freedom by necessity’,8 suggesting exile as a requirement of freedom. This idea of ‘freedom by necessity’ also seems to have a particular application to the situation of the numerous involuntary exiles with whom Auden associated or in whom he took an interest. These included Ernst Toller, Bertolt Brecht and the Mann family; Auden had earlier married Erika, Thomas Mann’s daughter, in order to provide her with a British passport when her German nationality had been revoked. They escaped to - in Auden’s phrase - ‘absolutely free America’9 and found their relation to state and nation changed. Auden, in choosing American exile, had deliberately elected that changed relationship but, as exile came to shadow much of his poetry, it seems to have been, at least temporarily, a choice that led him to uncertainty and the questioning of a previously secure self. This changing can be found in the difference between the printed version and manuscript amendment Auden made to his ‘Commentary’ on the Chinese war sonnets. As printed, the ‘Commentary’ called on Man to ‘Rally the lost and trembling forces of the will I ... I Till they construct at last a human justice.’10 At some point in the early 1940s Auden amended the printed copy of the poem belonging to his patron, Caroline Newton, so that the section became a Christian prayer, asking that Man should ‘give/ Accommodation to Thy justice ’.11 This handwritten amendment was presumably made after Auden’s return to the Anglican Christianity of his childhood in late 1940. The distance in time between the 1938 text and the annotation cannot be more than six years, since Auden’s friendship with Caroline Newton came to an abrupt end in 1944. However, the space between the first and second version is vast. The first looks to a progressive and evolutionary construction of human justice, which must be brought about by human volition, while the latter displaces the human element and sees the only feasible or acceptable justice as a divine gift. This was not an easy transition; Auden’s poems of 1939 and 1940 reach out for both justice and democracy in the face of terrifying events in Europe, but the human justice that still seems vital in Auden’s pre-Christian days12 appears barely achievable. Perhaps it is not until the conclusion of ‘New Year Letter’, the final lines of which 7 Ibid., p. 259, XXI, 1. 1. 8 Ibid., p. 262, XXVII, 1.13. This corresponds to the earlier stage o f development described in the fourth sonnet o f the sequence (ibid., p. 252) which draws a contrast between the constrained rural life, praised by tyrants because o f its constraints and the relatively free life o f the city. 9 Ibid., p. 267 ‘Commentary’, 1. 181. 10 Ibid., pp. 269-70,11. 278 and 280. 11 Amended edition in Berg Collection, NY. Quoted by permission o f the Estate o f W. H. Auden. 12 While Auden begins to refer to Jesus in this period, he does not necessarily mean Jesus as the Son o f God. Instead he tends to regard Jesus as a great teacher and interpreter o f history.

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were composed after Auden had read Charles Williams ’ The Descent o f the Dove,13 that Auden found a ground for confidence, if not yet for faith. But even here, the justice which Auden seeks is not the public justice of the Just City realized on earth but a city the existence of which is chiefly seen in internal and individual terms; it is from ‘the muddled heart’ that, significantly, both desert and city may be made so that ‘locality and peace’14 become a strictly private affair. The huge public wrongs outlined in the conclusion of Part I are thus offered as a strictly personal solution, an exact reverse of the passage in ‘Spain’ (later omitted from the text) which attributed fascism as well as its potential overthrow to psychological need.15 The solution that is offered is far from the construction of human justice and the democratic society which that involves. It is, instead, the subordination of the individual will signalled in the prayer, ‘O da quod jubes, Domine\ 16 I would not wish to depart from the view, put forward most thoroughly by Edward Mendelson,17 that Auden’s development at this point is thoughtful, raising questions for the reader for which there are no easy answers. However, the development of a poet, as of any other human being, is not simply a matter of choice and willed personal change but also of response to factors which may be experienced in common with other human beings. One aspect of Auden’s life reflected in his poems is the experience of exile and being among exiles. While Auden, doubtless conscious that he possessed a freedom to choose exile which had been denied to many others, never treats his experience directly as a life in exile, many of his poems of this period focus on the exile experience, whether real or metaphorical. At this point, it is helpful to return to the writings of Hannah Arendt. In The Origins o f Totalitarianism she considers the position of the stateless and rightless, particularly in relation to the position of those deprived of citizenship in totalitarian countries. However, she also discusses the position of the denaturalized individual or group abroad and the implications of ‘a global, universally interrelated civilization’,18 and at this point it becomes possible to see a correlation between statelessness and exile. It is here, too, that Arendt’s writings on statelessness can prove illuminating in relation to the exile-features of Auden’s writings of 1939 and 1940. 13 An account o f the influence o f Williams on the writing o f New Year Letter can be found in Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999). 14 W. H. Auden, New Year L etter (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), p. 74, 11. 1577-1680. 15 W. H. Auden, Spain (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), p. 10,11. 69-71: ‘For the fears which made us respond/ To the medicine ad. and the brochure o f winter cruises/ Have become invading battalions ... ’ In Auden’s 1940 volume, Another Time, the stanzas including this passage are omitted. 16 Auden, New Year Letter, op. cit., p. 74,1. 1684: ‘O give what you command, Lord’. 17 In Mendelson, Later Auden, op. cit. Anyone wishing to follow the details o f Auden’s developing thoughts and belief in this period should read this authoritative work o f scholarship which offers detailed readings o f many poems discussed here. 18 Arendt, The Origins o f Totalitarianism, op. cit., p. 302.

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Arendt’s distinctive understanding of the nature of humanity is to see human beings primarily and distinctively in their political relationship to one another - a relationship in which speech has relevance and laws have force. In her 1958 book, The Human Condition, humans are seen to possess a greater degree of distinctive humanity when interacting politically with others than when making things of lasting value or engaged in the kind of repetitive labour that is vital to survival. The key to distinctively human endeavour can be found through action and speech in a public arena where action and speech can be both contested and witnessed.19 For her, therefore, the stateless (and rightless) are not simply ill-treated in physical terms; they are deprived of what renders them distinctively human since they ‘no longer belong to any community whatsoever’ and ‘no law exists for them’.20 Thus they are forced out of ‘the common world’ of innumerable perspectives which is the necessary precursor of a political space and, as she goes on to say: ... are thrown back, in the midst o f civilization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation. They lack the tremendous equalizing o f differences which comes from being citizens o f some commonwealth and yet, since they are no longer permitted to partake in the human artifice, they begin to belong to the human race in much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species. The paradox involved in the loss o f human rights is that such a loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in general - without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify and specify him self - and different in general, representing nothing but his absolutely unique individuality which, deprived o f expression within and action upon a common world, loses all significance. 1

Of course, as a writer, Auden retained his profession. Nonetheless, he effectively resigned his role as citizen, in a way that he had not done on his previous travels. His journeys to Iceland (in 1936) and China (in 1938), by contrast, seem like attempts to find a distant point from which the workings of world history would become clear. His travel writings at that time constantly reflect on events in Europe at a distance which seems to add knowledge. These journeys were not exiles but an attempt to gain a clear perspective which could then be bestowed on, or shared with, those engaged in political debate and action. The journey to America severed many earlier political links, while throwing Auden back on his ‘absolutely unique individuality’ - a quality which, according to Arendt, could be valued in political speech and action but required a common world. In 1939—40 Auden, for all the small communities of friendship on which he relied, had yet to find this in the USA. 19 I am aware that this is a simplification o f Arendt’s very complex thought on this matter. Numerous writers have offered competing interpretations o f what, precisely, she means. For the sake o f this essay, however, some simplification is necessary and, I hope, excusable. 20 Ibid., pp. 295-96. 21 Ibid., p. 302.

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At no time did Auden see his decision to leave England in January 1939 as a wrong choice. He defended it to friends, suggesting that although it might be dangerous to live with the freedom of exile, it was also necessary for his growth as a poet. The idea of danger is present both in the Dodds correspondence22 and in the libretto for the operetta Paul Bunyan, in which the Quartet of the Defeated warn, ‘America can break your heart’.23 Moreover, his famous ‘Refugee Blues’ limit their concern with statelessness to the urgent material needs of those deprived of citizenship: food, shelter and, ultimately, physical life. For him, the rejection of the political realm, as he then understood and defined it, was highly desirable; the uncollected 1939 book, The Prolific and the Devourer - never published in Auden’s lifetime - includes his definition of himself as an ‘anti-political’.24 This, in my view, renders the characteristics of exile experience in Auden’s poetry of this period more pertinent. They are evidently not constructed to prove a point but may derive instead from the experience itself. One of the things that Auden seems to have sought in his early days in America, was, as the conclusion to the ‘In Time of War’ ‘Commentary’ foreshadows, the construction of a human justice. Examples of this are found in his depictions of successful communities. The most successful of these are exile communities: Voltaire, away from Paris, presiding over the Swiss watchmakers to whom he gave work and sanctuary, and the temporary communities of New York where music (and Elizabeth Mayer as hostess) creates a ‘civitas’ o f ‘assent’ and an ideal republic in the dinner party which is the basis of ‘New Year Letter’. Here, a community gathered by choice and chance is set up as the ideal in political terms - civitas and republic. Even Paul Bunyan has its successful exile community, driven initially by need and eventually breaking up into modem, free America. It should be noted, however, that these are not democratic communities but hierarchies ruled over by a single benefactor: they require assent rather than words or action. Paul Bunyan’s frontier community is most explicitly ruled by human necessity; only when the wilderness has been conquered can there be freedom of choice and it is at this point, significantly, that the opera ends. Auden may look towards the construction of human justice but what his poems of this period tend to demonstrate is autocracy. 22 In the Bodleian Library. 23 Paul Bunyan ‘Blues’ in W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, The Complete Works ofW. H. Auden: Libretti and other Dramatic Writings 1939-1973, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1993), p. 16. 24 W. H. Auden, ‘The Prolific and the Devourer’, Antaeus 42 (Summer, 1981), pp. 6-65. In describing himself as an anti-political, Auden describes him self as wanting ‘to be left alone, to write poetry, to choose my own friends and lead my own sex-life’. This category embraces all those whose interests clash with the state. He opposes this to the politician, who is the Enemy, ‘the person who wants to organise the lives o f others and make them toe the line’. Auden’s view, evidently infused by a sense o f guilt at his previous political activities, sees as preferable the ‘apolitical’ who is the ‘natural and sensible anarchist’ (pp. 13-14). Auden’s view here is plainly different from Arendt’s perception o f politics in which the political world is the most significantly human sphere.

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This autocracy need not be read, however, as a political prescription; indeed, given Auden’s known views, it would be absurd to read it in this way. What Arendt might point towards, however, is the way in which the exile experience forces the individual back on the sense of ‘absolutely unique individuality’. The apparently common worlds of the Voltaire poems, Paul Bunyan and ‘New Year Letter’ are not politically common but governed worlds which offer space for individual reflection. For all their political language, they do not mirror ideal political states but harmonious selfhood. There is a clear contrast here with the meaningful speech and action of previous works. For instance, in ‘Spain’ and On The Frontier, speech and action are both communicated and meaningful while the sonnet on the dead Chinese soldier suggests that the dead man, however ‘used’ and however ‘dull’,25 nonetheless - in an image which strikingly synthesizes speech and action - ‘added meaning like a comma’.26 In other words, in the slightly earlier poems and plays, the self gains meaning and value from its participation in a common world which makes political speech and action possible. From 1939 to 1940, there is a change in the perception of the self in Auden’s poems. The self becomes both a prison and something uncertain, unidentifiable and even fragmentary. As the exile is thrown back on himself, that self both imprisons and fragments. As early as the Yeats elegy - and Auden heard the news of Yeats’ death on the day he landed in New York27 - Auden writes of ‘each in the cell of himself’.28 That image divides the self from itself; if the self is prison it is also the only feasible prisoner. The Yeats elegy signals a clear move from the poems that Auden wrote at the end of 193 8 when living in Brussels and arranging his departure. The biographical poems of December 1938 show writers concealing or escaping aspects of themselves. A. E. Housman ‘Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer’29 while Rimbaud ‘from lyre and weakness was estranged’.30 However, coinciding with actual exile, the 1939 poems begin to discover an exile which actually fragments the self. The poem on ‘Matthew Arnold’ plays with images of exile here from the family - as something positive; away from paternal and maternal security is a ‘disorder’ which might have offered a vital subject to Arnold’s poetic gift. However, Arnold’s ‘homeless reverence’ for his father leads him to ‘thrust his gift in prison till it died’.31 Unlike the Housman and Rimbaud poems, the Arnold poem separates the self from the poetic gift, giving the gift an autonomous existence. It can therefore be killed rather than being kept in a drawer or estranged from the poet. Again the self fragments - here, into imprisoned gift and ‘jailor [sic]’.32 25 Auden, The English Auden, op. cit., p. 258, X V III11. 1 and 7. 26 Ibid., 1. 10. 27 26 January 1939. 28 W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory o f W. B. Yeats’, Another Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1940), p. 108, II. 1. 27. 29 Ibid. p. 24, VI. ‘A. E. Housman’, 1. 6. 30 Ibid, p. 31 XI. ‘Rimbaud’, 1. 8. 31 Ibid, p. 58, XXVII. ‘Matthew Arnold’, 11. 8, 9, 12. 32 Ibid, 1. 13.

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Arguably, the most fragmented self is that of the Ernst Toller elegy, written in response to the unexpected news of the poet and playwright’s suicide in New York in May 1939. The last two stanzas of the poem derive from Freud’s reference to Groddeck’s theories in The Ego and the Id, that we do not live but are lived: We are lived by powers we pretend to understand: They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand. It is their to-morrow hangs over the earth o f the living And all that we wish for our friends: but existence is believing We know for whom we moum and who is grieving.33

Here Groddeck’s quite specific ‘It’ has been transformed into generalized powers who rob the self of all specificity; the individual self has no real existence but is an assumption that humans need to make their lives bearable. Nor are the powers that rule existence given any identity or meaning.34 It is probably the bleakest conclusion to any Auden poem of this period. But just as the self contracts to a prison, fragments and even evaporates in these exile poems, at the same time it expands in images which suggest the self - as Arendt’s account might indicate - taking the place of the lost nation or state. The human subjects of Auden’s poems take on the dimensions of cities and countries. Matthew Arnold is ‘a dark disordered city’;35 Edward Lear escapes from his unhappy exile to become ‘a land’;36 Yeats has ‘provinces’, ‘squares’ and ‘suburbs’37 while the ‘We’ of the immensely difficult poem ‘Where do they come from?’ offer a Tying map’ of themselves to invite the arrival of ‘pioneers’ seeking ‘a West of wonder’.38 Curiously, these images tend to lead nowhere but are treated as an end in themselves. Yeats is identified by the attributes of a country only on his deathbed, while the Lear poem concludes with his transformation: ‘And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.’ Only in ‘Where do they come from?’ is there an attempted development of the image: ... Our tears well from a love We have never outgrown; our cities predict More than we hope; even our armies Have to express our need o f forgiveness.39

33 Ibid, p. I l l , III. ‘In Memory o f Ernst Toller’, 11. 16-24. 34 The use o f the term ‘powers’ recalls the ‘vanquished powers’ who bring death, ravishment and madness in the sonnet ‘And the age ended... ’, composed in 1936 but included in the China sequence. See Auden, The English Auden, op. cit, pp. 255-56, XII. 35 Auden, Another Time, op. c it, p. 58, XXVII. ‘Matthew Arnold’, 1. 1. 36 Ibid, p. 25, VII. ‘Edward Lear’, 1. 14. 37 Ibid, p. 107, II. ‘In Memory o f W. B. Yeats’, 11. 14-16. 38 Ibid, pp. 51-53, XXIV, 11. 17, 37, 23. 39 Ibid, p. 53,11. 53-6.

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The ending is confused and unclear but it must be significant that the poem uses ‘we’ rather than T , however rhetorically, and that the unwilled erotic encounter echoes Freud’s use of constructive Eros in opposition to the death instinct.40 The self is thus involved in a paradigm o f political activity, albeit one that is simultaneously expressed in terms of nation and individual sexual encounter. As the self both contracts and expands, again in correspondence with Arendt’s description of statelessness, language and its functions are called into question. While in the Yeats elegy (in lines excised from later editions) Time ‘worships language’, the slightly later composed second section famously asserts that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. This later assertion does not exist in a vacuum. The poems of 1939 and 1940 strive to find a role for writing but fail to have confidence in that role. For instance, the conclusion of ‘Voltaire at Femey’ suggests a political role for the writings of the exile. Voltaire, cut off from the court in Paris,41 is described in old age, still politically responsible and aware in a way that recalls the situation of Europe in 1939: ... The night was full o f wrong, Earthquakes and executions. Soon he would be dead, And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses Itching to boil their children. Only his verses Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working. Overhead The uncomplaining stars composed their lucid song 42

However, the stars, elsewhere in Auden, stand for indifference. At the end o f ‘Spain’ Auden reminds us that ‘The stars are dead’43 and much later, in ‘The More Loving One’,44 the stars are once more used to signify what is familiar but incapable of feeling. Voltaire’s verses, therefore, already limited in capability by the word ‘Perhaps’ - and the doubt is amplified by placing the word at the start of a line are related to a personal need to work and an indifferent universe, rather than to the readership which might give them both meaning and effect. Elsewhere, rather than being purposive, writing in Auden’s poem becomes an end in itself, or bound up with personal benefits. Hermann Melville’s revelation leads only to the words, ‘And sat down at his desk and wrote a story’ 45 Again, the 40 As in Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere (London: L. & V. Woolf: Institute o f Psycho-Analysis, 1930). 41 As described in N. L.Torrey’s book, The Spirit o f Voltaire which Auden had been reviewing. The poem is very closely based on Torrey. 42 Auden, Another Time, op. cit., p. 42, XVI. ‘Voltaire at Fem ey’, 11. 31-6. 43 Auden, Spain, op. cit., p. 12 , 1. 101. He may well be echoing Gerald Heard who, in his book o f the same year, The Third M orality, (London: Cassell & Co., 1937) describes ‘the new cosmology now constructed from the observation o f the movement o f “dead bodies” - the stars and (later) the atoms’ (p. 63). 44 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 445. 45 Auden, Another Time, op. cit., p. 34, XIII. ‘Hermann M elville’, 1. 41.

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act of writing has become an end in itself and by doing so ceases to have a wider purpose. This loss of purpose becomes increasingly evident as Auden’s poems attempt to find a rationale for his writing. In New Year Letter, the sentence that begins: ‘Though language may be useless, for/ No words men write can stop the w ar’46 seems to anticipate a contradictory and satisfying conclusion. Language, the reader expects, must have some clear function. But Auden substitutes truth for action. The ‘candid psychopompos’47 that then speaks can guide only the individual soul. Thus the relationship between truth-telling and political action remains unclear. This ‘private minute to a friend’ never quite enters the political world to which it so frequently refers, lacking the possibility of political effectiveness. Poetry and language can, in the condition of exile, come to mean no more than their own words; losing their public signification, they exist ‘In the valley of [their] saying’ - away from the world of action ‘where executives/ Would never want to tamper’. They may offer ‘A way of happening, a mouth’48 but this way of happening is divorced from the common world of public events. Thus, as Arendt suggests, ‘the loss of home and political status’ - or, indeed, the deliberate forsaking of home and political status entails ‘the loss of the relevance of speech’ as well as ‘the loss of all human relationship’ (which for Arendt, interpreting and following Aristotle, is the political relationship within a community). As the self becomes the only reality in the exile state, it simultaneously fragments and expands, taking the place of the absent polity and dividing under the pressure to do so. Language has no one to whom it can speak purposively, since the self has become the sole arbiter of its own words. A parallel may be found here with a recent article on exile by a refugee who describes silence as the governing characteristic of the overindividualized exilic life. Dr Vincent Magombe writes: When you are voiceless, in a world where the voices o f those with power and domineering privilege are thunderous, you say nothing. When you, as an individual, are powerless and cannot influence the way powerful institutions and systems shape the destiny o f your life, it is only logical that you say ‘I don’t know’, or ‘Sorry, Leave me alone’ to the question: ‘How is your life?’49

While this is not exactly Auden’s experience, as he had foregone power and influence voluntarily, it is notable that both the willed and the compelled exile have in common a sense of the powerlessness of individual voice and language. 46 Auden, New Year Letter, op. cit., p. 27,11. 295-6. 47 The primary meaning o f the term 7tau%07iop7ioa is theguide who takes the dead souls into Hades. It refers, specifically, to Charon. 48 Auden, Another Time, op. cit., p. 108 section 2. 49 Dr Vincent Magombe, ‘The Silence o f Exile’, iNexile:TheRefugee Council Magazine, Issue 10, (June 2000), p. 5

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Difficulties of exile are apparent in Auden’s early American writings, even though he would probably not, at that stage, have accepted Arendt’s argument or definition of his experience.50 The conflict between Auden’s acceptance of what he would term the aloneness of humans within the mechanized world (as he puts it in ‘New Year Letter’, ‘Aloneness is man’s real condition’51), and his desire for a community to replace nation, state and neighbourhood, exists as an unresolved conflict in Auden’s work of this period. Influenced by Forster, he denies the ‘Sovereign State’ to assert that We can at least serve other ends, Can love the polis o f our friends And pray that loyalty will come To serve mankind’s imperium.52

However, the circles of friendship that Auden created in literature and life never came to resemble a TtoXia. The experience of communal living may, as in ‘New Year Letter’, offer moments of ayaTiri, but it offers neither real political interaction in terms of effect on the outside world nor the model for humanity as a whole which Auden seems to wish. Instead, as in ‘September 1,1939’, the political world turns from an objective into a subjective reality: Out o f the mirror they stare, Imperialism’s face And the international wrong.53

Rather than the personal offering a model for the political, the political has become personalized. Following this, Auden’s ‘All I have is a voice’54 is condemned to purposelessness; while the Tronic points of light’, which represent the messages of the Just, may offer an affirmation55 but it is hard to say what, exactly, they affirm.56 My use of Arendt’s arguments in relation to Auden’s poems may seem to suggest that I consider they lack meaning because they lack political effect. This is not so. Arendt, in The Human Condition, places value not merely on political action but also on fabrication, the creation of things that will outlive their mortal creators. Moreover, poetry exists not only in its intent or political messages but alsointh 50 By October 1958, when his review o f The Human Condition was published Griffin, VII, 10, pp. 4 -5 , Auden’s views had reached the point where he could praise Arendt’s writing with unrestrained enthusiasm. 51 Auden, New Year Letter, op. cit., p. 69,1. 1542. 52 Ibid. p. 51,11. 994, and 997-1000. 53 Auden, Another Time, op. cit., p. 113, IV. ‘September 1, 1939’, 11. 42-44. 54 Ibid., p. 114,1.78. 55 Ibid, p. 115,11.92-99. 56 Edward Mendelson in Later Auden, op. c it, reveals that the ‘points o f light’ are derived from E.M. Forster’s essay, ‘What I B elieve’.

