Production of Emotions 9783653053401, 9783631659335

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
Editors’ Preface
Part I – Emotions in Dystopian and Modern Culture
“They All Look and Speak Like Machines:” A Rational Dystopia in Andrew Acworth’s A New Eden (Marta Komsta)
The Death of Affect: Embracing Capitalist Alienation in J.G. Ballard’s Fiction (Marcin Tereszewski)
Financial and Emotional Geometries in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, Crash by J.G. Ballard and Crash by David Cronenberg (Ewa Kowal)
Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991): A Study in Consumerist Void of Emotions (Ryszard W. Wolny)
The Foreign City as an Emotional Catalyst: Revisiting Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) (Stankomir Nicieja)
Part II – Emotions through the Ages
Joanna Baillie’s Dramatic Experiments with Strong Passions in the Light of the Idea of Sympathetic Spectatorship (Jacek Mydła)
The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom: Emotions, Superfluity and the Body in Selected Romantic Texts (Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys)
Emotional Patterns in Morality Plays (Ewa Błasiak)
Part III – Emotions and Social Sciences
“Entering an Arena of Adult Emotion:” Briony’s Recognition of Otherness in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (Tomasz Dobrogoszcz)
Homo Ludens: The Role of Pleasure in Iain Banks’s The Player of Games (Katarzyna Fetlińska)
The Representation of Emotion in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (Murari Prasad)
Part IV – Emotions and Interpersonal Context
A Transcendental Response to Space Travel and the Alien Contact: Emotion Elicitation in Walt Disney’s and Pavel Klushantsev’s Early Space Age Documentaries (Kornelia Boczkowska)
Richard Wright’s Emotionalization of Racial Experience in American Hunger (Agnieszka Łob)
The Many Faces of Homelessness: Politics, Emotions and Ethics in Nadine Gordimer’s A Guest of Honour (Marek Pawlicki)
Part V – Emotions and Imagination
Emotions Written in the Key of Life: Music and Individuality in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Patrycja Austin)
Moments of Emotions: Virginia Woolf Looks at Portraits (Teresa Bruś)
The Triadic Nature of Emotion and Subtext: A Close Semiotic Reading of the “You Shall Not Pass” Scene in Peter Jackson’s Film Adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Elżbieta Litwin)
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

Teresa Bru´s / Marcin Tereszewski

Production of Emotions The essays of this collection are, each in their own way, an attempt to address the centrality of emotions in literary and cultural production in a variety of genres, from medieval moralities to contemporary novels, from English Romanticism to film studies. Emotions are understood as mobile forms or forces, crossing between subjects and locations. The interdisciplinary and diverse nature of this collection reflects the view that emotions are interpersonal and forever slipping beyond our grasp. Yet, in thinking about emotion, we discover unexpected confluences. The contributions in this volume are grouped in five areas which reflect larger

categories and provide a valid platform for interpretation of emotions: dynamics of modern culture, history, social sciences, interpersonal contexts, and imagination. The Authors Teresa Bru´s is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Wrocław. Her research interests include contemporary Canadian literature and life writing. Marcin Tereszewski is Assistant Professor at the University of Wrocław. His research interests include English literature, Samuel Beckett, and literary theory/criticism.

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Production of Emotions Teresa Bru´s / Marcin Tereszewski

Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Liter atures 6

Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Liter atures 6

Teresa Bru´s / Marcin Tereszewski

Production of Emotions Perspectives and Functions

ISBN 978-3-631-65933-5

ACL 06_265933_Brus_ak_A5HCk PLE.indd 1

23.05.16 KW 21 15:05

Teresa Bru´s / Marcin Tereszewski

Production of Emotions The essays of this collection are, each in their own way, an attempt to address the centrality of emotions in literary and cultural production in a variety of genres, from medieval moralities to contemporary novels, from English Romanticism to film studies. Emotions are understood as mobile forms or forces, crossing between subjects and locations. The interdisciplinary and diverse nature of this collection reflects the view that emotions are interpersonal and forever slipping beyond our grasp. Yet, in thinking about emotion, we discover unexpected confluences. The contributions in this volume are grouped in five areas which reflect larger

ACL 06_265933_Brus_ak_A5HCk PLE.indd 1

categories and provide a valid platform for interpretation of emotions: dynamics of modern culture, history, social sciences, interpersonal contexts, and imagination. The Authors Teresa Bru´s is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Wrocław. Her research interests include contemporary Canadian literature and life writing. Marcin Tereszewski is Assistant Professor at the University of Wrocław. His research interests include English literature, Samuel Beckett, and literary theory/criticism.

6

Production of Emotions Teresa Bru´s / Marcin Tereszewski

Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Liter atures 6

Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Liter atures 6

Teresa Bru´s / Marcin Tereszewski

Production of Emotions Perspectives and Functions

23.05.16 KW 21 15:05

Production of Emotions

SILESIAN STUDIES IN ANGLOPHONE CULTURES AND LITERATURES Edited by Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak and Ryszard W. Wolny

VOLUME 6

Teresa Bruś / Marcin Tereszewski (eds.)

Production of Emotions Perspectives and Functions

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. This publication was financially supported by the University of Wrocław. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Polish Association for the Study of English. Conference (24th : 2015 : Wrocław, Poland) | Bruś Teresa, editor. | Tereszewski, Marcin, editor. Title: Production of emotions : perspectives and functions / Teresa Bruś, Marcin Tereszewski (eds.). Description: Frankfurt am Main ; New York : Peter Lang, 2016. | Series: Silesian studies in Anglophone cultures and literatures ; volume 6 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016019841| ISBN 9783631659335 | ISBN 9783653053401 Subjects: LCSH: Emotions in literature--Congresses. Classification: LCC PN56.E6 P65 2015 | DDC 820.9/353--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019841 ISSN 2197-4438 ISBN 978-3-631-65933-5 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-05340-1 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05340-1 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2016 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Table of Contents Editors’ Preface�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������9 Part I – Emotions In Dystopian and Modern Culture Marta Komsta “They All Look and Speak Like Machines:” A Rational Dystopia in Andrew Acworth’s A New Eden���������������������������������������������������������������������������15 Marcin Tereszewski The Death of Affect: Embracing Capitalist Alienation in J.G. Ballard’s Fiction���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������25 Ewa Kowal Financial and Emotional Geometries in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, Crash by J.G. Ballard and Crash by David Cronenberg�����������������������������������������33 Ryszard W. Wolny Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991): A Study in Consumerist Void of Emotions��������������������������������������������������������������������������������43 Stankomir Nicieja The Foreign City as an Emotional Catalyst: Revisiting Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003)������������������������������������������������������������������������53 Part II – Emotions through the Ages Jacek Mydła Joanna Baillie’s Dramatic Experiments with Strong Passions in the Light of the Idea of Sympathetic Spectatorship�����������������������������������������������65 Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom: Emotions, Superfluity and the Body in Selected Romantic Texts�������������������������������������������77 Ewa Błasiak Emotional Patterns in Morality Plays����������������������������������������������������������������������85

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Part III – Emotions and Social Sciences Tomasz Dobrogoszcz “Entering an Arena of Adult Emotion:” Briony’s Recognition of Otherness in Ian McEwan’s Atonement�������������������������������������������������������������������97 Katarzyna Fetlińska Homo Ludens: The Role of Pleasure in Iain Banks’s The Player of Games������� 107 Murari Prasad The Representation of Emotion in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 117 Part IV – Emotions and Interpersonal Context Kornelia Boczkowska A Transcendental Response to Space Travel and the Alien Contact: Emotion Elicitation in Walt Disney’s and Pavel Klushantsev’s Early Space Age Documentaries��������������������������������������������������� 133 Agnieszka Łobodziec Richard Wright’s Emotionalization of Racial Experience in American Hunger���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 145 Marek Pawlicki The Many Faces of Homelessness: Politics, Emotions and Ethics in Nadine Gordimer’s A Guest of Honour����������������������������������������������������������������� 155 Part V – Emotions and Imagination Patrycja Austin Emotions Written in the Key of Life: Music and Individuality in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go������������������������������������������������������������������������� 167 Teresa Bruś Moments of Emotions: Virginia Woolf Looks at Portraits�������������������������������� 177

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Elżbieta Litwin The Triadic Nature of Emotion and Subtext: A Close Semiotic Reading of the “You Shall Not Pass” Scene in Peter Jackson’s Film Adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 187 Notes on Contributors�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 199

Editors’ Preface This book is a collection of selected articles from the PASE Emotion(s) conference held in Wrocław in 2015. The title of this collection, “Production of Emotions,” already hints at the underlying theme informing the collected articles, i.e. an understanding that affect is a product of cultural contexts and literary devices, a product that can act as an agent upon the reader whose emotional responses are the target of intricately crafted narratives; but this product can just as well act as a tympanum registering the subtle vibrations of a particular cultural context. Even if we grant that Darwin was correct in his insistence that emotions derive from an evolutionary past of our species, we have yet to formulate the means of their expression, which is inevitably culturally-bound. The essays of this collection are, each in their own way, an attempt to address the centrality of emotions in literary and cultural production in a variety of genres, from medieval moralities to contemporary novels, from English Romanticism to film studies. Emotions are understood as mobile forms or forces, crossing between subjects and locations. The interdisciplinary and diverse nature of this collection reflects the view that emotions are interpersonal and forever slipping beyond our grasp. Yet, in thinking emotion, we discover unexpected confluences. The five areas under which the contributions in this volume are grouped reflect larger categories which can provide a valid platform for interpretation of emotions: dynamics of modern culture, history, social sciences, interpersonal contexts, and imagination. In the first part of our volume the particular emotion that seem to have drawn attention is apathy or at least distorted and perverted versions of socially acceptable emotionality. This is clearly the case in Marta Komsta’s analysis of Andrew Acworth’s A New Eden, a late Victorian dystopian novel depicting an isolated society founded upon radical rationalism, where all traces of emotion-based aspects of human existence have been eradicated as a result of social engineering and state control. Apathy is a theme that is also picked up by Marcin Tereszewski’s article, where J.G. Ballard’s High Rise and Concrete Island are compared as examples of critical dystopian novels registering the emotionally stultifying effects of urbanization and capitalism with its rampant consumerism. Fredric Jameson’s “waning of affect” is set beside Ballard’s “death of affect” as a possible avenue towards conceptualizing what amounts to Ballard’s critique of postcapitalist experience. Ewa Kowal, on the other hand, develops a comparison of Ballard’s infamous Crash with Dan Gilroy’s 2014 film Nightcrawler, focusing on emotional intensity, both

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Editors’ Preface

perverse and pornographic, which serves as an exaggerated mirror to the hedonistic consumerism and voyeurism of today’s mass media. Apart from drawing attention to the many thematic similarities between Crash and Nightcrawler, this paper also addresses interesting distinctions in style and aesthetics. A similar theme of emotional vacuity pervading a post-industrial and capitalist void can be found in Ryszard Wolny’s exploration Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). This article outlines the psychological makeup of a Wall Street white-collar psychopath, drawing attention to the defining role of his capitalist environment in evoking the self-alienation and emotional isolation propelling him towards excess and transgression. Stankomir Nicieja’s article continues the theme of postmodern alienation in his consideration of the tenuous emotional bonds found in Sophie Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). The protagonist’s affective responses are here considered in close relationship with the Far Eastern metropolis that serves as the immediate setting of the movie, a point that the article explores as a play with the already established trope in American literature of the “innocent abroad.” Considerations of emotions and their expressions are not limited only to the novel and certainly not to contemporary literature. With Jacek Mydła’s and Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys’s articles, our volume looks to Romantic literature for considerations of emotionality. Jacek Mydła examines the “plays on the passions” by the Scottish poet, Joanna Baillie, in connection to Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments, placing particular attention on philosophical links with the notions of sympathy and spectatorship. The author also employs David Hume’s idea of philosophical experimentation to interpret the tragedy on hate, De Monfort, in an effort to show how Baillie’s dramas address psychological, sociological and philosophical dilemmas. Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys article provides an examination of metaphors and images used to convey emotional excess in English Romantic poetry on the basis of carefully chosen works by Wordsworth, Blake and Shelley. Usually associated with the Romantic sublime and aesthetic experience, emotional excess, as the author argues, is far more complex, being at the same time a path to wisdom and a condition of artistic creativity. Going even further back to the Middle Ages, Ewa Błasiak’s article challenges the popular view that morality plays are incapable of producing in the audience any emotional response. This thesis is explored on the example of acclaimed modern reproductions of Everyman as well as Arthur Conon Doyle’s The Fires of Fate and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Austrian adaptation Jederman, both plays being part of a revival of morality plays at the beginning of the twentieth century. The following three articles address emotions in literature through a particular lens rooted in the social sciences, in this case psychology and linguistics. Tomasz

Editors’ Preface

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Dobrogoszcz, for example, proposes a Lacanian reading of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, in particular the course of Briony’s emotional development from the fateful misunderstanding by the well to the creation of her writer’s ego. Inconsistencies in Briony’s narrative are teased out in the context of Lacanian theory, where a subject’s passage into the Symbolic Order is bound with a paradoxical relationship with the Other. Katarzyna Fetlińska, on the other hand, takes a cognitive approach to the phenomenon of play in Iain Bank’s novel The Player of Games. Applying a theoretical combination of psychoanalysis and neuroscience, the author examines the role of play-related pleasure in the creation of human consciousness and culture in relation to Bank’s concern with demolishing dualisms, such as mind/body, science/humanism, or nature/culture. Finally, Muradi Prasad’s article approaches the theme of emotions through a linguistic standpoint and explicates the representation of emotion in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) by referring her use of the semiotic systems, choice of diction and syntactic structures. This is a particularly interesting approach, as the narrative presents itself through the language of children, with all their linguistic idiosyncrasies, and through the perspective of adults, whose language evokes a completely different emotional response. In the following articles, the historical context will have a defining role in how emotions in selected works of literature are approached. Kornelia Boczkowska’s article addresses the different cultural attitudes and perspectives on space exploration during the Cold War as embodied in the American frontier myth and the more utopian Soviet perspective. The basis for this analysis are Walt Disney’s and Pavel Klushantsev’s early space age documentaries, which, according to the author, present more than just a scientifically-minded portrayal of future possibilities, as they can also be seen as producing a transcendental narrative. Agnieszka Łobodziec explores the loneliness, fear and uncertainty particular to the black American experience as it is presented in Richard Wright’s American Hunger. Especially important in this analysis is how these emotions are structured by the protagonist’s migration from the American South to the North, bringing about in him a developed sense of self-identity. Another article that centers on the emotional response to a specific social or historic context is Marek Pawlicki’s examination of Nadine Gordimer’s A Guest of Honour. By emphasizing the emotional experience of the novel’s main protagonist in the context of the turbulent political events of his country, the article combines the personal with the political in order to make the case for the ethics of refusing uncritical ideological commitment. The role of art in evoking emotions and contributing to a sense of identity is explored in Patrycja Austin’s article which focuses on the emotive role of music

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Editors’ Preface

and its relation to the emotional lives of the cloned characters of Ishiguro’s 2005 Never Let Me Go. Music here is shown as not only a source of emotions but also a means of constructing the identity of the clones, whose emotional existence is a constant theme of the book and article. Teresa Bruś highlights properties of modulating emotions which accompany acts of looking at portraits in a Virginia Woolf ’s nonfiction writings. The author suggests a perspective which opens up charged issues of experience and its emotion-colored transmission. In a more taxonomic vein, Elżbieta Litwin’s article presents a semiotic exploration between representations of emotions in verbal and non-verbal communication on the basis of a minute pragmatic examination of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings. The author deconstructs the cognitive triad of the word – mise–en–scène – emotional action and proposes a typology of the semiotic relationships within the triad. The essays in Production of Emotions explore individual and interpersonal ways emotions operate between or among subjects, between and among cultures. Avoiding essentializing emotion as an interior force, the volume contributes to discussions on the complexity of emotions as forms of knowledge.

Part I – Emotions in Dystopian and Modern Culture

Marta Komsta Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin

“They All Look and Speak Like Machines:” A Rational Dystopia in Andrew Acworth’s A New Eden They then fitted out two large ships with the necessities of life, and about fifty people having embarked, all sworn to the principles of Socialism, they left the old country and landed safely on a fertile island, which had escaped alike the incursions of the uncivilized savages and of the more refined savages calling themselves civilized. This island they named Isonesus, and the government they established was a pure isocracy. (Acworth 39)

A New Eden, Andrew Acworth’s late Victorian dystopian novella, reflects some of the major debates of the period, fuelled by two major trends in the scientific, political and cultural landscape of the era: Socialism and Social Darwinism. As Gregory Claeys observes, while the former’s broad ideological range spanned “from more orthodox varieties of Marxism through the more decentralized, populistdemocratic ideas of Morris, to […] the socialism of Edward Carpenter, and the anarchism of Kropotkin, Bakunin and others” (xii), the latter’s view of society as an organic entity (illustrated by the infamous doctrine of “the survival of the fittest,” propagated, amongst others, by Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton) involved extensive application of eugenics and euthanasia as highly efficient tools of improving genetic foundations of a given society by means of population control.1 The precepts of Social Darwinism found its reflection in numerous texts of the period, most notably in various uto- and dystopian narratives, which provided ample arguments both for and against the advocated solutions.2 Published in 1896, Acworth’s work takes a decisively anti-socialist and anti-Darwinist stance in its depiction of a dystopian society founded upon the conjoined premises of unfettered socialism and radical utilitarianism. The dystopian elements of the narrative’s

1 For further information on socialism and Social Darwinism in late 19th-century Britain, see Claeys x–xxiv. 2 Claeys contends that “[u]topias have […] commonly stressed the physical improvability of human stock as a key goal, usually through the promotion of a healthier life, and from the Renaissance increasingly through scientific advancement” (xvi).

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presented world are meant to function as a warning to the readers of A New Eden, as it depicts the miserable fate of the world that succumbed to anarchy and “mob rule,” propagated by socialist ideologists (Acworth 15). It could be thus argued that Acworth’s text constitutes an example of the so-called anti-socialist dystopia (as Claeys defines it), whose major themes revolve around the demolition of the current socio-political order in favour of what was at the time perceived as typically socialist solutions, such as nationalization, communality, population control and “ruthless destruction of individualism,” amongst others (Claeys xii–xiii).3 In essence, Acworth’s text aims to depict the supposed horrors underlying “the divine power of Socialism” (39) by arguing for a socio-political system based on hierarchy, conservative gender relations and individualism. The subsequent analysis aims to outline the tension between the dystopian-marked notions of scientific progress and democratization and conservative ideas, which are presented as unambiguously positive in the examined text. I will also show that the aforementioned tension is foregrounded by the structure of the presented reality, as both time and space are heavily compartmentalized in order to facilitate stateengineered surveillance and control. In effect, the spatiotemporal enclosure turns out to function as the prominent element of the socialist Eden (the title being an ironic nod to the readers) and, simultaneously, as the key dystopic component in Acworth’s novella. Generic-wise, Acworth’s narrative is based on a typically utopian paradigm of an insular society whose isolation from the rest of the world allows for unhindered development. The two male protagonists, Kenneth Ives and Aubrey Tanqueray, arrive at the island of Isonesus, located somewhere in the Pacific, during their search for a lost colony peopled by Aubrey’s ancestors. The external perspective of the main characters has an obvious function of enabling the readers to sympathize with the protagonists during their exploration of the new world inhabited by people who resemble machines rather than human beings; the seemingly inherent impassiveness of Isonesians signifies the all-encompassing control exerted by the socialist state over the individual. Consequently, the society of Isonesus has a clearly delineated function of a representative of socialist and Darwinist tenets put into practice. The political system on the island is isocracy “in which all have equal political power” (Claeys 201); Isonesus is, according to its dwellers, “a State on an island, unprofaned by 3 I am using the term dystopia following the definition by Lyman Tower Sargent, who identifies dystopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived” (9).

A Rational Dystopia in A. Acworth’s A New Eden

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the early traditions,” whose goal is “to give the world an object lesson in the divine power of Socialism” (Acworth 39). In isocracy, it is explained, ”[w]e [the citizens] are the State. The whole population is the State. No one governs. We have regulations which have been handed down to us, and every one obeys them” (Acworth 26). The socialist foundations are met with obvious opposition from Acworth’s conservative protagonists, who view the isocratic ideals as fatal to the civilized world: Aubrey contends that the only possible outcome of allowing people to rule themselves is anarchy, which stems from “the absence of a strong arm to govern” (Acworth 41). In support of this view, the novella gives its readers a glimpse of the future to come: both Aubrey and Kenneth have already experienced “the revolt of the masses” when the entirety of Western civilization has undergone the so-called Great Upheaval, “which left the civilized world one vast ruined heap” (Acworth 41). According to Audrey, the elder and more experienced of the two protagonists, the world-wide revolution has been facilitated by the permissiveness of the ruling elite, which made it possible for the lower classes to seize power and wreak havoc upon the civilized world. To prove his theory, Aubrey recalls an incident regarding Kenneth’s sudden flight from his native Australia, provoked by the latter’s lenience towards his workers, who eventually rebelled against their employer and attempted to murder him: You paid them wretchedly, and then gave them too much liberty, too much education, and too much time to think. You should have paid them better, fed them better, and made them work harder. They were born to work, not to think. We are gradually getting back to the old time when every one was master; another generation or two and the time will be ripe again, and the mob will be at the throats of the men who, having the opportunity, neglected to govern them. (Acworth 15–16)

It is small wonder, then, that Acworth’s protagonists advocate the return to the hierarchical social structure, which they perceive as a prerequisite for the restoration of civilization. As Aubrey puts it, “[t]he whole secret is to govern wisely and well, kindly and justly, if possible, but in any case to govern” (Acworth 15). Soon enough, the outsiders discover that behind the benevolent façade of a socialist paradise one finds a profoundly dehumanized collectivist system that might be described as a Social Darwinist dream come true. The first indication of the dystopian foundations of the society comes to the fore through its radical uniformity, which aims to remove any distinctive features of an individual.4 During their first encounter with the members of the 4 Chris Ferns observes that “dystopian fiction makes explicit the extent to which the utopian ideal is premised on the suppression of any distinct individual identity” (114).

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alien community, the protagonists are immediately “struck by the remarkable uniformity in their height and general appearance,” (Acworth 16) as the islanders are “all dressed in garments of the same pattern, their hair […] cropped close to the their heads, and they all appeared to be clean shaven” (Acworth 17). Curiously, the arrival of the newcomers seems to evoke no particular interest on the part of the welcoming party, whose strikingly passive behaviour seems shocking to Kenneth and Aubrey, who initially cannot decide whether they are interacting with fellow human beings or rather with “talking machines” (Acworth 17). The motif of uniformity is developed in Acworth’s text at various levels – from the particular to the general – including not only the appearance of the islanders, but, most importantly, their upbringing, conduct, as well as socially acceptable modes of behaviour.5 Both men and women of Isonesus are almost indistinguishable from one another – the fact which initially causes considerable difficulty for the male newcomers, who have problems with differentiating between the sexes on the basis of their appearance as well as manner of behaviour.6 The repression of individuality becomes further conspicuous in the case of the islanders’ names, which consist of numbers and capital letters (conventional names such as Solomon or Bertram are only adopted for the sake of convenience, without any validity in the eyes of the State). No. 207 C.R., for example, denotes an inhabitant of building C, employed by one of the administrative boards (marked by the letter R), whose number 207 indicates the citizen’s placement in the population records. These elements point to one of the distinctive features of a dystopian society, whose central premise is based on the overall conformity of the individual to the laws and regulations of the state. According to Ferns, “[c]onformity is assured, and so too is uniformity – in the most literal sense. The citizens […] wear uniforms, reinforcing the sense that […] people are types rather than distinct individuals” (113). From the perspective of the outsiders, Isonesians resemble “well-drilled soldiers,” who take on their tasks in a “silent, mechanical way,” not unlike automatons (Acworth 48). Similarly, the democratic process of collective decision-making during the 5 Such structuring of the presented world is based on a synecdochic relationship between various elements. Artur Blaim explains that “utopian text is constructed as a hierarchy of levels of description, each lower level synecdochically related with the higher level located closer to the dominant values they embody. This makes all levels partially synonymous and at the same time different, because they refer to different aspects of the utopian world, whilst the model as a whole is defined by a set of interrelated aesthetic and moral values” (192). 6 Evidently the assumption is here that gender equality, according to the conservative narrator, equals uniformity in appearance and behaviour.

A Rational Dystopia in A. Acworth’s A New Eden

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so-called General Assembly by default takes precedence over individual rights, which are virtually non-existent in the socialist state: Whatever was the good of the State was just and right in their eyes, and all idea of individual tastes or judgment, any notion of personal liberty or initiative, was entirely unknown among them. They [the citizens] constituted the State; therefore the highest good of the State must be the highest good of every unit constituting it. (Acworth 65)

Uniformity is further effected by extensive industrialization and mechanization. The society of Isonesus takes full advantage of electricity, which enables almost complete automatization of labour. Food is synthesised and pre-prepared so as to enhance its nutritional value without any harm to digestive organs. In effect, disease amongst Isonesians is practically unknown, partially due to a ban on all tobacco and alcohol products. Even more so, individual life span is regulated in accordance with the society’s core values of rationality and utilitarianism, since “[p]erfect health, mental and physical, is the first duty owed by every citizen to the State” (Acworth 31). Fertility and reproduction are monitored in conformity to another typically dystopian premise that “individual agency cannot be trusted, even in the most intimate sphere of personal relations,” since, “in the end, the overriding interests of state must prevail” (Ferns 114). As one of the components of the body politic, every individual is subjected to spatiotemporal compartmentalization that aims to secure the foundations of the state: each stage of life corresponds to predefined temporal boundaries that are associated with specific spatial models. Starting in the State Nursery, where all children are being taken care of by high-tech machinery until the age of five, the young between the age of fifteen and twenty later enter a Technical College, which provides professional training (specific occupations are administered by the state).7 Family policy is strictly engineered in order to control population growth (the number is always exactly ten thousand citizens); every healthy woman is expected to give birth to two children, who are immediately taken away from the parents and located in the State Nursery. Working life ends at 40, as the retired citizens are relegated to administrative Boards. Life ends typically at 60, when an individual is given the so-called release by the state, a euphemistic term for euthanasia, the essential tool of population control that is also applied to any individual

7 When the protagonists visit the State Nursery and Gymnasium they are appalled by the sight of “unchildlike children,” whom they compare to “little old men and women” (Acworth 37).

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whose physical as well as emotional well-being violates the general social order.8 Therefore, “in order to maintain the splendid standard of sanity which has hitherto characterized the population all possible sources of contamination should be carefully weeded out” (Acworth 64–65). The ritual of release takes place in the Hall of Lethe (the mythological name alluding to the irreversible process of removing the obsolete component from the body of the nation), where during a quasireligious ceremony the participants end their life inside a crematory chamber. The spatiotemporal compartmentalization (indicated, first and foremost, by the fact that Isonesus is an island devoid of ship transport) is the pivotal aspect of supervision established at both general and individual levels. Apart from the state oversight, Isonesians themselves are trained into obedience as utilitarian constituents of a larger whole. Individual talents are discouraged,9 which results in a society whose inherent trait is that of passivity engendered by the conviction of the general superiority of the isocratic model. In what follows, the state of Isonesus resembles a self-perpetuating machine which does not require any authority to govern it, apart from the ingrained principles that have been unanimously accepted by the entire society. What is, however, most shocking for the outsiders is the overall rejection of emotions, a shift that is entirely in accordance with the generally utilitarian premises of the state, and which, at the same time, is perceived by the visitors as the core factor of dehumanization. Feelings, such as love, are considered detrimental to the well-being of an individual and should be suppressed by “the reasoning faculties” (Acworth 43). In consequence, all situations that would require heightened intimacy, such as sexual relations, are being closely monitored and transformed into “an intelligent act of duty towards the State” (Acworth 43), regulated by the Population Board. Subsequently, art, as one of the most effective means of evoking emotions, is rendered obsolete and, as such, relegated into oblivion. Objects which are not considered useful are placed in the Museum of Antiquity as artefacts of the past. Most importantly, however, art is seen as inherently dangerous to both the individual and the state. Writing poetry, for instance, “is always regarded as a sign of want of sanity, and discouraged by the State. An incurable case would certainly 8 Every activity upon the island is relegated to a specific localization: there is the Temple of Freedom/Parliament House for political decisions, the Hall of Recreation for all kinds of amusements, etc. 9 Eva, one of the female protagonists in Acworth’s text, explains that “we [Isonesians] develop in each of our citizens the quality most lacking, and preserve a high standard of general excellence” (Acworth 38).

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be discharged at once, lest it might prove contagious and dangerous to the State” (Acworth 54). Such was the fate of Walt Whitman himself, who, according to the historical annals of Isonesus, lived happily for some time upon the island until he “contracted an incurable habit of writing poetry” (Acworth 55) and eventually committed suicide. Suicide is considered “a terrible injury to the State,” since “[our] lives belong to the State, and it would be an injustice to deprive the State of our services before it is the time for our release” (Acworth 55). Unsurprisingly, the aforementioned premises are denounced by the visiting foreigners, who see them as innately unnatural: “I suppose hearts are as useless in this God-forsaken place as the rest of one’s internal economy – feelings, like food, are pre-digested and peptonised, I suppose,” Kenneth exclaims (Acworth 43). Ironically, their own outburst of indignation at the social mores is met with a similar, albeit far less emotional, response from the islanders. “What strange people these creatures are!” says one of the natives. “How they show their inferiority to us! This man […] is like a dog or a sheep. He has no reasoning power, and fears the release because he does not know what it is. Poor creature!” (Acworth 71). The younger of the two men, Kenneth, is particularly revolted by the utilitarian practices of the Isonesian society and decides to instigate a rebellion on his own by attempting to woo one of the women, Eva. His elder companion, Audrey, approaches the new world with a far more placid outlook as the inevitable result of the deterioration of the traditional social and political relations. Nevertheless, he too falls in love with an Isonesian woman, Lilith, who, much to her own surprise, reciprocates his feelings despite her conditioned upbringing. Eventually, both protagonists are sentenced to release by the state as potentially subversive elements. While Kenneth manages to escape alongside Eva, both Aubrey and Lilith die at each other’s side during the ritual of release. The conservative overtones of Acworth’s novella come forward through various biblical allusions, which allow the readers to interpret the socialist dystopia of Isonesus as hell on earth (Aubrey, for example, is appalled at “the monstrous customs of this unholy place” [Acworth 73]). The seemingly paradisiacal landscape changes into “a regular paradise of machinery” (Acworth 49) from which there seems to be no escape, except in death by immolation in the Hall of Lethe, the site itself evoking immediate association with the medieval stage artefact of Hellmouth into which the released are transported in a mechanical carriage “till it reaches a cavern of burning glowing fire” (Acworth 79). Accordingly, the two female characters who decide to aid the male protagonists in their escape from the anti-Paradise are named Eva and Lilith, the biblical/mythical associations arguably meant to represent the new beginning for the world

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destroyed by dehumanized progressivism. The fact that both female characters fall so easily for the outsiders functions as testimony to the tyrannical foundations of Isonesus. Eva, for instance, to her own surprise discovers “a sense of oppression which was very new to her” (Acworth 72). Significantly, the two couples come to symbolize diverse facets of love: the passionate romantic relationship of the younger couple, Kenneth and Eva, is purposefully juxtaposed with the mature love between Aubrey and Lilith. Wooed by Kenneth by means of poetry, music and amorous caresses that awaken dormant emotions, Eva decides to abandon Isonesus for the new world. The escape from the island thus becomes an imperative for the female protagonists in her quest for becoming human. “I am weary, so weary of this dull island, where I have never been able to take a free breath,” Eva contends. “Let me go with Kenneth to those wonderful lands of which he has told me, where, he says, people speak, and think, and work of their own free will, instead of acting like monotonous machines!” (Acworth 68). Lilith, the elder of the two women, decides to accompany Aubrey into death in what becomes a distinctly conservative revision of the Jewish legend of Adam’s rebellious first wife: in Acworth’s text the woman chooses to die alongside her beloved. Even though at first she attempts to warn Eve of the dangers of falling in love (“There is no room in the State for lovers,” she claims [Acworth 60], as love is considered to be “a bad case of atavism” [Acworth 59]), she eventually becomes enamoured with Aubrey’s calm and wistful demeanour. The shared intimacy of their death constitutes an ultimate act of rebellion against the dehumanized state: The two figures pass silently on into the darkness beyond, and a dizziness seems to come over them both. Aubrey holds out his arm, seeking his companion, who, with a little sigh of content, suffers herself to enter his embrace, and lays her head restfully on his broad bosom. Love reigns supreme even on the threshold of death, and life, with all its mysteries and its bitterness, its hopes and its joys, slips gently away in a dreamy sense of restfulness and peace. (Acworth 78)

Thus, Acworth’s dystopia envisages the supposedly practical implementation of socialist ideology, which, supported by unrestrained scientific progress, transforms society into a collectivist dictatorship. As Claeys points out, the readers may observe here “a growing concern with the protection and enhancement of the individual which could provide a counterbalance to authoritarian strands within socialism […]” (xxvi). Acworth’s narrative attempts hence to express “the need to regenerate society by restoring individualism after the degeneration of the species […]” (Claeys xxvii). Due to its rigidly authoritarian nature, the socialist Paradise in the novel becomes a nesting ground of “unheard-of-tyranny and oppression” (Acworth 66). Likewise, the motifs of uniformity, collectivism and radical rationalism, which

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exclude and actively oppose any individual agency, constitute pivotal elements of a political manifesto in favour of conservative social order depicted as the foothold of civilization.

Works Cited Acworth, Andrew. “A New Eden.” Late Victorian Utopias: A Prospectus. Volume 6. Ed. Gregory Claeys. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. 1–79. Print. Blaim, Artur. “Theses on Synecdoche and Utopia.” Spectres of Utopia: Theory, Practice, Conventions. Eds. Artur Blaim and Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH, 2012. 189–193. Print. Claeys, Gregory. “General Introduction: The Reshaping of the Utopian Genre in Britain, c. 1870–1900.” Late Victorian Utopias: A Prospectus. Volume 1. Ed. Gregory Claeys. London: Pickering&Chatto, 2009. ix–xxxv. Print. Ferns, Chris. Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999. Print. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1–37. Print.

Marcin Tereszewski University of Wrocław

The Death of Affect: Embracing Capitalist Alienation in J.G. Ballard’s Fiction J.G. Ballard’s place in British fiction has been precarious at best; perhaps this is due to his work being associated with the netherworld genre of sci-fi, which for many years has been deemed undeserving of any serious academic attention; perhaps this was a result of Ballard’s own experimentalism which alienated even his most influential supporters, most notably Kinsley Amis. This precariousness is beginning to subside, as six years after Ballard’s death we can witness increasing academic appreciation of his work in numerous critical books, conferences and a collection of his short stories published in 2009 (with Martin Amis writing a glowing introduction) and this is on top of two major film adaptations, most notably Empire of the Sun and the infamous Crash. Of the many associations we have with Ballard and with the term “Ballardian,” I would like to focus on the theme of affectivity, or to use Ballard’s own phrase, “the death of affect,” which has variously been attributed to dehumanizing technological developments, social changes, and environmental collapse endemic to modern society. What seems even more immediate in terms of the Ballardian landscape is a salient capitalist element, and it is precisely this late capitalism that exerts the most influence on the conditions depicted in what is commonly referred to as the “urban trilogy” (Crash, Concrete Island, and High-Rise). The question which emerges from this reading is how Ballard utilizes the cultural incarnations of post-capitalist society as a means of contextualising this decline of affect. This will be demonstrated on the basis of a reading of Concrete Island and High-Rise. The importance of the “death of affect” in Atrocity Exhibition (1970) is confirmed by Gasiorek, who considers it “one of its most significant motifs” (67). Ballard later elaborated this motif in his introduction to the 1974 French edition of Crash, where he offers his diagnosis of our postmodern condition: “sex and paranoia […] voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings - these diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the twentieth century: The death of affect” (309). Indeed, in Crash and in the Atrocity Exhibition, which incidentally was the source of Crash, the stultifying effects of media saturation, pornographic voyeurism and alienation are

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not only emphasized but are also conflated with imagery of rampant capitalism. The cultural and psychological effects of these processes are inextricably linked to what Fredric Jameson defines as the condition of late capitalism. It is precisely in the milieu of late capitalist postmodernism that Fredric Jameson perceives the “waning of affect” that he develops in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Far from treating this concept as a simple emotional consequence of being oversaturated with incessant images of violence and carnage, Jameson’s concept asks us to take a step back in order to reevaluate the conditions of possibility for emotive response. It is because of this perspective that Jameson’s analysis might lend itself to analyzing Ballard’s “death of affect” more in terms of aesthetic representation than reactionary moral evaluations of the state of contemporary culture. The concept of the waning of affect is a central tenet in Jameson’s critique of postmodernism, but one which will be discussed here outside the evaluative discussion on the legitimacy of this critique. Jameson presents postmodernist aesthetics as a result of suspending the outside/inside model, an operation which consequently leads to a focus on the relations of surface appearances at the cost of the more metaphysical idea of the depth model serving as a foundational anchor of meaning. If we suspend the legitimacy of concepts based on this depth model – such as unconsciousness/consciousness, authenticity/inauthenticity, truth/ideology – we will be left with only a representation of surface appearances with no pretense to being an expression of anything inside. In which case – at least within the theoretical categories promoted by postmodern thought which Jameson analyzes – the expression of affect would be a matter of ontological impossibility, as the basis for a bourgeois ego no longer exists. And so with the end of the bourgeois ego comes the end of psychopathologies of that ego, the end of style, the unique, and personal brushstroke. This postmodern suspension of dichotomies not only eliminates the Romantic notion of authenticity and personality, but puts in question the notion of the self itself. “As for expression and feelings and emotions,” Jameson argues, “the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling” (15). This notion of liberation, as we will see, constitutes one of Ballard’s most salient themes. In the aforementioned introduction to Crash Ballard claims that “This demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures” (309) and it is the task of science fiction writers, who are best equipped to deal with these particular themes, to “document the uneasy pleasures of living

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within this glaucous paradise” (309). It is perhaps surprising that Ballard would choose to use the word “pleasure” in describing the effects of living in this emotionally static environment, as if he were implying masochistic tendencies underlying the behavior of his characters, though it would seem more probable that the abjection which many Ballardian characters find themselves navigating promotes a more blissful resignation than masochism could ever offer. In what way then can Ballard’s “death of affect” be construed as a reflection of the “waning of affect” Jameson finds characteristic of postmodern art, itself a product of the determining conditions of late capitalism? It should be remembered that we are dealing with two different discourses – Ballard regards the “death of affect” as a result of technological social engineering, whereas Jameson sees the “waning of affect” as a consequence of late capitalism (or media capitalism, spectacle or image society, multinational capitalism, the world system). However, what thematically unite these concerns are the references to capitalism as a context wherein emotional sensitivity is diminished to the level of anodyne responses, to a predictable set of activities and events. There is no doubt that the worlds created by Ballard are deeply nestled in an awareness of capitalist structures, which leads to the question of how this death of affect comes about as a result of capitalist conditions. Ballard’s subsequent novels of the urban trilogy, High Rise and Concrete Island, provide a platform from which an answer to this question can be assayed. In High-Rise (1975), we are presented with a modern building with all the amenities of a small vertical city, with shops, restaurants, swimming pool at the convenient disposal of its tenants. It quickly becomes clear that what was to be a microcosm of utopian social engineering reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s famous ambitions of a rational and efficient urban dwelling quickly transforms into dystopian barbarism, as the tenants begin to gradually turn on themselves, first over petty annoyances, like noise, trash, broken elevators; later these petty squabbles escalate into clan warfare, transforming the whole building into a veritable warzone. “At first Laing found something alienating about the concrete landscape of the project - an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other” (Ballard High-Rise, 16). The unanswered question is, of course, what is triggering this violence and utter disregard for social norms. Firstly, it is important to reiterate that the high-rise itself is reminiscent of social engineering projects which sought to regulate and contain individual emotional impulses, thereby eliminating a common threat to a well-governed society. In a story which is exclusively set in the confines of this high-rise, itself a product of capitalist urbanization, the reader is introduced to three male protagonists, Anthony Royal, Dr Robert Laing and Richard Wilder, whose descent into savagery

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is accompanied by an almost psychopathological withdrawal from emotional contact. Ballard manages to present this not only by way of scenes but also in his unwillingness to develop any of the characters, rendering them rather flat, which seems to be a typical Ballardian trait, though the case could also be made that most dystopian narratives tend to eschew character development for the sake of emphasis on setting. What is more, no character is presented absent his or her job title or social position, which further stresses the capitalist conditions determining their literary existence. As a result, these characters are just as entrenched in capitalist politics of identity as the building itself whose division into zones reflects socio-economic stratifications, which is why Anthony Royal (the architect of the building and its first tenant) occupies the very top floor, whereas manual workers inhabit the bottom floors, the upper and middle classes occupying the stratified middle section of the building. This lends itself very conveniently to a Marxian reading, where the disintegration of boundaries set along capitalist lines contains a revolutionary aspect inherent the class conflict. If we assume that this “death of affect” results from a socially engineered capitalist environment that co-opts personal identity, thus exposing the depthlessness of personality/identity within the postmodern logic developed by Jameson, then the end result would be a gradual erasure of that identity. Speaking about this barren island, the narrator at one point observes that “Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence” (Ballard, High-Rise 34). The affectless, schizoid personality developed by Maitland becomes an adaptive mechanism, allowing the subject to navigate within the hyperrealistic conditions brought into effect by late capitalism. “A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere” (Ballard, High-Rise 46). We can read in this description how Ballard’s manages to conflate the human and the inhuman, man and machine into one being characterized by affectless depersonalization. As time progresses, the inhabitants of the high-rise lose themselves to primal instincts which at the same time come to stand as a kind of adaptive measure to deal with the technological and dehumanizing effects of their urban environment. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974) presents us with another take on similar themes encountered in High-Rise. This time, instead of being confined in a building, the protagonist is stranded on some anonymous Conradian blank space in the center of London, a triangular concrete patch of land between a network of motorways enclosed between steep embankments, a place left onto itself, forgotten

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and invisible to the everyday commuters. One day our main character, Robert Maitland, a middle-aged, successful architect, suddenly veers off the motorway in his Jaguar and crashes down onto this concrete island. What happens next is a 20th century take on Robinson Crusoe, as Maitland, now marooned on this island, exhausts the predictable array of escape plans, including trying to catch the attention of the drivers, trying to climb the embankments, setting his car on fire in an attempt to attract attention, writing a help sign on the ground. All these attempts are in vain. Hungry, injured, and near death, Maitland is rescued by two occupant of this island, Jane Sheppard, a young street-smart prostitute and Proctor, a Friday-like, mentally challenged ex-circus performer (a reference to Friday from Robinson Crusoe and Caliban from the Tempest), both pass the time on this island in a codependent symbiotic relationship, much like Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir. Nursed back to health, but ultimately dependent on the two for his life, Maitland first attempts to negotiate for his freedom with pleas and promises of money, only to accept and later even embrace his predicament. At one point he even defers his escape, asking Jane not to call for help, and this is after having spent the previous days exhorting her to call for help. Once Maitland manages to establish dominance over his territory, he abandons his desire to return to what was his ‘real’ life; the alternate reality of the concrete island takes hold. At one point Maitland admits that, “As he was already well aware, it was this will to survive, to dominate the island and harness its limited resource, that now seemed more important goal than escaping” (Ballard, Concrete Island 65). This becomes a crucial turning point in the plot, with the protagonist, on the one hand, undergoing a transformation leading him to reject the blandishments of capitalist lifestyle and social integration in favor of an existence the seeds of which have already been discernible before Maitland found his way on the island; and, on the other hand, enacting a ruthlessness indicative of capitalist rapaciousness in his desire to dominate and ‘harness the limited resources of the island’, which reads almost as cliché of capitalist activity. This reading reveals that in Maitland’s case alienation develops into acceptance, which might be viewed as complicity with a repressive system, in this case a system of capitalist domination. Ballard would most likely deflect such accusations, pointing to the existential values of alienation: “Rather than fearing alienation, people should embrace it. It may be the doorway to something more interesting. That’s always the message of my fiction. We need to explore total alienation and find what lies beyond” (qtd. in Sinclair 42). The editor of New Worlds, Michael Moorcock, also observed that this attitude of acceptance is what distinguished Ballard from other science fiction writers of the time, who tended to satirize or inveigh

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against the modern world, whereas Ballard “accepted the world and celebrated its wonders” (Moorcock xix). Although such a willingness to accept and even embrace even the most disturbing aspects of modernity allows Ballard to engage and explore these problematics in a more pragmatic way, one should be weary of reductive statements that tend to gloss over the inherent thematic ambiguities present in Ballard’s work. The deserted patch of wasteland has already been compared by critics to Marc Augé’s “non-place” and to Rem Koohlaas’s “junkspace” (Gasiorek 113, Luckhurst 129–131; Groes 129–130), Augé’s anthropological concept of ‘non-place’ has been an especially useful theoretical key to understanding Ballard’s dehumanized spaces. Augé draws attention to the existence of spaces which defy clear parametralization, spaces which belong to no-one as they inhabit an interstitial zone between already defined spaces. Examples of such non-places range from airport terminals, dutyfree shops, and interstate highways – in all these places the person is transitioning from one place to another; these places are, as Luckhurst explains, “ahistorical, non-relational, indifferent to locale, and renders equivalent everything within it” (131). Rem Koohlaas, on the other hand, draws attention to the wastelands which are by-products of capitalist expansion, the forgotten zones of consumerist waste. It should be, therefore, made clear that these non-places, regardless of how they are positioned in relation to normative spaces of capitalist production – whether they are inside the domain of public or private spaces – are still, nonetheless, products of capitalism, even when Ballard uses them as a means of suspending the rules of conduct regulating capitalist social structures. Not only are these non-places or junk-places products of capitalist production, they also give rise to schizophrenic subjectivities which result from deterritorialized spaces. In a decontextualized space, where not even money has any value, Maitland’s subjectivity has undergoes a categorical reevaluation or reinvention, which in this book seems to be partly presented in terms of liberation from capitalist oppression and partly as a perpetuation of such oppression. On the one hand, Maitland is relinquishing his former conventional life, as if living out an anarchistic romantic fantasy, on the other hand, he is motivated by a desire to dominate his new space, which is very much in line with capitalist imperialism. In both books Ballard plays with the double-bind of imprisonment and liberation, as both these concepts are shown to co-exist, thereby problematizing the assumptions that lie at the core of such a distinction. What is also relevant in relation to the capitalist context of these books is that in both High-Rise and to an even greater degree in Concrete Island labor is relegated to the background, i.e. we are aware of the professions each character has, but the mundane activity of actually going to work is rarely brought up, in fact the world

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outside of the immediate environment of the high-rise and the concrete island has marginal relevance for the narrative. What is perhaps even more telling is how money ceases to carry value in Ballardian environments. Money is worthless to both Proctor and Jane, which is why with no possibility of commodity exchange, Maitland’s primary source of power over other people proves impotent. This, in effect, calls into question his sense of identity, a situation which reads as an extension of a more serious argument developed by Georg Simmel in his sociological analysis, “Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), of urbanity’s influence on human behavior. There Simmel states: “To the extent that money, with its colorlessness and its indifferent quality can become a common denominator of all values it becomes the frightful leveler - it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way that is beyond repair” (268). As money is a symbolic and, therefore, semantically empty referent of value, its loss of exchange value is tantamount to absence. This reductive process is analogous to Maitland’s loss of identity in his new environment, as “the hollow core of things” is allowed to manifest itself. Such conditions regression and liberation seem to be largely determined by the prevailing economic system, in this case a variation of capitalism. Just as the Enlightenment desacralized the world by imposing realism onto mythological structures of understanding, so capitalism imposes a reorganization of space. For example, as Jameson points out, there is now a fundamental rift between our experience of everyday life and our awareness of the economic conditions which sustain this life (Jameson 410–411). In pre-capitalist societies, for example, one’s daily life was to a greater degree connected to the modes of production, whereas now our life is sustained by foreign, unknown, forces with an economic basis that is literally virtual. This rift seems to be a reiteration of Marx’s explanation of alienation, but takes the argument a step further, because in post-capitalist societies it is not only the worker that is severed from the mode of production but the consumer who now inhabits a space which will forever remain foreign. Social space that is created in a postcapitalist society is thus one of estrangement, where an individual is ontologically removed from his or her surroundings; this is what according to Jameson ultimately leads to the waning of affect. To put this in the context of Ballard’s fiction, whether we are dealing with claustrophobia of High-Rise, or the initial spatial confusion of Concrete Island, all of which - it should be remembered - are urban and modern ailments, the end result is one of estrangement, entailing a break of emotional ties with the subject’s surroundings.

