Recounting Cultural Encounters [1 ed.] 9781443814607, 9781443805667

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Recounting Cultural Encounters

Recounting Cultural Encounters

Edited by

Marija Kneževiü and Aleksandra Nikþeviü Batriüeviü

Recounting Cultural Encounters, Edited by Marija Kneževiü and Aleksandra Nikþeviü Batriüeviü This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Marija Kneževiü and Aleksandra Nikþeviü Batriüeviü and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0566-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0566-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 1 Chapter One Imagining Montenegro: From Tennyson to James Bond Peter Preston .......................................................................................... 9 Chapter Two Montenegro as the Scene of Some Strange War Images in Joyce Cary’s Memoir of the Bobotes Biljana Ĉoriü-Francuski....................................................................... 31 Chapter Three A Stay in Montenegro—An American Impression Bojka Ĉukanoviü ................................................................................. 49 Chapter Four “A soul that remembers can never be lost”: Tragic Cultural Encounters in Albahari's Götz and Meyer Vesna Lopiþiü ...................................................................................... 63 Chapter Five Twisting Cultural Stereotypes: Identifying Nations Linguistically Biljana ýubroviü .................................................................................. 79 Chapter Six To Translate or not to Translate: to Enrich or to Impoverish Identity Nadežda Stojkoviü ............................................................................... 89 Chapter Seven Transformations vs. Transformation Saša Simoviü...................................................................................... 113

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Chapter Eight The New Cultural Politics: Encounters between Race and Gender—Blackness and Feminism— in Toni Morrison’s Novels Mirjana Daniþiü ................................................................................. 119 Chapter Nine The Cultural Perspective of Indian Society as Revealed in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Soumen Mukherjee ............................................................................ 129 Chapter Ten The Quest for the Centre in Rushdie’s Novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet Aleksandra Jovanoviü ........................................................................ 139 Chapter Eleven The Strange Meeting of Arthur and George in Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George Marija Kneževiü................................................................................. 147 Chapter Twelve Sympathy for the Devil: Gurus and Shamans in Nineteen-sixties Music and Literature Victor Kennedy.................................................................................. 171 Chapter Thirteen Intertextuality and the Construction of Authorship in J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Lecture “He and his man” Olga Glebova ..................................................................................... 183 CONTRIBUTORS ........................................................................................ 195 INDEX ....................................................................................................... 201

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We want to express our gratitude to the contributors to this book not only for the material that made the book possible and for their encouragement to go ahead with it, but also for their enthusiasm invested in meditating the issue of knowing the Other and knowing one’s self. We are especially grateful to Peter Preston, the god-father of already a significant number of our publications. We are bound to the dean of Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšiü, Professor Blagoje Ceroviü, for his stimulating support. We are deeply indebted to our children whose patient love enabled us to complete this work. This book is dedicated to our parents, Živko, Ljubomir, Vojka and Kora. Marija and Aleksandra, March 1, 2009

INTRODUCTION

Four years in a row, the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšiü has hosted international conferences on English language, literature, and methodology. Each September Nikšiü becomes a lively place in which scholars from various academic centres assemble to discuss the main issues of their concern. Recounting Cultural Encounters is a result of their work in September 2007, and, therefore, in addition to its theoretical significance, the title of this collection is also a symbolical reminder of these profoundly friendly and collegial academic encounters. Contributions reprinted in this book highlight some of the wide ranging ways in which the issues of culture and identity can be approached in a literary text, while focusing on the ways in which cultural encounters have been changing both the world and its reflection in literature. The beginning of the twenty first century is an appropriate time to repay careful attention to these issues. Understanding how our perception of the Other changes with the concept of the world we inhabit, we want to emphasize the rising importance of fostering cultural pluralism and global understanding. Having based their research on widespread readings in academia, such as deconstruction, post-colonialism, post-modernism, new historicism, and narratology, the authors of these papers proceed by addressing the metaphor of travel as one of the strongest metaphors for the evolution of mankind, especially if considered under the light of the historically and politically imposed opposition between the progressive western and the static eastern or African societies. However, as the end of the imperialist era brought about poignant awareness of cultural relativism, as well as deconstruction of the great narrative of progress, facing the Other as an unconceptualized entity became a major moral concern of a modern traveller. It is pronounced that this concern should be textually testified to dramatize the human inability to avoid verbal appropriation of the other. The final question we seek to answer is whether the era of advanced technology and globalisation, along with a post-modern ironical attitude to hyper realities and textual transparencies, has rendered the sphere of the text the only available point of concern of contemporary literature and thought in general.

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Introduction

The first group of papers look into the Western approach to the Balkans, focusing for the largest part on the Anglo-American view of Montenegrin geographical, cultural, and social space. Peter Preston, from the University of Nottingham, begins his paper “Imagining Montenegro: From Tennyson to James Bond” quoting Alfred Lord Tennyson’s sonnet “Montenegro.” “O smallest among peoples! … Great Tsernagora!” wrote Lord Tennyson in 1877 at the height of national resistance against the Turks. Similar sense of Montenegro’s enormous gallantry in contrast to its physical smallness persisted in British writing about the country throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This paper discusses both famous and less well-known writers, including Rebecca West, Joyce Cary, and Jan and Cora Gordon, and concludes with the appearance of a “Montenegro of the mind” in Casino Royale, the most recent James Bond film. Biljana Ĉoriü-Francuski focuses on a more particular moment in the relation between Montenegro and the great powers. In her paper “Montenegro as the Scene of Some Strange War Images in Joyce Cary’s Memoir of the Bobotes” she analyzes the reputed British novelist Joyce Cary’s unusual response to the First Balkan War. Although it is generally thought that Cary treats the subject of war and those involved in it with contempt, some parts of his narrative show that he really considers his participation in the war to be a unique adventure, which he enjoys so much that it has been compared with a holiday and an excursion. Although it is true that the war serves only as a background for some of his personal feelings and thoughts, this does not mean that Carry was insensitive or in denial, since he volunteered to serve in a British Red Cross unit. ĈoriüFrancuski clarifies a few factors that prompted the young man to take part in the war and then depict it through the use of various unusual images, above all those devoted to describing food, drinks and the preparation of meals. Despite the presence of youthful, even boyish, indolence in his stance, a spirit of guileless and naive adolescent idealism, as well as a certain romantic enthusiasm for the cause of the Montenegrins pervade Cary’s book, infusing it with allure, genuineness, openness and spontaneity. In her paper “A Stay in Montenegro—An American Impression,” Bojka Ĉukanoviü looks at the Montenegrin experience of Mr. Henry Rushton Fairclough, a distinguished American scholar, who was a USA commissioner to the Balkans, and played a significant part in the relief and Red Cross work during World War I. One of the most interesting books depicting the desperate situation in which the Montenegrins found themselves in the aftermath of the War is his autobiography Warming Both Hands, which included his experiences under the American Red Cross in Switzerland and Montenegro. As Montenegro, even at the beginning of the

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twentieth century, was still a not well-known corner of the Balkans, he dedicated pages and pages of his biography to describing this tiny Balkan country, in order to bring it closer to his countrymen. His account of the country and his experience during his stay there appears as fascinating to the modern reader as Montenegro of those past times might have appeared to the author. In her paper “A Stay in Montenegro—An American Impression,” Bojka Ĉukanoviü looks at the Montenegrin experience of Mr. Henry Rushton Fairclough, a distinguished American scholar, who was a USA commissioner to the Balkans, and played a significant part in the relief and Red Cross work during World War I. One of the most interesting books depicting the desperate situation in which the Montenegrins found themselves in the aftermath of the War is his autobiography Warming Both Hands, which included his experiences under the American Red Cross in Switzerland and Montenegro. As Montenegro, even at the beginning of the twentieth century, was still a not well-known corner of the Balkans, he dedicated pages and pages of his biography to describing this tiny Balkan country, in order to bring it closer to his countrymen. His account of the country and his experience during his stay there appears as fascinating to the modern reader as Montenegro of those past times might have appeared to the author. “’A soul that remembers can never be lost’: Tragic Cultural Encounters in Albahari’s Götz and Meyer” by Vesna Lopiþiü assumes that the concept of cultural encounters is nowadays primarily read in a positive context. The connotations of creative exchange and constructive interactions are usually considered inevitable. However, contemporary history offers a significant number of examples that prove opposite trends. The relations of Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, USA and Iraq, are indeed close but not to the benefit of either party. Lopiþiü’s work examines the literary depiction of the tragic encounters from our recent history in David Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer. The Jewish population in Belgrade, on one side, and the German soldiers ordered to drive the truck to the gas chamber, on the other, represent two conflicting cultures meeting during the Second World War. David Albahari’s intention is to emphasize the moral significance of the memory of this tragic episode, which had lasting personal and cultural consequences. The following couple of papers examine the power of language over identity. Biljana ýubroviü’s paper, “Twisting Cultural Stereotypes: Identifying Nations Linguistically,” explores the cultural stereotypes of the British and Serbs as presented in Vesna Goldsworthy’s Chernobyl Strawberries (2005). Goldsworthy’s interest in the cultural diversity of the

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Introduction

two nations springs from both her language background and her rich life experience in Britain as her newly acquired country that allows her to describe this country as competently as she describes Serbia. Observing an individual as the locus of cultural and linguistic contact, ýubroviü’s analysis of the cultural beliefs and values as presented in the book is offered in the context of contact linguistics. Considering Eva Hoffman’s autobiographical novel Lost in Translation, Nadeža Stojkoviü, in her paper “To Translate or not to Translate: to Enrich or to Impoverish Identity,” observes the ways in which Hoffman employs the theme of an individual facing a sudden change in her linguistic surrounding due to her emigration, presenting language as a medium of personal and collective identity. Being a representation of a real, not fictional, experience, this novel exemplifies how adopting two languages, which existing side by side complement each other, enriches one’s identity in a creative way. The following series of papers are concerned with American soil and culture. They examine how American travellers perceived the other in the course of their history and how this perception has not only reflected their cultural being but has also determined it as well. In her paper “Transformations vs. Transformation,” Saša Simoviü discusses the ways in which Hawthorne’s romance contrasts two civilizations: the Eternal City of Rome, its tradition, experience, and Catholicism as opposing America’s youth, prosperity, ambition, and Protestantism. However, it is in the poignant context of the ruins of the City of Imperators that the protagonists of the novel are presented as the very offspring of New England. On the opposite side of them, Italian nobles, sylvan creatures, mysterious artists and lovers, introduce the posterity to the old civilization of Europe and often to its dark past, which leads to various types of transformations masterfully presented in both the characterization and setting of the romance. Mirjana Daniþiü presents her research, “The New Cultural Politics: Encounters between Race and Gender—Blackness and Feminism—in Toni Morrison’s Novels.” As the starting point Daniþiü takes Toni Morrison’s words: “As a black and a woman, I have had access to a range of emotions and perceptions that were unavailable to people who were neither”. The cultural capital of people of colour has been long disregarded and, given the existing racial polarization in American literature, it still relies on the subcultural. With her constructive explorations of the past and the present of Black women, Toni Morrison has united the two “marginal” groups in her literary works and decisively pushed the postmodern intellectuals towards new cultural politics of difference, both racial and sexual. The paper analyzes and illustrates Morrison’s ways of

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expressing the black and the feminine as something that has a key role in the reconstruction of the personal identity of her heroines. The third part of the collection pays attention to the complex relationship between the British and Indians. It opens with “The Cultural Perspective of Indian Society as Revealed in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things” by Soumen Mukherjee from the Faculty of Business Communication in Delhi. Mukherjee’s paper points to a sea change in the social, political, religious, economic and scientific fields, which India is undergoing at the moment and which are aptly captured and highlighted by Roy’s novel. Mukherjee explains how in recent years Indian novelists in English have made a mark in the world literary scenario scene? by their bewitching narration and have awakened an interest in the riches of Indian culture and civilization. Roy’s world acclaimed maiden novel, which won her the coveted Booker prize in 1997, proves to be a mirror wherein the reflection of the Indian culture and society can be perceived. The novel presents the cultural background of the important characters, the intimate relationship between culture and life, the tension and interaction in the process of the mingling of characters belonging to different cultures, and thereby trying to apprehend the various aspects of Indian culture in comparison to the West and its overall impact on the reconstruction of a modern society. The novel has had tremendous impact because it touches upon the basic human needs of love and compassion and does it through its female protagonist Ammu, a typical middle-class Indian woman, who transcends all cultural, linguistic and social barriers in her search for self identity. A research on the cultural stratification and cultural metamorphosis of the Indian society, this paper is also an interpretation of tolerance that life could contain brought out in the setting, the characters, the plot, and the interactions in the novel. Aleksandra Jovanoviü’s paper, “The Quest for the Center in Rushdie’s Novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” explores why and how the characters of Rushdie’s novel travel on a mythical task to find the meaning of existence. Jovanoviü examines Vina Apsara’s quests for meaning through the labyrinth of world cultural and historical events. The “ground beneath her feet” is constantly moving, because the centre is always “where she is not,” as Salman Rushdie says in this novel. She journeys in search of the lost meaning and the centre “which still holds.” At the same time, her love Ormus Cama searches for his identity locked in his dead twin whose notion contains the secret of the Other. Global cultural centres, New York and London, offer the scene for their adventure because of their resemblance with the wasteland, where the centre is buried under the layers of meaning of modern pop culture, the entertainment industry and

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Introduction

art. Jovanoviü shows how by deconstructing the bulk of modern culture and world history, Rushdie tries to uncover what lies beneath, as he builds the new edifice of sense which is retrieved through the universal and, at the same time, unique love of Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. The idea of the decentered meaning makes the quest for the (lost) centre the structuring principle of the Rushdie’s novel. Marija Kneževiü deals with Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George (2006). The title of her paper “The Strange Meeting of Arthur and George...” is inspired by Wilfred Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting” in which escaping from a battlefield of a strange war, which for the poet is a war between soldiers and politicians, the poet meets his true soul-mate among the enemy’s dead soldiers in Hell. The reversal of meaning at the end of the poem, when the latter introduces himself as “the enemy you killed, my friend” witnesses, just as Arthur & George does, a culture of utter arbitrariness and becomes an offspring of the culture in which encounters take place or don’t take place dependent on the angle of seeing. In this novel, somebody has received threatening letters and suffered wrongful arrest, false imprisonment, and defamation primarily on a racial basis, while, despite all the good will, no truth can be proved in the world in which all the superior instances are rendered fictive. However, presenting a new humanist appeal, the novel suggests that the meanings we apply to the event may not matter, but suffering is what matters, as well as our in/ability to redeem the pain. Stating this, the novel exploits several traditional genre narratives making thus specific literary analysis of the narrativity of life and searching within the rich literary heritage for the clue and the basis of a humanistic discourse that could be applied to the disillusioned twenty-first century’s mind. In the last part of the book, the papers regard the postmodern issues of clashes and interaction between popular and high culture, old and new texts, traditional novel and metafiction, authorship and readership. In his paper “Sympathy for the Devil: Gurus and Shamans in Nineteen-sixties Music and Literature,” Victor Kennedy examines the appeal of the gurus and shamans in the songs of the sixties and shows how encounters with these characters came to resemble fictional encounters with the devil. That popular music and literature of the nineteen sixties was full of gurus and shamans is evident already in the examples of Bob Dylan’s “Mr Tambourine Man,” Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, Jim Morrison’s “Lizard King,” and Pete Townshend’s “Tommy”. They all resemble fictional versions of real-life gurus Timothy Leary and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who were both highly influential not only among writers and musicians, but in the culture at large.

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Castaneda and Morrison themselves took on the status of cult figures, as did science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. In the early sixties, these attempts at counter-cultural spiritual development were seen as positive and enlightening, but as songwriters such as Ray Thomas (“Legend of a Mind”) and filmmakers Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider) predicted, such utopian dreams held a dark side, later revealed in the cults surrounding anti-gurus such as Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and David Koresh. This book closes with “Intertextuality and the Construction of Authorship in J. M. Coetzee’s Nobel Lecture He and his man,” a paper by Olga Glebova from the Jan Dlugosz Academy in Czestochowa. Glebova discusses J. M. Coetzee’s acceptance speech for the 2003 Nobel Prize in literature which has become one of the most original Nobel lectures undermining all traditional conventions of inaugural speeches. Delivered in the form of a short story entitled “He and his man” Coetzee’s text defies easy interpretation and offers a profound meditation on the metaphysics of writing and a radical questioning of the authorial role. Similarly to the novel Foe (1987), “He and his man” is inspired by Daniel Defoe and is constructed as a complex allegory based on allusions to Robinson Crusoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, The Journal of the Plague Year as well as to some facts from the English writer’s biography. The paper explores Coetzee’s use of the postmodernist narrative device of metalepsis to deconstruct the traditional oppositions “author-character,” “fiction-reality.” The paper also traces the metaphors provided by Coetzee to conceptualise his notions of author and authorship. Coetzee’s story, characterized by narrative indeterminacy and intertextuality, can be read as a self-referential commentary on Coetzee’s own work (which has drawn extensively not only on Defoe but on other writers as well, for example, Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg 1994). On the other hand, it can be seen as an allegory on the creative process in general understood as collaboration and appropriation of previous texts. For its argumentation strongly founded in recent literary studies and humanities in general, its interdisciplinary nature and its focus on the actual global problems of abrupt cultural change and exchange, its heightened understanding of the necessity of coexistence of differences in a changing world, its spirit of tolerance, and its international spirit in general, we assume this collection will not only attract academic literary scholars but will also appeal to the general reading public. Editors, Podgorica, January 2009.

CHAPTER ONE FROM ILLYRIA TO JAMES BOND: MONTENEGRO IN BRITISH WRITING, 1601-2006 PETER PRESTON

At the core of this essay lie discussions of four texts. One, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), is extremely well-known to those interested in the history of British responses to Yugoslavia, although the discussion here concentrates on West’s treatment of Montenegro. Tennyson’s magisterial sonnet “Montenegro,” written and published in 1877, is also familiar, and is fascinating for the way in which the poet creates from a few known facts a Montenegro of his imagination. Joyce Cary’s Memoir of the Bobotes, written soon after his return from service in the Balkan War of 1912-13 but not published until three years after his death, is important not only for its witness to events in the prelude to the First World War, but also because its author went on to be a well-known and much admired novelist. The fourth text, Two Vagabonds in Serbia and Montenegro by Jan and Cora Gordon, first published in 1916, is very little known but offers a rumbustious and probably rather fanciful account of the authors’ exploits in the region during the First World War. In many respects, however, it is difficult to separate the perception of Montenegro from the ways in which British observers have perceived the Balkan Peninsula as a whole. This subject has received extensive treatment from such authors as Vesna Goldsworthy, Maria Todorova and David Norris, all of whom helpfully bring post-colonial and other theoretical perspectives to the study of how the Balkans have been represented in both imaginative and factual texts.1 Although this essay concentrates on the specific ways in which Montenegro has been perceived, it is important,

1

Full details of these books are given in the Bibliography.

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as a context for its argument, to reiterate some points concerning literary Balkanism. The issues begin, of course, with the very word “Balkan”. Its original use in English as a name for the region’s principal mountain chain was based on a misunderstanding of a kind that is very common when travellers, traders or colonisers, mistake the word for something as the name of something. Balkan means mountain and to speak of the “Balkan Mountains” is to call them, tautologically, the “Mountain Mountains”. By extension, “Balkan” came to be used by the 1880s not only to refer to the peninsula that lies to the east of the Adriatic, but also to the states on that peninsula. At about the same time, the word also acquired associations concerning difficulties that were almost impossible to resolve: the Eastern Question of the 1870s became the Balkan crisis and the Balkan problem, which required solutions originating outside the Balkans. The geopolitics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ensured that the Western or Great Powers were very alert to the political affiliations of the Balkan states and to their strategic importance in containing the perceived threat posed by the Russian Empire. It was vital for Western Europe to exert a strong influence in the region in order to keep Russia at bay—but given the power of the Ottoman Empire and the competing Slavophilism of many in the Balkans the balance was a delicate one. The most significant outcome of this power play between East and West was what soon became known as “Balkanization”—the division of the region into a number of small units, usually hostile to one another—a policy calculated to keep the area in an almost perpetual state of conflict and upheaval. There is probably no part of the world where both individual states and groups of states have seen their name and standing change so frequently in so short a time and it is quite hard to remember where Montenegro or any of her neighbours stood at a particular moment during the years from, say, 1876 to 1946. Unsurprisingly, this led to uncertainty, resentment, hostility and warfare as states clamoured for the return of land that they believed was culturally, ethnically and historically theirs. In 1924 the American magazine Scribner’s wrote of Belgrade that “[p]atches of glaring ‘Westernism’ merely emphasize [its] fundamental ‘Balkanism’” (OED 903). Here, “Balkanism” emerges as a term to denote a quality that is not European, nor emphatically non-European. The Balkan’s existence on this borderline is a major determinant of its perception in Western culture. Its location places it somewhere between the civilisation of Italy to the west and Greece to the south. Greece used to be seen as part of the Balkans, but its privileged position within Western culture as the source of philosophy, drama, poetry and art somehow

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separated it from its northern neighbours. Hellenism and the legacy of Rome and the Renaissance from Italy were seen as central factors in the creation of Europeanism, but the Balkans were perceived as playing no part in these cultural developments: there was no Gothic movement, no Renaissance, no neo-Classical revival, no artist, writer or musician whose name was known or influence felt outside the Balkans. In terms of culture in the narrow sense used by Matthew Arnold, the Balkans were a blank, a void. The origins of many of these perceptions of Montenegro and its people can be found in the responses of the earliest English visitors to the country. In her excellent article “Njegoš and England,” Bojka Ĉukanoviü discusses the history of English contact with Montenegro from the early nineteenth century to the reign of Vladika Peter II Petroviü Njegoš, from 1830-1851.2 From the wide range of fascinating quotations drawn from the writings of many travellers and other observers who wrote about Montenegro two key points emerge. There is admiration for the bravery, boldness and daring of the Montenegrins in their courageous defence of their country against the Turks over a period of five hundred years. At the same time, however, courage and defiance can easily become defined in terms of other, less desirable qualities: the Montenegrins are also seen as fierce, blood-thirsty, lawless, barbarous, illiterate and uncivilized. Praise for their determination and their skilful use of the country’s mountainous terrain in their guerrilla war against the Turks is always qualified by a sense that they breach the rules of civilized warfare, and that practices such as the taking and display of their enemies’ heads place them in a realm that, for all their love of freedom and independence, lags behind Western conceptions of conduct. There is a sense that the Montenegrins have come to enjoy warfare and the qualities it demands for their own sake, and that their lust for vengeance and plundering therefore devalues the causes for which they have fought. Many commentators are inclined to forgive this extreme fierceness because their enemies, the Ottoman Turks, are not only seen as cruel and merciless but are also the ancient enemies of Christianity. Nonetheless, balancing or qualifying judgements are present in almost every commentator from this period. Njegoš himself, conscious of his country’s reputation and anxious to encourage contact with Western Europe, was always welcoming to visitors, who were in return impressed by his hospitality and his striking personal qualities. He was an awe-inspiring figure, six feet seven inches tall, with long black hair and a full beard; but observers noted that his 2 For place and personal names I have employed the transliterations in current use. Obsolete forms used in quotations are retained.

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strength was combined with gentleness, with a kindly face and a pleasant smile and small, delicate hands. Elizabeth Roberts sums up the impression that he made on his visitors: “agreeable in manner and dressed in national costume, he was the epitome of the romantic Balkan hero, at once poet and chieftain.”3 Visitors noted and approved of his soldierly qualities, his excellent marksmanship and his courage in leading his people in their struggle against the Turks. In this respect he shared many of the characteristics perceived in the Montenegrins as a whole; but what the visitors record with special emphasis are those aspects of his personality that separated him from his people. He was fluent in French, an excellent conversationalist, learned, with a love of literature and a poet himself. He had travelled in and was knowledgeable about Europe; he had established schools and promoted the printing of books; he was personally charming and especially courteous and gracious in the company of women—indeed he had many of the characteristics of the cosmopolitan European gentleman. These qualities, for many of those who met him, made it all the more extraordinary that such a ruler should emerge in a country like Montenegro. To be the romantic Balkan hero, that essentially Byronic combination of artist and man of action, was not necessarily an ideal or comfortable situation. Romantic barbarism may be very alluring, but for a man engaged in modern state-building, there are many disadvantages. One of his visitors, Charles Lamb,4 sums this up very forcefully: No social distinctions are yet known among them, and the most perfect equality prevails—even the sons address their father by his Christian name. The only exception is in the person of the Vladika—his lot is on the whole not an enviable one. The only educated mind among the many—the only polished gentleman among simple peasants; he is indeed an isolated being. Handsome and in the prime of life, yet there must be none to cheer his lot or lighten his solitude, nor any to whom he would love to transmit his mountain throne.5

There is, then, a personal and political price to be paid for the Vladika’s sophistication and liberalism, in the form of isolation and uncertainty about the succession. It is quite clear, however, that Lamb and other contemporary commentators regarded Njegoš as an isolated phenomenon, 3

Bojka Ĉukanoviü, “Njegoš and England,” Enciclopedia Njegoš, translated by Marija Kneževiü (Beograd—Podgorica: Pitura—Foundation Njegoš, 2006), 188. 4 This is not the Charles Lamb (1775-1834) who was the author of Essays of Elia (1823). 5 Charles Lamb, “A Ramble in Montenegro,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 57/351. January 1845), 50.

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an exceptional personality whose achievements, however significant and impressive, would not necessarily be translated into the transformation of Montenegrin society or its attainment of European standards of civilization. The response to Njegoš is paradigmatic of the two principal ways in which nineteenth-century commentators dealt with the Balkans: romanticisation or demonisation. Byron of course was the great romanticiser, largely because of his use in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18) of his experiences in Albania in 1809-10. For Byron, the exotic was extremely alluring, and at a time when he was disillusioned with England, he was powerfully drawn to the simpler or more primitive way of life he found among the mountains of Albania, and fascinated by the absence of those conventions that had so frustrated and angered him back home. But what fascinated Byron was a source of fear and anxiety to others, and where he gladly embraced a culture that was so distinctively non-European in its social codes and sexual mores, less dazzled commentators worried about that same difference between the Balkans and Europe. The Balkans simultaneously belonged to Europe and yet embodied various kinds of alarming difference and otherness. Here could be found a potential Europeanism of the purest kind, represented by Greece, the very cradle of Western civilised values, but a Europeanism that had been spoiled or turned by its long contact with and domination by the Ottoman Empire. Nor, as I have already suggested, was this situation entirely straightforward, because although in moral and religious terms, the English were anti-Turkish and anti-Islam, in political terms their official stance was pro-Turk and anti-Russian. Nonetheless, it was Gladstone’s conversation with Tennyson about the courage of the Montenegrins in defying the Turks in March 1877 that led to the composition of a sonnet about Montenegro by England’s most celebrated living poet. * They rose to where their Sovran eagle sails, They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height, Chaste, frugal, savage, armed by day and night Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails, And red with blood the Crescent reels from fright Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight By thousands down the crags and through the vales. O smallest among peoples! Rough rock-throne Of Freedom! Warriors beating back the swarm Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,

14

Chapter One Great Tsernagora! Never since thine own Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.6

With words like “eagle,” “scales,” “headlong,” “crags,” “rock-throne,” “ridges,” and “mountaineers”, the sonnet is packed with images of height, while the stoniness of many of these words lends them additional associations of obduracy and firmness. It also associates height with freedom, a trope that Tennyson also employs in a poem written in 1833 and published in 1842, which begins “Of old sat Freedom on the heights.”7 This is developed into the poem’s overall sense of elevation, of the Montenegrins occupying the heights both literally and metaphorically, physically and morally. Tennyson also emphasises the relative size of the opposing armies: the Montenegrins, “smallest among peoples,” are numbered in hundreds, while the Turkish “swarm” (conveying a submerged image of venomous insects) runs to thousands. The numerical inferiority of the Montenegrins is set against their heights of courage: they are “dauntless warriors,” people of “Great Tsernagora,” “mightier mountaineers,” who have defended their country over the enormous time span of five hundred years. Against this is set the comparative weakness of their opponent, whose “footstep fails,” who “reels from fright” and is to be seen “in prone flight,” a vulnerability emphasised by the rhyming words “fright”/“flight” and the emphatic alliteration on the letter “f”. The Montenegrins are “[c]haste, frugal, savage” and although the last word hints at the notion of a lack of “civilisation” in the European sense, Tennyson’s placing of these qualities at the beginning of the line and the metrical emphasis they carry suggests that they are rough but admirable virtues in the context of their defiance of the Turk. Furthermore, the alliterative link of “faith,” “freedom” and “frugal” balances the judgement of the Turks in “fail,” “fright” and “flight.” The rhythm and metre of the poem are steady and dignified, and Tennyson, who according to his son Hallam placed Montenegro “first among his sonnets,” is intervening in a tradition of sonnet-writing, also to be found in the work of John Milton

6

Alferd Lord Tennyson, “Montenegro,” The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969), 1240. The sonnet was first published in the prestigious periodical the Nineteenth Century, May 1877 and was accompanied by an article about Montenegro by Gladstone. 7 Ibid., 617-618.

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(1608-74) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850), to mark public events and call attention to the plight of oppressed and tyrannised peoples.8 * I had a certain romantic enthusiasm for the cause of the Montenegrins; in short I was young and eager for any sort of adventure. I saw most of the fighting and was among the first three across the bridge at Scutari, at the surrender of the Turks in 1913. For this campaign I had a little gold medal from the Montenegrin government which I prize very much, that it was earned in what was, for a boy of my age, very much an adventure.9

When Joyce Cary travelled to Montenegro in October 1912, he was a young man of twenty-four, recently graduated from Oxford University, idealistic but restless and casting around for an opportunity to act on his idealism and further his ultimate ambition to be a writer. He thought that it was vital for someone who hoped one day to write novels to experience war and believed that the Balkan conflict would be his last opportunity to do so, since like many other people at the time he was convinced that there would be no more large-scale European wars. The combination of Cary’s desire for experience and adventure is very evident in the style and structure of Memoir of the Bobotes, the book that Cary wrote, probably soon after his return to Britain in May 1913, about his Montenegrin experiences. Idealism is less evident in the Memoir, however, because the keenly observant and unflinchingly honest future writer in Cary transformed into prose what he saw and heard in Montenegro. He arrived in Montenegro with the hope of joining the Montenegrin Red Cross at Antivari (Bar), and when that proved too difficult he briefly considered enlisting in the Montenegrin army. But while he was in Antivari he was caught up in a series of events, which included being arrested as a possible saboteur, when he was near an army ammunition dump that suddenly exploded.10 In the event he showed great courage and presence of mind and as a result was able to join the British Red Cross, 8

See, for instance, Milton’s ‘On the late Massacher in Piemont’ (1655; Milton 436) and Wordsworth’s ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic (1802-03; Wordsworth 268). 9 Joyce Cary, Memoir of the Bobotes, Introduction by Walter Allen (London: Michael Joseph, 1964), 8. All the in-text references to this text are taken from this edition. 10 My thanks are due to Dr. Bojka Ĉukanoviþ of the University of Montenegro who in September 2007 took me on a tour of the ruins of Antivari, including the site of the blockhouse that exploded and the prison where Cary was briefly incarcerated.

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with which he served on the strategically vital Scutari front until the Turkish surrender. Such experiences certainly brought Cary to the heart of the war and he reports on some horrific sights; but for all its powerful verbal and visual representations of the consequences of war, Memoir is not in the strict sense a war book, and Cary’s interest is in rendering what it feels like to be involved in a war as a non-combatant. As he says, in the fauxapologetic last sentence of the book: “if this proves a disappointing book it must be because there is too much eating, and too little incident in it—too much like life, which is perhaps disappointing for the same reason” (164). For a time, Cary acted as chef for his Red Cross unit, so food inevitably figures quite prominently in the narrative; as he remarks earlier “[a]nyone will tell you that a war is not made up of just fighting, but just exactly of stew, and if you are lucky, eggs” (108). But Cary is not just interested in food for its own sake—he also wishes to make a point about the everyday realities of life and the role they play in the larger narratives of history: These seem to be paltry matters for a historical work, but they are after all the most important parts of history, and generally forgotten. No one would have bothered to make history at all but for appetite or, at the lowest, hunger. Take out the meals of a week of your life, and see what is left of you as a historical character on Saturday evening. (51)

Such macrocosmic reflections are uncommon in Memoir, because Cary is more concerned with life on a section of a front in a single war, and much less concerned with writing about War with a capital “W”. In tone, as Walter Allen points out, the book is very pre-First World War (9). In its descriptions of boredom between actions it anticipates some accounts of trench warfare on the battlefields of Flanders and France, but in other respects it is very different from that of writers like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden. It contains no outrage about the iniquities of warfare or any particular identification with a righteous cause, even though Cary’s sympathies were clearly with the Montenegrins. Cary’s letters home from the front are described by his biographer Malcolm Foster as “cool, factual, objective, simple”11 and these qualities are carried over into the prose of Memoir; indeed one might say that the greater the danger and horror he describes the cooler and more evenly paced his prose becomes, as in this short passage from his account of the explosion at Antivari: 11

Malcom Foster, Joyce Cary. A Biography (London: Michael Joseph, 1969), 80.

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We were taking cover for the last time, to get breath for the last rush, when Williams said suddenly: “Look at that, Joe!” and pointed down. Joe Baverstock and I looked, and noticed something like a piece of withered branch with the bark on. I picked it up and saw that it was a man’s arm, the fingers blown away at the palm. “I expect that’s the lad that did it,” was Joe’s comment; I handed the arm to our guide, who put it in his belt. (30)

The detachment, the mordant brevity of the spoken exchange and the refusal to make any comment about the experience, is characteristic of the book as a whole and does not indicate lack of concern on Cary’s part, but a desire to observe events as closely as possible and render them in clear, accurate and unadorned prose. Three more brief points need to be made about Cary’s representation of the Montenegrins at war. The first is that Cary displays little sympathy for those Montenegrins who have emigrated to America in search of prosperity and a better life and have returned to fight in the war, but who now complain about the poverty of the country, the difficulties of its terrain and the ignorance of its people. He reflects that “[p]robably the very rocks and cliffs that kept them hungry, and have kept them independent and self-respecting for so many centuries, give them also the good health, good air, and plenty of exercise, that make them happy” (57). Second, he frequently remarks on the beauty of the country, particularly when looking down from its heights on “a minute and distant world that seemed as far from us as Atlantis” (18). Finally, he pays tribute to the Montenegrin soldiers, whose courage and sense of honour are so evident; but he complicates that opinion with statements which very neatly turn the tables on European ideas of the superiority of their way of life to those of the Balkan countries: This was already the time of the Armistice, which was respected far too well by the Montenegrins for their own good. For the first time they were fighting by the rules of European warfare, and they are not enough civilized to know that these rules are never kept. (52)

* A text that appears to have eluded most previous commentators on British perceptions of the Balkans is Jan and Cora Gordon’s The Luck of Thirteen, first published with that title in 1916. When it was republished as a Penguin paperback in 1939 it was retitled Two Vagabonds in Serbia and

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Montenegro, to make it uniform with the authors’ series of travel books published in the intervening twenty years. The book is an account of twelve months, January to December 1915, that the Gordons spent working for the Red Cross in Serbia, which included an eventful and sometimes perilous excursion into Montenegro to bring much needed stores and hospital supplies into the country. The Gordons were in the great tradition of English eccentricity. Both came from solidly middle-class families, Jan the son of a clergyman and Cora—known in the book as Jo—the daughter of a doctor. Jan, after a false start as a mining engineer, trained as an artist in London, while Jo resisted her father’s attempts to steer her towards a nursing career and studied art at the prestigious Slade School in London. They were both gifted musicians: Jo had studied violin and piano at the Manchester Conservatory, while Jan was proficient on the banjo; and in later life they earned part of their income from performing folk music on a variety of plucked and bowed instruments. By 1906 they were both in Paris, painting and moving in artistic circles. They married in 1909 and returned to England at the outbreak of war. Jan was unfit for active service, so he and Jo volunteered to work for the Red Cross and were sent to Serbia with a unit from the Royal Free Hospital in London. On their return to England in December 1915, by what seems to have been a combination of cheek and charm, they persuaded a London publisher to commission a book. Two Vagabonds must be the only book in the world whose structure attempts to imitate the design of a hat. As they were leaving the publisher’s office, he asked Jo where she had got her hat. The Gordons explained that it was made of a white Albanian saucer-like fez which we had bought in Plevlie, that the handkerchief twisted round it was from the Bazar at Scutari, both held together by the large silver brooch which Nikolai Pavlovitch, ex-brigand and comitaj, had helped us to buy at [Peþ].12

The publisher asked that they should “write [the book] as much like that hat as possible” (11). The resulting volume, with alternate chapters drafted by one and then checked by the other, was completed in two weeks, and like Jo’s hat, it consists of a variety of elements, which give it a haphazard, slightly bizarre yet very attractive quality.

12

Jan and Cora Gordon, Two Vagabonds in Serbia and Montenegro (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), 11. All the in-text references to this text are taken from this edition.

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Although the book was revised for the 1939 Penguin edition, because readers of the first edition said that its arrangement was puzzling, the later text, even after more than one reading, remains infuriatingly elliptical and frustratingly lacking in contextual information. There are few chronological markers and no attempt to give everything a full or equitable treatment: the first five months of their service in Serbia are disposed of in a dozen pages, while their much shorter sojourn in Montenegro occupies over a hundred pages. The legend on the book’s only map reads “Route Map of the Authors’ Wanderings” and together with their use of the selfdescription “vagabonds” catches something of the nature of the book: there is a strong sense of a couple of ramblers enjoying the freedom of the road. The map has no key, no helpful direction arrows, and omits several places where significant events occurred. In this sense the book is an anticipation of their later travel books, in which they refuse to conform to the conventions of travel writing or their readers’ expectations of the genre. Like E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Byron, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, they were early practitioners of a new style of idiosyncratic and impressionistic travel writing that emerged in the inter-war years, offering a response to place rather than a guide to places. Yet Two Vagabonds is also a war book, but a war book that largely views the conflict from the wings or from behind the lines. The Gordons saw the consequences of battle, rather than the fighting itself. They observe wounded soldiers, a civilian population deprived of proper medical care, a peasantry trying to survive in times of acute shortages, and towards the end of the book, a retreating army. There is one scene set at the front when Jo fires a machine gun at the enemy and they witness a Montenegrin artillery unit, much to its surprise and delight, inadvertently scoring a direct hit on a building containing enemy officers. This sense of direct conflict comes as something of a surprise, for most of the violence in the book is between husbands and wives, as episodes in blood feuds or as a consequence of drunkenness, as when Jan deals with a Montenegrin soldier abusing a Turkish peasant by throwing him into a stream. Given their interest in people’s ordinary lives, it is not surprising that the Gordons have little to say about the war in a larger sense. Nor do they dwell on the historical dimensions of issues like Montenegrin independence. On one occasion they refer to Montenegro as “the black mountain where the last of the old Serbian aristocracy defied the Turk” (49) and there is also a passing reference to the epochal battle of Kosovo. A speech about Montenegrin territorial claims is put, without authorial comment, in the mouth of an irredentist Sirdar. There is a reference to Montenegro as a country which has over a long period resisted Turkish

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Chapter One

conquest, and how much the nature of the terrain always aided the Montenegrins and prevented the Turks from occupying the whole country. But the point is not dwelt upon: the relationship between the nature of the terrain and Montenegrin independence is not explored in the philosophical manner to be found later in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. The Gordons are much more interested in a number of other features of Montenegrin culture. They remark on “the grateful temperament of the Montenegrins,” (51) their unwillingness to admit to hunger because it is a sign of weakness (67), and their odd habit, encountered at several inns and cafes, of denying that rooms and food are available (115). They admire the energy, courage and cheerfulness of a group of women carrying supplies to sons, brothers and husbands at the front. They comment on the Montenegrins’ dignity of demeanour and appreciate their non-cosmopolitan innocence. In Danilovgrad they miss the “picturesque Turkish houses […] full of unexpected corners and mysterious balconies” (76) seen in Albania. Montenegrin houses are “small and simple, four walls and a roof, like the drawing of a three-year-old child, except that there were no chimneys. Broad streets lined with the houses would have been depressing had they not been painted in bright colours” (76-77). There are bad roads, smelly, bug-ridden bedrooms and disgusting food, but although the Gordons do all they can to sleep comfortably and eat adequately, they accept many of their problems as the inevitable consequences of the war, and they certainly make no criticism of the Montenegrins for the state of affairs. Nor do they seem to have come to the country with any of the conventional prejudices and assumptions to be found in many earlier accounts of life in Serbia or Montenegro. There is no significant mention of the supposed warlike nature of the Montenegrins or their tall, fierce, warriors. The only speech along these lines comes from a Montenegrin who accuses the Albanians of being interested in nothing but killing (118). The single reference to Montenegrin height is in a comic context, when some soldiers talk about the inadequacy of French uniforms, designed for an army with an average height of five feet two inches and supplied to the six footers in Montenegro’s army. The royal family, whose photos decorate so many houses, pops up in expected and banal places: a young and rather down-at-heel princess on a ferry, and in an inn a weary soldierprince in need of a shave. The Gordons note with amusement that Strauss’s The Merry Widow is banned in Podgorica because it contains a supposed portrait of Prince Danilov, but they make no comment as to whether they believe, as did so many popular novelists, that Balkan politics belonged in the world of light operetta and Ruritanian romance.

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Overall, however, the Gordons liked Montenegro. They found Podgorica, or “Pod” as they call it, “sleepy [and] inhospitable” (110). Cetinje they describe as a “polychromatic little village of little square houses, cheerfully dreary;” they note that the monastery is the town’s only building of architectural interest, and that since the prince-bishops reigned from there “it must have many a queer tale to tell” (79). Characteristically, however, they do not tell any of these tales. There is nothing about the characters of the prince-bishops, no mention of Njegoš or the Montenegrin Vespers.13 On the other hand, they are very conscious of the country’s natural beauties, which they describe with the eyes of trained painters: On the higher peaks of the mountains there was already a fresh powdering of snow. In the valleys the clouds had almost cleared away, leaving a film of moisture that made shadows of pure ultramarine beneath the trees. Your modern commercial grinder [of paints] can’t sell you this colour […] Pure lapis lazuli. (109)

They certainly seem to leave this “hospitable little country” (131) with regret, and compare it with Serbia, to the latter’s detriment: Coming back to Serbia from Montenegro was like slipping from a warm into a cool bath. One is reminded that the lords of Serbia withdrew to Montenegro, leaving the peasants behind, for every peasant in the black mountain is a noble and carries a noble’s dignity; while Karageorge was a pig farmer. There is a warmth in Montenegro—save only Pod. The Montenegrin peasant is like a great child, looking at the varied world with thirteenth century unspoiled eye; centuries of Turkish oppression have been hard on the Serb. (134)

* Rebecca West wrote Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in a different context from that of either Cary’s or the Gordons’ book. She visited Montenegro 13

The Montenegrin Vespers are said to have taken place on Christmas Eve 1702, when on the orders of the clan chiefs and led by the five Martinoviü brothers, there was a massacre of Christians who had converted to Islam and refused to recant. There is no contemporary description of the event, which does not appear in the historical record until the nineteenth century, and although there is a strong folk tradition about the Vespers, transmitted in popular ballads, some Balkan historians doubt that it ever took place. Its place in Montenegrin culture was, however, assured in 1847 when Njegoš, the poet-prince, published The Mountain Wreath, his epic poem dramatising the story of the Vespers.

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Chapter One

in peacetime and was usually able to move around the country with comparative freedom. She was also at a different stage in her literary career when she visited Yugoslavia in 1936, 1937 and 1938. Cary and the Gordons were young authors who had still to establish their literary reputation as authors; whereas West was a well-established writer in her mid-forties who had published several novels and undertaken a good deal of literary journalism. She had been a political activist, prominent in the suffragette movement, was associated with radical writers and thinkers. As the “Prologue” to the book indicates, she brought to Yugoslavia knowledge of the country’s history as well as an understanding of its current political situation. West’s journey through Yugoslavia as recounted in the book is an entirely literary construct, since she combines, conflates and synthesises impressions gathered from all three of her visits. Although it reads like a chronological continuum it is a narrative whose apparently uninterrupted journey is entirely illusory. Furthermore, the journey that gives the book its narrative drive is only one determinant of its shape and structure. West introduces passages of historical and political comment that thicken the texture of the narrative and strengthen its context. This is especially important because by the time the book was published in 1941, the war had begun, and its first English readers had already lived through the Blitz, the Battle of Britain and the fall of France and Dunkirk. Until the end of 1941, when America entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbour, Britain faced Nazi Germany almost alone. In these circumstances, the historical dimensions of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, with their accounts of five hundred years of resistance against the Turks, must have seemed very apposite. Although between 1936 and 1938, when West was actually in Yugoslavia, it was apparent that a large-scale conflict was imminent, by 1941 her journeys had acquired an extra retrospective significance. West’s “Bibliographical Note” makes it clear that she was aware of the tradition of European writing about the Balkans and that she disapproved of much of it. Her background reading was extensive, comprising histories of Christianity and the Roman and Byzantine empires, as well as nineteenth-century travellers’ accounts and recent works of history and analysis. She remarks on “the peculiar character of the literature which deals with the Balkans,” much of which is either “propaganda bought and paid for by the great powers” or “a sour controversy between birds of two different feathers […] content to beat their wings in the empyrean of

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ignorance.”14 Whereas the work of earlier polemicists is almost “entirely subjective,” she wishes in a more disinterested manner to “give a picture of the reality of South Slav life” (1153). West’s implicit suggestion that objectivity is possible in such matters is problematic, but the Balkans have posed particular problems of discourse for most foreign observers, and it is easy to understand and sympathize with Rebecca West’s irritation with some of her predecessors. And indeed it is clear that she was alert to the special historiographical problems implicit in the perception of the Balkans: It is to be hoped, that some expert historian will at some future date deal with this curious example of the difficulty humanity experiences in acquiring information about itself. When whole periods have been seduced into such fantasies, it is only to be expected that individual authors have succumbed. (1153)

It is notable that a great deal of space in the Montenegrin chapters of West’s book is devoted to the subject of beauty, not because West is indifferent to the aesthetics of landscape in other parts of Yugoslavia, but because her encounters with various forms of beauty in Montenegro appear to have been both unsettling and resonant. There are several appreciative, almost ecstatic descriptions of the landscape, emphasising its pure, idyllic and elemental quality: A circle of water lay in a square of emerald marshland, fringed with whitish reeds, and framed by hills patterned with green grass and crimson earth, with a sheer wall of snow mountains behind them. The glowing hills and the shining peaks were exactly mirrored in the lake, and received the embellishment of a heavenly bloom peculiar to its waters. (1005)

She dismisses the common idea that the country is barren as a “delusion of those who see it only from the sea,” and asserts that its inland region holds, as in a cup, a kind of purity: pure heat in summer, pure ripeness in autumn and pure cold in winter. In late spring, when West was here, it holds “pure freshness, the undiluted essence of what that season brings to the world to renew its youth” (1004). It was, as she says of the lake whose description I have just quoted, “as good a place as can be;” and she adds, “if beauty is any good” (1005). West’s speculations about the goodness or value of beauty lie at the centre of her representation of Montenegro as she struggles to make sense 14

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. A Journey Through Yugoslavia. 1942 (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993), 1153. All the in-text references to this text are taken from this edition.