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use that we, as readers, make of it. Auden’s state of self-willed, anti-political exile shows much about the exiled condition and humans’ need to be involved by speech or action in a political world; this remains as relevant to our own time as it was to his. Statelessness and rightlessness are as present now as they have ever been, while the nature of contemporary politics exiles large numbers of our population from effective political speech and action. What Auden’s work of this short period may demonstrate is the vital importance of political engagement to human existence. Auden, never entirely cut off from speech and action, ultimately found that he could speak thoughtfully from a position which he characterized as ‘loyal opposition’,57 combining belonging with an acknowledgement of decentred status. Arendt, having lived for many years as an exile, first in France and then in the USA, gained knowledge and experience which informed her major works of political philosophy. The articulation of exile, where it is possible, may have much to offer in human and political terms.

57

Auden, Collected Poems, op. cit., ‘The Garrison’, p. 633,1. 18.

Chapter 10

States of Being not Being in States: Metaphysical Border Crossings in the Work of Milan Kundera Daniel Cordle [Agnes] said to herself: the world is at some sort o f border; if it is crossed everything will turn to madness: people will walk the streets holding forgetme-nots or kill one another on sight. And it will take very little for the glass to overflow, perhaps just one drop: perhaps just one car too many, or one person, or one decibel. There is a certain quantitative border that must not be crossed, yet no one stands guard over it and perhaps no one even realizes that it exists.1

It is not, perhaps, surprising that the border should function as a potent symbol in the work of the Czech novelist, Milan Kundera. The dissemination and reception of his work have been mediated by the closings and openings of the Czech border since the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 by Soviet tanks. When we remind ourselves of the well known facts about his life and work - that his books were banned in Czechoslovakia from 1969, and that voluntary exile at a teaching post in France became irrevocable once his Czech citizenship was rescinded after the publication of The Book o f Laughter and Forgetting in 1979 - we can see that there are fraught relations between the carefully policed borders separating western Europe from the eastern bloc, and the meanings produced by Kundera’s texts. These relations dictate such fundamental issues of literary reception as language (Kundera’s novels are known primarily in translation, rather than his native Czech), audience (in terms of composition and expectation), and the media construction of Kundera as a dissident novelist.2 This biographical and historical context might suggest a reading of Kundera’s work through the lenses of political exile - and the personal consequences of the Cold War - as a productive critical approach. However, although the meanings of 1 Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (London: Faber, 1991), p. 23. 2 This construction is something that Kundera has strongly resisted, as is demonstrated by the anecdote reproduced in the foreword to some editions o f The Joke (and in various reviews o f his work) where he protests against a reading o f his work as a ‘damning indictment o f Stalinism’ on a television talk show by claiming that The Joke is ‘a love story’. We might also recall that one o f his characters, Sabina - who is, like Kundera, a Czech artist in exile - protests against an exhibition that constructs her paintings as simplistic political statements, by saying that, ‘My enemy is kitsch, not communism’. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness o f Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Faber, 1985), p. 254.

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Kundera’s texts are clearly mediated by this context (despite his frequent protestations to the contrary),3 this paper argues that the most potent sense in which exile functions in his work is temporal rather than spatial: exile from the past, rather than exile from a place. This is indicated by the epigraph to this essay in which Agnes, the central protagonist in Immortality, perceives the world to be poised at a border. This border is to be transgressed in time, not in space: the modem world (in fact we should, more accurately, term this the postmodern world, for reasons that will become apparent later on) is about to be transformed dramatically and, although we will occupy the same space, that space will have changed in fundamental ways. It will also be noticed that this border is not political, in the narrow sense of a policed border between different countries and political systems, but is, rather, metaphysical. This sense of a border crossing that is to do with a transition in states of being rather than the being in states of more prosaic, political border crossings - is characteristic of Kundera’s work, and it leads on to the final and fundamental point that this essay will make about the function of exile in Kundera’s work. This final point is that the metaphysical transitions that are involved in crossing borders in Kundera’s work are transitions from an Enlightenment to a postmodern sensibility: in the epigraph Agnes is concerned about a transition to meaninglessness - a world where ‘everything will turn to madness’ - and is thus preoccupied with a problem that is characteristically postmodern.4 It should be noted that, in a passage which immediately precedes the quotation, she is distressed by the sounds of a Bach fugue drifting out of an open window to merge with the sounds of the modem city: the work of a key figure of European culture is thus transformed by the contemporary world and robbed of its meaning. In the passage, the triggers to this shift into meaningless are all characteristic of the contemporary world: technology (one car too many), overcrowding (one person too many), and noise (one decibel too many). This passing of a grand European project, and its replacement by a contemporary postmodern perspective, is almost always configured as threatening in Kundera’s novels and is here apparent in Agnes’s prediction of a loss of sanity and a world in which people will ‘kill one another on sight’.

3 It should be noted, though, that Kundera is right to complain about simplistic readings o f his works as ‘dissident literature’. His status as a dissident shapes his work, but his novels are too complex to be reduced to simple statements o f dissatisfaction with Stalinism. 4 The anti-foundational stance o f much postmodernist thought - its refusal to believe that there is an unproblematically given reality - results in an anxiety about notions o f meaning. A number o f readings o f postmodern literature emphasize this concentration on the interrogation o f notions o f truth and authenticity. For example, Brian McHale famously argues that ‘the dominant o f postmodernist literature is ontological’: Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 10. What McHale means by this is that, whereas modernist fiction prioritized the asking o f epistemological questions, in postmodernist literature, ontological questions predominate.

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Yet this dissatisfaction with contemporary, postmodern culture cannot be noted and labelled as a naive nostalgia for a simpler world of Enlightenment values, for there is in fact an extremely complex relation between Kundera’s novels and the contemporary. This complexity is a product of the formal characteristics of his novels, for these surely bear the hallmarks of postmodern culture: they revel in metafictional playfulness with, for example, the narrator discussing the creation of his characters and addressing the reader directly, and flaunt their intertextuality through (among other means) discussions of literature, art and music. This means that as his novels renounce the contemporary, they simultaneously embrace it stylistically. Although the author-narrator of many of Kundera’s novels discusses with relish the early novelistic experiments of such writers as Henry Fielding and Denis Diderot, in a way that would suggest he would rather be identified with his eighteenth-century forebears than his twentieth-century contemporaries, the formal aspects of Kundera’s novels surely cannot but be read through the context of other postmodern literary innovations. This is because his novels exist within a literary historical framework that follows realism and modernism and are not, therefore, amenable - as the works of eighteenth-century novelists might be - to a reading that sees their stylistic innovations as formal indulgences of charming naivety, produced by a writer struggling to find his feet with a new form. Kundera’s interrogation of the novel form is an interrogation that must, by necessity, engage with the preconceptions of the realist and modernist traditions that precede it. Indeed, it is precisely this distance from an innocent novelistic past that marks out the sense of exile in his work: Kundera seems to yearn for an Edenic literary and cultural state from which he and his contemporaries are now estranged, where playful experimentation was undefiled by cynicism and irony. Furthermore, the questions his novels raise, both formally and thematically, about the intangibility and plasticity of meaning are questions that have a distinctly postmodern flavour: he may evince a nostalgia for an Enlightenment project which had a firmer sense of a shared and stable reality, but his novels face the possibility that such a reality is a chimera. In this sense, Kundera is reluctantly, but undeniably, a postmodernist. This can be demonstrated perhaps most forcefully by a careful reading of what is, perhaps, Kundera’s ‘least’ postmodern text - his first novel, The Joke.5 A good starting point is the opening chapter because this illustrates explicitly the complexity of the function of exile in Kundera’s work. It is also a particularly useful novel with which to demonstrate that the concept of exile transcends the specific political circumstances surrounding Kundera’s life because, published in 1967, it was a product of the flowering of the Prague Spring, before it was crushed by the 1968 Russian invasion, and therefore pre-dates Kundera’s own exile, both internal and external. 5 David Lodge argues that in The Joke Kundera displays his ‘mastery o f the modernist novel’: see David Lodge, ‘Milan Kundera and the Idea o f the Author in Modem Criticism’, Critical Quarterly, 26 (1984), p. 111. He goes on to contrast this modernist style with the postmodernist style o f The Book o f Laughter and Forgetting (p. 116).

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The novel begins with an image of exile, as the central protagonist, Ludvik Jahn, arrives in a nondescript town and takes a room in a hotel. Narrating the section, he tells us that he has had a Tong, arduous journey’ and ‘had almost no friends or acquaintances’ here.6 These feelings of fatigue and loneliness are exacerbated by the ugly, unwelcoming surroundings; the square in the town is ‘unsightly’ and the hotel room, bleak and characterless with a simple bed, table, chair, chest of drawers and cracked sink, is ‘not attractive’.7 Perhaps Ludvik is not unused to this sort of alien environment because he tells us that ‘[djuring a lifetime of sleeping in various beds I had developed a personal cult of keys’.8 What we are presented with, then, in the opening pages of Kundera’s first novel, is an image of exile: Ludvik, well travelled and alone, has arrived in a bleak environment in which he feels profoundly ill at ease. Yet this is not the simple vision of exile that my description thus far might suggest, because the other thing that we learn in these opening pages - that we learn, indeed, in the first line of the novel - is that Ludvik is ‘home again’: the town in which he is both unknown and unhappy is, in fact, his home town and, as Douglas Burnham argues in Chapter 3 of this volume, exile in the home must be the ‘most unnerving form of exile’.9 Exile in this case is not, therefore, tied to geographical displacement. It is, rather, the product of a broader sense of dislocation. The breadth and scale of this dislocation, despite the return to home, is indicated in a later section of the novel narrated by Ludvik when, looking at the monument in the town square, he muses that it ‘jutted up in the middle of the square like a piece broken off from the heavens that couldn’t find its way back; I thought to myself that we too had been cast out into this oddly deserted square with its park and restaurant, cast out irrevocably, that we too had been broken off from something ... ’.10 The expulsion from the ‘heavens’ suggests a fall from a state of grace that is to do with something much more profound than simply being away from home (or, more specifically, ‘home’ takes on meanings that go beyond a physical location to embrace a metaphysical state of being).11 Moreover, this exile is tied to specifically temporal boundaries because, although physical locations are indicated here (the exiles in this passage have been cast out into the ‘square with its park’), no relief from exile is possible simply by a return to a home environment (the exile operates 6 Milan Kundera, The Joke, trans. Michael Henry Heim and Aaron Asher (London: Faber, 1992), pp. 4,3 . The history o f the translation o f The Joke is actually rather complicated and is recounted in the Author’s Note to the edition cited. 7 Ibid., p. 3. 8 Ibid., p. 7. 9 See p. 21 10 Kundera, The Joke, op. cit., p. 179. 11 There is an interesting comparison here to the point Michael Davies makes, in Chapter 4 this volume, when he suggests that in Paradise Lost ‘exile and fallenness are synonymous’ (p. 33). As I go on to show, exile in Kundera’s work is very frequently tied to a fall from a state o f grace that is associated with the loss o f a ‘golden age’ o f European Enlightenment.

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‘irrevocably’ and Ludvik has, after all, found no relief from his sense of exile by coming home). What we need to ask, in order to uncover the function of exile in this novel, is where does Ludvik’s sense of alienation and exile come from? One seductive answer to this question - though one I shall show to be fundamentally flawed - is that its source is to be found in the totalitarian communist regime under which Ludvik has lived, and which has shaped his life. After all, the plot is driven by the destruction of Ludvik’s life at the hands of the Czech communist party. His promising career is curtailed when the authorities intercept a postcard to his girlfriend which, bom of frustration with her failure to miss him, mocks her enthusiasm for the new communist era. ‘Optimism is the opium of the people’, Ludvik writes in a fit of pique, ‘long live Trotsky!’ and the upshot of these words is the loss of his career, and a period of extended military service, working the mines of Ostrava. Yet, to focus exclusively on this aspect of the text - to read the novel as, essentially, a piece of dissident literature - is to miss the tme source of Ludvik’s sense of exile. By the end of the novel he is alienated not so much from the communist state which has betrayed him, the harsher aspects of which are, in any case, beginning to thaw out in the Prague Spring, but from an era in his own past when his life had meaning, however tragic that meaning may have been. Although Ludvik comes back to his home town to take revenge on Zemanek, a man who was instmmental in his downfall, the terrible truth he is forced to face is that nobody cares because both he and Zemanek are now part of a generation that has passed. To the new generation, he and Zemanek, regardless of their history of conflict, are equivalent - middle-aged and of a bygone era. What Ludvik is in exile from, by the end, is not the communist state (for which he almost yearns because of the gravitas and sense of tragedy it gave to his life), but his own youth. This personal sense of exile, then, is linked to a broader cultural sense of exile, when Ludvik’s realization of the irrelevance of his conflict with Zemanek is tied to his rediscovery of a tradition of folk culture on which he had turned his back. At the end of the novel Ludvik rejoins an ensemble of folk-music players, led by his estranged friend Jaroslav, and his nostalgia for this folk culture is portrayed through yet another image of exile which it is worth quoting at length: ... it seemed to me that inside these songs I was at home, that I derive from them, and if I had betrayed this home, I had only made it all the more my home ... but I was equally aware that this home was not o f this world ... that what we were singing and playing were only memories, recollections, an imaginary preservation o f something that no longer was, and I felt the ground o f this home sinking under my feet ... and I told m yself with astonishment that my only home was this descent, this searching, eager fall, and I abandoned m yself to it and to my sweet vertigo.12

By configuring folk culture as ‘home’, contemporary experience is conveyed as a 12

Kundera, The Joke, op. cit., p. 316.

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sense of exile from this home. This culture is under threat not so much from the communist state (which, in any case, funded revivals of this culture), as from the modem world: the players in this small group are drowned out by a drunken and (significantly) youthful audience and, earlier in the novel, the traditional ceremony of the Ride of the Kings is threatened by the noise of passing cars and motorcycles. Interestingly, the passage also illustrates Ludvik’s realization that the folk culture for which he yearns as a lost home, is in fact an illusion (‘an imaginary preservation of something that no longer was’). If this is the case - if there is no authentic cultural home for Ludvik - then home becomes, as Ludvik seems to realize, not so much the culture from which he has been estranged, as the vain search for this lost, and imaginary, cultural origin. What the text problematizes, therefore, is the idea that there ever was an authentic cultural home, and, in its destabilization of this notion of a secure and steady conveyor of cultural validity, it hints at the postmodern sensibilities that mn more obviously through Kundera’s later work. The Joke, then, presents us with a double sense of exile - exile from a lost youth and from a lost culture, and, in both cases, this exile is from something that is distanced temporally rather than spatially - exile from the past. In Kundera’s later work the lost cultural home, the second of these sorts of exile, is not that of Moravian songs, dances and ceremonies as it is here, but exile from a broader European cultural tradition, roughly equivalent to the Enlightenment. Although The Joke does not deal with this broader cultural tradition, the threat to it in the later works - a postmodern sensibility - is very clearly present in a comment by Ludvik’s friend, Jaroslav. Jaroslav has a strong dislike for communism, but he finds it much more appealing than ‘the era that seems to be approaching today: an era of mockery, skepticism, and corrosion, a petty era with the ironic intellectual in the limelight, and behind him the mob of youth, coarse, cynical, and nasty, without enthusiasm, without ideals, ready to mate or kill on sight’.13 The focus on scepticism, mockery and irony signals a distaste on Jaroslav’s part for a frequent target of ire in Kundera’s work: a contemporary world which has forgotten, or is distrustful of, an earlier progressive and optimistic phase in European culture. It will be noticed that the sense of threat that Jaroslav perceives here is remarkably similar to that felt by Agnes in the quotation from Immortality that serves as an epigraph to this essay: both are fearful of a world in which shared values are so depleted that people will kill each other on sight. A few examples from Kundera’s later work will serve to illustrate the way in which Jaroslav’s dislike of a contemporary (and postmodern) ironic stance in The Joke broadens into a nostalgia for a great European cultural project. In Immortality one of the characters, nicknamed Rubens by his friends because of his love of painting, feels that artistic tradition has reached a dead end: The road [of artistic tradition] had disappeared, but it remained in the souls o f painters in the form o f an inextinguishable desire ‘to go forward’. But 13

Ibid., p. 225.

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Rubens presumes that a great tradition of artistic development has come to an end: a square has replaced a road, and the vagaries of fashion have replaced the idea of progress. Here, the threat is to a specific tradition in one of the arts - painting. Elsewhere, though, the threat exists to both music - with a culture of classical music and jazz threatened by rock music and, more broadly, the noise of the modem world - and literature. For example, both Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness o f Being, and Agnes in Immortality, find music being overwhelmed by the noise of the twentieth century. Sabina ‘discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness’, and links this ugliness to the sounds of cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers and sirens.15 Similarly, in a passage immediately preceding that quoted in the epigraph to this article, Agnes walks through a Paris street and hears, through the sound of pneumatic drills, ‘as if from heaven... a piano rendition of a Bach fugue’.16 Rather like Ludvik’s perception of the monument in The Joke as a piece cast out from ‘heaven’, the Bach fugue here is the memory of something divine. Equally though, the fugue is irrevocably exiled from that state of divinity, for it is ‘no match’ for the sounds of drills and cars, and ‘cars and drills appropriated Bach’s as part of their own fugue...’.17 In the modem era, Kundera seems to be suggesting, there is no going back to the lost cultural home. Similarly, in the case of a literary tradition, in The Unbearable Lightness o f Being, Tereza feels that books - she has read ‘any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann’ - are a ‘single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her ...’.18 The names of the writers are significant, indicating an attachment to a literary tradition that starts in the eighteenth century and ends with modernism, just as Rubens’ conception of the history of painting in Immortality ends with the modernists. Just as the noise of the contemporary world threatens a tradition of music for Sabina and Agnes with its ugliness, so too here is the contemporary marked by ‘crudity’. Interestingly, the narrator comments that Tereza’s attachment to books makes her ‘different, but old-fashioned’19 - she, like so many of Kundera’s sympathetic characters, is out of place in the contemporary world. 14 Kundera, Immortality, op. cit., p. 321. It should be noted that Rubens does not assume that everyone marched down the road ‘likesoldiers’, and that he acknowledged the individuality o f painters as progress was made along the road. 15 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness o f Being, op. cit., p. 93. 16 Kundera, Immortality, op. cit., p. 25. 17 Ibid., p. 25. 18 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness o f Being, op. cit., p. 47. 19 Ibid., p. 48.

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There is, therefore, a recurrent sense in Kundera’s work of a specifically European culture of art, music and literature being threatened by contemporary developments. This threat is posed both by developments in the arts in the second half of the twentieth century (as in Rubens’ fears about painting) and by a more general modem culture of technology and urbanization (as in Agnes’s sense of fragility as she feels overwhelmed by the sounds of cars and pneumatic drills). Indeed, it is possible to identify a whole series of values associated with the past that are contrasted to, and threatened by, their present-day opposites in Kundera’s work. The most prominent of these are: a high versus a popular culture; a culture of quietness and subtlety contrasted with one of noise and (at least, for Kundera) vulgarity; and a coherent, developmental European tradition which is opposed to the vagaries of fashion. A brief focus on one more of these binary oppositions - that between slowness and speed - will serve to make this point, and demonstrate the way in which this dissonance between past and present engenders a sense of exile in Kundera’s work. It will have been noticed from my discussion thus far that there is a nostalgic yearning in Kundera’s work for a rather idealized lost world from which, rather like Ludvik in The Joke, we have been ‘cast out irrevocably’. This nostalgia is potently realized in many of Kundera’s novels through the contrast between the pleasurable slowness of a bygone era and the threatening speed of the contemporary world. I have already noted that the traditional Ride of the Kings in The Joke is threatened by traffic rushing to get by, and it is significant that, in the same novel, Kostka, the enthusiast for folk culture, finally realizes that his son has abandoned the old traditions when he absconds from a traditional festival to attend a motorbike race. This contrast between speed and slowness is most overtly demonstrated in Kundera’s novella from the mid-1990s, Slowness. In this book, two stories unfold, both set at the same chateau in France. In the first, a night of carefully poised and artistically realized seduction gradually unfolds for a young Chevalier in the eighteenth century. In the second, taking place 200 years later and set up as a counterpoint to the first, a young man called Vincent is enveloped in a rushed and farcical series of events when he completely fails to seduce, or indeed to be seduced, at a conference of entomologists. Vincent is a representative of the modem era and is defined as such by his motorbike. Kundera, who is named in the text as the narrator of the work, comments on the first page of the novella that ‘the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time’,20 and in this comment reveals a similar dissatisfaction with the contemporary to that felt by Rubens about painting in Immortality. Rubens’ main objection to contemporary artistic developments was that they involved the erasure of a sense of time and hence of the very notion of progress. Similarly, here, the man on the motorcycle is isolated from past and future, fleeing in a perpetual 20

Kundera, Slowness, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber 1996), p. 3.