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Works Cited Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. Jon Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Print. Ballard, J.G. High-Rise. New York: Liverlight Pub, 2012. Print. –. Concrete Island (1974) London: Fourth Estate, 2011. Print. –. “Introduction to the French Edition of Crash.” European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice. Ed. Martin Travers. London and New York: Continuum, 2001. 309–311. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. “Ballard’s Crash.” (1976). Trans. Arthur B. Evans. Science Fiction Studies 18:313–20, #55, Nov 1991. Print. Baxter, Jeannette. J.G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2009. Print. Brigg, Peter. J.G. Ballard. Starmont’s Reader’s Guide 26. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1985. Print. Gasiorek, Andrzej. J.G. Ballard. Contemporary British Novelists. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. Print. Groes, Sebastian. “The Texture of Modernity in J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise.” J.G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions. Eds. Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 123–141. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Luckhurst, Roger. The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1997. Print Moorcock, Michael. “Introduction.” New Worlds: An Anthology. New York: Thunder’s Mouth 2004, xi–xxx. Print. Punter, David, The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Print Simmel, Georg. “Metropolis and Mental Life.” Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory: Text and Readings. Eds. Scott Appelrouth and Laura Desfor Edles. Los Angeles: Pine Forge Press/Sage Publications, 2008. 265–273. Print. Stephenson, Gregory. Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J.G. Ballard. London: Greenwood, 1991. Print. Sinclair, Iain. Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard ‘Trajectory of Fate.’ London: British Film Institute, 1999. Print.

Ewa Kowal Jagiellonian University

Financial and Emotional Geometries in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, Crash by J.G. Ballard and Crash by David Cronenberg When speaking about economics, finance and war (among many other things) in his book The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to fractality, a concept introduced by the Polish-born French and American mathematician Benoît B. Mandelbrot. “Fractal – Taleb explains – is a word Mandelbrot coined [in 1975] to describe the geometry of the rough and broken – from the Latin fractus, the origin of fractured” (Taleb 257). “Fractality – he adds – is the repetition of geometric patterns at different scales, revealing smaller and smaller versions of themselves” (Taleb 257) – versions whose “shapes are never the same, yet they bear an affinity to one another, a strong family resemblance” (Taleb 258). I would like to propose that such a quality of fractality could be ascribed to the relationship between three works, J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, its 1996 film adaptation by David Cronenberg and the 2014 film Nightcrawler by Dan Gilroy. It is striking that Mandelbrot worked on the geometry of the broken and devised his “theory of roughness” roughly at the same time as Ballard wrote his fractured prose, which is then echoed in Gilroy’s case study of the business of breaking news. The novel, as Ballard said in his 1974 introduction to the French edition, is a kind of warning, and its central image, the car, is “a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society” (Ballard, “Introduction”). The novel’s many car crashes in all their permutations are self-similar repetitions of actual car crashes adding up to “a pandemic cataclysm institutionalised in all industrial societies that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions” (Ballard, “Introduction”). Therefore there is a fractal relationship between the world of the book and its film adaptation and the world outside them: Crash is a close-up of a small fragment of that world, but at the same time it is also an extremely magnified, even grotesque mirror-image of that world. The same can be said about Nightcrawler, which also has a fractal relationship with Crash, since the elements of the world that both visions are predominantly interested in largely overlap. However, even though both Crash and Nightcrawler provide much wider – and for the most part similar – diagnoses of

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their times, there are also important differences between them. In addition, they convey their messages in considerably different ways. The aim of this comparative study will be to analyse both the points of convergence and divergence in the three visions, focusing especially on emotions, technology and capitalism. Paul Virilio, the French urbanist and cultural theorist, has said that “each time we invent a technology, we program a catastrophe” (2003). About “contemporary civilization” he said that it “differs in one particularly distinctive feature from those which preceded it: speed” (Virilio 2003). The consequence of speed is our civilization’s second feature – the accident (Virilio 2003). Accidents are at the core of Crash and Nightcrawler. Also central to them is a drive to control accidents and profit from them, albeit in different ways. Accordingly, there is a considerable difference of scale between the consequences of the actions of the two main characters: Vaughan in Crash and Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler. Vaughan dies in the very first sentence of the novel: he kills himself while trying to cause an orgasmic car crash with Elizabeth Taylor, but instead plunges his car through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers (Ballard, Crash 7). He had caused many other car crashes before, but always putting himself in equal danger, which was the point of the shared impact as a sexual experience. Also, the photographs he makes are only for his own (or his few friends’) private consumption. Lou Bloom, on the other hand, discovers his true calling in shooting footage – and later in his own arrangement – of crimes and accidents for news channels. Lou’s images of other peoples’ suffering, or the moments of their death are intended for mass consumption. This is the major difference between Crash and Nightcrawler: Ballard depicts many car crashes as a secret activity of an underground group of enthusiasts or fetishists, whereas in Gilroy’s film ordinary people “consume” them via morning news. More importantly still, what enters their homes through television is not an illegal reconstruction involving willing participants, some of whom are professional stuntmen, as in Cronenberg’s scene of Vaughan’s re-enactment of James Dean’s famous car crash. What starts each day is a televisualised unique and real event befalling unsuspecting husbands, mothers, in short: upright citizens such as the TV viewers themselves. Importantly, the two different kinds of consumption of the imagery of crashes, that is private in Crash and mass in Nightcrawler, entail very different sets of emotions. David Cronenberg called his film “an existential romance” (1997). The “romantic” part of the film is that “the lovers [the book’s narrator called James Ballard and his wife Catherine are] united in the end, even with the impending death” (Cronenberg 1997). The existential part, connected with romantic idealism, is, in the director’s words, that “the only meaning that there is in the universe

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is created by us for ourselves” and “for the couple … all the old forms have lost their meaning” (Cronenberg 1997). Consequently, after the “epiphany of [his first] car crash,” James Ballard realises that he has to reinvent “the basics of life”: “love, sex, what death means, what emotion is” (Cronenberg 1997) and James Ballardthe character sets out to redefine these things together with a few like-minded people. Their experimental and extreme search for meaning consists not only in consumption of the imagery of crashes (Vaughan’s photography, crash test videos, famous car crash recreations), but in active participation in crashes, which becomes a sexual activity (the medical term for this is symphorophilia), just as all sexual activity becomes inseparable from cars. Thus the dominant emotion here is addictive fear-excitement of the most intense kind, which assuages the previous numbness of the run-of-the-mill middle-class metropolitan hedonism (which was the Ballards’ pre-crash lifestyle). However, the addiction also systematically dulls the senses, which then demand new and more extreme stimulation – until the last and desirable – since most climactic – time, which echoes Freud’s concept of a death-wish. In this sense, Ballard-the writer and Cronenberg offer us a vision of a suicidal spiral, which – bearing in mind Ballard’s own comment that Crash is a cautionary tale (1975) – refers to Western society as a whole. As Ballard added in his introduction to the novel, an extreme crisis requires “a kit of desperate measures,” and thus the form of the novel and the film is hyperbolic, even grotesque and not devoid of humour. This hyperbole, nonetheless, affords Ballard’s vision an allegorical quality. Nightcrawler presents its own spiral, which, even though not literally about sexuality and pornography, is, in a different sense, far more obscene. However, I suggest that the difference in this spiral is that it is not so much suicidal as lethal to most members of Western societies but not to the select few others. The main emotions in Nightcrawler are fear and pity, but predominantly fear. Fear and pity have to do with the spectacle of other people’s suffering and misfortune, which entails Plato’s (Sontag 96-7) and Aristotle’s (Lentricchia and McAuliffe 8) idea of deriving aesthetic pleasure from such voyeurism, but without Aristotle’s principle of catharsis. In fact, the opposite of emotional cleansing may be said to be taking place through watching shocking TV footage: there is no room for the contemplation necessary for catharsis, because every tragic image is immediately replaced by another, preferably even more violent and tragic image. This escalation is best suggested in the film – itself a story of the protagonist’s “progress,” his successive crossing of lines – by the figure of the child. Especially one child is conspicuous by his/her absence: in Lou’s luckiest scoop he records the immediate aftermath of a shooting in a suburban mansion. In fact, one victim is still in the process of

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bleeding to death, but the most tension-building moment arrives when Lou – following the blood trail and entering successive rooms as if in a virtual reality computer game – comes across a nursery. The camera gradually comes closer to a crib, building expectation for what could be the most shocking image of them all. Importantly, after a suspenseful delay, we as viewers of the film are put exactly in the position of the TV viewers of what is swiftly dubbed “Horror House.” The crib turns out to be empty – this time. The anchors’ sigh is audible – but we cannot be entirely sure of its sincerity. Thus, in addition to the idea of family in general, especially children are evoked by the news channel to heighten fear. In contrast, in the film Crash there are no children, the main characters have no clear responsibilities and attachments other than to each other and their interchangeable fellow-post-crash sexual partners. There are children in the book, however; Seagrave, the stuntman who is Vaughan’s no less obsessive friend, and his wife Vera Seagrave have a “small son”: in front of the child the parents entertain their friends in a physically uninhibited atmosphere enhanced by drug use (Ballard, Crash 104). Also in the novel, but not in the film, most of the prostitutes that Vaughan and James Ballard take for rides are teenagers, some “barely older than schoolchildren” (Ballard, Crash 139). Children are present in the crowds of spectators attracted by accidents: “many lifted on their parents’ shoulders to give them a better view” (Ballard, Crash 155). In this sense the novel is much more radical than its film adaptation: the presence of impressionable children makes the story a little less caught in the pleasure-seeking moment, linking it to the future. Childishness and the future fuse in the present in Ballard’s introduction to Crash: Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. … the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. […] Options multiply around us, we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly. (Ballard, “Introduction”)

In Crash, Ballard’s interest in the future as the present is most visible in his interest in the impact of modern technology on the human body, in his characters’ libidinous fascination with technology. In fact, their bodies fuse with machines and technological devices (his leg brace makes James Ballard-the character look like a cyborg in the hospital; Gabrielle remains such a cyborg, liberated by her new body). This fusion is celebrated in sexual unions, which themselves appear grotesquely mechanical, as if post-human. As a result of this merger between man, woman and machine gender ceases to matter, sexuality becomes fluid, all-consuming, all-encompassing, and – paradoxically – diluted in the landscape. Another consequence of this blurring of

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borderlines is that the landscape, the enormous machine that is the city, becomes sexualised too: “The endless highway systems along which we moved contained the formulas for an infinity of sexual bliss” (Ballard, Crash 213), “the flyovers overlaid one another like copulating giants, immense legs straddling each other’s backs” (Ballard, Crash 76). The entirely urban, industrial landscape of London in the novel and of Toronto in the film, “belong[s] to an enchanted domain” (Ballard, Crash 47). In Nightcrawler, the megacity of Los Angeles offers its own, very different kind of enchantment. LA is presented as a combination of the urban with the natural; as Dan Gilroy said about himself and director of photography Robert Elswit, “We wanted to show Los Angeles as physically beautiful and wild and untamed” (qtd. in Howard). Another difference is that there is no sexualised fascination with technology in Nightcrawler, although upgrades of cars, cameras and other equipment do play a crucial role in the story. However, their role is entirely pragmatic; unlike cars and crash simulators in Crash, machines in Nightcrawler are not objects of aesthetic pleasure and desire in themselves – they are integrated prosthetics for working and living. Technology is not sexy. Sexuality is not connected with technology here – it is connected with money. Crash and Nightcrawler present an interesting reversal or a complementary pair: Ballard’s work is all explicit sex, no mention of money; Gilroy’s work is all direct talk of money, no visible sex. In Crash, which we know to be about a highly advanced capitalist Western society, the question of money is strikingly absent. Yet it is the apparent absence of any direct statement of this question that provides a critique of the bourgeoisie and its class privilege. Work is present in Crash as one more place for realising one’s sexual desire. All the main characters are white middle-class professionals in their 30s and 40s. Their professions appear to have significance, but only as part of their back-story, they belong to the past. Vaughan, actually Dr Robert Vaughan, is “a one-time computer specialist,” “one of the first of the new-style TV scientists” (Ballard, Crash 63). Now, post-crash, he is only interested in his next project, his next crash – and the same happened or happens to all his friends. Gabrielle is a “social worker in the Stanwell child-welfare department” (Ballard, Crash 94), but really – and gloriously – a cyberpunk anti-ablecentrist pioneer. Helen Remington, the woman James Ballard has his first crash with, is now a highly distracted medical doctor. James Ballard is a producer of TV commercials, currently working on a car commercial, but he is not shown to be overly preoccupied with the job. Catherine, as it seems only occasionally, works at the airport; she also takes flying lessons – surely an expensive sport. The couple are clearly well-off as they live next to their “well-to-do neighbours” (Ballard, Crash 49) “in a pleasant island of modern housing units” overlooking “the endless landscape of

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concrete and structural steel that extended from the motorways to the south of the airport” (Ballard, Crash 48). The Seagraves especially live suspended in their own solipsistic world – evidently also because they can afford it. In contrast, Nightcrawler is all work, no play. Work is all-important; work defines one; one’s very existence depends on work. There is another major emotion in the film created after the 2008 financial crash: the fear of not having or losing a job – a fear that is equal to losing one’s life in a car crash. It is this fear that determines – more than anything else – the film’s main characters’ actions. In the opening scene of the film Lou looks hungry, even ravenous: he is unemployed, a thief, desperately looking for work. Rick, the man he interviews and then hires as his intern, comes to him unemployed, homeless, and desperate. Nina, the veteran TV news channel producer who buys Lou’s first footage, is threatened with losing her job. Lou takes advantage of both of them because he knows he can. Rick is an extreme symbol for all exploited “trainees,” being exploited literally to death. Because of her untenable professional position due to her age and gender, Nina, an attractive but 60-year-old woman, twice Lou’s age, is blackmailed by him into sexual submission. There are no sex scenes per se in the film; there is another kind of obscenity that the film is interested in and exposes by replacing what used to be obscene in cinema with different kinds of bodies in different positions. The only “romantic relationship” in Nightcrawler is a business transaction. Negotiations, haggling over the price of footage become a form of foreplay. One such dialogue takes place against the background of the image of Rick, who has just been shot dead in a scene directed, and then recorded by Lou, now being offered to Nina like a token of love (or bloody prey brought by a predatory male for a predatory female). Nina’s instruction to the anchors narrating the “Horror House” story: “Hit it again! Harder!” sounds like an altogether different kind of instruction. Thus the energy of sexuality has been absorbed by the pornography of the news media. It is nothing new, but most obscenely of all human life has a price depending on class and race: a crashed truck full of migrant workers, some of them illegal, is worth three thousand dollars (these people are measured in “trucks”); three wealthy white people shot and killed in their mansion in an upscale and affluent neighbourhood are worth fifteen thousand dollars. “We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs. What that means is a victim or victims, preferably well-off and white, injured at the hands of a poor or a minority,” Nina informs Lou early on, in effect ordering a product for which there is a demand, and for which there is now a talented supplier. What this proves is that there is a whole business model, an industry, and a network of service providers build around the fears of the rich (and white) about the poor (and non-white), who

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in fact are not a minority in terms of numbers, and whose minority status in terms of economic and political power can be counterbalanced by their actual power in terms of violence. The resultant fear of the rich is a valuable commodity, a product for consumption which is consumed more – in fact, becomes all-consuming – in an economic crisis, when the poor become even poorer. The poor not bearing their poverty any longer is the cause of the Euro-Anglo-Occident-centric fear of the racially other barbarians whose advance the white and well-off need to be constantly informed about – to feel safer, and paradoxically, less safe at the same time. Of course, this “crime wave” weather forecast is an exaggerated montage of carefully selected fragments of true footage broadcast in a relentless loop in the absence of any other kind of information. Importantly, this toxic fodder is itself sustenance for everyone involved in its creation. This story is not entirely real but it becomes real by being displayed on TV screens. As Ballard wrote already in 1974, “We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, […] the pre-empting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen” (1975). Ballard’s observations appear to be all the more true in the second decade of the 21st century. Unlike in reality, “on TV it looks so real,” says Lou Bloom to Nina in her TV station, marvelling at the night time panorama of LA in the background. In another scene, also in the TV station, he talks to a reporter shown on a screen who can neither see nor hear Lou, but, again, to him “it looks so real” that he forgets that he is talking to a transmitted image, that it is television. What also looks completely real to him, what – according to Dan Gilroy, “became his religion” is the philosophy of “climbing the ladder” (qtd. in Howard). In an interview, the director said about his protagonist, who clearly came from a deprived background: “I imagine that, in his search for sanity or some direction, he came upon capitalism” (qtd. in Howard). He took “an online business course” last year, as he tells Nina, and he has absorbed its corporate language to such an extent that nearly all his utterances include some business jargon cliché or are wholesale chunks of relentless corporate babble. While this language makes many scenes absurd and gives the film a grotesque quality, the vision of reality that it shapes – and not only for Lou – appears much less laughable. It may seem that Lou’s vision of reality is skewed, but in another sense there is a cold logic to it, an uncompromising perceptiveness: in Gilroy’s words, “Lou sees the world for what it is,” “Lou sees the world as a brutal world” (qtd. in Howard). For Lou the world is an ecosystem with a food chain, where everyone is assigned a role: you eat or are eaten. However, eventually, even those at the top, the elite consumers, are consumed by the bottom-feeders, the detritivores. An example of such a decomposer is the

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earthworm, or the nightcrawler, which feeds on live and dead organic matter and thus helps aerate – and enrich – soil. Lou begins as such a useful worm in this capitalist ecosystem. But he absorbs everything and grows stronger fast. As Gilroy remarked in an interview, “what is ultimately the hyper-free market? It’s a jungle! Hyper-free market is ultimately wilderness in which the strong survive and the weak get killed” (qtd. in Howard). Such is the post-financial crash reality of Nightcrawler. This is no fancy “existential romance” like Crash, with its upper-bourgeois boredom and escapism. The film depicts an entirely mundane Darwinian struggle for survival from which there is no escape. Its “nature red in tooth and claw” is television. And what it shows is far more obscene than the kinky sex in Crash. Ballard said about his book that it was “the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way” (1975). In this sense the film Nightcrawler shows an orgy of exploitation. It could be said that Nightcrawler takes up where Crash left off; it proves that the prophecy of Crash not only has come true but blossoms: violent pornography is a mass experience of the entire Western society, a “dark scopophilia” “excites modern masses” (Smith). It has its own technology and its own addictive power. Unlike Crash with its sensual and “conceptual violence” (Cronenberg 1997), Nightcrawler is much more down-to-earth and direct, even though it also has its dreamlike moments. Like Crash, Nightcrawler has its own warning and a prophecy, too. In the end, despite her initial reluctance and later ambivalence about being dominated by the younger and – to her – surprisingly powerful man, Nina appears to be fully on Lou’s side; they now form a power couple from hell. Consequently, Lou is able to make new useful contacts – this time as the founder and president of Video Production News – A Professional News Gathering Service. Predicting Lou’s future, Gilroy said in an interview: “I believe that if you came back ten years after the movie was over, Lou would be running a major, multinational corporation” (qtd. in Howard). After all, “[a]ll the qualities that serve Lou well as a nightcrawler are all the same qualities that are celebrated in the board room” (Gilroy qtd. in Ali). He will become one of those turning the lethal capitalist spiral – fractal-like, on his small-scale level he has already proved lethal for oven half a dozen people. For now he is a small cog in a huge machine, but as his creator predicts – just like capital – “[h]e’s just always going to be getting bigger and bigger” (Gilroy qtd. in Howard).

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Works Cited Ali, Lorraine. “Nightcrawler shows how the news worm has turned.” LA Times, 24 Oct. 2014. Web. 10 Apr. 2015. Ballard, J.G. Crash. London: Vintage, 1995. Print. –, “Introduction to the French edition of Crash!” Crash & Learn, Foundation, The Review of Science Fiction, Number 9, November 1975. Web. 11 Apr. 2015. Cronenberg, David, dir. Crash. Alliance/Fine Line Features, 1996. –, Crash Audio Commentary, Criterion laserdisc, 1997. YouTube. Web. 11 Apr. 2015. Gilroy, Dan, dir. Nightcrawler. Universal/Open Road Films/Bold Films, 2014. Helton, Shawn. “Parasitic Prowl: Analysis of the Hollywood Pyschodrama Nightcrawler.” Twenty-first Century Wire, 29 November 2014. Web. 2 Apr. 2015. Howard, Courtney. “Interview: Nightcrawler Writer-Director Dan Gilroy Talks Inspiration & Corporate Ethics.” Very Aware, 27 Oct. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. Lentricchia, Frank and Jody McAuliffe. Crimes of Art +Terror. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Print. Rose, Steven. “From Network to Nightcrawler: why has Hollywood got it in for TV news?” The Guardian, 31 Oct. 2014. Web. 2 Feb. 2015. Smith, Jonny. “Movie Review: Nightcrawler.” Movie Fail, 7 Nov. 2015. Web. 11 Apr. 2015. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Print. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007. Print. Virilio, Paul. “Foreword to the ‘Unknown Quantity’ Exhibition.” Trans. Chris Turner. Rhizome, 21 Jan. 2003. Web. 11 Apr. 2015.

Ryszard W. Wolny University of Opole

Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991): A Study in Consumerist Void of Emotions Since the times of the success of the non-fiction novel of 1966, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, American literature has been trying to examine, dissect and anatomise crime as an apotheosis of capitalism, consumer culture and the sick minds of the criminals. While Capote has been proclaimed the pioneer of the true crime genre, Ellis’s attempt to portray the mind of the serial killer raises doubts as to the reality of the demonstrated acts of murder, torture, sadism, mutilation, rape, cannibalism and necrophilia. American Psycho (1991) took the world by storm with its explicit presentation of premeditated crimes to such an extent as to make them unbelievable, unrealistic, imaginary and occurring just in the sick mind of the middle-class protagonist. The fact that Patrick Bateman, the main character, coolly confesses to manslaughter over the phone (“I just had to kill a lot of people”) proves to be a sign of our times – the times of unrestrained consumption, desires, urges, manias and mental emotionlessness that result in a variety of transgressions such as group sex, drug abuse or serial killings. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a thesis that American Psycho demonstrates postmodern, post-industrial and consumerist void of positive emotions towards people, animals and physical objects in the world. Such a detachment makes an individual suffer from mental and emotional isolation and stimulate a feeling of self-alienation in the world they construct in such a way. In his times, i.e. the 1980s and 1990s, Bret Easton Ellis’ novels were considered primarily as some sort of chronicles of his young generation dedicated to a lavish life: the life of the affluent and the spoilt by money, success, sex and drugs. His literary debut was Less than Zero (1985), the novel introducing the themes he would undertake in American Psycho but in a Californian context; more important feature being the tone and style of the presentation, which makes the reader believe that all narrated events are of equal importance and that is why they are delivered in the same register. As Murphet (2002) has it: Whether this unity of tone means simply that Clay [the protagonist, RW] is unable to distinguish between mutual masturbation with his girlfriend and lunch with his father, or that the quality of experience itself has been devalued by a consumerist culture, Ellis

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Ryszard W. Wolny refuses to give his readers pleasure through stylistic grace. Even more so than in Didion, there is a marked aversion here from simile, metaphor, symbol and allegory, as though such devices were ill-suited to a generation reared on television and the spoils of overconsumption; rather, everything is immediate, particular, and denied any sense of connection with everything else. ‘People are afraid to merge’ are the first words of the novel; and even the sentences tend towards separation and parataxis. (13)

Ellis’s emphasis on consumption is strengthened in American Psycho, the novel of endless copies without an ambition to point out the origin, the source, the value: Unlike some of his contemporaries, Ellis has deliberately kept to a very minimalist palette, using the reiteration of names (like themes and ideas) to underscore his larger satiric concerns: the identity, indifference, and repetition of human character. Although each novel has, in a sense, accommodated a larger social frame than the previous one (home, college, city, the world of fashion), this insistence on the same names, faces and above all the same language style, drives home the point for his long-term readers that, fundamentally, nothing really changes from scale to scale. (14–15)

As a postmodernist, Ellis argues that all places – very much like characters, motives, experiences – are basically the same: Glamorama extends this leveling of space to a European canvas as well. To the extent that, as tourists, consumers and commuters, this is the lived experience of more and more of those who belong to the world’s dominant group, Ellis’s fictional material looks like becoming increasingly relevant as satire. If we call Ellis a ‘postmodern’ author, we probably mean this above all; this flattening and erasure of the texture of his world, manifest above all in the flatness and affectlessness of his prose style, to which we are meant to respond with a kind of cool outrage. (20)

American Psycho is, then, an unusually usual novel. Apart from the bleakness, insanity and horror of the text, roughly ninety per cent of it is simply boring, with its main character, Patrick Bateman, the character without a character, other characters confusing themselves, most of the text devoted to male daily routine stretched ad absurdum with detailed descriptions of cosmetics he is using or outfits he and others are wearing, or clubs or fitness centres he is frequenting or videos he is renting or food he and his companions are having: However, American Psycho is a perversely unified text, and the rest of the book—a good ninety percent of it—is a carefully considered foil to the violence. Some of the emptiest dialogue ever committed to print; ghastly, endless descriptions of home electronics and men’s grooming products, apparently distilled from actual sales catalogues; characters so undefined and interchangeable that even they habitually confuse each others’ identity; and a central narrating voice which seems unable and unwilling to raise itself above the literary distinction of an in-flight magazine: all this material, so unpropitious, must also be made to mean. If Ellis wants to bore us, he must have a reason. (24)

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This boredom or, as one may say, emotionlessness derives primarily from this “central narrating voice,” which is the first person singular, giving the impression of the speaking “self.” Yet, what really emerges from the self ’s monologues are not the modernist interior monologues but, as one might have believed, the signs and brand-names of consumer society, exposing the emotional void of the self: Where a first person voice does not commit itself to breaking out of its habitual expressions and launching upon some experiential river or highway, but on the contrary fixes itself to habit with a ferocious determination, the effect is quite the opposite from the usual literary conception of a ‘self.’ Rather, what the voice gives us is a kind of non-self, a self defined not by freedom and the open horizon of the undetermined, but by repetition and tunnel vision. This is in one sense the design of Ellis’s novel, an interminable monologue of the non-self, which is, at some hypothetical socio-psychological limit, the lived self of everyday life in contemporary America. (26)

Bateman’s non-self seems to be an expression of this void of personality excessive consumerism of the late 20th century worked in young New York financial elite who are unable to reject the shell of inauthenticity: Bateman’s monologue can thus be seen as a ‘corrective’ to literary escapism. Rather than offer us a better vision of the individual in modern society by exposing his narrative voice to a variegated experience from which it duly learns the meaning of the human, Ellis gives us instead the unreflexive repetition and monomania of a voice that has not escaped the cocoon of its own routine, and enacts the inhumanity of pure habit. We readers are not offered the consolations of the ‘novel’ as such; here, nothing is new, all is prescribed, and the shape, texture and depth of the voice does not alter. Its monotony is the whir and hum of everyday life itself, which, despite all the rotations of fashion, fundamentally repeats its own elements and structures in a seamless procession of the same. And this is where the virtually unbroken present tense secures its most powerful hold over the meaning of the work as well. Every narrated instant (violence aside) is presented in the flat immediacy of the present, as though it has already been lived. What might in some other use of this tense have been a dizzying revolution of new perceptions and affections, is exchanged stylistically for the numb conviction that past and future have both collapsed into a point without dimension or dynamism, which the voice occupies indifferently—the ‘end of history’ as Hell. (27)

Out of at least three interpretations of the novel Jerzy Durczak presents in the chapter New Realism (Nowy realizm, 2003), the author seems to favour the one speaking of the hyperrealist record of a madman’s life, referring to those who justified the presence of the brutal and drastic scenes with the authorial intention of demonstrating the realist picture of the deviant’s world (553), dismissing at the same time the reading of American Psycho as a satire on the devoid of selfreflection world of the yuppies and as a postmodernist grotesque which presents the fantasy world of the generation.

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While the term “New Realism” has got some traces of adequacy (if I understand the adjective “new” properly) in the sense that this “newness” indicates a distance from verisimilitude, which basically and fundamentally renders what we make of realism, the authorial intention of presenting the realist (similar to truth?) picture of the deviant’s world is by far erroneous. No matter what may be thought in contemporary literary theory of “authorial intention” (intentional fallacy), the concept of a realist rendition of the deviant’s world remains largely a mystery. Even though the narrative frames of the novel are motivated by what may be broadly termed realism, the content, the story-line and particularly the incidents leading to its climax are, at least, hyper-realistic, bearing little or no semblance to reality of living in American urban society, especially in regards to law reinforcement. The brutal and drastic scenes, apparently “realistic,” seem to be just the projections of the mind – not necessarily the deviant’s mind – but the mind or rather the young brain ruined by a daily use of hallucinatory drugs and alcohol. The question, of course, is whether the pictures generated by such a mind can be called realist or not. The protagonist himself admits that “there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there” (American Psycho, eBook). Patrick Bateman distances himself from himself, from the reality of being himself, for which he uses the impersonal “a,” emphasising the immateriality, intangibility of the concept of the self, being simultaneously aware of his physicality, his body: I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. (eBook)

His depersonalisation serves as an emblem for the whole generation, or class, of young, successful caste of “yuppies” for whom the lifestyle has been marked, or reduced to, conspicuous consumption, status, greed and clear absence of any positive emotions, or what may be termed coolness. When Bateman says, “I have no identifiable emotions apart from greed and craze,” one is tempted to classify him as a psychopath since, as it is popularly known, they are characterised by severe lack of empathy and a poverty of emotional range even though they seem to have some primitive emotions closely related to their own welfare. As David Cullen has it:

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Psychopaths are distinguished by two characteristics. The first is a ruthless disregard for others: they will defraud, maim or kill for the most trivial personal gain. The second is an astonishing gift for disguising the first […]. Yet the majority have consistently eluded the law […]. He’s not just conning you with a scheme, he’s conning you with his life. His entire personality is a fabrication, with the purpose of deceiving suckers like you. (59)

He goes on: “The fundamental nature of a psychopath is a failure to feel.” Although psychopaths can display terrifying rages, this is mere “readiness of expression” without “strength of feeling.” They seem to have some “primitive emotions closely related to their own welfare” but that really is it: “Even an earthworm will recoil if you poke it with a stick. […] Psychopaths make it that far up the emotional ladder, but they fall far short of the average golden retriever, which will demonstrate affection, joy, compassion and empathy for a human in pain” (60). Patrick Bateman, a businessman by day, torturer and killer by night, certainly meets all the above criteria to pass for a psychopath. The story he tells his mute audience is a flat line buzz. Whether he is obsessively cataloguing the designer labels of everyone in his field of vision, or torturing a woman to death, the emotional tone remains exactly the same. Not only is he unable to feel, he is unable and unwilling to recognise emotions in others because his personality, his self is, as he claims himself, an artificial construct, sketchy and unformed: it is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. (eBook)

In the moments of sanity, Bateman admits he is insane and uncontrollable since the power of reason or, in Freudian language, his superego, his morality code is gone with the enlightened education he received at Harvard. Having no aims, he just plunges into the void of nihilism and non-being, proclaiming the recurrence of the same, the times of primeval chaos and neo-paganism in which “no one is safe” and “nothing is redeemed.” Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding

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However, he does not blame himself, believing he is just a victim of contemporary society and the social class in which evil is inherent and “cheap sensation and manufacture of mass-cultural artefacts are the logical ramifications of a situation where ethical unfoundedness of social life has been taken for granted” (Mydla 56). On top of this nihilism, Bateman’s behaviour is a pronounced indictment of (post)Enlightenment, where reason deposed ethics and morality of their privileged position and established the rule of the mighty in the de Sadean sense: “everything [the mighty] does is natural: his oppression, his violences, his cruelties, his tyrannies, his injustices […] are as pure as the hand that impressed them in him; and when he exercises all his rights to oppress the weak and to rob them, he does only the most natural thing in the world” (Sade, Juliette, in: Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 100). Patrick Bateman denies his confession any significance; he excoriates meaning from the words he produced to make the declaration faceless, void, dreary. The bleakness, horror and insanity of the text is a reflection of Bateman’s psyche – the product of the blind faith in social progress, middle-class schooling and consumer capitalism. In Shopping in Space: Essays on American “Blank Generation” Fiction (1992), Elizabeth Young has commented on yuppie lifestyle of conspicuous consumption and consumer capitalism in American Psycho and its manifest concern with the reverberating upshots of consumerism and reification on human beings: Within consumer capitalism we are offered a surfeit of commodities, an abundance of commodity choices, but this image of plenty is illusory. Our desires are mediated by ideas about roles and lifestyles which are themselves constructed as commodities and our ‘choices’ are propelled by these constructs. In a world in which the only relations are economic, we remain alienated from any ‘authenticity’ of choice or desire. Patrick has been so fragmented and divided by his insane consumerism that he cannot ‘exist’ as a person. (104)

Most certainly, every reader of American Psycho has noticed that virtually every chapter in the book contains a description of what Patrick and other characters are wearing, what they are drinking, what they are eating, etc. This is what is referred to as reification, the transformation of relationships between human beings into relationships between things (Murphet 37). Reification is both what is behind the urban alienation Patrick experiences and his only method for curing it: “The ties is a dotted silk design by Valentino Couture. The shoes are crocodile loafers by A. Testoni. While I’m dressing the TV is kept on to The Patty Winters Show. Today’s guests are women with multiple personalities,” who later on deny the method of

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multiplicity curing effect: “No, oh no. Multiple personalities are not schizophrenics,” the woman says, shaking her head, “We are not dangerous” (eBook). The infinity of things through which he can identify himself opens up the existential chasm in Bateman; he closes it briefly in the gesture of purchase. As Murphet correctly notices, “[t]his fragmentation is registered in the text through the stylistic devices of parataxis and list-making—the tendency of each sentence to break up into clauses which approximate a sales catalogue or advice column. In this way, Ellis designates the colonization of the psyche by prefabricated discourses, the reduction of thought to habitual reflexes of socialized language” (38). Little wonder, then, that brands are more recognisable than characters of the novel: people are invisible, their names are often confused and swallowed by the various products they wear: we are dealing here with commercial nominalisation – everything has its proper name. In his mock memoir, Lunar Park (2009), Ellis makes it clear that all these killings, tortures and acts of cannibalisms in American Psycho have, in fact, been pure fantasies and, simultaneously, the defence mechanisms of the troubled mind of its narrator: Patrick Bateman was a notoriously unreliable narrator, and if you actually read the book you could come away doubting that these crimes had even occurred. There were large hints that they existed only in Bateman’s mind. The murders and torture were in fact fantasies fuelled by his rage and fury about how life in America was structured and how this had – no matter the size of his wealth – trapped him. The fantasies were an escape. This was the book’s thesis. It was about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. (eBook)

Thus, Bateman – himself a mockery of American superman, Batman – becomes a symbolic of postmodern anti-heroism of the U.S. middle class of the late 20th century, a “walking denial of spirituality” (Mydla 62). Further, in James Annesley’s classification, as articulated in his Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel (1998), the new generation of American writers such as Dennis Cooper, Lynne Tillman, Bret Easton Ellis and Susanna Moore represents a shift away from the postwar obsession with complex plots, serious subject matter and overwhelming intellectual discourse. These writers appear to value superficiality over complexity, popular culture over high culture and youth over experience. Challenging conventional postmodernist approaches, Annesley reveals the dynamic of blank writing to be tied to the dominant economic forces of contemporary capitalism. This contextual analysis concentrates on the relationship between blank fiction and consumerism and locates the writing within currents of

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contemporary American culture, lucidly showing the direction in which American literature was progressing at the turn of the century. American Psycho is, therefore, probably the most important American literary production of the late 20th century not just because it shocks and unnerves the reader, but mainly because, from the literary point of view, it uses the hyperrealistic frames of narration to create a world devoid of realism and emotions, the human protagonist – dehumanised and depersonalised, all illusory and hallucinatory-like drugs the young financial elite of the USA use to free themselves from the harsh reality of capitalist rat race and the simulated world of widespread consumption.

Works Cited Works by Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991; London: Picador, 1991. eBook. Glamorama. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998; London: Picador, 1999. eBook. The Informers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994; London: Picador, 1994. eBook. Less Than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985; London: Picador, 1986. eBook. Lunar Park. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. eBook. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987; London: Picador, 1988. eBook.

Select Criticism Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto, 1998. Print. Bowman, James. “American Psycho.” The Times Literary Supplement. March 15, 1991: 12. Print. Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York: Random House, 1966. Print. Cooper, Dennis. “More than Zero.” Artforum. 28: 7. 2000: 29–30. Print. Cullen, David. Columbine. New York, London: Twelve. Hachette Book Group, 2009. Print. Durczak, Jerzy. “Nowy realizm.” Historia literatury amerykańskiej XX wieku. Vol. 2. Ed. Agnieszka Salska. Kraków: Universitas, 2003: 552–553. Print. Eberly, Rosa. Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Print. Fitch, Robert. The Assassination of New York. London: Verso, 1993. Print.

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Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1995. Print. Mailer, Norman. American Dream. New York: Random House, 1964. Print. 2013 Random House eBook Edition. Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. New York, London: Continuum, 2002. Print. Mydla, Jacek. “The Vanishing Psyche in American Psycho.” Zeszyty naukowodydaktyczne NKJO w Zabrzu. Ed. Grzegorz Wlaźlak and Alina Jackiewicz. Zabrze, 2009: 56–66. Print. Young, Elizabeth and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American “Blank Generation” Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Print.