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of the relationship between beauty, hardship, the struggle for freedom and the heroic but sometimes tough virtues of the Montenegrins in pursuing their liberty. Even as she notes the beauty of the country and its people she is conscious of allied qualities: an almost forbidding sense of impassivity and an affect that without actually rejecting visitors, does not welcome them unrestrainedly. “If the country has a blatant fault,” West writes, “it is a chilling blankness”; the face of the typical house is “singularly inexpressive,” and even when gathered in villages the houses “never warm into welcoming sociability [...] It is as if,” she continues, “the genius of the place lacked emotional and intellectual pigmentatio” (1006). Even the churches have “neither within nor without the faintest air of mysticism” and she observes that they “might have been town halls, or even, in some cases, block-houses” (1008). Although West is able to explain the apparently secular character of religious buildings in terms of Montenegro’s history of rule by prince-bishops, for her, these considerations add to the country’s elemental qualities. Podgorica is “built without eloquence” and “expresses nothing but forthrightness and resistance,” (1025) while even Cetinje is “typically Montenegrin in a Puritanism that suffers no decoration save an occasional great tree” and is “a town like a Golgotha” (1038) with “wide, unsecretive, banal streets” (1048). Intensifying the impression created by West’s descriptions of Montenegrin buildings is what she calls “the terrible purity of Montenegrin good looks”: The beauty of both the men and the women is beyond what legend paints it; because legends desire to please, and this perfection demonstrates that there can be too much of a good thing. They are fabulous non-monsters. Such symmetry of feature and figure, such lustre of hair and eye and skin and teeth, such unerring grace, chokes the eye with cream. (1006)

In West’s account this beauty becomes strangely inanimate, even inhuman. She speaks of the “white immobile handsomeness” of a young man and of the people as “marvellously beautiful […], placid as wild animals” (1007). In her sexual prime the Montenegrin woman “presents a disconcerting blankness. Her face is like a niche designed for a statue it does not hold” (1036). West observes in a passing cart a woman with her child who resembles a Byzantine Madonna and comments that perhaps “Byzantine is not so stylized as we believe, and that it may a more or less naturalist representation of a highly stylized life,” (1004) and later she writes again of the “Byzantine tensity” of the Montenegrin women. (1031). This sense of an iconic or marmoreal beauty in the people is central to Rebecca West’s reading of Montenegrin history. She understands the

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compulsions that have driven that history, even if her understanding is deeply disturbing to her equilibrium. Writing of the Montenegrin Vespers, she admires the Martinoviü brothers who are supposed to have led the massacre of Muslims: “Having seen what Turkish conquest meant to the Slav, it is certain they were justified in their crime. A man is not a man if he will not save his seed” (1008). But their determination to preserve their freedom may have extracted from the Montenegrins a terrible price. Constantine, the Serbian writer who accompanies West and her husband on their travels, argues that by devoting themselves so whole-heartedly to warfare and to living by an heroic code, the Montenegrins have sacrificed part of themselves and become a Homeric race, “brave, and beautiful, and vainglorious” (1009). Such vainglory, an absolute self-belief necessary for survival against overwhelming odds, has made them unfit for the modern world, unwilling to work and “empty-headed except for their wild and unthinking heroism” (1010). They are, as he says in another deflation of the heroic ideal, ‘“boastful imbeciles, like the Homeric heroes” (1019). Rebecca West reports Constantine’s speeches in which these phrases occur without comment or qualification, but in the following paragraph she articulates her own opinion in a manner that is startling and itself possesses some of the stoicism, implacability and determination that she attributes to the Montenegrins: Montenegro was something like a prison. Though it was airy as Heaven, instead of airless, like other prisons, it was stony like a cell, and it reeked of heroism as strongly as institutions reek of disinfectant, and the straitened inhabitants were sealed up in space with the ideas of slaughter and triumph as convicts are in their confinement with guilt and punishment. If one shut the eyes and thought of any pleasantness but the most elemental, any enjoyment that helped the mind further on in its task of exploring the universe, one had to say on opening them, “It is not here, nothing but the root of it is here.” (1010).

West constantly returns to these related ideas of root, element and bedrock, the “core of hardness humanity keeps under its soft wrapping of flesh” (1003). But there is also the sense that long endurance and obduracy may harden any human heart: as W. B. Yeats puts it in his poem “Easter 1916,” “Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart.”15 West’s representation of Montenegro in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon owes as much to events that occurred between her visits to Yugoslavia 15

William Butler Yeats, “Easter 1916”, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1963), 204.

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1936, 1937 and 1938 and the composition and publication of the book as it does to the impressions she gathered during her journeys through the country. The book was completed, published, read and received in wartime and needs to be considered in that context as much as in the category of Balkan travel writing to which it is usually consigned. Such a reading would surely note the relationship between Britain and Montenegro as small nations fighting for survival against enormous odds. It would also show how West positions herself in relation to Britain’s situation in 1940 and 1941. On the road to Kolashin, West and her companions meet a woman of sixty whose experiences include the loss of a husband and son in the 1914-18 war, the death of a daughter in a prison camp and those of her two children by a much older second husband now senile and violent towards her. She is walking in the mountains “to try to understand why all this has happened” (1012). At first, West is heartened by the woman’s search for “knowledge of what her life might mean” (1012-1013). As long as there is “one human being born in every generation who will not cease to inquire into the nature of his fate [...] some day we shall read the riddle of our universe” (1013). Yet after their “heroic” chauffeur, rather than admit that he has lost his way, leads them on a perilous climb across dangerous terrain, West’s mood changes and the woman’s search for meaning seems less feasible: “On the great mountains she was so small; against the black universal mass of our insanity her desire for understanding seemed so weak a weapon,” (1022) just as West’s understanding may have faltered before the vast irrationality of total war, the second in her lifetime. Nevertheless, West and her husband are “Western and therefore obsessed with the secondary meaning” (1058) the deeper significance beyond the immediate suffering, so that speculation about the woman and about “the monotonous white colonnade of Montenegrin heroism,” (1061) gives way to a reflection on why English culture is worth preserving. This passage may sum up the most important lesson that West brought away from her encounters with Montenegro. I know that the English [...] do not give themselves up to feeling or to work as they should, they lack readiness to sacrifice their individual rights for the sake of the corporate good, they do not bid the right welcome to the other man’s soul. But they are on the side of life, they love justice, they hate violence, and they respect the truth. It is not always so when they deal with India or Burma; but that is not their fault, it is the fault of Empire, which makes a man own things outside his power to control. But among themselves, in dealing with things within their reach, they have learned some part of the Christian lesson that it is our disposition to crucify what is

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good, and that we must therefore circumvent our barbarity. This measure of wisdom makes it right that my civilization should not perish. (10601061)

* At the beginning of the lecture on which this essay is based I offered some impromptu but not unconsidered remarks about Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night (1601). About a week before travelling to Montenegro to deliver the lecture I had seen the play in its latest production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. The production laid great emphasis on the play’s concern with disguise and the consequent identity and gender confusions. In a return to the practice of the Elizabethan stage, Viola was played by a male actor so that it was when playing a woman early in the play that he seemed most out of place. In the guise of a woman dressed as a man Viola attracts both Duke Orsino and Olivia, as does her twin brother Sebastian, a man playing a man. One of the female attendants at Olivia’s court was played by a man, part of whose business was to manipulate one of the two mirrors that were on the stage throughout the production and in which the actors occasionally checked their appearance. By the time Feste the clown cried, in some despair, “Nothing that is so, is so”16 it was impossible not to sympathise with his confusion. Twelfth Night takes place in Illyria, as the sea Captain tells Viola when they land after the shipwreck in which Sebastian is supposed to have been drowned. From the tenth century BCE until they were absorbed into the Roman Empire about 167 BCE, Illyrian tribes occupied an area west of the Balkans along the Dalmatian coast, including the land that is now Montenegro, so that Shakespeare’s play has a good claim to be the earliest reference to the country in English writing. Of course there is nothing in the least Illyrian about Twelfth Night: the plot came from an Italian source and the high born characters have Italian-sounding names. Otherwise, especially in the comic scenes among the servants and less respectable characters, the atmosphere of the play is entirely English. Like the Athens of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/6) or the Forest of Arden in As You Like It (1599-1600), Illyria is an imaginative realm, an evocative but remote location, unvisitable and unverifiable, in which Shakespeare can allow his characters to play out their dramas. The play occupied my thoughts a great deal in the final stages of preparing my lecture, less for its historical veracity or the details of the 16 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975), 4.1.9, 110.

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production, than for Feste’s cry that nothing that is so, is so. As the play moves towards its dénouement, its disguises cast off and its stratagems explained, Feste and other characters will have much more reason to doubt the certainty of what they thought they knew or felt. Tennyson’s Montenegro has a more solid relationship to the real country than Shakespeare’s Illyria, but ultimately it is a creation of his imagination; and sometimes it seemed that the world described by Joyce Cary, the Gordons and even Rebecca West had something imaginative and dream-like about it. Montenegro’s dark towering mountains and deep lakes, its tall fierce warriors and its equally dauntless, impossibly beautiful women sometimes took on a mythic quality. As another English writer, travelling through Yugoslavia in the mid-1960s puts it, “Montenegro is a little like a land from an old Romantic novel: a little unlikely, a little haunted.”17 This same sense of uncertainty about the reality of Montenegro emerges in the most recent British narrative to mention the country. There comes a point in the plot of the 2006 re-make of the James Bond adventure Casino Royale when Bond has to travel to the casino of the title in order to win a very large sum of money from an expert card player. There is an aerial establishing shot of some pleasant wooded countryside through which is speeding a luxury train carrying Bond to his destination. In the next shot he arrives at a luxury hotel near the glamorous Casino Royale in a town full of spires and onion domes, all brilliantly lit. At the beginning of this sequence there appears at the bottom of the screen the legend “Montenegro”. Several friends who saw the film commented on this sequence and remarked that I was fortunate to have visited such a beautiful country more than once. My only reply could be that Montenegro is indeed a beautiful country—but that it is not the country seen in the film: that, as the final credits revealed, was the Czech Republic. What is striking, however, is the extent to which in this case the medium has become the message and how many people accept that because the film said it was Montenegro, it must have been Montenegro. They seem to have forgotten that film is an art built upon illusion, in which Ancient Rome can be recreated in Morocco or Aberdeen can stand in for Moscow. An article in 2007 in the English Sunday newspaper, the Observer, discussed the future development of Montenegro’s Adriatic coast as a high-class tourist destination, evoking the glorious days when Sophia Loren, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were among its visitors. It reported that Michael Douglas and 17

Brian Aldiss, Cities and Stones. A Traveller’s Yugoslavia (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 208. Brian Aldiss (b. 1925) is one of England’s leading science fiction writers.

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Catherine Zeta-Jones are house-hunting near Kotor, where the racing driver Ralf Schumacher owns land. It also remarked that the country’s profile was raised “by Casino Royale, which took Daniel Craig as James Bond to play poker” and used a photograph of Daniel Craig as James Bond as an illustration18. If you type “Montenegro” into your favourite search engine you will probably be confronted with numerous websites offering holiday homes for sale or purchase and other kinds of investment opportunities, and many of them will mention Casino Royale as offering an authentic image of the country. The film-makers probably chose the name because it sounded like Monte Carlo, location of a famous casino, but an expensive place for filming and perhaps too readily recognisable for screen audiences to accept as anywhere other than itself: the Czech Republic provided a less familiar and no doubt much cheaper alternative. Montenegro was in many respects a perfect choice because, like the film’s other locations, which include the Bahamas and Venice, it is a real place, but it is not one that is yet well-known to many people outside the Balkans. It therefore functions in the film both realistically and imaginatively, a place which sounds exotic, yet is sufficiently unknown to serve as an unexplored elsewhere. It is, in short, a Montenegro of the mind, where, as in Shakespeare’s Illyria, nothing that is so, is so.19

Works Cited Aldiss, Brian. Cities and Stones. A Traveller’s Yugoslavia. London: Faber & Faber, 1966. Byron, George, Lord. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. 1812-18. The Major Works. Edited by Jerome J. McGann. 1986, 19-206. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cary, Joyce. Memoir of the Bobotes. Introduction by Walter Allen. London: Michael Joseph, 1964.

18

“Europe’s new golden coast”, The Observer, 15 July 2007, 33. My thanks are due to a number of colleagues in Montenegro and from elsewhere in the Balkans, from whose conversation and ideas I have profited in the course of writing both the original lecture and this essay. They include Dr Bojka Ĉukanoviü, Dr Marija Kneževiü and Dr Aleksandra Nikþeviü-Batriþeviü of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Montenegro; Dr Biljana ýubroviü and Mirjana Daniþiü of the University of Belgrade; and Dr Vesna Lopiþiü of the University of Niš. Dr Biljana Ĉoriü-Francuski’s paper on Joyce Cary’s Memoir of the Bobotes, whose conclusions complemented my own, gave me food for thought in the revision of my lecture for publication. 19

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Ĉukanoviü, Bojka. “Njegoš and England.” Enciclopedia Njegoš. Translated by Marija Kneževiü, 375-402. Beograd—Podgorica: Pitura—Foundation Njegoš, 2006. “Europe’s New Golden Coast.” The Observer, 33. 15 July 2007. Foster, Malcolm. Joyce Cary. A Biography. London: Michael Joseph, 1969. Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania. Imperialism of the Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Gordon, Jan and Cora. Two Vagabonds in Serbia and Montenegro. 1916 as The Luck of Thirteen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939. Lamb, Charles. “A Ramble in Montenegro.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. 57 (351), 33-51. January 1845. Mazower, Mark. The Balkans: From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day. 2000. London: Phoenix, 2001. Milton, John. The Poems of John Milton. Edited by Helen Darbishire. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Norris, David. In the Wake of the Balkan Myth. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. The Oxford English Dictionary [OED]. Second edition. Edited by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Roberts, Elizabeth. Realm of the Black Mountain. A History of Montenegro. London: Hurst, 2007. Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. 1601. Edited by J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1975. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. “Montenegro.” 1877. The Poems of Tennyson. Edited by Christopher Ricks, 1239-40. London: Longmans, 1969. Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. West, Rebecca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. A Journey Through Yugoslavia. 1942. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993. Wordsworth, William. The Major Works. Edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Yeats, W. B. Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1963.

CHAPTER TWO MONTENEGRO AS THE SCENE OF SOME STRANGE WAR IMAGES IN JOYCE CARY’S MEMOIR OF THE BOBOTES BILJANA ĈORIû-FRANCUSKI

“a war is not made up of fighting, but just exactly of stew, and if you are lucky, eggs.”1

Introduction Among the British authors who wrote about the country of Southern Slavs—in other words, the former Yugoslavia—the one who certainly deserves to be mentioned is Joyce Cary. This great man not only visited our lands, but even participated in a war fought here—on our side as well—and he described that experience in a very strange way in his autobiography Memoir of the Bobotes. The image of the Balkan nations was basically shaped and essentially established in English literature during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and this represents the crucial period for the creation of the general outlines of the Balkan stereotypes that even nowadays still prevail in the Anglophone world. Cary played a vital role in impartial, and even favourable, painting of the Southern Slavic nations, including Serbs and Montenegrins, unlike some other notable British authors—above all Miss Durham2—who were outstandingly anti-Serb and sharply criticised our people whenever the opportunity presented itself. 1 Joyce Cary, Memoir of the Bobotes (London: Michael Joseph. 1964), 108. All the in-text references are taken from this edition. 2 Mary Edith Durham (1863-1944) was a British writer who travelled in the early twentieth century down the coast of Dalmatia, by sea, and then overland to Montenegro. In the course of twenty years, Miss Durham visited various Balkan

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Nonetheless, who would have thought that the object of the following sentence: “We assured him3 that we had enjoyed [it] very much, congratulated him [...] and there was general4 hand-shaking,” (147) might be the war? And yet, that is precisely what it is: the First Balkan War— fought in 1912 between Turks and Montenegrins, as described by Joyce Cary in his Memoir of the Bobotes! It is generally thought that Cary treats the subject of the Balkan War with contempt, and that he writes disdainfully about those who were involved in it, on both sides. On the other hand, some parts of his narrative show that he really considers his participation in the war to be an extraordinary adventure5, and—however ghastly it may sound—enjoys it in every sense of the word, so much so that in his “Foreword” to the book Walter Allen compares Cary’s experience with a holiday6, and an excursion7, while Cary himself talks about an expedition (67) and behaves as if he were a simple traveller through the region (79). In fact, the war served only as the background for some of his personal feelings and thoughts, which does not mean that he was insensitive or in denial—he simply did not overdramatize things as some people tend to do. Since he volunteered to serve in a British Red Cross unit, we can compare his role in the war to that of a doctor in any hospital—and it is obvious that life and death hold another meaning for those who are in touch with painful tragedies on a daily basis. Moreover, countries many times, and particularly Albania, which was extremely undeveloped at that time. While she worked in relief organisations, Mary Durham also painted, wrote and collected folk art. Among her several books on the Balkans, the best known one is High Albania, in which she described the traditions and culture of that country, with a lot of symapthy for the “Albanian cause.” Contrary to that, Miss Durham fervently criticised the policy of the Yugoslav state, which included Kosovo as part of Serbia, referring to it as to “Great Serbia.” She was increasingly anti-Serb, thus causing disapproval by some more pro-Serb British intellectuals, namely Rebecca West, Robert William Seton-Watson, and—as the following quotation shows quite clearly—Joyce Cary himself. In his Memoir of the Bobotes Cary writes: “But if any nose cutting was done in this war (whatever Miss Durham may say, and I think she would now admit that she was misled) it was the Albanian irregulars who did it” (Cary, 48). 3 That is, a Montenegrin army commander—General Martinoviü. 4 On several occasions (see, for instance, footnote 45) Cary makes interesting puns using words which occur with different meanings or using similar words – in this case, he repeats a word twice in the same paragraph: as a noun in “General Martinoviü,” and as an adjective in “general hand-shaking.” 5 Cary’s words quoted in Walter Allen, “Foreword,” in Joyce Cary, op. cit., 8. 6 Ibid., 8-9. 7 Ibid., 9.

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Cary never even as much as hints that he is aware of the fact that his adventure represents for other people a matter of life and death, nor does he attempt to bring before the reader all the misery and suffering that war has caused. Only rare pages of the book contain upsetting and naturalistic sights, consequently revealing the presence of war, but even those are all filtered through the author’s lightheartedness, and thus remain distant from both him and the reader. In addition to that, a large part of the chronicle is devoted to describing food, drinks and the preparation of meals. There are three possible explanations for this phenomenon: first of all, Cary also served as a cook in his unit, so food was very important in his life at that time; the second reason is that his role of a cookee plus a dresser was such that he was not really in the midst of fighting, since both these duties are carried out further away from the forefront; and finally, he claims—which does not sound very convincing at first, but becomes evident after the memoir is read through—that it is the very meals that are “the most important parts of history,” (51) especially since, allegedly, “a war is not made up of fighting, but just exactly of stew, and if you are lucky, eggs” (108). Furthermore, there are some elements in Cary’s environment and in his early life which gave rise to such a viewpoint, so that their origins can be explained by clarifying a few factors that prompted the young man to take part in the war and then depict it by using such strange images. Despite his frail health, Cary was so brave and felt so self-sufficient at such a young age, that he chose to run away from the secure and comfortable—but also boring—life in his homeland and rush straight for the far-away, poor and insecure Balkans, ravaged by war. Given that he was yearning for excitement, this decision could be perceived as a fling of his youth, were it not for the extreme warmth and affection with which he paints that significant episode from the history of the Balkan countries. Therefore, it is obvious that Cary’s detachment is not a sign of his indifference, but the consequence of him wanting to be above all an impartial observer of the dramatic events he personally witnessed while he participated in them, or—as Walter Allen says—“In this book Cary’s function is to be a recording eye.”8

Crucial Facts from the Life and Work of Joyce Cary Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary, born in Ireland in 1888, came from a family of landlords deprived of their property shortly before his birth. He was born to Arthur Cary, an engineer, and Charlotte Joyce, the daughter of a 8

Walter Allen, op. cit., 10.

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rich banker. Although after his birth they moved to London, Joyce Cary spent a large part of his childhood at the old family home in Ireland, and that period is described with great feeling in his memoir book A House of Children (1941), which won the James Tait Black award for best novel. This splitting up of his life between the new home in England and the old one in Ireland only increased Cary’s feeling of displacement, which quite naturally marked almost all of his writing, and especially his autobiography Memoir of the Bobotes. Another important fact for Cary’s work was his extremely delicate health in childhood, as he suffered from asthma and was almost blind in one eye. That was probably the very reason why he developed a restless and independent spirit as a very young man, because he wanted to escape from the monotonous life in the safety of his home and Oxford university, where he studied art. And so, as a consequence of that and in order to satisfy that need for change, as soon as the First Balkan War started, he left for Montenegro in 1912 and enrolled as a volunteer to fight together with the Montenegrins for their cause. Such a state of mind can partly explain why Cary perceived that whole event as a war adventure, since it was mostly due to his youth. While he served there as a Red Cross orderly and at the same time as a cook’s assistant, Cary kept a record of his experiences, which he also illustrated himself. That book, Memoir of the Bobotes, was only published after his death, in 1964, and it represents an invaluable source of information about, on the one hand, Cary’s particular and specific literary procedure—to be further developed in his later works, and on the other, an outstandingly important epoch in the history of our peoples. For his merits during the Balkan War, Cary was awarded a gold medal by the Montenegrin government, which he appreciated a lot.9 With regard to the issue of the motives which prompted this young boy to leave his homeland and to start on a journey—turning his back to the life within a safe and lavish Oxford landscape—towards the distant Balkans and into the savage war environment, we can only guess about the reasons for such a decision from the work itself and on the basis of Cary’s words uttered some four decades after that whole adventure. Namely, that is when Cary told the American critic Andrew Wright that his wish had been to experience a war because he “thought there would be no more wars,”10 in other words, he “was afraid that it might be the last, for the 9

Walter Allen reports him saying the following: “For this campaign I had a little gold medal from the Montenegrin government which I prize very much, though it was earned in what was, for a boy of my age, a holiday.” (Cary, 8; italics—B. Ĉ.-F.) 10 Walter Allen, op. cit., 7.

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world was getting too civilized for war, or so it seemed.”11 Explaining in his own words this wish to experience something different and the desire of escapade, Cary personally reveals his feelings as follows: “I had a certain romantic enthusiasm for the cause of the Montenegrins; in short I was young and eager for any sort of adventure.”12 That quotation discloses Cary’s idealism and eagerness to help the people he knew nothing about. This would not, however, remain the only war experience Joyce Cary had gone through during his life, as in the First World War he served in a Nigerian regiment and fought in Cameroon, at that time a German colony, where he was even wounded. That fact proves as right the assessment that Cary’s personality “was vigorous, extrovert, and tough: tough, that is, in the sense that it contained a hard core of integrity that never dissolves into self-pity or self-justification.”13 As a writer, Joyce Cary is best known for his two great works in which he examines historical and social changes in England during his own lifetime, and which brought him early fame and fortune: The First Trilogy (Herself Surprised, 1941, To Be a Pilgrim, 1942, and The Horse's Mouth, 1944) and The Second Trilogy (made up of Prisoner of Grace, 1952, Except the Lord, 1953, and Not Honour More, 1955). The major theme of these two trilogies “is the necessity for individual freedom and choice,”14 and another important element linking Cary’s private life and his literary work is the fact that the author “was afraid of nothing and his personal bravery gets into his characters.”15 Having written these and many more volumes, Cary is justly regarded as one of the finest English language novelists of the early twentieth century—“as one of the few novelists to come into prominence after the war who responded deeply and imaginatively to the wider movements of contemporary history and their human implications.”16 One of Cary’s greatest strengths, which is displayed in almost all of his works, is the “power of absorption in his character’s desires and destinies,”17 leading to a rather high level of objectivity, while one of his 11

“Small War Remembered”, Time, June 27, 1960. Available at: time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,827712,00.html. 12 Walter Allen, op. cit., 8. (italics – B. Ĉ.-F.) 13 Gilbert Phelps, “The Novel Today,” in The Pelican Guide to English Literature: The Modern Age (Volume 7), ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 506. 14 Margaret Drabble ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature (V Edition) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 173. 15 Gilbert Phelps, op. cit., 507. 16 Ibid., 509. 17 Ibid., 507.

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outstanding achievements is certainly the extraordinary way in which he depicted the history of the first half of the century: In both trilogies the grasp of historical processes, the sense of gradual change within the social structure, of the interlocking of political events with sectional and individual destinies, of subtle shifts in public and private morality with their accompanying changes in dress, idiom, and mores, are conveyed in vivid and concrete detail.18

The most notable quality in Cary’s opus is a painter's touch with which he enriches the otherwise simple and almost casual recording of human experience is his narrative—and that is above all the case in his autobiography—Memoir of the Bobotes.

War Images The author of the “Foreword” to the Memoir, Walter Allen grasps the very essence of Cary’s unusual attitude along these lines: This sense of adventure and of holiday, of an interlude in the everyday realities of Edwardian England which, for Cary as for the great majority of his countrymen, did not include the possibility of war in which England could be vitally involved, emerges strongly from Memoir of the Bobotes, emerges, for example, in the delighted reaction to a novel scene and to picturesque peoples. [...] This excursion of Cary’s to the Balkan War strikes one now as like nothing so much as a present-day undergraduate’s trip in the long vacation to Greenland or the equatorial forests. Rough and tough as it was, it was still a holiday.19

And really, it becomes obvious that this is quite true as soon as Cary begins to describe the journey to Montenegro in the “Preface”, and that impression of the reader is only to be confirmed later on, when the author talks about an expedition (67). Cary was above all eager to watch what was going on during that war—as if he were not at all involved in the overall situation emotionally, which is evident in his choice of the verb to see when he declares the following: “I had hoped to get work with the native Red Cross, because it then seemed unlikely that the British Red Cross would see anything of the war” (14). Nevertheless, his subtle perception is revealed at times to a very careful reader, like in this description of a local lady: 18 19

Ibid., 508. Walter Allen, op. cit., 8-9.

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Popoviü knew the woman of the inn. She was the sister of a Servian soldier killed lately in the Sanjak and they talked about him while we had coffee. Her black clothes brought the war nearer to one’s imagination than the levies on the roads and in the train. (26)

Such deep insights are, however, more often than not hidden by the writer’s amusing and very light tone even while he describes some serious and disturbing events. In a rather detached way, Cary frequently shows his sense of black humour—like, for instance, when he talks about the aftermath of a terrible explosion in the citadel: “Joe Baverstock and I looked, and noticed something like a piece of withered branch with the bark on. I picked it up and saw that it was a man’s arm, the fingers blown away at the palm” (30). Another “funny” incident is the fire that broke out in Cary’s bed, when he lit a cigarette and set the quilt ablaze: I found that stamping not only did not put it out, but singed my feet. I was forced at last to drag it into the corridor and pour a couple of buckets of water over it, of course disclosing my trouble to all the world, a world that laughed unsympathetically and offered very ribald and useless advice. This was a fine end for the adventurer in his carriage of the morning. (32)

When he adds the last comment, Joyce Cary shows openly that he considers the whole thing an adventure and himself the adventurer. One more such exciting adventure, this one a bit less gory—and a good reason to be jolly!—took place when his train was stuck in snow all night: “We were probably in good spirits because if we had not been, our hands and feet would have been cold past bearing and our stomachs too empty to be borne” (39). Many of these amusing stories are spiced with food-talk20—as Cary himself says in his Memoir, having eaten his lunch one day: These seem to be paltry matters for a historical work, but they are after all the most important parts of history, and generally forgotten. No one would have bothered to make history at all but for appetite or, at the lowest, hunger. Take out the meals of any week of your life, and see what is left of you as a historical character on Saturday evening. Hilaire Belloc,21 a 20

As we would say in Serbian: “Ko o þemu, baba o uštipcima!” (literally: “An old woman talks about nothing but fritters!”—which is some more food-talk), or in English: “He’s harping all the time on the same string!” 21 Joseph-Hilaire-Pierre-René Belloc was an early twentieth century English writer, most remembered for his travelogue The Path to Rome (1902), which is not just his account of a walking pilgrimage to Rome, but also contains descriptions of the

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Chapter Two spiritual man, went on pilgrimage to Rome, for no reason but the good of his soul; yet you will find in the book he wrote to help others on the best road, that the descriptions of eating and drinking are done better than the prayers. (51)

It is interesting that Walter Allen also mentions Belloc when he draws a parallel between Cary and other contemporary writers, concluding that “the nature and style of Cary’s occasional reflections, those on food and eating, for example, [which] remind us that he was writing in the era of the polite literary essay.”22 The above-cited paragraph from the Memoir is followed by some more descriptions of rice pudding and potatoes, and then Cary casually adds: “After lunch we went to watch the firing” (51). This is just one more very aloof statement, in which food seems as important as the matter of life and death, and it is only one of the many such offhanded remarks that Cary inserts now and then, like for instance: “We found there a boat full of wounded for Rjeka. We had just time to make friends with the Governor, who speaks English (Jesus Christ— pleased to see you, sir) and eat a great deal of fried meat, before he left” (39). Here it happens again when he mixes in the same sentence issues related to war and these which concern food: Todd and I marched soberly behind in single file, and discussed barbedwire and bullet-holes, and potatoes, what a difference they made to a stew, or some such grave matter. We were perfectly contented, as everyone is when he is out on an expedition over mountains, and easy in our minds. (67)

In the following example, Cary describes the episode in which he and his mates were witnessing the bombardment of Montenegrin trenches by Turks, in such a manner as if they had gone to a cinema: “We had comfortable places, with plenty of cover and an excellent outlook over the positions” (118). While on another day, when Cary went to watch the people he encountered and his own drawings, these making the volume even more similar to Cary’s Memoir of the Bobotes. 22 Walter Alen, op. cit., 10. However, according to a more recent study, this topic of “food and eating” was not limited only to Cary’s era, as in modern times there is also “a harvest of publications” (Charles Camp, “Foodways in Everyday Life,” American Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1982, 278) on that broad subject. In his research of food and its consumption in modern culture, Charles Camp points to the fact that “Professional journals in the fields of anthropology, nutrition, education, public health, folklore, medicine, sociology, history, archeology, business administration, and psychology examine the subject of foodways according to wide range of definitions and points of view” (Ibid., 278).

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firing after lunch with his friends, they had a real son et lumière show, thus vividly depicted by the author: On this, the first occasion too that we could see each shot at both ends, the flash as well as the burst, it struck us very sharply how long the shell seemed to be in the air. We saw the flash, and then we heard the report and the loud roaring of echoes, a noise as if the winds were struggling among themselves, with the thin whistle of the shot itself in the middle, which continued apparently as long as one would take to smoke half an inch of cigarette, [...] until a puff of smoke and dust started up from the Turkish redoubts to mark the hit. (52)

A large portion of Cary’s writing is devoted to meticulous describing of food and related items, such as: the equipment they used to prepare food, including “pots and kettles as big as washing-tubs” (33); various specialties, among which stew is the most frequently mentioned one: “The stew was ladled out of its dixie into a broad flat pan” (34); with sporadic variety in the reduced menu, when “We ordered cabbage soup,” (26) or “We had a second meal of chocolate and snow” (84); though occasionally there is some bacon as well, like when Cary, in his role of a cookee, “made a lunch of boiled rice and bacon fat,” (92) or when he writes the following: “Breakfast was my business—I cut bacon fat into rashers, and bread into slices,” (58) after which follows a detailed account of how the breakfast was made and eaten. If by rate of recurrence stew is number one on Cary’s daily list, pudding is certainly his favourite dish, in all its forms and varieties. Therefore, he describes how he and his fellow soldiers “ate spotted-dog. This pudding was a great bond between us, and a deep dark secret” (49); then mentions that “Williams was fond of rice pudding” (51); so it is the duty of “Williams and I to make a pudding” (60); and remembers the occasion when he “ate macaroni pudding” (136). For that reason, the reader is not at all surprised to learn about “what rice pudding and fried meat meant to men who had been living for six weeks on sour bread, stinking goat, and cabbage-water” (50). Then again, the best meal he ever had during the war was—quite understandably for someone of his origin and creed—Christmas dinner, so naturally Cary takes advantage of that occasion to describe the feast in full detail: “We had soup, roast meat, a pudding, part of a cake, almonds, chestnuts to remind us of turkey, and cognac with the coffee” (74). Everything in Cary’s story—not just the dishes the size of washingtubs—is exaggerated in dimensions, which is probably meant to show the reader in a metaphorical way that the proportions of war and killing are

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immense: “The other orderly upstairs meanwhile cut the bread—hacked down a regiment of loaves as large as mill wheels with a knife like a scimitar, poured the coffee from a pot as tall as a small church into cups like baths,” (34) and later on, when “Two barge-loads of bread arrived on the evening of the march” (152). And, of course, Cary never forgets drinks, so he casually remarks that “They have the Niksiü beer here” (18); “There was a beer-booth in a garden near the barrack-square, where we found plenty of Nikšiü lager” (151); and “The three women of the house received us to a ceremonial glass of raki”23 (21); while an abundant meal is “washed down by four tumblers of wine” (40); and to crown it all, a good coffee: “Lunch was of two courses (unless it was plain stew)—soup, and then the meat the soup was made of; with coffee to come after, fresh roasted and ground by the guard (fine ground as it should be) and taken very sweet” (59). The following passage shows how important that beverage is for each and every one of Cary’s mates—who participate all together in the ceremony of making it—and not only for the author, who devotes much more space in his narrative to this custom than to the fact that a war is going on around him and his friends: Our coffee was good, and made in a proper way. Cap roasted it, Lauder and I ground it. It was roasted to the colour of milk chocolate, and ground fine in a brass mill. I brewed it in a small tin jug, putting plenty of coffee and sugar into pretty hot water and boiling it till the grounds sank. This is the way to make Turkish coffee. You can add a pinch of salt if you like. The grounds will float at first and make a firm crust on the water—you must leave room in the jug for the water to boil over the crust without spilling. Three boilings over will generally make the grounds sink. If they don’t, go on with it. You do not need a strainer or any fallals, the coffee will be clear. (100-101)

Very often, as well, Cary mentions the habit of smoking as the third semantic field that regards consumption. Apart from his own episode of setting fire in his bed with a cigarette, his casual behaviour after the explosion in the citadel—when he “began to take out a pipe, but put it back again, as if caught in an impropriety” (27); and a remark about “dinner, a meal with nothing before it, but the delights of pipe and bed” (60); Cary also effectively describes a French doctor who “chewed his immense bulldog pipe with a determination to be “sportif,” that could not 23 Rakija, abbreviated by Cary to raki, is the traditional alcoholic drink of Southern Slavs, similar to very strong brandy.

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be taken but with seriousness. We discussed English tobaccos with him. I gave him a fill of hardcut, which he said was “un peu fort, but of a fine bouquet” (111). As it can be seen from the last excerpt, more than food and drinks, smoking—and especially exchanging the gear for it—seems to create a bond between fellow soldiers, as well as between them and the local population. Accordingly, Cary informs the reader that an old Montenegrin gentleman “saluted again and offered me his tobacco box, assuring me it was real Tuzi tobacco. I rolled myself a cigarette, and gave him a readymade one in return from my own box” (17); while one of the orderlies in the kitchen “washed plates and forks in the manner of a nobleman playing at the backwoods, and returned to smoke with me over an evening coffee, and talk high European politics” (50). In addition to that, smoking also shows a relaxed attitude of the participants in this ritual—so, the Turkish soldiers smoke while they are on guard, as well, when they know they will not be shot at, because the Montenegrins would never fire at them before they did it first, since—as Cary explains semi-mockingly—for the first time they wanted to observe “the rules of European war-fare” (52). Even when the reader of the Memoir might expect some serious details about the war to be revealed to him, like during the conversation Cary is having with some Montenegrin soldiers, he discovers that their talk again revolves around food and drinks, since it consists of wise sentences to the likes of this one: “Wine too much watered at Fishing-House” (135). There are, in spite of this, some horrible scenes in the Memoir, like the ones when the author discusses what he simply calls nose cutting, bayoneting the wounded, impaling, and other cold-blooded ways of murdering the enemy. Not a single line, it must be stressed, shows the least effort to blame anybody for the massive destruction and killing or to protest against the warfare and injustice in general. This interesting lack of the author’s personal involvement is remarked and thus commented by Walter Allen: There is, on the one hand, no repudiation of war, no sense of intolerable personal outrage, or, on the other, any passionate identification with a political cause that must defend itself however horrible war may be.24

And indeed, this is apparent in the following quote that seems to be something like Cary’s summary of warfare, in which again he offers the reader a bizarre concoction of suffering and enjoyment, quite unsurprisingly including words like cooking, sugar, coffee, smoking and tobacco in the 24

Walter Allen, op. cit., 9.

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same sentence in which we can read about bombardment, searchlights, the sick, sore feet and lice: our excitements were these occasional journeys, caravans, bombardment, searchlights; our pleasures, smoking, talking, the fire, coffee, sleep, and slapjacks; our work, the sick, sweeping, cooking, mending, water-drawing, tree-chopping, fire-making; our advantage, the open air and a free life; our hardship, a shortage of sugar or tobacco, a sore foot (all our boots were burst— Todd and I were both in native slippers), wet clothes, or an increase in the normal force of lice. We had the pleasure of civilization without the pain, taking it that the pain of that state is all outside, and the pleasure in. (77)

The only sign of Cary’s concern and attachment shows up when he talks about the Montenegrin peasants and soldiers, for whom he obviously feels admiration and appreciation, and especially when he mentions the Montenegrin women and the respect they pay to men. To begin with, here is an interesting and witty description of the country in which they live: Montenegro itself is stones, stones, stones. It was chosen by those original noble fugitives of Servia, ancestors of the present race, for their refuge, precisely on account of its roughness and barrenness, and it is easy to understand why the Turks have never been able to conquer them these five hundred years. (55)

And then Cary adds on another story—this one well-known and frequently retold in our country—about how God, when he was creating the earth, used a sack of stones: But the sack was not very strong, and as he was passing over Montenegro, he gave it an accidental jolt and the bottom fell out. God, who was perhaps losing his first enthusiasm as a practical geographer, did not pick up the stones again but exclaimed, “Damn—it’s a son-of-a-bitch country anyway,” and went home. (57-58)

Cary’s portrayal of the local people—both the Albanians and the Montenegrins—is also more than exceptionally appealing and humorous: Albanians are much the same kind of men to look at as the Montenegrins, tall, aquiline, spare, tough, and extraordinarily good guerilla or mountain fighters. Both races march over trackless and broken hill country as fast as other people go on the road, and have much more dash for a fight left in them at the end of the day. They are after all brought up like chamois. (56)

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Therefore, Cary deems that is why they are of such a good disposition despite being so terribly poor, and he merrily concludes: “Son-ofbitches—always happy and always hungry. Don’t know nothin” (57). He often pokes fun at the Montenegrins, but without hostility—which is, on the contrary, present when he speaks about the Turks: This was already the time of the armistice, which was respected far too well by the Montenegrins for their own good. For the first time they were fighting by the rules of European war-fare, and they are not yet enough civilized to know that these rules are never kept. The Turks did not accept the armistice, and worked every day in their trenches. They knew that they would never be shot at unless they fired first. (52)

Extremely careful close-reading reveals delicate mocking of the latter—for instance, on one occasion, having entered a Turkish mosque, Cary writes: “We supped on the altar” (45)—although it is a well-known fact that: “There is no equivalent of an altar in a mosque.”25 Cary also makes jokes about other nationals, though not so often, but these contribute to the overall tone of cheerfulness despite the presence of fierce warfare: Twenty of the Italian Red Cross were on board with us, neat, pompous little men wearing side arms. They were bound for the Italian base hospital at Podgoritza. I suppose their bayonets proved useful for spreading ointment. (82)

Another striking feature of the narrative is that Cary quite openly shows that he is impressed by the behaviour of the Montenegrin women towards their men. For example, he depicts the habit of a young woman at the inn where he stayed overnight, who “brought in a bowl and a jug of water and washed us in the Turkish manner” (23). In addition to that, the attitude of female relatives of the wounded soldiers in the ward in which Cary worked as a dresser is extremely respectful: Several women, wives, sisters and daughters, slept here and there between the beds. They used to start up (but silently) from the floor as I approached, partly to help, if I wished to do anything for their patient, partly in a kind of sympathy, to shew that they were also watching. (36)

But the most striking is the description of a Montenegrin girl who brought Cary his supper after he had provided the stores for the wounded, 25

www.utulsa.edu/iss/Mosque/ MosqueFAQ.html.

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so after that he sat down at the table and “was waited upon by Malé (daughter of the Zogaj washerwoman) with all the conscious worthiness of a man that has brought white bread” (136). Cary uses every opportunity to mention that Montenegrin women were the ones who would prepare the best meals, like the owner of an inn who treated the writer and his friends with so much food they had the impression of being “thoughtless small boys who had not yet found out how much it is necessary to eat, to face the hard world” (40). Cary enlightens the reader that supper at her inn would often consist of “say, macaroni soup, two eggs, the meat that had made theqw soup, then fried meat, rice and sour milk, three pieces of Rahat Loucoum, and half a loaf of corn bread” (40). But even when he speaks about the pleasant appearance of the Montenegrin women, Cary often uses comparisons related to food, for instance when he describes an old woman in this way: “When she laughed her whole surface waved in ripples; to make a remark to her was as if you should drop a stone in milk” (38). Or when he mentions the women travelling in a train that was stuck in snow for the night, “whose patience and good-humour were as comforting as a hot dinner and an arm-chair for all of us” (38). Montenegrin men are also very well-mannered towards the foreigners, so Cary informs us that they “gossiped always in English out of politeness to myself, unless the words failed” (135). There are, however, some crude stories about the Montenegrins, like the one when Brigadier Vukotiü sends his servant Vuko26 for a bottle of wine in the middle of a battle: They were on the ridge in a very hot place, when the Brigadier became thirsty and sent Vuko down for a bottle of wine. Vuko was sprinting off among the shrapnel, when the Brigadier, who was watching thoughtfully his danger, recalled him and told him, when he should be coming back with the wine, to carry it under the leeside arm. I believe it arrived quite safely, for I’ve seen Vuko since, and he was not hit. (70)

Another such anecdote which includes a rude joke about the possible fate of the commanding officer and the poor patients ends with these words: “Todd and Lauder were not there, or we would have had a strong enough force to make a revolution, seize the house and the magazine of stores, barbecue the commanding officer, poison the patients, and start off

26

There is again a very subtle jeu de mots (see Footnote 4) regarding these two names: Vuko(tiü)—Vuko. The longer the name, the more important the person!

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with a clean sheet” (80). And yet, most of the fun still concerns food, which even Cary himself admits, by saying: We went off to get the eggs. You object again that this history is all of meals, of stew and eggs. Anyone will tell you that a war is not made up of fighting, but just exactly of stew, and if you are lucky, eggs. Just as the life of an American woman does not consist altogether of marriages and divorces, with homicide here and there, but of stew and eggs, and such matters (108).

Concluding Remarks By depriving the story-line in his Memoir of the Bobotes, which in itself is not very dynamic, of spectacular details, while recording events that occurred during the First Balkan War, Joyce Cary achieves additional simplicity and straightforwardness, thus at the same time intensifying the effect of his crucial exclusion from the combat itself. The advantage of this unique procedure is that it gives Cary’s work of art, devoid of romantic exaggerations of any kind, almost documentary objectivity and the value of unbiased observation. It is also true that the central narrative is often enriched with comic incidents arising sometimes from the situation itself, but sometimes also occurring in the middle of serious circumstances. That is the case when Cary uses an ironic comment to lighten up the atmosphere and render it unexpectedly relaxed, and this peculiar literary means makes the book seem more like a collection of essays or a travel memoir than a description of a cruel and merciless war. Such an exceptional technique has led a critic to conclude that “he is one of the outstanding humorous writers of the century.”27 All the same, despite a certain lack of concern, which is typical for youngsters of that age, the writer is obviously sincere and unaffected, while his book is full of idealism and zest—and herein lies its essential value for all those who care to read it. Cary’s obsession with the lavishness of life and his vitality are observable in the fact that he regards all the events chronicled in his book as equally important, as well as in his lack of selectiveness while telling the reader about certain details worth or not of being recorded at all. What surprises the reader most of all is also the mixture of concrete details with some broad and at times rather unexpected generalizations, especially these concerning food and meals. Cary’s first-person anecdotal narrative abounds with such amalgamations, clearly proving the fact that the famous 27

Gilbert Phelps, op. cit., 509.

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literary critic Homi K. Bhabha was more than right when he raised the following question: Must the project of our liberationist aesthetics be forever part of a totalizing Utopian vision of Being and History that seeks to transcend the contradictions and ambivalences that constitute the very structure of human subjectivity and its systems of cultural representation?28

And indeed, in keeping with these lines, the reader must accept the fact that such a strange approach to the extremely grim topic of war reflects Cary’s essential aestheticism,29 as well as that his lack of involvement is not the sign of indifference but of the fact that he is in that war “as an observer rather than as a participant.”30 It is not only for Joyce Cary, the author of this book, that such concrete factors—in other words, material realities31—like food represent warmth, safety and comfort, thus becoming more important than other elements of life itself. Some more authors researching the mechanisms of history have also remarked that it (history) is not a calculating machine. It unfolds in the mind and the imagination and takes body in the multifarious responses of a people’s culture, itself the infinitely subtle mediation of material realities, of underpinning economic facts, of gritty objectivities.” (italics—B. Ĉ.-F.)32

For that very reason Cary ends his Memoir by concluding the following: “If this proves a disappointing book it must be because there is too much eating, and too little incident in it—too much like life, which is perhaps disappointing for the same reason” (164). However, if we take into account two facts: that, firstly, in his well-known study Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said refers to Forster’s A Passage to India as “a novel that deals with personal, not official or national, histories”33, and secondly, that of course, Cary’s Memoir—as an autobiography—is more than any other volume in concordance with that classification, it will 28

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 19. 29 A concept that was always very important for this author, who—besides fiction and autobiographies—also wrote a study in aesthetics, Art and Reality. 30 Water Allen, op. cit., 9. 31 Words used by Davidson and quoted below. 32 Basil Davidson 200, quoted in Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 236-237. 33 Edward Said, op. cit., 246.

