Translation and Interpretation: Practicing the Knowledge of Literature [1 ed.] 9783737014731, 9783847114734

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Raul Calzoni / Francesca Di Blasio / Greta Perletti (eds.)

Translation and Interpretation Practicing the Knowledge of Literature

A Volume in Honour of Angela Locatelli With 8 figures

V&R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available online: https://dnb.de. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Department of Humanities of the University of Trento. © 2022 by Brill | V&R unipress, Theaterstraße 13, 37073 Göttingen, Germany, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany; Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria) Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Cover image: “Arbor scientiae” (Tree of Science), 1505. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-7370-1473-1

Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Dury About You: An Essay

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Jean-Jacques Lecercle Literature and Interpellation. Introduction to the Theory of Interpellation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Pirjo Lyytikäinen Interpretation and Emotion Effects in Literature: Reading Contemporary Experimental Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Susanne Knaller Liminal Texts as a Challenge to Literary Theory: Reformulating the Relationship of Literature and Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Annette Simonis Literature in the Context of Transmedia Storytelling . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ana Margarida Abrantes Shedding a Cognitive Light on the Problem of Interpretation. A Tentative Essay in Honor of Angela Locatelli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Michela Gardini The Translator as a Fictional Character

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

Luca Bani Alessandro Verri, Translator of Hamlet and Othello. The Discovery of Shakespeare in the Transition from Classicism to Pre-Romanticism in the Latter Half of the Eighteenth Century in Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Marco Sirtori Translating History: The Reception of 19th-Century Italian Historical Novels Abroad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Raul Calzoni Interpreting and Transferring the Ideals of the French Revolution: Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Elena Agazzi Rethinking the Past with a New Narrative Strategy. Nora Krug’s Heimat. A German Family Album . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Stefania Consonni How to Survive on a Desert Island, Resemiotized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Stefania M. Maci “Pestilence Is the Enemy We Fly”. Metaphors for the Pandemic in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Greta Perletti What’s Wrong with Fanny Price? Pathological Intellection and Jane Austen’s Science of the Mind in Mansfield Park . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Polina Shvanyukova What Makes Literature Valuable: A Nineteenth-Century Perspective . . . 187 Larissa D’Angelo Gender in Audio-Visual Translation: Giving (an Italian) Voice to Dystopian Heroines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Michele Sala From Words to Stories and Back. A Round Trip to Wonderland

. . . . . 213

Imke Polland-Schmandt Creating Conditions for Compassion in/through Fictions of Brexit: A Reading of Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018) . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

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Emanuel Stelzer Talismanic Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Isabel Capeloa Gil Slow Motion. (Post) Colonial Time Narrating Modernity Against the Grain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Eleonora Natalia Ravizza Four Unwritten Stories and the Geographies of Imagined Encounters. V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World and Virginia Woolf ’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Francesca Di Blasio Antipodes of the Mind: Literature between Traveling and Thinking . . . . 273 Vera & Ansgar Nünning Angela Locatelli – a Great Godsend for the University of Bergamo, for Literary Studies in Europe (and beyond), and for the PhDnet! . . . . . 281 Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 Tabula Gratulatoria

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

Angela Locatelli: Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

Foreword

When we were first inspired to compile this volume in honor of Angela Locatelli, who retired after many years devoted to academic research and teaching, our thoughts inevitably turned to the fascinating polysemic formula she developed in the early 2000s: ‘the knowledge of literature’. This formula effectively epitomizes her scientific orientation and the keen and sharp insight her critical perspectives and reflections yielded across time. In fact, Locatelli’s work, bringing to light, presenting, offering, and sharing her knowledge of literature, has been both precious and unceasing. The series of volumes1 dedicated to the subject are the result of as many gatherings, held at the University of Bergamo, on the occasion of the international conferences that animated the cultural and academic scene for a decade from 2001 to 2011. They remain as precious evidence of Locatelli’s distinctive and inexhaustible commitment to the deepest and most significant spirit of scientific research, always in constant evolution and innovation, one that she has passed on to her students and colleagues. The question underlying the research that Angela has pursued throughout her academic career, and that reverberates through this book, concerns the kind of knowledge that literature can offer as an expression of human creativity, a rhetorically articulated and relevant discourse, and as an intercultural ‘agent’. Literature is indeed a form of knowledge that has its own historical and epistemic specificity, and this makes possible a first critical perspective. However, it is also an object of investigation per se, and as such, it stimulates reflection on methodological and technical issues that offers another critical approach. Moreover, the interlinguistic, and therefore intercultural, circulation of the literary text makes it a powerful vehicle for interaction and cultural exchange. Such a composite framework derives from at least three dimensions of the literary, namely the imaginative, the empathic, and the critical. In the making of 1 La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Angela Locatelli (a cura di), 10 vols (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 2002–2011). At the end of this volume the complete list of Angela Locatelli’s publications is available.

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Foreword

stories, that are always different and never definitive, but always open to reconsideration and re-interpretation, and in variable and multiple relations of mimesis with the ‘real’, there is in fact a knowledge that is not taxonomic or ‘scientifically’ given, and that yet is substantial and effective. The transformative power of the literary lies precisely in its generative potential, which is both mimetic and imaginative. As Locatelli writes in the first volume of the ‘knowledge’ series, literary worlds may be provisional or even aleatory, but the knowledge of literature, both as an outcome of gnoseological investigation and as an object of inquiry, is a powerful and effective device for creating critical consciousness, and intercultural and interdisciplinary awareness, virtually without end. This volume is part of these theoretical and applied reflections on the theme of the knowledge of literature, and of literature as a form of knowledge. The literary stands as a ‘transitional object’ susceptible to different competences and critical inclinations, which include cultural and linguistic studies, hermeneutics, translation. To these are added the interdisciplinary discourses that literature, because of its specific epistemic quality, elicits, approaches, and intersects; this interdisciplinary perspective is in turn articulated within a rich framework, which includes, without any pretense of exhaustiveness, history, linguistics, philosophy, ethics, the neurosciences and medicine in general, anthropology, and many more. This book focuses on different articulations of these theoretical and practical issues, again offering a composite frame of reference, that embraces multiple cultural contexts and traditions, and their areas of contact. Scholars with expertise in multiple literary and cultural traditions, linguists, literary theorists, and philosophers have participated in this book to celebrate Angela’s work. As an attentive scholar, fine critic, eager reader, and a philosopher herself (not only for her double degree, both in Literature and Philosophy), Angela Locatelli has inspired, taught, gathered together, collaborated with, all the contributors to this work. Over the years her competence, together with her kindness and genuine enthusiasm have constantly promoted their research, fostered further steps, paved the way for an advancement of teaching and learning. The fields of investigation anticipated by the title of this volume, Translation and Interpretation: Practicing the Knowledge of Literature, are all representative of Angela’s research. A literary theorist, a fine Shakespearean scholar, and a translator, Angela has always crossed international and interdisciplinary territories, following and anticipating the scientific paths scholars are moving on today with the precious inspiration of her legacy. All the contributors to this book have known Angela Locatelli as an academic colleague, professor, friend, or maybe all of these. They celebrate her intellectual energies and the valuable writings she has contributed to the knowledge of

Foreword

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literature, and to understanding literature as a form of knowledge. Conversely, the scholars who have contributed to this book have treasured the research pursued by Angela throughout her brilliant and indefatigable career in varied and flexible ways. With their different expertise in the fields of literary, hermeneutical and translation studies, they pay homage to her, each according to their own inclination, but all with deep gratitude. Bergamo, Milano, Trento April 2022

Raul Calzoni Francesca Di Blasio Greta Perletti

Richard Dury

About You: An Essay

The scholarly interests of Prof. Angela Locatelli are unusually broad and varied: she is one of those happy spirits to whom everything is interesting. Her areas of study range from late medieval literature to Renaissance and early modern right up to contemporary, from treatises of rhetoric, to scientific discourse, poetry, drama and the novel, from translation to literary theory and the philosophy of literature. And no doubt other areas omitted by my oversight. Her interest in Renaissance texts happily coincided with her teaching the History of the English Language at Bergamo University in the 1980s and into the 1990s. It was here that her path and mine (a mere track through undergrowth in comparison) intersected and travelled awhile together, when for seven years I was her assistant. We saw a lot of each other then, due to a suggestion I made that she gladly accepted. On my teaching diploma course at the University of Manchester some years before, the teachers had all attended each other’s lectures, and this enabled them to coordinate and, through brief questions and contributions at the end of a lecture, created a community spirit of students and teachers collaborating together. I suggested we might do the same, and so for five years we did so, perhaps a unique experiment in Italian Universities, and for me a memorable period of enjoyable collaboration. While Angela for several years taught the special course on Puttenham’s treatise on rhetoric, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), a fascinating study of Elizabethan thoughts on language use, I was entrusted by her with the general course, a survey of the evolution of the English language from Old to Early Modern English, and which Prof. Locatelli had taught herself until my arrival. This was back in the days of the old ‘four-year’ degree—which I place in inverted commas because the average number of years for completion was seven. Certainly, it was less efficient than the present three-year degree. It was, indeed, a medieval system put under strain by the growth in student numbers, but in many ways it was more enjoyable: teachers had time to develop and diversify their courses, and those students who attended formed more of a community. As for the final thesis, though it varied in quality, length and honest originality, when it

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was good it was very good: an exercise in thorough research and writing, and the opportunity for a valuable and humanly enriching relationship between master and pupil. The History of the English Language is, like most disciplines (no, all disciplines), an area of study in constant self-definition (and why limit ourselves to disciplines?). Its overlap with philology, both linguistic and literary, was covered by Angela Locatelli’s special course; its overlap with historical linguistics by the survey course. What I would like to offer here is a brief contribution to that more historical linguistics side. Like all history, the history of a language becomes interesting when it narrates change, as variation and change are of the essence of any language system, indeed of all sublunary things. In some periods this change is rapid, among them the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the age of many of the texts that Angela Locatelli studied. One topic from this period that is covered in all language history survey courses and textbooks is the way English ended up with a second person pronoun, you, both singular and plural and no distinction between polite and familiar address, a topic also of interest to literary scholars, who want to understand what Shakespeare and others intended by the use of you and thou in their texts. In what follows I will try to explain these changes by taking into account the problems typically associated with the pronoun of address, by making comparisons with other languages, and by taking into account contact of a new standard language with other dialects. If I may be indulged by the one particular reader for whom I write (and by others who are, as it were, following the text over that reader’s shoulder), I would like to attempt an essayistic approach. The knowledge attained through literature (to allude to one of Prof. Locatelli’s principal interests) must also vary with the kind of literature, and the essay comes into its own in the exploration of matters for which there is no single or certain answer. This is true of the present study (and I will finally get to it), which would normally be presented in a scientific paper. Yet this form—in its displayed thoroughness, its meticulously numbered sections and subsections, its exhaustingly linear examination of competing theories and varying studies—can easily break up into a confetti-like collection of ideas: useful perhaps as a work of reference, uninviting to the reader. The interests of Prof. Locatelli (and hence of her over-the-should readers) have been so wide, technicalities and details are here out of place. Everyone is interested in language, not everyone in linguistic minutiae examined in lengthy sequence. The essayistic approach, with its possibility of conversational voice, of a broad-brush treatment, and its encouragement of clear but reasoned conjectures will be for me an interesting exercise in simplification and clarification. All details are left to footnotes, and these the gentle reader can, at a first reading, leave aside and read on.

About You: An Essay

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Angela Locatelli’s edition of Henry Peacham’s 1639 allegorical fable A Merry Discourse of Meum, and Tuum introduces us from its title to the twins Meum and Tuum, constantly disputatious and appropriately named, if we remember how a speaker defining what is ‘thine’ is encroaching on the listener’s territory and so can easily offend. Indeed, there is a potential difficulty whenever we talk about the person listening to us, especially acute when we use the pronoun of direct address. It is this difficulty that lies behind the strange discourse of Thou and You. The pronoun of address is used to define the listener—in ways that may be welcome or may threaten the other person’s self-image; it can be like looking or pointing at someone. Emphatic and repeated use by a friend is no threat, as we see in the repeated thou or you of the love song or poem: the way the poet’s thoughts at night ‘Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee’ or how his poem lasts as long as humankind: ‘and this gives life to thee’.1 Here the pronoun of address is placed emphatically at the end of the line or of the whole poem, which ends there but is also somehow compressed into that last word. And yet the pronoun of address, whether so-called ‘familiar’ or ‘polite’, can also be aggressive: as in ‘You, what do you want?’ Hence the need for tact in use, bearing in mind one’s feelings, the situation, codified distinctions and any current cultural changes. But let’s start with a quick overview of the changes in English. In 1200 the English of all classes, ages and places had a singular and a plural pronoun of address, unchanged since Anglo-Saxon days: subject thou and object thee for the singular; subject ye and object you for the plural. In the following century up to 1300, plural ye and you started to be used sporadically as a polite singular;2 then around 1300 and for the two or three centuries that followed the two pronouns were used in a systematic but flexible way, without ever becoming fixed as in modern European languages. The second change that happened was that the object forms of both pronouns of address, you and thee, began to be used as a subject, in both cases sporadically in the fourteenth century; in the case of you, beginning with the singular forms and spreading to the plural. The change continued in the following century until the original subject forms disappeared from normal use in the first half of the sixteenth century and were preserved only in literature. Elizabeth I, born in 1533, in her letters uses only you for both subject and object.3 The thou and ye subjects, familiar to us from Shakespeare, were part of an archaizing style deemed appropriate for plays and poetry. 1 Shakespeare, Sonnets 27, 18. 2 First attested in the second half of the thirteenth century. 3 In 1530 John Palsgrave does not use the form ye anywhere in his Eclarcissement de la langue françoise, not even among the personal pronouns listed in Book II; cf. Gabriele Stein, John Palsgrave as Renaissance Linguist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 462.

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The third change, linking up with the first, was the decline in use of thou and the use of you for everybody. The fifteenth-century Paston family use only you in letters between themselves, and by the 1560s you was the normal pronoun used by all.4 Nevertheless, thou continued in special and dialect uses for some centuries; indeed, for residual dialect and specialized uses it can even be considered to be still ‘part of the language’ today. As a coda, there was something that did not happen, which is also a kind of event (like Sherlock Holmes’s ‘dog that didn’t bark in the night’): no new polite pronoun evolved.5 Now let’s look at some possible explanations. The new polite pronoun of address was not any kind of spontaneous evolution, but the result of the influence of French vous: the courtly language and its pronoun of polite address were taken over from French into English along with the fashionable literature and the culture and courtly lifestyle of chivalry, and much vocabulary, as administrative and literary writing switched, in steps and stages, from French to English. This arrival of the polite pronoun of address in England about 1300 is the late result of a geographical spread northwards from southern Europe starting in the fifth century.6 The relatively short life in English of a system of familiar and polite pronouns may look exceptional but becomes less so if we see it in the context of a fringe Atlantic area of Europe where today a polite pronoun is either totally absent (English, Irish, North Frisian, Low German and Flemish) or exists (as in Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Dutch) 7 but is more restricted in use than in the more central and southern European languages. The above describes but does not explain: the dyadic system, a late arrival, could still have become established, as in Polish, another late-comer. And in other languages, as the polite pronoun ‘wears out’ and becomes generalized, a new polite pronoun normally evolves. In English, use of the two pronouns of address was always flexible: two speakers could switch from one pronoun to the other, depending on the evolving situation, mood and emotion.8 For the duration 4 Jonathan Hope, ‘Second person singular pronouns in records of Early Modern “spoken” English’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 94.i (1993), 83–100 (p. 91). 5 No new plural pronoun evolved either—in standard English, but there are many examples in dialects, from y’all in the South of the USA to Irish yous and increasingly common you guys, as well as the alternative ‘mending’ of the system in eighteenth-century singular ‘you is’ and ‘you was’. Here, the standard taught language has so far resisted. 6 Richard Dury, ‘YOU and THOU in Early Modern English: cross-linguistic perspectives’, in Germanic Language Histories ‘from Below’ (1700–2000), ed. by Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth, Wim Vandenbussche (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 129–148 (p. 140). 7 Ibid., pp. 138–139. 8 Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen, ‘Introduction’, in Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003), pp. 14–15.

About You: An Essay

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of the thou-you system of pronouns, there remained freedom in choice and the ability to momentarily switch, and such changes are a feature of texts from the late thirteenth century to Shakespeare. And by Shakespeare’s time, you is the default choice, with thou reserved for special uses, momentary shifts in mood and emotion, expressions of affection or anger, following, but not governed by, a flexible series of conventions, not all to do with emotion.9 For example, men (in male camaraderie) used thou more, while women used it less; as a result, in Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick and Claudio use thou to each other, but Beatrice and Hero do not. With no polite pronoun relating to more-or-less fixed aspects of interlocutors, the gradual abandonment of thou did not leave an uncomfortable gap in the pronoun system that needed to be filled with a new polite pronoun. But Middle French also had a flexible and system of pronoun choice governed by multiple factors10 and we know that the outcome was very different from what happened in English. Nobody has solved this conundrum; further studies, as they say, are required. One positive contribution I can make. The abandonment of thou can be partly explained by rural speakers adopting prestige metropolitan features. The situation in sixteenth-century England has some affinities with that in twentiethcentury Flanders in northern Belgium. Here, like English up to 1200, speakers of Flemish traditionally had only one singular pronoun of address (ge/gij) and no polite pronoun, but since the Second World War the Northern polite u from the Netherlands has been increasingly used. Meeting with the standard Dutch pronouns only in formal situations a number of Flemish speakers have overgeneralized the use of u, some mothers and grandmothers using this pronoun to their children.11 The Flemish situation suggests a stage that must also have been important in the history of English: the moment when parents start using you to children. Here’s a possible scenario: Non-metropolitan and non-landowning speakers lived most of their lives using only singular thou, and came across speakers of the prestige metropolitan dialect only in formal situations, in which speakers only use you. As these non-metropolitan speakers adopted features of the prestige 9 Penelope Freedman, ‘You’ and ‘Thou’ in Shakespeare. A Practical Guide for Actors, Directors, Students and Teachers (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 2–6; Penelope Freedman, Power and Passion in Shakespeare’s Pronouns. Interrogating ‘You’ and ‘Thou’ (London: Routledge, 2017), ch. 1 ‘Introduction’. 10 Tony Hunt, ‘The use of tu/vus in the Anglo-Norman Seinte Resurreccion’, in Diachronic Perspectives, pp. 47–48. 11 Marijke van der Wal, Geschiedenis van het Nederlands (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1992), pp. 407– 408; K. Deprez, K.– G. Geerts, ‘Pronominale Problemen: GE, U en JE in Duffel-Lier’, Levense Bijdragen, 69 (1980), 257–381 (p. 370).

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dialect for more situations, they used only you, including to their own children, in order to teach them the ‘better’ pronoun. The use of pronouns of address in English was a system with multiple factors at play and where the results seem chaotic. But ‘chaos’ is not the same as randomness: it is complexity for which one does not have all the information necessary to predict what will happen. The weather system is a typical example where a single unknown factor—the famous butterfly flapping its wings—can produce a large and, for us, unpredictable result. The system of thou and you in English between 1300 and 1500 did not develop into a fixed dyadic system for reasons that may be like the flapping of the butterfly or are anyway lost to present-day linguists, working with the equivalent of weather reports from several centuries ago. Several processes probably formed a ‘perfect storm’: metropolitan and courtly users of a flexible system of familiar and polite pronouns extended the use of the polite pronoun, aspirants to status copied them, and at the same time rural users of a single pronoun, in the process of adopting the prestige dialect, overgeneralized one of its unfamiliar features. The second story, of how you took over from ye, is not totally independent of the above, as it may be related to the use of a polite pronoun. The change here starts later, about 1400. This is not a problematic development: the extension to subject use of object pronouns is a widespread phenomenon in English and other European languages.12 One thing not often noted is that the generalization of you is preceded by the generalization of thee, which began about a century earlier, though the picture is obscured by the conservation of a distinction between thou and thee in literature and in Bible translations. But in all cases where the old singular pronoun remained in spontaneous spoken use, thee or versions of it became the only subject form.13

12 West Friesian ( j)y has been totally replaced by the originally-objective form jo(u), a cognate of you; similarly, in the Dutch dialects of Zeeland and Zaans originally plural and objective jo(u) is occasionally used as a familiar singular pronoun (Stephen Howe, The Personal Pronouns in the Germanic Languages [Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996], pp. 187–188, 190). Here are some more examples: Norwegian Bokmål second-person plural object form dere has been extended to the subject and a similar generalization has taken place in Swedish; in Afrikaans the first person plural pronoun is ons, originally objective; there is also a general tendency for personal pronouns to be levelled in favour of the object form in various English dialects in the British Isles and overseas (Kathleen M. Wales, Personal Pronouns in Present-day English [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], pp. 90–91; Clive Upton, David Parry, John Widdowson, Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and the Grammar [London/New York: Routledge, 1994], pp. 486–488. 13 Thomas Finkenstaedt, ‘You’ und ‘thou’. Studien zur Anrede im Englischen. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1963), pp. 216ff.; Upton et al., Survey of English Dialects, p. 486; Ossi Ihalainen, ‘On Grammatical Diffusion in Somerset Folk Speech’ in Dialects of English: Studies in Gram-

About You: An Essay

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Though this phenomenon has yet to be fully explained, the use of the object case for the pronouns of address may have developed from a special motive of respect or politeness. Here I have two scraps of evidence. The first is a report by Theodor Siebs in 1901 that in the Saterland area, modern East Friesian jie (cognate of ye) was replaced by the object pronoun jou (cognate of you) as a sign of ‘special courtesy’ (‘ganz besonderer Höflichkeit’) in addressing old people.14 The second is from an eighteenth-century commentator who said that Quakers use the object pronoun thee as a subject ‘from an imaginary superior softness of the term thee’.15 Truly, we should talk not so much of the history, but of the archaeology of the English language, as, like archaeologists, we have to interpret chance survivals and such scattered past reports. Both these reports reveal an avoidance strategy, where the direct, the invasive pronoun of address is replaced with a related oblique form. A similar strategy is ‘hiding’ by making you or its equivalent as little prominent as possible. In common colloquial English an unstressed form of you marks informality (y’know, y’c’n, see ya) and at the same time avoids the prominent full form. Where the full and stressed form cannot be avoided, for example when it contrasts with something else, speakers often substitute it with yourself. Instead of ‘What about you?’, one commonly hears ‘What about y’self ?’ Something similar must have been going on in the centuries when you was replacing ye. The spread seems to have started in typically unstressed early uses (‘hark you’, ‘if it like you’, ‘I pray you’) and the same is true of early subject examples of originally-objective thee.16 Object pronouns are typically unstressed and reduced in English and other European languages (‘I like im’, ‘I want em’, etc.). Could it be that typically unstressed object you, pronounced /ju/, was preferred to prominent ye in subject uses because of its unstressed and ‘safer’ qualities? That unstressed you substituted ye, like ‘y’self ’ can replace ‘you’? This would throw light on another ‘dog that didn’t bark in the night’: subject you was spreading in the same period as the dramatically-named ‘Great Vowel Shift’, affecting English long vowels, when, for example, words with the vowel in house, originally /hu:s/, changed to the modern diphthong. Yet this did not affect you, which kept the old vowel and did not become ‘yau’, even though the long vowels in I, me etc. underwent the vowel change. It is possible that you was matical Variation, ed. by Peter Trudgill, J. K. Chambers (London/New York: Longman, 1991), pp. 104–119. 14 Howe, The Personal Pronouns, p. 190. 15 Finkenstaedt, ‘You’ und ‘thou’, p. 131. 16 Edwin Abbott, A Shakespeare Grammar (London: Macmillan, 1879), §§205, 212; Angelika Lutz, ‘The interplay of external and internal factors in morphological restructuring: the case of you’, in Advances in English Historical Linguistics (1996), ed. By Jacek Fisiak and Marcin Krygier (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 189–210 (p. 200).

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typically used in an unstressed form, pronounced /ju/, and then this vowel was lengthened after the Great Vowel Shift had run its course.17 Some support for this hypothesis comes from another chance find by a language archaeologist: in 1898 Joseph Wright in his Dialect Dictionary recorded a form yau found in Lincolnshire and Leicestershire and added the fascinating comment: ‘To use this form is considered very offensive, and parents punish their children for it, saying that it is as bad as swearing’18. We might here have the relic of the taboo use of a prominent strong form, giving us a window into the history of the success of you—a pronoun of address considered ‘safe’ by being less direct and less potentially threatening (its obliqueness coming from its plural and objective origins) and at the same time typically unstressed. The gentle reader who has read (or skipped) thus far, will expect some conclusions. The first I offer is that the problematic nature of using you, the pronoun of address, probably lies behind all the changes we have seen, they are all the products of avoidance strategies. (I have, for example, avoided you in addressing the reader, though I have used – as Prof. Locatelli has surely noticed – the very respectful third person). The second is that the use of you and thee was governed by a concourse of situational and emotional conditions and their flexible interpretation by the speaker. This did not develop into a fixed system of use as in other European languages for reasons that are as difficult (or impossible) to discover as the effect of the flap of a butterfly’s wings on the weather. Of course, the use of you is only potentially problematic. When the two participants in dialogue are in harmony, when it reinforces gaze and sharing; as in those lines from Shakespeare’s sonnets that end in thee: such as number 27, where the poet’s thoughts ‘Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee’, where the line itself is a journey (and I love to clearly enunciate each of the three syllables of ‘pilgrimage’). Or number 43, where Shakespeare plays with the idea of doubling, opposition, reflection and repetition (another of Prof. Locatelli’s interests): ‘All days are nights to see till I see thee, / And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me’. So here I end this essay, remembering again the years teaching with Angela Locatelli, hoping that, though it contains no great revelation, it may yet prove interesting. And, to attenuate any disappointment in the conclusions, let us not forget the importance (so suited to the essay) of the process of exploration, of coming to a partial understanding. In the words of Virginia Woolf (one of Angela Locatelli’s favourite authors): ‘To speak of knowledge is futile – all is experiment and adventure’. 17 Willhelm Franz, Die Sprache Shakespeares in Vers und Prosa unter Berücksichtigung des Amerikanischen entwicklungsgeschichtlich dargestellt (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 4 ed. 1939), p. 257; Barbara Strang, A History of English (London/New York: Methuen, 1939), p. 140. 18 Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898), §YOU 18.

Jean-Jacques Lecercle

Literature and Interpellation. Introduction to the Theory of Interpellation

1.

Introduction

I had the honour of taking part in nine of the ten yearly sessions of Angela Locatelli’s conference, ‘La conoscenza della letteratura/ The knowledge of literature’. An amazing achievement: I know no other example of an on-going conference that has lasted so long. That success, beyond the intellectual authority and organisational skills of Professor Locatelli, may be ascribed to the importance of the theme. What attracted me from the start was the ambiguity of the genitive. In its objective acceptation (literature is an object of knowledge) it pointed out an important but, from the structuralist period onwards, not strikingly original field of research. But it also had a subjective acceptation: literature not merely as an object, but as a subject of knowledge. I have attempted, in my nine contributions to the conference, to flesh out what was at the beginning merely the intuition that literature knows, that literature thinks. The question, of course, that immediately arises is: what is it that literature knows? Or again, may we go beyond the obvious answer that what it knows, being the art of language, is the workings of language? The answer I would like to rehearse in the essay is that, by providing a form of knowledge of language, different from but no less important than the knowledge produced by the science of language, it offers a knowledge of the process of subjectivation. The subjective knowledge of literature is a knowledge of subjectivation. And since I am a late follower of Althusser’s theory of ideology, which states that the process of subjectivation occurs through the operation of interpellation, I shall develop the idea that the subjective knowledge of literature is a knowledge of the workings of interpellation, which it stages and thematizes. And in order to do that I need to provide an introduction to the theory of interpellation.

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A primal scene

Althusser’s theory of ideology starts with a thought experiment which is the equivalent of a Freudian primal scene (he describes it in terms of a petit théâtre théorique). This is how it goes: I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all) or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).1

The other theses on ideology advanced in that essay are well-known: ideology is not a question of ideas but of actions, what Marxists intend under the concept of practice; ideology, therefore, has material existence in apparatuses, rituals and practices; ideology has no history (or rather, since specific ideologies obviously have a history, it is omni-historical); ideology is the representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. Since I am a belated follower of this theory of ideology, I believe that grosso modo it does account for the process of subjectivation, in other words the constitution of subjects, as placed by ideology, whereby they acquire what we call an identity. Althusser’s petit théâtre théorique has the power of conviction of a well constructed thought experiment, and the reader is supposed to think, ‘yes, that is indeed how it works’, to recognize the scene described as an effective everyday occurrence, which incidentally makes this description of the process of interpellation an example of interpellation, the reader being interpellated into acquiescence. Yet, a more careful reading of the text will show that there are problems with the scene. The English translators quite rightly keep the French term, interpellation, as a term of art. But they are clearly uneasy with the term, and immediately gloss it as ‘hailing’. There is a good reason for this: the term does exist in English, but with a different meaning – a minister may be interpellated by the parliamentary opposition. The term also has that meaning in French, but that is not what Althusser means by it in this context, as the term has another, more frequent meaning: it usually means an arrest, as in ‘la police a interpellé plusieurs suspects’. And this is clearly what Althusser intends here: an extension of the police, not the parliamentary, sense of the term (the policeman blows his whistle or verbally hails the passer by, who has probably broken some rule). As a result, 1 Louis Althusser, On Ideology (1971) (London : Verso, 2006), p. 48.

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the conception of the subject offered here is a pessimistic one: the subject is subjected to ideology. For the term ‘subject’, in English as in French (but not in German) is itself the site of what Etienne Balibar calls an ‘epochal pun’: a subject is either assujetti, subjected to authority (the king reigns over his subjects) or an autonomous subject, a centre of consciousness, responsibility and agency. Althusser has obviously decided that only the first meaning was the relevant one, that the autonomy or freedom of the philosophical or moral subject was an ideological illusion, thus making his theory open to the objection of determinism: a subject that is assujetti is essentially a helpless subject. In his critical reading of the Althusserian primal scene, Lucien Sève remarks that the passer by hailed by the policeman, while he turns round, having duly recognised that the interpellation is addressed to him, may well react by calling the policeman a flic, a pig – in other words, he may well react to the interpellation by a form of counterinterpellation. Which suggests that, in the primal scene of interpellation, more than one subject is produced: the hailed passer-by is no longer an individual, but a subject, but neither is the policeman, who is interpellated at his place as the agent of authority, duly authorised to blow his whistle and interpellate the suspect. I have tried to develop this intuition in my latest book.2 The centre of my post-Althusserian theory of subjectivation is in the statement: there is no interpellation that does not provoke, at least virtually, a counter-interpellation. But since this is too abstract, I shall consider a scene of interpellation, which has the advantage of being real, rather than a philosophical thought experiment.

3.

Marshall Kitchener

In the summer of 1914, the Secretary for War, Field-Marshall Kitchener, had to recruit hundreds of thousands of soldiers, to compensate for the small numbers of the regular British army, in anticipation of what he foresaw would be a protracted war on land, and not, as most of his colleagues in the cabinet believed, a short war in which British naval superiority would be the decisive factor. The appeal took the form of a poster, which his biographer describes thus: On 7 August 1914 Kitchener issued his first appeal for one hundred thousand volunteers; and the whole country was soon placarded with posters depicting Kitchener in the character of Big Brother, with a Field-Marshal’s cap, hypnotic eyes, bristling moustache, pointing finger, and the legend, ‘Your Country Needs YOU’.3

2 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, De l’interpellation (Paris: Amsterdam, 2019). 3 Philip Magnus, Kitchener, Portrait of an Imperialist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 345.

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The poster, which was extremely successful, as volunteers flowed in at a rate which strained the administrative machine almost to breaking-point, is justly famous. When Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army is posing for a recruiting poster for the Home Guard, he immediately takes up the same pose as Kitchener and exclaims: ‘The Home Guard needs YOU!’ My initial question, therefore, is: since this poster is obviously so powerful (Magnus’s allusion to Big Brother is relevant), how does it work, and where does such power lie? And the obvious answer is that it lies in the combination of the slogan and the image, a combination powerful enough to encourage vast numbers of its spectators to do the right thing and enrol. The term ‘slogan’ is apt. This is no mere assertion but a concealed or indirect imperative (‘Volunteer!’): what counts is not the information the declarative sentence conveys but the illocutionary force it communicates. We are reminded of plateau n°4 of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, where they suggest, contra the linguistic doxa, that the primitive type of utterance is not the assertion but what they call the order-word (mot d’ordre), the grammatical imperative or the political slogan.4 Our sentence is a direct call for action and the reader is left in no doubt as to where his duty lies. But the sentence is also powerful, more so than if it were expressed in the imperative, because of its sheer simplicity, as its grammatical structure is the basic structure of assertion, subjectverb-complement. You do not jog your readers into action, you do not capture their emotions with a Henry James sentence (or rather, not the same readers and not the same emotions). In our case the simplicity of the sentence conveys a powerful illocutionary force through the repetition of the grammatical subject in the object (in both cases a second person pronoun: ‘your’/‘you’): this gives the sentence its rhythm and creates a strong focus on the last word, which is also the climax of the sentence, the emphatic ‘you’ that directly addresses the reader, that hails or interpellates him. So our slogan fulfils at least two functions of language in the celebrated list proposed by Jakobson: not so much the referential function, centred on the ‘context’, that is the referent, since it is not the real object of our sentence to convey information, but the conative function, centred on the addressee, and the poetic function, centred on the message (we remember that Jakobson’s cardinal example of the poetic function was Eisenhower’s electoral slogan, ‘I like Ike!’, which is less remarkable for its intellectual brilliance than for its clever use of phonetic repetition).5 It is this combination of the conative and the poetic that 4 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 75 sqq. 5 Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Style in Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 353–8.

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makes the slogan successful: the conative on its own would be merely threatening, while the poetic on its own would not necessarily encourage action. Lastly, the power of the slogan is due to its immediacy, conveyed by the manner in which the typography represents the (fictitious) oral character of the injunction: your country needs YOU, in blatantly capital letters (the three letters are not only enormous, compared to the rest of the slogan, they are also printed in a different colour), which means that the slogan on the poster does not even need the exclamation mark that normally would end a sentence of that type. As a result, our slogan is a perfect example of an order-word, the illocutionary force of which, embodied in the conative and poetic functions of language, produces an effect on the spectator through what we may call a force of address. Subjectivation through interpellation addresses the reader, it imposes an address on him (not a postal address but a form of identity), as a result of which the civilian passer-by will eventually find himself in the dress of a soldier (‘address’ and ‘dress’ have the same etymology). Such is the cleverness of the poster (and in French, ‘adresse’ also means a form of skill, rendered in English as ‘dexterity’). I have used the term ‘spectator’, in alternation with the term ‘reader’. Our slogan does not have only, or even primarily, readers, or an audience, but spectators, as its power is due to the inseparable combination of word and image and the immediacy of its effect is due, to a considerable extent, to its visual power, already present in the typographical manipulation of the pronoun of address. The ‘pointing finger’ noted by Magnus is the visual equivalent of the indirect imperative conveyed by the ‘you’, next to which it is placed on the poster, and we are reminded that the term ‘deictic’, which in linguistics designates demonstrative pronouns like ‘this’ and ‘that’, comes from a Greek verb meaning ‘to point out’ – what we have here is a visual form of deixis, a potentially threatening gesture that conveys the same force of address as the prominent pronoun. The term ‘address’ is particularly apt here, and Magnus is right to note the portrait’s ‘hypnotic eyes’: those eyes look straight into the spectator’s eyes, and together with the pointing finger, seen in perspective, like Parmigianino’s hand in his famous self-portrait, and therefore with a larger than life appearance, they ‘fix’ the spectator, as the French language has it, which means that they not only stare at him (and we have to use the masculine form of the pronoun, as the addressee of a recruitment poster is necessarily male) but stare him into submission, in other words assign a place to him– a physical place as he who stands in front of the poster, gaping, in the line of the pointing finger, and a metaphorical place as he who shall understand the meaning of the slogan and act upon it. Magnus’s description notes the ‘bristling moustache’, and to be sure there is a strong physical presence of the addressor in the poster: the force of address is conveyed through the senses, so that we might be inclined to talk not only of an illocutionary force, communicated by the slogan, but also of an invisionary force,

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conveyed by the picture, producing in the spectator an effect that is of the order of an affect (the spectator is affected by the poster, and that affection produces an affect of shame – why have I not volunteered yet? – and of enthusiasm – and they did, as Magnus reminds us, volunteer in droves). But the picture is in fact hardly a portrait, although the original is readily recognizable, and duly recognized, Kitchener’s popularity at the time being considerable: the bodily presence of the subject, the recently appointed Secretary for War, Field-Marshall Kitchener, is not at all due to the precision of the likeness. On the contrary, the poster, as is only natural, is highly stylised. A comparison with a photograph, where the subject is facing the camera, shows that the actual eyes are shifty, the actual moustache prominent but ragged – it does not have the almost geometrical perfection of the moustache on the poster, and we are reminded of the famous wart on posters of Chairman Mao, which was supposed to mean that the beloved leader did not wish his noble features to be beautified, and therefore did not encourage any personality cult – whereas of course it was a symptom of that very cult. The stylised portrait places its subject on another plane than the plane of our sordid everyday life (in other words, the force of address conveyed by the poster does not only address the addressee but also the addressor – it ‘fixes’ his place), it gives him due authority, and makes recognition (of the addressor, of the addressee: he it is who is talking to me–I am the one he is talking to) not only easier but imperative. What I am suggesting is that the portrait turns the Field-Marshall into a religious figure: the pointing finger is the pointing figure of God the Father in an Annunciation scene, when he points at the Virgin Mary, as the dove of the Holy Spirit speeds towards her ear and the Angel is intent on announcing the news. And there is an Angel in this secular Annunciation, although he is almost invisible: you have to look carefully at the detail of the poster to realize that under the enormous arm of the Field-Marshall pointing at YOU, a few discrete stylised letters inscribe the name of the author of the poster, Alfred Leete, a reluctant Angel, not wishing to obtrude, but nevertheless present through his signature. Let me rehearse the movement of my argument. The poster is powerful, and has been so successful, because it produces an effect on the reader which is of the order of an affect. This it does by communicating a force of address that is both linguistic and visual, both an illocutionary and an invisionary force (the latter adjective is my invention, the former originates in Austin’s theory of the performative).6 The illocutionary force is conveyed by a mixture of the conative and poetic functions of language, the invisionary by a mixture of stylisation and the manipulation of perspective. And the result is that the poster assigns their place to three figures, the authoritative Big Brother figure that convokes the reader/ 6 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

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spectator and turns him into a potential recruit, the recruited spectator that conforms to this assignation, and the modest but nevertheless present creator of the poster. We may note that all the elements of Althusser’s primal scene of interpellation are present in the poster: the individual that the reader/spectator gaping at the poster was, is now hopefully and in innumerable cases actually, transformed into a subject in both senses of a subjected individual (the new recruit is subjected to military discipline and makes a potential sacrifice of his life) and a subjective individual (by fulfilling the expectations of society, he will become a worthy member of it, wearing a uniform and as such escaping the white feather that eager young ladies were keen on distributing to men of suitable age who had not yet volunteered). And this subjection cum subjectivation is effected by accepting the authority of a quasi-religious father or Big Brother figure that from the dizzy height of the poster interpellates YOU, as in Althusser’s scene the policeman hails the passer-by.

4.

Theses, and a poem

At this stage, I may propose four theses that provide a sketch of the theory of interpellation. Thesis one: interpellation is the process whereby each of us is transformed from a mere individual into a subject, in both senses of the term: a subjected subject assigned a specific place in the structure of society, and a subjective subject endowed with responsibility and agency, and as such able to counterinterpellate the society that interpellates her at her place (the motto is indeed: no interpellation without counter-interpellation). Thesis two: the medium of interpellation is the force of address which is communicated in the process. We have so far encountered two forms of such force, the linguistic and the visual. The fact that it has at least two forms, involving two senses (vision and hearing) suggests that such force is material, the materiality of sensation as much as the materiality of institutions, rituals and practices Thesis three: since thesis two has suggested a strong link between address and ideology, I suggest (i) that the force of address which communicates the interpellation materialises the link (in the etymological sense of re-ligio) that holds society together, and (ii) that the concept that names such link is ideology. Thesis four: in this account of the nexus interpellation-address-ideology, it soon becomes apparent that language plays a central part. Not only is there a grammar of interpellation (and in a sense the visual grammar of interpellation, that is the structure of the invisionary force, is derived from its linguistic grammar), but the very process of interpellation through ideology is embodied,

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in its originary form, in the way a subject of enunciation is assigned a place by the structure of language and yet creatively counter-interpellates the language that interpellates her. This is for me the most important aspect of Althusser’s theory of ideology, an aspect he never developed himself, as he wasn’t interested in language as such (he never goes beyond the level of discourse). The prime example of the dialectics of interpellation and counter-interpellation, which operates through all the senses, is the dialectics of system and style. In order to pass from the status of etymological infant to that of speaker of a language, I must adapt to a system that is anterior and exterior to me–I must make mine the accumulated result of the linguistic practices of prior generations, as sedimented in a grammatical and lexical system. I must adapt to the common parlance and adopt it as my own. But having done that, which is the object of a learning process, I become a full-fledged speaker of the language, which means I am able in turn to adapt the system to my expressive needs – this is what we know as style, be it the style of a group, a class, a generation or the inimitable style of the individual speaker. I can best formulate the stages of this dialectic in French. First stage, la langue parle. Language speaks, the system is a treasury (to quote Saussure’s term) of accumulated meanings, together with a method of assembling them in an indefinite number of new combinations. It fixes the limits of the sayable. Second stage, la langue me parle. The system speaks through me, it makes me its mouthpiece, it imposes upon me the words and constructions I may use to express myself, thereby imposing constraints on my expression. One is reminded of Barthes’s celebrated provocation, la langue est fasciste. Whereby he meant not that the system prevents us from saying what we wish to say, through censorship, but that it imposes its meanings on us. Third stage, la langue me parle again, but in another sense. The system speaks not through me but to me. It addresses me, whereby giving me an address as a speaker, in other words an identity. This is the crucial moment: I am interpellated, at my place, as a competent speaker of the language, I have appropriated the system, I have made it mine by conforming to what Judith Butler calls its enabling constraints. I can therefore pass to the last stage, the stage of style, when je parle la langue, I speak language, I counter-interpellate the system that has interpellated me, I can make it say exactly what I want it to say, if necessary by distorting it. Here, we may remember that Deleuze defines style as the practice of a-grammaticality – style expresses the capacity of the speaker to speak with the system but also against it. And this is, of course, what literature, the art of language, is about. This is where the subjective knowledge of literature is situated: in the dialectics of system and style, of interpellation and counter-interpellation. A simple example will make this clear, a famous line from one of Housman’s Shropshire lad poems:

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Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? 7

The phrase ‘blue remembered hills’ has made its mark on the language, precisely because it does not conform to the rules of the system, but flouts or exploits them, thereby making creative sense – for such is the essence of the counterinterpellation that style practises. The system of the English language has rules that govern the sequence of attributive adjectives, such as subjective precedes objective (‘a lovely green hill’) or unstable precedes stable (‘an old French car’). Housman’s phrase is ungrammatical in two ways. First, ‘remembered’ is a subjective adjective, and as such it ought to precede ‘blue’, an objective adjective, and not follow it. On the face of it, this might be a form of the trope of hypallage, the deliberate displacement of adjectives, as in this line from the Aeneid, ‘ibant obscuri sola sub nocte’, ‘dark they went in the solitary night’. But there is more to it than this, as not only the semantics of the language, but also its syntax, are flouted. ‘Remembered’, a past participle rather than a proper adjective, cannot be used as an attributive adjective on its own, but only if preceded by an adverb, as in ‘fondly remembered hills’. Here it is indeed preceded by another word, but ‘blue’ is not an adverb. In other words, ‘blue’, is used here as an adverb, against the grain of the system. ‘Those fondly remembered blue hills’ would be a perfectly grammatical, but utterly banal, phrase. ‘Those blue remembered hills’ immediately attract the reader’s attention, because of its very a-grammaticality. It is agrammatical but immediately intelligible and makes better sense than the grammatical version – the syntactic equivalent of a fresh metaphor. In the equivalent of a Gricean calculus of implicatures, the reader may retrace the generative history of the phrase: ‘I remember those hills as blue’, ‘I remember them blue’, ‘those blue remembered hills’. The last step takes us beyond the limits of the system, into style. We must note that the process of interpellation works at two levels. The poet counter-interpellates the system of language that constrains his expressive possibilities. But is so doing, the poet interpellates the reader, by forcing her to stop for a moment in her reading, to notice the a-grammaticality of the phrase, to engage in a calculus of meaning, beyond the limits of the system. That interpellation, however, is not of the subjecting, but of the enabling kind: it requires not a passive but an intelligent reader, a reader whose own linguistic creativity is appealed to. That reader becomes a co–creator by indulging in interpretation. In other words, the enabling interpellation by the poet incites the reader to counterinterpellate, both the system that has been flouted for her enjoyment, but also the 7 A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896) (London: The Richards Press, 1943), p. 57.

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poet that has flouted the system. In other words, such enabling interpellation is an inter-pellation in the etymological sense, it establishes a dialogue between poet and reader, the dialogue of intelligent reading and interpretation. Here I think we have a criterion to distinguish literature from what is known as paraliterature. I shall pursue this idea by looking at two texts.

5.

Two incipits EMMA WOODHOUSE, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable house and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence, and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.8 The slim, fair girl came aboard alone, a mink coat draped around her shoulders with orchids on the lapel.9

The first incipit speaks for itself. The second is the opening line of a Mills and Boon romance, published in 1973, chosen because it is typical of a now outdated genre. Surprise, surprise, ‘the slim, fair girl’ marries the rich and handsome hero at the end of the novel and the only unexpected episode takes place towards the end, on the slopes of Vesuvius, when the heroine is on the point of giving in to his amorous advances – horribile dictu, since they are not yet married. Fortunately, at the very last moment, an earthquake saves her virtue. My aim is to study the relationship those opening sentences, and the novels that follow them, establish with their readers. And my answer to this question is predictable: they do so by way of the dialectics of interpellation and counterinterpellation. The initial noun phrase of the Mills and Boon romance, ‘the fair, slim girl’, introduces the heroine of the novel. But it doesn’t name her (she is named only at the end of a long paragraph). What we have is not a name but an incipient definite description. Grammar tells us that the definite article has a generic and a specific value. In our case, the article has its specific value: not one half of the human species, but this girl. According to Antoine Culioli’s version of enunciation linguistics, the specific value of the article makes it anaphoric, a form of pinpointing of an already extracted element of the set of girls (pinpointing normally follows extraction: ‘There is a crocodile on my balcony. The crocodile is exercising its jaws’). But the anaphora may be contextual (as in the example I have just given) or it may be situational (one talks in any context of the sun and the moon, as there 8 Jane Austen, Emma (1816) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 17. 9 Violet Winspear, Forbidden Rapture (London: Mills & Boon, 1973), p. 5. Winspear (1928–1989) is the author of seventy Mills and Boon romances. She created a furore by stating that she chose her heroes as being ‘capable of rape’.

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is only one of each). What is interesting in our sentence is that the anaphora is a false one. Since those are the very first words in the novel, ‘the girl’ cannot have already been extracted from the set of girls, that is introduced, which makes the contextual anaphora situational: this is not a singular girl but the archetypical girl, the heroine of the oldest story in the world, the erotic story, which the English, with their customary wit, summarize as ‘boy meets girl’. And you have noticed, of course, the male chauvinist patronizing: the girl is not a woman, not even a young woman, she is the girl. The rest of the sentence is a development of the archetype. The heroine is going on a cruise (‘aboard’), like us, the readers, since we are already on the boat (‘came’). She fulfils all the requisites of the heroine of an erotic story: she is single (‘alone’), pretty (fair and slim) and rich (she is wearing a mink coat with orchids on her lapel – not one orchid but a profusion of orchids). All this, which is pretty obvious, is made more so if we play the game of connotative antonyms. This is the beginning of the romance I shall ask Mills and Boon to publish: ‘The fat swarthy middle-aged woman climbed on to the bus followed by her six children. Her dirty raincoat had seen better days and her hair was in curlers’. In the rest of the novel, the narrative programme implied in this description of the heroine is duly fulfilled (the potential hitch on the slopes of Vesuvius is only one of the obligatory stages in this progress). The reader of our romance is duly transported towards the inevitable end, she is no flâneuse but a tourist, in a bus, on a guided tour, enjoying her escapist entertainment. But exactly what kind of reader does this involve? And what kind of relationship between author and reader? In this case, the answer is that we have a clear example of the interpellation of a subjected reader, un lecteur assujetti. There is a place in the textual structure which each and every empirical reader must fill, for her escapist pleasure. She is transported, not with joy or enthusiasm, but from A to B, from the coming aboard the cruise ship to the marriage ceremony. But she is not the only Greimassian actor to be interpellated at an actantial place by the text: so is the empirical author, Violet Winspear, who occupies the place of she who must distil the dominant ideology into the ready-made plot. The pleasure generated by the reading of such a text (and pleasure there is, otherwise the novel wouldn’t sell by tens of thousands) is the pleasure of recognition. As reader, I find myself in a world that is only too familiar – I recognize this world, in its very unreality; I have always already known its inhabitants (especially if my life is empirically closer to the old woman boarding the bus that to the heroine of the novel); the clichés that make up its language are always already my clichés, they are part of our national common sense. In reading Forbidden Rapture, I am a tourist (and the tourist never discovers anything new: he recognizes the Eiffel Tower as he has always already known it – all he needs and wants to do is leave a photographic trail of his transportation). The situation is vastly different if we turn to the incipit of Emma.

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I have always been struck by the brutality of this first sentence, and by the consequent brutality of the interpellations it practises – of the reader as well as of the main character. Unlike the heroine of Forbidden Rapture, Emma is interpellated with all the characteristics of a person, and the incipit is the literary equivalent of a passport application form. She has both a family and a Christian name, printed in capital letters (thus conforming in anticipation to the constraints of the application form). Her age (she is twenty) is mentioned, together with her social status (she is rich and lives in a comfortable home, so she belongs to the upper classes, and has no need to indicate a profession or avocation). Her physical appearance is duly mentioned: not perhaps the colour of her eyes, but her physical beauty – she may not be slim and fair, but she is handsome. And, going beyond the passport form, her moral qualities are celebrated: she is clever (an ambiguous term, since she might be ‘too clever by half ’, which is indeed an apposite description of her) and endowed with a happy disposition. All those characteristics, physical, moral and social, all those rubrics of the application form are the vectors of the interpellation of the character, whose place in this fictional world is thus fixed by the author, and who will have to conform to her placement by a tyrannical author, who takes full advantage of her position as creator and sole master of Emma’s world. Emma is my creature, the incipit seems to say, and I can do whatever I wish with her. Such fictional poiesis is made possible by a general characteristic of language, the apodicticity of assertion (which is shown a contrario by the well-known paradoxical statement: the cat is on the mat but I don’t believe it is). And this apodicticity, what I have called the brutality of the opening sentence, does not interpellate only the character who is assigned a place, but also the reader, who, in order to enter the fictional world of the novel, has to accept the author’s pronouncement (should I say: pronunciamento, the author’s narratorial coup) and to take Emma as what the author has decided she is. The problem is that the account I have just given is a damning indictment of the novel. What I am describing is merely a more acceptable version of a Mills & Boon romance, a banal story of boy meets girl, written by an author whom Miss Mitford, her less successful competitor, called ‘a husband hunting butterfly’, and who duly imposes a Mills & Boon heroine on a hapless reader: she is handsome, clever and rich and, as a consequence, the novel will end on a splendid marriage, and Emma will be mistress of Donwell Abbey, the seat of the Knightleys. But have I read the incipit with due care? The truth is that I have not. I have read my Mills & Boon clichés into it, not paid sufficient attention to the wording of this first sentence. For the sentence, which begins apodictically with positive characterisation (she is handsome, clever and rich) ends on two negative words, ‘distress’ and ‘vex’, even if they are themselves under negation (‘very little’) – a negation that smacks of Freudian denial. Even more so as, in the very centre of

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the sentence, when, after a comma, the sentence moves from grammatical subject to predicate, the main verb, ‘unite’, falls under a modal verb (‘seems’), which destroys the apodicticity of the whole statement. The apodictic imposition of the character’s main characteristics, her interpellation at a definite place, is mere appearance, and those ‘blessings of existence’ jut asserted are mere semblance. In other words, the author imposes her decisions on both character and reader and, in the same sentence, proclaims the unreliability of the truths just affirmed. We find ourselves in the same situation as with the celebrated incipit to Pride and Prejudice (‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’): an apodictic statement of truth turns out to be the wishful thinking of a foolish woman, Mrs Bennet, who has five unmarried daughters and an estate entailed in the male line. And the reversal is operated by forcing the reader, on her second reading, to take the modal auxiliary ‘must’, against the grain of grammar, in its deontic, not its epistemic acceptation: what was, according to grammar, a probability (it is highly likely that a single man with a good fortune should need a wife), is now an obligation: the said young man must marry one of Mrs Bennet’s daughters (he duly does at the end of the novel). Again, a world, with its maxims of common sense, is created by the author’s poetic fiat, only to be reduced, in the same sentence, to mere semblance – not an apodictic truth but a singular point of view which, by adhering to the proffered common sense but distorting it in order to satisfy its own emotional expectations – this is called wishful thinking, subtly criticizes it. I take this to be an encouragement, on the part of the author, to the counterinterpellation of the text by the reader. What I have called the author’s tyranny is mere provocation. Unlike the author of a Mills & Boon romance, Jane Austen – we may call this her notorious irony – does not wish to impose a world on a hapless reader: she feigns to call into existence such a reader in order to provoke the counter-interpellation of her text by an active reader. In Northanger Abbey, her first effort, this incitement to freedom was still only an appearance: the reader’s reaction was programmed by the explicit inversion of pastiche, and she must (in the deontic sense) counter-interpellate along the guidelines provided by the text. By the time we reach Pride and Prejudice or Emma, the modal takes on its epistemic sense: counter-interpellation is encouraged, but its exact form is left to the appreciation of each single reader. Which suggests there are two levels of counter-interpellation: on the one hand, it is still, up to a point, programmed by the text, but on the other hand, it may go beyond the programme and counterinterpellate, with, and possibly against, the text and its author. Emma provides a good example of this general Austenian practice, in that it contains a kind of parable, a metaleptic representation of interpellation by plot in

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the novel, staging the necessity of counter-interpellating such interpellation. I am alluding to the episode of the charade. Emma has persuaded herself that Mr Elton, the young vicar, is in love with Harriet Smith, her friend and protégée. He, as we learn later, has his eyes on Emma, as a worthy prize on his career path. As part of his courtship of Emma, which Emma believes is his courtship of Harriet, he produces a charade: To Miss – CHARADE My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings, Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease. Another view of man, my second brings, Behold him there, the monarch of the seas! But, ah! united, what reverse we have! Man’s boasted power and freedom, all are flown; Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave, And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone. Thy ready wit the word will soon supply, May its approval beam in that soft eye!10

The pretext for the charade is that Harriet keeps a riddle book. Emma has asked Mr Elton to write a charade for it: she wishes to encourage his courtship of Harriet and of course encourages his courtship of herself – the process of general misunderstanding is well engaged. And courtship (‘court’ plus ‘ship’) is of course the content of the riddle, which works at two levels, the immediate level of guessing the right word (in the first stanza), and the ultimate level of being itself an act of courtship, as the second stanza turns out to be an example of amour courtois, and as in the closing couplet the author is making ardent love to the addressee (except that the message is sent to the wrong address). The charade, therefore, is an exercise in interpellation: it is a declaration, addressed, in terms that are barely cryptic (as the riddle is meant to be deciphered with ease) to a definite addressee, thus placing both addressor and addressee in a structure of amorous exchange. And, on a superficial level, this address, in all the senses of the term (a declaration, sent to a postal address, composed with undoubted skill, or adresse in French),11 is successful. Harriet, who is not the addressee, fails to decipher the riddle: she tries ‘woman’, ‘trident’, ‘mermaid’, ‘shark’ – in other words, she has no idea of the solution. This is an example of class snobbery on the part of the author: it takes a young lady who is clever and

10 Austen, Emma, p. 97. 11 See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, De l’interpellation (Paris: Amsterdam), 2019.

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rich, in her comfortable home, to understand a charade, as a charade is a socially marked game and its successful deciphering one of the accomplishments a wellbred young lady is deemed to possess. And indeed, Emma, who is the intended addressee, has no problem with the riddle. But at the deeper, which is the real level, the interpellation fails, as Emma understands the charade but fails to understand its real content, a blindness caused by prejudice or preconception which turns the charade into a game of errors. So we have the representation of a process of interpellation, on two levels (a semantic interpellation: what does the riddle mean? And a pragmatic interpellation: who is the addressee?) which programs its own counter-interpellation, as the reader has a keener awareness than Harriet, who fails on both counts, and than Emma, who fails on the second, pragmatic, count. In other words, the reader is made to resist Emma’s interpretation of the situation. But the programmed counter-interpellation also meets with failure, in the guise of a non-programmed counter-interpellation, in that the reader cannot be unaware of the social snobbery involved in the whole game, the only victim of which is poor Harriet. The programmed counter-interpellation (which is a form of indirect interpellation) is explicitly inscribed in the text in the form of a clue, as in a detective story, when Emma rightly understands that the phrase in the last couplet, ‘thy ready wit’ can hardly apply to Harriet, but instead of revising her interpretation of the situation, she finds a way of comforting it by ascribing what would be a blatant exaggeration, did it refer to Harriet, to the idolatry of the tender passion. I think we may take this game of interpellation and counter-interpellation as emblematic of the whole novel. In fact, what I have called the programmed counter-interpellation seems to be the very theme of the novel. The reader is placed in the same position as Emma, whose knowledge of this fictional world, with its limitations, we share. For instance, we know nothing more than Emma about the relationship between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, and we are as surprised as she is when we learn the truth. But there is a difference: we are encouraged to distance ourselves from Emma’s point of view (in other words, to counter-interpellate the ascribed position), as we are made aware of Mr Knightley’s superior understanding (but so is Emma, even if she wilfully refuses to acknowledge it). So, unlike Emma, we soon suspect that Mr Elton is not interested in Harriet Smith but in Emma, even if, like Emma, we have to wait for the declaration in the carriage, as they are coming back from a party, to be sure. In other words, we are, as readers, less benighted Emmas, and we feel duly superior to the characters, many of whose misconceptions we temporarily share. We are made to counterinterpellate the subjective position we have to assume as readers of the novel, but such counter-interpellation has limited scope: we both distance ourselves from Emma and identify with her, in a novel made up of misunderstandings. And it is

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this idea that human relationships, especially linguistic relationships, are based on misunderstanding as much as on information and cooperation that allows the novel to make sense outside its historical conjuncture (this is what Marx would have called ‘the eternal charm’ of Jane Austen). This is a constant theme in her novels, witness this exclamation of Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, who is endlessly deceived, in her naivety, by such lack of directness and semantic transparency: ‘But why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood ?’.12 Such programmed, and limited, counter-interpellation, however, allows us to go further. There is a contamination of counter-interpellation, as the very idea of a programmed counter-interpellation suffers from a form of performative contradiction: not ‘I order you to disobey’, but ‘I force you to be free’. And free the reader becomes at last, free to counter-interpellate the text beyond what is programmed by the structure. A so far interpellated reader becomes an active critic of the text, helped of course by the change in historical conjuncture between the time of writing and the time of reading. In spite of its eternal charm, the novel is dated, and what I have called its social snobbery is no longer common sense for us – we are no longer taken in by the three mile radius of Jane Austen’s fictional world, especially if said radius is not taken as a geographical but as a social border. What is apparently a lexical detail will make this clear. Let us read again the incipit, and wonder why Emma’s beauty, which is not in doubt (after all, she is the heroine) is described as ‘handsome’. Why not ‘fair’, like the slim girl in Forbidden Rapture, why not ‘pretty’ or ‘lovely’? As we read the novel, we realize that the term is chosen advisedly, that the description is consistent, and correlated with the social standing of the characters. Thus, where Emma is handsome and elegant, Harriet Smith, who is only ‘the daughter of somebody’, in other words a social nobody, is merely ‘pretty’, and Mr Knightley does not share Emma’s enthusiasm for her protégée: ‘I cannot rate her beauty as you do, but she is a pretty little creature’.13 The difference between ‘handsome’ and ‘pretty’ is even made explicit in a conversation between Mrs Weston, who used to be Emma’s governess, and Mr Knightley. He answers her warm praise of Emma’s beauty with: ‘Oh! You would rather talk of her person than of her mind, would you? Very well: I shall not attempt to deny Emma’s being pretty’. To which she retorts: ‘Pretty! Say beautiful rather. Can you imagine anything nearer perfect beauty than Emma altogether – face and figure?’.14 Mr Knightley’s position is that Emma is ‘pretty’ if you take sole 12 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 176–7. 13 Austen, Emma, p. 85. 14 Austen, Emma, p. 67.

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account of her physical appearance and neglect her mind, but that taken as a whole, body and mind, Emma is ‘handsome’, and he puts an end to the conversation by saying: ‘considering how handsome she is…’.15 And here the readers that we are suspect that behind this contrast between physical and moral beauty, there is an aspect of class: the ‘daughter of somebody’ can only be ‘pretty’; if you wish to reach the heights of handsomeness, where physical beauty is associated with elegance and the cultivation of a mind, you must belong to the upper classes. And such class snobbery cannot be the privilege of the characters: it is part of the values the text wishes to share with its readers, but contemporary readers will refuse such complicity and counter-interpellate this class interpellation.

6.

Conclusion

This post-Althusserian theory of subjectivation through interpellation (as summarised in the formula: no interpellation without counter-interpellation) allows me three types of intervention, in concentric circles. First, it allows me to formulate a theory of literature as interlocution, of the literary text as a structure organising around itself a number of subjective positions (author, reader or character). This amounts to a theory of interpretation, which I developed in my book, Interpretation as Pragmatics.16 Interpretation is the positive counter-interpellation of the text by its interpellated reader, as I tried to show in the case of Emma. And the quality of incited counter-interpellation is what distinguishes literature proper – the danger being that what is offered here could be a formalist theory of literature, of the literary text as form, without reference to any content. One way of avoiding this lies in the dialectic of recognition (the escapist pleasure offered by para-literature) versus the cognition given by true literature. But this supposes a widening of the circle of intervention. The second circle involves a theory not only of literature, but of language, as captured in the dialectics of system and style. This is the local form of the general dialectic of interpellation and counter-interpellation: it accounts for the emergence of the subject as speaker. Saussure’s notorious dichotomy of langue and parole, on which he founded the science of language, is no longer treated as the contrast between structure and actualisation of the structure in performance, but as a dialectic contradiction: no style without a grammatical system and no system without style, or again, the speaker is interpellated at her place by the system, but the constraints the system imposes are enabling constraints, that enable the speaker in turn to counter-interpellate the system. And this is the first type of 15 Austen, Emma, p. 68. 16 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics (London: Macmillan, 1999).

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knowledge literature proper offers: a knowledge of the workings of language as subjectivating practice. But, as I said, the dialectic of system and style is local. Hence the third concentric circle. The third circle enables us to construct an anthropology. The first step takes the dialectic beyond language, into interpellation through various senses: in the case of the Kitchener poster, visual interpellation (with consequent counterinterpellation). Ideology, which is what the dialectic is about, captures subjects by way of the senses, it captures bodies, through what the French language calls, in a legal turn of phrase, une prise par corps. Such an anthropology may be found in the works of the French philosopher Lucien Sève. It is a development of Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach (‘The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’),17 and goes by way of the five Marxian concepts of Tätigkeit (activity, or practice), Vermittlung (mediation , or means of labour – moyens de travail – and communication), Vergegenstandlichung (objectivation), Aneignung (appropriation) and Entfremdung (alienation).18 Thus, language is a form of practice (a materiel, social and historical practice); it is a means of mediation between men and the world in which they live, it allows them, as tools do, to interact with it; the practice is objectivised and cumulative, generation after generation (the result of such a process is what we call a natural language, like English); it has to be appropriated by each new speaker, being exterior (objectivised) and anterior (cumulative) to her; lastly, in class societies, language is not only a means of appropriating the world around us but also a source of alienation, as not all interpellation is enabling. My contention is that this process, which is the process of subjectivation by ideology, is the third type of knowledge, let us call this a knowledge of ‘life’, that literature provides.

17 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), p. 652. 18 Lucien Sève, “L’homme”? (Paris: La Dispute, 2008).

Pirjo Lyytikäinen

Interpretation and Emotion Effects in Literature: Reading Contemporary Experimental Poetry

It is normally assumed and experienced that literature has an emotional impact on us. In classical poetics, to move (movere) was one of the functions imposed on literature, essentially linked with its moral function (docere) and enhanced by the function to delight (delectare). I claim that despite the changes in the ways in which contemporary literature moves us – moving suggests ethical and ideological engagements – this formula can still guide us in the interpretation. To consider how a literary text moves us, informs and aesthetically satisfies are essential to understanding it. An excellent example of this is Angela Locatelli’s article “The Moral and the Fable”,1 which has inspired the following essay. In my essay, I consider how contemporary poetry moves us, by moving teaches and, despite provoking “ugly feelings” also delights us. I understand being moved as being innerly and bodily affected by a text and not only in a positive, enhancing sense. Considering negative emotions and emotion effects is also highly relevant to exploring the emotional impact of texts. In contemporary literature especially, focusing on feelings of aversion provoked by the text, is necessary to understanding how the text works: it has been claimed that the key to contemporary poetics and aesthetics is disgust rather than beauty.2 Thus, interpreting literature essentially involves considering affective sensemaking: finding out how the text moves us. It is true that modern(ist) literature challenges the prescriptions and supposed harmonies presupposed by the classicist poetics and rhetoric but the interpretation of literary works still presupposes the disentangling of the relationship among the above-mentioned three functions of literature. Even the kind of modernism practising “coldness” and

1 Angela Locatelli, ‘The Moral and the Fable: A Fluid Relationship in Artistic Literature’, in Values of Literature, ed. by Hanna Meretoja, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen and Kristina Malmio (Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2015), pp. 47–62. 2 Cf. Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Emotion, transl. by Howard Eiland (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 124–128.

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“immorality” moves us emotionally and ethically.3 To focus on the affective is, in a certain way, a return to the basics, because the attitudes of modernism also turned literary criticism and scholarship away from emotions and movere and it is all the more important if we accept, as I claim we should, the tenets of contemporary ethical “sentimentalism”, based on multidisciplinary studies and empirical findings in such fields as the neurosciences, biology and psychology. According to this school, emotions regulate our moral judgments or intuitions and rational judgments come – if they do – only afterwards.4 My approach is based on the study of emotion effects that sees all elements of a literary text to be positively or negatively “valenced” or value-laden.5 Utilizing words or phrases that in the language or cultural context carry affective power is the basis of the networks of affective value that are formed in the text. The combinations created in the text manipulate what we already know or feel about language and the world around us. The emerging emotion effects guide the interpretation and an analysis of how these effects are produced allows us to understand more clearly how literature works. In my essay, I focus on the affective resources of experimental poetry via a case study of a much praised, award-winning Finnish work, Harry Salmenniemi’s Texas, sakset (Helsinki: Otava, 2010). Although clearly a work of poetry, Salmenniemi’s text is not a collection of poetry: it is rather a large, complicated textual collage where the parts make sense only within the whole. It flows forward in an apparently chaotic and multiform way, and only eventually do the connections between lines, pages and other elements begin to appear. The work’s more than 150 pages are unnumbered so that it is not possible to refer to specific pages. Moreover, within the whole, the unit to be considered is usually the spread, not the page. The work is exemplary in showing how contemporary poetry uses a rich array of resources to move us, an array that goes well beyond the persuasive devices usual in argumentative rhetoric. Similar strategies are conspicuous in 3 See, e. g., Friederike Reents, Stimmungsästhetik. Realisierungen in Literatur und Theorie vom 17. Bis ins 21. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), pp. 257–262. 4 See Patricia Churchland, Brainstorm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009 and Jesse Prinz, ‘The Emotional Basis of Moral Judgments’, in Philosophical Explorations vol. 9/1 (2006), pp. 29–43. 5 See Pirjo Lyytikäinen, ‘How to Study Emotion Effects in Literature: Written Emotions in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’’, in Writing Emotions. Literature as Practice, ed. by Ingeborg Jandl, Susanne Knaller, Sabine Schönfellner, and Gudrun Tockner (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017), pp. 247–264; Pirjo Lyytikäinen, ‘Passions Against the Grain: Decadent Emotions in Finnish Wilderness’, in Nordic Literature of Decadence, ed. By Pirjo Lyytikäinen, ˇ apková, and Mirjam Hinrikus (New York & Oxford: Routledge, Riikka Rossi, Viola Parente-C 2020), pp. 87–101. For the idea of valences, see Fabrice Teroni, ‘Emotionally Charged – The Puzzle of Affective Valence’, in Shadows of the Soul: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Emotions (New York & London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 10−19.

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many forms of experimental poetry that, since surrealistic and Dadaist literature, has developed and florished on the contemporary scene. To interpret these texts, the reader must consider a vast variety of affective aspects and their interplay with other factors, including moral issues. The thoughts and feelings evoked by these works of poetry are – more clearly than is the case with more conventional literature – not only related to what is said and told (to the semantic contents conveyed) but also largely to how this is said and, especially in Salmenniemi’s case, to how it is displayed. Instead of interpreting the meaning(s) of words or sentences or the qualities of “verses”, the most important challenge is to make sense of combinations, juxtapositions and what is often counted as the “material” aspects of literature: its lay-out, font and all the purely visual aspects of the book and its pages. If we presuppose that our reception in reading is based on seeing and interpreting what could basically be viewed as black marks on a paper, the visual field seems to be absolutely dominant in Texas, sakset, as the “marks” are really foregrounded and include non-signifying stripes, pictures and corrections (as if after proofreading). However, the mentioned presupposition is hardly ever true in any deeper sense. Instead, written (“visible”) language not only evokes the “sounds” and the audible text but also suggests every single thing mentioned. Normally, we don’t even notice the black marks on the paper because we immediately “see” what is conveyed by them.6 Actually, it is one of the effects produced by experimental poetry to make the black marks visible by interfering with the process of automatic sense-making. When the automatic process is inhibited by non-sense words, by misspelling and breaking down words, by cross-overs, variable fonts, non-linearities and so on as it is in Salmenniemi’s book, we begin to really look at the page. But then: even a black stripe on a page begins to signify and convey emotions connected to the whole. The “material” makes sense.

Provoking negative emotions Texas sakset (‘Texas, scissors’) offers the reader a kaleidoscopic, fragmentary vista on the contemporary world or even on the human world tout court. The title in Finnish is a word play or a palindrome: we all know Texas but here “Texas” alludes, in particular, to the film series The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and sakset which is Finnish for scissors reads backwards as Texas, when we perform the little 6 For a useful discussion of how complex our perceptual experience is and how we do not necessarily see what is available and how we “see” absent things or the “presence of absence”, see Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

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transmutation of ks to x (as the author does in the text, although not in the title). In the first place, scissors, that potentially contribute to the murder theme refer to the textual composition of the collection; its method is supposedly cut-andpaste. We can imagine the author cutting all kinds of texts and then, sitting on the floor in the midst of his piles, mixing and rearranging them into what is his own work: the composition made of ‘ready-made’ notes.7 The method is openly presented as textual violence: everything in this collection is cut out of some other text without respecting the content or context out of which it is drawn.8 On the contrary, the cut pieces often gain odd meanings in the new context. Parts of words or phrases are erased, words are distorted or cut, individual letters are scattered around and so on. At the same time, all marks and fragments have or acquire meanings that, together, compose a chorus of voices most often expressing worries and concerns from modern everyday life. The leading theme of violence – present, past and (presumably) future – is connected to the powerlessness and depressive symptoms of the victims of modern life and framed by a general sense of ennui and futility. Ultimately, how does this canvas work to produce a plethora of negative emotional effects on the reader? Salmenniemi’s 150 pages or more vary in style and structure. Some are intensively packed with fragments, words and fragments of words in a variety of fonts and font sizes; here we cannot speak of verses except on rare occasions when fragments of old poetry are quoted. Then, some pages are quite empty or have only occasional black stripes in corners or across the page and some pages and spreads contain only one word or two. Both the beginning and the end of the book follow this latter pattern with quasi-empty pages, whereas the middle contains mostly fully packed spreads as if to imitate a sort of dramatic curve. In a sense, the black stripes of variable breadth and prominence frame this drama and strike the reader with anxiety even before they read. The beginning sets the tone. After several empty pages, there is a page with the pronoun “minä” (I) in small size in the middle of the page and then the next spread gives us, similarly, “kuin silmä” (like an eye) and “silmä” (eye), before we begin to have pages with more words and phrases, whose connection with each other is not obvious, but which seem to qualify the “I”, the speaker on the first page. At some point, this I identifies – among other things – with a statue and marble, which then allude to the fairy tale “Happy prince” by Oscar Wilde: “the swallow does not want to leave the statue and dies of cold”. This gives a new meaning to the connection of the eye and the statue-like I. In Wilde’s tale, the 7 In an interview at the University of Helsinki in 2019, Salmenniemi himself described the process like this. 8 See Anna Helle, ’”On olemassa kivun alue minne vitsi ei yllä”: Harry Salmenniemen Texas, sakset ja väkivaltaiset affektit’, in Tunteita ja tuntemuksia suomalaisessa kirjallisuudessa, ed. by Anna Helle and Anna Hollsten (Helsinki: SKS, 2016), pp. 108–127.

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statue of the prince has sapphires as eyes and gives them to poor people with the help of the swallow. When winter comes, the swallow stays and dies of cold. The allusion introduces the reader to the ironic and tragic tone of Salmenniemi and adds a dimension to the fragments about happiness, that recur in the text and the complicated relationship of hardness and fragility, cruelty and generosity and the irony of fate that haunt Texas, sakset. At the same time, this is just one small strain in the network of suggestive associations that seem to introduce the reader into a labyrinth without Ariadne’s thread. In fact, to follow the associations and try to find motivations for individual fragments or map the allusions does not seem to be the most relevant way to interpret Salmenniemi’s collection. The semantic analysis is relevant in so far as to make the reader aware of the recurring themes and the main methods of selection and combination used by the author. Nevertheless, at the core of Salmenniemi’s work are the relationships between the affectively laden fragments and the affective atmosphere created by the interplay of the visual and textual, on the one hand, and the experiential world, on the other hand. Apart from the open violence theme, the fragments offer a vision of everyday life in the contemporary world emphasising societal problems, drug-addiction, inequality and fear, anxiety and melancholy with a whole spectrum of mental disorders and their medicalisation. The occasional allusions to happiness or other positive emotions seem to drown amid topics provoking negative emotions. Some pages are filled with the trade names or informative labels of drugs to treat mental disorders. The “ready-made” fragments from books, journal articles and letters to the editor are given with no comments, although some apparent comments on the method are included among them: “Even half of a reply opens up great statements”. The overall banality and the mostly depressing or just trivial factual statements produce an uncomfortable and mildly disgusting or depressing effect on the reader: “every fifth Swedish child lives in a family of alcoholics”; “every fifth is afraid of their boss every day”; “his schizophrenia got worse with time”; “he smoked heroin behind the mall”’ “she has made a long career as midwife” and “being afraid of getting fat, they vomit everything they have eaten”. Even the juxtaposition of so many disparate statements and fragments of life of so many different people (of whom we have no other information and do not even know which fragments possibly describe the same person) creates a numbing effect: there are too many! However, the reader is occasionally activated: discerning among the people some famous politicians or historical and even mythical figures (e. g., Grendel from Beowulf) encourages the reader to try to identify various representations. The reader may wonder, who is the person described as follows: “He talks simultaneously of Baltic Sea, Rhein and Styx and combines concentration camps and Christian suffering mysticism”. This is probably a citation from some book but it is hardly necessary to know the source

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of the interpretation. The forms of human thinking and the historical thinkers or heroes are shown in highly ironic light by these quotations, especially when the fragments about illustrious men are mixed with fates of anonymous ordinary people facing unemployment, violence or just some banal incidents of everyday life. Considering the phrase “in Buchenwald I eat ice–cream” on a page seemingly gathering some tourist experiences reveals the general emotion effect produced in the reader. This fragment may be connected to a phrase on the next page: “thousands and thousands of people have died so that I could be here and look at the ruins and eat ice–cream”, although the reader may also connect this to “Colosseum”, which is mentioned just before. These and many similar fragments evoke real atrocities, past and present but simultaneously convey the unbearable lightness and absurdity of contemporary life. This impression is sustained and strengthened by references to fictive atrocities and a “media-attitude” that ironically turns even Christ’s passion into a show. Jesus “speaks”: “you can watch me now as I bleed …”; “as a bonus we can mention that I am the son of god”; “Bye bye Peter, hold your chin up and put new bait on the hook . . . ” and so on. The irony – symbolized by the stone eye or marble – creates a critical distance but does not save the reader from the disgust, ennui and despair about the world that assaults the seeing eye. In the text there is not a single open comment, just this skilfully collected cavalcade of negatively valenced bits and pieces, where even mere letters and stripes become threatening. Texas, sakset makes us consider how emotional attunement (Stimmung) and affective meanings are transferred to “innocent” letters and forms. The contamination of neutral words or sayings by the context applies also to these, practically non-meaning entities. The context which makes the letters x and z become “visible” and appear with aggressive presence is developed in the parts of the book where seemingly innocent alphabetical lists appear. We already know that x belongs to the murder context because of its associations with what “Texas” stands for but it is elaborated with other associations connecting it to inequality, power and sex. On the first pages elaborating z we have “this Z”, “z”, “zenith”, “zettel” and so on and many apparently aleatory words like “zucchini” but there are also allusions to Zorro (and his sign, usually drawn with the sword) and, for some reason, this z section is interfered by the recurring BSE and allusions to the mad cow disease it signifies. The recurring “zeppelin” associates with the war theme that occasionally arises throughout the text. And the “zooming” is exclusively threatening after the interlude, where a “z-eye” is strangely mentioned and all the possible combinations of the Finnish word for eye (“silmä”) are given (like “slimä, msilä, mliäs” and so on). Since the mysterious beginning of the book, the “I” like an “eye” seems to be watching every step. The reader is led towards a sort of paranoia, where every letter, finally, becomes suspect. Another

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strategy to exasperate the reader makes the reading process itself quasi impossible: the pages are fully packed with disparate phrases, pieces of words, crossedout expressions, lists, odd letters without words, with drawings and allusions to mental disorders; the net effect is to create a hallucinatory experience of contagion by this textual disorder.

Stupefying the reader? But how to describe the overall emotional effect produced by this kaleidoscopic canvas? We cannot close our eyes from the disgusting but banal spectacle of the world. Somehow the ice cream in Buchenwald seems to tell us what we are. To try to verbalize the effect, the concept of stuplimity discussed in Sianne Ngai’s book Ugly Feelings may be helpful. Ngai forms the term in opposition to sublimity, which as such, expresses the first non-beautiful emotion that was accepted to the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century.9 However, whereas sublimity can be interpreted as a cathartic feeling, stuplimity denies any cathartic effects: the reader dwells in uneasiness and all the negative affects evoked by the text in question.10 In Ngai’s book, stuplimity stands as one ugly feeling among many but I suggest that it could characterize a more general effect and mood or Stimmung, spreading in contemporary literature although already recognizable in older literature. Thomas Bernhard’s Frost and his later works are intriguing examples. In Finland, Bernhard is, not accidentally, very much à la mode amongst many young authors. This Stimmung seems to involve disgust, anxiety and irritation. Even if melancholic, it does not incite the audience to peaceful melancholic contemplation in face of the incurable misery of the world but rather suggests uneasiness and guilt.11 Texas, sakset illustrates how stuplimity works in poetry. The traditional way of reading poetry involves appreciating individual verses, skilful rimes and metaphors. Even if modernism spoiled the uniform or harmonious tone and introduced ironical and paradoxical twists with its “flowers of evil”, the art of powerful verses was, at least to some extent, retained. Nothing of this remains in Texas, sakset. To read the individual fragments is a pain not only because of what is told but how it is said. The sheer banality of the individual pieces can be 9 See Menninghaus, Disgust, pp. 44–46, 63–67. 10 Ngai writes: “The feelings I examine here [besides stuplimity, they include irritation, anxiety, envy and paranoia] are explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release”. (Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings. (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 6–7. 11 Cf. Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 4–10.