Stankomir Nicieja University of Opole

The Foreign City as an Emotional Catalyst: Revisiting Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation remains one of the most memorable portraits of Tokyo in contemporary cinema. Released in 2003, the film tells a story of two Americans who find themselves stranded in the middle of the huge Japanese metropolis and gradually discover their mutual attraction. The female protagonist, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), visits Tokyo with her husband who works there as a professional photographer. While her self-absorbed and ostensibly immature spouse is busy pursuing his professional interests, Charlotte is stuck in a luxurious hotel, with apparently plenty of time to kill. There, her paths cross with an aging actor, Bob Harris (Bill Murray), who like many Western celebrities is hired by a Japanese company to take part in an advertising campaign. In Bob’s case it is Suntory Whisky, a drink he endorses but also indulges himself with for most of his stay. With barely masked exasperation, Bob treats the job as a tiresome chore. During his sojourn in the Japanese capital he never fully recovers from the combination of hangover and jet lag. His visible discomfort is aggravated by the evident symptoms of crisis in his marriage. Bizarre faxes and brief telephone calls Bob regularly receives from his wife Lydia (at different times of the day and night), betray a growing emotional gap between the two. Problems in Charlotte and Bob’s personal lives inevitably draw the two characters together. Judged only by this brief plot summary, Lost in Translation may appear as a very unremarkable production, distinguished only by unique location and the presence of celebrated actors in the lead parts. However, like in many landmark works in cinematic history, a plot summary of Lost in Translation is a poor indicator of the film’s value and broader appeal. In fact, Coppola’s movie is one of those rare cases which have been able to command near-universal admiration from almost all corners of the cinematic world. Upon its release, critics applauded the film for its unique humour and cool, detached style (French; King 3), while the audience turned out in large numbers to watch what was after all a niche, independent production. Rotten Tomatoes, a popular website comparing film reviews, granted Lost in Translation an unusually high average rating of 8.4 out of 10 (“Lost in Translation”). Numerous

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festival juries and professional bodies also acknowledged Sofia Coppola’s film by rewarding it with a number of highly prestigious awards. Most notable among them were the Golden Globes (for Best Comedy, Best Screenplay, and Best Comedy Actor), BAFTA film awards (for the Best Editing, Best Actor and Best Actress), and the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. As it was already mentioned, Lost in Translation resonated very well with the vast majority of the cinema-attending public. Within a year since the film’s release, it generated a worldwide revenue total of almost $120 million (King 27). By Hollywood standards, the sum may not seem outstanding, but bearing in mind the film’s budget of only $4 million, the ratio of return to investment could impress even the most jaded of producers. This almost dream-like reception of the movie was only marred by controversies with what some viewers perceived as highly ambiguous, even racist, portrayal of the Japanese characters in the film. Soon after the release of Sofia Coppola’s film, Asia Media Watch, an Asian-American group fighting against racial stereotyping in the media launched a campaign for the boycott of the movie. The organisation admonished Lost in Translation for what they interpreted as simplistic and offensive representation of the Japanese who were treated “with disregard and disdain” (“Campaign”; Laemmerhirt 190). They also objected to “the heavy reliance on Japanese stereotypes for humour” (Laemmerhirt 190; King 132). For many devoted fans of the film, such reaction may seem exaggerated. However, having in mind the long and well-documented history of ingrained institutional racism against Asians in Hollywood (and general racial prejudice against Asians in America), complaints voiced by Asia Media Watch should not be dismissed too quickly1. Although set exclusively in Tokyo, Lost in Translation does not feature even a single significant Japanese character (Laemmerhirt 186). The Japanese that do appear often act in an infantile, freakish or at best awkward manner. Two scenes in Lost in Translation attracted particularly negative attention. In both of them, Bob Harris (Murray) is forced to deal with highly perplexing and incomprehensible (at least from the Western perspective) behaviour of the Japanese. The first instance 1 Strong prejudice against Asian in mainstream American film and TV was manifested in the consistent portrayal of Asian characters as marginal and grotesque figures, speaking heavily accented English and performing menial jobs. Even more tellingly, in those rare cases when Asian characters fulfilled some more important narrative roles, they were exclusively played by white actors made up to look Asian. Such “yellow face” performances were unabashedly practiced well into the mid 1980s, when blackface (whites made up to play blacks) was already socially unacceptable. For a thorough discussion of institutional racism and negative portrayal of Asians in Hollywood and American media see for example Lee, Benshoff and Griffin or Marchetti.

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happens relatively early in the film, when a Japanese escort comes to Bob’s hotel room. Supposedly sent by the advertising company in order to alleviate Bob’s openly manifested discomfort and bad mood during shoots, she completely fails at her task and pushes the unwilling protagonist into further depths of comic embarrassment. Her insistent demands to rip her stockings, expressed in broken English for further confusion, or histrionic rolling on the floor, appear baffling to Bob as well as the cinematic audience. Viewed in the light of the long history of Orientalist prejudice in America, it is possible to interpret this scene as implying that Japan, despite semblances of modernity, is a “barbaric country” where objectionable sexual practices, not ostensibly condoned in the West (like sending prostitutes to entertain corporate guests), are a norm rather than an exception. Westerners often characterized “barbarians,” Tzvetan Todorov reminds, as those who wantonly violated established laws of human conduct, particularly sexual norms, as well as ignored the fact that they might be visible2 (15–16). Therefore today, any association of the Other with what may look like transgressive sexual behaviour carries strong connotations of Orientalist practice. This also explains why Asian Hollywood villains were commonly endowed with powerful and deviant sexual appetites, either in the guise of darkly seductive “dragon ladies” or lascivious Asian males, lusting over innocent white virgins3. The second highly controversial scene in Lost in Translation, which some viewers found offensive, unfolds later in the film when Bob is invited to take part in a wacky Japanese talk show. Flashy TV studio décor and bizarre, grotesquely exaggerated behaviour of the host, encourage the film’s viewers to question not only the taste and judgement of the creators of such a show, but predominantly the audience who may derive pleasure from willingly watching such a spectacle. Although those and other suggestive scenes contrasting the film’s American protagonists with the Japanese may smack of condescension, the majority of critics refrain from rejecting Lost in Translation as unequivocally Orientalist and racist. Instead, they encourage seeing the film as a much more nuanced creation which actively plays with established notions of Orientalism, and sometimes even 2 Another scene that may subtly hint at aberrant Japanese sexual tastes features Charlotte, who travelling on Tokyo’s underground, notices a man standing next to her unabashedly reading explicitly pornographic manga comic book. 3 Relatively recent example of such Oriental lecher is the character of Sao Feng (Chow Yun-fat) from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) but the most notorious case in this respect is the figure of Fu Manchu, a Chinese villain from the series of Sax Rohmer’s popular novels and their numerous film adaptations. For more on the subject see Chan 4–5.

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undermines them. For example, in her incisive analysis of Lost in Translation, IrisAya Laemmerhirt points to the markedly different readings of the film in Japan. Instead of concentrating on the way their country was represented, Japanese viewers focused more on the comic dimensions of the white protagonists and their awkwardness when faced with Japanese environment and customs. They found Bob’s arrogant behaviour comical rather than offensive. As Laemmerhirt explains: Bob is the perfect Occidentalist stereotype of a Yankee tourist who believes that everyone has to speak proper English and who never questions himself. For him, the Japanese are just two-dimensional, comical sidekicks whom he does not treat with respect but neglect. Yet, for Japanese viewers it is exactly this ignorant behaviour that makes Bob a funny character. (191)

Of course, there were also other, much more critical voices. For example, a reviewer from Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest daily newspaper, dismissed Coppola’s depiction of Japan as “outrageously biased and banal” (qtd. in King 132). Apart from the unorthodox approach to the representation of race and crosscultural communication, in Lost in Translation Coppola displays similar latitude in her treatment of the genre. The movie cannot be easily fitted into any clear-cut cinematic convention and some critics go even as far as to argue that the film constitutes a genre of its own (King 60). Undoubtedly, Coppola’s film draws on two well-established narrative formats: romantic comedy and “Americans abroad” narrative. Looking at the film’s plot, it is relatively easy to recognise certain elements of a classic Hollywood “romcom.” The film is built around a familiar pattern: the audience follows the development of emotional bond between two very different characters. Their mutual affection helps them to overcome seemingly insurmountable barriers. Usually, these are differences of race, class or social status; in the case of Lost in Translation the main factor is age. Despite obvious differences, Bob and Charlotte establish an exceptional bond and understanding, something they both ostensibly lack in relationships with their spouses. Geoff King, in his impressively detailed analysis of Lost in Translation, also points to other distinctive features of a romantic comedy in the film. They include the presence of a “wrong partner” to whom protagonists are initially committed, or a foolish “wrong step” that threatens to undermine growing affection (King 61). In the film Bob’s one-night stand with a bar singer from the hotel plays such a function of a “wrong step”. Coppola also uses editing patterns common in romantic comedies. At the beginning of the film, she heavily depends on the technique of paralleling, where camera changes perspectives following separate lives of the protagonists, highlighting similarities or differences between them, to finally tie the pair together in common scenes.

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Despite those numerous generic markers, Lost in Translation can hardly be called a typical romantic comedy, as it also deviates from the familiar pattern in many crucial respects. Not only we do not have any anticipated sexual consummation of the relationship, but also the resolution of romance is manifestly at odds with the rules of the genre (King 65). Instead of a typical, “last minute, all-out declaration of love and the imposition of romantic closure,” King writes, the characters return to their respective lives, with only a mild suggestion of some continuation of their friendship (66). The second genre creatively engaged by Sophia Coppola in Lost in Translation is Americans abroad narrative. Popularised by Mark Twain in his canonical The Innocents Abroad (1869), the format depicts often gullible and innocent tourists from America trying to survive in a foreign and often hostile environment. In other words, such stories juxtapose naïve Americans vis-a-vis “decadent” or cunning foreigners, often Europeans. Novelists as well as filmmakers, from Henry James to Woody Allen, have creatively adopted and expanded the genre.4 Undoubtedly, Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation constitutes a highly original and important contribution to the tradition. The generic references and associations are also connected with Lost in Translation as a film set in a concrete city. Although, as Laemmerhirt adamantly states, Lost in Translation is “not a movie about [emphasis original] Tokyo or Japan” (186), it draws viewers’ attention to a particular urban location, inescapably contributing to the place’s mythology and popular image. While it may not be a film about Tokyo, undeniably the Japanese capital plays in it a pivotal role. The Asian megapolis effectively becomes one of the characters. It works as an emotional catalyst and is instrumental in altering the protagonists’ behaviour as well as emotional responses. Had Lost in Translation been set in another city, it would have been a completely different, and certainly much less expressive creation. Giving a very prominent role to cities is not uncommon in cinema. Metropolitan spaces today are very rarely just generic backgrounds for cinematic action. More often, they take active part in motivating or guiding protagonists and pushing the action forward. The significance of a city conjured up on screen may vary dramatically. One can easily come up with a long list of notable films that give cities the status of another character. Classic examples include William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953), Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), and Wim Wenders’s Lisbon Story (1994). Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013) may serve as the

4 Some other notable cinematic examples of the Americans aboard genre include National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985, dir. Amy Heckerling) and Eurotrip (2004, dir. Jeff Schaffer).

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most recent example of a spectacular cinematic tribute to a concrete urban setting. Expectedly, those films employ a rich array of strategies by which a city is represented. They range from the light-spirited celebrations of the beauty of particular cities to the explorations of their darker dimensions. Along with this tradition, in Lost in Translation Tokyo emerges as much more than a colourful background for characters’ exploits and adventures. The imposing ambience of the city forces the characters to undergo soul-searching and to review their attitudes. As the film closes their problems do not get solved or even alleviated, but they definitely become better, more sensitive human beings and find connection they apparently lacked earlier. Tokyo’s role is undeniable in this transformation, yet it affects the characters in a very unexpected and idiosyncratic manner. Intriguingly from our point of view, most of the action in the film unfolds within a seemingly indistinct, generic environment of a luxurious hotel. Park Hyatt, where the protagonists are stranded for most of the time, is a highly Westernized space, with remarkably few “markers of Japaneseness” (Laemmerhirt 188). Similar hotels can be found in any major city around the world. They are frequently owned by global chains and their design is usually similar, if not identical. Despite all of this, the geographical setting of Lost in Translation remains vital. Majestically sprawling below the hotel, Tokyo affects the tone and feel of the entire movie. Coppola manages to achieve this effect by carefully juxtaposing the isolated space of the hotel with the exotic reality of contemporary Japan outside. Importantly the characters’ insulation is not complete. The westernized shell of the hotel environment isolating the characters is porous and leaky. Both Charlotte and Bob repeatedly come across various reminders that they are in Japan. These could be an ikebana class upon which Charlotte stumbles roaming the corridors of the hotel, or various everyday appliances packed with electronics (like a treadmill in the gym or a toilet) that talk back in Japanese to helpless and mystified Bob. When the protagonists finally venture beyond the confines of the Hyatt, things do not improve dramatically, the reality of quotidian Japan becomes neither more understandable nor more accessible. Coppola’s vision of Tokyo constitutes a highly amusing sight for the characters as well as the film audience. However, the film does not go very far beyond the mere spectacle in representing the city. The Japanese metropolis is primarily portrayed as a fascinating mixture of ultra-modernity and exotic tradition. Its omnipresent, glittering neon lights (with Japanese characters intelligible to most Westerners) together with intense colourful traffic are very photogenic. To use Jane Chi Hyun Park’s terminology, Tokyo from Lost in Translation is a quintessentially techno-Oriental city. It offers the taste of the future, yet it is laced with a

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strong dose of dystopian anxiety and melancholy (6). The images bring echoes of the colourful and ominous Asiatic urban jungle so vividly created in Ridley Scott’s influential Blade Runner (1982). In Lost in Translation the character’s distance to the city, Laemmerhirt observes, is continually emphasized by sequences when the protagonists are looking at the city through glass, through windows of their hotel rooms, trains or cars (190). As Laemmerhirt further remarks: “The spatial separation between Tokyo and the protagonists can be interpreted as invisible cultural boundary. Since Bob and Charlotte are ‘outsiders’ […] they are not able to assimilate with the city. The cultural difference and indifference to the Japanese culture keep the two protagonists at a distance” (191). However, as the action of the film develops, Charlotte and Bob discover that they actually enjoy the disruption their visit to Tokyo brings into their lives. In the highly evocative scene at end of the film, Bob, who earlier was so desperate to return home, confesses to Charlotte that he does not want to leave. The feeling of alienation is true for both protagonists, although they display radically different attitudes towards the possibility of exploring the city and another culture. While Bob is manifestly disinterested, even disgusted with Japan (at least initially), Charlotte makes considerable effort to connect with the outside reality with the hope of finding solutions to her personal problems. However, neither the trip to the busy shopping district, nor a visit to a quiet Buddhist temple provide such solutions. The enlightenment does not come. In a symbolic gesture, in order to alleviate existential pain and boost self-confidence, Charlotte resorts to listening to self-help tapes she brought to Japan from the States. The idea of Japan or more broadly Asia as a place for spiritual re-creation is questioned in Lost in Translation. Unlike in other popular films about distraught females travelling to the East, for example in popular Eat, Pray, Love5 (2010) where the protagonist Elizabeth Gilbert (played by Julia Roberts) finds solace in Eastern mysticism; Japan in Lost in Translation does not offer instant karma. An interesting, counterpoint to Charlotte’s unsuccessful attempts at insight is the character of Kelly, a young Hollywood starlet and Charlotte’s husband’s acquaintance. Kelly does not seem to feel any discomfort or a sense of loss. She is fully “integrated” in the globalised, multicultural world; however, it is a comically shallow integration which gets ruthlessly ridiculed in the film. Although Tokyo ultimately does not offer cultural interconnection or deeper self-understanding, it serves as a place two very unlikely friends learn to take care

5 The film directed by Ryan Murphy is an adaptation of a bestseller novel written in 2006 by Elizabeth Gilbert of the same title.

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of each other. The film explores an interesting paradox that we sometimes need barriers and frustrations to overcome other, more profound barriers and frustrations in life. Unfamiliar and unsettling foreign city, with all its power to alienate and confuse, is a necessary element of this process. Without it Bob and Charlotte would not be ready to open up. Coppola’s blatant rejection of Orientalist cliché as a solution to Charlotte and Bob’s personal problems does not mean that she managed to stay clear from the established patterns of presenting Japanese culture (and more generally Asian) in the West. Apart from more frequent employment of slow-paced editing and longer takes, Coppola’s depiction of Tokyo is not particularly original. She does not resist the temptation to embrace the more conventional ways of showing Japan’s visual beauty. In the second part of the film she inserts emblematic images and landmarks that one could easily find in any popular travel documentary about the island nation. Geishas against the backdrop of an ultra-modern cityscape6, karaoke, traditional Japanese wedding and even Mount Fuji viewed from the window of a speeding Shinkasen train, they all appear in the film. Therefore, Lost in Translation can by no means be declared a cliché-defying picture. Rather than completely rejecting the attractions of Orientalism and exoticism, Coppola chooses to play with them and show them in a slightly different light. Thanks to its popularity, Lost in Translation achieved the status of one of the more memorable Western movies set in Tokyo. The city plays such a significant part in the film that it effectively becomes one of the characters. However, the significance of the city is not straightforward. Far from glorifying Tokyo as mystifying and inspiring, Coppola chose to underscore the city’s foreignness and even hostility to the protagonists. Paradoxically, however, such ambient presence of the Japanese capital affects them in a very positive way. Thanks to the intensification of the protagonists’ life, they ultimately become shaken out of their daily routines and are provoked to examine their attitudes form a novel and sobering perspective. Tokyo does not open up to them; it does not reveal exotic charms nor does it provide simple solutions, but is nonetheless instrumental in enabling these two characters to open up to one another.

6 The image of geishas against the backdrop of an ultra-modern cityscape is one of the most often reproduced visual clichés that are supposed to express the spirit of the country. Such pictures are a staple for covers of books about Japan printed in the West.

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Works Cited Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Print. “Campaign - No Votes for Lost In Translation: Lost-in-Racism.org.” 22 Feb. 2004. Web. 4 Aug. 2015. Chan, Kenneth. Remade in Hollywood: The Global Chinese Presence in Post-1997 Transnational Cinemas. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2009. Print. French, Philip. “The Odd Coppola.” The Guardian 11 Jan. 2004. The Guardian. Web. 1 Aug. 2015. King, Geoff. Lost in Translation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Print. Laemmerhirt, Iris-Aya. Embracing Differences: Transnational Cultural Flows between Japan and the United States. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013. Print. Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. Print. “Lost In Translation.” Lost in Translation Score. The Rotten Tomatoes. Web. 9 Aug. 2015. Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Print. Park, Jane Chi Hyun. Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Print. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2010. Print.

Part II – Emotions through the Ages

Jacek Mydła University of Silesia, Katowice-Sosnowiec

Joanna Baillie’s Dramatic Experiments with Strong Passions in the Light of the Idea of Sympathetic Spectatorship Baillie and the drama of strong passions In this article, I examine emotions, or more traditionally: passions, in two contexts: that of the dramatic project formulated by the romantic playwright Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) and that of Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments with sympathy and spectatorship as its founding ideas. In the words of her friend, Sir Walter Scott, Baillie was “the best dramatic writer whom Britain has produced since the days of Shakespeare and Massinger” (after Brewer 166). Nowadays, even though Baillie’s work has been rediscovered and reappraised, “there has been insufficient effort expended in close readings of Baillie’s vast literary production” (Carney 230). Besides, more scholarly attention has been paid to her plays, the tragedies in particular, than to their philosophical embedding. Worth analysing in this respect are, her conception of drama and her theory of theatrical experience. In this article, we shall relate these to the way in which they engage and challenge her contemporary moral philosophy. With an anonymous publication of 1798, Baillie started an ambitious project which can be described as dramatic study of the passions. The elaborate title of this publication is self-explanatory: A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy. Baillie’s original intention was to devote two plays, a tragedy and a comedy, to each of the major passions – love, hate, ambition, fear, hope, remorse, jealousy, pride, envy, revenge, anger, joy, grief (Duthie 24). She later modified this project and eventually, over a period of almost 30 years (1798–1836), wrote altogether thirteen “plays on the passions” (Duthie 24). The 1798 book contained three plays: a tragedy on love, Count Basil; a tragedy on hate, De Monfort; and a comedy on love, The Tryal. Added to them was a prefatory essay, “Introductory Discourse,” in which Baillie outlined her theory of drama. According to Baillie, drama satisfies a basic human need: that of knowing other people. Baillie defines this “propensity” or “desire” as “sympathetick [sic]

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curiosity towards others of our kind” (Baillie, “Introductory Discourse” 69). “This universal desire in the human mind to behold man in every situation” (Baillie, “Introductory Discourse” 70) is what justifies drama; because we are naturally interested in what our fellow creatures think and feel, drama offers us a chance closely to observe them, especially in situations in which they are actuated by vehement emotions, or “strong passions.” The playwright’s task, and especially that of the tragic poet, is to “delineate” “the varieties and progress of a perturbed soul” (Baillie, “Introductory Discourse” 73). The idea of “sympathetic curiosity” thus supplies a foundation – a psychological justification – for Baillie’s dramatic project and. As we shall see, it also defines the functioning of drama in the context of theatrical performance, which is to be regarded as a type of communal or interpersonal experience.1

Sympathy and spectatorship In naming sympathetic curiosity as a universal human “propensity” and a justification of her dramatic project, Baillie revealed her philosophical credentials. Broadly regarded, her intellectual background, or formative environment, was that of the Scottish Enlightenment,2 the term coined in 1900 by William Robert Scott “to designate the great eighteenth-century flowering of moral philosophy and the human sciences in the university towns of Lowland Scotland” (Manning et al. 71).3 Scott’s explanation suggests that the period was dominated by a type of humanism, a man-oriented philosophy, as it flourished in southern Scotland in the second half of the 18th century. This prominent position of the philosophy of the mind – hence also of the theory of the passions regarded as “moral sentiments,” foundational for an ethics – accords with and is duly reflected in Baillie’s

1 It is important to stress the distinction between drama and theatre because Baillie wrote her plays on the passions with stage representation in mind; she wrote them as “acting plays” (Armstrong 23). Only some, e.g. De Monfort, were actually staged and none was a successful production. Baillie complained of the staging conditions as adverse to her dramatic project. 2 Baillie’s father, the Reverend James Baillie, a Presbyterian minister, was professor of divinity at Glasgow; here Adam Smith was professor of Moral Philosophy from 1752 to 1763. Joanna left Scotland for London after her father’s death at the age of twenty-two. Commenting on Baillie’s absorption of the “Scotts environment,” Isobel Armstrong speaks of her “saturat[ion] in the culture and intellectual disputes of the Scottish Enlightenment” (56, note 8). 3 See also: Broadie, “Introduction.”

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project. Let us here name two philosophers representative of this cultural milieu and examine some of their ideas. Among the many Scottish men of Enlightenment, two are of special significance for our concern: David Hume (1711–1776), author of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), and Adam Smith (1723–1790), author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Both were concerned with the passions and with sympathy. Smith in his Theory uses the term “sympathy” in the cognitive sense, close to that found in Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse.”4 Alexander Broadie explains this epistemological meaning of the term and sums up the psychological mechanics, according to Smith: “In the technical sense, to sympathise with someone is to have a feeling which one knows or suspects another person to have, and to acquire the feeling by imagining oneself in the very same circumstances that we know the other person to be in” (Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment 155, editor’s note; also: Broadie, “Sympathy” 168-9). Sympathy, in other words, is a cognitive and emotive faculty with a substantial social function in that it links a person to other people. When operating properly, sympathy creates interpersonal bonds of chiefly emotional nature and thus prevents, not only isolation and alienation, but also, as we shall see, all manner of antisocial conduct. To emphasise the philosophical, technical meaning of sympathy, theorists replace it with the synonym “fellow feeling.” They also use the metaphor of one person’s “entering into” another person’s state of mind (Smith 38). However, as further sections of this article will make clear, it is not possible to tie sympathy down to one strictly delimited denotation or to keep it free from all ambiguity. It is advisable to bear in mind the wider semantic field traditionally covered by “sympathy” and not to disassociate it hastily from its historical and cultural context. A passage in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry may be treated as a significant reminder in this respect: “and as our Creator has designed we should be united by the bond of sympathy, he has strengthened that bond by a proportionable delight; and there most where our sympathy is most wanted, in the distress of others” (Burke 42; also Fludernik 4). Smith’s theory is by no means blind to the idea of interpersonal bonding. Sympathy is a transpersonal or “transsubjective” faculty.5 Because, according to Smith, “we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, [consequently] we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected […].” From this assumption – 4 For Smith, as for Baillie, sympathy is an innate propensity, because “men are naturally sympathetic” (Smith 101). 5 In the context of Hume’s theory of the passions, Adela Pinch describes feelings as “transsubjective entities that pass between persons […]” (Pinch 19).

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which, incidentally, is not self-evident – Smith draws the conclusion that in order to be able to exercise emotional understanding of others (to fellow-feel with them), we need to put ourselves in their position; we need to imagine “what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (Smith 11). This transpersonal, “sympathetic” understanding is responsible for the construction of a shared reality. The communal environment thus created is “specular” and “panoptic” (see Fludernik 10), for its inhabitants and co-creators are at once the observers (“spectators”) and the observed. It is, in other words, theatrical. It is not surprising then that, in developing his system, Smith engages an idea which justifies the theatrical metaphor and encourages further comparisons between the philosophy of the human mind and Baillie’s dramatic project: the idea of spectatorship. Broadie makes the analogy clear: “For Smith, sympathy cannot be detached from spectatorship, for it is spectators who sympathise” (Broadie, “Sympathy” 158).6 As we shall see, spectatorship works on several levels and has a number of dimensions. For Smith and for Baillie, the moral aspect is perhaps of primary importance; the terms used to describe the spectator, i.e. “impartial” and “ideal,” make this sufficiently plain. The impartiality of the Smithan spectator should not, for this reason, be understood as implying indifference. On the contrary, it has inalienable moral and hence also social functions, which in turn can be related to the socialising role which Baillie ascribes to drama: “Drama improves us by the knowledge we acquire of our own minds” (Baillie, “Introductory Discourse” 90; my emphasis). To be fully apprised of the complexity of the Smithan idea of spectatorship, we need to stress its relation to self-knowledge and to conscience. D. D. Raphael uses the metaphor of the mirror to explain this connection: “Conscience is a social product, a mirror of social feeling” (35). Raphael insists on the need to distinguish the impartial spectator, or “the man within,” from actual spectators, or “men without” (36; the plural is mine). In principle, then, the “supposed impartial spectator” is not to be confused with “the actual bystander who may express approval or disapproval of my conduct. He [the former] is a creation of my imagination” (35). This type of imaginative creativity, we might add, must be guided by a person’s moral sense while simultaneously functioning as its (that sense’s) assistant. Moreover, it is possible for the actual and the imaginary spectators to be united in one person, even though this kind of blending seldom happens in real life. In literary works, which are after all also products of the imagination, such overlaps

6 As for instance in a passage in which Smith speaks of “the sympathetic indignation of the spectator” (Smith 98).

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may be more feasible. Baillie’s tragedy De Monfort supplies us with an example, to which we turn our attention presently.

Dimensions of sympathetic spectatorship The “desire” to know the content of other people’s minds is an epistemological propensity. Emotive cognition or understanding may thus be regarded as the basic function of sympathy. Yet it is not this aspect which Baillie and Smith regarded as the most significant, as we have already emphasised. As a playwright, Baillie was interested in sympathy’s role in sustaining and regulating interpersonal relations both on the page and the stage and in the larger context of performance as a form of communal experience, in the “internal” and “external” “communication systems,” a helpful distinction which I borrow from Manfred Pfister. Pfister distinguishes between the two communication systems (Pfister 40) in a section of his Theory and Analysis of Drama, a chapter devoted to “sending and receiving information.” If we foreground the transmission of feeling (emotional content) rather than information (cognitive or thought content in a narrow sense), we might fine-tune this distinction in the following fashion: 1) the interpersonal world as portrayed in a play (internal communication) – is to be distinguished from – 2) the performance as a social event (external communication). Somewhat paradoxically, it is the fictional world (internal c.s.) which is mimetically close to reality; it resembles or simply reflects the multi-personal environment in which we (the audience) live, a world of interactions understood as sympathetic transmissions of feelings. By contrast, the typical performance situation (external c.s.) is – usually – that of a one-way communication, because of the passivity of the audience. At the same time, this passivity is chiefly narrowly cognitive and in no way precludes intense emotional involvement. Of special significance for our considerations is the primarily emotional nature of the thus transmitted content. In both communication systems, we are dealing with sympathetic spectatorship. As a means of acquiring knowledge, sympathy regulates a person’s functioning in a community; indeed, it would be impossible to imagine authentic relations between people which were not founded in sympathy. Smith’s approach to spectatorship stresses moral involvement because – as we have seen – he tends to place emphasis on the interpersonal dimension and argues that a responsible individual has internalised the gaze and judgement of others (Forman-Barzilai 76). This emotional distancing – the ability to look at oneself as another person (the ideal or impartial spectator) would do – is made possible by sympathy; Smith expends a great deal of intellectual effort explaining the mechanics.

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Taking into account the context of the theatre, we can speak of a number of spectators and thus also of different modes of spectatorial (“specular”) and sympathetic involvement. It is necessary to distinguish: 1. on-stage, internal, spectators, real and imaginary: (1a) the actual characters (other than the principal one); and (1b) the internalised ideal spectator (identical with the protagonist or embodied in a separate figure) – the point of orientation here is the principal character (e.g. the tragic hero such as de Monfort – see below); 2. the audience, or external spectators, ideal (or imaginary) and real: (2a) “ideal” spectators as projected, construed or implied by the playwright; and (2b) the audience, present and responding, during an actual performance (preferably a historically documented one). Spectator 2a is analogous to the implied reader in the theory of fiction and can be reconstructed on the basis of the playtext. Helpful may be the playwright’s ideas expressed outside the texts of the plays. Although Baillie wrote for the stage and although some of her plays on the passions were staged, we have almost no information about 2b, i.e. their reception. We can only speculate about the level of emotional involvement that they elicited in the audience; in other words, for someone interested in sympathetic spectatorship, the plays and the theoretical texts (such as the “Introductory Discourse”) must be treated as the basic source. The question that arises is this: Is there agreement or consistency between what emotionally happens in the plays and what should be going on according to theory? Is there, to put this differently, any overlapping between internal and external spectatorship? In the remaining part of this article, I make use of Hume’s idea of a philosophical experiment to examine the operation of sympathy in Baillie’s tragedy De Monfort. In Book II (“Of the Passions”), Part II (“Of Love and Hatred”) of his Treatise, Hume embarks on an experimental method of investigation in order to elucidate the nature of love and hatred conceived as two basic passions; as he puts it, he “makes experiments upon the passions” (332). I suggest that the Humean approach may be an interesting method of examining Baillie’s dramatic study of hatred in the tragic mode. Our goal then is to analyse this play as an imaginary or thought experiment, naturally one of far greater complexity that any of the several philosophical ones carried out by Hume.

Plays on the passions as philosophical experiments: De Monfort I submit that it is worthwhile to look at and into Baillie’s plays as psychological, sociological and philosophical (thus also by implication moral) case studies of the operation of the passions in a complex interpersonal environment. This

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approach, however, can be productive on the condition that we remain openminded about the possible outcome of such test encounters between philosophy and drama. Baillie may have been indebted to the enlightened philosophy of the human mind with its rationalistic paradigm; yet, romantically one might say, she chose to observe the growth of strong passions in the live arena of the theatre and invited her and her readers and spectators to accompany her in these pursuits. This kind of debate, which engages philosophy and drama as friendly opponents or competitors, could not but produce conceptual tensions. For, one is tempted to ask meta-dramatically, can philosophy discipline strong passions? Is it at all possible for the enlightened reason to comprehend passion? Besides, while her drama offered a testing ground for the philosopher to examine his theories, her artistic project, at the very same time, has opened a space in which that same philosopher might question its (the project’s) major premises. Baillie’s experimentation consisted in deploying the tenets of moral philosophy in the live interpersonal context: that of drama (the internal communication system) and that of the theatre (the external communication system) – both at once. For this reason, despite the evidence of her borrowing of a number of philosophical ideas, a critic should avoid simplifications and shortcuts. A detailed study of the skirmishes between philosophy and drama – which is beyond the scope of the present article – must in advance be prepared for the two possible outcomes just outlined: 1. the opening of philosophy onto the possibility of redefinition of even the most basic premises (for instance, by having to confront and makes sense of unforeseen configurations of sympathetic relations between characters) and 2. the detection of discontinuities, perhaps even contradictions, in the conceptual framework of the artistic project. Just as no moral philosopher is capable of taking into account all varieties of interpersonal relations, no playwright is ever in full conceptual control of her artwork. The latter may be especially difficult in the case of a project like Baillie’s, where the stuff that this work is made on are strong passions. In De Monfort, Baillie delineates the progress of irrational hatred in the title hero-villain, a passion which predictably leads to disastrous consequences. In the internal system, that of sympathetic transmissions of feeling between the characters, the most prominent position is occupied by de Monfort’s sister, Jane, cast by Baillie in the role of the Smithan sympathetic and impartial spectator. Despite her sisterly affection, Jane is not able to prevent her brother’s crime of passion – the murder of the innocent man he hates. In philosophical terms, de Monfort has failed to internalise her as the voice of his conscience; or, alternatively, Jane has failed to impart to her brother her voice and gaze of impartial spectatorship. To be precise, this internalisation does take place, but only after the murder, i.e. after

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de Monfort has yielded to hatred. Hence the painful soliloquy, a perturbed soul’s outpourings, at the end of the tragedy.7 Throughout the play, Jane is making efforts to enter into her brother’s psyche; however, she is repeatedly repelled because the pathological mental state is too strong to overcome. Smith’s theory helps us to understand also the moral predicament faced by Baillie’s protagonists, the causes, both psychological and moral, of the catastrophe. Among the functions that Smith has devised for the impartial spectator is that of “bringing down” inordinate and “unsocial” passions: “before we can enter into them, or regard them as graceful or becoming, [they] must always be brought down to a pitch much lower than that to which undisciplined nature would raise them” (Smith 41, my emphasis). Several passages in the play address this sympathetic impasse, as we might wish to describe it. In two situations, the word “sympathy” occurs in the playtext. In an early scene, de Monfort is described as a stern and sullen man who “repels all sympathy” (Baillie, Plays on the Passions 305). This is an intimation of the pathological nature of his mental condition. “Repelling sympathy,” when construed in the context of the Smithan theory, suggests de Monfort’s strong disinclination to allow other people to share his feelings. Entering into emotional interactions with others would “bring down” de Monfort’s passion and prevent the catastrophe: the murder and the remorse-induced suicide consequent upon it. In another scene, when Jane offers de Monfort the resources of her fellow-feeling as a manner of mental therapy, he replies: “[…] thou wilt despise me. / For in my breast a raging passion burns, / To which thy soul no sympathy will own. / A passion which hath made my nightly couch / A place of torment […]” (Baillie, Plays on the Passions 331). The nature of the “raging passion” which consumes him, its sheer violence, makes sympathy not only ineffective but morally impossible. Sharing this passion with another person – he suggests – would infect that other person with the same pathological mental state. In her depiction of this complex relationship, Baillie thus exposes a dilemma which is at once emotional, social and moral. Assuming that Jane de Monfort is a model candidate for an ideal spectator, is it possible for her – “technically” – to enter into a mental state which is psychologically alien to her? And then, even if she were capable of this emotional feat, should she do it? Would it be appropriate for her as a virtuous person to fellow-feel with a sociopath? Wouldn’t this kind of involvement compromise her moral integrity or maybe even impair her dignity

7 Baillie attached great significance to the soliloquy “those overflowings of the perturbed soul, in which it unburthens itself of those thoughts, which it cannot communicate to others […]” (Baillie, “Introductory Discourse” 38).

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as a human being? And, again, supposing that this were permitted, what would be the consequences for the community, for we must not ignore the larger context, the environment which theory calls the external communication system? The very nature of dramatic art, with the essential multi-and-inter-personal dimension, does not allow us to ignore the sympathetic transactions that occur between the stage happenings and the audience. All these are difficult questions. It is certainly to Baillie’s credit that her work provokes them. One cannot be sure, however, to what extent Baillie herself was prepared or inclined to inquire into the cathartic experiences her tragedies had in store for her audience.8

Concluding remarks Joanna Baillie may not have been Britain’s greatest playwright. Nor were her plays the most popular fare on the repertoire, even though her contemporaries applauded her artistic aspirations. She did see herself as a continuator of the venerable tradition of legitimate drama, whose cultural survival was endangered by the idea that theatre should be yoked to entertainment. It is difficult to argue against those who question the idea of a philosophically-oriented drama; drama – they say – should be concerned with individual human beings, not abstractions, such as passions. On the other hand, it would not be fair to remain blind to the intellectual ambitions Baillie invested in her project. It would be intellectually improvident to ignore the intriguing challenges – many of them unforeseen by the playwright – which this project posed to theories of the emotional side of human nature advanced by the prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment. It would also be pointless to persist in indifference to the way her plays unleash aporias, theoretical and practical, raised by human emotionality. Here we have reflected briefly upon some. Baillie envisioned her protagonists as individuals inextricably linked to their fellow creatures by bonds of sympathy. She insisted that even those mental processes which seem radically subjective, due to the emotional nature of the human psyche, turned out to be intrinsically transpersonal. Ignorance in this respect was for Baillie potentially tragic; awareness – therapeutic and potentially sanative. Her tragedies thematise these realisations in a manner peculiar to the genre; in doing so they add special urgency to questions which, though full of gravity, might otherwise taste aridly intellectual. It remains for the individual reader to decide

8 Sean Carney has attempted an analysis of some of the possibilities.

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whether tales about the futility of flights from sympathetic spectatorship have any relevance for problems that trouble our contemporary world.

Works Cited Armstrong, Isobel. Joanna Baillie, Byron and Satanic Drama. Nottingham: School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, 2003. Print. Baillie, Joanna. “Introductory Discourse.” Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions. Ed. Peter Duthie. Letchworth: Broadview Literary Texts, 2001. Print. –. Plays on the Passions. Ed. Peter Duthie. Letchworth: Broadview Literary Texts, 2001. Print. Brewer, William D. “Joanna Baillie and Lord Byron.” Keats-Shelley Journal 44 (1995): 165–181. Print. Broadie, Alexander, ed. The Scottish Enlightenment. An Anthology. Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 1997. Print. –. “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator.” The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith. Ed. Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. –. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Ed. Alexander Broadie.Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Carney, Sean. “The Passion of Joanna Baillie: Playwright as Martyr.” Theatre Journal 52.2, (2000): 227–252. Print. Duthie, Peter. “Introduction.” Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions. Ed. by Peter Duthie. Letchworth: Broadview Literary Texts, 2001. Print. Fludernik, Monika. “Spectacle, Theatre, and Sympathy in Caleb Williams.” Eighteenth-century Fiction 14.1 (2001): 1–31. Forman-Barzilai, Fonna. Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy. Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1981. Print. Manning, Susan et al., eds. The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. Vol. 2. Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918). Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Print. Mulrooney, Jonathan. “Reading theatre, 1730–1830.” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730–1830. Ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.

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Pfister, Manfred. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Trans. by John Halliday. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print. Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion. Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Raphael, D. D. The Impartial Spectator. Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys University of Warsaw

The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom: Emotions, Superfluity and the Body in Selected Romantic Texts The importance of emotional intelligence has been widely recognized. It is said to condition the way we function in the society, enter into and leave relationships; it enhances our leadership abilities and makes us more capable intellectually, as we can discriminate between emotions and use emotional information in the decision-making process. Moreover, as noted by Joel Faflack and Richard C. Sha, being “severally global”, emotion is “the matrix through which the world is brought to our sensoria; it registers our response to this world; it worlds our world and thus makes sense of sense (…)” (1). However, while accepting the importance of emotions and emotional intelligence in our lives, most people are willing to agree that an excess of emotion is dangerous: we associate it with a loss of control, violence, complete self-abandon and various self-destructive tendencies. This paper seeks to investigate the metaphors and images of emotional excess in selected poems of English Romanticism. Unlike these days, when emotional stability and temperance are thought to be crucial in living a successful life, English Romantic poets glorified emotional excess, seeing it as a prerequisite for poetic creation, self-development and any revolutionary transformation. Such a stance can at least partially be explained by a reference to the aesthetics of the sublime, where beauty is measured by the intensity of emotional response. However, emotions in the Romantic period form not only a ground for an aesthetic experience; in fact, their status is much more complex: they simultaneously become a path to wisdom/knowledge and condition artistic creativity. The importance of strong emotional response is inextricably related to the Romantic shift from the rational to the irrational, and, by extension, from human mind to human body. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell William Blake writes that every human being is holistic, comprising reason and energy, body and soul. At the same time, Blake advocates what we might call a policy of extremes. His famous “Proverbs of Hell” state that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (plate 7) and that “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough” (plate 9). Soon he hastens to assert that “the excess of sorrow

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laughs, the excess of joy weeps” (plate 8). By pushing our emotional reactions to an extreme, we transform them into their direct opposites and gain wisdom. Blake links the positively assessed energy and emotions to the body. As he states, “Energy is the only life, and is from the body” and “reason is the outward or bound circumference of energy” (plate 4). Desires, he concludes, should not be restrained: it is “[s]ooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (plate 10). Hence, the excess that Blake writes about can be understood as a Dionysian belief that higher, better, more imaginative level of being may be achieved through libidinal excess or self-abandon (Crehan 75). The opposition of Dionysian and Apollonian forces in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell are embodied in the contrast between the Devil and the Angel. The Angel represents temperance, passivity, intellectual stagnation, convention and orthodox morality. The Devil stands for energy, libido, creativity and intellectual daring. The only way to gain wisdom is to break rules, Blake seems to be saying, when at the end of his text he describes the process of a conversion of the conventionally-minded, repressive Angel into an imaginative Devil. At first, the Angel is resistant towards the Devil’s arguments, but what convinces him is the argument how Jesus broke the rules: ‘Did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock’d sabbath’s God?”, “turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery?”, “bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate?” The Devil concludes: “no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules” (plates 23–24). As a result, the Angel “stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire” and became a Devil and Blake’s “particular friend” (plate 24). Thus, energy, passions and emotions form a springboard for the understanding of the world and are positively valorized, while reason and temperance are characterized as restraints on spiritual insight and self-expression. Crucially, in the opposition between devil and angel, reason and emotions, body and soul another conflict is embedded: that of art versus religion, or creativity versus imitation. All true art springs from Hell: Blake imagines himself writing down devilish aphorisms and recalls how he was “walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity” (plate 6); what is more, the Printing House in Hell, described in a Memorable Fancy from Plate 15, is an allegory of Blake’s own engraving method; Joseph Viscomi, in his pivotal essay on the Marriage of Heaven and Hell reminds us that “Blake states that he will print “in the infernal method, by corrosives … melting apparent surfaces away (plate 14), which is relief-etching poetically described.” What is more, by doing this, he will “melt the apparent surfaces away, displaying the infinite that was hid” (plate 14). As Viscomi points out, “[f]or Blake, the

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devil—in the form of Blake and the “infernal method”—opens the door, and the open door reveals the devil, for it opens to hell, to desire, energy, and creativity” (42). Finally, in another visionary Memorable Fancy we witness Blake’s conversation with the Prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah, where they assert that all true art and true poetry springs from Poetic Genius, and that they wrote their texts because of inner compulsion, the need for self-expression. This is the vision of the poetic process which has its roots in a deeply felt emotion, in listening to and following one’s desires. Thus, in Blake’s view creativity, art and wisdom all stem from Hell. How different is Blakean emotional excess from Wordsworth’s spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which seems to record a similar experience? The difference is fundamental. While Wordsworth’s lyrical poetry is also intensely emotional, in most cases, just as he gives himself to emotion, he immediately checks himself out: after any spontaneous overflow there comes a distancing, an attempt to contain a feeling which grows too overwhelming. This tendency may mean rationalizing; it may suggest dissociation and time distance; finally, it may be visible in the reluctance or inability to experience the emotion as it occurs, because it is too overwhelming or too traumatic at the time. In this case, emotional response is delayed till later, when the overflow of powerful feeling is easier to accommodate. Many examples of how Wordsworth avoids total abandonment to his genuinely felt emotions can be found in his short lyrical poems. The structure of these poems is similar: usually in the first part Wordsworth’s speakers describe a scene which has a profound emotional influence on them, while at the end come various strategies to contain and control the emotion previously described. Thus, in “It is a Beauteous Evening,” the sheer delight and awe felt at an intimation of a presence of the divine in nature, recordd in the octave of the sonnet, in the sestet gives way to the speaker’s musing about the difference between children and adults: whereas adult people employ their rational faculties even when they experience the sublime, children have the contact with the Absolute regardless of their lack of understanding. While the accuracy of such an observation may be generally accepted, it is hard not to notice that the mood of awe and delight masterfully created in the previous part of the poem, the record of the overwhelming admiration difficult to render in words, has been dispersed by the rational conclusion of the sestet. In famous “Daffodils” the first three stanzas record various emotions: from aloofness and detachment audible in the first line (“I wondered lonely as a cloud”) through the delight and joy shared by the speaker at the vision of the field of daffodils “toss[ing] their heads in sprightly dance” (l.12) to the impression of inclusion and belonging, almost a communion with nature, rendered in a famous image of the

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speaker’s heart joining in the universal dance. The poem, however, does not end there, but continues to record a later stage of the creative process, which, as we all know, entails distancing both in time and space from the initial scene. The emotion, recreated in tranquillity, loses at least some of its immediacy and overwhelming potency, and thus can be safely contemplated and contained. The same is true about some of Wordsworth’s other early poems. In “Composed after a Journey across the Hamilton Hills, Yorkshire” the listing of various sights on the sky which were so “glorious” (l.9) that they battled away disappointment and fatigue, and made an eye “delight in them” (l.12) is followed by an unexpected bidding to forget them, and a remark that they do not belong to the human realm; In “Lines Written in Early Spring” we do hear pervasive tones of dissociation: while Wordsworth describes the joy and pleasure of the natural world at the coming of spring, he “must think, and do all [he] can, / that there was pleasure there” (ll.19–20) because at the emotional level he does not join in natural happiness. “Resolution and Independence” argues a similar case: although at first Wordsworth’s speaker describes the mirth and carefree play of animate and inanimate nature – “the grass is bright with raindrops;- on the moors/the hare is running races in her mirth” (ll.10–11) – soon he dissociates himself from the joy and harmony of his natural surroundings and gives in to other emotions – “fears and fancies,” “dim sadness” and “blind thoughts” (ll.27–28). Before he is able to sink in dejection, however, rescue from potential emotional excess appears: the meeting with an anonymous Leech Gatherer, an epitome of perseverance and hope, is a shield against despondency. Apart from these strategies aimed at containing and curbing the potential overflow of powerful feelings, in his later poetry Wordsworth frequently resorts to another technique: that of repression. The theme of trauma and traumatic memory has been widely studied by renowned Wordsworth scholars. As Stephen Knapp argues, “Wordsworth’s whole doctrine of the ‘spots of time’, for example, depends on the detachment of certain images from whatever first made them important” (107). A number of scholars meticulously analysed Wordsworth’s tendency towards the repression of overwhelming emotions, primarily of personal grief. Michael David Raymond traces Wordsworth delayed emotional responses to the deaths of his brother and his children in his poetry of the sublime, primarily in the Snowdon episode of the Prelude, while Duncan Wu describes the delay of the expression of the grief Wordsworth experienced as he learned of his father’s death until the time of the composition of The Vale of Esthwaite, four years later (23–24). Therefore, Wordsworth’s treatment of emotions does not come on a par with Blake’s: where one celebrates abundance and glorifies emotional excess, the other favours retrospection, dissociation and tranquility.