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become evident that the book Cary presented his readers with comprises a very specific kind of personal history, the one that no reader can find disappointing. But, in case there is still some doubt about the role of food—as the one defined by Joyce Cary—in human life, and especially the life of an artist with literary ambitions, the attention should be focused on the works of many other renowned authors whose writings were also saturated by the sensory experiences of substances without which there is no life at all, such as the smell of a madeleine cake in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the taste of green chutney in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, or the overall pleasure discovered in innumerable divine specialties prepared by Sampath’s mother in Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Despite the old saying attributed to Socrates, claiming that: “One must eat to live, not live to eat,”34 there are many people who believe that meals are more than food and that they represent “socializing experiences and happy occasions.”35 The celebrated Mexican poet and writer Octavio Paz even wrote a remarkable essay entitled “Gastrosophy”36 (that means “the philosophy of food”), in which he investigated American food and came to some fascinating conclusions, leading us to believe that, although food is one of those subjects most people tend to take for granted, it is a subject of immense importance. In other words, by devoting so much space in his memoir to preparation of food and taking of meals, Joyce Cary wanted to share with his readers the eternal secret that “plain food [is] more indispensable than high thinking” (96)—and that another old saying is also true, this one to the effect that WE ARE WHAT WE EAT.

Works Cited Allen, Walter. “Foreword”. In: Joyce Cary. Memoir of the Bobotes. London: Michael Joseph. 1964: 7-12 Berger, Arthur Asa. Signs in Contemporary Culture (An Introduction to Semiotics). New York and London: Longman. 1984. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. 2003. 34

John Simpson, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 63. 35 Arthur Asa Berger, Signs in Contemporary Culture (An Introduction to Semiotics) (New York and London: Longman, 1984), 171. 36 Published in Daedalus, Fall 1972.

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Camp, Charles. “Foodways in Everyday Life”. American Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3. 1982: 278-289. Cary, Joyce. Memoir of the Bobotes. London: Michael Joseph. 1964. Davidson, Basil. Africa in Modern History: The Search for a New Society. London: Allen Lane. 1978. Phelps, Gilbert. “The Novel Today”. In: The Pelican Guide to English Literature: The Modern Age (Volume 7). Ed. Boris Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974: 490-530. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Simpson, John. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. 1988. “Small War Remembered”. Time, June 27, 1960. Available at: time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,827712,00.html. The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Fifth Edition). Ed. Margaret Drabble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. www.utulsa.edu/iss/Mosque/ MosqueFAQ.html.

CHAPTER THREE A STAY IN MONTENEGRO— AN AMERICAN IMPRESSION BOJKA ĈUKANOVIû

One of the most interesting books depicting the desperate situation, in which the Montenegrins found themselves in the aftermath of the World War I, is the autobiography of Henry Rushton Fairclough,1 an American commissioner to the Balkans of that time. This autobiography, with the title Warming Both Hands,2 included his experiences under the American Red Cross in Switzerland and Montenegro. Henry Rushton Fairclough came to Montenegro in 1919, as a Director of the Montenegrin Unit of the American Red Cross,3 and he was to stay there for the two successive years. 1 Henry Rushton Fairclough, a distinguished scholar with classic training, whose career at Stanford University extended from 1893 to the date of his death, February 12, 1938. Professor Fairclough was described as a natural scholar, a fine teacher, and a ready participant in the life of the University. He had also a significant part to play in the relief and Red Cross work during the World War I. He was honored in many ways. He wrote his autobiography during the years 1935-1937. 2 Although written much earlier, the book was published by Stanford University Press, Stanford University, California, by Humphry Milford in London, and by Oxford University Press, in 1941. It was given the title after the lines written by the poet Walter Savage Landor, which were also put as the main motto at the beginning of the book: I strove with none, for none was worth my strife: Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art: I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life; It sinks; and I am ready to depart. 3 The American Red Cross devoted itself to emergency relief, with emphasis placed upon free soup kitchens, distribution of clothing, and medical relief of a more or less temporary character. The American medical personnel included ten doctors and fourteen nurses.

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Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, Montenegro was still a not well-known corner of the Balkans, which with its patriarchal way of life easily captured the fascination of travellers and explorers. When Henry Fairclough learned that Montenegro was to be his destination, he protested that he knew nothing about that land and could hardly find its place on the map of Europe. That might well be the reason why, later, he dedicated pages and pages of his biography, over a hundred of them, describing this tiny Balkan country, in order to bring it closer to his countrymen. His account of the country and his experience during his stay there appears as fascinating to the modern reader as Montenegro of those past times might have appeared to the author. How to get to Montenegro was the very first problem commissioner Fairclough encountered. It was solved in an interesting way by the cooperation of two Embassies, British and American.4 He was to travel on a British war ship, in company with Count de Salis, the British envoy to Vatikan, who had formerly represented his government at the court of the Montenegrin king Nicholas. At the request of Count de Salis, the British Government ordered a gunboat to sail from Malta to Italy and there, either at Taranto or at Bari, to take them aboard to Montenegro. They boarded the ship at Bari, and it was May 3, 1919, when he first saw Cetinje, the old capital of the Kingdom. In his reminiscences of his stay in Montenegro, commissioner Fairclough, before going into details of his work, gave an account of the country—its physical features, the characteristics of the people, and the political situation as he found it on his arrival. In the following pages we shall go through some of his impressions.

The only existing civilian hospital in Montenegro was at Cetinje, and of that the Medical Staff of the American Red Cross assumed control immediately on arrival. A second hospital unit was established at Podgorica, third at Nikšiü, and a fourth at Kolašin. 4 At this time the precise status of Montenegro at the Peace Conference was still undetermined and an Allied Commission had been appointed to gather the necessary information. The American member was Colonel Sherman Miles and the British was His Majesty’s Envoy to the Vatican, Count de Salis, who received his instructions to go to Montenegro about the time of commissioner Fairclough’s own arrival in Rome. But Montenegro was then so poverty stricken that it was a matter of some doubt whether the Count could live in that primitive country in sufficient comfort. The presence of the American Red Cross unit suggested a possible solution; and it was agreed that, while the Count should take Mr. Fairclough across the Adriatic. In Montenegro the Commissioner should provide him such food supplies as he might need and the other furnished.

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It is interesting that he started his account with the description of the entrance to Montenegro, similar to the descriptions we find in almost every book of travel written by the British or the other west European travellers from the beginning of the 19th century and onward. Firstly he noted that the traveller who visited Montenegro usually entered it as he had done—climbing over the mountainous wall of rock, which separates the country from the Bay of Cattaro on the eastern Adriatic coast. Looking back from the top of the “Jacob’s Ladder” by which Mr. Fairclough has ascended over four thousand feet, he found before him a panorama of landscape and sea seldom equalled in grandeur in all the world, and while facing eastwards he discovered a strange and weird prospect such as might be associated with uninhabited and uninhabitable regions. He also recorded a story he had heard. Namely, at the Creation, according to the fable, the Lord allowed his bag of stone to burst over Montenegro and piled upon this small area the portion intended for many lands. Thus it was that those wild and barren limestone rocks, known in the mass to geologist as karst, and unrelieved by verdure, extend for miles before the astonished eye. But as one descends the eastern slopes of Mount Lovchen, the “Black Mountain,” or Tserna Gora, as it is in the native language, one finds first some stunted shrubs and diminutive trees, clinging to ledges of stone, and tiny patches of soil which have formed in the cervices and pockets of rock and which admit of cultivation on a smallest possible scale. Lower down, the wild shrubs, dwarf pines, and oaks become more frequent and the plots of tillable land larger and more numerous; but still for miles in all directions the country is mainly a mass of up-piled rocks, among which it would seem impossible for people to keep themselves alive. Only on the larger levels, such as those where Njegosh and Cetnje lie, is there room to work a plough.5

Thus, Mr. Fairclough’s first impression of the physical features of the country was an endless sea of grey rocks. The experience slightly altered upon passing Cetinje, the old political capital, and reaching the commercial centres of Podgorica and Nikšiü, both of which situated in the midst of broad valleys admitting of considerable cultivation. Farther, in the high Kolašin district in the northeast, he commented to have seen very rich forest areas, which provided much valuable timber in a land so largely sterile. Only under some compulsion, concluded Mr. Fairclough, could a country so generally wild and inhospitable have ever been chosen as a 5

H. R. Fairclough, Warming Both Hands, Stanford University, California: Stanford University Press:: London: Humphrey Milford:: Oxford University Press 1941 p. 332. All the in-text references are taken from this edition.

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permanent home; and this little country is a good illustration of the fact that the next to life itself the most highly prized of human blessings is the liberty. For he found that the liberty was the main reason for inhabiting this mountain retreat. As the Turks pressed westward over the Balkans, Montenegrins defied their foe for five hundred years at this “rough rockthrone of Freedom,” as Tennyson says in his famous sonnet, and by their heroic struggles not only kept themselves at bay but, by saving themselves, helped save the rest of Europe as well. “In all this waste,” a patriotic Montenegrin once said to Mr. Fairclough, with pardonable exaggeration, as Fairclough noted, “every rock has been bathed with the blood of my countrymen.”(332) The perception of the people was a different story. For all their poverty, Montenegrins are truly a race of noblemen; and as one sees the stately, regal looking man strolling in the late afternoon on the main avenue of Cetinje or Podgorica one recalls the historic comment on the Roman Senate that it was an assembly of kings. (333)

He remembered that Gladstone once said that Montenegrin traditions “exceed in glory those of Marathon and Thermopylae,”(333) a tribute that reminded him that down to our own time Montenegro had been the nearest modern analogy to the Greece of the old Homeric days. Thus, under her king, Montenegro was ruled in patriarchal fashion; for the King sat at his gate to pass the judgment, and went in and out among his people as friend and father. And as Achilles once sang the lays of heroes, so Montenegro has had among its rulers poets of patriotism—a truly great one in its Prince Bishop, Peter II, and a lesser one king Nicholas. One day in Cetinje I came suddenly upon a blind and aged minstrel who, accompanying himself on a simple, one-stringed gusle, or cither, was chanting to a listening throng the praises of his country’s heroes; and at once I called to mind not only the rhapsodists who recited Homeric lays but the Homeric poet himself, The blind old man of Scio’s rocky isle. (333)

As to political situation, Mr. Fairclough had been informed in Rome that King Nicholas, “father of beautiful Queen Elena of Italy,”(333) was living in France as an exile and that he would return to his country as soon as the Serbian grip upon it were relaxed. In Montenegro, however, he soon discovered that the King could not return—not because of Serbian tyranny but because Montenegrins would not accept him. Another fact, he considered, that was often brought home to Americans in their dealings

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with the Montenegrins was that the regret which many naturally felt for the passing of the Petrovitch dynasty of Nicholas was tempered by the knowledge that as Montenegro became absorbed in the larger territorial unit the sceptre was but transferred to a worthy cognate of the same family; for the Regent and Crown Prince, Alexander, who was soon to become King of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, was after all a grandson of Nicholas, through the marriage of his mother, Princess Zorka of Montenegro, to his father Peter, of the Karageorgevitch or “Black George” dynasty (334-335). As to King Nicholas’s adherents; they for the most part were living on foreign soil, in France, Italy, or elsewhere. Mr. Fairclough also recorded the facts that of the few who remained in Montenegro some organized themselves into small bands known as comitadji. Establishing themselves in mountain retreats, they would occasionally sally forth to attack small bodies of soldiery or to burn the homes of their political opponents. Other comitadji were adventurers who had taken to a life of brigandage, not because of political convictions, but because it was more to their liking than the work of cultivating the fields or of herding sheep and goats. None of these men could have kept up their lawlessness if they had not received outside support, Mr. Fairclough wrote; and he also noted down that it was commonly believed that they were largely equipped and financed through Italy, to whom internal disorder in this corner of the Balkans might be of some advantage (335). In his biography the Commissioner has described in detail the four centres of their relief-work—Cetinje, Podgorica, Nikšiü, and Kolašin. Of these centres the largest was Podgorica, which, however, was then a town of less than ten thousand people, while Cetinje, the political capital, was only half as large as Podgorica. In those times most of the people in Montenegro did not live in towns but were scattered about on tiny farms and knew nothing of real city life. There was only one railway in the land, a narrow-gauge line about twenty five miles along, which linked the narrow seaboard with the lake of Scutari. The highways, thought Fairclough, were well suited for heavy traffic; their excellence partly due to an ancient tradition, for at least two Roman roads once crossed the country at right angles and met at the site of Nikšiü. Near Podgorica he could still see the remains of a splendid Roman bridge by which the northsouth road passed over the river Zeta in ancient days (345). One of the American Red Cross hospitals was situated at Kolašin, a mountain town about fifty miles from Podgorica but, at that time, cut off from regular travel because the Austrians, when leaving the country, had destroyed a fine, lofty bridge which used to span the Moratcha River. .

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Because of that, they had to walk up a trail which reminded Mr. Fairclough of similar experiences in California, though the fording of the river, when they pulled of leggings, boots, and stockings, and plunged barefoot into the cold swift water, was something unusual. As a chauffeur and a “good Ford truck” were waiting for them on the other side of the gorge, they moved upward toward the mountain snows to enjoy superb views, which were reminiscent of the Swiss Alps. The road to Kolašin was like a corkscrew, with its many narrow bends where a careless turn of the wheel would have been disastrous. It took them three hours and a half to cover the forty-five miles and reach Kolašin before nightfall. There the evening air was very chilly; and it was pleasant to be welcomed with a hot fire on the hearth. Mr. Fairclough was lodged in a comfortable home of a well-to-do merchant, whose guest room contained many exquisite Oriental rugs. His host, he was told, was one of the few Montenegrins who had managed to save his precious textiles from the avaricious invaders of war days (339). Nikšiü was seen as an interesting old town the Roman appearance of which, with its walls, gates, and towers had long ago been commented upon by Arthur Evans. The drive to Nikšiü on a beautiful May morning gave him a superb view of some characteristic Montenegrin scenery. The road, following the right bank of the river Zeta, lead higher and higher in the mountains, while the valley through which the river flew, receding beneath on the right, varied in its colour and aspects. With its many little farms, it looked like a large checkerboard. Finally, when at a height of about one thousand feet, the river far below was seen to be issuing from a natural subterranean passage, which, they were told, was connected with a lake far away on the other side of the mountain. After climbing still higher, they started descending into the broad Nikšiü plain, which was crossed by a great viaduct that was built by the Russians in imperial days. As the town itself came into view, the most conspicuous object was the white cathedral, with belfry and cupola—another interesting gift from the Russia of imperial days (338). Podgorica was a sleepy little place, which retained some Oriental characteristics from the days of Turkish control. Thus there was an old socalled “Turkish” quarter, where there were two mosques, a picturesque bridge, and many well built stone houses, some of them quite spacious and provided with an open court which was entered through a gateway in a high wall. In that part only Mohammedans lived—a quiet, industrious lot, who seemed to need less outside help than their Christian fellowtownsmen. It was mainly medical aid that they sought; and occasionally when Mr. Fairclough could spare the time, he said that he would

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accompany their district nurse and her interpreter to the homes in which she ministered. He found that both men and women had gentle, gracious manners, were always most polite, and showed deep gratitude for their services, especially if these concerned their children (345-346). As a hospital for Podgorica district, the authorities had turned over to the American Red Cross the former home of Prince Mirko, which lay just outside the town in the midst of a large estate known as Kruševac. The grounds, sloping down to the Moratcha River, included a beautiful garden, and were well wooded. The palace itself, which was approached through a long avenue lined with tall trees, was a large, modern, two-storied building, with numerous rooms, most of which were well and even richly furnished. Not the least attractive feature of the place was the presence of interesting Roman remains; for the Prince had adorned his grounds with Corinthian columns and pilasters, a temple pediment with sculptures, and numerous tablets with Latin memorial inscriptions—all brought over from the ancient Roman city of Doclea, or Dioclea (still called Duklja), which lies only two miles from Podgorica.6 On learning that they had an old Roman town at their very doors, Mr. Fairclough often took his afternoon stroll out to Duklja and surveyed the imposing ruins. The town, he wrote, had been built in a strategic position at the very junction of the Zeta and Moratcha rivers; and its remains included a large portion of the city wall, the forum, a basilica, two temples, thermae (or bath), and a portico. Unfortunately, he also found out that the peasants living on the site of Doclea had collected many Roman coins and intaglios, Mr. Fairclough himself being able to secure a goodly number of those, while the other members of the unit were equally successful. The coins, he noted, dated from the time of Hadrian (A.D. 117-138) to that of the early Byzantine emperors, and many were minted in Alexandria. In those second-century days Montenegro was a part of the district known as Praevalitana in the Roman province of Illyricum, and the rocky waste in which Cetinje lay, he thought, was probably never even explored by the Romans. At any rate the only Roman road running west through modern Montenegro started from Nikšiü and reached the coast at Risan. Mr. Fairclough’s observation of the interesting antiquities of the country led him to prepare some papers,

6

Mr. Fairclough got aquainted with the Montenegrin claim that the emperor Diocletian was born at Doclea A.D. 245, though Monsignor Buliü, whom he met later at Split (Spalato), held that the Emperor’s birthplace was at Salona, a city whose impressive ruins may be seen near Split. Cf. Ibid., 347.

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which he presented on his return to America to the American Philological Association and to the Archaeological Institute of America.7 Among other interesting cultural accounts we find Mr. Fairclough’s experience of a market day in Montenegro, a day when country people are drawn to towns. Then he saw highways thronged, for the whole population was astir—men, women, and children—and with them went much of their livestock—horses and oxen, cows and pigs, sheep and goats. These would attract many buyers, or rather spectators; for very few seemed to purchase, and market day was a kind of holiday. Every now and then a boy would beat a drum, the crowds would gather round him and the town crier would read aloud some proclamation or important item of news, this being almost the only way in which the people learned what was going on in the outside world. Podgorica had no regular newspaper, and it was only a select few who could subscribe for Belgrade or other outside journals. He was especially impressed when on such days “some people would make a brave show by donning their beautiful, home-made costumes, fine of texture, rich in varied colors, and undoubtedly the most picturesque in Europe” (341). But he also noted that these fine garments were quite uncommon, and belonged only to the heads of the families, who had inherited them from their fathers and mothers. The average man was always poorly dressed in the roughest of homespun smocks, with leg-bands of similar material, and coarse sandals or tough moccasins with upturned toes, called opanke, made with sole of hide and hand-woven tops. The garments worn were nearly always old, threadbare, and much patched; and one of his early reports spoke of the Montenegrins as probably the most ragged people in Europe [...] But it was the children who needed our help above all others, for they were all in tatters and many were so near absolute nakedness that in cold weather they could not leave their homes. (341)

The chief reason for this extraordinary condition, the commissioner thought, was that the Austrians had swept the country clear of its sheep and there was 7

“Montenegro under the Romans”, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, LI (1921), XXV; also “Some of Montenegro’s Antiquities”, Art and Archaeology, XVII (1924), pp. 241-42. The larger aspects of the antiquities of Yugoslavia are treated in Art and Archaeology, which in 1922 published Mr. Fairclough’s article on “The Art and Archaeology of the Dalmatian Coast” and in the Yugoslav number of the same journal, which he edited in May 1924.

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no wool for people who were accustomed to make their garments at home. In the early stages of their work they distributed many tons of cast-off American clothing. Along with clothing they distributed large quantities of soap, a substance of which Montenegro was almost destitute. As to food supplies, the American Red Cross Unit had saved the people from the danger of actual starvation, by organizing soup kitchens at five central points—Podgorica, Cetinje, Nikšiü, Kolašin, and Grahovo— and nobody who needed food was turned away hungry. Apart from food and clothing the chief need was that of medical help. Exposure, malnutrition, and uncleanliness had sapped the vitality of the people; and grim disease, unchecked, was stalking through the land. But the American doctors and nurses undertook to fight humanity’s common foe. In the first five months their four hospitals treated one thousand patients, their district nurses visited eight hundred in their homes, their clinics tended over fifteen thousand people who sought their aid, and if their drug supply had not given out they should have handled thousands more (341-343). Mr. Fairclough noted that the native medical force was at that time very small. In the entire country there were only fourteen physicians or surgeons, and these were sadly handicapped through an almost total absence of medical supplies. The surgical cases treated in the American Red Cross hospital were curiously numerous; and it was not a mere jest when one of American doctors assured Mr. Fairclough on his first visit to him that the prevailing malady was gunshot wounds. The habitual practice of bearing arms in daily life was but one of many indications that Montenegro had remained in a primitive stage of culture. Mr. Fairclough remembered that when he saw the sturdy, manly figures going about with pistols at their belts or with rifles over their shoulders, he could not but recall the familiar remark that Thucydides, at the very outset of his History, makes about early Greece, that the custom of bearing arms was a survival of ancient piracy in Mediterranean waters. The gunshots that their doctors treated were largely accidental; for armed men, clambering over rocks and along narrow trails could easily cause or encounter mishaps. Thus, on a certain May morning, there was brought to one of the hospitals a woman through whose neck a bullet from her husband’s gun had passed. This, she herself assured them, was a pure accident. To a certain extent, of course, weapons were needed for self-protection if not for self-support. Wolves and bears were common enough in the mountains above Kolašin; and when shots could be heard at lower levels they did not necessarily imply a clash with comitadji, commented Mr. Hairclough, for he soon discovered that Montenegrins

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could fish with a rifle. Often a man who was a good shot would post himself on a bank above the Moratcha where there was a rocky cascade and, as a trout would leap up from the swift current, a timely bullet would pierce it, and the sportsman’s partner, stationed by the smooth waters some distance below, would gather in the stunned or lifeless fish (342-343). As a rule, the men were perceived to be of much finer physique than the women. The reason for that was seen in the fact that for many generations they have been warriors for whom the term “work” meant nothing unless interpreted in a military sense; and it was the women who were the hewers of food and the drawers of water. In the piazza upon which Mr. Fairclough’s bedroom windows looked there was a town pump, which was in constant use in warm weather. There he saw scores of women laboriously filling their buckets and carrying them off upon their heads; but only once did a man appear upon the scene, and he aroused such babble of scolding tongues that he had to retire in utter confusion. Thus, it was common to see the women who trudge along trails or roads bearing on their backs heavy burdens of hay or fodder or fagots, while their husbands or fathers would be seen riding the family donkeys. (345). The Americans found it a strange but interesting experience to live in that desperately poor country, and to realize that they were looked upon as beings from another world, a world of such health and wealth as Montenegrins could hardly conceive and certainly could hardly hope to realize for themselves. And yet, Mr. Fairclough stresses, those proud, stately people, who gloried in their race and ancestry, were far from envious and, apart from the terrible tragedies of war which they have faced so bravely, could not be described as unhappy or depressed. It was amazing to discover how much pleasure and satisfaction the Montenegrins could find amid the stern realities of their poverty. Almost every week some family would celebrate a name day—the day of the patron saint after whom a father or son have been named—and their friends and neighbours would call to offer congratulations, and the members of the American Red Cross would be welcomed with open arms. On such occasions the house would be gay with flowers and potted shrubs, and a table would be spread with such simple fare as the family could afford, while tiny glasses of rakia (a home made brandy) and cups of Turkish coffee would be offered to the guests. Then, again, on public holidays, which seemed to come very often, the people – men, women, and children—would join in procession and then assemble in a public square or, in bad weather, in a large hall, and there dance a kolo—a national folk-dance, of simple rhythm and simple movements, keeping it up hour after hour. The Americans would often

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join the dancing throng, much to the delight and amusement of the admiring natives (343-344). On the first Sunday Mr. Fairclough spent in Podgorica, he witnessed two wedding processions passing his office on their way to and form the church. In one the party drove in carriages; in the other they went on foot. As they were going churchward they sang chants and were on their best behaviour; but in returning they were merry and boisterous, while friends of the bridal party tossed oranges to the crowd. Seeing the commissioner at his window, they threw some up. That, of course, was to bring a good luck to the bride, a custom which was known from the old Greek days when apples were similarly used. Funeral processions, though very different in character, were also of great interest to Mr. Fairclough. First would be heard a low and distant wail, which would grow louder and louder as the company would grow near. That dirge, chanted alternatively by groups of boys and girls, had a strangely antique air, and always reminded him of the professional mourners of classical lands. Citizens of all ages would follow on foot. The Montenegrins, was Mr. Fairclough’s further discovery, were a people of simple and earnest faith in Divine Providence, who recognized and subsidized three state religions—the Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Mohammedan. “You see how liberal we are,” said the Orthodox priest when on one of the holy days he introduced Mr. Fairclough to some Moslem doctors, ulemas, and a Roman Catholic priest joined their group. The majority of the people belonged to the Orthodox Church, which was closely associated to the whole history of the country and which embraced some ancient and very sacred shrines, notably the monastery of Saint Basil, at Ostrog, which was annually visited by thousands from all over the Yugoslavs world. “May Saint Basil help you!” was a kindly greeting often heard, and Saint Basil was believed to be a real friend to those in distress, for numberless cured were credited to him, and his shrine was crowded with votive gifts of those who owed to his intercession their rescue from death or recovery from illness (342). Before returning from Cetinje to Podgorica some of the Americans visited the old monastery, where they saw the tomb of Peter I (17821830), the greatest of the vladikas or prince-bishops, as well as the coffin and crown of his successor, Peter II (1830-1851), the poet, saint, and statesman, who had been buried on the very summit of Mount Lovchen but whose remains had been brought down to the monastery for safety’s sake during the World War. They were also shown an interesting old missal, which had come from the famous printing-press at Obod in 1493, a date which was very close to years 1477-1491 when the Caxton press was

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active at Westminster. From the Obod press copies of the Gospels were sent into all Slavonic lands until its destruction by the Turks in 1566 (361). Mr. Fairclough has also witnessed the opening of the first cinema in Montenegro. Thus he recorded that Lieutenant Edward Barry was sent in to establish a cinema service—the first ever attempted in Montenegro. He was very helpful in setting up the American Red Cross unit electric plant; but the cinema was less of a success. However, it revealed new scientific wonders to the natives of the country, and he could well remember how the townspeople of Podgorica gasped when they saw president Wilson drive up before them behind fast horses, and how the children present dropped to the floor, fearing to be trampled (432). The outstanding achievement of the time, in this field of Child Welfare, which Mr. Fairclough recorded, was the establishment of two orphanages, one in Podgorica and the other in Danilovgrad. The former, which was to shelter one hundred full orphans from two to nine years of age, was opened on the Montenegrin Christmas, January 8, 1920, when a party was given to a thousand poor children of the district (406). At leaving Montenegro Mr. Fairclough took with him what he treasured most—a picture that had come from Belgrade. It showed a group of Montenegrin boys; and at the foot his friend, M. Novakovitch, the Government Food Administrator, formerly stationed in Cetinje, had written, in a language which he knew was more intelligible to Mr. Fairclough than Serbian: “Signor Colonello: ecco i figli della nostra Jugoslavia, per quali Voi tanto avete fatto.” On the reverse side he had written: “Al grand’ amico del nostro popolo Signor Col. H. R. Fairclough, Com.Am.Red Cross” (439). For their humanitarian work in the Balkans, the American Red Cross team received decoration, the badge of the “White Eagle,” and at the end of his stay Mr. Fairclough was also given the Order of St. Sava, Class III, the highest Serbian decoration that is given to civilians. The Prince Regent had been pleased to confer it upon the Commissioner in a desire to honour the whole American group for the splendid work which it was doing, especially for the children in Montenegro. Sailing back home on the “Aquitania” from Southampton was very little to Mr. Fairclough liking. He was travelling first-class, and yet he found himself envying the steering passengers, among whom there were some of America’s Olympic contestants. It was strange to be coming from the poorest country in Europe and find oneself surrounded by all the luxuries of a great ocean liner. Some of the richest people of America were on board; and the contrast between that extreme wealth and the extreme poverty he had left behind was almost upsetting. On reaching New York

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he was cheered by a message from Herbert Hoover, who asked him to come to the Office of the European Children’s Fund, 42 Broadway. There he told Mr. Hoover how badly the children of Montenegro still needed his help. “They shall have it,” was his reply.

CHAPTER FOUR “A SOUL THAT REMEMBERS CAN NEVER BE LOST”: TRAGIC CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS 1 IN ALBAHARI'S GÖTZ AND MEYER VESNA LOPIýIû

This paper intends to remind of perhaps the most tragic cultural encounter of the 20th century, the Holocaust, as rendered in Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer. David Albahari is a Serbian-Canadian author of Jewish origin who published Götz and Meyer in 1998 in Serbia to have it translated and published by Random House in 2005. As an acknowledged master of short fiction recognisable for his minimalistic style of writing and terse humour, Albahari creates a longer story in the same vein to tackle a very delicate cultural and historical moment: the extermination of Belgrade Jews in WW2. In a post-modern fashion, his nameless narrator questions his own identity, not being able to identify his immediate ancestors. This obsessive personal quest becomes a backdrop against which Albahari outlines a shameful encounter of two different cultures. To deal with the broad theme of culture, it is necessary to give its preliminary definition, especially in view of the fact that there are over two hundred definitions of culture (Wolf-Knuts). From those early ones implying that culture is a static product of a certain social group to the most recent attempts at defining culture in very dynamic terms as based in the process of communication, a great number of variables have been at times included or excluded from a particular definition, and almost always differently interpreted. For our purposes, and to avoid all the theoretical conundrums, culture can be defined as the values, traditions, norms, 1 This paper is part of the Project 148024D, financed by the Ministry of Science of the Republic of Serbia.

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customs, arts, history, folklore, and institutions that a group of people, who are unified by race, ethnicity, language, nationality, or religion, share2. Since the word culture comes from the Latin root “colere” which means to inhabit, cultivate or honour, it is implied that the majority of the referenced group of people respect most of the listed cultural elements and abide by the rules of their culture. By this, or any other definition for that matter, the German and the Jewish peoples developed two different cultures. Despite numerous examples to the contrary, the concept of cultural encounter is today most often used with positive connotations. The long history of bloody and fatal meetings of peoples and their cultures tends to be disregarded in favour of the positive effects of such events. The Romans, for example, spread ruin in the centuries of enlarging their empire but they established trade routes and brought “culture,” in the outmoded meaning of the word, to remote parts of Europe thus integrating European countries. Those same Europeans later largely destroyed indigenous cultures in Africa and America during the process of colonisation, but they introduced “civilisation” into the heathen lands, again defined in an unacceptable manner. If this happened long ago and seems to be almost irrelevant now, more recent times offer a greater number of relatively small-scope events, illustrating equally deadly cultural encounters: geographically, smaller areas are involved; statistically, greater numbers perished. Despite all this, the term is still associated with creative exchange, constructive interaction and mutual contribution between the two cultures involved. In this sense, the concept of cultural encounter is part of the wider phenomenon of globalisation which Edgell, for example, defines as the present pressure for a uniform world economic system, primarily capitalistic, market-cantered, as evolved and practiced in, and favourable first and foremost to Westernised nations, now spearheaded by the U. S.; and carried by apparently unstoppable [...] marvels of technology.3

The aim of globalisation is presumably human progress, which Huntington defines as “economic development, material well being, social and economic equity and political democracy.”4 All these ideals and 2

Cf. www.wind.uwyo.edu/sig/definition.asp. Alvin G. Edgell, “Globalization and Cultural Encounters,” International Third World Studies Journal and Review, Volume XIV (2003), 5. 4 Samuel P. Huntington, “Forward: Culture Counts,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000), XV. 3

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achievements have to be seriously questioned in view of the tragedies that cultural encounters often turned into in the course of the 20th century. The Holocaust is perhaps the most glaring example. David Albahari fictionalised the extermination of the Jews in Belgrade at the beginning of WW2. This relatively minor episode of the large-scale plan to deal with the Jewish population worldwide is nevertheless a very good example of the policy Hitler and his ideologists developed in order to purify the Aryan race and preserve its supposed racial superiority. Hitler had the Final Solution of the Jewish Question ready in 1939 as “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”5 whereby Europe will find lasting peace. This macabre project was put into practice in the period between 1933 (the Nazi seizure of power) and 1944 (when Germany surrendered). It was the most unmistakable example of genocide ever, according to the standard UN definition of genocide.6 As Bauman claims, “the end itself is a grand vision of a better, and radically different, society.”7 Bauman creates a metaphor of the modern culture as a garden culture, distrustful of nature, spontaneity and disorder in which parts of the social habitat are human weeds. Like with all other weeds, their effect must be diminished and preferably entirely eliminated. The social gardening in Nazi Germany was directed at the Jewish population though it affected other social groups like the Roma, the mentally handicapped and the homosexuals, in one word, the Other. Their extermination was supposed to give rise to a utopian perfect society and thus clear the perpetrators of any moral guilt. 5

Quoted in Omer Bartov, “The European Imagination in the Age of Total War,” in The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, ed. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 92. 6 Raphael Lemkin provided the elements for the definition of genocide in 1944 which were included in the text of Article 2 of the UN Convention on Genocide adopted by the General Assembly in November 1948: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: 1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. 4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. 5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Lilian Friedberg, “Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, 473) 7 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Uniqueness and Normality of the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, 84.

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The history of Judeophobia is well known. In his book The Cunning of History, Rubenstein summarizes Hilberg’s views on anti-Semitism, quoting the three fundamental anti-Jewish policies: conversion, expulsion, and annihilation. It is obvious that Hitler opted for straight annihilation, disregarding the other two possibilities of social engineering. What distinguishes the resulting Holocaust from numerous other pogroms of the Jews that are part of the chronicles of Christianity are its “systematic, bureaucratically administered policies of outright extermination.”8 Bauer clarifies the distinction between genocide and holocaust: Genocide, then, is the planned attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, or racial group using measures like those outlined by Lemkin and the U.N. convention, measures that accompany the selective mass murder of members of the targeted group. Holocaust is a radicalisation of genocide: a planned attempt to physically annihilate every single member of a targeted ethnic, national, or racial group.9

The outcome, whatever the definition, is an estimated six million Jewish people killed, often in the most atrocious ways. The most notorious were concentration camps which served as extermination centres and slave labour factories where the inmates perished through forced labour exhaustion, exposure, starvation, abuse, and infamous gassing. Given the relatively small Jewish population in pre-war Serbia10, the Nazi administrators found the building of gas chambers and crematoria which could destroy 2000 people11 at a time too costly and therefore

8

Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), 5. 9 Jehuda Bauer, “What Was the Holocaust?” in The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, 453. 10 Jasa Romano claims that the first Jewish settlers appeared on the territory of the former Yugoslavia 2.000 years ago. According to the census of 1921 there were 64.753 Jews in Yugoslavia that year, while according to the poll taken by the Association of Rabbis in Yugoslavia in 1924 the number of Jews was 73.266. It is estimated that when the Third Reich’s armed forces attacked and invaded Yugoslavia on 6th April 1941 Yugoslav Jewish community had a membership of 82.500 people. 11 Rubenstein emphasizes the bureaucratic aspect of mass murder: “Like everything else at the camps, under Himmler punishment was bureaucratized and depersonalized. Bureaucratic mass murder reached its fullest development when gas chambers with a capacity for killing two thousands people at a time were installed at Auschwitz. As Hannah Arendt has observed, the very size of the

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welcomed the latest technological device, the gas truck. Such a truck was used in Belgrade for execution of 5000-7.50012 Jewish women and children remaining after the mass murder of almost all men out of the Belgrade Jewish population of about 12.000 people13. They were interned at the Fairgrounds concentration camp and daily taken for a deadly ride over the Sava river to Jajinci where they were buried. In his novel, David Albahari concentrates not so much on the inexpressible suffering of the inmates in the camp but rather on the two imaginary characters, the truck drivers. He gives them the names of Götz and Meyer. For the inmates of the Fairgrounds camp, the only living Jews in Belgrade at the time when the drivers arrived on their assignment from Berlin, they were the only two Germans they would ever meet. Albahari took special care to depict them as typical representatives of the German nation of the Nazi period so that the cultural encounter occurring between these two representative samples, Jewish and German, was complete. Götz and Meyer were SS non-commissioned officers, loyal to the Reich and the Führer. They loved their families but duty always came first. As simple people, they whistled and told jokes while they drove the truck, feeling excited at first, then annoyed when the same route had to be taken every day and finally they fell into the unfeeling routine. “They are conscientious, they always arrive on time, they are calm and cheerful, their signatures are legible, their uniforms tidy, their step light.”14 On Sundays they played cards, went for a walk, drank beer. In one word, they were normal people. This sort of normalcy, however, was not an obstacle when they unquestioningly performed their gruesome job. In the early spring of 1942 chambers emphasized the complete depersonalization of the killing process” (Rubenstein, op. cit., 25). 12 It is difficult to establish precise numbers since German authorities systematically destroyed the records. Thus Wikipedia states that 6.280 Jewish women and children were killed in the gas truck. Savich gives the number of 7.000 persons, while Albahari opts for the “modest” estimate of 5.000 souls. 13 What is peculiar for the Serbian version of the Final Solution was execution of men separate from women and children. This was the result of the conflict between the SS and the Wehrmacht. Gruppenfuehrer Turner was the head of the German Military Occupation Administration in Serbia and a fanatical National-Socialist and anti-Semite. The German military eagerly executed Serbian Jews in reprisal for Serbian guerilla and resistance activity, while Turner and his SS did not flinch from executing the remaining women and children. (Cf. Carl Savich, Belgrade ’41: The Holocaust in German-Occupied Serbia) 14 David Albahari, Götz and Meyer, trans. Ellen. Elias-Bursac (London: Vintage, 2005), 111. All the in-text references are taken from this edition.

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they drove the truck nicknamed the “soul-swallower,” once or twice a day with a load of 80 to 100 women and children to be asphyxiated on the route to Jajinci. They watched the inmates climb the back of the truck, they stopped and fitted the exhaust pipe to the hole in the floor of the truck which relatively quickly killed the screaming people inside, they were there at Jajinci when the bodies were unloaded and buried. They knew what was going on, so they were the angels of death and the drivers, soldiers and simple men, the pretended saviours and the real executioners (45). Through his narrator, Albahari asks a question for all of us: “What kind of man would, like the two of them, consent to do a job that meant putting five or six thousands souls to death”? (68) This is a clear allusion to their inhumanity, to the inability to feel and sympathize. On the other hand, they fulfilled their assignment with “a dedicated tenderness,” (142) bestowed upon the truck. The model had a name, Saurer, and they treated it as a living creature. “This is one fine truck, Götz and Meyer would say, loyal as a horse, tough as a donkey, and stubborn as a mule” (30). “They had cleaned it and polished it so often, wiped down the headlights, washed the windscreen and the interior” (14). They believed that it had a soul, “they groomed it, cleaned and washed it, changed its tyres as if they were horseshoes, filled it with the finest petrol” (67). The proof of their sensitivity was the horror they felt when its rear axle broke. Götz or Meyer clutched at his heart, they felt despair at the unfairness of this breakdown, they were dejected until the axle was repaired. They were, after all, “only ordinary people, practical, skilled at something that requires no questions or answers” (91). They could show tenderness, even tears, had a German soldier been allowed to indulge himself like that, they were only human, after all. Albahari makes sure that another character asks a question aimed at the reader: “But what sort of human”? (67) As typical representatives of the German Third Reich culture, Götz and Meyer encountered the Jewish community of Belgrade when they drove their Saurer to the city. Both Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in Belgrade were well-established and respected members of society. Their businesses, associations, and synagogues were an integral part of Belgrade life so as citizens they felt at home and legally protected. Probably for this reason they were totally unprepared for the anti-Jewish measures introduced by the new pro-German government of Serbia in 1940 and afterwards15. All 15

“As far as the Jews of Yugoslavia were concerned, dark clouds started to make their appearance felt already during the years preceding WWII. The Yugoslav governments of those days found themselves ever closer to the policy of the Third Reich, allowing fascist ideology to be spread in the country, fascist organizations

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the Jews had to report at the Headquarters of the Special Police for Jews, their property was registered, the men were taken to various collection camps and summarily executed, women handed the keys of their homes over to the Police to be thereafter interned with their children at the Fairgrounds concentration camp. By May 1942 they were all dead. There was no resistance, no uprising, no complaints. Very few left the city, even fewer left the country. They waited patiently in queues to hand over their property, they stood resignedly in front of the firing squads, they climbed the gas truck in an orderly fashion. And in all this Belgrade Jews were no exception. The same gruesome process was going on in other European countries, and it seemed that the Jews everywhere calmly and passively met with their fate. They donned the yellow armbands and six pointed stars, accepted their destiny and hoped that nothing worse would happen, which was part of the Jewish culture of surrender and submission16. Albahari's narrator points this out talking about his parents: “They never even spoke of their own, or my, Jewish identity, convinced, I guess, that if evil were to come knocking at our door again, the silence would make us invisible” (34). It was part of the Jewish culture “to avert hostile action by bribery, petitions for mercy, or appeals to the religious or moral sentiments of their adversaries,” (71) Rubenstein claims. In other words, peaceful rather than aggressive methods were their policy. So, the encounter between such two differing cultures produces the tragedy of the Holocaust. For the ideologically processed minds of Götz to be brought into being and anti-Jewish Folksdeutschers’ activity to be carried out unabated. In 1940, the Cvetkoviü—Maþek Government enacted two anti-Jewish decrees, one prohibiting Jews to be engaged in production of and wholesale trade in food, and another introducing “numerus clauses” for Jews at the university and highs school levels” (Jasa Romano, Jews of Yugoslavia 1941-1945, Victims of Genocide and Freedom Fighters [Belgrade: Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia, 1980], 575). 16 “One of the elements conditioning the compliant Jewish response to the process of extermination was their own history. The last time the Jews had taken up arms against an enemy was during the Judeo-Roman Wars of 66-70 C.E. and 131-35 C.E. On both occasions, they fought valiantly and lost disastrously. Those who during the first Judeo-Roman war had counseled submission and surrender were installed by the victors as the religious and political leaders of the Jewish people. The religious leaders of the European diaspora for almost two thousand years were the spiritual heirs of the Pharisees and rabbis who rose to political and religious dominance only after they had been selected by the Romans as their ‘loyal and conscientious agents.’ Thus, diaspora Judaism began in the aftermath of a catastrophic military defeat and survived by developing a culture of surrender and submission in consequence of that defeat” (Richard L. Rubenestein, op. cit., 71).

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and Meyer, the Jewish women and children were simply loads which they were ordered to transport. The job itself was not big, only five thousand souls, if Jews had souls at all, which they did not; that, at least, was a commonly known fact. Science proved as early as the 16th century that being a Jew is an offence in itself.17 These same Jews were blamed by the beloved Fuehrer for “plunging the nations once more into a world war,”18 and in Belgrade particularly they had to pay large sums of money to “compensate for the damage suffered by the Third Reich in the April war provoked by the Jews.”19 They were allegedly genetic polluters for which reason it was not enough to eliminate the men only. Women and children could reproduce further, therefore it was only logical to destroy them too. Being rational people, Götz and Meyer knew that every job had its downside, so they did not allow the unpleasant aspect of the mass murder they conducted to interfere with their regular life: Later, in the evening, one of them would read a book, while the other went for a stroll. You could say that they felt no after-effects from their everyday duties, no pressure from horrible scenes, they suffered no discomfort from nightmares. They were in fine shape, had a good appetite, there was no residue of disturbing thoughts, not even nostalgia for their homeland. They were, in fact, the best proof of how advances in technology enhance the stability of the human personality (7).

Götz and Meyer were disciplined, conscientious, reliable, although they also longed for some other, more challenging assignment, like that of a fighter pilot. In this they resemble the officer, Andorfer,20 who was in 17

In his history of Shylock as a character, Sinsheimer offers the following piece of information: “Precisely in Venice and in the year 1568, though hardly known to Shakespeare, a treatise was published, De Judaeis and aliis infidelibus, by the lawyer Marquardis de Susanis. Proceeding from the assumption of the innate immorality of the Jews, the author examines the question whether being a Jew is or is not an offence in itself (he answers the question in the affirmative!) and goes on to develop a theory about them as half-citizens and non-citizens. On this treatise a number of other disquisitions on the legal position of the Jews are based” (Sinsheimer, 136). In the same line, Hitler and his apparatus easily denaturalized and denationalized the Jewish population. 18 Omer Bartov, “The European Imagination in the Age of Total War,” in The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, 92. 19 Jasa Romano, op. cit., 577. 20 Savich provides the following facts: „On December 12, 1941, Jewsih women and children were interned in the Sajmiste (Fairgrounds) camp. The commander of the Sajmiste camp was the Austrian SS-Untersturmfuehrer Herbert Andorfer who used mobile gas vans to kill approximately 7.500 Jewish prisoners, mostly women.