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interpreted as a violence against the aesthetically attuned reader. All these voices from banal every day, the plain matter of fact prose and the clichés that replace thinking, seem to kill poetry altogether. Moreover, even innocent or positive contents are “spoiled” by the appalling banality of expression. Thus, the disgusting canvas seems to exercise its violence by making the reader feel affective antipathy and, maybe, feel the need for one of the antidepressants “advertised” in the text. Stuplimity, in this sense, may retain a critical and ethical message or a teaching (docere), despite the disgusting and morally shattering effect of the textual world. We may, however, wonder, where lies the delight that makes us (according to classical ideas) swallow the drug.

Strange fascination How is it with delectare in modern times? Texts seriously resisting the empathic engagement by readers and engaged in shocking rather than pleasing, proliferate. Contemporary literature is particularly keen on cultivating negative tones or moods that evoke ugly feelings. These feelings are often marked by ambivalence and even if literature often can recuperate from these negative effects for a critical function, they do not, as such, contribute to the pleasure of reading. Thus, the texts imbued with triggers that evoke ambivalent and unpleasant emotion effects, seem to present a special challenge to the reader. Why do we still engage in reading these texts if they do not delight us? Especially when we are far from the somewhat guilty fascination called forth by many decadent texts and the graphic descriptions of extreme fiction (like American Psycho) where our interest in unconventional erotics, blasphemy, violence and all the dark sides of humanity is fed by ample details.12 In Texas, sakset, despite its theme of violence, the graphic details are never at the forefront. The implied atrocities and a general atmosphere of threat may provoke some anxiety in the reader but that is not what fascinates in this work. Still, it is undeniable that Salmenniemi’s text attracts and offers pleasures of reading. With its playful irony, its skill and open delight in exposing the reader to all the banalities and clichés by which we verbalize our life and history, Texas, sakset not only stupefies but also fascinates. Ironically, the paradoxical twist that haunts modern literature, is quite consciously exploited in the work. We may see the following as an ironical comment of the author to his work:

12 Tero Eljas Vanhanen, Shock Tactics & Extreme Strategies: Affectivity and Transgression in Late Twentieth-Century Extreme Fiction (University of Helsinki: Unigrafia, 2016) provides ample discussion on these matters.

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violence, erotica, contrasts, similarities, movement, illusoriness, mixing truth and fiction, exaggerations, metaphors, allegories, paraphrases, this goes much better than anything in my life before

Texas sakset involves the reader in a game by its experimental poetics and this literary game is what triggers the interest of readers: the readers are incited by curiosity and the will to learn about the connections, about how the game functions, and an admiration of the way different connections are made and how things work together. The stuplimity itself may spread melancholic apathy rather than incite one “to good conduct” but this play still enhances positive aesthetic emotions and aesthetic satisfaction is still there. However, is this a guilty pleasure like eating ice–cream in Buchenwald? Is it one of the basic paradoxes of literature that this kind of highly skilful and artistic literature seems to dance on corpses? Furthermore, we may ponder on the role of the textual violence, which, I claim, is satisfying in the face of human stupidities? It works like revenge on the world. These questions provoked by Texas, sakset I must leave unanswered. I just point to the move Angela Locatelli makes in her article: we should consider the metaethical dimensions of literary works. The uneasy and ambivalent atmosphere of works like Texas, sakset calls for further discussion.

Susanne Knaller

Liminal Texts as a Challenge to Literary Theory: Reformulating the Relationship of Literature and Context

I. In 2013 the whole city of Frankfurt read a book (which is the title of a yearly event)1 and functioned as a reading zone of Siegfried Kracauer’s novel Ginster (1928). This literary work is just one of many formats the sociologist, philosopher, film theorist and journalist tested throughout his productive life. Most of all known for his ground breaking book Das Ornament der Masse (1927), the study Die Angestellten (1930) and the later film essays (1960s), his œuvre further comprises essays, feuilleton texts and the interesting flaneur-like observations Straßentexte which were published in the 1920s. Twenty years earlier his admired teacher Georg Simmel is uttering the following lament in the short text “Kein Dichter” (“No Poet”): „Reality is too strong for me – I was no poet – no poet” (“Die Wirklichkeit ist zu stark für mich – ich war kein Dichter – kein Dichter”).2 This regretful statement can be found in one of his “Momentbilder sub specie aeternitatis” (“Pictures of a Moment”) which include several literary experiments and were written for the Munich journal Jugend between 1897–1907. Why is a famous philosopher and sociologist like Georg Simmel who published Philosophie des Geldes in 1900 dabbling in literature? Why is his student Kracauer tempted by the genre novel? As new editions of the publisher Suhrkamp show, Kracauer’s two novels – the mentioned Ginster and the earlier Georg (posthumous 1977) are still valid pictures of the generation of the author but certainly not the works that could have made him one of the most interesting intellectuals of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the originality and strength of Kracauer and Simmel lies in their openness towards formats and topics. Such an experimental approach to different discourses is paradigmatic for their epoch 1 Cf. https://www.frankfurt-liest-ein-buch.de [31. 05. 2020]. 2 Georg Simmel, ‘Kein Dichter’, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 17, Miszellen, Glossen, Stellungnahmen, Umfrageantworten, Leserbriefe, Diskussionsbeiträge 1889–1918. Anonyme und pseudonyme Veröffentlichungen 1888–1920, ed. by Klaus Christian Köhnke (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 400–402.

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and can be found in many other scholars and writers during the long turn of the century between 1880 and the beginning of the fascisms in the 1930s. European cities like Berlin, Vienna, and Paris are the centers of these new (metropolitan) experiences. This highly innovative period produces formats and experiments for which authors like Kracauer and Simmel are exemplary. Kracauer’s Straßentexte as well as Simmel’s Momentbilder are just two examples among many. Walter Benjamin with his “Denkbilder” comes to mind as well as Bloch’s Spuren. This oscillating between scientific, philosophical, journalistic and literary texts and formats can be observed from two points of view: It can be seen as an experimental dimension in the work of a single writer who touches different genres (novel, essay, poems, research and philosophical texts like monographies and studies) as well as a hybrid form of mixed formats in a single text. The first goes beyond defined roles for authors and writers of texts. The latter leads into a transgression of traditional genres and styles. Kracauer and Simmel try both variants. Walter Benjamin’s urban glimpses of cultural life are convincing examples of the second possibility. One could also mention the Viennese coffeehouse feuilletons and Werner Kraus’ journalistic political observations and Freud’s autobiographically marked narrations on modern psyche and identity. In France, the Collège de Sociologie, the journal Documents and writers like André Breton and Louis Aragon walking through Paris, Blaise Cendrars’ docu-fictions, Michel Leiris’ ethnological diaries are other convincing examples.3 In the following I will outline the reasons and circumstances of such formations. This not only allows to comprehend and identify a corpus which is paradigmatic for the modern era but will also help to raise some theoretical and methodological questions coming with it.4 The transgressive mode of the texts’ mixing literary, essayistic, scientific, and journalistic styles and contents provoke 3 An exemplary list of such authors: André Breton, Ernst Bloch, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Valéry, André Gide, Walter Benjamin, Wassili Kandinsky, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, George Bataille, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Lukács, Robert Musil, Michel Leiris, Claire Goll, Alfred Döblin, Erika Mann, Lina Loos; articles in Documents, Der Sturm, Die Fackel, Die Aktion; actions in the context of Contre-Attaque, Acéphale, the avantgarde groups like Dada, Surrealism etc. For further reading cf. Susanne Knaller, ‘“Neue Texte” und emotionale Landschaften: Schreiben als medialer Zwischenraum in der langen Jahrhundertwende (1880–1935)’, in Schreibprozesse im Zwischenraum. Zur Ästhetik von Textbewegungen, ed. by Jennifer Clare et al. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2018), pp. 193–210; also Susanne Knaller, ‘“Die Wirklichkeit ist zu stark für mich”. Georg Simmel im Kontext der neuen Texte der langen Jahrhundertwende’, in avldigital.de URL: http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/files/49171/Susanne.Knaller_Sim mel.pdf [31. 5. 2020]. 4 Cf. Susanne Knaller, Twilight Zones. Liminal Texts of the Long Turn of the Century (1880 to 1940). Austria, France, Germany (Graz: unipub, 2022) (in collaboration with Stephan Moebius and Martina Scholger). Also, the analytical anthology with the same title online under: http:// gams.uni-graz.at/liminal

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a revised look at the relation of literature and knowledge, text, and context. I start with a description of the most important features of the corpus at issue and a short overlook of the period at stake.

II. The period of the long turn of the century with its massive scientific innovations and new social, political, and cultural experiences5 are the substrate of such innovative experiments. Writers opt for multiple text forms which include studies, manifestos, program texts, essays, newspaper articles, lectures, docufictions, etc. They build and at the same time reflect correlations between academic, cultural, and aesthetic topics as well as between academic, literary, and journalistic formations and produce for instance feuilletons, document lawsuits, write travelogues. Authors from different fields take up the challenge of the time by leaving behind not only traditional concepts but also their formats.6 The function thereof are diverging – it is about the relation between the new sciences, about the transfer of knowledge, about cultural and political diagnosis and critique. Manifestos and programmatic writings are signs of interventional gestures coming from politics, philosophy, literature, and the arts in general. Due to the described features, these writings can be called “liminal texts”. They deny a classification into traditional systems, genres and forms. “Liminal” implies a status in-between, being transitional and located on plural sides – aspects, which catch the texts’ challenging, transgressive and sometimes provocative design. This liminality is based on a close relationship between the arts and the systems of knowledge and science which also marks a new phase of the modern era and expresses a sense of living in times of transit and permanent changes, of being “Übergangsmenschen” (“people in transition”) as Klaus Lichtblau can state.7 One of the reasons is that in contrast to the 18th and early 19th century, the arts and systems of knowledge are defined by new concepts of reality and life. This includes a background of massive scientific innovations. Notions of nature, reason, individual, subject and gender are reevaluated, expanded or even sup5 Jahrhundertwende. Der Aufbruch in die Moderne 1880–1930, 2 vols, ed. by August Nitschke https://www.amazon.de/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_2?ie=UTF8&text=Detlev+J.+K.+Peuker t&search-alias=books-de&field-author=Detlev+J.+K.+Peukert&sort=relevanceranket al. (Reinbek b.H.: Rowohlt, 1995); Franz Herre, Jahrhundertwende 1900 (Hamburg: DVA, 1998). 6 Cf. Kai Kauffmann and Erdmut Jost, ‘Diskursmedien der Essayistik um 1900: Rundschauzeitschriften, Redeforen, Autorenbücher. Mit einer Fallstudie zur Essayistik in den Grenzboten’, in Essayismus um 1900, ed. by Wolfgang Braungart and Kai Kauffmann (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), pp. 15–36 (p. 18). 7 Cf. Klaus Lichtblau, Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende. Zur Genealogie der Kultursoziologie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 23.

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pressed in favor of modern concepts of reality which are about acting in cultural, social, political, economic and media contexts.8 Another important aspect is the already mentioned new social and cultural urbanity which creates a lively transfer and interaction between the sciences and the arts within as well as between the metropolises. Cultural and literary journals are examples for this new era.9 The fascist structures with their censorship and extermination machines put an end to this productive creation and transfer, in Germany and Austria after 1933/1938, in France by 1940. The described processes of de-differentiation are based – and this might sound paradoxical – on a differentiation of systems as consequently effectuated and valid since the 19th century. This diversification nourishes antinomies, pluralities, interrelationships and crossing of borders regarding genres, media, disciplines and formats of production and reception during the long turn of the century. For this period is valid what Reckwitz calls the immanent contradictions in modernity and Latour identifies as the modern hybridity of objects.10 At the same time, these developments – and this is a central thesis of this essay –create a new notion of aesthetic provided by both, the arts and the sciences during the time at issue. It is only with a differentiated plurality of systems, a modern notion of reality and a new concept of aesthetic that the tight interleaving of sciences and the arts can be understood. Similar to the traditional one, also the new aesthetic is related to sensitivity and perception (aisthesis), yet its understanding thereof is based on the innovative sciences like psychology, ethnology, sociology and biology among others and as such oriented at new scientific concepts of cognition, body and emotion. On the contrary to the 18th century, a metaphysically marked notion of nature – basis for the idealistic and romantic model – is no longer the leading episteme but displaced by modern concepts of reality. The new aesthetic is forced by philosophers and writers like Nietzsche, Bergson, Bataille and Breton who depart form the idea that social and cultural practices are always defined by physical, sensitive, affective, and material perceptions and acting. A culture of morally designed sensitivity is displaced by a notion of affects and emotions that

8 Cf. Wolfgang Eßbach, ‘Vernunft, Entwicklung, Leben. Schlüsselbegriff der Moderne’, in Die Gesellschaft der Dinge, Menschen, Götter (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2011), pp. 131–140. Also Susanne Knaller, Die Realität der Kunst. Programme und Theorien zu Literatur, Kunst und Fotografie seit 1700 (Paderborn: Fink, 2015). 9 Cf. Andrea Albrecht and Susanne Friede: ‘Trans-, Inter- und Supradisziplinarität um 1900. Zum Diskurs in deutschen und französischen Kulturzeitschriften’, in Transdisziplinarität. Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven, ed. by Frank Brand et al. (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag, 2004), pp. 97–114. 10 Cf. Andreas Reckwitz, Kreativität und soziale Praxis. Studien zur Sozial- und Gesellschaftstheorie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016), p. 65; Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).

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are considered complex entities consisting of cognitive processes, perceptions, physical sensations, self-reflections, and practices.11 Because of this new aesthetic and the described new interrelations, sociology and the cultural studies have noted an “aestheticization” of reality and the everyday life while underlining the significance of an aesthetic perspective outside the arts.12 But on the contrary to these (fruitful) approaches, one has to consider that the system of arts itself has opened up to a comprehensive notion of the aesthetic by crossing the borders to the “non-aesthetic” and non-artistic in their programs. As such, the artistic aesthetic does not form a strict categorical difference to society, politics, and sciences, but the arts themselves have opened to interrelations with society, the systems of knowledge and their practices. As a result, they are marked by a productive tension between autonomy and heteronomy. From the late 19th century on the aesthetic in modernity is designated by such relational formations and a crossing or even dissolving of borders. Modernity of the long turn of the century produces textual formats which work these relations programmatically out. Therefore, when talking of modernity, it makes sense to apply a wider notion of aesthetic that is based on both, the arts and the systems of science and knowledge. Liminal texts are a sign of this new program. This liminality is effective on two levels: It is a specific aspect of modernity as well as a feature of texts which react to this systemic liminality while at the same time also producing it. Departing from these observations on a groundbreaking period of modernity and its new textual formations, I would like to sketch out some productive theoretical and methodological consequences for literary studies.

III. Together with an open notion of aesthetic it is the quality of liminality that provokes a revised approach to the way of dealing with the question of “text” and “context”. Practice-theory-oriented models are most helpful in this regard and allow to outline a model of analysis that departs from a notion of text as a socially and culturally relevant complex of formats, discourses, and practices.

11 Simone Winko, Kodierte Gefühle. Zu einer Poetik der Emotionen in lyrischen und poetologischen Texten um 1900 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2003), p. 159. 12 Cf. Ute Faath, Mehr-als-Kunst. Zur Kunstphilosophie Georg Simmels (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998); also David Frisby, Fragmente der Moderne: Georg Simmel – Siegfried Kracauer – Walter Benjamin (Münster: Daedalus, 1989), pp. 46–67. Klaus Lichtblau speaks of a valorization of the aesthetic in all areas of modern life. Cf. Klaus Lichtblau, Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende, pp. 178–280.

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Most useful for this task is Andreas Reckwitz’ notion of practice-discourseformation (“Praxis-Diskursformationen”)13 in which texts take part in practices and discourses while at the same time provide and form discourses and practices themselves. The relations between such discourses and practices must be understood as manifold and consisting of formal, conceptual, empirical, linguistic, and non-linguistic instances. From this point of view a text is constituted by its (linguistic) form as well as by paradigmatic and syntagmatic interactions with other texts, forms, discourses, and practices. Therefore, I would like to propose to give up the idea of context as a notion of difference without renouncing on a concept of a material, functional, and institutional alterity to texts.14 A starting point for this is grounded in the concept of what builds the material bases of texts. In this view, the materiality of a text is its linguistic form as well as its paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations to other forms, discourses, and practices. As such it is open, in constant movement and functional on different levels of reality. This includes the relocation of boundaries of formats and shifting attributions to genres, changing practices of production and reception. The New Historicists with their accurate reading could show that the borders between epistemological, pocal, religious, and cultural discourses as well as those between the formats and materiality of literary and non-literary texts are always shifting. Stephen Greenblatt also made clear that such “negotiations”15 are inherent in the texts themselves and work on syntagmatic and paradigmatic levels. Such an interchange and even questioning of the difference between literature and nonliterature is highly symptomatic since the 19th century, and the liminal texts are paradigmatic for these interrelations and shifting positions between text and context. They also lay bare – and this takes us back to the notion of aesthetic – that the relations between medial, practical and discursive dimensions in modernity form a new aesthetic. As already stated, the aesthetic in modernity is not limited to the artistic field but also located in politics, society, everyday life and media. An approach from a practice theoretical perspective appears helpful to dig further into this observation. Andreas Reckwitz and Jacques Rancière, for example, underline that the new aesthetic is fed by a concept that departs from the idea that not only the arts but also political, social and cultural practices are understood as determined by a physical, sensual, affective and material perception and acting.16 As a common ground the arts, the sciences, the systems of 13 Cf. Reckwitz, Kreativität und soziale Praxis, pp. 49–66. 14 Cf. Susanne Knaller, Mit Texten umgehen. Ein theoretisch-methodologischer Entwurf (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2022), pp. 52–76. 15 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 12. 16 Andreas Reckwitz, ‘Gesellschaftliche Moderne und Ästhetische Moderne’, in Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 37.1 (2012), pp. 89–98 (pp. 92–93).

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knowledge and politics share, as Jacques Rancière pointedly states, the division of the sensual. Therefore, he defines the aesthetic regime of modernity as “realistic” in the sense that the signs of history and everyday life are articulated and explained with the same signs as in the arts. Thus, knowledge, science, facts, and discourses can be described with artistic formations while at the same time artistic contents are open to the sciences and aspects of everyday.17 The liminal texts provide a paradigmatic case for Rancière’s aesthetic regime of modernity. They are relating literature, everyday life and models of knowledge and science which implies the questions of what is visible, utterable, where and in which arrangements, languages, media and by whom with which practices. Walter Benjamin sets a perfect example.18 Since the 1920s his writings show a strong inclination to things, objects, everyday situations. He observes them looking at new modes of perception and representation by considering their medial formations and the consequences for cultural life. In Einbahnstraße he points to a world of advertisements, their aesthetic force and resulting manipulations of what is still aesthetically valid or possible. In one of his Denkbilder, called “Tankstelle”, for instance, he describes this new world as one of “prompt language” and includes flyers, pamphlets, newspaper articles and posters as culturally valid objects and media. His writings make use of essayistic and aphoristic modes while at the same time providing theoretical observations on the new aesthetic and cultural consequences. From this point of view the aesthetic is a mode, in which practices and the formats that make them visible are articulated.19 As such, notions of aesthetic are fed by artistic poetics and formations of everyday life and knowledge and at the same time are observed by the arts and models of knowledge and their practices.

IV. Such a notion of the aesthetic considers the reciprocal relations between the linguistically organized text, society, the fields of arts and knowledge and their forms and practices. This relationship is inter-relational and not static: Relations are textual (as an intertextual and discursive formation), practical (as formations of action and knowledge), material (as formations of objects/artifacts, as written, sounding, visual or oral formations) and physical (as affects/emotions and psychophysical dimensions) in their constituents. Accordingly, texts are a dy17 Cf. Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique (Paris: Fabrique, 2000), p. 57. 18 Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße, ed. by Detlev Schöttker and Steffen Haug (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, 2009). 19 Cf. Rancière, Le partage du sensible, p. 23.

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namic and processual assemblage of medial, practical and material entities, whose quality of reality is changing according to their deployment, the chosen perspective and handling: actions can become texts as vice versa texts can become actions; materialities can become discourses as discourses can become material. More than being guided by the dichotomic idea of text and context (in an extratextual sense), what is interesting here are the manifold and variable relations being productive during textual (aesthetic) processes and practices.20 Such an approach illustrates that only within the interplay of different dimensions a text becomes a text. It only gets real as an interaction of material, medial and formal dimensions, including discursive complexes and dimensions of action. Therefore, literary studies must consider social practices and discourses (the locations of the arts and the social), in which art and literature are produced, distributed, and received as aesthetic events.21 At the same time, formats, forms, and structures of the linguistic text need to be analyzed. Thus, it is to question, how practices and discourses are articulated and reflected in texts. These relations between practices and modes can be captured by looking at textual structures and at the same time considering the aesthetically formed interfaces of practices and discourses within society and the arts.

V. At this point I can come back to the example of liminal texts. They link literary and scientific modes, forms of legal, informative, and economic texts as well as modes and practices of everyday life – quite often with programmatic aspirations. This constitutes the aesthetic quality of the liminal texts. At the same time, these interfaces lay bare the underlying modes and practices: Beside the mentioned de-differentiation of fields, this considers the distribution of assignments and roles (scientist, philosopher, journalist, writer etc.) and of genre. It opens the borders between text and paratexts and produces revised approaches to the notions of author, work, and reader. It also includes the tendency to form groups, which can range from intellectual circles, political groups (Contre-Attaque, for example) to secret societies (Acéphale). The aim is often a participatory, interventionist positioning of the authors and instead of single texts in the strict sense, one has to speak of a set of texts, inter/multi-media assemblages including practices like walking, singing, filming, etc.

20 Cf. ibid., p. 57. 21 Reckwitz, ‘Gesellschaftliche Moderne und Ästhetische Moderne’, p. 91.

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VI. From the point of view of praxeological approaches texts do not form an autonomous area.22 Therefore, dichotomic text-context-models are not sufficient to catch the complexity of a text. By contrast, praxeological approaches allow a notion of text which does not depart from a constitutive difference of the systems (between the arts and science for instance). Texts are always – in the sense of Roland Barthes’ – products of écriture23 (“writing”) and as such take part in practices and discourses while at the same time provide and form discourses and practices themselves. The relations between discourses and practices are manifold and consist of formal, conceptual, empirical, linguistic, and non-linguistic instances. Such an approach does not intend to suspend the specific formal and functional quality of literature. It rather becomes clear that literary text are a radically practiced form and praxis and take offensively a stand on their form as well as on their elaboration of discourses and practices. Literature is based on a double observational position: regarding social, political, and cultural formations and practices as well as the arts themselves. Departing from Andreas Reckwitz’ terminology of practice-discourse-formations literary works can be considered as formations, which treat practices and discourses offensively while at the same time being open for such observations. For literary studies this means a shift of interests from special ontological features as a constituent of literature to the idea of processuality. As Gérard Genette could state, literature is neither essentialist nor dependent of singular tastes, but can be described as a productive, formal, 22 Cf. regarding the relation between literary studies and praxis theories see the overview of Oliver Scheiding, ‘Diskurse und Praktiken. Zur Literaturwissenschaft im Spiegel der “neuen” Kultursoziologie’, in Kulturtheorien im Dialog. Neue Positionen zum Verhältnis von Text und Kontext, ed. by Oliver Scheiding. Frank Obenland and Clemens Spahr (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), pp. 177–198. See also: Steffen Martus, ‘Wandernde Praktiken “after theory”? Praxeologische Perspektiven auf “Literatur/Wissenschaft”’, in Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 40.1 (2015), pp. 177–195; Anjav Johannsen, ‘To pimp your mind sachwärts. Ein Plädoyer für eine praxeologische Gegenwartsliteraturwissenschaft’, in Zukunft der Literatur, Text + Kritik, special issue ed. by Hermann Korte (2013), pp. 179– 186. 23 Barthes describes with the notion of écriture in an earlier essay in this way: “Le texte est un tissu de citations, issues des mille foyers de la culture.” (“The text is a tissue of quotations, arising from thousands of focal points of culture”). Roland Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, 1968–1971 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2002), pp. 40–45 (p. 43). In his later texts he opens up term to the following aspects: aesthetic moments, the crossing of borders of genre and linguistic texts, writing and life, the cognitive-physical and practical aspects the relevance of texts of writing like diaries, notes etc., the affective and emotional side of writing. Cf. Roland Barthes, ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’, in Le bruissement de la langue. Essais critiques, vol 4 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984), pp. 333–46 (pp. 344–345).

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medial and receptive event in process.24 It acts and is understood through practices. The relational movements between these instances are multiple: They consider discursive and formal, poetological, and empirical, linguistic, and nonlinguistic moments. A praxeological oriented study of literature looks at questions of legacy, published and non-published material, editions, translations, language and their relationship to other media, processes of writing.25 Arrangements and interweaving of everyday, artistic and scientific practices and formations become observable. A productive result of text-context-discussions from a praxeological point of view reveals the potential of tools elaborated and applied by literary studies for all texts and renders them accessible for (new) analyses and readings. It creates new corpora, introduces generally relevant questions and innovative theoreticalmethodological solutions for other disciplines. As a result, liminal texts can be detected as a paradigmatic corpus of a certain period and observed analytically.

24 Cf. Gérard Genette, Fiction et Diction (Paris: Seuil, 2004), p. 94, also Knaller ‘“Neue Texte” und emotionale Landschaften’, p. 195. 25 Cf. for the question of writing processes Martin Stingelin. ‘“Schreiben”. Einleitung’, in “Mir ekelt vor diesem tintenklecksenden Säkulum.” Schreibszenen im Zeitalter der Manuskripte, ed. by Martin Stingelin, Davide Giuriato and Sandro Zanetti (München: Fink, 2004), pp. 7–21. Cf. for general theoretical and methodologcial questions regarding writing Schreibforschung interdisziplinär. Praxis-Prozess-Produkt, ed. by Susanne Knaller, Doris Pany-Habsa and Martina Scholger (Bielefeld: transcript, 2020).

Annette Simonis

Literature in the Context of Transmedia Storytelling

I.

Introduction: the function of literature in the age of transmedia storytelling

The following article explores the role and function of literature in the age of media convergence. My contribution focuses on transmedia storytelling and its possible impact on our reading and writing experiences. When investigating the interrelatedness of the cultural practices associated with transmedia narratives several key questions arise: In how far does the spreading and circulation of knowledge across media affect the situation of authors and readers alike, and in how far does it alter or modify their traditional roles? At first sight the present state of media abundance and convergence may seem to result in a marginalisation of literature and in a considerable loss of its traditional functions and values. Literature has been a source of knowledge and a platform for the exchange of perspectives, attitudes, political positionings and intellectual views etc for many centuries. It has been a privileged and widely cherished form of providing education, entertainment and information, a mode of expression that seems closely linked and intertwined with the cultural history of mankind. Nowadays literary texts, especially books, seem to be dismantled of their privileged position in the circulation and dissemination of cultural knowledge by a variety of new media, which are mostly digitally accessible and available in the world wide web. In his definition of the phenomenon of media convergence in the Britannica Terry Flew lists a series of implied aspects and consequences that have decisively changed the offers and possibilities for users: Media convergence, phenomenon involving the interconnection of information and communications technologies, computer networks, and media content. It brings together the “three C’s”—computing, communication, and content—and is a direct consequence of the digitization of media content and the popularization of the Internet. Media convergence transforms established industries, services, and work practices and enables entirely new forms of content to emerge […] Since a diverse array of content is

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now being accessed through the same devices, media organizations have developed cross-media content. For example, news organizations no longer simply provide just print or audiovisual content but are portals that make material available in forms such as text, video, and podcasts, as well as providing links to other relevant resources, online access to their archives, and opportunities for users to comment on the story or provide links to relevant material.1

The development described above entails a democraticisation of information and knowledge which becomes accessible to a global community of users whose number is steadily increasing: “With the World Wide Web, smartphones, tablet computers, smart televisions, and other digital devices, billions of people are now able to access media content that was once tied to specific communications media (print and broadcast) or platforms (newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and cinema).”2 While the accessibility and the abundance of knowledge in the internet and the non-hierarchical structure of its distribution is certainly to be considered an advantage, the user is at the same time confronted with an overflow of information. This may ultimately result in a loss of orientation and demands a careful process of selection. The globalisation of information and of narratives in the internet apparently has assigned literary texts a rather inconspicuous position among numerous other media forms. Even the entertaining qualities of literature seem to be overshadowed by the attraction and enhanced visibility of the new media and the increasing resources of digitalisation. At a closer look, however, the textual media have by no means disappeared or declined in the context of convergent media. On the contrary, there can be discovered a surprising increase in literary practices in the wake of transmedia storytelling which deserves further investigation. Although a competitive relationship between the different media types cannot be denied, the coevolution of media also inspires and stimulates the productivity of each single form involved. The emergence of fan fiction, which is to be considered a remarkable side effect of transmedia narratives, indicates and testifies the cultural significance of writing and reading. One of the most comprehensive and well known collections of fanfiction is provided by the web archive called Archive of Our Own (AO3), which constitutes a non-profit site and an open source repository for fan fiction. The Archive was created in 2008 by the Organization for

1 Terry Flew: Media convergence, https://www.britannica.com/topic/media-convergence [03/ 09/2020]. 2 Ibid. See also Wolfgang Hallet, ‘The Multimodality of Cultural Knowledge and Its Literary Transformations‘, in La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, ed. by Angela Locatelli (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2008), pp. 173–193.

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Transformative Works. By May 2020, the Archive of Our Own has hosted the incredible number of 6 million works in over 36,700 fandoms.3 Although basically fandoms can be inspired by all kinds of literary genres and media types, transmedia storytelling has had a decisive impact on the development and evolution of fan fiction in recent years. If Marie-Laure Ryan’s assumption that “transmedia storytelling is the most important narrative form of our time”4 holds true, the question arises, in how far literary genres coexist with those narratives circulating in other media and in which respects they enrich the narrative experience on the side of the authors as well as the readers. The concept of a narrative transcending the textual dimension and that of language expression alike has been introduced by Claude Bremond in the 1960s: Le sujet d’un conte peut servir d’argument pour un ballet, celui d’un roman peut être porté à la scène ou à l’écran, on peut raconter un film à ceux qui ne l’ont pas vu. Ce sont des mots qu’on lit, ce sont des images qu’on voit, ce sont des gestes qu’on déchiffre, mais à travers eux, c’est une histoire qu’on suit; et ce peut être la même histoire. Le raconté a ses signifiants propres, ses racontants: ceux-ci ne sont pas des mots, des images ou des gestes, mais les événements, les situations et les conduites signifiés par ces mots, ces images, ces gestes.5

Recently Harold Jenkins has suggested a similar definition of transmedia storytelling which embraces seven aspects or criteria: (1) spreadability, (2) continuity/ multiplicity, (3) immersion, (4) world-building, (5) seriality, (6) subjectivity, and, (7) performance.6

II.

Transmediality and the dynamics of Shakespeare’s plays

Although the notion of transmediality is closely associated with contemporary culture and the beginning of the twenty-first century the phenomenon is by no means restricted to the recent decades, instead it encompasses a considerable historical dimension. Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, can be regarded as a formidable example of a highly successful transmedia venture. As texts written for the stage and blueprints for theatrical performance they were not primarily 3 See: https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-archive-of-our-own-hits-six-million-posted-w orks/ [03/09/2020]. 4 Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword or New Narrative Experience?‘, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 2 (2015), 7 (Transmedial Worlds in Convergent Media Culture), 1–19 (p. 1). 5 Claude Bremond, ‘Le message narratif‘, Communications, 4 (1964), 4–32 (p. 4). 6 Cfr. Henry Jenkins,‘Transmedia Storytelling“. The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn‘ (availabte at: http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html [03/09/2020]).

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conceived of as literature in the narrower sense of the word.7 Since the 1980s Shakespearean scholars have discovered Shakespeare as a “man of the theatre”8 and showcased the theatrical and spectacular qualities of the plays, their intrinsic and fascinating nature as stage works. As Honigman has pointed out in a seminal study, “Elizabethan dramatists said of their plays that ‘the life of these things consists in action’(Marston)”.9 This seems plausible also with reference to Shakespeare. Why would an aspiring playwright like Shakespeare and a promising member of one of the leading companies of actors, also known as a shareholder of one of the foremost theatres in Elizabethan / Jacobean London, be interested in seeing his plays getting printed? The circulation of quarto editions of Shakespearean plays during Shakespeare’s lifetime, in an age where the notion of copyright had not yet been established, could at best enhance the attraction of his plays and serve as an additional marketing strategy. In the worst case scenario the cheap quarto editions provided useful material for rival companies of actors, which was easily accessible. Nonetheless the textual dimension is present in the making of Shakespearean drama from the very beginning. The initial drafts (foul papers) and manuscripts (which have mostly not been preserved) were transmitted by the device of the author’s handwriting as well as the notes in the prompt books, which highlight the crucial role of writing in the process of creation and construction of the plays. The scriptural mode is therefore inherent in the dramatic works and their production, while the literary culture is intricately woven into the texts and traces of Renaissance literacy10 are abundant. Moreover the posthumous publication of the First Folio by Shakespeare’s colleagues and friends consolidates the significance of the literary components and ensures the survival of the dramas as texts in their Renaissance wording beyond the vicissitudes of their stage history. In this respect the collaborative effort of preparing the First Folio edition is much more than a personal commemorative task. The famous lines from Ben Jonson’s tributary poem “To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And What He Hath Left Us”, written on the occasion of the post-

7 Cf. Shakespeare, Man of the Theater: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, ed. by Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio and J.D. Palmer (London: University of Delaware Press, 1983). 8 Ibid. 9 Ernst Anselm Joachim Honigman, Shakespeare’s Impact on His Contemporaries (London: Macmillan , 1982), p. 59. 10 Cf. Susan Clegg, Shakespeare’s Reading Audiences: Early Modern Books and Audience Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Jean-Christophe Mayer, ‘Early Buyers and Readers‘, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare‘s First Folio, ed. by Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 103–119.

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humous publication of the First Folio (1623), showcase the preservative impulse of the editors: Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give.11

In the First Folio the collection of Shakespeare’s works is presented as a memorial edition for those who “have wits to read”. While the stage life of the plays and their immediate appeal to the audience may have initially inspired and inaugurated the author’s fame it is the form of the book that finally guarantees their afterlife and the continuation of a Shakespearean tradition. The inevitably transient and ephemeral nature of the stage performance is counterbalanced by the conservatory impulse of providing an edition “not of an age, but for all time”,12 as Jonson phrases it, a notion boldly encapsulated in the palpable image of the impressive folio volume. A similar idea is expressed in another prefatory poem Jonson contributed to the First Folio edition which is printed next to Shakespeare’s portrait engraved by Martin Droeshout and simultaneously serves as a (critical) comment on the picture: O, could he [the engraver] but have drawne his wit As well in brasse, as he hath hit His face, the Print would then surpasse All, that was ever writ in brasse. But, since he cannot, Reader, lookeo Not on his Picture, but his booke.13

The book, so it seems to Jonson, is the one and only device to access Shakespeare’s works and to gain insights into his art, his intellect and his experience. Thus, the text in its written and printed form marks the beginning and the end of the production of Shakespeare’s plays from the point of view of a contemporary observer in the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. Apparently, the individual history of a Shakespearean play can be traced from its first recording in a manuscript to the original stage performance and from there back to a different textual mode, consisting of a series of carefully printed pages. In contrast to the earlier quarto editions frequently published immediately

11 Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: printed Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), First Folio Edition. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. Cf. also Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: Records and Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 198.

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after the successful stage performances the printing of a folio edition was a much more expensive and prestigious enterprise.14 The act of collecting and preserving mentioned in the quotations from Jonson’s poems is neatly symbolised and literally embodied in the large volume of the folio format. Moreover, Jonson’s role in the context of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays is revealing, because his commendatory poems excel all the other contributions by their aesthetic complexity and subtlety. Although his eulogy may be suffused with irony and ambivalence, his appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays seems genuine. In this respect, the two poems which Jonson has dedicated to his fellow playwright can be regarded as noteworthy examples of early modern fan fiction. Furthermore it was no other than Ben Jonson himself who had introduced the idea of assembling the dramatic works of an author in a substantial volume by the folio edition of his own Works in 1616. The symbolic significance of this edition, lanced with the self-assured gesture of a well known and established author, was hardly to be overestimated, as has often been pointed out.15 If Renaissance plays had so far merely been considered as a (more or less) delightful source of entertainment, with his edition Ben Jonson implicitly underscored their intrinsic value, combining the notion of artistic achievement with the concept of literary education and the transmission of cultural knowledge and experience. As a well educated author Jonson aspires to contribute his dramatic works to the literary tradition. Undoubtedly he includes his plays as well as those of his colleague William Shakespeare into the literary canon. He implicitly claims that they are being an important part of the cultural heritage encompassing a wide range of cultural insights. If the stage provides the ideal platform for social interactions and exchange and may function as a means of exploring multiple perspectives and of constructing complex cultural identities, it is the well printed book that, according to Jonson, furnishes the optimal medium for conserving, archiving and transmitting cultural knowledge. To a certain degree Jonson and the editors of the First Folio anticipate the awareness of modern Shakespearean scholars who have discovered the plays as a means to better understand the meanings and cultural negotiations of the English Renaissance.

14 Cf. Jean-Christophe Mayer, ‘Early Buyers and Readers‘, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. by Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 103–104. 15 Cf. Sara van den Berg, ‘Ben Jonson and the Ideology of Authorship‘, in Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, ed. by Jennifer Brady and Wyman H. Herendeen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), pp. 111–137 (p. 111) and Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Facts of the Matter: Satiric and Ideal Economies in the Jonsonian Imagination‘, ibid., pp. 64–89.

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As Angela Locatelli has poignantly elucidated in her article on ‘The Fictional World of Romeo and Juliet’ Shakespeare’s Italy is a ‘mirror image’ of English culture allowing insights into the cultural process of ‘self-fashioning’.16 The perpetuation and transfer of knowledge are the key functions which Jonson, as a learned author, naturally attributes to the printed text, to the medium of the book and to a (privileged) literate culture, a peer group enabled to decipher the depth of knowledge encoded in the dramatic works and to hold it in trust for future generations. Interestingly, Jonson to a certain degree anticipates the attitude of a contemporary observer in the year 2020, the perspective of a journalist who witnesses the exposition and transaction of a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio involved in an auction at Christie’s. The book is presented and regarded as a rare and precious object, awesome in its monumental quality – a perception which may however be the result of a socialisation process: I visited Christie’s in London to see the Folio during its time in the capital. Upon encountering the book, what immediately stands out is its hefty, monumental quality: printed in the prestigious folio format (two leaves per sheet), it visually elevates Shakespeare’s plays to the status of literary ‘works’.17

As Teresa Peres notes in her article, a copy of Shakespeare’s Folio is extravagantly costly and unaffordable for the common reader: “Although almost 240 partial or complete copies exist – with 82 of these at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. – a Folio only rarely goes on sale and there are currently estimated to be just six complete copies in private hands. The last time one was auctioned, in 2001, it sold for $6,166,000.”18 The prevalence of the book as a source of artistic expression and superior knowledge is, of course, a characteristic component of Renaissance culture and the humanist notion of intellectual education. It constitutes a concept that cannot be easily transferred to the present time. On the contrary, nowadays the distribution of information and education is attributed to other media, preferably digital ones that can be disseminated via the World Wide Web.

16 Cf. Angela Locatelli, ‘The Fictional World of Romeo and Juliet: Cultural Connotations of an Italian Setting’, in Shakespeare’s Italy, ed. by Michele Marrapodi et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 69–86. 17 Tessa Peres, ‘Shakespeare’s First Folio will set you back millions – but its cultural value is immeasurable‘, Apollo Magazine 22/01/2020: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/shakespea re-first-folio-auction-christies/ [03/09/2020]. 18 Ibid.

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The role of literature in transmedia storytelling in the global culture of the twenty-first century

The role of literary texts in the field of media convergence is a secret one, often hidden by the spectacular qualities of new media, e. g. the special effects in films, the fascination of a visual impression or the sensual attraction of a sound track. Yet, on closer examination, writing texts still proves to be a crucial, if not indispensable activity within the process of transmedia storytelling. Firstly, the initiation of the narrative process often consists of a literary text, be it a successful book or web novel. Conceiving and writing a story thus frequently provides the starting point of the transmedia experience. The textual, written form of the narrative figures as the initial moment and the core of the series of different media it entails. Its seminal role in the development of the narrative and in its gradual unfolding across different media cannot be overestimated. Nonetheless, this is not the only dimension where literary activity and writing practices are involved in transmedia projects. Often the chain of media products evolving from one narrative finally returns to the written text in so far as it frequently entices and provokes multiple forms of fan fiction. Among the creative responses to transmedia events and storyworlds, writing texts is by far the most widespread and popular reaction. This may not be altogether surprising, because one does not need a special equipment or apparatus apart from a pen and paper (or a computer notebook) in order to write a story, whereas a camera, a set and several actors will be required to produce a film. Successful transmedia story worlds like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter have stimulated a large network of fan fiction, which is being collected on international multilingual platforms, such as Archive of our Own. From the point of view of fan literature, it seems that transmedia enterprises paradoxically consolidate the key role of literature and writing in the production of narratives. The more successful and the more popular a series of stories, movies, TV dramas etc proves to be, the more likely it is that the viewers/ listeners/ readers become productive themselves. The groups of fascinated recipients aim at sharing their knowledge and experience about topics they equally delight in. They enjoy discussing their responses to their favourite transmedia narratives, whether intellectual or emotional, and sharing their reflections and experiences about a movie, a TV series, a Web series or a graphic novel. The writing of fan fiction and its discussion in social media enables the participants to exchange their knowledge and individual responses. When communicating about the transmedia narratives currently en vogue, they take part in negotiations of cultural identities, they become involved in consensual and sometimes highly controversial discussions of media and texts.

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In the following I would like to elaborate the dynamics of transmedia storytelling mentioned above and its reciprocal relationship to the emergence of fan fiction by focusing on a recent Chinese example: In 2019 a web series called The Untamed (Chinese: 陈情令; pinyin: Chén Qíng Lìng) unexpectedly turned out to become the most popular media series of the year in China and beyond, embracing a highly successful transmedia storyworld. The Untamed was first presented on Tencent Video, a Chinese video streaming website owned by Tencent, from June 27 to August 20, 2019.19 A shorter version, a 20-episode special edition of the drama aired on WeTV starting December 25, 2019. As a result of its great success the production seemed a good candidate for an international/ transnational audience and was also transferred to Netflix. The drama series was based on the web novel Mó Dào Zuˇ Shı¯ (Chinese: 魔道祖师), engl. The Grandmaster of demonic cultivation, written by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu.20 The novel was received somewhat controversially in contemporary China, because it included BL content, depicting a close friendship between the two protagonists, which gradually developed into an erotic relationship. The main characters, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are sect members and cultivators in a fantasy world that is typical of the genre of the so called xianxia novel. In the Xianxia genre of Chinese fantasy we encounter a heterogeneous mixture of Chinese mythology, Taoism, Buddhism, Chinese martial arts, traditional Chinese popular beliefs, etc. The first part of the novel had already been successfully adapted as an animation film, a donghua, which proved very popular, when the directors Zheng Weiwen and Chen Jialin decided to have a try at a transposition of the story to a series played by live actors. As was apparent from the start, one of the main obstacles of the adaptation was its BL topic, only hinted at for the most part of the novel, yet very present in the imagination of the readers nonetheless. In the social and political context of contemporary China homosexuality, though no longer incriminated and legally persecuted, is still considered a taboo. In mainland China, homosexual or lesbian marriages are illegal (in contrast to Taiwan). Significantly, Chinese censorship suppresses any kind of BL content in TV drama, which does not only include pornographical scenes, but also the mere mentioning of a homosexual relationship.21 The chances of transferring the narrative to the film in its original story line and depiction of characters did not seem very high at first. Nonetheless the 19 Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Untamed_(TV_series) [03/09/2020]. 20 For an English translation cf. https://exiledrebelsscanlations.com/novels/grandmaster-of-d emonic-cultivation/ [03/09/2020]. 21 Cf. also Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘China bans depictions of gay people on television‘, 04/03/ 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/mar/04/china-bans-gay-people-telev ision-clampdown-xi-jinping-censorship [03/09/2020].

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expectations of the fans were quite high, and, when a rumour was leaked that the role of a female character was to be expanded in order to introduce a conventional love story, the audience was enraged and threatened to ignore the series altogether and to discourage others from viewing it.22 As a result, the producers changed their strategy and tried to stick to the original plot and to the depictions of characters in the novel as faithfully as possible. They included numerous iconic images such as the stealing of the chickens and the petting of the rabbits which were invested with a symbolic layer of meaning. The formidable acting of the two leading actors Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo transported suggestive expressions and sousentendus, subtle hints and suggestions which often presupposed an intimate knowledge of the novel in order to be fully understood. The complex and thoughtful adaptation process did not only satisfy the fans, it even surpassed their most optimistic expectations. Given a rigid censorship it was highly improbable that the series could safely air, as it finally did in the summer of 2019. The pair of young actors were celebrated as rising stars and soon became very high in demand in the production industry and with advertising companies. An audiobook and a manhua accompanied the lasting success of the novel and the TV drama. Not least of all, it deserves to be mentioned that in the wake of the popularity of the donghua and the TV drama the web novel has been published as a book in several editions in Main China as well as in Taiwan and Singapore. Most editions have a representative form, some are illustrated editions. The emergence or re-appearance of the book in the course of the successful career of the web novel manifests its resilience as a preferred carrier medium of the narrative. In comparison, the digital version seems slightly inferior to the prestigious and colourful book editions. Since its first airing the series has also inspired numerous fanfiction published in the World Wide Web, in social media and media collections or archives. The Archive of our own currently includes 13923 fanfictions based on The Untamed and written in the course of the last twelve months,23 while the novel The Grandmaster of demonic cultivation, and ist multiple adaptations have inspired a total number of 26055 texts in the Archive since 2017 (on the same website).24 The texts largely differ in quality and style which is to be expected from a group of amateurs. Many stories, however, are surprisingly accomplished and well written. They deal with various fascinating topics and offer multiple per22 Cf. the excellent review and introduction to The Untamed on Avenuex: https://youtu.be /DF7 t0gwR6Lo [03/09/2020]. 23 Cf. https://archiveofourown.org/tags/陈情令%20%7C%20The%20Untamed%20(TV)/works [03/09/2020]. 24 https://archiveofourown.org/tags/魔道祖师%20-%20墨香铜臭%20%7C%20Módào%20Zuˇs hı¯%20-%20Mòxia¯ng%20Tóngxiù/works [03/09/2020].

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spectives on the original novel and its adaptations while mostly succeeding in attracting the attention of fellow readers and fans. What kinds of fan fictions can be found on the Archive within the large fandom of The Untamed and Mó Dào Zuˇ Shı¯? Numerous fanfictions delineate side stories to the main narrative, adding material that is only hinted at or altogether left untold in the novel or the TV drama. A perpetual source of inspiration is offered by the open ending of The Untamed which only suggests the reunion of the protagonists and abstains from depicting it in detail in order to avoid censorship. This kind of ‘Leerstelle’ stimulates the imagination and creativity of the fans and challenges their ingenuity. It raises numerous questions, as, for instance, if and how the main characters are finally reunited, whether they can establish their relationship as a homosexual pair within the society of their families and sects, whether they will get married and in which ways they care for their adopted son.25 Those aspects obviously provide ample material and problems to be dealt with. The childhood of the protagonists and an imaginary meeting of the heroes in their early childhood functions as another favourite subject matter.26 Another popular device of creating fan fiction consists in the modification of major events in the original story, such as the avoidance of certain characters’ deaths. Transforming the tragic entanglement of events into a more peaceful and comforting narrative is also a very popular approach. The length of the stories varies from short forms (mini episodes) to very comprehensive novels. Methodologically speaking, we also encounter a wide range of approaches which differ according to the writing skills and personal interests of the authors. There are psychological explorations focusing on the inner conflict of one or more characters and on their reciprocal relationships. Some authors direct their talents toward the meticulous depiction of cultural practices and rituals, while others concentrate on describing the interconnectedness between family members, the main characters and animals, human beings and nature. It is remarkable and surprising how many energies are invested to describe and evoke the details of a fictional storyworld, investigating with care the minute aspects of mythology, landscape and social as well as cultural life associated with the fictional characters. The recombination of fandoms provides another source of inspiration which may be very promising, for example the merging of the Xianxia world of the cultivators (in which the only fantastic creatures are the ghosts of the dead and a 25 Cf. Brieeze01: Suibian, Published: 2020–07–28 Chapters: 7, https://archiveofourown.org/work s/24655861 [03/09/2020]. 26 See for instance: through_shadows_falling: Life is Like a Stranger, https://archiveofourown.org/works/23236840/chapters/55637539 [03/09/2020].

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gigantic tortoise) with vampires or werewolves borrowed from modern western fantasy and gothic literature.27 The open nature of the novel and the web drama promotes and encourages imagining conclusive endings of the story and envisaging alternatives of plot and character development. The authors of fan fiction recognise the coincidental nature of events, they realise that things might have happened differently. Furthermore they explore the dynamics inherent in the narrative and further investigate into the psychological and social dimensions of the characters and their interplay. The motivation of writing fanfics seems to be based on the desire and need of sharing experience and knowledge about the same story world. The fictional universe with its imaginary society and natural environment can be regarded as a virtual reality which enables authors and readers to immerse into a mutually appreciated network of narratives and to participate in an international community of fans who are equally intrigued by the same stories. Additionally, the familiar practices of discussing and commenting the works published in the Archive heighten the sense of complicity and solidarity among the fans. In conclusion, it seems likely that the role of literature is strengthened in the process of transmedia storytelling. The multitude of fanfictions demonstrate the appreciation, if not a certain predilection of the written text which persistently manifests itself within the dynamics of storytelling across media. Paradoxically, perhaps, the re-emergence of story writing and reading proves to be the surprising response to the present tendency of narratives spreading across media in the age of media convergence.

27 See for example Tyongslips: Vampires, Cultivation, and Sleep. Series begun:2020–04–27, https://archiveofourown.org/series/1721212 [03. 09. 2020]. See also Netrixie: Unstoppable, Published:2020–07–21, https://archiveofourown.org/works/23615887/chapters/56674234 [03/ 09/2020].

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Shedding a Cognitive Light on the Problem of Interpretation. A Tentative Essay in Honor of Angela Locatelli

Introduction A Festschrift is a due tribute to an accomplished scholar, a solemn acknowledgement of a solid career and lasting legacy that the rituals of academia have institutionalized. In the case of the homage paid to Angela Locatelli, the genre surpasses this scope and strengthens the Fest that the name conveys: it is the celebration of a brilliant scholar and an exceptionally warm-hearted person. We have met on several occasions and different settings within the framework of the international PhD program in Literary and Cultural Studies, the PhD-Net, and I have always been impressed by the acknowledgement and admiration devoted to her by colleagues, by the erudition and kindness of her comments to students and by her genuinely radiant smile that challenges any weather. On the occasions in which we met, Angela was always gracious enough to ask about my work, and I have always wondered what of it could be of interest to her, such an accomplished scholar. My joy was considerable when I was first invited to be a part of Angela’s Day, on November 29, 2019 at the University of Bergamo, and I am honored to contribute now, however modestly, to this written celebration of Angela Locatelli. The following is thus a longer reply to Angela’s question about my interest in a cognitive approach to literature. In this paper I will approach the problem of interpretation from a cognitive angle and relate this concept with that of reading and how the two converge in meaning. Starting with some considerations on meaning in language and in literature, the paper then continues by introducing the field of Cognitive Poetics and how this approach combines the interest in the text as well as in the minds that both conjure and read it. Asserting a view of interpretation that combines individual perception processes and social cognition, the paper looks for parallels between literature and perception/conception in art, to conclude with a tentative interpretation of a very brief text. The final words bring us back to Angela Locatelli and to a possible convergence of our research interests.

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Meaning, from language to literature

In my home university in Lisbon I am occasionally asked to teach a course on methodology to first semester students. Besides study and research techniques, the use of libraries and online resources, bibliography management or citation norms, part of the course is devoted to readings in the human sciences to be shared and discussed in class. To avoid that student presentations are the sheer reproduction of the ideas in those texts (often not even by other words), I often provide participants with three questions for them to consider while reading, so they may be helped while preparing the presentation: – What does the text say? – What does the text mean? – Why does it matter? The formulation is certainly simplistic. However, my hope is that by asking three different questions students might notice a difference and try to ascertain the text’s ideas (thesis and argumentation), its significance with respect to other texts and the situativity of production and reception, and the relevance of the text for the discussion of a given problem and its importance for their program of study. They rarely go beyond the first question. And not seldom do they return with the interrogation: isn’t what the text says already its meaning? I then try an analogy with language and introduce them to John Searle and his work on indirect speech acts.1 And to the semantics of the verbs “saying” and “meaning”, which in Portuguese are translated into dizer, ‘to say’, and querer dizer, ‘to want to say’, the volitive modal querer already pointing out to the concept of intention. And without knowing or intending it, students find themselves at the core of the hermeneutic problem of interpretation. This problem is central to the study of language. While Saussure (1916) addressed it semiotically and Chomsky (1975) avoided it altogether by claiming the supremacy of form – who does not remember his “colorless green ideas”?2 – 1 Cf. John Searle, ‘Indirect speech acts’, in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 30–57. 2 Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, édition critique préparée par T. de Mauro, (Paris: Payothèque, 1972 [1916]) and Noam Chomsky, Noam, Syntactic structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). With the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, Chomsky intended to demonstrate the difference between syntax and semantics: despite being nonsensical, the sentence is syntactically sound. There is thus a level of understanding in language that is not dependent of context. A similar case to prove a different point is linguist Lera Boroditsky’s example: “Imagine a jelly fish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics” (Lera Boroditsky, How language shapes the way we think, TEDWoman, 2017, 1’02’’ (Availble at: https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we _think/transcript (last accessed on December 5, 2020). Her point is that by uttering this

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cognitive linguistics has taken up the challenge and proposed multiple answers to address the issue – from Langacker’s cognitive grammar3 in which semantics crosses other levels of language and there is meaning even in syntactic structures, to construction grammar, which posits that grammatical constructions are basic pairings of form and meaning.4 The shift from generative grammar to cognitive grammar is however a jump over a hole: from an exclusive faith in syntax as the Holy Graal of human language, to a place where what language means is surpassed by the interest in how language means. In such a view, meaning itself becomes an assumption. How we make sense becomes more interesting than that we make sense of or even what sense we make. In Translation Studies, the problem of interpretation is historically the problem of the meaning of sacred texts, of which Friedrich Schleiermacher’s biblical hermeneutics is paradigmatic. An average translation student, however, even when dealing with pragmatic texts, will take effort to ascertain the text’s meaning with respect to what was intended by it, so as to obtain an equivalent in the target language. In literary studies, the problem of interpretation is evident in the distinct views of a continental tradition of hermeneutics and phenomenology, on the one hand, and the indeterminacy of meaning claimed by New Criticism and deconstructivist approaches, on the other hand, which is grounded on an attitude of suspicion toward the text, a consequent quest for its possible meanings and a resistance to compromise to an ultimate reading. Contrary to this view, a semiotic approach to the text, as the one proposed by Umberto Eco e. g. in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, deals with the agents involved in the literary semiosis and differentiates between empirical and model author and reader, and moreover acquits them from intentionality, rather establishing intentionality at the level of the work itself: A text is a device conceived in order to produce its model reader. […] [T]he initiative of the model reader consists in figuring out a model author that is not the empirical one and that, in the end, coincides with the intention of the text. Thus, more than a parameter to use in order to validate the interpretation, the text is an object that the interpretation builds up in the course of the circular effort of validating itself on the

sentence the speaker can trigger in the hearer’s mind an image that was not there before and might never be, had the speaker not uttered it. This is the cognitive potential of language. 3 Cf. Ronald W. Langacker, 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. I, Theoretical Prerequisites (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1987) and Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. II, Descriptive Application, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991). 4 Cf. William A. Croft, Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Adele Goldberg, Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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basis of what it makes up as its result. I am not ashamed to admit that I am so defining the old and still valid ‘hermeneutic circle’.5

Deciding on the meaning of the text is thus an “interpretive bet”6 that barely starts in the language of the text and continues with devising the intention of the work, which results from engendering the model author of the text addressing a model reader, both distinct from the real persons doing the work. The two views on interpretation of a literary text propose very different paths to the meaning of the text: the indeterminacy view licenses a freedom in reading that could ultimately compromise the exchange, let alone the consensus, about the text’s meaning. The semiotic view proposes an ethics of interpretation that discards some readings as uneconomical and hence as overinterpretations. In this polarized view of interpretation, what can a cognitive approach to literature, such as it postulated by Cognitive Poetics or Cognitive Literary Studies, contribute to disclose a process that remains so indeterminate?

II.

Cognitive Poetics and the problem of meaning

The term Cognitive Poetics was originally coined by literary scholar Reuven Tsur. In his 1992 book Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics he explores the relationship between text structure of literary forms and the effects they trigger in reading, developing a perspective very much influenced by both formalism and structuralism, and then new findings on human perception.7 With the onset of Cognitive Linguistics new possibilities of research emerged: language was no longer viewed as an independent module of the mind, but an integral part of human cognition. And from here it was only a short step into the inquiry of literary language, be it through the study of literature proper or through the study of poetic elements in everyday language. A milestone was George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work on the Metaphors We Live By (1980) whose main argument was that metaphor is a conceptual strategy of sense-making, manifested in metaphorical expressions which in turn are not exclusive to literature but pervasive in communication and in thinking.8 This continuum between everyday and aesthetic cognition is further developed in Mark Turner’s Literary Mind

5 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 64. 6 Ibid., p. 63. 7 Cf. Reuven Tsur, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1992). 8 Cf. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we live by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003 [1980]).

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(1986)9 and in many other studies that began to appear from the turn of the century on, denoting a common interest in the intersection between cognitive science and literary studies, though focusing on specific aspects of this convergence: “Cognitive Poetics”,10 “Cognitive Stylistics”,11 “Cognitive Literary Studies”,12 “Cognitive Criticism”13 and more recently “Cognitive Literary Science”.14 It must be said that this proliferation of names to the field has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand it shows that “the work of literary critics and theorists [is] vitally interested in cognitive science”, as Alan Richardson formulated.15 And in fact many relevant issues arise from this affinity: the relation between linguistic devices and cognitive effects, the focus on emotions and empathy, or the psychology of reading, as it has been described by Richard Gerrig in Experiencing Narrative Worlds (1993) and further experimentally verified by studies like Kidd and Castano’s (2013, 2019) or Willie van Peer et al (2012).16 Even before this proliferation of studies and names for Cognitive Poetics, Mark Turner and George Lakoff proposed to consider aesthetic language and literature in their joint publication More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989). The book is a continuation of Metaphors We live By in its core argumentation: “[G]reat poets, as master craftsmen, use basically the same tools we use; what makes them different is their talent for using these tools, and

9 Cf. Mark Turner, The Literary Mind. The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 10 Cf. Tsur, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics; Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002); Joanna Gavins, Cognitive Poetics in Practice (London: Routledge, 2003); Cognitive Semiotics, 2 (2008). 11 Cf. Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002). 12 Cf. Lisa Zunshine, Lisa, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) and the Special Issue of the Journal of Literary Studies, 11 (2017), 2. 13 Cf. Terence Cave, Terence, Thinking with Literature. Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 14 Cf. Michael Burke, and Emily T. Troscianko, Cognitive Literary Science. Dialogues Between Literature and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 15 Alan Richardson, ‘Studies in Literature and Cognition: A Field Map’, in The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, ed. by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 1–30. 16 Cf. Richard Gerrig in Experiencing Narrative Worlds. On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) and further experimentally verified by studies like David Kidd and Emanuele Castano’s ‘Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind’, Science, 342 (2013), 377–380 and ‘Reading literary fiction and theory of mind: Three preregistered replications and extensions of Kidd and Castano’, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10 (2019), 4, 522–531, or Willie van Peer, Frank Hakemulder and Sonia Zyngier, Scientific Methods for the Humanities (Amsterdam- Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2012).

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their skill in using them, which they acquire from sustained attention, study and practice”.17 To this one could ask further: if poetic metaphor is based on the same cognitive processes involved in conventional metaphor, what makes poetic metaphor aesthetic and not simply intelligible?18 And what leads the reader to acknowledge poetic metaphor as artful and to enjoy the aesthetic pleasures of its appreciation as metaphor that is poetic? As Roman Jakobson has put it already in 1960: “What makes a verbal message a work of art?”.19 In 2002 Peter Stockwell published Cognitive Poetics. An Introduction, which together with its companion Cognitive Poetics in Practice20 are a landmark in the field, given their systematic collection of concepts and topics explored, on the one hand, and the diversity and scholarly backgrounds of the authors involved. In Cognitive Poetics, Stockwell claims: Concerned with literary reading, and with both a psychological and a linguistic dimension, cognitive poetics offers a means of discussing interpretation whether it is an authorly version of the world or a readerly account, and how those interpretations are manifest in textuality.21

And further: Cognitive Poetics models the process by which intuitive interpretations are formed into expressible meaning, and it presents the same framework as a means of describing and accounting for those readings.22

Stockwell elegantly bypasses the problems that kept so many a deconstructivist and hermeneutics scholar awake. He dismisses distinctions such as Eco’s between empirical and model author and reader, by claiming that “[l]iterary texts are artefacts, but readings are natural objects”,23 which thus can only occur involving actual minds. This view is akin to the claim for a scientific stand for cognitive poetics, such as is voiced by literary scholar Tony Jackson in his essay Literary Interpretation and 17 Mark Turner and George Lakoff proposed to consider aesthetic language and literature in their joint publication More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. xi. 18 This question is formulated by Per Aage Brandt, who in his essay ‘Metaphors and Meaning in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73’, in Spaces, Domains, and Meaning. Essays in Cognitive Semiotics (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 159–166, proposes an alternative to Turner and Lakoff cognitive reading of the poetic text. 19 Roman Jakobson has put it already in ‘Linguistics and poetics’, in Style in language, ed. by Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350–377 (p. 350). 20 Cf. Gavins, Cognitive Poetics in Practice. 21 Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, p. 5. 22 Ibid., p. 7. 23 Ibid., p. 2 (our emphasis).

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Cognitive Literary Studies (2003).24 In this paper Jackson claims that the methodology for interpretation of a literary text is necessarily different from the scientific method of the hard sciences, because the object is not physical or a given in nature, but cultural, and although literary interpretation could come close to other kinds of argumentation such as scientific explanation, the criteria for what counts as an argument will necessarily be different in literary studies and in science. Unlike science, verification and falsification do not work in literary studies on the basis of the invalidation of a previous hypothesis, but instead interpretations of a given text can co-exist cumulatively and contribute to larger knowledge of that text. With this, Jackson raises two problems. First the predicative “cognitive” in this strand of literary studies generates expectations towards a scientific character (“scientificity”) of its findings. And if this is so, and literature happens in the mind, than the study of the mind comes before the interest in the interpretation of the text. The findings thus obtained are likely to be more informative about the way we think than about the text as cultural artifact, in all its situativity and aesthetic uniqueness. Science searches for regularities. This resonates an oftenheard criticism about a cognitive approach to literary texts: Jackson expressed it elsewhere stating that cognitive literary studies “has much too often produced interpretations that are painfully obvious”.25 And Marie-Laure Ryan seconded this view saying that “[b]oth literary criticism and classical narratology consider [mental operations that readers perform unconsciously while reading a text] too banal, too automatic to be worthy of attention”.26The findings produced in this field are thus challenged both for the “methodological tolerances”27 of the humanities that allow for travelling concepts also from cognitive science, and for the circle of indeterminacy: [T]he nature of the object of study, literature, requires that a good literary interpretation re-create, at least virtually, just that object of study; not in the sense of re-creating what we know of a material object or process in the world, not in the sense that Copernicus in a way re-created the world by displacing the earth from the center of the solar system; but in the sense that the object of study gets re-created as an indeterminate, or literary, text. […] In this sense, the entire literary-interpretive endeavor is paradoxical (both originally creative and parasitic).28

24 Cf. Tony E. Jackson, ‘“Literary Interpretation” and Cognitive Literary Studies’, Poetics Today, (2003) 24, 2, 191–205. 25 Tony E. Jackson, ‘Explanation, interpretation, and close reading: The progress of cognitive poetics’, Poetics Today, 26 (2005), 3, 519–533 (p. 528). 26 Marie Laure Ryan, ‘Narratology and cognitive science: A problematic relation’, Style, 44 (2010), 4, 469–495 (p. 479). 27 Jackson, ‘“Literary Interpretation” and Cognitive Literary Studies’, p. 193. 28 Ibid., pp. 198–199.

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The second problem is that such a scientific view of literature, because more interested in obtaining generalizations about readings and readers (and their minds), may reduce the text to an instrument of experimentation, an illustration of the phenomena the mind is good at. Both these problems contribute to some skepticism about the cognitive approach to the study of literature. However, the relevance of this approach might be found also in how the problem of meaning and interpretation is dealt with in other fields, as in visual arts.

III.

Literary interpretation: from individual perception to social cognition

How could then a cognitive informed approach to literary texts provide some relevant insight into the phenomenon of interpretation? Perhaps one way to address this issue would be to consider two levels of analysis: at the level of individual cognition, by considering reading and interpretation on a par with more fundamental levels of sense-making, as is the case of visual perception; and at the level of social cognition, by considering the text as a conceptual space of semiosis, of intentional exchange of meaning, contextually situated and culturally embedded. Let us take each of these levels one at a time. Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and his colleague William Hirstein proposed in 1999 what they named “A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience” in a paper titled no less than The Science of Art.29 Without going into much detail here, what the authors propose is a set of “eight laws of aesthetic experience”, neural mechanisms that mediate human artistic experience. Their focus is on visual art, both because visual perception is their field of research and also because the visual cortex has been one fo the most extensively studied areas in the brain. Two of these laws are interesting for our purpose of addressing the problem of interpretation. An important principle of visual perception, studied mostly by Artificial Intelligence, is the ‘generic viewpoint principle’. The authors illustrate this principle with an image of the Neckar cube, which shows a transparent cube, whose front side can be seen both as turning down (in a diagonal axis from top left to down right) or turning up (the diagonal oriented from down right to up left). The interpret this three-dimensional image as an alternation of two possibilities, based on two viewpoints which are offered to perception. When the transparent cube is tilted so that the left angle of the front side superposes the bottom right angle from the back side of the cube, our brains tend to interpret what we see as a 29 Cf. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein, ‘The science of art: A neurological theory of aesthetic experience’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1999/6 (6–7), pp. 15–51.

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two-dimensional hexagon, with internal lines crossing or irradiating from a distal point in the center. We do not interpret it as a cube seen from a unique angle. As the authors formulate: “[Y]our visual system abhors interpretations which rely on a unique vantage point and favors a generic one or, more generally, it abhors suspicious coincidences”.30 It could be the case that this rule applies to broader contexts of sense-making. Could it be that it underlies the abhorrence of one single interpretation, also at the level of literary reception? Granted, this is a far-fetched idea, but it could help sustain the deconstructionist view of the indeterminacy of meaning, as a resistance toward a single meaning of the text. On the other hand, would this than undermine the semiotic view of interpretation, as proposed by Eco, according to which some readings may be discarded as uneconomical and hence as overinterpretations? The key here would be: where are the limits? Addressing this question from the same neuroscientific angle, and with Ramachandran and Hirstein, one other fundamental rule of visual perception is perceptual grouping and binding, by which the visual areas in the brain will extract correlations from the input and bind them to create unified objects. Once one such object is created from the binding of elements, this object remains stable and it is impossible not to hold on to the image of recognition. The example they give is an image of a Dalmatian sniffing the ground. It is a diffuse black and white image, in which the environment of the dog is made of black and white spots and dots, making it hard, at first sight, to integrate some of these spots as the good form os a Dalmatian. Once we see the dog, it is impossible to go back to seeing the image as an undifferentiated composition of black and white spots. Research on figure and ground in visual perception sustains this view of stability and develops it further. Ambiguous images prompt grouping and binding so that two possible images form. These are quite distinct: the brain cannot engender them simultaneously, but requires an interval of 2–3 seconds to shift between the two images it forms.31 Artists like M.C. Escher and René Magritte have tried to capture this transition in a unique mode of “visual slow motion”.32 For a view of interpretation, this could be read as the possibility of coexistence of several interpretations, but not of just any interpretation, which resonates the ideas put forward by Eco. 30 Ibidem, p. 30. 31 Neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel proposes a critical temporal window of 2–3 seconds for presemantic processing integration as “a general principle of the neurocognitive machinery […], a time zone within which the identity of a percept or a thought is created and maintained”, Ernst Pöppel, ‘Lost in time: a historical frame, elementary processing units and the 3-second window’, Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, 2004/64, pp. 295–301 (300). 32 See, for example, René Magritte’s Le Blanc-Seign (1965) or M.C Escher’s Metamorphosis II (1939–1940).

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The correlation one could establish between the more fundamental levels of human individual cognition and more sophisticated cognitive and cultural activities such as literary interpretation are certainly insufficient. A cognitive approach to literature and to interpretation can encompass a level of social cognition by understanding the text as a semiotic locus of representation, where individual, interactional and cultural levels interact. In the view of Line Brandt and Per Aage Brandt in their paper on Cognitive Poetics and Imagery (2005), the already extensive body of work in Cognitive Poetics – or Cognitive Literary Studies, a term they find more apt – can inform both textual analysis and cognitive aesthetic.33 The authors distinguish between three dimensions of textual analysis: reading, interpretation and aesthetic evaluation. Although not necessarily all present in a give analysis, they build on each other, so that a textual analysis is not possible without a reading of the text being generated, which in turn serves as the basis of an interpretation and the assessment of the text as an aesthetic text or work of art. Their cognitive view is interested not only in literature, but also in language as such. This perspective is in consonance with the earlier approaches to cognitive poetics, which followed closely advances in cognitive linguistics. This is certainly Peter Stockwell’s view and it is shared by other scholars working in cognitive stylistics. Interestingly, this view resonates Roman Jakobson’s claim that “poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics”.34 To this idea, as well as to his essay on Linguistics and Poetics we shall return in a moment. While pragmatic language is oriented toward a goal, and utterances are means to an end, literary language is meaningful in a double sense, as words on the page not only mean something in the ordinary sense but they are meant to be as they are on the page. This architecture of intentionality is built into the literary text and the awareness of it, both on the part of the writer and the reader, makes literary language processing more intense and aware: From the perspective of the literary reader, the author is expected to have anticipated the reading, which in a way entails the author reading his or her own text as the imagined reader would read it, that is, from the viewpoint of an anonymous ‘model’ reader – not an average reader, but a proficient and competent ideal reader.35

Brandt and Brandt further describe four interrelated levels of cognitive processes underlying textual comprehension and which allow for a reading of the text, a condition for its interpretation: The enunciation level that allows viewing the text as an instance of discourse (this is where categories like voice or perspective come 33 Cf. Line Brandt and Per Aage Brandt, ‘Cognitive poetics and imagery’, European Journal of English Studies, 2005/9 (2), pp. 117–130. 34 Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and poetics’, p. 350. 35 Brandt and Brandt, ‘Cognitive poetics and imagery’, p. 125.

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into play). Even in the least subjective texts there is an inbuilt perspective in language that allows a basic semiotic constellation. It is from this onset that the semantic content, the second level, is presented, namely the intention or the reference content of the text. These contents are presented by the enunciational voice in a given manner, which constitutes the textual rhetoric or authorial style, the third level. The awareness about these three levels of composition produces a reading of the text, which is the first condition for its interpretation. These three levels correspond to three interrogations to the text: who is speaking (and eventually addressing whom?), what is the text about and how is this semantic content presented, in terms of language and strategies of composition. Addressing these questions provides a reading of the the who, the what and the how in the text. The interpretation is the next level and it tackles the question of why: i. e. why the text is written as it is, and what it means. In semiotic terms, “[t]he reading of the becomes a signifier for some life-world phenomenon that can be identified as the model author intention”.36 We see how the authors follow closely Eco’s proposal. The interpretation generates a link between the text and the phenomenal world of human beings, and this generalization derives from the reading. In this sense, the authors write: “The most plausible interpretations are the ones that have the most support in the text, that is, whose claims are supported by the enunciational structure, the semantic content, and the rhetoric of the text, established in the reading”.37 Viewing the literary text and its interpretation as an instantiation of human life-world experience, and moreover understanding interpretation as being based on textual analysis that puts language at the core, has the implication that interpretations of literary texts aim at a level of generalized abstract meaning that transcends historical readings. This does not mean that the historical specificity of the text is bypassed; only that the historical particularities of a text are one version of a more general human life-world problem or condition, of which the historical situation is a situated version: [T]he intermediary level between seeing characters, with proper names and specific characteristics, and seeing human beings, would be the level at which these individuals are seen as ‘African-Americans’ or ‘French nineteenth-century urbanites’, or whatever they happen to be. However, the study of cognition cannot be the study of AfricanAmerican cognition, or French nineteenth-century cognition. It obviously has to be the study of human cognition.38

This cognitive perspective in the study of literature starts from the assumption that humans create and share representations of reality and experience and that 36 Ibid., p. 126. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 127.

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they can materialize such representations in artefacts that can be shared across space and time because they are grounded on stable textual meanings. The importance of linguistic meaning for the interpretation of the text is a point which this view of cognitive poetics inherits from formalist traditions. In Linguistics and Poetics, Roman Jakobson calls for “an objectively scholarly analysis of verbal art”,39 which he sees as the task of literary studies, instead of criticism. Triggered by the question “What makes a verbal message a work of art?”40 – which reminds us of the question asked above, namely if aesthetic texts are based on everyday strategies and processes of human cognition, what makes them aesthetic and not simply understandable or intelligible – Jakobson claims that “poeticalness is not a supplementation of discourse with rhetorical adornment but a total reevaluation of the discourse and of all its components whatsoever”.41 We could add that this evaluation must occur against a background of a given set of criteria: the first could be the fading referential function of language, overshadowed by the centrality of the poetic function; this attunes the reader into finding equivalence between formal patterns of composition and referential meaning. The second could be the intentionality intrinsic to the literary text as the construal of a model-author’s mind and its perspective of the world, which resonates in a view of an aspect of the human life-world. We shall now attempt to illustrate this with a brief example.

IV.

Interpreting a very brief text

The following is one of various Nouvelles en Trois Lignes written by Félix Féneon at the beginning of the 20th century (1906). The English version is a translation by Luc Sante, published in 2007 by the New York Review of Books: Certaine folle arêtee dans la rue s’était abusivement donnée pour l’infirmière Elise Bachmann. Celle-ci est en pairfait santé. A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.42

This briefest account is one of several nouvelles, reports about trivia that Féneon published in 1906 in the French newspaper Le Matin. The collection’s original title Nouvelles en trois lignes points to the ambiguity of the genre of these texts, 39 40 41 42

Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and poetics’, p. 352. Ibid., p. 350. Ibid., p. 372. Félix Féneon, Nouvelles em trois lignes, choix et préface de Régine Detambel (Paris: Mercure de France, 2015 [1906]), p. 19; engl. transl. Félix Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines, transl. and with an introduction by Luc Sante (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), p. 34.

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which can either be understood as brief news about random events – faits-divers – or novels of three lines, akin to Ernest Hemingway’s Briefest story ever told or Lydia Davis’s short-shorts. The random story is told by a distanced, cool voice, which reports with no involvement an event hardly worth of mention. An anonymous madwoman was arrested for falsely claiming the identity of another woman, with both a name and a profession, categories that the former apparently lacks. The causal link between the two events is clearer in the original, due to tense, but it is inferable in the English version as well: we may imagine the madwoman may have asserted her false identity, forcefully and with little concern for composure, all these inferences licensed by the predication “mad”. Were it not for the second sentence, the story would have been a clerk’s note on a legal matter. The second sentence however shifts the focus from the madwoman to the nurse, topicalizing the latter as subject. The contrast between the mental condition of the anonymous woman and that of nurse Bachmann comes as an unexpected sequence, the more so as the mental sanity of this nurse would not be in question: unless there is clear evidence otherwise, we assume that most characters we encounter are as sane as we are. Thus, both this shift of focus from the madwoman to the nurse and the contrast between the insanity of the first and the sanity of the latter result in a surprise in reading. It is the adverb “perfectly” that turns this surprise into wit. Perfectly is not modal, but epistemic, and it thus shifts again the focus from the nurse to the voice that assesses her mental condition. She is “perfectly sane”, but according to whom? Under which criteria? And where does the narrator have this knowledge from? We could speculate on their mutual acquaintance, but it is more probable that the narrator does what we normally do, namely that if nothing else makes us question it, others are perfectly sane. This adverb further discloses that the narrator is not as aseptic as initially assumed: though limited, his involvement in the story is evidenced in the assessment he makes. The randomness of this fait-divers meets the arbitrarity of the textual sequence, and in doing so the composition stresses the content of this story. But if this is a plausible reading of the story (what the text says), what does the story mean? And how might we interpret it? This story seems to be about identity and how individual identity is ratified by others: affirmed by a name, which is distinct from a noun. While nouns serve categorization, names are meant to render unique those who carry them. Language demonstrates this: the indefinite article preceding “madwoman” dissolves her identity in a category where other madwomen dwell, while “Elise Bachmann” does not even need an article. But for being so individual, so personal, names actually elude our will: others chose our name for us and our name is what we go by to others (it is thus so strange that in Italian or Portuguese we should say Mi chiamo, Eu chamo-me or I call myself). Identity goes hand in hand with identi-

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fication, and both are the first condition for any sort of human relationship. This is perhaps the aspect of intersubjective condition that this story is about. In the preface to the English translation of these novels in three lines, Luc Sante tells of Félix Fénéon’s biography, as well as about the social, political and cultural circumstances of his time. A time of political instability and the rise of anarchist movements, of which he was part, and of increasing importance of newspapers as media and of the fait-divers as a genre of social Comédie Humaine. Féneon was a literary editor, credited with editing Rimbaud’s Illuminations, with having translated James Joyce’s Dédale (1924) and for being a disciple of Mallarmé. Though virtually unnoticed and hardly remembered – “invisibly famous”, in the words of Luc Sante, “a great literary stylist who wrote little and published less”43 –, Féneon sharpened this miniature genre and perfected it with a heightened precision of language and contained emotion. We should return now to the view of reading and interpretation from a cognitive perspective we’ve alluded to above. Quoting Brandt and Brandt once more: “A cognitive reading of a text has a double scope. The reader’s attention is focused not only on understanding the text but also on the process of creating the representations that make up the text”.44 The experience of reading a literary text is thus one that unfolds at the surface level of the text and its semantics, while inviting a consideration of the enunciation architecture of the text as an instance of semiosis. The cognitive element in this approach could be, on the one hand, unveiling the mental processes involved in the representations manifested by the text, and on the other hand, relating these with other instances of mental representation and of sense-making of the human life-world. This is probably where Ramachandran and Hirstein meet Brandt and Brandt, and together they work in helping us understand how we make sense of this little text.

