Re-discovering Age(ing): Narratives of Mentorship 9783839443965

Table of contents :
Content
Introduction
Rediscovering ageing through narratives of Mentorship
Getting Old, Dreaming Youth: Notes about Fanny Burney
I may be retired—however, I am still a very busy man
Rumi, Sufi Spirituality and the Teacher- Disciple Relationship in Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love
Saviors and Survivors
Literary Mentors for Life
The Many Functions of Furniture
Experience as Mentor in Helping to Deal with Old Age
“One must take it as it comes”
Toledo
Lessons Learnt: CollAge for Maria and Brian
Of Trees and Fire
Embodied Legacies of Mentoring and Role Models
Mentorship as a Lifelong Experience
Reflections on Academic Generations and the Possibilities of Mentorship
All that Remains
On Listening to the ‘Music for two Pianos’
Maria And Brian— Our Parental Figures in the World of Academia
Connecting People through Brian and Maria—No Limits
To Feel Part of a Dream
Let’s have tea in “La Torre”: Mentoring through Affection
Your Child of Sorts—A Tribute to Maria & Brian
Notes
Notes on Editors
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

Núria Casado-Gual, Emma Domínguez-Rué, Maricel Oró-Piqueras (eds.) Re-discovering Age(ing)

Aging Studies  | Volume 16

The series is edited by Heike Hartung, Ulla Kriebernegg and Roberta Maierhofer.

Núria Casado-Gual, Emma Domínguez-Rué, Maricel Oró-Piqueras (eds.)

Re-discovering Age(ing) Narratives of Mentorship

A tribute to Brian Worsfold and Maria Vidal

The editors would like to acknowledge the economic support of the research group ›Grup Dedal-Lit‹ and of the Department of English and Linguistics of the University of Lleida

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Judith Sol i Dyess Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4396-1 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4396-5 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839443965

A tribute to B rian W orsfold and M aria V idal

Content

Introduction Of Wisdom, Growth, and Gratitude: Revisiting the Mentor Figure within the Framework of Ageing Studies

Núria Casado-Gual, Emma Domínguez-Rué, Maricel Oró-Piqueras |  9

R ediscovering ageing through N arratives of M entorship Getting Old, Dreaming Youth: Notes about Fanny Burney Maria Socorro Suárez-Lafuente |  21 I may be retired—however, I am still a very busy man Recollecting and Reimagining through Ageing and Mentorship in Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind Marta Miquel-Baldellou |  29

Rumi, Sufi Spirituality and the Teacher-Disciple Relationship in Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love Billy Gray |  47 Saviors and Survivors Narratives of Mentorship as Rescue Margaret Moganroth Gullette |  69

Literary Mentors for Life Joan Margarit’s Lessons on Poetry and Ageing in New Letters to a Young Poet

Núria Casado-Gual |  87

The Many Functions of Furniture Re-Discovering Mentors through Narratives of Material and Immaterial Convoys

Roberta Maierhofer |  105

Experience as Mentor in Helping to Deal with Old Age Susan Ballyn |  119

“One must take it as it comes” A Virtue-Ethical Approach to the Exemplary Life Practices of Centenarians

Aagje Swinnen and Hanne Laceulle | 125

Toledo Jeffrey Skoblow |  147

Lessons Learnt: CollAge for Maria and Brian Of Trees and Fire Antoni Cuadrado-Fernández | 155 Embodied Legacies of Mentoring and Role Models Josephine Dolan | 157

Mentorship as a Lifelong Experience Ander Errasti and Cristina Astier | 158 Reflections on Academic Generations and the Possibilities of Mentorship Sarah Falcus | 160 All that Remains Carme Farré Vidal | 161 On Listening to the ‘Music for two Pianos’ John Kinsella | 162 Maria And Brian—Our Parental Figures in the World of Academia Núria Mina and Ieva Stončikaitė | 165 Connecting People through Brian and Maria—No Limits Elena Urdaneta | 166 To Feel Part of a Dream Núria Casado-Gual | 167 Let’s have tea in “La Torre”: Mentoring through Affection Maricel Oró-Piqueras | 169 Your Child of Sorts—A Tribute to Maria & Brian Emma Domínguez-Rué | 171

Notes Notes on Editors | 173 Notes on Contributors | 174

Introduction Of Wisdom, Growth, and Gratitude: Revisiting the Mentor Figure within the Framework of Ageing Studies Núria Casado-Gual, Emma Domínguez-Rué, Maricel Oró-Piqueras The Oxford English Dictionary defines mentor as “an experienced and trusted adviser” and is often applied to a senior colleague who acts as counsellor in companies or educational institutions. However, as Vigen Guroian argues, “genuine mentorship is scarce in our day” (2008: 77): in his view, the pseudo-egalitarian relationships of modern society and the institutionalisation of mentorship programmes in virtually every field of education and professional life have trivialised such relationship, often transforming a mentor into a synonym for ‘friend’. In contrast, the Greek original word inspired by the venerable old friend of Ulysses and adviser of Telemachus in Homer’s Odyssey (actually the goddess Athena in disguise) “means mind or spirit and connotes a strong sense of purposefulness and agency” (Guroian 2008: 76). The classic figure of the mentor as a judicious old person is inextricably related to the Ancient Greek concept of wisdom and thus central to the issues examined in this volume. In our culture, wisdom has traditionally been concomitant with old age, elders being thus venerated as recipients and transmitters of that wisdom. However, as Jan Baars contends, in ancient times wisdom was not a consequence but rather a necessary condition to age: in other words, having lived a certain number of years did not guarantee its attainment, so a lifelong commitment to knowledge and philosophical thinking were perceived as necessary conditions to achieve wisdom in old age (2012: 90). As he explains, “there is a conditional not a direct relationship between old age and wisdom: in Plato’s “Republic” the leaders were not considered wise because they were old, as in some traditionally oriented societies, but because they had studied rigorously

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and thought deeply all their lives” (Baars 2012: 95). As narrated by Plato, the philosopher is not so much a recipient of wisdom but his efforts revolve around the wish to achieve it: thus, he “is neither wise or unwise, but aspires to attain wisdom and to determine what this might be” (Phaedrus 278d4; Symposion 204a; cited in Baars 2012: 93; emphasis in original). Thus, wisdom cannot be understood as the mere gathering of knowledge or experience, but rather as the effort and the ability to put them into practice and share them for the common good. These aspirations and capacities also characterize the mentor figure, and they encompass the consideration of ethical values and common sense, as well as a sense of commitment to self and others, and the development of emotional intelligence. In this respect, the exercise of the mentoring practice could well be related to the practical exercise of wisdom across the life course, which some age scholars and gerontologists have defined as “an art of living” (Baars 2012; Edmonson 2005). Through their teachings, mentors do not only provide their protégé(e)s with certain abilities, but also convey a sense of ethics and a considerable degree of affection, both of which become “ultimately crucial to the continuance of a practice, special art form, or way of life” (Guroian 2008: 77). Studies like Baars’ (2012) and Edmonson’s (2005) offer good examples of the relevance of mentorship in the field of ageing studies, and reveal the ways in which an examination of the mentor figure can provide interesting perspectives about cultural and literary narratives of ageing. Within literature, the archetype of the wise old man has typically represented the ageing mentor. In her study on the late poetry of Modernist authors, Kathleen Woodward (1980) describes the wise old man as a hero, a figure that is often characterized as a teacher and which offers the “embodiment of tradition and continuity” that is sought after by younger generations. Drawing from Carl Jung’s definition of the same archetype, Woodward notices to what extent this literary figure personifies meaning and the human need for personal growth (1980: 19). At the same time, she also draws attention to the importance that mentors have had or through the career of writers, to the extent of having become “doppelgängers, secret selves” throughout their careers and lives (Woodward 1980: 13). The consideration of literary representations of mentorship, either through archetypes or other characters, or through the careers of writers, throws light on the significant interaction between ageing, personal development and the dialogue across generations. At the same time, as Vigen Guroian

Introduction

contends, “true mentorship is vital to culture and the growth and flourishing of education and the arts” (2008: 77). This statement proves especially true in our present youth-oriented, technology-dominated society, in which the kind of wisdom that is personified by the (ageing) mentor needs to be re-valued, and the capacity of older people to sustain and enrich the common construction of knowledge needs to be recognized. Faithful to these convictions, this volume examines the concept of mentorship through a cultural and, predominantly literary, lens within the framework of current theories of ageing. The symbolic potential of all the studies and creative pieces of the collection enhances the cultural and social values implicit in the narratives of mentoring they explore. At the same time, this book offers a tribute to Brian Worsfold and Maria VidalGrau, founders of the research group Grup Dedal-Lit of the University of Lleida and pioneering scholars in the field of ageing studies in Catalonia. Besides celebrating Maria and Brian’s long and fruitful careers as extraordinary academics, the authors of this collection would like to acknowledge their lifelong commitment to the common good, mainly expressed through their perseverant dissemination of humanistic values, and the ongoing support to the younger generation of scholars they have contributed to training. In the light of the aforementioned considerations of wisdom and mentorship, Brian and Maria have been true mentors, in academia and in life. Their practice of mentorship has undoubtedly conveyed an “art of living” in the holistic sense, and even more so because both of them have transmitted their knowledge and experience through true affection. This extremely important human component may seem minor in the world of academia, but its effects contribute to building stronger links among generations and ultimately help consolidate the communal creation of knowledge. Now that Maria, Brian, and the rest of first-generation scholars in ageing studies exemplify the rich possibilities for growth of later life, the intellectual and creative exploration of ageing they have promoted may be enriched further through their own life experience. At the same time, their continuous intellectual and collegial exchange with members of subsequent generations of scholars enables their mentoring practice to continue, and new considerations of ageing to emerge through it. The nine chapters that constitute this volume revolve around mentorship from various perspectives and even interpret the notion of mentor in different and mutually complementary ways. However, all of

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them coincide in enhancing the essential value that mentors have had for those who receive their wisdom. Through either close readings of literary texts, or cultural readings of ageing, or as pieces of life-writing or of literature in their own right, all the chapters prove that the figure of the mentor not only guides future generations, but also provides them with tools to face the adversities of a long life and to enjoy, at the same time, their achievements and blessings. In “Getting Old, Dreaming Youth: Notes about Fanny Burney,” M. Socorro Suárez Lafuente re-discovers the figure of Frances Fanny Burney, or Fanny Burney, by examining both her biography and late works, while at the same time taking into account the older men that acted as Burney’s mentors and who had an important influence on the author’s growth and literary development. As Suárez points out, although Burney did not always concur with her mentors’ views, she felt grateful for their care and found “protection and peace of mind” in their friendship. Suárez Lafuente’s piece also looks at Burney’s later years, when she survived her mentors and developed new works. Besides enhancing the importance of older mentors in the life and career of the distinguished English writer, Suárez’s article draws attention to the ageist and sexist bias that diminished Burney’s later works during her lifetime and beyond. Marta Miquel-Baldellou’s article focuses on mentoring in Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind. By creating a fictional Sherlock Holmes in his retirement age and describing his growing friendship with the young son of his housekeeper, Cullin’s novel reveals a new facet of the otherwise cold and distant detective and, at the same time, uncovers the potential for change inherent in the mentorial relationship for both the older and the younger man. As Miquel-Baldellou argues, “it is in his old age that Holmes becomes significantly attracted to the domain of art and of imagination, after nearly a lifetime of having mostly resorted to logic and reason.” Holmes’ mentoring of the young man in the novel not only contributes to the latter’s intellectual and psychological development, but also operates significant changes to the old detective’s personality and approach to life, thus deconstructing the view that elderly people “disengage” (Cumming/Henry 1961) and instead concurring in the notion proposed by cultural gerontologists that age indeed provides new possibilities for further identity formation and the ability to make relevant choices (Wyatt-Brown and Rossen, 1993; Cohen-Shalev, 2002; CasadoGual/Domínguez-Rué/Worsfold, 2016).

Introduction

The essay “Rumi, Sufi Spirituality and the Teacher-Disciple Relationship in Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love” by Billy Gray continues to explore the dynamics of the teacher-disciple relationship through a close reading of the best-selling novel that is part of the so-called “Rumi phenomenon.” As Gray explains, the teacher-disciple component is at the core of the two narrative strands that Safak’s interweaves in her fascinating book, both of which highlight the profoundly transformative power that mentoring relationships have for the disciple within the context of Sufism; the component of moral risk that is taken by both Master and disciple in order to attain the desired inner growth of the latter in this spiritual context; and the fundamental role that love, understood in a real, abstract and mystic way, plays in such a process of discipleship. In his analysis, in which he contextualizes in detail the influence that Rumi has exerted both on Sufism and Western culture throughout history, Gray also pays attention to the connection that Safak’s novel establishes between the process of (midlife) ageing and the spiritual metamorphosis of its main characters. Whereas the contemporary narrative strand in The Forty Rules of Love suggests the ageless nature of the process of learning, the plot that fictionalizes Rumi’s biography underscores the richness of later life in knowledge and experience. Aligning with Suárez-Lafuente, Miquel-Baldellou and Billy Gray’s analysis of emblematic characters as well as canonic authors in the history of literature, Margaret Moganroth Gullette rethinks the concept of mentorship “along a wider literary spectrum” by focusing on three older fictional figures from three best-selling novels who literally save or rescue the younger characters from their respective abyss. The authors who created these benevolent ageing figures are Alexandre Dumas, Jesús Carrasco and Muriel Barbery, and the novels discussed are The Count of Monte Cristo, Out in the Open, and The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Through her analysis, Gullette not only enhances the moral qualities of these older characters, but also reflects upon her own process of ageing by recognizing that, with age, it is the older figures that now call her attention, in contrast to the fascination she had felt towards Dumas’ hero as a younger reader. At the same time, her analysis undermines stereotypical representations of youth and of old age, as it invites us to re-read these classical texts from the prism of the destabilizing paradigm that the development of age and ageing studies have represented in the last decades. As she contends towards the end of her essay, “[o]lder people too may need to be saved.

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What rule says that only the young live in distressing lack?” Her close reading of the three novels certainly makes us aware of this and other “anti-ageist innovations.” In the chapter “Literary Mentors for Life: Joan Margarit’s Lessons on Poetry, Ageing and Time in New Letters to a Young Poet,” Núria Casado-Gual continues to expand the notion of mentorship by analyzing the late essay by the Catalan poet as a meta-literary text that renders Margarit himself a literary mentor, and in which Margarit simultaneously recognizes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke as his own doppelgänger. By examining the two levels of discourse that conform Margarit’s ars poetica—that is, a literary discourse on the art of writing, and a moral discourse on the art of living—CasadoGual looks at the literary, cultural and philosophical foundations of the poet’s late-life views, and contextualizes their value in the creation of an emancipatory model of ageing that also includes the potential of late-life creativity. In particular, she pays attention to the themes of love and loss in Margarit’s consideration of his own poetry, as well as in the lessons he transmits to younger writers. At the same time, she also takes into account the symbolic implications of Margarit’s formal legacy, through which the experienced author not only passes on his formal conception of poetry but also “conveys his moral vision of life to his readers” as an older man. In an article that merges a personal and a scholarly gaze, Roberta Maierhofer acknowledges the fact that a scholar’s achievement is very often the result of immaterial contributions, many times facilitated by mentors such as the ones honored in this volume. In contrast with more formal or academic guidance, Maierhofer argues, some forms of mentoring that set the basis of significant research are often overlooked, if not totally ignored, when making a record of one’s academic results. Along this premise, Maierhofer offers a retrospective analysis of Rose Tremain’s The Cupboard as representative of another kind of ‘silent’ mentor, namely, a literary text that actually facilitates a real maturing of the person, both personally and professionally, and which, in her case, paved her way to her work in the field of ageing studies. In a similar way to Gullette’s revision of her classics, Maierhofer’s analysis creates an interesting palimpsest of readings in which the mature scholar re-evaluates her assumptions as a younger academic and reader. In another very personal contribution, Susan Ballyn presents an honest account of her first contact with older people when she was a secondary school student. It is then that she realized the extent to which experience,

Introduction

acquired through ageing, is the most valued resource one can have when needed. Her experience with old people, both as a teenager and working at a hospital as a young adult, provided her with tools to help her own parents and family members when they needed care, and also helped her when facing her own ageing. Through this piece of life-writing, Ballyn continues to extend the meaning of the notion of “mentor” to consider experience, in this case, as the mentoring agent per se. At the same time, Ballyn emphasizes the lessons learnt on ageing through direct contact with representatives of the so-called ‘fourth age’, who remain on the margins of both society and, all too often, of ageing studies themselves. In a study that also encompasses symbolic and social meanings of mentorship understood in a broad sense, and which is also focused on “the older old,” Aagje Swinnen and Hanne Laceulle analyze the fascination our contemporary society still has for centenarians, which brought the authors to start a project entitled “The Cultural Fascination with Centenarians.” In their essay, Laceulle and Swinnen contrast the concept of virtuousness from a theoretical standpoint with the views of centenarians in relation to the meanings they attribute to the “success” implicit in their long lives. By identifying several factors shared by the centenarians interviewed, Laceulle and Swinnen’s study shows that centenarians are indeed exemplary figures and thus symbolic mentors for the younger generations in the ways they face and understand life choices, both in terms of the opportunities it offers and the adversaries one must face. The last chapter, “Toledo,” is in fact a short story by Jeffrey Skoblow that was written while staying in an apartment Maria Vidal and Brian Worsfold offered him during his first visit at the University of Lleida in 2002, and which was first published in a personal collection of stories. “Toledo” presents a mentor of an unusual kind, also in the context of this volume: middle-aged, so not “technically old” (even though this can be easily discussed if properly contextualized), and an accidental private teacher to a very young couple, to somehow classify his relationship with the younger figures. What connects “Toledo” and its literary mentor with the rest of the volume, though, is the intimate connection the story establishes between teaching, living, and defending a specific philosophy of life (and an art of ageing that is derived from it) in which work, love and creativity are totally entangled. Due to its special nature, this collection concludes with a section entitled “Lessons Learnt: CollAge for Maria and

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Brian,” in which colleagues and friends of these two scholars express the importance they both have had for their research and above all life itself. As Gullette puts it in her essay for this volume: “'Mentor’ is an honorable title, betokening unselfish benevolence toward the young. Because raising the young well is so important to any functioning society, mentors become a necessity.” As mentioned in some of the essays as well as the contributions of the last section, mentoring is related to the transmission of knowledge, but also, especially within the field of ageing studies, to the richness and depth that establishing solid relationships between generations may bring with it. This actually has a very close relation with the definition of wisdom provided by Ricca Edmondson in a recent publication (2015), in which she argues that wisdom can only be accounted through “wise action,” rather than “wise people,” and that such “wise action” (204) is achieved through the sharing of one’s experiences across generations. In this sense, Brian and Maria have been firm believers and practitioners of “wise action” and, thus, have spread wisdom not only by building networks across generations, mainly within academia and, in the last twenty years, very prominently, in the field of literary gerontology, but also within their closest family, friends, neighbourhood and city. These are, at the end of the day, the foundational domains that compose the little but very significant stories that one can find in literature, no matter the period or background in which a text is set. And these are, ultimately, the places where new forms of mentoring, real or imagined, will continue to be built. The Editors

Works Cited Baars, Jan (2012): “A Passion for Wisdom and the Emergence of an Art of Aging.” In Aging and the Art of Living, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 85-126. Casado-Gual, Núria/Domínguez-Rué, Emma/Worsfold, Brian (eds.) (2016): Literary Creativity and the Older Woman Writer: A Collection of Critical Essays, Bern: Peter Lang. Cohen-Shalev, Amir (2002): Both worlds at once: Art in Old Age, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Introduction

Cumming, Elaine/Henry, William (1961): Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement, Basic Books: New York. Edmonson, Ricca (2005): “Wisdom in Later Life: Ethnographic Approaches.” Aging and Society, Vol. 25, pp. 339-336. Edmondson, Ricca (2015): Ageing, Insight and Wisdom: Meaning and Practice Across the Lifecourse, Bristol: Policy Press. Guroian, Vigen (2008): “Literature and the Real Meaning of Mentorship.” In: Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, pp. 76-83. Oxford English Dictionary: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ mentor Roberts, Andy (1999): “Homer’s Mentor: Duties Fulfilled or Misconstrued.” In: History of Education Journal. http://www.nickols.us/homers_ mentor.pdf Woodward, Kathleen (1980): At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, Ohio: Ohio State University Press. Wyatt-Brown, Anne M./Rossen, Janice (eds.) (1993): Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.

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Getting Old, Dreaming Youth: Notes about Fanny Burney Maria Socorro Suárez-Lafuente “Fanny Burney lived a remarkable life and, what is even more striking, is that she wrote it all down.” Paula LaBeck Stepankowsky Co-founder, President, The Burney Society (L orna C lark 2007)

Throughout history, women were not allowed to have a voice of their own. To ensure this, the dominant discourse kept women away from learning on the premises that the arcane of scriptures would be impossible for them to decipher. The few women having access to writing did it in the name of God, who spoke through their pen, or put their ideas on paper recognizing their subservience to men and their lack of merit. There are significant historical examples of this practice: Hildegard von Bingen insisted that she heard mighty voices compelling her to write about the marvels created by God, and Juana Inés de la Cruz asked for forgiveness before writing her poems because she was “the worst person in the world.” As Western culture moved into the age of Enlightenment, God lost his prominence in society, while more women awakened to the fact of their own possibilities. Female “entrepreneurs” then resorted to a figure of power closer to them, an elderly man, admitted in their circle as knowledgeable and wise, who could guide them and help them to overcome the social dangers of pretending to fly above their established role. A mentor, for women writers, was a person of authority more than one of influence—following one of the citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, he was “an experienced and trusted counsellor.” Jonathan Swift and his friend Esther Johnson, in Journal to Stella (written 1710-1713,) and Fanny Burney’s novels Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782) immediately

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come to mind as eighteenth century examples of mentoring in life and in literature respectively. Burney herself experienced a rich mentored life at the beginning of her writing career. I first came into contact with Fanny Burney’s life when reading Claire Harman’s biography of the author, published in 2000 and shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize. Prior to that, I had only read Evelina and knew very little about its writer. So I was very surprised to find out that Burney had lived to be eighty-seven, some sixty-two years longer than the date of publication of that first novel. What Burney had written, if anything, in such a long span of time and why it did not figure in the history of English Literature were questions that kept me inquiring, until Devoney Looser provided a plausible answer: as the novelist became an older woman, and had never been too attractive, she was dismissed by the critics of her time, forgotten to the point that she was actually taken for dead. Looser paraphrases Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, when she says that Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon Fanny Burney’s grave, apparently ignorant of the fact that Burney died twenty three years after Austen (Looser 2008: 169). That is, Burney was invisibilized when she was still an active writer. Fanny Burney was born in 1752, the fourth child in a large family. She was short-sighted and dyslexic and it obviously took her longer to learn to read but, once she did she was unmistakably taken by literature “in a house full of reading matter” (Harman 2001: 42). She was a serious little girl, nicknamed “the old lady” by her immediate circle when she was only eleven years old, a nick name that stayed with her and described Fanny seemingly accurately to those that met her superficially and found her “affected or dull.” Having had close contact with her religious maternal grandmother, Burney was aware of the transient nature of life on earth and believed in a supernatural haven, to the point that she wrote to her sister in their mature years that she had prayed for the dead throughout her life. If we add that Fanny was a dutifully obedient daughter and always felt “the pervasive dread of offending someone whose permission should be asked” (Harman 2001: 12), we get the picture of someone who respects older people and listens to what they had to say. Unguided in both her readings and her moral standards, Fanny followed, at an early age, the view of her times, namely “the superior authority of the male sex” (Harman 2001: 41), although she saw no reasons for that assertion: “I don’t in fact believe it!” (qtd. Harman 2001: 42). Andrew Marr reminds us that Burney

Getting Old, Dreaming Youth: Notes about Fanny Burney

had been born, not for nothing, “into the coarse, robustly male world of the Enlightenment” (The Guardian: July 9, 2000). Her mother died when Fanny was only ten years old, leaving nine young children behind, and although Mr Burney married soon afterwards and had two other children with his second wife, he was desolate at the time of his widowhood and was assisted by his close friends, soon to become mentors to a Fanny Burney decided to become a published author. Another characteristic of the Burney household that left an imprint on Fanny’s personality was the fact that, due to their mother’s death, “Mothering their father was what all the Burney daughters ended up doing” (Harman 2001: 27). As a result, the Burney household was less restrictive for young women than were other families of a similar social class, and while novels were not considered proper reading for them, they were not banned, probably not even noticed. Among those friends that assisted Charles Burney in one of his several hours of need, the most important one for Fanny was Samuel Crisp, in whose country house she found the wellbeing and stimulation required by her creative powers. Crisp not only gave her advice as regards her writing, he was also her counsellor and mentor throughout his life, having a say even in one of Fanny Burney’s marriage proposals: “Fanny Burney won’t always be what she is now! [...] Suppose you lose your father—take in all chances. Consider the situation of an unprotected, unprovided woman” (qtd. in Harman 2001: 73). So, even if Fanny “admired, even idealised older men,” and in spite of the love and reverence she had for Crisp, she always found the courage to contravene people in their own terms, referring to Crisp as unwise for espousing the cause of a person he did not even know (Harman 2001: 73). In an entry from her diary, from May 1770, when she was eighteen years old, she contradicts the previous observation— in visiting some older women friends of the family and disagreeing with the way they were raising a young child, she resumes: “had I been old enough to dare speak my sentiments unasked, I would have told them so” (Harman 2001: 13). Fanny Burney was well aware that Samuel Crisp was her most staunch mentor, at all times providing her with motivation, inspiration and guidance—as mentors should (Vogler 1998: 124), but she was never ready to renounce her independence of mind. She was well disposed though to find help and comfort in him when she was in distress. Even though Fanny did not follow Crisp’s advice all the time, she was grateful for his care

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and found protection and peace of mind in both his generous friendship and his house, Chessington Hall, “the long-loved rural abode [where] the Burneys’ happiness seemed to make a stand” (qtd. in Harman 2001: 39). Samuel Crisp was to Fanny the attentive, placid father Dr Burney did not always achieve to be. Another of Fanny Burney’s “older men” was Samuel Johnson, whom she met at the country house of a common friend after Johnson had read and liked Evelina, which had been published anonymously in 1778. He has been quoted as saying that there were “passages in it that might do honour to Richardson” and that “Harry Fielding never did anything equal to it” (Harman 2001: 114). No wonder Fanny was elated to meet “the acknowledged Head of Literature in this kingdom” (qtd. in Lonsdale 2006: 28), as she called him, who had such a favourable view of her writing, even if she found him ugly and awkward. Johnson liked the company of sympathetic young women, and Burney, although awed by his knowledge and fame, let herself be escorted and guided by this father figure, fortytwo years her senior. But time would eventually wear off the halo of importance which Burney felt by simply being acquainted with Samuel Johnson and meriting his attention, and as he grew older and more of a complainer, the young woman avoided sitting next to him and felt embarrassed to be seen “in the sick old man’s company” (Harman 2001: 173). Nevertheless, her capacity for empathy made Fanny Burney realize the unfairness brought by the inexorable passage of time, and she bitterly mourned Doctor Johnson’s death in 1784. The year before, she had also gone through the loss of her life-long mentor, Samuel Crisp, a committed friend, who throve in her literary achievements and always gave her sensible advice to survive and advance in the world of letters, she then being yet too young to realize “what Yahoos Mankind are” (qtd. in Harman 2001: 137). Fanny Burney was in her early thirties when both her older friends passed away. She was still single and living at home, with a father who was more to be mothered than to exercise paternal authority. However, Fanny felt young and powerful, contrary to what was to be expected of a woman in her situation, a non-too-graceful spinster, and in the eighteenth century. She kept a moderately active social life; regularly attended the gatherings of the Bluestocking Club, a club for women run by Elizabeth Vesey, made new acquaintances, went through an unrequited love and became Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte. While Fanny’s

Getting Old, Dreaming Youth: Notes about Fanny Burney

father was in raptures with her royal appointment, she was profoundly unhappy, cut off from family and friends and disliking the social duties derived from her post. After five years, she managed to get released and went on with her “lay” life. She had been all but forgotten by the literary world, given up as old and finished as a writer. But Fanny Burney was a Fenix-like woman, full of energy and resolved to survive. At forty-one, she married Alexander D’Arblay, a French soldier exiled to England, a liberal Roman Catholic a few years her junior. If she was old and termed a spinster, she was still young to have a family. Fanny Burney’s married life would be a novel in itself, a second wind for such a rich, varied and long life. She had a son at forty-two, lived for more than a decade in France, supported the family with her writings and the aid of some friends, and was a devoted and apparently satisfied wife till she became a widow in her sixties. Even though she would never enjoy the pleasures of literary recognition again, she never stopped writing. She produced two novels and several plays during her married life and she wrote practically every day in her private journal, since “the secretive solitude it required [was] a pleasure to her” (Harman 2001: 61). In 1832, when she was eighty, she saw the publication of the biography she had written of her father, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, which revealed the profound affection she felt for him, her renewed reverence for older men and her idealization of Charles Burney’s life, to the scorn of those who had met him. In fact, Marr observes how “[t] his tough, observant and vastly talented woman decayed into a prudish, fluffy, prolix moralist, a censorious bore, an obsessive rewriter of her family’s dubious history,” which probably was how her contemporaries judged her at this point, “a pretty, unattractive character” (The Guardian: July 9, 2000). But Fanny Burney was now above criticism, having experienced the pangs of old age herself, with a decaying body and the pain of going through the death of her son and several of her brothers and sisters. Still, her diaries and her attitude deny the stereotypical words of some writers, such as the Victorian critic Jerom Murch, postulating that “women writers in old age [are] calm and gentle, living out an inoffensive graceful coda” (qtd. in Looser 2008: 178). Even Walter Scott, in meeting Burney in 1826, when she was only seventy four, left us a rather patronizing portrait of her in his diary: “[…] an elderly lady with no remains of personal beauty but with a gentle manner and a pleasing expression of countenance”

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(qtd. in Harman 2001: 370). It is language which discloses the prejudices about women and old age: the use of “gentle” in both quotations, aided by “calm,” “inoffensive,” “graceful” and “pleasing,” together with the reiterative reference to the physical aspect without any mention of her literary achievements, offensively reinforced in the word “coda.” One wonders whether those sentences would have been applied to Samuel Johnson or William Godwin, to mention some male writers of that time. Devoney Looser poses two inconclusive questions to the topic of women writers in their old age, asking whether it is “ageism [that prevents] women authors from getting a fair reading by critics and audiences” and if it is a matter of their being “past their prime or perhaps past being worth listening to” (2008: 317). Looser refers her argument to Harman’s biography, where “the two short chapters dealing with Burney’s life in 1815 and thereafter are depressingly titled ‘Keeping Life Alive’ and ‘PostMortem’” (3) and run through thirty seven pages out of a total of 385. We find exactly the same appreciation in Spanish writer Rosa Montero’s book on Marie Curie, thus covering centuries and cultural borders: [L]as biografías son cartas de navegación de la existencia. […] [C]uando se alcanza la vejez se diría que lo que les sucede interesa muy poco. […] [A] lo mejor los treinta últimos años de la vida de una mujer que llego a nonagenaria resulta que se despachan en menos de veinte hojas. […] [E]se tiempo deshilachado y aparentemente insustancial del que los biógrafos no encuentran nada relevante que contar. (2017: 180-81) Biographies are navigation charts for a life. […] But according to them, when one reaches old age, what happens to one seems to be of little importance […] That is to say, the thirty last years of a woman who lived to be ninety are dispatched in less than twenty pages […] It is apparently a time frayed and insubstantial where biographers find nothing relevant enough to be mentioned. (My translation)

By the end of her life, Fanny Burney had experienced herself the archetypal views of society at large: while still young, she admired and sought the advice of two older wise men whom she, nevertheless, also found physically awkward, and when it was at last her turn to be old she suffered social invisibility in spite of her continuous activity as a writer and her unbeatable energy. A few months before her death, Fanny is still busy with family manuscripts, wishing she were young to read and order them, de-

Getting Old, Dreaming Youth: Notes about Fanny Burney

ploring her failing eyesight and uncertain as to what to do with the family heirloom. Her last surviving letter, from 30 July 1839, has clear intimations of Fanny Burney’s dreams of youth: “I wish I could call up a spirit of my ancient spirits” (Harman 2001: 565). However, her experience of death was ample enough for her to realize that her time was coming to an end. She might or might not recall her own words at the time of Samuel Johnson’s death, when she was thirty two years old: “Good and excellent as he is, how can he so fear death!” (Harman 2001: 179). Maybe a good epitaph for Fanny Burney could be the rewriting of her Evelina’s last words in the novel of the same title: All is over, my dearests, And the fate of your Fanny Burney is decided. I have time for no more, The chaise now waits which is to conduct me to the other side. The End

Works Cited Burney, Frances (2001): Journals and Letters, selected and introduced by Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide, with the assistance of Stewart Cooke and Victoria Kortes-Papp, London: Penguin Books. Clark, Lorna J. (ed.) (2007): A Celebration of Frances Burney, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Harman, Claire (2001): Fanny Burney. A Biography [2000], London: Flamingo. Lonsdale, Roger (ed.) (2006): Samuel Johnson: The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. Vol I, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Looser, Devoney (2005): “Women, Old Age and the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” In: Paula Backscheider/Catherine Ingrassia (eds.). A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture, London: Blackwell, pp. 299-320. Looser, Devoney (ed.) (2008): Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins UP. Looser, Devoney (2013): “Her Later Works Happily Forgotten: Rewriting Frances Burney and Old Age.” In: Eighteenth Century Life, 37/3, pp. 1-28.

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Marr, Andrew (2000): “Burney peculiar.” Review of Claire Harman: Fanny Burney. A Biography. In: The Guardian. Sunday, July 9. Montero, Rosa (2017): La ridícula idea de no volver a verte [2013]. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Vogler, Christopher (1998): The Writer’s Journey. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions.

Further Reading Chisholm, Kate (1998): Fanny, Burney: Her Life: 1752-1840. London: Chatto & Windus. Lee, Anthony W. (ed.) (2009): Mentoring in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. Routledge. Lorenzo-Modia, María Jesús/Fernández-Rodríguez, Carmen María (eds.) (2017): Frances Burney: El ridículo ingenio y Un día de mucho apuro. [Translations of The Witlings and A Busy Day]. Sevilla: ArCiBel Editores. Shaw, Patricia (1982): “The View in Winter: The Theme of Old Age in Contemporary English Fiction.” In: Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 5, pp. 59-79.

I may be retired—however, I am still a very busy man Recollecting and Reimagining through Ageing and Mentorship in Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind Marta Miquel-Baldellou For Brian and Maria, true mentors for life

One of the most highly successful and truly fruitful partnerships in late Victorian literature is arguably that of Detective Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson. Taking as a main source of inspiration Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and its peculiar detective Auguste Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle gave rise to a character that would act as a symbolic mentor to many literary sleuths for generations to come. Through four novels and five collections of short stories, the partnership between Holmes and Watson has been commonly interpreted as that of mentor and disciple insofar as the former initiates the latter in the intricacies of detection, and in particular, in the systematic use of the analytical method. Given the hierarchical nature of their relationship, as a mentor, Holmes has been portrayed through the powers of his mind and his outstanding gifts for observation, whereas, as a disciple, Watson becomes responsible for putting down in words Holmes’ most exceptional cases. It is through a series of frame narratives that Watson acts as a narrator and also plays a counterpart to the puzzled and mystified reader. In this respect, Matthew Bunson underlines these opposed aspects, which are representative of each character, describing Holmes as “the pure machine of logic and thought and Watson [as] the man of compassion and subjectivity” (1995: 282).