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present that is redolent of the emphasis in postmodern culture on a situation in which there is not so much progress from, as a continual reworking and pastiche of, earlier cultural phases. Sure enough, at the end of the book Vincent himself uses his motorbike to flee his unhappy experiences at the chateau, giving himself up to speed in an attempt to erase memory. In contrast, the chevalier exits the chateau and the novel on a slower form of transport, a chaise. As he leaves, Kundera dwells upon the tempered pace of his gait, which contrasts directly with Vincent’s hurried exit: ‘I want to go on contemplating my Chevalier as he walks slowly towards the chaise. I want to relish the rhythm of his steps: the further he goes, the slower they are. In that slowness, I seem to recognize a sign of happiness.’21 Kundera, as narrator, yearns for this lost world of slowness, associating it with happiness and, by implication, with a more authentic sense of meaning. Other examples of this contrast between slowness and speed abound in Kundera’s work. For instance, in The Book o f Laughter and Forgetting, Mirek briefly remembers a lost feeling of unbounded love when he stops his car at an idyllic station house in the country. The begonias in the window of the station house remind him of a love affair of his youth, but the memory is soon erased when he goes ‘speeding’ off into the countryside and, we are told, ‘space is [for him] merely an obstacle to progress’ again.22 As with Vincent, speed is associated with the present and with the erasure of memory. In the same book, in an allegory about death, Tamina is lured to a horrific and disturbing island populated entirely by children whose angelic appearance and behaviour is belied by their demonic coercion of Tamina and their insistence that she play their games. Significantly, the man who lures Tamina to this island is marked out by signifiers of modernity (he wears jeans) and speed (he drives a fast car). Focusing on these details of Kundera’s work - his dislike of motorcycles, of speed, of rock music, of contemporary art, and, indeed, of practically anything interesting that has happened since 1950 - might lead us to the rather banal conclusion that he is a cultural reactionary. However, this would be simplistic in the extreme, and fails to do justice to the complexity of his stance towards both the present and the past. Although there is a nostalgia for a world, and an Enlightenment project, from which Kundera and his most sympathetic characters seem to feel they are exiled, his novels do not simply yearn for this lost world; they also question whether it ever actually existed.

21 Ibid., p. 131. 22 Kundera, The Book o f Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 22. This is rather like an observation that is associated with Agnes in Immortality'. ‘[Man] no longer saw his own life as a road, but as a route: a line that led from one point to another... . Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed’: Kundera, Immortality, op. cit., p. 249.

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Kundera’s deployment of experimental literary techniques establishes his work as part of a more general contemporary postmodernist culture: his work searches for a lost cultural home, but this search, carried out through a series of complex metafictional investigations, problematizes the very notions of authenticity and meaning for which it seeks. The dialogue that is established when Kundera seeks to cross the borders between past and present throws into question the strict binary opposition between the two, reveals a series of other borders that are metaphysical in nature, and asks questions about identity and meaning that are characteristic of late twentieth-century culture. Exile from the past thus translates, ultimately, into exile from ourselves - an originating European cultural moment is at once sought and shown to be imaginary.

Chapter 11

Angela Carter’s The Passion o f New Eve: Sexual Transmutation as Psychophysical Exile Nicoletta Caputo In its narrow sense a political banishment, exile in its broad sense designates every kind o f estrangement or displacement, from the physical and geographical to the spiritual.1

Angela Carter’s The Passion o f New Eve revolves around a journey which is both literal and metaphorical. In this picaresque novel whose setting shifts from London, to New York, to the American desert and the Pacific Ocean, the reader is led on a voyage into the nature of gender identity, which is also a quest for a kind of sexuality that might be liberating for women. Conventional narratives of exile are often driven by a journey away from what is constructed as ‘home’, and it is this journey that enacts the character’s sense of displacement. The centrality of the journey in The Passion o f New Eve sanctions a reading of the protagonist’s gender-transgressive experience in terms of exile - an exile in which self-alienation is core, and whose fracturing effects will only be mitigated when the various stereotyped embodiments of sexuality that people the novel have been demystified. The protagonist of this journey to the roots of gender is young Evelyn, an English university teacher who abandons a New York on the verge of civil war and leaves for the American desert in search of his self. There, he is kidnapped and is brought to an underground womb-like city, Beulah, which is a female utopia (or dystopia?) ruled by Mother, a self-created goddess who calls herself ‘the Great Parricide’, the ‘Grand Emasculator’ (p. 49),2 ‘the Castratrix of the Phallocentric Universe’ (p. 67). In Beulah, Evelyn is transformed into Eve. Now Evelyn/Eve is a man trapped in a woman’s body. He reacts to his new body as if it were the body of a woman he desires, viewing it as his ‘own masturbatory fantasy’ (p. 75). He feels a discrepancy between outward female appearance and a sense of himself as essentially male: But when I looked in the mirror, I saw Eve; I did not see myself. I saw a young woman who, though she was I, I could in no way acknowledge as 1 Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., Exile and Creativity. Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 2. 2 Page references refer to the following edition: Angela Carter, The Passion o f New Eve (1977; reprint London: Virago, 1982).

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myself, for this one was only a lyrical abstraction o f femininity to me, a tinted arrangement o f curved lines, (p. 74)

Paradoxically, in the desert Evelyn seems to have lost his self.3 He experiences his sexual transmutation as a psycho-physical exile; he feels ill at ease, uncomfortable in his new body. And the narrative form (the novel is Eve’s autobiography), with its pronominal switches between the first and the third person, reflects the hero/ ine’s alienated perspective: ... at this time, / was literally in two minds; my transformation was both perfect and imperfect. All o f New Eve’s experience came through two channels o f sensation, her own fleshly ones and his mental ones. But at length the sense o f having been Evelyn began, in spite o f himself, to fade, although Eve was a creature without memory; she was an amnesiac, a stranger in the world as she was in her own body . . . . (pp. 7 7 -7 8)4

Having always been a man, New Eve is convinced that a sexual transmutation cannot be complete without a corresponding modification in the essence. Sophia, Eve’s nurse in Beulah, assures her that ‘a change in the appearance will restructure the essence ... Psycho-surgery’ (p. 68). However, what Eve’s adventure will show is that there is no essence to be restructured, since, as Carter repeatedly asserts, femininity is ‘a cultural production’.5 Therefore, the denouement of Eve’s story will contradict the very assumption on which Beulah and its mythology are built, and Mother, who has transformed herself into ‘the concrete essence of woman’ (p. 60), will suffer a nervous breakdown that will ratify the defeat of her self-constructed theology. The deconstruction of a fixed and timeless notion of sexuality runs counter to an essentializing tendency within 1970s feminism and is achieved, primarily, through a demystification of sexual stereotypes that are invariably revealed as socially determined. Evelyn/Eve, both before and after the surgical operation, meets various characters who are presented as sexual symbols. While still in New York, Evelyn meets Leilah, a black nightclub dancer who is the incarnation of ‘woman as the temptress’. She is seen as a predator, as a witch and she even attains a mythical dimension being defined as ‘a mermaid’ (p. 22) and as a ‘succubus, [one of] the devils in female form who come by night to seduce the saints’ (p. 27). Leilah only exists as a function of male desire (and of the male gaze). Every evening, in front of the mirror, she undergoes a ‘ritual incarnation’ and becomes ‘dressed meat’ (p. 31). While putting on her ‘public face’, Leilah becomes the perceived Other - a projection of a male erotic fantasy. She is never seen as an individual: ‘She was a perfect woman; like the moon, she only gave reflected light. She had mimicked me, she had become 3 4 5 p. 86.

As he tells Mother, he doesn’t find him self at all: cf. ibid., p. 75. My italics. For other pronominal switches, cf. pp. 79 and 85. John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London and New York: Methuen, 1985),

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the thing I wanted of her’ (p. 34).6 Evelyn seems incapable of considering Leilah simply as a human being and, as a consequence, he does not show her any respect: he rapes her, he beats her, he impregnates her, he forces her to have an abortion and, finally, he abandons her in a hospital after a hysterectomy. In the concluding section of the novel Eve meets Leilah again and discovers that her real name is Lilith and she is the natural daughter of Mother. Now Lilith is the competent leader of a group of guerrilla fighters. Thus, Eve learns that Leilah, the symbol of a femininity which is made to man’s measure, ‘that gorgeous piece of flesh and acquiescence’, has been ‘all the time a show, an imitation, an illusion’ (p. 172). The ‘perfect woman’, as Evelyn had defined her, is an image that corresponds to no essence and that can have no existence outside the world of patriarchal fantasies: ... what’s become o f the slut o f Harlem, my girl o f bile and ebony! She can never have objectively existed, all the time mostly the projection o f the lusts and greed and self-loathing o f a young man called Evelyn, who does not exist, either, (p. 175)

Another symbol of femininity that proves to be only a creation of male desire is the divine Tristessa, the beautiful Hollywood star that Evelyn has admired since his boyhood and who recurs throughout the novel as a leitmotif. In the 1940s, Tristessa had embodied ‘the very type of romantic dissolution, necrophilia incarnate’ (p. 7). Suffering was her vocation and her motto had been: ‘solitude and melancholy, that is a woman’s life’ (p. 144). Her masochism directly engendered male sadistic pleasure, as the twitch in pre-adolescent Evelyn’s budding groin at the spectacle of her distress exemplifies. But the femininity that Tristessa, ‘Our Lady of the Sorrows’ (p. 122), symbolizes ‘has no ontological status, only an iconographic one’ (p. 129), and that not only because she is a Hollywood product and, as such, she is ‘a piece of pure mystification’ (p.6) and ‘a moving picture of flesh, real, but not substantial’ (p.8), but first and foremost because, as Eve will discover during her pilgrimage (her ‘passion’), she is a transvestite: That was why he had been the perfect man’s woman! He had made him self the shrine o f his own desires, had made o f him self the only woman he could have loved! If a woman is indeed beautiful only in so far as she incarnates most completely the secret aspirations o f man, no wonder Tristessa had been able to become the most beautiful woman in the world, an unbegotten woman who made no concessions to humanity. Tristessa, the sensuous fabrication o f the mythology o f the flea-pits. How could a real woman ever have been so much a woman as you? (pp. 128-29)

6 A ccording to Luce Irigaray men use wom en as mirrors in w hich they narcissistically seek their own reflection: ‘For them, being drawn to the other means a move toward one’s mirage: a mirror that is (barely) alive’: Luce Irigaray, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, Signs, VI: 1 (Autumn 1980), p. 71.

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Paulina Palmer, misinterpreting the concluding comment on Tristessa, asserts that Carter ‘in celebrating Tristessa’s artificial performance of femininity and questioning whether ‘areal woman’ can compete with it,... misogynistically implies that ‘real’ biological women are inferior and redundant’.7 Quotation marks around the word ‘woman’ would have made evident the irony of Carter’s statement, that, far from implying the inferiority and redundancy of real women, points to the chasm existing between the real condition of being a woman and current patriarchal standards of femininity. Paradoxically, Tristessa has spent his whole life denying his anatomical maleness, but pursuing an idea of femininity that can only exist in a man’s mind, since, as the novel clearly reveals, passive femininity is nothing but a male creation: ‘I was seduced by the notion of a woman’s being, which is negativity. Passivity, the absence of being, to be everything and nothing’ (p. 137). Tristessa feels like a woman trapped in a man’s body. His masculine apparatus appals him, since it makes him feel exiled from what he perceives as his true self. The following extract bears witness to a condition of displaced subjectivity, to the character’s split identity: ‘For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself, but never met anybody, nobody,’ said Tristessa. ‘She had given herself to the world in her entirety and then found nothing was left; I was bankrupt. She left me for dead and I covered m yself from the cold wind o f solitude with her rags. So wore out an endless time. She who has been so beautiful consumed m e.’ (p. 144)

It is the condition of sexual exile that seems to make Tristessa the ideal companion for Eve: each a new Tiresias, both of them have experienced the psychic dislocation of the transgendered subject. The sense of uneasiness that Tristessa incessantly experiences in his own body blatantly shows that anatomical form and gender identity are not interdependent. Another attack on mystified versions of sexuality is launched through the introduction of the character of Zero, the poet. Zero is convinced that he is ‘Masculinity incarnate’ (p. 104), but he is physically handicapped (one-eyed and one-legged). He defines himself as ‘the avenging phallic fire’ (p. 127) and, after having raped Eve, he lectures her on the thaumaturgical effects of his sperm. But Zero is sterile. He keeps a plaster bust of Nietzsche on his desk, but, far from being an ubermensch, he is a nonentity who compensates for his actual weakness with delusions of grandeur. The myth that Zero has created of himself is confirmed on a daily basis by the submission and the adoration of his seven young wives, or, rather, it is their submission that has produced the myth, since ‘a god-head, however

7 Paulina Palmer, ‘Gender as Performance in the Fiction o f Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood’, in Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton, eds, The Infernal Desires o f Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism (London and N ew York: Longman, 1997), p. 30.

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shabby, needs believers to maintain his credibility’ (p. 99). Here, another sexual stereotype is exposed as a patriarchal image that corresponds to no essence. Zero and his harem live in total mystification: the girls have made Zero into a God and Zero, for his part, has reduced them to a subhuman state. They are not allowed to speak in words nor to use cutlery, soap, shoes and so on because ‘Zero believed women were fashioned of a different soul substance from men, a more primitive, animal stuff, and so did not need the paraphernalia of civilised society’ (p. 87). Zero is a misanthrope and a sadist. He prefers his dog and his pigs to his seven wives, who are continually abused and humiliated. They must obey a law which is cruel and totally arbitrary on pain of the lash, and Zero not only has complete control over their lives, but also over their perceptions: he regulates his wives’ understanding of him and also their understanding of themselves in relation to him. Completely absorbed in the adoration of their idol, Zero’s wives are hostile to each other. Such behaviour is typical of patriarchal societies, in which, being in a position of subordination, women tend to identify with the interests of the dominant group and, instead of supporting each other vis-a-vis men’s abuses, they fight for the attention of the male.8 When Eve is in Zero’s harem (she becomes his eighth wife) she has to undergo a bestial apprenticeship in womanhood and, again, with her female body and Evelyn’s male consciousness, she experiences a split between mind and body. While being raped by Zero, Eve becomes conscious of the abuses perpetrated by her former self on the female sex; she is forced ‘to know [herself] as a former violator at the moment of [her] own violation’ (p. 102). Her sufferings become a sort of expiation. However, despite what Eve herself thinks, far from learning ‘feminine manners’, she is only adapting herself to a patriarchal (and savagely morbid) idea of womanhood. Zero’s wives, while crudely embodying what several philosophers have said about women (namely, that they are of a different soul-substance from men, more primitive and animal-like), do not correspond to any essence of femininity: they are only exemplars of a degraded humanity that has lost all self-confidence and self-respect. A number of critics, including Robert Clark and Patricia Duncker,9 have found Carter’s exploration of female sexuality through images of passivity, bestiality, violence and sadomasochism ambiguous at best. According to them, such victimization of women unwittingly colludes with the repressive patriarchal system. But these critics tend to forget Carter’s professed role as a ‘terrorist of the imagination’ for whom the hyperbolic representation of the norm reveals its perversity and becomes a critique of the current relations between the sexes. 8 Cf. Jean Baker Miller, Towards a New Psychology o f Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), pp. 3-14; and Ann Oakley, Subject Women (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981), pp. 265-73. 9 Cf. Robert Clark, ‘Angela Carter’s Desire Machine’, Women’s Studies, 14:2 (1987); and Patricia Duncker, ‘Re-imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers’, Literature and History: A New Journalfor the Humanities, 10:1 (Spring 1984). Robert Clark defines ‘The Company o f W olves’ as ‘Old chauvinism, new clothing’.

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In The Passion o f New Eve even the glorification of femininity as maternity is demystified through the failure of Mother’s project to stop time (that is, a man) and her retirement to a cave by the ocean after her mythical world has been overtaken by history. This is Carter’s way of attacking (through derision) the romanticization of Mother Nature in the 1970s by radical feminists - their idealizations of the Earth Mother.10 When Evelyn first meets this character he comments: ‘She was personified and self-fulfilling fertility ... She was her own mythological artefact’ (pp. 59-60). But, as Angela Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman: ... [the] theory o f maternal superiority is one o f the most damaging o f all consolatory fictions . . . . It puts those women who wholeheartedly subscribe to it in voluntary exile from the historic world, this world . . . . Because she is the channel o f life, woman as mythic mother lives at one remove from life. A woman who defines herself through her fertility has no other option.11

As the author has declared in an interview with Paola Bono, The Passion o f New Eve is a book that is opposed to, and which sets out to destroy, myth,12 and such a demythologizing work is, according to Carter, an extremely important step towards women’s emancipation, since myths are ‘consolatory nonsenses’ which have been invented by men to keep women out of the arena - to exile them from history: If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack o f access to the modes o f intellectual debate by the invocation o f hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions o f women ... are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition o f myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival o f the myths o f these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price o f obscuring the real conditions o f life. This is why they were invented in the first place. Myth deals in false universals, to dull the pain o f particular circumstances.13

Luce Irigaray envisages in ‘playing with mimesis’ a strategy of resistance to male-defined roles for women: by parodically mimicking conventional images of femininity, the female subject can expose their artificiality and inauthenticity.14 This is precisely what Carter does in The Passion o f New Eve through the presentation of stereotyped versions of femininity which are proved deceptive. 10 Cf. Lisa Appignanesi, Writers in Conversation: Angela Carter (London: Institute o f Contemporary Arts video, 1987). 11 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979), pp. 106-107. 12 Cf. Paola Bono, ‘Intervista con Angela Carter’, DonnaWomanFemme, 2 (Summer 1986), p. 101. 13 Carter, Sadeian Woman, op. cit., p. 5. 14 Cf. Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe qui n 'estpas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977).

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Besides demystifying sexual stereotypes as patriarchal constructions that have no ontological status, the novel directly attacks any predefined notion of femininity and masculinity as unnatural and limiting. In The Passion o f New Eve transsexuality holds the key to the constructedness of all gender identities. Eve feels exiled in her new sexual appearance, but in contemporary society everybody lives as female and male impersonators, relentlessly trying to conform to stereotyped gender models.15 As Eve points out while learning feminine manners in Zero’s harem, ‘many women bom spend their whole lives in just such imitations’ (p. 101). However, masculinity is a cultural artefact too, since, as Mother states, ‘to be a man is not a given condition but a continuous effort’ (p. 63). Indeed, in patriarchal societies the constitution of the self is mediated by the symbols that men have created, and both women and men are daily engaged in adapting themselves to such culturally determined sexual ideals. The key to a notion of sexuality that would be liberating for women can be found in Mother’s assertion: ‘sexuality is a unity manifested in different structures’ (p. 66). However, this is just a glimpse of the truth, since, as Mother adds immediately afterwards, ‘it’s a hard thing, in these alienated times, to tell what [sexuality] is and what is not’. The unity in diversity is also the solution proposed in the ‘Postscript’ to The Sadeian Woman, which is taken from Emma Goldman’s The Tragedy o f Woman s Emancipation: Indeed, if partial em ancipation is to becom e a com plete and true emancipation o f w om an,... it will have to do away with the absurd notion o f the dualism o f the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.16

The only sexual myth that is favourably presented in the novel is the myth of androgyny, which is, precisely, the coexistence of a double sexuality in a single being - the overcoming of the dichotomy between male and female. The androgynous is first presented in the sexual charade that Zero imposes on Eve and Tristessa. In this pantomimic wedding the groom is Eve, a woman who was bom a man, and the bride is Tristessa, a man who has spent all his life pretending to be a woman. As Eve points out, ‘he made us man and wife although it was a double wedding - both were the bride, both the groom in this ceremony’ (p. 135). However, the apotheosis of the androgynous is found in the lovemaking of Eve and Tristessa in the desert:

15 Carter’s constructionist approach to gender has often been associated with the concept o f ‘feminine masquerade’, introduced in 1929 by Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, The International Journal o f P sychoanalysis, 10, and with one o f its appropriations. See also Judith Butler’s notion o f ‘gender as performance’ in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion o f Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 16 Carter, Sadeian Woman, op. cit., p. 151.