Concluding remarks Back to Angela. In April 2018 I had the immense pleasure of attending (more or less undercover) the seminar she gave to Master and PhD students in Lisbon on Literature and Mediation. Browsing through my notes as I was preparing this paper, I came across many of her ideas, which resonate with the approach to literature sought by cognitive literary studies. One is the idea that the skills required in mediation (including legal mediation) are best acquired through the experience of literature: accurate description, imagination, empathy, dialogic 43 Luc Sante, ‘Introduction’, in Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines, pp. 7–31 (p. 7). 44 Brandt and Brandt, ‘Cognitive poetics and imagery’, p. 128.

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reading or ethics. These are in fact among the most central topics in cognitive literary studies, which besides the textual analysis and work on the text, is concerned with the likely or desirable impact of these findings (a comprehensive account of this concern can be read in Vera Nünning’s Reading Fictions, Changing Minds)45. In this seminar, as well as in the lecture she gave and in fact in her opus magnum in ten volumes, The Knowledge of Literature, Angela convincingly advocates for a cognitive function of literature, as literature is a privileged means that provides knowledge of language, of life, the other, and ethics.46 In her argumentation, Angela compares literature with science, claiming that while science seeks explanation, literature affords comprehension, and while knowledge in science is experimental, in literature it is by nature experiential. The affordance of literature is thus to grant us the experience of approaching a text and ascertaining not only what it says, but also what it means and especially why it matters. By bringing together the knowledge of literature and awareness of the mind, consilience may be obtained in a view of interpretation that unveils at its core human intentional meaning.

45 Cf. Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014). 46 Cf. La conoscenza della letteratura. The Knowledge of Literature, ed. by Angela Locatelli, 10 vols. (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2002–2011).

Michela Gardini

The Translator as a Fictional Character

The ethics of subordination illustrated by Jorge Luis Borges, as interpreted by Alan Pauls,1 are the perfect fit for the emerging character of the translator in the world of literature today. Indeed, there is a growing trend for novels and films to include a translator (or an interpreter) as one of the fictional characters, and sometimes even the main character. As a result, the axiom of the translator’s invisibility established by Lawrence Venuti2 and cleverly summed up by Valéry Larbaud in 1946 now appears to be a thing of the past: The translator is an obscure figure, as he comes last and lives, as it were, on charity alone; he agrees to perform the most menial of jobs and accepts the most self-effacing roles; “to serve” is his motto, asking nothing for himself, but taking great pride in being faithful to the masters he has chosen to serve, faithful to the point of annihilating his own intellectual personality.3

If truth be told, a new visibility now seems to envelop the figure of the translator, as recent studies have pointed out.4 To the purpose of this, my contribution is to explore the translation fictional turn, to use the well-known term first coined in 1995 by the Brazilian scholar Else 1 I refer to Alan Pauls’ work El factor Borges (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004) and the following extract in particular: “Borges’s work is full of those somewhat dark, subaltern characters who follow, like shadows, the plot of a work or the footsteps of a more prominent character. Translators, exegetes, annotators of sacred texts, even the sidekicks of thugs armed with knives: Borges defines a true ethics of subordination […] Being a footnote to the text of another person’s life: isn’t this the parasitic vocation […] that almost always prevails in the best of Borges’ tales?”. The translation is mine; hereafter, unless otherwise specified, English translations are mine. 2 See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation (London-New York: Routledge, 1995). 3 Valéry Larbaud, Sous l’invocation de Saint Jérôme (Paris : Gallimard, 1946), p. 9. 4 See Klaus Kaindl, ‘Going fictional! Translators and interpreters in literature and film. An Introduction’ in Transfiction. Research into the realities of translation fiction, ed. by Klaus Kaindl and Karlheinz Spitzl (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 2014), pp. 1–26; also, Peter Hanenberg (ed.), A New visibility. On culture, Translation and Cognition (Lisboa: Universidade Católica Editora, 2015).

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Ribeiro Pires Vieira,5 by problematicising the character of the translator, looking at it from a purely literary (or fictional) perspective in order to consider its narrative potential. What does such a character add to literature? My interest lies not so much in translation studies aimed at establishing the contribution of literature to the theory and practice of translation, but rather in the imaginary and literary criticism. Whilst applauding those who have pioneered in this field of investigation, most of the reflections on the translation fictional turn have until now considered the character of the translator/interpreter as a function of the theory and practice of translating; in other words, remaining within the field of translation studies. This can be said to be true of the studies by Antonio Lavieri6 and those collected by Klaus Kaindl and Karlheinz Spitzl.7 My intention, on the other hand, is to enhance the interdisciplinary status of this character and so give it substantial aesthetic value, often associated with an ethical or political significance. The fictionalisation of the act of translating, together with the figure of the translator, will inevitably determine its aestheticisation. This aspect appears most strikingly in what we would call the ‘iconography of translation’, starting, by way of example, with the countless different portrayals of the Tower of Babel – seen as the founding moment of the practice of translation – and continuing with the iconic figure of the translator embodied by St. Jerome, as well as Magritte’s La reproduction interdite (1937), arguably a mise en abyme, that is a copy of an image within itself. Filmography adds to this aestheticising narrative with images, especially in the most original of outputs, as in the case of the film Arrival (2016) by the Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, where the challenge posed by translation goes beyond the boundaries of mere human communication, having as its object none other than the language of extraterrestrials called heptapods. As Alice Ray pointed out, the spotlight is put on the problem of translation in this film, making it far more important that the actual reason for the arrival of the aliens.8 But let us return to the matter of literary works, the main object of this article. Just like the character of the writer, the fictional translator is a powerful metaliterary figure who, indifferent to any translation theory, proves to be a crucial character in terms of the very conception of literary creation, encouraging the 5 Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira ‘(In) visibilities in Translation: Exchanging Theoretical and Fictional Perspectives’, ComTextos, 6 (1995), 50–68. 6 Antonio Lavieri, Translatio in fabula. La letteratura come pratica teorica del tradurre (Roma: Editori Riuniti 2007). 7 Kaindl and Spitzl, Transfiction. 8 See Alice Ray, ‘Traduire l’heptapode: la figure du traducteur dans Premier Contact’, Doletiana 7, (2019), Le tournant fictionnel de la traduction, 1–19. For a deeper analysis of the figure of the translator/interpreter in film, see also Michael Cronin’s work entitled Translation goes to the Movies (London: Routledge, 2009).

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reader to wrestle with the act of writing. Emblematic of this is the short novel by the French-Turkish author Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech, Insomnia. Une traduction nocturne (1998, second edition revised by the author in 2011). The following extract comes from the start of the fourth chapter: Goldman’s father is dead, has died, was dying, while, at the same time that, just as Goldman was committing suicide, commits suicide, committed suicide, had committed suicide on January 1, the first day of January, just at the time, at the very instant, at the precise moment that it seemed to him, appeared, that by dint of detachment and withdrawal, of retreat, a new period, epoch, era was finally opening up before him […].9

In Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech’s novel, translation is inspired by a nostalgic desire to reclaim a lost language, where translating is the only way to recapture the past. The original text works like a Proustian madeleine, evoking memories and sensations that had seemed lost forever, and translation becomes the only means of rediscovering and, especially, recreating lost time: The music of your prose sent me back into this corridor, initially black, silent and cold, then buzzing with sounds, languages, stories and my grandmother’s voice; following the thread of your words I rediscovered it. And yet every night I just can’t avoid it, I find myself back in this dark hallway with the fear of never being able to return to lucidity, to the circle of light formed by the lampshade under which I work by day. Maybe that is insomnia. So I try at all costs to hang on to a story, following the route, dreaming of the ports whence come our languages with fond memories of these places, between land and water, where we are simply passers-through. Like Hebrew, the language of wandering, which I adopt to take stories from one country to another, from one language to another, from the dead to the living.10

This wishful dimension of translation, aimed at regaining a legacy that has been snatched away, is also dramatically apparent in the autobiographical book by the French writer of Armenian origin Janine Altounian, L’effacement des lieux. Autobiographie d’une analysante, héritière de survivants et traductrice de Freud (2019), where translation is conceived as not just a crossroads of languages, but also as the transmission of stories and traumatic experiences: To translate a collective trauma, and to read the translation of the stories transmitting this, is to appropriate it as a subject, a subject which, on and through being written in the language of the country where the survivors gain refuge, then succeeds in establishing one’s heritage as an object worthy of love thanks to the distance created by its translation. To inherit a destroyed culture is, therefore, possible thanks to the double displacement achieved by translation. The translation of their heritage for the un9 Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech, Insomnia. Une traduction nocturne (Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Bleu autour, 2011), p. 31. 10 Pinhas-Delpuech, Insomnia, pp. 72–73.

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conquered world here and the expression of their debt to the survivors of death there allows us to inherit from them, learn how to love what they have transmitted, and be able to love them. In short, this form of translation is the very essence of what every translation should be: an act of love.11

The political impact of the character of the translator, a highly cross-cultural figure and as such a metaphor of our globalized world today, is all too clear. Indeed, it allows those categories normally considered passive and ancillary to emerge from the shadows: translators, like migrants, not to mention women. This combination – translation and the feminine – is widely seen and lies at the heart of the Canadian writer Nicole Brossard’s poetics, as seen in her novel Le Désert Mauve (1987). Writing from a feminist point of view, she strives to reverse the position of inferiority to which the female translator has always been relegated, just like certain other social categories, as Sherry Simon argues in her work Gender in Translation. Identity and the Politics of Transmission (1996): The femininity of translation is a persistent historical trope. Woman and translator have been relegated to the same position of discursive inferiority. […] the original is considered the strong generative male, the translation the weaker and derivative female. We are not surprised to learn that the language used to describe translating dips liberally into the vocabulary of sexism, drawing on images of dominance and inferiority, fidelity and libertinage.12

So we might also see Borges’ perspective as trying to make a political point, as he masterfully illustrates in his works how one can argue against the concept whereby translation is subordinate to authorial writing. Borges challenges the reader with an apparent paradox, by viewing a translation not so much as a copy, but as actually superior to the original text. If, as he claims, there can be no definitive version of a book, because one never finishes writing it, then equally any interpretation or translation of the same will cause it to be written ad infinitum. “The art of translation is perhaps more subtle and more civilized than the art of writing. Translation is a more advanced stage” is the famous quote attributed to Borges and repeated countless times, as the Canadian writer Jacques Poulin does in his novel La traduction est une histoire d’amour (2006).13 Canadian literature and, in particular, Québécois literature is widely seen as the product of a culture known for bilingualism and awash with translation, which is why the figure of the translator appears so frequently. 11 Janine Altounian, L’effacement des lieux. Autobiographie d’une analysante, héritière de survivants et traductrice de Freud (Paris: puf, 2019), pp. 122–123. 12 Sherry Simon (London-New York: Routledge, 1996), p.1. 13 Jacques Poulin, La traduction est une histoire d’amour (Arles: Actes Sud, 2006), p. 23; Id., Translation is a Love Affair, trans. by Sheila Fischman (Brooklyn: Archipelago books, 2009), pp. 17–18.

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In the rest of this article I will focus on two novels by the Québécois writer Jacques Poulin, namely: Les Grandes Marées (1978) and the aforementioned La traduction est une histoire d’amour (2006). Undoubtedly a less ideological author than Nicole Brossard, Poulin peoples his novels with writers, professional readers and, notably, translators. It is clear that the stylistic code of his poetics lies in metaliteracy, constituting an ode to literature and words. Translation once again becomes an object of love, as the very title of his 2006 novel seems to suggest, as, in the context of the fiction of this novel, it refers to the name that a university professor had given to a course on the correspondence between Kafka and his Czech translator Milena. Indeed, Kafka’s Lettres à Milena is an intertextual reference – a mise en abyme – entrusted to the memories of Marina, the female protagonist: Every day, to keep me faithful to your text, my words hug the curves of your writing, like a lover nestling in her sweetheart’s arms.” Milena had written that to Kafka. But I no longer remembered if the words really did belong to the Czech translator or if it was my professor who’d put them in her mouth to illustrate his thesis. I was inclined to believe the latter, knowing very well, as do all translators, that unlike Kafka’s, Milena’s letters had not been preserved.14

Wishing to mirror Milena, her role-model, on reaching the end of the novel and its translation Marina writes: I went back to work. In the chapter I was translating, which was the last one, Monsieur Waterman had taken out every useless word, he’d punctuated carefully, and I was trying to be faithful to him. Like Milena, I wanted my words to hug the curves of his writing.15

However, let us follow the order of publication of the two novels. Back in 1978, Poulin had already introduced the fictional character of a translator in his Les Grandes Marées. Teddy Bear, the main character, has retired to the island of Île Madame in order to concentrate on his work, that of translating comics from English into French. A predilection for leading a solitary life, an island retreat, the company of cats and a love for the dictionaries he surrounds himself with are all topoi of this character, and motifs we also find in Poulin’s 2006 novel. Yet the figure of the translator changes, as we shall see, from one novel to the other. The first thing that strikes the reader is the fact that Teddy Bear’s interlocutor is not actually the author of the texts he is in the process of translating, as usually happens in this type of fiction, but his employer, described as a rich businessman who owns Île Madame and who arrives on the island once a week aboard a deafening helicopter. This highlights Teddy Bear’s position of economic subordination according to the ruthless market logic to which he will fall victim. In 14 Poulin, Translation is a Love Affair, p. 123. 15 Poulin, Translation is a Love Affair, p. 143.

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fact, after several weeks he will learn that his translations have never been published, since his patron decided that it would be more profitable and quicker to rely on nothing less than an electronic brain, called Atan, capable of producing the translations “en deux minutes” (in a couple of minutes).16 Clearly his preference for machine translations is aimed at annihilating any creative ambition in the human translator, who is described several times in the novel as purposefully spending a long time on the search for the most suitable word in French. The very name ‘Atan’, as Sophie Bastien points out, reminds us of Adam, the first man, but the “phonetic deviation” would appear to announce the end of humanity, “through the disappearance of one of its foundations, namely work.” Sophie Bastien also stresses the homophony between Atan and “à temps” (on time), indicating “the obsession with time and the cult of speed” typical of the modern world.17 Teddy Bear is gradually deprived of his work and thus of his role in society: “vous êtes même en dehors de la marge” (you are even outside the margins),18 he is told by the extravagant characters who have since invaded the island, as suggested by the patron. These people will eventually force Teddy Bear to leave the island, to swim away, like a wasted life destined to become stranded on one island or another. Although the vision emerging from this novel is deeply pessimistic, the author also gives literature a sublimatory function, giving visibility to those who are ‘outside the margins’. Almost thirty years later, the author decides to portray the figure of the translator again, this time embodied by a young woman, the main character in his novel La traduction est une histoire d’amour. Far from heralding a romantic affair, once again the title evokes the wishful dimension of translation. “Je suis traductrice, j’aime les mots” (I am a translator, I love words)19 says Marine at the beginning of the novel. She too has retreated to an island, but mainly lives in language that is compared, metaphorically, to a house. In a game of intertextual reflections, language is the object of Marine’s love, as a translator, and that of Waterman, as an author, whose work Marine is translating from French into English: And launched into a long speech in praise of language, ending with a quotation that he had a hard time finding in his grimy notebook with its pages covered with strikeouts: “Very often, exiles do not bring any earth on the soles of their shoes; they bring nothing 16 Jacques Poulin, Les Grandes Marées (Montréal: Léméac, 1978), p. 180; Id., Spring Tides, trans. by Sheila Fischman (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2007). 17 Sophie Bastien, ‘Les grandes marées, dans le roman de Jacques Poulin phénomène naturel ou courant culturel ?’, Canadian Literature, 198 (Autumn 2008), 48–56 (p. 54). 18 Poulin, Les Grandes Marées, p. 206. 19 Jacques Poulin, La traduction est une histoire d’amour, p. 11.

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but a cloud of dancing golden dust that will halo all the creatures, all the objects, all the landscapes on which their eyes will light, their caresses linger; and that infinitesimal, intangible shimmer, made of dead ash and fertile pollen, is called language.” He added that the words were by Sylvie Durastanti, and I was happy to learn that she was a translator. In the same breath he cited Heidegger’s famous remark: “Language is the house of Being”.20

Marine and Waterman exemplify how translation has the power to fuse, to merge, even in the mirroring of their names. This can also be seen in another passage, where intertextuality is again the key: Waterman gets Marine to read Anne Hébert’s Dialogue sur la traduction and right from the very first line Marine is transported “into the old house of language, midway between earth and heaven”,21 to a place where Marine feels that, despite their age difference, she and the writer may reach out to each other. Once the young Limoilou enters the story, the novel gradually turns into a detective story. In fact, one day Marine finds a kitten with a message hidden in its collar, leading to the start of her investigations, which will soon involve Waterman too. The first thing she has to decipher is the incomplete message carried by the cat: “My name is Famine. I am on the road because my mistress can’t take care of me”.22 However this is missing the words which are later deciphered as being “not of herself”.23 From this point on, the main plot of the novel is the investigation, with the assistance of a former policeman, the goal being to unravel the mystery contained in the message and trace the cat’s owner, who eventually turns out to be a girl in trouble called Limoilou. So, the translator becomes a detective, giving rise to recurring metaphor: a police investigation as a metaphor for translation. There have been many other famous examples of this, such as in Julia Kristeva’s novel Possessions (1996), which opens with a crime scene featuring the decapitated head of a female translator. Likewise, in Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions (2002) where a major part of the story involves an investigation, following the writer/translator Zimmer’s attempts to discover what happened to the actor Hector Mann, who seems to have disappeared into thin air. Then there is Sydney Pollack’s film The Interpreter (2005) where a United Nations interpreter accidentally learns about an assassination plot to kill an African head of state. As Andreea Bugiac explains, a translator conducts a real linguistic investigation, questioning the meaning of each word and paying attention to the clues contained in an author’s style.24 This is also effectively illustrated by Jean Delisle: 20 21 22 23 24

Poulin, Translation is a Love Affair, p. 92. Poulin, Translation is a Love Affair, p. 80. Poulin, Translation is a Love Affair, p.32. Poulin, Translation is a Love Affair, p.38. See Andreea Bugiac, ‘Le traducteur fictif de Jacques Poulin ou l’invention d’un mythe littéraire’, in Studia Ubb Philologica, 1 (2018), 73–86 (p. 79).

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The translator, a detective in his own way, develops a keen sense of observation, scrutinises the text under the magnifying glass and tests various theories before coming to a decision. As a meticulous investigator, he considers the meaning, questioning each word and the structure of each sentence, leaving nothing to chance, no clue ignored. He reconstructs the scene with relentless logic, gradually piecing everything together until he finally solves the enigma of the meaning hidden in the original text. Is not the “science of translation” also a “science of deduction”?25

To return to Poulin’s novel, in a game of mirrors, the case of Limoilou turns into a chance for Marine to investigate her own life, and the opportunity to come to terms with her past by overcoming the sense of guilt she feels regarding her sister’s premature death. In point of fact, Limoilou, whom Marine looks after like a sister, is her chance for redemption. The topos of translator/detective should be added to those already mentioned and clearly demonstrates the process of fictionalising the character through assimilation to a consolidated literary imagery, as well as to an easily recognisable genre. Moreover, this example of a metaphor draws our attention to the infinite, inexhaustible number of metaphors used both by linguists and, as in this case, by writers in their attempts to define translation. This allows us to change the way theoretical studies and literary writing are seen. The proliferation of translation metaphors in theoretical texts – worthy of more detailed treatment and so not considered here – proves that it is not so much literature that takes on the role of theory, but rather that theory uses the tools of literature. In conclusion, the paradigm of invisibility, which in the novel Les Grandes Marées was stretched to the point that it decreed the deletion and annihilation of the human translator, fades until it almost disappears when it comes to the character of Marine, who is presented, so to speak, as being on the same level as Waterman. Indeed, it seems that the translator’s search for words throughout the novel overshadows the author’s own efforts. The typical subordination of the translator actually becomes complicity in this novel. The original text and the translated version therefore result in the creation of a single text that celebrates a love for words.

25 Jean Delisle, ‘Pierre Baillargeon, traducteur nourricier, littéraire e fictif ’, in Portraits de traducteurs, ed. by Jean Delisle (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa/Artois Presses Université, 1999), 259–301 (p. 269).

Luca Bani

Alessandro Verri, Translator of Hamlet and Othello. The Discovery of Shakespeare in the Transition from Classicism to Pre-Romanticism in the Latter Half of the Eighteenth Century in Italy

1.

Introduction

In recent years, literary historiography has examined Alessandro Verri in depth, reappraising his role in Italian culture in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Consequently, attention has been given to a figure often contextualized by the critical tradition in the story of the young and brilliant editor of Il Caffè who, after journeying to France and then England between 1766 and 1767, moved to Rome. There, he abandoned the reformist whims of the Milanese Enlightenment and oriented his works towards an essentially conservative Classicism. In fact, Verri’s intellectual and cultural parable is the perfect archetype of the rich and contradictory commingling of new and old artistic themes characteristic of the last decades of the century of the Enlightenment. In Verri more than others, the dramatic perception that a radical change was taking place in the society of the Ancien Régime was becoming clearer, as well as an awareness of the need to identify and explore more suitable means of expression in order to reflect and interpret this condition that was beginning to manifest itself. In this context, Verri’s relationship with England, with Shakespeare and his work, is exemplary of a search aimed precisely at broadening the horizons of Italian culture and, through this, at modernizing the language of its literature, and specifically, that of the theater and the novel. This in turn would provide them with new tools for exploring the social reality and new ways of exploring the human condition in the historical context that loomed on the horizon. It should be stressed that this does not make Verri an innovator per se. More specifically, it does not prevent him, from a typically political-ideological point of view, from taking a position of clear rejection of the outcome of the French Revolution, especially after Napoleon’s descent into Italy. This aspect can also be considered a sign of the times, an intimation of the difficulty even for an intellectual of his caliber to cope with a whirlwind of changes. If on the one hand this was appealing, because it was the consequence of a dawning sensibility that

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was felt confusedly but was basically shared, on the other hand it implied changes and implications that were so drastic they were difficult to accept.

2.

Alessandro Verri, England and freedom

The problematic relationship of Italian culture with the Northern civilizations and therefore also with that of England, at least for all of the seventeenth century, is well documented by studies that have now become classics.1 The cause of the almost total ignorance of what was happening across the English Channel and specifically of Elizabethan culture can be found in the cultural influence that first Spain and then France wielded over the Italian peninsula, in a persistent loyalty to classicism, in the substantial provincialism that isolated artists and intellectuals starting from the Counter-Reformation and, not least, in the “religious distrust” of non-Catholics that was typical of the period.2 The situation began to change towards the middle of the eighteenth century,3 when, as Arturo Graf affirms, the Italians “became infatuated with the English”4 and later also with the Germans, symptomatic of the strong bewilderment felt by intellectuals for the crisis5 in which they were working and the attempt to find the necessary stimuli in the best of European culture that would revitalize and give momentum to their own.

1 Mario Praz, ‘Rapporti tra la letteratura italiana e la letteratura inglese’, in Id., Letterature Comparate (Milan: Marzorati, 1949), pp. 145–196; Mario Corona, La fortuna di Shakespeare a Milano (1800–1825) (Bari: Adriatica, 1970); Franca Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia nel Seicento e nel Settecento (Bari: Adriatica, 1970); Fabio Pesaresi, La scoperta dell’Inghilterra. Epistolari e diari dei viaggiatori italiani del Settecento (Verona: QuiEdit, 2015). 2 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, p. 16. There were but a few Italian intellectuals who opened up to English culture during the latter half of the seventeenth century, making themselves mediators; the Milanese Gregorio Leti, an English history enthusiast, forerunner of eighteenth-century Anglomania and author of numerous works on contemporary England in his time, stands out among them; rabout Leti, see Franco Barcia, Un politico dell’età barocca. Gregorio Leti (Milan: Angeli, 1983) and Duccio Tongiorgi, ‘Oltre la storia nello spirito dei libertini: Gregorio Leti’, in Id., Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. V, ‘La fine del Cinquecento e il Seicento’ (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1997), pp. 982–984. 3 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, p. 58. 4 Arturo Graf, L’anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (Turin: Loescher, 1911), p. 9. My translation; hereafter, unless otherwise specified, English translations are mine. 5 Regarding the dialectics between “crisis” and “reforms” during this period, refer to Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore (Turin: Einaudi, 1969–1990), 5 vols.; in particular, in the chapter ‘Gli anni trenta del Settecento’ of the first volume (pp. 3–58), Venturi dates the lowest point of the Italian crisis to the 1730s, but also, by contrast, the moment in which the slow path to recovery begins that will lead to reforms in some areas of the Italian peninsula.

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It is a well-established fact that in this historic moment, Italian culture still had a typically aristocratic character.6 It is particularly among the Lombardy nobility, and the Milanese, that we find a strong restlessness and the desire for cultural emancipation from the “little homeland”, with more attention being paid to what was happening beyond the Alps, an area of science and doctrine with which people came into contact by virtue of more frequent travel and growing epistolary relationships with foreign scholars; these are gateways that will make it possible to evaluate with an increasing broader critical sense an Italian literature that is “burdened with glory, but no longer abreast of the times”.7 Firstly, it was due to French mediation and the translations of English authors and works published in Paris that the first significant contacts with English culture took place: these were contacts filtered by the ambivalent judgment or prejudice of the French, from Montesquieu to Voltaire,8 but which played a fundamental preparatory role leading to direct knowledge of the literature of the island, that terra incognita conquered by way of a slow but increasingly widespread knowledge of the language.9 The prevailing Gallomania was then joined by an equally strong Anglomania, which broadened interest in English history and civilization from the more general field of culture – with appreciation for the freedom of scientific research and the results of philosophical speculation achieved since the seventeenth century – to political, institutional and social spheres, to literature, for which persisted, however, a clear inclination towards that of the French, and even fashion, a phenomenon that led to the publication of periodicals such as the Giornale delle nuove mode di Francia e d’Inghilterra (1787) (Journal of New Fashions in France and England), an evolution of the previous Giornale delle dame e delle mode di Francia (1786) (Journal of Ladies and Fashions in France).10 In this phase, a gradual approach is made to English culture: the first step is represented by indirect knowledge of it, because it is mediated by French translations, and only rarely accompanied by general appreciation; the next level 6 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, p. 53. 7 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, p. 55. 8 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, p. 57. According to Anna Maria Crinò, while Voltaire’s fluctuating approach in judging Shakespeare must be contextualized in the Frenchman’s fidelity to classical rules and the resulting impossibility or inability to appreciate the works of the English playwright, it is not, however, “untrue that during the period starting from the publication of Brutus (1730) up to after the middle of the century, he worked almost unconsciously to prepare his contemporaries to appreciate it, giving a strong stimulus to the theater, introducing, albeit with exaggerated caution, a succession of innovations, for which he relied on Shakespeare’s example”, in Anna Maria Crinò, Le traduzioni di Shakespeare in Italia nel Settecento (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1950), pp. 64–83 (p. 17). 9 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, p. 59. 10 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, p. 60.

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consists of a direct contact with this culture through travels to England, the aforementioned study of the language and the resulting possibility of drawing directly on its sources. It is this latter path which Verri embarks upon, and his arrival in England translates into a sudden and lasting case of love at first sight for this land and its culture. After spending a few months in Paris with Cesare Beccaria, Verri reaches London on December 8, 1766, compelled to make this new stop on his journey also due to requests from Englishmen such as John Wilkes, in exile in the French capital with his daughter Mary, or Italians such as Paolo Frisi, who provides him with letters of recommendation to attend the sessions of the Royal Society.11 He still only possessed a rudimentary knowledge of the language, which he fell in love with from the first lessons, as he writes in the letter from London on December 29, 1766: “I am truly passionate about this language. It seems very sweet to me. Women speak it with infinite grace. That th, which is like the theta of the Greeks, is very harmonious to my ears”.12 His enthusiasm for the capital of the kingdom of George III and its inhabitants is evident from letters addressed to Pietro and other family members:13 neither the climatic and environmental conditions of the city nor the flaws he attributes to the English – such as poor table manners, inadequate cleanliness or modest physical beauty – are a problem for the Milanese traveler; what matters to Verri is the civility of moral customs, compliance with the law and more generally, the character, all qualities for which the citizens of the island are considered superior to the French.14 What impresses Verri most, however, is the absolute freedom of the British in expressing their opinions on any subject and their imperturbability towards opinions that differ from their own. As Franca Rossi states, the “smoky and sad, but free”15 London where Verri will have the opportunity to meet Benjamin Franklin and Laurence Sterne, the latter whom he had already met in Milan in 1765, is more suited to a young man who defines himself as a misanthrope, who appreciates English austerity more than the cheerful frivolousness of the French, and who will become an assiduous frequenter of English artists, intellectuals and nobles residing in Rome, such as Thomas Jenkins, Sir William Hamilton and many others,16 appreciating them because “they come to Italy to educate themselves, they undertake the study of the language and respect the 11 Vittoria Orlandi Balzari, ‘L’anglomania di Alessandro Verri’, in Studi sul Settecento e l’Ottocento, 11 (2016), 11–22 (p. 16). 12 Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Viaggio a Parigi e Londra. Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, ed. by Gianmarco Gaspari (Milan: Adelphi, 1980), p. 188. 13 See the long letter to Pietro dated February 2, 1767, deemed a true act of love from Alessandro to London, in Verri, Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, pp. 293–295. 14 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, pp. 66–74. 15 Letter to Pietro dated December 29, 1766, in Verri, Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, p. 188. 16 Orlandi Balzari, L’anglomania di Alessandro Verri, pp. 16–19.

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opinions and customs of the Italians, while the French bring to Italy the ‘pretentiousness’ of those who believe themselves to be very important”.17 Aside from these unusual examples of behavioral appreciation, the growing fondness of Verri and a part of Lombardy’s intellectuals for English culture derives not only from a growing impatience with French cultural hegemony, but from the choice of a precise philosophical direction, empiricism, which best accords with the forma mentis of an intelligentsia far from the metaphysical abstractness of rationalism from the other side of the Alps.18 Only in literary and dramatic production is France able to maintain its undisputed superiority, due mainly to the substantial persistence of this literature within the confines of reassuring classicism.19 Even regarding this specific context, however, the beginnings of a very small insurgency comes into being, represented precisely by the Verri brothers – “I do not know of a single man who likes Shakespeare; Carli does not, nor does Beccaria; the two of us alone are of this state of mind”, Pietro writes to Alessandro in a letter he sent on May 20, 1780.20 The two approach English literature, appreciating its elements of formal and thematic originality, and gradually turn into passionate Shakespeare enthusiasts. Their knowledge is a direct consequence of Alessandro’s experience gained visiting England21 and witnessing firsthand “that atmosphere of true ’worship’ for Shakespearean theater”22 revived in the years following the Restoration23 and distilled from the editions of his works circulating in the British capital at the time: those edited by Samuel Johnson (1765), Alexander Pope (1725) and Lewis Theobald (1757). 17 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, p. 73. 18 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, pp. 95–96. 19 Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, pp. 111–113. On the reasons for the persistent partiality for French literature and theater, see in particular pp. 173–174. 20 Pietro e Alessandro Verri, Carteggio, ed. by Emanuele Greppi, Alessandro Giulini, Francesco Novati and Giovanni Seregni, (Milan: Cogliati, then Milesi and Giuffrè, 1923–1942), 12 vols., XI, p. 72. In this regard, Giuseppe Baretti is an exception who, living in England from 1751 to 1760 and then from 1766 until his death in 1789, wrote, in direct disagreement with Voltaire’s critical interpretation, Discours sur Shakespeare et sur M. de Voltaire (London: Nourse – Paris: Durand, 1777); after Baretti, Alfieri and Foscolo will also be staunch admirers of Shakespeare, consolidating a taste that will become the norm during the 19th century. On Shakespeare’s previous and, in particular, subsequent success in Italy, in addition to the texts mentioned in the previous notes, see also the recent publication by Leonardo Bragaglia, Shakespeare in Italia. Personaggi ed interpreti. Fortuna scenica del teatro di William Shakespeare in Italia (1792–2005) (Bologna: Persiani, 2005). 21 On the circumstance that “[…] the first Italians who knew about Shakespeare’s theater were Italians who had touched upon it in England itself” see Graf, L’anglomania, p. 313. 22 Alessandra Iacobelli, ‘Alessandro Verri traduttore e interprete di Shakespeare: i manoscritti inediti dell’‘Hamlet’, in Annali della Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere dell’Università di Bari, XV (2001), 125–151 (p. 127). 23 Crinò, Le traduzioni di Shakespeare in Italia nel Settecento, p. 12.

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Verri, translator of Shakespeare

The first effects of the discovery of Shakespeare were seen in the years immediately following his return from the journey to France and England: by 1769 Verri had already translated Hamlet up to the middle of act IV and had sent the version to Pietro, who read it with enthusiasm. In a letter dated August 16, 1769, Alessandro wrote to his brother that in Shakespeare he found “a very unusual force: dark tones, which are effective; nothing exaggerated, but all taken from nature; very interesting sentiments, but equal to the human heart, to which oftentimes the tragedians, specifically the French, pay little mind”.24 From this moment on, there are countless references to the “Bard” in their correspondence, and in particular in the letters of the younger, in a crescendo of enthusiasm towards what is called a “surprising wonder of beauty and flaws”.25 Precedents pertinent to the Verrian experiment are significantly rare. If the initial traces of knowledge of Shakespeare in Italy can be traced back to the latter half of the seventeenth century and testimonies of partial versions of his works can be found in the eighteenth-century works of Antonio Conti (1677–1749)26 and Paolo Antonio Rolli (1687–1765),27 the first true translation of a Shakespearean tragedy, Julius Caesar,28 dates back to 1756 by Domenico Valentini, to whom credit is due for having challenged the Arcadian classicism prevailing in those years in Italy presenting to the public and critics, who were not in fact particularly appreciative, the work of one who had flouted Aristotelian rules.29 Verri’s actual translation activities took place from 1769 to 1777, when he would devote himself systematically not only to completing the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark, but also to the version of Othello;30 neither translation would then be published, as Verri preferred to present himself to the public as the author of his own tragedies rather than as a translator, according to his letter to Pietro on June 10, 1778.31 24 Verri, Carteggio, III, p. 18. 25 Verri, Carteggio, IX, p. 14. 26 The first assessment on Shakespeare, and positive for that matter, would date back to Antonio Conti, expressed in the preface to his tragedy, Il Cesare (Faenza: Archi, 1726), in which he wrote: “Sasper [sic!] is England’s Cornelius, but only more irregular than Cornelius, and albeit his equal, he is impregnated with grand ideas and noble sentiments”; see Crinò, Le traduzioni di Shakespeare in Italia nel Settecento, p. 33. 27 Crinò, Le traduzioni di Shakespeare in Italia nel Settecento, pp. 30 and ff. 28 William Shakespeare, Il Giulio Cesare. Tragedia istorica di Guglielmo Shakespeare tradotta dall’inglese in lingua toscana dal dottor Domenico Valentini (Siena: Agostino Bindi, 1756). 29 Crinò, Le traduzioni di Shakespeare in Italia nel Settecento, p. 41. 30 Three manuscript drafts of Hamlet remain, the last two identical, whereas there are two manuscript drafts of Othello, one a working draft, with lists of words impossible to decipher because they were unknown, and one definitive. 31 Verri, Carteggio, IX, p. 312.

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Verri’s enterprise got underway in the early years of that period in Rome, often described as ideologically “disengaged” and artistically “falling back” on Classicism, going so far as to show in some parts of his versions a taste even more advanced than the Shakespearean one,32 while in others, such as in “La Canzone del Salice” or in the ballads of Ophelia, Metastasian influence still prevails. The coexistence of foretastes of Pre-Romanticism with the persistence of still Arcadian models clearly derives from Verri being, as with many of his contemporaries, an intellectual straddling two contrasting sensibilities, marked by a rupture that the French Revolution would only exacerbate.33 Verri is well aware of the difficulty of his undertaking, and would declare it openly in the letters to his brother,34 but still decides to devote himself to it to both stress the influence the culture of the Italian Renaissance had had on Shakespeare, as well as for the similarities he finds between the latter and the Italian peninsula’s creative minds of the seventeenth-century.35 It is therefore a veritable work of cultural mediation, aimed at identifying and emphasizing the converging courses of action of two cultures that are still abysmally distant. In particular, Alessandra Iacobelli36 has recently explored the technical problems linked to the translation of the two Shakespearean tragedies. Rendered for the most part in prose, as Verri does not consider himself poet enough to translate into verses, the tragedies in translation manage to penetrate the spirit of the original. He has no qualms about pointing out the gaps left in the versions by words, phrases or puns that were untranslatable because they were constructed with terms obsolete even for the English or not found in the dictionaries and registers of the era, such as Giuseppe Baretti’s Dizionario (1755). In essence, “in these translations, despite gaps and errors, both on exclusively material and aesthetic levels, which nevertheless decrease in Othello by number and scope, Verri shows that he has entered into the spirit of the original, especially in the passages that approach his Pre-Romantic sensibility. While he may unknowingly remain linked to the atmosphere of the eighteenth century for certain details, it is the new taste that prevails in him, which, for that matter is also invoked by reading Shakespeare”.37 32 33 34 35 36

Silvana Colognesi, ‘Shakespeare e Alessandro Verri’, in Acme, 16 (1963), 183–216 (p. 193). Rossi, La cultura inglese a Milano e in Lombardia, pp. 193 and 195. See the letter dated May 27, 1779, Verri, Carteggio, X, p. 281. Colognesi, Shakespeare e Alessandro Verri, p. 184. In addition to the essay dedicated to Hamlet previously mentioned in note 22, see also Alessandra Iacobelli, ‘Alessandro Verri traduttore e interprete di Shakespeare: i manoscritti inediti dell’Othello’, in Traduzioni letterarie e rinnovamento del gusto: dal Neoclassicismo al primo Romanticismo, ed. by Giuseppe Coluccia and Beatrice Stasi, Atti del Convegno internazionale (Lecce-Castro, June 15–18, 2005), 2 vols., vol. I (Galatina: Congedo, 2006), pp. 205– 228. 37 Colognesi, Shakespeare e Alessandro Verri, p. 212.

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The ripest fruits of Verri’s translation endeavors, at least as far as his dramatic production is concerned, will be the tragedies Pantea and La Congiura di Milano, composed in 1778 and reunited in 1779 in Tentativi Dramatici.38 On the one hand, Verri’s translations reveal the Milanese to be a translator in the modern sense of the word with his ability to respect the characteristics of the original Shakespearean text, reproduced with absolute fidelity, unlike what took place with French translations. However, on the other, they strongly affect the ways in which Verri builds not so much Pantea, the tragedy dealing with classical issues, as his historical-passionate work with a modern theme, La Congiura di Milano, leading the author to moderately reject some of the strict regulations still in vogue in eighteenth-century dramaturgy, in particular in that of the French. Consequently, his supreme model was no longer, or at least not only, the Corneille/Racine dyad, but an increasingly acclaimed Shakespeare, in turn flanked by the greatest of the classical tragedians: Sophocles. Reading and translating Shakespeare, Verri acquires a decidedly innovative and anticipatory taste for the times because he is attentive to passions, to the irrational tensions from which they arise, to the illusory misrepresentations to which they often lead, all inserted in the overall framework of the “ungovernability of external situations and human wills” empowered by “amoral and barbaric images that were for Voltaire, untranslatable (and legible) for eighteenth-century audiences”.39

4.

Conclusion

The most significant result of Verri’s experience in translations transcends the effect of its repercussions on the Milanese’s dramaturgical activity and must be contextualized in a broader perspective and more profound cultural significance: through Shakespeare, Verri fully reaches the dimension of sentiment that literary historiography has classified as Pre-Romantic, opening up to that troubled taste and aesthetics – of which Shakespeare, alongside Homer and Dante, will soon become an indispensable model also in Italy – which place the restless unraveling of human passions against the background of an empathetic and sublime landscape. Furthermore, as the most observant scholars40 have rightly pointed 38 Claudia Messina, Alessandro Verri e la cultura del suo tempo. Milano, Roma e l’Europa. (1741–1816), PhD thesis in Italian Studies (XXVIII), Roma Tre University, academic year: 2016–2017, p. 183. 39 Messina, ‘Alessandro Verri e la cultura del suo tempo’, p. 188. 40 Marco Cerruti, ‘Alessandro Verri fra storia e bellezza’, in Id., Neoclassici e Giacobini (Milan: Silva, 1969), pp. 17–114 (p. 57); Iacobelli, ‘Alessandro Verri traduttore e interprete di Shakespeare’, p. 129; Messina, Alessandro Verri e la cultura del suo tempo, p. 186.

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out, this openness responds to Verri’s intrinsic distrust of humanity: a skepticism that undermines his Enlightened faith at its roots and grounding itself on a Pyrrhonian approach to reality, translates into a tragic and irredeemable vision of history, as will emerge precisely in his posthumous Vicende memorabili dal 1789 al 1801.41

41 Alessandro Verri, Vicende memorabili dal 1789 al 1801 (Milan: Guglielmini, 1858).

Marco Sirtori

Translating History: The Reception of 19th-Century Italian Historical Novels Abroad

The reception of Italian historical fiction abroad has been abundantly surveyed in the last decades, but an exhaustive study of such a complex phenomenon and a comprehensive catalogue of translations in European and extra-European languages are still missing. Italian and foreign scholars seem to have focused exclusively on the popularity of The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, a work that nevertheless stands apart from any other Italian historical novel as an unsurpassed literary masterpiece. Studies on the reception of Manzoni’s novel are nowadays copious, as the result of a well-established tradition initiated in the first half of the twentieth century.1 Researchers’ interests are usually confined to single national, or rather linguistic, contexts, such as articles in Francophone studies under Mariella Colin, Jacques Gaudet and Aurélie Gendrat-Claudel’s supervision, following in the footsteps of a seminal study by Dorothée Christesco.2 In German studies, it is worth mentioning a monograph by Stefania Cavagnoli-Woelk (1994), while in Spanish there are notable works such as a volume by Oreste Macrì (1974), an article by Maria de Nieves Muñiz Muñis (2012), and her encyclopaedic entry Manzoni in the Catalogue of Spanish Translations of Italian Literary Works.3 1 The bibliography on Manzoni’s reception abroad is too extensive to be mentioned here; in this article I will only quote the most relevant recent studies. 2 Dorothée Christesco, La fortune de Alexandre Manzoni en France. Origines du théâtre et du roman romantiques (Paris: Editions Balzac, 1943); Jacques Gaudet, Fortuna e sfortuna del Manzoni in Francia (Napoli: Istituto universitario orientale, 1970); Mariella Colin, ‘La fortuna dei Promessi sposi nella Francia romantica’ and Pierantonio Frare, ‘Manzoni europeo?’, Nuovi quaderni del CRIER, 9 (2012), 47–63 and 199–220; Giovanni Dotoli and others, Les traductions de l’italien en français au XIXe siècle, 2 vls. (Fasano: Schena; Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2004); Aurélie Gendrat-Claudel, ‘Quasi due secoli di fidanzamento: le versioni francesi dei Promessi sposi’, Annali Manzoniani, s. 3, 2 (2019), 111–149. 3 Stefania Cavagnoli-Woelk, Contributi per la storia della recezione tedesca dei Promessi sposi di Manzoni con particolare riguardo alle traduzioni (Regensburg: Roderer, 1994); Manzonis Europa – Europas Manzoni. L’Europa di Manzoni – Il Manzoni dell’Europa, ed. by Angela Oster, Francesca Broggi, and Barbara Vinken (München: Utz, 2017); Oreste Macrì, Varia fortuna di Manzoni in terre iberiche (Ravenna: Longo, 1976); Maria de Nieves Muñiz Muñis,

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English translations of The Betrothed have been the subject of in-depth and rigorous analyses by authoritative scholars (Carlo Dionisotti, John Lindon, and Ezio Raimondi),4 as well as of two recent works: a volume edited by Vittoria Intonti and Rosella Mallardi (2011), including essays on six translations of Manzoni’s novel published between 1828 and 1845 (four English and two American ones), and Alice Crosta’s monograph Alessandro Manzoni in AngloSaxon Countries (2014), a general study on Manzoni’s impact on English and North American culture.5 Mariarosa Bricchi’s essay (2012) on the reception of Manzoni’s works is the only recent study presenting wide-ranging relevant statistics. Thanks to a strictly quantitative approach, Bricchi succeeds in summarizing in a few pages the complex editorial history of The Betrothed both in Italy and in Europe, without neglecting the many intricate cases of editorial piracy.6 As for the translations of the novel, Bricchi’s essay highlights the recurrent practice of manipulating and censoring the hypotext for confessional, moral, or ideological reasons, although the number of word-for-word translations (73, i. e., 84% of them) is by far superior to the unfaithful ones. Significantly enough, Manzoni’s reception in Anglophone countries has been extensively explored. The first studies hastily reached the conclusion that Manzoni’s visibility as writer in England was marred by the low-quality English translations of his novel as much as by the writer’s Catholicism. Later on, scholars have gradually rejected such assumptions and adopted an even too rosy perspective. It is hardly astonishing that The Betrothed was highly popular among English intellectual classes, including readers such as Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot.7 Manzoni’s novel was universally appreciated

4

5 6 7

‘La prima ricezione dei Promessi sposi in Spagna: traduzioni e critica’, Nuovi quaderni del CRIER, 9 (2012), 93–112; Proyecto Boscán: Catálogo Histórico de las Traducciones de La literatura Italiana al Castellano y al Catalán de 1300 hasta 1939 (http://www.ub.edu/boscan /spagnolo/indexspa.htm). Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Manzoni and the Catholic Revival’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 59 (1973), 341–53; Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Manzoni e la cultura inglese’, in Appunti sui moderni (Bologna: il Mulino, 1989), pp. 299–315; Ezio Raimondi, ‘Un colloquio europeo. Newman e Manzoni’, Lettere italiane, 53/3 (2001), 347–53; John Lindon, ‘Alessandro Manzoni and the Oxford Movement: his Politics and Conversion in a New English Source’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 45/2 (1994), 297–318. Cultures in Contact. Translation and Reception of I Promessi Sposi in 19th Century England, ed. by Vittoria Intonti and Rosella Mallardi (Bern [ect.]: Peter Lang, 2011); Alice Crosta, Alessandro Manzoni nei paesi anglosassoni (Bern [ect.]: Peter Lang, 2014). Mariarosa Bricchi, ‘La fortuna editoriale dei Promessi sposi’, in Atlante della letteratura italiana, ed. by Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà, vol. III, Dal Romanticismo a oggi, ed. by Domenico Scarpa (Torino: Einaudi, 2012), pp. 119–127. Laura Diafani, ‘I “Promessi sposi” e due dei “venticinque lettori”. Il primo traduttore inglese e Mary Shelley (1828)’, Studi italiani, 1 (2017), 31–48.

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both for its moral coherence and for its gothic features (forced convent life, plague, sin, and repentance). However, its circulation in England was also due to the fascination for Italian culture in general, to the presence of Italian men of letter and printers like Pietro Rolandi promoting Italian literature, and finally to the activity of Italian political exiles in London, although their opinions on Manzoni might be contrasting.8 In France, the first edition of Manzoni’s novel appeared early, in 1827, and was reprinted several times by Baudry without the author’s consent.9 Yet, in 1841, Manzoni designated the French publisher as the trustee for the sale of the second edition of his novel, the so-called ‘quarantana’. The history of Manzoni’s French translations started in 182810 and it was fraught with distortions and misinterpretations. In 1832, the Marquis of Montgrand released a very unscrupulous version (Les Fiancés) that reflected the repressive atmosphere following the July Revolution. In his hands, The Betrothed became an edifying Catholic romance.11 Two years later abbot Philippe-Victor Didon published a free rewriting of the novel (Lucia Modella) in the Bibliothèque instructive et amusante of Frères Gaume.12 Didon was actually a teacher in the seminary of Saint Nicolas de Chardonnet and did his best to purge the book, cutting off many passages he found morally ambiguous. His version was meant to illustrate to his young seminarists the power of virtue and the torments of crime. Like other sulpiciens,13 Didon regarded culture (literature and philosophy, in particular) as instruments of Catholic apology and proselytism. His re-writing gave rise to a series of clerical and reactionary versions, which might explain the limited reception of The Betrothed in France even nowadays. In addition, Didon’s precedent authorized other French translators to freely adapt Manzoni’s novel to the taste of their audience, as Auguste de Tillemont did in 1872 with his Lucie Mondella ou la peste de Milan.14

8 In 1837 Giuseppe Mazzini published an article in the London and Westminster Review in which he accused the most popular Italian writers in England, Manzoni and Silvio Pellico, of offering a politically resigned vision of the destiny of Italy. See Luca Beltrami, ‘Manzoni nella critica letteraria mazziniana’, in I classici della letteratura italiana: Manzoni, ed. by Giangiacomo Amoretti and Giannino Balbis (Torino: Il Capitello, 2014), pp. 197–214. 9 I Promessi sposi. Storia milanese del secolo XVII, scoperta e rifatta da Alessandro Manzoni, 3rd edn (Paris: Baudry, 1827). 10 In the same year two different translations were published in France: by M. Rey Dussueil (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1828) and by M. G. (Paris: Dauthereau, 1828). 11 I Promessi sposi. Les Fiancés, Histoire milanaise du 17e siècle, découverte et refaite par Alexandre Manzoni, trans. by the Marquis de Montgrand (Marseille: Marius Olive, 1832). 12 Lucia Mondella. Nouvelle italienne tirée des ‘Fiancés’ de Manzoni (Paris: Gaume frères, 1834). 13 Members of the Catholic congregation of Saint Sulpice. 14 Auguste de Tillemont, Lucie Mondella ou la peste de Milan, Limoges, Ardant and Thibaut, 1872. See Aurélie Gendrat-Claudel, Quasi due secoli di fidanzamento, p. 122.

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Nevertheless, even in France some men of letter soon expressed their disapproval of the distortions Manzoni’s masterpiece was undergoing. In the ‘Préface’ to his French version of The Betrothed (1877), Giovanni Martinelli bitterly complained about the infinite series of misunderstandings to be found in his colleagues’ translations, denounced the brutal shortening of some chapters and the serious violation of truth resulting from the omission of the historical sources mentioned by Manzoni.15 No doubt, Martinelli’s projet of “restoring through translation” the real form and meaning of the novel was also generated by his ‘patriotic susceptibility’ (susceptibilité patriotique) and by the love for his mother country. Spanish translators as well were far from being respectful of the original text. The immediate and ongoing reception of The Betrothed in Spain was conditioned by a series of local ideological issues. Thanks to its Catholic implications, Manzoni’s work was appreciated both in Castilian Spain and in Catalan-speaking regions, where a truly “Manzonian” school was formed when the age of repression and absolutism imposed by Ferdinand VII came to an end. The first Spanish translation, by Félix Enciso Castrillon, appeared in 1833.16 The author, a sacred oratory teacher, erased any reference to the oppressive character of Spanish domination in Northern Italy, cut off descriptions and historical digressions, and removed don Abbondio’s moral portrait and Gertrude’s story. A new and successful translation was published in Barcelona in 1836 by a clergyman of liberal ideas, Juan Nicasio Gallego17 His version was undoubtedly better than Castrillon’s and became highly influential for many decades, even if the original text was partially censured in order to avoid any possible anticlerical and antimonarchist allusion. Both Castrillon and Gallego, as well as the third Spanish translator, de Mesa, decided not to include Manzoni’s introduction in their versions, maybe because of the difficulties in properly rendering the seventeenthcentury literary style that had been masterfully imitated by the Italian writer. In general, they deeply manipulated the text and subjected it to a process of ideological and confessional normalization.18 As happened in France, the novel was reduced to a religiously edifying literary work and interpreted as the narrative counterpart of Manzoni’s treatise On Catholic Morals. As for the massive production of historical fiction by Manzoni’s Italian colleagues, it is unquestionable that during the nineteenth century the preferences 15 Giovanni Martinelli, ‘Préface du traducteur’, in Alessandro Manzoni, Les Fiancés, trans. by Giovanni Martinelli (Paris: Hachette, 1877), pp. I–II. 16 Lorenzo, o Los prometidos esposos. Suceso de la historia de Milán del siglo XVII, trans. by Félix Enciso Castrillón, 3 vls. (Madrid: Librería de Cuesta, 1833). 17 Los Novios. Historia milanesa del siglo XVI, escrita en italiano por Alejandro Manzoni, trans. by Juan Nicasio Gallego, 4 vls. (Barcelona: Imprenta de Antonio Bergnes, 1836–1837). 18 Maria de Nieves Muñiz Muñis, ‘La prima ricezione dei Promessi sposi in Spagna’, p. 104.

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of foreign translators went to Liberal Catholic writers such as Tommaso Grossi, Cesare Cantù, and Massimo d’Azeglio, to the detriment of the Tuscan Democratic and fiercely anticlerical front of novelists led by Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi. The reception of the works by d’Azeglio, Grossi, and Cantù came on the heels of their Italian publication, benefiting from Manzoni’s fame, even if replete with a long series of critical misunderstandings. Although these novelists undoubtedly belonged to Manzoni’s circle, they did not share his moral and aesthetic horizon and, most of all, were far from reaching his literary heights. Nevertheless, their reception in Europe and North America was favoured and justified by their biographical closeness to Manzoni. When his Marco Visconti was first published in France (1835), Tommaso Grossi was greeted as Manzoni’s Italian best imitator.19 In England, till the end of the century, his historical novel was reputed a tribute to ‘his master and friend, Manzoni’, and as a work indebted to him for the ‘force and reality from the contemporary chronicles upon which it is founded’.20 In the ‘Preface’ to his English version (1907) Maurice Francis Egan insisted on the ‘Grossi-Manzoni diarchy’, saying that the two writers could be considered the Italian founders of literary realism: ‘Before Fogazzaro or D’Annunzio or Matilde Serao broke the tradition of the romantic school, to mention modern Italian literature was to think of Manzoni and Grossi’; as a matter of fact, they had been able to overwhelm and reject ‘the over-effusive, over-passionate and very Byronic works of the Italian romanticists’.21 Ettore Fieramosca, or the Challenge of Barletta by Massimo d’Azeglio had a similar destiny abroad. When it was first released in an English version by Michael H. Rankin (1835), the translator alleged that the European success of the novel was mostly due to the fact that it was the work of Manzoni’s son in law22 and even ventured that Manzoni himself ‘might probably have had a hand in its composition’.23 The Bostonian edition of 1856 (re-printed in 1859) magnified the political and patriotic implications in d’Azeglio’s novel by adding a fanciful subtitle (The Struggles of an Italian against Foreigner Invaders and Foreign Protectors) and a rhetorical appeal to its American readers:

19 Marco Visconti, histoire du XIVe siècle, 2 vls. (Paris: E. Renduel, 1835); Marco Visconti, roman historique du XIVe siècle, trans. by H. Colard, 2 vls. (Paris: Librairie de Dumont, 1836). 20 ‘Preface’, in Tommaso Grossi, Marco Visconti, trans. by A. F.D., the ballads trans. by C.M.P. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890), p. V. 21 Maurice Francis Egan, ‘Introduction’, in Tommaso Grossi, Marco Visconti (New York, The National Alumni: 1907), p. VII. 22 In May 1831 Massimo d’Azeglio had married Giulia, the writer’s eldest daughter. 23 Michael H. Rankin, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Massimo d’Azeglio, Hector Fieramosca, or The Challenge of Barletta: An Historical Tale (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Green and Longman, 1835), pp. III–IV.

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To those true Americans who think justly of Italian virtue, who, alive to Italian misfortunes, do not expect Italian social regeneration from blood, stiletto, or conspiracy, but from order, law, mutual respect, and from the revival of Italian wisdom, and of Italian valor.24

In this passage, besides the tribute to Italy and the foreshadowing of the future political unification of the Peninsula, the translator summons up a series of everlasting heavy cultural stereotypes and prejudices regarding Italians (their violent nature and their lack of civil values), to the point that he wonders if the revolutions of 1821, 1831, and 1848 might have failed in teaching them a common ‘code of practical national principles’. However, we must concede that the prejudices we find in foreign translators’ prefaces were somehow confirmed by Italian historical novelists themselves. In the introduction to her translation of Fieramosca (1880), Louisa Magenis depicts 16th-century Italy as a barbarous and primitive country, supporting her claim through the ‘historically accurate’ details of d’Azeglio’s descriptions throughout the novel.25 Not surprisingly, foreign translators ignored Italian readers’ reactions at the gross historical mistakes d’Azeglio purposefully made to satisfy his taste for the picturesque and to flatter his audience. In 1833, shortly after the successful publication of Fieramosca, Vitangelo Morea brought out in Naples a pamphlet against his unbearable misuses of history: ‘When they first read the mentioned operetta [work of no literary value], people laughed a lot in Barletta and in Magna Graecia, where the memory of this duel, which was fought on 13 February 1503, is still well preserved among the dearest and most glorious remembrances of that country of classical origins’.26 On one hand, Morea’s indictment was generated by his moralistic ideas, since he considered contemporary novels highly reprehensible in general, as a genre apt for ‘corrupted or idiot people’, whereas the proper 24 Massimo d’Azeglio, Ettore Fieramosca: or The Challenge of Barletta. The Struggles of an Italian against Foreign Invaders and Foreign Protectors (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1859), s.p. 25 Louisa Magenis, ‘Preface’, in Massimo d’Azeglio, The Challenge of Barletta, trans. by Louisa Magenis, 2 vls. (London: W. H. Allen, 1880), I, p. X. 26 Vitangelo Morea, Per lo Ettore Fieramosca del d’Azeglio. Osservazioni e racconto (Naples: Sèguin, 1833), p. 3: ‘La lettura della cennata operetta ha fatto sorridere alquanto in Barletta, ed in tutta la Magna Grecia, dove la memoria di questo singolar certame, seguìto nel 13 febbraio 1503, tuttavia si conserva tra le altre grate ricordanze non meno glioriose a quella classica contrada’. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

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function of literature should be to illustrate ‘plausible and gentle examples of civil honest virtues, valiant and magnanimous deeds, useful and worthy remembrances’.27 On the other hand, he was not wrong in pointing out d’Azeglio’s historical inaccuracy (his recurrent anachronisms), his geographical mistakes and topographic arbitrariness (the novelist even invented an island between Barletta and Gargano), and, above all, the excesses of romance: according to Morea the narration is overwhelmed with rascals, treasons, burials, resurrections, and sorceries. Italian critics’ reviews remained unknown in the rest of Europe, but d’Azeglio’s nonchalant approach to history would soon be made public by the Italian writer himself. After the English translation of his Recollction was published, European readers were faced with passages where the Italian novelist candidly confessed his deceitful use of historical sources: ‘instead of making historical inquiries about the period, artistic and topographical researches concerning the places, or, better still, going to see them, and familiarising myself with the spots I was to describe, as I ought to have done, I hardly had the patience to read through the pages Guicciardini has dedicated to the subject […]. What did I know about those localities? […] I invented a Barletta, a fortress, an island of Sant’Orsola entirely my own, and thus went on straight as an arrow […]’.28 Foreign editors and translators seem (or wish) to ignore the aesthetic questions that were harshly debated in Italy concerning literary works based on a ‘mixture of history and fiction’. Otherwise, they get around them, as testified by an interesting French translation, the first one, released ‘under the auspices of Mister Manzoni, whose touch is to be recognized in some passages of The Challenge of Barletta’.29 The second French translation30 contains a short presentation by poet and translator Antoine Louis Blanchard, a member of the Accademia Tiberina and of Arcadia who died the following year (1834) in a state of mental alienation.31 In his ‘Notice sur Alex. Manzoni et Max. d’Azéglio’ Blanchard admits that France is inferior to Italy in the domain of historical novels, but he considers this genre just a free and fanciful wandering through Medieval times. Yet, according to him, 27 Vitangelo Morea, Per lo Ettore Fieramosca, p. 13: ‘modi plausibili e gentili di oneste e cittadine virtù, di magnanime azioni, di memorande ed utili rimembranze’. 28 Massimo d’Azeglio, Recollections, trans. by Count Maffei, 2 vls. (London; Chapman and Hall, 1868), II, pp. 324–325. 29 ‘Avis de l’éditeur’, in Massimo d’Azeglio, Hector Fieramosca, ou Le défi de Barlette, roman historique (Paris: Fournier Jeune, 1833), p. [3]: ‘sous les auspices de M. Manzoni, dont on ne peut méconnaître la touche dans quelques parties d’Hector Fieramosca’. 30 Hector Fiéramosca, ou le Défi de Barletta, roman historique, par d’Azéglio, gendre de Manzoni, trans. by Antoine Louis Blanchard, 2 vls. (Paris: Hippolyte Souverain, 1833). 31 Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, ed. By Joseph François Michaud, 10th edn, 45 vls. (Paris: Louis Vivès, 1880), IV, p. 416.

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Italian novelists are to be praised when they choose a splendid epoch as the background of their romances and depict those times in bright colours. In other words, Blanchard is fascinated by historical exoticism. Moreover, the French critic goes on formulating a sort of paradox: the success of Italian writers is the result of their taking advantage of the fragmentary nature of their local history. If municipal chronicles arouse patriotism, local disputes and fights against foreign dominators turn Italy into the land of romance, the perfect setting of ‘fiery and ardent passions […] of heartbreaking stories, risqué scenes, captivating plots, risky adventures, and always new emotions’.32 Blanchard seems to describe an artificial, fairy-tale troubadour world, the ‘Middle Ages of cardboard and baked clay’ condemned a couple of years later by Théophile Gautier: Middle Ages that had ‘nothing of the Middle Ages but their name’33 a setting as inconsistent as the backdrops of opera buffa that triumphed in Paris in those days (we can mention, among the others, Le comte Ory, a successful vaudeville by Eugène Scribe and Charles-Gaspard Delestre Poirson). Blanchard goes even further: after presenting an arbitrary portrait of Manzoni as the champion of Christianity and the enemy of 17th-century philosophes, the French translator commends his treatise On Catholic Morals as an instructive book and celebrates the Italian writer for ‘his generous ideas of national independence’.34 In d’Azeglio’s novel he recognizes Manzonian qualities such as grace, facility, and skill,35 for, after all, reading Fieramosca you can ‘breathe family air’ (air de famille). Blanchard’s critical assertions are followed and partially offset by an essay by Paulin Paris included in the same volume, ‘Letter to the translator of Fieramosca about romances set in the Middle Ages’.36 This document shows a sincere interest in the Italian debate about the so-called ‘literary works mixing history and fiction’, to quote Manzoni’s cautious definition. Even though the Italian writer’s Discourse on the Historical Novel would be published in the collections of his Opere varie only in 1850, its contents were well known since 1830, as testified by the articles that Niccolò Tommaseo and Paride Zajotti published that year on ‘Antologia’ and ‘Biblioteca italiana’. 32 Antoine Louis Blanchard, ‘Notice sur Alex. Manzoni et Max. d’Azéglio’, in Hector Fiéramosca, ou le Défi de Barletta, I, p. 6: ‘des passions ardente et dramatiques […] de pathétique, de tableaux piquants, d’intrigues attachantes, de péripéties terribile, et d’emotions toujours nouvelles’. 33 Théophile Gautier, ‘Preface’, in Mademoiselle de Maupin and One of Cleopatra’s Nights (New York: Modern Library, 1910), p. XVI. 34 Antoine Louis Blanchard, ‘Notice sur Alex. Manzoni’, p. 8: ‘généreuses pensées d’indipendance’. 35 Antoine Louis Blanchard, ‘Notice sur Alex. Manzoni’, p. 9: ‘toute la grâce, la facilité et l’habileté que Manzoni a répandues dans Les Fiancés’. 36 Paulin Paris, ‘Lettre au traducteur de Fiéramosca sur les romans du Moyen Âge’, in Hector Fiéramosca, ou le Défi de Barletta, pp. 13–27.

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Whereas Blanchard just mentions rumours about Manzoni’s private condemnation of ‘the historical novel that nevertheless he was able to embellish with the charm of his rich imagination’,37 Paulin Paris concludes with a peroration in praise of the genre and even tries to justify the lack of verisimilitude found in d’Azeglio’s novel. In his assessment, historical fiction is in its essence a form of writing aiming at exploring and depicting the human heart;38 which is possible because fiction is related to history the same way dreams are related to daily existence. On the other hand, historical fiction seems to him more real than history itself, for it offers natural explanations to the reader’s imagination. The fantastic is nothing but a way to make acceptable what reason cannot demonstrate; it speaks to the heart and reveals the fears and hopes of humankind. In historical fiction the fantastic goes hand in hand with the truth. The success of this genre proves that contemporary readers dislike and find unbearable the naked truth of history.39 In short, Paris’ interpretation is symptomatic of the general attitude of foreign critics and translators towards Italian culture. Neglecting the ideological and ethical bases of Italian historical fiction, and ignoring that the genre had been developed to respond to the need for a realism that might arouse patriotic feelings in the population, they behave like European travellers, looking for exoticism in the land of their dreams. Thus, in their hands, the novels by Manzoni, Grossi, and d’Azeglio become romances.

37 Antoine Louis Blanchard, ‘Notice sur Alex. Manzoni’, p. 11: ‘le roman historique qu’il a su ce pendant embellir de tout le charme de sa feconde imagination’. 38 Paulin Paris, ‘Lettre au traducteur de Fiéramosca’, p. 15: ‘une composition dans laquelle on se propose uniquement la peinture du coeur humain’. 39 Paulin Paris, ‘Lettre au traducteur de Fiéramosca’, p. 26: ‘on ne dissimule en général que les objets dont le véritable aspect lui serait en lui-même insupportable’.

Raul Calzoni

Interpreting and Transferring the Ideals of the French Revolution: Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod

In the history of German literature, the author who put an end once and for all to the so-called Goethezeit, whose material but not conceptual finale had come with the author’s death in 1832, was Georg Büchner. Indeed, his scant oeuvre took literature beyond the era of classical and romantic art to embark upon a phase and age of literary realism in which the political and legal debate of the time could be heard loud and clear. Born in 1813 in Goddelau, near Darmstadt, in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, Büchner died at a young age, in 1837 in Zurich. While thinking himself above all a scientist with democratic leanings, Büchner left the two most important dramas of early nineteenth-century German theatre, Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death, 1835) and Woyzeck (1836–1837); the comedy Leonce und Lena (Leonce and Lena, 1837), another criticism of the absolutist German courts of the era; and the novella Lenz (1836). Before all of this, Büchner had also written the political pamphlet, transcribed by Protestant pastor Friedrich Ludwig Weidig and printed in 1834, Der hessische Landbote (The Hessian Messenger), which cost the author a warrant for his capture from the police of Grand Duke Louis II for participation in subversive activities. If we were to point to a theme running through the handful of works left to us by the Hessian playwright, it is certainly the topic of revolution that forms the hinge of Büchner’s theatre, fiction, and other writings. The revolutionary theme, in all its violence, can be understood best in Dantons Tod, the drama in which the dramatist from Darmstadt plastically brings the preliminary ‘results’ of the French Revolution to the stage. My choice of the term ‘plastically’ – plastisch – to immediately refer to a fundamental characteristic of all Büchner’s work, as ensconced in the so-called Kunstgespräch (Dialogue about Art) in the novella Lenz, is very much deliberate. In what is a theoretical crux for his theatre, Büchner delivers his reflection to a dialogue between the mentally disturbed Lenz and his interlocutor, Christoph Kaufmann,1 the two Sturm und Drang writers who in the 1 On the different methaporical meanings of Lenz’s mental illness, see Olivetta Gentilin,

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novella often exchange opinions on late eighteenth-century aesthetic. In his view, there exist two different types of poets, and therefore of writers in the broader sense of the term, capable of painting reality in a diametrically opposed manner: on one hand, the “so-called Idealists” – using what at the time was an anachronism – “who sought to transfigure reality”, and, on the other, those who “reflected” it, “reproduc[ing]” the world how “the dear Lord” created it: At table Lenz was back in good spirits, the topic was literature, he was in his element; the idealist period was beginning at the time, Kaufmann was a keen supporter, Lenz was vehement in opposing it. Those writers, he argued, of whom it was said that they reflected reality in fact knew nothing whatever about it, but even they were a good deal more bearable than those who sought to transfigure reality. The dear Lord, he said, has surely made the world as it is meant to be, and I doubt if we can cobble up anything better, our one aspiration should be to create much as he did. What I demand in all things is – life, full scope for existence, nothing else really matters; we then have no need to ask whether something is ugly or beautiful, both are overridden by the conviction that “Everything created possesses life”, which is the sole criterion in matters of art. All the same, we meet it only rarely; we find it in Shakespeare, it speaks to us full-throated in folksongs, fitfully in Goethe. Everything else can be thrown in the fire. These people can’t even draw a dog-kennel. They are supposed to want idealist figures, but they have produced nothing to my knowledge but wooden puppets. This “idealism” displays the most shameful contempt for human nature. People should try it sometime, they should enter completely into the life of the meanest of men and then reproduce it with every twitch of an eyebrow, every wink and nod, the whole subtle, hardly perceptible play of facial expression; he had tried something of the sort in The Tutor and The Soldiers. They are the most everyday people in the world; but the pulse of feeling is the same in almost everyone, the only difference is the thickness of the covering that it has to pass through. All you need is the eyes to see and the ears to hear.2

For Lenz, but in reality, for Büchner too, the sole criterion in matters of art concerns the sensation that what the “realist” authors create has a life of its own. Nevertheless, again remembering the Dialogue about Art, “All the same, we meet it only rarely; we find it in Shakespeare, it speaks to us full-throated in folksongs, fitfully in Goethe. Everything else can be thrown in the fire”. For Büchner’s theatre, of which the aforementioned Dialogue about Art can be said to provide the sum, Shakespeare and Goethe represented two explicit models of realism to oppose to the idealism, as Büchner had it, prevalently embodied in the plays of Friedrich Schiller in the period of Weimar Classicism. According to Büchner, unlike Goethe and Shakespeare, Schiller had been incapable of bringing Krankheitsbild als rhetorisches Element in Georg Büchners ‘Lenz’ und ‘Woyzeck’ (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2017), pp. 57–141. 2 Georg Büchner, Lenz, in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, trans. with an Introduction and Notes by John Reddick (London: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 148–149 [italic emphasis in the original].

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to the stage “human beings of flesh and blood”; instead, as Büchner wrote to his parents, a characteristic of Schiller’s theatre was that he depicted “puppets with sky-blue noses and affected rhetoric, but not human beings”. In this letter from 1835, the dramatist sets out his theatrical aesthetic, in a brief anticipation of the theoretical formulations contained in the Dialogue about Art: If incidentally anyone wanted to tell me that a writer should show the world not as it is, but as it ought to be, then my answer is that I don’t want to make it any better than the good God did, who no doubt made the world just as He meant it to be. As for the socalled Idealists, I consider that they have produced almost nothing but puppets with sky-blue noses and affected rhetoric, but not human beings of flesh and blood whose sorrow and joy I can share emotionally and whose deeds and actions fill me with revulsion or admiration. In a word, I have great respect for Goethe and Shakespeare, but very little of Schiller.3

In the same letter, Büchner also underlines the inability of the “so-called Idealists” to arouse Mitleid – a term expressing both ‘pity’ and ‘compassion’ in German – among the public, thus the inability to have the spectators share the portrayed characters’ joy or pain or feel admiration or repulsion for their actions. In the same letter which speaks of the “puppets with sky-blue noses”, Bu¨ chner also defines the characteristics of the playwright in relation to the historian. And so, again in the letter to his parents of July 1835, the author comments on the publication of Danton’s Death, defending it against the accusations of immorality that had immediately been levelled against it while repeating that, for him, the dramatist’s purpose is to get as close as possible to history, without arousing emotion in the audience, but teaching them to look at what is happening around them: As to the so-called immorality of my book, by the way, my reply is as follows: the dramatist is in my view nothing other than a historian, but is superior to the latter in that he re-creates history: instead of offering us a bare narrative, he transports us directly into the life of an age; he gives us characters instead of character portrayals; full-bodied figures instead of mere descriptions. His supreme task is to get as close as possible to history as it actually happened. His play must be neither more moral nor more immoral than history itself; but history was not created by the good Lord to serve as reading material for young ladies, so no one should take it amiss if my drama is just as ill suited for such a purpose. I can’t possibly turn Danton and the bandits of the Revolution into heroes of virtue! If I wanted to convey their depravity, then I had to let them be depraved; if I wanted to show their godlessness, then I clearly had to let them speak like atheists. If a few incident expressions occur, then think of the notoriously obscene language of the era, of which the words I give my characters to say are but pale reflection. The only other thing one might criticize is my choice of subject matter. But this 3 Georg Bu¨ chner, Letter to his family, Strasbourg, 28 July 1835, in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, p. 202.

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objection has long been refuted. Accept it as valid, and you would have to condemn the greatest masterpieces of literature. The writer is no preacher of morality, he invents and creates characters, he makes past ages live again, and people can learn just as well from that as from the study of history and from their observation of what happens around them in real life.4

Further confirmation of the fact that Büchner saw dramatic poetry as having an instrumental function with regard to history can be found in the letter to his family from 5 May 1835, in which the dramatist announces the imminent publication of his Dantons Tod: The full play should be coming out soon. In case you happen to see it, I beg you to bear in mind when forming your judgement that I had to remain true to history and show the men of the Revolution as they acutally were: bloody, dissolute, energic and cynical. I regard my drama as a historical portrait that must correspond exactly to its original.5

Hence, what emerges from the Dialogue about Art and from Büchner’s correspondence with his family on Danton’s Death is indeed the conception of the theatre according to which the dramatist re-creates history: instead of offering us a bare narrative, he transports us directly into the life of an age; he gives us characters instead of character portrayals; full-bodied figures instead of mere descriptions. His supreme task is to get as close as possible to history as it actually happened.6

It is well known that the Büchner’s interest in history, whose aesthetic ‘development’ was properly described in literature by Shakespeare, Goethe, and few others, was first of all of a political kind.7 So, in the Germany of the Vormärz, when in the ending of his Reisebilder (Travel Pictures, 1826–1830) Heinrich Heine exhorted the German citizens to take up arms, Büchner’s theatre offered the possibility of a close look at the deutsche Misère (‘German misery’ or ‘German wretchedness’).8 In particular, his work represented the geopolitical fragmentation that had resulted, following the Napoleonic period, from the establishment of the Deutscher Bund (German Confederation) in 1815, which had not been so much dented by the revolutions of 1830. This was the context, after the revolu4 Bu¨ chner, Letter to his family, Strasbourg, 28 July 1835, pp. 201–202 [italic emphasis in the original]. 5 Georg Bu¨ chner, Letter to his family, 5 May 1835, in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, pp. 199–200. 6 Büchner, Letter to his family, Strasbourg, 28 July 1835, p. 202 [italic emphasis in the original]. 7 See Raul Calzoni, ‘Zwischen Politik und Ästhetik: Der Briefwechsel Georg Büchners’, in Briefkultur: Transformationen epistolaren Schreibens in der deutschen Literatur, Würzburg, ed. by Isolde Schiffermüller and Chiara Conterno (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2015), pp. 69–84. 8 See Chapter V (‘Die deutsche Misere’) in Jan-Christoph Hauschild, Georg Büchner: Biographie (Stuttgart-Weimar: Metzler, 1993), pp. 227–393.

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tionary uprisings of 1830, that gave birth to Büchner’s two highly political theatrical works: Danton’s Death and Leonce and Lena. They provide two access routes parallel to our author’s political ideology: two ways of approaching Büchner’s political thought diametrically opposite in genre – Danton’s tragedy and comedy in the case of Leonce and Lena. Nevertheless, they cannot be considered separately if our goal is to deal with the question, so dear to the writer, of deutsche Misère and its origins, brought to the stage with the dramatic political and economic reality of the most backward little states of Germany. Moreover, Büchner had already explicitly denounced the situation of political backwardness in the little states of the German Confederation a long time before the publication of Danton’s Death and Leonce and Lena, in the famous pamphlet The Hessian Messenger, revised by constitutionalist democrat Friedrich Ludwig Weidig so as to dampen the more radical and anti-bourgeois tones of Büchner’s agrarian socialism. The topic dealt with in The Hessian Messenger is thus “the relationship between rich and poor, which Büchner sees as “the only revolutionary element in the world”, leading to his adage that “hunger alone can become the goddess of freedom”.9 The opposition between the “poor” (“peasants and labourers”) and the “rich” (“princes and gentry”) people is summed up in the motto that opens the pamphlet – “Peace to peasants! War on the palaces!”10 – uncoincidentally reproducing the Jacobean cry coined by Chamfort in 1792: ‘Paix aux chaumières! Guerre aux châteaux!’. Regardless of Weidig’s interventions, the emphasis on the relationship between poor and rich shows how Büchner’s political ideology derives from the socialist thought of Louis-Auguste Blanqui and the Neo-Babouvism of the Société des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, whose ideas the author sought to spread in Germany, also through his foundation of the Gesellschaft der Menschenrechte (Society of Human Rights).11 In other words, before composing Dantons Tod, Büchner was already convinced that his times and life were essentially material, that is, that the injustice and abuse suffered by the ‘people’ had determinable and real causes. In the same way, it was indisputable that “[t]he poor people tamely haul the cart on which the princes and liberals act out their ludicrous comedy”,12 as can be read in a letter by Büchner addressed to August Stöber in December 1833. With these words, Büchner denounces the existence of 9 See Georg Büchner, Letter to Karl Gutzkow, [Strasbourg], in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, p. 201. 10 Georg Bu¨ chner, The Hessian Messenger, in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, p. 167. 11 See Sebastian Wogenstein, Poetic Anarchy and Human Rights: Dissensus in Georg Bu¨chner’s Danton’s Death and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, in Imagining Human Rights, ed. by Susanne Kaul and David Kim (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), pp. 139–156. 12 Georg Bu¨ chner, Letter to August Stöbel, Darmstadt, 9 December 1833, in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, p. 192.

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a social situation in which “‘law’ […] turns the great mass of citizens into beastlike slaves in order to satisfy the unnatural requirements of an insignificant and degenerate minority” and where there reigns “violence, constantly and brutally perpetrated against justice and common sense”.13 Hence, there is a dialectic of violence between the ‘lords’ and the ‘poor’ legitimizing the revolutionary will to change the existing laws, that is, to modify a “justice” which, according to the author “[f]or centuries in Germany has been the whore of the German princes”,14 as can be read in The Hessian Messenger. The idea circulating among various exponents of the Hessian opposition who had read the pamphlet was that, in theory, violence was the only answer. Büchner, on the other hand, was convinced that all revolutionary impetus was condemned to failure; as he had it, a revolution could not change the status quo in Germany. Thus, what re-emerges in Danton’s Death is a plastic portrait of the impossibility of causing political subversion through a revolution, which, taken to its extreme consequences, such as in the case of the French Revolution, “like Saturn, […] devours its own children”.15 Indeed, in his play, the Republican ideas do not manage to find a politically complete form, while it is again the words of Sansimonists Bazard and Enfantin, about the exploitation of the working classes by the well-off, which energized Büchner’s rhetoric, in particular when the author opposes Robespierre’s and Danton’s ideas about the Revolution. In the 1835 drama, Büchner does not oppose the status quo of the Reign of Terror with an ideal organization of the political, social, and economic conditions. So, the first act of Danton’s Death presents three groups of revolutionaries: the partisans of Georges Jacques Danton, the followers of Maximilien de Robespierre, and the people, who do not agree with how the French Revolution has evolved. The two revolutionaries have different points of view on how to continue the revolt. Danton’s partisans hope for the end of Robespierre’s measures, which have already inflicted much suffering upon the people, who, as always in Büchner’s theatre, are hungry: 3rd citizen: The only blood in their veins is what they’ve sucked out of us! They told us: “Kill the aristocrats, they’re a pack of wolves!” So we strung them up on every streetlamp. They told us: “The King with his veto is scoffing your bread!” So we killed the King. They told us: “The Girondists are starving you to death!”. So we guillotined the Girondists. But they stripped all the clothes off the corpses, and we’re still freezing with nothing to wear. Let’s tear the skin from their thighs and turn it into trousers, let’s melt

13 Georg Bu¨ chner, Letter to his family, Strasbourg, 5 April 1833, in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, p. 190 [italic emphasis in the original]. 14 Bu¨ chner, The Hessian Messenger, p. 169. 15 Georg Büchner, Danton’s Death, in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, p. 21.