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charge of the Fairgrounds camp and who dreamed of being transferred closer to the front lines, where he could show all his military abilities. The execution of over five thousand women and children was not adventurous enough, although the German soldiers performed their duty ungrudgingly. They showed tenderness to the truck, but not to the Jews who were going to be killed in it. After all, gassing itself was chosen over shooting the prisoners as “a more humane and painless form of killing” (83)21. Albahari’s narrator envisions one of them even giving chocolates to skeletal children and ruffling their heir before they boarded the truck. The next moment, he would sit at the driving wheel, turn on the engine which would poison those same kids, and start whistling. The narrator also imagines an ingenious attempt of a boy to survive the truck ride only to be gun-shot when he miraculously turns to be alive at the end. They showed no tenderness then, only efficiency22. The murders continued until May, 1942. Andorfer was tried in West Germany and sentenced in January, 1962 to two-and-a-half years’ imprisonment“ (Savich). 21 It is well known that gas chambers were invented after Himmler’s fainting at mass executions. Albahari refers to that event in Götz and Meyer in the following fashion: Apparently in August 1941 somewhere near Minsk he was present at a large-scale execution before a firing squad. When he peered into the grave and saw that several of the victims were still alive, and that they were twitching and moaning, he was nauseted. I have no idea whether he vomited and stained his trim uniform, but going pale, knees knocking, was highly improper for a German oficer. So when he got back to Berlin, he issued an order to all services to work out a method of killing that might boost the morale of both the victims and the soldiers assigned to the executions. (8) Thus the gas chambers were invented. As Maurice Blanchot says: “Death humanized on the outside. Inside was horror at its most extreme” (Maurice Blanchot, “The Writing of the Disaster,” in The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, 304). 22 Albahari may have been inspired by a well-known example of miraculous survival which Browning analyses as belonging to “The Gray Zone” as defined by Primo Levi: While Levi focused on the spectrum of victim behaviour within the encompassed perpetrators as well. Even the SS man Muhsfeld of the Birkenau crematoria—whose “daily ration of slaughter was studded with arbitrary and capricious acts, marked by his inventions of cruelty”—was not a “monolith.” Faced with the miraculous survival of a sixteen-year-old girl discovered while the gas chambers were being cleared, the disconcerted Muhsfeld briefly hesitated. In the end he ordered the girl's death but quickly left before his orders were carried out. One ‘instant of pity’ was not enough to “absolve” Muhsfeld, who was deservedly hanged

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This same efficiency could be mistaken for the concern for the welfare of the prisoners, for example in the design of the truck. It was 5.8 metres long, and 1.7 metres high, able to carry a load of up to 4.500 kilos, which means that it could take about a hundred people weighing up to 50 kilos each. Packed full like that, it provided for the most effective usage of the carbon monoxide, which is lethal at one fifth of a percent in half-an-hour. The consequence of this was successful processing of the load at the minimal expenditure of the fuel, since the free space was so small. Another improvement in the process of gassing the load was gradual increase of the level of gas so that the prisoners died half-asleep. “Now you no longer see convulsed and disfigured faces on those who have been suffocated, and there is not much vomiting and defecation as there used to be earlier, when the gas was released all at once” (142). The scientific research conducted on the effectiveness of the trucks also proposed that there be a light in the truck which would help to reassure the load itself and “ensure a more equally distributed inhalation of the carbon monoxide” (117). Naturally, the bulb should be protected with metal netting so that nobody should break it and cut himself. These technological advancements brought death quicker, and may be considered merciful, but cannot be understood as constructive interaction between the two cultures. Industrialised murder specific to the Holocaust had as its prerequisite a complete depersonalisation of human relationships. In the death camps, it was achieved through a bureaucratic administration, allotment of numbers, and nakedness of the inmates before gassing and cremation. They were thus stripped of their humanity, of the thin layer of civilisation, of any form of human dignity, and treated as objects. Depersonalised, objectified condition of the victims helped the executioners to overcome any feelings of compassion and achieve perfect bureaucratic objectivity. Due to the lack of crematoria and the beforehand known short-term stay of the prisoners at the Fairgrounds camp, the inmates in Belgrade were not branded. The depersonalisation was achieved through anonymity. Logically, the administration had their lists of the interned persons, but the people who really got in some sort of contact were nameless. The Jewish children eagerly taking chocolate sweets from Götz or Meyer did not know their names, the Jewish women climbing the truck for that final ride did not know their names, and Götz and Meyer themselves never knew the names of those who were soon to perish. They took care of the in 1947. Yet it did place him too, although at its extreme boundary, within the gray band, that zone of ambiguity which radiates out from regimes based on terror and obsequiousness. (Christopher R. Browning, “’Ordinary Men’,” in The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, 143)

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technicalities and performed their duty impeccably, finding the names of those soulless people irrelevant. The truck deserved both a name and a nick-name while the Jews remained without either. As such, soulless and nameless, depersonalised, they could be easily dispensed with. At one point, Albahari stresses the significance of being able to name the Other. Götz or Meyer had a nightmare, and dreamed that someone spoke his name through that little hole where they fitted the exhaust pipe to the truck: “Enunciated it loud and clear: Wilhelm Götz. And then said: You are Erwin Meyer” (119). This apparently harmless dream is remembered as terrible and kept hidden from everybody. It is clear that subconsciously they feared the real human contact that comes with using a name and even worse, dreaded the ultimate identification of who and what they really are. Yet, without such knowledge, there is no meaningful interaction. When the load was being boarded to be processed, nobody offered any explanation, logical or otherwise, to these women as to why they and their children had to die such a terrible death. There was no communication between them and Götz and Meyer who trusted only Germans (135). History has no time for feelings, even less for trauma and pain, and least of all for dull helplessness, for the inability to grasp what is happening. One day you are a human being, and the next, despite the armband or perhaps precisely because of it, you are invisible. (35)

Götz and Meyer felt no horror at their execution, the inmates were immaterial, invisible, unlike the broken axle over which they grieved. It is clear that no meaningful encounter could happen between a visible culture and an invisible one. Nor is there a possibility for a constructive contact between two cultures if there is a heavy burden of prejudice and ideological mindwashing as there was on the part of the Nazi culture. Sinsheimer explains that until well into the eleventh century, there was little or no persecution of the Jews in mediaeval Europe. As adherents to the Old Testament, they were potential religious seducers, but the Church did not exclude them from the final act of Grace at the Day of Judgment, despite their lack of the true Faith. Jude’s betrayal of the Christian Saviour, the crime of the Wandering Jew, and accusations of ritual murder of children were all brought to life during the Crusades when enthusiastic and adventurous Christians realized that rich Jews lived in the heart of Christendom. Horrible massacres started, Jews were banished from England in 1290, and from Spain in 1492. Driven homeless, they found their spiritual home in their Scriptures; not allowed to hold landed property, they became second-hand dealers, money-lenders and pawn-brokers. That love of one’s

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fellow-men was inherent in Jewish doctrine was forgotten, and they, as murderers of Christ, were therefore rightfully hated. To the mediaeval prejudices of greed, hatred, revengefulness and the curse of eternal wandering, the Nazis added racial inferiority, while the modern times contributed the global economic conspiracy of international Jewry. Postone contends that modern anti-Semitism involves a biologization of capitalism—which itself is only understood in terms of its manifest abstract dimension—as International Jewry […] They became the personifications of the intangible, destructive, immensely powerful, and international domination of capital as a social form.23

Götz and Meyer had their own prejudices, probably shared by many other ordinary soldiers like them. They believed that the people they were killing had no souls, that “Jews were nothing more than mildew on the face of the world,” (4) and they treated them likewise. Everyone at the camp was expected to greet any German by doffing his cap, and bowing to the ground. The inmates did not deserve more than one square metre of space, one shower on a few thousand people, no toilets, and 1.3 watery meals per day. Götz and Meyer were also mentally disconnected from the landscape they watched every day on their route to the burial site. They rather imagined their own villages and did not want to have anything to do with Serbia, “that wild country, the crude people, the lack of order” (13). This sort of prejudice was combined with the Nazi ideology which coated all atrocities in a palatable way. For example, commander Andorfer got angry at the suggestion that the processed load should be simply dumped into the river: “We are not barbarians [...] if we have been called upon to give people a better life, then we should also give them a finer death” (78). Gassing and cremation are in that sense the finest form of death. This was not sarcasm but a deep belief in the uprightness of Himmler’s grand design. However, it certainly did not contribute to the creative exchange between the Germans and the Jews. Albahari's mastery of the narrative technique comes fully to the surface at the very end of the book. His narrator envisions his own encounter with Götz and Meyer at an old people's home in the foothills of the Alps. He is a man of fifty who is trying to find an answer to the question: “Who am I?” (89) Knowing where he was going with his life at that age, he needed 23

Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” in The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, 137.

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to figure out where he had come from which required filling up the empty slots in his family tree. The fact that the tree was almost bare was gradually related to Götz and Meyer and their mission in Belgrade. He discovered that out of 67 relatives at the arrival of Götz and Meyer, there were only six living after their departure. This creates a crisis and an obsession on the part of the narrator. He wanted to bring order to himself by introducing order to his family tree, by filling the void created through the Holocaust. Unable to learn much about his missing relatives, he had to learn everything about Götz and Meyer. Since he never saw them or their photo, he had to imagine and conjure them up in imagination in order to “reach fullness” (65). That was the only way for him to beat the meaninglessness of history that became, in the end, “the meaninglessness of our lives” (67). That was not an easy task and the narrator is repeatedly being frustrated by silence and blankness. In this he resembles many other Jews of a younger generation who feel uprooted and disoriented: There are holes as well in our genealogy. We have no family trees. At the most, we can go back to our grandparents. There is no trace of anyone before. Whose graves can we go visit? What hall of records can we consult? Everything was burned. It seems that what was transmitted to a whole generation of Ashkenazic Jews was anything but a full body of knowledge. It was more like a cloud of neurosis in which the individual cannot orient himself.24

By the end of the novel, Albahari’s narrator is indeed neurotic, verging on madness. His only living relative in Serbia is a sick and senile man who cannot be of much help, while the faces of Götz and Meyer remain blank. He discovers their names, but the reader does not learn the name of the narrator which means that the process of his identity formation is not completed. In the end, he can only imagine what he would do if he found them at the old people's home: I wouldn’t ask them anything. I’d just sit there next to them and be quiet, and let my quiet wash over them. And then, when there was nothing left in them but that quiet, when they were swimming in it like fish in the sea, I wanted them to turn to me, and in their eyes, which had finally filled with colour, blue or brown, I would be able to see that they knew who I was though they had never seen me, and they would know that they had lost the chance to know me, I wanted to see them remember. At that point I could 24 Henry Raczymov, “Memory Shot Through with Holes,” in The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, 414.

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The reader expected accusations, questioning, at least impassioned conversation, but what he got was silence. The narrator is a Jew and however deeply involved in the fate of his executed relatives, as a genuine offspring of his culture, he can only mutely stare. The key word here is “remember.”25 The emotionally overburdened narrator finally realises that the answers he came to cannot help him raise his relatives from the dead, fill the history with meaning, or restore his own peace of mind. The only reward for his painful research is the hope that at least memory will survive. Albahari gives a moral twist to the standard definitions of the significance of memory. It is indispensable for one's integrity, as collective it is essential for national awareness, but Albahari also says that “A soul that remembers can never be lost” (160). He makes his narrator state at the end of the novel that “all people have souls,” (160) but that the souls can be lost. This obviously refers to Götz and Meyer, who may loose their souls not only through the inhuman acts they performed but also through active forgetting. Obliterating the memory of the crime in a way clears the perpetrator from guilt in an immoral manner. In this context, when the narrator finally “meets” Götz and Meyer, he comes not as an angel of revenge but as their Saviour. He wants them to show that they remember and feel remorse, thus demonstrating their humanity after all. The narrator actually wants them to live so that he can convince himself that not all is lost. When he encounters the murderers of his whole family, he wants them to realise what they have missed in the Belgrade encounter. He wants them to look at him, and see him, like they have never seen his relatives. He wants a real encounter with Götz and Meyer so that they get to know 25

“As Yosef Yerushalmi has reminded us, the Hebrew Bible contains the verb ‘to remember,’ in its various declensions, 169 times (along with numerous injunctions not to forget). Yet what Jews are enjoined to remember is almost always God's handiwork; secular history, insofar as such a category is even admitted by the tradition, gets short shrift. Mourning and remembering the dead are, of course, traditional Jewish obligations. But Judaism has consistently disparaged excessive or overly prolonged mourning. Cremation is forbidden because it would dispose of the body too soon, but also forbidden is embalming, because it would preserve the body too long. Mourn, to be sure, is the message, but then move on: ‘choose life’.” (Peter Novick, “The Holocaust in American Life,” in The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, 478.)

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him, like they have never known the people they murdered. Yet, this never happened so the opportunity was missed for a meaningful cultural interaction. The Holocaust of WW2, even in its local manifestation at the Fairgrounds camp in Belgrade, is a tragic cultural encounter. Many researchers have theorised it and postulated different ideas, that it is a failure of culture (Adorno) or a test of modernity (Rose). For Albahari, it proves the meaninglessness of history which must not be disregarded. He is of the same mind with Rubenstein who says: “On the contrary, we are more likely to understand the Holocaust if we regard it as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century.”26 Adorno is equally concerned when he says: “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen” (Adorno). The precedent has been made and this should be kept upfront in the public mind. Raising Holocaust consciousness so that similar tragic encounters do not have a chance to happen was, after all, Albahari's aim in writing Götz and Meyer.

Works Cited Albahari, David. Götz and Meyer. London: Vintage, 2005. Trans. Ellen. Elias-Bursac. Bartov, Omer. “The European Imagination in the Age of Total War.” In The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 89-95. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Bauer, Jehuda. “What Was the Holocaust?” In The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 451-454. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Bauman, Zygmunt. “The Uniqueness and Normality of the Holocaust.” In The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 82-88. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Blanchot, Maurice. “The Writing of the Disaster.” In The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 299305. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Browning R. Christopher.”'Ordinary Men'.” In The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 140-144. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

26

Richard L. Rubenstein, op. cit., 21.

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Edgell, Alvin G. “Globalization and Cultural Encounters.” International Third World Studies Journal and Review, Volume XIV (2003): 1-11. Friedberg, Lilian. “Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust.” In The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 468-473. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Huntington, Samuel P. “Forward: Culture Counts.” In Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Novick, Peter. “The Holocaust in American Life.” In The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 474479. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Postone, Moishe. “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism.” In The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 132-139. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Raczymov, Henri. “Memory Shot Through with Holes.” In The Holocaust, Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, 410415. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Romano, Jasa. Jews of Yugoslavia 1941-1945, Victims of Genocide and Freedom Fighters. Belgrade: Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia, 1980. (English summary, 573-590) Rubenstein, Richard L. The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975. Savich, Carl. “Belgrade ’41: The Holocaust in German-Occupied Serbia”, http//www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/082.html (accessed August 3, 2007). Sinsheimer, Hermann. Shylock, The History of a Character. New York: Citadel Press, 1964. Wolf-Knuts, Ulrika. Culture or Cultural Encounter. The Abo Akademi University Communications: Abo Akademi University News Bulletin 1/2007.

CHAPTER FIVE TWISTING CULTURAL STEREOTYPES: IDENTIFYING NATIONS LINGUISTICALLY1 BILJANA ýUBROVIû

This paper explores the cultural stereotypes of the British and Serbs as presented in Vesna Goldsworthy’s Chernobyl Strawberries first published in English in 2005. This literary work depicts the author’s interest in the cultural diversity of the two above mentioned nations. Due to her language background and extensive life experience in Britain as her newly acquired country, Goldsworthy describes this country as well as Serbia through an interesting looking glass. An analysis of the cultural beliefs and values as presented in the book is offered in the context of contact linguistics, and one of its main postulates: an individual is the locus of cultural and linguistic contact.

Culture: a unique concept? Culture may be defined as a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”2 It is obvious that culture is here seen as the sum of men’s activities, unified in a whole. What should be emphasized at this point is that culture comprises a set of customs characteristic of a group, and a set of habits or the habitual behaviour pertaining to an individual. Culture may be regarded as a set of various manifestations of what human beings are and what they do. 1

This paper is part of the research project entitled “The Serbian and foreign literatures in contact and discontact,” sponsored by the Serbian Ministry of Science for the period of 2006-2010. I am deeply grateful to the Ministry for various types of support it has provided so far. 2 Edward Burnett Tyler, The Origins of Culture, 1871 (1959 Harper Edition, Vol. 1, Part 1 of Primitive Culture), 1.

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Culture has always had close ties to language. Stuart Hall writes: To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express themselves, their thoughts and feelings about the world, in ways which will be understood by each other. Thus culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is happening around them, and “making sense” of the world, in broadly similar ways.3

Needless to say, people behave in similar ways in similar situations, but depending on their cultural and language background, some behavioural inconsistencies are also to be found when studying individuals belonging to various nations. In order for an individual to understand the culture of another nation, they also have to pay attention to the language in question. Cultural and language mixing phenomena are evident from time immemorial, and especially intriguing are those instances of language and cultural mixing taking place in a bilingual speaker’s mind. Several interesting issues may be raised here: does a bilingual speaker see the world(s) they live in the same way as a monolingual speaker? Do two languages help a bilingual speaker understand the world better? How capable is a bilingual speaker of representing the two cultural frameworks they are accustomed to? All these questions are dealt with in the following sections and some plausible explanations offered at the end on the basis of examples found in Chernobyl Strawberries, a memoir written by Vesna (Bjelogrliü) Goldsworthy, a native speaker of Serbian, who has been living in Britain for quite some time now. Goldsworthy has written her book in English and excerpts from the original text are analysed in this chapter4. In Goldsworthy’s memoir the primary medium is English, and this paper deals with the ways she brings the British and the Serbian Weltanschauung closer to speakers of other languages. The Serbian lexical elements found in the English text are looked at in order to establish the level of language and cultural mixing in the memoir.

Lingustic means of culture depiction English is undoubtedly considered to be a true international language of today, and that may be the reason for Goldsworthy’s choice of the medium. Its domination is now completely understood and it is no use 3

Stuart Hall, The Work of Representation (London: Sage, 1997), 2. Chernobyl Strawberries was translated into Serbian soon after it was published. See the Reference section for further details on the translation. 4

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trying to claim something else. It is our reality that wherever we go, no matter whether we are in Asia, Africa or Europe, when we are at a loss regarding the choice of the lingua franca, we will most probably resort to English as the means of communication. In most cases, the communication attempted will be successful. On the other hand, English has deserved this status, as it has always been prone to the process of borrowing of all kinds: lexical, syntactic, morphological, even phonetic. As the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries may be described as an era of cultural mixing, due to the ongoing globalization and migrations, I have chosen to describe an account of the British and Serbs as seen by a native speaker of Serbian. Vesna Goldsworthy, the author of Chernobyl Strawberries, is seen as the locus of the linguistic and cultural contact, and the intensity of the contact situation will be compared to the scale as proposed by several authors studying language and cultural contacts in the twentieth century. With respect to borrowing, Thomason and Kaufman5 use intensity of contact to measure the stage of the borrowing process. They offer five types of contact in terms of its intensity: 1) casual contact, 2) slightly more intense contact, 3) more intense contact, 4) strong cultural pressure, and 5) very strong cultural pressure. Upon reflection, it is obvious that only stages 4) and 5) of language contact include cultural matters. This leads us to believe that culture is strongly imbedded into every individual, and is very hard to learn anew. Culture is, therefore, very hard to impose upon a newcomer in any society, having its own cultural values and judgements. As some linguists studying language contacts all around the world put it “with a minimum of cultural pressure we expect only lexical borrowing, and then only nonbasic vocabulary.”6 Another comprehensive typology of linguistic borrowing has been introduced and it covers five different scenarios where the languages in focus take different roles. It is claimed that the process of borrowing itself is much more significant than the elements borrowed (which have mostly drawn attention so far). Therefore, the type of the contact situation should be in focus of researchers. According to Appel and Muysken,7 the five scenarios are the following: 1) through convergence, 2) through cultural influence and lexical borrowing, 3) through second-language learning, 4) through relexification, and 5) through imitation of prestige forms. I shall 5 Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1988), 74-76. 6 Ibid., 77. 7 René Appel and Pieter Muysken, Language Contact and Bilingualism (London: Edward Arnold, 1987), 154.

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now deal with each in brief. Gradual convergence takes place where several languages have been spoken in the same area mostly by the same people for a long period of time. A perfect example of this borrowing scenario is the Balkans. The second scenario mentioned above is a very important one, and it boils down to lexical borrowing of mostly new but necessary lexical concepts in the receiving language. Third, when a language is brought into a new region, sometimes speakers adopt it as their own language and trigger the process of second-language learning. Second language acquisition in such cases is due to its cultural and political prestige. Naturally, the process of mixing the two languages may also influence the new language in various ways. Drastic relexification occurs when the replacement of the vocabulary of one language with that of another language takes place, while the original grammar tends to be maintained (especially in the case of content words). And last but not least, as part of the fifth scenario of linguistic borrowing, “sentence patterns or complex expressions of a prestige language are imitated”8. This borrowing scenario is applicable and limited to rather superficial language phenomena.

The Serbs in Chernobyl Strawberries Vesna Goldsworthy, being an author with the Serbian language background, by attempting to tell the story of her life, also offers her own view on the people she used to live with. Her account of Yugoslavia and all its inhabitants seems a very fair picture of their culture, habits and beliefs, at times significantly different from the British ones. When Goldsworthy attempts to describe cultural beliefs or habits of the Serbs, she does not use Serbian loanwords in her English text. When speaking of inquisitive Serbs, who prefer minding somebody else’s business to their own, Goldsworthy jokingly says that “there was never a shortage of opinion, free of charge, in my neighbourhood,”9 or that Everyone knew when you went out and when you came back. If anyone came to your door when you were not at home, neighbours would offer to take messages and invite complete strangers to await your return in their front parlour. (143)

8

Ibid, 158. Vesna Goldsworthy, Chernobyl Strawberries (London: Atlantic Books, 2005), 102. All the in-text references are taken from this edition. 9

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Also, when she wants to point out the natural modesty of the Serbian people she tells her reader the following: Where I come from one is supposed to live each day as though it might just be one’s last, not in any hedonistic sense, but, in trying to avoid—as far as one could—being caught by death halfway through anything of which your family might be ashamed. (18)

On the Serbian views on single mothers in this society Goldsworthy says: The security officer is the only single mother we know in the whole of Belgrade, and we feel sorry for her little son, as though he were an orphan, or worse. We cannot begin to imagine what his sad, fatherless life must be like. (41)

The views on single mothers have now been changed a lot, but Goldsworthy depicted the standpoints valid when she was a child, namely in the sixties or seventies. Being in the domain of gender (in)equality in Serbian or rather Yugoslav companies, men were hugely dominant in the twentieth century: Many of the supplicants assume that Toma10 is the boss—communism notwithstanding, Yugoslavia is still a patriarchal place—and start repeating their stories of misfortune when he enters. When Toma points out the error of their ways, they return to my mother with a syrupy flow of apologies. (42)

Goldsworthy’s mother was a boss in a big state-owned company at the time, and some of her employers were male. The example shows that a woman could hardly be expected to be a manager of any kind in exYugoslavia. Whoever has visited the Balkans must have heard a thing or two about the everlasting argument regarding the oldest and the most civilized nation in the region. Goldsworthy’s point of view familiarizes the reader with this issue: “In the Balkans, there has always been an unspoken competition as to who was the first to be civilized as well as to who was the most civilized” (168). The Balkans, being the troublesome region, the best thing for one to do is: “If you are ever offered a choice between ducats and land in the Balkans, take the ducats. In fact, generally, take the ducats and run” (16). The last example may lead the Serbian native speaker to believe that 10

Toma is a Serbian male name, frequently abbreviated from Tomislav.

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Goldsworthy has used at least one word that Serbs are aware of and that may be embraced as their own—the ducats. But, if the etymology of the word is taken into account, ducat dates back to the fourteenth century, and it has been used starting from the Middle English period to this day. Its ultimate origin is Greek.11 Serbian and English are quite different vocabulary-wise. The languages they came into contact with belong to rather different language families. English is known to have borrowed much of its vocabulary from French, whereas one of the main sources of loanwords in Serbian is Turkish. Turkish-origin loanwords in an English text would probably only confuse a native speaker of English (they are often used jokingly even in modern Serbian12). That might be the reason Goldsworthy avoids Serbian words when describing her own compatriots.

The British in Chernobyl Strawberries Apart from providing a truthful and occasionally funny description of the Serbs, Goldsworthy also manages to offer an account of the British as seen by the Serbs. I shall start with the inadequate terms for the nations living on the British Isles as used by the Serbian native speakers. In Goldsworthy’s words “Most Serbs I knew used the word English to mean British, so there was not let-off for the Welsh or the Scots either” (268). As for the typical British behaviour, at times so different from what the Serbs are used to, a friend of the author of Chernobyl Strawberries notices: You sound the same, you’ve barely aged, you dress in a similar way, and yet somehow you seem so much more English to me even when you speak Serbian. It must be the expression on your face […] Back where we come from one doesn’t smile so often, and one doesn’t say everything is wonderful if it isn’t. (202)

There are also several places in the book, where the stereotypical representations of the nation, its climate, as well as its cuisine are tackled: “England has, quite possibly, the worst climate in the world,” (269) or

11 Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com (accessed September 5th, 2007), see ducat. 12 One in a myriad of Turkish loanwords in Serbian is pendžer (Eng. window). It is nowadays mostly treated as archaic, and another word is used instead in modern Serbian—prozor. Pendžer is very often found in Serbian folk literature.

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England had perhaps the strangest cuisine in the world. They were reputed to have developed a special jam for every kind of meat, and they smothered their lamb with mint and vinegar […] When Simon13 sat down to eat, Granny kept wondering whether any of the jars from the larder— plum, rosehip, greengage, strawberry, melon—should be brought out to accompany his main course. (270-271)

Finally, the British royal family is inevitably a reflection of what an English person is like and how they behave. In Goldsworthy’s words, Serbs share this belief—“the fact that members of the royal family were somehow thought of as ‘typically English’” (269). Whatever “typically English” may mean. An analysis of the lexical material used to describe the British shows that no unusual lexical items are used by Goldsworthy when depicting the British. She uses simple English to provide a picture of the British as they are seen by the Serbs. In the context of Thomason & Kaufman’s theoretical framework, only a strong contact between two languages triggers mixing of cultural elements. Goldsworthy’s intention is not to intertwine the British and Serbian cultures in her memoir in a linguistic manner, i.e. by using both languages to a similar extent. What she intends to do is bring a foreign culture closer to someone who is not fully acquainted with it. She does so by using basic vocabulary items.

Serbian in Chernobyl Strawberries Goldsworthy seems impressively capable of keeping Serbian and English apart in her memoir, especially when depicting cultural elements. However, she occasionally incorporates a word or two of Serbian to achieve a different effect. I shall now look at selected examples and analyse them. When speaking of pubs/restaurants/taverns in Belgrade, she readily mentions the inevitable Borosane (136), canvass shoes which used to be worn by waitresses in the communist era (or as she puts it “shoes worn by surly waitresses in peep-toe canvass boots” (ibid.), provided by their employers. The place in which you could normally see these shoes is called a kafana in Serbian – at one point Goldsworthy says “in the middle of a smoky kafana (137) where a shot of loza (ibid.) could be ordered. Kafana is a common name for a restaurant in Serbian, the focus being on consuming alcoholic beverages rather than food. Loza is a type of strong 13

Simon is Golsdworthy’s British husband.

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Serbian brandy, served in small shots, also thought to have healing properties in the fight against a high body temperature. Goldsworthy goes on to show a British native speaker that Serbian is a very colourful language in the domain of booze. You can easily find “lorry driver bifes” (ibid.) on motorways in Serbia. In order to specify the type of a pub which lorry drivers frequent, Goldsworthy chooses to use a widespread French loanword in Serbian—bife. All these Serbian lexical units are most probably new to the AngloAmerican reader, but also somewhat exotic as they can hardly guess their Serbian meanings, except for bife (where the semantic component might be more transparent, at least when pronounced). Furthermore, at one point in the memoir, Goldsworthy ventures to elaborate on a difficult meaning of a Serbian word, whose first meaning is a peasant, and which can also be used to refer to someone who lacks manners, when used colloquially: “Peasant,” mumbled my sister. She used the feminine form of the noun. There was no doubt that she had me in mind. […] (The word peasant, with its full power of character assassination, is not really translatable into English. It was neither here nor there as far as the real peasantry were concerned, but a poisoned dart if directed at a Belgrade student of letters.) (102-103)

Goldsworthy seems to be perfectly capable of bringing the Serbian language and its difficult pronunciation closer to foreigners by using a simplified transliteration technique. In the Afterword to Chernobyl Strawberries, she says that she attempted to transcribe names into English “wherever practical, rather than always using the diacritics from the Serbo-Croatian version of the Latin alphabet” (285-286). A selection of examples follows: Ljubiša Lyubisha, Dedinje Dedinye, Bjelogrliü Byelogrlitch, Višnjiþka banja Visnyichka Banya, Crnjanski Tsernianski, Nikšiü Nikshich, Njeguš Nyegush. This transliteration technique enables a non-native speaker of Serbian to pronounce Serbian/Montenegrin names more clearly. Finally, Goldsworthy wishes to show her readers (or as she herself puts it “to God and his aunt”) how Radio Television of Serbia (RTS, for short) greets its audience. Namely, RTS news anchors address the audience with the notorious phrase: “respected viewers”. Last but not least, Goldsworthy plays with the funny way of addressing daughters in Serbia: “How are you today, my son?’ […] In Serbian, calling a daughter ‘my son,’ ‘my brave son’—using the masculine as a generic name for a child—is not that unusual” (233). There is no need to elaborate on the idiosyncratic usage of the Serbian word, as Goldsworthy readily provides an explanation to her readers,

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which uncovers her professional vocation—a philologist mindful of tiny linguistic intricacies.

Final remarks Chernobyl Strawberries may be described as a book which contains fair pictures of the British and Serbs, as presented by an individual who seems to have acquired the cultural and linguistic stereotypes of both nations (one at an early age and the other later in life). In her accounts of the British and Serbian cultural specificities, non-native words/borrowings are very rarely used, as the examples imply. This may lead to a conclusion that Vesna Goldsworthy manages to keep the two codes apart. However, when she wants to bring a Serbian concept closer to a non-native speaker of Serbian, she readily uses a Serbian word, and also offers a very detailed explanation of the Serbian lexeme, if necessary. As for the choice of Serbian lexemes in the English text, nouns are most often used. When Goldsworthy decides to incorporate a Serbian word/noun in the English text, these importations usually refer to superficial language phenomena, and belong to non-basic vocabulary in Serbian. No Serbian sentence patterns or complex expressions are imitated in Chernobyl Strawberries, a phenomenon so widespread in the writing of many authors of Serbian or other origin.

Works Cited Appel, René and Pieter Muysken. Language Contact and Bilingualism. London: Edward Arnold, 1987. Goldsworthy, Vesna. Chernobyl Strawberries—a memoir. London: Atlantic Books, 2005. Goldsvorti, Vesna. ýernobiljske jagode—seüanja. Translated by Zia Gluhbegoviü. Beograd: Geopoetika, 2005. Hall, Stuart. The Work of Representation. London: Sage, 1997. Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com. Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1988. Tyler, Edward Burnett. The Origins of Culture (1959 Harper Edition, Vol.1, Part 1 of Primitive Culture), 1871.

CHAPTER SIX TO TRANSLATE OR NOT TO TRANSLATE— TO ENRICH OR TO IMPOVERISH IDENTITY NADEŽDA STOJKOVIû

The Realisation of identity in emigration Immigrants’ texts on their lives are considered highly valuable as the authors need to overcome the gap between two cultures thus illuminating the question of overcoming the chasm between the past and the present. Their geographical perspective and their dislocation from the original referential places force them to look at life more profoundly. The past is often metaphorically examined as the place from which we all “emigrate,” and whose loss is a part of our collective human experience. The writers who leave their countries have that feeling further strengthened by the physical sensation of discontinuity, their present being a different place from their past. The autobiographical novel of Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, 1989, deals with the possibility of realising an authentic identity in a new environment. In that autobiography she describes her experience of emigrating from Poland into Canada, the Jewish community in Cracow, the life in Canada and the USA. The text is a dialogue between the two cultures and is on the border between fiction and autobiography. Aware of the different cultural norms of different communities, the author questions the ideas and concepts whose meanings and relevance are often taken for granted in those very communities. Race, nationality, identity, all gain new connotations as the immigrant writer moves among two or more interpretations of these terms. In this text there is an emphasis on the element of fiction in the construction of our ideas about race, nationality, or identity. Concurrently, the text deals with the concepts of the foreign and domestic. The author uses the model that can be defined as

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the movement from “heaven” to “exile,” and into a “new world.” Autobiography in itself has the aim to revive the sense of the past in the present, but in this case also to bring the “old world” closer to the “new world” of a significantly different culture. However, in that act, fiction is undeniable. That looking back is followed by the knowledge that inspires profound insecurity, the fact that the physical alienation from the original world necessarily implies the impossibility of reviving the loss. Autobiographies therefore are not an attempt at recreating villages and cities, but at creating imaginary homelands of our mind. Autobiographies require a certain degree of fiction in searching for imaginary homelands and identity. In this context, language is of paramount importance, and that fact entirely fills the work of Eva Hoffman. In her text, she describes, as she says in the title, her movement from one language to another, and the effect that such movement causes in her life. When she comes to Canada she tries with much effort to “translate herself” from Polish into English. It could be said that by writing on her Polish past in English, she reverts the process of translation. But, can an autobiographical process help an author find a way to transcend the doubleness of their identity composed of two languages, two homelands?

Realisation of identity through writing—autobiography An emigrant condition can sometimes resemble bridging two cultures, their union in a creative, fruitful way. However, it is often a life in a gap separating two cultures. Then there develops an anxiety due to the feeling of not belonging and uprootedness. It can be a serious problem for living a full life and for determining and realising one’s identity. Today, there is much talk about new forms of identity, some of which go that far as to discard the very concept of identity as inadequate as by definition it subsumes something static. Yet, there are still no personal experiences that would justify this new viewpoint as valid and appropriate for creating healthy social relations. Immigrants’ texts bear crucial significance as they deal with the problem of linguistic representation of past and present. Thus they open up the much disputed questions of objectiveness and subjectiveness in representation. At the same time, such texts illuminate the complexities of personal comprehension and representation of “reality.” More importantly, they make intriguing parallels with the writing of “official histories,” and comprehending and representing collective identities. Eva Hoffman believes that such a situation relates to the possibility of a dialogue between two cultures that is “materialised” through writing.

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Here the relevance of art can be seen at best. In the act of writing one comes to the realisation about themselves, it becomes a way of realising identity. Then, through the nature of art itself, that realisation is offered every reader to enrich their own identity by making parallels with the represented experience, or by simply learning about someone else’s view of life. Due to living in different cultural norms, the author questions the validity of those norms that are most often unconsciously perceived as given. That is one personal, concrete experience that corresponds with the contemporary social theory that deals with the concepts of race, nationality, identity. For an immigrant these concepts have specific connotations as they are viewed from two different cultural perspectives. Autobiographies show the element of fiction that may even be formative in the creation of the concepts of race, nationality, identity. Immigrant writes on experiencing life in homeland and abroad, and necessarily on similarities and differences. Autobiography thus shows the possibility of ambivalence and reconciliation. In a higher context, as a personal, but also historical document, autobiography can signal the complementarity of two cultures.

Relationship between autobiography and fiction As a genre, autobiography has for its aim the recreation of the past in the present. In her novel—autobiography, Eva Hoffman constantly tries to revive her old world in the contemporary, new, culturally significantly different world. This, however, is the source of multitude of questions referring to linguistic representation. It is an established fact that immigrants suffer a sense of loss after leaving their homelands. The need and the attempt to recapture the feeling of life in the home country may be one of the basic motives for writing autobiographies. The very physical separation implies the impossibility of a precise representation of the loss. Although physical presence does not guarantee the so called objectivity, emigration is a complex mental state that makes the past be perceived in a nostalgic and compensatory way. In other words, instead of an authentic representation of the lost experience, fiction is created. In such a situation, the role of language is paramount, and it is clearly seen in the work of Eva Hoffman. In her text she describes, as indicated in the subtitle, life in a new language, her movement from one into another language, and the influence that such a move has on her life. Once in Canada, she tries to “translate” herself from Polish into English. Translation becomes one of the key concepts for reading this autobiography. A great

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question that this book poses is if an autobiography can help realise an identity composed of two languages and two homelands. The author answers this question by describing her inner journey through her two homelands. In writing about that she consciously experiences profound insecurity, doubt, whether she is merely creating an “imaginary homeland.” This is evident on numerous examples throughout the book. Some of the most remarkable are her scenery descriptions, the way she perceives them, and the way those impressions illuminate the difference between the “domestic” and “foreign.” The transition from one language into another influences her identity, and her attempt to represent that identity in an autobiography. So, when writing about their homelands, immigrants present readers with that part of the world through their personal, innermost, and therefore unique vision. At the same time, they endeavour to discover and locate their identity.

Life in a new language Hoffman’s novel largely follows the structure of a conventional autobiographic genre. She commences the story with her childhood and unfolds it to the very moment of her writing the autobiography. The narration is mostly chronological. She was born in 1946, in Poland, into a Jewish family. With great skill and luck, her parents managed to survive the war. After it, in 1959, they emigrated to Canada. The text is divided into three parts, “Paradise,” “Exile,” and “The New World,” and depicts how the author was unhappy when leaving Poland, her struggle as a teenager in the new world, and finally, her settling in that new world. The text focuses on her experience of transition from one into another culture through language. The chronological structure of the plot consists of three central moments: foreboding and expecting the new world, the contact with it, and the comparison of the old and new worlds. Although in line with classical autobiographical model, this one deals with essential questions of the present: dislocation, psychological effect of crossing borders, language. In the light of globalisation, she finds of lesser importance issues of organising life in a new surrounding, success, or assimilation.

Paradise Eva Hoffman begins her story on the ship that takes her family and herself away from her place of origin.

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We can’t be leaving all this behind—but we are. I am thirteen years old, and we are emigrating. It’s a notion of such crushing, definitive finality that to me it might as well mean the end of the world. [...] I am pierced by a youthful sorrow so powerful that I suddenly stop crying and try to hold still against the pain. I desperately want time to stop, to hold the ship still with the force of my will. I am suffering my first, severe attack of nostalgia, or teúknota—a word that adds to nostalgia the tonalities of sadness and longing.1

Already at the very beginning of the novel, the author stresses the importance of language and translation for experiencing and realising one’s identity. The word teúknota can not be fully translated into English. At the example of that word we start to follow deep, complex differences between the two cultures and the way they are represented in language. The difference in languages, the impossibility of one to convey the depth of experience contained in another is the marker of differences in identity formed in those two cultures. English language will pose her a problem for long, as she is not capable of expressing emotions in it. With its “shortcomings” that language will thus express her acute sense of loss of childhood and homeland. At the same time, English will become the language of a “vast” but “empty” Canada, and the “whole new geography of emotions” with which she needs to come to terms. Eva Hoffman identifies emigration and growing out of childhood as the exile from paradise. The moment when she rationalises that illustrates the problem of representing “reality.” Many years later, at a stylish party in New York, I met a woman who told me that she had had na enchanted childhood. Her father was a highly positioned diplomat in an Asian country, and she had lived surrounded by sumptuous elegance, the courtesy of servants, and the delicate advances of older men. No wonder, she said, that when this part of her life came to an end, at age thirteen, she felt she had been exiled from paradise, and had been searching for it ever since. No wonder. But the wonder is what you can make a paradise out of. I told her that I grew up in a lumpen apartment in Cracow, squeezed into three rudimentary rooms with four other people, surrounded by squabbles, dark political rumblings, memories of wartime suffering, and daily struggle for existence. And yet, when it came to leave, I, too, felt I was being pushed out of the happy, safe enclosures of Eden. (4-5)

1 Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation—A Life in a New Language (London: Vintage, 1989), 4-5. All the in-text references are taken from this edition.

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Little further, the author says: “Maybe it didn’t happen after all, maybe it’s only a story, and a story can be told differently, it can be changed” (7). Yet another example of an authentic perception and linguistic representation of experience is the difference between hers and that of her parents. For them, emigration equals leaving for the “promised land,” for her “exile from paradise.” In emigration, the author loses her first, authentic identity that the new, thoroughly different culture cannot support. For the parents everything is different. Their sense of identity is based on their feeling that they are Jews, that they live in Poland, and that due to the circumstances of the rising hostility towards the Jews on the side of the Poles, they have no other option but to leave. Almost all their friends in Krakow leave the country. The only doubt they have is whether to go to Israel or Canada. This novel emphasises the difference between public and personal, child’s and adult’s perception of identity. That is why the descriptions of Poland as paradise of childhood, and Canada as a land of exile, are placed in a personal, rather than political context. Eva Hoffman depicts emigration to Canada as a forced exile from childhood. That acute feeling of the loss of childhood in Poland and the sense of the past based on that loss are the turning points of her search for identity, not a political elaboration of the position of the Jews in the post war Poland. Such personal feeling of contemporaneity, individual similarities and differences in the experience, Eva Hoffman contrasts and compares with the so called official histories. Her autobiography exemplifies the gap between the personal and official interpretation of history that shapes all identities. She opens up numerous relevant issues. Foremost, the author deals with the question of the relationship between memory and history, their imminent interdependence, the question of their reliability, the possibility of comprehending the past and its meaning. Thus, in an attempt to find out more about her own past, when confronted with a wall of silence on the part of her father, she realises the double role of language for exploring personal psychological origin. Apart from material evidence, the basic medium of understanding psychological roots of an individual, as well as a social group, is language. Her father’s silence leads to a seemingly paradoxical conclusion. It is not a barrier to discovering the past. Yet it shows personal arbitrariness in representing the past. The value of a past represented linguistically thus becomes questionable. My father almost never mentions the war; dignity for him is silence, sometimes too much silence. [...] How will I ever pin down the reality of what happened to my parents? I come from the war; it is my true origin. But as with all our origins, I cannot grasp it. Perhaps we never know where we come from; in a way, we are all created ex nihilo. (23)

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A further issue in finding out about the past is the temporal and psychological distance that hinder its full comprehension, making the past a meaningless, devastating burden. Two relevant ways of perceiving the past are contrasted here. The author is in search for the past whose understanding enriches one’s identity, entire life. The other, although not explicitly stated, is the opposite, it means insisting on the past and its glorification per se, which is a way of impoverishing identity and its negation. That way may not be far from various forms of extremisms. My mother wants me to know what happened, and I keep every detail of what she tells me in my memory like black beads. It’s a matter of honor to remember, like affirming one’s Jewishness. But I don’t understand what I remember. To atone for what happened, I should relive it all with her, and I try. No, not really. I can’t go as near this pain as I should. But I can’t draw away from it either. When I am much older, I try to get away more. Surely, there is no point in duplicating suffering, in adding mine to hers. And experience: it does not apply to my life; it is in fact misleading, making me into a kneejerk pessimist. (24-25)

In the first part of her autobiographical novel, Eva Hoffman initiates a highly relevant, always acute question of personal understanding of “official history.” Her own example is especially significant as it happens in a totalitarian time. Yet, there is a huge doubt about how different periods are more or less totalitarian or democratic. The author illustrates this with an example of her history teachers in Poland immediately after the war. They had a prescribed ideology to convey, within which they needed to negate the values of previous epochs. However, through delicate and profound psychological manoeuvres, those people managed to transfer the forbidden knowledge that they found truly valid. More importantly, in that, they taught the pupils the need for a critical distance towards official interpretations of history and identity. I don’t know the exceedingly complex historical and ideological arguments that one could level at this version of history, but I know that my teachers don’t believe it. Through the approved conceptual grid, they show us glimpses of different picture. That king, who supposedly oppressed his subjects so tyrannically [...] really, a teacher throws in, he was a great Polish patriot, he installed a decent sanitation system and brought Italian architects to build some of the most beautiful buildings in Europe. His wife, Queen Jadwiga, was so religious and good to the poor that she was considered a saint. From this, I can infer several things: apparently, in this teacher’s book, being a patriot and being religious are good things, and apparently, he

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The next big theme, relevant for this investigation into the interdependence between language and identity, is the relationship between the two cultures. To illuminate this, the author depicts the coexistence of Catholicism and Jewishness in the pre war Poland, and the contrast between Poland and Canada. When speaking of her early childhood, Eva Hoffman presents us with free mixing of the Catholic and Jewish cultures, up until the emergence of anti-Semitism. She makes friends with Catholic children with the approval of parents on both sides, she attends Catholic religious rites and rituals. When desperate, her mother would say: “Jesus, Joseph and Sainted Maria.” The author is able to deeply perceive the beauty of another religion, culture. “I kneel down with the others, and I sing the beautiful anthems; I get a particular thrill when some clear, strong voice emerges from the unison crowd” (30). Only at the end of this autobiographical story, when the author can realise her own life in two languages, does she again become capable of experiencing the fullness of another culture and so enrich herself. The very completeness of this theme that begins with children’s attending Catholic masses and exhilaration, and finishes with the possibility of living a complete life with two cultures within oneself, is the most beautiful illustration of the thesis that identity is enriched through language. Prior to emigration, the contrast between Poland and North American culture is experienced through the expected stereotypes that are, nevertheless, the first personal grasp of differences. Thus, America is the land that offers cars, dollars, chewing gums, pens, all unavailable in Poland. These, seemingly trivial illustrations of life of another culture, along with the previous example of experiencing the two faiths, represent the possibility of an insight into cultural richness of those cultures. So, when she hears the famous song Rock Around the Clock, which she immediately likes, Eva Hoffman makes the following comment: The electric, sexy excitement of this piece of music is totally unlike the plaintive lyricism of the songs I usually hear on the radio—mostly Polish and French. And, as I hum “Rock Around the Clock” in my sadly unhoarse voice, I can’t quite believe that a country from which so many terrific things come can be as glum as the newsreels would have it. (61)

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Within the context of the contemporary, “global” world that has its beginning in the time of the Hoffmans’ emigration, the concept of dislocation starts to loose its meaning. Today, when cultural differences are questioned, when transport and information are almost instantly available, the notion of a place is significantly altered. It is the reason why there are huge polemics on to what extent should ethnical, linguistic, and cultural authenticity be preserved, whether globalisation necessarily implies annihilation of differences or a new concept of connectedness and union. After the World War II, emigration meant an essential change of the place and identity. For Eva Hoffman it was a hard experience that required strenuous effort to cope with. She links her notion of identity directly not only with a culture, but literally with geography that produced that culture in the first place. She finds geography a constant and unquenchable source of her own identity. That is a basis that is further built onto with new experiences. No, I’m no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love. It lives within me despite my knowledge of our marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions. Is it blind and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory? I think it would be blind and self-deceptive not to. All it has given me is the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me the colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves. The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured: no geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservation [...] Insofar as we retain the capacity for attachment, the energy of desire that draws us toward the world and makes us want to live within it, we’re always returning. All we have to draw on is this first potent furnace, the uncomparing, ignorant, love, the original heat and hunger for the forms of the world, for the here and now. (74-75)

Strengthened with the love for the country of her origin, the country that gave her life, the author copes with all the doubts and hardships of living in a physically and spiritually unknown geography. She lives to be an enriched, mature individual, socially integrated with the two cultures that she has fruitfully brought together in herself. Her love can be understood as a positive attitude to life, the art of seeing the beautiful and ennobling, and of accepting it as a constituent part of human spirit. Such an attitude is a defence against the ever present ugly, devastating, that if pervading as a way of perception, inevitably impoverishes and destroys identity. The theme of language opens and closes this chapter which commences with the description of the first notion of language, mother

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tongue, the articulation of voices, expressing meaning. That is the author’s first awareness of the limits of language and her own needs of expression. That need is at the same time a form of realising identity, which as depth psychoanalysts claim, is a life long process. Autobiographical writing is in itself a reflection of identity. When as a child she forms syllables and words, she wants to “tell A Story, Every Story, everything all at once” (11). In that initial, half conscious experience of language, she nevertheless finds out that a language has to follow certain rules that may be limiting, yet the disregard of which prevents the only referential connection with the surrounding. This is an example of how a child feels what the linguists were discussing throughout the XX century. There is a hidden rule even in this game, though—that the sounds have to resemble real syllables, that they can’t disintegrate into brute noise, for then I wouldn’t be talking at all. I want articulation—but articulation that says the whole world at once (11).

She wants to convey herself through language. She will learn to do so by establishing a bridge between the two languages and their cultures. A language is the well of authentic cultural experience at once idiosyncratic, unknown to other cultures. Such kinds of experience are most difficult to translate as in that a problem is reached that to solve would require the so called “total reading,” understanding the entirety of a culture whose image is compressed in words, phrases, sentences, that once translated either lose or have no meaning. An example of this is to be found in a contrastive description of children’s memory books in Poland and North America. In the old homeland those notebooks were filled with melancholic, romantic verses that depict life as “a valley of tears” or “a river of sorrow.” In the new homeland there came imperative sentences, like “never lose your amiable personality,” “always be happy and nothing bad will ever happen to you!” Another example illustrates the inability of a language to convey experience contained within. That is the part when Eva Hoffman sees Montreal for the first time. For her it is an amazingly huge city, and so she says: “We look at the approaching world wordlessly” (95). She is yet to achieve a language that would express experience that is awaiting her.