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In spite of Holmes’ praise of the analytical method and of being strictly meticulous as a detective, it must be acknowledged that, as a medical doctor, Watson is also first and foremost a man of science. Similarly, although Holmes has a profound knowledge of chemistry and anatomy, through the detection process he exhibits a significant inclination towards the arts. As Watson observes in the first novel of the series, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes plays the violin and often resorts to sensational literature in order to unravel the most unsavoury cases he is assigned. The fact that Holmes is critical of Watson’s literary turn of mind, despite his own Bohemian style and his turn for theatrical disguise, and that Watson is truly a man of science despite his evident literary creativity, suggests an overlapping of qualities and skills between both which also extends to their expected roles as mentor and disciple. This covert but significant blurring of the roles for which Holmes and Watson have acquired their fame, as skilled mentor and inexperienced apprentice respectively, serves the purpose of rendering Watson a less fallible disciple, while also contributes to revealing some of Holmes’ less known weaknesses and concealed imperfections as a mentor. Manifold postmodern reinterpretations of this legendary partnership have been particularly keen on bringing to the fore the most human and vulnerable aspects of Holmes’ personality in spite of holding on to his unquestioned expertise in the art of detection. As a case in point, Mitch Cullin’s postmodern novel A Slight Trick of the Mind portrays Sherlock Holmes as a retired detective in his old age, living in a secluded farmhouse in Sussex with his widowed housekeeper, Mrs. Munro, and her young son Roger. In the absence of Doctor Watson, who has been dead for some years at this stage, Holmes initiates his young disciple Roger into the care of his bees in the apiary of his farmhouse, developing an affectionate predilection for him and establishing a mentoring relationship which will prove particularly fruitful for both of them. Focusing mostly on the fact that Holmes is portrayed in his late years in Cullin’s novel, this article aims at portraying the different mentoring relationships that Holmes establishes and reflects upon in his old age, while paying particular attention to how the clearly-defined roles between mentor and disciple often become blurred. The mentor’s teachings help the disciple, but also the apprentice’s eager attitude and dexterous ways exert an important influence on the mentor. Likewise, as Holmes recollects past cases and reimagines them in his late years, he tackles issues in relation

“I may be retired—however, I am still a ver y busy man”

to the analytical method used in his process of detection, procedures concerning scientific research in the field of apiculture, the pervasive role of memory and the increasing importance attached to imagination, and how remembrance and creativity appear to be inextricably related to each other. Finally, this article also underlines that, in Cullin’s postmodern revision of this mythical late Victorian detective, it is in his old age that Holmes becomes significantly attracted to the domain of art and of imagination, after nearly a lifetime of having mostly resorted to logic and reason. *** The different assignation of roles as mentor and disciple to Holmes and Watson respectively is explicitly stated by the celebrated detective in a passage of the novel The Sign of the Four, in which he censures Watson’s literary vein, and as an expert in detection, he draws attention to the importance of precision and accuracy when it comes to giving account of each case: Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism […] Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserves mention is the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes. (100)

In the course of his inquiries, Holmes mostly relies on analytical reasoning, which he describes in the novel A Study in Scarlet as a procedure by means of which “you were given the result and had to find everything else for yourself” (92). As Alan MacFarlane contends, even Conan Doyle acknowledged the analogy between the analytical method and scientific research in general terms, as, in order to tackle the kind of problems that researchers face in the domain of medicine and social sciences, one starts at the end of the chain and works backwards to learn about the causes (2009: 70). In this respect, Holmes’ analytical reasoning bears many points in common with the inductive method of analysis, whereby one moves from specific observations to broader generalizations, focusing on observation first, trying to work out a pattern, formulating some hypotheses, and finally, trying to induce a theory. As MacFarlane

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further argues, throughout Conan Doyle’s stories, Holmes often tries to shed light on the analytical method in the course of his deliberations with Watson, and to that end, Holmes makes use of different metaphors, such as that of a series of threads, or that of a chain with different links in it. Hence, in spite of Holmes’ blind reliance on reason and logic in his youth, as MacFarlane claims, the analytical method that Holmes so often praises also involves intuition and imagination, and significantly, as Cullin’s novel shows, these creative components of the analytical method are more and more cherished as Holmes grows older. In addition to the connections established between the analytical method and research methodologies, such as the inductive method—which moves from specific observations to broader generalisations—and how imagination can play a major role in both of them, in his old age Holmes also shows how memory is also inevitably entangled with imagination and creativity, especially when relying on remembrance, which becomes harder than it used to be in the past. The blurring between memory and imagination, and the important role they both play in the course of the analytical method, contribute to a pervasive and symbolic process of intertextuality, as Holmes deals with different cases that often overlap. Given this pervasive sense of intertextuality in Cullin’s postmodern novel, Holmes’ lifelong interest in royal jelly and its health benefits acts as a recurrent motif that joins all the cases Holmes tries to resolve in his late years. Likewise, it also turns into a metaphor for continuation that overlays different periods of time, as well as any set distinctions between the domains of memory, imagination, and research. As Matthew Bunson remarks, as a result of his extensive research in apiculture while working on his cases, Holmes might have come up with a concoction made of royal jelly that might have allowed him to extend his life well into his old age (1995: 26). In Cullin’s novel, this hardly ever noticed circumstance in Holmes’ life is taken up and further explored, as the retired detective often resorts to royal jelly in order to improve his increasingly failing memory in his late years. Likewise, the recurrent and symbolic presence of bees, which gives rise to a series of epiphanies, also contributes to linking three different storylines and time frameworks in the novel, and by extension, three different cases of mentorship in which Holmes plays a major role. In analogy to the fact that Holmes has often been considered an eminently rational detective, resorting to the analytical method, it must be acknowledged that the first recorded usage of the word ‘mentor’ appeared

“I may be retired—however, I am still a ver y busy man”

in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. In fact, given its Greek etymological origins, the root of the term could be translated as ‘mind,’ since, in essence, ‘mentor’ literally means “one who thinks” (Klein 1966: 964). Holmes’ expertise in this scientific field, as well as his extraordinary fondness for beekeeping, serve the purpose of establishing the basis for his mentoring relationship with his disciple Roger, to the point of echoing that he had established with Watson in his youth and to the extent of keeping him active in spite of his retirement. Hence, even though his days as an active detective have long been left behind, upon the arrival of Mrs. Munro and her son Roger, Holmes makes the point of repeating the litany “I may be retired—however, I am still a very busy man” (110), thus stating that, despite his retirement, he still remains fully active in his old age, while he also feels wary of the fact that the young boy might become the cause of diverting his attention from his daily routines. However, much to his surprise, as Holmes admits to himself, although “he hadn’t taken kindly to the boy upon first sight,” he gradually begins to think of him as “a dear, welcomed companion” (110), and he even defines his comradeship with Roger as “an effortless, innate association” (112). As Vigen Guroian asserts, since, in Homer’s epic poem, the character of Mentor has often been interpreted as an embodiment of wisdom, given his inequality of knowledge with regard to his disciple Telemachus, the mentoring relationship necessarily acquires a hierarchical quality, as it is the mentor who becomes responsible for initiating this partnership and for choosing his apprentice at will (2008: 77). Similarly, Holmes even depicts his association with Roger as a relationship of tutelage, acknowledging that “it was evident that his casual, if not deliberate, tutelage of Roger had reached fruition” (84), since Holmes is well aware that Roger is perfectly capable of tending to his apiary on his own with the utmost care. As he initiates Roger in the art of beekeeping, Holmes realizes that not only does the young boy prove to be an apt pupil, but the aging detective eventually acknowledges the boy’s invaluable help, to the extent that, in a symbolic act, Holmes even agrees to give Roger the clothing that he no longer wears to tend to the bees. In the process of taking care of the hives together, Holmes also becomes increasingly aware of the boy’s equal satisfaction, realizing that he begins to harbour some “paternal stirrings” (12) for the young boy, in spite of the fact that he had rarely enjoyed the company of children up to then.

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Drawing on the mythical dimensions of mentorship, in Homer’s poem, Mentor is chosen in his old age by his friend Odysseus to be in charge of his son Telemachus when Odysseus leaves for the Trojan War; hence, their mentoring relationship is established on a mutual feeling of loss and absence. In analogy, when Holmes first makes the acquaintance of Mrs. Munro’s young son, the latter is already fatherless, as Mrs. Munro’s husband has recently been killed in the war. Likewise, Holmes has remained childless all his life, and in his late years, in the absence of his life-long companion Doctor Watson, who has already passed away, Holmes cannot help feeling somehow lonely. Hence, Holmes and Roger are firstly united by a mutual sense of loss, the first being childless and the latter being fatherless, but what starts as a convenient association between an experienced apiculturist and a young apprentice gradually acquires an emotional quality and a mutual feeling of admiration, which eventually leads to an actual relation of mentorship. According to Andy Roberts, the role of mentor truly acquired significant pedagogical connotations owing to the publication of François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), which was a treatise on education by means of which the figure of the mentor truly came to signify a wide advisor or a preceptor that provides a young or less experienced person with help and guide (1999: 88). In Cullin’s novel, the central mentoring relationship between Holmes and Roger also surpasses that of mere instruction, as the former begins to feel true affection for the young boy, while Roger feels the need to emulate his senior companion, since, on occasions, the young boy “pretended that he was Holmes reclining in the desk chair with his fingertips pressed together, gazing at the window, and inhaling imaginary smoke” (16). Roger’s admiration for Holmes goes beyond his mentor’s expertise in apiculture, as he tries to replicate Holmes’ habits and pattern of behaviour, taking him as a model to follow in the absence of a father figure. Likewise, as Holmes’ teachings and lessons endow the young boy with knowledge and experience along his process of coming of age, a mutual sense of identification between mentor and apprentice is further underlined, as the following epiphanic moment attests: Roger’s pupils stayed fixed on those venerable, reflective eyes, as though the boy was seeing distant lights shimmering along an opaque horizon, a glimpse of something flickering and alive existing just beyond his reach. And, in turn, the grey eyes that focused sharply on him […] endeavoured to bridge the lifetime that

“I may be retired—however, I am still a ver y busy man”

separated the two of them […] and that seasoned, well-lived voice somehow made Roger feel much older and more worldly than his years. (54)

This passage calls to mind Jacques Lacan’s psychological stage of development, known as the infant mirror stage, whereby the infant is able to identify with his unified reflection in the mirror in contrast with his self-perceived disunified body, except for the fact that Roger is not looking at his own image in the mirror, but at the aging image of his mentor, Holmes. Hence, Roger feels identified with Holmes’ aging image, as he tries to emulate his mentor. In contrast, this scene could thus be interpreted as a reversal of Kathleen Woodward’s description of the mirror of old age (1983: 59), since, if Woodward describes this stage as the aging individual’s inability to identify his unified self with the fragmented image reflected in the mirror, in this passage, Holmes’s attachment to Roger also enables him to feel gradually identified with a younger mirror image of himself. *** Given this sense of identification, not only does Roger benefit from this mentoring relationship, but surprising as it may seem, it is also Holmes who finds this partnership particularly fruitful. In his late years, Holmes gradually becomes aware of the fact that his memory is increasingly failing, and he often finds himself unable to remember not only certain facts in relation to past cases, but also particular details of his everyday life. As time goes by, in relation to his memory, Holmes gains insight into the fact that any “apparent lapse, he feared, was a result of changes in his frontal lobe due to aging—how else could one explain why some memories stayed intact, while others were substantially impaired? Strange, too, that he could recall with complete clarity random moments from his childhood” (55). According to psychologist William James, the phenomenon of memory can be defined as “the knowledge of a former state of mind after it has already once dropped from consciousness” (1918: 648), thus drawing attention to the fact that “forgetting is as important a function as recollecting” (1918: 679), and emphasizing the importance of the mixture of forgetting and remembrance, which is described as “one instance of our mind’s selective activity” (1918: 680). Judging from his words, though, Holmes realizes that his sense of forgetting is gradually

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exceeding that of remembrance owing to aging, while he also notices the workings of selective memory, as he gradually finds it easier to recall events from the distant past rather than from the present. Nonetheless, it is through Roger’s curiosity to learn about Holmes’ past and his famous cases that the detective’s latent memories about his glorious past are awakened, together with the need to resume those cases which still remain unsolved. In fact, it is owing to Roger’s eagerness to inquire about Holmes’ past that, despite any explicit forbiddance to do so, the young boy sneaks into the detective’s study, where he finds an unfinished manuscript on which Holmes had been working, while struggling to remember the details of a case whose resolution involved an acute sense of personal turmoil for the great detective. Roger’s action acquires particular significance, as his curiosity will urge Holmes to make an effort to remember, not only in order to put his manuscript to an end, but also to try to recall the source of the overwhelming sense of guilt he felt as a result of this particular case. Likewise, in tune with the analogy that William James establishes, stating that we “search in our memory for a forgotten idea, just as we rummage our house for a lost object” (1918: 654), Roger’s action of finding and browsing through Holmes’ manuscript in the seclusion of Holmes’ study, which is significantly located in the attic, acquires symbolic connotations, as Roger’s performance actually personalizes Holmes’ memory at a time when the detective’s sense of remembrance seems to be starting to decline. As Holmes himself notices in this later stage and admits to his housekeeper, I fear my advanced age has produced some diminishment of retention, as you are, no doubt, completely aware. I often misplace things—my cigars, my canes, sometimes my own shoes—and I find things in my pockets that mystify me; it’s rather amusing and horrifying at the same instant. There are also periods when I cannot remember why I have gone from one room into another—or even fathom the sentences I have just written at my desk. Yet many other things are indelibly etched within my paradoxical mind. For example, I can recall being eighteen with the utmost clarity—very tall, lonely, and unhandsome Oxford undergraduate. (236)

Insofar as his failing memory and his increasing physical fragility are concerned, at first Holmes is portrayed in his late years in a way that seems to comply with Margaret Gullette’s concept of “age-as-loss as a powerful cultural construct” (1997: 4). Nonetheless, it is also precisely in his old age

“I may be retired—however, I am still a ver y busy man”

that Holmes feels gradually detached from the word of logic and reason, and likewise, he also starts conceding more importance to other domains that he had so far ignored or dismissed as unimportant. Through the recurrent use of a concoction made of royal jelly and Roger’s persistent requests to make him recollect the particulars of a past case, Holmes struggles to hold on to recollection, virtually aware that remembrance is also inextricably related to a personal sense of identity. In this respect, as William James further argues in relation to memory, in addition to “the revival in the mind of an image or copy of the original event” (1918: 649), it is also necessary for the subject to think he has directly experienced it (1918: 650). In the course of their mentoring relationship, while Holmes initiates Roger in the intricacies of apiculture, Roger often urges Holmes to revisit his past, and by extension, to come to terms with his identity as a public figure and celebrated detective. Through this enforced process of remembrance, Holmes establishes connections with three different time frameworks and three different examples of mentorship, which become gradually entwined and entangled, complying with the view, as William James further asserts, that recollection often works by association (1918: 653). As Holmes struggles to remember and unravel pending cases from his past, he also attempts to come to terms with his present and gain insight into his personal identity both as a public figure and as an individual. The unfinished manuscript that Roger finds and urges Holmes to bring to an end portrays one of Holmes’ last cases. Some time prior to his retirement, Holmes was hired by Thomas Keller in order to watch over his wife, Ann, who, after having gone through the bitter loss of her unborn children, begins to take Madame Schirmer’s lessons in order to learn how to play the glass harmonica. In spite of the fact that Thomas realizes his wife’s mental health is improving as a result of instruction, he also gains insight into the fact that, following Madame Schirmer’s teachings, Ann is using the glass harmonica and its music to try to communicate with her departed children. Despite Holmes’ initial incapacity to remember the outcome of the case, he gradually recollects that this case prompted his willing retirement as a result of guilt, since not only did Holmes fail to help Ann Keller, as she finally committed suicide, but he also recalls the fact that he became infatuated with his client’s wife. Likewise, while trying to recollect the details of this past case, Holmes also reflects upon his recent trip to Hiroshima in Japan. There he met Tamiki Umezaki, with whom Holmes started a close friendship when

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they began to send each other numerous letters, as a result of Umezaki’s admiration for the prodigious detective. It was Umezaki who told Holmes about the benefits of prickly ash in order to improve his memory, and his trip to Japan to visit his pen friend responded not only to Umezaki’s insistence to meet the celebrated detective, but also to Holmes’ wish to learn how he could improve his health through the consumption of this exceptional product. However, Umezaki finally discloses his actual motivation to meet Holmes, when he unveils that his father had been a diplomat who had left Japan for England, and following the advice of the English detective, whom he had actually met in his youth, he decided to remain in England, leaving behind his family in Japan. Umezaki tells Holmes that his father had sent him a copy of A Study in Scarlet when he was a child, and now in his adulthood, Umezaki asks Holmes whether he could inform him about the reasons his father might have had to abandon his family in Japan to serve England. In spite of his efforts, Holmes finds himself unable to remember the case and, while in Japan, he dismisses Umezaki’s request, taking for granted that Umezaki’s father wanted to live his own life and casting doubts whether he had actually met Umezaki’s father at all in his youth. The juxtaposition of these different cases in the novel not only blurs the chronological distance separating them, but also underlines significant parallelisms among these diverse examples of mentorship. As a sort of leitmotif that acquires special symbolism all through the novel, the presence of bees—which acts as a metaphor of continuation through time—pervades these three parallel time frameworks. While Roger takes care of Holmes’ apiary and Umezaki shows interest in Holmes’ scholarly volume about apiculture, Holmes recollects the fact that the first time he talked to Ann Keller, he noticed how a bee stayed delicately upon her palm as if they were one and the same, which may subtly account for Holmes’ life-long fascination with bees. Similarly, Ann Keller, Tamiki Umezaki and Roger are united by the common experience of loss, Ann Keller being childless, and Umezaki and Roger being fatherless. Likewise, all of them are in need of help and guidance to go on with their lives, and resort to Holmes in search of tuition and guidance. However, in all cases, Holmes feels reluctant or incapable of fulfilling his role as a mentor appropriately, mostly because he feels at odds to become emotionally involved. In spite of his growing attraction towards Ann Keller, he feels unable to express his emotions, and consequently, he

“I may be retired—however, I am still a ver y busy man”

also feels unqualified to help her cope with the death of her children and with her unsuccessful marriage, which leads her to commit suicide, even if, as subtly admitted, she may also long for Holmes’ affection. Likewise, in relation to Umezaki’s case, owing to his increasingly failing memory, Holmes feels unable to give him information about his missing father, and even though he notices how Umezaki increasingly regards him as a father figure in absence of his true progenitor, Holmes feels incapable of displaying the same fondness. Finally, with regard to Holmes’ mentoring relationship with Roger, in spite of the fact that Holmes feels attached to his young apprentice while tending to his apiary, it is precisely owing to having been initiated into the art of apiculture through Holmes’ teachings that Roger finds his death. While trying to defend his will to defend the bees, Roger suffers the violent attack of a swarm of wasps, to Holmes’ utmost despair and subsequent feelings of remorse. The unpleasant resolution of these three cases leads Holmes to feel an acute sense of guilt, mostly resulting from an increasing awareness of having failed to fulfil the part of mentor that, either overtly or tacitly, these individuals had assigned to him. Nonetheless, in a reversal of roles, Holmes finds himself learning from these unsuccessful experiences, as well as from those individuals who had resorted to him for help and had regarded him as a mentor. *** In this postmodern portrait of the all-time highly-esteemed detective, not only does Holmes struggle to unravel cases that had been left unresolved, but in his late years, he also moderates his analytical method, for which he has become worldwide famous, in favor of a more artistic approach to life. In fact, most of his disciples in these cases show a particular sensibility towards art and the pursuit of knowledge, inasmuch as Ann Keller is learning to play the glass harmonica, Tamiki Umezaki is a poet, and Roger widely displays his interest in the field of apiculture. In view of their artistic talents, Holmes gradually feels attracted towards the domain of art and even imagination, whereas, in his youth, he had explicitly made a point of refusing Watson’s creative bent of mind and his literary output based on his most famous cases. Likewise, it is in his late years that Holmes feels inclined to emulate Watson for the first time and write about one of his cases in order to help himself remember and appease his sense of guilt—as this case eventually led to his voluntary retirement—but also

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in order to give voice to his own version of himself in comparison with the well-known account of the detective provided by Watson with which everybody is acquainted. As Holmes mentions in the manuscript that he is writing about Ann Keller’s case, in his youth and adulthood he disapproved of Watson’s creative vein. Holmes states that, even though “John was inclined to write about our many experiences together, I regarded his skilful, if somewhat limited, depictions as exceedingly overwrought” (19). Nonetheless, it is in his late years that Holmes decides to take up Watson’s place in his absence, arguing that “only retirement afforded me the luxury and inclination finally to engage myself with John’s suggestion” (19). It is thus in his old age that Holmes becomes interested in creativity and imagination to the detriment of the domains of the mind and reason which he had always preferred up to then. Holmes even finds himself stating “what did it matter if, eventually, […] there existed no ultimate reason, or pattern, or logic to all which was done on the earth?” (253). Hence, it is when his memory begins to fail that he feels an unprecedented sense of freedom, which enables him to engage in creativity and provide his own interpretation of the past. With regard to creativity in old age, Anne Wyatt-Brown refers to different models of late-life writing, such as that of late-life revival (1993: 10), whereby she refers to those writers that present an unprecedented productive period at a later stage of creativity. Given the fact that Holmes writes mostly in his late years, his late-life creativity bears important points in common with Wyatt-Brown’s model focused on an unprecedented awakening of creativity in old age. With regard to the relation between memory and imagination, William James claims that “the recollected past and the imaginary past may be much the same,” stating that an imagined past event differs from a recollected event only because of “the sense of a peculiar active relation in it to ourselves” (1918: 652), that is, memory and imagination only differ because of our particular involvement in the former. Similarly, while giving rise to his manuscript, Holmes recollects details from this former case in which he had personally been involved. However, although Holmes seems unaware of this, as long as he is giving his own account of the case, he is also imagining, as Watson had done when he wrote his own version of the case; hence, at this stage, Holmes finds himself playing the same part that his disciple Watson used to play.

“I may be retired—however, I am still a ver y busy man”

The blurring divide between memory and imagination also extends to how Holmes has been remembered and reimagined through the years. Pondering how he has been imagined as a public figure, Holmes becomes aware of how extravagantly his disciple Watson portrayed him in the novels, as many individuals, upon meeting him, feel at odds to identify him as the celebrated detective they have so often read about, while Holmes admits that Watson also depicted himself in the novels in a very unfavorable and unrealistic way. As Holmes contends, “the very notion that I would burden myself with a slow-witted companion might be humorous in a theatrical context, but I regard such forms of insinuation as a serious insult” (20). Likewise, in tune with the postmodern portrayal of Holmes that is presented in the novel, the great detective is aware that, upon meeting him, many individuals may find him a less gaudy character in comparison with the colorful depiction provided by his disciple Watson. Upon meeting his admirer Umezaki in Japan, Holmes defends himself stating, You are referring to the arrogance of my youth. I am an old man now, and I have been retired since you were but a child. It is rather shameful in hindsight, all the vain presumption of my younger self. It really is. You know, we bungled a number of important cases—regrettably. Of course, who wants to read about the failures? (75)

In his late years, Holmes describes himself as a more approachable and human character, aware that most people know him through the extraordinary way Watson had imagined him in his writings. In his late years, Holmes resorts to writing in order to help himself remember, placate his guilt, and metaphorically bring Ann Keller back to life through creativity. In his manuscript, he also reflects upon the cause that might have led her to commit suicide, finding himself wondering “if creation is both too beautiful and too horrible for a handful of perceptive souls, and if the realization of this opposing duality can offer them few options but to take leave of their own accord” (251). Likewise, Holmes also resorts to imagination to try to resolve the case of Umezaki’s father. Finding himself unable to remember whether he had actually met Umezaki’s father and what had become of him, Holmes decides to send his disciple a letter in order to appease him, praising his father’s exceptional qualities as a legendary diplomat. As Holmes admits to himself, “he could give no

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proper explanation as to why Matsuda had abandoned his family to live on the Cook Islands—yet, as desperate for answers as Mr. Umezaki was, Holmes felt certain the story would suffice” (213). Nonetheless, upon facing the death of his young disciple, Holmes even feels at odds to use creativity in order to soothe his suffering, and particularly that of Roger’s mother, stating that “he knew he couldn’t fabricate an appeasing falsehood to ease her suffering, as he’d done for Mr. Umezaki; nor could he fill in the blanks and create a satisfactory conclusion, like Dr. Watson had often done when writing his stories. No, the truth itself was too clear and undeniable: Roger was dead, a victim of misfortune” (240). It is as this stage that Holmes gains insight into the fact that reason and logic cannot account for every event in life, thus showing that, in his late years, Holmes deprives the powers of the mind of the importance he had assigned them in his youth. Likewise, taking into consideration that, as a disciple, Roger was bound to pick up Holmes’ baton in his absence as a man of logic and science, Holmes realizes that Roger’s death involves the impossibility of holding on only to reason at this current stage. *** According to Cora Kaplan, the thrill of invoking and reinterpreting the Victorian past involves a pleasure “associated with the mix of familiarity and strangeness” (2007: 11), as it is often the case that we try to imagine our present in the past or conjure the past in our present. In this respect, Cullin’s novel summons and revisits a late Victorian myth, as it reimagines Sherlock Holmes as an aging man in the quietness of his retirement. In his late years, Holmes is presented as struggling with his increasingly failing memory and his fragile body to the extent that made it impossible to live alone any longer. Nonetheless, although his portrait at this later stage could at first match some conventional representations of old age, such as that of the elderly sage, as Herbert Covey argues (1991: 61), or even the cultural construct of old age as loss and decline, as Margaret Gullette claims (1997: 4), Holmes is primarily depicted as an active and busy man in a productive stage of his life, as he takes care of his apiary, enjoys scientific research, travels abroad, and makes the effort to come to terms with unresolved puzzles from the past. In his late years, as he reflects upon past cases, while he initiates his young apprentice, Roger, into the art of apiculture and turns into his mentor, he also considers

“I may be retired—however, I am still a ver y busy man”

other cases in which his mentorship and expertise were required, but turned out to be cases in which he felt he had failed to accomplish his aim. In this respect, Holmes is reimagined as a more human and fallible character, in contrast with the prodigious portrait that Watson gave in his youth. Likewise, in order to shed light on these past, and particularly, troublesome cases, Holmes resorts to the analytical method as he used to do, but also especially to creativity and imagination, relying mostly on creativity for the first time so as to unravel these cases. As these cases unfold, it is particularly the blurring of roles between mentor and disciple that is particularly brought to the fore, through passages in which it is not only the disciple that emulates Holmes, but in which Holmes also finds himself emulating his apprentice, establishing a reciprocal mentoring relationship. In fact, as Andy Roberts contends, in Homer’s epic poem, it is truly Pallas Athene—the daughter of Zeus and goddess of wisdom—who anthropomorphizes and takes the form of Mentor to deceive Penelope’s suitors and counsel young Telemachus in his father’s absence (1999: 85). To a similar extent, emulating Pallas Athene’s gift of anthropomorphization, Holmes plays the role of mentor for his disciple Roger, as well as for Ann Keller and Umezaki, in a series of blurred and intertextual mentoring relationships that distort the boundaries of time and location, and through which Holmes learns from each of his disciples important issues about himself, both as a public figure and as an individual. Roger urges Holmes to initiate him into scientific research and the analytical method, recollect his past at a time when Holmes’ memories are gradually fading, resume unsolved past cases in order to put them to an end, and attach importance to imagination and artistry at a stage when Holmes feels reason and logic are no longer so imperative. From his relationship with Ann Keller, Holmes learns about fallibility, as he fails to help her, but he also gains insight into the dangers of underestimating the importance of feelings and emotions, while it is as a result of his sense of remorse after her death that his creative turn is finally kindled. His mentoring relationship with Umezaki acquaints Holmes with the way he has been imagined by millions of people owing to Watson’s literary accounts of their cases, while, being a poet, Umezaki contributes to making Holmes interested in the domain of creativity, especially in a foreign land which remains in utter desolation after the Second World War. As if in a reversal of Woodward’s metaphor of the mirror of old age (1993: 59), these different

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examples of mentoring relationships involve Holmes looking at younger images of himself, while his disciples look at older images of themselves, establishing mutual mentoring associations. Likewise, the tragic and unexpected death of Holmes’ young disciple, Roger, whom Holmes had initiated mostly into the world of the analytic reasoning, symbolically evokes his realization that relying only on logic and reason is out of the question, while it also ratifies the evidence that rationality cannot account for everything in life. It is thus significant that, in Cullin’s postmodern reappropriation of the myth of Sherlock Holmes, it is in his late years that Holmes gives vent to his creativity and puts down in words one of the most noteworthy past cases. This phase of creativity ratifies Wyatt-Brown’s thesis about late-life revival as a model of life writing (1993: 10), while it also considers creativity at a later stage as particularly therapeutic, since Holmes revisits Ann Keller’s case to come to terms with his emotions towards her and also to appease the terrible sense of guilt he felt following her death. Likewise, in his new role as a writer, Holmes inevitably emulates his late companion Watson, as, in his absence, Holmes takes over Watson’s task of writing about their cases, thus, symbolically and ironically, turning into his disciple in spite of having acted as his mentor for nearly a lifetime.

Works Cited Bunson, Matthew (1995): The Sherlock Holmes Encyclopedia: A Complete Guide to the World of the Great Detective, London: Pavilion. Conan Doyle, Arthur (2012): “The Sign of the Four.” In: The Complete Sherlock Holmes Novels, Oxford: Benediction, 97-184. Conan Doyle, Arthur (2012): “A Study in Scarlet.” In: The Complete Sherlock Holmes Novels, Oxford: Benediction, 1-95. Covey, Herbert (1991): Images of Older People in Western Art and Society, New York: Praeger. Cullin, Mitch (2015): A Slight Trick of the Mind, Edinburgh: Canongate. Gullette, Margaret (1997): Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Guroian, Vigen (2008): “Literature and the Real Meaning of Mentorship.” In: Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, pp. 76-83. James, William (1918): The Principles of Psychology, New York: Henry Holt.

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Kaplan, Kora (2007): Victoriana: Histories, Fiction, Criticism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Klein, Ernest (1966): A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, London: Elsevier. MacFarlane, Alan (2009): “On Creative and Analytical Methods: Sherlock Holmes and Cambridge Anthropology.” In: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 29/1, pp. 68-87. Roberts, Andy (1999): “The Origins of the Term Mentor.” In: History of Education Society Bulletin 63-65, pp. 81-90. Woodward, Kathleen (1983): “Instant Repulsion: Decrepitude, the Mirror Stage, and the Literary Imagination.” In: The Kenyon Review 5/4, pp. 43-66. Wyatt-Brown, Anne M./Janice Rossen (1993): Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.

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Rumi, Sufi Spirituality and the TeacherDisciple Relationship in Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love Billy Gray Only in a time as confused as ours could one think that the teacher-student relationship—an archetypal and sacred form—exists as an option, rather than a necessary requirement, a station on the way. W illiam Patrick Pat terson1 Three short phrases tell the story of my life: I was raw, I got cooked, I burned. Jalaluddin R umi 2

Given the increasing public prominence accorded to discourses relating to complex global trends such as migration, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, it is unsurprising that within literary studies, increasing critical attention has been focused upon writers whose work engages with the political, cultural and human consequences of these momentous, at times overwhelming, global developments. One such writer is the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak,3 who in texts such as The Gaze (2006), Honour (2012) and Three Daughters of Eve (2016) depicts Muslim, predominantly 1 | William Patrick Patterson, Struggle of the Magicians (1997: 92). Qtd. in Mariana Caplan, The Guru Question (2011: 44). 2 | Qtd. in Idris Shah, The Sufis (1964: 69). 3 | Shafak, who writes in both Turkish and English, is the daughter of a Turkish diplomat. She was born in Strasburg and spent her formative years in Madrid, before

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female protagonists who, caught in the maelstrom of globalisation, cultural upheaval, and the pervasive attractions of Western secularism, face numerous familial, generational and gender demands upon their emerging personal identities. What is particularly noteworthy in relation to Shafak’s writing is the extent to which its rejection of religious and cultural fundamentalism and the concurrent promotion of a more fluid, cosmopolitan response to the dilemmas confronting contemporary society is predicated upon her knowledge of, and belief in, the general principles of what can be loosely termed “Western Sufism.” Shafak has on several occasions openly acknowledged her interest in Sufism, most noticeably in an essay entitled “The Celestial Eye,” contained in her collection of non-fiction articles Black Milk (2007). This specific autobiographical essay recounts how Shafak gravitated from a position of aggressive atheism based on her proclivity to “wrap several shawls of ‘isms’ around my shoulders,” to one where a spiritual guide, euphemistically referred to as “Dame Dervish,” entered her life. Shafak reveals how “motivated by her, I started to read about Sufism. One book led to another. The more I read the more I unlearned. Because that is what Sufism does to you, it makes you erase what you know and what you are sure of” (2007: 162). She confesses that, of all the Sufi poets and philosophers she read about during those formative years, There were two that moved me deeply: Rumi and his legendary spiritual companion, Shams of Tabriz. Living in thirteenth-century Anatolia, in an age of deeply embedded bigotries and clashes, they had stood for a universal spirituality, opening the doors to people of all backgrounds equally. They spoke of love as the essence of life, the universal philosophy connecting all humanity across centuries, cultures and cities. As I kept reading [...] Rumi’s words began to tenderly remove the shawls I had always wrapped around myself, layer upon layer. (162)

This fascination with the teachings of Muhammad Jalal ad-Din, known to the Anglophone world as Rumi, and his spiritual guide and mentor, Shams of Tabriz, reaches its culmination and most significant artistic expression in Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love, published in 2010. Although she had previously “thematised” Sufism in her earlier fiction and moving for a short period to the United States. She currently resides in Oxford, England.

Rumi, Sufi Spirituality and the Teacher-Disciple Relationship

clear, if minor, references to Sufi philosophy permeated previous novels, such as The Bastard of Istanbul (2007), The Forty Rules of Love situates a fictionalised representation of the relationship between Rumi and Shams at the centre of the narrative and provides a more overt depiction of the Emanationalist, Perennialist and Universalist ethics contained within Sufi dialectics. The novel contains two parallel but interrelated narratives, the first of which is situated in contemporary Massachusetts, where Ella Rubenstein, an unhappily married forty-year-old Jewish American housewife finds temporary employment for a literary agency. Her first assignment is to read and produce a detailed report on a work of fiction entitled Sweet Blasphemy, written by an unpublished novelist called Aziz Zahara, who claims to have written the book “purely out of admiration and love for the great philosopher, mystic and poet Rumi and his beloved Shams of Tabriz” (15). The second narrative strand of Shafak’s novel consists of the contents of Zahara’s text which, situated in thirteenthcentury Anatolia, relates how in a period of political instability, fanaticism and impending violence Shams of Tabriz essentially transformed Rumi— at that particular time a prominent Muslim cleric and expert in Islamic jurisprudence—into a committed mystic and poet of incomparable ability. In relation to the two narrative strands contained in The Forty Rules of Love, a clear connection is drawn between the mystical love that binds Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and the extramarital affair that arises between Ella and the Sufi adept Aziz, who, the novel suggests, may be the literal reincarnation of Shams himself. Reading Sweet Blasphemy, and becoming increasingly captivated by the tale of Rumi and Shams, Ella becomes estranged from her emotionally distant husband and expresses a growing dissatisfaction with her marriage, the restrictive gender roles she had previously embraced and the confines of her prosperous middleclass lifestyle. Ella’s encounter with Aziz’s manuscript, her exposure to Rumi’s poetry and, ultimately, the personality of Aziz himself help her to recognise her need for a more spiritual lifestyle and an attachment to a form of Sufism which emphasises the essential unity of all faiths and the paramount importance of love. The Forty Rules of Love is undoubtedly one of the more prominent and commercially successful4 contributions to what Amira El-Zein has 4 | The novel became an international bestseller and has sold more than 700 000 copies in Turkey alone.