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the fat of their bellies to lard our soup with. Come on! Death to all them with no holes in their coats!16

The people have not found the Revolution to be the answer to their material and moral needs. Robespierre, the “Incorruptible”, enters the stage, invites the third citizen to follow him into the Jacobin Club, and immediately becomes the spokesman for the hungry people in the third scene of the first act of Danton’s Death: robespierre: I have told you before: the internal enemies of the Republic are divided into two factions, like separate armies. Under different banners and by the most diverse routes, they rush to achieve the self-same goal. One of these factions is no more. By painting our most valiant patriots as played-out weaklings, these prancing lunatics tried to cast them aside, and thus rob the Republic of its mightiest defenders. By declaring war on religion and property, they created a diversion on behalf of the kings. They undermined the glorious drama of the revolution by parodying it with grotesque and deliberate excesses.17

After this heated speech by Robespierre, the indulgent Danton accepts to meet the so-called “Incorruptible”, as proposed by his friends. Indeed, this is the only scene in which Danton and Robespierre confront each other verbally in an altercation, which is worth listening to in full. Robespierre’s and Danton’s different positions reveal that the Revolution has transformed into a sort of “Saturn [that] devours its own children”. The meeting between the two does not resolve the situation and Robespierre chooses Danton’s death, albeit doubting that his decision is the right one. In the second act, Danton’s friends urge him to act or at least to flee from Robespierre’s supporters, but the protagonist of the drama does not see the need, nor does he believe that the National Convention will dare to act against him. It is in this moment that Danton confides to his wife, Julie, the remorse he feels for inciting the September massacres. Immediately afterwards, against his hopes, Danton is imprisoned and brought before the National Assembly, which is divided and at first sides with him, but then the speeches by Robespierre and Saint-Just change the situation around. Moreover, it is here that Büchner demonstrates the force of expression of the Jacobins’ revolutionary rhetoric. It is so based on violence as to transform words into arms,18 as Barère says to Saint-Just, Robespierre’s mouthpiece in the drama, when he says: “Go on, St. Just, concoct your para16 Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 10 [italic emphasis in the original]. 17 Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 14. 18 See Karl Eibl, ‘Ergo todtgeschlagen. Erkenntnisgrenzen und Gewalt in Büchners Dantons Tod und Woyzeck’, in Euphorion, 75 (1981), 411–429; see also chapter 4 (‘Violence and the Tenacity of the Self: “I am something, that’s the misery of it!”: Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death’) in Crafting Flesh, Crafting the Self: Violence and Identity in Early Nineteenth German Literature, ed. by John B. Lyon (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 154–214.

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graphs: every comma the stroke of a sword, every full stop a severed head!”.19 Indeed, “the Revolution is,” for Saint-Just, “like the daughters of Pelias: it rejuvenates humanity by hacking it to pieces. Humanity will rise up from the bloodbath as the earth arose from the waters of the Flood: with pristine vigour in all its limbs, as though created for the very first time”.20 As the second act of Danton’s Death progresses, it sees at least three revolutionary projects clash (the people’s, Danton’s, and Robespierre’s), perpetuating the animosity between human beings into a future foretold in the drama by the voice of Camille Desmoulins, lawyer in Paris, school companion and friend of Robespierre and fellow initiator of the storming of the Bastille, unswervingly loyal to Danton and co-founder with him of the Cordeliers Club. Tired, like Danton, of Robespierre’s terror – a major theme of Büchner’s drama – in January 1794 Desmoulins had founded Le vieux Cordelier, a cleverly satirical newspaper inviting moderation and the establishment of a clemency committee. Before being arrested and sent to the gallows with Danton, in the first scene of the second act in Büchner’s drama, Camille gives a speech on the “mathematicians of the flesh” and their “hunt for the ever elusive x”, as the revolutionary defines it, setting out the drama’s hidden message:21 camille: To put it more grandly: “How long is mankind in his eternal hunger to continue devouring his own limbs?” Or: “How long are we shipwrecked sailors in our unquenchable thrist to continue sucking each other’s blood?”. Or: “How long are we mathematicians of the flesh on our hunt for the ever elusive x to continue to write our equations with the bleeding fragments of human limbs?22

The “hunt for the ever elusive x”, that is, for a solution to the Revolution capable of putting an end to the clashes and the trail of blood, joins the two factions fighting in Büchner’s drama which, despite their proclamations to the contrary, only in fact continue the violence characterizing the ugly reality. In this connection, the stratagem adopted by Büchner, who inverts the heads of the factions’ roles, does not allow for any distinctions. In other words, it allows neither the words of Danton to be used as a cue in the work to warn of the end of all illusions, nor the lips of Robespierre and Saint-Just to revive the Revolution.23 Instead, the exchange of roles acts as a reference to the substantial analogies between the actual deeds of the protagonists and their followers. 19 Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 55. 20 Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 43. 21 In this connection see Simonetta Sanna, Die andere Revolution. Dantons Tod von Georg Büchner und die Suche nach friedlicheren Alternativen (München: W. Fink, 2010). 22 Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 29. 23 On the history of the interpretations and critical debate, see Rüdiger Campe, ‘Danton’s Tod’, in Büchner-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. by Roland Borgards and Harald Neumeyer (Suttgart-Weimar: Metzler, 2009), pp. 274–282.

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Hence, the eponymous protagonist and head of the Indulgents, Danton, withdraws to his private space – “I would rather be guillotined than guillotine others”,24 he affirms – while, in contrast, the most incorruptible Robespierre dominates the public space by administering the machine of terror. In the third act, the prisoners also discuss the life and existence of God, but the attempt to prove his inexistence fails. Danton’s followers are then transferred to the Conciergerie. In the meantime, the Revolutionary Tribunal undertakes to form a jury of men who are loyal to him. Danton appears before the tribunal with a confidence and declared will for justice that stuns the public. Because of the signs of sympathy among the spectators, the hearing is suspended. The members of the tribunal invent a plot to convince the public. During the second trial hearing, Danton loses the people’s favour owing to his lifestyle. Danton’s liberal programme proves to be inacceptable for the masses, and yet, in the third act, in the Revolutionary Tribunal, when he is “accused by the National Convention of conspiring with Mirabeau, Dumouriez, Orléans, the Girondists, the foreigners and the faction of Louis the Seventeenth”,25 Danton is forced to go back to speak from a ‘revolutionary’ point of view, so what he previously felt to be “horrible sins”26 are again reason for merit: danton: It was I in September that fed the tender brood of the revolution on the shattered bodies of aristocrats. It was my voice that forged weapons for the people from gold of the rich and the nobility. My voice was the hurricane that buried the lackeys of despotism beneath waves of bayonets.27

For Danton, the moment has come to follow through the words of Mercier addressed to him just before he went into the Revolutionary Tribunal: mercier: How did it go, Lacroix? – “All are subject to the sword of Equality!” “The lava of the revolution is in fiery spate!” “The guillotine is the crucible of the Republic! The spectators cheer, the Romans rub their hands with glee, but none of them realize that every word is the blood-chocked scream of another victim. Just follow your slogans through to the point where they turn into flesh and blood. Look around you: what you see is what you’ve said – a precise translation of all your words. These miserable wretches, their executioners, the guillotine: they are your speeches come to life. Like Bayezid with the pyramids, you’ve built your grandiose schemes out of human head.28

24 25 26 27

Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 29. Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 50. Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 37. Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 51. Danton thus once again shows he is convinced that “the Revolution […] rejuvenates humanity by hacking it to pieces”, as claimed by Saint-Just, Robespierre’s mouthpiece (see Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 43). 28 Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 49.

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In the fourth act of Danton’s Death, the rhetoric of violence finds a precise translation and turns “into flesh and blood” in the lexicon of the death sentence given to Danton and his followers.29 Danton and his friend Camille Desmoulins exchange opinions on life and death. Julie, Danton’s wife, to whom he had promised fidelity even after his death, poisons herself. On the way to the gallows, the people appear curious and ironic. When Lucille Desmoulins sees her husband climb onto the guillotine platform, she goes mad. She decides to die, shouting “Long live the King!”30 to bring about her own death sentence. Lucille’s paradigmatic cry projects the fratricidal fight past and present beyond the action, which takes place from 28 March to 5 April 1794, the day in which Danton and his followers are put to death. Indeed, as his antagonist had foreseen, Robespierre himself would then be executed on 28 July, in the same place and in the same year. All differences between the two are thus cancelled out by time as it continues blindly on its way: while Danton killed in the past, in the present the killer is Robespierre, but, in the end, he too will be killed by the Revolution. The “hunt for the ever elusive x” is thus fated to fail, that is, to bow down to the law, in other words, the principle that governs the harsh reality. Büchner refers to this in a famous letter to his fiancée Minna Jaeglé in March 1834: I’ve been studying the history of the French Revolution. I felt as though utterly crushed by the hideous fatalism of history. I find in human nature a terrible sameness, in human circumstances an ineluctable violence vouchsafed to all and to none. Individuals but froth on the waves, greatness a mere coincidence, the mastery of geniuses a dance of puppets, a ridiculous struggle against an iron law that can at best be recognized, but never mastered. I wouldn’t dream any more of bowing down before the pranching show-offs and hangers-on of history. My eye has grown accustomed to blood. But I’m no guillotine blade. ‘Must’ is one of those words by which mankind was damned from the very beginning. The saying, ‘It must needs be that offences come, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh’, is horrifying. What is it in man that lies, murders, steals? I can’t bear to take the thought any further.31

This quotation once again reveals that Büchner’s political ideology in Danton’s Death is demonstrated by the friction between the Girondists’ “fame” and the people’s “hunger”, to which he also refers in the Italian motto of the play Leonce and Lena:

29 See Martin Wagner, ‘Why Danton Doesn’t Die’, in Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Robert Gillett, Ernest Schonfield and Daniel Steuer (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 173–91. 30 Büchner, Danton’s Death, p. 73. 31 Georg Bu¨ chner, Letter to Minna Jaeglé, [Gießen, after 10 March 1834], in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, pp. 195-196.

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Alfieri: E la Fama? Gozzi: E la Fame?32

Hence, the reference to the hungry people also shows the primary need – the only possible driving force for revolution – at the basis of Büchner’s political thought. Büchner’s people, in Leonce and Lena, in Woyzek, and also in Danton’s Death, are always hungry. Satisfying the body’s needs is therefore the hinge around which the dramatist’s criticism revolves.33 He criticizes an affected political system which represses all instincts and genuine feelings by virtue of raison d’État, which makes the “lords” and “princes” who live inside it into automatons and puppets, and which makes the “poor people” similar to animals who “tamely haul the cart on which the princes and liberals act out their ludicrous comedy”.34 Hence, to avoid the Revolution it would be (have been) enough to fill the people’s bellies, as Büchner himself indeed wrote in a letter to Karl Gutzkow: The whole revolution has already divided into liberals and absolutists, and it is the uneducated and poor class that has to swallow the consequences. The relationship between the poor and the rich is the only revolutionary element in the world, hunger alone can be the goodness of freedom, and only a new Moses inflicting the Seven Plagues of Egypt upon us could be our Messiah. Fatten the peasants, and the revolution will die of apoplexy. Put a chicken in the pot of every peasant, and the Gallic cockerel will drop down dead.35

32 Georg Büchner, Leonce and Lena, in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, p. 75. Büchner wrote the motto in Italian owing to the play on words that the language affords: fama, fame and fame, hunger. On this play, see Serena Grazzini, ‘Identität und Komik in Georg Büchners Lustspiel Leonce und Lena’, in Georg Büchner Jahrbuch, 14 (2016–2019), 219– 232. 33 See Eva Horn, ‘Der nackte Leib des Volkes. Volkskörper, Gesetz und Leben in Georg Büchners “Danton’s Tod”’, in Bilder und Gemeinschaften. Studien zur Konvergenz von Politik und Ästhetik in Kunst, Literatur und Theorie, hrsg. von Beate ricke, Markus Klammer u. a. (München: W. Fink 2011), pp. 237–270. 34 Bu¨ chner, Letter to August Stöbel, Darmstadt, 9 December 1833, in Id., Completed Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, p. 192. 35 Georg Büchner, Letter to Karl Gutzkow, [Strasbourg], p. 201.

Elena Agazzi

Rethinking the Past with a New Narrative Strategy. Nora Krug’s Heimat. A German Family Album

Foreword This contribution marks the completion of a path that, over a ten-year long collaboration on Angela Locatelli’s project, entitled La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, has led me to reflect on ’literature and memory’ in German culture of the second post-war period. Reflection paved the way to further study, which eventually took the form of broader critical works. It was the essays disseminated in the volumes Angela edited that provided some initial seeds for research. My scientific and personal gratitude to Angela, who blazed new trails for multifaceted and cognitively dynamic textual hermeneutics and pursued a transdisciplinary endeavour ever sensitive to new trends in literary criticism, goes well beyond the few words I have ventured here.

I.

The features of Heimat as an album, an inventory, an archive and a memory lexicon

Six years of intense work, three gestation phases (divided into two years for research, two for writing and two for the work’s illustration) for a project that ties family micro-history to the macro-history of the Second World War; diverse cultures (German, Jewish and American); past and present; a sense of belonging to a community and a keen perception of being foreign to one’s native land. All that is Belonging. A German Reckons with History and Home (in the German Version, published in the same year, the title of the book was Heimat. Ein deutsches Familienalbum [Heimat. A German Family Album]1 by Nora Krug, a German writer who now lives in New York and who, after marrying a Jew, felt the need to rediscover her roots and find answers to the many questions concerning 1 In the second American edition of 2019 the title of the book was adapted to the German one: Heimat. A German Family Album.

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the life of her loved ones in the days of National Socialism. As she recounts, in fact, casual inspiration for this research came to her in New York, from a conversation with a Jewish woman, who told her that she had escaped the gas chamber sixteen times, because one of the kapos had fallen in love with her. On the next page, the faces of nine concentration camp ’female guards’. These arresting close-ups probably taken by the Americans at the end of the war, capture the eyes of readers and stir up a kind of emotional shock few photographs are able to cause. In their deadpan expressions one can only surmise the horror these female guards must have witnessed as well as their own responsibility for what they did. If one were to try and establish a clearly-defined literary genre for Nora Krug’s Heimat one would probably experience some degree of unease, especially if one does not read the whole text from top to bottom but lets oneself be captured by overall, superficial impressions. It is certainly not wrong, but awfully inadequate to be guided mainly by its subtitle, which links the connotation of the work as ’German’ to the format of the ’family album’. This would immediately lead us to consider the story as a fresh variant of the Familienroman genre, which forcefully imposed itself in the mid-90s of the last century in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, this assumption would fail to do justice to the fact that Heimat is also a graphic novel, which has the breath of a memory atlas, made up of collages of drawings, photographs, and texts that are grafted unto each other to produce a composite reconstruction of the past through the experiences of its protagonists2. Also, the book’s function is overtly more didactic than the one achieved by family or generational novels. The adventurous tracing of family roots and the violation of the ’taboos of memory’ is never coloured by fiction. Rather, it follows the precise plan of a personal anamnesis within past History. Finally, one cannot fail to trace from the very first pages an ethical-moral line of discourse that far exceeds the boundaries of personal micro-history3. What

2 An exceptionally useful essay that delves into the multifaceted format of the construction of Nora Krug’s work is Ulrike Vedding’s ‘Alben, Sammelsurien, Inventare, Museen. Todesnähe und Literatur‘, in Album. Organisationsform narrativer Kohärenz, ed. by Anke Kramer and Annegret Pelz (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), pp. 143–155. Speaking of the graphic novel in 2017, Anna Stemmann acutely remarked that until then the comic genre which was meant to address the theme of the Holocaust had very much remained a male prerogative (whose forerunner was Maus by Art Spiegelman of 1992, which inaugurated this narrative form of the suffering and violence against Jews). See Anna Stemmann, ‘(Bio-) grafisches Erzählen von Gewalt im Kontext des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Erinnerungskulturelle Perspektiven auf Comics der 2000-er Jahre‘, in Storylines and Blackboxes: Autobiografie und Zeugenschaft in der Nachgeschichte von Nationalsozialismus und zweitem Weltkrieg, ed. by Johanna Gehmacher and Klara Löffler (Wien: New Academic Press, 2017), pp. 197–220. 3 Not surprisingly, this book was presented by literary critic Denis Scheck during a short broadcast of the German broadcaster ARD, available at the link https://www.youtube.com/wa

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clearly emerges page after page is that any community may become the object of derision, prejudice and violent physical and moral rage by other communities that cherish different historical-cultural traditions. Even a German who travels abroad or who takes root in the new American Heimat will not be immune from hostile attitudes, because the responsibility and the sense of guilt that accompany Germany’s Nazi past work relentlessly under the radar, much like woodworm gnawing at wood. Provided they do not degenerate into the violent reaction of those who feel hurt in their pride and end up taking a dangerous drift, these feelings become an opportunity for asking questions, for trying and understanding how it was possible to break the rule of peaceful coexistence among peoples by stoking resentment and fear. It is precisely this relentless dialectic between questions and answers that marks the narrative force of the text: a text which comments on the images that accompany it and lets itself be corroborated by these images, essential features of a Bildergeschichte that is built with pencil, brush strokes, and photographs alternating with sheer storytelling4. Recalling what Svetlana Boym writes in The Future of Nostalgia (2001)5, one should always distinguish between a ’good nostalgia’, which unites all those who are alike, in the expression álgos (indicating the pain of deprivation) and a negative, divisive nostalgia, identifiable in the expression nόstos (which strongly reaffirms the identity found upon returning home or going back to one’s homeland). Nora Krug’s perspective is placed between these two needs, in our opinion tilting decisively towards the first form of nostalgia, as an effort to reach an emotional compensation freed from the need for revenge. For Nora Krug, the search for lost identity coincides with the need to place herself in the wake of family history, without passively accepting their navigation route as a hereditary stigma. As it will become apparent, there was no lack of opposing opinions and critical voices over this point.

tch?v=xiY_WWvPpH4&t=5 s, as a ’Bilderbuch für Erwachsene’ (illustrated book for adults) and as a ’moralischer Kompass’ (moral compass). 4 “It was, in a sense, a shame that with the post-war popularity of American comics the previously used definition of ‘Bildergeschichte’ as a genre (story in pictures) was lost, simply because the English term sounded more modern. In the era of National Socialism, the word ‘comics’ had been used as a provocative term, to claim the inferior status of that narrative genre, popular in the United States, set up against the tradition of German picture stories: what sounded so comical must necessarily lack the required seriousness and hence the depth that the German genre was endowed with”, Andreas Platthaus, ‘Durchsetzungsvermögen. Wie der Begriff „Graphic Novel“ das Verständnis von Comics verändert hat‘, in Allmende, 2 (2018), 4– 15 (available at http://www.allmende-online.de/media/docs/allmende_ 102_platthaus.pdf). 5 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

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In spelling out the language of childhood memory, Heimat in some sections also casts itself as a lexicon of ’Vergangenheitsbewältigung’6, which makes one reflect on the terminology of National Socialism and of air warfare – whereby the Allies coined the vocabulary of retaliation as ’moral bombing’ – while introducing the reader to a register of words that today have become the common heritage of a collective attempt to rework the past. From her high school period, dating back to the time when she attended the penultimate class and visited the Birkenau extermination camp with her classmates, to her great shock, the author recalls, among other things, the following: We resorted to the expression “that’s so typically German” to describe someone’s unfriendly or narrow-minded behavior. We learned that VERGANGENHEITSBEWÄLTIGUNG means “coming to terms with one’s political past”, but felt that it really defined “the process of struggling to come to terms” with it. We learned that the German word for RACE should only be used to distinguish animal species, and ETHNIC only in the context of genocides; yet we felt that history was in our blood, and shame in our genes. But there were also gaps in our education: we didn’t learn that tens of thousands of Germans had been killed for resisting the Nazi regime (because it would have made our grandparents who didn’t resist look guiltier in comparison?), or that 150,000 men of Jewish descent had fought in the WEHRMACHT (because their participation would have made us feel less guilty?) 7.

Begun as an action of ’denazification’ of German culture and politics in the immediate post-war period, the moral and civil re-education of the people who had perpetrated crimes against humanity developed over the following decades – not without difficulties or resistance – with one main goal: to prevent oblivion of everyone’s direct and indirect responsibilities towards the Shoah. The register applied to the narration of Heimat is at once descriptive and reflexive. It recalls the register of an intimate diary, in which Krug’s consciousness expands to include the fate of the three generations of the paternal and maternal branch of her family as well as that of two communities, Külsheim and Karlsruhe, framed in the most difficult years of German history. Nevertheless, personal memories have a decidedly reduced import in the general economy of Nora’s story (who was born in 1977), while the issue of testimony, whether oral – through the words of the characters interviewed by the writer on her journey through memory –, or documentary (thanks to archival research) or photographic, is absolutely central.

6 See Lexikon der ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung‘ in Deutschland. Debatten- und Diskursgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus nach 1945, ed. by Torben Fischer and Matthias N. Lorenz (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007). 7 Nora Krug, Heimat. A German Family Album (USA: Penguin Books, 2019, I ed. Simon & Schuster, 2018), chapter 1. Early Dawning, p. 18.

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Some objects, drawn or photographed, take on the function of ’telling objects’8: the ones Nora chooses to accompany the development of her book end up under a special “heading” in the ’notebook of a homesick émigré’. In other words, they are those ’German things’, Nora has introjected as symbolic objects of her personal childhood memories; fetishes which stand for the Heimat she had left many years earlier to move to New York. These ”devices of memory” are veritable buoys, to which Nora clings as she chooses to be carried away by the troubled waters of the river of family memory. It is a river full of eddies (the contradictions between what her relatives know or at least say they know and what emerges from archival records or eyewitness reports); of sharp bends (turning points marked by the discovery of new clues useful to clear Nora’s maternal grandfather or paternal uncle, the subjects of her investigations, from alleged sins); of shallow waters (that is, gaps, unspoken words and lies). The impetus of this river of memories is also conveyed by the fact the pages of Heimat are thoroughly flooded with writing, with images and, let’s not forget, different colours that reflect the various emotional states of the writer and are presented without any kind of progressive numbering. This latter feature of the text, certainly not accidental, induces an uncanny sense of disorientation, because it prevents those who would want to dwell on a specific feature from easily quoting it; unless one goes back to the beginning of each chapter and counts the pages that comprise it, until one reaches the page one wishes to quote. To pause on a page and to refer back to it in one’s commentary marks a challenge, because it forces the reader to actually retrace the writer’s pilgrimage and to attempt a cyclical recapitulation of events, in order to then focus on the episode in question. The work is divided into 15 parts, each bearing an evocative title for the atmosphere that surrounds that specific phase of the itinerary and of detection. While the investigation follows the laying out of clues and branches out into a path of parallel stories, the work also charts a journey backwards towards the origins that frame Nora’s position within the history of her family. As she sails down this river of her family history, Nora also meets some ’ferrymen’ (the two historians from Külsheim, her father’s hometown, and later the son of the neighbour (Albert W.) from her maternal family: the Rocks’.) In a letter, Albert had testified the lack of involvement of her maternal grandfather Willi and of many others in the National Socialist cause, which allowed Nora to relive what had happened in the past more vividly and to find, at times, comfort and hope. An additional feature of Heimat is that it constantly intertwines a path within the consciousness of its author with the experiences of others, which may be 8 Mieke Bal, ‘Telling Objects. A Narrative Perspective on Collecting’, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 97–115.

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defined as ”the unknown”. So, for instance, Nora buys some war souvenirs at the flea market: postcards from the front, toy soldiers, photos of the bombings on German cities, but also images of the soldiers portrayed in the few peaceful moments when they were allowed to be with their companions, or to play with the animals of the occupied farms. All these the readers can observe as they scroll through her text. Together they make up an inventory of the historical memory of Germany. From time to time they are gathered together on a separate page entitled From the Scrapbook of a Memory Archivist. Flea market find with a progressive numbering (1, 2, 3 etc.). And these special pages signal firm fixtures within the narrative path, much like the stages of a via crucis. This collection of relics serves to recall the personal stories of ordinary men, subjects who recapitulate the meaning of a senseless war; who have been submerged by History not as victims of Nazi savagery – Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents -, but as young people called to the front with the clear perception that they may never be able to return home. This “German” reading of historical facts, certainly ascribable to the debate that raged throughout the 1990s, when the veil on the suffering of the civilian population in German cities during the bombings was lifted, is on the one hand similar to history in highlighting the fact that the vulnerability of life ’requires a remembrance of the past to save the memory of ’ all ’the dead (including helpless women and children slaughtered by air warfare). On the other, such reading of history is bound to justify itself again and again with respect to a wider sharing of historical guilt, which relentlessly falls back even on the third generation of those born in Germany. This is undoubtedly necessary, if the voice of the youngest is somehow to mitigate, albeit mildly, the breakdowns of conspiracy and silence produced by the second generation – that of the parents – with respect to the crimes committed by grandparents or to their passive acceptance of the political directives of National Socialism9. The relatives whose past Nora tries to piece together and reconstruct, her maternal grandfather Willi, by his own admission a member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1940 and his paternal uncle Franz-Karl, who died when he was barely 18 years old fighting in Italy in 1944 , are men who by all means wore their uniforms; men who did not perish as ’civilians’ under Allied bombing. 9 On this topic, I would refer to an essay of mine that appeared in vol. V of Knowledge of literature. The Knowledge of Literature, edited by Angela Locatelli, entitled ‘“Opa war kein Nazi”. Structure and Narrative Strategy in the German Generational Novel’ (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2006), pp. 15–36. The essay discusses in some depth how the book of interviews by Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall (eds.), “Opa war kein Nazi”. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 2002), opened Pandora’s box over the techniques for removing criminal and mournful events in family communication across the three generations affected in Germany by ties to the Nazi past, along three main behavioural patterns: a) self-distancing, b) fascination, c) abuse syndrome.

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Postcards may often figure among the materials of the Scrapbook of a Memory Archivist, as it also happens in the works of W.G. Sebald. Sebald, for his part, did not limit himself to reproducing postcards, but often made them indistinguishable from amateur photographs; or he described them in such detail in his text, so as to evoke them vividly in the reader’s eyes by a subtle use of ekphrasis. One striking and well-known example is the postcard that Sebald visually introduced at the beginning of his Zurich lectures on ’aerial warfare and literature’, which shows the city of Frankfurt am Main in 1947, raised to the ground by bombings. The postcard below, dated fifty years later, ”which tourists can buy today at news-stands in Frankfurt and send all over the world from the metropolis on the Main” – as Sebald writes – gives an account of a ”perfectly functioning removal mechanism” which glorifies the efforts made by the Germans to turn a page and remove the feelings of guilt; a mechanism which makes it possible to build on the remains of the past a thriving city of finance and industry10. To Nora, a postcard found online becomes an opportunity to pierce through the facade of houses, to explore the environments in which her relatives moved, as seen for example between pages 22 and 23 in section X of the book, entitled Looking for Traces. A postcard found online shows the salon of the Weinhaus Just, the winery with an attached restaurant which was in the same building where Willi’s office was located. I look at the postcard and I imagine Willi entering the restaurant after a long day at the office. I see him leave his mothball-scented flannel hat with the maître de salle. I hear the chair move across the carpeted floor as he pulls it out from under a table to sit down […] I see him tap his foot to the rhythm of the German tango: ”You black Gypsy, you know my pain. And when your violin cries, my heart cries the same!” And all I need to do is sit down on the chair across from him in the midst of the music and the happy tipsiness and look at him and put my hand on his and ask him the questions I’ve always been burning to ask11.

In this section of her text, Nora is intent on investigating how her maternal grandfather Willi (1902–1988) lived, while in Karlsruhe the Sinti and Roma were being forcibly transferred to Poland, while in the Baden-Württemberg region 6,500 Jews were deported and from the same city a thousand of them were first taken to the Gurs concentration camp, in the Pyrenees, to end up partly in Auschwitz a couple of years later. And that was far from the whole story. Three 10 W.G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur. Mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch (München-Wien: Fischer, 2001, I ed. Hanser, 1999), p. 15. 11 This situation obviously elicits a sense of horror in the reader, who imagines how the stereotype of the Gypsy violinist, surrounded by the languid atmosphere of a song that reaches across a space outside historical time, clashes with the raids of the National Socialists who at that very time targeted, among others, the Roma communities.

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years earlier, between 9 and 10 November 1938, during the infamous Reichskristallnacht, the synagogue that was right opposite her grandfather’s office had been set on fire. Nora simply cannot fathom how Willi could possibly have ignored the event.

II.

The moral question and an assumption of responsibility

Once it has been ascertained that, in the work of Nora Krug, the perspective on the past is managed from an extremely subjective point of view and that her effort is oriented towards filling the gaps, the empty spaces left behind by the process of removing memories by family members, it is precisely on the way in which Nora scan the records of her maternal grandfather and paternal uncle for evidence of a complicity with Nazism that Matt Reingold, one of the few articulate commentators on Krug’s work, ends up pointing his finger. Reingold, member of the Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, was visibly irritated. Primarily due to the fact that a) “Krug’s text does not explore the Holocaust from the perspective of its impact on Jews but as a subject wherein a contemporary German feels alienation and shame as a result of her German identity”; also because, b) ”while Krug is able to recover the documents that detailed her grandfather Willi’s Nazi involvement, she is unable to document his qualitative or emotional experience as a Nazi ”thus proceeding in her excavation of the past as do ”narrators who retell the Holocaust experiences of others″ [and who] ”fashion their own memory of the places where the Holocaust occurred, which undoubtedly shapes their representation of their family’s experiences”12. Indeed, at the end of her journey, Nora either must or wants to assume that her grandfather was no Nazi ’criminal’ (therefore not an offender) – according to the responsibility scale the American military garrison had used to classify German citizens’ involvement in Nazism13: he was merely a follower. In the immediate post-war period, that status would still cost him the freezing of his work permit, would make it difficult for him to obtain food and force him to find a line of defence that would allow him to be rehabilitated and be able to support his wife and two small children. Before conclusions are reached as to whether Nora’s grandfather is really to be judged guilty or innocent, his story, as well as the story 12 Matt Reingold, ‘Heimat Across Space and Time in Nora Krug’s Belonging’, Monatshefte, 111 (2019), 4, 551–569 (p. 552, p. 557); last quotation refers to Esther Jilovsky’s article ‘Recreating Postmemory?: Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Journey to Auschwitz’, Colloquy, 15 (2008), 145–162 (p. 146). As already said, the American title of the Heimat-Book is Belonging. A German Reckons With History and Home. 13 The scale listed Major Offenders, Offenders, Lesser Offenders, Followers and Exonerated Persons. Nora Krug, Heimat, chapter 12. Following the Flock, p. 7.

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of other protagonists who were obviously conditioned by the climate of control, coercion and fear imposed by Hitler, is put forward as a ’crossroads story’, typical of the interactive construction of stories which are built between text and images or even just through images, a construct typified by the genre of book-games. In fact, several possible alternatives are proposed to suggest a different unfolding of events compared to what may seem to provide the most obvious answer on the actual moral conduct of Nora’s relative. Each ’basic block’ that construes how the facts may have unfolded – for instance the one block made up of the four hypotheses that outline the scenario of where grandfather Willi might have been during the fire of the Külsheim synagogue – makes the reader responsible for favouring the most likely solution. Nora Krug thereby abandons an individual point of view and invites those who accompany her on her journey to apply the ’benefit of the doubt’ to actions whose cause remains in the shadow. Reingold’s harsh judgment is undoubtedly justified, if the reminder of the victims of repression and deportations is taken as the only viable prospect for demolishing the myth of Heimat as the common home of the Germans. No circumstantial evidence will be allowed for that reading of history, except as an admission of guilt. As for Nora, although clues may lead to a strong evidence of guilt, it is essential to work on the family history based on progressive deductions, with the help of the finds and documents she collects during her investigation. Once again, this choice of method depends on the moral angle that Krug chooses in order to walk in the past, i. e. avoiding ’prejudices’ and raising questions. For the morning when the synagogue was set on fire, Nora presents four vignettes or cartoons on a single page that illustrate four different hypotheses of where her grandfather Willi might have been, providing in each box ( a / b / c / d) a different answer and listing in the table header her grandfather’s number found in the Külsheim telephone book of 1938, which she would have liked to dial to hear his version of the facts:

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Four simple digits. 3935 Where were you the morning of November 10, 1938? a) I was in another part of the town b) I was at home c) I was in my office d) I was there when it happened.14 ************

Nora Krug completed her research and went back to New York. On the penultimate page, the author reported that she had applied for American citizenship, and had had to to fill out a questionnaire in which a question stood out, among many others similar to those her grandfather Willi had had to answer back in April 1946: “Did you work or collaborate with the Nazi government of Germany between 23 March 1933 and 8 May 1945?”. Absurd? Anachronistic? Certainly not, because – as Krug herself immediately added, “the 2017 German national elections saw the emergence of a new right-wing party. The far right has claimed seats in parliament for the first time in over half a century”. By way of conclusion, what needs to be stressed is that in Heimat, while two photographs in the first chapter entitled Early Downing crudely exhibit the massed bodies of Jews found in the camps upon the arrival of the allies and then transported by order of the American military on wagons driven by the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages to the burial place, no photographs of crimes committed by Wehrmacht soldiers are ever given. Not surprisingly, in one of his essays, Helmut Lethen commented that the exhibition entitled Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, circulated in 28 German and 6 Austrian cities between 1995 and 1999, quite possibly broke the last bastion of resistance for Germans, as represented by the ’cover taboos’ of an uncomfortable memory; a bulwark that not even Nora Krug had the strength to breach by direct assault. While that may be said to show a vulnerable side to Heimat, her works remains a morally solid endeavour:

14 Nora Krug, Heimat, chapter 10. Looking for Traces, p. 17. In terms of graphic technique and composition, the cartoon format Krug uses to recall the events involving various members of her family is reminiscent of the Bauerngeschichten painted on wood with naive touches and placed along the wall of farms below the roof, a rare sight documenting the daily life of small rural communities one may come across in Southern Germany or Austria. Yet how can we forget that these stories, often associated the narrow escape from various calamities and famines, featured human sacrifice, most often represented by the martyrdom of some Jew, which stood for the perfect scapegoat? To be sure, in the 17th and 18th centuries these sacrificial rituals were often ends in themselves. Even though Nora never mentions these, since she came from a family of field farmers on her father’s side she was most likely acquainted with that mode of storytelling.

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The scandalous nature of the exhibition consisted in the fact that it crossed the dividing lines [which divided family collections of photos of the front and propaganda photos of violence perpetrated by soldiers, E.A.]. It exposed intersection points between war and criminal actions in the sphere of intervention of the Wehrmacht, and showed them visibly gathered in the memory albums of individuals15 […]

Lethen borrows the concept of family frame from Marianne Hirsch, who opens her well-known study [Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory of 1997, E.A.] with a quote from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Is History not simply that time when we were not born? I could read my non-existence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her. There is a kind of stupefaction in seeing a familiar being dressed differently16.

15 Helmut Lethen, ‘Schrecken und Schatten des family frame in Brieftaschen, privaten Sammlungen und öffentlichen Ausstellungen‘, in Album. Organizationsform narrativer Kohärenz, pp. 156–167 (pp. 157–158). 16 Ibid., p. 158. In addition to this essay, I would like to refer also to Elena Agazzi, ‘Nora Krug Heimat. Ein deutsches Familienalbum (2018). Fotoalbum, Collage, Objektsammlung und Zeichnung zwischen Erinnerungsdiskurs und rekonstruierter Geschichte‘, in Vom Sammeln und Ordnen. Achim Hölter zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet, ed. by Paul Ferstl et al. (Berlin: Weidler, 2022), pp. 181–196.

Stefania Consonni

How to Survive on a Desert Island, Resemiotized Robinson Crusoe, Lost, Minecraft

I.

Things Little Fellows Know

As I set out to think what might best celebrate Angela’s work, it struck me how her writings and teachings seem to obey a twofold and yet harmonious purpose. On the one hand, as her series on The Knowledge of Literature evidences, she has thoroughly been unveiling much about the cognitive and epistemological dimension of literary and cultural texts. On the other hand, when one thinks of her critical practice with colleagues and students (such as myself), it is outstanding how she can convey the pleasures, the enchantments to be found in the reading of texts, and in the beauty of words, sounds, and images. For Angela, first and foremost, appears to me as a creature of curiosity, grace, and candour. Of wisdom – and style. Which brings me to the content of this contribution, the project of which came from a bright little fellow, and a few of my own family textual pleasures. This chapter explores resemiotization (“intersemiotic translation, or transmutation”)1 across different genres such as literary fiction (Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, 1719), TV serial narrative (Lost, ABC, 2004–10) and indie videogames (Minecraft, Mojang, 2011). The alignment, overlay, or even friction among these three linguistic systems, pivoting on different versions of the visuality/narrativity mix, and the recodification of complex messages by means of complementing (or commuting) verbal with (or to) visual signs, whereby representation is progressively shaped and shifted across evenmore propagative contexts and media, was in fact brought to my attention as my nine-year-old son and I were watching an episode from Lost.

1 Roman Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in On Translation, ed. by Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 232–239 (p. 232). See also Rick Iedema, ‘Resemiotization’, Semiotica, 137 (2001), 23–39; Rick Iedema, ‘Multimodality, Resemiotization: Extending the Analysis of Discourse as Multi-Semiotic Practice’, Visual Communication, 2 (2003), 29–57.

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Fig. 1. Lost Season 1 cover artwork (2004–05)

Admittedly, finding connections between Lost and Robinson Crusoe is not unstraightforward. Throughout six seasons and 120+ hours of vision, and through the most mesmerizing plot ever seen on TV, the show tells the story of how Oceanic Flight 815, from Sydney to Los Angeles, mysteriously crashes on an unknown, uncharted island, and of how survivors manage to recreate some aspects of civilisation amongst a tropical phantasmagoria of supernatural events (including miracles, telepathy, clairvoyance, spatiotemporal tunnels, etc.); ghosts, smoke monsters and polar bears; metaphysical dilemmas (predestination, free will, contingency, doom, death, the nature of the soul, etc.); a jungle full of pitfalls, whispers, hatches, sonic fences, archaeological ruins, and vestiges of psycho-technological experiments; as well as a sequence of ill-fated numbers and widening circles of ever more threatening locals, aka “the Others”. And these are but a few ingredients of the recipe. To put it, if you will indulge me, in terms of patisserie: if Defoe’s crowd-pleasing bourgeois epic eats like a classical piece of tiramisu, Lost sweetens the pot to Premium Tiramisu – with a triumph of mayonnaise on top. If you see what I mean. For better or worse, be it because of its strokes of genius or barbaric shortcomings, Lost is in fact is a prodigious show. Streamlining Crusoe’s main concern with how a man may “subdue nature to his own material purposes”, so that “the basic economic processes are turned into therapeutic recreations”,2 as well as reinterpreting issues from eighteenth2 Ian Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 151, 153.

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century moral and political philosophy, authors J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Jeffrey Lieber have created a transmedial phenomenon that is both disproportionately elaborate and ambitious; blatantly cheap and stodgy; longwinded and hypnotic; soap-operatic and yet at times incredibly inventive.3 Suffice it to think, for instance, of the names characters go by: Jack Shephard, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Desmond David Hume, Juliet Burke, Danielle Rousseau, Anthony Cooper, Kate Austen, etc.4 Or of the textual/visual references to anthropological, cultural, and metaphorical islands: Atlantis, Avalon, Bimini (home of the Fountain of Youth and Immortality), Prospero’s magic island, Swift’s Laputa, Saint Brendan’s (aka the “lost island”, to be found only by chance), Thule, or Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. Or think of the literary knowledge summoned by books that either physically appear in the show, or are quoted by characters or in episodes’ titles, a partial list of which includes L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Aldous Huxley’s Island, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, C.S. Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Verne’s Mysterious Island, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge.5 But to go back to our family viewing. At some point, a helicopter carrying “the Oceanic Six” (i. e. the six people who escaped the perils of TV’s most iconic island) starts shaking as a consequence of getting into a wormhole generated by the island’s electromagnetic activity. Time abruptly rewinds as Desmond, the show’s Ulysses character, is tossed eight years back in the past, only to be haunted by impossible memories of his future self on the island. While the grownup party of the audience was worried that the pampered third-grader might be perplexed by Lost’s temporal paradoxes (and therefore put an end to the show), the latter nonchalantly observed: “It’s a time shift. That’s because he traversed an interdimensional portal, so he got into a parallel universe”. Verbatim. The fact is that, being one of the 126 million Minecraft players in the world, the boy has a specific visual/narrative competence about multiverses and wormholes, which he gathered from his multimodal literacy experience with digital language and meaning-making practices. Unsurprisingly, the desert island setting – which 3 The extra-televisual transmediality of Lost is by now a classical phenomenon, including Lostpedia (https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page), forums (e. g. The Fuselage, www.thefuselage.com), Alternate Reality Games (such as The Lost Experience, Find 815, The Lost University), etc. 4 Not to mention other insights into the history of mathematics and physics (George Minkowski, Daniel Faraday, Eloise Hawking), fantasy/adventure literature (Charlotte Staples-Lewis, James ‘Sawyer’ Ford), theology and spiritualism (Richard Alpert, Dogen), etc. 5 See Roberto Manzocco, Pensare Lost. L’enigma della vita e i segreti dell’isola (Milano: Mimesis, 2010), pp. 39–46.

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will progressively reveal relics and ruins, Dharma stations, camp sites, and disrepaired temples and villages – also looked all too familiar to him. And not because of Robinson Crusoe. As it were, Minecraft is a first-person, open-ended sandbox game – in all respects, a digital evolution of Lego building bricks –6 the purpose of which is to explore a simulated landscape, discovering and extracting its natural resources (i. e. mining it). In so doing, players can place a virtually infinite number of cubic modular units inside an imaginary grid which provides the spatial coordinates of the game’s fictional biosphere.7 They can thus craft any kind of object, structure, or architecture they want, and/or modify the geographical environment at leisure, so as to create one’s own fictional ‘brave new world’. As the game starts, the player finds his/her avatar in a so-called ‘spawn point’, that is to say, the point of origin of the world (see, for instance, a classical desert island spawn point in Fig. 6 below). Like playing with sand, Minecraft lets the player shape the game itself, by manipulating the (per se fictional) representation of a virtual world through the ludic (and indeed metafictional) schematization of strategic movements related to the extraction-destruction-construction cycle of materials and structures. Instead of sand grains (or Lego bricks, for that matter), players use 1 m3 modules, providing constructions with a blocky, stationary outlook. Which, together with an incredibly soothing background ambient music, is what makes Minecraft both a morphologically high-constraint and a performatively low-pressure game. As a result, everything that exists inside Minecraft’s language is cubic: the Sun, clouds, trees, sea waves, tools, etc. No attempt whatsoever is made at curvilinear patterns, or mimetic biomorphism, although there appear to be verisimilar physical laws at work, such as the day-night cycle (which goes 72 times faster than in real life), gravity, nutrition, photosynthesis, mechanical and chemical properties, etc. Pointing to a criterial – as opposed to photorealistic – representation of matter,8 one that specifically draws on its distinctive functional features, geometrical abstraction encodes even the most complex empirical phenomena by means of voxelated cubes, to which texture and metadata are added so as to render a wide range of referents (i. e. everything the player has in his/her inventory).9 As can be seen in Fig. 6 below, cubes can mean and build sand, water, rocks, vegetation, etc. 6 Mojang, Minecraft [PC game] (Stockholm: Mojang, 2011). 7 The maximum number of blocks that can be generated in Minecraft equals 9,216x1017, that is to say, seven times planet Earth’s volume. 8 Günther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London: Routledge), p. 6. 9 See Jorge Garcia-Fernandez and Leonor Medeiros, ‘Cultural Heritage and Communication through Simulation Videogames: A Validation of Minecraft’, Heritage 2 (2019), 2262–74, p. 2269.

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Now, as my son was exposed to the cinematic rendering of a wormhole in the aforementioned Lost episode, he immediately recognized one of the special interdimensional gateways that one can literally build in Minecraft in order to take a break from the ordinary domain of materiality, temporality and perception. For Minecrafters can leave the ‘overworld’ – that is, the 3D fictional landscape they set out to reify and modify – and reach one of the alternative dimensions of the game, viz. the lush subterranean cave-and-lava labyrinth called ‘Nether’, where clocks simply stop working, and the riddles and mysteries of the metaphysical desert landscape called ‘The End’. A portal to the Nether, for instance, is made from a 14-obsidian-block frame, activated by the use of a flint and steel, which the player has to retrieve from his/her tool inventory. Fig. 2 shows what such a wormhole looks like.

Fig. 2. Portal to the Nether

As the portal is walked through, the avatar’s subjective vision is pretty much shaken up. The landscape blurs, vibrates, turns to violet (Fig. 3), quite similarly to what happens aboard Lost’s helicopter, until the threshold is completely crossed and he can set foot on Nether ground to start discovering its secret and valuable resources (Fig. 4).

Fig. 3. Entering the Portal

Fig. 4. Exploring the Nether

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Interestingly enough, the spatiotemporal grammar of Lost’s flash-sideways into alternative dimensions, generating a plethora of as-if and or-else subplots, which made a narrative sensation back in mid-2000s, ended up being effortlessly deciphered by means of an immersive digital gaming procedure developed as of 2011 onwards. (One that Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, the game’s creator, in all probability derived – among other cool and nerdy things from millennial pop culture – from Lost itself.) As if, we may hypothesize, the configurative intricacies of Minecraft’s visual design somehow back-translated into the labyrinthine narrative patterns of Lost. Or, in other words, as if both linguistic systems mutually and interdependently borrowed from a common reservoir of intersemiotic resources, irrespective of which of the two systems was first codified, and of which side of the visuality vs. narrativity dichotomy each of the two languages predominantly sits on. As a consequence, the visual grammar of Minecraft may work as a compass to Lost’s poetics of narrativity, as much as the narrative grammar of Lost may serve as a key to interpret Minecraft’s visual language. Which is the point of my paper. For both Lost and Minecraft resemiotize a question as old as (at least) Defoe’s pioneering novel: with what means (and to what purposes) does one survive on a desert island? The TV show and the videogame may be read as intertwined transpositions of the all-compelling terra nullius motif that Crusoe pivots on, i. e. the discovery, reification, and privatization of a newly found physical space that appears to be unowned, secluded, seductive and more than just potentially threatening. The exploration of the virgin land is followed by the extraction and exploitation of its resources, the extinction of possibly hostile presences (be they sick or belligerent Others, as in Lost, or mobs and monsters such as Endermen, Zombies or Creepers in Minecraft), and the resulting territorial expansion of the occupier. All based on the (material) Lockean principle that ownership of a land derives from the understanding and harnessing of its potentialities, and on the (symbolical) lures of infinite semiosis, which are the innermost pleasures to be found within such an invitation to a white-page space of endless possibilities. Crusoe’s enjoyment of self-directed labour, along with the semiotic (and ethical) remuneration that goes with the subject’s strategized behaviour and triumph “over his physical environment”,10 thus seems to be the foundation of both Lost’s narrative structure and Minecraft’s visual procedures. For both are in fact rooted in the desert island trope as a cultural (more than symbolical, psychological or anthropological) metaphor.

10 Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism, p. 151.

Robinson Crusoe, Lost, Minecraft

II.

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A Virtue of Necessity – Or Perhaps Chance?

Both Lost and Minecraft play with desert islands in pretty much a ‘constructionism-meets-maker-culture’ fashion, focusing as they do on the procedural and cognitive significance of tangibly manipulating the world through practices of “self-regulation, problem solving and critical thinking”.11 From the standpoint of constructionist epistemology, which I adopt in this paper,12 knowledge can indeed be built through meaningful material experimentation in a given environment, whereby sensory exploration, analytical fluency and manual dexterity may craft perceptive information into new structures of thought. Survival on a desert island will then, quite predictably, be an issue of perception, movement, and increasing degrees of agency within that environment, starting with attending to first necessities like water, food, shelter, and materials and tools to make essential commodities with. And from there, it will move forward to more intellectual pursuits, as further skills will increasingly be resorted to, like goal-setting, resource-mining, task-designing, structure-building, until more accomplished world-making resources will finally bring a new cosmos to life. Hence, the repurposing of natural elements or leftover supplies, the organisation of (pseudo)social activities, the keeping of pets, or the designing and building of symbolical and artistic artefacts, structures or architectures, etc. Generally speaking, the cultural myth at stake in this trope is that of infinite possibility within the finite necessity of material constraints. Think of the sandbox model. Or a bucket of Lego. Or a barrelful of spare items from the galley of a ship or the cabin of an aircraft. Which is what happens as of Crusoe’s arrival on the island, and in the opening scene of the Lost Pilot, as well as in the procedural generation of Minecraft’s overworld. And yet, my claim is that there exists a wider structural law which regulates all of these pragmatic and cognitive functions, all of this mining and crafting – be it in response to essential urges or more advanced needs –, in the same way as there is a functional grammar to playing with sand. And that same functional grammar is at work within the linguistic systems represented by Crusoe, Lost and Minecraft, governing the

11 Rick Marlatt, ‘Literary Analysis Using Minecraft: An Asian American Youth Crafts Her Literacy Identity’, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 0 (2018), 1–12. DOI: 10.1002/ jaal.747, p. 2. 12 See Maria Cipollone, Catherine C. Schifter, and Rick A. Moffat, ‘Minecraft as a Creative Tool: A Case Study’, International Journal of Game-Based Learning, 4 (April-June 2014), 1–14. DOI: 10.4018/ijgbl.2014040101; Dodie J. Niemeyer and Hannah R. Gerber, ‘Maker Culture and Minecraft: Implications for the Future of Learning, Educational Media International (30 October 2015), 1–11. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2015.1075103.

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intersemiotic strategies that they resort to (and lend one another) across domains, contexts and media. Incorporating linguistics, social semiotics and narratology, and borrowing from a major dichotomy from the classical episteme of the Eighteenth century,13 I will define this functional grammar in terms of an opposition – or, better still, an interplay – between the categories of Chance (and next-of-kin notions, i. e. happenstance, haphazard, contingency, fortune, accident, coincidence, randomness, and free will) and Necessity (and its correlates, i. e. destiny, fate, doom, providence, determinism, and predestination).

II.1

A Compass without a Needle

Just to be clear, how does one even get to a faraway island? Like Saint Brendan’s, these locations seem unfindable unless by chance, the only way to reach one appearing to be stranded, or beached, or tossed to it. By accident or happenstance, and not particularly comfortably, one would claim. Let us go back to Defoe’s novel. His ship being “ill-fatedly” caught in a storm, Crusoe is swallowed by the waves until he is landed “or rather dashed […], against a piece of rock, and that with such force as it left me senseless, and indeed helpless, to my own deliverance; for the blow, taking my side and breast, beat the breath as it were quite out of my body”; after which he comes to, opens his eyes and crawls “to the mainland”, “up the cliffs to the shore and sat me down upon the grass, free from danger, and quite out of reach of the water”. After which exploration starts, “to see the kind of place I was in, and what was next to be done”.14

Fig. 5. The first two shots of Lost

In a likewise happenstance and stressful way, Lost’s protagonist Jack Shephard is plunged onto an unknown island between Fiji and Tahiti after the wreckage of Flight 815; being at the mercy of gravity and ballistics, he is swallowed not by 13 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), trans. by A. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989). 14 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), pp. 51–52.

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waves, but by the wilderness of a bamboo grove, which he suddenly opens his eyes to as he regains consciousness in the very first shot of the Pilot episode (see Fig. 5 above). After which, being a doctor, he gets up to cope with contingency, taking care of the injured, suturing wounds, assisting a pregnant woman, etc. Procedural randomness also seems the key to getting into one’s own simulated island in Minecraft. To access his/her brand-new overworld (or game environment) through an avatar whose conventional name is Steve, the player needs an algorithm called ‘seed’, that is, a mathematical integer sequence of 19 digits that generates the unique ecosystem represented by that player’s fictional world. Each seed will yield a combination of biomes (e. g. beach, jungle, forest, mesa, taiga, etc.), terrain patterns (i. e. natural structures like mountains, caves, lakes, etc.), mobs (both passive, like sheep, turtles, mushrooms, etc., and hostile, like Creepers, Endermen, etc.) and a portfolio of materials pertaining to that particular environment (e. g. sand, earth, wood, stone, etc.).

Fig. 6. Desert island spawn point, as seen through Steve’s subjective angle

As it happens in the Lost Pilot, time zero in the game is the moment Steve’s eyes open up to the new biosphere that has just taken shape. It is the activation of the subjective angle from which the discovery and modification of the overworld will take place. As can be seen in Fig. 6, the spawn point is immediately visible through the avatar’s gaze – which is conventionally signalled by the black and white block at the bottom right of the frame, representing the avatar’s hand, which will always remain in the foreground.15 15 Steve’s hand is always visible in the foreground, unless he is carrying a tool, in which case the

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In Case of Force Majeure

And yet, in all three linguistic systems the concept of Necessity almost immediately comes into play, to become functionally interwoven with its counterpart, Chance. For, even though Defoe never cares to be specific about this, greed, impatience and hubris emerge as the moral roots of Crusoe’s exile to the island. Is it really out of blind fate that Crusoe reaches it? Or is it the effect of individual responsibility? Is the shipwreck fortune’s fanciful (if perhaps undeserved) blessing, or a pre-established punishment for not accepting the “middle state”, or “upper station of low life”16 as the most convenient for human happiness? The plot keeps swaying between these two extremes, as Crusoe’s adventures never come to be “mere fate or fault”.17 Which one is it? There is no way of knowing. For ad ventura are in fact ‘things yet to come’, i. e. future events in their suspended, embryonic state, yet to be shaped by the interplay of Chance’s tokens, i. e. change, dynamism, uncertainty, and hazard, and Necessity’s prerogatives, i. e. the solidity, stability, and continuity of one’s homeland and culture. Adventure is thus a twofold concept. It is a violation of fate’s design, something which may or may not happen, but one that will ultimately configure the future. Which, in most of the Western scenario (think of the Odyssey), equals coming back home. In actual fact, Crusoe’s achievements in the new world progressively shift away from the conceptual realm of accident and contingency towards the principles of motivation, design, and providence. Clear water, shelter and food he finds by mere “casual accommodation of opportunity”.18 There is a spring near the shore, and a nearby “thick bushy tree like a fir”, while chewing tobacco prevents hunger. But serendipity soon evolves into the organised harnessing and repurposing, the mining and crafting of resources (e. g. biscuits, rum, rope, wood planks, a spare topmast, ammunition, etc.).19 Goal-setting and task-designing bring about “a more organized use of caves and walled defences”, up to “the notions of the main house, the country retreat and the specialised storage area”.20 And yet, betting is not over. We know that Crusoe will re-embrace Chance, discontinuity and peril, for he will leave the island, de facto his home, in pursuit of further “surprising incidents in some new adventures of my own, for ten years more”.21

16 17 18 19 20 21

tool is shown, while the hand is implicitly alluded to. In Figs. 3, 4 and 5, for instance, Steve is carrying one of my son’s favourite tools, a ‘diamond sword’. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, p. 17. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, p. 18. Ian Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism, p. 152. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, pp. 54–56. Ian Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism, p. 152. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, p. 277.

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My claim is that the functional interplay of Chance and Necessity, first codified in Defoe’s treatment of the desert island trope, is precisely the object of resemiotization within Lost’s narrative grammar and Minecraft’s visual language. Indeed, Lost’s castaways’ immediate priorities are, similarly to Crusoe’s, identifying a suitable camp site, locating springs, gathering supplies from the fuselage, and finding a way to send a radio SOS. Their setting foot on the island accordingly seems to stem from a casual disgrace, that is, Flight 815 losing contact with ground control, entering severe turbulence, undergoing mid-air breakup and crashing on different sites of the island, one thousand miles off course in the middle of the South Pacific. There is no room here (alas) for discussing the visionary, utterly reckless multiple interpretation twists that this first sequence of events undergoes along six seasons, especially through formidable characters such as John Locke: coincidence vs. destiny, election vs. deception, science vs. faith, determinism vs. anomaly, free will vs. destiny, Karma vs. Dharma, circularity vs. linearity, etc. Suffice it to say that the show’s structural hallmarks – synchronicity, flash-sideways, time travelling, criss-crossing destinies, and temporal paradoxes,22 which we all regret as dramatically at odds with the teleology of Season 6 finale – are a consequence of Lost’s entire plot being a backgammon game played between Jacob (the island’s protector) and his nameless Brother (aka ‘Smokey’).23 Which in turn triggers the dichotomies insistently associated with Chance and Necessity, and especially incarnated in key figures such as John Locke, Desmond Hume, Daniel Faraday, etc. As a consequence, the crash of Flight 815 is explained in Seasons 1–2 as the result of Desmond’s failing to enter a numeric code into Dharma’s Swan station computer, thus releasing an enormous amount of electromagnetic energy which interfered with the aircraft’s instrumentation and dragged it down towards the island. Mere happenstance thus reads as the result of a domino-effect causal progression that has to do with the island’s unique geophysical features, i. e. pockets of electromagnetism, seismic activity, navigational difficulties, time dilation, invisibility from the outer world, and the capacity to… move. But as the plot unravels through Seasons 3–4, this account is progressively overridden by a wider explanation, one linked to the island not being a place but a mystic entity, endowed with the very source of universal “Light, Birth and Rebirth”. 22 Whereby, for instance, the decisions a character like scientist Daniel Faraday will make in 2004 determine what he did in 1977, the year he was actually born – and died, too. 23 In such a game, the spiritual power of the “Heart of the Island” (a subterranean pool filled with electromagnetism, but also the spiritual source of birth and rebirth) is the stakes; the 72 survivors from Flight 815 are the pieces, to some of whom the cursed Numbers are associated, and whose biographies prior to getting to the island are connected by synchronic chains; actions and events are the pieces’ trajectories on the island’s game board, where Dharma stations and other locations are the squares, etc.

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For which reason, destiny called: the passengers of Flight 815 were inevitably doomed to reach the island, for one of them will be chosen to be Jacob’s successor as its guardian against Smokey’s evil forces. And the numeric sequence that, for complicated reasons, Desmond refused to feed to the Swan station computer, thus seemingly triggering the crash, was not a random security code at all. It was a (fictional) mathematical algorithm – the so-called Valenzetti Equation: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 – which, having been commissioned by the UN Security Council in the 1960s, had the power to predict the time of human extinction on Planet Earth. The Dharma Initiative is revealed as a psycho-socio-technological experiment whose mission was to alter one of the coefficients, so as to interfere with the inevitable course of events on the planet, and prevent The End from happening. The point about entering the code to the computer is thus keeping mankind’s destiny on a tight leash. And yet, this same sequence of numbers was fortuitously played by Hurley at the lottery: a lucky break winning him the $114 million jackpot, but jinxing his life all the way from the US to Australia – this being the incidental reason he boarded Flight 815. But in contrast to Crusoe, Hurley’s fate will be to stay forever on the island, as its spiritual protector. Et cetera. There is no coming out unscathed from Lost’s narrativity. Thousand-page musings have been produced about its twists of fate and strokes of luck, and about Abrams, Lindelof and Lieber’s poetics of architectural design and paradoxical cult of coincidence. That is how much one can love it. To come to its visual game transposition, Steve’s adventures on the randomly generated Minecraft island follow a pretty much similar pattern. Although it is a playerdriven, non-zero-sum game, with no ascending levels or final score (the point being experimenting with one’s sense of scenery, materials and structures), when played in Survival mode Minecraft does immediately confront the player with the concept of Necessity.24 From the moment he is spawned, Steve has ten minutes before night falls, that is, before Creepers, Zombies and other monsters come by. That is to say, he needs to harvest materials and build a shelter for the night. One way of doing so is looking around for a tree, mining and disassembling it into cubes of wood, collecting the blocks and reassembling (i. e. crafting) them into wood planks. With four planks he can put together a ‘crafting table’, i. e. a 3x3 Lego-like ‘meta-crafting’ grid that can handle up to nine ingredients and yield more complex tools, such as axes, torches, saws, compasses, clocks, armoury, weaponry, etc., which will be necessary for survival in the long run.

24 The game can be played in Creative mode (i. e. unlimited resources, no health and hunger bars, no monsters, and avatar can fly) or in Survival mode (i. e. limited resources, empty inventory, monsters, no flying). The former is more about exploring and making sceneries and structures, the latter is more goal-oriented (thriving despite scarcity of food, goods etc.).

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In Minecraft’s visual ecology (and economy), mining typically comes about out of good luck, i. e. the happenstance discovery of useful resources from the territory, ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’ being an implicit rule of the game. Crafting is conversely the result of purposeful meaning-making configurative practices that are shared among the player community; it is mainly an issue of deconstructing and reconstructing certain blocks in a certain way, which one must be informed of, as in the case of the 3x3 crafting table. The player, that is, has to perform a precise protocol of gestures, the meaning of which is the visual configuration of a certain item or substance. For instance, bumping into ‘redstone dust’ in a ‘jungle pyramid’ while wandering in the middle of nowhere, or getting it as loot for taking down a witch is certainly a lucky chance. Putting nine redstone dust units in the 3x3 crafting grid will instead earn the player a ‘redstone block’, a powered mineral with which one can engineer circuitry for electrical, mechanical and illumination purposes. Top-notch gear, that is. But to go back to Steve’s first days on the island. Finding food is the second obvious thing that he needs to do. At sunrise he can then leave his improvised shelter and kill whatever animal passes his way, which may be acceptable, for a start. But thriving on the island requires better organisation. Adding bread to one’s diet is a better solution. Bread can be made through a specific ‘recipe’ – which is what any crafting technique is called in the game’s metalanguage: mining weeds that spontaneously grow in the biome; breaking them to get seeds; planting the seeds with a shovel (made from one block of cobblestone and two sticks) and exposing them to sunlight and torches (craftable from one charcoal block plus one stick); and putting a horizontal row of three wheat stalks in the 3x3 crafting grid (see Fig. 7). (There are further recipes for cake and cookies, too. But no tiramisu, alas.)

Fig. 7. How to craft bread

A protocol like this one pretty much reads as a visual resemiotization of a similar procedure for making bread that is described in Defoe’s novel. Around six months after his arrival, Crusoe finds some spare corn seeds; makes a wooden spade; digs the ground; sows and protects the seeds from animals; threshes corn; builds an oven, and bakes bread. After which he observes, “it might be truly said that now I worked for my bread”, having performed a “multitude of little things

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necessary in the providing, producing, curing, dressing, making, and finishing this one article of bread”.25 (Although it is too hot for baking in Lost, boar and fish being the basis of the dietary pyramid, a comparable food item in this regard might be leftover Apollo Candy Bars from Dharma stations, whose visual appearances in the show obey laws of intermittent coincidence and intricate inevitability.) The interplay of Chance and Necessity appears in several respects to be a structural feature of Minecraft – one which however there is (alas) no room to discuss at length. Let me just mention a few facts. The game, stylishly enough, comes with no instructions whatsoever. Learning to play implies mining for creative resources outside the box, e. g. hunting for solutions and recipes in the Internet (a ‘how-to-Minecraft’ Google video search yielding nearly 300 million results). Mashing and ‘modding’ are indeed complementary features of the game, which was intentionally devised by Mojang to as to be freely modifiable by designers and programmers, who can edit ‘Notch’ Persson’s original coding by adding their own “agile software developments”,26 thus promoting a community collaboration in the constant development of the game. And apropos historical trivia with curious implications.27 The game’s distinctive graphic design, reminiscent of early-1980s Arcade aesthetics, is but the incidental result of the platform being independent from centralised servers, whereby direct peer-to-peer exchange of information made it necessary to devise a light, agile and quite rudimentary interface, one that would not engulf the flow of data. At the same time, though, the conspicuousness of such blocky retro graphics turned out to enormously encourage the development of “in-world curatorship”28 and of onscreen literacy skills on the part of users, also boosting the online social identity of players, many of whom (e. g. Dream, Technoblade, Illumina) are fully-fledged celebrities, with specific thematic specialisations, mechanic styles, game IQs, etc. Minecraft’s visual language, i. e. the much-celebrated material outcome of an early technical constraint, exemplifies the affordances generally provided by visualization in the representation of reality. Pivoting on the fictional reduction of reality’s geometrical complexity triggered by morphological abstraction, irrespective of whatever effort to mimic reality, the game’s outlook qualifies as a 25 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, p. 115. 26 See Agile Alliance, ‘Manifesto for Agile Software Development’, retrieved from http://agileallianc e.org. 27 Other than Creepers being created by mistake, out of a messed-up pig model. Pink was turned into slimy green: that is how the most iconic feature of the Survival mode was born. 28 Michael Dezuanni, ‘Redstone Is Like Electricity: Minecraft and Children’s Digital Making: Implications for Media Literacy Education’, Learning, Media and Technology (8 May 2018), 1–14. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2018.1472607, p. 49.

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“powerful channel to represent both geometry and the qualitative properties of the built environment”.29 The fact is that play “schematizes life”: it refuses to “imitate it in any very strict sense”.30 Playing is about structural, strategic, procedural and reflective knowledge. Which suggests a linguistic parallel – one that ‘Notch’ Persson himself fully acknowledged – between Minecraft and construction toys, especially Lego bricks. The architectural allure of construction game stems from the functional grammar that they are based on, which is again an issue of Chance in tension with Necessity. In M.A.K. Halliday’s terms, a Minecrafter’s inventory, as much as a child’s bucket of Lego, is a materialization of the absolute potentiality of a linguistic system; of its openness to virtually any meaning-making practice; and of the whole abstract system of possible resources and options, which will come to be actualised “in the context of speech situations”.31 A single brick (or block) configuration may instead be compared to a material act of speech, i. e. the “simultaneous selection” of specific elements “from a large number of interrelated options”, to perform which the creative exercise of selectivity is needed.32 The ideational appeal of coming up with adventurous new structures from the repetitiveness of modular units, then, stems from the here-and-now, now-ornever possibility of change and inventiveness, which breaks the predictability of the available repertoire. As much as, vice versa, creativity is tickled by the finitude of one’s inventory. For unlimited resources are tedious. And desert islands are better when they are small. If you see what I mean. Which entails that one could build anything – at all. Which, in turn, is what makes playing home on an exotic island so irresistible, isn’t it?

II.3

One Way or Round Trip?

And this is how the story ends. Robinson Crusoe never looks back. At the end of Defoe’s novel, he leaves for some other island, farther away. Linearity wins, and the openness to Chance that goes with it. In Lost’s Season 6 finale, The End, circularly mirroring the opening of the Pilot, Jack Shephard forever closes his eyes to the island of which he had been chosen as the new guardian. It is a matter of Necessity: in The End, endings must meet beginnings. We know this since at least the Eighteenth century. The ultimate meaning of Lost’s flash-sideways is 29 Garcia-Fernandez and Medeiros, ‘Cultural Heritage and Communication through Simulation Videogames’, p. 2269. 30 Brian Sutton-Smith, Toys as Culture (New York: Gardner Press, 1986), p. 138. 31 M.A.K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar: Third Edition (London: Hodder Arnold, 2004), p. 29. 32 M.A.K. Halliday, On Grammar (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 174.

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(alas) now unravelled. The labyrinthine configuration of the show’s plot is brought to a halt, and turned into the purely static visualization of the final twin shots (see Fig. 8) – an incredibly schmaltzy, catch-as-catch-can intersemiotic master stroke. As the script for the episode reads, a plane “clears frame, finally free of the Island. Jack Shephard has done what he came to this place to do. He has found his purpose. […] The bamboo sways across the blue sky, and Jack Shephard’s eye closes one final time. He is gone. The end”.33

Fig. 8. The last two shots of Lost

As to Steve, sooner or later he will come across an underground Stronghold and find the ultra-rare 12 portal frame blocks that, once activated with an equal number of ‘eyes of ender’, build a portal to The End. Which is Minecraft’s third, Lost-imbibed metaphysical dimension: a dark, ethereal land made of dispersed islands in the void of a hieratic white stone sea. Even though ‘Notch’ Persson planned for his game to be pure spatialization, with zero story line, The End is where narrativity comes into play. (That is, narrativity other than the spatial/ environmental sense of story that is triggered by one’s architectural and engineering achievements.) And where Minecraft has its intersemiotic momentum. Players can decide for themselves whether or not they wish to activate the portal; they may prefer never to do so and walk away. And the game will indefinitely go on as usual, in endless linearity. But if they do, they know that in The End they will have to serve a specific purpose, i. e. killing the game’s boss, the Ender Dragon. Which may take months, or even years of playing. And an expert inventory, filled with all sorts of blades, crossbows, enchanted potions, and whatnot. But if the player manages to kill the beast and take the exit, s/he gets congratulations in the form of a read-aloud (ten-minute long!) End Poem.

33 Lost, 6x17–18, The End, retrieved from http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/ Lost/Lost_6 x17-18_-_The_End.pdf.

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That’s right: Minecraft ends in poetry. It ends with a “silly over-the-top out-ofnowhere text”34 on the meaning of life and of the Universe, the matter of dreams, the crafting of billions of atoms in the shape of a binary code… After which, the player’s avatar dissolves, only to rematerialize immediately thereafter in his original spawn point. Where he first opened his eyes. T.S. Eliot probably said it better: “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time”.35 And this, if you please, was my tribute to you, dear Angela. A round trip from literature, to literature. Where everything began.

List of Figures Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

Fig. 3.

Fig. 4.

Fig. 5.

Fig. 6.

Fig. 7. Fig. 8.

Lost artwork (by Long Zheng, CC BY-SA 2.0 license, retrieved from https:// www.flickr.com/photos/longzheng/52393244/in/photostream/. Image adapted in compliance with license) Portal to the Nether (by Gamingedus, CC BY-SA 2.0 license, retrieved from https://wordpress.org/openverse/image/6dc49647-49ba-46d1-b09 f-1ab398d71 f 4b. Image adapted in compliance with license) Entering the Portal (by ephesossh, CC BY-SA 2.0 license, retrieved from https:// wordpress.org/openverse/image/097d19d9-ac7b-40 f8-80f9-b3b4bda4cc93. Image adapted in compliance with license) Exploring the Nether (by Viperid, CC BY-SA 2.0 license, retrieved from https:// wordpress.org/openverse/image/8b5e5254-7fa8-4527-b089-779152ce6729. Image adapted in compliance with license) The first two shots of Lost (retrieved and adapted from https://24.media.tumbl r.com/5ea93ef5b8bc815c6188ed8e87b1245d/tumblr_mpal3qyk1M1sxs9kgo1_50 0.jpg) Desert island spawn point, as seen through Steve’s subjective angle (by colmmcsky, CC BY-SA 2.0 license, retrieved from https://wordpress.org/openverse/image/e9 9096f8-2d72-42ee-858e-0ce4d619231f. Image adapted in compliance with license) How to craft bread (retrieved from https://en.meming.world/wiki/File:Minecraf t_Crafting_Recipes.jpg/) The last two shots of Lost (retrieved and adapted from https://24.media.tumbl r.com/5ea93ef5b8bc815c6188ed8e87b1245d/tumblr_mpal3qyk1M1sxs9kgo1_50 0.jpg)

34 As ‘Notch’ himself defines it in one of his tweets. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/notch/sta tus/125612634425921537. 35 T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, V, vv. 214–16. In Four Quartets. Orlando: Harcourt, 1943, p. 35.

Stefania M. Maci

“Pestilence Is the Enemy We Fly”. Metaphors for the Pandemic in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

1.

Introduction

The Last Man, by Mary Shelley, is a dystopian novel published in 1826.1 Divided into three volumes, it is set in the 2070s and forecasts how the world faces a deadly plague. In this novel, Lionel Verney is The Last Man, the one who survives the pandemic and the novel’s narrator. No one can figure out the cause of the plague, where it came from or how to cure it. Nonetheless, it starts spreading in America and then moves to England, Scotland, Ireland and across Europe, via the migration of infected people to these countries. The UK Lord Protector seems quite unprepared for this pandemic and the novel is indeed particularly sarcastic against the institutional response to the disease.2 It also underlines the residents’ spiritual degradation while experiencing this plague, as they are involved in looting and murders due to poverty. It is only thanks to military intervention that the situation settles down. Yet, religious fanaticism poses challenges for societal unity and governmental management. The world imagined by Mary Shelley in 2100 is one characterized by illness and fanaticism.

1 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man (available at: The Gutenberg Project www.gutenberg.org [Retrieved on 02/09/2018]). On Shelley’s novel as a dystopian text see Kat Eschner, ‘The Author of “Frankenstein” also Wrote a Post-Apocalyptic Plague Novel’, Smithsonian Magazine (30 August 2017), n.n., available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-ne ws/author-frankenstein-also-wrote-post-apocalyptic-plague-novel-180964641/ [Retrieved on 02/09/2020]; Ayesha Ashraf, ‘Pandemics in English Literature’, Daily Times (15 April, 2020), n.n., available at: https://dailytimes.com.pk/595798/pandemics-in-english-literature/ [Retrieved on 02/09/2020]. 2 Paul Keaveny, ‘Pandemics from Homer to Stephen King: what we can learn from literary history’ The Conversation (16 March 2020), n.n., available at: https://theconversation.com/pan demics-from-homer-to-stephen-king-what-we-can-learn-from-literary-history-133572 [Retrieved on 01/10/2020].

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Interestingly, McWhir claims that Shelley’s plague, variously defined as yellow fever, smallpox and typhus, is a metaphor indicating “any system, idea or influence considered to be morally or intellectually dangerous”.3 When we use metaphorical or figurative language, we talk and think about one thing in terms of another on the basis of the correspondence between them.4 In this sense, we use metaphors to communicate new, complex and at times abstract or complex experiences in more familiar or accessible terms. This is the case when cancer is described as an enemy to be defeated. In doing so, as aptly underlined by Semino5, a metaphor has framing effects, since it highlights some aspects dealt with by the topic and backgrounds others, thus influencing people’s reasoning, evaluation and emotions. For instance, she goes on, since the outbreak of Covid19, war metaphors have been widely used and research has shown that they can be useful in some contexts, for example to convey the need for crucial collective effort, but at the same time they can discourage self-limiting behaviours, such as just staying at home. Drawing on Semino,6 it is the purpose of this contribution to see what metaphors are employed in The Last Man to describe how the pandemic destroys humanity in the novel – whether the disease is called plague, fever, typhus or smallpox. In order to do so, a corpus linguistic (CL) approach will be adopted and the study will be corpus-based,7 in that the investigation focuses on existing linguistic categories, frameworks or theories to see whether they can be validated, refuted or refined by the corpus under investigation. The results seem to indicate that there are two main macro-metaphors used in this novel: ILLNESS IS FIGHTING A WAR and ILLNESS IS A PUNISHMENT, with different implications as to meaning deployment.

3 Anne McWhir, ‘Mary Shelley’s Anti-Contagionism: The Last Man as “Fatal Narrative”’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 35/2 (2002), 23–38 (p. 24). 4 Elena Semino, Metaphor in Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Elena Semino and Zsófia Demjén, The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language (Oxon: Routledge, 2017); Elena Semino, Zsófia Demjén, Andrew Hardie, Sheila Payne and Paul Rayson, Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A Corpus-Based Study (New York and London: Routledge, 2018). 5 See Elena Semino, ‘“A fire raging”: Why fire metaphors work well for Covid-19’ (1 July 2020), n.n., available at: http://cass.lancs.ac.uk/a-fire-raging-why-fire-metaphors-work-well-for-cov id-19/ [Retrieved on 02/09/2020]. 6 Semino, “‘A fire raging’”. 7 Marina Bondi and Mike Scott, Keyness in Texts (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2010); Paul Baker and Tony McEnery, Corpora and Discourse Studies: Integrating Discourse and Corpora (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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Methodological approach

We uploaded the .txt version of The Last Man to WMatrix,8 thus creating the LastMan_Corpus comprising 171,511 tokens (the overall number of running words forming the corpus) and 15,563 types (the number of instances of each word included in the corpus). WMatrix is an online software environment for CL analysis; it operates through comparison against either standard corpora samplers (e. g. the British National Corpus 1-million-word sampler) or any corpus collected by WMatrix users. In WMatrix, uploaded texts can be analysed for word frequency, keyword lists and concordances, and also annotated in terms of (a) part-of-speech (POS) thanks to CLAWS (the Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System)9 tagset10 (Piao et al. 2006); and (b) semantic domains thanks to the USAS (UCREL semantic analysis system)11 category system.12 CLAWS annotates parts of speech using “a statistical Hidden Markov Model (HMM) technique (Jelinek 1990) and a rule-based component”13 and is said to achieve 97–98% accuracy for standard written texts.14 USAS annotates semantic domains using 232 category labels grouped into 21 major semantic fields, which are then sub-grouped into semantic areas whose meanings reflect relationships of synonym-antonym, general-specific or meronymy-holonymy.15 The categories are not mutually exclusive as one term may fall into more than one category.16 The accuracy of WMatrix semantic tagging by USAS is around 91%.17 Rayson underlines the necessity of being aware of “possible tagging errors”, not 8 Paul Rayson, ‘From Key Words to Key Semantic Domains’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13/4 (2008), 519–549. 9 See http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/claws/. 10 Scott L. Piao, Paul Rayson, Olga, Mudraya, Andrew Wilson and Roger Garside. ‘Measuring MWE compositionality using semantic annotation’, in Proceedings of COLING/ACL Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Identifying and Exploiting Underlying Properties (Sydney: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2–11, available at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm? id=1613695 [Retrieved on 03/09/2020], 2006). 11 See http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/. 12 Dawn Archer, Andrew Wilson, and Paul Rayson, Introduction to the USAS Category System (Benedict project report, 2002), available at: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/ [Retrieved on 09/ 09/2020]. 13 Paul Rayson, Matrix: A Statistical Method and Software Tool for Linguistic Analysis through Corpus Comparison (PhD thesis, Lancaster University, 2003), p. 63. 14 Rayson, Matrix. 15 Archer, Wilson, and Rayson, Introduction to the USAS Category System. 16 Archer, Wilson, and Rayson, Introduction to the USAS Category System, p. 2. 17 Paul Rayson, Dawn Archer, Scott Piao, and Tony McEnery, ‘The UCREL semantic analysis system’. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Beyond Named Entity Recognition Semantic Labelling for NLP Tasks in Association with 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (25 May 2004, Lisbon, Portugal. Paris: European Language Association Resource), pp. 7–12.

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only because the tagging is automatic, but also because the tagging is “coarsegrained and may not match [the sense distinctions] required in specific studies”.18 We used WMatrix to identify the The Last Man semantic fields in order to detect the wordlists and concordances of all lemmas included in the DISEASE semantic domain (identified as B2-). We then used the Metaphor Identificatio Procedure (MIP) from the Pragglejaz Group19 to identify metaphorical uses to represent disease in the LastMan_Corpus. We excluded other than disease-related metaphors from this investigation.

3.

Finding metaphors

Metaphors are composed of a source domain, a target domain and a common ground. For instance, in the expression Love is a battlefield, the term battlefield, the source domain, is the one adding metaphorical connotations in terms of meanings to be added to the target domain love. Attributes from the (military) semantic domain of the lexeme battlefield are selected and applied to the target domain love, and then common ground will create a new meaning for the overall sentence.20 This may both mirror and strengthen a particular way of thinking about love as a difficult enterprise and in terms of military aggression. Using metaphors means contributing to realizing the speakers’ own rhetorical goals, which goes beyond expressing one’s opinions in an effective way: metaphors are expressions by means of which people talk about one thing in terms of another, but above all think about one thing in terms of another. When this occurs, we have conceptual metaphors.21 Conceptual metaphors map across conceptual domains, so that a ‘target’ domain (e. g. our knowledge about any arguments related to love) is partly structured in terms of a different ‘source’ domain (e. g. our knowledge about battlefield). In this way, the arguments characterizing the target domain related to love can be economically described because of implicit and explicit attributes deriving from the source domain battlefield.22 We first analysed what lemmas the semantic domain B2- DISEASE detected by WMatrix included. Amongst them, nouns indicating the following diseases were 18 Rayson, ‘From Key Words to Key Semantic Domains’, p. 529. 19 Pragglejaz Group, ‘MIP: A Method for Identifying Metaphorically Used Words in Discourse’, Metaphor and Symbol, 22/1 (2007), 1–39. 20 Semino, Metaphor in Discourse. 21 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we live by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 22 For an in-depth analysis of cognitive metaphors, cf. Semino, Metaphor in Discourse and Semino and Demjén, The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language.