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... we folded ourselves within a single self in the desert ... out o f these fathomless kisses and our interpenetrating, undifferentiated sex we had made the great Platonic hermaphrodite together, the whole and perfect being to which he, with an absurd and touching heroism, had, in his own single sex, aspired; we brought into being the being who stops time in the self-created eternity o f lovers, (p. 148)

According to the myth that Plato relates in the Symposium, the hermaphrodite was the perfectly happy and self-fulfilling primeval being who was subsequently divided into two parts, male and female, which are attracted to one another to regain their pristine unity. The depiction of the hermaphrodite represents a moment of utopian vision in the novel,17 and Tristessa’s death confirms the impracticability of such a solution. Androgyny remains an illusion; the ‘Messiah of the Antithesis’ (p. 67) that will abolish the dichotomy between male and female is not yet bom. According to David Punter: in the lifeless mating o f Eve and Tristessa in New Eve, the sexual act can be figured only as instant emission, an eruption o f desire so small and so unsatisfactory that it serves only to confirm the boundary between the genders and the incompatibility o f desires.18

Such an assertion denotes a complete misunderstanding on the part of the critic; in fact, it is a brief, yet powerful triumph over the stereotyped sexual dichotomy that can be glimpsed in the mating of Eve and Tristessa: in them, biological sexual identity is not linked to a conventional predefined gender identity. ‘Masculine and feminine are correlatives which involve one another’ (p. 149): in the text, this statement follows Eve and Tristessa’s lovemaking and could be read as a fair definition of that condition of psychic androgyny that would, hopefully, put an end to all kinds of exploitative relations between the sexes. Contrary to Punter’s assertion, the endpoint of Carter’s exploration is not ‘the pronunciation of sex as impossible’;19 rather, in The Passion o f New Eve, in The Sadeian Woman and in all Carter’s work, what is envisaged is a redefinition of gender that would make sex a more gratifying experience for both women and men. 17 Hermaphroditism was a much debated issue in the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The discussion about the progressive value for women o f the revival o f the Platonic myth was started by Carolyn Heilbrun’s Towards a Recognition o f Androgyny (1964). Those in favour o f the concept o f androgyny considered it a helpful notion to overcome the present sex-role division (cf., for instance, June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New Theory o f Sexuality (New York: Doubleday, 1976)). The unity in diversity (and the recognition o f androgyny as a positive value) is also the endpoint o f Eddie Twybom’s quest across genders in Carla Dente’s exploration o f Patrick White’s novel, Chapter 12 o f this volume. 18 David Punter, ‘Angela Carter: Supersessions o f the M asculine’, Studies in Modern Fiction, 25 (1984), p. 221. Reprinted in Lindsey Tucker, ed., Critical Essays on Angela Carter (London: Macmillan, 1998). 19 Ibid.

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In The Passion o f New Eve, the Platonic hermaphrodite is connected to the Jurassic bird, archaeopteryx, that Eve sees in the visionary backward journey to the beginning of time that she undertakes in the cave/womb near the Pacific Ocean by order of Mother: ... bird and lizard both at once, a being composed o f the contradictory elements o f air and earth. From its angelic aspect spring the whole family tree o f feathered, flying things and from its reptilian or satanic side the saurians, creepy crawlers, crocs, the scaled leaper and the lovely little salamander ... A miraculous, seminal, intermediate being whose nature I grasped in the desert, (p. 185)

The archaeopteryx, being a combination of contrarieties and symbolizing a wholeness before the separation into two different strands of evolution, can represent a model of sexuality that pre-existed but, through the chronological dynamics of the novel, appears to have overcome the split into feminine and masculine. During the symbolic and cathartic journey through the cave/womb, before seeing the archaeopteryx, Eve finds several objects including a chair, a mirror and a picture of Tristessa. These objects are linked to the notions of femininity which the novel has deconstructed, and the way in which the three objects appear in the cave decrees the ultimate rejection of any mystified idea of femininity. The chair, which has served as Mother’s throne in Beulah, is empty now, since Mother has abdicated as a matriarchal goddess; the mirror is fractured and does not reflect Eve, nor any portion of her - in other words, traditional images of femininity have been shattered and Eve has to learn to live without them. By tearing up the picture of Tristessa, Eve proves that she has understood that manmade symbols of femininity have to be destroyed, even if such an operation can be painful. The end of Eve’s psychophysical exile is confirmed by her disparaging refusal to take back the genitals which have belonged to Evelyn and are now offered to her by Lilith. Eve has definitively renounced her old self and accepted her female identity. Paradoxically, the word ‘exile’ occurs for the first time at this point of the novel. Because of her pregnancy, Eve cannot participate in the war, and Lilith invites her to remain on the beach by the ocean until her time comes: She gave me my exile, since I did not want my old self back; as soon as I realised this, I began to wonder if I might not in some way escape ... I knew in my heart, that, in her heart, Lilith pitied me just because o f the exile to which she believed I was condemned, (p. 188)

However, Eve is not willing to accept any kind of displacement or confinement, either physical or psychological, now that she is finally mistress of her own destiny. She immediately looks for a solution to this new kind of banishment, and she finds it in the ocean that stretches before her. The ocean, on which the novel comes to a conclusion, could be interpreted as the symbol of the enigma of a new femininity

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that will be free from myth at last. A sort of afterword to Eve’s story of exile can be glimpsed in the harsh comments on Evelyn’s oppressive masculinity which are scattered throughout the novel. In all those cases, the pitilessness of the narrating voice cannot but reflect a consciousness that has discarded all remains of a former male condition. As far as women’s emancipation is concerned, The Passion o f New Eve envisages plurality as the one way out of the straitjacket of culturally determined sexual roles. On first meeting Mother, Evelyn asserts ‘one woman is all women’ (p. 58). Such a statement postulates the existence of the eternal feminine and blatantly discords with Carter’s non-essentialist feminism. As she declares in The Sadeian Woman, ‘the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick’:20 There is the unarguable fact o f sexual differentiation; but, separate from it and only partially derived from it, are the behavioural modes o f masculine and feminine, which are culturally defined variables translated in the language o f common usage to the status o f universals.21

Femininity is a social construct and, in contrast to what Sigmund Freud has theorized, anatomy is not destiny because, as Carter observes, ‘my anatomy is only part of an infinitely complex organisation, my self’.22 Paulina Palmer thinks that femininity is obliterated in The Passion o f New Eve, as all the female characters are either biologically male (Eve and Tristessa), or possess male features (Leilah/ Lilith); moreover, she objects that the novel does not contain any positive embodiment of femininity.23 However, it is only fake versions of femininity that are effaced in the novel; in fact, by destroying stereotyped and biologically determined images of women, The Passion o f New Eve opens up new prospects for femininity. As Elaine Jordan notes, the search for role models in The Passion o f New Eve is misleading; rather, Evelyn/Eve ‘is put through certain phases of the action for the instruction of the reader. It is the action and the commentary on it which signify.’24 A realization of new complex models of gender can only be glimpsed in The Passion o f New Eve. What really matters is the investigation into the cultural construction of femininity, the exploration of the social processes and the cultural mythologizing that determine gender identity and transform women into ‘woman’.

20 Carter, Sadeian Woman, op. cit., p. 12. 21 Ibid., p. 6. 22 Ibid., p. 4. 23 Cf. Paulina Palmer, Contemporary Women s Fiction (London and N ew York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 16-20. 24 Elaine Jordan, ‘The Dangers o f Angela Carter’, in Isobel Armstrong, ed., New Feminist Discourses. Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London and N ew York: Routledge, 1992), p. 122.

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Julia Kristeva’s assertion ‘I favour an understanding of femininity that would have as many “feminines” as there are women’,25 could be taken to summarize the conclusions reached in The Passion o f New Eve as regards the nature of female sexual identity. The quest for a kind of sexuality that would be liberating for women has resulted in the refusal of fixed sexual models in favour of plurality. The psychophysical exile of Eve that has followed her sexual transmutation has reached an end with the demystification of all the stereotyped versions of femininity and masculinity, which have been shown to be social constructs of male desire. Through the unmasking of the stereotyped embodiments of sexuality that Evelyn/Eve has met in his/her pilgrimage, the novel has demonstrated that anatomical identity, far from being a destiny, is only a biological fact, and that both masculinity and femininity are not essences but, rather, culturally determined variables.

25 Julia Kristeva, ‘A partir de P olylogu e\ Revue des sciences humaines, 168 (December 1977), p. 499.

Chapter 12

‘Nothing of me is mine, not even the body I was given to inhabit’: Gender as a Land of Exile in Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair Carla Dente Consideration of the notion of writing combined with the theme of exile has developed in time into an articulated typology of writers’ attitudes towards their own existential, social and literary uneasiness. In their treatment of the subject, literary critics have tended to discuss exile in two ways.1 First in its conventional meaning of actual expatriation - voluntary or involuntary - with reference to the related problems of language, translation and even contribution to the new cultures in which the writers find themselves; and, second, through an analysis of displacement - the condition of those writers who are exiles in their own countries, and who thus experience a sense of alienation at home. Artists are not always happy in their environments because of their sensitivity to the pressure towards conformity that the social configuration, their homeland and their family might exercise on them. The flight towards a different condition, a different land and more kindred ideologies often takes the form of self-banishment from the objects of the writer’s hatred - of exile from those nets he or she perceives as oppressive. The impulse towards the opening up of this category creates an opportunity to investigate gender as being among those areas of refuge or escape where one can find solace from one’s own uncomfortable existential condition. This paper will thus bring together discussion of expatriation, gendered identity and displacement in an analysis of exile as transgendered dislocation.2 1 See A. Gurr, Writers in Exile: The Identity o f Home in Modern Literature (Brighton: Harvester, 1981). Gurr introduces the distinction between exile as a result o f an involuntary constraint, and expatriation, as a voluntary act. See also B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin, K ey Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), where less literal articulations o f the notion are suggested with the introduction o f considerations about race, ethnicity and cultural dislocation caused by the dialectic between dominant and marginal cultures. 2 The motif of dislocation embodied in so much Australian literature has been discussed through different manifestations. It is represented first as the consequence o f geographical and cultural dislocation, as appropriate to a population o f English, and subsequently European, origin in a dimension that is dramatically ‘other’, and in a place that is ‘down under’. Later the focus moves towards the sense o f dislocation experienced as distance from the national myth, that o f the ‘bushman’, so deeply part o f the recently acquired

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It is in the nature of art developed in the countries that once were part of the Dominions to be related to exile, as that art develops in and from a literary language and tradition common to both colonizer and colonized, but within which the colonized may feel intrinsically self-alienated because its very materials have become ‘foreign’to lived experience. Art is sometimes placed in a sort o f ‘dreamtime’ of the white colonizer - cherished and nostalgically lamented in a dislocation that is both geographical and cultural.3 As the colonized begin to talk back, however, an essentially ‘English’ literary tradition becomes increasingly embodied in different voices resonating from thousands of miles away from the homeland. One of these voices, that of Australia, has powerfully established ‘the bush ethos’ as a sort of national mystique. Here a national hero is celebrated - one with exaggerated virile features, who fights out his life in a hostile environment, and is capable of establishing an outright opposition between the cultural stereotypes of the masculine and the feminine, based on essentialist notions of sexuality. Australian writers are doubly responsible for the shaping and dissemination of the myth, first as citizens who are culturally involved in the establishment of their nationhood and, second, as part of the group which has codified the traits of their national identity while being at the same time examples of a blatant contradiction. They are, in fact, people who do not live up to the stereotype and, furthermore, they testify their inevitable indebtedness to English literary models in what and how they write. The stereotypes, of gender and of the national character, culturally determined as they are, were initially based on reality, then proved effective as projections of ideas of the self and their specific roles and, finally, were reflected powerfully in literature, forming perhaps the first differentiating trait of an Australian cultural and existential identity in opposition to the models of United Kingdom,4 the homeland which had somehow rejected them. This discussion has informed some decades of criticism in Australia and elsewhere. According to the myth, the typical Aussie is, by extension, and starting from the characteristics widely attributed to the bushman of the nineteenth century: ... a practical man, rough and ready in his manners and quick to decry any appearance o f affectations in others ... ever willing ‘to have a go’ at anything . . . . Though capable o f great exertion in an emergency, he normally feels no impulse to work hard without a good cause. He swears hard and consistently, gambles heavily and often, and drinks deeply on o ccasion .... [T]acitum rather than talkative, one who endures stoically rather than one national identity. Following this, the exploration o f transgendered dislocation has brought the discussion towards problems and themes widely shared with a variety o f cultures and national literatures. On this issue see also Caputo’s analysis o f Carter’s The Passion o f New Eve in Chapter 11 o f this volume. 3 It is difficult to forget Australian Christmas cards with snowy landscapes, part o f the English iconography o f Christmas time. 4 The allusion here is to the set character o f the ‘bushman’, the myth o f ‘mateship’, the characteristic Ocker attitudes and so on as codified in the texts by H. Lawson, B. Baynton, Henry Handel Richardson and Joseph Furphy.

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who acts busily. He is a ‘hard case’, sceptical about the value o f religion and o f intellectual and cultural pursuits generally. He believes that Jack is not only as good as his master but, at least in principle a great deal better . . . . He is a fiercely independent person who hates officiousness and authority, especially when these qualities are embodied in military officers and policemen.5

The sense of independence, however, does not prevent group solidarity, especially male group solidarity, in that difficult Antipodean masculine environment that largely excluded women. One of the dominant themes in Australian social history has been a strong intrasexual loyalty among men, an inheritance from the cellblock isolation of the penal days and the outback isolation of the pastoral era, which has led more than one sociologist to suggest that it submerges male sex lives in a sea of heavy drinking,6 aggressive masculinity and loyalty to their mates rather than to their women. In time, and through different contributions, discussion on the ethos of the ‘nomad tribe’, inclusive of the notion of mateship, have also foregrounded implications of latent homosexuality at the unconscious level: ‘male homosexuality, in a patriarchal society is a basic and extreme expression of phallus worship ... and ... misogyny’.7 At the same time, any deviation from the stereotype of the Ocker was culturally sanctioned to the extent that those who chose a different lifestyle - a life that did not constantly test the strength with which a man could oppose the forces of a hostile Nature - was considered effeminate, its prototype being the life of a writer. Lack o f manliness and the w riter’s sensibility have long been considered synonymous in Australian culture. At this point in my argument, I become only too aware of the dangers of oversimplifying the relationship between an author’s life and the motifs offered by his later literary production. I intend to discuss here Patrick White’s novel, The Twyborn Affair, in which there are striking points of contact between the materials around which it is constructed and elements of White’s biography. The book is the story of Eddie Twyborn, the only son of an established Melbourne family, who, for no apparent reason, leaves Australia on the eve of his wedding to a society girl from Victoria. The reader reads about it later on in the novel, after meeting Eudoxia Vatatzes, a young woman apparently married to a elderly Greek man,8 5 R. Ward, The Australian Legend (1958; reprint Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 2. 6 See R. Conway, The Great Australian Stupor (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1974) p. 144; Sol Encel in a broadcast, as quoted in M. Dixon The Real Matilda, Women and Identity in Australia 1788-1975 (1976; reprint Ringwood, Viet.: Penguin Australia, 1978), p. 81. 7 Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (London: Allen Lane, 1975), p. 189. 8 There is an autobiographical element here, referring to the long lasting liaison between White and Manoly Lascaris, his Greek partner o f almost a lifetime. He came out proclaiming overtly his homosexual inclinations rather late in his life, but before beginning to write this novel.

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and clearly passionately attracted to him. The couple suddenly leave the French Riviera resort where they live, after the efforts of an Australian married couple, the Golsons, to establish a close friendship. Vatatzes dies suddenly a few days later, in 1914, but not before indirectly and rather shockingly revealing to the reader, in his dying words, that Eudoxia is male: ‘I have had from you, dear boy, the only happiness I’ve ever known.’9 The story of Eudoxia is left abruptly at this point, to be alluded to later on, in the middle of other narrative threads. The use of this rhetorical device to build up stories of fragmented selves is quite common in White’s fiction, and has been discussed elsewhere.10Aposiopesis signals a strategy devised by the writer to leave his reader’s interest unsatisfied, inducing and increasing a sense of estrangement from a fragmented universe. At the same time, it signals a certain reticentia by diverting the line of discourse, arguably in the effort to represent the sense of the writer’s inadequacy or unwillingness to articulate the emotionally and perhaps culturally ‘unspeakable’ of certain narrative turning points by means of the textual silence, as it were. In this novel, it is apparently impossible for the writer to face the character’s successive deaths and rebirths, and these are inextricably connected with White’s own uneasiness caused by his personal gender identity.11 The breaking of the narrative thread for the first two parts of the novel is occasioned by the unexpected intrusion of the Golsons - Joanie (the protagonist’s mother’s very special friend) and her husband, real personifications of the threat of the past. In the final part, the sudden death of the protagonist in one of the air raids on London during the Second World War concludes the story. White, after leaving Eudoxia to her own destiny at the outbreak of the First World War, takes up the narrative in Australia, where Eddie Twybom, demobbed following distinguished service during the war, unexpectedly reappears among his alienated family, soon to start an experience, and maybe a career, as a jackaroo in a station in the outback.12 The experience ends after Eddie has impregnated his lover, Mrs Lushington - the wife of his father’s close friend and master - and has also become the lover of Prowse, the station manager, apparently a stereotype of the hard bushman. In the second part the reader is led to conclude that Eudoxia was Eddie’s transvestite identity. The third part is set in London in 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, where Eddie is now Eadith Trist, the mistress of a renowned bawdy house, 9 Patrick White, The Twyborn Affair (Jonathan Cape, 1979) p. 126. All page references will refer to this edition. 10 See E. Linguanti, ‘Sequenze e ritmi in A Fringe o f Leaves di Patrick White ’, in P. Bertinetti and C. Gorlier, eds, Australiana (Rome: Bulzoni, 1982). 11 For the relevance o f this theme in the novel see J. Colmer, Patrick White (London: Methuen, 1984), and B. Kieman, Patrick White (London: Macmillan, 1980). 12 A ‘jackaroo’ was a young man o f good connections working on a station as a cadet to gain experience o f station management. See G. A. Wilkes, A Dictionary o f Australian Colloquialisms (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1978; reprint Melbourne: Fontana/Collins, 1980).

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and has again taken on the identity of a female transvestite. Here she is reunited with the lesbian mother she had never really been able to cope with in her male persona, and dies at the beginning of a new, potentially more relaxed and more promising relationship with her, which could have lead to nothing less transgressive than a return to Melbourne with her in female disguise. The Twyborn Affair is a quest for identity, an effort to reach the fullness of unity through a journey across genders and lifestyles in an exploration of sexual and national identities, which entails anguish and fear. The effect is that personality is represented as developing not so much according to a linear process going from the past to the future, as in a largely retrospective activity that produces, rather than reproduces, life meaning and does so while elaborating it for writing. In other words, the world of the subject would not exist had it not been written down.13 The anguish of Eddie Twybom’s quest brings with it the constant practices of concealment and defection: the first connected with uncertainty and uneasiness with regard to gender identity; the second with feelings of insecurity, self-escape from an inner truth one feels unable to cope with. At the core of his self there is the impossibility that Eddie might come to terms with his ambivalent and ambiguous experiences, that he would forgive his own inadequacies and, in the end, love himself. In the words of Carolyn Bliss: Apparently the genesis o f Eddie’s sexual ambivalence is classically Freudian: his upbringing by a mannish and possessive mother, herself unsettled sexually, and a deeply loved but undemonstrative father who frightened and awed his son.14

Even his appearance is represented as ambivalent through his reflection in the mirror or through the perception that other people have of him: Then I do appear consecutive, complete, and can enjoy my reflection in the glass, which he [Angelos] has created, what passes for the real one, with devices like the spangled fan and the pomegranate shawl, (p. 27) It was still impossible for the watcher to decide whether the hair, illuminated by sudden slicks of light, was that o f afolle Anglais orpederaste romantique, but in whatever form, the swimmer was making for the open sea, thrashing 13 This poses the fundamental problem o f what comes first, the self or the language in which the self is described. Cf. P. J. Eakin, who suggests that ‘Much o f the controversy about the ontological status o f the self in autobiography has tended to polarize into a selfbefore-language or a language-before-self set o f positions whereas the most promising contemporary treatments suggest that the self and language are mutually implicated in a single, interdependent system o f symbolic behaviour’: P . J. Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 191-92. See also P. Jay: ‘The contradictions between identity and discourse - between, that is, the s e lf and any representation o f it - is absolute, since the ‘s e lf’ can only exist conceptually as a representation’: P. Jay, ‘Being in the Text: Autobiography and the Problem o f the Subject’, Modern Language Notes, 97:5 (1982), p. 1046.