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called “the Rumi phenomenon” (2010: 71-85). While he has long been a renowned figure in the Persian and Turkish speaking worlds, as well as the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, in the last few decades Rumi has become a recognised poet in the West, particularly in the United States. Triggered by Coleman Barks’s 1995 volume of translations (or more accurately “renderings”) entitled The Essential Rumi, the thirteenthcentury Islamic Mystic has recently achieved a remarkable public visibility, to the extent that in 1996 he became the best-selling poet in North America, selling in excess of several hundred thousand copies in a country where Pulitzer prize winning poets struggle to sell more than 10 000 books. Rumi’s posthumous literary success has been accompanied by a number of fictionalised biographies relating to his life and work, including not only The Forty Rules of Love, but also Nigel Watt’s The Way of Love (1999), Muriel Maufroy’s Rumi’s Daughter (2005), Connie Zweig’s A Moth to the Flame (2006) and Nahal Tajadod’s Rumi: The Fire of Love (2008). Moreover, as Franklin Lewis has pointed out in his magisterial biography Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (2007), interest in Rumi has recently transcended the printed word and moved into various multimedia formats, inspiring musicians, choreographers, film-makers, video-artists and others, with a concurrent visibility in the outer reaches of cyberspace (2). For example, the American minimalist composer Philip Glass has created a huge multimedia piece entitled “Masters of Grace,” complete with 3-D glasses and featuring a libretto of 114 poems by Rumi (2). In 1998, the celebrity new Age guru Deepak Chropra produced a CD entitled “A Gift of Love,” which included none other than Madonna, Martin Sheen and Goldie Hawn reciting some of Rumi’s verses, and in the same year the popular singer wrote and recorded a song entitled “Frozen,” included in her Ray of Light album, which she claimed is based on a poem (unspecified) originally penned by the Sufi poet. These are just some of the more prominent examples of how the contemporary American hunger for metaphysical knowledge appears to have found in Rumi the ultimate source of inspiration and make it possible to argue, as Amira El-Zein has done, that “more than any other past or contemporary poet [...] [h]e is considered by many Americans today as a spiritual guide” (2010: 71). Rumi’s success as a pop-culture icon in the United States can partly be explained by the various and gradual processes of domestication, appropriation and Americanisation of the Rumi narrative, as well as a result of the considerable effort that has been expended in presenting

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Sufism as an important counterpoint to the religious extremism which dominated the Islamophobic discourses following 9/11. It can also be fruitfully contextualised within what Georg Feuerstein has defined as the secular world’s “widespread revival of interest in the experimental, mystical dimensions of religion” (2006: 14). According to Elena Furlanetto, this interest should not be viewed as a new or even isolated phenomenon but rather as a culmination of a much older cultural dialogue between American literature and Sufi poetry (2016: 2012). This is a perspective endorsed by Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh, who has charted the various ways in which readers in the West began to discover the work of Rumi approximately two hundred years ago, when the pioneers Orientalists and Romanticists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—who perceived Rumi as part of the mystical and visionary Orient—paved the way for his impact on Western spiritual discourse (2015: 287). Zarrabi-Zadeh charts the manner in which Rumi’s teachings subsequently impinged upon Western consciousness and how he was considered a spiritual saint par excellence by advocates of New Age spirituality in the second half of the twentieth century, a position he has retained ever since (2015: 287). Interestingly, Zarrabi-Zadeh also contends that the contemporary Western tendency to wrench Rumi from his Islamic context and reduce his sacred message to a bland commercial and consumerist product is, in historical terms, simply the most recent manifestation of a long tradition and he laments how the popular (as opposed to the scholarly) perception of Rumi’s spirituality does not fully reflect the perennial philosophy to which the poet belongs and merely encourages “a form of vague spirituality entangled in relativity and temporality” (2015: 301), Zarrabi-Zadeh expresses concern with the manner in which “the interpretation of Rumi’s ideas through a circular hermeneutical process has been coupled with the imposition upon his Sufi system of foreign mystical philosophical and religious frameworks that are not necessarily congruous with his own mystical principles” (2015: 288). Accordingly, this tendency has led to the decontextualisation of Rumi’s mysticism from the epistemological context to which it belongs and represents an essential violation of the constituent parts of his Sufi system. This viewpoint is shared by Franklin Lewis, who has criticised those contemporary spiritual practitioners who have taken extensive liberties with the content of Rumi’s poems and whose representations of his teachings consequently appear “blurred and bland” (2017: 8). Pointing out how “when it came to differences of creed, we should not be deceived

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by his [Rumi] tolerance into imagining that all beliefs were equal to him” (2015: 12), Lewis states: It will simply not do to extract quotations out of context and present Rumi as a prophet of the presumptions of an unchurched and syncretic spirituality—while Rumi does indeed demonstrate a tolerant and inclusive understanding of religion [...] [He] did not come to his theology of tolerance and inclusive spirituality by turning away from traditional Islam or organised religion, but through an immersion in it; his spiritual yearning stemmed from a radical desire to follow the example of the Prophet Mohammad and actualise his potential as a perfect Muslim. (2017: 20)

It has been argued—most notably by Elena Furlanetto, who has produced the only noteworthy scholarly study on The Forty Rules of Love—that in her presentation of the Rumi narrative, Shafak “succumbs to the oversimplification and decontextualisation of his work perpetrated by the Western popularisers of the Rumi phenomenon” and that she “privileges the aesthetics and the interests of the American readers over conveying a more complete image of Sufism” (2013: 204). It is my contention that the reality is somewhat more complex: while Shafak is certainly culpable of expunging essential references to Islamic doctrine in her depiction of Rumi’s teachings and is undoubtedly complicit in presenting the Rumi’s narrative from a Western perspective, this is, I believe, an inevitable consequence of her adherence to a form of Sufism which is essentially Western in orientation rather than traditionally Islamic.5 Limited space prohibits a thorough and detailed explication of the various ways in which Western Sufism differs from Sufism in its classical form; in general terms, the former propagates a psychological system rather than a faith-based theological exegesis, and privileges the Universalist strand embedded in Sufi philosophy.6 Traditional Sufism, however, is inextricably linked 5 | In the list of “sources” reproduced at the end of the novel, Shafak cites Coleman Barks, Idris Shah, Kabir Helmunski, Camille Hetminski, William Chitwick, Ann Marie Schiminel and R.A. Nicolson, all of whom would be considered figures of seminar importance within Western Sufism. 6 | In the twentieth century, Western Sufism was propagated by figures such as the Greek Armenian George Gurdjieff (1866-1947), the Russian mathematician and philosopher Pytor Osspensky (1878-1947), Alfred Richard Orage (1873-1934),

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to the Islamic world, does not reject the world of conventional religious observance and recognises Islam in both its exoteric and esoteric dimensions. It is my contention, therefore, that, far from misrepresenting Sufism, Shafak’s novel incorporates within its narrative design important elements of Sufi philosophy, not least her detailed depiction of the teacherdisciple relationship, which is such an essential aspect of Sufism, both in its contemporary and traditional forms. Who then was Jallaluddin Rumi and what was his relationship to Sufism? Moreover, in what ways are important elements of his spiritual philosophy reflected in The Forty Rules of Love? As Franklin Lewis has emphasised, although there currently exists a bewildering array of materials on Rumi, both popular and scholarly (as well as devotional), “we remain someway off from reconstructing an exhaustive biography detailing all that can be known about him” (2007: 4). This difficulty is compounded by the indisputable fact that a hagiographical tradition, which uncritically perpetuated a legendary image of the poet, emerged immediately after his death in 1273. As regards reliable biographical information, it is accepted as fact that Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh, Persia (today Afghanistan). When he was twelve years old, Balkh was invaded by Tatars and his father fled the province with his family and gravitated towards Rum (Asiatic Turkey). They eventually settled in Konya, where the future poet and Sufi scholar acquired the name “al-Rumi,” taken from the name of the area. Upon his father’s death Rumi assumed the position of Shaykh in the religious community in Konya, where he taught and preached for several years. He met and became a disciple of the controversial Shams of Tabriz in 1244,7 and is believed to have died editor of the influential “New Age” magazine, J.G. Bennett (1897-1974), a British scientist and reputed British spy, and most recently Idris Shah (1924-1996), believed to have been the foremost exponent of Sufi ideas in the West. 7 | As Franklin Lewis points out, we know considerably less about shams of Tabriz than we know about Rumi. It is believed that he came from a family of spiritual practitioners and there are suggestions that his forebears were connected to various fringe sects of Sufism whose affiliates experimented with highly unorthodox practices. While legend portrayed Shams as an untutored wandering dervish possessed of miraculous powers, it appears that Shams was fully appraised of the learning of his day, had studied Islamic law, and possessed extensive knowledge of mathematics and astronomy. See Lewis 135. As regards the remarkable influence

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in 1273. The disciples and descendants of Rumi subsequently formed a confraternity, or Sufi Order, committed to following the mystical practices, spiritual discipline and teachings which they traced back to Rumi himself. This Brotherhood (which also includes female members) is officially called the Mevlevi Order, although the adherents of the Order are best known to the general populace as “the whirling dervishes,” after their distinctive practice of meditative turning. As Zadeh has outlined, Rumi’s significant contribution to the intellectual and spiritual development of Sufism was facilitated by the Mevlevi Order’s amicable relations with their Ottoman rulers and Rumi’s fame was spread, not only throughout Anatolia, but also in territories occupied by the Ottoman Empire (2015: 287). In relation to what Rumi actually taught, his doctrinal system was essentially based around his conviction that the entire path of mystical perfection is centred around Man’s desire to return to his divine origin, thereby returning to the ontological unity he had once enjoyed. For Rumi, the all-consuming problem of Human existence stems from the painful existence of imperfection caused by alienation from our essential source. His metaphysics depict the beginning of creation as a unified realm, where Man’s inward reality and the virtual existence of all created things were present with God in a state of harmonious unity. In order to once again experience this original state of spiritual perfection, Rumi emphasises its gradual and progressive nature and insists that the mystical path involves passing through limitless successive spiritual “stations” (290). He characterises the starting point of Man’s mystical journey as a purging of what are known within Sufis as “the nafs,” defined as the bestial aspect of Man’s nature, an adversary that hinders each individual from achieving mystical advancement. It is, therefore, essential to struggle against the deceitful nature of the nafs and eradicate the deluding power of the partial intellect. If the appellant is successful in these attempts, the mystical journey can ultimately reach a stage where neither the nafs nor the intellect that Shams was to wield over Rumi, Inyat Khan has written: “The impact of Shams[...] upon the erstwhile scholar Rumi was so overwhelming that he became practically overnight one of the great Murshids (teachers) the Sufis have ever known” (2006: 25). Will Johnson, in his short but fascinating biography of Rumi’s life and teachings, simply claims that “Shams was the key to Rumi’s lock.” See Will Johnson, The Spiritual Practices of Rumi: Radical Techniques for Beholding the Life of the Divine (2007: 12).

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govern the soul; instead it is the soul’s “pure untarnished essence,” or what Zarrabi-Zadeh refers to as the “unrestricted and ineffable heart” (2015: 291), which dominates the disciple’s existence. Perhaps the most singular element of Rumi’s spiritual doctrine and one which has significantly contributed to his current status as a precursor of modern, unchurched and syncretic spirituality is the emphasis he places upon the role of love as the major component of the entire mystical journey. A great deal of Rumi’s poetry refers to the state where, through love, “The seer becometh the eye, the eye, the seer,” and when Man begins travelling on his spiritual journey it is the reciprocal love between the aspirant and God that plays the pivotal role in this gradual and arduous practice. Rumi attributes the motion of all particles through the cycle of forms to the powerful attraction of love and perceives all creation within both the physical and metaphysical worlds as a great upward spiral of transmutation (2015: 296). If the individual soul frees itself from the taint which it has contracted in the material world, it can escape those subjective values which function as the veils of truth. When this occurs, it is possible to live in the realm of the Beloved and practice the art of love which resides in the depth of the psyche. In other words, whether its immediate object be human or divine, real or phenomenal, love ultimately leads to a knowledge of God. As Will Johnson attests: “Become a lover. This is Rumi’s message to us” (2007: 42). As the title of Shafak’s novel suggests, The Forty Rules of Love engages with Rumi’s philosophy of love on a number of seemingly unrelated but ultimately interconnected levels. This is partly due to the ideological positioning of the text; Rumi’s advocacy of love and tolerance is presented by Shafak as evidence of an “Other” Islam, far removed from the rhetorics of fundamentalism frequently associated with Muslim fanatics and equally the poet’s religious message is used in the text to highlight the incompatibility of genuine spirituality and institutionalised religion, the latter being depicted as dogmatic, reified and essentially divisive. This viewpoint is frequently voiced by the character of Aziz, who, in a letter to Ella dated 2008, writes: “I am spiritual [...] religiosity and spirituality are not the same thing and I believe that the gap between the two has never been greater” (145). More significantly, Shafak’s neo-Sufi agenda and belief in the timeless relevance of Rumi’s teachings is primarily embodied in the character of Ella Rubenstein. A rigidly disciplined personality, living a comfortable, bourgeois existence with no margin for unpredictability or surprise, her life “consisted of still waters—a predictable sequence of

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habits, needs and preference” (1). She acknowledges how “it was a pity that, at almost forty, she hadn’t been able to make more of her life” (36). The fact that Ella is soon to turn forty is highly significant, as she is evidently suffering from the symptoms of a classic “mid-life” crisis. As her birthday approaches, she commits to paper a list of resolutions aimed at providing a form of emotional ballast against an increasing sense of existential atrophy and stagnation. Confessing that “I feel like I have reached a milestone in my life” (113), she blames herself for “not ageing well,” and feels “particularly insecure about her body, her hips and thighs and the shape of her breasts, which were far from perfect after three kids and all these years” (304). Ella’s crisis is compounded by her oldest daughter Jeanette’s unexpected decision to inform the family of her impending marriage. When faced with her mother’s outspoken disapproval, Jeanette responds by telling Ella, “I love him, Mom. Does that not mean anything to you? Do you remember that word from somewhere?” (9). Her daughter’s outburst forces Ella to confront her dispassionate and rational views on love, encapsulated by her banal protestation that “women don’t marry the men they fall in love with” (10), as “love is only a sweet feeling bound to come and quickly go away” (10). For Ella love is simply for those “looking for some rhyme or reason in this widely spinning world” (78). Nevertheless, Jeanette’s pointed comments have clearly touched upon a troubling issue for Ella as, in a moment of contemplation, she confronts her true feelings on the subject of love, as she asks herself: “But what about those who had long given up the quest?” (78). Ella’s increasing awareness of the emotional and spiritual vacuum at the centre of her life is directly connected to the character of Rumi, as he is represented in Aziz’s novel Sweet Blasphemy, a text which Ella has been asked to review. Rumi is depicted as suffering from an inexplicable sadness, a situation at odds with his visible wealth and numerous achievements. Described as a prominent scholar of Islam “who knew everything except the pits of love” (74). Rumi, despite his increasing fame and public prominence, remains inwardly dissatisfied. When pondering upon his enviable litany of achievements he asks himself, “why then, do I feel this void inside me, growing deeper and wider with each passing day? It gnaws at my soul like a disease and accompanies me wherever I go” (99). At the mid-point of their lives, therefore, both Ella and Rumi find themselves afflicted by an existential emptiness, exemplified by a

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condition of spiritual and moral exhaustion. It is fortunate, therefore, that their lives are fundamentally transformed by the influence of two remarkable individuals—Aziz Zahara and Shams of Tabriz respectively— who, through their guidance and teaching, impart a more profound understanding of the potential of love in all its manifestations. Moreover, the parallel experiences of Ella and Rumi, separated as they are by gender, history, culture and religious affiliation serves as an importance literary device whereby Shafak can investigate the function of the teacher-disciple dynamic within Sufism and the essential role such a relationship plays in the individual’s esoteric odyssey. Before examining the extent to which The Forty Rules of Love reproduces classic tropes and strategies of the teacherdisciple discourse ubiquitous to Sufism, it is important at this juncture to outline how, since time immemorial, Sufis has perceived authentic spiritual life as a matter of initiation and discipleship and championed the role that the authoritative spiritual guide performs in relation to the seeker’s desire for inner growth. While the concept of spiritual “transmission” has largely been eradicated from contemporary, New Age discourses, within Sufism the “path” or “the Way” is constantly renewed by successive teachers who are referred to as Sages (arif), Guides (murshid), Elders (pir) or Sheikhs. In relation to both the history and praxis of Sufism, a system of discipleship to spiritual teachers originated which involved the aspirant developing his/her spiritual proclivities under the supervision of a guide. This guide operates as an indispensable link between the disciple and his/her objective and is ultimately responsible for organising the inherent flexibility of the Sufi work. By practising a variety of structured activities, teachers endeavour to transmit to their pupils the “Baraka”—essentially, an implacable force imparted to people, situations, places and objects for a specific reason— they receive from their own Masters. As Idris Shah writes: “To be a Sufi and to study the Way is to have a certain attitude. This attitude is produced by the effect of Sufi teachers who exercise an instrumental function in relation to the Seeker” (1982: 24). In their proper application, therefore, Sufi teaching techniques depend upon an interrelation between the Master and the disciple, primarily because one of the major obstacles many seekers face is that they cannot access “the real” without guidance from teachers who have transcended ordinary limitations and embraced the imperatives of esoteric knowledge. Essentially, the teacher embodies and symbolises “the Work” itself (of which s/he is a product) and also the

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continuity of the system (the chain of transmission). The Sufi teacher does not simply impart knowledge or expect mere behavioural modification on behalf of the disciple; rather the guru’s principle function is to directly communicate transcendental reality. The ultimate objective of spiritual transmission, therefore, is attuned to exploiting unexpected opportunities in which skilful intervention may catalyse a profound ontological shift in the student’s awareness. Lex Hixton, a contemporary teacher of Sufis, has advised “every seeker [to] receive traditional initiation and personal guidance from at least one authentic spiritual guide. Then one no longer simply experiments with contemplation but lives contemplative practice” (Qtd. in Feuerstein 2006: 223). This perspective is put more succinctly by Georg Feuerstein, who writes: “I cannot imagine why one would dare to cross the shark-infested waters of the ego without a boat man” (Qtd. in Caplan 2011: 72). In The Forty Rules of Love, Rumi’s “boatman,” Shams of Tabriz, informs a young villager how “people everywhere are struggling on their own for fulfilment, but without any guidance as to how to achieve it” (207). For Ella and Rumi, who are the fortunate recipients of such guidance, the aim of their respective teachers is to act as a transmitter of grounded spirituality by facilitating their disciples’ latent transformative capacities. This involves the deployment of a specific pedagogical methodology which is aimed at disarming the manifestations of the ego and facilitating the emergence of a more fully developed intuitive approach to life. Ella and Rumi are taught that objective spiritual practice resides in the ego-transcendence as opposed to the chimera of ego-fulfilment. This realisation leads to a fundamental shift in their inner-perception and is accompanied by a recognition that authentic spiritual life is essentially deconstructive in nature. This perspective is evident in Rumi’s disclosure that Shams “has taught me to unlearn everything I knew” (192). Shams’s specific teaching principles are designed to fundamentally challenge Rumi’s reliance of the subjective phenomena of social conditioning and conventional morality. This approach is evident at their very first public meeting; when confronted by an unexpected query from Shams, Rumi recognises how “when Shams asked me that question [...] there was a second question hidden within the first question (165). His curiosity aroused, Rumi’s response is significant: “I felt as if a veil had been lifted and what awaited me was an intriguing puzzle” (154). What “awaits” Rumi is nothing less than a fundamental spiritual realignment. After each subsequent meeting with Shams, he

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feels “intoxicated by a substance I can neither taste nor see,” and is brought to an awareness that his normal condition of spiritual insentience could only have been overcome through the extraneous guidance of a fullyfledged Sufi teacher: “Until he forced me to look deep into the crannies of my soul, I had not faced the fundamental truth about myself” (192). Ella undergoes a remarkably similar transformation under the tutelage of Aziz Zahara, a man who defines himself as “a Sufi, a child of the present moment” (160). When tasked with reading about the lives of Rumi and Shams in Aziz’s novel Sweet Blasphemy, Ella initially expresses doubts about whether “she could concentrate on a subject as irrelevant to her life as Sufism, and a time as distant as the thirteenth century” (12). Her midlife crisis has left her “beleaguered by questions and lacking answers,” yet she finds herself becoming increasingly intrigued by the character of Shams, and soon realises that “she was enjoying the story, and with every new rule of Shams, she mulled her life over” (129). Her growing interest in Aziz’s depiction of the teacher-disciple component inherent in the relationship between the two prominent Sufis, is accompanied by an increasing awareness that her friendship with Aziz is essentially replicating the dynamic that existed between Rumi and Shams, with Aziz as the symbolic reincarnation of Rumi’s great teacher. She is forced to confront Aziz’s influence on her life and acknowledge his pivotal role in her spiritual growth: “[...] you meet someone [...] who sees everything in a different light and forces you to shift, change your angle of vision [and] observe everything anew, within and without” (263). On a closer reading, it is evident that Shafak’s interest in the teacherstudent dynamic within Sufism is not limited to a broad understanding of the general principles governing such relationships; in fact, her depiction of the two main teacher-student relationship in The Forty Rules of Love reveals a detailed knowledge of how, in their proper application, Sufi teaching techniques are dependent upon a specific and individualised interrelation between the Master and his/her disciple. To the Sufis, the teacher’s adoption of specific pedagogical approaches which are, of necessity, specifically tailored to the needs of each individual student, is an essential part of Sufi philosophy and a sign of flexibility rather than evidence of inconsistency. In relation to Ella, her predominant character flaw is a deeply engrained inability to relinquish control over her immediate surroundings and “live in the moment,” and tellingly, it is precisely this failing which is targeted by Aziz on numerous occasions.

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When the latter informs Ella that part of his spiritual education involved developing a disposition whereby he could adopt “a peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend” (54), she responds with “What a bizarre thing to say [...] to a woman who has always put too much thought into the past and even more into the future” (160). In a subsequent email communication Aziz writes “instead of intrusion or passivity, may I suggest submission?” (54), and suggests that the act of surrender, both to a Higher Power and the possibilities of the present moment are an essential component of the spiritual journey. He instructs Ella to “go with the flow,” an approach to life that she attempts—successfully—to develop and refine: “she had discovered that once she accepted that she didn’t have to stress herself about things she had no control over, another self emerged from inside— one who was wiser, calmer and far more sensible” (175). In regards to Rumi, it is made abundantly clear that the main obstacle curtailing his spiritual development is the exceedingly high regard in which he is held by both the civic and religious communities in Kenya. His strictly ordered life and unrivalled reputation as an orator of genius have brought him a welcome degree of material comfort and security in a period where the region is beset with political uncertainty. Inevitably, this prosperity has led to a burgeoning sense of self-regard and exponentially reduced the element of struggle viewed by the Sufis as an essential catalyst for spiritual renewal and regeneration. Although he is a relative newcomer to the region, Shams notes the exception deference accorded to Rumi by numerous important personages and informs an acquaintance that “His [Rumi’s] ego has not been bruised, not even slightly damaged by other people. But he needs that” (224). It is significant, therefore, that the specific type of teaching that Shams devises in order to “shock” Rumi out of his spiritual impasse is precisely that form of guidance mostly designed to demolish Rumi’s elevated standing within the local community. Interestingly, Shams deliberately exposes Rumi to a radical form of teaching commonly known as “Crazy Wisdom” or “Holy Madness,”8 so beloved by numerous Sufi practitioners. What “crazy-wise” adepts have in common is a seemingly deliberate rejection of consensual reality, as well as the ability to instruct others in ways clearly designed to shock 8 | For a detailed overview relating to the role of the “Crazy Wisdom” within esoteric traditions, see Georg Feuerstein’s Holy Madness (2006).

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the conventional mind. In historical terms, some Sufis addressed the spiritual dangers of a pious reputation by intentionally acting in apparent contradiction to religious law or acceptable social standards. In order not to succumb to the temptation of false piety, they might shear themselves of all outward signs of social respect by exhibiting behaviour which would have clearly appeared bizarre by conventional standards. Such teachers may therefore act in ways that do not fit accepted moralistic ideas of how a teacher may behave. “Crazy-wisdom” practitioners, however, have insisted that despite the unconventionality of their doctrine, the teachings are always designed to serve the disciple’s spiritual journey by drawing attention to the insidious rigidity of egoic identification. In many respects Shams is viewed by the various communities in Konja as the true embodiment of a “crazy-wisdom” teacher. He is described by Jack Head as “a maverick of a dervish” and “a heretic who has nothing to do with Islam. An unruly man full of sacrilege and blasphemy” (22). Even commentators sympathetic to Shams note how he “fanned the flames of gossip, touched raw nerves and spoke words that sounded like blasphemy to ordinary ears, shocking and provoking people” (289). Shams deliberately fraternizes with social outcasts such as prostitutes, thieves and other criminals in order to provoke the religious authorities of Konja and, by association, expose Rumi to public ridicule and moral outrage. The latter’s friendship with the itinerant dervish frequently leaves him open to criticisms and aspersions uttered by the orthodox clergy, resulting in Rumi’s increasing social ostracism from the important spheres of political influence. In order to gauge Rumi’s response to his increasing isolation, Shams remorselessly exacerbates his disciple’s deep-seated fear of derision by setting “tests,” such as instructing him to publicly purchase wine in a tavern of ill-repute. He attempts to free Rumi from his conformity and his fear of opprobrium as well as stimulate a growing detachment from the assumptions and prejudices of conventional Islamic piety. Despite some major reservation amongst men who previously held him in high esteem, Rumi passes the “test,” by embracing social disrepute in the interests of spiritual development. He subsequently advises one of his own students to “throw away reputation, become disgraced and shameless,” and claims that “Because of him [Shams], I learned the valued of madness” (290). The fact that Rumi is willing to renounce an enviable reputation for moral probity in order to follow the “crazy-wisdom” teachings of his master points both to the essential unconventionality of the Sufi Way

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as well as the manner in which the path of spiritual transformation is defined by fundamental risk. This is a truism irrespective of the personalised characteristics of each individual “seeker.” The spiritual “journey” is an inherently challenging one as the genuine teacher works towards a painful deconstruction of the disciple’s personal universe of meaning. Guy Claxton has noted how enlightened teachers “resemble[...] the demolition expert, setting strategically placed charges to blow up the established super-structure of the ego, so that the ground may be exposed” (Feuerstein 2006: 226). As the ultimate objective of spiritual transmission is to fundamentally modify the subject’s very state of being, the teacher constantly tries to provoke an ontological crisis in the disciple, with the intention of deepening the appellant’s commitment to the spiritual process. This strategy is confirmed by Ken Wilber, who claims that what he terms “transformative spirituality,” “does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world, it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone” (Caplan 2011: 8). The genuine teacher does not seek to remove the disciple’s deepseated aggravation about life; indeed, s/he will, in numerous subtle and not so subtle ways, attempt to augment the pupil’s sense of frustration. If spiritual discipleship involves the voluntary acceptance of constraints in order to facilitate one’s inner freedom, it also requires a tremendous act of courage, as, in the words of Al-Ghazadi, “You must prepare yourself for the transition in which there will be none of the things to which you have accustomed yourself” (1968: 60). Mariana Caplan, in more contemporary language, reiterates this fundamental principle when she writes: “Ultimately, there is little value in playing it safe. Reality isn’t safe and neither are Truth nor God” (2011: 135). This is why, in The Forty Rules of Love, the narrative emphasises that both Ella and Rumi must embrace and element of risk if they are to make substantial progress on their spiritual journeys. This involves a recognition that values invariably cherished by most people, such as security, comfort and the avoidance of suffering, merely serve to inhibit progressive spirituality. As their relationship deepens, Aziz informs Ella how “the stages along the path are easy to summarise, difficult to experience” (165) and warns her that “spirituality is not something we can add to our life without making major changes there” (146). For Ella, these “major changes” essentially relate to a necessary relinquishing of her obsession with the “safety” of the domestic sphere, an attachment which serves as a mere subterfuge for her risk-

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averse personality. Under the guidance of Aziz, she retreats from her obdurate fussing over recipes and health related issues and embraces an inclusive relationship with life itself: “She understood with chilling clarity and calm [...] she would simply walk out into the world where dangerous things happen all the time” (64). For Rumi, the consequences of Shams’ tutelage are perhaps even more radical in nature. At a formative stage in their relationship, Shams admonishes him for his seeming self-regards and instructs him that “he [Rumi] must learn to practice mysticism, not just read about it” (289). This pointed criticism of Rumi’s reliance on the printed word is followed by a ritual burning of his beloved and coveted scholastic text books, many of which he has inherited from his beloved father. It is little wonder that Rumi subsequently confesses that “Shams cut loose all the moorings that tied me to life as I knew it” (290), and, in reference to the transformation of his spiritual life, admits, “of the scholar and teacher, not even the smallest spec remains” (342). For Shams, the greatest risk of all and one which every spiritual aspirant must, of necessity, take, is to embrace the experience of love in all its multitudinous manifestations. He tells the Novice (a minor character in the novel): “Intellect risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious—intellect does not always break down, whereas love can effortlessly reduce itself to rubble” (66). Given Shafak’s stated awareness that the doctrine of love formed the focal theme of the historical Rumi’s practical teaching and the core of his mystical experiences, together with the centrality of Shams’s doctrine of the forty rules of love to the narrative design of the text, it is evident that the Sufi perspective on love constitutes the single most important theme in her novel. As Mariana Caplan points out, “Sufi teachers, [...] in spite of their realisation of the void, illusion and emptiness, emphasise the role of love” (2011: 248), and their efforts of will, discipline and selfless service are enacted, not for the purpose of self-fulfillment, but as expressions of love. In Growth to Self hood: The Sufi Contribution, Reza Aresteh notes how in Sufi dialectics “the psychological laws of the ‘I’-’thou’ relationship which yield to unitary experience involve basically three elements—the ‘I’ known in Sufism as lover, ‘thou’ or the beloved, and the process known as ‘love’. At the end of the experience these three elements are supposed to become one” (1980: 118). The Sufis contend, therefore, that whenever the apparent antithesis of ‘lover’ and ‘beloved’ is resolved by their transmutation in the

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universal essence of love, relatedness to time and space is often eradicated and the principle of unity becomes visible. To the Sufis, to perceive oneself as constituting an inimitable self-enclosed entity is to exhibit the classical symptom of spiritual atrophy and even a desultory reading of Sufi literature would reveal this precept as being the single most important component of their religious ontology. Without the unifying experience of love, human beings appear incapable of understanding the basic tenets of spiritual life and continue to view their individual entities as constituting merely a single entity in the greater whole of humanity. Syaed Ahmed Hatif writes: If you give all to love, I’ll be called a pagan if you suffer a molecule of loss. The soul passed through the soul of love will let you see itself transmuted. If you escape the narrowness of dimensions and will see the “time of what is placeless,” you will see what has never been seen, until they deliver you to a place where you see “a world” and “worlds” as one. You shall love Unity with heart and soul; until with a true eye, you will see Unity. (Qtd. in Shah 1968: 267)

In The Forty Rules of Love, these perspectives are primarily voiced through the “lessons” and “teachings” enunciated by Shams. He compiles a list entitled The Basic Principles of the Itinerant Mystic of Islam, which essentially constitute The Forty Rules of the Religion of Love, and frequently emphasises how a complete understanding of the “forty rules” can “only be attained through love and love only” (40). His teachings embody the centrality of this fact, as he, on numerous occasions, explains to Rumi and numerous others that love is the essential component of true mysticism. He explains to the prostitute Desert Rose how “there is no wisdom without love” and asks her to “remember, only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you” (221). Rumi’s encounter with this aspect of Shams’s philosophy triggers the completion of a paradigm shift in his approach to piety and spirituality and he discovers that beyond the safe, dry and socially approved forms of obedience and renunciation there exists a meta-spirituality of love which consists of joyously and creatively celebrating the existence of God. For Ella, her initial scepticism about love is frequently challenged by Aziz, who invariably interposes his letters and emails with injunctions concerning the value of love. In an early communication, he writes “May love be always with you and may you always be surrounded by love” (14),

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and adds: “because love is the very essence and purpose of life” (15). Ella inevitably moves from a position of outright opposition to what she views as the inane pieties of a hopeless romantic, to a subsequent recognition of the role love must play in her newly reconstructed life. While sharing a dinner with her estranged and incredulous husband David, she goes so far as to quote Rumi in an attempt to explain her “new” philosophy of love: “Rumi says we don’t need to hunt for love outside ourselves. All we need to do is eliminate the barriers inside that keep us away from love” (250). It appears irrefutable, therefore, that, through their multifaceted teachings, both Shams and Aziz initiate a profound metamorphosis in the spiritual lives of Rumi and Ella respectively. Moreover, it is made clear in the novel that the profound benefits accrued from such teachings are not dependent upon a long term, continued interaction with the spiritual guide himself; Rumi’s and Ella’s subsequent separation from their mentors—in Rumi’s case due to Shams’s obsessive need of independence, while for Ella the separation is enforced due to Aziz’s premature death— merely reinforces their spiritual potential and self-reliance. Remarkably, one of the more manifest benefits of their discipleship is a renewed belief in the creative potential of the later life. Ella is particularly stuck by Aziz’s assertion that “there is no such thing as early or later in life [...] everything happens at the right time” and is convinced that true spirituality is unrelated to the ageing process: “It’s never too late to ask yourself ‘Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within?’” (324). For Rumi, his transformation, which is partly manifested in a love of poetry, music and meditative dance, is accompanied by an awareness of the benefits accrued from the ageing process: “little by little, one turns forty, fifty, and sixty and, with each passing decade, feels more complete. You need to keep walking though there’s no place to arrive” (342). For both Rumi and Ella, such a conviction is accompanied by an awareness that, in the words of Will Johnson, “Behind this world opens an infinite universe” (30). Sufism contends that if we are to glimpse this “infinite universe” a spiritual guide is necessary, a view which The Forty Rules of Love, with its vivid depictions of the teacher-disciple dynamic appears to endorse. Shafak’s novel, with its erudite and fascinating portrayal of one of the most iconic relationships within the Sufi esoteric traditions, appears intent on convincing the reader that Sufism in its universalist and non-denominational form, is a living, breathing philosophy of life with contemporary relevance to a world beset with factionalism and orthodoxy.

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At the very least, The Forty Rules of Love serves as a literary confirmation of the view expressed by Aziz in Sweet Blasphemy when he writes how “almost eight hundred years later, the spirits of Shams and Rumi are still alive today, whirling amidst us somewhere” (20).

Works Cited Aresteh, Reza (1980): Growth to Selfhood: The Sufi Contribution, Oxford: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Barks, Coleman (1995): The Essential Rumi, San Francisco: Harper One. Caplan, Mariana (2011): The Guru Question, Colorado: Sounds True Press. Colorado El-Zein, Amira (2010): “Spiritual Consumption in the United States: The Rumi Phenomenon,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 11.1: 7185. Feuerstein, George (2006). Holy Madness: Spirituality, Crazy-Wise Teachers and Enlightenment, Washington: Hohm Press. Furlanetto, Elena (2013): “Between Orientalism and Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love.” European Journal of English Studies 17.2: 202. Johnson, Will (2007): The Spiritual Practices of Rumi: Radical Techniques for Beholding the Life of the Divine, Vermont: Inner Tradition. Lewis, Franklin (2007): Rumi—Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalalal-Din Rumi, London: One World. Madonna, Ray of Light 1998. Maufroy, Muriel (2005): Rumi’s Daughter, London: Rider New Ed Edition. Shah, Idris (1982): Seeker after Truth: A Handbook, London: Octagon Press. —(1964) The Sufis, London: Octagon Press. —(1968): The Way of the Sufi, London: Octagon Press. Shafak, Elif (2007): Black Milk: On the Conflicting Demands of Writing, Creativity and Motherhood, London: Penguin. —(2010): The Forty Rules of Love, London: Viking. —(2006): The Gaze, Penguin: London: Penguin. —(2007): The Bastard of Istanbul, London: Penguin. —(2012): Honour, London: Penguin. —(2016): Three Daughters of Eve, London: Penguin.

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Tajadod, Nahal (2008): Rumi: The Fire of Love, Cambridge: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Watts, Nigel (1999): The Way of Love, Oxford: Thorsons. Zarrabi-Zadeh, Saeed (2015): “Comparative Mysticism and the Problem of Interpretation: Rumi and Meister Eckhart.” Islam and ChristianMuslim Relations 26.3: 287. Zweig, Connie (2006): A Moth to the Flame, Oxford: Roman and Littlefield.

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Saviors and Survivors Narratives of Mentorship as Rescue Margaret Morganroth Gullette Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness [...]. —F rom “K indness” by N aomi S hihab N ye, The Words U nder the Words : S elected P oems , E ighth M ountain P ress , 1995.

“Mentor” is an honourable title, betokening unselfish benevolence toward the young. Because raising the young well is so important to any functioning society, mentors become a necessity. Ideally, parents or their proxies do the fundamental work of nurture, and teachers the educational work of transmitting culture, and both parents and teachers transmit values and traditions and adaptations and defences. Still, something often goes missing; dangerously, treacherously missing. Someone else is needed. That mysterious outsider, in some novels, is a second character who starts off as a stranger. An adult. It’s a life-cycle matter. A younger person needs an older person endowed with both the right experience and willingness to assist and not harm. You read this plot right when you see that the original condition of the protégé-to-be is one of deficit. In his or her milieu, youth and ignorance are the common deficits.

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The greater the lack, the more urgent the need for rescue. In this essay, I focus on those older adults who turn up, only by chance, in the nick of time. What makes them admirable—amazing, in contexts of true rescue—is their readiness to respond, given the magnitude of the younger person’s neediness. A younger person’s deficit may be—in the great spectrum of relational needs that fiction covers—relatively slight and easy to remedy. It usually is. In small domestic worlds where mentors readily crop up, is where many easy-going mentoring stories in song and story lie.1 In children’s fiction, young readers are offered a satisfying identification with age-peers who rapidly work their way into a worthy mentor’s regard. (“Plucky” was an adjective of choice.) How I identified! My own favorites were Harvey in Kipling’s Captains Courageous (1897) and Elnora Comstock in Jean Stratton Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost (1909). What the boy toiling on shipboard and the girl who sold moths had in common, from my point of view, was an absorbing, rewarding plot arc. This arc—a progress narrative (Gullette 2011: 147-166)—takes a lonely under-appreciated self to a triumphant outcome. I lapped up these novels, ardent for personal growth and recognition, as innocently ready to change my accent as I was to wear bohemian clothing and eventually leave home. But the deficit experienced by the young can be a void, an abyss. Deprivation may arise from glaring, distorting lacks in their earlier formation, grave dangers in the current historical situation, or a whole world of desperation. In a hostile milieu, at a perilous moment, pluck is not available. The young need external help. I am proposing here that we rethink “mentorship” along a wider literary spectrum, far away from teaching cocktail repartee. The mentoring story that came nearest to my heart in adolescence, Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and the stories that interest me now in my old age, are at 1 | In Anglo-American literature, Patrick latches onto his Auntie Mame, Eliza Doolittle stumbles upon her Henry Higgins, the Banks children open the door to Mary Poppins. (In most such books, the younger person does not fall on evil guides— Oliver Twist, Fagan; Trilby, Svengali.) When the mentees are shown as emerging adults, they learn a skill (to hustle at pool, catch murderers through detective work) or an attitude (asking for a bigger pay packet). A brisk course in what was lacking— discipline, self-confidence, acculturation to normal social values, worldliness—and presto change-o. The young person is off.

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the darkest end of that typological spectrum, psychologically, existentially, sociologically, politically, generically. They show solitary young people at the greatest risk that the authors can devise—detached from family and society, lost in utter hopelessness, craving suicide or facing death as a least bad choice. The old person steps into a plot where literal survival is at stake. When I was an adolescent, I identified mainly with the younger person of the dyad. No longer. Reading fiction over a lifetime changes one’s perspective; growing older matters in a hundred untold ways. For one: “Identification” is probably no longer the right word, now, to explain my interest in writers’ imaginative effects when they put together two characters of different ages, in contexts where age difference matters so much. My attention, better balanced, looks with greater curiosity at the literary deployment of the older figures. In narratives of such extremity, no ordinary mentor will do. The dyad of protector and protégé goes back millennia to the original “Mentor,” an elder who was supposed to protect the royal family on Ithaca while Odysseus led his troops to the Trojan War. But in The Odyssey, it is no mere mortal who guides the son, Telemachus, but Pallas Athene, daughter of Zeus, disguised (Roberts 1999: 3). This personification suggests that when the stakes are high, it takes a goddess. In a post-pagan age, however, where God pares his nails offsite (as James Joyce wrote), what does it take to save a young person who has lost faith in life? The three fictional figures I want to consider are not gods, but older human beings—humbly lodged by their authors in a priest, a goatherd, and a concierge. None has children, or prior experience in mentoring. They too are solitaries. All become “saviors,” speaking or acting in a crucial Scene of Encounter that gives them the right to the higher honorific. The three authors who created these ordinary and noble characters are Alexandre Dumas, Jesús Carrasco, and Muriel Barbery. (As it happens, the novels I focus on—The Count of Monte Cristo, Out in the Open, and The Elegance of the Hedgehog, respectively, also have in common having been international best sellers).2 2 | Dumas’ Le comte de Monte Cristo (1845, The Count of Monte Cristo), has been translated into 100 languages. Carrasco’s Intemperie, (2013, Out in the Open), his first novel, won several book prizes and has been translated many times. Barbery’s L’élégance du Hérisson (2006, The Elegance of the Hedgehog), was translated into

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What do their unlikely saviors provide? What crucial void do they fill for the unlucky young person who needs a savior? Given their apparently paltry means, how in the world do they manage a rescue? What evil makes the young need them so desperately?