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included, namely: plague, disease, pestilence, disorder, convulsions, exhaustion, typhus, fever, smallpox, and epidemic (here listed in frequency order). We then analysed the concordances with WMatrix by searching for plague, disease, pestilence, disorder, convulsions, exhaustion, typhus, fever, smallpox and epidemic in a span of five words to the left and five words to the right in the LastMan_Corpus. That generated 286 concordance lines as indicated below (numbers show raw occurrences of concordance lines of the lemma; the wildcard indicates that the lemma was found in both singular and plural forms): plague*: 125 disease*: 56 pestilence: 45 disorder*: 12 convulsion*: 8 exhaustion: 3 typhus: 3 fever*: 28 smallpox: 1 epidemic: 5

For each concordance line, the text was read and contextualized, which allowed us to detect what metaphors are exploited with the aforementioned terms within the semantic domain B2- DISEASE. Two main metaphors were detected: 1. – – – – 2.

ILLNESS IS FIGHTING A WAR THE DISEASE IS AN ENEMY INFECTION IS AN ATTACK BY THE DISEASE THE BODY IS THE BATTLEGROUND THE DISEASE TAKES OVER ILLNESS IS A PUNISHMENT

More precisely, the ILLNESS IS FIGHTING A WAR metaphor is a sort of umbrella metaphor including sub-metaphors all evidencing the aggressive nature of the disease, to be perceived in the fighting domain, as we will explain in the following paragraph. ILLNESS IS A PUNISHMENT is not a religious punishment, usually referred to as in iconoclastic tradition, but rather, as we will see later on in this contribution, a form of criticism of any governmental inability to manage societal unity.

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4.

What metaphors tell us

4.1

“Pestilence is the enemy we fly”

The very term disease, which is incidentally also the title of the semantic field under investigation, shows one instance of personification: diseases haunt our frail humanity (p. 414). In this expression we have the perspective from which we must read the whole semantic domain: humanity is characterized by frailty and disease is not just an infection but also an infestation. More precisely, the verb to haunt is recorded by the OED as collocating with disease and meaning “To visit frequently or habitually; to come up or present themselves as recurrent influences or impressions, esp. as causes of distraction or trouble; to pursue, molest”. Diseases, therefore, recurrently molest humanity. Humanity, being frail, cannot oppose them. And because of this, THE DISEASE IS AN ENEMY, as indicated in excerpt (1): (1) Pestilence is the enemy we fly (p. 250) In this metaphor, pestilence is an enemy. The source domain characterizing the ILLNESS macro-metaphor is WAR. In a war, there are battles, with winners and losers. These can be accompanied by other target domains such as MEDICINE or TREATMENT, usually seen as WEAPONS. Yet the latter are absent here: (2) So the plague killed you, I muttered. How came this? Was the coming painful? You look as if the enemy had tortured, before he murdered. (p. 342) The plague killed somebody, personified as a murder. Indeed, the disease is described as an enemy who tortured and murdered the sick person. There are, indeed, no indications of weapons to fight back against the plague as, in the novel, the origin of this infection is unknown, as is the cause of the contagion. In the ILLNESS IS FIGHTING A WAR metaphor, the source domain, war, is a type of war where we have neither armies and soldiers who fight, nor weapons: ILLNESS IS FIGHTING AND WINNING A WAR because there are no opponents. This macro-metaphor has a further development in another micro-metaphorical realization, where the battle is clearly seen to be fought against humanity: INFECTION IS AN ATTACK BY THE DISEASE, as seen in excerpt (3) below, which speaks about people being attacked and not being able to recover: (3) None who had been attacked by pestilence had recovered. (p. 450) In this micro-metaphor, even taken out of context, it is evident that pestilence or fever, personified entities, conduct their battle and that THE BODY IS THE BATTLEFIELD, as revealed by excerpts (4)–(7): (4) A slow fever preyed on her veins. (p. 416)

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(5) The fever was violent, the torpor complete. (p. 380) (6) Oppressed by fever and aching pain. (p. 442) (7) If Pestilence among you has slain its hundreds, with us it has slain its thousands. (p. 492) In (4), the disease shows its destructive force through the verb used, i. e. preyed. Not only does the verb itself convey the idea of a predator attacking people, but also of a predator mercilessly killing them – the image depicting the idea of a beast violently (5) attacking a person, so violently, as to suppress any living being (6). Furthermore, pestilence does not simply kill: it slays in (7). The destructive and violent power of the disease is revealed by the verb in the past participle slain (cf. OED), which is used to indicate the fury with which thousands of people have been killed by the pestilence. People in (8) are metonymically represented by the city, where they are simply prey of the pestilence; furthermore, the plague ravages cities, as an enemy army does in war, as indicated in (9) (8) The city was the prey of pestilence. (p. 250) (9) (T)he ravages the plague made in its chief cities. (p. 243) When the enemy wins the war, it is the conqueror, and THE DISEASE TAKES OVER, as shown in (10)–(11) below: (10) Haste, my friends, apparel yourselves in the court-dress of death. Pestilence will usher you to his presence. (p. 347) (11) Pestilence reigned paramount even here. By the time that day and night, like twin sisters of equal growth, shared equally their dominion over the hours, one by one, beneath the ice-caves, beside the waters springing from the thawed snows of a thousand winters, another and yet another of the remnant of the race of Man, closed their eyes forever to the light. (p. 555)

4.2

“God sends down his angry plagues from high”

As aptly indicated by Marshall, in iconoclastic tradition, the Black Death was always depicted to convey a warning of punishment to sinners and societies:23 people dying of the plague were people who not only underwent God’s punishment for their wickedness, but also people who would endure an eternity of 23 Peter Marshall. Religious identities in Henry VIII’s England. (London: Routledge, 2016). See also Emily Karsiel, ‘What Plague Art Tells Us About Today’ in BBC (Available at: https:// www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200514-how-art-has-depicted-plagues 2020, [Retrieved on 01/10/2020]).

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suffering in the other World. In these miniatures, the Black Death reaches men through heavenly messengers, subcontracted by God, devils or angels who shoot down arrows to inflict horror and chastise humanity and their sin24. This is figuratively represented in the novel, where we can see that God is angry and for this reason he sent the plague, in (12); that the plague has in itself rage, as in (13), but above all, that there are arrows of pestilence, as in (14), (15) and (16), or even a flaming sword of plague as in (17): (12) God sends down his angry plagues from high, Famine and pestilence. (p. 301) (13) Does not the plague rage each year? (p. 253) (14) But frost would come at last, and with it a renewal of our lease of earth. Frost would blunt the arrows of pestilence, and enchain the furious elements; and the land would in spring throw off her garment of snow, released from her menace of destruction. (p. 345) (15) Now, at the time of the Flood, the Omnipotent repented that He had created man, and as then with water, now with the arrows of pestilence, was about to annihilate all, except those who obeyed his decrees, promulgated by the ipse dixit prophet. (p. 532) (16) Its pleasant places were deserted; its temples and palaces were converted into tombs; its energies, bent before towards the highest objects of human ambition, were now forced to converge to one point, guarding against the innumerous arrows of the plague (p. 292) (17) The high walls of the tomb, and the flaming sword of plague, lie between it and him. (p. 422) In (12), the main character is actually quoting the translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days to describe the coming plague (and thus, Shelley reminds the reader of the classical tradition in relation to the plague account).25 From that moment on, all the examples, therefore, apparently reinforce the figurative trope of the plague as God’s rage and punishment for men’s sins, or, we might better say, for men’s behaviour. Indeed, as McWhir claims, “Mary Shelley also draws on the common metaphorical meaning of plague: any system, idea, or influence considered to be morally or intellectually dangerous”.26 According to McWhir, there is a relation between the discourse and metaphor of disease (contagion can occur anywhere without knowing the reasons why) and the discourse of politics and moral ideology, which is something evident in the debate of the 1790s, and particularly

24 Marshall, Religious Identitites, p.183. 25 Cf. McWhir, ‘Mary Shelley’s Anti-Contagionism’, p. 34. 26 McWhir, ‘Mary Shelley’s Anti-Contagionism’, p. 24.

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present in both Romantic poetry27 and Shelley’s novel, which instantiates the following questions: “Where do dangerous ideas come from and how can they be controlled? How does power corrupt oppressors and oppressed? What is the relation between individual moral choice and social influence or determinism?”.28 This is indeed clear whenever the metaphor of contagion is used in relation to politics: on the one hand we have a description of the incapability of managing the political situation: (18) It required all his ardour in pursuit of an object, and his patience under difficulties, to calm and animate such a number of his followers, as might counterbalance the panic of the rest, and lead them back to the means from which alone safety could be derived. He had hoped immediately to follow me; but, being defeated in this intention, he sent his messenger urging me to secure my own troop at such a distance from Versailles, as to prevent the contagion of rebellion from reaching them. (p. 527) On the other hand, this inability leads to people’s wickedness, as can be seen in (19), below: (19) Medical aid was less easily procured, food was more difficult to obtain, and human beings, unwithheld by shame, for they were unbeheld of their fellows, ventured on deeds of greater wickedness, or gave way more readily to their abject fears.” (p. 353) Indeed, as can be seen in (15), which we are here reporting (our emphasis): “the Omnipotent repented that He had created man, and as then with water, now with the arrows of pestilence, was about to annihilate all, except those who obeyed his decrees, promulgated by the ipse dixit prophet”. In addition, the word plague appears for the first time in the second volume, just before the fall of Constantinople, therefore in a context in which a political movement is occurring. The disease, therefore, is the right punishment for the political decay and for this reason the ILLNESS IS A FIGHTING WAR metaphor is used in a way that shows humanity can do nothing but lose.

27 For an analysis of Romanticism in terms of discourses of politics, moral ideology and disease metaphor, see McWhir, ‘Mary Shelley’s Anti-Contagionism’. 28 McWhir, ‘Mary Shelley’s Anti-Contagionism’, p. 27.

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Conclusions

The metaphorical development of the ideas of illness and punishment exploits a rich area of the reader’s experience. The metaphorical imagery is rich and familiar, even if it has never been experienced before; multiple elements (enemies, soldiers, victims, winners, losers, rights, frauds etc.) are included in it, with strong evaluative and emotional associations. As we have seen, the ILLNESS IS FIGHTING A WAR metaphor is used flexibly, in that other sub-metaphors are created for multiple purposes. In particular, to convey the idea that the illness is an enemy attacking humanity, the battleground is the human body. Unfortunately, in this war, there are not two armies fighting each other: the disease is the only (superior) army on the battlefield ravaging and is cruelly killing humanity, who in their impotence can do nothing but hope all this will stop. This disease is the plague, God’s punishment. The arrows of the plague depict the ILLNESS IS A PUNISHMENT metaphor, symbolically linked to the iconoclastic tradition that God’s angels can hit anybody: the punishment is linked to humans’ weakness and wickedness in political morality. Hence men’s inability to counter-attack in the war the disease is perpetrating. The idea is that there is a collective responsibility in this at all social levels – only a change in lifestyle can save humanity. Since this does not occur, everybody but The Last Man dies. This explains the gloomy narrative of despair and death.

Greta Perletti

What’s Wrong with Fanny Price? Pathological Intellection and Jane Austen’s Science of the Mind in Mansfield Park

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the protagonist of Mansfield Park (1814) must be in want of much of the attractiveness that other heroines of Jane Austen’s novels possess. While Lionel Trilling probably sounded rather hyperbolic when he bluntly remarked that ‘[n]obody I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfied Park’,1 it is no mystery that Fanny Price has proved baffling for generations of Austen’s readers. The long history of the ‘Fanny Wars’ described by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfields2 is dotted with many notable detractors of the protagonist of Austen’s third-published work: some of Austen’s closest relations, for example – her niece Anna, who ‘could not bear Fanny’; or Austen’s mother, who thought Fanny ‘insipid’3 – but also critics like (to mention but a few) D.H. Harding, Nina Auerbach, Tony Tanner.4 Indeed, even readers who have praised Fanny Price hardly ever failed to admit that she is a very strange heroine, or that, as Marylin Butler puts it, ‘Mansfield Park is at its best when [Fanny’s] part is smallest’.5

1 Lionel Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park’, Partisan Review, 21.5 (1954), 492–511 (p. 496). 2 Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfields, ‘A History of the Fanny Wars’, Persuasions, 36 (2014), 15– 33. 3 Jane Austen, ‘Opinions of Mansfield Park’, in Later Manuscripts, ed. by Janet Todd and Linda Bree (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 230–34 (pp. 230, 231). The manuscript has been digitalized as part of the project Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, and can be viewed at the link https://janeausten.ac.uk/manuscripts/blopinions/1.html (accessed on 15th January 2021). 4 D.H. Harding, ‘Mansfield Park’, in Regulated Hatred (London: Athlone, 1998), pp. 106–26; Nina Auerbach, ‘Jane Austen’s Dangerous Charms: Feeling as One Ought about Fanny Price’, in Jane Austen: New Perspectives, ed. by Janet Todd (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), pp. 208–223; Tony Tanner’s Introduction to the 1966 Penguin edition of Mansfield Park was reprinted in the Penguin edited by Kathryn Sutherland. See Tony Tanner, ‘Appendix: Original Penguin Classics Introduction by Tony Tanner’, in Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 440–64. 5 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 248.

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This essay intends to address the strange and puzzling character of Fanny Price by adopting the lens of cognitive literary studies: the protagonist’s striking difference from other heroines of Austen’s novels be can be effectively grasped, I will argue, by focusing on the impression of ‘pathological intellection’ that the text conveys, and that is expressed through Fanny’s difficulties when engaging in some cognitive processes that affect her social competence. The essay will begin by providing an overview of the importance of Austen’s writings within cognitive literary studies and will then move on to consider in what ways this critical perspective may enhance our experience of reading Mansfield Park.

1.

Cognitive Literary Studies and Jane Austen’s Novels

Ever since the powerful ‘cognitive turn’ started to affect literary studies, Jane Austen has proved to be a very popular author, whose works have seemed especially fit to test the importance of reading literary texts through the lens of what Stanislas Dehaene termed the new ‘culture of neurons’.6 If we follow Alan Richardson’s suggestion that, in the field of literary studies, the fascination with the adjective ‘cognitive’ can be explained with its capacity to intercept ‘an overriding interest in the active (and largely unconscious) mental processing that makes behaviour possible’,7 it is not surprising that Austen’s novels should appear so significant. All of Austen’s works are well-known for their sophisticated ways to accurately depict human behaviours, foregrounding scenes of human interaction (through dialogues, conversations and social gatherings) where readers can discern the real or pretended motives that lie at the core of characters’ choices and decisions. Moreover, Austen’s use of free indirect speech and thought (particularly in her mature works) and her deft use of characters as internal reflectors of the narrative have the effect of not only vividly exposing the mental operations that underlie characters’ behaviours, but also revealing the extent to which individual biases and perspectival distortions can seriously alter and mystify the perception of events and situations.8

6 Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009), p. 4. 7 Alan Richardson, ‘Studies in Literature and Cognition: A Field Map’, in The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, ed. by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 1–29 (p. 2). 8 The bibliography on Austen’s narrative technique is immense; here I would like to mention just two works that have been especially valuable for this essay: Massimiliano Morini, Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques: A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009); Joe Bray, The Language of Jane Austen (Cham: Springer, 2019).

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While the desire to combine cognitive and literary discourse has resulted in a very diverse, heterogeneous and still evolving field of investigation, Austen’s works have managed to appeal to many of the different critical trends generated by such interdisciplinary work. The objective of cognitive literary studies, which Isabel Jaén and Julien Jacques Simon sum up as ‘the construction of a more complete and coherent image of the human mind and its manifestations’,9 can be achieved not only through the findings of neuroscience, but also, as Richardson observes, with the help of the ‘long and elaborate history of careful scrutiny of figurative language, representation of mind and behavior, narrative and discursive modes, and other linguistic phenomena’ that are supplied by literary discourse.10 In line with this view, Austen’s novels have been explored in a vast array of critical works: if some scholars have been fascinated by the dynamics of sexual selection and the principles of evolutionary psychology traceable in her works,11 other critics have applied to Austen’s texts some contemporary neuroscientific concepts and theories, such as embodied cognition, monofocal and multifocal attention, theory of mind and mental time travel.12 Recently, Beth Lau has edited the fine collection of essays entitled Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind, which showcases the broad range of cognitive-literary perspectives that can be applied to Austen’s works (including her juvenilia and unfinished texts).13 Beside Pride and Prejudice, always a favourite among scholars as well as among lay readers, the novels that have proved most productive for cognitive

9 Isabel Jaén and Julien Jacques Simon, ‘Introduction’, in Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Trends and New Directions, ed. by Isabel Jaén and Julien Jacques Simon (Austin: Texas University Press, 2012), pp. 1–9 (p. 1). 10 Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. xiii. 11 Brian Boyd, ‘Jane, Meet Charles: Literature, Evolution, and Human Nature’, Philosophy and Literature, 22, 1 (1998), 1–30; Joseph Carroll, ‘Human Nature and Literary Meaning: A Theoretical Model Illustrated with a Critique of Pride and Prejudice’, in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, ed. by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 76–106; Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson, and Daniel J. Kruger (eds), Graphing Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 12 Kay Young, Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2010); Patrick Hogan Colm, How Authors’ Minds Make Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 20–25; William Nelles, ‘Jane’s Brains: Austen and Cognitive Theory’, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 16, 1 (2014), 6–29; Natalie Phillips, ‘Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind: An Interdisciplinary fMRI Study of Attention and Jane Austen’, in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. by Lisa Zunshine (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 55–81; Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 93–113; Id., The Neural Sublime, pp. 79–96. 13 Beth Lau (ed.), Jane Austen and the Sciences of the Mind (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).

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literary studies have been Emma and Persuasion.14 This is not surprising, for it is especially in Austen’s maturity that her writing achieves full mastery over the sophisticated narrative techniques deployed for the representation of cognitive operations. Mansfield Park, however, which is considered the first of the socalled ‘Chawton’ (often synonymous with ‘mature’15) novels, remains comparatively understudied. One notable exception may be Natalie Phillips’s fascinating work, which places Austen’s third-published work at the core of its experimental section. The research project led by Phillips focused on the relationship between attention, distraction and the reading experience in 18thcentury philosophical and literary culture and culminated in an experiment which, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fRMI), studied the brain activity of a group of PhD students engaged in the reading of Mansfield Park. In this project the novel, however, is not the subject of Phillips’s analysis: when describing the patterns of attention and distraction that are traceable in Austen’s writings, Phillips mainly works with Pride and Prejudice, although in a later chapter devoted to attention and memory she does consider some important

14 In an article that presents an overview of a college course on cognitive perspectives on Austen, Nelles observes that ‘[f]or those who must rely on only one Austen text to introduce the principles of evolutionary criticism, Pride and Prejudice is the hands-down choice’ (Nelles, ‘Jane’s Brain’, p. 15). Pride and Prejudice is also discussed in William Nelles, ‘Omniscience for Atheists: Or, Jane Austen’s Infallible Narrator’, Narrative, 14, 2 (2006), 118–3. While Zunshine’s work on theory of mind surveys many novels and more than one text by Austen, Pride and Prejudice has considerably more space: see Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), pp. 18-20, 61-63, 131-32; see also Id., ‘Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency’, in Theory and Mind and Literature, ed. by Paula Leverage, Howard Mancing, Richard Schweickert, and Jennifer Marston William (West Lafayette, Purdue University Press, 2011), pp. 63-91. Pride and Prejudice is also the subject of much of Phillips’s work: see Natalie Phillips, Distraction: Problems of Attention in EighteenthCentury Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2017), pp. 174-211; and Id., ‘Distraction as Liveliness of Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Characterization in Jane Austen’, in Theory and Mind and Literature, ed. by Leverage, Mancing, Schweickert, and William, pp. 105-22. Emma is the subject of Richardson, The Neural Sublime, pp. 79–96; Jones, ‘Emma’s Brain’; Hogan, How Authors’ Minds Make Stories, pp. 20–25. Blakey Vermeule’s study on readers’ attachment to fictional characters mentions all of the major novels by Austen but devotes a chapter to Emma: see Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 171–92. On Persuasion see Richardson, British Romanticism, pp. 93–113; Zunshine, ‘Why Jane Austen Was Different, and why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It’, Style, 41, 3 (Fall 2007), 275–99. In Lau’s collection, although there are a few chapters devoted specifically to individual novels, many contributors survey more than one novel in their essays. 15 As is well known, the distinction between ‘Steventon’ and ‘Chawton’ novels is (or has been) a convenient one for critics wanting to distinguish between ‘early’ and ‘mature’ texts, though it is not historically accurate. See Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Chronology of Composition and Composition’, in Jane Austen in Context, ed. by Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 12–22.

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aspects of Mansfield Park.16 This is somehow consistent with the treatment that this novel by Austen usually receives in cognitive literary studies: only few works focus extensively on Mansfield Park and treat it as the main subject of the study.17 More frequently, cognitive literary articles or chapters working on Austen’s texts devote only a few pages to Mansfield Park, while other novels are analysed more extensively. This essay intends to at least partly redress the scarcity of cognitive literary readings of Mansfield Park by showing that some cognitive dysfunctions (more loosely indicated in this essay as ‘pathological intellection’) contribute significantly to the impression of ‘strangeness’ that surrounds the protagonist of the novel.

2.

What’s Wrong with Fanny? Social Marginalisation and Pathological Intellection

Fanny Price is unlike any other heroine we find in Austen’s novels. We may not agree with Nina Auerbach when she describes Fanny Price as ‘a charmless heroine who was not made to be loved’,18 but it is evident that, in the choice of the main female character, Austen’s third-published novel marks a significant departure from both her earlier and later works. In a famous letter written to her sister Cassandra shortly after the publication of Pride and Prejudice (1813), Austen jokingly describes her latest work as being ‘rather too light & bright & sparkling; – it wants shade’, arguing that now she’d better work on a long ‘chapter of sense’.19 It is tempting to think that Austen elaborated on this idea and, instead of a chapter, one and a half year later she decided to offer readers a protagonist who literally embodies both ‘shade’ and ‘sense’, as she avoids sunshine as much as she can and is one of the most morally upright characters of Austen’s oeuvre.

16 See Phillips, ‘Distraction as Liveliness of Mind’; Id., Distraction, pp. 212–28. The findings about the cerebral activity detected through fMRI are discussed also in Phillips, ‘Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind’. Mansfield Park is explored more at length in Natalie Phillips et al., ‘Patterns of Attention and Memory in Jane Austen’, in Lau, Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind, pp. 156-79. 17 This is the case for example with the chapters by Wendy Jones and Bethany Wong in Lau’s collection, examining Mansfield Park through the lens of the neurobiology of love and of D.W. Winnicott’s theory of child play respectively. Wendy S. Jones, ‘Mapping Love in Mansfield Park’, in Lau, Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind, pp.75-94; Bethany Wong, ‘“My Fanny”. The Price of play’, in Lau, Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind, pp.136-55. 18 Auerbach, ‘Jane Austen’s Dangerous Charms’, p. 221. 19 Letter to Cassandra, 4 February 1813. In Jane Austen, ‘Letters’, in Id., Pride and Prejudice: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Donald Gray (New York and London: Norton, 2001), pp. 270– 80, p. 271.

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As critics have pointed out, the plot of Mansfield Park does not include the typical trajectory that leads the heroine to success after a journey involving the acknowledgement of the protagonist’s mistakes, her ensuing humility and, following these, the young woman’s profound inner change and moral growth. Rather, Fanny’s is a Cinderella-like tale, in which humility and suffering are foregrounded at the beginning of the novel and continue to plague the young woman’s life until the unexpected conclusion grants her the triumph that she deserved throughout. The storyline of Mansfield Park is rather simple: adopted when she’s still a young girl by her wealthy uncle Sir Thomas Bertram (the owner of the titular Mansfield Park), Fanny is raised as an inferior member of the Bertram family, suffers because of her lower social status but is eventually rewarded with success (i. e. marriage to her cousin and ideal mentor Edmund Bertram) because she has satisfactorily imbibed Sir Thomas’s inflexible moral values. With a plot apparently consistent with the precepts of conduct books and Evangelical literature – two genres which Austen knew thoroughly but also repeatedly criticised in her writing20 – Mansfield Park prompted readers to inquire, as in the title of an influential article by Kingsley Amis, ‘[w]hat became of Jane Austen’,21 and how to account for a work which, as Claudia Johnson puts it, rather disturbingly retains the ‘mode’ but not the ‘mood’ of comedy.22 One aspect that distinguishes Fanny from other heroines is the fragility of her constitution. Although women’s physical strength is not necessarily praised in Austen’s writings (in Mansfield Park, one need only think of Mrs Norris’s apparently tireless vigour),23 Fanny’s condition is clearly far from desirable. Introduced by her own mother as a ‘somewhat delicate and puny’ eight-year-old girl,24 Fanny remains weak and sickly throughout the novel: beside getting tired 20 See Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Katie Halsey, Jane Austen and Her Readers: 1786–1945 (London: Anthem Press, 2013). On Mansfield Park as ‘a polyvocal response’ to Evangelical influence see Jennifer Robertson, ‘“Edmund Inconsistent”: Edmund Bertram, Fanny Price, and the Issue of Evangelicalism in Mansfield Park’, Persuasions Online, 42, 1 (Winter 2021), available at: https://ja sna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/vol-42-no-1/robertson/ (accessed on 20th December 2021). 21 Kingsley Amis, ‘What Became of Jane Austen?’, Spectator, 4 (October 1957), 27–28. 22 ‘Jane Austen in Mansfield Park divorces the mode of the novel from the mood. The novel is, in other words, comic in form and structure (i. e., it is shaped by a heterosexual love plot, where the sexual desire of the young couple is vindicated, albeit contained, by marriage, that wishedfor outcome promising not only personal fulfillment but renewed social stability as well). But Mansfield Park is not comic in mood (for Fanny, sexual desire and not its unnatural blockage, has been a problem, and pleasure itself is suspect).’ Claudia L. Johnson, ‘What Became of Jane Austen? Mansfield Park’, Persuasions, 17 (1995), 59–70 (p. 63) [emphasis in the text]. 23 See Kathleen Anderson, ‘Lounging Ladies and Galloping Girls: Physical Strength and Femininity in Mansfield Park’, Women’s Studies, 38, 3 (April/May 2009), 342–58. 24 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 12.

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very easily, she suffers from a number of complaints, such as fatigue, shortness of breath and headaches. As Ula Lukszo Klein has recently pointed out, critics working on Mansfield Park have often read Fanny’s sickly disposition as a metaphor of her frustrated and repressed sexual desire for her cousin Edmund.25 Metaphors, however, tend to draw attention away from the body as well as from the actual impairment that illness brings to the person suffering from it. Klein sets out to counter this scholarly trend by adopting the critical stance of disability studies, which place bodily suffering centre-stage: as Klein argues, considering Fanny’s disabilities ‘as an embodied state of being rather than metaphorical phenomena illustrates how the novel draws attention to the social marginalisation of Fanny and how this peripheral and precarious state intersects with her love for Edmund but isn’t necessarily caused by it’.26 In other words, Fanny’s debility can be read as a device that exposes the dynamics of oppressions operating at Mansfield Park, forcing readers to consider the extent to which social, political and economic marginalisation can bring about acute pain and suffering. The damages inflicted by marginalisation become especially relevant when we consider that Fanny’s debility is not only physical, but also mental, affecting some of her cognitive skills. As Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuite observe, ‘[w]hile Austen’s other novels prize discernment and contrive scenes of enlightenment or self-understanding, in Mansfield Park the language of pathological intellection seems to jump out of every page’.27 The phrase ‘pathological intellection’ captures very well the nature and expression of Fanny’s cognitive complaints, for the ailments Fanny suffers from (like headache or fatigue) clearly hamper her powers of ‘intellection’. Because of her perpetual state of agitation, tiredness or restlessness – as we read early in the novel, Fanny’s is ‘a mind which ha[s] seldom known a pause in its alarms or embarrassments’28 – the young woman is often unable to account for what happens around as well as within her. We have an example of this aspect in Chapter 7, when Edmund, back home after some daily excursions around Mansfield Common, learns that Fanny is suffering from headache, and realises to his horror that she was left for four long days ‘without any choice of companions or exercise, and without any excuse for avoiding whatever her unreasonable aunts might require’.29 While Edmund implicitly establishes a connection between Fanny’s intense headache and her social dependence, the narratorial focus 25 Ula Lukszo Klein, ‘Fanny Price as Disabled Heroine in Mansfield Park’, Studies in the Novel, 60, 3 (Summer 2020), 577–95. 26 Klein, ‘Fanny Price as Disabled Heroine’, p. 580. 27 Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, 30 Great Myths about Jane Austen (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), p. 104. 28 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 34. 29 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 70.

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then shifts to the protagonist’s own thoughts, and it is at this point that the text reveals how Fanny’s lower social status has also engendered a form of pathological intellection: Fanny went to bed with her heart as full as on the first evening of her arrival at the Park. The state of her spirits had probably had a share in her indisposition; for she had been feeling neglected, and been struggling against discontent and envy for some days past. As she leant on the sofa, to which she had retreated that she might not be seen, the pain of her mind had been much beyond that in her head; and the sudden change which Edmund’s kindness had then occasioned, made her hardly know how to support herself.30

Beside acknowledging the debilitating action of Fanny’s emotions (i. e., her feeling neglected and envious), the narrator illustrates the interplay between physical and cognitive ailments and the pathological intellection they produce: when ‘the pain of her mind’ overpowers the head-ache, Fanny is unable to even rejoice in Edmund’s solicitous care towards herself and resorts instead to ‘hardly know[ing]’ how to resist fainting (‘to support herself ’31). As Fanny’s disabilities direct our attention towards her marginal space and role within Mansfield Park, we are left to wonder at the crucial paradox of having Fanny star as the protagonist of Mansfield Park. For how can a young woman who has imbibed the desire to avoid the spotlight (‘that she might not be seen’) ever be a heroine? Fanny’s ‘transplantation’32 at Mansfield Park and her upbringing there have caused a type of pathological intellection that manifests itself in relational interaction, as Fanny is often at pains to conform to what she thinks is expected from her. Thus, upon Sir Thomas’s departure for Antigua, ‘she really grieved

30 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 70. 31 Austen had used the phrase ‘knew (not) how to support herself ’ to indicate the peril of extreme weakness and, probably, fainting in Pride and Prejudice: when Darcy leaves the room at Hunsford after Elizabeth’s rejection of his proposal, the young woman has to sit down, because the emotional intensity of the conversation has made her weak: ‘The tumult of her mind, was now painfully great. She knew not how to support herself, and from actual weakness sat down and cried for half-an-hour’ (Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 128). 32 The word is deployed by Sir Thomas in the episode of the ball for Fanny, when he reflects on the improvement of the young woman’s looks and manners: ‘he was proud of his niece; and without attributing all her personal beauty […] to her transplantation to Mansfield, he was pleased with himself for having supplied everything else’ (Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 255). See also Kathryn Sutherland’s remark that we may ‘see in Fanny, uprooted from the insurrectionary atmosphere of her lower-class Portsmouth home and transplanted into the ordered environment of the Mansfield Park gentry, the origin of the novel’s wider politics of enclosure’ (Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in Austen, Mansfield Park, p. xxvi). Of course, this political reading of transplantation finds its origin in Edward Said’s post-colonial reading of the novel. See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), pp. 80–97.

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because she could not grieve’;33 after his return to Mansfield Park, when he behaves kindly towards her, ‘Fanny knew not how to feel, or where to look. She was quite oppressed’.34 Elsewhere, mental agitation and gratitude become impediments to the enjoyment of the few little pleasures that come to Fanny. For example, when Edmund offers to stay home with his mother so that she can visit Sotherton, Fanny’s gratitude is described as ‘in fact much greater than her pleasure’ and is ultimately translated into ‘pain’ at the thought that ‘he should forego any enjoyment on her account’.35 Similarly, upon discovering the chain that Edmund has given her (so that she can wear her pendant at the ball), she is ‘overpowered by a thousand feelings of pain and pleasure’.36 In these examples, the protagonist’s mental confusion illustrates how the sense of moral obligation that the socially-marginalised Fanny has imbibed during her stay at Mansfield Park has become an obstacle not only to her happiness, but also to a healthy interaction with other people. The protagonist’s pathological intellection manifests itself in many different ways throughout the novel, contributing significantly to the impression of Fanny as a very odd type of heroine. Timorous and timid, Fanny is reluctant to trust her ideas: she lacks ‘confidence in her own judgment’37 and, when the opinions of other people contrast with her own, she is often ready to dismiss hers.38 At other times, her inability to recognise and control her emotions (most typically, her jealousy) leads her to uncertainty as to how to interpret situations. In such cases, Fanny’s pathological intellection is expressed through syntactical structures that convey her painful struggling with the meaning of other people’s behaviour: ‘Fanny could not wonder that Edmund was at the Parsonage every morning’;39 ‘[s]he could not but think, that Mr. Crawford might have saved him the trouble’.40 In other moments, Fanny’s agitation and mental fatigue are attributed to excessive heat or to the glare of the sun, which become symbolical of oppressive situations.41 33 34 35 36 37 38

Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 31. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 165. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 75. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 241 [my emphasis]. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 108. During the theatricals, Julia is believed to be the target of Mr. Crawford’s attention. Fanny notices that Mr. Crawford seems to be more interested in the already engaged Miss Bertram (Maria), but she dismisses this idea when Edmund does not seem to catch the hint that she gives him: ‘she only hazarded a hint, and the hint was lost. […] Fanny supposed she must have been mistaken, and meant to think differently in future.’ Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 108–9. 39 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 62. 40 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 64. 41 In the episode mentioned above, Fanny’s headache and pain of the mind were attributed to the fact that the young woman was forced by her aunts to cut roses and walk ‘in a hot sun’; in the last section of the novel, when Fanny is sent to her Portsmouth home, the sickly glare of

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Significantly, Sir Thomas’s decision to send Fanny back to her family in Portsmouth after she rejects Mr. Crawford’s courtship is clothed as a ‘medicinal project’ to redress her pathological intellection, i. e. her incapacity to understand fully and judge properly the advantages deriving from the match: It was a medicinal project upon his niece’s understanding, which he must consider as at present diseased. A residence of eight or nine years in the abode of wealth and plenty had a little disordered her powers of comparing and judging. Her father’s house would, in all probability, teach her the value of a good income; and he trusted that she would be the wiser and happier woman, all her life, for the experiment he had devised.42

To readers acquainted with Austen’s works, Sir Thomas’s belief that Fanny is unable to use her judgment sounds ironical. As a matter of fact, when Fanny resolutely resists other people’s attempts to convince her to marry Mr. Crawford, she finally becomes more similar to the other heroines of Austen’s novels. Indeed, the confidence in her feelings for Edmund confers to her an assertiveness that contrasts strongly with her usual hesitancy and timidity.43 Moreover, the irony also derives from the fact that the aim of Sir Thomas’s ‘medicinal project’ consists precisely in what makes Fanny’s judgement ‘diseased’ throughout the novel: Fanny’s complete assimilation to Mansfield Park. Although there is no space here to consider at length the extent of Fanny’s pathological intellection, in the rest of this essay I would like to examine one of its possible manifestations: namely, Fanny’s occasional predilection for mono-focal attention, which arguably affects negatively both cognitive richness and social competence.

A.

Mono-focal Attention and/as Absorption

In her analysis on the patterns of attention that are detectable in Austen’s narrative, Phillips foregrounds the role distraction plays in the construction of the type of focus that Austen uses for characterisation. In particular, Phillips observes that while Austen traces a connection between multi-focal attention and a the sun fatigues her and make her feel ‘stunned’: Here, [the sun’s] power was only a glare: a stifling, sickly glare, serving but to bring forward stains and dirt that might otherwise have slept.’ Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 68–70 (p. 68); pp. 354–411 (p. 408). 42 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 342. 43 This becomes visible especially in a dialogue with Edmund, when Fanny assertively vindicates her decision to reject Mr. Crawford’s proposal: ‘I should have thought […] that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man’s not being approved, not being loved by some one of her sex […]. […] surely I was not to be teaching myself to like him […]. I am sure his sisters, rating him as they do, must have thought it so […]. His sisters should consider me as well as him’. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 327 [emphasis in the text].

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higher degree of distraction, mono-focal attention is expressed through narrow focus and the tendency to banish distraction altogether. From this premise, Phillips argues that ‘Austen carefully links intricate minds with distraction and simple minds with narrow focus’, and she goes on to examine Elizabeth Bennet and her sister Mary as examples of the former and the latter type respectively.44 Of course, Elizabeth is by no means an absent-minded, distracted character: she can be attentive when she needs, but her attention can also be easily diverted (or, to use Phillips’s terminology, ‘divided’), her focus shifting to different sources of interest; and it is precisely this type of multi-focal attention, ‘blurring the line between distraction and multitasking’,45 that confers depths and liveliness to her character. When Elizabeth does different things at the same time – for example, playing the piano, listening to Lady Catherine speak to Mr. Darcy and speculating about Mr. Darcy’s (lack of) romantic interest in his cousin Anne46 – the text suggests that ‘the ability to accommodate distraction – a focus that can shift – is the signature of mental flexibility’.47 On the other hand, in the character of Mary Bennet we find the convergence of late 18th-century ideas about the encumbrances of selective or narrow focus, ultimately culminating in the pathologisation of the unhealthy fixations and monomaniacal tendencies displayed in Gothic fiction (as well as by Gothic readers). As Phillips shows, while 18th-century discourse continued to praise focus as related to ‘cognitive fortitude’, excessive attention came to be increasingly stigmatised.48 Absorption, its most extreme manifestation, was described by a commentator as ‘a violent disease of the mind’ similar to ‘a raging fever’, impairing and paralysing all other faculties.49 Engaging with this type of discourses, Austen portrays Mary Bennet as a young woman who, immersing herself in didactic and moral texts and barely doing anything else, ‘becomes a figure for the cognitive costs of excessive attention – inflexibility, rigidity and a deep social awkwardness’.50

44 Phillips, ‘Distraction as Liveliness of Mind’, p. 106. 45 Phillips, Distraction, p. 207. 46 ‘Elizabeth immediately began playing again. Lady Catherine approached, and, after listening for a few minutes, said to Darcy: “Miss Bennet would not play at all amiss, if she practiced more […]. […] her taste is not equal to Anne’s. Anne would have been a delightful performer, had her health allowed her to learn”. Elizabeth looked at Darcy to see how cordially he assented to his cousin’s praise; but neither at the moment nor at any other could she discern any symptom of love […]’. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 117. 47 Phillips, Distraction, p. 178. 48 Phillips, Distraction, p. 191. 49 Charles Allen, The polite lady: or a course of female education (1760), quoted in Phillips, Distraction, p. 145. 50 Phillips, ‘Distraction as Liveliness of Mind’, p. 112.

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Comparing foolish Mary Bennet to a complex character like Fanny Price might appear quite unreasonable. Fanny is clearly admired by the narrator because she is an attentive character, and she is frequently depicted while silently observing what happens around her. And yet, I would argue that Fanny’s style of attention occasionally also recalls some of Mary’s predilection for strong, single focus, and this considerably affects Fanny’s ability to really understand and sympathise with other characters. Interestingly, the person that mostly pays notice to the quality of Fanny’s attention is Henry Crawford: himself a rather frivolous and unfocused character, Mr. Crawford’s interest in Fanny seems to grow parallel to his admiration for her attentiveness. Thus, when he observes Fanny listening to her beloved brother William, Mr. Crawford is struck by ‘the glow of Fanny’s cheek, the brightness of her eye, the deep interest, the absorbed attention’, somehow relating Fanny’s beauty to her immersion in her brother’s tale.51 Attractiveness and attention are again combined in a conversation between Mr. Crawford and his sister Mary. This time, the young man notices that Fanny can be a skilled multi-tasker, shifting the focus of her attention to adjust to what is required of her: ‘Had you seen her this morning, Mary’, he continued, ‘attending with such ineffable sweetness and patience, to all the demands of her aunt’s stupidity, working with her, and for her, her colour beautifully heightened as she leant over the work, then returning to her seat to finish a note which she was previously engaged in writing for that stupid woman’s service, and all this with such unpretending gentleness, so much as if it were a matter of course that she was not to have a moment at her own command, her hair arranged so neatly as it always is, and one little curl falling forward as she wrote, which she now and then shook back, and in the midst of all this, still speaking at intervals to me, or listening, and as if she liked to listen to what I said. Had you seen her so, Mary, you would not have implied the possibility of her power over my heart ever ceasing’.52

Mr. Crawford here admires Fanny’s deft if quiet focus-shifting, as she tries to be up to all the tasks that her aunts (as well as Mr. Crawford himself, talking to her) expect from her. However, Fanny’s multi-tasking is less similar to Elizabeth’s insatiable curiosity and appetite for life than it is a tribute to Fanny’s dutiful disposition. As a matter of fact, Fanny’s focus shifts not because she welcomes distraction so that she can follow what seems interesting to her, but rather in order to comply with the little requests coming from other people. As such, her multi-focal attention here merely replicates her being utterly deprived of even ‘a moment at her own command’: her moving about to do what she must is something that she acquiescently accepts (‘as if it were a matter of course’) because she has no choice, not because it is part of her cognitive style. Mr. 51 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 218. 52 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 273 [emphasis in the text].

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Crawford senses this, because in a later episode he manages to achieve a small triumph over Fanny’s resolute rejection of his courtship by exploiting the young woman’s privileged type of focus: mono-focal attention, in its fullest manifestation – absorption. Finding that Fanny has been reading to Lady Bertram extracts from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Mr. Crawford seizes the opportunity to display his good acting skills, forcing Fanny’s attention to be directed – and then entirely absorbed – by his performance. The scene is described by Edmund, who carefully details the shift of Fanny’s focus as well as her immersion in the performance: All her attention was for her work. She seemed determined to be interested by nothing else. But taste was too strong in her. She could not abstract her mind five minutes; she was forced to listen; his reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme. […] Edmund watched the progress of her attention, and was amused and gratified by seeing how she gradually slackened in the needle-work, which, at the beginning seemed to occupy her totally; how it fell from her hand while she sat motionless over it – and at last, how the eyes which had appeared so studiously to avoid him throughout the day, were turned and fixed on Crawford, fixed on him for minutes, fixed on him in short till the attraction drew Crawford’s upon her, and the book was closed, and the charm was broken.53

Fanny here allows her focus to shift from duty (the needle-work) to aesthetic delight (appeasing her ‘taste’). However, this type of diversion is not used to introduce multi-focal attention, because Fanny simply shifts from one type of narrow focus (‘[a]ll her attention for needle-work) to the other (her immersion in the performance). Moreover, in spite of the ‘extreme’ pleasure that Fanny is reported to derive from good acting, this diversion does not appear to be fully healthy or pleasurable. Once Fanny turns to Henry, the narrator borrows the language of absorption to describe the quality of her attention: Fanny is ‘forced to listen’ and is then captured in ‘motionless’ and ‘fixed’ concentration. Absorption arrests all movement, producing a form of concentration that momentarily deprives the mono-focused subject of agency: the climactic series ‘fixed on Crawford’/‘fixed on him’/‘fixed on him’ vividly depicts a type of complete engrossment which Fanny is not able to control or interrupt until the spell is broken for her. Thus, although Fanny’s absorption into Mr. Crawford’s acting is initially sparked by a form of distraction that diverts focus from her work, once her attention is caught in his net it becomes a sort of fascination that arrests Fanny’s mind in a ‘fixed’ state. Thus, although Fanny’s absorption into Mr. Crawford does not last longer than a few minutes, the young man is attracted by her attentiveness because he envisages in her predilection for narrow focus a possible 53 Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 311–12.

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means to exert his power over her – or simply, to keep her in the subjected and marginalised position which she has been trained to adopt.

B.

Absorption and the Obstruction of Sympathy

The fact that, in the extract above, aesthetic diversion produces absorption should not be overlooked, as it is a key factor in order to understand how Fanny’s cognitive style may impair her social competence by disabling her ability to sympathise with other people. Absorption is the opposite of sympathy: as Phillips observes, ‘[i]f sympathy is the magnet that holds society together, fixation reverses the polarity of social bonds and the mind’54 by sealing characters within their own very narrow focus. Mansfield Park actually thematises the mutual incompatibility of absorption and sympathy when, during the theatricals, Tom, Edmund and Mrs. Norris, not noticing that Julia is suffering, fail to sympathise with her. The narrator carefully attributes the three characters’ ‘inattention’ and ‘blindness’ to ‘the fullness of their own mind’, which is then specified as (self-) absorption: ‘Tom was engrossed by the concerns of his theatre […]. Edmund, between his theatrical and his real part […] was equally unobservant; and Mrs. Norris was too busy […]’.55 For the Romantics, an aesthetic experience like the one Fanny is having while listening to a play by Shakespeare is made possible by (and in turn should produce) sympathy. As James Engells observes, the Romantics are intrigued by the ‘sympathetic power of the imagination to get out of itself and feel its way strongly and vividly into other people and even into the forms of nature’.56 In Mansfield Park, Fanny is aware that, as for the Romantics, the sympathy that derives from the encounter with beauty has not only an aesthetic, but also an ethical dimension: admiring the beauty of a starlit night in a dialogue with Edmund, Fanny argues that ‘wickedness’ and ‘sorrow’ would have no place in the world ‘if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried out more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.’57 Aesthetic pleasure, Fanny implies, improves human relations and makes the world a better place by enabling people to be lifted from their own concerns and open instead to the needs of fellow-beings. And yet, although she rehearses for Edmund her knowledge of Romantic theory, when Fanny does encounter beauty she fails to be ‘carried out of herself ’, 54 Phillips, Distraction, p. 159. 55 Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 150–51. 56 James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MASS: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 156. 57 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 105.

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because the type of sympathy she can feel is limited by her proclivity towards narrow focus. If while watching Mr. Crawford’s performance Fanny’s mind folds itself into absorption rather than really ‘reaching out’,58 in the novel her attention is actually mostly caught by things that she is already familiar with or by people who are similar to her. Fanny can recognise beauty only in so far as it is exactly in line with what she has learned: this is why her ‘rhapsodising’ moments in the novel sound bookish, full of anaphorical structures that render her enjoyment of natural scenery somewhat emphatic and artificial.59 More generally, it is clear that Fanny can appreciate only what can establish recognisable associations with what she already knows. Thus, while in her focused listening to Mrs. Rushworth at Sotherton Fanny’s attention and delight are all concentrated on the possibility ‘to connect anything with history already known’,60 in her attraction to Edmund she confirms her desire for a companion who is familiar or, indeed, already part of the family. The narrator famously argues that ‘the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal’, as ‘[c]hildren of the same family, the same blood, with the same first association and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connexions can supply’.61 Fanny’s love for Edmund is founded on this logic of sameness: he is Fanny’s cousin and mentor, but Mary Crawford also notices that Fanny and Edmund are physically similar – ‘[y]ou have a look of his sometimes’.62 While critics have often noted that Fanny’s love for Edmund is almost incestuous, Fanny’s predilection for narrow focus may shed new light on her propensity to recognise beauty in what she can safely trace to well-known mental associations. Because she is a complex character, Fanny cannot be simply defined as unsympathetic; rather, the text at times suggests that Fanny’s sympathy may be partial and flawed, once again calling attention to the damage inflicted by her upbringing on her cognitive skills. After all, upon arriving at Mansfield Park, Fanny received an imprinting in defective sympathy: in the early days, her ‘acute’ feelings were ‘too little understood to be properly attended to. Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put themselves out of their way to secure her comfort’.63 58 ‘The Psyche Reaches Out: Sympathy’ is the title of the chapter that Engells devotes to Romantic conceptions of sympathetic imagination. Engells, The Creative Imagination, pp. 143– 60. 59 Here are some examples: ‘Here’s harmony! […] Here’s repose! Here’s what may leave all Painting, and all Music behind, and what Poetry only can attempt to describe.Here’s what may tranquillize every care […].’ ‘The evergreen! – How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen! – When one thinks of it, how astonishing a variety of nature!’. Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 105, 195. 60 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 80. 61 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 216. 62 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 156 [emphasis in the text]. 63 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 15.

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As a result, she imbibes a similar inability to ‘put herself out of her way’ to truly sympathise with other people. In the episode of the theatricals mentioned above, Fanny is the only character who not only observes Julia’s unhappiness, but also understands that the cause of it lies in Julia’s jealousy for the growing attachment between her elder sister Maria and Mr. Crawford. And yet, Fanny cannot offer any practical help to Julia, because she is unable to truly ‘reach out’ to her: ‘Fanny saw and pitied much of this in Julia; but there was no outward fellowship between them. Julia made no communication, and Fanny took no liberties. They were two solitary sufferers, or connected only by Fanny’s consciousness’.64 The imperfect quality of Fanny’s sympathy undermines the heroine’s social competence, because Fanny’s ability to understand other people is compromised by her narrow focus. Although Lau includes Fanny among the group of ‘Austen’s vindicated heroines’, who ‘possess the capacity for entering into the feelings of other people, which often distinguishes them from other, less empathic characters’,65 I would argue that the perception of the flaws of Fanny’s sympathy is an aspect that greatly enhances readers’ impression that she is different from the other protagonists of Austen’s novels. These flaws are visible in at least three limitations to Fanny’s capacity to sympathise with other characters. First, Fanny can understand mainly those who are, at least momentarily, similar to her: fellow-sufferers like Julia Bertram and Mr. Rushworth, for example, who are blighted by the pains of jealousy, exactly like Fanny; or Sir Thomas on his return to Mansfield, when Fanny’s opposition to the theatre has revealed the full extent of her assimilation to his conservative mindset and made her in the position to anticipate ‘how much unsuspected vexation was probably ready to burst on him’.66 Secondly, those who lie outside of the narrow focus provided by sameness are not simply invisible to her, but also become the target of her criticism and misjudgment. The Crawfords, for example, continue to be impenetrable to her throughout the novel: absorbed in her moral condemnation of them, Fanny misunderstands in particular the attention they devote to herself, failing to acknowledge Mr. Crawford’s romantic interest as well as Mary’s feelings of friendship.67 64 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 150. 65 Beth Lau, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Imagination in Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets’, in Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, 1790–1835, ed. by Id. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 179–210 (p. 192). 66 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 166. 67 The text repeatedly indicates that Fanny fails to catch the hints that Mr. Crawford’s words and behaviour leaves for her. In particular, on the occasion of Mr. Crawford’s reporting to her the news of William’s promotion, Fanny’s incapacity to interpret his behaviour is represented as another example of pathological intellection: ‘he spoke with such a glow of what his solicitude had been, and used such strong expressions, was so abounding in the deep interest, in twofold motives, in views and wishes more than could be told, that Fanny could not have remained

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Finally, Fanny’s narrow focus isolates her from other characters, ultimately making genuine sympathy impossible. Fanny at times does not take part in other people’s feelings and appears sealed off from their emotions: in the theatricals, for example, until the arrival of Sir Thomas she remains absolutely isolated in her displeasure with the play. Moreover, because of her jealousy of Mary Crawford, Fanny’s and Edmund’s emotions are often in inverse proportion, her misery growing with his happiness and, conversely, his dejection resulting in her satisfaction.68 Fanny’s emotional isolation is re-defined as strongly defective sympathy in the last chapter of the novel, which famously opens with the disturbing acknowledgment that Fanny ‘must have been happy in spite of everything’,69 where ‘everything’ stands for the misery of all the other characters. The narrator’s remark is actually anticipated by Fanny’s very explicit happiness in being summoned from Portsmouth to Mansfield Park in the aftermath of Maria’s and Julia’s scandalous elopements and Tom’s illness: she was, she felt she was, in the greatest danger of being exquisitely happy, while so many were miserable. The evil which brought such good to her! She dreaded lest she should learn to be insensible of it. To be going so soon, sent for so kindly, sent for as a comfort, and with leave to take Susan, was altogether such a combination of blessings as set her heart in a glow, and for a time, seemed to distance every pain, and made her incapable of suitably sharing the distress even of those whose distress she thought of more.70

Although Fanny wishes she would not be ‘insensible’ to the tragedy that has hit Mansfield Park, she cannot help being unresponsive to other people’s pain, insensible in his drift, had she been able to attend; but her heart was so full and her senses still so astonished, that she could listen but imperfectly even to what he told her of William […]’. Also in the case of ‘the sort of intimacy’ that is developed between herself and Mary, both Fanny and the narrator (who is entirely absorbed at times in Fanny, although this claim would require another essay) appear biased and judgmental: ‘an intimacy resulting principally from Miss Crawford’s desire of something new, and which had little reality in Fanny’s feelings. Fanny went to her every two or three days: it seemed a kind of fascination: she could not be easy without going, and yet it was without loving her, without ever thinking like her, without any sense of obligation for being sought after now when nobody else was to be had; and deriving no higher pleasure from her conversation than occasional amusement, and that often at the expense of her judgment […]’. Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 277 [emphases in the text], 192–93. 68 When Edmund and Mary find that they both had the same idea to rehearse their parts in the East Room, ‘great was the joy and animation of being thus thrown, together […] She could not equal them in their warmth. Her spirits sank under the glow of theirs’. On the other hand, when Edmund and Mary quarrel over Edmund’s chosen profession, Fanny cannot help being happy: ‘Fanny, not able to refrain entirely from observing them, had seen enough to be tolerably happy. It was barbarous to be happy when Edmund was suffering. Yet some happiness must and would arise, from the very conviction, that he did suffer’. Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 157 [emphases in the text], 257. 69 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 428. 70 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 411.

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engrossed as she is in her own unexpected happiness. The narrator alerts us as to some aspects that should strike us as dissonant with the sympathy a morally irreprehensible character like Fanny would be ‘suitably’ expected to show: the initial hedging ‘[s]he was, she felt she was’ seems to carefully frame Fanny’s happiness within the bounds of subjective perspective, while the individual feelings of happiness and misery are disturbingly replaced by moral values (‘evil’, ‘good’) which increase the sensation that the ethics of the narrative world has turned upside down. Following these anomalous aspects, in the final part of the extract the adverbial ‘for a time’ fails to attenuate the impression that Fanny’s insensibility is somehow barbarous, going against the rules of civilised society and seriously compromising social competence. This is what, according to Nina Auerbach, turns Fanny into a real ‘monster’: not only because she is a perplexing protagonist, ‘magnetically unconvivial’, ‘a killjoy, a blighter of ceremonies and a divider of families’,71 but also because, rather than growing into a sociallycompetent heroine, ‘she merely passes from the isolation of the outcast to that of the conqueror’.72 By placing such a protagonist at the core of the text, Austen draws attention to the damage that Fanny’s imprinting of and assimilation to the narrow focus of Mansfield Park have caused to her body and mind. The antidote to absorption is distraction, which is an option that is never fully available to Fanny: as a stern and rather inflexible character, Fanny has few opportunities to allow her thoughts to wander. The ball that Sir Thomas gives for her and her brother is a notable exception, as it provides a momentary relief to Fanny’s absorption, effectively impeding ‘[the mind’s] fixing on anything serious’.73 When Fanny leaves the room, ‘feverish with hopes and fears, soup and negus, sore-footed and fatigued, restless and agitated, yet feeling in spite of every thing that a ball was indeed delightful’,74 her ‘restlessness and agitation’ lose their disabling quality by being diluted among the numerous, various and frivolous stimuli provided by the evening. However, in the rest of the novel Fanny’s main inclination toward monofocal attention tends to seriously impair the development of the cognitive richness that characterises other heroines of Austen’s novels and that can partly be recognized in the novel’s anti-heroine Mary Crawford. In the text, Fanny’s focused attentiveness is repeatedly contrasted with Mary’s impatience with serious or ‘bookish’ matters.75 Moreover, in a very explicit comparison of the two heroines during 71 72 73 74 75

Auerbach, ‘Jane Austen’s Dangerous Charms’, pp. 210, 211. Auerbach, ‘Jane Austen’s Dangerous Charms’, p. 218. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 254. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 259. At Sotherton, Fanny’s absorbed interest in Mrs. Rushworth’s descriptions of the estate have no power on Mary: ‘Miss Crawford, who had seen scores of great houses, and cared for none of

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the journey to Sotherton, the narrator considers their different models of attention: while Fanny is ‘entertained’ by ‘the appearance of the country, the bearings of the roads, the difference of soil, the state of the harvest, the cottages, the cattle, the children’, Mary is reported as possessing ‘none of Fanny’s delicacies of taste, of mind, of feeling; she saw Nature, inanimate nature, with little observation; her attention was all for men and women, her talents for the light and lively’.76 While the narrator clearly discounts Mary’s interest in ‘men and women’, the novel shows that this heroine’s type of attention is in line with her mind, which, like Elisabeth Bennet’s, is consistently characterised as ‘lively’.77 Like Elisabeth, Mary welcomes motion and distraction, claiming that ‘resting fatigues me’78 and ‘refresh[ing] her spirits by a change of place and neighbour’79 when she feels annoyed or bored. However, although Mary Crawford effectively manages to show genuine sympathy towards Fanny80 and even grasps intuitively the connection between the symbolic imagery of heat and the dynamics of oppression operating at Mansfield Park,81 accepting her as the heroine of Mansfield Park remains problematic. Mary is harshly rebuked by the conclusion of the novel, and some of her views on marriage, money and social position appear morally objectionable, exposing the flaws that have derived from the lack of morally authoritative parental figures. Thus, although many critics and readers have been fascinated by Mary Crawford’s witty and sparkling nature, this character does not offer a real way out of absorption. Rather, the contrast between Fanny’s and Mary’s anti-

76 77

78 79 80

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them, had only the appearance of civilly listening’. See also the abrupt conclusion of Fanny’s famous rhapsodizing on the evergreen: ‘Miss Crawford, untouched and inattentive, had nothing to say’. Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 80, 193. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 76. Phillips shows observes that Austen generally uses three words to describe a character; in the case of Elisabeth, the words are ‘lively’, ‘playful’ and ‘quick’. While ‘quick’ is not used to characterise Mary Crawford, ‘lively’ and ‘playful’ are repeatedly deployed to qualify Mary’s ‘lively mind’ (sometimes ‘too lively mind’) and her ‘playful manner’ or ‘playful smile’. While ‘playful’ is used to highlight a sinister aspect in Mary’s personality, ‘lively’ always has a positive connotation. See Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 61, 391, 332, 391. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 89. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 229. Just some examples: understanding that Fanny does not want to act, she stops other characters from urging her to play the Cottager’s Wife and diverts her attention by talking to her about William. Later, after Fanny has entered the Parsonage to listen to the harp, Mary understands that Fanny wants to leave before she has to ask for a coach to go back to Mansfield Park. Finally, some days before the ball, when Fanny goes to Mary to seek advice about what to wear, Mary understands Fanny’s desire for privacy and finds a suitable room for their conversation. See Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 137–39, 191–92, 237–38. Although this point would deserve more space than is allowed here, the novel shows that Mary reacts to some highly charged moments, which foreground moral and/or social oppression, by remarking on the ‘insufferably hot’ or ‘suffocating’ quality of the atmosphere. See for example Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 85, 135.

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thetical styles of attention is part of the broader system of dichotomies the novel pivots on: the love for the country vs the attractions of the city, gravity vs levity, physical debility vs a remarkably ‘active and fearless’82 constitution. Mansfield Park, as Johnson and Tuite argue, constantly oscillates between the value of each of the dichotomic poles, thus placing ‘an uncommon burden of discernment’ on the reader and ‘baffl[ing] our too-easy judgements’.83

Conclusion The perspective provided by cognitive literary studies can provide new insights to approach Mansfield Park, perhaps the most complex as well as the least loved among the novels by Austen. In particular, the combination between contemporary concepts such as mono- and multi-focal attention on the one hand and the Romantic theories of sympathy on the other offers new ways to understand the importance of Jane Austen’s science of the mind for an interpretation of her novels. In her article against Fanny Price, Nina Auerbach argues that ‘Fanny excites the same mixture of sympathy and aversion as does Frankenstein’s loveless, homeless creature’.84 I would argue that the reflections about Fanny’s self-absorption may also point to a similarity between Fanny’s type of attention and the self-absorption that afflicts less the creature than the male idealists of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) – as well as the Romantic ideology of sameness that Shelley targets in her novel. At the same time, the limitations to Fanny’s sympathy continuously force readers to pay attention to the harm caused by social marginalisation. Fanny perplexes us as a strange heroine because her pathological intellection strongly inhibits her growth and maturation. As Fanny’s body and mind bear the scars of neglect, low self-esteem and restraint of feelings, the novel leads us to wonder what is wrong with this heroine, and what type of cognitive skills we would consider as absolutely necessary to the protagonist of a novel by Austen.

82 Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 64. 83 Johnson and Tuite, 30 Great Myths, p. 105. 84 Auerbach, ‘Jane Austen’s Dangerous Charms’, p. 219.

Polina Shvanyukova

What Makes Literature Valuable: A Nineteenth-Century Perspective

Literature is able to promote complex identifications and dis-identifications with different subjects and it thus promotes judgement, through both intellect and the emotions. But when literature is taken to be a mere ornament, a means of evasion or of political indoctrination, rather than a means of deepening human understanding, literature betrays its own epistemic reality and primary social function, as well.1

The ways of reading and engaging with literature are manifold and subtle, as a passage from a 2014 essay by Angela Locatelli quoted above so skilfully reminds us of. The same passage, however, alerts us to the eventuality that literature can easily fall prey to mechanical reading and ideological violence.2 In this contribution I aim to show how literature can be divested of its complexity, stripped of its ethical dimension and manipulated to realise specific ideological aims by focusing on the example of nineteenth-century discourse of female conduct. Nineteenth-century advice literature addressed at English women compelled their readers to ‘examine their conduct, find it wanting, and apply themselves to correcting the faults they identify, so as to align their lives with the ideals found in the discourse.’3 The dominant discourse of conduct aimed to disseminate ideas 1 Angela Locatelli, ‘Reading Literature: An Ethical Gesture in the Postmodern Context?’, Armenian Folia Anglistika, 1–12 (2014), 121–130 (p. 126). 2 Or, as Locatelli points out in a different essay, literature can actively contribute to transmitting and disseminating of certain ideological values: ‘Throughout history, literature has provided an immediate and functional support to specific political situations and ideologies, as was the case, for example, with the Tudor ‘myth’ in sixteenth century England, or with various nationalisms in nineteenth-century Europe’, Angela Locatelli, ‘Literature’s Versions of Its Own Transmission of Values’, in Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media, ed. by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), pp. 19–34 (p. 19). 3 Erzsi Kukorelly, ‘‘This Demon Anger’: Politeness, Conversation and Control in EighteenthCentury Conduct Books for Young Women’, in Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English: Literary and Linguistic Approaches, ed. by A. H. Jucker and I. Taavitsainen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2020), pp. 122–140 (p. 127). Just how varied and large this body of texts was in the period between 1770 and 1900 is testified by the two six-volume editions of Conduct Literature for Women. Part IV, 1770–1830, ed. by Pam Morris, 6 vols (London:

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about how women were expected to look, to think and to behave, with women identified as different from men and, at the same time, complementary and subordinate to men in all spheres of life. By mobilising and promoting specific ideological beliefs and values, these manuals laid bare a set of expectations about women’s gendered identities and their position in society as gendered beings. The ideal woman in these texts was allowed to articulate her self in the ‘extraneous accomplishments’4 only to the extent to which this self was pleasing to others. That different rules applied to women and their behaviour as compared to the conduct expected from men is made explicit in the treatment of the topic of female education and the role that reading was to play in women’s lives. In discussing the didactic and social impact of literature, the authors of nineteenthcentury advice manuals for women coincidentally elaborated on their ideas about the function of literature and the potential the knowledge of literature had to transform their readers’ lives. This discussion concerning the place of literature was naturally embedded within the larger discursive frame set up with the purpose of delimiting the woman’s ‘appropriate sphere’5 in contemporary society. In other words, when attempting to tackle questions such as ‘How should woman be educated? Under what training should she be placed? and what is the end of her tuition?’6, these authors made no secret about forcing literature into their toolbox of instruments for ideological subjugation of women. In what follows, I will examine the different themes associated with the discussion of the role of literature in female education that emerge in nineteenth-century advice discourse in English. These themes include the advantages and disadvantages that systematic reading can offer, the choice of literature appropriate specifically for women readers, as well as the ultimate goals women are incentivised to realise through reading. To start with, the different manuals spell out, with unequivocal clarity and precision, the commonplace assumption that a woman’s duties are first and foremost those of daughter, wife and mother: The sphere of Woman is eminently practical. There is much which she will be expected to do, and ought therefore to learn, and to learn early, if she would acquit herself creditably. Though to combine the excellencies of a housekeeper, with much eminence in literature or science, cannot rationally be attempted, still there is no need that Pickering & Chatto, 2005) and Conduct Literature for Women. Part V, 1830–1900, ed. by Roy Vickers, Jacky Eden and Pam Morris, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006). 4 Anon., Mixing in Society: A Complete Manual of Manners. By the Right Hon. The Countess of **** (London, New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1872), p. 99. 5 Anon., The English Maiden. Her Moral and Domestic Duties ( London: Henry Green Clarke, 1841), p. 46. 6 Anon., The English Maiden, p. 45.

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domestic duties should preclude mental improvement, or extinguish intellectual enjoyment. They may be united by diligence and energy, and the foundation of these qualities should be laid now, in youth.7

The authors attempt to persuade their women readers that they are allowed and encouraged to find time for mental improvement, but that ‘captivating [such] pursuits’8 is not to be undertaken at the expense of time allocated to matrimonial and domestic duties. In fact, the consumption of literature, especially fiction and romance, can never interfere with these key duties: She who is faithfully employed in discharging the various duties of a wife and daughter, a mother and a friend, is far more usefully occupied than one who, to the culpable neglect of the most important obligations, is daily absorbed by philosophic and literary speculations, or soaring aloft amidst the enchanted regions of fiction and romance.9

Another author wholeheartedly agrees with this statement: Knowledge is desirable in all situations, if it be not obtained by a sacrifice of that time which their peculiar duties demand; and subjects of literature especially afford resources, of which the mind cannot be deprived; a fund of enjoyment alike valuable in prosperity and adversity.10

At the same time, reading is indicated as ‘peculiarly necessary’ for women: A TASTE for reading is important to all intellectual beings. To our sex, it may be pronounced peculiarly necessary. It is important to all, because it is the way in which aliment is conveyed to the mind; and to our sex peculiarly necessary, because, dwelling much in the contemplation of little things, they are in danger of losing the intellectual appetite. […] A taste for reading is […] an armour of defence.11

7 John Butcher, Instructions in Etiquette, For the Use of All; Five Letters on Important Subjects, Exclusively for Ladies; And Conversational Hints to Whom Concerned, 3rd edn. (London and Nottingham: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., and Dearden, 1847), p. 64. According to Mary Talbot, such statements are ‘in line with the pronouncements of the Greek philosophers […] Aristotle, for example, wrote that women should be prevented from taxing their brains with things like political activity, because it would dry up their wombs’ (Mary Talbot, Language and Gender, 3rd edn. [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019], p. 201). Cf. also Nancy Armstrong, ‘The Rise of the Domestic Woman’, in The Ideology of Conduct. Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 96–141. 8 Rev. T. Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of Mind, and The Conduct of Life, 2nd edn., revised and corrected (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster Row, 1810), p. 5. 9 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, pp. 4–5. 10 Mrs. Taylor, Practical Hints to Young Females, on the Duties of a Wife, a Mother, and a Mistress of a Family, 4th edn (London : Taylor & Hessey, 93, Fleet Street; Josiah Conder, St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1815), p. 92. 11 Butcher, Instructions in Etiquette, p. 66.

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But for what purpose exactly, may we ask, are women to cultivate the mind by growing their intellectual appetite? The simple answer provided by one of the authors is that ‘she should be so educated as to know her appropriate sphere.’12 What this means is that reading is employed as a tool to render the woman ‘qualified’, on the one hand, to be ‘an entertaining and instructive fire-side companion’13 to her husband, and, on the other hand, a worthy mother and educator of her children: you must read books of useful knowledge, in order to retain a fund of judicious and entertaining conversation. This will render you a most valuable companion, and enliven your solitary hours. What happiness will your husband experience, by seeing you capable of filling up the serious, as well as the sprightly hours of life! What inexhaustible pleasure will he find in the society of a wife, whose conversation is ever new, and whose charms will exist when youth and beauty are fled!14

The inevitable loss of beauty and youth is used as a powerful incentive here to coerce women into paying due attention to their education. As such, the duty of the women to please their husbands clearly emerges as one of the main preoccupations with the authors of advice literature. The dreadful prospect for a woman who fails to accumulate ‘a fund of judicious and entertaining conversation’ is that of jeopardising her marital felicity: She, whose mind has not been formed by reading and reflection to a taste for rational pleasures, will be ill qualified, as a companion or a friend, for a man of an improved and well-cultivated understanding.15

That a woman’s education has the ultimate aim of ‘[rendering] her more useful, more humble, more happy’16 is made even more transparent in the passages dedicated to her role as mother and educator. The great responsibility of ‘forming the minds of the youth, not only of her own, but of both sexes’17 is leveraged in an attempt to justify the still somewhat questionable necessity to educate women: Another important light, in which the necessity of cultivating the female mind may be regarded, is that which relates to the judicious management of a rising family. Here, more especially , the influence of a sensible, well-informed mother is of infinite con-

12 Anon., The English Maiden, p. 46. 13 Butcher, Instructions in Etiquette, p. 66. 14 Mrs. Maxwell, Advice to Young Ladies on the Conduct of Life: With Friendly Hints How to Make Home Happy in the Married State, new edition (Glasgow: and London: W.R. M’Phun, Bookseller and Publisher to H.R.H. The Prince Consort, 1859), p. 96. 15 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 16. 16 Anon., The English Maiden, p. 47. 17 Anon., The English Maiden, p. 28.

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sequence to the future, happiness of those who derive their being more immediately from her, and may even extend to distant generations.18

The woman is made responsible for transmitting to her children the love of learning.19 This responsibility is categorically claimed by one of the authors who goes as far as to state that ‘Every woman is by virtue of her sex, a teacher.’20 Already a dutiful wife and mother, the woman reader is also expected to function as a valuable member of polite society. In that regard, she must play her part as an active participant in ‘polished intercourse in society.’21 In order to prepare for this role, reading, once again, is instrumental. Yet not any kind of reading will suffice to make her ready for this arduous task: [without a tolerable acquaintance with English literature, she can never adequately enjoy what is truly called good society] – she cannot take her part in a communing with superior minds; she may enjoy, in wondering, the radiance of their intelligence; but the wondering must be composed in part of amazement at her own folly in not having dipped into those almost fathomless stores, which our own language possesses.22

The familiarity with ‘the admired productions of the classic British authors’23 is presented as the only desirable path towards the cultivation of a refined taste that will distinguish a polite lady: Reading is essential. Not to know the writings of our popular authors, not to be acquainted with the British classics, to be totally ignorant of what has been written and what has been said, is not only a great disadvantage, but a positive barrier to all intercourse with polite society.24

The attention directed at national literature is meant to eclipse the writings produced by continental authors (German, Italian and French alike). Moreover, as another author points out, the study of ‘our best English Authors’ represents a valid alternative to the study of the appropriately ‘male’ subjects, such as Mathematics, Latin and Greek: 18 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 21. 19 Anon., The English Maiden, p. 28. 20 Anon., The English Maiden, p. 40. Another author, discussing the topic of motherhood and reading, acknowledges how difficult it may be to find time for reading: ‘But how, it is inquired, could a wife and a mother, so occupied as we are told she must be, find opportunity for reading! Ah!’ (Mrs. Taylor, Practical Hints to Young Females, p. 115), only to helpfully suggest that reading can be used to keep the children quiet. 21 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 11. 22 Anon., The English Gentlewoman: A Practical Manual for Young Ladies on Their Entrance into Society, 2nd end. (London : Henry Colburn, Publisher, Great Marlborough street, 1849), p. 31. 23 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 53. 24 Anon., A Manual of Etiquette for Ladies: Or, True Principles of Politeness. By a Lady ( London: T. Allman & Son, 42, Holborn Hill, 1856), p. 33.

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throw away your French reading, unless as a recreation, and fix all the powers of your mind upon earnest, daily, well-digested English reading.25 Now, although it is neither practicable nor desirable that women should have the same advantages as men, in the completion of education, (in its commencement they have more), it is important for women to possess judgement and clearness of perception. Energy in action and discretion are the results of those qualities. It appears to me that, without Mathematics, without a course of Logic, without Latin and Greek, a young lady may, upon the perusal of our best English Authors, strengthen and elevate her understanding, so that her reasoning powers may be devoid of that feebleness, her ideas of that confusion, often and justly imputed to the female sex.26

According to the good general rule, as the woman reader is cautioned by another author, literary productions ‘should be perused in a judicious manner!’27 The fuzzy term ‘literary productions’ here refers specifically to novels and works of fiction which, only when consumed in moderation, can exercise some beneficial influence: I am far from disapproving of a moderate indulgence in the works of fiction; but they must be regarded as recreations, like other recreations, to be selected under the guidance of experience and judgment, more matured than that of a young lady. The human mind, like the frame, requires a variety of food, and is not supplied by only one kind of nourishment. […] Our language is rich in works of fiction which elevate the tone of the female mind, soften the heart, and prepare it for the usages of society.28

Very cleverly, none of the authors examined here provides any specific titles of such recreational works that are best to be avoided. At the same time, the alarming increase in the number of such taboo productions is eloquently described in a comparison of their proliferation to a brood, numberless as the sands upon the sea-shore; and which resembles one of those destructive swarms of the insect tribe, which speedily strips the most flourishing regions of the fairest fruits of vegetation, and spreads darkness and desolation wherever it comes.29 25 Anon., The English Gentlewoman, p. 34. However, French writers specifically are singled out by a number of authors. An even more pronounced attack on French writers, for example, is contained in the following passage: ‘The novellists of France have a heavy responsibility for which to answer, when they reflect on the scenes they have laid bare, the poison they have skilfully mingled with what is most beautiful in nature, most fair in appearance’. (Anon., The English Gentlewoman, p. 40) Another strategy is that of lamenting the neglect of the English literature: ‘But, in the devotion of the time to these pursuits, English literature should not suffer; alas, it does! Often does the conviction force itself upon us, that foreigners are better acquainted with it than we are ourselves […].’ (Anon., The English Gentlewoman, p. 29). 26 Anon., The English Gentlewoman, p. 36. 27 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 52. 28 Anon., The English Gentlewoman, p. 40. 29 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 54.

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This strong position towards works of fiction is echoed in yet another text in which the author denounces ‘the turbid waters of corrupt and corrupting literature’ a young woman is in danger of ‘imbibing’: Alas! That she should now prefer fiction and folly to the healthful writings of wise men. Deplorable is it, that her past lessons of instruction, so many and so faithful, must now, by her own indolence or perversion, prove to have fallen on her ear, like snow-flakes that melt on the ocean.30

The consumption of ‘corrupting literature’ is of course identified as a gendered phenomenon: Woman is addicted to the eager perusal of works of fiction. We regard this fact as an indication of a want of her nature. Not therefore to eradicate, but to control, and direct, and restrain this propensity, would we endeavour.31

Surprisingly, we also find traces of a more balanced view on the subject of the reading of fiction by young women: Works of imagination usually predominate in the libraries of young ladies. To condemn them in a mass, as has been sometimes done, is hardly just. Some of them are the productions of the finest minds, and abound with the purest sentiments. Yet discrimination, with regard to them, is exceedingly important, and such discrimination as a novice cannot exercise. The young should therefore ask guidance of an experienced and cultivated mind […]32

With fiction to a large extent excluded from the list of ‘the healthful writings of wise men’ (cf. above), it is works on Christian revelation and the science of morals, history, grammar, Logic, geography, natural philosophy, chemistry, and architecture that are prescribed to women readers as part of a systematic course of reading that aims to educate them to fulfil their duties at their best. Interestingly, it is historical readings especially that are assiduously recommended by the authors of advice literature as the best possible method to apply in the cultivation of the female mind.33 In fact, the study of history is presented as an antidote to the poisonous influence of light literature. For example, in the following passage the author exploits the authority of David Hume with the view of convincing his readers that From the study of history, as Mr. Hume observes, women in particular may learn a lesson of the greatest utility to them, and which may tend to counteract those false impressions which are often made upon their minds by the reading of novels, the 30 31 32 33

Anon., The English Maiden, pp. 56–57. Anon., The English Maiden, p. 65. Butcher, Instructions in Etiquette, p. 68. This is discussed in a number of manuals, for example, in Butcher, Instructions in Etiquette and in Mrs. Maxwell, Advice to Young Ladies.

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witnessing of theatrical representations, and the general strain of fashionable and polite conversation. From history […] the fair sex may learn, that love is not the only, nor always the predominant, principle in the hearts of men; a remark which it may be of advantage to you to treasure up in your minds, and to recollect occasionally in future life.34

Nor are the benefits of perusing historical writings limited to their potential as a defensive shield protecting from the corrupting influence of novels and plays. The usefulness of historical readings lie in ‘the events, the characters, the excitement’ and their capacity to stimulate the forming of ‘a strong and elegant mind.’35 The same author also suggests a course of reading including historical works written by women, offering the following motivation: [historical works written by women] have an attribute of peculiar value: they shew what women can do in historical literature, without departing from the modesty and propriety of their sex, and even whilst adorning their sphere with every domestic virtue.36

Discipline in reading is another subject dealt with frequently in these texts. ‘[A] regular, methodical manner’ of reading is recommended, boosted by a careful reviewing of ‘the different subjects which have occupied your attention. Without observing some order in your reading, all will be confusion and darkness in the mind.’37 The best course of systematic study dictates that ‘a small portion of every day’38 should be dedicated to reading: By your reading, much may be accomplished toward correcting your taste, enlarging your intellectual vision, and sanctifying your spirit. Form now the habit of daily reading some volume with reference to your personal improvement. Let no engagement seriously interrupt this practice. Read the writings of your own sex. […] Read poetry. If it be

34 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, pp. 49–50. 35 Anon., The English Gentlewoman, p. 17. 36 Anon., The English Gentlewoman, p. 39. Another specific gendered reference is found in a different manual that suggests reading of the biographies of ‘eminently pious women […]; in which , though many of the histories are rather far-fetched, you will find many examples well worthy of imitation.’ (Mrs. Maxwell, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 69). 37 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 87. Moreover, some helpful guidance is given in a different manual on what ‘the most graceful position in which to hold a book when we are reading’ would be: ‘If you be reading aloud, place the book in the left hand, the right hanging easily by the side, or placed on the margin of the book, so as to be prepared to turn over the next leaf. If the leaves will not keep apart without the interference of the right hand, you may place the fingers upon them ,towards the bottom of the page, but avoid, if possible, holding the book in both hands, or placing the thumbs inside, and do not (as is very common) wet your thumb in order to facilitate the turning over the leaves. Neither should you amuse yourself by playing with the corner of the leaf. When standing, place yourself perfectly erect, and do not bend the neck, to avoid which, hold the book at a convenient distance from the body.’ (Butcher, Instructions in Etiquette, pp. 41–42). 38 Mrs. Maxwell, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 68.