Exile into a new language The central part of this autobiographical novel almost entirely deals with the author’s perception of the new language, English. She describes her inner path from the very first impressions that this new language

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imprints on her perception of the world, and the effect of that world onto her inner life, her identity. Through a gentle story on fitting into a Canadian society, she elucidates her gradual coming to terms with that new language, its meanings, experiences that it reflects. The author continuously makes comparisons with her mother tongue, often aware of the differences that the two languages exhibit. Those are the idiosyncratic values of different societies and their vision of the world, the historical layers of experience. She knows how one language can express great depths of human perception, perhaps unknown to other cultures. She also gains insight into essential cultural differences that may have preconditioned different perception. On the other hand, she feels the acquisition of a new language as a change in her own personality. Her spirit is changing as her new language allows her new perspectives of the world around. At times, among the multitude of new stimuli, her mother tongue seems either inadequate or looses meaning it used to have. This chapter shows that incorporating a new language leads to the change of personality. Language contains and expresses a certain view of the world through complex historical and psychological sedimentations. Learning a language subsumes adopting that vision of the world. The chapter begins with the author’s physical discovery of that “terra incognita.” Physical mastery of a new space precedes articulation of experience. Her presence in the new land becomes a demarcation line between the previous and the new part of her life. At the very beginning of that other part she is not yet capable of enjoying the scenery she passes by and retreats into a sort of “silent indifference.” Autobiographies do point to the fine or nonexistent difference between the authentic and fictive. The silence mentioned here, that in a novel proper would have a symbolic function, here has an authentic one. Namely, new experience, physical, and then the corresponding psychological, not contained in the existing language in use, can not be articulated. Silence is the proof of the impossibility to rationalise these new mental contents. In her new life, the author first becomes conscious of physical variances. The new world as it physically appears, unlike Poland, indicates a shorter history. She recognises this in, for example, the Canadian interiors. In them, there is “nothing that gathers a house into itself, giving it a sense of privacy, or of depth—of interiority. There’s no solid wood here, no accretion either of age or dust” (102). The beauty of this autobiography lies largely in the author’s capability to illustrate crucial issues of our civilisation on small examples drawn from ordinary life. A new identity is born in the moment of renaming. The symbolic and real acts are inseparable, showing the importance that linguistic marking

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has for the perception and realisation of identity. When the author enrols a Canadian school the teacher gives her a new name, an approximate English equivalent to her original, Polish name. She, Ewa, becomes Eva, and her sister Alina becomes Elaine. That is a “careless baptism” on the side of the teacher, which the author feels as “a small, seismic mental shift.” The twist in our names takes them a tiny distance from us—but it’s a gap into which the infinite hobgoblin of abstraction enters. Our Polish names didn’t refer to us; they were as surely us as our eyes or hands. These new appellations, which we ourselves can’t yet pronounce, are not us. They are identification tags, disembodied signs pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself. We walk to our seats, into a roomful of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers to ourselves. (105)

At this stage, the new language is unnaturally attached to her. It is not a reflexion of her feelings and thoughts, it does not support her identity. However, she intuitively grasps the renaming act as a major change that is yet to happen. What follows is a true learning of that new speech. Completely immersed in it, she starts to retell her first experiences in English. In the beginning she feels the sounds, syllables, rhythm. That is an irrational stage when she “likes” or “dislikes” some words according to their melody. She intuitively sees social conventions, the absence of meaning masked with polite phrases. Such experience minutely corresponds with the process of language acquisition in children. Eva Hoffman becomes bilingual. As she tells of her acquiring of English language, she makes comparisons and contrasts with her mother tongue, yet the words with the same signifier are not felt equally. But mostly, the problem is that the signifier has become severed from the signified. The words I learn now don’t stand for things in the same unquestioned way they did in my native tongue. ’River’ in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. “River” in English is cold—a word without an aura. It has no accumulated associations for me, and it does not give off the radiating haze of connotation. It does not evoke. The process, alas, works in reverse as well. When I see a river now, it is not shaped, assimilated by the word that accommodates it to the psyche—a word that makes a body of water a river rather than an uncontained element. The river before me remains a thing, absolutely other, absolutely unbending to the grasp of my mind. (106)

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The paragraph speaks in favour of the thesis that only a truly felt personal experience leads to a full experience of language. Hereby, the author touches upon highly relevant contemporary issues, those of bilingualism and translation. When speaking of translation, she emphasises huge cultural heritage held within a language, that in turn becomes further enriched by personal experience. Such an attitude to language has in itself characteristics of both the collective and personal. She realised that a “symmetrical,” complete translation is not a reality. That which is impossible to translate are the idiosyncratic sedimentations of experience of a community. The words of another language have different layers and do not convey the same experience. When my friend Penny tells me that she’s envious, or happy, or disappointed, I try laboriously to translate not from English to Polish but from the word back to its source, to the feeling from which it springs. Already, in that moment of strain, spontaneity of response is lost. And anyway, the translation doesn’t work. I don’t know how Penny feels when she talks about envy. The word hangs in a Platonic stratosphere, a vague prototype of all envy, so large, so all-encompassing that it might crush me—as might disappointment or happiness. I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom; I cannot help knowing that words are just themselves. But it’s a terrible knowledge, without any of the consolations that wisdom usually brings. It does not mean that I’m free to play with words at my wont; anyway, words in their naked state are surely among the least satisfactory objects. No, this radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances – its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection. (107)

The author is profoundly educated and so thoroughly aware of what is happening to her. She is familiar with linguistic theory that she has experienced in practice when she could not establish a meaningful connection between the signified and the signifier, the referential reality and language. A word looses its relational function once it no longer relies on actual physical or mental surrounding. The loss of the living relationship becomes a serious issue as it implies a loss of a way of self reflection and self expression. That is why the author speaks of this part of her life as of an “exile.” It is the exile from one language into another, from one perception of identity into another. In connection with this, she says: “Polish, in a short time, has atrophied, shrivelled from sheer uselessness. Its words don’t apply to my new experiences” (107). Her Polish experience of life is no longer sufficient to express the fresh experience.

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Here commences the most acute insight into the contrasted natures of her two cultures. Eva Hoffman comprehends that through her two languages. As an immigrant, a person that now has in herself two types of cultural heritage, she is now in a position to feel the possibilities and limits of one language in a thoroughly authentic way. Her elaboration on the incapacity of language to express her unique experience illustrates the relevance of language for expressing oneself. She even says that when one is not able to express themselves, their identity, due to the inappropriateness of language, one does not really exist. Now, this picture-and-word show is gone; the thread has been snapped. I have no interior language, and without it, interior images – those images through which we assimilate the external world, through which we take it in, love it, make it our own—become blurred too. [...] The verbal blur covers these people’s faces, their gestures with a sort of fog. I can’t translate them into my mind’s eye. The small event, instead of being added to the mosaic of consciousness and memory, falls through some black hole, and I fall with it. What has happened to me in this new world? I don’t know. I don’t see what I’ve seen, don’t comprehend what’s in front of me. I’m not filled with language anymore, and I have only a memory of fullness to anguish me with the knowledge that, in this dark and empty state, I don’t really exist. (108)

Translation is not limited to words only, but refers to the entire way of life. In the case of living in another culture, translation closely relates to assimilation, or at least fitting in and belonging to a new community. The author points to the fact that the differences are not only in experience that is linguistically shaped, but that they are equally present in physical reality. She illustrates that on the example of her physical look. While in Poland she was considered a beautiful girl, in Canada things are quite different. In fact, I can see in these women’s eyes that I’m a somewhat pitiful specimen—pale, with thick eyebrows, and without any bounce in my hair, dressed in clothes that have nothing to do with the current fashion. And so they energetically set out to rectify these flaws. (109)

First it was language that created a barrier in her endeavours to present her identity. Now the imposing of a certain, desired physical look further strengthens it. When she looks at a photograph of herself, she finds herself in a sombre state of alienation—“Alienation is beginning to be inscribed in my flesh and face” (110). This phase in the process of joining a new

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community may be crucial. It is a turning point that is followed either by assimilation that implies suppression of identity realised in the previous culture, or by active, creative and enriching participation in the life of the new community when the value of the previous experience is not diminished or negated, but upgraded with new contents. For insofar as meaning is interhuman and comes from the thickness of human connections and how richly you are known, these successful immigrants have lost some of their meaning. In their separateness and silence, their wisdom—what they used to know in an intimate way, on their skin—is stifled and it dries up a little. Probably, in their phase of immigrant life, full assimilation is impossible, and in trying to take on the trappings of their new environment, they’ve achieved an almost perfect deracination instead: they move in a weirdly temperate zone, where the valence of cultural vitality is close to neutral. Sitting upright in their chairs, in their immaculately pressed dresses, keeping their houses more spotlessly neat than the natives, they say to each other, ’I’m fine, everything is fine,’ and they almost believe that they are. (143)

In this section she notices that complete assimilation is actually impossible. Identity acquired in one culture can not be erased as that would really mean wiping out of entire personal psychology. Instead, people who strive for “complete fitting in a new society” reach one artificial state of simulation of belonging. Thus realised identity certainly has nothing to do with authenticity. One seems to live in a sort of vacuum where meaning of either culture is elusive. Such immigrants exemplify impoverishing and inhibiting way of complying with the new surrounding. Eva Hoffman possesses a different sensibility. She has no desire of loosing her previous heritage, her original identity. Therefore she places heavy importance on memory, active memory that creatively influences the experiencing of the new, and that has an undeniable relevance in mental stability and growth. Concurrently, she is conscious of the unreliability of memory that is often distorted due to complex psychological mechanisms. Loss is a magic preservative. Time stops at the point of severance, and no subsequent impressions muddy the picture you have in mind. The house, the garden, the country you have lost remain forever as you remember them. Nostalgia—that most lyrical of feelings—crystallizes around these images like amber. Arrested within it, the house, the past, is clear, vivid, made more beautiful by the medium in which it is held and by its stillness. (115)

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Consequences of ignoring memory are devastating. They lead to simulation of identity, more to say, the absence of authentic, or any kind of identity, as shown in the previous quotation. It turns to be a negation of personality. The relationship to the past, memory, is conditioned by a whole complex of social structure. Some societies have that historical privilege to live without major changes. Those which are forced to change face the fact that memory is a necessity that guards against annihilation of identity. This is how the author elaborates on this: In our highly ideological times, even nostalgia has its politics. The conservatives of the sentiments believe that recovering their own foreign history is an antidote to shallowness. The ideologues of the future see attachment to the past as that most awful of all monsters, the agent of reaction. It is to be extracted from the human soul with no quarter of selfpity, for it obstructs the inevitable march of events into the next Utopia. Only certain Eastern European writers, forced to march into the future too often, know the regressive danger of both forgetfulness and clinging to the past. But then, they are among our world’s experts of mourning, having lost not an archeological but a living history. And so, they praise the virtues of a true memory. Nabokov unashamedly reinvokes and revives his childhood in the glorious colors of teúknota. Milan Kundera knows that a person who forgets easily is a Don Juan of experience, promiscuous and repetitive, suffering from the unbearable lightness of being. Czeslaw Milosz remembers the people and places of his youth with the special tenderness reserved for objects of love that are no longer cherished by others. (116)

The author’s sensibility is such that she spontaneously attempts to build her own personality on the twofold cultural heritage. This process is not initiated as a conscious decision, but as a profound spiritual need. Nothing ever being autochthonous, so this striving can be traced back to humanistic, primarily family background. The previous excerpt testifies to this, as well as the one from the beginning of the autobiography which depicts the free life together of people of two faiths. Strengthened with such a perception of the world, where differences do not imply a conflicting relationship, but mutual enrichment and fulfilling, she now approaches life in the new community more consciously. With the same love that was apparent in her experience of the old homeland, she now begins to perceive the new one. She tries most conscientiously to understand it thoroughly and so incorporate it into her internal world. It will take years before I pick and choose, from the Babel of American language, the style of wit that fits. It will take years of practice before its

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nuances and patterns snap smartly into the synapses of my brain so they can generate verbal electricity. It will take years of observing the discreet sufferings of the corporate classes before I understand the equally discreet charm of New Yorker cartoons. (119)

Her medium in this endeavour is language. She begins to feel in herself two languages that express two different kinds of experience contents. When she receives a diary for a present, she realises that the written trace of her life and identity, now needs to be in English. Still, some time will pass until she is able to transform the written text into free flowing, her own speech. Writing as a form of self reflexion allows her a certain degree of objectivity and internal growth. In that process she becomes more aware of the language in which she now expresses herself, namely English. So she tries hard to master it the best she can. That in itself is a form of belonging to a society, at the same time being a way of developing one’s personality. This is a model of a healthy, active psychological growth. When I write, I have a real existence that is proper to the activity of writing—an existence that takes place midway between me and the sphere of artifice, art, pure language. This language is beginning to invent another me. [...] Sociolinguists might say that I receive these language messages as class signals, that I associate the sounds of correctness with the social status of the speaker. In part this is undoubtedly true. [...] And in my situation especially, I know that language will be a crucial instrument, that I can overcome the stigma of my marginality, the weight of presumption against me, only if the reassuringly right sounds come out of my mouth. Yes, speech is a class signifier. But I think that in hearing these varieties of speech around me, I’m sensitized to something else as well— something that is a matter of aesthetics, and even psychological health. (121-123)

Self actualisation, the realisation of authentic personality is, as the practitioners of depth analytical psychology profess, life long, strenuous, and extremely complex process. The author attempts to overcome the expected prejudices about herself with the aim to exist unhindered and free from historical circumstances. Her aim is the fullness of life, the realisation of her personal potentials. Her exposure to language, the strife with it, helped her feel herself alive, see how the state of being deprived of language causes psychological problems, the impossibility of self expression, self degradation and destruction ultimately. In contrast to that

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is the fullness of true communication in which the contents of two souls are exchanged and thus enriched. It’s not that we all want to speak the King’s English [...] we want to be at home in our tongue. We want to be able to give voice accurately and fully to ourselves and our sense of the world. [...] Linguistic dispossession is a sufficient motive for violence, for it is close to the dispossession of one’s self. Blind rage, helpless rage is rage that has no words—rage that overwhelms one with darkness. And if one is perpetually without words, if one exists in the entropy of inarticulateness, that condition itself is bound to be an enraging frustration. [...] an infuriated beating against wordlessness, against the incapacity to make oneself understood, seen. [...] If all therapy is speaking therapy—a talking cure—then perhaps all neurosis is a speech disease. (124)

The author’s attempt to master the new language is her way to master social circumstances and let herself be herself. Her self actualisation, individuation, begins only with her comprehension of the specifics of her existence, both past and present. When speaking about survival, she does not imply only physical life, but her aim—the fullness of living. “I know how unprotected my family has become; I know I’d better do very well – or else. The ‘or else’ takes many forms in my mind—vague images of helplessness and restriction and always being poor” (157). As shown, the condition of being an immigrant is a universal human condition. Immigration is one civilisational trait of man, their innermost striving to conquer hardships, new spaces, whether they be physical or spiritual. The author evokes her thoughts on this: “As a radically marginal person, you have two choices: to be intimidated by every situation, every social stratum, or to confront all of them with the same levelling vision, the same brash and stubborn spunk” (157). Her words reflect the primordial human condition of the fight for survival: “I too am goaded on by the forked whip of ambition and fear, and I derive a strange strength—a ferocity, a puissance—from the sense of my responsibility, the sense that survival is in my own hands” (ibid). It is of great importance that the fight can not be successful only if in line with the given circumstances. This part of the autobiography beautifully illustrates the way of personal actualisation, strife to acknowledge one’s potentials, to be oneself both inwardly and in the world. The medium of identity realisation is language. The process of realising one’s identity largely resembles narration, the fact supported by the very genre here in question. The chapter being discussed ends with perhaps crucial stage in the individuation process—seeing oneself truly which is the precondition for personal growth.

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And what is the shape of my story, the story time tells me to tell? Perhaps it is the avoidance of a single shape that tells the tale. [...] perhaps it is in my misfittings that I fit. Perhaps a successful immigrant is an exaggerated version of the native. From now on, I’ll be made, like a mosaic, of fragments—and my consciousness of them. It is only in that observing consciousness that I remain, after all, an immigrant. (164)

Life in the new world The final chapter focuses on the elaboration of ways in which the author manages to comprehend and express her own self. It begins with an evocation of a party. Her friends and associates are present. Through the easy flowing narration of their chatting, the readers witness them all as a group, all belonging to the society. That is a major change in relation to the previous section when she saw herself as not belonging. Now her attitude is to be as she is, a “mosaic” comprising segments of various kinds of experience, thus attaining her own self. This chapter, the first with the word life, now life in the USA, suggests that only now does the author begin to breathe fully having the sense of belonging. That was and is possible only when one remains true to themselves, strives for self realisation, perseveres in the never ceasing individuation process. When she says for herself that she belongs, at the same time not agreeing in everything with her surrounding, it is yet another proof of a mature, autonomous identity. They think of me as one of them, even if my opinions are sometimes slightly askew in relation to the general consensus. When I think of myself in cultural categories—which I do perhaps too often—I know that I’m a recognizable example of a species: a professional New York woman, and a member of a postwar international new class; somebody who feels at ease in the world, and is getting on with her career relatively well, and who is as fey and brave and capable and unsettled as many of the women here—one of a new breed, born of the jet age and the counterculture, and middle-class ambitions and American grit. I fit, and my surroundings fit me. (170)

The author’s belonging that equals preserving and cherishing personal specificity was possible only through her thorough knowledge of the new culture. She realised that a complete translation of one type of experience is an impossibility in itself. But she also realised that despite this, understanding is possible through friendship and love. That is a deeply human moment that is beyond the limits of our ratio as expressed in

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language. There is a huge part of ourselves that can not be properly expressed with words, yet it is felt intuitively and can therefore be conveyed willingly. The author emphasises this fact. Today man has achieved a sufficient level of awareness to be able to ponder into the soul of another human being, true communication thus being a matter of conscious endeavour. “You can’t transport human meanings whole from one culture to another any more than you can transliterate a text. Nevertheless, Lizzy and I set out to understand each other with a will” (175). Further on she explains: Much of what I read is lost on me, lost in the wash and surf of inexactly understood words. And yet, chagrined though I am by this, I soon find that I can do very well in my courses. I believe this happens not only despite but also because of my handicap: because I have so little language. Like any disability, this one has produced its own compensatory mechanisms, and my mind, relatively deprived of words, has become a deft instrument of abstraction. In my head, there is no ongoing, daily monologue to distract me, no layers of verbal filigree to peel away before the skeleton of an argument can become clear. (180)

The author learns English through the impulse of a true humanism, love, openness for new vistas, and art of that new world. She acknowledges the good sides of the new culture. She illustrates this on the example of literature which through her education becomes close to her as she is not imposed an interpretation but rather invited and incited to provide her own understanding of it. That is a “democratic ideology of reading” that allows the reader to think for themselves and experience a work of art. For understanding the relationship between identity and language it is of crucial importance that the art of words is perceived in this way. I’ve learned that in a democratic educational system, in a democratic ideology of reading, I am never made to feel that I’m an outsider poaching on other’s property. In this country of learning, I’m welcomed on equal terms, and it’s through the democratizing power of literature that I begin to feel at home in America, even before I understand the literature of America, or the relationship between them, very well. (184)

Eva Hoffman feels “at home” when she is not forced into accepting a certain interpretation, a form of identity, but when she finds herself in the surrounding that enables her to accept new experience freely, in her own innate way. She thus realises her nature unstrainedly. She manages to master the new language through literature, by studying numerous

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interpretations, proofs that identity is not a given fact, mould to be followed. In that way, through language, she now comes to the full realisation of her identity. I’m back within the music of the language [...] Words become, as they were in childhood, beautiful things—except this is better, because they’re now crosshatched with a complexity of meaning, with the sonorities of felt, sensuous thought. (186)

Her language now expresses the entirety of her existence, the complexity composed of both rational and emotional. Identity is related to some form of belonging, to a social group, nation. Hoffman finds herself in a situation much characteristic of globalism, and her experience of identity could be an exquisite example of dealing with the identity issue. The concept of identity is today largely being questioned to the point of being completely negated. The author has grown in America, a society representative of globalisation. There she finds out that personal authenticity, difference, in every society represents a kind of exile and not belonging. Paradoxically, such a state leads to the very belonging to the society that rests on differences. Moreover, she now sees that exile is the archetypal condition of contemporary life. This is the axis idea of this autobiography. The chapter titles, “Paradise,” “Exile,” “New World,” strengthen that idea with their mythological and archetypal parallels. In this case, in the context of globalisation, exile can be understood as personal difference, authenticity, endeavour to endure in the attempt of realising one’s identity within a society, yet not succumbing to its given or imposed models. When elaborating on this topic, the author creates a strikingly beautiful text on the fullness of living. She recalls Nabokov, who despite given historical circumstances, regimes and ideologies, managed to overcome them, lived the way he wanted to. Identity thus achieved is a proof of freedom and independence. I wish I could breathe a Nabokovian air. I wish I could have the Olympian freedom of sensibility that disdains, in his autobiography, to give the Russian Revolution more than a passing mention, as if such common events did not have the power to wreak fundamental changes in his own life, or as if it were vulgar, tactless, to dwell on something so brutishly, so crudely collective. I wish I could define myself—as Nabokov defines both himself and his characters—by the telling detail, a preference for mints over lozenges, an awkwardness at cricket, a tendency to lose gloves or umbrellas. I wish I could live in a word of prismatic refractions, carefully distinguished colors of sunsets and English scarves, synesthetic

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The realisation of one’s inner potentials even when they contradict social circumstances, needs to be achieved within a society. Such a demanding balance is the ultimate proof of an actualised personality. And it requires lots of mutual understanding, will, patience. “The soul can shrivel from an excess of critical distance, and if I don’t want to remain in arid internal exile for the rest of my life, I have to find a way to lose my alienation without losing my self” (207). As in the contemporary world, the world of globalisation, exile is an archetypal condition of humanity, there have appeared numerous social theories on the relativity of culture as an answer to this new condition of being. Globalisation on one hand is an affirmation of cultural diversity. Cultures themselves are no longer isolated, or at least separated. Instead, clear boundaries are obliterated. The author compares this situation with translation which for her represents understanding different experience. Words alone are insufficient, imagination is equally needed, an ability and willingness to ponder into the other. “There are shapes of sensibility incommensurate with each other, topographies of experience one cannot guess from within one’s own limited experience” (205). Those experiences, other’s perception of the world, just like our own, can be understood by understanding the very medium they are transmitted by—language. The author emphasises the narrative nature of the conceptualisation of identity and past. She returns to Poland to “see how her story might have turned out.” The journey into her own past is the precondition of understanding the present personality. She makes a clear difference between going back to the past as a sort of escape from the present, an impossibility to establish a fruitful relationship with the given living conditions, and as a creative relationship that allows a creative relationship with the surrounding. “To some extent, one has to rewrite the past in order to understand it” (242). The narrative nature of such an attempt is seen as the personal rationalisation of life that consequently

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acquires the shape of a narration. Mere chronology does not subsume objectivity (the concept deeply questioned in contemporary social sciences), as one can not “step away” from oneself, from the perspectives determined by their own personality. This autobiography being an open search for identity, the author tries to comprehend her experience with the aid of the social theories she was educated on. Apart from the theory of narration, she largely relies on depth analytic psychology, and the philosophy of deconstruction. When she has a dream in English, she is aware a major psychological change has taken place. The new language now penetrates the layers of her psyche other than conscious, those which are the pillars of her personality. She knows that the most important interpretation of that dream is: that it was in English, and that English spoke to me in a language that comes from below consciousness, a language as simple and mysterious as a medieval ballad, a gnostic speech that precedes and supersedes our analytic complexities. (243)

When she begins having sessions with a psychotherapist she has treatments in English language. By telling her life backwards, she not only relives it to understand it better, but relives it in English. In that way she learns to accept her life as it is, again, but in a new, integrative way. Nevertheless, she is aware that the gap between the old and new life will remain. Then she relies on her knowledge of literature, primarily the philosophy of William Blake, his ideas of the “Doors of Perception,” and Derrida and his theory of Deconstruction. Both philosophies together create her own interpretation of contemporary identity, of the way to overcome the imposed limitations and achieve completeness. The gap has also become a chink, a window through which I can observe the diversity of the world. The apertures of perception have widened because they were once pried apart. Just as the number “2” implies all other numbers, so a bivalent consciousness is necessarily a multivalent consciousness. Multivalence is no more than the condition of a contemporary awareness, and no more than the contemporary world demands. The weight of the world used to be vertical: it used to come from the past, or from the hierarchy of heaven and earth and hell; now it’s horizontal, made up of the endless multiplicity of events going on at once and pressing at each moment on our minds and our living rooms. Dislocation is the norm rather than the aberration in our time, but even in the unlikely event that we spend an entire lifetime in one place, the fabulous diverseness with which we live reminds us constantly that we are no longer the norm nor the

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Derrida’s theory on the centre and periphery, metanarration that the modern world has been building, has been personally experienced. The deconstruction of the hierarchical, domineering relationship of the centre and the periphery, is the image of the present day, “global,” world. Now identity is formed in a new way, just as the world is living a new epoch. The new way of realising identity means realising numerous ways of existence, equality of various modes of living, and the freedom to choose individually. Yet freedom and the possibility of choice are possible when one understands fully the complexity of experience. The evidence of that is the capability to articulate such experience, to master the language of the time. Linguistic articulation is the rationalisation of experience, of one’s own authentic identity that we are all to find, so that we would know we do not exist only within a culture, yet also beyond it. Identity then allows for a creative, meaningful relationship between the past, present, and future of one’s life, the fullness of living. But once time uncoils and regains its forward dimension, the present moment becomes a fulcrum on which I can stand more lightly, balanced between the past and the future, balanced in time. [...] I breathe in the fresh spring air. Right now, this is the place where I’m alive. How could there be any other place? Be here now, I think to myself in the faintly ironic tones in which the phrase is uttered by the likes of me. Then the phrase dissolves. The brilliant colors are refracted by the sun. The small space of the garden expands into the dimensions of peace. Time pulses through my blood like a river. The language of this is sufficient. I am here now. (280)

CHAPTER SEVEN TRANSFORMATIONS VS. TRANSFORMATION SAŠA SIMOVIû

Eight years after he published his The Blithedale Romance (1852), the last and according to many critics the most complex and mature romance of Nathaniel Hawthorne appeared in 1860 and received a significant reception. What appears to be interesting is the very title of the romance. The English edition was published as Transformation on February 28, but the title was not to the author’s liking. Hawthorne expressed his deep disagreement with the choice of his English publishers Smith and Elder calling them “pig-headed individuals.”1 Furthermore, in one of his letters to his American publisher Fields, he states that Smith and Elder’s calling the book Transformation: “gives [him] the idea of a Harlequin in a pantomime”2 and that he wants it to be published as The Marble Faun: A Romance of Monte Beni. A week later, the American edition appeared with this title. Although the only of Hawthorne’s romances set outside America (sketched out in Italy but prepared for publishing in England), the book expresses much of his poetics. The choice of Italian background “was chiefly valuable to him as affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon as they are, and must needs be, in America.”3 In numerous descriptions of Rome, we recognize the realistic elements interwoven in the texture of The Marble Faun with fantastic and dream-like ones. Once more the reader is acquainted with a world deeply soaked in sin and harshly divided into two spheres. Manichean dualism of light and darkness, good and evil, heaven 1

Malcolm Cowley, The Portable Hawthorne (Kingsport: Kingsport Press Inc, 1979), 689. 2 The Portable Hawthorne, 689. 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: or The Romance of Monte Beni (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1961), 22-23. All the in-text references are taken from this edition.

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and earth, body and soul, mundane and spiritual comes forth and dominates the book as well as it dominates The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables or The Blithedale Romance. Again we are faced with the problem of loneliness and isolation, in relation to a man attempting to find his place in the universe. Guilt and the sense of being sinful pervade all of his romances as well as the past that haunts and annihilates. Hawthorne’s vision of the world is the vision of Manichean mystery.4 The contrast between two spheres is present constantly, or as John Updike put it, “[t]he axis of Earth—flesh—blood versus Heaven—mind—spirit with a little rotation become that of the world versus the self.”5 But there is another well developed contrast that the author introduces in The Marble Faun and insists upon throughout the book—the clash between two civilizations. On one side we have Rome, Eternal City, civilization built on the ruins of the once upon a time glorious civilization of Caesar, tradition, experience, Catholicism and on the other side America, youth, prosperity, ambition, Protestantism. On the ruins of the once magnificent City of Emperors, the “other” Rome appeared with its “statues, grey with the long corrosion,” the statues that “half hide and half reveal themselves high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen and broken on a turf” (83). Rome is a place where you can find “steps of rough stone, rude wooden balustrades, a brick pavement in the passages, a dingy whitewash on the walls” (54). According to the romance’s narrator, Italians seem to have no emulative pride so common in the region of New England “where every householder […] endeavors to make his homeside” (271). In this context we see the main protagonists. Obviously, a fair—haired Saxon girl Hilda, a copyist and Kenyon, a young sculptor of certain ability, present the very offspring of New England and everything it implies. On the contrary, Donatello, a genuine and in a way childish Italian noble, a “sylvan creature” that later proves to be a murderer, and Miriam, a painter and beautiful woman shrouded with mystery, present the posterity to the old civilization of Europe in which both are so deeply rooted. The plot of the romance is interesting. From the very first chapter the author introduces the four main characters, being three American artists who came to the cradle of the old civilization to learn and to get inspired by the works of masters from the past, and the young Italian noble, the offspring of the ancient Tuscan family of Monte Beni. Initially, they appear in the sculpture gallery of the Capitole in Rome, looking at the statues, the masterpieces of the antique. It is there that the three friends 4

Cf. Samuel Chase Coale, In Hawthorne’s Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 1-21. 5 John Updike, Hugging the Shore (New York: Ecco Press, 1994), 78.

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from America saw Praxiteles’ sculpture of the Faun and noticed the great “resemblance” between the statue in Pentelic marble and the Italian Count. “Our friend Donatello is the very Faun of Praxiteles. Is it not true, Hilda?” (29) Miriam asked her friend. Gradually we get to know the real nature of relations between these four friends although some imprecise, “shadowy,” explanation made the author add a “Conclusion” to the second edition of the book in order to additionally elucidate some of the “mysteries” of The Marble Faun. The two couples, Donatello and Miriam and Hilda and Kenyon are contrasted in different ways. Donatello belongs to the line that originated supposedly “in the sylvan life of Etruria, while Italy was yet guiltless of Rome,” (216) the line of a race of rustic creatures of the old. The family of Monte Beni was one of the oldest in Italy, “where families appear to survive at least, if not to flourish, on their half-decayed roots, oftener than in England or France” (ibid). It is through the character of Donatello and his family roots that Hawthorne emphasizes the Italian antiquity— Etruscan, Roman and Christian—but Donatello’s innocence and close relation to nature disappear the moment he commits a murder out of his love of Miriam. By this deed the triangle of Donatello, Miriam, and the model who returned from the past to “destroy” her present, is broken. “I did what your eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the precipice,” (167)6 says Donatello to Miriam after the crime is committed. From this very moment his innocence vanished because of his knowledge of sin. Although once he was recognized by his American friends as a person that has nothing with time because of his look of eternal youth and of the Faun from Arcadia where sin and sorrow simply do not exist, committing the crime inevitably makes him a fallen man, a man unable to bear his burden. Alone and confused, yet aware of a sense of guilt, he is no longer the cheerful and carefree youth he used to be. His destiny becomes linked closely to Miriam’s who is formally innocent but morally guilty. “’Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!’ said she; ‘my heart consented to what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together for time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!’” (168) This is why both of them recognize Caesar’s murderers as their own brethren with whom they could exchange a salutation. Even the “woodland inhabitants” he knew so well as a boy, who would come forth when they heard his voice, are different now. Faced with the fact that a venomous brown lizard was the only creature that responded to 6

The description of the Tarpeian Rock presented in The French and Italian Notebooks was obviously used in The Marble Faun. Cf. “Miss Frederica Bremer” in The Portable Hawthorne, 659-663.

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Donatello’s call, deeply disappointed he says to Kenyon: “They know it! […] They shun me! All nature shrinks from me, and shudders at me! I live in the midst of a curse, that hems me round with a circle of fire! No innocent thing can come near me” (231). Not only is the modern Faun obviously transformed, but all of the protagonists undergo a process of transformation. Miriam, with her family roots stretching toward England and Southern Italy, combined with a vein “of Jewish blood” as well, is trying to escape from her mysterious past but comes to a dead end. Although the death of Cappuchin in a way presents a relief for her, she becomes marked and stained with blood forever. After all, it was because of her that crime was committed, the deed that made Donatello fall and experience sin. Before “the faun and nymph,” the fabulous sylvan creatures, became to know guilt, the beautiful scenery around Villa Borghese was like Eden. All this reminds us of the fall of the first Man and the inevitable transformation from innocence to knowledge. From the very beginning the author insists on Miriam’s being shrouded in mystery. The Dark Lady of the romance is “connected” even with Beatrice Cenci, another sinner from the old. But she was also the one who introduces the problem of the Fortunate Fall: “Is he not beautiful?” said Miriam, watching the sculptor’s eye as it dwelt admiringly on Donatello. “So changed, yet still, in a deeper sense, so much the same! He has traveled in a circle, as all things heavenly and earthly do, and now comes back to his original self, with an inestimable treasure of improvement won from an experience of pain. How wonderful is this! I tremble at my own thoughts, yet must needs probe them to their depths. Was the crime—in which he and I were wedded—was it a blessing, in that strange disguise? Was it a means of education bringing a simple and imperfect nature to point of feeling and intelligence which it could have reached under no other discipline?” (388, italics—S. S.)

On the other hand, her counterpart, the daughter of Puritans, Hilda the Dove will unequivocally reject this theory, unlike Kenyon who feels that it might be perilous but rejects it only after the conversation with virtuous Hilda. Although Hilda is presented as an innocent, almost saint alike girl, always dressed in white, dwelling in her tower high above busy Roman streets, and everything that is material and that threatens to spoil the whiteness of her Puritan soul, and although the author insists on this whiteness and her being sinless, the reader gets the impression that she is not perfect, especially when she denies help to Miriam after she accidentally witnesses the very act of crime. As it seems that Hilda lacks compassion and sympathy when Miriam needs it the most, the idealized

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keeper of the Virgin’s shrine proves to be unable to help the poor soul and show her mercy. She can only offer her silence. It seems that the stain of Donatello’s crime makes her indifferent to other people’s sorrow. “I never dreamed,” said Hilda,— “how could you think it? —of betraying you to justice. But I see how it is, Miriam. I must keep your secret, and die of it, unless God sends me some relief by methods which are now beyond my power to imagine. It is very dreadful! […] While there is a single guilty person in the universe, each innocent one must feel his innocence tortured by that guilt. Your deed Miriam, has darkened the whole sky!” (199-200, italics—S. S.)

The fourth member of the party, Kenyon, a sculptor of a significant artistic ability, falls in love with Hilda. He also functions as an observer because it is through his eyes that we get to know the detailed history of the old Tuscan family of Monte Beni and face the young Count’s grief and loneliness in his forefather’s tower in the Appenines. He himself is not directly connected with the crime and is the last person that becomes acquainted with it and its consequences. Being occupied with love, his interest in any other affair, even art, to the reader’s surprise, gradually weakens. His aloofness and being absorbed in his “earthly existence” sometimes makes him superficial. Kenyon needs to be guided by Hilda – otherwise he would be lost. That is why at the end of the romance he says: “O Hilda, guide me home!” (411) ready to leave Rome, sacrifice his ambitions and thirst for art for the sake of love. The last chapter is named in the same manner as the first one “Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello.” All of these four friends passed the process of transformation, each of them having been transformed. Hilda and Kenyon, the offspring of New England Puritans, decide to leave Rome, a center of art, and return home to find peace and joy. Although once enchanted with art, they become ready to sacrifice their ideals in order to return to their origins and New England’s homely atmosphere. The other couple, burdened with guilt, is forced to face the consequences of the deed that marked their life and united them for eternity. Either sentenced behind bars in a gloomy dungeon or being a humble penitent, both “the peasant and contadina” have to expiate their sin. The first couple “find[s] earthly happiness at the cost of losing profound insight and the chance of creating great art” while the other “gain[s] profound insight at the cost of

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happiness.”7 Apparently, the pair that is deeply rooted in the Old Continent is connected directly with knowledge and experience, sin and a sense of guilt, while the other completely fits in the image of a Puritan New England society connected with prosperity and progress. Two of them made their choice—a simple and “sheltered” life in their homeland across the ocean. Comparing the young pairs in this manner, once again we recognize a hint of allegorical contrast between virtue and sin, so often exploited in various ways in Hawthorne’s romances. Interwoven with the contrast between Rome and New England on different levels—characterization and setting primarily—it offers numerous and diverse interpretations to the modern reader.

Works Cited Brodhead, Richard H. Hawthorne, Melville and the Novel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976. Coale, Chase Samuel. In Hawthorne’s Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer. Kentucky: The UP of Kentucky, 1985. Cowley, Malcolm, ed. The Portable Hawthorne. Kingsport: Kingsport, 1979. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun: or The Romance of Monte Beni. New York: Dell, 1961. Liebman, Sheldon W. “The Structural Principle of The Marble Faun.” In The Merill Studies in The Marble Faun. Edited by David B. Kesterson, Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merill, 1971. Martin, Terence. Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Twayne, 1983. Updike, John. Hugging the Shore. New York: Ecco, 1994. Waggoner, Hyatt H. Hawthorne: A Critical Study. Cambridge: The Belknap, 1955.

7

Sheldon W. Liebman, “The Structural Principle of The Marble Faun,” in The Merill Studies in The Marble Faun, ed. David B. Kesterson (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merill, 1971), 42.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE NEW CULTURAL POLITICS: ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN RACE AND GENDER – BLACKNESS AND FEMINISM – IN TONI MORRISON’S NOVELS MIRJANA DANIýIû

“Scars are a map to one’s past [...] proof that even the worst wounds heal”. —Disney, Beauty & the Beast

Introduction to the “culture of difference” i.e. a new politics of difference Race and gender have always been two great topics for black women writers because they want to show just how much race has mattered historically to African American women. Toni Morrison started this cultural and literary work in her earliest novel The Bluest Eye and has never stopped. She has examined the roots of black Americans in slavery, analyzed the white supremacist ideology and focused on the social and political consequences of racist thinking and practises describing the traumas they cause. In an interview in 1974 and, more recently in a TV interview with A. Byatt, Morrison said that “all good art has always been political.”1 She said that she doesn’t believe that an artist can avoid being political: “I don’t believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political because that’s what an artist is – a politician.”2 As she 1

Jill Matus, Toni Morrison (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 13. 2 Ibid.

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asserts that the artist “bears witness,”3 her own emphasis on the political implications of art is often repeated in her articulations about her role as a novelist: “The word novel means ‘new’. A novel ought to confront important ideas, call them historical or political, it’s the same thing.”4 The reason for this she finds in her strong belief that “art alone can stand up to the consequences of practically everything we do.”5 Unlike history, or social or natural science, the special nature of art and literature is able to explore literally everything, including the psychic, the taboos, the imagined, the subjective. Looking for the theoretical framework for the issues of race and gender, I was drawn to the theory of “culture of difference” created by Cornel West and explained in his essay “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” which can be read as a manifesto for intellectuals working on behalf of the “culture of difference.” Cornel West is one of the America’s most important public intellectuals whose best-selling book Race Matters (1993), sold in 400,000 copies, transformed the linguistic, social, cultural, and political tradition of white supremacy and changed the course of America’s discourse in matters of race, justice and democracy. In the above mentioned essay, West says that distinctive features of this new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing.6

What makes this politics novel is trying to answer the questions: What constitutes difference? How is it constituted? What is the weight and gravity given to it? It addresses the issues like class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, nation, region and treats these issues differently from the previous forms of cultural critique. West asserts that the new cultural politics of difference consists of creative responses to the circumstances of the marginalized groups7 who try to fight against escalating xenophobias 3

Ibid. Danille Tayler-Guthrie, ed., Conversations with Toni Morrison (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 238. 5 Jill Matus, op. cit., 1998), 14. 6 Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), 257. 7 Ibid. 4

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against people of colour, Jews, women, gays, etc. and, at the same time, try to fight for the expansion of freedom, democracy, and individuality. The decisive push of postmodern Black intellectuals toward a new cultural politics of difference has been made by constructive explorations of some black women writers, like Toni Morrison who repeatedly emphasized that being a black and a woman had given her “access to a range of emotions and perceptions that were unavailable to people who were neither.”8

Toni Morrison and the Civil Rights Movement Even though Toni Morrison grew up relatively unscarred by racial prejudices in neighbourhoods where there was always a mix of races and nationalities, her experiences at the University of Texas a few years later stirred her consciousness: The consciousness of being Black I think happened when I left Cornell and left to teach at Texas Southern University. […] I think it was in 1957 or 1958 that I began to think about Black culture as a subject, as an idea, as a discipline.9

Morrison’s growing consciousness of black culture resonates in the context of the civil rights and black cultural movements. She describes herself as a witness of the early stages of the civil rights movement (sit-in protests, bus boycott during segregation). Still, her standpoint was against the integration: I was not in favor of integration. But I couldn’t officially say that, because I knew the terror and the abuses of segregation. But integration also meant that we would not have a fine black college or fine black education.10

She wondered why the assumption was that black children were going to learn better if in the company of white children. She at times responds surprisingly to political issues and apparently her opinions sometimes work against the established opinion. When asked by an interviewer if she was actively involved in current politics, Morrison affirmed her deep involvement: “I am active in terms of where I speak, and the things I write about.”11 Morrison’s fiction is decidedly political and feminist and she 8

Danille Tayler-Guthrie, op. cit., 243. Ibid, 174. 10 Jill Matus, op. cit., 9. 11 Ibid., 12. 9

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repeatedly emphasized her role as a novelist as well as the social power of art. It is an artist’s job “to enlighten and strengthen. So I now think novels are important because they are socially responsible. I mean, for me a novel has to be socially responsible as well as beautiful.”12 In the published lectures she gave at Harvard titled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination she explains what new cultural politics means to her. She focuses on the powerful Africanist presence in American literature and American imagination, and construction of national identity, revealing how the opposition of “white” and “black” generates meanings which are mutually dependent. The meaning of “white” is inextricably bound up with the meanings of “black”. By showing how the question of race has been erased from critical studies in American literature, she reveals that, despite not having been mentioned, the Africanist presence was crucial to many generations’ sense of Americanness: “Evasion has fostered another, substitute language, in which the issues are encoded.”13 Therefore, “whiteness” in American literature is formed in relation to “blackness”, either by ignoring race or approaching the racial issues restrictively. On the other hand, “ black women writers—having the example of authoritative mothers, aunts, grandmothers, great-grandmothers—have something special to contribute to the world. They have a distinctive and powerful artistic heritage. It is not white, and it is not male.14

Race and gender (blackness & feminism) in Toni Morrison’s fiction Another important point in her study Playing in the Dark is that gender cannot be understood without inflections of race—womanness and race cannot be considered separately. “My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world.”15 Among black women

12

Ibid., 13. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 9. 14 Danille Tayler-Guthrie, op. cit., 141. 15 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 4. 13

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writers there is usually a simultaneous concern for both these issues—they abhor both racist and sexist oppression.16 Nevertheless, black women’s concern for feminism is more groupcentred than self-centred, more cultural than political,17 which means that they are particularly interested in the female cultural values of their own racial group. Although feminism has traditionally been seen as a kind of sisterhood, there are feminist critics who claim that “every woman’s movement in America from its earliest origin to the present day has been built on a racist foundation.”18 All such movements presume that what is true for the white middle-class woman is true for all women. Feminism is based on the belief that women share a common experience of subordination to men. Nevertheless, in an attempt to identify this common experience, there is a tendency to put all women in an image that denies the rich variety of women’s experiences. Black women had very different experiences from the white women, because the slave system discouraged male supremacy of black men. The demands of slavery were that male and female slave be equally submissive to the will of the master. Similarly, mothering in the slave community was much different from mothering in the white community, since the child did not belong to the mother, but was owned by the slave master who may or may not have been its biological father. This highlights the difference between sex and gender. As sexed females, slave women may give birth, but only gendered (white) women may mother. And we know that female slaves were sexed, since they were valued, among other things, by their breeding capacity. Thus, female slaves were breeders, not mothers. Why were they excluded from womanhood? According to the ideal of Victorian, Puritan womanhood, acknowledged and practiced at those times, a woman was “of a sensitive, morally superior being who was guardian of Christian virtues and sentiments absent in the outside world.”19 True womanhood consisted of four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Obviously, female slaves were excluded from “true womanhood” for the lack of purity or chastity, they were considered promiscuous, because they were frequently raped or they themselves chose to enter into premarital sexual relations. They were not regarded as persons, but quantities, 16

Carolyn Denard, “The Convergence of Feminism and Ethnicity in the Fiction of Toni Morrison,” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, ed. Nellie Y. McKay (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988), 171. 17 Ibid. 18 Venetria K. Patton, Women in Chains—The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: State University of New York, 2000), 11. 19 Ibid., 20.

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deprived of personhood, which was marked on their bodies with scars. Scars proved that one’s body was not one’s property, the white masters could rob the black women of everything, including their mother’s milk. They were used as wet nurses, their milk taken from them to feed white babies. All maternal labour of the female (degendered) slaves was supposed to belong to the white mistresses who were the only females with gender.20 Thus, the mere institution of slavery eradicated the possibility of female slaves fitting the definition of true womanhood. Female slaves were quite aware of their status of property and the way in which this status affected their mothering. So, when we read a novel such as Morrison’s Beloved, gender and race in history will be her primary concerns in the development of the female characters. In her Foreword Toni Morrison says: I think now it was the shock of liberation that drew my thoughts to what “free” could possibly mean to women. In the eighties, the debate was still roiling: equal pay, equal treatment, access to professions, schools. […] and choice without stigma. To marry or not. To have children or not. Inevitably these thoughts led me to the different history of black women in this country—a history in which marriage was discouraged, impossible, or illegal; in which birthing children was required, but “having” them, being responsible for them—being, in other words, their parent—was as out of the question as freedom.21

Despite being published in 1987, the novel remains one of the most celebrated contemporary novels of the slave experience (a neo-slave narrative) and one of the most highly acclaimed novels in the 20th century. It depicts the community of ex-slaves drawn together by a common horror—their memories of slavery. Although a fictive account, the novel is inspired by the true story of a black American slave woman, a fugitive slave, who in 1855 killed her own baby in order to save the child from the horrors of slavery. The novel deals with the slave reality where mother is allowed to bear a child, but not raise it. “A man ain’t nothing but a man,” said Baby Suggs. “But a son? Well, now, that’s somebody.” It made sense for a lot of reasons because in all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been 20

Ibid., 14. Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 2005), x-xi. All the in-text references are taken from this edition.