Three Sur vival Narratives In a French Prison Cell, Edmond Dantès’ Receives the Abbé Faria’s Higher Education The Count of Monte Cristo begins with a situation of existential despair, in the Bourbon France of 1814, as Napoleon was invading from Elba. Edmond Dantès, a nineteen-year-old Marseille sailor who in one twisted blow of political history loses his future wife, his job, and his freedom, is doomed to remain for life in a solitary island dungeon, for a political crime he is ignorant of. “The jailer was right; Dantès wanted but little of being utterly mad” (Chapter VIII).3 Edmond decides to kill himself through starvation. “All his sorrows, all his sufferings, with their train of gloomy specters, fled from his cell when the angel of death seemed about to enter” (Ch. XV). Writing in the 1840s, Dumas presents Dantès’ major problem as an unfurnished mind, especially lacking knowledge of history. “He was simple and without education. […] [N]o distraction could come to his aid; his energetic spirit that would have exulted in thus revisiting the past was imprisoned like an eagle in a cage” (XV). The mental stupor in which Dantès’ has fallen, and his resolution to starve himself to death, seem to foreclose any future. But in a romantic genre, if mental vacuity is the foremost problem, the diagnosis foreshadows an apparently impossible rescue—a mind capable of awakening his. Indeed, another solitary prisoner has been tunnelling toward escape in his direction. The Abbé Faria finds Edmond instead of freedom; and Edmond quickly appreciates his qualities of mind. Faria proves his 30 languages. To what extent the plot that unites them—the rescue of the young by wise older heads—explains these novels’ astonishing popularity, is a question for a different kind of criticism. 3 | Since there are numerous editions, I am providing chapter numbers. The quotations in English come from the deeply foxed volume I read in childhood, which I still own.

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exceptional political and deductive abilities by prizing out of Dantès information that reveals the great mystery of who betrayed him and why. (And thus Faria, who will regret it, gives Dantès the three names he needs in order to undertake his cold unrelenting revenge, once he obtains freedom and vast wealth). Absorbing as riches and revenge are, my point here is rather Dumas’ higher values, those Edmond intuitively prizes: “lucidity and clearness of judgment” and the particular education Faria can provide. In no more than three sequential chapters—XV, XVI, XVII, thirty amazing pages, the ones I read over and over as an adolescent—Dumas shows how the construction of a relationship between mentor and protégé, or more exactly, a savior and a survivor, is accomplished, swiftly and intensely. Faria bears salvation. Bereft of conversation for years, young Edmond is ready to love the unknown bearer of the wise voice even before he sees him. “Love” is the first gift he promises. When the other prisoner declares himself entirely “alone in the world,” Edmond says instantly. “Then you will love me. If you are young, I will be your comrade; if you are old, I will be your son” (XV). Age is going to be the basis of the platonic, intellectual, relationship. And youth too. Faria first fears this unknown madman may betray him, but as soon as he figures out that Edmond was only nineteen when he was arrested, the Abbé concludes, “at that age he cannot be a traitor.” If this relationship suggests Joseph Cambell’s “myth of the resurrected hero […] [whose] adventures usually involve instruction, testing, and transmission of power by a father figure of godlike character,” as critic Amelita Marinetti writes in The French Review (1976: 262), it is Dumas’ stylistic particulars that make the scenes of encounter memorable. The heightened Romantic language of feeling, the drastically contrasted characters of the two ages, the Abbé’s offer of gifts, the younger man’s gratitude –these have lost none of their power. Here there may in fact be not one but two resurrected heroes. The subjective feelings of the abbé, a sixty-year-old man still strong enough to spring lightly into Edmond’s cell, also matter to Dumas: “his chilled affections seemed rekindled and invigorated by his contact with one so warm and ardent” (XVI). An inspiration, a moral guide, a teacher, with no designs on the young man, Abbé Faria dazzles the reader of 1844-45, and of the present, by having relied during his years of confinement on

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150 Great Books that, when free, he had presciently memorized. His is a superb practical intelligence. In a bare cell, he has made ink, a pen, a penknife, writing material, to produce a book of political philosophy. “I am still trying to improve myself.” ‘What do you wish to see first?’ asked the abbé. Edmond answers in eager words every writer wishes to hear. ‘Oh! your great work on the monarchy of Italy!’ (XVII) Faria had also spent three years on a project of escape that had not even occurred to the younger, stronger man. But the sight of an old man clinging to life with so desperate a courage gave a fresh turn to his ideas, and inspired him with new courage and energy. An instance was before him of one less adroit, as well as weaker and older, having devised a plan which nothing but an unfortunate mistake in geometrical calculation could have rendered abortive. (XVI)

It is the younger man’s awe and desire of emulation that Dumas underscores. “I was reflecting, in the first place,” replied Dantès, “upon the enormous degree of intelligence and ability you must have employed to reach the high perfection to which you have attained;—if you thus surpass all mankind as a prisoner, what would you not have accomplished as a free man?” Dantès eagerly, courteously, jumps at the opportunity to learn. He has the youthful charm of modesty. “You must teach me a small part of what you know,” said Dantès, “if only to prevent yourself growing weary of me. I can well believe that so learned a person as yourself would prefer absolute solitude to being tormented with the company of one as ignorant and uninformed as myself. (XVII)

Faria responds like a seasoned teacher. Alas! my child […] human knowledge is confined within very narrow limits; and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do myself. Now, it will scarcely require two years for me to communicate to you the stock of learning I possess. (XVII)

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Edmond, “longing” to begin the work of improvement, asks eagerly, “when shall we commence?” And that very evening the prisoners sketched a plan of education, to be entered upon the following day. Dantès possessed a prodigious memory and astonishing quickness and readiness of conception. (XVII)

Reading the delight of the willing student kept me rapt then, hoping I too would reveal “prodigious” and “astonishing” powers of learning. I took “education” literally, as book-learning. I took “jewels” literally, as the way riches came. The abbé provided both. But I also wished to emulate him. I wanted to acquire all the knowledge of the world, to memorize tomes of wisdom and exhibit “outward polish.” [...] his appearance bore that air of melancholy dignity, which Dantès, thanks to the imitative powers bestowed on him by nature, easily acquired, as well as that outward polish and politeness he had before been wanting [...] (XVII)

The excitement of obtaining such knowledge and such mental and social virtues draws the suicidal young man back to life. Although the abbé refuses escape, since it would now involve killing the guard, Dantès also patiently respects his ethical leadership. Dantès never even alluded to flight; it might have been that the delight his studies afforded him supplied the place of liberty; or, probably, the recollection of his pledged word (a point, as we have already seen, to which he paid a rigid attention) kept him from reverting to any plan for escape: but absorbed in the acquisition of knowledge, days, even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive course; time flew on, and at the end of a year Dantès was a new man. (XVII)

*** The dungeons of the Château d’If symbolize a way to achieve freedomwithin-imprisonment. Dumas left open meanings that readers can profitably mull, when frustrated by their own metaphorical prisons. As a child, I was not trapped in a prison. Or was I? Perhaps childhood itself is the confinement that children look forward to escaping, by simply growing older.

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In a Luxurious Parisian Apartment Building, a Bourgeois Child Receives the Will to Live Not so for Paloma Josse, a child in an upper-bourgeois French family, only 12 years old. In Muriel Barbery’s L’élégance du Hérisson Paloma is already, unemotionally, suicidal. Her plan, openly described in her diary, is to finish her life on her thirteenth birthday—when she will take the sleeping bills she has been stealing from her mother, and, on a day when her parents and sister will be out, burn down the family apartment. This is not a book to leave around for children to pick up. The literary problem for the author, is to make plausible the suicidality of a smart privileged girl. How can a Parisian hôtel be made into a prison? Paloma feels orphaned inside her family, not only because they are represented as thin caricatures, but also because she feels permanently trapped inside herself. She believes this is a fact of the human condition. “If we were to realize, if we became conscious of the fact that we never see anything but self in the other, that we are alone in the desert, we would go crazy.”4 One of her haikus reads, Teach me that I am nothing. And that I am worthy of living. 5

To this isolated child her future life course appears to be a punishment, rather than the solution to many problems. Paloma’s aversion to life comes from anticipating that no adult ever avoids living in “the fish-tank.” This simile carries a lot of weight. Adult life is worse than a vacuous dungeon. In a fish-tank life is passed alongside a futile alienated mob of other goldfish. Yet Paloma’s suicidal ideation, if thorough, is not definitive. The girl is trying to find saving remnants in the milieu she condemns: beauty, solidarity, an open-ended life course. And into her life comes a “chance” that she has known to beg of Fate, “the chance to see beyond oneself and 4 | “Si nous nous rendions compte, si nous prenions conscience du fait que nous ne regardons jamais que nous-même en l’autre, que nous sommes seuls dans le désert, nous deviendrons fous” (Barbery 2006: 176, my translation). 5 | “Apprenez-moi que je ne suis rien/Et que je suis digne de vivre” (Barbery 2006: 204, my translation).

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meet someone.” Barbery, who taught philosophy, considers “meet” and “see” as acts of exceptional insight. Paloma “meets” Renée Michel, the concierge, only after 300 plotless pages alternating between the two characters’ solipsistic diaries. Those 300 pages represent the stasis in which they live their separate but kindred griefs. Given twice as much narrative space as Paloma, Renée becomes an independent protagonist with selfhood, not as a result of becoming a savior but beforehand. Renée is a self-contained, widowed 54-year-old, resigned to living defensively in hostile relation to the classist ignoramuses she works for. Like Faria, Renée may dazzle readers, not least by her first allusion, to Marx’s German Ideology. She too is an autodidact. Her culture by predilection is chicly high-low—Tolstoy, Mozart, indie movies. She likes eating, usually a good sign in any novel whose genre long remains unclear. She has wit. Her grammar is impeccable, her diction a little showy. (One French reviewer had to look up réquisit, asthénie, pithiatique, dysphonie). Barbery gives her defences that a child does not have: dead-end but stable employment, the ability to live alone, one true female friend. Barbery was only 37 when she published this novel, but her empathy long seems weighted toward the older woman. Even before Renée and Paloma meet, their similarities, greater than the obvious class and age differences, hint at a future convergence. Each likes Japanese culture (manga, the film-maker Ozu, tea). They both seek “eternal” things: for Renée, the beauty of a camellia on moss; for the girl, choral singing. What goes deeper than tastes is temperament: the instinct to hide. The concierge protects herself from the contempt of the privileged. When the child is first able to “see” one person who (like herself) is not who she appears, she observes a kindred spirit: [...] on the outside [Mme Michel] is covered with sharp quills, a real fortress, but I intuit that inside she is as simply as refined as hedgehogs, those animals who are apparently indolent, fiercely solitary, and terribly elegant. 6 6 | “Mme Michel a l'élégance du hérisson: à l'extérieur, elle est bardée de piquants, une vraie forteresse, mais j'ai l'intuition qu'à l'intérieur, elle est aussi simplement raffinée que les hérissons, qui sont des bêtes faussement indolentes, farouchement solitaires et terriblement élégantes” (Barbery 2006: 175, my translation). Future page numbers in the text are from the French, with my translations.

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Renée is tender toward genuine people, the working class, and, when she meets Paloma for the first time, toward the sad girl. At their very first meeting, Renée unhesitatingly invites her into the small sacred shelter of her loge. The concierge will offer the child of a parliamentary deputy not education, but tea. She intuits Paloma’s real needs, the self-harming rigor of her sweeping critique. “A judge of Humanity,” the hedgehog astutely judges. And the forlorn child, with a “poor little unpractised smile that breaks my heart” (“un pauvre petit sourire sous-entraîné qui me fend le coeur” [309]), pleadingly asks if she may return for refuge inside the only hide-out that Renée herself possesses. Renée, who can be cutting, accedes. In the new dyad, each has been seen. But the definitive encounter happens later, after Renée refuses a pleasure, a birthday dinner with a rich new resident of the building, Kakuro Ozu, an elective affinity who has become her first male friend. Paloma interrogates Madame Michel severely about her masochistic refusal. The older woman is surprised into telling a story about the utter impoverishment of life in her farm family, the seduction of her sister in the bourgeois family she worked for, and the gruesome death of her sister in childbirth. In a chapter called “Sisters” (Sœurs), Renée reveals this burdensome, life-determining secret, overwhelmed in “big, warm, long, good” tears. She finds her fingers stroked by Paloma, whose sad severe face has been transfigured into “wells of warmth” (363). What sustains Paloma’s life is the example of an admired woman able to overcome, as Renée reflects, 54 years of living in a “moral and emotional desert,” filled with hatred for the class enemy and hopelessness about change. Paloma now understands her own situation differently. “I was suffering because I could do no good to anyone around me. [...] I have to admit it, I no longer want to die so much” (366). Renée then accepts Kakuro Ozu’s invitation. But on the cusp of a new life—in relationships with a kind man and a sensitive affectionate child— Renée is hit by a cleaning van as she is trying to save a homeless man. She dies, again in happy tears, knowing she has she loved this child, “my soul sister” (mon âme sœur). “It is towards you that I turn. You, the last one. Paloma, my daughter” (403). Older people too may need to be saved. What rule says that only the young live in distressing lack?

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In Rural Spain, a Lost and Abused Child Receives the Indispensable Minimum “The boy” in Out in the Open also has a time of utter despair; but unlike the wished-for suicides, his is a dreadful hopeless moment in which he sees that death may come through no will of his own and no bearable alternative. Jesús Carrasco, the author, has given his child protagonist the most extreme exposure. Exposed would be my preferred translation of the title. The boy, given no age or name, has escaped from his family and evaded a hostile search party. He is alone in a hot, shadeless, desert-like plain with no knowledge of its geography, no water, no food, no shelter. Worse off than Dantès, who is fed twice a day; worse off also, by never having known love of any kind. We slowly perceive that he was abandoned to a sexual abuser by his father; his mother was helpless. The way Paloma believes she is “nothing,” the boy believes he is “bad.” Whatever torment and terror have befallen him must be deserved. Of these three novels of youthful ordeals, Carrasco’s is the grimmest. Out in the Open is not lightened by fantasies of wealth and erudition like The Count of Monte Cristo; nor, like The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by the intellectual comedy of Paris manners. The donnée—the distrustful childoutcast hunted by his powerful sexual abuser, a bailiff in a countryside so remote it has no countervailing state power—puts it in the brutal realist tradition that Carrasco knows from deep reading in his favorite writers, all American men: Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy. The arid denatured setting brings this novel closest to McCarthy’s The Road, with Spanish desertification in place of the ashy American post-apocalyptic catastrophe. But the boy in The Road has a true father who doggedly keeps going day after day to forage for his son—a protective figure ruthlessly stripped away in Out in the Open. The orphaned boy comes upon the old man on his first desperately thirsty night, but the encounter between them that truly saves his soul must wait 160 pages. “El pastor” (who is given no other name) is a goatherd. “Pastor” in Spanish means both a priest and, as in the King James’s version of the 23rd Psalm, a shepherd. (The word for goat-herd specifically would be cabrero.) The first time they meet, the pastor feeds him and gives him drink, but doesn’t take him on as a responsibility. A day later the old man rescues him from sunstroke by applying herbs and aloe. The boy

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nevertheless flees after he sees the old man pee, distrusting any male with a penis, even one who has touched him gently, has fallen asleep beside him without harming him, and is guiding him north beyond the abuser’s reach. When the bailiff comes upon them and the boy hides, the goatherd lies about his whereabouts and is brutally beaten. The boy, trapped in a ruined chimney at whose base the bailiff sets a fire, survives by finding an air hole and then, sent to find water on his own, discovers a run-down inn stocked with sausages and wine, near a well that still has water, managed by a legless man who is vicious and avaricious. Shackled by the cripple while he sleeps, the boy in agony tears his hand to free it, in order to save himself and hurry back, bleeding, with water and food, to his disabled savior. The conditions the boy has endured skirt torture-porn. But despair overtakes him only when he finds that the old man, whom he left immobilized by his wounds, is not lying in the place where he left him. He imagines the goatherd’s lifeless body being dragged along behind the bailiff’s motorbike and the bailiff’s deputies, laughing. His future dissolves, in a moment. [He] covered his face with his hands and wept. His childish flight, the searing sun, the bleak, indifferent plain. He sensed the immutability of his surroundings, the same inertness in everything he could touch or see, and for the first time since he had run away, he felt afraid of dying. The idea of carrying on alone terrified him.7

To avoid death, he can imagine nothing but a sullen unwelcomed return to his father’s house, to the wretched subjugated life he had known before. At that point he hears “Get up, boy.” The goatherd’s quavering voice and his bony hand on his shoulder. The boy sprang to his feet, and without even looking at the goatherd, he flung his arms about his frail body. He pressed his face into the old man’s rags so as to become one with him, to enter the tranquil room his own hands had denied him. It was the first time he had been so close to someone without trying to fight him off. The first time he had been skin to skin with someone and allowed all the humors and substances of his being to flow forth from his pores. The goatherd welcomed him without a word, as if he were welcoming a pilgrim or an exile. The boy embraced him so tightly 7 | Carrasco, Out in the Air (161); Intemperie (2013: 158-159).

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that the goatherd cried out, “Mind my ribs,” and immediately the knot dissolved and they separated. [...] The seed, however, had been sown. (“La semilla, en todo caso, estaba echada”) 8

What is the indispensable minimum to sustain a young life at risk? Not food and water and herbs, as in the pastor’s first rescues; nor violence, as in his last act of rescue, but sheltering love. The embrace in the desert is a pained, constrained, long-delayed echo of the instant loving encounter in the Château d’If. Renée sobbing as Paloma silently holds her hands is another echo. All three writers make the scenes of encounters memorable, worth the wait. The pastor accepts the embrace instinctually. But that kindness involves perception, some level of identification with the boy’s suffering, sympathy for his state of abandonment, tact, and muteness—the opposites of the disregard, sexual abuse, sadism, and threats that are all the boy has ever known. The boy’s response, to leap into the old man’s arms as into a “tranquil room,” is also shown, in Carrasco’s poetic language, as instinctual—a spontaneous movement that overrides all the harsh knowledge and painful avoidances of his short life. Gratitude at the sense of physical closeness, safety in an embrace, has not been beaten out of him, as we know it can be from the withdrawn or feral behaviour of terrorized children. This boy who has no home is suddenly like “a pilgrim or an exile” who has found a home. Reciprocating, it is he who now tends to the wounded and enfeebled benefactor. Now he feels he is “a different person.” To be sure, he had the resources, when alone, to have painfully torn his hand loose, and to batter the treacherous cripple. But the hug has made the profound and durable difference. “La semilla, en todo caso, estaba echada.” The seed—of reliance on another, of trust in another—opens the boy to reciprocate the care he has received, and to emulate, or at least participate in, the Christian ethical world of his guide. Accepting the old man’s laconic interpretation of a Biblical injunction that “all humans are God’s children,” the boy will accompany him, to save the wounded cripple from the pecking of crows. In the last quarter of the book, the pastor becomes central, a protagonist with his own score to settle. The abuser, having located the boy yet again, plans to rape him. The pastor, although frail, wounded, and 8 | Carrasco, Out in the Air (162-3); Intemperie (2013: 160).

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disabled, turns up in time—the unlikely avenger in a lawless world, like the vigilante figure in the “Western” genre. Having seized a rifle from the bailiff’s side-kick, he shoots the rapist, protecting the boy decisively from at least this source of danger. Rarely does “the hero with a thousand faces” have so old a face. Creative writers do not have to write revenge fantasies to emulate this anti-ageist innovation.

Sur vival-by-Other Survival is not guaranteed, even in fiction. Not everyone is saved. There are fictional worlds where solitudes and solipsists brush up against nothing but the barbed wire of indifference or spleen or self-interest. And some young protagonists of Bildungsromans manage to save themselves without older-adult help. Survival-through-an-elder may be as unusual a literary theme as it is a reality. Saviors, as we have seen, make themselves responsible for another person’s life. They did not plan to, but they accepted a tremendous demand. In ordinary life, most mentors would not or could not accept. It is enough that they teach skills or open worldly doors without wanting to own their protégés. The inarguable way to show the importance of saviors is by showing the magnitude of their gift. Is this gift “education”? Indubitably, but education may mean extraordinarily different things, as these three novels almost eccentrically exhibit. Henry Adams, the descendent of American presidents, failed to find the meaning of “education” because no education he came upon fit him for the conditions of his time. Each of my authors asked, what kind of education fits each lost child or abandoned young man in the world as I envision it? Bildung—the formation of mind and character—became newly interesting in the period after the Enlightenment when democratic vistas, as Walt Whitman called them, were opening up, but public schools were not universal. Ignorance was much on the minds of 19th century writers. Henry Adams wrote that “the human mind” needed to be redeemed from “error” (1918: 33). In Silas Marner (1861), the great English novelist George Eliot demonstrated the gulfs of ignorance in a population governed by superstitious credulity, xenophobia, and impulses toward violent exclusions. Of course Dumas’ ill-educated Dantès wants Faria’s princely

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Great Books course, and until he uses it to become a single loaded spear of revenge, it is the making of him. In Out in the Open, the education is basic survival. Politically, it is a lawless space ruled by a paedophile. Environmentally, the ungiving land is also a human product. Having grown up in Extremadura, living a life outdoors where he caught rabbits for fun, Carrasco lived into the era of global warming, with wells and springs drying up and villages being abandoned to dust and howling wind—places where eating a rat can count as a protein treat. Carrasco counts on a curated appetite for apocalyptic dystopian literature, punishment for paedophilia, and learning useful skills à la Robinson Crusoe. The pastor teaches the boy how to milk a goat, load up a mule, forget no tool or potentially useful rag; what the word “jurisdiction” means; when revenge is justified as justice; how to perform the basic ritual of burial and to pity the dying. That learning is narrow but it is here indispensable. In The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Paloma is so far advanced in her reading that she has nothing to learn in her collège; her main scholastic effort is to hide what she knows. Educated “intelligence” is abundant but insufficient. Neither correction of error nor survival skills matter in this postmodern upper-class world of disguised competitiveness, preening display and hidden misery. If the type of education these novels promote (or deride) distinguishes them from one another, they have something profound in common: they believe in the education of feelings, and show that this development can happen even when the extremity is dreadful. Call it “solitary confinement.” The Château d’If literalizes the state of mind. Dantès, Paloma, and the boy start off as prisoners, each in his or her own way: “an eagle in a cage,” an aimless fish in a fish-tank, an exile on a doomed plain. “Monads,” as Leibniz called us. Paloma thought that we each live “alone in the desert” of our own mind. Dantès almost goes crazy. In the desert of the plain, out of dire distrust, the boy is alone. Their original states show us “how desolate the landscape can be/ between the regions of kindness.” To the isolatoes, the desolation appears to be permanent. For the younger person to escape, an older person is necessary— who becomes the right person by developing latent, admirable, human qualities in the emergency.

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Carrasco wrote that his novel is founded on “the idea of dignity. A concept of the highest ethical value.”9 The pastor, Renée, and Faria—each mentor creates an impression of personal dignity in the mind of the reader, despite their own vulnerabilities (their inability to evade physical force, class prejudice, or incarceration for life, respectively). But Carrasco defines dignity far more actively. “To be capable of maintaining this posture, to be that person who in the subway, when someone is being assaulted, intervenes.”10 As must be clear by now, an older person intervening on behalf of a needy stranger is the key act in all three of my novels. Each novelist constructs determining gestures in the scenes of encounter that lead to mutual recognition: Faria’s welcome, the lost boy’s first hug, Renée’s unexpected impulsive openness—sharing her loge and then her traumatic past. The saving acts come from kindness. But to take on the burden of a younger person’s griefs—or, in the goat-herd’s case, a vulnerable child’s life—is more than ordinary generosity. It is a gift that not everyone has, and that some people have never expressed and may not know they possess: emotional intelligence that operates like an instinct. In all these narratives, the tenderness of the elder also says something philosophically hopeful about the human condition. The three younger survivors are not finally solitary and bricked up, lacking openings through which a mind could actually receive or supply causal influences. They have a “window.” The soul of a youth peeps through that dark window, timorously, dubiously. It loathes its solitude, as we have seen. And then— by way of a hug in Carrasco, words of love in Dumas, a greeting of the spirit in Barbery—youth jumps quickly through the window. And is thereby emotionally saved. Edmond Dantès thought instantly, “at worst he would have a companion; and captivity that is shared is but half captivity” (XV). After long deprivation, Paloma “met” a protector she can accept. The abused boy too, justifiably wary, learned the relief of relying on a proven helper. The younger people become able to reciprocate. For them, the beneficial effects of belonging to this dyad seem almost miraculous, yet, by any theory of human development, sociality, or interdependence, the effects are plausible. 9 | “Intemperie gira en torno a la idea de dignidad. Un concepto de un altísimo valor ético” (Fontana 2013, my translation). 10 | “Ser capaz de mantener la postura, de ser esa persona que en el metro, cuando alguien está siendo agredido, interviene” (López Iturriaga 2013, my translation).

Saviors and Sur vivors

The warmth of connection in these humanistic novels makes it even more striking, then, that in every one of these novels, while the protégés live, the kind and dignified saviors die. Faria dies so that the patient Dantès may escape: When the older man dies of a stroke, the younger man decides to take his place inside the shroud, to be tossed over the cliffs into the sea. The goatherd, once strong despite his age and nomadic conditions, dies mainly as a result of the exertions he makes to protect the boy for good from his predator, through vengeful justice. He is not only hero but martyr. Barbery wrote Renée’s death elegiacally, indeed sentimentally, in order to emphasize her new ability to love a spiritual child despite her class. Renée is neither sick nor old, however, and Barbery could have given her such a recognition scene, warm with grateful tears, once—not twice— while also letting her enjoy a rich, admiring male friend and watching her new daughter grow. Must mentors die? Is there some hidden motive that these three writers of development-in-extremity share? Is it that they favor the young against the old? Do they consider the power of the older guide a threat to the liberation of the young, which drives them to have the younger literally survive the elder (as Harry Potter survives Dumbledore)? Psychoanalytic theory might suggest that my three writers are still anxious about their early childish dependence on care-givers, and that they use fiction to break free in fantasy. May be. But my final hypothesis is less dramatic, more pragmatic, based on experiences that the life course trains us to accept. Perhaps the deaths of the older saviors imply, as serious literary plots can, that the lucky rescue of kindness, transformative as it may be, can never be a permanent resource. However important to us our beloved elders may be—whether teachers, parents, mentors or saviors—they do usually predecease us. Even though we may be far from young when orphaned. Adult life is the wilderness where each survivor must go forward again, with whatever resources one has gratefully garnered from one’s protectors, seeking to make meaning—and new interdependent relationships—from now on, by oneself, each alone.

Works Cited Adams, Henry (1918): The Education of Henry Adams, Boston and New York: Houghton Miffin Company.

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Barbery, Muriel (2006): L’élégance du Hérisson, Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Elegance of the Hedgehog. New York: Europa, 2008. Carrasco, Jesús (2013): Intemperie, Barcelona: Editorial Planeta. Translated as Out in the Open, by Margaret Jull Costa. New York: Riverhead, 2017. Dumas, Alexandre (no date, circa 1900 [1845]): The Count of Monte Cristo, complete in two volumes, New York: A. L. Burt, no translator. Eliot, George (1909): The Writings of George Eliot, Volume VII: Silas Marner; Brother Jacob, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Fontana, Antonio (2013): “Jesús Carrasco: ‘Intemperie es un ‘western’ ibérico.’” In ABC Cultural January 22. http://www.abc.es/cultura/cul tural/20130122/abci-jesus-carrasco-intemperie-western-201301221058. html Gullette, Margaret Morganroth (2017): Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth (2011): “Our Best and Longest-Running Story.” In: Agewise. Fighting the New Ageism in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 146-166. López Iturriaga, Mikel (2013): “Jesús Carrasco: ‘La obsesión actual por aprovechar el tiempo me parece atroz’.” In: El País August 5. https://el pais.com/elpais/2013/08/02/eps/1375442829_655302.html Marinetti Amelita (1976): “Death, Resurrection, and Fall in Dumas’ Comte de Monte-Cristo.” In: The French Review 50/2, pp. 260-269. Roberts, Andy (1999): “Homer’s Mentor: Duties Fulfilled or Misconstrued.” History of Education Journal http://www.nickols.us/homers_mentor. pdf

Literary Mentors for Life Joan Margarit’s Lessons on Poetry and Ageing in New Letters to a Young Poet Núria Casado-Gual This article is the result of part of the research conducted for the project “Ageing, Quality of Life and Creativity through Narrative” (FFI2016-79666-R).

Mentors can probably be distinguished from teachers, guides or counsellors in that they surpass their strictly technical or pedagogic functions by offering models of living and, consequently, models of ageing. Also in contrast to other teaching figures, the difference of age between mentors and their pupils is an essential element in their tandem: for mentoring not only involves the mere transmission of knowledge, but also the passing on of one’s life experience to a less experienced (often younger) pupil. The combination between knowledge and maturity in the (older) mentor figure often crystallizes in what is commonly perceived as a model of ‘wisdom.’ add Saxon Genitive, “Erikson’s” and then add “extended model of the life cycle” before the reference. This positive view of ageing coincides, at the same time, with the highly moral view of old age reflected in studies like Erik and Joan Erikson’s extended model of the life course (1997). The triad mentor(ing)-ageing-wisdom is, itself, an old one, and it has a literary origin inasmuch as it takes us back to Homer and, hence, to the foundations of Western literary culture. The connection between the process of ageing, the transmission of wisdom, and the realm of literature continues to be reflected in the relationship that older characters establish with younger figures in modern literary texts. At the same time, this tripartite correlation can also be found in the cultural and personal legacy

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that a writer—often of late-middle or advanced age—leaves to his/her readers. Writers can convey their life-views through any of their literary works and, in this way, they may exert an important influence on readers through different genres; but it is especially through essays on their own work, memoirs and other pieces of life-writing that authors become teachers to their readers in a more explicit way. Albeit more indirect than interpersonal forms of mentoring, the literary transmission of knowledge and life experience through the author’s autobiographical, often metaliterary oeuvre enables the passing on of both an individual conception of literature and a particular view of the world. Thus, the recipients of this composite form of knowledge can construct their own sense of belonging to a literary community and/or to a specific culture by looking at the models they choose to learn from through their readings. The present essay focuses on this second form of mentoring by considering ageing writers as symbolic guides to their (frequently younger) readers and, in particular, by paying attention to Joan Margarit, the most widely acclaimed of the Catalan contemporary poets, as a significant case study. Margarit (born in Sanaüja, Catalonia, in 1938) started to publish his first collections of poetry in Spanish in his early thirties. Almost fifty years later, he continues to do so in Catalan, his mother tongue. His volumes have been translated into many other languages, and they have also received important awards, including two National Literature Awards (by both the Catalan and Spanish Governments), as well as the recognition of writers, critics and readers alike. For all these reasons, Margarit is regarded as an extremely popular and respected writer, not only in Catalonia, but also across the Spanish state and beyond. Through his frequent appearance in the media, he is also acknowledged as an important voice of his generation. This was clearly illustrated in his participation in (S)Avis, a TV programme presented by Josep Puigbó and produced by the Catalan public TV which, for seven seasons and as indicated by the pun on “savis” (wise people) and “avis” (older people) of the name of the show, featured long interviews with older representatives of Catalan culture and society. Margarit was a guest on the programme in 2013, when he was 75 years of age. As reflected by this and other public appearances, it is in Margarit’s later years that the poet’s image as an ageing ‘wise man’ has started to take shape, not only due to his presence in the media, but also through his own late-life writings. From the age of seventy and up to the present, Margarit has completed five late collections

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of poetry with personal epilogues in which his views of poetry, and also of life and old age, are overtly expressed; and, even more significantly for the theme of this essay, at the age of seventy-one he published his treatise on poetry in the book Noves cartes a un jove poeta (2009), which was translated into English only one year later. The present essay examines this volume in particular as a form of autobiographical text through which Margarit, as an older writer, passes on his craftsmanship to readers with a poetic vocation and, consequently, renders himself a literary mentor for future generations. Besides the lessons he conveys on poetry and literature, this article resorts to cultural gerontology as main critical framework in order to observe the meanings of ageing that are reflected in Margarit’s book and which are part of the holistic lesson that the author constructs and transmits in its pages. All in all, this essay intends to show the extent to which Margarit’s late-life address to his readers communicates a personal conception of poetry that also bears moral implications and which, at the same time, generates an integrative and developmental view of old age from which younger readers can also benefit. *** In his introduction to the volume, (New Letters to a Young Poet ix) Margarit explains he first read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929) at the age of 20, when this classic of literature became his “secure refuge” as he was trying to become a poet himself (x). In a way, as will be shown later, Rilke became Margarit’s own literary mentor through his famous collection of letters. In Margarit’s own words, through Rilke he “learned some truths [he] has never forgotten about [him]self and about poetry” (ix). Since Margarit’s formation years, Rilke’s seminal text has been part of the Catalan poet’s life: this is reflected in his claiming that he still feels a sense of warmth every time he returns to the underlined pages of his 1957 edition of Rilke’s book (x). Margarit’s personal version of the German poet’s letters—or, rather, his personal perpetuation of Rilke’s philosophical and literary exercise—is interesting for the objectives of this essay in at least two ways. On the one hand, in his “new letters,” presented in the form of ten chapters, Margarit expresses the inextricable connection that poetry and life (and, more particularly, a moral view of life) have for him. Thus, he

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claims that, in contrast with poetry that “borders on the plastic arts or o music,” or on “poetry qualified by adjectives or poetry that is in itself an adjective,” to him, “substantive” poetry is “based on emotion,” so he is interested in poetry that makes him “a better person, bring[s] about greater inner balance, console[s] [him], or leave[s] [him] a little closer to happiness [...]” (x-xi). As will be explained, Margarit finds this moral sense of poetry in both the themes he chooses to focus on, which evolve around the apparently contrasted experiences of love and loss, as well as in the style he favours in order to express them. It is this moral level that especially renders Margarit a literary ‘mentor’ rather than a mere literary ‘referent’ for his readers. On the other hand, in the chapters that conform his dissertation, the poet enhances the passage of time and the experience of ageing itself as necessary elements for one’s growth and development, not only as a writer, but also as a person. As a matter of fact, the opening paragraphs of the book offer one of the first enlightening lessons in this respect, when Margarit claims that, even though Rilke’s lessons helped him “pose the basic questions,” he did not “comprehend” them until a long time later: in Margarit’s words, “[t]o comprehend something means to spend a long time understanding, long enough so that what has been understood is no longer outside us, but forms part of our character. Comprehension is understanding that will never leave us” (x). The necessary interaction between teaching/learning and the passage of time—a combination that is also part of the mentoring process—is hence conceived by the author as essential for internalizing knowledge in a profound sense, to the extent that only time allows the learning of important lessons to become fused with the Self, and to be transformed, eventually, into wisdom. The experience and perception of time in the process of becoming a (better) poet and of growing (older and wiser) as a person is the other significant theme in Margarit’s autobiographical volume, to which part of the analysis that follows will be devoted. *** Even though these are not explicitly defined as such, love and loss are the two thematic axes around which Margarit’s understanding of poetry—and, consequently, the lessons he derives from it—revolve. Significantly, both themes are invested with moral value in his meta-literary

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essay, insofar as they are deemed crucial for the poet’s growth and understanding of life. Love has occupied a very important place in Margarit’s oeuvre from the beginning of his career (Cornadó 1993), to the extent that two anthologies of love poems stand out as some of his most popular collections (Margarit 2001, 2013). However, in his “new letters,” Margarit does not present himself as an expert in the poetic expression of love: even though he mentions the multiple possibilities that this theme offers to the poet (88), as well as the different poetic schools and masters that can be followed within the classic literary tradition (89), he does not establish a catalogue of rules on how love poems should be written, nor does he elaborate on the different subthemes that can be found within love poetry. Instead, he highlights the complexity inherent in connecting poetry and love, which he considers “one of the most basic, longest, and most difficult parts of a poet’s training” (85). As he puts it, a poet “advances only by deepening the relationship between poetry and love” (85), and it is through this deepening that his readers and himself—as a constant learner—can gradually become better writers and gain, at the same time, a more profound understanding of themselves. To Margarit, love and poetry are two complex realities with pathways that lead to their mutual comprehension. As such, their relationship is enriched by age and the passage of time. This dynamic and constructive view of the interaction between love and the life course contradicts stereotypical visions of old age that associate this phase of life with emotional rigidity or even passivity. Since ancient times, such stereotypes have contributed to the development of a negative narrative of ageing that is largely based on the notion of decline (Gullette 2004). In contrast with this age ideology, and in coherence with Margarit’s own view, contemporary research in critical gerontology demonstrates that emotional complexity, in fact, increases with age, and through it, the experience and understanding of love become richer. For example, in her study of love in late life, Amanda Smith Barusch contends that older people have “the ability to distinguish subtle changes in [their] emotional lives,” a capacity which “may be the reward for learning to pay attention to [their] feelings” (2008: 49). Through their vocation and craftsmanship, poets are accustomed to looking inward and expressing their emotions; but this is also a capacity that is trained and that, therefore, may be submitted to improvements throughout time. Thanks to his double view as an ageing poet, and to

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the emotional baggage that he has accrued with age, Margarit realizes that “the love poetry written in one’s youth [...] is often laced with fear” (90), something that prevents early love poems from releasing the poet’s inner voice and, at the same time, from expressing the multiple forms in which love can be manifested. Following his own mentor Rilke, Margarit recommends “leaving love poems for later” in one’s career, a recommendation that poses a clear rupture with the deeply ingrained association between writing love poetry and the poet’s own youth, as well as with the Romanticists’ “idolation of youth as the fountain of creation” (Cohen-Shalev 2002: 5). In contrast with the Romantic conception of creativity as resulting from, in Amir Cohen-Shalev’s words, “a sudden, inexplicable, involuntary, and uncontrollable burst of creative energy” (2002: 5), and also in opposition to the (ageist) idea that emotional engagement, like creativity, decline with age, Margarit advises his potential pupils to leave the writing of love poems for a more mature stage in their lives. Despite this recommendation, Margarit does not deter younger poets from exercising themselves in this complex poetic genre: on the contrary, he claims that “one mustn’t stop thinking about [love poems], reading, seeking the inner paths which lead to them” (90), because it is in those where the richness of literature and life are to be found. In this respect, he regards youthful fear as only (but also significantly) one of the “foundations” of love (86), just like repetition, which is the other path through which a poet (or younger reader) can get to understand love in its diversity and also complexity. For Margarit, repetition is “a mystery” in the act of loving (85), and at the same time it sets the emotional mechanics of love in motion: “A face must be repeated to be loved, and our eyes return often to the photo that evokes some person or some place we love” (85-86). At the same time, repetition enables the object of love to be transformed into a poetic object, since Margarit understands love itself as “the action of turning something into a symbol [...]” (86). Once again, the passage of time is crucial for this transformation, since repetition and the ensuing process of poetic signification can only occur within and throughout time. Likewise, the transformation of the object of one’s love into a symbol or poetic text requires the concretion of a love experience or of many, or the intimate knowledge of the object(s) of our love, both of which can only be expressed in a more truthful way with the experience that time (and age) may bring.