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true poetry, it is the twin-sister of religion. It will exalt and ennoble your soul. Study history. From that you will draw unfailing draughts of knowledge.39

While it is true that, according to the authors of advice literature, women can and should derive unquestionable benefits from reading, there lurk certain dangers associated with reading that they must be warned of. In addition to the corrupting influence that the French authors especially appear to be made responsible for, reading can be harmful and become ‘a bane, instead of a blessing’ when ‘pushed to excess’: Books are a refuge in many seasons of sickness or sorrows, when unable to perform the active duties of our station; but, if permitted to encroach on indispensable domestic duties, become a bane, instead of a blessing. Devote a part of your leisure to some useful book; by reading a little every day, if you have not proper time for more, you will acquire and retain a fund of knowledge, which, with the improvement of your mind, will render your conversation most agreeable and instructive.40

Moreover, excessive reading will not only, as other authors have already observed, distract the woman from her all-important household duties, but can result in an even graver danger of turning the woman into a pedant, an eventuality that is to be avoided at all costs: In order to converse agreeably and intelligibly, a lady should cultivate her intellect, not with the idea of becoming a blue-stocking or a pedant, but to render her society pleasant and profitable to others. Some ladies sit quietly simpering, and say nothing, an inclination of the head being the only sort of acquiescence given in any sentiment broached; and others make an ostentatious display of their learning, as if they were always saying, ‘Hear me, I am well read, deeply versed, and well able to instruct you; I have taken a vast intellectual view of the general subjects which engage public attention; my universal knowledge helps me to be profound’.41

The so called ‘literary ladies’42 – as well-read women are degradingly labelled – are unmercifully reprimanded for being guilty of pedantry, something that is ‘disgusting in the extreme’43 in women: If you really possess excellence of any kind, let me advise you to be extremely careful not to make it appear too prominent. Particularly guard against any unnecessary display of

39 Anon., The English Maiden, p. 65. Poetry specifically is recommended by yet another author: ‘To soften the heart, to improve the moral tone, and to delight the fancy, the touching and simple poems of Cowper are admirable for the young, and sink so deeply into the memory, as to be recalled in all the diversities of our fate in after-years. (Anon., The English Gentlewoman, pp. 17–18). 40 Mrs. Maxwell, Advice to Young Ladies, pp. 101–102. 41 Anon., A Manual of Etiquette for Ladies, p. 24. 42 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 4. 43 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 6.

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literary attainments; since of all the objects that are disagreeable to the other sex, a pedantic female, I believe, is the most confessedly so.44

The reason a pedantic female is so disagreeable to the other sex is explained by establishing a natural connection between pedantry on the one hand, and immorality and immodesty on the other: [a woman may] believe herself all-competent, qualified by nature, to cope with man in every situation. This view will lead her to self-satisfaction, and of course prove unfriendly to her moral character, and to her spiritual culture. The affectation that has sometimes accompanied learning in females, has led not a few men to abhor the very name of a ‘literary lady.’45

Modesty, we are told, is so interwoven with the nature of woman, that she who lays it aside, becomes odious to her own sex, and disgusting to the other; she destroys the enchantment she wishes to create, and sinks from a goddess to a fallen angel. The most splendid talents, or the utmost personal beauty are of no value unaccompanied by modesty. Cultivate, my dear young friends, the better path; it is in your power to be all that is lovely, amiable, and admirable: beauty must soon cease to charm; esteem is more lasting, and will exist when youth and beauty are fled.46

In her discussion of nineteenth-century conduct books Mills, for example, argues that the proliferation of advice manuals on women’s conduct should be read as an indicator of women’s resistance to gendered discourses of subordination, rather than as evidence of women’s oppression.47 It is certainly true that the tension and the precarious balance in these texts between the need to educate women, on the one hand, and the urgency to place well-defined constraints on female education on the other, betrays strong anxieties in the contemporary English society about the changes in the social position of women.48 At the same 44 Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 95. 45 Anon., The English Maiden, p. 47. 46 Mrs. Maxwell, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 13. The same author joins in with the authors quoted above with the following recommendation: ‘Do not make a parade of your learning if you have any, ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing,’ and few women have more than a little. If you are really well-informed, you may choose subjects which may instruct in conversation, but men, in particular, have a dislike to women who seem too sensible of their literary acquirements’. (Mrs. Maxwell, Advice to Young Ladies, p. 23). 47 Sara Mills, Discourse (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 90. 48 Such anxieties can be dealt with by denigrating women that do not conform to the prescribed model of femininity, in ways that are exemplified in the following passage: ‘The prude and the pedant are often firm friends, each adoring the other. The fast young lady deals largely in epithets: ‘Idiot, dolt, wretch, humbug,’ drop from her lips; but the prude and her friend the blue-stocking permit themselves to use conventional phrases only; their notion of conversation is that it be instructive, and, at the same time, mystifying. The young blue-stocking has, nevertheless, large views of the regeneration of society, and emancipation of woman

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time, from the point of view of a twenty-first-century reader of nineteenthcentury advice literature for women, what is most striking about these texts is how resilient the ideologically-charged discourses of inequality and inferiority of women continue to be. These discourses are aptly summarised in the following passage that serves as a reminder to continue to reject the notion of ‘the legitimate paths’: In these happy times, females are not called on to signalize themselves in modes repugnant to a gentle nature; their sphere is to render the domestic hearth happy to embellish society by their accomplishments – to polish its asperities by their refinement – to influence by their example – to incite to goodness, and to train up the infant mind. As a friendly adviser, I would not have you to step beyond these legitimate paths, unless you are so decidedly gifted as to do so properly, without drawing upon you the world’s censure, instead of applause.49

from her degrading inferiority of social position. She speaks in measured phrase; it is like listening to a book to hear her.’ (Anon., The Habits of Good Society: A Hand-book of Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen, etc. [London: James Hogg & Sons, 1859], p. 269). 49 Mrs. Maxwell, Advice to Young Ladies, pp. 47–48.

Larissa D’Angelo

Gender in Audio-Visual Translation: Giving (an Italian) Voice to Dystopian Heroines

1.

The gender revolution in dystopian novels and their film adaptations

Analysing the vast number of dystopian novels for Young Adults (YA) published in recent years, one can see how the number of female protagonists has grown considerably. The increase in the presence of female heroines in these novels and their movie adaptations is certainly due to the increasing number of women dedicated to dystopian writing, who can finally find their own space in this genre considered to be, for many years, dominated by male authors and a male audience.1 Since the 1970s, in fact, many scholars, for the most part affiliated to a feminist critique, have pointed out that neither utopian nor dystopian romances treated female characters with the same dignity with which male characters were treated.2 Unlike their male counterparts, women characters did not experience a radical change in utopian or dystopian societies: they were depicted as passive and silent women, inseparably linked to the role of mothers. It is only during the 1980s, thanks to the advent of internationally recognized writers such as Octavia E. Butler, Marge Piercy, Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood, that science fiction and dystopian novels experienced a real gender revolution. Thanks to a series of narrative strategies and techniques, these authors have succeeded in renewing this literary genre, without concealing their subversive 1 Roberta Seelinger Trites, Waking Sleeping Beauty, Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997). 2 Jeanne Cortiel, Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999); Id., ‘Feminist Utopia/Dystopia: Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975) and Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)’, in Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse: Classics-New Tendencies-Model Interpretations, ed. by Alessandra Boller and Eckart Voigts-Virchow (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2015), pp. 155–169; Joanna Russ, ‘Recent Feminist Utopias’, in Future females: A critical anthology, ed. by Marleene S. Barr (Bowling Breen: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981), pp.71–85; Jenny Wolmark, ‘Alternative Futures? Science Fiction and Feminism’, Cultural Studies, 2/1 (1988), 48–56; Id., Science Fiction and Feminism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994).

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intentions towards the dominant male ideology. According to Baccolini, feminist writers considered the subversive potential of dystopian literature particularly suitable to carry out a revolution not only of the literary genre, but also of gender (understood as the culturally constructed representation of sexual identities). These writers exploited the potential of dystopian and science-fiction literatures: they created different and imaginary worlds whose flaws or qualities brought the reader, more or less directly, to a reflection on our current society and the still too passive role of women: Women’s science fiction novels have contributed to the exploration and subsequent breakdown of certainties and universalist assumptions – those damaging stereotypes – about gendered identities by addressing, in a dialectical engagement with tradition, themes such as the representation of women and their bodies, reproduction and sexuality, and language and its relation to identity.3

Dealing with themes such as the representation of women in society and the use of the female body mostly for reproductive and sexual purposes, dystopian writers began their investigation on women’s subjectivity and their role as protagonists in the novels, trying to free them from that passive and silent dimension to which they have always been withdrawn. The critical and oppositional potential of science fiction literature was thus rediscovered and renewed by female authors such as Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth, who succeeded, thanks to their dystopian female protagonists in The Hunger Games (2008)4 and Divergent (2011),5 in voicing new types of struggles and resistance. In particular, Day, Barteet and Montz,6 and Fritz7 (2014) claim that these novels provide opportunities for girls to be empowered by blending “dystopian defying political activism with the rhetoric of girl power” (Fair 2015:90)8 and Fritz (2014: 30) states that these novels “[…] can be understood as helping female adolescent readers to develop a new awareness of their own potential as empowered socio-political agents.” Also Green-Barteet (2014)9 perceives great potential for the female role 3 Raffaella Baccolini, ‘The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction’, PMLA, 119/3 (2004), 518–521 (p. 520). 4 Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games Complete Trilogy (London: Scholastic UK, 2013). 5 Veronica Roth, Divergent (London: HarperCollins, 2011). 6 Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green Barteet, and Amy L. Montz, Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 7 Sonya Sawyer Fritz, ‘Girl Power and Girl Activism in the Fiction of Suzanne Collins, Scott Westerfeld, and Moira Young’, in Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, ed. by Sara K. Day, et al., (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 17–31. 8 Thomas P. Fair, ‘Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz, Eds.: Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction’, Rocky Mountain Review, 69/1 (2015), 89–92. 9 Miranda Green-Barteet, ‘“I’m beginning to know who I am”: the rebellious subjectivities of Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior’, in Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, ed. by S.K. Day, M.A Green-Barteet and A.L Montz, (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), p. 33–50.

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within the dystopian genre, observing that “acts of rebellion” allow characters such as The Hunger Games’s Katniss and Divergent’s Tris to become “empowered subjects rather than […] subjugated objects” (p. 37). These female protagonists have strong and curious characters, they are aware of their own conditions and those of the people surrounding them, they are combative, impulsive and courageous. But they are also typically feminine and not simply “male quest heroes in drag”.10 Although sometimes the protagonist feels disadvantaged because of her gender, she is able to accept her feminine characteristics and transform them into strengths that lead her to become a heroine that is empowered by her own actions and succeeds without emulating masculine power.11 It is not the fact of possessing masculine characteristics that helps them in their mission. Indeed, while overcoming obstacles these protagonists often discover the feminine aspect of their body and character and their inner strength leads them to acquire the strength that allows them to change the world in which they live. It is precisely this feminine strength that undermines the foundations of patriarchal societies, as heroines are able to defy the expectations that are placed upon them because of their gender and use their exceptional abilities to break free from the structures that confine them. If Young Adult dystopian novels have succeeded in creating a new type of heroine, it is through the film industry and the work of audio-visual adapters and translators that these characters have reached the widest possible audience and obtained international success. However, it is well-known that the original message of authors and screen-writers might be lost when translating a product in another language. Furthermore, an audio-visual translator is not the only person that has a saying on the dubbing process a foreign film goes through: also dialogue writers, adaptors, dubbing actors and film directors can intervene on the target text, rendering very difficult to define the exact amount of work carried out by the translator. If the AV translator does translate dialogues and voice overs initially, the adapter is the one that ‘adapts’ the text to the spatial and temporal limitations of AVT.12 The end product, therefore, can be far from the actual translation provided by the audio-visual translator, so much so that the role of the adapter has gained more prestige than the role of the translator. Having said 10 Kara K. Keeling and Marsha M. Sprague, ‘Dragon-Slayer vs. Dragon- Sayer: Reimagining the Female Fantasy Heroine’, The Alan Review, 36/3 (2009), 13–17 (p.13). 11 Cortiel, Demand My Writing; Id., ‘Feminist Utopia/Dystopia’; Day, Barteet, and Montz, Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction; Russ, ‘Recent Feminist Utopias’; Wolmark, ‘Alternative Futures?’; Id., Science Fiction and Feminism. 12 Jorge Diaz Cintas, The Didactics of Audiovisual Translation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2008); Id., New trends in audiovisual translation (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2009); Jorge Díaz-Cintas and Aline Remael, Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling (London: Routledge, 2014); Maria Pavesi and Elisa Perego, ‘Profiling film translators in Italy: A preliminary analysis’, The Journal of Specialised Translation, 6 (2006), 99–114.

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this, the present work seeks to analyse, adopting a comparative perspective, how the ‘female voices’ of two dystopian heroines portrayed in the motion pictures The Hunger Games (2012) and Divergent (2014) have been translated into Italian and will consider how the different ways women are represented on screen may impact the public discourse and perception of women and femininity in a culture. Vinay and Darbelnet’s model is applied13 and relevant examples of Direct and Oblique translations are hereby provided as well as instances of Errors, Omissions and Additions, which help understand how gender is handled and translated in Italian in the Hollywood adaptation of the two novels.

2.

Methodology

Vinay and Darbelnet’s taxonomy is in part applied to the present analysis to categorize the techniques found in the Italian AV translation of the motion pictures The Hunger Games (2012) and Divergent (2014), as cases of Direct Translations or Oblique Translations (see Table 1). Direct Translation Borrowing

Oblique Translation Transposition

Calque Literal Translation

Modulation Equivalence Adaptation

Table 1. Vinay and Darbelnet’s taxonomy14

Borrowing, Calque and Literal Translation are categorized as Direct Translations (DT). Borrowing is utilized whenever foreign and exotic elements are left unaltered in the target text, ‘foreignizing’, as a consequence, the final product. Thanks to Calque new lexemes are created instead in the target text, because a word or the components of a phrase are translated from one language into another, recalling the original semantical structure. Finally, whenever the original grammatical structure of an expression or phrase is maintained, Literal Translation is utilized. Transposition, Modulation, Equivalence and Adaptation are Oblique Translation (OT) techniques. Transposition changes the sequence of words because of the different grammatical structure of languages, whereas Modulation rephrases, perhaps with a more idiomatic expression, the original formulation. Equivalence is utilized whenever the clichés, proverbs and idioms in 13 Jean Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, Stylistique comparée de l’anglais et du français (Paris/ Montréal: Didier/Beauchemin, 1958); Ids., Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1995). 14 Vinay and Darbelnet, Comparative Stylistics of French and English, p. 137.

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the ST are substituted by equivalent idiomatic expressions in the TT. If an element in the ST is unknown to the TC, Adaptation is employed to find the closest equivalent, using linguistic elements that are part of the TC. Besides instances of Direct and Oblique Translations, the present analysis considers a number of stylistic differences found in the AV translation of the two motion pictures, namely the use of repetitions and long sequences of coordinated sentences and the use of questions vs. statements in dialogues.

3.

Comparing the Italian and English AV translation of The Hunger Games and Divergent15

Divergent is a 2014 American dystopian science fiction film directed by Neil Burger, based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Veronica Roth.16 It is the first title of a trilogy (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant) set in an unspecified future in which few human beings have survived an apocalyptic war. To maintain peace, the population has divided itself into five factions, each playing a specific role in society. The first two books report that the inhabitants of Chicago are the only human beings left in the world and, to protect themselves from external threats, they built a fence that runs all around the city, without however knowing what is outside. Beatrice “Tris” Prior is the narrating voice. Like every sixteen-years-old, she undergoes the Aptitude Test, which analyses personalities and places teenagers in a faction. When Beatrice undergoes the aptitude test, it produces many results. Beatrice, therefore, discovers that she is a Divergent, that is, that she has characteristics that make her suitable for more than one faction, which renders her very dangerous in the eyes of the Government. Like all sixteen-year-old teenagers, Beatrice’s personality is complex, and her character develops and strengthens as the series progresses. The Hunger Games is a 2012 film co-written and directed by Gary Ross. The film is the cinematographic transposition of the 2008 science fiction novel of the same name written by Suzanne Collins.17 It is the first title of a trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay) and like in Divergent, the story takes place in an unspecified future in which few human beings have survived an apocalyptic war.

15 In this analysis, the extracts of the English and Italian version of The Hunger Games and Divergent will be referred to as: HGI (The Hunger Games in Italian), HGE (The Hunger Games in English), DivI (Divergent in Italian) and DivE (Divergent in English). 16 Roth, Divergent. 17 Collins, The Hunger Games Complete Trilogy.

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The story is set in the nation of Panem, located in the United States in a postapocalyptic America, made up of the vibrant Capitol City and thirteen large surrounding districts, of which twelve are still inhabited, and a thirteenth was destroyed long ago by Capitol City during an attempt at rebellion carried out by all the districts. Every year, as punishment for having tried to rebel years earlier, in each district a boy and girl aged between twelve and eighteen are chosen to participate in the ‘Hunger Games’, an event in which participants must fight in a place called ‘arena’, controlled by Strategists using very sophisticated computers. The ‘Hunger Games’ continue until only one participant remains alive. The name of the boy and girl to be sent to the Hunger Games are drawn from an ampule during a ceremony called ‘reaping’. In District 12, the poorest district, lives a girl named Katniss Everdeen who is very skilled in hunting and archery. Katniss spends most of the time in the woods with her best friend, Gale Hawthorne, looking for food to feed their families. During the draw for the 74th edition of the games, the name of Primrose Everdeen, Katniss’s younger sister, is selected, but Katniss volunteers in her place. Together with Katniss, Peeta Mellark, the baker’s son is also chosen. Katniss immediately recognizes Peeta as the boy who had given her bread years earlier, allowing her to feed herself and her starving family after her father died. Katniss and Peeta are then brought to Capitol City, where each district has a team of coaches that strategically prepare the ‘tributes’ to participate in the games. The AV translations of The Hunger Games and Divergent, in addition to being part of the same genre, display similar elements in terms of style and narrative. The same narrative technique or the same stylistic devices are often used, such as repetitions and long sequences of coordinated sentences, and the two AV translators approached the translations in rather similar ways. However, although both Italian AV translators try to remain as faithful as possible to the original structure of the sentence, using the method that Vinay and Darbelnet define as “literal translation”, it is evident that the AV translator of The Hunger Games worked in a more “invasive” way than the translator of Divergent, who has instead reduced to a minimum his presence in the target text. Dialogues are characterized by short, simple sentences, without coordinates and subordinates. The translators manage to recreate a sense of immediacy that allows the viewer to follow the thought and the feelings of the protagonists. This style, concise, immediate and dynamic, however, is lost at times in the Italian AV translation. The Italian translators preferred to create coordinate systems in place of the simple sentence structure. Another change in style that is often used by the AV translator of The Hunger Games is the transformation of questions into statements and vice–versa. The Italian AV translator often turns Katniss’s affirmative sentences into questions, thus painting Katniss as insecure and doubtful when instead she is determined

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and decisive – a fundamental characteristic of the protagonist – as the following examples show: Ex (1) HGE KATNISS: “Haymitch had called the Avoxes traitors. Against what? It could only be the Capitol. But they had everything here. No cause to rebel”.

HGI KATNISS: “Haymitch aveva chiamato i senza-voce ‘traditori’. Ma traditori di cosa? Poteva trattarsi solo di Capitol City. Ma qui avevano tutto. Che ragioni avevano di ribellarsi?”

Back translation KATNISS: “Haymitch had called the Avoxes traitors. Against what? It could only be the Capitol. But they had everything here. What reasons did they have to rebel?”

At times instead, resolute expressions in the ST are turned into kind requests in the TT, when Katniss’ character often lacks patience, as in Ex (2): Ex (2) HGE HGI KATNISS: “Suppose we tie KATNISS: “E se facessimo some knots” qualche nodo?”

Back translation KATNISS: “What if we tied some nots?”

PEETA: “Right you are”

PEETA: “OK”

PEETA: “D’accordo”

The same intervention also occurs in reverse mode, i. e. a question in the ST is rendered a statement in the TT. For example, when Katniss discovers that her male partner Peeta has decided to train separately from her, she feels deeply betrayed and begins to question herself about the confused feelings she has for him. In the Italian AV translation instead, all doubt is erased through a statement (see Ex. 3), that modifies our perception of the character: Ex (3) HGE KATNISS: “Was there some part of me that couldn’t help trusting him?”

HGI KATNISS: “Evidentemente, c’è una parte di me che non ha potuto fare a meno di fidarsi di lui.”

Back translation KATNISS: “Evidently, there is a part of me that couldn’t help trusting him”

The only moments in which Katniss seems to show weakness are those dedicated to Peeta. This weakness is always expressed through doubts and uncertainties regarding the behaviour of the boy, but as in Ex (3) the omission of the question makes Katniss absolutely certain she trusts Peeta, whereas in the book almost until the end this is never taken for granted. These series of stylistic changes, although at first glance may appear superficial, connote in a different way the

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cold and complex personality of Katniss, which in the Italian version appears as a more accommodating woman than its original. The analysis based on Vinay and Darbelnet’s model18 has instead revealed that the most frequent technique used in both The Hunger Games and Divergent is Modulation. This type of substitution or modification occurs when translators decide to modify the register of a sentence, transforming a simpler expression in English into a more elaborate one in Italian, or when they decide to replace it entirely. The following example, which reflects a somewhat more complex case with respect to the concept of Modulation proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet, could also be defined as instances of “voluntary modulation”, as in Ex. (4) where we see that the expression ‘in a sort of brave way’ is replaced with the idiom ‘in un modo un pò guascone’ (in a ‘Guascon way’, here meaning ‘braggart’): Ex (4) HGE KATNISS: “I’m not sure exactly what it means, but it suggests I’m a fighter. In a sort of brave way”

HGI KATNISS: “Non sono sicura di conoscerne il significato esatto, ma forse dà l’idea che io sia una combattente. In un modo un po’ guascone”

Back translation KATNISS: “I’m not sure I know the exact meaning, but maybe it gives the idea that I’m a fighter. In a Guascon way”

These changes also occur within DivI. Sometimes sentences are partially replaced by others. In some cases, the expression is replaced by an idiom that leaves the meaning unchanged, as in the following example: Ex (5) DivE BEATRICE: “Haste, I think, will not help”

DivI BEATRICE: “La fretta, penso, è una cattiva alleata”

Back translation BEATRICE: “Haste, I think, is a bad ally”

At other times, however slightly, these expressions undergo a change of meaning as in Ex. (6) and (7): Ex (6) HGE KATNISS: “He made me look weak!”

HGI Back translation KATNISS: “Mi ha fatto appa- KATNISS: “He made me rire insicura!” look insecure!”

18 Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, Stylistique comparée de l’anglais et du français; Ids., Comparative Stylistics of French and English.

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Ex (7) DivE BEATRICE: “A new place, a new name. I can be remade here”

DivI BEATRICE: “Un posto nuovo, un nome nuovo. Posso ricominciare da capo, qui”

Back translation KATNISS: “A new place, a new name. Here I can start over”

Translating weak as “insicura” (insecure) does not completely change the meaning of the sentence but gives it a different nuance. When Katniss uses the term weak, she loads it with a precise meaning: her greatest fear is to appear weak both physically and mentally, to her opponents in the arena. The Italian translation “insicura” connotes the expression differently, emphasizing mainly an emotional dimension, something that Katniss doesn’t contemplate at all. The same change of nuance can be seen in the translation of remade into “ricominciare da capo” (start over): the meaning that Tris gives to the term remade is very deep, as it involves a complete physical and mental renewal, a real reconstruction of the ego; instead the Italian translation tends to simplify in part the importance of the term. The AV translators that have worked on HGI and DivI have often used the technique that Vinay and Darbelnet call Equivalence to cope with the numerous idioms found in the dialogues. In the Target Language (TL), they are replaced with different but loaded expressions having the same meaning or a similar one. Maintaining idioms in a Target Text (TT) is important because it helps maintain the informal tone of the Source Text (ST), rendering it much more realistic and closer to the everyday language of young people, a fundamental feature of YA fiction. As can be seen the following examples, despite the radical substitutions, the original meaning does not change for the reader of the target text: Ex (8) HGE EFFIE: “I bet my buttons that was your sister. Don’t want her to steal all the glory, do we?”

HGI EFFIE: “Mi sarei giocata la testa che quella era tua sorella. Non vogliamo che ci rubi tutta la gloria, vero?”

Back translation EFFIE: “I would have bet my head that that was your sister. We don’t want her to steal all our glory, do we? ”

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Ex (9) DivE TRIS: “Just because we were in the same faction doesn’t mean we get along. Plus, Edward and Myra are dating, and I would rather not be the third wheel”

DivI TRIS: “Solo perché proveniamo dalla stessa fazione non significa che andiamo d’accordo. Inoltre Edward e Myra stanno insieme, e preferisco non fare la ruota di scorta”

Back translation TRIS: ”Just because we come from the same faction doesn’t mean we get along. Also, Edward and Myra are together, and I prefer not to be a spare tire. ”

Ex (10) HGE KATNISS: “We have to joke about it because the alternative is to be scared out of your wits”

HGI KATNISS: “Dobbiamo per forza scherzare su questa cosa, perché l’alternativa sarebbe impazzire di paura”

Back translation KATNISS: ”We have to joke about this, because the alternative would be to go crazy with fear”

DivI BEATRICE: “Non dovrebbe sorprendermi che gli Intrepidi ci costringano a partire in quarta, ma non mi aspettavo di dover cominciare dopo solo sei ore di sonno”

Back translation BEATRICE: ”It shouldn’t surprise me that the Intrepids force us to start in fourth gear, but I didn’t expect to have to start after only six hours of sleep”

Ex (11) DivE BEATRICE: “I shouldn’t be surprised that the Dauntless expect us to hit the ground running, but I anticipated more than six hours of rest before the running began”

In the analysis of the Italian translations, several important alterations of the original meaning have also been found. A misrepresentation of meaning leads to a phrase that is semantically different from the original; it happens for example when Katniss thinks nostalgically about her friend Gale while she is in the arena (see Ex. 12). Ex (12) HGE KATNISS: “Oh, Gale, if only you had my back now”

HGI Back translation KATNISS: “Oh, Gale, se solo KATNISS: “If only we fossimo insieme ora” were together now”

In this case, an alteration of the translation makes the ‘Italian’ Katniss appear more emotional than the American version. She clearly expresses her desire to have her friend Gale there with her so that she can protect her while she goes off to

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kill the other Tributes. In the Italian translation, we hear instead an utterance full of emotional nostalgia and devoid of any strategic reference. The analysis of the two AV translations has also highlighted a series of Omissions, which are rather extreme interventions available to translators. Different sentences in the ST were deliberately omitted in the TT as for example in (13) where we see that Peeta, the main male character in The Hunger Games is made silent in the Italian version, where he should instead have said “I think he said for us to hold hands”. By silencing him in HGI the translation is distorted as his gesture can be mistaken as an affectionate one, whereas it is clear that he is only following the instructions of the Game Master in HGE. Ex (13) HGE KATNISS: “What’s he saying?” [asking Peeta]

HGI KATNISS: “Cosa sta dicendo?” [asking Peeta].

PEETA: “I think he said for us to PEETA: “—” (He grabs hold hands” (He grabs her right her right hand in his left, hand in his left, and they look at and they look at Cinna) Cinna)

Back translation KATNISS: “What is he saying?” [asking Peeta]. PEETA: “—” (He grabs her right hand in his left, and they look at Cinna)

These rather ‘drastic’ interventions are present to a greater extent in the translation of The Hunger Games, where there are 12% of omitted sentences, and to a lesser extent that of Divergent, where only 2% of sentences have been omitted. Interestingly, in The Hunger Games only, the translator also uses Additions to disambiguate confusing phrases or to increase the emphasis of some expressions, as shown in the following two examples: Ex (14) HGE KATNISS: “I can’t help feeling glad. That makes ten of us. The other three I’ll figure out tomorrow”

HGI KATNISS: “Non posso evitare di essere felice. Io e Peeta. E fanno dieci. Domani capirò chi sono gli altri tre”

Back translation KATNISS: “I can’t help feeling glad. Me and Peeta. That makes ten of us. I’ll figure out the other three tomorrow”

Ex (15) HGE KATNISS: “Good and safe. We don’t have to worry about her now. Good and safe”

HGI KATNISS: “Riposa in pace. Non dobbiamo preoccuparci per lei, adesso. Riposa in pace, piccola Rue”

Back translation KATNISS: “Rest in peace. We don’t have to worry about her now. Rest in peace, little Rue”

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In (14) and (15) the female character is once again modified and rendered more prone to sentimentalism than she really is. In (14) the Italian AV translator added ‘me and Peeta’ to the utterance, giving the impression that Katniss always thinks about Peeta and his safety, whereas she is merely counting the tributes that are still alive. In (15) by adding ‘little Rue’ at the end of the phrase, she is yet again rendered more emotional than she actually is in the ST.

4.

Conclusions

From a stylistic point of view, the AV translators working on the Italian version of The Hunger Games and Divergent seem to have opted for similar decisions: they sacrificed in part the concise and dynamic style of the ST in favour of a delivery style that is more fluent and harmonious by simplifying the language or altering the register through a modulation process, replacing idiomatic expressions with others thanks to a process of equivalence, or by omitting and adding sentences. Turning simple sentences into more complex phrasing is however difficult to quantify in purely numerical terms, given that in both AV translations this operation is rather frequent. For what concerns vocabulary and morphosyntax, various interventions were carried out by both AV translators and all the idiomatic expressions identified were rendered through Equivalence in an appropriate and semantically transparent manner. Most of the discrepancies between the source text and the target text have been identified in the AV translation of The Hunger Games, where the greatest number of alterations in meaning have also been found. A comparison of figures is interesting: in HGI errors in translation that lead to shift in meaning were found in 10 cases, compared to the 4 found in DivI. The sentences whose meaning was partially altered during the translation in DivI are only 3, while in HGI are 5. The series of stylistic changes (changing syntax, transforming questions into statements and vice versa), as well as changes applied through Modulation, Equivalence, Alterations, Errors, Omissions and Additions, although at first glance may appear superficial, connote in a different way the cold and complex personality of dystopian heroines, that in the Italian version appear as more doubtful, male-dependent and accommodating women than in the original version. Because of this slight although perceivable change of the female characters emerging from both AV translations, but more predominantly in the AV translation of The Hunger Games, one could suggest that the translation of The Hunger Games was performed more superficially than that of Divergent, certainly not considering evolving gender roles. It is conceivable that the AV translation of The Hunger Games, carried out three years before that of Di-

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vergent, took place in a period in which dystopic literature and its movie rendering released soon after still occupied a rather marginal role in the Italian market. Because the dystopian novel at the base of the HG film transposition was, at the time of its release, still located in a peripheral area of the Italian literary scene, it is presumable that the translator of HGI has been granted a great deal of freedom in translation on a product that, a few years later, would experience an unexpected sales boom. Changes in the main female character of DivI are in fact less visible than in the HGI because its AV translation appears to be more faithful to the original screenplay and without major interventions by adapters and translators. Divergent appeared on screen at a time when dystopian literature was conquering the publishing market, and as a leading interpreter of the genre it may have enjoyed greater care in translation and had probably more rigid rules to obey in its foreign rendering. This discrepancy between the original female characters and their Italian version can be perceived as detrimental and goes against the original message of an empowered girlhood. Harris, in Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century, strongly advocated that: In a time of dramatic social, cultural, and political transition, young women are being constructed as a vanguard of new subjectivity. They are supposed to offer clues about the best way to cope with these changes. Power, opportunities, and success are all modelled by the ‘future girl’ – a kind of young woman celebrated for her ‘desire, determination, and confidence’ to take charge of her life, seize changes, and achieve her goals.19

Dystopian literature (and the numerous movies deriving from it) has become a very favourable field for the introduction of such strong-natured heroines, as this genre offers many possibilities to test female protagonists. The creation of new distorted worlds always brings new possibilities to subvert corrupt systems and, as Day adds20, the introduction of strong female protagonists can produce surprising and still unexplored ways to change the world. What is interesting is that the power conquered by these female characters is not a mere physical or mental power, it is something more. It is a strength that helps female protagonists find a new identity for themselves, far from pre-existing models, that will lead them to reach a new autonomy and a renewed self-awareness. As Trites explains, When I describe feminist protagonists as empowered, I mean that within the text they are able to do what they want to do, what they need to do. I most emphatically do not mean that by having power, the feminist protagonist enacts the age-old paradigms of

19 Anita Harris, Future Girl: Young women in the Twenty-First Century, (London: Routledge, 2004), p1. 20 Day, Barteet and Montz, Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction.

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power that have shaped too many societies. I use the term ‘power’, then, to refer to positive forms of autonomy, self-expression, and self- awareness.21

To achieve power, it is necessary for the protagonists to fully accept their female characteristics, such as the propensity to cooperate and care for others, avoiding emulating typical male heroic protagonists, who are traditionally portrayed as physically strong and prone to adventure. In this way, females are able to subvert the negative stigma of weakness linked to women and to show that there are not only heroes, but also heroines. One can only hope to find many new female characters that are able to be strong and female at the same time, a characteristic that so far has been lost in translation.

21 Trites, Waking Sleeping Beauty, p. 9.

Michele Sala

From Words to Stories and Back. A Round Trip to Wonderland

Angela Locatelli (henceforth AL – not to be confused with the chemical element of the same name) has it all. She is a renowned scholar, widely appreciated by the academic community at national and international level, and she is also a distinguished and dedicated professor, widely appreciated by students of any degree – graduate, post-graduate, doctoral and post-docs. AL is a literature enthusiast, both as a researcher and in the classroom. This not only makes it enjoyable to see her work and work with her, but, first and foremost, it is an evidence that such enthusiasm in both domains is indeed possible! As all those contributing to this volume (and those reading it) know, AL has been for several decades actively involved in expanding the knowledge regarding English literature, literary criticism, the philosophy of language and semiosis (and their interplay) by both researching (corroborating existing orientations, envisioning new directions, exploring boundaries and also charting unmapped territories), and promoting initiatives (establishing channels for debate and scholarly exchange, i. e. the Knowledge of Literature series of conferences and related publications). AL is also a great teacher. Evidence? Exhibit A: Students just love her. As a university student, I didn’t have the chance to be in her classes myself, but… I heard stories. As I was to find out, AL is not just one of the nicest persons one could meet (good-natured, caring, supportive, witty, etc.), but, besides being a scholar, she is a teacher at heart: she manages to make contents understandable, interesting and even enjoyable; to transmit their relevance as well as her passion for them; she pushes students to actively participate in the understanding of materials and notions, so one had the impression of contributing, somehow, to bringing home the (intellectual) bacon. And this is something. Exhibit B: Back in the days, students attending English literature courses were divided in two groups: those in her courses and those envying those in her courses. Not because their official teacher was bad, quite the opposite, and cer-

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tainly not because AL’s courses were ‘easier’, at all. One of the fondest memories of a good friend of mine (one of those students I envied at the time, and who went on to great things in his professional career) concerns the possibility he was given during an exam to discuss some semiotic notion using as a sample text the album cover of an obscure post-punk act of the late seventies. How extraordinary is that? Well, this might not sound extraordinary in current 2.0 classes, but that was a different decade, a different century and a different millennium altogether. Exhibit C: While I was working on my dissertation thesis on Lewis Carroll under the supervision of another professor, being lost as to how to organize my work and what direction to take, I plucked up my courage and met her during her office hour for a piece of advice. I came out with plenty of ideas, a different type of work in mind and… a new supervisor. And down the rabbit hole of language we went… At the time I felt I did not have the (‘narratological’) competence to attempt an analysis of Lewis Carroll’s work. I knew that the Alice books were, well… ‘special’ to say the least, but simply because they do not fit any recognizable and traditional criterion: the story is not really a fairy-tale even though, somehow, it sounds like one; it’s not really a children’s book although this is how it is often labelled; it does not tell a ‘proper’ story, there is little progression or development, the heroine doesn’t always act like one, her friends are not always to be trusted, and the enemies – even though they may appear diabolical – are not evil, but simply… weird. So, how was I to deal with this salmagundi? How to redress my discombobulation? ‘Start from the words.’ This, in sum, was the piece of advice I was given by my brand-new supervisor. ‘Read, just read. Things will become evident as you go along…’ There, I swore that I knew the books almost by heart, and that I had read anything I could possibly find about the author and the books, works by literary critics, writers, philosophers, etc. ‘Don’t just read about Lewis Carroll. Read Lewis Carroll.’ And, of course, she was right. Until then I had been looking for some kind of direction as to how to approach Carroll’s works, or safe ways by which to align to the traditional classification and understanding of the texts, according to which the text is a ‘mere’ – if exhilarating – literary eccentricity, a peripheral phenomenon with respect to mainstream children’s literature. And we may easily agree about its peripherality in the framework of Victorian literature, but not if we consider its editorial success at the time and in the ensuing decades, or the fact that the Alice books are among the most quoted texts in Western culture, or again its impact on popular culture: Carroll’s sense of ‘nonsense’ has gained currency in modern British culture – not unlike the Union Jack – having been made popular, among others, by John Lennon’s lyrics to Beatles songs (about walrus

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people, babies in the sky with diamonds, and folks who know “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall”) or the Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketches (and even more so, the PM Margaret Thatcher quoting a line from the Python’s ‘Dead parrot sketch’ in her speech at a Conservative Party Conference and everyone in the audience getting it – and bursting out laughing!). Clearly, there must be more to this ‘eccentricity’. So, I started reading anything authored by the man himself, both private (as Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) and public writing (fiction and non-fiction, as Lewis Carroll, the Reverend’s pseudonym), and there it became evident Dodgson/Carroll’s fascination with the worlds that words may bring to life. That was the beginning of a journey in the realm of words (and language studies), where language is not the medium, but the object, and where things do not necessarily ‘make sense’ because they correspond to bits of reality and shared experience, but they ‘make’ sense in the true sense of the word, in that they construe, give shape, modify and even create meaning from scratch, irrespective – or at least independently – of any link to external reality.

Wonderland Map Reference When trying to find a place for the Alice books within the generic framework of prose fiction – primarily taken up by mimetic and realistic genres – Northrop Frye points out the eccentricity of the text – yet considering it a masterpiece of its kind – as depending on several factors: – the presence of elements of Victorian romance (i. e. the dream-vision framing) and allegory, coupled with the lack of the allegorical seriousness typical of both genres; – the intellectualized nature of the text, which appeals to reason rather than emotion, and offers cognitive stimulation rather than eliciting an emotive response (as children books normally do); – the stylization of characters, which are caricatures of mental attitudes, devoid of any form of psychological realism, hence deprived of any chance to grow, change or develop.1 Frye groups the Alice books in the genre of Menippean satire – or ‘anatomy’ in his own words – together with other works such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, within a tradition which starts in the classic period with the satires by the Greek phi1 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton/Oxford: University Press, 1957), p. 290.

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losopher Menippus (hence the label), then went through different stages of development with the works of Latin authors such as Petronius (Satiricon) and Apuleius (The Golden Ass), medieval writers like Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel), and which may be extended to include more recent ‘experimental’ works, such as Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Critics dealing with the description of this genre, and notably Mikail Bakhtin,2 list, among others, the following defining features: – humour and erudition (i. e. superiority towards subject and, possibly, the reader as well); – distance from any form of realism of depiction (freedom of plot) in favour of extraordinary situations; – challenge to philosophical ideas or accepted truth, and position of theses to be demonstrated; – ‘experimental fantasticality’ triggered by reasoning from “some unusual point of view”; – “dialogic relationship to one’s own self”, which may easily be (mis-)taken as an expression of insanity; – eccentricities and violation of social expectations and politeness. To sum up, as aptly synthesized by Weinbrot, anatomies are “a kind of satire that uses at least two different languages, genres, tones, or cultural or historical periods to combat a false and threatening orthodoxy”.3 This is precisely what goes on in the Alice books: they tell a ‘sort of ’ story which is organized around – and hindered by – the clash between words, and notably, between their literal and conventional meanings, their pragmatic and cognitive understandings, their informative and social functions4.

2 Mikail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevski’s Poetics, trans. by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971/1984), pp. 114–18. 3 Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: The John Hokins University Press, 2005), p. xi. 4 Cf. Geoffrey Leech, Principles of Pragmatics (London: Longman, 1983). Cf. also M.A.K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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Through the Looking-Glass of Words The starting point of modern linguistics is the notion that language – more precisely, the link between words and referents – is arbitrary (Saussure).5 If today this idea is widely accepted and understood even outside the domain of linguistics, it certainly wasn’t in Carroll’s time. Notice that the Alice books – Alice in Wonderland (1865, AW henceforth) – and Through the Looking-glass (1871, LG henceforth)6 predate of almost half a century the publication of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916). Today in schools we are taught that the relationship between signs and objects is neither necessary, nor stable and permanent, as is testified by the fact that word meanings can change overtime (i. e. awful, turning from ‘full of awe’ to ‘dreadful’, or gay, from ‘joyful’ to ‘homosexual’) and that different dialects – either national languages, varieties of the same language or different jargons and registers within the same variety – codify the same meaning differently (i. e. sister in English vs. soeur in French; trousers in British English vs pants in American English vs kecks in Liverpool English; sore throat in everyday English vs pharyngitis in specialised contexts). Also, the case of (close) synonymy (different words with the same meaning, i. e. adjoining, contiguous and close) and homonymy (words with different meanings but the same spelling, i. e. bank, as in ‘river bank’ vs. ‘bank of England’) can be seen as evidence of language arbitrariness. This ‘condition’ is the norm in Alice’s world, and everyone there seems to be quite happy to live by it: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” (p. 163)

Such an unstable relationship between words and referents brings about two different phenomena in Alice’s fantasy worlds: on the one hand, the lucid awareness – on the part of Wonderland characters – of language semantic opacity (word ≠ referent), and, on the other, the primacy conferred to words over referents (word > referent). The referential function of language, which is the basis of everyday communication and understanding, here is supplanted by a form of pseudo-referentiality that manifests itself in two different ways: when words are formally intelligible but not comprehensible,7 that is when the sign is recognized but not its link to reality; or when words determine – or even pro-

5 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, ed. by Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye and Albert Riedlinger (Paris: Payot, 1916/1971). 6 All references to AW and LG are from: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray 2nd edn (London: Norton & Company, 1992). 7 John Catford, ‘Intelligibility’, ELT Journal, 1/1 (1950), 7–15.

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duce – reality by simply being uttered. We may tentatively label such phenomena as hypo-signification and hypersignification.8 Instances of the first type are very frequent in the Alice books and are often marked by the puzzlement felt by the characters when they cannot make sense of the words they hear. In AW, when the Mad Hatter explains the (weird) functioning of his watch, Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. (p. 56)

Hypo-signification is also what hinders interpretation of the Jabberwocky in LG, a short poem in mock Old English telling ‘some sort’ of story mostly through made-up words: Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. (p. 116)

As we see, these ‘words’ so closely align to the morphological regularity of the language that they ‘sound’ as bearing some meaning (i. e. brilling as a progressive form of some unheard-of verb; the phrases slithy toves and mome raths as combining a modifier and a plural noun of some sort, outgrabe as an irregular verb in the past tense, etc.). Because of these peculiarities, and only on the basis of those, Alice can claim, “It [the poem] seems very pretty […] but it’s rather hard to understand […]. Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are!” (p. 118)

Another form of hypo-signification is to be found in the trial scene in AW, when Alice answers some questions she is asked: “This is very important”, the King said, turning to the jury […]. “Unimportant, your Majesty means, of course” [said the white Rabbit]. “Unimportant, of course I meant,” the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, “important – unimportant – unimportant – important –” as if he were trying which word sounded best.” (p. 93)

In this case, a meaning and its opposite appear to be both equally valid, the only distinguishing criterion between the two being the way they sound. This clearly casts doubt as to the referential function that words have in Wonderland.

8 The two terms are here used in purely linguistic terms, to refer to the interplay between sign and meaning, and not in the sense attributed to them in other domains (most notably Urban semiotics, referring to the varying degree of power-based symbolisms found in architecture and the organization of urbans spaces).

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Hyper-signification, instead, is the case of words which modify or bring about reality simply by labelling it. Reality as we know it is indeed an abstraction and language is the cognitive tool for speakers to represent and make sense of it. By giving names to reality objects language is not only a pervasive and powerful resource, but may indeed bias our understanding of reality and experience of it, often fixing conventional interpretive matrixes which leave little room for diverging interpretations. And we can see that in our everyday life. So, when we label something as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘nice’ or ‘nasty’, ‘certain’ or ‘dubious’ that something is likely to be taken as such (at least, at first) without giving it much thought. We can wage war for ‘peacekeeping’, and use this label to justify all sorts of military intervention. If you say that you are ‘not a racist’, then you are allowed a certain amount of discriminatory comments against a specific group possibly steering clear of overt allegations of racism. If we say that ours is a ‘nonviolent’ form of protest, then, that’s how it should be taken, irrespective of the number of shop-windows shattered and cars set on fire. Along the same lines, when we are the object of some form of violence then we are the ‘victims’; when we are the perpetrators, then we become ‘victims of circumstances’ (in an apologetic perspective, even by confessing to such violence) or ‘heroes’ of our own private war (in a bolstering perspective), as someone who has the courage to stand up and fight back (whatever it is that needs fighting back). ‘Body-shaming’ is, well, body shaming only when directed towards us or the group we care about; when it goes the other direction, then it is freedom of speech, a legitimate reaction to some provocation, or a non-aggressive and purely ironic comment on someone whose body clearly deserves shaming… The terms ‘fake news’ and ‘conspiracy’ (or ‘conspiracy theory’, for that matter) are often taken as evidence in themselves, thus needing no particular substantiation, and ‘censorship’ is such only when it is meant to silence our own words, whereas silencing someone else’s (which are ‘lies’, of course) is a remarkable act of resistance and a sign of our utter ‘love for the truth’. As it were… The use of language as a reality-shaping device seems to be the norm in the Alice books. So much so that the word ‘cat’ is as frightening to the poor Mouse as the real animal, as if a cat in flesh and blood could somehow be summoned by the simple mention of its name (p. 19). Along the same lines, the best way to get dry when you are wet is by being told dry stories (p. 21); and, of course, it’s hot pepper what makes people hot-tempered (p. 70). If you are called Mary Ann – even if your name is Alice – then you act like Mary Ann “without trying to explain the mistake” (p. 27), and even though you have no idea what Mary Ann is expected to do. In AW and LG, not just the words, but also their semantics and syntactic mechanisms (i. e. parallelism, syllogisms, etc.) impose specific and compelling ways by which to process reality. When Alice tries to explain that she is not a serpent, the comment she gets from the Pigeon is that, if “little girls eat eggs quite

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as much as serpents do […] then they are a kind of serpent: that’s all I can say” (p. 43). Similarly, since you would never consider a dog – that “growls when it’s angry, and wags its tails when it’s pleased” (p. 51) – ‘mad’, well then you must consider a cat ‘mad’, since it behaves the exact opposite way. As simple as that. At the Mad Tea Party, the Dormouse tells (bits and pieces of) a story of three little sisters living at the bottom of a well, a treacle-well: “And so these little sisters – they were learning to draw, you know –” “What did they draw?” said Alice. “Treacle,” said the Dormouse […]. “Where did they draw the treacle from?” “You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter, “so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well – eh, stupid?” (pp. 59–60)

As we see, the homonymy of the two verbs ‘draw’ – as ‘pull out’ and ‘sketch’ – is enough an explanation. Ask no more. This is what is discomforting for Alice, first, and then for the readers who see these worlds through her eyes: words supplant reality, and their combinatory possibilities are more relevant than any form of likeliness or resemblance to our experience of reality.

Advice from a Caterpillar A second level of analysis concerns another dimension of language, namely its function and purpose in context as a channel for communication. According to Halliday, there are two general metafunctions underlying all uses of language, namely “(i) to understand the environment (ideational), and (ii) to act on the others in it (interpersonal)”.9 The ideational (or transactional)10 function pertains to the transfer of information, while the interpersonal is the realm of facework,11 where interlocutors establish their ethos and negotiate their public persona with respect to the situation, the interlocutors and the type of meaning to transmit. The former metafunction hinges on semantic transparency, referential precision and linguistic economy (and this is accounted for by the respect of the maxims of the Principles of Cooperation)12, whereas the latter refers to what in

9 Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, p. xiii. 10 Cf. Gillian Brown and George Yule, Discourse Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 11 Cf. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Interaction (Chicago: Aldine, 1967). 12 Cf. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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linguistics is referred to as (pragmatic) politeness13 – that is to say the awareness of the interlocutors’ face. This dimension contains all the strategies and devices which can be used to make certain meanings appealing, convincing, and easy to process by showing a specific attitude towards the interlocutor, in terms of closeness or distance, inclusion or exclusion, familiarity or formality, etc. This group of markers includes discourse connective, cues, tag questions, and very conventional expressions merely intended to facilitate interaction, yet being semantically empty (i. e. you know, I mean, isn’t it? so, well, etc.). The problem in Alice’s adventures is that here there is no distinction between the two metafunctions and, as a consequence, the ideational dominates over the interpersonal: every word is dealt with as if it had some contextually relevant informative content. And this makes exchanges very odd, or, in pragmatic terms, little felicitous and highly uncooperative. For instance, when Alice reassures the Mouse, still scared by the mentioning of Dinah – Alice’s cat – and says “we wo’n’t talk about her any more” (p. 19), the Mouse objects about the (yet purely conventional) use of the inclusive we: “As if I would talk on such a subject!” (ibid), he replies. The most typical example of the mismatch between the two functions is to be found in the exchange between the Alice and the Caterpillar: “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. […] Alice replied, rather shyly, “I–I hardly know, Sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” “What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!” “I ca’n’t explain myself […] because I’m not myself, you see.” “I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar. […] “Keep your temper!” said the Caterpillar. “Is that all?” said Alice […] “No,” said the Caterpillar. (p. 36)

Alice, at that point, waited for the Caterpillar to complete his utterance, as one would be expected to do in everyday situations, but nothing ‘worth hearing’ (ibid.) came from him. As we see in the extract, the opening question, which could easily have been answered by Alice by simply providing her name, on the basis of convention, is instead taken as a sort of soul-searching question about her own true nature and deeper identity, and as such it is impossible to answer. The same applies to the directive ‘explain yourself ’, which loses the conventional meaning 13 Cf. Robin Lakoff, ‘What You Can Do with Words: Politeness, Pragmatics and Performatives’, in Proceedings of the Texas Conference on Performatives, Presuppositions and Implicatures, ed. by Andy Rogers, Robert Wall & John Murphy (Arlington, VA.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1977), pp. 79–106. Cf. also Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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of ‘explain what you mean’ in favour of less conventional ‘explain who you are’. The Caterpillar’s replica to Alice’s comments also hinges on the literal meaning of the expression rather than its discursive one, so he responds literally to the discourse marker ‘you see’ (in the sense of ‘do you understand?’) by blatantly claiming that he does not see. Finally, he replies to the question ‘is that all?’ (as in ‘is there anything else you want to tell me?’) with a simple ‘no’: of course, a simple piece of advice cannot be ‘all’ that is! There is a whole world in Wonderland, and through the Looking Glass, and plenty of creatures inhabiting it, with their strange stories, ideas, activities (and, for that matter, there’s a whole world outside these worlds, as well). How could a simple remark be all? … and this would be all. Or is it? Is this really all that can be said about Alice and her adventures, Carroll and his writing, or language, its intricacies, assets and shortcomings? And also, is this all that can be said about the person who first pointed me in that direction and got me ready (well, at least not afraid) to navigate through language idiosyncrasies? Of course not. But this is all I can say in 25.000 types. Maybe there is room for another couple of words before calling this a chapter: thank you, AL! Thank you for all.

Imke Polland-Schmandt

Creating Conditions for Compassion in/through Fictions of Brexit: A Reading of Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018) “Our society is full of refusals to imagine one another with empathy and compassion”1

Since the British voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the literary landscape has seen a surge in Brexit fictions,2 so-called ‘BrexLit’,3 stories that either directly refer to Britain leaving the EU, play with historical-political facts as social settings, or allude to broader socio-cultural discourses surrounding the referendum and the issues at stake. These stories are a way of trying to account for this major political incision and the deep fractures it revealed in British society. With ‘fictions of Brexit’ one addresses both the powerful socio-cultural fictions constructed or laid bare in the context of the referendum campaigns as well as the fictional writings about the underlying concerns, beliefs, and narratives. The Brexit vote revealed that the ‘two camps’ fail(ed) to understand each other’s lines of reasoning or – referring to this article’s introductory quote by Martha Nussbaum – that they even “refuse[d] to imagine one another with empathy and compassion”.4 Throughout the Brexit campaign, it was less the reference to facts and logical arguments but rather calls for emotions and sensationalist slogans that succeeded. Roy Sommer pinpointed this situation in his recent article on Brexit as Cultural Performance: “In the right narrative, false 1 Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. xvii. 2 Amongst some of the most well-known publications are Ali Smith’s Autumn (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2016), Douglas Board’s Time of Lies (London: Eye Books, 2017), Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (London: Pereine Press, 2017), Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (London: Abacus, 2017), Ian McEwan’s The Cockroach (London: Vintage, 2019), or John Lanchester’s The Wall (London: Faber & Faber, 2019). 3 Kristian Shaw defines the term as follows: “The term BrexLit concerns fictions that either directly respond or imaginatively allude to Britain’s exit from the EU, or engage with the subsequent socio-cultural, economic, racial or cosmopolitical consequences of Britain’s withdrawal. However, many pre-Brexit Europhobic fictions anticipate the thematic concerns encapsulated by this proposed literary term, including the nostalgic appetite for (an admittedly false) national heritage, anxieties surrounding cultural infiltration, and a mourning for the imperial past”, Kristian Shaw, ‘BrexLit’, in Brexit and Literature. Critical and Cultural Responses, ed. by Robert Eaglestone (London/New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 15–30 (p. 18). 4 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, p. xvii.

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promises create worlds that seem so much more appealing than reality that people forget we’re not living in fiction”.5 Hence, the study of literature and culture has important perspectives to offer that address the beliefs, appealing narratives, and cultural fictions underlying Brexit. While it is true that “[e]ncouraging people to read more literary fiction will not defeat the banality of Brexit”, the capabilities trained through reading may create “the conditions for the return of political judgement”6 and, one may add, of empathy and compassion. Thus, this article argues that ‘practicing the knowledge of literature’ is particularly meaningful and informative in the context of Brexit Britain, in order to gauge the virulent fictions and to reflect on the potentials and cultural work of literature. The question is: how does BrexLit work towards staging and creating understanding and towards negotiating values that enable a society to live well together? In the following, I will briefly discuss the particular case of literary complexity in the context of BrexLit, arguing that, in the current situation, reading may work towards reconstructing the willingness to engage with conflicting views. Subsequently, dialogue and the negotiation of values are explored as two important functions of literary Brexit fictions. This will then be explicated by an analysis of Jonathan Coe’s 2018 novel Middle England.7 Based on a short close reading, I show how a polylogue of diverging attitudes towards the nation is staged and how estrangement is overcome by mutual effort and emotional investment in the future. In this way, the present article demonstrates that the first wave of BrexLit may afford a unique perspective on sense-making processes of negotiating and configurating the stories Britons (want to) live by8 in the aftermath of the referendum.

The Question of (Literary) Complexity in the Context of BrexLit Initially, one might be tempted to think of BrexLit as perhaps slightly reactionary; this impression could be enforced by the fact that some literary works have even been commissioned after the vote. Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut 5 Roy Sommer, ‘Brexit as Cultural Performance: Towards a Narratology of Social Drama’, in Narrative in Culture, ed. by Astrid Erll and Roy Sommer. (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 293–320 (p. 311). 6 Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘The banality of Brexit’, in Brexit and Literature. Critical and Cultural Responses, ed. by Robert Eaglestone (London/New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 15–30 (p. 13). 7 Jonathan Coe, Middle England (London: Viking, 2018). 8 This draws on Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self. Stories Americans Live By (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and his argument that people tell stories – which are based on culturally available characters, themes etc. – to make sense of their lives, to assign meaning, or even purpose, and create coherence.

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(2017), for example, was commissioned by Peirene Press, whose Meike Ziervogel writes in the book’s publisher’s note: The result of the EU referendum shocked me. I realized that I had been living in one part of a divided country. What fears – and what hopes – drove my fellow citizens to vote for Brexit? I commissioned Anthony Cartwright to build a fictional bridge between the two Britains that have opposed each other since the referendum day.9

Ziervogel’s commissioning of a literary work of fiction to “build a bridge” and access the “fears and hopes” of the people, reveals that she is convinced of certain values and potentials of literature. But what do these consist of ? The potentials of literature have been elaborated on by Angela Locatelli, who writes: The encounter with complex literary texts is also conducive to an experience of language which is not provided by other forms of knowledge. I believe […] that the experiences of a discursive plurality, and of a special awareness of language, represent a cultural value in themselves, which does not exclude the fact that literary texts can also be made, and have always been made, functional to specific (and often even opposite) ethical and political projects.10

What singles out the valuable and singular11 knowledge of literary fictions is their complexity consisting of “discursive plurality” and a special use of language. Locatelli further argues that complex texts are “polymorphic, plurivocal, oblique, surprising, provocative, difficult, while at the same time rewarding and entertaining”.12 Their complexity therefore also creates “the social experience of diverging views”13 for the reader; an effect that will be addressed in the analysis section below. The confrontation with different perspectives in literary texts results in the possibility of negotiating norms and values. It is in literature, therefore, that “meanings and morals are put in place and put on trial”.14 This is done through a complex exploration of the particular by which literature provides significant knowledge of (forms of) life. It is “through its special use of language, modes of emplotment, and rhetorical strategies, [that] literature has a special way of

9 Cartwright, The Cut, n. pag. 10 Angela Locatelli, ‘Literature’s Versions of Its Own Transmission of Values’, in Ethics in Culture: the dissemination of values through literature and other media, ed. by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 19–34 (p. 20). 11 See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, (London/New York: Routledge, 2004). 12 Angela Locatelli, ‘“For nothing was simply one thing”: Observations on the Knowledge of Literature’, in La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, ed. by Angela Locatelli (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2004), vol. III, pp. 141–53 (p. 67). 13 Ibid. 14 Stonebridge, Banality of Brexit, p. 9.

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accessing the particular, which it foregrounds and interprets”.15 By presenting specific situations, motivations, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings of characters, by exploring a spatio-temporal situation in detail, complex works of literature may broaden readers’ horizons. This is, however, only achieved through ‘reading widely’, i. e. choosing texts that confront readers with situations, characters, contexts, cultures, or thoughts that differ from their familiar life realities.16 Assuming that luring but escapist socio-cultural fictions could be countered by the knowledge offered by complex literary fictions presupposes that these texts have the respective outreach needed. But many Brexit fictions to date can be regarded as mainly an attempt by Remainers to understand Brexiteers.17 Nonetheless, as Sommer emphasizes, “that is no mean feat, considering that in order to bridge a gap, someone has to start building bridges”.18 The referendum campaigns and public discourses surrounding the Brexit vote revealed that from the perspective of the Remainers, one could not reasonably argue with the Brexiteers, who in turn criticized the Remainers’ allegedly unquestionable cosmopolitanism, their political correctness, and air of moral superiority. Lyndsay Stonebridge summarizes the “banality of Brexit” as being about “a protest against people assuming that other people were stupid”.19 And this is exactly why in the case of Brexit fictions one has to be particularly careful when discussing the literary complexity and potentials of some works of fiction not to make “assumptions about the value of some books over others” and equal it to the value of “some ways of thinking over others”.20 Because in this way, the very same logic underlying the referendum dynamics would be reproduced. Keeping this in mind, one should acknowledge that the activity of reading fictions and thus engaging with perspective-taking can have effects on the cognitive level. As Vera Nünning shows, reading fiction “can improve readers’ abilities to understand other human beings” and “[b]oth factual and fictional stories induce readers to alter and adjust their beliefs; they shape what readers think about facts and causes of events”.21 The activity of reading itself thus fosters some of the most important features that British society in Brexit Britain lacked:

15 Angela Locatelli, ‘Constructing and Deconstructing “Forms of Life”: Life in Literature and the Life of Literature’, in Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses, ed. by Michael Basseler, Daniel Hartley, and Ansgar Nünning (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015), pp. 39–52 (p. 40). 16 See Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds. The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014), p. 301. 17 See Sommer, Brexit as Cultural Performance, p. 309. 18 Ibid. 19 Stonebridge, Banality of Brexit, p. 10. 20 Ibid. 21 Nünning, Reading Fictions, p. 10.

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perspective-taking, identification, and/or empathy. While training these capabilities is arguably of importance, it is central to acknowledge that [f]ictional works can only improve readers’ abilities if and when they are practiced by sharing the thoughts and emotions of characters whose knowledge and attitudes differ from that [sic!] of readers. Otherwise, simulation and perspective taking merely confirm and strengthen readers’ extant modes of thinking.22

It is therefore only by imagining oneself in the position of another, as required when engaging with complex literature, that prejudices can be countered, (unquestioned) assumptions be revised, attitudes altered, and ethical and moral judgement evoked. Especially in the context of Brexit, where mutual prejudices, nostalgic fictions, and nationalist protest came together, Angela Locatelli’s argument about literature can be brought forth to highlight how central reading fiction can be in times of socio-cultural uncertainties. She writes: the exercise of interpretation which literature intrinsically involves is a good antidote against both fundamentalism and pragmatism, and not only technological and economic pragmatism, but also against the monolithic perspective of any dominant and/or rule-based interpretive community. The study of literature lets us know that there are cultures and worlds beyond the ones we inhabit, beyond the fantasies we are immersed in, and beyond the often unacknowledged logic of one’s own behavior.23

It is particularly in the context of Brexit, where people talk at cross-purposes, that this capability could be of central importance for resolving the apparent tensions. Because BrexLit responds to such a specific situation of socio-political upheaval, these texts offer significant insights into the bases on which the conditions for mutual understanding and compassion could be (re-)built.

“You have no idea, do you?”24 – How Literature May Foster Understanding and Renegotiation Processes Two processes needed in such a divided society are empathic engagement with others and a (re-)negotiation of shared values and common frames of reference. For both of them, literature may play a decisive role. First, empathy is the prime example of a mental and emotional capacity trained and enhanced through reading literature.25 As Catherine Z. Elgin argues, “[w]orks of fiction enable us to suspend our own perspective, temporarily take 22 23 24 25

Ibid., p. 302. Angela Locatelli, Literature’s Versions, p. 27. Jonathan Coe, Middle England, p. 283. See, for example, Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Nünning, Reading Fictions.

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up another, and see how things look through other eyes. […] Works of fiction can unsettle complacent convictions, calling into question what we take ourselves to know”.26 By depicting the life of characters including their motivations, thoughts, and feelings and thus by focusing on human experience, literary fictions hold the potential to foster understanding. By way of literary imagination and empathetic reading, fictional works have the capacity to “broaden our emotional horizon and expand the range of emotions which we can identify and understand. They can enable readers to empathically share feelings they have not experienced in their own lives”.27 Second, literary fictions not only explore particular motivations or life situations of characters, but also, through depicting their (inter-)actions and thoughts, consequently, offer knowledge of/about forms of life, meaning sociocultural practices at large. This knowledge is, however, not solely represented in the text, but one has to conceive of literature “as a medium of the representation and reflection, the modeling and construction, of forms of life, lifestyles, and life knowledge”.28 Negotiation processes of values and notions of forms of life are constantly taking place on various levels: it is through a narrative’s formal outset that “unspoken mental assumptions and cultural forms of life” in a particular spatio-temporal setting are presented and scrutinized but also constructed and influenced.29 Literary texts can be conceived of as providing myriad examples of ideals to strive for but also of cautionary tales, dislikable character traits, social interactions gone wrong etc. In this sense one can conceive of literary texts as experiments: Vera and Ansgar Nünning have recently emphasized that “[l]iterary works create aesthetically designed thought and life experiments that test different models of more or less successful ways of life and unsuccessful life plans”.30 It is in the literary realm, therefore, that ‘the stories people live by’ are renegotiated and put to the test. And readers are, in turn, inspired by literary stories

26 Catherine Z. Elgin, ‘The Laboratory of the Mind’, in A Sense of the World. Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge ed. by John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 43–54 (p. 52). 27 Nünning, Reading Fictions, p. 49. 28 Ansgar Nünning, ‘Experiments in Life: Literary and Cultural Studies as a Form of Life Science’, in Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature, pp. 53–74 (p. 61). 29 Ibid. p. 63. 30 Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, ‘Literaturwissenschaft und der eudaimonic turn: Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen zum Lebenswissen der Literatur und zu Axel Hackes Wozu wir da sind als literarisches Gedankenexperiment für ein gelungenes Leben’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 70/1 (2020), pp. 53–83 (p. 55). The original reads: “Literarische Werke entwerfen nämlich ästhetisch gestaltete Gedanken- und Lebensexperimente, die unterschiedliche Modelle mehr oder weniger gelungener Lebensformen und misslingender Lebensentwürfe erproben.”

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and characters to make sense of their own life situations.31 Letting readers experience alternative life situations, actions, and evaluations through the literary process opens up the space for negotiation of their own values and frames of reference, for contextualizing and adjusting them. By providing ‘stories (not) to live by’, BrexLit may, therefore, not only serve to start building bridges, but also contribute to recreating the conditions for living well together based on shared values, frames of reference and compassion.

Experiencing Brexit in Jonathan Coe’s Middle England Covering the time frame of eight years, from 2010 until 2018, and portraying the life stories of more than ten protagonists and further characters throughout his novel, Jonathan Coe manages to create a personalized and embedded version of a multitude of discourses leading to the Brexit vote and to portray its experience. The main characters are well-rounded as they already feature in two earlier works: The Rotter’s Club (2001) and The Closed Circle (2004). But, importantly, readers don’t have to be familiar with these former works to understand Middle England, to follow the plot, and connect to the characters. I would like to take two examples from the novel to illustrate how Coe stages, first, the characters’ relation to the imagined community of the nation and their experiences of coherence despite diverging views. Second, the novel explicates the rift in society revealed by the referendum outcome by way of tracing one couple’s divorce. After that a perspective for the future is hinted at. The first scene I analyze is set in 2012 and describes how the main characters are watching the London Olympics opening ceremony. It starts out by a highly repetitive, almost one-page-long paragraph describing what all of them are doing “[a]t nine o’clock on the evening of Friday, 27 July 2012”.32 The sentence structure does not vary at all and the reader simply gets a list of who is doing what and where, e. g.: “Sophie and Ian were sitting together on the sofa in their flat, watching the Olympic opening ceremony on television. Colin Trotter was alone at home in Rednal, sitting in his armchair, watching the Olympic opening ceremony on television”.33 This creates the impression that all over the country people were engaging in the same activity. Watching the Olympics, hence, is depicted as a 31 See McAdams, Redemptive Self, p. 299, who points out that “[o]ur own life stories draw on the stories we learn as active participants in culture” and that “I will never be just like my most admired hero from history or the movies [or books for that matter], or my most beloved high school coach. But I may borrow pieces of their stories and work them into my own” (ibid., p. 14; addition I.P-S.). 32 Coe, Middle England, p. 129. 33 Ibid.

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joint national experience, a media event that creates a sense of togetherness and belonging. This is first revealed, when one of the protagonists, Philip, watching together with his wife Carol excitedly points out: “‘You know what that is, don’t you?’ said Philip in delight, pointing at the screen with a chopstick. ‘That’s a Pink Floyd reference.’ […] ‘Only you would know that,’ said Carol. ‘Me and a few million others,’ he said”.34 The media event is used as an occasion to portray the feeling of a connection to an imagined community of fellow Englishmen, who share a frame of reference of cultural knowledge and experience. This is even carried further as other characters are presented to experience a surge of national pride: Like Sophie, Doug had approached the opening ceremony in a mood of scepticism. Like her, he watched it with a mounting sense of admiration that was soon bordering on awe. […] And what he felt while watching it were the stirrings of an emotion he hadn’t experienced for years – had never really experienced at all, perhaps, having grown up in a household where all expressions of patriotism had been considered suspect: national pride. Yes, why not come straight out and admit it, at this moment he felt proud, proud to be British, proud to be part of a nation which had not only achieved such great things but could now celebrate them with such confidence and irony and lack of self-importance.35

Tracing his own way to realization and following his reflection of his own feelings, creates the possibility of empathic understanding for a perspective one would perhaps be critical of. But this presentation of Doug’s feelings is rendered comprehensible and seems to be genuine because of his very hesitancy. The fact that he has to admit these feelings to himself and then relativizes them through a reference to irony and alleged British traits like restraint, lets readers sympathize with him and relate to the sentiments of national pride, strengthened by the repetition of the word ‘proud’. At the same time, however, this scene contrasts his attitude with other facets of national pride as expressed by the older protagonists. Readers can thus gauge different nuances of this feeling and recognize typical complaints they have become familiar with during the Brexit campaign, e. g. respective the notion of political correctness: Colin enjoyed the celebration of British history as well. […] The only thing that annoyed him was that they had to include a reference to the arrival of HMS Windrush, and Britain’s first Jamaican immigrants. ‘Oh, here we go,’ he muttered into his lager, as soon as he saw the actors. ‘The bloody political correctness brigade are at it again…’36 34 Ibid. p. 130. 35 Ibid., p. 131–2. 36 Ibid., p. 132. Similarly, Ian’s mother Helena is also estranged by the performance of black actors playing Victorian industrialists. She asks herself: “Why did they have to do that? Why? Did people have no respect for history anymore?” (ibid., p. 130–1; emphasis in original).

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The fact that Colin voices this complaint by ‘muttering into his lager’ mocks the nationalist spirit. Similarly, other reactions and opinions are criticized subliminally by way of their representation: For example, Ian’s sudden upsurge of patriotic feelings is depicted as an almost child-like reaction and emotional outburst. While, at first, Ian loses interest in the ceremony very quickly, “became restless, got up to get more beers from the fridge, emptied some crisps into a bowl”, his attention is caught by James Bond actor Daniel Craig and the staging of the Queen’s entry to the ceremony. [T]he effect of these elements – the Queen! James Bond! The Union Jack! – was to induce in Ian an almost orgasmic surge of patriotic excitement, so that he leaped to his feet and shouted ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ – and then threw himself down next to Sophie, enfolding her in a tight hug and kissing her again and again.37

The list of exclamations and repetition together with the imagery drawing on bodily pleasures, lets his reaction appear rather emotionalized or irrational. By contrasting generational differences in attitudes, but also by familiarizing his readers with corresponding differences in educational, class, or geographic backgrounds of his characters, Coe manages to turn this scene into a polylogue of impressions, feelings, and attitudes towards the nation that offers wide-ranged identification potentials. In this way the scene also – perhaps quite bluntly – reproduces the distribution of views across Britain, which were later revealed by the Brexit votes: e. g. that the older generation living in the countryside complains about political correctness, sports a distorted nostalgia, and consequently votes leave. Even though these characterizations might seem stereotypical at first sight, the plurality created in this scene affords perspective-taking across a whole range of attitudes. In this manner, views and related values are up for negotiation. With the benefit of hindsight – i. e. with the knowledge of common views taken throughout the referendum campaigns – Coe was able to dialogically juxtapose the diverging opinions and sentiments towards the nation, its history, and the community. The network of family and friends presented in Coe’s novel encounters situations which prompt confrontation and interaction with members of other social, cultural, or ideological groups. Multiperspectivity is employed in order to explore the different mindsets, motivations, and imaginaries and to stage (failed) dialogue. In the novel, this is carried further as the referendum draws nearer and it escalates when the results are revealed. The most telling example of a situation questioning and trying to reconcile opposing views in a manner that is supposed to foster mutual understanding is Sophie and her husband Ian’s relationship counselling session after they broke up because of “a difference of opinion over 37 Ibid., p. 133.

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whether Britain should be a member of the European Union or not”.38 Their relationship and separation can be regarded as emblematic for the situation in Britain at large and their decision to resort to counselling, consequently, as an acknowledgement of the fact that what is lost is respect and understanding. Sophie reflects on their separation in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum and realizes that it had not so much been a reason as a tipping point. Ian had reacted (to her mind) so bizarrely to the referendum result, with such gleeful, infantile triumphalism […] that, for the first time, she genuinely realized that she no longer understood why her husband thought and felt the way that he did.39

The lack of understanding between the different narrative communities is thus presented as the central problem. This realization – notably by the Remain-voter Sophie – is the reason for them seeking to re-enter into dialogue and to reestablish common ground. During their first session, Lorna, the counsellor, seeks to understand the root of their estrangement. She asks: ‘Sophie, why are you so angry that Ian voted Leave? And Ian, why are you so angry that Sophie voted Remain?’ Sophie had thought for a long time before answering: ‘I suppose because it made me think that, as a person, he’s not as open as I thought he was. That his basic model for relationships comes down to antagonism and competition, not cooperation.’ Lorna had nodded, and turned to Ian, who had answered: ‘It makes me think that she’s very naive, that she lives in a bubble and can’t see how other people around her might have a different opinion to hers. And this gives her a certain attitude. An attitude of moral superiority’.40

What becomes clear at this point – right after the referendum – is that no dialogue is effectively possible, as both parties are convinced they have a better grasp of the situation and thus talk at cross-purposes. Therefore, the very conditions for dialogue would have to be re-established first. In this situation, understandably, the counselling fails to reconciliate the two and they separate. However, in the course of the novel, the couple gets back together. It is by way of interference of a third party – notably the immigrant employee of Ian’s mother – that Sophie is induced to seek reconciliation after being told that Ian has fallen out with his mother over her racist attitude. Sophie interprets this as a sign that he has come to his senses and therefore returns to him. In terms of the overall stance of the novel, it is quite telling that it is the Leave-voter, Ian, who has to ‘see reason’ and change his attitude before the Remainer, Sophie, makes the first step towards dialogue. Therefore, while Coe stages various perspectives and opinions, the underlying values suggested are cosmopolitan ones. In this way, Middle England 38 Ibid., p. 326. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p. 327.

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fits into the first wave of Brexit fictions, which tend to “espouse an outwardlooking cosmopolitan engagement as a form of resistance to an increasingly nationalistic and inward-looking cultural landscape”.41 The development of Sophie and Ian’s relationship over the course of the novel stands exemplarily for the rift that opens up between the ‘camps’ but also the bridge that can be and is built. The novel emphasizes the fact that this bridge is not only based on effort alone – symbolized by the couple therapy – but also needs the individual realization that understanding requires an open-minded willingness to engage with each other’s views. Importantly, it is also fostered through the process of reading itself. Dialogue is thus both staged in the novel and set in motion within the reader. By the end of the novel the couple’s consolidation is crowned with Sophie’s pregnancy. Their child is due the very date that was set for Britain’s exit from the EU at the time the novel was published: March 29, 2019. In the final passage, one learns that the baby is “Sophie and Ian’s tentative gesture of faith in their equivocal, unknowable future: their beautiful Brexit baby”.42 This somewhat kitschy ending seems to be rather flat at first. Nonetheless, the stance of activating utopia’s principle energy of hope, does more than build a bridge: This baby stands for a whole new generation, a new ground on which to (re-)organize a rejoined British society. The divided generation, it seems to be the implicit demand, should thus not pass down their deadlocked opinions and patterns of thinking. No matter how divided the national community might be, as long as people try to communicate and try to understand each other, there is hope for the future. Indeed, this is an endeavor that many works of BrexLit engage in, albeit until now largely from the Remainer’s perspective.

Conclusion: Towards the Construction of a More Compassionate World? The examples briefly discussed above show how Coe’s novel explores first, the differing attitudes towards and projections of what the nation is about and second, the personalized experience of mutual estrangement resulting from political but also cultural beliefs that are in turn based on socio-economic and geographic backgrounds. The literary fictions steadily written, produced, spread, and read surrounding Brexit and its socio-cultural, economic, and political consequences work to unhinge those fictions purported by the divided narrative communities. Angela 41 Shaw, BrexLit, p. 28. 42 Coe, Middle England, p. 421.

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Locatelli has recently pointed out that literature “conveys events as they are lived and experienced by their protagonists in a precise spatial and temporal context. This phenomenological perspective makes literary narratives a relevant form of historical knowledge”.43 Therefore, it is the subjectivization of events, the exploration of how they are felt and experienced by the people affected, that marks the benefit of their literary explorations. By bringing in concrete political events as contextual framework, e. g. by citing newspaper headlines, television statements of prominent politicians, or even celebrity tweets, Middle England links characters’ specific situations, attitudes, and feelings to political realities and thus offers a personalized experience and evaluation of Brexit and of Britain in the 21st century. It thus provides an appealing narrative with some complexity that may be able to efficiently scrutinize both the enticing populist narratives so virulent in the context of the Brexit referendum, and the seemingly unquestioned moral superiority of the cosmopolitan elite (which is no less exclusive of others’ views as it dismisses them as irrational instead of acknowledging the circumstances they result from and the fears they build on). Facing the insecurities and divides revealed by the referendum outcome, it is no wonder that most of the first-wave Brexit fictions deal with Britain itself instead of its European relations.44 The surge of novels about Brexit, its discourses, and underlying socio-cultural issues are attempts at making sense of this reality. And with Angela Locatelli, one can conclude with the anticipation that literature “provides a unique contribution not only to the development of emotional and intellectual sophistication, but also to the enhancement of our problem-solving faculties, hopefully oriented towards the construction of the more just and compassionate world”.45 Particularly pertaining to the currently (Dis-)United Kingdom, meeting socio-cultural fictions with literary fictions may be one of the best ways to reinstate the ground for understanding, judgement and, ultimately, compassion.

43 Angela Locatelli, ‘Traces of European Crises and resilience in Contemporary British Literature: A Reading of Julian Barnes’s Pulse and Chris Cleave’s Incendiary’, in Europe’s Crises and Cultural Resources of Resilience: Conceptual Explorations and Literary Negotiations, ed. by Imke Polland, Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning and Sandro M. Moraldo (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2020), pp. 169–82 (p. 169). 44 See Shaw, BrexLit, p. 27–8. 45 Angela Locatelli, ‘Plurivocal Narration as an Empathetic Response of Resistance to Colonial Prejudice. Writing Alterity in The Voyage Out’, Le Simplegadi XVII/19 (2019), 53–64 (p. 63).

Emanuel Stelzer

Talismanic Texts

1.

Communing with Books

Jeanette Winterson, referring to The Gap of Time (2015), her rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,1 has stated: “All of us have talismanic texts that we have carried around and that carry us around. I have worked with The Winter’s Tale in many disguises for many years”.2 This essay wishes to investigate the notion of what a “talismanic text” may be, particularly focusing on the interaction between talismanic texts and authors. What kind of “disguises” does a talismanic text adopt? What types of intertextuality does it produce? What ‘work’ does it perform? A talisman is not merely a good luck charm. The word ultimately derives, via the Arabic noun tilsam, from the Greek verb telein: to fulfil, to perform, to ˙ consecrate. It is an “alteration of late Greek telesma, ‘completion, religious rite’”.3 This etymology signals the two semantic nuclei of the term: fulfilling and sacredness. It is true that some books have been called talismans of whole generations: for instance, it has been claimed that “Pilgrim’s Progress was a talismanic book during the period 1870–1914” for the British working class,4 or that “the Ruba˘iya¯t became a talismanic book for the [Aesthetic Movement], who responded to its hedonistic affirmation of the pleasures of the here and now”.5 1 Winterson’s book spearheaded a series of rewritings of Shakespeare’s plays by well-known authors: the Hogarth Shakespeare Project. 2 Quoted in Dennis Abrams, ‘Tales from Shakespeare Retold by Modern Novelists’ (2013), https://publishingperspectives.com/2013/06/tales-from-shakespeare-retold-by-modern-novel ists/ (last accessed: 24. 05. 2020). 3 Elizabeth Knowles, Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), s.v. “talisman”. 4 Charles Walter Masters, The Respectability of Late Victorian Workers: A Case Study of York: 1867–1914 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), p. 1. 5 Susan Owens, ‘Literature and the Aesthetic Movement’, in The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1890, ed. by Stephen Calloway (London: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 2011), pp. 40–59 (p. 44).