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This is the beginning of the description of an attempted suicide, not carried out to its extreme consequences essentially because you need a self to commit self­ slaughter. Eudoxia in fact writes in her journal: ... nothing o f me is mine, not even the body I was given to inhabit, nor the disguises chosen for it - A[ngelos] decides on these, seldom without my agreement. The real E[udoxia] has not yet been discovered, and perhaps never will be. (p. 79)

Both when the protagonist’s mask is Eudoxia and when it is Eddie, the reader is made aware of the disjunction between appearance and reality and of the consequent uneasiness with gender experienced by the character. The character constantly feels exiled by the other part of his or her own self, and frustration is the prevailing sensation. After her experience with her Greek lover, she takes refuge in a male transvestite identity and partly as a self-vindication, he starts an affair with his master’s wife to prove himself capable of sex with a woman (p. 217). In the same period, however, he experiences an uneasy attraction towards Don Prowse, the stereotypically masculine bushman deserted by his wife, who first feels an embarrassed affection for him and then, unexpectedly aroused, rapes him. Eddie, humiliated in his effort to construct a heterosexual identity for himself to match his new persona, accepts Don’s offer of himself in apology for what he had done, giving way ‘to what was less lust than a desire for male revenge’ (p. 296). His rage is also increased by self-disgust at his spontaneous, feminine impulse to comfort the desperate man. This ambivalence remains unresolved in him to the extent that he has to get rid of this identity, of Eddie’s mask. The operation that White has performed can be viewed, in the first part, from the standpoint of the authorial voice as that of a male author speaking through a female character or, in the second part, speaking through a male character who reflects his own inner female self.15 This seems sufficient to make any gender distinction of the narrative ‘I’ groundless, while thematizing the transvestism of the process. Elizabeth Harvey has examined a similar, if less complicated, process in early modem writers and has termed it transvestite ventriloquism,16 a neologism which suitably foregrounds the linguistic implications of the operation of authorial cross-dressing. The textual space occupied by this kind of language seems to be 14 C. Bliss, Patrick White s Fiction. The Paradox o f Fortunate Failure (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 168. 15 Eddie sees him self as a ‘crypto-queen’ (p. 143), as a ‘pseudo-lover’ (p. 255), and in the third part as a ‘pseudo-man-cum-crypto-woman’ (p. 298). 16 See E. D.Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices. F em inist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (1992; reprint. London: Routledge, 1995).

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the best space in which the articulation of difference can be traced: the discrepancy between character and the various roles enacted is mapped and the cultural construction of gender as a category affirms itself while apparently blurring the identity of the object of the narrative utterance. At each turn in White’s novel, the protagonist’s voice is imbricated with sexuality, with emotional make-up, with gendered imagination, or silence with continence. It also delimits areas of identity spatially perceived as shelters for an ‘I’ emotionally exiled from a part of itself. And the part of the self that is exiled struggles to reaffirm its rights against a dominant power, which needs subverting in order to make survival and rebirth possible.17 To return to the novel, when the reader meets the protagonist again in London, this time the name is Eadith, the gender is feminine, and she has at last accepted herself as a fiction, as testified by the range of devices used to represent her identity to the world: for example, a ‘baroque’ dress (p. 310), an elaborate make-up defined as ‘poetic’ rather than ‘fashionable or naturalistic’ (p. 310). In this new identity the threat is represented by Gravenor, her friend and patron in relation to her business as the owner of a select bawdy house, who is capable of inspiring deep affection in her, despite the fact that she has definitely renounced sex and its multifarious practices: As she tramped the Embankment, her hand skimming the parapet between herself and the river, she was touching Gravenor’s squamous skin: the ignoble lord, her would-be and rejected lover, who might have wrecked the structure o f life by overstepping the limits set by fantasy, (p. 322)

The danger lies both in the probable reactions of a heterosexual lover to the discovery of her anatomical peculiarities and in the demands of reality and sincerity on her part that a true relationship inevitably would advance. That past tied to her origin and to her unresolved relationship with her parents is a challenge that Eadith cannot accept before the possibility of a redemptive grace offers itself. In this novel, as previously, for example, in The Eye o f the Storm - redemptive grace is connected with old age, very often with an old woman. She meets her mother in London, by chance, more than once, in church, prayer book in hand, and imagines her as an intercessor for her redemption. Particularly suggestive is the scene when they meet in the Underground: She despaired o f ever catching sight o f her mother, when here she was, ascending by escalator out o f the depths o f the underground, Eadith herself descending, on a day o f rain. All the faces on the up and down conveyed some purpose. Excepting Eadie Twybom As she was carried higher, she was staring straight ahead, her abstracted face drained o f any human 17 The conclusion o f the process o f transvesting the self is utter sterility since each o f the parts o f the novel ends up with a death: Eudoxia’s old Greek lover, Angelos, at the end o f the first; Marcia and Eddie’s son at the end o f the second; the protagonist’s own at the end o f the novel.

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As Carolyn Bliss observes, the judge in the family is not her mother: she is the one who makes initial contact by passing a note reading ‘Are you my son Eddie?’, and, in reply, she receives another note reading ‘No, but I am your daughter Eadith’. After a little while she accepts the complexity of a situation which she was in the position to understand better than any other, saying, ‘I am so glad. I’ve always wanted a daughter’ (pp. 422-23). In a sense, this was not enough, because it was not forgiveness that she wanted by now. She had been led by Gravenor, indirectly, to see her androgynous essence as a positive value; in his last letter, written when already at war, he says: I like to think those other automata you and I created for ourselves out o f our inhibitions were human beings underneath, and that we might have loved each other, completely and humanly, if we had found the courage. Men and women are not the sole members o f the human hierarchy to which you and I can also claim to belong, (p. 426)

In a final attempt to resolve her/his inner conflict she renounces her world of fragmented identity and goes to visit her mother in male clothing but Eadith’s make-up,18 after leaving the brothel to her manager’s care to find ‘some occupation in keeping with the times’ (p. 427). It is as if she wants to reconcile herself with all her previous identities - that is, with her personal past and her androgynous uniqueness, and perhaps also with her perfection.19 The quest for the unity of the self has concluded with the affirmation, under Gravenor’s suggestion, of the values of love (both fleshly and divine), acceptance and forgiveness not disjointed by death, but inextricably inscribed in the framework of the times. This epiphany, however, does not acquire the supreme quiet that can be enjoyed at the dead centre of turmoil - in the ‘eye of the storm’, as is customary in White. Here the death of the protagonist is linked to his birth and is reminiscent of the successive rebirths she/he had enjoyed and that all the names allude to, while also reflecting those of both his parents. This may be a further allusion to two possible other halves of the same basic unity, another indication that identity can be found only in conjunction with wholeness. 18 All through this novel there is the repeated suggestion that rituals o f dressing up are used to sustain one’s own social self - the ‘face’, in I. Goffman’s terms - as opposed to the subject’s real identity. J. Colmer alludes to nakedness and clothing as synonymous o f private and public selves. See I. Goffman, Interaction Ritual (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972); and J. Colmer, Patrick White (London: Methuen, 1984). 19 Discussing this novel, Colmer speaks o f ‘the attraction of the impossible choice’ for White (ibid., p. 79).

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Personal suffering and humiliation are necessarily connected with human life and lead to spiritual insight, to the possibility of catching up with the mystery that is at the core of a human being, a sort of unity in diversity. In this existential process rational, intellectual qualities reveal themselves to be totally inadequate, as much as language. Notwithstanding the ‘world of fragmentation and despair in which even the perversities of vice can offer regeneration of a kind’ (p. 420), and just because the ‘difference between the sexes is no worse than their appalling similarity’ (p. 63), the writer’s and the character’s quests are directed towards the fulfilment that results from a perfectly harmonious love relationship whose essential union, however, constantly evades them. Yet whatever the form she took, or whatever the illusion temporarily possessing her, the reality o f love which is the core o f reality itself, had eluded her and perhaps always would, (p. 336)

K. Gelder comments on this attitude as follows: It should be noted, however, that although White does explore transexuality and sexual ‘^completeness’, he also occasionally smooths over the divisions by appealing to the somewhat glib sexual unity o f the androgyne: ‘the woman in man and the man in a woman’, (p. 360)20

A comparison with the thinking of Virginia Woolf, on the issues raised here by White, seems to me inevitable. The fusion of contraries was affirmed as a step towards the overcoming of the male/female opposition by Woolf in 1929, in A Room o f One s Own, where the androgynous mind is advocated as one capable of offering the best of both genders, while keeping their differences. This suggestion has been particularly fecund for some postmodern writers who have picked up and explored it further, as is shown by Nicoletta Caputo in Chapter 11 of this volume. As for Woolf, in her fantasy-biography Orlando,21 the main character lives a life spanning four centuries, experiencing both the life of a man and of a woman, and the writer makes a point of disrupting all the conventional certainties that the reconstruction of life might entail, especially those apparently uncontroversial ‘facts’ such as temporal and spatial coordinates, sex and names, and other key events. The story is the negation of its opening statement: ‘He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it - was in the act of . .. ,’22 The act in which the reader observes Orlando is that of lightly going across the epochs, in a Bergsonian, fluidly continuous time, and simultaneously experiencing 20 K. Gelder, ‘Sex in Australian Fiction 1 9 7 0 -1 9 8 7 ’ M ean jin , 1 (1988), pp. 129-30. 21 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Hogarth Press, 1928; reprint London: Grafton Books, 1979). 22 Ibid., p. 1.

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canonical moments in English literature. Orlando is a splendid writing creature whom Woolf denies the effort at introspection she had given the protagonists of her other books, and who has a self that is fractured by the losses suffered in her prime. She compulsorily needs writing: to hold together her fragmented self through the word, both whole and broken. In The Twyborn Affair as well, something relevant to the literary heritage of Australia has happened. The sexual transformations which the protagonist undergoes in the progress of the story undermine any claims to dominance of a masculinist model: as already mentioned, at a certain stage, repressed homosexual desires within the archetypally virile world of the outback station are exposed and this goes against established literary myths, temporarily necessary for a relatively young literature to distinguish itself from a longer, better known tradition whose language they both share. This demystification of the cultural myth o f the bushman has ramifications both for the deconstruction of an essentialist view of sexuality and for the deconstruction of the literary model at the foundations of ‘Aus. Lit.’ - and for indirect discussion of the role of the writer in the formation of cultural constructs. White’s protagonist presents the reader with a fragmented gender identity and this foreshadows the implicit metaphor of the writer’s identity fragmented through his characters. The idea of a self which perceives itself as exiled in different and multiple genders through ventriloquism has its equivalent in the notion of a writer who perceives himself doubly exiled, both in gender and behind all the masks he creates for himself and for the reader with his characters. Quite interestingly, after The Twyborn Affair, White wrote a self-portrait, Flaws in the Glass, and another novel, difficult to define in terms of literary genres - Memoirs o f Many in One. All of these were written in the first person, all of them toy with the traditional generic labels - biography, autobiography, diary, memoirs. The cover page of Memoirs o f Many in One, in the vastly popular Penguin edition, moreover, depicts a mask and a fan, both means of concealment in a book apparently about self-revelation. Just as Eddie’s complex personality had ventriloquized a discordant voice in terms of gender identity, Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray - the T behind the several masks of Memoirs o f Many in One, the novel fictionally edited by Patrick White himself who appears in the story as a character - ventriloquizes voices of many more discordant selves, as many as the personae she creates as projections of her multiple personality in what is claimed to be her autobiography. I would like to conclude simply by quoting from White’s Memoirs o f Many in One, in a jump from and to different levels of ontology advocating the view that each of the characters created by Alex are like the writer’s characters - temporary locations of their exiles from the instability of their personal identities. I hate m yself because I know the inner o f me. My beauty is a mask, my writing a subterfuge.23

23

P. White, Memoirs o f Many in One (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), p. 57.

THE TWYBORN AFFAIR Words are what matter. Even when they don’t communicate. That’s why I must continue writing. Somebody may understand in time. A ll that I experienced on Nisos - as Cassiani - in any o f my lives, past or future - as Bendict, Magda, D olly Formosa. Som ebody... could understand tomorrow ... I don’t aspire to God the Father - but one o f his understudies.24 While I - the creative ego - had possessed m yself o f Alex Gray’s life when she was still an innocent girl and created from it the many images I needed to develop my own obsessions, both literary and real.25

24 25

Ibid., pp. 86-7. Ibid., p. 192.

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Chapter 13

Paradoxes of Hijrah (Exile): Tales from Algerian Men in Britain Yvette Rocheron The narratives of immigration, told by six Algerian males who have married British women and settled legally in Britain, may help to make intelligible some of the links between ethnicity, individuals and cultural pluralism. The term ‘ethnicity’ denotes, here, a more elastic concept than the sharing - whether imagined or real of some common blood. In social theory ethnicity is a changeable status which, like class-consciousness, may or may not be voiced in particular contexts. Use of the term ‘ethnic identity’ marks a slippage between personal histories and histories of race, nations and cultures. It is these boundaries between the individual and the collective that will be examined in exploring this broad question: how do Algerian men become immigrants in Britain? ‘Algerian’? One wonders whether a sociological narrative should qualify these narrators as ‘Algerians’: some have become British. ‘Immigrants’? Some have lived here since the early 1980s. ‘People in exile’? Possibly. Two of them risk arrest upon returning to Algeria. All of these terms will be used here, not in a bid to confuse, but to signal the particular threads that make up their new social identity.

Exile: an analytical tool The universal paradigm of ‘exile’ may help identify some of the paradoxes of immigration from a Muslim country to Europe. In our European imagination, fed by such texts as Homer’s Odyssey, the exile, a male, maintains his turbulent relationship with the native land through loyalty, certainly, but also through episodes of forgetfulness. Ulysses, an immigre in search of his past, faces the dangerous frontier between loyalty and betrayal in one of the many lands that turns sour, the Island of the Cyclops. One of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, devours a few companions before Ulysses gets him drunk: When I saw that the wine had got into his head, I said to him as plausibly as I could: ‘Cyclops, you ask my name and I will tell it you; give me, therefore, the present you promised me; my name is Noman; this is what my father and mother and my friends have always called me. But the cruel wretch said: ‘Then I will eat all Noman’s comrades before

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Noman himself, and will keep Noman for the last. This is the present that I will make him.’1

The wonderful double entente - ‘nobody’ slipping into ‘somebody’ - eventually saves Ulysses’ life.2 Although lacking in such dramas, contemporary tales by immigrants from Africa reveal an interplay of strategies that highlights absence and presence, together with shrewdness. This is clearly the case in this study which deals with Algerians moving from a place, conceived by the confused Third World British representations of Algeria as some ‘backward African land’ to a country represented, in some Muslim imaginations, as an island of infidels. Ulysses’ identity is not simply that of an heroic Greek with a long lineage. He is Ulysses from Ithaca. Similarly, the ethnicities of Algerians are localized in space as well as in the history of the Arabs and the Berbers - before and after they marry their Penelope.

Hijrah: exile for Muslims More sharply than the banal term ‘immigration’, ‘exile’, in both the French and English languages evokes a spectrum of feeling attached to such dramatic oppositions as native/host land, inclusion/exclusion, past/present, loyalty/betrayal, danger/ seduction and liberation/imprisonment. Classical Arabic denotes an even stronger association between ‘immigration’ and ‘hijrah’. It is therefore important to establish this overlap before engaging with the nitty-gritty of contemporary identities. O riginally the classical Arabic term, hijrah, which nowadays means ‘immigration’, designated the Prophet’s exile from Mecca, his place of birth, to Medina where he established the first Qur’anic institutions in 622. Exile had been both a regrettable necessity and a sacred path to Allah’s forgiveness and love. Ever since, the Q ur’anic model of immigration has been interrogated by Muslim theologians particularly with regard to countries in which Muslims do not represent the majority. How can one be a good Muslim when away from the umma (the community of believers)? Should those who wish to practise their faith unfettered emigrate to a Muslim state, as the Qur’an seems to suggest with the words: ‘And the Angels will say: is the land of God not vast enough for you to emigrate?’3 Different Islamic theories and strategies have been developed to deal with such heartbreaking questions under such widely different historical situations as, for 1

Book XIX, Internet Electronic Classic Archives, Homer, The Odyssey, trans S.

Butler. 2 When Polyphemus, blinded by Ulysses, shouts to the other Cyclops: ‘Noman is killing me by fraud! Noman is killing me by force’ his neighbours shout back: ‘If no man is attacking you, you must be ill’. They walk away, leaving Polyphemus to his fate. See a slightly different interpretation o f the same passage in Maria Leandro’s study o f Portuguese names in France: ‘Les jeunes Portugais et les enjeux de la denomination’, in MigrationSociete, 11: 61 (1999), pp. 105-17. 3 Sourat IV, An-Nisa, verse 97-100.

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instance, the religious duty to emigrate from Spanish Andalusia in 1495, or the necessity of remaining under French colonization until better times.4 The notion of hijrah in modem European nation-states, which constmct immigrants as either ‘citizens’ or ‘foreigners’ but never as ‘Muslims’, may create deep crises of loyalty and faith. We find an echo of this Qur’anic notion of immigration as dangerous to the spiritual self in the Moroccan term, ahagra (people who bum their past) - men so desperate to emigrate to 1990s Europe that they risked life and limb on boats crossing to Gibraltar. In 1998 between 2000 and 3000 people were estimated to have died in such ventures over a period of two or three years.5 While this tragic view of illegal immigration arguably needs to be revised with regard to legal migrants who, in Francophone literature for example, tell less grim stories, there is nevertheless compelling evidence from French sociological studies that a paradigm of exile structures tales of male, legal Algerian migrations. Abdelmalek Sayad concludes, in his analysis of three generations of Algerian immigrants to France, that labouring men perceive immigration as ‘the original sin ... the essential sin which engenders all the other faults’.6 The more France is ‘abandoned by Allah’, the greater the fall as is testified by an eloquent, illiterate Berber Paris street cleaner: France, I shall tell you, is a woman o f ill repute; she is a whore. You don’t realise it, she turns around you, she tries to seduce you up until you drop into her net, and then, she sucks you, she drains your blood, she has her own way, always, and when she is fed up with you, she throws you down like an old slipper, like something with no meaning ... she is a witch. How many has she taken with her? She has a thousand ways to imprison you, for life, it is a curse.7

Immigration seduces, before exile curses, the Muslim soul. So far, we have assumed that, in modem times, ethnicity is a status contingent upon particular spaces and times for majority or minority groups. We have also identified a core Muslim representation of immigration to non-Muslim countries as ‘exile from one’s se lf’. Four antonyms - loyalty/betrayal, liberation/ imprisonment, seduction/danger and inclusion/exclusion - structure the narratives o f Algerian male migrants to France who were motivated by the search for employment outside their mountain villages as late as the 1970s. Surprisingly perhaps, this theoretical framework is useful for the analysis of a very different group of people - Francophone men, of mixed social origins, mostly highly educated, mostly secularized, and people who happened to be anchored (for some 4 Jean-Paul Chamay, ‘Que devient une religion reduite a l’obervance rituelle?’, Islam de France, 1 (1997), p. 40. 5 Liberation, 20 August 1998. 6 See Abdelmalek Sayad, L ’Immigration ou paradoxes de Valterite (Brussels: De Boeck, 1991), p. 20; see also ‘Les trois ages de l’emigration algerienne en France’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 15 (1977), pp. 59-79; ‘Le retour: element constituitif de la condition de l’immigre, Migrations-Societe, 10: 57 (1998), pp. 9-45. 7 Sayad, L Immigration, op. cit., pp. 126-27.

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as early as the 1980s) to the shores of England through marriage, like Ulysses to Ithaca. How do these men, then, make sense of their mono ethno-cultural origins in conditions that are so different from those found in France? France and Algeria are still welded to each other: 7 million people8 live in France with different memories of Algeria whereas, in Algeria, families have accumulated memories of emigration over nearly a century so that, for earlier generations of ‘fellahs/peasants’, ‘la belle France’ embodied a treacherous siren. This is not the case for Britain with a recent population of about 7000 Algerians.9 How do these men respond to the questions asked by British natives unfamiliar with Algeria? Do they express a ‘feeling of sin’ in relation to kin and country as do their compatriots in France?

Negotiating myths of origin Coming from Algeria to England creates opportunities for self-dramatizing narratives as in travellers’ tales. The four Berbers and two Arabs, on whose accounts I draw here, seek to emphasize in public their nationality, at the expense of religious and cultural identities. As their Berberite and Arabicite evaporate, they promote a form of ‘Algerianness’ for British consumption which requires, from people conscious of their long lineage, acrobatic shifts of identity. YR: Do you see yourself as an Arab? Hassan (aged 48, 16 years in Britain): Not really, Algerian, yes. For my parents, the important thing is being a Muslim, not being an Arab. You think o f Saddam Hussein or rich sheikhs but that’s in UK or France. I don’t recognise m yself even as an Arab or a Muslim. I don’t think I have any affinities with Pakistanis or Egyptians or a Moroccan or a Tunisian. We are different. Even in Algeria, if you live in the West or the East, we are different. The only thing we have in common is Islam, not the languages, and not even the ways people behave.

Both within and outside Algeria, opting for the ‘Algerian’ label helps to resist reductionist definitions of the ethnic self. Loyalty to parents does not seem crucial here. Hassan, a practising Muslim, points to the illusion of unity: filial, national or international. An ethnic minority in Algeria, the Berbers have the longest tradition of emigration to France.10 Some of them still mourn the defeat of their nationhood at the hands 8 An estimate, derived from the work o f Benjamin Stora - see La Gangrene et I ’oubli (Paris: La Decouverte, 1991) m dlm aginaires de guerre: Algerie- Vietnam, en France at aux Etats-Unis (Paris: La Decouverte, 1977). 9 The total o f 6673 Algerians recorded by the 1991 census o f the Office o f National Statistics is an underestimate as a number o f Algerians have sought refugee status in Britain since that time. 10 About 5 million Berbers - that is 2 0-30 per cent o f the Algerian population which is formed mainly by Arabs.