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The intimate link that Margarit perceives between the understanding (and continuous study) of love poems, and the gradual comprehension of the complexity of living are clearly reflected in his recognizing the experience of loss as inextricably part of the experience of loving. Thus, loss cannot only be regarded as the second major theme in Margarit’s poetry, but as an essential component of his personal poetics of love and of his particular vision of life. This intimate bond between love and loss in the poet’s life view, which is more overtly manifested in his late poetry, explains his comparing love with “a crowded city never completely known, with neighbourhoods of all sorts, some old or in ruins, some new or still under construction” (90). Without the knowledge of both the “old neighbourhoods” and, especially, its “ruins,” which evoke certain forms of loss, the (young) poet’s knowledge of the “city” of love can only be deemed superficial. In parallel to the development of the theme of loss in his most recent collection of poetry, in which grief (and especially the grief felt over the loss of his daughters) is re-interpreted as the most intense form of love (Margarit 2017: 65), loss also appears in his “new letters” as the other theme that may help the (young) poet comprehend the richness of his/her own life, even at the hardest moments. In this respect, loss and suffering in general are endowed with a positive light insofar as, in Margarit’s “letters,” they are regarded as a necessary path towards meaningful learning. This constructive view of pain is reflected in the following lines, in which the art of living—with its losses included—is completely intertwined with the art of writing poetry: No one has ever matured without going through some inner commotion, loss, or anguish, and good poems show how important it is to have experienced pain [...] As poets and readers know, this road toward inner growth carries us toward lucidity and truth. (98)

In line with Margarit’s approach to poetry and love, loss, suffering and poetry are also communicating vessels for the poet: namely, it is through poetry that the experience of pain can be understood in a more profound way, and this experience leads, at the same time, to a better understanding of loss and grief. As Margarit says, “[t]his is why we need poetry, for not even love can be understood without the experience of suffering” (98). In fact, to him poetry is not only a source of “lucidity and truth,” but also a

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“refuge,” a form of “consolation,” even “an orphanage” which, as implied in one of his late collections, Casa de misericòrdia, (“House of Mercy”), provides a moral home to one’s loss(es) when nothing else is left (2007). The conception of poetry as a safe refuge for the tempests of life is repeated through these three terms in the authors’ letters, like a litany that justifies the need to continue reading and writing poems (37, 46, 88, 95, 97). If, as mentioned earlier, Margarit’s reflections on the theme of love undermine the ageist association between writing love poetry and being young, his presentation of loss and grief as forms of learning and as part of the richness of one’s life, contest the optimistic views of successful ageing, the narrative of old age whereby the prospect of loss and, especially, of one’s death, are constantly put at bay (Timonen 2016: 21). Contrary to this contemporary ideology of old age, Margarit develops an integrative view of ageing in which the death of a loved one, like our own death, is accepted as part of the natural finitude that defines our lifetime and our own mortality. It is this constructive view of loss (and ageing) that brings Margarit’s late-life view closer not only to the Erikson’s notion of ‘egointegrity’ but, further back in time, to the Ciceronian interpretation of old age: as Jan Baars explains, for Cicero “there [was] no intense conflict between old age and death [...]” (2012: 117), in the same way that to the Stoic philosopher there was not a contradiction between his having lost two daughters, which was a major cause of suffering for him, and the writing of his famous treatise, De Senectute, in which he refuted the deeply ingrained idea that old age should be an unhappy phase (Baars 2012: 114). Significantly enough, besides the biographical coincidence between Seneca and Margarit’s parental experiences of loss, the Catalan writer entitles one of his late poems after Seneca’s famous treaty (2017: 65). Likewise, as also reflected in the many of his late poems, the “strange happiness” he discovers in the last phase of his life incorporates the constant evocation of his deeply felt losses. In addition to passing on his comforting view of loss to his readers, Margarit presents grief as a literary theme that puts the (young) poet’s craft to the test. In other words, in a similar way to the theme of love, writing on loss forces poets to find their own way of expressing a universal event. As Margarit puts it:

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Faced with the harshness of life, we are all very similar. When someone we love dies, we feel the same thing whether we’re powerful or powerless. What makes us different form one another is simply our ability to explain an event. (36)

As with the poetic rendering of love, only one’s life experience can transform theoretical knowledge and technical mastery into truthful verses on loss; and, once again, the passage of time is paramount for this poetic (and personal) transformation. Thus, only time can offer the poet a sense of distance that enables him/her to go back to that (disordered, chaotic) experience of grief and return it to his/her potential readers in a comprehensible way. As the author maintains: Poems that speak of love for someone who has died require extreme delicacy, prudence, distance. This is hard because with this sort of poem the poet has no chance to remember from a distance; he must write before the unstoppable process of oblivion wipes out the scene he has imagined and needs for the poem. When oblivion seeps into pain, circumstances have changed and the poem is already something else. (90)

At the same time, as with love poetry, Margarit does not discourage the young poet from working on poems on loss or suffering. Rather, he believes the young poet must soon start thinking of essential themes, since “[p]oetry tries hard to [...] help us live life with the least mystification possible, without succumbing to fear; live with the maximum dose of truth that we can stand [...]” (76), which also means one must be ready to endure its cruelty (82). In this respect, Margarit draws his mentoring essay close to the Stoic idea of preparing the young “for a whole life, including the hardships this may bring, and not just for a career” (Baars 2012: 124). Although loss can be experienced at any stage of the life course, it inevitably becomes more prominent in the later phase of the life cycle. By preparing his readers to learn about all the facets of life, including the familiarity with loss, Margarit is actually paving the way for their late years, hence complying with the Ciceronian tenet that “old age must have its foundation well laid in early life” (Baars 2012: 124). ***

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Margarit’s teachings on the two thematic axes of his poetry and his own conception of this art would not be complete without the consideration the author gives to formal matters in his late essay. Margarit’s reflections on formal aspects of poetry encompass, once again, two viewpoints at once: on the one hand, that of the experienced writer who, committed to his art beyond the limited time of his own existence, passes on his formal conception of poetry to future generations of writers; and, on the other hand, that of the older man who, through his lifelong poetic vocation, conveys his moral vision of life to his readers. The poet’s insistence on ‘clarity’ in his “new letters” stands out as one of the main formal precepts that, in addition, overtly bears ethical implications. To Margarit, the poet always needs to be “clear,” not only to be understood, which is the basic quality he demands of a poem (44), but also to be completely faithful to what he really wants to communicate, or “what he needs to say” (24). In this respect, the stylistic demand for ‘clarity’ is closely linked to his demand for ‘sincerity,’ a moral feature that Margarit explicitly advocates for in his essay, and which he also considers essential in a poem. For Margarit, good poems require a complete rendering of oneself, without the protection of any kind of personal censorship or devious concealment. On the contrary, Margarit believes that poems need to be imbued with the poet’s “frankness” and, therefore, must be written with “a certain lack of inhibition” (58). The kind of personal involvement that Margarit expects of a poet is reflected in the direct form of some of his warnings, as when he tells his potential pupils: “[i]f you can’t give poetry everything you have—and ‘everything’ means all the truth there is in your life—you shouldn’t go on with it” (17). Facing one’s truths and revealing them in a poem may entail unveiling intimate wounds, sharing uncomfortable thoughts, or displaying views that underline the poet’s own vulnerability. However, it is from those exposed and, therefore, more honest positions that Margarit believes poetry must be written. In a way, Margarit’s formal and moral ideal of poetry can be associated, again, with a Stoic form of wisdom insofar as, according to him, “[p]oetry needs to concentrate on the sparest, driest, deepest parts of our world” (52). It is from those Spartan, austere places that a more direct sense of reality, and a more profound view of the Self, can be obtained. As expressed in his essay, the poet believes any formal technique can convey this directness as long as it is filtered through what he calls “an intelligence of feeling,” namely, a form of intelligence that takes “the experience of emotion” as

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its starting point and which, in the opposite direction to “Romantic and Avant-Garde [forms of] transfiguration [...] is always governed by reason, and even more closely by common sense” (62). Through the combination of emotion, rationality and ‘common sense,’ Margarit’s notion of “intelligence of feeling” expresses a “conventional,” even “fatherly” form of wisdom, in Aleida Assman’s terms (Baars 2012: 215), which, derived from the poet’s own life experience and poetic conception, prepares the (younger) reader for a better understanding of reality and of him/herself. As Assman maintains in her multicultural approach to the history of wisdom, the dangers of this type of wisdom, which has been typically associated with old age, lie in the equation of personal experiences with a fixed vision of life. Jan Baars affirms that, albeit valid in pre-modern cultures, this correspondence may be deemed insufficient in our postmodern world (2012: 216). However, Margarit combines a classic, traditional, even pre-modern view reality and of the Self as ‘solid’ entities one can get to know, with the need to continue searching for the meaning underlying those realities. This inner quest, which perpetuates the Socratic legacy of examining one’s life and perceptions, suits, at the same time, the sceptical form of wisdom that is favoured by postmodernity. Hence, Margarit’s recurrent use of the word “search” in his late essay mirrors the poet’s continuous revision of his own poetic conception and, at the same time, defines the kind of creative impulse underlying both his oeuvre and his philosophical stance (24, 28). “Construction,” one of the main images in Margarit’s poetry, is the central metaphor of his multifaceted “search,” through which, as a retired architect, Margarit expresses his modern perception of poetry as well as the dynamics of the creative process: I am an architect, and the part of architecture that always interested me most, more than the planning that goes on in the studio, is the act of construction itself [...] And it’s the same for poetry, which arises out of life with its dirt and noise and ugliness [...]. (15-16)

By the same token, to Margarit, poetry is in itself a ‘construct’ of a clearer reality, or at least it needs to be so, since he expects (good) poetry to “produce a change, a greater inner order amid the continuous outer disorder of life” (42). In this respect, the poet’s defence of an “intelligence of feeling” in order to produce ‘clear’ and ‘sincere’ poetry has to do with his belief in the

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capacity of poetry not merely to reflect the poet’s inner world or vision of reality, but to provide some ‘order’ to it and, ultimately, transform both writers and readers. This profound sense of “understanding,” which entails personal change, is reflected in his affirming that— someone enters the poem in a certain inner state [...] a degree of ‘inner disorder’ caused by fear, sadness, loss, and all that constantly threatens our inner harmony. If the disorder is less when that person exits the poem, it means and it was a good poem that that it has been understood. (46)

Margarit’s trust in the capacity of poetry to endow our ‘disordered’ existence with a sheltering sense of ‘structure’ also entails a belief in the capacity of readers (and writers) to mould (even renovate) their own selves, both through their readings and throughout time (50-51). Significantly enough, the poet highlights two essential factors for what could be considered a developmental model of literary (and vital) apprenticeship: the combination of personal experience, and a close examination of other literary models. Regarding the former, Margarit enhances the importance of living intensely in order to be able to reflect that intensity in a poem: intensity becomes, therefore, both a formal and a philosophical precept. This is reflected in statements such as, “[o]nly when we write from life, and live it fully, can the poem come into existence” (16), or “[a] good poem is probably, most of all, a matter of intensity” (45). As for the study of other writers’ styles, and in opposition to the hasty lifestyles of our modern societies, Margarit repeatedly endorses a model of ‘slow reading’ that entails personal reflection and mimetic writing (5, 7-8, 10, 17, 20, 24, 26-7, 35), from which the young poet can derive positive models. As with other formal forms of advice, this recommendation is also loaded with moral qualities, such as the need to be modest—with respect not only to the criticism one may receive following any creative exercise (59, 68-9), but also in regard to the masters one chooses to follow, whom he considers as the main referents for one’s apprenticeship (68). In this sense, Margarit defends a positive (and moral) model of imitation: to him, “[i]t’s always easier to negate than to affirm [...] How much better to create from admiration (the nucleus of love and of creation) than from rejection!” (25). On the whole, Margarit’s formal lessons on poetry display a sustained convergence between his conception of an ars poetica and his accrued understanding of an ars vivendi. Although his moral and rational

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conception of poetry opposes the Romantic exaltation of irrationality, Margarit defends the identification of poetry with life that was promoted by the Romantic movement (60). Significantly enough, he finds in Rilke, his own literary mentor, the main source of inspiration for the same model he wishes to pass on: Rilke lived the way he was able to, or wanted to, surely a little of both, but what matters isn’t how Rilke lived but the belief in an essence that exists outside of life—poetry—on which the poet, when he reaches this world, must pattern his existence. (61)

As implied in these lines, poetry is for Margarit a moral mirror through which a more insightful view of life can be gained. Throughout the different sections of his late essay, the vantage point from which the benefits of committing one’s life to the art of writing poetry can be better contemplated is, in fact, the poet’s own old age. *** Indeed, through the dual lessons—on poetry and life—that Margarit leaves in his letters to his readers, the poet also promotes a constructive model of ageing whereby later years are regarded as an extremely important phase in the life course. In fact, in a recent interview with Xavier Grasset, Margarit affirmed that old age is the most important of all the life stages because, being the last one, it is the only phase in which you will not be able to judge yourself (Grasset 2017). The implication is that, following our later years, our late-life actions and version of ourselves will eventually be remembered and judged by others, which endows our later years with a unique sense of moral responsibility. In his late essay, Margarit’s old age allows him to judge himself in retrospect and, as a result, ascribe a different value to the different life stages he has undergone. By sharing his personal life review with his readers, he does not only teach them about the importance that each life stage has for the vocational poet, but also generates a positive narrative of the process of ageing as a whole. However, this narrative does not present the life course as a gradual, continuous path towards maturity, but rather places an emphasis on childhood and middle age as significant phases for the poet, to the detriment of young adulthood. As Janice Sokolow demonstrated in a pioneering

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study of ageing in literature, “the development of human character [...] is not necessarily linear” (1987: 129). By the same token, whereas Margarit considers his childhood an extremely important phase for the formation of his own identity, he disregards his youth and the poetry he produced in it (6, 28, 67). Interestingly enough, he applies the same model to other writers and, consequently, he advises his readers to “imitate and read the great poets,” but by considering their latest works as the most important ones, since “in the poems of youth [...] we are least likely to find things worth learning” (67). Once again, Margarit’s personal interpretation of the interaction between creativity and experience undermines Romantic exaltations of youth, while at the same time contradicting the narrative of decline, according to which one’s creative powers diminish with age. As for middle age, and coinciding with the experience of many other writers and artists (Cohen-Shalev 1989: 35-36, Wyatt-Brown 1989: 175-6, CasadoGual/Dominguez-Rué/Worsfold 2016), Margarit regards this stage of life as that which is more likely to generate work that can be deemed authentic or truly personal. In his case, he considers the age of 37, when his book of poems Crónica was published (1975), as the moment in which he “first recognized a voice finally [his] own” (11). Interestingly enough, it was the combination of time, learning and experience that made this poetic birth possible for him. And, remarkably, he refers to his own literary mentor at this point, by claiming that “after that first book, [he] learned, or reaffirmed, in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, all the basics of what [he] then needed to know” (11). It was in his middle age, therefore, when he could transform “understanding” into “comprehension,” and hence fused the teachings of his own mentor Rilke with his own experience and knowledge as a poet. As revealed by this example, finding one’s voice as a poet has to do with knowing oneself better, an essential form of wisdom that was expressed through the Greek motto ‘know thyself’ inscribed on the forecourt of Apollo’s temple. As a matter of fact, Margarit evokes the humanistic proverb in his late essay when he claims that, “[i]n a way,” the poet’s apprenticeship deals “with the Nosce te ipsum [...]” (28). In the long road towards self-knowledge, Margarit evokes Rilke’s lessons again, and contends that the worst enemies for him “are a sort of ambition, pride, unreality, a certain childishness” (28). These “moral enemies” are, more problematically for the poet, “technical enemies,” too, because they interfere with the creative process and the introspective effort it requires. Interestingly, the kind of solitude that both the act of introspection and

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creation demand is facilitated towards the end of the life course. Even though Margarit’s late essay does not explicitly correlate solitude with old age itself, the connection between growing older and finding pleasure in simply being by oneself is clearly reflected in his late poems, written in parallel to his late essay. Likewise, in recent interviews the poet also explains that in his old age social life seems less important to him than his own intimacy (Grasset 2017). In the light of these late-life revelations, the weight that solitude receives in the poet’s “new letters” as the only path towards the poet’s “inner growth” (98) and his “inner harmony” (46) can also be perceived as an advantage of old age. Hence, albeit indirectly, late-life solitude is re-interpreted in his essay as a Socratic oasis of selfexamination and continuous learning, which makes “poetry reach[-] its maximum intensity” (95), “allows us to deepen our reading of a poem and accept the consolation it offers” (95), and, more meaningfully, does not limit “life to sensuality and entertainment,” a form of (self-)ignorance which, according to Margarit, our modern world tends to promote (96). Undermining both successful models of ageing centred on activity and social life, and narratives of decline that equate old age with decay and loneliness, Margarit concludes his “new letters” with a powerful invitation for his younger readers “to face [their] solitude” (99). Thus, “solitude” is the last word with which Margarit closes his address to “younger poets” (99), and this concept remains, again, associated with qualities related to knowledge and wisdom, such as “clarity,” “lucidity” and “illumination,” insofar as it favours self-growth (98-99). At the same time, the kind of “solitude” that is enhanced by the poet applies to the art of writing poetry as much as to the art of living, since it entails a willing acceptance of life in all its dimensions, losses and gains, past and present, “without the need to forget” (99). In this respect, it is the state that enables the ageing poet to embrace his own older Self and all the ages and life stages that are contained in it. Through this final representation (and self-portrait) of the older poet in his solitude, Margarit enriches his literary and moral legacy by adding a progressive and integrative dimension to the concept of ageing, namely, one that depicts the older writer in a self-chosen secluded space that enables both insightful contemplation as much as his continuous development and creativity. ***

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As has been shown throughout this article, Joan Margarit may be considered a literary mentor inasmuch as, through his public appearances and late writings, and, especially, through his essay New Letters to a Young Poet, he interweaves his knowledge of poetry with his life experience and returns it to his readers. As demonstrated throughout this chapter, Margarit’s literary legacy is condensed into a rich text that contains literary and philosophical insights on the essential themes of love and loss, and which highlights the moral implications of poetic form as well as the insights that poetic form itself offers to the (young) poet and reader. As already mentioned, Margarit’s autobiographical approach to poetry also includes an emancipatory narrative of ageing that deconstructs reductive visions of old age, while at the same time enhancing the moral qualities and meanings that are gained with the passage of time and through the lifelong commitment to poetry as an art. As Thomas Cole puts it, ageing is in fact a moral concept, and it cannot be separated from moral or political stances (Edmondson 2015: 62-63). In his late-life meta-poetic discourse, Margarit interconnects his own stance as an older man with his literary and philosophical viewpoints, which at the same time derive from his own learning and eventual comprehension of Rilke’s classic text as his main mentoring narrative. Through the constant assimilation of Rilke’s thought into his own literary and life experience, Margarit is able to become a literary mentor himself by passing his lessons on to the generations of poets and readers to come. All in all, it could be said that, through his book, Margarit enacts a ‘gerotranscendent’ gesture, in Lars Tornstam’s terms (2005), which enables him to think of himself beyond the limited horizon of his own existence, and to favour, at the same time, a cultural and moral continuum among generations of poets, thinkers and readers of different ages and periods. To follow Margarit’s own architectural image, this ‘gerotranscendent’ act renders him the ‘construction material’ or the ‘construction site’ on which others can build their literary voices and visions of life. Like his late-life poems, his late essay hence becomes a ‘structured shelter’ in which younger poets and readers may take refuge before they face one of the, perhaps, most difficult lessons for literature and, also, for life: in the words of Margarit, that “it isn’t enough to immerse yourself in the world of the masters: you must also know how to leave it” (11). It is probably in old age when finally, one is brave and wise enough to leave the world of one’s masters, and face that ultimate sense of ‘solitude.’ Yet, through this mature self-recognition,

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one can still take pleasure in the foundations that made one’s singularity possible, either as a writer, or as a person, or both; and, as Margarit teaches us in his book, one should modestly and constantly recognize the incommensurable value they have had for our lives. ***

Works Cited Primar y Sources Margarit, Joan (2010): New Letters to a Young Poet, Trans. Christopher Maurer, Chicago: Swan Isle Press. —(2009): Noves cartes a un jove poeta, Barcelona: Edicions 62.

Secondar y Sources Baars, Jan (2012): Aging and the Art of Living, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Casado-Gual, Núria/Domínguez-Rué, Emma/Worsfold, Brian (eds.) (2016): Literary Creativity and the Older Woman Writer: A Collection of Critical Essays, Bern: Peter Lang. Cohen-Shalev, Amir (2002): Both Worlds at Once: Art in Old Age, Oxford: University Press of America. —(1989): “Old Age Style: Developmental Changes in Creative Production from a Life-Span Perspective.” Journal of Aging Studies 3/1 (1989), pp. 21-37. Cornadó, Maria-Pau (1993): “Introducció. Antologia del navegant (19811993). In: Maria-Pau Cornadó (ed.), Joan Margarit, Barcelona: La Magrana. Edmondson, Ricca (2015): Ageing, Insight and Wisdom: Meaning and Practice Across the Lifecourse, Bristol: Policy Press. Erikson, Eric H. (1997): The Life Cycle Completed: Extended Version with New Chapters on the Ninth Stage of Development by Joan M. Erikson, New York: Norton. Grasset, Xavier. Interview with Joan Margarit. Més 3/24. Televisió de Catalunya, Barcelona. 5 Dec 2017. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth (2004): Aged by Culture, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Margarit, Joan (2007): Casa de misericòrdia, Barcelona: Proa.

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—(2013) Poemes d‘amor, Barcelona: Enciclopèdia catalana. —(2001): Poesia amorosa completa 1980-2000, Barcelona: Proa. —(2017): Un hivern fascinant, Barcelona: Proa. Puigbó, Josep. Interview with Joan Margarit. (S)Avis. Televisió de Catalunya, Barcelona. 25 Oct 2013. Rilke, Rainer Maria (2016) Letters to a Young Poet, 1929, London: Penguin. Smith Barusch, Amanda (2008): Love Stories of Later Life: A Narrative Approach to Understanding Romance, Oxford University Press. Timonen, Virpi (2016): Beyond Successful and Active Ageing: A Theory of Model Ageing, Bristol: Policy Press Shorts Research. Tornstam, Lars (2005): Gerotranscendence: A Developmental Theory of Positive Aging, New York: Springer.

The Many Functions of Furniture Re-Discovering Mentors through Narratives of Material and Immaterial Convoys Roberta Maierhofer As literary and cultural scholars, we analyze cultural representations in terms of material realities within the very specific cultural, social, historical, and political contexts. We determine the when, where, who, what, and how of a text. The very specifics of production and distribution of cultural representations are one of the concerns of literary and cultural critics. We seek dissemination of our work in terms of official academic conferences and publishing opportunities that are established and in the academic community accepted, where the term ‘peer-review’ is sometimes more of a reminder of critical commentaries rather than of a supportive and encouraging community of colleagues. Serious academic work usually demands of us that we ignore more personal aspects of research contributions, the when, where, and who of our own texts. Scholarly work is seen as separated from the life of the scholar, and receives recognition mostly based on material visibility—the written and spoken production of ideas, analysis, and interpretations in formal contexts. Important contributions, such as discussions of scholarship in informal settings, over coffee and meals, walking from one conference venue to the next, or in shared transit, are not only ignored but seen as irrelevant, and often are associated with the suspicious aura of not being serious research or being based simply on personal connections, sympathies, and alliances. There are, however, exceptions, and considerations of personal contexts of development are mostly undertaken in connection to a long-lived academic life and linked to markers of age. This volume has been dedicated to the achievements of two individuals within an academic context, and the topic of the book serves as a commemoration of their academic life dedicated to

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literary and age/ing studies, but more importantly to their work of making immaterial contributions to scholarship by not only being scholars in their own right, but by guiding and mentoring others. As an acknowledgement of this dedication and their understanding that we as scholars also live our academic lives in time, such a volume is not only a very specific format of academic writing that entails a collection of original scholarship, but also has two further functions. On the one hand, it honors two people for their academic achievements and recognizes the aspect of duration in a life lived. On the other, it also constitutes a ceremony of expressing connections, relationships, and networks of an academic community. In this case, there is an additional motivation involved. The stated intention is also to express gratitude for leadership and guidance on a very individual level in terms of personal and academic mentorship, and in addition calls up the next generation of scholars to take on this task of not only producing good scholarship, but letting others now in their turn stand on their shoulders to help present and future cohorts of academics to continue the calling. When invited as an Americanist to re-discover my topic of research through narratives of mentorship, I decided to acknowledge not only the task as such, but the context in which such an invitation has been issued, not only the what, but the who, how, and why of the text in which this article would appear. In this sense, I decided to choose a text to interpret, which I also wanted to re-discover, as it was a text I had enjoyed, when it was published in 1981, at a time when I still had the luxury of sometimes solely reading for pleasure, for the experience, for the time spent with a world in a book. Looking back to that time, I now understand that my interest in age and aging, in the matrix of time and experience, was already present in the joy I found in this reading. Although at the time I was working on two theses dedicated to language in German literature and English poetry of Modernism and continued later on to write a PhD thesis on “fictosophy” and postmodernism, my enjoyment of Rose Tremain’s novel The Cupboard (1981) was in many ways a foreshadowing of my work in aging, which I only started a decade later at the beginning of the 1990s. At the time, however, it was also a book of mentorship, as I was an unexperienced care-taker to my dying mother, and the connections described in the book resonated with my own feelings of hopelessness and despair, but also with the love, joy, and pleasure I experienced simply being in my mother’s company regardless of the circumstances. Thus, when considering a contribution to a volume that is a tribute to two scholars that have shaped the field

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of Age/ing Studies as a “meta-discursive dialogue on ageing between generations,” I immediately thought it fitting to discuss Tremain’s work less as an academic contribution, but exactly in these in-between realms of the material and immaterial that in many ways brings different discursive methods together to create a multifaceted and multilayered narration. It is my own role of naïve reader of Tremain’s work at the time that allows me now to present my reading of her work as a tribute to two academics who have influenced and guided scholars involved the field of Age/ing Studies exactly on a level where the personal and the public meet. In addition, the novel itself can be seen as foreshadowing of the wealth of current fiction and research devoted to the topic of age and aging. This interpretation of the novel also represents the unexpected aspect of mentorship and guidance, which is not only to be found in the academic world, i.e. that support often happens aside the official established structures, where help and guidance are offered unanticipated through people and books that we encounter by chance, and thus perhaps even more so shape our lives in abstract as well as concrete ways. Despite the fact that Tremain packs a wealth of topics into this book, such as important historical, political, social, and cultural events—for example by introducing important public figures such as Emily Davidson or fictional characters such as Gérard Guérard, who represent historical, political, social, and artistic developments—our first reaction, when reading the novel, is a warm and satisfying feeling at an emotional level. The book, therefore, like good mentorship, can speak to us in many different ways. In her novel The Cupboard, Rose Tremain explores the life of an exceptional woman through conversations with a character who at first sight represents in almost all aspects her opposite. Whereas Erica March is an eighty-seven year old independent, rebellious, passionate, and fierce character, her conversation partner Ralph, who comes to interview Erica before she dies, is an American journalist described as timid, lonely, nerdy, and afraid to live. Where Erica is courageous, Ralph is hesitant, where Erica is sensual, Ralph is wary of his body and sexuality, where Erica can look back on an exciting and politically meaningful life, Ralph is portrayed as boring, mundane, and uninteresting. Ralph’s world is narrow and small, whereas Erika’s is presented as wide open, full of possibilities for good and bad experiences. The book is also a traditional metafiction, as Erica’s work as a writer is displayed throughout the text, and is a running commentary of the present shown in the conversations

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of Erica and Ralph. The book excerpts, on the one hand, explain Erica’s narrated life experiences in an abstract way, and on the other, provide Ralph in contemplation with concrete guidance on how to live his life. Even though in her old age Erica is no longer known, there is still this one person, the young and frustrated journalist, who believes that through Erica’s narrative, he can find a way of learning to lead his own life with fulfillment, meaning, and joy. Despite the fact that the book which made Erica famous and established her reputation as a serious writer is out of print, this still serves to define her as a serious intellectual despite her frailty and age. As a journalist, however, Ralph is still seeking to define himself as a professional, and therefore sets himself the task not only to produce an interesting article, but to learn from Erica as a mentor. When the book cover promises “a book brimming with life,” we as readers come to understand that this definition of life relies heavily on contrasts in terms of the protagonists in order to finally understand that these binaries are deconstructed. When the worn European cultural narrative of cultured traditions and past glory is reinforced by presenting Erica as the “ideal” woman having lived her life to the fullest, from her political activism, her fulfilled sexual life, to becoming an important and influential writer, and the young man stands for the American clichéd narrative of the young, new, uncouth, I as a now experienced reader also roll my eyes looking back on my own naïve self enjoying the story. Nevertheless, even at this point I can find a value in the book, as it also offers another possibility of interpretation. The wealth that life brings is not by contrast, it is in the inbetween, both body and soul, material and immaterial, subject and object, and even more importantly in narrating one’s life as a passing of time and a making sense of our existence in the matrix of time and experience. The title of the novel, The Cupboard, emphasizes exactly this interpretation by highlighting the material quality of life, and raising our expectations concerning a wider perspective of what such a furniture might contain both in terms of what David Ekerdt has described as the “stuff” quality of our life, as well the metaphorical aspect of what things and objects in our lives stand for (2017). The novel begins with the end of Erica’s life: “At the age of eighty-seven, Erica March died in a cupboard” (7). The bizarre first sentence is quickly explained that her dying in a cupboard was a conscious decision based on detailed planning of when, how, and where:

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She wrapped her body in a chenille tablecloth, laid it out neatly under the few skirts and dresses that still hung on the clothes rail and put it to death very quietly, pill by pill. (7)

Intergenerational connections are established textually through the concrete level of friendship expressed in their conversations and the telling of her life story as well as on the abstract level. Although Erica leaves a note, the note does not refer to the important message she is trying to convey, but confidently relies on Ralph to ignore the explicit spelling-out of the text and interpret the more important signs Erica leaves: She left a note, but the note made no mention of her suicide, nor of the cupboard in which she had chosen to commit it. In the room, she had seemed only to make ready for the night, turning down her bed, setting out her indigestion tablets, drawing the curtains and switching on her bedside light. (7)

By emphasizing the everyday and mundane act of getting ready for bed, and in this process for the continuation of life, preparing for another day to come, the text suggests that Erica’s self-imposed death is possible, because she has handed on her mission to the next generation. Ralph, who is shown as in search of meaning and is driven by an irrational desire to interview Erica, is the one who will carry on her legacy: She had known, however, that it would be Ralph who would discover her body. She had left the door unlocked for him, certain that he would come in next afternoon to say goodbye as he had promised and that when he found her, he would do everything she had asked, exactly as she had asked it. (7)

When David Ekerdt in his article “Possessions as a Material Convoy,” invites readers to consider the relation between persons and possessions in a life course framework, he addresses “the management of possessions in later life, the reasons for keeping and disposing, and the labor that things entail” (2015: 313). In this novel, the management of Erica’s most valued possession of the cupboard, the importance of which is indicated mostly through the title of the book, is the main focus of the story, even though we as readers need to piece this together in seemingly unimportant statements and passages throughout the book:

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Erica sat in silence for a while and then she said. “The cupboard I mentioned was my mother’s. […] I think the cupboard had been her mother’s before, because it was the only good piece of furniture we had. And she kept it polished. Not like the old kitchen table which we scrubbed with soap”. (14)

This piece of furniture connects Erica to the past, but becomes part of her own life-course. Originally the cupboard represents her mother and helps her overcome her pain, but with time Erica appropriates the cupboard as part of herself. Both for her mother as well as herself the cupboard is linked to their lives. Thus, the father finds it unbearable to keep the cupboard in their bedroom after her mother dies, but also understands that he cannot get rid of it and simply erase the memory of her. Dismantling the cupboard and setting it up in Erica’s room is on the one hand an expression of mourning and loss, on the other it is also the handing on of a legacy. The free-spirited mother dies in a freak accident of a “grown-up secret,” which is described as an atavistic mating ritual as well as a kinky sexual game of her parents, which Erica discovers by reading her father’s diary: […] Bull not attracted at once by Ellen’s waving blue skirts, so she calls it. And it comes lolloping. It noses her and she laughs. She begins whispering our fertility rhyme. The bull is on top of her and she strokes it. Then she shouts to me and I open the gate to the cow’s field. The bull almost runs and together we shut him in. As he mounts a cow, Ellen kisses me. She is hot and trembling. (15)

While Erica recounts the incident and the ritual that she learns of from reading her father’s diary as a game—“A game, you see! They played it each year for their land. The land was all they had and they gave it their own desire—(15), it is the material quality of the cupboard that determines not only Erica’s relationship to her parents, but also stands for restrictions, containment, and human bonds throughout her life. When her mother is trampled to death during this fertility ritual, it is the cupboard that offers her solace when mourning her mother. I was eight years old when the cupboard came to be mine. My father took it almost to pieces to get it out of their room and rebuilt it in mine. He knew he couldn’t part with it because it was in the family, but he didn’t want anything left in his room to remind him of her. I told him, I didn’t want the cupboard either. If you got in it, you

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could smell her, and the smell of her was both wonderful and unbearable. I spent nights in the cupboard holding her clothes over my face. […] (15)

However, the cupboard is also linked to fertility and sexuality and suggests that life and death are inherently connected. When her adopted brother Gully, who is described as suddenly arriving at their farm without a background and “odd with his twisted head” (9) “made out of Norfolk clay” (8), becomes sexually active, Erica as a young girl taunts him incessantly to tell her about his sexual encounters, so that her father punishes her by locking her into the cupboard. When Gully then later that evening whispers through the cupboard door the answer he refused to give her before, it is the cupboard that frames the way she learns about sexuality: “Seventeen times! I couldn’t imagine seventeen times, not at fifteen, and shut in a cupboard which still smelled of my mother’s clothes […]” (27). The material object that outlasts humans becomes a symbol of an anchorage in life despite death. After her mother’s death, Erica becomes obsessed with funerals, which she justifies in her conversation with Ralph at the end of her own life with the fact that her mother’s funeral had been “so utterly solemn” (17). In this novel, Tremain repeatedly cross-references historical events and links this obsession with funerals (and not death) to the famous English suffragette, who died after throwing herself in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Tremain’s 1981 novel pays in many—but often vague—instances tribute to Emily Davison and the suffragette movement by pointing to the visual effect of rituals: […] But life is so odd, Ralph, don’t you think, because the next funeral I went to was hers. And I expect you’ve seen pictures of this, haven’t you? Of the carriages, and all of us in white with our sashes and our purple and orange flowers and the great crowd. It was the most gilded funeral of its time. (18)