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However, Winterson’s notion seems to privilege a subjective dimension. A talismanic text is more than a livre de chevet: for a text to be talismanic, it must have a profound impact on the reader’s life and establish strong emotional connections, such as a sense of communion, pleasure, and hope. The talismanic workings of a book on an author seem to evade Bloomian ‘anxieties of influence’ and resist the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ as formulated by Paul Ricœur. But far from being amoral or solipsistic, the effects of a talismanic text may well be understood within a conception of literature as “a ‘training in wonder’”, wonder being “an irreplaceable source of poetic, philosophical and scientific knowledge”.6

2.

Talismanic Intertextuality: The Winter’s Tale in Jeanette Winterson’s Oeuvre

While it is true that the “common denominator of all her books from 2004 onwards is actually her reuse of the classics: Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Lighthousekeeping; Robinson Crusoe in The Stone Gods; the myth of Atlas in Weight”,7 to which we may add Frankenstein in Frankisstein: A Love Story (2019, her latest novel at the moment of writing), Winterson’s relationship with The Winter’s Tale is more profound and has marked her whole authorial career. Winterson calls The Winter’s Tale her “private text”, a description which may surprise, considering the status of Shakespeare in English-language, and indeed, world culture: I wrote this cover version [i. e. The Gap of Time] because the play has been a private text for me for more than thirty years. By that I mean part of the written wor(l)d I can’t live without; without, not in the sense of lack, but in the old sense of living outside of something.8

To use Genettian terminology, The Gap of Time should be considered a hypertext of The Winter’s Tale,9 whereby a hypertext “can be read for itself and in its

6 Angela Locatelli, ‘Orpheus: The Tutelary Deity’, in La conoscenza della Letteratura / The Knowledge of Literature, ed. by Angela Locatelli, 10 vols (Bergamo: Sestante Edizioni, 2009), VIII, 7–13, (pp. 10–11). 7 Elisa Bolchi, ‘“Existences holding hands”: Winterson Retelling Shakespeare’, Altre Modernità, 11 (2017), 60–75 (p. 61). 8 Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time (London: Hogarth Press, 2015), p. 267. 9 For readings of The Gap of Time, see Bolchi, ‘Existences’; Silvia Antosa, ‘“That which is lost is found”: Jeanette Winterson riscrive The Winter’s Tale di William Shakespeare’, in William Shakespeare e Miguel de Cervantes: I pilastri della modernità, ed. by Silvia Antosa and Trinis Antonietta Messina Fajardo (Bologna: CLUEB, 2018), pp. 51–66; Paul Joseph Zajac, ‘Distant

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relation to its hypotext”,10 but Winterson does more than invite the competent reader to the “double reading”11 typical of the hypotext/hypertext model. In a sort of preface, called “The Original”, she provides a synopsis of the play and sketches its themes; her rewriting of the play is then heralded as “The Cover Version”. No reader is supposed to approach her text without knowing that it is a tribute to Shakespeare’s play. The action is transplanted to contemporary London and a deep-south U.S. city; King Leontes is Leo, an arrogant hedge-fund manager; Queen Hermione becomes MiMi, a French chanteuse; King Polixenes is Xeno, a videogame designer, etc. As a person, Winterson feels implicated in the action of the play (“It’s a play about a foundling. And I am”);12 as an author, she keeps writing and thinking through it. In her poignant “sort-of memoir”,13 Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011), Winterson refers to a characteristic of her writing: “I tend to work obsessively with texts, and I embed them in my work”.14 Intertextuality is thus coded as an “obsession”, a compulsion that cannot be controlled, which Winterson avowedly connects with an autobiographical factor. Winterson “acknowledges the profound impact of her adoption on her writing”,15 when she states: “I have written love narratives and loss narratives — stories of longing and belonging. It all seems obvious now — the Wintersonic obsession of love, loss and belonging”.16 And Winterson explains further why she finds The Winter’s Tale so resonant: The Winter’s Tale. My favourite Shakespeare play: an abandoned baby. A sick world which shall not be righted again if ‘that which is lost be not found’. Read that line. Not ‘that which was lost’ or ‘has been lost’. Instead, ‘is lost’. The grammar shows us how serious is the loss. Something that happened a long time ago, yes — but not the past. This is the old present, the old loss still wounding each day.17

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Bedfellows: Shakespearean Struggles of Intimacy in Winterson’s The Gap of Time’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59 (2018), 332–45. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 397. Angela Locatelli, ‘Intertextuality: Theory and Practice’, Merope, 8 (1996), 5–18 (p. 14). Winterson, The Gap of Time, p. 268. Jeanette Winterson, ‘On Accrington: “I love the north; our energy, toughness, humour”’ (2018), http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/journalism/accrington-love-north-energy-tough ness-humour/ (last accessed: 24. 08. 2020). Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), p. 160. Reina Van der Wiel, Literary Aesthetics of Trauma: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 208. Winterson, Why Be Happy, p. 160. Winterson, Why Be Happy, p. 161.

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The perspective given by Winterson is inextricably autobiographical: she too was an “abandoned baby” who was adopted. This would presuppose an identification with Perdita, the Sicilian princess stranded on the “deserts of Bohemia” after her father, King Leontes, does not acknowledge her as his own child, even contradicting Apollo’s oracle, thereby dooming himself and all his family to anguish and misery. And Winterson writes that a whole world is “sick” as a consequence. Rationally, this cannot be right (think of the minimisation of Icarus’ fall in Pieter Brueghel’s famous painting, as pondered by W.H. Auden in Musée des Beaux Arts, 1938). Aesthetically, it feels right. Besides being the story of a foundling, the reversibility of time is another aspect of Shakespeare’s play that seems to particularly captivate Winterson. Liquid imagery “is almost always there in Winterson’s novels as if to reflect the problematic nature of time” (Özyurt Kılıç 2009: xv).18 In one of her early novels, The Passion (1987), the narrator describes Venice as a “a city surrounded by water with watery alleys”, a “city of mazes”, where “there is no such thing as straight ahead”.19 More relevantly, the reader is interpellated: “here, in this mercurial city, it is required you do awake your faith”.20 It is an embedded quotation from The Winter’s Tale (5.3.94–5):21 these are exactly the words uttered by Paulina in the final scene, when she prepares Leontes (and, metatheatrically, the audience) for the wondrous coming-to-life of Hermione’s statue. Similarly, in Art & Lies (1994), the author puts in the mouth of a character, Handel, the words: “That which is lost is found”,22 commenting on the abandonment of a baby — as already seen, a hidden quotation from Shakespeare’s play (3.2.133). In her second book for children, The Battle of the Sun (2010), which is set in Elizabethan England, a mother has been transformed into stone and at the end is returned to her son: the source inspiring Winterson is unmistakable. Shakespeare himself appears in The Daylight Gate (2012), a novel about the Lancaster Witch Trials of 1612. The main character, Alice Nutter (who historically was one of the women who were hanged for witchcraft), faints during a household production of The Tempest. Shakespeare attends to her and asks: Tell me, do you think a stone statue can come to life? I have used that device in a play I am still revising called The Winter’s Tale. The end cannot succeed unless you believe,

18 Mine Özyurt Kılıç, ‘Introduction’, in Winterson Narrating Time and Space, ed. by Margaret JM Sönmez and Mine Özyurt Kılıç (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. ix– xxx (p. xv). 19 Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (New York: Grove Press, 2007), p. 49. 20 Winterson, The Passion, p. 49. 21 All quotations from The Winter’s Tale refer to the Arden edition, ed. by John Pitcher (London: Methuen, 2010). 22 Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies (London: Vintage Books, 2013), e-book, n.n.

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just for a moment, that a statue could perhaps step down and embrace you. Return what you had lost.23

Shakespeare tells Alice that “[t]here are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind”, and warns her not to openly question the reality “that is clear to others” with the one that is clear to her.24 This is linked to the third element of The Winter’s Tale that seems to interest Winterson: the capacity to suspend one’s disbelief as well as to fashion a world of alternative futures (to which we will return shortly). When one turns to Winterson’s non-fiction, the reader finds a more pragmatic approach to The Winter’s Tale. In her essay ‘A Work of My Own’, she compares herself to a pedlar who depends on her ability to catch the attention of the bystanders: I pack my pages with shiny things even though I am a writer who does not use plot as an engine or a foundation […] I am not particularly interested in folk tales or fairy tales, but I do have them about my person, and like Autolycus (The Winter’s Tale), I find that they are assumed to be worth more than they are.25

Which means that Perdita is not the only character Winterson feels an affinity to. As an author, she feels more akin to Autolycus, the rogue who steals, sings, and sells ballads. She repeated this association in an interview: writers should always be trusted because they are rather like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, rather dubious characters with pockets full of ribbons and coins and some things of immense value, and some things that are entirely worthless, and you’re never quite sure what you might buy from them.26

Shakespeare’s play may be Winterson’s “talismanic text”, but she shows herself aware of the different perspectives constitutive of a dramatic text. She does not naively identify with just one character, nor is quixotically oblivious to the difference between the world of the play and that of real life. But she believes that Shakespeare’s fictive world can enable her, and her readers, to cope with reality by interrogating ourselves and making us embrace otherness. This can happen through what she calls the redemptive power of imagination: Leontes and Lear, Macbeth and Richard II, are studies in the failure of the imagination. In The Winter’s Tale, the redemption of Leontes is made possible through a new capacity in him; the capacity to see outside of his own dead vision into a chance as vibrant 23 Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate (London: Hammer, 2012), p. 91. 24 Winterson, The Daylight Gate, p. 92. 25 Jeanette Winterson, ‘A Work of My Own’, in Id., Art Objects: Essays on Ecstacy and Effrontery (London: Random House, 2013), e-book, n.n. 26 Margaret Reynolds, ‘Interview with Jeanette Winterson’, in Jeanette Winterson: The Essential Guide, ed. by Jonathan Noakes and Margaret Reynolds (London: Random House, 2012), ebook. n.n.

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as it is unlikely. When Paulina says to him, “It is required you do awake your faith” she does not mean religious faith. If the statue of Hermione is to come to life, Leontes must believe it can come to life. This is not common sense. It is imagination.27

Importantly, Winterson explains what she means by “talismanic” in a passage in which she reflects on her attempts at going beyond realism: Fiction is a leap of faith. Leaping takes energy, from the reader and from the writer, and we are living in a time when fiction is becoming more like a guided tour, a documentary, as close to ‘real life’ as possible, a mimic, a recording angel. […] I hoped that the narrative naturalism of film, and television in particular, would free up the novel from its dreary burden of ‘life as it is lived’, and allow it the talismanic and imaginative properties of poetry, where language, and ambition for the form itself, would be more important, and more interesting than everyday narrative.28

It follows that Winterson attributes to poetry a genuine talismanic quality that transcends time while remaining secular, and which may be infused into prose as a reparative power. Winterson recalls that, in her early writings, she “[went] for the talismanic, not worrying much about the plot”.29 To recapitulate, The Winter’s Tale encompasses almost all the Genettian “restrictive”30 categories of transtextuality in Winterson’s works: intertextuality (through citation and allusion), paratextuality (e. g. the title of The Gap of Time, a quotation from the play, and the subtitle: The Winter’s Tale Retold), metatextuality (in her non-fiction), and hypertextuality (most evidently, in her rewriting of the play). The missing type is architextuality (a relationship according to literary genre): Winterson has yet to write a tragicomedy, or a dramatic romance. However, broadly speaking, Winterson’s confession of being fixated on “love narratives and loss narratives — stories of longing and belonging” may be read as touching also this type of relationship. In order to understand what ‘work’ Shakespeare’s play does as Winterson’s talismanic text, we need to confront the question of intertextual affect.

3.

The Pleasure of Talismanic Texts

Shifting the focus from authorial intent to readers’ meaning-making processess, and in keeping with his notion of text as a process, Roland Barthes suggested a rather playful typology of readers’ pleasures: 27 28 29 30

Winterson, Art Objects, n.n.. Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping (London: Harper, 2004), p. 21, italics mine. Winterson, Why Be Happy, p. 42. Locatelli, ‘Intertextuality’, p. 13.

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We can imagine a typology of the pleasures of reading — or of the readers of pleasure; it would not be sociological, for pleasure is not an attribute of either product or production; it could only by psychoanalytic, linking the reading neurosis to the hallucinated form of the text. The fetishists would be matched with the divided-up text, the singling out of quotations, formulae, turns of phrase, with the pleasure of the word. The obsessive would experience the voluptuous release of the letter, of secondary, disconnected languages, of metalanguages (this class would include all the logophiles, linguists, semioticians, philologists: all those for whom language returns). A paranoiac would consume or produce complicated texts, stories developed like arguments, constructions posited like games, like secrete constrains. As for the hysteric (so contrary to the obsessive), he would be the one who takes the text for ready money, who joins in the bottomless, truthless comedy of language, who is no longer the subject of any critical scrutiny and throws himself across the text (which is quite different from projecting himself into it).31

We have established that Winterson, when stating that The Winter’s Tale is her “private”, “talismanic” text, does not mean that she projects herself into it completely: there is a kind of distancing. Winterson never forgets that Shakespeare’s plays are fictional and that they work because their author needed them to be successful for financial reasons; i. e. she understands literature as a form of entertainment. Like Barthes’ fetishist, Winterson revels in the “pleasure of the word”; like the “obsessive”, she looks for secondary languages and their cultural effect, and like the “paranoiac”, she looks at the play as a complex game. This multiplicity of approaches to her talismanic text signals that Winterson’s love for The Winter’s Tale is strong but is not ingenuous. Paul Ricoeur traced the lineage of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ to the writings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, characterising them as “the primary architects of a distinctly modern style of interpretation that is driven by a desire to demystify, an adamant refusal to take words at face value”.32 The hermeneutics of suspicion disparages passionate responses to a text. Reading ‘for pleasure’ is sometimes seen as a quaint hobby even by the people in academia who should care most about the future of the humanities. What has been called the “eudaimonic turn” in criticism has been trying to redress this problem.33 According to Rita Felski, “the malaise of critique could […] free us up to reassess our current 31 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. by Richard Miller (New York: Noonday Press, 1975). 32 Rita Felski, ‘Suspicious Minds’, Poetics Today, 32 (2011), 215–34, p. 216. 33 See James Pawelski and D. J. Moores (eds), The Eudaimonic Turn: Well-Being in Literary Studies (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). I am obliged to Prof. Ansgar Nünning and Prof. Vera Nünning for drawing my attention to these developments through their paper presented at their opening lecture at the international workshop ‘Translation and Interpretation as Literary and Epistemic Practices’ (University of Bergamo, 29 September 2019).

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ways of reading and reasoning: to experiment with modes of argument less tightly bound to exposure, the demystification, and the lure of the negative”.34 “The immersion in an aesthetic experience leads to the valorization of previously unexpected sensations and feelings, and/or to the modification of associated valorizations”,35 because enjoyment in reading “pluralizes meanings”36 and has an embodied dimension, already envisaged by Barthes: “Reading is the gesture of the body (for of course one reads with one’s body) which by one and the same movement posits and perverts its order: an interior supplement of perversion”.37 Looking at talismanic texts from this perspective can help us better understand this category. Exactly because they can be so personal and intimate, it is difficult to say whether someone we know has a talismanic text, unless they tell us. In the case of authors, this is even more complicated by the different ways they may choose to articulate their relationship with it. The relationships between, say, Petrarch and St Augustine, or Iris Murdoch and Plato are extremely fraught. A more fruitful avenue is probably the case of the relationship of Margery Kempe (ca. 1373-after 1438) with the Scriptures. Kempe is the author of, arguably, the first autobiography in the English language: The Book of Margery Kempe (1438). There, Kempe relates her life, including her mystical experiences and her pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Rome. Some of the most memorable passages are those in which she describes her visions in realistic detail. She offers her help to the pregnant St. Anne; she cares for and dresses the young Mary until her marriage with Joseph; she prepares a hot drink to comfort Mary at the time of the crucifixion; she discusses at length her ultimately erotic bond with Jesus. Anna Wilson casts a fresh perspective on this medieval author: Kempe effectively “imagines herself into the Gospels as a speaking character, interacting with the Holy family and the disciples” and the book becomes her own Biblical, timetravelling “fanfiction”.38 Kempe “insert[ed] herself as a character into the story, the better to feel, to experience, and to be affected by, the events of Christ’s life”.39 It has been claimed that Kempe’s self-portrayal as illiterate is a “deliberate self34 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 119–20. 35 Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Cambridge and Malden MA, Polity Press, 2017), p. 150 (author’s italics have been removed). 36 Zahi Zalloua, ‘Editor’s Column: Reading Enjoyment’, The Comparatist, 39 (2015), 1–5 (p. 1). 37 Quoted in Zalloua, ‘Editor’s Column’, p. 1. 38 Anna Wilson, “Full-Body Reading”, Aeon (10 November 2016), https://aeon.co/essays/how-a -medieval-mystic-was-the-first-creator-of-fanfiction (last accessed: 24.08–2020). For another articulation of this notion, see the paper presented by Godelinde Gertrude Perk, ‘“‘Birgitta Never Saw Me This way”: The Book of Margery Kempe as Competitive Fan Fiction’, at the ‘Gender and Status Competition in Premodern Societies’ workshop at Umeå Universitet, 26–7 November 2015. 39 Raymond A. Powell, ‘Margery Kempe: An Exemplar of Late Medieval English Piety’, The Catholic Historical Review, 89 (2003), 1–23 (p. 10).

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construction”,40 and the notion of the Bible as her talismanic ‘text’ must be taken broadly, encompassing aural knowledge and non-verbal tradition. However, what clearly emerges is that she does not go against tradition, but luxuriates in her capacity to inscribe herself into the narrative, “where her own imagined participation in biblical events realizes for her a newly experienced way of knowing them”.41 Interestingly, also Winterson inserts herself into the narrative in The Gap of Time — a strategy which we would normally describe as typically postmodern,42 but which, in fact, is apparently centuries old. In her novel, Winterson has Leo read the Wikipedia page of his wife, MiMi. In the “Early Life” section, the reader finds this sentence: “MiMi made her acting debut in 2002 onstage at Théâtre National de Chaillot in Deborah Warner’s adaptation of The Powerbook—a novel by the British writer Jeanette Winterson”.43 Or when, at the end, Winterson-asnarrator takes the floor: “So we leave them now, in the theatre, with the music. I was sitting at the back, waiting to see what would happen […]”.44 Both Kempe and Winterson do not represent their authorial engagement with their talismanic text as a Bloomian agon driven by the anxiety of influence; they most certainly do not feel cursed with belatedness. For Kempe, the Bible is a book of timeless truth and her authorial activity signifies, articulates, and facilitates her religious faith. Winterson, on her part, perhaps exactly because her talismanic text is a dramatic text, appreciates the multiplicity of perspectives onto which it is built. In fact, she manages to insert multiple points of view also in her novel. Winterson recognises the centrality of Shakespeare in Western culture and of his impact on the English language, and claims that Shakespeare’s ability to portray human emotions and socio-political issues is what makes him unique, which does not mean that he is the universal genius hailed by bardolaters.

40 Jacqueline Jenkins, ‘Reading and The Book of Margery Kempe’, in A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 113–28 (p. 113). 41 Barry Windeatt, ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Id., (London: Penguin, 2005), e-book, n.n. 42 Another ‘postmodern’ device is the fact that Pauline, the Paulina character in The Gap of Time metafictionally quotes from The Winter’s Tale: “‘There’s an old saying,’ said Pauline. ‘What’s past help should be past grief ’. ‘That’s Shakespeare,’ said Tony. ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ said Pauline” (Winterson, The Gap of Time, p. 103). 43 Winterson, The Gap of Time, p. 49. 44 Winterson, The Gap of Time, p. 267.

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When people say Shakespeare was for all time, or timeless, what they are really saying is he had this capacity to plug into the hotspots of the human situation, like sexual jealousy, betrayal, the way that old men just hold everything up.45

Moreover, Winterson has selected one of his plays as her talismanic text. As a reader as well as an author, she does not seem particularly interested in the sources of Shakespeare’s play or in specific aspects of staging, but her ongoing engagement with The Winter’s Tale centres on the story, the language, and, in particular, the emotions that she feels when viewing and reading it. Both authors’ relationships with the talismanic text is ultimately an emotional bond — which begs the question whether there is a difference between religious and secular talismanic texts. The differences in type and degree of truth claims on the part of religion and of fiction are a subject of heated controversy.46 Still, it can be said that, although religious emotions are, “like all other emotions, historically and culturally specific”, they are special: religious emotion differs from others in terms of the individual’s conception of the divine, both as ‘object’ and as ‘addressee’ […] The uniqueness of religious emotion is then determined within a triangular relationship, centred in the feeling and sentient subject, and branching out towards the imagined/posited object and towards the addressee of the emotion.47

Given the subjective quality of human emotions, as well as their cultural specificity, it would probably be misleading to say that when one reads one’s talismanic text, one feels the “oceanic feeling” described by Romain Rolland as the sensation of bliss and communion generated by religious experience, and investigated by Freud. One may posit that, whereas religious talismanic texts may make their readers live ‘by the book’, secular talismanic texts may invite their reader to live ‘through’ them — privileging the conative-prescriptive dimension of religious texts over their affective import. However, this notion could also be misleading: both secular and religious texts are affective/affecting narratives making different types of epistemological claims (one may remember Philip Sidney’s dictum, the poet “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth”). Both are potentially empowering and can produce Barthes’ ego-assuring plaisir as well as unsettling jouissance. 45 Quoted in Hope Whitmore, ‘How Author Jeanette Winterson Reimagined One of Shakespeare’s “Problem Plays”’, Vice (25 December 2015), https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k wx9bn/jeanette-winterson-and-the-gap-of-time-527 (last accessed: 24. 08. 2020). 46 See Angela Locatelli, ‘Suspensions of Disbelief: Myth, Religion, and Literature’, in La conoscenza della Letteratura / The Knowledge of Literature, ed. by Angela Locatelli, 10 vols (Bergamo: Sestante Edizioni, 2009), VIII, 165–78. 47 Angela Locatelli, ‘Emotions And/In Religion: Reading Sigmund Freud, Rudolph Otto, and William James’, in Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, ed. by Ingeborg Jandl et al. (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017), pp. 77–95 (p. 93).

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Conclusion

When someone tells us that a book has changed their life, or that they see themselves as the protagonist of a fictional work, our reaction may be easily sceptical or cynical, and accuse the speaker of bovarism. But this approach implies a rejection of fiction’s power to increase empathy and stimulate cognitive appraisal. Readers experience pleasure in their talismanic text, not delusion. Winterson feels joy in experiencing, over and over, the ambiguity of The Winter’s Tale, and this aspect is crucial: according to recent psychological studies, “inducing readers’ moral reasoning is one of the aspects that heighten their fascination with a given text”.48 The exercise of “feeling like” a fictional character and living through the imaginative world of a text responds to a human cognitive need to fill the gaps. In the case of an author’s own works, the intertextual references to their talismanic text have an embodied, affective dimension. Winterson acknowledges Shakespeare’s works as being at the heart of the Western canon, but, at the same time, appeals to an ‘intimate’ Shakespeare, as his words “stick like velcro on the soul”.49 Whose soul? Apparently, hers, and that of her own readers.

48 Vera Nünning, ‘The Affective Value of Fiction: Presenting and Evoking Emotions’, in Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, ed. by Ingeborg Jandl et al. (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017), 29–54 (p. 44). 49 Quoted in Stephen O’Neill, ‘Quoting Shakespeare in Digital Culture’, in Shakespeare and Quotation, ed. by Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbold (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 275–85, (p. 275).

Isabel Capeloa Gil

Slow Motion. (Post) Colonial Time Narrating Modernity Against the Grain1 They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out there. Toni Morrison, Paradise Time exists for me because I have a present. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

In the time of speed, connections and networks, I come before you today proposing to speak about a conundrum: modern slowness. Instead of daring to seek a way out of this contradiction in terms, I venture to take the challenge and address a certain kind of slowness at the heart of a concept that is always unaccomplished – the modern is what will be – and foreshadows its own continual destruction – the modern is what already has been.

I.

Modernity and the Owner of the Present

In the semantics of cultural discourse, modernity, as concept and idea, and colonialism as a practice are by no means estranged bedfellows and have often posed as interrelated signifiers. In this relation, time, or the ownership thereof, has had a strategic role to play. Clearly, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has argued in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), claiming that “Time exists for me, because I have a present”,2 the task of the modern age was an attempt to own time, to seize the day, and hold it, erasing the past and extending the present into a fulfilling future. Merleau-Ponty addresses time, not as a cognitive, conceptual category but rather as a phenomenological formant that is not linked to knowledge but rather to existence.3 Time is not a condition of the present, on the 1 An initial version of this paper was given at a colloquium on Slowness, in Giessen. It is indebted to the common friend and academic, Ansgar Nünning, who brought Angela and I together in our excellence network, the PhD Net in Literary and Cultural Studies. I dedicate this to Angela Locatelli, intellectual partner and friend. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge, 2013, p. 424. 3 Descartes, at the height of European expansion, ascribes res extensa to existence in space. Whatever exists materially occupies space. Spatiality then is as much a defining trait of modern subjectivity as the cogito, though arguably their importance is not interchangeable. Rob Shields

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contrary, it is the seizure of the now by a reasoning subject that allows for the existence of time. The unreachable present, the eternal new, the fleeting, changing now, becomes the apriori category for the existence of time. Without the Jetztzeit there would actually be no time (Zeit).4 However, if the present cannot be grasped, that ownership of time, the taming of time that the modern subject desires is always deferred, unaccomplished, and doomed to continuous self-destruction. Modern time then displays the contradiction of an epoch which defines itself as fluid, transient and ephemeral, while faced with the physical (un)certainty of the universal time of progress and science, one which according to Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) was: “Absolute, true, and mathematical […], of itself and from its own nature, flow[ing] equally without relation to anything external”.5 This objective, external, or as Stephen Kern claims, “public time”, clashes with a fluid, heterogeneous, subjective temporality.6 Time becomes duration, pivoting around experience.7 This clash rebounds in modernity with an effective collapse of the norms organizing the relation between past, present and future. In the first of the Duineser Elegien, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests precisely this collapse when he speaks of time as an eternal current that sweeps across organized time Die ewige Strömung reißt durch beide Bereiche alle Alter immer mit sich und übertönt sie in beiden.8

The disruption of time in modernity was not simply about the demise of universality but a challenge to regulation itself. In fact, while Newton and the laws of thermodynamics considered a stable time and space locked inside one enclosed system ruled by one clock, Einstein’s relativity theory allows us to imagine “as

4 5 6 7 8

takes this clearly too far in the argument that one could rephrase Descartes and argue that ‘I occupy space therefore I exist’, Rob Shields, ‘Spatial stress and resistance: social meanings of spatialization’, in Social theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. by Ulf Strohmayer and Georges Benko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 186–202 (p. 194). I am referring to Jetztzeit as a category defined by Walter Benjamin as a temporality that is defined by presence, that does not exist without the experience and the occupation of a body in space. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1989), p. 11. This was foregrounded in Kant’s first critique, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), where time is foundational to all knowledge and experience as a priory category. Einstein would come to the conclusion that time is both slowed down by mass and speed. See Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2019), pp. 34–35. Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke. Kommentierte Ausgabe, vol. 2, Gedichte 1910–1926, ed. by Ulrich Fulleborn et al., (Darmstadt: WBG, 2021), p. 224.

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many clocks as we like”,9 that is, accelerated bodies create a time change, because every piece of matter in the universe creates a gravitational field, and since gravity equates acceleration he concludes that “Every reference body has its own particular time”.10 Thus each subject can indeed own her exclusive present. This can be sought by enlarging the field and opening it up for new possibilities, as Einstein suggested, or by a deliberate destruction of the symbols of regulation. This ultimate, senseless, modernist gesture is precisely what Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent (1907), M. Verloc, is asked by the anarchist Mr. Vladimir to perform by blowing up of the Greenwich meridian: ‘There could be nothing better. Such an outrage combines the greatest possible regard for humanity with the most alarming display of ferocious imbecility. I defy the ingenuity of journalists to persuade their public that any given member of the proletariat can have a personal grievance against astronomy. Starvation itself could hardly be dragged in there – eh? And there are other advantages. The whole civilised world has heard of Greenwich. The very boot-blacks in the basement of Charing Cross Station know something of it. See?’ […] ‘Yes,’ he continued with a contemptuous smile, ‘the blowing up of the first meridian is bound to raise a howl of execration’.11

The end of the present, as Carlo Rovelli names it,12 operated by modern physics and anticipated by literature and philosophy, would face resistance, as the ownership of time was monetized by capitalism. The regulation of time, and time zones, would be instrumental in the dissemination of the capitalist world narrative and in the efficient running of global markets at the height of the Age of Empire. The establishment of the World Standard Time conjugates this imperial regulatory time pattern. Its origins go back to the International Meridian Conference in London, in 1884, which approved the proposal by Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming to divide the world in 24 time zones each one with 15 degrees of longitude and one hour of separation, taking Greenwich as prime meridian. Conrad’s meridian narrative speaks to this time of transformation. Verloc cannot blow up the meridian no less than he can destroy time, but simply disrupt its symbolic anchoring, the observatory. His is clearly an activist gesture against modernity’s imperial mandate to own temporality. More than senseless violence, “an alarming display of ferocious imbecility”, the blowing up of the meridian is obviously an act against the structure of modern civilisation itself, against capitalism and its universal right of ownership, materialized as well in the fiduciary organization of time zones. 9 Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory. 100th Anniversary Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 181. 10 Ibid., p. 26. 11 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Classics,1991), p. 49. 12 Rovelli, The Order of Time, p. 34.

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But Conrad’s Secret Agent also suggests that the narrative of modernity as a discourse of time is enmeshed in crisis. Because it was taken away from the logic of the universal, modernity’s understanding of time and temporality act against the grain of the master narratives of the modern: empire, colonialism and capitalism. At the same time, that very same understanding of fluid time that dissolves all that is solid into thin air promotes the disruption of social modes of cohesion for the benefit of structured forms of domination, economic, social and political. Hence, on the one hand, the fluidity of modern time is a powerful tool to eliminate the anchoring of power systems to essentialized appropriations of a space, Achille Mbembe defines in the colonial context as the inevitable raw matter of sovereignty, occupation and violence.13 Time becomes a driver to overcome an understanding of power relations as dependent on the conquest, occupation and management of space.14 Zygmunt Baumann acknowledges the liberating effect of the modern narrative of time, underlining “ […] the emancipation of time from space, its subordination to human inventiveness and technical capacity, […] setting it against space as a tool of the space conquest and land appropriation”.15 And yet, modern time accounts for a crisis of historicity that according to Fredric Jameson will inevitably lead to the disjunction between past, present and future, leaving sorry ghostly remnants in its place: The crisis in historicity now dictates a return, in a new way, to the question of temporal organization in general in the postmodern force field, and indeed, to the problem of the form that time, temporality, and the syntagmatic will be able to take in a culture increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic. If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but ”heaps of fragments” and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory.16

Jameson speaks about a crisis of subjectivity operated by modern capitalism, a dissolution that subverts the imperial logic of unified universal time, emplacing in its stead a fluidity that is no less damaging to the subject’s integrity. How then does modern time articulate the imperial logic of domination? Whilst the European expansion brands the narrative of imperialism as a system of territorial 13 Achille Mbembe, Necropolítica (São Paulo: N-1 Edições, 2018), p. 39. 14 See Carl Schmitt, for whom human development is based upon the tripartite acts of taking the land, dividing it and cultivating the soil (nehmen, teilen, weiden), Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), p. 18. 15 Zygmunt Baumann, Liquid Modernity (Malden: Polity Press, 2000), p. 112. 16 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 89.

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domination and merchandise control, as a practice of space, colonialism as a practice of exploitation is grounded and disseminated by a discourse of time. The slave, the colonized is deprived of a present, set beyond temporality, submitting to the colonizers pace, to his time. Moreover, he is disowned of the past. And because there is no past narrative, for the slave there is no history.17 The lack of temporality is embedded with a structural displacement, a fragmented disruption, setting the colonized before time. They are the as-yet. In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison refers to the time of slavery as a non-time. As a forgotten, unclaimed and unpassed story. Just as it happens with perishable merchandise, this story and its displaced slave characters did not withstand the passing of time and the anchoring in cultural memory, because: […] in all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.18

In this study, I want to suggest that time in post-colonial19 narratives of slavery functions as a relational go-between that inhabits the colonial so as to make it undone. The experience of slavery, that no narrative time can fully contain, suspends the chronological flow, as the process of writing the story that could not be told, works against the grain of time to force a new temporality. A temporality set against the hegemonic discourse of progress, linearity, speed, of Western/ European Time, and the slow movement of the survivors of the time of colonial exploitation. By looking at A Mercy (2008), Toni Morrison’s narration of the early colonial period in the English New World settlements, the paper proposes to remediate slow motion, a modern cinematic invention, as a textual strategy for the regaining of the slave’s coevalness and prompt a post-colonial narration of modernity against the grain.

17 The impact of BLM has increasingly given rise to a number of relevant projects addressing the urgency to write the African contribution to American history, for instance, and to Western history at large. One such project is the New York Times 1619 Project, referencing the date of the arrival of the first African slaves to the English colonies (https://www.nytimes.com/inte ractive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html). In March 2021, the magazine the Atlantic published an issue dedicated to this inscription titled “Inheritance: Black Life and American history”. 18 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2000), p. 23. 19 I am using the hyphenated post-colonial, following Tiffin and Lawson’s assertions that there is no ‘post’ of the colonial in the ‘post-colonial’, cf. Chris Tiffin, Alan Lawson, De-Scribing Empire, Post-Colonialism and Textuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

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Lack of Coevalness: Colonial Time

Going ahead slowly, let us rewind for a moment to pause and recall what anthropologist Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other (1983) has famously called the “lack of coevalness” of the colonized in imperial discourse. Fabian expands the semantics of the etymon coeval, as that which is contemporary or of the same era, to define coevalness as an attribute, a “recognition as cognizing and remembering”.20 Thus the colonized’s lack of coevalness justifies their displacement from both knowledge and history. Agreeing that colonialism as a political tool reifies a system of knowledge, informs a cognitive experience, defines a mode of thinking and experiencing and both structures and is conveyed by discourse, the absence of coevalness displaces the colonized from the contemporary time of colonial discourse, places them outside cognition and robs them of memory. Moreover, as a performative discourse that feeds on spectacle, imperialism acts on the structure of representation, submitting what can be known (re-cognized) to what can be presented, i. e. not only performed but also drawn to embody the same temporality as the observer ruling over the scene. This perverse observer who rules over the scene of time and history is the colonial ruler, he is the one who asserts the privilege of history and displaces the Other, as Chakrabarty argues, to an imaginary ‘waiting room’ of history.21 In the best possible description, and just as in Hegel’s understanding of the African, the colonized Other is displaced to a time before history: Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained – for all purposes of connection with the rest of the world – shut up. It is the Gold-land compressed within itself – the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the Dark mantle of Night.22

In this theatre, the colonized is the child of history, waiting for elevation to the temporality of civilization by the Europeans’ civilizing mission. The European owns his present by being ‘on time’, grasps the modern advancing through a stadial, developmental history out of bounds for the subaltern. In this economy, the colonized is always late. He is the one who comes last, who is deferred from time as epitomized in the notorious racial slur of ‘Black people’s time’. How can they then make way for other clocks beyond the contentious imperial time of modernity?

20 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 25. 21 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), p. 8. 22 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History (New York: Cosmo Books, 2007), p. 91.

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A post-colonial strategy of analysis requires a revised cognition of time, which is simultaneously cultural and semantic. This means rewiring semantics – stealing words and concepts from the rule of colonial discourse and investing them with other meanings; refiguring the tropological discourse and its stereotypes of Otherness in order to articulate a different dynamic of time and space, drawing from the subjective experience of time within the long suffering durée of colonial history. This relational understanding of time is no longer built on the binary opposition between development and backwardness, stasis and speed, motion and slowness. These categories are not absolute but experiential, and configure a temporality of resistance to the contentious homogeneous linearity of the colonial. Slow and fast are not opposites with cultural attributes supporting the temporality of empire, but in the ambivalence of modern time they can be usefully recoded against the grain. Literature functions as a strategic driver in this process of cultural recoding, because of its anthropological power to mean differently and in so doing to reconfigure the symbolical framework that establishes the meanings guiding human existence. I suggest that Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy taps into the anthropological transformation of time of the post-colonial experience and in so doing recodes imperial binarisms structured upon race.

III.

Slow Motion: Time Against the Grain and the Post-Colonial

Slow motion is a conceptual hybrid. Invented as a technical film making effect by Austrian August Musger in 1904 (Zeitlupe),23 it depicts an effect whereby each film frame is captured at a much faster rate than the usual 24 frames per second. When replayed at normal speed, time seems to have slowed down within the filmic economy. Another way of achieving this effect is to play a normally recorded film footage at a lower speed. This technical effect provides an interesting time-image for the hybrid, interstitial concept of time I wish to test. In technical terms, slow motion draws from the same structural ambivalence a postcolonial temporality demands, for it blends the capture of speed with the retention of slow replay. Slow motion images do not partake of a different temporality than regular film footage, rather they allow for the ungraspable, fleeting, imperceptible details of that time frame to become apparent to the viewer. In this, it does not present slow and fast as antagonistic attributes ruled by the colonial grammar, but instead move away from the concept of time as a measurable system and instils 23 Literary historian Adalbert von Hanstein coined in 1900 the term Sekundenstil, to designate the collapse of narrated time and narrative time in Naturalist novels, giving vent to a prolonged sense of time anchored on the piecemeal description of events second by second as they happened. The Sekundenstil suggested the same sort of prolonged duration materialized in slow motion.

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another kind of rationality. Slow motion instils an alternative temporality revealing the interval of time where what Mark Hansen calls the time of affect, rather than the time of cognition becomes apparent. Time of affect revisits the notion of time image as a cognitive act of disembodiment that occurs through the image in film to reconsider a whole new relation between image, body and time. One, that becomes apparent in Bill Viola’s work, as the bodily mediation in the experience of time as a mode of self-affection, that is, a time that is grasped in the act of being aware of one’s subjectivity. Time of affect is a concept borrowed from Mark Hansen’s discussion of video artist Bill Viola’s artwork The Passions (2003). Viola’s work aims at drawing the viewer’s attention to the imperceptible changes in motion and emotion, which for him become interchangeable signifiers. By shooting motion with high-speed film at a speed of 384fps and the replaying the footage at normal speed he “[…] literally exposed the viewer to the imperceptible – to incredibly minute shifts in affective tonality well beyond what is observable by (non-technically supplemented) human perception”.24 One of the pieces included in The Passions is the “Quintet of the Astonished”. Drawing from the gesturality of Renaissance painting, namely Andrea Mantegna’s “Adoration of the Magi” (1495–1505), Viola aims to display precisely the motions intervals frozen in paint. He says he is interested in visualizing what the old masters did not paint, those steps in between time, motion and its emotion. He reveals a temporal deceleration that provides room for the viewer to become aware of the thickness of the present and by so doing reflect critically on her own temporality. Hansen calls this a fuller experience of subjectivity25 provided by a slowing down of one’s own temporal reaction: Even though you have no further success in perceiving the images as a distinct evolving progression, you do discover that the experience of simply watching them has left you deeply moved with a feeling that you’ve lived through something quite intense, even if oddly identifiable.26

Viola’s art is a metaphor, perhaps of the workings of slow motion as a productive mode of addressing a relational temporality within the framework of the postcolonial. It unveals the thick presence of the now fostering a relational practice that will allow for a revised re-cognition of the past. One where the present and its thickness is reappropriated, a fitting strategy for a renewed understanding of the colonized’s temporality. This, I suggest, is precisely the supplement explored by the relational time of the post-colonial, set between the longue durée of colonial 24 Mark Hansen, ‘The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 3, pp. 584–626 (p. 614). 25 Ibid., p. 589. 26 Ibid.

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exploitation – the unreachable present of the modern – and the narration of another modernity against the grain, the time of the survivors of this system. Tony Morrison’s A Mercy revisits the time before race became a significant tool of repression, a time before slavery and race were interchangeable. As she had already done with Beloved (1987), twenty-years earlier, Morrison embarks on an archaeological literary enterprise, unveiling the invisibility of slavery and oppression within the American literary imagination, without resorting to a counter master narrative. That is, without resorting to romanticize blackness and vilify whiteness in the process, as she insightfully claimed in the introduction to the essays Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993).27 Winding back to colonial America, A Mercy, is indeed a novel about the birth of modernity and capitalism as intertwined systems of oppression, that operate before racial codes. Set in 1690’s Virginia, the novel follows the lives of “Unmastered women in colonial Virginia” as John Updike notoriously wrote in his review for the New Yorker.28 Composing a community of women of different races, Morrison is interested in addressing modes of slavery and gender exclusion present before race as a meaning making category became culturally relevant. This motley racialized community is composed by Rebekka Vaark, the wife of Sir Jacob Vaark, an Englishwoman who sailed to the New World seeking for a better future and marriage; Lina, a native American woman, rescued from her disease trodden village; Sorrow, a white wild child found in a wrecked ship; Florens, a black slave girl offered as compensation for debt; and two white male indentured servants, Willard and Scully.29 As she had already done with Beloved, and in a way breaking with certain critical strands in African American criticism that consider the cultivation of historical continuity, of appropriating a different kind of time continuum a necessary practice for the reappropriation of the past of slavery and oppression,30 Morrison sets sail to focus on the effects of the time of exploitation of single characters rather than on the longue durée of colonial exploitation. Indeed her 27 Cfr. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1992). 28 Updike claims Morrison wrote the novel in “an effort to remove race from slavery”, cf. John Updike, ‘Dreamy Wilderness. Unmastered Women in Colonial Virginia’, the New Yorker, Nov. 3, 2008, (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/11/03/081103crbo_books _updike, retrieved 20/03/2020). 29 Updike erroneously calls them homosexual. 30 This is the case of Houston Baker, Jr. for instance: “Africans uprooted from ancestral soil, stripped of material culture, and victimized by brutal contact with various European nations were compelled not only to maintain their cultural heritage at a meta […] level but also to apprehend the operative metaphysics of various alien cultures. Primary to their survival was the work of consciousness, of non-material transactions”, Houston Jr. Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 38.

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goal can be more aptly defined as a probe into the time of affect. She claimed in an interview on Beloved: ”I realized that I could do it if I had a single narrative about people,” says Morrison. ”If I simply entered the minds and the bloodstream and the perception of individuals, then it was manageable.”(NPR http://www.npr.org /templates/story/story.php?storyId=95961382). She set out to construct and reveal a critical temporality that relates to the critical geography she announced in Playing in the Dark. Her task was then to I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World – without the mandate for conquest.31

This critical geography is arguably marked by the romanticizing of possibilities of charting without conquest. In A Mercy she takes this mapping one step further, diving into the colonial past as the blue-print for a thick present of racial and social oppression. She does so by means of a redress of temporality, drawing from the subjective experiences of the characters, who provide the varied narrative voices in the novel, and building from a slow-motion technique, deployed across four strategies that I wish to elaborate shortly upon: temporal deceleration, relativization, freeze-framing and repetition. Temporal deceleration – Although set in colonial Virginia in the late 17th century, the novel dissolves historical time into the kairotic experience of circular time. “1682 and Virginia was still a mess”,32 Jakob Vaark claims, dissolving the time line into the blurring chaos of modern colonialism. In contrast to the linear time of the European power logic, marked by the speed of executions and repression, the time of the New World is unhindered, literally dis-organized, slow. Rebekka thus says she has moved into an exile from time proper,33 whilst Jakob steps on the continent carrying the hope of riches suggested by the Virginia Company and intent on negotiating a new time in a new geography. For the settler, the New World means New Time, but for the slave there is no newness in this world. In the second chapter, Jakob is introduced by literally walking slowly into the narration proper: The man moved through the surf, stepping carefully over pebbles and sand to shore. Fog, Atlantic and reeking of plant life, blanketed the bay and slowed him. […] Despite the long sail […] he took delight in the journey. Breathing the air of a world so new, almost alarming in rawness and temptation never failed to invigorate him. Once beyond the warm gold of the bay, he saw forests untouched since Noah, shorelines beautiful enough to bring tears, wild food for the taking.34 31 32 33 34

Morrison, Playing in the Dark, p. 3. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., pp. 7–10.

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Walking into the New World is a slow practice, requiring a different pace, a different cognizing structure. The critical mapping is equated with a critical time, one that the male subject will negotiate with the immensity of the uncharted territory but also with the racially different community of women. The slowness of action and narration also requires a different reading practice, a slower one, allowing for the thickness of the narration to sink in. Otherwise, for a fast reader, the passage could be deceptively identified with the canonical depiction of the American Adam treading the shores of the New World. This was in fact the reading of the proficient writer, but not so proficient reader, John Updike in his review of A Mercy for The New Yorker: In “A Mercy,” Morrison’s epic sense of place and time overshadows her depiction of people; she does better at finding poetry in this raw, scrappy colonial world than in populating another installment of her noble and necessary fictional project of exposing the infamies of slavery and the hardships of being African-American. The white characters in “A Mercy” come to life more readily than the black, and they less ambiguously dramatize America’s discovery and settlement. When Vaark strides ashore through the Chesapeake surf, he is Adam treading the edge of an immense Eden.35

Updike proves unable to read an alternative temporality beyond the canonical adamic rhetoric of Americanness, Morrison had so readily denounced in Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. It is really not a zero adamic history that begins, but rather what Morrison achieves is a rethinking of the imperceptible fine changes in the American movement into history. This is performed by decelerating the narration of developmental history and blending time with the retention of differenced experiences and the subjective recollection of a multitude of temporalities, those of the African slaves, brought by the Portuguese from Angola into the shores of Barbados, of the decimated Native-Americans and the white slaves, and finally the lack of time consciousness of the eternal child, Sorrow. Relativization – The novel is constructed as a circular narrative, supervised by the ‘telling’ of the slave girl, who submits narration to the rhythm of her affect: the trauma of the loss of the mother (‘A minha mãe’), Sir’s death, Mistress’ illness, the passion for the free black blacksmith and the love rejection. That is why the novel begins with the slave girl’s ‘telling’ to an ideal reader – the blacksmith – who will not be able to respond, because as the proficient reader will learn at the end “The blacksmith can read the world, but not the letters of talk”.36 The reader is thus tasked with fulfilling the task of the telling, discerning the novel as the expression of the ‘house of words’, the room in Sir’s house, across whose walls the story is written by Florens. The time of history is relativized by the time of 35 Cfr. Updike, ‘Dreamy Wilderness. Unmastered Women in Colonial Virginia’. 36 Toni Morrison, A Mercy: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 2008), p. 158.

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narration, moving slowly, in a circular repetition beyond linearity. “My telling can’t hurt you and I promise to lie quietly in the dark – weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more – but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth”.37 Freeze framing – Another strategy to counteract linearity is the framing of the narrative according to freeze frames of the characters’ experience. Thus the slave girl’s narrative begins in unsuspecting manner: “The beginning begins with the shoes”.38 The fetishist mannerism of the girl who loved shoes provides the miniature anecdote that acts as a counterdiscourse to the important developmental issues of canonical time narratives. As Joel Fineman argues, the anecdote is what refers to the real in literary or historical narration.39 Florens’ shoes anecdote captures the interval of subjective experience and freezes it with the oppressive time of slavery. The beginning begins with the shoes. When a child I am never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody’s shoes, even on the hottest days. My mother, a minha mãe, is frowning, is angry at what she says are my prettify ways. Only bad women wear heels. I am dangerous, she says, and wild but she relents and lets me wear the throwaway shoes from Senhora’s house, pointy-toe, one raised heel broke, the other worn and a buckle on top. As a result, Lina says, my feet are useless, will always be too tender for life and never have the strong soles, tougher than leather, that life requires. [..] Florens, she says, it’s 1690. Who else these days has the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady?40

It is in fact the love of shoes, the fetishist avowal of the young girl, that provides the slave mother with the motif to offer her girl as exchange matter for the kind white settler Jakob Vaark and thus prevent her from being caught in the sexual bondage of the brutal Portuguese master, solely known as Senhor. Repetition – Furthermore the novel enacts a strategy of repetition. Tropes and anecdotes overlap to signify a cut with linear narration and chronology. They come up in the conversation around the shoes, Rebekka’s illness, the kind master’s death or the love affair with the blacksmith. The episodes relay modes of narration that provide a contextual temporality beyond linear streamlining. This repetition without overlapping works to uncover the trauma effectively and binds all the characters together, be it Rebekka’s loveless family who openly forces her to accept marriage overseas; Lina’s loss of community cohesion, the trauma of slavery and bondage and the traumatic Middle passage for the slave cargo ships; or, in Florens’ case, the trauma of a mother’s rejection. It is out of traumatic loss 37 Ibid, p. 1. 38 Ibid., p. 2. 39 Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction”, in The New Historicism, ed. by H. Aram Veeser (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 49–76 (p. 56). 40 Morrison, A Mercy, p. 2.

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that the characters seek to take control of the present. The blacksmith’s interpellation to Florens, after the accident with the foundling at his home: “Own yourself, woman”,41 suggests an incitement to move beyond the cyclical retelling of trauma. Reliving, retelling, not only allows for a new openness to the past, but brings affective time, the time of sorrow, loss and anger as resolute clues to reappraise the very texture of the present. What is then the novel’s mercy? A clue is provided by the last telling in the book, that of the slave mother. Within the narrative economy, a mercy was offering up the child as a strategy for her own protection from the sexual violence of the master. But mercy can also define the poetical strategy of recovery of the past and its narrative retention. A Mercy, now, presents the reader with a fictional reowning of the present, a slow moving depiction of the thick temporality of slavery, aimed at instructing that: “[…] to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing. Oh Florens. My love. Hear a tua mãe”.42 The idea of the modern has been based on the desire to control time and occupy space. Colonial time is perhaps the epitome of this desiring mode and the testament to its failure. Revising slowness as a gesture to unpack the categories that have supported the master binarisms of modernity will not only promote a reading of the modern against the grain but lay out for analysis the complex details that speed reading cannot grasp. It allows for a detailed perception of the interstice where the time of events interacts with the slowness of bodies experiencing violence and exclusion, and it also gives the analyst time to grasp the past in the hope for a better future.

41 Ibid, p. 139. 42 Ibid., p. 165.

Eleonora Natalia Ravizza

Four Unwritten Stories and the Geographies of Imagined Encounters. V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World and Virginia Woolf ’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’

What is the value of encounters? What potential may encounters hold for catalyzing change and for engendering new forms of relationality? How are encounters embedded in specific politics, temporalities, and spatial arrangements? Over the past two decades, geographies of encounters have been addressing these questions with the purpose of understanding how urban life unfolds, how people negotiate difference in their every-day life, and what role prejudice plays in human relationships.1 As it draws on a variety of geographical interests, current research focuses on encounters as a specific genre of contact. Deriving from Old French encontrer (from the Latin adverb incontra, i. e. in + contra, ‘against’), the word ‘encounter’ simultaneously encloses, on the one hand, the ideas of hostility, enmity and conflict and, on the other hand, the potential of a ‘becoming-with’.2 Encounters are thus receiving attention as events of both rupture and possibility, as well as moments in which difference and similarity are negotiated. Dealing with encounters means not only tackling how people come together, but also, and most importantly, how subjects are formed, meaning is produced, and patterns of relationships are established in ways which may either be informed by, or undermine, the structure of power. For this reason, as I intend to focus on the semiotic value of encounters, I am going to address how geographies of encounters are constructed in two literary texts dealing with encounters which, in spite of their being just imagined, give us profound insights into the complex patterns of human relationality. The evocation of possibilities that encounters may open up is highlighted in the title of this essay, which contains a rather 1 Helen Wilson, ‘On geography and encounter: Bodies, borders, and difference’, Progress in Human Geography, 41.4 (2017), 451–47; Helen Wilson, ‘Passing propinquities in the multicultural city: The everyday encounters of bus passengering’, Environment and Planning 43.3 (2011), 634–649; Gill Valentine, ‘Living with difference: Reflections on geographies of encounters’, Progress in Human Geography, 32.3 (2008), 323–337; Tatiana Matejskova and Helga Leitner, ‘Urban encounters with difference: The contact hypothesis and immigrant integration projects in eastern Berlin’, Social & Cultural Geography 12 (2011), 717–741. 2 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008), p.1.

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specific reference to four unwritten stories. To be more exact, the objects of my analyses are Virginia Woolf ’s short story ‘An Unwritten Novel’ (1921),3 which I will analyze in connection with her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925),4 and V.S. Naipaul’s masterpiece A Way in the World (1994),5 in which three chapters are subtitled ‘An Unwritten Story’. In both Woolf ’s and Naipaul’s works, the idea of stories being ‘unwritten’ is somehow connected both with the (im)possibility of getting to know the other, and with the unexplored potential that encounters may trigger off. As literary imagination is the protagonist of both texts, the adjective ‘unwritten’ is also strictly related to the process of literature writing itself and reflecting on its own values.6 Differently put, the imaginative process of storytelling is the subject-matter of Naipaul’s and Woolf ’s texts, instead of being only the effect of it. In Woolf ’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’, the main narrative takes place in an unnamed, ungendered first-person narrator’s mind. As s/he sits in a train bound to the East coast with another five passengers, his/her attention focuses on an elderly woman, whom s/he arbitrarily calls Minnie Marsh, on whose face s/he seems to read the signs of profound unhappiness. The narrator, like a writer composing the biography of a character in a novel, imagines the woman’s lifestory, only to find out that the elaborate narrative s/he has constructed is ungrounded. Naipaul’s text, instead, deals with encounters by intersecting the fictional, the non-fictional and the meta-fictional. At the heart of the BritishTrinidadian writer’s complex literary enterprise is an exploration of the interconnected history and present of the Caribbean both from the point of view of the individual – i. e. Naipaul relating his personal and professional development as a writer – and of the collective experiences of diaspora, migration and exile. In the following sections I intend to show how Naipaul and Woolf bring into their texts reflections on how we inscribe the experience of encounters into narrative and linguistic structures. My analyses focus on the continuities between modernist poetics and insights into the nature of (inter)subjectivity, and more contemporary reflections on transnationality and cultural hybridity. Narratives are instrumental for negotiating people’s symbolic relationship within a shared space characterized by incessant movement and always under construction. Also,

3 Virginia Woolf, ‘An Unwritten Story’, in Monday or Tuesday (London: Hogarth Press, 1921), pp. 39–57. https://archive.org/details/cu31924013241066/mode/2up. 4 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Penguin, 1996). 5 Although other editions are mentioned, all quotes in this essay are taken from the following edition: V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the World. A Sequence (London: Minerva, 1995). 6 Angela Locatelli, ‘‘For Nothing Was Simply One Thing’. Observations on the Knowledge of Literature’, in La Conoscenza della letteratura/ The Knowledge of Literature, Vol III (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press), pp. 141–152.

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they may be regarded as dynamic sites, both ‘arenas of epistemic confrontation’7 and testing grounds for exploring how processes of becoming are engendered.

Virginia Woolf ’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’ and the collective intimacy of encounters Virginia Woolf ’s modernist masterpiece Mrs Dalloway (1925) may be read as the story of two people who never meet. A central passage in the novel describes a moment of physical and emotional proximity: Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith are just a few feet apart as they both jump at the violent noise of a car backfiring, but no real interaction takes place between the two characters. After the shock of the unexpected explosion, which interrupts Clarissa’s flow of thoughts and allows Septimus’ trauma to reemerge, the elegant lady’s mission to buy flowers for her evening party resumes and the shell-shocked veteran’s walk continues, at his wife Lucrezia’s insistence, despite his conspicuously being in pain. The intersection of Clarissa’s and Septimus’ paths is just a brief accident, an unexpected convergence in the intricate tangle of the streets of a metropolis which, for the two characters, is connected to very different sets of experiences and expectations. London is both a place bursting with life, as Clarissa’s interior monologue tells us (‘In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June’)8 and a Moloch which ‘has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith’.9 The big city does bring together multitudes of people from different backgrounds and with different expectations, and yet strong and persistent boundaries are established by the way different embodied subjects negotiate the public space. The privileged Clarissa is sheltered inside the florist’s shop and is the object of the care and attentions of the considerate florist Miss Pym, who behaves apologetically ‘as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all her fault’.10 Septimus, instead, is exposed to the judgment of passers-by, which raises Lucrezia’s discomfort and makes her feel unbelonging and unprotected (‘People must notice; people must see. People, she thought, 7 On Virginia Woolf and writing as a form of agonistic struggle, see Rossana Bonadei, Virginia Woolf. In the Nerves of Writing (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2011). 8 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London, Penguin Books, 1996), p. 6. 9 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 94. 10 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p.16.

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looking at the crowd staring at the motor car; the English people, with their children and their horses and their clothes, which she admired in a way; but they were ‘people’ now, because Septimus had said, ‘I will kill myself ’; an awful thing to say’).11 Unlike Clarissa and Septimus, the two main characters of Virginia Woolf ’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’ are forced to acknowledge each other’s existence as they find themselves sharing a stretch of the same train journey, and even exchange a few words. They are two temporary inhabitants of a non-place, a palimpsest of transience and mobility where, as Marc Augé puts it, ‘the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten’.12 Non-places are by definition spaces of anonymity and solitude, and thus the genuine curiosity that the narrator has toward the woman s/he arbitrarily decides to call Minnie Marsh has to break a wall of privacy and social conventions. The Times, which the narrator occasionally glances ‘for manner’s sake’,13 embodies the barriers which individuals put between themselves to protect themselves from others. Yet, ‘The Times was no protection against such sorrow as hers’,14 claims the narrator, observing how life shows through the face of the woman. The complex made-up narrative about Minnie’s life – her strained relationship with a sister-in-law, her solitude, her repressed sufferings – draws on a ‘phenomenology of life-forms’, which the text, as Angela Locatelli argues, both constructs and deconstructs.15 When it is revealed that Minnie is not a lonely creature but a beloved mother, the novel that the narrator had started to draft in his/her mind is suddenly interrupted. Virginia Woolf ’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’ and her masterpiece Mrs Dalloway both revolve around the interlacing of lives, thoughts, memories and existences. If ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ receives a myriad sensations, and the complexity of this incessant flow of impressions (‘trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel’)16 is what makes the substance of our lifeexperience, Woolf teaches us that encounters cannot just be regarded as overdetermined by causal relationships, or emplotted in a specific narrative. So, if we want to investigate how geographies of encounters are configured in these two 11 Woof, Mrs Dalloway, p.16. 12 Marc Augé, Non-places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (trans. by John Howe; London: Verso, 1995). 13 Woolf, ‘An Unwritten Story’, p. 39. 14 Woolf, ‘An Unwritten Story’, p. 40 15 Angela Locatelli, ‘Constructing and Deconstructing Forms of Life: Life in Literature and the Life of Literature’, in Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature. Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses, edited by D. Hartley, A. Nünning, E. Kovach and M. Basseler (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015). 16 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928 (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), pp. 157–164 (p.160).

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literary texts, we need to reflect not only on how discourses, societal roles, attitudes, and power dynamics shape our identities and determine the possibilities we have for interacting with others, but also on the fact that encounters ‘exceed the boundaries of reified identities’17 as they are the product of a variety of more subtle contingencies. Current debates on geographies of encounters cast light on the embodied nature of social distinctions – how subjects and objects may be defined, for example, alongside the lines of sexuality, class, ethnicity, migratory patterns, colonialism and power asymmetries.18 This dimension, although not central, is very much present in Mrs Dalloway, and acts as a contrast to the kind of human connection that Clarissa/Septimus and the nameless narrator/Minnie manage to establish. Clarissa’s realization that death in general, and Septimus’ death in particular, of which she was informed at her party, ‘was an attempt to communicate’19 stands out against Dr Bradshaw’s incapacity to understand a patient whom he looks down to. Unlike Clarissa and Septimus, Dr Bradshaw and Septimus do meet, but the patronizing, self-entitled psychiatrist is not able to overcome the difference in the social ladder that separates them, or his prejudices on masculinity and social rules. Although Clarissa will not realize it (but we, as readers, most certainly do), her capacity to feel empathically has breached a barrier, the same barrier which, in ‘An Unwritten Novel’, the narrator tries to overcome through his/her narratorial capacity. By registering the unexpected connection between a high-born lady and a young, traumatized ex-soldier, the literary text traces a yet untraced path in the geography of encounters, one which traverses not the external space of the city, with all its hidden borders and distinctions but rather the human consciousness. The latter emerges thus not as the private space of the individual, but rather as a shared terrain, in which, as Locatelli puts it, ‘sensory perception, memory and imagination find a solution of continuity in language’.20 Differently put, life is a form of connection – ‘a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’21 – and the language with which we struggle to give an imperfect form to it is also endowed with an exterior, material and transpersonal quality. By exploring the ways in which individuals negotiate their existence through the shared medium of language, writers are able 17 Gavin Brown (2008) ‘Ceramics, clothing and other bodies: Affective geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters’, Social & Cultural Geography 9 (2008), pp. 915–932 (p.915). 18 See notes 1, 2 and 18. See also Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 19 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 202. 20 Angela Locatelli, Una coscienza non tutta per sé. Studio sul romanzo dello ‘Stream of Consciousness’, (Bologna, Patron: 1983), p.21. My translation. 21 Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, p. 160.

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to access the unexplored ways through which human empathy and conflicts are shaped. If we observe ‘An Unwritten Novel’ from the dimension which Woolf invites us to explore – the collective intimacy of our consciousness – at what level does the encounter between the narrator and Minnie take place? The narrator who, as we have mentioned, is a prospective writer aspiring to transform Minnie into a literary character, does not seem to be able to establish an intersubjective relationship like the one between Clarissa and Septimus. Their consciousnesses, in other words, do not seem to speak to each other. The short story may be read as a game of deduction gone awry and the little hints that Minnie gives about herself (her sad look, the bitterness of the tone with which she mentions a sister-in-law) are misleading. ‘Life escapes’,22 unavoidably, and so does Minnie, who leaves the train station in the company of her son and disappears into the streets of Eastbourne. What the short story depicts, though, is not the failure but rather a process of semantic deterritorialization and reterritorialization of an encounter. The relationship between the two characters is initially structured by its asymmetry: the narrator’s perspective is dominant, and Minnie’s incapacity to hide what the narrator perceives as suffering makes her the object of an unrequested ‘interpellation’:23 the narrator claims for him/herself the privilege of rebaptizing the elderly lady, of peering indiscreetly at her external details (the expression on her face, her shabby look, her observance of unspoken conventions) as a realist novelist might do, and of imagining an hypothetic interior monologue (streamof-consciousness style, this time) combining fabricated old memories and present sorrows, trivial preoccupations (‘health, money, bills’) and theological problems. But as Minnie exits the train, meaning, as well as the relationship between the two characters, has to be renegotiated. Minnie is not an open book, but one in a couple of ‘mysterious figures’, which the narrator is able to see, as for the first time. While throughout the process of imagining her life, the narrator had expressed a sort of one-sided compassion towards her own version of Minnie, as s/he is confronted with reality, his/her feelings change into a new form of acknowledgment, and even reverence, for an ‘other’ which s/he knows s/he is not able to understand: ‘If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me–adorable world!’24 The sudden realization of Minnie’s otherness engenders a moment of awareness, a ‘becoming-with’ which forces the 22 Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, p. 159. 23 On the Althusserian concept of interpellation see J.-J. Lecercle, De l’interpellation: Sujet, Langage, Idéologie (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2019). 24 Woolf, ‘An Unwritten Story’, p. 57.

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narrator to reevaluate and redefine his/her attitude, transforming it in a completely different form of respect for the unknown. The novel about Minnie has to remain ‘unwritten’, yet in the word ‘unwritten’ the prefix ‘un’ is not a negative (i. e. signifying that a novel cannot be written anymore), but rather a reversive one (i. e. that the novel should be ready to change direction continuously). If writing wants to be up to the task of measuring itself with life, it also must acknowledge that even fleeting encounters may destabilize meaning – and that they may shift relations and attitudes. What we see at work in ‘An Unwritten Novel’ is the forging of the tools of a writer who is aware of the challenge of representing the complexity of the process through which we may, or may not, get to know the ‘other’. In this sense, the narrative’s greatest task is precisely to find ways to deconstruct (or unwrite) itself.

Transnational geographies of encounters in V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World Encounters are the narrative scaffold which sustains Naipaul’s collection of interwoven stories and meditations A Way in the World (1994). Just like in his most autobiographical work The Enigma of Arrival (1987),25 in A Way in the World Naipaul transacts his own story in terms of the stories of other people. In the nine sections which make up the book, the British-Trinidadian writer weaves together the lives of a variety of people who are not just friends or persons who played a significant role in his own development as a writer, or historical/political figures whose actions reverberate on the complex present that Naipaul is addressing, but often casual acquaintances. The focus of Naipaul’s first-person narrative is not the personal, but rather the relational, which in A Way in the World connects specifically with the transnational and the transhistorical. Each narrative is presented as a fragment in the entangled, rhizomorphic net which Paul Gilroy called ‘the Black Atlantic’.26 Underlying Naipaul’s first-person narrative is the attempt to engage with the interconnected landscape and cultural memory in which Trinidad, his native homeland, belongs. Also, the predicament of the individual is constantly addressed in terms of the layers of history underlying each personal experience. Each of the nine sections in which the narrative is divided contains interconnected meditations on the multicultural heritage and hybrid identity not only of Naipaul, but also of the people he comes across in his first-person narrative. Some of the encounters are narrated as real-life experiences made by the author himself, often during his own journeys. Others are 25 V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (London: Vintage Books, 1987). 26 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso: 1993).

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related to the complexities of events accompanying the decolonization process – the emergence of new dictatorships, labourers’ strikes, and political assassinations. A few, instead, are just presented as the product of the narrator’s imagination, and deal with the early moments of the colonization of the Americas, as well as with early attempts at emancipation from colonial rule. While in the United States A Way in the World was marketed as ‘A Novel’, thus placing special emphasis on the fictional component of Naipaul’s work,27 the British editions are accompanied by the subtitle ‘A Sequence’.28 The British label may suggest that the stories that are juxtaposed in the narrative are somehow bound by a sort of arrangement or concatenation – a path followed by the firstperson narrator alongside the many characters whom he meets in his narrative. Yet, the selection of encounters presented in the book is not justified by an explicit criterion but follows multiple lines of thought. Like Virginia Woolf, Naipaul believes that linear progression, ordered plots and simple causality are not apt to express the complexity of the reality we live in. Encounters figure not as part of a single straightforward succession (i. e., of a single ‘way in the world’, as the title seems to assert), but rather as starting points to explore the many directions in which Trinidad and the Caribbean’s cultural space expands. Naipaul describes a world of incessant moving and becoming, of contacts and conflicts, woven from the countless lifelines of its manifold human and nonhuman constituents. Persons and things are not identified by stable categories of identity and belonging, but rather by the very pathways along which they have previously come and are presently going. Thus, another point of contact between the Trinidadian Nobel laureate and Virginia Woolf is that in their work they both focus on haeccities, i. e., on the specificities of single moments, of singular individuations that are the product of circumstances.29 As such, an emphasis on the concept of encounter allows both writers to focus on the momentary, the passing, and the fleeting nature of identity and difference. Naipaul shows that coming to terms with the globally interconnected past and present of the Caribbean is an enterprise which does not fully exclude imagination. Accordingly, A Way in the World challenges generic definitions and mixes non-fictional genres such as travel writing, memoir, historical account and character analysis with narrative speculation. The homodiegetic, autobiographical narrator signals his presence and provides meta-fictional comments, 27 First American edition by Alfred Knopf (New York, 1994). 28 First British edition by William Heinemann (London, 1994). The quotes in this essay are from the Minerva edition (London, 1995), also subtitled ‘A Sequence’. 29 The Deleuzian concept of haeccity is analysed with specific reference to Virginia Woolf in Angela Locatelli, ‘‘For Nothing Was Simply One Thing’. Observations on the Knowledge of Literature, in La Conoscenza della letteratura/ The Knowledge of Literature, Vol III (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press), pp. 141–152.

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especially in the three chapters subtitled ‘An Unwritten Story’: ‘New Clothes’ (Chapter 3), in which a fictional explorer sets out to meet an ancient Amerindian Tribe; ‘A Parcel of Paper, a Roll of Tobacco, a Tortoise’ (Chapter 6), which depicts the imaginary conversations between a sick, declining Walter Raleigh on his last, doomed expedition to the Orinoco river and his ship surgeon; ‘In the Gulf of Desolation’ (Chapter 8) which narrates the story of the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco Miranda. The metafictional comments that the narrator makes in the three ‘unwritten story’ chapters are strictly linked to the double meaning which the adjective ‘unwritten’ acquires throughout the narration. Firstly, ‘unwritten’ implies that the memory of historical events is not fully enclosed in the documents left from the past, but that there are other dimensions (e. g. the private, for example, and also, as we shall see, the corporeal) that only literary imagination may allow us to explore. Secondly, ‘unwritten’ alludes to some unrealized writing impulses which, as Naipaul recounts, he had been playing with in his mind for years and which had stayed with him until he was able to include them in a wider, multilayered, narrative. For example, at the beginning of Chapter 3, Naipaul shares with the reader the process of giving shape to the story that he is about to tell: ‘A story shaped in my mind over the year. But it never clothed itself in details […]. My idea remains an idea and (partly working it out for the first time) I write it down here’; ‘Who is this narrator? What can he be made to be?’30 In A Way in the World, the concept of encounter emerges as inextricably linked to the liminality of the transnational space. Encounters come into being as events happening on the borderline between the incompleteness of the historical narration, the fragmentation of individual experiences, and the creative power of interpretation and imagination.31 The very theatre in which they occur are often non-places, the transit-points in which people meet and then proceed with their own personal journey: airplanes and airports, ships, compounds where international guests (émigrés, travelers and members of cosmopolitan élites) are accommodated in colonial countries, and dormitories where students spend their formative years. The geography of transnational encounters, nevertheless, does not only concern external spaces, but also, and most significantly, the body. Bodies and embodiment have received a lot of interest in the field of social and cultural geography, as Abrahamson and Simpson remind us.32 ‘Where does one body end and another one begin? Is the limit of a body drawn at the skin, or does a 30 Naipaul, A Way in the World, 1995, p. 45. 31 On Naipaul and Liminality, see also Zhu Ying, ‘V.S. Naipaul’s A way in the world: contesting liminality by translating the historical past’, Literator 27.7 (2006), pp.97–106. 32 Sebastian Abrahamsson and Paul Simpson, ‘The Limits of the Body: Boundaries, Capacities, Thresholds, Social & Cultural Geography, 12.4 (2011), pp. 331–338. See also Angela Locatelli, ‘Presence evading presence, or the narrative economy of the body’, Textus, 8 (2000), pp. 15–32.

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body extend beyond its epidermis? If we both are and have a body then where does it/I end?’, the two geographers ask, simultaneously addressing the issue of the modes of representation, apparatuses and strategies through which bodily limits are drawn and performed.33 In Naipaul’s work the body similarly emerges as the problematic site of encounters and semantic renegotiations, at times matching colonial concerns about mapping and establishing borders in order to keep an unknown environment under control, at times in connection with the genetic and cultural intermingling which is a main feature of the Caribbean. Disease, for example, emerges as a central theme in the ‘unwritten story’ regarding Walter Raleigh (Chapter 6: ‘A Parcel of Paper, a Roll of Tobacco, a Tortoise’). The Raleigh chapter deals with the early attempts to explore and transform the space of the so-called New World, and tells how the enfeebled, sick body of the former Queen Elizabeth’s favourite is exhausted by the strain put on him by his being in an unexplored space, among unfamiliar peoples and unknown diseases which have decimated his crew. Naipaul’s narrative hints that the space of encounter that Mary Louise Pratt described as a ‘contact zone’34 was also profoundly structured not only by the clashing and intermingling of populations that had been kept historically and geographically separated for century, but also and most significantly by disease, both as a reality and as a metaphor.35 The character of the legendary Elizabethan hero appears as a feeble reflection of the man he used to be, the embodiment of a growing epidemiological and epistemological crisis casting its shadow onto a late phase of the Renaissance. The experience of disease is inextricably linked with the fears concerning a hostile ‘Other’, one which has to be conquered and regimented through symbolic and discursive practices, but seems to elude control and perform a sort of colonization in reverse. Raleigh’s conversations with a ship surgeon show how his struggle for sanity is also a struggle for sense, i. e., for the capacity to understand the inhospitable land in which, instead, he expected to find El Dorado. Encounter and disease are coupled also in the incomplete narrative of Leonard Side, a mild and shy man who, in his person, seems to sum up all the many contradictions which characterize the hybrid, syncretic space of the Caribbean. Side is presented as an acquaintance of an acquaintance of Naipaul’s. We are introduced to him through the repelled perspective of a Trinidadian teacher who had hired him as a judge for a students’ flower arrangement competition. Naipaul describes the teacher’s feeling of uneasiness towards Side’s capacity to traverse borders: he is a Muslim, but his house is decorated with a crucifix; he has a 33 Abrahamsson and Simpson, ‘The Limits of the Body’, p. 331. 34 Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 35 See Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999).

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feminine appearance and earns his living with a feminine job; he is a mortician and a cake decorator and his fingers touch with the same skills the corpses of dead people and the sweets that his students will eat after the cake decoration courses he teaches. Uneasiness turns to revulsion as the teacher finds him sick in his bed, symbolically imprisoned in the liminal space between life and death which, in his two professions, he seems to traverse carelessly every day. Disease is, in the eyes of the horrified teacher, the tangible and detestable outcome of bodily encounters, of the impossibility of regulating the intermingling of different people, and of the disaster which may arise when dimensions that are meant to be separated are brought together. We are not told what happened to Leonard afterwards, but Naipaul, instead, imagines that his life will continue, and maybe take root somewhere else, following the big migratory wave of the second post-war period. Side is a fragment of the great movements of people, and his story – his body – emerges not just as an individual but rather as a shared destiny, one that makes all human beings part of a relentless becoming which we are not fully able to grasp: I can give you that historical bird’s eye view. But I cannot really explain the mystery of Leonard Side’s inheritance. Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memory of thousands of beings. I might say that an ancestor of Leonard Side’s came from the dancing groups of Lucknow, the lewd men who painted their faces and tried to live like women. But that would only be a fragment of the truth. We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.36

Leonard Side’s narrative of disease evolves towards a discourse of collective and reciprocal transformations which has its site in the body – not as a receptacle of disease, but rather as an undecipherable, unwritten collective memory in transit, as well as a form of co-presence with innumerable others: ‘in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memory of thousands of beings’. The incompleteness of Side’s story – the impossibility to ascertain his past or of his future – is a matrix of the collective geography of encounters which, in A Way in the World, Naipaul writes and unwrites.

Conclusive remarks In this essay I have drawn on the disciplinary field of geography and social studies to illuminate the intersections between a modernist and a contemporary (postcolonial, postmodern) narrative of encounters. The concept of encounter figures 36 Naipaul, A Way in the World, p. 9.

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as a central preoccupation both in the work of Virginia Woolf and V.S. Naipaul not simply as a theme, but rather as an aesthetic interrogation. The way Woolf and Naipaul develop their specific ‘poetics of encounters’, which goes beyond causality, linear narration and modes of emplotments, provides us with illuminating insights into the complexity of the concept. Encounters are moments of negotiations of difference and similarity which belong in a flux of human relations. While Virginia Woolf traces a geography of encounters which expands to the realms of language, consciousness, empathy, memory and sensation, Naipaul focuses on the materiality of human connections, and sheds light not only on their transpersonal, but also transnational and transhistorical dimension. Both Woolf ’s and Naipaul’s narratives show us that the very act of devising new ways to represent encounters in the literary text provides us not only with new narratives and discursive models but also with new conceptual models for understanding the way humans relate.

Francesca Di Blasio

Antipodes of the Mind: Literature between Traveling and Thinking

In his last book entitled Faut-il vraiment découper l’histoire en tranches?,1 (Is it really necessary to cut history in sections?, or to ‘slice history’?), while dealing with the question of using periodization in the study of history, Jacques Le Goff argues that there hasn’t been any actual rupture between the Middle Ages and what we define Renaissance. He talks of a “long Middle Ages” spanning from late Antiquity to the Eighteenth century (“d’un long Moyen Âge occidental qui pourrait aller de l’Antiquité tardive (du IIIe au VIIe siècle a jusqu’au milieu du XVIIIe siècle”).2 This perspective is based on a twofold assumption according to which, on the one hand, the Middle Ages was already an age of progress and innovation (with the introduction of crop rotation, iron ploughs, windmills and watermills), and on the other that no main changes can be signaled up to the Seventeenth century, from the socio-economical point of view, but also from the cultural one, if we consider the role of Christianity. This is of course a very complex question which is important not to oversimplify, and there are elements in this theory one can agree with, especially in the realm of the so-called microhistory. It is equally a truth clearly acknowledged that cultural traits commonly associated with the Middle Ages survive in what we define Renaissance, as markedly expounded by Ulysses’ speech on order and degree in the third scene of the first act of Troilus and Cressida, or by Hamlet’s lamentation on the “quintessence of dust” embodied by “the piece of work [who] is man”: What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?3

1 Jacques Le Goff, Faut-il vraiment découper l’histoire en tranches? (Paris, Seuil, 2014). 2 Le Goff, Faut-il vraiment découper…, p. 9. 3 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Works. Compact Edition, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), II.2.305–310, pp. 666–7.

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This last quotation is utterly renowned, but worth to be recalled, as it conjugates the lines of continuity, or the to and fro movements, between Humanism and the Middle Ages more than it epitomizes the crisis of the former. Similarly, Ulysses’ firm assertions on the role and importance of degree seem to lead to an arrest of the movement forward of the human apparatus, and to take it back to a certain medieval fixity which alone is able to guarantee order against chaos: Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores And make a sop of all this solid globe.4

It is by the way equally arguable that changes there were, and notably they are connected, among other issues, to the revival of the classics, which traditionally explains the very term ‘Renaissance’. Micro-history is maybe less affected by a cultural perspective mainly linked to the high and intellectual part of society, yet that perspective, together with other cultural, social, economic changes, was deemed to change, at length, what we define the collective unconscious of the time and for sure is detectable in most of the coeval literary production. In this respect, it is also worth recalling that, for example, the theatre of the time is not, or not only, meant for the élite but has a precise popular trait and as such, a ‘popular’ pervasiveness. Equally, a change in the conception of the human being in the universe is undeniable. Going back to the passage from Hamlet quoted above, to conceive man as “a piece of work”, “noble in reason”, and “infinite in faculty”, to deem the human being as “the beauty of the world” and say that s/he is “like a god” “in apprehension” conflate the very philosophical essence of Humanism. These two aspects, i. e., going back to the classics and the celebration of the human faculties, indisputably signal a precise and effective movement of thought from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Other elements of course concur to prove this movement. One of these leads us to the theme of this writing. In fact, it seems arguable that together with the resurgence of the classics and the new centrality of the human being within the universe, a paramount role in determining the spirit of the Renaissance is played by the geographical discoveries and by the physical movements on the terrestrial globe on a scale way larger than in the Middle Ages. In this respect it’s worth starting with a quotation from Libro de las Profecìas, authored by one of the great navigators of the time, Christopher Columbus. In 4 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, in The Complete Works. Compact Edition, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), I.3.109–113, p. 721.