21

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hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children. (28)

In the above passage, Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, explains that the word son has enormous emotional load, whereas men are mere goods—sold, loaned, rented, stored, bought, etc. It should not be surprising that ex-slaves frequently declared that “they would go dancing to the gallows rather than to be sent back into slavery.”22 By killing her child, Sethe, the main protagonist, the mother, is only asserting her right to the child. Not accepting to be an impotent mother, Sethe believes the only way to protect her baby daughter is to kill her, thus showing her “thick love.” Slavery did not prevent her from having a mother’s feelings. The story is set eight years after the end of the Civil War because the author wants to emphasize the impossibility to escape from the repercussions of slavery. Sethe is haunted by the memories she wishes to forget, she tries to block out the experiences of being whipped and beaten while pregnant, of having her breast milk violently stolen, of killing her daughter to prevent her from being taken back to their slave master, of exchanging sex for the engraving on that same daughter’s tombstone. Her desire for forgetfulness remains unfulfilled, because even the slightest sensation triggers memories which are overwhelming. Further, the plot turns to the embodiment and physical appearance of the ghost of Beloved, the murdered daughter, so that the characters are forced to explore what it means to confront their past. Morrison explains that “the purpose of making her real is making history possible, making memory real—somebody walks in the door and sits down at the table so you have to think about it, whatever they may be.”23 But, it proves hard to heal scarred bodies and souls. Their legs, backs, heads, eyes, hands, wombs, kidneys are broken by slavery, they have “flesh that weep,” as well as their spirit and heart. Ex-slaves are broken emotionally, physically and metaphysically and in a number of ways Morrison calls attention to the suffering that female bodies endured under slavery. Sethe’s back retains the marks of the cowhide whipping, which marks her as a slave for the rest of her life:

22

W. L. Andrews & N. Y. McKay, eds., Beloved: A Casebook (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29. 23 Danille Tayler-Guthrie, op. cit., 249.

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Sethe knows her mother only by a mark under her breast (a circled cross burnt right into the skin). She remains unnamed and exists solely in Sethe’s fragmented memories, because she was hanged early in Sethe’s life and her body burned and mutilated beyond recognition. “Losing the mother often represents the loss of childhood, and in Morrison’s fiction, ‘orphans’ not only lose their own childhoods but deny those of the next generation as well.”24 In Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, for example, Cholly Breedlove, who was abandoned upon a junk heap when four-days-old, becomes a drunken and delusional father who rapes his eleven-year-old daughter Pecola. Both Cholly and Pecola have been manipulated by white culture which proves destructive for their African American identity. Pecola has always fervently desired to have the blue eyes of Shirley Temple, hoping that this would grant her beauty and acceptability, thus being as much a victim of her culture as she is of familial abuse.25 Morrison explores the most damaging kind of sexist and racist oppression on black women: presenting a Caucasian model of physical beauty (blonde hair, blue eyes) as a standard of female beauty, which suggests that women who do not fulfil the standard are not beautiful and hence inferior. Cholly experienced impotence during his first sexual encounter as an adolescent when two white men found him with his girlfriend and started cheering and forcing him into completing the act. Failing the white men’s standards fuelled his sexual confusion and selfloathing which would, years later, provoke his drunkenly rape of his own daughter. And in Beloved, Sethe attempts to kill her four children, first slitting the throat of her baby daughter who now yearns from the grave to be reunited to her mother: “her face is my own and I want to be therein the place where her face is and to be looking at it too” (210). Morrison pictures Sethe’s motherhood “with compelling and brutal honesty.”26 All women characters in the book are strong, intense, actively present, even when dead for years. They seem to put up a persistent struggle. There are critics who call Morrison an “ethnic cultural feminist,” because her female 24

Paula Gallant Eckard, Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason and Lee Smith (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 36. 25 Ibid., 38. 26 Ibid., 37.

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characters keep their vision and focus their energies on what is worthwhile and sustaining. She tries “to seek ways to reinforce the value that racism and sexism would take away from the beauty, the work, and the cultural values of black women.”27 The feminist position Morrison advocates for black women is to validate the traditional beauty and strengths, so the true heroines of her fiction are those women who exhibit the traditional values of black womanhood, such as Pilate in Song of Solomon, Baby Suggs in Beloved, L in Love. Pilate is perhaps the most awesome of all Morrison’s characters. Tall, short-haired, angular, with smooth, black skin and large brown eyes, with no navel, she defies all standards of white beauty. She wears long dresses, knitted hats, and long quilt over her shoulders. Still, her physical eccentricities do not determine her personality. Pilate fulfils all her family and community duties: she single-handedly raises and provides for her daughter and granddaughter, she helps the weak and saves those in trouble and her home always offers genuine comfort, because she possesses an inner peace. Even though she has no concern for the artificial standards set by the larger society she belongs to, Pilate is not alienated from her community. She simply adheres to historically and culturally uncompromising values: she deeply cares for home, family, and community. The character of Pilate is the evidence that Toni Morrison desires to cover up and repair the racial wounds she has exposed. Her novels seem to have a reparative urge and potentially healing power in the race-divided American society where race still matters, thus we can sense in them what West calls a theory of critical organic catalyst.

The idea of “Critical Organic Catalyst” Asserting that long-lasting white cultural supremacy influenced the society to the extent that there are many degraded people who are hungry for identity, meaning and self-worth, West suggests that the most desirable option for people of colour who promote the new cultural politics of difference is to be “Critical Organic Catalysts.”28 They stay attuned to the best the mainstream has to offer—its paradigms, viewpoints, methods— yet, they affirm and enable subcultures of criticism. Thus they become cultural workers who simultaneously position themselves within the mainstream, while being clearly associated with the groups of resistance. 27 28

Carolyn Denard, op. cit., 178. Cornel West, op. cit, 266.

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In this way, they can “take clues from the great musicians or preachers of colour who are open to the best of what other traditions offer, yet are rooted in nourishing subcultures”29 built on vital heritage. Openness to others, including the mainstream, does not have to mean inhibiting individual expressions, it represents networking of people of different colours, which will hopefully reduce racial hostility, violence and polarization.

Works Cited Andrews, W. L. & N. Y. McKay, eds., Beloved: A Casebook. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Denard, Carolyn. “The Convergence of Feminism and Ethnicity in the Fiction of Toni Morrison.” In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay, 171-179. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988. Eckard, Paula Gallant. Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason and Lee Smith. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Matus, Jill. Toni Morrison. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Vintage, 2005. —. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993. Patton, Venetria K. Women in Chains—The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: State University of New York, 2000. Tayler-Guthrie, Danille, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 256-267. London & New York: Routledge, 2000.

29

Ibid.

CHAPTER NINE THE CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE OF INDIAN SOCIETY AS REVEALED IN ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS SOUMEN MUKHERJEE

Dealing with life as it is seen and experienced by individual writers, literature is fundamentally the reflection of the society, its values and its culture. For the modern writers, such as T. S Eliot, the term “culture” “includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people.”1 Therefore, it gives shape to civilization and strongly influences individual lives. Of all the forms of literature in modern times, fiction is a privileged site because in it, perhaps better than in any other form, one can see the working of ideology in the lived experience of society. India cannot remain alien to the great political and cultural changes that have taken place throughout the world. Indian English novelists from the past century or so have been engrossed to bring to the surface the social, moral and sexual changes that have almost engulfed the whole society. This tendency has produced the desired result and with the advent of the 21st century, Indian English novel is finding a vast audience spread across the world. Its popularity may well be perceived through the vast array of international recognition. Arundhati Roy with her maiden novel The God of Small Things, which won her the world acclaimed Booker Award in 1997, is aptly successful in sketching a proper picture of the cultural perspective of the Indian society. Roy vividly portrays the dilemma of a social system which, on the one hand, demands greater social reform and, on the other, pleads against the age old subjugation of women and the indescribable humiliation of the under class. The world of her novel is captured through a state of anomaly, but within the backdrop of the intimate relationship between culture and life. 1

T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber, 1948), 31.

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The novel is imbued in cultural elements which form essential part of the story. But before we discuss these cultural aspects in detail, let us make our stand clear in one respect. Although Roy might be felt to represent something of the new India in this novel, in reality she comes from and writes about Kerala, a province situated in the extreme south of the country. As such, though not always, her writing does not stand for the whole of India. The events of this novel take place in Kerala and her characters are Syrian Christians almost without exception. In fact in this novel, we see an amalgamation of three cultures—Kerala culture, which is the most prominent, Bengali culture, and Western culture. To apprehend a particular culture, we should be acquainted with its social customs. One of the important Indian social customs is that of exchanging gifts with their kiths and kins. Indians generally exchange gifts during social occasions and religious festivals. The Indian Christians follow this practice during the occasion of Christmas, at par with their ageold religious tradition all over the world. The God of Small Things mentions this tradition, when Comrade Pillai, while conversing with Rahel, points to a particular photograph, which were taken by her maternal uncle Chacko with the “Roleiflex camera, that Margaret Kochamma had brought him as a Christmas present.”2 If we want to study the culture of a society, we must analyze its social division. In every society of the world, one finds a division, either on the basis of caste, colour, religion, different interest and ideologies, language etc. or on the basis of economic condition. Keralian society, like any other part of India is often been segregated on the basis of caste and creed. Though casteism is out and out a Hindu phenomenon, Roy’s novel depicts Syrian Christians, who form twenty per cent of Kerala’s population, as influenced by it. As per the Indian caste system, the ‘Brahmins’ or the priestly class form the upper strata. Naturally, we find the same phenomenon in Kerala, where the untouchables, who make the lower strata of the society, are the Paravans, Pelayas and Pulayas. Their grim life is aptly described in the novel: Pappachi would not allow Paravans into the house. Nobody would. They would not be allowed to touch anything that touchables touched. Caste Hindus and Caste Christians. Mammachi told Estha and Rahel that she could remember a time, in her girlhood, when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints, so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally 2

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (New Delhi: IndiaInk, 1997), p. 134. All the in-text references are taken from this edition.

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stepping into a Paravan’s footprint. In Mammachi’s time, Paravans, like other Untouchables, were not allowed to walk on public roads, not allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas. They had to put their hands over their mouths, when they spoke, to divert their polluted breath away from those whom they addressed. (73-74)

However in this region, those were the Christians, who did their level best to improve the condition of the untouchables. Even Punnyan Kunju, father-in-law of Mammachi, had founded a school solely for the untouchables. It was in this school that Vellaya Paapen’s son Velutha, the protagonist of this novel, took his early education. In the course of time, Velutha became a professional carpenter. Roy hits hard at the society by describing the plight of an educated but untouchable Velutha, amidst the hostile so-called “Touchable” society. When Velutha returned to Ayemenem after four years, Mammachi, recognizing the former’s education and skills, rehired him in the factory. However it was not taken in the true spirit by the other higher-caste workers working in the factory. As the following lines reveal, “it caused a great deal of resentment among the other Touchable factory workers, because according to them, Paravans were not meant to be carpenters. And certainly prodigal Paravans are not meant to be rehired” (77). The discrimination is not limited only to the attitude of the people, but also to the wages that are being paid to the untouchables in the factory. “To keep the others happy, and since she knew that nobody would hire him as a carpenter, Mammachi paid Velutha less than she would a Touchable carpenter but more than she would a Paravan” (77). From these lines we can very well imagine the plight of the lower class people in the society of the time. Right from working together to that of getting salary, there exists a strong resentment among the upper cast people towards the low class Paravans. Apart from the mentality, the food habits of the people may also be taken as a parameter for detecting the culture of a region. India is one of the major rice producing countries in the world. In many provinces of India, such as Kerala, rice is considered to be the main crop. In the novel we see that Kalyani, wife of Mr. Pillai, offered Chako some avalose oondas, typical south-Indian snacks, when he paid a sudden visit to their house. Another important aspect of Indian culture is revealed when Kalyani, in accordance to an old, although almost obliterated custom of Indian villages, serves food to her husband Mr. Pillai before taking her meal. As the food habits depend to a great extent on the geographical conditions of the region. Kerala, being situated on the sea-shore, finds fish, together with rice, as one of the staple foods of the people. That may be

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why in the novel Velutha “caught fish in the river and cooked it on an open fire” (76). When Estha and Rahel go to Velutha’s house they smell “of red fish curry, cooked with black tamarind. The best fish curry, according to Estha, in the world” (79). It is in the nearby river Meenachal that Estha and Rahel had learnt to fish out of their love for it. As a matter of fact, not only Kerala, but more or less all the people residing in the coastal part of the country love to eat fish as their daily food. India is a land of numerous cultures, creeds, and cults. As such, it is quite expected that mixed marriages would take place here frequently. In reality, however, even today most of the hurdles are associated with mixed marriages as a result of the complex operation of economic, political, social and other factors, as succinctly depicted in the novel. In fact, the characters involved in mixed marriages often face stiff cultural resistance not only from their family, but also from the society at large. The female protagonist of this novel, Ammu, a Syrian Christian by birth, marries Babu, a Bengali Hindu, much against the wishes of her parents. At the time of the marriage, Babu was working as an assistant manager of a tea estate in Assam. However, soon after her marriage, Ammu realized that her husband was an alcoholic and often under its influence he started behaving in a vindictive manner, “with all of an alcoholic’s deviousness and tragic charm” (40). After the birth of her twins, and, “after the war in Pakistan began,” as it says in the novel, having found it degradable to continue the strained relationship with him, Ammu makes it to her paternal home at Ayemenem, although “unwelcomed” (41). Having been married to a Hindu, Ammu feels like an intruder here. Moreover, as divorcee women in India were not paid proper respect by the society at that time, she is looked down upon. Deprived of any right in her parental home, and constantly being made to feel dejected and degradable, Ammu finds her life suffocating. It was at this vulnerable juncture that Ammu is drawn towards the untouchable Paravan-Velutha, both mentally and physically. Not for a single moment she contemplates on the consequences, for nothing could be worse than what she is already going through. Notwithstanding any social barrier or cultural constraint, she allows herself to be drenched in the love of Velutha every night for two weeks. Since Ammu had no “Locusts Standi” in her parental house, her position is similar to that of the untouchable Paravans in the classconscious society. However the family members of Ammu were unable to digest the hard truth that a Christian lady from a respectable high class society could indulge into a physical relationship with a low-class Paravan. Mammachi was so furious upon learning of this incident that she

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pushed Vellya Paapen, the father of Velutha, who had brought the news, with all her strength and spat on him. Mammachi’s hatred for her daughter and Velutha are vividly described in the following lines: She thought of her naked, coupling in the mud with a man, who was nothing, but a filthy “Coolie”. She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breast. His mouth on hers. His black hips jerking between her parted legs. The sound of their breathing. His particular Paravan smell. Like Animals, Mammachi thought and nearly vomited. “Like a dog with a bitch on heat.” (257-258)

As a consequence of this “heinous act,” Ammu was forced by her brother Chacko to leave the house. What she did and where she went was no one’s concern. On the other side, Mammachi punished Velutha first by dismissing him from his job and then the latter was hounded by the police on charges of rape lodged against him by the malicious Baby Kochamma. The police arrested Velutha, beaten him black and blue to such an extent that he ultimately succumbed to his injuries in the police custody. From this shameful incident, it is clearly apparent that though caste was more practiced by the Hindus, some of its traits had affected other religions in India. Although the members of the Ayemenem house were Syrian Christians who spoke English even at home and adored the Western lifestyle, when it came to the real life situation, they are prone to follow Hindu caste values and likewise shirk from the Untouchables. Another case of mixed marriage is that of Ammu’s brother Chacko, who marries an English lady, named Margaret Kochamma in England, without even intimating his parents. But within a year Margaret gets disgusted with Chacko’s untidy way of living and after the birth of Sophie Mol, their daughter, leaves Chacko for ever to marry and live with Joe, a biologist in England. A disheartened Chacko returns to India to look after the Pickle’s factory after Pappachi’s death. Though after Joe’s death, Margaret does come to India, along with Sophie Mol, on the invitation of Chacko, she also makes it a point to hastily return to England when Sophie Mol meets sudden death. Yet, when the funeral was conducted in the Church, she doesn’t allow Chacko even to put his hand on her shoulder. The problems arising out of the mixed marriage of Rahel is also pathetic. After the death of her mother, Rahel spends a neglected life, both at school and home. She studied in a convent school, but was expelled thrice for her mischievous activities. At home, her maternal uncle Chacko and grandmother Mammachi “provided the care (food, clothes, fees), but withdrew the concern” (15). As a result of this nonchalance from her family members, Rahel grew up to be an aimless girl, who took admission

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in an Architecture College of Delhi only to find herself in solitude after spending eight years there, without finishing the five year undergraduate course and taking her degree. She married an American Larry McCaslin, apprehended the futility of their marriage and got divorced. It may be possible that a girl who has grown up amidst Indian culture and ethos could not adjust with someone from an alien culture. After her separation, Rahel did many odd jobs in America, right from working as a waitress in an Indian restaurant to serving as a night clerk at a gas station outside Washington. But when she was intimated of the return of Estha to Ayemenem, she resigned from her job and came back to India. Not only did mixed marriages in India create intricate situations from which the couples could never make a success of their lives because of their different cultures and a lack of proper guidance, but so did sometimes simple inclinations. Out of her unrequited love affair with an Irish monk, named Father Mulligan, Baby Kochamma, when she was barely eighteen years old, defied her family’s wishes and became a Roman Catholic. She even took entry into a convent of Madras only to have a glimpse of her lover. To save Baby Kochamma from leading restless and vague life, her father sent her to America for further studies. However, after two years, “Baby Kochamma returned with a diploma in Ornamental Gardening, but more in love with Father Mulligan than ever” (26). Although Father Mulligan converted himself into a Hindu Vaishnava later and ultimately died in Rishikesh, the obstinate Baby Kochamma continued loving him till the fag end of her life. As elsewhere on the earth, money generates power in the Indian social set up. Rooted in real experience, Roy’s novel creatively shows how Velutha’s, Ammu’s and the children’s loss of power is related to their economic poverty to a great extent. One of the reasons for Ammu’s paternal aunt Baby Kochamma’s revengeful attitude towards Ammu and Velutha is due to her innate “fear of being dispossessed” (12) A life long spinster, staying along with her brother Pappachi’s family, she has little right to the property. All the more, the presence of Ammu and her daughter Rahel is a threat to her comfortable existence. If we want to know the culture of a particular geographical region, we must take into consideration the dressing sense of the people. In her novel, Roy has mainly highlighted the dress used by the people of Kerala and not of the whole India, though at times, in a faint manner, she also hints about the dress etiquette of Bengal. In the province of Kerala and also some other parts of south India, men and women mostly wear “mundu,” a cotton cloth used to cover the lower part of the body. It is evident from the description of comrade Pillai: “Comrade Pillai himself came out in the

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mornings in a greying Aertex vext, his balls silhouetted against his soft white mundu” (13-14) However, the way women wore the mundu differed. Description of Kochu Maria’s dress sense aptly proves the point: Though even in those days, most Syrian Christian women had started wearing saris, Kochu Maria still wore her spotless half-sleeved white Chatta with a V-neck and her white mundu, which folded into a crisp cloth fan on her behind. (169-170)

When Chacko visits Pillai’s house, he observes Kalyani: “Her white mundu & Kavani were crisp and ironed. She smelled of sandalwood and the crushed green gram, that she used instead of soap” (270). While describing the marriage of Ammu with Babu, Roy also gives a vivid portrayal of the dress etiquette of Bengali women. For marriage Ammu wore a sunset-coloured silk sari shot with gold. She had rings on every finger. Her eyebrows were dotted with sandalwood paste, which is a common culture among the Indian brides. Although Syrian Christians, when it comes to dress, this family follows the dressing sense of the Hindus. This is also evident in the depiction of the children playing: They were, all three of them, wearing saris (old ones, torn in half) that day, Estha was the draping expert. He pleated Sophie Mol’s pleats. Organized Rahel’s pallu and settled his own. They had red bindis on their foreheads. In the process of trying to wash out Ammu’s forbidden Kohl, they had smudged it all over their eyes, and on the whole looked like three raccoons trying to pass off as Hindu ladies. (189)

The amalgamation of different cultures in India also inspires people to change over from one culture to another. For instance, although an out and out Irish Christian monk, Father Mulligan got involved in a deep study of Hindu mythology. His love and admiration for Hinduism gradually prompted him to abstain from his Christian faith, convert to Hinduism, and become a “Vaishnava” or a devotee of Lord Vishnu, one of three most prominent Gods of the Hindu religion. Father Mulligan became such an ardent lover and worshipper of Hinduism that he left south India and settled amidst the Mountain Himalayas, in the religious place of the Hindus called Rishikesh, where he ultimately died. In his later days, Father Mulligan not only gave away his religious faith and dress, but he also started wearing saffron dress, which is normally worn by a Hindu priest. Religion and religious faith has always been considered the epicentre of any culture. Every religion has its own tradition, containing some kind of superstitious beliefs and practices that sometimes can engulf the illiterate. This issue is played upon in the novel at the moment when the

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heavy December rainfall is reported by the newspapers to be due to a cyclonic disturbance, but Vellaya Paapen, the Paravan, considered it as a curse from an unhappy Supernatural power. India has sheltered many religions through the ages. These religions have grown in their own way. Though a total unity in diversity exists in India, which can be a model for many countries in the world, still, when it comes to mingling of the different faiths, we tend to see some religious prejudices. Baby Kochamma’s family was very rigid Christians, belonging to the Syrian Orthodox Church, prominent in the province of Kerala. When Ammu with her children Rahel and Estha attended the funeral of Sophie Mol, she was deliberately not allowed to stand close to other family members in the church, since she had married a Hindu without the family’s consent and despite Christian order. At another instance, the superiority complex of the Christians may be evident from Baby Kochamma’s sarcastic comment on the Hindus: The bald pilgrims in Beena Mol began another bhajan. “I tell you, these Hindus,” Baby Kochamma said piously, “They have no sense of privacy.” “They have horns and scaly skins,” Chacko said sarcastically. “And I’ve heard that their babies hatch from eggs.” (86)

When due to the severe dejection from the society, she died alone in a lodge of Alleppey, “the Church refused to bury Ammu. On several counts” (62). This is an important moment in which Roy strongly criticizes not only the cruelty of the society but also that of the Church, which is considered the heart of human equality, behaves in the most unjustifiable manner. Cultures and festivals are almost synonymous in any society. A very prominent festival in Kerala is the Onam, which Roy aptly mentions in the novel. She makes the point of speaking about the Onam boat-race, which is accompanied by the following song: Thaiy thaiy thaka, thaiy thaiy thome! Enda da Korangacha, chandi ithra thenjadu? (Hey, Mr Monkey man, why’s your bum so red?) Pandyill thooran poyappol nerakkamuthiri nerangi njan (I went for a shit to Chennai, and scraped it till it bled). (196)

Portraying the simplicity of the people through this song that speaks about “Onam,” Roy also mentions a little bit about Hinduism and its tradition, through the image of Ayemenem temple and its activities. In the temple, the chenda, a kind of drum, was beaten to announce the performance of Kathakali to people. It is believed that the great stories (of Gods) were

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enacted through Kathakali, while there was also an elephant called Kochu Thombon, which was much in vogue, especially among the children. Finally, Roy also tries to portray the civic sense of the people in the rural areas of India, indirectly depicting the cultural aspect of the region. One of the major environmental problems in India is the river pollution humanly provoked. “On the other side of the river,” the novel reads the steep mud banks changed abruptly into low mud walls of shanty hutments. Children hung their bottoms over the edge and defecated directly onto the squelchy, sucking mud of the exposed river bed. The smaller ones left their dribbling mustard streaks to find their own way down. Eventually, by evening, the river would rouse itself to accept the day’s offerings and sludge off to the sea, leaving wavy lines of thick white scum in its wake. (125)

Diversity of culture has made India unique in its own way, but it also guaranteed world acclaim to Arundhati Roy’s novel. An assiduous analysis of the novel reveals how even the simplest, the negligible aspects of human life are unavoidably determined by culture and fully understood only within a complex cultural context.

Works Cited Eliot, T. S. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber, 1948. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: IndiaInk, 1997.

Suggestions for Further Reading Bahri, Deepika. Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature. Minneapolis, MN : U of Minnesota Press, 2003. Barsamian, David and Naomi Klein. The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Cambridge, MA: South End, 2004. Ch'ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. “The Politics of Design: Arundhati Roy.” Weird English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 2004. Fox, L. Chris. “A Martyrology of the Abject: Witnessing and Trauma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 33.3-4 (2002): 35-60. Partridge, Jeffrey F. L. “Arundhati Roy (1961- ).” World Writers in English, Volume II: R. K. Narayan to Patrick White. Ed. Jay Parini. New York, NY: Scribner’s, 2004.

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Seth, Aradhana.DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy. Brooklyn: First Run Films, 2002. “Author Profile: Arundhati Roy.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 79.3-4 (2005): 70.

CHAPTER TEN THE QUEST FOR THE CENTER IN RUSHDIE’S NOVEL THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET ALEKSANDRA JOVANOVIû

In Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet encounters between various worlds are presented in stories about love, desire and the pursuits of the main protagonists of the book. The singer Vina Apsara is in the centre of the novel’s dense web of narrative voices, plots and interpretations. However, she feels that the centre, with its stability, always betrays her, leaving her with a feeling of disorientation and the need to roam through other realities in the pursuit of meaning. As in the verse of the “U2” song “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, Vina is the owner of a beautiful voice. As in the song, she has been worshipped and followed, “wherever she went,” by admirers—fans and lovers—and, above all, by Ormus Cama and Rai. They worship the ground beneath her feet, and try to follow her into it, as Orpheus does in one of the most famous love stories of world tradition. As in Orpheus and Eurydice’s story the pursuit is motivated by love and on a deeper level of analysis by a craving and passion for knowledge, meaning, and the heart of things, both earthly and divine. The clear mythical prefiguration links Rushdie’s novel right from the opening with the wisdom of the ancients and leads his characters, along with the reader, through intricate maze of references. Progress depends, as is the case for every knight errant, on the excellence of the quester. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet the quest pattern takes the form of a quest for the centre. Thus, the characters of this novel, as many questers before them, travel with the mythical task of finding out the truth about themselves, their true identity, and the meaning of their existence. The novel begins with the earthquake in which Vina Apsara, the world famous music star, dies. As in the myth of Persephone the moment of

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death is for Vina the moment of divine realization—the acquisition of all knowledge by mastering the secret of death. Thus, for Vina death is the moment of unity and truth. On the other hand Vina is a tragic human being, a doomed quester, who could never find the wisdom or the centre of meaning in life. Ironically, or maybe aptly, she dies on St. Valentine’s Day. This event terminates a life abundant in passion but scarce in love. Again the parallel with Persephone is evident. The day Apsara dies is also the day when the “fatwa” against Rushdie was issued—February 14, 1989—a fact which additionally links her life with death. All her life the ground beneath her feet is moving, leaving her with the impression that “the centre is always where she is not.” She searches for it through modern wastelands in the shape of various metropolises— London, New York, and Mexico City, in the faces of her many lovers, and in different world traditions, modern media and music. Rushdie writes: At the age of forty-four she was making a new start, a solo career without Him, for the first time in years she was on the road without Ormus, so it wasn’t really surprising that she was disoriented and off balance most of the time. And lonely. It has to be admitted. Public life or private life, makes no difference, that’s the truth when she wasn’t with him, it didn’t matter who she was with. She was always alone. Disorientation: loss of the East. And of Ormus Cama, her sun.1

Vina’s road is directed by the search for her lost, found, and many times abandoned and re-found love—Ormus Cama. Therefore, their love story is defined by their separate quests for identity and meaning. Both of them are lonely creatures, as their union—their oneness—has never been quite fulfilling. Instead of one, they are two and sometimes find harmony in three. The third is Rai, the narrator. But when I began to call myself Rai, prince, it felt like removing a desquise, because I was letting the world in on my most cherished secret, which was that ever since childhood this has been Vina’s private pet name for me, the badge of my puppy love [...] That’s Rai: a boy princling. But childhood ends and that was Ormus who became Vina’s Prince Charming, not I. (18)

1

Salmon Rushdie, Ground Beneath Her Feet (London: Random House, 2000), 5. All the in-text references are taken from this edition.

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Vina and Ormus’s “two” often becomes one. However, it very soon splits in two again, when they break up and search for other centres. Thus, their relationship reflects the infinite oscillation between one and two. In the ethereal presence of Rai, her secret lover their love finds “stability”— in the spiritual (three). The relation between the lovers could be seen in terms of Jung’s numerical description of Self. The “seed of unity” confers “human wholeness”, writes Jung in Psychology and Alchemy. The uncertainty has a duplex character – in other words, the central ideas [about the nature of the divine unity] are ternary as well as quaternary […] Four signifies the feminine, motherly, physical, three the masculine, fatherly, spiritual. Thus the uncertainty as to three or four amounts to weavering between the spiritual and the physical.2

Jung further interprets this phenomenon as “the vacillation between three and four,” with three standing for the spiritual and four—for the physical aspect of Being. The incessant splitting and doubling process in human consciousness continually questions the divine unity leaving the individual mind always in doubt about the nature of unity. Like in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur—both are at the same time split (in their own mind) and doubled, ego/alter-ego situation. Like Theseus heading for the centre, every hero-quester oscillates between one and two. That uncertainty reflects the uncertainty about the unity’s essential character. This is experienced by the protagonists—the confused questers of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. That is, in the game of numbers—symbols of the psychological processes of the unconscious, every quester feels disorientated. So does Vina. She begins to doubt the existence of the centre of the maze as the meaning she is trying to grasp constantly drifts away. Rai, as Vina and Ormus’s transcendental third signifies their hope of progress on the road. This is reflected at the symbolical level, as Rai’s real name Umeed, in Urdu means “hope.” Therefore, Rai says: I liked that it was the name that travelled easily, everyone could say it. It sounded good on every tongue. And if on occasion I turned into “Hey, Ray” into that mighty democracy of mispronunciation, the United States, then I was not disposed to argue […] And in another part of the world Rai was music [...] Umeed, you see. Noun, feminine. Meaning hope. (18-19)

2 Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Alchemy. 2nd ed., trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), 26-27.

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Perhaps, this is to say that meaning is to be searched after through different languages, worldviews, and the products of different cultures. To search and hope. On the other hand, different interpretations in the “mighty democracy of misinterpretation” disorientate our certainty in meaning, or rather in absolutely grasping any sense. That’s why Vina always suspects that there may be more to it. The “more” is in this novel personified in the “Other,” included in any of various representations of the Other in the story: the alter ego, the “lost” self, the lost lover, or the lost dimension of reality. Naturally, the quest for meaning leads the way to that Other. Let us consider Ormus’s Other. Ormus’s mother Lady Spenta Cama had been told in the thirty-fifth week of pregnancy that the child she was carrying had died in her womb […] so when she saw the still-born corpse of Ormus’s elder brother Gayo, his nonidentical […] twin her wretchedness was so great that she believed that the continual movement within her was her own death trying to be born so that she could be united with her lifeless child at once. (24)

The most obvious presence of the Other in the book is Ormus’s lost twin. Ormus’s mother, Lady Spenta Cama, gave birth to one still-born child—Gayo and one living baby—Ormus Cama. So, from birth Ormus has a very palpable Other—his mirror image is present somewhere in the cosmos, in another reality. The mystery of their connection is immediately apparent when they are likened to the divine twins of ancient Greek mythology. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama [the father of the twins] who knew his Greek Mythology, was familiar with the Olympian deities’ practice of inserting a babe (Idas, Polydeuces) of semi-divine parentage into a womb that was also preparing to bear (Lynceus, Castor) a fully human child […] Presumably the dead Gayo was the earthly child, and the living Ormus the one with the immortal pedigree as well as yearnings. (25-26)

In Ormus’s name, as well as in his birth and subsequent upbringing, two traditions are united—Eastern and Western. That is: “Hormuz or Ormazd, local derivatives of Ahura Mazda, were her [Lady Spenta’s] stated options, which Sir Darius X [the father], the Classicist, at once Latinized as Ormus” (25). The Camas had already had the 5-year old twins Khusro and Ardaviraf better known as Cyrus and Virus. As Rushdie further explains, the “multitalented Khusro [is] a child with the genuinely malign ruthlessness of a true hero,” while “a slow-witted sweet-natured Ardaviraf” is kindness

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itself (25). Thus, we understand that their own selves are split and the opposite poles of their consciousness dominate their egos. On the other hand, they are doubled as each other’s mirror images. In the same style, Rushdie has created numerous paired characters in this novel. For instance, as Ormus Cama’s character is revealed through the concept of his dead twin. Gayo and Ormus‘s images are also reflected in the characters of their older twins. The opposing concepts (goodness/evil), orders (earthly/divine), and human features (cleverness/stupidity) reflect one another, coincide, bump into each other and rebound, defining and re-defining images which mark glimpses of the ungraspable and invincible truth. The confusing doubling culminates in Ormus’s communication with his dead twin. Who is in whose dream? Who is dreaming of whom? Which ultimately leads to the question who is dead, and who is alive? Or, what reality is dominant? In Alice in Wonderland, we come across the question of whether Alice is in the Red King’s Dream, or she is dreaming of him. Or is it just the incessant reflection of One. The same is true for Ormus and Gayo. As Derrida has it, “the philosophical text is within metaphor,” which means that the meaning is to be found within metaphor. 3 The metaphor of Vina’s death, therefore, gives Rai a clue of the direction on his road. It literally puts him back on the quest. He comes with a new revelation – new metaphor of Being. In the end I decide it’s because although I, we, didn’t really know them, they knew us and whenever someone who knows you disappears you lose one version of yourself. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond cutter’s tools […] Her knowledge of me was so deep, her version so compelling, that it held together my miscellany of identities. To be sane we choose between the diverse warring descriptions of our selves; I chose hers. I took the name she gave me, and the criticism, and the love, and I call that discourse me. (509-510)

He refers to several pieces of information which, so to speak, contributed in the making of him. Rai feels that he is a text, merely a version of himself. In line with the suggestion that meaning is a textual construct, Rushdie lavishly offers intertextual references in the book. The possibility of a 3

Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Hemel Hempstead (Hertsfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), 258

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deeper meaning of the text in the intertext tempts the reader to follow the meaning through the numerous intertexts. Rushdie manipulates mythological imagery along with the folklore and the wonders of modern technology. He uses intertexts, word games, and ambiguous references. Rushdie takes his cue from Eliot: modern myths of urban culture have lost the vital connection with their origins and the modern world no longer follows the divine paradigm. Nevertheless, the universal pattern inspires human deeds unconsciously. The irony comes from not seeing the vital connection. For example, in London Ormus is fascinated with bakeries. He spends time composing odes to bread. Ormus’s verse is heavy with mythological reference. He sings: “Oh, bread of heaven, bread of leaven feed me till I want no more! [However, Ormus is] looking for the amorality and sensuality of a loaf in his first wholeheartedly erotic encounter with London life” (290). Rushdie here clearly alludes to the mythical value of wheat along with its function in Christian lore. The alternative reality is invisible but “always there.” All through the book Ormus feels it in the shape of another centre. In his dreams he glimpses Gayomart’s world, not ideal, but alternative. He argues: It’s not paradise, he says […] I’d call them [glimpses] variations, moving like shadows behind the stories we know. This doesn’t have to be supernature, it doesn’t have to be god. It could be jus—don’t ask me— physics, okay? It could be some physics beyond our present capacity to comprehend. It could just be I found the way of stepping outside the picture. (349-350)

Later in the novel Rushdie suggest how that “stepping outside the picture” could be visualized and confronted. This time Rai finds that the modern technology could offer answers to mysteries: “The video camera has an internal-playback capability. I put my eye to the eyepiece and hit the Play button. The tape begins to run. The woman sitting in the chair” (506). The rest would be easy to imagine. The unfamiliar woman coming from another world, or dimension of reality, is telling her story. You see, one of our ancient philosophers say, consider the humble bat. You know what I am saying, isn’t it? That we should try to experience the reality as a bat might. The purpose of the exercise being to explore the idea of Otherness, of radical alienness with which we can have no true contact, let alone rapport. You understand? Is it clear? Bats live in the same space and time as we but their world is utterly unlike ours. So also: our world is as unlike yours as a bat’s. And there are many such […] Well, we are one another’s bats, that’s it. (506-507)

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In spite of modern devices that capture “all the sense,” why is it that the meaning is as distant as ever? As in Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie Blow up meaning is always “almost there,” “almost captured” before it blows up again and is seen in millions of fragments. In much the same manner (and technique) Rai “captures” Otherness on the lens of his camera. How much of it can he “capture,” or grasp? This is how the woman from another universe sees it: [There are] just these doors, yes, these apertures, you are a photographer, so you understand that word, the aperture opens and light flies in, light like a miracle, staining another reality, leaving its image behind. I cannot explain it better. We are light from elsewhere […] This is all that will remain of us: our light in your eye. Our shadow in your images. Our floating forms, falling through nothingness, after the ground vanishes, the solid ground beneath our feet. (507-508)

The woman wants to make us believe that a parallel universe can be perceived for a brief second until it disperses. The centre of meaning endlessly regresses into its own fragments, into various other centres, to be grasped, captured and unmasked anew. What is more she shows that there is nothing metaphysical about this concept. The physical, “real” door on the camera let her world in and left her out in time. These images could serve as a metaphor of all brief encounters with other realities. Vina was that centre, the metaphor impossible to grasp, yet the vehicle of all knowledge. Persephone, Eurydice, all women. In this line Rai concludes: “What she meant to me was love, certainly, but also mystery, a woman utterly unquantifiable and impossible to grasp, my window into the inexplicable. The mystery at the heart of meaning. That was her” (492). However, Vina also has her double—Mira, another heroine; the physical fourth of Jung’s paradigm; the materialization of the spiritual; the known reality; the symmetry; the force which has stabilized the faltered progress of numbers; the harmony of a diamond shape. With Mira the process has come full circle. Mira is Rai’s next true love—the love which survives. The love who survives. Mira is the heroine reborn. As a mature quester, Rai realizes that lost meaning can be found only in a new quest for it. He doesn’t find the centre of meaning. Instead, he discovers the vehicle of knowledge—the metaphors, reflections and the incessant play of universal patterns.

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Works Cited Derrida, Jacques. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Hemel Hempstead. Hertsfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982: 207-271. Jung, Carl Gustav. Psychology and Alchemy. 2nd ed. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1980. Rushdie, Salmon. Ground Beneath Her Feet. London: Random House, 2000.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE STRANGE MEETING OF ARTHUR AND GEORGE IN JULIAN BARNES’S ARTHUR & GEORGE MARIJA KNEŽEVIû

Deepening epistemological doubt coated within heightened postmodernist hermeneutic consciousness does not make Julian Barnes’s work exactly a place “in which we can take our ease.”1 Rather, meditating on the human condition, Barnes deconstructs the truths we take for granted, while, at the same time, he subverts genre taxonomy to test the degree to which he can stretch without breaking the thread of his narration.2 Barnes’s latest novel Arthur & George bears pronounced witness to this. The alarming issues Arthur & George touches upon, such as racial prejudice, social justice, the illusion of the great narrative, the corrosion of reality, although related to a particular moment in history, rise to universality at the point when, in their ambiguousness, they produce a framework for general human suffering. Pointing to this, historical events of a wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and defamation are endowed in an aesthetic code of parody within which, as it is said, everything is possible. What Barnes hoped to achieve in the novel was, he says, “to ratchet up the reader’s sense of injustice—even if you know in the end it

1

Henry James, Italian Hours, ed. John Auchard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 117. 2 About his choice of heterogeneous narrative in Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes says, “I found myself excitedly wondering how far I could push the constraints of traditional narrative: how far I could distort and fragment the narrative line while still keeping (I hoped) a continuous and rising expectation in the reader.” Quoted in Vanesa Guignery, The Fiction of Julian Barnes: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave—Macmillan, 2006), 40.

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will be somewhat unresolved.”3 Yet, saying that this novel is about what one can prove, not only in a criminal but also in an emotional sense,4 Barnes develops a kind of humanist appeal, insisting on the fact, which cannot be relativized. Namely, the depicted events did take place; the meanings we apply to them may not matter, but suffering is what matters, as well as our in/ability to redeem the pain. * Already the first page of Arthur & George succinctly summarizes the basic recurrent issues and previews the narrative strategies of Barnes’s work. Depicting Arthur, who in his childish curiosity enters the room in which lies the corpse of his grandmother, the opening of this novel not only establishes what its protagonist deems to be his first memory, to which he applies “central importance” but also filters out an encounter of life and death as the basic issue of life. This encounter acquires primary significance for the novel, which in the end regards death as the only certainty of life, as well as representative for the author who has found death an incessant inspiration all the way from his first famous novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), to his last discursive book, Nothing to be Frightened of (2008). That Arthur informs the readers of his Memoirs and Adventures sixty years after the event that this encounter took place at an age when he was only “able to walk, and could reach up to a door handle”5 is an instant that problematizes reliance on memories in the accession of the truth of one’s past. Here the novel advances the question posed by the narrator of Flaubert’s Parrot who, recognizing the blurring of the boundaries between history (biography) and fiction, asks “How do we cease the past?” Barnes has already artistically demonstrated the impossibility of rendering in words somebody else’s past, or the past of one’s nation, which, being a rich material for interpretation, as also depicted in England, England, is given prime importance in coming to terms with one’s

3

John Freeman, “Elementary Justice: Julian Barnes discusses Arthur & George”, available at: http://www.newcitychicago.com/chicago/5045.html. 4 Quoted in The Guardian, Wednesday July 6, 2005, available at: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1522030,00.html 5 Julian Barnes, Arthur & George (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), 3. All the intext references are taken from this edition.

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present.6 Arthur & George commences with a notion that one’s own past, as well, seems to be an eternally lost ground. Writing one’s memoirs, just as writing biographies or histories, inevitably means fictionalising one’s past, and possibly one’s personality. As the large part of evidence is always missed, it needs to be imagined, because past, as Barnes says, is a collection of holes that needs tying up with an imaginative string.7 Therefore, having established this necessity, the narrative voice inquires, “How many internal retellings had smoothed and adjusted the plain words he finally used?” (3) Yet, while in England, England Martha Cochrane asserts that she cannot remember her first memory, the protagonist of this novel claims his indisputable right over his memories. What the boy saw, namely, “a ‘white, waxen thing’,” (3) the mature narrator remembers and interprets as “the sloughed husk” of the grandmother’s body after her soul had departed it, which image becomes his unarguable possession. At this moment, the memory of the mature man introduces the institutional teaching which makes the boy assume that the soul of the deceased beloved had “clearly flown up to Heaven,” pointing thus to the fact that the image has also grown from a tender age exposed to various formative influences and prone to fabulations. Besides, in a farcical manner, largely obvious in the use of the modifier “clearly,” it is also emphasized that the narrated time and the narrating time of the Memoirs are inextricably mixed, so that we can know our past only through our present, i.e. through our present abilities of interpretation. In Barnes’s recognizable manner of subverting objective truths only to reinstall them,8 this is also an instant in the novel which underlines another face of the same issue, explicitly that memories are all we have of our past, being, moreover, prime determinants of the way we experience our present. Therefore, the narrative supposes that the image “still seemed as clear as on the day itself” and juxtaposes a “grandchild who, by the acquisition of memory, had just stopped being a thing, and a grandmother who, by losing those attributes the child was developing, had turned to that state,” the state of a thing, an unresponsive thing and, therefore, an absence.

6 In England, England, Martha Cohrane says that “the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.” Julian Barnes, England, England (London: Quality Paperbacks Directs, 1998), 6. 7 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (New York: Vintage, 1990), 38. Cf. Vanesa Guignery, “History in questions(s)”, An Interview with Julian Barnes, Voix, Printemps 2000, www.univ-pau.fr/saes/pb/concours/bibliconc/02/Barnes.html, 63. 8 Cf. Vanessa Guignery, The Fiction of Julian Barnes, 68.

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At the same time, playing with the central visual metaphor of the western culture, the metaphor that determined the narrative strategy of nineteenth-century fiction, saying that what we see is what there really is, the narrative does not only introduce the disillusioning play of perspectives, but assumes, as Michael Bell argued in his seminal book Literature, Modernism, and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century,9 that those are not the eyes that see on a mere physical level, rather that it is a person, a cultural construction, who sees. Yet, the old ontology, along with the Cartesian cogito, being deconstructed, and the modern narrative instituted on the Lacanian idea that “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I don’t think,” (Ecrits) postmodernity remains equally unsatisfied because it can only claim, as it will be derived at the end of this novel, a succession of limits to one’s knowledge, or, in Baudrillard’s terms, a succession of absences. Therefore, if what the subjective consciousness sees is all there is for the particular consciousness to see and what, therefore, there really is, the narrative of the human quest for truth should rightly begin with an assertion that “[a] child wants to see,” because “it always begins like this” (3), as it has begun in the remembered history of the human race. If truth is defined as inaccessible, the novel will let the boy see what there is to be seen, although it is exactly an absence. Besides, what Arthur sees at the beginning of his remembered life, namely death, and therefore what he doesn’t see, because we cannot see death and cannot experience it, George will and equally will not see in the end of this narrative when, trying to comply with Arthur’s life conviction, he attends a spiritualist séance at which Arthur’s spirit is to materialize. * This juxtaposed image of Arthur and George not only highlights the bifocalizing narrative method of the novel, but also serves to equalize beginning with ending, problematizing thus both concepts in life as well as in a novel. In England, England, the Official Historian believes that “there is no authentic moment of beginning, of purity. […] There is no prime moment.”10 Wondering where narrative voice finds its true beginning, Edward Said elaborates how even the myths of genesis are derived from some previous narratives, but that quest for an origin is an “aboriginal 9

Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism, and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). 10 Julian Barnes, England, England, 132.

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human need” of knowing the absolute.11 Yet, relying on findings of various philosophers, among them Nietzsche who says that “strictly speaking knowledge is only a form of tautology and as such is empty. Any knowledge that is an advancement is really an identification of the nonsimilar with the similar, which is to say, something essentially illogical.”12 Said derives that modern thought is determined with realization that the absolute is ungraspable for “finite minds.”13 Moreover, it is not only because of the fact that death will become the phenomenon of central interest for Arthur, but also because historical narratives seem to be the only medium which can give shape and meaning to our experience, we are told that he “could see the beginning of the story—where he was now” (6), remembering—and therefore logically, he could see the end, while “only the middle was for the moment lacking” (6). However, Deleuze and Guattari elaborate that cultures do not grow as an organic body with roots, bole, branches, but rather develop as a rhizome continually multiplying, which, therefore, could have neither beginning nor end, but only middles. Our consciousness can only start with the middle, go through the middle, and end its narrative in the middle, without origins or conclusions. “The tree imposes the verb ’to be’,” they say, “but the fabric of rhizome is the conjunction, ’and… and… and…’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ’to be.’ Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions.” 14 As Barnes has already suggested in England, England, “making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation— all imply a false conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic…),” Deleuze and Guattari elaborate here. Recognizing this phenomenon of delusion, Arthur & George, likewise overthrows the old ontology, “do[ing] away with foundations, nullify[ing] endings and beginnings.15 Structured in the circular play of four chapters: “Beginnings,” “Beginning with an Ending,” “Ending with a Beginning,” and “Endings,” this is a novel without either a definite beginning or a definite end, as it begins with the problematic memories of a mature writer in which the 11

Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 5. 12 Quoted in Edward Said, op. cit., 37. 13 Edward Said, op. cit., 77 14 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “A Thousand Plateaus,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 522. 15 Ibid.