When in her novel Tremain contrasts Erica’s mother’s funeral with “flopping bundles of wet flowers on top of her” (18) and the above described “most gilded funeral of its time,” we as readers learn to understand that relationships are made tangible in the rituals performed. Ralph, the young, inexperienced, frustrated would-be writer, discovers in the course of his interviews not so much a story that he can publish to advance his career, but a mentor, who bestows an important task upon him. He is asked to ensure that Erica has the funeral that—like one of Erica’s novels

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that are described and quoted in length in this novel—fulfills the criteria of a life well lived. When asking Ralph to ensure that she has the funeral that she has planned, she defines their relationship as meaningful for both. The request, however, is only revealed gradually in the course of the novel mirroring the growing trust and bond that is created in the different instances of their conversations. When Erica starts talking about the task she wants to bestow on Ralph as her last will, it is at first met with incomprehension: “You could do it, though, Ralph!” And her eyes stared and stared at him. “You could tell them, there used to be the smell of her dresses in there and the odour of the forest, sometimes in the darkness, and I imagined the trees that made it. And afterwards, there was the smell of books, like a clean sanctuary, and never in there was there anything that hasn’t been a part of me [...].” (29)

Through the title of the novel and side-references to the cupboard throughout the book, we understand the significance of this piece of furniture for Erica. When Ralph is asked to make sure that Erica will be able to be buried in this cupboard, the material importance of the object becomes immaterial, as it is the act of performing Erica’s last will that takes precedence. When contemplating the cupboard for the first time, Ralph contemplates continuity and change within a life-course: “Ralph began to understand why she had attached so great an importance to it. It was the only thing in her life that had never changed” (102). Ralph’s incomprehension of the task is a reflection of his own lack of understanding of life in general. His desire is to understand his own life through Erica, but the only explanation he can find is an image, which again is abstract and distances him from sensually and materially experiencing an embodied state of existence: “The nearest I can get to an image for our two lives—Erica March, 87, Ralph Pears, 35—is two basins of wheat. Her basin, which should be almost empty, is heavy and full. The wheat is spilling over and the same grans have fallen. There is no mental nor spiritual famine here. But my basin, which should be full, is very light—about a quarter full only. I have almost no knowledge of how the grains got used up. But I know the grains left are too few. I’m not nourished [...].” (34-35)

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Like in other instances of the novel, Ralph expresses these thoughts in writing and tries to make sense of his encounters with Erica under the heading of “Summary” (34). Ralph experiences his own suffering as mundane and self-pitying, but understands that he can find respite from his woes through his relationship with Erica. However, still locked in his own narrative of independence and autonomy, he describes this mentoring experience as a theft. I think what I’m doing is putting my basin near to Erica’s. I’m kinda hoping grains will fall from hers into mine, hundreds of grains, so that it begins to fill up and there is some RECOVERY. This is simplistic and over-optimistic. I admit this. It is also stealing. (35)

Although Tremain distracts us by explaining Erica’s wish to be buried in her cupboard also as a wish to live on in different form (“I might be given a little more time, not as me of course […], but as something […]”) (47), we as readers understand that her wish “to organize death in a certain way, in a certain place” (47) is also an invitation not to Ralph as a “stranger” (47) but as a friend of the next generation to accept life in its ambivalence of the material and immaterial. When Erica and Ralph talk about material things, Erica admits that things are also an expression of an acceptance of life: “And of course that cupboard, which is all that was ever left of my mother, and I will never be parted from it” (53). When Erica finally reveals what she wants Ralph to do, she explains in minute detail how she wishes to be buried: Well. So there it is. It’s terribly simple, Ralph. You’ll find me in the cupboard, dear, that’s all. I’ll make certain I’m there and I’ll put a scarf around my face so you won’t even have to shut my eyes, which is a thing I hate doing. And all you have to do is to go out and see if you can find, even from some expensive shop, some mimosa to put around me. And then lock the cupboard with me inside, and make sure that I’m buried in it, not in a coffin which they knock up, these days, from any old bit of wood. And the silk inside isn’t silk, but poly-something or other. Just tell the council or the undertakers or whoever it is, that I am not to be moved out of the cupboard and that this is my last wish. I know it’s very large and I suppose someone will have to dig a wider hole than normal. […] It’s all very simple. (193-194)

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Although, on first reading, Ralph is used as a simple binary of lack in contrast with Erica’s wealth on so many levels, it is interesting that Ralph’s most precious “possession” is not material, but are the herbs on his window sill. When asked by Erica what he is worried about, he does not voice any of the concerns expressed in his writing, but refers to the fact that he forgot to ask his neighbor to water his plants. Therefore, when doubting whether this assignment interviewing Erica will provide the answers he is looking for, Ralph again focuses on his herbs as an expression of himself: “Here is just one life,” Ralph wrote on page two of his Summary. “Pointless, perhaps, to imagine that this life, given me, second hand and most of it lived in another era, can really help me make sense of mine. Erica’s sympathy will not revive my dead herbs […].” (56)

In many ways, the novel is a predictable read and almost like a script for a Hollywood movie slipping into sentimentality and overzealous images and metaphors. An enthusiastic blog writer with the interesting name of “Lady Fancifull” has thus described the novel as both “an ‘easy’ read— and a read of depth” comparing Tremain to “a mountain goat” and being impressed “by her agility and sure footedness, negotiating high peaks, impervious to the sheer and deadly drops beneath!” The wealth of ideas and events that Tremain describes is, therefore, also visible in the way she introduces objects and possessions into the story. When Erica’s father after fifteen years of mourning marries Eileen, Erica describes her through her possessions: “The house was full, full of Eileen’s belongings […]” (61). It is the cupboard that offers Erica refuge (“I went to my old room and opened the cupboard. […] So I crawled in among the dust and the soft skirts and rocked myself.” [61]) When, after a heated discussion, Erica again retreats to the cupboard with Eileen following her to continue the argument, Eileen claims that God had appeared to her in many forms. In an exaggerated ironic way, Tremain lets God appear to Eileen in form of a lacquered musical box and a tin of Belgian sardines, which in this discussion Erica counters with pointing to Eileen’s fish knives, a Chippendale chair, cushions with tassels, and other objects as well as a list of all her furniture (64). Despite the obvious flaws of the text, the excess of content, the obvious good-will intention of painting a character as more interesting than is possible, and the not always convincing tone between irony, sentimentality, and kitsch, the novel does convey a wonderful feeling

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of connection in terms of the old woman and the young man. When Ralph tries to put into words what he wants to ask Erica before she dies, he fails to find the right questions. He knew what they were: practical questions, ethical questions, questions to satisfy, if not everyone who could come to know of her death, at least himself, the whole self, not just the reporter in him […] But the questions hung just out of reach. One question seemed to obscure another. (195)

When Ralph returns to the United States and reports to his boss Walt, it is the objects that he contemplates: Ralph looked at all the familiar things in the office: the array of telephones; the photo of Walt’s wife, Nancy, taken twenty years before; his single golfing trophy on a stand; his maps and graphs and random news cuttings pinned to wallboards; the cocktail cabinet made of maple wood; the bottle of Biofeed for his plants [...] all stubbornly unchanged—day to day proof that the man existed and that he existed to work. (245-6)

Contrasting the wealth of Erica’s life in the vibrant world of her words— first conveyed in her writing and then in the conversations with him— with the bureaucratic organization of the newspaper business, Ralph realizes that his understanding of endings have been redefined and that their conversations and their friendship is a legacy that lives on. Walt was Walt, unchanging and unchanged in his enormous body. The body would push back, and that would be that. An ending. The canned music would go on and on in the elevators, the telephonists would simper their repetitious greetings: ‘Bulletin Worldwide, can I help you?’ Walt would swallow his daily laxative with his first cup of coffee, go round with the Biofeed bottle before the serious work of the day began [...] already it was meaningless, a world too contained in itself to contain him. And now that he was free of it [...]. (250)

When these thoughts are interrupted by Walt calling him to demand the tapes not for an inroad into Erica’s life and as a testimony of a meaningful and beautiful existence, but as a property, and threatening legal action if they were not returned, Ralph can only respond with incomprehension. The final paragraph of the novel, however, allows a sentimental and in its

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cliché satisfying ending. Even though Walt uses a synthetic fluid to feed his plants emphasizing the artificiality of his world, Ralph’s plants are the ones that have survived despite him forgetting to ask the neighbor to water them in his absence. All his herbs, except the parsley, have survived: Ralph got up and walked stiffly to the open window. It was hot in the room and already the cold of London seemed very far away. He leaned out and touched his plants. The soil was dry, yet all the herbs except the parsley had survived his absence and were in full leaf. (251)

It is interesting that the novel closes with this sentence, as we as readers remember the scene in the book where Ralph sits in an Italian restaurant with a growing feeling of hope: The spaghetti came and it was spicy, tasting of fresh parsley and the sea. […] The whole chicken arrived, cooked in rosemary and garlic, with a dish of zucchini. As he ate the chicken, he remembered his own herbs, dead no doubt on their sheltered sill, but the thought of their death didn’t upset him as it had done recently. “Other things,” he wrote almost illegibly, “take shape and grow right here. They take time, that’s all.” (89)

If mentorship is guidance and often speaks of an uneven relationship in terms of experience, it also describes a relationship built on trust and the willingness on the one hand to advise, that is to enter a meaningful relationship, and on the other to accept advice, that is to sustain and establish such a relationship. When talking about the objects in our lives, the sociologist David Ekerdt has spoken about possessions as “material things that reside with people and stay long enough to merit some care, if only to be placed somewhere for later consideration.” Analogous to the social convoy, the material convoy is a dynamic composition of enduring and transient items, having developmental features, members with more or less importance, and convoy constituents that also occupy the convoy of others. People develop emotional and affirmative relations with their things and, like social convoys, maintain this resource for its actual as well as potential supportiveness. (2015: 313)

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This material grounding of our existence—so Ekerdt—can be expressed in objects, but I would add that more importantly the narratives about things establish our relations to others, and thus create a material and immaterial convey of meaning. Through narratives, possessions are positioned relationally and become subjects, as they represent the connections that are otherwise only expressed on the abstract level. Through a literary text, the object of the cupboard not only stands for the immaterial quality of the relationship between mentor and mentee, but also expresses the responsibility that is handed on in terms of mentorship. By using an object such as a cupboard in a novel, this piece of furniture becomes even more abstract and immaterial, and can thus convey the abstract in even clearer terms: the concrete then can be understood as expressing the non-tangible, non-accessible aspects of our existence. If in real life, possessions—as Ekerdt claims—“have communicative value for telling stories about oneself,” what does the representation of such possessions in a literary text do? Even though firmly rooted in the material realities, these possessions or in Ekerdt’s term this “stuff” are both in their existence and their meaning only understood through the way they are narrated. These narratives determine not only how “biographically meaningful” they are (2015: 314), but also create an awareness of the life course as palpable and material, not through the thing-ness alone, but through the narrative expression of past-present relations in flux. By positioning possessions in relation to the subject in narrative reference, the abstract quality of an identity can be traced as a visible mark of cultural, social, historical connections. In terms of my own anocritical approach, these narratives construct meaning. The re-discovery of the title of this volume can thus represent a re-visiting of a text read at a different time with a different meaning, but it also helps to re-discover connections and relationships. In the discussed novel, a world of change is presented through positioning an old English woman in juxtaposition with a young American man, and framing the story by centrally placing a piece of furniture as a symbol of a different form of permanence. The cupboard of the title promises the reader containment through things that represent a life well-lived, but the unexpected wish of the dying woman to be buried in this cupboard opens up a new perspective. Ralph is not given any object to remember Erica by. He is provided with a task, to make sure that against all bureaucratic resistance her last wish is fulfilled. The afore mentioned enthusiastic blogger, who describes herself not as a critical reader but a fan, finishes

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her comprehensive description of the novel with this sentence: “This means her life is large, joyous, terrifying, fraught with periods of madness, despair, doubt, pleasure etc etc.” When trying to address the abstract and the concrete in terms of academic scholarship and at the same time the people that have shaped and influenced the research in the field, as is the intention of this volume, it seems the only way to pay tribute is to offer an interpretation of a text that meant something on a personal and emotional level at a certain point in time. At the same time, however, it reveals the intertwining of the abstract and the concrete, which good mentorship— both in narration as well as in real life—contains. And finally, it probably can also only be described by admitting that I am approaching the topic not only as a critical reader but as a fan, and therefore end my article with “etc etc.”

Works Cited Ekerdt, D. J. (2015): Possessions as a Material Convoy. In: J. Twigg/W. Martin (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, Oxford: Routledge, pp. 313-320. Ekerdt, D.J. (2017): Aging in a World of Things. Keynote at the Aging Graz 2017 Conference “Cultural Narratives, Processes and Strategies in Representations of Age and Aging.” https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=fkAONmwLcOQ Review of Rose Tremain The Cupboard, Jan 8, 2014. https://ladyfancifull. wordpress.com/2014/01/08/rose-tremaine-the-cupboard/ Tremain, Rose (1983): The Cupboard, London: Arena.

Experience as Mentor in Helping to Deal with Old Age Susan Ballyn

This article is in no way theoretical in dealing with the question of ageing and old age. Rather it is an empirical reflection of seventy years of my life course and how, over many of those years, experience acted as my mentor in dealing with the elderly, ageing, disabled and of course myself as I age. Although risking stating the obvious, it is experience that molds our lives and makes us what we are as we grow through life. Many people have no experience of dealing with the disabled and elderly, often reaching old age itself with no awareness of how to deal with the problems related to ageing. This can be due to any number of reasons. I can cite my great aunt who reached ninety with extraordinary agility both mental and physical, eventually dying in her sleep at home. She is a fine example of somebody who never had to struggle in age and was never called upon by her family to help with her ageing siblings. Reflecting on my early childhood, I had no contact whatsoever with anybody elderly or disabled. I never met any of my grandparents and have no memory of their generation except my great aunt. The family lived scattered across England and transport in those days was not as easy as now. I realise that growing up and being in contact with elderly, ageing relatives would have given me an early first-hand awareness of something I was going to have to deal with much later in my life. It was while I was in Lower Sixth Form that my first experience came about both with elderly and disabled people. At school we were offered the chance to do social service on Saturday mornings. To be honest, I think many of us saw it as a chance to get out of school and uniform and did not give it much more thought. On returning after the first day, the mood was

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very different as we discussed what we had done and seen, many of us were very emotionally charged. I was first sent to a home for disabled people and a few war veterans, most from the RAF. On arrival I was assigned to take care of a RAF airman who had been badly burned in the war and apart from being badly disfigured, was bedbound and could not use his hands. I can remember standing by his bed completely at a loss as to what to do. He found talking difficult and I to understand him, but gradually we were able to communicate by various means. While he could not smile, his eyes spoke for thousands. Lunch arrived, and I was set to help him eat, which he did with great difficulty. To this day, I will never forget what happened next. Without further ado, I put the spoon to his lips. He emitted the most gut-wrenching shriek-like sound. It had not even crossed my mind to test the heat of the soup, nor even thought that burnt skin might be much more sensitive to temperature. I cannot, to this day, describe how I felt but, that single experience taught me to always try and gauge a disabled person’s way of being, responses, to respect their individual identities and regard them as on a par with myself. I spent several months seeing “my airman,” as I came to call him, every Saturday. From him I learnt resilience and indeed defiance in the face of disablement. Whenever I think of him, I am reminded of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” as I am sure “my airman” did.1 My second assignment was to an old people’s home near the school. It was more a hospital than a home as there were no private rooms but small wards. All the elderly inmates were suffering from some degree of dementia. This proved to be a different eye opener for me. We were not assigned to anybody but would help on the ward serving meals and such like, sit with elderly people who could still converse and even with those that could not in the hope of somehow keeping them company. At that time occupational therapy was not in place as a regular feature of daily life in homes, and as now, the wards seemed to be very understaffed and the shifts that came on and off duty while we were there, stressed. The residents were all at different stages of senility and what today would 1 | Thomas, Dylan (1952): In Country Sleep and Other Poems, New York: New Directions.

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be clear cases of Alzheimer. Those residents who were aware of their surroundings, would welcome us and ask that we spend time with them. The sense of loneliness was patent. Each had a story to tell, a biography of a life now slowly vanishing and repeated on each visit. Others, however, were completely lost in a world of silence, blank expressions, rarely communicating at all. Some of the residents had moved into a state of childish behaviour which could fluctuate between extreme anger or pranking. I remember one very old lady whose sense of fun was a trial indeed. She would often wet her bed and a clean one would be made up for her. On a bad day, she would unmake the bed, pile all the bedding in a stack at the end, sit on it at a very dangerous angle and then proceed to urinate or defecate on the lot with great glee. I think most of us learnt the value of patience and a sense of respect for the elderly regardless of their mental or physical condition. The following year, in Upper Sixth Form the assignations changed. We were sent in pairs to an elderly person’s house to help with shopping, light cleaning, making cups of tea or coffee and really, overall, we found that what the elderly really wanted was our company. We always went to the same person’s house. Over the months Jane and I, who worked together, worked out a routine whereby during the time we were with Mrs. Whitehouse, she was never left alone. We would take it in turns each weekend to do the shopping or the light housework. We were struck by the loneliness she obviously suffered from, lack of neighborly contact and most of all lack of contact with her family who had moved overseas. She obviously looked forward to seeing us each Saturday and took a keen interest in what we had been doing but also slowly revealed much of her biography to us. The one thing she never did was to complain either about her ailments or her loneliness. She felt life had, and was, still being good to her. It was a sad day for all three of us when we had to say goodbye, new horizons opened for us at university and dreams of what the future would bring us. For Mrs. Whitehouse the horizon remained flat and predictable. I had eighteen months free before going to university and, at a loss as to what to do, I took up auxiliary nursing at the Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases in Bath, where I lived. It was, and may still be, the largest hospital dedicated to Rheumatic diseases. It was here I learnt the basic skills of care, making tight beds, helping to bath and dress patients who were disabled by rheumatism, how to lift without damaging one’s back, basic first aid, and a whole host of other things which have stood me in good stead over

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the years. I had no idea at all that some form of rheumatic disease could disable young people like Georgina, aged eighteen and already confined to a wheel chair! Nor had I any knowledge of just how crippling the condition could be, rendering a person unable to turn on a tap, hold a knife or fork, reducing their mobility to close to zero and of course the pain encountered as the illness took its course. The work was hard on an eight-hour shift. There were moments of glumness, but also moments of laughter and joking. It was fortunate that this was not a hospital where deaths occurred, or at least not while I was there, but the tough part was the inability to alleviate many of the patients’ discomfort. Some were in for quite a time while others came and went quite quickly. Years later, when I helped my ageing parents and parents-in law I became aware of just how much I had learnt through experience both at school and in the hospital. Without having had that experience it would have been far harder for me to have come to terms with what was happening in my own family and attempt to deal with it. Now, I myself am in the category of ageing! It remains to be seen whether the experience acquired over the years will enable me to confront whatever awaits me. I have learnt resilience in the face of difficulties through working with the elderly and disabled. I firmly believe that experience is the best mentor one can have in one’s life. It is, in many ways, a passive learning process, that allows for thoughts and events to filter and sediment themselves in one’s brain and inner self. When the need arises these sedimented experiences can be called upon to meet any necessity that arises. Looking back, I now realize that this is exactly what has happened in my own life. When my family was in need of care, experienced events surfaced, and I was able to reshape them and apply my learning to the question in hand. I have written poetry from time to time on ageing and the elderly, and I would like to end with one in which I find so many elderly people I have known portrayed.

E xperience as Mentor in Helping to Deal with Old Age

Hibiscus cardinal hats ridiculous, bobbing on a window box – rotting wood precariously perched on an urban sill – flaking paint decaying, watched by a woman who cannot remember her name.

Works Cited Thomas, Dylan (1952): In Country Sleep and Other Poems, New York: New Directions.

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“One must take it as it comes” A Virtue-Ethical Approach to the Exemplary Life Practices of Centenarians Aag je Swinnen and Hanne Laceulle Attitudes towards the oldest old seem to encompass an intriguing paradox. On the one hand, the oldest old are relegated to the category of the fourth age (Gilleard/Higgs 2010) and associated with fearful, deplorable images of frailty and dependence. On the other hand, once people are 100 and beyond, they are celebrated and admired. The fascination with centenarians has taken three, often interrelated, forms: 1) historical fascination for centenarians as living links to the past; 2) fascination for the underlying bio-psycho-social mechanisms causing exceptional longevity, whereby some scholars even dream of cracking the code of immortality in a modern version of the ancient quest for the fountain of youth; 3) fascination for the oldest old as potentially meaningful and inspiring role-models of living and aging well (Swinnen 2014). This article ties in with the third form, focusing on elements of centenarians’ life practices, attitudes and character dispositions that may make them exemplary figures. These elements are explored by analyzing data from qualitative interviews with ten centenarians, collected in the context of the Marble project “The Cultural Fascination with Centenarians” at Maastricht University. Our interpretation is guided by a virtue-ethical framework. Virtue ethics enables reflection on what it means to aspire to a good and meaningful life, and what character dispositions may be helpful in enduring life’s adversities and vulnerabilities. We consider virtue ethics to be a valuable new perspective in centenarian studies, which may enrich the dominant bio-psycho-social approaches.

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We start with a brief discussion of some relevant studies on centenarians, which focus on their psycho-social dispositions and distinctive behaviours. Next, we introduce our virtue-ethical framework and discuss its relevance for the context of aging. After this, our methodological approach and the empirical findings from the interviews will be presented. In the final discussion, we reflect on our findings in relation to the virtue-ethical framework.

Theore tical B ackground Psycho-social Outlook of Centenarians In a review of centenarian studies of recent decades, Poon et al. (2016) present longevity as a highly individualized process influenced by numerous factors, varying from genetic outlook and personality characteristics to available social resources. Longevity turns out to be a multi-layered phenomenon and the very old are involved in a complex daily struggle to balance their remaining psycho-social and spiritual resources with the increasingly heavy burden of daily life stressors, including functional and cognitive decline. The majority of centenarian studies are quantitative, applying diverse measures of physical health, psychological traits, general well-being, and life satisfaction. The number of qualitative studies remains comparatively limited (Jopp et al. 2016a). They probe the life histories and experiences of centenarians, usually with rather small samples (cf. Hutnik et al. 2012; Araújo et al. 2016a; Darviri et al. 2009; Dello Buono et al. 1998). The cultural settings in which centenarian studies are performed are quite diverse, including American, European (e.g., Danish, German, Italian, or Greek), Australian, and Asian cultures (e.g., Japan and Hong Kong). The studies include respondents from both urban and rural environments, either living in institutionalized settings or in their own homes/with their families. The vast majority of centenarians participating in these studies is of female gender (Poon et al. 2016). Underlying most centenarian studies is a strong drive to unravel the secrets of successful aging. The assumption seems that those who manage to reach (the age of) a 100 and older must have some exceptional characteristics. What these studies define as ‘successful’ in aging is largely,

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and rather uncritically, following the assumptions underlying contemporary successful aging discourse, which implies a strong focus on health, functional abilities, (relative) independence, and self-supportiveness (Rowe/Kahn 1998). The centenarians in these studies, perhaps not so surprisingly, often score rather low on these characteristics. Yet, most participants do report experiencing their lives as good and meaningful, although they simultaneously hope for their long lives to come to an end (cf. Jeune et al. 2010; Araújo et al. 2016b). This should perhaps urge us once again to nuance the criteria for success in aging discourses (Holstein/ Minkler 2003). Despite the individual diversification, some common characteristics of centenarians are worth mentioning. For example, centenarians score relatively low on the personality characteristics neuroticism and extraversion and relatively high on agreeableness and conscientiousness (Martin et al. 2012; Kato et al. 2012; Baek et al. 2016). Also, they generally show an optimistic attitude towards life, combined with a well-developed capacity to adapt to situations of adversity (Bishop et al. 2012; Engberg et al. 2013; Jopp et al. 2016b; Kato et al. 2012). In addition, the oldest old are characterized by a resilient emotional profile (where positive and negative affect are both moderate but accompanied by sufficient life satisfaction and adaptive emotion regulation strategies) (Etxeberria et al. 2017). More interesting than these general correlations are perhaps the accounts given by the very old themselves in qualitative studies. Jeune et al. (2010) have reviewed available (auto)biographical sources on some of the longest living known persons (115+ years) to evaluate their special characteristics. Among the cases they discuss is the famous Jeanne Calment who reached the age of 122. She was a strong-willed and humorous person with a talent for enjoying small things in life and an unwillingness to linger with losses and grievances. As is reported about several other centenarians as well, Calment was highly selective in her choice of social contacts and felt it was important to be satisfied with life and not complain. It is noteworthy that, for many centenarians, religion and spirituality prove to be important continuing factors in their lives. A religious or spiritual outlook helps them to accept the decline that is inherent in reaching a very old age and to give meaning to their longevity (Manning et al. 2012). Calment, for instance, reported to feel like “God’s little angel,” which comforted her and contributed to her lacking fear of death (Jeune

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et al. 2010: 292). In addition, many centenarians reported that their social embedding was crucial to them. In a qualitative project in nursing homes by Schrader (2008), respondents emphasized the importance of being able to enjoy life, humor and laughing with others, religious orientation and praying, taking time to enjoy friends, family, and hobbies, and remaining socially engaged, both by doing things with and for others. This implies an embedding in a social and communal context, which is one of the underlying principles of virtue ethics. Here, living a good life is always understood in a social and relational manner, never purely individualistic. We will now turn to our discussion of this philosophical perspective.

Introducing Virtue Ethics Virtue ethics goes back a long way in the history of Western moral philosophy (Crisp/Slote 1997). In the world of Greco-Roman antiquity, where philosophy was perceived as a practice of continuous moral and spiritual self-development (Hadot 1995), virtue was the central focus of ethics. The good life was geared towards eudaimonia or happiness. Happiness was understood not primarily in modern terms of lifesatisfaction but rather in terms of human flourishing. Developing and practicing virtues throughout life was seen as quintessential for optimal fulfilment of one’s potential for self-realization as member of the polis or community. In Aristotle’s well-known Nicomachean Ethics, virtue is described as an excellence of character. The good life for human beings is believed to be realized through “activity of the soul in accordance with virtue” (Aristotle 1980: 14). Importantly, this means that virtue ethics, in general, is concerned with moral self-development rather than moral legitimization of actions, which is a much more common approach in contemporary moral philosophy (Schneewind 1990). Developing virtues presupposed a lifelong process of maturation and gaining experience through acting in the right manner. Consequently, according to Aristotle, children could not yet be called virtuous, for virtue requires life experience. On the other hand, older people could also not automatically be perceived as virtuous; after all, a long life offers plenty of possibilities to go astray in the quest for a good life, and, as Aristotle famously stated, “one swallow doesn’t make a summer” (1980: 14). Virtues are thus attitudes and character-dispositions to be practiced throughout

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our entire lives; we become more just, generous, courageous, etc. through performing just, generous, or courageous acts. Virtue ethics does not aim to formulate general ethical principles other than strive for excellence. Rather, it emphasizes the importance of assessing the demands of a specific situation and act upon these demands from a virtuous disposition or attitude which helps one to define the most appropriate response (Swanton 2003). It is thus a highly context-sensitive, flexible approach to ethics, which can be seen as a distinct advantage in the context of contemporary moral pluralism (Laceulle 2017). Another important feature of virtue ethics is its sensitivity for the profound interdependence of human beings and the way their individual lives are intertwined with the moral traditions that have shaped the socio-cultural context of their lives (MacIntyre 1984); in particular, contemporary reinterpretations of virtue ethics emphasize the fragile complexity of striving for a good life. The demands of the self always have to be balanced in a prudent manner with the demands of others and of the world (Swanton 2003). These contemporary versions can be seen as less ‘perfectionist’ than the traditional Aristotelian account, where excellence is the high purpose to be acquired. Swanton, for instance, defines virtue in terms of a ‘good quality of character’ that enables people to respond to situations in an ‘excellent or good enough’ way (Swanton 2003: 19, our emphasis). We follow this less perfectionist interpretation, which also implies that people need not be overall virtuous to be inspiring examples to others. Precisely because virtuousness takes shape in specific contextualized practices, it is not necessarily the case that people will be virtuous in all situations. Naturally, a more general disposition of virtuousness can be expected to increase their admirable status in the eyes of others.

Virtue Ethics and E xemplar y Figures In traditional virtue ethics, it was believed that someone who managed to lead a virtuous life embodied a form of excellence as a human being. For Aristotle, it is this form of virtuous excellence that makes a human being a good human being. That is, a human being that performs its natural function well, just like a hammer is only a good hammer when it performs its function of hammering well. The—somewhat unspecific— criterion for virtuous behavior for Aristotle was acting like a virtuous person

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would act in a given situation. Thus, we can see that virtue ethics is quite congenial to the idea that we can learn something from others when it comes to living a good life. Virtuous persons are perceived as exemplars of moral excellence, who can function as role models for others in their quest towards a more virtuous existence of eudaimonia. It is important, however, to reflect on what it means to be a moral exemplar to others and to be inspired by one. In the Aristotelian tradition, virtuous persons represent those members of the community that embody practical wisdom, as the most fundamental virtue encompassing other virtues. Embodying practical wisdom gives virtuous people high social status and incites others to follow their example. However, simply imitating the virtuous practice of the exemplar is not enough to become a good person oneself. We should remain critical towards the ones we admire, for their conduct may not be overall good or match our own life circumstances in every regard. Thus, it is not a good idea to imitate virtuous role models uncritically, as if their behavior sets standards for our own life. Duyndam (2012) argues that we are all inclined to mimetically follow the example of others without properly reflecting on it. This natural mimetic tendency becomes potentially dangerous, however, if we lose our distance towards our role models and fail to critically evaluate their example. To escape this danger, Duyndam suggests that we should engage with exemplary figures in a hermeneutical way. This means that we should always critically interpret the meaning of the example for our own lives, thereby performing an act of application. Because virtue ethics is a flexible, context-sensitive rather than a universal, rule-based ethics, it provides plenty of opportunities for hermeneutically engaging with virtuous persons and developing one’s own form of virtuousness in the process.

Virtue Ethics and Aging There are several reasons why a virtue-ethical perspective is relevant for the context of aging. First of all, the fact that virtue ethics presupposes a lifelong human capacity for moral development of excellent qualities of character gives it a counter-cultural potential against decline narratives, which are generally negating development in older people (Laceulle 2017). Second, as Norton (1979) has emphasized, it is typical for eudaemonist ethical perspectives, such as virtue ethics, that they are sensitive to the

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idea that each phase of life may have its own specific values and virtues instead of prioritizing moral terms belonging to adulthood, as is rather common in our culture and society. Third, virtue ethics has great value in developing perspectives on how to deal with the existential vulnerabilities inherent in our human condition. This results from its emphasis on finding ways to balance demands of self-development with external demands. The latter include both contingent and existential forms of vulnerability, with which older people are more likely to be confronted. We can, therefore, expect the consideration of possible attitudes and character dispositions, i.e., virtues that help them deal with these vulnerabilities in a meaningful way, to be valuable (Laceulle 2017). However, the application of virtue-ethical language to the domain of aging has remained limited. May (1986) uses virtue ethics to found his contention that older people should be taken more seriously as full members of the community. By implication, they should be treated as moral beings whose behavior may be evaluated in a moral sense. He reproaches professional caregivers for often consigning older people to the status of passive recipient of services rather than treating them as full-fledged moral agents with an active responsibility for their own lives. The common response to similar critiques has been to proclaim the importance of respecting older people’s autonomy (Holstein et al. 2011; Moody 1992). However, May argues that an approach focusing on questions of character and virtue is much more sensible. In his view, autonomy is not very helpful for older people facing “the ordeals of sickness […] infirmity, and fading powers” (1986: 49). Instead, gerontologists and ethicists should focus on the strengths of character that older people need to integrate these circumstances in their lives. Relevant virtues discussed by May include courage, patience, simplicity, benignity, integrity, wisdom, and, finally, hilarity—a type of “humoured detachment” (1986: 49) that can emerge in people who have been through a lot. Developing these virtues requires perseverance and often struggle, but the effort pays off because it enables people to address life’s challenges in a meaningful way. Ruddick (1999) also raises the question of which virtues may be of relevance in the context of aging. She highlights two examples of virtues that she perceives as particularly precious from an aging perspective. The first is the capacity to forgive and let go of bitterness and regret, which she connects to the importance of life review and the Eriksonian goal of egointegrity or acceptance of how one’s life has turned out. The second is the

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capacity for what she calls wise independence. This includes both upholding one’s self-directing capacities and acknowledging one’s limitations in this regard and being able to accept needed assistance with an attitude of graciousness. Other virtues especially relevant to aging, according to Ruddick, are curiosity, capacity for pleasure and delight, concern for others, (self-)acceptance, appreciation, hopefulness, and “energetic anger” (1999: 51). Importantly, Ruddick refutes the idea that it is overly demanding to expect virtuousness from older people. She does warn, however, that virtues of older people commonly valued by others, such as productivity, independence, or self-sufficiency, mirror the problematically stereotypical and ageist understandings of later life and could, therefore, have detrimental consequences for aging persons.

D ata C ollection and A nalysis Before we turn to our empirical findings, we introduce our method. Our data are generated by students from Maastricht University who participated in the Marble project “The Cultural Fascination with Centenarians” under supervision of the first author in 2013. For this project, five students and their supervisor interviewed ten people who were born between 1909 and 1913 (Table 1). The general aim of the interviews was to gain a better understanding of the meanings centenarians attribute to their exceptionally long lives and what they believe are the reasons behind their longevity. Possible participants were identified by consulting local newspapers that report on festivities surrounding centenarians, municipalities, and nursing homes. All participants gave informed consent and their contributions are anonymized. The interviews were conducted in Dutch, German, and Italian depending on the interviewers’ nationality and language skills. Participants were interviewed up to three times and the length of the interviews varied between 45 and 75 minutes. All interviews were transcribed and then analyzed through multiple rounds of close reading. For the purpose of this chapter, we focus on attitudes towards life and life practices that could be exemplary or inspiring to younger generations. In this respect, we have identified four themes that we will elaborate on in the next section. These themes are: doing one’s best in life, practicing equanimity, adapting and accepting, and claiming agency. Quotes from interviewees are translated by the first author.

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Table 1: Participants Alias

Place

Year of birth

Living situation

Religion

Occupation

Mr. S.

Sardinia, Italy

1913

Lives in his own house with support of daughters Is in good health

Catholic

Dairy owner

Mr. B.

Sardinia, Italy

1913

Lives in his own home with a housekeeper Is in good health

Has no interest in religion

Medical doctor

Mrs. F.

North RhineWestphalia, Germany

1909

Shares a house with daughter and son-inlaw who take care of her Stays temporarily in a nursing home when her family members are travelling Uses a wheelchair, has problems with sight and hearing, and has a leg that has an open sore

Catholic

Draper’s saleswoman

Mrs. S.

Belgian Limburg

1913

Lives in a nursing home Uses a walker

Catholic

Housewife

Mrs. R.

North RhineWestphalia, Germany

1913

Lives in a nursing home Is in good health except walking difficulties

Catholic

Seamstress

Mrs. O.

North RhineWestphalia, Germany

1912

Lives independently with a little professional assistance

Evangelical Christian

Housewife

Mrs. N.

Gelderland, The Netherlands

1913

Lives in a service flat Uses a walker and hearing aid

Dutch Reformed

Housewife

Mrs. B.

Zeeland, The Netherlands

1913

Lives at home with support of family and nurses Has fractures of the pubic and collar bone

Catholic

Housewife

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Mrs. J.

Belgian Limburg

1911

Lives in a nursing home Has a pacemaker

Not mentioned

Not mentioned

Mrs. C.

Dutch Limburg

1911

Lives in a nursing home Uses a walker and wears a hearing aid

Not mentioned

Housewife

F indings “I have taken ever ything seriously and where I could help, I did” (Mrs. F.): Doing one’s best in life In order to define the first theme that we could identify, we have coined the phrase “doing one’s best in life.” First, “doing one’s best in life” refers to the seriousness with which interviewees take on tasks. In their most literal sense, tasks are here understood as professional duties as well as household chores. Mrs. F. kept working in a draper’s shop till she turned sixty in addition to taking care of her family. Mr. B. takes pride in the fact that he never took a day off and instructs the interviewer to note down the controversial statement that he perceived the war as his only holiday. Mrs. J. confirms also that “working well is already the start of a good life.” In a more figurative sense, life is perceived as a task that requires longstanding commitment and unwavering engagement. Mrs. O.’s life motto is “never start to give up and never give up to start again” (more specifically, the German translation “Fang nie an aufzuhören, hör nie auf anzufangen” of the famous aphorism by Marcus Tullius Cicero). When her husband and resident sister-in-law passed away and her bachelor son suddenly decided to leave his parental home and get married, she fell into a depression. After a five-week stay in psychiatric care, she succeeded in turning the page and getting on with her life. Each time when Mrs. O. feels “she cannot go on like this,” “things get better,” in her experience. Second, “doing one’s best in life” applies to how one interacts with other people. Mr. S. believes that there is a causal relation between his healthy senescence and the fact that he has always tried to “do good for others.” He brings into memory that a priest once told him that “in doing good for others, you help yourself.” Mr. S., Mrs. F., and Mrs. J. all emphasize that

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they have no enemies or conflicts. Mrs. N. says that “if you want others to have an interest in you, you should also show that you are interested in them.” This way she explains the relational quality of genuine concern. This brings us to a third aspect of “doing one’s best in life,” namely to remain outward-looking within the limits that one is confronted with. Some interviewees love trying out something new. To the surprise of her caregivers, Mrs. R., for instance, went into the wonder wheel of the local funfair. Mrs. C. has signed up for a four-day walking tour that she absolutely wants to be a part of even in her wheelchair. Mrs. B. learned how to use a SimPC and made a family tree as well as a family book upon her children’s recommendation. Although she only has a primary school diploma, she continued developing herself first by learning together with her children and then by taking language courses. She is adamant that “going with the new things” brings you further in life. Many interviewees stay up-to-date by following the news. Staying in touch with others—however limited—is also a way of staying involved. Mr. S. looks out the window all day and greets passersby. In his view, “anyone who never talks to other people is lost.” Mrs. N. stresses the importance of “not isolating oneself but taking a step outside.” For Mr. B., this takes the shape of a daily ride with his car. Mrs. O. closely follows the whereabouts of her grandchildren. Especially the exchanges with her granddaughter A. keep her informed about the way gender roles have changed and about the challenges young career women face nowadays.