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In the poetry of Keats and Shelley, in turn, emotional excess plays a crucial role, and the expression of strongly experienced feelings is frequently connected with images of the body animated by somatically displayed passions. This tendency can be traced to the intricate culture of sensibility, which flourished in late 18th century England, and which undoubtedly was a formative influence on both poets. Sensibility, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is “quickness and acuteness of apprehension or feeling; the quality of being easily and strongly affected by emotional influences.” In his seminal Poetics of Sensibility, Jerome McGann straightforwardly links sensibility to the body and instincts, as it finds expression in frequently involuntary and unpremeditated reactions such as blushes, sighs, or tears (33). Shelley’s poetry, in particular, seems infused with emotional excess expressed though the reactions of the body. When the speaker of the “Ode to the West Wind” describes his present state, he does so in passionate exclamations such as “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” (l.32). The “Ode” is, at once, a record of a past experience of union with the wind and a passionate prayer for this experience to be repeated. The speaker yearns to merge with the absolute force, an experience of total abandon, at times rendered in suggestively violent images: “O, lift me, like a wave, a leaf, a cloud! (l.34); “be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!” (ll.61–62). In terms which are covertly erotic, he confesses that he wishes to “pant beneath the Wind’s power” (l.45), to give in completely to an experience of total powerlessness, helplessness and willing surrender. The poem stems from longing and passion. Passionate somatic reaction as a response to an overwhelming emotional experience abounds in Shelley’s chief love poem, Epipsychidion. The poem is addressed to a 19-year-old Contessa Teresa Emilia Viviani, who for Shelley became at once the ideal love, the ideal woman and a divine spirit. Addressing his lover-turned-goddess, Emilia, Shelley describes his path to vision and poetic creativity as a simultaneously erotic and religious rapture. After being lifted to the heights of vision and poetic song, he dramatically plummets down. This fate is previewed at the end of the first, litany-like part of the text. Vehement exclamations and rhetorical questions aptly record emotional intensity: Ah, woe is me! What have I dared? Where am I lifted? How Shall I descend, and perish not? (ll.123–25)

Passionate encounter longed for in this poem is inherently paradoxical, being feared and desired at the same time. It is dangerous and frightening, as it leads to the crumbling of the self, to a metaphorical self-annihilation of the poet. It is

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desired, as it brings poetic vision and conditions creativity. The readers witness the speaker’s annihilation at the end of Epipsychidion, when he actually describes his momentary union with Emily, an ecstatic temporary dissolution of his self, followed by a spectacular collapse: Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of Love’s rare Universe Are chains of lead around its flight of fire— I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire! (ll. 587–91)

Another poem by Shelley which relates similar encounter and similar longing is “To Constantia, Singing.” The text records the influence of a musical performance on Shelley, and suggests an inextricable link between music, love and the process of poetic composition. Passion for music becomes inextricably fused with overtly erotic passion and is related to the theme of artistic creation. The male speaker of “To Constantia” records his rapture and enchantment provoked by the sound of the female voice, and his subsequent disillusionment and despair when the music ceases. He figures himself as a passive admirer, a responsive audience to her performance. Constantia’s song, it appears, transfixes and almost paralyses the speaker of the poem as through her music she transports his to the extraterrestrial, ideal realm: The cope of Heaven seems rent and cloven By the inchantment of thy strain, And o’er my shoulders wings are woven, To follow its sublime career Beyond the mighty moons that wane Upon the verge of Nature’s utmost sphere, Till the world’s shadowy walls are past, and disappear. (ll. 27–33)

The moment of highest intensity invoked by the aesthetic experience soon becomes simultaneously ecstatic and self-annihilating. Shelley’s speaker describes the impact of Constantia’s song through his own bodily response, a perfect expression of the poetics of sensibility: My brain is wild, my breath comes quick, The blood is listening in my frame, And thronging shadows fast and thick Fall on my overflowing eyes, My heart is quivering like a flame; As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies,

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I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies. (ll. 5–11)

Soon the song becomes too intense to bear, threatening the listener with madness. Thus, after the moment of ecstasy, he implores Constantia to “[c]ease, cease—for such wild lessons madmen learn” (l.34). His rapture verges on agony; it robs him of his senses. However, it is indispensable for his own poetic creation, and he exclaims passionately: “Even while I write my burning cheeks are wet/Such things the heart can feel and learn, but not forget!” (ll.43–44). Shelley’s poetry, an effect of ecstasy turned into pain, is directly conditioned by an experience of emotional excess, almost unbearable in its intensity. Such a predicament, in turn, is expressed through acute somatic reactions. Gasping, dizzy, transfixed and paralysed poet creates his own “strain,” his own poetic song out of emotions that are overwhelming and overflowing, a total emotional abandon. Thus, emotions and emotional excess in the poetry of the canonical Romantics form a theme per se. Out of the three poets whose texts have been examined in this paper, Wordsworth seems most cautious and wary towards uninhibited emotions, while both Blake and Shelley enthusiastically embrace emotional and instinctual excess. Despite these differences, nevertheless, it is in intensely felt emotion where Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley locate an origin of artistic creativity and any essential formative experience. It seems that emotions are linked to the body in terms of the binary opposition of rational/irrational, feminine/masculine, controllable/ uncontrollable. Yet, as the reading of the three Romantic poets shows, it is in the excess, in the realm of the seemingly unruly and uncontrollable where wisdom, self-development and poetic creativity lie.

Works Cited Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Crehan, Stewart. “Producers and Devourers.” William Blake. Ed. John Lucas. New York, Routledge, 2013. 60–79. Print. Faflack, Joel and Sha, Richard C., eds. Romanticism and the Emotions. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 2014. Print. Knapp, Stephen. Personification and the Sublime. Milton to Coleridge. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. Print. McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1996. Print.

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Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. London: Oxford UP, 1925. Print –. “To Constantia, Singing.” The Lyrics of Shelley. Ed. Judith Chernaik. Cleveland and London: Case Western Reserve UP, 1972. Print. Viscomi, Joseph. “In the Caves of Heaven and Hell: Swedenborg and Printmaking in Blake’s Marriage.” Blake in the Nineties. Eds. Steve Clark and David Worrell. London: Macmillan, 1999. 27–60. Print. Wordsworth, William. The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994. Print. Wu, Duncan. “Wordsworth’s Poetry to 1798.” The Cambridge Companion to William Wordsworth. Ed. Stephen Gill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 22–37. PDF.

Ewa Błasiak The University of Wrocław

Emotional Patterns in Morality Plays It is a truth universally acknowledged that the prime objective of medieval religious drama was to teach rather than to entertain. Heavily didactic and tediously allegorical, morality plays would not probably be the first choice when it comes to the study of emotions. The scholars of medieval literature often discard morality plays as a genre potentially appealing to a contemporary audience. One of the many aspects of morality plays which may support their view is what Marion Jones identifies as an unqualified lack of unexpectedness: the absence of any surprising turn of events within the play (216). Talbot Donaldson points to the neatness of “allegorical equations” as a potential reason for the unpopularity of a moral play today (367). Hardin Craig espouses his view, claiming that it was indeed the constant re-introduction of “allegorical figures of virtues and vices on the stage” which became the bane of moralities in the Renaissance (378). Morality plays approached their end, argues A.M. Kinghorn, because as time went on “they no longer answered the questions which were being asked by educated people” (125). In his essay on medieval drama, Brander Matthews contrasts the classical drama of Greece and Rome, which he calls a “dramatic literature” with the religious drama of the Middle Ages (1). At the same time, however, he observes that the medieval drama is similar to the ancient drama of Greece in that they both evolved from the observance of religious rituals. What must be observed above all, however, is that medieval drama, morality plays included, like all drama has been brought to existence by an emotion: the most universal and the most primitive of human emotions, which is a mimetic impulse (Nicoll 13). The aim of this article will be to demonstrate that morality plays are more than staged sermons filled with lifeless characters in the form of walking abstractions. They are capable of dramatizing and producing emotions. The plays which the article will refer to in this context are Everyman (late 15th century), The Fires of Fate (1909), Jedermann (1911) and Wit (1997). Selection of these particular dramatic pieces has been dictated by the intention to present a morality play as an adaptable form which while changing over time persisted to present audiences with an emotional challenge. Although medieval moralities have often been accused of “heavy didacticism and hair-splitting abstractions” (Potter 33), T.S. Eliot sees Everyman as an example of a genuinely artistic play. He juxtaposes morality plays with the realistic theatre

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of Elizabethans, which today’s audience would normally associate with emotional drama, and which he rejects and finds “formless” (Eliot qtd. in Styan 70): [t]he great vice of English drama from Kyd to Galsworthy has been that its aim of realism was unlimited. In one play, Everyman, and perhaps in that one play only, we have a drama within the limitations of art […] [A]bstraction from actual life is a necessary condition to the creation of a work of art (“Four” 93). Eliot not only praised morality plays but also fully acknowledged his own indebtedness to this medieval form in relation to his religious play Murder in the Cathedral, which dramatises the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Beckett in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. It must be stressed, however, that although indubitably influenced by Everyman, Murder in the Cathedral was not a “modern morality play.” Indeed, with its chorus and inevitability of protagonist’s death it resembled rather a Greek tragedy. Everyman, as Eliot himself indicated, served more as a suggestion than imitation (Potter 238), which seems to be confirmed in the second part of the play that mostly departs from verse for the sake of prose. The strong affirmation and absolute certitude characteristic of the medieval Everyman were never Eliot’s theme or aim (Potter 240). Surprisingly, despite Eliot’s confirmed admiration for Everyman, his idea about the emotional capacities of a religious play was not optimistic: “people who go deliberately to a religious play at a religious festival expect to be patiently bored and to satisfy themselves with the feeling that they have done something meritorious” (“Murder” 251). It will be one of the objectives of this article to counter this statement and to revisit several moralities which, as it shall be demonstrated, proved attractive for their audiences due to the emotional power they held over them, rather than because of some distant promise to secure a feeling of moral duty well-performed. The investigation of the emotional load in morality plays shall begin with a closer look at the medieval plays which are today most criticised for their constant employment of personified abstract qualities as their characters. Investigations of this convention and its function proved perplexing and throughout centuries they have led to different assumptions. When the abstract characters were first discovered in the eighteenth century, antiquarians found them confusing and strange but preferable to representations of Biblical figures in the mystery plays. For nineteenth-century scholars, the abstractions were a step back from realistic characters of the cycle plays. Most researchers and audience members today would probably agree with the latter vision and indeed morality play characters are often perceived as “wooden” (Potter 39). It must be pointed out, however, that their prime role was to produce a conflict, to provide a context for the plot and

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to allow a didactic aim, and that they were successful in serving this function. They clarified the moral truth which the play was to convey (Kinghorn 116). It is true that The Christian Virtues, The Seven Deadly Sins, World, Age, Knowledge, Confession, Poverty, Chastity or Patience were “walking abstractions” and thus really cannot have been as full-blooded and multi-dimensional as the characters of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson or Webster. But, as Potter suggests, their failure results more from “relentless determinism” than from being abstract: the preachers must preach, the tempters must tempt, the death must come and all roles and fates are predetermined as “necessary consequences of human life” (Potter 40). Nevertheless, it seems that before announcing morality play characters as “bloodless abstractions” (Schell and Shuchter (vi)), one should take into consideration MacKenzie’s argument that whenever “the play was acted, the characters, instead of being dreary types and abstractions, were at once individualized and humanized; and the same transformation once took place in the case of every one of […] [m]oralities which are now so hastily judged on the basis of a printed copy” (qtd. in Kahrl 104). Kinghorn argues that despite their dramatic weakness, morality personages had in themselves “the seeds of change” which finally helped to establish a morality play as a movement towards the completely secular drama in England (117). The evidence for this may be found in the works of Shakespeare, in which Mack (66) and Knight (177) recognize similarities in the construction of characters in morality plays. Another aspect of medieval moralities related to emotions that requires reconsideration is the repetitive plot pattern which can be identified as a descent into sin, and an ascent towards salvation. The play thus presents three stages of human existence: a potential state of innocence, a lapse into sin and a possibility of repentance. Dramatisation of the transition between those stages constitutes the action of Everyman, as well as the action of most morality plays, and serves as an emotional catalyst. Thomas F. van Laan, like Potter, sees in Everyman a bipartite structure designated by a falling and a rising action. A falling action constitutes the first half of the play, which begins with Death’s arrival and follows Everyman into his despair. The rising action pictures his rise towards salvation symbolized by the coming of Angel (van Laan 466–467). Although for Marion Jones this mode of action results in the play’s inevitable predictability, other critics, like T.S. Eliot, perceive Everyman as not only perfectly functional allegory but also high drama: the religious and the dramatic are not merely combined, but wholly fused. Everyman is on the one hand the human soul in extremity, and on the other any man in any dangerous position from which we wonder how he is going to escape - with as keen interest as that with which we wait for the escape of the film hero, bound and helpless in a hut to which his enemies are about to set fire. (qtd. in van Laan 465)

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Kinghorn contrasts the medieval tradition with Elizabethan drama, stating that while in Shakespeare the manner of Everyman’s dying would be the object of the play, in the morality play Everyman goes to his grave without a struggle but with Truth revealed to him (120): “[n]o struggle is possible against Death and the play’s didactic intention is limited to showing sinners how they may repent” (124). For Kahrl, however, Kinghorn’s vision is an oversimplification: [t]hese plays are studies in the choices man makes, the recurrent opportunity to fall, in which man is no inert battlefield over which the forces of good and evil march but a being with free will […] whose chances to choose the right road to salvation end with the coming of death (106). Thus, from the fusion of allegorical significance and dramatic quality there emerges what van Laan sees as an “indispensable emotional tension” (465). Everyman’s passage from hope through despair to the relief brought on by his salvation forms a definite emotional pattern that is recognisable in a number of medieval moralities. While thinking about Everyman and morality plays in terms of emotions and in terms of their potential dramatic value, one has to remember about a significant event which determined the twentieth-century history of morality plays. When in 1901 William Poel and the Elizabethan Stage Society of London undertook to revive Everyman as an antiquarian experiment, nobody expected it to become a public triumph. Nonetheless, more performances were scheduled and in 1902 the spectacle was selected to be performed during festivities for King Edward VII’s coronation after which it quickly became a “sensation of the season.” With time, new elements were added and deleted from the performance; music was introduced and some scenes had been cut out in the beginning (e.g. Fellowship’s offering a woman to Everyman). The excisions continued in the subsequent years (Potter 222). After its success in London, Everyman gained international fame and in 1902 was staged in New York, where it at first caused an ecclesiastical outrage, but later was appreciated and upheld the popularity achieved in London. The audience was especially amazed to note the lack of curtain and footlights (Everyman was the first production in America to employ a quasi-Elizabethan stage) (Potter 222–224). Poel’s Everyman was a dramatic curiosity which must have accounted for part of its box-office success. Still, the lasting popularity of this play contradicts Eliot’s statement that the role of a religious play in contemporary theatre is to bore the audience and give them the sense of a worthy achievement. It seems highly improbable that a play which was not at all dramatically successful, and which did not evoke in the audience any emotional response, could become so popular. The 1902 staging of Everyman is also significant as an impulse for the revival of morality plays which took place in the first decades of the 20th century.

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The examination of critical reaction to this phenomenon shall prompt further observations pertinent to the emotional value of morality plays. A review that casts some light on how modern moralities worked to produce emotions in their audiences comes from The Musical Standard, whose reviewer from 1904 praises Dr. H. Walford Davies’s musical version of Everyman denominating the cantata as “the finest product of Dr. Davies’s pen” (W.H.C. 358). He refutes our contemporary vision of morality plays as a tedious moralising event that one has to sit through and stresses the formidable effect it had on the audience: “[t]o be reminded of Man’s ultimate destiny and of his inevitable and unquestioning obedience to the icy touch of his arch-enemy, Death, called forth a remark I heard at the Festival …, ‘It’s very fine, but it’s too creepy for me’” (358). The review is especially worth mentioning as it discusses the early twentieth-century revival of Everyman conducted in a setting different than a theatre stage: that of a music hall. As a journalist of The Musical Times admits, such an enterprise was not necessarily certain to be acclaimed; “[t]hat a morality play calls for musical treatment may be perhaps open to doubt” (“Dr. Walford Davies’s ‘Everyman’” 650). At the same time, however, he confirms its success: “it must be admitted that Dr. H. Walford Davies […] has written music that invests the ancient mystery with fresh interest” (650). Another of the early-twentieth-century morality play authors surprisingly turns out to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who in 1909 wrote The Fires of Fate: A Modern Morality Play. The four-act play is a dramatization of Conan Doyle’s novel The Tragedy of Korosko and relates the story of Colonel Cyril Egerton, who, upon visiting a doctor, learns that he suffers from terminal spinal disease. Determined not to become a burden to his friends and accompanied by the doctor (a materialist) and his brother (a clergyman), the Colonel sets off on a journey to Egypt, hoping to thereby precipitate his own end. Among the co-passengers of the Nile steamer he meets Miss Sadie Adams of Massachusetts and thus, re-motivated by love, he commences a fight for his life, which consists in searching for a considerable shock to the nerves (that is, the only known cure for his ailment). In the end, a fight with the desert dervishes occurs, and after receiving two strong blows to his cranium Egerton is miraculously healed and free to pursue the demands of his heart. The reviews from such periodicals as The Practical Teacher and The English Illustrated Magazine prove that the morality play was not watched with patient boredom but with honest interest and though it was not received with such enthusiasm as Poel’s Everyman, it definitely was not considered an emotionless stage-filler. The reviewer from The Practical Teacher notices how the educational aspect of a modern morality play moved away from the medieval, purely spiritual religious didacticism to encompass more practical and human instruction: “Sadie

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Adams learns more of true womanhood; the colonel plays the man in spite of his sad lack of sword […], the minister shows that his religious professions are the outcome of a perfect readiness to act the Christian gentleman under trying circumstances; the doctor sees the folly of his materialism” (“A Modern Morality Play” 244–245). Oscar Parker from The English Illustrated Magazine goes further in assessing the emotional value of the modern morality play by calling The Fires of Fate a psychological comedy converted into a thrilling drama. He also points out the melodramatic showiness of the play and its attempt at humour: “if Sir Conan Doyle had developed his story among less lurid lines he might have given us a masterpiece but he chose the more showy path […] and so we have ‘The Fires of Fate’ as it stands; popular it is sure to be, but as a play, neither fish, flesh nor fowl, only a ‘“modern morality play’” (424). “It is quite the scheme of a modern morality play that the “comic relief ” should save the situation,” he adds (422). In the end, I would like to further advocate the emotional and dramatic value of morality plays by referring to two indications of the presence of morality play aspects in contemporary theatre. Those examples will be Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 play Jedermann and Margaret Edson’s Wit from 1997. Jedermann (subtitled The Play of the Rich Man’s Death) is a modern story about a greedy materialist which till this day attracts viewers to its annual staging during Salzburg Festival. Many new elements were added to Everyman’s story in this Austrian adaptation and the morality play was developed into a brilliant spectacle, with actors and musicians situated on the tops of the buildings surrounding the square where Jedermann was performed, with the show being scheduled to coincide with the sunset, with an orchestra, a chorus and the ringing of the bells of the nearby Salzburg cathedral tower interwoven into the show (Potter 230–231). The annual production was stopped by Hitler in 1937 but after its resumption in 1946 Jedermann has been staged every summer in Salzburg. The play is not only gripping but also aesthetically impressive. Although the only description of the show in the programme is “the play about the death of the rich man” (which is rather a simplification) it still enjoys immense popularity. Wit tells a story of a literature professor diagnosed with metastatic ovarian cancer. Vivian Bearing is fifty, unmarried, extremely ambitious and alone during her pilgrimage towards her inevitable death and moral education, the nature of which she only at the end of the play comprehends. As the events in the play unfold, Vivian has to face not only a fearsome future, but also an ignominious past. Abandoned, in pain and with a considerable degree of irony, she reminiscences about the old days when she denied kindness to both her students and herself. Gradually, her understanding of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets proves misleading. It seems

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that only her own encounter with death allows Vivian to grasp the “ungraspable” truth of the poems. In the end, Vivian dies alone but peacefully, reassured by the kindness shown to her by her academic mentor, Professor E.M. Ashford. Wit and Everyman converge in numerous respects. They both display a didactic impulse: in Wit one of the characters says “[t]his way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn’t you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present” (Edson 15). They both use the concept of unexpectedly upcoming death as a key to moral enlightenment and redemption. They both refer to the concepts of memento mori and danse macabre. They utilise irony to introduce humour into the play and they begin with a direct address to the audience (a solution characteristic of medieval moral plays). Above all, however, they employ the same mode of action. If one considers Wit a “modern morality play” (more modern in fact, and more of a morality play than, for example, Doyle’s The Fires of Fate) they can note how this form evolved from a dramatic activity originally conceived for religious teaching to a powerful play, in which emotions swirl maddeningly. Especially towards the end of the play emotions accumulate as the protagonist approaches her end: “I want to tell you how it feels. I want to explain it, to use my words. It’s as if… I can’t… There aren’t… I’m like a student and this is the final exam and I don’t understand the question and I’m running out of time” (56). Looking at Wit one observes how from the tradition of plays once seen as dramatized sermons there has arisen a drama, in which Everywoman does not “go to [her] grave without struggle” (Kinghorn 120) but as a full-blooded, three-dimensional character speaks out all what Everyman leaves unspoken. In conclusion, morality plays can be both emotionally and dramatically successful. Before dismissing them as a theatrical activity incapable of evoking in the audience any emotional response, one should re-consider some of their aspects, such as the allegorical nature of their characters or the plot pattern. It is vital to remember that there are elements in morality plays which, though they appear dramatically ineffective when the play is read, used to come to life on stage and appeal to the audience when the play was performed. Although none of the earlytwentieth-century morality plays have managed to gain fame that would equal Poel’s Everyman, the revival of the genre at that time, as well as the reviews of those plays offered by key British periodicals, suggest that morality plays used to be watched with excitement and considered on par with other dramatic activities. In the end, it must be stressed that some aspects of the morality play tradition do not cease to echo in modern drama, even today giving rise to emotionally powerful plays.

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Works Cited Craig, Hardin. English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978. Print. Donaldson, E. Talbot et al., eds. Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume I. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. PDF file. “Dr. Walford Davies’s ‘Everyman’.” The Musical Times, 1904–1995 45.740 (1904): 650. ProQuest. Web. 3 June 2013. Eliot, T.S. “Four Elizabethan Dramatists.” T.S. Eliot: Selected Essays 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1914. Google Book Search. Web. 14 July 2015. –. “Murder in the Cathedral.” Playwrights on Playwriting: The Meaning and Making of Modern Drama from Ibsen to Ionesco. Ed. Toby Cole. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. 251–254. Print. Jones, Marion. “Early Moral Plays and the Earliest Secular Drama.” In The Revels History of Drama in English. Lois Potter, ed. Vol. 1. London: Methuen, 1983. 213–291. Print. Kahrl, Stanley J. Traditions of Medieval English Drama. London: Hutchinson, 1974. Print. Kinghorn, A.M. Mediaeval Drama. London: Evans Brothers Limited, 1968. Print. Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel Of Fire: Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Tragedy. Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1964. Google Book Search. Web. 25 July 2015. Mack, Maynard. King Lear in Our Time. 1966. Reprint. Oxon: Routledge, 2005. Google Book Search. Web. 27 July 2015. Matthews, Brander. “The Mediæval Drama.” Modern Philology 1.1 (1903): 71–94. PDF file. –. “A Modern Morality Play.” The Practical Teacher 30.5 (1909): 244. ProQuest. Web. 3 June 2013. Nicoll, Allardyce. British Drama: An Historical Survey from the Beginnings to the Present Time. 5th edition. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963. PDF file. Parker, Oscar. “The London Stage.” The English Illustrated Magazine 77 422–6. ProQuest. (1909): Web. 3 June 2013. Potter, Robert. The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Print. Schell, Edgar, and J.D. Shuchter, eds. Introduction. English Morality Plays and Moral Interludes. By Schell and Shuchter. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969. Print.

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Styan, J. L. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Print. Van Laan, Thomas F. “Everyman: A Structural Analysis.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (1963): 465–475. PDF file. W., H. C. “Dr. Davies’s “Everyman” at Leeds.” Musical Standard 22.570 (1904): 358. ProQuest. Web. 3 June 2013. Wit. By Margaret Edson. Dir. Derek Anson Jones. Union Square Theatre, New York. 7 Jan. 1999. PDF file.

Part III – Emotions and Social Sciences

Tomasz Dobrogoszcz University of Łódź

“Entering an Arena of Adult Emotion:” Briony’s Recognition of Otherness in Ian McEwan’s Atonement Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement still continues to be his most widely read and critically discussed work. It is an example of the novelist’s finest and most accomplished writing, exhibiting a highly elaborate structure and touching weighty ethical issues. The novel is openly self-reflexive: the short Coda, following the three major parts, frames the bulk of the text as a fictitious narrative weaved by Briony Tallis, an aging novelist who, on a verge of plunging into the abyss of vascular dementia, wishes to atone for her childhood error. In summer 1935, the thirteenyear-old Briony, still a sensitive and naïve child, barely entering her adolescence, misrecognises the sexual tension between her older sister, Cecilia, and her beloved, Robbie. Guided by the unconscious structures that impose an idealistic but uninformed order on her perception of reality, the girl mistakenly accuses Robbie of raping her under-age cousin, Lola, which devastates his and Cecilia’s lives. This paper attempts to analyse the novel with the theoretical apparatus provided by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. It endeavours to demonstrate that Briony’s inception of the writer’s ego might be interpreted as the ‘second mirror stage’. Still, the language, which is for her, as for anybody, the bedrock of the implementation in the Other, is also the guarantor of the incomprehension of the Other. Estranged within the maze of misleading signifiers, unprepared for maturity, Briony becomes interpellated into the subject by a taboo word accidentally spotted in a letter. The first three parts of the narrative, before the Coda introduces the metafictional dimension of the text, constitute ‘atonement’ not only in the title, but also in intention. Briony thoroughly delineates her deplorable act and depicts its unfortunate consequences for Robbie, degraded to gaol, later exposed to the atrocities of war, and eventually killed by septicaemia in Dunkirk, as well as for Cecilia, separated from her family, condemned to hardships of a nursing job, meeting her death during a German air raid. The intense feeling of remorse cannot be obliterated, Briony realises that “she would never undo the damage” (285), and that it is not possible to “hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream – three streams! – of consciousness” (320). Still,

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she believes that some form of a symbolic redress is required of her; she engages in a literary project which, after forty years and several failed drafts, brings forth her expiation novel. The undertaking cannot absolve her, obviously; she is aware that there is “no atonement for God, or novelists”, so her efforts remain futile and “the attempt [is] all” (371). In consequence, the lingering burden of self-reproach remains a factor informing the mood of the narrative, especially in Parts Two and Three, where Briony’s disgrace and culpability are “mirrored in the chaos and the contingency of the Second World War” (Schemberg 80). On the other hand, the dialectic of guilt has to be perceived differently in the context of war horrors, and the narrator, focalised on Briony, wonders: “But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was” (261). Dominic Head goes as far as to consider it Briony’s “rhetorical trick, which appropriates the episode of Robbie’s death for the larger theme, and which simultaneously allows Briony’s crime to be subsumed in – and overshadowed by – the larger movements of twentiethcentury history” (171). In fact, several other critics agree that Briony’s atoning intentions might not be as virtuous as her narrative implies. In this context, Seaboyer sees her relation to otherness as quite problematic: “Her desire to atone is complicated by her desire to arouse in us desire for her narrative. Part Two is exemplary of that seduction. Her moving identification with the mind of the man who was her victim is an atoning act of love and respect. But is it also a violation, a colonisation?” (32). Similarly, Wells acknowledges that “McEwan leaves his readers many clues that Briony’s remorse may be only skin deep” and that her “reconciliation is with the self, but not the other” (110); she complains that while Briony presents her own psychological portrait with significant depth and compelling strictness, Cecilia and Robbie are delineated in a simplified manner, “as stock figures from a melodrama” (110). D’Angelo, in turn, claims that Briony self-consciously employs her intricate “narrative techniques to bury her crime within the text” (99). However, this apparently superficial veneer of remorsefulness might be interpreted as more than just a façade concealing self-interest if we reassess it from the psychoanalytical perspective. When Lacan examines the manner in which the social mask functions within the symbolic order, he connects this guise to some hidden, fundamental authenticity. As Žižek puts it, the emotions I perform through the mask (the false persona) that I adopt can in a strange way be more authentic and truthful than what I assume that I feel in myself. When I construct a false image of myself which stands for me in a virtual community in which I participate …, the emotions that I feel and feign as part of my screen persona are not simply false: although (what I count as) my true self does not feel them, they are nonetheless in a sense true. (How To Read 32, emphases added)

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In this way, perhaps paradoxically, what appears merely perfunctory and hence insignificant might, in fact, relate to the person’s unconscious and be decidedly operative. In Briony’s case, even if an appearance of a novelist overwhelmed by guilt is no more than a pose, it can still signal a vital internal antagonism. The roots of a psychic conflict can be seen in the adolescent Briony, even before she realises the consequences of her wrongful condemnation of Robbie. In fact, it is exactly the collapse of the meticulously concocted unity of her world vision that precipitates the disastrous indictment. When the thirteen-year-old girl is “entering an arena of adult emotion” (113), she becomes “a participant in the drama of life beyond the nursery” (160) and repudiates the fairy-tale scenarios which have structured her worldview. She experiences disidentification, a process which, as Lacan suggests, can be triggered by encountering a menace to one’s consolidated self-image. She faces the dissolution of the imaginary unity of the ego which, since the original operation of the mirror stage, has structured her self-perception and, as a result, she is confronted with the uncanny threat of radical fragmentation: She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? (35)

This situation, in turn, requires the re-enactment of the mirror stage process and the re-construction of her ego.1 To be able to perform that, she first needs to wipe away her ‘erroneous’ self-image and reset her self-integrity. She symbolically completes this through the ritual with the nettles: Flaying the nettles was becoming a self-purification, and it was childhood she set about now, having no further need for it. One spindly specimen stood in for everything she had been up until this moment. But that was not enough. Planting her feet firmly in the grass, she disposed of her old self year by year in thirteen strokes. She severed the sickly dependency of infancy and early childhood, and the schoolgirl eager to show off and be praised, and the eleven-year-old’s silly pride in her first stories and her reliance on her mother’s good opinion. (74)

Subsequently, Briony undergoes her “second mirror stage”, not with a mirror, but with the gaze of the Other as the registering agency. In Seminar VIII Lacan readjusts his formula of the mirror stage, introducing the parental Other into the equation and having the child look around and search for traces of recognition or acceptance in the eyes of the adult, as if looking at himself/herself from the external adult perspective: “By internalizing the way the Other sees one, by 1 In fact, Lacan postulates that “consciousness is not a permanent feature in any sense” and that the ego “must be constantly reconstructed” (Fink, “The Real Cause” 226).

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assimilating the Other’s approving and disapproving looks and comments, one learns to see oneself as the Other sees one, to know oneself as the Other knows one” (Fink, Lacan 108). Quite significantly, in Part One McEwan employs the technique of the shifting focalizer, providing a variety of points of view, a procession of different gazes focused upon Briony. This becomes an effective vehicle of dramatizing the girl’s reconstruction of her ego, by means of allowing Briony to look at herself from the outside and identify with the Other’s view of her, the identification being more complete given the fact that it is her, the ‘author’ of Part One, who has granted this perspective to the reader. From the first formulation of the mirror stage, Lacan has on numerous occasions stressed the indispensability of otherness in the process of ego formation: the ego isn’t even conceivable without the system … of the other. The ego has a reference to the other. The ego is constituted in relation to the other. It is its correlative. … The relation of the ego to the other, the relation of the subject to this other himself, to this fellow being in relation to whom he is initially formed, is an essential structure of the human constitution. (Seminar I 50–52)

I would postulate that one of the most crucial aspects of Atonement, most prominently accentuated in Part One, is Briony’s recognition of Otherness. It is essential both for the reconstruction of her ego during what is above referred to as the ‘second mirror stage’, and in the reformulation, or perhaps the first proper inception, of her ego as a writer. For a thirteen-year-old girl the discovery of Otherness is a formative revelation: Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. (36)

Thus, although through the recognition of Otherness Briony is enabled to form her ego, she must as well face the realisation that her individual self is merely one in a two-billion crowd of other sovereign ones. This concession of otherness is also a necessary step in her development as a creative writer, enabling her to incorporate the multiplicity of points of view into her narrative: “only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value” (40).

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As O’Hara notes, in the “perspective shifting narrative, we find characters, again and again, realizing that they are bounded by otherness, by other minds with their own plans, their own interiorities, their own ways of perceiving the world” (75). From the angle of her sixty-year long liaison with literature, she recognises the momentous consequence of this formative time when she “became recognizably herself ” (41), not only as a person but as a novelist, too. McEwan explores the double potential of the narrative emplotment of otherness, considering it useful for creating narrative identity, but also potentially hazardous for the novel as a genre. In her ruminations quoted above, Briony contemplates an alternative solution of her dilemma, the possibility that she is “surrounded by machines,” which denies other characters their selfhoods. Although this might seem as a naïve pseudo-philosophical hypothesis of a thirteen-year-old, the reasoning has a metafictional undertone. Bradley sees this issue as a general ethical problem of fiction writing: does the novel really enable us to experience the lives of others as they are lived, or, as Briony suspects, is it a way of turning them into little narrative machines with no existence independent of our own? From an ethical way of being in the world, we move to a darker idea of the novel as a kind of narrativized narcissism that expands to fill in the gaps where empathy should be. (27)

McEwan shows that the shifting focalisation in Part One can be seen as both Briony’s way to “enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value” and, at the same time, her ingenious strategy to project into the artificially created minds of “narrative machines,” devised in order to facilitate apparent objectivity and, consequently, the reader’s forgiveness. Thus, the antagonism between understanding the novel as a morally empty artifice and as an effective ethical vehicle is visible in the manner Atonement treats otherness. Lacan is adamant in his claim that the ego, as long as it requires otherness as an indispensible constituent for its formation, remains distanced from it, and later the subject, once he or she enters into speech, can never break the barrier separating it from otherness: “The subject is separated from the Others, the true ones, by the wall of language. … language is much there to found us in the Other as to drastically prevent us from understanding him” (Seminar II 244). This doublebind of language functions both as a bedrock for the subject’s implantation in the Other, and the guarantor of his/her incomprehension of the Other. Simultaneously, Lacan makes a clear-cut distinction between the other (le petite autre, spelled in lower-case) as an individual being, and the Big Other (le Grand Autre, capitalised, sometimes simply “the Other”) as the symbolic order, the domain of language, the “absolute otherness that we cannot assimilate to our subjectivity”

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(Homer 70). He oftentimes emphasises that the subject is inescapably implicated in the incomprehensible otherness of language, because even at the moment of being formed, he/she is already immersed in it, and thus suffers unfixable alienation, having no other means of articulating his/her desire. As Chiesa phrases it, “the subject is necessarily alienated in language insofar as language already exists before his birth and insofar as his relations with other human beings are necessarily mediated by language” (37). Lacan himself declares: Symbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him ‘by bone and flesh’ before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gift of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the place where he is not yet and beyond his very death; and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgment, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it – unless he reaches the subjective realization of being-toward-death. (Écrits 231)

When the subject enters the symbolic order, a necessary step in a regular development, he/she enters the already pre-structured reality, ruled by the law of the Big Other and functioning according to its principles. Our reality is largely established by the unconscious, which, as Lacan’s most widely recognised credo suggests, is structured like language. Atonement also seems to acknowledge that language, burdened with its alienating pre-figurations, despite being the only accessible option for articulating reality, is not an accurate means for it. As Nick Bentley notes, Part One of the novel indicates that “language is a slippery medium, and suggests the way in which the desire to record memories accurately is frustrated by the fact that language is not transparent or impartial, but already carries with it cultural signifiers and connotations that affect meaning” (156). This seems to be in line with Finney’s argument, who claims that through the metafictional elements, so abundantly present in the novel, McEwan reminds us “that we are all narrated, entering at birth into a pre-existing narrative which provides the palimpsest on which we inscribe our own narratives/lives” (79). Both opinions are, in some way, paraphrasing Lacan’s proposition about the alienating nature of language. Lacan not only highlights the linguistic nature of the unconscious, he also overturns the Saussurean conception of the sign, giving primacy to the signifier over the signified.2 His emphasis is often on the function of the signifier, and

2 See esp. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud”, Écrits 412–441.

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especially of the chain of signifiers, both in the signification process and in the construction of the subject of the unconscious: “the unconscious is the fact that the man is inhabited by the signifier” (Écrits 25). At the same time, though, Lacan also stresses that the slippage of floating signifiers is not endless; they are “tied” to signifieds at certain crucial spots, which he names points de capiton (translated usually as “quilting points” or “button ties”), places where “the signified and the signifiers are knotted together” (Chiesa 94). Atonement provides a useful example of a quilting point in the word “cunt”, which Robbie so haplessly, and with so devastating consequences, writes into a letter passed mistakenly to Cecilia through Briony’s hands. After realising his ‘“Freudian lapse,” Robbie remembers the experience of reading an illicit copy of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which makes Ingersoll rightly assume that the taboo word “from that fugitive novel writes itself into Robbie’s letter from the text of his unconscious where it has inscribed itself ” (250). Certainly, the chain of signification the word initiates in Robbie is utterly different from Briony’s associations. Actually, in the narrative focalised on her thirteen-year-old self the word becomes muted; the girl focuses on its phonological value and typographical shape, so that it seems to melt into simple form without signification: The word: she tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts, and yet it danced through them obscenely, a typographical demon, juggling vague, insinuating anagrams – an uncle and a nut, the Latin for next, an Old English king attempting to turn back the tide. Rhyming words took their form from children’s books – the smallest pig in the litter, the hounds pursuing the fox, the flat-bottomed boats on the Cam by Grantchester meadow. Naturally, she had never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks. No one in her presence had ever referred to the word’s existence, and what was more, no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the existence of that part of her to which – Briony was certain – the word referred. She had no doubt that that was what it was. The context helped, but more than that, the word was at one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoeic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddling at the foot of the cross. (114)

Briony confronts the threatening enigma of the word, which becomes for her “a call for articulation – but [she] is as yet unable to translate it into an appropriate narrative, her memory and her writing being still shaped by fairy tale or nursery rhyme sequentiality” (Pedot 154). Certainly, the lack of signification is only apparent, and she becomes “excited/repelled by the power of desire the [letter] reads in her with its inclusion of that fugitive word ‘cunt’, a signifier that perhaps reads the energy of Eros in its readers as well” (Ingersoll 252). The newly discovered taboo word becomes for Briony a point de capiton, “the point through which the subject is ‘sewn’ to the signifier, and at the same time the point which interpellates individual into

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subject” (Žižek, Sublime 113). It facilitates her metamorphosis from an innocent and ignorant child, living in the symbolic order structured by idealistic fairy stories, into a distrustful and insecure teenager, tainted with the discourse of adult genres, who has “entered an arena of adult emotion.” Faced with the primacy of the signifier, Briony is rendered helpless; her world becomes fixated around unconscious significations which dictate her actions. This, again, strictly reflects the Lacanian belief in the dominating authority of the signifier: “Such is the signifier’s answer, beyond all significations: ‘You believe you are taking action when I am the one making you stir at the bidding of the bonds with which I weave your desires’” (Écrits 29).