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of Arab invaders in the seventh century, for these people are proudly nationalist. Thus, for the Berber respondents, any national label oversimplifies complex forms of personal and collective identities: YR: Are you Arabic or Berber in origin? Jim (aged 23, 2 years in Britain): I am Berber. It does not matter to me. I am Algerian, that’s all for me because Berbers and Arabs, I like all people, they are not different. To me, if you are going to make a difference between Arabs and Berbers, it is going to be like being a racist, isn’t it? And I am here over in England, so, [laughter] I cannot describe how [laughter] I am going to be racist between Arabs and Berbers to a British girl, it’s completely different, oh yes, I am Arab, oh yes, I am Berber, to me it’s the same, like in France between Britons and French people, there is no difference.

Jim both asserts (‘I am a Berber’) and denies Berberite as a desirable ethnic difference, having appropriated the language of racism/anti-racism from France or Britain. It could, however, matter again, as in Algeria ‘it’s completely different’. Thus Jim positions Berberite, like Arabicite, within the global language of difference, not as a fixed identity but as a political identity which is also dependent on social boundaries (age, country, interlocutor and so on) By contrast, the Algerian self-label offers a promise of sameness: ‘I like all people, they are not different.’ Like A ra bicite, B erberite has become a linguistically and culturally deterritorialized identity whereas the Algerian self is perceived as a handy device. Repressing their time-space ethnicities, respondents seem to nurture the republican illusion of national identity, based on notions of unity, resistance and pragmatism. The twentieth century has turned the waving of passports at border crossings into a prominent display of one’s nationality but there remains a cultural frontier, albeit less tangible, through which foreigners have to proceed time and again. What does one call oneself? When Ulysses calls him self‘Noman’, his stratagem negates his parentage. Exile provokes a similar strategy of self-denigration as in the following volte-face: Selim (aged 36, 14 years in Britain)’. Sometimes I present m yself as French in terms o f jobs. For my business, I have a name Pierre Lebrun, because I know Selim is not very popular. I can speak French and nobody realises where I come from. It is just for business. When I was in academia, it was easier, but in the business world, where you come from is very important and on my CV it’d make a huge difference, I wouldn’t get any job. There is prejudice, not always, but basically you’d be taking a chance . . . . These companies I do a lot o f training for, I train business people, they would not respond to a letter from Selim Mohammed, computer consultant, they’ll think I pretend [laughing]. So, I am French in my new job. I don’t mind, I don’t care as long as I have a job.

After 14 years of residence, England is, for this British citizen, a land that occasionally pulls down the shutters of inclusion or exclusion. Yet it is not a land

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of exile that devours the soul. Selim seems well established in his profession and marriage. In no way does his account convey any ‘feeling of sin’. He even derives some fun from inventing a full French identity kit as an employment strategy in his new motherland - an impossible trick to pull off in France with authentic Frenchmen around! Here is a theatrical, postcolonial irony in which the ex-colonized successfully impersonates the ex-colonizer in order to deflect European prejudice against Muslims. Britain is shaped by this middle-class man as a space where foreign Muslim status can be negotiated with some shrewdness. Three other respondents have disguised their origins with anglicized names. Jala has become Jim, the son-in-law. Paradoxically perhaps, at the level of social interactions the name-as-mask provides a liberating affirmation of a desirable identity. The aim is, at worst, not to lose face and, at best, to seduce the natives. At the collective level, the symbolic cost is disloyalty.

Myths of return Ulysses’ peregrinations attest to his will to return as he keeps wrenching himself from seductive places. In modem times emigres, exiles and refugees are expected to follow the same path. The myth of return is especially potent whenever it distils the desire by host countries to cast out their outsiders or when native states question the value of emigration, as Algerian governments have done more or less since 1973.11 So, do Algerian men who have married abroad express a desire to return to their homeland or are they more ambivalent? However different and diverse their experiences, once settled through marriage in England, they weave modem tales that cloud, as in ancient stories, the frontiers between attraction and detachment on the one hand, and destiny and will on the other. Each respondent mobilized the current ‘troubles’ in Algeria into the legitimate argument that there is little possibility of returning safely: YR: Would you go back permanently? Solomon {aged 36, 13 years in Britain): Put it this way: if Algeria was a peaceful country, like it used to be, yes, I would consider spending some time in Algeria if I did not feel comfortable here but, as long as I feel comfortable here, I’ll carry on living here, I mean if Algeria is not peaceful, I don’t have any choice.

11 The Boumedienne regime questioned the large quotas o f immigrants which previous Algerian governments had signed with France since the 1960s. Nationalist feelings were intensified in the 1970s, the economic value o f emigration revised, and the hardships o f migrants in France deplored. Since the 1980s, new objections have emerged, some economic (decrease in foreign currencies being sent back, brain drain and so on) while others are cultural. See Kay Adamson, Algeria in Competing Ideologies (London: Cassell, 1995) and Sayad, ‘Le retour’, op. cit. Disappointment at the few benefits brought by emigres was expressed in the 1980s by the hefty landing taxation imposed upon them.

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Solomon’s narration refers to fate and contingency but his account is a partial one. He is not acknowledging openly what he knows inwardly - ‘Troubles or not, I don’t want to return, I feel more comfortable here. ’ Instead, he invents his childhood Algeria as a land of unity (which is debatable in itself) in order to reject the present Algeria. This non-dit indicates the detachment, which long-term emigres may feel towards the native land, unlike Ulysses. More precisely, the ‘troubles’ free immigrants from the constant need to explain less legitimate reasons for not wishing to return. Returning home, after all, is clamped to destiny. According to Sayad, although the imagined return structures the condition o f all working-class immigrants, neither Algerian society nor those ‘cursed’ to settle in France wish the return to take place.12 For Algerians, the emigres have added minor sins (Westernized cultural codes, being too successful or too poor and so on) to the major problem of their absence. For those in exile, France - in the tales they tell about immigrant life during trips back to their native land - is endowed with fullness, solidarity, light and strength - how else could the absence be justified? When back in Europe, Algeria gains the attributes of a land of exile - those of distance, decentredness and darkness. These two narratives constitute one of the major discursive processes whereby the immigration of labourers is fully legitimized as permanent on both sides. This study, which deals with a different category of immigrants to a different country a decade or so later, identifies the same narrative structures, but with some new additions. As husbands to a would-be foreign wife, respondents judge that a return would be problematic for the wife (and children) in an alien country represented as closed to Western women’s aspirations. The husband’s narrative is grafted on to the immigrants’ narratives analysed by Sayad but, nowadays, with much softer hues. Algeria has become a land of exile for various reasons which indicate that the politicization of the return continues, although under new sociohistorical conditions, some of which concern contemporary gender dynamics. On landing, Ulysses fails to recognize Ithaca, for a time an island of mist and chaos: ‘A las’, he exclaimed, ‘among what manner o f people am I fallen? Are they savage and uncivilised or hospitable and humane? Where shall I put all this treasure, and which way shall I go? I wish I had stayed over there with the Phaeacians.’13

The respondents experience similarly daunting changes outside and within themselves. ‘Over there’, they encountered much ambivalence towards immigrants, nationalisms in disarray and strife which could cause you to be arrested (two respondents had not done their national service). At a more personal level, emigres do not bum their past but, once immigrants, each generation fantasizes about an 12 13

See Sayad, L'Immigration, op. cit., p. 47 and ‘Le retour’, op. cit., p. 395. Homer, The Odyssey, op. cit., Book XIII.

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illusory unity between past and present to which mass media, modem transport and communication contribute by abolishing frontiers between presence and absence. However, more than patriotism and ethnicities are implicated in fantasized returns among older respondents who portray their cultural differences from compatriots as an unbridgeable mismatch between generations: I don’t like the younger generations. Arabisation and Islamisisation all go in the same way. I was in Algeria in 1988-89. As soon as people travel, they ask ‘Why should I be insulted?’ I want basic rights; it is not being better off which matters. (Hassan, aged 48, 16 years in Britain)

Hassan posits himself as a man who is alert to the prerogatives of democracy, seen as lacking among Algerian youth whom he categorizes as an ‘insulting’ crowd: In Algeria you feel excluded (as a migrant), especially people o f my generation. With the younger generations, we have nothing in common. They have been infiltrated by Saudi-Arabia, it is understandable because before it had been difficult to talk about Islam in Algeria but these people come in and they are changing everything, even the way o f dressing, I’ll never wear something like that, it is a sort o f exhibition, and they are clever they have studied, they have a high education, they are very able, they have a total refusal o f Western values.

Hassan stresses that moderate Muslim values have been lost by younger generations while he shares common cultural practices with highly educated Muslims, as he was once: Hassan: Too much freedom is not good at times. I watch the TV and cannot sit there and watch. In my generation, I cannot sit in the same room as my father and watch someone kiss on TV, it is nearly pom and I still can’t. Heather (his wife)'. A kiss is OK. Hassan: Not a long one. I can’t sit comfortably and people over there think this freedom o f the tabloid press is invading the privacy o f people, I feel the same.

Although Hassan experiences in Britain the same discom fort at Western representations of sexuality as if he were still living in Algeria, his feeling of being a misfit ‘over there’ persists. A calculation of losses and advantages is constant in migrants’ selection of narratives - which story will be the least troublesome for the self, family, communities and national groups? This is even more pertinent for immigrants to Europe from Third World countries who, although well settled, are still required to account for their experiences by all and sundry. Thus study suggests that discursive structures, constitutive of the paradigm of exile, underpin the diverse stories told by a few immigrant men about Algeria, Britain and France. Archetypal oppositions such as exclusion/inclusion, past/present, seduction/danger and absence/return

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confirm that a core condition of Muslim immigration is the risk of betrayal by and of the native groups. Furthermore, myths of return can legitimize contradictory desires about a no return. The statute of Muslims living in secular states is not yet resolved by modem Islamic jurists, wary of Islamic relativism14 but no Muslim respondent interpreted his migration as a curse. Probably the marriage itself moderates any tragic Muslim views of hijrah well within the structures of Algerian immigration to Britain. Respondents’ redefinition of their Muslim roots in relation to British assumptions regarding other British Muslim groups concurs with this possibility. But, for the time being, it is more safe to say that their narratives reveal a strong process of relative autonomy from Algeria, except perhaps for those who express a soft form of long-distance patriotism,15 along with a reluctance to adopt a dual nationality. This process of detachment reflects a tendency already identified among post-1962 Algerians migrating to France,16 but it is currently articulated with the global processes of migration and cultural pluralism. To an unprecedented extent, in France, Britain and Algeria, nationality scarcely camouflages the diversity of origins and nations. Whether familiar or not with this objective convergence, respondents deftly deploy strategies of resistance against fixed definitions of their ethnic identification and, in this, they are no different from any other groups, British or foreign, who fear marginalization. A few characteristics o f this general phenomenon, however, need to be noted. First, under the British gaze, Arabs and Berbers tone down their robust identification with their respective ethnicity, each group probably for different reasons. Second, this detachment eventually mobilizes an instrumental national identity, which these immigrants perceive as attractive because o f its vaguely non-discriminatory character that opens up a strategic opportunity to highlight or obscure a particular mono-ethnic identity. Third, through such discursive processes, self-exile is translated into a no-retum narrative that enunciates a few key symbols of contemporary pluralism (ethnic origins, nationality, names, myth of return). In France the football player Zinedine Zidane has become the champion of ‘Bleu, Blanc, Beur’,17 the colours of metissage since France won the 1998 World Cup. He will never change his Maghrebi name, unlike some others with Maghrebi names and less famous. Concealing one’s Maghrebi name for professional reasons epitomizes some of the tensions of European pluralism. On the one hand, such a strategy prevents one being seen as undesirably different; on the other, it 14 See Sadeck Sellam, ‘Peut-on etre un bon musulman quand on est citoyen d’un etat non musulman?’, Islam de France, 1 (1997), p. 28. 15 See Benedict Anderson, ‘Exodus’, Critical Inquiry, 20 (Winter 1994), pp. 313— 27. 16 Sayad, ‘Les effets culturels de 1’emigration’, Nouveaux enjeux culturels au Maghreb, ed. Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (Paris: CNRS, 1986), p. 389; see also Alec Hargreaves, Immigration, Race and Ethnicity in France (London: Routledge, 1995). 17 A pun on the tricolour flag ‘bleu, blanc, rouge’, ‘beur’ referring to the children o f Maghrebi immigrants bom in France, most o f whom are French.

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acknowledges the hybrid self. In brief, integration remains conditional on significant symbolic departures from native cultural codes - sometimes Berber or Arab, sometimes Algerian, British or French. Certainly, to alternate such ‘emotionally charged symbols’18 projects the illusion of ubiquity. Algerian migrations embody paradoxes of modem immigration to Europe, which nowadays encompass cultural pluralism - the latter being probably a discursive counterpoint to a century of segregation and ethnic cleansing. Any exilic identity is a wounded soul roaming a nostalgic past. Any European Third World immigrant identity should be more than that. It should seek to negotiate perceptions of cultural difference, both here and over there, within a paradigm of culture that treats all cultures equally. In this utopia, Ulysses and Cyclops need fear each other no longer.

18 See Richard Holton, G lobalisation and the N ation -state (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 150.

Chapter 14

The Left Side of Exile: The Dream of Tolerance in Francesca Duranti’s Sogni Mancini Marina Spunta Two languages, two lands, perhaps two souls ... am I a man or two strange halves o f one?1

These lines by the Italian-American poet Joseph Tusiani powerfully render the condition of emigration - in this case that of Italian emigrant writers in America. Francesca Duranti is a special kind of emigrant: bom in Genoa in 1935, brought up in Tuscany, possessing a law degree from Pisa University, and, to date, with eight published novels, various short stories and literary translations to her name, Duranti has recently moved to New York, although she regularly returns to her villa in the countryside near Lucca. In her latest novel, Sogni Mancini} the protagonist/narrator Martina Satriano, rather like the author, chooses voluntary exile from the oppressing academic, social and political Italian system, and settles down to lecture in New York. The central motifs of the novel reveal displacement emerging as a positive state, allowing both individual and society to strive for an ideal level of perfection and tolerance. I will explore these motifs after briefly introducing some aspects of exile and emigration, with a focus on the present Italian scene. The notion of exile encompasses the state of forced, as well as voluntary, separation from one’s native country,3 and is characterized by the dynamic state of the person leaving home who is, as Paul Tabori puts it, ‘changing from exile to emigrant or emigrant to exile’, for, he continues, ‘an essential element in this process is the attitude of the exile to the circumstances prevailing in their homeland that are bound to influence them psychologically’.4 Both exile and emigration are potentially traumatic experiences5 which are often accompanied by a state of crisis, either preceding or following the departure, both in the person leaving (who often 1 Joseph Tusiani, ‘Song o f the Bicentennial’, in Gente mia and Other Poems (Stone Park, IL: Italian Cultural Center). 2 Francesca Duranti, Sogni Mancini (Milan: Rizzoli, 1996). The author has translated her novel into English: Left-handed Dreams ed. Nicoletta McGowan (Market Harborough: Troubador, 2000). 3 Paul Tabori, The Anatomy o f Exile (London: Harrap, 1972), p. 23. 4 Ibid., p.2. 5 Leon Grinberg and Rebeca Grinberg, Psicoanalisi dell Emigrazione e dell Esilio (Milan: Angeli, 1990).

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turns the crisis into a rebirth) and in those left behind. While in the case of exile the person is often forced to leave in a hurry, missing the important ritual of departing, which might equate their leaving to a death, in the case of emigration, or voluntary exile, one knows that it is always possible, although difficult, to go back. In classical antiquity and in the Middle Ages, as Ehrhard Bahr suggests, exile was one of the most terrifying of punishments, especially for a writer (take the case of Ovid, for instance). Modem history’s sentences of exile, however, have become rare and are mostly cases of political or voluntary exile.6 Remo Ceserani’s claim that ‘the image of the stranger, the foreigner, is present in the collective imagination of all communities, for it is used in the very construction of a community identity’7 holds true despite the increasing multiculturalism of present societies. The notions of exile and emigration are central to postmodern speculation, with its loss of faith in grand narratives, its self-reflexivity and its re-evaluation of plurality as positive. As Anthony Elliott puts it: Postmodemity suggests that cultural ambivalence cannot be overcome, that ambiguity and discontinuity cannot be straightened out, that social and cultural organisation cannot be rationally ordered and controlled . . . . Postmodernism denies that there is any repressed truth to the path o f modernity, and as such recasts society and history as decentred. In short, postmodernism opens the way for a liberation o f differences.8

Working with the assumption that ‘postmodemity promotes a reflexive mapping to ourselves, a mapping of selves multiple, other and strange’,9 the metaphors of exile and displacement become central tools with which to explore contemporary fiction. The themes of distance and displacement are common (although not exclusive) to the literature of emigration, which, in the first conference on Italian emigrant writing in 1990, was defined as the whole of the works written by emigrants,

6 See, for example, Ehrhard Bahr and Carolyn See, Literary Exiles & Refugees in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 1988), p. 3. 7 Remo Ceserani, Lo Straniero (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1998), p. 7. On the same topic see also Mario Domenichelli and Piero Fasano, Lo Straniero (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997); Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, Women’s Writing in Exile (Chapel Hill/London: University o f Carolina Press, 1989); Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Francesco Loriggio, ed., Social Pluralism and Literary History. The Literature o f the Italian Emigration (Toronto/New York/Lancaster: Guernica, 1996). 8 Anthony Elliott, Subject to Ourselves. Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996), p. 7. Consider also: ‘Postmodemity is a self-constituting and self-propelling culture, a culture which is increasingly self-referential in direction.... It is possible to make sense o f this apparent disorientation, however, provided that w e grasp the irreducibility o f the plurality o f human worlds’ (p. 21). 9 Ibid., p. 4.

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whatever their thematics.10 In moving to New York, Francesca Duranti is continuing the tradition of the ‘transatlantic intellectual’,11 as defined by Robert Viscusi - a tradition which includes names such as Umberto Eco, Furio Colombo, and Paolo Valesio. Sogni Mancini presents an ironical reflection on the state of living and writing abroad,12 sharing with the literature of emigration a considerable emphasis on dichotomy and plurilinguism. In particular, Sogni Mancini can be compared to Luigi Fontanella’s Hot Dog,13 which similarly recounts the state of suspension, confusion and conflict in the protagonist, whose identity, like that of Martina Satriano, is rooted in gastronomic habits, and also to Rosa Cappiello’s Paese Fortunato ,14 whose monologic, diaristic and autobiographical account of a writer’s life in a foreign country becomes, as in Duranti’s novel, the means of integration into the new society. The condition of exile is commonly employed in Italian contemporary fiction to voice a sense of disillusionment with Italian society and politics, as in Tabucchi’s Sostiene Pereira, which dialogues with Sogni Mancini on political commitment and the role of intellectuals. The metaphor of travelling as voluntary exile is also central in writers such as Eco, Del Giudice, De Carlo, Celati, Tondelli, and Petrignani (to name just a few), and particularly in the latest generation of ‘young’ writers, such as (among many others), Silvia Ballestra and Rossana Campo, who sets her stories between France and the United States. Set in this context, Francesca Duranti’s fiction15 (which has received public acclaim both in Italy and internationally, but significant critical attention only 10 Jean-Jacques Marchand, ‘Introduzione’, in Marchand, ed., La Letteratura dell ’Emigrazione. Gli Scrittori di Lingua Italiana nelM ondo (Turin: Fondazione G. Agnelli, 1991), p. xxiii. Interestingly, while francophone is a long-accepted term, Htalofonia’ is still used to define non-native speakers o f Italian in Italy (and not abroad), which is symptomatic o f the still scarce critical awareness o f the Italian language being used (also for literary purposes) outside Italy. 11 Robert Viscusi, ‘La Letteratura dell’Emigrazione Italiana negli Stati Uniti’, in Marchand, ed., La Letteratura d e ll’Emigrazione, p. 132. 12 See Teresa M. Lazzaro, ‘L’essere doppio al di qua e al di la dell’Atlantico: l’esperienza di Luigi Fontanella’, in Marchand, ed., La Letteratura d e ll’Emigrazione, op. cit., pp. 449-58; Alfredo Luzi, ‘Espressionismo Linguistico ed Emarginazione Sociale: la Scrittura di Rosa Cappiello’, ibid., pp. 539-45. 13 Luigi Fontanella, Hot D og (Rome: Bulzoni, 1986). 14 Rosa Cappiello, Paese Fortunato (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981). 15 So far Duranti has published the following novels: La Bambina (Milan: La Tartaruga, 1976; Milan: Rizzoli, 1985); Piazza mia bella Piazza (Milan: La Tartaruga, 1978); La Casa sul Lago della Luna (Milan: Rizzoli, 1984) (which brought the author to fame, with three Italian literary prizes and 15 translations); Lieto Fine, (Milan: Rizzoli, 1987); Effetti Personali (Milan: Rizzoli, 1988) (four literary prizes and translations); Ultima Stesura (Milan: Rizzoli, 1991); Progetto Burlamacchi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994); Sogni Mancini (Milan: Rizzoli, 1996). Among her published translations are: Susan Dick, ed., The Complete Shorter Fiction o f Virginia Woolf. Tutti i racconti di Virginia Woolf (Milan: La Tartaruga, 1988) (translated with Adriana Bottini, Masolino D ’ Amico); P. Hartling, Risentimento (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989) (from the German Nachgetragene Liebe).