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protagonists will meet again by the end of the novel, and as it turns out, in a more real way. Within this indeterminate middle we meet Arthur from the title as Arthur Conan Doyle, identified as the creator of the famous Sherlock Holmes, a man from the city, who has acquired the title of Lord on account of his achievements in science, literature, and on the imperialist battlefields. George is George Edalji, a Parsee solicitor from a parish in Midlands, a victim not only of racism but also of relativism, whose story only seemingly becomes the mobile factor of the novel. Yet, in alternative chapters, the novel follows their growing up. While Arthur progresses from anonymity to celebrity, George suffers an historical miscarriage of justice, being accused for mutilating livestock and writing threatening letters to himself, which everybody that surrounds him, except himself, understands as a result of racial prejudice. Doyle comes onto the stage of George’s life as a powerful saviour, but, as it turns out, only to lead him from notoriety to anonymity. Or, if we take another beginning, we encounter Arthur as an accomplished novelist, who, having built his life on the idea of chivalry, realizes upon his wife’s death that she was aware of his being unfaithful to her, falls into deepest depression to be brought out only by the injustice regarding the Edalji case, but whose process of solution he may as well have fictionalized. The point at which their two stories cross is, therefore, true and false at the same time. With an aim to emphasize the suffering and aggression a human being is constantly exposed to, this middle is given in a cruelly objective narrative voice. Yet, in its self-consciousness, this text, which doesn’t take sides seemingly to avoid being political, employs an unobtrusive narrative to show a clear awareness that it is exactly impossible to be apolitical in a world inhabited by humanity. Besides, although it speaks about an event that took place one hundred years ago, its standpoint is contemporary, and it speaks more of the contemporary hermeneutic hesitation, especially as it defines itself in an ironic relation with imperialist and positivistic convictions. Because what has been said deserves attention and special consideration only in an ironic fashion, as Miroljub Jokoviü argues drawing on Lyotard, art gives up the old aim of signifying and takes up a parodic signifier as the sole means of connecting the world, which no longer cherishes myths, with art that yearns for recognition.16 Therefore, tending both to self-reflection and historical documentation, Arthur & George develops as an ironical palimpsest. It exploits several generic traditions as means of the human search for truth. It appropriates 16 Miroslav Jokoviü, Ontološki pejzaž postmodernog romana (Beograd: Prosveta, 2002), 25.

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features of a classical novel, and is almost on the road of Bildungsroman. It actually includes Künstlerroman, with several in-text references to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It provokes expectations regarding the genre of detective novel, gives a court process, as fantastic as that by Kafka, explores Englishness, re-evaluates the past, criticizes the patriarchal, imperial and Eurocentric, for a great part in a form of postcolonial appeal. However, in the end it undermines fundamental assumptions of all these genres, exposing them as inadequate attempts at portrayal of the complete truth of life and, indulging in a rich intertextual play and stressing its own fictive reality. Moreover, all these genres when acquired by the protagonists will help them construct their identities and establish their selves in the world, but will also help the novel deconstruct those identities as characters’ fabulations, questioning, finally, the likelihood of avoiding fabulating in everyday life.17 For this reason, the text which, in Baudrillard’s terms, has started as a sign of the first order, a true picture of an a priori referent, progresses as deconstruction of the very basis of its existence. Relativizing everything, it also relativizes itself only to force upon us its scriptive reality as the only fact we can take for granted. * Meditating on the prospects of establishing coherent identity, be it of an individual or of a piece of fiction, Arthur & George enters a prolific stream of writing on Englishness.18 Although the story that captures most of the narrative develops around a miscarriage of justice performed on the basis of racial prejudice, the narrative neither begins nor ends with this issue, pointing out that it is rather a momentary product of a huge construction of unavoidable circumstances for which, indeed, none of the parties is to be blamed. Had not the chain of historical and political circumstances allowed that a Parsee become a devoted Anglican vicar in an English province, a province, moreover, unprepared for the cultural change brought about with the imperial heritage—meaning adaptation of one’s imperial past for the coexistence of differences in a tolerant 17 Marija Kneževiü, “Modest Proposals of Some Twenty-First Century Novels”, in Olga Glebova (ed.), The Novel in English at the Start of the Twenty-First Century: Re-contextualizing the Tradition (Czestochowa: Wydawnictwo AJD, due 2009). 18 Cf. Köln Vera Nünning, “The Invention of Cultural Traditions: The Construction and deconstruction of Englishness and Authenticity in Julian Barnes’ England, England”. Available at: http://www.artandculture.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/ACLive:woa/wa/artist?id=1236

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multicultural society of the present—the wrongful prosecution of George would not have taken place. At a historical moment when, as David Morly and Kevin Robins explain,19 Great Britain needs to get used to the feeling of being decentred from the world’s political and cultural stage, trying at the same time to understand its own cultural and ethnic complexity, to many the multiplicities of the contemporary British society mean disturbance of the old notions of Britishness. Moreover, pointing with an ironical edge to how Britishness has often been identified with Englishness, Barnes, as already attempted in England, England, shows that cultural history shared by everybody is an illusion and that Englishness has never been a coherent concept, but has stood for a multiple identity. Already the presence of the Edaljis in the heart of England at the time when Britishness may have been most firmly established, i.e. at the historical zenith of the Empire, supports the fact that the object of national pride is a complex grid, as much determined by the subaltern as it changed the fate of the subaltern.20 Besides, assuming an ironic stand in the subversion of myth, the protagonists from the title carry the names of two English kings. As neither is originally English, the title adopts palimpsest function calling to mind another ironical consideration of Englishness uttered previously by the founder of the English realistic novel, Daniel Defoe in his satire “The True-Born Englishman. A Satyr,” in 1701. Showing how the English nation had been historically formed on a mixture of various nationalities, Defoe concluded that the very concept of a true-born Englishman was an absurd paradox, a verbal irony, indeed a fiction. Unlike that of the famous Arthur, the history of the anonymous George unfolds in the present tense narrative, probably because the author had to make up most of it for the novel21. The very first sentence characterizes George as an incredulous person who cannot accept that he can have the first memory; all his memories are interwoven with the telling of the others, and he must admit that he cannot unmingle the threads and reconstruct the past. Yet, George’s mental maps are clearly established. Although of a combination of Parsee and Scottish origin, George thinks of himself as of an Englishmen, because he was born in an English surrounding

19

Dejvid Morli i Kevin Robins, Britanske studije kulture: geografija, nacionalnost, identitet, prevod: Ivan Panoviü, Srÿan Simonoviü i Ljiljana Markoviü (Beograd: Geopoetika, 2003), 17. 20 Cf. Ketrin Hol, “Britanski kulturni identitet i naslijeÿe imperije”, u Dejvid Morli i Kevin Robins, op. cit., 40-52 21 Cf. “Author’s Note”, Julian Barnes, Arthur & George. .

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and has assumed cultural practices widely considered proper for the surrounding. Born in a Midland parish, a traditional guardian of Englishness,22 George is taught by his father, a protestant preacher, that he is English, living in the heart of England, that “England is the beating heart of the Empire,” (23) and that “the blood which flows through the arteries and veins of the Empire to reach even its farthest shore [is] the Church of England” (23). As a proud product of the entirety of imperial heritage, George’s father expresses correct political affiliation as he bases English nationalism on its protestant identity. This identity, in turn, he centres in the place where he lives and works, namely Great Wyrley near Birmingham, the town defined as the heart of the Empire. His insistence on the religious dimension of identity gains manifest interest when considered against the fact that even on the peak of its imperial power British culture experienced a falling trend where religiosity, especially among the white population, is concerned.23 Almost parallel to this, George’s appreciation of the teaching of the Bible gradually weakens, and he turns to more palpable things, doing it in a quite English utilitarian manner. He accepts science, history, and literature but only as distinct fictions, (85) sharing thus one of the stereotypical English characteristics E. M. Forster finds prominent in “Notes on the English Character”— namely, lack of imagination.24 It is only when he “discovers” law and its powerful narrative structures that “the world is beginning finally to make sense” (89) for George. Being a rationalist, he observes that “there are almost as many books of commentary on the law as there are on the Bible. But at the end there is not that further leap to be made. At the end, you have an agreement, a decision to be obeyed, an understanding of what something means. There is a journey from confusion to clarity” (89-90). George’s confidence in the English legal system also reveals his confidence in English language. We are told that he enjoys “textual exegesis” of law, i.e. in “explaining how words can and do mean different 22

Cf Alin Haukins, “Selo i engleski identitet”, in Dejvid Morli i Kevin Robins, op. cit., 81. 23 In the case of contemporary Britain, however, according to the survey carried out in 1990s, almost two-thirds of the population claimed to belong to the Church of England, only two millions are its active members. Cf. Mike Storry and Peter Childs, eds. British Cultural Identities (London—New York: Routledge, 2001), 281-282. 24 E. M. Forster, “Notes on the English Character”. Literature in the Modern World, ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford University Press—the Open University, 1990), 176-177.

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things” (89). This linguistic capacity additionally strengthens George’s understanding of his national identity, as we know that language defines the way in which we perceive the world and in which we identify with the community. The old assumption that good English keeps the traditional values of the nation and “support[s] Britain’s self-image as a great industrial and imperial power”25 is worthy of note especially if considered against the richness of linguistic diversity present in contemporary Britain.26 Raised in the English spirit, George logically believes in progress: “There is a journey, there is a destination,” he is certain. “At home, the destination is the Kingdom of heaven; at the office, the destination is justice, that is to say, a successful outcome for your client” (69). In other words, he clearly distinguishes a line between one’s private convictions and one’s obligations to the community. Moreover, George’s Englishness is confirmed by his daily practice of going to work by train, which in turn further substantiates his belief in an ordered society and in the importance of rules: “The railway suggests how it ought to be,” he deems; moreover, “how it could be: a smooth ride to a terminus on evenly spaced rails and according to an agreed timetable, with passengers divided among first-, second- and third-class carriages” (69). Playing with the commonplace portrayal of British as a class-ridden society, the novel depicts George as approving of the class system and taking the given social order for granted, although his image with “a proper hat, a three-and-sixpeny bowler from Fenton’s in Grange Street” may also mean, as suggested in Michael Moorcock’s novel Mother London: A Novel (1988), acceptance of the conspiracy of lies.27 Although George doesn’t feel displaced, considering himself at home in Midlands, already as such he is utterly incomprehensible to those around him, whose reaction is, consequently, unintelligible to him. George’s Christian teaching, which tells that the right way to fight prejudice is “to pity and cherish the feeble of mind,” (44) partly explains his stubborn denial of racial prejudice. For the others, brought up on the central nineteenth-century scientific belief in the evolutionary superiority of the white race, soothed somewhat by the comfortable philistine insular 25

Mike Storry and Peter Childs, op. cit., 246. Storry and Childs come out with a survey carried out in 1980 according to which only “15 per cent of pupils spoke what their teachers considered to be standard, or ‘correct’ English […] Another survey of the same period found that there were at least twelve languages in Britain which could claim over 100,000 speakers.” Mike Storry and Peter Childs, op. cit., 243. 27 Cf. Filip Tju, Savremeni britanski roman, prevod Nataša Vavan Pralica (Novi Sad: Svetovi, 2006.), 122. 26

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pride of a Midland provincial, he is different, dark skinned, therefore, to the prejudiced observer, intellectually inferior, emotionally dangerous, prone to barbarous practices and, logically, to crime. On the other hand, showing how the community’s almost general unison in the prosecution of George serves as a powerful means of establishing their identity, the novel clearly points to the reality as a grid of self-creating and self-referential discourses. In circumstances such as these it is only strongly motivated in the novel that an appearance of the non-English will provoke sensation. As Catherine Hall writes, unlike London, Liverpool, or Bristol, where ordinary people developed their identity in relations of difference, and subordination, with the non-English whose number was significant, Birmingham in the 19th century could hardly be called a colonial town in the conventional sense of the word. Although its political and cultural life was still firmly defined in its relation towards the nation and the Empire, it was independent from the colonial commerce and an appearance of an African or Asian was unusual to the point that it would instantly be noted in the local newspapers.28 Such a reaction might not spring only from cultural intolerance. Commenting on A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, Brian Finney implies that deeply inherent to the constitution of the human species is a need of “an artificially created alternative or other that provides it with its sense of cohesion and identity. […] Dependent on binary oppositions for our (false) sense of identity, we choose not to deconstruct them.”29 It may also be interesting to compare this notion with the idea of ritual construction as a means of exercising power in a multicultural society elaborated in Jay Clayton’s book The Pleasures of Babel. Clayton draws on René Girard’s idea of sacrifice ritual (from Violence and the Sacred), which, choosing its victim from among the marginalized groups of society, serves to preserve or restore harmony, stability, and solidarity among the members of the group, and, therefore, to confirm their identity.30 This is also supported by a finding that a great number of Asians in Great Britain experience their racial identity not on the grounds of their complexion per se, but as a product of the fact that their surroundings keep emphasising the difference.31 However, when George’s 28

Cf. Dejvid Morli i Kevin Robins, op. cit., 42-43. Brian Finney, “A Worm’s Eye View of History: Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, Available at: http//www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/Barnes.html. 30 Jay Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel (New York—Oxford: OUP, 1993), 111-113. 31 Tarik Modud, “Britansko-azijski identitet: nešto staro, nešto pozajmljeno, nešto novo”, in Dejvid Morli i Kevin Robins, op. cit., 78. 29

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colleagues in the office seem to find his difference an unending spring of amusement, George invites one of them to turn up his sleeve and show his sunburnt forearm indicating the arbitrariness even of complexion. Considering this, the district police deems, though: “if you shut your eyes, you’d think him an Englishman” (124). The ironic play with the visual metaphor continues in the court, which, as George realizes, has little to do with the law, as far as he understands it, that it surpasses the narrative play he enjoys, and becomes a play of conventions, indeed a performance. As is established, “law, like every other cultural institution, is a place where we tell one another stories about our relationships with ourselves, one another, and authority”32 (italics—M. K.) The unbearable arbitrariness continues when the judge reads the basis of the accusation and George thinks how “it was just a story […] something made up from scraps and coincidences and hypotheses; he knew too that he was innocent; but something about the repetition of the story by an authority in wig and gown made it take on extra plausibility” (167). When the mere appearance bestows more credibility on this false story than on the true story given by his father, George learns that “the best people are not necessarily the best witnesses” (193). It is his defence who points out that the more scrupulous the witnesses are, the more honest, the more they dwell on each word of the question and doubt themselves out of modesty, then the more they can be played with. [...] From a purely legal point of view, the best witnesses are those whom the jury believes most. (193)

Apart from revealing the court’s justice as reduced to another fiction, this novel brings into focus the powerful determining word of media as another cultural instance of illusion. In his “Author’s Note” Barnes says that all the newspaper clippings introduced in the novel are authentic. However, they record the crudest imaginable negligence of facts, which speaks loudly of their tendency of turning human life into commodity. When the Birmingham Daily Gazette depicts George as “28 years [old] but looks younger,” George reacts: “perhaps that is because I am twentyseven. My mother is not English, she is Scottish. My father is not a Hindu” (157). But the all-penetrating reason of his defender judges that Hindu is “near enough for the Gazette” (157). Finally, George is one of the victims of media in two respects: not only is he stigmatized but he also learns to consider all the actual stories depicted by it as fictions, “another 32 Clare Dalton, “An essay in the Deconstruction of Contract Doctrine,” Yale Law Journal 94 (1985), 999, quoted in Jay Clayton, op. cit, 13.

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TRAGEDY” (179). In other words, not only is he devoid of human care, but he himself loses ability to sympathize. George reflects that the nature of fiction supposes that every idea can be subverted and realizes that “if his story was subtly changing around him, then so too were some of the characters” (170). As he complies with rules in general, he complies with the rules of fiction, but he can hardly admit the fact that a repeated lie soon becomes truth in the public awareness. He thinks how his family said they knew he was innocent, but then wonders if they only cherish an ungrounded idea. To know him innocent they must, either have sat up all night and observed him sleep, or else been on watch in the Colliery field when some lunatic farm-hand arrived with an evil instrument in his pocket. Only thus could they truly know. So what they did was believe, truly believe. (202-203)

George will soon learn that, as Peter Childs argues discussing Flaubert’s Parrot, what is “deemed ‘correct’, emotionally or historically, is far more a matter of socially agreed opinion, of what Foucault calls being ‘in the true’, than it is of absolute truth.”33 George’s agony deepens when he thinks of the power of words, which as a lawyer he must be clearly aware of and assumes, “what if, over time, some words of Mr Disturnal, some assertion of Dr Butter, or some private long-held doubt about George, began to undermine their faith in him?” (203) Now he derives the following “declension” for which, he says, no one is to blame: “Today: we know George and we know him innocent. But perhaps in three months: we think we know George and we believe him innocent. And then in a year: we realize we did not know George, yet we still think him innocent” (203). Finally, it is this corrosion of reality that the novel throughout its narrative and contextual structure witnesses—this, as it says, “declension” of all the conceptions essential for human existence: love, knowledge, justice, freedom… Exploiting the illusion of freedom, namely that people outside prison think they are free, whereas actually we are all imprisoned within some narratives, the novel depicts George as easily accepting and respecting the prison rules that, leaving no space for interpretation, give him “a sense of order that was almost edging towards contentment” (212). To confirm this sense, he takes Walter Scott’s historical novels that embrace the mythical image of a Britain of justice and freedom fighters that was especially popularized, alas romanticized, in the nineteenth century. 33

Peter Childs, Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970 (London: Palgrave—Macmillan, 2005), 90.

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* This is exactly an ideal that Arthur Conan Doyle identifies with, along with a series of negative projections that gives sufficient ground for regarding him as a schizoid character. In that middle, between the beginning of his remembered life and the narrative of his Memoirs, Arthur, among other things, rejects an identification with his artistic and irresponsible father, stops believing in the saying of the Church, “father Murphy [became] a storyteller he no longer believed,” (21) and assumes, challenging the era, “that his reason and conscience did not always accept what was placed in front of them” (21). Although of mixed Scottish and Irish origin, and of catholic education, Arthur starts feeling himself a true Englishman: “Irish by ancestry, Scottish by birth, instructed in the faith of Rome by Dutch Jesuits, Arthur became English. […] English freedom made him proud; English cricket made him patriotic” (31). Besides, as “a healthy Briton,” Arthur enjoys “a good hunt” (36). What most inspires him is English history, while the epoch of English history he believes the greatest was that of the fourteenth century, where, in his stereotypical vision of fundamental Britishness, lay “the root of Englishness” (31). For many King Arthur and his Camelot, and their “long-gone, long-remembered, long-invented world of chivalry,” (31) suggest “a traditional identity and a sense of equality and fairness.”34 Because we can only have constructions of the elusive past, one significant part of becoming a nation means, as shown in England, England, to take its history wrong, i.e. to build up a nation’s identity on fantasy. In like manner, upon the onset of the Boer war, Arthur, as an honourable Englishman, feels his duty to help his country’s cause and believes that the war is “worth a white lie or two” (256). Now he behaves as an imperialist, for whom murder is legally and, therefore, morally accepted. As a nineteenth century knight, understanding the value of money, Arthur believes that it is possible to be an artist and “to be robust and responsible” (84) at the same time. He starts “applying his practical mind” to the “writing game,” and, playing with the contemporary taste and complying with the pronounced practice of English nationalism that expressed its idea of British greatness in popular genres of adventure stories, Arthur’s first fictional exercises project its values, fears, desires in the far-away conquered lands: “he set his tales in distant lands, where buried treasure could often be found, and the local population was high on black-hearted villains and rescuable maidens” (33). Mature novelist, 34

Mike Storry and Peter Childs, op. cit., 25.

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Arthur plays within the borders of convention and makes up his Sherlock Holmes combining serialization with stories complete within themselves, “yet filled with running characters to reignite the reader’s sympathy or disapproval,” (61) but to be calculated rationally, and not blossom from romantic inspiration. Educated in the school of medical materialism, Arthur believes in careful looking. In medicine, however, he comes across another sign of absence; as a doctor, examining corpses, he notices relaxation of muscles when “devoid of activity and tension of life.” His complicated mental construction is now enriched with the realization that there is a reality beyond “the ironclad walls of a materialist universe” (54) and that “the human dead also bore in their gizzard pebbles from the land the maps ignored” (38). Science having recently discovered phenomena no one could have ever thought of, like radio waves, it is only a matter of time that the afterlife will be made fact, depending on “how quickly slumbering humanity wakes up and learns to use its eyes” (284). In quite a paradoxical manner, and as it will turn out in the end, these eyes should have to be the eyes of (the abandoned) faith. Therefore, Arthur invites: “Who dared claim now that science was the enemy of the soul?” (100). Leaving faith in the realm of courageous imagination, he argues that only “the fearful and unimaginative had concluded that Wallace and Darwin had delivered us into a godless and mechanistic universe, had left us alone upon the darkling plain” (100), which in Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” (1851) is a battlefield of two armies that cannot see each other. * In its metonymic function, narration of this novel gradually moves the protagonists from the province to the capital, following their quest for identity and the pronounced need of a centre. However, London, a meeting point of all global tendencies that, having their most obvious, most intense, and most dramatic appearance here, as Robins explains, deeply complicates established cultural models. Being a great provocation of the clarity and coherence of British national culture,35 London, Robins suggests, can be understood as a cognitive model for contemplating our cultural feelings. If a nation is a space of identification, as we were shown on the example of the nineteenth-century Midlands, the city is experiential and existential space.36 While a nation keeps to the concepts of stability 35

Kevin Robins, “Ka Londonu: Gradu izvan nacije”, in Dejvid Morli i Kevin Robins, op. cit., 472-477. 36 Ibid., 474

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and continuity, the principle of urbanity goes together with the category of multitude: it is in the urban context that people can experience their existence as an existence of multitude, an open and changeable multiplicity.37 Therefore, London’s Grand Hotel provides symbolic setting for the first encounter of Arthur and George. Arthur, who approaches George from behind (which is again an interesting encounter, if we take encounter in its primary meaning of meeting face to face), comes across an obvious fact to prove George’s innocence. Namely, by the way George bends his head while reading his newspapers Arthur concludes that George is myopic and, therefore, incapable of committing the brutal acts. What follows is a strange encounter that resembles more of a clash of the “ignorant armies” from Arnold’s poem. Arthur immediately coaxes George into claiming being racially maltreated. His question, “You had enemies in Great Wyrley?” (299), is grammatically an assertion, which George denies. Being a lawyer, he looks for evidence and seems to find none of a material significance. His argument is firm: “I was brought up as an Englishman. I went to school, I studied the law, I did my articles, I became a solicitor. Did anyone try to hold me back from this progress? On the contrary” (300). However, Arthur demands that George not think like a lawyer and behave as someone else, i.e. a Parsee going through an ordeal, bringing out another fantastic argument: “The fact that no evidence of a phenomenon can be adduced does not mean that it does not exist” (301). Moreover, the ironic intertextual play of this novel encourages us to suspect that Arthur was creating a role for himself similar to the one Zola had in the famous French Dreyfus affair. In other words, we cannot help feeling that he was looking for a spectacle, a simulation of growing significance that may help him get over his destabilized self-esteem. Besides, this may also be read as an interesting historical occurrence that proves Carl Marx’s saying that Barnes has already twice alluded to in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapter, namely that “History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”38 In the next phase, Arthur uses an argument quite modern for his time and richly exploited by his contemporary novelists, asserting that George cannot clearly see his own position in the story that is being developed.39 However, George counters using the general utilitarian stand: he doesn’t believe making the case of intolerance lying in the heart of the English 37

Ibid. Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (London: PicadorJonathan Cape. 1990), 175, 241. 39 For example, this is an idea that stands behind Henry James’s and Joseph Conrad’s impressionist narrative choices. 38

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legal system, and therefore, English power, constructive, and adds, “Or perhaps, Sir Arthur, you believe Mr. Gladstone [Home Secretary] himself to be afflicted with that prejudice?” (302) Here George confirms what David Miller in his book On Nationality (1995) argues for as an important instance of cultural identity and identity with community in relation with ethical and political actions. Mutual identity, he believes, understands certain loyalty and increases belief that the other members of a community will respond with a certain amount of cooperative behaviour,40 which George has already attempted by offering help to solve the mysterious crime. Community, Miller believes, is a community of obligations and mutual devotions. Cultural uniformity and ethical and political solidarity are constants because people are interested in creating the world in cooperation with the group they identify with. Therefore, for him, national identity cannot be arbitrary or fictive, or mere historical coincidence.41 George’s argument is moreover constructive for the recognition that historically inherited identity must adapt itself to a growing cultural pluralism, i.e. a conception of British citizenship defined as a group of political principles: tolerance, respect of the rule of law, belief in the parliamentary democracy.42 Therefore, for George, Arthur relies on a most unreliable argument suggesting, “You and I, George […] are… unofficial Englishmen.” Not only is it “impolite to question a man’s categorization of himself,” (303) deems George in his empirical, utilitarian, and, most of all, individualistic Englishness, but it also disagrees with his idea of Englishness. Besides, as cultural identity has significantly to do with representation, logically to George, Sir Arthur, by “his name, his manner, his fame, his air of being absolutely at ease in this grand London hotel, even down to the time he kept George waiting,” appeared the hero who represented the true Englishness. “If Sir Arthur had not appeared to be part of official England,” we are told, “George would probably not have written to him in the first place” (303). Although neither of them is born English, for George, they both stand for Englishness as it presents itself to the world. As he has never thought that one’s nationality can be what one privately decides to assume or not, he wonders: Does Sir Arthur mean that when they took away his freedom […] they also struck him off the roll of Englishmen? If so, he has no other land. He

40

Kevin Robins, op. cit., 463-464. Dejvid Morli i Kevin Robins, op. cit., 464. 42 Cf. Ibid., 465-466. 41

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This instance in the novel has yet another ironical edge which allows Barnes to play with the conventional idea of cultural identity showing how Englishness often becomes a substitution for Britishness, as he is subverting a mentoring cultural politics of an internal imperialism in relation with the non-English population, including the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish.43 After Arthur’s declamation about the irrationality of the British state and proclamation of his intention to shake the hypocrisy of “the official English,” George still wants “some basic verification” of Arthur’s motivation, and what he gets are the following words: “George, I have read your newspaper articles, and now I have met you in person. So my reply is, No, I do not think you are innocent. No, I do not believe you are innocent. I know you are innocent” (305-306). As for George the semantic scopes of these three verbs do not easily overlap either, being a lawyer and a careful reader of Arthur’s Memoirs, he wonders if Arthur would react differently “had the first Lady Conan Doyle not recently died” (470). George understands that Arthur’s knowledge of George’s innocence does not come from either his experience or strength of facts, because he has collected them all from second-hand sources, from one man’s testimony recorded on a page, and, therefore, from fiction. George’s dismay regarding his patron’s reasoning gradually deepens. While for Arthur the fact that George is an abstainer and doesn’t smoke obviously speaks for his inaptness for crime, George deems smoking “a pointless, unpleasant and costly habit. But also one unconnected with criminal behaviour. Sherlock Holmes famously smoked a pipe—and Sir Arthur […] did likewise—but this did not make them candidates for membership of a gang” (417). In the end, playing on the fictive grounds and having illegally obtained the culprit’s weapon, Arthur has not only acted similar to the incompetent Great Wyerley police—which he seems to be fictionalising in life to complement the way he had imagined and laughed at them in his novels—neither had he only committed theft, but, for George, he has also ruined the only piece of evidence and, thus, the complete case. Besides, George feels disconcerted being scrutinized and described by the famous novelist. It made him feel fictionalized: “It made him feel like several overlapping people at the same time: a victim seeking 43

Cf. Piter Dž. Tejlor, “Koja Britanija? Koja Engleska? Koji Sever?”, and Krišan Kumar, “’Englestvo’ i engleski nacionalni identitet”, in Dejvid Morli i Kevin Robins, op. cit.

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redress; a solicitor facing the highest tribunal in the country; and a character in a novel” (416). He accuses Arthur of mixing fiction and reality and believes that all Arthur’s “excess of enthusiasm [was] the fault of Sherlock Holmes,” (426) who “performed his brilliant acts of deduction [but] had never once been obliged to stand in the witness box and have his suppositions and intuitions and immaculate theories ground to very fine dust over a period of several hours by the likes of Mr Disturnal” (426). Yet, when the final assertion from the Home Office arrives, both Arthur and George are struck by the fact that the evidences submitted are enough to provide George a free pardon, but not substantial to demand a grant of compensation for the years spent in prison. The verdict, therefore, being George was both innocent and guilty, in Arthur’s eyes, is not only a compromise made on the side of the English legal system, but it clearly shows the system’s underlying hypocrisy. For George, the verdict makes his movement “from villain to martyr to nobody very much,” (466) “a footnote in legal history” (443). Consequently, when he finally regains his life, in a little flat in metropolitan London, George is no more recognized (either as a villain or a victim); therefore he is rendered insignificant. Suggesting that he was more fulfilled as a person when he was talked about, as Oscar Wilde famously argued, that then he possessed at least some meaning, if only that of a taboo, George feels that he is not compensated enough. All the while, his supporters are trying to assure him “that his case was as significant as that of Dreyfus, that it revealed as much about England as the Frenchman’s did about France.” They even insisted, confusing once again life and art, that George’s great defender Arthur Conan Doyle was a better writer than Émile Zola, “whose books were reportedly vulgar and who had run away to England when threatened in his turn with gaol” (467) – an experience that George has just gone trough. On the other hand, while Dreyfus’s name “increased in fame,” (467) George has fallen into anonymity, as Christian teaching against pride deterred him from public addresses, so that the appearance wins again. Namely, when George’s prosecution ends, he reflects that his case may not have happened at all except as a replica of the famous French affair. A postmodernist mind formatted by Baudriallard’s relativising theory and his interpretation of Disneyland and the Watergate affair, might read this series of events as a legal scheming that serves to, paradoxically, prove the power of the state, its legal system, education, and, above all, its racial tolerance, proving that not all of the state is conditioned by preconceptions like the Great Wyrley police, or, if it were, the state has just shown its ability to fight it and transcend the racial intolerance.

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In the end, George reasons that his obscurity has to do with English rationality and reservation, displaying yet another definition to add to the stereotypical notion of Englishness, especially in opposition with France. Although England was not apt to passions and extremes like France, he agrees that it was just as principled, but less keen on making a fuss about its principles; a place where the common law was trusted more than government statue; where people got on with their own business and did not seek to interfere with that of others; where great public eruptions took place from time to time […] but which soon faded in the memory, and were rarely built into the history of the country. [...] The Edalji Case would not have arisen if there had been a Court of Appeal? Very well, then: pardon Edalji, establish a Court of Appeal before the year is out—and what more remains to be said about the matter? This was England, and George could understand England’s point of view, because George was English himself. (467-468)

* It is living in this liminality and anonymity in the bustling space of London and in a need of confirmation that makes George use Arthur’s Memoirs as a proof of his existence. Barnes goes one step further from what he did in A History where contemplating Géricault’s painting of the shipwreck of Medusa he notices that it ignores important particularities of the real event to shift spectators “through currents of hope and despair, elation, panic, resignation,”44 and offers a consoling existential compromise when he concludes that “Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.”45 Because authentic experience seems to be forever lost in the past, all we are left with is an interpretation of the experience, in history texts, biographies, memoirs, and art. Therefore, it is not only to say that “history provides the only templates for human visions of paradise,”46 but this replica of human experience, being the only means of keeping it, achieves and keeps a reality more real than the authentic but subjective one kept in the elusive memory. Holding firmly the fiction in his hands, George attends the memorial meeting organized to mark Arthur Conan Doyle’s promotion to afterlife, at which, thanks to a celebrated medium, Arthur’s spirit was to appear to 44

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters, 137. Ibid. 46 Cf. Peter Childs discussing A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters in Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970 (London: Palgrave— Macmillan, 2005), 94. 45

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several thousand people in the audience. Yet, George deems that an afterlife existence depends on one’s religious belief or luck to be given an extra sight by God (487), but he was more inclined to think that death is extinction. Feeling a pang of conscience for denying his saviour, the myopic George uses his binoculars to extend his visual perception. When he is advised that only “the eyes of faith” will help him see, he wonders if these were “the eyes Sir Arthur brought with him when they met at the Grand hotel, Charing Cross” (499). Yet George does not possess a comfort of self-confidence. His real guilt in the world he inhabits may be exactly his constant approval of the authority of the other. In the end, arguing against the un-English fervour of the event, his limited imagination hindering him from picturing the materialisation of the spirit of Arthur, for him the true representative of England, George stands amazed at the sudden realization of infinite succession of limits to his knowledge: “he presses the binoculars to his spectacles, gazes through his succession of lenses, out into the air and beyond.” Here the labyrinthine narrative ends with three simple questions: “What does he see? / What did he see? / What will he see?” (501) Ending a novel with a question reinforces the “dispersed schizoid”47 nature of contemporary experience and states a question similar to the one Jago Morrison asked: “what kind of conclusion could possibly give ‘narrative closure’ to historical contents of this kind?”48 Yet, Barnes’s novel is not just mimicking the layers of perspectives and lamenting the absence of certainties but death. His query about the future does not only engage the novel in a dialogue, but rather makes it transcend interpretation. Together with his newest book Nothing to be Frightened of (2008), which opens with an assertion “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him,”49 and uniting with the efforts of a group of British greatest contemporary authors, Barnes’s work does “look beyond nationalism, religions, and ethnicities to develop further our ‘species consciousness’” and promote a “new humanism”, which, Childs argues, “might be something that the novel, the exemplary literary product of national consciousness, will continue to be well equipped to promote in the future.”50 Talking about Barnes’s novel Staring at the Sun (1987), Childs says: “The metaphor of the book’s title is that human beings have to stare courageously at the fact of a godless universe: stoically face life as chaotic 47 Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism”, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (Edinburgh: London, 2000), 370. 48 Jago Morrison. Contemporary Fiction (London—New York: Routledge, 2003), 10. 49 Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), 1. 50 Peter Childs, op. cit, 276.

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and death as final without the consolations offered by religion.”51 In a similar manner, Walter Benjamin asserts that “death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death,” which in this case is, indeed, “the very source of the story.”52 Besides, as the protagonists’ beginnings and endings in this novel coincide with the words with which they were created and in which they recreated themselves, the novel also makes an ironical allusion to the famous motto of Mary Queen of Scotland, “In my End is my Beginning”, which suggests an eternal life (but only) after death and which T. S. Eliot altered in his “East Coker” into “In my beginning is my end” that recognizing the transience of life leads the poetical persona to the endless “wisdom of humility.” As a letter to the world at the beginning of the third millennium53 Arthur and George embodies the way in which we do exist in our human “here and now,” disoriented and deceived, but with an acceptance of our human need for sympathy and love.

Works Cited Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters. London: Picador—Jonathan Cape. 1990. —. Arthur & George. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. —. England, England. London: Quality Paperbacks Directs, 1998. —. Flaubert’s Parrot. New York: Vintage, 1990. —. Nothing to be Frightened of. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008. Bell, Michael. Literature, Modernism, and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: CUP, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller”. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. Edinburgh: London, 2000. Childs, Peter. Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970. London: Palgrave—Macmillan, 2005. Clayton, Jay. The Pleasures of Babel. New York—Oxford: OUP, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “A Thousand Plateaus.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 51

Ibid, 82. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (Edinburgh: London, 2000), 19. 53 Barnes has called England, England a letter to his own country at the turn of the millennium. Cf. “History in questions(s)”. An Interview with Julian Barnes. Voix, Printemps 2000, www.univ-pau.fr/saes/pb/concours/bibliconc/02/Barnes.html, 70 52

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Eagleton, Terry. “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism”. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. Edinburgh: London, 2000. Finney, Brian, “A Worm’s Eye View of History: Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, http//www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/Barnes.html. Forster, Edward Morgan. “Notes on the English Character”. Literature in the Modern World. Ed. Dennis Walder. Oxford: Oxford University Press-the Open University, 1990. Freeman, John. “Elementary Justice: Julian Barnes discusses Arthur & George”. http://www.newcitychicago.com/chicago/5045.html. Guignery, Vanesa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006. —. “History in questions(s)”. An Interview with Julian Barnes. Voix. Printemps 2000, www.univ-pau.fr/saes/pb/concours/bibliconc/02/Barnes.html. The Guardian, Wednesday July 6, 2005. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,152203 0,00.html James, Henry. Italian Hours, Ed. John Auchard. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. Jokoviü, Miroslav. Ontološki pejzaž postmodernog romana. Beograd: Prosveta, 2002. Kneževiü, Marija. “Modest Proposals of Some Twenty-First Century Novels”. In The Novel in English at the Start of the Twenty-First Century: Re-contextualizing the Tradition. Ed. Olga Glebova. Czestochowa: Wydawnictwo AJD, due 2009. Morli Dejvid i Kevin Robins, eds. Britanske studije kulture: geografija, nacionalnost, identitet. Prevod: Ivan Panoviü, Srÿan Simonoviü i Ljiljana Markoviü. Beograd: Geopoetika, 2003. (Morly, David and Kevin Robins, eds. British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality, and Identity, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Morrison, Jago. Contemporary Fiction, London—New York: Routledge, 2003. Nünning, Köln Vera “The Invention of Cultural Traditions: The Construction and deconstruction of Englishness and Authenticity in Julian Barnes’ England, England”. http://www.artandculture.com/cgibin/WebObjects/ACLive:woa/wa/artist?id=1236 Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

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Storry, Mike and Peter Childs, eds. British Cultural Identities, London— New York: Routledge, 2001. Tju, Filip. Savremeni britanski roman. Prevod: Nataša Vavan Pralica. Novi Sad: Svetovi, 2006. (Tew, Philip, The Contemporary British Novel, London—New York: Continuum, 2004.)

CHAPTER TWELVE SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: GURUS AND SHAMANS IN THE MUSIC AND LITERATURE OF THE NINETEEN-SIXTIES VICTOR KENNEDY

The nineteen-sixties were a time of change and cultural instability. Disillusioned by existing institutions and leaders, many people, young and old, were looking for new ideas and new leadership. Pop music and literature of the nineteen sixties and early seventies, reflecting this desire, were full of fictional, as well as real life, gurus and shamans. Bob Dylan’s “Mr Tambourine Man,” Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” Carlos Castaneda’s don Juan, and Pete Townshend’s Tommy resemble in many ways the reallife gurus Timothy Leary and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who were both highly influential not only among writers and musicians, but in the culture at large. Castaneda, like Jim Morrison, whom his fans dubbed “The Lizard King,” himself assumed the role of a cult leader, as did science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology, and Leary once ran for governor of California on a bizarre platform.1 Joseph Campbell argues in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that many of the neuroses and psychoses revealed by 20th-century psychological discoveries can be traced back to the spiritual vacuum left by the decline of myth and religion: “This is our problem as modern ‘enlightened’ individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.”2 Evidence of the problem is revealed in the dreams of patients 1

Among other things, Leary proposed legalizing marijuana, then eliminating all money from Californian society and returning to a barter system (The Montreal Gazette, May 31, 1969). He was defeated by Ronald Reagan and subsequently imprisoned on drug charges; shortly afterwards, he escaped from jail and fled the U.S. 2 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Commemorative ed, Bollingen Series; 17 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 104.

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recorded by psychoanalysts, and an attempt to solve it in the widespread search for guidance from gurus and leaders. In the early sixties, those attempts at counter-cultural spiritual development were seen as positive and enlightening, but as songwriters such as Ray Thomas (“Legend of a Mind”) and filmmakers like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider) predicted, such utopian dreams contain a dark side, later revealed in the excesses of cult leaders such as Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and David Koresh.3 Analysis of the songs and films of the nineteen sixties through the eighties shows a cycle that begins with hope for new leaders who would lead the world away from the militarism that led to the quagmire of Vietnam, but ending with betrayal and disillusionment. This paper will examine the appeal of the fictional and real-life shamans of the sixties, and will show how these characters resemble portrayals of the devil in such influential earlier stories as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Mark Twain’s “The Mysterious Stranger,” and Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. The development of the sixties counterculture, based on a desire for freedom from the restrictive, patriarchal society that emerged after world war two, was influenced to a large extent by Timothy Leary’s dictum “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The search for enlightenment through personal experimentation with drugs, meditation, eastern religions, and new forms of old religions took on a communal character, and became transformed into a search for a leader through voluntary submission to a succession of gurus, shamans, saviours, and messiahs; the former became marred by tragic examples of drug overdoses and psychic disorders, and the latter eventually ended in betrayal, disillusionment, rejection, and crime.4 Campbell points out that the difference between a successful hero and the much more common failed hero is often merely one of timing: the failed hero hangs on too long, long enough for his or her followers to perceive their human weaknesses, while the successful hero achieves timely 3

Jones was the founder of the Peoples’ Temple, 920 of whose members committed mass murder-suicide by poison and shootings in Jonestown, Guyana in November, 1978; Manson was the leader of the “Manson Family”, a cult that murdered seven people in August, 1969; Koresh was the leader of the Branch Davidians religious cult. 53 adults and 21 children died in a fire following a siege by the FBI on their compound in Waco, Texas in 1993. 4 “The psychedelic ‘trip’ into inner space replicated the shaman’s magic journey, from which he returned with secret knowledge for his tribe.” Camille Paglia has written extensively on the use of hallucinogenic drugs by musicians in the 1960s. (Camille Paglia, "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s," in Arion: a journal of the humanities and classics 10, no. 3 (2003).

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martyrdom. The cycle can be seen in an archetypal pattern exemplified in Pete Townshend’s Tommy (1969) and Fonda and Hopper’s 1969 film Easy Rider, and in the real-life adventure of the Beatles in the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and in the early death of Jim Morrison. Camille Paglia provides an anthropological explanation for the cycle: The basic principle of the counterculture began as communality but ended as the horde, the most primitive entity in social history. The horde is prey to superstition and panic. It looks for leaders but ruthlessly slays them, then reveres them as ancestral spirits.5

An example of a guru early in the cycle appears in Bob Dylan’s “Mr Tambourine Man,” (1964) which uses the imagery of “turn on, tune in, drop out”, but Dylan’s is a more subtle exhortation, encouraging his listeners to escape, not to an illusory drug-induced paradise, but to expand their minds with images of poetry and music instead: “Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship/my senses have been stripped/my hands can’t feel to grip/my toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels/to be wanderin’.” The “trip”, unlike the LSD trips offered by Timothy Leary or the peyote-inspired visions offered by Castaneda’s don Juan, uses as its vehicle the sensory “magic” of music and dance. Moreover, in the lines that follow, “I’m ready to go anywhere/I’m ready for to fade/into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way/I promise to go under it,” the “spell” is the spell of dancing, the “parade” it promises is an individual one, and the promise to go under the spell is voluntary. Canadian poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen’s vision was, and is, darker than Dylan’s. “The Master Song” (1968) contains another example of voluntary submission to a “master” figure, although in Cohen’s version the figure is a more ambiguous and sinister one, and the dominance and submission in the love triangle are constantly shifting. The girl addressed in “The Master Song” appears to be an archetypical sixties searcher for truth, based upon where she met the master: “You met him at some temple, where/they take your clothes at the door.” The speaker himself comments ironically on “the Master,” however: “He was starving in some deep mystery/like a man who is sure what is true.” As the song progresses, it appears that The Master is really a master of psychological manipulation, but in the end it appears that the real “master” is the speaker himself, who like a puppeteer, shifts the dominance in the story to himself: “And I sent you to him with my guarantee/I could teach him something new/and I 5 Camille Paglia, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s” in Arion: a journal of the humanities and classics 10, no. 3 (2003).

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taught him how you would long for me/no matter what he said no matter what you’d do.” As in many of Cohen’s other songs, the ambiguity of the beginning is heightened, rather than dispelled, by the end. The mood created by the haunting minor key is enhanced by Cohen’s deep, gravelly baritone, and the lyrics are full of shocking, psychedelic imagery, such as the speaker’s characterization of the Master as “an ape with angel glands”.6 Like Townshend’s Tommy, whose “sickness can surely take the mind/where minds don’t usually go,” the narrator of “The Master Song” begins by saying “I believe that you heard your master sing/when I was sick in bed.” The unspecified sickness appears to be a sickness of the mind in the next line, “I suppose that he told you everything/that I keep locked away in my head.” The inward examination here is yet another example of the search for truth through introspection, for meaning through analysis of images from the subconscious or dream states of mind, expressed in the “song” of the “Master”. Like Dylan’s “Mr Tambourine Man”, Donovan’s song “Hurdy Gurdy Man” (1968) refers to a musical shaman: a hurdy gurdy is a medieval stringed instrument with drone strings that sounds similar to a bagpipe. Like the songs previously mentioned, “The Hurdy Gurdy Man” calls for attention to history and the stories of the past to answer questions of the present: “Histories of ages past/unenlightened shadows cast/down through all eternity/the crying of humanity.” After this statement of the problem comes the solution: “'Tis then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man/comes singing songs of love…” Rather than Dylan’s call for intellectual engagement with songs and music, however, Donovan’s call is more a Wordsworthian appeal to nature for its soothing effect: “To find that I was by the sea/gazing with tranquillity.” Donovan’s song does not actually use the instrument, and according to hurdy gurdy makers Alden and Cali Hackmann, Donovan first saw a hurdy gurdy more than fifteen years after writing the song , but it does use the heavily distorted psychedelic guitar and sitar characteristic of the sixties to create an exotic mood. The tranquility the song aims for is created less by the symbols and images of the lyrics than by repetition of vowel sounds and droning instruments, like an eastern mantra.7 Donovan’s 6

A phrase that economically blends Darwinism and Judeo-Christian religious tradition. 7 Donovan, in the London Daily Mail Weekend magazine dated 20th May 2006, said, “I was intrigued by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's teachings of transcendental meditation, which were also followed by the Beatles. I went with the Beatles and George's wife, Patti Boyd, Cynthia Lennon and Jane Asher to stay with the

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lyrics are less ominous than Cohen’s, but, like Cohen’s song, the mood of “The Hurdy Gurdy Man” is full of ambiguity, with its mysterious but somewhat hopeful lyrics contrasted with its dark and distorted guitar tones. Perhaps the most fully developed account of the guru in sixties music is Pete Townshend’s rock opera Tommy (1969). A victim of childhood abuse, Tommy’s trauma has left him deaf, dumb, and blind, but he eventually attains enlightenment and becomes a spiritual leader. The song “I’m Free” reflects the notion of freedom from conventional restraints espoused in Buddhism, the casting off of the social conventions that allows true development of the personality and all its potential: “I’m freeI’m free/and freedom tastes of reality.” Once freedom has been achieved, the guru is ready, like Buddha, to share his enlightenment with followers: “I’m free-I’m free/and I’m waiting for you to follow me.” Like the freedom of the road, and the freedom gained by casting off the constricting rules of society in exchange for the freedom of nature evoked in the theme song of Easy Rider, “Born to be Wild” (“like a true nature’s child/we were born, born to be wild”8), Tommy’s freedom has a dark side, and the reaction evokes a counter-reaction. The natural reaction of his followers is expressed in the song immediately following, aptly entitled “We’re Not Gonna Take It!” Joseph Campbell’s hero is one who explores a supernatural or metaphysical realm and returns to share his enlightenment with the rest of mankind. Most sixties counterculture heroes explored the realm of the subconscious (as in Ted Nugent and The Amboy Dukes’ “Journey to the Center of the Mind”) with psychedelic drugs, meditation, and lessons from eastern religions. After his experience with drugs forcibly administered by the Acid Queen, Tommy, like real-life rocker Ted Nugent, rejects those ways, saying “Hey you getting drunk, so sorry/I’ve got you sussed/Hey you smoking Mother Nature/this is a bust/Hey hung up old Mr. Normal/don't try to gain my trust/’cause you ain’t gonna follow me any of those ways/although you think you must.” His unimaginative followers, who have not yet broken away from their habitual thought patterns, resist:

Maharishi in the Himalayas for three months. For a while, Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence shared the bungalow next to mine. She inspired John Lennon to write ‘Dear Prudence.’ ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ was influenced by the sounds I heard there.” (http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1097). 8 Evidently this freedom did not include freedom from buying fuel and fixing flat tires.