Works Cited Bentley, Nick. Contemporary British Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Print. Bradley, Arthur. “The New Atheist Novel: Literature, Religion, and Terror in Amis and McEwan.” The Yearbook of English Studies 39.1/2 (2009): 20–38. Print. Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness. A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007. Print. D’Angelo, Cathleen. “‘To Make a Novel’: The Construction of A Critical Readership in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Studies in the Novel 41.1 (2009): 88–105. Print. Fink, Bruce. Lacan to the Letter. Reading Écrits Closely. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Print. –. “The Real Cause of Repetition.” Reading Seminar XI. Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. 223–229. Print. Finney, Brian. “Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Journal of Modern Literature 27.3 (2004): 68–82. Print. Head, Dominic. Ian McEwan. (Contemporary British Novelists). Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007. Print. Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. (Routledge Critical Thinkers.) London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Ingersoll, Earl G. “Intertextuality in L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Forum of Modern Language Studies 40.3 (2004): 241–258. Print. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Print.

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–. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. John Forrester. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991. Print. –. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991. Print. McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Vintage, 2002. Print. O’Hara, David K. “Briony’s Being-For: Metafictional Narrative Ethics in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Critique 52 (2011): 74–100. Print. Pedot, Richard. “Rewriting(s) in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Études Anglaises 60.2 (2007): 148–159. Print. Schemberg, Claudia. Achieving ‘At-one-ment’. Storytelling and the Concept of the Self in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, Black Dogs, Enduring Love and Atonement. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004. Print. Seaboyer, Judith. “Ian McEwan: Contemporary Realism and the Novel of Ideas.” The Contemporary British Novel. Eds. James Acheson and Sarah C. E. Ross. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. 23–34. Print. Wells, Lynn. Ian McEwan. (New British Fictions) Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. London: Granta Books, 2006. Print. –. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2008. Print.

Katarzyna Fetlińska University of Warsaw

Homo Ludens: The Role of Pleasure in Iain Banks’s The Player of Games It is no coincidence that in the title of this paper I allude to Johan Huizinga’s work, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938), in which play is defined as the central activity in flourishing societies. According to Huizinga, play both predates and comprises culture, manifesting itself in diverse human activities. Therefore, Huizinga’s argumentation is vital for my essay, since he argues that play is, first of all, a universal phenomenon (1). At the same time, Huizinga emphasises the fact that scientific methodology has been unable to fully explain the phenomenon of play, since biological inquiries tend to omit its emotional aspect: “[t]his intensity of, and absorption in, play finds no explanation in biological analysis. Yet in this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play” (1–2). Thus, Huizinga perceives playing as a universal human and societal trait, and he also ascribes to it an emotional value, Huizinga’s work is to a certain extent interdisciplinary, but, nevertheless, it is grounded in the Cartesian dualist philosophical tradition, which separates science and humanism, mind and body, reason and emotion, nature and culture. In Huizinga’s times emotions were not regarded as a proper scientific subject: these were the days before neuroscience. In the 21th century, however, affects and thoughts are already perceived as functions of the body and the brain. Cartesian substance dualism, or dualism in general, ceased to be mainstream positions in the fields of both science and Western philosophy (Damasio 187, Slingerland 3–4), while cross-disciplinary approaches, such as using neuroscience to comment upon literature, “open up new avenues for empirical study and testing” (Nalbantian 1). In my essay I discuss the phenomenon of play as presented by Iain M. Banks’s1 in The Player of Games (1988) in light of a contemporary intellectual zeitgeist generated by the development in cognitive sciences. I provide an outline of ideas concerning the emotional aspect of playing, by placing Banks’s novel in the context 1 Iain M. Banks is the pseudonym used by Iain Banks to publish his science fiction works, as explained in the BBC interview Five Minutes with: Iain M Banks.

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of 20th century ideas expressed by Johan Huizinga, Sigmund Freud, or Jean Piaget, which serve here as an intertextual introduction to a discussion of play in The Player of Games in light of Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven’s neuroscientific work. Panksepp and Biven examine play as an inherently emotional phenomenon, and it may be stated that their scientific views fit into the tradition of play-related writings, in which a propensity for focusing on affects can be traced. Thus, I proceed to examine the role play-related emotions serve in the creation of a particular self as well as the whole society’s structure. The use of an interdisciplinary methodology is, in this case, further justified by the fact that Iain Banks’s literary oeuvre is, in my opinion, focused upon analysing and demolishing dualisms, such as mind/ body, science/humanism, or nature/culture2. Iain M. Banks’s science-fiction novel The Player of Games offers a vision of a distant future, in which a huge part of the universe is dominated by the pangalactic, post-scarcity society called the Culture. The Culture’s reality is more or less utopian: money and institutionalised power are obsolete, while bioengineering and immense technological advancement allow humans and aliens alike to lead a peaceful existence. Having unlimited resources at their disposal, members of the Culture spend their endless free time on hedonistic endeavours, such as sex, drugs, or game-playing. Even though it all may look like a utopia, some of the Culture citizens stay embittered and suffer from depression: one such individual is Jernau Morat Gurgeh, the novel’s main protagonist. Although immensely successful in the field of game-playing, Gurgeh feels embittered and meaningless. Eventually, he is recruited into the Special Circumstances division of Contact, which serves as the Culture’s diplomatic forces. Contact needs him, because they are intent on dismantling the enemy interstellar empire of Azad, which, rather than being peaceful and democratic like the Culture, is built around the notions of conquest, violence and power. Azad is also the name of an extremely complicated game, which rules both public and private life of the empire’s citizens. In order to eviscerate Azad, Culture does not want to engage in an open conflict. Instead, it wants Gurgeh to travel to the planet of Eä, play the game and defeat the current emperor. Interestingly, Gurgeh seems not to be aware of, or interested in, the Culture’s goals: all he really cares about is playing itself. In fact, Banks’s entire novel is organised around metaphors associated with playing, such as game of life (20), or to play a role (100): Azad rules lives of all the Empire’s citizens, and Gurgeh is just a pawn in the Contact’s game, in which the Culture ultimately wins inter-galactic hegemony. Game-associated discourse is 2 This is one of the main arguments of my doctoral thesis.

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present both in Marain, the language of the Culture, and in Eächic, the language of Azad. Even though the vital role of games is expressed in these linguistic systems in a kindred manner, the meaning of play varies substantially in the two abovementioned societies. As Huizinga argues, “a general play-category has not been distinguished with equal definiteness by all languages”, while “languages differ widely in their conception of play” (28). Various activities are being described with the use of vocabulary and the metaphors associated with playing, hence formulating a definition of play based upon linguistics only is, according to Huizinga, impossible. The definition should focus more upon psychological, behavioural and cultural implications. Nowadays, a widespread definition of play, proposed by Gordon Burghard, states that play is a spontaneous and pleasurable activity, which occurs among unstressed and healthy individuals, and whose adaptive functions are not visible at the moment of playing (81). Carefree game-playing in the Culture seems to fulfill all of Burghard’s criteria, since the novel begins with a description of a typical Culture game: technologically enhanced rough-and-tumble play, or “a battle that is not a battle” (Banks 3–5). On the other hand, even though the Azadians use play-related expressions that are easily translatable into the Culture’s language, gaming in Azad heavily departs from Burghard’s definition. The linguistic similarity between Marain and Azadian may only support an illusion that both societies share similar concepts of playing. Rather than being spontaneous, Azadian playing sessions are carefully planned (76–77). Heavily ritualised, gaming in the empire’s reality is only pleasurable for those who win, since others may easily lose all their material possessions, social status, health, or life (79). Even at its outset, the game of Azad serves a clear function: individuals engage in it in order to gain better positions in the heavily stratified society. As Ronnie Lippens puts it, “[t]he purpose of Azad is not play itself, but the regulation of political life through oppression, segregation and the imposition of hierarchies” (139). Azad cannot be separated or distinguished from the political and socio-economical system on Eä. In sum, it equals life with all its strain, pain and danger. Among the Culture citizens, playing is a virtue because it grants pleasure, enhances empathy, boosts social intelligence as well as communitarian feelings. In the long run, the victory does not matter: only the fun does (Banks 21). Interestingly, Gurgeh seems not to fit too well into this society, since he craves not pure social joy, but the emotional experience of anticipatory euphoria (196), a state of feeling superior, powerful (191), and real (21). The Culture’s most famous game player is addicted to strong emotional stimulation, experienced both at the level of the body and the mind (272–274). Playing grants Gurgeh the most gratifying feelings, which allow him to construct a certain

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view of his ideals and emotions, hence, self-reflective consciousness. Games allow Gurgeh to feel “like a wire with some terrible energy streaming through him … a god with the power to destroy and create at will” (272). In fact, Banks’s novel is imbued with a fascination with emotions: their expression in the body and the brain, as well as the function feelings play in the construction of individual selves and whole societies. At the beginning of the narrative, Gurgeh states that the most important areas of life are: “intellectual achievement”, “the exercise of skill”, and, most importantly, “human feeling” (6). It is worth mentioning at this point, that in the 20th century, numerous thinkers attempted to determine and analyse the emotional aspect of playing, and this is what I would like to pinpoint in the context of my analysis. Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget and Johan Huizinga observe and discuss the emotional aspect of play, treating pleasure as one of the prerequisites for its existence. They associate the notions of both communal and individual experience with play-associated joy. Sigmund Freud perceives games as pleasurable, because they, according to him, allow for controlling one’s ego, as well as influencing the external world (8–11), while Jean Piaget postulates that play is satisfying, due to the fact that it allows for subduing reality to the ego, granting humans the feelings of security, as well as a sense mastery (The Moral Judgment… 31; Play, Dreams, and Imitation… 61–68). According to Piaget’s theory of moral development through games, individuals at play impose their behavioural strategies on the external reality, hence, they practice and exercise control, and this brings to them a strong sense of gratification (The Moral Judgment… 95–103). At the same time, Johan Huizinga asserts that at the heart of play lie both the joys of improvising and acting together, and the pleasures in control, mastery, or surpassing oneself and defeating others. (12, 47–50). It is now worth discussing how it is possible that one activity encompasses such diverse, even contrastive, types of emotional experience. On the one hand, play equals joy, because it is a social, safe and carefree activity. On the other hand, however, it incites a different sort of pleasure associated with experiences of individualism, mastery and superiority. As Paul Kincaid notes, “by codifying games, the characters [of The Player of Games] impose at least the semblance of control upon lives that are out of control” (27). Banks analyses this dualistic nature of playing as illustrated by the opposition between the Culture and the Empire of Azad. What he suggests, however, is that play itself has no dark side. If it seems to have one, then a game is not a game (3), but something utterly different, and, unfortunately, easily confused with pure playing. From Huizinga’s Homo Ludens emerges a similar general assertion: many aspects of culture that tend to be termed as play actually do not meet its definition.

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As I have already attempted to illustrate, Iain Banks’s work may be discussed in the context of 20th century analyses of playing: be it writings belonging to the field of psychology or those associated with cultural history. Nevertheless, even though created in the late 80s, The Player of Games goes also in line with the newest trends in science and philosophy. Banks’s observations concerning play-related emotions are coherent with the recent neuroscientific discoveries and arguments proposed by such scholars as Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven in their co-authored work The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (2012). While in 1962 Jean Piaget has identified the activity of playing with a quest for cognitive consistency, fifty years later, in 2012, Panksepp and Biven argued that all affects, including those connected with playing, lie at the heart of who we are: feelings lead to the creation of consciousness and self. All mammals, humans included, possess a set of universal emotional systems in their brains: these old anatomical structures are responsible for expressing a set of emotions, spanning from joy to fear. Interestingly, human higher brain functions, such as abstract reasoning, work in unison with these primitive, ancient neurological systems (Panksepp and Bivench). In fact, Panksepp and Biven note that PLAY3 is one of the most substantial neural systems of the brain, which allows for experiencing a whole plethora of emotions associated with playful activities, such as sheer pleasure, social joy, or solidarity and camaraderie towards others (ch. 10). Banks’s Culture is a highly hedonist and game-playing society, and all of the play-related feelings serve a substantial function in the everyday lives of the Culture’s members (9–13, 20–21). PLAY stays, however, very close to what Panksepp and Biven call SEEKING. SEEKING is the primary, oldest and dominant emotional system of the brain, which gives the incentive to search for and acquire water, food, shelter and other necessary resources. The arousal of this system leads to pleasant excitation and euphoria of the kind we feel while waiting for something to happen. Rather than standing for the pleasure of fulfillment, SEEKING-related emotions equal an eager anticipation to act, while feeling attractive, powerful, effective and influential (Panksepp and Biven, ch. 3). These are exactly the feelings which Gurgeh craves, and which he lacks, because the activation of the SEEKING system is obsolete in the ultra-advanced, post-scarcity reality of the Culture. In one of his game-related commentaries, Gurgeh notes that “[i]f somebody wanted a house like this they’d already have had one built; if they wanted anything in the house … they’d have ordered it; they’d have it. With no money, no possessions, a

3 Panksepp and Biven use capitalised names of the primary affective systems, so that these words’ meanings would not be interpreted according to their common usage (ch. 1).

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large part of the enjoyment the people who invented this game experienced when they played it just disappears” (Banks, The Player of Games 21). In the Empire of Azad, however, it is easy to see the SEEKING system in action. Scarcity of resources, social stratification, and the constant need to fight for survival all contribute to such a condition. The true, dark nature of Azad is hidden under the guise of a game. Therefore, Banks shows that the pleasurable emotions associated with pure play may be easily confused with the individualistic and egocentric euphoria of engaging in a competition. In fact, the joy of interactive game-playing may be very easily transformed into much stronger, and much more addictive, emotions regulated by the SEEKING system, which all contribute to perceiving oneself as an influential and attractive persona (Panksepp and Biven). PLAY and SEEKING systems are very close to each other: both of them are responsible for pleasurable experiences which have commonly been associated with game-playing. This fact may at least partially explain the fluid, multi-faceted descriptions of play present in the writings of psychoanalysts such as Piaget and Freud. Piaget, for instance, proposed that engaging in pleasurable playful activities often leads to the establishment of behavioural schemes and rituals which enable individuals to categorise and control external reality. In fact, Panksepp and Biven suggest that these are the outcomes of the SEEKING system being at work. Pure play has nothing in common with the emergence of rituals, traditions and repetitive behaviours. It is the over-stimulation of the SEEKING system that leads to the creation of rigid schemes, which grant individuals the illusion of order and control. Therefore, in case of Banks’s novel, engaging in the game of Azad offers a consoling sense of influence onto a world ruled by chaos and chance (52). As I have already mentioned, both Freud and Piaget were especially intent on showing how the experience of play-related communitarian joy ultimately leads to the cultivation of individual moral or cognitive skills needed to sustain a coherent self. To them, play was an exercise allowing humans to learn how to impose control upon the world and themselves. According to such theories, play exists because of its adaptive function, which equals strengthening individual skills. Johan Huizinga criticised this function-centredness of the play-related theories, since, according to him, any analysis of play shall focus upon the internal qualities of the activity itself, and not its utilitarian qualities (2–3). Huizinga stated that people play for sheer fun of the game, and not because they infer that playing may be somehow beneficial in the future: Nature, so our reasoning mind tells us, could just as easily have given her children all those useful functions of discharging superabundant energy, of relaxing after exertion, of training for the demands of life, of compensating for unfulfilled longings, etc., in the

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form of purely mechanical exercises and reactions. But no, she gave us play, with its tension, its mirth, and its fun. (3)

Thus, not psychoanalytical writings, but Huizinga’s cultural history is closest to what contemporary neuroscience offers in the discussion of play’s emotional aspect. What is more, according to Huizinga, play always lies between a mindless biological process, and a complex logical inference (3–4): Huizinga’s concept of a thin line separating the direct experience and conscious reasoning is akin to Panksepp and Biven’s theory of affective consciousness, according to which conscious reason springs from affects (ch. 1). The theories concerning the intimate relationship between reasoning and emotionality are furthermore concurrent with Banks’s ideas, in that The Player of Games is a novel extensively describing Gurgeh’s emotional states, which are for him subsequent steps on a road to self-discovery. However, in his study on the ambiguity of game-related emotions, Huizinga postulates also the presence of an immediate connection between play, ritual, and competition. This phenomenon would nowadays be put down to the possible co-existence of the SEEKING- and PLAY-related emotions during game-playing. Banks vividly points to the fact that the notion of play is confusing, since it is easily associated with a very diverse set of activities and affects. The Player of Games may serve as an illustration of Banks’s distrust towards describing experience via language only: he observes that one notion, in this case “play” with all the linguistic expressions and metaphors connected to it, may bear numerous different meanings, such as social action, camaraderie, domination, or rivalry. On the one hand, play in its purest form denotes joy, which enhances empathy, social intelligence and communitarian feelings. On the other hand, play may be treated as a synonym of fierce competition, which incites a euphoric sense of power. Hence, according to the Scottish writer, analysing and categorising aspects of human experience shall be based more on the observation of factual human activities, sensations and emotions, than on focusing upon their linguistic renderings. He observes that in order to speak of humanness, one shall abandon the dualism of mind and body, since consciousness and identity grows out of biological matter of the brain, and is grounded in bodily interaction with the external world and other beings. In The Player of Games, Banks focuses on Gurgeh’s affects and sensorial experiences, in order to transform them into a description of the protagonist’s psyche. In other words: what the man does and feels, heavily influences what he thinks. The division between nature and culture is, according to Banks, also superficial: speaking of the societal impact of phenomena such as game-playing should not be reserved to a sociological or historical analysis. Interestingly, Johan Huizinga already in 1938 suggested the impact affects have on the generation of culture.

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Banks’s ideas are very close to those expressed by Huizinga: one of the main arguments outlined in Homo Ludens concerns the close relationship between playrelated affects and the generation of culture. According to Huizinga, numerous ludic attitudes, such as the communitarian joy (12–13), or the pleasure in surpassing oneself and defeating others (47–50), all constitute the culture’s core. It may be postulated that Banks regards the biological phenomena associated with what we commonly term as “play” as one of the main factors inciting both individual and societal change. Engaging in game-playing, with all the PLAY-related social joys it brings, often leads to innovation and development, as is the case of the ultra-advanced, machine-symbiotic Culture. On the other hand, games may also activate some competitive, individualistic affects in subjects, leading them (and their society) to cruelty, injustice, greed, as well as the establishment of hierarchies. Such is the case of Azad, and Banks seems to suggest that in a culture built around SEEKING-related affects, social mobility is impossible, while any “zero to hero” myth is just an illusion supporting the ethos of violent individualism. In sum, Iain M. Banks does not refrain from delving into the direct, biological experience of play-related emotions. The Player of Games presents an immense scope of affects, and the influence they have on the emergence of individual consciousness, as well as the shape of a particular society and its culture. Like Panksepp and Biven, Banks perceives emotions as a biological phenomenon, and just like another neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, Banks suggests that culture is a form of a biological revolution: in chapter 11 of Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010), Damasio writes that both human consciousness, and human culture, are closely related to nature. First of all, mind’s processes, including emotional reactions, abstract thinking and a sense of self, grow out of biological substrate. Damasio states that “the emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behaviour, and mind that ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in the sweep of natural history” (Damasio, ch. 11). Thus, humans use their neurobiological competences to analyse and question nature’s ways, as well as to influence the external world; and play is, according to Iain Banks, one of the phenomena which belong to the joint category of nature and culture.

Works Cited Banks, Iain M. The Player of Games. 1988. London: Orbit, 2012. Print. –. “Five Minutes With: Iain M Banks.” Five Minutes With. BBC News, 3 Nov. 2012. Web. 4 Jun. 2015.

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Burghard, Gordon M. The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2005. Print. Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010. EPub. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. London, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961. Print. Henricks, Thomas S. “Play as Self-Realisation: Toward a General Theory of Play.” American Journal of Play 6.2 (2014): 190–213. Print. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. 1938. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Print. Kincaid, Paul. “Far Too Strange: The Early Fiction of Iain Banks.” Foundation 42.116 (2013): 23–36. Print. Lippens, Ronnie. “Imachinations of Peace: Scientifictions of Peace in Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games.” Utopian Studies 13.1 (2002): 135–147. Print. Nalbantian, Suzanne, Paul M. Matthews, and James L. McClelland, eds. Introduction. The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives. By Suzanne Nalbantian. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2011. 1–26. Print. Panksepp, Jaak, and Lucy Biven. The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions. 2012. New York: W. W. Norton. EPub. Piaget, Jean. Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. Trans. Caleb Gattegno and F.M. Hodgson. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962. Print. –. The Moral Judgment of the Child. 1966. Trans. Marjorie Gabain. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Print. Slingerland, Edward. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. 2008. New York: Cambridge, UP. Print.

Murari Prasad D.S. College, Katihar, India

The Representation of Emotion in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things The major source of literary experience, as J. A. Appleyard notes, is emotional (Becoming a Reader passim). When we read a novel, our engagement with its narrated fictional world involves close interaction with the events and characters depicted therein, as well as comprehension of the plot dynamics and understanding of its content and concerns. The cognitive processes that yield these goals are driven by interest and appreciation motivations with implications for anticipated emotional reactions. Furthermore, the explication of a novel’s content for insight or derivation of meaning has considerable emotional consequences, unlike culling out information while reading non-fiction. “Our brains have the machinery,” according to Keith Oatley (“Meaning and Ambiguity” 5), “to make scenes that we experience […] to construct what we perceive.” Our experience gets actively simulated on the wetware of the mind and, as Martha Nusbaum notes (The Intelligence of Emotions), the cognitive activities involved in our moral appraisal of the narrative action are emotionally valenced and potentially affective. Furthermore, D.S. Miall and D. Kuiken contend in their essay “A Feeling for Fiction: Becoming What We Behold,” that aesthetic emotions arising from readers’ encounter with the narrative properties of a novel, such as its craft and style, and narrative emotions engendered by their experience of the fictional entities modify and buttress one another. Their argument is akin to what Wolfgang Iser proposes as interpretation and reception: The aim of interpretation […] is to assemble meaning. It invests the imaginary with semantic determinacy. […] Reception, on the other hand, is not primarily a semantic process. It is a process of experiencing the imaginary gestalt brought forth by the text. Reception is the recipient’s production of the aesthetic object along the structural and functional lines laid down in the text. (“Literary Theory” 19)

There is thus no substantive dichotomy between emotional readings of literature and cognitive text processing. How does a writer evoke emotions in fiction? In his essay, “Hamlet and His Problems,” T.S. Eliot has offered a fruitful direction for evaluating emotional investments in literature:

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The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding “an objective correlative”; in other words a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (107–108)

Adequacy of emotional representation entails “skilful accumulation of imagined sensory details” (Eliot 108). The equivalence of the external with the emotion is captured and released by words. If the reader’s mental simulation of the fictional world triggers feelings of identification and empathy with the characters caught in a variety of situations, s/he experiences divergent emotions elicited by the narrative in the form of affect. In her Booker-winning novel, The God of Small Things (1997), Arundhati Roy ingeniously uses affective language to capture and convey the matrix of emotions in signifying narrative transactions. The nodal event around which the novel’s narration circles ensues from the subversive attempts of the subalterns, namely Ammu, her twins, Estha and Rahel, and Velutha, a low caste untouchable, against the oppressive social and sexual order sanctified by a pervasive and segregating caste system. With their transgressive gestures and rebellious streaks they seek to breach the dominant paradigms of history. The concluding part of Chapter 1, “Paradise Pickles & Preserves,” of the novel exemplifies Roy’s distinctive technique of emotional elicitation. Her narrative mode in the form of a methodological bricolage unfolds a sequence of episodes replete with affective appeal. The textual mechanisms accounting for the underlying emotion include an evocative use of language. We experience not only aesthetic emotion but also a kind of narrative transportation. Roy’s “stylistic acrobatics” (Dvorak 56) is fuelled by “focalization, i.e., the narrative is being written from the twins’ perspective or point of view” (Lane 99). The recurrent affect-producing rhetorical and aesthetic assemblage in the following passage may be taken apart to realize the textually encoded emotions and feelings: In a purely practical sense it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem. Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house -the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture-must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story. Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it.

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Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendancy, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purplerobed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea-serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. (32–33)

The crucial moments of the family chronicle in Roy’s narrative begin with the arrival of Sophie Mol and her mother, Margaret Kochamma (Chacko’s daughter and his divorced English wife respectively), in Ayemenem (the fictional village in the state of Kerala in India) from England; her death by drowning; and Ammu’s liaison with Velutha, the untouchable carpenter. Crucially too, the rigid social and sexual taboos are transgressed by Ammu and Velutha. Ammu’s dizygotic twins, Estha and Rahel, are coaxed and manipulated into hushing up Velutha’s merciless butchery. The past is filtered through Rahel’s adult perspective, when the 31- year-old narrator returns to the abandoned family estate to see her brother, Estha. Rahel recollects the seminal past events from her memory, which is the engine of the novel’s plot and Roy makes an ingenious and unconventional use of the language, such as compound neologisms, extraordinary capitalization, sentence fragments and excessive paragraph breaks, intrusive parenthesis, copious metaphoric transference, and heterosemiotic intertextuality to summon up the active elements of the story. The use of adverbials like ‘In a purely practical sense’, ‘probably’, ‘perhaps’ and their semantic implications reproduces the past through a piecemeal, tentative process of remembrance. The retrospective narration is non-linear. The past is reappropriated through mnemonic action and imaginative creation, bridging different time zones and disconnected plural memories. The narration of the past through echoes and recollection mitigates the finality of a statement but emotionally primes the reader for a close interaction with the text. Furthermore, the use of these disclaimer adverbials is a device for collecting different elements and points of view as well as disengaging and distancing the narrator from omniscience. The separate images of the past and isolated events are summoned up in a simultaneous focus and fashioned into building blocks of the plot. Equally, the dispersed recollections and details linked by places coalesce into a rich contextual significance and add to the accretion of narrative emotion

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with a telling resonance: “Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it” (33). A dominant factor of the past impinging on the present is the deeply entrenched patriarchal values within marriage and society and the conservative codes of caste and “good taste” in intimate human relationships. The disastrous moment in the Ayemenem House is the violation of ancient “Love Laws” that triggers the tragedy of Ammu and Velutha as well as causes the psychic wounds of Rahel and Estha. Ancient and “larger historical pressures,” as Alice Truax notes, “… combust with catastrophic results” (web), and the salience of Roy’s novel lies in its fresh and innovative use of the language for exploring the emotion of the oppressed and subjugated victims. The playfully bold use of English is a remarkable feature of children’s language, which is not amenable to the normative standards of English used by the adults in the novel. It is an appropriate emotional idiom whereby the children register and note the realities around them. We notice some of these stylistic features in the cited excerpt of the novel. The sentences are sparse and chiselled; the images sharp and telling. Graphological variations in the sentence fragments – ‘subject-less’ sentences, single-sentence paragraphs – and stand-up capitals are noticeably evocative of the narrator’s startling emotional experience. The selection of adjectives in the form of past participles like ‘salvaged’, burned’, ‘charred’, ‘singed’, ‘scorched’ for their accretive semantic resonance is a salient ingredient of Roy’s expressive devices. In addition, parallelism (“that things can change in a day”; “that a few dozen hours…whole lifetimes”; “… that when they do, those few dozen hours…”) and nuanced lexical verbs (“resurrected”, “examined”, “preserved”, “accounted for”) foreground the relationship between language and the imagined narrative world. The sequencing of key words is wedded to the novel’s dramatic portent and emotional dimension. Graphological sentences are grammatically unusual but the links across them are emotionally logical, and the clues to them lie in keywords and repeated phrases (“things,” “a few dozen hours,” “before”). More positively, the repetition is not fortuitous. Roy really knows how to clank a sentence in tune with the emotional accent. The parallelistic syntactic pattern in conjunction with the novel’s emotional structure is markedly evident in the latter part of the extract: “Long before the Marxists came”; “Before the British…before the Dutch Ascendancy…before… Vasco da Gama…before the Zamorin’s conquest…”; “Before…Syrian Bishops…”; “…long before Christianity arrived… and seeped into Kerala….” (33). Long spans of history have been captured in succinct phrases with the full weight of their implications in the novel’s thematic strands. Delicately but devastatingly, the novel focuses on Marxism and Christianity. The two historically momentous interventions

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in the political and social formation of Kerala constitute an engaging backdrop in the novel and set off the oppressive social structures and hypocritical institutions. The boundaries marked by the “Love Laws,” constricting women’s freedom in a sexually skewed social dispensation, is the novel’s pumping heart. The repeated capitalization of “L” in “Love Laws” not only suggests an auditory correlative of emphasis in speech but also underlines the oppressive weight of the cultural code. The signifying phrase alludes to Book 3: 19 of the Laws of Manu: “For him who drinks the moisture of a Sudra’s ( untouchable) lips, who is tainted by her breath, and who begets a son on her, no expiation is prescribed” ( Muller 79). The sylleptic coordination in “[t]he laws that lay down who should be loved, and how” (33). clinches the chilling admonition directed at the transgressors of the sexual code. Roy presses her conspicuous sensitivity to the intricacies and sounds of the language into the service of stimulating our cognitive participation in the novel and our interaction with its emotional content as well as eliciting the meta-emotional concerns of the text. The phrase “the God of Small Things” has signifying transactions in the text. It reflects the book’s emotional structure as well as the elements of its affective sphere. The contrast between the “Big God” and the “Small God” suggested in Chapter 1 of the novel gears the reader’s cognitive disposition towards its emotional repertoire: That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cosy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. (19)

The significant opposition is a divide that separates the determinate rules from transgression, history as the repository of moral prohibitions and social conventions from biology and individual volition. There is a constant replication of the oppositional paradigm in the novel’s narrative discourse by echoes, lexis and imagery. In the economy of the novel the variations on the theme of transgression constitute its emotional gestalt. In a perceptive study of the novel M.K. Naik notes: “It is Velutha who gives the novel its title: ‘The God of Small Things’; it is he who is that kind of a ‘god’” (66). A.N. Dwivedi says that this ‘God’ is “undeniably related to Ammu’s dreamworld” (183). To support his point textually, he quotes an excerpt from the novel: “The God of Loss? The God of Small Things? The God of Goose Bumps and Sudden Smiles? Of Sourmetal Smells—like steel bus-rails and the smell of the bus conductor’s hands from holding them?” (217). Dwivedi argues that Ammu’s “little dreams” crucially inform the novel’s title in that the phrase “one-armed man” is

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directly related to “the God” part in the title. Ammu dreams of “a cheerful man with one arm [holding] her close by the light of an oil lamp. He had no other arm with which to fight the shadows that flickered around him on the floor” (215). In another reference to this “God”, we note that he could do only one thing at a time: “If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win” (330). In another chapter of the novel, the “one-armed man” features similarly: “If he held her [Ammu], he couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he couldn’t feel her” (215). Dwivedi further says that Ammu’s feverish longing for this man “with the whole of her biology” (184), her dream and clandestine recourse to the consuming passion in defiance of the hidebound and oppressive social norms constitute the world of small things. He affirms his point with emphasis: “[…] the ‘Small Things’ in the title of the novel suggests the fulfilment of sexual hunger. Hence the title is a pointer to the unrequited love of Ammu and Velutha” (184). In my view, it is a reductive explication of the book’s title and Dwivedi’s argument is not quite cogent. Though the copious occurrence of the title phrase in the text refers to Velutha quite often, it does not entirely equate with him. It encompasses the world of small activities--free, fragile, innocent and energetic but dread-filled, vulnerable, unprotected and subject to the sledgehammers of coercive powers. In the absence of a saviour, as Suguna Ramanathan argues, “the vulnerable ones in this novel have to get on without Marx or Jesus” (68). The way this “God” or the life force unfurls its strands of freedom outside the matrix of dominant culture and strives to survive is no less than a miracle, for it is weak without any controlling power or superior strength which is associated with the term “God.” It is hostage to a spectrum of threats and is too tender to resist the onslaughts of the intrusive social machine, or the traditional weight of customs. The novel’s title can also suggest, as Jon Mee notes, “the dislocations between the ‘Small God’ of individual lives and the ‘Big God’ of the nation” (Mee 335). As Roy herself puts it in an interview, “To me the god of small things is the inversion of God. God’s a big thing and God’s in control. The god of small things… whether it’s the way children see things or whether it’s insect life in the book, or the fish or the stars-there is a not accepting of what we think of as adult boundaries. This small activity that goes on is the under life of the book” (web). The protagonists of these small activities become the ‘god’ of their ordinary, innocent and impulsive longings. Roy uses a varied range of registers to evoke specific emotions with descriptive prowess. For instance, Velutha’s brutal killing is caught alive with intense and

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poignant effect. The graphic rendition of the gory details has authentic affectivity of grotesque feelings: His skull was fractured in three places. His nose and both his cheekbones were smashed, leaving his face pulpy, undefined. The blow to his mouth had split open his upper lip and broken six teeth, three of which were embedded in his lower lip, hideously inverting his beautiful smile. Four of his ribs were splintered, one had pierced his left lung, which was what made him bleed from his mouth. The blood on his breath bright red. Fresh. Frothy. His lower intestine was ruptured and haemorrhaged, the blood collected in his abdominal cavity. His spine was damaged in two places, the concussion had paralysed his right arm and resulted in a loss of control over his bladder and rectum. Both his knee caps were shattered. Still they brought out the handcuffs. Cold. (310)

Through his affairs with Ammu, Velutha has flirted with the forbidden and so he is practically silenced by the petrifying and hegemonic social order. The sexual liaison between Ammu, an upper caste divorcee, and Velutha, a social outcast, is an act of social transgression and for this reason it remains the predominant point of social disapproval in the novel. Velutha’s appalling torture in the police custody is focalized by the child narrators, Estha and Rahel. The emotion generated by this clinically focused and chilling description is frightening. Our imagination works on the palpable details to evoke a pitying sense of the low-caste Paravan’s (Velutha’s) gruesome butchering as well as a realization of the menace that the oppressive system of social segregation holds for freedom and avenues of individual accord. Semantically, the words coalesce into a sensory image; the imprint of the brutal act is recorded. The subjective sensory description is anchored in sharp, vivid physical particularity. The register encoding the victim’s mangled anatomy is exact and telling. In this extract too, Roy’s predilection for truncated sentences and paragraphs is evident. The culminating sense of “cold” supercharges the context in a momentary entirety. As David Myers rightly puts it, “It is Roy’s linguistic ability to reconstruct our world through the words and the eyes of the gifted twin children, Estha and Rahel, which makes The God of Small Things a masterpiece” (Myers 364). The material qualities of the represented fictional world in Roy’s novel shape our perspective on the configuration of propositions laden with quasi-emotional responses which compel us to appreciate and evaluate the fictional entities. For instance: she can sum up a complex historical situation in a short paragraph of crisp and pithy sentences. This narrative perspective on social calcification unimpeded by Christianity and Marxism is again a component of the novel’s emotional economy.

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The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala insidiously. A reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy. (66–67)

The portrayal of Kerala’s communist weltanschauung comes after the author’s narrative reports on a couple of “competing theories” about the success of the communist movement in the state. In a plausible account of the political situation we share Roy’s and Ammu’s superior knowledge about the shallow roots and brittle ideological moorings of communism vis- a- vis “orthodox Hinduism” untouched by the supposedly transforming influence of Christianity. Roy suggests that Christianity did not dissolve social stratification in Kerala. The conservative codes of caste and “good taste” persist with the Christian community divided along the Hindu lines of discrimination in matters of worship and sexual liaison. By converting to Christianity, the ‘Untouchables’ have become doubly invisible. Roy’s depiction of the communist world and her sarcastic references to the comrades evoked sharp protests including a rejoinder issued by the late communist leader from the state, EMS Namboodiripad’s daughter, Malathi Damodaran. I should like to mention here that this paper is concerned with the representation of emotion in the configuration of novelistic details and so I will rather wash my hands of the political controversies in the wake of the novel’s publication. The lexical set used in the passage to describe communism gives the impression of a soft political intervention, aiming at quiet and gradual changes, not seeking any structural overhaul. By the use of elegant variation “communism” has been demoted to “a reformist movement,” then reduced to “a cocktail revolution,” and, finally, declared as “a heady mix” with depleted revolutionary content. The shortlived surface excitement of the political formation is suggested by the register of fizzy concoction: “cocktail,” “heady mix,” “spiked,” “shot.” The phonological prominence given to within underlines the complicity of communist leaders in sustaining the ossified social practices. Their tepid commitment to their professed political belief emanating from the bland brew of the “reformist” ideology seems to have undermined the efficacy of the communist movement. Noticeably, with deft verbal strokes Roy subverts the hegemonic official history by projecting counterhistory or “inner narratives from within the text” (Maiti 2000). What we see in the writer’s doppelganger of a given reality is a discrete slice of history in the form of subjectively salient narratives, destabilizing the certainty of the dominant official narrative. A striking feature of Roy’s novel is the children’s subversive voice and their vision and perception of the world around them—in other words, their resistance

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to various assertions of domination and forms of oppression. The twins’ counterpoint to the adults’ way of interpreting institutional power and traditional grids of repression is apparent in their highly idiosyncratic use of language. The linguistic transformations, as Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas notes, “seek to unstitch conventional English and institutionalized utterances in order to question established power and histories” (115), and to that end, Roy’s ludic preferences constitute a hallmark of her textuality. She exploits the ludic dimension of English in order to communicate the children’s subversive feelings with sophisticated verbal prowess in the following examples. In the police station Rahel and Estha read the board backward. The inexplicable insolence of Inspector Thomas Matthew is highlighted in the reverse reading of each letter of the word ‘POLICE’ in an acrostical formation: ‘ssenetiloP,’ he said, ‘ssenetiloP,ecneidebO,’ ‘ytlayoL,ecnegilletnI,’Rahel said. ‘ysetruoC.’ ‘ycneiciffE.’ (313)

Tellingly enough, it cross-refers to an expression which has already occurred in the context: A posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal River…Servants of the State. Politeness Obedience Loyalty Intelligence Courtesy Efficiency. (304)

Both Rahel and Estha are traumatized by the flagrantly hostile attitude of the policemen towards law and justice. Their disdain for the derelict institution of the state is silently eloquent, and we empathize with their entrapment.

Morphology dependent play Roy’s novel provides many examples of the child narrators’ play with morphology, both inflectional and derivational. It is germane to the novel’s emotional nexus in that the speakers seem to articulate the delicate nuances of their muffled resentment and subtle layers of wry humour. Here is an example of inflectional effect in Rahel’s narration of Sophie Mol’s reluctant compliance with her mother’s command:

Margaret Kochamma told her to Stoppit. So she Stoppited. (141)

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And there are lots of examples of derivational neologisms:

‘Where’re you going?’ Rahel asked. ‘Feeling vomity,’ Estha said. (107)

Other examples include “co-hecklers”, “co-ambassadors”, “cemently”, “re-Returned”, “outdoorsy”, and several more.

Syntax-dependent play In the following example, Estha’s interlocutor takes an idiom literally, and the ludic play manifests itself when the underlying surface structure is brought up to the surface: ‘Ayemenem,’ Estha said. ‘I live in Ayemenem. My grand-mother owns Paradise Pickles & Preserves. She is the Sleeping Partner.’ “Is she, now?’ the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man said. ‘ And who does she sleep with?’ He laughed a nasty laugh that Estha couldn’t understand. ‘Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.’ (102–103)

And here is another example: Chacko said: (a) You don’t go to Oxford. You read at Oxford. And (b) After reading at Oxford you come down. ‘Down to earth, d’you mean? Ammu would ask. ‘That you definitely do. Like your famous airplanes.’ (56)

Lexical play Roy’s child narrators are fond of making use of puns to suggest two or more meanings of a word or phrase or the meaning of another lexical item similar in sound. Ammu’s locus standi in the Ayemenem family, is punnily put in by the twins as “Locusts Stand I.” As a daughter of the family she had no claim on its property in the patriarchal scheme of things and it is being suggested that her brother Chacko is a predator preying on his sister’s legitimate inheritance: Chacko told Rahel and Estha that Ammu had no Locusts Stand I. ‘Thanks to our wonderful male chauvinist society,’ Ammu said. Chacko said, ‘What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine.’ (57)

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Sometimes the pun is simply neologistic: Ammu said that Pappachi was an incurable British CCP, which was short for chhi-chhi poach and in Hindi meant shit-wiper. Chacko said that the correct word for people like Pappachi was Anglophile. (51–52).

Pragmatic play As David Crystal points out, “Pragmatic play refers chiefly to ludic manipulation of the rules governing normal conversational discourse” (1998). Communicative behaviour acknowledges co-operative principles. When people abide by the cooperative principle, they agree to act according to various rules, or rather Maxims, as Grice calls them. Roy’s characters sometimes violate these conversational maxims and the reader deduces the implicature. In the first example, Ammu’s response to Chacko’s cautionary notes flouts the maxim of relation, that is, normal expectation of relevance. Her sarcasm is leavened with humour. She deliberately wishes to change the subject by teasing the latter. The implicature is added by the kinesic information in the author’s narrative description of Chacko’s tense silence. There was hustle-bustle. And police whistles. From behind the line of waiting, oncoming traffic, a column of men appeared, with red flags and banners and a hum that grew and grew. ‘Put up your windows,’ Chacko said. ‘And stay calm. They’re not going to hurt us.’ ‘Why not join them, comrade?’ Ammu said to Chacko. ‘I’ll drive.’ Chacko said nothing. A muscle tensed below the wad of fat on his jaw. He tossed away his cigarettes and rolled up his window. (64)

From the narrator’s report we gather that Chacko is “a self-proclaimed Marxist” (65), thus Roy helps us understand Ammu’s motivation for implicature in relation to Chacko’s false pretences. Another example which appears to break the Gricean maxims of manner, quantity and quality comes later in the novel: Rahel wondered what he [Comrade Pillai] gained by questioning her so closely and then completely disregarding her answers. Clearly he didn’t expect the truth from her, but why didn’t he at least bother to pretend otherwise? ‘Lenin is in Delhi now, Comrade Pillai came out with it finally, unable to hide his pride. ‘Working with foreign embassies. See!’ He handed Rahel the Cellophane satchel. They were mostly photographs of Lenin and his family. His wife, his child, his new Bajaj scooter. There was one of Lenin shaking hands with a very well-dressed, very pink man. ‘German First Secretary,’ Comrade Pillai said. (131)

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Comrade Pillai is giving unsolicited and irrelevant information about his son to Rahel. The interlocutor’s silence indicates her lack of interest in the humdrum details of conversation. With his pride in his son’s material acquisitions and his fascination for lucrative location, Comrade Pillai stands unmistakably ridiculed. Roy deploys the language play to depict the Communist leader’s hypocritical stance, pointing obliquely to the corruption corroding the revolutionary movement.