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recently16) explores, in a distinctive voice, the problematic relationship between the individual and society, and in particular between the writer and the intellectual world. The clear autobiographical stance (especially in her first novel, La Bambina) and the constant intertextual references create a recognizable fictional world, conveyed through a variety of perspectives, which include a third-person male narrator {La Casa sul Lago della Luna, Progetto Burlamacchi), a first-person male narrator (Lieto Fine) and, predominantly, a first-person female narrator {Piazza Mia Bella Piazza, Effetti Personali, Ultima Stesura, Sogni Mancini). All the protagonists’ quests merge the metaphor of the journey with that of writing, as their jobs as writers, journalists, or academics take them to foreign countries, from Austria in La Casa sul Lago della Luna, to eastern Europe in Effetti Personali, to the United States in Sogni Mancini. Sogni Mancini is a self-portrait of the Italian Martina Satriano, who emigrated to the United States to lecture in ‘History of European Culture’ at New York University. By focusing on Martina’s ‘micro-diversity’, rather than her ‘unAmericanness’,17 in line with Christopher Hitchen’s ‘hyphenate principle’ and much contemporary American fiction, the novel positively presents different, coexisting cultural forms, in order to challenge public definitions of national and individual identity, and to foster amalgamation of minority groups with the dominant culture 16 The main scholarly works on Durand’s fiction to date include: Sharon Wood, ‘Writing in a Changing World: An Interview with Francesca Duranti’, The Italianist, 12 (1992), pp. 186-95; Sharon Wood, ‘Seductions and Brazen Duplications: Two Recent Novels from Italy’, Forum fo r Modern Language Studies, 28:4 (1992), pp. 349-62; Rita Wilson, ‘City and Labyrinth: Theme and Variation in Calvino and Durand’s Cityscapes’, Literator, 13:2 (1992), pp. 85-95; Shirley W. Vinall, ‘Francesca Duranti: Reflections and Inventions’, in Zygmut Baranski and Lino Pertile, eds, The New Italian Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 99-120; Giovanna Giobbi, ‘Know the Past, Know Thyself. Literary Pursuits and the Quest for Identity’, in A. S. Byatt’s Possession and in F. Durand’s Effetti Personali’, European Studies, 24 (1994), pp. 41-54; Stefania Lucamante, ‘Intervista a Francesca Duranti’, Quaderni dTtalianistica, 15, 1-2 (1994), pp. 247-55; Shirley W. Vinall, ‘The Portrait o f the Second World War in the Early Works o f Francesca Duranti and Rosetta Loy’, The Italianist, 15 (1995), pp. 231-47; Stefania Lucamante, ‘La Geometria nel Romanzo: i “Grafici Narrativi” di Francesca Duranti’, Forum Italicum, 2 9 ,2 (1995), pp. 313-22; Janice Kozma, ‘Bio-fictive Conversations and the Uncentred Woman in Francesca Durand’s N ovels’, The Italianist, 16 (1996), pp. 176-90; Rita Wilson, ‘Writing an Identity: the Case o f Francesca Duranti’, Studi dTtalianistica nelTAfrica Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 9 (1996), pp. 81-98; Marina Spunta, ‘A Balanced Language: Spoken and Dialogic Style in the Narrative o f Francesca Duranti’, The Modern Language Review, 9 5 ,2 (April 2000), pp. 374-88. Among over 100 review articles on Durand’s fiction to date, consider: Monica Witt, ‘Incidentalmente Donna’, Leggere Donna, 34 (September-October 1991), pp. 23-24; Daniela Pasti, ‘Se il Sogno ti Giocaun brutto Scherzo’, La Repubblica, 5, 1 (1997). 17 Christopher Hitchen defines ‘hyphenate principle’ the preference o f old and new minorities ‘to emphasize their micro-diversities, while many among the majority regard that very stress as un-American’: C. Hitchen, New York Times Book Review, 25 June 1995, p. 7, in Lois Parkinson Zamora, American Contemporary Women Writers (London: Longman, 1998), p. 1.

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by unveiling unjust social situations (such as homelessness).18 In voicing her split subjectivity by fictionally addressing her students in frequent direct appeals,19 Martina discovers a flexible definition for herself, as her narration finds ‘a voice or style that does not violate [the] several components of [her] identity’,20 allowing her to leave behind her sense of being Italian in America and adopt a more positive Italian-American identity. The author’s disclaimer of any autobiographical resemblance with her protagonist in the Preface - ‘Questo non e un romanzo autobiografico’ (p. 9)21 - in fact leads the experienced reader of Duranti’s fiction, who is used to an element of autobiography, to suspect its presence. But regardless of any similarity to Duranti’s own life, the very ordinariness of the protagonist clearly works to make the (female) reader identify more easily with Martina. Besides her undertaking of traditional women’s tasks, Martina’s ‘normality’ is, in fact, quite striking in her passion for social justice, interestingly attributed in the Preface to her father’s influence:22 La mia protagonista e una donna come tutte le altre, che ripercorre i suoi ricordi, cucina i suoi pasti, arranca nella sua carriera, cura il suo corpo, vive i suoi amori, lava i suoi bucati, affronta le sue tentazioni. Ma intanto cerca di aprire per tutti le porte di quella regione dello spirito che fu di suo padre e del mio, applicando a una macchina per scaldare i croissant una modifica destinata a redimere il mondo dall’intolleranza.23 My protagonist is a woman like all the others, who goes back over her memories, cooks her meals, struggles along in her career, takes trouble over her appearance, lives her love stories, does her washing, faces her temptations. But in the meantime she tries to open for everyone the doors o f that spiritual region that was o f her father as well as mine, making a

18 Hitchen, New York Times Book Review, op. cit., p. 4. 19 The protagonist/narrator repeatedly appeals to her students directly, for example ‘Potrei caveme una lecture da tenere a voi ragazzi’ (p. 9); ‘I could put together a lecture for you students from all this’ (p. 3); ‘Ragazzi, sto parlando di piu di trent’anni fa’ (p. 13); ‘Folks, I’m talking over thirty years ago’ (p. 5). This intrinsically dialogic feature o f the text is an interesting authorial device to draw the reader into the story. 20 Hitchen, New York Times Book Review, op. cit., p. 6. 21 The title o f the novel evokes dreaming as an image o f the unconscious, uncontrolled identity, confirmed by the adjective ‘lefthanded’, possibly Martina’s original inclination before being corrected. The phrase sogni mancini recalls the Italian expression tiri mancini (dirty tricks), perhaps hinting at Martina’s unexpected (and later declined) job offer, alluding to Berlusconi’s lucky rise to power (which will be discussed later). 22 ‘quella regione dello spirito che fu di suo padre e del m io’ (Preface) suggests an identification between the character/narrator’s and the author’s father, Paolo Rossi, a committed socialist, who taught law at Pisa University and served as minister o f public education after the war. 23 From the Preface o f Sogni Mancini, signed Francesca Duranti, N ew York, 2 giugno 1996 - my translation. All following English translations o f the novel are taken from Duranti’s own translation, Left-handed Dreams, edited and introduced by Nicoletta Di Ciolla McGowan. The Preface was not translated.

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modification on her croissant-warmer dream machine, destined to redeem the world from intolerance.

From the Preface, Martina appears as a portrait of contemporary woman, dividing herself amongst many tasks, in the attempt to dominate the natural order of things,24 while searching for her real self in the past. Her relationship to food and cooking immediately emerges as central to her identity, and to the main theme of tolerance, as the metaphor of international cuisine harmoniously blends a variety of ingredients and cooking methods into a whole. In a society that is ‘no longer defined by geographical or national borders but by cultural contact’,25 such as that in the United States (but also in Europe, with its increasing immigration rate), individual identity, and especially women’s identity, is constantly shifting and adapting to new roles. Academic and political life, in particular, offer an interesting paradigm of such an apparently strong, yet weak notion of identity,26 driven as it is by market forces. The novel’s juxtaposition between American and Italian education and political systems highlights some positive, but mostly negative, sides of both countries, indirectly favouring, despite its strong businesslike nature, the US university system, which gives Martina the opportunity to develop her career that was not available in Italy, where nepotistic politics often blocks the careers of young scholars who do not enjoy the patronage of senior professors. All the more interesting is Martina’s original research project, attempting to reunify not just her self but the whole of society,27 by exploring her oneiric life through her DreamMachine, which wakes her up daily with these words:

24 Domestic tasks can be seen as rituals, as in Becker’s definition, ‘the manmade forms o f things prevailing over the natural order and taming it, transforming it and making it safe’: Ernest Becker, The Denial o f Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 238. According to Monica Wilson, ritual is inherently social, for it reveals ‘the values o f a group (as opposed to those o f the individual)’: Monica Wilson, Ritual o f Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). Both references are found in Ann Romines, ‘Introduction’ to The Hom e Plot. Women, Writing and D om estic R itual (Amherst: U niversity o f Massachussets Press, 1992). By defining herself in terms o f her past life, as well as her domestic rituals, from the very beginning Martina merges her individual and social identity - two components which remain intrinsically linked in her quest for identity. 25 Parkinson Zamora, American Contemporary Women Writers, op. cit., p. 2. 26 Consider Renate Holub’s notion o f ‘paradoxically potent weak thought’ in ‘Weak Thought and Strong Ethics: the Postmodern and Feminist Theory in Italy’, Annali dTtalianistica, 9 (1995), p. 133. 27 This portrays the great ‘reflexivity in academic culture’, as argued by Hopper, whereby ‘academics are increasingly using the tools and resources o f their own disciplines to analyse and reflect upon their own disciplines, [...] as postmodernism has encouraged the human scientist to look critically at his or her situation and the practices o f representation, objectification and prescription that form it’: Simon Hopper ‘Reflexivity in Academic Culture’, in Barbara Adam and Stuart Allan, eds, Theorizing Culture (London: University College London Press, 1995), pp. 58-69 at pp. 59-60.

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Offered a new high-ranking job in Italy by the enigmatic Professor Sebastiano Cerignola, Martina eventually declines it, making her home permanently in the United States. This plot line, Duranti admits in an interview,28 reflects the author’s own refusal to run for the post of mayor of Lucca for Berlusconi’s political party, ‘Forza Italia’, in the 1994 Italian general elections, because of their lack of a serious programme. Seen in this light, Martina’s left-wing social commitment is a clear statement directed against the then New Right in power, with their false promises of social development - a falseness betrayed by their pretence of stylishness and intellectualism, figured in Professor Cerignola’s choice of apparently high-class restaurants. In reaction to this moment of temptation, Martina strengthens her social belief in an egalitarian and tolerant society by merging her two cultural heritages into an harmonious, international self and cuisine. Martina’s dual perspective, granting her further detachment and objectivity, often results in an ironical tone, common to all Duranti’s narratives. This sense of displacement powerfully emerges in the recurrent metaphors of shipwreck, an unexpectedly positive image, for it allows Martina to take a clear and proud look at her split situation and recreate a new self, from what she defines as: ... uno dei tanti europei arenati sulle spiagge di una delle tante Universita americane, in una posizione nella quale e molto difficile andare avanti mentre non e affatto escluso che un’onda ti riporti indietro, perche th a t’s America. Un sistema che non fa certo complimenti e non ci mette molto a sopprimere una cattedra o un intero dipartimento con tanti saluti, non appena il cliente sovrano - voi studenti che pagate la retta - dimostra poco interesse (p. 28). ... one o f the many Europeans stranded in num berless A m erican Universities. Usually in a teaching post where it’s hard to get ahead, but where it only takes a single wave to knock you back, because that’s America, and there they don’t stand on ceremony. When the biggest customers - you fee-paying students - lose interest, a course and sometimes a whole department can be eliminated, just like that.

Just as the frontier, as Claudio Magris suggests, is double, ambiguous, at times a bridge, at others a barrier, but always suggesting that everyone, as in a medieval mystery play, is the Other,29 similarly identity is a fluid, ever-changing state, whereby we constantly review our origins from a distance; our point of departure is something we lose and find again, afresh, in an incessant process of displacement 28 Pasti, ‘Se il Sogno ti Gioca’, op. cit. 29 Claudio Magris, Utopia e Disincanto (Milan: Garzanti, 1999), p. 52. On the question o f modem identity and literature see also Claudio Magris, Itaca e Oltre (Milan: Garzanti, 1982), especially pp. 6 and 8.

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and return.30 That well rehearsed feminist issue - whether to advocate a strong, single identity or a fluid, multiple one - is resolved here in favour of the latter,31 in line with the ‘weak’ and hybrid nature of contemporary culture. Yet the positive acceptance of postmodern fragmentation, as theorized in Vattimo’s ‘weak thought’32 reveals indeed the strong ethics33 of contemporary societies recognizing and accepting their own limits. A further self-definition links Martina’s identity with both American and British literary traditions, mixing Moby Dick's opening line with Defoe’s shipwrecked character, Robinson Crusoe,34 thus merging the eighteenth-century English literary tradition of quest and travel writing with the postmodern notion of shifting identity. This is Martina narrating: Chiamatemi Robinson. Stabilito che la vita di ogni comune mortale e costellata di piccoli e grandi naufragi... il massimo conforto che provo, nei grandi e piccoli naufragi della mia vita, e quello di prendere in esame il poco che mi rimane per vedere cosa se ne possa cavare. ... Chiamatemi Robinson, dunque. Quasi mi piace naufragare per essere costretta a costruirmi la mia capanna sull’isola deserta. (pp. 32-33) Call me Robinson. Given that in life we go from one shipwreck to the other ... I take some consolation - in both the small and big shipwrecks o f life in examining what I have left and seeing what can be made o f i t . ... So call me Robinson, I almost like being shipwrecked so that I’ll be forced to build m yself a hut on a desert island, (pp. 14-15)

30 ‘[l]’identita non e un rigido dato immutabile, ma e fluida, un processo sempre in divenire, in cui continuamente ci si allontana dalle proprie origini, come il figlio che lascia la casa dei genitori, e ci si ritoma col pensiero e col sentimento; qualcosa che si perde e si rinnova, in un incessante spaesamento e rientro’: ibid., p. 69. 31 In line with Duranti’s novel, consider Cora Kaplan’s words ‘I would rather see subjectivity as always in process and contradiction, even female subjectivity, structured, divided and denigrated through the matrices o f sexual difference. I see this understanding as part o f a more optimistic political scenario than the ones I have been part of, one that can and ought to lead to a politics which will no longer overvalue control, rationality and individual power, and which, instead, tries to understand human desire, struggle and agency as they are mobilized through a more complicated, less finished and less heroic psychic schema’: Cora Kaplan, ‘Speaking/Writing/Feminism’, in Michelene Wandor, ed., On Gender and Writing (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 181; also in Mary Eagleton, ed., Feminist Literary Theory: a Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 32 Gianni Vattimo, Pier Aldo Rovatti, eds, II Pensiero D ebole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983). 33 On this notion consider Renate Holub, ‘Weak Thought and Strong Ethics: The Postmodern and Feminist Theory in Italy\A n n a li dTtalianistica, 9 (1995), pp. 125-43 at p. 133. 34 The author’s passion for this novel already emerges in her fictional self in La Bambina, where the shipwrecked condition had a negative connotation o f internal exile (due to the war), whereas in Sogni M ancini it has the positive function o f regenerating identity.

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In her critical look at her own life, determining her commitment to continual change, Martina seems to enact the essence of postmodemity, as articulated by Zygmut Baumann: Postmodemity is no more (but no less either) than the modem mind taking a long, attentive and sober look at itself, at its condition and its past works, not fully liking what it sees and sensing the urge to change.35

As Robinson is forced to find a means of survival on an island, so Martina advances in her quest for material and spiritual sustenance in a new country. Similarly, all the other characters are portrayed through their relation to food and cooking, which also works as a powerful device for plot advancement. Martina’s initial return to Italy for her mother’s funeral triggers her search for identity by directly juxtaposing the two countries and bringing back her memories of childhood and youth, as her identity is suddenly threatened by the newly emerging intimation that, having being bom lefthanded, she had been forced to become righthanded. This increasing uneasiness, however, doesn’t affect the protagonist’s memories, which are crystallized in an idealized image of Italy, evoking a foreign, stereotypical view of the place.36 After attending her m other’s funeral, and realizing that all her Italian acquaintances and friends have remained the same as when she left, Martina returns to her home in New York, happy to smell its odour, even that of ‘Broccoli tiber Alles’ (p. 37). Like Italy, America is portrayed through food, and particularly through the powerful, alienating media. Television clearly emerges as the ‘hidden persuader’ (another quite direct hint at Berlusconi’s media empire) determining the individual’s choice by intrusive advertising, which symptomatically filters through open windows. Many American failed careers seem to end up on TV, undermining the myth of America as a land of opportunity with the reality of a lack of freedom imposed by the media. Besides the gastronomic and media alienation, Martina’s condition of exile emerges in the sense of her own impotence in changing society, which she still naively opposes through her left-wing, socialist faith and commitment to a moral 35 Zygmut Baumann, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 272, quoted in Elliott, Subject to Ourselves (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 3. 36 Martina’s family originated from Lucania, and then moved to Tuscany, recalling Duranti’s own family move to Tuscany, though from Genova. Martina’s sense o f nostalgia, also reflects the present ‘nostalgia paradigm’, theorized by Bryan S.Tumer in M edical Power and Social Knowledge (London: Sage, 1987) and Georg Stauth and Bryan S. Turner, eds, Nietzsche s Dance: Resentment, Reciprocity and Resistance in Social Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), which sees history as decline; sense o f loss o f wholeness; loss o f expressivity and spontaneity; loss o f individual autonomy. According to Ray Robertson, ‘late 20th-century globalization [...] exacerbates the nostalgic tendency in a number o f ways [...] in particular references to [...] national societies, individuals, the system o f international relations, and humankind as a species’: Ray Robertson, ‘After Nostalgia? Wilful Nostalgia and the Phase o f Globalization’, in Adam and Allan, eds, Theorizing Culture, op. cit., p. 57.

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of social responsibility and integration. Towards the end of the novel, the episode concerning the tramp (pp. 155-60) - when she calls the police to help a beggar, much to the amazement of every passer-by and of the police themselves when they arrive and find no one in the street - reinforces Martina’s resolution to strive for individual and social amelioration, against the background of indifference of modem society, but on a par with the ideals of America’s founding fathers. Reiterating this condition of social exile is the sense of linguistic displacement, conveyed through a prose which, as a mixture of literary and spoken ‘neo-standard Italian’, presents an original contribution to the transformation of Italian literary style. Interestingly, such language is interspersed with frequent foreign terms (mainly American-English), mostly referring to typical American practices, settings, or food, such as ‘tramp’ (p. 32), ‘block’ (p. 36), ‘dry-cleaner’ (p. 36), ‘lobby’ (p. 38), ‘local time’ (p. 38), ‘dough’ (p. 135). The common practice among emigrants of mixing languages extends beyond American-English and Italian, to incorporate French and German words, reflecting the strong internationalization of contemporary society. The impossibility of maintaining a stable attitude reaches a symbolic climax in Martina’s uncertainty on translating the Italian word ‘watfwra/ezza’ (naturalness) into English, for ‘even in Italian. Although I’m familiar with the word, I’ve long ago lost what it refers to’ (p. 117). Such difficulty reflects the split between her lost naturalness (her original lefthandedness) and her controlled, tightly scheduled rhythm, between the dream of an ideal tolerance and a practical social-political commitment, and the gap between an existing literary language and the creation of a new language of Italian fiction, as the author believes that ‘the door to be breached is that of naturalness, following the example of English literature’, which she admires and translates into Italian.37 The passion for the English language binds author and protagonist to the chosen foreign country. Despite the way in which American society is ironically characterized for its media and business madness, Martina’s final decision to remain in New York suggests that she prefers living there because of the greater freedom she experiences in both her working and personal life, even at the expense of her emotional self. Through her quest, she has rewritten and humanized ‘traditional’ men’s themes (detective and travel writing) and fields (scientific creation and psychoanalysis with her Dream-Machine), by inserting ‘traditional’ women’s domains, such as cuisine (symptomatically, Martina’s Dream-Machine can also make breakfast). Cooking and writing blend together as essential ingredients of self-expression in her new life as an Italian-American; she feels at home as soon as she smells her pots of basil on the balcony. Merging multifaceted individual identity with social commitment in a new hybrid and naturally exiled society (the threshold 37 Lucamante, Tntervista a Francesca Duranti’, op. cit., p. 250. Duranti stresses the need to look at the English tradition o f the novel, voicing her own admiration for it. She continues the English narrative tradition in her ‘traditional’ use o f plot and characters. See Vinall, ‘Francesca Duranti: Reflections and Inventions’, op. cit., p. 99

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of the balcony revealingly bringing the two spheres together) through international cuisine, Martina Satriano’s and Francesca Duranti’s dream of integration and tolerance can come true: E ora che tutto e deciso posso finalmente aprire la porta, sento l’odore del basilico sulla finestra e sono a casa. (p. 230) And now that that’s decided I turn the key, open the door, smell the basil on the window sill and I’m home. (p. 118)

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DISPLACED PERSONS

Yates, F., The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1972). Zamora, Lois Parkinson, American Contemporary Women Writers (London: Longman, 1998)