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this highly ‘intertextual’ book, Columbus ‘comments’ his enterprise towards the newfound lands of the western hemisphere by collecting ‘prophetic’ quotations from other texts of the Christian tradition (both biblical and medieval) but also from the classical canon. In the following passage taken from Seneca’s Medea, we read: There will come an age in the far-off years when Ocean shall unloose the bonds of things, when the whole broad earth shall be revealed, when a new sailor, as Jason’s Tiphi, shall disclose new worlds and the isle Thule not be the limit of the lands.5

Colombus’ quotation from Seneca symbolically communicates an image of endless movement, both of the body and the mind, able to change the old world with a new one. In this new world inaugurating a new age, the travelogue is a flourishing genre and its growing relevance is demonstrated, for example, by the well-known A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia by Thomas Hariot. First published in Latin in 1588, the Report was an account of the author’s exploration during the 1585 expedition to North America, and Richard Hakluyt included it in his compendium, Principall Navigations of the English Nation, the following year. Along with this most famous case, many other reports of the same kind are to be mentioned. Among them the writings of Sir George Peckham (1583), Sir Richard Whitbourne (1622), and the Earl of Stirling (1630), just to quote a few. In Hariot’s Report, the attentive survey of flora, fauna, uses and habits of the inhabitants of the new world is presented in a comparative and positive way: We found the soyle to bee fatter; the trees greater and to growe thinner; the grounde more firme and deeper mould; more and larger champions; finer grasse and as good as euer we saw any in England; in some places rockie and farre more high and hillie ground; more plentie of their fruites; more abundance of beastes; the more inhabited with people, and of greater pollicie & larger dominions, with greater townes and houses. Why may wee not then looke for in good hope from the inner parts of more and greater plentie, as well of other things, as of those which wee haue alreadie discouered?6

The passage above is organized along two main paradigms: the heavenly abundance of the new place, and the urge to move even further through it in order to reach other wondrous, inexperienced realities. These two aspects, which are highly representative of Early Modern era overseas voyages to distant and unknown lands, foster and fuel, in a reciprocal sphere of influence, other ‘wan5 Seneca, Medea, cit. in Cristoforo Colombo, Libro de las Profecìas, cit. in Gabriella Moretti, Gli Antipodi (Parma: Pratiche, 1994), p. 121, translation mine. 6 Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London, 1588), p. 31. This and the other texts mentioned in this section are preserved and have been examined, in the original indicated editions, at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.; all quotations are from these editions.

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derings’, i. e., those of the human mind, that coalesce into a specific literary genre, the “utopia”. Starting with Thomas More’s eponymous book of 1516, many works of fiction written across Europe in this period belong to the utopian genre, from Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602) to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, published in Latin as Nova Atlantis in 1624. More in general, the whole literary production of this period is influenced by the utopian frame of mind, as demonstrated by Francois Rabelais’s digression on “The Abbey of Thélème” in the first book of his Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), or by Gonzalo’s speech in the second act of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (2.1.146–68). The ‘toponomy’ of literary utopias is, of course anti-geographical, in the sense that it does not aim at literal description after direct exploration. On the contrary, it is grounded in political discourse and has a strong political basis. However, especially in the so-called Age of Discovery, there is a reciprocal influence between the two cultural realms of utopia and travel, and the overlapping of the literary and mythical with the geographical and factual is frequent in the literature of the period. Gonzalo’s speech is a case in point, being modelled on John Florio’s translation of an earlier utopia, Michel de Montaigne’s Of Cannibals (1580), which had, in turn, been inspired by a travel account, De Orbe Novo (1511), by Peter Martyr, the Italian born historian of the Spanish discoveries during the Age of Exploration. Montaigne’s ‘account’ is one of the first and of the most famous in reversing the Eurocentric belief in the superiority of European culture. The cannibals of the title are not, by any means, barbarous and ignorant, on the contrary, they are capable of living in harmony with nature, of using effective and virtuous skills, and of experiencing the best relation with both religion and government: I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things. They are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas, in truth, we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have changed by our artifice and diverted from the common order. In those, the genuine, most useful, and natural virtues and properties are vigorous and sprightly, which we have helped to degenerate in these, by accommodating them to the pleasure of our own corrupted palate.7

7 Michel de Montaigne, (1580), ‘Of the Cannibals’, in Essayes Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne done into English according to the last French edition by Iohn Florio (London, 1613), pp. 100–107.

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A special role in this cultural frame of reference is held by both utopian and geographical writings involving the so-called Antipodes. Theorized in antiquity by Aristotle and Ptolemy, on the basis of the fact that the land mass of the Northern hemisphere had to be counter-balanced by a similar mass in the Southern hemisphere, the very concept of the Antipodes grew into a philosophical and religious construct in the Middle Ages. In this period, the existence of the Austral hemisphere was pronounced a heresy. In fact, Biblical ‘evidence’ of its impossibility was provided by quoting Saint Paul’s words on the “sound” [of the preachers of the gospel] that “went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world”. The argument was that since none of these words had reached the Antipodes, then no Antipodes could exist. However, as a result of the early voyages of Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish navigators, cartographic figurations of the Southern hemisphere began to appear more and more frequently on the maps of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth century, and the related travelogues multiplied. Pedro Fernandes de Quirós, a Portuguese navigator sailing for the Spanish Crown, visited an island south of New Guinea in 1606. He named it La Australia del Espiritu Santo and he reported the visit to the King of Spain in an account, eventually translated into English and published in London in 1617 with the title “Terra Australis Incognita, or A New Southerne Discouerie”. After that, the year 1768 is the date of publication in English, of another, much longer report, translated from French, in which Charles de Brosses narrates his Voyages to the Terra Australis, while yet another English translation of the report by Antoine de Bouganville, entitled A Voyage round the World, was published in 1772.8 The places in the area of the South Pacific visited by these navigators in a period that spans about two centuries were still often rhetorically represented with a “heavenly” overtone that fed the Western imagination and contributed to preserve an idealized perception of a completely different, Antipodean, world. In Quiros’account we read: Their bread is usually made of three sorts of rootes, which grow there in great abundance. Neither doe they imploy much labour in making this bread, for they doe onely roste the rootes until they are soft and tender. They are very pleasant to the taste, wholesome and nourishing. […] There is great store of excellent fruits in these Countreys. There are sixe kindes of Maple trees, Almond trees of four sorts, […] Innumerable Wallnut trees are found there, […] They have moreouer Sugar-Canes, large in size and in great plenty, […] they have Palm-trees without number, out of which there may easily bee drawne a iuice, which will make a liquor alluding much to wine, as also whey, vineger and hony.9 8 These accounts are all preserved at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., where I had access to them. 9 Pedro Fernandes de Quiròs, Terra Australis Incognita, or A New Southerne Discouerie (London, 1617), pp. 7–8.

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The topos of an edenic land of ‘bread, wine and honey’ is clearly evoked in this passage, as, William Eisler argues: The fifth continent […] surpassed the Indies in terms of its natural resources. Silver, gold, pearls, valuable oils, and coconuts were to be found in abundance. […] Salt and fish could be extracted from its seas. […] In short, if the Spice Islands had been denied to Spain, God had reserved for her an infinitely more desirable realm.10

The imagery related to this geographical portion of the globe nourished a rich production of utopias of a highly imaginative kind in Early Modern Europe. These writings were spawned by both the actual physical distance of Terra Australis Incognita and by the interdiction of the past centuries on the Southern hemisphere. Some of the most relevant among them are: Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem (1605–7), Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668), Gabriel de Foigny’s A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis (1693). While a modern edition of each of these “Austral utopias” is now available, an anonymous texts published in London in 1684, The Travels of Don Francisco de Quevedo through Terra Australis Incognita,11 still remains unpublished. Variously attributed to Joseph Hall and Alberico Gentili, it is considered a variant of Hall’s Mundus. It presents the Antipodes as a place inhabited by giants, characterized by plentiful natural resources produced in rich profusion, and, in a certain area of it, as an allwomen and women ruled society. As already stated, the “toponomy” of literary utopias is anti-geographical, and even when they embark in spatial descriptions, their assumptions are grounded in political discourse and have a strong political basis and purpose. In the Harvard Anonymous we read: You must seriously survey the Countrey we are now to Describe; it is called the Antipodes, and lyes Farthest distant foot to foot from our Region; […] The Dimentions [sic] of the Antipodes is just as large as the Country which is above it; so that the English Antipodes, if I may so term that part of it which seems beneath our Nation, is just as large as England.12

10 William Eisler, The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 50. 11 The original 1684 edition of this text is preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. 12 Anon., News: True News, City News, Country News, Court News. The World is Mad: Or, It is a Mad World, my Masters. Especially now, when in the Antipodes These things are come to pass, (London, 1679), p. 6.

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When it comes to the Antipodes’ inhabitants, we read: The people whereof, in outward features, Language, and religion, Resemble those to whom they are Supposite, or beneath, as those under England are very like the English in persons, but in manners, Carriage, and Condition of Life, Extremely Contrary.13

In fact, not only roles and tasks of men and women are reversed, but also: To describe the manner of the Metropolis or Head City in the Antipodes, the Aldermen there are poor, honest and witty; the Town Poets mere Puritans, […] Lawyers there think themselves much abus’d, if you offer them a Fee; you cannot retain them unless you keep your money.14

The reported passages are very consistent with early figurative representations of the “Antipodes”. In them, the concept of a “world turned upside down” is suggestively reproduced with connotative elements that invert the ordo naturalis. In a woodcut printed in Hartman Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle, written in 1493 and preserved at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, the “Antipode” is an anthropomorphic figure whose feet are oriented backward, with an alteration of the human anatomy that literally corresponds to the ethimological meaning of the word “antipodes”. In fact, “anti”-“podes” derives from two ancient greek terms: “anti”, meaning “against”, and “pous” (genitive case: “podos”), meaning “foot”. This “going against of the feet” has of course relevant symbolical and cultural implications as it suggests a reversed movement, the image of something, expanding to a whole world, turning the other way round. Such a perception also reflects the “transgressive” overtone which the idea of the Antipodes had acquired and was to keep from the Middle Ages up to the beginning of the Early Modern era. As we have seen, in the so-called Age of Discovery, and in the movement it implies, there is a reciprocal influence between the two cultural realms of utopia and travel, and the role of these literary representations in shaping the forms of actual knowledge of extra-European cultures in Early Modern Europe is deeply significant. In the case of Terra Australis Incognita, the passage from heresy to myth involves a transgressive fascination with the “impossibility” of Church pronouncements, and the construction of utopian spaces represents “possible” alternatives to the cultural and political status quo in a distinctive way. This is the case with many of the “Austral” utopias mentioned above, since all of them participate in the creation of the myth of a world that, in the European imagination, “goes the other way round”. An extreme form of movement, we can conclude, able to expand our vision and imagination, as evoked by John Donne’s

13 Anon., News: True News, City News, Country News, Court News…, pp. 3–4. 14 Anon., News: True News, City News, Country News, Court News…, pp. 4–5.

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dialogically reversed perspective in An Anatomy of the World, where searching in the utmost depth, one of the antipodes rises: And men, to sound depths, so much line untie As one might justly think that there would rise At end thereof one of th’ antipodes.15

15 John Donne, An Anatomy of the World, in The Complete English poems [of] John Donne, ed. by A.J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 292–294, p. 389.

Vera & Ansgar Nünning

Angela Locatelli – a Great Godsend for the University of Bergamo, for Literary Studies in Europe (and beyond), and for the PhDnet!

It is a great privilege and a tremendous pleasure for both of us to thank Angela Locatelli from the bottom of our hearts for her excellent cooperation in the PhDnet for more than a dozen years, and to pay tribute to her achievements in fostering international collaboration, supporting young researchers and developing literary studies in Europe and beyond. Since other contributors to this volume will address her role as a literary critic, theorist and scholar, we should like to focus instead on some personal remarks, honouring her outstanding role as an internationally esteemed colleague, collaborator, friend and mentor of young researchers. To put our thoughts in a nutshell – usually a fairly difficult task for German academics used to their native language with its particular syntax – we can reduce our key idea to six words, two of which are proper nouns: “Angela Locatelli is a great godsend!” Of course, we could just leave this statement as it is and let the readers and listeners use their own imagination, but then someone might legitimately object that that is too thin if it is supposed to be a proper tribute to a great scholar or at least an epilogue to a scholarly volume. We should thus like to elaborate a little and elucidate why Angela is such a godsend. For one thing, it is a godsend to us all that this young lady, Angela Locatelli, is supposed to have reached the tender age of 50 or even 60. Who could credit that this irrepressible, indefatigable, busily researching, publishing and travelling power pack of a scholar might be about to retire? This youthful, dynamic and highly creative Italian lady confounds every idea that most people have of this age but Angela does confirm some views that we learn from popular culture: You may have heard of the German popular singer Udo Jürgens who sang “Mit 66 Jahren, da fängt das Leben an”, which means that “Life begins at 66”. Another singer called Udo, Udo Lindenberg, commented after his 70th birthday in his dry North-German manner: “Ein schräger Vogel ist vor kurzem 70 geworden, und das ist gut so; denn die Alternative wäre ja gewesen, nicht 70 zu werden, und das wäre deutlich schlechter gewesen”. In English he might have said: “A weird guy

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recently turned 70. This is a good thing. After all, the alternative would have been not to turn 70 and that would have been a whole lot worse”. Or we could turn our attention to the Beatles and listen to what the fabulous four have to say and sing about “When I’m sixty-four”. You might be hoping for a thorough study of age but to make everything simpler, suffice it to say that Angela Locatelli seems to confirm everything that the renowned Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer puts forward in her captivating book Counter Clockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility (2009). She takes to task the flawed ideas and stereotypes that most people have about growing old and elderly people and sums it up by saying ‘You are as old as you feel’. In Angela’s case this might be somewhere between 25 and 52. At any rate, it confirms what Langer writes about the social constructedness of our ideas of age and growing older: “our culture is made up of people who age very differently” (Langer 2009: 174). – ‘not at all’, as we are tempted to add in Angela’s case, as she does not seem to have aged at all over the almost two decades we have had the privilege and pleasure to have known her. But let us return to the actual topic, i. e. to the question of why and for whom Angela Locatelli is such a godsend. The following comments are limited to four main areas and a few key points, although we could easily continue singing her praises for many more pages. First of all, having Angela Locatelli as a professor and teacher is a huge boon for the subject that she has taught and researched in her professorship over the past decades, and to which she will no doubt continue to make important contributions even after her official retirement. She has achieved unparalleled success, both in the range and depth of her research. Many of the doctoral researchers we have supervised together in our international network will testify to her thoughtful input, her vast knowledge, tireless energy and devotion to the subject and job, both in literary theory and in literary studies at large. Professors are supposed to teach and research their subject in a wide-reaching context and this is usually stipulated in the advertisement for the post. Although some appointed professors unfortunately do not really fulfil this criterion, we do not know anyone in the field of literary studies or literary theory who comes anywhere near the quality, breadth and depth that Angela has at her fingertips. She could run rings round them all. Her research interests focus on the Renaissance and modernism, but also on the contemporary British novel and literary theory, i. e. on quite different and far-reaching fields; Angela’s research and publications have contributed greatly in the way of originality, also on other periods, works and authors, and she has been one of the most distinguished and renowned scholars in the field of literary studies in Europe and beyond. We could therefore limit ourselves to stating that Angela Locatelli is not only an exceptional and internationally renowned scholar in literary studies, but also

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an excellent expert in literary theory. In 2005, she joined the international team of three editors of the European Journal of English Studies and impressed Martin Kayman and myself with her extensive knowledge, her apposite remarks, her extremely quick and efficient decisions on manuscripts that were submitted, and also by her amicable cooperation and her meticulous editing. Angela has always been, and continues to be, a great privilege and pleasure to work with. Not only is she an expert and authority in the subjects, she is also a superb team player. The second example to show how lucky we all are to have Angela as a distinguished colleague and a wonderful friend is the European PhDnet “Literary and Cultural Studies”, an established international institution and pioneering model for the reform of postgraduate research training that has changed the face of doctoral training in Europe. It was initiated by the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Giessen and constitutes an international research network between Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, the doctoral programme for philosophy, arts and society at the University of Helsinki and the doctoral programmes in literary and cultural studies at the University of Bergamo, the Catholic University of Lisbon, the University of Stockholm, the University of Graz and, more recently, also the University of Warwick. Members of the PhDnet pursue their doctoral studies at JLU and one of the six partner institutions, where their projects are jointly supervised. Moreover, they are awarded bi-national degrees. The PhDnet “Literary and Cultural Studies” offers a clearly structured three-year doctoral programme of high academic standard and with a distinctively international orientation. Joint events (symposia, conferences, master classes) implement the tight network structures envisioned in the PhDnet. Thus, the PhDnet curriculum provides a range of courses designed specifically for the needs of international doctoral researchers. This study programme ensures the academic quality of the PhD while at the same time reducing the time needed to obtain the degree to three years; the new cohort (already the 5th) began its PhD studies in January 2020. Right from the start when we were preparing the application for the German Academic Exchange Service in 2007/8, Angela Locatelli was actively involved as a founding member and she has also been a principal investigator right from the word go. You might even go so far as to assert that there would not have been a PhDnet without Angela, but certainly there would not have been an Italian university as a cornerstone of this joint venture. Angela was always greatly committed to solving all imaginable administrative difficulties that have often arisen in the context of the implementation of joint degrees between Bergamo and JLU Giessen, going to lots of trouble to find creative solutions to bureaucratic problems and shirking no confrontation to make things work. She has represented the PhDnet time and again at international summer schools, symposia,

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conferences and PhD defences as part of the Cotutelle procedure and can always be relied on to make an excellent impression. During the dozens of meetings of the Steering Committee and Executive Board, the international conferences, workshops, symposia and progress reports that the PhDnet has organised since 2008 we have had the pleasure of Angela’s friendly, collegial but also focussed and efficient participation. The Executive Board and Steering Committee of the PhDnet are the only meetings during my thirty-plus years of university work in which we not only work effectively but always find something to laugh about. Thirdly, the University of Bergamo can also consider itself hugely fortunate that Angela chose to spend most of her working life there, although many other top-ranking international universities would have been pleased and honoured to have had her among their academic staff. Being both an internationally distinguished and renowned academic and the loveable and wonderful personality that she is, Angela has always been an outstanding ambassador of the University of Bergamo, representing Italian scholarship and scientific rigour at its very best, not to omit the unsurpassed Italian hospitality and warm-heartedness that we have all enjoyed time and again whenever we have come to Bergamo. Many international colleagues have reported that she is held in the highest regard as a committed, talented, and also kind academic and ambassador of the University of Bergamo and the PhDnet. Her glowing reputation extends all over Europe, from Helsinki to Lisbon and from Graz to Stockholm, but she and her original work are equally well-known in the US. The Department of English at Bergamo University can consider itself exceedingly fortunate to have secured Angela Locatelli. All concerned parties in Bergamo have come to appreciate Angela enormously for her indefatigable efforts, her tireless energy, her productive input. She is not only an extremely dedicated and conscientious colleague, never giving up, even in the face of administrative or ministerial hurdles, but on a personal level she is fair, friendly, helpful and always willing to go the extra mile. She is always approachable for everyone, amiable and unfailingly cheery. Her boundless energy, kindness and constant good humour have the effect of flooding a room with sunlight. Last, but certainly not least, Angela Locatelli has always been a real godsend for the students and doctoral candidates who have been fortunate and lucky enough to have had her as an academic teacher and/or have worked under her supervision. We can speak on behalf of all our international colleagues when we emphasise that all our young researchers felt privileged and pleased to work with her and under her supervision over the past 12 years. She has given several master classes and keynote lectures in the context of the PhDnet curriculum and conferences that have inspired the doctoral candidates of each cohort. Her substantial and highly valuable feedback to the doctoral candidates has had a ben-

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eficial influence on many PhD projects and our successful graduates. Her enthusiasm is an inspiration to all. The main reason for her success is that Angela Locatelli is not only an excellent academic but also a wonderful and inspiring teacher and mentor, as well as a lovely, generous and kind person. She fulfils – of course – the conditions of competence, enthusiasm for her work, but just as importantly, Angela is authentic, full of integrity, and she is fair, honest and simply nice. She contrasts strongly with the inconsiderate egomaniacs who concentrate only on ‘me, myself and I’ in their ruthless career path and she is also the opposite of those glum, grumpy misanthropic individuals who take their bad moods out on students, people they are in charge of, or the world at large. The way Angela performs her work as a university teacher is vitally important as professors, like teachers in general, are examples set to young people and should also exude positive energy, inspiration and optimism. Other characteristics in my view are natural authority based on competence, enthusiasm, the ability to enthuse and inspire other people, serenity, generosity, intellectual curiosity, respect, tolerance, trustworthiness, sense of responsibility, moral courage and the ability to value other people and their achievements: “granting greatness to others”, as Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander put it in their captivating book The Art of Possibility (2000: 73). Unlike some other people, Angela has these qualities in spades and our hearts fly out to her. *** An epilogue like this, claiming that someone is a great godsend, is bound to concentrate on a person’s great achievements, strengths, and admirable qualities, but someone might ask if the person has any kind of flaws, failings, idiosyncrasies, embarrassing habits? Is there nothing to discredit in this gigantic individual? Yes, there certainly is: Angela Locatelli is sometimes arguably far too fast and does not only do a lot but sometimes she does much too much. She sometimes appears to be in advance of herself, sometimes she appears to be running after herself. Anyone who has observed her energetic activity, her very frequent publications and tireless travelling for the sake of academia can hardly make out whether it is a hare or a hedgehog that is whizzing along the academic furrows, never slowing down. My final words are thus to recommend to all readers and especially to Angela one of the most beautiful stories of world literature: Angela Hildesheimer’s “1956 – ein Pilzjahr”, i. e. ‘a mushroom year’. Mushrooms, as you may know, are symbols of good luck in the German language. As Angela is highly unlikely to slow down or work less, as our gigantic colleague and friend has the gift to be an

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academic long-distance runner or win a triathlon and not turn into a Slow Professor (cf. Berg/Seeber 2016), so we should all take note of the protagonist of this story and follow his example. He is called Gottlieb Theodor Pilz, i. e. Mr. Mushroom. Those of you who are not familiar with the story and this protagonist have revealed a gap in their education, but this is understandable today in times of ranking, excellence strategies, evaluations and other pointless competitions, but no-one should be prevented from following Pilz’s wise principle: ‘more words, less action’. Quite unlike Angela Locatelli, Gottlieb Theodor Pilz excels less as a catalyst and more as a slower-down, fighting tirelessly against artistic exaggerated zealousness (31). For example, he seriously tried to persuade Rossini to devote himself to gastronomy (30) instead of music and with no less seriousness tried to cut down Racine’s tragedies into a single one-act play (33). When Madame de Stael, displaying her usual busy-body-ness (24) informed him that she intended to write a book about Germany, Pilz replied by tersely saying ‘what for?’ (24). She appeared to be rather baffled and taken aback, never having considered this question and was lost for words. Therefore may we appeal to all our wonderful colleagues who know, like and love Angela: If she mentions that she intends to commence a new publication or project, please immediately transform yourself into a modern-day version of Gottlieb Theodor Pilz and pose the polite or terse question ‘what for?’ If she declares that she wants to write another book, please quote Pilz again and retort that this is possible, but by no means a reason to put her idea into practice. If she gives you a manuscript to read you can also quote Pilz, who, in a communication to Beethoven after hearing his 5th symphony said: ‘Not bad, not at all bad’. It is my view, dear Angela, that you should devote more time to frivolous activities (29). Just as Pilz made sure that the number of works did not get out of hand, we should all make a concerted effort to combat today’s creative pressure and, use intelligent conversations to put a damper on Angela Locatelli’s awesome drive. Let us hope that Angela’s birth year or one of the years after her retirement will also become a lucky mushroom year like 1956 or 1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution. On a personal level we have been to Bergamo more than 20 times for university events, meetings and conferences. Angela has always not only given us a very warm welcome that is second to none, her generous hospitality has also been unsurpassed. Nothing is ever too much trouble. She will never allow bronchitis or even broken bones to stand in her way. She also rose to the occasion when Ryanair tried to thwart us in our attempt to reach Bergamo by calling a strike on our departure date. In spite of cancelled flights, delays and other hurdles, Angela managed at short notice to iron everything out and make new arrangements,

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charming Il Sole into understanding our position and not make heavy compensatory demands. This goes to show that Angela is indomitable in adversity and does not take no for an answer. We might be tempted to say ‘she always comes up trumps’ but that idiom has now necessarily been deleted from the English language for selfexplanatory reasons, so may we instead observe that ‘she always comes out on top’. Well done Angela, top marks in every instance, and universal admiration by your colleagues, friends and all the young researchers who have had the great pleasure and privilege to work with you, to boot. If we could plug this wonderful Angela dynamo into a socket, we would immediately solve the energy crisis.

Notes on Contributors

Ana Margarida Abrantes studied German and English language and literature at the Universities of Aveiro, Essen and Innsbruck. After completing her Master’s Degree in cognitive linguistics, she received her PhD in German language and literature with the dissertation Meaning and Mind. A Cognitive Approach to Peter Weiss’ Prose Work (Peter Lang, 2010). Between 2007 and 2009, she held a postdoctoral position in the Department of Cognitive Research at Case Western Reserve University. Since 2010, she has worked at the Catholic University in Portugal. In addition to teaching German language and translation, she is senior researcher at the Communication and Culture Research Center (CECC). Her research interests include cognition and culture, narrativity, and German Studies. Publications: cienciavitae.pt/portal/5A1C-1D19-BD25. Elena Agazzi is Full Professor of German Studies at the University of Bergamo. Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung since 1996. President of the Italian Association of German Studies (2016–2019) and in the Directory Board of the International Association of German Studies (IVG). Member of the scientific committee of some international journals such as Monatshefte, Comparatio, Arbitrium, LINKS. Co-Editor with Vita Fortunati of the series Interfacing Science, Literature and the Humanities by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Research interests: Classical-romantic and Contemporary German Literature as well German Literature in relationship with figurative arts and science from 18th to 20th Century, the literary avantgardes and the Moderne in Germany and Austria; German culture of the second post-war period, cultural memory and the Shoah. In addition to this, theory and practice of literary translation, hermeneutics and literary aesthetics. Publications: W.G. Sebald: in difesa dell’uomo (Le Lettere, 2012), with E. Schütz, Nachkriegskultur (1945–1962) (De Gruyter, 2013), with R. Calzoni Progetti culturali di fine Settecento fra tardo Illuminismo e Frühromantik (Cultura tedesca, n. 50, 1/2016) and Distorsioni percettive nella Moderne (Cultura tedesca, n. 55, 2/2018), with G. Gabbiadini and P.M. Lützeler, Hermann Brochs Vergil–Roman (Stauffenburg, 2016), with Gesa Dane e Gaby Pailer, The Queen’s

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Two Bodies. Maria Stuart und Elisabeth I. von Schiller bis Jelinek, in JIG (Peter Lang, 2021). She is completing a translation and commentary work on Herder’s early essays (Bompiani 2022). Luca Bani is Associate Professor of Italian literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bergamo. He has been a member of the scientific committees of the French magazines of Italian Studies Italies and Transalpina since 2008, and he has been the President of the Centro di Studi Tassiani since 2013. Since 2014, he has been a member of the editorial committee of the Saggi and Testi series of CISAM (International Centre for Studies on the Avant-gardes and Modernity). His research crosses Italian and European literature and culture from the 18th to the 20th century, with particular attention to the theme of the natural and urban landscape in poetic and narrative texts (Carducci, Pascoli, d’Annunzio, Pavese, Bassani, Moravia , Thomas Mann, Ibsen, Woolf) and to 18- and 19-century epistolography (Bettinelli, Cesare Cantù, De Amicis, De Gubernatis and Faldella). Raul Calzoni is Full Professor of German Studies at the University of Bergamo. His research areas include German Classic and Romantic ages and the following aspects of German literature and culture in the 20th century: the strategies of recollection of the past and transmission of European cultural memory in contemporary German and Austrian literature; the relation between witness, memory and history in the literature after World War II; the theories of intermediality in the wake of the relationship between science and literature and music and literature. His publications include “Ein in der Phantasie durchgeführtes Experiment”: Literatur und Wissenschaft nach Neunzehnhundert (ed. with M. Salgaro, 2010), Monstrous Anatomies. Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century (ed. with G. Perletti, 2015), Intermedialität – Multimedialität. Literatur und Musik in Deutschland von 1900 bis heute (ed. with P. Kofler and V. Savietto, 2015), Denkbilder. “Thought-Images” in 20th Century German Prose (ed. with F. Rossi, 2016), Übersetzen. Theorien, Praktiken und Strategien der europäischen Germanistik. Akten der Jahrestagung des italienischen Germanistenverbandes (ed. with E. Agazzi et al., 2021). Isabel Capeloa Gil is Full Professor of Culture Studies and the current Rector of UCP – Catholic University of Portugal. She holds a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Lisbon (1987), and an M.A. in German Studies from the same university (1992), as well as a PhD in German language and culture from UCP (2001). She was Guest Professor in Germany (Saarbrücken, Munich), United Kingdom, Ireland (National University of Ireland), Italy (Univ.

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Ca Foscari, Venice), in Brasil (PUC-Rio) and in the USA (U. Pennsylvania and U. Stanford). She is furthermore an Honorary Fellow at the School of Advanced Studies of the University of London. From 2005 to 2012 she was the Dean of the Faculty of Human Sciences at the UCP. She has held numerous visiting professorships at universities in the U.S., Germany, Brazil, Italy, Ireland and Wales. She was a founder of The Lisbon Consortium network and leads the International Doctoral Degree Program in Culture Studies. She is also a senior researcher and founder of the Research Centre for Communication and Culture. Stefania Consonni is a Researcher in English Linguistics at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Bergamo (Italy). She has published books and essays on textual paradigms; narratology; the history and theory of the novel; the semiotics of visual vs. verbal language; re- and cosemiotization; the history and theory of spatialization; specialized communication in a discourse-analytical and culturalist perspective; the semiotic, pragmatic and epistemological features of traditional and new genres within academic, scientific, entertainment and media discourse. She is an active member of the Research Centre on Languages for Specific Purposes (CERLIS), based at the University of Bergamo, and of the CLAVIER (Corpus and Language Variation in English Research) inter-academic research consortium. She is on the editorial board of JCaDS (Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, University of Cardiff), the CERLIS Series (University of Bergamo), and Ibérica (European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes). She has been involved in interacademic Research Projects, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, on social and cultural studies and on specialized language and discourse. Larissa D’Angelo is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and Head of the UNIBG Eye Tracking Lab. She specialized in English Language in the USA (Youngstown State University), obtaining an MA, a TESOL Certificate and a Certificate in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and she later obtained a PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading (UK). She is on the editorial board of CERLIS Series (University of Bergamo), and Ibérica (European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes). Her main research interests deal with biometric analyses, multimodality, Audio Visual Translation (AVT) and the translation of Children’s and Young Adult Literature. She is an active member of the Research Centre on Languages for Specific Purposes (CERLIS), based at the University of Bergamo, and since 2006 she has been involved in several inter-academic research projects on academic language and discourse funded by the Italian Ministry of Education.

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Francesca Di Blasio, PhD in English literature, teaches at the University of Trento, Italy. Her areas of research are literary theory, indigenous Australian literature, early modern literature, Modernism. Di Blasio has been working for over a decade, and continues to work on Australian indigenous literature and the post(?)-colonial gaze, and is the author of various articles and books (unitn.it/d u/en/Persona/PER0002970/Pubblicazioni) on this topic. She has translated Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s We Are Going (Trento 2013) and Rita and Jackie Huggins’ Auntie Rita (Verona 2018) into Italian. Di Blasio is the president of the Italian Association for Australian and South Pacific Studies (AISAO – Associazione Italiana di Studi sull’Australia e sull’Oceania (aisao.it/)). She received a fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. for an ongoing project on the representation of “Terra Australis” in Early Modern literature. Richard Dury, born in Bristol in 1947, graduated in Medieval and Modern History at the University of Manchester and then continued his studies with research into the mythology and ideology of the ancient history as written in Italy in the age of Dante. Youthful zig-zags then took him to Marseille and MIlan, in which city he worked for the British Council and was a translator for architectural reviews. A final chance event brought him to the University of Bergamo as a ‘lettore’, and where he became Researcher in 1985 and Associate Professor in 1998, teaching English Language, English language History and English Literature. He has published numerous articles on the History of the English Language and on Robert Louis Stevenson, whose interwoven style and thought he especially appreciates. In 1996 he created the Stevenson website, and in 2004 he edited the scholarly edition of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Edinburgh University Press). Now retired, he is a General Editor of the new edition of all Stevenson’s works for Edinburgh University Press, for which he has edited two volumes of the essays, soon to be published. Michela Gardini is Associate Professor of French Literature at University of Bergamo. She is a specialist in 19th and 20th-century French literature. Her research focuses predominantly on the intersection between literature, religion and supernatural; on the rewriting processes of myths; on the dialogue between word and image; on the intertextuality and metatextuality. She has published, amongst other works, Il ritratto e l’assenza. Percorsi nella letteratura francese (Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 2019), Remy de Gourmont. Écrits sur Shakespeare et la littérature anglaise en France (Pisa: ETS, 2017), Joséphin Péladan. Esthétique, magie et politique (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), Giovanna d’Arco e i suoi doppi (Bergamo: Sestante, 2009), Nei frammenti della modernità (Bergamo: Sestante, 2006).

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Susanne Knaller is Professor of Romance and Comparative Literature at the University of Graz. She is the founder and speaker of the Research Department General and Comparative Literature. Since 2013 she has been Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Graz. Research interests: aesthetic theories 18th to 21st century, theory of authenticity, concepts of reality in modernity, writing as practice. A selection of published books: (2007) Ein Wort aus der Fremde. Geschichte und Theorie des Begriffs Authentizität; (2013) Realität und Wirklichkeit in der Moderne. Texte zu Literatur, Kunst, Film und Fotografie (analytical anthology) gams.uni-graz.at/context:reko; (2015) Die Realität der Kunst. Programme und Theorien zu Literatur, Kunst und Fotografie seit 1700; (co-ed.) (2017) Writing Emotions. Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature; (2018) (co-ed.) Schreibprozesse im Zwischenraum. Zur Ästhetik von Textbewegungen; (2022) Mit Texten umgehen. Ein theoretisch-methodologisches Modell; (2022) (with co-authors) gams.uni-graz.at/liminal Jean-Jacques Lecercle is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nanterre. He was educated at the École Normale Supérieure and taught at the Universities of Nanterre and Cardiff. A specialist in Victorian literature and the philosophy of language, he is the author of, among others, The Violence of Language, Interpretation as Pragmatics, Philosophy of Nonsense, Une philosophie marxiste du langage and De l’interpellation. Pirjo Lyytikäinen is Professor Emerita of Finnish Literature at the University of Helsinki, and the author of several monographs on prominent Finnish novels (Aleksis Kivi’s Seven Brothers, Volter Kilpi’s modernist masterpiece In the Parlor of Alastalo and the novels of Leena Krohn, a contemporary author of allegorical phantasy). She has edited volumes on the interrelationship of Finnish and other European literatures. She is a specialist in Symbolism and Decadence and their relations to Romanticism as well as early Modernism. Her recent publications in English include the co-edited volume Nordic Literature of Decadence (2020, Routledge) and the article on Nordic Decadence in The Oxford Handbook of Decadence (2022). Other coedited volumes in English include Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of Literary Representation (2012), Imagining Spaces and Places (2013), and Values in Literature (2015). Her recent research focuses on affective poetics and the emotional effects conveyed by literary texts. On these issues she has published several articles in Finnish and one in English: “How to Study Emotion Effects in Literature Written Emotions in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in Writing Emotions. Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature (2017).

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Stefania M. Maci (Phd, Lancaster University, UK) is Full Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo. She is Director of CERLIS (Research Centre on Specialized Languages), and member, amongst others, of CLAVIER (The Corpus and Language Variation in English Research Group), BAAL (British Association of Applied Linguistics), and AELINCO (Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics). She also serves on the executive board of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica). Her research is focused on the study of the English language in academic and professional contexts, with particular regard to the analysis of tourism and medical discourses. Recent publications include: the monographs English Tourism Discourse (2020); the co-edited volumes: with Cristina Hanganu-Bresch, Michael Zerbe and Gabriel Cutrufello The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Communication (2022); with Larissa D’Angelo and Anna Maurauneen Metadiscourse in Digital Communication (2021); with Maurizio Gotti and Michele Sala Scholarly Pathways. Knowledge Transfer and Knowledge Exchange in Academia (2020); and the papers: “Living-with-dying”: the elderly’s language of terminal illness (2021); The narrative of the anti-vax campaign on Twitter (2021); From #traveltomorrow to #MagicalKenya: a sociosemiotic analysis of a tourism narrative response to Covid-19 (2020, coauthored with Cinzia Spinzi); Parents’ narrative about congenital heart diseases: Acquiring knowledge and sharing empathy (2019). Ansgar Nünning is Professor of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies and founding director of the “International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture” (GCSC), funded by the Excellence Initiative and inaugurated in 2006, and of the European PhDnet “Literary and Cultural Studies”. His most recent publications include Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives (ed. with Vera Nünning & Birgit Neumann. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 2010), Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze – Personen – Grundbegriffe (ed., Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 5th ed. 2013), Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses (ed. with Michael Basseler & Daniel Hartley. Trier: WVT 2015), The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns – Literary Developments – Model Interpretations (co-edited with Vera Nünning, WVT 2018), and Literature and Literary Studies in the 21st Century: Cultural Concerns, Concepts and Case-Studies, (co-edited with Vera Nünning & Alexander Scherr, WVT 2021). In addition to narrative theory, English and American literature, cultures of memory, and literary and cultural theory, his recent research interests include forms of life and notions of a good life, narratives of slow change (e. g. climate change, mind change, stories of health and illness) and the interfaces between narratives/narrative studies and medicine/salutogenesis. He has collaborated with Angela Locatelli in various capacities since 2005, e. g. co-editing EJES: Eu-

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ropean Journal of English Studies and co-founding the European PhDnet “Literary and Cultural Studies” with colleagues from Helsinki, Lisbon and Stockholm, while also contributing to some of the lecture series organized, and volumes edited, by Angela in Bergamo on “The Knowledge of Literature”. Vera Nünning has been Professor of English Philology at Heidelberg University since 2002, and she also served as Vice-Rector for International Affairs from 2006–2009 and as one of the Vice-Presidents of the German consortium of the Turkish-German University in Istanbul. Among her most recent works are New Approaches to Narrative: Cognition – Culture – History (ed., WVT 2013), Ritual and Narrative (co-edited with Jan Rupp and Gregor Ahn, transcript 2013), Changing Fictions, Changing Minds (2014), and Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (ed., 2015), Methods of Textual Analysis in Literary Studies: Approaches, Basics, Model Interpretations, (co-edited with Ansgar Nünning, WVT 2020), and The Value of Literature. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 36 (co-edited with Ansgar Nünning, Narr 2021). Besides British literature from the 18th to the 21st century and cultural history from the 16th to the 19th century, her main research interests have recently been contemporary literature, postclassical narrative theory, and the interfaces between narrative studies and psychology. She has known Angela and (like Ansgar) been an avid reader of her works for twenty years, also contributing to some of the lecture series organized, and volumes edited, by Angela in Bergamo on “The Knowledge of Literature”. Greta Perletti is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Trento, Italy. She holds a PhD in Textual Analysis and Theory (University of Bergamo, Italy) and her research interests focus on interdisciplinary discourse, with a special emphasis on 19th-century literature and culture, cognitive literary studies and memory studies. She is the author of two monographs on the interplay between literary and medical discourse and of a number of articles and chapters in this field. In addition to science and literature, she is interested in the interactions between literary and visual discourse, especially photography in the 19th- and early 20th-century. Imke Polland-Schmandt is a Postdoctoral Researcher and the academic coordinator of the European PhD Network “Literary and Cultural Studies” at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus Liebig University Giessen. Her PhD thesis ‘For Better, For Worse?’ Royal Heirs between Continuity and Change in Media Representations of British Royal Weddings (2005–2011) has been published with Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT, 2020). Her current project investigates Anglo-European relations and config-

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urations of Englishness in British Literature. She is co-editor of the volumes Literature and Crises (ed. with Elizabeth Kovach and Ansgar Nu¨ nning, WVT, 2017), Europe’s Crises and Cultural Resources of Resilience (ed. with Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nu¨ nning, and Sandro M. Moraldo, WVT, 2020), Realms of Royalty: New Directions in Researching Contemporary European Monarchies (ed. with Christina Jordan, transcript, 2020), The Cultural Work of Fictions: Trajectories of Literary Studies in the 21st Century (ed. with Ansgar Nünning), and Forms at Work: New Formalist Approaches in the Study of Literature, Culture, and Media (ed. with Elizabeth Kovach and Ansgar Nu¨ nning, WVT, 2021). Annette Simonis, since 2005 Professor for German and Comparative Literature at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen; since 2008 co-editor of the journal Comparatio (Journal of Comparative Literature), member of the international PhDnet at the University of Giessen; since 2017 president of the German Association of General and Comparative Literature (DGAVL). Principal research interests: the cultural imaginary, intermediality, transmedia storytelling, aestheticism and avant-garde literature, poetics of culture, ecocriticism. Recent book publication: Das Kaleidoskop der Tiere. Zur Wiederkehr des Bestiariums in Moderne und Gegenwart (Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2017); Recent co-edited works: Im Archiv der vergessenen Bücher (Heidelberg: Winter 2018); Medienkomparatistik. Beiträge zur Vergleichenden Medienwissenschaft 1 (Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2019); Medienkomparatistik. Beiträge zur Vergleichenden Medienwissenschaft 2 (Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2020); Das Faszinosum Tier. Spiegelungen, Visionen, Transformationen in Literatur, Musik und Bild (Hildesheim: Olms 2020); Tierwelten und Textwelten. Beiträge der Bologneser Tagung (Bern, Frankfurt a.M.: Lang 2020). Eleonora Ravizza is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Bergamo. She received her PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Bergamo and the Justus Liebig University of Giessen (Germany) in 2012. Her main research interests include post-colonial literatures in English, contemporary poetry, philosophy of language, and literary theory. She has published several essays on the work of contemporary Caribbean, Canadian and Black-British authors, focusing on hybrid identities, exile and transcultural poetry. She currently teaches at the University of Bergamo and at the State University of Milan. Michele Sala, PhD (University of Bergamo), MA (Youngstown State University, Ohio), is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Bergamo (Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures), where he teaches English linguistics and translation at graduate and undergraduate level. He is a member of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica),

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CERLIS (Centro di Ricerca sui Linguaggi Specialistici), CLAVIER (Corpus and Language Variation in English Research Group) and a member of the scientific and editorial board of the CERLIS Series (international peer-reviewed volumes on specialized languages). His research activity deals with language for specific purposes and, more specifically, the application of genre and discourse analytical methods to a corpus-based study of specialized texts in the domain of academic research, law, medicine and applied linguistics (English Language across Contexts, Media and Modes [co-authored with S. Consonni], Genre Variation in Academic Communication. Emerging Disciplinary Trends, [co-edited with S.M. Maci]), The Language of Medicine: Science, Practice and Academia and Insights into Medical Communication [both co-edited with M. Gotti and S.M. Maci]), as well as digital humanities (Corpus Linguistics and Translation Tools for Digital Humanities [co-edited with S.M. Maci]). Polina Shvanyukova is a Researcher in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Udine. She studied Swedish, English and German at the Novgorod State University in Russia. After obtaining her second Master’s degree in English and German from the University of Bergamo, she enrolled in the European PhDnet Programme in Literary and Cultural Studies and gained a double PhD degree from the universities of Giessen and Bergamo. She held Postdoctoral Researcher positions in English Language and Linguistics at the Universities of Florence and Bergamo. She also taught English Language courses at the University of Milan. She is an active member of the HoLLT (History of Language Learning and Teaching) international research network (hollt.net/) and has published on the history of English language teaching in Italy, Business English in a historical perspective, as well as Late Modern English travel literature related to the exploration of the Pacific. Marco Sirtori teaches Italian Contemporary Literature at the University of Bergamo (Italy) and since 2009 has been Visiting professor at the Université Lumière Lyon2 (France), where he is also fellow member of the research group LCE (Lettres et Civilizations Étrangères). He is a member of Editorial Boards and of Scientific Committees of Italian and International journals, such as Novecento transnazionale (Roma La Sapienza), Textures (Universitè Lumière Lyon2), Acta et Studia, Sediziose voci. Studi sul melodramma, Studi del CISAM. Among his research interests: Romantic Culture (art, music and literary forms) in Italy and Europe; narrative and theatrical genres of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries; comic literature from the 18th to the 20th century; Italian contemporary literature. His recent publications include: Lector in musica. Libri e lettori nel melodramma di Sette e Ottocento ; Atlante letterario del Risorgimento. 1848–1871 (ed. with Matilde Dillon Wanke) ; Giosuè Carducci. Il testo, l’edizione ; Ecfrasi

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musicali. Parola e suono nel Romanticismo europeo (ed. with Raul Calzoni); Poeti pittori e pittori poeti. Poesia e arte tra Otto e Novecento (ed. with Raul Calzoni and Fabio Scotto); Lo spazio tra prosa e lirica nella letteratura italiana. Studi in onore di Matilde Dillon Wanke(ed. with Luca Bani); Storia memoria invenzione nella narrativa e nel teatro italiano dell’Ottocento. Emanuel Stelzer is a Researcher at the University of Verona. He is the author of Portraits in Early Modern English Drama: Visual Culture, Play-Texts, and Performances (Routledge, 2019) and of Shakespeare Among Italian Criminologists and Psychiatrists, 1870s–1920s (Skenè Texts and Studies, 2021). His articles have appeared in journals including Critical Survey, Early Theatre, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, English Studies, Notes and Queries, The Huntington Library Quarterly, and Skenè: Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies. His main interests are early modern English literature and drama, textual studies, and theatre history, with a particular interest in source studies and early modern paradoxes. His work on William Sampson has earned him the Huntington Library Quarterly Centennial Essay Prize; he has also translated into Italian Philip Massinger’s The Picture (Aracne, 2017) and John Milton’s Comus (ETS, 2020). Dr Stelzer is managing editor of Skenè: Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies and contributes to The Year’s Work in English Studies.

Tabula Gratulatoria

Prof. Dr. Anesa, Patrizia, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Antosa, Silvia, Università di Enna Kore Dr. Avallone, Lucia, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Bajetta, Carlo M., Université de la Vallée d’Aoste Dr. habil. Basseler, Michael, Justus Liebig University Giessen Prof. Bensi, Mario, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Bernini, Giuliano, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Bianchi, Marina, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Bigliazzi, Silvia, Università degli Studi di Verona Prof. Bizzotto, Elisa, Università Iuav di Venezia Prof. Burini, Federica, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Cammarota, Maria Grazia, Università degli studi di Bergamo Dr. Carobbio, Gabriella, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Castagna, Valentina, Università degli Studi di Palermo Prof. Dr. Casti, Emanuela, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Cenni, Serena, Già docente Università di Trento Dr. Censi, Martina, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Coppola, Maria Micaela, Università degli Studi di Trento Prof. Corti, Erminio, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Costantini, Mariaconcetta, Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio” di Chieti-Pescara Prof. Dr. Cuzzolin, Pierluigi, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Del Bello, Davide, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Desoutter, Cécile, Università di Bergamo Prof. Dillon Wanke, Matilde, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dossena, Marina, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Facchinetti, Roberta, Università di Verona Dr. Falchi, Simonetta, Università degli Studi di Sassari Prof. Dr. Franchi, Franca, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Dr. Gabbiadini, Guglielmo, Università degli Studi di Bologna Prof. Garofalo, Giovanni, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Gennero, Valeria, Università degli studi di Bergamo Prof. Ghisalberti, Alessandra, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Giorgi, Sonia, Già Docente di Scuola Superiore; Psicoterapeuta, Psicologo Analista

300

Tabula Gratulatoria

Prof. Gottardo, Maria, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Gotti, Maurizio, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Grassi, Roberta, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Guidotti, Francesca, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Hanenberg, Peter, Universidade Católica Portuguesa Prof. Dr. Heller, Dorothee, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Lo Monaco, Francesco, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Lyytikäinen, Pirjo, Helsinki University Prof. Marchetti, Leo, Università di Pescara Prof. Marrapodi, Michele, Università degli Studi di Palermo Prof. Marzola, Alessandra, Università degli studi di Bergamo Prof. Meriggi, Maria Grazia, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Morelli, Gabriele, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Mucci, Clara, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Nicora, Flaminia, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Dr. Pallone, Cristian, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Palmieri, Nunzia, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Partenza, Paola, Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio”, Chieti-Pescara Prof. Dr. Pellin, Tommaso, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Persi, Ugo, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Persico, Gemma, Università degli Studi di Catania Prof. Dr. Pesenti, Maria Chiara, Università degli studi di Bergamo Prof. Pisanty, Valentina, Università degli studi di Bergamo Dr. Pucciarelli, Edvige Prof. Dr. Pyrhönen, Heta, University of Helsinki Prof. Dr. Reggiani, Enrico, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – Milano Prof. Dr. Riem, Antonella, Università di Udine Prof. Rodríguez Amaya, Fabio Alberto, Univerità degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Saggini, Francesca, University of Edinburgh Prof. Dr. Salis, Loredana, Università degli studi di Sassari Prof. Scotto, Fabio, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Scirocco, Giovanni ,Università degli Studi di Bergamo Dr. Seligardi, Beatrice, Università di Parma Prof. Dr. Stanco, Michele, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II Dr., Priv.-Doz. Dr. Strohmaier, Alexandra, Universität Graz Dr. Taddei, Marco, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Dr. Vaghi, Massimiliano, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Valentini, Ada, Università degli studi di Bergamo Prof. Vallorani, Nicoletta, Università degli Studi di Milano Prof. Dr. Violi, Alessandra, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Dr. Visinoni, Alessandra Elisa, Università degli Studi di Bergamo Prof. Dr. Wåghäll Nivre, Elisabeth, Stockholm University

Angela Locatelli: Publications (edited by Eleonora Natalia Ravizza)

Books 2002–2011. Angela Locatelli (a cura di). La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Volumes I–X, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni. 1998. Il Doppio e il Picaresco: un esempio paradigmatico nel Rinascimento Inglese, con The Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum / L’Ameno Racconto di Meum e Tuum (1639) di Henry Peacham, edizione critica con traduzione a fronte, introduzione e note, Milano: Jaca Book. 1989. L’Eloquenza e gli Incantesimi: Interpretazioni Shakespeariane, Milano: Guerini e Associati. 1983. Una coscienza non tutta per sé: Studio sul romanzo dello “Stream of Consciousness”, Bologna: Patron. 1983. Coping with the inexplicable: Language and Situations in Pinter’s Early Plays, Milano: Coopli dello I.U.L.M. 1976. Introduzione semiologica al teatro shakespeariano, Milano: Coopli dello I.U.L.M.

Papers and Book Chapters in English 2021. “‘A voice answering a voice’: Il dialogo della poesia in Virginia Woolf”. Ticontre. Teoria Testo Traduzione 16, 1–14. 2021. “Literature as an Ecological Space of Self-awareness, and Perspective-Taking. With a Reading of The Voyage Out”. REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 36 (“The Value of Literature”, edited by Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning), Tübingen: Narr, 119–130. 2021. “Fiction as Play: Theoretical and Literary Perspectives on Simulation (Embodied or Not)”. In The Cultural Work of Fictions. Trajectories of Literary Studies in the 21st Century, edited by Ansgar Nünning and Imke Polland-Schmandt, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 23–34.

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2021. “Translation as a Catalyst of Re-writing and Translation as a Kind of Writing”. In Traduzioni esemplari e saggi storici sul tradurre dal Romanticismo a oggi, a cura di Fabio Scotto, Milano: Cisalpino Istituto Editoriale Universitario, 207–224. 2021. “Literary Translation as Performance. Theoretical Questions and a Literary Analogy”. Armenian Folia Anglistika. International Journal of English Studies 17(1), Yerevan, 96–107. 2020. “‘They […] Who, moving others, are themselves as stone’: Instances of moving and being unmoved in English Renaissance Rhetoric and Shakespeare”. InScriptum: A Journal of Language and Literary Studies 1, 7–27. 2020. “Traces of European Crisis and Resilience in Contemporary British Literature: A reading of Julian Barnes’s Pulse and Chris Cleave’s Incendiary”. In Europe’s Crises and Cultural Resources of Resilience. Conceptual Explorations and Literary Negotiations, edited by Imke Polland, Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning, and Sandro M. Moraldo, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 169–182. 2020. “(How) Can Recent Cognitive Studies Contribute to Literary Interpretation?”. Armenian Folia Anglistika. International Journal of English Studies 16(1), Yerevan, 137– 156. 2019. “Spatial mobility as social mobility in the Early Seventeenth Century: Henry Peacham Jr.’s picaresque novel. A Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum.” Armenian Folia Anglistika 15(1), Yerevan, 166–181. 2019. “Plurivocal Narration as an Empathic Response of Resistance to Colonial Prejudice. Writing Alterity in The Voyage Out”. Le Simplegadi 17, 53–64. DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE128. 2019. “Religious and Amorous ‘Apocalypses’ in John Donne’s Metaphysical Imagination”. In The End of the World in Medieval Thought and Spirituality, edited by Eric Knibbs, Jessica A. Boon, and Erica Gelser, London: Palgrave, 315–338. 2018.“Hamlet and the Android: Reading Emotions in Literature”. In Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies 4(1, “Transitions”), Verona: Università degli Studi di Verona, 63–84. 2017. “‘The Humble/d’ in Literature and Philosophy: Precariousness, Vulnerability, and the Pragmatics of Social Visibility”. In The Humble in 19th- to 21st- Century British Literature and Arts, edited by Isabelle Brasme, Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau, Montpéllier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 147–163. 2017. “The (In)visibility of Systemic Victimization: A Reading of Rupa Bajwa’s The Sari Shop”. In Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction, edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, London: Taylor and Francis, Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Literature, 164–175. 2017. “Experiencing and Responding to Crisis: Layered Discourses and Hybrid Epistemologies in Early Modern English Culture”. In Literature and Crises. Conceptual Explorations and Literary Negotiations, edited by Elizabeth Kovach, Ansgar Nünning and Imke Polland, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 31–44. 2017. “Emotions and/in Religion: Reading Freud, Rudolph Otto and William James”. In Writing Emotions. Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, edited by Ingeborg Jandl, Susanne Knaller, Sabine Schönfellner, and Gudrun Tockner, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 77–95.

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2016. “Victorian and Postmodern Hybrid ‘Language Games’: Reading Tolstoy’s On the Significance of Science and Art”. In Knowledge Dissemination in the Long Nineteenth Century: European and Transatlantic Perspectives, edited by Marina Dossena and Stefano Rosso, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 105–121. 2015. “Re-configuring Classical Myth in Early-Modern England: Orpheus as ‘Tutelary Deity’ of Poetry and Civilization”. In Allusions and Reflections. Greek and Roman Mythology in Renaissance Europe, edited by Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre, Anna Carlstedt, Anders Cullhed, Carin Franzén, Peter Gillgren, Kerstin Lundström, and Erland Sellberg, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 105–122. 2015. “Constructing and Deconstructing ‘Forms of Life’: Life in Literature and the Life of Literature”. In Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature. Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses, edited by Michael Basseler, Daniel Harvey, and Ansgar Nünning, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 39–52. 2015. ”The Moral and the Fable: A Fluid Relationship in Artistic Literature”. In Values of Literature, edited by Hanna Meretoja, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, and Kristina Malmio, Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 47–62. 2014. “Reading Literature: An Ethical Gesture in the Postmodern Context?” In Armenian Folia Anglistika 10(1–2), Yerevan, 121–130. 2013. “Landscaping Literature in Early Modern England: Praxis, Gnosis and the Shiftings Knowledge of Literature”. In (Re)Contextualizing Literary and Cultural History, edited by Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre, Beate Schirrmacher and Claudia Egerer, Stockholm: USAB, 81–92. 2013. “Constructions of Space: The Literary Configuration of ‘the English Countryside’”. In Imagining Spaces and Places, edited by Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Kirsi Saarikangas and Renja Suominen-Kokkonen, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 143–160. 2012. “Turning Points and Mutuality in Literature and Psychoanalysis”. In Turning Points. Concepts and Narratives of Change in Literature and Other Media, edited by Ansgar Nünning and Kai M. Sicks, Berlin: De Gruyter, 425–436. 2012. “The Knowledge of Literature Through the Hour-Glass”. In Langage en effet / Language in Deed. Textes en l’honneur de Jean-Jacques Lecercle, edited by Chantal Delourme and Richard Pedot, Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 51–64. 2011. ”The Knowledge of Literature or the Special Effects of Literary Discourse”. Armenian Folia Anglistika, 7(2), Yerevan, 127–136. 2011. “Well said, well seen: Aspects of the Visual in Literature”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. X, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 131–146. 2011. “The Apophthegms: Renaissance Education between Laughter and Scapegoating”. In Hammered Gold and Gold Enamelling. Studi in onore di Anthony Leonard Johnson, a cura di Simona Beccone, Carmen Dell’Aversano e Chiara Serani, Roma: Aracne, 373– 386. 2011. “Description in Literary and Historical Narratives: Rhetoric, Narratology and Ways of Seeing”. In Author(ity) and The Canon. Between Institutionalization and Questioning Literature from High to Late Modernity, edited by Mihaila Irimia and Ivana Dragos, Bucharest: Bucuresti Institutul Cultural Roman, 115–126.

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2011. “Mutuality and Challenges in Literature, Theory, and the Philosophy of Language: An Interview with Jean-Jaques Lecercle”. In The European English Messenger 20(2), 59–66. 2011. “Conjuctures of Uneasiness: Trauma in Fay Weldon’s The Heart of the Country and in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach”. In Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 227– 239. 2011. ”‘A green Thought in a green Shade’: Knowledge in Literature and the Visual Arts”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. X, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 7–12. 2010. “Complicity or Rivalry? The Historian and the Poet in the English Renaissance”. In La conoscenza della letteratura /The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. IX, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 93–106. 2010. “Framing Events: Literary and Historical Knowledge”, In La conoscenza della letteratura / The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. IX, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 2010, 7–18. 2010. “‘I give you my word(s)’: Layered realism and Images of Life in Literature”. In Genre and Interpretation, edited by Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Tintti Klapuri, and Minna Maijala, Helsinki: University Press of Helsinki, 109–121. 2010. “Discursive Intersections on the Subject of ‘Light’ in English Renaissance Literature”. In Representing Light across Arts and Sciences: Theories and Practices, edited by Elena Agazzi, Enrico Giannetto and Franco Giudice, Göttingen: V&R UniPress, 69–87. 2009. “Suspensions of disbelief: Myth, Religion, and Literature”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. VIII, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 165–178. 2009. “Orpheus: The Tutelary Deity”. In La conoscenza della Letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. VIII, a cura di Locatelli Angela, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 7–14. 2009. “Amphibology, Oral Pleasure, and a Fantasy of Completeness: A Psychoanalytical Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. In Psychoanalytical Studies of English and American Literary Works, studies contributed in celebration of the 35th anniversary of The Society for Psychoanalytical Study of English Language and Literature, Kumamoto City (Japan): Publishing The Society for Psychoanalytical Study of English Language and Literature, 21–38. 2009. “The Ethical Use(s) Of Literary Complexity”. In Values in Literature and the Value of Literature: Literature as a Medium for Representing. Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values, edited by Sybille Baumbach, Herbert Grabes and Ansgar Nünning, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 67–78. 2008. “Impersonating Intertextuality: Impressions, Exempla, and Aesthetic Norms in Shakespearean Characters”. In The Difference of Shakespeare, a cura di Alessandra Marzola, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 53–66. 2008. “Acknowledging Boundaries and Entanglements between the ‘Two Cultures’”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. VII, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 7–12. 2008. “Literature’s Versions of its own Transmission of Values”. In Ethics in Culture. The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media, edited by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes and Ansgar Nünning, Berlin: de Gruyter, 19–34.

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2008. “‘This Phantasie May Be Resembled to a Glasse’: Collisions and Collusions in EarlyModern Literary and Scientific Discourse”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. VII, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, Bergamo, 157–172. 2007. “The Ecology of Wonderland: Textual, Critical and Institutional Perspectives in Literature”, in Literary Landscapes, Landscapes in Literature, a cura di M. Bottalico, M. T. Chialant, ed E. Rao, Roma: Carocci Editore, 46–53. 2007. “The Common Desire of Representation: or How to ‘Express’ in Literature and Science”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. VI, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 7–22. 2007. “Larger than Science? Bacon’s idea of Poetry in The Advancement of Learning”. In Inspiration and Technique. Ancient/Modern Views on Beauty and Art, edited by John Roe and Michele Stanco, Bern: Peter Lang, 157–170. 2007. “Did Francis Galton lose his marbles? Scientists in A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. VI, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 137–152. 2007. “Cloning Discourse: Aspects of the Postmodern in British Literature”. In Il tradimento del bello: Le trans-figurazioni tra avanguardia e postmodernità, a cura di Elena Agazzi e Marco Lorandi, Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 151–163. 2006. With Martin A. Kayman and Ansgar Nünning. “On being ‘European’ in English”. EJES European Journal of English Studies 10(1), 1–12 2006. “Introduction: Literature’s (Play)ground”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. V, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 7–13. 2006. “Landscaping Literature: Landmarks and Wonderland”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. V, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 133–149. 2005. “‘It hath no bottom: and I will sing it’: Literature as Endless Hypersign of Revelation and Concealment”. In Saukoanaritikaru Eibungaku Ronso, Psychoanalytical Study of English and Literature 25, Tokyo, 1–12. 2005. “Literature’s Elusive Posture: Imposture?”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol IV, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 7–19. 2004. “Theorizing the Fantastic, and Translating The Dream”, in International Shakespeare. The Comedies, a cura di P. Kennan e M. Tempera, Bologna: Clueb, 147–166. 2004. “Literariness, consensus, or ‘Something Else’”. Tropismes 12 (“Whither Theory? Où va la théorie?”), Paris: Université Paris X Nanterre, Centre de Recherches Anglo-Américaines, 173–188. 2004. “‘For nothing was simply one thing’: Observations on the Knowledge of Literature”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. III, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 141–152. 2004. “Critical Observations on the Cultural Tradition of ‘City and Country’: The Hum and Murmur, The Triumph and the Jingle”, Merope 42, 5–17. 2003. “The Freudian Symptom and the Modern(ist) Subject: The Shifting Borders of Body and Mind”, in Rites of Passage, a cura di C. Nocera, G. Persico e R. Portale, Catania: Rubbettino Editore, 235–242.

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2003. “Teaching Literature and Literary Theory: ‘Facts’ and ‘Fictions’”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. II, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 139–148. 2003. “Literature: Teaching meets ‘Theory’”. In Textus 6(1, issue edited by Angela Locatelli and Coppélia Kahn), 15–22. 2002. “Symbolic and Material Economies in Fay Weldon’s Narratives”. In The Economy Principle in English, a cura di Giovanni Iamartino, Marialuisa Bignami, e Carlo Pagetti, Milano: Edizioni Unicopli, 427–438. 2001. “Method, interest and purpose: some face(t)s of Freudian interpretation”. In Merope 32, 5–24. 2001. “‘English Matter, in the English Tongue, for Englishmen’. Lingua, retorica e poetica dell’identità nazionale nel rinascimento inglese”. In Racconti di Identità, a cura di Alessandra Marzola, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 13–34. 2000. “Semantic Integration and Diversion in Henry Peacham’s Emblems”. Slavica Tergestina 8, 77–93. 2000. “Rhetoric of Place in Henry Peacham’s Writings”. Slavica Tergestina 8, 273–288. 2000. “Presence evading presence, or the narrative economy of the body”. In Textus 13 (“Discourses on/of the Body”, edited by V. Fortunati and S. Greenblatt), 15–32. 1999.“‘Questionable Shapes’: Skeptical Subjectivities and Contemporary Theory”. Merope 25, 29–43. 1999. “The Shifting Context of Psychoanalytical Criticism in Shakespearean Studies”. Saukoanaritikaru Eibungaku Ronso, Psychoanalytical Study of English and Literature 20, Tokyo, 1–23. 1999. “Shakespeare’s Discoursive Strategies and their Definitions of Subjectivity”. In Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by G. Melchiori and M. Marrapodi, Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 76–94. 1999. “Shakespeare in Italian Romanticism: Literary Querelles, Translations, and Interpretations”. In Shakespeare and Italy (Shakespeare Yearbook, Vol. X), edited by H. Klein and M. Marrapodi, Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 19–37. 1998. “The Land of Plenty: Erasmus’ De Copia and English Renaissance Rhetoric”. In Silenos: Erasmus in Elizabethan Literature, a cura di C. Corti, Pisa: Pacini, 41–57. 1998. “Semiotic Seductiveness: Cleopatra’s Descriptions, Proscriptions, and Inscriptions”. In Descrizioni e Iscrizioni: Politiche del Discorso, a cura di C. Locatelli e G. Covi, Trento: Università degli Studi di Trento Editrice, 185–196. 1998. “Realistic Directions for Wesker’s Stage”. In The Wesker Casebook, edited by R. W. Dornan, New York: Garland, Hamden, 209–220. 1997. “Shakespearean Enunciation and the Textual Subject of Ethics”. In Mnema, a cura di P. Pugliatti, Messina: Armando Siciliano Editore, 31–44. 1996. “Notes on the Creation of Literary Histories and the Diversity of the Semiosphere”. Slavica Tergestina 4(a cura di P. Deotto, M. Nortman, M.C. Pesenti, e I. Verc), 53–64. 1996. “Intertextuality: Theory and Practice”. Merope 19, 5–18. 1994. “The ‘Doublenesse’ of Figures in Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie”. Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Lett. Comparate (Università degli Studi di Bergamo) 10, 223–233.

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1993. “The Fictional World of Romeo and Juliet: Cultural Connotations of an Italian Setting”. In Shakespeare’s Italy, edited by M. Marrapodi, E. T. Hoenselaars, and M. Cappuzzo, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 69–86. 1993. “‘Wisdom’ and ‘Eloquence’: Note sull’Episteme della retorica inglese del XVI e XVII secolo”. In La Fortuna della Retorica, a cura di G. Castorina e V. Villa, Chieti: Métis¸ 91– 97. 1992. “Doubles and Doubling as Shakespearian Difference”. Saukoanaritikaru Eibungaku Ronso, Psychoanalytical Study of English and Literature 15, Tokyo, 20–36. 1992. “‘The Double’, Replica and Supplement in Twelfth Night: rhetorical paradigms and psychic processes”. Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Lett. Comparate (Università di Bergamo) 9, 53–65. 1991. “Affective Semiosis, Figures and Signifiers: Psychoanalysis in Italian Literary Criticism”. Merope 5, 115–125. 1989. “The Image of the English Language in the Elizabethan Controversy on Rhyme”. Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Letterature Comparate (Università degli studi di Bergamo) 5, 43–49. 1987. “Aspects of Reception in the Drama of the Seventies: The Case of David Hare”. Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Letterature Comparate (Università degli studi di Bergamo) 3, 17–26.

Papers and Book Chapters in Italian 2019. “Considerazioni sulla letterarietà della storia e la storicità della letteratura”. Ticontre Teoria Testo Traduzione 11, 363–377. 2017. “Shakespeare Romantico: vicende della ricezione dalla tragedia al melodramma”. In Shakespeare e Cervantes. Traduzioni, ricezioni e rivisitazioni, a cura di Fabio Scotto, Raul Calzoni, e Marco Sirtori, Milano: Cisalpino, Istituto Editoriale Universitario, 43– 57. 2017. “Quattrocento anni e non li dimostra: complessità, traducibilità e attualità di Shakespeare”. In Atti dell’Ateneo di Scienze Lettere Arti di Bergamo, Vol. LXXX, a cura di Maria Mencaroni Zoppetti, Bergamo: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 17–32. 2014. ”Cosa sa la letteratura? Note sulla complessità epistemologica del letterario”. In Critica e letteratura: studi di Anglistica. Anglica. Studi e Testi/Studies and Texts, a cura di Silvia Bigliazzi e Flavio Gregori, Pisa: ETS Edizioni, 31–42. 2007. “‘Living at home abroad – living abroad at home’: ovvero la letteratura come Altro”. In I Linguaggi dell’Altro. Forme dell’alterità nel testo letterario, a cura di Anna Maria Piglionica, Claudia Bacile di Castiglione e Maria Serena Marchesi, Firenze: Olschki, 1– 16, 2005. “Romeo and Juliet: un possibile percorso di didattica della letteratura nella Secondaria”. Nuova Secondaria 7, 75–81. 2005. “Un percorso didattico dei ‘classici’ della letteratura: Shakespeare nel secondo ciclo”. Nuova Seconaria 5, 75–79. 2005. “Il percorso traduttivo come impersonare voci, trovando la propria”. In Atti dell’Ateneo di Scienze Lettere e Arti, Bergamo: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 41–47.

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2005. “I tempi della letteratura. Aspetti di un pensiero non (troppo) astratto”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. IV, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 139–155. 2004. “Raccontare una storia: costruire un mondo per capire il mondo”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/ The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. III, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 141–152. 2003. “Il mito letterario della ‘campagna inglese’: forme di identificazione immaginativa”. Arcipelago 4, 53–62. 2002. “Pensiero Poetico: Forma, Immaginazione ed Empatia”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. I, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 181–190. 2002. “Introduzione: Note sul sapere letterario”. In La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. I, a cura di Angela Locatelli, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante Edizioni, 7–12. 2001. “Inventare il corpo: Percorsi della rappresentazione”. In Corpo reale/Corpo virtuale, a cura di Marco Lorandi et al., Viareggio: Baroni, 171–193. 2001. “Rilievi testuali ed interpretazioni dei Sonetti shakespeariani di Rina Sara Virgillito”. Traduttologia 3, 9–22. 1997. “Nominare e dominare: le strategie pedagogiche di The Taming of the Shrew”. In The Taming of the Shrew: Dal testo alla scena, a cura di M. Tempera, Bologna: Clueb, 1997. 1996. “Paradigmi del ‘Doppio’ nell’episteme Vittoriana”. RSV Rivista Studi Vittoriani 1(1), 39–59. 1995. “Il ‘Doppio Shakespeariano’: riflessioni per una tipologia delle ‘Dramatis personae’”. In Le Aperture del Testo: Studi per Maria Carmela Coco Davani, a cura di M. Billi, L. Curti, E. Di Piazza, e D. Corona, Palermo: Corona, 291–299. 1995. “I sensi joyciani: ovvero la resistenza e la seduzione dei segni”. In Intorno a Joyce: Cinquant’anni dopo, a cura di M. Billi, B. Bini e P. Splendore, Roma: Cosmopoli, 61–72. 1994. “Il tesoro del Mercante: la padrona degli scrigni”. In The Merchant of Venice: Dal testo alla Scena, a cura di M. Tempera, Bologna: Clueb, 133–142. 1994. “Specularità e ‘doppi fondi’ della Dodicesima Notte: Paradigmi Retorici e Processi Psichici”. In Semeia. In onore di Marcello Pagnini, Bologna: Il Mulino, 285–294. 1993. “Il concetto di ‘Utterance’ in Abraham Fraunce, ovvero la teatralizzazione delle passioni”. In I Linguaggi della Passione, a cura di R. Rutelli e A. Johnson, Udine: Campanotto, 161–167. 1993. “Il Doppio: Replica e Supplemento in Twelfth Night”. In Shakespeare e la sua eredità, Atti del XV Convegno dell’Associazione Italiana di Anglistica, Parma: Edizioni Zara, 121–130. 1992. “Dire l’identità: il soggetto woolfiano tra psicoanalisi e ‘fiction’”. Merope 6, 67–91. 1992. “‘Disrobe the Images’: la proclamazione e cancellazione dell’eroe nel Julius Caesar”. In Giulio Cesare: Dal Testo alla Scena, a cura di M. Tempera, Bologna: Clueb, 63–67. 1991. “‘How shall we find the concord of this discord?’: Le aporie del senso in Midsummer Night’s Dream”. In Sogno di una Notte di Mezza Estate: Dal Testo alla Scena, a cura di M. Tempera, Bologna: Clueb, 61–75. 1990. “‘Speake thy Mind’: fondamento filosofico del ‘Plain Style’”. Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Lett. Comparate (Università di Bergamo) 7, 1–7.

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1990. “Tutt’altro che Rose: le guerre dinastiche del Medioevo inglese e la letteratura coeva”. In Donizetti e il suo Tempo, a cura dell’Assessorato allo spettacolo del Comune di Bergamo, Bergamo: Poligrafiche Bolis, 13–18. 1990. “I modi del comico in A Resounding Tinkle di N. F. Simpson”. In Le Forme del Comico, a cura di Paolo Bertinetti e Carla Marengo Vaglio, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 425–432. 1990. “Hamlet: Indecisione/Indecidibilità ovvero i casi dell’interpretazione”. In Amleto: Dal Testo alla Scena, a cura di M. Tempera, Bologna: Clueb, 43–50. 1990. “La variabilità iconica e funzionale della didascalia in Arnold Wesker”. In La rappresentazione verbale e iconica. Valori estetici e funzionali, a cura di C. De Stasio, R. Bonadei, e M.Gotti, Milano: Guerini e Associati, 153–162. 1989. “Riccardo III: Deformità e potenza del corpo politico”. In Bergamo e il Teatro 1989– 90, Bergamo: Stefanoni, 129–135. 1989. “Timon of Athens: Tragedia dell’articolazione dualistica e della ‘praxis’ perdente”. In Il Muro del linguaggio: Conflitto e Tragedia, a cura di L. Curti, L. Di Michele, T. Frank e M. Vitale, Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 139–149. 1988. “Traduzioni Ottocentesche dell’Othello in Italia: La problematica del contesto”. In Metamorfosi: Traduzione/Tradizione. Spessori del concetto di Contemporaneità (atti del Convegno A.I.A 1986), a cura di E. Glass, F. Marroni, G. Micks e C. Pagetti, Pescara: Clua, 293–303. 1988. “Sogno d’una Notte di Mezza Estate: Eros e Creatività”. In Bergamo e il Teatro 1988– 89, Bergamo: Stefanoni, 61–66. 1988. “Recursività dialogica e dell’azione in Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon”. In Arnold Wesker Past and Present, atti del seminario “Progetto Wesker”, Bergamo: Istituto Universitario, 29–35. 1988. “La melodrammaticità di Othello nel testo e in alcune varianti di fruizione”. In Forme del Melodrammatico: Parole e Musica (1700–1800) Contributi per la Storia di un Genere, a cura di Bruno Gallo, Milano: Guerini e Associati, 329–338. 1988. ”La prima traduzione italiana dei sonetti shakespeariani”. In La traduzione del testo poetico, a cura di Franco Buffoni, Milano: Guerini e Associati, 283–292. 1986. “Anticipazione e ‘performance’ in Romeo and Juliet”. In Romeo and Juliet: Dal Testo alla Scena, a cura di M. Tempera, Bologna: Clueb, 39–50. 1986. “Testo o spettacolo? Questo è il dilemma”. In Incontri con la Semiotica, a cura di Gian Franco Arlandi, Como: Centro Stampa del Comune di Como, 55–57. 1985. “Drammaturgia sperimentale e didatticismo affabulatorio in A Resounding Tinkle di N. F. Simpson”. In Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Letterature Comparate Bergamo: I.U.B: 53–62. 1984. “Frammentarietà e composizione: Lettura di Novel on Yellow Paper di Stevie Smith”. In Atti del VI Congresso dell’A.I.A. (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica), Fasano (BR): Grafischena, 251–256. 1984. “‘Wisdom’ and ‘Eloquence’: Note sull’episteme della retorica inglese del XVI e XVII secolo”. In La fortuna della Retorica, a cura di G. Castorina e V. Villa, L’Aquila: Métis, 91–97. 1983. “Inquietudine ermeneutica e ricerca artistica nel teatro di Samuel Beckett”. In Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Lett. Comparate (Università di Bergamo), 63–70.

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1983. “The Tempest: Rappresentazione di un metalinguaggio”. In Annali dello I.U.L.M., Ravenna: Angelo Longo Editore, 261–279. 1983. “Strutture simbolico-narrative e codici epocali nella lettura di tre ballate inglesi”. In Annali (1982/83) dell’Istituto Universitario di Bergamo, Bergamo: I.U.B.,15–40. 1981. “Epistemi culturali in Iris Murdoch, saggista e scrittrice di romanzi”. In Annali dello I.U.L.M., Ravenna: Angelo Longo Editore, 203–213. 1980. “Metafisica e retorica nelle poesie di Emily Dickinson”. Cenobio 29, Lugano (CH), 137. 1978. “Gioco del desiderio e desiderio del gioco: la poesia di Katherine Mansfield”. Cenobio 27, Lugano (CH), 253–254. 1977. “Dialettica e Ideologia in The Merchant of Venice”. Studi Inglesi 3, Bari: Adriatica editrice, 9–26. 1977. “Convenzione e linguaggio nel teatro di Oscar Wilde”. Cenobio 26, Lugano (CH), 411– 412. 1976. “The Importance of Being Earnest ovvero la strutturazione di un personaggio wildiano in prospettiva sociologica e metateatrale”. In Annali dello I.U.L.M., Ravenna: A. Longo Editore, 249–259. 1974. “Folklore e poesia americani in una testimonianza moderna”. Cenobio 23, Lugano (CH), 357–358. 1974. ”Una lettura dell’Amleto in prospettiva semiologica”. In Annali dello I.U.L.M., Feltre: Panfilo Castaldi Editore, 1–8. 1974. “Immaginazione e immagine nella poesia di Wallace Stevens”. Cenobio 24, Lugano (CH), 427–428.

Publications in French 2006. “‘Infinite variety’: La diversité du plaisir selon Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra) et Pasolini (Teorema). Dans L’art de plaire: Esthétique, Plaisir, Représentation, sous la direction de P. Chezaud, L. Gasquet et R. Shusterman, Brionne, France: Gérard Monfort Editeur, 275–290.

Prefaces 2018. “Prefazione”. In Translating Young Adult Literature for Italian Readers, di Larissa D’Angelo, Bergamo: Celsb, 9–16. 2017. “Prefazione”. In Il ritratto, di Philip Massinger, a cura di Emanuel Stelzer, Canterano (RM): Aracne, 7–12. 2003. Locatelli Angela and Coppélia Kahn, “Preface” to Textus 16 (1, Teaching Literature), 3–10.

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Review Articles 2016. Review of The Armenian Genocide. A Linguocognitive Perspective (2003), by S. Gasparyan, Yerevan: YSU. Armenian Folia Anglistica 15, Yerevan, 350–353. 2005. Review of Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (2003), edited by L. Pujante and T. Hoenselaars, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Shakespeare Quarterly 56(2), Washington, 237–240. 1999. Review of Forms of Argumentative Discourse. Per un’analisi linguistica dell’argomentare (1998), a cura di M. Bondi, Bologna: Clueb. Traduttologia 1(1), 98–101. 1992. Review of The Uses of the Canon: Elizabethan Literature and Contemporary Theory (1990), by H. Felperin, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Merope 7, 237–241. 1990. Review of Sul Discorso Fantastico: la narrazione nel romanzo gotico (1989) di C. Corti, Pisa: ETS. Il Confronto Letterario, 14, 493–495. 1990. Review of Rewriting the Renaissance (1986) by M Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N. Vickers, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, Il Confronto Letterario 13, 215–117. 1989. Review of Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (1987) by M. Garber, New York and London: Methuen, in Annali Istituto Universitario Orientale Anglistica 30, 140–142. 1989. Review of Semiosi: Teoria ed Ermeneutica del Testo Letterario (1988) di M. Pagnini, Bologna. Il Confronto Letterario 12, 489–492. 1986. Review of Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (1985) by P. Parker, and J. Hartman, New York and London: Methuen. Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Lett. Comparate (Università degli Studi di Bergamo) 3, 97–99. 1984 Review of Interazione, Dialogo, Convenzioni: il Caso del Testo Drammatico (1983), by W. Dodd, C. Falzon Santucci, and P. Pugliatti, Bologna. Il Confronto Letterario 2, 414– 415. 1975. Review of In Their Wisdom (1974), by C. P. Snow, New York: Scribner. L’Europa letteraria e Artistica 6, Chiasso, Zurich, and Geneve, 148–149.