Metalinguistic play Sometimes Roy’s characters play with the terms for talking about language. When the twins asked what cuff-links were for--‘To link cuffs together,’ Ammu told them--they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language. Cuff+link=Cuff-link. This, to them, rivalled the precision and logic of mathematics. Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language. (51)

It is also used for parody, for satirising a character’s style and signalling our attention to encounter two levels of language awareness simultaneously in the dialogue: ‘So!’ Comrade said. ‘I think so you are in Amayrica now?’ ‘No,’ Rahel said. ‘I’m here.’ ‘Yes yes,’ he sounded a little impatient, ‘but otherwise in Amayrica, I suppose?’… ‘Recognized?’ Comrade Pillai asked the man with the photographs, indicating Rahel with his chin… Punnyan Kunju’s son? Benaan John Ipe? Who used to be in Delhi? Comrade Pillai said… ‘His daughter’s daughter is this. In Amayrica now.’ (129)

A perverse kind of conversational behaviour arises in this piece of dialogue, as Comrade Pillai, much too fond of the sound of his own voice, becomes unduly curious--thus denying the premise of shared information. The writer has a good ear for her character’s idiolect, and it is shown in the idiosyncratic spelling of “Amayrica”, as also in a strategy of deviance. “If a novel is no more and no less than a verbal artefact,” say Leech and Short, “there can be no separation of the author’s creation of a fiction of plot, character, social and moral life, from the language in which it is portrayed” (26). These examples illustrate that by a deft sleight of hand Roy has translated inner states into words and produced emotions in order to intermingle mental spaces of her characters. The illustrative examples cited and explicated above demonstrate the salient point of the paper that Roy’s skilful manipulation of language fosters the transmission of the novel’s essential emotion. The author succeeds in persuading the reader to experience the imagined textual world with its own landscape, people,

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behaviour and values. In the context of experiential reading of fiction, Oatley’s taxonomy of narrative emotions (“Identification in Fictional Narrative”) includes the emotions of sympathy, emotions of identification and re-lived emotions. Mar et al have added the emotions of empathy and remembered emotions to Oatley’s formulation (822) of the emotion phenomenon in literature. As we notice Roy’s evocation of narrative emotions in The God of Small Things, she offers a blend of the five narrative emotions by way of facilitating the reader’s epistemic access to the fictional entities and to the transaction of feelings in a cleverly crafted verbal habitat for the characters and events. Her handling of language evidently gives her writing an architectonic and cinematic structure linked with free linguistic play, whereby she goes beyond “the normal and normative modes of perception” (Lane 105) and makes an attempt at “dislocating embedded socio-political structures, i.e. the laws of social exchange” (Thormann 300) intertwined with experiential representation of a montage of affective emotions.

Works Cited Appleyard, J. A. Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print. Baneth-Nouailhetas, Emilienne. The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy. Armand Colin/VUEF-CNED, 2002. Crystal, David. “Carrolludicity: The Lewis Carrol Phenomenon.” Cardiff: The University of Wales, 1–5 April 1998. Web. 1–12. 15 October 2015. Dvorak, Marta. “Translating the Foreign into the Familiar: Arundhati Roy’s Postmodern Sleight of Hand.” Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Eds. Durix, Carole and Jean-Pierre Durix. Dijon: Collection U21, 2002. 41–61. Print. Eliot, T.S. Hamlet. T.S. Eliot: Selected Prose. Ed. J. Hayward. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953. 104–109. Print. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Literary Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Print. Lane, Richard J. The Postcolonial Novel. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Print. Leech, G.N. and M.H. Short. Style in Fiction. London: Longman, 1981. Print. Maiti, Prasenjit. “History and Counterhistory: Novels and Politics.” Economic and Political Weekly (July 1, 2000): 2382–2385. Print. Mar, Raymond A., et al. “Emotion and Narrative Fiction: Interactive Influences Before, During, and After Reading.” Cognition and Emotion. 25:5 (2011): 818– 833. Web. 31 October 2015.

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Mee, Jon. “After Midnight: The Novel in the 1980s and 1990s.” An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. 318–336. Print. Miall, D.S. and D. Kuiken. “A Feeling for Fiction: Becoming what we behold.” Poetics 30 (2002): 221–241. Print. Muller, F.M. Manav Dharam Sastra (The Laws of Manu). The Sacred Books of the East. Vol. XXV. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886. Print. Myers, David. “Contemporary Tragedy and Paradise Lost in The God of Small Things.” Arundhati Roy: The Novelist Extraordinary. Ed. R. K. Dhawan. Delhi: Prestige Books, 1999. 356–364. Print. Naik, M.K. “Of Gods and Men: A Thematic Study of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” The Journal of Indian Writing in English. 31.2 (July 2003): 66–73. Print. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print. Oatley, Keith. “Taxonomy of the Emotions of Literary Response and a Theory of Identification in Fictional Narrative.” Poetics 23 (1994): 53–74. Print. –. “Meaning and Ambiguity.” Emotions: A Brief History. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 1–18. Print. Ramanathan, Suguna, “Where is Christ in The God of Small Things?” The God of Small Things: A Linguistic Experiment. Eds. Indira Bhatt and Indira Nityanandan. New Delhi: Creative Books, 1999. 63–68. Print. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: IndiaInk, 1997. –. . Web. 10 May 2015. –. “Words Worth interview with Arundhati Roy.” . Web. 10 May 2015. Thormann, Janet. “The Ethical Subject of The God of Small Things.” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. 8.2 (Fall 2003): 299–307. Print. Truax, Alice. “A Silver Thimble in Her Fist.” New York Times May 25, 1996. Web. 14 October 2015.

Part IV – Emotions and Interpersonal Context

Kornelia Boczkowska Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

A Transcendental Response to Space Travel and the Alien Contact: Emotion Elicitation in Walt Disney’s and Pavel Klushantsev’s Early Space Age Documentaries In this paper I present and compare emotion elicitation in Walt Disney’s and Pavel Klushantsev’s early space age documentaries, particularly in their visual and textual representations of space exploration and the alien contact. The study examines the Disney television series, Man in Space (1955) Man and the Moon (1955) and Mars and Beyond (1957), and compares them with Klushantsev’s speculative science documentaries, Doroga k zvezdam (Road to the Stars, 1957), Luna (Moon, 1965) and Mars (1968), often seen as American and Soviet counterparts of each other (Scott and Jurek). Considered one of the first popular attempts at educating the public about the abundant prospects of human interplanetary exploration, both series adopt a serious tone, providing a science-factual vision of man in space, which largely lacks a spiritual quality. Partly contrary to this assumption, I argue that both auditory and visual stimuli tend to elicit emotions which build both a realistic and a transcendental narrative, teetering between science and religion. For instance, while Disney’s episodes intend to present the public with “visions of promise and fear” and thus prepare them for the conquest of space embedded in the frontier myth (McCurdy 61), the Soviet series expose a visionary, utopian and awe-inspiring scenery, offering more “dramatic demonstrations of scientific principle” (Lewis 264). Diverse ways of thinking about outer space in America have been constantly shaped by the forces of national culture and continue to affect political, social and cultural life, including the works of literature, art, film or various forms of entertainment. Such ideas, especially those that emerged throughout the 20th century, “may speak more to imagination than to science and technological feasibility” (Harrison 2012), thus shaping and redefining the relationship between humans and the universe. One of the first popular forms, though hardly explored in scholarly terms, where space exploration-related concepts were discussed on the nationwide scale were science documentaries. Following World War II, a novel trend emerged

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in the science documentary, fueled by “popular science boom” or the “post-war bonanza” (Gregory and Miller 1998) and characterized by a gradual tendency to move toward more complicated representational extremes. Largely triggered by the rise of specialist science writers and the development of television, some early science documentaries have taken up the subject of outer space and space exploration by producing a particular form of textuality, thus “mediating between arcane forms of otherwise inaccessible knowledge, and popular everyday forms of understanding” (Silverstone 72). As a subgenre of the early science documentary, a space documentary utilizes a standard and simple format by providing explanatory voice and illustrative visuals as well as draws on a clearly realist paradigm in portraying speculative scientific theories (van Dijck 6). A linear essay-like structure is achieved through the combination of still images, video, graphics and animation with a voice-over narration, which tends to convey certain ideological values combined with attempts to maintain balance of opinion (Mayeri 64, Silverstone 377). The latter statement is particularly true in the case of Disney’s and Klushantsev’s programmes where the task of portraying the represented reality, mostly in the form of largely invisible astronomical phenomena or futuristic space technology, can be deemed more complex. Therefore, in order to present the viewers with visually appealing, simplified and comprehensible representations, both documentaries had to rely on a set of familiar cultural and historical conventions of depicting concepts related to both space and space exploration. Utilizing cultural codes in the science documentary is also inseparably connected with the concept of emotion elicitation, so far examined mostly by psychologists and social scientists studying subjects’ responses to visual and auditory stimuli contained in selected film clips likely to trigger a set of emotional states (see e.g. Philippot, Gross and Levenson, Hewig et al., Sato, Noguchi and Yoshikawa). Based on phenomenological and psychoanalytical film theory, emotion elicitation and spectator pleasure are predominantly investigated as a cognitive and “interpretive activity firmly rooted in the arts and humanities” (Plantinga 7) where emotions are understood as concern-based construals. However, rather than investigate the narrative and visual content of early space documentaries by means of cognitive tools, I choose to utilize a visual content analysis in attempt to examine their ideological meanings as part of the broader astroculture, defined as “a heterogeneous array of images and artifacts, media and practices that all aim to ascribe meaning to outer space” (Geppert 8). Therefore, the concept of emotion, including a sense of wonder, fear, awe, transcendence, etc., is seen as structures of feelings (Pribram, Williams) and collective cultural experiences represented visually and textually in the media through particularized narrative and cultural contexts.

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In the 1940s, representing space travel in the U.S. popular culture was predominantly confined to the realm of science fiction. America witnessed an influx of pulp fiction magazines, including Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, and early Hollywood pictures which contributed to the otherworldly image of space exploration by promoting completely fictional scenarios whose plot derived more from a fantasy genre than science as such (McCurdy 34–35). Simultaneously, however, there appeared a higher demand of the publishers and film producers for realistic space imagery that served the purpose of convincing the nation that the government’s space programme, which put forward the concept of exploring the final frontier, was in fact feasible and worth pursuing. A group of first-generation astrofuturist writers with an impressive intellectual background in technoscience, including Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley or Isaac Asimov, provided an outlet for new, highly probable science fiction scenarios (Kilgore 64–65). Von Braun’s The Mars Project (1953), for instance, can be seen as a continuation of the U.S. territorial expansion aimed to conquer and terraform new lands, which was an ideology that to a large extent dominated the mid20th century print and broadcast media, utilizing imperialist, capitalist as well as utopian motives in its promotion of exploration and colonization of the universe. Also, due to the technical and scientific complexities of popular science discourse, astrofuturists often turned to entertaining and familiar conventions of the genre, particularly a “sense of wonder”, which stands for an emotional and intellectual enlightenment of the reader who suddenly confronts and comprehends a given idea anew (Csicsery-Ronay 71). The combination of the Western patterns of technosocial thinking with a sense of wonder, which reinforced a fictive and futuristic element of technoscientific speculations, and 19th century romantic imagination, which presented the subject as “an American destiny emerging inevitably out of the national experience” (Kilgore 81), constituted the main narrative models of conveying space travel to a wide audience. In the domain of popular science documentary, Walt Disney’s television series Man in Space (1955), Man and the Moon (1957) and Mars and Beyond (1957) reflected some the aforementioned tendencies. The shows summarize a history of rocket science as well as introduce the audience to the basics of the first manmade spaceflight and extraterrestrial conditions. As put by Reynolds (32), Walt Disney teamed with Wernher von Braun to bring von Braun’s plan for space to a television audience, preparing American imagination for the challenges of the space frontier. In three episodes of Disneyland (…), Disney made the concepts of space travel accessible and fired enthusiasm for the adventure that awaited mankind in space.

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The productions, whose scenario was based on Collier’s series of articles known as Man Will Conquer Space Soon! and written by such space authorities as Willy Ley or Heinz Haber, spread naive and optimistic futurism of early space exploration. While the first episode, Man in Space, explained the technicalities of human space travel and detailed von Braun’s project of a reusable space shuttle, the second installment, Man and the Moon, continued the narration by presenting the audience with the construction of a ring space station and the manned mission around the moon. The final episode, Mars and Beyond, offered a more entertaining and dramatic vision of what travel to Earth’s neighbour planet and the extraterrestrial life inhabiting it might look like. In line with the U.S. astrofuturist culture and some essential characteristics of popular science discourse, Disney’s productions intended to present the American public with “elaborate visions of promise and fear” and thus prepare them for the conquest of space (McCurdy 61), partly in response to the launch of Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 and the rise of Cold War national security concerns. Largely justifying the main space programme policy objectives, Disney’s series offered highly detailed and fact based descriptions of extraterrestrial objects, spaceflight and other space endeavours with no or little attempt at philosophizing. Meanwhile, the representation of astronauts, accompanied by considerably accessible, explanatory and educational texts, is clearly shaped through nationalism (represents physical strength, national pride and international prestige), romanticism (represents heroism in accomplishing missions in the final frontier), and pragmatism (brings economic, scientific and educational benefits to humanity) (Kauffman 50–66). Additionally, the image has yet another dimension, namely that of the frontiersman, ideologically related to Turner’s Frontier Thesis, which successfully advanced the myth that pioneering the American West has played a substantial role in shaping the national character. Naturally, promulgation of the frontier myth served as a driving force behind the ongoing promotion of a sense of national identity in the context of national space efforts; an evocative image of the space frontier was offered to convince the public that the prospect of spaceflight was in fact real as well as to spread the need for continuous progress and innovation. The use of Turner’s thesis in Disney’s series was particularly telling when referred to the moon landings which advances “an almost transcendental faith in American growth, American institutions and American exceptionalism” (Launius 130). Therefore, its symbolism was successfully transported into space which gained a new ideological dimension associated with the themes of discovering, exploring, taming and finally settling the unknown, literally intangible wilderness; in other words, the act of moving westwards was replaced with that

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of upwards. However, in Disney’s documentaries, the image of the frontier aimed to render the represented concepts real and science-factual rather than sublime, romantic or mythicized, as often portrayed in 19th century American landscape paintings. Furthermore, embracing a frontier philosophy in early space imagery served the function of ensuring the national survival, enlivening the spirit of innovation and creativity as well as providing a continuous source of inspiration for space enthusiasts (McCurdy 163–164). Similarly to its U.S. counterpart, one of the leading forces constituting the Soviet public discourse about space were popular science magazines which helped determine the ideology and imagery of the cosmic enthusiasm, thriving particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. Following Tsiolkovskii’s ideas, popular magazines of the period described in detail the technical and scientific aspects of spaceflight, promoted the ongoing successes of the Soviet space programme as well as explained the greatest mysteries of the universe (Schwartz 233–234). In some early Soviet science fiction films, such as Aelita (1924), Kosmicheskii reis [Cosmic Voyage] (1935), Nebo zovet [Battle Beyond the Sun] (1959), Planeta bur [Planet of the Storms] (1962) or Tumannost’ Andromedy [The Andromeda Nebula] (1967), explorations of alien planets and species were often portrayed as optimistic, either humorous or dramatic, adventure stories accompanied by depictions of an uncanny and infinite void of the cosmos as well as outlandish extraterrestrial landscapes replete with volcanic eruptions, monstrous creatures and hostile plants. Meanwhile, in the realm of popular science documentary, Klushantsev’s programmes, considered one of the first of this kind, were particularly widespread among the audience, mostly due to their visionary and awe-inspiring scenery as well as the use of numerous visual effects which were then considered revolutionary and much ahead of their time. Road to the Stars is both historical and speculative in nature, depicting the life and work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the basic principles of rocket propulsion, ballistics, manned spaceflight, a ring space station and lunar colonization. Meanwhile, Klushantsev’s 1960s films Luna (Moon, 1965) and Mars (1968) “combined science education with realistic portrayals of science fiction, [and] (…) two were hybrids of documentary and theatrical film, switching from scientific lectures and interviews to dramatic demonstrations of scientific principle” (Lewis 264). What is more, the pictures followed a similar pattern and utilized both highly evocative depictions of spaceflight and extraterrestrial landscape with a science-grounded discourse. Scott and Jurek (12) praise Klushantsev’s Road to the Stars for its realistic portrayal of the manned spaceflight mission or space station which are visually reminiscent in a number of aspects to Kubrick’s epic scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

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Klushantsev’s productions might be seen as a reflection of the imagery and ideological boundaries of cosmic enthusiasm of the 1950s and mid-1960s (Schwartz 233). Similarly to popular science journals, which incited public interest in space endeavours pursued by the Soviet Union, early space documentaries tended to connote a number of ideological meanings. For instance, the first significant achievement of the national space programme, the launch of Sputnik, which in Russian means fellowship and companion, was on the one hand metaphorically associated with the Soviet political and technological superiority in the space race rivalry and, on the other, with popular religious beliefs as the first satellites or cosmonauts were often addressed as “‘stars’ in the sky and ‘brothers in heaven’” (Schwartz 237). The latter carry deeper metaphysical and mystical meanings which served as fateful omens and suggested that new space technology, particularly the prospect of spaceflight, could ensure a better future and provide the opportunity to escape confines of the Earth and get away from one’s own society. Other concepts, developed within the cosmic enthusiasm ideology, included the way mankind would discover, conquer and colonize the universe, their close encounters with extraterrestrial intelligence or how would human interaction with the cosmos and alien civilizations affect life on Earth. Such topics, as presented in Klushantsev’s programmes, are also characterized by a style which clearly borders on science and pseudo-science. Due to the fact that scientific discourse in the late Stalinist period was extremely politicized and therefore remained in a clear opposition to the Western materialistic concept of science, other speculative theories of esoteric or occult origins gained popularity after Stalin’s death, such as alien visits or intergalactic communication via telepathy, usually discussed in a highly serious tone. The Stalinist idealist tradition of discussing space exploration and the post-Stalinist trend to present such issues in a more positivistic, materialist and scientific light often overlapped and thus resulted in certain speculative as well as esotericism- and occult-grounded undertones (Schwartz 240). While in the Stalinist era scientific achievements of the national space programme were mostly attributed to the Soviet people and served strictly propagandistic purposes, later the same activities also became subject to unknown forces of cosmic and supernatural origins, including extraterrestrial intelligence. Similarly, in Khrushchev’s times, the image of space exploration and cosmonautics was no longer strictly associated with the concept of state control, social order, political repression as well as enforced collectivization and industrialization, but it became one of the primary means for the Soviet society to achieve a transcendental and spiritual transformation. For instance, some imagery can be suggestive of spaceflight presented as an attempt to escape the Soviet everyday reality into

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inverted utopias where the authors’ fears, desires and views concerning their own society were extrapolated (Schwartz 245). Particularly, while in some scenes alien worlds and space efforts were presented both in an optimistic manner of social realism with the focus on the Soviet ideology, Road to the Stars’s visionary special effects – the scientific accuracy of depicting weightlessness, construction in earth orbit, a rotating space station, and rocket travel to the moon – employed a style reminiscent of medieval icons which, through various artistic means, emphasized spirituality, mysticism and esotericism of the depicted scene. A range of such connotative meanings exposed in Klushantsev’s documentaries may be also embedded in Russian Cosmism, a space-oriented philosophical movement which originated in late 19th century Russia and whose aim was to explore the origins, evolution and future prospects of an intrinsic relationship between humans and the universe. In general terms, its primary focus were an indissoluble spiritual unity between man and the cosmos, the cosmic nature of mankind as well as unlimited and abundant prospects of space exploration by means of highly advanced technology (see e.g. Bashkova 38–39, Dubenkov 57–58, Semenova, Vladimirskii and Kislovskii 11–12, Young 4, etc.). The foundations of such a way of thinking might have been laid by some unique properties of Russian culture, shaped by the mystical doctrines of the Eastern Orthodox Church and spiritual forms of utopianism, later functioning also in its technological dimension in the form of scientific Cosmism (see e.g. Scanlan 29). The nation’s spirituality, determined by the Orthodox Church and traditional folklore as well as the widespread concept of cosmic universalism formulated by Fedorov, laid the foundations for a complex and mystical system of the Russian thought. As suggested by Thomas (8–9), Fedorov skillfully combined the Orthodox philosophy with space technology and rocket science in an attempt to promote peace and harmony as well as the idea of resurrection achieved by rational means; space travel and establishing human colonies on distant planets were seen as a moral goal for mankind responsible for enabling habitation of all resurrected beings. Most importantly, however, Cosmism, having been founded on the core principles of Eastern Orthodoxy, aero- and cosmonautics, transhumanism as well as mysticism and panpsychism, developed into a nationwide rationale which often served as a credible explanation of the Soviet pursuit of space ventures (see e.g. Bashkova, Djordjević, Rogatchevski, Schwartz, Siddiqi, Thomas, Trotsky etc.). It seems that Disney’s and Klushantsev’s programmes can be seen as both explanatory science documentaries as well as epic journeys through space and time. There are, however, some distinctive differences between the two, particularly when examined in terms of their specific cultural content. One may argue that

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the Soviet productions tend to portray the Stalinist and post-Stalinist intellectual traditions in depicting space-related themes, sometimes also suggestive of the Russian Cosmist twofold ideology. While on the one hand, the presence of certain propagandistic elements associated with the Soviet socio-political system is quite evident; on the other hand, certain depictions of space exploration contain quasireligious and occult connotations. Meanwhile, the U.S. documentaries present their audiences with largely naive and optimistic scenarios of space exploration and also rely on an evocative, yet highly factual image of the frontier by conjuring realistic visions of a golden age for mankind, which offers limitless possibilities of human spaceflight and a highly utopian idea of civilizing new worlds. At the beginning, such optimistic visions promised the inevitable coming of the age of space travel, yet with time, most of these prophesies failed to come true and fulfill the public expectations, thus bringing about the nationwide disillusionment with space ventures. However, the idea that “space travel would rekindle the frontier spirit as humans left Earth and colonized the cosmos” continued to prevail in the U.S. culture, yet in a more realistic form rooted in homegrown traditions of westward expansion and frontierism which laid the foundations for a characteristically American set of values and beliefs (McCurdy 309).

Works Cited Aelita. Dir. Yakov Protazanov. Mezhrabpom-Rus, 1924. Film. Bashkova, Natalia. Preobrazhenie Cheloveka v Filosofii Russkogo Kosmizma [Man’s Transformation in the Philosophy of Russian Cosmism]. Moscow: KomKniga, 2013. Print. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. “On the Grotesque in Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 29.1 (2002): 71–99. Print. Dick, Stephen J., ed. Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference. Washington D.C.: History Division, 2008. Print. Djordjević, R. “Russian Cosmism (with the Selective Bibliography) and Its Uprising Effect on the Development of Space Research.” Serbian Astronomical Journal 159 (1999): 105–109. Print. Doroga k zvezdam [Road to the Stars]. Dir. Pavel Klushantsev. Leningrad Popular Science Film Studio, 1957. Film. Dubenkov, B. N. Russkii Kosmism: Filosofiia Nadezhdy i Spasenia [Russian Cosmism: The Philosophy of Hope and Salvation]. Saint Petersburg: Sintez, 1992. Print. Geppert, Alexander C. T., ed. Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

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Geppert, Alexander C. T. “European Astrofuturism, Cosmic Provincialism: Historicizing the Space Age.” Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Alexander C. T. Geppert. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 3–26. Print. Gregory, Jane, and Steve Miller. Science in Public: Communication, Culture, and Credibility. New York: Plenum Trade, 1998. Print. Gripstrud, Jostein. Television and Common Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Gross, James J., and Robert W. Levenson. “Emotion Elicitation Using Films.” Cognition and Emotion 9.1 (1995): 87–108. Print. Harrison, Albert A. American Cosmism. Contact: Cultures of the Imagination, 30 Mar.–1 Apr. 2012, Sunnyvale, CA. Unpublished conference paper. Web. 12 Feb. 2015. Kauffman, James. Selling Outer Space: Kennedy, the Media, and Funding for Project Apollo, 1961–1963. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Print. Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Print. Kosmicheskii reis [Cosmic Voyage]. Dir. Vasily Zhuravlyov. Mosfilm, 1935. Film. Launius, Roger. D. “Perceptions of Apollo: Myth, Nostalgia, Memory or All of the Above?.” Space Policy 21 (2005): 129–139. Print. Lewis, Cathleen. “From the Cradle to the Grave: Cosmonaut Nostalgia in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film.” Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference. Ed. Steven J. Dick. Washington, DC: History Division, 2008. 253–270. Print. Luna [Moon]. Dir. Pavel Klushantsev. Lennauchfilm, 1965. Film. Man in Space. Dir. Ward Kimball. Walt Disney Productions, 1955. Film. Man and the Moon. Dir. Ward Kimball. Walt Disney Productions, 1955. Film. Mars [Mars]. Dir. Pavel Klushantsev. Lennauchfilm, 1968. Film. Mars and Beyond. Dir. Ward Kimball. Walt Disney Productions, 1957. Film. Mauer, Eva, Julia Richers, Monika Rüthers, and Carmen Scheide, eds. Soviet Space Culture: Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Mayeri, Rachel. “Soft Science: Artists’ Experiments in Documentary Storytelling.” Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience. Ed. Beatriz Da Costa and Kavita Philip. Cambridge: MIT, 2008. 63–82. Print. McCurdy, Howard E. Space and the American Imagination. Baltimore: JHU Press, 2011. Print.

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Nebo zovet [Battle Beyond the Sun]. Dir. Mikhail Karzhukov and Aleksandr Kozyr. A.P. Dovzenko Filmstudio, 1959. Film. Philippot, Pierre. “Inducing and Assessing Differentiated Emotion-Feeling States in the Laboratory.” Cognition and Emotion 7.2 (1993): 171–193. Print. Planeta bur [Planet of the Storms]. Dir. Pavel Klushantsev. Leningrad Popular Science Film Studio, 1962. Film. Plantinga, Carl. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Print. Pribram, Deidre. Emotions, Genre, Justice in Film and Television: Detecting Feeling. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print. Reynolds, David W., Wally Schirra, and Gene Cernan. Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon, 1963–1972. Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2003. Print. Rogatchevski, Andrei. “Space Exploration in Russian and Western Popular Culture: Wishful Thinking, Conspiracy Theories and Other Related Issues.” Soviet Space culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies. Ed. Eva Mauer, Julia Richers, Monika Rüthers, and Carmen Scheide. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 251–265. Print. Sato, Wataru, Motoko Noguchi and Sakiko Yoshikawa. “Emotion Elicitation Effect of Films in a Japanese Sample.” Social Behavior and Personality 35 (2007): 863–874. Print. Scanlan, P. James, ed. Russian Thought After Communism: The Recovery of a Philosophical Heritage. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. Print. –. “The Nineteenth Century Revisited.” Russian Thought After Communism: The Recovery of a Philosophical Heritage. Ed. James P. Scalan. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. 23–31. Print. Schwartz, Matthias. “Dream Come True: Close Encounters With Outer Space in Soviet Popular Scientific Journals of the 1950s and 1960s.” Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies. Ed. Eva Mauer, Julia Richers, Monika Rüthers, and Carmen Scheide. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 232–250. Print. Scott, David M., and Richard Jurek. Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. Print. Semenova, S. G., and A. G. Gacheva, eds. Russkii Kosmizm: Antologiia Filosofskoi Mysli [Russian Cosmism: Anthology of Philosophical Thought]. Moscow: Pedagogika-Press, 1993. Web. 18 Feb. 2015. Semenova, S. G. “Vstupitelnaia Statsiia” [Introduction]. Russkii Kosmizm: Antologiia Filosofskoi Mysli [Russian Cosmism: Anthology of Philosophical Thought]. Ed. S. G. Semenova and A. G. Gacheva. Moscow: Pedagogika-Press, 1993. Web. 18 Feb. 2015.

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Siddiqi, Asif A. The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857–1957. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print. Siddiqi, Asif A. “Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia.” Osiris 23 (2008): 260–288. Print. Silverstone, Roger. “Narrative Strategies in Television Science: A Case Study.” Media, Culture and Society 6 (1984): 377–410. Print. Silverstone, Roger. “Rhetoric, Play, Performance: Revisiting a Study of the Making of a BBC Documentary.” Television and Common Knowledge. Ed. Jostein Gripstrud. London: Routledge, 2002. 71–90. Print. Thomas, Andrew. Kul’tura kosmosa: The Russian Popular Culture of Space Exploration. Boca Raton: Dissertation.Com, 2011. Print. Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Trans. Rose Strunsky. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975. Print. Tumannost’ Andromedy [The Andromeda Nebula]. Dir. Yevgeni Sherstobitov. Dovzhenko Film Studios, 1967. Film. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print. –. Politics and Letters: Interviews with ‘New Left Review’. London: NLB, 1979. Print. Von Braun, Wernher. The Mars Project. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953. Print. Van Dijck, Josè. “Picturizing Science: The Science Documentary as Multimedia Spectacle.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (2006): 5–24. Print. Vladimirskii, Boris and Lev Kislovskii. Putiami Russkogo Kosmizma. Sudby Liudei i Idei. Vliianie Kosmosa na Sotsialnye Protsessy. Poisk Zhizni vo Vselennoi [The Ways of the Russian Cosmism. Fates of People and Ideas. The Impact of the Cosmos on Social Processes. The Search for Extraterrestrial]. Moscow: Librokom, 2011. Print. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968. Film.

Agnieszka Łobodziec University of Zielona Góra

Richard Wright’s Emotionalization of Racial Experience in American Hunger In American Hunger, reflecting upon the history of racial bifurcation in America as a catalyst for certain emotional personalities, Richard Wright concludes that “color-hate” (6) engenders black loneliness, fear, uncertainty, and self-hatred. Further, he elaborates on three other ramifications of color-hate – the black man’s repercussion of self-hatred, interracial hatred towards “those who evoked his selfhate in him” (6), black intra-racial hatred as a result of black people’s projection of rage upon other members of the black community. Simultaneously, the ubiquity of confining “external events, lynchings, Jim Crowism, and the endless brutalities” (7) coerces Wright to reconsider the meaning of his life and individuality not through the prism of his surrounding reality but through a conflicting emotional prism of “crossed-up feeling, of psyche pain” (7). The aim of this article is to ferret out Richard Wright’s representation of the geopolitical, epistemological, and cultural dimensions of black emotions. In American Hunger, the narrator comments on the geopolitics of black male emotions. Wright sees black experience as an emotional phenomenon predicated upon two geographical locations – the overtly racially segregated South and an allegedly integrated North. In the 1920s and 1930s many Southern black people thought of the North as a Promised Land. For instance, The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “often urged Southern blacks to migrate to the North, a flight from oppression” (Ammons 470). To a certain extent, Richard Wright’s experiences in the North reveal the possible reasons for such urging, because it is where the absence of “For White – For Colored” (1) signs, the ability to buy a newspaper without being obliged to yield to white buyers in front of crowded newsstands, and the freedom to travel by train together with whites temporarily dissipated Wright’s “racial fear” (1). In the North, his Southern emotions still resurfaced, but they were not as worrisome as those engendered by racial oppression in the South. The black migrant’s insecurity rather stemmed from the overwhelming urban landscape of “towering buildings of steel and stone […] soot blackened buildings” (2). At least, the Northern pressure seemed manageable in comparison with the Southern sense of desperation.

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Unfortunately, in Chicago, despite de jure integration, Wright develops a never before experienced sense of incertitude. On a visit to his Aunt Cloe, he is disappointed to find out that she lives in a rented room, the only accommodation he himself can afford. He is also dismayed by “stricken, frightened black faces trying vainly to cope with a civilization that they did not understand” (3). Compelling is also the fact that the owners of the apartments, shops, and restaurants are all white. Thereafter, he is struck by the systemic racial bifurcation he observes while working as an orderly at a Chicago medical research institute: The sharp line of racial division drawn by the hospital authorities came to me the first morning […] A line of white girls marched past, clad in starched uniforms that gleamed white […]. And after them came a line of black girls, old, fat, dressed in ragged gingham […]. I wondered what law of the universe kept them from being mixed?” (46)

Wright, in consequence, begins to experience loneliness and insecurity. Tragically, further events occur that cause the resurfacing of the emotions and behaviors that beset him in the South. In fear of losing a shop job, while attempting to account for his absence from work, which was really due to an interview for a better job as a postal clerk, he tells his employer the falsehood that he has to go to Memphis to bury his mother. Afterwards, he feels “disgusted that [he] had to lie and lie again” (9). At another time in a restaurant, he becomes uneasy when white female workers pass physically close to him, “an incident charged with the memory of dread” (11). Furthermore, he hides issues of a black periodical called the American Mercury within a newspaper after his white boss’ sarcastic comment that “the colored dishwasher reads the American Mercury!” (15). He also temporarily refrains from informing on the Finnish cook who expectorates into food because he is afraid that no one would believe the only black worker in the restaurant. Eventually, exploitation as a cleaning man at the medical research institute causes him to feel like a slave. He confesses, “Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon. Working against time, I would wet five steps, sprinkle soap powder, then a white doctor or a nurse would come and […] walk on them and track the dirty water onto the steps I already cleaned” (51). Nonetheless, in fear of dismissal, Wright represses his anger. In the aforementioned circumstances, Wright believes that northern inauthentic black life and the fear of self-expression emanate from an inability of black migrants to unburden themselves of southern emotions while confronting a new urban space. He asserts, “Though I had fled the pressure of the South, my outward conduct had not changed. I had been schooled to present an unfalteringly smiling face and I continued to do so despite the fact that my environment allowed more open expression” (14–15). For this reason, he refrains from reading a

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literary magazine in the presence of his white boss, does not manifest his disgust upon discovering the white cook’s abominable practice of expectorating into food, and bears silent witness to unconscionable and unethical white medical research. He concludes that black men suffer social exclusion nationwide. Although in the North he is not threated by overt racial violence and terror as he was in the South, culturally he is still marginalized and emotionally constrained. He contends, “I had fled one insecurity and had embraced another” (3). Wright’s narrative communicates two possible consequences that might emerge from confrontation with the unfamiliar, restrictive urban reality. The black man might accommodate to “the daily horror of anxiety, of tension, of eternal disquiet” (6) through peaceable contemplation of his condition as practiced by Wright or become frustrated and manifest violent behaviors as exhibited by Bill, Wright’s workmate at the medical research center. Wright relates Bill thusly: “His simplicity terrified me. I had never met a Negro who was so irredeemably brutalized” (47). Wright elucidates the emotional dimension of the black American Great Migration experience. In the same vein, Mark Sanders writes that “African American individual and cultural identity was forced to adjust to the new demands of the city and industrialization. As a result, African American culture entertained new concepts of individuality and tried to rationalize new feelings of alienation” (qtd. in Costello 43). In the midst of constraining circumstances, Wright perceives that awareness of one’s individual emotions is the point of departure towards self-discovery and self-integrity. Above all, he regards emotional profundity as a quintessential element demarcating black experiential uniqueness in contrast to the passionless vacuity of the life of white people like that of his white female workmates, who knew nothing of hate and fear, and strove instinctively to avoid all passion. […] They lived on the surface of their days; their smiles were surface smiles, and their tears were surface tears. Negroes lived a truer and deeper life than they, but I wished that Negroes, too, could live as thoughtlessly, serenely as they. The girls never talked of their feelings; none of them possessed the insight or the emotional equipment to understand themselves or others. How far apart in culture we stood! All my life I had done nothing but feel and cultivate my feelings. (12–13)

Wright presents pain, suffering, and containment, accompanied by fear and hatred, as factors that bring depth to black life and compel black people to contemplate their existential reality. He associates freedom, in turn, with easygoingness and material concerns, which makes life shallow, enabling so-called free individuals to thoughtlessly and hedonistically past the day. Such an assessment of the value of emotions in black experience leads him to delve into his own emotional

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state. To facilitate the understanding of his emotional response to the surrounding reality, he reaches for stream of consciousness fiction and scientific works in “the field of psychology and sociology […] tables of figures relating population to insanity […] housing to disease […] schools and recreational opportunities to crime […] various forms of neurotic behavior to environment, racial insecurities to the conflicts between whites and blacks” (20). After attaining greater knowledge of the origins and nature of his emotions, he begins to take note of their epistemological nature and their facilitation of self-awareness. Wright, then, relates of black people whose life had become “a sprawling land of unconscious suffering,” (7) observing that “there were but few Negroes who knew the meaning of their lives, who could tell their story” (7). Interestingly, Wright comes to realize the difference between unconscious (7) and conscious suffering after he discovers his individual self over against a number of entities – a black literary organization on Chicago’s South Side, the Garveyites, and the Communist Party – all of which dismiss emotionalism and individualism. He perceives the members of the literary group as well-off conformists, who emulate the white middle class in their lifestyles, appearance, and priorities. Departing from what Wright labels as profound black emotions, they are predominantly “finicky about their personal appearance [and] preoccupied with twisted sex problems” (27). Such conformity renders them and their life inauthentic. Thus, “[a]lways friendly, they could never be anybody’s friend; always reading, they could really never learn; always boasting of their passions, they could never really feel and were afraid to live” (28). Another organization, the Garveyites, in turn, effectuates conformity to an idealistic, but unrealistic naïve belief in black immigration to Africa as the way out from under white American racial oppression. Although Wright acknowledges the “emotional dynamics” (28), of hope, unity, and resistance that the black leader Marcus Garvey evoked within marginalized black people, he pities Pan-Africanists “too much to tell them that they could never achieve their goal, that Africa was owned by the imperial powers of Europe, that their lives were alien to the mores of the natives of Africa” (29). Unlike the African-centered conformists, Wright is unable to separate himself from the black experience in America and its dilemmas. Analogously, no matter how promising and impressive the Communist party’s “organizational efforts” (29) and call for unity seem to be, Richard feels ill at ease with its members and speaks to them “affably but from emotional distance” (29). At some point, he discovers that the party also is conformist in nature, disapproving of individual feelings and perspectives. Initially, he joins the Communist Party after being attracted by its call for unity. After two years, however, he becomes skeptical of the white members’ intentions

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and objectives in “denying profit and home and God” (66), and their abstract notions. At one point he feels that Communists “oversimplif[y] the experience of those whom they [seek] to lead” (66), and decides to “tell the Communists how common people felt” (66). Unfortunately, the communists immediately disapprove of his so-called emotionalism and intellectualism. Wright’s approach is a far cry from the mass-oriented proletariat literature disseminated by “the instruments of Party power like the New Masses, the Daily Worker, and the John Reed Clubs [which] seriously shaped cultural production” (Lauter 367). Reproached by such statements as “Intellectuals don’t fit well into the party” (79), and being charged “with ‘anti-leadership tendencies,’ ‘class collaborationist attitudes,’ and ‘ideological factionalism’” (87), he again feels entrapment and resurgent “fear” (92, 98, 100,) predicated this time by “the party’s discipline” (92) when he is threatened that “No one can resign from the Communist party” (112). Wright’s experience with the Communist Party was not uncommon. Historically, the Party’s “embrace of black members was itself often tentative, as McKay, Wright, and Ellison quickly discovered; and their sometimes rigid hewing to the Comintern line […] stifled creative activism around black ideas and interests” (Lott 44–45). By and large, the attempts Wright makes to establish relationship with organized entities fail because his individual thoughts and feelings contradict their conventions. Eventually, Richard Wright considers writing to be the only means whereby he can freely express his own emotions that reflect the particularity of black American experience. In due time, he discovers even the therapeutic effect of reading and writing as his sense of uncertainty begins to fade away. Although, in the process, he begins to feel lonely, paradoxically, he feels he is “not alone in [his] loneliness” (44). Wright develops a sense of collective experience, and his writing becomes a way whereby he reconnects himself with other marginalized black people, “filling endless pages with stream-of-consciousness Negro dialect, trying to depict the dwellers of the Black Belt as [he] felt and saw them” (26). Therefore, writing has two major functions for Richard Wright; either as a means of selfexpression or as “an attempt at understanding […] that tragic toll that the urban environment exacted of the black peasant” (26), complex emotions and mental states of black people. Although in American Hunger Richard Wright does not make any direct reference to the blues, his contemplations of the emotional dimension of black American experience are analogous to blues discourse which relates multifaceted aspects of black racial experience in America. Historically, in general, the blues “relate to segregation, lynchings, and the political disfranchisement of black people” (Cone 3)

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and emotively express black male experience, “depicting its joy and sorrow, love and hate, and the awesome burden of being ‘free’ in a racist society when one is black” (Cone 102). The blues convey a variety of black male emotions that arose in confrontation with color-hate, accompanied by violent manifestations. Mark Anthony Neal maintains, [d]isciplinary violence and retributive violence […] inflect blues songs and blues literature in crucially important ways, subtending both the overt victimhood of the blues singer […] and his or her fantasies of heroic retribution […] intimate violence – both real ‘cutting and shooting’ and symbolic mayhem threatened and celebrated in song and story – was an essential, if sometimes destructive, way in which black southern blues people articulated their somebodiness, insisted on their indelible individuality. (4–5)

Correspondingly, referring to color hate, Richard Wright notes lynching and other forms of brutality inflicted upon black people, of black male hatred of white oppressors, and of black male misguided aggression against other black people by which they transfer their own self-hate or hate towards the oppressors upon members of their own community. Both, Wright’s musings and the blues portray particular emotions reflecting unique black American historicity. In terms of the geopolitics of black emotions, Wright’s aforementioned reflections on emergent northern emotions are indicative of blues discourse. Urban blues are believed to express black male emotion evoked by “the rawness and poverty of the grim adventure of ‘big city livin.’ […] The tenements, organized slums, gin mills, and back-breaking labors in mills, factories, or on the docks had to get into the music somehow” (Jones, LeRoi 105). Moreover, “The male, urban blues form was musically an adaption of the country blues to urban conditions, (i.e. instrumentation, backing musicians, audience dance styles, etc.). The urban bluesmen adapted the country-blues form and transported it to the Southern and Northern cities” (D. J. Hatch and D. R. Watson 171). Wright, like bluesmen, negotiates the new northern reality through the prism of Southern experience. In Chicago, he adapts his Southern attitudes to the North. Wright’s emotions, therefore, engender a specific cultural practice, analogous to the blues, as he seeks an appropriate emotional idiom to employ in his creative work. The writing that he utilizes to express his individual emotions and to describe the intricate feelings of other oppressed black people corresponds with what literary theoreticians regard as “blues literature and blues orature” (Neal 10). In terms of form, Wright uses “stream of consciousness Negro dialect” (26) and employs a first-person narrator, whose narrative reflects the blues first-person lyrics, where “The self-feeling is strong in his pictures. The individual plays the most important part and the singer is most generally the subject or the object of the

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action concerning which he sings. ‘I’ and ‘my’ are the keynotes to the great majority of situations” (Odum and Johnson 279–280). As far as content is concerned, Wright’s perception of writing is analogous to the approach of bluesmen to their songs, by which they “unleash the pent-up emotions of their being” (Cone 1), rendering the blues a unique expression of black American experience. Richard Wright’s accentuation of individual emotions over against conformist society’s structures can be fittingly analyzed also from an existentialist point of view, although, in American Hunger, the novelist does not make a direct reference to specific existentialist thinkers, and, in general, there is disagreement among the researchers of Wright’s thought relative to what extent he actually “imbibed the heady existentialist brew” (Cobb 362). Firstly, when he discovers certain organizations’ orthodoxy, he leaves them. Such an approach echoes Nietzsche’s critique of the so-called “herd morality” (23), characteristic of organized socio-political or cultural units and actions, explicated by E. L. Allen, who writes, “The weaker characters composing the herd [who] are unable, because of their weakness, to affirm life; they accordingly construct a morality that will enable them to evade it and yet withal to gain power” (177). Wright observes that regardless of their appeal to the masses, certain agendas seem to be in play that only undergird the power of given individuals or groups of people who impose or emulate particular conventions and demeanors within the unit, be it a black literary organization on Chicago’s South Side, Garveyites, or the Communist Party. The sense of loneliness and fear that accompany an individuals’ struggle for self-affirmation are other major existentialist themes. Martin Heidegger defined angst as an emotion accompanying the growth of self-awareness towards authenticity, a completeness of being. Angst “provides the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping Dasein’s primordial totality of Being” (183). Jorn K. Bramann contends, According to Heidegger it is only the feeling of angst that genuinely reveals nothingness – in this case the possible not-being of everything that I personally am. Only the feeling  of  angst  reveals death as  my  death, the death that only I will die. And in doing so angst individualizes my existence, for the life that I live authentically is the life that is defined by my personal death. (Educating Rita)

The psychologist, Erich Fromm, even more lucidly stresses interconnectedness between a person’s manifestation of individual freedom and fear, writing that a man who finds himself free is “alone and free, yet powerless and afraid” (50), and is continually tormented by a “fear of isolation” (35). This fear of isolation or the lack of recognition induces conformity to normalcy as Jean-Paul Sartre observed of the publishing industry: “The bourgeoisie is so afraid of the negative that it hides it from itself by every means at its disposal. It sees the writer as a cog in the

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book industry; he is the inventor or perfecter of prototypes. On this basis, it will explain the production of literary goods in terms of being” (198). An externalist consideration of one’s individuality translates into a human being torn between two conflicting emotions – self-expression and fear of isolation. Ergo, Wright depicts fear and loneliness as consequences of his nonconformity. He recalls, “I sat alone in my narrow room […] I was restless. […] I wanted to visit some friends and tell them how I felt. […] Why do that? My problem was here, here with me, here in this room, and I would like to solve it here alone or not at all. Yet, I did not want to face it; it frightened me” (134). In American Hunger, Richard Wright’s reflections on the black experience in America encompass references to emotions. He presents color-hate as a facilitator of racial bifurcation within American society. Oppressed, black people find themselves tormented by fears that they continually seek to repress to the point that they become oblivious of their true emotions and begin to live inauthentic lives. Fear of white anger constrains black people from overt manifestations of their feelings, regardless of geographical location. Challenging conformist organizations and movements, Wright embarks on a journey of self-discovery and he resorts to writing as a means of self-expression. Employing emotional tropes, he composes a particular literature of black cultural expression mirroring the blues. The price he pays for the cultivation of his individual emotions and his endeavor to reveal deep truths of the black experience is loneliness and fear. He concludes that his loneliness and fear are caused, to a great extent, by the racial socio-political state. To Wright, no matter how troubling his feelings of loneliness and fear of isolation are, he regards soul-searching of his individual emotions as the source of self-knowledge and self-assertion over against repressive external marginalization. Moreover, his emotions attain an even more epistemological meaning in that they assist his understanding of the nature of Southern and Northern black American experience that black people have a particular response to. Lastly, his individual feelings kindle his creative imagination, leading to the production of a unique blues literary expression.