“I am content with what I have. One must take it as it comes” (Mrs. S.): Practicing Equanimity Despite exposure to pain and loss, the majority of our interviewees show a high degree of psychological stability and composure, which we call equanimity. “Practicing equanimity” takes three forms. First, enjoying little things seems to uphold the interviewees’ balance of mind. In Mrs. S.’s and Mrs. J.’s experiences, a simple glass of red wine makes for a nice evening. Mrs. O. loves to cook and bake. Mrs. N. takes pleasure in the monthly activities from charity De Zonnebloem. She describes a good life as follows: “Well, the positive things, well, what can I say, that you still are able to enjoy what is left, what you can and may do.” Mrs. C. and Mrs. R. also like participating in activities (such as singing and playing games) organized by the nursing home that they reside in. Furthermore, Mrs. R. appreciates visits from her carnival association. Yet,

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most interviewees dote on their family members and look forward to their visits. Mrs. C. takes joy in shopping with her daughter and likes receiving small gifts. Mrs. N. is pleased that her family who lives in Tasmania made the effort to join her 100th birthday party. Mrs. J. cannot wait to see her granddaughter marry. This is how she puts the blessing of offspring and friends into words: “Children who visit daily. Have visitors each day. Many visits. Makes me content.” Contentment is not connected to grand gestures but small pleasures. Being grateful is a second element of the theme of equanimity. Mrs. F. is grateful that her daughter (74) and son-in-law (80) take care of her. In the course of the interview, she stresses several times that their dedication is extraordinary and even may put their own health at risk. Mrs. R. is also appreciative of the professional care that she receives and thankful for her roommate even though the latter is bedridden and hardly able to speak. Mrs. F. thanks God for her having such good children. She refers in particular to the fact that the sons from her first and second marriage get along so well. In her turn, each night, Mrs. O. says a prayer for her cognitive health. Mr. S. feels complete contentment with his life after retirement, a life without big plans or great expectations. In a similar vein, Mrs. N. says: “Every day is a day […] I really do not expect anything anymore. I am very happy that I have been able to achieve this, really grateful for it.” None of the interviewees takes his or her longevity for granted. Third, some interviewees put their trust in God and surrender to his plans. In prayer, they find peace. Mrs. S. prays around the clock for a local saint (’t Heilig Paterke) and attends mass three times a week. She always has her rosary at hand. Mrs. B. no longer visits church but prays before each meal when she is alone. Mrs. F. hopes that God will answer her prayer to die before her daughter and son-in-law. With a smile, she adds that God clearly is not listening. There seems to be a connection between the faith of these interviewees and the fact that they do not fear death. Mrs. F. recalls telling her son on his deathbed that the only thing left for her to do was to pray for him. Mrs. R. says: “When the day comes, it comes.” Feeling part of a bigger picture contributes to these interviewees’ equanimity.

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“And then I thought, I should not do that anymore” (Mrs. N.): Adapting and Accepting The third theme encompasses both the life strategies of adapting and accepting, as they are so closely interrelated and equally important to wellbeing. Several interviewees have accepted traumatic events from the past. They talk about great losses over the course of their lives with remarkable resignation. Still, the misfortunes some had to deal with are considerable. Mrs. F.’s mother, who lived with a psychiatric disability died at 47. As a result, Mrs. F. grew up with a stepmother with whom she had a difficult relationship. Furthermore, Mrs. F. had a miscarriage and later lost a son to cancer when he was only 56. Then, her husband and sisters died. The first husband of Mrs. S. died during the Second World War and left her with three young boys. After getting remarried, a son from her second marriage died at the age of two because of a wrong diagnosis. Mrs. R. lost her father when she was eight. Her sons passed away before her— one of them at 54. Watching her sons’ photographs, Mrs. M. becomes emotional for a moment. Apart from this moment in which Mrs. M. gave in to sadness, interviewees tend to discuss painful incidents from the past with notable acquiescence. Most interviewees have also learned to accept their dependency on others—caused by age related functional changes—as well as the fact that their social network is getting smaller and smaller because of the death of family and friends. When Mrs. F. describes her daily care routines, it is striking that she does not show any embarrassment despite the physical intimacy this care, provided by her daughter and son-in-law, entails. Both Mrs. R. and Mrs. C. talk about their transition from one place to another. Mrs. R. says with resignation: “It is not better here. At home it was nicer. Better. I lived in the Hartmannstraße. Gone is gone.” Mrs. C. discusses the discomforts resulting from the construction of the new nursing home that she lives in at length. Yet, she adds that she has adjusted to the new situation and now enjoys her environment. Another recurring topic is Mrs. C.’s annoyance over the coming and going of nursing staff. Yet, she also tries to accept that this is the way the care is organized and that it might even impact more negatively on the interns than on her. Mrs. N. misses people from her generation to share memories or to play cards with. Laconically, she adds: “So be it.” Instead, she has learned to pass her time with knitting and other handicraft.

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Accepting that things have changed often results in adapting oneself to new circumstances. Interviewees show their capacity to adjust plans and expectations. Mrs. B. always looked forward to her husband’s retirement. They had plans to visit Indonesia, the country where he was born. Unfortunately, her husband died during a trip to Canterbury. From that moment onwards, she started travelling with girlfriends, which she enjoyed tremendously. She ended up visiting Indonesia with them instead of with her husband. After her depression, Mrs. O. started travelling to Naples and did so all by herself between her 80 and 85 years of life. After the fire in the airport of Düsseldorf in 1996 and the chaos and fear she was confronted with, she gave up her journeys and accepted that this chapter of her life was closed.

“I am not going to sit at home watching the world from behind the geraniums” (Mrs. N.): Claiming Agency “Claiming agency,” our fourth theme, refers specifically to how interviewees safeguard a sense of independence within care relations. In the first place, “claiming agency” implies that interviewees to a certain extent manage to maintain personal routines and habits. Mrs. R. finds it important to read and watch television at night. When nurses try to switch the lights or television off, she reproves them until she gets her way. She claims not to bother the resident that she shares a room with because she puts the television on mute. When Mrs. R. wants to visit the teahouse in the garden, she insists on getting there by herself. When the interviewer suggests opening the window, she reprimands her for taking away her agency. Mrs. C. keeps busy from morning till evening by getting her place and herself in order. She puts it as follows: “Yes, I have always something to do. To sit and to walk and to walk and to sit. Sitting and walking. When I start in the morning, getting dressed and undressed again. […] I do everything by myself and I have Brinta porridge in the morning.” Doing it oneself, however limited, is crucial to the self-esteem of these centenarians. In the second place, “claiming agency” may refer to how interviewees respond to ageist behavior and talk on the part of medical professionals. It is remarkable that many of the physical inconveniences (poor eyesight and a paralyzed arm or leg) that the centenarians in this study are confronted with are caused by the decisions not to operate or treat otherwise in the past simply because doctors did not foresee their clients would continue

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to live on for another two decades. The case of Mrs. C. is most poignant in this respect. When she had unbearable stomach pain, first, her complaints were not taken seriously. Then, she was misdiagnosed and only received diuretics, which nearly killed her. In each interview, she recollects this experience and takes pride in her endurance: “But I saved myself, really. I know who the culprit of that evening is, but I will remain silent. I better keep silent.” Sharing this and similar stories with the interviewers seems a way of reclaiming one’s voice when not being heard previously. In the third place, interviewees tend to self-limit their radius of action in order not to jeopardize other liberties. Mrs. O. loved gardening but decided to give it up after two falls. Having made this decision, she can still remain in her own house. Mrs. N. no longer leaves her flat without company: “No, I do not dare do it anymore. And why should I exhaust myself then? Why would I do that”? Because she avoids stairs, she no longer makes home visits to two of her children. Also, Mrs. C. stopped walking stairs and feels she is too old to learn to use a mobility scooter. To these centenarians, self-limitation is not a matter of defeat but a rather unexpected way of taking matters in one’s own hands.

D iscussion We have presented virtue ethics as a potentially valuable perspective to explore how the centenarians in our study can serve as inspiring exemplary figures for others. Our interpretation of virtue ethics as a context-sensitive perspective on the good life strongly emphasizes the importance of responding to the situation at hand in the most sensible way—that is, through balancing your own needs and the needs of the external world in the most optimal manner. It is in this virtuous response to life situations that people embody excellent attitudes, character dispositions, and values and may inspire admiration and hermeneutical application of their exemplarity to other people’s lives. Because the most virtuous way of acting depends on the situation and context of particular life circumstances, the aim of this chapter has not been to arrive at a list of virtues that are generalizable to the group of centenarians. As such, the themes from our analysis are not meant to correspond with canonical virtues. Instead, the attitudes and life practices of centenarians emerging from the interviews are exemplary in their continuous search for a

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balance between agency and resignation in dealing with life’s challenges and pleasures. It is precisely in this balance that their virtuousness is expressed. Looking through the lens of virtue ethics enables us to arrive at a better understanding of the ways in which persons who live exceptionally long lives manage to sustain meaning in life as part of a continuous moral self-development in interaction with their social community. In our view, the findings offer a more detailed insight into how our interviewees deal with contingent and existential vulnerabilities characteristic of aging. Abstract notions of virtues, such as equanimity and acceptance, turn into very concrete actions and activities narrated by the interviewees. Goethe’s saying that “it is in working within limits that the master reveals himself” (cf. “Was Wir Bringen” 1802) seems to resonate well with our four themes. The centenarians in this study first and foremost illustrate how they succeed in finding “more” in “less.” They seem to have found the wisdom to distinguish between what they can and cannot change in life, the strength to endure adversities, and the courage to commit to changing and developing themselves where possible, to paraphrase the well-known serenity prayer that sums up the aim of virtue ethics rather aptly. As mentioned in our theoretical framework, we propose a nonperfectionist interpretation of virtue ethics, which departs from the idea that persons need to be virtuous at all times and in all circumstances to be inspiring examples. We conceptualize virtuousness as a practice, i.e., a contextualized doing rather than being, which implies that it is unfixed and changeable. For this reason, we find it important to also address some of the instances in which the interviewees do not manifest themselves as especially virtuous or inspiring. For instance, Mr. B. perceives aging as a terrible illness. He complains and whines over all kinds of losses in life from the loss of values and norms to his loss of independence (mind that he has no health issues and lives at home). His children have always known him to be grumpy and little affectionate and put his complaints into perspective in their exchange with the interviewer. Mrs. F. shows little compassion when discussing other people’s misfortunes. In her view, her sister, an avid smoker, owed it to herself that she died of lung cancer. Moreover, the confused older woman who uninvitedly frequents her room is perceived to be a threat to her safety in a classic example of the abjection of people living with dementia. Nonetheless, in the findings above, there are several instances in which these particular interviewees demonstrate behavior that could be perceived as exemplary.

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The majority of research into centenarians offers a functionalist psychological approach and mainly identifies character traits that can be causally linked to chronological age and health. We are convinced that a virtue-ethical approach to the exemplary life practices of centenarians offers an important addition to these functionalist psychological approaches. Functionalist psychological approaches are predominantly individualistic and interpret social relations mainly according to their instrumental value. Virtue ethics, by contrast, perceives human beings as social and moral beings that co-constitute meaning in communities together. To illustrate this, we may look at the religious outlook that often characterizes the oldest old (cf. Manning et al. 2012). Psychological approaches focus on the instrumental importance of this religious orientation, for instance by emphasizing how it takes away fear of dying. Religious approaches, by contrast, focus on the importance of a sense of vertical connectedness with transcendent dimensions of life, which suggests a sensitivity to meaning-making dimensions. Virtue ethics takes this a step further and adds reflection on the role of humans as moral communal beings, adding a horizontal relation of connectedness to the picture. Our research illustrates how the attitudes and practices of the participants are indeed, to a certain extent, related to their religious worldview. To let go of expectations, to adapt to new circumstances, to continue contributing to other people’s lives in meaningful ways, and to be grateful for possibilities that are left, to name just a few concrete outcomes, are informed by trust in God and his larger plans for humanity. From a virtue-ethical point of view, we can interpret these findings as the fulfillment of people’s potential for self-development in service of the continuous creation of a viable human moral community. This illustrates how belonging is as important for a good life as religious belief. As we advocate a hermeneutical approach to understanding centenarians as exemplary figures, it is necessary to acknowledge not only that interpreting the interviews is a hermeneutical exercise of its own but also that the data are generated in a very specific encounter between a younger student and a centenarian of her interest. One of the pedagogical aims of the project was to enable an intergenerational exchange between students in their early twenties and persons who have lived a hundred years or longer. In general, the experience of these younger students with older persons is limited to their encounter with grandparents or other family members. Rather than just speaking about longevity, the research

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invited them to directly engage with centenarians to discuss what a good life entails. What does it mean for centenarians to perform virtue in such specific intergenerational encounter? And what are the hands-on hermeneutical skills that interviewers need to turn these conversations into fruitful exchanges on practices of virtue? These are directions for future research.

C onclusion This chapter started with the contradiction between the fear of aging into deep old age and the fascination with centenarians. Many younger people have difficulties imagining their older selves and are rather sceptical towards the possibility of sustaining good living practices when being confronted with vulnerabilities and losses. It is our hope that the fascination with people who have lived a century and beyond can be one of the ways to further stimulate reflection on and engagement with their exemplary lives. Furthermore, the virtue-ethical approach that we advance in this chapter enables us to see how the oldest old, through their lifepractices, can keep contributing to the sustainment of a viable social and moral community with those around them. This offers a welcome counterpoint to the cultural tendency that neglects the agential potentials of the oldest old on the basis of their physical and/or mental frailty and dependency.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the Marble students Nina Pappert, Nina Rothermel, Laura Sorgenicht, Iris van de Voort, and Aïsa Widlak as well as the interviewees and their caregivers for their participation in this research.

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Hadot, Pierre (1995): Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell. Holstein, Martha B./Minkler, Meredith (2003): “Self, Society and the ‘New Gerontology’.” In: The Gerontologist 43/6, pp. 787-796. Holstein, Martha B./Parks, Jennifer A./Waymack, Mark H. (2011): Ethics, Aging and Society: The Critical Turn, New York: Springer. Hutnik, Nimmi/Smith, Pam/Koch, Tina (2012): “What Does it Feel Like to Be 100: Socio-emotional Aspects of Well-Being in the Stories of 16 Centenarians Living in the United Kingdom.” In: Aging and Mental Health 16/7, pp. 811-818. Jeune, Bernard/Robine, Jean-Marie/Young, Robert/Desjardins, Bertrand/ Skytthe, Axel/Vaupel, James W. (2010): “Jeanne Calment and Her Successors: Biographical Notes on the Longest Living Humans.” In: Maier, H. et al., “Supercentenarians” Demographic Research Monographs. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, pp. 285-323. Jopp, Daniela S./Boerner, Kathrin/Ribeiro, Oscar/Rott, Christoph (2016a): “Life at Age 100: An International Research Agenda for Centenarian Studies.” In: Journal of Aging and Social Policy 28/3, pp. 133-147. Jopp, Daniela S./Boerner, Kathrin/Cimarolli, Verena/Hicks, Stephanie/ Mirpuri, Sheena/Paggi, Michelle/Cavanagh, Andrew/Kennedy, Erin (2016b): “Challenges Experienced at Age 100: Findings from the Fordham Centenarian Study.” In: Journal of Aging and Social Policy 28/3, pp. 187-207. Kato, Kaori/Zweig, Richard/Barzilai, Nir/Atzmon, Gil (2012): “Positive Attitude Towards Life and Emotional Expression as Personality Phenotypes for Centenarians.” In: Aging 4/5, pp. 359-367. Laceulle, Hanne (2017): “Virtuous Aging and Existential Vulnerability.” In: Journal of Aging Studies 43, pp. 1-8. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1984): After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (3rd ed.), Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Manning, Lydia K./Leek, Jessie A./Radina, M. Elise (2012): “Making Sense of Extreme Longevity: Explorations Into the Spiritual Lives of Centenarians.” In: Journal of Religion, Spirituality and Aging 24/4, pp. 345-359. Martin, Peter/Deshpande-Kamat, Neha/Margrett, Jennifer A./Franke, Warren/Garasky, Steven (2012): “Exceptional Longevity: An Introduction to the Iowa Centenarian Study.” In: International Journal of Aging and Human Development 75/4, pp. 297-316.

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May, William F. (1986): “The Virtues and Vices of the Elderly.” In: Cole, Thomas R./Gadow, Sally, What Does it Mean to Grow Old? Reflections from the Humanities, Durham: Duke University Press. Moody, Harry R. (1992): Ethics in an Aging Society, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Norton, D.L. (1979): Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Poon, Leonard W./Martin, Peter/Hagberg, Bo (2016): “Understanding Very Old Age: Looking Back and Thinking Forward.” In: Journal of Aging and Social Policy 28/3, pp. 208-217. Rowe, J.W./Kahn, R.L. (1998): Successful Aging, New York: Random House Large Print. Ruddick, Sara (1999): “Virtues and Age.” In: Walker, Margaret Urban (ed.), Mother Time: Women, Aging and Ethics, Lanham etc.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., pp. 45-60. Schneewind, J. B. (1990): “The Misfortunes of Virtue.” In: Ethics 101, pp. 42-60. Schrader, Susan L. (2008): “Centenarians’ Views on Long Life and Nursing Home Living.” In: Journal of the American Medical Directors Association 9, pp. 45-50. Swanton, Christine (2003): Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swinnen, Aagje (2014): “Die Faszination der Hundertjährigen: Liv Carlé Mortensens 100 Lightyears.” In: Querformat 7, pp. 35-47.

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Toledo Jeffrey Skoblow In those days Toobin rode the train like a man witching for water. He would settle down and let himself go slack, and when the time came he’d get off: it could be anywhere, the next stop, hours later, or the next morning. The wand of the train had twitched him to earth at night underground in New Madrid more than once, when the concrete and noise and signs called to him, he had disembarked at the docks in Bayonne and in the suburbs of Fontbonne, he had been to Cadiz, which is hardly there at all beside the tracks, a few barns among pastures, where maybe he got off to hear how silent it would be when the train left, and stayed two months. He would stay as long as pleasure and profit made themselves available, or as whim directed, a year sometimes, or only a few days, and board whatever train was running when he was ready. This is how I picture it, anyway. Cadiz is where he came to us from, and I picture him standing beside the track early in the morning, looking at the place one last or at least one more time, leaving without regret or eagerness—moving on. He rides up out of that hilly farmland and all day across the central mesa, and coming into Toledo he’d be asleep, leaning against the window with his jacket balled up for a pillow, waking up as the train slowed down around the bend coming into the station. He looked out and stood—someone sitting near him was gone, he was alone in the compartment—and grabbed his satchel, bag and stick, and went out. That’s how he came to be here: pure chance, more or less. (One of his maxims: pure chance, more or less.) There wouldn’t have been much to see from the station at that time—some shacks and small cinderblock buildings, a garage and gasoline station, the whole place somehow vaguely under construction, some trucks, a dog and some chickens: like a picture of almost nothing, he said. (Not that it’s much improved since then, although the chickens are gone and more than the one road is paved.)

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When you come into town even today, coming over the crest of that little hill up from the train station, it still has the look of some out of production fairytale. You seem to see the place simultaneously from above and below, the big gate rising into view to tower above you at the corner of the great walls, above the gate a dimensionless shadow piled with brick and stone suddenly on top of you. He would have followed the road down to it and gone through. Inside it becomes a narrow street, which the sun hardly reaches even today, cobbled and curving, climbing again, with a sidewalk even still on one side only, and houses right up against one another. He could look ahead to a sunny plaza with signs of activity at the top of the street—bodies in motion, some fountain or obelisk—and, typically, he would turn into the first little hotel he came to. The man behind the counter is straight-faced, with a direct gaze but everything else in his face hidden. There are plenty of rooms, and Toobin signs for one, and when he mentions that he is a teacher the man says he has a son and calls his wife. He asks where Toobin received his training, and nods when Toobin says “Las Palmas.” His wife comes and introduces herself, and stands behind the counter beside him. How old was the boy? 15. Carmello. Could Toobin do math, and language? Language was very important, history and culture. Of course. Try it out for a week, free room, breakfast at the café down the street? Of course, and beyond —? An hourly wage, or however [...]? Of course. At first his lessons to Carmello took the form of casual conversations, and they retained something of this form even later, when their subjects were more deliberately chosen, and readings, perhaps, were involved. They began walking around the neighborhood for an hour or two each day that first week, Carmello answering questions Toobin put to him about how the place worked, who sits on that bench in the little square there, what goes on over here, and asking questions of Toobin, where he’d come from, what he’d seen—half an hour here and there, in between errands Carmello was running for his parents, and other hotel jobs he performed. Toobin took his breakfasts at a café he’d passed the first day, which was run by Flora, who was Carmello’s father’s sister, and settled into his room, and explored the farther reaches of the town on his own. At the end of the first week, he met with Mr. and Mrs. Colombo in the lobby, and told them the lessons were going well, Carmello’s aptitude for language and culture was high, and they’d done a little math [...] Mrs. Colombo said the boy was happy, too, and that he particularly wanted to learn something about

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marsupials. (This remained a lifelong interest). Terms were arranged for the indefinite future. Fall is a beautiful time of year in Toledo, and Toobin and Carmello continued their studies and ranged more widely around the town and occasionally beyond its walls, along the ragged edges of the open spaces around it. More time was provided to them, whole afternoons or weekends at times, to pursue their conversations, which revolved around and rotated among several primary subjects: American literature, historical and contemporary Toledo, ethology, and geometry. They studied walking, and stopped in squares or little parks around town, or at cafés, and would have crossed paths with Carmello’s friends, or friends of his parents, here and there, or with new acquaintances of Toobin’s as he developed his own favorite haunts. It’s easy to picture them sitting often, at various hours of the night and day, in the small plaza at the top of the street by the hotel. They would have a book or two with them, or watch the performers who appeared every week, itinerants like Toobin, in this or that corner of the plaza, dancers and musicians, contortionists, juggling jokers, comic ranters, who would come and go and return within a season. This too was naturally the source of much discussion. Toobin’s habits were always as regular as could be, given the irregularities of living as he did, from place to place, tutoring different students over the years, of different ages, in different situations and arrangements, singly and in groups. He always awoke early, opened the shutters in his room, and sat by the window reading for an hour or two. He only bathed at night, and always in the dark, before going to bed. He always had the same breakfast. Flora remembered that the first morning he walked into her café he was very indecisive and they had a long discussion before he settled, at her suggestion, on thick slices of toasted bread, buttered under the grill, and a small bowl of cappuccino. The second day, when he walked in, she said “the usual?” and never asked again. He always ate lunch out somewhere, alone. Every evening before he ate, he walked for an hour in silence, alone, or with Carmello. He liked having Carmello read the newspaper aloud to him, and often asked him to, especially in the evening. He didn’t like to read by artificial light. When things happened, they seemed already to have been happening for a while. At some point, it would have been hard to say when, and depending on who you listen to, Flora began a flirtation with Toobin, which continued for some time with the breakfast counter between them.

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There wouldn’t have been many other customers there at that hour, only solitary people sitting in the booths in front reading their morning papers, and Flora could stand at the stove and talk to Toobin about whatever people talk about when they’re getting to know one another. He must have known soon that she was married to a man named Marcel, a traveller of some kind, like Toobin, who, unlike Toobin, crossed the country on a regular round, for a while reappearing in Toledo every Spring. No doubt it was during these visits that he had courted her over several years, and one year they married. I imagine her speaking of him fondly but not frequently. And Toobin would often quote Flora’s Universal Cooking Guide which must derive from this time as well: things like flip it before you burn it, and two eyes, four pots, I remember myself; also butter it all the way through, and it’s all in the wrist. In any case it would seem they never saw each other except at breakfast, until one day, one morning after breakfast, Flora took him behind the curtain, behind the counter, through a second (small) kitchen and another room, and through another curtain to bed. At a certain point, too, a couple of weeks after arriving in town Toobin had placed an ad in the Evening Sun which brought him two more students—twin sisters of 16, Patricia and Leticia, with whom he did literature—and then, through their family, another, a young man of 20 who wrote poetry. Carmello remained his primary occupation—apart from spending most mornings after breakfast with Flora, as the Fall went along, and occasional nights as well, once Winter (winter) came; and one time sitting in the plaza together reading Hawthorne, he introduced Carmello to the twins when they came strolling by—they had seen the boy walking in silence with Toobin before—and soon Carmello and Leticia were finding time together apart from other ears and eyes. Occasionally, later, the two would meet with Toobin together; or Carmello would tell his parents that he was going on a silent walk with his teacher for an hour, and meet Leticia in a friend’s basement, or in the library. It may have been their second such relationship. Imagine. As Fall gave way to Winter both couples, elder and younger, pursued their private pleasures. When Carmello learned that Toobin was spending nights elsewhere—his mother, who cleaned the rooms, noticed and told his father, who knew more, and Carmello heard them talking—he asked Toobin about it, and his teacher explained (I imagine perhaps broadening the discussion to talk of affective disturbances and biological mechanisms of various kinds and in general), which would have led Carmello to

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mention his own embraces of Leticia, of which, I imagine, Toobin was not surprised to hear. They were sitting in the park behind the library, as they’ve always told the story, looking at pictures in a book about Euclid, and Carmello was making drawings in the margins of the planes and shapes of Leticia’s body, and then Leticia appeared, and joined them, along with her sister, who then split off on her own. At some point Toobin sent the young people off to the library to find a copy of Lucretius and bring it to him. He bumped into Freddy, the young poet, who had a poem in his pocket, “Love is the Poetry of Death,” which he gave to Toobin with eager apologies before moving on, and which Toobin put in his own pocket, for later. He sat and watched the performers, getting busy for the noon strollers, while he waited for Carmello and Leticia. I can see these people still. A man wearing robotic padding on his knees and elbows does stretching exercises on a little towel he’s spread on the stone ground, and a woman, half-hidden behind a tree, arranges small jars of colored liquids on a folding table. Across the way another man sets up a table, covering it in shimmery velvet cloths, and places two speakers under it, which begin to play poorly recorded burlesque standards. He has a little sign out front—Mr. Diagonal—and pulls two puppets onto his hands and begins dancing them on the velvet, back and forth. Toobin moves closer to see: a preacher and a queen with a crown, glove puppets with finger legs doing a kind of tango. Mr. Diagonal rolls and rocks his own hips to the music like a shy stripper; he has melancholy eyes and long, flowing black hair with silver streaks, and wears a bright yellow running jacket with a shiny blue diagonal slash across the chest, over one shoulder and around the back. He smiles, briefly and sadly, only when the song ends, and changes into another set of puppets, two hula girls who dance to a slower number, or the President and a Madonna ice-skating, breaking into the can-can. An astronaut and an alien, one lumbering, one nimble, doing something operatic. Carmello and Leticia are a long time finding Lucretius and Toobin watches the whole show, drifting into realms of reflection from which he seems to return blank, and looks about him. The young people found him later, in the hotel lobby having his weekly chat with Carmello’s parents about the boy’s progress, telling them that everything was fine and that their son showed unusual diligence in all his subjects. Leticia had found On the Nature of Things and read some aloud to Carmello earlier, but they had spent most of the afternoon rehearsing their presentation on Omoo, she said. Evening was coming down, the teacher

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and his students took their silent hour’s walk and ate together at a bornagain sandwich bar around the corner, then had coffee and talked about atoms and cannibals (depending on who you ask) at a café nearby, and then Toobin left them to go see Flora, as by her invitation that morning (as he had thought). She wasn’t there. The lights were on at her place and the door was unlocked, but the sign on it was turned to “Sorry, Come Again!” and when he entered, calling her name, there was no one. The stove and the counters were clear, and behind the curtain the rooms were dark. He walked through them, calling softly. He sat on the sofa in her middle room, in the dark, but didn’t want to frighten her if she came in late, and he got up and went out for a walk, and when he came back an hour later nothing had changed. He left a note for her on the back of Freddy’s poem, and went back to the hotel. Mr. Colombo was in the lobby, as usual, reading, and waved to Toobin but said nothing—and Toobin took his bath and went to sleep. In the morning, still no sign of Flora. He turned off the café lights and walked through her rooms, which I imagine felt suddenly something like a crime scene, but there was no sign of a crime. He opened her closet, but he had never looked in there before, and couldn’t see if anything had been taken. He looked at her chest of drawers, but didn’t open any, and thought that he should not be there, but stayed. Her bed was made, her shoes were on the floor—but she had other shoes. In the bathroom her toothbrush was in its cup. Mr. and Mrs. Colombo knew nothing, and Carmello was out running errands. The week of the Feast of the Infant Caesar was coming up just then, then as now a huge event, and the local shopkeepers kept the boy busy on top of his usual duties, fetching and delivering for them in their preparations, which in Toledo were if anything even more extensive in those days. Toobin would have seen the men putting decorations up on the lightposts outside their shops earlier that morning, and some religious performers practicing their acts in the plaza though nobody at that hour was listening. He went out walking again—he hadn’t had breakfast—and stopped at a café near the library, where he had difficulty deciding what to eat, and then went back to Flora’s and sat in a booth at the window reading a newspaper from two days before which he found there. After a while he wandered back inside. He found her spare key hanging on a nail by the phone, and heard someone coming in the door of the café—a customer, who wondered where Flora was, and left when

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Toobin explained. He went back to the hotel and Mr. Colombo stopped him in the lobby. “We are not toys, Mr. Toobin,” is what he remembered of what Carmello’s father told him, “we do not live like this.” Leticia was pregnant. Her father had come by. The boy was no longer Toobin’s student, and if he could pack up his things and be gone before evening, it would be appreciated. Toobin understood. It would only have taken him a few moments to pack and then there he was again standing on the sidewalk with his satchel, bag, and stick. That’s how I picture it all, anyway. Which is how I came to be born in the bed at Flora’s place, behind the second curtain, in August of the following year. Toobin went back to the café to put his things down, left the door unlocked and the key in his pocket, and what else, went out walking, and coming back he found Carmello and Leticia sitting in the small kitchen. They wanted him to take them away, they wanted to go to Copenhagen or Vanuatu, he could join them. Their teacher, who was no longer their teacher—two days later the twins’ father came personally to void the arrangement between them— counselled patience, “a more mature confusion” is something I remember him saying many times, and he sent them home, where they lived under their parents’ disappointment and aggravation until they couldn’t bear it anymore, and moved together into Flora’s place. Toobin had taken a room in a nearby hotel from the start, and had begun opening the café for breakfast, offering what he could, and soon enough in the evening as well, changing the menu every day, learning how to shop; and three weeks after she disappeared, he got a card from Flora, in the café mail, saying she was with Marcel in Nunavut, traveling now with a troupe that was famous in Canada, and that she might not return, she sent her love; so it was an easy matter for Carmello and Leticia to meet there, and then to move there, and for their mothers to come and help them as they could, as the time drew near. But when the time came there was nobody there but the boy to help Leticia bring me down and through and out into the world, and Toobin, sitting in the small kitchen asking questions and issuing reminders, periodically appearing behind the curtain to visit and attend. He’d made a careful study of the basic necessities, you could be sure, and had studied the techniques of breathing and of pain reduction “broadly considered,” he would say, with Leticia and Carmello, and they had looked into the biology of it, as far as they had capacity and need. Through the Spring and

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early Summer they also made an intensive study of bonobo behavior and baboon society as well, to which there was occasion to refer as the hours went along and undid themselves, as I can only imagine. And all went well and I was born. Of course the rest of the story—the story of my life—is equally unimaginable without Toobin, and all this is just to say that it was so even before I got here. He was never not around when I was growing up, and when my parents moved to New Madrid when I was 8 they left me with him in Toledo and I lived there—he’d moved into the café flat by then—for the next eight years, more or less, visiting my parents every weekend and whenever we could (and continuing to change the menu every day). Truly that’s a novel for another time. Eventually they came and took me back to the city to live with them, and then Toobin would visit us alone, and then we picked up and moved out to San Francisco, and he wrote postcards, and came to see us only every so often. By then he was traveling again, he sent photo cards of local oddities from the Gulf and the hills, and one year I remember seeing him—this is the last time I saw him—at the airport in San José, on his way back, he said, to San Juan. He’d kept the café going— when he was gone, Freddy’s wife did—and pursued his studies on his own. “Enough teaching,” he said, smiling at me. Then he stopped traveling. He sold the café to Freddy’s wife for a modest but steady check which arrived every month, and he moved to El Caribe. It’s twenty years now since that last time I saw him, several years since the last postcard, but I find lately I can’t stop thinking about him, and I’m going to see if I can get down there sometime soon, if I can get the boat fixed first. I’d like to bring my daughter along to meet him too. She’d find him interesting, in her way, and he would enjoy her, I’m sure.

Lessons Learnt: CollAge for Maria and Brian Of Trees and Fire Antoni Cuadrado-Fernández

I remember fondly the time I spent as an undergraduate student at the University of Lleida. Those were times of discovery, amazement, and above all, learning: about growing up in a new city, meeting new people who would eventually become lifetime friends, meeting a whole bunch of dedicated lecturers, and, of course, meeting deadlines too. At 18 years of age, life is still an unexplored path, an uncharted territory, “a road that is made by walking,” to paraphrase our beloved Spanish poet Antonio Machado. But this newly treaded path in life didn’t come without moments of loneliness, of missing family and friends in La Seu whilst struggling to find who I really was when coming of age. It is in these moment in life when some people emerge as beams, as human references or father/ mother figures who provide some sort of not only intellectual, but also emotional harbour in the unpredictable yet sometimes treacherous sea of teenage life. Brian and Maria were this kind of people. I remember Brian’s gentle stance, his soft, always calm voice, and his approachableness. I remember Maria as a kind, courageous and caring professor who always made me, and surely us, feel she really cared about the intellectual and personal development of our still youthful, immature, brazen selves. Now that Maria and Brian are retiring and getting ready to enjoy the best part of their lives, may this epilogue serve as a short and humble reflection of what it means to get old, away from our hyper-technological, dull, bureaucratic western society, whilst embracing the milieu of perspectives offered by the rich cultural tapestry of our beautiful, yet beleaguered planet. One of my

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dearest depictions of the significance of ageing comes from Indigenous Australia, in a poem titled “Seasonal revelations” by Romaine Moreton: great trees do not grow overnight they live through droughts floods axes and birds saplings wish they could comprehend how much of the earth is invested in great trunks but can only appreciate the strength acquired seasonally and you my mothers aunties and grandmothers are the greatest trees of all and you give me the most desired shelter and shade

As I mentioned before, Brian and Maria, like trees, made us feel a bit more at home, sheltered in the long, bustling corridors of the English department. Indeed, what is ageing if not the strength acquired through years of droughts, floods, axes and birds? To conclude, Maria and Brian take with them a legacy of humanity, professionality and dedication in the hyper-bureaucratised, post-Bologna world of higher education, a legacy that has been passed on to generation after generation of students like a fire, as in Moreton’s “My Tellurian Grandfather”: ‘See the flame,’ he would say, putting a hand to his chest, ‘It always was and always will be.’ ‘But grandfather,’ came my reply, ‘you can put the flame out.’

Epilogue: Lessons Learnt: CollAge for Maria and Brian

‘Yes,’ said he, ‘but there will always be fire.’

Dear Brian and Maria, this is how I would like to remember you in your ageing, strong and seasoned like trees; and continually warm, passionate and motivated like fire.

Embodied Legacies of Mentoring and Role Models Josephine Dolan

I will always call it my Calendar Girls moment: an experience of raised consciousness about the gendering of ageism. It began with my own raw anger engendered by the critical reviews Calendar Girls with their condescending surprise that the bodies of the film’s ageing female cast remained a fit sight, even a desirable sight, for public consumption. A subsequent attempt to channel that anger into a conference paper was less than satisfactory—I found myself confessing to my assembled peers that I was unable to address my own questions about gender and aging since these issues were a striking absence within the feminist film and media studies on which my research was reliant. Far from being the humiliating experience that I feared, this confession triggered an episode of solidarity amongst a small group of scholars wrestling with similar questions and theoretical deficits—what one might call a collective mentoring as potential avenues of interdisciplinary research were aired and ultimately inspired me to organise the ‘Ageing Femininities’ conference (UWE 2007). When meeting Grup Dedal-Lit, which already had an established body of age studies students, and getting to know Marta Miguel-Baldellou and Nuria Casado-Gual at the ‘Ageing Femininities’ conference, I was introduced to the young (chronologically speaking) and intellectually astute scholars from the University of Lleida who presented finely nuanced analyses of literary texts informed by age theory and cultural gerontology. I was immediately impressed by their confident demeanour: a demeanour that far exceeded mere self-belief accruing from thoroughly prepared papers. Rather, the intellectual generosity on display hinted at effective mentoring and a supportive research environment where ideas could be aired, shared, critiqued and developed. As the conference papers were slowly transformed into the edited collection, Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations (2012) my respect for the professionalism and

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responsiveness of the Dedal-Lit scholars grew as Marta and Nuria met every deadline with seeming aplomb, submitting perfectly formatted and carefully copy-edited contributions. They were, and are, dreams to work with. During the e-mail exchanges and conference gatherings of this time, the names Brian Worsfold and Maria Vidal-Grau were oft repeated and their joint roles as much loved mentors to a cohort of junior scholars became more and more evident. As Brian and Maria became a familiar part of my networking landscape, and even before I met them in the flesh, the model of reciprocal support and respect between junior/senior scholars that was fostered within, and embodied by, the Dedal-Lit Grup rapidly became my role model for proper behaviour within the academy. I am still learning from that example, and fortunately, thanks to the body of scholars that will continue to compose Grup Dedal-Lit post- Brian and Maria (and the bodies of that body of scholars), I have no fear of lost exemplars. So while I have deep personal regrets that the retirement of Brian and Maria means no more conference coffee breaks and dinners in their esteemed and highly lovable company, I can happily wish them ‘Bonne Chance’ as they jointly embark on whatever the future brings in the sure knowledge that their mentoring legacy is securely embodied by the constituent members of Grup Dedal-Lit.