Index Abraham, N. 67-8, 71 Adam and Eve (see Milton) Adis, Henry 48-52 A Fannaticks Letter Sent out o f the Dungeon o f the Gate-house Prison o f Westminster 44 A Fannaticks Mite cast into the K in gs Treasury 49-50 A Letter Sent from Syrranam 51 Albania (see Balkans) Algeria as land o f exile 166 representations o f 161 immigration from 160-69 national identity 163 Allen, William (see Bible) Amerika (see Kafka) Anderson, Mark 110, 112 Anima Mundi, 8 anti-semitism (see also Judaism) 93-6, 99 Arabicite 163—4, 168-9 Arendt, Hannah xvii, 115, 123-7 The Origins o f Totalitarianism 115-16, 119 The Human Condition 120, 126 We Refugees 116 follows Aristotle 125 Aristotle (see Arendt, H.) asylum 116 Auden, W. H. xvii-xviii, 115, 117-27 P aid on Both Sides 117 In Time o f War 117, 121 The Ego and the Id 123 Exile 118 Commentary 118, 121 New Year Letter 118, 121, 125-6 Spain 119, 124 Paul Bunyan 121 The Prolific and The Devourer 121 Refugee Blues 121 September 1, 1939 126 The More Loving One 124 Kallman, Chester 117 Voltaire, Fran^oise 121 autobiography 71, 82-3, 158, 173 Bahr, Ehrhard 171 Bakhtin, Mikhail 65

Balkans xvi, 72, 74, 82, 87 Albania 83-5 Bosnia 86 Bulgaria 77-8 Kosova 86 Macedonia 75-6 Moldavia 72 Romania 72, 76 Second Balkan War 78 Serbia 76, 81 Balkanist discourse 83, 85, 87 Ballestra, Silvia 172 Barkley, Henry 77, 81 Bartkowski, Frances 72 Baumann, Zygmunt (see postmodern) Beer, Gillian 102 Behn, Aphra The Rover, or the Banished Cavaliers 40 Belzoni, Giovanni Battista 55, 58, 64 Benjamin, Walter 62 Berberite (see also ethnicity) 163-4, 168-9 Berlusconi, Silvio 176 Bethe, Hans 97 Beza, Theodore (see Bible) Bhabha, Homi (see also hybridity) 73 Bible (see also Luther, Martin; Tyndale, William) xv, 11-12 Allen, William 16-17 Beza, Theodore 13 Bristow, William 16 Coverdale, M iles, Latin/English Bible 19 English New Testament (see also Whittingham, William) 13 Geneva translation 12-15, 18-20 used by Shakespeare and Pilgrim Fathers 13 Great Bible, the 15, 18 Gregory, Martin 16 King James version 14-15, 18-19 Latin New Testament 13 Psalter, the 15 Rheims translation xv, 12, 15-20 use o f latinate language 18 work o f Martin Gregory 16, 19 translation into vernacular 11-20 Vulgate 17, 19

196

DISPLACED PERSONS

‘Black Bartholomew’ day (see Act o f Uniformity) Son de Negros en Cuba (see Lorca, Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms) Bliss, Carolyn 153, 156 Blunt, Lady 76 Boccaccio D e Genealogia 9 Boethius Consolation o f Philosophy 1-2, 5 ,7 border xii, xiv, xviii, 113, 129, 176 (abolished by media) 167 between individual and collective 160 between past and present 57, 137 Boston Medical College 56 Bourdieu, Pierre 62 Braudel, Fernand 62 Brecht, Bertolt 118 Bristow, William (see Bible) British Archaeological Society 61 British Museum 56 Edward Hawkins, Keeper o f Antiquities 59 British Press 69 Bucharest, siege o f (1916) 72 Budapest 88 ethnic composition o f 89 Jewish population o f 90, 92 Society o f Social Studies 89 University o f 91, 93 Bulgaria (see Balkans) Bunyan, John 43, 45, 48 Pilgrim s Progress 43, 45 Grace Abounding to the Chief o f Sinners 43 ,45 Burgin, Victor 102 Burnham, Douglas 131 Buzard, James 74 Calamy, Edmund 53 Account o f the Ejected Ministers 52 Calvin, Jean 12-13 Campbell, Colin 62 Campo, Rossana 172 Canterbury Congress 69 Cappiello, Rosa, Paese Fortunato 172 Carrier, James 63 Carter, Angela Interview with Paolo Bono 143 exploration o f female sexuality 142 The Passion o f New Eve xviii, 138^18 sexual plurality in 146 The Sadeian Woman 143-5

Carver, Robert xvi, 84 The Accursed Mountains 83 Cavendish, Margaret 39 Natures Pictures 40 Celati, Gianno 172 Ceserani, Remo 171 Charles II (Stuart) (see also Declaration o f Breda) xv-xvi, 36-53 Charing Cross Hospital 59, 62 Chaucer, Geoffrey 6 Clarendon Code, the 43 Clark, Robert 142 Clift, William 59-60, 68 Colombo, Furio 172 colonization xiv o f Algeria 162 British 74 colonial dissolution 78 post-colonial (see also Said, Edward) 165 sport and 75 voice o f colonized 150 Conan Doyle, Arthur The Ring ofThoth 56 Lot No. 249 56 consumption xvi aesthetics o f 63^1, 71 commodified lifestyle 62^1, 71 economics o f 62^1, 71 middle class 61-3 o f objects 61-4 object/subject in 65 o f the dead 65-71 Cooper, James Fenimore 109 Coulson, Anthony 73 Coverdale, Miles (see Bible) Criterion, The 117 Crosse, Andrew 77-8, 82, 85, 86 Round About the Carpathians 76 Cruikshank, George 60 cyclotron 99 Danza de la muerte (see Lorca, Dance o f Death) D ’Athenasi, Giovanni 55-6, 59, 61, 63 Daly, M. 62-4 Davidson, John 59 De Carlo, Andrea 172 Declaration o f Breda (1660) 38, 42, 47, 51 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe xiii, 177-8 The Shortest Way With Dissenters 52

INDEX Del Giudice, Daniele 172 Denon, Description de I Egypte 63 Devon and Exeter Institution 56 diaspora Jewish xii Dickens, Charles Martin Chuzzlewit 109 Diderot, Denis 130 Disch, Lisa Jane 116 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 103 Notes from the Underground 103 Dryden, John 41, 46-7, 49, 51 Astrea Redux 39 Dumas, Alexandre Twenty Years After 40 The Vicomte de Bragelonne 41 Duncker, Patricia 142 Duranti, Francesca xix, 172 La Bambina 173 La Casa sul Lago della Luna 173 Effetti Personali 173 Piazza, Mia Bella Piazza 173 Progetto Burlamacchi 173 Sogni Mancini xviii, 170-80 Ultima Stesura 173 Eco, Umberto 172 Eden (see Milton) Edward Tudor, heir o f Henry VIII 12-13 Egypt 53 as key to past 64 Einstein, Albert 97 attacks on 96 Theory o f Relativity 94-5 Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land 103, 106 Elizabeth I, Queen o f England 12, 14 excommunication o f 16 Elliot, Anthony 171 El poeta Ilega a la Habana (see Lorca, The P oet Arrives in Havana) El rey de Harlem (see Lorca, The King o f Harlem) Emerson, Ralph Waldo 103 emigration 42, 98, 170 Englishness xvi, 38, 73-6, 80, 82-3, 86 as patriarchal 81 Enlightenment, the 82, 85, 102 in work o f Milan Kundera xvii, 129-30, 133,136 ethnicity xviii, 162 Algerian 160-9 Arab 163--4, 168-9 Berber 163-4, 168-9

197

Evelyn, John 37-8, 49 Exeter City Museum 56 exile (see also emigration; frontier) xiii, 21, 24, 29, 36, 41-2, 55, 64, 71, 74, 86, 87, 104, 115, 118, 121-2, 131-2, 168, 170-72, 176, 178 in America xvii-xviii, 42, 98-100, 103, 110-13, 115-27, 170-80 as banishment 34 forced 150, 170 as metaphor 37-8, 45, 103, 143 and myth o f return 165-6, 168 and nativity 51 political 39^40, 94-100, 125, 132, 170-71 anti-political 127 religious 11-13, 51, 160-69 as transsexuality 150-9 voluntary xiv, xvii-xviii, 7, 103-104, 117, 119, 150, 171-2 feminism (see also Carter, Angela) 177, 139 femininity (see also Kristeva, Julia; gendered identity) 79, 141, 143, 147, 150, 154 Fenton, James 55, 71 The Memory o f War and Children in Exile 53 Fermi, Enrico 99 Ficino, Marsilio 9 fiction 172-3 Fiedler, Leslie Waiting fo r the End 103 Fielding, Henry 130 flaneur(euse) 63 Fontanella, Luigi, Hot D og 172 Forman, Paul 94 Fox, George, Journal 4 3 -4 Fuller, Rev. Fitzherbert 56 Franklin, Benjamin Autobiography 109 Freud, Sigmund 66-7, 103, 123, 153 The Ego and the Id 123 Galicia 91 Garden o f Eden xii Gardiner, Stephen 17 Gautier, Theophile Romance o f the Mummy 56 Gelder, K. 157 gendered identity (see also identity; masculinity; femininity) 79, 149-59, 151-9

198

DISPLACED PERSONS

gender transgression (see also Carter, Angela; homosexuality) 139, 144, 151-3, 156 Geneva Bible (see Bible) Goldman, Emma, The Tragedy o f Women s Emancipation 144 Goodman, Christopher 13 Gorky, Maxim 103 Granville, Augustus Bozzi 58 Graves, Robert xvi, 75-6, 78, 86 Groddeck, Georg (see also Freud, Sigmund) 123 Guillaume de Conches 1 Habsburg Empire 93 Emperor Franz Joseph 91 Haggard, Rider, She 56 Hamlet (see Shakespeare, William) Hamsum, Knut Hunger 103 Hanford, Sir Henry (see Royal College o f Physicians) Harvey, Elizabeth 154 Hawkins, Edward (see British Museum) heimliche (see unheimliche) Henderson, John 59 Henryson, Robert 1-10 Orpheus and Eurydice (see also Sir Orfeo\ Orpheus) xiiii, 1, 5-10 Macrobius used in 8 The Testament o f Cresseid 6 -8, 9 Hevesy, George von 91, 93, 97 hijrah 160-69 Hill, Christopher 41 Hitchen, Christopher 173 Hitler (see Nazism) Hoch, Paul 99-100 Holinshed, Raphael (see Shakespeare, William) Holitscher, Arthur 109 Homer Odyssey 160-61, 165-6, 169 home(land) (see also memory) xii, xv, 20, 21, 25, 30, 46, 73, 82, 85, 101, 150, 178 homosexuality 117, 151, 158 Horace Ars Poetica 9 Homedjitef (see mummies) Hughes, Langston 108 Hunterian Museum (see Royal College o f Surgeons) Hungary (see also Budapest) 89 communist revolution (1919) 92 Magyarization in 91 rise o f nationalism 91

hybridity xix, 74, 177 identity (see also ethnicity) xviii, 76, 85-6, 158,164-5, 173 national 168, xviii woman’s (see also femininity) 80-81, 157,166, 174-5 immigration xiii, 89 (European) 167, 169, 175 Muslim (see also Islam) xviii, 168 Indulgence, Act o f (1672) 48 Indulgence, Act o f (1688) 52 integration 78, 169, 180 intellectualism 133, 157, 173, 176 transatlantic 172 Interregnum 42, 51 Irigaray, Lucy 143 Islam (see also hijrah) British Muslims 168 exile o f prophet 161 Qur’an in 161-2 prejudice against 165 relativism 168 Islam, Syed Manzural 73 Israel xii James I (see also Shakespeare, William) 23 James II 52 JanMohamed, Abdul R. xiii, 73 Jewish diaspora xii Jewishness (see also anti-semitism) 90, 92, 9 5 -6 ,1 1 7 Johnston, David 108 Jordan, Elaine 147 journey 4,131 as metaphor 39, 138, 173 Joyce, James xii, 103 Judaism (see also Lanczos, Cornelius) 92 Jung, Carl 103 Kafka, Franz (see also Lowy, Michael; Anderson, Mark) xvii, 103 Amerika 103, 109—14 ‘The Man Who Vanished’ 109 Kallman, Chester (see Auden, W.H.) Kant, Immanuel 103 Karman, Theodore von 91, 93 Kamak (see mummies) Keir el-Basi (see mummies) Knox, John xv, 12 Kristeva, Julia xii, xiii, 66, 82, 148

INDEX Kundera, Milan xvii, 128-37 The Book o f Laughter and Forgetting 128,136 Immortality 129, 134-5 The Joke xvii, 130, 133-5 Slowness 135 The Unbearable Lightness o f Being 134 La Aurora {see Lorca, Dawn) Lanczos, Cornelius 92, 98 Judaism and Science 92 language 125, 179 in fiction 128, 179 pluralism 172 Latitudinarians 48 Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 56 Lenard, Philipp 96 liberty o f conscience (see nonconformity) Literary Gazette, the 61 Lorca, Frederico Garcia xvii, 103 After a Walk 105 The Blacks 108 Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms 108 Blind Panorama o f New York 107 Dance o f Death 107 Dawn 106 The King o f Harlem 109 The Poet Arrives in Havana 108 Poet in New York 103-108, 110, 112-14 Standards and Paradise o f the Blacks 108 Thoughts on Modern A rt 104 Los Negros (see Lorca, The Blacks) Louis XIV (of France) 48 Lovelace, Richard 39 To Lucasta from Prison 40 The Grasshopper 40 Lowe, Lisa 79 Lowy, Michael 109 Interpretation o f America 110 Luther, Martin 13-14 95 theses 11 McCarthyism 100 Macaulay, Lord 37-8 Macbeth (see Shakespeare, William) Macedonia (see Balkans) Macfie, Robert 79-80, 86 With Gypsies in Bulgaria 78 Machiavelli, Niccolo xv, 23, 27-8, 31-2 Magombe, Vincent 125 Magris, Claudio 176

199

Manhattan Project 100 Mann, Thomas 118 Marie, Queen o f Romania, 72-3, 85, 87 ‘martians’, the xvii, 88-101 Martin, Gregory (see Bible) Marffy, Judit de 92, 95 Mary Tudor xv, 12-14 Mary, Queen o f Scots 15 Marx, Karl 63 masculinity (see also Englishness) xviii, 7 7 -9 ,8 1 ,8 3 ,8 6 , 141-2, 158, 179 Australian masculinity ( ‘Ocker’) 150-51, 158 May, Karl 109 Mayakovski, Vladimir 103 Melville, Herman M oby D ick 177 memory 133, 166, 169, 178 Mendelson, Edward 119 Mikes, George 98 Milton, John xvi, 45, 51 Paradise Lost xv, 33-7, 43^1, 47 Adam and Eve in xv, 33, 35, 47 fall from Eden 33^1 Satan in 33-5, 47 as theodicy 35 as paradigm o f the Restoration 36 modernism xvii, 65, 103, 130 Manhattan as spectacle in 103 expression o f exile 114 modernity 102, 129 New York as symbol o f 103 Moldavia (see Balkans) Morning Chronicle, The 69 multiculturalism 168-9, 171 mummies xvi, 53 An-set-shu-mut 57 Hor (found at Keir el-Basi) 57 Homedjitef (found at Kamak) 57 Padihersef 57 Irtyersenu 57 Seti I 58 unwrapping o f 53-60, 64, 67-71 curiosity about techniques o f mummification 57,61, 69-70 imperialist appropriation o f 55, 62 as representatives o f arcane wisdom 56 as semi-magical medicine 56 as erotic 55, 57-60, 71 as source o f scientific knowledge 62, 69-71 subverting object/subject categorization 65

200

DISPLACED PERSONS

Musil, Robert 103 Muslims (see Islam) nation 123, 163 nationalism 79, 100, 163-9 Nazis (see also anti-semitism) xvii, 97, 116 Hitler, A dolf 96 Neumann, John von 88-91, 93, 97-8, 100 Newton, Caroline 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich 103, 141 nonconformity xv-xvi, 36, 42-53 liberty o f conscience 36, 38, 42, 47-8, 50-53 Norma y paraiso de los negros (see Lorca, Standards and Paradise o f the Blacks) Northern Ireland xii nostalgia xix, 101, 130, 133, 136, 150 nuclear energy 88 objects (see also consumption) personification o f past by 64 ‘Ocker’ (see masculinity) Odysseus xii Ophelia (see Shakespeare, William) Orpheus, myth o f (see also Orfeo and Orpheus and Eurydice) xiiii, xix 1-10 Ovid 171 Metamorphoses 1-2, 5, 8 Paget, Lady Louisa 81 Palestine 91 Palmer, Paulina 141, 147 Panorama ciego de Nueva York (see Lorca, Blind Panorama o f New York) Parker, Samuel 46-8 Parkinson, Maude 76 Passalasqua, J. 57 Peierls, Rudolf, Bird o f Passage 101 Pepys, Samuel 37, 40-41 Petofi, Sandor 100 Petrie, Flinders 63 Petrignani, Sandra 172 Pettigrew, Thomas 55-9, 61, 69-70 History o f Egyptian Mummies 60 Philips, N. 63 Pictorial Times, The 70 Pilgrim Fathers 14, 99 Pitt-Rivers Museum 53, 64 Plato 23 Symposium 145-6 Poeta in Nueva York, (see Lorca, Poet in New York)

Poliziano Favola di Orfeo 9 Polo, Marco xiii post-colonial (see colonization) postmodern xvii-xviii, 129-130, 133, 137, 171, 178 fragmentation 177 Baumann, Zygmunt 178 Prague Spring, the (1968) 128, 130, 132 Punter, David 145 Puritan Commonwealth 34-6, 48 racist representations 77 in British discourse 82 radicals (see also non-conformity) 35, 42^1, 46, 48-9, 92 Reformation, the xv, 11 Remy o f Auxerres 1 Rennaissance xv, 6, 9-10, 12, 35 Restoration (see also Charles II) xvi, 36^13, 45, 47 -8 , 51-3 Rheims New Testament (see Bible) Robinson Crusoe (see Defoe, Daniel) Rockefeller Foundation 98 romance medieval 2, 5 post-romance 7 vocabulary o f 5 Romantic 102 Romania (see Balkans) romanticism 102 Rorty, Richard xvii, 102-103 Royal College o f Physicians, the Sir Henry Hanford, President o f 59 Royal College o f Surgeons, the 59, 62, 68 Edward Belfour, Secretary o f 60 Hunterian Museum at (see also Clift, William) 59 Royal Institution 59, 61 Rushdie, Salman xii Rutherford, Ernest 95, 99 sadomasochistic transference 71 Salt, Henry 55-7, 58, 61, 63 -4 Sandes, Flora xvi, 77, 79-82, 86 Said, Edward xii-xiii, xvi, 64, 73-4, 104 other xvi, 71, 76, 87, 114, 176 Saunders, Thomas 59 Sayad, Abdelmalek 162, 166 Segal, Charles 1 Segre, Emilio 100 Serbia (see Balkans)

INDEX sexual identity 103 (see identity, femininity, masculinity, homosexuality) as patriarchal construction 144 sexual stereotypes (see masculinity, femininity, gender transgression) sexual violence (see also masculinity) xviii, 140-42 Shakespeare, William 14 Hamlet 68 Macbeth xv, 21-32 temporality in 28-9 language in 30 Stuart politics in 22, 32 based on Holinshed’s Chronicles 22, 24, 29 portrait o f Edward the Confessor 22 Ophelia 68 Sir Gawain 5 Sir Orfeo (see also Orpheus; Robert Henryson) xiiii, 1-8 Seymour, Edward, Duke o f Somerset 12 socio-political comittment 120, 122, 127, 178 left-wing 176, 175 Stark, Johannes 96 Stoker, Bram The Jewel o f the Seven Stars 56 Szilard, Leo 88, 90, 92-3, 97-100 Tabucchi, Antonio Sostiene Pereira 172 Tabori, Paul 170 Teller, Edward 88, 90, 93, 98, 100-101 Thackeray, William Makepeace 76 Todorova, Maria 83 Toller, Ernst 118 Tondelli, Pier Vittorio 172 Trivet, Nicholas 1, 5 Tusiani, Joseph 170 Tyndale, William 12-14 unheimliche xiv-xv, 66-7

201

Uniformity, Act o f 43 Black Bartholomew Day 43 Valesio, Paolo 172 Vattimo, Gianni 177 Venner Rising (1661) 50 Verschollene, D er (see Kafka, The Man Who Vanished) Villiers, George, Duke o f Buckingham 48 Virgil Georgies 1-2, 4 -5 , 7 -8 Viscusi, Robert 172 Voltaire, Fran^oise Marie Arouet (see Auden, W.H.) Vorosmarty, Mihaly 100 Voyeurism xvi, 60, 66-7, 69, 71 Vuelta de Paseo (see Lorca, After a Walk) Waller, Edmund 41, 49 To the KING upon his M ajesties Happy Return 39, 46 Weimar Republic 94 White, Patrick The Twyborn Affair xviii, 149-159 The Eye o f the Storm 155 Flaws in the Glass 158 Memoirs o f Many in One 158 Whittington, William xv, 12 Wigner, Eugene 88, 91, 93, 96, 98-101 Wilkinson, John 63 William o f Orange 52 William, Charles The Descent o f the Dove 119 Wilmot, John, Earl o f Rochester 48 Wither, George Speculum Speculativum 41 Woolf, Virginia xiii A Room o f One s Own 157 Orlando 157-8 To the Lighthouse 103 Worcester, Battle o f (1651) 39^10, 41 Zidane, Zinedine 168 Zwingli, Ulrich 12