Works Cited Allen, E. L. From Plato to Nietzsche. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1990. Print. Ammons, Elizabeth. “Black Anxiety about Immigration and Jessie Fauset’s ‘The Sleeper Wakes.’” African American Review 42 (3/4) (Fall - Winter, 2008): 461– 476. Web. 27 Jan. 2015.

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Bramann, Jorn K. Educating Rita and Other Philosophical Movies: Study Edition in Two Parts. Cumberland, Md.: Nightsun Books, 2009. . Cobb, Nina Kressner. “Richard Wright: Exile and Existentialism.” Phylon (1960– 2002) 40.4 (1979): 362–374. Web. 27 Jan. 2015. Cone, James H. The Spirituals and The Blues. New York: Orbis Books, 1998. Print. Costello, Brannon. “Richard Wright’s ‘Lawd Today!’ and the Political Uses of Modernism.” African American Review 37.1 (Spring, 2003): 39–52. JSTOR. Web. 27 Jan. 2015. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon Books, 1965. Print. Hatch, D. J. & D. R. Watson. “Hearing the Blues: An Essay in the Sociology of Music.” Acta Sociologica 17.2 (1974): 162–178. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Print. Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963. Print. Lauter, Paul. “Searching for Lefty.” American Literary History 17.2 (Summer, 2005): 360–368. JSTOR. Web. 27 Jan. 2015. Lott, Eric. “Cornel West in the Hour of Chaos: Culture and Politics in Race Matters.” Social Text 40 (Autumn, 1994): 39–50. JSTOR. Web. 27 Jan. 2015. Neal, Mark A. Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. Odum, Howard W, and Guy B. Johnson. The Negro and His Songs: A Study of Typical Negro Songs in the South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1925. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Eds. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka. Northwestern UP, 1974. Print. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Perennial Library, 1977. Print.

Marek Pawlicki The Witold Pilecki State School of Higher Education in Oświęcim

The Many Faces of Homelessness: Politics, Emotions and Ethics in Nadine Gordimer’s A Guest of Honour “Our greatest task is to constantly understand what is happening in our own countries.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

In a lecture titled “When Art Meets Politics,” delivered in 1999, Nadine Gordimer addressed the topic of a literature which is politically committed. Having begun the lecture with a short list of novels which fit her example, she poses the question as to why so many writers over the centuries have undertaken the task of representing political life in their work. She offers the following answer: “We are fatally linked to the political and social consequences of whatever our society, our country, that country’s politics, may be, and further, to the flux and reflux of the globalisation we are beginning to live through. That is why original expression is inexorably linked to politics” (Gordimer, Telling Times 550). The reason that Gordimer gives for literature’s involvement in politics is strictly a social one: all people, including artists, are heavily and inescapably (perhaps this is what she wants to convey by the expression “fatally linked”) involved in politics, not so much by virtue of their actions, but by the sole fact of being part of a given society. The process of creating literary works can then be viewed as a way of responding to the situation of being deeply immersed in the socio-political situation not only of one’s homeland, but also that of other countries. Gordimer’s explanation for the close connection between literature and politics applies to all countries and no doubt many of her fellow writers would identify with her statement. Nonetheless, it seems that this observation is particularly resonant in the countries which were or still are troubled by serious social conflicts, fuelled by such emotions as resentment and hatred; in such places politics may indeed be perceived as a factor permeating people’s existence. The impact of politics on people’s private lives is certainly one of the main focuses of Nadine Gordimer’s writing, her novels and stories, as well as her essays and interviews. Aware of this fact, many critics have analysed her works as a reaction to the socio-political issues in South Africa contemporaneous with her activity as

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a writer (ten out of her fifteen novels were written before the democratic elections in South Africa in 1994). As Gordimer proved with the publication of her fifth novel, A Guest of Honour, as a social and political analyst, she is not only concerned with the present, but also with the possible future. The novel is certainly one of her most interesting works, and one which, forty three years after its publication, remains both a difficult and a rewarding challenge to her critics. Published in 1971, when the National Party was strongly in power, A Guest of Honour presents events in an unspecified future time after the country has gained its independence. In this respect A Guest of Honour is, as Stephen Clingman observes, “a ‘post-apartheid’ novel” (115). In his discussion of the novel, Clingman writes: “It has been suggested that all of Gordimer’s novels are in some sense social hypotheses: attempts, within a fictional domain, to formulate the structures and forces of social reality and their implications for personal life” (114). It is significant that in his observation Clingman mentions not only the political aspect of Gordimer’s novels, but also their social dimension. The accuracy of this observation is, to a large extent, borne out by Gordimer’s views on her novels and on her activity as a writer: in an interview conducted in 1979, she explained to Claude Servan-Schreiber that writing for her had never been “a political activity” (Gordimer, Conversations 114). She stressed the fact that she was not primarily interested in politics, but rather in “the way politics affect the lives of people” (114). Gordimer’s contention alerts the reader to the fact that when analysing her literary works it is important to concentrate not so much on politics, but rather on the various convergences of politics and the personal life of the protagonists. Indeed, most critical studies of Gordimer’s oeuvre, to varying degrees, adopt precisely this perspective, analysing the experiences and emotions of the protagonists. This study will not be an exception to this general tendency. It will focus primarily on a detailed analysis of A Guest of Honour, looking specifically at the main protagonist’s actions against the backdrop of political events narrated in the novel. Returning to the quotation which opens this article, taken from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, this discussion will show how the protagonist tries to understand the new social and political situation of the postcolonial country and then respond to the country’s problems and conflicts. Due to the fact that the aim of this study is to show the protagonist’s thoughts and emotions, special attention will be given to a psychological analysis of the main character, and, even more importantly, to the ethical dimensions of his actions. Before this detailed discussion is possible, it is necessary to give an outline of the novel’s plot and then present the most important aspects of Gordimer’s philosophy of composition.

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The main protagonist of A Guest of Honour is Colonel James Evelyn Bray, a fifty-four-year-old Englishman and a former colonial official. In the period of colonial rule, Bray supported the anti-colonial movement, anticipating the inevitable end of colonialism. As Michael Wade observes, Bray belongs to the group of “the few Europeans who have, in the past, understood that the nature of their official relationship with Africa possessed within it the seeds of its own decay” (156). Due to his political sympathies, he was called from his post and sent back to England. Now that the African country has gained independence, its president, Adamson Mweta, invites him to join the independence celebrations. Bray accepts the cordial invitation of his influential friend, leaving his wife, Olivia, in England. Back in Africa, Bray joins an enthusiastic crowd, greeting Mweta as the first president of their independent country, after which he is invited to the presidential palace. Mweta is determined to keep Bray in his country and so offers him the post of educational adviser. Bray accepts the offer, acknowledging the “supportive role history now appoints for whites” (Temple-Thurston 60). His role is to survey the poor condition of schooling in the country and propose ways of improving the situation. He travels all over the country and ultimately settles in the northern province of Gala, which he administered during the colonial rule. During his stay in Gala, he begins a relationship with the secretary of the presiding colonial administrator, a thirty-year-old woman, Rebecca Edwards. It is also during his stay in Gala that he meets his old friend, Edward Shinza, a one-time freedom fighter, pushed to the political margins by the president. Bray senses a deep animosity between Mweta and Shinza, who used to be close comrades in their struggle against colonial rule, but are now strong political rivals. As John Cooke observes, for much of the novel Bray “persists in a mediatory posture between two sets of contradictory allegiances” (Cooke 136); he tries to reconcile the two men, as he is convinced that cooperation between the two accomplished leaders would benefit their country. Ultimately, his attempts are to no avail; after a political confrontation, ending with Mweta’s victory over Shinza, the latter decides to plan a coup d’état aimed at deposing the president. Bray finds himself sympathizing with Shinza, and, in consequence, is torn between the two men and their political affiliations. Meanwhile riots break out across the country, to which Bray falls victim: he is killed in an ambush attack launched by Shinza’s supporters, who know nothing about Bray’s clandestine cooperation with their leader. Andrew Vogel Ettin calls the circumstances of Bray’s death “bitterly ironic” (123), and indeed there is irony in the fact that Bray dies at the hands of revolutionaries that he tried to help. In her study of Gordimer’s novels, Denise Brahimi calls Gordimer a “classical writer” (9) in that she “readily employs traditional narrative techniques” (9) and

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belongs to the tradition of the genre which is based on “the interdependence of characters and the world they inhabit” (9). Brahimi is referring here to the notion of literary realism as defined by Georg Lukács. As many critics have pointed out, Gordimer’s philosophy of composition has been heavily influenced by Lukács’s philosophical and literary studies. This is clear in the case of A Guest of Honour, apparently Gordimer’s first novel after reading Lukács (Roberts 273). The two most important literary studies by this Hungarian philosopher and critic are The Theory of the Novel, and, more importantly, Studies in European Realism. It is in the latter book that Lukács formulated his famous definition of realist literature. As he observes, the criterion of realist literature is that it effects “a peculiar synthesis which organically binds together the general and the particular both in characters and situations” (6). In his study of Balzac’s novels, which he discusses as one of the landmarks of realist literature, he admires the fact that in those works of fiction the central characters are not individuals abstracted from society, but, on the contrary, embody the most important thoughts, dilemmas and social processes of a given period. It is important to note that the lives of such protagonists are inextricably linked with the society of which they form a part. The main protagonist of A Guest of Honour is certainly one example of a Lukácsian protagonist. His sense of responsibility and his political ambitions are features that bind his life to the reality of the postcolonial country described in the novel. In an analysis of Bray’s motivations and his moral choices, it is instructive to consider the first of two epigraphs to A Guest of Honour, taken from Ivan Turgenev, a writer whom Gordimer admires: “An honourable man will end up by not knowing where to live” (Gordimer, A Guest). This succinct and somewhat ironic observation becomes more understandable if it is placed in the context of Gordimer’s observations about the role of the public individual. As she observed in her Nobel lecture, the role of the writer is to “use the word even against his or her own loyalties” (Gordimer, Living 206). This ethical imperative can jeopardize the writer’s political and social affiliations; if he decides to criticize his political allies as well as his adversaries, he puts himself at risk of being rejected by all camps and thus becoming, in a sense, homeless. This observation refers of course not only to important writers, but to all public figures; it is also manifest in Bray’s life after his return to the African country. Indeed, Bray can be called homeless in more than one sense of the word. He is homeless in that he is not at home in the African country, which is torn by the conflict between Mweta and Shinza (undoubtedly, if he had supported Mweta uncritically and became his loyal servant, ignoring the arguments of the opposition, he would be able to lead a comfortable life, with no moral dilemmas). He is

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also “not at home” emotionally in that he is torn between two women: his wife, Olivia, and his lover, Rebecca. It is interesting to look at Bray’s relationships and his political affiliations in the context of Lukács’s definition of realism. In Gordimer’s novel the synthesis of the general and the particular, which Lukács mentions, is effected through parallels which Gordimer draws between Bray’s personal life and his public undertakings. This point has been raised by the author herself, who observed that A Guest of Honour is intended as “a political novel treating the political theme as personally as a love story” (Newman 39). Gordimer’s objective in writing the novel is clearly visible both in its construction, and, what is more important, in the consciousness of the main protagonist. Thinking about the women in his life and the political leaders of the postcolonial country, Bray realizes that he, his wife Olivia and his friend Mweta, are “linked at some level of his mind” (Cooke 136). By the same token, he subconsciously associates his young lover, Rebecca, with his revolutionary friend, Shinza (Cooke 136). Indeed, this parallel is quite precise, as is demonstrated in a conversation between Bray and Rebecca. At one point Rebecca asserts that Bray loves Mweta, and adds: “You are tied to someone, it goes on working itself out, like a marriage” (Gordimer, A Guest 248). What Bray’s attitudes towards Olivia and Mweta have in common is primarily Bray’s attachment to them, an emotional attachment which results from their shared past. Does this awareness act as an impetus for the further development of a love relationship and a political alliance? This does not seem to be the case with Bray. Analysing his life choices, one can notice that there is a stronger imperative than personal attachment; after all, Bray does not tell Mweta about Shinza’s subversive activities, and nor does he end his extramarital relationship with Rebecca. In the political context, this imperative can be defined as integrity, understood as the ability to stand by one’s convictions and by the choices which one considers morally superior in a given situation. In the context of relationships, the principle which Bray values over loyalty towards his spouse is the assertion of his personal ambitions. Bray’s relationship with Rebecca gives him the strength which he needs in his public activities. As Dominic Head observes, “Bray’s affair with Rebecca Edwards represents a personal vitality to parallel the public vitality of Bray’s growing political maturity” (87–8). Nonetheless, it should be added that Bray’s new emotional and political attachments are not strong enough – at least not yet strong enough – for him to terminate his old relationships; both with Olivia and with Mweta. It seems that Bray wants to feel his inner conflict between Olivia and Rebecca, Mweta and Shinza; he seeks to be subjected to both personal and political demands – it is only then that he feels that “he is alive” (Gordimer, A Guest 293).

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As Elaine Fido observes, “the basis of his actions remains a desire to bolster his sense of himself as an active man” (101). Bray is aware of the fact that living in conflict between his relationships and conflicting political affiliations have their price – he is putting at serious risk both his marriage and his, as well as Rebecca’s, life. Admittedly, he tries to secure Rebecca’s future – when the riots break out he tries to illegally allocate her funds in a Swiss bank – but this isolated attempt stands out as an inadequate response to the danger posed by the highly unstable political situation in the country. Although conscious of the risks connected with staying in the African country, he continues to collaborate with Shinza; this fact shows the true extent of his political ambitions, which are as strong as his emotional bonds. Why does Bray show such determination in his actions? This is a question which is likely to trouble the reader, and it is only towards the end of the novel that a possible answer may be given. Before embarking with Rebecca on his last, ill-fated journey to the capital, Bray has moments of lucid insight into the motivations that have driven his actions throughout his stay in the African country. Lying in his bed, Bray considers his decision to go with Rebecca to Switzerland in order to organize the funds needed to help Shinza in his planned coup d’état against Mweta. This fragment is worth quoting at length, as it is crucial in the analysis of his character: His mind was calm. It was not that he had no doubts about what he was doing, going to do; it seemed to him he had come to understand that one could never hope to be free of doubt, of contradictions within, that this was the state in which one lived–the state of life itself–and no action could be free of it. There was no finality, while one lived, and when one died it would always be, in a sense, an interruption. (Gordimer, A Guest 464–5)

It seems that Bray’s determination in his political, as well as personal actions stem from the hope that his important, and to some extent, irreversible decisions can bring about a sense of order in his life, as well as the peace of mind he desires. In this respect Shinza is certainly his role model – the single-mindedness with which the former freedom fighter realizes his political goals is admired by Bray more than once in the novel. What Bray realizes towards the end of his life is that despite his attempts to imitate Shinza in his determination, he is unable to put his mind at rest that his actions are feasible politically as well ethically. As will be shown, this trait of Bray’s character, which may be considered a drawback from the political point of view, as it certainly hinders his actions, is one of his most admirable features, when considered from an ethical perspective. Part of Bray’s “imperfection” – his enduring doubts about his political commitments – results from his contemplative nature. He is a man whose attitude

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towards even his own actions is marked by scepticism, and thus Bray is aware that his meetings with Shinza have brought about a major change in his thinking. The moment in which this transformation is revealed immediately follows the one quoted above: [Bray] was aware […] of going against his own nature: something may be worth suffering for as a matter of individual conviction, but nothing is worth bringing about the suffering of others. If people kill in a cause that isn’t mine, there’s no blood on my shoes; therefore stand aside. But he had put aside instead this ‘own nature.’ It was either a tragic mistake or his salvation. He thought, I’ll never know, although other people will tell me for the rest of my life. (Gordimer, A Guest 465)

It is worth noticing that the second sentence of this extract includes a latent critique of a hypocritical brand of humanism which distances one from those in need; Bray observes that he ignored the suffering of others on the strength of the argument that he was not complicit in the situation which brought about their plight. It would be a mistake to state that Bray rejects his humanist stance only because of its hypocrisy – as argued, the radicalization of his stance is, to a large extent, the result of his meetings with Shinza. What is most important here is how this new, radicalized attitude manifests itself. Bray’s former ethical stance was clearly that of humanism; he rejected the suffering of other people as the necessary cost of any political and social transformation. Towards the end of the novel he moves closer to the radical position in that he has jeopardized his own life and those of others in his hope of seeing major changes in the country. Although he is not willing to admit this in his reflections, he is at this point considering the question which would not have occurred to him before, namely that of whether people’s suffering and death might be a necessary step towards political and social transformation. It is important to note that contrary to Shinza, who has adopted this stance without any ethical reservations, Bray is not at all sure whether this new attitude can be justified: this is evident in the quoted passage, especially the fragment when he reflects that the rejection of the humanist stance, which is so deeply ingrained in him that he calls it “his own nature,” is “either a tragic mistake or his salvation.” The last sentence is perhaps the most striking of the whole fragment, as it seems to be prophetic; Bray is killed the next day, and indeed he does not learn whether the radicalization of his stance was an adequate response to the grim political situation in the country. After a detailed discussion of Bray’s motivations, it is now possible to arrive at the last meaning of the word homeless. It was argued that Bray is homeless in the sense of being torn in his political and personal alliances. His homelessness is also manifested in his ethical stance: Bray is homeless in that he does not embrace

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wholeheartedly any political stance and does not find solace in it; in this respect he is different not only from Shinza, but also from Mweta. Bray does not allow himself to be carried by such emotions as hatred and resentment, as is the case with Shinza; neither does he succumb to Mweta’s vision of a comfortable and affluent life at the cost of the poor population. Defined in this way, his homelessness makes him vulnerable and can be viewed as a sign of his weakness, particularly by those who, like Shinza and Mweta, are determined to realize their political ambitions with little consideration of the ethical aspect of their actions. If A Guest of Honour is indeed to be considered as a turn to radical political activism, it is towards that rare kind of activism which does not accept uncritically its own principles and refuses to be motivated by strong and destructive emotions. It may be argued that such a self-critical stance is a contradiction in terms, and that it is in the nature of efficient activism not to be hindered by speculation, but instead, to embrace action as the only feasible response to a given political situation. If one accepts this premise, then the only possible conclusion is that such self-cancelling activism is weak and ineffective. Nonetheless, it seems cynical to consider this stance as merely an end-oriented policy, and disregard the fact that even the people whose political agenda is based on a drastic change to the social order can be critical of the means by which this change can be effected. A selfcritical person, who investigates and even questions the principles on which he stands and the emotions he experiences, has the unquestionable advantage of being able to respond adequately to a dynamic political and social reality. This sceptical attitude need not be viewed only in terms of political efficiency. As has been argued in this study, it is also extremely valuable from an ethical perspective.

Works Cited Brahimi, Denise. Nadine Gordimer: Weaving Together Fiction, Women and Politics. Trans. By Vanessa Everson and Cara Shapiro. Cape Town: UCT Press, 2012. Print Clingman, Stephen. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. London: Bloomsbury, 1993. Print. Cooke, John. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/ Public Landscapes. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985. Print. Ettin, Andrew Vogel. Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Print. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Print.

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Fido, Elaine. “A Guest of Honour: A Feminine View of Masculinity.” Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer. Ed. Rowland Smith. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990. 97–103. Print. Gordimer, Nadine. Conversations with Nadine Gordimer. Ed. Nancy T. Bazin and Marilyn D. Seymour. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Print. –. Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century. New York: Farrar, 1999. Print. –. A Guest of Honour. 1971. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. Print. –. Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008. New York: Norton, 2010. Print. –. Interview with Nadine Gordimer. By Stephen Sackur. 14 July 2014. The Official BBC Website. 31 October 2014 . Head, Dominic. Nadine Gordimer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print. Lukács, Georg. Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others. Trans. Edith Bone. London: The Merlin Press. 1972. Print. Newman, Judie. Nadine Gordimer. London: Routledge, 1988. Print. Roberts, Ronald Suresh. No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer. Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2005. Print. Temple-Thurston, Barbara. Nadine Gordimer Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. Print. Wade, Michael. Nadine Gordimer. London: Evans Brothers Limited, 1978. Print.

Part V – Emotions and Imagination

Patrycja Austin University of Rzeszów

Emotions Written in the Key of Life: Music and Individuality in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go As selfhood becomes self-reflexive, literature comes to assume a crucial role in exploring what it means to be a person. Rita Felski Death is more than love or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and art or not. This is the subject. This is the subject. This is it. Salman Rushdie

The novel as a genre has since its early days three centuries ago featured individuals searching for truth about their selves and the surrounding world. With the progressive diminishing of the external guarantors of meaning, especially since modernism, characters needed more and more to look for meaning within themselves. After the postmodern play with form and language which, having abandoned universal meaning altogether, was accompanied by the focus on local and particular problems (nationalism, postcolonial condition, gender and racial equality, etc) early twentieth century fiction once again begins to look at the human not through the prism of ideology but with the intention to recover his or her humanity. Never Let Me Go is a novel which rehearses the themes of knowledge and understanding of one’s place and significance, yet in a rather unexpected way. The first person narrator, Kathy, writes her account of the years spent with her two friends, Tommy and Ruth, in a boarding school called Hailsham and of their short lives after graduation. The story is set in a dystopian England of the 1990s in which cloning humans for organ donation is a common practice. The school is an experiment carried out in order to understand whether children raised for organs possess a human soul – this is why focus is laid on artistic education and subjects like drawing, painting, arts and crafts or music appreciation constitute the core of the curriculum. It is believed that it is in art that we can get the closest to expressing our inner selves, our idiosyncratic experience and emotions. The children’s understanding of their role and of the world in which they grow up is, however, withdrawn on many levels and, in addition, Kathy’s memories are elusive, often in discordance with the way other characters remember the same events.

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This limited understanding and gaps in memory are reflected in the fragmentarity of the narrative and the heightened sensitivity to the failure of language in conveying objective reality. The final picture is thus highly idiosyncratic, limited to characters’ singular experiences and their emotional reactions to it. The novel takes its title after a song that becomes the central leitmotif in the story. The school organizes periodic sales during which students may choose from a range of second hand goods. Kathy reminisces: “I suppose we’d all of us in the past found something at a Sale, something that had become special: a jacket, a watch, a pair of craft scissors never used but kept proudly next to a bed” (Ishiguro 41). For Kathy such emotionally invested object becomes a tape, Songs After Dark, by a fictional singer from the fifties, Judy Bridgewater, and particularly one song, the eponymous ‘Never Let Me Go’. She describes it as: “slow and late night and American, and there’s a bit that keeps coming round when Judy sings: ‘Never let me go … Oh baby, baby … Never let me go’” (69). Kathy, who was 11 at that time, and not accustomed to listening to music, became enthralled by the song, yet, as she later admits, she interpreted the lyrics in her own, singular way: she imagines a woman who is unable to have children, yet, by some miracle, she gives birth to a baby and is holding this baby tight so that they never separate. Even at this age, though, Kathy realizes that her interpretation is incompatible with the rest of the lyrics, still, as she says, “that wasn’t an issue with me. The song was about what I said” (70). The above interpretation draws attention to the question of meaning. Kathy understands the song’s lyrics literally; being a child she cannot grasp the metaphorical concept of the word “baby” referring to a lover. While listening to the song, she imagines a pillow to be an imaginary infant that she is holding while swaying to the rhythm of music. Such (mis)interpretation of language is not uncommon in Hailsham. During a geography lesson children learn about different parts of England; the teacher shows calendar pictures depicting landmark cities and counties, she fails though to provide a picture of Norfolk and calls it, instead, “something of a lost corner” (65). Over time, the county becomes associated with a place in the school called “a lost corner” where lost property was kept; Norfolk becomes in their imagination England’s Lost Corner, where trucks bring things lost and found from all over the country. The children create their own understanding in place of the gaps created by their limited experience of the world outside of the school grounds. Kathy admits: “to us, at that stage in our lives, any place beyond Hailsham was like a fantasy land. We only had the haziest notions of the world outside and about what was and wasn’t possible there” (66). The literal

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understanding of Norfolk brings them a sense of comfort, the knowledge that one day, when they grow up, they can find their lost objects. The notion of their own place in the world is likewise limited. The guardians at Hailsham take advantage of their naivety and tell them just enough so that they can form a vague image of the reason they were raised without properly understanding its implications. The task is made easier by the fact that the pupils prefer to remain ignorant and thus retain a sense of childhood safety. Kathy muses: We certainly knew – though not in any deep sense – that we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside; we perhaps even knew that a long way down the line there were donations waiting for us. But we didn’t really know what that meant. If we were keen to avoid certain topics, it was probably more because it embarrassed us. We hated the way our guardians, usually so on top of everything, became so awkward whenever we came near this territory. It unnerved us to see them change like that. I think that’s why we never asked that one further question… (69)

Nevertheless, the tape becomes for Kathy a secret, one of the things onto which she can project her fears and longings, the feelings which do not comply with the image of perfect Hailsham education. The sense of secrecy is reinforced by the image on the cover. It features the singer – a woman smoking a cigarette, an unwelcome practice for future organ donors. This fact makes the tape for Kathy an even more coveted possession. It becomes the first, even if small, act of rebellion against the system. However, in a short time the cassette disappears and the precise copy is never again recovered, and in this way Kathy’s rebellion ends. What enables Kathy to arrive at her own meaning of the song is not just the words, but music against which the words are set. Music is often believed to be the language of emotions. Indeed, beside the self-referential (depending on the internal context of the composition) and extrinsic (referring to something beyond the composition – literature, cultural connotations, etc.) emotive and conative meanings have also been thoroughly theorized1. The listeners can process musical patterns in line with the five basic emotions: fear, sadness, anger, joy, and tenderness, in their different forms, combinations, and to varying degrees. The song Kathy listens to makes her feel hope, excitement and, at the same time, fear. The girl is too young to fully comprehend the reality that being a clone excludes the mother-daughter relation, yet the song allows her to experience and form a mental picture of the emotions connected with this void in her life.

1 see, for example: Wolf, Werner 1999, Meyer, Leonard 1956, 1976, Davies, Stephen 1994, Cook, Nicholas and Dibben, Nichola 2001, Ekman, Paul, 2003.

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The song’s literal meaning varies considerably from Kathy’s understanding yet there are more cases of misinterpretation connected with it. One of the persons behind the Hailsham project, Madame, is moved to the point of sobbing when watching the girl dancing to the song. However, to her the scene had a different meaning. During her meeting with Kathy and Tommy at the end of the novel, just before Tommy’s final donation, when reminiscing this event, Madame admits: I was weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she new in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn’t really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I’ve never forgotten. (267)

She pictures the pillow held by Kathy to be the old, passing world where compassion and humanity prevailed, one from before cloning became a common practice in prolonging one’s life span. Her understanding is broader, she knows the reality which is withheld from Hailsham students. Tommy later explains Madame’s sadness at this moment in yet another way - as a reaction to the fact that Kathy, being a clone, cannot have children. Thereby, each person’s understanding of the same event varies and, in addition, neither takes into account the intended meaning of the song. This implies that in music meaning is not given, the listener takes an active role in ascribing one to a particular piece of music –one’s interpretation is enforced by the specific moment in life in which he or she listens to it, the circumstances, cognitive abilities, their individual personality. Meyers explains that in our understanding of music “emotional response, which changes over time, is a direct result of (and consequently congruent with) cognitive activity. It involves intricate patternings of anticipation and tension, delay and denial, fulfillment and release” (1976, 122, original emphasis). On hearing the song at the age of 11, Kathy could not comprehend the meaning intended by the performer and yet the music released in her emotions connected with the side of her life she could not verbally define. The tape is recovered many years later when the three friends travel to Norfolk, where Kathy finds another copy of Songs After Dark in a second-hand shop. It is not the same copy as the one she had lost and, likewise, those emotions cannot be recovered. Being an adult she understands both meanings of the word “baby” and the impossibility of retrieving the earlier vision. The childlike naivety even embarrasses her. This is why the initial emotions she experiences at this moment border on disappointment. She may be reminded, at that moment, of the hopes and wishes that were still possible in the “fantasy-like” world of childhood. It might

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also bring back the sense of secrecy that surrounded the tape – an attempt to go against the system that by now seems no longer possible. Soon, however, new emotions are born: “Then suddenly I felt a huge pleasure – and something else, something more complicated that threatened to make me burst into tears. But I got a hold of the emotion, and just gave Tommy’s arm a tug” (170). Since that day Kathy’s memory of the tape doubled; it reminds her both of her childhood and of that day in Norfolk. Interestingly, the cassette is recovered in Norfolk, where the three friends go, along with another couple in order to find Ruth’s “possible,” that is the model from which her material was taken, as a woman with very similar physical features was apparently spotted there. It is during this trip, to England’s Lost Corner, that Kathy and Tommy find the long lost tape, thus collapsing the distinction between the literal and metaphorical meanings. However, just like the expression “the lost corner” carries two meanings in Norfolk, the word “baby” in the song recovers the meaning that was intended by the singer, that of somebody loved. Since their Hailsham days, Tommy has been in a relationship with Ruth. It is easily noticeable, however, that there is no deep emotional bond between them. Small gestures and nuances suggest instead that there have long been deeper feelings between Tommy and Kathy. While in Norfolk, the group of friends split and Tommy separates from Ruth in order to accompany Kathy. He admits that it had been his wish since their Hailsham days to find the cassette that Kathy had lost and after they eventually find it, he offers to buy it for her, which proves that his affection for her has been long-lasting. Later on that day, the two friends discuss the possibility of a deferral from donations for couples who can prove to be genuinely in love. Even though they do not refer to themselves directly at that moment, years later they will apply for it with the hope that their love will be perceived as genuine enough. The intended meaning of the song is thus recovered in Norfolk when they discover their true feelings for one another that had seemed lost. This can account for the rush of pleasure after finding the tape. After losing the initial understanding of the tape Kathy gains a new one, suitable for her older, more mature self. Once Kathy and Tommy’s union becomes possible they consider applying for the deferral. In their understanding what can prove their feelings is their artwork. At Hailsham, as mentioned earlier, the strongest emphasis in the- children’s education was placed on art. The teachers believed that “things like pictures, poetry, […] they revealed what you were like inside. […] They revealed your soul” (173). This way of thinking is compatible with many theories of art, including the expressionist theory which holds that the essence of art is to express emotion, that the artist feels a need, a compulsion to translate the joys and sorrows he or she experiences

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into works of art. It is, therefore, impossible to encourage art by teaching manual skills. In John Ruskin’s words, “the problem is not how to give gentlemen and artist’s education; it is how to give artists a gentleman’s education” (qtd in Donagan 33). In other words, you are either born with an artistic soul or not. In terms of the Hailsham experiment, you are either born with a soul or not. There was pressure from the teachers and among students themselves to produce the highest quality works of art. Tommy was not creative and never fully fit in with the rest of the students. His tender, caring nature drove him, nevertheless, to search for Kathy’s tape and allowed for its eventual recovery. What is more, the tape in nearly half a century old and is found not in Woolworth, a modern supermarket that carries the latest hits, but in a more modest shop with old used objects. It belongs, thus, to the world that Madame imagines Kathy to be holding while listening to the song. It is the contemporary world that has lost the ability to feel compassion and this is why the Hailsham project fails and the school needs to be closed. People do not want to be reminded of the origin of the organs. By the end of the novel the nature of humans and non-humans is thus put into question. The roles seem to be reversed and, paradoxically, it is the latter who are still capable to experience deep emotions. This explains what was and was not found in Norfolk: Tommy and Kathy found genuine feeling, while, Ruth did not find her model from whose genetic material she was created, which was the reason for the excursion. The deep sense of first excitement and then disappointment during their excursion delineates the importance that is given to the idea of finding one’s possible; it “both intrigued and disturbed us,” says Kathy (136). “Nevertheless, we all of us, to varying degrees, believed that when you saw the person you were copied from, you’d get some insight into who you were deep down, and maybe too, you’d see something of what your life held in store” (138, original emphasis). Such a wish is nothing new; humans have frequently longed to find a projection of themselves, intimate and at the same time distant, in shadows, mirror images, or the soul. However, as Jean Baudrillard argues, the power and wealth of this wish for such a mirror image of the self, or “the double,” rests, precisely, in its immateriality, in its phantasmatic nature. While the imaginary double “haunts the subject as a subtle and always averted death,” when it materializes, “it signifies imminent death.” (Baudrillard, “Clone Story” 135) In creating clones the wish for the double would be realized and that, Baudrillard says, “would push them metaphysically to deny all alterity, all alteration of the same in order to aim solely for the perpetuation of an identity, a transparency of the genetic inscription no longer even subject to the vicissitudes of procreation” (Baudrillard, “Clone Story” 135).

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Interestingly, Kathy searches for her model in pornographic magazines which she finds abandoned in the Cottages where the friends move after their Hailsham days. She flips through the pages quickly, examining the faces, her expression “sad” and “a bit scared” (134). Having experienced sexual desire, and not knowing it is a natural part of the human experience, she suspects she might find her possible among these pages. In “Clone Story” Baudrillard describes the paradox that while cloning produces sexed beings, since they are similar to their model, sex itself becomes useless, as it does not serve to create new life. This reference to procreation brings one back to the meaning experienced by Kathy while listening to the song in childhood, which centered around the mother-child relationship. Baudrillard writes that not only is parenthood eliminated, but along with it all contingency: Cloning radically abolishes the Mother, but also the Father, the intertwining of their gene, the imbrications of their differences, but above all the joint act that is procreation. […] The Father and Mother have disappeared not in the service of an aleatory liberty of the subject, but in the service of a matrix called code. […] Cloning enshrines the reiteration of the same: I+I+I+I, etc. Neither child, nor twin, nor narcissistic reflection, the clone is the materialization of the double by genetic means, that is to say the abolition of all alterity and of any imaginary. (“Clone Story” 136)

In the song, however, this negation of alterity is challenged. The diverse and evolving interpretations and feeling associated with the reception of the song draw attention to the fact that the characters are not static beings, that they evolve, shaped by their experience and circumstances, and so they cannot constitute a mere copy of the Same, especially that whoever their actual model is, would doubtless arrive at their own particular meanings at different points in their lives. The clone-like nature of Kathy and her friends is thus challenged. In Ishiguro’s world, Ruth’s success at finding a possible would mean that she is a mere copy, not a being in its own right. However, through the creation of the group of people who grow up in a separated, unnatural environment and whose knowledge of the world is limited to what their guardians have chosen to convey, Ishiguro talks about the condition of the contemporary society whose major source of information, likewise limited, comes from the TV, mass media and the advertising industry. Ruth herself acts in a way which is a copy of the way older inhabitants in the Cottages behave which in itself is borrowed from TV series. Kathy notices: “So many of their mannerisms were copied from the television” (118). The idea for Ruth’s possible comes from a newspaper advert showcasing a “beautifully modern open-plan office. […] The place looked sparkling and so did the people. […] ‘Now, that would be a proper place to work,’” Ruth exclaimed on seeing it (142). The fictional creation with time becomes, in her mind, a place

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furnished with details, brought in her imagination close to reality – a near future workplace, the difference between fiction and reality collapsing in her long and elaborate descriptions. This resembles Baudrillard’s total reduction of the separation between the real world and the imaginary in the third order of simulacra. He explains: The imaginary was a pretext of the real in a world dominated by the reality principle. Today, it is the real which has become the pretext of the model in a world governed by the principle of simulation. And, paradoxically, it is the real which has become our true utopia – but a utopia that is no longer a possibility, a utopia we can do no more than dream about, like a lost object. (“Simulacra” 310)

In his view, the “historical” worlds of the past can only be artificially resurrected, yet even though reconstructed with high precision, they are empty of meaning and of the original essence. This resembles Madame’s nostalgia for the long lost and gone world she imagines Kathy to be holding on to. Yet, in the clones - the ultimate simulation of reality - the world filled with genuine and meaningful emotions seems to be truly reborn. The fiction and simulation Kathy notices in their behavior since their early childhood Ruth will recognize only before her death. It is in those final moments of her life that Ruth begins to act less egotistically and learns how to put others’ good before her own. Her selfless decisions at that stage of her life make her a fully-fledged human being. In the world devoid of external meaning the characters thus discover one inside. Finally, their individuality is underlined in the impossibility of placing them in a single uniform category or definition. The three characters vary in personalities, creativity, approach to reality. Kathy’s search for understanding must be, thus, necessarily elusive and fragmented. Her memories are foggy, often in conflict with the memories of her friends. The novel is metatextual in the way it provides two images which can explain how the story should be read. One of them is connected to music. When it gets warm, Hailsham students develop a habit of listening to tapes on a walkman together: “The craze was for several people to sit on the grass around a single Walkman, passing the headset around. […] You listened maybe for twenty seconds, took off the headset, passed it on. After a while, provided you kept the same tape going over and over, it was surprising how close it was to having heard all of it by yourself ” (100-1). The other one refers to Tommy’s drawings that he did in the years after Hailsham. He attempts to present imaginary animals, yet from up close they are a maze of details, only by stepping back can the presented object be recognized. Likewise, Kathy’s narrative is an amassment of small moments, of events that made up their days, presented in a random, non-chronological way. Only by stepping out of the narrative can

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a more complete image of their lives and experiences be formed. Yet, since there are still many gaps, each reader’s understanding of the characters will vary just as the three characters’ understanding of the eponymous song did. The clones will escape any final definition and will thus be able to retain their individuality.

Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean, and Evans, Arthur. “Simulacra and Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3. November 1991. Web. 29 July 2015. Baudrillard, Jean. “Clone Story.” Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. 135–37. Print. Cook, Nicholas, and Nichola Dibben. “Musicological Approaches to Emotion.” Music and Emotion; Theory and Research. Eds. Patrick Juslin and John Sloboda. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Davies, Stephen. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Donagan, Alan. The Later Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Print. Ekman, Paul. Emotions Revealed. London: Phoenix, 2003. Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print. Meyer, Leonard. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956. Print. Meyer, Leonard. “Grammatical Simplicity and Relational Richness: The Trio of Mozart’s G-Minor Symphony.” The Spheres of Music: A Gathering of Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Print. Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1999. Print.

Teresa Bruś University of Wrocław

Moments of Emotions: Virginia Woolf Looks at Portraits How … did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Virginia Woolf

Centred on the presence of the individual, painterly, sculptural, and photographic portraits depend on the notions of the subject and representation. Portraits are still surfaces which declare, inscribe and enable identity in layered interactions. Focused on registers of meaning which are intertwined with emotions in portraiture, the paper traces connections between the experience of looking at pictures and its emotion-coloured transmission in selected essays and shorter fiction by Virginia Woolf. Experienced by a common viewer who comes into contact with pictures in galleries and private collections, emotions are relevant, even “benign,” because they advance understanding which in turn entails “an increase of life; a power to say what one could not say” (Woolf, “A Simple Melody” 204). Both in her fiction and her nonfiction, Woolf renders usually intense emotions in the context of art. The connection with arts, which gave Woolf “vocabulary and aesthetics” (Humm 13), is responsible for potent interdisciplinary crossfertilisation. Art has what human nature does not. Art also expresses what words cannot. In her enthusiasm for paintings, Virginia Woolf makes ample use of portraits, a broad category in which she includes pictures, outlines, conversations and sketches, to lay claim to a set of modulating emotions. Written and visual portraits appear in Woolf ’s fictional characters’ environments; we find them in public spaces depicted in her novels, in the thoughts and references of the narrators desiring to create solid patterns and objects. As Diane Gillespie argues, portraits in Orlando, Flush, The Years and Waves recall intimacy, identity, tradition, authority and culture: “in these capacities, sometimes they console, sometimes they oppress, and sometimes they reproach their viewers” (207). In novels, portraits feature mostly as works of art “whose subjects have lost their identities as beings” (207). In essays, portraits also play a role as representations which assert the visibility of individual identities and their personal and communal effect. Woolf believes that: “From a portrait, too, we get almost always something worth having—somebody’s room,

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nose, or hands, some little effect of character or circumstance, some knick-knack to put in our pockets and take away” (“Pictures” 143). Because the encounter with a portrait is structured between the portrait image, the human original and the viewer’s gaze, it is always relational. Richard Brilliant finds that it is “the intensity of the viewer’s engagement with the portrait image at a much deeper level of personal involvement and response” which makes portraits so alluring (19). What attracts Woolf to portraits is their strength not only as art objects, but as beings. The story “A Simple Melody” (1925), for example, explores a poetics of relation. In the story, an encounter with a picture produces in Mr. Carlike a stream of reactions. Bored and confused at a party, he discovers that each time he looks at a beautiful painting of a group of people on a heath, he receives something unexpected. His “scattered and jumbled emotions” are brought into “proportion” (201); he is transported into a “happy and far more severe and exalted world, which, was also so much simpler than his” (201); he is brought into contact with the perceptive mind of Stuart Elton, the painter. Considered in a moment of silence, the picture like a simple melody, available to anyone, works by touching a “deep reservoir” of ideas “that were half feelings” in us; “they had that kind of emotional quality” which was not analysable (206). The narrator says that the picture impacted the reservoir, it “rippled it, liquefied it, made it start and turn and quiver in the depths of one’s being” (205). In the story, Carlike is portrayed as a man who, by exposing himself to the wave coming out of the interaction with a picture, experienced for a moment a rare sense of order and enlargement in life. Woolf the essayist credits the eye with the power to illuminate both visible and invisible galleries, those tempting “border-lands” of London’s great art exhibitions, also those mental spaces where, for example, real friends are hanging like “little bright portraits … on the wall of the mind” (D III 46). There are those galleries where “the hard tangible material shapes of bodiless thoughts [are] hanging like bats in the primeval darkness” (“Pictures” 141). Woolf is certain that “it is impossible that one should not see the pictures,” that “we cannot possibly break out of the frame of the picture by speaking natural words” (“Three Pictures” 228). She makes clear distinctions, though. Writers engage with a variety of pictures, but they are not art critics. Like other common viewers, they do not learn anything from paintings: [If] we accost them in picture galleries, disarm their suspicions and get them to tell us honestly what it is that pleases them in pictures, they will confess that it is not the art of painting in the least….They are there after something that may be helpful to themselves (“Pictures” 142).