Mentorship as a Lifelong E xperience Ander Errasti and Cristina Astier

Having the opportunity of meeting Maria and Brian was a tremendous learning experience. We met in the spring of 2013 during the kick-off meeting of a European project: SIforAGE (social innovation for active and healthy ageing). Back at that time, our knowledge of ageing studies in general and more specifically the life course approach, arising from literature, was close to zero. It was since that shiny day in May at the entrance of the historical building of the University of Barcelona, where we met them, that our journey on that primary field of knowledge for the future of our societies began. So far, it has lasted until today and, hopefully, will last far beyond. From then on, we faced together various challenges within the project. We explored issues that went from the allegedly simple debate on what does the common notion of ‘older persons’ exactly mean, to the more complex

Epilogue: Lessons Learnt: CollAge for Maria and Brian

debates on issues such as ageism, literary creativity, and policy making. All through this journey, both Maria and Brian eased our learning process by continually offering themselves to overcome our inadequacies in this area with their extensive knowledge. However, while providing us with this precious support, they also steadily fostered a multidisciplinary dialogue with us, showing that mentoring is not only about teaching but mostly about mutual learning. Having the opportunity of learning this lesson from such consolidated scholars as Maria and Brian was a pivotal moment of our understanding of mentorship. The most unequivocal proof of this fruitful dynamic has been the development of our professional careers in the field of ageing. Little wonder, right after successfully finishing the project that brought us together, we managed to develop a new project in one of the most excellent research and innovation frameworks in Europe, the EIT Health (European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s Health area). That project, Ccentre (a narrative approach to improve ageing and well-being), has a unique aim: training healthcare professionals working at healthcare services on situating the desires, preferences, aspirations and wishes of older persons at the centre of healthcare. It is, of course, a counterfactual statement, as we do not know what would have happened in our careers if we had not known Maria and Brian. However, the way they showed us since the very first day, with rigorous evidence-based knowledge as well as vigorous passion, how age does not univocally define the person, is undoubtedly at the core of our current work. That is why we cannot but acknowledge the generosity of their personal and professional mentorship all through these years: they not only transferred us their knowledge but, more importantly, they showed it to us with their life-course examples. What could better exemplify what mentorship is about?

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Sarah Falcus

Reflections on Academic Generations and the Possibilities of Mentorship Sarah Falcus

Generational identity is something we are very aware of as scholars of ageing studies, and academic fields shape their own versions of this. As scholars of ageing studies, we must be sensitive to the ways in which academic ageing takes place. Senior academics may be esteemed and respected, but they may also be disregarded in favour of the new. More junior academics may be in precarious situations, in need of support from those more established. Strong relationships across academic generations (generations that are not simply mapped onto chronological age) are surely central to a field in which ageing in any context is to be approached critically and questioningly. As we progress through our academic lifecourses (and age through these), we increasingly take on supportive, mentoring roles for those colleagues at earlier stages of their careers, whether chronologically younger or not. Ahead of us on this journey loom those figures more established within the area of study. If we’re lucky, they offer us the benefit of their wisdom, their connections and their support. If we’re very lucky, we find people like Brian and Maria, whose mentorship I would describe as a form of generous hospitality. I first met Brian and Maria at a European Network of Aging Studies conference in Maastricht in 2011. Fairly new to aging studies, I hadn’t yet discovered the rich vein of scholarship from Grup Dedal-Lit at the University of Lleida. Not only did Brian and Maria take the time to tell me all about their work, but Brian later sent copies of the Dedal-Lit volumes on ageing to me. I have since visited Lleida a number of times and I have always been welcomed by Brian and Maria warmly and enthusiastically. Arriving late at night, there has been no better sight than to find them both at Lleida Pirineus railway station ready to drive me to my hotel via a cafe or restaurant. Brian’s knowledge of the history of Lleida and of Catalonia has enriched these visits to conferences and other academic meetings. Maria’s organisation and warm personality have ensured that visits are always enjoyable and sociable. Brian and Maria have been at the heart of Grup Dedal-Lit for many years and their mentorship has had a positive effect on many of the academics at Lleida. The affection in which they are held is clear to see. The research

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group is made up of many of wonderful scholars of ageing and they follow Brian and Maria in the welcome they extend to international scholars and the support they offer to those in the field. Perhaps we don’t always pay enough attention to the ways in which we support our colleagues and friends in our fields of study, and to the effects of ageing on academic identity. Reflecting on Brian and Maria’s example, I hope that I am as welcoming, generous and encouraging to scholars finding their way in this field as they have always been to me. In turn, we must recognise the valuable and ongoing contribution of senior scholars, and continue to develop relationships that nurture all academic generations.

All that Remains Carme Farré Vidal

When you look back into the distance in all the walks of life that your feet have travelled, you realise that you have never been, and still are not, alone on the journey. It is thanks to the help of your private mentors, whom you have been so lucky to meet throughout your life, that you are where you find yourself now. They are those advisers whose opinion you respect and who you know that you can always turn to; they are those talented guiding experts whose far-reaching vision you value at every step you take. On that day when you arrived at university as a student, you could not tell what the future held for you or the crucial role of those professors who you met would be. They were your inspiration during your formative years because they embodied invaluable academic experience and talent. Now theirs are the timeless words of wisdom echoing at the back of your mind. Later on in your life, when you realise that literature catches your interest, these mentors sit beside you when you read voraciously, marvelling at the characters and plot twists that your favourite writers fill book pages with. You cannot help but wonder how writers do it, but then your mentors are there to guide you in the search of a voice of your own that unveils a plausible explanation. Passion for literature brings you together. Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton’s woman detective of her alphabet series, writes these words at the end of the novel T is for Trespass (2007): I prefer to focus on the best in human nature: compassion, generosity, a willingness to come to the aid of those in need. […] There will always be someone poised to

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take advantage of the vulnerable: the very young, the very old, and the innocent of any age. Though I know this from long experience, I refuse to feel discouraged. In my own unassuming way, I know I can make a difference. You can as well. (482)

Kinsey Millhone is reflecting on evil in current society and points out that some people can make a difference; outside the novel, these words seem to fit the description of mentors to the point. Another distinctive trait that defines mentors is faith: their faith in your capabilities, their faith in your work, their faith in you; if you break down, they are there for you. The following quote from Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta series—in particular the novel Back Notice (1999)—illustrates this interpersonal support between your mentors and you. It comes from a time when Scarpetta is going through a very difficult moment herself and she is provided with the following supporting words: “if there’s anything I know about you, it’s that you will prevail against all odds. You always have, and this stretch of your journey happens to be the hardest, but there’s a better road ahead” (7). Brian and Maria, or Maria and Brian, whatever the order, apart from being living history of the origins of English studies at the University of Lleida, are my personal mentors. They embody everything that has been said before in this epilogue—or I would rather call it eulogy. Apart from being both past and present, they have also planted numerous seeds for a bright future still to come. I would like to finish simply saying thank you for being you.

On Listening to the ‘Music for two Pianos’ Version of Liszt’s ‘Dante Symphony’—‘Inferno’ and ‘Magnificat’—in the Bresciani/ Nicolosi version—and thinking over Canto V of the Inferno and Fra Rocabertí’s The Gloria D’Amor (‘A Catalan Vision-Poem) and also Bernat Metge’s subtext of Inferno Canto III in ‘fort vell, ab los pelsbands—ab los hulls flamerants’—while straying into Paradise and Catalonia

John Kinsella

‘ The Catalonians deserve greater praise in that they heed rather the general scheme of the Inferno.’ From The Beginnings of the Influence of Dante in Castilian and Catalan Literature Author: Chandler Rathfon Post Source: Annual Reports of the Dante Society, No. 26 (1907), pp. 1-59; Published by: The Johns Hopkins

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University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40165880 Accessed: 05-06-2018 01:15 UTC for M & B We read the pages of love of people of plain of tower we read of the pigeon we read of the feather we read of the stone and bird of prey and hot chestnuts by the river — memory brings out the range of voices and also a radiated modernity as machined and ordered as a central government imposing its empire on the garden on the lovedones who record the extremes of heat & cold sent by the depression sent by the repository of history of people of language where imitation is newness and bent as echo of an inland boat maybe like the American prairie schooner but so very very different. But we are ageing, and friendships are monitored by the keepers of taxation by the tree of weather swaying over the farmhouse the crops the family where youth and ageing blended and made prepared piano made harmony made the a-tonal made stops that lifted the notes through cathedral vaulting and fadein/to fragments of half-English spoken in the Auditori Enric Granados, slides of a kangaroo virus as the white-haired visiting poet who was only in his late 30s then said paradise is possible for lovers and activists if they believe if they refuse to give in—not a paradise for them not a paradise they can latch on to with an eternity of joy as pay-off—no way—rather a paradise for those who will follow for locals and refugees who will breathe and enjoy

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a language of love a language of community and language whose fragments are made of the stones the syntaxonomic array of Neolithic holm oak that gripped the plain the refuse of past is the history charcoal brings onto the heretic record where forest once was where people are walk and walked and axes hacked out crèches and homes and graves and hectic shifts in identity and anger and lives make art across strata of sword and worship and will the reintroduced bear be able to tread the stones the slopes the grasses sniffing altitude with the word of God and people and two pianos talking across the red of Europe across trade routes and alliances and borders and devastations and healings and envoys and imitation and welcome and art and the whirlwind sweeping the lovers with whom we empathise and caution ourselves—this could happen to you, too, by opening a book and mouthing the words—the vascular police state closing in wanting to recast history as a tool of control without a second look.

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Maria And Brian— Our Parental Figures in the World of Academia Núria Mina and Ieva Stončikaitė

Both Maria Vidal and Brian Worsfold have made a big difference in our careers and our intellectual and personal growth. As graduate students, we have greatly enjoyed the encouragement and the intellectual exchange of thoughts during their respective lectures on literature and culture of the English-speaking countries. We would never forget the critical analyses we shared in Maria’s sessions on North-American literature, as well as Brian’s reassuring words when he was passing around the attendance list, saying: “Please sign. Well, if you wish to. Now that you are adults, you have a choice.” This comment made us feel aware of both our rights and duties as university students, and as a friendly welcome to enter the complex but interesting academic environment. Although Maria and Brian have never been our official mentors, we see them as such: they have always been our trusted guides and advisers who have helped us to transfer our skills and provided us with interesting opportunities in the academic field and outside. When we enrolled in PhD studies, Maria and Brian became like our parental figures who have guided us along the path into the world of academia. They have always been ready to give us valuable advice on academic life and career opportunities, as well as on personal issues. Thanks to them, as well as to our PhD supervisors, Núria Casado, Ieva’s co-director, and Nela Bureu, Núria’s initial supervisor, we had a chance to become members of the research group of the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Lleida, Grup Dedal-Lit, initiated and led by Brian, who was the first to start research on literary and cultural gerontology in our department. Maria and Brian not only have introduced us to the field of ageing studies, and, in particular, to literary gerontology, but have also been the milestones who helped us to develop our selfconfidence and to unleash our potential as early stage researchers. We have established a close informal and collaborative relationship based on mutual admiration and respect, which continues to grow stronger as the years go by. Although Brian and Maria have already retired from their posts as university lecturers, they continue to be very active at university life and, especially, in the field of cultural and literary gerontology. Their

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friendliness, kindness, and encouragement keep accompanying us while we are making our first steps into the academic world. The following poem summarises our experiences and appreciation towards Maria and Brian: Much obliged! Madam, Sir, Entering a new stage in life Navigating through rough waters in The non-stop tick-tack Of academic pressures Resting, thankfully, In the little moments of sharing, Needed expertise from two Greatly devoted scholars. Creating bridges among Older and younger landscapes of the mind, Unique in your know-how, your being at ease. Promoting our knowledge in the worlds of Xhosa and the didgeridoo, Leading us past age-related prejudice, Encouraging the wisdom-seeker in us.

Connecting People through Brian and Maria—No Limits Elena Urdaneta

I had the pleasure to meet Brian and Maria in 2011. It was through a successful European Project proposal called SIforAGE—Social Innovation for Active and Healthy Ageing—within the VII Framework Programme, Science in Society. The project tried to strengthen cooperation among the stakeholders working on active and healthy ageing. We aimed at putting together scientists, end-users, civil society, public administrations and companies in order to improve the competitiveness of the European Union regarding the promotion of research and innovative products for longer and healthier lives. Working on this objective, we found Brian and Maria completely determined to seek and integrate stakeholders The SIforAGE consortium was integrated by a wide range of stakeholders along the value chain of innovation, such as private foundations, care

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centers, civil society associations representing aged people, universities, public policy makers, think tanks and experts at a European and International level in order to bridge the existing fragmentation among them.  For more than 6 years we have worked together day after day. I have learnt from them to value the contribution of older people through their eyes. Also, I had the opportunity to learn about literature and how to organize a conference taking into account all the details and all the excellence that they provided. Brian Worsfold and Maria Vidal have been the glue for a lot of partners trying to build a project with scientific excellence but reaching the maximum of public engagement through conferences, theatre, books and other kinds of dissemination events. We have respected all the time that they have dedicated to all the people involved in the project and also in the research team. For the final conference of SIforAGE, we worked together to organise a scientific, social and cultural event with more than 200 participants. After the conference, I had the opportunity to edit a book together with Brian as the final product of SIforAGE. This book is also a compilation of social innovations dedicated to the life of older people. With Brian and Maria I had the opportunity to learn something new in every task performed together. For me, it has been a real pleasure to meet and to build an interdisciplinary project, with such reliable and lovely people as Brian and Maria. I fondly remember many days in my professional and personal life, Brian and Maria, for their excellence and for the integrity and peaceful time they dedicated to build complex projects such as SIforAGE.

To Feel Part of a Dream Núria Casado Gual

I must have been 16 years old when I first learnt about two extraordinary academics named Maria and Brian, who happened to be married, and who, despite their very different personalities, were considered to be equally important in the training of future teachers of English in Lleida. This happened during an informal conversation with my first English language teacher, to whom I confessed I was considering the possibility of studying English Philology. As it is usually the case with the great events that are bound to mark one’s life, little did I think, at that early stage of my youth, that Brian and Maria would become an extremely important part of

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my life at both academic and personal levels. They were to become, as to others before and after me, my mentors. While I was an English undergraduate, and later, when I became their PhD student, they both led me, with passion and extreme patience, through the extraordinary rich field of postcolonial studies, which they pioneered in Catalonia at a time when internationally respected writers like Buchi Emecheta or Lewis Nkosi could be shamefully frowned upon by certain Spanish full professors. Under their PhD supervision, I also started intertwining my academic interest in Afro-Caribbean drama with my theatrical vocation, which they both fully supported. In parallel to my PhD, and to my surprise, I was also invited to participate in some of their personal projects, in which I always felt intellectually inspired, cared for (emotionally and tea-wise), and, mostly, loved. To work closely with Maria and Brian makes you feel part of a “dream team.” This is, in fact, what, tongue-in-cheek, we used to call ourselves during the extremely enriching process of co-translating an Australian novel on the Spanish Civil War at the Torre in the first years of our relationship, and this is what, some time later, they helped create when Grup Dedal-Lit, following Brian’s initiative, started to make its way through the fascinating field of ageing studies. As with many observations and suggestions Maria and Brian have made throughout the years I have known them, the “idea of starting research on ageing” was generously offered almost in passing, as a marginal possibility the group members might or might not want to follow [...] and, as it turned out, this unimposing, casual suggestion became crucial for all of us, and even more so, for the future generations of PhD students that were to join the team. To delve into the rich field of ageing studies entails not only a fabulous academic enterprise, but also a radical change of mindset in many ways, and a constant opportunity for self-discovery and development. To be part of a mentoring experience (and to be, or feel, mentored by Brian and Maria in particular) has similar transformative effects. Nonetheless, it is impossible to put into words the lessons I have learnt from them, which range from academic matters to, even more significantly, moral and emotional issues. This is impossible, not only because the list would exceed the scope of this text and yet would always fall short of their generosity, but also because many of those essential lessons resist verbal expression. In a way similar to the multiple treasures one inherits from

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parents, the precious emotional, cultural and ethical models one receives from mentors reside not only in one’s mind, but also in one’s heart and, even more intriguingly, in one’s behaviour, thoughts, and even ways of expressing oneself. We could say, maybe a bit theatrically, but not for that matter less sincerely, that the legacy of mentors becomes ‘embodied’ in and by the mentoree throughout time. At this point of my life, I may wonder: how much of my current understanding of the world has been shaped by Maria’s and Brian’s interpretations of it? How many of my relationships, in academia and beyond, mirror their ways of relating to others? To what extent who I am, or think I am, in my middle years, is the result of what they have inspired me to become? In what ways is my approach towards ageing (and life in general) imbued with their academic and personal interest in the richness of growing older, in the adventure of living as a whole? I would like to think that the answer to these questions is “a lot,” if only to feel closer to the ideal of humanity that both Brian and Maria represent for me, if only to be truthful to, and thankful for, the myriad lessons I feel they have transmitted to me, both consciously and unconsciously, throughout the years and up to the present. Com dius gràcies als teus mentors, sense que es quedin curtes les paraules? De la mateixa manera que un pot intentar donar les gràcies als pares: tot continuant el seu camí amb la mateixa il.lusió amb què ells l'han aplanat per a tu, i procurant ser, cada dia, dignes portaveus de la seva lúcida visió, del seu afecte constant, i sobretot, de la seva honesta i valenta coherència; tot formant part del somni personal i professional que han perseguit.

Let’s have tea in “La Torre”: Mentoring through Affection Maricel Oró-Piqueras

Any time I think of Brian and Maria “La Torre” comes to my mind. Just a few minutes away from the city, a tattered road that leads you to Lleida’s typical fruit tree fields; you have to be very careful to take the right narrow country road to the right. I am actually never sure whether I have taken the right one because “La Torre” does not let itself be seen until you are a few metres from it. A cottage made of two—or rather, three, since Salvador’s one is hidden behind—little cottages surrounded by a fence which immediately becomes welcoming when either Maria or Brian appear through it and tell you about something they were mending,

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repairing, painting, polishing or cleaning—any sort of handwork I cannot imagine myself doing with enough diligence. As I go up the stairs, I’m never sure whether I am in a typical Catalan country house, one of those which very few have managed to maintain in Catalan little villages, or in a cosy English one. The smell of tea, vegetables, apples, curry and wood immediately tell you you are going to spend two, three or four nourishing hours in which the conversation will go from family news, BBC news to commenting on any former or new research project, article, author or text in which any of us—or all of us have been immersed. This is exactly how I remember most long summer afternoons of the three years I spent writing my PhD, with Brian picking up on any idea I had come up with after lots of reading, which I initially thought minor and which actually turned to be the main topic of a chapter, and with Maria offering a straightforward and common sense solution to any critical juncture I would find in the solitary and still enriching process of writing a thesis. This apparently simple but still powerful effect of ‘Let’s have tea in “La Torre”’ was the drive and philosophy with which Brian and Maria, together with the members of Group Dedal-Lit, organised three successful international conferences on age and ageing studies in 2005 and 2008 in Lleida and 2016 in Barcelona, all of them as part of the disseminating results of research projects which have undoubtedly contributed to set ageing studies in the spotlight at a national level and, hopefully, at an international level too. Yes, we, as members of Group Dedal-Lit helped but it was actually Brian and Maria who contributed the biggest amount of creativity and affection, not to say effort and time in guiding us towards these big events. These conferences were turning points in the development of ageing studies not only because of the research that was disseminated through projects, but also, and probably mainly, because of the synergies, and friendships, born from discussions after panel sessions, in the middle of corridors, over a cup of coffee or at lunches and dinners. Every literary wise man and woman has some kind of magic which is the guiding light of future generations; this is their ‘magic power’, making things happen from a straightforward ‘Let’s have tea in “La Torre’.”

Epilogue: Lessons Learnt: CollAge for Maria and Brian

Your Child of Sorts—A Tribute to Maria & Brian Emma Domínguez-Rué To You, dear Sir, Who taught me to love Edward Elgar With me remains Your quaint equanimity Your polite firmness Your quiet manners Your way of saying Exactly what you wanted Without actually saying it To You, dear Madam, Who made me feel at home With me remains Your amazing resourcefulness Your swiftness in a crisis Your passion for literature Your robust embrace To soothe our sorrows And make them yours Your presence Dearly missed Still breathes in our office Which is yours And will remain in me Your child of sorts.

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Notes Notes on Editors Núria Casado Gual is Associate Professor at the Department of English and Linguistics of the University of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain). The author of a PhD thesis on the dramatization of racism in Edgar Nkosi White’s plays (2006), she has published numerous articles on this and other contemporary playwrights. As the coordinator of the research group “Grup Dedal-Lit” since 2013, she has led the group’s recent competitive projects on ageing and literature. Her experience as an editor includes the volumes The Polemics of Ageing as Reflected in Literatures in English (co-edited with Maria Vidal, 2004) and Literary Creativity and the Older Woman Writer: A Collection of Critical Essays (co-edited with Emma Domínguez-Rué and Brian Worsfold, 2016). Núria is also a theatre practitioner and the author of several playscripts. Six of her plays have been published to date. Emma Domínguez-Rué graduated in English at the University of Lleida (Catalonia) and studied an MA in English Literature at Swansea University (UK). Her PhD dissertation was published in 2011 with the title Of Lovely Tyrants and Invisible Women: Invalidism as Metaphor in the Fiction of Ellen Glasgow (Berlin: Logos Verlag). Aside from ageing studies, she has worked on narratives of disease, contemporary detective fiction, and Victorian and Gothic fiction under a feminist perspective. She is Associate professor and Degree Coordinator for English Studies in the Department of English at the University of Lleida and has recently co-edited two volumes on Ageing Studies:  Ageing and Technology: Perspectives from the Social Sciences  (transcript 2016, with Linda Nierling) and  Literary Creativity and the Older Woman Writer: A Collection of Essays  (Peter Lang 2016, with Núria Casado-Gual and Brian Worsfold).

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Maricel Oró-Piqueras is Associate Professor at the Department of English and Linguistics, Universitat de Lleida. She is also a member of research group Dedal-Lit since it started working on the representation of fictional images of ageing and old age in 2002. Within group Dedal-Lit, she is member of ENAS, European Network of Ageing Studies. Her research on contemporary British novelists from an ageing studies and gender studies perspectives has been disseminated in national and international conferences as well as in articles in reputed journals such as Journal of Aging Studies and Journal of English Studies and in international collections of articles.

Notes on Contributors Cristina Astier is a researcher at Globernance (Institute for Democratic Governance in San Sebastián) and a researcher at GISME (Group on Innovative Mathematical Solutions for Entities), a multidisciplinary group of the University of Barcelona. She graduated with a BA in philosophy from the University of Barcelona and a Master’s degree in political philosophy from Pompeu Fabra University. Astier combines academic work with non-academic professional activities, especially in European funded projects. From 2012 to 2016, she was the coordinator assistant and head of communications of the European project SIforAGE (Social Innovation for Active and Healthy Ageing) funded under the 7th Framework Programme by the European Commission. Since 2016, she is the content and communications manager of the European project Ccentre. Sue Ballyn is the Founder and Honorary Director at the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies at the University of Barcelona. Her main areas of interest are Convict Studies, Ageing Studies, Sephardim in Diaspora, Asian Pacific Studies and Human Rights. She has written prolifically on Convict studies and just released a book together with Professor Emerita Lucy Frost, University of Tasmania, titled A Spanish Convict in Colonial Australia (1808-1877) Who was Adelaide de la Thoreza? She has published in other fields as well, including ageing studies, and also, occasionally, writes poetry.

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Antonio Cuadrado-Fernandez (PhD, University of Est Anglia; MA, Universitat de Barcelona; BA Universitat de Lleida), is a language teacher, IGCSE examiner at Cambridge International Examination, and also literary critic and reviewer, literary translator and ecopoetry tutor based in Ely (Cambridgeshire, UK). The scope of his academic interests ranges from Indigenous studies, cognitive linguistics and poetics, critical theory, biopolitics, and multiculturalism, to name a few. Antonio has coordinated two research projects at International Network for Alternative Academia, “Global Cities and Cosmopolitan Dreams,” and “Re-founding Democracy”, research contributor to OISC (International Observatory on Stability and Conflict), and has recently translated Mapuche poetry into English, to be published in Street Voice journal. At present, collaborates with poet Hadaa Sendoo in the edition of the World Poetry Almanac. His research has been published in a number of journals and book chapters. Josephine Dolan is a Visiting Reader with WAM (the Centre for Women, Ageing & Media) at the University of Gloucestershire and researching with Canada’s SSHRC funded aging+communication+technologies project. She is author of multiple publications including  Contemporary cinema and ‘old age’: gender and the silvering of stardom  (2017) and is coeditor of  Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations (2012). She has presented evidence to committees on older women and the media to both the UKs House of Commons and House of Lords and has international research links to ENAS (European Network in Aging Studies), NANAS (North American Network in Aging Studies) and the University of Lleida’s Grup Dedal-Lit. Ander Errasti holds a PhD in Humanities—Ethics and Political Philosophy—from the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), supervised by Dr Sonia Arribas and Dr Daniel Innerarity. BA in Philosophy at University of Barcelona (UB), MA in Political Philosophy and Business Administration Diploma at UB, Advanced LLM in Legal Sciences at the UPF. He has been working at the Basque Institute of Democratic Governance since 2013. Errasti is also member of the GISME group at the UB since 2010, directed by Professor Javier Tejada. In that capacity, he is the Coordinator Assistant of the “CCentre: Towards Citizen Centered Active Ageing and Well Being” project (2016-2019) financed by the EIT Health and Coordinated by Professor Elena Lauroba. He was the Project Manager of the European

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Commission funded SIforAGE Project on Social Innovation for Active and Healthy Ageing for Sustainable Economic Growth (2013-2016). Sarah Falcus is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Her research centres around ageing and gender. She is currently completing a co-authored book (with Dr Katsura Sako, Keio University, Japan) on contemporary narratives of dementia. She is also working on a project about ageing and illness in children’s books. She is the co-director (with Dr Raquel Medina, University of Aston, UK) of the Dementia and Cultural Narrative Network. Carme Farré-Vidal is an English language technician at the Institute of Languages, University of Lleida. She holds a PhD in English Philology from the University of Lleida and is also a member of the literature research group Grup Dedal-Lit, whose main research objective is the study of aging through literatures in English. Her research focuses on cultural and gender studies, with particular attention to detective fiction and female detectives by women authors. Margaret Morganroth Gullette is the author, most recently, of Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (2017) and of several prize-winning nonfiction books about age, ageing, and the life course. She is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University. John Kinsella is the author of over fifty books of poetry, short fiction and criticism. His most recent books of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016) and On the Outskirts (University of Queensland Press, 2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment, Curtin University, Western Australia. Hanne Laceulle is an assistant professor ‘Philosophy of life course and art of living’ at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, The Netherlands. She finished her Master’s degree (cum laude) in Humanistic Studies in 2009. Following her Master, she enrolled in the PhD program of the University of Humanistic Studies. Her PhD project on aging well and self-realization culminated in a dissertation titled Becoming who you are. Aging, self-realization and cultural narratives about later life in 2016. Her

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research interests broadly include ethics, aging and identity, addressing topics like self-realization and human betterment, narrative and moral identity, moral agency, autonomy, authenticity and virtue. In particular, she is interested in how socio-cultural influences such as dominant cultural narratives impact our identity-constitution and influence our chances of leading a good life. She is particularly committed to seeking interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of these and other topics. She has presented her work at several international conferences, and published in leading journals of gerontology such as The Gerontologist and Journal of Aging Studies. Roberta Maierhofer is Professor of (Inter)American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria, and Adjunct Professor at Binghamton University, New York. From 1999-2011, she served as Vice Rector for International Relations of the University of Graz. Since 2007, she has been directing the Center for Inter-American Studies of the University of Graz. Her research focuses on (Inter)American Literature and Cultural Studies, Feminist Literature and Research, Transatlantic Cooperation in Education, and Age/Aging Studies. Roberta Maierhofer holds a master’s and a doctoral degree from the University of Graz as well as an M.A. degree in comparative literature from SUNY Binghamton. In her publication Salty Old Women: Gender, Age, and Identity in American Culture, she developed a theoretical approach to gender and aging (anocriticism), and was one of the first in early 1990 to define her work within the field of Cultural/ Narrative Gerontology. Billy Gray was born in West Belfast, Northern Ireland. He wrote his Phd thesis, entitled “The influence of Islamic Mysticism on the work of Doris Lessing” under the supervision of the established scholar and writer, Professor Robert Welch. His research interests subsequently led him into two specific areas: Irish Literature and texts dealing with Literary representations of Ageing. He have published articles on writers such as Hubert Butler, Chris Authur, Derek Lundy, Patrick McCabe, Owen McNamee, Joseph O’Neill, J. M. Coetzee, Irma Kurtz, Doris Lessing and Jenny Diski in international, peer-reviewed journals such as the New Hibernia Review and The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, as well as in numerous monographs. He is currently one of three Series Editors for the Peter Lang Cultural Identity Series as well as editor of the History,

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Politics and Media Studies section of the Peer-reviewed Nordic Irish Studies Journal (NIS) and has recently edited—together with Dr. Carmen Zamorano—Authority and Wisdom in Contemporary Ireland, published by Peter Lang. He is currently a member of the ISTUD research group at Dalarna University and Grup Dedal-Lit of the University of Lleida. His current academic interests involve the manner in which ideas relating to Sufism and Neo-Sufism are reflected in the novels of writers such as Leila Aboulela and Elif Shafak. Núria Mina Riera is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Lleida (Spain), where she studies contemporary Canadian poetry. Her dissertation analyses the process of formation of “the late style” in Lorna Crozier’s works from the interdisciplinary approach of aging and ecocritical studies. She also teaches English language, poetry, history and culture at the University of Lleida, where she has also been a member of research group Grup Dedal-Lit since 2015. Marta Miquel-Baldellou holds an International Doctorate in English Studies from the University of Lleida, and a Postgraduate Degree in Literary Studies with a specialisation in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Open University of Catalonia. Her doctoral dissertation —entitled Symbolic Transitions as Modalities of Aging: Intertextuality in the Life and Works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe, and directed by Professor Dr. Brian Worsfold—is related to the fields of comparative literature and aging studies. During her doctoral studies, she conducted a research stay at the Victorian Studies Centre (Leicester University, UK), which was funded through a government scholarship (AGAUR-BE2) for doctoral research students.  As a member of the Dedal-Lit  Research Group (University of Lleida, Spain), she is currently taking part in a three-year research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness in relation to the matrix of ageing, narrative, and creativity. She has also recently been granted a post-doctoral scholarship to work on a postdoctoral research project in relation to narratology and gothic fiction by the Spanish Association of Anglo-North-American Studies (AEDEAN). Her main research areas are comparative literature, Victorian literature, aging studies, and popular fiction, and her articles have been published in volumes edited by international publishing houses

Notes

such as Transcript Verlag, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Peter Lang, and Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Jeffrey Skoblow has been Professor of English Language & Literature for many years at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Fulbright Scholar at the University of Lleida in 2002, where Maria and Brian took him and his family under their wing. Author of scholarly work on British 18th, 19th and 20th century poetry, a long meditation on Paleolithic art, and a collection of short stories on pedagogical themes, among other things, including, for DEDAL-LIT, an essay on Bob Dylan’s late period. “Toledo” was written while living in Lleida on Cardenal Cisneros. Ieva Stončikaitė defended her PhD thesis in 2017, which focused on the intersections of ageing, sexuality, body politics, and the literary creation in the works of Erica Jong. Stončikaitė is a member of the research group Grup Dedal-Lit (U of Lleida, Spain) and a member of the ENAS Advisory Board. She is also affiliated with ACT (Concordia U, Canada) and TCAS (Trent U, Canada), where she carried out a part of her research. Ieva has presented her work in national and international conferences and has published articles in Societies and in the collection of essays Literary Creativity and the Older Woman Writer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Peter Lang, 2016). She has also co-taught as assistant lecturer at U of Lleida and collaborated with the Project SIforAGE. Her current research interests include cultural gerontology, leisure and sexual tourism, and social innovation related to active and healthy ageing.  María Socorro Suárez Lafuente is Professor of Literature at the University of Oviedo, Spain. Her interests lie in the field of Contemporary Literature, both in English and Spanish, in Feminism, Postcolonial Theory and the development of the Faust theme. She has published extensively on those fields, and has been co-editor of several volumes and journal issues. She is the author of the books Crónicas de anglosajones y demás mestizos and Desasosiegos éticos. Her work appeared in New Women of Spain, a selection of essays written by Spanish women scholars to witness the development of a feminist academia in the country in the last forty years, and she is founding member of the ESSE Gender Studies Network and the European Network of Dialogue Process Facilitators. She was president of the Spanish

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Association of Anglo-American Studies and of the Spanish Association of University Women and is Fellow of the English Association. Aagje Swinnen is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University and Endowed Socrates Chair in International Humanism and the Art of Living at the University of Humanistic Studies in The Netherlands. Swinnen writes about how literature and art can offer alternatives to stereotypes about aging and old age, how older artists experience, understand, and give meaning to creativity in the later stages of their career, and what the participatory arts (Timeslips and the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project) can mean in dementia care. Her work has been published in journals such as The Gerontologist, Journal of Aging Studies, and Dementia. Amongst her co-edited volumes are Aging, Performance, and Stardom (with J.A. Stotesbury, 2012) and Popularizing Dementia (with M. Schweda, 2015). Committed to stimulating dialogue among social sciences and humanities approaches to the study of aging and later life, Swinnen is co-founder and deputy chair of the European Network in Aging Studies as well as co-editor of the journal Age, Culture, Humanities. Elena Urdaneta is Director of Cooperative Innovation at Euskampus. She gained her PhD in Pharmacy at the Universidad de Navarra in 1995. Elena has made a number of postdoctoral visits to centres abroad including the UCLA Faculty of Medicine (Los Angeles, California) and the Physiology Department of the University of California in Irvine (UCI). She currently combines her position as Associate Lecturer as Doctor in Physiology at the Universidad Pública de Navarra with her role as Research Director at BCC; both positions are related to research projects in the field of the promotion of nutrition and e-health. She is the main researcher on numerous funded research projects on physiology, gerontology and nutrition and she is the author or co-author of over thirty scientific research articles in international periodicals. In 2004, she received the “Beca Ortiz de Landázuri” granted by the Health Department of the Government of Navarre. She is a member of the Sociedad Española de Ciencias Fisiológicas, Sociedad Española de Geriatría y Gerontología, International Society for the Advance of Alzheimer’s Research and Treatment and of the American Physiological Society. She is currently supervising three doctoral theses and she is a peer-reviewer of international books and articles on physiology. She was

Notes

Director of Ingema Foundation gerontology (2007-2012) and Director of Research and Innovation of Basque Culinary Center (2013-2017). She coordinated SIforAGE project (FP7, Science in Society, 321482), related to social innovation for healthy and active ageing with 19 partners.

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Social Sciences Carlo Bordoni

Interregnum Beyond Liquid Modernity 2016, 136 p., pb. 19,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3515-7 E-Book PDF: 17,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3515-1 EPUB: 17,99 € (DE), SBN 978-3-7328-3515-7

Iain MacKenzie

Resistance and the Politics of Truth Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou March 2018, 148 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3907-0 E-Book PDF: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3907-4 EPUB: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-7328-3907-0

Franziska Meister

Racism and Resistance How the Black Panthers Challenged White Supremacy 2017, 242 p., pb. 19,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3857-8 E-Book: 17,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3857-2

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!

Social Sciences Cameron Harrington, Clifford Shearing

Security in the Anthropocene Reflections on Safety and Care 2017, 196 p., hardcover 79,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3337-5 E-Book: 79,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3337-9

Benjamin Heim Shepard, Mark J. Noonan

Brooklyn Tides The Fall and Rise of a Global Borough February 2018, 284 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3867-7 E-Book: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3867-1

Ilker Ataç, Gerda Heck, Sabine Hess, Zeynep Kasli, Philipp Ratfisch, Cavidan Soykan, Bediz Yilmaz (eds.)

movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies Vol. 3, Issue 2/2017: Turkey’s Changing Migration Regime and its Global and Regional Dynamics 2017, 230 p., pb. 24,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3719-9

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!