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They are finally convinced, however, after sharing the experiences that brought Tommy enlightenment, in “See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me”: “Listening to you/I get the music/gazing at you/I get the heat/following you/I climb the mountains/I get excitement at your feet.” In the next lines we see Tommy’s small cult growing into a mass movement, and ominously, we see how his followers cease to think for themselves as they learn to obey the teachings of their master: “Right behind you/I see the millions/on you/I see the glory/from you/I get opinions/from you/I get the story.” Townshend’s “Amazing Journey” echoes Campbell’s “perilous journey into the darkness […] of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolic figures”9: “Sickness will surely take the mind/where minds can’t usually go/come on the amazing journey/and learn all you should know.” Like a Biblical prophet who travels into the wilderness to experience visions which he will bring back to inspire his listeners, Tommy’s early isolation and abuse cause him to see a vision in which a Christ-like figure gives him a special insight that he will share with his followers: “A vague haze of delirium/creeps up on me/all at once a tall stranger I suddenly see/He’s dressed in a silver sparked/glittering gown/and His golden beard flows/nearly down to the ground.”10 Perhaps the most famous example of a real-life search for enlightenment among musicians during the nineteen sixties was the Beatles’ trip to the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968. In contrast to the photographs of the Beatles in suits, ties, and smiles of 1964, the wellpublicized trip resulted in the famous photographs of the Beatles and other musicians and actors, including Donovan and Mia Farrow, in flowers, beads, beards, and sandals with the Maharishi, and the experience and the surroundings resulted in a creative outpouring of songs and stories. The experience was marred, however, by doubts and scandal, and the Beatles left amid rumours of the Maharishi’s sexual adventures with some of his young female acolytes. John Lennon expressed his personal disillusionment in the song “Sexy Sadie”: “Sexy Sadie what have you done/you made a fool of everyone.” Even in the alternative world of the 9

Joseph Campbell, op. cit., 101. Similarly, Robert Heinlein's Valentine Michael Smith progresses from guru to prophet to martyr (Robert Anson Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (New York: Putnam, 1961).

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ashram, Lennon expected that the guru would follow the rules, but “Sexy Sadie oooh you broke the rules.” When he perceived that the Maharishi had broken the rules, Lennon left in disgust. The rules broken were the ones Lennon had brought along with him, however, and others, including George Harrison, kept faith in the guru. Ray Thomas’ “Legend of a Mind” (1968) is another song that reveals disillusionment with a contemporary guru figure: “Timothy Leary’s dead/No, no, no, no, he’s outside looking in.” Although, in interviews, Thomas and other members of the Moody Blues assured readers that they were still good friends with Leary, and that the song was nothing more than a good-natured joke, it is still a harsh criticism of Leary’s lifestyle and philosophy. Leary was still alive when the song came out, and the phrase “outside looking in” refers to his position on the outside of mainstream culture, looking in and criticizing. Later he would be on the inside looking out, serving a 35-year jail sentence for illegal drug possession. Another irony comes in the second part of the first stanza: “He’ll fly his astral plane/takes you trips around the bay/brings you back the same day/Timothy Leary.” Here the pun on “astral plane,” seen literally as a kind of airplane, rather than its usual metaphorical, mystical meaning, and on “trips” as physical, rather than chemical-induced, journeys. The satire diminishes and brings down to earth the grand metaphysical claims of “turn on, tune in, drop out”, as does the satirical second verse: “So raise your glass, we’ll drink a toast/to the little man who sells you thrills along the pier.” The hopes and fears of the sixties generation are not unique to their songs and movies. The themes of hope for a new leader who will bring peace and prosperity, and subsequent betrayal and disillusionment are universal. The examples presented earlier fit the time and place, but the stories are familiar. Two 19th century American short stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Mark Twain’s “The Mysterious Stranger,” portray the devil as an alternative leader who fails to match the expectations of his potential followers. Goodman Brown, an inhabitant of Salem, Massachusetts during the time of the witch trials, sets out on Hallowe’en to meet the devil in the forest, presumably to sell his soul for some unspecified price. He has his doubts and several times almost turns back, until he sees evidence that his wife, the allegorically named Faith, has also set out on a similar quest. Desperate, and fearing that he has “lost his Faith,” he stumbles into a Black Mass, but at the last moment calls out to Faith to resist. The scene disappears and next morning Brown wearily arrives back home, sadder but no wiser, with a new-found awareness of evil which he sees everywhere until the day he dies. In this

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story the devil plays the traditional role of evil tempter of souls, but ironically, his victim, Goodman Brown, is portrayed unsympathetically as a fool who gets what he deserves. His reward for resisting temptation is a long but miserable life, beset by doubts and seeing evil wherever he looks. In Twain’s unfinished story, set in Austria in 1590 during the European witch hysteria, the main character, named Satan, claims to be a nephew of the other, more famous Satan. A rather less malevolent character than Hawthorne’s devil, he is an unconcerned tutor to three boys, including the first-person narrator, and merely demonstrates to them the follies of mankind and of mankind’s “Moral Sense”. At the end of the story he says: It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dreamʊa grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thoughtʊa vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities! (144)

To this the narrator responds “He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true” (91). This is hard-won knowledge, but not of much practical use. Twain’s Satan is an amoral, objective being who prefigures both existentialist philosophy and the devil in Timothy Findlay’s 1984 novel Not Wanted on the Voyage. Like the devil in Hawthorne and Twain’s stories, Lucifer in the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968) is an urbane, cultured tempter. Inspired by the devil in Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita, as the quoted lines at the beginning and ending of the song indicate, “Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name,” Jagger and Richards’ devil is a master of irony: “As heads is tails” inverts the old order of things and shows, as Goodman Brown discovered to his cost, that “every cop is a criminal/and all the sinners saints.” Overturning the accepted order of things may seem to be a good idea at the time, but without restraint, Lucifer will “lay your soul to waste,” and you’re no further ahead. The contemporary doubts expressed in “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “Sympathy for the Devil” are echoed in The Strawbs’ “Round and Round” (1974): “After all it’s just the revolution I despise/the dawn of revelations and the flower power prize/and I pity those poor children with no sunshine in their eyes.” Dave Cousins’ lyrics parody the “mystic crystal revelation” in the “dawning of the age of Aquarius” of the 1968 song “Aquarius” from the musical Hair. By 1974, events such as the Vietnam War, the Kent

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State massacre, and Altamont, the anti-Woodstock, had combined to disillusion the hippie generation.11 Mark Knopfler’s “The Man’s Too Strong” (1985) shows a further downside of the impulse to follow the leader. Although the song was released over a decade later than the other songs discussed, it summarizes the fears of the time well. The speaker is a convicted war criminal being led to his execution, protesting to the end that he was just following the orders of a leader too strong to resist: “And I can still hear his laughter/and I can still hear his song/the man’s too big/the man’s too strong.” His list of crimes, “I have legalized robbery/called it belief/I have run with the money/I have hid like a thief,” and especially the line from the first stanza, “I’ve called the tune/to many a torture session” are uncomfortably familiar to anyone who watches the news in the twenty-first century. While the song evokes echoes of the defence pleas of Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, subsequent events all around the world attest to its timelessness, although in 1985 there was still hope that a man confessing to such crimes would eventually be brought to justice. The thematic structure of Townshend’s rock opera Tommy follows what Northrop Frye identifies as the epic archetype of descent to an underworld and triumphant return of the hero to this world, while Easy Rider follows the related, but less complete plot structure of tragedy, in which the hero inexorably proceeds to his cathartic doom.12 Neither exactly reflects the real life characters of the sixties, but there are strong coincidental parallels between these works and the lives and times they describe. A few years after his disappointment in India, John Lennon met a tragic death, shot by an assassin.13 More to the point, these works, like many other of the time, reflect a great historical movement in aspirations and attitude that is still working itself out. In a time of change and desire for improvement, hopes for freedom and excitement at the failure of old leaders and institutions were tempered with fears of betrayal by the new ones, aptly summarized in yet another song by Pete Townsend, “Won’t 11

In May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on a group of Kent State students demonstrating against the Vietnam war, killing four and wounding nine; on December 6, 1969, a member of the audience was stabbed and beaten to death by Hell's Angels acting as security guards during a performance by the Rolling Stones at a concert in Altmamont, California. Three other members of the audience died during the festival. 12 An anti-hero in this case. 13 By the time of his death Lennon was something of a guru himself, having claimed in an interview in The Evening Standard, March 4, 1966, that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.

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Get Fooled Again” (1971). Subsequent events have shown Townsend’s title to be rather optimistic, but we can see the dynamic working in this, as in every, election year.

Works Cited Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanas§evich. The Master and Margarita. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1995. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Commemorative ed, Bollingen Series; 17. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Findley, Timothy. Not Wanted on the Voyage. New York: Delacorte, 1984. Frye, Northrop. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Richmond Hill, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1991. Hackmann, Alden and Cali 2000, 2005. Frequently Asked Questions. In, Olympic Musical Instruments, http://www.hurdygurdy.com/faq.htm. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, and Brian Harding. Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales, World's Classics. Oxford—New York: OUP, 1987. Heinlein, Robert Anson. Stranger in a Strange Land. New York: Putnam, 1961. Hopper, Dennis, Peter Fonda, Terry Southern, Charles Kiselyak. Easy Rider. Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1969. videorecording. Paglia, Camille. "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s." Arion: a journal of the humanities and classics 10, no. 3 (2003). Twain, Mark. No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger: Being an Ancient Tale Found in a Jug and Freely Translated from the Jug. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Discography Bonfire, Mars. “Born to be Wild.” MCA, 1968. Cohen, Leonard. “The Master Song.” Stranger Music Inc. (BMI), 1968. Cousins, Dave. “Round and Round.” A&M, 1974. Dylan, Bob. “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.” Columbia, 1964. Farmer, Steve and Ted Nugent. “Journey to the Center of the Mind.” Mainstream, 1968. Jagger, Mick and Keith Richards. “Sympathy for the Devil.” Decca, 1968. Knopfler, Mark. “The Man’s Too Strong.” Warner Brothers/WEA, 1985. Leitch, Donovan. “The Hurdy Gurdy Man.” EMI, 1968). Lennon, John. “Sexy Sadie.” Apple, 1968.

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Thomas, Ray. “Legend of a Mind.” Deram, 1968. Townsend, Pete. “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” MCA, 1971. The Who. Tommy. MCA, 1969.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN INTERTEXTUALITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AUTHORSHIP IN J. M. COETZEE’S NOBEL LECTURE “HE AND HIS MAN” OLGA GLEBOVA

The exploration of cultural encounters involves a wide range of issues and can be approached in multifaceted ways. This essay focuses on the variety of cultural encounters which occurs within an intertextual space and takes the form of intercultural communication of writers representing different historical periods and geographical locations. This type of crosscultural interaction, which emerges when a writer deliberately appropriates previous texts, creates various sites of dialogue and contestation, contributing to the on-going debate on the current political, social, philosophical, cultural and aesthetic problems and becoming conducive to shaping the cultural specificity of contemporary society. The object of this study is to show how through a cross-cultural dialogue with his predecessors, a contemporary author, J. M. Coetzee, examines the nature of creativity and the cultural construction of authorship in his acceptance speech for the 2003 Nobel prize in literature. Since the publication, in the late 1960s, of two influential essays, Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1967) and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” (1969), the question of authorship has continued to be the site of intense debate in literary theory. As Andrew Bennett in his book The Author points out, Critical interest in literature is driven by an uncertainty about the author, about what the author is, about what this author is (this author that we are reading, now, a book in our hands). And such an interest is impelled in fact by the author’s irresistible infraction of the limits of textuality, meaning, intention. The condition on which criticism and theory are undertaken, the

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Although postmodernism challenges the idea of the author as source and centre of the text, author figures, paradoxically, have become pervasive in postmodernist fiction where they often function as the writer’s alter ego and become a means to articulate a text’s metafictional reflection. J. M. Coetzee is seen by critics as “a self-conscious postmodernist,” “a writer’s writer”2 whose central preoccupation is the nature of authorship, the writer’s authority over his subject as well as the wider issue of the cultural authority to which fiction written within the Western tradition can lay claim. In his works, Coetzee has revisited authors of the past, rewriting Robinson Crusoe as Foe (1986) in the female castaway’s point of view, reimagining Dostoevsky and conjuring up the genesis of his novel The Possessed in The Master of Petersburg (1994). He has also created a fictional author character, Elizabeth Costello, in the 2003 eponymous novel, who re-appears in his novel Slow Man (2005) providing a discourse on the interrelationship between the literary author and his characters, fiction and reality. Coetzee’s acceptance speech has become one of the most original Nobel lectures undermining all conventions of inaugural speeches. Delivered in the form of an enigmatic short story entitled “He and his Man,” Coetzee’s text is a quintessence of postmodernist poetics, a metafictional parable which offers a profound meditation on the metaphysics of writing. Similarly to the novel Foe, the story “He and his man” exhibits Coetzee’s long-standing interest in and fascination with Daniel Defoe. Like Foe, “He and his man” is constructed as an appropriation of Robinson Crusoe and contains allusions to other works by Defoe, in particular, to A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-27) and The Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Like Foe, “He and his man” includes Defoe as a character and performs the metafictional function by enacting the metafictional commentary through its intertextual relations. Mark Currie in Postmodern Narrative Theory defines this kind of metafictional commentary as a performative metafictional mode in contrast to constative, straightforward comments.3 1

Andrew Bennett, The Author. London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 127. Elizabeth Lowry, Like a dog, Review of Disgrace and The lives of animals by J. M. Coetzee, London Review Bookshop 21, no. 20 (October 14, 1999), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n20/lowr01_.html. 3 Mark Currie, Postmodern narrative theory (London: Macmillan 1998), 69. 2

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However, while Foe is both a metafictional and political allegory questioning the assumptions of race, class and gender underlying the works of the Western literary canon (the novel has been described by Dominic Head as a “textual decolonization,”4 “He and his man” is not so overtly political concentrating mainly on issues dealing with the nature of authorship which is conceptualized by the central metaphor of the text— that of “he and his man.” This metaphor is worked out on a variety of levels in the text. Coetzee’s story, in a kind of sequel to Defoe’s novel, features Robinson Crusoe, sitting in his room in the Bristol hotel long after his return from the island, and reading reports which are sent to him by an uncertain character he calls “his man.” These are reports about strange and dramatic events “his man” witnesses in different parts of England: about Lincolnshire decoy ducks, or duckoys, Halifax’s engine of execution and the plague in London in 1665. The ambiguous deixis of the pronouns “he” and “his” at the beginning of the story creates narrative indeterminacy; it is only gradually, by the process of cataphoric referencing, that the reader comes to realize that “he” is Crusoe, transmogrified into the successful author of the story of his own adventures on the desert island while “his man” can be identified as Defoe (though this name is never used in the story)—a businessman “who will dash so busily hither and thither across the kingdom, from one spectacle of death to another (clubbings, beheadings) sending in report after report” (Coetzee 2003). The situation becomes even more complicated when the figures of Crusoe and Defoe—the figures of “he and his man”—overlap as it turns out that Defoe is in fact Crusoe’s imaginative construct for whom Crusoe creates an identity and for whom he writes his “reports.” As Crusoe searches his mind for some true understanding of the “man” who writes of and for him, the story poses important questions: Who is the writer who writes? What is the relationship between the author and his characters, literature and reality? What is the relationship between the author and his predecessors, tradition and contemporary literature? Using the idea of a real (historical) author being re-invented and written into history by his creation, Coetzee employs the device which Gérard Genette terms “narrative metalepsis.”5 This device, especially favoured by postmodernists, consists in a transgressive blurring of narrative levels by violating ontological barriers between the author’s 4

Dominic Head, J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14. Gérard Genette, Narrative discourse: An essay in method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), 235. 5

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realm of existence and his characters’ realm of existence. The paradoxical reversal of the roles of Defoe and Crusoe with a subsequent collapse of the correlation between them serves to destabilize the asymmetrical relations of “master—servant,” “dominance—subordination,” “originator—offspring,” “superiority—inferiority” implied in the traditional opposition “author— character” and is used to dramatize the Foucauldian idea according to which both character and author belong to discourse, they are both discursive constructs. Rather than developing “spontaneously” as the “attribution of a discourse to an individual,” the author is “constructed” in relation to the text’s position within a particular culture.6 Indeed, Coetzee draws our attention to the fact that today Defoe has become, in the words of Jean-Paul Engélibert, a “half-real, half-fictional character”7; there exists a myth of “Daniel Defoe—the author” which constructs Defoe as “the poor but prolific writer, eternally creating yet eternally the victim of his own undertakings, inventor of the “English novel” despised by his contemporaries.”8 This mythic Defoe, continues Engélibert, combines all the characteristics of the writer and the adventurer. He presents us with the spectacle of adversity and of perseverance, of courage and of genius, of a life of suffering and wandering and yet a life of inexhaustible energy; inventing a new literary form against all the odds he becomes a hero of the act of writing.9

Revealed to be a discursive construct, the author is dispossessed of his work; the authoritative and controlling role of the author is called into question and the author’s exclusive right over his own texts is problematized. Coetzee’s story also rejects what Barthes (1967) called the myth of filiation—the traditional notion of authorship that views the author as a kind of parent giving life to a text. The kind of deconstructive metaleptic game played by Coetzee in his story is disturbing because it suggests that the dividing line between fiction and reality can prove to be rather fuzzy. This uneasiness about the logic-defying violation of narrative norms in metalepsis, about the blurring of “a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which 6

Michel Foucault, “What is an author?” in Textual strategies: Perspectives in post-structuralist criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (London: Methuen, 1979), 150. 7 Jean-Paul Engélibert, “Daniel Defoe as character: Subversion of the myths of Robinson Crusoe and of the author,” in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and metamorphoses, ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (London: Macmillan, 1996), 268. 8 Ibid., 272. 9 Ibid., 268.

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one tells, the world of which one tells”10 was voiced by J. L. Borges and repeated by Gérard Genette. According to Borges, “[s]uch inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious.”11 For Genette, The most troubling thing about metalepsis indeed lies in this unacceptable And insistent hypothesis, that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and that the narrator and his narratees—you and I—perhaps belong to some narrative.12

Speaking about the “unacceptable and insistent hypothesis” Genette evidently refers to the characteristic postmodern view of reality as textuality and points out that narrative metalepsis is primarily used to express the epistemological uncertainty of postmodernism. “He and his man” can be read as an allegory on the creative process in general and as a meditation on the relationship between the great writers of the past and their followers today. Coetzee’s story takes part in the ongoing debate concerning the ability of contemporary writers to construct fictions in a time which emphasizes the usedness of language, insists that all stories have been told before and proclaims the exhaustion of literature. Today, the widespread phenomenon of rewriting has generated an anxiety that literature has been reduced to “ventriloquial reproduction of old voices; being merely possessed by the past.”13 The concern that the postmodern present is condemned “to a rather disabled career of simply parroting old stuff”14 is famously expressed by the main character of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, who thinks “on est parlé,” “one is spoken,” rather than speaking for oneself.15 Similarly to Barnes, Coetzee introduces the image of the parrot/writer in his story and transforms the underlying metaphor of “master—servant” from the one describing the relationship between authors and their characters, literature and reality, into “master—parrot” which comes to allegorize the relationship between the great figures of the literary canon and contemporary writers. However, Coetzee rids the metaphor of parrot of its habitual negative connotations as a signifier of senseless imitation 10

Gérard Genette, op. cit., 236. Jorge Luis Borges, Other inquisitions, 1937-1952, trans. R. L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 46. 12 Gérard Genette, op. cit., 236. 13 H. M. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume II (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co 2000), 1908. 14 Ibid. 15 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s parrot (London: Picador, 1995), 11. 11

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and artistic failure. Coetzee recognizes authorship as an inherently appropriative act and sees literature as a field marked by signs of presence, filled with the words of others; he regards literary activity as collaboration and actualization of previous texts, as the following passage shows: When the first bands of plagiarists and imitators descended upon his island history and foisted on the public their own feigned stories of the castaway life, they seemed to him no more or less a horde of cannibals falling upon his own flesh, that is to say, his life; and he did not scruple to say so. […] But now, reflecting further, there begins to creep into his breast a touch of fellow-feeling for his imitators. For it seems to him now that there are but a handful of stories in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old then they must sit for ever in silence.16

Coetzee recognizes the power of the master, which lies in his ability to teach contemporary writers to use language creatively: “Only when he yields himself up to this man of his do such words come,” admits Crusoe. But Coetzee also emphasizes the idea that the “parrot” is not necessarily worse than his “master.” In the story, Crusoe, comparing the two parrots he has owned, muses: Even at his best, his island parrot, the better loved of the two, spoke no word he was not taught to speak by his master. How then has it come about that this man of his, who is a kind of parrot and not much loved, writes as well or better than his master?

This idea is given support to and reinforced by the epigraph to the story borrowed from Robinson Crusoe: But to return to my new companion. I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spoke; and he was the aptest scholar there ever was.

By deconstructing the opposition “canonical authors”—“contemporary authors” Coetzee eschews the traditionally held view of the secondary, belated position of a contemporary writer in relation to the great masters of the past, the position usually seen as inferior, as characterized by lack or loss, by the “anxiety of influence,” by mere “parroting.” At the end of the story, when the focalization and deixis of the last two paragraphs become 16 J. M. Coetzee, “He and his man,” The Nobel lecture, 2003. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture-e.html

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extremely ambiguous, we seem to hear the authorial voice as Coetzee places his own work in relation to canonical texts and ponders on his relationship with Defoe and other great predecessors: How are they to be figured, this man and he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin brothers? As comrades in arms? Or as enemies, foes? If he must settle on a likeness for the pair of them, his man and he, he would write that they are like two ships sailing in contrary directions, one west, the other east. Or better, that they are deckhands toiling in the rigging, the one on a ship sailing west, the other on a ship sailing east. Their ships pass close, close enough to hail. But the seas are rough, the weather is stormy: their eyes lashed by the spray, their hands burned by the cordage, they pass each other by, too busy even to wave.17

Thus Coetzee conceptualizes the relationship between a contemporary author and his predecessors as kinship and collaboration, as fellow workmanship, which underlines their common purpose and common function. Interestingly, in his Nobel lecture, Coetzee refracts his understanding of authorship developed in Foe and The Master of Petersburg. In Foe, by introducing the character of Susan Barton, who struggles to tell her own story and to retrieve Friday's story, Coetzee opens Defoe’s canonical text to the suppressed voices of the white woman and the black man. Drawing our attention to the fact that Foe was Defoe’s real name, Coetzee discloses him as foe, enemy of truth, “the giver of false witness.”18 As Paula Burnett reminds us, [p]articularly in Protestant Christian parlance the Foe is the devil, the old enemy. In the moral landscape of the text, Mr Foe is unmasked as a figure of the devil, seducing with his apparently reasonable blandishments, then disappearing when he has done his evil work, leaving a trail of unpaid debts. […] The reader realizes that the voice of the elite culture of patriarchal power comes to marginalise the vernacular voice of the woman, the Other of gender, and to “drown” out completely the voice of the racial Other, Friday.19

17

Ibid. Paula Burnett, “The Ulyssean Crusoe and the quest for redemption in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and Derek Walcott’s Omeros,” in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and metamorphoses, ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (London: Macmillan 1996), 244. 19 Ibid., 245. 18

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The novel constructs authorship as betrayal, as distortion of truth while the author is represented as a bearer of guilt who failed in his authorial responsibility. In The Master of Petersburg Coetzee further reflects on the potential dangers of authorship and enhances the metaphor of writing as betrayal through misrepresentation. However, in his Nobel speech, as was shown above, he metaphorizes authorship in a more positive way. It has to be noted that Coetzee’s text is a dialogue not only with his predecessors, it is also a self-referential commentary on his own work: it contains autocitation (“foe”), repeats the imagery recurring in other works (the image of a “castaway” appears both in Foe and in In the Heart of the Country), uses the same characters (Defoe, Crusoe) and reflects on appropriating practices typical of Coetzee’s own writing. As a result, there emerges a complex system of intertextual relations not only between Coetzee’s story and Defoe’s texts, but also between Coetzee’s story and his own previous writing. Coetzee’s texts create a textual-metatextual sequence in which meanings are integrated and transformations are explicated. This makes “He and his man” an autometatext which reflects on its pretext and generates an autointertext. In this way the borderline between individual texts and their metatexts is violated; both the author and his fictional world become intertextual. Like its pretext Robinson Crusoe, “He and his man” is a tale dealing with some fundamental problems of human existence. Coetzee’s story is an elegiac meditation upon solitude, death and salvation. It conveys a very acute sense of human isolation which characterizes all the works by Coetzee. In many senses Coetzee can be seen as today’s most important continuator of the literary tradition established by Beckett and Kafka. The figure of a castaway becomes in his works a recurrent symbol of existential loneliness. As Magda from the novel In the Heart of the Country says: “We are the castaways of God as we are the castaways of history.”20 In a similar mood, Robison’s parrot, Poor Poll, wonders, “What island is this […] that I am cast up on, so cold, so dreary? Where were you, my Saviour, in my hour of great need?”21 The desert island in the story does not only allegorize the acute sense of the individual as apart from others. Robinson’s trip to “a farther side to the island, craggy and dark and inhospitable,” may be interpreted as a trip into the unconscious, into “the dark side of the soul,” representing the sense of the individual estranged within his or her own consciousness. The

20 21

J. M. Coetzee, In the heart of the country (London: Vintage, 1977), 135. J. M. Coetzee, “He and his man,” 2003.

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tragic nature of human existence is also represented by the haunting apocalyptic images of the plague, as in the fragment below: Some London-folk continue to go about their business, thinking they are healthy and will be passed over. But secretly they have the plague in their blood: when the infection reaches their heart they fall dead upon the spot, so reports his man, as if struck by lightning. And this is a figure for life itself, the whole of life.22

In a bleak universe, where God is absent and death inevitable, “Who shall save poor Robin?”—asks the story. How to cope with our inalienable solitude? Significantly, Coetzee portrays Crusoe as assuaging his loneliness with the help of “his man”: by writing and reading the reports of “his man”: “the writing of his adventures has put him in the habit of writing, it is a pleasant enough recreation. In the evening by candlelight he will take out his papers and sharpen his quills and write a page or two of his man.”23 Representing Crusoe as simultaneously the reader and writer of the reports, Coetzee conflates another binary opposition – that of “author – reader” by suggesting that both reading and writing are acts of creativity. Moreover, he seems to see literature as “the product of mutual loneliness – of a writer or a reader,” to use the words of another Nobel prize-winning author, Joseph Brodsky. In his Nobel Lecture Brodsky said: A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation […] that is very private, excluding all others—if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness.24

Likewise, Coetzee attributes a lofty role to literature suggesting that literature, being a communication of two consciousnesses, is a way to relieve existential loneliness. In the final paragraph of his story Coetzee compares the relationship between “he” and “his man” to deckhands on ships going in different directions. The metaphor can be taken to suggest that as ships in their voyages go from continent to content and from island

22

Ibid. Ibid. 24 Joseph Brodsky, The Nobel lecture. http:// nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1987/brodsky-lecture-e.html 1987. 23

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to island connecting them, books traverse the boundaries of an individual consciousness and reduce the tragic solitariness of the aware self. To conclude, in his Nobel speech Coetzee chooses to address the issue of authorship via an intertextual strategy. The whole metafictional reflection which his story articulates is aimed at disrupting and deconstructing the hierarchy traditionally established between “author— character,” “canonical author—contemporary writer,” “author—reader” and rejecting a linear epistemology according to which the left-hand term is seen as superior and dominant. Coetzee’s story seems to be less iconoclastic in relation to canonical authors than his previous texts; the network of metaphors associated with the idea of authorship emphasizes its dialogic and collaborative nature.

Works Cited Abrams, M. H. and Stephen Greenblatt, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume II. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co. 2000. Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s parrot. London: Picador. 1995. First published in 1984. Barthes, Roland. The death of the author. In Authorship: from Plato to postmodernism: A reader, ed. Seán Burke, 125-130. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 1995. First published in French in 1967. Bennett, Andrew. The Author. London and New York: Routledge. 2005. Borges, Jorge Luis. Other inquisitions, 1937-1952. Trans. R.L.C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1964. Brodsky, Joseph. The Nobel lecture. 1987. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1987/brodskylecture-e.html. Burnett, Paula. 1996. “The Ulyssean Crusoe and the quest for redemption in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and Derek Walcott’s Omeros”. In Robinson Crusoe: Myths and metamorphoses, ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson. London: Macmillan. 1996: 239-255. Coetzee, J. M. In the heart of the country. London: Vintage. 1997. —. Foe. New York: Viking. 1987. First published in 1986. —. “He and his man.” The Nobel lecture. 2003. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/coetzeelecture-e.html Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. London: Macmillan. 1998. Engélibert, Jean-Paul. “Daniel Defoe as character: Subversion of the myths of Robinson Crusoe and of the author.” In Robinson Crusoe:

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Myths and metamorphoses, ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson. London: Macmillan. 1996: 267-281. Foucault, Michel. “What is an author?” In Textual strategies: Perspectives in post-structuralist criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari. London: Methuen. 1979: 141-160. First published in French in 1969. Genette, Gérard. Narrative discourse: An essay in method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1995. First published in French in 1980. Head, Dominic. J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Lowry, Elizabeth. “Like a dog.” Review of Disgrace and The lives of animals by J. M. Coetzee. London Review Bookshop 21, no. 20 (October 14, 1999), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n20/lowr01_.html.

CONTRIBUTORS

BILJANA ýUBROVIû is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of English, University of Belgrade, where she received her MA and PhD degrees (in 1999 and 2004 respectively). She is the author of The Phonological Structure of Recent French Loanwords in Contemporary English and A Workbook of English Phonology, as well as a co-author of three books of tests entitled English Entrance Exam Practice—tests with key and explanatory notes. Dr. ýubrovic is the Editorin-Chief of Philologia, the professional-scientific journal for the study of language, literature and culture, Philologia (ISSN: 1451-5342) and the Associate Editor of The Linguistics Journal published by Time Taylor International Ltd. (ISSN: 1718-2298; ISSN Print: 1718-2301). She has given invited talks in Japan, Great Britain and Serbia, took part in teachertraining seminars for English teachers in Serbia, and participated in a number of international conferences. The focus of Dr. ýubrovic’s work and publication is English Phonetics and English phonology, as well as linguistic and cultural interplays between English and Serbian, language contacts, and EFL testing. MIRJANA DANIýIû gained her BA and MA degrees from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, where she has been employed at the English Department since 2002 and where she is currently working on her PhD thesis in African American Literature. The focus of her work and publication is on Literary Studies, modern American and British fiction in particular, as well as cultural studies, translation studies and EFL testing. She is the Literary Section Editor of Philologia, the professional scientific journal for the study of language, literature and culture. BILJANA ĈORIû-FRANCUSKI received her PhD on Reception of the PostWar English Novel in Serbo-Croatian Criticism until 1985 from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade in 2002. She has worked at the English department of the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade since 1997, while she is currently holding a position of an Assistant Professor and teaches British Cultural Studies. The focus of her work includes: post-colonial literature, British post-war novel, and translation studies. So far, she has

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published more than twenty papers and one book, as well as participated in the work of nine conferences. BOJKA ĈUKANOVIû is a full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, the University of Montenegro. She is the author of a number of books, e.g. Bibliography of Montenegro in English (1993), a study on Njegoš and England (1999), Apotheosis of Montenegro (2008), and many shorter studies and critical reviews in British literature. Her special interest is British travel writing. She is a translator of Joyce Cary (Memoir of the Bobotes) and co-author of the books Introduction into Civic Education (2002) and The School Has Decided to Live (2002). OLGA GLEBOVA obtained both her MA and PhD degrees from Moscow State Linguistic University. Since 2001 she has worked as an assistant professor at the English Department of the Jan Dlugosz Academy of Czestochowa (Poland) where she has taught History of English Literature, Introduction to Literary Studies and conducted BA seminars. Since 2007 she has been chair of the English Department. Her research interests include the contemporary novel and literary theory, especially critical narratology and intertextuality. She has published extensively on these issues in Poland, Russia, Germany, Lithuania and Latvia. She is currently completing a book on hypertextual transpositions in contemporary literatures in English. ALEKSANDRA V. JOVANOVIû graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, where she also gained her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature, and where she works as an assistant professor for various English literature courses. The title of her Ph.D. thesis was Greek Mythology in the Novels of John Fowles. Her research interests lay mainly in the field of postmodern English and American novel. Her other interests include modern British and American fiction, as well as translation from English, Spanish and Greek into Serbian. She has published articles in literary journals and a book, Nature, Mystery, Myth – the Novels of John Fowles. VICTOR KENNEDY was born in Scotland and attended university in Toronto, Canada. He taught English literature at the University of Toronto, Humber College, and Trent University, and is now a professor in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Maribor. He has published several articles on metaphor in art and music, and on references to astrology and astronomy in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is currently writing a book about rock and roll lyrics.

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MARIJA KNEŽEVIû teaches 19th- and 20th-century British literature, Canadian Literature, as well as British and American cultural studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro, where she also works as a vice dean for international relations. Her publication primarily focuses on the work of D. H. Lawrence (Lorens u Italiji, Beograd: 2000, and Traganje za onostranim u prozi D. H. Lorensa due 2009), but her recent interests include contemporary British and Canadian literature, travel writing, as well as Native American literature. Together with Aleksandra Nikþeviü Batriüeviü, she co-edited Culture-Bound Translation and Language in the Global Era History, Politics, Identity: Reading Literature in a Changing World, both published by Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2008, as well as Size Zero (Podgorica, 2009). She edited and co-edited a series of translations of British, Canadian, and Native American authors. VESNA LOPIýIû is an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, and acting Head of the English Department. She published a study Fall into Culture: Human Nature in the Work of W. Golding and M. Atwood, a collection of essays Developing Identities: Essays on Canadian Literature, a study Aspects of Autobiography: “The Book of Revenge” and a number of course books and readers. She teaches English Literature, British and Canadian Studies Courses in several universities. Her special interest is the novel in English. She is an active member of YACS and a country representative on CEACS’ Executive Council. SOUMEN MUKHERJEE is an assistant professor of Business English at the Institute of Management Studies, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India. He has completed his master degree from Banars Hindu University (B.H.U), Varansi. Prior to the present assignment, he has taught for almost six and half years at the undergraduate level of Uttar Pradesh Technical University and also the MBA students of the Business Management Institute of New Delhi. He has presented papers on ELT and communication at various international and national conferences. He is the winner of the prestigious BESIG-IATEFL scholarship, for his innovative research paper on chronemics IATEFL based at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. At the present, he is working on his Ph. D. ALEKSANDRA NIKýEVIû BATRIûEVIû teaches English and American literature at the Department of English language and literature, University of Montenegro. She also teaches English language at the Departments of History and Sociology. Both her M.A. and her doctoral dissertation are on

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American literature. Although in her publications she primarily focuses on the works of Herman Melville and American female poets, her interests also include narratology, feminist criticism, and various other authors from the domain of English and American literature. During the previous years she has participated at various international conferences and herself coorganized four on Anglo-American studies at the University of Montenegro and one on female writing that took place in American Corner in Podgorica. She is president of the Society for Anglo-American Literary Studies. PETER PRESTON retired in 2005 as Director of the Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Nottingham, where he is now Special Lecturer in English Studies and Academic Consultant to the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre, which he founded in 1991. He has published widely on Lawrence in several countries, and present he is working on a book on Lawrence’s reception in British culture since 1930. In 2007 he received the Harry T. Moore Distinguished Scholar Award for his contribution to D. H. Lawrence studies. He has also published on Bennett, Dickens, Gaskell, Mansfield, Morris and contemporary British fiction. He has written several on-line study guides, and his current on-line projects include an critical edition of Morris’s A Dream of John Ball and a distance learning MA module on travel writing. In retirement, he is studying for an undergraduate qualification in Art History. SAŠA SIMOVIû graduated in English language and literature from the Faculty of Philosophy (Nikšiü) and did an MA in American literature (Hawthorne’s Language and Style) at the Faculty of Philology (Belgrade) in 2007. Currently she is working on her doctoral thesis Literary and Theoretical Views of Edgar Allan Poe (University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology). She works as an associate teacher at the Department of English language and literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšiü. With an interest in both American and British literature and culture, she has participated at several international conferences. NADEŽDA STOJKOVIû is a lecturer of English language at the Faculty of Electronic Engineering, University of Niš, Serbia. Her main areas of interest and research include relationship between language and identity, contemporary literature, ESP. She is the author of the textbook Written and Spoken Communications in English for Science and Technology, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Niš, 2005; and co-author of following books: Identity and Difference, Peter Lang Publishers, Switzerland, 2005,

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Metafrastikes Optikes: Epiloges ke Diaforetikotita. Athens University: Parousia, 2006, Languages for Specific Purposes—Searching for Common Solutions, Cambridge Scholars, UK, 2007; Education Landscapes in the 21st Century: Cross-cultural Challenges and Multi-disciplinary Perspectives, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK 2008. She participated in two projects: Language and Literature, joint project of Serbian Ministry of Science and Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU), for the period 2006-2010, and TEMPUS Joint European Project CD_JEP-181052007—Revision of the Electrical Engineering Curricula Based on New Technologies and Bologna Recommendations.

INDEX

A Africanist, 122. Americanness, 122. Albahari, David, 63-78. Allen, Walter, 16, 32, 33, 36, 38, 41. Arnold, Matthew, 11, 12. Arthur & George, 6, 147-160. As You Like It, 27. authorship, 183-194. autobiography, 36, 46, 49, 89-92, 94, 99, 105, 106, 109, 111. autocitation, 190. autointertext, 190. autometatext, 190.

B Balkanism, 10. “Balkanization”, 10. Balkan War of 1912-13, the, 2, 9, 32, 34, 36, 45. Battle of Britain, the, 22. Baudrillard, Jean, 150, 153. Bell, Michael, 150. Beloved, 124-127. Benjamin, Walter, 167. Bhabha, Homi K., 46. bifocalizing narrative, 150. Bildungsroman, 153. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 9, 20-26, 28. blackness, 119-128. Blithedale Romance, The, 113-118. Blitz, the, 22. Bluest Eye, The, 119, 126. Blunden, Edmund, 16.

Bond, James, 2, 9, 28, 29. Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanas§evich, 172, 178. Burton, Richard, 28. Byatt, A., 119. Byron, George Gordon, 13. Byronic, 12. Byron, Robert, 19.

C Campbell, Joseph, 171, 172, 175, 176. Castaneda, Carlos, 171. Cary, Arthur Joyce Lunel, 2, 9, 1517, 21, 22, 28, 31-48. Cartesian science, 150. caste, 130, 131, 133. Casino Royale, 2, 28, 29. Chernobyl Strawberries, 79-88. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 13. Childs, Peter, 159, 167. Civil Rights Movement, the, 121. Civil War, the, 125. Clayton, Jay, 157. Coetzee, J. M., 7, 183-194. Cohen, Leonard, 173-175. Craig, Daniel, 29. “critical organic catalyst” theory, the, 127. Culture and Imperialism, 46. culture of difference, 119, 120. Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future, The, 66.

202

Index

D Darwin, Charles, 161. Darwinism, 174. Defoe, Daniel, 7, 185-186, 189, 190, 192. deixis, 185, 188. Deleuze, Gilles, 151. Derrida, Jacques, 11, 112, 143. Desai, Kiran, 47. diegetic, 187. discursive construct, 186. Dostoevsky, FyodorMikhailovich, 7, 184. Douglas, Michael, 28. Doyle, Arthur Conan, 147-170. Dreyfus affair, the, 162, 165. Durham, Edith, 31, 32. Dylan, Bob, 6, 171, 173, 174.

Ĉ Ĉukanoviü, Bojka “Njegoš and England,” 11.

E Eagleton, Terry, 167. “East Coker,” 168. “Easter 1916,” 25. Eastern Question, the, 10. Easy Rider, 172, 173, 175, 179. Ecrits, 150. Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 129, 144, 168. Elizabeth Costello, 184. England, England, 148-151, 154, 160. Eurydice, 139, 145. extradiegetic, 187.

F Fairclough, Henry Rushton, 49-61. feminism, 4, 119, 122, 123. Final Solution of the Jewish Question, the, 65.

Findlay, Timothy, 178. First Trilogy, The, (Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, and The Horse's Mouth), 35. Flaubert’s Parrot, 148, 159, 187. focalization, 188. Fonda, Peter, 172. Forster, Edward Morgan, 19, 46. Foster, Malcolm, 16. Foucault, Michel, 159, 183. Frye, Northrop, 179.

G gender, 4, 7, 83, 119-124, 184, 189. Géricault, Théodore, 166. Girard, René,157. Gladstone, William, 13, 52, 163. God of Small Things, The, 5, 129138. Goldsworthy, Vesna, 3, 9, 79-88. Gordon, Jan and Cora, 2, 9, 17-22, 28. Götz and Meyer, 3, 63-78. Ground Beneath her Feet, 5, 139146. Graham, Greene, 19. Great Powers, 10, 22. Guattari, Felix, 151. gurus, 6, 171-181.

H Hadrian (A.D. 117-138), 55. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 4, 113-118, 172, 177, 178, 198. “He and his Man,” 7, 183-193. Hero with a Thousand Faces, The, 171. High Albania, 32. History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, A, 157, 162, 166. Hitler, Adolf, 65, 66, 77. Hoffman, Eva, 89-112. Holmes, Sherlock, 152, 161, 164.

Recounting Cultural Encounters Holocaust, 63, 65, 66, 69, 72, 75, 77. Hopper, Dennis, 172. House of Children, A, 34. House of the Seven Gables, The, 114. Hubbard, L. Ron, 171. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, 47. Huxley, Aldous, 19.

I Illyria, 9, 27, 28, 29. intertext, 144. intertextuality, 7, 143, 183, 184, 196.

J Jung, Carl, 141, 145. James, Henry, 147. Jokoviü, Miroljub, 152. Jones, Jim, 172. Journal of the Plague Year, The, 7, 184.

K Kafka, Franz, 153, 190. King Arthur, 160. Koresh, David, 172. Knopfler, Mark, 179. Kundera, Milan, 104. Künstlerroman, 163.

L Lacan, Jacques, 150. Lawrence, David Herbert, 19. Leary, Timothy, 171-173, 177. Lennon, John, 176, 177, 179. lingua franca, 81. linguistic borrowing, 81, 82. linguistic stereotype, 87. literary canon, 185, 187. Loren, Sophia, 28.

203

Lost in Translation, 4, 89-112. Love, 127. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 152.

M Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the, 171. Manson, Charles, 172. Marble Faun: A Romance of Monte Beni, The, 113-115. Marx, Carl, 162. Mary Queen of Scotland, 168. Master and Margarita, the, 172, 178. Master of Petersburg, The, 7, 84, 189, 190. Memoir of the Bobotes, 2, 9, 15, 3148. Merry Widow, The, 20. metafictional, function, 184. parable, 184. reflection, 184, 192. metatext, 190. Midnight’s Children, 47. Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 27. Miller, David, 163. "Montenegro", 28, 29. Moorcock, Michael, 156. Morly, David, 154. Morrison, Jago, 167. Morrison, Jim, 6, 7, 171, 173. Morrison, Toni, 4, 119-128. Mother London: A Novel, 156.

N narrative indeterminacy, 7, 185 narrative metalepsis, 185, 187. neo-slave narrative, 124. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 151. Norris, David, 9. Nothing to be Frightened of, 148, 167. Not Wanted on the Voyage, 178.

204

Index

O On Nationality, 163. Orpheus, 139. Owen, Wilfred, 6, 16.

P Paravans, 130-132. Passage to India, A, 46. Paz, Octavio, 47. Pearl Harbour, 22. performative metafictional mode, 184. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 122. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, 153. Possessed, The, 184. postmodernism, 184, 187. pretext, 190. Proust, Marcel, 47.

R Race Matters, 120. Remembrance of Things Past, 47. Roberts, Elizabeth, 12. Robins, Kevin, 154, 161. Robinson Crusoe, 7, 184, 185, 188, 190, 192. Rolling Stones, The, 178. romance, 4, 20, 113, 114, 116, 118. Roy, Arundati, 5, 129-138. Royal Free Hospital, the, 18. Rubenstein, Richard, L., 66, 69, 77. Rushdie, Salman, 5, 6, 139-146.

S Said, Edward, 150, 151. Scarlet Letter, The, 114. Scott, Walter, 159. Second Trilogy, The, (Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord, Not Honour More), 35.

shamans, 171-181. Sassoon, Siegfried, 16. Schumacher, Ralf, 29. Shakespeare, William, 27-29. sixties, the, 6, 7, 171-181. Slavophilism, 10. Slow Man, 184. Song of Solomon, 127. Staring at the Sun, 167. Strauss, Johann, 20.

T Taylor, Elizabeth, 28. Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 2, 9, 13, 14, 28, 52. Third Reich, 68, 70. Thomas, Ray, 172, 177. Todorova, Maria, 9. Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, A, 7, 184. Townshend, Pete, 6, 171, 173-176, 179, 180. Transformations, 4, 113-118. “The True-Born Englishman. A Satyr,” 154. Twain, Mark, 172, 177, 178. Twelfth Night, 27. Two Vagabonds in Serbia and Montenegro, 9, 17.

U untouchables, the, 130, 131, 133.

V Vietnam War, the, 178. Violence and the Sacred, 157. Vladika Peter II, Petroviü Njegoš, 11, 12.

W Wallace, Alfred Russel, 161. Waugh, Eveline, 19. Warming Both Hands, 2, 3, 49.

Recounting Cultural Encounters West, Cornel, 120. West, Rebecca, 9, 20-26, 28. Woodstock, 179. World War, I, 2, 3, 9, 16, 35, 49, 59. II, 3, 70, 97, 172. Wordsworth, William, 15, 174. Wright, Andrew, 34.

205

Y Yeats, William Butler, 25.

Z Zeta-Jones, Catherine, 29. Zola, Émile, 162, 165.