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Thus first asserting her non-authoritative observational framework, Woolf proceeds to emphasize that it does take some effort to actually get to galleries. Once there, she nestles into those “smiling avenues, pleasant places filled with birds, sanctuaries where silence reigns supreme” (“Pictures” 142). For Woolf ’s fictional character Mary, from Night and Day, visits to galleries produce impressions, emotions, exaltation, making her life “solemn and beautiful.” Mary walks to these secure places of “solitude and chill and silence” for reasons which are not purely aesthetic (n. p.). Writing autobiographically, Woolf says she discovers that the pictures are “very pleasant things” which “are not “silent inscrutable patterns”, “treasured houses with locked doors”. Re-experienced all her life, pictures are the things “we live with and laugh at, love and discuss (“Roger Fry” 83). Pictures “stir words” and indicate “forms where we had never seen anything but thin air” (“Pictures” 142). Using the “we” form in order to break the barriers, she says in galleries we learn to understand life, sharpen perception, confront ramifying emotions (“Pictures” 142). Woolf ’s enjoyment of pictures developed into a rare critical animus. Throughout her life she tried to put her finger on the nature and the changing character of pictures, especially portraits. Attentive to the reordering of the subject in the beginning of the twentieth century, Woolf entered into a dialogue about a significant shift in the mode of communicating the human presence which coincided with the new era, marked by the rise in popularity of the photographic portrait. Looking at pictures, Woolf not only responds to the pleasure of viewing them. She documents the changing aesthetics of portraiture, changing ways of viewing portraiture, and her changing tactics for analysing emotions connected with portraiture. Concerned about the visual excess of modern culture and the dependence of the subject on images, in her essays Woolf refers to diverse exhibiting places which solicit our attention, dictate practices of visual consumption, and even influence self-discoveries. Portraiture as a cultural practice and, traditionally, as effigy involves interaction with a revelatory mediated presence of the seeing subject. For Woolf, portraiture engages an illuminating cycle of gazes which always requires a place. Scrutiny of portraits happens in a particular emotional atmosphere in which the self can be articulated visually and in which she can attempt to articulate herself. Woolf does not believe, however, that the extraordinary visibility and scientific accuracy of representation of the modern subject contributes to the subject’s self-awareness. She responds with concern to the passing of the painterly portraits and the ensuing clash between the old and new cultures of portraying, a change which she sees in terms of loss of distance. Looking at picture papers, for example, she notes that “the camera eye has an immense power in its eye.”

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This eye keeps changing direction, offering ever new visual principles. Woolf is sure that in the early twentieth century the camera picture was used to cause new emotions but also to indulge dangerous fantasies (especially in the photography of the poor), providing an escape “from the drudgery, about which there is no sort of glamour, of being ourselves” (“Royalty” 186). Unlike the “Paradise” which portraits of the English dukes and kings allowed us to “inhabit” (“Royalty” 184), photographic portraits frustrate the desire for a union. “Even a rudimentary survey gives some strong feelings as to the peculiarity of British portraiture and through it the British as they wished to be seen.” Thus Sir Roy Strong introduces a study of portraiture which he identifies as the British obsession (73). Strong’s argument rests on the specific historical evidence in Britain enabling continuity of belief in the individual and his efforts, a feature not found in other European countries. In Britain, says Strong, the unique interest in portraiture included not just interest in having one’s portrait painted but also in collecting portraits, assembling collections and creating collections, like the first National Portrait Gallery in the world (10). Images of potent agents responsible for the formation of a distinctive national identity became widely available and recognized. Their celebration developed into “our English romance” (Woolf, “The Royal” 206). We are exposed to mechanisms of this romance when we look at the ancestral portrait gallery in Woolf ’s Orlando, the private country house gallery of Knole rendered as a visible history, enabling the production of a strong national culture. In a short essay “Waxworks at the Abbey,” published in The New Republic in 1928, Woolf illuminates the function and appeal of a particular type of English sculptural portraiture. The visitor, confronted with the “garish bright assembly” of effigies, gazed at by flocks of gentlemen, stops at a wax statue of Queen Elizabeth. It “dominates the room as she once dominated England” (205). Her dress and regal attributes accentuate the fine face and hands rendered in a way to enhance the monarch’s stature: “She is immensely intellectual, suffering, and tyrannical. She will not allow one to look elsewhere” (205). For the visitor, the statue of Queen Elizabeth, “moulded from the dead,” is the controlling and coherent presence (206). The subject of the gaze is monumental and is here understood as the substitute for the model. Facing such an honorific sculptural portrait, viewers, she says, “fall silent” (206). Silence is a typical reaction to what John Berger identifies as the almost metaphysical quality of traditional portraits. It is an invention which contributes to the effect of “incomparableness” traditional portraits possessed. Berger says that “the painted (or sculptural) portrait was the only means of recording or presenting the likeness of a person” and that likeness did not have anything

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to do with the psychological truth (42). Other than a few exceptions, traditional portraits inspired attention and awe because of the sense of unity they possessed, a unity which was not an image of the sitter’s integrity but a result of conscious crafty decisions by the makers (42), a result of the imposed intentionality contributing to the emphasis on authority. Without trying to re-inscribe the Queen, Woolf discovers a thrill in visually identifying the Queen. Looking activates an emotion which is very old and which is disappearing. She explains in a different essay, “old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections” (“Royalty” 183). To enjoy a portrait of the Queen is to enjoy a compound of old and new emotions “related to love of pageantry, which has some connection with love of beauty—a respectable connection; and again with the imagination—which is still respectable for it creates poems and novels” (“Royalty” 183). We can also identify the viewer’s emotion of joy that looking at the statue of the Queen triggers as one of those emphasized or hypercognized emotions in the English culture. The overwhelming visual evidence of the seeming coherence and finality of the royal subject engages the overwhelming emotion of thrill. It colours the observer’s fantasy of a subjectivity which, discovering continuity in ancestry, discovers personal identity. She comments in “Royalty” that it is “a consolation to know that such beings exist. If they live, then we too live in them, vicariously” (184). Perhaps in some rare moment we too can feel that, like them, we are “beautiful and immune from human weakness” (186). Thus the power of the portrait is great because it offers the space for the observer to construct what Roger Hargreaves calls a “new visual genealogy” (46). “The Royal Academy”, published by Woolf in 1919 in The Athenaeum about the 1919 Summer Exhibition, is a record of contradictory emotions aroused upon a visit to a gallery housing “one thousand six hundred and seventy-four works of art” (211). The event was an important and emotional occasion following the end of the war. It “was attended by prominent members of the royal family and aristocracy, the armed forces, the government, and the artistic elite (Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling among them)” (Harvey 148). Woolf went to see the exhibition after it had already been reviewed and widely publicized. In the essay, the Academy as an established institution shocks “our” gazes. Having been “jabbed and stabbed, slashed and sliced” (Woolf, “The Royal” 211), the observer flees the gallery and joins the world of ordinary life. In this essay, the nature of the relationship between the viewer and the pictive and scriptive space of a picture gallery is lodged in diffusion. The viewer does not experience there what Roger Fry called, after Clive Bell, a unified “aesthetic emotion.” In the essay, a gallery visitor begins by noting the sharp change of “visions” which comes upon us as we enter from the busy, though

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indiscriminate and relatively sober, Piccadilly into an enclosed space of form and unity. Upon entering, we receive the world with a changed perception: “everything appears symbolic,” the frame of mind is “both heated and romantic” (207). Leaving the space of crowded “vehicular traffic,” we move up the “ceremonious steps” to a formal English precinct housing excellence and promising thrill. Having crossed the psychological and emotional threshold, we feel “elevated,” even though we are among groups of gazers, even “the shabbiest and most suburban,” those who may not be “quite up to the level of the pictures” (207). We are “confronted with” accomplished portraits and led to discern connections between them. Many of these pictures are Academy pictures representing “people of sufficient distinction” (207). Benjamin Harvey explains that “by ‘Academy picture’ Woolf means something specific—a descendent of the Victorian ‘problem picture’” (148). Its specificity becomes erased in a plausible ensemble of visual crossovers created by the visitor. She focuses on confident postures and costumes of splendid authority and privilege. Earlier portraitists tried to capture the greatness of men to prove their incomparable status. Berger explains that “the function of the painting portrait was to underwrite and idealize a chosen social role of the sitter” (43). In Woolf ’s essay, the viewer, recognizing the faces of Dukes, notables and superior gentlemen, realizes, of course, that such galleries are indeed implicated in power structures. They exist for the enforcement and protection of the “chastity” of characters like “English maidens and gallant officers” (208). Yet, for those who come to see the exhibition, the catalogues assert another function, that of the “benign influence of the canvas” (210). The visitor subjects herself to its working, securing at the same time the position of a responsive and indulgent spectator. She has attended to the gallery carefully: “I had gone through the rooms twice” (208); she has looked about, gazed at some canvases even for ten minutes; she has been reading their meanings. We are following an anxious observer, both a spectator and a reader, one who is attracted to “vociferations” created in the gallery while unsure how to reconcile the disparate emotions experienced there. Detailed descriptions of three distinctive Academy pictures follow. Picture no. 306 is by John Reid. “The Wonders of the Deep” is a realistic depiction of a sea scene with a woman and a little boy, presented in terms of “superb rosiness, fatness, and blueness of every object depicted” (208). The observer notes a revealing detail, “something in the woman’s eye…. A veil of white dimmed the straightforward lustre” (208). This tear, a mark of painterly convention, as well as another mark, a sartorial feature which distinguishes the boy accompanying the woman from a busy fisherman, are sufficient to suggest to the visitor some other truth behind the canvas, a possibility of a sad story which “reels itself out like a line with

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a salmon on the end of it” (208). No. 248 by Albert Priest is called “Cocaine” and presents a drugged man on a woman’s lap at dawn. Again, she notices the sitter’s “staring disillusionment in the eyes”. They are provoking questions to which the painter’s suggestions can provide only hypothetical answers. The viewer focuses on the direction of the woman’s eyes to open space for multiple identifications. She suggests that other onlookers engage with the picture, trying to “cap that story with a better” (209). The act of viewing produces an excess of autobiographical response: she says memories, visions, illusions “of all kinds poured down upon us” (210). She detects that viewing activates “the strange power to make the beholder more heroic and more romantic” (210). This painting clearly infuses in the viewers a positively-charged emotional atmosphere. The third painting produces, on the contrary, a violent emotion. “Gassed” by John Singer Sargent “pricked” the visitor with an arrestingly painful detail. It is about a blind, wounded soldier lifting one of his legs too high above the ground in order to mount a step. Harvey notes that “Her selection of this work as the ‘last straw’ can hardly be accidental. No painting received more press attention that year, and none so starkly divided viewers and reviewers” (148). Despite being familiar with it, the viewer finds it too distressing to contemplate. She escapes the space of the gallery. What is the identity of the pictures displayed on the gallery walls? They are diverse and mixed, combining different codes and conventions exemplifying an older and younger culture (no. 248 is a painting with photographs). The images in the gallery “glowing with colour, glistening with oil, framed in gilt… ogle and elevate, inspire and command” (210). They invite interaction. They “radiate,” “pierce” and “arrest.” The experience of looking destabilizes the onlooker: “from first to last each canvas had rubbed in some emotion, and what the paint failed to say the catalogue had enforced in words” (211). While the words help anchor meanings and fix the observer’s position, images are captured as forever metamorphosing and threatening. In the end they are rendered as “gaudy and brainless” birds, turning the place into a world of irresponsible incoherence. Words are urgently needed to impose some order. The viewer in the essay acknowledges the lack of correspondence between what she makes of the emotions of ordinary life, emotions aroused by her response to the pictures and emotions written down. The notorious gap served as one of the major problems in the thinking on aesthetics proposed by Woolf ’s friend Roger Fry, mentioned at the end of the essay. Woolf summons Fry to offer some “proper” evaluation of the viewer’s contradictory emotions and to present some necessary intellectual correction for the emotions, to resolve the crevasse applying to “unityemotion” ultimately obtainable in contemplation of works of art. Yet unlike Fry,

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Woolf emphasizes the need to keep re-connecting with a strong emotion which she believes “must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it” (“A Sketch” 8). Visits to galleries renew vital relations. Woolf anticipates photography will inaugurate new emotional displays and interactions. Being shown in a newspaper “almost a life size” portrait of a caterpillar found in a back garden next to a photograph of a Princess feeding a panda, produces in a viewer a thrill which Woolf says is very much like “the Royalty thrill” (“Royalty” 186). The portrait of a caterpillar is aesthetically pleasing— “symmetrical in shape and brilliantly barred”; morally reassuring—“the desire of the moth for the star was gratified;” cognitively stimulating—“how little … we know of the lives of caterpillars” (186). Yet, the individuation not of a noble or heroic character like the Queen or the blind soldier but of a small insect captured with a scientific precision for all to see in their households exposes the presence of an appropriative gaze. A non-human subject brought to us for our inspection is not a participant in the cycle of gazes. Its close-up portrait declares a certain value judgment about human relations and emotions.

Works Cited Berger, John. The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969. Print. Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Print. Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. Gillespie, Diane F. The Sisters’ Art: The Arts and Paintings of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. New York: Syracuse UP, 1988. Print. Hargreaves, Roger. “Putting Faces to the Names: Social and Celebrity Portrait Photography.” The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in the Nineteenth Century Photography. Ed. Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves. Hants: Lund Humphries, 2001. Print. Harvey, Benjamin. “Virginia Woolf, Art Galleries and Museums” in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Print. Humm, Maggie. “Virginia Woolf and the Arts.” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Print. Strong, Roy. The British Portrait: 1660–1960. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1991. Print.

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Woodall, Joanna. Portraiture: Facing the Subject. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Print. Woolf, Virginia. “A Simple Melody.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. San Diego: A Harvest Book, 1989. Print. –. “A Sketch of the Past.” The Virginia Woolf Reader. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Print. –. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. Ed. Anne Oliver Bell and Andrew McNeillie, London: Hogarth Press, 1988. Print. – . Night and Day. Booklassic. Ebook, 2015. Web. 1 April 2015. – . “Pictures.” The Moment and Other and Other Essays. London: The Hogarth Press, 1947. Print. – . “Roger Fry.” The Moment and Other Essays. London: The Hogarth Press, 1947. Print. – . “Royalty.” The Moment and Other Essays. London: The Hogarth Press, 1947. Print. –. “The Royal Academy.” Collected Essays. Vol. 4. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. Print. –. “Three Pictures.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1985. Print. –. “Waxworks at the Abbey.” Collected Essays. Vol. 4. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. Print.

Elżbieta Litwin Wrocław University of Technology

The Triadic Nature of Emotion and Subtext: A Close Semiotic Reading of the “You Shall Not Pass” Scene in Peter Jackson’s Film Adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring The purpose of this paper is to explore the interdependence of representations of emotions in verbal and non-verbal communication in film approached as a cultural text – in order to define and categorize the nature of the processes revealing emotion and subtext. I will base my exploration on a close reading of the “You Shall Not Pass” scene of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s acclaimed novel The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New Line Cinema, 2001) for pragmatic reasons. Firstly, for the volume and acuteness of expression, both in the performance and the mise–en–scène areas. Secondly, for the balance between the verbal and non-verbal means of communication. Last but not least, it seems that the scene has had its independent semiotic, if not iconic, life within the cultural consciousness of the western civilization. It has echoed metaphorically, and sometimes sarcastically, in the university hallways, and not merely as a resounding bell of pre-exam anxiety. There appears to be an immanent cognitive world within the emotional structure of the scene that is seductive, trance-like and empowering. It creates the qualities of a personal relationship – in the mode of a mesmerised, close-embrace dance. I will approach my analysis from the empirical perspective that I have developed over the years of my academic experience as a semiotician of the film language as well as a practising director. The assumed semiotic platform will be, on the one hand, the “Method” acting technique (Stanislavski, 1936 and Strasberg, 1988), specifically its aspects of psycholinguistic relations and interdependence between words and bodily expressions, and, on the other hand, the grammar of the film language (Arijon, 1976 and Katz, 1991 and 2004), in particular the cognitive function of imagery and juxtaposition. As the semiotic tools for my analysis I will use the triad of the spoken word (dialog), the actions – according to the Stanislavski’s concept of “inner activity” (Stanislavski: 34–43) i.e. the cognitive

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processes within the actor as sender – encoder, and the mise–en–scène (the visual input, or the semiotic enhancer applied by the director). Syd Field, in his story-character breakdown theory (Field, 1979) that laid the foundations for the contemporary dramatic screenwriting, assumes the intertwining nature of the character’s internal journey and its physical representation (Fig. 1) – that is at work in the very conception of the screenpaly. Would it be going too far as to put forward that Field’s theory ultimately favors the former over the latter, reducing the purpose of any physical action to a sheer communication vehicle for the emotion it conceals? In my interpretation, the subject of a film does not have a complete narrative sovereignty, and is not an entity of his or her own – rather, his or her nature is a construction, a minute mosaic of deeds and feelings. It is revealed through action and character, where action is divided into physical and emotional, and character is torn by internal needs that prompt the subject’s external actions. Thus the external – the physical action that we actually see happening on the screen, is merely the reflection of the internal – of the subject’s stormy, complex, ubiquitous oceans of emotions. Fig. 1:  My reconstruction of Syd Field’s character breakdown diagram (Field: 40)

The emotional action has been defined in many ways. Originated by Constantin Stanislavski’s System at his Moscow Arts Theater and referred to as “inner activity” or “inner stimulus” (Stanislavski: 34–43) and later developed by his followers, it may be summed up as the mapping out of the character’s internal journey expressed by active verbs creating beats of behavior – in the musical sense

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(Hagen: 175–176) – on a moment-to-moment basis (DeKoven: 30–44). It is a means to externalize emotions, and – from my experience as a director – is best expressed in the actor’s eyes or by his or her body language. Action has its own independent life, parallel to the dialog or other verbal means of communication, and is enhanced by mise–en–scène. The American counterpart of Stanislavski’s System – the “Method” – has been evolving throughout the years. Ever since 1923, when Richard Boleslavsky (Bolesław Ryszard Śrzednicki), a Polish actor and director – and Stanislavski’s apprentice and follower – transplanted the System into the United States by establishing the American Laboratory Theater in New York City (Encyclopaedia Brittannica), battles over the nuances of Method acting have been fought and factions have been established, and as a result there have emerged four main “branches”, or schools (and gurus): Stella Adler, Bobby Lewis, Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg. It has become the leading approach to acting in the U.S., and has “influenced, directly or indirectly, almost every American actor” (Weston 153). Mise–en–scène, the French theater term literally meaning “put in scene” used in the English language since at least 1833 (Merriam-Webster), has been widely adopted by filmmakers and has had an established position internationally since André Bazin, who successfully introduced it into the filmmaking jargon in the 1950s (Bazin, 1967–71). In popular denotation, and from my own experience as a director, it refers to all the visual means at the director’s disposal throughout the cognitive process, in collaboration with the director of photography, the production designer and the editor. Whereas most of the semiotic choices are derived from the knowledge of the film language grammar and its impact (shot size, camera relationship, composition and imagery – including color, lighting, contrast, set design, costumes, 180-degree rule and the editing patterns), the possibilities are endless – a truly creative filmmaker will take inspiration from other fine arts disciplines, especially painting, sculpture and still photography. The mise–en–scène choices become an on-going dynamic dialog with the giants of past and present on whose shoulders – consciously or not – all truthful, outstanding artists stand. Naturally for film being a staged process (Arijon: 13), mise–en–scène is designed a priori of the filming, and therefore before the actors’ interpretation of the action is complete. And yet, without the actual knowledge of the overt outcome of the performance, the mise–en–scène becomes the semiotic canvas, the cognitive background, and often an additional source of inspiration for the actor. To close the cycle, after the principal photography is completed, the mise–en–scène re-enters the cognitive process. It serves as the action enhancer

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and creates additional semiotic layers in the editing process, may even alter the decoding of the performance by altering the viewer’s perspective. The word – mise–en–scène – action is an inseparable triad that enables our journeys into “stuff that dreams are made on.” I will attempt to define the space within that triad, the very nature of the relationships, the quality of what lies between words and bodily expressions – in the context of mise–en–scène. My research based on my own cognitive experience of directing Method actors proves the existence of a subdivision of that relationship. Practising directors and actors have the experience of the variety: Clurman’s On Directing mentions that “actions are not always obvious in the author’s writing. They occasionally seem to contradict the dialog’s surface connotations” (Clurman: 82). However, my close analysis proves the existence of at least six consistent variables of the parallel between the verbal and the non-verbal, and therefore I propose the following typology: 1. Psycholinguistic interaction. 2. Counteraction. 2.1. Opposition. 2.2. Elimination. 3. Domination. 4. Anticipation. In accordance with my initial statement, for the purpose of this analysis I shall break down the representations of emotions in verbal and non-verbal communication within the external and the internal journey of the character of Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s cinematic interpretation of the “You Shall Not Pass” scene. In the scene, Gandalf ’s overall external pursuit is to rescue the Fellows from the Balrog, while internally he wants to prove his worth. This objective-need duality creates a dynamic intracharacter conflict of interests which informs, motivates and guides Gandalf ’s every action, physically and emotionally.

1.  Psycholinguistic interaction Psycholinguistic interaction is the most agreeable and most straightforward verbal vs. non-verbal interdependence – and perhaps most frequently applied – in which the action directly supports the words spoken and the physical pursuit. There is a full consent of intention between the verbal and the non-verbal. The type begins the scene and immediately engages the viewer emotionally. The opening shot reveals the Fellowship running away from the Balrog – prompted by Gandalf, who utters a powerful command (“Fly!”) and then for a moment physically stops to catch his breath and decides the best tactics: physically, he assesses the

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danger (Fig. 2). The emotional action supports Gandalf ’s consternation: in the first reaction shot we see a close-up of Gandalf ’s face and in his eyes – concerned acknowledgement of the Balrog’s might. The mise–en–scène enhances Gandalf ’s concern: in a powerful tilt-up the camera reveals the gigantic, fiery figure of the Balrog and tracks into the hellish abyss of its monstrous roar. Fig. 2:  Breakdown of the “Fly!” moment first reaction shot Seconds into scene

Shot size (semiotic significance)

Verbal means

Physical pursuit

Action

Imagery

Camera/ editing choice

0:07

Close-up (enhances intensity of beat, raises the stakes)

“Fly!”

Assess the danger

Acknowledge the Balrog’s mighty power

Fiery might, Volume contrast: abyss of the tilt reveals giant Balrog’s roar might and roar

Another example of psycholinguistic interaction can be observed when Gandalf stops in the middle of the narrow bridge between the cliffs and physically faces the Balrog, determined to stop the monster, which he expresses verbally with a straightforward: “You cannot pass!” (Fig. 3). At the same time, he challenges the Balrog in a powerful emotional statement of standing his ground. In a striking over-the-shoulder shot, the mise–en–scène emphasizes how thin Gandalf ’s chances are against the humongous Balrog – and how courageous his act is, as the Balrog rises ostentatiously in an act of victorious cockiness. Again, Gandalf ’s emotional action volumizes his physical pursuit. Fig. 3:  Breakdown of the “You cannot pass!” moment Seconds Shot size Verbal into scene (semiotic significance) means 0:49

Medium close-up (enhances Gandalf ’s shaky physique)

Physical pursuit

Action

Imagery

Camera/ editing choice

“You Stop Challenge by Fiery invincibility Volume contrast: cannot the Balrog standing his of the Over-the-shoulder pass!” ground Balrog enhances dominance

Perhaps the most powerful act of psycholinguistic interaction occurs at the pivotal “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” momentum (Fig. 4). Gandalf ’s mighty line reflects his physical objective and his emotional need: to destroy. The triad achieves the perfect unity, and the mise–en–scène shows off Gandalf ’s victory by the quick cutting of a whole variety of his different shot sizes, his dominating screen-time, and, most importantly, by his attribute of power – his staff, which consequently rules the foreground of his frame.

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Fig. 4:  Breakdown of the “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” momentum Minutes Shot size Verbal into scene (semiotic significance) means

Physical pursuit

Action

1:27

Destroy

Destroy Glowing staff, Gandalf ’s dominance

Medium close-up, extreme close-up, full shot (enhances dizziness of climax, total victory)

“YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”

Imagery

Camera/ editing choice Quick cutting enhances Gandalf ’s power, screen-time dominance

To sum up, in psycholinguistic interaction the character’s external pursuit is in complete agreement with his internal journey. The relationship is harmonious.

2. Counteraction Counteraction is the type of the verbal vs. non-verbal relationship on the opposite end of the typology spectrum, in which the character’s action counteracts his/her physical pursuit. A representative example of the type is Gandalf ’s second reaction shot at the beginning of the scene, following the familiar “Fly!” command (Fig. 5). Gandalf ’s physical pursuit, to stop the Balrog, is now counteracted by his emotional condition of fear. In fact the two are mutually exclusive. Since the moment follows closely Gandalf ’s first reaction shot, the viewer’s memory of the fiery imagery is still fresh, and so the fiery mise–en–scène widens the gap of counteraction, now enhanced by the prolonged stillness of Gandalf ’s frame and the camera angle emphasizing his (literally) looking up to the Balrog. The quality of the relationship within the triad is one of anti-magnetism. Fig. 5:  Breakdown of the “Fly!” moment second reaction shot Seconds into scene

Shot size (semiotic significance)

Verbal means

Physical pursuit

Action

Imagery

Camera/ editing choice

0:16

Close-up (enhances intensity of beat, raises the stakes)

“Fly!”

Stop the Balrog

Fear

Fiery might, abyss of the Balrog’s roar

Prolonged stillness, timid looking-up

2.1 Opposition A subtype of counteraction is evolving counteraction, or opposition. It demonstrates a lack of consistency, a gradual discrepancy and eventually a crack within the triad, with the emotional component breaking away from the physical and drifting in the opposite direction of intentions. When Gandalf verbally delivers his arguments of righteousness (“I am a servant of the Secret Fire…”), he physically reassures himself and thus the verbal and the physical aspects are in agreement

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and unite. However, his emotional action goes in quite the opposite direction at this moment: in his eyes we see the emotional pleading (Fig. 6). Over the course of the verbal communication act the reassurance subsequently takes over the pleading, and the two equal each other. The process is reflected in the mise–en–scène: at the moment of pleading the Balrog’s sword reflects on Gandalf ’s face enhancing his inner need, however when the reassurance wins over Gandalf ’s emotional action his staff glows to neutralize the Balrog’s sword. In other words the staff-sword duel of illumination reflects the psychological dynamics between the characters. Fig. 6:  Breakdown of the “I am a servant of the Secret Fire” moment Seconds into scene

Shot size Verbal (semiotic means significance)

0:57

Medium close-up (enhances Gandalf ’s shaky physique)

Physical pursuit

“I am a servant of the Reassure Secret Fire, wielder himself of the flame of Anor. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udun.”

Action

Imagery

Camera/ editing choice

Plead with the Balrog

Fiery might of the Balrog’s sword reflecting on Gandalf ’s face vs. Gandalf ’s glowing staff

Volume contrast in separation: Tracking back and tilt reveal the Balrog’s giant sword

2.2 Elimination Elimination is the most acute relationship of the verbal and non-verbal, and the most extreme subtype of counteraction (Fig. 7). When Gandalf hangs over the cliff after he is struck by the mischievous Balrog’s whip he physically wants to climb back up but realizes that is impossible and anticipates his fall. His eyes covet life in disbelief, perhaps even beg for salvation. Yet verbally, he prompts the Fellows to continue their escape and leave him behind: “Fly, you fools!”. In faithfullness to his overall scene pursuit and scene need (to rescue the Fellows and prove his worth), he eliminates his own chance to save his life. His verbal communication eliminates both his physical pursuit of the moment – to save himself – and his action – to covet life, beg for salvation. The helplessness and the stillness in the mise–en–scène enlarge his tragic condition painfully. Elimination is a heroic relationship.

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Fig. 7:  Breakdown of the “Fly, you fools!” moment Minutes into scene

Shot size (semiotic significance)

Verbal means

Physical pursuit

2:08

Close-up (enhances intensity of beat, raises the stakes)

“Fly, you Save fools!” himself

Action

Imagery

Camera/ editing choice

Covet life, beg for salvation

Fellows’ terrified reaction shots, Gandalf ’s helpless grip

Tracking in, prolonged stillness

3. Domination Domination is a mise–en–scène domain. It is a non-verbal extension of the action, an externalization of the interdependence of two or more unequal entities, and it is revealed in mise–en–scène: either through the volumes, foreground-background relation or screen-time proportions. Good illustrations of the type can be found in the scene within the the above-described types and subtypes: the contrast of volumes between Gandalf and the Balrog showing the latter’s domination (Fig. 2, 3, 4 and 6), the foreground domination of Gandalf ’s staff (Fig. 4), and Gandalf ’s domination via screen-time in the otherwise unequal fight (Fig. 4). Characteristically for this type, the visuals always reflect the psychological / emotional domination.

4. Anticipation Anticipation is a verbal or non-verbal hint of what is about to happen. In a way, the term of anticipation can be compared to screenplay terms used by Paul Joseph Gulino, “telegraphing,” “pointing,” “advertising,” and “dangling cause” (2013: 12–13), or the literary term “foreshadowing” (Merriam-Webster) commonly used by story-tellers of all kinds. In my analysis the term of anticipation is used as their internal and relational counterpart. An example of verbal anticipation in the scene is the beat when Gandalf calls out “Fly!”, or later “Fly, you fools!” – the word “fly” bears a shadow of anticipation of his own fall into the abyss, in a wicked act of emotional prediction of his doomed fate. On the other hand, the line itself, the nature of the words “Fly, you fools!” – besides the Shakespearean depth – carries a trace of self-encouragement, and can be interpreted as an act of talking to oneself in a heroic attempt to remind oneself of one’s mission. Indeed, physically Gandalf holds onto the cliff just like he holds onto his mission emotionally. As we see moments later, the line fulfills itself as he literally flies down, with his arms stretched horizontally. At the same time, by sheer association with the Christ’s cross, his act gains a transcendental

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dimension of self-sacrifice and salvation.1 Yet, letting go of the cliff presents a hard decision and the encouragement is much needed. Hence the word “fly” which connotes – and anticipates – swiftness, lightness, freedom, achievement, and salvation itself, via association with the eagles. In verbal anticipation, the word initiates the anticipated imagery, and in a way assumes the role of the imagery as it unites with the non-verbal action of anticipation. Non-verbal anticipation is the reverse process: it is initiated by a non-verbal element and culminates in an act of verbal communication. In the analyzed scene the camera repeatedly shows the images of the long, narrow, scary, dizzy bridge over the abyss and reveals it in multiangularity throughout the scene planting the idea of passing into the viewer’s subconscious – in order to build up to the climactic “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” and ultimately the destruction of the passage. In fact, each component of the verbal line has its own non-verbal anticipation. “YOU” is anticipated by the visuals of the gigantic, ferocious, dark, deadly Balrog. Similarly, the impact of “SHALL NOT” is anticipated by the imagery of Gandalf ’s swift, mighty, invincible staff which relentlessly fends off the Balrog’s attacks. By the time we hear the full line, we are semiotically prepared to interpret and absorb its every word – the volume of the line has been fully anticipated.

Conclusions The word – mise–en–scène – action triad is of organic nature and it is the juxtaposition and the space in-between the elements that create the full scope of emotion and subtext. Despite its independent life, emotional action remains in tight interdependence with the verbal as well as the non-verbal (visual) means of communication: it feeds off the words in order to bounce off and take its own direction of development. However, without the words the act of emotional communication would not be thorough, would lack its semiotic power: the words function as a catapult. Likewise, while the words intensify the physical action, they would sound empty without the action – the duality is symbiotic. Mise–en–scène completes the triad. It serves as an overt extension of the action or the words: an extra commentary on how high the stakes are, or on the emotional circumstance, on the distribution of power. Perhaps the most significant cognitive aspect of the relationships within the triad is their predominant qualities of anti-magnetism and conflict rather than attraction. It resembles a tango in which the words are the masculine partner that leads, inspires, 1 As we learn much later in part two of the trilogy, Gandalf ’s act of salvation is further confirmed by his resurrection as the white wizard – which in the analysed scene he must be anticipating in his wisdom.

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and provokes the feminine – in this case the independent and unpredictable action, dressed in the showy and revealing mise–en–scène, which at times wraps around and mesmerises the leading partner. The union produces a breathtaking effect, and the inseparable togetherness conditions the success.

Works Cited Adler, Stella. The Technique of Acting. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. Print. Arijon, Daniel. Grammar of the Film Language. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1976. Print. Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1 & 2 (Hugh Gray, Trans., Ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–71. Print. Boleslavsky, Richard. 1933. Acting: The First Six Lessons. New York: Theatre Arts, 1987. Clurman, Harold. On Directing. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Print. DeKoven, Lenore. Changing Direction. Burlington: Focal Press, 2006. Print. Field, Syd. Screenplay. New York: Dell Trade, 1979. Print. “Foreshadow.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2015. . Gulino, Paul Joseph. Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Print. Hagen, Uta. Respect for Acting. New York: Macmillan, 1973. Print. Jackson, Peter, dir. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. New Line Cinema, 2001 (USA). On-line video https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mJZZNHekEQw. YouTube, 12 Jan. 2014. Web. 17 April 2015. Katz, Steven D. Film Directing Shot by Shot: Visualizing from Concept to Screen. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 1991. Print. Katz, Steven D. Film Directing: Cinematic Motion. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 2004. Print. Meisner, Sanford, and Dennis Longwell. Sanford Meisner on Acting. New York: Random House, 1987. Print. “Mise–en–scène.“ Webster’s Third New International Dictionary: The Definitive Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. Merriam-Webster Inc., 1993. Print and Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 27 Sept. 2015. . “Richard Boleslavsky.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 2015. Web. 27 Sep. 2015. .

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Stanislavski, Constantin. 1936. An Actor Prepares. Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. A Theatre Arts Book, New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. Strasberg, Lee. A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method. New York: Plume, 1988. Print. Weston, Judith. Directing Actors. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 1996. Print.

Notes on Contributors Patrycja Austin is Assistant Professor at Rzeszów University where she teaches English Literature. She received her PhD degree from Warsaw University. In her research she focuses on postcolonial literature and theory, especially Indian Writers in English, as well as on ecocriticism and music in literature. Her book In Words and Music: Glocal Imaginaries in the Works of Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Amit Chaudhuri was published by cyberwit.net in 2014. Ewa Błasiak graduated from the University of Wrocław with a Master’s degree in English Studies in 2014. Now she is doing her PhD degree at the same university. She has also spent two semesters studying English Literature in the United Kingdom, first at the University of South Wales, then at the University of Southampton. Her research area is medievalism in modern English drama. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the return of morality play tradition to contemporary theatre. She teaches English Literature. Kornelia Boczkowska is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She received a Ph.D. in English (2015) with a specialization in American culture studies as well as an M.A. in English (2011) and Russian (2010) from Adam Mickiewicz University. Her research interests and publications focus on American and Russian astroculture in the context of visual, popular culture and film studies. Her current research is on the development of space science documentary and the relationship between science, esotericism and the occult in the history of spaceflight. Teresa Bruś is Associate Professor at Wrocław University, Poland. Her major fields of research include visual culture, photography and literature, and life writing. She teaches M.A. seminars on autobiography, electives on the poetry of the 1930s, English modernism and portraiture. Her doctoral dissertation focused on aspects of “profound frivolity” in W. H. Auden’s poetry. She is also a graduate of the International Forum of Photography in Poland. She has published on various aspects of life writing and photography in journals, including Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Prose Studies, Connotations, and Thepes. Tomasz Dobrogoszcz teaches courses and seminars in British literature and literary translation at the University of Łódź, Poland. His main fields of research

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include contemporary British and postcolonial literature, as well as poststructuralist and psychoanalytical literary theory. He is the editor of Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Cultural Contexts In Monty Python, a collection of essays on the British comic group (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). He translated into Polish a seminal work in postcolonial theory, The Location of Culture by Homi K. Bhabha, as well as many other critical and literary texts, for instance by Hayden White or Dipesh Chakrabarty. He is currently working on a monograph on Ian McEwan. Katarzyna Fetlińska is a PhD candidate in the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests include the links between biology and humanities, in particular the relationship between brain sciences and British post-war novel. Marta Komsta is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Maria CurieSkłodowska University in Lublin. Her main research interests include contemporary Gothic, urban fiction, and utopia/dystopia in film and literature. She has published articles on contemporary British and American fiction as well as filmic and literary utopian narratives. She is the author of a book on the urban chronotope in Peter Ackroyd’s novels: Welcome to the Chemical Theatre: The Urban Chronotope in Peter Ackroyd’s Fiction (2015). Ewa Kowal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She is the author of the book The “Image-Event” in the Early Post-9/11 Novel: Literary Representations of Terror after September 11, 2001 (Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2012) and a series of articles devoted to post-9/11 literature. Her research interests concentrate on contemporary literature and film, in particular the most recent responses to the aftermath of (post-)9/11 terror and the current economic crisis. Her additional interests include contemporary literary, cultural and aesthetic theories, feminist criticism and gender studies, as well as the visual arts. She is also a translator and editor. Elżbieta Litwin – expert analyst in psycholinguistic communications specializing in method technique with versatile pragmatic experience of method technique application in media. Method technique mentor and educator with 8 years of academic teaching experience at City University of New York and School of Visual Arts. Has led auteur method workshops in New York City and Los Angeles. Films include Teeth, The Ghost, The Magician. Screenplays include To the End of Time, The Other Side of the River. Received her MFA in Film from Columbia University

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and her BA in English Studies from the University of Wrocław. Currently a PhD student at the University of Wrocław. Agnieszka Łobodziec, PhD, is Assistant Professor and the head of the Section of Literature of the English Speaking World, English Department, University of Zielona Góra and a member of the Toni Morrison Society’s International Programs Committee. She is the author of Black Theological Intra-racial Conflicts in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Currently, she researches the literary portrayals of African American men’s confrontation of violence. Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys works as an Associate Professor at Warsaw University, Poland. She has been teaching courses on Romantic and Victorian literature, on the relationships between literature and the visual arts and on the images of femininity in poetry and painting of the 19th century. She has published widely on William Blake, John Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites. Her main publications include Soft-Shed Kisses: Re-visioning the Femme Fatale in English Poetry of the 19th Century (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2013), “Life Exhaled in Milky Fondness: Becoming a Mother in William Blake’s The Book of Thel”, in Blake/ An Illustrated Quarterly, Vol. 46, no. 4 (spring 2013), “(In)significant Details – Vision and Perception in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘My Sister’s Sleep’ and ‘The Blessed Damozel,’” in Zeitchrift Für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, ZAA 61.2 (2013), “For Where Thou Fliest I Shall Not Follow”: Memory and Poetic Song in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Itylus.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies. Vol. 23 Fall 2014. Jacek Mydla is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia. He holds a PhD and a post-doctoral degree (habilitation) in literary studies. He conducts research and lectures in the history of British literature (specialising in Shakespeare studies and Gothic fiction and drama), literary theory and narrative theory. His book-length publications are: The Dramatic Potential of Time in Shakespeare (2002), Spectres of Shakespeare (2009; a study of appropriations of Shakespeare’s drama in the early English Gothic), and The Shakespearean Tide (2012; a study of human time in Shakespeare). Recently, Mydla has published articles on Romantic drama, British empiricism in the eighteenth century and the uncanny and supernatural in fiction. Forthcoming is a monograph on the ghost stories of M. R. James approached from the perspective of narratology. Stankomir Nicieja works as an assistant professor at the Department of Culture, School of English and American Studies, University of Opole. His academic interests include film studies, contemporary literature and utopian studies. In 2011,

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he published a monograph entitled In the Shadow of the Iron Lady: Thatcherism as a Cultural Phenomenon and Its Representation in the Contemporary British Novel in the University of Opole Press. Currently, his research revolves around the problems of representation of China and the Far East in contemporary Anglophone films and novels. Murari Prasad teaches Anglophone postcolonial literature in the Department of English at D.S. College, Katihar (India). He wrote his doctoral thesis on Melville, Conrad and Hemingway. He has edited critical anthologies on Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (2005) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (2008) as well as on Arundhati Roy (2006) and Post-Rushdie Indian English novels (2012). He has a string of research papers and book reviews to his credit in addition to an entry on Upamanyu Chatterjee in Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB 323: South Asian Writers in English), Bruccoli Layman, Michigan, 2006. Marcin Tereszewski is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wrocław, where he specializes in modern British fiction. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Failure: Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013) and numerous articles dealing with various aspects of Samuel Beckett’s work in relation to postmodern thought. His current research projects deal with dystopian fiction and focus on an examination of J.G. Ballard’s work in relation to psychogeographic theories of spatiality and architecture. Marek Pawlicki graduated from the Institute of English Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He completed his PhD studies with a thesis entitled “Self-Reflexivity in the Works of J. M. Coetzee,” published in 2013 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. He works at the Witold Pilecki State School of Higher Education in Oświęcim and at the Jagiellonian University. He has published articles on the prose of J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, John Banville and Anne Enright. Ryszard W. Wolny is Professor and Director, School of English and American Studies, University of Opole, Poland. His interests focus largely on British and Australian literature and culture. He is an author of about ninety scholarly publications which include, among others, The Ruinous Anatomy: The Philosophy of Death in John Donne and the Earlier Seventeenth-century English Poetry and Prose (Perth, Western Australia, 1999), A Cry over the Abyss: The Discourse of Power in the Poetry of Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne (Opole 2004), Australia: Identity, Memory, Destiny (with S. Nicieja, Opole 2008), Crosscurrents: Culture, Literature and Language (Kielce 2008), On Time: Reflections on Time in

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Culture, Literature and Language (Opole 2009), Culture and Postcolonial Studies (Kielce 2012), Evil Ugliness Disgrace in the Cultures of the West and East (with S. Nicieja, Opole 2013), and The Masks of Ugliness in Literary Narratives (with Z. Wąsik, Frankfurt 2013). In the last three years, he completed a monograph entitled Patrick White: Australia’s Poet of Mythical Landscapes of the Soul (Wrocław 2013), Poisoned Cornucopia: Excess, Intemperance and Overabundance across Cultures and Literatures (Frankfurt 2014) and currently is working on Outlandish, Uncanny and Bizarre in Contemporary Western Culture (Frankfurt 2016). He is a co-editor of Peter Lang series Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Literature (with Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak).